Mark Dippe: We have a few scenes that are completely digital. We created a digital Hell. Why? 'Cause you can't fucking make Hell any other way. It's pretty obvious. I challenge anyone to try ... all those luddites out there.
R. U. Sirius (mocking): Yeah. Rub a few sticks together and try to make a decent fucking Hell.
I'm in a cafe on Melrose talking to that old demon spawn from Computer Graphics hell, Mark Dippe. When I met Dippe in the early '90s, he was the tech whiz at ILM who had just declared - in the pages of Mondo 2000 - that he'd "be the one leading the assassination team on George Lucas and Steven Speilberg" if he weren't working for them. And he didn't even get fired. He's that good.
Dippe, I discovered back then, isn't just the typical subversive hip weirdo, ubiquitous to all computer-graphics operations. The Markster is a hardcore lunatic who digs Actionism, the European art movement inspired by Hermann Nitsch that frequently involves public atrocities that push audiences and governments to the very limits of tolerance. We have sat together perusing someone's collection of torture, pseudo-snuff, and animal/human sex videos. We have shared some of the strangest things on this planet, the details of which are best left unrevealed. All in a very few meetings.
It was Dippe who threw an ILM party during the SIGGRAPH convention in Pasadena back in '93 at the newly opened Richard Nixon Memorial Library, with naked dancers, ritual scarification, postpunk music, and Timothy Leary (Nixon's "most dangerous man alive") delivering his blessings from the stage. And walked away unscarred, as usual.
Dippe helped to make dinosaurs roam again for Spielberg, he helped spawn the infernally reconstituting T2 villain that so taxed Arnie's musculature. He provided the few thrills in the abysmal Abyss.
And now, here he is in Hollywood directing a 40-million-dollar movie aimed at a primarily adolescent audience, and sweating bullets for a PG-13 rating.
Who's really evil?
Spawn, based on Todd McFarlane's comic series, is a satisfyingly complex black superhero story that asks deep questions about the use of violence for positive ends, religion as a cover for evil, and how to locate personal integrity in a sleazy world. In Dippe's words, the storyline is as follows: "You kill bad guys? You become one of them. You become what you most despise. And the priest in the church, he'll side with the general who's killing the heathens. Those are the kind of elements that, story-wise, are thought-provoking. They might cause young people to say, 'You're a little fucked-up there, going to Bank of America. You're a little fucked-up there, believing in Christian values.'"
Naturally, the ratings-meisters at the MPAA have been busting his balls. "The MPAA is driving a stake through my heart with this, because they're making me take this movie down so much. And in my mind, it's not because there's truly graphic acts of violence. Nobody gets their body ripped in half. No blood! They're actually upset because it deals with issues that are truly thought-provoking for kids, like 'what is evil'? If you say you are good, if you go to church, are you good? If you think you're doing right, can you still be part of evil? In other words, it's questioning the status quo. That's the essence of the book.
"They're a bunch of buttheads. They should stand up for something like this because deep down, Spawn is a very positive story. You have to have a contemporary urban consciousness to appreciate how strongly positive it is. What it's saying is that the world can screw you up. You've got to keep your head up because there's a lot of people out there who want to take advantage of you. And when you get taken advantage of - like a lot of us do - you can still correct yourself. You can still redeem yourself. It's an uplifting story."
Dippe and original Spawn author McFarlane have agreed that the motion picture must get a PG-13 rating, since teenagers are the primary audience for the film. Dippe and I agree that today's teenagers can handle materials that their parents would have a difficult time with. We conjecture that parents simply wish to pass on the own naive sense of unreality that allows them to feel comfortable in a highly stratified police state contained within a collapsing ecosphere. But who are we to say?
New action heroes
We're comfortably numb on Melrose Place discussing our own favored unreality or surreality, the one that computer graphics provides. "The reason I've been involved in 'digital filmmaking' is that it allows me to make the kind of images I want to see - the fantastic, the surreal, the strange, the sci-fi. But it's not just sci-fi technology that entrances me. I've always been attracted to the unknown - the other, the fantastic and the bizarre.
I asked him for some of the specific technological tricks used in creating Spawn. We both sigh. "We're using flocking algorithms to create hordes of Hellspawns. We're doing - I dunno, there's tons of tech stuff blah, blah, blah." Dippe, Gods bless him, is refusing to geek out.
I suggest we drop the tech subject completely but he suddenly becomes animated behind a point he's wanted to make. "As a digital guy, people are always asking me, 'Don't you want to get rid of actors?' Definitely not. The performers here were amazing. John Leguizamo as the Clown is a good example. With prosthetic transformation, working in combination with the computer-animated transformation that he goes through, we create a whole character that no single person could do, and that computers couldn't do. It's the synergy of the two."
Such a reasonable fella. However, as we're leaving, somehow the subject of some of the more extreme conjectures of cyberpundits and techno-fetishists comes up. A crack from my friend Josh Ellis brings out the technophile in Dippe. "Oh, I'm a total believer. I want to make the new Mickey Mouse. It'll be the body of Arnold Schwarzenneger, the head of Mel Gibson, the voice of Marlon Brando, the genitalia of John Holmes, the mind of Timothy Leary. Fuck computer-graphics-created characters. I'm gonna get into genetic engineering, and I'm gonna fucking make these things real."
