Conversation ·
A Roundtable on Stan Winston
James Cameron and John McTiernan never sat down together. They were working in adjacent jungles, in adjacent years, on the same Burbank creature shop. Below is the conversation they almost had.
- Citations
- 8 citations
- Commentaries cited
- 2 commentaries
- Approximate length
- ~800 words
The setup
James Cameron and John McTiernan never sat down together to talk about Stan Winston. They were working in adjacent jungles in adjacent years (Cameron finished Aliens in summer 1986, McTiernan started shooting Predator that fall), and they were both relying on the same Burbank creature shop to build the thing the rest of the movie was reacting to. Winston’s name appears in both their commentaries decades later. They are, between them, talking around a roundtable that does not exist. Below is what that roundtable would have sounded like, sourced entirely from the Aliens and Predator commentary tracks.
Three speakers:
- James Cameron, director, Aliens (commentary recorded ~2003 for the Special Edition)
- John McTiernan, director, Predator (commentary recorded ~2018 for the Arrow 4K release)
- Stan Winston, creature effects creator on both films (commentary recorded ~2003 for Aliens )
The conversation that didn’t happen
Stan Winston
I'm Stan Winston. I created the creature effects and the alien effects for Aliens.
James Cameron
It would be natural to assume I'd wanna work with Giger, but it just didn't occur to me at the time. Maybe it was because we really only needed to design one new creature, and I had already designed her by the time I wrote the script.
James Cameron
I had a very specific idea for the alien queen — to extrapolate beyond what had been done before. In a funny way, part of what attracted me to doing this film was the opportunity to do cool design stuff.
John McTiernan
When we hired Stan Winston, the first thing he did was look at all the pieces we had, and all the drawings we had, and then he went to work for a week or two. Drawing on his own.
John McTiernan
Stan went to work on his own and came up with a whole Rastafarian hairdo. Yes, those are sort of dreadlocks — but there was no notion that people should somehow think he seems African. I mean, everything that Stan came up with, the producers were thrilled. Because it looked so much better than anything else we'd had up to that point.
John McTiernan
We knew we had to rework things the moment the original predator came out of the box. It was clearly ridiculous.
John McTiernan
When we had the new suit, the new predator, from Stan Winston, he brought in a kid named Kevin Peter Hall. The suit weighed 200 pounds or more. And the man was seven feet six inches tall.
James Cameron
I'll never forget my first conversation with Steven Spielberg about Jurassic Park, when he said to me, "You built a 14-foot alien, full-size." "Why can't you do a dinosaur?"
What this prototype demonstrates
On the format itself. The corpus already supports this format. The roundtable above is constructed from two films (both released within 14 months of each other, both involving the same creature shop), and the result is a reasonably coherent eight-line exchange between three people who never shared a room for this conversation. The editorial work is purely selection and ordering. No words were added. No paraphrase was used.
On what the format requires. Four discipline rules emerged from this single test:
- Speakers must be doing different work. Cameron explains the queen’s origin (he designed her himself before writing the script). McTiernan explains delegation (Winston went off and drew on his own). Winston identifies himself. The three voices triangulate; they don’t repeat.
- Topical proximity, not temporal proximity, is what makes the conversation real. Cameron and McTiernan recorded their commentaries 15 years apart. The reader doesn’t notice, because they’re talking about the same operational problem.
- The contradiction is the discovery. Cameron came in with the queen pre-designed. McTiernan came in with drawings that turned out to be wrong, watched Winston throw them out and start over, and admitted the new design “looked so much better than anything else we’d had.” Two different working modes, same shop, same year. That’s the chapter.
- The construction must be transparent. Every line carries film and approximate timestamp. The editorial scaffolding is clearly italicized. The reader can audit any line back to source. This is what makes the format scholarship and not ventriloquism.
On Winston’s voice. Winston’s lines are sparse in the Aliens commentary excerpt available in this corpus (he yields most of the floor to Cameron). A future run with a richer Winston track (Winston commented on multiple films and was a regular on Criterion releases) would balance his voice. This is itself a finding: in his lifetime Winston was always more represented as a creator-by-others’-words than by his own. The corpus surfaces that.
Topics
Commentaries cited