Dennis Muren, who receives this year's VES Life Achievement Award, began his career 30 years ago on Star Wars. He worked on approximately 200 shots for that movie. All images courtesy of ILM.

Dennis Muren, the eight-time Oscar-winning senior visual effects supervisor from Industrial Light & Magic, began his effects career 30 years ago on Star Wars and has been on the cutting edge of the industry ever since. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom, Innerspace, The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Jurassic Park, A.I. and War of the Worlds, to name a few. But Muren is more than a genius when it comes to effects -- he is a thinking man's filmmaker, which comes across in his work and in his thoughts about the aesthetics and craft of storytelling.

Bill Desowitz: What excited you about the past year's visual effects achievements at ILM and throughout the industry?

Dennis Muren: I really thought that Pirates was pretty above and beyond the rest of the stuff because I loved the shot designs and the execution of everything. Poseidon -- you know, there's just always a lot of work. I don't know if I want to play favorites.

BD: I was thinking more in terms of what's state-of-the art that excites you: performance capture and attaining greater photorealism.

DM: I've done a lot of MoCap in the films that have animation in them, but my original heart and soul has always been in spectacle. If it involves a dinosaur, I really like it if the dinosaur's 20-feet tall. I still really like that. If I can see the stuff that I can't see in real life, that's what really excites me.

BD: What have you been working on lately?

DM: I'm actually writing a book on my own and spending a little bit of time at ILM and a little bit of time at Pixar. The book is for CG artists and I'm probably about a quarter of the way done with it. I've been on it for a year, but, hopefully, it will speed up.

BD: Do you have a title?

DM: No, not a real title yet.

BD: What's the focus of it?

DM: It's for people who are doing the work. I think people have not had an opportunity to learn about art. CG people come right out of school and are thrown into the work and there are a lot of basics they don't really have time to pick up on. Tools don't make the shots, and I talked about this to some universities and the people I've spoken to there don't seem to know what I'm talking about. We need more art classes and a better understanding of what reality looks like. Well, I gave up on them and just decided to do this as a book myself. That's what I'm doing. It's pretty important because I want to get this stuff down. Half of my job as an effects supervisor is saying the same stuff over and over and over again that I think could be in the job descriptions. If they just knew what they don't know -- and it's not taught anywhere.

Muren has mixed feelings about the digitally enhanced E.T. While he finds the work seamless and that it maintains the tone of the shots, he's pleased that both versions are available.

BD: How much of your own work do you use?

DM: There's some of that. I can speak more directly about personal experience about what worked here and why it worked. But it's not a memoir. In fact, the last time I saw Ray Harryhausen, I said, "You've got to write a book on how to do the work you used to do." People, just for historical reasons, need to know how you got rid of the hot spot on the process screen. And any tricks you used to cut the contrast on the projection plates when you were projecting them up. And he's never going to do that, but my book is something like that for CG: How to make images look better. That's what's going on. I have a feeling that a lot of the effects films are looking more like games and the games are looking a little bit better but are not even close to being reality. And it could just be that a lot of people may not care if the audience grows up watching game quality stuff in movies, and there's nothing you can do about that, but I hope that somewhere there's still some sense of achievement in trying to reach something that is very difficult to do, and reality is just about the most difficult thing you can do, especially when you're trying to put something that is unreal in a realistic environment and behave in a realistic way because you don't have any way of figuring out what it looks like or how it should move.

BD: Speaking of greater realism, I asked John Knoll what was at the top of his wish list and he replied computer-assisted balance for characters.

DM: It's a very good thing -- that would help. But if it ever gets to the point where there is the final, magic button on your keyboard, and the shot comes out perfect, that's not going to be enough for most people. They're going to be bored with that after pushing the button twice. Some of us are and we're always going to be pushing for something new. I think at the moment some of the folks think that the ray tracer is the final way to render -- that RenderMan is the final way to render: just put it on and it looks great. And it never is right.