Tippett on Directing Starship Troopers 2: The Bugs are Back
Vfx legend Phil Tippett (Starship Troopers, Star Wars, RoboCop, Jurassic Park and Dragonheart) gets his first crack at directing with the direct-to-DVD Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation. Limited to a 26-day schedule, $6 million budget and miniscule amount for vfx (courtesy of his Tippett Studio), he definitely had his hands full with those pesky alien bugs. Part Alien, part Sam Fuller-style war picture, Starship Troopers 2 couldn’t come out at a better time, what with the war in Iraq. Tippett discusses his directorial debut with VFXWorld editor Bill Desowitz.
Bill Desowitz: Starship Troopers 2 is guerilla filmmaking in more ways than one.
Phil Tippett: Yeah I know. It certainly was done on a shoestring, so we ended up having to pull out as many stops as we could.
BD: Is $6 million accurate?
PT: Yeah, that’s accurate.
BD: And what about the budget for effects?
PT: Oh, my god! That’s almost incalculable. I mean… I was able to beg, borrow, steal and cajole and plead for help. It certainly helps having my own studio. I was able to get a number of folks to pitch in and help get it done.
BD: Were you able to do much previs?
PT: Well, kind of. I mean every filmmaker uses pre-visualization in a different way and you can do it and use it if you’ve got the budget, and in my case I had time because it took about a year to get the script completely together. And during that period I used that time and whatever resources I could to cobble together. With a hot glue gun or a pencil and paper, I tried to come up with as much stuff as I could. Primarily as an assistant and an aide to work with the writer [Ed Neumeier] so we would build sets and little sets and miniatures and figure out exactly — or more precisely — what we were intending on doing because we every decision we made was a financial one.
BD: How are the bugs different this time around?
PT: Well, we used the generic stand-by warrior bug from the first film. They’re the equivalent of the infantry, so in the first act and in the third act when the bugs are attacking the human beings we just recycled the warrior bugs from Starship I, and then the new bugs that we brought on were the parasite bugs and the spy bugs. They were integral to the story and the idea of people being hijacked by the enemy. So those there were two new kinds of bugs that were designed. I was lucky to get my buddy, Craig Hayes, who designed all the creatures in the first Starship Troopers to design the new bugs just to keep everything in the same world.
BD: And what software did you use?
PT: Oh, our studio animation packages: Maya, Shake, RenderMan, and then there’s a lot of plug-ins that the guys at the studio write and make work better with our system.
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