Working with Ang Lee on The Hulk was interesting but Muren thinks the green color might have hurt the special effects because it distracted the viewer's eye. © 2003 Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.

BD: And A.I.

DM: Well, I had met with Stanley Kubrick a few years before on that show and it was terrible that he had died, but then to have it show up again with his blessing to Steven to do it, was amazing. But Steven is a very loyal person and I think he just didn't want that to disappear. And the movie isn't nearly as gloomy as the one that Stanley would've made. But for a Spielberg film, it touches on things he hasn't really touched on in his other films.

BD: I read that you discussed the possibility of doing a CG boy with Kubrick.

DM: Yeah, and Stanley never could make up his mind what he wanted either. That would've been a problem too. I don't know how the film ever actually gotten done. He was very indecisive. One minute it was CG, another minute it was a real boy, another minute it was a manipulated boy, which is what I was pushing for. Also, he didn't have a lot of money for his films and that was a very expensive project almost any way you look at it. So the producer side of him was fighting with the creative side of him.

BD: And then War of the Worlds must've been a great opportunity to re-imagine a classic and tackle some old-fashioned spectacle.

War of the Worlds posed some design challenges. For Muren, the tripod was essentially a 19th century design that had look forceful and menacing. ™ & © 2005 Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks. All rights reserved.

DM: Yeah, I loved that film when I was a kid, but it posed some interesting design challenges. It was essentially a 19th century design of the tripod and it was hard to make the thing look forceful and menacing. We had a lot of artists working on it for a couple of months before we came up with a combination of designs that Steven liked. And it has a lot of armor on it like a tank... I was a real proponent of doing the show graphically the way it was going. Shots that lasted a long time and surprising the audience and making the stuff look like documentary footage. And everyone went along with that. Steven had been doing it in Private Ryan, but to try it in an effects film was a different challenge because it's not all right in front of you. So that was what I was going for. And when we did the opening Newark sequence, there was a lot of stuff that when the destruction happened, we made sure we got the residual stuff in the air. When the creature comes out of the ground for the first time, there's huge amounts of dust just floating out there for three or four minutes afterward, which is pretty much what would really happen if you had that much displacement. That whole sequence seems so hazy, but when we were out there it was so much cleaner, of course. We came up with that as we were doing the compositing of the shots. And Steven liked it too, and it allows me the opportunity to do what I call "peek-a-boo," which is to do something that is not as literal as the storyboards. In other words, you don't show everything in one shot, unlike the storyboards. And a lot of folks like to show everything in one shot and you get bored with it. A good cameraman, and I like doing this because I am a cameraman also, will focus the attention with the effects and that smoke in that sequence is to be able to do that. So we were able to cloud up what wasn't important and it just made everything grittier. That's what a lot of directors like about my work, which is that cameramen do that, so it fits in with their live-action movie.

BD: You mentioned earlier that you're working part-time at Pixar. What are you doing with them?

DM: Making some suggestions and ideas on some of the visuals. I had some ideas that would give them a different kind of look. So I'm just in there a day or two a week, looking at stuff and talking about it without mucking it up. Their palette is so beautiful. It's just a fantastically artistic place. The CG films that they make are so aesthetically great...and that's one of the reasons I was drawn to them, as well as the stories being so great.

BD: We've come full circle back to storytelling again, so congratulations again on the lifetime achievement award and we look forward to your book and other future projects.

Bill Desowitz is editor of VFXWorld.