Kent Houston

Kent Houston Side 1 

Kent Houston  0:00  

All right, here we go. Tim, okay, thank you.

 I'm Kent Houston. I was born in Wellington, New Zealand in September 1951 I'm a visual effects technician,

Darrol Blake  0:16  

great. Okay, tell us a bit about the family and whether they had anything to do with the business theater film. Yeah,

Kent Houston  0:21  

My parents were in the film industry previous to the Second World War, and in fact, during the Second World War, because of certain circumstances, they ended up in New Zealand in the early 50s, which is where I was born. My father continued to be involved in what was the fledgling New Zealand film industry. Through that time, my mother became a housewife, and basically I had always sort of resisted the notion that I might get involved in movies, and in fact, I went in the direction of engineering. I studied mechanical engineering, but I had a part time job at a motorcycle shop in New Zealand in Wellington, and ended up working there and enjoying it a lot, and it became a full time job, and in fact, became my career. And towards the end of 1970 I sort of felt the urge to travel, and I contacted a British motorcycle dealer in Bromley and Ken and asked them if they'd have a job for me, which they said, Yes, we will do we will certainly have a job if you want to come over. So I turned up down on Bromley, all bright eyed and bushy tailed and tanned from the six week boat trip, and they offered me just over 20 pounds a week, and then tax had to be deducted from that and living costs. And just realized I could not afford to do it. I couldn't afford to live here even, even in 1970 you know that things were

Darrol Blake  1:46  

Can I, can I take you back? Can you go back to before the war? Yeah, I know you weren't there, but can you remember anything about what your parents did in the film industry?

Kent Houston  1:56  

Yes, my father was a sound engineer and was involved in very early Motion Picture Sound on both sides of the Atlantic. He worked for Disney. He did some work on Fantasia, and he was also involved in a lot of the development of different sound techniques for recording in British studios. He worked with people like John Cox and John Aldred. The interesting thing about my father was that he was an American citizen, and when the Germans invaded Poland, he felt terribly strongly about what was happening, and decided he wanted to fight join the war effort. And went to the British Embassy in America, and they said, Well, you can't join the British army. You're a neutral citizen. And he was quite persistent, and in the end, they said, well, there is one way we can get you into an army, but it won't be the British army. It'll be the Indian Army, because they don't have the same agreement with the United States. So my father ended up working in the royal Indian Army Service Corps involved in making films, doing combat coverage, that kind of thing in India and in Burma. He was responsible for a series called calling Blighty, which was soldiers who spoke to mum on a bit of film, which somehow would make its way back to Britain and get shown somewhere local to that family. My mother, her career really started in fashion design, but she was a very talented artist, and she got involved in animation. Worked for a number of very early British animation pioneers. She knew people like John Halas, and she worked on a film called "Things To Come". Sandy McKendrick, she then, towards the beginning of the war, worked for a company animation studio out in Stroud in Gloucestershire, and they ended up with a job, which was animating German aircraft silhouettes so that gunners could recognize the enemy aircraft at different angles, obviously long time before computers could do this kind of work, and it was felt as the bombing on Gloucester increased and intensity, felt that her role was too important to be left vulnerable to bombing attacks. So they actually flew the whole studio out to India in flying boats and set up out there. And that was supported by the Indian Army Film Unit, which my father was attached to. And that's how they met, how they met. And my father absolutely loved India, and in particular, Burma. But obviously living in Burma after the war wasn't really feasible, and as they headed towards partition in India, things got a little bit bad. So my father then started to think about where he was going to live, and what had happened, unfortunately is because he joined a foreign fighting force, he was stripped of as the American citizen. Citizenship, and he was never really able to get it back, and very bitter about that. So he ended up working in Britain for gourmont Kali, who at the time had a contract for re equipping a lot of the Commonwealth film studios so they could start promoting tourism and immigration and things. And one of the installations he did was in Wellington, New Zealand for what was at the time, I believe, in tourist board films. And he went out there, started putting equipment in, and then sent my mother a telegram saying, this is where I want to be. And so my mother and my older sister went out there by sea. My father never really left. He loved it. And my mother was she lived there until she left. My father in the mid 60s, and she came back to Britain and started her career in animation again. So that's the

Darrol Blake  5:53  

That's the background right now. Let's start the story that's fascinating. Thank you. So we've got you through the bicycle shop, the motorcycle shop thing, and the engineering study. And you came to Britain in the 70s, end of 70s, end of the 70s, and found that wasn't economically Well, it's

Kent Houston  6:16  

end of 1970 so it was actually end of the 60s. Yeah, so 

Darrol Blake  6:21  

Sorry, I'm confused now, you said you mean the beginning of the 70s, 

Kent Houston  6:26  

The end of 1970

Darrol Blake  6:27  

 End of 1970 Yeah, thank you. 

Kent Houston  6:29  

Sorry Iwas narrowing it down to a particular year. 

Darrol Blake  6:32  

Yeah, I thought you said the end of the 70s, but I've got the fact that you confused anyway, I'm not now. Thank you. And so what happened then, once

Kent Houston  6:43  

you decided, I sort of realized that I wasn't going to be able to make much of a living doing the thing I loved, which was working on motorcycles. So I thought, well, I've got X amount of money to spend. I'm just going to stay in Britain for six months, see all my relatives and friends, and then I'm going to head back to New Zealand. And so I basically just did what every traveling Kiwi does is party and have hangovers and spend too much time in pubs and things. And then my sister, who had come over to Britain in the mid 60s, was working as personal assistant and secretary to an animator called Bob Godfrey, and one day she said to me, Well, if you're not really doing anything, do you want a job as a runner? And I just thought, Okay, why not? And it didn't pay very much at all. It paid less than the motorbike shop, but it was much less traveling involved, and it was a short term thing. So I started working there, carrying cans around Soho, and just usual sort of film running activities, which is very good because I got to know very much who did what in SoHo and where things were and how a lot of the industry worked. But one of the things that was going on at Bob godfrey's a lot at the time was the filming of traditional animation on this big machine called the rostrum camera. And bulb had one of the few privately owned ones around. It was a very good one, so people used to hire it from them, and they generally have to come in and work at night because his jobs were going through in the daytime with his regular camera name, and one of the people who wanted to hire his camera was Terry Gilliam, and Terry's quite happy working at night and weekends and things like that. And I had sort of figured out that this was a job I could do. I'd watched the guy working the camera. It was a pretty technical process, but no more complex, and dealing with a very complicated motorbike engine, really, and I knew a bit about photography, so I started doing that. And I started doing animation shooting for Terry and bits for Bob. And then I sort of expanded my horizons a bit, and still working as a runner in the day, I worked as a rostrum cameraman for Alison batchinger At night over in Covent Garden just made a bit of extra cash. Was that where your mother was at that time? At the time my mother was working for Larkins, which is about four streets over from here in Henrietta Street, above what used to be a Barclays Bank, and Larkins did industrial training films, that kind of thing. So I

Darrol Blake  9:22  

Almost a family business, 

Kent Houston  9:24  

Almost a family business. I mean, I I found the rostrum camera side of it fairly straightforward in terms of the work itself, but I did find some animators are a little bit difficult to deal with. But one of the interesting things about a rostrum camera is that it can be used as a very primitive kind of special effects device. And I'm not sure of the reasons for it, but Terry and I got on very well together. And it may be that we're both strangers in Britain, and you know, either of us fit in very well. But. We ended up with a very good relationship. We did a lot of work together. And then when the first Monty Python film came along, which was And now for something completely different, we had some very cheesy effects. We had to do, no money to do them, so we sort of improvised. And I got quite interested in that, and I thought, well, I like doing this sort of work. It's fun. And I think Terry like the fact that it was cheap, I feel like the cheesy bit. But we then started doing more complicated things, and you see those in films like The the meaning of life and the Holy Grail,

Darrol Blake  10:37  

yes, yes, yes. That's That's leaping ahead a bit. There isn't it really, as I said, the first thing on the list is, is the rhubarb and custard television series where you're actually credited, or on this list, at least as a camera operator. I mean, it was that which company made that.

