Original subtitles

There are very few things that are universal to all human beings and

monsters are actually one of them. They are with us from our earliest memories

in the folk stories we hear.

They've been with our ancestors from

thousands of years ago in their cave paintings about the giant creature that

was coming to kill us monsters and fantasy creatures have lived with us

throughout all of our lives they're not just for nerds and they're not just for

geeks and game players and and movie audiences i mean it's the archetype of

the villain in any kind of a story any kind of a morality tale and they've been

around us since we've been kids if you go back to the bible and you know

lucifer as the snake in the tree is the embodiment of all that is unknown and

evil and even prior to Christianity every culture and religion has had their

dark force and their evil entity and it's a way of helping us understand how

the world works they tap into a deep-seated fear of the unknown and with

films unlike with a cave painting or a book it takes a team of craftsmen of

artisans to help bring those monsters to life

One of the reasons I do what I do is because I saw Frankenstein on TV as a

kid. I was fascinated, first of all, by the look of the character, but also that

whole concept of creating life.

It's kind of godlike to create something that never existed before, to take raw

elements and your own imagination and breathe life into something.

And I know it sounds like a cliche, but that feeling that you get when it comes

out of the womb of your mind, I now know why Dr. Frankenstein went crazy when he

said, it's alive, it's alive, because that feeling, there's nothing else like

it in the world.

Put your heart and soul in all of them, even the little low-budget ones, they

all mean something to you. I mean, it's great if they become Jurassic Park or

the Terminator series or Avatar, but each and every one of them is...

Really important every step of the way it is like raising a child when it's

little you have to nurture it And then as it gets a little bit older and starts

taking on the life of its own To the point where it becomes something that

maybe even at times you hadn't expected it to become the very first Emotional

reaction that I have to that creation is when it moves for the first time you

feel that rush of it is alive It's it's moving. It's doing what we wanted it to

do

The monster is actually a mirror on which we project a certain number of

sensations, feelings, emotions that are most of the time repressed. A monster

without emotions, for me, it doesn't work.

The creator of monsters that impressed me the most is Rob Bottin, and in

particular the Devil of Legend.

Very consciously, he crosses the line and says the monster is actually

superior to man. The monster is a better man.

stronger, more powerful, and probably more beautiful.

But since he's unique, he's a monster.

Not their inhumanity, but their otherness in a sense.

Anytime we get a chance to do a full-on character that goes through a range of

emotions like sadness or, you know, surprise or joy,

that's a real character and we're always grateful for that opportunity.

Some people say we don't do realistic stuff. We do characters or cartoony

stuff. But I'm just reminded as we work with clients, they'll say they want an

alligator or they want a dinosaur.

And then we'll do a realistic interpretation.

Then they say, well, can you make him meaner? Can you make his eyes bigger?

Well, that's making it a character. So now you're broadening some of the

characteristics of these animals, and it's more of a character. That's what we

do. We bring character to these things.

To me, a creature is successful when it has attributes that I can emotionally

connect to, that I obviously that I believe in, that I care about. I may

hate the creature. I may envy the creature. I may feel love for the

creature while watching that movie.

We don't respond to monsters intellectually.

I mean, monsters are all about, you know, and getting terrified or

fascinated or whatever it is.

So it has to be.

that thing that is has that element of connection immediately it has to be very

quick when you see it if it doesn't have that then yeah it could be a fascinating

creature beautiful work but that's not not what a great creature is to me a

great creature has the emotional response designed into it You've got to

know what kind of emotion you want to evoke from the audience.

It's really kind of difficult, and I think a lot of times what a character

does, their action, also defines them a little bit more than their physicality.

For designing a creature, the first steps of reading a script are very

important.

When I sit down to write a screenplay, like Robocop or Starship Troopers, and

it's got monsters in it and stuff like that, which you...

What you realize is that you have to give some information that is compelling

information to the reader. Tells them enough about what it does, the monster,

but doesn't kind of tell them too much or doesn't insist too much on what it

is. It really has to function in the narrative.

And then the real trick is you got to work with really good people. You should

allow room for their imagination.

That's the most important thing. You hope you'll get something that's better

than you can think of. The way you cast a movie with designers is the same way

you cast with actors.

Is this actor comedic? Is this actor good at drama?

The first step is good casting.

You look at the script and have discussions with the director, and then

the next move is to start visualizing the director's ideas in the context of

the script. You try to have a storytelling in the monster.

Ray Harryhausen used to say that a good monster needs to be imagined and

reposed. Not just attacking, not being bad, because he used to say, a lion is

beautiful when he's resting, but if the lion is on top of you and about to bite

you, it's terrifying.

So a monster has to have that duality, if possible. It has to have an element

of majesty or beauty.

And the easiest and quickest way to get that idea across, to develop it, is

through drawings. That's where my brother Charlie steps in. He can do a

number of drawings, variations.

If I see it in my head, I can draw it. And that's the fun part of it, you know?

And then trying to work with, you know, directors and producers and trying to

get out of their mind what they're seeing.

You never design a monster to be a monster. You design a monster to be a

character. The moment you see that monster, you know what it does. You know

the essence of its personality.

The more you put into it, the more life it gets. And as an artist, you know,

that was satisfying to a point.

And that's why we got into filmmaking.

We wanted to bring the artwork to life.

I always look at it as a man, as a male.

This is the closest thing that I can do.

to giving birth.

You can be whimsical and crazy with the characterization, but unless you put

anatomy that grounds it in reality, it will only be a cartoony fantasy kind of

thing. If you start incorporating the physical anatomy of real animals and

your audience says, you know what, this thing could exist.

it makes it much more real. In design, I look for things that rhyme, that a line

here is echoed on a line over here, that the eyes are positioned so that you can

give them intent.

For example, the eyes on a creature, you know, you need the creature to look

intelligent when it looks down or look evil when it looks up, you know. It's

almost like making up or dressing an actor.

It's partly trying to not get lost in practicalities.

when designing a creature that is pure fantasy.

Dragons breathe fire, fair enough, that's what they do.

Do we need to break it down scientifically and try and visibly

explain how they do it?

I think not. It would be like doing a film on Greek myth where you... We're

preoccupied by how centaurs feed themselves.

I think it's an easy trap to fall into.

So we simply take some things as givens because they are part of a

mythological setting.

So a common technique is two-dimensional drawings of the character.

And a preferred technique for me is to actually use a three-dimensional

maquette that gives you a little bit more of a feeling for what the character

could be as a three-dimensional character in movement.

We like to think of maquettes as sketches, as a clay sketch, like you

would do a pencil sketch.

But you can quickly throw down some shapes, and it's...

much more informative than a drawing or even a computer rendering.

So we love traditional sculpture, and it's very quick.

When I start a sculpture, basically, you know, a small bust like this,

I'm... Really not too concerned with any details or form. You want to start

off with just the very biggest forms by getting the shoulders and the block of

the body in. You know, that's the first stage, is to just get the feeling of the

body that I want.

As I'm working, you know, and just getting in general proportions, I see

little things, little forms that start to happen in the clay, and you can...

follow that the clay talks.

It sort of tells you what you can do.

We grab that whole sculpture without color and we put it under a desk lamp

and then we move the desk lamp all around it.

I see that every single angle works.

And then you start with color.

Like in any other thing, you use the color as composition.

And then what you do is you take the creature and you decide on its

environment, and that's part of the creature design. People think that the

creature just designed the creature and they put it in the movie. That's not

true. The movie needs to exist in a light and shadow and color and light

pattern that allows the creature to live there. The xenomorph in Alien works in

the planet and in the ship.

But if you put the xenomorph in the middle of Wall Street, it doesn't look

good. It doesn't work.

After you've broken down the script, done your sketches, done your designs,

done your maquettes, basically once you've done the fun part...

the true art, the design, now you gotta get down to the real world and roll

around in the dirt and figure out how you're gonna actually make this thing

come to life and put it up on the screen.

And, I mean, the choices are endless, depending on what you're creating.

I mean, a lot of times, one of the easiest ways is to do a prosthetic

makeup on an actor. The term special makeup effects was coined probably in

the late 70s, early 80s, because before it was either makeup or a special

effect. Special effects blowing up, making it rain, makeup was putting

powder on somebody's face, we had nothing to call it. So suddenly it's a

special makeup effect.

I was one of the first people to start to use the credit special makeup

effects, and it was because it wasn't just normal makeup.

You know, we wanted to separate ourselves from that.

