Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
This sort of interview is the exact reason that Quint is so beloved here at AICN. This boy lives, breathes, and eats geek. And besides that, a little known trivia fact is that Quint is my clone, being grown so I can harvest organs when I need them. Of course, he’s in the same kind of sad, pathetic shape I am (an oval, for the record), so maybe I need to grow another clone that we can both harvest from. It’s all so complicated...
At any rate, here’s a whole lotta seaman with an interview just for you...
Ahoy, squirts! Everybody's favorite friendly neighborhood seaman, Quint, here with quite a long interview with special effects artist Tom Woodruff Jr. If you're a horror geek in any sense of the term then you should be familiar with his work. TREMORS, ALIENS, MONSTER SQUAD, PUMPKINHEAD, TERMINATOR... the list goes on. Not only did he work on the effects for the above films, he IS Pumpkinhead. He was the guy in the suit. He was also "Gillman" in THE MONSTER SQUAD, one of my absolute favorite films of all time.
We talk about all those flicks and much more, including his most recent stint on Joe Dante's LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION flick. I actually found out some really cool geek stuff that happens at the climax of the film. Read on if you're at all curious! By the bye, since we talk a lot about ALIENS and PREDATOR, check out the new line of McFarlane's Movie Maniacs, the Aliens and Predator series, here: Spawn.com. The Alien Queen deluxe box set is the coolest, but I'm still not too hot on those other Alien figures... They look alright, but I'd much rather see... Say... THE TALL MAN or THE HOWLING werewolf or HANNIBAL LECTER... But that might just be me.
Anyway, onto the long, long, but really cool interview!
QUINT: Now you work primarily with Alec Gillis. You both founded your own effects company, right?
TOM WOODRUFF JR: Our company name is AMALGAMATED DYNAMICS INC. It really began as kind of a joke. We needed a company name, for business reasons we needed a company. We didn't want to just call it ALEC AND TOM'S MONSTER SHOP. We said, "Let's come up with something that sounds big and imposing and something that sounded like some big, war-time company that would be building air crafts." Ultimately what it really was was two guys working out of a rented space in Chatsworth.
It has come back in times to haunt us. I remember being really disappointed by the poster on STARSHIP TROOPERS that credits the anamatronic work to AMALGAMATED DYNAMICS. I'm thinking, "That's exactly what we don't want to do." We don't want to make it sound like it's all this soul-less, faceless corporation that does the work. It's mostly about two guys who have wanted to do this stuff since they were 12 years old and have an association with a big bunch of people that do the work.
QUINT: So, what hooked you in your youth? What made you want to make monsters?
TOM WOODRUFF JR: For me it was all about monster movies when I was a kid. It's not all that different today, except when I was a kid there wasn't a DVD collection. It wasn't videotapes. It was waiting until whatever entity decides what movie to put on Friday night, late night, movie channels would let me see. I can remember all through Junior High School and High School, looking through the TV listings and seeing what movies were coming up at night and try to stay up 'till twelve o'clock Friday night so I could watch some Ray Harryhausen movie and always falling asleep and being frustrated.
I remember so many times... It was almost like this inspired torture because I would always wake up when the closing credit music was coming across. So, I'd miss everything and you sort of resign yourself to knowing it's going to be another 6 to 9 months before this thing gets cycled and shows up on another TV station. It was really hit and miss.
I don't know if that inspired me more to start doing my own stuff and to search out other avenues. Also, when I was a kid there were not a lot of magazines. We didn't have a lot of magazines. We didn't have things like Fangoria. You know, you can buy video tape sets now that tell you how to make monsters. It's so out there. There are a bunch of programs that focus on special effects. None of this stuff was even heard of.
I was this dork kid in a small town in Pennsylvania. I could find FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND and that was about it. You'd have to kinda suffer through Forry Ackerman's puns just to get pictures and some insight, but it wasn't really about telling you how to do any of this stuff back then. It was a real struggle just to learn techniques or materials or approaches to this stuff.
QUINT: I saw that you worked on TERMINATOR early in your career. Was that one of your first movie gigs?
TOM WOODRUFF JR: That was the first big one. When I finally moved out here... Officially my first movie was METALSTORM: THE DESTRUCTION OF JARED-SYN.
