Legendary makeup artist Rick Baker—Oscar-nominated "Monster Maker" behind American Werewolf in London (1981)—traces his career from crude 1970s cult films like The Octoman ($1K budget, 10-day shoot) to Star Wars’ cantina masks and Thriller’s feline dancers, critiquing modern Hollywood’s committee-driven gore over his signature transformative horror. His near-fatal cyanide foam experiments and battles with producers (e.g., The Wolfman reshoots, Frankenstein’s 1994 misfire) highlight the industry’s lost artistry, yet his dyslexia-fueled focus thrives in personal projects like Grinch’s detailed prosthetics—proving genius often emerges from constraints. Now retired at 69, he works only for passion, dismissing remakes but leaving Rogan with a 250-dollar, 17-pound book of his life’s work. [Automatically generated summary]
I think it was probably Star Wars that kicked it off for me because I, like many kids, a lot of people today were so removed with first VHS and then DVDs and Laserdiscs and now streaming.
It's so easy to watch movies, but when Star Wars came out...
We would go see it over and over and over again.
It was like a little contest between a lot of the kids that I went to school with.
I think I saw it 13 times while it was out in the movie theater.
But I became fascinated.
I've always been fascinated with comic books.
I always wanted to be a comic book illustrator.
I always loved those films.
Fantasy novels like Creepy and Eerie, you know, those graphic novels.
But I really became fascinated with special effects and particularly makeup after your work.
Well, you know, it's kind of the same thing for me.
I mean, you know, I grew up in – I was born in 1950. You know, I grew up in front of a TV, but it was a little black and white one, you know, and – There was always the monster movies on Saturdays or Sundays, and that stuff just hit a chord with me, and I just said, I have to do this.
When you stop and think about the earliest versions of makeup in movies, like special effects style makeup in movies, you know, you go back to like Nosferatu is probably one of the very earliest, right?
I mean, they really didn't have anything to go with.
Well, I think those are just his hands at this point.
You know, I mean, later, I mean, in like the John Barrymore, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you know, I remember reading Famous Monsters, which was, again, like my Bible, you know.
Yeah, it's such an interesting time capsule when you look at these films, when you look at something like Nosferatu from 1922, and then you look at what we're doing today with CGI, in a lot of ways...
I mean, I'm not a fan of CGI. I'm not a fan of it in terms of, like, for monsters.
It just seems, everything seems fake.
The suspension of disbelief is higher than if I'm, like, what you did with American Werewolf in London, one of the more brilliant things about it was the special effects and the makeup were fantastic, but there were these really quick scenes.
It was like you saw it for a second and it was burned into your eyes.
And what was great about Werewolf, working on that film with John Landis, was he...
You know, said, you're the expert.
I want a four-legged hound from hell.
I wanted to make a biped werewolf.
You know, we argued about it.
And it was basically, you know, he wins.
He's the director, you know.
But he says, four-legged hound from hell, make it.
And I did.
I mean, the first sculpture was what the final thing became.
Same with everything in it, the Nazi demons, all that stuff.
You know, cut to, you know, like when I did the Wolfman.
I mean, it did.
There's thousands of designs and all these producers are going, well, maybe if you do one between this and that and do one between this and that, or maybe this poor should be over here.
And that kind of stuff just is so soul-sucking.
And it's one of the reasons I retired.
But to this day, I mean like on the cover of my book is the sculpture of one of the Nazi demons from American Werewolf.
And a number of people said this is like one of the greatest designs ever, you know, and this kind of stuff.
And it's people who are production designers and stuff.
We sculpt every pore and every wrinkle and everything.
I have magnifying glasses I wear when I'm doing this.
And after you spend hours and sleepless nights doing it, and then some guy who doesn't know what he's talking about comes in and says, well, why don't you do this?
I mean, when someone contributes money, and they're the ones who get to decide whether things get made or not made, they think they're artistic as well.
And it's the thing, you know, I mean, when you see a movie or a TV show, there's 47 producers.
You know, it used to be they were show people.
And there was a guy, you know, for example, on Gremlins 2, Mike Fennell, who was the producer, who came from Roger Corman School of Filmmaking, you know, so he really checks every penny.
But he was a guy I could go to and he would look at everything and go, why are you buying this?
And you'd explain it to him and he'd go, okay, that makes sense.
And there'd be a person you could talk to and you could get an answer from.
Now there's, like I said, 47 producers and nobody will commit to anything.
It drove me crazy.
I did make it because I loved it and I feel so fortunate that My hobby became my profession and I did well and got awards for it and stuff for something I would do for free.
But it got to the point where I was just becoming a bitter old man because of all this.
I have to retire and I want to make things for myself while I still can.
I'm almost 69 years old and having trouble with joints and vision and all kinds of stuff.
I'd be pissed off if I was working on some movie for some producer that Didn't know what he was talking about and screwed up my work.
Yeah, well, I was, you know, I'm a fan, you know, and I think...
I think that too.
I mean, people who love what they're doing and come up from a fanboy point of view, you know, and it's something I think the producers don't understand because they're all about making as much money as they can and they think everybody's trying to cheat them out of money and stuff, you know?
