INTERVIEW WITH ADAM AND JAMIE

How did you break into the special effects business?

Jamie: Persistence and creativity. Not being afraid of cleaning – if you clean something you learn what it is, how it works and where it belongs. That knowledge is power.

Adam: I was making props for theatre companies and Jamie called me out of the blue to come work on a Nike Commercial. In the interview with him, I told him all about these cool animatronics that I saw for the movie Arachnaphobia. He let me finish my elaborate description of what I thought was cool about the rig before he revealed that he had in fact built what had impressed me.

What's your dream special effects project?

Jamie: I've done three dream projects. I designed and built a number of robots for GE plastics – they were waldo-controlled – where the remote controlled unit was custom-made to fit the body of the puppeteer – human-sized robots that are as strong and fast as a human. We were playing baseball with them. I built some robots for 7-UP that were vending machines with tank treads on them. They went 20 mph and had a full autocannon that shot soda out the slot at 300mph. It held a 12 pack. I also built a complicated puppet for Nike and shot several commercials with Tiger Woods.

Adam: The most fun I've ever had on a film was working on the rotting buildings in New York City for the film A.I.

What's project are you most proud of?

Jamie: The rocket car for Mythbusters. Otherwise, the robots I built for GE plastics. I like making robots.

Adam: Mythbusters, of course, solving myths.

Is there a personal goal you haven't yet achieved?

Jamie: I've accomplished more than my fair share. I don't know anyone that enjoys his work as much as I do, and has been so successful at it. I'm a poster boy for having fun at work. I have a wife who I'm proud of – she teaches science at a local high school. I have my own business, and while I can't afford a lot of things, I'm doing okay. If I didn't have to work, I'd be doing more or less the same thing I do now. I’m looking forward to the possibilites and opportunities Mythbusters offers. I actually got started in film because I wanted to use the medium to teach, so I'd like to see Mythbusters achieve a high level of both entertainment - fun myths - and information.

Adam: I am not yet the All-Being of time space and dimension. Besides that I'd like to go to Hawaii.

How did you meet each other?

Jamie: Adam was one of many young people that I've gotten into the business – he had some experience in theatre and with his own art when I met him, and I saw great intelligence and energy in him. He has turned into one of my best guys. Now he's getting kind of cocky though and he's becoming more of an irritant. He doesn't clean up after himself and he's always on his cell phone. But he's still really bright and a fast worker. I just have to follow him around with cleaning and repair equipment.

Adam: Jamie had this charming chateau in the south of France – oh wait, that's my ex-wife.

Do either of you fear anything?

Jamie: I am afraid of people who are boring, but require too much attention to ignore.

Adam: Wasps, tapeworms and any job that requires me to wear a name-tag.

Who are your idols/greatest influences/mentors?

Jamie: I’ve had some good bosses that have been very supportive. I would say that there are a lot of engineers out there that I hold in high regard because I have taken things they have designed apart and can see right into their brains. There is so much wonderful and creative stuff that exists that most people aren't aware of. An engineer’s or designer’s creativity is inside things that you use every day and you don't even know it’s there.

Adam: Marcel Duchamp, Artist; Richard Feynman, Physicist; Dean Kaman, Inventor; Rene Magritte, Painter.

Since you’re both involved with toy-prototyping, what's the coolest toy you've created?

Jamie: The coolest toys I've created are too dangerous to actually sell. Adam: I was a manager of research and design for a discontinued toy called ZOOB. It was a building toy based on ball and socket joints. I hope to help resuscitate it again someday.

Is there anything either of you CAN'T do?

Jamie: I can't catch things very well or jump very high. But I'm unusually strong.

Adam: I cannot see through walls and I've never woven a basket.

What happens to everything you create for solving myths on the show?

Jamie: I throw it all out. I already have too much stuff and don't want more. We do strip the creations and reuse parts for other projects.

