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John Cox In January 2007 I interviewed Australian FX artist John Cox about his work on Korean monster movie The Host. That part of the interview will appear soon on Fangoria.com and the part about his work on killer croc film Rogue I’m keeping in reserve for nearer that films’ release date. But I also took the opportunity to ask John about some of his earlier films...
"Ah, what a great movie. Old Christopher Lee gets to sing that ‘Name Your Poison’ song which is such a terrific little number. I was sort of assistant prop person on that one and looked after making the model town in the tank at the end that separates and blows up. There were a lot of cutaways. There was a deli where we had to make all replica fish and things out of latex. There were some replica weapons and things but the main piece that I worked on was that model at the end." Was the film a success when it was released? "No, it disappeared without a trace. Another one I worked on that did the same thing was Sky Pirates. Sky Pirates was an attempt to rip off the Indiana Jones series and could have been interesting but at the end of the day, due to budget restrictions, like very extreme budget limitations, they couldn’t come up with an ending for the film that would fit within their budget. They sort of played it by ear so in the film you don’t see anything. It’s one of those movies where you don’t see it because they couldn’t afford to shoot it! You lead up to the big climactic event and then everyone walks out of the cave and it’s all over. It was one that suffered from very bad script problems." I must ask you about Lorca and the Outlaws. "2084 is what it was originally called, then renamed Lorca and the Outlaws. A Roger Christian film. I worked with a guy, Lewis Morley Jr - his dad is Lewis Morley the famous British photographer - and Lewis and I looked after a lot of the props stuff. Lewis built all of the hardcore, mechanical devices and things and I looked after the exterior robot body shells, a lot of the sculpting, moulding and casting. What was the little robot called? I’ve never seen the film."
You’re lucky. He’s called Grid. "I remember building all the drone robots and police things and blowing them up and all that sort of stuff. That little robot, that’s Deep Roy, he was inside it. They wanted a dead bodyweight version of it to hang upside down from the back of a truck so the little robot’s head is just swinging inches from the ground or whatever. We made it but we didn’t have a really good structure inside the piece. It was also made out of a fairly unstable urethane polymer. A bit shoddy back in those days; this was in 1984, we made it. And he started to stretch! They were doing a take and his head’s whacking into the ground! “We were trying to figure out what’s happening and we realised that he’d now grown about four or five inches! The length had stretched and his head was hitting the ground so we had to do something to tie him back up again. That and the corridors. I remember there was a lot of talk from Roger about how he dressed Star Wars, just going to the tip and buying stuff and doing this, that and the other. We did the same thing on this - and it looked like it!"
There’s an extraordinary scene where Deep Roy fights another midget robot and they throw each other through the walls, and you think: how structurally sound is this spaceship? "That’s right, there was supposed to be a spaceship, wasn’t there? I remember they built those corridors and it was basically just a square. You’d keep walking around. It was almost like the camera would follow the actors and then behind the camera you’d got us changing things on the wall so they could keep walking around in a circle! A very cheap film. I remember seeing it advertised one night on late TV here, probably ten years ago or something but I just didn’t get round to watching it.” John very kindly supplied me with these two previously unseen behind-the-scene shots from Lorca and the Outlaws/2084. That’s John himself with the machine gun. He also sent me these behind-the-scenes shots from The Return of Captain Invincible. Official website: www.johncox.net | ||
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