Ahoy, folks! Quint here with a truly fascinating interview with Ray Harryhausen. If you've ever gotten the chance to meet Mr. Harryhausen in person, then you know how soft spoken and genuinely kind he is. I've had the lucky chance to meet Mr. Harryhausen twice in my life... I didn't get many words with the man, but I did see how he treated his fans and how his fans treated him, with quiet respect. There aren't many out there like Ray Harryhausen. I found the below interview, sent in by Scott Essman, to be insightful and a damn fine read. Now, I give it to you!
RAY HARRYHAUSEN
Interviewed by Scott Essman for BELOW THE LINE NEWS
Concluding Question by Stephan Lokotsch of MovieFX Magazine
April 16, 2004
How does one create an introduction to perhaps the finest below-the-line cinema craftsman to ever have lived? Stop-motion animator and filmmaker Ray Harryhausen’s achievements and influence are incalculable. Numerous giants in the world of cinema have cited his work, especially in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad in 1958, as the most profound reason that they attempted a career in films. Mr. Harryhausen has taken upon himself to provide a detailed overview of his career with a new book, An Animated Life, co-written by Tony Dalton. Harryhausen, 84, who retired from making films in 1980, lives in England, but still makes journeys to his hometown of Los Angeles to meet with friends, colleagues and protÈgÈs. On a recent book tour, he took precious time out of his hectic schedule to reflect on the book, his pioneering career, and the future of animation in film.
SCOTT: Mr. Harryhausen, how proud are you of your book finally coming out for the whole world to see?
RAY H: Well, I’m delighted with the book. Billboard Books in England, of course, published it, and did a beautiful job of it. Co-author Tony Dalton and I are very proud of it. It’s gotten wonderful reviews, and we’re looking forward to it being released here in America. Some people have it through Amazon. And fortunately, the first 5,000 books sold out in four weeks. So we’re looking forward to a big sale here in America. We have a lot of fans here from various conventions and different phases of the special effects world. So we’re looking forward to that.
SCOTT: Have you ever stopped to think about how many fans you have, and how many people were influenced by your work, and maybe even indirectly by the work of people who followed your work, such as Phil Tippett and Jim Danforth and Dave Allen? Has that ever crossed your mind?
RAY H: When we made the pictures, of course, it wouldn’t cross one’s mind. But I’m so grateful that we’ve left a positive influence. Charles Schneer and I tried to make our pictures understandable, and on a good plane. We always got the best composers. Music is so important. I learned that from watching King Kong. And we had wonderful composers score our films because they’re a visual type of thing. We try to keep a minimum of dialogue. Sometimes we’re criticized for that. But you don’t want a complicated story for a fantasy film. And music’s so important when you have striking visual images, which we tried to create on the screen. We had Bernard Hermann score four of our films. And the last, Clash of the Titans, was done by Laurence Rosenthal. Marvelous composers who have great imagination and a feel for fantasy.
SCOTT: When you think about the impact of Willis O’Brien’s work on your work, do you think it was a complete effect where you wouldn’t have done what you ended up doing without his work? Or do you think you might have gravitated toward stop-motion anyway?
RAY H: Oh, that’s all speculation. I say sometimes that if the 1976 version had come out in 1933, I probably would have become a plumber or something. But my mother wanted me to become a commercial artist. I don’t know… somehow it gelled. I think the fickle finger of fate had something to do with it. Because of little signposts here and there, I felt a compulsion to do certain things. And I don’t know where that comes from. But I felt a compulsion to study camera work.
When I entered the Army, I thought I wanted to be a combat cameraman. I didn’t realize they were shot like clay pigeons. So I’m glad I didn’t. But I got transferred into the Special Service Division. Basically because I made a little film, four minutes long, called How to Build a Bridge. And my teacher showed it tohe showed it to Frank Capra, and I got transferred into the Special Service Division. And I worked with Ted Geisel on cartoons and made models and several covers for Yank magazine. So it was a great experience that I got to do something during the war that I was able to do, rather than just carry a gun.
SCOTT: What do you think is the most important thing you learned from O’Brien on, say, working on Mighty Joe Young?
