This summer, Chucky will return to the big screen in the brand-new reimagining of Child’s Play. Horror Geek Life had the honor of speaking to legendary FX maestro Todd Masters of MastersFX to discuss his career, the art of special FX, and the process of bringing everyone’s favorite murderous doll back to theaters.
Horror Geek Life: According to MastersFX.com, you’ve been working on visual FX since you were 12 years old. What drew you to the art of animation and FX at such a young age?
Todd Masters: Oh my god, isn’t that funny? I realized that this year is my 40th year in film FX, which kind of blew me away. I was this kid who had too much creativity, and I was literally just trying to figure out what to do with it all. I was drawing on my parents’ walls, I was making these little movies with my dad’s camera, trying to film the neighborhood kids and all that. I also loved monster movies. I loved that damn Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer thing that came along every year. So, I was always curious how some of that stuff was done.
While I was making my little movies, the biggest problem was, you know, actors (laughs). All my actors were like 7-year-old neighborhood kids. They’d never show up, or they’d want to go play or something. I loved monsters, and I knew some of this other stuff was animated. So, I just sort of started experimenting, trying to find as much information as I could in magazines; I called a bunch I found in the phone book, like Ray Harryhausen. I just started learning by trying to absorb it. This was without the internet, and there were hardly any books at that point. And this was all before I was 12 (laughs).
So, by the time I was 12, I looked in the phone book and I found this animation house in south Seattle. I was living in a suburb of Seattle and I figured I could take the bus there. I went down and I did a little interview and I showed them of my movies and they said, “great, you’re hired.” They had no idea I was 12, I had a really deep voice and I was a big kid. So, I started there as a summer job and it just kind of kept evolving from there. Then I worked at another place called Alpha Cine, which was a film lab in Seattle. I actually started by working on Empire Strikes Back, believe it or not, just as a film-processing kid. So I did that and I kept making my own movies and developing my skills by just trying to steal as much information as I could from wherever.
Until I was 18, I had made enough noise by calling people that I kind of had an open door. I hadn’t got invited to go to art school, I kind of got rejected (laughs). I just packed up my Volkswagen bus, and I drove south to Los Angeles. Some of the people I had corresponded with, one of them being Steve Johnson, hired me pretty much day one to work on Big Trouble in Little China. So, off I went. I kind of just hit the vein of genre films in the mid-’80s, which I was fortunate to arrive when I did. I never looked back. It’s just been one long day ever since. I was just a kid who wanted to make weird art and monsters, so it was a dream come true to be able to actually get into the business to begin with, then to make a career of it. Then, bang, all of a sudden, I’m an old guy looking back. My company is 32 years old, and it’s like, “What happened?” (laughs)
HGL: Speaking of your company, MastersFX created the doll for the upcoming Child’s Play reboot. Tell us a little about the challenge of reinventing such an iconic character.
TM: Yeah, it’s definitely a challenge. Any time you’re faced with a remake or redo, or even the slightest redesign, you’re always going to be dealing with an uphill battle. People are going to have their fixed-in memories. Images, especially horror images, or any type of effect that draws emotion, really does kind of burn into the mind. People take ownership of your stuff. Which is what you want them to do. You want them to be emotional about designs. Everybody loves Chucky.
So, when I first heard about the project, I was a little reluctant. I had been on Chucky movies in the past, but it was always the same doll design. When I heard that they wanted to redesign it, I thought, “Well, this is just how it goes.” Everyone wants to keep remaking and revising. The “what worked once might work again” type of stuff. So, it’s inevitable that we’re going to hit some of this stuff. We redid Predator; we’ve redone a bunch of stuff over the years. It’s kind of funny that a lot of these movies are from when I first started in the business. A lot of these ’80s remakes I actually touched way back when. So, it was kind of interesting when Chucky came along.