Kent Houston  10:57  

Bob Godfrey, yeah, Roobarb and Custard. And that was a job that basically was brought to Bob by a gentleman called Grange Calveley who had come up with the idea. And Bob and his colleagues figured out a very cheap and fast way to do animation, which basically was using felt tip pen on animation paper, very loosely drawn. It was very cheap to make. There was no inking and painting as such. I mean, the animators would do these very loose shapes, and then other people would fill them in and the effects of the felt tip pen solve. It was quite interesting, but we cranked out quite a few series of things regarded custard. And it was, I believe, quite successful, very straightforward from my point of view. And one of the last things I really did in terms of traditional animation work

Darrol Blake  11:47  

Prior to that, though there had been other television series, presumably, I mean animated things for BBC or ITV,

Kent Houston  11:55  

I  never did very much in the way TV series, except when I was working for Halas and  Batchelor. What had happened working with Bob was a little bit interesting. Bob's quite eccentric and somewhat erratic, and I decided at one point to leave the industry. And actually went and helped out a fellow New Zealander who was doing the 500 CC Grand Prix season, and ended up working in a motorbike shop in Edinburgh, and I got a phone call when I was there from time T's television, of all, people who said they were making a TV series about a funny little American group called the Jackson Five, and it was a cartoon series now make it in Spain, and they needed people to go and shoot animation that would have been in, I guess, 72 probably 1972 so I went down to Spain, worked there for a while, shooting animation on that series. You know, Michael Jackson came to visit tiny little boy. Very interesting, flat nose, big fro, charming. And I went back to Bob's after that, and worked for a while, but my interests really became more in the special effects side of things,

Darrol Blake  13:16  

Right? So we've gone now into the first of the Gilliam things, presumably, I mean, his sort of rehearsal for all this stuff was the Monty Python television series, when he did all those animations for that. Yes, were you part of any of that

Kent Houston  13:36  

With the TV series stuff, the stuff that everybody knows here, it was all shot at the BBC, and within the BBC, and I wasn't involved any of that. But interestingly, the Pythons then sold the program to Bavarian television, and the BBC wouldn't release the material, so they basically had to reconstruct all the shows, and part of that meant reshooting all the animation, and that was the stuff that I got involved with, helping Terry on. He also did animation for Marty Feldman Show, and I shot that for him,

Darrol Blake  14:13  

Right? But then, so, yes, yes, the first you've already mentioned the first film, which was "And Now For Something Completely Different"  which was their first feature, wasn't it? Yeah, and I can't honestly remember the percentage of animation in that or effects,

Kent Houston  14:35  

There were bits of animation. I mean, the thing with Terry is that he, you know, was really trying to leave the animation behind and you know, "Now For Something Completely Different," was a kind of a rehash of some of the sketches, but with some very simple effects work in it as well? Yeah, and that was, that was the start of Terry's move away from that cutout animation thing.

Darrol Blake  14:58  

But was he created as director? Was it Terry Jones? 

Kent Houston  15:01  

No, Ican't remember. Generally, it's Terry Jones,

Darrol Blake  15:04  

yeah.

Kent Houston  15:06  

But usually they worked together, yeah. Nominally, Terry Jones will be the director, and then yes, Terry will Terry G will be in the background, yeah, dealing with the things that are of interest to him,

Darrol Blake  15:18  

Right. So that's, is there anything you want to say about the latter half of the 70s before we get into the features?

Kent Houston  15:26  

Well, what happened when I when I'd returned to Bob Godfrey Is after my little spell in a transit van, careering around Europe, living out of can food tins, I was more and more interested in the visual effects side of things, and there was another company used to rent Bob's animation camera called Trick Film Studios and run by a genius called Charlie Jenkins. Charlie was a very, very talented guy. Was able to virtually make rostrum cameras fly with the sort of things that he did. He designed a lot of the sequences for " Yellow Submarine", for instance, and I admired his work greatly. And in the end, I think in 1974 I left Bob Godfrey and went and worked for Trick Film, but ironically, I ended up working back at Bob Godfrey's at night on the same camera that I'd left working in the daytime. But I did a lot of very, very interesting work, and a very talented bunch of people. It was a mixture of graphic effects, very early motion graphics, some quite interesting trick film sequences

Darrol Blake  16:44  

For what product?

Kent Houston  16:47  

Charlie did, a lot of commercials. The one that was very interesting for him, because there were so many of them, was, oddly enough, a series for Burton Suits, where they used to bang out a new commercial almost every month. And Charlie was very well connected with David Bailey And John Swannell, who tend to do a lot of photography these sort of companies. So we used to make these commercials basically out of stills, but do interesting things with the camera and make them move. And you know, that sort of approach now has a sort of a proper name, but at the time it was just, how can you make this still interesting. We did commercials for Boots. We did series for Fanta. He had quite a strong international clientele. A lot of French commercials Italian. We did some work for America. We did all the launch campaigns for Cherry Coke. When that first came out, it was a fascinating, fascinating place to work. And what happened, though, is Charlie never liked to own equipment. So after two or three years, basically, of having no social life and earning a lot of money, I thought I really need to buy some equipment and then continue to do His work, but with my own equipment, or with equipment I don't have to work nights and weekends. And I bumped into Terry Gilliam one day, and I was telling him about this, and he said, Well, that sounds really interesting. You know, if you're looking for someone to go in with you, I'd be really keen. And at the time, I just bought a house, and eventually, for the princely sum of 18,000 pounds. So felt desperately in debt and not really wanting to start a company, but together, Terry and I started peerless. We formed the company in 1975 and I believe it was registered in 1976 and you know, we've worked together ever since, been business partners ever since in Britain,

Darrol Blake  18:44  

I see So now we come on to the onto the to the, you know, the more elaborate movies, really, I guess after, after and was the the first one was it" Life of Brian". Would you say? Looking at  this list? 

Kent Houston  18:58  

What we when Peerless first started, the very first movie that we actually did. It was "Jabberwocky", which was Terry's first movie as a director. Yeah, again, very simple effects wise. And what I'd done with Peerless, he was getting away from the animation, getting away from live. Yeah, there's no kind of animation directing actors, actors and monsters. But basically what I tried to do when I set Peerless up was arrange it so it could service trick film properly and do the kind of work that they did and and also do other effects, you sort of thing. So the camera that we ordered and had built was the first digitally controlled animation stand of its kind in Britain, so it could do all the camera moves and things automatically and over and over again. And that worked out very well. One strange quirk, though -

Darrol Blake  19:53  

That had been that sort of thing had been started in the States, presumably, yeah,

Kent Houston  19:59  

The. Digital control of cameras had been pioneered in the US, and then the person who developed it here was a Australian chap called Mark Roberts, who's got some technical Oscars. 

Darrol Blake  20:12  

Did you have anything to do with the first " Alien"? Because there was, I seem to remember, some sort of motion camera thing on that. 

Kent Houston  20:19  

There were some motion graphics, but the particular kind of camera that we had built by Mark Roberts was very advanced for its day. And I mean, it doesn't sound advanced now, the program is on punch paper tape, you know, and it used to run underneath a light bulb to load into the computer, but it was able to do things that other cameras at the time could not do. And so I interrupted, sorry, no, that's right. And then so basically, we ended up setting this company up with a primary aim of servicing companies like trick film and other people did the same sort of work. But the bizarre thing about Charlie Jenkins is that because I laughed, he didn't give me any work, which was a little bit of a surprise, as he promised to give me all his work. But I learned so much from the guy that I don't resent it at all. It's just one of these things. And so we started picking up other odd bits and pieces, and one of the things I was very interested in was a machine called an optical printer, which is the forerunner of modern special effects tools. There were very few around in Britain, and virtually none privately owned. Most of them are in the laboratories. And going to say, in the labs weren't really that interested in doing anything elaborate. And we found a old printer that had been built in the early 1950s in New York. It was about to be scrapped by one of the labs in Britain. So I thought, I can probably make this work. So we bought this machine, we put modern drives on it that turned out to have the most amazing optical system on it, probably better than anything that's ever been made since. And that printer, then we started to use to do various optical effects and vision effects on subsequent projects. And it really became the heart of the company. We became more of an optical company than a animation standard company. We still have that printer, and it still works two of us now in the business and how to use it.

Darrol Blake  22:28  

So the "Time Bandits", "Life of Brian", "Meaning Of Life," "Brazil". This is, this is, you're still, it seems, within the Terry Gilliam world, as it were, there must have been other things in between. I mean, other films or other,

Kent Houston  22:49  

Yeah, basically, you know, through the late 70s and the early 80s, I was just busy growing the company, and it was before the advent of digital technology and television. So we used to do a lot of television commercials. Work loads and loads of it, you know, anything from silk cut cigarettes, Renault, cars, Hamlet cigars, that kind of thing. And all commercials that involved tricks. And that was that became a very strong part of the business. And it wasn't really a lot of movie effect work going on in Britain. And I was always a bit of an outsider. Anyway, there were a few of the the older gentlemen who had been doing it for years who still tended to get the work and be known as the ones who could do it. Yeah, and, you know, just bit by bit, we would tackle things, you know, that other people didn't really want to try on. Still a small company, they're probably by the early 80s. They were perhaps six or eight staff. But what happened on "Brazil", which was Terry's first real use of blue screen is? He called me up and said, So what are the rules about blue screen? And I said, Well, you don't want the costumes to have anything blue. Try and not get anything out of focus. Don't have anything shiny. All the rules. 