Adam: We have most everything we've built for the show here at the Mythbusters studio in San Francisco. Much of it is re-useable from show to show.

Who inspired you as a kid?

Adam: As a kid, the first two things that I thought I really wanted to do were to design for Lego, and to work on Star Wars. As an adult, the people that inspire me are people like the physicist Richard Feinmann, and artists like Marcel Duchamp. I find it humbling and amazing getting email from people who say they're inspired by what Jamie and I do on the show. I'm glad that having fun and learning while doing our job have had such a positive effect on our fans.

Jamie: I was an ordinary child. I don't think I had any particular idols or role models. I seem to have acquired those as I've got older. They’re scientists and engineers but I don't think there are any in particular I would point out. In this job we become familiar with these people and the kinds of insights they have in their jobs.

I'm in awe. What did you major in at college?

Jamie: I started out as an art major but quickly discarded it and decided to get a degree in Russian language and literature. I found it intricate and kind of like playing chess to speak the language. Having got a degree in it, I haven't had much opportunity to use it.

Adam: I spent six months at New York University studying acting. I spent the next six months lying to my parents about my attendance and have spent the resulting 18 years learning on the job.

How does your family react when they see you doing all these things?

Adam: My mom calls me occasionally and gets upset that I haven’t told her that I did some fun myth like piercing my tongue or getting into a car when it was submerged. But for the most part my immediate family knows what I’m doing when I’m doing it.

Jamie: My wife is a science teacher. She teaches high school science, and so she watches what we do and its connection with science and just kind of shakes her head. She would almost prefer not to know what I’m doing.

What are some of your hobbies when you get home?

Jamie: I don't really have any hobbies when I go home. As Adam and everyone will attest, I might as well live in the shop. My home is clean and empty, and I like it that way. I go there to sleep and eat and various things like that. I'm a proponent of choosing an occupation that is fun, because we get very motivated when we enjoy our work and we excel at it.

Adam: If I have downtime, I'm likely to be making things, just like on the show. I'm still doing what I've always done, which is collecting skills and trying new things. I watch a tremendous amount of DVDs. I collect movie props. And I'm always building my ever-growing collection of crap by going to garage sales and flea markets.

Has there ever been a time that Jamie's shirt actually did get dirty?

Adam: Jamie's shirt does, in fact, get occasionally dirty when solving myths. But it rarely goes beyond small dots of oil or hydraulic fluid or some small amount of paint. I believe that, years ago, he developed some kind of personal force field, as well as a miracle fabric that keeps his shirts absolutely pristine. A little known fact is that Jamie has one shirt for every day of the week, like Einstein.

How do you picture the Mythbusters saga ending?

Adam: Amazingly, I was just thinking about this the other day. I was picturing us, years down the road, a little older and greyer, I'd be missing a finger or two, and I was thinking about the MythBusters series finale. I concluded it would have to end with Jamie's and my ultimate destruction, thus propagating our own myth and leaving it for someone else to bust.

Jamie: I like to think that this will go on as far as the subject material will allow. I don't see MythBusters as just being about urban legends and, as such, something that we could run out of. I think the show is about a lot more than that, and the show would be able to go on and be interesting as long as Adam and I find interesting things out there to explore. I think that would mean the show would last a very long time.

What has been your favourite myth to bust so far?

Adam: Jamie's favourite is the ‘Rocket Car’.

Jamie: And Adam's favourite was the ‘Escape From Alcatraz’.

Adam: Alcatraz to me was one of the most fun because from a technical point of view, I read all 1,800 pages of the FBI report on the Alcatraz escape, and I felt we came up with the most detailed reproduction of exactly the kinds of rafts they built to escape. I had no idea until I got in the boat whether it would sail immediately or carry us to shore. It was very exciting to reach the shore in exactly the amount of time we expected to.