QUINT: HAHA! I've seen that! The 3-D movie, right?
TOM WOODRUFF JR: Let me go change my list. Now there are 14 people that have seen that movie. I have nothing but fond memories of it. I mean, my God... I had no experience. I had a portfolio of masks and models I had made basically when I was a kid. I ended up being out here for 6 months, it seemed like years, just making the rounds to these different effects houses, showing my portfolio, trying to get a job. Finally the guys at MAKE-UP EFFECTS LAB were starting up this low budget science fiction movie and I was just primed for it. "Sure, I'll come in and work for 2 bucks an hour!"
You start by cleaning up the shop and eventually they'd show you how to make molds, so you graduate to making molds. By the end of the show... it was a dream! I was sculpting and painting. I was doing applications onset. It was such a great learning experience! I just don't see it today. As much as we try to set up that kind of learning experience in our own shop, it just seems like the business is so different now. There are so many avenues, including CGI, where people can satisfy their urge to create something, some fantastic kind of creature or monster or design, that it doesn't seem like there are the numbers, the amount of people, that are interested in learning the hands on approach... Doing it the practical way, the real way on set.
So, anyway, I started with that. I did METALSTORM. I came off of METALSTORM feeling good and invariably what sets in is the 2 or 3 or 4 months of no work available. Nothing else is going on. So, I went to Tom Burman and got picked up over there and I worked on BUCKAROO BANZAI and STAR TREK 3, probably the worst of the STAR TREK series. I missed WRATH OF KHAN by THAT much!!! (laughs)
I did some stuff over there. Again, I got to sculpt and mold and paint... Didn't get to go onset and do application because at that point it was a Union make-up show and I wasn't anywhere near being in the Union. But it was still a great experience. God... Tom Burman, in my eyes... He was the guy who stood next to John Chambers and did all that work on PLANET OF THE APES, a movie that inspired me and probably a lot of people in my generation, my age, to get into this kind of work. That was great, too. He had great stories. How could you beat that? You're doing something you love to do and Tom Burman's telling you first hand experiences of stuff you used to read about you used to read about as a kid. So, that was cool.
Then that wrapped up and again I'm feeling great, then again "No more work. We'll call you when something comes up." Luckily by then a couple of the guys I had met on METALSTORM had actually started working with Stan Winston on a TV pilot for a show called WISHMAN. They were just getting finished getting ready for that, ready to take it to set to shoot for a few days, but Stan had a big project in the works, which was TERMINATOR, and he was taking on some new people. So, they put in a good word for me and I got hired just at the beginning of TERMINATOR.
When people tell you it's as much a matter of being in the right place at the right time I can definitely testify to that because that was the best place to be at that moment. Nobody had heard of Jim Cameron outside of people that had worked with him and all of a sudden TERMINATOR took off. Stan already had a name for himself, obviously, but his presence suddenly grew as well. We got to do ALIENS and PREDATOR and a bunch of other movies in-between that I often refuse to talk about. (laughs)
It was great years. Learning and building... helping build the Stan Winston name, which we always took pride in. It's funny because I talk to people today and there are so many people who are kinda jaded and kinda down on the whole thing of having worked for somebody else. For me and the guys I worked with, to us it was always a matter of personal pride... Even though Stan Winston's name was on it, it was still your work and you still took it to heart. At that time I had no plans to go out on my own, so I totally enjoyed the whole world of being involved, being a part of his artistic crew.
QUINT: What was your main job on TERMINATOR? What was your responsibility?
TOM WOODRUFF JR: Sculpting. And I did lab work. Sculpted puppet heads of Schwarzenegger based on lifecasts that Stan had taken previously...
QUINT: Ah! For the cutting out of the eyeball?
TOM WOODRUFF JR: Yeah. Cutting the eye. Then I got to sculpt pieces... It's funny because whenever I go to see TERMINATOR 3-D show out here at Universal Studios and they've got replicas of the endoskeleton all over the place and I still look at things and I go, "Hey, I sculpted that pelvis and that vertebra..." It's cool. I tell my kids and at this stage now they just kinda role their eyes and go, "Yeah, yeah. Whatever."
