Written By: Michael D. McClellan | Tijana Petrović is in the public eye, and for all of the right reasons. The Belgrade-born filmmaker, cinematographer and lecturer is one of the featured artists in The Hudson Eye, the inaugural new program presented by the Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation and arranged by curator Aaron Levi Garvey. The series, which aims to stimulate cultural and economic diversity in the area, takes place August 23rd through September 2nd, 2019, timed through Labor Day Weekend in historic downtown Hudson, NY.
The Hudson Eye is the perfect vehicle for Petrović’s mesmerizing, monumental work Canyon, a 45-minute video projection of a continuous traveling shot of a winding canyon wall in Glen Canyon, Arizona. Equal parts ambitious, artistic, and thought-provoking, Canyon re-introduces the world to the fabled lost beauty of Glen Canyon, documenting the imprint of time and changes it carves into nature’s terrain. The film is especially timely, given the extreme weather and climate change the world now experiences as the new normal.
Canyon is also a history lesson of sorts, a reminder of man’s indelible imprint on the environment: In 1963, the floodgates closed on the newly constructed Glen Canyon Dam near the Arizona-Utah border, locking the waters of the Colorado River behind its concrete face. The water pooled behind the dam, slowly filling in the vast canyon – and the maze of slot canyons and grottoes feathering around its edges. Seemingly lost forever was the magnificent natural splendor of Glen Canyon, as well as oases like Cathedral of the Desert, Ribbon Canyon, and Dungeon Canyon. But now, after a decade-long drought that has reduced the 254 square mile reservoir to half of its 9-trillion gallon high-water mark, Glen Canyon is once again revealing itself to the world.
Petrović brings all of this into focus through her intriguing views of a winding canyon wall in Glen Canyon, taking the viewer on a contemplative journey that will screen on loop throughout the festival at the corner of 8th and Warren in Hudson.
FifteenMinutesWith caught up with the filmmaker born and raised in the former Yugoslavia.
Please tell me about growing up in Belgrade. What memories stand out most, and how did
this region, still healing from war, influence your filmmaking?
Growing up as a teenager in the 1990s
in Belgrade (then Yugoslavia, now Serbia) meant that we lived through two wars,
sanctions that lasted an entire decade, long teacher strikes, extreme economic
inflation, and a period of transition from socialism to capitalism that has
been slow and painful in many ways. In terms of filmmaking this period had a
very strong impact on my love of cinema as an artistic medium. Living in a big
city meant that I had access to the cinematheque which showed foreign and classic films by most important film
directors. I spent a lot of evenings there
watching films by Kurosawa, Bergman, Chaplin, Tarkovsky, and many others. Cinema provided an escape world. We had accepted the absurdity of things happening around us
and the senselessness of the war. But these films were dealing with big questions and
ideas about humanity and their attention to the subtleties
of human existence was very much needed in our lives.
You studied filmmaking at The New School in New York. How did the school’s multidimensional
approach to education help shape you as an artist?
It was during my studies at The New School that I decided I wanted
to focus on documentary film, so my experience there was foundational in terms
of what I wanted to continue doing with film. I was part of the very first
class of the documentary certificate program at The New School. We had great
professors and were exposed to really accomplished and talented guest
filmmakers. We took classes in the Media Arts department and I also worked at
the Parsons School of Art and Design’s Photography lab as a student which
allowed me to use their photography facilities and continue my photo work.
An MFA in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University is
next level stuff. What was this experience like for you, and what aspect of
this journey did you enjoy the most?
It is an intensive program that has strong educational goals in
terms of preparing you to work as a professional in the documentary film world.
You are immersed in working on your own films during the two-year program and I
think this aspect appealed to me the most. Having to make a film in a very
short period of time and move on to the next one. Even though it felt
overwhelming at times it gave me an opportunity to explore different approaches
to filmmaking.
Let’s talk about the technical aspects of documentary filmmaking.
What were some of the more difficult techniques or concepts for you to master,
and what type of equipment are you using in your documentaries today? What cameras do you shoot with most?
I use whatever camera and format are best for the project I’m
working on. I still shoot 16mm film with a Bolex camera, and I recently shot a
project on an Arri SR2 16mm camera. But most often I shoot on digital cameras
of various sizes. In certain situations I use very small cameras, like the
Black Magic Pocket Cinema camera in order to have a smaller footprint and be
less conspicuous in public. In other cases, where I am able to move slowly and
take my time, as in a current project where I’m shooting desert landscapes that
I plan to manipulate in post-production I’ve used a RED Dragon camera and shot
on a very high resolution.
Is lighting as difficult to get right as it appears?
Yes, definitely.
Documentaries tell stories. You strike me as a natural
storyteller. What draws you to
documentary filmmaking?
What appeals to me the most is the documentary process itself
which for me is one of exploration, digging, revealing. I don’t know very much
about the subject of the film at the start, usually a film is born out of some
instinctive attraction, an idea that seems appealing to me and resonates with
themes I’m interested in. But it’s the process of making the film that then
generates new ideas and creates itself, and this process is one that always has
to be very open in the beginning and remain open for a while in order for some
new element to be revealed. I love that documentaries allow for spontaneity and
surprise and I love when these elements are included in a film. It feels like
you are collaborating with reality.
You also teach and lecture. What are some of the common mistakes
that beginning filmmakers make?
Most early mistakes have to do with technical issues and the
general lack of experience with using the equipment. But this is just a part of
the process and the best approach is to try to embrace the mistakes and find a
way to integrate them into the project. This is a truly creative approach to
documentary filmmaking, to always be responding to your material, rather than
trying to control it tightly. Often times these ‘mistakes’ allow you to
discover something new or end up being an important element in the film.
I love the concept behind Changed Landscape. You have the mundane
overlaid with reminders that the world in which we live has become far more
complicated and chaotic than ever before.
Where did you draw your inspiration for this film?
I was interested in making a film that didn’t have any kind of
story but was rather shaped by an imposed structure and was conceptual in
nature. I also wanted to work with image and sound in a way that created new
content when juxtaposed together. But in terms of content I think the film is
concerned with a feeling that was very familiar to me as a young person growing
up in post-war Yugoslavia – a sense of absurdity of everyday life in light of
extreme circumstances, the banal and the tragic put together.
Let’s talk about The Hudson Eye. How did you get involved
in Jonah Bokaer’s inaugural 10-day public program?
Jonah Bokaer had seen a few of my recent works and was interested
in including something in the festival. He asked me to send them to the curator
of The Hudson Eye, Aaron Levi Garvey who decided to include Canyon,
the video projection that will be shown at the festival.
I’ve watched the 7:58 excerpt of Canyon,
and it is brilliant. Please provide me
with the genesis of this project.
I was interested in landscapes that were altered in some extreme
ways for human use and over time couldn’t be controlled any longer. Instances
where our predictions about a place were no longer valid and our ability to
control it was lost. I came across an article by Rebecca Solnit about Lake
Powell and the declining water levels which revealed the canyon walls that were
under water for many decades. She writes with such brilliant insight about the
circumstances of the formation of this man-made lake and its precarious future
in light of environmental change, that I was immediately drawn to this
geography.
Canyon – Tijana Petrović
The idea about a single traveling shot came once I had spent some
time at the lake. I am very much drawn to films that use long duration to
express ideas – films of James Benning, Sharon Lockhart, Chantal Akerman, and
others who are concerned with the element of time in their films and how it can
shape our seeing.
I wanted to create a visceral relationship between the viewer and
the place and I didn’t think that would happen by explaining the story of the
lake. I wanted to create an experience in which the viewer could have a very
intimate engagement with the piece and its subject. I felt that by filming it
in this way I was placing a magnifying glass in front of the viewer, and that
gesture I felt spoke for itself.
From a technical standpoint, what were some of the biggest
challenges faced in shooting Canyon?
There were many technical challenges. Doing a single take is
always a difficult task and in this case there were many parameters we had to
figure out before shooting the actual piece – time of day to shoot in, getting
to know the actual route, and many other more technical issues related to
in-camera settings. We ended up doing many iterations of the shot over a 10-day
period.
Last question: If you had one
piece of advice for aspiring filmmakers, what would that be?
To keep making work, look for support and community and watch a
lot of films.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Tijana Petrović is a filmmaker born and raised in the former Yugoslavia. Her films have screened at festivals and screening venues internationally including True/False, Ann Arbor, Anthology Film Archives and Dok Leipzig among others. Her work has received support from various institutions including The Enersen Foundation, University Film and Video Association, RI Council for the Humanities among others. Tijana studied documentary film at The New School in NY and holds an MFA in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University. She is a lecturer at San Francisco State University and Stanford University. Currently she is a Resident at the SFFILM FilmHouse for 2019.
ABOUT THE FESTIVAL:The Hudson Eye is an artist-driven 10-day public program and urban showcase, with a focus on Dance, Music, Performance, Film, Visual Art, Dining Out, and Nightlife. Works by the following artists will be featured during the First Edition of Hudson Eye: Jonah Bokaer Choreography, Ryder Cooley, Laura Gutierrez, Patrick Higgins, Rachel Libeskind, Elena Mosely, Tony Orrico, Tijana Petrovic´, Matthew Placek, Davon, Betti Rollo, Erika Schipa, Sheida Soleimani, Timothy Stanley, J.M. Tate, Alexander Turnquist and others.
