Humphreys also has kindly provided me with several never before seen photos of his work! I've been very looking forward to finally transcribing and uploading this interview.
Makeup Effects Archive: What made you want to be a sculptor originally?
John Humphreys: Since I was a small boy, I was interested in the arts, architecture and sculpture. In fact, Ancient Greek sculptures seemed very familiar to me, even long before I entered sculpting. It just was something I was fascinated by.
When I was a boy, there was bomb sites around Manchester, left from being bombed during the war. I would dig the clay out of these, and make it into objects. I was just intrigued with making three dimensional things. I just knew I could sculpt before I ever did any sculpting, it was just one of these strange things where I just knew.
So when I went into art college, I had only done painting, but when we were given a sculpting project to do, it just seemed the most natural thing in the world to sculpt from clay. I was still interested in painting as well, I always had that side to me, but I did further sculpting projects at art college. I loved it, and I started painting my sculptures too.
At that age, did you ever have an interest in special effects in film?
Funny you ask as I just remembered something. As a boy I wasn't allowed to have an air rifle, but my friend was. He came round with one, and we had plastic figurines to shoot. I filled them up with liquid, so when there was a bullet hole, liquid would come out! *laughs* A bad boy kind of thing! I suppose that was my very first special effect!
But my main interest was doing sculpture, and when I went to the Royal Academy, I didn't really think about special effects or film work. When I was there, I was approached by a designer working on The French Lieutenant's Woman. He came to one of my student exhibitions, and commissioned me three pieces for that film. I did a neandarthal head and two anatomical sculptures. That was in 1980, the first film I worked on.And when I was a student in the Royal Academy, I worked in theatre during the evenings, and I met someone through the theatre who was creative and *did* want to work in special effects for films. That was a chap called Peter Litten, and together with another friend of mine called George Dugdale, we formed a company called Coast To Coast Productions.
So by the time I left the Royal Academy, by accident I was doing special effects work! Which wasn't really the direction I wanted to go in, but all the same I like my work to be theatrical and it influenced my fine art in the long run.What was the first production you worked on?
When I started working with Peter Litten, he was already working at the BBC, in its design department. He approached me as he had been offered a job on The Last Horror Film, filmed in the south of France, starring Caroline Munro. He rang me up when I finished college, and asked 'Do you want to go to Cannes next week to work on this film?' I said 'Okay!'
A few days later we went there and set up a little workshop in a villa, and thats where we did all the effects for that film. It was actually after that where Peter introduced me to George Dugdale and we formed Coast to Coast.What was your next gig after that?
Through Peter's connections, we started getting work from the BBC to do lots of different programs. Doctor Who, The Two Ronnies, The Kenny Everett Show, The Young Ones, various science programs...I can't remember all the names, it's all a bit of a blur as we were working mad hours. That's what we did for quite a few years.
Afterwards, other companies started approaching us, so we ended up on a horror film by George Pavlou.
Underworld, the Clive Barker adaptation?
Yeah, and for that, sadly we did some fantastic effects that were cut because they were seen as too horrific. We did one thing where Denholm Elliot is going through this transformation, and he pulls all his skin away and these pins force their way out, so he became a 'pin man', and it was a fantastic thing but it all ended up on the cutting room floor.
I'll get back to Underworld, but going back to the BBC work, you did a couple of monsters for Doctor Who?
I can't remember all the stuff we did for Doctor Who, but we did a monster for the serial 'The Caves of Androzani'. One that really sticks in my mind is Sil (in the serial 'Vengeance on Varos'), who was played by Nabil Shaban.He is a great actor and a very charming man, very humourous and positive. It was a very successful creature, because when creatures get lots of complaints from children's parents you know you've done a good job!
Love that!
For Sil, I sculpted the full body, and the cowl-like head. All that was visible of Nabil was his face, it was quite hilarious. He laughed his head off, we had turned him into a little fish maggot thing, and his face was protruding. So his face had to be made up with makeup. But the fin on his head, his hands, so on, was all sculpted and he fitted inside.
When you did monster suits or prosthetics for the BBC, how much do you work with the costume designer or makeup designer?
