Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Steven Spielberg had been fascinated with outer space ever since childhood, as he remembered in an interview with Cinefantastique 'Well, it began when I was about six years old, I think. I'm very good at procrastinating. Even as a kid, I was a great procrastinator.

I’d always push things off till the eleventh hour. And I'd spend a lot of time just looking up at the sky. My parents thought it was strange, but I was a real stargazer. Before I was eight, I got into astronomy. My father was into science fiction; I’ve never cared for it that much, myself.

But I remember one night he got me out of bed at 1 o'clock in the morning to see a meteor shower & I was absolutely fascinated. I wanted to know what put those points of light up there.'

Spielberg described this formative experience in another interview years later. 'It was this fantastic meteor shower, like the Perseus meteor shower we have sometimes, and I just remember looking up at the sky and every 15 to 20 seconds, there was this fantastic streak of light across the sky! I think that was my first introduction to the world beyond the Earth, and probably what first impregnated me with the idea of wanting to tell stories not of this world!'

This childhood interest in outer space led to Spielberg becoming curious on the UFO phenomenon. 'I always thought, as a kid and into my 20s and 30s, that there was some truth to it all. Too many similarities in the accounting of UFO sightings.

This was before the media embraced UFOs as a cultural pastime or as a kind of alternative religion. You're talking about witnesses who were seeing things in Des Moines, Iowa, reporting the same thing people were seeing in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

So I really believed in this whole UFO phenomenon, and I thought it was really interesting that we didn't have to journey to the stars to make our discoveries, but beings from other stars have journeyed to our planet.'

The first draft of what became Close Encounters of the Third Kind was started in 1973, after the release of The Sugarland Express, under the formative title of 'Watch the Skies', as a nod to the final scene of The Thing from Another World.

'Watch the Skies' was intended to be a low-budget film, as the big film studios considered science-fiction to be b-movie fare. It wasn't until the runaway success of Jaws, the film that Spielberg took on after Sugarland Express, that he was able to negotiate a higher budget.

The experience of making Jaws had been a major ordeal partly thanks to that film's heavy effects workload, especially the mechanical shark. Yet compared to Jaws, Close Encounters would prove to be, according to Spielberg, 'Twice as bad and twice as expensive as well'.

Out of the effects needed for Close Encounters, the aliens were some of its most challenging. The film's title alone, taken from the writings of ufologist J. Allen Hynek, meant aliens had to appear: a 'close encounter of the third kind' was when you saw a UFO's occupants.

Joe Alves, the production designer of Close Encounters (and who Spielberg had previously worked with on Jaws), based the design of the aliens on UFO reports such as the infamous Betty & Barney Hill case. 'I had a lot of pre-production time, a good year on the production before we started shooting so I was sort of messing around with a lot of different concepts, and the alien certainly was one. I made some sketches, naive little sketches, of two little creatures based on articles that I read on how people saw these little things.'

Spielberg recalled how the very first attempt to realize the aliens ended in failure. 'The first thing I did was go in search for the perfect E.T. I had the strange idea that they shouldn't be people in costume; they had done that from the dawn of time in Hollywood.

So what I did was, I had a chimpanzee brought to the set. We put the chimpanzee in an E.T. suit and further complicated the test by putting rollerskates on him, because I didn't want the chimpanzee to walk simian-like, but I wanted him to glide smoothly down a ramp.

You can imagine the test; a chimpanzee with a large rubber latex head and a little kind of flimsy ballerina costume and large rollerskates, disguised with a kind of dust ruffle so you couldn't see the actual wheels.

We put the chimpanzee on a ramp and the first thing that happened, of course, was the chimpanzee fell and slid down the ramp and it kept making these rather remarkable Charlie Chaplin pratfalls, the chimpanzee was laughing like he had a great time doing this.

At one point the chimpanzee did pull off his head and throw it at the crew. That was his way of telling me, "Find another way."'

Joe Alves' design sketches for the aliens.

After this, Spielberg resorted to having the aliens be actors in prosthetics. John Chambers, famous for his work on Planet of the Apes, was approached but had to decline due to poor health and so offered the job to fellow makeup artist Frank Griffin.

As Frank Griffin recalled to Cinefantastique, it was via him that the Burman Studio wound up getting involved with Close Encounters. 'Originally, I was going to do the show with Eddie Butterworth, who is a really brilliant sculptor and makeup artist; but after we got about three or four days into it, that dissolved. Eddie wanted to go do something else—plus we didn’t have a lab. I was determined not to use the lab on the studio lot because I knew the background over there and I figured our work would be all over town before we got the picture started. So that’s how Tom Burman came into it. I needed a big lab; and he and his brother. Sonny, had one.'

Essentially, while Griffin would design the aliens to Spielberg and Alves' wishes, the actual production of the prosthetics fell to the Burmans. However, it was at this stage that the aliens started to prove troublesome, partly thanks to Spielberg's indecision!

'Everything was always sort of abstract. He’d have all these sketches and he’d say, “I’d like a little bit of this, and a little bit of that,give me a little bit of that eye, and a little bit of that nose.” So we’d end up working from bits and pieces of maybe eight different sketches.

The original concept for the head looked sort of insect-like, almost like a cricket or an ant’s head. Mike McKracken was our sculptor at the time, and it would take him about a week to come up with a rendering. Then we’d take it over to Spielberg and he’d say, “Well, that’s almost right, but I still feel it should be this or that.’’

(...) So we never got a firm yes or a firm no—it was always “a little bit of this; a little bit of that.” Gradually it evolved into something we called Casper, because it looked like Casper the Ghost, but it changed again, even after that.

We were on the show a good two months before we got the final go-ahead from Spielberg, but we never had a firm blueprint. And once they left for Mobile, we never saw Spielberg again until Tommy (Thomas Burman) went down with the finished heads.

