SPECIAL EFFECTS WIZARD: RAY HARRYHAUSEN
By Ted A. Bohus

Ray Harryhausen is a wizard in the field of special effects and a pioneer in the art of stop motion photography whose career has spanned more than five decades. After being inspired by seeing KING KONG, he began very modestly, creating his own armatures and animating out of his parents garage in Los Angeles where he grew up. In the 40’s he created the wonderful puppet film series MOTHER GOOSE STORIES and later worked for two years on George Pal’s PUPPETOONS.
Soon after, the dream of a feature film came true with his work on MIGHTY JOE YOUNG. What followed was a string of fantasy films unsurpassed in their variety and innovation. His talent and vision has inspired filmmakers all over the world to go out and try to duplicate the magic he created on the big screen. Some of his films include the classic MIGHTY JOE YOUNG in the 40’s, THE SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD, 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH, and THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS in the 50’s. In the 60’s he gave us JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS, MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, and FIRST MEN IN THE MOON. The 70’s brought THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD and SINBAD AND THE EYE OF THE TIGER. His last film was CLASH OF THE TITANS.
Amazingly, Mr. Harryhausen has never won an Academy Award for special effects. This changed when he was presented with the Gordon E. Sawyer Award for lifetime achievement.

•RAY HARRYHAUSEN INTERVIEW •
TED: How did it feel getting the Gordon E. Sawyer Award for lifetime achievement?

RAY: I was delighted, absolutely delighted. It was a big surprise to me. A fan that I didn’t know very well sort of spearheaded the whole thing and it came out the blue, so I was quite surprised when Karl Malden called me up and said that you’ve won the Gordon E. Sawyer Award.

TED: It’s about time. In my opinion, you should have a roomful of Oscars. Of all the films you’ve done, which one is your favorite?

RAY: I don’t know, one has bits and pieces of each film that you fall in love with and I think you enjoy the ones that challenge you the most. I suppose Jason and the Argonauts would be the most complete film that I’m delighted with. There are bits and pieces I would like to do all over again but that’s wishful thinking.

TED: If you could redo certain sequences from some of your films, which ones would you choose?

RAY: Oh, I can’t name any specifically but in every film you’re subject to the curse of making a picture on a limited budget and therefore you have to pass many times, things you would like to change. When I see them years later I always say “If only I had taken ten minutes more...or twenty minutes more to do that scene I could have made it much better”. But that’s hindsight and you can’t indulge in that too much.

Most of the takes you see were the first take. It was very rarely that we had the time to make two or three takes of each scene. When you think about it you have 350 or 380 scenes to do. If your going to finish the picture in a year that means you’ve got to do one a day and do the set up and everything, so you have to figure ways of getting that amount done by inter cutting and all that sort of thing, so that’s why these types of films have to be so carefully planned.

TED: What was the most difficult animation sequence you had to do, If you had to pick one.

RAY: There were a number of them. I suppose the skeleton sequence was the most tedious in Jason and the Argonauts because I had seven skeletons synchronized with three men all swinging swords, and when a man swings a sword and it stops, you got to have a skeleton there to stop it. So it took a great deal of planning. It took me about four and a half months to animate the sequence. That’s aside from the production of the live action. That’s the most challenging, multiple figures, because you have to keep in mind what each figure is doing. The other was the seven headed Hydra in the same film. To keep the Hydra’s seven heads moving in different directions and make it look like it’s a live creature was a big challenge which I enjoyed.

TED: For people who may not know, when you do animation, you have to move the model each frame at a time...

RAY: It’s very similar to the animated cartoon and the trouble is the slower movements are subject to one millimeter movement and it can get tedious. Medusa’s head was another problem. She had twelve snakes in her hair, each with a head and a tail. So each snake, every frame of film, had to be moved so that it looked like it was writhing. That was in Clash of the Titans.

TED: What’s your favorite animation segment from someone else’s film?

RAY: Oh I don’t know, I’ve never thought much about it...That shows how self absorbed I am. (Laughter) There has been some marvelous animation. Phil Tippett’s done some remarkable work in the Star Wars series with the Imperial Walkers and I’m sure there were many other animators involved as well.

TED: Did you like Jim Danforth’s animation in When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth?

RAY: Jim Danforth has done some remarkable work, yes.

