Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan Page #3

and therefore he dropped two legs,

literally dropped two legs,

so it's only got six.

So you never see all of the tentacles out

at one time because he hid them.

Ray loves calling it the Sixtopus.

(I Dramatic orchestral music)

(Man) When we did

Pirates Of The Caribbean here at ILM,

Hal Hickel and all the guys that worked

on that were big Harryhausen fans.

And, for example,

the Kraken had six legs

because the octopus

had a limited number of legs, of course,

in It Came From Beneath The Sea.

And a lot of the feeling of Davy,

that sort of, you know,

in-your-face performance

came right from seeing Ray's film

where it's an in-your-face

performance going on.

When Harryhausen animated the octopus

for It Came From Beneath The Sea,

I can imagine it must have been

pretty difficult for him

to get the character into tentacles.

There's no face.

We had a huge advantage when we

created the tentacles for Dr. Octopus

because we created faces, basically.

So we would have a certain opening

of the mechanical aspects of it

that would create anger.

We would have another one

that would be curiosity,

another one that would be sadness.

And each tentacle had a range of emotion.

I think it's pretty obvious that Sam Raimi

is a huge fan of Ray Harryhausen

if you take a look at the work

on Spider-Man 2

Dr. Octopus. I mean, come on.

Ray Harryhausen, to me, the most

important thing that he has done

is to be an influence and to inspire

literally a generation

or probably two generations

of filmmakers.

I don't know anyone else that has taken

all these young adolescent children

who watched his movies

and turned them into filmmakers,

directors, writers, special effects men.

I wanted the movie to be an homage

to the Ray Harryhausen movies.

I'm very flattered that they find

that our films were that attractive

and tried to make

a similar type of image.

(Sirens blare)

(Narrator) 'The whole

world is under attack.

'Can it survive?'

(Screaming)

I found it a challenge

to try and make the metallic objects

like the flying saucer

have an intelligence inside,

even though we never showed

the actual people inside.

And that came out about the time

when there was a lot of flying saucer

clippings in the newspaper.

(Dennis Muren) How can you bring

a personality into a flying saucer?

And there were a lot of movies made

with saucers in the '50s

that were pretty dull to look at.

But Ray gave them personality and life

and you were just enthralled as a kid

looking at them.

(Tony) These are two

of the flying saucers.

They were designed by Ray,

very carefully designed by Ray

in great detail.

And they were machined and built

by Ray's father,

with Ray, Fred Harryhausen.

Ray built into the design

three nodules on each flying saucer

so that he could actually

suspend the actual machine.

And from each of the nodules

would come up to the aerial brace.

(Screeching)

He'd used wire braces.

If you think of a string puppet,

you have a cross like that

from which the strings hang

so you can manipulate the puppet.

He invented a geared aerial brace

where it would tilt the flying saucer.

So they'd be able to go in

at a certain angle.

I knocked over the Washington Monument

long before Tim Burton did. (Laughs)

His films, when I saw them, he just...

You felt the hand of an artist with him.

And it's something that's always

touched me and I've always remembered.

No matter what technology you use,

you know, whether it's

stop motion or cell

or live action or CGI,

you know, it doesn't really matter

what the technique is,

you try to find artists.

They come in many forms.

The Animal World was a film

that was being made by Irwin Allen,

an ex-agent

who had become a producer.

And he wanted to put a film together

about the animal world,

the animal kingdom.

He used 16mm film a lot

and blew it up to 35

from different cameramen

who had made pictures

in jungles and remote areas.

But it was going to have

an opening sequence of dinosaurs.

So Irwin Allen asked Willis O'Brien

to design the special effects

and Willis O'Brien asked Ray

to do the animation.

He would do the set-ups,

I.e. he would design everything.

It's only a very short sequence, I think

it's between 10 and 15 minutes long.

(Ray) I remember

when the first publicity came out,

the reviewers mentioned the dinosaur

sequence before any other sequence

and said that

that was the highlight of the picture.

So Willis O'Brien and I

were most grateful for that.

(Narrator) 20 Million

Miles To Earth. '

(Roaring)

(Woman screams)

(Roaring)

(Roaring)

(Creature roars)

The creature in 20 Million Miles

To Earth went through many changes.

It was very stout. It had horns at

one point. It had one eye at one point.

(Tony) Originally

20 Million Miles To Earth was made,

as written by Ray and a dear friend of his,

Charlotte Knight,

as The Cyclops,

and was gonna be attacking Chicago.

(Ray) That was an early concept

of the Ymir.

(Tony) But Ray wanted to go to Italy,

specifically Rome.

(Ray) So I changed it around

because I wanted a trip to Europe.

And that's where he changed the creature

from a Cyclops into the Ymir.

(Ray) Finally I arrived

at the humanoid torso,

sort of a lizard combination

with a humanoid torso,

because I felt you could get much more

emotion out of a humanoid type of figure

rather than an animal type of figure.

(Man) The Ymir, coming at the end

of Ray's black and white period,

is probably the best black and white

monster that he ever created,

particularly in the early stages

when it's small

and it's doing things like this.

All the humanoid gestures

that make these monsters so personable

and make them

so much more appealing.

The design of the creature that we have

in Piranha is a little bit like the Ymir.

In Piranha, there was no stop motion

monster written into the script.

The stop motion monster

was in the movie

simply because Jon Davison,

the producer, and I liked stop motion.

Any kind of stop motion from my movies

is a tribute to Ray Harryhausen

Or Willis O'Brien...

You can't make a creature film

without thinking of Ray Harryhausen

because he created creatures

that were so sympathetic.

And let's face it, he made

the greatest monster movies of all time.

(I Dramatic orchestral music)

His monsters have a heart.

His monsters are charming.

So you might be frightened by them,

but when the movie's done, that's what

you remember and you care about it.

(Tony) Ray never calls

any of his creations monsters.

They're never called monsters,

they're always called creatures.

(I Dramatic orchestral music)

I destroyed New York

with the beast,

I destroyed San Francisco

with the octopus,

I destroyed Rome

with the Ymir

and I destroyed Washington

with the flying saucers.

And that got rather tedious.

So I was looking for a new avenue

in which to use stop motion animation.

And I latched upon Sinbad

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