Early design drawings of the 'Casper the Ghost' aliens.

The aliens were to be played by children, which slightly complicated matters; child actors are already difficult to work with, but this was going to require the kids to wear heavy alien masks! Thomas Burman explained in Cinefantastique;

'We needed an impression of the children who were going to wear the heads so we could come up with something that would fit each child exactly, because these things were going to be a little heavy and the kids had to support them. To give the articulated heads a bit of individual personality, we made three versions, all slightly different.

David Ayres, my brother (Sonny Burman), and I each sculpted one, based on Mike McKracken’s approved design. Sonny’s and mine were duplicated to bring the total to five. We sculpted those heads over the castings we made in Mobile, and then made outer surface molds in a dental stone material — we needed those so we could use foam rubber, which requires a certain amount of curing time in an oven at about two hundred degrees.

After we took the molds out, we had to lay a layer of clay on the inside, and then take another mold of the inside of that, so that we now had the outer skin and a mold for the armature that the skin would fit over. We made the armature out of fiberglass and used it to mount all our mechanics -servo motors and whatnot, to run the eyes and everything. This would then sit directly on the kid’s head like the liner in a football helmet.'

The Burmans' early alien head.

However, Spielberg was not impressed with the original alien heads, causing not just a heavier workload for Burman but also an unpleasant altercation with the film's producer, Julia Phillips.

'It took us three months to finish all the heads; and when we did, I took them down to Mobile and showed them to Steve Spielberg and he didn’t like them. He thought they looked too scary and he wanted something softer and more gentle-looking.

And that really put me in kind of an awkward position. I was representing the heads, and yet I'd had nothing to do with the design or concept. Frank Griffin had done a couple of film tests with them and they’d been accepted at the time, so it wasn’t Frank’s fault. It wasn’t anybody's fault. I guess Steve Spielberg just had a change of mind once he got on the set.

But when Steve Spielberg didn’t like them, Julia Phillips panicked. She jumped all over me anti was going to sue me for twenty million dollars, and on and on and on. She was really abusive. I’d spent some time in the Marine Corps, so she wasn’t catching anybody for the first time, you know. I mean, this woman really came down on me heavy, and it just took me totally by surprise. Under any other circumstances, I’d have probably just walked out the door, taken my plane ticket, and come home. But I liked Steve Spielberg and I believed in the project; and I knew they were in a fix. So I just told her I’d see what we could do about it and what kind of corrections we could make.

I came back with my brother (Sonny), and together we remade every one of those heads. The background masks only needed minor changes, so we were able to get by with just modifying our previous molds. But we had to re-do the articulated heads completely. Sonny and I sculpted several versions and sent Polaroid pictures to Spielberg by airplane.

He called back and told us what changes he wanted made and gave us the okay. Fortunately, the mechanisms were already made, so it was just a matter of reskinning them—putting another look on the outside. We did the whole thing in about ten days, working day and night straight through.'

The Burmans' revised alien head.

David Ayres recalled the experience of filming the child actors in the alien masks. 'We started out with about a hundred of the little girls, but they dwindled down to about fifty after the first day or so. A lot of the kids were complaining about not being able to breathe in the masks, and some of the mothers were getting uptight because their kid only got a peanut butter sandwich when some other child got cheese.

And then the kids got tired of putting on the masks and the hands and they had padding all around to make them look less human and more cartoon-like. They couldn’t see out the eyes. Instead, they had to look out the little nostrils on the mask, and the mouth. Some of them could not get used to it, but the ones that did would just pinpoint their vision through one hole, and then they could move it around and get a wide scan of everything. You could sec them cocking their heads, and it looked very real. We finally ended up with about thirty-five kids.

In order to get them acclimated to the costumes, we had them practice doing things with the heads on. There was a dancer down there who’d been hired to work with the kids, and she’d have them do jumping jacks and shaking their fingers, kind of programming them for the shooting. She was there, more or less, to mother them all; but she used to drive us crazy, because she’d keep going around to the kids saying: “Are you feeling all right? This costume must hurt. Doesn’t it?” And the kids arc going: “Well, I don’t know. Yeah, I guess it kinda does.” And we’d be going around trying to keep her quiet so she wouldn’t go talking the kids into anything.

A more finalized alien mask by the Burmans.

Thomas Burman explained in detail the process behind the alien masks. 'Once we got the concept down, we had to make two kinds of heads. One was a closeup head that had to be articulated, the eyes had to be able to move up and down, and from side to side; and the mouth had to move.

We built five of those; and since we couldn’t expect the children inside the suits to trigger all the mechanisms by themselves, we designed them to be operated remotely with a small model airplane radio control set. Then we had about sixty background masks that were just slip rubber masks and sat on the kids heads.

We did the basic modeling in wax, because it has kind of a high polish; and then we had plaster molds made. We made three different sizes for different sized kids. Except for the eyes, which were vacuum-formed plastic, the entire mask was just cast out of rubber, with rubber filler added to make it a little stiffer, so they weren’t too flexible.

They were originally cast without mouths because Spielberg wanted the creatures to have no mouths; but it turned out that the kids needed them to breathe, so we ended up cutting them in after we got down to Mobile. The skin was covered with a clear polyurethane to give it a kind of odd shiny texture, and then painted'.

Frank Griffin remembered how the mechanized masks also provided a new set of issues for the children wearing them.

'For the articulated heads, Spielberg told us he wanted the eyes to track naturally, and follow you; but he also wanted the eyes to be able to move separately. It happened to be really busy that year and all the good effects guys were tied up; but fortunately, we were able to get Del Rheaume. He was working on hydraulics and stuff for The White Buffalo at the time, but we were able to get him to moonlight with us for awhile at night.

