For the last six and a half years I have had the privilege of participating in something we dubbed the No Sleep Tour. It all started with Michael Malone, who I had worked with on Godless and The Highwaymen, calling me in early 2019. He had just landed a project with David Goyer called Foundation. Michael told me it was the Foundation and said he needed a VFX guy that wasn’t going to jerk him around. It was nice to be thought of as that guy, but I had never done Sci-Fi like this before. When opportunity knocks though, I have a hard time saying no.

I was flying to LA that week, regardless, for the American Gods season 2 premiere so Michael set up a meeting for me with Skydance. On the plane I read the first book of the Foundation series to refresh my memory. My first thought was, “This is going to be West Wing in space… but with Kentucky accents.” I kept hearing Foghorn Leghorn in my head when I read Limmar Poynets’ dialogue. Thinking about it now, technically our Hober should’ve had the accent too if we were adhering to the books… but I digress.

The morning after the Gods premiere, I went to Skydance and interviewed with Dieter, Matt and Carol. All went well with the execs, so they set up to interview with Goyer the following week and they gave me the pilot script to read. It’s safe to say, we weren’t doing West Wing in Space. The best way to describe what David had written is to say that he humanized the encyclopedic sketches of Asimov’s characters and opened the world of Foundation up to allow for some spectacular visual world building.

Prior to leaving LA, I went to see John Swallow who I had also worked on Godless and The Highwaymen with. John and I had become fast friends. We were both curmudgeons and both shared the same mantra of realism when it came to creating visual effects. John had recently been diagnosed with cancer and in typical John fashion he said he didn’t want to see me because he was laid up. Whether it was his wife, Lori, who convinced him or not he called me the morning I was flying back to Toronto and said he’d love for me to come for coffee.

I spent a couple of hours with John that morning. He had his bed setup in their living room. We talked about how things had gone on The Highwaymen and talked about new projects he wanted to work on. We talked about taking a trip to Vancouver to shoot (with cameras) a pack of wolves he heard was up there. Eventually the conversation came around to what I was going to do next. Even though we had wanted to continue to work together, John’s current state meant he couldn’t do much. I had a few irons in the fire, American Gods was doing a third season and Scott Frank had just started prep on The Queen’s Gambit, but Foundation was the one we talked about the most. With John’s experience, it was hard not to ask him what he would do. He thought for a minute, then looked me dead in the eye and said, “Do what scares you the most.”

We both grinned. Lori must have heard John, because she yelled down the stairs, “Not everything has to be hard, John!” We had a good laugh over that. We said our goodbyes and I told him I’d call him in a couple weeks to let him know where I ended up. Unbeknownst to both of us, that would be the last time we would speak. John passed a few weeks later.

I returned home to Toronto and a few days later I had my interview with Goyer. I read the script a couple times. Then a couple days before the interview Dieter called and said Goyer wanted a reel. This was something I hadn’t done since 2007. Luckily, I had enough materials to slap something together. I pulled an all-nighter to get it done and sent it off.

David pulls no punches and it’s something we still joke about today, but one of the first things he said to me in the interview is that I wasn’t his first pick for visual effects supervisor. I acknowledged this, and why should he? He didn’t know me from Adam. I talked about my work on Highwaymen and Godless. We talked about the reel I’d cobbled together. We talked a bit about how Foundation should look and how to do something as ambitious as a space elevator crashing into the surface of a city planet. Our aesthetics and filmmaking mantras seemed to jive. The call ended and, to be completely honest, I wasn’t sure how I’d faired. A few days later, Dieter called and told me I had the job. Rory Cheyne, our production designer, was hired shortly thereafter. In May of 2019, we both met Michael in Iceland and the no sleep tour began.

There are almost seven years of stories like this to tell... We were a band of filmmaking misfits tasked with the seemingly impossible challenge of pulling together one of the most ambitious television projects of the last decade. We thrived on the chaos of it all. Somehow, we came out the other side with a new respect for the craft and a deep respect for each other as colleagues and, dare I say, friends. I would do it again in a heartbeat.