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Tippett and Hayes mistrust the mixture of complacency and perfectionism that permeates the digital age; they abhor the idea that everything will come out right given enough computer time. "Anxiety, too," Hayes says, "is part of the artistic process."
Tippett wants to stay in a warts-and-all mode of filmmaking. ILM has by and large jettisoned the DID, but Tippett Studio has continued to refine it. Hayes designed one that could be worn as a body suit for the "animatics" (animated story boards) on Dragonheart. For Starship Troopers he came up with another that could move (in Hayes' words) "like a doll, in real time" (rather than frame by frame), an enormous help for conjuring crowded action scenes of bugs "jumping over walls, snapping, slamming into people."
4. Starship Troopers
Starship Troopers is one of the most effects-intensive projects in movie history, containing more than 500 effects shots. Tippett pulled off 250 of them. (The Lost World, by comparison, had about 200.) He did more than rise to the occasion: He made the occasion with his most tumultuous and imaginative menagerie yet. The beasties that dominate the final hour have more juice and life than the air-whisked fascist beauties of the first. The soldier bugs have heads like staple removers and limbs like corner pieces in a razor-sharp erector set; when they cover the horizon like the massed tribesmen in Zulu, they erupt with a primal xenophobic aggression far more persuasive than the humans' teen spirit. At the high end of the insect spectrum are obscenely endomorphic brain bugs that are like abstract cartoons of effete, sedentary, polymorphous-perverse intellectuals. It's a bestial rogues' gallery worthy of the medieval craftsmen who took their cues from Revelations.
It's arguably the biggest foray into total filmmaking for any maverick creature-builder since Harryhausen. The project has led Tippett to treat the computer with grudging respect: "It enables us to blend every kind of special-effects technique with animation, so that you're not doing your shots in a vacuum, but you're involved with the plan and construction of the movie, with the director and producer, the editors, all the way through to the sound people."
Judged strictly by the calendar, Starship Troopers has been a four-and-a-half-year project for Tippett. But it's rooted in his long professional history with producer Jon Davison, starting with the jovial 1978 Jaws rip-off Piranha, and with director Paul Verhoeven, which began with the 1987 smash RoboCop (which Davison executive-produced). As Verhoeven explained to me over the phone from L.A., his impetus for Starship Troopers came from an earlier project he'd hatched with Tippett: "It was set 60 million years ago when dinosaurs were the rulers of the world. It was going to be about a little doglike animal who befriends them before a meteor hits and destroys them all. Walon Green [co-writer of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, co-director of The Hellstrom Chronicle] wrote the script; it was grim but entertaining and philosophical; there were battles between good and evil, but no human beings. It would have cost anywhere from $30 to $45 million and Disney thought that was too high."
When Starship Troopers came along Verhoeven saw it as a chance to do a similar Darwinian spectacle with Tippett, whom he regards as "a genius in his field. I had it in my contract that I would do the movie only if Phil Tippett were doing the bugs." Tri-Star hesitated to give the movie the green light until Tippett and Verhoeven made a test. I saw the 45-second clip at Tippett Studio, and it does make you believe that Warrior Bugs exist and can corner and impale a human soldier. Verhoeven says, "Even before the filming, I felt that Phil was acting as a co-director.''
Craig Hayes was also in from the start. Tippett notes, "Craig designs the things to look good; I have to make sure they work." And Hayes agrees: "I try to create something visually strong. Phil's input comes with the movement, how a bug would reach in and grab someone and cut him in half." The two of them consulted with Verhoeven, Davison, and screenwriter Ed Neumeier, too. Hayes says they agreed on a central concept: "This was to be not a fantasy film but a war film. The bugs would almost be mundane -- instead of having five thousand legs floating in some other dimension that would take an audience the whole movie to comprehend, we wanted to keep them grounded in reality, so people could register what they were and get on with the rest of the movie."
They based the different types of bugs on military functions. For armchair troopers, here's Hayes' rundown of the film's insect forces: "The Warrior Bugs are just dangerous. They can attack not only from jaws and claws but from any part of the body; their legs are all pointy, and thousands of them pour out in waves across the surface. The Hopper Bugs are Zeroes, like an air force, attacking from the sky, swooping down and scooping people up. The Tanker Bugs are like tanks or halftracks that move along with the infantry. The Plasma Bugs are superheavy artillery, 85-feet tall, our Guns of Navarone bugs; they're able to launch their plasma into space and shoot down ships and knock asteroids out of orbit. The Brain Bug is the central intelligence bug, and its entourage are Chariot Bugs who join to form a vehicle for the Brain Bug." Tippett screened insect documentaries (including The Hellstrom Chronicle) and World War II movies and, for inspirational mayhem, The Wild Bunch. "A lot of the color patterns," says Hayes, "came from spiders and wasps, natural history. You flesh one creature out, then go back and forth and fine-tune them to match. And Phil is always thinking of what a thing can do, how fast it can buck and spin around."
Tippett was on set for the filming of the battle scenes, where the actors had to imagine their enemies. He tried to embody the insects to help Verhoeven pitch the tone for the actors and -- most important -- signal where they should look during one-on-one or one-on-swarm combat with arachnids. He rigged two poles with a length of rope, like a surveyor's tool, to show the actors both the length and position of the insects. And, Verhoeven says, "Phil always took the front pole, stretching the pole forward and impressing the actors with the threat. He went into 'attack' mode."