Now, Del is really clever, but once he got into it, even he said it would be impossible to build a system where the eyes could move independently and then be able to lock back into a tracking system, at least if you wanted to make it small enough and light enough to sit on a child’s head. We finally ended up using a model airplane radio with two controls.

He could do just about anything with those eyes that a human could do, but they wouldn’t move independently. What one eye did, the other had to do. Human eyes tend to cross or spread as distances close or separate; but once those eyes were fixed, they were fixed which meant you had to maintain a certain distance from the heads or else the eyes would get kind of a staring look. We shot some test footage at Columbia, but the little girl they had in the costume couldn’t even keep her head up, it kept flopping forward or to the side.

And some of those guys at the studio would say: “Why can’t this little girl hold her head up? It can’t weigh more than four or five pounds.” So I said: “Figure body weight. The head’s probably ten percent of her gross body weight. Could you hold up twenty pounds on your head all day?”

So we decided to use little boys for the closeups with the articulated heads, and use the little girls for the full-figure shots to maintain the unisexual look. They picked out six or seven boys down in Mobile, and Tommy and I flew down there around March or April to take head impressions of them.'

The mechanized alien masks.

Griffin elaborated on the aliens' 'unisexual' look, as well as how the makeup department had to work alongside the wardrobe team.

'The heads were painted to match the costumes the kids would be wearing. Spielberg wanted tight clinging body stockings without any visible seams, so that in the back-lighting, you would never be sure whether the aliens were wearing something or if they were nude.

His original intent was that they look very unisexual. That’s one of the main reasons he wanted to use little girls so there would be no obvious sexual organs of any kind. They tried shooting midgets; but of course, that didn’t work, so they went back to the little girls.

Wardrobe spent about three or four months looking for a fabric they could use, and finally ended up with a four-way stretch cloth, which tends to cling quite well; and once they finally decided on a color, they gave us a swatch of it and we’d try to match it.'

The aliens were meant to have long, spindly fingers, which also caused problems, as Griffin explained. 'The hands turned out to be a real problem. We went all over town trying to find a good animator and finally ended up at a place called Show Craft.

They made one mock-up hand for us, and it was really nice because the fingers could contract and flex and everything. But it took a long time to get into them because you had to strap them quite a way up the forearm in order to get a good firm movement.

So I said to Steven, “By the time you get those heads and those hands on fifty kids, the first ones are going to want to be getting out to go to the john or somethingand you’ll never get a shot.” Plus, the cost was just prohibitive. It was going to come to like five or six hundred dollars a pair.

So Tommy took an impression of one of the kid’s hands, and from that we made a false hand out of something called methyl methacrylate, which is used in dentistry: when it dries, it looks almost like bone or teeth. It had long, spindly fingers and we made it so the first joint covered the entire finger of the child’s hand; and we put springs and levers in between so that by manipulating their fingers, the kids could bend all the succeeding joints.

We had one pair made, but it took a little strength and the girl they had testing it just wasn’t strong enough. We discussed it all with Spielberg again, and finally ended up just making the hands out of slush rubber. They were inanimate and fit on like gloves. The kids could move them a little bit with their fingers, but that’s about all.'

Spielberg was dissatisfied with the aliens realized by Frank Griffin and Thomas Burman, and opted to omit most of the footage he had shot of them. What little footage used was overexposed so that the features of the mask were not visible.

Bob Balaban also felt the suits were unconvincing. 'One of the problems that I remember was that the rubber hands...were just these rubber hands with long finger! When they (closed their hands) you could kind of see the rubber crinkling up at the edges and it was hard to do. And the facial expressions weren't so great.'

Thomas Burman felt that this was a disservice to the hard work the makeup department had done on the picture, especially as the little alien sequences had taken so much effort to film.

'They were originally supposed to shoot only two days with the aliens, but they ended up shooting eight. They worked those little kids for twelve hours a day and paid them almost nothing. I think they got something like $25 a day. But the little girls never complained.

I had little girls climbing all over me two or three of them; sometimes as many as five. would walk out on the set with the children hanging all over you. It was really tiring for them, and it was tough to keep their energy levels up.

But they were better than the little boys. We brought the boys in because we felt they would be stronger than little girls, but it turned out that girls actually have more stamina at that age than boys do. The little boys faded out almost immediately.

I hadn't really wanted to get that involved in it, right from the beginning, but ended up very deeply involved and a little angry. The irritation was that after coming back and working around the clock like that out of some sense of responsibility I didn t even get screen credit on the show. Columbia even put out a statement disclaiming that I had ever worked on it.'

Spielberg was still seeking out other methods on how to realize the aliens that didn't have to rely on actors in costumes. Douglas Trumbull, who headed the film's photographic effects, proposed to realize the aliens via elaborate miniature puppets.

'My concept was to have a single extraterrestrial come out of the ship. It would be maybe twelve to fourteen feet in height. Very thin and gaunt and almost transparent. If you’ve ever seen pictures of embryos, they have very thin skin and tissue and you can see the veins and organs inside. I wanted to make this being just like that. Sort of humanoid, but delicate and transparent so you could see his heart beating inside and the blood rushing through his veins, and you could see him breathing and watch his muscles work. (...)

We would probably have had to build it in miniature, maybe four or five feet tall. It was sort of a complicated articulated puppet concept not a puppet hung by strings, but a puppet operated by thin rods from behind, with all the moving parts isolated away from the being itself, so it wouldn’t just be full of solenoids and valves and hydraulic actuators and stuff.'

While Spielberg rejected Trumbull's offer as it would be too expensive, it was clear that Spielberg was impressed by the concept enough that the film's second alien, realized as a more conventional puppet, would reflect Trumbull's 'embryo' concept.

