'Terminator 2, Judgment Day', VFX Artist, Stephen Rosenbaum

0:09Jawad MirWelcome back everyone to another other episode of Kingdom of Dreams podcast, The Making of Stories. Today my guest is again Stephen Rosenbaum. I had him a few weeks ago to speak about James Cameron Abyss. This is part two of four-part series where today he'll be talking about Terminator 2: The Judgment Day, followed by Jurassic Park, the first Steven Spielberg film, and then followed by Forrest Gump, directed by Robert Zemeckis. Some great insights in this, episode, things that I didn't know about. But without further ado, here's my conversation with Stephen Rosenbaum, VFX artist for James Cameron T2 Terminator: The Judgment Day. That jump from The Abyss to Terminator 2, you know, the, we used to call it the liquid man. I remember in high school, "The liquid man is here." You know, like from T2…

0:57Stephen RosenbaumYeah

0:57Jawad Mir... It's called T-1000.

0:59Stephen RosenbaumYeah

0:59Jawad Mir... Tell me that leap from that to Terminator 2 was that idea... Like how did that happen? Did you come on board right in pre-production because of your work in The Abyss?

1:13Stephen RosenbaumYeah, it…

1:13Jawad MirJust run through the story on me.

1:14Stephen RosenbaumYeah, literally Jim, on the backside of The Abyss, he said, "Okay, I wanna..." He called us up and just said, "I wanna now go into T2." And, we talked about the scope of the project and what, you know, his expectations would be for the T-1000, and that it all had to be computer generated. And again, for context, we, the Pseudopod, we had done 90 seconds of creature animation, and now we were talking about, you know, a principal character in his movie…

1:42Stephen Rosenbaum... Running all through, running from beginning to end, with hundreds and hundreds of shots. So, w… we literally, I remember sitting in a conference room and we were talking about it internally and saying, "Okay, well, we're gonna have to triple in size, and we... By the way, nobody here has any idea how to do liquid metal. So let's just, you know, put our heads together and go for it." And you know, there was a lot of fear, but that didn't stop us. It, you know, again, we have some really smart guys. And we hired even smarter people to come in. You know, those were the days, f… you know, if you wanted to name drop, we brought in like Joe Letteri, who now runs Weta Digital. He's been running their, running them for 20 years now. We had, you know, s… people like Scott Anderson, who was, you know, he's, you know, Academy Award winner. He's done a lot of big shows, but he really helped with our shader development.

2:43Stephen RosenbaumMark Deppe. And then, we brought in,.. Well, so we had Steve Williams in there, but you know, we, some software developers who really helped with, a process that we ended up calling Make Sticky, which was, basically a 3D morph technique. If you remember, you know, doing the facial animation was a cheat. It was a two-dimensional image…

3:15Stephen Rosenbaum... Essentially a depth map, that we were animating, or smearing essentially. But we needed to do something truly 3D with that. And so we had, some tools that we would allow us to essentially, like, move a, move the T-1000 through some jail bars and warp through a hole and, you know, deform into all these different shapes and so forth. So, that was, you know, l… largely animated and then simulated on top of that. But it was, again, it was just a collective effort of brains, big brains coming together and, trying to figure it out. But Jim was incredibly, patient with us, but you know, insistent that he get the image that he wanted. So we were very enthusiastic to keep trying, and eventually I think we hit it. That movie, I would have to say, like, of all the movies I've done, it still holds up relatively well, you know, which is surprising.

4:19Stephen RosenbaumI go back and look at some of my other movies, you know, even from 10 years ago, and I go, "Ooh, it's not quite there."

4:25Jawad MirYeah.

4:26Stephen RosenbaumBut that one... And I think, again, that's a sort of a testament to Jim's filmmaking style. He just knows how to, how to, you know, put the image forward that's gonna, you know, people are gonna, it's gonna resonate with people and, you know, it's not gonna be just about the effect.

4:44Jawad MirYeah. No, it's, it's true. And Terminator, so everything with T-1000, you and your team was behind it, correct?

4:52Stephen RosenbaumYeah. Yeah.

4:53Jawad MirYeah, that's…

4:53Stephen RosenbaumSo we did…

4:53Jawad Mir... That's a lot of work.

4:55Stephen RosenbaumYeah. It was. I mean, in the grand scheme of what we do these days, it's, it's a small show.

5:01Jawad MirYeah. Yeah.

5:01Stephen RosenbaumBut back in those days it was just this largely impossible, you know, undertaking. But you know, again, I think with the leadership we had internally, George Joblove and Doug Cade, you know, again, our fearless leaders, they just said, "Okay, we're gonna just hire really smart people, you know, and make it happen." And we, they did. You know, it was, it was, those were the days when, you know, it was huge amount of camaraderie and just very, you know, everybody supporting one another. And also we, interestingly, we weren't really sort of pigeonholed into specific tasks, although, you know, we did have animators. But most, for the most part, the TDs, the technical directors, you did pretty much everything. You know, you did your own scene layout, you did your own, lighting, you did your own, compositing. So it was… You know, it was you sort of had a comprehensive skill set, so you weren't just handing it to, you know, doing one small section of it and then handing it off to somebody.

