Throughout the nearly 130-year existence of film, there have been on-screen moments so powerful that cinema itself could never return to the way it was before.
Dorothy opening the door of a sepia farmhouse and walking into the technicolor world of Oz, Obi-Wan Kenobi firing up his lightsaber, Dr. Alan Grant seeing a field of giant dinosaurs lumbering past, Trinity hovering in mid-air as the room spins impossibly around her.
And the first time the world saw Christopher Reeve fly.
These moments go beyond pulling off a “special effect.” They surpass even their value as pioneering techniques. These moments change the landscape because what they accomplish is so integral to the story and our belief of what we are seeing that the film could not succeed without them.
In November 1974, when producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind obtained the rights to make a big-budget Superman movie, they faced one major hurdle—no matter who they cast or how good the script, if they could not make Superman fly, it was never going to work.
To put this in historical context, one must understand that prior to “Superman: The Movie,” it was not just original director Guy Hamilton or eventual director Richard Donner who did not know how to make this effect convincing enough for a sophisticated modern audience—no one did.
Flying in close-up was simple enough. It could be achieved by showing only the arms and torso of the actor while projected footage of a moving background played behind them. This is the same technique used in old movies when you see characters “driving” in a car. Rather than have the hero move through space, have the space move behind the hero.
The limitations, of course, were obvious. It’s hard to portray superheroics when you can’t show the superhero’s feet, and there are going to be times in the story when you’ll need to do that.
Early solutions were painfully crude.
The “Adventures of Captain Marvel” serials used a seven-foot tall paper mâché dummy which slid up and down on pulleys connected to each shoulder and calf. To go sideways, they pulled the wires. To fly upwards, the cape was weighted, the dummy slid downwards, then they would reverse the film. In 1941, this was groundbreaking.
By the 1948 Columbia Pictures serial simply titled “Superman,” the effect was still elusive—so instead, the producers opted for animation to show full flying. This was somewhat in keeping with the fully animated Superman cartoons of the early ’40s, but visually jarring when actor Kirk Alyn turned into a cartoon to fly, then back to live action when he landed.
It goes without saying there was no CGI in the 1940s.
The only solution was wires.
Stuntmen and actors alike were suspended at various heights with harnesses. It was an uncomfortable and dangerous business. George Reeves’ 1951 “Superman and the Mole Men,” the first theatrical feature film based on any DC Comics character, relied solidly on these techniques. When the success of that movie led to an ongoing TV series, there was an accident.
Late in the first season, while filming the episode “Ghost Wolf,” the supporting wires that held Reeves above the studio floor snapped. He fell the full distance and came close to suffering a concussion. This led to the invention of “the pan,” which held him with a form-fitted tray under his costume. In closeups, you can see the outlines of this apparatus through the cloth.
Twenty years later, not much had changed.
1974 television gave viewers a “Shazam!” show that did its best to limit the poor effects by limiting the flying screen time, followed in 1975 by “The Secrets of Isis” that through lack of budget or lack of know-how, sometimes showed what amounted to little more than an actress standing up and rotated to the side.
Which brings us back to the producers of “Superman: The Movie.”
It is now 1976. Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman have signed on. Mario Puzo, author of “The Godfather,” has turned in the script, and rewrites have been finished. That script is for both “Superman” and “Superman II.” It is 400 pages long, and it has a lot of flying.
Pre-production is about to start in Rome, which will include set construction and flying tests—flying tests for a technique that does not exist. No one has a clue how to “make it look real.”
Enter Colin Chilvers.
Born in London in 1945 (when paper mâché dummies were still the peak of on-screen flight technology), this quiet yet impossibly imaginative young man had already made a bit of a splash in the industry.
Among other projects, he had worked in the art department on “2001: A Space Odyssey,” was a junior in the special effects department on “The Battle of Britain,” supervised effects on The Who’s “Tommy,” and, of all things, helped turn the stage performance of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” into one of the most visually striking cult classic films of all time.
