Invaders from Mars (1986)

Tobe Hooper's remake of Invaders from Mars was part of a three picture deal he had with Cannon Films, following on from the previous year's Lifeforce. Hooper, an open admirer of the 1953 original, said about the project, 'I wanted to bring my own spin on it, but also I did respect the original film. It's a children's movie, it's all from a little boy's point of view'.

Hooper's Invaders from Mars being a children's film (unlike the remakes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing or The Blob) meant that graphic gore or body horror was forbidden, but there would still be that staple of kids horror; scary monsters!

The alien creatures, along with much of the alien spaceship sets and props, were originally designed on paper by William Stout, but it was Stan Winston who contributed the final creature designs, and whose effects shop fabricated the suits, animatronics and puppets.

A problem that arose during the shoot was Stan Winston being called up to work on James Cameron's Aliens, which had begun filming at Pinewood Studios in England. Winston left Alec Gillis in charge of the on-set duties, which Gillis found very daunting.

Gillis remembered his feelings at the time. 'Stan said, ''We're all gonna pack up and go to London and I'm gonna leave you in charge for Invaders from Mars!''. I'm thinking, 'Holy crap, I've never did anything like this before'. I'd been in the business for about 5 years, but it was always smaller things, working *for* people. So it was an oppurtunity to actually step up and be a department head on the set. And all the pressure that goes along with that, which was quite considerable on Invaders from Mars! (...) I just remember being in the shower, and my hair falling out in clumps, just from the stress. It was a growing experience.'

Gillis looked back on how his time on Invaders from Mars, even if under Winston, foreshadowed his career path as co-owner of Amagamated Dynamics. 'My interaction with Tobe was day-to-day on the set, so I worked with him in very much the same way I work with directors now. Talk about today's work, what you're looking for out of the creature, how can we help you get what you want, and then I work with the assistant directors to work out the schedule. But most of Tobe's conversations in terms of the designs happened with Stan.'

Alec Gillis acted as the art department coordinator, while Rick Lazzarini and David Nelson were the mechanical department's coordinator.

The creature effects team included Bill Sturgeon, Larry Odien, Shane Mahan, Tom Woodruff Jr., Shannon Shea, John Rosengrant, Matt Rose, and Steve Wang. Among the crew were also Kevin Yagher, and future KNB EFX founders Robert Kurtzman and Howard Berger.

Maquettes for the Martian drones.

The main monsters of the film, the Martian 'drones', were originally humanoids in the script, but Winston wanted to do something different. 'The basic thrust in the Drone development, along with their being organic and interesting to look at, was that they had to have production practicality. They had to be moveable in such a way that they didn't appear to be men in suits, as well as being interesting and unique characters.'

'In the original script that I read, the drones which at that point were referred to as androids, were part machine, part man, stood six or seven feet tall, and had clear glass boxes for heads with a floating brain inside. They were a bit ludicrous, and I didn't want to do these characters. I felt that they should be organic monsters - I didn't want to do another machine, another man in a metal suit. I had just done a horrible thing called Frankenstein Factor (aka The Vindicator) which was a man in a metal suit.

I tried to be as diplomatic with Tobe as I possibly could, and said that I would much rather do an organic creature, and Tobe was in complete agreement, that's exactly what he wanted. One of Stout's sketches had knees going in the opposite direction, which gave me the idea of a man in a suit backwards, and I said 'Now, that's a terrific idea; Let's go with a man standing backwards in a suit.' I first discussed using two contortion artists.'

Instead of contortion artists, Winston opted to fabricate an armature on which two people of different heights could move around in. 'I set up with production companies on casting a number of bodybuilders and little people. My idea was for the little person to sit in a specially designed back-pack placed on top of and facing away from the bodybuilder, with the contention that this would be a six-limbed creature, using the arms of the little person and the arms of the bodybuilder as four appendages, with the legs of the bodybuilder for mobility, and finally, using the legs of the little person to mechanically operate the creature’s mouth.

We'd have the bodybuilder moving backwards so that the bend of the knee was unlike a human bend. The direction of the legs was reversed, and this gave the basic configuration of the monster a look that would be other than human.'

The Martian drone suit's armatures.

The Martian drones design was influenced by Winston's brainstorming over how the armature, hence the almost comical squat yet gangly look of the monsters. 'From those photographs of exactly what was on the inside, I drew the final sketch of what the drones would look like, front and profile. I wasnt designing something that wouldn't work technically. So in fact, the drones are a concept that is drawn and designed from the inside out - and it worked beautifully. It's a terrific design: fun, silly, big and lumbering. It has all of the practicalities of a man in a suit, because it's literally a guy walking around - but it doesn't look like that way.'

