Stop-motion animation has been around
since the silent-movie days, but no one has put a personal stamp on the
technique like Ray Harryhausen. In 16 movies from 1949's Mighty Joe Young to
1981's Clash
Of The Titans, Harryhausen gave life to an entire zoo's worth of fearsome
monsters, including the giant octopus which destroys the Golden Gate Bridge in It Came From Beneath The
Sea, the carnivorous dinosaurs of One Million Years B.C. and The Valley Of Gwangi,
and, from his most memorable film, Jason And The Argonauts, the colossal guardian
Talos and the homicidal, sword-wielding skeletons. It's rare for a
special-effects artist to be the real driving force behind a movie, but
Harryhausen's contributions often dominated the shaping of his films. He
achieved this while working mostly alone and under the pressures of low-budget
filmmaking—Titans'
$16 million budget was more than the total cost of his previous collaborations
with producer Charles Schneer, his partner for the bulk of his career. Just
before embarking for America, where he'll be touring through early May,
Harryhausen talked with The A.V. Club about his life and his new book The Art Of Ray Harryhausen,
which looks back at his career from his high-school days building mammoths out
of his mother's discarded fur coat to his latest work as a bronze sculptor.
The
A.V. Club: How did you first get interested in becoming an animator?
Ray
Harryhausen:
[Laughs.] Well, that was quite a long way back. It was through King Kong, of course. I saw that at
Grauman's Chinese [Theater] in 1933, and I haven't been the same since. My aunt
had three tickets to this strange film that was playing on Hollywood Boulevard
at Grauman's Chinese. I was still in high school, and we went one afternoon
when I was off. It was quite an amazing spectacle. Sid Grauman was a great
showman; he used to have a stage show just at the beginning of the feature, and
he had a big display out in the foyer of the bust of Kong and pink flamingos
strutting around. It was so impressive. They really put on a show in those
days.
AVC: What impressed you
about Kong?
RH: It's so compact, that's
the beauty of it. Everything points to the central theme and the central
concept—there isn't a wasted scene or superfluous word of dialogue in the
picture. I've seen it so many times, and Ray Bradbury still admires it as well.
I know Peter Jackson loved it as much as I did.
AVC: Later, you actually
contacted Willis O'Brien, Kong's special-effects creator, and he
became your mentor.
RH: When I was still in high
school, I called him up at MGM. A friend of mine said "Let's call him
up"—her father had worked with him. And he kindly invited me down to MGM
to take a look at his preparation for [the unfinished 1938 project] War
Eagles.
AVC: How difficult was
it for a high-school student to meet a professional in the film industry?
RH: Everybody likes to be
isolated when they're working on a film, but I guess not many people were
interested in animation. He thought I might have been an exception, I guess. At
that time, I hadn't found another kindred soul who admired King Kong the way I did.
AVC: And even in high
school, you were experimenting with movie special effects.
RH: I wasn't actually working
with stop-motion. I was making models of the La Brea tar pits. I admired those
type of things. I'd seen Willis O'Brien's Lost World when I was 4 or 5, I
guess, and of course that was a silent film and I was impressed visually, but
it makes a big difference when you have a fine score, like Max Steiner created
for King Kong.
AVC: Later you worked
with O'Brien on your first professional film, Mighty Joe Young.
RH: Yes. I worked for George
Pal's Puppetoons before that, but they were stylized puppet films. O'Brien's
technique was very different, although they used the same principles of
stop-motion.
AVC: How does
stop-motion animation work?
RH: It's very similar to the
animated cartoon, only instead of a flat drawing that's progressive, you use a
three-dimensional model that's jointed. [The 1933] King Kong was about 18
inches high. He had [a skeleton with] every joint that a real gorilla would
have made of ball-and-socket steel, and then he was covered with rubber and
rabbit fur. Then you photograph it frame-by-frame. Each frame of the film on
35mm is like taking a series of still pictures; when you run them at 24 frames
a second, which is sound speed, you get the illusion that it's moving by
itself. But, of course, you have to be very careful that you keep the head and
arms and everything in synchronization so it gives the illusion of reality.
AVC: It's very detailed
and time-consuming work.
RH: It is. It's not
everybody's cup of tea. You have to have a certain mentality for it, I think.
[Laughs.] I
try to give [my creations] a character. Mighty Joe, I gave him a lot of little
side things to do, to give him character. Willis O'Brien did that with King
Kong, and I admired that so much in his film.
