Creature effects

My name is Alec Gillis. I am the co-designer of the creature effects for Alien³ of Amalgamated Dynamics Incorporated. I'm Tom Woodruff, Jr. I'm Alec's partner in Amalgamated Dynamics, co-creator of the Alien effects, and I was in the rubber monster suit. I'm Richard Edlund. I was the visual-effects supervisor on the show. It's the last movie we ever did totally photochemically, actually. Right. This was on the cusp of the digital age. We did have some digital elements. When the alien's head cracks at the end it was a digital shot. That was the only one. Styrofoam floor. - Yes. We had a better Styrofoam floor for that where we'd covered it with metallic dust. It made a more interesting effect. I've always been a little self-conscious of those Styrofoam floors. Plus, that alien juice is pretty mean stuff. I think it's interesting that you can fly through space in a Styrofoam ship! Hey, there's a glimpse... Was that it? That scan, that was a fun scan. There it is - the multilayered sculpture. Are those your star fields too, Richard? - Yeah. I'm Alex Thomson. I was the director of photography on this movie, Alien³. I actually got involved because the original cameraman was Jordan Cronenweth, who did Blade Runner for Ridley Scott, beautifully in my opinion. But Jordan became ill in the first four days of shooting and had to leave the production. I was asked to take over, and I was honored to be able to try and match to his lighting. All I heard, and I wouldn't know if there was any other reason whatsoever, was the fact that Jordan wasn't well. We knew he had got Parkinson's. We knew he had that. You could see he wasn't a fit man obviously when I used to go and talk to him. He was a great character. I liked him very much. I knew him from Blade Runner. I'd met him on Altered States, too, cos Stuart cut that, didn't he? But I'm convinced it was the fact that he wasn't well enough to continue. I know it was a sad loss, but at the same time, I love Alex's work. I did Legend with him. I did Legend with him. Yeah, and I love him anyway. And I did The Saint with him. I love this shot, and I love the fact that it's a model. I just still feel that these miniatures have a quality that CGI spaceships just don't have. Do you think that, Richard, or is that just me? Am I being old-fashioned? Well, it can and it can't. I mean, it depends. On Air Force One I would never have made any models now. It depends on the kind of stuff. This is obviously special effects. These are models shot by the second unit, by Tony Spratling, up in the north of England.

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And the warden - was that Brian Glover? Is that who that is? - was a wrestler or something? Cos I know all the British guys on the crew were very excited to see him. They loved him cos he was a wrestler. And everybody was excited from him being in American Werewolf in London, and doing his lines over and over. That's right. - "That's enough." "That's enuff." I think by this time I'd said "Why can't we see the lamp, guys?" And we pulled it into the shot. It had a sort of curious bluey-green feel to it, which I kind of re-echoed in the close shots. This is Lance Henriksen. I bought the big winding staircase from this movie. I had it shipped home and I put it in my house. That big cast-iron staircase. That big cast-iron staircase. The decision to go away from the ox as a vehicle for the birth of the alien was, as I recall, in our postproduction phase, because generally it was felt that an ox is sort of a cumbersome, slow, non-threatening animal. And that a faster-moving four-legged animal, more aggressive animal would be a more interesting host for the alien and that if it had picked up any of its host's characteristics it would be better if it came, for instance, from a Rottweiler than from a beast of burden, which was probably a good move. Although all of this stuff with the ox has much more scope to it, which I love. And there's always something about the... When you go back in and retroactively change a script, it's like a house of cards. If you can keep the whole thing from collapsing that's great. But somehow, sometimes little changes make it a difference. And not always for the better. But it's understandable. I think that the creature... You know, an ox... An ox alien... Eh, you know. Not very interesting. But it's actually quite a nice thing and it was weighted very... We built it so that it had an armature in it that we could just add more weight to it. Sandbags and what have you. It really was weighing at probably about 300 pounds for this scene, because it had to... This actor's kicking it. It can't just bounce around like a foam teddy bear.