We got to go to set and operate everything. I did puppeteering. I got to do all the close up shots at the end of the endoskeleton when he's getting his head mashed on with a pipe. My arm up inside... God, it was just so much hands on... We did some make-up application on... There were some bigger scenes of the future people that had been forced underground with all the scarring and radiation that happened to them. There was a lot of stuff we had done to them. It was a total, all around approach, doing make-up, some puppetry and anamatronic stuff.
QUINT: You jumped onto ALIENS pretty quickly after that, right?
TOM WOODRUFF JR: Yeah, we came off TERMINATOR, then did, I think, a couple other movies, then word came back... "Hey, Cameron's got another movie! He's doing the sequel to ALIEN!" I remember at the time thinking... God, TERMINATOR was brutal onset. Jim's just a brutal guy. Every story you read about him is true, but the other truth is it all serves a purpose. I think what's great about him is... I think he's hard on people if people are sensitive or unsure of themselves or worse, just trying to do as little as possible to get by. He's sharp. He catches that.
I remember when Stan came to us and said, "Hey, Cameron's got another picture." I remember thinking, "It's gonna be like boot camp again..." But also knowing it was going to be worth it. The movie comes out... I remember when TERMINATOR came out and going down to Hollywood to see that when it opened... It was the greatest feeling to see this movie and see the reaction it was getting and how well it had all come together. You know it's going to be worth all the sweat and the blood and all the other shit that goes with it.
QUINT: On ALIENS were you sculpting again? What'd you do?
TOM WOODRUFF JR: I got to sculpt again, I got to sculpt the warrior head. I got to sculpt all the body sections. When we put the bodies together they were really kinda stylized. They were ultimately like body stocking leotards with raised sections glued over them to show the structure of the Alien Warrior body. It's almost like the old fashioned skeleton costumes that you'd put on and it's just a black leotard with white bones painted on it. It was that kind of effect, but the point was that Jim only wanted to show these things as structural highlights moving in among the shadows, so all the connecting detail was all insignificant. It just didn't matter. We'd put them all together and slime them up. He'd pull them out of the darkness with hot light raking across them. It was very effective.
QUINT: As someone who grew up wanting to make their own monsters... I mean, there's nothing more iconic than the endoskeleton or... I mean, you got to sculpt the Alien head, you know! (laughs)
TOM WOODRUFF JR: I know! At the time... You know, there's no historical perspective to it. While we were working on THE TERMINATOR, nobody had any idea what it was going to be. It turned out to be this hugely memorable thing that people still talk about. I like that. I like going back thinking, "Man! I remember when it was just talk about... You know, Stan or Jim Cameron would come back with machine pieces as examples and say, 'Look at the way this thing is all re-enforced... Look at the lines on this... Work a lot of this stuff into the robot." At the time you had no idea that it was going to be anything that big or that special.
QUINT: Well, I'm sure Willis O'Brien thought the same thing when he was working on KING KONG.
TOM WOODRUFF JR: Yeah, it's cool. I like going that way in history, too. Working on that movie did he ever stop to think that 70 years later it would still be revered as it is or to him was it, "Ah, I gotta do my best job on this thing, but basically it's a big gorilla picture..." It'd be interesting to find out.
QUINT: Now, you said you worked on PREDATOR as well?
TOM WOODRUFF JR: I did a little bit of stuff on PREDATOR. I did some finger extensions and a lot of lab work, but a lot of that sculptural stuff was all Steve Wang (THE GUYVER, HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN) and Matt Rose (HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN).
QUINT: I believe we've come to the real meat of this interview... MONSTER SQUAD! How did you first hear of the movie?
TOM WOODRUFF JR: Again, it was a Stan Winston thing. The script came in and Stan used to give us scripts and say, "Look at this. I think this is the next thing we're doing." What was it... Was it a Shane Black script?
QUINT: Yep, it was.
TOM WOODRUFF JR: Yeah, OK... We had known of Shane Black's work and thought, "Wow, this could be cool!" Reading it... It just read like being involved in a fantasy world, being totally involved in monsters. From a technical point of view, you start reading about the Frankenstein Monster and The Wolf Man and The Creature... How can you help but mentally project that it's going to be the same Universal monsters.
