He also works as Senior Visual Effects Supervisor for ILM and worked on movies like the Jurassic Park films, The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Murren also worked for the first 5 Star Wars movies, but let Star Wars Episode III go, to work on Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds.

Here are a few clips from the interview:

Who came up with the design of the Tripods and how they were going to move?

We did the designs at ILM with a half dozen artists, who came up with about 100 designs. Another guy, Doug Chang, his little group did some designs, too, but the ones we came up with that were in the film were ours mostly. We tried an insect approach, and another one was a stiff, straight-legged type of approach, which was stiff, and then we ended up coming up with something which was more of a combination of things that from some angles can look very sinister and other angles look sort of benign even. The motions convey a lot of what's frightening about it. So, it took about a month, before we really had the design worked out on it, and even then, we were refining them as we were shooting the film.

Once you had the design and had to get it into the computer, was there anything you had for reference when figuring out how they would move?

Yeah, Steven gave use a clue. He said that these things are kind of like a jellyfish, sort of an underwater strange thing moving around mysterious, like its searching with a lyrical quality to it. That's why it walks like that. It's flowing, you know, as opposed to the stiff mechanical thing that is really in the artwork that was done around the time of Wells' story, because that was all based on the industrial revolution, so that all steam engines and stuff, and we wanted something much more contemporary than that. But still with the three-legged tripod.

Can you talk about the rather different look of the aliens?

Muren: We didn't want them to look like monsters, because they're not monsters. They're not as cute as E.T., but to each other, some are very attractive and some are not so attractive. They walk on three legs, like the Tripods walk on three legs, with sort of a triangular, three-sided head when viewed from the top. We carried the three symbolism all the way through all the Martian designs. We tried three eyes, but that didn't look right and we took that out.

How much easier or harder do you think you had it then the effects crew from the 1953 film?

I saw that when I was six years old, when it came out, and I still remember it. Green is still my favorite color because of that movie, because the ray machines had these green things on the side. I know everything they went through, and they shot most of the effects for that in three weeks, which is amazing. They had no time on it. I definitely admire where they came through and what they had to work with. So I'm very aware of the past. I think it's a good time now to be doing this stuff. There are thousands of kids coming out of schools that want to do what I do, but most of them need to study filmmaking. They're studying how to use a computer and that's important, but that's not what my job is about.