These were David Cronenberg's words when he appeared on The David Letterman Show in 1991, promoting his newest film; an adapation of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch.
The project to adapt the infamous novel to the screen had begun as early as 1984, when Cronenberg met film producer Jeremy Thomas at Toronto's Festivals of Festivals. Thomas and Cronenberg discussed the possibility of a Naked Lunch film, but it was not until 1989 that Thomas managed to secure the rights and production could start proper.It was also in 1984 that Cronenberg had earned Burroughs' approval in person for the project. Cronenberg had long been an admirer of Burroughs' writing, and the feeling was mutual.
'He'd (Burroughs) seen The Fly, and The Dead Zone. I think he's seen Videodrome. He says he likes them to the extant that when he was in Toronto he said he felt that I was the only person who could do Naked Lunch. I don't think he would have said that if there had been no belief in it whatsoever.'One of the many problems Cronenberg faced as he wrote the Naked Lunch screenplay was the reality that it would require special effects, an element of filmmaking he was starting to grow tired of dealing with as a director. Cronenberg remembered the dillema years later.
I said to Jeremy Thomas, 'There's a lot of hi-sci-fi and horror imagery in Burroughs, particularly in Naked Lunch; there are Mugwumps and all kinds of creatures. But I don't think I want to make an effects movie. I don't want you to expect that and be disappointed.'I could tell by his reaction that he was disappointed. He thought, and I think rightly so, that that would be one of its main strengths and selling points: an effects movie for adults. The book itself was a sort of sci-fi horror novel for adults.
When I started to write, of course, I didn't get three scenes into it when the creatures started to appear. There was nothing I could do about it. Once you're writing, it's got to be what it's got to be. I was as surprised as anyone else that suddenly Naked Lunch was a heavy-duty effects movie, with effects that also talk a lot. That worried me, because if the effects don't work, all the dialogue goes as well. It's like casting an actor who turns out to be bad.'The special effects of Naked Lunch would be handled by Chris Walas Incorporated (CWI), who already had previously worked on Cronenberg's The Fly. Jim Isaac, effects supervisor on Naked Lunch, said about why CWI accepted the gig.
'We were very excited by the script. Most of the effects in the movie were things that had never been seen before. We took the project because it was unique and also we love working with David. We had had a great time on The Fly and we really respect him as a director.'CWI had at least six months to construct everything before principal photography would commence. All the puppets and props were fabricated in CWI's headquarters based in San Rafael, Marin County, before being shipped over to Toronto.
The CWI team on Naked Lunch was overseen by Mark Walas and Jim Isaac; Walas acted as general manager and Isaac as project supervisor. Kelly Lepowski acted as mechanical supervisor, Greg Olsson as painting supervisor, and Wim Van Thillo as mound supervisor. Stephan Dupuis was the main designer, and Brian Dewe the animatronics engineer.
Among the many credited 'animatronic technicians' at CWI were Carol Bauman, Harold Weed, Lauren Vogt, Danny Wagner, Dave Isaac, Valerie Sofranco and James Hynemar.
Many scenes of the film involve Peter Weller's role Bill Lee, a sort of substitute for Burroughs himself, talking to giant beetles. The first of these beetles, the 'case officer', was based on a design by Chris Walas, with sculptor Harold Weed finalizing it. According to Weed:'I sculpted it in six body sections — the main body, the sphincter, the head, the mandibles, the wings and the legs. Each part had to be sculpted and mechanized individually.'
At least five Case Officer beetle puppets were made, each with a different function according to Jim Isaac. 'We had one that scurried across the table by itself. That was a motor-driven, cam-operated rig. And then there was one that had a magnet on it. By putting another magnet underneath the table where the bug sat, we were able to move the puppet around.
There was also one that was fully mechanical — the legs moved, the wings opened, and it had a talking sphincter. Then we had one where we locked down the legs for closeups of it talking. That one had four-way head movement and the antennae moved on it, too.'Harold Weed had to construct several 'breakable' Case Officer puppets for the shots where Peter Weller smashes the offending insect with his shoe. 'I made thin, shell-like duplicates of the beetle out of a very brittle urethane plastic. We airbrushed the inside so that once it shattered, any inside pieces that showed would look like flesh and veins and so forth.
