WIRED By Design: Adam Savage on His Lifelong Obsession With Recreating Movie Props

between 1966 and 1973 one of the greatest shows ever made for television ran and its first run and then in syndication almost constantly throughout the 70s 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 a cell acetate because my father was an animator and I drew a radarscreen I lit it with a giant six volt lantern battery which was what I was allowed to buy at the hardware store and powered it with two flash light bulbs that I literally taped the wires to I then put toggle switches in there and a speaker grille and I labeled one of the toggle switches in an amazing bit of precedence detonate 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 I am 14 years old and 1981 was an amazing time if you loved stories and especially if you love 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 Divac Sharky's machine Raiders of the Lost Ark Dragon Slayer 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 this vision a little bit and made an amazing sword & Sworcery 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 and in addition to all that other stuff the thing that really captured me about the film was the armor the 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 armors black in its knobby and when King Arthur builds the round table and Camelot the armor is all sparkling and I didn't know that I was seeing Nicole Williamson and a young Helen Mirren showing everybody else had act I didn't realize that I was watching Liam Neeson Patrick Stewart and Gabriel burns 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 a 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 a luminize tape at the plumbing store and I made aluminized 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 Nicole Williams since performance he's this beautiful modulated voice and I could hear his voice in my head as I picked it off the workbench behold the sword of power 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 and October I made myself a suit of armor again out of cardboard I even made a white horse that I wore with spenders and I wrote it around school I lost the Halloween contest to a Mickey Mouse with big puffy hands then my father told me that there was an armored 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 Horseman horses wearing their own armor I didn't even know such a thing existed and this is 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 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 came back with a roll of roofing aluminum and some pop rivets on 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 aluminium suit of armor we used buckles from rotting luggage we found in the basement and we made everything the crease the tassets the knee cups the elbow cops the placard the helmet I needed an excuse to wear this which is 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 yearbook because I stayed around all day and the photographer found me and took a picture the second 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 third 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 and even from the back miss Salva raucous 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 and I woke up in the nurse's office and in a key moment when life becomes an allegory for itself I woke with a start and said where's my armor 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 throughout that entire shelf of stuff an act that so enraged me I actually at sixteen consulted an attorney about whether I could sue him 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 up 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 Lucasfilm in 1998 I got hired on Star Wars Episode one and it was like dying and going to heaven I was working with people that I'd been reading about since I was 11 years old when Star Wars first came out and that was the second job I ever knew that I wanted was to work on Star Wars and here I was up in Turner Boulevard and then eventually up here at the main house at the ranch working on Episode two 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 I 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 second two Matrix films sorry about those two 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 grebe Lee's to the side of a spaceship you have to have an understanding of why every grebe Lee is 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 logics 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 Indiana Jones father's Grail diary from the third 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 machine myself a Blade Runner gun and actually it's out there in the lobby and that's the third Blade Runner 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 the original guns that the real Blade Runner 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 that transformation I also spent 14 years making the zf1 from The Fifth Element out there not fourteen straight years but looking at screenshots building the entire thing in 3d then finding out that Steven Lane from the prop store of London it actually bought a real one and he gave me access to it for a few hours to make 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 than you love Stanley Kubrick and there's a traveling exhibition of his archives going around the world right now and it was at LACMA in LA for a bunch of months and if you didn't get to see it there I exhort you to head up to Toronto after November where it's going to be for about six months it's a remarkable exhibition everything from his point five 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 it didn't realize they were from the Kubrick archives but there was this one thing oh I also you know saw one of the spacesuits from 2001 but I was already making one of those so I didn't need any more reference of it but there was a piece that really compelled me and it was from dr. Strangelove maybe my still my favorite of all Kubrick's movies I'm always surprised every time I see it how both upsetting and how hilarious it is and yet how I leave it feeling really really unpleasant about humanity but it within that movie there is this one object and it's 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 to for somewhere around the beginning of the third 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 he doesn't deliver the a-bomb and caused 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 man dragged to the idiot idiotic sergeant bat guano to Jack D Ripper the only military man within the film who show a quiet cabin quiet competence are the pilot and his crew of this Flying Fortress bomber led by Slim Pickens and as they realized 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 he starts to go through it I'm going to read it to you he says 145 caliber automatic two boxes of ammunition for 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 one hundred dollars in rubles one hundred dollars in gold nine packs of chewing gum one issue prophylactics three lipsticks three pairs nylon stocking shoot fell could have himself good weekend in Las Vegas with this stuff 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 survival pack Wow five minutes I'm going to go over time taking pictures of Kong survival pack and I started researching it and the things I discovered when I started researching it if you were ill if you were issued condoms during the Cold War in the mid 60s which is when this movie was supposed to take place you were issued trojan fins 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 packet is telling you a whole nother story about the film because of the purpose with which 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 that 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 myth busters 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 the alien space suit 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 a hundred and fifty bucks and it remains my favorite costume I've ever built it's from Hayao Miyazaki's film spirited away and spirited away is 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 Kuniyoshi and no face is this sort of amorphous blob with a with a white face and he's very sad and he's very humble and I built this I slumped vacuform plastic 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've AK you 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 people's shoes but I wore it out on the floor and walking in oh also he has these long black arms and I wondered how am I going to get long black arms on eyebrows I live in San Francisco I went to the drag queen store I said you have long black comes up to my arm and they said shiny or matte 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 lap 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 love this right and I was like oh this is great and I could see that they ought aku the Japanese girls the geek girls were really freaking out about it oh my god they're taking bunches of different pictures and then after about 30 minutes somebody grabbed my hand and they put a gold coin back in it was an angry gesture and I wonder if I gave chocolate to a kid who's like charging to chocolate or something I didn't know and it kept on taking pictures and giving out the coins and then it happened again and it happened a third time before I realized what was actually going on what was going on was that in the film it's bad luck to take gold from no face and the attendees at Comic Con were giving me back my gold because they wanted no part of no faces bad luck and then I realized that we were all participating in a theater that 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 deckert's pistol I can hold on to the egg gun I can look at borns 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 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 in easier ways to kill large animals with sharpened sticks that language came about because of story and it might be the story of a lonely 13 year old kid trying to find his place in the world and finding solace and 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's my story and I'm sticking to it thank you very much

Channel: WIRED

Views: 160,424

Rating: 4.9623165 out of 5

Keywords: wxd, design, wired design conference 2014, wdx, new, news, Wired App, Wired Magazine, Wired.com, Wired

Id: nn-FRAkf0yI

Length: 21min 13sec (1273 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 04 2014