Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I'm Charlie Melcher, founder and director of the Future of StoryTelling, and I'd like to welcome you to the FoST podcast.

One of the biggest developments in modern storytelling has been the evolution of computer-generated imagery, or CGI. The rapid development of astonishing new imaging technologies has taken filmmaking to new heights, but many directors still choose to shoot using props, sets, and prosthetics crafted in real life by human hands. When executed well, practical effects and physical builds can lend an incredible sense of realism and allow a film to avoid the dated look that eventually comes from most CGI.

In this field of handcrafted movie magic, few companies match the reputation of New Zealand's Weta Workshop. When directors like Peter Jackson, James Cameron, and Steven Spielberg need the best work out there, they call Weta. Weta has crafted some of the most beloved world's ever shown on film, from timeless classics like The Lord of The Rings trilogy and The Hobbit, to futuristic hits like Avatar and Blade Runner 2049. For Disney's recent live action, Mulan, they crafted over 3,500 lifelike weapons, not to mention all the armor.

No detail is too small for their exacting standards. And it is this attention to detail, coupled with their expansive imaginations, that has led them to receive five Oscars and four BAFTA awards. And while film and television has been their main focus, their endless creative drive has brought them into new fields like video games, museum exhibits, location-based entertainment, and even mixed reality.

The primary creative force behind Weta Workshop is Richard Taylor, who co-founded the company with his wife back in 1987. Richard is the CEO and creative director and has had a hand in every major project Weta has worked on. I could not be more thrilled to welcome Richard Taylor to the Future of StoryTelling podcast.

Richard Taylor, it is a true honor and pleasure to have you on the Future of StoryTelling podcast. Welcome.

Richard Taylor:

Thank you, Charlie. It's a great pleasure to be here talking to you.

Charlie Melcher:

So I thought I would start by asking you a question that probably no other interviewer has ever asked you. And it's an innocent one. Tell me about the first thing that you can remember having made as a child.

Richard Taylor:

I grew up on a small, well, it wasn't a small farm. It was someone else's farm, but we were living in the sharemilker’s cottage at the end of the farm. And there was a creek on the farm where there was a beautiful clay that you could actually dig out of the walls of the banks of this little creek. And I started digging that out and taking it home and sculpting in it. And that's probably the first time I really discovered my love of sculpting. I actually sculpted the Loch Ness Monster in it.

Charlie Melcher:

Wow. So that's wonderful. So your first memories as a maker, as an artist, as a creative person go back to literally having your hands in the dirt, in clay.

Richard Taylor:

If I jumped forward, what? 48 years, I'm 56 now, so let's say that was happening when I was six, seven years old, I still today lament the fact that people don't any longer have that visceral and gritty connection with the materials of the world. How many kids today don't take their shoes off and actually walk in long grass? How many kids don't actually get to build sand sculptures with wet sand at the beach?

Some may argue, well, what does it matter? Technology has replaced those tactile connections with the earth, but I actually do think it matters. I do think that it's the very foundation of craftsmanship. I think it's the very inception of the creative process, the ability to see how you can manipulate other materials to form something of beauty and complexity and joy.

Charlie Melcher:

And I've had the great pleasure or honor of a tour of Weta Workshop, and it to me just seems like one of the most extraordinary makerspaces I've ever been in. I mean, it has a whole series of different shops. I mean, this is just a place of incredible creativity. Can you tell me a little bit about how you think about your workshop and the kind of people that you collaborate within it?

Richard Taylor:

Today we have 16 different creative divisions under the one roof, and that is really born out of two things. I have this insatiable desire to fill any slot of time with another creative endeavor. And it might be a bit of a problem because there's no time to slow up or rest, but the desire to actually create an environment where people can find their niche and their specific area of interest, we work in design, conceptual design, armor, weapons, creatures, miniatures, prosthetic makeup effects, props, costumes, and vehicles, but to achieve that range of work, we have 16 different departments, whether that be the steel at the engineering department, animatronics, woodworking, the cleanup department, costuming, hard surfaces department, painting, foam, latex and silicon, and on and on and on it goes, mold-making of course.

