Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/713430
I've got my life cast, my crew and a space to work. All that was left was my team on set. I knew there would be some heavy beard work so I put the word out. Two people immediately responded with the same name … Leslie Devlin. DONE! I stated before that my build crew was lean, well, my set crew was even leaner. The constant producer mantra I kept hearing was "It's just two guys, how hard could it be?" Anissa Salazar, our Department Head Hair, was a department of ONE … "It's only two guys, how hard can it be?" I know that all three of us could now answer that with a swift response. "It's hard!" Let's talk about those two guys, Manny and Hank. Initially, I had all these grandiose ideas on how I would break down Manny's make-up and consecutively, the dummies, look. I had planned on progressively rotting Manny throughout the film. Black putrefaction and sloughing skin was my vision. Unfortunately, nobody else shared that vision. Ultimately, the audience had to relate and care for this magical corpse and anything too "real" could potentially be distracting. In the end, we landed on an air-brushed Illustrator make-up with no appliances. The make-up progressed as the character is horrifically abused throughout the story. Manny, the multipurpose tool that Hank uses to stay alive, can cut rope with his teeth, store and regurgitate water, use his head as a hammer, and start a fire with his flatulent. Manny also fell off cliffs, down hills, was thrown out of a tree, into the river, in the ocean and caught fire. Most of this abuse is played down to keep with the fantastical, non-distracting, magic corpse concept. Paul Dano's character, Hank, was just as challenging if not more. When we are introduced to Hank, he is a disheveled mess. Stranded on a deserted island, Hank is sunburned, dehydrated and filthy. To convey this, we gave Hank a spray tan, a scraggly beard and mustache a la Cast Away and a thick layer of grime. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to see Dano until the day before shooting to do a make-up test. After I applied the beard, we decided it felt little to Amish and ended up cutting it down considerably. This decision forced Leslie to hand lay a majority of it during filming. Hank would suffer all the same desecration as Manny with an additional bear mauling, which was a piece beautifully sculpted by Mark Nieman and applied by 26 Previous spread and this spread: Jason Hamer and team create the dummies and make-ups for Swiss Army Man. This photo: Paul Dano (top) and Daniel Radcliffe in their roles as Hank and Manny.