ILM did the special visual effects
for all three movies.
Obviously, they were in their early days
at the time you made the firstpicture.
I wasjust wondering
ifyou had any concern at the time...
...aboutsome of the visual effects
that had to be done to the picture.
There's no digital work.
Everything was optical.
There's only about 30 shots in the whole movie.
Everyone sees it
as a big special effects movie, but...
...there weren't that many shots.
In those days, everything had to be a lock-off.
They had this little Vista Vision camera
that could only run...
...a minute of film.
That was real old-fashioned optical stuff
from the early days of Star Wars.
That's what everything was.
The car at the end was a miniature...
...that they made movejustlike they did
the spaceships in Star Wars...
...on an articulated arm.
They had a motion-controlled camera...
...they had up at ILM
with a green screen and a blue screen.
Just all the old optical work.
We neversaw a decent optical until about...
...a week before the picture
had to be turned over to negative cutting.
We were terrified, because this was
the first time we'd ever worked with ILM.
We would get these comps down,
and they would be terrible.
Bob would have these frantic conversations
with Ken Ralston...
...about why this didn'tlook right,
and why this didn'tlook right...
...and would it even be possible
to getitin time.
ILM did.
There's the one shot thatstill doesn't work...
...Ken just couldn't get the one where...
...you see his eye through his hand.
That's the imperfection that we putin there for....
We didn't want to insultAllah.
It's a movie, so it's perfect enough.
ILM worked on all three movies.
Obviously, when Back to the Future was made,
they were in their earlier days.
I'm wondering ifyou had any concerns
aboutsome of the work...
...that had to be done in the movie,
in terms of visual effects.
In the shots of Chris on the clock tower,
you can see the cable on his harness.
Which would be an insult...
...if I paid $9 to go see Spiderman
and I actually saw...
...a cable in the shot.
There's no excuse for that now.
But, in those days,
there was no way to remove it.
That was the best-played piece ofperformance.
This movie would be so easy to make now.
Can you imagine
how I would have done the town square?
I would havejustpainted itin.
I would've had huge buildings.
And then, when I went back...
...to the '80s,
it would've been so completely different.
I wouldn't have had to do it all physically.
I could have made it better,
if I had digital technology.
Movies have always been this technical thing.
It all, ultimately, comes back to the script
and the imagination of the filmmaker.
The digital stuffisjust a tool.
Being a director and a screenwriter...
...was there a particularscene
thatyou were excited about...
...going in and directing?
Did thatscene come out
exactly the way you had imagined it?
Ijust couldn't believe how lucky I was...
...on the day we shot Michael
walking into the town square...
...for the first time, because I had
those great cumulus clouds in the sky.
If I was doing the movie today,
Ijust would have painted all those in.
The sky would have looked perfect.
Butit was, "I can't believe...
"... how lucky we were to have thatsky. "
-That was a great thing.
-So, you have those, or...
...there's millions of times in this movie,
where the actor...
...will do something you neverimagined,
and you go, "WowI
"I never thought I'd eversee an actor
do a reading like that, or hear that. "
Those are the gems. But, as far as...
...my work, it's alwaysjust compromise.
It's always less than I everimagined it.
I always have to go in and say:
"We'll piece this together. We'll figure out a way
to make it work, somehow.
"If we had another day,
it could have really been great. "
That's how I come away from everything.
In this movie, we did have
the unusual