VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams On Creating Special Effects For ‘Jurassic Park’

Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams is probably the mastermind behind at least one of your favorite movies.

Williams is considered a pioneer in computer animation. He garnered multiple Academy Awards for his work on The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) and Jurassic Park (1993). After working on those three groundbreaking movies in computer graphics, his career blew up.

Now, Williams is reflecting on his life and career as the subject of a documentary, Spaz, directed by Scott Leberecht. The film focuses on his groundbreaking work on Jurassic Park, as he did what many thought was impossible.

uInterview founder Erik Meers caught up with Williams at the Spaz premiere at the SXSW Film Festival to discuss how he was able to create special effects for Jurassic Park back in the early 1990s.

“You’re dealing with an industry that had done things for 80 years, so you have the convention and standard of doing things,” Williams said. “Any upstart that comes along that says, ‘I think we can do it another way is seen as being a heretic. At the time, I wasn’t doing it to upset anyone. I just said, ‘Now that photo chemicals moved into this world of pixels and pixels don’t have a conscience, the human eye sees 20 million colors. We can calculate 16.7 million.’ So it was really in my view a matter of time until anything was possible visually, and of course, that was a shot down by the peers at ILM. I had to prove it, so the T-Rex was sort of the classic ambush. I literally had to ambush people because the ship had sailed. They were going to do a prosthetic stop-motion so I ambushed them and they didn’t know what was going to happen and everything changed.”

Watch the full interview above for more insight into Williams’ career and how the documentary came about.

Spaz is now playing in select theaters across the nation.