RAY H: Well, I think I learned many things from watching Kong. Which in turn, was O’Bie. He had to project himself into Kong. And that made it so much easier when I was animating Mighty Joe Young. Because I almost felt that I was projecting O’Bie and myself into the figure. We had a mutual respect for one and other, and particularly that he was my mentor. And I worked with him on the preparation period of Mighty Joe Young, which lasted about eight months before the picture was even considered a viable project. And so I knew pretty well how O’Bie was thinking. And I’m so grateful O’Bie was influenced by people like Charles Knight. He was influenced by his background. There were very few people ahead of him that were interested in stop-motion. So he’s sort of the grandfather, in America, of stop-motion photography.
So I tried to go on from O’Brien’s work and then ILM picked up. And the snowball rolls on and gets bigger and bigger and now we have the computer animators who say that our films affected them. So I’m grateful that we’ve left a positive influence. And Charles Schneer and myself really tried to make pictures that were constructive rather than destructive. I rather pity some of the young people today who are growing up in this atmosphere of violence, nothing but violence, you can only settle a problem by the fist or the gun. And it‘s not a proper atmosphere. It’s rather disturbing, I find it.
SCOTT: In the films of the ‘50s, the black-and-white ones, It Came from Outer Space and 20,000,000 Miles to Earth, it seemed like you were creating your own distinct style, especially with like the Ymir character. Do you think those characters were different from any that had come before it?
RAY H: Well, I don’t analyze it in that way. I leave it to other people on the outside. You can analyze it--they wrote a book called Girl in the Hairy Paw, which tried to portray King Kong in many psychological different phases. And you can read anything. It’s like an inkblot. I think a film is like an inkblot. It tells you more about the person who’s watching it than it does about the film itself. Merian Cooper always says that he just set out to make a damn good piece of entertainment. And that’s what we set out: to entertain the public in a positive way.
And I’m grateful that we have; when I go to these various conventions that I tried to illustrate in the book, family of three generations will come up for signatures on their stills or what have you, and say that our films made their childhood. Because Charles and I were the only producing company that made films of that nature. I can’t think of any other one that did. Some people tried to copy it afterward. And then, of course, we destroyed Washington; we destroyed Coney Island; I destroyed Rome, made new ruins among the old. And it got tiresome, so I wanted to hop onto a new idea, which to use stop-motion photography.
And, of course, the Sinbad legend came to mind. And for that we developed three Sinbad pictures. And the next step, of course, was Greek mythology. Because when I grew up we had Arabian Nights stories. They would talk about the Cyclops. They would talk about the Roc. But you never saw them on the screen. So I wanted to put the storybook concept on the screen. And I think we succeeded in doing that.
SCOTT: What’s your favorite of the films?
RAY H: When you’re making low budget pictures, you always have to compromise. And, unfortunately, we had to compromise on many of our projects. But I think Jason was the most complete.
SCOTT: Any particular reason?
RAY H: Well, I think it tells what we wanted to tell in a very reliable way. They’re even using the film in schools now to teach Greek mythology. Even though we had to modify Greek mythology in order to make a palatable film.
SCOTT: Is it fair to say that the seven skeletons are the most complicated of the animations that you did?
RAY H: It was one of the most complicated; took the most time. One tries to avoid time-consuming shots like dollying and moving a camera because we were making pictures on a low budget and every minute counts. And every ounce of dollar counts. And we tried to put that on the screen. And I think we succeeded.
SCOTT: What’s your favorite character? Or do you have a favorite character?
RAY H: The others get jealous if I have a favorite character. I like the complicated ones. I like the Hydra, the skeletons, seven skeletons fighting scene. They’re a challenge. I like Medusa. I think that’s one of the highlights. I still find a soft spot in my heart for the first scenes I did in Mighty Joe Young of Joe pushing over the lions’ cage. I think that’s one of the highlights of my career.
SCOTT: For what reason?
RAY H: Well, it all worked out the way I had imagined it. The lion in the cage and pushing it over. I did it all in three days as a complete sequence. And then it was edited by the editor, the film editor, into cutting close-ups of the live actors in. But the original scene was all shot in three days as one unit.
SCOTT: Wasn’t the lion projected into the cage?
RAY H: The lion was double printed in through the cage, yes. In another pass.
