Special-effects whiz brings experience to ‘Ghost in the Shell’
Whatever baggage you bring to the live-action “Ghost in the Shell” movie — that it seems more like “Robocop” than the complex, forward-looking science fiction found in Shirow Masamune’s original manga comics and Mamoru Oshii’s anime features or that star Scarlett Johansson isn’t the least bit Japanese — you have to concede one point: This thing looks amazing.
Some of that can be attributed to John Dykstra, the legendary special-effects specialist whose eyepopping career includes the original 1977 “Star Wars,” the first TV iteration of “Battlestar Galactica,” 1979’s first “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” several mid-’90s “Batman” movies and early 21st century “Spider-Mans,” a couple of recent Tarantinos and “X-Men” outings and “Kong: Skull Island,” released earlier this month.
Much of “Ghost’s” futuristic Asian urban setting, which can loosely be described as “Blade Runner” on steroids, was designed and executed by New Zealand’s fabled Weta Workshop, Peter Jackson’s special-effects house adjacent to his studio where most of the movie was shot (along with location work in Hong Kong and Shanghai).
Weta also made many other aspects of this future when humans and machines are merging like never before, such as the Japanese franchise’s signature assassin geishabots. And with costume designers Kurt and Bart, the team helped create the iconic flesh-colored, form-fitting thermoptic suit worn by Johansson’s character, The Major, a terrorist-fighting cyborg with a human brain.
Dykstra came in after production was underway to oversee execution of several specific elements and, perhaps also, to lend his keen perspective on visual narrative to the overall project.
“The thing about ‘Ghost in the Shell’ is it’s an interpretation of a different storytelling medium,” the 69-year-old Long Beach native points out. “It’s anime and the graphic novels. They have a certain caricature quality; the villains are bigger than life, the heroes are bigger than life, and the existential crises are bigger than ... well, I don’t know, existence.
“But it’s not the clear-cut kind of story that more traditional blockbusters pursue,” Dykstra notes. “As a result, the setting for this has to carry the mentality of the conventional blockbuster, and as a result, the environments have to be different from what you’ve seen before but carry the personality that the animes had.”
Among the most amazing examples of that are the multistory high holograms throughout “Ghost’s” urban center, which The Major and her crime-fighting Section 9 comrades often run through during chases and escapes. Dykstra, who calls the towering 3-D projections “solograms” (“That’s a fake word for not-really-solid-gram,” he laughs), lent a hand in making them look real. But not too real. “It comes down to capturing Rupert’s vision, and that was of a place that had this extended media presence,” Dykstra says, referring to “Ghost” director Rupert Sanders (“Snow White and the Huntsman”). “The solograms are images of people ... being presented in what I would call extreme advertising.”
The thing that’s fun about that, he says, is that they are real-looking but also ephemeral.
“That was a really challenging part of the image creation, and it carried over into so many of the other things that took place in there,” Dykstra continues. “Once you established this conceit that you could project objects into three-dimensional space and have them appear substantial enough that you could potentially even interact with them, it became an integral part of telling the story. The way they captured evidence at crime scenes, the way they pursued their adversaries, creating the illusion of them being present when they weren’t ... and then there’s the fight between the Major and what we called the Skinny Man.”
Indeed, Johansson often goes invisible in the movie, another “capability” of that thermoptic suit that gives the impression she’s running around naked. The suit is actually, well, a shell, applied in sections to The Major’s synthetic body — as is Johansson’s face.
While much of this is clearly done with computer generated imagery, Dykstra reveals that practical costumes, makeup and mechanical effects were mixed in for The Major’s and many other characters’ presentations.
“There were some faces that were practical,” he confirms. “The tricky part was integrating the stuff so that the practical gags were indistinguishable from the CGI gags.”
What’s real and what’s not, human and artificial: That’s “Ghost in the Shell” in a (ahem) nutshell.
“The efficacy of visuals within this world was inherent and incorporated completely with the telling of this story,” is how Dykstra puts it. “And that’s a great parallel with the arc of the story itself, which is what is real and what is an illusion when it comes to the business of that which makes up your soul.”
Dykstra also came in on “Skull Island” after the film was designed and mostly shot. His job was to keep the gianter-than-ever giant ape and other digital, prehistorically proportioned critters in (eye)line.
“It was all things creature-oriented, the nature of the gorilla, the nature of the adversaries,” he says. “As much as anything, it was trying to help keep scale in these creatures. One of the biggest problems with animals that are 150 feet tall is they start to become very toylike if they don’t move correctly.”
After establishing George Lucas’ effects shop Industrial Light & Magic for “Star Wars,” Dykstra went on to pioneer the motion-control and blue-screen technologies that are still vital elements of combining live and CG imagery to this day. The son of a mechanical engineer, he has mixed feelings about digital effects’ now-dominant role in the film industry, as opposed to the way they used
to do fantastic things.
“We’re in an era where there’s really nothing that can’t be visualized,” Dykstra admits. “One of the biggest problems in contemporary filmmaking, as far as I’m concerned, is the flexibility the filmmaker has to put images on the screen is not tempered by effort.
“We used to have to fly planes 300 feet over glaciers in Greenland, strap cameras onto motorcycles and go out to the desert, there was a huge amount of blowing things up, vast amounts of water being dumped down spillways, making overscaled gophers run through overscaled doors,” he recalls. “It was great, because we physically built tons of things and pursued great, really fun engineering challenges. That was the personality of visual effects up to the point at which computers became capable of reproducing images that were, for the most part, indistinguishable from reality.
Then all of a sudden, an industry which required a vast range of capabilities — we had to be machinists, we had to be pilots, we had to physically know how to do all of these things — came down to knowing how to use a keyboard. “I mourn the loss of that hands-on physicality,” Dykstra says. “But there’s an upside.
The energy and mental process that went into figuring out how to get a camera to travel 100 miles an hour and stop in 3 feet without shattering into whatever precious subject matter it is that you were trying to photograph? You get to spend much more time now thinking about what the image means and the subtlety of how it can be presented.”
One thing has remained constant for Dykstra throughout all the years of change in his profession.
“I’m a California boy,” says the effects maven, who now lives in Sherman Oaks. “I loved growing up in Long Beach, I love the beach, everything about it. I’ve traveled around, spent time in other countries and other places, but I still come back to Southern California. It’s my home and the place that I’m most comfortable in.”