'Minority Report', VFX Art Director, Alex Laurant

0:08Jawad MirWell, thank you, Alex, for joining on Kingdom of Dreams podcast, and you're here to speak about Minority Report, your work on that, Saving Private Ryan, and also some preliminary work on BFG. So good to have you.

0:23Alex LaurentOh, thanks. Thank you. It's really nice to be here talking with you.

0:27Jawad MirWonderful. So just give me a little bit of background on who you are, Alex. Like how did you get into this world of VFX art direction, and for those of us who don't know what that is in detail, in layman terms if you can explain us that too.

0:44Alex LaurentAbsolutely. I'm happy to. Well, I come from a background of art. I was raised in a household full of art. My mother was a painter. I was raised in San Francisco, California, and, she was a fine artist, and her father was a, was a very successful illustrator and fine artist as well in New York. So it's… You can talk about nature versus nurture, but I think I had some of both because she both encouraged me, and I had that family context of art being acceptable a… and an accepted thing, encouraged thing, as well as whatever genetic, whatever…

1:23Jawad MirYeah

1:23Alex Laurent... Genetic predisposition I may have inherited. We can debate that another time. But, it, I, it was, it all added up to being a very supportive upbringing when it came to, embracing my creative side. And so with that, I pursued… I mean, I was always drawing. I was always making things. I was sculpting, and I fell in love with film specifically, to answer your question, also at a very young age because my mother encouraged me to experience lots of different kinds of art. She would take me to all sorts of really interesting exhibitions at the museum and films. We went to movies all the time. She loved movies as well. So, we went, to a lot of types of films, and I fell in love with, not surprisingly, as a young kid, fantasy and science fiction films. And I was captivated by the special effects, by movie magic and…

2:22Jawad MirRight

2:23Alex Laurent... At one point she took me to a wonderful lecture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art by a veteran effects artist and inventor, Linwood Dunn, who is part of the history. He's an iconic figure in the history of filmmaking from a technical point of view, sort of a behind the scenes…

2:43Jawad MirSure

2:43Alex Laurent... Point of view. And he really was responsible for the development of the optical printer and all the early analog old school film pre-digital, compositing, techniques. He was very instrumental in the advancement of that entire technology of combining pieces of different pieces of film into one, which was employed, you know, in many different ways through all of our twentieth century film history in terms of effects. So…

3:10Jawad MirYeah

3:11Alex Laurent... He was iconic. He gave his great breakdown of behind the scenes stuff. And not to date myself too much, but this was the seventies. This was before this kind of thing was known, was mainstream, was talked about, and so seeing something like this just blew my mind and it really started me, I would say, on the track. I'd say that, and then seeing the fantasy films of Ray Harryhausen. So that's nothing shocking. Ray Harryhausen is a much better known iconic figure…

3:40Jawad MirSure

3:40Alex Laurent... Of course, the grandfather of special effects is what he's often called, among many others. So I fell in love with Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, and Jason and the Argonauts, and all of them. And, you know, additionally, I went and saw, you know, my mom, to her credit, took me to see 2001: A Space Odyssey.

3:59Jawad MirYes.

3:59Alex LaurentOn the big screen, of course. So, you know, VHS wasn't even a thing when I first saw it. So that's just how old this guy is. But it's really the, this where it all started, to answer your question. I actually took a rather circuitous winding path to get to work in film. It was not the normal course. I, as I said, was raised in Northern California, far from the schools, the big schools that you heard about, UCLA…

4:29Alex Laurent... And USC and all of those prestigious film schools. I was a little daunted by those and didn't really feel like I had access to those. We didn't have the money really to sort of afford them. So I ended up pursuing my visual art and my drawing instead, and that really became the thing that I used to creatively, express myself. But meanwhile, my obsessive nerdy hobby in school, in high school was making stop-motion animated movies in my bedroom with my own little sculptures and monsters and scenes, and I'd make those with a couple of similarly nerdy friends, and that's how we sort of developed our skills. And we would follow whatever media we could at the time, which was limited to a handful of really low budget magazines about animation and special effects.

5:19Jawad MirYeah.

5:19Alex LaurentAnd so we would get inspiration from anything we could find, and we would go to the sketchiest movie theaters downtown at all hours of the weekend and spend days, the entire day, basically watching triple features of old grainy prints of these B movies just to watch makeup and special effects and animation in any form we could consume it. So we kinda just constantly fed ourselves this diet, and then we'd go and make our own Super 8 movies. So it was a wonderful way to have a nerdy childhood.

5:53Jawad MirYeah. No.

5:54Alex LaurentVery much, you know, different from the norm.

5:57Jawad MirI noticed you mentioned Jason and the Argonauts and Sinbad and Seventh Voyage. Sinbad and Seventh Voyage is probably the first movie That I, to my memory, to my knowledge, that I ever saw. And, I still remember, you know, the one-eyed, the monster, and then the fight with that.

6:16Alex LaurentThe Cyclops. Yeah.

6:16Jawad MirAnd, there was another one, Jack and the Giant Killer. I don't know if you've seen that one.

6:20Alex LaurentOh, of course. Always. Yeah.

6:22Jawad MirAnd…

6:22Alex LaurentI'm glad you mentioned it.

6:24Jawad MirYeah. And the sto… I mean, if you look at it now, I mean, yeah, it looks, you know, especially Jason and the Argonauts, like the skeletons fighting, the sword fighting.

6:33Alex LaurentYeah.

6:33Jawad MirIt looks so good even if you consider that it was in the…

6:39Alex LaurentYeah

6:39Jawad Mir... '60s and, you know, pre-Star Wars, pre-2001…

6:42Alex LaurentOh, yeah

6:42Jawad Mir... Space Odyssey, era.

6:44Alex LaurentOh, yeah.

6:45Jawad MirAnd great movies.

6:46Alex LaurentIt was amazing. I know. They, the, a… and it was really, at that point it was almost entirely one man. It was Ray, you know, Harryhausen, and it was…

6:54Jawad MirYeah

6:54Alex Laurent... He was, now he had assistants. We don't hear a lot about them.

6:57Jawad MirYeah.

6:57Alex LaurentBut he had some, but largely it really was shouldered by him. He…

7:02Jawad MirYeah

7:02Alex Laurent... Really kind of pioneered the whole thing. He built, he was standing of course on the shoulders of other giants before him. Willis O'Brien, known for King Kong and Mighty Joe Young, really did develop cinematic stop-motion animation, at least in LA. There's many other East… Eastern Euro… you've got a handful of other artists who get a little less notoriety for inventing a lot of, being very inventive with visual effects as well in Eastern Europe. But, and the name is escaping me now, but there are a couple of wonderful f… animators and filmmakers from back then who also invented quite a few techniques. But Willis O'Brien is the one that is known for bringing them all together, and then Harryhausen trained under him, and yeah. So that's a heck of a first, movie experience to have for you.

7:47Jawad MirI th… I think it was the first. I mean, I, memory, if my memory serve, memory serves me right, yeah. I mean that, Jaws, Raiders.

7:55Alex LaurentYeah.

7:55Jawad MirI don't think I ever saw Star Wars until in the '90s. I just, I never got exposed to Star Wars. But…

8:00Alex LaurentWow.

8:01Jawad MirYeah.

8:02Alex LaurentYeah.

8:02Jawad MirBut when you mention stop motion, I'm, I'm interested to know, Aardman Animation is like, to me…

8:09Alex LaurentOh, yeah

8:09Jawad Mir... Like, you know…

8:09Alex LaurentOh

8:09Jawad Mir... The king, the king of storytelling and stop motion combined, right?

8:14Alex LaurentYeah.

8:14Jawad MirLike you look at Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run. Now they're working on Chicken, I think there's a Chicken Run 2 coming out next year.

8:20Alex LaurentOh, good

8:20Jawad Mir... How, w… was there, was that, was there ever sort of an inspiration to be working there, or how did you end up at ILM? Were you at ILM? Sorry, I just have to make sure that it was…

8:31Alex LaurentYes, I was at ILM. Yeah. And Aardman didn't exist back then. It was pre-Aardman.

8:36Jawad MirDidn't they come in mid…'90s, Aardman?

8:38Alex LaurentI don't know. I would, I, they may have. Mid to late '90s. I sort of, I sort of equate them with being a little later, but I don't know the exact date.

8:49Jawad MirOkay.

8:49Alex LaurentBut when I was interested in stop motion, it was way before, Aardman…

8:55Jawad MirAardman

8:55Alex Laurent... Had sort of the…

8:56Jawad MirYeah

8:56Alex Laurent... The exposure to stop-motion animation beyond special effects and visual effects movies like Harryhausen's was also these traveling, anthologies of animation, these tournée. The international tournée of animation, and I believe this was out of Canada. I believe it was, Toronto had a big an… animation. Quebec had a, had a big animation, huge animation sort of, well huge…

9:23Jawad MirYeah

9:23Alex Laurent... Relatively speaking, in the animation scene. And film bureaus and committees that appreciated animation. And they would assemble these international tournées that would then tour. There were two hours' worth of, two dozen animated shorts. And these tended to be very artistic and sort of elevated artistic animation. Sometimes very personal, very dark. Lots of different styles, and some lighthearted. But…

9:50Jawad MirYeah

9:51Alex Laurent... Very much artistic. Not mainstream Disney or, you know, typical cartoon animation. And they would tour, and they would come to the Museum of Modern Art, and that's another thing that my mom always took me to, was these animation compilations. And they, that went on for a while in different forms. Spike and Mike was another variation of that, which was a lot more subversive and kind of, snarky and, R-rated, later on.

10:19Jawad MirYeah.

10:19Alex LaurentThat would tour, that would travel around also. And so those were other ways that animation in all these different styles, including some really sort of edgy, inventive, original styles…

10:32Jawad MirSure

10:32Alex Laurent... Started to kind of get exposed. So that was another source of inspiration for a lot of us. But to answer your question, I found my way to ILM in a very indirect way. I studied illustration and, fine art and graphic design and art history. Kind of a hodgepodge. Got my degree from a small, really wonderful art school in, Oakland, now in San Francisco as well, called California College of the Arts. Then it was called California College of Arts and Crafts. But they had a, they had a great illustration and fine art program. I kinda mashed them together in my own way. But I wasn't studying film. I again ended up pursuing illustration and graphic design as my first attempted career. I was hired by a company in Half Moon Bay, a very small startup in the, in the early '90s that was starting to do computer graphics. And this was…

11:30Jawad MirYeah

11:30Alex Laurent... Just when the Macintosh was coming, was being released, and desktop computers were a thing. And suddenly people were starting to experiment with bringing animation techniques to the computer, and those were becoming democratized and able to be produced outside of some huge computer lab or a university research, department where these giant computers had been. And so now this was suddenly put in the hands, these tools, the early crude versions of them, pre-Photoshop or early Photoshop for instance, were put in the hands of a lot of different people. So this was pretty revolutionary. Obviously very disruptive and hugely, and a historic shift, happened at that moment. So I was hired by this company on the basis of my cartooning and illustration skills that were starting to put together this kind of product for corporate uses. So I… they would scan my drawings in and create animation on the Mac, on the Macintosh…, ...