6:08Stephen RosenbaumSo, you know, I think that made a difference in terms of people taking ownership of the work, and the quality really showed.

6:17Jawad MirRight. So let me talk about then three scenes that I want, if you can break them down however way you want them, and if memory is there for that. The three scenes that stand out for me to this day, I mean, there's amazing stuff throughout the film. But the hospital scene, right, when the, T-1000 comes out of the floor like that.

6:38Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

6:38Jawad MirAnd then obviously running into the elevator. Then the helic… helicopter scene where he... The transition or the morphing or the movement happens towards the end.

6:48Stephen RosenbaumPours himself into the helicopter.

6:49Jawad MirYeah. Yeah. Yeah.

6:50Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

6:50Jawad MirAnd then obviously the ever popular, you know, hasta la vista, baby scene, like where he rips apart and the liquid starts coming together again.

6:59Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

6:59Jawad MirWhichever order you want, if you can just talk about them a little bit, about each of them, that'd be super cool.

7:06Stephen RosenbaumYeah, the, so the hospital scene was interesting. That was a good example of, MakeSticky and what we, you know, basically projection mapping, where we could take a plate and photograph s… real world elements and essentially project it onto a 3D image, a 3D element rather. You know, I think people are familiar with it. You know, if you come up, if you come along too far along the side on perspective, it falls apart. But as a 2D image, you could warp it essentially around a 3D surface, and it would hold up to some extent. So, that was, you know, again, largely done by, initially animation and then complemented with a simulated, component to the, to the deformation action. So basically getting key frame poses, into the action and then simulating through those poses.

8:07Stephen RosenbaumAnd then projecting essentially the, I think if I recall, it was like a, I forget the term for it, but it's the black and white tiles. There's a, there's a term for it, like a parquet term.

8:19Jawad MirOkay. Okay.

8:20Stephen RosenbaumAnyway, yeah, just getting that image and then projecting it onto the 3D element and looking like he's emerging from the floor. If I recall, there was actually, it was one of the early, female TDs we had, Liza Keith, who has since d… passed away, sadly. But she was one of the ear… you know, we very few women in the industry at, in those days, and she was one of the TDs who just knocked that shot out of the park. I mean, she did a really good job with that. And then, in the, in the helicopter scene, I believe that was done by Jay Riddle. And again, animated, I believe, by Steve Williams, pouring the T-1000 pouring in. And so he's, he's creating, key frame poses again that, you know, from A to B to C to D and so forth. And then that's b… created, then simulating between the different poses.

9:20Stephen RosenbaumAnd back in those days, the simulations were very rudimentary. They were, they were not true physical sims. They were more, what's the term? Tr… sort of trans… transitional image.

9:35Jawad MirOkay.

9:35Stephen RosenbaumTransitional image simulations. Basically going from different poses, and then you had some nominal amount of control over those, the how fast and how much it deforms. But not beyond that. And then, w… and then we had to deal in that, in that particular shot, it was very complicated because it involved glass, and so forth, and the compositing was pretty tricky. But by the time we got to Terminator 2, we had established our ability to do our own compositing. And so, we took that upon ourselves. We had a, we had a group of developers creating simple comp… composite tools for us. A lot of it was still command line, but there was some UI to it. Oh, sorry about the phone. Do you wanna pause for a second or are you okay?

10:29Jawad MirSure. Yeah, go ahead.

10:31Stephen RosenbaumYeah, I'm one of those people that still has an old landline. I don't know why.

10:35Jawad MirOh, you do?

10:36Stephen RosenbaumI don't know why we have it because the only people that call are telemarketers.

10:42Jawad MirThat's okay. It's all good.

10:43Stephen RosenbaumSo we don't bother. I should turn that off, sorry. Anyway, we, it, the ability to composite, you know, obviously to iterate gave us a lot more control. So in that shot in particular, there was a lot of back and forth where it was, okay, this is working. Let's composite that. Let's look at it and reevaluate and then adjust. So there was a good fluid, workflow, between the animation, like TD lighting and compositing teams. And often, like I said, the TD and, was also the compositor. So, that was, that was, made things really efficient. And then, what was the last one? It was the…

11:30Jawad MirThe T-1000

11:32Stephen RosenbaumThe hasta la vista, baby. Yeah.

11:33Jawad MirHasta la vista, baby. Yeah. Yeah.

11:35Stephen RosenbaumYeah. There's a, the, that was, a custom simulation, that took ages to do.

11:47Jawad MirI'm sure.

