Thru the Moebius Strip: Preproduction

Bringing the vision of a preeminent graphic novelist to the big screen with DV and desktop tools.

Less than a quarter hour after leaving the rental car lot at Los Angeles International Airport, I pull into a tiny industrial complex. No. "Industrial complex" is too grandiose a way to describe the low-profile building situated off a narrow yet busy side street near the Marina Del Rey harbor. The place could be Any Auto Repair Shop, but for the artful logo painted on its double glass door entrance. Like so many structures that house film production companies, this one is cleverly disguised. The logo on the door isn't even the name of the company residing within, all the better to hide it from star-struck autograph hounds with nothing better to do than disrupt folks who are trying to put in a hard day-and-a-half's work. 

A test render that Coproducer and Director Frank Foster describes as "very rough, but it gives an idea of how well Moebius's drawings translate to 3D."

Not that the star struck are likely to be looking for the L.A. offices of Global Productions, Ltd. That will change if things go as planned. Headquartered in Kowloon, Hong Kong, Global's parent company, Global Digital Creations Group, hopes to grow into an animation industry powerhouse. To get things started, they're animating a Saturday morning 3D animated show called Butt Ugly Martians. But that's only the beginning. They've also embarked on a two-year project in which 200-plus 3D artists and animators will bring a story by legendary French graphic novelist Jean "Moebius" Giraud to the big screen.

On this day, Global's L.A. staff has opened the door to a camera crew from one of the news services and to me, a star-struck autograph hound masquerading as the editorial director of DV. Moebius has long been one of my favorite artists. He has written and illustrated a plethora of graphic novels, many of which have been translated to a variety of languages other than his native French. In 1963, Giraud created one of his most celebrated characters, Lieutenant Blueberry, for the magazine Pilote. A decade later, Giraud was one of the cofounders of Metal Hurlant, the magazine that was the inspiration for National Lampoon's Heavy Metal in the United States. It was in the pages of the first issues of Heavy Metal that most Americans became aware of Moebius--the pen name Giraud uses to sign his darker work. His Arzach stories were weird, beautifully illustrated tales featuring a guy who flies around on the back of a pterodactyl. The Airtight Garage stories didn't always make sense, but they were cool nonetheless.

Moebius has contributed conceptual designs and storyboards for such science fiction classics as Tron, Alien, The Abyss, and The Fifth Element. The Airtight Garage stories are the basis for Sony entertainment center arcades, one of which is a couple of blocks from the DV offices in the SOMA area of San Francisco's Multimedia Gulch (the other Sony entertainment center is in Tokyo, with a third to be built in Sony's newly acquired Millennium Dome in London).

References to his work show up in the strangest places. Director Quentin Tarantino is said to have written the scene from Crimson Tide in which two submarine crewmen get into a fight over which is the authentic version of the Silver Surfer--the (Jack) Kirby Surfer or the Moebius Surfer. Denzel Washington's character settles the matter by explaining that everyone knows the Kirby version is the only true Silver Surfer. After all, Kirby created the character, but Moebius collaborated with Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee on a Silver Surfer graphic novel some years ago.

In 1985, Moebius was awarded the highest decoration in France, the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of Arts and Letters). Like I said, the man is a legend. So when I ran into my longtime friend Frank Foster at SIGGRAPH 2000 and learned he was coproducing and directing Thru the Moebius Strip, there was no way I was going to pass up the chance to drop by the L.A. operation.

Walking through the doors, I tell the guy sitting behind the reception desk that I'm there to see Frank Foster--Foster, by the way, has some pretty mean credits. Way back when, he worked for five years at LaserMedia. After that, he helped start a music software company called Hybrid Arts with an old college buddy. Foster became that company's CEO. He worked at Atari for a short time before becoming the second person hired in the research and development group at TriStar Pictures. Eventually he was involved in pitching Norio Olga on what became Sony ImageWorks. By '97 or '98, Foster was a senior vice president at Sony ImageWorks; and as he describes it, he was "upper management doing more of the business side more than the technology side. I was still pushing toward trying to save money with PCs and NT. That was something I was always doing, and then SIGGRAPH offered me the opportunity to direct The Story of Computer Graphics for them. It was an HD project."

