Collider interviewed special effects genius Phil Tippet about his involvement on on a number of projects including Breaking Dawn.
Last night, you talked about taking meetings with directors and they would tell you they wanted this and that for their project, and sometimes their requests weren’t particularly thrilling to you. I’m wondering what the strangest request you’ve ever heard from a filmmaker was, or if there was something that someone wanted that you knew couldn’t possibly be done. Does anything like that come to mind?
TIPPETT: One that I get over and over and over that just irks me is that everyone wants it to look “real.”
As opposed to what?! As if anyone would want it to look fake?
TIPPETT: Exactly! We try our best, but…”You mean you just want it to look good?”
THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN Part 1 posterYou’ve been working on the new Twilight movie, which is a franchise—if I’m being frank—I’m not a fan of…TIPPETT: Yeah, neither am I.
Well, that’s because we’re not pre-teen girls. But there are a lot of fans out there, and there is a huge amount of buzz about the next one. I’ve read some things in particular about the storyline of the last book, and some of the sequences that were written into that novel sound like they’d need some elaborate special effects to make it on screen. Like, I’ve heard there’s this C-section scene where a vampire baby crawls out of a girl? Can you talk a little bit about the effects that you designed for the new Twilight movie and if so…
TIPPETT: Well, I really just do the wolves on this [film]. I’m not the effects supervisor, so I’m not apart of designing and putting together all of that stuff. But, it’s a PG13 rated movie. I’ve seen some of the stuff and it looks pretty cool. It’s a real good production team, the director is very good, very inclusive, and we work well together.
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