David Mattingly

(continued)

Interview by Alyce Wilson

So how much of a chance do you get to work on personal projects? Today you were showing us an animated sequence that you had done, a ship landing on a street and the alien picking off the people walking by. How often do you get a chance to say, "I had this idea today. And nobody's paying me, but hey, why not?"

I probably should do more of it. Actually, that shot I showed of the spaceship landing was a class I took called Directing for Special Effects. And we were all supposed to do a shot like that, put it together start to finish.

I admittedly have a bit of an illustrator's mentality in that I wait for the author of the book to spark my creative energy. One of the paintings in the show was St. Joan burning a computer, and that was actually an idea I had. And I managed to just wait around until a project came about where I could use that idea. If you come up with a good idea, as long as it's sort of related to science fiction, and 12, 14 projects cross my desk during a year, I may be able to shoehorn it onto one of those projects.

What was it like for you starting out your career at Disney?

I was blessed. I don't mean to keep bragging about this boss of mine, Harrison Ellenshaw, but he sort of spoiled me for ever working for any boss ever again. Because he simply was one of the greatest people. One of the things that amazed me about Harrison, in old times, whoever was head of the matte department would just take credit for what everyone did. And when I was working there, I learned that Harrison during production meetings, as they were showing the dailies for shots, would tell everyone exactly who'd done them. And that was so rare that anyone would give an assistant matte artist or, you know, the people who were working under him, credit. It was really eye-opening that you could be as generous as he is.

And he's also superbly organized. Actually, when he left to set up the matte department at ILM, that's how I became head of the matte department. And I became acutely aware of my failings as an organizer, especially compared to what Harrison could do. And I'm still not a great organizer. My temptation is, if I've got a project, to do it all myself. It's just hard for me to delegate stuff.

It's nice when, especially if you're in a position of authority, to learn how to not dominate the project yourself. And I've learned that over the years. It's one of the reasons I've continued to work alone. Although I love working in the studio setting, especially if there's someone else to give the assignments out.

But to answer your question, I loved working at Disney. It was actually a great time and great fun.

Do you think that there was any difference in the workplace environment between the matte department, where you worked, and the animation department?

The animation was kind of in the doldrums during the time that I worked there. It was right after The Rescuers had come out. And there was essentially not much animation going on. The animation buildings were still there. And you would go into the animation building, and they'd lined the walls with cells from Pinocchio and cells from these great classic films. So I went there and was greatly inspired by it. But I actually left Disney shortly before they hit their big revitalization and Michael Eisner took over.

And one of the reasons I left Disney is I'd worked on The Black Hole for two years, and it's sort of a funny thing. When you're working on a film, mostly you think it's going to be incredibly great. It's very hard to tell whether a film is any good while you're working on it.

Well, you know, your part of it's great. I saw it. I think it's great.

Thank you. I appreciate it. You know, I still have a great deal of affection.

It's also a funny thing when you watch a film that you've worked on. You don't really think of the scenes, you know? You think about the experiences you had surrounding making those scenes. So I have a great deal of affection for the film, just because of that.

But after it came out and it was clearly not a masterpiece, which I thought all the way through it was going to be, I thought, "Man, you know, I've just worked a long, long time on this, and it didn't turn out to be all that hot." And the one thing about doing a book cover is it takes you two weeks, three weeks to do the cover. And then, whether it comes out good or bad or indifferent, you're on to another thing.

And it's also nice because every year you do however many covers, and some of them will be really good. And then a couple of them will be really bad. But you have sort of a variety.

And with movies, you tend to work a long time on something, and if I had the experience of working on something insanely great, maybe I'd still be living in Los Angeles and being a matte artist. But it was hard for me to work on something that didn't turn out all that great.

It seems to me also it wasn't your first love, because you said that that was more the cover art. So you probably weren't showing up at people's doors and saying, "Give me five minutes." You know what I mean? It sounds like you really did end up focusing on what you love.

I did. I still love the whole book cover thing. It is my first love. I still love to go back and work doing matte paintings. It's funny; I've worked alone for so many years that when you go back and you work in a studio system, and you've got people around, it's like a vacation for me to not be sitting alone in a studio.

I was thinking about how you said you miss the physicality of a work and being able to frame it and put it on a wall. Do you worry at all about the impermanence of what you do? Or is it more like there's millions of copies of it out there; it will live forever, in some form? How do you think about that?

You know, I don't. I don't think about that. I don't mean to put myself down. I love my work, and I enjoy it. If people are looking at my work in 100 years, I guess I'll be surprised. There's a lot of illustrators that are still remembered as sort of niche illustrators, you know? Guys who did pulps in the 1950s. And if people look back at the science-fiction work I've done with that amount of affection, I'll be thrilled.

So I don't know. I've never had this feeling that this painting will be remembered a thousand years from now.

I mean, what will be people's memory. [For instance,] when you look at the most important painters of 1880, there was this painter who really is a fabulous painter named [William Adolphe] Bougeureau who was French. And he painted women sitting around in gardens. He was one of the most amazing technicians. The guy made boatloads of money. Everybody knew him.

You know, you think about a guy like Van Gogh. I mean, if Van Gogh ever thought, "Oh, my God. A hundred years from now, people will pay millions and millions of dollars for my paintings," I doubt it. I think he just got up every morning. He really loved what he did. And that was good. I don't think he had any expectation.

So you know, what people will remember in the future is kind of hard to predict. Why does certain art resonate? It's like when you look at Vermeer's work, for instance, that work resonates within a contemporary audience. And part of it is sort of the purity of the work. Part of it is the technical skill. And yet, when you look at all of Vermeer's contemporaries, and they painted the same sort of thing, women sitting around in drawing rooms and stuff like that, and it does not resonate with a contemporary audience at all. Why is that? There's a certain mystery to why paintings live on.

I've always thought that the one illustrator from our time, or the one painter from our time ... I bet Normal Rockwell will be remembered, because his work really said something about our time. When you look back at the '50s, Rockwell presented that in the same sort of way Vermeer did. And there was a magic to those canvases that will probably be remembered a long, long time from now.