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Special Feature: Make-up master Rick Baker
[Tue 08/07/2008 03:55:44]
By Rodney Appleyard
Rick Baker is arguably the best special effects make-up artist in the world right now. He spoke to us about his experiences on great films, such as An American Werewolf In London,Coming To America and Planet of The Apes.
Rick Baker has already won six Oscars for his groundbreaking work and is still setting the limits for every other artist out there.
Whether it be creating incredible werewolf transformations, stunning animatronic apes, unforgettable characters and faultless make-ups, let’s face it, nobody does it better.
And now with his beautifully conceived and executed old age make-ups for the move Click, he has become so much more than Rick Baker Monster Maker.
Rodney Appleyard spoke to him about how a hobby turned him into a living legend.
“I was one of the first generations of children who grew up in front of the TV screen and look at what happened to me. I was brought up in a family with very little money, but we eventually bought a small TV, which I used to watch monster/horror movies, science fiction series and fantasy films.
"One day I went to the supermarket with my mother and started reading the magazine called Famous Monsters. I found out about all these guys who made monsters for a living so I decided that’s what I wanted to do too. I started very early as a kid and was fortunate enough to have a very creative father who knew something about painting, sculpting and a little bit about mould-making.
"He pointed me in the right direction in terms how to make a mask and then I researched the rest in books I borrowed from the library.”
Baker had already created quite a few impressive inventions by himself by the time he had the good fortune of meeting Dick Smith at the age of 18, after sending him a letter full of photographs.
“I lived in California at the time and he lived in New York. When I sent him my letter he was blown away by the stuff I had done and invited me over to meet him. I spent the day with him. He gave me this yellow pad and said: ‘I’m going to tell you a lot of stuff which I think you should write down so that you don’t forget it.’ Within one day he helped my work improve 2000 percent. He told me everything I wanted to know and provided me with all kinds of formulas. I immediately just wanted to go back to my little make-up bedroom and put all this stuff to use.”
After this meeting with Smith the two of them kept in touch and sent each other pictures of what they were making. And then one day Baker received a call form Smith in a panic when he was working on The Exorcist.
“He was pretty much a one man show and did everything in his basement by himself. He had prepared all of the appliances for Linda Blair already, but on the first day of production he was asked to replace them with new make-up. Smith said to me: ‘I need some help!’.
"So I joined him and ended up sleeping in one of his sons’ room, who was at college at the time. I worked in the basement with him and it was an amazing experience. Dick showed me everything he had made throughout his career and how he worked with foam rubber. Just to be with him, to see how he worked and watch him put make-ups together was incredible. All I did was make moulds, clean things up, run foams and very little sculpting, but it was fantastic.”
Despite receiving so much encouragement from the Godfather of make-up, he was not welcomed so warmly by the make-up unions initially. Bob Burns, the first make-up artist he ever met when he was 15 years old, introduced him to the make-up union because he was so impressed with the work that Baker had already made at such a young age.
“So I went to the union with a box full of masks, appliances, pictures of make-ups and fake heads. But the union rep. told me that I was never going to get into the industry. He said: ‘Most of the time you’re going to be mopping sweat off a bitchy actress.’ It was very disappointing and kind of gave me a: “F**k you attitude!!” I couldn’t believe that nobody would use me if I was good. I felt like: “O.K., I’ll prove you wrong, you bastard!” It made me work much harder in fact. At that stage there was a lot of nepotism involved and you had to be born into it or you had to be close friends with somebody.”
Later on when he worked on King Kong, other make-up artists from the union would say to him: ‘We know about you kid, and you’re not going to get in.’
“I thought: ‘What did I do? What do you know about me? I spent most of my life trying to be a make-up artist and work to the best of my ability.’ The major thing the union did back then involved protecting the incompetent workers. They didn’t want talented people to get in there and take their jobs from them. They spent a lot of their time trying to keep those people out, and I was one of them.”