Darrol Blake  24:16  

And watch the hair 

Kent Houston  24:17  

Watch the you know, watch the hair, and don't have any see through costumes, that kind of thing. Those present terrible problems. And Terry makes this odd noise all the time. It's sort of a high pitch giggle, which usually means trouble. And he sort of giggled. And then about two weeks later, this shot turned up of Jonathan Price and Kim Greistagainst the blue screen, and Jonathan was wearing a suit of armor with blue stripes on it, and he was holding Kim Greist who was wearing a translucent negligee, and she had flowing blonde hair that was out of focus at the beginning of the shot. And to cap it all Jonathan had this enormous pair of angel's wings. Which were translucent and which motion blurred. And Terry sort of pushed this thing at me and said, See what you can do with that. And

he did it deliberately, 

Probably, I expect so, and it was, it basically broke every single rule in the blue screen book. And I think normally you would just say, This is impossible. And I was looking at it, and I just thought, there's got, we've got to try and figure something out. Because, you know, we there's no way we're going to be able to write a scope this and reshooting it. Bear in mind the various issues with the production of "Brazil "was going to be very unlikely, and it was quite a key sequence. So one of my optical printer technicians, and I worked basically through a Christmas looking at all the different techniques of blue screen that had been tried over the years, and we still stumbled on something that nobody else had ever done. And we got our first test back, I believe, on Christmas Eve, and we just thought we've cracked it. We found a way to do the shot which we did, and it's in the movie, and it's quite remarkable. And that was really the first big jump that peerless made in to visual effects, because we then had a unique system for doing blue screen that could deal with shots that pretty much nobody else in the world do. But you have to remember, this is all photochemical. This is not digital bits of film. And, yeah, huge printers. And, yeah, strips of mats that can be affected by humidity and tube trains going underneath the building. Yeah.

Darrol Blake  26:30  

Did you say matte, mattes? Yes, but I thought you were gonna, I about to say, you won't, you won't tell us how you did it, of course. But was there a matte involved? 

Kent Houston  26:39  

No, I'm quite happy to explain the technique. I mean, basically it was, there were two different techniques used to generate traveling mattes, as they were known blue screen mattess. And one of the systems was to initially generate a female matte, which is basically, if you've got somebody on blue, you turn the area around them in black, and then clear. But there was another system which was used completely independently, which was to actually do a mail matte complete reverse. But nobody ever did the two at once. So what we did is we thought, well, we can make these both at the same time, so they'll be on the same piece of film, and they'll be made from the same elements, so they'll line up to each other, and they if one matte expands because of humidity or whatever, then the other will expand the same amount, and they'll fit and they won't have matte lines. And then the other complicated part of doing the traditional blue screen is that you have to have a thing called a colour difference record, because you're effectively getting rid of the blue layer of a film and everything in it, all the details. So what you have to do is make up a piece of film which is a record of the difference between the red and the green, effectively, which is what is in the blue layer. And you put that back in, but you take out anything that's blue. And it sounds quite complicated, but anyway, it's gnarly, but without it, you can't reproduce strong yellows. And you you're very limited in, you know, things like Aquamarine and that you can't get close to magentas are very hard to reproduce, but with the color difference record, you can get much closer. And so what we were able to do is figure out a way to incorporate the color difference record as well into the single strip of film that had male and female matte and that just made compositing much, much easier.

Darrol Blake  28:35  

Brilliant. Thank you. Would I be right in saying that "Legend" I mean, this is going through the list backwards. Legend was probably the first film that you did with another director. Or was that, am I wrong? Gee, doesn't really matter. But, I mean, it's next on the list.

Kent Houston  28:54  

You know, we had, we had, we had worked with other people before then, but, you know, we were very much a service company, you know, and the visual effects industry as such didn't really exist. I think "Star Wars" was kind of the first time, you know, visual effects, houses sort of emerged as an entity.

Darrol Blake  29:15  

 But that was late 70s. 

Kent Houston  29:17  

That was the late 70s. But of course, things take a while to sort of spread over here. There were no apart from 2001 there were no major visual effects movies made for a long time after Star Wars.

Darrol Blake  29:29  

But I think most of those, most the visual effects of both those were done in the States, weren't they? I mean, there

Kent Houston  29:34  

 2001 was pretty much all done here, 

Darrol Blake  29:35  

Was it?

Kent Houston  29:36  

 Yeah? Ah, yes. In fact, I had somebody working at Peerless , who worked on it? Ah,

Darrol Blake  29:40  

right now, when we finish, I tell you another story. Remind me 2001. . Okay, so come to Legend anyway, because it's on the list. How did you get into that? As it were, well, 

Kent Houston  29:52  

I'd known Ridley through commercials, commercials, and we basically just did bits of. Legend, not all of it. There was another company involved, and it was a collaborative effort. And the other interesting thing that happened while we work on Legend is that we were also working on Brazil, and they're both Universal Studios pictures, and both were required to be altered by the studio, so we worked quietly away on the changes on Legends that were requested while we watched the battle for Brazil going on in the background or in the foreground. And Legend was a beautiful looking film, very underrated. I mean, wonderful sets and photography was gorgeous, gorgeous, but not actually a very complicated movie, visual effects wise.

Darrol Blake  30:49  

And this is a general question, really, you obviously work away from the main production. I mean, you're always in your, you know, rostrom camera area, as it were, or you're in the lab or your own. 

Kent Houston  31:04  

No, in fact, for the last, I guess, 12 years, I've pretty much been on set. And yes, the way visual effects evolved, it became in, you know, America in particular now the visual effects budget is much bigger than the budget for the Stars movie. So it's become a very different industry. And in the early 90s, it became quite common for a visual effects representative to be on set at all times, and that's pretty much what I ended up doing. I mean, 

Darrol Blake  31:38  

because there are so many elements that they're actually shot with the actors that yes, you need to work on

Kent Houston  31:42  

Yes, the process of shooting movies has become much more different now, where they won't bother taking down TV aerials and removing streetlights and painting over yellow lines, and they always want somebody around to sort of handhold and say, "Yes, we can take care of it and don't worry about this." So the industry has changed a lot, but that's really with the advent of digital technology on the optical side of things. The biggest optical effects job we ever did was a movie called "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" in the late 80s. I was on set for a lot of that and 

Darrol Blake  32:18  

And there was a lot of it. 

Kent Houston  32:19  

There was an awful lot of it 

Darrol Blake  32:21  

Different countries. I believe

Kent Houston  32:24  

All the post production was done here, but there were some very interesting locations issues on location in various places.

Darrol Blake  32:35  

Okay, so we've got to sort of, well, there are various other things happening in the 80s. Weren't there films that you contributed to "Princess Bride" for instance  which was made here, anything to say about that, any particular things that you remember about that? 

Kent Houston  32:56  

Well, the interesting thing about working on Princess Bride was, it was, it was a big American film that was being made here with, you know, American producers and American actors and American director, American director, very fine man, very bright and knew exactly what he wanted. And they wanted to sort of do things in an American way. I mean, one of the problems that we'd had sort of through the 80s was getting our work taken seriously. And there was a tendency of a lot of the people in the industry here to waste nickel and dimers, and because we're at the end, they'd spent all the money. And, you know, so it's tuppence here and tuppence there, and it was very hard often working on some of the projects that we were expected to do for not very much money. And projects like Princess Bride were great because it was basically an American budget with American expectations and very enjoyable job. I really, really liked it. And they, if they you, said to them, we need to send a three man crew to Ireland for a week with a camera, and they're probably only going to shoot for half a day. They just say, Fine, tell us who you want to send them. 

Darrol Blake  34:01  

Rob Reiner believe was 

Kent Houston  34:03  

Rob Reiner was the director,

Darrol Blake  34:04  

 and it was Pinewood?

Kent Houston  34:06  

We shot that. I think we shot it at Shepperton. Oh, right, yeah, I'm trying to remember. Doesn't realize. I'm pretty sure it was Shepperton, yeah, yeah. Billy Crystal was in that interesting early days of Billy Crystal, and very good too.

