Interview: Steve Wang

As I continue to plug away at Return of the Sequel, I wanted to share this brief interview except with director Steve Wang, as it had to be cut out of the book for spacing reasons. In Return of the Sequel I cover all things Guyver: Dark Hero (1994) with Steve, but I wanted to share the rest of the conversation we had, which spans his early make-up days, to working with Stan Winston, through to his views on CGI vs Practical effects.

Steve has worked on designing creatures for the likes of The Monster Squad (creating The Gill Man for Stan Winston’s studio), Underworld: Evolution, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Hell Comes to Frogtown and Aliens vs Predator: Requiem, to name a few. He has also been a prolific director for both TheGuyver (co-directing with Screaming Mad George) and Guyver: Dark Hero, along with episodes of Power Rangers Lost Galaxy, Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight, and the highly respected low-budget martial arts masterpiece Drive (1997)

The interview was originally conducted in June 2017 via Skype and was due to be part of a Podcast interview series leading up to the release of the Return of the Sequel. Due to technical issues (which would have made for poor audio listening), I decided to have the interview transcribe so it could be used in the book.

So sit back, relax and scream Guyver at the top of your lungs. Enjoy my interview excerpt with director and monster-maker extraordinaire Steve Wang!

D.J O’Brien: What really spurred you on to do make-up effects and get in to monster films? Did you start at a young age or come in to it a different way?

Steve Wang: Ever since I was a kid I was really artistic, and I think I started drawing when I was four years old. My older brother started drawing and I was fascinated by it, so I started drawing. A couple of years later he stopped, and I just kind of kept going.

I lived in Taiwan at the time – I was born there – and by the time I was nine years old I saw a poster for an Ultra Man movie that was made in Thailand and it just blew my mind seeing all these guys in silver and red fighting these monsters. I went to this theatre to go watch it one day and ended up watching it three times. It just changed my life and at that point I didn’t really know if I was going to be doing this kind of stuff, but I knew eventually this would somehow be a part of my life. They had a contest at the time where the winner of the contest would get a little three-dimensional plastic Ultra Man mask and up until that point I’d never seen anything like it before. All the masks in Taiwan were printed off cardboard where you pushed the eyeholes out and used a rubber band to put it round your ear – that was masks for us. So seeing something three-dimensional was pretty mind-blowing to me.

Eventually I ended up moving to the United States back in 1975 and around Halloween time, in the local toy store, there were hundreds of these latex rubber masks and that again blew my mind… it looked so life-like with hair, blood, and everything, so at that point I started collecting masks. About four years into it I realised that wasn’t enough for me and I wanted to know how to make it. So I started going to local libraries and looking up books on theatrical make-up and masks, and watching monster movies back then, and reading monster magazines like Famous Monsters and Starlog. Eventually seeing all these photos of how guys like Stan Winston and Rick Baker did their work. From there I bought some clay and just started sculpting and teaching myself how to do this stuff.

D.J O’Brien: So did you look to try and get a career in this from the get-go? Or was this a hobby you were trying out?

SW: First of all it was just a hobby, I really loved it. I was a pretty crazy kid you know… the summer before I started high school I sat in my room the entire summer spending 18 hours a day sculpting, and my mum thought something was wrong with me because I didn’t want to do anything except I came out to eat, came out to get the mail so I could see what kind of mask catalogues showed up, but I just made masks. She thought I was nuts and funnily enough, she got one of my older brother’s friends to come and try to get me out of the house to go to parties and meet girls… all these things. Two weeks later, mum found us in the garage with him helping me create my first full body monster suit.

D.J O’Brien: What was the first film you ended up working on?

SW: Technically the first two films I worked on never came out, as they were local Bay area productions, low budget films, and I don’t know what ever happened to them.

The first Hollywood film was Invaders from Mars (1986, dir Tobe Hooper). That was a Stan Winston project, and that was the first time I actually worked with Stan. That was 1985 and my first job.

D.J O’Brien: And from there you went on to do work on Predator?

SW: Yeah that was almost exactly a year after Invaders from Mars. We finished that, ended up going to Rick Baker’s and was hired as a sculptor to work on Harry and the Hendersons (1987, dir William Dear). I went on to a few other shops at Boss Films, worked on the original Predator (1987, dir John McTiernan) which was originally called Hunter, until that whole thing went kind of awry. Then I went off and worked on Evil Dead II (1987, dir Sam Raimi), then a year later came back to Stan’s again but instead of working as a lab assistant and doing a lot of technical work he hired me and my roommate at the time – Matt Rose – to head up the Creature from the Black Lagoon for The Monster Squad (1987, dir Fred Dekker). We were only 20 years old at the time, but within a year we were given such a huge level of responsibility, and we had to come up with a lot of techniques on how to create the suit. It was just an amazing opportunity to give a couple of kids so young. We really impressed Stan and right after that, Stan got Predator and asked me to co-design it with him and head it up.