Instead the task fell to Bob Baker, a puppeteer who had worked under George Pal's Puppetoons and later set up his own company, the Bob Baker Marionette Theater. Bob Baker specialized in making puppet shows for children, but he was eager to take on the job.

'Joe Alves gave me a call in October and asked if we could build something according to a design. I said sure. He told me he couldn't say very much about it, but he’d drop off the designs. I was out of town when they arrived, but when I got back, I looked at them and thought, “Gee, I'd really love to do something like this” they were really kind of way out.

So I had a meeting with Steven Spielberg, who has a very imaginative mind. He was going along ninety miles an hour: “Can you do this? Can you do that?” And I'm saying, “Yes, yes, yes.” So it was decided then that we'd build one prototype puppet for three or four others that would be built on a much larger scale. After the meeting, George Jensen made up a full-scale drawing for us to work from. The thing that intrigued me about this figure, in the beginning, was that there was no way a human being could have dressed up in a suit to play that part. So body has those kind of proportions; and there wasn't any way you could stretch the human body, even through trick photography, to make it look like that.'

George Jensen's artwork for the marionette alien.

Bob Baker explained further about how the marionette was made. 'There were four of us who were really involved with the figure: Roy Raymond did some of the internal metal things on it; Ho Kusudo helped me make the arms, which were very complex; Dino Williams did all my plastic work; and I guess I kind of lived with it the most of everybody. It’s one of the few things in the last few years that I've really wanted to be part of, and do as much of myself as possible.

Our alien was about five feet tall, with long arms and legs and torso, and with a head that sat on the end of a very long neck which came forward in a kind of lazy “S." We didn't want to scare people with it. but we wanted to give it the look of maybe an evolved human being; and so we made it as though things that were no longer needed within the framework of the body were being eliminated. Everything was mental, they no longer needed such things as feet, so we had no feet on it. It was kind of a transitional being. The epidermis was constantly regenerating, leaving the body and trailing off behind. And you could see inside the creature and watch his heart beat and see him breathe, the whole chest cavity would go up and down.

His temples would pulsate and you could see the brain moving inside. And all this was done with strings and springs and wire a little bit of everything. Also, in the beginning, they wanted to have light beams coming out of the eyes. So we came up with a little battery-powered light that we beamed through a prismatic device when the eyes moved, the beam moved with them.

But I guess Spielberg thought that was a bit too theatrical by the time he got around to shooting it, so he didn't use it. In fact, most of the things we built into our puppet weren't really visible on the screen.'

Bob Baker's alien marionette today.

Bob Baker's marionette would also prove to be a victim of Spielberg's fickleness, as he instead became more enamoured with the idea of the main alien being realized as a mechanical puppet by Carlo Rambaldi. However, months later Spielberg had a change of heart and decided he did want to use Bob Baker's marionette in the film alongside Rambaldi's creation.

The marionette was filmed in a miniature version of the mothership set, to give the idea that the alien was inhumanly tall. As Bob Baker recalled, this was months after the puppet had been originally constructed, and so it needed to be quickly refurbished before filming.

'We had only two days notice to shoot; and unfortunately, the puppet had been hanging around so long it had dried out. Originally, the skin was nice and pliable but just the air hitting it had made the thin plastic we used sag and get brittle. We had to practically re-do the whole thing; tighten it up, replace some parts, and re-glue. It was a real bugger. And we were afraid we wouldn’t be able to get the same smooth actions again. If we’d known how little they were going to use of it, it would have been no problem. It was capable of doing a lot more.

The marionette had from twenty-five to thirty strings - it varied, because some were removed or added, depending on the shot. And stringing it was a sonofagun, because we had to use such fine line. I had eight puppeteers on the thing, any fewer and the controls would have been ungodly complicated, because there were so many parts and the strings were so long. Then we had two people on the floor. Sometimes we needed to hold the figure down so it wouldn’t sway, so we’d put strings on from below that they could steady it with.

There was a special catwalk built for us above the set; but unfortunately, the carpenters who built it didn’t understand what they were doing and they positioned it so it was almost impossible for us to work off either side of it. And then the sound stage was filled with diesel smoke, and our eyes burned and we couldn’t see what we were doing. Everybody had gas masks on, and Doug Trumbull would be down below yelling things up to us that we couldn’t understand; and we’d be yelling things back to him that he couldn’t understand. The whole thing was really pretty funny, and it's surprising it came out as well as it did.

When we built our alien, the plan was for it to walk forward, bend down with a very deep bow, and gesture toward the ship with his arm. We were able to do very beautiful hand and head movements, and even in its grotesqueness, it seemed a sympathetic character to us. We were very pleased with the work, especially since it was just a small prototype.

If we’d gone on to build the others, as originally planned, they were going to be eight-and-a-half feet tall and we’d have had more volume to work with and could have gotten even more into it. But they didn’t want anything very complicated at this point, anyhow.

We only did about six different shots, each done a couple of ways and I think there were about three major set-ups. We started pretty early in the morning, and by about eight o’clock that evening, we were done.

Bob Baker's alien marionette during filming.

Carlo Rambaldi gained Spielberg's attention thanks to his mechanical effects work on the 1977 King Kong, one of Rambaldi's first jobs on an American picture. Rambaldi explained how he got the Close Encounters gig, as well as his design process for the friendly alien.

Steven Spielberg contacted me in January and asked me to come to the United States to discuss an extraterrestrial creature that he needed for Close Encounters. When we met, he told me he wanted something about four feet tall, with a very large head and a slender body, but he gave me no actual designs. So I went back to Rome to develop my concept.

I felt that, though humanoid in form, the extraterrestrials would be at least ten to twenty thousand years more advanced than humans, so I designed the head proportionately larger. But with their increased reliance on pure intellect, they would have a decreased need for such senses as hearing and smelling, and so the ears and nose and other facial features would become much less prominent.