Against the odds, he eventually made it into the union, but he quickly got sick and tired of their seemingly pointless meetings. At one point Smith called Baker up to tell him that the union were going to inflict the steepest fines on them if they used the terms: “Special Make-Up Effects”, or “Make-Up Consultant” in their credits.
“So myself, Dick Smith, John Chambers, Stan Winston and a few others went to the union to challenge them about this. They said: ‘We find it offensive that you use the term special effects because it refers to sweaty welders and we’re artists.’ Firstly, I don’t agree with that statement, especially since people like Ray Harryhausen have created so much great work in the past.
"So I replied: ‘Wait a minute, I’ve seen movies where the make-up artist is the craft service guy who brings candy to the set, but WE’RE getting the credit up there with costume designers and directors of photography, and you find that offensive? You’d rather us be credited after the craft service guy?’ The reply was: ‘We regret that you won’t have a credit with the term special effects in it.’ Again, it gave me a: ‘F**k you attitude! I’d been in Life magazine and most other major magazines with the word make-up in it, so I said: ‘Instead of fighting us, you should be paying us for elevating the status of make-up artists.’”
However, despite these difficulties, Baker now believes that the unions have changed for the better and after winning six Oscars he is finally accepted as a make-up artist by the unions. A major turning point that led to these attitudes changing was the film An American Werewolf In London, for which he won the first ever Best Make-up Oscar at the 1981 Academy Awards for his groundbreaking work on this film.
“To be honest, I never expected to win an Oscar for An American Werewolf because it was a horror movie. But when I won I tried to give a reasonable speech and represent make-up well. But all I got back from the union was grief! They said: ‘How dare you not thank us for all we’ve done for you?’
"I thought: ‘What have you done apart from being a pain in the ass.’ I even received hate mail. But for me there is stuff in that movie that makes me cringe when I look back at it now. I could do it much better these days.”
Next, John Landis (director of An American Werewolf in London) invited Baker to work on Thriller with Michael Jackson. Baker enjoyed working with Jackson very much on this project, which is still considered a landmark music video.
Another person Baker really enjoys working with is Eddie Murphy, who he transformed into multiple characters over the years, including an old Jewish man in Coming to America, which was another Landis project.
“The funny thing is at first I thought I wouldn’t be able to work with this guy. This is because whilst I was doing his lifecast he kept pulling it off to tell jokes to his whole entourage. Landis (director of Coming to America) said to me at the time: ‘Rick, you are going to see more black people today than you have ever seen in your whole life.’ Sure enough, Eddie turned up with a whole load of big scary black guys who were basically like a travelling party, which Eddie was the star of.
"At one stage I had already put on his life mask, wrapped up the back half of his head in plaster bandage and I was in the middle of mixing up the alginate to do the front. When mixing it up you have a limited amount of working time because you are concentrating on making a good mix and ensuring that it isn’t lumpy.
"As I was doing this, I looked up and he had completely pulled out the back half of the life mask so that he could lean over and tell some jokes to the guys watching him. So I grabbed his head and shoved it back in. This ended up with everything flapping around.”
So after that I went to Landis and said: “I know I sound like a real pussy but it’s a really intense time, which involves trying to get these pieces down with thin tissue edges, and trying to get them to blend underneath the skin. If you glue it and the person is moving or talking at the wrong time you can totally screw it up and have to start all over again. I can’t do this in the middle of making Eddie into a white Jewish guy with all these people around.”
But Landis refused to tell Murphy and made Baker tell him about the situation. “So I called him up and explained it all to him and Eddie replied: ‘O.K. But can I sometimes have maybe one person in there?’ I said: “Yes, but if it it’s at the wrong moment, for instance when I’m gluing down your mouth and you can’t talk, then I’m going to have to ask that person to leave.’
"And then he was great about it. That’s when I really started my love affair with Eddie. The old Jewish guy make-up consisted of 16/18 pieces. So I sat Eddie in the chair and stuck the cheek on him first of all and then started to glue the next thing on. He started to make faces straight away, seeing what came through the rubber and what didn’t and then he said: ‘Ooh, that’s good.’”
