From Michael Jackon's legendary werewolf transformation in Thriller over King Kong to his first Oscsar - the inaugural Best Make-up Oscar - for An American Werewolf in London to his later work in Maleficient: Rick Baker is a living legend of makeup art and creation of phantastical creatures who shaped the collective image of Werewolves, Bigfoot and the Gremlins. Just a few hours before receiving Locarno's Vision Award for his work, Rick Baker sat down for an interview with Lidanoir about hi early passion for horror makeup, working on Thriller and his legacy of giving people nightmares and inspiring dreams.
Lida Bach: You have seven Oscars, five Saturn Awards, a star on the Walk of Fame, an Emmy … and now Locarno’s Vision Award for your extraordinary work. With shelves full of prizes, does one more even mean anything?
Rick Baker: Yes, it certainly does, especially at this age. Everybody likes to be appreciated. And I’m honored. I’m a big fan of film festivals like this. It definitely means something.
LB: What’s the secret of your success, and what makes your makeup so unique?
RB: I think the secret of my success was the fact that I was a fanboy to begin with. I loved the movies that I saw that came before me, and the makeups, the monsters, the characters. I was 10 years old when I decided this is what I was going to do with my life. I wasn’t born into the industry. People were telling me, “There’s no way you’re going to get in.”
My feeling was, if I got really good at what I was doing, someone someday was going to hire me. And fortunately, it worked out. But I worked very hard. I was a pretty bad student in school because instead of doing my homework, I was doing homework for my career. I was making a mask or doing the makeup on myself. And I loved it. I was able to shine at what I did, because I was having fun. It wasn’t like a job to me. I mean, yes, it is a job, and it can be a pain-in-the-ass job sometimes. But still, it’s not like working in an office, which there’s no way I could do. My brain isn’t wired that way.
LB: You once said, “I suppose I’m responsible for a lot of childhood traumas.” Which was your childhood trauma in that sense, and what made you think, “I want to scare people to death”?
RB: It wasn’t so much that I wanted to scare people, but I just wanted them to be fascinated by what they were seeing on the screen. Movies that I saw on television with monsters in them didn’t really scare me. They fascinated me. Somebody asked me the other day what movie I saw that was scary. But there was a movie I saw on television. I think it was called The Well. About a little girl. There was an abandoned well, and she fell in the hole and was trapped down there. And that frightened me. Monsters never did. I didn’t set out to, even though I said that, necessarily terrify people, more to fascinate people.
LB: Over the years, do you find new sources of inspiration, or is it the same things that inspire you throughout your career?
RB: Both. I notice there’s a thread through my designs. I seem to do a similar thing, but I’m always looking. Part of being a creative person is that you see the world differently than the average person. Sometimes it’s a rock. Or bark on a tree. My wife, who’s sitting back there, the cute little redhead, has a whole bunch of photos of me taking photos of ridiculous things. We’ll go to some amazing country, and I see some moss on a rock and I’m taking a close-up picture of it.
I just try to keep my eyes open and take in what’s around me. If I’m in an airport, I’ll have sunglasses on so I can stare at somebody’s wrinkles and go, “He’s got some really cool wrinkles. I just take it in and mix it all up.
LB: An American Werewolf in London, Wolfman. Do you think you have a special link with the werewolves? And how did you make them so scary?
RB: I have a special link with hairy things. Besides werewolves, I’ve done a lot of apes, too. Probably as many apes as werewolves. I loved the whole concept of a human becoming a creature, and the transformation scenes. My second film was a film called Schlock, John Landis’ first film. I was 20, he was 21. He played a hairy character, a Schlockthropus.
He was an early man, like an Australopithecus. John had already written An American Werewolf in London. When he was young, he backpacked through Europe, and it inspired the story. As I was making him up, he told me the whole story. He said, “But I don’t understand why Lon Chaney Jr. would just sit still in a chair when he was transforming. It would be a painful process, and I want to show that pain.
“And I want him to be able to move, and I want to shoot it in a room like this with a lot of light, because that’s real. Because I think that’ll make it more scary.” And I go, “Yeah, it’s going to make it a hell of a lot harder, too.” But he said to me, “How would you do that?”
I said, “Well, I don’t know, but I would love to have that opportunity.” He said, “Well, it’s going to be my next movie, so figure it out.” Fortunately for me, it wasn’t his next movie. It happened 10 years later. So I had 10 years of pre-production time to think about it. What I loved about doing that film, and I think part of why the designs are still valid, is John said, “I want a hound from hell.” I personally wanted to do a biped werewolf. He wanted a quadruped werewolf. But that was his only direction. He goes, “Make a hound from hell. You’re the expert. You do it.” He had faith in my ability, and I think there’s a certain vitality that comes from that.
I knew that when I was pushing clay around to sculpt this werewolf face, it was going to be what was on screen. Cut to some of my later films, and it’s hundreds of designs, with the director just saying, “Well, can you do another one?” And it’s like, “What would you like? Here are a hundred designs.”