11:48Stephen RosenbaumAnd, basically breaking apart, you know, how to break apart geometry, s… in a, in a fluid-like simulation. You know, I don't, I don't have a lot of information that I can recall…

12:03Jawad MirThat's fine

12:03Stephen Rosenbaum... On that, but other than I remember it took o… it took ages to get right. I believe Tom Williams, who is also now deceased, was working on that. And, but it was a great scene. It was, you know, really well done. There's, there's a number of s… of shots in that whole end sequence that I think, you know, or I did one where the, where the guy's pointing. You know, he has, he has Linda Hamilton pinned, and he extends his finger out like that.

12:35Jawad MirYeah.

12:36Stephen RosenbaumAnd we had, these reflection maps with all... You know, with, when you're doing any kind of reflective element, you had to capture the environment. So we had photographs of that particular environment that Linda was, filmed in. And, we couldn't get that to work right. And, it just didn't, it just didn't look right. So I ended up taking,.. I had an image of my family that I used as one side, and it actually gave us the right look of that, you know. So I can't say whether or not that lasted in the show, but, anyway, it gi… it gave us the right type of reflection in there.

13:18Jawad MirThis is the last, the end sequence you're talking about, right? When the... Or was it the hospital one when the duplicate Linda Hamilton…

13:24Stephen RosenbaumNo, it was the last in, when she's, you know…

13:26Jawad MirYeah

13:26Stephen Rosenbaum... At the very end…

13:27Jawad MirYeah

13:27Stephen Rosenbaum... Battle sequence.

13:28Jawad MirYeah.

13:28Stephen RosenbaumYeah. But then the, yeah. The, there was a lot of good innovative stuff. And again, just keying off of, you know, what we could do, how we could deform 3D geometry, was really that's, that was the big innovative step on Terminator 2. And, you know, we managed to pull it off amazingly. And then the floodgates opened from there. I mean, it was…

13:53Jawad MirYeah

13:54Stephen Rosenbaum... From there it was, we had Steven Spielberg calling, and we had Bob Zemeckis, you know, asking us to do stuff. And, we did. We s… I think we tripled in size again, and computer graphics started to take root. It was kinda sad in a way because, you know, the traditional means of doing visual effects, you know, that ILM, you know, had made its name obviously on the Star Wars movies and the, and Indiana Joneses and so forth, and you had this wealth of talent. But there was a time there where our leadership, I think it was Ed Jones actually who made the decision, let's try to cross-train people. You know, you have us young bucks who are, you know, skilled at using the box and, you know, technically savvy, but just naive to the craft.

14:55Stephen RosenbaumAnd then you had these people in the other building doing traditional effects for, you know, 20, 30 years at that point, and, doing it, you know, had ma… essentially masters of the craft come over. And it was, it was an incredible symbios… symbiosis of talent where, you know, we could chain... You know, I certainly benefited from it. You had, you know, teaching them how to use the box, and they were teaching you the craft and, the, you know, the art of filmmaking. So that was, that was a nice thing. So on the backside of T2, that's kind of what happened, it, you know, this internally, which was a nice thing for ILM, and I think they don't get enough credit, for that

15:42Stephen Rosenbaum... Because that, you know, they could have just said, "Okay, you know, you guys, old school, you're going away. Good luck." Instead, what they did is they recognized that, you know, we had this talent pool, and we should try to leverage that.

15:56Jawad MirThat's super awesome. That's really cool. And then, you know, before I talk a little bit more about T2, one of the things about T2 that as we're talking about it, all this, you know, is coming back, and it has nothing to do with visual effects, but just in general, the great thing about that film is that especially T-1000, right? And especially that scene where he's frozen, and then he's shot, and then he's sort of reassembled, for lack of better word.

16:25Stephen RosenbaumOh, yeah. Yeah.

16:28Jawad MirI feel even this very moment the smell of that. I, you know, it is so, like that deep freeze smell that you have, like when you're in winter walking outside.

16:39Stephen RosenbaumYeah. Yeah.

16:40Jawad MirAnd nitrogen gas and all that. Like, you actually... I, that's what's so great about that film, that every little aesthetic, from VFX to sound effects to, you know, smell, if there is such a thing, it, you just felt that you were there…

16:56Stephen RosenbaumYeah

16:56Jawad Mir... Throughout the film. And again, going back to what you said about Jim, is that it's a testament to his leadership that you actually feel all these little things, and it adds up to it, and you like it as a whole without realizing that it's the little pieces that come together.

17:11Stephen RosenbaumYeah. And to that extent, he's, he's very skilled at grounding everything as something physically real. And that, I think that's why you relate to it. You can, it's, you know, quote unquote, smell it. Even, you know, the liquid metal thing, there's, if you, if anybody's ever seen, like, mercury…

17:29Stephen Rosenbaum... If you look online, you can see these, you know, m… mercury pooling together. It's basically, that was our reference for the T-1000, right? That you just have pools of mercury, and when they come together, they kind of do this melding that is just, you know, you have a visual of it, and you go, "Okay, yeah, I have a target. I know what to hit visually." But even, like, that shot you're talking about where the T-1000 is shot and blows apart, that's, you know, classic liquid nitrogen. I don't know if you've ever seen, you know, the, you know, a bullet that's, there's a classic shot of a bullet piercing a, an apple that's been frozen in liquid nitrogen.