It's hard to put a definition on it, you know. I just see it as the evolution of

makeup. You take an actor and you actually alter his or her face by taking

a life cast first, a mold of the actor's face, then you alter it with clay by

sculpting it, make a mold of that, and duplicate the prosthetic piece, the

appliance.

in a material like silicone, gelatin, or foam rubber.

Then you apply it to the actor's face and you've got your special prosthetic

makeup effect.

We use latex and aluminum and all kinds of things and we have something that we

created with our own hands.

It all goes back to two people.

Lon Chaney Sr. first, silent movie star, the man with a thousand faces.

He was an actor. He had nobody to turn him into these characters, so he just

figured out how to do it to himself.

The Phantom of the Opera, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mr. Woo, all of these

things. The Man Who Laughs, unbelievable make-ups. No one had ever seen anything

like that.

Certainly at that time, and even still to this day, because Chaney did some

pretty amazing things without...

necessarily just building up. He even figured out ways to detract from his

face by pulling his eyes, by stretching his mouth, all kinds of, I mean,

anything he could do. He wasn't limited because he didn't learn it from anyone.

He taught himself.

And then, of course, Jack Pierce, the Frankenstein monster, the werewolf Jack

Pierce. did iconic images that still stand today i mean i don't think i've

ever seen a makeup that is as iconic as the frankenstein monster the first film

on boris karloff it's the reigning king of creature makeups and it's so simple

the brow can't be more than a quarter inch thick at its thickest and then the

headpiece right up here and the wig i mean it's genius is what it is because

it's just the right amount of makeup on the right actor to create something that

is branded into the collective consciousness of mankind forever carloff

as the creature of frankenstein has already that beautiful bone structure

that boris had and he had the capacity of doing the glassy dead eyes i

think the actor part of their structure and their physique and their essence

is vital to the monster. I mean, Ron Perlman, when we started Hellboy, I knew

it was going to be Ron, but I thought it was going to be the voice of Ron and

maybe an animatronic.

And Rick Baker says, why?

He's already 50% there.

And sure enough, Ron was perfect underneath the makeup. We did the test

and it was perfect.

I think that's one of the things that has to happen is the actor's performance

and the makeup artist's.

You know, they work together, and they have to complement each other for it to

really work.

I loved watching the Universal Monster movies, and I always felt like those

creatures were an extension of Jack Pierce.

You watch The Wolfman, and you know Lon Chaney's in there, but it feels like a

different character. You know, same with Frankenstein. Certainly Lon Chaney was

one of the masters. Jack Pierce was one of the masters. Those were the guys that

pioneered, but...

That certainly gave way to probably one of the most important makeup artists of

the modern era, who I think was Dick Smith.

He is the grandfather of the modern era.

of makeup effects and aside from being a great artist himself he was very giving

of all of his secrets he didn't have secrets he was a guy who believed that

that quality came from the hand of the artist not the kind of paint that he

used or the or the or the technique in particular he developed techniques and

he gave them away and of course dick smith did the exorcist i mean that movie

changed everything in a lot of different ways i mean think about that for just a

minute a cherubic face young child i don't remember how old she was maybe 12

in the film to turn her into such a horrific image.

I mean, the juxtaposition of innocence with absolute horror.

Dick actually invented techniques on that. The contact lenses, nobody had

been using contact lenses back then, so to change this girl's eyes, so

effective.

I think one of the things that makeup effects artists and creature designers

are trying to do over and over again is get away from the human anatomy.

By extending the arms, by extending the head, you know, there's a lot that can

be done with prosthetics, but ultimately your canvas, your base, is still the

human body.

The real trick with men in suits, rubber monsters who are performed that way, is

hiding the human form within.

you've seen all kinds of attempts to make that happen. I think one of the

designs that turned that notion on its head and embraced the human anatomy, yet

still worked beautifully, was Predator. I think it's one of the greatest

creature suits ever designed. My father and his team at Stan Winston Studio

nailed it.

The dimensions are purely human. There are no arm extensions or leg extensions.

This allowed the performer to be very dynamic, get a great performance, but

the head...

took it away from human.

You know, mandibles is not something you often see on a person.

But again, stuck with the actor's eyes so that you had a dynamic, in-the-moment

performance.

When you see a movie like Alien and you see the extent that they

distorted... the performer's body by elongating the head by adding all those

little protrusions onto his back and how it was filmed you were able to very very

successfully implant in the audience's mind that this is something alien that

it is not something human we're very

performance oriented i'm physically in the suits of most of the creatures we

build i've been the alien in the last four alien movies i've been a gorilla in

two or three movies, a bunch of TV shows, everything around here that has

two arms and two legs, chances are I've been inside the thing. So I'm in there,

and initially it was because I fit the suits and I had the endurance and I was

willing to take that last step physically to make everything look

great. Tom, when you don't move your hips around much, the tail hangs to one

side or the other.

So I think you need to constantly be aware that you have to keep it moving

and swishing it to get it to go.

It's still favoring your left. Put your hands on the dome, like you're stroking

it. Remember like that Giger thing?

A little further up.

And just like interlock the fingers.

Yeah, that's cool.

Stroke it all the way up the dome.

These creatures that we build and create, they happen on set in front of a

camera because of the way we're performing. With me inside, with Alec on

the outside.

puppeteering or directing the entire group of puppeteers to bring a

performance out of it. It's not just movement. It's not just making a big

monster creature that can move. It's no different from acting, except it's more

technically challenging.

We made this suit animatronic upper arms and head and face and lip syncing and

way over the top. And it's here to remind me to never do it again.

because i was in the suit 120 pounds um no fresh air no vision um we would run

air tubes inside run a water tube up inside so i get a drink because once i

went inside i'd be locked in for for several hours at a time so basically i

lived through my crotch during those hours the japanese did wonderful things

with men in suit technique uh godzilla was a big big landmark for me as well

part of the charm of the man in the suit technique is the fact that you could see

that there was a man in the suit the way he moved you can kind of sense there was

a guy inside and what was really great about them though that the performance

might not have been as specific a performance what they did do was they

interacted with the scenery around them you had godzilla rodan and gedra all

these creatures smashing the buildings walking through the buildings and the

tactile reality of having them mess up all the surrounding area was really

unique to that technique.

It was kind of a pseudo-reality that you were able to get involved in.

It was, for us, watching it as young kids, it made us emulate that technique

because it was something that we could do quite easily, make our own costumes

and make our own little monster movies.

One, two, three, now!

Ah, that'd be much better.

Action!

One, two, three, now!

Godzilla is the king of the monsters. The design might be outrageous.

It might clearly be a guy in the suit. It's still going to be effective,

though, because even though it's not real, it's really there.

And that's important.

It taps into your own memories of pretending to be a monster in your

bedroom as a kid and bashing things. You know, the fun of stuff breaking.

And audiences can feel that, and they love it. You can touch it.

You can feel it on camera.

This is garbage bags and foam.

How fun is that?

As a child watching Godzilla destroy Tokyo, it would have been pretty

horrifying, especially in the black and white documentary style that they shot

it in. There was something about it that was kind of engaging, kind of safe zone,

that it looked like a man in a suit.

With makeup effects and costumes...

There are certain limitations that result of being tied to the human body

for the character and stop motion animation really allows you to make

characters that a human could not fit into.

Stop-motion is a technique that was used obviously in the pre-digital age because

there was no other way of creating a phantasmagorical character that couldn't

be a man in a costume or a cable-controlled puppet of some sort.

There's absolutely no way that a human being could fit into this.

This is the ED-209 stop-motion puppet from RoboCop.

He's constructed with an aluminum and steel armature which allows us to hold a

pose incrementally over shooting multiple, multiple frames when projected

back at 24 frames a second gives the illusion of movement.

The technique had been used from 1925 all the way up to Jurassic Park.

Those of us that got involved with doing stop-motion animation were inspired by

the work of Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen.

And Willis O'Brien was one of the primary creators of stop-motion

animation, starting back a little bit after the turn of the century. And he

was the guy who was able to visualize or marry the possibility of shooting a

single frame of film at a time and then incrementally repositioning a...

model that's usually covered with rubber that has an articulated skeleton that we

call an armature. His masterpiece was really the 1933 King Kong, of which this

is a reproduction of the articulated skeleton.

Then in 1949,

He took on Ray Harryhausen as his student and mentored Ray Harryhausen,

who did a significant amount of animation for Mighty Joe Young with

these articulated armature skeletons.

Ray Harryhausen, after Mighty Joe Young, made quite a number of films. The one

that really inspired me was in 1958, The Seven Forges of Sinbad.