Darrol Blake  34:24  

How we doing? We not beeping any yet. All right, okay. "Fisher King," yeah. Also, a Terry Gilliam, yes, I don't remember much about effects of that. Was that to do with flying or something?

Kent Houston  34:38  

No, The Fisher King was a very enjoyable movie to work on. Again, it was, it was well produced. Lynda Obst and Debra Hill were the producers sadly Debra's    passed away, but two ladies, who very much knew what they were doing. Good script, great cast and shot in America, I think the shot in New York. Much all in New York and principally on location, very few visual effects. It wasn't a visual effects movie, but just lots of odd little bits and pieces here and there and all done using traditional technology. There was no digital stuff in that at all.

Darrol Blake  34:38  

Okay. Oh, then, then the first of your Merchant  Ivorys or at least, I presume, the first of your Merchant  Ivorys.

Kent Houston  35:26  

A lot of work for Merchant Ivory over the years. Generally, we don't get too many credits for it, but because one of the sidelines of having an optical printer and rostrum camera is that we could do titles. We tended to do an awful lot of titles for movies. And we got involved quite early on in Merchant  Ivory's history. And did tend to do all of their titles and optical effects and things. Lovely gentlemen, great projects. You always knew there'd be another one coming. And

Darrol Blake  35:58  

So you must know Paul Bradley.

Kent Houston  35:59  

I know Paul Bradley very well. 

Darrol Blake  36:02  

That was the first interview we did together.

Kent Houston  36:04  

 It was a lovely, sort of offset against Ishmael and James. And exactly,

Darrol Blake  36:09  

Exactly I do worry about him now that, because half of the company's dead, as it were, I see so titles and these, oh, next one here is the "Conquest of Paradise" 

Kent Houston  36:25  

1492 The  interesting that what you know, I'll take you through the sort of, yeah, basically, in the late 80s, what was starting to happen is that there was an awareness that the digital technology that had absolutely flourished in television was somehow going to find its way into the film industry. And I had always thought that computers would be the answer to a lot of problems. But, of course, physics. When I lived in Wellington, I think there was one computer in the whole city, and that did air traffic control, and not very well. And I just, you know, with the digitally controlled animation stand. I could see, you know, here's a tool. This is going to work. You know, one day we'll start manipulating images. And so I kept talking to various manufacturers, saying, "When are you going to do this kind of equipment so we can do film work?' And there was lots of promises. And, you know, how much do you want to pay? And blah, blah, blah. And interestingly, I heard about a company set up by a few physicists who had decided to build this equipment themselves, and they had got some development money. They'd managed to sell some of the software that they developed in the process, but they were finding it a little bit difficult to kind of make a go of it, I guess, is the best thing to say. And you know, I really liked these people and what they were doing, but in talking to them, it was clear that some things needed to change, and that was going to involve some money. And I talked to Terry about it, and basically we decided that we wanted to be involved in this company. So we got involved in 1990 with the computer film company, and both Terry and I could really see that this was the way forward for technology. And Pure  Film Company is one of the world pioneers in digital film technology, and they've got numerous technical Academy Awards. Their film scanning machinery, which was based on technology we developed in the early 90s, is now the sort of absolute pinnacle of film scanning technology. They've sold 40 odd units around the world. A lot of the CFC software technology has been incorporated in other software packages, and I was very pleased about the way that CFC worked out. But the one thing that they didn't do was ever make the equipment available for sale. So it left me holding Peerless, you know, which is still a company of traditional technology, but very much wanting to get into digital technology. So

Darrol Blake  39:03  

And  you were growing. The company was growing. Quite

Kent Houston  39:05  

The  company was growing. CFC was growing. You know, they started to do very well, and they'd got some integrity, and were able to do shots and deliver them. And so I became able to offer a range of services on a movie, digital and traditional, and I could sort of decide which, you know, which shop might be best for which technique, because at the time, optical, traditional was good for some and digital was good for others. So it was a great time for me. And we ended up some very interesting projects. And one of them was "1492,: Conquest of Paradise," which I really enjoyed working on, and we had some extremely challenging shots to do on it. One of them is when Columbus first sees the New World. And there's a shot basically of mist pulling apart, and you see a beautiful beach. And that that was a digital composite, very few people realize it. So just think it's a very nicely staged bit of smoke gun act, you know, very, very advanced composite for its days, and a wonderful shot. And nobody has any idea that it was done in a computer. Good, absolutely, absolutely. 

Darrol Blake  40:15  

You're doing extremely well.

End of Side 1

Kent Houston Side 2

 

Darrol Blake  0:05  

No doubt, there's a DVD out. Sure, I'm sure, sure. I wonder how Depardieu got on there.

Kent Houston  0:13  

They got all great, actually, yeah, I had this absolutely bizarre night that I remember for the rest of my life with Depardieu in Costa Rica, where he we were all sitting at this little bar by a swimming pool, and the chef had gone home, and Depardieu got hungry, so he just moved the door from the kitchen and cooked, cooked up a big meal. Yeah, it was excellent. It was the manner that he removed the door, and it was the most surprising. Yeah, it's locked, Gerard,

Darrol Blake  0:48  

it's a sort of door removing shape, isn't it? Okay? You're fit. Okay? So yes, we you were telling about the wonderful shot in the mist, parting and seeing the New World, which is a revelation for everybody. After that, there's a whole reign of splendid movies. "Arizona Dreams", though I don't know anything about

Kent Houston  1:18  

"Arizona Dream" was a fascinating project that came to us because of our commercials connections in France. We'd done an awful lot of very high profile French commercials, and in fact, for a while, more of our business is coming from France and from anywhere else. And nice thing about the French is that, oddly enough, they have no fear of digital technology. They're actually world leaders in a lot of digital technology in this industry. And we were approached by a producer, a lady called Claudie Ossard, who said that she'd made a movie with Emir Kusturicawho's a Serbian director, and she said it was a very unusual movie, but it needed effects and would I go to Paris to see it? And so I went over with one of my colleagues, and we went to this theater and sat and watched this movie, which was five and a half hours long, and it was absolutely remarkable, just gobsmackingly gorgeous, Faye Dunaway's in it. It's got people like Jerry Lewis, Johnny Depp, just absolutely extraordinary. I think it's Faye Dunaway's performance of her life, really. And we did a lot of very, very fancy visual effects of that film. But it is so quirky that I don't think anybody's ever really sort of taken the time to figure it out. But it was lovely. I mean, it really was a great experience. And

Darrol Blake  2:44  

By visual effects, what do you mean? I mean, you're spinning images. Or,

Kent Houston  2:49  

You know, there are things, 

Darrol Blake  2:49  

Tricking things, or,

Kent Houston  2:52  

 Well, one of the, one of the things that the character that Johnny Depp plays, one of his dreams, is to, he wants to be an Eskimo. He's read Jack London novels, and he wants to go and fish through a hole in the ice. And he's unfortunately saddled with selling Cadillacs. So he's in a Cadillac dealership one day, and there's a fish in a water tank which suddenly splashes out of the water tank and whizzes around the showroom, goes through Cadillac windows and then splashes back into the tank.

Darrol Blake  3:23  

 I see how you could  help 

Kent Houston  3:25  

 Yes, and so we ended up with a full motion controlled halibut, which we shot on blue screen, and then we composited that into the footage that they'd already shot. I mean, they, they had shot this whole movie, really, without any consultancy at all with any visual effects expertise, and so we had all the stuff to kind of make work. And

Darrol Blake  3:48  

So it was a work in progress. When you came to it, 

Kent Houston  3:50  

it was a cut ,it was a shot, cut film, but without any effects. 

Kent Houston  3:55  

And then we did a little bit of pickup work with Johnny Depp in Paris, shooting different things that we had through the film since his handy, and it was, it was a really, really great project, and as a result, we had a ended up with a good relationship with Emir, and we then started work on another film for him called "Underground", which was about Tito and the fall of Yugoslavia. And that obviously went on to become very successful.

Darrol Blake  4:27  

Next one on this list is "The  Madness of King George", which, I mean, that was taking out television aerials ? Or 

Kent Houston  4:37  

"The Madness of King George" was some, some crowd replication. There's a some sequences outside St Paul's where they had to have a big crowd. And obviously it's the usual thing where, yeah, you know, you don't have enough people, so you have to sort of move them around and shoot them in slices. And yeah, the complication with this was that it was actually a moving shot they want the. camera to move down from the dome of St Paul's to the crowd, yeah. And luckily, they had a terribly skilled cameraman who was quite hip to all the technology, so we're able to sort of shoot all these people. And

Darrol Blake  5:14  

it was different positions. Nick Hytner's first film, of course, yeah. He presumably was surrounding himself with real pros. 

