Interviewer: Today in our Meet a Celebrity weekly program we are talking to a successful filmmaker Jim Slogan. Welcome, Jim.
Jim: Good afternoon, everyone. It's good to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Interviewer: So, Jim, did you want to be a filmmaker when you were growing up?
Jim: I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction. In high school I took a bus to school and I was always absorbed in a science fiction book which took my mind to other worlds. I had a deep interest in other worlds, but didn't have an idea of where it take me in life. Whenever I wasn't in school, I was out in the woods taking samples, frogs and snakes and bringing them back, looking at them under the microscope. I was trying to understand the world and the limits of possibility.
Interviewer: Sounds like you could have become a scientist then.
Jim: Well, not really. I was an artist, I could draw and paint. And I found that it was because of no video games. So I had to create these images in my head. You know, we all did as kids read a book and made a picture in our heads. And so my own response was to paint, to draw alien creatures, alien worlds, robots, spaceships, all that stuff.
Interviewer: I see. So in your art, you had this combination of science and imagination that eventually has led to movies, right?
Jim: Yes. When I chose a career as an adult, it was filmmaking because that seemed like the best way to reconcile this urge. I had to tell stories with my urge to create images. Filmmaking was the way to put pictures and stories together. And, of course, the stories that I chose to tell were science fiction stories.
Interviewer: Yes, most of your films are sci-fi, and in all of them you used some highly complex technology. Do you choose your plot to fit the technical possibilities, or do you create technology to suit your needs?
Jim: Usually we come up with ways to realize my film ideas. In one of my films, we created this water creature and we used computer generated animation. In this resulted in the first computer animated character that was ever in a movie. I witnessed something amazing. The global audience was in awe with this apparent magic. You know, any really advanced technology is hard to tell apart from magic. I thought, Wow, this is something that needs to be used in the cinema art. So in my next film, we took that much farther. We created the liquid metal figure, we created magic again and we had the same result with an audience.
Interviewer: You are known for your feature films, but do you ever do documentaries, for example?
Jim: Funny you should ask that. There was actually a moment in my life when I said: Okay, I'm going to take a break from my day job as a Hollywood moviemaker, and I'm going to be a full time explorer for a while. And so with a team, we went on an underwater exploration of a major shipwreck and made a film of that. At the same time, I was getting very interested in space science as well. I got involved with NASA. We put what we were learning on tape.
Interviewer: You must have learned a lot through these new experiences.
Jim: I learned a lot about science, but I also learned a lot about leadership. When I made my next sci-fi film, I tried to apply the principle of leadership, which is that you respect your team and you earn their respect in return. And the respect of your team is more important than all the fame in the world.
Interviewer: That's very insightful. What advice would you give to young film directors?
Jim: I would say: Don't put limits on yourself, other people will do that for you, don't do it to yourself. Don't bet against yourself. Go and take risks. Whatever you're doing, failure is an option. But fear is not.
