Imaginary Worlds - Bonus: Rise of The Villains Outtakes

Episode Date: February 7, 2024

When I interviewed special effects artist Shannon Shea about The Terminator and other villains of ’84, we also discussed his experiences working on Terminator 2. He tells me about the many life-sized puppets of Arnold Schwarzenegger they built and how the industry has changed in the last 40 years. We also hear an outtake from my conversation with Neill Gorton about why the industry is moving away from depicting villains with scars and disabilities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everybody, welcome to this bonus episode of Imaginary Worlds. The guests from my last episode had so many interesting things to say that I couldn't fit into the broader theme of villains in 1984. And Shannon Shea had some great stories about working on Terminator 2. As we heard the episode, back in 1984, Shannon was trying to break into the industry. He went to see the Terminator in the theaters because he was a fan of Stan Winston, who did special effects for the movie. Years later, Shannon found himself working on Terminator 2. He was excited to work with his hero, Stan Winston, but he also realized how much James

Cameron had been involved in the design process. In fact, he actually saw James Cameron's original drawings for the Terminator. I asked him to describe what they looked like. They were colored pencil drawings. They were colored pencil, and he, like yours truly, I mean, I love drawing on black paper with white pencils, especially when you're trying to do something moody and scary. But no, he had like a graphite on white drawing of like the schwarzenegger terminator

with part of his skin missing and his eye there so and they were his drawings they were his designs you know and so it's the same thing with uh with sections of the robot you know like the legs and things and he he did that himself and he also did that on aliens i mean i don't know if i'm you know letting the the cat out of the bag here but you know stan had done some drawings of the queen alien but jim just kind of went this is what i want and did his drawing and it was spectacular it's like wow it's really cool you know he's really an amazing artist amazing illustrator so when you worked on t2 like what kind of conversations did you have with him about

about the character compared to you know the Terminator that everybody knew versus this newer Terminator we're going to show everybody? secretive that when you were working on something that was script important, you literally got a page. In some cases, everything was blacked out except the description that you had to read. So I really didn't know much about the story of Terminator 2 until it was... I know that John Connor was in it. I knew of the T-1000. I knew there was going to be this nuclear holocaust scene, which I was pretty responsible for figuring out how we're going to do that. But as far as discussions about how things were going to change, even when Schwarzenegger came in for a life cast, he wasn't talking about it. No one was talking about it much. I mean, we figured out that Arnold was going to be the

good guy because you know suddenly we had this new guy that was liquid metal you know so i will say one thing we we did push the envelope on those schwarzenegger terminator effects i mean not that they weren't good in the first film but we really really pushed further, I think, on the second film. And I know that there was something that Jim wanted to do that we just didn't have the time to perfect. And that was for scenes where half of his face is blown off and he was going to have dialogue. He wanted it to be where from one camera angle, it would be Schwarzenegger in a makeup doing his lines. And then from the other camera angle, like

on, you know, past him onto Linda Hamilton, it would be a puppet that would lip sync, like a lip syncing puppet. But even in 1990, we really, those things were getting close, but we just weren't there yet. we just didn't have the

time to do that development but think about amazing that would have been with what we had developed all the way through into jurassic park and tales in the crypt and chucky and all that stuff to have a lip-syncing schwarzenegger puppet like that would have been pretty cool it's a shame we didn't get to do it and And by puppet, you mean the side that's the puppet is like the totally exposed... Totally exposed side, yeah. But there'd still be elements of lips and stuff, but he wanted it to be able to talk and move his head and this and that.

So you'd think that that would be perfect because it's a mechanism anyway. But we just, like I said, we had so much to do on that show. I think people, one of the misinformation about Terminator 2 is how much of that is practical. I mean, people just assume that when the T-1000 is running and all of a sudden they're going, you know, and all these things are appearing on his chest, they think those are all CGI. But if you think about what motion mapping was in 1990, the motion mapping that we did on Spy Kids was revolutionary.