The model, I think, for animation is always going to be Harryhausen. He

created actors, not monsters, and that's the highest praise you can give a

monster creator is that they become characters.

The process of stop-motion animation, to a lot of people, seems kind of tedious,

kind of monotonous, but it's really not. Your mind is filled with a thousand

decisions.

that have to be made while you're doing this, essentially a performance.

And it really is a performance going through your body into the puppet. And

it's amazing. I mean, you've seen puppeteers do puppets, and you can see

that out there. They translate the movement to a live performance. That's

really compelling.

Back.

Put your hand up. Hand up.

Push your hand up a little further, Jim.

Hand up.

Yeah,

great.

Marionettists do the same thing.

In a weird way, in a weird time-lapse way, a stop-motion animator is the

actor.

And he's translating his performance like 1 24th of a second at a time. It's

really cool.

You're actually doing a performance with a complete three-dimensional object in,

you know, real space, you know, with real light on it.

not necessarily in real time, but you have to adjust your perception of time

so that it will be ultimately compressed into the kind of performance that you're

looking for.

Deep down inside, people probably know it's a miniature.

They know it's a small, inanimate object.

But the fact that it comes to life on the screen, that's magic.

But there are instances where what they need is another full-scale prop.

For RoboCop 2, we had two different scales of cane puppet.

This is the stop-motion puppet that was used, shot one frame at a time, for the

acting and the ambulatory scenes.

But there was a requirement that needed interaction with Peter Weller when he's

fighting with the creature. So there was live-action Peter Weller that would not

fit with the scale.

puppet. So what we did was build a full-scale cane prop that Peter Weller

interacted with.

The most important thing is to make these effects real and believable and

that comes from having them interact with actors on set in front of the

camera and to do that we will now be able to bring on a full-scale

animatronic creature and we can animate it and bring it to life and give it

motion and some kind of touching feeling kind of interactions very physical and

very real because it's actually happening right there for the cameras.

This gorilla is one that we built for the movie Zookeeper.

It was a talking gorilla, so it had to be able to emote and be a character that

had to interact in a comedic fashion.

It has 35 servo motors in it, and 16 of the motors are in the lips and mouth

alone.

So he can go from looking very sympathetic...

to very angry.

That's what animatronics is, is to design a system that allows elements of

a character to move realistically without a person's face behind it. It's

all done with servo motors, linear actuators, electronics, advanced systems

to create natural movement.

Actually, the word animatronics is animation through electronics, and it

originally came about, I think, during the time of Disney's building his theme

park, and he was using something called audio animatronics because they were

controlled by an audio tape machine.

But animatronics for us is just anything where we can bring life and performance

to it in a controlled way through electronics.

It can be done as something as big as the Queen Alien from Aliens and Alien

vs. Predator.

We had a whole computerized armature, a mechanized, hydraulically powered queen

alien that could squat down and just by operating controls suddenly stand 14

feet tall and spin her head around and come right down to a person and open her

jaw and the little jaw would come out. And it was like, honestly, it was one of

the coolest toys I think we've ever played with.

You can sit there, eight of us, puppeteer the little joysticks, and

whatever you would do, the queen would do, and you could record the moments,

and we'd get the marks down. We got a lot of use out of her on set.

Of course, as animatronics designers, we stand on the shoulders of giants.

Literally, one of the first giant puppets ever created for film was

Georges Méliès' Conquest of the Pole, an incredible giant...

ice creature that was manually controlled.

He, of course, didn't have the sophistication of the hydraulics and

motion control computers that we have today, but the scale of it was just

absolutely spectacular for its time. Historically for movies, the techniques

that were used were usually defined by the script, like a Frankenstein monster

lent itself very well to be Boris Karloff with a Jack Pierce makeup.

King Kong and the dinosaurs really needed to have the gravitas of the kind

of things that they were.

So stop motion was the best technique. And then in 1977, George Lucas got Star

Wars going.

And in George's universe, it was proliferated with all sorts of different

kinds of characters and creatures that required a combination of every

different kind of effect, stop motion, makeup, you know, cable control things.

I've worked a lot with George Lucas on the original Star Wars films. Primarily

the way it works is that George sort of has the idea for it, and he doesn't, at

the time, didn't really care how any of the work was done, and we sort of would

come up with, you know, a different approach.

But sitting here before you kind of represents a pretty big range.

You know, for the original Star Wars, the cantina were all masks that we wore.

They were very, very, very simplified masks that didn't have a great deal of

articulation. Stuart Freeborn did the cantina scene originally in the English

shooting, and George Lucas showed me on the flatbed editor the cantina scene as

it was.

And I was so excited. I just thought it was such a cool idea to have this bar in

space with all these aliens in it.

And he said, you know, I want to add to it. But there was no money.

As far as Fox was concerned, the film was shot.

And nobody knew Star Wars was going to be Star Wars.

Nobody knew the reaction it was going to cause.

But I couldn't pass up this opportunity.

I had to do this film. So we found a little workshop we could put the guys in

for Star Wars. And I did some sketches. And they had some great sketches that

Ron Cobb did. And George picked some of mine and some of the Ron Cobb ones. And

we started making these aliens.

The cantina scene is a weird centerpiece showcase because George Lucas

brings you into a world full of tactile people.

George Lucas was a fan of monster movies and serials growing up. So for him, it

was like, yeah, we're on an alien world.

Let's go nuts. Let's not just make people look like Klingons. Let's make

them look like this guy. It looks like a walrus. This guy looks like a big furry

thing. This dude's going to get his arm cut off.

Nobody.

Looks human except the people coming into the bar. You got the cantina scenes

with the devil in there You know and a werewolf and a werewolf just like oh my

god alien like that or like this it just textures it

Admiral Ackbar was more of a sophisticated mask that had a lot of

cable control movements so his eyes could move around.

There were lip controls that controlled him. There was also a double that was

like a hand puppet so we could get more articulation out of his mouth.

The chess set was all done with traditional stop motion animation with

little puppets about this big.

I love stop motion. I said, let's try to do the Walker sequence stop motion

because we can get it done in the time frame. We know it'll look good. We can

control everything. And I knew stop motion animators, Phil Tippett and John

Berg and other guys who could do the work and build the puppets and

everything and do a great job.

75% of the Walker scenes were all paintings with model floors, you know,

really simple, really elegant, you know.

Just like they had done in King Kong. That was really part of the idea. And

you'd walk in and look at the set and say, my God, this is like they did King

Kong.

Other stuff that like George would do, you know, he had, you know, the big

Jabba sequence and all the stuff in the palace in Jedi. Based on the technology,

the only way you can do it is, you know, rubber puppets with armatures inside or

rod puppets.

The Rancor pit monster was a character about three times this size that I put

my hand up into, and we shot as a high-speed puppet. I had always imagined

it as a stop-motion puppet, and we tried, George really wanted us to try to

do a man-in-a-suit Godzilla kind of a thing, and it just didn't look good, so

George said, okay.

Go for it. Do what you want. But by that point in time, there was not the time to

do it as a stop-motion puppet.

So it was Dennis Murin's idea to do it as a high-speed miniature.

For Return of the Jedi, George wanted a new array of aliens.

Phil Tippett, who brought me in on it and said, just, you know, do some

sculptures, do some quick maquettes and stuff. George likes to see the stuff in

3D.

and you just do whatever you want because it's probably all going to

change 10 times over before uh we get into production so it's okay you did a

bunch of stuff and george came in and said that one that one that one all of

them that's good so kind of surprised the heck out of us And suddenly every

production in town wanted rubber aliens in their movies. And there weren't a lot

of people in Hollywood doing that at the time. And so suddenly from that point

forward, man, like, rubber monsters were sexy. There's a period where people were

like, those are 50s movies. And then they became the real deal. So

prosthetics kind of worked their way out from the late 70s going into the 80s.

All that traces back to Star Wars.

The beginning of the 1980s was really a big change in makeup effects because of

two movies, The Howling and An American Werewolf in London.

In the old Universal Wolfman movies, basically you would have the actor still

in one position and you'd roll the film, you'd stop the camera, then you'd add

some hair to his face.

You'd roll the camera and then you'd stop it again. You'd add the nose, you'd

add the teeth, you'd do whatever.

And it was one lap dissolve over another that would gradually bring you from

human to werewolf.

But in The Howling and in An American Werewolf in London, everything changed.

I wrote American Werewolf in London in 1969.