We never really got any drawings, just conversations. It depends on the script. So the script may say 'It's a big armadillo creature'. With regards to Sil, the only requirement I was asked was to have a fin on the head, as he was meant to be an amphibian type thing, but that was it.
Apparently you were also involved with the infamous BBC TV movie Threads?
Work was given to us via the Visual Effects Department, so when it came to Threads they wanted loads of burnt bodies and burn wound prosthetics.I believe the BBC's makeup designer assigned to Threads, Jan Nethercot, got a BAFTA for the film but you didn't?
We've done lots of work for thingss that we never got awards, as we're not classed as designers. I'm sure Jan did a fabulous job and deserved the BAFTA. For Max Headroom, we didn't get an award at all, yet it got a BAFTA for 'computer graphics', yet the only computer graphics were the backgrounds behind Max!I was going to get to Max Headroom, actually! How did you and Litten get that gig, and what was the design process behind Matt Frewer's makeup?
Funnily enough, we met George Stone (writer of Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future) over an earlier project (Coast To Coast) was trying to develop, which was a bit Max Headroom-esque. We had the idea of a pirate radio station in space, and it would have been broadcast via a computer generated mouth.
I don't remember if it was via George Stone, but we were approached to do the makeups for Max Headroom. Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, the directors, commissioned us to make the Max Headroom makeups. My idea was that the computer designer, in the program, had tried to recreate him in the computer, but they hadn't quite got it right.
We took a life cast of Matt Frewer, and what I did was keep the sculpture very similar to his features, because he has a great face and expressions, but stretch him a little bit. Make his head higher, and his chin lower, so he's elongated.We sculpted it and made the prosthetics. Peter (Litten) applied the prosthetics on Matt Frewer in our workshop, and we did a makeup test that delighted us. Because of how we stretched his features, it looked surreal, like he was in a different space to our own. I turned to Peter and said 'I think we've won a BAFTA award!'...uh, turned out we didn't in the end.
When Morton and Jankel came in, we thought they would be delighted, but they were a bit disappointed. Their words were, 'It looks too much like Matt!'. But it was too late in production and we couldn't change it, so they went along with it. Thank god, really!
To be fair to them, we could have done it much more like a caricature, much more surreal, but he was so expressive! When we saw the audition, you could hear laughter in the background because he was so expressive and funny!
And you don't want to lose his acting ability under a mask that his character's not going through. The great thing was, because of the subtlety, people couldn't put their finger on what Max was. So everyone believed it was all computer graphics.It's such a great image, even decades later Max Headroom is still memorable. When it came to Max, you also had to make his 'suits' too?
Yeah, we sculpted a fibreglass 'suit', that he was screwed into. We made a dark jacket and tie, we did a golfing one, I can't remember all of them now, just these three.
There was other Max Headroom makeupe too, such as his brief 'angular' shape?
Within the script, the computer is creating Max Headroom and doesn't quite get it right. I did an angular version of the Max Headroom makeup, that was only for a glimpse in the pilot film.It's very similar to what you later saw with the makeup for Kryten in Red Dwarf. Interestingly, Andrew Deubert (who did many of the Kryten makeups) worked for us on Max Headroom!
Was there anything else Coast to Coast made for the Max Headroom pilot past the titular character's makeups?
I know we blew a person up, because it was about 'blipverts' that could make people blow up. I'm pretty sure we did all the other effects, like the body parts in the van.
Max Headroom was originally a British creation, but got popular enough it landed an American TV series. Was Coast To Coast involved on the American series?
I know we supplied tons and tons of makeup appliances to America, but whether it was for the American series or the Coca-cola commercials, I can't really remember. It may be that they got the Americans to copy it, I don't know.There's been so many pastiches of Max Headroom. Back to the Future 2 did Ronald Reagan, Ayatollah Khomeini and Michael Jackson as Max Headrooms, and Playboy had a girl Max Headroom, called Maxine Legroom.
Ha! We actually tried to develop a female version of Max Headroom called Roxscene. We did makeup tests on Caroline Munro, who was married to George Dugdale, but it never got beyond that.In fact, my latest sculpture, Lulu in the Sky with Diamonds, the wraparound hairstyle, that is what I wanted to do years ago with Roxenne.
They also did a pastiche on Channel 4, with an aged Max Headroom, still played by Matt Frewer.