There's so many times I would say, you know, why did you hire me?
You know, if you don't, you're not letting me do what I do.
But he says, you know, if you were a Westmore, you know, you would get a union card with your birth certificate, you know, but nobody knows, you don't know anybody.
He said, first of all, you have to be 21 to serve an apprenticeship.
I was 15. He said, there's only a few apprenticeships and they're going to go to a Westmore or to a Bauer, you know, somebody who was a name makeup artist or a relative of one of those.
And he also said the kind of makeups that I wanted to do, which were monsters and weird stuff, He said, those jobs are few and far between, and most of the time you're going to be mopping sweat off of some bitchy actress.
And from what I heard, he would, whenever the publicist would come to take pictures, he would give everybody a day off or the afternoon off, and then he would go up to the lab and pose with us.
And, you know, it was funny because, I mean, I had like my mom's brother and my uncle would, you know, say stuff like, you know, when is Ricky going to stop doing this silly stuff and do something he can make a living at, you know?
I had six weeks and like I think $1,000 to make this suit.
And so after school, and I got my friend – the very first job I ever had actually – and this again happened because of my dad when he was a truck driver delivering plumbing supplies here.
He went to the wrong building and the building he went into was called Cloakie Productions and they made Gumby and Davy and Goliath, stop motion animation, which I did stop motion as well.
Big Ray Harryhausen fan, you know.
And for some reason, I grew up in Covina, which is east of LA, like 30 or 40 miles.
And there wasn't anything film-related out there.
But for some reason, Cloakies was out there, I think because it was cheaper rent.
And on my quarter-a-week allowance, when I found a place I could buy rubber, it was like almost $9 for a quarter of rubber.
And it took me a lot of weeks and a lot of mowing lawns and a lot of stuff to save up that money.
And I said, I need a job.
So I didn't have a car.
We only had one car in the family.
And, you know, I went to any place I could walk to, supermarkets, you know, busboys, all this stuff.
Nobody wanted me.
And my dad said, Oh, I remember this place.
And it did stop motion.
And you'd stop motion, you know, maybe...
So I went there with my box of stuff.
And it was summer vacation between my junior and senior year of high school.
And they said, start tomorrow.
Got paid minimum wage, which I think was $1.25 or something at the time.
But that place was like a magnet for any weird kid or any guy that was like a stop-motion fan.
Any stop-motion person would show up there at one point or another.
And I met this guy named Doug Beswick, who was a few years older than me.
And we became, again, fast friends.
You know, he read Famous Monsters.
He was a Ray Harryhausen fan.
And Doug, when I did this Octoman film, Doug had a little workshop, and we did it in his workshop, and we did it together.
But yeah, it was a real introduction to the film industry because it was the very first day's filming, filming in Bronson Canyon, Griffith Park.
We show up.
We went in Doug's 57 Chevy.
It had Octoman in the backseat.
And we show up there and looking around and there's nobody there.
And I go, what the hell?
And this is before cell phones and all that shit.
So we'd have to go.
We went back down the hill, down Bronson Canyon to, like, there was a market there, and we got a payphone, called the production office, and it was like, oh, yeah, we pushed one day.
We just forgot to tell you, you know, and it's like a movie called The Octoman.
You forgot to tell the people who were making the Octoman, the title character of the movie, that you weren't filming.
And I learned that, you know, you can't believe anything they tell you.
You know, I mean, it was designed by somebody else.
And I got this job handed down through people I met at Cloakies.
It was going to be stop motion at one point.
They decided that was too expensive.
They're going to make a suit.
The first thing I did was a little maquette.
A little what?
Maquette, a small sculpture of the design.
But I said there's – because he had – they tried to figure out how they could do eight tentacles on a man and his feet kind of like turned into tentacles and it kind of split off into a back tentacle.
But I said I think they look like elf shoes and it's not a good way for me to join the two things together.
And it's like, kid, don't worry about it.
There's only going to be one shot of the Octoman in the movie where you actually see it.
The rest of the time, it's just going to be a shadow or a glimpse.
But we'll have a money shot where you can make sure it looks great.
The movie starts out with a close-up of his feet, basically.
And it was...
It was a real introduction.
I thought it was going to be like working on 8mm movies like I did as a kid.
Everybody just jumps in and we're making a movie.
Let's do it.
It wasn't that.
The DP, the director of photography, because I had long hair and Doug had long hair.
He called us the girls.
This was at a time when long hair was...
Get the girls to get their silly monster suit out.
I might have to fire up a joint and watch that one.
Now, when you look back on that, I mean, it's got to be kind of, even though it sounds like a clusterfuck, it seems like it's kind of a fond memory as well, because that was where it started.
Yeah, and I got, you know, we came up with a way to do this because we couldn't, It's a foam rubber suit and foam rubber has to be baked in an oven.
We didn't have a big oven.
We didn't have the mean.
So we came up with a clever solution.
And it's what I had to do so many times in films, do things that people hadn't done before on a budget and a schedule, you know, and try to figure out.
