Stop-motion animation has been around since the silent-movie days, but no one has put a personal stamp on the technique like Ray Harryhausen. In 16 movies from 1949's Mighty Joe Young to 1981's Clash Of The Titans, Harryhausen gave life to an entire zoo's worth of fearsome monsters, including the giant octopus which destroys the Golden Gate Bridge in It Came From Beneath The Sea, the carnivorous dinosaurs of One Million Years B.C. and The Valley Of Gwangi, and, from his most memorable film, Jason And The Argonauts, the colossal guardian Talos and the homicidal, sword-wielding skeletons. It's rare for a special-effects artist to be the real driving force behind a movie, but Harryhausen's contributions often dominated the shaping of his films. He achieved this while working mostly alone and under the pressures of low-budget filmmaking—Titans' $16 million budget was more than the total cost of his previous collaborations with producer Charles Schneer, his partner for the bulk of his career. Just before embarking for America, where he'll be touring through early May, Harryhausen talked with The A.V. Club about his life and his new book The Art Of Ray Harryhausen, which looks back at his career from his high-school days building mammoths out of his mother's discarded fur coat to his latest work as a bronze sculptor.
The A.V. Club: How did you first get interested in becoming an animator?
Ray Harryhausen: [Laughs.] Well, that was quite a long way back. It was through King Kong, of course. I saw that at Grauman's Chinese [Theater] in 1933, and I haven't been the same since. My aunt had three tickets to this strange film that was playing on Hollywood Boulevard at Grauman's Chinese. I was still in high school, and we went one afternoon when I was off. It was quite an amazing spectacle. Sid Grauman was a great showman; he used to have a stage show just at the beginning of the feature, and he had a big display out in the foyer of the bust of Kong and pink flamingos strutting around. It was so impressive. They really put on a show in those days.
AVC: What impressed you about Kong?
RH: It's so compact, that's the beauty of it. Everything points to the central theme and the central concept—there isn't a wasted scene or superfluous word of dialogue in the picture. I've seen it so many times, and Ray Bradbury still admires it as well. I know Peter Jackson loved it as much as I did.
AVC: Later, you actually contacted Willis O'Brien, Kong's special-effects creator, and he became your mentor.
RH: When I was still in high school, I called him up at MGM. A friend of mine said "Let's call him up"—her father had worked with him. And he kindly invited me down to MGM to take a look at his preparation for [the unfinished 1938 project] War Eagles.
AVC: How difficult was it for a high-school student to meet a professional in the film industry?
RH: Everybody likes to be isolated when they're working on a film, but I guess not many people were interested in animation. He thought I might have been an exception, I guess. At that time, I hadn't found another kindred soul who admired King Kong the way I did.
AVC: And even in high school, you were experimenting with movie special effects.
RH: I wasn't actually working with stop-motion. I was making models of the La Brea tar pits. I admired those type of things. I'd seen Willis O'Brien's Lost World when I was 4 or 5, I guess, and of course that was a silent film and I was impressed visually, but it makes a big difference when you have a fine score, like Max Steiner created for King Kong.
AVC: Later you worked with O'Brien on your first professional film, Mighty Joe Young.
AVC: How does stop-motion animation work?
RH: It's very similar to the animated cartoon, only instead of a flat drawing that's progressive, you use a three-dimensional model that's jointed. [The 1933] King Kong was about 18 inches high. He had [a skeleton with] every joint that a real gorilla would have made of ball-and-socket steel, and then he was covered with rubber and rabbit fur. Then you photograph it frame-by-frame. Each frame of the film on 35mm is like taking a series of still pictures; when you run them at 24 frames a second, which is sound speed, you get the illusion that it's moving by itself. But, of course, you have to be very careful that you keep the head and arms and everything in synchronization so it gives the illusion of reality.
AVC: It's very detailed and time-consuming work.
RH: It is. It's not everybody's cup of tea. You have to have a certain mentality for it, I think. [Laughs.] I try to give [my creations] a character. Mighty Joe, I gave him a lot of little side things to do, to give him character. Willis O'Brien did that with King Kong, and I admired that so much in his film.
AVC: Even the spaceships in Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, although they don't have many moving parts, move with a certain amount of personality.