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I didn’t actually work on the originals, but I certainly knew the crew, and I knew what was going on behind the scenes. For one, it was hesitation; two, it was an honor to be chosen to do it; three, it was horrifying because I knew the schedule was going to be tight. The big part is that we like challenges. The producers really wanted it to be a practical thing; it seemed wrong to try to do something like that digitally, so it was kind of cool to go that way. It was a really intense build. We made a lot of puppets, various puppets to do various things. We did do a lot of the sculpting on the computer. When the script came it, I gotta say, it was shocking how great it was. Not to say we don’t expect good scripts, but we do read a lot of mediocre stuff, especially remakes. Sometimes they’re a little soft. I thought this script was really really good. Then I met Lars (Klevburg, director of the new Child’s Play), and he flew over from Norway. The big thing with the script was that it really isn’t the same movie and there’s a reason, a real story reason, that he looks different. That kind of got me interested in it in a different way. It wasn’t like we were trying to take the original design and soften it here and round there and do things like that. It is a totally different thing. I think people will understand that when they see it.
It was a crazy build, I think we managed because we have a great crew. We didn’t do a lot of the sculpting phase. A lot of these practical FX, there’s quite a bit of work done in sculptural form. Our studio has really welcomed a digital pipeline, so there is a lot of sculpting but some of it is in the computer. I think that also saved our bacon a little bit. It allowed us to change sizes on the fly; if Lars wanted it 5 inches higher, we could do that. From the very beginning, that was one of our big questions. How big is this damn thing? It’s kind of silly when you see a young kid carrying around this massive doll. Of course, it has to be big to hide all the stuff, but still, it shouldn’t be this massive thing. It’s gotta appear like something that’s marketable and desired by children. So it gave Lars a chance to really study that. I think we outputted 4 or 5 different sizes of the doll, in full clothing and everything.
HGL: When it comes to integrating digital and practical FX, what are the advantages of using both approaches?
TM: Great question. It’s kinda funky because practical FX and CG/digital FX have this weird relationship in that each methodology has its own good side and bad side. It’s assets and liabilities. One thing I noticed years ago is that the assets of one appear to be the liabilities of the other. For example, CG has a really hard time feeling real and believable. It’s hard for actors to act against tennis balls, etc. Where practical feels real pretty quickly. You make something practical look real and perfect pretty fast. It looks real because it is real. Actors can see it, they can react to it, and directors can direct it if it’s a person in a suit, for instance. Practical’s big liability is that it has to abide by the laws of physics. You can’t just bring a puppet on set and say, “Physics does not apply!” (laughs) You still have to stage and move it. Digital doesn’t. Digital can set the amount of gravity it wants to have. So, there’s a handshake between the two methodologies which makes them really nice to stitch together.
We started doing this aggressively a few years ago. It comes across in some interesting ways. Some people really buy into the fact that they’re looking at something completely believable. It doesn’t have a tell, CG sometimes has a tell, you can kind of see something’s coming. CG, of course, grows better and better, and practical FX grows better and better, too. We’re starting to see a lot of filmmakers see the power of practical FX in a different way. So, we’re doing a lot more of that. Not only on set has it changed, but even in the way we build things. We’ve embraced a digital companion throughout the entire process. For example, on Chucky, Predator, or a couple of others we’ve just done. We’ve used digital outputs for certain things we just can’t quite do, or at least do easily with our hands.
We just did a bug monster, and we wanted these cool texture-patterned eyeballs. That would suck to sculpt (laughs). We’ve done it before, but with the computer, we can do a bunch really fast, and we can have choices. Then, we will sculpt the head by hand. It’s about mixing the methodologies.
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HGL: Besides the projects you mentioned, you also worked on the modern classic sci-fi horror film Slither. Tell us about your experience working on that film and with director James Gunn.
TM: (laughs) Oh boy. Well, that was a few years back now. James and I have done a lot of stuff together. He’s a hell of a filmmaker. That was his second directed film, though it was kind of his first. His first was Tromeo and Juliet, and I’m not sure we can quite count that (laughs). In a way, Slither was his first baby. James came in with a head of steam. He had so many great ideas. I wasn’t familiar with him; I was just meeting him right off the bat. We just started drawing and creating together. Trying to bring his script to life. It was a lot of fun. We bonded on that and did several other projects afterward.
I think we did some things on Slither that no one has ever tried before. That was a nice synergy between our LA and Vancouver shops. It was a lot of fun mixing the teams together. There was just so much stuff to do. We actually had to expand in LA; we ran out of space. We took over an airport hangar to finish the Grant Grant monster; it was just ridiculous. There are all sorts of great stories. I could talk about Slither for weeks. We were running out of materials because we were making so much big stuff.
