Up Till Now: The Autobiography

The producers told me we had to cut the budget. Okay, can I have five suits? I could make it work with five. Okay, five suits.
    We started shooting. A week passed, two weeks, I still hadn’t seen the suit. But I’m excited about it, it’s going to be great. Fire is going to come out of it. It’s going to be amazing. It’s almost ready, I’m told. Great, when? Next week. Trust me. More weeks pass, we’re shooting in the Arizona desert and we’ve got to shoot that final scene soon. I’ve planned it out, I see it in my head. It’s going to be amazing. And then they told me that, essentially, we could afford only one suit.
    One suit? One fucking rock man suit? Well, I had no options. I decided I’d shoot it up close, far away, in different locations, and then we’d use movie magic to make it appear as if it were an army of devils. Okay, one. When am I going to see it? On the 17th, they promised.
    But we were scheduled to shoot the scene on the 18th. They guaranteed I’d have it on the 17th, and it would be great. It’ll breathe smoke and fire. It’ll be amazing. Amazing!
    On the 17th I returned from our location and the special-effects people were waiting for me. They were smiling. “It’s done and it’s fantastic. George is wearing the suit. You want to see it?”
    The sun was setting behind George as he appeared. It was awful, terrible. It looked like a monster from the 1930s Flash Gordon serials. I held my temper, maybe the fire and smoke will save it. I took a deep breath and asked, “Where’s the smoke?”
    And then a thin wisp of smoke curled into the air from behind a rock. I looked behind the rock and two special-effects men were crouched there smoking cigarettes and blowing smoke into a tube. I was just about speechless. We’d started with $3.5 million for ten suits and we’re down to one $350,000 suit with two men blowing smoke into a tube.
    I took a few steps back and if I squinted and sort of looked at it from the corner of my eyes and if the lighting wasn’t great it did look as if it might be oozing out of the rock. Okay, all right, I stayed calm, somehow I’d make it work. I was a director! And directors always make it work. “How does the fire work?” I asked.
    “Well, the fire’s a problem,” they admitted. “We tried it and it burned the stuntman’s face. So we’ll put it in the CGI. We’ll create it on the computer. We’ll just create it in editing. He’ll open his mouth and flames will come shooting out. It’ll be great. Trust us.”
    There was nothing I could do. I thought I was getting Romeo and Juliet on mountaintops in the Alps, instead I was getting ALF in a playground. If I obscured him in a lot of smoke, and if we shot in dim light, maybe, just maybe I could get away with it. So the next night we all went up to the location on the side of a mountain andgot everything set up. Finally, we were ready to shoot the climactic scene. Cue the stuntman. He appears and... and there’s no smoke! “Cut! Cut! Where’s the smoke? I need smoke!”
    They looked at me sheepishly. “Well, we’re blowing the smoke through the tube, but the breeze is dissipating the smoke.” The breeze? They hadn’t planned for the breeze? We’re in the desert and the desert cools at night and creates a breeze. Since the beginning of time there’s been a breeze at night in the desert. Instead of a fire-breathing smoking devil, I had a ridiculous-looking guy in a leather outfit. It was useless. I didn’t have an ending. Not only didn’t I have an ending, I didn’t have my God. At one point the alien-devil sends out a shaft of light that we’re supposed to believe is God. So what does God look like? Initially I intended to use a stylized Jesus Christ–like figure but then Roddenberry made his salient point: God is different for everybody. So we also needed God.
    We were going to have George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic create God for us. George Lucas! Just imagine George Lucas’s vision of God. And ILM did extraordinary work, it was the most creative company in the entertainment industry. I was absolutely thrilled. Maybe they could save me.
    Unfortunately, they were busy working on two major pictures— and they probably were a little too expensive. So we found this guy in Hoboken, New Jersey. I’m totally serious. This was a man who’d done some impressive work on television commercials. Five of us flew to New York and met with him in his house. His wife was a five-star