18:07Jawad MirYeah.

18:07Stephen RosenbaumIt just shatters…

18:08Jawad MirYeah

18:08Stephen Rosenbaum... Into tiny little pieces. That was, again, our physical real world re… reference that Jim, you know, said, "This is what I want it to look like." And so you, it becomes relatable. You kind of subconsciously understand, you know, the effect, and it's not just something outlandish that you can't, there's no tangential…

18:26Jawad MirYeah

18:26Stephen Rosenbaum... Understanding. Yeah.

18:28Jawad MirYeah. No, that makes sense. So specifically for you in T2, like besides the one that you talked about, were there any, particular shots that you had to spend a lot of time on yourself or your team, that you feel proud about? Or any funny anecdote or story like you shared from the Abyss we spoke about?

18:49Stephen RosenbaumYeah, there were,.. You know, I think the getting, you know, the f… for the, one of the big, concerns was getting the T-1000 to move correctly. I... You know, that's a testament to Steve Williams. I think he… We did a lot of reference photography, of the real world actor moving around, talk, walking. We put, targets on him essentially and how to move. And Steve and the other animators did a lot of, a lot of, testing and studying of that movement. So they, that was a, I think a big accomplishment is to s… somewhat, animate if you... We use the term rotomate, essentially.

19:45Stephen Rosenbaum'Cause you're, you're just putting a CG character over a real world, and you're, you're trying to reanimate that exact precise, human motion. So they did a, they did a really good job with that. I think that they, you know, that was a big step forward for us. But for me personally, the shots, w… the shots I'm most proud of, I did that head through the bars shot

20:14Jawad MirAt the hospital?

20:15Stephen RosenbaumYeah, at the hospital. So that was, that took a long time. And that wasn't done entirely by me. So we didn't…

20:24Jawad MirSure

20:24Stephen Rosenbaum... Have an animator. So I, we, I had a plate of, the shot, and the actor would essentially move through the space. There was no hot… There were no bars there. And then we would shoot another plate with the bars back in place, okay? So I needed to marry the two, and have him pass through. So I took, I took a 3D scan of his head and, tracked it essentially to his body motion as he was going through. And, in order to get him to look real, we used that, again, the projection mapping technique where I just took... I essentially roto'd out his face from the, from the first plate, and then projected it onto the 3D version of his head.

21:18Stephen RosenbaumAnd then from there we had a, you know, that, the deformation tool that we use, the Make Sticky deformation tool, which essentially could move through the b… bars. We had three… I put 3D bars in that place, and it, and as the 3D head hit the bars it would dis… deform around it. And then we would kept building more and more controls over it to get the right kind of, timing and the ma… the quality of how it folds and contorts around the bars and so forth. The big issue there was the shadows that nobody accounted for. You know, okay, when we're doing... We have a, the first plate, the A plate, which is the actor moving through without the bars, and then we had the B side, which is the, what we call the clean plate with the bars, the real bars in there. They had l… it had lighting on it. But if you think about the head moving through the bars, it's gonna c… it's gonna cast a shadow onto the bars. So I had to create artificial shadow on the bars and…

22:20Jawad MirOh, God.

22:20Stephen RosenbaumIf you, if you go back and look at that, it's, it works. M… nobody sees it, but now that I've pointed it out to you everybody's gonna go, "Oh, yeah, that looks bad."

22:29Jawad MirI never noticed it. I never noticed it. One thing about that se… Sorry, go on.

22:36Stephen RosenbaumNo, that's fine. Yeah, go ahead.

22:38Jawad MirI was just gonna say, one thing about that little sequence that I love the most, at the time as a, you know, as a kid it didn't make sense to me, but now it makes sense mathematically, it had to be right, is the fact that the gun doesn't go through, right?

22:51Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

22:51Jawad MirUsually when he comes out… And the gun, obviously it's not gonna go through because it's not part of him.

22:55Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

22:55Jawad MirBut that little detail right there, it's just so cool to see that. You know, you could have easily made that mistake. Like pe…

23:03Stephen RosenbaumYeah

23:03Jawad Mir... You know, sometimes movies do make that mistake. So that was really cool to see.

23:07Stephen RosenbaumYeah. That's a classic Jim Cameron. You know, I wanna make sure people understand, you know, what this is about.

23:13Jawad MirYeah.

23:13Stephen RosenbaumReinforce it. Yeah. Yeah, he's very good at that.

23:17Jawad MirCool. And, anything else from T2 that y… sticks out that you worked on?

