John Dykstra Quotations

We still get to blow some stuff up. One of the most enjoyable things about doing special effects was going out and blowing up miniatures.

We stayed there 24 hours a day. We lived and ate and slept that movie. We were enthusiastic, not just because of the movie, but because we had such a great collaborative team. We had a really good time. It was very much a family.

Film, as far as I'm concerned, is my area of artistic endeavor, so I never think of a movie that gets released as being all done-it's just when they took it away from you.

It's funny because I've gone through a long career that started in '75. I've had the opportunity to direct a couple of movies, and I've directed lots of commercials. But I'd say since '85, directing a feature is something that I wanted to do; I just haven't understood the movies offered to me, or it was a case where the visual effects came before the story, which never interested me.

It's an embarrassment of riches because you have directors who don't better. You end up with so much stuff going on the screen that you don't know where to look, and that's what I consider self-indulgent.

The tsunami is a critical component in the telling of this story. It's a sensitive storytelling issue.

It's easy to create something that has a lot of luster, but it's very hard to make something that has a lot of depth.

If you understand how the real world feels and looks and sounds it is much easier to create a virtual version of the real world.

Once the image was in the digital environment, one of the problems was, we had no means to reproduce the color spectrum, grey scale, and contrast that film produces, without converting the digital file to film, evaluating it, then going back and changing the digital image.

Human beings are really attuned to their senses. When you work in film, you are working with the visual and audio senses. An understanding of tactile and other components that go into the creation of those objects are important to making them look real on screen, like a plasma of energy.

I had done a lot of rock 'n' roll photography when I was in college. I was one of many photographers who worked for The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and all of these rock 'n' roll bands.

George Lucas wanted this moving camera for all of the photography in Star Wars. He was willing to take a risk with the concepts that I advanced with regard to ways for doing that.

In the first Spider-Man, at the end of the movie, Peter Parker had to deny himself a relationship with a girl that he's in love with. The very next thing that happens is that he's swinging through the city.

I come from an era when we had to figure out how to bolt a camera to a motorcycle or an airplane or dig a hole and find a canyon deep enough to repel into it so that we can capture images that were real.

As with sound, images are subjective. You and I may not see the same color red as red, but we will probably agree that the image on the screen is a digital image or film image, based on contrast, bit depth, and refresh rate.

You had to make a camera look like it's traveling at 300 mph, but you couldn't make it actually travel at 300 mph so you had to slow everything down and build devices to do that. So you were constantly engineering.

Because I come from that old-school optics environment, I know stuff about depth of field and camera movement and things that are not necessarily a part of the curriculum for people who started on a box and have never done anything that wasn't on a box.

I think that era of mechanically figuring out of how to bring a particular evocative image to the screen was a really important part of my education.

Digital imaging has untied our hands with regards to technical limitations. We no longer have to be arbiters of technology; we get to participate in the interpretation of technology into creative content.

If you can imagine it, we can make it.

It's very much like filmmaking always is-you're always asked to do something that you're not sure you know how to do. So you make an educated guess as to what you think will work and you hope between that and plan B, that you can end up with a product that's really good.

With the advent of digital imaging I made the transition from trying to figure out how to do things to creating objects, characters and the whole cloth. It kind of freed up the analytical part of my brain and I had the opportunity to use more of the creative side of my brain for how things interact with light and integrate into stories.

Boy, am I glad there wasn't a fourth episode of Lord of the Rings.

I was involved in the color correction and the digital color correction. In an odd way, you end up making a film many times-the DVD, the archival record of a high-definition master, and so on.

I like engineering, but I love the creative input.