Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan Page #6

so we chose the Hydra.

(Tony) This creature,

like most of the creatures in Ray's films,

were built in Ray's workshop

in his London house.

(I Dramatic orchestral music)

(Ray) There is a sequence

in the original tale of Jason

where corpses come out of the ground,

rotting corpses which are not

very pleasant to look at,

at least in that time.

Well, we didn't want

to get an X for our film

so we made them clean-cut skeletons.

And we had seven skeletons.

Seven is a magic number

all through mythology.

And we had seven skeletons

fighting three men.

He always tried, like filmmakers do today,

to outdo themselves.

And that's why one skeleton developed

from 7th Voyage

into seven skeletons

in Jason And The Argonauts...

Why have one when you can have seven?

(Laughs)

This is one of the original skeletons

from Jason.

He has every joint

that a real skeleton would have.

We photographed the live action first

with stuntmen who portrayed the skeletons

who were swordsmen.

We'd time it very carefully

and maybe rehearse it ten times,

and then the final piece of film,

the stuntmen are removed

and the actors shadow-box.

And that as a piece of film

I rear-project behind these skeletons

so that the human being

is the same size as the skeleton.

(J' Frantic orchestral music)

When the skeleton kills Andrew Faulds

against the temple

and Andrew Faulds falls on the ground,

and the skeleton looks around

and he then jumps over the body,

that's an aerial brace,

the use of an aerial brace.

Aerial wire animation takes a lot longer

and it's very complicated.

Most people would have had it

stepping over or going around,

but Ray had him jumping over.

That's the difference.

That's the Harryhausen touch.

(Ray) Sometimes I would only get

about 13 to 15 frames a day.

It took four months

to animate to the sequence.

It only took two weeks

to photograph the live action.

They pretty much used

every single frame that they shot, too,

so it was... He was very economical.

Almost everything was take one.

98 percent, 99 percent was take one.

An amazing achievement

if you think about it.

We never had money or budget or time

to do retakes.

(Steve Johnson) I think if he finessed it

and did two takes, three takes,

it wouldn't come from his heart.

He would refine it too much

in his mind

and it would not be

what he initially thought.

And H.R. Giger taught me that. The more

quickly you get your ideas out of your head

and up on the screen or onto the canvas,

the more real it's gonna be.

I believe Clive Barker told me

the same thing.

He said, "When I'm painting,

I like to make mistakes."

And I think that has a lot to do with

why Harryhausen's stuff really resonates

and sticks and stays in all of our minds,

because it's very pure.

(J' Frantic orchestral music)

When I was about 12 years old,

I remember rushing home,

I couldn't wait to see Jason

And The Argonauts for the first time.

And I was just so gobsmacked.

The skeleton fight

in Jason And The Argonauts?

I can practically remember

what row I was sitting in

at this little theatre in Orangeville,

Ontario, at the age of nine

when the images of those skeletons

leaped off the screen

and drilled straight into my DNA.

I know this isn't real

but, boy, it sure looks real.

And that's the feeling I had as a young boy

in the theatre watching Ray's films.

When you're transported as a

young person to these fantastic worlds,

whether it was Greece or wherever it was,

and skeletons move around

and sword-fights happen, this is magic!

(J' Frantic orchestral music)

I'm sure there's a direct link

between those demonic skeletons

and the chrome death figure

in The Terminator

So, Ray, I hope you can forgive me

and remember that imitation

is the sincerest form of flattery.

I see a lot of sequences

that we had originally done years ago

reproduced in various films of today.

Very flattering!

(Narrator) 'The Hrs! Men In The Moon.

'An experience unparalleled

on the screen

['as two worlds meet and clash]

(Ray) H.G. Wells,

I was a great admirer,

and I wanted...

After Mighty Joe Young

I wanted to do War of the Worlds

and I made a lot of drawings

and an outline for the story structure.

I wrote to Orson Welles

but I never got an answer.

I wanted to do The Time Machine

but somebody else

had already taken the rights.

Finally we did a Wells story

called Hrs! Men In The Moon.

(J' Dramatic string music)

We tried to keep that feeling that

the insects developed an intelligence

rather than the mammals.

I think Ray Harryhausen

would probably say

that he was influenced

by Georges Mlis.

If you look at his work,

it really is part of a continuum

that goes back to the birth of cinema.

(I Slow piano music)

Actually, Ray has

a personal business card

of Georges Mlis.

Ray, oh, yes,

a huge admiration for Mlis,

and I think most fantasy filmmakers do.

(Man) The First Men in The Moon

aliens are...

Nowadays we would look

at them as kind of

this B-grade, you know, clich,

kind of like...

But a clich I actually really love.

I love the fact

that when we design aliens

for feature films or comics

or games or whatever,

humans keep on going back

to the same grab bag of elements.

They're insectoid or they're reptilian

or they're, like, octopi

or cephalopods and stuff.

We just go back to the same clichs

again and again.

Everything humans think is creepy, crawly

and disgusting, that's what aliens become.

(Man) Stand back!

(Vincenzo Natali) Essentially the best

effects films, like District Q

are the ones where you can feel

the hand of the creator

within the design and execution

of the creatures.

What's important to remember is when you

look at the link between Ray Harryhausen

and the work of, say, ILM or Phil Tippett

is how much there actually is

in common between them.

And really, in essence,

how little has changed

in spite of how the technology's evolved.

(Creature growls)

I'm always saying to the guys

that I work with now on computer graphics,

you know, "Do it like Ray Harryhausen,"

or, "Why don't you just look at a

Harryhausen shot and see what he did?"

And I'm always going back to that well

because of the economy

and the simplicity.

Take guard!

There's this tendency with computer

graphics, because you can do it,

if you want somebody to reach

and pull something in,

there tends to be, like, these ridiculous

flourishes and all this extra stuff.

It's like, "What's that about?"

"Just do it," you know?

"Just get to it and tell the story

as directly as possible."

One of the ironies is

all the great innovators

in computer-generated animation

are all stop motion animators.

I mean, you know,

Phil Tippett, Dennis Muren,

these guys, they were all animators.

The first job I got was actually

doing stop motion for a commercial

and I think that really sort of helped

to figure out the character,

what its performance is,

what it's feeling,

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