12:31Alex LaurentThat would then be digitized. And they trained me from the ground up. So I got hired by them, and it was one of those lucky breaks because I was... My first job, here I was being trained in these brand-new tools. So I learned early Photoshop… Sure... Illustrator, 3D modeling tools, 3D animation, video editing. Super crude by today's standards, but these were all the early versions, and that's, that's what got me into it. That's kinda what started to turn the lights on in my head, and it exposed me to digital tools. And I went in very skeptically, by the way. I was very snooty about old-school techniques that I'd been trained in. Yeah. Physical, tactile media, and so this digital thing was very much like, "not sure about this." Didn't take long for me to be seduced by it. I... This was called multimedia back in the early '90s. Yeah. And multimedia was the... Remember all that? Oh, yeah. And so your CD-ROMs, CD-ROMs is how you would distribute these things. Everything, yeah. You're starting to see these PCs and Macintosh computers in more people's living rooms.

13:35Alex LaurentAnd education was one of the ways that, these were, or, you know, being used early on, being experimented with. Maybe we can use this for some interactive kids education, experiences, games. Basically education games, point-and-click kinds of things. So that's what I ended up getting into. For the next five years, I joined another multimedia company, a small one up in Marin County, California, across from San Francisco, and we did museum exhibits, educational museum exhibits using animation of various kinds and interactive screens that you'd click on. And we worked on a ch… a children's ABC educational, cartoon game, which,... And a bunch of corporate stuff as well for training. All of this was starting to embrace digital, and it was also teaching me how to be an art director. And I learned my management, creative management and creative direction skills there as well.

14:35Alex LaurentSo this was a critical maturing opportunity for me in my early 30s, and then that by a happy circumstance, one of these happy accidents of being in the right place at the right time, and then showing initiative at that moment when I needed to, all the pieces came together and I got interviewed at ILM. And I had been, again, in San Francisco Bay Area knowing that Industrial Light & Magic was right there in this industrial area of San Rafael in Marin, driving by it on the freeway, knowing it was there, and feeling like it was, you know, this walled-off golden city. Which is ironic, because it was an industrial collection of very anonymous and humble buildings. Yeah. Anything but shiny and golden, but that didn't matter to me. So the opportunity to interview at a place like this, to get inside there, to go beyond the walls of what I knew what was going on then, this was 1996… Interesting...

15:36Alex LaurentWas an amazing thing. It was an amazing thing. Yeah. So I got hired. I got hired into their art department. And finally, to get around to answering your question about what my job was and what I, what I did all those years as a visual effects art director… Sure... The art department at Industrial Light & Magic was and still is, for the most part, everything's changed at ILM of course, but it's in some ways similar. The art department is centralized. The cen… the art department is a central kind of service, group, a service bureau, if you will, to all of the rest of the productions throughout, ILM. And so we... Yeah, a production is a visual effects project, a film that comes through ILM, and there can be half a dozen or more at any given time. Now the company has scaled up, of course, so much that I think the number's much higher. But the way it was then, you have an effects supervisor, and you had a CG supervisor, and an animation supervisor.

16:38Alex LaurentAnd in the older days, you had an art director who were part of the senior creative and technical leadership, all reporting up to the effects supervisor. Ah, and the producer. Cannot forget the critical VFX… Sure... Producer role as well, who's right up there as the partner to the effects sup. And those two really form the tip of our pyramid and the conduit with the studio and the director and the production. So visual effects is considered post-production. We're the thing that starts once production has wrapped and the film is in the can. And that's when we begin. That's the old model. Now there's a lot more overlap because… Yeah... Digital production techniques are so interwoven with production that same thing still has to happen. But let's just say the integration of digital and visual effects happened so much earlier in the design process, in the, in the production scheduling and planning, and what's gonna be on a sound stage, and what's gonna be on location, and which of those locations can be done digitally later.

17:44Alex LaurentAll of these decisions have, of course, changed radically since those days. But the basic building blocks of techniques and production practices we have now, they were laid down back then in the late '90s and early 2000s when I was there. So that is to say that this was an explosive period for visual effects when I joined, because digital was coming... Just it was early days. These toys, so to speak, these techniques were being played with a lot of enthusiasm by directors and studios. To date, that period in terms of movies that were in, ILM Studio then… Men in Black was just being made

18:27Jawad MirTerminator 2, Jurassic Park.

18:29Alex LaurentTerminator 2 had already happened, and Jurassic Park…

18:31Jawad MirYeah, after

18:31Alex Laurent... Had already happened.

18:32Jawad MirYeah.

18:32Alex LaurentExactly. They'd already happened. The Mask had happened. So digital was already being used. Some of the big breakthrough experiences, The Abyss, for example. Those had already happened, and we were now in the wave that was following that period.

18:50Jawad MirSure.

18:50Alex LaurentSo it was a really exciting time because you had old school and new school really working together. We had a wonderful model shop that we're very well known for, amazing miniatures, and incredible artists and craftsmen there. Of course, we had all our stages, our stages and our motion control cameras, and a, you know, there was a lot of physical filmmaking that was part of our process. And in addition to, of course, all the compositing. And I really enjoyed this combination of old school and new school. You know, I'm kind of a sentimental fan and extra interested in VFX history, you know.

19:29Jawad MirYeah.

19:29Alex LaurentWith the, with the early childhood experiences I described earlier, it's, it's not surprising that I love sort of the old school techniques and how clever they are, the in-camera effects techniques. And so I love seeing miniatures used with digital, combined, digital compositing. I felt like we were entering into a period where we could get the best of both, and that's still really the case in, it's still the case in some, areas.

19:55Jawad MirYeah. I'm glad you mentioned that because I find once a technology comes out, it's, it's overly used in some cases, in some cases…

20:07Alex LaurentYeah

20:07Jawad Mir... It's combined with the actual physical, sets or miniatures, like you said. You know, I think, so there are very, there are very few directors who use combination, of both very well. Christopher Nolan is one of them.

20:22Alex LaurentSure

20:22Jawad Mir... Obviously Steven Spielberg, James Cameron.

20:25Alex LaurentJames Cameron. Cameron. Peter Jackson. Yeah. Yeah.

20:28Jawad MirPeter Jackson. And it's, I personally, and I think I agree with you about the old skill, school thing is I can, and you're not in the space with the characters when they're in a green screen room, period. Like, that's…

20:44Alex LaurentRight

20:44Jawad Mir... At least for me. Like, I, you can tell. I mean, maybe I'm in the film business, maybe that's why I n… maybe pick things. But you're not there. But when you're actually physically on a set, and then…

20:56Alex LaurentOoh

20:56Jawad Mir... It's combined with, like for example, you know, what was that movie? Interstellar.

21:01Alex LaurentYeah.

21:01Jawad MirYou know, when that, when they go on the planet and the spaceship lands in the water. That was all real. Like, it was actually a real, you know, ship that they built. But obviously there was, I mean, the multilayers of effects after that. So I think that it, now that '90s era is coming back, because I do feel, you know, with ex… some exceptions from 2000 onwards up until maybe four or five years ago, it was just heavy effects digital.

21:29Alex LaurentDigital. Yeah. Yeah.

21:30Jawad MirYeah. And I'm glad now it's coming back because y… you lo… you lose the characters, you lose the story, right?

21:37Alex LaurentYeah. There's a, there's a hard to pin down quality of the physical, of light hitting a real object and a h… light hitting a character, whether it's a puppet or someone in makeup or whatever…

21:51Jawad MirYeah

21:51Alex Laurent... That's, that's missing. And the immediacy of it. There's still a lot of innovation happening, that is attempting to bring that sense of immediacy in the digi… using digital tools, kind of mixing things. And I'm, I'm really excited about, Stagecraft and the volume and basically, immersive LED wall spaces as you were seeing in the, used in The Mandalorian. Still with ILM's, part, you know…

22:19Jawad MirYeah

22:19Alex Laurent... Participation heavily obviously driving that. They're not the only ones in the industry doing LED walls, but they've certainly gotten the most notoriety in that they've been ahead of the curve partnering with Epic, who makes a real time game engine called Unreal. So Epic is, also an amazing company making these amazing real time tools that allow artists to build these digital environments super realistically and rendering them in real time. So video games and film, and I went into video games later in my career and kind of went back and forth. There was a lot of talk back when I first made the crossover, in the mid 2000s, late 2000s, that there was this convergence happening there. The buzzword was convergence. And it was kind of an aspiration that video game and film makers and video game makers could come together, and the mediums were gonna kinda merge sometime somehow. And it was, it was a lovely thought in a way, but it was also missing the point, and it never really happened the way people thought it might.

23:24Alex LaurentThey didn't really know what it meant. Are we gonna have films that we can interact with, but watch in a movie theater, or are we gonna have games that look more like film? And that's, that's actually, the s… the latter one is what we've seen happen much more. But they're still very different. And so with these volumes, there's ways of bringing background environments into the set so that the actors can react. And the lighting and the mood and the vibe of even a digital environment can still surround the actor, giving them that grounding that you were just talking about. We're starting to see that still with this merging of game and filmmaking techniques. That's what I'm calling real convergence finally happening. Because it's not in the medium itself. We're still, the out… the output…

24:16Jawad MirYeah

24:16Alex Laurent... Is still, is still a linear piece of entertainment. But they're using techniques and cross-pollinating different approaches in a way that's, that's quite deep and it's revolutionizing the way… The way, s… scenes are filmed and the way locations are scouted and the way film budgets are, you know, are allocated right now. It's, it's, it's upending a lot and offering a huge number of options. It's very exciting.

24:47Jawad MirWell, they're, they're doing that now on Netflix, I think, right? I mean, it's not really a combination of game, but it's more like an interactive film where you choose an obstacle. If you choose this step, you'll face that obstacle.

24:58Alex LaurentRight. Choose your own adventure, model.

25:01Jawad MirYeah.

25:01Alex LaurentIntera… interactive narrative, yeah.

25:03Jawad MirRight.

25:03Alex LaurentI was at HBO for a brief time, with, trying to start up a group there, working with a group, trying to explore the future of just that, interactive narrative. What would it be like to watch Game of Thrones and be able to choose, s… not just choose binary paths, decision points like in the Black Mirror episode that you might be referring to, that got a lot of notoriety. I don't remember the name of it the episode. It was, it was excellent though. I, well, I enjoyed it. It was an interesting experiment.

25:37Jawad MirYes.

25:38Alex LaurentA very interesting experiment. It's really hard to do that, really to pull it off, but it's an area that fascinates me for sure. So I…

25:47Jawad MirDo you think…

25:47Alex Laurent... I think we're gonna see, we're gonna see a lot more artistic boundary pushing experimentation with interactive narrative for sure.

25:56Jawad MirI wonder, and this is probably too far-fetched, but then again, where we are right now, 60 years ago nobody would've imagined. I wonder with the evolution of AI and this new, well, it's not really new, but it's becoming more popular, the meta world and everything.

26:11Alex LaurentMetaverse, yeah.

26:12Jawad MirYeah, metaverse. And I wonder if there is a way, you know, when you're, when you're f… making a film, let's say Game of Thrones, you're making an e… you're filming an episode and you're trying to make it interactive, so you have to do different, if this happens, this is what I'm gonna go. You have to shoot all these different scenes. I wonder if with AI, the evolution of AI, if it becomes so powerful where you don't necessarily have to shoot all these extra scenes, AI automatically does it for you. Like, it digitally creates certain environments for you. I wonder if that's something that's possible.

26:43Alex LaurentI think it is possible. It's a little scary.

