Here Muren (left) puts finishing touches on a shot for Return of the Jedi.

BD: What's it like looking back on Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom?

DM: I had a lot of the big scale stuff that I really like doing. That was maybe one of the first shows you would now call a set extension. The guy's hanging from the rope ridge at the end and the mine chase was really neat, the idea behind all of that and the energy trying to get everything to show up in those quick cuts. And the big flood sequence at the end. Up until that time, I hadn't had a chance to dump a big water tank and flood everything and figure out someway to get the droplets not to look too big. I just pushed tons of air on it all the time, maybe 40 or 50 pounds blowing the droplets tiny. So that was fun and nerve wracking to get done in the old photochemical days to get it look right.

BD: What has it been like working with Steven Spielberg, who has managed to keep one foot in analog and one in digital?

DM: He's never really been interested in technology, but his ideas have given opportunities for that technology to be used. He would've been OK with stop-motion dinosaurs in Jurassic -- we were going to add blurs to them and everything. But there was something else we could do better at the time. I think that was probably the same with Close Encounters, with the sort of ethereal saucers, but Doug Trumbull figured out something better. And again, there's somebody going for the vision. George agreeing to build the motion control camera system for Star Wars because he wanted to pan the camera during the dog fights. And George understood animation stands because he had done animation before at USC. Again, that's technology at the service of the need of the movie.

BD: The Abyss?

DM: Well, is it even possible to do that? That was the big thing I remember. And we ended up doing 13 shots in six months and it was pretty close to on budget. And it was amazing for that time that we could do it for that quality where it had to be perfect.

BD: And then you worked with James Cameron again on Terminator 2.

DM: Yeah, I always thought that Terminator 2 was the big CG breakthrough film. A lot of people think it was Jurassic, but that's where we solved the digital compositing and managed to get a system set up where we could get a lot of dailies and takes on the CG where we could get the performances right and that was not easy. And then be able to get the movie done on time. And then later on when Jurassic came, we were really up to speed. And with Jurassic the problem was fine-tuning the animation much better and also getting the skin renderings to be just amazing. And then we got the matchmove stuff working out and lighting tricks for Jurassic 2.

Muren (left) adjusts the camera on the set of Return of the Jedi. Even though Muren worked on almost all the Star Wars episodes, he doesn't see the two trilogies as being related.

BD: And what was it like returning to Star Wars with Phantom Menace?

DM: Yeah, that was interesting. I still don't see those final three as being related. They are, I guess. They talk about the same things, but if it doesn't have Mark and Carrie and Harrison in it, then they're sort of something else. But it was neat to have all synthetic environments with battles and all that stuff was pretty wild. The underwater sequence was a lot of fun from an artistic side, being able to lay out the shots and to get the colors to look really beautiful and mysterious and playing with all the darks and scales of the fish. And the battle with all the droids was pretty neat, too. The scale of that and being able to make sense of the sequence and design the sequence so you could figure it out. And that was a one-off show, so there wasn't going to be any effort in writing software for it. That was done with MoCap and repeated motion. It took a lot of cloning and a lot of compositing to get those quantities up there.

BD: And The Hulk must've been an interesting challenge working with Ang Lee.

DM: It was interesting because we were wondering what Ang was going to do and it was pretty daunting. It was tough and the green color in some ways, I think, really hurt us because it pulled your eye all the time on the special effect. And it made it really difficult to make it look like it was fitting in the world. Really dramatic stuff and some moments I really liked. Ang got some nice emotion and there was some nice emotion in Casper too. Some really wonderful and sympathetic shots in that, which is pretty tough for a transparent bulb head.