The Martian drone suit sculpture.

Winston explained how the other parts of the Drone suits were operated. 'For the Drones we also used state-of-the-art techniques for their final articulation including radio-controlled eye movement. There was a series of fans within the suits to keep the operators cool and for the bodybuilders there was a small video monitor in front of the face connected to a camera in the Drone’s nostril in this way you could see while walking backwards'.

'The creature's mouth was moved by the little person's legs; it had extra appendages coming out of its head, which were the little person's arms; the eyes, the snarling and the facial articulations were all radio-controlled and cable-operated. We had two actual suits.'

Component's of the Martian drone suit.

Can you spot the camera in the second image?

The shot where Louise Fletcher's schoolmarm is eaten alive by one of the Drones required a puppet head for Fletcher to 'fall' into. Gillis explained, 'When the creature eats her, I think we had a head you could operate by hand, with rubber teeth that wouldn't hurt anybody.'

Gino Crognale, one of the artists on Winston's crew, had an amusing memory of Fletcher's reactions to filming the scene. 'That day we had established Fletcher going in (the Drone's mouth), and so made her gooey and wet. She had a great sense of humour about it, and at one point I remember her saying, 'I've won an academy award and I'm doing this!'

Winston said about the final onscreen suits, 'When the audience finally sees these enormous creatures lumbering around it will look like nothing they’ve ever seen before in motion picture history. When they see them theyII think that they must be stop-motion animation figures because they don’t look like people in suits. The creatures were able to do things beyond what we thought they would be able to do.

It must be noted that the life and character of these Drones beyond their initial visual design, comes from the actors within. The bodybuilders and the little people were the Drones. It was a very, very difficult job physically and artistically demanding to get life and fun and character into these cumbersome suits. They deserve an enormous amount of credit for the work they put into bringing these creations to life.'

The drones are commanded by the second of the film's aliens; the Martian Supreme Intelligence. Winston described the design process behind it. 'The original creature was sealed within a transparent globe, but Tobe wanted our Martian to be free and not confined to a container. In designing the creature what I wanted most to convey was that it was, in fact, a Supreme Intelligence and not just a monster with a monster's face on a long, tentacled body.'

'What I tried to get out of the Supreme Intelligence was just that - the look of intelligence. So I researched this andd spent a great deal of energy trying to find the proper face - the eyes more than anything - I located the most intelligent-looking eyes.

But then, so that it didn't just look like a man's made-up face, and a big head, I designed it in such a way that the proportions and the locations of these eyes - in relationship to its mouth and the size of the head - could never imply a man in makeup or a man in a suit.'

'The eyes and the expressions were all radio-controlled and the mouth was hand-puppeted. They were bladders, a series of air-jet systems that moved the lobes on the sides of the Supreme Intelligence, which looked like organs. The veins pulsated in the organs themselves.

We had two forms of heads - one with a more extreme expression, of pain and agony, for when it gets shot. So, there were two different facial elements, but one main Supreme Intelligence. It was a very neat looking creature, but not without its technical problems.'

The Supreme Intelligence puppet required at least thirteen puppeteers to operate it, and had to be manually lifted onto the set for certain shots, as Gino Crognale remembered. 'We rehearsed one night, after everyone had wrapped, pushing that snake thing out of the hole and trying to land it onto the throne. And it was hard! You have like seven or eight guys up top with this kind of sled unit. And you actually pushed that thing through a piece of the set that was collapsible, and trying to hit the mark was tough! We even had people with wires trying to land it.'

Crognale also was the puppeteer inside the Supreme Intelligence during the fateful day when faulty squibs caused the set to catch fire, with him still inside the puppet! 'After we got it on the throne, Alec asked me, 'We need you go inside the puppet and play the Supreme Intelligence. So I'm like, yeah I'm in! This will be so much fun!

One day, its the scene where all the soldiers come in and start shooting at the Supreme Intelligence. (...) I'm inside, playing the Supreme Intelligence, and behind me is a slanted board so my body's laying on it, and my upper torso is inside the Supreme Intelligence.

I hear 'Action!' and I start rearing up, and as soon as I start moving, my monitor goes black. But I could hear gunfire and noise, so I'm going crazy performing as hard as I can. I'm in there sweating, feeling 'Man this is taking long!' doing these reverse situps.

