Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with first of a run of interviews from my set visit to THE THING prequel (Click Here To Read It!). Of course I drooling at the chance to be in close proximity to Mary Elizabeth Winstead, I wanted to talk MacReady comparisons with Joel Edgerton, I wanted to pick the director’s brain, but the one chat I was desperate for was with the head of the creature effects. On this show that person was ADI’s Alec Gillis, an effects man that cut his teeth with Roger Corman and Stan Winston before teaming up with Tom Woodruff Jr. to start their own effects company. We talk quite a bit about the legacy of Rob Bottin’s industry-changing work on John Carpenter’s original THE THING, about the modern realities of practical vs. CGI and what we’re likely to see up on the screen when this prequel hits the screen. Hope you enjoy the chat!
Quint: I have to imagine you fought every other practical effects company tooth and nail to do this. This has got to be one of the dream jobs, especially since they aren’t really doing a remake, but a prequel idea; something where you can actually try to match the iconic nature of Rob Bottin’s work, but at the same time the whole concept behind THE THING and what it can do as a creature allows you a certain freedom with it. It’s got to be the best of both worlds for you.
Alec Gillis: Yeah, it really is. It really is… It’s amazing for me, first of all, that it took so long to do a sequel/prequel of the movie, because it’s so iconic, in an era that was full of great horror movies and science fiction movies, it’s surprising to me, but having said that I’m thankful that it’s happening now; not just for me personally, but because of the technology. I don’t mean the digital technology because as much as I respect the digital stuff I think we’ve seen enough digital stuff that looks like video games, computer games, but the technology as it’s changed for us in the animatronics world, with the silicones and more powerful small motors and stuff like that. So for me, and Tom (Woodruff, partner in ADI) feels the same way, yeah that’s exactly right, (THE THING is) the sought after creature job and we consider ourselves lucky, because we are competing against a lot of guys that have wanted it equally and have been around for a long time. So yeah, we feel very fortunate.
Quint: It also seems to be very… the fact that you have the producers and Matthijs, that are really wanting to have such a practical angle to the. The reason why I think a lot of fans now are still questioning this movie is because they don’t know to what extent… THE THING was such a milestone in practical effects and creature effects. People don’t want to see, at least the fans, don’t want to see digital Things and so I can just imagine the fact that they are wanting to have so much non-digital work on set stuff… They showed me a shot with Mary where there was a Thing walking across the frame and she lit it on fire as it was walking across the frame. There’s something in the way the flame engulfed the creature, the way it threw off light, the way it changed the air around it... You couldn’t replicate that unless you had James Cameron kind of money.
Alec Gillis: That’s what I really like about this group, they all have been first of all extremely respectful of the Carpenter version and you can see that in the script as well. They have also been very respectful of the status that the movie has because of Bottin’s work and the imagination that was displayed back then it’s something that can’t be ignored. So they have been really making an effort not to go the usual studio route, which is to turn it into a factory of digital effects where you pump money in one end and the video (game) quality effects come out the other end. And to that I’m really thrilled that they got Image Engine, because the stuff in DISTRICT 9 looked very photo-real, so that’s fantastic news and then the other great thing is that we are designing effects that will make use of digital as an embellishment. For instance we have a character, without getting too specific in it, we have a character that there are going to be aspects of it that change that will be digital within the frame. In other words you are not just exclusively cutting from a practical Thing to a digital Thing now crawling up a wall. There’s going to be some of that, but what we are really trying to do is within the frame trying to create a blend with the two technologies because the perfect thing about the nature of this creature, the perfect opportunity to blend the techniques, is that where we in the make-up and animatronics world have a handle on the realities of flesh that moves and looks translucent and has all of that tactile quality and goo and blood and all of that kind of stuff, the digital world has the ability to change and morph and make things really radically grow before your eyes. So if we can combine them in a seamless way, I think that the fans will be happy. I think that the fans are going to go “Okay, this I can see is a real Thing, but it’s doing some extra cool stuff.”