“Where in this range do you see it?”
“I don’t see it there.” And I go, “Can you at least give me something close?” And it’s like, “Just do another one.”
“Like what?”
“Something different.” It’s soul-sucking. After a while, you just think, “Why am I even doing this?”Then it would be, “Do one in between this design and that design.” And I go, “These are so close together. There isn’t an in-between.”
“Just pick something, damn it.” It’s so much better to have the freedom.
LB: In Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, someone said, “Oh, that’s the ’80s. That’s Rick Baker.” Isn’t that a good reason for you to go back to cinema?
RB: When I first retired, I thought maybe I would do consulting or designs. But I’m having too much fun. I feel like I’m 10 years old again. I can make what I want to make without the interference of other people. That’s how it was when I started. I have a studio and a house next door to my house. I wake up every day and think, “Oh boy, I’m going to make some stuff.” I don’t think anything could get me back into the film industry. And again, right now, there are too many people involved in the decision-making, and they’re all afraid to make a decision.
In the old days, there would be a producer, and you would go to him and say, “I want to do this, and I need money for this.” And they would usually say no, but you would get an answer. When you have 47 producers, nobody wants to be responsible. It was just making me a bitter old man that I didn’t want to be. Now I feel like I’m 10 again. I don’t look like it. I hated seeing that picture [points at his photo on the cover of the festival’s Pardo Magazine] “Who’s that old man on that cover?”
LB: Over the years, you saw many changes in the industry, you already mentioned, also technical progress. And now we have not only very advanced CGI, but we have AI. Are you worried about a new young generation of makeup artists, that it will just be AI numbing everything?
RB: Yes, I am. I hate to see creative people not having an outlet for their creativity. There’s something so great about the tactile part, having clay and pushing this clay around and making it a face or a werewolf. I don’t think you get that same joy from typing in a prompt. The same thing happened when CG came. When CG came out, we were considered dinosaurs. “That’s old school. We’re the new and modern way to do things.”
And I said at the time, “10 years from now, look back at what I’m doing at this date and look at what you guys did at this date, and you tell me which one looks more real and which one looks better.” When you look at ’90s CG stuff, it looks terrible. You look at something I did in the ’90s, it still looks pretty good. I had hoped that there would be more of a marriage of the techniques, which there has become, but it took a lot longer than I’d hoped. With AI is everything’s going to be so homogenized and look the same that they’re going to want an artist to have a vision. Un
But I also find it exciting, too. I have real mixed feelings about it. It’s another trick in the bag of tricks. It’s another way to do things. So I’m real mixed about it, but I would hate to see artistic people just be pushed to the side. What I worry about is a producer going, “Why do I have to pay this guy? I can just type something in.”
LB: How are your memories of doing Michale Jackson “Thriller”?
RB: The first part of the experience was panic. There wasn’t a lot of time, and the dancers weren’t cast until a few days before we filmed. So I said to John Landis, “I can’t take the life masks and sculpt something specifically for these people in that amount of time.” So I said to myself and my crew, “We all have casts of ourselves.” I have casts of my body. I even have casts of my eyeballs.”Let us be the featured zombies. And I’ll figure out a way to do the dancers.” My way to do the dancers was: I have small, medium, and large life casts of female, small, medium, and large male life casts.
And I said, “I’ll concentrate just on this kind of, like, what we call a bandit-mask area, because we didn’t have to worry about the nose length or stuff. And I’ll make some big teeth that we can put dental lighting material in and shove it in.” But where the panic really came in is, it was going to be my crew. It was going to be a non-union shoot, and my crew knew how to put these makeups on. At that time, there weren’t a lot of people experienced with prosthetic makeup. At the very last minute, it became a union show. And when we did the dance, besides the fact that I was making up Michael, I had 20 makeup artists doing makeups or pieces they had never seen before.
And I was running through the trailers going, “No, no, no, no. It goes here. And this is supposed to be this color. And I’ve got to get Michael done.” Then the dance started. And all the panic switched off. I saw the Thriller dance for the first time live. Actually, I’m getting goosebumps now. None of us knew that Thriller was going to be the phenomenon that it was.
Also, I didn’t know that John was going to do The Making of Thriller. He told me on the day that we were doing Michael’s life mask. I said, “No. Michael’s painfully shy. And I don’t want these guys filming us.” And he goes, “Look, were doing it.” I was not too happy about it. But I’m so happy that it was made now. Because I’ve had so many people come up to me saying, “When I saw The Making of Thriller, that’s when I decided I wanted to be a makeup artist.” My stock answer was, “Well, you figured if that idiot could do it, you could do it.”
But I’m so proud my work inspired a whole generation of people. I think the greatest makeups that have ever been done are being done right now by people inspired in part by work that I’ve done. That will be my legacy: A whole group of people got inspired by the stuff that I did.
