Adam Savage on His Lifelong Obsession With Recreating Movie Props
Released on 11/04/2014
(applause)
(upbeat music)
Between 1966 and 1973 one of the greatest shows
ever made for television ran in its first run
and then in syndication almost constantly
throughout the 70's and I grew up absorbing this show,
Mission Impossible.
I can't tell you that I understood the complex
politics of the plots but I understood deeply
that the agents cool under pressure of the impossible
mission force team allowed them to complete
their tasks time and time again and I coveted
their cool.
And when my father threw out a small Zero briefcase,
somewhere around 1974, I knew exactly what I wanted
to do with it.
And I had already learned at that point
that in addition to Lego, a cardboard box
and a roll of masking tape are one of the most
powerful tools for creation ever invented.
So I took a cardboard box.
I cut out a sheet of it and I put it in the bottom
of that Zero case.
Then I cut out a hole and I used cell acetate
cause my father was an animator and I drew
a radar screen.
I lit it with a giant six volt lantern battery
which was what I was what I was allowed
to buy at the hardware store, and powered it with
two flashlight bulbs that I literally taped
the wires to.
I then put toggle switches in there and a speaker grill
and I labeled one of the toggle switches
in an amazing bit of prescience, detonate.
(laughter)
And I spent hours in my yard pretending
to get signals from other members of the Impossible
Mission Force team and responding to them
and correctly hitting detonate at the time
it was supposed to be hit.
Fast forward to 1981 and I am 14 years old.
And 1981 was an amazing time if you loved
stories and especially if you loved movies.
To be 14 years old, the list of important
and amazing films that completely shaped me
is too long to go into here, suffice to say
Escape from New York, Diva, Sharky's Machine,
Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Dragonslayer,
all came out that year.
But there's this one movie that, that hit me
that I want to talk about and John Boorman
had been trying to make a version of Lord of the Rings
since 1968 and when financing didn't come through
on that because his vision of it was too expensive,
he reduced his vision a little bit and made an amazing
sword and sorcery film called, Excalibur.
His retelling of the Arthurian Grail legend.
And this movie was a hard R.
It was bloody and there was guts and crows
eating eyeballs out of skeletons and there was sex
and I managed to convince my dad to take me
to this movie twice.
(laughter)
And in addition to all that other stuff,
the thing that really captured me about the film
was the armor.
And the armor, you can't miss it in the movie.
Every male character in Excalibur wears their armor
everywhere, to dinner, to the bed, to sex,
they're constantly wearing armor and the whole story
is told in armor.
In the beginning the armor's black and it's knobby
and when King Arthur builds the round table
in Camelot, the armor is all sparkling.
And I didn't know that I was seeing Nicol Williamson
and a young Helen Mirren showing everybody else
how to act.
I didn't realize that I was watching Liam Neeson,
Patrick Stewart and Gabriel Byrnes first movie.
What I knew was I saw this armor and it represented
some type of transformation to me and I wanted
a piece of it.
I came home and we had those lattice slats of wood
protecting the underside of our house from raccoons
and I pulled one out of a spot that probably wouldn't
be missed and I went down to my dad's shop
and I planed it into a sword shape and I spray painted
it with silver and when it wasn't silver enough,
I figured out that you could buy aluminized tape
at the plumbing store and I aluminized this sword blade
and I found a little glass bead and I put it in the bottom
of the hilt and in the movie, Nicol Williamson's
performance, he has this beautiful modulated voice
and I could hear his voice in my head as I picked
it off the work bench.
Behold the sword of power.
(laughter)
And I felt the power.
I really felt this, this object that I had made
had this power to me.
It had a weight and it had a swing and a swish
that I deeply craved.
So for Halloween that year, this was the summer
of 1981.
For Halloween in October, I made myself a suit
of armor, again out of cardboard, I even
made a white horse I wore with suspenders
and I rode it around school.
I lost the Halloween contest to a Mickey Mouse
with big puffy hands.
(laughter)
Then my father told me that there was an armor
room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
And I made him take me.
And if you've never been to the armor room
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
it is an absolute wonder.
There are four mounted horsemen, horses wearing
their own armor.
I didn't even know such a thing existed.
And this was, I took a sketchbook and I made
sketches of the armor and slowly built a notebook
of reference because I wanted to make my own
suit of armor.
I still do.
But I asked my dad for, I'm trying to figure
out the exact timeline but I believe somewhere
in there I went into therapy because I was a lonely kid.
(laughter)
And the therapist told my parents that I was too close
to my mom and not close enough to my dad.
Shocking.