And because of their extreme technological orientation, I felt they would no longer smile broadly as we do on earth; but since they would still retain certain emotions, I gave them a slight smile. Also, as the brain expanded, other parts of the body would take an opposite course. The need for muscular movements would diminish, and so their limbs would become thinner and longer.

I prepared several sketches of my design and sent them to Spielberg. He said it was exactly what he wanted. We made a contract agreement over the phone and I started to work.'

Carlo Rambalid's design drawings for the alien.

Carlo Rambaldi's alien puppet was filmed months after the original footage with Thomas Burman's mostly rejected aliens. Rambaldi explained further;

'I sculpted the form of the creature first in clay, and then made a positive and negative mold. In the negative part, we fused a special polyurethane skin, which was about a quarter-of-an-inch thick, and very realistic. Like human skin, it even changes color when pressure is applied to it.

This was fitted directly over a skeleton framework of aluminum and steel. The skull was made of fiberglass, with pieces cut away for the concealed mechanisms used to move the eyes and create expressions.

All of the movements were accomplished with flexible cables. Each was connected to a mechanical joint or muscle and ran down through the body and out at the feet. The cables connected to levers, and by manually moving the levers, the cables operated just as human tendons would.

By manipulating the levers controlling the head, for instance, the cables would either push up or pull down on the mechanical muscle next to the skin to create a facial expression. I prefer using a mechanical system rather than an electronic one because I think the human hand is capable of producing a more natural and subtle movement.

Also, there are certain places in the body where it would be impossible to install electronic devices, even though miniaturized, because of limited space. For example, I could not have implanted an electronic device in the elbow of the extraterrestrial and yet retained the natural flow of the creature.

The mechanical 'skeleton' of Rambaldi's alien puppet.

When I came back to the United States in March to receive my Oscar for King Kong, I brought my work with me. I also brought Isidoro Raponi, one of my four assistants from Rome; and along with Dick Cobos, an American makeup specialist, we finished it up at Columbia Studios.

The extraterrestrial had fifteen cables, one for each required movement. It took seven just to operate the facial expressions, and another five to create the arm and hand signals. Esophagus and chest movements we accomplished by pumping air from cylinders in through tubes. We also constructed a walking mechanism which would allow it to take two steps, but that was not used in the film.

Steven Spielberg was very pleased with my extraterrestrial. In fact, he spent a lot of time playing with it. He especially liked the smile; and during the filming, it was he who operated the levers controlling it. All together, it took eight people to operate all the mechanisms and we practiced with it for almost a week before shooting to get it perfect.'

Out of the various artists who worked on the alien effects on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it was only Carlo Rambaldi who got a screen credit for his effort.

While the wildly differing alien designs were due to trial and error, Spielberg rationalized it years later with a very simple explanation that fitted the film's optimistic tone.

'We live on a planet with so many different races and colours and cultures, so I wanted to show that on the alien world there's also different races. There's the race of the long willowy aliens, and the race of the short bulbous head aliens, and there was the race of the very skinny alien. I wanted to show that like here (on Earth), there are different races there.'

Sources:

• The Making of 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind'
  
• Cinefantastique Vol 07 No 3-4 (1978)
  
• Steven Spielberg: A Biography (Joseph McBride, 1997)
  

Species (1995)

Dennis Feldman, the screenwriter of Species, got the idea from an essay by Arthur C Clarke. The thrust of Clarke's own essay was that, due to faster-than-light travel being scientifically impossible, humanity could not 'travel' the stars with spaceships like in a space opera.

Feldman, by his own admission rattled by Clarke's bleak conclusion, took this to mean that the reverse would also be true; no alien life would be invading Earth by zipping through the cosmos in metal flying saucers! Instead they would reach us via more insidious means.

Feldman explained; 'It worried and bothered me, and I realized, after thinking about it a while, that there could be speed-of-light communications and we could receive instructions from across the void to build something that would talk to us, that would communicate with us.

And as I thought about it, this wouldn't be a robot; it would be wetware. It would also want to use our DNA to make sure it could live in our environment, whatever this creature was. It knew the genes that were surviving here were the ones that would tell it what form to take and how to survive here'.

Feldman realized that any script about such a being would have to be frank about sex and its role in nature. 'The next issue was biology, and I realized that the engine of biology is reproduction. I started to examine what we're all doing here.

Certainly, as a species, what we're doing is reproducing, thriving and battling with other species - and ourselves. We'rein a constant invasion here, in reality. Animals seem to move from one continent to another, from one niche to another. This entire story is a way to look at what humans are as animals, and what human animals do'.

Feldman's script, now about an alien femme fatale named 'Sil', was submitted to film producer Frank Mancuso. However, it was Roger Donaldson, the director assigned to the project, who brought Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger to Mancuso's attention quite by chance!

Donaldson spied a copy of Necronomicon, a published compilation of Giger's artworks, during a visit to a comic shop with his son. Donaldson realized Giger's morbid and sexually charged artwork suited the themes of Feldman's script, and showed the book to Mancuso.

Mancuso later said about why he chose Giger, 'We wanted (Sil) to be scary, but at the same time have a sensuality that isn't lost when she appeas as the creature. There needed to be a constant level of elegance and grace to her character, and H. R. Giger was the only person we could think of who could accomplish this.'

Giger's initial Sil sculpture, in a promotional shot for Cinefantastique.

Mancuso contacted Giger's California representative, James Cowan, about if he would work on the Species project. Cowan was agreeable, saying, 'I thought this would be a worthwhile project for Giger because it allowed him the opportunity to design a very beautiful and special creature, perhaps the most elegant design since the Maria robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.'