But what was cool about the Octoman, the male lead was Kerwin Matthews, who was Sinbad in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, which I get a Ray Harryhausen film and I was a big fan of.
So one of the first things I had to do, there's a scene where the Octoman's tentacle is supposed to creep through this cave opening and they basically – Wadded up some tar paper and I stood behind the tar paper in Bronson Caves and stuck my hand in this tentacle and did this.
And when Kerwin walked by, I said, super dynamation, which is what Ray Harryhausen's technique he called for a few films.
And I would say to him, and this was during the time when computer stuff was starting out, you know, and his movies were $50,000 movies, you know, the whole budget of the movie, you know, not just his effects, the early ones that he did, you know.
And I said, you know, doesn't it piss you off that now...
They get millions of dollars, and there's hundreds of people working on stuff that you did by yourself, you know?
You know, a fraction of an inch, a puppet at a time, you know, and it takes forever, you know, and I mean, having, if you've never done stop motion, you can't appreciate it.
Once you do something and you look at it, you see all the things that are wrong with it, you know.
And I always say, I wish I could see the film before I make this stuff because so many times the thing that's supposed to be the most important thing just isn't.
And something that you, like, threw together is all of a sudden the most important thing, you know.
I mean, American Werewolf was probably the one where – I mean, that's one that really put me on the map.
I mean, a lot of people say King Kong was.
But American Werewolf, you know, I looked at it and I thought, well, that's pretty cool.
But I also went, God, I wish we did this and I wish I didn't do that.
Right.
I see so many things that I would do differently now.
Low budget, you know, movie shot by a kid, basically, you know.
With a, you know, and he, like I said, he played this, it was based, have you ever seen Trog?
Yes.
Joan Crawford did it?
Yes, yes.
He saw Trog and couldn't believe that they made this movie, so he was making like a joke version of Schlock, you know.
And he wanted to play this ape-man character, and it's like, well...
Okay, but you're going to be the director too?
So he had to be on set at 6 in the morning, whether schlock worked or not, all made up.
And it was shot in three weeks, and John and I were going on two hours sleep a night.
I would make him up.
We were out in Agura, where it used to be an Oakwood school where John went for a while and I think it was thrown out of.
And we lived and worked in this like screened patio that was left over in this dilapidated building.
And I was making up John on a bar stool and eventually he was like falling asleep and doing those, you know, that thing, you know, and I'd have to grab him.
For some reason, they were doing the dailies at MGM, so we would have to go from after a 12-hour day of filming and an hour removing the makeup, we'd get in the car, drive to MGM, look at the previous day's dailies, drive back, sleep for two hours, get up and start again.
And he said, I want to do a transformation in a way that had never been done before.
It doesn't make sense to me that a man changing in his body going through this metamorphosis would… Would sit in a chair like Lon Chaney Jr. and be still until he finished changing because I think it would be painful and I want him to be able to move and I want to show the pain and you know how would you do that?
I have no fucking idea but I would love to you know because we both love those transformation scenes you know.
I was in high school, and I remember seeing this in the movie theater, and this was another one that sort of cemented the idea that I wanted to be a makeup artist.
When he pulls all his clothes off, and he's burning up, and then he looks at his hand, and his hand starts stretching out.
But we thought what would be the most impactful thing would be for his face to change last, but what I don't like about the transformation, like here, the wolf has a big mane of hair, so he's got this big hairy neck that I don't like.
And a lot of the stuff, like in Piccadilly Circus and the big bus crash and stuff, that's me in a wheelchair with a head with John pushing me down the street.
And Griffin, who played Jack, when I first made him up in that makeup, as I was putting the stuff on, in the makeup chair, he's kind of getting more and more sad and sinking down in the chair.
Yeah, no, and he was brilliant, and he was terrific to work with, you know, but the initial shock of seeing himself torn up was, it was hard for him to take.
Yeah, but he, you know, I thought, okay, I got a call.
John was in England, already scouting locations, and so I said, you know, you got to talk to Griffin.
He's, you know, kind of upset about what he looks like, you know.
But I took that opportunity, being the sensitive guy that I am, to tell him that the third part of his transformation was he was actually going to be a puppet.
It wasn't really going to be him because he was supposed to become basically a talking skeleton.
And the makeup process is an additive process.
And, you know, he would have to be a huge skull to look right, you know.
And he wasn't too happy about that either.
But I said, but I want you to operate the mouth because you're doing the lip sync, you know, you're doing the voice, you know.
I mean, I got my first Oscar for that film, you know, and...
I mean, so fortunate to me that John came into my life, and this happened again because of Don Post Studios that I talked about, where they made the Halloween masks.
John was a mailboy at Fox for a while, and he knew John Chambers.
He would deliver mail to John Chambers, who did the Planet of the Apes makeup.
And he talked to John Chambers at first about doing Schlock.
And John said, well, I need $250,000.
And the budget of the whole film, I think, was $30,000.
So I think he basically didn't want to deal with this hyperactive kid.
