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Ed Verreaux Has Designs On The Future
by Scott Essman
After ten years working as a production illustrator for Steven Spielberg, Verreaux has climbed to the top of his craft as a production designer, most recently on "Mission to Mars."
FIRST EXPERIENCES
I started working for Chuck Jones in 1974 as an apprentice animator. I always loved movies and I especially loved cartoons - from Disney and Warner Brothers. After college, I went knocking on doors, and also started taking classes at Art Center at night. Through a friend at Art Center, I found out about this job--it was basically being a gopher with Chuck Jones. I went over and got the job, and just began to learn--really it was like hands-on learning about how things work. It was pretty cool, because for one thing, there wasn't any video in those days, but Jones did have a big film library of all the stuff he'd ever done on 16mm, and he had his own little screening room. Whenever people would come visit, he would have me run the projector. So at lunch, when nobody else was in there, I'd run two or three of these old Looney Tunes. And they were things that I grown up with as a kid back in the fifties. I worked for him for a couple of years, and then went off and worked on a feature film. Now I had these skills and a portfolio, and I heard about a guy named Bob Abel, who was doing very futuristic, multi-media, computer generated commercials in Hollywood. Even though I didn't know anything about any of that technology, I thought, "This sounds really interesting." And I worked with them for about a year and a half, until they got the contract to do the effects for first "Star Trek" movie [eventually assigned to Douglas Trumbull who had created the visual effects for "2001" and "Close Encounters"].
THE CHANCE OF A LIFETIME
In 1979, I got a call from one of the guys that I'd worked with on "Star Trek", and he said that there was this guy I should go meet. There was a producer named Frank Marshall who was producing a movie for Steven Spielberg
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called "Raiders of the Lost Ark". And that they were looking for storyboard artists. Well, I had done quite a bit of storyboarding on the "Star Trek" movie. So I called the number and went over and met Frank and a couple of weeks later got to meet Steven. He gave me three of these little thumbnails and said, "Here, go home and draw these up for me, and come back, and this'll be your test." So I went home and I spent the whole weekend and didn't sleep, just stayed up all weekend and did these fairly comprehensive illustrations.
FOUR ORIGINAL "RAIDERS" SKETCHES
One was during the chase sequence, it was looking back at the truck as Indy's getting smashed out through the windshield. And then one where he's hanging on under the front bumper. He's hanging on to the front grill and he's looking over his shoulder at the camera. Originally, the German Gestapo guy, who was named Todt--you know, "Death"--he had a bionic arm, which was designed by Ron Cobb. And he was like a Dr. Strangelove,
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where he would go click-click and his arm would snap straight, and there'd be like a machine-gun handle in his elbow, and out of his finger, that would be the barrel. And so I did a drawing of the staff car following the truck. And here's Todt, kind of big in the foreground, shooting at Indy, who's in the midground jumping off the horse onto the truck. Originally the whole chase was gonna take place in this big mountainous area, so it was like this convoy climbing up in to these really jagged peaks up in these mountains.
ILLUSTRATIONS FOR "RAIDERS"
Steven, all during the time I worked with him, would do very simple little stick figure drawings, so there'd be like a little stick figure with a little head and a little hat, and a little hand holding a gun. And he'd say, "Okay, here's Indy." And he'd draw the bullwhip and stuff, but they were very flat. And then I'd have to go back in and make it really look good, so that somebody else could look at it and say, "Oh, I get it. Here's Indy." In the spring of '80, I was storyboarding for Steven on "Raiders," and then they went off to do the movie. Between David Negron and myself, we had weekly meetings with Steven, and we'd go over the stuff. The scenes that I boarded were specifically the chase, the Well of Souls, some of the Tanis dig stuff, and then the opening of the Ark on the island. First, I storyboarded in pencil and then went back and did marker and
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wash in pen to enhance it. Each of those panels was about eight and a half by eleven. I probably could have done them smaller, but it never occurred to me - I did a hundred to a hundred and fifty a week.
THE CLIMATIC OPENING OF THE ARK
I did 40 color storyboards of the sequence of opening up the Ark when out comes this force and it destroys everybody. And basically what happened was Steven had me and another guy each do our own version. Meanwhile, Joe Johnston was working with George, up at ILM, and they had their versions. And we all met down here and they sort of took bits from each of the boards, the stuff that George and Steven liked.
