How To Make An American Werewolf ...

So far he's won six Oscars for makeup and visual effects, and has been nominated for six more. He's won six Saturan awards and three BAFTAS, and has been nominated for the same amount of each in different years. He was awarded two Hollywood Makeup Artist and Hair Stylist Guild Awards in consecutive years, and two years ago he was given a special lifetime achievement award from the Las Vegas Film Critics Society Awards.

Before Rick Baker came along, werewolves looked like fuzzy men. "I especially liked animal people like the Wolf Man, and the transformation," he recalls. "So I really wanted to make (American Werewolf in London) the coolest werewolf movie we could make." And that they did. Not only did they make a cool movie, but also the most influential werewolf movie since "The Wolf Man". He achieved things that everyone before had simply deemed impossible, and we fans of the genre have much to thank him for.

It was when twenty-year-old Rick was working on his friend John Landis movie "Shlock" in 1972 that Landis told him that his next movie was going to be called "An American Werewolf In London". Rick was definitely intrigued by this, and spent a lot of time thinking about the kind of werewolf effects he could achieve while he worked on movies such as "It's Alive!", "King Kong" and "The Incredible Melting Man". Almost ten years later, he was finally worked on a werewolf movie ... but it wasn't with Landis. It was Joe Dante's "The Howling". While he was in the early stages of working on that one, he got a call from Landis saying he was ready to make American Werewolf.

Rick quickly abandoned his work on the Howling to join Landis' team. But he immediately disagreed with Landis about the design of the wolf. Baker wanted the wolf to be a biped and walk around on two legs like Lon Chaney Jr. and those in "The Howling", while the director insisted it should be a four-legged beast. "He kept saying he wanted it to be this 'demon hound from hell'," says Baker. The four-legged design caused obvious problems for Rick. Eventually he came up with the 'wheelbarrow' design, "Remembering as a child, people did that wheelbarrow race when people hold your feet and you're walking on your hands ..." he explains. "We had a guy lying on this plank with wheels on it, with a wolf suit around it. You never saw the rear end of the wolf." He based the design of the werewolf suit itself partially on his pet dog.

And it was Landis' insistence on originality that pushed Baker to produce some of his best work ever, which is most obviously apparent in the truly brilliant transformation sequence which won him his first Oscar in the newly-created "Best Makeup" category. The sequence, which nowadays would be done in CGI, was achieved with 100% physical effects, and involved false casts of the actors hands, face, back and legs. These casts could be stretched to achieve the effects of distortion and growing as his body shifts into this new configuration. "I spent months working on this thing and it took (John Landis) ten seconds to shoot it," Baker recalled. "It was disappointing to think of all that time going into that ... but then I went with my crew of kids to Westwood, to see the movie will a real audience, and when that ten seconds happened with the face stretching out, people stood up and cheered. It was like 'Alright! This why we did that!'" Landis claims that if he were to do the transformation scene now, he would use a combination of physical effects and CGI -- "I hope in my life I get the opportunity to do it again," he says.

It was over decade until the next werewolf movie Baker worked on. That movie was "Wolf!" starring Jack Nicholson, in which he didn't use a lot of makeup in order to let Nicholson's own wolf-like qualities shine through, and that approach definitely paid off. Lately, Rick's work is often being scrapped in favour of CGI. It happened with a creature he created for Men In Black II, and now the same appears to be happening on his first werewolf movie in ten years, Wes Craven's "Cursed". He has now retired from that project, but some of his designs are apparently still being used in the production, which we can all look forward to with much anticipation.