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IF FX: Creature Feature
[Thu 28/05/2009 06:02:47]
Patrick Tatopoulos can do anything he puts his mind to. Rodney Appleyard finds out what is next for the creature designer.
Patrick Tatopoulos was following his dream of being a professional surfer in Greece, before he stumbled across a copy of SFX magazine Cinefex and decided to try his hand at special make-up effects design in Hollywood.
That stroke of luck spurred a 20-year career working with creatures that has included big Hollywood blockbusters such as I,Robot, 10,000 BC and Eragon. His career – including most recently directing Underworld: Rise of the Lycans – is all the more remarkable considering he was only one day away from forgetting his Hollywood dream.
“As you can tell from my accent, I was born in France, but my father was Greek. When I was in my 20s, I went to Greece to live for a while. I remember being on a beach, painting surfboards, when one day my friend came to me and said: ‘Hey, look at this magazine!’ It was the first Cinefex I had seen in my life.
“In my spare time I had been drawing creatures and murals 33 and I was pretty much a hippy kind of guy, trying out lots of different stuff. When I looked at this magazine I thought: ‘Wow!
There’s people in Hollywood who make all of these really cool creatures and monsters that I see in the movies.’ “I’d never thought about the people behind the scenes before. I instantly knew that I really needed to do this. So I bought some ceramic clay, sculpted five or six creatures and painted them. A friend of mine took pictures and I headed off to LA with my portfolio.”
When he arrived in LA, he only had one week to show his work to industry stalwarts such as Stan Winston and Rick Baker.
“However, when I actually got to LA, my suitcase was stuck in Amsterdam, so it didn’t make it through at first. For five days I couldn’t show my work to anybody. I ended up losing all of my meetings. But the day before I was meant to head back to Greece, my suitcase arrived. In the end, I only had time to see one very small company, called Make-up Effects Lab.
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