At that point, creatively, I was just so up on the idea of recreating the old Universal monsters. Somebody would say, "Where's your design heart? Don't you want to do something new? Or something that's evocative of the originals, but has your touch?" My answer would be, "Hell no! I want to do exactly what I used to see as a kid and do them with some of the techniques and some of the materials and things that we can do today, but they couldn't do back in the '30s and '40s."
That was great. The expectation was high and I think it lasted for about a week, then word came back from the studio that they could not get the rights from Universal to duplicate them, so we had to come up with originals. It's funny... Reluctantly we were forced to be creative because if it was up to me I would have copied every single line. I would have done everything exactly the same, except have them be in color. I thought that would have been the cool way to go.
QUINT: I think the only creature that really hurts from that in the film is Frankenstein. Personally. I love the Wolf Man design and think Gillman looks awesome.
TOM WOODRUFF JR: That's cool. It's funny, my favorite one is also Gillman and again that's a Steve Wang/Matt Rose thing. Watching them sculpt it was amazing. I got to do the prosthetics for Frankenstein. It's difficult because you're wanting... You know, story-wise it's supposed to be Frankenstein, so now everyone knows what it SHOULD look like, but legally you can't make it look too much like that. That was always a bit of a struggle.
But you like the Wolf Man, huh? That's interesting, 'cause that's one of my least favorite characters, I think.
QUINT: Well, I'm only 21, so I think I was only 6 or 7 when MONSTER SQUAD came out, so it was my first time really seeing these monsters before. I don't know about Frankenstein, but I know I saw MONSTER SQUAD before I saw the Universal WOLF MAN, so...
TOM WOODRUFF JR: Well, that makes me feel old! (laughs) That's interesting... Hey, take another look at it and see if, when you look at the Wolf Man, see if you can see Stan Winston's face in that design. He snuck some kinda caricature of himself into that one character. I don't know if he ever felt the same way or not, but I question the whole thing.
QUINT: (laughing) Actually, I can see it already. I'm seeing the scene where the dude is changing in the phone booth. It IS Stan Winston!
TOM WOODRUFF JR: It's funny. I wonder... I wonder what he did... But I was totally excited on the movie because I got to play The Gillman. I remember that came about because I had wanted to... Oh! When we were in London doing ALIENS, I remember getting so exasperated to play The Warrior. We always see them as these tall, sleek sinewy kinda creatures and they sent in stunt-men. They had enough need of Alien Warriors that we had a whole handful of stuntmen. They were not real tall and they were not real thin. A lot of the guys were physically fit and they were stockier than you would want, but luckily the way it was all lit it doesn't feel that way. We used to joke about what we called the Lon Chaney Jr. phenomenon whereby the end of the Frankenstein series, when it was no longer Boris Karloff, but it was Lon Chaney Jr., it was always like, "Why does Frankenstein look thicker now than he ever did."
So, we had that going on. I thought, "Oh, man! I could play these things! I could totally get into this! And it's not like I'd be making an ass out of myself because I get to wear a mask and nobody knows who's inside..." I remember one night, after we finished with the suits, we wanted to take pictures of them, so I put on the Warrior suit that had first been finished and did a whole series of shots of it just doing all these Alien poses, just thinking it was great. It's just great fun to be in this thing, doing all these cool moves.
So, when we came back and started MONSTER SQUAD I went to Stan to ask if I could do this and luckily we had a body cast of me that we had recently finished as a personal project, I was working on a gorilla suit. So, I said, "Look, there's a body cast! Let me start sculpting right on this!" He said, "Uh... eh..." He went for it. He knew I really wanted to do it, so he said, "Alright, let's make this work." So, that was the first monster suit I got to wear in a movie was Gillman.
QUINT: Then you got shot by Fat Kid!
TOM WOODRUFF JR: Yeah, that's right. I got to do my own stunts. I got to do this whole fight sequence, too, that is really cut short in the movie... When the Creature climbs out of the manhole, that was a struggle, too. You know, I'm trying to do it without tearing out the crotch of the suit and keep balance. And the damn head! I'm blind because we had these gorgeous looking amphibian eyes, but there's no way to see through them. We left the tear duct open in the eyes, so I literally had an opening the size of a thumb tack in the corner of each eye and that's a little bit spaced out about an inch and a half away from my eye. So, if you hold up a little hole in a piece of paper an inch and a half away from your eye, that was my vision! And it's at night and I've got 2 or 3 of these guys, they're supposed to be Sheriffs, coming in. Stunt men with these rubber clubs and they're all primed to start whacking on me. We had to time the whole thing out where I basically just throw up my hands and they make sure when they're swinging they're targeting, so it can look like I grab them. I remember feeling awkward, but ultimately it looked fine on film.
