Joe Johnston, the ILM veteran and accomplished feature filmmaker enters the documentary space to tell the story of ILM and Lucasfilm’s digital filmmaking odyssey in the second season of Light & Magic streaming now on Disney+.
Warning: This article contains spoilers from Light & Magic Season 2
Among the first group hired at Industrial Light & Magic in 1975, Joe Johnston began his career as a storyboard artist and concept designer. After 10 years with ILM on three Star Wars and two Indiana Jonesfilms, among others, he went to the University of Southern California film school under George Lucas’ sponsorship. He’d go on to direct classics as varied as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), October Sky (1999), and Captain America: The First Avenger (2011).
Johnston’s directorial debut in the documentary medium, however, comes today, with the Season 2 premiere of Light & Magic on Disney+. The non-fiction series charts the storied legacy of Industrial Light & Magic, now celebrating its 50th anniversary, an unprecedented achievement in the history of visual effects.
“I don’t have any experience in documentary or non-fiction filmmaking,” Johnston tells ILM.com. “When I was at Cal State Long Beach, I worked on a documentary that was directed by Tony Brennan called Hitler’s Secret Weapon. It was about the V2 rocket. Basically, my job was to do illustrations that explained some of the ideas he was trying to get across. That was my entire experience with documentary filmmaking, almost nil.”
But Johnston does have experience as a storyteller. “While I had never worked on a documentary, I had a pretty good idea of how to tell a story, whether it’s real or fictional,” he says. “And you have to remember, especially with a project like this, though it’s true of all filmmaking, I had so much help. I had a supervising producer [Nicole Pusateri], story producer [Carly Baggett], a line producer [Andrew Hafnor], three great editors [Mike Long, Jennifer McGarrity, and Robinson Eng], and an archivist [Eugen Bräunig] whose job it was to go through thousands of hours of footage from ILM. It was more like a steering process, and I steered that process toward an ultimate goal. It was a real team effort all the way through.”
Finding the Story
After a successful first season directed by veteran screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, Lucasfilm and Imagine Entertainment agreed to produce a second. It was then that Imagine producer Christopher St. John gave Johnston a call. The latter was surprised by the inquiry, thinking they wanted him to appear in Season 2 as an interview subject. “I said, ‘Guys, I’ve said everything I have to say about it in Season 1.’ And Chris said, ‘No, no, we want you to direct it.’ Well, okay. I had to think about that for a while. It sort of came out of nowhere. I wasn’t expecting it.”
Johnston’s relatively distinct point-of-view helped motivate him to accept the offer. “Having been an insider for the first 10 years during the original Star Wars trilogy, maybe I could have a unique perspective on what Season 2 might look like, having not been around for any of that. I left in 1985, came back for a couple of projects afterwards, but the whole shift toward digital was all new to me. Once I was onboard, it was a matter of guiding it in the direction I thought it should, one goal of which was to tell George Lucas’ story as much as possible.”
That story emerged as Johnston and team reviewed thousands of hours of archival footage preserved in ILM’s collection. “I recognized that one of the stories that needed to be told was how George Lucas had basically steered the entire motion picture industry – in a way he sort of dragged it kicking and screaming – into the digital age,” the director explains. “That was a story that I didn’t think had really been told before. Here was a chance to feature that aspect of ILM and Lucasfilm.”
This would chiefly center around the production of the Star Wars prequel trilogy, released between 1999 and 2005. The first entry, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), was the most ambitious visual effects project ever undertaken up to that time, counting more than 2,000 shots produced entirely within ILM. The middle entry, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (2002), was the first blockbuster feature film made in a completely digital format and workflow. Surrounding these Lucasfilm productions were a bevy of groundbreaking achievements for client productions as varied as environmental effects in Twister (1996)and The Perfect Storm (2000) to performance capture in The Pirates of Caribbean trilogy (2003-07) and a fully-animated feature with Rango (2011).
Always a Student
“What also appealed to me was the chance to interview these people, a lot of whom I’d known over the years, but hadn’t worked with,” Johnston adds. “Hearing their personal stories…. It was an education for me. I don’t know that much about visual effects, so it was interesting to learn how effects had evolved since my involvement in the 1980s.”
Indeed, Johnston is keen to note that, although he’s had a reputation “as a visual effects person, I have to always remind people that I’m not at all. I was a designer, storyboard artist, sequence director, and stuff like that,” as he explains, “but I never really got involved in the visual effects. I was surrounded by people who could do that. My designs were used in those sequences, but once I was happy with the design, I’d hand it off to people like Richard Edlund and Dennis Muren to make it work.”
As a feature film director, Johnston collaborated with ILM on The Rocketeer (1991), Jumanji (1995), and Jurassic Park III (2001), providing him with first-person, client-side experience during the era covered in Light & Magic Season 2. He describes how Jumanji, for example, took place during a transitional moment “where it wasn’t always cheaper to do it digitally, or it wasn’t necessarily cheaper to do something with an analog solution. We had to figure out which method was the best to achieve a certain effect.” Johnston worked alongside visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston on that film, a former colleague from the original trilogy.
“I am a proponent of the idea that any film should not have one more visual effect than it needs,” Johnston comments. “You have the minimal number to help you tell the story and move on. I don’t like films that are all about the visual effects; spectacle for the sake of spectacle. It’s such a waste. You’re not telling the story; you’re just trying to impress people.”
Read the exclusive interview in full at ILM.com. Light & Magic season 2 is now streaming on Disney+.
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