D.J O’Brien: I didn’t realise you were that young when you were doing work for Stan Winston! It’s really impressive.

SW: Yeah, well most of the people in the business were my age – between 20 and 25 years old. We were all pretty young so I never thought that was too unusual. What was intense for me, thinking back, was that I hardly knew anything after five years of self-taught sculpting and rudimentary mould making before I go in to the business. Then a year later I was tasked with heading up a big project for Stan. That was really cool and I remember having my 21st birthday about a month before we went to Mexico to shoot in the middle of Predator. Back then it just seemed really cool, and the age thing wasn’t really a factor. But now I think back like wow… I was that young when I did Predator and The Monster Squad – that’s kinda crazy.

D.J O’Brien: I’ve got a huge fondness for Monster Squad, because it was one of the first monster films I could officially see as a young kid. In the UK we don’t have R-rating systems, so Monster Squad had a 15 rating. It was a little, forbidden VHS tape doing the rounds at school and the sense of taboo and feeling terrified kept making me want to go back and watch the film. The Gill Man in particular that you designed is no in the film as often as say, Wolf Man or Dracula, but when he does appear it stays in your memory for sure. The overall look is just stunning still.

SW: Thank you… what’s really weird is that throughout my career most of the stuff I’ve done are usually not in the film very much… We’ll spend like six months to create something and it’s in the film for a blink of an eye and it’s kind of bitter sweet you know, because it stands up to the camera and I think it looks pretty good but for some reason they almost never use it enough. So it’s always been a bittersweet thing for me when you put so much effort in to stuff but no one ever sees it.

D.J O’Brien: What’s your favourite creature that you’ve worked on, in any film?

SW: Let me see… one of my favourite things I’ve designed was for the Guyver – the Guyver Zoanoid. That was based on the Guyver, the whole design of the Guyver that was created by Yoshiki Takaya, so mine was more like a spin on it, and I really enjoyed that one.

I thought the Gill Man was pretty fun, Predator was fun, but I don’t know – I don’t really think about these things to be honest.

D.J O’Brien: Speaking of Predator, there’s that great picture of you working on a sculpt of the Predator – I think you posted it on your Instagram – which I think is a posed photo when you had the dumbbell weight you were using to lift. Where you airbrushing at the time?

SW: No, I mean I was airbrushing, but we used to joke around and used to call people ‘sculpting stud’ or ‘painting stud’, so I thought it would be kind of funny if I was lifting weights. You know, pretend I was so badass I was lifting weights as I was painting. So we mocked that picture up just for fun, and if you examine the dumbbell it’s actually a cut-off broomstick with two little weights on it. The funniest story about that was after that photo was taken, Matt Rose walked by and dropped one of the weights on his toe and broke it. It was awful, he was limping for a couple of weeks!

But yeah, we forgot about that photo and somehow it resurfaced… and it just went viral. I think there was some website – maybe ten years ago – that had top ten or 15 photos of Hollywood, with stuff from like Ben Hur and Cleopatra, and number ten was our picture. I thought what the hell, how did that become top ten Hollywood photo on this website. It’s pretty crazy.

I went to some convention, I remember, and there was this guy talking to somebody at a dealer table and I was standing next to him not realising. He looked at me and had a surprised expression, and I looked down at his shirt, and his shirt was that picture! It was just a fun joke and it went crazy.

D.J O’Brien: I just want to briefly talk about practical vs. CGI. With your background in make-up effects, I just want to see how you get on with more CGI-heavy films. I saw Warcraft recently – the Duncan Jones film – and that is visually and technically impressive because the motion capture they’ve used on the orc’s faces is phenomenal. They’ve got past the ‘dead-behind-the-eyes’ look nowadays, so you actually feel connected with that character… the same goes for Planet of the Apes. But there is something missing… it does feel soulless, almost video-gamey, as impressive as it is technically. –

SW: It’s funny I think some people just do it better than others and some subject matters lend itself more naturally to it than others. The Warcraft orcs – for the most part they felt very plastic to me. You know, if you zoom in on the imagery it’s immaculate. The level of detail is astounding, but somehow, they just seem plastic-looking, despite all the work that is put in to it. Then you look at the Planet of the Apes movies – Caesar sometimes is a little digital-looking, sometimes he looks really well – but then there are characters like Maurice, the orang-utan, who just looks 100% real. They’re just amazing creations. I think because they’re apes and they exist in real life they tend to lend themselves to being more believable. There were shots in the film with Maurice, I’d freeze-frame the film and look at Maurice and say you cannot tell me that’s not 100% there in the movie. It’s just amazing, it’s mind-blowing. So there’s varying levels – movies like Planet of the Apes really shows you the potential of where digital can go if everything is done right. To me that’s exciting because you see a lot of bad CGI out there too, so whenever you see something good it really is refreshing.

The remainder of the interview with Steve Wang, which covers Guyver: Dark Hero, will be in the finished version of Return of the Sequel – Due 2019.