The Hudson Eye will also feature daily Hot Topic Talks hosted by guest speakers whose professional affiliations represent the diversity of Hudson. Speakers include Dr. Carrie Wilkens, Dr. Jeff Foote of Center for Motivation and Change, Sean Kelly founder of Sean Kelly Gallery, Dr. Gidon Eshel of Bard College, Ned Sullivan of Scenic Hudson, Jon Bowemaster and others.
Written By: Michael D. McClellan | Back in 1989, when Biz Markie belted out the line “Ohhhhh baaabbbbbyyyy youuuuu!…got what I neeeeeeed,” the former Juice Crew funnyman crossed over, barging into the mainstream like that crazy uncle who shows up unexpectedly at the family reunion, his gap-toothed smile instantly relatable even if the gold chains, four-finger rings and cocked brim baseball caps spoke to a hip-hop culture most at the time didn’t understand. The clowning – we turned on MTV, and there was Biz singing the chorus of Just a Friend dressed as Mozart in 18th-century clothing – made it easy to let our guard down and let him in, the same way millions of kids would do when he uncorked “Biz’s Beat of the Day” on the Nick Jr. hit show, Yo Gabba Gabba!, a generation later. Biz was one of us – a little on the hefty side, happy-go-lucky, the perfect goofball to skateboard with on a lazy Saturday afternoon.
For Biz, the commercial and mainstream success of Just a Friend introduced the world to an
artist whose recording career had been steadily building since the mid-‘80s.
His 1988 debut album, Goin’ Off, featured
odes about going to the mall, dances that seemed impossible, and the joys of
picking boogers. He was part of the hip-hop collective Juice Crew, assembled by
producer Marley Marl (on Ty Williams’ Cold Chillin’ label), and anchored by the
group’s core that included the larger-than-life spectacle that was Big Daddy
Kane, the slippery tongued Masta Ace, and the profanely prickly Roxanne Shante.
And his hit, Vapors, stormed Yo! MTV Raps to become one of the show’s
most requested songs.
Biz Markie scored big with his one-hit wonder, Just a Friend. The single reached #9 on the Billboard charts in 1989.
A year later came the release of his second album, The Biz Never Sleeps. The cover comically
portrays the rapper as a mad scientist mixing chemicals as if he’s in search of
the perfect formula. With the possible exception of Will Smith, Biz Markie’s
comedic persona carved out unique niche in the late-‘80s rap scene, just in
time for Just a Friend to take off. The
song peaked at #9 on the Billboard charts, becoming a one-hit wonder with an
off-key chorus that everyone loved to sing, the accompanying video eventually earning
Biz the nickname “The Clown Prince of Hip-Hop.” The album proved almost as
successful as the single, peaking at #66 on the Billboard 200 and #9 on the Top
R&B/Hip-Hop Albums, respectively, on its way to certified gold status. For
the Harlem-born funnyman, life at the end of the ‘80s was good indeed. Trouble,
it turns out, was just around the corner.
~ ~ ~
When Biz Markie’s third album, I Need a Haircut, dropped on August 27, 1991, the music industry
was on a legal collision course over copyright infringement, with his single Alone Again soon at its epicenter. Musically,
Alone Again samples several bars of
the familiar piano riff from Gilbert O’Sullivan’s 1972 hit, Alone Again (Naturally), and Biz sings
part of O’Sullivan’s hook for his own chorus. On the surface, Alone Again seemed to follow a very
similar template to Just a Friend,
which also riffed off a piano loop and song hook borrowed from singer-songwriter
Freddie Scott. Behind the scenes though, a storm began to brew.
“Samples,” Markie says with a laugh. “It was all about the samples.”
When sampling technology and practices became hip-hop’s musical blueprint in the late 1980s, the business and legal rules were a gray area. Since the techniques created digital copies of source material, copyright holders could argue that unauthorized sampling violated their intellectual property. Those doing the sampling could argue they were repurposing fragments of recorded music to create something entirely new. Up until 1991, disputes around whose argument carried more weight tended to be settled outside of court.
This is where Biz comes back in.
In 1991, O’Sullivan sued Markie over the Alone Again sample. The case came hot on
the heels of a $1.7 million settlement between members of ‘60s rock group The
Turtles and the rap group De La Soul, stemming from a few seconds of a Turtles’
song sampled by De La. With the O’Sullivan/Markie case, one complication was
that Markie and Warner Bros. initially tried to clear the sample through O’Sullivan,
but when O’Sullivan declined to do so, the label released the song anyway. This
set up the eventual legal showdown which, unlike the previous cases, didn’t get
settled out-of-court but instead ended up being decided by judge Kevin Duffy in
a far-reaching decision for future sampling practices.
The landmark case filed by Gilbert O’Sullivan against Biz Markie forever changed the music sampling landscape
Duffy found Biz guilty of infringing on O’Sullivan’s copyright,
ordered the rapper to pay $250,000 in damages, barred Warner Bros. from continuing
to sell either the single or album and, most astoundingly, referred the matter
to criminal court on the grounds that Markie was liable for theft. That Markie
was never charged is only the footnote in the bigger story. Duffy’s decision
permanently altered the landscape for sampling, not so much curtailing it – sampling
is still rampant today – but changing the creative and business practices
around it.
For Biz, his response to all this drama came two years later
with All Samples Cleared!, a tongue-in-cheek
swipe at the historic legal hot water he’d just navigated. The cover art finds
Markie playing both judge and defendant, restaging the Duffy courtroom with a
smirk. On the LP version of the album, the samples are prominently, properly
included on the back cover liner notes. There are no sideways shots at either
O’Sullivan or Duffy on the tracks, no “fuck you” lyrics aimed at either man.
But then again, going hardcore wouldn’t have been the Biz Markie way.
“Had to keep it real,” he says of making his point with the
cover art. “My way of laughing at the whole legal brouhaha and then moving on down
the road.”
~ ~ ~
The Biz has stayed plenty busy in the intervening years
since. There were television appearances on In
Living Color and a 1996 freestyle rap commercial on MTV2. Tight with the
Beastie Boys, Biz also made guest appearances on Check Your Head (1992), Ill
Communication (1994), Hello Nasty
(1998), and their four-star anthology The
Sounds of Science (1999).
“We had a great relationship,” he says of the influential Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame hip-hop group. “If they called me to do something, I was
down. We never planned stuff out. We would just hang out and if stuff happened,
it happened.”
Tight: Biz Markie and the legendary Beastie Boys, together ’til the end
In 1996, Markie appeared on the Red Hot Organization’s
compilation CD, America is Dying Slowly,
alongside Wu-Tang Clan, Coolio, and Fat Joe, among others. The CD, meant to
raise awareness of the AIDS epidemic among African-American men, was heralded
as a masterpiece by The Source
magazine.
In 1997, Markie appeared on the Rolling Stones’ song Anybody Seen My Baby? on their album Bridges to Babylon. In 2002, Markie appeared in Men in Black II, with Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, playing an alien parody of himself, whose native language sounded exactly like beatboxing. A year later he released his fifth studio album, Weekend Warrior, with tracks featuring P. Diddy and DJ Jazzy Jeff. In 2004, his song Vapors appeared on the soundtrack of Rockstar’s popular video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. In 2005, Biz detoured from his recording duties to appear on the first season of the television show Celebrity Fit Club, losing more weight than anybody else in the competition.
Since then, he’s had the beatboxing segment on Yo Gabba Gabba!, opened for Chris Rock’s No Apologies tour, deejay-ed all over the world, and continued to appear on a stream of television programming, including Spongebob Squarepants, Empire, and Black-ish.
His legal troubles long since forgotten, it turns out that
it’s Biz Markie who has had the last laugh.
Who inspired you?
My father is one of
my musical influences. He played saxophone with Johnny Coltrane. My first
exposure to hip-hop was listening to groups like the Cold Crush Brothers,
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and the ‘L’ Brothers. The ‘L’ Brothers was the first cassette that
I ever owned.
When did you know you
wanted to make music for a living?
I knew that I wanted to do music since eighth grade. As soon
as I heard that ‘L’ Brothers cassette I knew that that’s what I wanted to do.
I’ve got brothers and sisters who are doctors and lawyers and cops, but I
didn’t want to do that.
What was your
family’s reaction?
I got put out the house! My mom put me out the house because
I chose this path, and she told me not to don’t come back until I was a
success. I would never do it any differently. Hip-hop or die. I can’t really
think about anything else. I’m self-made, I didn’t follow anybody, and I did it
myself. My way. My rap. That’s why I always thank the fans, because the fans
are the ones that said, “Yo! We like you this way! We don’t like you like that one. You’re not like
a Rakim or a KRS-1. Be yourself, bring that comedic side out!”
How did you get into
music?
I got my start by beat boxing when I was in my teenage
years. I put on a show…I would dance,
rap, do everything to keep it popping. I
learned a lot from Marley Marl as far as how the studio works. I just watched
everybody and tried to do the opposite of what a lot of people were doing. I
learned from the whole industry. I learned from teaching myself.
I learned the most about hip-hop from the streets of New
York. I still follow the rap scene because I’m a DJ, and I’ve been doing this
for 27 years. I DJ all over the world.
I’ve got a tour going on right now called “Decades Collide – ‘80s versus ‘90s.” It’s a battle between two local bands from
wherever I go. They get onstage and perform, then I get on, then they get on
one last time, and I close it out. It’s a Live Nation tour. It’s an adrenaline
shot!