Dan Rebert, who was a co-supervisor with me, was supervising the LA team. He had some formula that’s used in sex toys to make this weird plasticized slither shit, he was casting stuff out of it, and he started running out of the raw material. So, he sent one of the assistants to every sex store in LA, and he bought all these toys (laughs). He brought them back to the shop, and we had a whole team chopping them up to make them easier to melt down. It just happened to be a day I was bringing a client through (laughs). So, we walk through the shop and there’s a huge table in the center with a mountain of sex toys and a bunch of people chopping them into little cubes. It must’ve been the most surreal thing for that person. I don’t know if we got that job (laughs). It was one of those reality meets film surreality scenarios where you ask yourself, “What is my job again? Weirdest career ever.”
Slither had all kinds of funny little episodes like that. There was a moment with James on-set where we were shooting the opening stuff when (Michael) Rooker got shot with the yellow organism. That organism had a very sculpted sexual look to it. When I read scripts, I always look for undertones and subtext and stuff and that script just reeked of sexual perversion, the whole thing is about infidelity and sexual overdrive, like Rooker’s character and probably Rooker himself (laughs). Out of nowhere, James just announces to the crew, “Hey, Masters! Why does everything you do have a vagina on it?” (laughs) or something like that. He said that he thought Brenda looked like a gigantic tit, he thought the slugs looked like penises, all these things.
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Some of it, I subtly put in there. After he said that, I said, “James, look in your own script! You’ve actually written the subtext.” Right in the script, it truly said, I think the words were, “There’s a yellow organism that quite frankly looks like a big yellow vagina” (laughs). Like, James, this is the movie you’re making, man. So, that was a funny moment and I think the whole crew had a chuckle about it.
It’s interesting to hear people talk about that movie still. It didn’t quite see the right fan base when it came out; it kind of fell apart at the box office. I think marketing was a bit weird on that one. I’ve always loved the film, and people seem to always want to talk about it. It’s got a great funny tone, and James really kicked ass on it. I’m really glad he’s been able to keep it up and be such a rockstar.
HGL: Lastly, as you already touched on, the Child’s Play films have a rabid fan base. What might you tell fans of the original Child’s Play series who may hesitate to trust a new vision?
TM: The script actually wouldn’t make sense with the same doll. It really wouldn’t. The script is a big component. I can’t really say the details of what that is. I think it’s already been leaked that it’s a very corporate-based entity that is involved. It’s much like how Starbucks evolved its design over time. They simplified it. It’s kind of the point of big corporations. You look at Starbucks now; it’s kind of lost the small coffee house feel; it’s just become this conglomerate of brown liquid. If you look at their logo and their whole image, it’s gone from being comfortable and homey to being a little more brutalistic and cold and more “get the fuck out of here” (laughs). That’s not the narrative for Child’s Play, but it had a lot of the corporate attitude to respect in the design.
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The first doll was triggered by something else and it was what was required for that narrative. The other thing to keep in mind is that Chucky is always an asshole. Part of the reason we love Chucky is because he’s an asshole. He kind of does and says a lot of the things we’d like to say and do but can’t. That’s another thing that I think is funny about how the response has been going. Everyone is responding like Chucky is an asshole, which I think is exactly what the studio wants. That’s sort of the point. The reason that you’re emotionally connected to Freddy, or Chucky, or any of these characters is that the story and the design just work together. They just kind of function as one. We couldn’t do the same design. Fans want it, but sorry, it just wasn’t in the cards. It had to be a new design for a number of reasons. And if they don’t like it, it’s not supposed to be anything but a doll (laughs).
It’s kind of cool that people are already responding. It’s like a few years ago when they had that blue dress thing going. Everyone is like, “That’s a grey dress,” or “That’s a silver dress,” or whatever. In a way, it’s kind of cool that Chucky’s kind of messing with people already. I kind of like that. The face design was done by Einard Martinson, a designer who was one of Lars’ people. We took his 3D files and just printed them right from there. They really came in with a plan, so I think you need to see it before you judge it. It’s really hard to tell with what’s been released, and I think people are going to really like what they see. It’s not the movie they think it is.
The Asbury PR Agency provided all images.
Sorry to tell you but this movie is going to fail miserably! Very disappoint with Chucky’s ugly face and ridiculous red eyes!