SCOTT: And there was a stop-motion lion.
RAY H: Stop-motion lion that leaped out of the cage. That was the only time the stop-motion lion was used. Outside of in the nightclub when they jumped on Joe’s back.
SCOTT: Right. And you did, you estimate, 80 per cent of the animation?
RAY H: Oh, more than that. 90 per cent. O’Bie was setting up the next shot, and getting it prepared, so that we could keep a continuity.
SCOTT: And didn’t Pete Peterson work on the film too?
RAY H: He worked on some of the shots later. But I did most of the shots. And we had Buzz Gibson came back with his brother, and he stayed for about five weeks, I suppose. But they never used any of his film. He complained the models were too small, but we did that for a reason.
SCOTT: My favorite character of all the characters would be Ymir. And there’s one reason: he’s not a bad character. He’s provoked into violence.
RAY H: That’s correct, yes. By the farmer stabbing him with a pitchfork.
SCOTT: And if he hadn’t done that, he would have been an innocent alien creature.
RAY H: He was. He wasn’t a vicious creature. And we tried to get sympathy with our demonic characters that people are not too familiar with. But in order to get sympathy for him, he was a misplaced person. That’s why I like to call them creatures and not monsters.
SCOTT: He was also very sympathetic, I thought. Even at the end, when he’s jumbling up Rome, it’s almost like King Kong: you feel that he didn’t deserve to die.
RAY H: Yeah. There’s a lot of influence of Kong in that, too.
SCOTT: Was it a conscious influence?
RAY H: Oh, yes. I mean, what else could you do? In Rome, he had to get on top of the Coliseum. In New York, he had to get on top of the Empire State Building.
SCOTT: The designs for the different characters: some of them came from mythology, but some of them were completely your original idea. Where do you think these ideas came from?
RAY H: They develop. You don’t just say, “Eureka! This is the way it’ll be.” They develop. The Ymir developed. First he had two eyes, then I had him cyclopean with one eye. In one drawing I made, he had two horns. But I wasn’t happy with him, he was too bulky. So I went back to the basic idea of a humanoid type of figure, because then you can put humanoid things in it without being a send-up. If you try to make a dinosaur humanoid, it’s like a cartoon. It’s a send-up. And that was the mistake in the Son of Kong. They made Kong do these funny things which it finally became tongue-in-cheek send-up. Which I don’t find suitable for these type of pictures.
SCOTT: In The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, the Centaur versus the Griffin, was that purely from mythology, or did you add some of your own ideas into how the characters would look?
RAY H: You mean the character, the Griffin?
SCOTT: And the Centaur.
RAY H: Well, basically I was influenced by Gustave DorÈ’s concept of Roland the Furious.
SCOTT: And also in the Centaur, half man, half horse?
RAY H: Yes, we made it a cyclopean, just to make it a little different. I understand David Bowie copied the Centaur’s haircut. At least that’s what I read somewhere.
SCOTT: Another favorite character, for the sympathetic reasons that I like the Ymir, was the Trog in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. He’s sort of a brute that doesn’t know his own strength.
RAY H: Yes. We didn’t want to make him completely brutal. I’m rather proud of some of the animation. A lot of people think it was a man in a suit, but it wasn’t. It was completely animated. And I think there’s some wonderful animation, but they’re seldom recognized by critics. The same with the baboon. We tried. A lot of people think the baboon was a live baboon.
But we’ve never used live animals, except in One Million B.C., I used an iguana in one shot. Because the theory was that if it was a live lizard, you would better accept the animated characters. But the thing reversed on me, and I was sorry that I did that. But we didn’t have time to animate another animal. We had to cut out the brontosaurus sequence in One Million B.C. because of time and money. But that was the only time I used live lizards.
SCOTT: All of the characters were stop-motion except for little pieces of characters that you would need to build, right, for certain close-ups and things. Like in the Clash of the Titans, Calibos was also a make-up creation.
