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Paul Hyett (part 1) You can’t be a fan of British horror and not know the work of top make-up effects artist Paul Hyett. From I, Zombie (when he was still in his teens!) through to The Descent, Mutant Chronicles and beyond, Paul has created some amazing effects. I did this interview by phone in January 2008 and an edited version was published in Fangoria. Jump to Part 2 of this interview
"Totally." What immediate effect did it have on your career? "It was the difference of being able to go into a meeting - and people had seen The Descent. The nice thing about Descent was I finished it and then, about two months after we actually finished shooting, it was out. So it was absolutely great. For the first year after that, I would go into interviews and: ‘Oh, you’ve done The Descent! Yeah, yeah.’ And suddenly, the things I was going for I tended to get. That was absolutely great." What was the first thing you did after The Descent? "Let’s see. I’m going to check my CV. I know that straight after The Descent we were looking at The Cottage but it didn’t happen. Sick House and Straightheads was one year after. It might have been Wilderness." Would you say Wilderness was a horror film? "It’s rat-kids borstal, in the woods. Yes, I’d call it a horror film because it is about people terrorised by psychopaths with dogs. I didn’t do prosthetics on Wilderness but I did all the dog effects. I got a call, right at the last moment. Basically the guy that was supposed to make the dogs had let them down and they said, ‘Please please make these dogs.’ I was told that I had quite a bit of time but it turned out, once I’d started, there was hardly any time. So we rushed it all in and I think we made all the dog puppets in three weeks or even less than that." When you say ‘we’, do you have a regular team? "I’ve got a few people that I always, always use but they’re all freelancers so if I haven’t got any work on they go and work somewhere else." But you’ve got a pool of people that you know you can call on and you know you can work well with them? "Absolutely. To be honest, there’s some guys who’ve only worked with me for the past few years, from Descent. There’s probably a core two or three that I always use but it changes from film to film. Sometimes, like on The Descent, I’ll have up to ten people. But usually there’s a few guys milling around in my workshop."
"Basically, I’ll design exactly what I want it to look like, what I want it to do. I’ve got one person who comes in; she’s worked on absolutely loads and loads and loads of stuff. She’ll come in and be in charge of the sculpture and fabrication and then we’ll have a mechanical person coming in, I’ve got electronic people that I call in from time to time and fur people that I call in, guys that are really good at sculpting creatures. Part of my job is going to meetings, putting together the right team for such a big project, delegating it, all this sort of stuff." Some time after that you did The Sick House, which comes out on US DVD in March. Did that ever have a UK release? "As far as I know it only had an American release, I think. It had US theatrical distribution." Were you making up the plague victims? "Yes, that was an interesting one. The make-up artist was Jacqueline Fowler and I was prosthetics designer but she had a lot to do with it. We would make up all the prosthetics and she would apply them all. I don’t think I actually applied any plague victims." Were you aiming for realism or, given that most people only have a vague idea what bubonic plague looks like, did you have a bit of creative license? "Yes, absolutely. Sometimes it just has to look cool. Like on Doomsday, we looked through so many different things and I said to Neil, ‘What do you fancy? Does it have to look like anything in particular?’ and he said, ‘No, just make it look gross and cool.’ So we went with a real mix of sexual diseases and fungus and pretty much everything that was gross that we could think of." Is it more fun, the more gross you can make it? "Yes, he just wanted grossness: ‘Ah, let’s do something really, really nasty.’ I was like, ‘Okay...’ I showed him a few gross pictures and he was going, ‘That’s gross... that’s gross...’ There was one point where I put something on each side of their face and asked, ‘What do you like?’ He said, ‘I kind of like all of them.’ So I said, ‘Which should I use?’ and he said, ‘Use all of them, we’ll call it an ultra-virus.’ Fine, let’s do that." Is there a danger, in trying to push the limits of extremely gross stuff, that you’ve then got to try and top it with the next picture? "It’s kind of weird. I mean, take the work on WAZ for example. Me and Tom Shankland the director, we were thinking of the grossest things possible and we came up with a lot of gross things. It’s all been cut out of the theatrical version but it’s all going to be in the DVD version. But if you said to me, ‘You’ve got another torture sequence,’ I’d be like, ‘All right.’ and I’d just think of new stuff to do. To be honest with you, as a prosthetics guy you tend to think, ‘I wish I’d done this, I wish I’d done that.’ So there’s always somewhere to go."