I wasn't involved with that. I know a comedian on TV did a Max Headroom spoof, that we actually supplied the 'wig' for it.How does it feel to have inspired so many imitations?
When you come up with something unique, it becomes an iconic image, or it can at least. When people homage it, it feels like a compliment!
Now we get back to the ill-fated Clive Barker adaptation Underworld. How much did Coast To Coast make for it?The script, if I remember correctly, was about people undergoing some kind of metamorphosis. Some had trees growing out of their faces, and were becoming almost like gargoyles. But there seemed to have been some kind of misunderstanding, I don't know if Clive Barker realized how much stuff we made that was edited out.
The thing we did with Denholm Elliot was a fabulous effect, and Peter Litten put his heart and soul into that, and it worked really well. I did the sculpting, and Peter did the design for how the effect would work, as Peter is basically a designer, though he sculpts as well.
He was instrumental in that effect, and I was so dissappointed that it wasn't used, as it would have led us to work more on the Books of Blood films.That skinned puppet appears on a Fangoria issue. The same issue says Christopher Tucker was involved on it?
Tucker didn't do any of the sculpting as far as I remember, we did that in-house, but we had him there to cast the foam of the lastex moulds, as he had the expertise. Tucker knew Peter Litten, and that was our connection.The first time I met Tucker was on the set of The Company of Wolves, where he played a bit of a prank on us! We were on the set, and he had all these dogs that looked a bit wolfish, and they were trained to charge at the point where Tucker had put us, and turn 360 and carry on.
And of course, when he shouted 'Action!', these bloody dogs ran at us! Peter nearly jumped out of his skin! *laughs* But they just ran away, as they were trained to do, but we thought three blinking wolves were charging at us!
It fits Tucker worked on Underworld, given the skinned puppet he did for Company of Wolves. Was it challenging to attempt a flayed body effect?
I've got a basic understanding of anatomy, and it's basically just sculpting. If you're sculpting a flayed person you get your anatomy books out and have a little study. You just go to it, put your hours in and do the work. Thats what you do when you're a sculptor!
Then there's the second Clive Barker adaptation, Rawhead Rex. How much did you contribute to the film, versus the rest of the Coast To Coast team?
I didn't work on the monster, as I was still involved on Max Headroom stuff at the time. I did the severed heads and prosthetic wounds. The creature was by Paul Catling, he's an incredibly talented artist and creative force. One of the problems with remembering is that we worked day and night, so it all becomes a blur. Some days we would end up sleeping in the workshop!
I can imagine, with all the heavy workloads I hear about! When you do gore in films, like in Rawhead Rex or Threads, do you have to know what the real nasty stuff looks like? It seems to be a common story with makeup effects.
I've always had anatomy books, and we bought the books that medical students use for their anatomy studies. But if you're going to do a severed head, or show burns, you have to study it. You tend to not just make it up, you do that and it won't look realistic. You want it to look realistic as possible, as it's what makes the effect work.
That slows you down when it comes to sculpture, as you're referencing all the while, but if you want something that looks right, then you do it. We had an anatomy book, that I got sick of looking at if I'll be honest with you, as it had burns, horrible flesh eating diseases, things like that. It can be quite horrific.
I actually got upset once, at one image in the book. I stopped using it in fact. My wife had just had babies, and I was flipping through and there was a picture of a cot death victim. I closed the book and went 'Guys, that's it, I'm not looking at this book any longer!'. In general that's the stuff I don't really want to look at. When it's just studying anatomy, I'm fine with it.
I believe Cliff Wallace, who worked under you for Rawhead Rex, worked on the skinned Frank effects on Hellraiser?
Cliff Wallace is a friend of mine, and a really, really talented sculptor and special effects artist. He's worked on loads of stuff.
He provided me with the facilities for the Alien Autopsy with Ant & Dec, and his workshop in Oxbridge. I've not spoken to him in a little while, but we keep in touch.In the later Clive Barker film Hellraiser, they also did do a skinned body effect. Did you ever interact with Bob Keen?
I think I may have met him once or twice at trade shows, but I didn't have any working relationship with him.
After Max Headroom and the two ill-fated Clive Barker films, the next big project you did was Alien Autopsy.