Jamie: In my case, the rocket car is very simple. I'm not that fascinated by the myths, at least not as much as Adam is. I just like to build neat things. And as far as a neat thing, a radio-controlled full-size car with a rocket is about as neat as I can imagine! I would probably opt for taking a ride to the moon instead, but short of that, this was right up there.

What was the biggest surprise myth to you, busted or not?

Adam: I'd say it was ‘Exploding Jawbreaker’. We're more often than not surprised by our results. The most surprising myths are those that were entirely wrong or entirely right in every fact, and Exploding Jawbreaker was one where we thought of every way to heat a jawbreaker to prove that the idea of it becoming dangerous was plausible.

Jamie: I'm happy to say we don't feel terribly constrained one way or the other about busting myths or not. We're more interested in the process of dealing with them. And so we're kind of open to whatever happens as we explore.

Adam: In the spirit of science, there really is no such thing as a failed experiment. Any test that yields valid data is a valid test. That concept yields one of our favourite phrases on Mythbusters, which is: ‘Failure is always an option’.

What was the most costly damage you've caused and how?

Adam: That would be the airplane. Jamie: I'd say the airplane too. We blew up a full-sized airliner. Although it was scrap, it was still a pretty expensive thing.

What type of myths do you like to bust the most?

Jamie: The show is known for large explosions and big mechanical things, but we’re fascinated by the whole range of things that we approach, whether we’re dealing with something to do with dogs or with training goldfish to do tricks. And we, of course, have to do regular explosions and big things - fun myths to keep the show lively. For us, the most interesting thing is just the incredible variety. We also like to think that it’s what keeps the audience interested in the show because we’re not doing the same thing over and over again.

If resources were not an issue, what is the ultimate myth you'd like to tackle?

Adam: Personally, I only consider the ‘Rocket Car’ myth half done. We put the correct amount of thrust on a Chevy Impala and got it to 140 mph. But I want to see what it would take to get a Chevy Impala up to 350 mph. We'd also love to solve myths about space travel. We'd love to go to the moon to prove you can actually get there.

There’s a myth that you can build a nuclear device out of household items. Is that something you have considered testing? Adam: Absolutely. It has been on our list for a long time. There are various complexities of construction that has made it difficult. We’ve also had a problem figuring out how to write the episode, but it’s definitely been on our list and still is.

Jamie: We do have a bit of a constraint with some of these things. We don’t want to show people how to do these kinds of things. It’s just not something that we want to encourage. The show is about using your brain, problem solving, science, engineering and the crazy things that happen where man meets technology. When there’s something that is potentially harmful as a result of man meeting technology, we don’t want to encourage it.

How do you choose what myths to test?

Adam: The process of choosing myths is a long and involved one. Currently, about 30 per cent of the myths we get are from the show's fans, either from suggestions posted on the website or from emails. We always try to look for things to test that have some basis in the physical world so that we can test them. Consequently we refuse to do aliens, and we'll probably never tackle Bigfoot.

Do you find that there are experiments that you are interested in doing that wouldn’t work well in the show?

Adam: There are a lot of myths Jamie and I are interested in where the myth itself might not be fascinating from a visual perspective. We often try and find ways to couple those myths with other ones that will have spectacular endings. If you see an episode where one of the experiments doesn't involve an explosion but another one does, it's very likely that the one that doesn’t involve the explosion is the one that we were most interested in to begin with, but we bring in the explosive aspect or another myth that has a more spectacular ending so that we can do them all.

Have either of you been seriously hurt while busting myths?

Adam: I've had a couple of nasty gashes. And there was getting my lip caught in a vacuum cleaner. I'd like to add that even with that bruised and bloody lip, I asked my girlfriend to marry me that night. And she agreed.

Jamie: In general, we’re pretty good at figuring out ways of dealing with things remotely, even if we have to make a robot. We have quite an array of remote firing systems and blast shields. We work with the FBI quite a bit and they also have ways of dealing with things remotely to keep things safe. It’s rare that we run across something that we just can’t tackle because it’s too dangerous.

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