Creature Design Quotes

When I was a little girl, I used to watch a lot of monster movies, like 'Godzilla.' All those monster movies.

You have the wookie character, which is one of the biggest aliens in 'Defiance.' These guys are just walking about with these mechanical faces on, and it actually looks insane. The amount of diversity of all the aliens in the town is quite unbelievable.

When I was a child, I thought I was going to be a paleontologist because I loved dinosaurs. I loved monster movies and sci-fi, and then 'Star Wars' came out, and I was completely out of my mind with that, with 'Close Encounters,' and then I thought maybe I was going to go into special effects makeup, which I thought was awesome.

I always considered Ray Harryhausen's work so fine that it was way out of my league: in terms of realism and naturalism, in terms of animal movement.

CGI is done after the film is done. It's through the computer. Most of the film is not computer-generated special effects. Most of it is that creature that is in the room with you.

I don't think there have been many alien movies where the actors have actually seen the aliens.

Watching 'Dark Crystal' now, having made Muppet films, it really strikes me just how ambitious that film is in terms of the constructs, the builds, the puppeteering.

They're [zombies] us, you can also have the wrestler zombie, the clown zombie, the Jay Leno zombie and the nun zombie. I've never seen the clown werewolf or vampire. But because zombies are us, at the lowest possible level, they're a lot more versatile for storytelling.

Everyone who's ever met Guillermo Del Toro knows that he's the most generous, creative, mind-bogglingly wonderful man. And I was so lucky that he had seen Storytelling and he asked me to do Hellboy. And then I watched Devil's Backbone and I was blown away.

It's into the same bag as E.T. and Yoda, wherein you're trying to create something that people will actually believe, but it's not so much a symbol of the thing, but you're trying to do the thing itself.

I spent a lot of time on my own working out the physical vocabulary for how Gollum moved. As I say, I drew on a lot of Tolkein's descriptions of how he moves, but also the conceptual artist sketches.

Both Adam and I come from a practical effects background.

My father was a low-budget monster movie maker, so he made classics like 'The Crater Lake Monster.' There were always creatures around. And my dad was a huge fan of Ray Harryhausen. One of our neighbors, who went on to win several Academy Awards, was close friends with my dad. His name is Phil Tippett.

I've always enjoyed watching makeup artists - but I'd like to go to the extreme and do monster makeup in movies.

I grew up as a little 4- and 5-year-old kid, watching Phil Tippett and my dad make monsters in our garage. That's what I did, as a child.

When I stage a violent scene, I try for it to serve a purpose. I do love those things, the makeup effects. But I love them more with the monsters. I never was much of a gore guy. I've always enjoyed just creating monsters.

The aliens from 'Attack the Block' - I thought they were some of the most unique and creative movie monsters I had ever seen. From the jet-black hair to the neon blue teeth.

But with The Dark Crystal, instead of puppetry we're trying to go toward a sense of realism - toward a reality of creatures that are actually alive and we're mixing up puppetry and all kinds of other techniques.

I had no special effects, no monsters running around, nothing blew up; those things are all things I've done so many times that they lose their allure after a while.

I think of Ray Harryhausen's work - I knew his name before I knew any actor or director's names. His films had an impact on me very early on, probably even more than Disney. I think that's what made me interested in animation: His work.

I spent four months in Prague in these blue rooms reacting to nothing and you basically place your faith in the hands of the director and the special effects co-coordinator and you keep your fingers crossed and hope that the creatures look really scary.

If any single human being is responsible for all this nonsense I've done with my life, it's Ray Harryhausen... In 'Kubo,' you can see some of his influence throughout.

The cool thing about my character was that it's not that digital. I get to put hours of prosthetic makeup on and see a different creature altogether. I've seen how he looks and it's really cool.

I couldn't draw anything that was too outlandish or too horrible. I never did that. What I did draw was something intriguing. There was something about this monster that you could live with. If you saw him you wouldn't faint dead away.

There aren't that many monsters. It's very hard to create a new monster.