QUINT: I've been talking to a friend of mine at ANCHOR BAY and they're dying to buy up the rights to THE MONSTER SQUAD and release a DVD, but Columbia refuses to let it go, but also refuses to do anything with it.
TOM WOODRUFF JR: Oh really? What's the speculation for the reason behind them being reluctant to let it out?
QUINT: I don't really know, but I'd hope it's because they want to put out their own DVD. I mean, I'm sure they saw how well THE GOONIES sold on DVD. I would hope that's the reason why, but I really don't know. Since the likelihood of seeing a MONSTER SQUAD DVD in the near future isn't so grand, I have to get some behind the scenes stories from you while I can!
TOM WOODRUFF JR: Yeah...
QUINT: C'mon... Monsters... Kids... Scary German Guys...
TOM WOODRUFF JR: It's such a great mix. I really think the movie should have done better. I don't know if it just wasn't promoted well enough... In terms of kids movies, too, you know, where kids are carrying the story, it was really well done. A lot of these things sink to the level where it's just a bunch of smart-ass kids and you just don't buy it at all, but I don't know... I just remember thinking these guys were really likable in their roles. I thought there was a lot of good balance to it all, between the kids and the parents part of the story and all the monster stuff... It was fun.
QUINT: Do you remember any big scenes that might have not made the final cut?
TOM WOODRUFF JR: No, I don't think so. It was pretty economical in that we didn't go off and shoot a bunch of stuff that didn't make it into the movie. I'm trying to think of some good stories... The only stuff I was involved with onset was the Gillman stuff. The other guys of Stan's crew were on doing the werewolf transformation make-up and Alec (Gillis) had built that big half bat half human Dracula body when we find him in the Sporting Goods store as a big puppet.
Oh, with the Gillman stuff in the pond I remember thinking that was cool because we were on the Warner Bros backlot and they referred to it as Walton's Pond, a big concrete lake. We're shooting this stuff at night and it was, like, late winter/early spring, so it was still pretty cold, but the good news is they said, "The pond is heated, so we'll have it warmed up."
What I wasn't aware of, at the time, is when I go into these suits... We don't have the ability to take the suits on and off very easily. It takes a little time to get into them and then we glue down the hands and the feet and the head and everything so it's all totally seamless. We glue up the zipper in the back, so it's not like you can get out and take bathroom breaks. In light of that, I didn't drink a lot of fluids, which I know now is not smart, but at the time I thought "I'm not going to deal with having to go to the bathroom."
Now it's night and it's cold out and I have to go into this pond. Now, you know this phenomenon of walking into a hot pool in cold weather when you have to go to the bathroom... At that point there was this really uncomfortable urge... You just want to go to the bathroom and start thinking, "Hmm... This is a pretty big pond. I wonder if anybody would even notice?" Then I suddenly had this horrible thought that what if there's some weird, reactive thing to foam rubber... Like a strip of litmus paper where the PH balance will do something... I'll come out of the water and I'll have this gigantic orange stain all over the legs of the suit! So, I decided to hold it all in. I was in that suit for a total of 13 hours before I came out.
QUINT: Well, one of the next films you worked on you ended up playing a guy in a suit, too... Or rather a demonic, vengeance hell-bent creature...
TOM WOODRUFF JR: (laughs) Aptly described!
QUINT: You got on PUMPKINHEAD through Stan Winston, I take it... That was his first directorial gig, right?
TOM WOODRUFF JR: Yeah, that was his first feature. That was a great experience because Stan's the director. Stan had total confidence in us pulling off the work... He turned over the design of the creature, the building of the creature, totally to us. There were really, like, 4 of us over there doing all the designs of the creature and all the make-up appliances on Haggis, the witch. You'd go into meetings and you suddenly thought you were a grown-up now. People were talking to us and asking questions and we were much more involved than we were when we just Stan Winston's guys working in the shop and that was because Stan was the guy running the show.
