|
 |
Find interviews by: | ||
| | |
Karl Derrick (Part 1) I interviewed top make-up effects bloke Karl Derrick in May 2009 about his work on Doghouse. Part 1 / Part 2
"I wanted to do a coincidence of two things. One of which was to work with Jake. I’d wanted to work with Jake for a while and I wanted to work with him because creatively we are very similar. Pumpkinhead came up and we talked about it. You know Jake: in the end he’s not going to give you the job, he’s going to pitch for it because he doesn’t believe in favouritism. That’s one of the good things about him. As an aside, if you work for Jake, even if you’re a friend of his, you don’t get any quarter whatsoever which is the way I like it. I think it’s a good way to be because it keeps everybody on top of their game. He wants what he wants - and the Platinum Prince will be served. “Getting back to Pumpkinhead, they really couldn’t afford me, that was what it came down to. They had a micro-budget, it was very much a TV budget, and I think Gary Tunnicliffe ended up doing it. It’s very easy to criticise things but we don’t know what sort of pressure he was under to produce the stuff. I know the budget was very, very small. Doghouse was a small budget but this was a micro-micro-budget. I just don’t think it was meant to be. Maybe it was a good thing and Doghouse was the thing where Jake and I were supposed to work together - and Dan Schaffer. There was a confluence of three people who happened in the same place and it felt like more of a fated thing." So how did you get to know Jake originally? "I met Jake through a comic artist I know called Bill Sinkiewicz who ‘s been around for a long, long time. He did Elektra Assassin and he did a book on Jimi Hendrix, he’s a very well-known comic artist. We were introduced through him and we hit it off straightaway. I can always tell when I’ll get on with someone because I basically end up laughing a lot and I spent a lot of time laughing around Jake. It was one of those things where we decided that we should work together. “I think at that point I was still doing the Potters and that sort of thing. It was just one of those things that seemed a very natural partnership. I do feel it’s a partnership with Jake. He has a tremendous respect for the work and for the artistry that goes into doing it. And the techniques of time management, things that directors don’t normally consider, because he’s a fan of the work." With Doghouse, what did he present you with as a brief? Presumably you were given the concept drawings. "The first word out of his mouth was ‘zombird’! He had me at zombird! It was one of those things and we had a chat early on. Jake was very open to ideas and he wanted to know what we could do for the budget. What we did was ambitious. I think on the last day of the shoot we had 41 zombirds on set. It was a huge, huge thing. We had no fewer than four hero make-ups per day, each of which took about three hours to put on. I had an on-set crew of 14 make-up artists and technicians and the build crew on Doghouse was 33 people. It’s a blockbuster-type crew for a not-blockbuster-type budget. “So Jake wanted to handle this in a way which hadn’t been done before, which was nice, but to get back to where all of us fanboys live which is about 1986. Try to do everything in camera but keeping the quality threshold as high as possible. we determined very, very early on that the comedy - and this is working with Dan as well - that the comedy is what happens to the guys, the comedy isn’t that the effects are crap. We can’t have people laughing at this stuff. They can laugh at what happens but they shouldn’t be laughing at the make-up or anything like that. So we were very careful to keep the quality as high as possible."
"The Bash Street Kids!" ...Did you have to wait until the roles were cast so you could design the make-up around the actors? "I was really lucky in that early on, a really talented conceptual artist named James Ryman was involved. Dan knew James and I think had something to do with him getting involved in the project. James did the brilliant sort of stream-of-consciousness artwork of what the make-ups of the creatures would look like in an ideal world. We had a lovely one: Bubbles was fantastic but there was no way we could do Bubbles on that budget, it would have been impossible. Bubbles stage two ended up being a full-face mask and a big neck piece that had a condom full of silicone oil in the neck so that it would flop about when she wobbled around. “It was just thinking what could we do with the budget we had. It was a real challenge, it was great. It took me back to rubber monster movies which is why I got into the business. It was really nice, almost nostalgic. When we were there we realised it was something special The film was really good to make, it was great fun and I think that because of that it will be great fun to watch." Did you have enough time to get everything prepared? "Ah, wrong question! There’s never enough time. I don’t think there’s a damn thing that I’ve done that I wouldn’t go back and do better. And I think that’s good because that’s a growth thing; looking back at stuff and realising you could do better. I will go out on a limb and say I don’t think anyone could have done a better job on the budget and the time that we had. We are all rightfully proud of Doghouse, however well it does at the cinema; we don’t know yet. I have a sneaking suspicion it’s going to do very well in the long term on DVD. I think it’s going to be one of those ‘kebab in one hand, six-pack in the other, come on lads let’s watch this movie’ kind of things! It’s made by the people it’s intended for: I think Jake and I and Dan will sit down and watch i! “I have high hopes for it. It’s a brilliant script, it’s certainly more intelligent than your average horror movie. In many ways the zombirds are incidental to what’s going on, it’s about the guys and how they deal with this thing. I like its unapologetic nature. It’s a bt like Dusk Till Dawn in that way: there’s vampires, nobody knows how or why but it doesn’t really matter. The fact is they’re here and that’s your biggest problem. But it’s really how the guys deal with things and the comedy is playing off the creatures so you’ll find in the final cut it’s not a creature feature, they’re not the point of it. The point of it is the guys."
"I did Brothers Grimm for Terry Gilliam and I was working for a company called Artem who do basically everything but their knowledge and experience in the prosthetics field wasn’t as good as it could have been so I kind of took hold of that. I think I had a crew of 120 people on that. I don’t have a problem with crew size. It tends to be broken up into groups who do certain things. For example, at any time we had two dedicated contact lens technicians on set. “We were very careful to keep things as safe as possible for our performers. Each make up was put on by at least one application artist. So quite often you would see, round the room, there were four make-up stations and each one would be occupied by one of the performers. They would have a make-up artist and an assistant in most cases putting the make-up on them. These would be phased in and out of the make-up room. “Deborah Hyde, my co-ordinator, who ended up playing Stella the zombird barmaid because she’s quite an experienced creature performer, she would co-ordinate the in and out of the make-up room while in make-up, which was hilarious. Quite often you’d come in and she would be typing with three-inch claw nails. Very, very funny." Part 1 / Part 2 | ||
| | |
With the zombirds all having a distinctive character...
You have impressive credits on