It took more than 30 years for this shocking film to see the light of day: It’s Mad God, the crazy project of Jurassic Park’s special effects creator.

what are you talking about

Dive into the ruins in the depths of the world, where we follow the killer. Its dark design is lost in a labyrinth of strange landscapes, a den of disturbing and magical fauna.

animated fate

The name Phil Tippett may mean nothing to you. But it’s his business. Passionate about animation after discovering Ray Harryhausen’s special effects on The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, he specializes in stop-motion, notably animating the Millennium Falcon’s holo-chess creatures in Star Wars – Episode IV. in 1977. Then brings them back to life forty years later in The Force Awakens.

Meanwhile, he created the appearance of Jabba the Hutt for the purposes of Return of the Jedi and invented the AT-ATs and the funny The Empire Strikes Back, which he moved using go-motion techniques, a stop-motion option. – Motion designed by him and composed using blur to make the movements more fluid than in frame-by-frame animation.

Willow, Robocop, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Starship Troopers, Twilight or Jurassic Park dinosaurs also benefited from the knowledge of the person who won two Oscars (Return of the Jedi and Jurassic Park, to be exact). But it was the director who took on his greatest challenge with Mad God, a feature film released in cinemas this Wednesday, April 26, following its presentation at the L’Étrange festival in September 2021. and three decades of development. at least

“I started thinking about him in my twenties”He explained to us in January 2018 during the Paris Images Digital Summit, where he was one of the guests. “I was looking for a way to use the special effects techniques of the time to create something that was more like a collage, both visually and narratively.”

Mad God evolved more unconsciously than intentionally. It took me years to figure out what I wanted to talk about

“It’s experimental for me, in the sense that I’m playing with different narrative strategies compared to a classic motion picture, which has a beginning, middle and end. It all really started when I was very young, because I was always drawing monsters, dinosaurs, and my father, who was an artist And he had a collection of books, he showed me one about the artist Hieronymus Bosch.”

“Something clearly popped into my mind when I found The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. Then the Bosch book is more subconscious than intentional. It took me years to figure out what I wanted to talk about.”

The Strange World of Mr Phil

Set in a labyrinthine world reminiscent of Alice and Mr. Jack’s Wonderland, as well as the world of Hellraiser, this wordless stop-motion film, criss-crossed by several flesh-and-blood performers, is a veritable deluge of nightmarish and haunting images. Even if the experimental and radical side can be put off, and it obviously shouldn’t be in front of everyone.

But its behind-the-scenes story is just as crazy as what flashes before our eyes for more than 80 minutes. In the late 80s, after working on Robocop 2, Phil Tippett embarked on a project he never imagined would be breathless. The author was killed A prehistoric beastwhose traces will be found in the documentary TV film Dinosaurs!He decides to walk for a long time with mad ambitions.

And the project was simply abandoned after a few years. Hired to work on Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs, he eventually saw Steven Spielberg opt for computer-generated image animation and feared it would quickly become obsolete when computers replaced stop-motion. It certainly won’t be, but it will still be many years before the Mad God is revealed to the public.

The original script is only twelve pages long, but it takes a long time to bring the world and the creatures born in its mind to life. “I started shooting about 30 years ago on 35mm film, but it got too big for me. Then the digital revolution came, so I had to rethink things, I had children and I didn’t have time.”

“But I was able to train supervisors that allowed me to have a little less hands on the projects I was involved in and a little more time to work on Mad God.

“And I was able to recruit volunteers, nostalgic for this era of digital gimmicks, to relaunch Mad God. Sometimes there were up to fifteen of us, and we met every Saturday: I tried to prepare things to shoot during the week so that we. can move forward.”

A crowdfunding campaign launched in 2010 allowed him to raise $124,156 (almost the entire Mad God budget of $150,000) and finally move on to the realization of his life’s project…which he still needs. period of time. But she regularly breaks news about her baby by posting snippets online, which together make up half of the film.

which ends in 2021, the year of its presentation at L’Étrange Festival and Sitges, from where it left the award. And we’ll still have to wait a little less than two years before it hits French cinemas. A true visual and audio experience that could have been repeatedly dropped in the water, but which would never let go of its author. Moral: Believe in your dreams, no matter how dark, weird, and disturbing they are.