March 13, 2012

Check out PART ONE of our epic interview with FX legend Steve Johnson right HERE! Read on for PART TWO.

You hear stories about the people or movies that influenced or inspired you in the very beginning – the first time you see something in a film that inspires you to want to be one of the people involved in making that. For you, what was the movie that made you decide to take an interest in how films were made?

That’s easy for me. Every one else in my age frame always says Planet Of The Apes. “It’s fantastic!” Planet Of The Apes? You know what I say? They’re stiff rubber masks glued onto someone’s face! What’s so exciting and inspiring about that? It did nothing for me, but everyone else in my age range cites that. For me, it was Little Big Man. Dustin Hoffman in this incredible old Western played a 110 year old man, as well as himself at a dozen other ages. And Dick Smith was the one who did the make-up! It came out in 1970. All I could think when I walked out of the theater was ‘Oh my God! Why didn’t they just hire an old man to play this role?’ You have to see this movie. It’s great and it still holds up. It’s not only a great movie, but the make-up inspired me to do what I do today. I couldn’t believe that was Dustin Hoffman for that entire movie, I lost my mind over that. So ya know what? F**k Planet Of The Apes. It’s all about Little Big Man. I want to do this to spite Planet Of The Apes! The interesting thing about Planet Of The Apes is I’m more thrilled with the new one Rise Of The Planet of The Apes and here’s why – 2 times in my lifetime, two movies have come out both called Planet Of The Apes. They both spawned amazing ground-breaking imagery. Unbelievable. The first one inspired an entire league of people to get into make-up FX. The second one inspired a lot of digital FX animators and motion capture people. I love that new Planet Of The Apes. It is so great. In one lifetime, the same movies does the same thing twice? How often does that happen? It’s amazing.

So who was the first person you contacted in the business that you considered your first friend and mentor?

Rick Baker.

When did you meet and first start working with him?

I met him in 1976. I was 16 and I had a terrible head blocking cold and I never stayed home from school ever because I was a good student, believe it or not. Look at me now. I was so, so sick. I’m lying in bed and my mother was in the living room sorting laundry and said, “Steven, you have to come in here and see this.” There’s this guy on this local game show called Dialing For Dollars and there’s this guest wearing an alien mask, this slimy faced alien with exposed brains. And right as I staggered in, he pulls the mask off and it was Rick Baker. He was there because he was publicizing that he was going to be speaking at a convention in Houston that weekend. This was 1976; this was a new thing back then! Monster conventions? So I said, “Mom you have to take me down there.” So I was 16 and she drove me down and I had this little portfolio with photos of these ancient make-up’s I’d done on 12 year old kids. I was so afraid to meet Rick. Remember I was a 16 year old kid living in Texas and had no experience with this kind of thing, but I went up to talk to him after. He was mobbed by a bunch of people wanting to talk to him, but I finally got up to the front of the line and I said “Mister Baker, would you like to look at my portfolio?” And he said, “Yes, I’d be happy to.” So I started flipping through the pages, one after another and he didn’t say anything. Stone cold silence and the whole time I kept thinking “I knew it. I’m terrible. I’m not good at this!” He finally turns to the last page of the book and says, “Well… you’re not very good…yet.” “But there’s something really interesting about what you’re doing. You’re living in Texas, which is about as far as you can get from the West Coast and the East Coast where these techniques and these materials are readily available. You can’t ask anyone how to do this. If something fails, you have to figure it out yourself. And ya know what? That’s what you’re doing here. How do you make a monster? There are no rules, there’s no right way. You have to make it up! I think you’re kind of a genius.” He wrote his phone number down and gave it to me and 2 years later I was knocking on his front door. Rick gave me everything. He ushered me into this business and taught me everything.

You are aware of your influence though, right? Not only with your on-line videos most recently with Amalgamated Dynamics, but I recently worked on the Evil Dead 2 Blu-Ray documentary and Shannon Shea had mentioned the inspiration for “Evil Ed” was the grinning Amy in the original Fright Night.

Oh really? That’s really funny because Tom wouldn’t talk to me the entire week of that make-up and I wouldn’t talk to him. (Laughs) Because that make-up was done over night and Randy Cook sculpted it actually. I didn’t like the way it looked. But it was a static shot with this big grin and Tom was like, “No Steve, I just want one shot in front of the camera and that’ll be it.” Alright, alright. So I was like, “Randy, you stay up all night and sculpt it. I ran out of cocaine. I can’t do it. You do it.” So he did it, and Tom shot it around set for a full week! Amy runs around all week and I had thought it didn’t look good. But… it’s on the poster, they revisted it in the remake! So I guess I was totally wrong on that one. (Laughs) Well, my problem was that it was an immobile face. It looks like a mask to me, but people love it. And ya know, I liked that remake too. I liked the Night Of The Demons remake as well.