AVC: Even the spaceships
in Earth
Vs. The Flying Saucers, although they don't have many moving parts, move
with a certain amount of personality.
RH: We tried to give the
illusion that they were guided by intelligence, although we very seldom showed
the creatures that were inside.
AVC: So what's the trick
to making a flying saucer behave like a living thing?
RH: [Laughs.] I don't know
whether there's a trick. Everybody sees things differently—that's the way
I see it, another animator might do it a little differently. I can't say that
there's any specific trick to it, it's just trying to give the illusion that
there's something alive inside that's guiding it.
AVC: Some of your
earliest work, like the Fairy Tales—
RH: Yes, those were more
experiments. I call them my teething rings, because I learned a great deal from
making fairy tales. I made them for schools, for young people. "Mother Goose
Stories" was made to associate the written word with a visual image, and it's
still used in schools all over the country. I made most of them in my garage.
AVC: And your father
helped you as well.
RH: Yes, my father was a
machinist, and he made the armatures [steel skeletons forming the structure of
a stop-motion model]. My mother made the costumes, and I designed everything
and built the little miniature sets and photographed it. And I learned so many
different techniques; I went to night school while I was still in high school
to study film editing and art direction as well as photography.
AVC: And he continued to
help you quite a long way into your film career, making some of the models in
some of your professional films as well.
RH: Oh yes, he made the
armatures. I made very detailed drawings, and I would send them to him in
America. He made the skeletons, Talos, and the harpies for Jason And The
Argonauts.
AVC: Besides Kong, what were some
of your other early influences?
RH: [Gustave] Doré was one of
the main ones. His engravings in his Bible Gallery and for Dante's
Inferno
and Don Quixote
were so visual and cinematic. I always call him the first motion-picture art
director, because in the silent days, a lot of art directors in films used to
copy him. Cecil B. DeMille used to group his biblical characters very similar
to the drawings that Dore made.
AVC: You mentioned
earlier that as a young man it was difficult to find people who enjoyed King Kong as much as
you did. Not too much later, though, you made lifelong friends of
science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury and Famous Monsters Of Filmland fanzine
editor Forrest Ackerman.
RH: That was through Kong as well, indirectly.
AVC: How did you meet?
RH: Through the [Los Angeles]
Science Fiction Society that was going in those days. I went to a little
fleapit to see a reissue of Kong for 10 cents, I think they charged. [Laughs.] And
they had these beautiful 11×14 stills of Kong that I hadn't seen since
Grauman's Chinese, when they had them in the foyer. I asked if I could borrow
them because they were an inspiration to me, and the manager said that they
didn't belong to him, that he borrowed them from Forrest Ackerman. So he gave
me his number, and I called him up, and Forry gallantly loaned me the stills,
and I copied them. Then he invited me to the Science Fiction Society, which
held meetings every Thursday in the Brown Room, in Clifton's Cafeteria.
AVC: You worked with Ray
Bradbury on one of your first films, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. How do
you think your friendship influenced your career?
RH: Well, we were all
interested in science fiction, the unusual. [The Society] had a rocket
scientist, and Ray was only a struggling writer selling newspapers on the
street corner. [Laughs.] He was very enthused, and [although] he was getting a
lot of rejection slips, finally he hit the big time. He was very persistent. We
had a lot in common; he loved dinosaurs and I loved dinosaurs, and Ray and
Forry and I would sometimes go way out to Eagle Rock and Pasadena just to see a
replay of Last Days Of Pompeii, which was a [Merian] Cooper picture, and She, and King Kong, and Son Of Kong. That was way back in
'38, before the war. We've been friends ever since. I seldom see him today,
because I live in England. Whenever I go to America, we always get together for
dinner. I explain all this a lot in my DVD called The Early Years Collection. [That also has] all my
fairy tales as well as my early experiments that I made before the war.
AVC: You were raised in
Los Angeles?
RH: Yes, I was. I spent half
of my life there and half here in England.
AVC: As a filmmaker,
what were the advantages of being in England, rather than staying closer to Hollywood?
RH: Well, when we were making
a film called The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver, we had [to create the effect of] big
people and little people [in the same shot]. We couldn't use rear projection,
which dominated the film business for special effects in America, and the Rank
Laboratory in England had a marvelous system [called a] traveling matte, which
is a way of putting two pieces of film together without them being noticeably
different. So we wanted to come over essentially to use that particular process
of the Rank Laboratory.
