Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan Page #4

(J' Dynamic

orchestral music)

(Creature roars)

'The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad

is the eighth wonder of the screen!'

The first sketch I made

was the skeleton on the spiral staircase.

And then I made

six or seven other drawings.

I did a 20-page outline

of how the story could develop.

And I took it around Hollywood

and nobody was interested.

Howard Hughes had just made

The Son of Sinbad

It flopped at the box office.

So most of the producers

that I showed it to, my drawings,

they said,

"Oh, costume pictures are dead."

No, it cannot be so.

(Ray) I brought the drawings out

and Charles Schneer got very excited.

But I had visions in mind

of doing it lavishly

like The Thief Of Bagdad

that Alexander Korda made.

So I re-evaluated it

and redesigned it

so that we could make it

for an inexpensive sum.

When he hooked up with Charles Schneer,

who was a sympathetic producer,

he gained a lot of power

and therefore he was able to go to

the story conferences

and able to design the movie

through the storyboards

and really have an extreme effect

at putting his mark on the pictures.

(Ray) We got several writers

to formulate a script,

a comprehensive script,

using my drawings as the basis,

and that's how

The 7th Voyage developed.

I remember growing up

with Maria Montez films.

She and Sabu and John Hall

made a series of Arabian Nights

pictures for Universal.

One was called

Ali Baba And The 40 Thieves.

And they would talk about the Roc,

they would talk about the Cyclops,

but you never saw it on the screen.

(Cyclops roars)

The critics started saying that it was

animated, the creatures were animated.

The average person

hears the word animation,

they immediately think of a cartoon.

So we found that many people,

particularly adults, stayed away

because they thought

it was for children.

So we tried to devise a new name called

Dynamation from "dynamic animation."

(Narrator) 'This is Dynamation!'

(I Dramatic orchestral music)

I designed the Cyclops very carefully

because I didn't want people to think

it was a man in a suit.

So I put goat legs on,

like a satyr in ancient mythology.

And I gave him an appearance

and three fingers

so that no-one could assume that

there was a man inside the Cyclops.

And I think it worked out very well.

Whereas I was beginning to learn

how to alter a human face

and a human head,

Harryhausen could do anything.

He could make a huge Wingspan

on a creature.

He could make something have a single

eye and make it blink. Backward-bent legs.

He could make dragons,

he could make octopus.

I couldn't do that. I could change

the shape of someone's nose.

I could turn myself into Mr. Hyde.

I could turn my friends into the Mummy.

But I couldn't do these fantastic creations.

And so, yeah,

I guess I was a little bit jealous

because it seemed

way out of my league.

I get more fan mail coming in about the

Cyclops I think than any other character.

My favourite Harryhausen creature

is always gonna be

the Cyclops in 7th Voyage

because that was the one that,

you know...

Suddenly it's in colour

and it comes out on the beach

and it's huge and it's got this strange

sort of motion to it you can't figure out

and it's angry

and it's gonna get poor Sinbad.

And, you know,

you never forget that.

It was so inspiring

that it made you wanna make movies.

Are we going anywhere special tonight?

I just got us into a little place

called, erm, Harryhausen.

(Laughs)

You know, Ray, my first success,

if you like, in movies

was when I was 15 years old

and I made a film for a high school

competition called The Valley

And it actually won the award

for best special effects

and this was the star of that movie.

You'll see a similarity

to somebody that you created

a long time ago.

When I was 12, 13 years old,

and other kids were getting interested

in cars and sports and girls,

I used to like monsters,

and I particularly loved Ray's films.

I think Peter Jackson said he had a bunch

of stop motion things that he had done.

He wanted to be Ray Harryhausen.

He tried doing this stuff and was like,

"No, maybe I'll be a director instead!"

Without The 7th Voyage Of Sinbaoi

you would never have

The Lord of the Rings.

Peter had developed

his way of directing scenes

and I had developed my way

of directing and designing scenes

and when we did Lord of the Rings,

we collaborated on designing

and directing sequences

which emulated what we felt

was the best of Harryhausen.

Ray Harryhausen,

he's a child himself, to some degree.

He's able to connect

with the audience and say,

"isn't this amazing, isn't this cool?

"Creatures, monsters,

let's bring them to life."

On Alice in Wonderland

Tim Burton obviously is a big fan of Ray's

and the last sequence

with the Jabbervvocky,

we wanted to touch a little bit

on Ray's work.

So the Jabbenrvocky does

certain stances and things.

He doesn't fly. He does more

Harryhauseny type of movement.

(Jabbervvocky roars)

And the location it takes place in is

kinda like taking Rob Stromberg's designs,

a bit of Jason And The Argonauts

squeezed into the spiral staircase

to nowhere from 7th Voyage.

(Ray) If you had James Bond

fighting a skeleton,

it'd be comical.

But having a legendary character

like Sinbad, who personifies adventure,

you would accept it more readily

as a melodramatic story.

We had Enzo Musumeci,

who was an Italian fencing expert.

And when we would rehearse, he would

play the skeleton in The 7th Voyage.

He'd give claps of his hands

to get a beat.

They knew that at that point, they had to

stop their sword and not let it go through.

When the first 7th Voyage Of Sinbad

was released in England,

they cut out

the whole skeleton sequence.

They said it would frighten children.

Good Lord,

what you see on the screen today

is more horrifying

than any skeleton on the screen!

(J' Majestic

orchestral music)

The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver

was a classic story

and that really

brought us over to Europe,

because The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver

required big people and little people,

little Liputians.

We used to have to wait

maybe six weeks

to get a composite print

of what we called traveling matte

where two pieces of film are interwoven

with one another in the optical printer.

And the Rank laboratory

had a traveling matte system

that would make the picture

very practical.

So we decided to move

our whole operation to Europe

and use the sodium backing

that the Rank laboratory had in England.

Music I found very important.

I discovered that

when I first saw King Kong.

The fact that the score for King Kong

enhanced the film so much,

I became interested in music

and what it could do

to heighten the emotion of the visual.

Ray has a passion for film music.

He actually animates to music sometimes

to give him inspiration.

A very famous one is the snake woman

from 7th Voyage Of Sinbad

He used to play Shhrazade to that

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