23:23Stephen RosenbaumThere'll probably be something to come up, but I think that, yeah, I think we covered it. It, I mean, it was a... It literally was the show where... You know, we felt like when we started with The Abyss, you know, it was, it was a challenge. We had a lot of, we made a lot of mistakes, but we got through it, I think largely because it just wasn't a lot of work. You know, like I say…

23:46Stephen Rosenbaum... It was only about a minute and a half. When we got through T2, that was the... And how supportive the company as at large was of our department and what we were doing. It was j… it was, we came a, we came out of it feeling, you know, just flying, thinking, "Okay, we can, we can, if we put our heads together, we can do anything here. We can..." And, you know, I think the big missing variable, and I mentioned this earlier, was, you know, how well do we really understand the craft of visual effects? And the stu… the company, ILM, solved that for us by bringing in…

24:26Jawad MirYeah

24:26Stephen Rosenbaum... For the future shows, you know, all this incredible talent and teaching us, you know, how to, how to make visual effects. Or how to make visual effects that are worth watching.

24:37Jawad MirYeah.

24:37Stephen RosenbaumYou know, keep them exciting and interesting. Yeah.

24:41Jawad MirYeah. No, makes sense. Do you remember when Terminator 2 came out? Or let me rephrase this. So when it was about to come out, let's say a week before, a month before, when it was completely in the can, the anticipation of knowing how well would it be received, was that there? And when it was released, or maybe at a screening that you attended, was beyond people's expectations? Like, just run that timeframe, because it must be a really rewarding feeling and at the same time full of fear.

25:14Stephen RosenbaumI think a lot of people didn't... I mean, the original movie is such a classic and, but it was, it was sort of a cult following, if you recall. It wasn't, it wasn't... It didn't have the sort of wide appeal, to the general film-going audiences. And so we felt, you know, actually somewhat at ease about that because we knew that there would be this, you know, the, again, this sort of niche demographic that would watch this. And, you know, if everybody else missed it, you know, that would be their loss. But, you know, we didn't, we didn't have that worry of expectations, as a result. But we w… we knew that we had ch… achieved something special at that point. We were very proud of that work and we were amazed, frankly, that we had pulled it off to that level. We d… we didn't expect it to look as good. So we knew, we knew if people were, if it got the right kinda marketing, that it would play big, and I think it built on that. I think so g… g… To answer your question more directly, I think it caught, it caught the general movie-going audience a little by surprise and then, you know, of course w… word of mouth starts to propagate and people start to say, "You gotta go watch this."

26:37Jawad MirYeah. It was actually, I'm just looking it up right now. It was the highest grossing film of 1991, grossing $520 million, at the box office, which to, I mean, I don't know about the inflation calculation, but I would imagine it would be over a billion considering…

26:55Stephen RosenbaumEasily, yeah

26:55Jawad Mir... It's been over, yeah, you know, over 30 years. But I think I was in grade 10, I think, at the time. And I remember it was such a thing in school from math class to science class to English class. That's all we all talked, at least the boys. I don't know about, you know, the girls and all that, but at least the boys, we talked about T-1000, Schwarzenegger, T2 all the time, and I think that's where the core audience was despite the fact that I think it had an R rating, if I'm not mistaken.

27:32Stephen RosenbaumYeah, I don't... Actually, I don't know. I don't remember. But it…

27:35Jawad MirLet me just see what the rating was, at the time, in 1991, because the ratings change over time too sometimes. Yeah, it was R. It was R-rated. Yeah. I it was just amazing, like how popular it was among the young people, like 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, especially boys. And I think, I could be wrong, that audience was your key audience to me…

28:10Jawad Mir... Because of what that young, the protagonist or the young boy who was there.

28:14Stephen RosenbaumYeah. And had you s… You'd of course had watched the first one, right? So you knew the backstory.

28:20Jawad MirNo, that's interesting you bro… brought that up.

28:23Stephen RosenbaumOh. Oh.

28:24Jawad MirSo the first one I remember when I was back home, because I was probably seven or eight.

28:30Stephen RosenbaumRight.

28:30Jawad MirI didn't get to see it.

28:31Stephen RosenbaumToo young. Yeah.

28:32Jawad MirToo young. And then I saw the second one. So for me, Schwarzenegger switching modes, you know, that from first to the second…

28:41Stephen RosenbaumYeah

28:41Jawad Mir... Was not, was not there.

28:43Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

28:43Jawad MirBut the crazy thing is then I saw the first one, and then I saw the second one again, and even though I had seen the second one, I felt as if that scene, you know, in that mall corridor or hallway where he…

28:56Stephen RosenbaumYeah

28:56Jawad Mir... Takes the gun out, I felt like he was gonna shoot John Connor.

29:00Stephen RosenbaumYeah. Yeah, the horror.

29:00Jawad MirThat's how amazing that was.