Kent Houston  5:20  

He did appear to be surrounding himself with real pros. He had very good producers, and Andrew Dunn was the DP, a very skilled man, and it was a relatively straightforward job. I mean, again, it was in the early days of digital technology. There was a certain amount of nervousness about it. But, you know, when they started to see the shots come through. They were, they were fine,

Darrol Blake  5:44  

Good. Can you remember any, I mean, there's 12 Monkeys, White Squall, Loch Ness, Mary Riley, or that, that sort of mid 90s period. Is there any, any particular one which you could remember fondly, or was a bugger, or whatever. 

Kent Houston  6:01  

The mid 90s, a couple of really interesting experiences for me. One of them was work on Braveheart, and we were asked to provide location motion control services to the movie in Ireland to shoot scenes of the gathering armies where, again, they didn't have enough people, they needed to replicate them. And that was a very interesting job, working with Mel Gibson and David Tomlin. And terrific, just terrific. 

Darrol Blake  6:34  

You used the word location that was then. Did you mean that you worked in Ireland,

Kent Houston  6:38  

A field, in Ireland, by that time, we developed portable motion control systems instead of the big studio fixed ones, and we actually were sending crews all around the world to do commercials, bits of movies, things like that. And "Braveheart" just happened to be a movie that ended up being phenomenally successful, and just it was a very interesting job as well to work on. Went very well for us, and it established a good relationship between us and the company that were doing the visual effects. 

Darrol Blake  7:12  

And the picture got an Oscar.

Kent Houston  7:13  

 I think it got more than one.

Kent Houston  7:17  

And then the next really interesting job for me, which was a real bugger, but still interesting, was Mary Riley, which, you know, is, of course, based on famous Robert Louis Stevenson story. But it's, it's very, it was very, very beautiful film of fantastic sets and gorgeous photography. John Malkovich, Julia Roberts, yeah, I think it's a terrific movie, but Stephen, Stephen Frears directed it, and they had very ambitious ideas about how they were going to do the Jekyll and  Hyde transformation, and they I wasn't involved at the beginning of this movie, and I was brought in because a lot of it was going wrong. It continued to go wrong for a while, but we did eventually figure out a way to make it all work. And in fact, some of the transformation work that was done, bear in mind, it was in the early 90s. It was actually quite remarkable, and I was very proud of what we did. And I mean, it was painful, and we ended up having some of the work done in London, and we did some of it in Los Angeles, at the branch. We then opened for CFC, just because we had a better concentration of particular kind of artists over there.

Darrol Blake  8:36  

And that had just opened, you just opened that, that branch before 90s, yeah, oh, I see Yeah, because Mary Riley was 96 Yeah. So you going some time? Yeah? Uh huh. Loch Ness,

Kent Houston  8:51  

Yeah. Loch Ness was an interesting job that 

Darrol Blake  8:54  

You created a monster.

Kent Houston  8:55  

 We did. We created a CG Loch Ness monster, and a CG Loch Ness baby, and a lot of compositing, actually a charming movie, nice project to work on, well produced, well directed, again. Just don't know why it didn't quite work, but you know, the movie's great, and I was very happy with the work and very happy with the way everything went on it. Yeah.

Darrol Blake  9:19  

And then there's another Ridley Scott, "White Squall".

Kent Houston  9:22  

White Squall was, again, an interesting movie. Again, it's this thing where I think they go into a film thinking there won't be many visual effects in this movie. And then, of course, when you want a storm, you can't get one. And when you're out at sea, filming that's not actually at all as easy as anyone thinks. So we were engaged to come up with some storm sequences, or enhancement of storm sequences, which we did, and we did some computer generated water and a lot of sky replacements, putting in for boating, sort of clouds and so on, things like that. Interesting job. I. Good.

Darrol Blake  10:04  

"Some Mother's Son", I don't recognize "Some Mother's Son"  aka Sons and Warriors, yeah,

Kent Houston  10:10  

Some Mother's Son was a film about the IRA  And very moving, very strong, very powerful film. And basically for that, we had to provide crowd enhancement. They recreated some of the IRA parades in Belfast. But obviously, for all sorts of reasons, couldn't have that many people. So we did our usual sort of tricks to make it look like a much bigger gathering. I see very powerful moving movie.

Darrol Blake  10:43  

Who directed it?

Kent Houston  10:44  

 Terry George.

Kent Houston  10:50  

Double check that, but I'm pretty sure.

Darrol Blake  10:52  

 it doesn't say I couldn't trace a director. Sorry, another, the next one the list is another Merchant Ivory, which is Surviving Picasso Yes, yeah. And Paul told us that, of course, they had to make the film without using one inch of any Picasso work. Yeah,

Kent Houston  11:11  

That's right. That was, again, it was a lovely job. And, you know, working with Hopkins is always great, very rewarding. And their main contribution to that was a sequence which is set, I think, either during the Second World War or just after, when food was very scarce in France. And there's a sequence basically where a cat is after some mice and an owl grabs a cat, then takes the cat away. And you know, being in France, there's and with the attitude to animals, I think they thought that they were going to be able to shoot it. And of course, it's a daytime shot, and you can't get an owl to do anything in the daytime. So the poor thing flapped around for a while in the vineyard, and then they sort of said, well, can you help? And so for that, we did a CG owl and a CG cat. And that that worked. It was very interesting. Job worked out very well. 

Darrol Blake  11:11  

Did you do that on location ? 

Kent Houston  11:30  

We shot, we shot the the footage on location down in the south of France and and then obviously, did the computer work back here. I Hmm,

Darrol Blake  12:25  

oh, "Fierce Creatures" we know about that was that was that, did you create a fierce creature?

Kent Houston  12:29  

"Fierce Creatures" was an odd sort of mixture. I mean, Kevin Kline plays two roles in the film, so there's a lot of split screen during Kevin Kline's and a lot of it with moving camera, which means you have to use a motion control camera, and he is such a professional actor, quite easy to shoot, to be honest. He absolutely got the process and some nice stuff. I mean, unfortunately, it's so good, I don't think people realize quite what's going on. And the makeup of him as the son and as the father is so different. It could be two different people. And that's an odd thing. We've done this before, sometimes on shows where we've had the same person sitting around a dinner table and people haven't realized that it's actually the same person. And so what's the big deal? It's all the same guy.

Darrol Blake  13:17  

 Yes, sorry, I've got, I've got a story about that sort of things. So it's, it's 2001 and our world, okay? Butcher Boy,

Kent Houston  13:29  

yeah, "Butcher Boy" was a great movie. It's one of the movies that I, I'm the most proud of, in a way. It's, again, a film that is absolutely amazing a lot of people haven't seen. It's very tough. It's basically about the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, about boarding schools, priests, nuns, you know, the Ireland in the 50s and 60s, and basically about a young boy who goes mad and his visions and his behavior. It's enormously powerful, and it was a real, real pleasure to work on that film. Neil Jordan was the director. Sinead O'Connor is in it and plays the Virgin Mary. A lot of very surreal images and terrific performances. Film looks beautiful and shot by the late great Adrian. Biddle -  looks terrific, 

Darrol Blake  13:29  

Extraordinary. I don't recall  it at all.

Darrol Blake  13:54  

The Edge,

Kent Houston  13:55  

 Yes, "The Edge" was directed by a fellow New Zealander, Lee Tamahori, and it's a movie about some city people who are involved in a plane crash in the Rockies and are then stalked by a bear. And the question is, which of them is going to survive, who's going to get out alive? And. It's basically Alec Baldwin and Tony Hopkins and Elle McPherson. And it's It's about relationship between Baldwin and Hopkins and who's the smartest of them all. It was originally called Bookworm, and the character that Hopkins plays is a bookworm. And you obviously sort of sold the idea that the guy who reads all the books isn't going to be the one who can make it out alive,

Darrol Blake  15:25  

But he's read a lot of useful things.

Kent Houston  15:26  

 Read a lot of useful things. And we had, we filmed, we did some shots with a real bear, with a motion control camera, did a bear attack. Obviously, we couldn't have a manually operated camera near any of the bear, so we

Darrol Blake  15:40  

 Had a manually operated bear. 

