JL: But you do a lot of gore effects! Didn’t you tell me that when you were a teenager, you used to do make-up wounds on yourself, just to freak people out?

RB: Yeah I did, but that was just to get a reaction, an easy reaction. That’s why I don’t have that much respect for those kinds of make-ups because I know how easy it is to fool somebody with just the sight of blood. It’s not as hard as doing a character, or to turn a young person, through make-up, into an old person.

JL: Your own interest in monsters seems to be aesthetic.

RB: It’s a visual thing. I’ve always been fascinated by the way they look and how people designed and changed a human into something else.

JL: If I said to you, “I want to be made-up to look like me, but I want it to be scary,” are there things, shortcuts, you can do...?

RB: There is kind of a formula to that.

JL: Like what?

RB: Angularity. Look at the werewolf in An American Werewolf in London[John Landis, 1981], your four-legged hound from hell. It had big scary teeth that are going to tear you up, but it’s also sculpted in a very angular way. The brows are very angular and there are 45° angles all through it. There is something scary about 45° angles.

Baker working wolf head in Piccadilly Circus for American Werewolf in London[1981].

JL: Well, Dracula has got that going on.

RB: Yeah, with the widow’s peak and the eyebrows shaved—I use 45° angles all the time.

JL: They always show the devil that way, and Mephistopheles has brows like that.

RB: Yeah, the devil’s horns go up at 45°, as well as the ears. I don’t know why 45° angles are scary, but they are! I think some of the scariest make-ups, and the guy who was the best at making scary faces, was Lon Chaney, Sr. So many designs that I’ve done, and I know other make-up artists would say the same, were influenced by Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera[Rupert Julian, 1925]. Some of the faces he makes in that are great.

JL: And Chaney was using old stage make-up, with big limitations in what he could do because of the primitive materials he had to work with.

RB: A lot of the old make-up guys didn’t have a lot of the tools that we have now, and that’s part of the reason their efforts worked so well. They worked within specific limitations. They couldn’t make 10,000 werewolves crawl on the ceiling, you know? There was a certain reality to their work. It was closer to what you could really believe.

JL: Do you have a favorite movie monster?

RB: Frankenstein is my favorite and the Boris Karloff version is by far the best. It was one of those movies where the mix of people involved—James Whale, Jack Pierce, and Boris Karloff—created magic.

JL: Karloff had an amazing face.

RB: He’s got a great face, and the make-up Pierce designed for his face never looked as good on anyone else. And I don’t think that anyone else was as good as Karloff either.

JL: OK, so you’ve done a lot of aliens.

RB: Aliens and werewolves. I did your movie [ An American Werewolf in London], and I did The Wolfman[Joe Johnston, 2010], and I did Wolf[Mike Nichols, 1994]…

Baker making-up Griffin Dunne as “Dead Jack” for An American Werewolf in London[1981].

JL: Of course! What is it about werewolves that people are so interested in.

RB: Well, I think everybody seems to feel like there’s a beast inside them somewhere.

JL: Like Jekyll and Hyde?

RB: It’s that whole evil side coming out. But what I like about werewolf movies is the change in the appearance of the person. I’m interested in the transformation, more than the story itself. That animal and man combination has always fascinated me, going back to [French artist Charles] Le Brun. I always thought the combination of humans and animals was such a fun thing. That’s why I liked Island of Lost Souls[Erle C. Kenton, 1932].

JL: The first film version of (H. G. Wells’ novel) The Island of Dr. Moreau? I love that movie! The make-ups in that picture are great.

RB: Better than in any of the remakes.

JL: Why is that?

RB: Because my favorite make-ups are the ones where the guys didn’t have the tools that we have today! For Island of Lost Souls, they didn’t have foam rubber or silicone so they couldn’t make really crazy things, and I think they benefited from that. The Beast Men are these hairy, man-like creatures, but there’s a reality to it.

JL: You flew to London to join me for Ray Harryhausen’s 90th birthday event at the National Film Theater. [Steven] Spielberg, [James] Cameron, [George] Lucas, Tim Burton, Guillermo [Del Toro] all talked about how he inspired them. What is so special about Ray’s work?

RB: He really does give those metal and foam rubber puppets life! He makes them characters… but also, I think a lot of this is that we’re the generation which grew up with his films and saw them fresh and new. I would watch a Harryhausen movie and suffer through 20 minutes of bad acting just to see his effects. Since then, I’ve seen so many huge effects movies, with thousands of things doing all sorts of crazy action, to the point where it just has no impact and I don’t care. But I can watch one of Ray’s puppet animations with complete pleasure.

JL: Do you remember the big battle in the second Lord of the Ringsmovie [ The Two Towers, Peter Jackson, 2002]? That was the first time I saw a CG movie with so much CG that wasn’t in outer space. I thought: “This is great!” It was a way of realizing these enormous monsters on a vast scale. But now I’ve become so bored with CG effects. Things have gotten so elaborate, I just don’t care.

RB: I know, just because you can have a thousand werewolves climbing upside-down on the ceiling, it doesn’t mean that you should!

JL: You know what you showed me once that totally freaked me out? You were very gleeful. You had gotten a medical encyclopedia full of horrible photographs of medical anomalies, and one of them was of teeth growing out of a guy’s leg. Do you remember that? It really freaked me out.

RB: When I first went to junior college, I found books on plastic surgery. Just talking about those kinds of things scares me. Seeing what can happen to you and that you can still be alive… There was one guy in particular that was in an airplane crash, who basically had no face, and no skin on the top of his head. They had drilled holes in his skull to let the pressure out, but the guy was alert and alive. I find that horrifying. What scares me is that it could actually happen to me. How would I deal with that when I looked in the mirror and that’s what looked back at me?

I think that’s something that always fascinated me about make-up: that I could look through my eyes, and see a completely different person looking back at me in the mirror. I was painfully shy as a kid, but in make-up you can do things you can’t do as yourself.

JL: I think that’s true of Eddie Murphy.

RB: I think it’s true of any actor. Everybody hates the process of being made-up—hours in the morning—but you’re sitting there looking at yourself, and you can see that other face, the character’s face, looking back.

JL: What clearly demonstrates that is costume. I’ve seen it millions of times. Once the actors get into their clothes, they know who the character is.

RB: Actors need that. When you walk onto a cool set and you’re in this environment, and you’re in make-up and costume, it’s got to help! With all this movement to motion-capture and blue screen, I really think it affects the performance and reality of the moment.

JL: I am always impressed by the fact that actors, especially in fantasy films, so often have to react and respond to something that is not there. Some gigantic creature or cataclysmic event that will be put in later in post production.