THE BIRTH OF E.T., THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL
I got a call from Kathy Kennedy who said, "Can you come over to MGM and meet with Steven and Carlo Rambaldi, because Steven is going to be doing this project, and it's about a little alien." This was the beginning of "E.T.". And Carlo and I went off to his studio for about a month. And every day, we would just draw lots of different things. And I'm a pretty fast drawer, so I would do 20 or 30 drawings of just different heads and stuff. And after four or five days, we would go back to meet with Steven, and we would pin all of these drawings up on the wall. So it became like one of those criminal ID things: "Well, he had eyes like this, and he had a nose like this." That was how we began to home in on ET. We started with the face - Steven had got all these books of photographs of faces by Avedon, Lord Snowden, Dorothea Lang and people like that. He was kind of pointing at things that he liked. But in the end, we were just drawing. And I then, remembered an image from childhood, and so I got that heart-shaped face look, and Steven really responded to that, so we began to develop it from there. At one point, as I continued to draw and refine the look, Carlo began to sculpt in
clay. We would have meetings, and we would drive out to the movie studio and look at stuff. It was great because I got to be very closely involved as Steven's right-hand man. He'd say, "What do you think?" And I'd say, "Well, I thing this is great but why don't we try this?" And he'd say, "Yeah, let's try that" or he'd say, "No, that's dumb. Let's not try that." But it was fun because it was very collaborative.
LEARNING ABOUT PRODUCTION DESIGN
I remember very early on going with Steven and Kathy Kennedy up to ILM, because he was also preparing "Poltergeist" at the time we were prepping "E.T." He was the executive producer of "Poltergeist." And so we flew up for a day to have a meeting with Tom Smith and everybody up there. And Jim Spencer, who was production designer on "Poltergeist," came up with us; he had me doing storyboards on "Poltergeist" as well as "E.T." There would be times when I was busy on stuff for "E.T.", and he would say, "Ed, I need to have you storyboard this effects sequence." And so I'd take a couple of weeks off and we would bang that out. Then sometimes we would just do video conferencing calls where I would hand him the storyboard, and we would be talking to the video monitor, and he would be explaining the shots, because they didn't have anything like teleconferencing in those days. And they would Fed Ex the taped up to ILM where Dennis Muren was the effects supervisor on "E.T.
," and Richard Edlund was the effects supervisor on "Poltergeist." So Steven was kind of like doing two shows at once. On this trip, I remember saying to Steven, "You know, I really want to become a production designer. That's really my goal," not having any idea what the hell that meant! I knew I had a lot of good ideas; I knew I was creative; I knew I had a good sense of design and all. So it just seemed like that was the place to want to end up, to be the guy who was the collaborator, right with the director in terms of "what's it look like?" Steven said, "Fine, that's great." And basically, I think with Steven, you need to then go out and prove that you can do it. Then I said the same thing to Jim Spencer and to Jim Bissell [production designer of "Twilight Zone: The Movie"] and just about anyone else who would listen.
WORKING WITH SPIELBERG
I was close to Spielberg, so I had a lot of input with him as far as storyboards and stuff like that. But the thing is, when you work with a guy like Steven, he's the most creative guy in the room. That's the thing that's just terrifying, because you walk in, and for every one good idea I'd have, he'd have ten; he is like the most clear-sighted guy in the room. It's the same way with Bob Zemeckis. They're very skilled at what they do. What it does to me is raise the bar of expectation of what you want to try to accomplish because you want to please these guys. You really want their approbation, and you definitely want to try to do the best you can for them. Frank Marshall said this to me one time. I was moping around the office I guess I looked kind of sad. I'm not sure what I was thinking, but he walks by me and says, "Cheer up, Ed. This is the big time." And I try to remember that, although sometimes it's easy to get overwhelmed. But it's the big time. I guess for me, it was always kind of a shock. "It's just little old me. There has to be a mistake here." But here you are working in the big time with one of the biggest dogs in town, if not the biggest.
SUPPORT FROM OTHER DESIGNERS
Rick Carter and Michael Riva have been very, very supportive of a lot of us who are coming up, and that's ultimately
what happened on "Contact". Because I had been working as an art director for a while, and basically when Bob Zemeckis was brought in to do "Contact", Rick was busy doing "Jurassic Park II" and "Amistad", and he couldn't do "Contact". And I had been working with the previous group of people on "Contact" under George Miller, the Australian director. And there was some difference between George and the studio, and he left the project. Now it was a whole new team, and Rick talked to Bob's producer, Steve Starkey, and also to Joan Bradshaw, who was the executive producer, who both know me. And they said, "You know, you should give Ed a try." And that's pretty much how it came down. And basically, Bob Zemeckis gave me a shot. He said, "Here." And I went, "Yeah! Okay!"