I mean, back in 1990, you would need a motion control camera, you know, capturing all the data. I mean, that wasn't that at all. That was literally physical foam rubber that had been vacuum metallized. That was like little flowers that were on his chest and were triggered, you know, mechanically triggered. So when he's getting shot, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, those are foam rubber things,

blossoms opening up on his chest and people just assumed it was all CGI. That just isn't true. There was tons of physical effects in that film that I think people assume are CGI. They're just not.

They're physical. They're real. We really did it. We really did it. So what were some ways that you did? You were talking about how he wanted to push the design of the Schwarzenegger Terminator. You know, there's that scene that sounds amazing

that he was not able to do. What are some things that you did do that you're like, well, yeah, so they did this, the original 84 film, but we wanted to do this a little differently. I'm proud, you know. I think, yeah, I the one of my favorite effects that we did for terminator 2 was when uh john connor says show him sure and throws him the knife and cuts through his his arm and rips the skin off of his endoskeleton and i I mean, if you watch that, I think there might be a cut,

there might be a cut, but it was filmed. It was kind of filmed in a way where you see him start the cut with a bleeding knife. He lowers his hand out in frame. The mechanical arm comes up and he strips the skin off. Listen to me very carefully. You know, it's the old Texas switch, you know, but it's it's it was so great when we saw the dailies. It was really beautiful. And so that's what one of my favorite things. And that hand actually worked. And I remember we had to change. I mean, they're minute aesthetic, minute things so that the mechanism would actually work. so that the mechanism would actually work. There's another shot that I think is in like a long version of the film where they open up Schwarzenegger's head

and pull out the chip in his head. And Linda Hamilton's about to destroy it. And it's so weird because there is a puppet of Schwarzenegger on one side and there is Schwarzenegger sitting on the other side. It's not a mirror. It is literally, I think, in that when I think it's Linda Hamilton and her sister, she has a twin sister. How coincidence. How weird is that? But that shot in the film, or that shot and the stuff that we did for that is really cool because they had designed, I think Steve Berg had designed this thing where there's like this corkscrew thing

that comes out of his skull and then you open that up and inside of it is this chip that they pull out. It was really neat. And it's a shame that I think you can see it in like extended versions of the film. It wasn't in what was released, you know, in the theater. Certainly not to the extent of what we did.

It's a beautiful fake head sculpted by Greg Figgle. Just beautiful. We'll hear more from Shannon Shea in a moment. What's it like to trade crypto on Kraken? Let's say I'm in a moment. For seven support and multi-layered security, go to Kraken.com and see what crypto can be. Not investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. See Kraken.com slash legal slash CA dash PRU dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. So it's funny, I was trying to think about other really memorable kind of monsters or

things created with practical effects in the 80s. There's Chucky, there's Preducky there's predator beetlejuice i don't know i feel like 84 i don't know i do you feel like there was something going on the industry really because star wars comes out in 77 and there's this sense of oh my god this is what we can do and this sort of like slow build slow build slow build it's it do you feel like by the time you get to 84 you're starting to get get towards this industry coalescing, getting really excited about what it's capable of? Yes. I think that if I

had to say what the arc was, the actual arc, because I think we're on the downside of this now, it starts with movies like The Howling and Scanners and An American Werewolf in London. And I think that what happened in Star Wars, because remember, Star Wars, there's as much creature stuff in Star Wars as there is,

you know, spaceships and flying. I mean, there's Chewbacca, who is in the entire picture. I mean, there's a guy in a suit in the entire picture with moving lips. And I mean, he's really well done. Stuart Freeborn, an English makeup effects guy. So he's in the entire picture. People just assume, oh, Chewbacca, that's a makeup effect. He's walking around through, you know, most of the picture, you know, and then you have, you know, the Jowess, which I know are more wardrobe. And, but I would even push Steve Friedhill into that category. He is a robot. It's a man in a suit. You know what I'm saying? So if you look at these things, which I think people took for granted in 1977, you see a very logical splitting off between

