Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan Page #7

and communicating that idea

in a few frames to the public.

The role of the animator is changing.

First of all, you've got motion capture,

you've got all these tools available to you,

so the actors are giving us

amazing reference.

- How will I know if he chooses me?

- He will try to kill you.

The CG character

would be from their performance,

exactly as they did it,

down to the minutest detail.

And so the animators,

who are very important in the process,

they would do the tail, the ears,

and they would ensure

that the actor's performance

was exactly replicated in the CG.

Art challenges technology.

Technology inspires the art.

And I would argue

that's the way that every master

of every medium of animation,

be it puppet animation,

clay animation,

computer animation,

hand-drawn animation,

that exact thing happens with them.

Well, there's room for every type of media

for entertainment.

After all, that's the end product,

is to entertain the public.

If you can entertain them with a yo-yo,

well, that's fine,

use a yo-yo for entertainment.

But that's rather difficult.

(Narrator)

'One Million Years BC.

'Introducing the fabulous Raquel Welch

as Loana The Fair One,

'John Richardson as Tumak'

(Ray) One Million BC is another matter.

I made that for Hammer films.

And they bought the rights

to a remake of it,

a 1940 film with Victor Mature

and Carole Landis.

I don't like retakes, basically,

but I felt we could do better

than the original

where they used lizards

with fins glued on their back

and they had a tyrannosaurus

with a man in a rubber suit

that looked so phony,

they had to keep hiding it behind bushes.

So all you saw was an eye

or a finger or something.

So I wanted to change that concept

by using animation.

(Dinosaur roars)

A lot of the motion

is developed on the screen

and comes from the character.

If you have a dinosaur,

I like to keep it active

by having the tail

swooshing all the time.

I used to read dinosaur books

and imagine going to see them,

what it would be like to stand next to them

and then I discovered this film

where there are real people with dinosaurs

and I couldn't believe it.

(Roaring)

My influence was Charles R. Knight,

the key figure in

the American Museum of Natural History.

He was the first one to restore dinosaurs

from the basic skeletons.

Here is an example

of some prehistoric restorations

and then we start actually

from the skeleton, the basic skeleton,

to plan the armature

for the rubber models.

And then we go to the museums

and actually see the skeletons

and try to develop our animals

in a way that they're well known

from the museum point of view.

(Dinosaur roars)

Ray Harryhausen's work

had a huge influence on us

during the design of King Kong.

There were lots of ways

we could possibly go

with the design of the creatures

and the dinosaurs.

And Peter said he didn't want them

to be real dinosaurs,

he wanted them

to be movie dinosaurs.

So we were trying to evoke that era

of dinosaurs from movie history

and really capture that.

And in that sense, they're more

sort of monsters and characters

more than they're true animals.

(Dinosaurs roar)

(Woman) I remember one scene

when we were in Lanzarote,

this is when these pterodactyls

were kind of coming over us,

and we didn't know this,

we didn't see this,

but Ray got onto a flatbed truck

and drove in front of us

while we, in our little wet,

skimpy little pieces of leather,

brandished our spears...

(Laughs)

...at these things.

(Growls, laughs)

(Ray) Raquel Welch

was cast in the picture.

That was one of her first films.

She never looked like a real cavewoman

She wasn't supposed to.

That wouldn't have been

very entertaining to the public.

If cave women in prehistoric days

looked like Raquel Welch,

we've regressed today! (Laughs)

Gwangi was another story.

Willis O'Brien started Gwangi at RKO

way back in the '40s.

And unfortunately, the war came along

and they canceled the picture

after OB spent about

a year preparing it.

So he kindly

gave me a script years ago

and I had it in my garage

and Charles and I

were looking for a subject one time

and I brought out

this whole script of Gwangi

O'Brien's original idea

was to have cowboys

roping a dinosaur for the Sideshow.

That always impressed me. And we tried

to keep that part of it in the picture.

(Tony) The lasso sequence in that,

of course, was incredibly complex.

The lassos from both sides of the...

the cowboys lassoing the monster

around the neck or on the foot,

would be lassoing this pole on this Jeep

which would be hurtling around.

He put the screen together at the back

so he obliterated the Jeep

with the monster stick.

The miniature ropes would be

tied to the monster around the neck

and that would go off at exactly,

match the exact same direction

as the live action would

on the rear projection plate.

It took well over two and a half months

to film that one sequence.

- (Dinosaur roars)

- (Men scream)

(Chaotic shouting)

(Man) Ray, we owe you more

than we can ever really express,

based on all of the roads

that you pioneered and built from dirt

into a super-highway

of eventual digital technology.

The V-rexes in King Kong were...

They're fundamentally different

from what we know real dinosaurs to be.

They had this heavy-set tail that was

hanging down, they had three fingers

and they're basically inspired by things

like Gwangi from Ray Harryhausen.

(Joe Dante) Harryhausen has never

worked with a, quote, "great director."

No-one ever says, you know,

it's a Jim O'Connolly movie

or it's a Nathan Juran movie.

It's always a Ray Harryhausen movie.

It was his concepts,

the creatures in them were from his mind,

so they were his films.

A lot of directors couldn't see that.

There were examples where the director

did not approve of Ray

being on location shoots,

but didn't quite understand

why he was there.

Even though the scripts

would detail in Ray's drawings

exactly what was gonna happen

in that sequence.

(Ray) I make hundreds

of continuity drawings

which show the progression

of the scene

and then I direct

those scenes myself.

Ray Harryhausen

was the star of those movies.

I couldn't really tell you

who the actors were in the films

but I certainly remember the creatures.

I mean, the thing with the Films.

I think there's some terrible acting in it,

the scripts aren't the greatest,

but, boy, his elements,

when he made clay live,

are still some of the best moments in Films.

(Woman) I was probably

about six or seven at the time

and I remember two old ladies came up

and said, "Oh, hello, sweetheart.

Can we have a look in your baby buggy'?"

"Yeah, you can look at my dollies,"

you know?

Pulled back and there was Gwangi!

Of course, instead of dolls,

I had dinosaurs.

To me, it was normal.

Dad had them all over the house.

And he didn't have an oven

and so he used our oven

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