American Cinematographer - August 1987 - 68

the body, and the demands Muren
made in order to achieve his live,

Rich Townsend
installs

tiny, ultrabright headlights in
Tuck's pod, which
act as primary

effects, the model
shop faced the largest miniature
construction project since Return
Of The Jedi.
"One of the odd things
about Innerspace was that the
script specified a number of loca¬
tions in the body where Tuck is
supposed to go only once,"
Muren says. "That meant that
spontaneous

illumination in many
of the set-ups.

elaborate sets had to be con¬
structed for sequences that con¬
sisted of from one to four shots,
which meant we had a lot of mod¬
els to make. They just didn't last

long

on-screen,

but

we

wanted the

film to have a very textured look
and this was necessary to achieve
that texture. Still, it was very ex¬

build all these sets, so
many over again as we
could, which really didn't amount
to many, but there were some and
every little bit helped.
pensive

we

used

to

as

"The sets were made out
of large pieces of foam rubber,
with bits of urethane here and
there where we needed translu-

for lighting. Since Marty
always on the
move, I wanted his body parts to
look like they were always mov¬
ing, too. Some of the sets were
cency

Short's character is

tographed by a miniature Dante
actually in the body and reacting
to everything he was seeing."
Designing the sets them¬
selves was Muren's greatest challenge. To create a huge
environment that also looked in¬

credibly small, Muren employed
both concept artist Richard Vander Wende and art director Harley
Jessup to develop the contradic¬
tory style all three of them agreed
the settings required. "We worked
for quite a while trying to decide
what the inner parts of the body
would look like," Muren recalls,
"and trying to figure out how we
could make this stuff seem very
small but vast. We didn't want our
sets to look like cathedrals or au¬

ditoriums, because I thought that
was going in the wrong direction.
It needed to have an organic, tiny
look to it, while from the trav¬
eler's point of view things had to
look like they were huge distances
apart. That was quite a task to get
that look into our sets, because I

66

American

Cinematographer

had

a very different idea of how
things should look than they did
back when they made Fantastic
Voyage, which also deals with a
miniature journey through the
human body.
"I thought our film

shouldn't have such a studio feel
to it. Our is, in many ways, biolog¬
ically more correct, although we
did take a lot of liberties in some
areas. We avoided having too
many vertical and horizontal lines
in our sets because there are very

few such

things in the human
body. Consequently, everything
looks skewed as much as possible,
is made to look completely
organic, and we kept our set
pieces in motion all the time."
Once the designs of the
were
locked down, it
mained for Bill George and

sets

ILM model

shop

re¬

the
the

to construct
sets. Due to
the demands of the script, which

large scale miniature

required actor Dennis Quaid, to
through numerous areas of

pass

August 1987

built for use in a seven foot square
underwater tank, with the back
wall of set always in motion."
One of the areas where
Muren and his crew had to take
liberties was in the lighting of the
miniature sets. "The body is really
not that open," he explains. "Ev¬

erything is packed in there, except
for spaces like the throat. If any¬
thing, we were fighting the fact
that it's very dark, which means
you can't see very far, and when
you can, there's just another big
slab of flesh colored stuff or an¬
other grey structure over there.
We didn't want it to appear overly
lit in there, but it's pretty much a

low-key situation with very little
additional light, which made it
very difficult for my cameramen,
John Fante, Pete Kozachik, Kim
Marks and Don Dow, to come up
with good looks. When we could,
we

took liberties with

our

light-
American Cinematographer - August 1987

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - August 1987