TED: Is there a film you wish you did, a film that you wanted to do but didn’t get the chance?

RAY: Well yes, there were films. Years ago I wanted to do Dante's Inferno because Doret was my mentor. Gustav Doret, I would say was the first art director of motion pictures. So many art directors and directors like Cecil B. DeMille used his compositions as a guide for their work. In King Kong the most impressive shots were right out of Gustav Doret where you get that depth of field of a mysterious looking jungle.

TED: Weren’t you going to do Sinbad goes to Mars?

RAY: We were at one time, but some of these pictures would be so costly today that I’ve had to discard them from my mind.

TED: What do you think of computer animation in films?

RAY: It’s fine, it’s another tool. A lot of people are under the mistaken concept that computer animation is going to be a substitute for everything else. Well that’s not true. It’s another tool and the way it’s been used is most effective.

TED: Yes, but I don’t like to hear about people substituting computer animation in a film they were going to use stop motion in. There could be a mixture.

RAY: Yes I think there could be a mixture. I’ve seen some remarkable things done with a computer that have even staggered me. So it is capable. But whether you could do the skeleton sequence from Jason and the Argonauts with a computer is anyone’s guess.

TED: Or The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. I just screened that again recently and I’ll tell you, that film holds up remarkably well even today. They don’t make films like that anymore. The ones with a 150 foot creature roaming through the city.

RAY: That’s true. Well we always used our animated creatures as leading actors, as the villain or the protagonist. Mighty Joe Young went through the whole film when I worked with Willis O’Brien. King Kong went through the whole film, Gwangi, the Ymir in Twenty Million Miles to Earth. We tried to establish them as characters. Even though we’ve been accused, we never made a picture just for the sake of making special effects. That wasn’t the purpose. We’ve had to use every special effect conceivable just to be able to put on the fantasy element.


TED: One of my favorite films of yours is First Men in the Moon. I like the story, the idea of a period piece.

RAY: It’s an H.G. Wells story. I always wanted to do that. We wanted to try to keep it in the period and still be modernized. The writer came up with the idea of having a present day rocket ship land and find a British flag already on the moon. So that brought us back to being able to do the whole story the way Wells conceived it, from the Victorian period because, yes, it made a nice period piece.

TED: It was released in Cinemascope. Anyone seeing the film “flat” on TV is missing half the picture.

RAY: I know. The whole thing was designed for wide screen.

TED: Were you disappointed that you had to use “men in suit” ant creatures along with the animated ones.

RAY: (Laughs) I’d still be animating today if I started animating thousands of ant creatures.

TED: What future plans do you have, are you going to just take it easy now, retire, sit back, do a few conventions...

RAY: Everyone thinks when you retire you sit and twittle your thumbs.

TED: (A-hem) Well no, what I meant by that exactly was... if someone were to come to you with a big animation film and wanted you to work on it, would you?

RAY: I’d rather not because I gave up film making because it took up too much of my life. I was willing to do that in the early days but after a certain age, I’m a little over thirty-nine (Laughter) I would like to have a few years where I see my family and not live eat and sleep film, so I’ve been doing sculpture. I’ve been trying to restore a lot of my early creatures that were cannibalized because we didn’t have the money to build new armatures. We had to take the old ones and convert them to reuse.

For those of your readers that don’t know, the armature is the metal structure inside the animated model enabling it to maintain a pose for long enough to take one frame of picture. So many of those creatures like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was made into a dinosaur, the Ymir was made into a Cyclops, the Cyclops was probably made into something else so those no longer exist. I’ve been restoring these in bronze because the rubber figures deteriorate. They eventually rot, so to try and preserve these images I’ve been doing quite a number of restorations.

TED: Do you get royalties for the model kits they do of your animation figures?

RAY: No, not really. The one’s that are legitimate, I hope to, eventually, but a lot of them are illegitimate.

TED: Do you have any of them in your collection? Do they send them to you out of courtesy?

RAY: No. I have few of the Japanese models. Some of them are very good, they capture the essence of the design but some are very crude. It’s interesting that people want to copy them.

TED: In closing, I just wanted to let you know that in one of my films, Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor I gave you special thanks at the end and we named the lab facility the Talos Corporation. Ray, thank you very much for your time, It’s always a pleasure speaking with you.

RAY: Well, thank you.