Fans love your
comedic side. Do you have a favorite comedian?
Before he passed away, one of my biggest influences was
Benny Hill. I met him when I went to
London. He said, “Yo, you’re funny like I am!”
And I was like, “Yo, yes I am!”
How did your comedic persona
come about?
My pops played every instrument, but mostly the saxophone.
For me, hip-hop was different. In hip-hop, you could be whatever you wanted to
be. If you know me, you know that my style is different from anybody else’s
style. That’s how I could fit into so many other different groups. Whether I’m
rocking with the Beastie Boys, or Juice Crew, I fit everywhere because my joint
was happy. Being comedic comes natural. Somebody could be the straight man,
more serious, and I’m coming across with a positive vibe, so my stuff was
different. You saw Two and a Half Men
right? Charlie is the funny man, and Allen is the straight man. Or The Odd Couple? Felix is the straight
man, and Oscar is the funny man. I’m the funny man, I’m more kid oriented.
Speaking of kids, how
did you get involved with Yo Gabba Gabba!?
Christian [Jacobs] and Scott [Schultz] were the creators and
directors of the show. They were friends of mine. They wanted me to do “Dancey
Dance” but my back was hurtin’ and I didn’t feel like doing it, so I made up “Biz’s
Beat of the Day” on the spot. That was in the pilot, and the response was
overwhelming. The rest is history.
LOS ANGELES, CA – NOVEMBER 26: Biz Markie (L) and Jamie Foxx (C) pose with members of the cast of Yo Gabba Gabba at Yo Gabba Gabba Live! – Los Angeles, CA at Nokia Theatre L.A. Live on November 26, 2011 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Jerod Harris/WireImage)
What’s your favorite
thing about working with kids?
Just the pure excitement, and the fact that they aren’t self-conscious. They’re not doing stuff ‘cause it’s cool, they’re just doing something ‘cause they like it. That’s what I like about kids.
Let’s switch gears. Is
it true you that you met the legendary Big Daddy Kane at a battle?
Yeah, I met Kane in Brooklyn and we rapped against each
other. I heard about him around the ‘hood, so I wanted to take him down. I put
out the challenge, and he finally came looking for me.
Who won?
Yo, I did [laughs]. He didn’t expect me to come at him with
funny shit. Kane’s style was hard and serious, but it didn’t work against my
style of rap. So we got down after we met and battled – back then I used to get
into all kinds of parties and stuff, so he eventually rolled with me. We’re
still tight to this day.
You and Big Daddy
Kane joined the hip-hop collective Juice Crew.
There will never be another Juice Crew. Ever. But I’d say
that the closest thing to Juice Crew would have to be Wu-Tang. I mean, like us,
they had different rhyme styles, personalities and they all rhymed about
different things.
Marley Marl, Biz Markie & The Juice Crew
Let’s talk about your
albums. Tell me about Goin’ Off.
Goin’ Off – This
one was my first, so it’s the one that means the most. I was just happy to make
an album.
One of the most
success songs on the album is Vapors.
What’s it about?
Vapors is like, you get a whiff of my success. Before I was
successful, you ain’t paid me the time of day. Soon as I got hot, you get a
whiff of my success. So you get the vapors.
Your next album was The Biz Never Sleeps.
I had something to prove with my second album. This is the
one that had the song Just a Friend
on it.
Just a Friend was a monster hit!
Nobody liked that record. People thought it was whack. Even
my peers were telling me not to do it, that it was garbage, but they didn’t
hear what I heard. I’m like, “Okay, I hear you, but I still believe in it.”
Even my record company dissed it, but all of a sudden it popped. It was a
different story then. They looked at me, like, “Yeah!” All of a sudden they
believed in it, but I knew that I was the only one there from the beginning.
That’s why I do things my way, and not anybody else’s way. You’ve got to
believe in yourself.
How’d your life
change when Just A Friend blew up?
Not much changed. I just became really, really popular
overnight and got more money. But otherwise I was the same and not much
changed. I’m always the same dude no matter what.
Is it true that you
actually weren’t going to sing the hook on Just
A Friend?
Yeah, I was tryin’ to get my man (Juice Crew singer TJ) Swan
but he said he was doing his album. Then I tried to get Al B Sure, and I tried
to get Keith Sweat. They were both too busy doing their own stuff, so I said
I’ll do it. The rest is history!
Tell me about I Need a Haircut.
That’s the album that I got sued over [laughs].
In 1993, Biz followed the drama created by the Alone Again (Naturally) sampling court case with All Samples Cleared!, a tongue-in-cheek (and litigation-free) album release
Where were you when
you found out about the whole court case over your sample usage?
I was driving in my car and they told me about it. Good
thing is, I never even had to go to court! It was the record company’s thing.
Were you concerned
that it might hurt your career?
No. I actually didn’t think it affected things much. I felt
real talented then, and now too, so I would’ve just jumped into something else.
I’m a survivor. Whatever I do, I’ll always provide and survive.
The case affected
hip-hop as a whole. Did you think it would be that monumental?
I didn’t know then that it’d be that important. I just
thought it was another court case. Sorta like if you got pulled over and got a
traffic ticket or something [laughs]. I don’t even really think about it. I
know it was important, but I have to only think about the future. I did that
during the case and I still do that now.
You’ve released five
albums, four of them on Cold Chillin’ Records. What was your main contribution to
establishing Cold Chillin’?
Besides me being me, I was like a talent finder. I like to
believe in people, so I put Kane on. I was always a team player and that’s
probably my main contribution to Cold Chillin’.
Let’s talk basketball
for a moment. You’ve performed at
halftime of several NBA games.
I was born in Harlem. I grew up in Colonial Projects, right
across the street from Rucker Park. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the
Rucker before, but when I was young I got a chance to see dudes like Dr. J.,
Earl ‘The Goat’ Manigault, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, so the NBA was always in my
blood.
Rapper Biz Markie performs during Game Two of the Eastern Conference Semifinals of the 2019
Favorite NBA team?
I followed the Knicks growing up, but Kareem was from around
my projects, so that’s how I became a Lakers fan. The Lakers-Celtics in the
‘80s was a rivalry! That was my era! Larry Bird was the thorn in the Lakers’
side. The whole Bird-Magic thing turned out to be one of the greatest rivalries
of all time, because they could both do everything. And that whole rivalry
started in college, you know what I mean? Michigan State. Indiana State. Both
of those guys were incredible.
You’re a very
successful DJ. Any favorite stories jump out?
I was on tour with Will Smith – I took Jazzy Jeff’s spot for
a little while – and we were DJin’ in London. The Queen and other royals was in
the audience and they were dancin’ off disco. Another time I did an Oscar party
– Seinfeld, Kramer, and a whole bunch of them guys was there at the Grammy
party. Wild times, bro!
Will Smith is another
rapper with a comedic side.
Yeah, me and Will came out kinda at the same time. It’s just
that Will did his way of rap and I did my way of rap. I was experimenting with
rhyme styles at the time, and my subjects were different.
Your rendition of
Elton John’s classic Benny and the Jets
was recorded with the Beastie Boys. Tell me about that.
The way that came is me and the Beastie Boys and the Boo-Yaa
T.R.I.B.E. was all playing basketball at the Beastie Boys studio. After we got
done playing, one of their boys, [Money] Mark, got on the piano and they just
started playing rock songs. And I was singing every rock song, songs like Jeremiah was a Bullfrog, and they were
buggin’ out. When they broke down Bennie
and the Jets, and I just sang it.
You appeared on the TV show Celebrity Fit Club and set the record with a 140 pound weight loss. How was the experience of being on a reality show?
It was weird! But only because I didn’t know any of the
other celebrities on there. We were a bunch of strangers, really. I mean, I had
seen them all on TV before. But I had to get to know them. We were honestly
like a big family once we got to know each other.
Biz Markie’s friends Will Smith and Magic Johnson bet he couldn’t lose the weight. Thanks to Celebrity Fit Club, he dropped 140 pounds in his fight against Type 2 diabetes. Now, he says, he has to keep it off.
You are connected to
an eclectic group of acts, including The Flaming Lips.
Yeah, Flaming Lips is my boys. They’re my peoples. We did
two tracks. Wayne [Coyne] is super-duper creative and he’s just a fun guy.
When you look back on
your career, do you think you were a highly influential character?
Yeah. I think the way I did things were influential ‘cause
it’s still reflected in people today. You know, the way people rap and have
their pants sagging, whatever. Many little things man. Maybe I didn’t invent
these things, but I popularized it in many ways. I popularized a lot of things.
How do you see your
place in pop culture?
I don’t look at myself as just part of hip-hop. I look at
myself as being sorta important at different times. I was always popular at
school and that sorta carried over to my career. When I make a record, I don’t
just make it for one purpose, I do it for many different reasons. I don’t think
I’ll be remembered for just one thing, ya know?
If you had one piece
of life advice for others, what would that be?
