MAD GOD: Phil Tippett on the nightmarish stop-motion epic that nearly destroyed him

Mad God nearly destroyed filmmaker Phil Tippett. The legendary SFX artist best known for his iconic and groundbreaking stop-motion-animation work on the Star Wars films and Jurassic Park began working on Mad God 30 years ago and has finally unleashed his apocalyptic animated vision to the world. The man who brought us the incredible AT-AT sequence in The Empire Strikes Back, the Rancor in Return of the Jedi, and the rampaging T-Rex in Jurassic Park has finally delivered his magnum opus, a fascinating and hellish stop-motion descent into the depths of a future world unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.

The project initially began as a series of short segments that Tippett slowly worked on over the years, before he eventually became obsessed with finishing the nightmarish world he had created. He grew his hair long, wouldn’t shower, and dedicated himself to the painstaking work of executing the film, at one point landing in a psychiatric ward due to a psychotic break.

While Tippett now likens the process of making the film to feeling “like a victim of violent crime,” Mad God is finally complete and out in the world, and beginning to blow minds as it snakes its way through the film festival circuit. A haunting mixture of strikingly beautiful and grotesque imagery, the mostly dialogue-free film unfolds like a fever dream. We follow a masked character trekking through a post-apocalyptic landscape with enslaved characters marching inextricably towards their violent ends, meeting all manner of terrifying and unforgettable creatures along the way.

It’s a mindboggling and thrilling journey and one that demands to be seen on the big screen (if that’s an option). We caught up with Tippett just ahead of the Mad God screening at the Fantasia International Film Festival to discuss the film’s difficult birth, his inspirations behind the work, and his thoughts on the current state of Hollywood (spoiler: he hates it). Mad God is currently making the rounds on the film festival circuit and will screen at this year’s Fantastic Fest in Austin this September.

Bad Feeling: How does it feel now that the film is starting to make its way to people? It’s playing at festivals, and people are finally getting to see this project that you’ve been working on for so long.

Phil Tippett: It’s overwhelming. The response has been more than I could ever hope for. It was kind of iffy. I mean, I’d show it to my professional friends and they’d go, ‘it’s great, but it’s not for everybody.’ But you get the right audiences … I think people are kind of tired about the consumerism that is flowing through Hollywood. Netflix is just an engine that’s just eating up content, content content, and it comes out as hot air, hot air, hot air. You know, it’s just so much noise that you really have to dig to find something worth watching. I think it’s really abysmal.

Mad God is literally like a biblical vision, you know, in a lot of ways. It was similar to the equivalent of interviews with, say, Bach or Mozart. And when they were asked how they made their amazing music, they’d say, ‘Well, I just transcribed it you know, God told me what to do. I wasn’t thinking.’ That’s my process.

Was it a therapeutic film to work on in some ways? What was the feeling like when you finally finished it?

Well, stepping back a little bit, when I finished shooting, there was still a big chunk of time in there where it was a lot of compositing going on and whatnot. And what happened to me was, and I couldn’t even see this because I had kind of become a method director. My friends told me later, I was disintegrating into like Steve Bannon on a bad day. My clothes were ripped [laughs] and my hands were stabbed and bloody and my hair was long, and my beard was long. And I wouldn’t shower or shave.

And I was unaware of this, you know, but it got to this point. I had to force myself to go into work and just get behind the mule and plow. And it was actually kind of painful. And I had some kind of psychotic snap and ended up in the psych ward for a while. But what was interesting about that experience is — are you familiar with Carl Jung’s Red Book? He embarked on this thing. It was a secret project that he did. It took him 16 years, and it was a journey. And the journey took him to this very dark place where he got lost and his family had to go in and pull it out and send him to a psychiatrist or something. [Laughs] Yeah, the same thing happened to me. I just got sucked into this thing. And I lost all touch with reality.

The film is really open to interpretation, which makes it so fascinating, and it’s probably going to help with future viewings. I feel like I could watch this film every day and probably take something different from it.

Yeah, me too. That’s what happens to me. You know, a lot of creative people don’t know what they’ve made until months or years afterwards, and I’m in that position right now. I have a cottage in the back where I have a huge library that I use for all of my research, and there’s just tons of tchotchkes and masks that I’ve accumulated over the years. And now I’m at my cottage studio in the back, and I’m gutting it, I’m throwing everything out. I’m giving all the books away, and putting Mad God behind me, because I need to do that.

It’s very cathartic, you know, to just close the door, and then maybe at some point in time, we’ll figure out what I made. Well, I know what I made, you know, I mean, you do it, it’s very intentional, without operating from the point of intention. It was totally from the unconscious.

The images that we see in the film, are they from your subconscious? Or were they influenced by things you were reading or seeing or just the state of the world?

Everything would just get built by accident or design, you know? I need a likeable character here, and I need a disgusting creep to come in and attempt to eat it. Like that. And so I know what I want to do. And, you know, a lot of these things, some of these things are puppets I made many years ago, 20, 30 years ago.

Over the years, you’ve worked with some of the greatest directors of our time (Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Paul Verhoeven); did you take away anything specific from any one of them, or maybe something from each that helped you in your own directing skills?

They were all my mentors. That was my film school. I couldn’t afford to go to film school, so I went to art school, which is actually the best thing that ever happened to me. I had to get a student deferment, so I didn’t have to go to Vietnam. And yeah, one thing just led to the next.

A lot of the imagery in Mad God is also quite beautiful. There’s a fine line between grotesque imagery and something that can also be quite beautiful.

Oh, that’s totally intentional. Like Bosch, who could make these horrible things in their own way beautiful. As well as all the sets, you know, and then that contrast to the horrible, you know, nightmarish imagery.

You seem like someone that doesn’t necessarily like to look back on older projects. But does it ever surprise you which of your creations really stick with people over time?

No, I never think about it, you know? Yeah, you’re right. You know, I just close the doors behind me. And then I don’t think about it until you know, people like you ask me questions.

You partly funded Mad God with a GoFundMe; is that something you’d like to pursue down the road for future projects? It seems like it worked very well, in this case.

It was really terrific. We were able to support three chapters off of the money that I got from that. I supplemented it with a bunch of artifacts, so I auctioned those off, and that money [went] into Mad God. And I have some friends that are wealthy that lent me some money, and I built it up that way, and out of my own pocket. That’s what allowed me to do it.

Now, I’ve got like, 13 people working for me, you know, social media. They’re actually so important to the process that they are executive producers on the film. They’re from the Toronto Film Festival. You know, they’ve been my guides through a world I know nothing about. So I’m just in their hands. They’re doing a fantastic job.

Was it a blessing or a curse to essentially have no one else to answer to and really be limited only by your imagination on Mad God? Or was it a bit of both?

It’s not a bit of both, it’s a lot of both! I just want to put Mad God behind me, you know? For the first few years, it was a lot of fun and a lot of work. But it ended up, looking back on it, you know, I feel like a victim of violent crime. I want to put the experience behind me.

What do you expect or hope audiences take away from this film?

Well, one of the many concepts or notions that I had while I was making it, was kind of visualizing Mad God as a pot, like a hand-thrown pot that I would make. And it’s up to the viewer to dip into that pot and pull out what’s relevant to them.

Mad God is currently making the rounds on the film festival circuit and will screen at this year’s Fantastic Fest in Austin this September.