Creativity Quote by Dennis Muren

Muren is doing something rarer than predicting the future: he is refusing to be dazzled by it. The line has the plainspoken cadence of a craftsperson who has watched several “revolutions” come and go, and it lands as a quiet corrective to tech hype. “The tool set being the same” is the key phrase. He’s flattening the supposed divide between live-action and virtual production, between photographed reality and fabricated imagery, into one continuum of technique. In his mouth, that’s not a celebration; it’s a warning against confusing new pipelines with new storytelling.

The subtext is pragmatic, almost parental: virtual movies will be “fine for some stories but not for others.” That conditional punctures the industry’s favorite fantasy that a single breakthrough will obsolete everything else. Muren’s career context matters here. Coming out of the ILM era where optical compositing gave way to digital, he’s seen how each wave of innovation arrives with a sales pitch about freedom and ends with a new set of constraints, budgets, and aesthetics.

The final clause, “but they are already doing it,” has a dry, slightly weary irony. The future has been marketed as imminent for decades; he’s pointing out it’s already here, just unevenly distributed and often treated as novelty. Underneath is a defense of judgment over capability: tools don’t decide what a film should be, filmmakers do.