LB: Do you feel Oscars at your time had more relevance than an Oscar today with CGI and AI?
RB: Well I still find it unbelievable that I have any Oscar, and An American Werewolf in London, a horror movie that’s very gory and has nudity, I thought, “They’re never gonna give an Oscar to this movie.” I didn’t want to make a fool of myself, so I prepared a speech. And when they called my name, all of a sudden it was just like, “Fuck.” You have 30 seconds, and there’s a clock, and it starts when they call your name.
You see is this clock that’s already gone 10 seconds, and you’re prepared for 30 seconds. And then you’re looking and you see Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson looking at you. I also didn’t know when it was over. Then they go, “Okay, now you go back here and talk to the gauntlet of press people,” which I didn’t know was going to happen.
It was a surreal experience, and especially for a horror fan to have Vincent Price, who was a presenter, and Kim Hunter, who was in Planet of the Apes. I’s just unbelievable that this has happened in my life and that I’ve won so many. Some of my best work, I didn’t even get nominated for, which is a weird thing, too. The last Oscar was for The Wolfman, and that was one of the better ones because we were like the bastard children, Dave Elsey, Lou Elsey, and I. It’s like nobody wanted us to be involved in this movie, and everybody was embarrassed to be doing a movie called The Wolfman. Anthony Hopkins wasn’t, the actors weren’t. It was the producers.
But we were not allowed on the set. We had prepared transformation stuff, and they go, “No, no, we’re not going to do that, and you can’t even be there when we’re filming it.” The director had a little teeny monitor, and he would stand in front of it and wouldn’t let us look at it. To get that award was like, “Fuck you!” I shouldn’t be saying this stuff. I’m going to get in trouble! But that was a good win.
LB: Over the years, was there any project where you were, like, “I wish I could have been part of that,” or that you said no to and then felt sorry?
RB: Oh, there’s many. Stupidly - I mean, usually - when I do a film, I focus on that. A lot of times it was a crap film, and something better would come along, but I would say, “I can’t do it. For example, I was doing a film, it was a Japanese film called Rex. This was prior to Jurassic Park, and we were doing a baby T-Rex thing for it. During that time, I was offered Predator, but I turned it down because I was doing this Rex movie. The Rex movie got canceled. “Shit, I could have done Predator.” The same thing happened with Edward Scissorhands. I figure when I’m hired to do something, I’m committed to it.
I was doing Wolf, which I originally turned down because I was doing something that got canceled. The person who was doing Wolf was doing too much. It was about Jack Nicholson getting empowered by this werewolfism. I even said to them, “I don’t know why you’re talking to me because it kind of mostly needs makeup.” They go, “That’s why we want you, because you understand that.”
So they called me two weeks before they started filming, and they go, “We’re in big trouble. Is there any way you can help us?” And I said, “Well, the film I was doing got canceled.” I was doing that film, and somebody in my crew brought in a trade paper that said Tim Burton is doing a film about Bela Lugosi and Ed Wood, and Martin Landau is playing Bela Lugosi. I’m an Ed Wood fan and a Martin Landau fan and a Tim Burton fan.
I called up Tim, who I’d known from other projects that never came to fruition. “Tim, I have to do this.”, I said, “I’ll do it for free if I have to.” He pretty much heard the “for free” part. I did it not for my usual money, but out of joy. But I said, “The problem is, I can’t — I won’t be able to apply the makeup daily. But I know that you’ve worked with Ve Neill, and I’m perfectly comfortable with her applying it. But I really need to design and make these appliances.” He agreed. When I was a less experienced makeup artist, I probably would have put too much rubber on Martin Landau. But when I read the script, I felt it was so important that he be real, less is more in this case.
So I said, “Instead of trying to do an exact likeness in the sculpture, I need to get the essence of Bela. And I need to trust that Martin is going to bring the rest of it.” So that’s when I broke my rule of not doing two at the same time. At another time, it was forced upon me. I was doing How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which was a huge makeup movie, I had 60 makeup artists working with me, 60 people in makeup every day on Jim Carrey!
Brian Grazer said to me early on, “I wonder if it’s a good idea to do a sequel to The Nutty Professor at the same time we’re doing The Grinch.”
I said, “I don’t know how I’m going to find 60 makeup artists to do this. There’s no way we’re going to do the sequel to The Nutty Professor at the same time.” Well, we did. Fortunately, when I did Nutty Professor, I worked with David Anderson, who won the Oscar with me. We had, I think, every stage at Universal. It was great for me because I always wanted to be Jack Pierce. I had a golf cart, and I would go from the Grinch stage to the Nutty Professor stage. A lot of times, just to decompress because Eddie was funny, Jim was not. To get away from the tension of that, I would go and spend some time with Eddie. That was two big movies at the same time. I preferred to focus on one thing.
LB: Thank you so much for being here and the interview!