Rick Baker on "An American Werewolf in London"

you know I did John Lance's first film Sherlock and I was 20 years old and he was 21 and as I was making him up he was talking to me about his next movie which was gonna be American Werewolf in London so right away started thinking about it and then cut to you know many years later it turned out you know Sherlock was the u.s. $30,000 you know independent a low-budget film and and nobody was really banging down John's door to make American Werewolf inand so I had a long time to think about it monster movies are what got me into this business and I especially liked you know animal people like the Wolfman and the transformation so I really wanted to make this the coolest werewolf movie we could make I remember having arguments with Jonna because I wanted him to be a biped a two-legged werewolf you know uh cuz I always think of werewolves more like that basically probably just because of the Wolfman you know i Lon Chaney jr. walkin around in two legs he kept saying he wanted it to be this demon hound from hell when John said he wanted it to be you know a quadrupedal for like that um I wasn't quite sure how to do it even you know I thought how am I gonna do that you know how am I gonna do you know can I put two people in his suit no that's gonna look dumb yeah and it was one of those things I'd like in the middle of night I just happen to think of it and it was uh remembering as a child where you do the wheelbarrow racing where people hold your feet and you're walking on your hands I thought you know we if we could if we did something like that if we put a guy kind of on like a on a board where he was actually walking in hands with a board with wheels on it and we could like puppeteer the hind legs and like the rod puppet we could have him really in so he could move up and down with it and really have his hands like a contracted round like that and so that's basically we did we had a guy lying on this plank with wheels on it and with a wolf suit around it and and in the rear under that you never saw that that rear-ended the wolf because what happened at the rim is a wolf er there were two feet sticking out of his rear the guy who was inside I had a dog at the time that was a keys hound that that had some kind of big manor fur and stuff and it ended up the werewolf ended up looking very much like my dog Bosco and I had at the time you know cuz it was a good reference to look at you know but he did you know I actually I think the wolf is very cool Johnny said he was never gonna show him for all only just a few frames and I intentionally sculpted a very extreme expression on him so that in a very short amount of time you could see that he was as evil hound creature I love you David you know at the time I mean it was the first film where I really had a crew to speak of you know I hadn't like one assistant before that on this film I had I think six people helping me and they were all kids they were fans of mine and wrote me fan mail and you know one guy was from Texas and you know the guy was from Connecticut you know and and there were kids as I brought out and basically trained and we to be honest we didn't really quite know what we were doing yeah we were like you know unchartered ground basically I mean people hadn't done this kind of work before but Jack what what we going I don't know I'll tell you when we get there okay in the script you know it says that you know Jack who has played bait and Griffin done you know his throat is torn out by this wolf and you know half his face is missing and he continues to degenerate through the course of the film so I didn't basically what I thought that would look like which is this big hideous you know wound in his neck and in a very scarred up face and and Griffin on the first day they didn't makeup test huh I wasn't too pleased about it you know he thought no one was really gonna look at him because he was so horrifying looking and disgusting you know and he was disgusting looking here people always gonna remember there's a little piece of flesh that wiggle on his neck you know like staring and he's probably right I think there are times where instead of looking at his performance you're looking at the low piece of Wiggly flash you know but the wolf's bloodline must be severed the last remaining werewolf must be destroyed it's you David it was you know a series again a series of different makeups each time we saw him he was more decomposed so that means we had to rescale to make new pieces Oh be serious would you the process of makeup is an additive process you add to someone's face and it's you know it's easier to make someone look fatter it's very difficult to make them thinner because we really can't subtract from what's already there and as you're decomposing you become very skull like you know it's it's very difficult so what usually happens when you do a makeup like that you end up building the cheekbones out and in building the rest of it out so that it becomes hollow looking but it gets big you know and I thought you know let's do it cool why can't we make it a puppet you know I thought let's we do a puppet we actually can subtract so what I actually did was headache lifecast of griffin dunne that I did a clay press out and I had a clay version of it and I actually carved in where it should be go in you know and sculpted basically what Griffin's skull would look like and then we were able to make a much more emaciated dead dead looking character that way you look awful thank you in the scene in the in the porno theater he's a puppet um and Griffin controlled the actually operated the mouth of the puppet and as he read the dialogue I want you to meet some people David Kessler this is Gerald brings Lee Gerald's the man you murdered on the subway we thought it best for you not to see him as he's a fresh kill and still pretty messy yes I do look most unpleasant why are you doing this to me this isn't mr. Goodman's idea he's your good friend what as I am a victim of your carnivorous luna activities John said he wanted to do a transformation in a way that hadn't been done before where it wasn't just like Lon Chaney jr. in the Wolfman where they sit him in a chair and dewlap dissolves do a little bit of makeup and shoot some film it a little bit more an overlap the two he says it seems to him that you know if your whole body is changing into a different creature it would be a painful experience and he wanted to show the pain and not and have movement uh one point was pushing to try to make it all happen in one shot I thought it would be really spectacular John pointed out that he thought it wouldn't be as dramatic II thought he thought it would be better filmmaking to do it in cuts and to show different things in close-up and and as it turns out that was about the only way we really could do it one of the things we did do like for example like it's a new week David had basically hairless chest and we ended up with a very hairy chest on him we actually did the hairy chest first shot that stuff and then trim the hair back and pulled off some hair and shot an earlier stage and then pulled off some more hair and trimmed it back and shot an earlier stage so we could get more makeups done in one day I eventually came up with the idea of besides having his hairs grow we could actually make this distort the face and have something pushing underneath it and have that change so we made what we call change-o heads and change your hands and change your back so if we square prop likeness heads and hands and so on that actually physically had a mechanism inside that would distort it into a different shape so I was afraid that the foam latex that we normally use wouldn't stretch out far enough for these change-o heads so we went to a urethane elastomer that we could plasticize and highly plasticized and we plasticized it about twice as much as you're supposed to in it made this very stretchy flesh-like material but it eventually continued to plasticize and it just turned itself into Google and just disintegrated but it lasted long enough to get the film done anyways the transformation didn't really take all that long to actually shoot the physical things and these change-o heads that we made you know John would say action they were gonna hear it and stretch out and you go cut and it's like okay we've got that it's like we've got that King I just spent months working on this thing and you shut it took you ten seconds to shoot it you know well I got it you know it's like whoa God you know is like disappointing to think of all that time going into that but then I went with my crew of kids you know to Westwood to see the movie when it came out with a real audience and when that 10 seconds happened of the face stretching out people stood up and cheered you know and I was like all right you know this is this is why we did that you know it was funny ahead his many times happens in the industry you know I mean American Werewolf kind of set the standard for what a monster movie was going to be and how a transformation was going to be done in every film after that that had to transformation and it did what we did and I would actually love to have the opportunity to do a transformation in it in a film like American where again I would definitely take advantage of computer technology as well I think a real marriage of the techniques when we actually get you can do it transformation that would just totally blow people away you know I hope I get the opportunity in my lifetime to do it again you

Channel: filmSCHOOLarchive

Views: 64,522

Keywords: An American Werewolf in London, American Werwolf, Rick Baker, Interview, Make Up, Special Effects, EX, EFX, Designer, talks, talk, chat, commentary, on, about, film, movie, work, his, horror, werewolf, monster, 1980s

Id: h-W2lW87wdg

Length: 11min 4sec (664 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 07 2016