Recently, we had the chance to join a media roundtable at Toronto’s Fan Expo Canada to talk with Adam Savage about MythBusters, the cosplay community, and the influence he has had on people from all walks of life over the years.
Media: Looking around the show, all I see is making. When you started, that was not the case, and you’ve been one of the driving forces to bring it there. Even cosplayers now with 3D printers, everything that’s going on, it’s all making. I was wondering where you thought this might go, and how far it might go?
Adam Savage: Wow, you know, I’ve never even considered how far it’s going to go. There are so many parts to this question. One is I feel very lucky that MythBusters became ascendant at the exact same time the maker movement does. What was called rapid prototyping, now it’s rapid manufacturing, all those happened at the same time and we fed off each other, which was amazing. This then becomes a gateway, deeper than any maker fare, especially in terms of eliminating gatekeeping, and that’s actually where I hope it goes. Somebody asked me once, “Oh, when you see someone in costume, how often do you think it’s their kink?” and I said, that’s a funny question but you’re actually misunderstanding the entire culture here. It’s not about look at me, it’s about look at what we can do, and it’s very different. So the degree to which the maker community does not tolerate a lot of gatekeeping is so gratifying to me. In my book, I say I want to be a one-person permission machine but I also want to take down gatekeeping wherever I can find it, because it’s a pointless exercise.
Look, I just feel where it goes with a place like this is more tolerance, I don’t think you’ll find a lot of intolerance in this room. When we put on these costumes and embed ourselves into narratives that mean something to us, and we can see each other doing that, we can exult together. You learn a lot about people. The one thing the world needs right now is more people listening to each other and really trying to understand each other’s experiences.
Horror Geek Life: You started your career acting. Was there a moment that made you change the direction of your career, to turn towards building, hands-on work, or did you just find that much more interesting at the time?
Adam Savage: No, you’re thinking that there was a plan. I was sixteen-to-nineteen years old, highly clever, I was lazy, I thought cleverness would be enough to move through the world, I had no idea how many clever people there are that have never done anything. I thought that things would be easy, and there was a point that I realized that going to these auditions was not creatively satisfying and, frankly, I wasn’t doing a lot of the grunt work to become a better actor, so why was I doing this? I was doing work for hire where I was using my hands, which was far more satisfying, so I just drifted towards that, but it was mostly that at eighteen, nineteen, I had no ambition and that’s also one of the reasons I moved from New York to San Francisco because New York is a terrible city if you don’t know your ambition; it will eat you alive.
San Francisco is the ultimate city to live in if you have no ambition because you can go out and find your ambition. It also means a lot of the art you go and see is crap. You go to a lot of bad performance shows, but those are people doing things, they are trying it out. I did a lot of bad performances and art shows in San Francisco, but doing that helped me figure out that yeah, this is what I want to do.
Media: You’ve worked on a lot of sci-fi movies. I wanted to know which was your favorite to work on, which one is the most memorable?
Adam Savage: The thing about working on movies, is you’re almost always working on a movie you’ll eventually hate, because most movies are bad, the odds are against you that you’ll work on great movies. My favorite movie I worked on was Galaxy Quest, and I was only on that one for two weeks, it was awesome, but my favorite show to work on was A.I. In A.I., when they go to New York, New York, sixty years from now when the water is at the twentieth floor and all the buildings are rotting and falling apart, me and my team spent six months breaking all of those buildings. We had reference material from the Kobe earthquake, we were going to building sites and looking at how they constructed stuff. It was really, really creatively satisfying but also, I had been following the progress on this secret Stanley Kubrick film since 1994, so to eventually be working on it in 2000 blew my mind. I just saw it recently and it’s actually way better than I remember it being, I really liked it upon the most recent watch.
A follow-up to that, when I gave my Ted Talk on cosplay, about two hours later Steven Spielberg came over and said I really liked your talk, which was gratifying because I had talked about what a piece of crap the Jaws Halloween costume was in 1977. He said, “I’m surprised you haven’t used your narrative skills in the film industry,” and I said, “Steven, I built all of your broken buildings in New York for A.I.,” and he was like, “Oh my god, you were working with Stanley’s drawings!” I said, I know, and we spent a couple minutes yelling at each other.