[pagebreak]
AVC: And then you
decided to stay?
RH: We had new locations very
close by. You can't keep using Malibu Beach and the Grand Canyon for lost
islands. Television uses up all the locations in America. So we're only two
hours from Jordan and two hours from Spain, and it's much easier. Two hours
from Italy—we've shot in all these foreign countries. We cased Greece,
but it was so dreary, and they haven't as many restorations as Italy. Italy has
a lot of restored ruins that are very impressive. We shot the harpies in Jason
And The Argonauts in
the temples of Paestum in southern Italy, near Pompeii. There are wonderful
Greek temples there that have been there for 5,000 years.
AVC: Although you're
best known as an animator, you also had quite a bit of creative control on your
films.
RH: Oh yes, I wore many
different hats. And I was very modest in those days—it took me 50 years
to find out that it doesn't pay in Hollywood to be modest. [Laughs.] I worked
on the scripts—I worked very closely with [writer] Curt Siodmak when we
devised the story for Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers. I always worked with the
writers, right from The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms up to Clash Of The
Titans.
And I brought in a number of films, of course—I conceived the three
Sinbad films and 20 Million Miles To Earth. But I contributed much more. I looked for
locations as well, and I've always been associated closely with the producer. I
do wear many different hats.
AVC: That's an unusual
degree of input.
RH: It is, because our films
are not what you'd call a director's concept, as they say in Europe. Our films
have to be so carefully laid out before the director even comes on the job,
because it can cost $1,000 more or $200,000 more if the director says "I want
this shot at this angle," and you have to say "No, this is going to cost too
much." So I had to figure all this out long before we started production.
That's why I discovered the locations, so that they'd fit with the special
effects. Charles Schneer and myself and the writer would have what we call
sweatbox sessions, where we take the 10 pages that the writer has composed,
pick them to pieces, and try to make them as logical as possible. I make
sketches of what [creature effects] I feel I can do in the best way and for the
least possible expense, and it's the writer's job to incorporate them in a
logical way so that we have a story that has a beginning, middle, and an end.
AVC: The ability to work
within a budget seems like a crucial part of your success.
RH: Yes, that was very
important. Because in those days, science fiction wasn't very popular. And Mighty
Joe Young
got, for some strange reason, the reputation of costing too much. O'Brien had a
big crew—we had 47 people in the miniature department and the animation
department. So I tried to cut that down. I've sort of been a one-man show just
to keep the cost down. Because a lot of producers were frightened that it would
cost too much. I know Obie had [that] problem, because he would prepare so many
films and then they'd never reach production.
AVC: Is that why you
typically worked alone when you were animating?
RH: Yes, that's the main
reason. The other reason is, animation requires a great deal of concentration,
and I preferred to work alone because then I'm not deterred by somebody asking
me if I want coffee, or the phone ringing or something. But that and keeping
the cost down was the main thing. Because our pictures were low-budget; we were
considered B-pictures, although we've survived the so-called A-pictures of that
period.
AVC: Your early movies
like the Fairy Tales are entirely animated, but most of your work is a
combination of live action with stop-motion.
RH: I've never felt that
animated creatures by themselves could hold an audience for an hour and a half.
[Laughs.] But puppet films, as you saw in Wallace & Gromit and Chicken Run, are entirely different.
They're very stylized films. They've done very well. I'm certainly glad that
they're keeping animation alive. Because everybody used to say that animation
is dead, because CGI is taking over.
AVC: Do you think
stop-motion still has a place in film?
RH: I think it will continue.
People haven't made any films quite like we did, but I get fan mail from young
people today saying they prefer our old films to some of the new ones. I'm
grateful that our films are appreciated. A lot of them were entered for Academy
Award consideration, but they were never nominated. Nobody knew much about
animation during that time. I was grateful in '92 that they finally gave me an
award for my profession in the industry. [In 1992, Harryhausen received a
Gordon E. Sawyer Award, an honorary Oscar given for technical achievement.
—ed.]
AVC: There wasn't even
an award category for best visual effects then.
RH: They didn't have a
category, more or less. O'Brien won one for Mighty Joe, but that was the first
time they had special effects put in that category. But special effects were
ignored for a good many years. They go way back to Noah's Ark in the silent days, and
there was an early sound film called Deluge that came out in 1933. It
was very impressive—it shows New York sinking under the ocean. But they
were never as popular as they are today.