But because of that, because I left, that's the only time in my life I actually had a business card.
And John says, you know, it said Rick Baker Monster Maker, but I think it said Rick Baker Makeup Artist.
But I gave a card and some pictures to Don Post, and when they were trying to get rid of this kid who wanted a funky gorilla suit thing, they said, well, this guy's made some gorilla suits.
Why don't you talk to him?
And John lived in Westwood near the cemetery there, the Veterans Cemetery.
He drove out to Covina.
And again, I was still pretty shy at that point.
And my bedroom at that point was, you know, I slept on a convertible sofa because I had gotten enough money to buy one so I could fold it up and have more floor space to work.
But my masks had work tables everywhere, you know.
And John is very loud and...
I'm hyperactive and he was coming in and he was flipping out over the stuff that I made, you know, and like touching it and stuff.
And I'm going, oh, you know, it's like this guy's in my room and he's touching my stuff and he's really scaring me, you know.
But I mean, thank God.
I mean, American Werewolf, you know, put me on the map and I mean, I – I did Coming to America, and my introduction to Eddie Murphy was, you know, and I did a lot of films with Eddie.
And because of John, I actually met my wife, Sylvia, on a John Landis film, where he had me play.
Originally, it was a Jesus Freak.
It was a film called Into the Night, and it was all filmed at night.
And met my wife on Hollywood Boulevard in front of Fredericks of Hollywood.
In the middle of the night, and it turned out they changed it to a dope dealer.
I was playing a dope dealer, and Sylvia was the hairstylist on the film.
And John came in and says, I want you to be in the movie.
I want you to play the part you were born to play, a hooker.
So my wife was a hooker in the background.
And there's a picture of us.
It's in the book, actually, on the night we met in front of Fredericks of Hollywood.
You know, and as we said, one of the things about that film is it was so strategic in its use of the werewolf.
You know, that you really, when you got a chance to see it, like one of my favorite scenes was when the guy, the businessman is in the subway and he's running away from the werewolf and you know it's chasing him but you don't see it.
And you don't see it until he's stumbling on the escalator and then you see it at the bottom of the escalator just for a second.
Well, that was the thing with the design of the werewolf as well, because John said he wasn't going to show it.
Normally, when you do something that's going to be an animatronic character, you kind of sculpt it in a neutral position, and you let the mechanism make the expressions.
But from my experience in other films, the editor doesn't necessarily choose the moment where you think it's the best expression.
And I thought, if it's only going to be on for a second, I want it to be scary looking.
So I sculpted in a scary expression on it, which I normally wouldn't do.
So there was no way that it wasn't going to look scary when I saw it.
Well, I... That came about – originally, the film was done in England.
Nobody knew Star Wars was going to be Star Wars.
Stuart Freeborn was the makeup artist in the film.
He did the Wookiee.
He did the cantina scene originally, but George wanted to embellish on it and didn't like a lot of the stuff that he did.
So at ILM, which was in Van Nuys then, Industrial Light and Magic, when it first started, the guys that were doing the visual effects for Star Wars, my friends that I met at Cloakies, Dennis Murren and Ken Ralston, were shooting the special effects.
And George came in and said, do you know anybody that can make a mask?
Because I want to add some masks to the cantina scene.
And they go, yeah, we do.
So they called me in.
So I went over to Valjean Avenue and George on a flatbed editor showed me the sequence as it existed.
And I was flipping out.
I was like, what a cool idea to have this bar full of aliens, you know?
And I go, let's do, you know, let's do, we could do one that has like, you know, like, that's kind of like an alien pirate that's got a, like, alien parent character and this stuff.
He goes, well, we don't have any money, you know?
It's like...
We've already spent the money.
We don't have a lot of money for this.
I just want masks.
And I said, you know what?
I have a bunch of stuff I made myself for fun that we can throw in there.
There's a devil guy.
I made that five years before Star Wars.
There's a werewolf guy and another guy with glowy eyes.
I made those before Star Wars.
I just said, you can use them.
I thought they were going to be stuck in the background, you know, but we did like the Cantina Band, you know.
The first aliens that you see, almost all the first aliens you see are all the ones that we did.
I think we did 30. But what was great, yeah, that was one of the masks I made before.
Yeah, in Los Angeles by different people at a different time.
And I've said to, you know, when I say to people, can we shoot this in post?
And Because what happens, you know, most directors don't like dealing with this shit, you know, and they'll put it off to the last shot of the day and then it's like, well, you got 45 minutes and I go, but this is the money shot, you know, and I prepared for months for this and you give me 45 minutes to do this.
It's not right.
You know, let's shoot in post-production.
Well, that'll never work.
It'll never match.
It's like, did you see Star Wars?
Yeah.
You know, the band that's in the cantina?
Yeah.
That was shot by different people in a different country months later.
Did you know that?
No.
It's like you think they're there.
You hear the music that they're playing through the scene.
These are some of our aliens, those two guys, the blue guys, as is that werewolf.
But after that, every movie, every space movie had a cantina scene, you know.
And it's like American Werewolf, too.
