(I would like to thank sculptor and artist Graham High for having been so kind to help out by sending so many images of his work under Christopher Tucker for the film! Please check out more of Graham High's work at grahamhighartist.com !)
Neil Jordan had long been an admirer of the writings of Angela Carter, so when the two met in 1982, the director leaped at the chance to work with her on an adaptation of 'The Company of Wolves', one of the stories compiled in her 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber.Jordan said about the meeting; "I met her at a writer's conference in Dublin and she told me she was interested in bringing one of the short stories in The Bloody Chamber to the screen. She had been asked by a TV company to do a 30-minute film. I found it extremely exciting because there were so many elements in it that related to the basic werewolf stories."
All of the stories in Bloody Chamber were based on classic fairytales, with 'Company' heavily influenced by Little Red Riding Hood. Carter emphasized the sexual undercurrents of the original text, with the Big Bad Wolf now able to take the form of a man; in short, a werewolf.
Jordan was no stranger to fantasy filmmaking, having already worked with John Boorman on the latter's Excalibur, but he was still wary on how the film could be viewed in terms of genre The assorted Bloody Chamber stories, including 'Company', had gruesome touches, but they were not written as outright horror fiction. Jordan spoke about his dilemma."The Company of Wolves doesn't belong in any category, so it's difficult to prepare an audience for it. It's not a horror film, it's not a fantasy film, it's not a children's film – so what is it? Those categories are terribly artificial, really. Why should a horror film be just a horror film? To me, The Company of Wolves is a fairy tale; it's got all those elements plus a lot more. And we know that fairy tales aren't innocent any more."
The sentiment was echoed by producer Stephen Woolley. Wooley has been impressed with Jordan's previous film, the 1982 thriller film Angel, but he still worried about how Company could work as a more arty, yet still bloody horror film. Woolley said to Cinefantastique;
"Horror movies tend to fall into two categories these days. They are either Friday the 13th, or The Thing. One is extremely nasty, and the other goes overboad with special effects. If you try and straddle those two aspects, as I think Schrader's Cat People did, and aim for an intelligent horror film, you tend to fall between two stools. Whether that is the corect approach or not, it is the approach we are aiming for. We are being nasty but there is a very good reason for it.
With Company we are trying to combine the wonder of Diva with the imagination of The Evil Dead. That's why were are two producers on this movie. We don't want to sacrifice the look, design or the beauty of it for the sake of special effects. At the same time, however, just because it's going to look good, move spectacularly, and have a fabulous soundtrack by George Fenton, we don't see why it shouldn't have great special effects as well.Art movies aren't supposed to have all the modern horror trappings, so we are trying to reinvent the fantasy genre so it will be treated with the respect of something like 2001: A Space Odyssey. Angela Carter is very pleased with what we are achieving."
Woolley and fellow producer Chris Brown immediately went to Christopher Tucker to handle the special makeup effects. At that point, Tucker already was renowned in the British film industry for his work on David Lynch's The Elephant Man.
Stephen Woolley discussed how Tucker got the job, as well as the brief tenure of Christopher Hobbs, the film's original production designer. In addition to designing the film's look, Hobbs was also to design the grislier sequences; he had designed the burning flesh effects on Ken Russell's The Devils and the alien transformatons in the science-fiction film Xtro.
When Hobbs left the production, none of his ideas were used in the final film. His replacement production designer Anton Furst went for a larger-than-life studio-bound 'look' to the film, and Christopher Tucker made a point of avoiding Hobbs' ideas for the werewolf changes!
"Tucker was the first person we went to. Only three people have been involved in this project as long as my co-producer Chris Brown and I have. They are: Neil Jordan, Anton Furst, our production designer (...) and Chris Tucker. I'll admit he has a pittance for what he's trying to do, which, let's be honest, is outdo Rick Baker and Rob Bottin.
We realized special effects would be one of our most costly areas. We isolated the effects and storyboarded the entire film: not once, but twice. Christopher Hobbs did one set (of storyboards) so that when we went to Tucker we could confront him with concrete ideas, not nebulous ones. Tucker's side of the story is that he doesn't have enough money. Ours is, we told him last August how much he could spend. That is the producer's dilemma. Once a price has been agreed upon, you expect it to be done for that."
Tucker was eager to accept the Company gig; not only was it a change from his usual makeup work but also was a chance to finally make a werewolf, a monster he had strong opinions on!
