Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan Page #5

and that gave him inspiration

before Bernard Herrmann came on board.

Bernie Herrmann, I used to listen to

his music on Orson Welles' radio show.

(Tony) It was Charles Schneer

that managed

to get Bernard Herrmann on board

and he went on to write exceptional scores

for 7th Voyage Of Sinbad

Gulliver, Mysterious Island

and Jason And The Argonauts...

And his music is very unique

and was just made for our type of film.

(I Dynamic orchestral music)

The scores that Bernard Herrmann wrote

for Ray Harryhausen

are certainly some of the most exciting,

I think, that he wrote.

- Where's Gulliver?

- Here I am!

Down here.

(I Dramatic orchestral music)

Glumdalclitch! Down here!

Bernard Herrmann

was very strange and very quirky

but he also had the adventure sense.

Grand, but quirky and strange.

(Man) The Harryhausen movies, for sure,

that's where Herrmann was at his best,

as an orchestrator

doing incredibly unique things,

being extraordinarily colourful,

and two, being highly dramatic

in the best of ways.

He contributes greatly

to the believability of it all

because he takes it so seriously.

Every composer I've ever known who's

worked in fantasy or horror films or sci-fi

have talked about

how he's influenced them.

Ray got on

with Bernard Herrmann very well,

as you can tell

from most of his animation sequences.

We wanted to make fantasy memorable

and I think that's occurred.

(Woman screams)

Fantasy, I would say,

appealed to my sort of gothic mind,

from my German ancestors,

I suppose.

Fantasy is

magnificent on film.

There's

no other medium

that you can express yourself in fantasy

the way you can in films.

(J Dramatic

orchestral music)

(Narrator) 'Whatever you have imagined

in your wildest dreams

'now becomes a visual reality,

'as Jules Verne's most fantastic adventure

in space and time...'

(Ray) Mysterious island

was another problem.

The studio, Columbia Pictures,

had a script

and after we'd made

The 7th Voyage,

they felt that perhaps we would be

interested in doing Mysterious Island

which was a Jules Verne story.

We used the basic principles

of The Mysterious Island

but we had to make it more interesting

because it ended up as just

how to survive on a desert island.

We re-storied the whole basic line

to add to the final screenplay

that you saw on the screen.

At first, it started out

as a prehistoric background.

We were gonna have dinosaurs.

Then we decided against that.

And finally, when Captain Nemo

became prominent in the story,

we decided to have it based on

him trying to produce more food

for the world by growing everything large.

We would have many so-called

sweat-box sessions

where the writer would turn in

a certain number of pages

and we would tear it apart

and analyse it.

Then I would bring drawings

of what I thought we could do

lavishly on the screen for little money.

Then it was the writer's job

to incorporate all these suggestions

and drawings into the final screenplay.

I have a two-year-old daughter

who loves Mysterious Island

a movie she calls

"Big Chicken Fall Down".

(Woman screams)

(Narrator) 'Jules Verne,

'a man whose great stories

inspired such unusual films as

'Around The World In 80 Days,

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea,

Journey y To The Centre Of The Earth,

'surpasses them all

with Mysterious Island'

(Screaming)

The crab came from

Harrods department store.

It was a live crab

when I bought it at the fish market

and we had a lady at the museum

put it down in a humane way.

She took all the meat out of the inside

and I put an armature

in the actual crab.

The next step was to try to put

Greek mythology on the screen.

(J' Majestic

orchestral music)

Some of the films

are better made than others.

And some of them

have better scripts than others.

I mean, Jason And The Argonauts

probably has the most literate screenplay,

and so it's a better movie.

A lot of people find

Jason And The Argonauts

is one of our best films.

It's my favourite

because it was the most complete.

(Joe Dante) The plots of Harryhausen

movies are fairly consistent,

and I think that's one of the reasons that

Jason And The Argonauts sticks out,

because there's a lot of other

Greek baggage that goes with that story.

(Ray) Basically, the Talos sequence

came from an idea I had

about the Colossus of Rhodes.

(I Dramatic orchestral music)

In the original tale

of Jason And The Argonauts,

Talos is just

an eight-foot mechanical creature.

(John Landis) If you look at Talos,

how does a man of bronze move,

you know?

And it's just so miraculous

how that moves

and how he creates

this sense of size,

how enormous, enormous. IS...

I mean, what other monster is as big

as Talos? I mean, just enormous!

Without changing any expression.

I mean, Talos is a statue.

When he's dying,

grabbing for his throat,

the way he moves is something!

(Man) I want to speak

on behalf of all the actors

that appeared in Harryhausen films.

They weren't all monsters,

they weren't all effects,

there were real live actors in there.

What I do remember

was the hands-on ability he had

to direct us.

I ran along the sand

and what astonished me

was that Ray ran with me.

And he said, "I looked up to the sky,

there was the monster."

There was no monster,

just a big blue emptiness.

But he said, "Fall now!" I fell...

We were trained to be classical actors,

to appear at the Old Vic.

That was our standard.

But there was I eating sand in Palinuro.

But loved it, loved it!

Loved being there, being part

of this titanic imagination of this man.

(Peter Jackson) I love the fact that

when you're watching one of his movies,

you're aware that you're looking

at literally a performance of his.

I mean, he's acting

through all these different creatures,

whether it's a Cyclops

or a snake with nine heads.

I mean, you're seeing...

you're seeing his acting abilities.

As an animator,

you have to kind of become an actor.

You know, you're...

Before you do a piece of action,

you often either look at yourself

in the mirror

or you act it through on video

just to see what it is,

and you put something of yourself...

You know, you try to put emotion

into an inanimate puppet.

He sort of starts in his brain,

goes through his fingers

into the creatures that he's animating

and finally onto the screen.

I asked him once, with the Hydra,

with all those seven heads,

I said, "How did you keep track'?"

He said, "I have no idea."

(Tony) This is the seven-headed Hydra

from Jason And The Argonauts.

It's probably one of the biggest

of Ray's models.

As you see, it has incredible detail.

The complexity of it,

seven heads, two tails.

Ray could never make anything

easy for himself.

He would always make it

more complex each time.

(Ray) The Hydra came

from the Hercules legend.

We had to bring that in.

We didn't want a dragon because there

had been dragons on the screen before,

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