We had bought the rights for Doctor Who from the BBC*, and had a major fallout with the BBC over it and that stopped us completely in our tracks financially.
*(Note: Yes, Coast To Coast Productions indeed tried to produce a Doctor Who movie in the series' final years, as described in Starlog #130)
After that, I was approached by Ray Santili, he brought this footage that was very badly degraded, and he wanted to show the world what was on it, and the idea was to recreate the scenes from the footage.Do you believe the footage Santili had was real?
I do!When you recreated the footage, was there any design process for the alien corpse? Did you think of the aliens encountered by abductees such as Betty & Barney Hill?
Most people describe aliens in a similar way. If you asked a child to draw their mother or father, they'll draw a great big head, because the head is important. They'll then draw great big eyes, because the eyes are also important.
They exagerrate these things, but when I saw the footage, I could see that yes, it is a head larger than a human's size, but not ludicrously large! The figure is relatively small, the anatomy is humanoid. So it's not that hard to bring it all into focus so to speak.Yeah, the cover art for Whitley Strieber's Communion is now the template for the 'Grey' alien archetype. Blank face, big eyes, so on.
They've had things like this in The Outer Limits, science-fiction movies from the 1950s, but they're caricatures. They're not real enough, not like what I saw anyway.
What did you make for Alien Autopsy? Was it only one body?
No, we made three bodies in total, though I lose track. There was one sculpture, and we cast off it for any props required for the effects.
The mould was cast in fibreglass, and so you cast a soft material into the hard mould. The original 1995 one was cast in latex, and the 2006 Ant & Dec version cast in expandable foam.What were the aliens 'organs' made of?
Animal guts and things, from a butcher. I used to be a butcher's boy! Actually, to go back in time, my very first special effect was in the butcher's shop! I made a 'thumb' out of a sausage, and I pretended I had chopped my thumb off, and the butcher went mental!
Alien Autopsy left a huge mark, so many American and Canadian makeup artists homaged your sculpture on shows like The X-Files.
Like I said with Max Headroom, if your work influences people, then you've done a good job! If you make unique things, it sets a benchmark. If people copy it, good for them.But to be fair, I did have access to the footage that Ray Santili bought, so I was ahead of the game wasn't I?
And then Alien Autopsy was spoofed for Ant & Dec a decade later, and you worked on that too! What was it like recreating the footage?
Very surreal, because I had to redo everything, so now I was copying my old work. It was actually difficult in some ways, because when you've done something you don't want to do it all again. But it all went well, and it was nice working with Ant & Dec, the whole production was very nice. Hard work, but fun at the same time.
I notice your film career gets sporadic in the 90s and 2000s. What did you do in these decades?I worked on a few commercials, and also worked on Alexander and Charlie & the Chocolate Factory. I don't really like working on films, the hours are painful. And I got to the stage where I'm far too old to do the hours, so now I focus on my fine art career.
I really love your art show sculptures! With Max Headroom you were playing with distorted faces, something you do a lot with your current sculptures.
If you see them in person, they don't actually look three dimensional, yet people say 'They look so 3D!'. That was something Alan Sugar said to me once!
What I'm doing, I turn the viewer into the artist. It activates the spatial part of your brain, which is saying to you, 'Your eyes have made a mistake, I must resolve this', as your brain is confused by the vision its getting, and wishes to adjust it, and manipulate it.
So you start thinking like a sculptor, literally resculpting it in your mind. The idea is that they hint at a difference space, at a fourth dimension.
Subjectively, they're about how we see things when we're disturbed, or isolated from our normal sense of reality. The way you see things when you're bereaved, the sense that things aren't normal, and the world is spinning around.
One of the reasons I didn't like looking at that anatomy book with the cot death photo was, when I was a boy, one of my brothers died, and it affected my perceptions of reality for a while.
The sculptures reflect that sense of being in a different space of reality when you're traumatized. I don't want them to be horrific, but I want them to make the viewer question the reality they are in.Even seeing photos of them online made me have that sense, they feel so unreal and disorientating. Such a fascinating image!
You have to see them in person!
Again, I would like to thank Humphreys for being so kind to give me his time and answers, as well as providing me with these behind the scenes photos of his work. More of Humphreys' work can be seen on his website johnhumphreyssculpture.com
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