We experimented with different kinds of ‘guts’ for it — tapioca and butterscotch pudding and different consistencies of methocel that were tinted either with acrylic paint or food coloring. We put the goop in sealed bags and then stuffed those bags inside the body. David (Cronenberg) smashed it in closeup — and when he did, stuff flew everywhere.'The talking beetle puppets were designed with anus-like sphincters, which were operated to mimic the movement of speech. Cronenberg explained, in a blunt yet succinct fashion, as to why he made the choice for the beetles to, well, talk out of their arses.
'The talking asshole, and I mean no disrespect here, is Burroughs himself. It's the part of you that you don't want to listen to, and saying things that are unspeakable, that are too basic, too true, too primordial, too uncivilized and too tasteless to listened to, but are there nonetheless.(...) In a sense, that's what I'm saying when I say that people's reactions to some of the things that I do in my films, and what Burroughs does in his writing, is too middle class and too worried about taste and refinement and being civilized and nice. And therefore any truths involved in these disgusting things must not be listened to or discarded.
In a sense the mouth versus the asshole is more a Freudian schism. The asshole being the unconscious and the mouth being the superego. More than being a mind versus body schism, its more a mind-mind split'.
The second of the beetles, the Clark Nova typewriter, was intended to be slightly sympathetic, and so required a degree of characterization to its design. Cronenberg said, 'He’s a good guy — or at least as close to a good guy as you’re going to get in Interzone. So Clark-Nova had to have some charm, which made his design somewhat difficult. We went through a lot of debate over this guy. How big should he be and how much expression should he have? How much could we rely on real insect anatomy and still get something that would work dramatically? There was a lot of trial and error before we came up with a successful design.'
Another challenge was how the Clark-Nova beetle was also the altar-ego of the main character's typewriter. Jim Isaac recalled, 'David knows what bugs look like. so we really had to do our research to make this thing look real. It had mandibles in the front that were like claws, and then legs that were more beetle-like. The front was flat-faced with a keyboard and the wings came up from that. In the back — which is where the body would be — was a talking sphincter like the one on the case officer bug.'
The sculpting of the Clark Nova bug was started on by Randy Ottenberg, and was finished by Harold Weed after Ottenberg had to leave the project. Weed was assisted by Stephan Dupuis and Joel Friesch. Weed explained about the Clark Nova;
'When Randy left, there was a big push on the Clark-Nova. I sculpted the wings and the legs and most of the head. Joel sculpted the mandibles — over and over again. For some reason, they were always being changed. Even after we started to mold the head and make pieces, the mandibles got changed three or four times.'
'One was a rod puppet that we used for closeups of the head. The jaw, wings, mandibles and antennae were all capable of movement. Since the same puppet was needed for shots of the Clark-Nova scurrying across Lee’s desk, it also had mechanical legs operated on a cam controller. Then, for the talking sphincter in the back end, we had a second hero Clark-Nova that was a hand puppet. On that one, the front legs moved up and down and side to side, but the back legs were tied down. The head section of that one was also operated by hand — a puppeteer would put his hand inside, hold the jaw and move it up and down.'
When it came to mechanizing the beetlepuppets, the CWI team used techniques previously used on the film Arachnophobia a year earlier. According to mechanical supervisor Kelly Lepkowski, 'Luckily we had had time on Arachnophobia to develop devices that would allow us to make insect movements. We had built cam devices that pulled cables in a sequence to get the repeating motion of a spider’s walk. So the technology we developed there made it easier for us to build the insects for Naked Lunch.'Bryan Dewe worked on the lip-syncing for the Clark-Nova' puppet's sphincter-mouth, achieved via hand puppeteering. 'Because there was no armature in this particular rig, we glued little finger cups inside to give the sphincter more definition. We had started out with an armature built into it; but David didn’t really like the way it moved, so we took the armatures out and started to do the hand technique — which worked fine. We cut a hole in the floor and I would stand underneath the desk. My arms would get tired, holding them up over my head all day, but David was really good about letting me rest. There was a monitor there to watch while I was puppeteering. I would read the lines on the page while the actor on stage was reading them aloud and then glance at the monitor from time to time to see how I was doing.'
Kelly Lepkowski said, 'It was really a frantic motion so it didn’t have to be that controlled. In one scene it had to slam into a door, so that puppet was built like a tank. It had huge aluminum girders in it and the head was solid fiberglass with big bumpers all along the front. We used the mandibles themselves, cast out of urethane rubber, to absorb the shock.'