Be yourself. Find
yourself by yourself. When you look
back, you don’t want to regret copying someone, and not being authentic. Stay true to yourself. That’s why I always do my stuff different. I
want to be remembered for me.
https://www.fifteenminuteswith.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/the_biz_markie_interview.png400600Michael McClellanhttps://www.fifteenminuteswith.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/FifteenMinutesWith_NewLogoPrototype.pngMichael McClellan2019-05-27 01:23:452019-06-21 17:36:07Biz Markie – Just a Friend
Written By: Michael D. McClellan | Colin Chilvers knows a thing or two about special effects. Like the classic E.F. Hutton advertising campaign from the early ‘80s, when Chilvers speaks, people listen, and for good reason: The English-born film director won a Special Achievement Academy Award in Visual Effects for his work on the 1978 blockbuster Superman, helped visualize Michael Jackson’s gravity-defying lean in the Smooth Criminal video, and has served as the special effects coordinator for films such as Marvel’s X-Men, Harrison Ford’s K-19: The Widowmaker, and Vin Diesel’s The Pacifier. Not that Chilvers brings a boatload of hubris with him to the interview. Far from it. While the Oscar statue is usually in tow, it’s more for the audience’s enjoyment than the man who helped Christopher Reeve fly. Chilvers, it turns out, is about as chill and as humble as they come.
“When I broke into the business, working in special effects
didn’t carry the same weight that it carries today,” Chilvers says with a
chuckle. “You worked your 40 hours, and you went home at a decent hour. It was a regular job in the truest sense of
the word.”
Chilvers, who got his start in the late ‘60s, worked several
movies as a special effects assistant before given the chance to supervise Inspector Clouseau, starring Academy
Award-winner Alin Arkin. It was all the break Chilvers needed, launching him on
a nearly 50-year odyssey through some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters and adored
cult classics.
“The buildup for Superman
was tremendous,” he says. “There was a
great anticipation for this film, and it was a proud moment when it was
released to the world. And who would
have thought that a little film like The
Rocky Horror Picture Show would still be going strong today?”
Christopher Reeve as Superman during production on Superman. Creative Supervisor and Director of Special Effects Colin Chilvers is at the far right. (Image courtesy of Colin Chilvers)
Born in London, Chilvers got his first real taste of the
movie business during the filming of 2001:
A Space Odyssey. It was here that he
scored his first job, only to be fired days later because the production designer
had promised the position to a relative. Nepotism, as it turns out, knows no
bounds.
“I learned quickly that it pays to know someone,” Chilvers
says with a chuckle.
Despite getting canned, Chilvers soon found himself working
special effects on The Battle of Britain,
which in turn led to a number of other credits. And then came Clouseau. There was no looking back.
“It reached the point where I knew I could do something I
loved for a living,” he says. “The
success of Inspector Clouseau opened
a lot of doors, and made getting other special effects jobs much easier.”
Those doors included a string of 1970s cult hits, including Tommy, Lisztomania, Rocky Horror
and 200 Motels – all while rubbing
shoulders with geniuses like Stanley Kubrick, or working with controversial filmmakers
like the notorious Ken Russell. Through it
all, Chilvers continued to build his resume and expand his network, ultimately
landing the special effects job on Superman
– and the challenge of a lifetime:
Making Superman fly.
“It was a different era,” says Chilvers. “You have to
remember, the industry was decades away from the special effects that we have
today. There were no computers, no CGI, no digital effects. Everything we did
back then, we had to improvise. And the whole world was watching. Everyone
wanted to go into the theatre and believe that Superman was really flying. We
had to improvise. There were a lot of tricks.
It was quite a challenge, but the result was something to be proud of.”
Winning the Oscar for Superman led to more success in the 1980s
– Superman II, Condorman, Superman III –
but it was a slew of toy commercials, such as promotions for Spidey Alive and
Starship Troopers, that brought Chilvers together with one of the greatest entertainers
in the world.
“During the 1980s, there wasn’t a bigger act than Michael
Jackson,” Chilvers says quickly. “Thriller
had become the best-selling album of all time, and Michael had performed his iconic
moonwalk on live TV. And then, after
touring, he went to work on Bad. I
was in the right place at the right time. It really helped that Michael and I
hit it off immediately. I enjoyed working with him.”
Colin Chilvers and Michael Jackson on the set of Smooth Criminal (image courtesy of Colin Chilvers)
With the King of Pop dancing and Chilvers directing, the duo
created Smooth Criminal, one of
Jackson’s most impressive works. The video,
central to Jackson’s Moonwalker film,
is best known for that gravity-defying lean during the ending dance sequence. Everyone wanted to know the same thing: How did Michael do it?
The secret, it turns out, was the genius of Colin Chilvers.
“Piano wire gets all the credit,” he says with a laugh. “It
was the staple of many special effects during the ‘70s, and it worked perfectly
in the Smooth Criminal video.
Sometimes the best tricks aren’t the newest.
Sometimes you rely on the tried and true.”
Chilvers would continue to work through the ‘90s and on into
the new millennium, eventually helping four of his nephews – Chris, Ian, Paul,
and Neil Corbould – launch special effects careers of their own. The foursome have worked an impressive list
of Oscar-winning movies, including Gladiator,
Saving Private Ryan, Batman Begins, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Gravity.
“My nephews have become very successful, and I’m very proud them,”
he says with a smile. “To see them succeed in a new age of special effects, to watch
them work on some great movies and win Oscars of their own…those things mean
more than winning the Academy Award.”
How did you break
into the movie business?
It was the classic Catch-22, because I was told that you had
to be in the union to get a job, and that you had to have a job to get into the
union. I finally cracked that one when I
got a job as a trainee animation director with a with a company in Borehamwood,
England. At the time, the office was right
next to the MGM Studios’ England headquarters, which happened to be where they
were making 2001: A Space Odyssey.
How did being part of
the union help?
Whenever a new movie was going to be made there, the union
would release a new list detailing the available jobs. On this particular
occasion, there was a job that came up on 2001. I had no idea what this movie was about, who
was directing it, but that didn’t matter.
It was a job in the movies, and I wanted to get into the business. I
applied and was interviewed by the producer, and when the interview was over he
said, “You got the job. You start on Monday.”
It was a very exciting time for me, because I’d finally broken into the
movie business, and when Monday rolled around I started my career as a junior
in the art department.
From humble beginnings to Oscar winner; for Colin Chilvers, it has been quite a ride (image courtesy of Colin Chilvers)
You finally break
into the business…and they immediately fire you?
When I showed up that first morning I met the production
designer, who had a confused look on his face.
He said, “Who are you?” and I proudly replied, “I’m your new assistant.” He promptly left the room and, about ten
minutes later, the production manager came in and said, “I’m sorry, but you are
sacked.”
The idea was that the job would go to a relative of the
production designer, but the production designer happened to be on vacation
when I interviewed, and the producer gave the job to me instead. When the production designer came back, he
told them that my hiring shouldn’t have happened, and I got sacked. As a member
of the union they had to give me a two-weeks notice, so I was actually on that
movie for two full weeks. Unfortunately,
I didn’t to get a credit.
Did you get a chance
to meet Stanley Kubrick?
I met Stanley once during the two weeks I worked on 2001.
I gave him a couple of ideas for one of the sets – if I hadn’t have been
sacked already, I’m sure I would have been sacked for talking to the great Stanley
Kubrick like that [laughs]. Later on, I worked
with Stanley during tests for Barry Lyndon
in England. I actually got to be quite
friendly with his daughter and husband through another friend, Steve Lanning,
who was an assistant director on Superman.
The special effects
world was quite different when you got your start in the late ‘60s.
When I started in the business, it was a job that I loved to
do, but it was a job. It’s only since
movies like Star Wars and Superman that effects people have
achieved celebrity status and developed their own following. It’s interesting
that people are so intrigued with the way that we did things. I get asked about
it all the time, because I’m one of a rare breed in that I’ve lived through a
digital revolution in special effects.
When I started working in special effects we had no computers, or motion
capture and all that. It was all
in-camera, or done on optical print. It
was a different world completely.
In 1971, you worked
on Murphy’s War, starring Peter O’Toole.
Peter O’Toole was a legendary actor, nominated eight times
for the Academy Award for Best Actor. Working with him was a thrill. Murphy’s War was set in Africa, but we actually
filmed in a remote location in Venezuela called Pedernales, also known as Dos
Rios, which was roughly 150 miles up the Orinoco River in the middle of the
jungle. I remember a Spanish fort on one
side of the river, and the kids who were selling the Spanish doubloons that
they had found while scavenging the countryside.
Peter O’Toole in Murphy’s War (1971)
It sounds dangerous!
The nearest town to us was an hour’s flight. I was just a junior assistant at the time,
and I remember being sent into town to buy supplies. I would fly into town on a four seat DC-3, load
up, and fly back. There were other times when I would drive an hour-and-a-half
through the jungle. Looking back now,
those trips were dangerous – who knows what would have happened had I broken
down, ran out of gas, or encountered bandits along the way. But in 1970, I was too young to even think
about things like that. The whole trip
was just a huge adventure for everybody.
What was it like filming
in such a remote locale?
We worked with the local Indians during filming, which was
interesting. They told us that we
shouldn’t feed them because their digestive systems weren’t used to the kind of
food that we ate. The movie company
built a village by the side of the river, at a point where the river was two
miles wide, and the natives actually lived there during filming. One of the things that we had to do in the
movie was to burn the village down and blow it up. This led to confusion,
because the natives had been allowed an amazing place to live for a time, and didn’t
understand why we had to destroy it.
Peter O’Toole’s
characteris the sole survivor of
the crew of a merchant ship, which had been sunk by a German U-boat.
