The American Phil Tippett (Berkeley, California, 69 years old) is the star of
stop motion (an
animation technique based on the succession of still images) that CGI (computer generated images) and other technological tricks have never managed to kill. .
It represents the last artisans of the film industry, who have seen the great special effects of a Hollywood not so recent being born between their fingers.
In his particular family book he is listed as the
father
of Jabba the Hutt, among many other creatures from the first
Star Wars
trilogy
,
Paul Verhoeven's
RoboCop
(1987) and the dinosaurs of
Jurassic Park
(1993).
He has built viewer dreams for decades and survived continuous digital changes, but the feature film
Mad God
, his great personal challenge as a director, never entered the canons of the studios.
That is why it has taken more than 30 years to see it finished and projected on a big screen.
It happened for the first time this Thursday at the Locarno film festival, which he also attended to collect the Vision Award 2021, dedicated to his entire career in the world of visual creativity.
"I hope the viewers are not too scared," comments this self-confessed misanthrope ironically, whose aesthetic education began with the vision of heaven and hell in the paintings and drawings of El Bosco that he found collected in a book in his father's personal library. .
Funded by multiple crowdfunding,
Mad God
is deliberately retro and experimental.
It is set in a world of monsters, war animals and crazy scientists in which what happens, something that is not very clear in the 83 minutes of footage, is not what is important, but how it happens.
"I am aware that it is not a film for everyone, so I prefer not to have expectations of how people here are going to receive it," he says in the Swiss city hours before the general public can check the final result of the work of his life.
“The guys who do these wonderful things with computers are enormously talented.
There's no doubt.
The problem is that they don't watch movies.
They don't know about movies! ”.
Despite the obvious successes, the Californian with the long white beard and the gestures of the eternal
hippy,
capable of being sullen and warm at the same time
,
never sought to be a hero of commercial cinema. Give a good account of this
A genius named Phil Tippett
, a 2019 documentary directed by the French Gilles Penso and Alexandre Poncet that can be seen in Spain through Filmin. During the eighties, in full wave of success, he left the Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) factory of the almighty George Lucas to create his own company, Tippett Studio, from which he has continued to connect in one way or another with the saga galactic as an advisor to its new directors.
His wife and company president, Jules Roman, has done much more for his career than the two Oscars he has won, one for
Return of the Jedi
in 1984 and one for
Jurassic Park.
in 1994. "She is the one who has made my creative chaos profitable and I could continue in this world," he says.
Ironically, it was Spielberg's dinosaurs that marked the pivotal moment that made him realize that it was guys like him who were in danger of extinction;
that his way of life, creating models and monsters with his own hands to make films with them, was about to become obsolete in the face of new technologies.
“The guys who do these wonderful things with computers are enormously talented.
There's no doubt.
The problem is that they don't watch movies.
They don't know about movies!
And that is something that hurts my soul ”, he laments.
Disciple of his idols
For Tippett's professional and even sentimental education it was essential to become a disciple of his idols from a very young age, the two Rays who have defined the 20th century science fiction genre: Harryhausen, a pioneer in the field of special effects in the cinema, and Bradbury, a legend of literature. With both of them he maintained a close enough relationship that they gave him advice. He established contact with the writer while working on a 16-millimeter film that adapted his short story
The Sound of Thunder
, recalls:
“
I was a 14 or 15 year old kid and I mailed him some pictures of a dinosaur that we were building and part of the script.
And so it all began.
He had that philosophy in which the day to day had to be built with love, love and only love, in the style of John Lennon.
But with the passage of time, the world has been changing and I no longer find those values that he had ”.
Phil Tippett, this Thursday at the Locarno film festival.URS FLUEELER / EFE
Again, that misanthropy that allowed him, he assures, to connect much better with Verhoeven's dark personality comes to light (his are also the alien bugs from the cult war satire
Starship Troopers)
than with Lucas and Spielberg. They are different ways of understanding passion for cinema, he says. “It is curious that the word passion comes from the Latin
passio
, a term derived from another that means 'suffering'
[passus]
Tippett says to confess that a couple of years ago, he started hating his passion. “For the first time in my life, it was hard for me to go to work. Until there was a point where I had something like a little psychotic break that dissociated me from reality. I didn't realize it, but my friends and people close to me did. It took me a couple of months to recover. It was serious, "he recalls.
That situation led him back to
The Red Book
, handwritten and illustrated by the psychologist and essayist Carl Gustav Jung over 14 years, which founded his main theories on the collective unconscious and psychological archetypes and that Tippett had spent so much time reading. . Someone who has spent decades studying art history, cinema and psychology, keeping their curiosity alive, is unable to feel at least some attachment to humanity ?: “I really don't feel it. I don't think there is much hope for us. We are heading for the abyss and only luck can save us ”.
His review of the seminal work of the Swiss psychologist and, paradoxically, the isolation and rest forced by the pandemic allowed him to see some light. “I started writing a kind of sequel to
Mad God.
But this time I'll do something more accessible, with a plot and defined characters. It will be a story that people want to pay upfront [in a new crowdfunding]. For years, Hollywood studios have repeatedly rejected this project. " And
streaming
platforms
, always hungry for news, have not compensated for this disinterest. "Not at all! They are machines for manufacturing content, in charge of filling our void, like those gigantic supermarkets that overwhelm you with products until you end up dizzy, ”he says.
In spite of everything, his work in the field of special effects has not died out. To explain why
stop motion is
not entirely dead, Tippett quotes the late and legendary American film critic Roger Ebert: “
Stop motion
seems fake to you, but it feels real to you; the CGI seems real, but you feel it as something false ”. And, at the end of the sentence, a broad smile appears on his face.