Quotes from John Knoll

I've been lucky enough in my career to have opportunities to revisit things that meant a lot to me in childhood.

Often if a picture is in trouble one way or another, there are ways to salvage it, through reshoots or whatever.

'Pacific Rim,' for me, was a chance to touch on those old Toho monster movies. 'Godzilla' and 'Rodan'... and then 'Ultraman' and 'Robotech' and all those kinds of things.

I think it's an important part of the visual effects supervisor's job to get really deeply embedded in production and keep us all focused on trying to generate the best result. I'm not proprietary about, 'I would rather do this effect than let physical effects do it.' No, let's do the smartest thing for the movie.

'Phantom Menace' was a huge project. It was the biggest visual effects production ever done at that point, and it was a little scary how big it was and how many unknown technologies had to be developed to do that work.

Almost everything I've been paid to do was something that was largely self-taught.

Life's too short to be spending all your waking hours doing something you're not excited about. And when people are that excited, you can see it in the work.

I have three daughters who grew up while I was working on the special editions and the prequels. They got to be big 'Star Wars' fans. And, you know, I would see them identifying with a lot of the male characters, and I just thought, 'Star Wars' could use more good strong female leads.'

I read a magazine called 'Cinefantastique' that had just come out with a making of 'Star Wars' issue. They had some very long and detailed interviews with a whole bunch of people at ILM. I think I memorized that whole magazine.

I've been on lots of movies where we've done a lot of planning of sets - how much you build, and is this big enough, and will this get us what we need? - just with foam-core models.

It's part of the culture at ILM and at Lucasfilm that the work is better when you collaborate, you know. There's this culture of open exchange, a wonderful ego-free sharing of ideas and talent.

In animation, you can often defer decisions or make changes later.

There's things that you just couldn't do with an optical printer. Now, with digital compositing, most of the energy that goes into a shot goes into the aesthetic issues of, 'Is it a good shot or not?'

As soon as you take your hobby and make it into your profession, it sort of kills it as a hobby.

Part of the process is always, 'Is there a better way?' We try to think through if there's something we can do better creatively or technically, or just is more efficient.

A lot of filmmakers understand that the work is done digitally, and it's technically possible to change it late in the game.

I don't have any particular loyalties to one technique or another. I'm just trying to use the best for the job.

If you need to do a movie where you have an army of 10,000 soldiers, that's a very difficult thing to shoot for real. It's very expensive, but as computer graphics techniques make that cheaper, it'll be more possible to make pictures on an epic scale, which we haven't really seen since the '50s and '60s.

On every show, there's some amount of work that is brought to some state of completion - or even finished - and then cut out of the movie.

It's harder to get your second picture than it is to get your first one.

Visual-effects shots should flow into the rest of the live action, and you shouldn't be able to see a difference.

When I was a kid, I built miniatures, and that was actually the first thing I did professionally in the film industry. It was a demonstrable skill that I had, so I worked as a model maker.

In high school and college, I'd set a bunch of goals for myself. I wanted to be the lead effects supervisor on one of these really big, innovative visual effects productions, something on the scale of a 'Star Wars' movie. And I wanted to work on a project that wins the Academy Award for best visual effects.

It's definitely an issue if the actor has passed away without stating any intention or desire about how his or her likeness should be dealt with. Then it falls to their estate. That's a problem that will start solving itself. Now the technology exists, and actors are aware of this and can make their wishes known.