Every transformation after American Werewolf was basically the same transformation.
They did the same things, you know.
And it happened on Thriller, too.
You know, I mean, because of American Werewolf, when Michael came to John Landis to do Thriller, you know, he liked American Werewolf and he wanted it to be a short film.
He didn't want to call it a music video.
And John contacted me and said, you know, Michael Jackson wants to do this American Warwolf-like music video, you know, for the song Thriller, which I hadn't heard.
And it was like, you know, Michael Jackson, Little Michael Jackson, Jackson 5?
Yeah, you know, he's not called that anymore, you know.
And so he goes, John says, I'll send you a cassette, listen to it and get some ideas, you know.
And this was when we had Little Walkman, you know, and I'd listened to it with one.
I had another one that I would like, like, pre-associate ideas when I was listening, you know.
It was like – I thought, well, we came up with the idea of doing these zombie dancers.
And I said, well, I'm sure you're going to hire the dancers way in advance so they can learn the dance and stuff.
And he goes, no, they only need a couple of days.
So they hired him like three days before we filmed.
And he went, I can't – that doesn't give me time to take life masks and do all the stuff that I would do.
And these zombies should be really cool, you know.
So I said, how about if the first zombies you see are like me and my crew, because we already have life masks, we can start those today.
And we can spend the time on making some cool ones.
So I'm in Thriller coming out of a crypt like this, you know.
And all my crew basically are the first guys that come out of the ground and break through windows.
But the dancers, I said, I'll figure out a way we can do them.
And I, because I had a number of life masks of different people, and small, medium, large, male, small, medium, large, female.
And we sculpted, we kept pieces, we called them like bandit masks.
They were kind of like this, around this area, like a bandit in a movie.
Yeah, and it didn't have the nose on it because, you know, proportionally you could get away with more.
So we had different sculptures of small, medium, large male, small, medium, large female that we would just say, okay, you're a medium male number two.
And we made these big teeth that we could pop in their mouth and put some denture lining material and fit them.
So the dancer makeups were not as good as the more featured makeups.
It turned, I mean, they spent the money, they had a lot of cameras and a lot of stuff when they're filming.
But it, I was, you know, working day and night, every day of the week to get this stuff done.
John and John didn't surprise me with the making of thriller on the day that Michael was coming out for us to take his life mask and make a cast of his face.
He goes, Oh, there's a big camera crew here, a couple cameras.
And what are you talking about?
He goes, I want to do a making of and I go, I was gonna know.
It's like, it always looks horrifying to see somebody having a life mask taken.
And I go, I don't need, and Michael's really shy.
I don't need, we don't need this.
I don't want this.
He goes, shut up.
We're doing it.
You know, I was like, fuck, you know, I was not happy about it.
But then so many people have come up to me who are makeup artists now and go, the reason I'm a makeup artist is because I saw the making of Thriller and it inspired me to do this, you know.
My stock answer is, you thought that if this idiot could do it, I can do it.
It was an amazing experience because I was really stressed out the day that we were filming The Dancers.
I had to make up Michael as a zombie.
I had a number of makeup artists I didn't even know and hadn't worked with before that were doing other zombies and I'm running through trailers going, no, no, no, like this.
I'm making up Michael and it's like, oh man.
And we were filming in Vernon, downtown Los Angeles, next to the former John Meatpacking place.
And they had just slaughtered the animals and it had this weird smell in the air.
And then the dance started.
And all of a sudden, just like this wave went over me.
The stress went away and I just was looking at what was happening in front of me.
And I was going, oh my God, look at this.
And people would pay money to see this.
And I get to see this.
I saw the Swirler Dance happening for the first time there when it was being filmed.
I expected that it would do it CGI because everything at that time was basically CGI. And I had a friend that got a copy of the script and I read it and it read like a CGI thing.
And I was actually filming at Universal.
We were filming some of the Norbit stuff at Universal.
And I went to a producer there that I knew who was a visual effects producer as well.
And I asked him if he knew anything about the Wolfman, you know, because I said, I'd love to do this, you know.
I mean, that's one of the films that made me do what I do, you know.
And I said, is it going to be CG? And he goes, no, actually, they were talking about it being a makeup.
And I go, well, will you put my name in there?
You know, I would love to do this.
The original director wanted it to be a makeup and I thought we were going to do transformation.
We actually built stuff for a transformation.
It was a weird film in so many ways.
It seemed like, you know, Benicio was great to work with.
He wanted to be the wolf man, you know.
He's a monster, a real monster kid, too.
Anthony Hopkins was great.
I did it with my friends Dave and Lew Elsie.
But I think we were the only people that wanted to be working on a movie called The Wolfman.
I think everybody else was embarrassed that they were working on a movie called The Wolfman.
Well, that's what was – it was very reminiscent of the old movies, but like a new version of the old movies with the fog and the gypsy camp and all that jazz.
Yeah, and it had kind of a Hammer film feel to it, too, you know?
And we, and Anthony Hopkins' makeup was, you know, a little more Curse of the Werewolf, Christopher, not Christopher, I was going to say Christopher, what was his name?