29:02Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

29:05Jawad MirYeah. No, it's, it's an incredible piece of film, I mean, from technological standpoint, story, and everything. And yeah, I mean, there, if you look, started looking into it, there's so many, you know, loopholes, but who cares? It's just an action film. It's a fun film, and it has so much, you know, the, especially the whole nuclear war element. I mean, now…

29:23Stephen RosenbaumYeah

29:23Jawad Mir... We're just so close to it than ever.

29:26Stephen RosenbaumAnd like you say, the relatability of the characters too.

29:28Jawad MirYeah.

29:29Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

29:29Jawad MirYeah.

29:29Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

29:29Jawad MirYeah. I think if there was one thing that I learned from that film and Jurassic Park was that, you know, you can have a little bit of loopholes, which is fine, but if you keep the story tight and the characters limited…

29:43Jawad Mir... People will believe in that world.

29:45Stephen RosenbaumYeah. Yep. Yep.

29:48Jawad MirAmazing. Oh, awesome. Anything else?

29:50Stephen RosenbaumAlways a strong female character too with Jim's movies.

29:54Jawad MirYes. Aliens, T2, I mean, you look at Avatar. True Lies, Titanic.

30:00Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

30:00Jawad MirThey all do. They all do.

30:01Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

30:02Jawad MirYeah. No, anything else to add for Terminator 2?

30:06Stephen RosenbaumNo, that's, that's, I think we covered it.

30:09Jawad MirAmazing. No, that's awesome, man. Thank you so much for this. I appreciate it.

30:14Stephen RosenbaumMy pleasure. Do you,..

30:17Jawad MirWell…

30:17Stephen RosenbaumSo go on. Sorry.

30:18Jawad MirNo, I was just gonna go ahead. Nothing important for me to say.

30:20Stephen RosenbaumDo you... So do you wanna, tomorrow, did you wanna... So we go into Forrest Gump and…

30:30Jawad MirJurassic Park

30:31Stephen Rosenbaum... Jurassic. Okay.

30:32Jawad MirYes.

30:35Stephen RosenbaumIn there's, in between there's also s… some Bob Zemeckis stuff too. I don't know if you wanna touch on that. It's up to you.

30:44Jawad MirAbsolutely.

30:44Stephen RosenbaumThere was, Death Becomes Her.

30:45Jawad MirI'm, I'm a huge fan of his. Yes.

30:47Stephen RosenbaumYeah. And

30:48Jawad MirLet's, let's do that. Let's do that.

30:50Stephen RosenbaumOkay.

30:51Jawad MirI've spoken to Don Burgess a lot of times. I don't know if you've worked with him directly.

30:56Stephen RosenbaumYeah, a lot. Yeah.

30:57Jawad MirYeah. So we've ha… I had him on Forrest Gump. I had him on for Contact, Cast Away, What Lies Beneath, and his most recent film, Here. So yeah, I'm a huge Zemeckis/Spielberg fan, so we can definitely touch upon that. Can we do it tomorrow, maybe a tad early, or is that too early for you?

31:14Stephen RosenbaumYeah, we can do it. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, we…

31:16Jawad MirHow early is early for you?

31:18Stephen RosenbaumI can do it at 9:00 maybe.

31:22Jawad MirThat's perfect.

31:23Stephen RosenbaumYeah. If that, is that all r… So that's, that's noon for you?

31:26Jawad MirYeah, that's noon for me. So, at 1:00 I have to sort of wrap it up, so I think one hour should be enough.

31:32Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

31:32Jawad MirBut, just if you think it's longer, then maybe we can schedule another 15 minutes, but, totally up to you.

31:40Stephen RosenbaumYeah, no, it's, that's fine. Yeah. D… just to go back to Don for a second. So I, so, and Bob. My history. So I did, I started working, on the Back to the Future s… so I did, I w… I did a bunch of work on Back to Future II.

31:56Stephen RosenbaumAnd then Death, and then Death Becomes Her, and then Gump. And then, my mentor, supervisor at the time, Ken Ralston, he moved to Sony and he asked me to come with him. So I went with him down to LA for that…

32:12Stephen Rosenbaum... Three-year stint, and, we did Contact there. And then I was supposed to... So I had, you know, a lot, I worked a lot with Don and Bob, of course, in there and, but, the, I was supposed to do Cast Away and What Lies Beneath. I w… I was gonna supervise that, and then, I left I… Sony to go back…

32:36Stephen Rosenbaum... To ILM at that point.

32:38Jawad MirOh, okay

32:38Stephen Rosenbaum... So I didn't, I didn't wanna stay in LA anymore. Even though I grew up in LA, I, we had a, we had a young family and we wanted to raise our kids up in the Bay Area, so…

32:47Jawad MirSure

32:47Stephen Rosenbaum... We went, we went back to ILM, and yeah.

32:52Jawad MirOkay. Okay. No, that's good to know. I mean, honestly, man, like, I, you probably think I'm… making this up because I'm talking to you. I'm not. Like, all these movies that we're talking about, not probably just for me, but for a lot of people, like, they're, they mean a lot, especially Contact.

