19 ISABELI - Fairbanks Productions

19
15
STARRING
ISABELI
FONTANA
Ashley
Smith
CARMEN
ELECTRA
RIVER
VIIPERI
EUGEN
BAUDER
MISCHA
BArTON
Codie
young
THE CREATURE KEEPER
SHAUNE HARRISON SPENT HIS CHILDHOOD SCULPTING MONSTERS IN HIS BEDROOM. IT WAS A HOBBY HIS PARENTS
HOPED HE WOULD OUTGROW, AND EVENTUALLY HE DID – IT JUST TOOK 24 YEARS AND AN ILLUSTRUOUS FILM CAREER...
The Mouseman, from the TV series Demons
Dochraid Merlin, from the TV series Merlin
According to Harrison it all starts with the script or, when working with
a visionary like Clive Barker, it begins in the imagination. Barker would
sketch out what he was looking for and approve everything his team
made, but even then the job required artistic ability, a rich imagination
and a spirit of collaboration (Harrison himself considers the work so teambased that he has trouble isolating his favourite creation simply because
he can’t conceive of what he’s crafted as his alone). But however well a
writer or director can envision a creature in the abstract, bringing it into
the physical world is a craft in itself. Even in the days of CGI (which
Harrison says used to be regarded as a major threat to his job but has, in
fact, just opened doors), puppets and guys in suits remain some the most
compelling creatures ever created.
Shaune Harrison, with a silicone head from Grabbers
Silicone puppet from behind the scenes of Decay
“I think my parents thought, ‘Oh, Shaune is just going to grow out of
this. Just leave him alone to grow up and get out and get a normal job,’”
recalls Harrison. “So I just put a Chestburster thing on my chest and put
the camera on a table and, you know, pressed action.”
Growing up in a small town in Merseyside, near Liverpool, Harrison
couldn’t have been further away from the film industry. But he did have
one distinct advantage: a father whose factory job provided him with a
steady stream of industrial putty which, when combined with chicken
wire, was suitable for sculpting dead bodies and second heads. “He would
bring stuff home and say, ‘Can you use this, Shaune?’ So I was just playing
with it and working with it and trying to sculpt it.”
Even so, it was only fun and games until An American Werewolf in
London was released. Harrison, who was 13 at the time, wasn’t old
enough to watch, but he wasn’t too young to become fascinated by how
the transformation from man to wolf would function. Seeing it for the first
time drew the line between childhood pastime and potential profession.
“When I saw it there was one image of the face transforming, but I had
no idea how it was done,” he explains. “So I tried to come up with ideas
of how I thought it was going to be made.” The answer came when a film
review show on television demonstrated the transformation. “As soon as
I’d seen it in action, moving, I thought, ‘I want to try and recreate that.’”
Young men in Harrison’s small Merseyside town built ships or Vauxhall
cars, not creatures. But by the time he reached working age he’d put
his bets on another kind of vehicle entirely: a career vehicle for horror
writer and director Clive Barker called Nightbreed, aimed at turning the
Hellraiser director into a legend. Years of scouring film magazines for
the names (and studios) of big special effects makeup artists and sending
off reams of letters had finally paid off. After innumerable pleas to film
studios and the supportive but fully staffed Christopher Tucker, make-up
designer on The Elephant Man, it was Bob Keen of Highlander fame who
saved the day after receiving a box full of Harrison’s work. He’d sent
it without even knowing the address, just Keen’s name and the studio
for which he worked, but the package arrived regardless and its contents
landed Harrison a job as a runner on Barker’s set.
Harrison says of his first job experience, which consisted mostly of
making coffee and scrubbing down sets, “For me it was more the fact
that when I went there, there were other people doing what I wanted
to do. I didn’t feel weird wanting to make monsters because they were
doing the same thing.“ Payment, or lack thereof, wasn’t an issue. He says,
“We were bunch of kids that didn’t really know what we were doing.”