Oliver Reed, who played that, had that kind of feel to it.
And I mean, like I said, Benicio is a real big fan of the horror films, and we got along great.
In fact...
He would come into the makeup trailer with old monster magazines that he bought on the internet.
Because they said, well, we've got to do the great transformation like American Werewolf.
And I said...
American Werewolf, we had a naked man who changed into a four-legged hound from hell.
Here we have Benicio de Toro, and we have Benicio de Toro with some hair on his face and some teeth.
The changes aren't the same.
We can't stretch out his body.
Well, we wouldn't have that same kind of feel, so I said, well, how about if we do things where his fingers twist and do uncomfortable things and stuff like that?
Well, yeah, I thought that too, but it wasn't the case.
But, you know, I mean, something interesting, when I read this book on my career, I complained too much about the film industry, and I shouldn't, because it's been really good to me.
I mean, like I said, it was my hobby, and I made a decent living at it, and I got awards for it, and I got free food and things, you know.
And it is magic.
Keep that rolling.
It's like time traveling, like working on this movie.
When we're in London in areas that haven't changed since the 1800s and you have all these people in period costumes, it really is like your time travel.
You get to work with some really amazing people.
Yeah, see, this is all CG. Really well done, CG. It's really well done.
Yeah, and Steve Begg, who was the visual effects supervisor, was a really great guy, and he was really upset that we weren't able to do this stuff as well.
But I think they did a terrific job.
And I like CG to a degree.
I mean, I like the fact that it's another technique that we can use to do things that we can't do in the real world with rubber.
I just don't like that they do things when we can do it.
And I think a lot of it comes down to...
Before American Werewolf, I would have to try to beg people to let me do something.
I mean, it was like, can I put a mustache and a scar on this guy?
After American Werewolf, I would get scripts with stuff in it.
I had no idea how the hell I was going to do it, like crazy, crazy stuff.
But they would say to me, what...
because they did a lot of interviews after American Werewolf.
And they said, what is the material that changed, that allowed you to do work that we haven't seen before?
And I said, I got adequate time and adequate money.
And it was the first time I had that.
And after that, like when I did Gremlins 2, I had a year's prep.
But the problem is I need answers a year before we start filming because I need to make the stuff.
And usually a director's on another movie then and doesn't want – well, eventually after I hound them, I try to get an answer.
Well, give me some kind of answer just to make me shut up.
Now, when you see a film like that, and you think about all the difficulties that you had in making it, was there ever a film where they let you just go crazy, just do whatever you wanted to do?
But they said, what can we do to entice you to do this movie?
And I go, let me redesign the gremlins some.
I go, I would like to make them individual characters.
Chris's version, all the gremlins are out of the same mold, all the mogwais are out of the same mold.
So you basically, because you can't make one puppet that does everything.
So you have this puppet that you have your hand in, you have this puppet that you have some rods on, you have this puppet that does this, but they could be interchangeable for any mogwai or any gremlin.
Making them individual characters means I had to have, you know, six versions of each one, you know.
So we made hundreds of things.
But I said, you know, if I can make them characters and change the design some, I'd be more interested.
And then we came up with the idea of doing the genetics lab where one turns into a bat, one turns into a spider, one turns into a vegetable gremlin.
But what was great about working with Joe Dante, I mean, Joe is also a monster fan, you know, monster kid guy.
So we could communicate in that way.
You know, we would say, you know, it's like an invasion of the saucerman.
But I, you know, for me, an average makeup is a three-and-a-half-hour makeup.
Then you have a 12-hour day.
Then you have an hour removal time.
So they're very long days.
I spent most of my career working 18, 15, 18-hour days, you know, and 20-hour days and sometimes all night, you know, and all day just to get this stuff done, you know.
The paint that I used to use to paint rubber, it's hard to get rubber, the paint to stick to rubber.
And I found out that on the Creature from the Black Lagoon, they made paint out of rubber cement and universal tinting colors and thinned it with benzene.
And it was bonded to rubber.
So I used to paint my mask in my bedroom with benzene, which is a carcinogen, atomizing it, spraying it through an airbrush, no spray booths or anything.
I used to have a five-gallon drum of benzene that I'd wash my hands off in.
And then when I found out, because they weren't material safety data sheets like they are now, when I found out how dangerous this stuff was, I became kind of fanatical about it.
I don't know.
But yeah, it's a little scary, especially in the old days when we didn't know better.
Not the one that just came out, but the first one.
And it was interesting.
It came about because a friend, Tony G, who is Angie's makeup artist and does her beauty makeup all the time, she worked with me first on Nutty Professor and then we did Life together and She was like the department head on the Grinch, on the Grinch all Christmas and Planet of the Apes.
The Planet of the Apes that I did dealt with all the makeup artists.
And it was really great.
She's a great beauty makeup artist, but also a really great effects makeup person.
And she said to Angie, you know, when they were going to do Maleficent, she goes, you have to get Rick Baker.
He's the guy to do this, you know, and he's got a good aesthetic and he knows not to, when to put stuff on and when not to, you know, and And I said, boy, I don't...