RAY H: Yes. That started out to be a total animated character, but then we felt it needed dialogue explanations. And I talked with Beverly Cross, I worked with him on the script, and when they put live action dialogue, it’s very difficult to make a convincing lip sync with animated models. They start to look like a puppet. So we felt that by having an actor do the dialogue, and then I make the puppet in the long shots, we could solve the problem. Which I think it worked out quite well. And the shots where Harry Hamlin is fighting him in the swamp is an animated model. We had Harry go through the gestures as a shadow boxing, and then I put the monster in the proper place to match his movements.
SCOTT: The only other one I found in the films that was not a complete stop-motion character was a pterodactyl in Gwanji? They capture it in the Valley of Gwanji. At a certain point, it’s a real puppet.
RAY H: The close-up, right. How many times did you have to see it before you found it? Of course we had a big mock-up of Gwanji when he put the rope around his mouth. That was a big prop. But we tried to keep within very limited budgets. So you have to make many compromises sometimes.
SCOTT: How do you feel about what’s happened to stop-motion right now, in that there’s still people who do it: Henry Selick...
RAY H: Yes, but those are puppet films. They’re not the type of films we made. They’re obvious puppet films. They’re stylized. Aardman Animation did some marvelous things. Chicken Run was a delight. But it’s obvious stylized puppet film. It’s not the type of film that we made.
SCOTT: So how do you feel about what happened to the kind of films that you made?
RAY H: Well, I don’t know. We made them, and I’m happy we made them. And if we remain unique, and nobody else does anything quite like it. I’m delighted.
SCOTT: Do you think it’s fair to say that the computer-animated world has taken over?
RAY H: It has by hype mainly. But it also defeats itself, because in a 30-second commercial, you see the most amazing images. So the amazing image is no longer unique. In the ‘50s, to see something special on the screen was an experience. Like Kong, in the ‘30s, when you saw it on a big screen. People who see Kong for the first time on a small screen, it’s not the same film. It’s a different film. But you see Kong for the first time on a 30-foot screen, it’s a powerful film. But on the little box, it just becomes another unusual monster picture.
SCOTT: If O’Bie was the grandfather of stop-motion, and you were the father, the spiritual father, is it fair to say that Phil Tippett, Dave Allen, Jim Danforth and Doug Beswick are the children of stop-motion? Is that a fair comparison?
RAY H: Well, I suppose if other people compare it, yes. I never compare it that way, but once you make a film, it’s up to the public to how they see it.
SCOTT: Do you see your techniques being used now by current animators?
RAY H: Sometimes. But I don’t think anybody’s done a film quite like ours since.
SCOTT: Why do you think that is?
RAY H: I have no idea. They don’t want to. We wanted to. And as Bradbury said when we had a session today at Clifton’s Cafeteria -- you’ve got to put love into it. And we put love into all our films. Because we wanted to do them more than anything else. I make a lot of sacrifices personally because I wanted to see the picture finished and put on the screen. Unfortunately, O’Bie had many projects that fell through. I was very lucky. I think that most of the projects that we started saw the screen.
But O’Bie did many preparations like Gwanji in the early days, and War Eagles, that never matured. He wanted to do Frankenstein at one time and it never reached the screen. So I’m grateful that we were able to complete Gwanji. And I’m glad that our pictures have been more appreciated today than when they were first released.
STEPHAN: What, if anything, do you find awe-inspiring today in filmmaking or special effects?
RAY H: Well, I think computer generated images are awesome. Little Gollum in Lord of the Rings is a remarkable character. But again, you have a big crew doing that. They have all the time in the world, all the money in the world. When we had to make pictures, and nine tenths of everything you see in our films were the first takes. We never had time to refine it. In stop-motion, you have to start all over again to refine it. But with computer generated images, you can have a dozen people work on that image and refine it and refine it before it reaches the screen. And that wasn’t possible in our day.
So the computer is a remarkable thing. And I have a great respect for it. But it is a tool. It doesn’t mean you have to use a computer for every type of story. I think different types of story--animation adds that dream quality. Kong is like a nightmare. It has that dream quality. You don’t want it too realistic. Even today, with some of the faults you may see, it’s a great film.
SCOTT: Thank you so much. I mean this in all honesty: your work is a gift to the world.
RAY H: Well, thank you. I’m glad that it’s left a positive influence.
Scott Essman lives in the LA area and writes regularly about cinema craftspeople. He can be reached at scottessman@yahoo.com.
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