So all of these areas are required to produce the things that we desire to make. And every time a client comes to you with a new challenge, it requires a new set of disciplines. And I use the term innovating new methodologies. If there's one reason we've managed to stay in business, it's our quest to innovate new methodologies. Because that keeps us ahead of the game, it keeps us ahead of the ball, and it keeps us cost effective in a very, very competitive world.

Charlie Melcher:

What I'm struck with is how grounded in craft all of the work that you do is, that there's incredible craftsmanship, whether that's forging a sword or building a model. Why is craft important? How do you think about craft?

Richard Taylor:

I do see that craft is obviously craftsmanship, what men and women have created through history. And I do see that craftsmanship is the road markers through time that defines the culture of our countries uniquely to our own country.

If you think through the evolution of the culture of any country and what today we can go back on and reflect on, obviously since the turn of last century and news reels and broadcasting became prevalent, we've started to document history, but before that, it was word of mouth, the written word. But what manifests the written word in a physical item is a work of craftsmanship, whether that be the architecture of a building, the cut of a dress, the finery of jewelry worn around the neck. It is speaking to the capabilities and the cutting edge of creative endeavor at that period of time for that particular culture in that particular country.

So to me, when I think about what we make, when we make a prop for a movie, it's a prop, but when we've finished the movie, it becomes an artifact. And to that end, even if it is a prop for a film or a TV show, I still see that it is worthy of celebration, of archiving and being recognized as an artifact of our country's creative process.

Charlie Melcher:

What I think I hear you saying is we're not what we say. We're not even necessarily what we do. We are what we make.

Richard Taylor:

I had a little saying on Lord of The Rings which I would share with the young people that might at times find themselves lost down the rabbit hole of replication and reproduction around making many, many of the same thing. And probably the most extreme example of that was the chain mail costumes that we were making. We ultimately hand-linked 12 and a half million rings of chain mail on Lord of The Rings done predominantly by just two people.

No matter how fine and how pale the thread that you hold in your needle, if you don't weave it into the tapestry with care, thoughtfulness and craftsmanship, in some way the tapestry will be threadbare. It is imperative that no matter what part of the process, if you don't do it to the highest level of your capability, the whole process in some way will be lessened because of it. So it's actually striving to try and reach that break through the ceiling, I guess, and reach that level to try and achieve something that's truly extraordinary.

Charlie Melcher:

Let's talk a little bit about you as a filmmaker and the role that you've played in terms of creating fictional worlds, right? You are really I think one of the most sought after, one of the highest order of go-to shops. If somebody is trying to make just the most imaginative, the most creative film possible and they need help realizing it down to the smallest stitch in a belt, they would come to Weta Workshop for realizing that vision. What is it like to collaborate with some of the world's greatest filmmakers? What is it like to be that go-to place to help imagine worlds that don't exist?

Richard Taylor:

Firstly, I'd just correct the term. We're not filmmakers. We work for people that make film, but we do think of ourselves as an integral component in the creative process of film, television, location-based experience, et cetera. About one in eight of the projects that we have the good fortune of connecting with somewhere along its early development pipeline will ultimately see its way through to production.

Of course getting to work on these projects bring us into contact with a truly extraordinary ilk of human being. Because if you think about what it takes to do a film of the scale that these people are making, I always think that above all else, they have to be incredible strategists. Ultimately they're almost like a military general in the way that they have to strategize how to go on the journey, how to build the parts of the puzzle, how to bring it all together into a cohesive whole. Even a small movie which is made with a limited budget has extraordinary challenges.

Having worked in the industry for 33 years, it still amazes, baffles and delights me the process that these filmmakers go through to achieve that. And we play our part in that and I feel very thankful for that, but I give credit always to the people that are brave enough and focused enough to drive forward with these amazing pieces of art.