Standing at the reception desk, I take in the surroundings. Someone is getting something to drink out of a refrigerator in a kitchen area. A woman comes in from a patio area. She appears to be on a mission of some importance and takes no notice of me. A dog comes by to check me out. He's quite friendly. A couple of young kids pop in and out of sight. Things seem pretty laid back--not unusual for a project still in its initial planning stages. Foster appears, greetings are exchanged, and I'm ushered into a room dominated by a conference table you could play a game of football on--the first thing that even remotely looks like a Hollywood cliche. A number of large poster-sized cards festooned with storyboards are stacked along a wall. In front of them is a TV monitor, a VCR, and a miniDV camera. As I pull out my recorder, Foster starts in.

FF: From the moment Moebius draws something, it's scanned, it goes into the database, and all the assets are managed digitally from that point. We save the sketch book as a piece of history. As soon as we've done one walk-through with the storyboards as you see them here, they go right into the nonlinear system and I cut an animatic as we go. On the animatic, I cut in the temp shots to replace the animatic as soon as those are ready, so we have this evolving show reel. It's a technique my PC department did at Sony years ago and was standardized at Sony for Stuart Little. It was all based around Windows NT, actually the DPS systems--PAR and later the Perception, now Reality. We're beta testing the DPS Reality HD card. That was my big, happy discovery at NAB.

Not to get all caught up with technology, because that's very transparent to the artist. The work we're doing now is preproduction, so the work is hand-drawn art. Only a small part of it is CG. I have four of our crew from Hong Kong here in Los Angeles working alongside the artist, not only for them to get the experience, but also because we're building stuff that Moebius can watch and supervise.

The transition from his hand-drawn style and CG is a jump. A big jump. It's really a fun process because he is like a little kid in a toy store. "You can do this! You can do that!" And we're not trying to be so strict as, perhaps, Disney or a studio like that might be about making everything look like it's hand drawn. We're trying to get a style that matches Moebius's and keeping a comic book feel to it. But at that same time, we're not afraid to utilize reflections, texture mapping, and volumetric lighting, and so on to add atmosphere. Because of course with CG, you can get that so easily.
 
 

DV: Will the movie be 100 percent 3D or will there also be 2D cel elements?

FF: One hundred percent 3D. And we're in discussion now about doing a feature-length stereoscopic IMAX version. Because it's all in 3D, we can rerender in high resolution. I just did that with IMAX for Cyberworld. Cyberworld is an IMAX project where they went to a lot of different companies and rerendered some earlier work as this anthology piece. I had a chance to do a lot of IMAX work at Sony. Jean-Jacques Annaud's Wings of Courage was an interesting project.

There are two main looks in the movie: The human biosphere, which includes the family--the protagonists. And there's an alien planet, full of these giant aliens that kidnap the human father. Moebius is filling sketch books with images to inspire the CG people.

I have a crew of artists who work under Moebius's direct supervision, who take his artwork and convert it into elevation and plan views so the 3D artists can build models--it all has to be built in 3D. The 3D people would have a lot of trouble working with something like this Moebius sketch (see the image of the mushroom-filled alien world below), even though it really conveys a lot of the flavor and feel. So there's a lot of discussion between Moebius and the art department here about how things should be. 

Foster: "This planet is very Moebius. There are no trees. Everything is mushrooms. Mushroom forests."

Because we're doing the work miles away from Los Angeles--in Paris and Hong Kong--we have to put together a very careful production bible that shows exactly how things should be put together, in what color schemes, for all the characters and all the main pieces.

Another collaborator on the project is a German digital image artist called Brummbaer Matzerath. Brummbaer is probably best known for doing a lot of SIGGRAPH Electronic Theatre openings. I worked with him at Sony for a long time. In this case, he's working with Moebius and going directly from Moebius's sketches to building 3D models. We're still a long way from doing final lighting and color, but you can see a definite Moebius-style architecture in what he's doing. 

This scene takes place in a temple that's built inside a huge double pyramid that will have hundreds of giant aliens dancing and playing drums. The outside of the pyramid is being modeled by 3D artist Brummbaer.

Key moves

DV: What are your thoughts on using motion capture technology?

FF: Our plan is to use a combination of all of the techniques: procedural using Biped [now a part of Discreet character studio]; a lot of keyframing; and then, for the martial arts sequences, we'll use mo-cap. We'll do that in Hong Kong. It's the perfect place to record motion capture for martial arts. But it will really be a combination of techniques. At Sony, we were really down on motion capture. They wouldn't touch it for Stuart Little.
But I think there's a lot of good reasons to use it. 

DV: Tell us about your production pipeline for the project.