Kent Houston  15:42  

Well, they did have a manually operated beer actually, which didn't really do anything, Twitch and jerk and so on. You know, unfortunately, that's a sad aspect of a lot of what we do is repairing things that don't  work on which a lot of money has been spent.

Darrol Blake  15:42  

I worked with a director, well, I mean, in the next office, as it were, to a director at Thames, who, after she'd shot her piece, would take it into the mending shop, which, which was her name for editing. Yeah,

Kent Houston  16:10  

That's right, yeah.

Darrol Blake  16:16  

Fallen, which? Fallen, fallen, I don't again recall.

Kent Houston  16:20  

yeah, "Fallen" is basically a movie about evil and how evil is actually contagious and can be passed from person to person. You know, I think there's a thoughts that, you know, you're born evil, and there's thoughts that if you hang out with bad people, you'll become bad yourself. And I think this movie is in a concept. Is showing that evil can pass on its own from one person to another. So it's basically about, isn't there something on the door saying, interview in progress?

Darrol Blake  16:53  

So that was,  Oh, right, Back to " Fallen". That was made by - 

Kent Houston  17:10  

That was directed by -  Oh God, 

Darrol Blake  17:14  

Was it  an English film?

Kent Houston  17:15  

It's an American film, a Warner  Brother's picture, and it was shot in Philadelphia. And yeah, mainly in Philadelphia. Greg Hoblit was the director.

Darrol Blake  17:28  

I'm sure he'd be pleased to be named. "The  Man In The Iron Mask". 

Kent Houston  17:37  

Yes "The  Man In The Iron Mask" was it came to us as a result of our work on "Braveheart'. " The Man in the Iron Mask" was directed by William Wallace, - Randall Wallace, who wrote Braveheart. Ah, right. And so he approached us, and we got involved. And that because,

Darrol Blake  18:01  

Sorry, William Wallace was the hero of Braveheart". 

Kent Houston  18:03  

William Wallace was the hero. too many Wallace's. 

Kent Houston  18:09  

Yeah, so he approached us similarly, got involved in that. And that was just a mixture of things. There are, there are two, who's the actor? Twins? Yeah, there's a pair of twins played by famous American Actor, 

Darrol Blake  18:28  

Yes, yes, yes. Baby Face, 

Kent Houston  18:30  

Leonardo DiCaprio, that's it, yeah. And he walks around himself, yeah. So there's jobs like that that we did. That was quite an interesting film.

Darrol Blake  18:40  

 Made in France?

Kent Houston  18:41  

 Shot in France, yeah, mainly on location, bit of studio work, and then post produced, all the editing, and that was pretty much done in America. 

Darrol Blake  18:50  

So were you by this time? Were you flitting backwards and forwards to the to the states? Yes, all over the place. 

Kent Houston  18:55  

By that  timemost of my work was actually coming out of the United States, and I ended up eventually moving to the US, but "The  Man In The Iron Mask" was about the time I made the move. So we did work in LA on it, and we did work here, 

Darrol Blake  19:11  

Right, right. So where are you based now then?

Kent Houston  19:16  

Santa Monica,

Darrol Blake  19:16  

Oh, right. "Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas"

Kent Houston  19:24  

Yeah, that was a good you know, it was good fun. It was, again, a well produced movie with some nice effects in it. There's some really fun stuff in it that we did with at one point, the boys are starting to hallucinate, and the pattern in the carpet comes alive and starts running up their legs, which we had a lot of fun doing. And there are people with grotesque heads. There's a famous sequence called the Lizard Lounge, which basically is this load of people in business suits who've got sort of lizard head and tails. And it's, it's in the book. And. Yeah, they originally somebody was going to build a load of lizard suits, but then the budget for that came in, and it was astronomical. So it was one of those things where we needed 16 people, and we had five, I think, and so Terry wanted the shot to have a camera move in it. So we had to do it motion control, and do the move going backwards, going backwards, going backwards, and then move all these people around and populate the bar. Johnny Depp is sitting in the bar as well, on a stool. And the interesting, two interesting things about that scene is that we shot at the Ambassador's Hotel, which for me, was quite interesting, because that was where Robert Kennedy was assassinated. 

Darrol Blake  20:48  

And it's now no longer there. 

Kent Houston  20:49  

It's in the most extraordinary place. I mean, very odd to be working there.

Darrol Blake  20:54  

I was in LA a couple of weeks ago, and we were shown a stone in the corner of completely empty lot. Yeah, and there's a it said Ambassadors. And I thought was that, was that a theater or a cinema or something? And then somebody said, Ambassadors Hotel, of course, I remember the assassination, 

Kent Houston  21:12  

That's right. And so, you know, it was sort of quite overwhelming for me to be in that environment. And the shot itself was very difficult, because this shot, it was designed in such a way that as the camera pulled back, it revealed the tracking rails that the camera was running on. And obviously you can't have that in the middle of a cocktail lounge. So we had to do this one last take once we got all the other passes where we actually took the camera back a bit, removed the rails that had just run over, went back a bit further, took out another set. But of course, we couldn't relay the rails in exactly the same position, because they would never have gone to the same place. And that was our very last take. And luckily, it all worked out, so we ended up with a nice clean patch of carpet to strip back in on the shot.

Darrol Blake  21:57  

I'm pleased that you're still challenged. Well, "Darkest Night" again, I don't know, yeah, 

Kent Houston  22:12  

Don't know much about Darkest Night 

Darrol Blake  22:13  

All right, okay, "Titus."

Kent Houston  22:15  

"Titus,"  yeah. "Titus" was  made in Rome. It was made in Rome. It was fascinating job. Julie Taymor is extraordinary, a really extraordinary person. She likes to work on her own. Doesn't really have an assistant, takes on an enormous amount, terribly inspiring, very enthusiastic. Italian production and crew and creatively absolutely wonderful, but in organizational terms, what you'd expect, but we did some amazing work on that. Again, not many people have seen the movie, but there's a sequence, for instance, where Laura Fraser is standing on a tree stump in a swamp, pleading, and she's actually had her hands cut off and replaced with twigs, and her hands /stroke twigs are in front of her face, and we basically had to remove her hands digitally and then put in these CG twigs that are actually tracked onto her wrists and figure out a treatment for the stump so it wasn't too grizzly, Very, very difficult work and very powerful shot, very powerful. I think people look at it and just think she's kind of, you know, got mitts on and she's holding some little branches. But it's not at all like that. It's a much more complicated, and a lot of very complex work on that film.

Darrol Blake  23:46  

And did you increase the number of soldiers, or did you

Kent Houston  23:49  

We did bits of replication? We did things like, you know, that people talk about the matrix shots, the time slice shots, you know, Titus has a time slice shot, you know, which is set at a dining table, and a gentleman is actually spitting, and, you know, the spit is caught in, you know, time slice, and it's, it's early stuff, but people kind of ignore it and acknowledge that it's there. 

Darrol Blake  24:18  

Yes, I mean, got wonderful notices, I remember, but didn't, didn't, you know, pack them in.

Kent Houston  24:23  

Well, neither has the stage play, really, has it? No, no. Well,

Darrol Blake  24:27  

People go to see the blood, don't they? I mean, it's, you know, your Shakespeare, "Angela's Ashes", yes, was that the first time we worked with Alan Parker? No,

Kent Houston  24:37  

I actually worked with Alan  Parker on "The Wall". We did the the animation work for "The Wall". which was a very interesting project. Yes, Gerald Scarfe designed, but the challenge on "The Wall". was that the film was anamorphic. And there was nobody in Britain who could film animation in the anamorphic format. So we actually worked with Panavision to design a system that would allow us to do that. And it was great because it all worked, but it was a little bit difficult because were the only people who could do it. So a lot of pressure to get everything right and get it done. 

Darrol Blake  25:16  

It was a fairly unhappy film. I seem to remember from people close to it

Kent Houston  25:20  

 I think it was a tough project, you know, it's, you know, it's autobiographical and quite intense for a lot of people, but it's beautifully crafted. I mean "The Wall". is the most extraordinarily well made film, if you take yourself away from, you know, whatever you may have heard about it and just look at it. Yeah. Photography is exceptional. Bob Geldof, who plays the hero, is terrific. And obviously there are songs in it that people will never forget. I found it a great project to be involved in. I mean, it's technically very challenging, and Parker, obviously is an interesting director. That was my I was actually not my first contact with him. I had done some commercials work with him. And I don't know if he really knew who I was, but we had already worked together by the time we did "The Wall".

Darrol Blake  26:17  

That was that some way back in the in the story, right ? 