26:47Jawad MirIt is. It is

26:47Alex Laurent... But it seems like a logical, scary from a, from a number of different points of view, but from the defensive point of view of an artist, a practicing artist in the industry who doesn't wanna have their job taken away.

27:00Jawad MirOh, yeah.

27:00Alex LaurentThat's a whole other discussion. M… but A… AI is showing that it can do a lot. It can't do absolutely everything, but it can do a lot. What you're describing is a whole level up in terms of…

27:12Jawad MirYes

27:12Alex Laurent... Sophistication, but to say that it's not possible would be naive. Whether it would be good or not is a whole other question, but y… you know, we're talking about also steps on the way to such a, such a future.

27:27Jawad MirYeah.

27:27Alex LaurentSo perhaps AI could be useful for a portion of the production, like the background. Say you make a decision in your branching story point that's going to affect the environment, and it's the same environment, but in one version it's blazing hot, it's sort of a blazing hot hellscape, and in another version it's an arctic snow covered tundra.

27:50Jawad MirYeah.

27:51Alex LaurentRight? And so it's the same environment, but dressed differently.

27:54Jawad MirYeah.

27:54Alex LaurentOr maybe it's an apocalyptic future as opposed to a splendid, wonderful, you know, verdant green future. So just whatever contrast you want in the story. AI tools a lot closer to what we have now could absolutely be used. I can see a pretty clear path where AI tools could be used to generate those backgrounds because there's a certain contained, you're drawing a certain line between what the variability is.

28:19Jawad MirSure.

28:20Alex LaurentHaving the AI literally control, choreograph, and script the character or characters and their behavior at a high quality level is an entire other level of complexity that seems a whole jump ahead, but…

28:37Jawad MirYeah

28:37Alex Laurent... Hey, you know, could happen.

28:40Jawad MirWell, it gives me a nice segue to your work on Minority Report, which we'll come to. But Minority Report was written, I think, in the '60s or the '50s.

28:50Alex LaurentYeah.

28:50Jawad MirAnd the film came out in two, the early 2000s, and this whole thing about, you know, retina scans and all this…

28:58Alex LaurentYeah

28:58Jawad Mir... Other stuff that was in the film, it's here, right? Like all this stuff.

29:03Alex LaurentYeah.

29:03Jawad MirYou know, facial recognition system and all that, and that, and that goes me, takes me to the next point is how did you get involved, and we'll come to Saving Private Ryan, but since we're talking about technology, how did you…

29:14Alex LaurentYeah

29:14Jawad Mir... Come, get involved in Min… Minority Report? At what stage, and what was your work, for it? Like, what scenes did you work on?

29:24Alex LaurentOh, I, absolutely. I, so I will... It's a good way for me to sort of connect back to the story I was telling earlier about how ILM's art department works and how ILM serves as a sort of post-production step that still gets involved early on, with the production when they're filming. And so this is a great example of how that handoff and how that collaboration works and how there's sort of a shared vision. Even though it's separated by time, there has to be a continuity of style between the production's, work, obviously filming, and everything that's added later. It all has to feel the same. And so w… with Minority Report, ILM had a long and fruitful relationship with Steven Spielberg…

30:13Jawad MirYeah

30:13Alex Laurent... Obviously for many years and many productions, and a lot of innovation as well. I have to say for, in the context of a lot of these other films and a lot of the films that have come since, Minority Report was a fairly modest and contained effects movie. It did not have a huge budget…

30:30Jawad MirYes

30:30Alex Laurent... For a, you know, for a DreamWorks level film. It was modest. I mean, it had Tom Cruise, and it had this amazing cast. So…

30:37Jawad MirYeah

30:37Alex Laurent... You know, it's not to, not to… Say that it was overly humble, but from a VFX point of view, it was not meant to be extravagant. Spielberg's philosophy about the way the effects should feel in the film was very specific and made really clear to us. And it was his philosophy for the design of the whole movie, and that is that it feel grounded and realistic and not overly shiny or sexy or futuristic. That the ways that it felt futuristic needed to be very realistic. They needed to… They weren't about shiny chrome surfaces everywhere and flying cars and whatnot.

31:15Jawad MirYeah.

31:16Alex LaurentWe had maglev cars, which was the compromise. But he wanted everything in there from a technology point of view, as well as from a sociological and cultural point of view, from an architectural point of view. All of the aspects of the world-building, he wanted to be grounded in research and as much tangible, known reality as possible. And so to do that, he gathered, as many people know, he gathered this research think tank, this group of consultants to all come together and have this big roundtable, when the script was still being finished. And this is, again, all before ILM is really in the mix at all. The person who's the closest to my job who's in the mix there is the production designer. The production designer is responsible on any film on the production side for designing the look of the entire movie, and really working closely with the director from the very beginning, and then working with the director of photography, throughout all the production, and all of the other art directors who work on the sets, the scenic, th-this, the dressers, this, the prop people, the lighting team.

32:27Alex LaurentAll of this team of crafts and artists who work together are following the high-level direction of the production designer. I had someone, a veteran production designer on a film I worked on, tell me that one way to think of the job of a production designer as, is that they design the production. And that's a very cute, glib way of saying it. This was Grant Major, who designed Lord of the Rings films, by the way. So…

32:55Jawad MirYeah

32:55Alex Laurent... You know, a formidable, a formidable person. And he said this with certain tongue in cheek, but his point was that it's not about designing every beautiful thing visually. It's about the logistical planning exercise, the problem-solving, the strategic planning of the whole production. How do you get from script to final film, the result, in X amount of time with this budget and these resources, and all of the logistical puzzle pieces that have to be fit together that lead you to decisions, practical decisions about what sets you're gonna be able to build, how big those sets can be, how many can we build at once so we can film this many scenes over two weeks? If we're gonna be on location here and we only have three days, how can we make that work? And that always leads then to… those limitations lead to the need for visual effects. And that's why the production designer and their team lead to and connect with the work that someone like ILM is going to do.

33:58Alex LaurentSo back to Minority Report. Alex McDowell is the name of the production designer who ha… worked with Spielberg on Minority Report, and he is an awesome production designer with an amazing resume. I've been fortunate enough to have the chance to, work with him a little bit, since then and get to know him a little bit. And he's just a terrifically smart guy. I highly encourage you to, invite him to speak about his career, including Minority Report. But he also designed Fight Club. He designed

34:35Jawad MirChocolate Factory

34:36Alex Laurent... Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and many others. He's just got a visual, And for DreamWorks, he also, I believe, was participating in Bee Movie. We had talked a bit about Bee Movie before. So he was, he was, working in various scales and capacities with DreamWorks for a while, and I got to know him just peripherally on Minority Report. That's where we met. And really this is the example of that handoff. You know, we went down to meet with him, and we're in Northern California. George Lucas, when he set up ILM, he wanted this distance from Hollywood. He wanted this feeling of independence. Later, many years later, of course, we had to close that gap logistically. How do we communicate smoothly with the production when we're many miles away? Well, we had early video. We had early video conference. Early versions of Zoom. Nothing like Zoom, but it was much more cumbersome, much more clunky. But, you know, we made it work.

35:36Jawad MirYeah.

35:36Alex LaurentAnd we were able to talk to each other like this, and we were able to, more importantly than seeing each other, we could see the film. We could see the film frames we were working on. We could run the shot, scrub back and forth, and we could have a frame-by-frame review of sh… every shot that we were working on, with the production in real time. And we would do this every morning. Luckily, we were in the same time zone, so it made it a little easier, at least for that film. But I'm getting ahead. How I got to be involved in this is I was working in the art department, and it came in as, one of the jobs we were gonna do. So I was assigned to be the art director on this film. And this was compared to something like The Mummy, where the director had come to us early on and had us involved with the design process of the creatures and the characters and the environments very early on, helping us really design the look of the movie…

36:40Jawad MirSure

36:40Alex Laurent... Along with the production designer. In this case, a lot of work had been done Prior to it ever coming to us. So this was a different version of that process. And there's all varieties of this. You just… with every film is different. You know, different productions, depending on how visual effects heavy they are, they will have done a lot of their own design work upfront with their own art departments down at the studio. And by the time we at ILM would get that work, they had thought through, in those cases, a lot of the visual decisions and a lot of the broad style of the movie. And this was the case with Minority Report. So they had this amazing think tank where they brought in all of these experts from many different, you know, industries and to consult about what life would be like in Washington, DC 50 to 75 years in the future from then. It was not a far future, again, it was a near future.

37:40Alex LaurentAnd he brought in all these technologists as well in that mix. And so Alex McDowell and his art direction team and production design team, including some concept illustrators and visual designers, were all in that mix, I believe. I would have loved to have been at that table, but this was again, prior to our involvement directly. But that is what really fed into the world-building, the design of the world that they, that they landed on. And that is what influenced the building of the amazing sets and the design language of the architecture and the feeling of the clothing and the fashion. All of this is, again, that production team. When we got the assignment, we had several meetings. We got this packet of amazing artwork, and then my job working with Scott Farrar, the effects supervisor, and Dana Freedman, our effects producer, and our whole CG team, but early on it was just sort of the senior folks.

38:42Alex LaurentReally my job was to translate the aesthetic and the future design language of the world that Alex McDowell and all of the visual people working under him and around him had developed, to take that and translate it into the visual effects extensions that we would be providing, showing the larger world. And we worked on a number of different, a number of different sequences which were big and showed the wider view of the world, and others that were much smaller and more intimate, like the plants, the sort of moving intelligent plants, that are in the greenhouse at the end of the film.

39:24Jawad MirYep.

39:24Alex LaurentAnd a lot of other miscellaneous effects throughout the movie. And I've got… I'm happy to talk, if you'd like, about some of those in detail.

39:32Jawad MirSure.

39:32Alex LaurentI happen to have some of the artwork here as well, if that's of interest.

39:36Jawad MirYeah. Absolutely, please.

39:37Alex LaurentI can go into a few examples.

39:39Jawad MirAbsolutely.

39:39Alex LaurentAll right. Wonderful. Well, I'm gonna start... I'll start by showing an example of some of the artwork we got from the studio. So this is an example of a concept piece, a key frame, showing the, what we later…

39:57Jawad MirYep

39:58Alex Laurent... Nicknamed the Waterfall Building. This building with here you see…

40:01Jawad MirAll right

40:01Alex Laurent... Tom Cruise on the, on the maglev car about to plunge over this vertical stretch in this amazing action scene. So, this was created by an artist, Gerner. And so… and there was, again, there were designers who worked on the c… the design of the cars, and there were concept artists and industrial designers who worked on the look of the building. So we got this basic sort of seed, very clear more than a seed, a quite a sophisticated development. And we had a set number of shots, and we had a set number… we had a budget, and we couldn't go absolutely hog wild. We had to work within some constraints. So again, my job was to kind of take the next step to making that vision real and re… tangible is probably a better idea. Realistic looking and tangible, but we had to find a way to build it and make the scene actually work. And so that's where the problem-solving, sort of cinematic problem-solving came in.

41:04Alex LaurentThere's another part of the process besides drawings and storyboards, and that's animatics. Pre-visualization is the broad word we use for this. And for those that don't know it, think of, think of a storyboard, a sequence of drawings that describe each shot, and then think of animating those, so now you can show…

41:22Jawad MirYeah

41:22Alex Laurent... A moving camera shot. You can show some of the action.