FF: This is a 100 percent PC and NT production. There won't be an SGI piece of equipment anywhere in it. I mean, that's just the way it is. Nothing political [laughs]. The theatrical version will be mastered on the DPS system. It will be compressed in HDCAM standard, and I don't have any problem with that because nobody will ever see an uncompressed HD signal except an engineer. When it gets broadcast, when it goes to the movie theater to get digitally projected, it will always have some compression. And hey, if it's good enough for George Lucas, it's good enough for me.

So there's no film involved. We won't even cut negative. We'll go right to a negative from the HDCAM digital source. And we'll rerender for IMAX. The good thing about that is it's like an incremental budget step. The thing is that we have to design for it.
 
 

DV: How much will you have to reframe for IMAX?

FF: Maybe a little bit, but not much. There's a lot of depth in the way Moebius is putting this together. I don't think we were going to do any poke-'em-in-the-eye things just because it is 3D. Especially because we're considering feature length--well, we wouldn't even be considering a feature-length IMAX version if it wasn't for Shrek [Dreamworks/PDI's upcoming animated release, which is being released in both 35mm and in IMAX stereo]. It paved the way there, and we're hoping there will be a demand for product when it finishes its cycle. I've heard that [Dreamworks's Jeffery] Katzenberg is really behind it, and doesn't care what it costs, so I'm hoping it paves the way for a lot of people, especially a low-budget project like us.

DV: Is the decision to do the animation in Hong Kong budgetary?

FF: Yes. The budget is $6 million for the animation, and all of the rest will come from a separate budget, but we've allocated $6 million for the production in China. To answer the question candidly: Yeah, of course. If we didn't do it in some way like this, it would be way over $6 million, you know that. But more important, this is a situation where the company in Hong Kong took it upon themselves to purchase the property. They're partners with Moebius on the project, they own the property, and will basically do negative pickups when the project is completed. I'm sure that they'd like to make a deal prior to that, but it's really to Moebius's benefit not to have the studio looking at every shot, and the script, and so on.

We knew this was a movie that had to play not just in China, or not just in France, but in the United States. So we hired Jim Cox, who's a well-established Disney screenwriter, and who has also produced his own feature, Fern Gully. He was a good chunk of our budget because he's an established scriptwriter, but it was important because he brought a Hollywood discipline to the story. It's not necessarily how Moebius would write. I mean, look at The Airtight Garage or some of his comic books--they're incredibly imaginative, but they aren't the classic "act 1, act 2, act 3, something happens on page 40" Hollywood way of doing things. I have to admit there has been discussion among Jim and Moebius and myself about breaking some of the Hollywood script rules. But that's fine because Moebius's vision is so strong and intuitive that it's well worth breaking the rules here and there to accommodate it.

In some ways, Moebius is like a rebellious kid. I mean, there are times when Jim Cox will say, "Hey Jean, the villain must be evil. Pure, 100 percent bad." Moebius will say, "No. I want the audience to understand why he's bad." Because if it's a rule, he will instantly want to break it. So I can imagine if he had a studio person asking for script changes . . . well, our budget would be higher than Final Fantasy's. Uh, maybe not. That's too high [laughs].

I think this is the best way for the project to happen. It's timely, and two years ago, it would have been really hard to do in 3D. Now it's very convenient. I have two standard consumer cable modems at home, and I download dailies from Hong Kong. Our morning is their night, so in the morning, I've got dailies waiting for me. And I'm this far away, you know? So this is the right time to do this project. And yes, I will go to Hong Kong and be hands-on with the group there when we get into the serious animation part and color and lighting and all that.

It's absolutely international. There are meetings where English, French, and Chinese are all being spoken at the same time. I can only understand the English part [laughs].

DV: How do you handle meetings?

FF: Everything is in English, unless they start talking among themselves. And Moebius speaks very good English. Most all of the animators in Hong Kong speak English. Sometimes not good English, but they speak it and understand it. All the Maya textbooks, all the 3D Studio Max texts, are in English. They have to read and understand those at a certain level.

A challenge is training, because there's a cultural difference and a technological training difference, but the level of willingness to learn is incredible. There's also an incredible interest in American culture. If you walk through the production area in Hong Kong, you could very easily think you're in an American production facility. They have the same toys on the monitors and the same posters are on the walls. If you walked through ImageWorks or ILM, you'd see the same anime posters. And in a lot of ways, Hong Kong is more advanced than what I've seen in the United States. When they finish at night, instead of going home when they finish late, they have an HD projector in the conference room and they stay and watch DVDs. And they watch the behind-the-scenes footage on the DVDs. They're just hungry for it. It's a real joy to work with people who are so motivated--I'm not saying that American animators are jaded, but the market has changed a lot in the last year or so. Let's face it, there is a shortage of talent to get all the work done.