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Yeah, there's that... There's all those cuts now. So now we're back into footage that was shot with the creature in LA. And this was actually... We built what we called a teenage alien and retrofitted it to use in this scene. Originally we built what we call a "Bambi-burster." That's the teenage alien which spits acid at one of the guys in the vent shaft and served us double duty here. And we built a little rod-puppeted version. This is a CGI version, which we had the benefit of the CGI in the 21st century here, which we didn't really. We built a rod-puppeted version, and we also tried a little dog in a costume. We tried a whippet in a costume. And he did pretty good at the audition. Then once you got him in front of the camera with all the rubber on, he kind of froze up a little bit. It was pretty funny. He was a nervous little doggy. And once we got him in situ, with all those frightening chickens around him in their cages, he kind of seized up and couldn't perform. But we built a Bambi-burster rod puppet, which was a one-to-one scale rod puppet, which had some mechanical stuff in it. I think we may have shot some elements with it. But it was never comped, it was never completed. The decision came down that they were going to go... Use the Rottweiler instead. And then when we got back to LA, we started building Rottweilers and mechanical dog parts and stuff like that for the scene.

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An end to crime. An end to poverty. Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this very special audio commentary track for the film Robocop 3. My name is Michael Felsher with Registered Pictures, and I'm here today with the film's director, the one and only Mr. Fred Decker. How are you, sir? I'm good. So here we are with Robocop 3. We've done your other two films together for DVD and Blu-ray releases, Night of the Creeps and, of course, The Monster Squad, and now we've come to Robocop 3. So...

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and their guardians. And that was the edict from the get-go. We want a PG-13 RoboCop. And I think one of the reasons they hired me was that the Monster Squad had sort of straddled that line fairly well as far as being edgy enough and scary enough that it wasn't wimpy, but it also didn't go too far. Right, right.

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So when the movie came out, did you feel that, I mean, because obviously Orion at that point was, you know, on its last legs, it was pretty much on life support. How did you feel about the release? Because my perception of it as a moviegoer at that time was they just kind of threw it out there. Movie marketing is really hard. Yeah. You know, we've talked a lot about the Monster Squad, which has gotten kind of short shrift due to its...

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Pitof made this shot with the second unit. Pitof was a special effects supervisor for Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, and now he's a director. At the beginning, he made the shot just for the small things, the creature, and little by little, day by day, he began to make some big scenes. Jean-Pierre said to us that he thought that the eggs in Aliens, I think it was, which we worked on, were lifeless, mechanical. So we said "OK..." So we put all this squirming stuff and bladders in the lips of the petals. So there's lots of organic movement in the lips there, and inflated bladders on the inside. A lot of layers of silicone - especially inside - to you give the feeling of all the gelatinous layers of this inner egg, before we see the facehugger... I was ashamed, Pitof, this day, because I had told you that we'd put a facehugger tail in there. Somehow it didn't get packed with everything. At the last minute I discovered it, and you said "Where's the tail?" And I went "Oh, it's in Chatsworth." Yes, I remember that. You do remember that? I let you down. Sigourney Weaver was so proud to do everything herself. She wanted absolutely to put the ball inside the basketball without special effects. I was very worried, because I thought "We are going to make maybe 200 takes." I said: "Sigourney, we won't use a machine, but please work with your trainer, because I don't want to spend a lot of time." She was so upset about that. She wanted to do so herself, she did that. It was amazing. You will see Ron Perlman... No, you won't see it, because... I had to cut before. The close-up of Ron just after the basket is just incredible. I used it until the last possible frame, because the frame afterwards he was so astonished.

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Sylvain Despretz, he works a lot with Ridley Scott's design, this chair. I love the idea with the weapons hidden on the char. These were tough shots - to show enough of the alien, but not give it away. The problem with the alien suit is that if you show too much of it, it's very clearly a guy in a rubber suit, but for wider shots, it was done effectively. Where you see the shadow, it was a matter of lighting so it wasn't revealing the body, but only the shadow across the grid. As an actor, I haven't seen often the monster on set. Remember, Jean-Pierre? As an actor, I haven't seen often the monster on set. Remember, Jean-Pierre? I remember, we changed the sense of the scene during the editing. He was supposed to listen, or to see an alien, and we put some different sound to explain the aliens are escaping from the cell. That's true. I don't like to do that, because an actor plays something, and if you change the sense it's not good. But that was good, because it added to the pressure he had to face, knowing that the complete ship was coming under the aliens' control. Another stupid idea. I love that shot, the Steadicam, where we speed the picture. Pitof put some flames from the guns, because the guns didn't work. Never. The actors had to pretend to shoot. It was a bit breakable as well.