I would assume you grew up a comic book fan? Because the work you posted from Superman Lives and The Incredible Hulk is all really amazing stuff.

I didn’t actually. I’m not a comic book guy at all. Even the graphic novels today, I don’t get it. It’s never been my thing and I hate to say it, but I think it’s kind of lazy. Look – it’s because I love the written word. I’m in love with it. That’s why I’ve turned into a drunk, unpublished writer! (Laughs) I love reading and I love to write. But graphic novels are too easy. In my opinion, the best writing is like a handshake, it’s time travel between the writer and the reader. The reader meets them half way; the writer gives them just enough so they can use their own mind and their own imagination to make it yours. That is so beautiful to me and you can’t really do that with graphic novels because you give people the art and you’re giving it all to them. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy it if it were the right one at the right time, but never have I even picked up a graphic novel.

The stuff you guys were doing for Superman was pretty radical –

Don’t start with me on that! I’ve had it with these things on-line saying “this suit is probably why the movie didn’t get made” and blah blah blah. What people don’t understand is pretty straight forward. Do you understand the point behind that suit?

Umm… It’s his regenerating suit?

Yes! It was never meant to be the actual Superman suit. Superman dies, in Tim Burton’s version. He’s wrapped around by this alien presence which I would assume someone in the comics came up with. It’s a living life form on top of him that brings him back to life. So everybody looked at the suit and said “Jesus, Tim’s lost his mind! Steve’s doing too much blow!” That wasn’t what happened! It was never meant to be the Superman suit. It was an alien wrapped around him. Let’s put that on the record for once. Colleen Atwood designed all the Superman suits. We had the real one; we had the black one from the ending. But the one people have seen wasn’t meant to be the Superman suit, it was an alien that was regenerating him and it was really that simple. I don’t know why all the fans were getting so angry about that. If they were real fans, they would know!

I Am Legend was another notorious production that had a lot of different people attached to it, but you’ve got that great practical make-up test you posted on-line. Who were you working with on that project at the time?

It was long before the Will Smith one. Those were crazy days and we had a million projects going all at once, so I don’t remember exactly who the director was at that time.  It was for Warner Brothers, but I thought “hey! I’ll do a test!” We threw some money into doing a test and thought let’s go nab this film because that’s what we used to do. We would put a lot of money into doing a lot of designs and even make-up tests and that’s what that was. A lot of people look at that test on-line and think I was hired by the producers to do that movie and then they said, ‘no that’s not good enough, we’ll just do it digitally’, but that’s not what happened at all. We did that test years before the movie was filmed and we did it out of our own pocket because we thought it’d be an amazing project to work on. It’s the greatest vampire story ever told and those were good vampires. I wish I could’ve gotten that movie and worked with those characters. And people on-line responded really well to that make-up. I love that movie actually. But has it gotten to the point where we have to do actual human characters digitally? You know why they did that? They had every FX company in town fighting like lions to get that job and nobody could do it in time, nobody could satisfy the director or the producer. So ya know what? Let’s film nothing! We’ve got nothing, so we’ll film nothing and do it digitally!

First half of the movie is great; it’s the second half with the digital vampires that’s a bummer.

I still walked out of that movie once again feeling very satisfied. I liked it. The digital characters? You have to compartmentalize and realize that’s what they’re going to do these days. It’s where its going and you can’t deny it. Let’s just think about this – think about 50 years ago. Now think about 50 years from now. Think of the FX. Imagine the movie making experience 100 years in the future. Imagine what it’ll be like to walk into a theater in a hundred years from now. These are birthing pains. The old techniques are dying; the new ones are taking over. This is the painful part. That’s what’s happening with digital FX. They’re taking over but once they do and they finally cross that uncanny valley, I’m with it, man. I’ll tell ya what the future of entertainment will be 100 years from now and it has nothing to do with the FX that I used to made or the FX that George Melies used to do or Lon Chaney or any of these people. What it will have to do with is going into a space in your mind where you can be and become anyone that you want to be; male, female, an eagle, a polar bear, whatever! And you can soar high over alien mountainscapes and you can affect that outcome – like video games, kind of – you can be there, you can smell it, you can touch it. And the life blood is digital technology. That’s how we’ll get there, so I can’t deny that. I can see it; it’s in the future, its happening. I just happened to get in the way. It’s not my fault I’ve made a living doing monsters and they’re done.

Steve Johnson will be appearing as a guest at the upcoming Monsterpalooza convention in Burbank, California on April 14th as part of the Fright Night reunion. Details on the Monsterpalooza site.