Media: Do you look back on some of your work and think you could have done something different, after the fact?
Adam Savage: Always. Well, if there’s something I can go back and fix, I will, but more frequently it’s like I finish it. I finished the Hellboy Samaritan last summer, and it took me about 130 hours of work, over five weeks, and the moment I finished it I was like oh shit, now I want one in steel. I didn’t know I needed the steel until I made it out of aluminum, and only then did I get it. That’s usually what happens. I’ll eventually make it in steel, it’s just going to take a lot longer.
Media: Along the same lines of that question, you’ve talked in the past about working with a friend and agreed to do way too much. You were building the entire sets for them, and you ended up letting them down, it being one of the biggest regrets in your life. That resonates with me, and a lot of people that I know. Do you think that’s a landmark that you have to get past as a creative person, something you have to go through, a rite you have to pay?
Adam Savage: Yes. We’ve all met people who don’t think that they’ve failed and they are not easy to work with. The people that I like to work with have that thousand-yard stare, they know what it means to have really boned people you care about because you were ignorant about your skills or what was ahead of you. That tempers your soul, it humiliates us, and humbles us in a way that I think is really important, and surviving that is really important. That is still a hard story for me to tell all the way through, and it should be, I’ve learned a lot since then.
Horror Geek Life: I have two kids, both into cosplay, both enjoy building their costumes, whether it’s their own design or something original, both have enjoyed your show. Do you ever look back and think how much you have helped influence others to get involved in building things or at the very least, trying to build things?
Adam Savage: One of the favorite things I’ve done since the beginning of my career is to have no pretense on any expertise, and to me that is the ultimate non-gatekeeping, right? I don’t want to teach anything because I don’t think I’m a teacher. My joke is when people tell me that is, one day, I will call upon my army! (Laughs)
You know, someone asked me in line if this ever gets tiring, and in the beginning of my career, when I was doing meet and greets, it certainly was tiring. You feel the person across from you wants something out of the interaction and when someone is pulling, our natural impulse is to resist a little to protect ourselves. There was a point during one of those hundreds of meet and greets every night, the moment I learned the trick was to lean in instead of lean out, they took longer and felt shorter, instantly. They went for forty minutes to ninety minutes, but they felt like ten, and that’s the reality. I get to sit across from people and hear those stories like, me and my brother burned down the garage, we strapped a costume to the cat, all of that, I mean, we’re all going through the same stuff, it’s just great to share it.
A friend of mine who was becoming famous, and their parent was actually famous, the parent said to them, “Sweetie, what you’ve been given is a magic wand to make someone’s day, just by being sweet,” and it’s really true. There’s no cost to it and every benefit, so every day after I do the con, I go right back to the hotel room but I don’t get to sleep until one or two in the morning because I’m just so wired.
Media: I have three daughters, my youngest one is thirteen and she’s a STEM kid, and she doesn’t want to go that way but I feel it’s the way the school system here in Canada is directing her. What would you say to someone to get them out of that misdirection?
Adam Savage: So, I’m not a woman, nor have I ever been, but I do know her experience in science is radically different from ours. There are going to be microaggressions that she will be encountering that she might not even experience as microaggressions, but just at the end of a week of dealing with them, she doesn’t give a crap about science anymore. That is really real. Women have a much more difficult path moving through the sciences and engineering than men do, and that is really vital to be able to talk about.
I don’t know if I have an answer, but just recognizing that she may be experiencing that and not even be able to put a name to it, but it’s informing the direction she feels like going in. Simply because we can’t conceive how shitty it is, we really can’t conceive how someone can just randomly come in and tell you you’re an ignorant idiot all the time, simply because you’re a woman. But that is generally their experience in the sciences and engineering.
I want to thank Adam for taking the time to talk with us.
RELATED: ‘The Boys’ Showrunner Eric Kripke Pledges No More Guns with Blanks