“A lot of people who I’ve made up before in the past usually complain about you not making them look good because you’re covering up their face. But he wasn’t like that at all. The more stuff I put on him, the more he played with it and had fun with it too.
"When he was all made up he said: ‘This is so much better than I ever imagined it would be and so much more real than the Jewish guy I perform. I’m going to have to re-think this. What I do is such a stereotype but this is real.’ I ended up using a video camera and pointing it in the mirrors so that I could film him performing and improvising. He came up with some hysterical stuff.
"Some of the things he came out with were also very moving and touching and I thought: ‘Wow, this guy is a lot more talented than I thought he was.’ That was really a different experience for me. He has fun with the make-up and likes becoming somebody else.
"There were times when I just wanted to put the brush down and watch him perform. You know you can take longer because all you have to say is: ‘We were over schedule today because Eddie was goofing around.’ And that’s o.k..”
Baker may have found himself a new actor/make-up artist partnership following the work he did recently on Click with Adam Sandler. For this movie he had to age about 20 people and it was a huge challenge for Baker’s team. For the fat make-up on Sandler, they had to create an incredibly elaborate mould with a collapsible core so as to create a silicone appliance without seams. It was a huge mould with a core made up of 13 different pieces that were all held together with magnets.
The silicone appliance that was made using this mould was very difficult to put in place and had to be applied very delicately because of the enormous size of the make-up. Yet again, the work that Baker and his team achieved on this movie is considered to be groundbreaking. With pre-production times on movies becoming more and more ridiculously short (for instance, he was given four months to create the characters for Planet of the Apes, instead of the year that he believed was necessary) Baker is often tempted to take a rest from the industry. But thankfully when the right project comes along, he still finds it difficult to walk away from it totally. And for that, the industry, in the industry can breath a sigh of relief.
Baker Fact File:
- Rick Baker played Kong in the 1976 Dino De Laurentiis King Kong.
- Baker is the pilot who shoots Kong in Peter Jackson’s King Kong – thus effectively killing himself.
- When Christopher Lee asked why he had to do another take on Gremlins 2 just because the puppet got it wrong, Rick replied: “Because this movie is called ‘Gremlins’, not ‘Actors’.
- Baker first worked with Landis on Schlock. During this movie Landis not only played the ape-like Schlock but he also directed it too.
- Baker calls Eddie Murphy his ‘Boris Karloff’, referring to the other successful actor/make-up artist combo of Boris Karloff and Jack Pierce.
- Kong is not the only ape Baker has played. He also plays an ape in Kentucky Fried Movie, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, The Thing with Two Heads, and he is also the pipe-smoking ape in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes.
- Rick named the ape in Kentucky Fried Movie ‘Dino” to spoof Dino De Laurentiis, who produced the 1976 King Kong.
- He made his first make-ups when he was 10 with in pie dough.
- You can spot him as an alien disguise fitter in Men In Black 2.
- Universal’s Frankenstein is still one of his favourite movies.
- He would like to be asked to do one more werewolf transformation, as he believes he can do it better than anyone utilising old school techniques with modern technology.
After this meeting with Smith the two of them kept in touch and sent each other pictures of what they were making. And then one day Baker received a call form Smith in a panic when he was working on 
Later on when he worked on 
However, despite these difficulties, Baker now believes that the unions have changed for the better and after winning six Oscars he is finally accepted as a make-up artist by the unions. A major turning point that led to these attitudes changing was the film 
"At one stage I had already put on his life mask, wrapped up the back half of his head in plaster bandage and I was in the middle of mixing up the alginate to do the front. When mixing it up you have a limited amount of working time because you are concentrating on making a good mix and ensuring that it isn’t lumpy. 
"Some of the things he came out with were also very moving and touching and I thought: ‘Wow, this guy is a lot more talented than I thought he was.’ That was really a different experience for me. He has fun with the make-up and likes becoming somebody else. 
