Tuesday, November 7, 2017

"20-Year Anniversary: Creature Supervisor Phil Tippett Reflects On ‘Starship Troopers’"



CB has the interview:
There’s a famous test done for Starship Troopers [view below], and Paul Verhoeven introduces it. Was it a test done to convince the studio to make the film?

Phil Tippett: Yeah, that’s exactly what it was. We went out to Vasquez Rocks and shot Olympic gold medalist Mitch Gaylord playing a soldier that was being chased and killed by a bug. Then Jon and Ed and I – Paul was shooting Showgirls – we went to pitch it and it went up the food chain at Sony, and showed them what we were doing.

They would worry about things like, ‘Where’s the mouth on the bugs?’ We’d go, ‘It’s that little hole there.’ They’d be like, ‘Well, how do they eat?’ We’d say, ‘Well, they eat sap from the queen back in the cave.’ They’re like, ‘Really? But if they don’t have mouths, they can’t kill people.’ I go, ‘No, they’ve got these big beaks that can chop people in half, and they’ve got these things that can skewer them, so they just kill people. They don’t eat people. They don’t care about people.’

Then we had to go through the hierarchy of screening for three different executives, and at that time Mark Canton was the head of the studio. He brought his entourage in, and they looked at it, and he turned around and said, ‘Well, is this movie going to be fun?’ We’re like, ‘Yeah. Sure, it’ll be fun.’ So he said, ‘Okay, go ahead and make it.’