We brought in a submarine that played the part of a German
U-boat hiding in the Amazon River. For
the role, she was modified by the addition of a cigarette deck and was painted with
a ‘dazzle’ camouflage pattern. When filming
was over, the submarine was actually sold the Venezuelan government.
Murphy’s War was
an amazing journey, because I hadn’t been in the business for very long before
being whisked off to a foreign land like Venezuela and spending four months in
the jungle. We also spent four months filming
in Malta, which was a British colony in the Mediterranean. Everyone spoke English and the wine was
really cheap. It was a lovely place.
That same year, you
also worked on the cult classic, 200 Motels,
written and directed by Frank Zappa and Tony Palmer.
That was a weird movie, as it attempted to portray the
craziness of life on the road as a rock musician. Frank Zappa played
himself. Ringo Starr played a
dwarf. Keith Moon, the late drummer for
The Who, played a nun. I was young at the time and happy to be working. Getting
a chance to interact with people like made it even better.
In 1975, you worked
on Lisztomania. Tell me about the
controversial director, Ken Russell.
Ken Russell was very talented. Some of his earlier films, which were focused
on classical composers – Elgar, Delius, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, and Franz Liszt –
were beautifully done. Ken was also quite a character, the kind who did
whatever he wanted and didn’t care what anyone said or thought.
There were more than
a few who questioned Ken Russell’s sanity.
During the filming of Lisztomania,
even his wife at the time was quoted as saying that she thought he’d had gone
crazy [laughs]. He would have these utterly berserk visions of what he wanted
to do, and much of it was outlandish sexual imagery. There’s a dance sequence in the movie
involving The Who’s Roger Daltrey, who was playing Franz Liszt. For that scene,
we were asked to build a 7-foot penis that was supposedly Roger’s. And if that weren’t enough, Ken decided that
he wanted three dancing girls sitting on it.
It was a very interesting movie to say the least.
In 1975, you also
worked on the rock musical Tommy.
I worked as a special effects supervisor on the film, which
was a musical fantasy film based upon The Who’s rock opera album Tommy. It was
an uncredited job, but it was rich in the respect that I was able to work with
some of the biggest names in music – people like Roger Daltrey, Tina Turner,
Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton, and Elton John.
Another big break
came that same year, when you were asked to work on The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
A good friend of mine had seen the stage production in
London, and was wild about it. I thought
it was going to be a pretty crazy movie when I read the script, and also a lot
of fun for the audience, so I was excited to be involved with this film. I suppose
nobody, not even the people who made the movie, realized how successful that it
would go on to be.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
Tell me about some of
the special effects that you put into place for Rocky Horror.
Doing the rain scene at night was both memorable and
interesting, because there was no water. The hotel was actually a country house
that sat along the River Thames in Bray.
It didn’t have any water because it was derelict, so we had to put pumps
into the River Thames to create the rain.
When the wheelchair gets pulled up the stairs, we actually
had the wheelchair on wires. They didn’t
get rid of all of them during post-production, so you can still see some of the
wires one the film if you look closely enough.
When Frank N. Furter walks out into the mist and jumps into
the swimming pool, they had decided to paint the Sistine Chapel on the bottom
of the pool and position a camera up in the ceiling of the stage. I suggested using dry ice as he walked out on
the diving board so that you really wouldn’t know where he was going. Then we used
a big electric fan to blow away the ice for the big reveal. It was a nice moment
in the film, because it was a good reveal.
Brad and Janet walk hand-in-hand towards the castle in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The ‘rain’ was pumped in from the nearby River Thames.
Did you use real ice
when Meatloaf smashes through the freezer?
No, we used cast wax instead. We made blocks of wax and
stacked them up, and that’s what he broke through.
Richard O’Brien wrote
Rocky Horror. What was he like?
Richard was living as an unemployed actor in London during
the early 1970s. He wrote most of what was originally titled The Rocky Horror Show during one winter
just to occupy himself. I found him to
be very professional. Jim Sharman was
the director, and Richard didn’t seem to interfere with Jim’s direction – which
I suppose he had every right to do if he wanted. It never came across as him being a force in
that area.
What about the cast?
The whole cast had worked together before on the London
stage show. They didn’t need any
rehearsals, other than rehearsing on location, because working on a stage was
obviously much different than working on a film set. But they knew their parts
so well, which made shooting pretty easy to do.
In 1978, you landed
the job of a lifetime, working on the blockbuster movie Superman.
I have only fond memories of that experience. I actually made
the permanent move from London to Canada in 1980, during the filming of Superman II. I came over for three weeks to shoot the
Niagara Falls scene and met my wife, where she worked for the Niagara Parks Police.
Three weeks turned into four decades. That blessing happened because of the Superman
movies.
Please tell me about
the late, great Christopher Reeve.
Chris was a great guy.
I believe he was 23 when he first got the part to play Superman, and he
was always in character while on set. Interestingly
enough, he wasn’t the first choice for the role, but they ended up coming back
to him. It was the smartest move they could have made.
Why did they
originally pass on him for that role?
Chris was the perfect Clark Kent, there were no concerns
about that. While he was 6’-4” and very athletic, they thought he was too
skinny to play the Man of Steel. Chris went
through an intense two-month training regimen that was supervised by former
British weightlifting champion David Prowse, during which he switched to a protein-heavy
diet. It worked, because he came back a
different man. Once he got in that suit, he was
Superman.
The biggest special
effect in the movie – and the one that helped land you an Academy Award – was figuring
out how to make Superman fly.
I remember watching the Superman TV series, and I had also
gone to those Saturday morning matinees where they had superimposed Superman
against a screen, and those scenes always looked terrible. So the challenge was to make it look like he
could really fly.
Easier said than
done?
We had some crazy ideas of what we thought would work – for
example, we tried sticking a tube up the rear end of a Superman dummy and
firing it off of a cannon – but none of those ideas worked well [laughs]. But all
of the brainstorming finally paid off. Depending on the scene, we eventually had
five different ways that we could make Superman fly. That meant putting Chris into
various suits, depending on how we were going to fly him. It turned out very well,
given the tools we had at the time.
Give me an example of
one of those ways.
Today, with digital effects, when they put someone on a wire, they use heavy duty cord-gauge wire. We didn’t have all of the digital tools that they have these days, and roller scoping the wires out of the scene was a very difficult process, so we had to try to put him on thin enough wires that couldn’t be seen. It was difficult and it was dangerous, but Chris was great. I remember him being suspended 60-feet in the air on 16-gauge piano wire. He would say, “Whether I’m falling sixty feet or fifteen feet, it isn’t going to make a lot of difference.” Chris was amazing. We had the screen in the background, and a rig that we used to move around, which was very uncomfortable, but he never complained. He would do anything that we wanted him to do.
What was the deal
with Superman’s cape?
The cape was one of those things that presented a big
problem. Every time we put Chris up on
the wires and turned on the wind, the cape would wrap around the wires, which,
of course, didn’t look very heroic [laughs]. So, we had to devise a different way
of making it look like Superman’s cape was fluttering in the wind.
Les Bowie, who worked in special effects as a matte artist, came
up with this idea of putting a motor on Chris’s back. The motor had a bunch of sawed-off fishing
rods connected to it, which the motor would move, and then we would cover it
with the cape and put a bit of wind on it.
The magic motor beneath Superman’s cape – The remote-controlled cape-waving rig devised to allow Superman’s cape to billow as he flies. (Image credit: http://supermania78.com)
Problem solved.
Twenty-five years after Superman
I, my nephew was on the effects team for Superman Returns. He phoned
me from Australia, where they were filming, and asked what we did to make the
cape flutter. He was amazed at what we were able to accomplish without the aide
of digital effects.
Tell me about Marlon
Brando.
Unfortunately, we only had Marlon Brando on the set for 10
days. During that time he had a terrible
cold, or the flu, so he wasn’t at his best as far as that goes. It was quite a
big deal. By that point in his career he was strictly doing cameo work, and he
was paid a record $3.7 million and a healthy percentage of the gross profits
for his cameo on Superman.
Did you get to see Brando
act while he was on the Superman set?
Yes. The interesting about him was that he wouldn’t – or
didn’t want to – learn his lines.
Instead, he insisted on having cue cards positioned all over the
place. A lot of actors use cue cards,
but it surprised me that Marlon Brando would do that. There is the opening scene in Superman where they are sending the
child off in a spaceship. You obviously
don’t see this in the finished movie, but instead of a baby in the spaceship,
there is a cue card instead. During
filming, every now and again he would sort of do a dramatic look up in the air,
and he was actually looking at a cue card.
It was like that during his entire time on set. He would tell the prop guys where to put the
cue cards, and during filming there would be a few pregnant pauses, which
allowed him to find where his cue cards were located. It was a technique that I
didn’t expect from someone like Marlon Brando, but who am I to judge? He was a
legend.
Marlon Brando, who was paid $3.7 million for 10 days worth of work, brought star power to Superman
What about Margot
Kidder?
Margot was a sport. I
remember the scene where we put Margot in a car and crushed her. In Superman
II, we threw her in the river. She
was willing to do whatever it took to get the job done [laughs].
What were some of the
other challenges faced when filming Superman?