Giger himself was, at first, enthusiastic about the Species gig. 'I was told this time I could do something I always wanted - to create a monster in another way - an aesthetic warrior, also sensual and deadly, like the women look in my paintings. Usually, they ask me to design monsters with bad-looking, ugly faces and horrible teeth. I wanted Sil to turn into the monster and still look beautiful. This oppurtunity was why I was attracted to the Species project'.

However, Giger soon found himself apprehensive. 'When the contracts first come it's always an unnecessarily long time anil a lot of tricks, and I'm not used to people wanting to cheat me. The legal part was more horrible this time than on Alien 3. It seems to be the normal thing in Hollywood. But in the end, it’s the result that you see which is important and not how much it cost. It has to look good. If it looks bad, I would be ashamed. I want it to be a good movie because I’ve already worked on two that weren't terrific films: Poltergeist 2 and Alien 3'.

Giger was unable to travel to the USA, partly due to looking after his ailing mother. Instead Mancuso and other members of the production team flew to Switzerland and visited the artist in his Zurich home to discuss his designs and the script with him.

Despite Giger's protestations, Mancuso started taking charge. Mancuso admitted in a Fangoria interview, 'We felt that for Giger to be successful, we had to give him a series of functions for the creature to do. We would be on the phone with him for hours every day to make sure he understood what we were trying to accomplish and checking on his designs. The fact that he is an artist and used to creating still pictures was a concern.

We had to convince him that this creature had to move with an energy that still pictures don't have, and possess a distinct personality. It took a lot of patience to work with Giger. Not because he was difficult to work with - it was more of a language thing and the fact that he was such a long distance away.'

One sore spot for Giger was how he had hoped the production, and creature effects, could be done in Switzerland. The pre-production models, including the 'ghost train' (covered in detail here!), were made at Atelier Formart, a Zurich-based sculpting studio. Giger explained;

Since I couldn’t travel to the States, I didn’t want to leave Sil to just anybody, so I produced my sketches in such a way that they conveyed an impression of Sil, but would never have enough detail to construct her from. I wanted to make the model myself, as I had the alien in Ridley Scott’s (Alien). The preproduction (Sil) model started in Andy Schedler’s studio in Switzerland wasn't bad. But the work morale was counterproductive from the beginning. We had no specialist and too little know-how. There is no film industry in Switzerland'.

Giger's original Sil sculptures.

Giger offered many suggestions to Mancuso and Donaldson as to how the Sil creature should act, as well as suggestions for the script's storyline (that, to Giger's frustration, were ignored). One concept Giger had was that, when transforming, Sil's body would glow from the inside.

This effect could only be shown well if Sil had a transparent body, which would be a daunting task for a practical creature. This was something rarely attempted on film before (except by Steve Johnson on The Abyss, but we'll get back to him later...)

To prove that the translucent glowing effect was possible with a physical puppet, a transparent Sil model was constructed by Giger at Atelier Formart, with help from sculptors Andy Schedler and Cony De Fries. Holograms were inserted into the limbs to show the transparency in action.

More of Giger's preliminary sculptures. NONE of these are by Cliff Wallace

To further convince the producers, Giger commissioned a Sil model from Cliff Wallace's CFX Studio, based in Pinewood Studios in England. Based on Giger's design drawings, Wallace's team constructed a half-scale Sil model, and a full-size transparent Sil head.

Atelier Formart's and CFX's models of Sil were enough to convince Mancuso that Sil could be realized with a transparent body, but he unconvinced that the work could be done in Europe, and demanded the effects work and filming be done in America. Giger glumly remembered;

'We were made to feel guilty during an attack-like visit from Mancuso, Donaldson, production designer John Muto and screenwriter Dennis Feldmann, who wanted to move the production of Sil to Hollywood. Even though we hadn’t even started production, we were collectively ashamed and left Sil to the Americans.'

Despite Giger's best efforts, Mancuso, setting in motion the film's worst elements, decided that Sil would be a mostly digital creation, as otherwise a transparent monster would have to be a puppet, and thus too 'stiff' to depict on camera.

For the digital Sil, Mancuso contracted Thomas R. Burman's Burman Studio to sculpt a set of Sil maquettes. Giger was unimpressed with Burman's sculptures. 'I saw the photos of Burman's small Sil. The head looked like a fish. It was not at all what I had imagined.'

Mancuso hired Richard Edlund's Boss Film Studios to realize Sil as a digital creation; however, Edlund was fully aware that for close-up shots, Sil would have to be physical. Digital technology, especially motion capture, was still in its infancy in the 1990s.

Edlund enlisted the help of Steve Johnson's XFX; not only had Johnson previously worked under Boss Film, but had already handled Giger's designs on Poltergeist 2, and had realized translucent creatures for The Abyss.

Johnson, an admirer of Giger, wanted to do his best to make him happy and made sure to listen to Giger's suggestions. Johnson recalled, 'Giger’s designs are fluid, marked with raw motion on the canvas, and they are incredibly erotic. When you’re asked to bring one of his creations to three dimensions, it's a difficult thing to achieve, because you have to take a loose, fluid approach to it. I think one reason the entire process turned out as well as it did is that we stayed in very tight communication with him through faxing, phone calls and Fed Ex. We kept him very much in the loop and always listened to what he had to say.'

Giger, still frustrated at the studio's bureaucracy, was more pleased with XFX's Sil design than he was with Burman's but still felt it was imperfect;

'What was presented to me—in half size — was (Burman's) clay model with a fish face, which even MGM didn’t seem to like. The second clay model, made by Steve Johnson in actual size, was better, although the upper body was too big and the head with its low forehead looked a bit ape-like. I corrected the figure’s appearance, using faxes and phone, so that she would remain beautiful even after her transformation.'