So my dad started to spend more time with me.
And one of the things I guess that he did
as a project was he went to the hardware store
and he came back with a roll of roofing aluminum
and some pop rivets and a pop rivet gun.
And he taught me how to take planar forms
like sheet aluminum and bend it and crimp it
and tie it so that you could make compound curves
and slowly over several weeks we made me an aluminum
suit of armor.
We used buckles from rotting luggage we found
in the basement and we made everything.
The cuisse, the tassets, the knee cups, the elbow cups,
the plackart, the helmet.
I needed an excuse to wear this.
Which was of course, Halloween again.
Because every year at Halloween everyone came
in costume and they went around and took
pictures of everyone.
Now, my first suit of armor is in fact
visible in my 1981 high school year book
because I stayed around all day and the photographer
found me and took a picture.
The 2nd suit of armor, the aluminum suit,
there are no pictures of it and I'm really
sad about this.
But it's because I didn't last past 3rd period
in the armor.
I went to math class and I was standing in the back
in my full suit of armor because I couldn't sit down.
(laughter)
And even from the back, Mrs. Salvarakis, my math teacher
said, are you okay?
And I said, yes, I am and then I slid down the wall
and passed out of heat exhaustion.
(laughter)
And I woke up in the nurses office and in a keen
moment when life becomes an allegory for itself,
I woke with a start and said, where's my armor?
(laughter)
My armor had been put on a shelf in the art room
along with all these other things that I had built.
I was incredibly prolific in the art room
in my high school.
By my junior year I had made dozens and dozens
and dozens of really elaborate things.
Many out of cardboard but out of all sorts
of mixed media.
And my armor went on the shelf next to that
and I trusted that it was safe but that summer
the principal went in and in a fit of space saving zeal
threw out that entire shelf of stuff.
An act that so enraged me, I actually at 16 consulted
an attorney about whether or not I could sue him.
(laughter)
I couldn't.
But it so depressed me to lose those objects
but specifically the suit of armor that I didn't
build anything else for another 18 months.
I went on to fall in love, deeply in love
with film as a storytelling medium and as
a method of transformation and eventually
ended up calling it a career.
I got my first job in special effects
in 1993 out here in San Francisco.
I'd started off in the theater industry and got
hired by my partner on Mythbusters, Jamie Hyneman.
And that led all the way to actually coming
up here to Lucas Film in 1998, I got hired
on Star Wars Episode 1.
And it was like dying and going to heaven.
I was working with people that I had been
reading about since I was 11 years old
when Star Wars first came out and that was
the 2nd job I ever knew that I wanted was to
work on Star Wars and here I was up in Kerner Boulevard
and then eventually up here at the main house
at the ranch working on Episode 2 and building
spaceships and models and one of the first things
I discovered working on advanced and beautiful
movies like I was working on here.
Worked on AI and did all the destroyed buildings
in New York.
Space Cowboys, I helped build the space shuttle
and did everything inside the payload bay.
Terminator 3, sorry about that.
(laughter)
Second two Matrix films.
Sorry about those, too.
(laughter)
But I learned as a model maker,
that like every job in filmmaking,
my job was to tell stories just as much
as the directors was.
That when you're gluing what we call greeblies
to the side of a spaceship, you have to have
an understanding of why every greebly was there.
It doesn't have to be clear to anyone else,
but that panel has to have an internal logic
and when it does, it feels right and there are
different logic's to the Star Trek Universe
and the Star Wars Universe.
In Star Trek it's totally okay to have three
objects, one, two, three, next to each other.
In Star Wars, you can never.
You have to have one, two, and then there's
a space and then there's a third.
Because in Star Wars, everything's being fixed
all the time.
Every car is under construction so at least
one fender is spray painted primer gray.
And the whole time I was working on those movies
and honing my skills and even onto, after 2002,
I got hired to do Mythbusters.
Which I've been making for the last 12 years.
I still kept on building objects and things
from narratives that compelled me.
I spent a year replicating Indian Jones' father's
grail diary from the 3rd Raiders film.
Maybe the only good thing in that movie.
But, every last newspaper clipping and silver
certificate and train ticket I put in there,
I hand weathered every page and because when you're
doing something like that, it's only marginally
harder to make 12 than it is to make one, I made
12 of them and I traded them to people for other
props that I wanted.
I hand machined myself a Bladerunner gun, and actually
it's out there in the lobby and that's the 3rd Bladerunner
gun I made.
I made one when I was 18.
