"(Kaufman) remembered me so he called me to come in and told me they were starting this movie in less than three weeks and told me what they wanted to do. Kaufman asked me if we could do these parts and pieces and I said we could do it but three weeks wasn't enough time.
I told him, 'You're shooting up in San Francisco and I'm in Los Angeles.' I've got a lot of work to do in just three weeks time. So we did the FX simultaneously as the movie was being shot. We would do the next gag for the following week. Eddie Henriques, a guy who worked for me, he and I would fly up to San Francisco, do the gag, jump on a plane, fly back and start working on the next one. I loved working on the film."Burman and Henrique's work was mostly on plant-like alien 'pods' and the resulting doppelgangers they birth. The sequence of a pod almost copying Donald Sutherland's character needed a performer to wear a static mask in Sutherland's likeness.
“That was a case of what would happen with DNA if it got skewed or went awry, and if two pods were side by side, one of man and one of dog, and their (bodies) became fused in a crazy way. What monster could be created?"
An extra touch to this already grotesque image was the dog licking its human lips with its canine tongue, which was done very simply according to Kaufman. "We put something on the lips of the mask so that the (dog) would lick at it, and it worked.”
Joe Gieb wore the prosthetics, consisting of a misshapen face appliance with discoloured makeup applied on his arms and torso, and clamber out of a modified pod prop.
The shots of both the miniature and full-size pods blooming were achieved via simple means according to Howard Preston, who handled the miniature effects. 'All of the sequences involving the pods flowering or sprouting tendrils were all shot in reverse. It amounted to pulling nylon threads through the surface of the leaf (...) In the case of the flower, the petals were made of latex and we just pulled them gently back into the pod.'
Unlike the Don Siegel original, or Abel Ferrara's later 1993 remake, Kaufman opted to open his film with an effects sequence of the pods, in an almost ethereal state, abandoning their dying home planet. This sequence was handled by Howard Preston and Ron Dexter.
Howard Preston was skilled with plate photography, and so was able to work around the film's low budget. "The set was a piece of plywood. It was relatively small, I think it was 28 inches wide and 24 inches deep. There was a landscape integrated into the plywood that was actually consisting of ground-up volcanic rock, to make this kind of sandy, desert-looking area.The foreground was the same volcanic rock, but in big chunks to give a look of forced perspective. So at least from one angle, with a very wide lens, it would look like the set was very, very large. The other component was the background of stars and planets; that consisted of a plexiglass sheet that was painted deep black and then holes were just pecked out of it to give the illusion of stars."
(To show the pods floating through the cosmos in their rudimentary state, Kaufman used a vat of paste that, when poured into water, would form into clumps. He filmed this and simply reversed the footage!)
"Over the years I realized one of the things I enjoyed the most was pulling a rabbit out of the hat. I like to be able to do things quickly and fast and solve them. (...) You don't always have the finest work, by the way. You have to save yourself sometimes using creativity. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is one of the most fun things I've done. I really enjoyed working on it. We got to do stuff that had never been seen before."
Sources
- 'The Special Effects Pod' featurette
- Cool Ass Cinema interview with Thomas Burman
- The Hollywood Reporter 'Why Invasion of the Body Snatchers Still Haunts Its Director'