41:26Jawad MirYeah, they did that with, for, Jurassic Park. I remember in the behind-the-scenes stuff they did, like before the, before the digital dinosaurs were discovered…

41:36Alex LaurentThat's right

41:36Jawad Mir... They did all those sequences for Spielberg. But go on. Sorry.

41:40Alex LaurentNo, that's a, that's a great example because that's taking pre-visualization and animatics to a whole other level.

41:45Jawad MirSure.

41:45Alex LaurentThey were using stop-motion animation to do some of those. So they started off with drawings…

41:50Jawad MirRight

41:50Alex Laurent... And then they actually built miniatures. Phil Tippett was the stop-motion animator, still is…

41:55Jawad MirYeah

41:55Alex Laurent... The stop-motion animation veteran genius who runs Tippett Studios. And he had been working on the pre-digital experiments for how to do the dinosaurs using stop-motion. When they decided to make the jump back then to digital dinosaurs…

42:11Jawad MirYeah

42:11Alex Laurent... Which was a huge decision, they kept Phil Tippett on…

42:15Jawad MirYeah

42:15Alex Laurent... In, to take advantage of his mastery of the medium and his understanding of performance and behavior and anatomy and animation at its core. And so he did the entire sequence you're talking about, many of them, using stop-motion as a motion…

42:33Jawad MirOkay

42:33Alex Laurent... And performance template, a base…

42:35Jawad MirSure

42:35Alex Laurent... Sort of inspiration for the digital, animators to come.

42:39Jawad MirYeah.

42:39Alex LaurentSo it's a really wonderful example. I'm so glad you brought that up. So previz, however, you, we don't use, Stop-motion animation now mostly, for that. It's very time-consuming.

42:49Jawad MirYeah.

42:49Alex LaurentSo we use digital, very simple, rudimentary digital 3D animation, but also 2D, where we will literally take storyboards, cut them up into pieces, and animate them so that we can see a sense of timing, in the sequence. So we received a combination of different kinds of animatics and pre-vis, as we call it, from the production. So the sequences and the shots had been fairly well defined. But again, it was a far cry from figuring out exactly what our shots really could be. So I existed as sort of a translator and a bridge. So among the things, this is an example of the sort of exercise, thought exercise that I would go through visually. This is just one of three or four different studies I did to figure out just how tall a building could realistically be in terms of plausibility in order for... And this is just basic napkin math. If we're having the building fly by during this whole maglev action scene where Tom Cruise is jumping from car to car as he goes down this, how many seconds do we have in film time for the sequence to get from the top before he'd hit the bottom, and he needs to sort of jump off at a midway point in the sequence.

44:04Alex LaurentSo this is where film is not reality. Of course, it's all nothing but cheating and storytelling and magic and hand-waving. So the actual height of this building is complete fictitious. It's completely made up.

44:19Jawad MirRight.

44:19Alex LaurentMy job is to just not make the audience think about it, but to convey by showing things flying by in the background to suggest the speed, to give them the sense of vertigo and danger, and to make it feel like over the course of the sequence, we're kinda getting closer, lowering down a little, but the ground is still always far below us. So…

44:41Jawad MirYeah

44:41Alex Laurent... This simple test and this piece of artwork here, done by, Aaron McBride in our art department. He was my, illustrate, illustr… one of my illustration, partners in this to help visualize a lot of these drawings. How high up, what will it look like from the top of the waterfall building with our complex sort of on-ramps, you know? This is a much more realistic height. But at what point does being 150 stories up in the air with a f… kind of, this kind of freeway structure feel fake?

45:14Jawad MirYeah

45:15Alex Laurent... My job was to keep everything feeling very realistic and grounded again, right? And it could never start feeling like some Dr. Seuss-like architecture that just defied all physics and gravity. And it, this was a great way to visualize early on when that started to break. So when the illusion would break. So this is jumping now to sort of the architectural design part. This was, based on a sketch that I had done. This is a 3D model and concept rendering of this building at the top.

45:45Jawad MirYes.

45:45Alex LaurentSpielberg wanted to have some futuristic advertising and billboards, animated billboards, as part of the future as well. So we designed these big spaces to sort of fly by us at the very top of this building, and then this is, this is a final, a final frame.

46:01Alex LaurentNear final frame, showing what the final building... And again, this illustrates the aesthetic. This is not some shiny, wonderful…

46:09Jawad MirYeah

46:09Alex Laurent... Fantasy building. It's a really brutalist, kinda ugly, boring cement building that is intentionally designed that way to be mundane, but just a little bit, you know, a little bit off from what we're used to, a little bit different from what we're used to, and that's by virtue it, of it being so tall.

46:30Jawad MirYeah. I find…

46:32Alex LaurentYeah

46:32Jawad Mir... I find, you know, movies like Blade Runner. I don't know if you've seen Looper.

46:39Alex LaurentYeah, years ago. Yes. Loved, I loved Looper.

46:41Jawad MirLoved Looper. Minority Report. You know, d… this, even Back to the Future, the second one, a lot of the s... They're considered sci-fi, all of them, in a, in a way, futuristic sci-fi, and a lot of them u… all of them, all four of the titles that I mentioned, they use special effects very, effectively, where they were not overly done. So, like, one thing I loved about Minority Report is, you know, those alleyway sequences, even the one that you just showed, it was very minimal. It came.

47:13Alex LaurentYeah.

47:13Jawad MirYou got the point, and it moved. It wasn't, like, overly done just to wow…

47:18Alex LaurentYeah

47:18Jawad Mir... The audience, right? And that's, that's what I loved about it.

47:21Alex LaurentYeah. That's great.

47:22Jawad MirAnd it just blended in. It just blended in.

47:24Alex LaurentYeah. And the words you're saying are exactly what Spielberg would hope because that's, that's what he, that's what I learned. You know, we're a visual effects studio, you know, then, and so naturally we're invested in the spectacle, right?

47:37Jawad MirYeah.

47:37Alex LaurentAnd there was a part of me coming in that was looking forward to more shots, more big shots showing the world and the vertigo and, you know, more epic scale. And there was enough there, but Spielberg's sensibility kept pushing back, and that was also a budget thing. He wanted that minimalism that you're talking about. He wanted us to have a, I don't know, a sobriety, a, as you said, just enough to convey the action. But he was really inspired by, I think, an earlier style of suspenseful action filmmaking that…

48:11Jawad MirFrom the old…

48:11Alex Laurent... Films like Hitchcock's North by Northwest is a great example of just this economy of shots and there isn't a dwelling on something beyond. It's all about the choreography that the scene demands, and it is not about showcasing visual effects in a gratuitous way just for the sake of spectacle. And Spielberg's known as the king of spectacle, but really he's, that's, that so undersells what his, what his wisdom is…

48:38Jawad MirYeah

48:38Alex Laurent... Creatively. He's a storyteller, and he understands this balance, and less is more sometimes.

48:43Jawad MirNo, for sure.

48:44Alex LaurentEven though it, you know, frustrated us sometimes, but he kept that contained. And I learned from it

48:50Jawad MirFor sure, because that scene, I remember it was about when Tom Cruise's character,.. Was it Anderson, I think? A…

48:56Alex LaurentAnderton.

48:57Jawad MirYeah.

48:57Alex LaurentYeah, with a T. Yeah.

48:59Jawad MirHe gets these passengers out and he calls, his boss and he's like, "I'm being set up."

49:05Alex LaurentYeah.

49:05Jawad MirRight?

49:06Alex LaurentYeah.

49:06Jawad MirAnd there was so much tension in that scene that for that, when the film is, when the, when the scene is being shot from inside the car, you forget about future, you forget about technology, you forget about special effects because that's where the focus is, the story and the character and where it's taking us.

49:22Alex LaurentPerfect. Perfect. So I, that's another great example. You happened it's as if we coordinated this conversation in advance…... Jawad, because that's a perfect, that's another example where we, you know, I was very involved w… with designing what was gonna go by outside the window during that very intense sequence.

49:40Jawad MirYeah.

49:40Alex LaurentThe sh… the camera is low, right underneath his lap, you know, pointed up at him, and we see the curved window of the car he's in, and we see freeway stuff going by. So as an art director, as any production designer as well, I'm always looking for opportunities, even incidental ones…

49:58Jawad MirSure

49:59Alex Laurent... To describe the world outside, even if it's literally something going by a window. It's incidental. It doesn't matter compared to the dramatic focus, of course, but it's still an opportunity that we use. We're always focused on every frame, every pixel, every f… bit of the frame.

50:15Jawad MirYeah.

50:15Alex LaurentAnd that's a canvas we can use, however subtly, to telegraph something about the world. So, hey, we're pointing the camera up. We see this freeway's going by. How are we gonna do those? Maybe it's another great opportunity to showcase some of this maglev stuff. But actually, the way it turned out, we focused way down on it. You know what we ended up doing? We ended up going out in a car, in a convertible with a camera, Scott Farrar and the rest of our team at ILM, and scouted around the San Francisco Bay Area, and we ended up shooting real freeway overpasses and just compositing them in…... Matching the angle, and just compositing them in and darkening them down. Those are all real freeways there. They're not futuristic visual effects freeway overpasses, 'cause they didn't need to be.

51:04Jawad MirYeah.

51:04Alex LaurentSo we went super simple for exactly the same reasons you just pointed out, and again, budget. It was not, it was the fastest way to get the effect, and it was not appropriate for us to use that little glimpse as some, "Hey, look at me. Look at me, I'm a cool futuristic piece of architecture."

51:22Jawad MirYeah.

51:23Alex LaurentNot appropriate. So, to go back to

51:28Jawad MirSorry.

51:29Alex Laurent... Futuristic architecture. No, that was a fantastic point you brought up. So there's the scene with the, with the tunnel, and I don't have a finished frame of it, but the, a shot where we're going through this incredible sort of tunnel…

51:45Jawad MirYeah

51:45Alex Laurent... Structure of this…

51:46Jawad MirYeah

51:46Alex Laurent... Maglev freeway. And it's just one shot. It's one or a couple of quick shots, and yet we had to build this entire fantastic looking structure. So the high level vision for what this thing would look like was in one of those concept paintings we got from the studio. But again, this was a challenge now to figure out how to make it so we could build it. And so I used a rather old school technique of my own, which was just building a foam core and paper model with…

52:14Jawad MirNice

52:14Alex Laurent... Designing where these on-ramps could be and how traffic would flow from one down into the other as our camera would follow it. And by building this simple model, because it was faster for me to use physical techniques than digital ones at the time.

52:29Jawad MirYeah.

52:29Alex LaurentThat had to do with my skills as a 3D digital artist. It was easier for me to just do this first as a bridge from the 2D drawings, the sketches, to what would be the 3D model in the computer. And this allowed us to just get together, for me to, and Scott Farrar to, and others, to have the conversation about where the cars could flow, where the camera could track them, and it was just very immediate and tangible. And so it was really, and I like to tell this story because, again, this was a period where you could have old school, tangible, physical…

53:06Jawad MirYeah

53:06Alex Laurent... Design tools combining with the digital process and it proved to be really fruitful. A very quick, simple beat in a long design process, but it's, has almost historical

53:21Jawad MirWell…

53:21Alex Laurent... Historical sentimental value to me now.