BECOMING A PRODUCTION DESIGNER
I tend to see the movie more as a director might see it, and that's ultimately what it's about. You always want to remember you are making a movie. I think it's really important that you're telling a story, so it's not about the details on the wall as much as it's about the overall gestalt of the thing. Because of working with Steven for so long, I do tend to think sequentially. As opposed to just a set, I do tend to see things more like a moving series of images. And I really think that's important, especially when you're cutting between different things. It's like, "Okay, how is this going to work when you're cutting from this place to this place?"
CONCEIVING THE DESIGN OF "CONTACT"
I had worked with a really, really brilliant illustrator/designer, named Steve Burke, who's actually worked on a lot of the big sci-fi films in the last 15, 20 years. Steve and Ron Cobb had a lot to do with the design of "The Abyss," and Steve had a lot to do the design of "Total Recall." He and I had worked together earlier, back in 1990, on "Honey, I Blew Up the Kid," and we had been talking, because he knew I was up for this project. He was working on another show, but I
said, "Can you do some drawings for me at night?" and he said, "I'd love to." So over the next couple of nights, I did my batch of drawings, he did his batch, in black and white, just concept sketches. And then pasted them up on a board in front of Zemeckis. Carl Sagan wanted the object at the center of the machine to be a dodecahedron, which is a 20-sided figure where each facet is equal. We brought a couple of his guys up who had worked with him on the "Cosmos" series, Rich Sternbach and Don Dave, who are both illustrators and designers in their own right. So they went off and they did their design, but Bob says, "Well why don't you put a sphere inside the dodecahedron?" It was this series of throwing stuff out at Bob, and then Bob going, "Well, you know, why don't you just put this in here?" That was the genesis of it, so we kind of hit the basic idea of the machine in the first couple of weeks.
OTHER RECENT PROJECTS
"Contact" was going to be directed by George Miller, the Australian, and the production designer at that point was Dennis Kavner, who had just finished "Waterworld." And Dennis hired me to be the supervising art director. And then when the whole project kind of lost steam, we all went our separate ways, and then I was called back. In fact, I actually went over to DreamWorks, and began to work on a project for Steven called "X-O," a digital movie, like a Helen of Troy in space. So I spent a lot of time doing that, then I did about six or seven months of prepping "X-Men" with Bryan Singer, and then the whole thing got put on hold for a while.
BEGINNING "MISSION TO MARS"
What I was trying to find was kind of a level that you felt like you were in a real NASA craft. We've all seen the spaceshuttle and we all know what it looks like. That was the level of detail I was trying to find. So it's like modern-day aerospace technology. And then let's take it and give it a little bit of flash and a little pizzazz to make it look interesting, you know. The idea was that this is something that's gonna be flying in 20 years. If you think about it, the shuttles that are flying now were actually designed 30 years ago.
FINDING AN IDEAL LOCATION
We built most of the actual Mars planetary surface on location, except for a few second unit shots that went out to Jordan. Going through the big crack was right in the area where the caves of Petra are. But everything else that we did, we actually built it after months and months and months of location surveying in North America. We had found places in Cameron, Arizona and in Utah, but because of the studio's insistence that we shoot the movie in Canada, we looked and looked and looked, and finally my art director, Andrew Neskoromny, said, "There are these sand dunes that are just south of the airport in Richmond, where we shot part of "Double Jeopardy." I had actually seen photographs, but a lot of times the photos just didn’t do it. So we went out there and we took a look at this: the Harbor Commission, when they dredge the river for shipping, they dump the sand there. And so we made inquiries, and then realized that we could actually build sets. Basically, I sat down with my art directors and we actually picked angles. We said, "Okay, this area will be the habitat area. This'll be the landing site for the ERV. This is the pre-blast and the post-blast face." We actually built them side by side. Working with Steve Burum, we found exactly where we were on the planet. He has an Internet program where you punch in your longitude and latitude coordinates, and the date that you want, and it spits out a graph that shows you sunrise, sunset, and azimuth for every fifteen minutes of that day. And then we just backed into that and said, "Okay, we'll be here in the middle of August, so this is how we'll align the set, so that we get the optimum sun." So it was great to work with Burum because it was a very collaborative effort, and he was very, very helpful to me.
