Back in February RopeofSilicon was invited by 20th Century Fox, along with several other online outlets, to the set of The Day the Earth Stood Still in Vancouver, British Columbia. Over the course of the next four days we’ll be bringing you interviews with Keanu Reeves, Jon Hamm, Jennifer Connelly and director Scott Derrickson. I’ll be describing a scene I saw filmed as well as bringing you interviews with the cast, director, production designer and today’s opening interview feature with special effects guru Todd Masters.
It was definitely cool to meet Jennifer Connelly, amazingly attractive in person, and marking Keanu off the list has been a goal since Point Break. Scott Derrickson seems like a hip fellow, though of course they kept all the “talent” away from us pesky journos as much as possible. My favorite part of the trip was either 1) Being told I look like Michael Cera by the Fox rep (bless that guy) or 2) Walking on the extremely large set of The Day the Earth Stood Still, surrounded by a painted city, on the a set the size of a small stadium, but more on that in the coming days. We hope you enjoy this peek inside 20th Century Fox’s surefire December hit, let’s get underway.
Todd Masters, of MastersFX, was nice enough to sit down with us to talk The Day the Earth Stood Still. Todd’s firm is handling the creature effects and makeup for Twentieth Century Fox’s remake. Here’s what he had to say about Keanu, sex toys (huh?) and what went wrong on The Invasion (you remember that one right?).
Enjoy!
Todd Masters (TM): [pulls out what looks to a be clear skin-like prop] This is alien skin. It’s made of dermal plastic and silicone. We actually hired a gentleman who worked in the sex toy business. He had the greatest materials I’ve ever seen. We brought him on and we bought a sex toy making machine and now we can make this weird stuff that nobody else can make.
It has an amazing translucency and an amazing flexibility. These are things I don’t usually relate to sex, but it’s apparently what they do. We’re making a lot of the skins out of that. A lot of it is assisting visual effects and production to find the best way to create effects. That’s usually a mixture of what’s best, what’s most cost effective and what’s production friendly. So we’ll choose methods, whether it be post production CG models or physical characters for the production to work with.
What’s your work with Visual Effects been like?
TM: Quite a bit. I actually started in Visual Effects before I started making practical monsters professionally. Before computers, when they were opticals. Now they are a lot easier to composite. The language between their team and ours is pretty seamless. It’s important to have really tight relationships with all the departments. Anything visual, as a language, it’s always difficult to describe in words. It’s hard to describe the minutia of design.
Is it more interesting to tackle a classic like The Day the Earth Stood Still?
TM: Yeah, for the impact it’s made on so many people… I had a customs agent ask what I was doing in Vancouver and I wasn’t sure what recollection people would have of the original, but this guy’s ears perked right up and he said he had to see it when it came out. It’s tricky because you want to honor the original film, but that the same time with modern technology and modern filmmaking you want to enhance the story. So it’s a tricky double edged sword.
I always remember when Robert Ebert said, years ago, when the 1939 version of Stagecoach was remade, you could never find that movie. And it’s like “Oh God, I hope that doesn’t happen.” I hope it encourages people to see both. It would be nice if a DVD came out to compare the two. The first one, multiple endings and a lot of political injections in there. This one is similarly doing that with what’s troubling our society now. It’s kind of a green message.
Were you actually allowed to bring this stuff through customs?
TM: You would be amazed what I can get through customs! (laughs) I come through with the strangest things. I’ve brought through heads, bodies, animals. I’m always amazed when they don’t stop me. We have a studio in L.A. and Vancouver, I take planes like they are busses. It’s always a challenge because the idea is to make it look organic.
If you remember a movie from a few years back called Turistas, there was a highly detailed body in there that we had to ship to Brazil. The film has a horrific surgery sequence. Strangely enough we didn’t get our body until hours before the shot. They held it up for a week and a half. It was so realistic, our studio has done things like Six Feet Under where you have to do bodies that are so good you don’t notice them as dummies. So every detail, every eyelash, every nose hair is in there. So it is a little weird, if you’re a layperson, to open up a casket, because we ship them in caskets, it would be a little disturbing. Even if it says “Fake” all over it.
Do you learn anything from a remake like The Invasion?
TM: We worked on that film. We learned a lot. The communication between practical and visual effects was never very well linked on that project. It was one of those “Shoot anything and we’ll fix it in post” type of attitudes. Not only does that not play best for the audience but you can start detecting weird little holes. It also drives production crazy and drives the budget up. It’s so seductive to try and go back to sweeten everything.
If you saw The Invasion you can see Nicole Kidman, they went back and retouched things that probably never should have been retouched. Little pieces of skin that were just little pieces of skin. It should have always been little pieces of skin. They weren’t supposed to be special effects. It’s tricky not to overwhelm the design and push as many computer buttons as you can. That’s very seductive. A certain amount of restraint is actually important. The best example of film effects is when you don’t experience it as an effect.
What are the stages of Klaatu in terms of makeup?
TM: He comes out of his orb looking grey, but he’s more translucent. That’s the CG, to be created by WETA digital down in New Zealand. He gets shot, he falls into Helen’s arms, bleeds all over her. All CG at that point. As he’s losing his life force he becomes less translucent and more opaque. We do a timecut transition, a helicopter trip to the O.R. Once he’s being pushed down the hallway in his hyperbolic chamber, that’s when he’s a practical piece. We rush him into the O.R. and do all these surgery scenes. Until we do the big reveal, which reveals the inner being.
It’s mainly going to be a CG model with our skin and fragments all over the place. So you’ve got a real subtle moving thing. Originally we were talking about doing a puppet, but with so much going on and a shorter and shorter schedule to shoot it, the decision was made to choose our battles.
Did you do any makeup on Keanu?
TM: I did a lot of photoshop. We talked about doing some subtle stuff with Keanu but it was decided that we really wanted to see him the way he is. So no crazy prosthetics on Keanu. We did headcast him and we were originally going to do a baldcap with really subtle eyebrows growing out of his skin.
We are still doing a close-up of hair growing out of his arm a la Werewolf in London. We took a mold of one of our artist’s skin and we enlarged it through chemical processes. So we have this gigantic chunk of skin that has the overdetailed pores and all that. It’s a macro close-up. It will be done in reverse, much like the Werewolf trick. It’s a pretty bizarre piece. It should be subtle, you won’t even know it’s fake.
The Day The Earth Stood Still opens on December 12th, for more information on the film including pictures and trailers click here.