Women are the hardest to make up, you know.
Especially if you're doing age makeup, you know.
I don't think any woman wants to look old, you know.
I've done some films where we do the most incredibly subtle little thing and then the actress doesn't want to come out of the trailer because they say they look like a burn victim, you know, and stuff, you know.
Or in tears.
And I said, you know, I... Angie wanted appliances.
She wanted rubber on her face.
And I was thinking, I don't think she should have.
I said, I think we can do it with the horns and maybe just ears.
But she had this very specific idea that she wanted these angular, sharp cheekbones.
So the very first thing I did, I said, well, let me just think about it and do a...
Design, what I think it should be.
I did this design, and then I met with Angie.
She came to my studio, which is now a storage facility.
And she brought a couple of her kids, and like a nanny kind of person, and paparazzi followed her.
We closed the gates, and we're talking, and she's telling me what she wants.
And one of her kids says to the nanny person, and he goes, I want a Coke.
And Angie was mid-sentence talking to me and she went, please?
And it really, I liked that she was teaching her kids manners, you know?
And that kind of sold me right there.
You know, it's like, okay, she's a mom too, you know?
And she is incredibly beautiful to look at, you know, and she's pretty persuasive in that respect, you know?
Tony G made her up, and I had a really great Dutch guy who was a fan named Arian Titan who put the appliances on with Tony G and represented me on the set.
Well, the sculpture gets destroyed basically when you make the mold.
I have one of the original heads still.
I mean, foam rubber is basically the sap of a rubber tree that you put chemicals in to make a cure, and you whip air into it to make it foam, and you put another chemical in to make it congeal, and then you bake it in the oven.
But because it's an organic material, it decomposes, it rots.
And it will last through a film, but it usually doesn't last years.
But it does, the American werewolf, the stunt head, the one that I kill griffin with on the moors and go through the pig daily I have, and it's hard as a rock.
It turns to like, I call it like grain crackers, and if you touch it hard, it'll crumble into dust.
Oh, wow.
Mine's, it's all hard like that, but it's not, people don't touch it, you know.
When anyone comes here, one of the first things they want to do is take a picture with the wolf.
That literally is like one of the first, like everybody and their brother has a photo like posing next to the wolf or pretend the wolf's biting their head or pretend they're having sex with the wolf.
Oh, and that's one of the films I think still, I mean, when people ask me what my favorite one is, I say Harry because I can look at that film today and I think it holds up perfectly fine.
The only thing I think I would change is I would make his teeth a little more translucent, you know, in the ends.
But that was a challenging movie because he had to communicate just by his visual expressions and carry the movie, you know.
And I think he did, and I think it worked quite well.
I'm surprised I'm even mentioning it because they shut the film down.
And I went, okay.
And I said, but we were doing some really cool transformation stuff.
And it wasn't quite done.
And I said, listen, if you ever think the film's going to pick up again, if you can keep a number of my people on for another month, we can have this transformation stuff.
We'll put it in a box.
It'll be ready to go.
I said, if they disperse now, it's going to be like starting again.
Because I won't necessarily get the same people, you know.
Right.
Just put everything in a box, ship it to us.
If we start up again, we'll figure it out.
They started up again.
I didn't do it.
I was on something else.
Someone else took over.
They changed everything that I made.
They didn't use a lot of what I made.
But the film has a single card opening credit that says Rick Baker on it.
And I spoke with Weinstein and go, I don't want credit for this film.
But I think it's bad that, you know, a movie, you know, when, you know, Halloween and Friday the 13th, and it just became, what's the most graphic way we can kill a teenager, you know?
But it's so – I mean, people would think it's funny and kind of ironic coming from someone like you who's made these insane monster films like American Werewolf in London.
We're just ripping guys' heads off and – Piccadilly circus.
Because, you know, Karloff was a good actor, I think, too.
And then eventually, you know, when it turned into Glenn Strange, who was bigger and stuff, who was still kind of a cool Frankenstein, but it wasn't Karloff, you know.
I thought, great that they have an actor, you know, but I was so disappointed when I saw it.
I didn't think what he did was amazing at all.
And the design, it was a lot of work, and I thought it was well done, but it didn't have the impact that the Karloff...
I'm working day and night, and I got into my friends Dave and Lou Elsie again, and I found a couple guys that could kind of do some of this stuff, and we pulled it off.
I mean, seriously, I was working day and night, got on a plane, flew to London, got off the plane.
Made up Inicio.
In another trailer, we had people I hadn't worked with before making up the stunt double.
And it was like, we have to do this because Emily Blunt is going to be doing Gulliver's Travels.
She's only available for two days.
So we have to film now.
So I get off the plane, make up Inicio.
Stunt double's made up.
Everybody's looking good.
I walk out to where we're filming, and they're filming the stunt double in silhouette.
And this is, again, there's like video village where there's an army producer sitting in chairs looking at the monitor.
And I went over to him.
I said, okay, you have to explain this to me.
And they go, what, Rick?