33:08Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

33:08Jawad MirI mean, the way that movie wrapped up, right? Like, I think it's one of the most amazing, if you wanna call it, alien movies ever made by far.

33:17Stephen RosenbaumIt's, it is. I'm, I'm always dumbfounded by that 'cause there's so many people who say that. I… it was so painful to do.

33:27Jawad MirI'm sure.

33:28Stephen RosenbaumI, w… you know, I was j… just, sorry to keep you here for the…

33:32Jawad MirNo, it's fine

33:32Stephen Rosenbaum... But it was…

33:33Jawad MirI love it.

33:33Stephen RosenbaumIt was... I, we had... I had moved down to LA and we had s… gone, moved into Sony Image Works and it, they were sort of this sort of very fledgling boutique style effects house. And we grew them exponentially. I mean, they were, I think there were, like, 30 people and we grew them into, like, 400 or 500 people.

33:59Jawad MirWow

33:59Stephen Rosenbaum... And we took on Contact, and that was, it w… you know, as you can imagine with that kind of g… fast growth, it, there was a lot of chaos. But w… we did a really good job, I think, in the end. And, but I think largely that's just Bob's storytelling ability. You know, he was very good with that. But there are some interesting stories there, if you ever wanna get into it, about, like, the machine. Oh, I'm blanking on the author. Who's the original author of Contact?

34:30Jawad MirThe, Carl Sagan. The po…

34:32Stephen RosenbaumCar…

34:32Jawad MirThe pod you're talking about.

34:33Stephen RosenbaumYeah. So did you... I don't know if you ever heard this story, but it actually, the day we were gonna shoot it, the first... Carl Sagan never liked the idea of the machine, like, a physical machine. He had some other concept, which I never understood. But, w… the day we were gonna actually gonna shoot it caught on fire, and just two days before Carl had died. So it was like…

34:59Jawad MirOh, wow

35:00Stephen Rosenbaum... "Ooh, it's, like, really weird. Like, that's a little too coincidental. We know that Carl didn't like this. He had just died." And then, I'm not kidding, two days later the set itself catches on fire.

35:14Jawad MirThat's crazy.

35:14Stephen RosenbaumThe day we were gonna shoot it. Yeah. It was really nuts.

35:17Jawad MirAnd the cr… it's crazy also the fact that in the film itself, the first launch, you know, the guy, the nut who blows it up…

35:26Stephen RosenbaumYeah. Blows it up

35:27Jawad Mir... Yeah.

35:28Stephen RosenbaumYeah. Yeah.

35:29Jawad MirWell, we gotta talk about that too, for sure.

35:32Stephen RosenbaumOne day. Yeah. There's some other…

35:33Jawad MirYeah

35:33Stephen Rosenbaum... Good stories with Contact that we can talk about. But yeah.

35:36Jawad MirI, m… man, Steven, if I, if I had the, you know, if you had the time and if you're interested, I am willing to talk about anything and everything you've done. I mean, it's just fascinating, and you're a great storyteller, which is really cool too, and also being able to talk about the films that I love and people love, it just means a lot.

35:53Stephen RosenbaumI appreciate that. I, hey, you actually caught me at a good time 'cause I'm, I'm, there's a project that I'm heading into, but I've been heading into it for the last three months. They keep, it keeps pushing and pushing and pushing. I actually got word yesterday. It's like, "Oh, another two weeks." So…

36:09Jawad MirYeah, no, I…

36:09Stephen RosenbaumSo you got me. You have me, you have me now, but at some point I'm gonna disappear again. But then I'll, I'll resurface.

36:16Jawad MirThat's fine.

36:16Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

36:16Jawad MirThat's fine. Whenever you're, whenever you have time, and I completely understand that frustration. I'm going through something like that too. I'm waiting on a project for the last four months, so…

36:25Stephen RosenbaumOh, no

36:26Jawad Mir... It's like this. Yeah.

36:27Stephen RosenbaumWhat's it, what's it on?

36:28Jawad MirIt's actually my own, film.

36:30Stephen RosenbaumYeah

36:31Jawad Mir... It's, it's called Whispers in Time. It's, it deals with… A Jewish boy in 1944 and a Palestinian boy in 1972, and how their stories are interconnected that leads them to 2023.

36:45Stephen RosenbaumAh, very timely.

36:46Jawad MirSo yeah, it actually came, the idea came out of the frustration of me arguing on both sides, trying to…

36:52Stephen RosenbaumYeah

36:53Jawad Mir... Calm people down.

36:54Stephen RosenbaumSame here.

36:54Jawad MirAnd…

36:54Stephen RosenbaumYeah

36:55Jawad Mir... Yeah. And now it's, I, for the last seven months I've been... It's a short concept so that we can make a feature. Just trying to raise money. And now things are kinda falling into place, and just location scouting in Poland and Jordan in the next month or two, and then…

37:11Stephen RosenbaumOh, fantastic.