The conception that was in the screenplay, it was that the

transformation, the metamorphosis from man to wolf, one, was very painful, and

two, I wanted to show it in bright light, which is unforgiving and a

terrible thing to do to an effects guy.

I gave that script to Rick Baker when I was 21, and he was 20 when we made

Schlock, and I said, figure this out.

And it was, like, exciting and terrifying at the same time because I

had no idea how I would do it.

It was like, well, wait a minute, now we actually, if we do a head, we can do

things that we can't do on a person. You know, having a person inside is very

limiting.

But if it's a fake head, you can have a whole mechanism inside.

So, you know, Change Your Head idea was born.

Ten years later, when I finally was able to get the money, I called Rick.

Hooray! You know, we got the money, and Rick said, I'm kind of doing a werewolf

movie.

And I said, what?

And he told me that he was just hired by Joe to do a movie called The Howling.

Well, I knew that John had been working on a werewolf movie, and I knew that he

had asked Rick to do one, but I had never heard anything come of it. And I

went nuts. I was hysterical. I was like, you didn't show him the change-o heads,

did you? Because Rick went, well, yeah.

So I got hysterical. And Rick actually, his assistant...

on The Howling was the very brilliant Rob Bottin, who took over and did The

Howling with Joe, and then Rick came and did Werewolf with me. Ironically, I

worked as Rob Bottin's assistant on The Howling, and then directly from that

film, I worked as Rick Baker's assistant on American Werewolf. If I could say

anything to the new people out there these days, it's just strive to be the

best. And this I learned from Rob Bottin. One night, we were working

together when we were sculpting the final...

tall werewolf and rob would sculpt one side and he would task me with matching

him so we'd get done twice as fast so rob would do the designing on one side

and i'd sit there i have to keep up and go oh my god i'm not good enough look

what he's doing this is genius genius genius threw one away started another

i'm like why did you do that so i can do better he threw that away and started

another and it's the most amazing werewolf i've ever seen in my life and

he comes toward me with a sledgehammer and goes

You've already destroyed two werewolves. Why did you do this? And he just kind of

sets his cocktail on the shelf and he goes Because I can do better

This

is the number two change-o head And what's unique about this one, it's two

different faces, basically. This side is more human and more in pain.

This side is more like the wolf and more evil.

But when it came time to shoot the change-o heads, you know, John would

say, action, and we'd make the head change.

I said, okay, cut.

Great.

And Rick went, what do you mean great?

I said, great.

Go. Next.

You know, we worked for months on this, you know? It's like...

And that's all you're going to do? And then John would say, does it do anything

else? It was disappointing at the time.

But we got the payback when we saw the film.

So all Rick Baker has to figure out how to do is make somebody's head mold of

somebody, David Naughton, make his mouth become a wolf mouth, let John Landis

shoot that.

And everybody's imagination is insanely captured because now you're taking

rubber to the next level. I think I was too enamored of Rick's work. I thought

it was so cool that in the movie I show way too much of the wolf and way too

much... You know, if I made that movie now, I don't think I'd show it as

clearly as I did in the movie I did.

We made the same mistake.

Once the distributors saw the rough assembly of this

hit... don't change a frame and it was like what it's it's two minutes long

it's too long you know oh no no we're going to show it to the exhibitors so

they showed it to the exhibitors oh they don't want to book the movie now and

it's like you can't change it and it was like it's too long she's standing there

this woman has got a werewolf changing in front of her she doesn't run away an

american werewolf in london and the howling started an entirely new approach

and a new kind of makeup effects and a new kind of people who wanted to come

into it. In John Carpenter's The Thing, Rob Bottin took those makeup effects

to extraordinary highs. Nobody had ever done anything to that extent.

You're working with Rob Bottin on The Thing, also very extensive

transformation type of effects and other sorts of makeup effects.

Is it more of a pain in the neck or do you really enjoy the process?

Well, unlike John, we...

We have set aside about five months to shoot all the effects, separate and

apart from the first unit. Well, you have much more extensive than I did.

They go on and on and on and on and on and on.

They are a pain in the neck if you try to do them in your first unit. If you're

trying to do them all at the same time, like if I had a ten-week schedule and it

took a week to do the transformations, I would be out of my mind. It was the last

week. In fact, we'd shot all the inserts, so we had nothing to do.

I read the screenplay by Bill Lancaster of John's movie.

The Thing. The Thing.

And it's just, talk about demand. It's unbelievable what is supposed to happen

in the film. I mean, it's unbelievable.

I can't wait to see it. It's mind-boggling. I love John Carpenter's

The Thing. And it's funny because, speaking of Rob Poutine, the work was

great.

Worked great out for him on the Howling. Rob Bottin became a superstar.

So then he gets his opportunity on The Thing. I kind of think that it turned

him into a monster. He's like, wait a minute. If I can make a human turn into

a werewolf, I'll make spider legs grow out. I'll have his chest rip open and

turn into teeth.

And I'll have anything imaginable. I'll have a big alligator head grow out of

him because it's possible now.

Rob was high on the creative process, and he's such a creative person that he

just would not stop. That team, I heard, worked 24 hours a day creating stuff

that, goddammit, to this day has not been matched.

If you look at movies that happened prior to that, there was one monster in

the film, and you would build your entire movie around that. What Rob did

and John Carpenter was that they took eight or nine big set-piece moments

and... Created characters creature characters for each one and not only did

you get to see each one? But you got to see them be formed and created even

today It still is astounding visually astounding and it's not just the

creature effects. It wasn't just Rob Bottin He was a genius with what he

brought visually but Carpenter also created an environment that made all of

that stuff live and breathe and work and impact you on an emotional level so it's

it's a difficult movie to ever get out of the shadow of because it's the It's

like probably one of the most perfect creature effects films that have ever

been made.

Normally, when we operate a head like this, we split up the functions.

Sometimes we have one or two people operating just the head, and then other

people operate the body and other functions on the character.

The reason for that is because it's easier, for example, for me to focus

only on the eyes, only on the performance of the eyes, to make sure

they're looking where they need to look, blink the right way.

If I'm operating the eyes and the mouth and everything else, it's a little more

confusing. It's a little more difficult to do it just with one person.

So we split up the duties, and that way two or three of us can deliver a much

better performance than just one person trying to do it all by themselves.

One of the things people don't... understand is when you see a puppet on

screen and his face is all moving and his arms are moving and everything else

that's not one person operating it's one character but it can be three five

twelve people operating this one character so those 12 people have

to work in unison to create the performance of this creature the

sophisticated uh you know animatronics that we have or at least had uh are are

dependent on a lot of different people pulling like a team like a like a

military operation almost to try to get the puppets to have a personality and to

have make expressions that can be read by the audience as you know sad or happy

or angry or whatever and it doesn't work if one person's off and the eyebrow goes

down this way and the other one goes up this way well you can't use that

Gremlins.

First off, I should say, Gremlins was the most trying project of my entire

life. Almost killed me.

To be quite honest, I didn't know how to make the movie.

We went into it and Joe Dante initially thought, well, maybe the Mogwai will be

monkeys dressed in costumes.

We got a rhesus monkey and put a gremlin head on it.

and put it in a costume, and it went crazy and ran all over the editing room

and shit all over everything.

We realized that that wasn't going to be the way we were going to do our

Gremlins. So the puppets were the way to go, but at that particular point in film

history, there weren't a lot of animatronics developed at all. There

were a number of approaches for the Gremlins, the larger puppets. We had our

own little code.

dialogue for everything. Dummy puppets were puppets that basically had the

mouth open and closed, and that was it.

Simple puppets had the mouth open and closed, the brow went up and down, and

the ears went up and down to give it motion. And then there were very, very

elaborate puppets.

We had what we called a super gremlin, and that had 64 cables coming out of it.

and i remember at the end of the picture just thinking to myself oh my god if i

could pull this movie off i could do anything i didn't i didn't worry about

making rubber monsters after gremlins after films like

gremlins and et i think directors wanted to direct something live they didn't

want to rely on a post-production technique so then we got involved with

uh

animatronics and puppets and costumes we did the critter movies we did all four

critter films for new line cinema basically it's a puppeteer's hand up his

ass and doing that i i can't get in there now and open it up because it's

kind of rotten and stuck together very low tech this was like the medium-sized

critter and it was a hand puppet a big hand puppet and in those days we didn't

have a radio-controlled rc motors in the head so it was all cable operated

bicycle cables pulling all of the the uh The pull points in the mouth and the

cheeks and the snarls and the eye blinks and all of that.