"Well, it was different from anything I'd been offered before and it was quite unique; it's not often that someone attempts to make a macabre fairy tale for the cinema. Also because it presented me with the challenge of creating werewolf transformatons of the type I'd like to see myself. Besides, it promised to be far more interesting than eternally aging someone. (...)
I have never liked the Lon Chaney Jr. concept of a 'wolf-man' as I think it's rather stupid and very disappointing, even allowing for the fact that the film was made over 40 years ago.It's the idea that's wrong; if you're going to do a werewolf picture then you should have people turning into wolves, not wolf-men. I was even disappointed by The Howling and American Werewolf in London. Technically the effects were good, but I felt the concepts were wrong.
(Howling) had a group of creatures that looked like a grotesque Disney version of the Big Bad Wolf, and in (American Werewolf), when you finally saw the werewolf, it was nothing more than a bear-like beast. Since I hate to do anything that's been done before I relished the oppurtunity presented by Company of Wolves to do something different."
Afer several meetings where he discussed his ideas with the production team, Tucker's work commenced in the September of 1983. At first he only had two assistants, Sinnika Ikaheimo and Stephen Grasby, but as the workload increased his team was joined by sculptors Graham High and Steve Onions, and animatronic technicians Stuart Robinson and Ian Whitaker.The first effect Tucker designed was Stephen Rea's skin-ripping transformation into a wolf, with the first stage being a bloody facial appliance that he could tear apart on camera. A skeletal hand puppet was made for the shot, implying the skin was also pulled off.
Tucker had designed a similar makeup for Gregory Peck to wear in 1978's The Boys from Brazil, for when his Dr. Mengele has half his face torn off by dogs, but it never made it into the final film. No doubt Tucker saw Company as a chance to finally realize it on-screen
"Once September arrived we launched into building Bert and one or two other effects which we shot tests of. This was mainly for the benefit of ITC, so they could rassure themselves that the effects were feasible. As soon as they were satisfied, the rest of the money was forthcoming.
Bert was really very experimental and was never intended to be the final product. I think the producers thought he was, and he didn't look too bad. They were very pleased. In fact, Peter McDonald, the effects cameraman, said Bert was the best thing he'd ever seen, and he's had far more experience in this field than anyone else on the project as he's been doing effects photography all his life.
But Bert had many shortcomings, mechanically and artistically, as I never intended him to be anything other than a prototype that could be refined. What in fact we ended up doing was to virtually rebuild the whole darn thing. We salvaged bits and pieces and modified certain things, so by the time we finished there was very little of the original left.
Once you alter any part of the internal structure you inevitable alter the external structur to some degree. Also I insisted on using mechanically sound principles, like proper ball races, etc, meaning every component had to be engineered correctly so the mechanisms wouldn't fail under any circumstances. Of course that's time-consuming, but it had to be done."
The second stage of the transformation, where the werewolf's flayed body starts to more closely resemble a wolf, was nicknamed 'Rover 1' by Tucker. Tucker explained why he went for such a viscerally nasty visual for the transformation.
"I wanted to ring the changes and make the whole thing macabre in keeping with the rest of the film, so I decided to remove the character's skin and hair and develop it from there. I wasn't being gratuitous for the sake of it, as to rid the skin helps to remove certain appendages that get in the way, such as the ears, nose and lips.It was logical to get all that stuff out of the way and to get on to the real business of the bones and muscles rearranging themselves. Who wants to see another stretch effect (a la Howling or American Werewolf)? I certainly didn't. It makes the transformation more convincing and interesting, I think, and I'm sure audiences will agree."
'Rover 1' was fully mechanized; not only could it's neck extend from the body and its head able to swivel around, but its eyes, ears and tongue were all able to move as well. Tucker remembered how 'Rover 1' was actually the most difficult puppet to operate.
"All the major elements worked very well, but we did have one or two minor hiccups when the cables snapped on Rover 1, primarily because of the sheer size and weight of the beast.It needed a much thicker, stronger cable to cope with the friction. The fact we were working on a tiny, cramped sound stage didn't help and prevented the cables from running in a straight line, consequently applying an unncessary degree of tension. Despite the fact that we used ball races to miimize the friction on the business-end, the seven-ply steel hawser actually broke, which tells you something about the size of the rig."