37:13Jawad MirYeah. That's the goal. Let's see. Fingers crossed.

37:15Stephen RosenbaumAre you directing it?

37:16Jawad MirYes.

37:17Stephen RosenbaumNice. And you're writing as well?

37:19Jawad MirI wrote the first draft, but I'm not, I don't consider myself a screenwriter, so I'm trying to get somebody just to kinda hash out the characters and everything.

37:27Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

37:27Jawad MirAnd just ma…

37:27Stephen RosenbaumYeah

37:27Jawad Mir... Give them a little bit more depth, so.

37:29Stephen RosenbaumGood move.

37:30Jawad MirYeah.

37:30Stephen RosenbaumGood move. Yeah.

37:31Jawad MirYeah.

37:31Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

37:32Jawad MirAwesome.

37:32Stephen RosenbaumThere are people who are very good at that. Unfortunately, a lot of directors don't realize.

37:36Jawad MirYeah, no, I know that. I think I, if I was doing this 10 years ago, I probably would've thought I know everything.

37:44Stephen RosenbaumYeah

37:44Jawad Mir... But you know, with age you kinda start realizing that you gotta hire the best that are better than you and go with it.

37:48Stephen RosenbaumYeah. Yeah.

37:50Jawad MirWhat about you, if you are able to talk about it? Anything exciting?

37:53Stephen RosenbaumIt's an, it's a sequel to Greyhound, the movie.

37:59Jawad MirOh, with Tom Hanks.

38:00Stephen RosenbaumYeah. So the last, you know, I did Masters of the Air with Platone and Apple.

38:05Jawad MirPlatone, yeah.

38:06Stephen RosenbaumAnd so this is a sequel to it. But we'll, we'll see. It's, they're trying to sort things out, and I've a feeling they will. It's just a when. So we'll, hopefully I can hang on a little longer to do it. I enjoy working with Platone, and Apple's great. But I also have to pay bills, so.

38:27Jawad MirYeah. No, I know. I know, man.

38:28Stephen RosenbaumI gotta work.

38:29Jawad MirI know. I know, I get it. But do you think the fire would have any impact on that?

38:34Stephen RosenbaumIt has. It's definitely... That was, you know, just before the holidays everybody said, "Oh, okay, we'll regroup in the new year, and then we'll move forward." And then of course the fires hit. And, you know, you j… you're not hearing from anybody. I've, the only people I've heard from are people who have lost homes. You know, and then they're scrambling now to find a place to live with, you know, along with the other thousands of people. So it's, it's tough. I think it'll be a while, for them…

39:00Jawad MirYeah

39:00Stephen Rosenbaum... To work that out. But that's, that's certainly more important. Real world stuff.

39:04Jawad MirOf course. Of course. No, I know, I know. I mean, they're talking about ca… canceling Oscars, but I don't think they've made a def… decision yet, but, it just keeps growing. I was, I'm even on the fence right now just to go out and just help for three, four days, just random people.

39:19Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

39:19Jawad MirPeople I know. But I'm just kinda debating with the smoke, like if that's a smart idea or not. So, yeah, it's…

39:27Stephen RosenbaumYeah

39:27Jawad Mir... Absolutely what's going on.

39:29Stephen RosenbaumI think moral support is definitely welcome. People…

39:31Jawad MirYeah. I know. It's just that I have a family, and my wife is like, you know, "Don't go," and I'm like, "No, I gotta go." So you know how that is, right? So.

39:38Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

39:39Jawad MirYeah.

39:39Stephen RosenbaumIt's, it's, it's, it's hard. But I, yeah. Well, I think people will get through it. I think it's gonna be many years of recovery though. It's, it's tough.

39:49Jawad MirYeah.

39:49Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

39:49Jawad MirYeah, I think the first goal is obviously to stop everything, you know, and then rebuild. Because it just keeps, you keep seeing in the news it's gonna get worse, it's gonna get better, and then it just flip-flops, right? So fingers crossed.

40:02Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

40:02Jawad MirAwesome.

40:02Stephen RosenbaumHey, r… before you go…

40:03Jawad MirYes, yeah

40:03Stephen Rosenbaum... Just so you know, we got a VES nomination for Masters. So.

40:07Jawad MirAh.

40:08Stephen RosenbaumYeah.

40:08Jawad MirGood.

40:08Stephen RosenbaumSo we're…

40:08Jawad MirWe'll talk about that tomorrow.

40:10Stephen RosenbaumOh. Okay.

40:11Jawad MirWe'll talk about that briefly tomorrow, just so that we can

40:13Stephen RosenbaumWe're, we're happy

40:14Jawad Mir... Keep the night going.

40:14Stephen RosenbaumWe're happy that we get some recognition. Yeah.

40:16Jawad MirNo, it was a great series, and I am glad that I, we talked last year and now this and, I, yeah, it's, it's, it's awesome. Congratulations.

40:25Stephen RosenbaumYeah, we're happy. Thanks.