SHOOTING EXTERIORS
All that we shot indoors, was inside the ship and inside the habitat. For the rest of the film, if a scene was set outside, we were actually shooting outside. We built exterior sets on location and then all we had to do was we had to replace the skies. We sculpted [the Martian landscape] all out of sand, and then to keep the sand from blowing away, because there's a lot of wind out there, we painted it with a colored concrete that's called Shockcrete. Then we dressed the set with all kinds of different rocks and aggregates. After that, the paint crew actually used a large industrial paint gun that actually fires paint out of a fire-hose sized nozzle. It went through these big 250-gallon paint buckets. And it would pump like literally 200 gallons a minute. I think we went through like fourteen thousand gallons of paint. We got the colors all worked out and then the head painter just gave the formula to his team.
DESIGNING THE SPACESUITS
We designed the suits before the costume designer was actually on board. This helmet that the visor reflected about 230 degrees of view. So you could see grips 500 yards away behind the camera. The suits also had their own voice, so when they're in the suits and they're talking, it was going right to sound. They cool suits underneath the suits that the NASA astronauts actually wear, so in the backpack was a coolant pump as well as an air pump that pumped air on their faces to keep their breath from condensing on the visor. There was also a transformer and a battery inside the pack as well. So those things weighed about 45 pounds. And then also in the little pack on front, that was actually the coolant water. Everything on the suit was functional.
PLANNING FOR THE SHOOT
We were in Vancouver June through October of 1999 after we had begun prepping in November of '98. There was another director assigned to "Mission to Mars" at the beginning, but he had differences with the studio on vision, so he bowed out. And then there was a while there where they were gonna shut it all down, and I said, "If you do, that's fine, but then you should let us all go." And they said, "We'd like to keep you on." And I said, "Yes, but if you still want to do a June, '99 start, then you need to let me keep my entire crew. We're busy generating drawings, so they were gracious enough to let me and my art department stay on over Christmas, while they began to try to find another director.
The whole design of the ship changed concept a couple of times - it went through some pretty serious changes. I was designing and realizing concepts on this movie all the way almost to the last week.
CURRENT PROJECTS
Right now I am designing and building a project for Disney/Touchstone TV called "The Beast", and it's like an "ED-TV" meets "Network" meets "Truman Show." It's a realistic, dramatic piece about the media and the Internet and all that, which is really a lot of fun. It's incredibly challenging, but hopefully, it'll make it to series and be a good show.
RUNAWAY PRODUCTIONS
Right now it's just a lot of the work is going away. I mean a lot of the work that was traditionally done here, is being done in Canada. And I just got done talking with my agent a couple of days ago, and we went through the list of a whole series of films. And every other one was, 'That's in Toronto. That's in Canada. They're going to hire a Canadian to do that.' So a lot of our work is going away. There were quite a few things that looked really interesting, so we'll just have to see how it goes.
THE FUTURE OF VERREAUX's DESIGN FOR MOVIES
I'd like to be able to have a chance to make it my work much more fantasy-based, like, what if Dr. Seuss designed stuff for NASA. I think that would really be lot of fun. One of my favorite films that I've worked on, although I was just the art director, was CASPER. My whole background really is animation, and is cartoons. There is that aspect of me that I'm keeping caged up for a while, but I'd love to let that go again.
THE END
Edward S. Verreaux
Production Designer - filmography
1. Mission to Mars (2000) ... aka M2M (1999)
2. Contact (1997)
Art Director - filmography
1. How to Make an American Quilt (1995)
2. Casper (1995)
3. Blue Chips (1994)
4. Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (1992)
5. Distinguished Gentleman, The (1992)
6. Rookie, The (1990)
Miscellaneous crew - filmography
1. Back to the Future Part III (1990) (assistant art director)
2. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) (production illustrator)
3. Twins (1988) (set designer)
4. Scrooged (1988) (illustrator) (as Edward S. Verreaux)
5. Empire of the Sun (1987) (production illustrator)
6. Big Trouble in Little China (1986) (production illustrator) (as Edward Verreaux)
7. Color Purple, The (1985) (illustrator)
8. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) (visual design consultant) ... aka Mad Max 3 (1985)
9. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) (production illustrator) (as Edward Verreaux)
10. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) (unit illustrator) ... aka E.T. (1982) (USA: short title)
11. Poltergeist (1982) (production illustrator)
12. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) (production illustrator) ... aka Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the
Lost Ark (1981) (USA: video title)
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