That was a great experience. Being onset... It was a lot of fun. Everything you'd guess it'd be if you were into this kind of movie... Being suited up and playing all this stuff and getting a chance to get really crazy with some of the moves. The first time we brought this thing out onset... We were big on wanting to keep it this really kinduva pale, flesh color, you know... Like a pinkish-orangish flesh color, but real pale. We had a lot of veins painted.
We also just painted this big, weird kinduva dark knot down on the crotch of the suit because we didn't want to get into doing genitalia for the monster, but we knew people were going to look and we thought, "Let's give 'em something where if they look they see something that sorta satisfies that urge, but not really definitive." It was this weird, twisted knot that was all shriveled and looked like it was going to fall off.
The first day we were onset, I walk out on the set and I was looking out these little slits in the neck, with my head down looking at the ground, and I'm just suddenly aware of the big, long expanse of bare leg and crotch and I'm totally surrounded. Then I started thinking, "God! Everybody's standing there looking at me like this and, literally, the only thing between me and them is a quarter inch of foam rubber." I remember it being really embarrassing at first. It took me about a day or two to get over that, but there was that first moment where you literally, even though you're wearing a costume, you feel like you're out there naked and people are just staring at you from every angle.
QUINT: You also worked on another horror geek favorite... One of my personal favorite films, TREMORS.
TOM WOODRUFF JR: Oh, yeah! That was actually our first feature after we left Stan.
QUINT: When did you leave Stan Winston Studios?
TOM WOODRUFF JR: LEVIATHAN was the last movie we did and we did some design stuff with him for his second feature he was directing called... I think it ended up getting released as NORM... or A GNOME NAMED NORM... something.
QUINT: Yeah, A GNOME NAMED NORM, I think.
TOM WOODRUFF JR: A movie you just love to talk about out loud because it's such an annoying title to verbalize... Hey, it's funny... Here's a movie you probably never saw, but I remember having the same reaction to a movie that was out in the... I wanna say the early '70s... I will spell the title, but I won't try to say it. It was just S-S-S-S.
QUINT: Oh yeah. The snake movie.
TOM WOODRUFF JR: Yeah, the snake movie.
QUINT: I'll do you one better. I even remember the tagline. "Don't say it, hiss it!"
TOM WOODRUFF JR: Yeah! You're good! I didn't even talk to people about it... The title it's just so demeaning... Same thing with GNOME.
QUINT: I collect film, so I spend a lot of time watching old 35mm trailers and 16mm TV spots. I saw a TV spot for S-S-S-S.
TOM WOODRUFF JR: That's cool. Yeah, I was into that film because it was John Chambers (PLANET OF THE APES, PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE) and Dan Striepeke (PLANET OF THE APES, BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS) make-up. Anyway...
We left Stan's... He was concentrating on his directing and said he was going to scale back and not work on the big movies for a while. He wanted to work on his own thing. At the same time, we were thinking, "Hey, maybe this is a good time to break off." We had a short film that we had produced and directed that we were shopping around trying to get interest in. There was a small production company that wanted to have some meetings with us about actually doing a film, which, of course, ultimately fell through.
At that point, we thought, "We're not going to go crawling back to Stan, so let's make a go of it. We'll take on some jobs and continue to try to be screenwriters and filmmakers in our off-hours." Of course, that doesn't go exactly as planned. We ended up doing more and more of the monster stuff and the make-up stuff and everything just kept growing from there, just took off really fast. A lot of it was Stan giving us referrals on job. We got a lot of support from him.
QUINT: So, is that how you got the job on TREMORS?
TOM WOODRUFF JR: Yeah, that came to us through Gale (Anne) Hurd (producer of ALIENS, etc). She'd gone to Stan and Stan was busy, but he said, "Hey, Tom and Alec recently broke off. Go to them and talk to them about doing it."
It was a good movie to start with because it was kinduva cool genre that's a little bit comedy, but also some real, solid monster kinda stuff in the movie. We thought it was a good mix, although people connected with the film claim that's what ultimately made it difficult for Universal to market.