All of a sudden, I feel this frantic pulling at my legs. I see, out the bottom of the suit, a big knife, and they're cutting the belts and duct tape holding my legs. 'Gino, the set's on fire! We have to get out of here!' I remember looking behind, and the whole roof of the set was in flames! Pieces of the set were falling! Because it was all paint and glue, it went up like *whoosh*!'

Alec Gillis remembered the fateful day all too well. 'I was under (the puppet) and all the squibs go off, and all the guys are puppeteering and then all of a sudden, 'What's happening here? Can you smell smoke? There's smoke!' (...) And then Dave Nelson pulls back a bit of the creature skin, and goes 'Right lads, out you go, come on!'. And we come out, and it's like a World War 2 movie or something, the walls were on fire thanks to the foam they used!'

Stan Winston said about the experience, 'I found Tobe very easy to work with. He gave me complete free reign - I must have seen him twice in the entire four months of pre-production. Once he okayed the design, he came over a couple of times to see how things were. He knows what he likes and was very easy to work with.

As always, the final success of Invaders was due to the talent and dedication of my crew, artistically headed by Shane Mahan, John Rosengrant, Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis, and mechanical techniques headed by Richard Landon, David Nelson and Rick Lazzarini.

Alec Gillis looked back on the experience, and the film itself, decades later. 'The last time I saw it, I was feeling the campiness was definitely there. It's so campy that it's going to age well (...) It's just big broad strokes, the stuff we did was almost like Muppets, that's the fun of it. (...) It was not an easy movie. You watch it, and you think about all the work that went into that.'

Sources:

• 'The Martians Are Coming! - The Making of Invaders from Mars' featurette
• Cinefantastique Vol. 16 #3 (July 1986)
• Fangoria #56 'Stan Winston's Killer E.T.S: Part One' by Adam Pirani

Fire in the Sky (1993)

On November 5, 1975, forestry worker Travis Walton went missing for several days, claiming to have been abducted by a UFO. The case was dismissed as a hoax by many, but that didn't stop Walton from writing The Walton Experience a few years later.

Walton and his family were known as UFO buffs, and two weeks before his supposed abduction, NBC had aired The UFO Incident, a TV movie based on the infamous Betty and Barney Hill abduction. No doubt Walton also was hoping for a motion picture deal.

He got his wish fifteen years later, as the success of Whitley Strieber's novel Communion had led to a renewed media interest in UFOs. By 1993, there was already several films and TV series based on harrowing tales of close encounters; Philippe Mora's film adaptation of Communion, Dean Alioto's The McPherson Tape, and the CBS miniseries Intruders.

Paramount Pictures wanted in on the action, and so hired screenwriter Tracy Torme (who incidentally also wrote the script for Intruders) to write a screenplay based on The Walton Experience, with the caveat that the alien abduction scenes had to be scarier.

Robert Lieberman, who was attached to direct the screenplay now titled Fire in the Sky, felt he had to come up with different aliens. 'In Travis Walton’s book, he describes his abduction as they walked him into this geodesic dome that looked out onto the stars. He describes the aliens [as] being seven-foot-tall, Aryan-looking, [with] long blonde hair. I went, ‘I can’t have Dolph Lundgren playing the alien, man, they’ll laugh me out of the theatre.’

Assorted sets built by ILM for Fire in the Sky.

The special effects of Fire in the Sky were handled by Industrial Light & Magic, who got the job thanks to one of the producers, Nilo Rodis-Jamero, being a former ILM employee. Michael Owens, who acted as visual effects supervisor on the film, recalled how he got the gig.

'Nilo Rodis was an associate producer on the movie, and he used to work at Industrial Light & Magic, in the art department. The studio and the filmmakers realized that what Travis (Walton) described of his abduction was not very fascinating. They wanted to do something else, and Nilo came to me, to ask 'Could you come up with something?' as he knew I was capable.'

Owens explained to Cinefex, 'We basically took the project ‘sight unwritten’. The producers came to us with some rough storyboards, and Nilo Rodis, one of the associate producers, had done some preliminary conceptual work for the sequence. But with the exception of some of Nilo’s designs, most of the original concepts were eventually discarded'.

ILM was tasked with realizing the entirety of the alien abduction sequence; the aliens, the sets and props, and the effects shots of D.B. Sweeney 'floating'. Owens explained how the major hurdle on the project was the low budget, partly thanks to ILM being attached to Jurassic Park.

'Fire in the Sky was coming around the same time as Jurassic Park was happening at ILM, so the resources were all going there, and all the money going there also. Fire in the Sky couldn't afford (bluescreen or matte paintings) so we had to come up with a way to tell a story but not the visual effects. Meaning we were approaching it from almost a live-action method (...) so we still had puppets and animation, but it was pretty much on-camera'.

