Known for his work on many films and TV shows from An American Werewolf in London and Weird Science to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and The X-Files, Craig Reardon has had a fascinating career working as a special makeup designer – a title that covers a multitude of disciplines. On the recent Arrow release of Weird Science, he talks about the challenges of creating the Chet Blob (his title for the faeces-resembling creature into which Bill Paxton is turned), and he chatted with Paul Simpson about working in the movies in the 1980s…

Watching Weird Science now feels like looking at a time capsule. How does it feel to you going back looking at it as a job you worked on and as a movie itself?

I have mixed feelings about everything in life, and it affects the movies I work on as well. I’m fundamentally a movie fan. Weird Science is an easy target to nominate as a creature of its time possibly because it so aggressively attempted to be.

Look at a Western: they never have had as much to do with the American West as they had to do with mythology. There’s a certain amount of mythology even with a topical movie from the 60s – it would be wrong of people to look at movies from the 60s, 70s, 80s from America as the news. There’s a heavy element of theatricality and traditional entertainment. One eye is definitely looking cockeyed at the entertainment element and the imaginative element.

I think that’s true of Weird Science – I hope everyone will go out and buy the new Arrow Video of it which is a gorgeous piece of work on their part (good for the Brits – they know how to do home video). I’m interviewed on it and I make the point when I read the script I was a little set back because it’s wall to wall vulgarity, but I was copping an attitude. I was about 31 when I worked on that; I wasn’t a teenager but close enough in memory, and I never went as far as these boys do. But part of the profanity and taking the low road, particularly for a vulnerable young man, is all about it’s his armour. He’s pretending to be tough, he’s trying it out for size because he’s really got no self esteem backing it up. That’s what takes the real work – learning the self confidence and belief in yourself. For some of us that can take half a lifetime.

That bounces off my hull now but when I first read it I thought oi, what a piece of crap. But I didn’t reckon upon the tremendous humanising element, and to some extent buffering element, of talented actors. John Hughes had a great eye and ear for young actors. Many of the people he used in his films in the brief comet-like period that he was making these things were unknown at the time – not completely but sometimes. That was the case with Weird Science. Neither I nor the world had heard of Robert Downey jnr yet or Bill Paxton who emerged very large later on. Anthony Michael Hall had been in a couple of his movies but he wasn’t in the top box office things. You thought of it as an ensemble thing rather than something with one or two big box office names – that made it easier for kids to relate to because these weren’t intimidating movie stars.

Stranger Things has tapped into that same of idea of “it could be me up there”.

Absolutely. If it worked out that way, it doesn’t matter if it was deliberate. It was certainly a serendipitous effect.

Is Weird Science one of those films you look at and think, if I did it now, I’d do it completely differently? Or start the same way?

What I wound up with is in the ballpark of what I would have done anyway. I contributed a couple of my early sketches to the Arrow set, and they’re indicative of the fact I hewed to the same idea. I’d have done it a little differently if I’d had an entirely free hand or a little bit earlier green light from John Hughes. He was not a typical director in not having a definite idea what he wanted – you can put the onus on directors to make decisions and keep the ball rolling but I’d hate to be in their shoes. They get it from everybody, coming to them for approvals. How many hats can one person wear? I don’t blame John by any means but this created some delay at the beginning – I like to have the objective in mind and just go forward. I don’t like to go back and forth. There just isn’t the time, and that never helps, let me put it that way.

Apart from that there are some flaws that had nothing to do with John but to do with the usual movie deadlines – it’s difficult to translate the amount of time we have. “I want to do it this way but I don’t have the time so I’m going to do it that way.” It has to do with materials, techniques – one may take four days but the compromise gets it done by the end of that day…

“Do you want it good, or do you want it tomorrow?”

And they always want tomorrow. I’ve been hired back in the day where they say “This movie is coming out on this date and that’s it.” The whole locomotive is limited to that thing. To which I often wanted to respond, “Why the hell didn’t you hire me sooner?!” You’re permitted your thoughts but not always permitted to express them!