But was this young special effects wizard, however talented, the right man for the job? Could this 31-year-old really make us believe Superman existed in the modern world—as if we could, at any moment, gaze out of our skyscraper office window and see not just a streak of color and a cape zooming by but a smile and a reassuring demeanor as he catches a falling damsel in distress with one hand and a huge helicopter in the other?
He was. And he did.
What Colin and his team achieved was more than the solution to a technical problem. What cannot be overstated is that his solutions allowed the space for actors Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder to breathe and inhabit their roles during the effect sequences.
When Superman and Lois have their first date, our hero one-ups every guy who ever thought he could impress a girl with a ride in a fancy car. He takes her flying. He holds her hand. He flirts. Their high school crush chemistry is adorable.
And we believe every second of this sweetness.
When lives are at stake, and there is no hope but Superman—if only he can get there in time—yes, we are still amazed at the realism of a man in mid-air, but we are captivated by the emotion of the scene. We are completely and utterly in the moment, desperately hoping he succeeds while simultaneously feeling his determination not to fail.
And when all is well and the day has indeed been saved, well…I think we all know how we felt about this triumphant moment:
The release of “Superman: The Movie” changed the world. The critical and public response was so overwhelmingly positive to director Richard Donner’s vision of realism that it changed the culture of dismissing a movie like this as “just for kids” into the one we have today, where superhero movies are taking home Academy Awards for Best Picture.
Forget the past. This was now what flying looked like. For every film that followed after December of 1978, if your hero didn’t fly like this, he wasn’t doing it right.
And the Academy noticed.
For their work on the film, Colin Chilvers and his team earned the first Academy Award ever for a superhero movie.
In 1979, there was no award for Best Visual Effects. That category did not exist. To honor the groundbreaking contribution to the state of filmmaking, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented them with a Special Achievement Award for Visual Effects.
This award is unique because it does not go through the process of voting from a list of candidates. There is no envelope. There is no drama about who will win. It is considered such an outstanding achievement that it is simply given. No debate. No doubt. Simply deserved.
To make sure no one missed it and the audience had a chance to fully appreciate it, the award was presented by Steve Martin right before Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder took the stage.
The team was given similar awards from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for Special Achievement in Special Effects and British Contribution to Cinema.
Colin would then go on to provide his practical and special effects expertise to “Superman II” (which required significant reshoots due to a new director), “Superman III,” Disney’s “Condorman,” the sci-fi classic “Saturn 3,” “Bride of Chucky” and (yes, you are about to read this right) the first “X-Men” film, where Colin supervised all on-set physical effects, including Magneto levitating and dropping the police cars, Logan’s truck exploding, Storm’s weather powers, and Magneto’s dramatic entrance to the train car.
In 1988, he directed the TV series “War of the Worlds” and, keeping his superhero cred going, five episodes of “Superboy.”
But first, he was asked to do a little project for the King of Pop.
Rewind five years. It is March 25, 1983. Michael Jackson has just stunned the world with a new dance move called “The Moonwalk.” Like watching Superman fly, we can’t believe what we’re seeing. It becomes an instant cultural icon.
Now comes the challenge of every success. How do you follow that? If you are Michael Jackson, the public wants the next incredible thing. And it has to be even better. There is no going back and no staying still. You have to top it.
But…how?
Michael wanted to swing big. His idea was to take the best of his videos, weave them together into a narrative, and at its center showcase a new jaw-dropping dance number—one that everyone would talk about to such an extent it would drive interest in a full 90-minute movie named, appropriately enough, “Moonwalker.” So it had to be good. Really good. Like nothing anyone had seen before.
To do that, he was going to need a miracle worker.
Enter Colin Chilvers.
Michael didn’t just want Colin to provide special effects. He wanted him to direct. And he wouldn’t just be directing a movie with the most famous singer in the world; he’d be directing the “bad guy” of the piece—a gentleman who had already racked up multiple awards for his role in “Raging Bull” and would soon take home an Oscar of his own for “Goodfellas”—a rising star named Joe Pesci.