optical effects, which are X-wing fighters and all this stuff going this way. And you see creature effects, which is going from Chewbacca to American werewolf and the howling going this way. And so you have this kind of bifurcation of technologies that start building on each success that goes in front of it. And so it's like this acceleration that was happening in 1984. I agree with you. I think 1984 is a pivotal year. It's, it's just before things really hit because the next year we're working on aliens at Stan Winston. So yes, it keeps building, building, building, building. It goes all the way up to Jurassic Park. You get to Jurassic Park, we're building 40 foot long puppets that people on set are moving. And

this big foam rubber animatronic is moving on set. And then digital comes in and we start going down, which is not to say that there haven't been some amazing animatronics and amazing makeups that have been done post-Jurassic Park. I would be a liar if I said that. It's just that the demand starts going down. Those of us that were lucky to be part of that kind of gold rush, let's call it. It was like a gold rush. I mean, we got to see some of the best, you know, and then and now things have just pared

down. There's still people out there fighting the fight, doing great work. It's still impressive to see when people do things that are a little outside of the box. But someone, and for the sake of this person, I'm going to just say, leave their name off. But I was talking to someone recently. They had been on a big television show, really popular television show. I'll keep that under wraps. He said, oh, you'd hate to be on set. And I went, why? And he went, because there's very little yelling anymore, which was always a big part of working on set. We'd bring a puppet out and set it up, get everything lit. We'd go through a take and a

cable would break. And boy, the screaming would start because everyone had to stop. We had to open up the puppet. We had to open up the puppet. We had to reroute the cable. We need to hook it back up again and start all over again. It would take sometimes 20 minutes. So 20 minutes on set, dead time would irritate people. He said, now you go out there. It's not perfect the first time. He said, no one gets angry. They just say, thank you. Could you please move everything out of the way, please? And they move it out of the way. They shoot their plate and they move on. And then someone comes up and says, OK, we're done with you for the day. They sign you up. You go home because the idea

is we'll fix it in post with CG. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it's just and again, it's just it's the logical progression of things. I understand, you know, I'm I feel like I'm a dinosaur myself, but there's something about having something on camera, on set, in front, or to be more specific, having Robert Englund in a makeup acting. I mean, you do that and you're setting yourself up for some real amazing stuff. some real amazing stuff. I think there's something about trying to make terror less about this human scale or you have these like weird stuff. Like I can't remember the name of the picture.

I know my daughter made me watch it. And there's a lot of gore effects in there, pretty horrific gore effects. And that's the thing that I see a lot of gore effects in there pretty horrific gore effects and and that's the thing that i see a lot of too is i see a lot of people doing very very realistic gore stuff that sometimes is enhanced with cgi just to make it that much more horrible but to me that's not what intrigues me the ones the you picked, they're characters, and I really like that. I mean, even the shark from Jaws

in its own way is a character. It has a theme. It puts you in its point of view as it's going through the ocean and all that stuff. It's not just some psycho. It's not just some crazy cult or someone wearing a plastic bunny mask.

It is a full character. And I think that that's, in my opinion, what's missing from a lot of things. And like, you know, I mean, there's so much that was happening back in those days. And it's, I still say, this is, okay, I'm going to leave you with this thought. And this is something that, you know, you can debate with another guest somewhere down the line. This is my prayer. I hope that AI explodes. I hope AI explodes all over the industry, and I hope what it does is generates a movement,

a humanist movement, where it comes to motion pictures and the production of them. I hope AI becomes so mundane, so huge and so mundane, that people just get tired of looking at it. And then one day someone will do something like scanners, where it's just a bunch of air bladders under someone's face, moving around. People go, what am I looking at? Because as Steve Johnson said it better than me, Steve Johnson said it used to be people would look at something and go, how'd they do that? He said, now people look at stuff and go,

