JOHN BRUNO

Visual effects supervisor. Academy Award for The Abyss. Other credits include Heavy Metal, Poltergeist 1/2, Ghostbusters, fright Hight, Batman Returns, Terminator 2, Cliffhanger and True Lies. Director of Virus.
Going back through twenty years of visual effects, I’m most impressed by the snow planet attack with the walkers in The Empire Strikes Back. The overall design and concept of these huge machines just worked for me -1 totally believed they were there and totally bought into the whole thing. The original Star Wars may have impressed me more as a film – and was probably the reason I wanted to do visual effects – but when you look at Empire, it’s much slicker overall.
In terms of a favorite that I personally worked on. I’d have to pick True Lies because that movie incorporated every possible technique to deliver a believable effect There’s the bridge attack and the physical stunts of the runaway limousine, and everything involving the Harrier. We physically pushed the envelope on those shots because Jim Cameron and I believed in doing as much for real as possible. So we built a full-size jet and put it on a hydraulic gimbal on a rooftop, where the light and altitude and all of that stuff would be accurate. Then we used digital work to remove the rig that was supporting it
For one scene, shot in Miami, we actually put the full-size mockup of the Harrier on a cable and swung it out over the street about three hundred feet in the air, with stunt people cabled to it – that was real. We also put Arnold Schwarzenegger in the same mockup and lifted the jet with a huge crane to make it look like he was taking off- another instance of going for total realism.