Johnson followed with Giger's request, noting Giger's perfectionism when it came to Sil. 'You're talking about a creative change of about a 1/4-inch, and the untrained eye would't even be able to notice it. Not a big deal - we just added a clear dome over her forehead.'

XFX had only ten weeks to construct the first of the Sil puppets before filming began. The Sil puppet was based on sculptures by Mike Hosch and Norman Cabrera.

From moulds of the sculptures, the puppet's components vacuformed in clear plastic, and cut up in pieces wherever the points of movement where to be.

One challenge Johnson had set for himself was that the puppet had to appear as life-like as possible, already complicated by Sil's translucent design. Johnson stated, 'Our creature has a complex skin process that allows light to penetrate, as well as play across the body structure. It is a unique and horrifying being, yet a thing of beauty as well. One of the coolest elements of the creature was that it’s translucent and you see through it, so it couldn't be done in the normal way. One thing that helped us out a lot was all the materials research we’d done for The Abyss previously for the floating aliens at the end.

You do a sculpture, a mold, a mask, then a paint job. I feel it doesn’t always move naturally or organically, or doesn’t wrinkle upon itself naturally. I wanted to make something a lot more organic than that for this film. It was my major goal to do that and make Giger happy.'

Foam rubber was used for the puppet's elbows, knees and hands, but a different material was used for the puppet's other translucent 'organic' areas; nylon! Johnson explained, 'Nothing was working, and we were running out of time so, in desperation, we tried nylon hose, grafting it in large sections with a few floating vacuformed pieces to help maintain the shape. It was a wonderful solution – so stretchy that no matter how the creature moved, it didn’t wrinkle like fabric. And, coated with K-Y jelly, it was virtually transparent – like a clear, fleshy membrane'.

Eric Feidler supervised the puppet's mechanics. The puppet's body was articulated via rod-puppeteering and marionette methods, while the skull's movements would be cable controlled. Johnson explained, 'Since the skull was visible behind the clear outer face, we thought it would be interesting to mechanize the head on the inside.So we put plates under the outer skin on top of the skull to effect brow movement, and added bands of texture under the cheeks.”

The animatronic Sil head was fitted with two sets of mobile teeth, and the animatronic head's eyes were fitted with mechanics that allowed it not just to blink, but to also change eye colour.

Another consideration for the Sil puppet was the hair, which was overseen by Shaun Smith and Brian Goehring. Johnson originally wished for Sil's hair to be a more ambitious effect.

'We explored the idea of mechanizing the strands independently for a Medusa effect but when that proved unfeasible, we ended up making three different hair constructs.

Two were non-articulated – one in a dormant shape and the other fanned out like a peacock tail – and the third, our hero version, had a double tentacle mechanism concealed under the strands to provide a snake-like, four-way movement at both the base and top. The strands were elasticized and attached in several places so that they functioned as one unit, moving in a graceful S-curve whenever Sil whipped her head around.'

The Sil puppets could have their limbs, heads and torso detached, which proved useful for the swimming pool attack sequence which was shot first! Johnson said about the added difficulty of filming a puppet in water, 'Anytime a puppet works in water it's always very difficult because it's harder to move in, and what you build has to work mechanically and cosmetically in water.'

In addition to the main Sil puppet, another specialized Sil puppet was made for the climactic scene where Sil gives birth. To achieve the shot, a puppeteer would force a dummy 'baby' through a membrance made of a type of adhesive.

Johnson explained, 'By using the membrane, we didn’t have to create a perfectly realistic baby – which would have been difficult to do. Once Sil sets it on the ground and begins to peel off the chrysalis, the camera cuts to a real baby.'

Giger was reportedly delighted by XFX's Sil puppet, to the point he sent Johnson a fax saying the XFX puppet was the best realization yet of any of Giger's designs. Johnson appreciated this so much, that he in turn printed out the fax and pinned it to the office wall!

Certain shots couldn't use either the puppet nor Boss Film Studio's digital model. For these shots, XFX supplied three foam rubber suits, made by Lynette Johnson, Dale Brady and Tamara Carlson, and painted by Moto Hata. The Sil suits were worn by kickboxer Dana Hee.

Hee being fitted into an early version of the suit.

One sequence where Dana Hee wore the suit was a dream sequence where Sil mates with a male of her, ahem, species. Johnson described the thought process behind the dream male's design, 'I wanted to really break up the human form, (similar to) what Giger did with the Alien using tubes running off the back and length of the head, so you didn’t quite know what you were looking at and it didn't look so much like a man-in-a-suit.’

The dream male alien mask being sculpted.

Johnson elaborated on the 'dream man' alien suit, 'We broke up the human form on the male with a series of twelve-foot protuberances – like enormous crab claws – extending down the back, and a penile tentacle protruding off the back of the head.'

XFX also was tasked with the film's other effects, in particularly the gelatinous cocoons that Sil would be 'born' from. The blob-like creature in the laboratory scenes, surprisingly used more puppets than the main Sil monster did! Johnson explained,'

'We used over 20 different puppets to create a two-minute sequence. It was one shot after another, with each shot requiring a separate strategy: gravity tricks, different puppeis, opticals...We were very excited about it —and very nervous.

'We took a real lateral approach to the cocoon and several of the lab creature effects. We show this organism grow from a single cell throughout twenty different effects all the way into a 10-foot chrysalis. Chrysalis supervisor Bill Bryan and I came up with a way to actually create creatures without using rubber molds. A real organic, lateral approach to actually creating animatronics... What it basically involved was forming layers of polyeurathane plastic that we then manipulated with pneumatics by applying negative and positive air pressure.

We then painted them with colored gels, overlapping them. So we ended up with something that moved much more organically than a foam rubber piece ever could. Like muscles moving underneath, skin sliding on top of that and wrinkling where it naturally would — I’m very pleased with that. It’s probably one of the most innovative things we did in the film.'