Quint: And if they can’t spot the effect, that’s the real trick. Listen, I’m of the mind where if it were up to me, I would be like “You are going to bring in somebody who can paint on glass and we are going to have real matte paintings, we are going to go total old school,” but I realize that’s not how they do it.
Alec Gillis: And that comes from a studio level, too. These days the logic is… You know, the bummer is that movies are getting more and more forced into becoming a product of offices with people working in cubicles. It’s not like David Lean is out there with a thousand people fighting the elements or it’s not a Fitzcarraldo kind of situation any more and I’m sad about that because I think that is was still takes my breath away. When I look at something and go “Oh my God, it’s real.” Part of reality is pulling back because we’ve been through this phase now where we have seen so much digital work that shows you every little thing and every nuance becomes over-nuanced and I don’t want to see it.
Quint: You don’t want THE THING to be TRANSFORMERS.
Alec Gillis: That’s right.
Quint: You don’t want to see every working part in glaring bright light. That’s not what this universe is about.
Alec Gillis: And the other aspect of this that these guys get is that this is a horror movie, it’s not a sci-fi fantasy where you are going to step back and enjoy the world from afar. You need to be right in it, in the gristle and the meat and you need to be unsure of what you are looking at and excited by “who knows what the hell is going on?”
Quint: The exciting thing about Carpenter’s movie… There’s so much going on from the script, the character work, you cared about the guys. They weren’t black and white. MacReady was somehow extremely likeable, but a fucking asshole. Then when you get to Bottin’s stuff it’s like he really did show you things that you had never seen before. When Norris’s head separates from… That whole sequence is not just the head growing the legs, which is incredible and all, but everything from the head starting to separate and you see the things pop and bulge. It looks biologically correct in some odd way.
Alec Gillis: When I watched that film again, that to me is the best… from the time of the guy putting he paddles on his chest, the chest opening up… The genius of doing a likeness makeup on an amputee and then that neck stretch with all of that… when you watch that, it’s foam latex too, from back in the day. They are pumping syringes with tubes of acetone and who knows what the hell is going on in there and you know that just to get that neck to stretch and pop in that fashion and shake like blubber, that is months and months of work of people testing materials and all of that kind of stuff. Man, that to me is the equivalent of the David Lean stuff where you’ve got a guy in the world to “How do you stretch and make skin pop?” Honestly, that’s the kind of stuff now that goes digital, right? It’s an easier route to get to that and movies have compressed pre-production schedules and all of that, but man I look at that stuff and I still feel like I did… I think I was 22 or so when that movie came out and Bottin… I’m just a little bit younger than Rob and Rob was always ahead of me. I came to Roger Corman’s in 1979 and I met him when he was doing HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP and I first of all couldn’t believe that he was only like two years older than me because he looked like he was like nine feet tall with this giant sasquatch beard and all of that stuff. So I’ve always looked up to the guy and always felt like “My God, how will I ever do that?” When I was 22 and I saw that movie, I thought, “I might as well get out of the business. How am I ever going to come close to anything like that?” The guy was what, he was about 21 or 22 when he was helming that and it was what his third movie as a department head? Unbelievable. And with Rob, if I may go on about him for a second…
Quint: Please do.
Alec Gillis: THE THING was one of many movies: THE HOWLING and…
Quint: And LEGEND. LEGEND was fucking unbelievable.
Alec Gillis: LEGEND to me is… Particularly The Darkness character is just unreal. Those horns! You know when you see that, the boldness of that… THE EXPLORERS and ROBOCOP… ROBOCOP was one of my favorite Sci-Fi films and a lot of it has to do with that character and how expressive it is and he was of course legendary for putting production through hell like the story of putting Tim Curry into the LEGEND make-up taking 14 hours, they open the doors and the crew has gone home. I don’t know if any of that (is true), you can check with Tim, but what was great about that is that was a guy who was a mad genius, perfectly suited to his time and he would say, “They are going to wait. They are just going to wait. We are just going to do this.” Actors feed off that right, they see that kind of dedication and they, not always, but they will jump onboard if you have that kind of commitment and dedication.