We were about six months into the production of Superman when the team’s morale had hit
a low point. The director, Richard Donner, got the editor to put together a 15-minute
demo reel, which included the shot of Superman becoming Superman at the Fortress
of Solitude, and him flying behind the camera. Richard showed that scene to the
whole crew, and you suddenly felt that you were going to be part of something special. That was Richard Donner’s genius. I remember
that he had a sign posted in his office that read ‘verisimilitude,’ and he
lived by that mantra. To Richard, he insisted that you must feel like what you’re
doing is real, and that’s what we all tried to do.
I remember that Richard Donner had gotten a copy of Star Wars from George Lucas before the
film came out, and he showed us that movie. It pumped everyone up, because it
was the first time that special effects was a major focal point in a motion
picture.
Star Wars changed everything.
Years earlier I had tried to get an English producer to do a
movie on the character John Carter of Mars, and the idea was flatly
rejected. They told me that movies like
that were finished, and that no one wanted to watch science fiction. And then Star
Wars came out, and suddenly special effects movies were all the rage.
You directed Michael
Jackson’s music video Smooth Criminal.
The lighting and the costumes – not to mention the dancing – are as amazing
today as when the video was first released. Congratulations on a masterpiece!
Thank you. I showed Michael a movie that I felt would fit
the theme of the video, something called The
Third Man. He loved the film-noir look that it had, so we used it as a
blueprint and worked with the camera man to light the video in a similar way.
Is it true that Smooth Criminal is Michael Jackson’s tribute
to Fred Astaire?
Yes, in many respects. The dance piece was Michael’s tribute
to Fred Astaire, but it goes deeper than that. In the video, Michael wears a
similar kind of costume that Fred had used in one of his movies, a film called The Band Wagon. You can compare photos and
see what I’m talking about.
We also had the pleasure of having Fred Astaire’s
choreographer come on the set, gentleman named Hermes Pan. He worked on a bunch
of films and TV shows with Astaire,
including those 1930s musicals with Astaire and Ginger Rogers. He was a giant,
having won both an Oscar and an Emmy for his dance direction, so it was a
thrill to meet him. He visited the set while we were doing the song and dance
piece, and said that Fred would have been very happy and proud of being copied
by such a wonderful person.
Michael Jackson pays homage to Fred Astaire with his wardrobe choice in Smooth Criminal
Michael Jackson’s two
most famous dance moves are the moonwalk from Billy Jean, and that gravity-defying lean in Smooth Criminal. How did you do it?
The inspiration behind Michael’s gravity-defying lean actually
came from my Superman days. It
required a bit of ingenuity. We had Michael and the other dancers connected to
piano wire, and fixed their feet to the ground so that they could do that
famous lean. I fixed their heels to the ground with a slot, so that they were
locked into it. If you look in the video, when they come back up from that
lean, they kind of shuffle their feet back to unlock themselves from the
support they had in the ground.
Michael Jackson seemed
like a positive, loving person. What was the mood on the set?
We had 46 dancers, plus the choreographers, hair, make-up, and
everything else. Every day at lunchtime we’d go and watch the dailies from the
day before. The mood was always festive, and it always felt like there was a party
going on in the screening room. Michael would be right there, and there was
always a lot of noise and excitement when everyone saw how good the dance
sequences looked. If Michael saw something he didn’t like, he would say, “We
can do better than that.” He pushed everyone to deliver their very best.
Tell me about your
work on Moonwalker.
Moonwalker was
Michael’s movie, and he was going to do exactly what he felt he needed to do to
make it perfect. The producer, Dennis Jones, was coming in from outside the
studio, and his concern was usually centered around the amount of time we were
taking. He had a habit of walking towards me and looking at his watch. Jerry
Kramer, who co-directed Moonwalker,
always had the same thing to say: “Dennis, with Michael, you don’t need a
watch, you need a calendar.” That’s
because Michael wanted it to be perfect, and he was in the unusual position
where money wasn’t an object. He was only concerned about perfecting his art,
and that’s the way he was. Not the usual
way to make a Hollywood movie, that’s for sure.
Special effects were
changing around the time that Moonwalker
was made.
We were using a lot of innovative techniques, especially for
those days, because this was just before the real digital era kicked in. We
were using motion capture, motion control – the robot was all motion
controlled. We did a lot of mattes, and things like that. We built some
beautiful sets. We actually shot in the same studio in Culver City, where they
shot Gone with the Wind, which was
kind of neat.
How did you land a
job working with Michael Jackson, King of Pop?
Avi Arad, who was the founder of Marvel Studios, once told
me that there is no such thing as luck, but in this case I felt lucky to be in
the right place at the right time. I was shooting a commercial in Los Angeles,
and I had an effects guy named Kevin Pike working it with me. Kevin had just
finished shooting Back to the Future,
and Michael really liked that movie, especially the DeLorean. Michael had
spoken to Kevin about the effects that he wanted to do for a music video. Kevin
asked him who was going to direct it, and Michael explained that all the
big-name directors like Steven Spielberg were busy for the next two years.
That’s when Kevin suggested me to direct. He then came to me and asked if I would
like to meet Michael Jackson. I looked at it as the ideal opportunity to get
through the door, as it were.
Did the two of you
hit it off?
Michael and I got along quite well during that initial
meeting, and the next thing you know I’m flying back to Los Angeles. I remember
checking in at the Château Marmont, and a very interested guy behind the front desk
says, “Excuse me sir, there is a call for you. It’s Michael Jackson.” And it
was! I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Michael had just called me to say,
“Welcome aboard, let’s get together tomorrow.” We seemed to click from the very
beginning.
Michael Jackson and Colin Chilvers share a quiet moment together. Chilvers would direct the Smooth Criminal video and co-direct Jackson’s feature-length film Moonwalker. The two would become fast friends. (image courtesy of Colin Chilvers)
Was Michael Jackson
shy?
I got the sense that he wasn’t as shy with me as he normally
was with people that he met for the first time. We discussed various things
that he wanted to do with the music video, as well as with the 42-minute Smooth Criminal sequence that was Moonwalker’s
centerpiece. Above all else, Michael made it clear that he wanted it to be
a movie for kids. I had experience in this area – I had done a two-hour show
about Pippi Longstocking for ABC, and I had done a lot of kid’s toy commercials
for Hot Wheels, Barbie, and things like that – , and he really liked that. He also
liked the fact that I had gotten an Academy Award for special effects for Superman. What he wanted to do with Moonwalker involved a lot of special
effects, so he thought it would be a good idea if I worked with him.
How long did you work with Michael Jackson on this project?
What started out as a music video grew into a 42-minute movie
that took nearly two years to produce. It wasn’t supposed to be that long – we
shot for 18 weeks, which was a lot longer than I thought it would take – but
Michael was working on the Bad album,
and then he went on tour, and then they had to finish the album when he
returned. So they put us all on hold for three months while he finished the
album. Working with Michael on that project was a fun period of time in my
life. We had Joe Pesci and Sean Lennon on set, and of course we had the dance
piece in the middle of Smooth Criminal.
I was able to come up with that famous lean, so everyone walked away happy.
Michael Jackson’s gravity-defying lean created buzz worldwide, and became one of Colin Chilvers’ most famous special effects.
Looking back now,
what was it like working with the King of Pop?
That was a good period in my life that was very well enjoyed
by me and my family, especially my wife. We had some very nice dinners with
Michael, and sometimes Bubbles would join us. It was an interesting time to be
around Michael, because he was so on top of the game at that point. He had just
come up with Thriller, and was doing Bad, and we had everything we wanted.
Working with Michael Jackson was a dream come true, and it was amazing in all
ways.
Your nephews have
worked on some of the biggest films ever made.
I have four Corbould nephews from England who are all
working in special effects – Chris, Ian, Paul, and Neil. Two of them have won Academy Awards. Neil got his start with me on Superman, and has gone on to work on
some of the biggest films, such as Gladiator,
Saving Private Ryan, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Black Hawk Down. He’s also done several of the James Bond
films. He’s been nominated for four
Academy Awards, and has won two Oscars – one for his work on Gladiator, and another for Gravity.
Chris has worked on eleven James Bond films and counting since
the early 1980s. He’s also worked extensively
on the Batman films – Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises – and has an Oscar for Inception, as well as nominations for four other films, including Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
Paul has two Academy Award nominations, both for Best Visual
Effects in the movies Guardians of the
Galaxy and Doctor Strange. Ian has worked with his brothers on many of
these films as either a special effects technician or special effects
supervisor. The four of them are sort of
the top-notch crew in England at the moment, and a good way to segue toward
what I’m leaving behind, as I’m not in the movies anymore. The fact that they’ve all followed in my footsteps
is my legacy to the movie business.
Neil Corbould, Colin Chilvers’ nephew, celebrates his own Oscar win
Special effects has
changed a lot since your time working on Inspector
Clouseau.
There have been some incredible advances thanks to the
Digital Revolution. But then again, a lot of things haven’t changed. For
instance, on the movie Gravity, Neil
had to make Sandra Bullock fly on a wire – actually, he used a bunch of wires
so that he had complete access to all of her movements. There was no other way
of doing it because you still can’t make an actor act as a digital image. It
ended up being a pretty amazing effect.
What is one of your
proudest moments as a special effects artist?
That would probably be during the first Superman movie, when we were playing around and trying to make a
vortex. I actually put together a rig that created a perfect miniature twister
that was about six or eight feet high.
That was my most proud moment, strangely enough, because it required a
high degree of problem-solving. The
ability to problem solve is still a big part of special effects today, except
that they have a lot more tools to work with in the digital world.
