'It was inspired by something I witnessed, when I was bring driven to Umag to Novi Sad (...) This guy named Sacha who was a Yugoslav (...) a very nasty guy, but he was the driver and spoke perfect English. He and I were being driven down the road, and we stop. We get out, and there was gypsies (...) They were burying this dead guy wrapped in canvas with garlands of garlic and rosaries. (...) He's being buried this way so he doesn't get up and cause mischief.
And so I'm going like 'Hello, like a zombie?' and Sacha's going like 'Yeah! Hahaha!', he thought it was hysterical! We stood there for like 45 minutes watching this, and Sacha's meanwhile just pissed himself laughing, he thought it was the funniest thing. And I'm thinking, what if (the dead man) did get up? (...) Sacha and I would be totally, not only ill-equipped but unequipped to deal with the living dead, because it's not only out of our experience, it's horseshit!Spurred by what he saw, Landis wound up completing a script by the end of that year. The script kept the darkly comic premise of a modern, urban young man confronted by the undead, but also featured another supernatural monster from European folklore: the werewolf.
Landis was, by his own admission, a fan of the 1941 Universal Horror classic The Wolf Man, and while the premise of American Werewolf carried on the tragedy inherent to the older film's story, he also wanted it to wow contemporary audiences with a more grisly tone.Two years later, Landis directed Schlock, a low-budget parody of trashy b-movies such as 1970's Trog. As a fan of monster makeups, Landis had wanted first John Chambers and then Don Post to handle the ape monster suit, but both declined due to wanting a sizable fee.
Don Post in particular wanted a $100,000 payment to work on the film, but Schlock's entire budget was just $60,000! Yet Landis' trip to Don Post would end up proving fruitful, as Don Post's son suggested an up-and-coming makeup artist who could do the job.
'As I was leaving, Don Post Jr. said, "There was a kid in here last week who maybe could help you." He went and found the card, which said, 'Rick Baker, Monster Maker.' with an address in Covina. (...) His room was just lined with shelves of masks and things he'd made. Now I had worked on over a hundred pictures, and his work was vastly superior to what I'd seen at the studios. I took (producer) Jim O'Rourke aside and told him: 'This kid is amazing! Get this kid!"'
Schlock marked the start of Landis and Baker's professional relationship, and it was during its filming that Landis told Baker about his prospective American Werewolf script. Baker, a fan of monster movies and 'animal people like the Wolf Man', was interested in the project.
Baker and Landis discussed about how the werewolf and its transformations should look like, and how their film would stand out when compared to earlier werewolf films. Landis later described the tone he was going for with American Werewolf in an interview;'This is an all-out horror show, a total monster movie. A lot of people will be shocked by it, I think. It is unrelenting, uncompromising, extremely horrific, terribly violent, very tragic.'
By 1981, Rick Baker's career had quickly progressed, with It's Alive, the 1976 King Kong, The Incredible Melting Man and the Star Wars cantina sequence all under his belt. Yet in all that time, Landis' American Werewolf script had still not been picked up by any studios. When Baker got a call to work on a certain other werewolf movie, he gladly accepted it.
'I had kind of given up on it. I figured it was never going to happen; and as the way things work out, I get a call one day from Joe Dante and Mike Finnell saying, ‘We have this werewolf movie we’re gonna do, would you be interested in doing it?’ I said, ‘Yeah’, and this was The Howling.I started out doing some designs, working on it, and thought this’ll be my chance to use my transformation stuff I’ve thought up, and I didn’t really wanna tell John about it.'
Joe Dante remembered how Baker wanted to use Howling as the new springboard for his American Werewolf ideas. 'We had dinner and Rick said, 'John has been talking to me about making his werewolf picture for years. I've got a lot of ideas, but he's never made the movie and he's never come up with the money. So maybe I can use the ideas on your picture.'
Unbeknownst to either Dante or Baker, that same year was when American Werewolf had finally been greenlit by Polygram Pictures, thanks to Landis' recent commercial and critical success with National Lampoon's Animal House and The Blues Brothers.
John Landis, ever the entitled manchild, threw a temper tantrum when he found out Baker was signed on The Howling. Baker remembered how the unpleasant phone call went.
'I figured American Werewolf was never going to happen. But the way things work in Hollywood so often, and in life, was that almost as soon as I said yes to The Howling, maybe a few weeks later, John calls up and says, 'Good news. We're going to make American Werewolf!'. I said, "I just took another werewolf movie!", "You FUCKER!" he starts yelling at me, but I calmed him down by saying, "I'll sort it out, I'll figure out a way to make this work."'Baker left The Howling's producers a compromise that he could only serve as a 'consultant', leaving it in the hands of his protege Rob Bottin. (I will go into detail on this front in the section on American Werewolf's transformations, as well as on my article on The Howling.)
Rick Baker formed a new effects company, EFX, to take on American Werewolf's effects. EFX counted among its number Steve Johnson, Craig Reardon, Tom Hester, Shawn McEnroe, Kevin Brennan, Doug Beswick, Bill Sturgeon and Rick's wife Elaine Baker.The EFX team, some of them only just out of their teenage years, were mostly novices. Baker essentially had to teach them on the job. 'Almost all the guys I had on my crew hadn't really worked on movies before. So I took the time to show them how to do things: 'This is how I do a life mask. Tomorrow you're going to do a life mask of him, he's going to do a life mask of you'.
The first third of American Werewolf's runtime, after David Naughton's doomed Kessler has seen his best friend mauled to death by a werewolf, is marked by several eerie dream sequences, culminating in a nightmare where demonic Nazi soldiers slaughter his family.Landis explained the cultural baggage behind the seemingly random shocker setpiece, as well as how the dream sequences were inspired by Surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel.
'(Kessler) is afraid he's losing his mind, so his dreams have to relate to his own experience, which is why he thinks of his family where he's safe. And because he's a Jewish-American kid who was my age at the time, so he grew up with images of the Nazis.
(...) This is directly influenced by Bunuel. His film, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, which is one of my favorite movies, has people keep waking up, so you're so confused by whose realities are what. Dreams within dreams within dreams!'Baker's EFX team were tasked with realizing the ghoulish dream demons. The first of the demons - a decaying, fanged ghoul - was sculpted and painted by Rick Baker himself.
Baker sculpted the second demon, a bald ogre with a twisted grimace, but left Tom Hester to finish sculpting the mask and give it a paintjob. EFX also sculpted a set of stylized 'stahlhelm' helmets that could fit over the masks, but only one helmet was used in the film.
Sources:
- 'Beware the Moon: Remembering An American Werewolf in London' (2009)
- John Landis On: An American Werewolf in London (2001)
- Rick Baker: Metamorphosis - Volume 1: 1950 - 1989
- Cinefex #16
- Fangoria #13 & #16
Read more on An American Werewolf in London's special effects in the 'Part 2' article, covering the undead Jack Goodman and other gore makeups.
No comments:
Post a Comment