The ILM veteran and accomplished feature filmmaker enters the documentary space to tell the story of ILM and Lucasfilm’s digital filmmaking odyssey. By Lucas O. Seastrom Warning: This article contains spoilers from Light & Magic Season 2 Among the first group hired at Industrial Light & Magic in 1975, Joe Johnston began his career as a storyboard artist and concept designer. After 10 years with ILM on three Star Wars and two Indiana Jones films, among others, he went to the University of Southern California film school under George Lucas’ sponsorship. He’d go on to direct classics as varied as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), October Sky (1999), and Captain America: The First Avenger (2011).  Johnston’s directorial debut in the documentary medium, however, comes today, with the Season 2 premiere of Light & Magic on Disney+. The non-fiction series charts the storied legacy of Industrial Light & Magic, now celebrating its 50th anniversary, an unprecedented achievement in the history of visual effects. “I don’t have any experience in documentary or non-fiction filmmaking,” Johnston tells ILM.com. “When I was at Cal State Long Beach, I worked on a documentary that was directed by Tony Brennan called Hitler’s Secret Weapon. It was about the V2 rocket. Basically, my job was to do illustrations that explained some of the ideas he was trying to get across. That was my entire experience with documentary filmmaking, almost nil.” But Johnston does have experience as a storyteller. “While I had never worked on a documentary, I had a pretty good idea of how to tell a story, whether it’s real or fictional,” he says. “And you have to remember, especially with a project like this, though it’s true of all filmmaking, I had so much help. I had a supervising producer [Nicole Pusateri], story producer [Carly Baggett], a line producer [Andrew Hafnor], three great editors [Mike Long, Jennifer McGarrity, and Robinson Eng], and an archivist [Eugen Bräunig] whose job it was to go through thousands of hours of footage from ILM. It was more like a steering process, and I steered that process toward an ultimate goal. It was a real team effort all the way through.” Finding the Story After a successful first season directed by veteran screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, Lucasfilm and Imagine Entertainment agreed to produce a second. It was then that Imagine producer Christopher St. John gave Johnston a call. The latter was surprised by the inquiry, thinking they wanted him to appear in Season 2 as an interview subject. “I said, ‘Guys, I’ve said everything I have to say about it in Season 1.’ And Chris said, ‘No, no, we want you to direct it.’ Well, okay. I had to think about that for a while. It sort of came out of nowhere. I wasn’t expecting it.” Johnston’s relatively distinct point-of-view helped motivate him to accept the offer. “Having been an insider for the first 10 years during the original Star Wars trilogy, maybe I could have a unique perspective on what Season 2 might look like, having not been around for any of that. I left in 1985, came back for a couple of projects afterwards, but the whole shift toward digital was all new to me. Once I was onboard, it was a matter of guiding it in the direction I thought it should, one goal of which was to tell George Lucas’ story as much as possible.” That story emerged as Johnston and team reviewed thousands of hours of archival footage preserved in ILM’s collection. “I recognized that one of the stories that needed to be told was how George Lucas had basically steered the entire motion picture industry – in a way he sort of dragged it kicking and screaming – into the digital age,” the director explains. “That was a story that I didn’t think had really been told before. Here was a chance to feature that aspect of ILM and Lucasfilm.”  This would chiefly center around the production of the Star Wars prequel trilogy, released between 1999 and 2005. The first entry, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), was the most ambitious visual effects project ever undertaken up to that time, counting more than 2,000 shots produced entirely within ILM. The middle entry, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (2002), was the first blockbuster feature film made in a completely digital format and workflow. Surrounding these Lucasfilm productions were a bevy of groundbreaking achievements for client productions as varied as environmental effects in Twister (1996) and The Perfect Storm (2000) to performance capture in The Pirates of Caribbean trilogy (2003-07) and a fully-animated feature with Rango (2011). Master Yoda first appeared as an all-digital character in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (Credit: Lucasfilm & ILM). Always a Student “What also appealed to me was the chance to interview these people, a lot of whom I’d known over the years, but hadn’t worked with,” Johnston adds. “Hearing their personal stories…. It was an education for me. I don’t know that much about visual effects, so it was interesting to learn how effects had evolved since my involvement in the 1980s.” Indeed, Johnston is keen to note that, although he’s had a reputation “as a visual effects person, I have to always remind people that I’m not at all. I was a designer, storyboard artist, sequence director, and stuff like that,” as he explains, “but I never really got involved in the visual effects. I was surrounded by people who could do that. My designs were used in those sequences, but once I was happy with the design, I’d hand it off to people like Richard Edlund and Dennis Muren to make it work.” As a feature film director, Johnston collaborated with ILM on The Rocketeer (1991), Jumanji (1995), and Jurassic Park III (2001), providing him with first-person, client-side experience during the era covered in Light & Magic Season 2. He describes how Jumanji, for example, took place during a transitional moment “where it wasn’t always cheaper to do it digitally, or it wasn’t necessarily cheaper to do something with an analog solution. We had to figure out which method was the best to achieve a certain effect.” Johnston worked alongside visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston on that film, a former colleague from the original trilogy.  “I am a proponent of the idea that any film should not have one more visual effect than it needs,” Johnston comments. “You have the minimal number to help you tell the story and move on. I don’t like films that are all about the visual effects; spectacle for the sake of spectacle. It’s such a waste. You’re not telling the story; you’re just trying to impress people.” Effects progression from The Perfect Storm (Credit: Warner Bros. & ILM). The People Come First Working across three one-hour episodes, each with its own editor, Johnston followed a number of the precedents established by Kasdan in Season 1, not least of which was the emphasis on individual stories of the artists, filmmakers, and other talent involved in ILM’s work.  “I hope the audience will recognize that these people at ILM who are revered by visual effects fans are basically just like anybody else,” Johnston says. “They grew up making models or loving technology or whatever it was, and they found a way to make their dreams come true by coming to ILM. It’s interesting because that’s not the way it was on the original trilogy. Nobody knew what they were doing. They didn’t know what they would do when they got hired. That in itself was a voyage of discovery for people. ‘Why am I here, what am I doing? Oh you want me to do that – I guess I better figure it out and learn how.’” But despite the generational distinction, Johnston does identify the central constant in ILM’s story. “There is an attitude of ‘I know you can do it because it’s impossible.’ That was the spirit in the original trilogy, analog days, and it was during the start of the digital era as well. ‘How are we going to do this? Let’s jump in and figure it out.’ I find that story appealing and interesting. Several of the interviewees talk about it. ‘We didn’t know how we were going to do it. We were running out of time. We’ve got this deadline, we’re working seven days a week, but somehow, we figured it out.’ I think that’s a great story to tell. It’s fun. It’s scary. Scary is good.” Visual effects supervisor John Knoll with high definition monitors on the set of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (Credit: Lucasfilm & ILM). Piecing the Story Together “Like a lot of feature films, this project was definitely made in the cutting room. You’re assembling so much footage from the last 20 years and beyond,” says Johnston. Documentary filmmakers often have very distinct processes in terms of assembling their narrative elements. For Johnston, this meant close collaboration with the editors to help realize the story he wanted to tell. “I can’t give the editors enough credit. A lot of the ideas came up in the cutting room. They did a fantastic job. They’re semi-sung heroes.” Johnston also found ways to collaborate more directly with his interview subjects. “At one point, we decided that we needed someone to help tie all of these loose ends together. So we did a second interview with [former ILM general manager] Jim Morris and explained the story we were trying to tell. He got it, of course, being who he is, and he really helped us to cement some of these ideas into a story. It’s always like that in my limited experience. You don’t write a script beforehand like a feature; you write a script in the making of the film itself.” Johnston was adamant about leaning into the drama of the story, including the challenges that ILM, Lucasfilm, and Jar Jar Binks actor Ahmed Best faced during the release of The Phantom Menace. In Jar Jar, the creative team had pioneered what was the first all-digital main character in a feature film using performance capture technology, which later became industry standard. But some in the press and the audience struggled to accept Jar Jar’s role in the film’s story. “The whole Jar Jar Binks thing was probably the most controversial feature of the prequels,” Johnston says. “As with any filmmaking project, without conflict there is no drama. I wanted to highlight that.” It was important to be honest about the creative process, which is full of discussion and compromise.  “Interviewing [Star Wars producer] Rick McCallum was a similar choice,” Johnston adds. “Rick played a huge role in getting the prequels produced. Most people had a problem with Rick McCallum at some point because he was trying to get everything done as cheaply as he possibly could. He’s an interesting character. I wanted to hear his story.” Animation Rob Coleman (second from left) and actor Ahmed Best (third from right) with the ILM crew while shooting performance capture for Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (Credit: Lucasfilm & ILM). In addition to interviewing George Lucas, Johnston chose director Gore Verbinski as one of Light & Magic Season 2’s other filmmaker interview subjects. Verbinski collaborated with ILM on a watershed string of features, including three Pirates films and Rango. “The Pirates films that he directed were interesting because ILM had to keep besting themselves, and Gore tells that story quite well. “I wanted to feature Rango for the very reasons that Gore says in the interview, which is that ILM always had the ability but never the opportunity to be part of a project where they’re actually telling the whole story,” Johnston continues. “That was unique to ILM, and unique to that project. I came away, personally, hoping that ILM gets more opportunities to do things like that. Having experienced the situation that Gore explains where ILM does a shot, and they don’t know exactly where it’s going to cut in, they’re basically working on something in isolation. For them to be able to not think that way and tell the whole story was groundbreaking for ILM. That’s another story that was important to tell.” Animator Maia Kayser during production of Rango (Credit: ILM). Concept art of Rango by Christian Alzmann (Credit: Paramount & ILM). Finding Inspiration With the open mind of an artist, Johnston reiterates that he “never walked into an interview or the cutting room knowing exactly what something was going to be. It was a process. There were tons of surprises, things I didn’t know. It was refreshing, in a way. It made me have a newfound love of documentary filmmaking.” As Johnston looks ahead to future non-fiction stories of his own, he shares his hopes that Light & Magic Season 2 will help to inspire the coming generation of storytellers. “I would hope that a lot of young, potential filmmakers or visual effects artists would watch this series and say, ‘That person who I really admire had no idea how they were going to get to ILM. They did this thing that they were good at, it was recognized, and they got a call.’ If this is something that people want to pursue, they should recognize that it’s possible. There’s a route to success. There might not necessarily be a formula for success, but there’s a way to find your path if that’s your dream.” Effects progression from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest with actor Bill Nighy as Davy Jones (Credit: Disney & ILM). Light & Magic Season 2 is streaming now on Disney+. Visit Lucasfilm.com to learn more about the stories told in the series’ latest installment. New merchandise celebrating the 50th anniversary of Industrial Light & Magic is now available on Amazon.com. – Lucas O. Seastrom is the editor of ILM.com and a contributing writer and historian for Lucasfilm.