The decayed corpse prop fabricated by ILM for the spaceship sequence.

Agreeing with Lieberman's assertion to reject Walton's 'Nordic' aliens, Michael Owen remembered how daunting it was to design an alien unique to the film. 'That took quite some time to figure out, because of all the stuff we've seen in the past. You don't want to repeat it, but it does feel familiar to what humans think aliens might be.'

Designing the aliens was a collaborative effort between Nilo Rodis and members of the ILM team; art director Harley Jessup, model and creature supervisor Jeff Mann, animatronics engineer Guy Hudson and sculptor Richard Miller. Hudson spoke about the design process.

'It took quite a bit of time to get the design of the aliens just right (...) at one point they were going to have three leg joints, like a dog; but later it was decided to go with a more human, two-jointed leg. While others were working on those issues, Brian Dewe and I designed the actual structure for the aliens. It needed to be lightweight since we were going to be hanging it on wires, so we made it out of thin aluminum tubing with light aluminum joints. There was no facial movement — just joints that moved in the neck.'

The two aliens that drag D.B. Sweeney through the spaceship were five-foot tall rod puppets, operated by a puppeteer hidden underneath the set floor. An overhead rig was used to prevent the puppets from toppling over as they moved across the set on a wheeled platform.

The puppeteer operating the puppet from under the set also was on a wheeled trolley, so that they would move along with the puppet, and still be able to operate it. The puppeteer controlled the aliens legs and arms to simulate movement.

ILM's Dave Heron explained in detail to Cinefex. 'We built pipes into the set and placed carriages on them that supported the weight of the puppets. Underneath, there were tracks and slots where the cables and rods could come through. All the articulations were operated from below; the top was just a weight support. We had a large drum and an endless looping cable so that the carriage the puppeteer rode on and the carriages that carried the puppets all moved at the same rate of speed. They were connected'.

Brian Dewe and Jean Bolte designed and built the 'doctor' alien puppet to have articulated head movements, and could be operated like a hand puppet from a hole in the torso. Mike Smithson fabricated arm and hand prosthetics for shots of the aliens holding tools.

Michael Owens said about the 'doctor' alien puppet, 'We wanted the doctor to be different from the other puppets. He was older — more intense and more reserved — and therefore required a minimum of movement. His job was to convey thought and very specific action — he was our Laurence Olivier character. Very subtle movement can telegraph a great deal if the face sculpture is great — and we were pleased with the design. Just by sitting there and looking at you, the doctor was believable, yet creepy and unnerving.'

Harley Jessup recalled the process of the alien puppeteering, 'There were several different kinds of puppets. It took a team of about six puppeteers trying to fit in a very small space, keep out of frame and create the gestures and life-like movement. Only shooting their bodies at one point, or their feet, or their heads. They just need a moment (of puppet footage) in the shot, and it adds to the mystery of them when you're only seeing fragments of them within the mist. We used atmosphere a lot to help the believability of the characters.'

Lieberman knew his aliens looked different to the various extraterrestrials witnessed in 'close encounter' reports, and defended the choice years later. 'All the UFO groups and conventions and websites and all that stuff, they don’t like my movie because they don’t believe my aliens are true to form, you know? And I thought, no, I’m not buying into that. I got to make an alien that has certain qualities. One is it can’t look like a person’s inside it, right?'

ILM's work on the alien abduction sequence paid off, and it remains the most memorable part of Fire in the Sky even to this day. Michael Owens reflected on how much of a challenge it was to achieve such a tall order - puppetry, set design and stunt work - with the limited resources.

'It was a thrill to solve these problems, and when you accomplish it, and it works on-screen, and the audience doesnt think it looks bogus, it's just fantastic. (...) But to get there, it was very difficult. Moving cameras? No. Panning cameras? No. Miniatures? It was really hard to photograph miniatures because you couldn't get enough light to have enough depth of focus! But still, it was a great challenge. Working with modelmakers, matte painters, animators, putting this together, it was really fun back then.

That camaradarie, with that kind of talent...today you go and walk around (ILM offices) and all these people are at their individual desks. One of the things I really miss is that team effort, physically working with people. That doesn't happen today. I miss that'.

Sources:

• 'Fear from Above: The Practical Effects of Fire in the Sky' featurette
• Cinefex #54 'Quick Cuts: Unfriendly Skies'
• The Companion 'How We Made Fire in the Sky'