Nightbreed was a critical and commercial failure for Barker, but in many
ways it launched Harrison’s career by wedging him firmly through the
door of Pinewood Studios. He spent three years there as a runner, staying
at the studios late into the night to sculpt in his free time. That enthusiasm
caught Bob Keen’s attention. Harrison was made an assistant. He says,
“We literally were thrown into the deep end. They said to us, ‘We’ve got
four weeks, build this creature.’ And you have to design it, sculpt it, paint
it, mould it. You literally just go, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’ And that crazy naiveté
just takes you along, really.”
The same crazy naiveté that compelled Harrison to ship an address-less
box full of monsters to Bob Keen would eventually take him to the heights
of special effects make-up, and through all eight Harry Potter films, where
he was one of the main designers behind the character Mad Eye Moody,
and movies like The Mummy and Captain America. He even got one
of his creations a position in the Jedi Parliament of George Lucas’s Star
Wars: Episode One despite stiff competition from an expansive creaturemaking team. Along the way he’s learned the secrets of making monsters.
Perhaps he was just born knowing them.
Harrison explains that CGI can make a film look dated, that it’s too obvious
a technique: “The audience will go, ‘Oh, that’s just digital’, whereas you
want them to have no idea how that was done. For me that’s the best
way and what filmmaking is all about. Trying to cheat the audience.”
As counterintuitive as it may seem, the monsters that work the best are
the closest to reality. Design and context make the difference between
something foolish (Harrison points out the last incarnation of Godzilla as
an example. How does such a massive creature hunker down low enough
to hide in the city centre, huh?) and something incredibly frightening. The
most nightmarish monster is of-this-world enough for the audience to
convince themselves that it may actually exist. To achieve reality Harrison
relies on towers of reference books. “It’s all about trying to copy what’s
real,” he says. “Real animals are just so much cooler than monsters.”
Bib Fortuna, from Star Wars Episode 1:
The Phantom Menace
Goblin, from Harry Potter
and the Deathly Hollows Part 2
scare the audience,” he says. “I’m forever trying to figure out what would
scare me.”
Asking Harrison what his goals are, what’s next for him in the industry,
is like throwing open the floodgates. His mind is a pure and violent rush
of imagination, with at least two other ideas for features and enough
material for prequels and sequels. His dream project, besides any of his
own, would be an adaptation of HG Lovecraft’s story ‘At the Mountains
of Madness’, a twisted tale of an Arctic expedition uncovering something
it never meant to. “I just love really cool creature movies set in desolate
places,” Harrison adds. “Amazing!”
While special effects make up isn’t going away immediately Harrison
is about to start re-shoots of the zombie apocalypse film World War Z
starring Brad Pitt much of the draw is economic. Monsters pay the bills,
but the obsessive love of craft that drove him to hunt down kindred spirits
has shifted from sculpting to writing and directing. “It would be nice
eventually to say goodbye to monsters,” Harrison admits. “Even though I
love them and stuff.”
However, after 24 years there aren’t enough creatures real or imaginary to
keep Harrison’s head in the game. He’s a man of immense imagination,
his fantasies too plugged into the reality of his everyday life to relegate
them to working hours. The result has been a sharp left turn in his
ambitions. He’s now working towards writing and directing, a hunger that
arose in him during the long haul of the Harry Potter films. “From being
on film sets and watching big directors working,” Harrison says, “I just
kept thinking it would be quite nice to try. Because I had quite a lot of
story ideas. So I just started writing shorts and thinking, ‘Oh, maybe I can
fit that in,’ but at the same time I have to do my day job, which is making
monsters. So I would try and fit them in between.”
Harrison made four short films this way, sandwiched neatly between
instalments of Harry Potter: The Grave, Skeleton Crew, Uninvited
and Red Light. He is now in the process of getting his first feature,
Decay, which he’s written and will direct, off the ground. Contrary to
expectations, Decay is not a creature film but an eerie supernatural horror
in the old style. Shock and gore is too easy for a man who spent decades
in special effects, Harrison says. He wants fear. “If it scares me it will
Troll, from Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Words / Lucinda Beeman