Maybe I can use this forum now, when we got the job the first thing we said was “What about Bottin?” People were like “We don’t know where he is or what he’s doing.” You want to pick up the phone and track him down, but at the same time we wanted to make sure we had the job (laughs), but we have wanted, and I know that the producers feel the same way, they’ve wanted him to come here, but I think everybody is jus going a million miles a minute and I don’t know about him even coming to Toronto, but please Rob, if you are reading, I would like to invite you to ADI to come check out the stuff that we have done for the movie. You are probably going to look at it and say, “You know… Yeah… Okay, I would have done it a little differently,” but we would love to have you come by and take a look at this, plus it’s been probably 20 years since I’ve seen him and I would just like to see him again. I think the guy is just a complete Hollywood movie original thinker that we have all been trying to be like since this movie.
Quint: The dude’s on another level. As great as the transformations in THE HOWLING and the gore in THE HOWLING, the stuff with the melted man in ROBOCOP still freaks me out, but it really is THE THING though. THE THING is pretty much… he is the unofficial star of that movie.
Alec Gillis: Yeah, and to be given that kind of creative control… First of all, I don’t know how Carpenter got away with just going “Okay, that’s my guy” and no studio, the times have changed so much, no studio comes in and goes “Are you crazy? The kid is 22, have you seen him? Have you talked to him? He frightens us!” But to then be able to sit down and brainstorm at a writing level basically and say “What if this? What if that? What if…” That’s really quite remarkable. Some of my guys on my crew have… I’m friends with James Kagel, who was a sculptor on THE THING and he said “Yeah, we had about a year to do this stuff and then we went six months over schedule,” so 18 months. Of course my guys are moping around saying “18 months! If only we had that kind of time!” But I say “Listen man, they were inventing the shit that we are doing now. They were coming up with all of that stuff, so we benefit by all of that groundwork.” And they really established the language and the rules, so yeah once again we stand on the shoulders of giants.
Quint: If I remember correctly on the original, that scene that we were talking about, they did the shot and they did the burn, but something didn’t work and that Carpenter said “Well, we need this the next day” and that essentially Bottin reset the entire thing that took him a month and a half to get into position, he had to do it all over night. Have there been any instances like that on this?
Alec Gillis: Not so far. Right now we are just getting into the heavy second unit stuff which is where our stuff really comes to life and where we get to play with it and you don’t have to worry about shooting out eight actors, so we are just getting into it, but I am anticipating that kind of hell which is good you know, because you’ve got to… Again, this is what I love about what the practical work has to offer, you can come up with happy accidents that you just can’t duplicate. I don’t know how many times we have been powering something down and the face just starts spazzing out and you go “Wow, look at that! Let’s use that.” When it’s all pre-planned and pixel dominated to the Nth degree, you lose the organic quality of it. You lose the spontaneity.
Quint: There are digital artists out there that are just brilliant at what they do, but there is always that element missing. I was listening to I think it was the DP of Poltergeist, Matthew Leonetti, who did a podcast and he was talking about effects on that and then they ended up talking about RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and about the cloud tank, putting the ink in the water to get the menacing clouds, and they noticed that whenever they started draining the water out it created this weird circle in the middle of the clouds and then that’s what they ended up using when the Ark’s pulled up into heaven. That was perfect when those clouds just separate. It’s just changing the pressure in the tank somehow and opening one little thing that just created this great memorable effect. I’m such a big fan of that stuff.
Alec Gillis: Me too, I’m a huge fan of the ‘60s and ‘70s and it blows me away that younger people are huge fans of the ‘80s movies, because I didn’t realize when I was working at Stan’s that we had whatever six or eight weeks to pick up the pieces on PREDATOR. “Here, pick up the pieces and make a creature suit.”
Quint: They changed it midstream, yeah?