It's very archaic, but very much fun. A lot of hands-on.

He's too crispy to move. I mean, the foam doesn't last very long, and as you

can see, he's not the Critter he used to be.

He's a mere shell of his former self.

The Kyoto's puppets for Critters, you know, they had a fraction of the money

to do what Gremlins did.

It turned out, luckily, that Romans was the right movie at the right time.

It made a lot of money. It was a huge success.

Astounding Warner Brothers, who expected it to be a flop.

I think it was their most profitable movie, wasn't it? It was that and

Ghostbusters, I think, were the biggest movies that year. For Gremlins, Chris

Whaless' guys were doing really complicated puppets, and everybody was

trying to one-up the next.

With Slimer and Ghostbusters, I didn't feel like that technique made sense. I'd

read the script, obviously, and the movie's really funny, so I thought,

what's my reference for Tex Avery cartoons?

When a character smiles in a Tex Avery cartoon, they don't just do it like

this.

Their whole face deforms. I mean, the cheeks come up to here. The head will

flatten down.

The eyes will pop.

This happens. I mean, they just go nuts. I mean, in ways that you could never,

ever do in a standard mechanizing process.

And so I thought, well, the only way to muscle around this much foam rubber is

to do it literally by hand.

Ghostbusters was challenging, but I have to say The Abyss was by far the most

difficult project I've ever...

ever tackled because james cameron asked for something that was virtually

impossible he called me up and he said i want you to create the most beautiful

ethereal image ever put on film they've got to uh work underwater they've got to

be glass clear they've got to self-illuminate and change colors so i

said yes i'll do it shook hands went into the studio got my team working on

it you got to remember this the early 80s the heyday of the stuff and we were

all kids we're all in our early 20s we didn't know how to do anything So we

need to really get this background thing together and then see if we can actually

get some real movement in it.

The optics look better on it. We can get the arms. We'll have arms in the first

place on it. That would be nice.

Why are you taping? This is a miserable thing to say about it.

If we have arms on it, then we'll see what the arms do.

Finally,

we find something that maintains its clarity a little bit for a few days, but

if it's clear, it doesn't.

self-illuminate. If we find something that's clear and self-illuminates, it

doesn't work underwater.

If it works underwater and self-illuminates, it's not clear. It's

like every possible ad infinitum thing to make this not work. Jim Cameron knows

exactly what he wants, open to ideas certainly, but knows really what he

wants from the first frame to the last frame of every single shot. How big it

is in the frame, how fast it gets from here to here.

James, as we all know, was a very difficult taskmaster, but...

he also brings out the best in people.

You know, I know he didn't come to us and ask us to do something that he knew

would crash and burn. I think he always had a way out and knew that it was

possible if he cracked the whip hard enough. So finally, we decided to use

fiber optics, and it worked.

Jim Cameron came up with this sequence for The Abyss that was supposedly like a

water snake, this giant creature that was made out of water that was sort of

like a probe.

He didn't quite know really how to do it, but he had some ideas. He talked to

Phil Tippett about doing it out of clay.

He wanted to shoot like 500 frames a second, people throwing a bucket of

water up in the air, so it'd be a super slow motion.

And then he wanted me to get like white clay.

and kind of roto the clay for, like, all the little... That was the original

idea? Yeah. Wild, man. And it was like, you know... I'm getting to hear this for

the first time. You are batshit crazy, dude. You know, it's like, I got, you

know, two things to tell you. You know, it was like, one, write it out of your

script, or two, you know, see if you get lucky and go talk to Dennis Muir at ILM.

One of the ideas he was going to try was computer graphic work. We did a test. We

stayed up all night and did it.

Jim Cameron thought it was really great, and we got the job. And that was 18

scenes, 72 seconds.

Took us about a year. We had two machines.

James Cameron, he told me something that I've always remembered. He said, listen,

in every film, you've got to give the audience something.

One thing that they cannot get out of their head. They walk out of the

theater, and they can't stop talking about it. In The Abyss, it was the water

tentacle, which completely eclipsed my work.

Everybody on the special effects team got an Oscar, except for me, because of

that goddamn water tentacle.

So, you know, I just, it just seemed like this was going to take off.

But it wasn't until really Jim came along with T2 that really things went

crazy, you know, in the CG world. In The Abyss, we could have taken the sequence

out and Jim would have had a movie. But in Terminator, he couldn't take the T

-1000 out.

It obviously was a main character in the movie, and so it was through the

experience in the abyss that gave Jim the confidence that it could actually be

done. Terminator 2 was the seminal film that launched

CGI and what it was capable of. What most audiences don't know is that it was

also an equally groundbreaking practical effects film. The majority of the shots

in that film were actually handled with practical effects.

Terminator 2.

was probably the hardest movie I've ever worked on in my life. People don't

realize how much that we did in that movie.

One of the most famous shots in that movie that I'm so proud of is when the T

-1000 is frozen and he blows apart.

There is not one bit of CG in that, but everyone assumes that's a great CG shot.

Whenever you saw the liquid metal man getting damaged, that was a puppet. When

you saw it healing itself, that was digital.

Stan's group always designed the look of the character. We took his designs and

would rebuild them in the computer and do the performances.

We had the actor Robert Patrick come up, and we had a four-inch grid painted all

over his body, and we shot him with two VistaVision cameras. There was no motion

capture at that time. And from that, I was able to load it up on my computer,

and I constructed a set of bones and data. So here we had walking bones,

right? So it was my job then to actually build the physical data of Robert

Patrick.

In Terminator 2, you see it, the effects are part of the character.

They're part of what you're specifically responding to. They're not a world

beyond imagining.

You're not being blown away by the entire screen. You're being blown away

by that element of the story that's being done incredibly well.

In this character and all his incarnations over the series of films,

you've seen every possible...

Technique for bringing him to life in the first one. It was makeup and

puppetry and stop-motion animation in the second one CGI exploded on the scene

and tons of practical effects in that one as well and the new ones continue to

blend all those techniques and You know, honestly when I look at a terminator

skull, I see the entire history of special effects

We were sort of seen as this sort of funny little faction at ILM at that time

because George Lucas had spent a tremendous amount of money on computer

graphics, and then he just washed his hands of it, and he sold the company for

$8 million to Steve Jobs.

After we sold Pixar, we came up at ILM with our own computer graphics division,

and once we had control of the computer graphics division, that's when we really

took off and did The Abyss and T2 and Jurassic Park.

Jurassic Park was a film that really sort of changed the way what people

thought they could do with movies. Dennis Mirren took us all out to lunch

one day, and he said, Steven Spielberg has this movie, and it's going to be

stop motion, go motion, and Tippett Studio, Phil is going to do all the

work, and we're going to add motion blur to it.

At ILM, there was this little, like, rebel team that was going on. Mark

DePay, Steve Williams, and a couple other guys wanted to do CG dinosaurs.

I was working on a commercial with Mark DePay at the time, and then I snuck off

and I found a scan-in of a T-Rex, and I started to build it in data.

A couple of tests that were done. There was a test of a Tyrannosaurus that they

built on quietly and secretly, and we did a test with a lot of Gallimimuses

running along also. And it worked so well that we showed that to Steven, and

he just said, this is great, you know, can you guys do it? And I said, yes, we

figured out we could do it in the time frame. He said, let's do it that way

then.

So we went ahead and that changed it, and Phil said, you know, hey, I'm

extinct. Yeah, at that particular time, it was, you know, not a surprise,

but I was shocked.

You can imagine having both of those, you know, kind of, you know, thoughts

and emotions going on. It was a little bit of a limbo land in that, you know,

my whole world just kind of... disappeared everything that I was

interested in that had mainly to do with actually you know hands-on you know

making things and figuring out how they should work was now all done magically

in a black box and I had no relationship to that and so you know I felt very

alienated.

You know, it was like it was a new world, and I don't particularly care to

participate in that.

And I hadn't put it all together. I got very depressed, and I got very sick.

I was emotionally devastated when this whole thing happened. I got pneumonia. I

was told to go to bed for two weeks. It was just like, oh, well, you know.

I didn't mean it. Now what am I going to do?

And it was pretty much between, like, Dennis and my wife, Jules, trying to

figure out a way of keeping us engaged.

You know, it needed him to be on the show because he knew more about

dinosaurs than anybody and knew about filmmaking and storytelling that was

critical to this. And I needed their stop-motion animators, Tom Sanamon and

Randy Dutra, to be able to do animation in case our guys couldn't quite do it.

