Starburst #7

March 1979

Superman - The Effects

Without doubt Superman is the biggest special effects movie to be made in England since 2001; A Space Odyssey (though much of Star Wars was filmed in England the model effects were all shot in the USA). Not surprisingly, it involved a huge team of British effects men, including Les Bowie, Colin Chilvers, Derek Meddings, Wally Veevers, Roy Field, Denys Coop, John Richardson, Zoran Perisic, Denis Rich and Charles Staffell.

Recently I had the opportunity to speak to three of the effects supervisors who worked on Superman—The Movie; Colin Chilvers (who was in charge of all the physical and mechanical effects in the sequences shot in England), Derek Meddings (who supervised the model photography) and Roy Field (who was responsible for all the optical work).

Colin Chilvers — mechanical effects

Colin Chilvers started his special effects career as an apprentice working for Les Bowie's effects group back in the 1960s— like many other of Britain's top effects people who had also received initial training with veteran effects expert Les Bowie. He then worked as an assistant for another effects supervisor before becoming a fully-fledged supervisor himself in 1974. His first assignment was to provide all the effects in Ken Russell's Tommy, followed by another Russell film, Liztomania, and Richard Lester's The Ritz. Other assignments followed and then came Superman which has so far consumed two and a half years of Chilvers' life and will consume a lot more before he will be able to say goodbye to the man in the blue suit.

I asked him if he had any idea when he became involved in the picture that it was going to take so long to make.

"No," said Chilvers, "I think I started in March 1976 and we were supposed to begin shooting in September that year but we didn't actually start until March the following year. We began at Pinewood, then we went to Bray Studios, then to Italy . . . then back to Shepperton, and later we moved back into Pinewood. It grew in length because it was the type of film that had never been attempted before. Superman has been filmed before, of course, but never very successfully because they always had problems making the guy look as if he was really flying. That was the big nut to crack.

"The reason that 1 got the job on Superman," continued Chilvers, "not having any delusions of grandeur about myself as an effects supervisor, was that at the time that the picture was beginning to prepare there just weren't a lot of supervisors about who were available — everyone was busy on other films. But having just finished a picture I was available, and it also helped that I knew both the art director and the director, who at that time was to be Guy Hamilton.

"Originally there were only three effects supervisors involved — Les Bowie, Roy Field and myself. I was to do all the physical effects and the flying, Les all the models and Roy the opticals. But the film just grew and grew, and as it progressed other supervisors were hired. Wally Veevers was brought in to do the flying and the front projection because it was decided it would be too big a job for me to handle both the flying and the physical effects. So I just handled the exterior flying sequences. You needed two different crews to prepare the flying scenes, one in the studio and one outside. I worked mostly with Derek Botell who is the leading wire expert in this country, and when Wally left to go on another picture we ended up doing the rest of the flying."

I then asked Colin Chilvers one of the same questions that I was to ask both Derek Meddings and Roy Field—were all those press stories about it being necessary to re-shoot many of the flying sequences true?

"No," said Chilvers emphatically, "they weren't true. There were problems with the flying, of course, but the big problem was that you were dealing with a guy who had fantastic powers and you didn't just have to show him doing all these incredible things but you had to make them believable! If he lifted, for instance, the Empire State Building people would have laughed so Dick Donner decided to play his powers down. Everyone knows that Superman can jump mountains and everything but you had to scale down what you had him doing on the screen to avoid making him look ridiculous. You had to actually believe that a person could do what you were seeing . . . the effects had to relate to people."

The next question was, of course, how were the flying sequences done? Wires or what?

"Well yes, wires were used on some scenes but they are actually very restrictive. If you want to make someone fly, wires seem to be the obvious answer but they're not. First of all the wire has to be of a size that would support the actor's weight, and that makes it difficult to conceal. It also depends on the background as to what sort of wire you use and also how high oft" the ground you want him to be and what movements you want him to make. For sudden, jerky movements you need thicker wires to ensure they won't snap under the sudden strain. And the biggest problem with wires is starting and stopping the actor, because first you need an acceleration time, then time to make the actual shot you require, and then a de-acceleration time. Well, it's pretty difficult to find a stage big enough to get all that in. And you've got the other physical problems, going round corners and going up and down at the same time. So the actual wire flying was kept to an absolute minimum."

So how then did Superman fly the rest of the time ?

"Well, for one shot of him flying four or five different processes might have been involved. Travelling mattes, etc. Often we used a hydraulic arm to support him . . . we used special suits and special capes and other rigs that concealed whatever was keeping him aloft. But the biggest boon to us in the flying scenes was the front projection process which we were able to zoom in on and that kept him in relation with the background he was flying against. If we'd been forced to keep the camera static it would have looked as if he was just suspended in front of a projection plate. But they devised a way of being able to move him in relation to the background so that it looks as if he's really flying."