Alec Gillis: Yeah and you don’t know that what you are doing is going to become iconic and that you are part of it and that’s a thrill, but I love the movies of the ‘60s and ‘70s where cinema verite started happening and you had handheld cameras and things were gritty and they stopped putting so much make-up on people’s faces, so you would see freckles all over Sissy Spacek’s face or something. I love that stuff. I like the down and dirty stuff and that’s what I like about practical because you can get something on the set and you can put three cameras on it. We have done some really cool stuff in the second unit with long lenses where all you are getting is weird shapes passing through and you don’t know what you are looking at, but whatever it is it’s cool whereas this post digital editing philosophy is “Let’s step back and watch the wonderful world of things happen from a safe distance.” I don’t like that. I want to be in there.
Quint: You know what’s weird? The action should be a little bit farther back; it shouldn’t all be so close where you can’t tell what’s happening. Having nice establishing shots, seeing a fight sequence, or seeing something like that and the other way around with the creature effects, the stuff that’s left up to the imagination, the glimpses you get, just what’s hidden in shadow. Somewhere in the modern filmmaking handbook those two styles got switched and no one noticed.
Alec Gillis: Limitations that make you better. JAWS is the famous one, right? I couldn’t believe it, I heard an interview with Spielberg and they were saying “How would you make JAWS differently?” He was saying “I’d probably do more shots where you could see the shark” and I’m thinking “No! Forgive me, you are a genius, but no!” Just like Ridley Scott told me that part of the way he shot the alien was that he realized when the guy got in this slip latex suit which didn’t have a lot of flexibility, the guy couldn’t move, so he thought “Oh shit, I’m not going to be able to have this thing running around grabbing people. I’ve got to cut around that.” And he came up with a language that was way better where it’s glimpses of things. Those are the kind of things that the practical world gives you and you go “Hmm, what can it do? What can’t it do? Let’s play to the strengths and hide the weaknesses” and then you end up with something as you said that leaves a bit to the imagination.
Quint: It’s the reason why the original STAR WARS movies will always be better than the prequels in my mind. Even going into RETURN OF THE JEDI there is still the sky wasn’t the limit, they had to creatively come up with ideas, but especially so on the first movie where they had such a limited budget, they had limited creative control.
Alec Gillis: That’s always the case.
Quint: And it always makes it better. It’s harder, but it’s better.
Alec Gillis: And filmmakers always get excited “Now my imagination can run wild,” well that’s not necessarily a good thing, you know? Working within parameters is what keeps it tight.
Quint: That’s what makes things iconic, especially in genre. There’s a famous story where Carpenter didn’t like the frozen Norwegian with the slit wrists. I haven’t seen any pictures of the build before it was lit, but that changed the way he shot it. He said, “It didn’t look good. It sucked,” but the way that he shot it, it looks like one of the coolest things in the movie.
Alec Gillis: Yeah and you don’t get enough of a glimpse of it, which is a great thing.
Quint: And it forced him to focus on MacReady as a character and force him to focus on the reaction.
Alec Gillis: That’s what was brilliant about that, he gives the audience time. You are looking at something and hen you get to see the characters looking and reacting as well and I love the lack of music in that film.
Quint: It’s very heartbeat driven.
Alec Gillis: And I love also low angles looking up where you are seeing ceilings and I get that feeling here when I’m looking at the monitors and I’m seeing shots laid out like “Wow, I feel like I’m back in that movie.” You know, the little intercom boxes on the wall are the same… Gorgeous!
Quint: I noticed outside of The Thing that I immediately went to first, but when I went over to the monitors the first thing I saw I’m like “Oh good, you are shooting super wide. You are shooting just like Carpenter would have.”