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The newborn was supposed to be digital, and, again, for budgetary reasons, it was decided Jean-Pierre would have to do everything with the newborn as animatronic. I think it was a problem for him because initially he wanted to have a real chase. He wanted Ripley to be chased down the halls by this thing. The beast was so big, the animatronic. It was a nightmare to shoot the scene when he tries to catch Winona Ryder. I remember I had to improvise, to change my mind, and it wasn't an easy time for me. I cheat on this shot because it's like a point of view of the newborn and it's fake, he is inside.

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That was kind of like the weirdest part. It's bordering on, I suppose, the creature he would design for species in that regard. Somewhat sexualized it a little bit with the third one. But this one basically kind of looks a bit like the arms and legs are a bit longer. It still just kind of looks like a xenomorph.

1:18:32 · jump to transcript →

is so much more work, and so much more goes into that than might be obvious. Because if you just let, because they obviously had this, so they shot the monster as a rod puppet against blue screens, and they shot clean plates on the set, and they used some sort of primitive version of motion control by the sounds of things to marry the two up and stick them together. And it sounds, or it looks to me like that's what they've done. They've just stuck them together.

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that shot, it gives it away. I think that shot we saw, it hangs on it too long. And it's not lit right either. And that shot, that scene there is a prime example because there's all this fire around and looked in detail. I dare say they've done something clever to try and reflect that fire in the surface of the monster. But whatever it is they did wasn't working for me.

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you would have the mechanism of the creature kind of lying all in pieces between takes. And this was an actual person in there. So they kind of wanted to treat her like she was an actor and like she was always there and she was always Amy. And they kind of, you know, again, she was like their pet. But Ernie Hudson tells kind of a crazy story. It's not really connected to this movie, except that...

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I don't even know if you'd call it turnaround, but Frank Yablans still had the rights to it until Jurassic Park. Right. On Jurassic Park, which Kathleen Kennedy produced, she was on the set with Crichton and sort of started out, he started telling her the whole saga and she began to think, oh, well, you know, with technology, like Jurassic Park obviously was a landmark film in terms of special effects technology. And so between the animatronics and the CG dinosaurs and all that, she thought, well, maybe this is the time to do it.

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So they had worked together before, but Stan Winston had gotten more into animatronics, which culminated in Jurassic Park. Actually, initially, Peter Elliott, the ape man, he was hired to play Amy himself.

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Stephen Prince

Record of a Living Being was not terribly popular when it came out, whereas Godzilla memorably translated these fears into a format that endured, the monster awakened by radioactivity that goes on a rampage, destroying civilization. So Kurosawa pays homage to Honda's achievement in Godzilla by using his visual rhetoric of spectacular destruction and hysterical mobs of people running from a scale of disaster that is overwhelming.

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Stephen Prince

They provide an indicator of the creature's anguish. This scene amalgamates various folkloric and religious strands in which demons or ogres are a malevolent force in human affairs and inhabit either a world of the dead, a hell, or a zone between living and dying.

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clear level of sympathy there that the character in other hands probably would not have gotten yeah like i think sometimes the most effective sort of stories and even the sort of fairy tales stories of taking down the monster there is at least some sort of dimension to the monster and i think there that is achieved here in this film

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beautiful beautiful just a beautiful scene and the light comes out we are out of night vision um oh just so effective still plays and clarice is just her eyes are bulging her eyes are on the prize she's essentially killed the monster

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Probably his best movie, in my opinion. Like Louis Teague, he did some early work for Roger Corman. His first director of photography credit is on the 1970 film Bloody Mama, which Corman directed. John Alonzo, kind of a reverse situation of like Bill Paxton or Charlie Sheen. He actually began as an actor. Oh, interesting. He began in front of the camera. He was from Dallas, Texas. And in Dallas, Texas, as a puppeteer, he created a character for a local kids TV show called Senior Turtle.

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At the end of the day. Yeah, and I'd done Freddy. I mean, I know how long it takes to do that makeup, but then you've got to add all the animatronic stuff to it. And it always worked. I mean, that's the other thing with Stan. Unlike the tank, you know, you're building all this stuff, you're putting it all in on, and all the animatronics worked always. So just Stan, genius. And I always loved that he kept a copy of all the Rippers in his museum next to the Alien and the Terminator. Oh, wow.

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