53:24Jawad MirTa… tangible stuff is always great. I don't, I don't think that will ever go away. It will still have…

53:30Alex LaurentI hope

53:30Jawad Mir... Its value, right? Because…

53:32Alex LaurentYeah

53:32Jawad Mir... Just like I was saying before, like Christopher Nolan, Spielberg, James Cameron and such, like they will use these physical objects. I mean, I didn't even know in Inception, I learned this like two years ago during COVID when I was watching the behind the scenes stuff of Inception, that whole sequence of them in this, hallway and when they're flying upside down, the, it was all like an actual hydraulic stage which they built.

53:55Alex LaurentYes. Yes.

53:56Jawad MirAnd, you know, and because it was so real, you never look it up, "Okay, how did they do it?" Because it was…

54:02Alex LaurentYeah

54:02Jawad Mir... Just so real. But then looking at it, holy crap, they actually did that. They actually built a physical hydraulics.

54:07Alex LaurentOh, yeah.

54:08Jawad MirYeah.

54:09Alex LaurentI mentioned 2001: A Space Odyssey earlier as one of the earliest inspirations for me, and of course legions of other filmmakers and people and sci-fi fans. And in so many ways, that film was an inspiration, among many others of course, but that's one of the ones that I connect with Christopher Nolan's use of that kind of technique of rotating stages. And spending the money on that physical mechanical, setup is so ambitious in its own right, and yet the result is that, is that you get that physicality. And when you go back to look at 2001, and I'm not talking about the outer space stuff with the spaceships and miniatures and… And all the techniques they used, 2D and multi-plane animation and all of that. But, just the physical set building and the way they had those c… characters, the astronauts and the stewardesses and the pilots walking around these, you know, walking on the ceiling and walking around, the staircases, the circular spherical stuff, ignoring gravity.

55:13Alex LaurentThose were so convincing and so simply done in that respect. Same kind of technique, big revolving stages. When he's running around the giant centrifuge and goes for his jog, and the camera's following him in this continuous shot. This is famous stuff. But…

55:28Jawad MirYeah

55:29Alex Laurent... You can see the line between that and Christopher Nolan's use of that in the fight scene you talked about. It's all the l… the connection is right there.

55:37Jawad MirWell, most definitely. I think a lot of people were inspired by 2001, Spielberg, George Lucas.

55:44Alex LaurentOh, absolutely.

55:45Jawad MirYou know, make all the stuff.

55:46Alex LaurentA whole generation.

55:47Jawad MirYeah.

55:47Alex LaurentA whole generation of filmmakers. Yeah, absolutely.

55:49Jawad MirYeah. I remember when I first saw it, this was early '90s. I'm like, "What was, w… what was that?" Like, it d… it just didn't hit. Like, the story-wise it didn't make sense to me, but then I saw it again 10 years later, I was like, "Yeah, this is, like, a masterpiece," even in today's time, right? Because not just…

56:07Alex LaurentYeah

56:07Jawad Mir... From the storytelling, but just the way it was done.

56:10Alex LaurentYeah.

56:11Jawad MirRight?

56:11Alex LaurentYeah.

56:12Jawad MirIt was...

56:13Alex LaurentShout out to Douglas Trumbull. He was the effects supervisor on that, on that film.

56:18Jawad MirYeah, that's it.

56:19Alex LaurentAmazing, innovator and artist.

56:22Jawad MirDo you think, do you think we're, in the distant future, we're gonna have what Minority Report is all about, foretelling the future murders?

56:32Alex LaurentThat I couldn't say.

56:34Jawad MirFor example

56:34Alex Laurent... I think that gets, the ti… the time prediction aspect is so, you know, beyond the kind of technological innovation that the rest of the film shows. That part to me is, like, a whole other level that gets…

56:48Jawad MirYeah

56:48Alex Laurent... Into a zone that I don't know enough about to know whether we're, whether we've planted any seeds of that kind of technology now that are shaping up to be anything like that, the ability. And that's where the film takes a, I mean, their ability, the Precogs' ability to predict is not based on a, on a computer algorithm.

57:09Jawad MirYeah.

57:09Alex LaurentIt's a genetic mutation, I believe, if I remember correctly. It's, it's something very unique and biological. It's a quirk that the technology and the technologists find a way to tap into and translate their ability to see, into a bunch of technological tools that humans can use. That's the interface and the gestural interface that Tom Cruise uses, of course. But to put these pieces together. But it all starts inside an organic flesh and blood being.

57:40Jawad MirSure.

57:41Alex LaurentA mutated human. And so that's where the film's technological crystal ball kinda takes a step to the side in a slightly different way. But when it comes to any other technology in there, including ethical decisions about privacy and about seeing you in the world…

57:57Jawad MirYeah

57:57Alex Laurent... When you don't know you're being seen, and your data being collected, and being tracked everywhere you go, and then physical tangible stuff like maglev transportation, absolutely. That stuff, we're already seeing that. And gestural interfaces. Gestural computing and immersive computing, all of that stuff is, in various ways, we're seeing it. So I, it's a firm yes to all of the tech besides the actual Precog predictive stuff, which I just…

58:26Jawad MirYeah

58:26Alex Laurent... Don't know much about.

58:27Jawad MirI wonder, right? Like, I mean, we can talk about Philip K. Dick, who wrote Blade Runner and Minority Report. There was this, I th… I think, where was I watching this? There was a Hollywood roundtable discussion with the likes of Ridley Scott, Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, and a few other directors, and there was this, I think it was that, there was a conversation, do movies influence the future in technology or is it just something that they, it just happens organically? But, you know, for example, Star Trek: The Next Generation, like, that's something that, very vivid in my mind, like, whenever the doctor or Data or Geordi, were going through this little tablet, right? Like, checking the mechanics and the medical treatment. That's iPad, right?

59:14Alex LaurentYeah, sure.

59:14Jawad MirLike, it's literally the exact same d… almost the dimension and the concept of it. So, and just personally, do you feel that when we make these movies or these stories, do they actually become the reason the technology becomes or is it just something that's gonna happen anyways?

59:31Alex LaurentBoth. The answer is, both, but do I believe that it is an influence? Not the only influence, but an influence? Absolutely, yes.

59:39Jawad MirYeah.

59:40Alex LaurentI, and that, you know, zooming out or even just sort of aside from moviemaking like we're talking about, I believe storytelling i… and technology is, and the art and creative side, of our, what we make is an influence to the technological engineering, and technological innovation. And I believe ideally they speak to each other. There's a conversation and an influence constantly going back and forth. Technology influences the arts, and the arts influence technology. Because technology and culture can't be separated completely e… ever. They are part and parcel. The conversation and the tension and the sort of gravitational pull between these things, you can't avoid it. They're part of the same continuum that the way technology innovates and invents things is in response to a need, whatever that need is, a product need, a marketing need, a profit need, or a genuine cultural or sociological practical need.

1:00:45Alex LaurentAny number of combinations of those things. And on the creative side, you have a lens on our real world from storytellers… Who are, whose job it is essentially to interpret that and to tell stories about the impact of technologies like this on our culture. And we use future, we use sci-fi as one of the main mediums to do that in, which is why I love it so much.

1:01:12Jawad MirYeah.

1:01:12Alex LaurentSci-fi for me is not just an escape, it's, an escapist kind of, genre. But it's about, more importantly, it's a reflection. It's a, it's a lens on our current life. And it's a, it's a stage on which to practice, you know, or rehearse our certain scenarios, and see where they might go, if this was the, this was developed or if that was developed or if this got into the wrong hands or whatever it is, both for better or worse. So yeah, absolutely. The arts, including movies, have such a deep cultural impact that can't help but be an influencer on which technologies are developed. Not a sole decision-maker, but at least which technologies enter the popular awareness and the popular kind of conversation.

1:02:03Jawad MirYeah.

1:02:04Alex LaurentThat's for sure.

1:02:06Jawad MirI see that happening. I mean, when Ready Player One came out, what was it, like five years ago?

1:02:12Alex LaurentYeah.

1:02:12Jawad MirI mean, it's already happening. Like metaverse is already here. But one of the things that I was really fascinated by, and I'm kind of going off topic, you've probably seen AI, Spielberg and Kubrick's film, right?

1:02:24Alex LaurentYeah.

1:02:25Jawad MirThe whole concept of futuristic society where robots are discriminated, you know, and they're mistreated, I genuinely believe that's around the corner. Like we're very, like, you know, I think next 20, 25 years…

1:02:41Alex LaurentYeah

1:02:41Jawad Mir... Is probably gonna be a place for that. But it, my point to that is that Spielberg has this nag with all of his films just figuring out what the future could be in a very discreet way. And obviously he has a team of people that helps him and everything, but he just, his timing with projects and foretelling…

1:03:02Alex LaurentYeah

1:03:02Jawad Mir... What the future would hold. I mean, yeah, you know, Minority Report and AI were like materials of Kubrick and Philip K. Dick, but the timing of the way they were made, I mean…

1:03:10Alex LaurentYeah

1:03:11Jawad Mir... Mino… Minority Report is already here, you know, except the…

1:03:13Alex LaurentYeah. In so many ways. In so many ways. Yeah. No, I think these are sometimes y… they're kind of a testing ground. Some of the things we see in these films are coming true, as you say, before our eyes. The seeds were planted for a lot of that technology. Again, that's kudos to Spielberg for grounding the film's production design, you know, and Alex McDowell and all of the people, the, all of the people who put that together and synthesized all that research into this fiction. They grounded it in research. And, you know, the gestural interface, that was based on technology that was being done, for real at the time. I wish I could remember the name of the fellow who was spearheading some of that. But, it's easy to find out. He's very well known for it, for the gestural, the gestural stuff.

1:03:57Alex LaurentI worked at Microsoft, after my film career on the HoloLens, which is a mixed reality, augmented reality headset…

1:04:03Jawad MirSure

1:04:04Alex Laurent... Which mixes digital content with the real world you see. You heard of AR glasses. Well, this was an early version about 10 years ago in that. So the HoloLens was a successful experimental product launch to prove this tech. And it was very interesting to me to get to work with some of the stuff that I had worked on fictitious movies about in earlier parts of my career. Here, this was like science fiction stuff coming to life, and that included gestural interfaces. Using pinch gestures and other sort of specific language of how you use your hands and your fingers instead of, instead of a mouse, right?

1:04:46Jawad MirYeah.

1:04:46Alex LaurentInstead of clicking a mouse on a screen, we were there to sort of help invent and develop what the alternative to that is in a s… immersive space when you don't have a screen. No mouse, no cursor. What is, what's your version of that in immersive 3D space? So that was a very, a wonderful opportunity I happened to have later to, again, take some of these sci-fi ideas of the future and here it is happening for real in a very close way. And so now gestural interface in immersive VR and AR is now a whole, it's a whole area of user experience and user interface design. Spatial computing is now a thing we... Those are words we use. Spatial computing. What does that mean? It means immersive computing that's not on a screen. I mean, that's pretty mind-blowing.

1:05:45Alex LaurentAnd when I look back at Tom Cruise gesturally controlling this interface of the crime sort of puzzle assembly, assembling the fragments of memory on this glass curved thing, it's so wonderful to see that connection. I like the fact that there was almost a, almost a nostalgic, tactile quality to the fact that was mapped onto a surface of glass. That there was a tangible quality. He's not wearing immersive glasses.

1:06:18Jawad MirYeah.

