Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1097515
DGA QUARTERLY 25 When Will is thrown into frame, he's holding a rubber version of the alien baby that has no electronics, and there's KY Jelly to give it that glistening new- born baby look. But it was designed to be jelly- enough-like so that it would have natural move- ment. I was lucky enough to hire Rick Baker to be the special makeup and creature designer, and Rick said to me, "As much as you can do practically, you want to. Puppeteers are really funny. They're real actors. They can give your actors stuff to react to. They can respond and ad-lib. You want puppeteers, not CGI. The other babies had RC motors in them and a guy off camera with a re- mote to move the tentacles, but I be- lieve this version connected via wires because it allowed for more motors and more indepen- dent movement. This one also had a tube so it could vomit and hit Will. This is real, not CG, so Will had to angle the baby's head just right. You can't see it, but the wire is hidden around the back of Will and it actually vomited that stuff. Here's the thing about Will: Will hates to be dirty. He hates to have slime on him so Will is not acting here. He's being Will Smith being disgusted. Will, also, is one of the great- est spit-take guys ever. This is the work of a great puppeteer who can get the squid baby's thumb into its mouth, and why you don't want to use CGI if you can do it for real. If we had animated Will instead of putting him on wires, it would never have looked as real or as funny—it's very, very hard to get animators to get physical comedy. Normally you would let him drop out of frame and cut to his face hit- ting the roof in the foreground; he would react and be lifted out of frame again. But for me, that wasn't the joke. The joke is never leave the shot. ® 11 12 13 14 11 12 13 14