I made another one when I was 26 and the last
one I made when I was doing Mythbusters and I
could afford to actually buy all of the original
guns that the real Bladerunner gun is made from
and hand gunsmith every single part and piece
and nut and bolt to make it exactly the weight
that it should be and I'll tell you,
I still pick it up from time to time, just to feel
that weight and that transformation.
I also spent 14 years making the ZF1 from The Fifth Element
out there.
Not 14 straight years but looking at screenshots,
building the entire thing in 3D, then finding
out that Stephen Lane from the Prop Store of London
had actually bought a real one and he gave
me access to it for a few hours to take measurements
and then make my own totally accurate.
I had to throw out the old one.
I've still got it but I wanted that total accuracy.
Now I keep on looking for projects to dive
my head into.
And if you love stories like I love stories
and you love film then you love Stanley Kubrick
and there's a traveling exhibition of his archives
going around the world right now and it was
at Lakme in L.A. for a bunch of months
and if you didn't get to see it there,
I exhort you head up to Toronto after November
where it's going to be for about six months.
It's a remarkable exhibition, everything from his
.5 lenses that he shot Barry Lyndon with.
His director's chair, his archives for Napoleon,
costumes from Barry Lyndon, original drawings
from AI that I remember seeing and didn't realize
they were from the Kubrick archives.
But there was this one thing, oh I also
saw one of those spacesuits from 2001 but I was
already making one of those so I didn't need
anymore reference of it.
But there was a piece that really compelled me
and it was from Dr. Strangelove, maybe still my favorite
of all Kubrick's movies.
I'm always surprised every time I see it
how both upsetting, how hilarious it is
and yet how I leave it feeling really, really
unpleasant about humanity.
But within that movie there is this one object
and it's out there, it's half complete
and I don't usually show things that are
half complete but it's within the spirit here,
it's Major Kong's survival pack that comes,
for somewhere around the 3rd act of Dr. Strangelove.
So, to refresh your memory, Major Kong's plane
has been shot, he can't go above 150 feet
and amazingly, limping over the Russian countryside.
This is what's allowing him to escape,
the gun batteries that the Russians are trying
to use to shoot him down so that he doesn't
deliver the A-bomb and cause the doomsday device
to kill the entire planet.
And in this, Kubrick skewers every single facet
of the military in this film.
From the British mandrake to the idiotic
Sergeant Bat Guano to Jack the Ripper.
The only military men within the film
who show a quiet competence are the pilot and his crew
of this flying fortress bomber led by Slim Pickens.
And as they realize that they might not deliver
the bomb and they might have to ditch and they might
end up in hostile territory, he pulls out this
list and starts to go through it.
I'm going to read it to you.
He says, 145 caliber automatic, two boxes
of ammunition, four days concentrated emergency
rations, one drug issue containing antibiotics,
morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills,
tranquilizer pills, one combination Russian
phrase book and bible, 100 dollars in rubles,
100 dollars in gold, nine packs of chewing gum,
one issue prophylactics, three lipsticks,
three pairs of nylon stockings, shoot, a fella
could have himself a good weekend in Las Vegas
with this stuff.
(laughter)
The line was actually supposed to be Dallas,
but they were editing the movie
when President Kennedy got shot
and they changed the line to Las Vegas.
Now, I got home from having taken pictures
of Kong's survival pack, wow, five minutes.
I'm gonna go over time.
Taking pictures of Kong's survival pack,
and I started researching it,
and the things I discovered when I started
researching it.
If you were issued condoms during the cold war
in the mid 60s, which is when this movie
is supposed to take place, you were issued
Trojan thins.
And they made special ones for the military.
It took me six months to figure out
how gold would have been packaged
as they gave gold to Gary Powers
when he was shot down, and they packaged it
in a really clever way.
Now CIA operatives use what's called a bot necklace
that has different gram weights of beads,
and they can pull them off and trade them
for various amounts.
But back then, they usually had Krugerrands,
sovereigns, gold watches, and gold rings,
and they were cast inside a block of foam rubber
so that you couldn't steal them.
If you did, it was clear you had cut into the pack
and there was a whole protocol for dissolving that pack.
I discovered that no survival pack in history
has ever had nylon stockings or lipsticks as part of it,
but of course, Kubrick's telling a whole nother story.
The subtext of the Kong survival pack
is telling you a whole nother story about the film,
because of the purpose with which he chooses those items.
Now, I'm not only making one, I'm making a bunch of them.
And, I'm not even sure why except,
I know I don't want to sell them.
I'm not interested in getting money for these.
I want to trade them, because trading
is a way in which, actually, a whole nother story
gets told about the object.
