Grant Imahara Quotes

I grew up watching movies and being amazed at the animatronics you'd see in stuff like 'The Dark Crystal,' and all those kinds of movies. So, I'm always enthralled with how they can make it all work, behind the scenes, with the visual effects.

When I finally got up to Industrial Light And Magic to work on the 'Star Wars' movies as a model-maker, it felt like dying and going to heaven.

Well, the Empire State was about 40' high in the studio. King Kong was a little model about 2' high, and the scenery that he worked in was in proportion to his size.

I started off as a model maker, so the first part of my career was a model maker and then a motion control camera operator, so I shot a lot of miniatures.

I think a lot of times, in a lot of modern-day movies, a lot of things are CGI, but so much of the stuff in 'Star Wars' is built and created by these artists.

I don't think you can beat a costumed monster. It's brilliant. I'll take that over CGI any day.

Both Adam and I come from a practical effects background.

I think some of the special effects in Close Encounters hold up better than the new more expensive special effects is because they were better actually.

But with The Dark Crystal, instead of puppetry we're trying to go toward a sense of realism - toward a reality of creatures that are actually alive and we're mixing up puppetry and all kinds of other techniques.

Whether it's the experiments on 'MythBusters' or my earlier work in special effects for movies, I've regularly had to do things that were never done before, from designing complex motion-control rigs to figuring out how to animate chocolate.

Going from 'Shark Night' to 'Piranha,' a guy holding a fish on a stick in front of you that they're going to replace in post-production, it's a lot different than seeing this animatronic shark that, if you get caught up in the moment, looks, acts and you sometimes think could be real.

I wanted to be a columnist so badly that I took a huge pay cut to leave Forbes, which wouldn't give me a column, and join Newsday, which wanted my column for its Sunday business section.

You can take my job any time you’re ready.

I think, the first movie I saw that made me go, 'How did they do that?' was 'Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster.'

I feel unfulfilled in England. I think I'm a decent manager and a very good coach. I've still got a lot to offer some club who will maybe take a chance on me.

If any single human being is responsible for all this nonsense I've done with my life, it's Ray Harryhausen... In 'Kubo,' you can see some of his influence throughout.

When we were growing up and saw a Ray Harryhausen movie, we were interested in how it was done. But thank God we got to go through the magic of seeing it before we knew how it was done. You were able to get this beautiful, pure, visceral response to something without knowing too much about it.

I grew up as a little 4- and 5-year-old kid, watching Phil Tippett and my dad make monsters in our garage. That's what I did, as a child.

The sets were incredible. You would walk in at 6 in the morning, and we were really living in 'Blade Runner.'

Muppet films are never easy to film 'cause Muppets have no legs.

'Mayabazar' was the film I immensely loved as a kid. Only when I became a filmmaker about 20 years later did I realise its technical marvel and what a great epic it was. I and my visual effects supervisor, while making 'Yamadonga,' took two days to understand the magnification shot of Ghatothkatcha's persona.

The most fun about working with special effects is that you have to really rely on your imagination to build the scene. You can't actually see how what you're doing will fit in ultimately and you look silly while doing it but when you see the finished product it becomes something amazing!

Working on movies and TV is a blast, and ILM has the most talented people in the world. But on 'Mythbusters' I've been able to go places I would never have access to otherwise.

Before I became an actor, I was a producer and a visual effects supervisor. Our industry wasn't making the kind of films I was interested in.

I could have continued being a speechwriter for as long as I wanted.