HE’S THE STOP-MOTION GENIUS BEHIND SOME OF YOUR FAVOURITE CINEMATIC CREATURES — BUT FOR PHIL TIPPETT, IT’S ALL BEEN LEADING TO MAD GOD, A PASSION-PROJECT DECADES IN THE MAKING. EXCLUSIVELY FOR EMPIRE, HE EXPLAINS WHY THIS IS HIS GREATEST CREATION

WORDS PHIL TIPPETT

The genius at work — the director puts his stamp on Mad God;

Tippett putting the finishing touches to one of his stop-motion models;

MY VERY FIRST memory of being alive was a dream. In the dream I was in a crib, with bars on it. (I was that young.) I had a nightlight in my room. The door was open, and I could see out in the hallway — and then this slurpy, four-foot-long, black octopus thing came into the room and slithered across the floor. I just watched as it put its tentacles up on the bars and plopped over into the crib. That was the dream. I couldn’t have been older than two years old.

Later, when I was maybe about eight, I had a dream where I saw this huge monster, out in the back yard: just a black shape, about eight feet tall. It was standing there, staring at me, putting the fear of God into me, and I knew immediately its intentions were very malevolent. The thing was going to devour me. I realised that I had to do something, otherwise I would be destroyed. What came to me was that I must, somehow, be worse than the demon: so within myself, I conjured something, and attacked the thing, screaming. Then I woke up.

I’m guided by my dreams a lot. Dreams have always kind of followed me — or I followed them. But I have no idea why I have always been fascinated by monsters. My earliest drawings were always of things that inspired me: giant squids, hard-hat deep-sea divers, knights... There was a lot of blood and mayhem in my drawings. I just found it all very exciting.

I was a prolific dreamer while working on Mad God, my feature film. Every night I would have dreams, and I would write the dreams down, in a good-sized notebook. Sometimes it’d be as much as six pages at a time. After doing that for a few months, I was able to discern a structure to the dreams. If you talk about your dream at the breakfast table, it just evaporates — but in writing them down, I found a beginning, middle and end. It’s a Joseph Campbell deal: story narrative is innate within us.