(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)