Kent Houston  26:19  

Some way back, yeah, indeed. And "Angela's Ashes" came to us. It's a period film, so the bulk of the work on Angela's Ashes is just making sure that certain things do look of the period and some location fixes. But there was one shot I remember to this day, which still makes a bit of a chill run down my spine, that they asked us to do, was a POV from a ferry of Manhattan, and they shot it. It was a contemporary piece of footage, but we had to remove the World Trade Center from it. And of course, I became very familiar with that skyline during the process. And of course, just a few years later, we got familiar with that skyline again. So it's, it's very odd thing to see.

Darrol Blake  27:19  

"Nuremberg", 

Kent Houston  27:20  

No,I didn't .That's a IMDb thing that they keep putting on. I've had them take it off about five times,

Kent Houston  27:28  

Right? Okay,

Kent Houston  27:28  

They keep putting it  back on again. 

Darrol Blake  27:30  

"Vertical Limit". 

Kent Houston  27:30  

"Vertical Limit", yep. "Vertical Limit" was a great project for me because basically, it was a large Hollywood movie that was made in New Zealand, in my homeland, and it was produced by a New Zealander and directed by a New Zealander. So I ended up basically back in my homeland, in perhaps the most beautiful part of New Zealand, for nine months on Hollywood salary. So yeah, very physically arduous movie. A lot of the locations we had to go to every day could only get there by helicopter. We all had safety bivouac equipment in case the weather came in and we got stuck up on the mountain and had to stay overnight, which did happen, but didn't happen to us. fortunately. Quite a lot of high altitude work, lot of helicopter filming. It's basically a interesting enough. The movie is an evolution of a story that I was looking at doing several years earlier, called Into Thin Air, which is a book written by Jon Krakauer about a Everest expedition that went wrong. And there's some discussion about that job. And then I believe, for casting reasons, it sort of got put to one side. But I guess somebody

Darrol Blake  28:48  

 Was it a period story? 

Kent Houston  28:50  

No, it's, it's based on a climbing story from the 90s where, and

Darrol Blake  28:55  

I think it was, what it would might be, the Mallory expedition.

Kent Houston  29:01  

It's one where there was a terrible storm hit Everest, and one of the guides got trapped, and he was still able to be reached by a satellite phone, but they couldn't get to him, and he died while he was still in contact the outside world. But that may still get made, and there is discussion about it at the moment, great story, very powerful, but basically "Vertical", and it was a sort of a spin off of that, but a bit more of a sort of an adventure journey. But I really enjoyed it. I was completely knackered at the end of it, but loved the job.

Darrol Blake  29:37  

And who were you slaving for? Was that Warner Brothers or Universal? 

Kent Houston  29:40  

Sony Pictures, but the director, Martin Campbell, is, oh, he's television, yeah. Well, I had done a lot of work for Martin in commercials in London, and knew him very well. But Martin's extraordinarily energetic and very hard to keep up with. And. you have to keep up with him. So I was ready for a good rest by the time I finished that.

Darrol Blake  30:04  

So you said he was a New Zealander? Yeah, yes, his partner is a New Zealander, okay? "Beyond Borders", yeah.

Kent Houston  30:13  

"Beyond Borders", again, was a job for Martin Campbell. It came from Paramount, and it's a lovely film, really, about international medical relief and charity. Again, didn't do terribly well in the box office, but a great movie got some lovely stuff in it, and we do a huge mixture of things in that film, some I can't talk about, but others, there's a baby that features strongly in the film,

Kent Houston  30:24  

What do you  mean, you can't talk about,

Kent Houston  30:50  

Because I can't, 

Darrol Blake  30:51  

Oh,

Kent Houston  30:53  

Digital technology, 

Darrol Blake  30:54  

Oh, I see, I see, right? 

Kent Houston  30:56  

But there's a sequence, a number of sequences involved in this baby is supposed to be incredibly thin and malnourished, and we shot most of  "Beyond Borders" in Namibia, where there's actually quite a good health system, and people are very healthy, although they just sadly had a polio outbreak there I see. But they couldn't find a skinny baby, so they decided to bring down a load of Ethiopians, and then the Namibians suggested that wasn't a great idea. So basically, we had to digitally thin out this baby, which is really difficult. I mean, really, really difficult, but we did it, and it's really, it's quite amazing. Most people don't realize that that's been done. I mean, very few people realize, and those that do realize don't quite believe it, but it was a tough work, really enjoyable. And the interesting thing about that film was, as I mentioned, we shot most of it in Namibia. Angelina Jolie is the star, and of course, that's where she's gone to have her first child, back to the very same town we filmed "Beyond Borders",

Darrol Blake  31:59  

Right? Oh, that one   "Beyond  Borders", yes, sorry, the penny suddenly dropped.

Darrol Blake  32:05  

"Racing Stripes", ?

Kent Houston  32:06  

 Yeah. "Racing Stripes", was a fun movie for kids. I mean, as a parent, I always been very much aware of the lack of good movies for kids, and spent countless Saturdays wandering around Central London, looking for movies I can take my kids to. And 

Darrol Blake  32:24  

You sorry, you've suddenly acquired a family. We know in this interview, yes, the first time you've mentioned the family, presumably you you found a wife at some point.

Kent Houston  32:36  

 I have had a wife at some point. Yes, I had, I have two daughters born in the 80s, and yes, so "Racing Stripes", came to us. Basically. It's just a charming talking animal movie about a zebra that convinces itself it's going to win the Kentucky Derby. Lots and lots of talking animal shots, hundreds of them and shot on location in Africa. Lovely shoot. Lovely job went very well. Good fun. Nice people,

Darrol Blake  33:10  

"The Brothers Grimm".

Kent Houston  33:14  

"The Brothers Grimm", well, what can I say?

Darrol Blake  33:21  

Who was the director of that? I wonder. 

Kent Houston  33:23  

The director of that was Terry Gilliam, Probably the most miserable experience of my career. I'd say. Putting it all together. It started off very well. A lot of good ideas, a lot of nice images, a lot of enthusiasm. Along the way. It kind of became somewhat off the rails and went a little bit out of control. The work was incredibly difficult. We had a lot of fixes that we had to make an awful lot of stuff that should have worked on set and didn't with physical effects rigs and so on. And I had been asked to reduce the budget in order to get the film greenlit. And the understanding was, obviously that later on down the line, if there  extra things, we'd get paid for them. And from a business point of view, it was a very difficult job to do, We did get paid. 

Darrol Blake  34:33  

So in the preparation period you were, you were almost a producer. I mean, you were 

Kent Houston  34:39  

In the prep period, what I was, 

Darrol Blake  34:41  

Or you were tendering, as it were, with the budget?

Kent Houston  34:43  

 Well, we basically, When you get a special effects film come to you have do a  break down, and then you figure out a budget. And sometimes that budget is competitive, and they'll get other bids. And then sometimes it's just, you give them the number, and they'll see if it fits into what they have, and I believe that what they had was less than what they needed. And

Darrol Blake  35:08  

That's the story of my life,

Kent Houston  35:11  

But it just became a very unhappy film. The combination of Terry and the Weinsteins really just wasn't a good one, and for all sorts of factors, I mean, they they obviously have their position, you know, as heads of the studio, and they need to have a certain amount of economic responsibility, and then Terry has the responsibility as a director. And I kind of  stuck in the middle.  Yeah, yeah. And I, you know, there was a potential for a really, really extraordinary movie with some extraordinary stuff in it. And really, there's a mixed up movie with some extraordinary stuff in it, and great performances by Heath Ledger. I mean, that was the thing that was was funny, is that it came out before "Brokeback Mountain", and the critics didn't like it very much and slagged it off. And, oh, we've always said Heath Ledger's a terrible actor. But of course, then "Brokeback Mountain" came out, and they're all like, oh, well, we've always said Heath Ledger's a wonderful actor. 

Darrol Blake  36:18  

Oh, you must be talking about the states because, because because it opened after "Brokeback Mountain" here, 

Kent Houston  36:23  

Yes, I'm talking about the States. Yeah,

Darrol Blake  36:27  

It's confusing, yeah. And the other was the Australian lad, wasn't it? 

Kent Houston  36:32  

No, Matt Damonis the other star. 

Darrol Blake  36:34  

Oh, sorry, sorry, yeah. 

Kent Houston  36:36  

Matt is obviously very good.  aknowledged to be a very good actor. But there were some real positives about "Grimm".  One of them was that I got to live and work in Prague for six months, which was excellent and

Darrol Blake  36:51  

The Barranburg or whatever.

