Interview With Jenny Fulle

AE: Where do you see yourself five years or 10 years from now?
JF: Ten years from now I see myself retired. My son will turn 18, and when he goes off to college I will get in an RV or something.

When I left Lucasfilm I moved down here [to Los Angeles], and I had to get into a freelance mentality where you just go from show to show, from effects company to effects company or from studio to studio. It was really several-year stints here and there.

I really love it here at Imageworks. I've been here for 10 years, which is longer than I've ever been anywhere. We have a lot of really great people and we do lots of work, and I'm free to be me, and it's a great gig.

AE: You have always been out at work. I read articles here and there in which you say that you never really felt like that was an issue.
JF: No, it never really has felt like an issue. You know, certainly, I'll meet some people and they look at me and they don't know quite how to respond to me at first, but then, generally speaking, I think they come around. I think a lot of times — because we work in a rather liberal industry — it makes people actually feel more liberal themselves when they are dealing with someone who is obviously a big dyke, and it's somebody they see as a partner, and aren't they open-minded and fantastic.

AE: There are some people I've met who work on the top television shows who are kind of weird about being out. I'm more shocked that they are hesitant about being out than I am about them being in the closet.
JF: For me, I wouldn't be happy if I couldn't be out, so I can't make an assumption for everybody and their situation. But I think that because I am comfortable with it, and because it's who I am, and it's like, "Here I am! You can like it or not like it, but it's who I am" — I can guess that people respond to me differently. If I were making apologies for who I was, trying to hide it a little bit, then it may be a little easier for people to judge.

AE: Can you give me an overview of Imageworks?
JF: We do three different types of things here: We do live-action visual effects movies like Spider-Man; we do performance capture movies like Beowulf, Monster House and Polar Express; and then we do fully C.G. animated films like Open Season and Surf's Up. They all start with kind of the same process, but a little different.

For the visual effects films, the filmmakers will come here and then have an idea, and then have some storyboards. We then will assign a creative team to it that will help them take that to the next level. We then figure out technically how that is achievable.

The producers will put together all the parameters around that and set up the box for them to work in. The animated films and visual effects films can be very collaborative too; it just depends on the filmmakers.

We will work with them; they will get the story going, and then our guys here — our creative guys — will be involved in developing the stories and the characters.