The third stage of the transformation was another puppet, nicknamed 'Rover 2'; Rover 2's 'skin' was cast from a wolf sculpture by Graham High. Tucker made sure to research real wolves for the film's effects, even travelling to Dorney Court in Buckinghamshire to personally record the wolves owned by Roger Palmer, founder of the UK Wolf Conservation Trust.
The 'Rover 2' puppet was larger than either 'Bert' or 'Rover 1', but was still designed to be the second-last stage, ergo skinless. The flayed look was one of the main hurdles for Tucker.
"You could describe the effects as a problem in themselves because once you attempt a transformation in this manner, without skin, you immediately transpose terrible limitations as you've got nowhere to hide the mechanisms. There's only the skeleton and the musculature, but they're moving. So we are talking about a concept which multiples the normal difficulties by a factor of about 30."
Tucker's team was having to pull shifts as long as 20 hours a day by the time Rover 2 was filmed. At this point, Roger Shaw joined the production to help build and maintain 'Rover 2'.
The final stage of the transformation needed a puppet wolf; the furred wolf puppet was more simple in design than Rover 2, as it only needed to be used for very brief shots. A more detailed close-up wolf puppet seems to have also been made for the film.
The film's second transformation sequence was significantly less complicated, and also less gorey! The scene, where a dinner party of wealthy nobles all transform into wolves (actually Belgian Tervurens, but I digress), relied on fairly simple tricks.
Tucker's main background was in prosthetics, and so made a facial appliance for the actress playing the guest whose face turns into a wolf-like snout. The mask's lips were able to curl up with the performer's own facial movements.
In addition to the wolf, High also made an animatronic frog. and an animatronic owl.
Tucker also handled the film's 'mundane' gore effects, such as a severed head in Stephen Rea's likeness, and a severed wolf head.
The finale needed one more werewolf transformation, and one markedly different to the ferociously violent self-flaying. Tucker opted to take a more surrealistic approach for the huntsman's transformation, implying he was changing from the inside out.
A lifecast was made of Micha Bergese to make several puppet heads from, with the first having a fake wolf tongue lolling out of it.
According to Tucker, this was actually one of the most challenging effects to film, and Tucker originally wanted the sequence to be even more bizarre but time and money forced his hand.
"This is the scene where a wolf’s snout emerges through the mouth of the hunter. That scene had to be filmed at the dress rehearsal in case anything went wrong. The eyes were radio-controlled and there were so many cables down the dummy's throat that at one stage it didn't look like the mechanisms would fit. The original idea was to have the whole hunter's face turn inside out to become a wolf, but it was impossible to do on schedule. To push the mechanism back in the mouth without splitting the skin needed a lot of surgical jelly as it was. The Elephant Man was difficult enough, but this posed a whole new set of problems."
The hard work paid off; Tucker's effects for Company of Wolves remains one of the film's most memorable elements, with Micha Bergese's transformation in particular ending up on all the film's posters! By his admission, Tucker had a fairly good experience on Company.
"Directors frequently come to me at short notice with half-baked ideas and ridiculous demands that are either mechanically impossible or prohibited by lack of time and money. Most of them display a total lack of common sense or imagination. No wonder so many films are derivative.The other aspect of filmmaking that annoys me intensely is that the supposedly intelligent people involved continually change their minds about the effects they want. But this film has proved a refreshing exception. Steve Woolly and Chris Brown had clear cut ideas and they valued my opinions, realizing that the transformations were my province and that I had definite ideas of my own as to what I could or could not do on the film's limited budget."
Tucker at the least also had nothing but praise for his various crew members, who pulled off all of Company's effects in six weeks on a budget equivalent to $80'000 in 1983.
"They were all tremendous and deserve medals. Stuart Robinson did some great engineering work, and Ian Whitaker worked wonders on the eye mechanisms. Steve Onions and Graham High produced excellent sculptural work, and I would have been stuck if Stephen Grasby and Sinnika Ikaheimo, my long suffering assistants, hadn't given their usual tireless dedication to the molds and casting.
There are a lot of others who gave invaluable aid but I just cant list them off the top of my head. Suffice it to say everyone was terrific. I didn't actually do as much specific work as I would have liked because I was in charge and had to keep a close eye on all the proceedings, so I had to be content with occassionally sticking my oar in. I couldn't have wanted a better crew. And I think the film shows that."Sources:
- "In the Company of Neil Jordan" LA Weekly 1985
- Fangoria #42
- Cinefantastique Vol. 15 No 1 (Jan 1985)