oh, it's computer. And I think that has taken something out of it all. So when you pick 1984, you're talking about when the ship is leaving the port, not when it has come back and all the cargo has been distributed. I also want to play an excerpt from my conversation with Neil Gordon. I asked Neil if Freddy Krueger feels dated now because there's been a movement away from depicting villains with physical deformities. He said yes. In fact, he recently found himself in

the middle of a controversy around this issue. Neil Gordon is a creature makeup designer on Doctor Who, and sometimes they produce mini-episodes for the telethon Children in Need. And recently, they did a mini-episode about the Doctor Who villain Davros. Now going all the way back to the 1970s, this villain Davros has been depicted as having a bulbous bald head with wires in it. He's blind and sees out of an artificial eye, and he moves around in kind of a motorized chair. But in this new mini episode, we see Davros at the beginning of his career as an evil genius, looking very able-bodied. Davros, an honor to work for you, sir. Then allow me to show you the future of our beloved college race.

A lot of fans were upset about this change and vented their frustration on social media. fans were upset about this change and vented their frustration on social media. But Neal says even before he worked on this mini episode, he had given the subject a lot of thought. I wrote a piece for a magazine about the

last Bond movie. There was a lot of notes about the fact that you weren't allowed to mention, it was about the makeup on Rami Malek that Barry Gower did. And it was like, you can't mention scars. You can't say scars. You can't say this. Because there'd been a lot of issues with, you know,

a lot of pushback against those things that always put a big scar on a villain or put them in a wheelchair, you know. So, you know, a bit of simplistic psychology. People sometimes, going back a ways people would fear or not identify very easily with anybody with a disability or something like that. I think that was sort of built into people to be less understanding of. And so again, it was very easy to create a villain out of people who had those kind of problems,

those issues, you know. And now we're more enlightened, you'd hope. I mean, there is, I mean, again, there's always a reaction to everything online, especially with Doctor Who. But I know that some people are like,

wait, Davros, you know, he was scary looking and now he just looks like a Nazi. Like you've, you know, Davros has gone woke or whatever. But it's it happened. And you've kind of, you know, you've got to see it from all sides, you know, and I think that you will always have some things that it's easy to be angry at. It's easy to be upset at change. But at the same time, you've got to try and change some of these things because some of those perceptions are they do become ingrained.

They do become the idea that someone in a wheelchair is somehow, you know, if you keep painting all these villains as scarred and, you know, requiring wheelchairs and all these sort of things, that becomes the norm. That becomes ingrained in people. You know, I see the point. You know, there's sometimes, I mean, personally personally i'm gutted i love that i love the character i love making devros i've done devros a couple of times and it pains me in one way because you just go oh that's it it is it's an established thing and everything but at the same time you go well no they they also

want to you know you look at the new specials and we've got characters in wheelchairs who are heroic and very much part of the story. And actually that just is more uncommon. So yes, maybe it's time to flip it around a bit and try and just take away the stigma from that, take away the connotations of the evil genius in his, you know, lair with the cat and the wheelchair and the scars and turn it into a different thing, you know? Yeah. I mean, do you miss that or do you feel like it became too much

of a crutch to designing a villain being like scars, melted face? Exactly. I mean, that, you know, you go back into the 80s and of course that was that was people's go to. Let's make him burn. Let's make him this, you know, know i mean you look at you look at those characters you know you look at jason you know and he he's a child with a deformity a hydrocephalic head and all that kind of thing you know you look at freddie it's all he's been burnt and all that kind of you know they're they're just easy things to do you know it's it's like going the films that kind of went well every time there was an action movie in the 80s, the villain was a terrorist, you know, and we had lots of Arabic

actors being terrorists. And at some point, you've got to kind of move away from the stereotype, you know. So these things have got to evolve. It's just an evolution, you know, we're evolving a bit, you'd hope that we're all evolving a bit. We've just got to work a bit harder to tell those stories in smarter thinking than lazy thinking. Well, that's it for our episode of Bonus Material. We'll be back next week with part two of our mini-series, Class of 84.