We came up with the idea of building a dinosaur model that had encoders on it

that you could animate stop-motion and feed those motions into a computer.

And that's what Phil's group did.

This thing is a stop-motion armature that was engineered by Craig Hayes and

built by Tom Sanamon.

So it's basically a series of hinges that have these little potentiometers on

them. So whenever you move this thing, it sends an electrical signal of that

axis down to some telecast, and that plugs into a thing that plugs into a

thing that plugs into a thing that plugs into a monitor.

And so when you move the Tyrannosaurus head, the wireframe on the screen moves

as well. So we would get...

And we had, there was a satellite, you know, or a big satellite dish, right,

that would basically project microwave images to ILM, and we would get this

data. Remember that, how crazy that was?

We only had a certain number of processors to render stuff every night.

So we had to get the show done all the time. We couldn't wait and do all the

work at the end. So we were turning out final shots as the film was still being

made. And the more we got into doing these shots, the closer we could get on

these dinosaurs and they would still look real. I was excited to see the

dinosaurs.

in Jurassic Park looking so great, but I was even more excited by the camera

moves. It freed up Spielberg's camera, and you could run backwards with this

thing as this thing was pursuing you. You suddenly were not restricted to the

locked down camera of the old photochemical days.

Before that, when you would superimpose, even, you know, Ray Harryhausen,

very often it looked like the monster was...

like, in front of the actors were going, like this, but, you know, it just didn't

have the real, or it'd have a blue line around it.

Jurassic Park was the first time I saw that the creatures were in the picture

in a way that was new. And in the rain.

Yeah, amazing, amazing.

But I still happen to think that a combination of CGI and actual

animatronics and puppetry is really the best way to go, because the actors

really benefit from having something to react to. Part of the success of

Jurassic Park and the way Jurassic Park felt had a lot to do with Stan Winston's

studio. And I think if it was just ILM, and not the ILM Creature Shop, just ILM

Computer Graphics...

the feeling of Jurassic Park, at least back then, wouldn't have had the same

texture. You know, there were actors on the set touching dinosaurs, and I think

that was critical.

Making the full-size wrecks...

It was a bit like building the Statue of Liberty. I don't remember how much clay

went on top of that. I mean, tons of clay.

I think Steven Spielberg had faith in Stan and all of us to do that because of

the work we'd done in Aliens. The Queen Alien was big.

T-Rex was much bigger, 36 feet long, stood 18 feet tall. Had to actually

raise the roof in the studio to make room for that T-Rex.

It's all for you, Steven.

I feel bad for actors. It's all green screens these days, especially even

sets. Now they're just building the floor of the set, and where's the fun in

that? Well, that's right. You were trained as an actor. Yeah, yeah.

How do you get into the environment, into the character, if you've just got a

lot of green around you? That's right. That's right. You go onto a set, and you

see it, and the smoke is being pumped in, and there's a creature, and no

acting required.

I remember being on Jurassic Park sets with my father. Those are the earliest

memories of my life where seeing these characters come to life. My greatest

experience was with the dinosaurs, the T-Rex on Jurassic Park.

We brought in new people and people involved from theme park industry. We

built these great puppeteering rigs that we could move by hand, like you

could put that physical body language into making it move by manipulating it.

I was actually one of the raptors in the suit.

There's the famous shot where it comes into the kitchen and stops and looks up

and hoots. So that's actually me in the suit doing this.

When Jurassic Park came out, because the new kid on the block was all the CG

effects, that got all the attention.

Dan starts to feel like he's losing out because...

he felt like they were his dinosaurs.

Well, of course ILM felt like it was their dinosaurs.

Interestingly enough, the press felt like it was ILM's dinosaurs and Stan was

devastated.

I remember distinctly my father having two reactions when Jurassic Park was

released and the digital work got more attention than his

insanely pioneering animatronics work.

The first reaction was to make more noise about the animatronics. He went on

every news show. The second reaction he had was to invest in digital technology.

And he went out and he bought tons of workstations and he realized that Yes,

the press was focusing on CGI, but the fact was, here was an incredible new

tool for creating characters.

And rather than hang his head, he bought in and eventually co-founded with James

Cameron and Scott Ross, Digital Domain. So maybe for a moment, he took it in the

gut, but then he said, okay, great, adapt or die.

Digital revolution in film was very quick.

It was a very quick one and very complete. Everybody went over to it as

quickly as they could afford to do it.

There were a lot of makeup effects companies that didn't survive that

transition.

I think Jurassic Park was just coming out when I decided to close the shop.

And so there was a shift for the kind of work that was being done.

There was still a lot of the rubber stuff going on, but of course, you know

Hollywood, they see a change. If something new is successful, then

everybody jumps on that one. And there's also kind of this tendency for when

things change for the new kids on the block to diminish

what you do. It's like the gunslinger thing, right?

By opening the digital revolution and opening those floodgates, that meant

that movies that people couldn't figure out how to do five years ago were now

getting made.

Now, I'm an old-school guy, and I'm a purist, and if anybody touches 2001, I

will fucking kill them.

If anybody touches Jaws, I would kill them.

If anybody went back to those movies and said, oh, now we have the technology,

and we could probably fix the shark and make the shark look like a real shark.

No. However, utilizing that tool created a boom in the

genre of filmmaking in the late 90s.

The only reason Starship Troopers got made was because of CGI and because our

friend Phil Tibbitt had worked on Jurassic Park. And when Jurassic Park

came out, that was the end of everything that was before and the promise of all

these things to come. So on Starship Troopers, we had two different groups

doing the bugs. We had Phil Tippett doing the digital stuff, CGI.

And the full-size props were made by ADI, by Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff.

Digital and practical effects not only can live together, but have very

successfully. I think that Jurassic Park and Starship Troopers are the two

classic examples of where the techniques are used to their strengths.

If we're called upon in Starship Troopers, for instance, to create an

army of 100,000 bugs climbing over the landscape in an attack,

we're not going to say that we can do that.

A bug that is going to be used in close-up and is going to, in a tactile

way, be touched, you can get so much value out of those shots.

We had half a giant brain bug, and it was 12 feet tall.

And then we had a full mechanical warrior, which was amazing to look at,

and we had a half mechanical warrior for shots where they had to interface with

actors.

I wrote it originally. I just thought, well, it should be about, you know, it

should be taller than a man.

I knew that it was going to be, you know, a bug, so I thought it had six

legs.

I think this design of the giant running jaw has got to be attributed mostly to

Phil Tippett because it's just, you know, that's such a Phil idea.

Practical effects tend to have a rough edge on them somewhere, especially if

you're talking about creature work, because you're talking about something

that has a lot of operators, got a lot of stuff going on inside of it, so

you'll get that magic moment and then a tentacle will click.

And now CGI can fix that. CGI can augment the existing stuff. You could

have this really cool puppet that you build, and you have three guys in green

suits in the shot, and then you film it, and then in post, they erase the

puppeteers.

You know, when I reflect on the Frighteners, it's with a little bit of

sadness, because for me, being a physical effects guy...

It was the first time I really came cognizant of the fact that things were

changing and they were changing dramatically and they were going to

change forever.

Digital effects had arrived, CGI, and you have to embrace it.

But it's hard at some level.

By the time we got to Small Soldiers, the idea originally was that Stan

Winston was going to create these soldiers and these...

gorgonites these other misfit monsters and they were all toys and they would be

largely uh puppets and ilm would help out wherever they could oh that's

great but

in practice

what happened was that we discovered that it was very very time consuming to

try to manipulate the puppets on the set

There was almost no way to operate them without having to see

the puppeteer so I would say probably

60 to 70% of the movie is CGI.

It's very, very critical that we never look at CGI and practical effects as

being at odds.

They're literally just different approaches to creating a character, and

the smart thing to do is use this what it's best for, use this what it's best

for, mix them all up, and you leave your audience guessing how it was done.

People always try to kind of, you know, they think that the rubber guys are

against the computer guys on that.

I'm not, you know, I'm all for the technology, and any way that we can

achieve an effect that you can't achieve something that I can do with rubber,

it's great. You know, any trick in your bag, it tricks to fool people.

What I don't like is when it's used improperly. In Men in Black, we built

two giant Edgar Bug animatronics.

I kept saying, you know, this doesn't look bug-like enough to me.

The design that they finally chose, and it was kind of a design-by-committee

film. many people involved in that i kept saying it doesn't look enough like

a bug the day came we were on the set we had our edgar bug out and everything

else and all set up and then that's when they broke the news to me they go you

know what we're not going to film this we're going to do it all later as cg

because it doesn't look enough like a book so i was like okay

And unfortunately, you know, and it happens, you know, in films all the time

now, especially now, especially.

