John Knoll Quotes

I'm not a sculptor; I'm a hard-edged model maker. You give me a drawing, you give me a prop to replicate, you give me a crane, scaffolding, parts from 'Star Wars' - especially parts from 'Star Wars' - I can do this stuff all day long. It's exactly how I made my living for 15 years.

In our home we have many movie props from old film productions.

I have a trophy case that contains all the action figures ever made of me. It also has items I've stolen from my movies, like three guns and holsters from 'Serenity'.

Well, the Empire State was about 40' high in the studio. King Kong was a little model about 2' high, and the scenery that he worked in was in proportion to his size.

You've seen how they make movies like Star Wars and stuff. They're never really there. They're in front of a green screen just pretending to be jumping around.

'Dark Knight' shot in London and Chicago, and we were on that for so long.

Back when I was a professional model-maker at Industrial Light & Magic, my specialty was hard-edged construction - spaceships, miniature sets, and architectural stuff. These objects were sometimes just 12 inches across yet needed enough detail to fill a movie screen.

When I finally got up to Industrial Light And Magic to work on the 'Star Wars' movies as a model-maker, it felt like dying and going to heaven.

If an original piece of wardrobe came up from Star Wars, I'd probably spend a lot of money on it.

I definitely used to dream of sitting in the movie theatre watching the 'Star Wars' credits come up knowing I was part of one of those films.

I started off as a model maker, so the first part of my career was a model maker and then a motion control camera operator, so I shot a lot of miniatures.

I used Malta as a location to shoot a lot of my action sequences, and that's because we don't have the kind of setup that Malta Film Studios does. They have a world-class facility.

I read a magazine called 'Cinefantastique' that had just come out with a making of 'Star Wars' issue. They had some very long and detailed interviews with a whole bunch of people at ILM. I think I memorized that whole magazine.

I liked how 'Star Wars' felt both old and new. I even built a model of R2-D2, taking about two months mixing two kits to make one that looked just like the real thing. I'm the kind of person who gets really into it when I do something like that.

I kind of want to be in a comedy movie, or maybe something like 'Star Wars.'

For four years, I worked as one of the general shop crew on movies like 'Naked Lunch' and 'Arachnophobia.' I made lots of bugs.

I'll never forget travelling to New Zealand for three months to make the 'Underworld' films - that was pretty special.

But in the former, those movie sets that you've been on like that, even if they're huge movies and most of its being spent in special effects afterwards, I think that's the way that we're going.

Ewan McGregor and I had very similar first-time light sabre experiences. We both burned ourselves! These things are hot - they're full of batteries!

The scene [in The Hangover] where the tiger actually pops up behind us, that's actually a Jim Henson tiger puppet. The Jim Henson Company actually supplied that tiger. And it's really cool. Its entire face moves. It has like all these little motors in its eyebrows and cheeks and mouth. It was amazing.

[I was filmed] against a blue screen [in the Star Wars]. All the rest came later, in Lucasland. They did have me take gun lessons, though. I went to the same guys who taught Robert De Niro for Taxi Driver.

I'm a film geek man. I love toys. I love everything in filmmaking, so for me to just be around this technology is just so cool to watch it being used for the first time, some of the stuff.

I enjoyed being at Jurassic Park, with Jeff Goldblum and Sir Richard Attenborough. It's funny, because Steven Spielberg would actually operate the camera sometimes. He'd consider the camera, and he'd be kind of looking at me. He actually shot a few of the things that I'm in, in that lab, with that long ash dangling off that cigarette. Hogging that fake cigarette. Because I had quit smoking, and he wanted to make sure I didn't go back, so he got me the worst-tasting fake cigarettes ever.

We had about seven real cats at any one time on the set, and two animatronic, (one that sits and one that lays down) and two stuffed animal type cats that we used for rehearsals or any sort of silly torture we had to instill on the poor guy.

I didn't shoot any guns then or when we did the scene with Uncle Charlie [Matthew Goode] and Evie [Nicole Kidman] in the hall. I sort of pressed the button but there were no blanks or anything in there because I think it was always going to cut.