John Dykstra

“What we were doing in Star Wars was taking a 19th-century process and applying 20th-century technology to it.”

“The challenge is to do something that hasn’t been done before.”

“We were making it up as we went along.”

“There's an aesthetic to the way things blow up.”

“The audience wants to be fooled, but they don’t want to know they’re being fooled.”

“The original goal of the Dykstraflex was to make a camera that could be programmed to do the same shot over and over again.”

“Motion control was a way to get repeatability so we could put multiple layers of film together and have them all register perfectly.”

“George [Lucas] had a vision, and our job was to figure out how to put that vision on screen.”

“We had to invent a lot of the technology because it simply didn't exist.”

“The computer is a tool, just like a hammer is a tool.”