Yes, that happens more and more these days. We had a terrible experience when

we were working on the prequel of the thing because of the plan at the time of

starting was that it was going to be whatever, 80 percent practical, 20

percent digital. And we love that. We love the hybrid feeling of using digital

as a tool. But somehow during the course of.

post-production at least we actually shot everything that we had built even

though there was sort of a sense that that we were starting to slip and that

we felt at times i don't know if you noticed at times but i felt like at

times it didn't seem like like the stuff we were shooting was really going to end

up being used or being used properly and um having heard uh horror stories of big

guys like rick baker and men in black that whole thing where he he had an

animatronic that wasn't even used at least we got our stuff on film But that

was the last anybody ever saw of it. If we didn't have video of our effects, it

would be impossible to be able to even prove that we had worked on that set.

With the advent of CGI, what started happening is that impatient

producers who didn't want to wait to get that perfect take on set would be,

you know, counseled by their VFX person, oh, we'll just replace it in CGI.

It started happening.

And it sort of threw out 100 years of movie making, which is on set, you work

it till it works. A great example of a character that suffered from a practical

effects to CGI switch and how he was executed as Yoda, in my opinion. The

Yoda from Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi is a simple hand puppet at

its core, operated by a puppeteer, brilliant Frank Oz, and designed by

Stuart Freeborn. There was only one way to really do it.

and they did a great job on the original star wars movies you know with a great

puppeteer and a great sculpt of it and and did whatever it took to get it you

know it was limited in what it could do but that forced the filmmakers to be

creative and uh focus on the essence of the character

phantom menace was george lucas's return to the

star wars series and he had been waiting around for some way to do stuff that he

couldn't do before.

And CG is what gave him the chance to have the Yoda fight, you know? When they

were able to execute him in CGI, yes, he could do more. He could bounce all

around Christopher Lee's head.

But I feel he lost a sense of reality, of texture, of being there. You know, we

hoped that it wouldn't be seen as some kind of slight to the puppeteer's art or

some kind of indication that we thought suddenly...

We were better than puppeteers.

I think we just felt that with the tools we had in our hands at the time, that

that was the best way for us to do Yoda in the film.

When we saw that, we were thinking, oh, you know, this looks silly, you know,

Yoda's flying around and everything.

And some people might think that, but boy, the audience loved it.

You know, George just saw something in there that the eight-year-old wanted to

see, and those films, I think, were made for around that age group, you know,

eight, 12 years old, something like that.

And you couldn't do that at all any other way. And most of the directors now

want that, if they had a choice, they want to be able to have the character be

a full acting creature and not something that has got a restriction on it. You

try and get a puppet to walk across a room, pick up a telephone, put it to

their ear and answer it.

It's just impossible in a single take.

You have to cut it into pieces.

And I believe one of the great blessings of CG today is that it gives you that

fluidity of performance where the digital character can go and do

anything. So, of course, every technique has its limitations.

Animatronics have limitations.

One of the most difficult animatronics jobs I was ever tasked with was the Doc

Ock character for Spider-Man 2.

The guy is tied to 28 people puppeteering him with an overhead rig.

Sam Raimi looks at it. He doesn't really pay a lot of attention. He steps behind

the curtain. He goes, okay, here's what I want Doc Ock to do. In this shot, I

want him to crash into the telephone pole, throw one door open with his upper

right tentacle. Another cop car is going to come in this way. It's going to crash

into the bank window.

I want Doc Ock to reach his tentacle over there, rip the hood off of the

guy's car, toss it, and then I want him to lean back casually on a lamppost,

retrieve a cigar from his coat pocket with one tentacle, put it in his mouth,

light it, and lean back in triumph.

I'm like, Sam, you do realize these aren't real tentacles, right?

These are puppets.

And he looks at me and goes, oh, okay, okay, well, just tell me what I can do.

And I said, well...

Let's break it down into shots. And Sammy said, okay.

Which brings us back to the shark from Jaws. It didn't work. You know, nine

-tenths of the time, it didn't work. But that's not their fault. It's just, like,

trying to blend mechanics, water, 1974, 75.

So Spielberg had not enough footage to create, you know, the effects he wanted.

Instead, he was like, well, let's suggest the shark by being POV in the

water with the camera. He kept you waiting for so long. He kept you so

tense about the shark that when he shows it, even though even in 1975, it looks

ridiculously rubber.

Everybody's like, that's a shark.

Can you imagine, Jaws, if you could have seen a digital shark?

it wouldn't be nearly as scary.

To me, a shark will always look like Jaws. A shark has giant black eyes, and

his mouth is usually open. He can jump on boats. So, you know, that was a

rubber effect that was so powerful, it still defines me today.

There's a certain flavor that goes with each style of effect, and you have to

know what flavor your movie is.

We let the character define the technique, not the technique define the

character.

We define the character, learn what the character needs to do, what the

producers, the directors want to accomplish, and then we figure out the

best way to do it. Is it a puppet? Is it stop motion animation?

Is it CG?

You know, sometimes it is.

We prefer it wouldn't be, but sometimes it is.

The job of creating a creature in CGI is similar in some ways to what it's always

been. You've got to build the creature. We have modelers who do that digitally.

You've got to put controls into it so you can move it, just like a puppeteer

would with a puppet or an armature in a stop-motion puppet, so that the

animators can get at it and pose it.

In stop-motion, you have a wire armature, and that's the skeleton.

And in CG, you have the same exact thing. You have a skeleton with joints,

and that's what we call rigging. These joints are where the character can bend,

so you need them in places like the finger joints, anywhere where it's going

to move and it's going to articulate.

The way we place joints is based on anatomy.

One of the things you're thinking about is how simple can I make the rig, what's

intuitive, what is an animator going to want to work with, and you try and make

those controls as simple as possible.

And then the job of the animator is very much what it's always been. It's, you

know, sort of imagining the performance, doing it yourself in front of a mirror

or a video camera, really living it.

You know, it's really enjoyable because that's the step where we're bringing the

character to life, of course.

And you get to a certain point where it stops being movement on screen and it

becomes life.

Welcome to TV.

People say computer animation.

as if you put an order into the computer. Give me five shots of a

monster attacking a city.

And they come out. But in reality, it's animation.

Nobody calls painting brush painting.

Painting is painting. Monet, Manet, Degas, Picasso, Renoir, it doesn't

matter. They are all using brushes. Nobody says brush painting.

Same thing with animation.

I think that you cannot say, oh, it's computer.

No, it's not computer. It's human.

Spontaneity is definitely one of the biggest challenges because it's a highly

iterative process where you are creating an animation, looking at it, tweaking

it, playing it back, tweaking it, playing it back. So it's almost

counterintuitive. You have to consciously include things that look

like accidents or feel like spontaneous events. I think it's really hard

nowadays to make a CG creature look like it's one.

live one thing with its own personality and attitude because you have so many

people that have to work on it.

You've got people maybe that just do the face and other people do the bodies.

And one of the ways to get this done quickly is to use motion capture or

shoot people going through the performance. Then you've got hopefully a

good actor who's acting it out and everybody follows that.

With Peter Jackson, we got a chance to do that when we created Gollum for The

Two Towers because that was the first time that we had to create a character

in close-up that had to act with other human characters. It was brilliant that

Andy Serkis was on board, first to do the voice of Gollum, but then actually,

as it turns out, to create his performance.

The motion capture that we had couldn't do fingers, couldn't do facial. It was

just rudimentary.

body movement and pretty crude at that. It was always interpretation of the

dialogue through the animator's skill.

So we tried another technique to capture the face for King Kong.

There seems to be a rather open debate about performance capture.

Who is most responsible?

Is it...

the performer, the person who's wearing the digital pajamas who will later

become something?

Or is it the artist who is gonna sit there and paint digital hairs on this

dude until he looks like an ape?

You know, and that's like, it's a chicken or the egg kind of thing. They

are dependent on one another.

But unless you've got a team of artists who are like, I'm turning this into a,

this is gonna look more simian, then it's just Andy Serkis jumping around on

set.

When it came time to do Avatar, Jim Cameron extended it with the idea of

putting a head rig with a camera in front of the actor's face so that they

can be completely mobile and move all over the stage. And at that point,

because we were dealing with the totality of the performance, Jim started

calling it performance capture.

You're ready.