It's funny, we're involved with the production guys again for the sequels that just came out on video, you know... TREMORS 2 and 3... And it's funny. To hear them talk, there's such a strong divisionary line, even within Universal, between their feature offices and their direct-to-video offices where direct-to-video guys say, "Hey, TREMORS is huge on video. Make some more TREMORS movies, so we can release them on video." Then the theatrical guys go, "Well, it didn't do that well in the theatre... There's no market for it." So, they ultimately decided they'll just do direct-to-video sequels. The budget's not there, the time's not there, but you still struggle and try to pull off what you can.
I actually still love the stuff in TREMORS 2, you know, with the Shriekers and all that puppet stuff. It's not exactly what you'd want if it was a big, full on theatrical feature, but...
QUINT: I think what's missing the most from the video sequels is the great camaraderie we saw in the first film between Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward.
TOM WOODRUFF JR: Yes. I know, I know. There was a lot more character stuff when it was done the first time around.
QUINT: You mentioned STARSHIP TROOPERS earlier. I'm a huge fan of that movie. You worked on the real onset Alien Bug creatures, right?
TOM WOODRUFF JR: Yeah, we did all the full size hydraulic bug stuff. We're always the first ones to say, "Look, there's a great example of a movie that's 95% CGI and 5% our stuff, but we still feel the 5% was important to see specific contact between actors and monsters." I remember right after JURASSIC PARK came out, people said, "Wow, CGI is finally here! Those dinosaurs look great! Does that mean you guys are going to be out of work soon? Are you worried?" I think we were concerned for a moment, but we quickly realized what the truth is. First of all, the JURASSIC PARK example was turning to... someone did a timed evaluation and out of I forget how many total minutes of dinosaur stuff, more of it was Stan Winston's animatronic dinosaurs than CGI, but obviously CGI makes a huge impression because CGI does stuff you can't do with animatronics.
So, ultimately instead of there being less work, there was more work. A movie like STARSHIP TROOPER could not have been made without CGI. There's no way you could have done all those thousands of bugs on a planet's surface using conventional puppets or animatronics or conventional visual effects. It had to be CGI stuff. Because of CGI that movie got made and because that movie got made there's still a need for more animatronic and real tactile, onset puppets as well.
QUINT: You just finished up working on Joe Dante's LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION... I met him once at a screening of THE HOWLING at the Egyptian Theatre in LA and he struck me as a totally cool guy, a huge geek. How was he to work with?
TOM WOODRUFF JR: He was great. You know, we went into meetings because the monsters that they chose for the end sequence in LOONEY TUNES... they were trying to get a handful of recognizable, iconic 1950s style movie monsters. The ones we ended up getting to do were Metaluna Mutant (THIS ISLAND EARTH), MAN FROM PLANET X, which I think is a totally obscure little character, but really came off cool, and ROBOT MONSTER.
QUINT: Sweet!
TOM WOODRUFF JR: (laughs) Everybody wanted to do ROBOT MONSTER and we held out and got to do it. That is really twisted, taking current techniques and approaches all in an effort to do ROBOT MONSTER. We would go into meetings with Joe and he was totally up on all these things and we said, "We want to do some changes. Let us do this to Metaluna Mutant and do this and this..." He'd say, a little reluctant, "Um... OK... Don't change too much! Guys, be willing to embrace the garishness!"
Then we started talking about this MAN FROM PLANET X and it was just this weird looking little thing. I had never even seen the movie up 'till then, so I finally went out and rented it. We actually got the original head that they used in the movie. Bob Burns is a great supporter of our work. He let us take the original head he had from his collection. We took it to Joe Dante and we thought, "This'll help seal the deal. He'll see how crude and how rough this thing is." It was all kinda distorted from storage for 50 years and we showed it to Joe and he goes, "Oh, yeah! That's it! I love it! I love how one half of the face is different from the other half." We said, "I think that's because when it was sitting on a stand for 30 years it kinda folded weird and got hard." He goes, "Oh, I guess you're right."
Ultimately, to compromise, we said, "Look, Joe. We'll do whatever you want, but please don't make us do a bad sculpture." He said, "OK, OK. Just make it look good!" So, yeah. He's totally up on all that.
That was a blast, too, because we got to be onset with all those characters. Bill Malone had ROBBIE THE ROBOT (FORBIDDEN PLANET) there and the guys from KNB (FX) did a Triffid (1962's DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS) and some Daleks (DR. WHO). It was a couple week of great set stuff going on.