I then asked Chilvers how Superman's actual take-offs were achieved. Was the old device of having the actor bounce off an out-of-camera springboard (a favourite gimmick in the 1950s Superman TV series) utilised? "On a couple of occasions, yes," said Chilvers, "but on most occasions he was on wires, or something else . . ."

And what did Chilvers think of Superman himself, Christopher Reeve? "He was marvellous, he worked himself into the ground. The great thing about him was that lots of times he was obviously very uncomfortable but he could still act wonderfully ... he still looked as if he could fly no matter what he was actually suffering. We tried to keep his comfort in mind when we were hanging him on wires or fixing him onto rigs but it was not always possible. We had other people to use as stand-ins for him, like stuntmen, but Chris had this thing about being Superman and as soon as you put someone else on the wires or on the rig they just didn't fly like Chris . . ."

Apart from a lot of the flying scenes, what else did Colin Chilvers do on Superman? "All the mechanical effects, like Superman smashing doors down, boring underground, lifting cars . . . anything that moved I was involved in really. The destruction of Krypton was a major task— that was when we had Marion Brando over here for two weeks and there was a lot of money involved, so every minute counted. We had to be well prepared for that and it turned out to be quite a fortnight's work. We used a lot of hydraulic equipment in those sequences — crystals had to come up through the floor, chasms had to open up in front of the actors, things were shattering all over the place . . . we had lots of tip tanks dumping rubbish on people, bits of styrofoam and masses of silver 'glitter' and other debris."

One of Chilvers' biggest tasks on Superman was the sequence where the helicopter, carrying Lois Lane (Margot Kidder), goes out of control when taking off from the roof of the Daily Planet building. "The script required it to crash on the roof, then it had to hang over the edge of the skyscraper and finally fall. It was difficult because we were dealing with a full-sized helicopter. Finally we had to make our own mock-up and it weighed more than real helicopter — over a ton and a half. We had people inside it as well, and then the girl had to hang underneath it on the strap, so we had to bear their safety in mind when we were trying to get it to do what the script required. When it was spinning out of control on the roof it was mounted on a special hydraulic device, and when it was falling off the edge it was suspended from a large crane. A problem was getting the rotors to move at the right speed—300 rpm or whatever the speed actually is—so that people wouldn't look at it and say: "Oh, that's a mock-up'. Also our helicopter had to match with the footage of a real helicopter that was actually shot landing on and taking off from a roof in New York."

I asked Chilvers whether he found it a strain working on such a big movie for such a long period of time. "I didn't find it a strain from the mental point of view but it was physically a strain because you had five different units shooting at the same time and that meant you only had a certain number of people available to work with on a particular job. Sometimes on a special effects shot you may need 25 or 30 people and the next week you may only need 3 or 4 but I was restricted to a crew of about 15 people and with that 15 I had to organise it so that I always had enough people at the right place at the right time . .. and that was often more of a strain than devising the actual special effects."

On the subject of devising effects I asked whether any breakthroughs had been made in the development of equipment for the physical effects in Superman. "Well, you can't really call them break-throughs," said Chilvers, "with physical effects you use whatever is at hand—you haven't got the time to develop a specific piece of equipment. What you do is utilise anything you can actually go out and buy— like hydraulic pumps, rams, valves, etc. It's all conventional equipment but we use it in very unconventional ways. We never really get the opportunity to develop new equipment and devices—we basically just do very peculiar things with existing equipment."

Overall, how did Chilvers think Superman ranked as a technical achievement? "Well, considering the majority of the people who worked on it were good technicians but had never been involved with something as gigantic as this before in their careers we all did a very good job. Obviously you'll get some members of the audience who will go just to pick holes in it and say they see wires—which they won't. In a way one must look upon part of the time we spent on the first Superman film as a research and development period — working out how to make the guy fly and appear to have superhuman strength— which we can put to use in the second film. In fact there's going to be far more action in Superman Part 2 than there was in Part 1 — a helluva lot more action because in Part 2 you've got the three villains who also have super powers. They're the ones you see imprisoned in the Phantom Zone at the beginning of Part 1. In Part 2 they come down to destroy the Earth and go around smashing up everything in sight ..."

My final question was whether he was tired of Superman after spending 2 1/2 years already on the project and now facing a further indefinite period of further work on Part 2: "No, not at all," said Chilvers. "One of the things about Superman that you come across very rarely is that the whole crew worked well together — there were no prima donnas — and this applied right up to Richard Donner himself. If you didn't like something that was being done you could go and see Dick and say that you didn't like it. From the personal point of view as well as the professional he was the best director I've ever worked with. He actually worries about you, not just at work but he worries about you at home too. You could arrive home after a particularly hard piece of work and find a case of wine waiting with a note saying: 'Thank you, Richard', which shows that he not only appreciates your efforts but is thinking of you. Not all directors are like that . . ."

>>>PAGE 2