I’ll never forget seeing The Empire Strikes Back for the first time. While I’d been lucky enough to see A New Hope in theaters for its 1997 re-release, it was off to the library to grab VHS copies for the rest of the original Star Wars trilogy. Even though the screen was dramatically smaller than what I’d started my Star Wars journey on, it didn’t matter: the opening battle on the ice planet of Hoth absolutely captivated my 5-year old imagination. Watching the Rebel ships fly between the giant Imperial Walkers, struggling to take them down, blew my mind. As I grew older, I would literally stop and rewind the tape (I know, I’m dating myself a lot here), trying to figure out how they created the sequence.
The answer? Dennis Muren.
A Kid, His Toys, and a Camera
Muren’s story is not so different from the stories of many of the pioneering filmmakers that emerged in the 1970s and 80s. Like James Cameron, Muren started off as just a kid who liked playing with plastic models of dinosaurs and spaceships (how fitting) — but, crucially, he had a still camera in tow too, finding exciting ways to shoot his action figures to bring them cinematically to life. These long hours led to a passion that would define the rest of his life — and the future of moviemaking as we now know it.
Eventually, Muren found himself taking a job as a second cameraman at a fledging new upstart visual effects studio in California. It didn’t pay great, the hours were long and grueling, and he spent his days in a nondescript, hot building, but he was getting to finally do what he loved: filming physical worlds in miniature and making magic.
Oh, and they were making Star Wars.
Muren’s work with the team at his new employer, Industrial Light and Magic, completely upended the entertainment industry upon Star Wars’ release in 1977. Muren, however, did not rest on his laurels — he was addicted to this new visual effects frontier. He ultimately only took a single weekend off before getting to work on his next film, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, again as a second cameraman. His tireless work ethic and perfectionism caught the eye of both Lucas and Spielberg, earning him a promotion to Effects Director of Photography for his next film, Empire Strikes Back, where his miniatures work on the Battle of Hoth continues to be legendary. Oh, and he won his first Oscar for Best Visual Effects.
After that, he became a Visual Effects Supervisor — a role he would hold on to for the rest of his films going forward.
The Digital Frontier
What came next for Muren? Perhaps you’ve heard of these ones: E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial; Return of the Jedi; Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; Innerspace; The Abyss. During that stretch from Empire through Abyss, Muren would win six Academy Awards, as his groundbreaking work at Industrial Light and Magic continued to both upend and define blockbuster filmmaking during the 1980s.
When his company began to move into computer graphics, it was Muren who insisted that this new, digital frontier not lose the handcrafted feel of film. For audiences to be able to not only embrace but believe these computer-generated images, the effects needed to be as unnoticeable as possible, mimicking the lenses and film-stock look that audiences were accustomed to. Muren’s decades spent building physical worlds in miniature were invaluable to these new, digital worlds, making his legacy one that continues to stretch into today. (Today’s current filmmakers would be wise to take a page out of Muren’s book, here, but I digress.)
As more and more films began to embrace computer-generated effects, Muren put himself at the forefront of figuring out how to use these new tools most effectively, supervising these new techniques initially on James Cameron’s The Abyss. Following The Abyss, Muren took a one-year sabbatical to study CGI software and hardware theory, assembling the first robust film scanning, manipulating, recording system for flawless, photo-real 2D and 3D image manipulation.
All that time spent studying? Well, it proved to be pretty invaluable, with two little films called Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park to follow.
A New Jurassic Age
When Steven Spielberg was starting pre-production on Jurassic Park, he was initially planning on doing all of the dinosaur work in stop motion, turning to master stop motion animator Phil Tippett (more on him in another article, I’m sure) to figure out how to make this a reality. The results were impressive, but looked…well, like stop motion, not dissimilar from the Harryhausen creature work that defined previous decades of visual effects work. Spielberg needed something more fluid and realistic for the dinosaurs, or audiences would never be sold on the core concept of dinosaurs being brought back to life.
Enter Muren. He saw the stop motion work being done for the wide shots of the movie and decided to allow the team at ILM to create CG test footage of a walking T-Rex, hoping to convince Spielberg that ILM could pull off visual effects work never before attempted. The results, showing fluid movement but also the weight of the T-Rex lumbering across the screen, convinced Spielberg to immediately abandon his original plans, likening watching the test footage to “watching our future unfolding on the TV screen.”
The hours were grueling — not dissimilar to those early days on Star Wars, as Muren and the crew spent long days and nights designing and rendering these new computer-generated effects on computers that could barely keep up. The end result, though? I don’t need to tell you. Jurassic Park, despite releasing in 1993, still largely stands up today. Why? Because of Muren’s perfectionism, stretching the capabilities of his time to the utmost limit.
It’s no understatement to say that the effects work on Jurassic had a seismic effect on the entertainment industry. Suddenly, anything was possible in filmmaking. Things that had been only dreams before, deemed impractical, were now just a few clicks away. Lucas, who previously was endlessly frustrated that the ideas in his head weren’t able to be fully realized on screen, finally felt the technology was ready for his Star Wars prequel trilogy. Similarly, a young, primarily shock-and-awe filmmaker from New Zealand, Peter Jackson, felt this his dreams of Lord of the Rings and King Kong movies were now also possible. In the decades that followed, new visual effects landmarks in filmmaking would always be called “the next Jurassic Park.” A new standard was set, and filmmaking would never be the same.
Keeping the Spirit Alive
In the years that followed, Muren would continue working primarily with Lucas and Spielberg, serving as the VFX Supervisor on the first two Star Wars prequels, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, and on War of the Worlds. He would serve as a VFX supervisor one last time — on JJ Abrams’ Super 8 — before serving primarily as a consultant, first on WALL-E and then on JJ’s Star Wars sequel, The Force Awakens.
Muren may be at the forefront of the digital age of filmmaking, but it’s his background in the analog era that makes his legacy so untouchable in Hollywood history. He insisted on retaining the handcrafted feel that got him into the industry in the first place, while also admitting the limits of computer-generated technology. While others were wanting to push more and more — even into creating digital humans — Muren pushed back on that and continues to do so.
He is, in total, the recipient of eight Academy Awards. Spielberg said that he “set the example” for visual effects excellence. Others have called him a pioneer. He became the first visual effects artist to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and is the reason why so many screenwriters and directors now feel able to tell stories never before possible, bringing a level of realism to visual effects work that never existed previously.
Not bad for a kid from Glendale who just really liked building spaceships and dinosaurs.
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