RH: We tried to give the illusion that they were guided by intelligence, although we very seldom showed the creatures that were inside.
AVC: So what's the trick to making a flying saucer behave like a living thing?
RH: [Laughs.] I don't know whether there's a trick. Everybody sees things differently—that's the way I see it, another animator might do it a little differently. I can't say that there's any specific trick to it, it's just trying to give the illusion that there's something alive inside that's guiding it.
AVC: Some of your earliest work, like the Fairy Tales—
RH: Yes, those were more experiments. I call them my teething rings, because I learned a great deal from making fairy tales. I made them for schools, for young people. "Mother Goose Stories" was made to associate the written word with a visual image, and it's still used in schools all over the country. I made most of them in my garage.
AVC: And your father helped you as well.
RH: Yes, my father was a machinist, and he made the armatures [steel skeletons forming the structure of a stop-motion model]. My mother made the costumes, and I designed everything and built the little miniature sets and photographed it. And I learned so many different techniques; I went to night school while I was still in high school to study film editing and art direction as well as photography.
AVC: And he continued to help you quite a long way into your film career, making some of the models in some of your professional films as well.
RH: Oh yes, he made the armatures. I made very detailed drawings, and I would send them to him in America. He made the skeletons, Talos, and the harpies for Jason And The Argonauts.
AVC: Besides Kong, what were some of your other early influences?
RH: [Gustave] Doré was one of the main ones. His engravings in his Bible Gallery and for Dante's Inferno and Don Quixote were so visual and cinematic. I always call him the first motion-picture art director, because in the silent days, a lot of art directors in films used to copy him. Cecil B. DeMille used to group his biblical characters very similar to the drawings that Dore made.
AVC: You mentioned earlier that as a young man it was difficult to find people who enjoyed King Kong as much as you did. Not too much later, though, you made lifelong friends of science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury and Famous Monsters Of Filmland fanzine editor Forrest Ackerman.
RH: That was through Kong as well, indirectly.
AVC: How did you meet?
RH: Through the [Los Angeles] Science Fiction Society that was going in those days. I went to a little fleapit to see a reissue of Kong for 10 cents, I think they charged. [Laughs.] And they had these beautiful 11x14 stills of Kong that I hadn't seen since Grauman's Chinese, when they had them in the foyer. I asked if I could borrow them because they were an inspiration to me, and the manager said that they didn't belong to him, that he borrowed them from Forrest Ackerman. So he gave me his number, and I called him up, and Forry gallantly loaned me the stills, and I copied them. Then he invited me to the Science Fiction Society, which held meetings every Thursday in the Brown Room, in Clifton's Cafeteria.
AVC: You worked with Ray Bradbury on one of your first films, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. How do you think your friendship influenced your career?
RH: Well, we were all interested in science fiction, the unusual. [The Society] had a rocket scientist, and Ray was only a struggling writer selling newspapers on the street corner. [Laughs.] He was very enthused, and [although] he was getting a lot of rejection slips, finally he hit the big time. He was very persistent. We had a lot in common; he loved dinosaurs and I loved dinosaurs, and Ray and Forry and I would sometimes go way out to Eagle Rock and Pasadena just to see a replay of Last Days Of Pompeii, which was a [Merian] Cooper picture, and She, and King Kong, and Son Of Kong. That was way back in '38, before the war. We've been friends ever since. I seldom see him today, because I live in England. Whenever I go to America, we always get together for dinner. I explain all this a lot in my DVD called The Early Years Collection. [That also has] all my fairy tales as well as my early experiments that I made before the war.
AVC: You were raised in Los Angeles?
RH: Yes, I was. I spent half of my life there and half here in England.
AVC: As a filmmaker, what were the advantages of being in England, rather than staying closer to Hollywood?
RH: Well, when we were making a film called The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver, we had [to create the effect of] big people and little people [in the same shot]. We couldn't use rear projection, which dominated the film business for special effects in America, and the Rank Laboratory in England had a marvelous system [called a] traveling matte, which is a way of putting two pieces of film together without them being noticeably different. So we wanted to come over essentially to use that particular process of the Rank Laboratory.
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