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Dreamwatch

Do you think actors should be concerned that eventually they’ll be completely replaced by computers in the future too?

We’ve seen years and years of actors whose faces have been covered by rubber, whether it’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST or BELLE ET LA BETE – everything Lon Chaney ever did right through to the present day work of Rick Baker and Stan Winston. I think we’ve gone about as far as we can go with rubber and it’s fun to see the result, but the way I see it done, the actor’s still in charge of the performance, like Eddie Murphy in THE KLUMPS or Jim Carrey in HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS. I don’t think there is any value in recreating exactly perfectly a human being on a computer. To me, that’s not a novelty. That’s something that somebody will do at some point just to prove they can, but where’s the market for it? If you can have a human being, hire a human being because they’re much cheaper. Even one actor that costs $20 million in a picture is cheap when you consider to make a synthetic character to take their place would cost fifty times as much based on how many scenes they would have to be added into it. This would take a tremendous amount of time too, so from a schedule and financial aspect, it’s just not a plus.

Wasn’t it 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY that got you into movie making in the first place?

Yes, that film got my teenage brain active on how shots were made and it was actually a transition from being a fan of films to wanting to get my hands on a camera and try some stuff. Then STAR WARS completely rebooted the whole conception of science-fiction when it leapt to the highest-grossing film in history, and because I had loved it and most of my ideas, my fantasies, my imagining had been in the science fiction genre, suddenly I was now a talent that could be exploited by low-budget filmmakers I worked for, as a designer, an artist, a story teller.

What does directing mean to you and where does it fit into your other interests?

I always promised myself, after TITANIC, I would take a lot of time off, but I took about two weeks off and just got busy again with a lot of other projects. I’ve been doing so many other things that aren’t directing features but are just things that I’ve always wanted to do; writing a novel, starting a non-profit marine research entity and an internet company, and a lot of things that haven’t really reached the market yet but I’m working on them, like designing a deep submergence robot that can go down to 20,000 feet and explore the insides of shipwrecks and sunken submarines. It’s undergoing sea trials as we speak and is working perfectly, so we’re going to take that and do some TV specials built around it. I don’t feel limited just because I’ve been successful as a feature director. Not that I’m a qualified scientist but I have an abiding love of investigation and the scientific world, and I’ve had a wonderful experience dealing with NASA and the other various ventures I’m involved in, so I’ll continue with all these other interests too.

So does this mean you could give up directing altogether?