AVC: The early part of
your career is dominated by science-fiction films and giant-monster tales like It Came From Beneath
The Sea and Earth
Vs. The Flying Saucers. Later, you moved into sword-and-sorcery films with
the Sinbad series, Jason,
and Titans.
What prompted the change?
RH: I like mythology. I think
legends and mythology is ideal. [In my early career,] animation had been used
only for things like King Kong and the destruction of cities, which was very
popular in the 1950s. I got tired of destroying cities. I destroyed New York, I
destroyed San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, Rome, and Washington. I was
looking for a new outlet, and I came across the Sinbad legends. You could
believe that Sinbad could fight a skeleton because that's from a period in the
past, a magical period. But if you had James Bond fighting a skeleton, it'd be
almost comical.
AVC: Do you have a
favorite among your films?
RH: Well, Jason is more complete. We
always had to compromise because we had to make them on a very tight budget. A
lot of people don't appreciate that. They've proven to last longer than the
so-called A-pictures, where millions were spent on effects and they play once
and that's it.
AVC: What do you think
of the new version of King Kong?
RH: It's very good. Peter
Jackson did a very wonderful job. The CGI stuff is very good. It's a very long
film, and a little different concept than the original. But it's another
person's point of view. Everybody sees things differently. But he loved the original
and he did a wonderful job compared to the '76 version, which was quite
outrageous, I thought. It lost all the fantasy qualities of it. I mean, the girl
making smart talk to the gorilla was just so out of place.
AVC: In your book, you
mention that you were once offered the chance to remake King Kong for Hammer
Films.
RH: Yes they wanted to do it
some years ago, after we did One Million Years B.C.
AVC: You said you
weren't sorry that it didn't happen.
RH: No, I wasn't. Because I
don't think they would have put the money or the imagination into it. When you
put a big budget into a film today, it doesn't necessarily mean it will be a
better picture, but it does help in creating new images on the screen. [Hammer]
pictures were always on a very tight budget. I find it very difficult, the
concept of remaking a classic. I latched onto One Million B.C. because I thought
animation would be so much better than [the other effects] they used in the
film. They used big lizards with fins glued onto their backs and shot them in
slow motion, thinking that was supposed to be a dinosaur. So I thought we could
do better. But I don't think it would be very possible to top the original King
Kong.
AVC: It wasn't until
your last movie, Clash
Of The Titans, that you had a chance to work with some of the A-list actors
of the day, such as Laurence Olivier, who played Zeus. Do you wish you'd had
that opportunity earlier?
RH: Not necessarily. We never
had so-called stars in our films before, but we had many competent actors who
were just as good. But who else could play Zeus besides Laurence Olivier? I
know Charlton Heston had played God, but we couldn't afford him. MGM wanted
[Olivier] to have a cameo, so I'm grateful for that, because I think he added
enormously to the film. They have marvelous actors here [in England]. They've
all had a lot of stage experience. They feel much more convincing than in
America, where they don't look quite at home in a toga.
AVC: In your book, you
say that you have ideas for creatures—some of which you've been carrying
around in your head for decades—that never found the right film.
RH: There were
several—I was much luckier than Willis O'Brien. I had some pictures
collapse or disintegrate before they reached production. But Obie had [that
happen to] so many pictures—his War Eagles and Gwangi and several others. He
wanted to do one on whales, and he couldn't get that off the ground. I've been
much luckier than he was, in that I got to do at least 15, 16 feature films.
AVC: Have you had ideas
for films that you'd like today's filmmakers to try to pick up and complete?
RH: Sometimes, yes. I think
I've listed them in the back of the book of An Animated Life.
AVC: One that you
mention in the book is Force Of The Trojans, which was planned to be your next
project after Clash
Of The Titans.
RH: That was Greek mythology,
yes. I don't know what happened. MGM made quite a profit on Clash Of The
Titans,
and we thought Force Of The Trojans would go through there. But apparently the
public's tastes turned to other types of films.
AVC: Do you think
stop-motion animation has qualities that CGI can't duplicate?
RH: There's a strange quality
in stop-motion photography, like in King Kong, that adds to the fantasy.
If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane. In Kong, you knew he wasn't real,
but he looked like a nightmare, you know? He acted real, and the dinosaurs
looked real. But there was something about them that had a magic that you don't
quite get yet in CGI.