I enjoy looking at the thing, and – no pun intended, giving the Chet Blob – I like it warts and all, especially the warts. But nothing’s ever perfect, and I doubt anyone who’s ever worked in the movies would ever say anything other than you can always make it better. There are always things that you don’t like. Rarely you get a guy who says they loved everything they ever did. I remember the late [composer Bernard Herrmann, he said it in an interview and I laughed out loud when I read it, but thought “good for you”. I’m not happy with everything I ever did. I always took my best shot and pushed myself right into the fan, so to speak. You have to say, “Alright this is what it is, get it done to the best of my ability.”

You can always tell when people have gone the extra mile.

That’s true and I’d add, I never look at movies from the 30s and think “Why isn’t this like the movies we make today?” That is the furthest thing from my mind but I see that sort of criticism frequently. How could you expect someone in 1944 to deliver a 2019 movie?! If you can’t calibrate and take a little imaginative empathy for how they thought and behaved and how things were made generally back then, then skip it. Stick to your topical life, that’s your privilege.

What was the biggest challenge on Weird Science apart from the time factor?

Yes, that was the biggest, but we’ll shove that out of the way. In addition I had two other characters to do that we shot but ultimately Joel Silver, the producer, decided to kick them out.

Joel suddenly told me that seeing something preposterous and horrible happening to the two antagonists from high school would kill the laugh for what happens to the brother. I said I disagree, I thought it would ramp up and create a crescendo – Jesus, if that happened to those guys, what is she going to do to Chet, the worst of all? I think he blew it; it was a blow to the movie – those two guys from high school really have it coming and all they do is disappear. A lot of time I think the guys at the top panic, because of the weight of things as it’s a business more than anything to them, and they second- and third- and fourth-guess everything. But I’m not them and they’re not me – I’d counsel them to go with their gut, because that’s what us would-be artists do. If you don’t do that, then you’re not an artist – that’s not how artists go about things. They have convictions, good bad or indifferent – you may hate or love what they do but it comes from the same conviction: take it or leave it.

Of course you can’t use that sort of language with them when you’re talking because they want you to be malleable – I get all that, and it’s part of being diplomatic and getting along with them, but I have to walk out and say, “Here’s what I’m going to do.” What else do they want from me? We know the history of great movies that have been emasculated because of them “shitting their pants” (to use a line from Weird Science) if they don’t pull it apart.

But then also think of all the good movies and the good decisions that got made, and the people who put their trust in the creative people – just finish it and go out and do it. It’s easy to spot the screwups because they’re so obvious.

The people in this movie were very nice to me – it was almost embarrassing. Anthony Michael Hall called me ‘sir’! As a young man when he wasn’t working, he was bookish – he looked like the role he plays in The Breakfast Club – but when it came down to playing his part, the personality on screen came right out. Downey jnr was quiet; Bill Paxton was quiet – his transformation into Chet was every bit as amazing to me when I saw the movie. People in my line of work in those days basically had our ankle chained to the workbench 95% of the time to make our deadlines and get this stuff done. I wasn’t on the set except when I was needed for filming. I didn’t have the sense of total involvement, like the set makeup artist, which I’ve also done.

What a lot of us did in that period – people like Rick Baker, young people like me getting started – we were into prop building, costumes, not primitive but clever and simple special effects tricks, pretty much everything apart from cosmetic make up as the average person thinks of make up. Depending on which way your career goes, you better have that on board if you call yourself a makeup artist.

I’ve done everything – pretty women makeup, ‘straight’ makeup where you make a guy look more bronzed and healthy if that’s appropriate, old age makeup – which is kind of what I wanted to do, with an emphasis on what I did most in the 80s when this movie was made. I was never one of the leaders like Rick or Stan Winston but I had more than my fair share of culty objects come my way, and sometimes those have legs – sometimes they last longer than the big bloated productions which vacuumed up Rick and Stan, and sometimes sunk them because some of those shows don’t have their weird level. They’re big overgrown gaseous balloons that they float every summer to make a killing, and they’re often atrocious films. “Coming to a theatre near you soon!” I got some marvellous one-offs – I got to work on ET, and thank God they never got to put a sequel that; Weird Science, ditto.

 

Weird Science is out now from Arrow

An American Werewolf in London is out now from Arrow