QUINT: Too cool! Did you work on any other effects in the film or just the classic sci-fi recreations?
TOM WOODRUFF JR: No, that was it. It was strictly 2 weeks of working with these 3 monsters... trying to make them look good, but also having fun with them.
QUINT: What do you think us sci-fi geeks with take from the LOONEY TUNES movie?
TOM WOODRUFF JR: From LOONEY TUNES? Eh... I don't know if it'll be so much of a sci-fi fan kinda thing because the whole flavor of the movie is really this kind of a... I haven't seen a whole script. They only sent us pages for what we were working on, but even within the context of that scene there's so much going on. I think they're just trying to make it huge and dense, like an old Warner Bros cartoon, but all amped up. It's like condensing as many gags as you can into as short a time as you can without tripping all over them.
It's really funny. They have all the old Warner Bros cartoon characters in, so there's going to be that kind of SPACE JAM mix of animation and live action. But just gorgeous sets. I don't even know who the production designer is on it [Seaman sidenote: it's Bill Brzeski who was the PD on STUART LITTLE and AS GOOD AS IT GETS], but just gorgeous sets. I think it should do well. Maybe not so much for the sci-fi fans, but at least for a good time at the movies. I think it'll be good for over-all geeks.
QUINT: Your fingerprints are all over the coolest monsters of the last 20 plus years. Where does the passion for your job come from?
TOM WOODRUFF JR: I think my passion is in finding something in the design of the creatures that becomes a character, whether it be in the designed look of it or playing these roles. I still love getting in the suit or doing the onset puppetry that makes this thing come alive. To me, that's the total package, to carry it all the way through to the point of seeing it go on film moving the way you want it to or expressing the feelings you want it to express. To me, that's the passion.
QUINT: What are you doing next?
TOM WOODRUFF JR: Right now we're at a great position, finally, with some projects we've been developing on our own. One of them is this project called MONSTER SEEDS that Alec (Gillis) and I developed as a story and we're now pitching it. The good thing is it's a solid story, but it's got a lot of great opportunities for monster characters. We've brought in a couple of writers to work on shaping it with us to go out to pitch. Larry Wilson, who did BEETLEJUICE and THE ADDAMS FAMILY, and Alan Katz, who came from OUTER LIMITS and TALES FROM THE CRYPT. A really solid team. We're probably half way into our meetings and we're getting great responses from a lot of different places.
The bad side of it is we've wanted to make this thing such a stand out thing that it's unfortunately a huge budgeted thing, so it is not the kind of project we're going to burst out of the gate with and be able to direct it. It's sort of something we have to offer up as a project and stay involved as creators and producers. But ultimately, it'll get our name out and get people to look at us in a slightly different way, which we're finding is the biggest problem. We have a lot of other projects that we want to take out on our own and be able to produce and direct out own content.
QUINT: What's your favorite dirty joke?
TOM WOODRUFF JR: Ha! Favorite dirty joke, huh?
QUINT: And I know you FX guys are foul mouthed, so don't feel shy!
TOM WOODRUFF JR: God, you're going to be so disappointed now because since my... I don't want to admit to the FX geeks that I have an outside life with a wife and kids, but because of my kids I've sorta backed off on my ability to retain dirty jokes in my head.
I'll tell you the most recent one that made me laugh. Let's see if I get it right... And the funny part is I'll tell you where I heard the joke from. The joke is something like: Two guys are onboard the Titanic as its going down. A guy and a priest. They hear the announcements come out over the loud speaker that everybody must move away from the lifeboats. Women and children first.
The one guy turns to the priest and says, "Did you hear that? Screw the women and children!" The priest says, "D'you think we got time?" That's not too dirty, right? But you know where I heard it from? My 10 year old 5th Grader!
There you have it, squirts. Whew, that was a monster of an interview to transcribe. I hope you folks liked it. I have more cool shit comin' your way in the near future, including my report on the 2 days I spent up in Chicago watching Robert Altman film his new movie, THE COMPANY, plus some reviews and other coolness... Hell, I might end up in Sundance if my buddy Rav has his way, so who knows? You might be getting some frozen Seaman Sundance reports... 'Til that day, this is Quint bidding you all a fond farewell and adieu.
-Quint