1:06:18Alex LaurentHe is still, there's something on which there's a screen. There's a screen there, even though it's a very shiny, cool screen. There was an old-fashioned quality to some of the technology.

1:06:28Jawad MirYeah.

1:06:28Alex LaurentAnd the wooden ball that gets carved, that comes through that sort of crazy contraption. That machine has a very sort of old world quality, earlier 20th century quality.

1:06:39Jawad MirYeah.

1:06:39Alex LaurentAnd I connect that in my mind to some of Blade Runner's aesthetic, this sort of retro future design of…

1:06:46Jawad MirYeah

1:06:46Alex Laurent... The machinery that has this wonderful combination of sort of early 20th, early and mid-20th century mechanical quality with…

1:06:54Jawad MirAnd that…

1:06:54Alex Laurent... Whatever mysterious…... Digital future tech…

1:06:57Jawad MirYeah

1:06:57Alex Laurent... Inside. It's just really cool.

1:07:00Jawad MirNo, and I think that's what connects with the audience, right? And I mean, you worked on Minority Report, which is like a futuristic tale, and then going back a few years to in your career, you went back to Normandy in Saving Private Ryan, and you worked on that.

1:07:13Alex LaurentOh, yeah. Yeah.

1:07:13Jawad MirYou know, that, again, two different movies completely. You know, one, that had already happened, and the one that's kind of already happened in the future. So how did you get involved in Saving Private Ryan, and what was your role on that? If you can just sort of dive into that for us, please.

1:07:31Alex LaurentOh, happily. Yeah. That, it was going back in time for sure, several years.

1:07:34Jawad MirYeah.

1:07:34Alex LaurentSo that came out in '98, I think.

1:07:39Jawad Mir1999.

1:07:39Alex LaurentEight? '99.

1:07:41Jawad MirYeah.

1:07:41Alex LaurentSo I have some artwork here I'll show you in a minute, which is dated '97. So that shows you how early we were sort of visualizing some of the effects. So that was one of the... I joined ILM in '96, so this was one of the first films I worked on. I worked on the Star Wars special editions when I first got there, in a, in a sort of support capacity. It was the first project they threw me into, and I worked on a couple of other smaller projects. We also, I should add, had a commercials division at ILM then.

1:08:12Jawad MirOh, yeah.

1:08:12Alex LaurentSo we would, in the art department, an artist, concept artist, and an art director like me would get thrown into any, whatever project came in. And in between movie projects, there was always some cool commercial that would need…

1:08:24Jawad MirYeah

1:08:24Alex Laurent... Some visual effects characters or animation or something designed. So I would work on that. So this came as one of the first big features that I got. So, I believe, and this was, talk about scale of effects shots. You know, ILM has a number of shots in the movie, but they're really invisible. You don't know they're there, with a couple of exceptions. They don't ever say, "Look at me, I'm an effects shot." and it's a relatively small, number compared to anything now. It's, it's, again, not about the visual effects, but the visual effects come in to help the story when they're needed. And it was another great example of Spielberg not overusing the tools and technology, especially for Saving Private Ryan. He wanted to exercise that same storytelling discipline. I was gonna say sobriety, but discipline is a better word because it's, it can be extravagant and it can be immersive and it can be extreme, obviously.

1:09:28Alex LaurentSober suggests that it's tamped down. But it's not a question of sort of volume. The intensity can be at a very high volume, but how he's doing it is where the discipline comes in. So discipline's a great word. As visual effects art director, this all translates to this very different kind of challenge creatively, and I also needed to immerse myself in the history. So for me as an art director, one of the first things I do with any project is research. I immerse myself. Obviously, I read the script or the treatment or whatever I have. I look at any reference material the studio sends us or any visual concept work they have done, look at all of that, and then I go do my own research and by any means necessary. I just learn about this thing. When The Mummy, it was ancient Egypt and ancient Egyptian architecture. I had to learn a lot about that so I could basically bastardize it and turn it into this epic s…

1:10:25Jawad MirYeah

1:10:25Alex Laurent... You know, Hollywood thing, a version of it. But I still did a lot of research. In this case, I researched Normandy and that moment in World War II. And I spoke to veterans. I cold called veterans associations across the country and would just kind of be referred from one to another in an attempt to find out some very s… specific information about this or that, to make sure that anything that we introduced into the film as a visual effects element was authentic and historically accurate. And that was in keeping with the respect, obviously, that Spielberg…

1:11:04Jawad MirSure

1:11:04Alex Laurent... And all of us really felt we, you know, responsibility to tell the story respectfully and accurately. So again, there weren't very many effects shots that I directly impacted except one very big one, which was this, Normandy beach landing scene, which happens after the initial invasion sequence that the film is so known for.

1:11:32Jawad MirYeah.

1:11:32Alex LaurentSo this is the aftermath, the follow-up once the Allied forces have established their presence on the beach, and they've kind of set up camp. This is the moment there, and it's at the end of a very long, dolly shot that's a dolly and crane shot. I mean, it's this elaborate, it goes forever. It's following a conversation, between two characters in the foreground as they walk through this entire camp. And then finally, the camera at the end tracks up to this. So when we would watch this shot in dailies, we would watch the entire shot every time to finally get to this moment. God, it was, we watched that shot go back and forth many times. So, this is the plate. This is the, this is what was real.

1:12:16Jawad MirOh, wow.

1:12:17Alex LaurentAnd they had a handful of, you know, a dozen or two soldiers, costume soldiers marching with a couple of vehicles, a tank or two and a, an armored truck or two that would drive along here and march. And they basically... I was not on set, by the way. This was a beach in Ireland, doubling for, doubling for Omaha Beach.

1:12:38Jawad MirYep.

1:12:38Alex LaurentAnd they, you know, they put all of these, I don't remember what they're called, these basically barrier pieces, these spiky pieces to deter any beach f… any enemy boats coming in.

1:12:51Jawad MirSure.

1:12:51Alex LaurentAnd that was real. The weather and the puddles and all that were real. And basically they… It's classic cr… cl… crowd duplication technique. Nothing too revolutionary. They filmed a bunch of troops and the trucks here, then they filmed another pass of them here, switched up a bit, and they filmed several of those going down the beach, and they combined them later in the compositing stage. And so this illustration basically shows what all of the elements would be. And this is what becomes a kind of a visual document of the design that the director, the production, and ILM, and all of us use to agree together. It's like a visual design. It's like a contract. "Okay, this is what we're all approving. Spielberg approves this. He likes the composition. We're gonna do that, and we're gonna follow that as closely as possible." So that's the purpose of this piece of artwork, which is done in Photoshop, basically painted over this plate.

1:13:57Jawad MirReally? That was done in Photoshop?

1:13:59Alex LaurentYeah. Yeah.

1:14:00Jawad MirWow.

1:14:00Alex LaurentYeah. All digital tools. So I, you know, again, I'm not a much of a 3D artist. I'm a 2D. Photoshop is a 2D tool.

1:14:08Jawad MirYeah.

1:14:08Alex LaurentSo I, you know, I painted all these things, but then this goes to our amazing computer graphics team that use a combination of matte painting, digital matte painting techniques and to create these ships, and 3D, animation as well for some of these barrage balloons, as I learned they are called. So I had some, you know, veterans and refer some books and historical books and things, and they would tell me what these things were. And these balloons were actually something I decided to add in inspired by photographs I saw. And I said, "What are those blimps? How big are they? Are they small? Are they large? What are they used for? Why are they there?" And so that's one of the tracks of research I did, and I was I learned what they're for. They're to, they're to, they're, they're, they're not huge. They're about 10 to 15 feet long, and they are suspended there to keep enemy fighters from flying down across the beach strafing. You know, doing a strafing run. They'll tangle any plane like that up, and bring them down.

1:15:10Alex LaurentAnd they provide a distraction, a challenge that will make that plane easier to shoot down if it does try and attack.

1:15:16Jawad MirYeah.

1:15:16Alex LaurentSo I did not know that before. And I thought it would make a nice compositional element in the, in the shot. And this is a way that I could ask Spielberg, "What do you think?" And he could make some changes. He could ask for, yeah, maybe put some more or put some less, or, "I don't like them, take them out." Whatever the answer might be, this is where that conversation happened.

1:15:36Jawad MirYeah. I think in the final shot, I'm just looking at it right now, they had, like, one in the foreground and then many of them in the distant background.

1:15:46Alex LaurentYeah

1:15:47Jawad Mir... Yeah.

1:15:47Alex LaurentYeah. This, they stuck really close. Our team stuck really close to this…

1:15:52Jawad MirYeah

1:15:52Alex Laurent... Because, again, it was, like, one iconic shot. Spielberg had approved this, so the directive was stay pretty close to it. But it's still then, you know, this is just a piece of…

1:16:02Jawad MirYeah

1:16:02Alex Laurent... Art. It's a still image. Whatever the composition is has to ultimately move, and I think that foreground blimp you're talking about actually kind of parallax shifts in frame because the camera is moving. So it's…

1:16:16Jawad MirProbably, yeah. Yeah, right

1:16:17Alex Laurent... Why that was one of the ideas. The whole purposes of putting those in was to have some parallax. You know…

1:16:22Jawad MirYeah

1:16:22Alex Laurent... If you're moving down a space and you have a row of telephone poles or trees, you see, you see the depth. And so I wanted to put something in the frame that showed the depth and the space. So…

1:16:35Jawad MirAbsolutely

1:16:36Alex Laurent... It was, it was a wonderful thing to have that included. A lot of the other work that ILM did, which was brilliant work at the time, was, I would call it sort of gore and explosion, augmentation. We augmented and made a lot of the danger, immediate danger stuff worse. We did cleanup. We added some really brutal injuries and, bullet wounds and bloody stuff and a lot of other incidental things. Damage to explosive damage to walls and things like that. Simulating gun, fire, impact hits and things like that. Basically adding stuff in that would've been too dangerous on set to have an explosion…

1:17:24Jawad MirYeah

1:17:25Alex Laurent... For instance, go off right next to an actor. And so a lot of the ways we used effects in that sequence tied so closely, of course, to the way Spielberg and his partner in crime, Janusz Kaminski, the DP, of the, for that sequence, how they crafted it was very challenging. And everything we added, again, needed to look completely realistic and blend in with that handheld aesthetic.

1:17:54Jawad MirWell, it's also the shutter speed that Janusz Kaminski changed, right? Just to give it…

1:17:58Alex LaurentYeah

1:17:58Jawad Mir... A little more dramatic

1:17:59Alex LaurentAbsolutely. And the bleach bypass, processing as well in terms of that bluish teal kind of wash that the whole thing has. Emulating film stock of the day, that gave it this nostalgic quality. That cool, that same cool look and the heavy grain. That bleach bypass look, of course, was used in Minority Report as well.

1:18:23Jawad MirYes.

1:18:24Alex LaurentSo…

1:18:24Jawad MirYes

1:18:24Alex Laurent... We would do all our stuff for Minority Report, like this shot, full color, nor… normal color, if you will. We would design it and texture all the things and render them all as if they were, you know, more realistic, modern cinematography. And then we would treat those color-wise in the compositing stage to match that look.

1:18:47Jawad MirYeah.

1:18:48Alex LaurentI would took a lot of the color out and added a lot of grain back in, so.