DV: Do you do teleconferences between here and Asia?

FF: Yeah. And I call my coproducer on his cell phone there, which works better than our cell phones here. And he does the same, and we usually have our conversations at five or six in the evening here because it's morning there. And it works surprisingly well. I would've hoped and dreamed it would work out this well, but it actually exceeds my expectations.

DV: How long is the project going to take overall?

FF: Two years. We finish preproduction in early October 2000. We're looking at a premiere in Paris sometime 2003. I started on it at the end of last year. There's been training and development aspects that go back a couple of years, but it had a couple false starts with different ideas and scripts. Jim Cox started on the script in January 2000. And Moebius came to Los Angeles for a week in spring 2000 to go through the first draft with Jim and me.
 
 

The story

DV: Tell us about the story.

FF: It's a unique property. It's not one of Moebius's previous comic books; so when we started the project, I didn't have any idea exactly who the characters were or what the story was. Last October 1999, we met in Hong Kong for a week with Coproducer Arne Wong. And Arne is the one who brought Moebius to the people in Hong Kong, because Arne and Moebius worked together on Tron.

Arne, Moebius, myself, and Raymond Neoh--our coproducer and the guy who made this all happen; he found the financing--met for a week last October 1999. And Moebius dreamed up the story, some of which he had plans for a long time, but a lot was spontaneous and intuitive. I just took notes for six days. Every one of those days, we sat in an office and he'd say, "Well, we can do this and then that would happen." By the last few days, we were editing the ideas into a story. I then put together a nine-page treatment, which I gave to Jim Cox as a starting point for the first draft.

So the story is Moebius's. Jim restructured it a bit. He recognized that it was actually a Jack and the Beanstalk kind of fairy tale in this science fiction setting. And then Moebius got here in June 2000. Ever since, we've been adjusting the script and doing concept art. And from the concept art, the storyboard artists are starting to build it up.
Moebius is very involved in the storyboarding. He storyboarded a lot of Tron and he storyboarded a French film called Masters of Time, and, as you probably know, he did Alien, Willow, The Abyss, and The Fifth Element. So storyboarding is something he's very familiar with. He's also very in-tune with his story. He's very protective. 

If Jim's doing something to play with a dramatic point and it's not in Moebius's vision of that character, he'll definitely bring it up. It's really fun and lively in those storyboard sessions. We've done a lot of changing things around for the better. As the coproducer, I'm nervous when we make a lot of change because it affects a lot of things.

But of any of the projects I've worked on, this one has been the smoothest and the most fun. Moebius is very entertaining to be around. Very charming, as most French people are. And he's very creative, so it's never dull. 

Jean "Moebius" Giraud has been drawing comic books for 40 years. He has also done conceptual design and storyboarding work on science fiction classics as Tron, Alien, Willow, and The Fifth Element.

Enter Moebius

As if on cue, Jean "Moebius" Giraud hustles into the conference room and apologizes for being late as he takes a seat. He's soft spoken, humble, and very much, as he describes himself, 63 going on 12 years old. He's also very French. We've left his French/English syntax unedited in hopes of preserving some of the charm of his speaking manner.

DV: Where did the idea for the story of Thru the Moebius Strip come from?

Moebius: It's a combination of a drawing, an idea for a spaceship. It's not completely mine. It's an idea I had years ago that I gave to a friend of mine. And he was so interested in the idea that he did a drawing. It was a little bit different. It was a sphere with land on one side and another land on the other side. So it had two persons in that ship. One was on one side, the other on the other side. It was very funny. They had lakes, streams, everything; but upside down, like we are on Earth, but it was at the center, at the equator, and all around was empty space. 

All of the characters on the alien planet are giants--humans only come up to the aliens' knees.

So when I started the story, I had the idea of a sphere. The lower part is the motor and the bridge. The upper part is atmosphere, clouds, country, very nice farm. The people were a family of farmers who travel from planet to planet to sell their products. So that was the basic idea.

Raymond Neoh wanted to have my name in the title. He thought it was a crucial hook. So, I was thinking what could . . . if my name is in the title, it cannot be me. It must be the Moebius Strip. And why? So I had suddenly the idea that it was important to go through space like another dimension. There are a lot of things like that in the tradition of science fiction. Especially the Moebius Strip. In fact, it's a tribute to the stories that I read when I was 16 or 17 that gave me the idea to take the nickname Moebius.