One of the real advantages of working with performance capture is that you can

have actors...

creating characters that in the past would have been physically impossible i

think if you look at the planet of the ape series that's a good example in the

original series you had these fantastic makeup effects but it was of its time

the actors can be as expressive as they want some of that subtlety of motion is

necessarily going to get lost because prosthetics are passive devices this is

one of the original prosthetic makeups done by john chambers for the original

Planet of the Apes films. It really was fairly simple. It's just two pieces, the

eyebrow and the cheeks and the nose and upper muzzle, and then the bottom part

of the muzzle.

And it was just applied with spirit gum at the time, was the adhesive.

And they would blend in the edges and put on the hair and the wigs. I mean, it

took about two and a half or three hours every day.

Roddy McDowell had to go play Cornelius. He was burying rubber.

And that was one of the most human performances you'll ever see. He

humanized the chimpanzee so much so that I said to my parents, can we get one?

And they're like, don't you see what will happen? But I didn't care.

Cornelius would be my friend. Rick Baker's approach in the 2001 remake

directed by Tim Burton was to try and give the makeups more...

Expression more facial movement than the original makeups had and of course with

the original prosthetics That was all a lot of rubber that didn't have a lot of

movement. So Rick's approach was to do a much thinner mouth area and then do the

mentionality of it to poke it out with the teeth that the actors wore.

Tim Burton's version of Planet of the Apes, nobody liked it, but he stuck with

the rubber makeup, man, and it still worked, and that was not that long ago.

Now the ape characters are being done with motion capture and CGI, and it's

taken it to a whole new level.

Apes! For human-scale creatures like Gollum and the apes on Planet of the

Apes and all the Andy Serkis-scale creatures, that's a very valuable tool.

Peter Jackson knows how to use it, Andy Serkis knows how to use it, but I myself

find that if you're working at a larger scale, you

may want to do frame animation.

When I'm directing the monsters on Pacific Rim with ILM, I can direct the

animation.

I have a... When you go to scales like that, for example, it's very hard for me

to believe that an actor is going to translate the weight of a 25-story high

monster. The way digital effects are being used now, it sort of brings new

hope to fantasy characters that will be coming our way on movie screens for

years to come. But filmmakers just need to be careful to use it judiciously and

to use it wisely and use it...

first and foremost, to tell a story.

What's happened now is now we are so used to seeing miraculous things that we

don't care anymore.

Rick Baker and I went to see one of the Underworld movies.

And, you know, Rick turned to me and he said, you know, just because you can

have a hundred werewolves running across the ceiling doesn't mean you should.

Here's an example. Like, Tibbetts Studio worked on Cloverfield, okay? There's an

example. of what should be done with computer graphics, which is that you

don't show the whole creature, you show bits of the creature, right? That was

very responsible.

It was responsible because it was a $25 million show and they didn't have any

money. Yeah, but guess what? It worked. It totally worked.

I think people have lost a lot of the sense of wonder because even my

daughters that know the difference between this and that, they always say,

oh, that's computer.

And it's not. I remember the wings on the Angel of Death of Hellboy 2,

which... We did physically, and it's one of the most complex rigs we've ever

made. We rigged all those eyes to really blink in sequence.

We did feathers one by one with garbage bags and wire.

And people saw those wings, and they said, oh, it's a computer. And it

wasn't. We have had a revolution in...

animatronics that has been overshadowed by the digital revolution.

What we see personally is a revolution in skin materials.

We see many, many more different types of silicones, for instance, that we have

a lot more options than we did, say, back in the 80s. We have smaller motors

that are now lighter weight yet more powerful digital motors, you know, as

opposed to the ratchety kind of analog motors we used to have.

The other...

Really cool breakthrough that we've achieved is phonem recognition lip sync

capable puppetry.

So you're talking to a microphone, it recognizes the phonemes in your voice,

it sends digital signals to the servo packs, and that creates pretty accurate

lip sync, including tongue articulation.

We have begun to explore areas that we've never tapped into before. Advanced

robotics, facial recognition technology.

You know, what's happened over time is...

They still demand that the excellence be there, top notch.

But what's happened is budgets get shrunken, time frames get shrunken, so

we've tried to figure out, you know, how can we still build excellent creatures

or robots or suits or whatever it may be?

How can we enhance that process within the time frame? Our build schedules are

getting so short now, so amazingly short, and we keep doing it.

But keep doing it, and then the reward is to make it shorter the next time. So,

I mean, it's got to reach some point where you can only squeeze so much and

still get the quality. For me, the problem with that wasn't about losing

the money so much or the work.

It was about losing the respect.

We literally, in the 80s, early 90s, all the way into the mid-90s, people like

me, Botin, Rick Baker, all of us, we were almost like rock stars.

The people responsible for these effects attained this kind of cult status, you

know? I mean, Tom Savini and Stan Winston and Rick Baker and Rob Bottin,

these guys all became celebrities.

You didn't really hear too much about makeup artists until this started

happening, and then you knew their names.

These names, you know, are synonymous with movie monsters, movie makeup, movie

magic and stuff. It was a big deal. We got so much attention, but...

The best part was we got respect from the film industry.

Producers and directors would come to a certain artist because they liked their

style. It was a time when you would go to a Rick Baker, a Stan Winston, or a

Dick Smith, and you would say, what do you think? You're the artist. Please...

Please give us your vision. And in that respect, it was much more pure, which is

why I think people respond to those movies from the 80s and into the 90s,

because you felt like you were watching an artist's vision rather than a

corporation's vision. We just got lucky. We kind of happened to be at the right

place at the right time. It was the entire process of creating imaginary

worlds that are populated by demons and gods and strange things.

That was fascinating, and we just got really lucky and were able to earn a

living doing it. We got to live through the golden age of what we do, and we got

to see it come, and we've seen it go.

For example, I mean, Rob Bottin left the industry for the very same reason, lack

of respect. I mean, he was at the top of coming up with outrageous concepts and

things nobody had ever seen.

And look what happened to him. He's become an enigma. The 80s were the high

watermark for practical effects, guys.

There are people that refer to that time period fondly as the days when we were

rock stars. And I think what that meant is, like, people on the outside just

assumed that we could do anything and we got paid everything and we held all the

cards, right? And from being in the inside, it wasn't really so much that,

but it definitely changed no matter how big you thought.

We were back in the 80s. It definitely changed once we hit the 90s. You know,

slowly, it kind of, the artisans, the makeup masters went away, and now, of

course, they've been replaced by animators. And that's the important

thing I think we've got to work against now. Need to be more people jumping into

prosthetics again.

Because you don't want that to be a throwback.

It's time, and it's very important.

That younger generation picks it up and keeps going forward with it. It's

critical that we do this.

Because number one the more we share the more we ensure the future of this

industry in this craft We all love so much and number two the only way to

innovate

is to build upon a foundation of knowledge.

I can see through my teaching that there's a young audience out there who

want to learn some of the old practical effects techniques.

Because remember, these young people were brought up on the films of the 80s,

and they have a soft spot for rubber, stop motion, and makeup effects.

They like the tangible quality of this technique.

We're often asked, you know, as creature designers, what's your lifestyle like?

Like, how did you get into this? You know, what...

drives a person to become this, and what exactly are you? You're not like an

accountant or a banker.

And I say, yeah, we're not normal people. We grew up as weird kids reading

comic books and watching monster movies. And I think in terms of the way you

carry that with you, it does affect your daily life. So it is not a business, per

se.

from my perspective, more of a lifestyle.

The Frankenstein complex is a very strange thing because let's face it,

this is a strange job.

The art has grown like wildflowers. People are doing this stuff just simply

for the love of doing it. It's an addiction.

It is simply an addiction that you take from your cradle to your grave.

It's important to keep that kid spirit alive in you.

because that's what got you into it in the first place. And it's very easy in

the business to get that, you know, taken away when you get into the reality

of deadlines and finances and learning to keep that kid feeling alive is a job.

You have to see the world through childlike eyes.

The childlike...

aspect of wonder.

When I was a child, I loved playing with army men and dinosaurs.

Then filmmaking came into my mind because I could then make this play come

alive and show it to other people. And you've got to tap into that kind of

childhood creativity in order to really be viable in this industry.

When you are an adult in this craft, you're basically a kid that grew up and

is now playing with his favorite band.

So you need to get excited that you are, you know, with Lennon and McCart, you

know, you're part of the monster world and now you're creating those monsters.

And I tell you, the happiest I can be is when the monster walks into the set and

I feel for a moment my life is complete.

Thank you.