1:18:52Jawad MirYeah. Saving Private Ryan's opening sequence, I mean, I still remember watching in the movie theater, and the one thing that always There's two things that no matter how many times I watch it, I always appreciate it, and that doesn't mean that the rest is not to be appreciated of, is when… The soldiers fall off the boat, and then there's this one guy pulling the soldier out, and the camera goes in the water and out the water, in the water, and then the bullets passing by, and the sound effects of those. You know…

1:19:21Alex LaurentOh, yeah

1:19:21Jawad Mir... They were so real. And talking about your effects, you know, the multiplication of, soldiers on the beach and the digital thing, I don't know if you ever saw, this came out probably three, four years after Saving Private Ryan, a bunch of young guys recreated the Omaha Beach, sequence.

1:19:40Alex LaurentHm. I don't remember…

1:19:42Jawad MirYou…

1:19:42Alex Laurent... Seeing that, no

1:19:42Jawad Mir... You should watch it on, it's on YouTube. But all they did was it was just two guys.

1:19:47Alex LaurentHm.

1:19:47Jawad MirAnd they used green screening techniques, green screen techniques in climbing on the mountain, and they put together, like a mammoth beach invasion scene. Let me just see if I can find it right now.

1:20:00Alex LaurentWow.

1:20:00Jawad MirIt's incredible, and it just goes to show the technology of how it's become so

1:20:08Alex LaurentYeah

1:20:08Jawad Mir... Accessible, you know, even at that time.

1:20:10Alex LaurentYeah. Well, even then, exactly. That's, that's what's impressive. I wouldn't be as surprised to hear you tell me about a couple of young filmmakers who tried to do that now, or even in the last five years, because everything's become so much more accessible. But back then, even four years after the movie, that's still early 2000s, that's all the more impressive. So that's great.

1:20:35Jawad MirYeah, no, I'll send you the link. It, they just did a crazy job. I mean, it's like a four-minute-long video.

1:20:40Alex LaurentOh, I definitely wanna watch that.

1:20:42Jawad MirAnd it's…

1:20:42Alex LaurentFor sure. Yeah, send me the link.

1:20:44Jawad MirYeah.

1:20:45Alex LaurentI mean, send over the link. Yeah.

1:20:47Jawad MirLet me do that right now before I forget.

1:20:49Alex LaurentOkay. By the way, do you want me to, in the interest of time, I have more Minority Report.

1:20:57Jawad MirYes.

1:20:57Alex LaurentA couple of more things to show.

1:20:59Jawad MirYeah.

1:20:59Alex LaurentWould you like me to go back and show those, and you can…

1:21:01Jawad MirYeah. Let…

1:21:01Alex Laurent... Decide whether to cut them in?

1:21:03Jawad MirI think let's…

1:21:03Alex LaurentWhat do you wanna do?

1:21:04Jawad MirI think let's do that. I think BFG is something that we'll probably hold off, if that's okay with you.

1:21:10Alex LaurentI don't have any of the sketches. That's…

1:21:12Jawad MirOkay. That's cool

1:21:12Alex Laurent... That's totally fine. We don't need them.

1:21:14Jawad MirSo let's just…

1:21:14Alex LaurentWe don't need them

1:21:14Jawad Mir... Focus on Minority Report, for the next little bit, and I think that should be good.

1:21:19Alex LaurentAwesome.

1:21:21Jawad MirSo what other stuff did you work, on Minority Report?

1:21:25Alex LaurentWell, we were talking about the maglev architecture, and there's one other shot that I'll show you something from 'cause it's an interesting example, again, of the collaboration between the physical sets and their design, and how those can influence the design of the visual effects outside world. So, this was also a shot that, I got to design myself, based on, just a really rough script description, 'cause it had not been designed yet by the studio.

1:21:59Jawad MirSure.

1:21:59Alex LaurentSo this was one of those kind of surprises that came a little later as an insert that Spielberg wanted to help connect the story, and it was a really awesome just opportunity that fell into my lap. So I jumped at the opportunity to actually design a piece of this world inspired by everything else. So basically it's this shot which takes us from, and this is my very first sketch, but, it basically takes us from Anderton's apartment. It's the commute shot, basically.

1:22:28Jawad MirYeah.

1:22:28Alex LaurentIt takes him from his apartment out, down this maglev freeway towards Washington, DC in the distance. And it simply is a transition shot that takes us from one moment…

1:22:40Jawad MirSure

1:22:40Alex Laurent... And brings us into the next beat of the story, and gets to show off a bit of the world. So this was, again, putting to the test all of the balances that I had to, I had to, the balancing act I had to do, which was kind of fantastical sci-fi, freeway on-ramp structures and this giant thing, without it looking silly or unrealistic. How do you, how do you make that happen? And it was quite challenging, balance to be struck. So this building being round, this is where Anderton's apartment is. So Alex McDowell and his team had designed the interior, very cool interior of his apartment. And I don't have a shot right here. I'll send you one later, but I don't have, something to show right now here of the interior. But basically it included a carport. Basically, his maglev car can, if you remember, just park itself right in this little alcove.

1:23:38Jawad MirYeah. Yeah.

1:23:38Alex LaurentAnd he gets right out into his apartment, and so everyone has this, like their own garage. And so we only saw that from the inside. This is, a cool shot I managed to find of the set seen from the outside. So the, we're looking at the outside of this giant set of the apartment, which you can see…

1:23:58Jawad MirYeah

1:23:58Alex Laurent... Just barely poking through. And this is how it looks on the outside with the full size mock-up of the car. And you can see these rails here because in the shot we see it…

1:24:10Jawad MirIt comes up those rails

1:24:11Alex Laurent... Comes up those rails and sort of curves into place and settles in. And so that is sort of the cue that I had. That's all I had to go on. What would the outside of this building even look like? And so that was fun to extrapolate. So I basically, worked with 3D tools, and this is a concept painting again from, Aaron McBride. And this basically is what a final piece of concept art it looks like for the CG team to go and actually build this out. And these are all texture references here of rusted metal and stained concrete and sort of ca… cast concrete struts and supports, how weathering, and dirt and grime gather in the gaps. All of those things that are needed to make this look like something grounded and real and not necessarily pretty. But specifically the architectural challenge, you can see up here, these little ports I designed… As sort of units.

1:25:16Alex LaurentThese are each apartment units. And then the idea is that they, you come off of this, your own personal little port, and there's the curvature. You kind of come down, go around to the nearest place where you can join up with this exit ramp off the building. And the nice thing about movie making is we don't have to worry about how all that works. Yeah. That's on the other side of the building. Yeah. The idea was to keep this super simple. We wanted to follow his car when it comes off of his balcony, his little carport, down onto this road and off… To the next one... To the next one. So this is, this is an example of the 3D previz. So I, again, I don't do a lot of 3D, but I, in this case, mocked this up in 3D. And you can see that sequence here. Very simple. Goes from his apartment, then the car comes this way, merges on and goes down. We follow it down and around, and we join the rest. And we see, we see, you know, all of this needs to be choreographed.

1:26:19Alex LaurentWhat do these cars do? Some of them are going here, some of them are on the inside, some of them go here. So these are sort of the logistics, the details that somebody has to worry about… Yeah... That nobody in the audience is gonna really notice. And here is, here is, Wow... An almost finished frame, using a matte painting with the Washington Monument in the background. You can see this is not fully finished 'cause we don't have all the traffic on it. Yeah. But it gives you at least an idea. Closer idea. So you can see how closely that ended up resembling the, resembling the final shot, which is again, really fun. You know, we had the budget and we had time constraints, and so for background skyscrapers and buildings, we had to come up with a modular system of easily, quickly building these. So here are a bunch of renderings for how we could mix and match some simple cylindrical shapes and different textures and window configurations and quickly get a bunch of background buildings that we needed for that canyon of skyscrapers that we see going by in the background while Anderton is jumping from car to car again.

1:27:28Alex LaurentYeah. We had to show... I mean, I always compare it to classic 2D animation like The Flintstones, Hanna-Barbera animation… Yeah... Where someone's running in the foreground and you've got the background going by, right? This is essentially the same thing. We're just showing stuff in the background that you're not meant to focus on, but it needs to show how far down we're traveling during that sequence again. Yeah. So it's, it's a fun illustration of how many of these details someone has to design, think about, build, light and blend in and composite to the whole to make everything s… come seamlessly together. And a lot of this stuff is sort of incidental, you know? Here's something, else that I did early on in the show that was very incidental. Oh. No one's gonna ever notice this, but if you remember in the Hall of Containment… Yeah... Where we, Anderton gets, his tour and has his conversations with this character, Gideon, and the Gideon's ramp.

1:28:29Alex LaurentSo they built this part right here, circled in red, as a set, and then they built this part as a set. But this part here, we see only as a digital. This is a digital piece. Oh. The extending arm. So it's a completely throwaway, incidental piece of the architecture of this place, but it's a detail that mattered to Spielberg, and he wanted us to see how this place worked, how this thing extended from here out to here, so they can then have the rest of this very cool sequence kind of spinning through all of these containment capsules… Yeah... Containing, pr… Yeah... You know, presumed criminals. So, you know, this is a design that gets built by our CG team. It's integrated into the shot, and nobody knows about it ever again. I have to tell one story that everyone seems to think is very funny, and it is a good story, and it's another funny example of how physical stuff comes…... Into the artistic design process.

1:29:29Alex LaurentSo you might remember another incidental shot. Sorry for the shiny print. Yeah. Lykon was the name of this character, the drug addict, in the street who Anderton goes to buy drugs from. And he's got no eyes. And he has this big quote, that he says as he takes his glasses off. So big shock shot right here. So Spielberg wanted a very specific amount of gross-out shock value, but not too much for what was inside there, the scars. So I, this is an early painted version that I tried over the painting over the frame, and it... None of these ideas were really quite clicking. Close, but no cigar. So he would send them back, "doesn't look real enough," "It's too gross," or, "Not gross enough," or, "I wanna see something more specific." and so I thought, well, one of the ways to kind of up the grossness and give it something concrete is some stitches. If we actually see some scarification and stitches.

1:30:30Alex LaurentBut that was beyond my painting ability to do that realistically, so I decided to sculpt an eye socket and sculpt it myself. And then I went and got my wife's sewing kit. My favorite part of the story. Her favorite part of the story also. I borrowed her sewing kit and, stitched with a needle and thread into this Sculpey eye socket, and then photographed it. And I kind of got the look that I needed, and then I photoshopped that back into this for the concept to get his approval. And he said, "Thumbs up." In our dailies video transmission, I told him the story of,.. Oh, one, I left out one of the most important parts. My wife's objection was not to me borrowing her sewing kit. It's to the fact that I sewed chicken skin onto the socket of Clay. We had a chicken, leftover chicken in the, in the refrigerator. Seriously, this is true.

1:31:30Alex LaurentAnd I peeled…

1:31:31Jawad MirOh

1:31:31Alex Laurent... The skin off and I sewed it. You can, you can see there, that's chicken skin right in there, sewn. And that was the extra ingredient of realism that made it really gross. And when I told Spielberg the story about that, he got a chuckle out of that, and said to thank my wife. So she's not credited in the movie unfortunately, but, maybe she should be. The story lives on. So realism, sometimes you just gotta look at reality in order to get the best result, and in that case, I had to build it myself and…

1:32:03Jawad MirIt's again…

1:32:03Alex Laurent... Sew chicken skin on.