Alec Gillis: I love the idea, and I know that some people have expressed some concern about a prequel, but I love the idea because they are taking great pains to show you… We are given a lot of clues in the first film, “Something went down here” and to be able to see exactly what did happen, “How’d that ax get stuck in the wall?” I love that and I like that the setting is 1983. My biggest concern when I heard about THING 2 is “Uh oh, I hope it’s not THING GOES TO MANHATTAN and now we have a zombie outbreak of creatures and now it’s like a video game.” It’s funny because the videogames used to be tiny and the films were big, now it’s the opposite. I want to see a film that draws me in with the characters and even if you have less effects, but you have great characters and you have scary great looking stuff going on. But yeah I hope people will give it a chance. At this point honestly I don’t know what the final mix of digital and practical is going to be. We are pushing for as much practical as possible and they have been great about it.
Quint: I keep hearing 80/20 practical to CG. Does that feel right to you?
Alec Gillis: I guess I’d have to… I know that we are doing a bunch of cool things, but it’s hard to say at this stage. Once you get into postproduction and you see what needs to be added to it and you see what needs to be fixed up.
Quint: Sometimes post can be a bad place for you guys, too. I was on THE MIST for about a week with Frank and I was seeing the stuff that Greg Nicotero and his guys were doing and I’m like “Wow, the tentacles look fucking great,” then you see the movie and they are just completely washed over.
Alec Gillis: I keep teasing these guys, I’m saying “Don’t get the sickness” and the sickness is that you’ve been watching these images now for months and months when you are editing in postproduction and you have seen them and you are tired of them and you start nitpicking them apart and then you start going “We should replace” and then you end up not giving your digital guys enough time because they were never planning to replace that, so what they end up doing doesn’t have presence in reality…
Quint: And it wasn’t shot that way. You didn’t have the clean plate...
Alec Gillis: Yeah and nobody is happy, so I’m saying “Please stay healthy.”
Quint: I think one of the best examples… I think that the atmosphere in SILENT HILL was incredible, but I was disappointed at some of the CG and then I saw the behind the scenes on the DVD and saw a lot of the creatures that were there were actually practical creatures, but then they put this weird digital sheen on them, like the armless guys that were walking around. The stuff that was on the behind the scenes was creepy. It looked great, but in the movie they just look like digital blobs.
Alec Gillis: [Pointing to a man.] That gentleman worked on it right there. That’s Paul Jones and we talked about that, actually. That’s exactly as you say and there’s something that practical stuff that we fans like because it’s got detail, because it does have a crispness and a reality, but for some reason as you get through the process of posting people feel like they have to give an artificial gloss to it or something and it actually takes away. We’ll see how it works out. I hope everybody likes it. Oh, one last thing, I want to say I can’t remember who sent us an email to our website that was basically a… it wasn’t quite a threat, but it was a stern reminder. “Congratulations, you got THE THING. I hope you understand the gravity of this, because the fans want to be fucking scared.” (Laughs) And at the very end it said “PS, no Goddamn CGI.” I’ve shown that to Petra, our supervisor and I told it to Yespur and of course they are like “Oh… We don’t know that we can completely accommodate that,” but the guy did say “Except for landscapes and atmospherics and things like that.” I thought that was a pretty reasonable email.
Quint: And you know rod removal, set extensions, I think that CG has a big place. Even here when they are talking about a lot of the tentacles being CG it gets me nervous, but the fact that… You are right, the guys that did DISTRICT 9 did organic texture, granted that was more insectoid, but they were able to make something actually look like it was there.
Alec Gillis: And it had character and it had performance and that’s a big part of it. I will say working with Image Engine, it’s one of the more pleasant experiences that I’d had working with a digital company. They are very non-territorial and they are very respectful of the practical aspects and what it gives us, so I have a really good feeling about it.
Quint: Cool.
Alec Gillis: Anyway, great talking to you.
Quint: You, too.
I’ll be back tomorrow with one of four possible remaining Thing interviews. I have Joel Edgerton, director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and writer Eric Heisserer in the queue. You’ll get one a day until I’m spent (that’s what she said). See you folks tomorrow for the next Thing chat! -Quint quint@aintitcool.com Follow Me On Twitter