Some shots also required another specially mechanized puppet, which the crew christened 'the flailer'. Jim Isaac explained, 'It had a battery-powered motor inside — like a Makita power drill — that moved off-center and made the whole puppet flail and shake. We used it for quick wide shots. It was self-contained — we’d just turn on the switch and it would go.' At first the 'flailer' was to be used for the shot where the Clark-Nova leaps off the table, but instead the crew opted to use one of the hero puppets and the running puppet, with the help of some camera trickery. Jim Isaac explained in Cinefex;'The trouble was that all the other rigs looked so good that we couldn’t quite get away with the flailer for that one shot. So instead we designed a shot where our hero puppet jumped off the table with the wings and everything moving — it dove right off and left frame. Then, hidden underneath was our runner puppet which would take off. So you see one dive off and then a split second later you see the other one running.'
The Clark-Nova's death scene required bother a specialized puppet, as well as another to be altered, as Jim Isaac described. 'It was filled with bladders and tubes that had all kinds of green goop inside. It took nine people to operate that rig. We also modified a puppet to be used in shots of him after he dies. We took the head off and the sphincter section and resculpted them with slash marks and the eyes punched out.'
Three Martinelli puppets were made, the first being a 'destructible' one for when the beetle hits the floor. Jim Isaac said, 'We made a rig that was like one of those old spring-loaded cars that crack up the kind that hit and then fly apart. That particular rig was loaded with different flesh and mechanical pieces so that when it hit they went all over the place.'
The second Martinelli puppet, used for the shot of it running across the floor, was a 'hero' mechanized puppet. The hero puppet was fitted with 'breakaway' segments that could come off it, revealing the raw innards underneath when the Clark-Nova was biting it.
Isaac elaborated, 'The hero (Martinelli) had cam-controlled legs and cable-controlled head movement. It also had two sets of wings — one that was mechanical and moved up and down, and another that was meant to be ripped off during the fight.' The sequence where the Clark-Nova attacks and rips apart the Martinelli required at last fifteen puppeteers on-set. Jim Isaac said about the Martinelli's death scene;'It was very complicated. We actually shot the whole thing on the set. We blocked out the scene, figured out where the puppets should move on the floor and then slotted the floor accordingly. The Martinelli had to travel something like two-and-a-half feet. There was a bar down the middle of its body and we moved that bar through the slots in the floor. A rug helped hide the track — when the Martinelli traveled, it pulled the rug along with it.'
The transforming typewriter prop was based on the genuine (albeit altered) vintage typewriter that had been supplied by the art department. The shots of the transforming typewriter becoming fleshy was achieved via air bladder techniques, as Jim Isaac explained.
'We could suck those bladders in with a suction mechanism and then expand them so that the fleshy part would balloon out and start to pulse. We also had bladders around the entire rim of the typewriter so that it would bulge and begin to change shape. Then, in the back, there was a phallic appendage that grew between the two ‘cheeks’ of the typewriter. It was basically a half-man, half-woman sex blob. It had all the right organs for both.' One shot required fleshy innards inside the Mujahideen typewriter to open up, revealing the fleshy innards underneath. Another consideration was that inflating the prop could make the paintjob crack and crease, as painter Gregg Olsen remembered.'We had to create a surface on the skin of the blob that would read as metal but would expand with bladder work. We ended up using a combination of real keys and some metal chrome tape on the edges, but most of it had to be soft to accommodate the bladders.'
'In a sense the sex blob is another metaphorical trick. Instead of Joan (Frost) and (Jim) Lee being sexy, this blob is sexy. It is general lust incarnate in a twenty-five pound package that flops around the room. It wasn’t in Burroughs’ literature, but I think it’s a Burroughsian concept.'
Three 'sex blob' puppets were made for a sequence where they are chased out by the housekeeper Fadela. Jim Isaac explained, 'We had one that jumped and then another that traveled across the floor as Fadela chased it with the whip. It was self-contained and motorized; we could turn it on by radio control to control its speed. We also got a lot of good movement out of it just by pulling it with wires. Then we had a third one that was a hand puppet with cam-controlled appendages that flailed around.'
Sources:
- Cinefex #49 'Borrowed Flesh' by Jody Duncan, 1992
- Cronenberg on Cronenberg (Chris Rodley, 1996)
- 'Naked Making Lunch' featurette
- David Cronenberg on The David Letterman Show, 1991
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