Still, the question remained. What to do with the centerpiece? The two coordinated and planned it out.
If the last thing you did was defy physics, the next would be to defy gravity itself.
“Moonwalker” took two years to make. During that time, they came up with what is now known worldwide as “the lean,” where multiple dancers strike a confident pose in unison at a 45-degree angle to the floor while everyone else in the room stays vertical.
It is, of course, humanly impossible. But so was flying.
The move was inserted as part of the music video “Smooth Criminal.” It was released on November 14, 1988, and became an instant sensation. Like the moonwalk before it, everyone was asking, “How did he do that?”
During an interview with FifteenMinutesWith.com, Colin shared the secret:
“The inspiration behind Michael’s gravity-defying lean actually came from my ‘Superman’ days. It required a bit of ingenuity. We had Michael and the other dancers connected to piano wire and fixed their feet to the ground so that they could do that famous lean. I fixed their heels to the ground with a slot, so that they were locked into it. If you look in the video, when they come back up from that lean, they kind of shuffle their feet back to unlock themselves from the support they had in the ground.”
“Smooth Criminal” was nominated for a Grammy and won Best Video of the Year at the People’s Choice Awards, the World Music Awards, the Broadcast Film Critics Association, the BRIT Awards, and the British Phonographic Industry.
Not bad for a kid from London.
Colin continued to work in special effects on films like “Driven” (with Sylvester Stallone), “K-19: The Widowmaker” (with Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson), “Bulletproof Monk” (with Chow Yun-Fat), “The Pacifier” (with Vin Diesel), and “Shoot ‘Em Up” (with Clive Owen, Monica Bellucci, and Paul Giamatti).
He retired in 2007 to his home in Canada with his wife Colleen. Colin and Colleen met in Niagara Falls during the production of “Superman II” while she was working with the Niagara Parks Commission. They fell deeply in love. She and Canada have been his true home ever since.
He spent the remainder of his days active in his community, enjoying a love of woodworking, the outdoors, and graciously offering his time to those who showed an interest in the profession of movie-making.
Colin was a member of the Phoenix Artists Group in Port Colborne, served on the advisory committee of Niagara College, and received an honorary doctorate from Brock University for his contribution to the movie industry.
In 2016, he received the Legend award from the Nemo Academy for Visual Arts in Florence, Italy, whose mission is to acclaim the work of artists who have made entertainment history.
President of the Festival Jury, Federica Fabbri, said, “Many great masters have remained behind the scenes of great films which have inspired millions of children around the world to dream. For us it is a duty but moreover a great honor to never forget their names.”
In 2019, author Aaron Lam co-wrote a biography of Colin’s life called “Believing a Man Can Fly: Memories of a Life in Special Effects and Film.”
Colin also gave an exceptional interview in 2020 on the Caped Wonder podcast about his experience shooting the Superman films.
Colin Anthony Chilvers passed away on November 19, 2024, in Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada. His memory lives on in his work and in the hearts of his wife Colleen and daughter Lucy. The legacy of his contribution to film continues in the accomplishments of his nephews Chris, Ian, Paul, and Neil Corbould, and niece Gail Corbould (all of whom followed their uncle into the family business and have collectively won Oscars of their own), and everyone who had the privilege to know and create with him.
Throughout the nearly 130-year existence of film, there have been on-screen moments so powerful that cinema itself could never return to the way it was before.
We all now live in such a world—one that is permanently better for the existence of one man.
One very, very, super man.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article stated that Collin’s daughter lived with the family in Canada. This fact was not accurate, so we adjusted the information accordingly. We also were asked to include other family members. (Updated Dec. 3, 2024)
A wonderful piece about terrific man, mentor, brother-in-law, and friend. Thank you for your efforts in making this highlight article seem so real., and more important to the world of cinema than even I had imagined. My sister is beyond heart broken. She misses him so very much.