Any regrets?
My agent once came to me and asked if I would be interested
in working on this weird movie about the Nazis finding the Ark of the Covenant.
I passed on it and, of course, Raiders of
the Lost Ark ended up winning an Academy Award and becoming one of the most
iconic movies ever [laughs].
Now that you’ve
retired, how do you reflect on your career?
I’ve enjoyed my career. Now and again I’m asked about movies
that I don’t even remember doing, like Saturn
3. Those experiences are all part of the journey, just like going to
Venezuela for those four months to shoot Murphy’s
War. You look back on something like that and can’t help but wonder how you
survived.
When I was leaving for art school at 16, who would have thought?
I come from a working class family in London, and suddenly I was thrown into
this sort of business, going to the exotic places and doing things that you
would never have thought possible. It’s just incredible when you think about
it. You can get a bit immune to it in the end, but thinking back on it now, it has
been a pretty amazing life.
Retired from special effects, Chilvers continues to work – his Oscar statue never very far behind (image courtesy of Colin Chilvers)
Last question: If you
could offer a piece of life advice to others, what would that be?
The headmaster of my primary school once said to
me, “Son, you’re going to work a third of your life, enjoy it.” And I can
certainly say that I’ve enjoyed that third of my life because it was such an
amazing journey. My advice would be to pursue what you are most passionate
about, because you only get one chance to do this thing called life.
https://www.fifteenminuteswith.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/the_colin_chilvers_interview2.png400600Michael McClellanhttps://www.fifteenminuteswith.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/FifteenMinutesWith_NewLogoPrototype.pngMichael McClellan2019-05-19 04:24:382019-05-27 02:56:39Colin Chilvers – Movie Magic
Written By: Michael D. McClellan | Pharrell Williams never sleeps. How can he? The multi-hyphenate superstar is insatiably inquisitive, his interests ranging from the mysteries of deep space to the provocative genius of artists as varied as Daniel Arsham and Marina Abramovic, his mind in a constant state of restless exploration. That Williams can move seamlessly across the spectrum of art, fashion, film and music, all while collaborating with a Who’s Who of pop culture as only Pharrell can, proves that the man on the other end of this interview isn’t quite human but something more, Hu2.0 maybe, a Next Gen creative with alien DNA coursing through his veins. What other explanation can there be?
“No sir, there’s no truth to that rumor,” Williams says with
a laugh. And then, when pressed for a
plausible explanation: “I’m indebted to God and the universe for giving me the
time to do what I do, and for putting me in position to make the most of my
opportunities. From there I follow my instincts.”
Williams’s creative universe is as diverse – and damn near
as infinite – as the physical one in which we all exist, heavenly constellations
populated with a dozen Grammy Awards (and counting), two Academy Award
nominations, and an impressive dossier of hit songs, designer collections, art
exhibitions, and eclectic collaborations.
Exactly where Skateboard P gets the drive is anybody’s guess. How he
does it while looking younger than he did twenty years ago only fuels
speculation that Williams is not of this Earth. Never mind that this
hardworking N.E.R.D. was once fired from three different McDonald’s in Virginia
Beach, or that he didn’t have career goals growing up. Williams plunged
headlong into keyboards and drums at an early age, laid the groundwork for The
Neptunes during a seventh-grade band camp, and parlayed an audience with Teddy
Riley into a lucrative career as a singer, songwriter, rapper, producer,
fashion designer and much, much more.
Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo: The Neptunes
So, which is it? God’s plan? The universe? Alien DNA? The
only certainty is that a young Pharrell Lanscilo Williams stood out at Princess
Anne High School mostly for being different. He loved music but didn’t gravitate
to any particular clique. He didn’t try to fit in. He was a black kid hooked on
Star Trek and hanging with white kids
mostly, riding his skateboard at Mount Trashmore and listening to groups like Suicidal
Tendencies and Dead Kennedys. In 1990, Williams and Chad Hugo formed The
Neptunes, dissecting A Tribe Called Quest records and trying to figure out why
their beats gripped them and refused to let go.
And then, as if by divine intervention or some otherworldly encounter, the
duo was discovered by Riley, the Harlem-born record producer who’d had enough
of New York City and decided to relocate his studio to, of all places, Virginia
Beach – a five minute walk from Princess Anne.
“Who really knows why he moved into my back yard,” says
Williams. “I used to think it was pure luck, but now I think there’s more to it
than that. I don’t believe these things don’t happen by chance. The timing of
the move lined up perfectly with where I was on my journey. A year or two
later, a few years earlier, and who knows? Everything changes. We wouldn’t have
had the same opportunity.”
Williams and Hugo, the shy Filipino boy who attended nearby Kempsville
High School and shared Pharrell’s love for Eric B. & Rakim and the Red Hot
Chili Peppers, didn’t just seize the opportunity presented by Riley. They used
it as a springboard to dominate the music scene, their work earning a string of
Grammys and garnering walls of gold and platinum records. Consider: The
Neptunes racked up 24 Top 10 hits in the late 1990s and early 2000s, becoming
one of the most successful production teams in pop. At one point in 2003, The
Neptunes were responsible for a whopping 43% of the music being played on US
radio, and 20% in the UK. Among the hits: Drop
It Like It’s Hot, the classic 2004 production for Snoop Dogg, which sported
skittering beats and swishing, pulsing synths, reminiscent of the music heard
on ‘80s Atari video games.
Pharrell with Snoop Dogg
“We wanted a different sound, so we went with something that
sounded like a can of spray paint,” Williams explains. “That ‘ssss’ sound is
what we ended up placing on top of the song, it was different, like us.”
Different can also be applied to N.E.R.D (No-One Ever Really
Dies), the band formed by Williams and Hugo, along with Tidewater-area pal Shay
Haley. Flavored with funk and hip-hop, the experimental rock band released its
second album in 2004, Fly or Die,
which reached Number 6 on the charts and stamped Williams as a gifted singer in
his own right.
The Neptunes continued its hot streak over the next several
years, producing for everyone from Gwen Stefani to Kanye West to Beyoncé and
Britney Spears. And that’s just the
music. Through Rizzoli, Williams released a lavish coffee-table book filled
with images of the many products he has designed in collaboration with other artists
and fashion designers. He hosted ARTIST TLK on YouTube’s Reserve Channel,
interviewing some of the world’s most creative and interesting people (think
Spike Lee, Usher and Tony Hawk, the show topped off with naked women serving
drinks, and you begin to get the idea). He opened boutiques on West Broadway in
New York. He co-founded apparel brands Ice
Cream Clothing and Billionaire Boys
Club. He’s curated art shows like This
Is Not a Toy at the Toronto Design Exchange. All while pouring time, energy
and money into his charity foundation, From One Hand To Another, which supports
young people living in communities at risk around the country.
And all while still professing to be human, just like the
rest of us.
~ ~ ~
When it comes to the music biz, 2013 was The Year of Pharrell. The hit maker figured prominently in 2013’s most massive (and seemingly unavoidable) gangbuster singles: Daft Punk’s Get Lucky and Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines, with both competing against each other for the coveted Record of the Year Grammy. (Get Lucky walked away with the hardware.) And then there was the ubiquitous cherry on top: Happy. The song, originally written for CeeLo and part of the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack, blew up after Williams came up with a brilliant marketing idea – a twenty-four hour video for the song, featuring a diverse cast of characters, including the artist and some famous friends, dancing along to the track. Happy peaked at No. 1 in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and 19 other countries. It became the best-selling song of 2014 in the United States with 6.45 million copies, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. That it took Williams ten tries to get it right is lost on nearly everyone but the artist himself.
“I got in my own way,” he says. “It wasn’t until I relaxed that everything opened up and the right song presented itself. As soon as it did, I knew it was the right fit.”
Pharrell Williams accepts the award for best pop solo performance for Happy at the 57th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday, Feb. 8, 2015, in Los Angeles. (Photo by John Shearer/Invision/AP)
~ ~ ~
Yes, Pharrell Williams has collaborated with music’s biggest
stars – from Miley Cyrus to Mariah Carey, from Jay-Z to Justin Timberlake – while
earning a reputation as a hit-making mystic, his finger fully on the pulse of a
fickle music landscape, his instincts helping him stay one step ahead of stale.
That he can do it while remaining disarmingly approachable and unfailingly
polite is, in its own way, disorienting.
“My parents raised me to be respectful. It’s who I am.”
Southern hospitality aside, scoring an interview with
Pharrell was far harder than I’d ever imagined. One minute he’s focused on Rules of the Game, his multidisciplinary
stage collaboration with Arsham and choreographer Jonah Bokaer, and the next
he’s replacing CeeLo Green as a celebrity coach on The Voice. Blink and he’s collaborating with Hans Zimmer on the
soundtrack for the film Despicable Me,
or penning that monster hit, Happy,
for the sequel. That the stars somehow aligned only supports the prevailing
theory that Williams is not one of us. Who says aliens have to come from outer
space hellbent on waging war and destroying mankind? Maybe they arrive in
flat-brimmed hats, possessing the regal air of an ancient pharaoh and the
vitality of a creature defying the onset of middle age. Maybe they come
equipped with indefatigable drive and prodigious talent. And maybe, after two
years of cancellations, postponements and reboots, they agree to sit down and
tell you how it’s all done.
Thank you for this
opportunity. Please tell me about your songwriting. Do you have a certain method
that works best for you?