So it was a portal to travel through time or maybe through space. It was space. Then came the idea of danger coming through that. And somebody lost. Maybe the father of a child in the biosphere. From that the story came very naturally, very easily, with big aliens as usual [laughs], some bad guys, some good guys, some family stuff. When the story was finished it had something in it that Jim Cox saw right away. He saw that it was a metaphor for Jack and the Beanstalk. He changed some of the stuff and it became that story. The transposition of the story to science fiction.

When I saw the script, I only had little things to fix. Some fights [laughs] to be sure. Everyone had to be happy, so everyone fight for his own happiness. And it was okay. Everyone accept that. We lost some stuff, but now the story has a very good balance. Right now we're in the middle of the storyboards. Can we say that? Really close.
 

Character studies for Space Prospectors. Moebius also did the conceptual design of the space-suited humans in Alien, the aliens and policemen in The Fifth Element, and the deep-water diving gear in The Abyss.

  

More character studies for Space Prospectors.

Moebius: It's difficult to say, because in five days with Frank, it was very intense. In Hong Kong, I had a kind of pressure on me and I had to do it, and I did it. I didn't try to think. I let the words flow through my mouth. And in English! It was a kind of performance. If I'm allowed to be self-indulgent, I could say was a kind of performance.

After that, we had to work a lot because the first load was too rushed to be very well done. We had to cut and add things. It's difficult to say anything about that process. It's very complex. It's a lot of details. A lot of fights, doubts, discoveries. And at the end, I hope we have something.

DV: How important is the back story to you?

Moebius: I do that almost subconsciously because I do comics since very long. And I have my way. I draw and I feel and I use a lot of eraser [laughs]. I change the nose, the hair. Sometimes I don't understand what I'm doing, I'm just following my fingers. Sometimes I have an idea but it's too obvious.

The first idea comes from the reservoir, the trunk we have in our subconscious. And it's always the same stuff. Sometimes I like to have the same stuff. Sometimes I think I have to go further. So it's a mix of that and that.

FF: But the back story is very important to you, because when we're talking about things, you will bring up, "The king has this motivation because the women are not allowed to speak."

Moebius: When I do the women, all of them have a mask, you know. There is nothing about that in the story.

FF: So we keep saying that will be for the Web site [laughs].

Moebius: The Shamen women have the right to speak under normal circumstances. You know it's a metaphor. The aliens represent an aspect of our world that doesn't want to change, that is afraid of change. And when they see little beings having an advantage, it's almost more horrible that they were giants because they are like rats, thinking rats. Trying to take advantage of the beautiful giants in a system they cannot understand. And their only response is to destroy

I have to start from that point. The first point was the spaceship and after to work on the aliens, the giants. I wanted them different, but not that different. Because I wanted to have a woman. And I wanted those women sexy. So what is sexy? We as humans need to see some mammal characteristics [ha ha]! Maybe more of them than we are used to seeing. Especially because they are huge, you know. Imagine huge breasts--it's a monster. But in another way, we would have to show that on the screen, so in the beginning the aliens were very strange. But in time they became more human.

Afterward, I started to draw the hero, the mother, the uncle, the grandmother, the friends, and the different aliens. The bad king, the bad girl. The good giant. The bad giant. After a while it becomes step by step, not a routine, but the development of the story.

[Moebius picks up a sketch book and starts flipping through it to illustrate his points.]

This is the first book I had. This is a storyboard [the page shows a group of maybe 12 rectangles roughed out in two rows]. Here I went searching for the giants, the aliens. They were very, very strange. So I had those ideas that became [page turn] that. Then after I did that, I did my first version of the bad king [page turn]. Aliens. Another idea for the aliens [page turn]. The first idea for Jack [a young boy in the story]. [Page turn.] Another idea for the aliens, but when I saw that I said, "Oh no. Not that." [Laughs, then turns the page.]

Here is the first drawing I did that was really close to the final version [more page turns]. These are studies for some aliens and the bad king. The characters. Another version of the aliens where they have nice clothes, they look alien. [A number of other drawing go by--Jack's father, other aliens.] This is a study of the alien hand. I wanted it to be different [the hand has two fingers with an opposable thumb centered at the base of the palm]. It's a bit embarrassing. I think if we have the thumb not in the middle, but over here, it's because our planet is very nice [laughs, and turns more pages]. Another study for the family. The mother, the father, the brother, the Chinese guy, an alien. The first sketches for the ship. Oh. This is a study for the alien world. 