And I go, why are we filming this fucking stunt double when Emily Blunt, Benicio Del Toro, Hugo Weaving are sitting in their trailer?
We only have Emily Blunt for two nights.
We're filming in the summer in England.
It gets dark at 10 o'clock.
It gets light at 4 o'clock in the morning.
It's going to be light in two hours.
This is one of the two days that we have Emily Blunt.
He used to be a makeup artist in Mexico, and he was a Dick Smith student and a fan, you know, a Dick Smith fan, and Dick introduced me to him, and Guillermo came to my studio as a fanboy makeup artist first, and I did Hellboy with him in Mexico.
And I was in The Strain.
He has me killed by one of the Strigoi in The Strain.
If people are talking, when I'm signing my name, I asked the person how to spell their name, and then they were saying something else, and I screwed up their book, wrote their name wrong.
I've written my name wrong.
In the book, there's a picture, some drawings I did as a kid, and one I did in pen and ink of Dracula.
And I wanted to be, because it was pen and ink, and I couldn't erase it.
I got out of Famous Monsters to make sure I spelled Dracula right and very carefully was looking at the letters and writing in a pen and ink.
It says Drac-lila on it.
And I did a painting for my wife, this kind of romantic old painting.
It was for Valentine's Day, and I didn't know how to spell Valentine, so I looked it up.
And I very carefully painted Valentine Time.
Again, thank God that my career choice worked out because I couldn't work in an office, and I'm sure I'd be a homeless guy now.
I mean, my brain just doesn't work like a normal person.
If somebody listens to you on this podcast and realizes that a lot of people have fucked with you while you worked and says, Rick, we could do something amazing.
Well, you know, one of the things I – when I watched Breaking Bad, and Bryan Cranston, you know, is such a great actor, but I said, you know, he would make a great Lon Chaney if they ever did a remake of Man of a Thousand Faces, which was the story of Lon Chaney.
He would be a perfect person, you know, besides being a great actor.
And my wife Sylvia and I went to a Comic-Con and went to a panel that they had on Breaking Bad, and we went back and I met Brian and Vince, and I said that to them, you know.
And I don't know, maybe if that happened, you know, I don't think anybody would go see that film now, or how many people even know who Lon Chaney is now, you know.
But to be able to recreate some of those makeups on an actor like that, you know, if it was the right people.
But again, I realized, you know, I mean, death became a more real thing to me when my parents died.
And I have friends that were younger than me that are dead now.
One of my favorite crew, one of my best guys just recently passed, 54 or something.
And I know there's an end in sight, and I know I've got arthritis, I've got cataracts.
There's a limited time that I have left to do the things I want to do, and I want to do what I want to do.
I mean, you know, if I died today, which I hope I don't, I mean, I would be happy with what I've accomplished.
And that was another thing with the book.
I mean, when you see it laid out there in 800 pages, you know, saying, well, I've made a lot of shit in my time, you know?
I've made a lot of stuff, and I'm proud of what I made, you know?
I mean...
You do the best you can in the circumstances, and I fight.
One of the things that I realized when I read the book, too, which Cameron Publishing, who did the book, and Jonathan Rinsler, who wrote it, he interviewed me a lot, and he also went back to old articles and old things at the time and did a really nice job of weaving the story together.
But when I read it, I thought, God, you know what?
What a pain in the ass I am, but I fight for what I think is right.
For example, The Grinch, How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
They wanted me to paint Jim Carrey green, and that was it.
And I was like, well, I mean, I think they wanted some hair, too.
But I'm like, come on.
It's not called How the Green Jim Carrey Stole Christmas.
It's How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
It should be a Grinch.
So I did like I do many times on myself, like I did in The Wolfman.
I make myself up, and I film some stuff, and I show them.
So I made myself up what I thought the Grinch would look like.
I filmed some stuff.
I cut it together.
I shouted to him and go, this is cooler than the Green Jim Carrey.
I'm sorry.
And I'm going, well, it doesn't look like Jim Carrey.
And I go, no, because it's on me.
And I go, but again, it's not the Green Jim Carrey.
And it seems to me it should be this character, not just, you know.
And I fought and fought and fought.
And I ended up doing a thing.
Where I decided to use the internet to help me get my point across.
So there was an internet movie site at the time that was popular and I knew the guy who ran it was a fan.
And I said, can you say that you saw this test that I did and that the guys at Universal were making a big mistake, you know, and just let the fans chime in so there was like thousands of responsible...
What the hell's wrong with these idiots that are running the movie studios?
I don't want to see a green Jim Carrey.
I want to see a Grinch.
So like two weeks before we started filming, they changed because of this.
And I only sent the copy of my test to Brian Grazer and Ron Howard.
And Ron's going...
How did this guy get hold of this copy of the tape?
And I go, I don't know.
I only sent it to you and Brian, you know?
And I didn't let him know what I did at the time.
Now I don't care because it came – I think the movie is better for it, you know?
And in fact, even at an Oscar party, one of the executives at the studio came up to me and said, you know, thank you for doing The Grinch and for arguing with us because the decision was right.