Charlie Melcher:

You create these very rich three-dimensional artifacts or objects, props, worlds. When you do that, it all then gets translated through the lens of the camera, right? So it ultimately gets flattened out into this two-dimensionals rectangle of various sizes. Are you frustrated by that process? I see the detail that goes into the things that you make. You're not making two dimensional things. You're making incredibly rich three-dimensional things and then it gets translated through the camera into a flat plane.

Richard Taylor:

That's a very interesting question, Charlie, because no, I'm not because I've rationalized our place in the process over our careers. Some directors, they don't see necessarily that the prop or the costume is there for inspection. It is an appropriate piece of the overall picture that they are creating. Other directors take joy in exploring the detail that is in the world and exemplifying the work that companies such as ours and others might do, and that is a very special thing.

I'd argue that the very movie that we're doing at the moment, Avatar with James Cameron, there's a director that loves exploring to the minutia level the actual cultural reference points within the objects of the world. And that is very, very rewarding, and that's the case with many of the directors we work with.

What we have done is that we have in parallel complimented our creative aspirations by doing location-based experiences, museum exhibitions, exhibits, because what that gives us the ability to do is put the objects that we build directly in front of our audience going through no filter. They don't go through the process of a director's analysis and choice of decisions around how that object is going to be seen. And that gives us an incredible opportunity to exemplify what we love to do.

Charlie Melcher:

You know, Richard, it reminds me how originally all storytelling was experiential. Sharing a story around a campfire or singing and dancing in a drum circle, they were all group participatory experiences. And film, as much as I love it, can't recreate that sense of being in it. But now with these incredible new technologies like VR and sensors, and with the popularity of immersive storytelling and location-based experiences, it's almost like we're returning to our roots in a sense of creating stories that people get to participate in.

Richard Taylor:

We are, exactly. And once mixed reality has its place in the world, it will take us right back there, multi-person mixed reality where the shaman is conjuring conceptual mythological thoughts out of the flickering flames of the campfire, the ability for storytellers to draw people in. Then you start to think about where we're going to be when the metaverse becomes prevalent and you can exist entirely within a digital world of your own construct where your avatar is interacting with a populace from across the world in a socially engaging way sharing stories. And those stories, through AI enablement, are actually forming their own constructs and building and growing and populating worlds, populating other planets and other parts of the universe all within the metaverse.

That to me is an immensely exciting area. And if it can be regulated, if the new renaissance of the metaverse can have its own controls so that it is a safe place for people to be, then the potential for another renaissance of creativity and art and storytelling will emerge from it. And what a lovely thought coming out of the back end of COVID, that we find the ability to emerge not as we went into it in 2019, but emerge out of it with a new aspiration for a heightened level of creativity into different disciplines.

Charlie Melcher:

I had a different topic or question I wanted to just touch on. When I visited New Zealand and Wellington, I got to go see a museum exhibit that you designed, Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War, at the Te Papa Museum, and was so blown away by your ability to take your craft and some of the cinematic arts and bring history alive in a way that made it just so incredibly resonant and emotional. And I just wanted to ask if you could tell us a little bit about that exhibit or just that process of using your craft to bring history to life.

Richard Taylor:

Thank you very much. I appreciate those kind compliments. We were invited eight months out from the opening of the commemoration of the hundred year anniversary of Gallipoli. For those that don't know, Gallipoli is a campaign that the New Zealand and Australian Forces participated in in conflict with the enemy, as it was known at the time. But it was a very odd campaign because the British were at war and the Kiwis and Australians, although went with enthusiasm to be part of it, ultimately realized that the enemy probably weren't the enemy, and there was a lot of conflict around the impact of this campaign. It could be argued that it played some part in changing us from a colony of England into a country in our own right.

I was very certain from the outset that you couldn't hope to tell the story of an army and connect a modern audience to the intimacies of that story. You had to find individuals, and those individuals in turn would speak for the collective. The very fortunate thing is that most of the soldiers kept diaries, very elaborate, very beautifully written diaries as a way of documenting their lives because their diaries would become their voice. And in turn, we created an exhibition.

