After 30 years and multiple Kickstarter campaigns, Phil Tippet’s long-held passion project Mad God is finally finished, and will debut at the Locarno Film Festival next week. It’s rare for these ambitious, independently produced projects to ever see the light of day (see Yuri Norstein’s The Overcoat and Richard William’s The Thief and the Cobbler). Maybe it’s because they’re too idiosyncratic in style or the stop-and-start production process frustrates collaborators and financiers? Still, there’s something irresistibly romantic to me about an artist having a vision persist for so long; sustaining a tone for decades is a proper feat!
I love the handcrafted look of this one. The blending of live action photography with complex, stop motion setups that utilize tracking shots and moving cameras is kind of irresistible to me, especially since it seems to be eschewing heavy plotting for a more free-form experimental mood piece. I hope there’s a way to see it soon, be it on the festival circuit or digitally.
My wife was in the editorial department on “Amadeus,” so we got to hang out with Milos Forman a lot, and I asked him if he could give me any advice and what he said was the best advice I’ve ever gotten as a filmmaker which helped chart my course on this film. He said, “If you want to take a good shit, you have to eat a good meal.” The more time you put into something and let it incubate, the better the result, and that’s what that 20-year period did for me.
Here’s a little making-of featurette from a few years back:
I’ve had friends working on this for years… they were ramping up it significantly when I left over ten years ago. Seemed like a fun thing to putter on if you liked crafting messily and didn’t have a home to get back to, since a lot of it was after hours, labor of love style. I was a bit too wrapped up in my sports leagues and video games to lend a hand, but it might have been fun to collage some shit-men and animate them on fire.
I myself worked on the other CG short we slapped together out of other assets, in between shows and during downtime. You can see there’s a theme to Phil’s meanderings…
I’ve been sitting here wondering how much work Tippett did on the movie before he died, and then I realized that I’ve been thinking of Ray Harryhausen. smdh
Shudder seemed like such a niche service when it launched, but it’s become one of my favorites in the last few years. I’m looking forward to checking this out.
It’s totally bizarre and disturbing. A tour de force of the macabre, in an unrelenting hell world filled to the brim with death, war, murder, torture, execution, genocide, expendable workers that are disposed of by the landfill, and more.
Pretty sure there’s a metaphor in here somewhere about a viscous cycle of mankind’s most vile and destructive tendencies and trying to cure or at least reset will just repeat the entire process over again. It’s pretty bleak.
Yeah and I loved it, if only because it was just wildly strange, grim and arresting. It definitely seems like a kind of hell but I couldn’t really interpret anything specific from a first watch. I’m hoping to go through it again with the commentary on.