I follow something that speaks to me, something that just
feels good and puts me in a creative mood. Typically, the beat comes first. As
an artist, my job is just to listen to it and let it tell me what should be fed
lyrically, where the drums should go, where the melodies should go, how
everything fits together. The music sets the framework for the words. The
feeling and the emotion directs all creativity. It’s the overarching guide. It’s
all by feel.
What is your idea of
creativity?
Creativity is a gift in the truest essence. It’s a gift from
all that is, all that was and all that ever will be – the creator. So when we
create, we’re essentially co-creators.
When you sit down to
work on a song, do you sense beforehand that it’s going to be a hit?
No sir, I don’t know when a song is going to be huge, I
don’t think you can ever predict or manufacture that sort of outcome. It’s
really up to the people to make that decision. They do that by buying the
records, streaming the music online, voting on it, generating buzz on social
media. Those things are out of my control. The only thing you can do as an
artist is be loyal to your creativity, and follow it wherever it takes you. If
you’ve poured the very best of you into your work, and you’ve done it in a way
that’s new and fresh, then you can walk away from it satisfied with the
outcome.
Pharrell Williams performs at Coachella
Your 2003 debut
single, Frontin’, features vocals
from Jay-Z. Do you enjoy collaborating with other artists?
Collaboration has always been part of my DNA. Most of the songs
that I ended up putting out by myself were actually songs that I wrote for
other people. And collaboration goes beyond just music. I know you’ve
interviewed Daniel Arsham and Jonah Bokaer, and my collaboration with them on Rules of the Game was a new frontier.
Was there a specific
point in you career when you realized that you’d become a star?
No, I’ve never approached what I do in that way. I don’t
believe you can ever assume that you’ve “made it,” because that’s too much of
an arbitrary assumption. And I think that mentality has a limiting effect on
your creativity – when you start buying into that mindset, you’ve instantly put
a ceiling on what you create and where you can take yourself. That mindset can
also chip away at your edge, the thing that drives you to create in the first
place. For me, I always looked at it like, “Wow, I get to do it again.”
Chad Hugo is a
childhood friend and a big part of your musical past and present. How did the
two of you get started writing songs?
We started breaking down Tribe [A Tribe Called Quest] records, and then we started making our own tracks. We were still in high school at the time.
The two of you formed
The Neptunes, and you’ve won three Grammys producing music for some amazing
artists like Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake, and Jay-Z. Tell me a little about
your approach.
When we work with an artist, it’s about understanding how to
bring out the best in them at that particular point in time – how to draw
attention to the gifts that are already there. We don’t give the artist anything,
because we didn’t create the artist. The artist is co-created with God and formed
by a unique set of life experiences. Our job is to do the things on the
periphery that accentuate the artist’s gifts. And if we’re doing our job, we’re
providing the frame to fit the artist into, then adding interesting colors and creating
the backdrop. The artist is subject matter. We’re just the framers.
The legendary Teddy
Riley discovered you. Tell me about that.
We were discovered at a talent show because Teddy Riley had
a couple of A&Rs check us out. A&Rs are people who represent music
companies, and they are always on the lookout for talent. It was one of those
amazing circumstances, and a mysterious chain of events, really – Teddy Riley
decides to leave New York City, and of all the places he could have built a
recording studio, he decides to build in Virginia Beach, literally a
five-minute walk from our high school.
Let’s go back to
2013, which was a pretty good year for you. Happy
was a monster hit.
That period, 2012-2013, was a real pivot point for me. I
just felt like something was happening around me that I couldn’t explain. I’ve
compared it to seeing the wind blow on the trees; you see the leaves move and
you know what’s causing them to move. You don’t question whether there’s a
wind, even though you can’t see it. You can feel it and you know it. Back then
I could feel it. There were all of these things going on in my life, and the
song Happy was part of that.
What was the
inspiration behind the song?
The inspiration for the song Happy came from the movie Despicable
Me 2. Gru was a character who was
often seen as mean, with very dry humor, and definitely on the evil side. I was
tasked with how to make a song for him that expressed his elation after meeting
this woman. That was a tough thing for me, because Gru was mean and not someone
who would fall in love.
You’ve been known to
pen hits in minutes. I hear it took some time to come up with Happy.
I worked on song after song, but nothing was really working.
I thought every song I wrote for the movie was going to it, because of reasons
X-Y-Z, but then it wouldn’t work out and I’d write another, and the same thing
would happen. Nothing really worked until I had exhausted all of my ideas from
an egotistical standpoint. And then, I finally asked myself how do I make a
song about a guy who’s just happy, and nothing can bring him down. That’s when
everything clicked.
The video for Happy ran for twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours! That was the genius move that put the song
into a different stratosphere.
Basically, I would perform for four minutes at the top of
every hour. Then, after me, someone else
would perform, and that would happen fifteen times an hour for twenty-four
hours. The intention was to make the video feel as alive as possible, and the
video’s imperfections, the funny bloopers and mess-ups, are what give it
character. I’m not interested in perfection. It’s boring. Some of my favorite moments
are accidental. There’s one where I’m underground. I was turning a corner just
as a train was coming in our direction, and it stopped right on cue! It was
weird. The universe gave us great moments that day.
In addition to Happy, you killed it with two
collaborations that were massive successes – Daft Punk’s Get Lucky and Robin Thicke’s Blurred
Lines. Did you sense how big these songs were going to be?
No sir. As an artist, you only have a sense of what feels
good to you personally. The commercial success of the song is predicated on how
everybody else feels when they hear it. If they feel something strongly enough
to say they like it, great. If they feel something enough to say, “I like it
and I want to tell somebody else about it,” then that is magical. The vote with
the likes, the views, the shares. That’s where all of this comes from. It comes
from the idea that people are connecting and sharing the things they feel
sentiment about.
Pharrell Williams and Daft Punk
Daft Punk has a
unique vibe. What’s it like working with them?
It’s always fun working with the robots. They did Hypnotize on the last N.E.R.D album and
we remixed Harder Faster Stronger
more than 10 years ago with them. So we always had a great relationship with
the robots and all of their crew. There’s always been love there for us.
Your collaboration
goes well beyond the recording studio. Tell me about your work with
multidisciplinary artist Daniel Arsham.
Daniel is a genius artist across so many disciplines. We’ve
worked on projects as varied as recreating the first instrument I ever made
music on, the Casio MT-500, to producing the multidisciplinary performance Rules of the Game. Rules was big for me because of the talented people that I worked
with on that journey – the amazing Jonah Bokaer, who provided the choreography,
and the composer, David Campbell, who is an absolute music industry legend.
Let’s talk about Rules of the Game. What led you to becoming involved and writing
the original score for this amazing stage performance?
Daniel’s work is such a magnet for brilliant, interesting
people. I’m lucky to call him friend, and to have worked with him on other
projects. With Rules, it was a case
of me being persistent, and asking him the fundamental question, “What can we
do now?” Rules was the next step in the evolution. We’d worked together on
beautiful objects that didn’t move, like the Casio MT-500, but this was
something completely different. This was a new frontier, a brand new medium where
movement is not only an additional element, it’s absolutely essential to
communicating the point. To be able to come into a project like that, and to
work with such talented people, is a privilege.
Daniel Arsham, Pharrell Williams and Jonah Bokaer – The creative geniuses behind the multidisciplinary stage performance, Rules of the Game.
Tell me about the
film Hidden Figures. What attracted
you to this project?
You have three African-American female protagonists who were
scientists, engineers, and mathematicians…technologically advanced. So that
blew my mind. It involved NASA, and it involved space, which is a subject that
I’ve been obsessed with since childhood. And all of this happened where I’m
from – Hampton Roads, Virginia, in the 1960s. So, getting involved with this
film was an easy decision to make.
You love fashion, and
you have a keen fashion sense.
Fashion is great. I love the way fashion helps people
express their individuality – when they take things and make it themselves. So
fashion and style go hand-in-hand. It’s indicative of who you are and what
you’re feeling. I’ve developed my own look by following my instincts and acting
on what I feel connected to at a given point in time. There’s a certain power
and excitement that comes into play when and you see people creating their own
distinctive style and identity. But do I
love fashion? I love life. I love the
opportunities that I’ve been given, and the support that I’ve been getting, and
the reaction that I’ve been getting to the work that produce, those are the
things that I love. Those things are irreplaceable. Fashion comes and goes.
I play a lot of
tennis. Several years ago you launched the adidas Tennis Collection. The
collection’s roots are in the ‘70s Golden Era of tennis – Bjorn Borg, Billie
Jean King, Arthur Ashe, Chris Evert.
The players back then just had a great swagger, both on and
off the court. They were super confident. There was a sexiness that they all
carried – the men and women – because they just knew they were killing it. They
knew what they were doing and what they were wearing was sick. Next level. We
need that. Not that today’s players don’t have that kind of confidence, but the
‘70s was so effervescent and vivid.
Final Question: If
you could share a piece of life advice with others, what would that be?
Remember to show appreciation, and to be grateful. You’ve gotta give things to something bigger than you.
https://www.fifteenminuteswith.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/the_pharrell_williams_interview.png400600Michael McClellanhttps://www.fifteenminuteswith.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/FifteenMinutesWith_NewLogoPrototype.pngMichael McClellan2019-03-17 23:27:592019-05-19 04:27:12Pharrell Williams – Star Power