So what we tried to do with Gallipoli, and thankfully I believe it works successfully, is very quickly take people into a labyrinth where they are distanced very quickly, not only from modern life, but from the very museum that they are in. So they very quickly forget that they are actually in a modern museum in the middle of a modern city and they get immersed entirely in the exhibition. To date, it's become New Zealand's most highly attended exhibition. We've had over three million people visit.

Charlie Melcher:

I'm not at all surprised because it had that wonderful balance of an emotional response and an intellectual curiosity, a hard thing to do to get a lot of information across and still take people on an emotional ride or emotional journey.

Richard Taylor:

And I would just say one last thing, Charlie. I think it's just a given that we all have to accept in this particular trade, in the museum trade and the exhibition trade that the general public have the potential of seeing more incredible things on the journey from their parked car to the entrance into the museum due to be unbelievable and elaborate advertising placards, the architecture of a city, the incredible things that you can see in everyday life in a city than they may discover in a museum. And that's a challenge today.

And we knew from the outset that this could not be a curatorially led exhibition. It had to be led through heart, through story, through design and share with them something that's impactful and memorable we set as our primary challenge through the use of graphic novel-like illustrations, pictograms. Even if a audience member were to run through, taking only five minutes from start to finish, enough subliminal information would be delivered through the graphic realization of the exhibition, the very large-scale paintings, the pictographic representations of the words, "Shrapnel fell like rain," or, "We dug trenches to save our life."

Whatever the pictograms were, we made a real effort to guarantee that the exhibition would imprint on whoever visited at whatever level of interest. And we're very thankful that we did that because I'd like to think that almost everyone coming through now has had some level of experience that absorbed them in the information.

Charlie Melcher:

And clearly you did that beautifully in the exhibit. You had a lot of different access points for people, depending on the time and attention that they were willing to give it. It reminds me of just a sort of deeper question about the role that you feel that storytelling plays in the world today and how important that is.

Richard Taylor:

I come from a world where we're a component in the storytelling process. So naturally I would have a bias. Some people would argue that the pivotal component of life is religion, or some would argue it's sport. Some would argue it is the communal group that they belong to, or the family. All of these of course are vital components in an individual's journey through their lives, but it is all woven together through story. Our own life from birth to death is a story and I would argue that we are players in that story every day, of course, but our decisions around how we choose to tell our own story defines the outcome, the destination.

Our needs to find story in almost every aspect of our lives, in what we read, what we view, what we interact with, the very banter around our own fireplaces, which are arguably the water coolers for the cliche of the office blocks of the world, develop story. I just acknowledge whenever I'm on the workshop floor with our team, the constant banter of storytelling is the actual energy that flows between the individuals that keeps the day rocking along and makes the day fulfilling for people because of their personal connections with each other.

Charlie Melcher:

Couldn't agree more. What I think of is the role that people like yourself play in being role models, of being inspiration for that next generation, for people who've gone before and have shown that they can make a successful career doing this and they can have the ability to express themselves and create original work and to have an impact through their imagination into the world. And so I really appreciate and thank you for the extraordinary creativity and originality and worlds that you help to create. It's making a tremendous difference in the world and for generations to come. So thank you, Richard.

Richard Taylor:

Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure chatting, Charlie, and it's nice to talk from across the world.

Charlie Melcher:

What a great pleasure to spend time with Richard Taylor. If you'd like to learn more about Weta Workshop and view images of some of their work, you can do so by visiting this episode's page on the Future of StoryTelling website at fost.org, or by following the link in the episode's description.

My heartfelt thanks to Richard for joining me today, and a special thanks to our talented production partner Charts and Leisure.

If you haven't already, please be sure to subscribe to our show. And if you're an Apple subscriber, please consider giving us a good rating on Apple Podcasts.

I hope you join us again in a couple of weeks for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong and story on.