"No. Basically, reading all the article about it, people may think it’s torture porn but it’s actually not. Everything is done for a reason. Everything is done because someone is going through a certain state of mind. If you look at Hostel 1 and 2, it’s pure torture porn: let’s get some kids, torture them, beat them. But with WAZ it’s all in the story. The torture scenes are secondary. It’s more about the story than it is about some cool gross stuff." So what sort of stuff did you have to do for WAZ? "We did flayings, cheek slicings, we saw a guy’s cheek sliced open with a scalpel and then fingered. We had a nipple being ripped off, we had bits of stomach being torn out, we had a whole leg flayed, we had scalpel slices. We had nails being hammered into people’s fingers. We had, I think... did we have a castration? We’d got a castration but we felt we didn’t need to show it. Oh, and his knee gets hammered until it’s pretty much completely smashed to pieces. So me and Tom really went mad. We were talking about all the gross things we could do: what about this? what about that? We shot loads - and also Selma Blair’s got the most horrible rape scene - and I remember saying to him, ‘There’s no way all this can get through, I’m sure.’ I watched it and, yes, they’ve taken it out. It’s still a great movie, it’s really good. Great reviews. But there’s always a part of you that goes, ‘It would be nice if...’ But like they said, it’s got great reviews, it’s a great movie, they’re going to stick it on DVD with all the extras. I saw them putting up an extra section when I was up at Vertigo last and it was pretty predetermined. So it’s a treat for all the gore fans." With something like that, does the script accommodate what you can do? It sounds like you had a script that said ‘torture scene here’ and the director said ‘What can you do?’ and you said, ‘Oh, I can do a knee.’ "You know what, as I remember, it wasn’t that specific. Me and Tom pretty much worked it out. The writer of WAZ came on set and he went, ‘Oh, this is gross! This is gross! I didn’t think up that bit!’ The writer was actually quite squeamish and he wasn’t as full-on as you’d think. So basically, me and Tom had a talk and Tom was going on and on about flayings. I wasn’t sold on the flayings - ‘Is that going to look good?’ - I was thinking more about drilling knee-caps. I knew about inserting things whereas he was much more about the flaying. I said, ‘Okay, let’s try it’ so we did a quick test and I said, ‘You know, that’s actually quite gross.’ We also did, with the cheek flaying, instead of having huge chunks sliced out, I made it so that it was like the smallest sliver being cut away with a scalpel. As it was coming away from the cheek, it just looked, rather than a chunk, like a really thin slither. I think that made it look a hundred times worse." Do you sometimes come up with ideas for things and keep them on file somewhere until you can find a use for them? "Not so much. What tends to happen is that if I have ideas for a script and we don’t use them then those will be stored and that’s all cool. But I will hardly ever think of anything then right it down. It will always be connected to the script. I’ve got so many idea about torture now that if I’m given a film with a torture scene I just go, ‘Oh my god, yes, there’s loads of torture things I’d like to do.’"
"I’m always trying to come up with new stuff, I’d say. A lot of people think ‘Oh, I wish I’d done it this way... If I get a chance to do it again I’d do this...’ But I’d rather try something new, just because it keeps me sane. To do the same thing wouldn’t really be interesting to me." Straightheads is a film that completely passed me by. Is that a sort of Straw Dogs revenge-type movie? "Yes, it’s kind of odd. It was out in the cinema a while ago. Huge posters." Not in Leicester, there weren’t! "Alan Jones was a big fan of it. It’s like a very dark revenge-for-rape movie. There’s one guy who gets a shotgun inserted into him. We did an eyeball puncture, all the stitching and the healing around eye wounds. We did a mechanical deer that they run over. There’s a whole thing of them trying to rescue a dead deer. They get it off the road and that’s when they’re attacked and she’s raped and he’s beaten up. We did a dead dog, loads of bits and pieces. There was an eye-gouge at one point but I think they cut that in the end, it was just too nasty." | ||
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The skills required to make a dog puppet, are they different from the skills required for prosthetic make-up?
Do you prefer trying brand new stuff or perfecting new variations on things you’ve already done?