Moebius: "Another version of the aliens where they have nice clothes--they look alien."

DV: It's all mushrooms.

Moebius: Only mushrooms [laughs]. It's not finished. We still have to go into details. In the beginning, it was the main characters. I'm not working alone. We have some artists here who are taking my drawing and transforming them into things the CG artists can use. Front view, side view, top view.

DV: How involved are you in determining the look of the 3D rendered output?

Moebius: I try to do my best in helping the artists. But at some point, they will do their own. And Frank will be in charge of taking care of the quality and continuity.

FF: I think Sylvain Despretz will be involved, also. [Despretz is a long-time Moebius collaborator. He most recently did the storyboards for Gladiator.] He's becoming our second Moebius, because our access to Moebius is somewhat limited.

Moebius: And Sylvain. But you know, the movie will be done in two years. 

According to Foster, "Color is a real important factor in the way Moebius does his work." This still was hand drawn in pencil and inked by Moebius. It was then scanned into a computer, where Moebius used Photoshop to reposition the head of the woman being tackled, clean up the lines, and then apply color. The entire image is a single layer. Note the use of gradients and the fact that all of the lines are closed loops, making it easy to use the Paint Bucket tool.

DV: The tests are very true to your color schemes.

Moebius: Yes. But it's not completely what I wanted. For example, they did the aliens in full light. I think the alien world should be much darker. Inside the forest should be almost black. Very, very black. Because mushrooms, they have no leaves. They don't let light through. And the mushroom, they like darkness. What I will do, I will create the idea of luminous mushrooms. Mushrooms giving light.

DV: A number of visual artists who come from producing still images have trouble transitioning to moving images.

Moebius: I have some trouble. I started to make some storyboards for the movie, and I made some mistakes. I was going crazy. I realized . . . I have done storyboards before, so I had to come back to the beginning. Because storyboards must be done very carefully. Sometimes it's really difficult to visualize a movement. It's a pretty specialized skill. But I like to do that. It's very close to comics work. But when we see a frame done by an artist, we watch the [animatic] sequence all together with Frank and Sylvain and Arne. Everyone's got something to say. At the end, generally because we are all professionals, we find the best way to do the movement.

I have still the feeling that I need to see all the scenes because I'm in charge or my name is in the title. But maybe not. Most of the scenes we have now are well done. I don't think there is a bad way to show an action in a storyboard. But you can do the best storyboard, but if in making the animation, the action is a little late or too soon, we lose the quality of the scene. But it's something I have to trust to others, because I can't be at the entire production in Hong Kong. You know, when they do a movie with Disney or Pixar, it takes a lot of time and a lot of money. But we don't have a lot of time and a lot of money. I'm working here two months instead of one or two years. And we have only $6 million. It should be $120.

DV: Have you wanted to fight for anything else? 

Moebius: When I'm working with many people, I follow a connective logic. I try to express my way. "It must be that way because I'm Moebius!" you know [laughs]. I did that only two or three times. But for the rest of the movie we worked together. I didn't see any crazy ideas I should fight. We follow logic in the movie tradition. When I have an idea, I don't think it's crazy. I try to have nice ideas. It's true. There's nothing especially incredible.

FF: I don't know about that. There are strange things in this story. There's always a little surprise you have.

Moebius: Yeah? Okay. What I would like to say is, I'm not trying to be surprising. I think the movie will be a surprise for my fans. A nice surprise that I hope they will enjoy it. But when someone sees the movie who doesn't know me, I would like them to think, "Oh, it's a nice movie," not "Oh, it's incredible. What strange spirit is behind that?" I'm not trying to do that. Because I'm not somebody who's strange. I have a wife and two children. I cannot be normal in my family life and suddenly when I go out, blargh! [gestures and makes a horrible face]--I'm a hairy monster. I can only try to do a nice movie with a science fiction theme. And science fiction in the imagination is very open, but there is logic in the madness.

Ed. note: Our interview with Moebius continued, but the conversation veered to his career as a comic book artist and his drawing technique. If such things are of interest to you, stay tuned for the second part of our interview, coming soon to SFX news.

Preproduction on Thru the Moebius Strip was completed in early October 2000, about a month after this interview was conducted. The next phase of production will take place in Hong Kong and includes hiring and training about 200 animators. We hope to check back in with them so we can report on the production process. The movie is scheduled to premiere in Paris in 2003.