Australian Penthouse

American Rick Baker is a legend in the world of special effects make-up. Since winning the first-ever Best Make-up Academy Award for An American Werewolf in London (1981), Baker has been at the forefront of innovation in the field. Penthouse spoke with the make-up master about creating 127 original aliens for Men In Black 3 and staying relevant in Hollywood.

Interview: Drew Turney

How do you keep raising the bar after such a long and lauded career?
It really is hard, especially when you’re as fucking good as I am! [Laughs] A lot of times, the script sparks ideas, and what I like about the Men in Black films is that I’m a real collaborator. Barry [Sonnenfeld, director] and I come up with ideas I might not be able to conceive on my own. Barry wants that collaboration and appreciates it. It’s not always appreciated.

What was your inspiration for the alien designs in the Men In Black movies?
Pretty much every 1950s and 60s alien movie there ever was, but there was one in particular called Invasion of the Saucer Men. It was a ´50s B movie and this guy called Paul Blaisdell made these big-brained, bug-eyed alien masks that little people wore. And we got to do a saucer man for Men In Black. It’s not an exact duplicate—we made it a little cooler—but it was very much inspired by that.

In describing your work, do you think of yourself as more of a make-up artist, designer or sculptor?
I’d always just called myself a make-up artist, but then I realised I was taking it to another level and started doing stuff a normal make-up person wouldn’t do. I didn’t like the limitations of make-up. When you’re working on an actor’s face, that’s the armature for your sculpture. If you’re putting a new nose on someone and they have a bump, you can’t really get rid of it. Or if their eyes are a certain distance apart, you can’t really make the distance any wider.

So that’s when I starting getting into animatronics and puppetry. In the transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London, we did what we could with standard make-up and then we had two fake heads containing animatronics so they could transform on camera. That was the only way we could do it. I actually got a lot of flack from make-up artists because that stuff wasn’t make-up but, to me, it was a natural evolution.

Is staying aware of the technology a way of staying relevant?
You bet. I’ve kept learning because I’ve been a fan of this stuff for as long as I can remember. Jack Pierce, the make-up artist at Universal who did Frankenstein’s Monster and The Wolf Man and The Mummy and all these classic films, didn’t progress with the times. Other people were using foam rubber appliances and he was still using cotton and spirit gum. I took note of that as a kid and told myself I was going to stay on top of what’s new. But doing that’s easy because it’s just more fun.

“What’s hard when it comes to aliens is trying to come up with something nobody’s seen before”

What make-up work has really impressed you lately?
I was really impressed by the work in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I so wanted to hate that movie because I did the make-up for Tim Burton’s 2001 Planet of the Apes, which isn’t very fondly remembered, but I think most people think the make-up is really good. To me, Planet of the Apes was actors in make-up, and that’s where I’ve come from. But they did Rise… on computers and I thought it looked great. I was very impressed.

I worked with the digital guys on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. We made real-world silicone heads, which they scanned and made the computer models from. In the ´90s, CGI was kind of crappy. It was neat that they could do it, but I thought the stuff we were making still looked more real. But CGI’s come a long way.

You’re known for monsters and creatures, but are human make-up effects like those you did on Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor a whole different ball game?
They are, and I like doing both of them. Aliens are easier in a lot of ways because you don’t see aliens every day. Human make-up is the hardest to pull off. What’s hard when it comes to aliens is trying to come up with something nobody’s seen before, but if you have a defect in the rubber, you can leave it because nobody would know the alien isn’t supposed to look like that.

Do you prefer monster effects because they’re a little more visible and you can get more recognition?
I just like mixing it up, I always have. Sometimes I’ll do an alien, then I’ll do the fat suit for The Nutty Professor where the characters are all human, then I’ll do a big ape suit or The Grinch. I just don’t like doing the same thing over and over again.