Unknown Speaker  36:54  

Yeah. Barrandov Studio.

Darrol Blake  36:56  

 Barrandov Studio

Kent Houston  36:57  

That's right, which is a, you know, lovely old studio that needs a good clean and then the other great thing is that, from the production design point of view, it's a remarkable film. A chap called Guy Dyas did the designs for it and designed the sets, and it was wonderful. I mean, he built a little medieval village, and I went up there once with my daughter, who was about 20 at the time, and there was nobody around. They'd finished building the village. And she said, "Look", She Said, "Can you leave me here for a moment?" And I went, "Okay, "and I walked off, and just went and sat in the field nearby. And she came back, and she was quite moved, and said, "You know, Dad, I used to play in this when I was little." which I thought was so remarkable.And she said "He has got this kind of thing absolutely perfect." It's Marvelous. 

Darrol Blake  36:57  

 Indeed. "World's Fastest Indian"  Another Tony Hopkins,

Kent Houston  37:53  

Yeah, do you need to do your changing thing? David,

Darrol Blake  37:59  

Yeah, okay, let's have a pauser.

End of Side 2

Kent Houston Side 3

Darrol Blake  0:26  

Right  Okay, The World's Fastest Indian, which is another Anthony Hopkins, 

Kent Houston  0:30  

That's right. The great thing about World's Fastest Indian is that it's set in New Zealand, and it's about motorcycles. I had spoken to

Darrol Blake  0:40  

End of story, really, but do go on. 

Kent Houston  0:42  

I'd spoken to Roger Donaldson while he was in pre production, and I'd said to him, I was very interested in being involved in the movie. He said, really at the time, that they didn't think they had much in the way of effects and but, you know, we would keep talking, and I was fortunate enough that he did get me involved later on, and I just It's one of the greatest movies I think I've ever worked on. I enjoyed it so much. Very professional bunch of people. It was privately funded, so there's a lot of positive aspects to that. Obviously, the subject matter was great. I loved working with Hopkins, and it's a terrific film. I mean, it's, it's got great performances, 

Darrol Blake  1:08  

Was it American Finance?

Kent Houston  1:33  

A mixture some Japanese, some New Zealand, some private finance from here and there. But you know, if you can, it's a good way to make a movie, because you can make the movie and then go and sell it, and it's a it's done on business and that everybody who sees it absolutely loves it, but it hasn't pulled the box office audience. But it is the most gorgeous looking film. I mean, the photography is extraordinarily good. The art department side of it is good. And, of course, Hopkins is fantastic. I just loved it. I really, even if I didn't know anything about bikes, I think, 

Darrol Blake  2:09  

How was his accent?

Kent Houston  2:10  

 It was pretty good. It was pretty good. I mean, it's a tough one, though the New Zealand Southland accent has a touch of Scottish in it, but it's, it's definitely a New Zealand accent, and some of Bert Munroe's family actually went to the shoot and got quite moved because he had their father down to perfection.

Darrol Blake  2:33  

 Yeah. Yeah, good. "Legend of Zorro",

Kent Houston  2:39  

Yes. "Legend of Zorro" is another Martin Campbell film, Sony Pictures. Again, that's a sequel to the original Zorro film that Martin did, and we shot it in Mexico the year before last. Again, it wasn't going to be a very big visual effects movie, but ended up having a lot of effects in it. Some of them were usually kind of thing, of things not quite working on the day 

Darrol Blake  3:06  

Are you amending again,?

Kent Houston  3:08  

 A bit of mending. And then there was a train crash that they just couldn't afford to shoot. It's a period film with a steam train in it. And there are issues with running steam trains on Mexican Railroad, which we had to address, but all shot in and around the location in central Mexico, not a very pleasant place, but a nice shoot,

Darrol Blake  3:32  

But no studio work then.

Kent Houston  3:34  

 We did a tiny bit of studio work. They got a deserted tobacco warehouse and turned that into a studio but very luckily , they found a hacienda, I think it's 17th century, which was in considerable disrepair, quite big, and it had an old tannery and I believe a silversmith plant attached to it, which were derelict, and they managed to figure out some sort of deal with the owner where they could use it as a set, as long as they left it safe. And they actually dressed it as two separate haciendas, and then used all the ancillary buildings for different locations. So it actually worked out very well, and the 90% of the movie was shot in around that hacienda.,

Darrol Blake  4:22  

yeah, yeah. I mean, this is the by the, by really. But Sony, of course, bought MGM, didn't they?

Kent Houston  4:28  

Well, it was a merger of interests, yeah, it was a purchase. But I believe that that is in the process of disentangling itself.

Darrol Blake  4:38  

Yes, I hear now, what I was thinking about was, was the old MGM lot in Culver City. I mean, I think that's now called Sony studios, isn't it, or something. The

Kent Houston  4:49  

it's a bit of a mix up. There's, there's like, two big film studios in Culver City, and yeah, Sony have both of them now. And I.

Darrol Blake  4:58  

Yeah, yeah. The story continues. 

Kent Houston  5:02  

The story continues. MGM were just across the road in Santa Monica from my office, but I believe they've gone somewhere else now. 

Darrol Blake  5:10  

Yeah, yeah, another story. So we're be up to more or less up to date, aren't we? I gather that there may be something on here that I don't know about. I mean, between "Zorro" and the Bond, the current Bond, there must be countless commercials and other things going on out there.

Kent Houston  5:32  

I basically from the end of Zorro, I decided to take a break. So I've actually not been on a movie since October last year, just trying to sort of catch up on a few things in life. And you know, the company's been busy on various projects. But not me personally,

Darrol Blake  5:53  

But, but I was under the impression that you're working on the current Bond  

Kent Houston  5:57  

The  company is.

Darrol Blake  5:58  

Yes, right, right. Okay, looking back over it. Do you think if you've now taken a break, do you now think that you've come to a sort of fork in the road, or that you will come back to the same sort of, will you go into be a producer? Will you,  you seem to  talk like a producer quite a lot of the time.

Kent Houston  6:21  

Well, you know, I have to deal with a lot of money both, you know, a company owner and as a head of department. You know, you end up dealing with that sort of thing. I think it's like the situation. A lot of people say to me, don't you want to direct? And I actually, having worked with such brilliant directors and watch them in action, I look at them and think, there's absolutely no way in the world I could ever do anything like that. And where they get their inspiration from is just unknown to me. I mean, Ridley Scott, for instance, has the most amazing eye for a shot. There have been times in the past when he likes to get cover scenes with a number of cameras, and he would give me a camera, so go and get shot. Just doesn't matter, just go and pick something up. So I'd go, and I'd kind of try and frame something up and and before we turned, he'd come over and he'd say, you're set up. Let's have a look. And he put his eye on the viewfinder. He moved the camera like a 16th of an inch. Oh my god. What an amazing shot. Just things like that. And, you know, in the, you know, in the same sense as with producing, you know, good producers are remarkable, and I wouldn't want to sort of ever try and do what they do. So I just, I'll stick with doing what I do. I'm trying to spend a lot more time messing around with motorbikes, and I have done for the past few years, and I've got quite a good collection going now. But what I really like, I think my key interest in movies has not really been fantasy. It's been doing work that's invisible and people don't know what you've done." World's Fastest Indian" obviously, is not an effects movie, but there are about 120 effect shots in it of different kinds, just to help the movie work. And it's the, it's the sort of visual glue, if you like, that holds it together. And I That's the work I like. It's like, I like working on Merchant Ivory films because of that. You know, they don't, people don't go to see a visual effects movie, and it's quite nice where people say, What did you do in that? And, yeah, yeah, I would rather than say that then, oh my god, I saw that wonderful castle you put in so and so. That monster. 

Darrol Blake  8:33  

Yeah, that's, well, I've always thought it was a mark of a good director actually, if you, if you, you absorb the story, and you're in the story whisks you along, you know. But if the director starts putting himself in front of the camera and whipping the camera around in a most ridiculous way, then I think that's not the way to do it.

Kent Houston  8:51  

Yeah. So, yeah, that's it, you know, I'm looking at a number of projects at the moment, all of which are reality based. Those are the ones I prefer. No, actually, that's a lie. One of them is not reality based, but, right? That's a Terry Gilliam film,

Darrol Blake  9:13  

Right? That's far from reality. Great. Well, that's absolutely wonderful. Thank you very much indeed. Yes, you know, we'll do another in 10 years. 

Kent Houston  9:25  

Yeah.

End of Interview.