1:32:05Jawad MirIt, the tangible stuff, right? Like, nobody notices these things, and they just look real in the grand scheme of things and they look effective. How does it, or does it not, or does it ruin your experience as a moviegoer watching these movies that you work on? Especially, like, you know, Minority Report and Saving Private Ryan.

1:32:27Alex LaurentYou know, it's funny. If I were still in the industry it might, the answer might be different. But I, as I've kind of been away from it for a while, I've gone back to being more in the audience. That doesn't mean I can look at any effects shot and not think of it as an effects shot, and I of course have to, as, I'm always got, I've always got that lens on, you know, of assessing it. But as an audience member now, I'm also able to be affected by these movies even though I know how fake they are and I know how... I know they're not real, but I can get swept up in them again, which I kinda like. And it means that, it means that I can kind of enjoy being entertained by them a bit more. I ha… I can have both those lenses going at the same time, and I kinda switch back and forth. And when I see a movie and watch it with my wife, I still can't help it. I'll still say, "Oh, that's an effects shot," sometimes. And she'll say…

1:33:24Jawad MirYeah

1:33:24Alex Laurent... "Don't ruin it for me."

1:33:27Jawad MirYeah.

1:33:27Alex LaurentShh. And so mo… I'm sh… I'm being quiet more often now, and just letting it go by. Frankly, part of it is because there are so many effects shots now, there's so much visual effects everywhere…

1:33:37Jawad MirYeah

1:33:37Alex Laurent... That I would be talking nonstop if I was pointing out every effects shot that I saw. It's so everywhere now that it doesn't even bear mentioning because it's a cool effect. It bears mentioning if it's a beautiful shot, or particularly just unusual or just beautiful and effective. Then I'll comment. But she's appreciating that part as much as me. My wife, that is. It doesn't have, you don't have to be an effects nerd to appreciate that…

1:34:05Jawad MirYeah

1:34:05Alex Laurent... Part of it. So I think my lens has shifted a bit. I can, I can still enjoy movies.

1:34:10Jawad MirBut I think also audiences have become more knowledgeable when to pick effects. Like for example, if I'm watching something m… and then the effects is not, are not done well, like…

1:34:23Alex LaurentYeah

1:34:23Jawad Mir... An average audience member is gonna pick it up. "Oh, is that green screen?" You know, that would be the first question, like, they would ask.

1:34:29Alex LaurentOh, yeah. Or does it look CG? Does it just look digital?

1:34:32Jawad MirYeah.

1:34:32Alex LaurentDoes a character, digital Spider-Man behave, move properly, you know? Or does he look…

1:34:39Jawad MirYou can tell

1:34:39Alex Laurent... Like a light. You can totally tell.

1:34:41Jawad MirYou can tell.

1:34:42Alex LaurentYeah.

1:34:43Jawad MirYou can tell. But…

1:34:44Alex LaurentSo I agree that our audience has become much more sophisticated in their visual sort of bar, quality bar, and the standard.

1:34:54Jawad MirWell…

1:34:54Alex LaurentThe bar is higher. It is both higher in some ways, and the bar is lower in other ways, 'cause we're s… just there's so much of it. You know, in an, any MCU movie, any Marvel Cinematic Universe movie is just filled with so many, it almost just becomes noise. And it's, it's, it's just kind of becomes it's a different medium. To me it's not as special, at all as far as visual effects.

1:35:16Jawad MirWell, I refuse to see MCU movies or I have no interest in them. But I think going back to what audience really cannot tell, well, I shouldn't say cannot tell. What audience really appreciate more than anything is the depth of characters and the storytelling, right?

1:35:34Alex LaurentYeah. Yeah.

1:35:35Jawad MirI don't know if you have, if you have seen Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul, the TV series.

1:35:40Alex LaurentYeah.

1:35:40Jawad MirI mean, m… marvelous stuff. And even in a, in a film like, you know, Minority Report, Saving Private Ryan, AI, yeah, they're about futuristic and past, but it's the characters and it's the story that the audience, when you get connected to the au… characters and the story…

1:35:56Alex LaurentOh, of course. Absolutely

1:35:56Jawad Mir... Everything becomes real. Everything becomes real.

1:35:59Alex LaurentAbsolutely. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

1:36:00Jawad MirThat…

1:36:01Alex LaurentAbsolutely right.

1:36:02Jawad MirYeah.

1:36:02Alex LaurentEffects can never be the thing... Well, I mean, they can be, but it's a different kind of movie. It's a lot more…

1:36:06Jawad MirYou know what I mean. Yeah.

1:36:08Alex LaurentYeah, absolutely. Of course, of course. But

1:36:10Jawad MirYeah

1:36:10Alex Laurent... The be… better, the effects are much more effective if they're part of a compelling story.

1:36:16Jawad MirYeah.

1:36:16Alex LaurentAnd in order to have a compelling story, you need to have compelling characters we care about, period. And without them, it's just a showcase for effects artistry, and we might as well just look at some concept art or paintings or just watch a reel full of effects shots. Which is fine, but it's…

1:36:36Jawad MirYeah

1:36:36Alex Laurent... As far as it goes. You want to s… it has to be a part of a story. I'll also say that even just talking about, like, environmental effects and sort of non-character focused effects, elegant design is also something I think people, good design of a shot. Classic…

1:36:54Jawad MirYeah

1:36:54Alex Laurent... Sort of discipline of just visual composition…

1:36:57Jawad MirAbsolutely

1:36:57Alex Laurent... Basic. The basic level of artistry is what matters to me and m… and to a lot of audiences, I think, even if they're not thinking about it. And when you're talking about an environment, I'm, I, for some reason I got, coming to my head another one of my favorite relatively recent sci-fi films, Arrival. So…

1:37:15Alex Laurent... Denis Villeneuve, Obviously, and his beautiful sense of composition that you see in all of his films, and you see again, of course, in, the new Blade Runner and in Dune, that composition that is so beautifully informed, the composition of the shots. And the way those ships hover, that ship hovers over the valley in Arrival.

1:37:39Alex LaurentIt's not about being flashy. It's not about being, complex or baroque. It's a minimalist design, but it's so elegant and so dramatic, and the audience probably knows that it's not... Of course, they know it's not real. It's all willful suspension of disbelief. But you appreciate the design of that, the grandeur, and what it says about the aliens, what it says about the technology and who they are, that they've designed this minimalist curving ship that's so unlike so many other sci-fi ships we see.

1:38:14Jawad MirYeah.

1:38:14Alex LaurentSo I think that is another aspect of the design that audiences app… will appreciate when it's done well.

1:38:20Jawad MirAbsolutely.

1:38:20Alex LaurentAnd that's, that's this minimalism again. This less is more aesthetic that relies on classic composition and artistic ar… you know, composition rules and how to compose a frame and shapes, all of that basic stuff.

1:38:37Jawad MirI, and I also think that, you know, people like Tarantino, Spielberg, Nolan, Scorsese, even Coppola, like, you know, going back to the '70s. One thing that I really get immersed, and I'm sure you do, too, and a lot of people do, but they don't probably realize, is that when there is... When you are with a character in an environment and there is no cut, you know, to the over the shoulder c… shots or excessive cut…

1:39:06Jawad Mir... You get immersed into it so much.

1:39:08Alex LaurentYeah.

1:39:08Jawad MirLike, I'll give you an example. I don't know if you've seen the Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep and St… Spielberg movie, The Post.

1:39:15Alex LaurentYeah, years ago. Yeah.

1:39:16Jawad MirYeah.

1:39:16Alex LaurentWhen it first came out, yeah.

1:39:18Jawad MirSo you probably didn't notice this, I mean, I didn't notice it until I s… I saw Spielberg's interview, but it was the opening shot of them in the restaurant. Spielberg had filmed so much coverage, right? Like, over the shoulder and all that stuff, but he also had a master. And that eight, or maybe, I don't know the time, but definitely over five minutes, was all one shot with…

1:39:40Jawad Mir... Both of them in the frame in the restaurant, you know, people moving in the back. And it just immerses you so much into your characters and your story.

1:39:48Alex LaurentYeah.

1:39:48Jawad MirAnd sometimes the best editing is no editing as well.

1:39:51Alex LaurentYeah.

1:39:51Jawad MirLike going back

1:39:52Alex LaurentYeah. No, I agree. We've had a lot of... A whole, there's a whole subgenre now of oners, as they call them. A oner.

1:39:59Jawad MirYeah.

1:39:59Alex LaurentThat's the, that's, that's the slang. One shot, one take. Even if it's not fully real, it's now this stylistic trope, unfortunately. So, but we've had it really well used, and used to really good effect…

1:40:11Jawad MirYeah

1:40:11Alex Laurent... To immerse you.

1:40:12Jawad MirBut as a gimmick, right?

1:40:12Alex LaurentAnd then sometimes it's a gimmick. Right.

1:40:14Jawad MirYeah.

1:40:14Alex LaurentIt can also be a gimmick.

1:40:15Jawad MirYeah.

1:40:15Alex LaurentBut, you know. I'm a huge Alfonso Cuaron fan, and he's someone who loves to use that technique. So, you know, I love, I love his use of it in Birdman. I love his use of it in Gravity.

1:40:27Jawad MirExactly

1:40:27Alex Laurent... I enjoy it, in those... The way he uses that in Children of Men, particularly, my gosh, that's where I... That was when he first started bringing his version of that one take, long shot… ... Yeah, to bear in a really effective way. That to me, that was before it had become abused, as a gimmick.

1:40:46Jawad MirYeah.

1:40:47Alex LaurentBut…

1:40:47Jawad MirNo, definitely. I'm not saying that's something to do all the time, but it has to serve the story. Like, if... W… what the…

1:40:52Alex LaurentThat's right

1:40:53Jawad Mir... What the scene entails, right?

1:40:54Alex LaurentThat's right.

1:40:54Jawad MirIf you're just doing it for the hell of it, then it's just like overusing the effects. There's no difference.

1:40:59Alex LaurentThat's right. That opening shot in Birdman, to me, was a beautiful demonstration of that chaos, of that moment and all of the different parts of the, of that theater, and all of the introducing us to all of these characters and all of these moments with this sense of real-time urgency, that really worked well. Later in the film, I didn't feel it needed it as much, and I believe he goes…

1:41:21Jawad MirYeah

1:41:21Alex Laurent... To a more traditional editorial style in other parts of the movie, if I recall. I need to watch it again. But I don't think he keeps that up through the whole movie for its own sake. It's mostly that opening part where it serves a purpose.

1:41:34Jawad MirYeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, listen, Alex, thank you so much for giving me your valuable time and talking to me about Minority Report and your work on that, and as well as Saving Private Ryan.

1:41:47Alex LaurentAbsolutely.

1:41:47Jawad MirAnything else you wanna add?

1:41:49Alex LaurentNo, it's just been a pleasure to talk with you today, and, really fun to go back in time and sort of remember these experiences and share some of the stories and artwork. It's a, it's a lot of fun, and it's really nice that, you're still interested in hearing about this stuff. It's great, and I'm honored to be a part of these conversations that you are, you're, you're collecting, having and collecting,... In honor, in honor of DreamWorks history. It's, it's, it's, again, an honor. I'm happy to do it.

1:42:20Jawad MirI hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for watching and listening. Don't forget to subscribe, like, share, and comment, and do come back for another episode. Until then, have a great day.