For the 45th anniversary of the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival (MSPIFF) the organizers have designated the annual Al Milgrom tribute award to be given to legendary Hollywood cinematographer Dean Cundey. He may have only received one nomination for Best Cinematography, for his work on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” but he also shot such films as the “Back to the Future” trilogy, John Carpenter’s “The Thing” and “Jurassic Park.” He agreed to take part in a discussion about his long and storied career, and was interviewed by fellow cinematographer Ferguson Sauvé-Rogan. The panel started with a discussion on why he wanted to get started in Hollywood.

“I really didn’t get started until pretty late in my life, I was 10 years old and I probably should have started when I was five. It’s interesting because I came from a very creative family. My parents supported all these goofy things I wanted to do… so I was always encouraged to do creative stuff. And so when I was about 10 years old, I got for Christmas a magic kit. A magic set for kids, simple little tricks, but I loved the idea that I could fool people into believing the impossible. At least they had me believe that they really did. And so I just got involved in creating illusions, and over a period of time, I would get a bigger trick and a bigger one and a larger one. And pretty soon, I realized that the best magic trick of all was one of those things I was watching all the time: The movies,” Cundey said.

After working briefly for Roger Corman’s company, making low budget films, Cundey then mentioned his next collaborator, who gave him his first big break in the industry.

“I met John Carpenter, who was a great visualizer, very collaborative, and we went off and made this movie that was gonna be just horrible. Nobody had been doing bad guys with knives for a while. So when it first came out, the first week, there weren’t a lot of people who came, and we thought, ‘Oh, well, we tried it.’ Second week, it doubled. Third week, it doubled again.

Suddenly, with a huge hit, my phone won’t stop ringing with all these people with lame low budget horror films… But ‘Halloween’ was my calling card, as it was for John, of course, and a variety of folks,” Cundey said.

He then had to deal with an interesting catch 22 to move on in Hollywood.

“And after that, I started to get invited to join other bigger, bigger movies. And one of the issues was that to work legitimately, in Hollywood studios, you had to belong to the union, and in order to join the union, you had to be working on a film. I wasn’t sure how that was going to work out until John Carpenter got this opportunity to do a bigger film…,” Cundey said. “If the film gets started, in pre-production, and then they sign the contract, anybody who’s in pre-production gets to join the union. And so we deliberately set up this circumstance, a scam, a kind of strategic technique… I got to start down the road to being able to work at major studios. And, so, and that film was, uh, was an interesting film. It was called, this…, what was it? Ah, ‘Escape from New York.’”

Years later, he got an opportunity after his work on “Jurassic Park” to work on another special effects heavy film, “Apollo 13.” He shot the space scenes with director Ron Howard primarily on planes referred to as “vomit comets,” where they fly in a parabolic arc and upon their descent back to earth you briefly experience zero gravity before feeling 2 G’s of force as it flies back up to the sky.

“And the idea was to build the capsule set inside the cabin, and so it was a little too large, so I said, ‘Here, we’ll cut all six inches from here, move this in, put some artificial lights in, and then… you can do your weightless stuff.’ There were 23 seconds of weightlessness, so they had to carefully plan the action to be what we could then kind of replicate all on a set. And it was, it was an amazing experience to be the first film that did actual real weightlessness and portrayed what the astronauts went through in a very realistic way,” said Cundey.

He also talked about an iconic film that featured more camera trickery than special effects, and how he was able to accomplish his work on Nancy Meyers’ “The Parent Trap.”

“Disney had done it with Haley Mills on one side of the screen, then the other side and combined it with a split in the middle, and it was very static. What I wanted to do was try to push past that, and Nancy was very much on board with that,” Cundey said.

“There was this visual effects company that had this motion controlled repeatable head that you could put the camera on, and repeat, pan, tilt, move and it would repeat over and over exactly the same. So you’d shoot one shot. And then it would go back to one in here, start the camera again, and you can shoot the exact same shot and it would match perfectly. And I thought, ‘this is a great opportunity.’”

The effect that resulted was seamless, and managed to fool a whole generation of people into believing that there was more than one Lindsey Lohan, even the then president of Disney, Michael Eisner, was taken aback and thought they cast two people after first seeing it in a test screening. In the end, movies all leave us a bit like that, bewildered and fooled into believing in impossible and beautiful fantasies.