Star Wars legendary visual effects wizard, Phil Tippett has spoken with the Calgary Herald about his film project, Mad God that he has been working on for the past 30 years.
“I’m done with dinosaurs, space aliens and giant robots.”
For fans of Oscar-winning visual effects wizard Phil Tippett’s most famous creations, this may seem a depressing pronouncement. After more than 40 years in the business, Tippett’s pioneering work has included everything from looming Imperial Walkers in the Empire Strikes Back to the supercool alien chess set in the original Star Wars and the menacing Enforcement Droid 209 in Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop. When he reluctantly switched from stop-motion to computer-generated effects in the early 1990s, he supervised the animation for Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park and created those horrifying alien arachnids in Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers.
While the first Mad God film wasn’t released until 2014, Tippett has been chipping away at the concept for the past 30 years. Using stop-motion animation, the films’ nightmarish narrative is described as “shambling hordes of Sh-t-Men stagger and splatter through the unearthly subterranean chambers of Mad God, a world of beautiful, handcrafted monstrosities … ”
“Kind of like everything else in my life, it was inspired during childhood,” Tippett says. “My dad was an abstract painter and had half-a-decent art library. He turned me onto a book with a bunch of reproductions of Hieronymus Bosch paintings of heaven and hell. His hell paintings were pretty amazing. Even back then, at the age of 10 years old or so, I started to think how it would be cool to see something like a Hieronymus Bosch painting. After working on all these successful movies, I just got tired of the traditional three-act structure and the hoops you have to jump through to make a commercial. I’ve always wanted to see stuff that was different, that I had never seen before.”
Tippett says he has one more shot to complete before releasing the Mad God project theatrically in the next couple of years. After building his own studio in the 1980s, Tippett put together a volunteer crew and spent eight months filming the first six minutes of Mad God using stop-motion animation.
“The digital revolution hit and my wife and I had a couple of kids, so that kind of stopped everything for about 20 years in terms of being able to produce anything,” he says. “But that allowed me the time to do all the research that I did, studying the unconscious and reading up on Jung and Freud and studying other esoteric psychologies and mythologies and religions and stuff like that. The conceptual work was done in that intervening 20 years in whatever spare time I had. Then, about 10 years ago, I got a bunch of volunteers, who were people that as kids were inspired by the movies that I had worked on previously.”