But why?
Like, I actually grapple with this question.
I have a cave in the mission in San Francisco,
and it is overwhelmingly packed with objects
that I absolutely love, and there's thousands
and thousands of them.
And the why of it is something that I grappled
with for a long time, until I started
going to Comic-Con.
Now, Mythbusters got invited to Comic-Con
about seven years ago, and I'd always wanted to go,
and I'd always known that it was deeply about costume
and so am I, clearly.
So, every year at Comic-Con, I put an elaborate costume
together.
The first year, I was Hellboy,
after that I was a stormtrooper,
I was a ring wraith, this year I was in an alien spacesuit
and a mercury spacesuit that's out there
in the lobby for you to see.
But, about four years ago, I put together
a costume that didn't take me months to build
and it didn't cost thousands of dollars.
It took two weeks and about 150 bucks,
and it remains my favorite costume I ever built.
It's from Hayao Miyazaki's film, Spirited Away.
And Spirited Away, on one level, it's a story about
a little girl coming to understand her own power,
but it's also about her rescue of a sad spirit
named No-Face or Kaonashi, and No-Face
is this sort of amorphous blob with a white face,
and he's very sad and he's very humble.
And I built this, I slumped vacuum form
in a hole to make the oval, and then I painted it.
And then, because in Spirited Away,
you can actually see through No-Face most of the time
and you can see that there's sort of
a figure within the figure, so behind the head,
I vacuum formed a clear plastic head
that I wore on a kayak helmet strapped
tightly to my jaw, which hurts like hell
and I can't see anything out of this costume.
All I can see through the mouth is peoples' shoes.
But I wore it out on the floor and walking
and, oh, also, he has these long black arms,
and I wondered, how am I going to get long black arms,
then I realized I live in San Francisco.
I went to the drag queen store.
(laughing)
I said, do you have long black gloves up to my arm?
And they said, shiny or matte?
(laughing)
So, I walked out onto the floor and I was No-Face,
and I could see people freaking out,
and if you've seen the movie and if you ever see
a seven foot tall No-Face costume,
it is a bit arresting.
I remember the first time I saw one.
And people were coming up and asking for pictures
and I would bow my head and I would take a picture
with them.
And then, I had, in my gown, a pack full
of gold chocolate coins, because this is one
of the ways in the film that No-Face draws
people to him, he makes gold appear in his hands
and he lures people to him, then he eats them.
He eventually vomits them all back up later in the movie,
but the gold is the way he thinks
that he has to make friends, so I had gold
in my pack, and when people would take a picture
and they'd be done, I would have one ready
and I would make it appear in a flourish
and I would give it to them.
And they really were freaking out,
they loved this, and I was like, oh, this is great.
And I could see that the otaku, the Japanese geek girls
were really freaking out about it,
oh my god, they're taking bunches of different pictures.
Then, after about 30 minutes,
somebody grabbed my hand and they put a gold coin back in.
It was an angry gesture.
And I, wow, I wonder if I gave chocolate
to a kid who's like, allergic to chocolate or something,
I didn't know.
And I kept on taking pictures and giving out the coins,
and then it happened again.
It happened a third time before I realized
what was actually going on.
What was going on was that in the film,
it's back luck to take gold from No-Face,
and the attendees at Comic-Con were giving me
back my gold 'cause they wanted no part
of No-Face's bad luck.
And then I realized that we were all participating
in a theater, that when I put on these costumes
or I make these objects, they're all part and parcel
of the same activity.
I'm injecting myself into a narrative
that has fed me, and I'm attempting
to build it around myself so that I can put myself
inside of it, I can feel Deckard's pistol,
I can hold onto the egg gun, I can look
at Bourne's bag and pretend it's over my shoulder
and that I'm a secret agent.
All of these things are real experiences
I have with those narratives and with those objects.
But, I used to think that story was a one-way transmission
from teller to listener, and what I realized
in that moment of theater at Comic-Con
was that, the story not only changes,
a good story not only changes the listener,
but it changes the teller as well.
That the story evolves every time it gets told.
And we've been telling stories to each other
since we sat around campfires
and taught ourselves better, and faster, and easier
ways to kill large animals with sharpened sticks,
that language came about because of story.
And it might the story of a lonely 13-year-old kid
trying find his place in the world
and finding solace in narratives
or it might be a 47-year-old man
and his love of telling stories.
But we are all part of that process,
and something that evolves like that, a story,
is actually something alive,
and it is evolving alongside of us,
at least that my story and I'm sticking to it.
Thank you very much.
(upbeat music)
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