XFX also handled the film's shocker moments of gore and body horror, such as the shot were pickle-like tendrils erupt out of young Michelle Williams' face. The effect was achieved via prosthetic makeup, as Johnson explained.

'It’s a combination of two very distinctly different techniques; one being makeup effects and the other CGI. She has appliances on her face and underneath those are little buttons and we attached mono-filament to those buttons, and just out of frame, pulled the wire. The computer department took care of removing the wires And there’s really no other way you can get that direct kind of movement.

Then we went to another method and had the worms actually break through the skin using the same technique which had pre-scored skin on top of the buttons, so it would look like a worm beginning to grow out. Once that had gone three or four inches, then the CGI took off.'

Another gruesome effects shot was where Sil, in a fit of jealousy, rips out the spine of some unlucky party girl. This was achieved via a prosthetic which a false spine could be yanked out by the performer in the Sil suit.

XFX also supplied dummy heads in actors likenesses, for shots of Sil smashing them; one of the many plot elements Giger was unhappy about, as he felt it was retreading Alien.

XFX also supplied the more understated makeup effects, such as Alfred Molina's cut face, the prosthetic finger that gets sliced off, and of course the baby dummy for Sil's birthing scene.

Despite XFX's massive workload, the lion's share of the creature's scenes still went to Boss Film Studio's digital Sil. As reference for Sil's movements, Edlund's team would construct a small puppet first.

Andre Bustanoby and Ken Dudderar built a miniature Sil armature. The Sil armature was more advanced than Boss Film's earlier attempts at making motion capture puppets, as Bustanoby explained in Cinefex;

'The Sil armature is a third-generation device. Our first armature was one the model shop originally made for a dinosaur test in response to a potential project requiring enormous amounts of animation input instead of only key-framing. Then we did a cow for a Kellogg’s commercial – really our first production use of it. All the while we were learning and making mistakes and seeing where we could improve.

The Sil armature was designed so that it could be reused for later productions as well, as Bustanoby explained, 'With our first- and second-generation armatures, we were locked into a particular configuration once they were built. I wanted this one to be like a tinker toy set that you could break down into its component parts and basically reconfigure in an infinite number of ways. So we constructed it as sort of a smart armature, with each joint a self-contained unit equipped with its own circuitry. That way, we could pre-program it, throw it in a box and use it later to create a new character in a fraction of the time it would take to build one from scratch.'

Craig Talmy, the lead motion capture puppeteer, explained how the armature's actions were operated to match the footage recorded by Donaldson. 'My job was to correspond the puppet’s performance to background footage of the cavern which consisted of prerecorded film dumped into the computer and played back at a given frame rate. If a shot required a lot of intricate moves, we could slow the playback down to maybe three frames a second – whatever was needed to get the take. The system allowed us to accomplish far more than a standard CGI department doing key-framing. Plus it gave the director room to reject something or change his mind about a shot without slowing things down.'

Boss Film's motion capture Sil armature.

Giger was thoroughly displeased with how production of Species had went, but it was Boss Film's digital Sil that particularly drew his ire. Giger was quoted as saying in Cinefantastique;

'Visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund once called the mechanized puppet of Sil, built by makeup effects expert Steve Johnson, a "transparent pin-up girl.” Thus, two completely different Sils appeared in the movie. There was the — for me, aesthetically convincing — transparent puppet built by Johnson and the other, absolutely not transparent, teeth-gnashing, unaesthetic computer-Sil, which has nothing to do with my ideas.

Unfortunately, this computer-controlled, frog-like ugliness appears in the last ten minutes of the film and I can only hope that viewers will not consider it synonymous with my work. I want to distance myself from this Sil, which has nothing to do with my concept.'

The CGI Sil that Giger so despised.

Johnson, who had done his best to adhere to Giger's vision, was more neutral on the experience, but still understood Giger's frustrations.

'I had one phone call with (Giger) after he saw the film where I commiserated with him. I feel badly for him that he didn’t get his image necessarily shown a lot. And for the first time it was one he really liked, so he would’ve been very happy to have it seen. It’s probably more of a disappointment for him than me because I understand the Hollywood process a little better.

The reason I have no bad feelings is it was just such a wonderful, positive experience. I know that we were all on the same team and made the movie that was ultimately their choice to make. But I really can’t complain because as much as Giger’s unhappy, I think he’s unhappy because he’s not as directly involved in the film and doesn’t quite understand as well that it’s a group effort all the time.

It’s not really fair to criticize after the fact until we’re out there producing and directing our own film. I don’t think we’re ever going to get our artistic images exactly the way we want them.'

Johnson also felt the experience had been positive as it encouraged the XFX artists to think outside the box. 'I did a lot of research at the start, and had a revelation of sorts. I came to the conclusion that our industry has gotten so stuck in accepted techniques that we may have forgotten what creating reality is all about. In Species, nothing we did was standard technique – but it was, hands down, the best work we’ve ever done.'

At the very least, Giger was so impressed with Johnson's work on Species that he commissioned XFX to build a replica Sil display prop after production wrapped. The display Sil still resides in the HR Giger Museum today.

The replica Sil sculpture.

Sources:

• Starlog #218 'In the Blood' by Bill Warren
• Fangoria #144 'Supervising Species' by Marc Shapiro
• Cinefantastique Vol. 27 #7 (March 1996)
• Cinefex #63 'CAPTURING AN ALIEN SPECIES' & 'AN ENDANGERING SPECIES' by Estelle Shay
• World of Fandom Vol. 2 Issue #26 'SPECIES, MGM, Sil, the Ghost Train, and Frustrations of H.R. Giger' by Joseph B. Mauceri
• Assorted bluray featurettes