Interview: Ray Harryhausen at the Watershed

Wednesday 4th March 2009

Forget all that slick and soulless CGI nonsense from Hollywood, here in Bristol we like our animation with a little heart and personality to it.

So it’s fitting then that the Watershed is welcoming a genuine icon from the golden age of movie-making to meet his fans and present one of his most famous films this month.

Ray Harryhausen, the stop- motion animation guru who played such a pivotal role in films including One Million Years BC, Mighty Joe Young, Clash Of The Titans and the Sinbad franchise, will be visiting the Watershed on Thursday, March 12, for a book signing session and to introduce a 1963 version of the fantasy classic Jason And The Argonauts.

Ray’s love affair with cinema and spectacular monstrous creations in particular was kick- started when he saw King Kong and the work of pioneering animator Willis O’Brien for the first time in 1933.

And Harryhausen almost single-handedly kept the flag flying for these pioneering stop- motion techniques in Hollywood for the next three decades.

His first big break came when he was commissioned to provide the special effects for 1953’s The Beast From 2,000 Fathoms. With its relatively small budget of $200,000, Harryhausen first used a technique which cleverly merged his own animated monsters with live action. It was to be his trademark for decades to come.

Working in parallel with the directors, throughout much of his career Harryhausen’s work was something of a family affair.

His mother and father both helped out with filming sequences and Harryhausen also used a taxidermist assistant, George Lofgren, when any of the characters were of the furry variety.

It was only on his last film, 1981’s Clash Of The Titans, that Harry hired a full-time assistant – the double Oscar-nominated Jim Danforth.

Along the way, Harryhausen was a key figure in the glory years of sci-fi and worked on It Came From Beneath The Sea, which saw a giant octopus attack San Francisco, and the box office hit of 1956, Earth Vs Flying Saucers.

But it was in the Sixties that Harryhausen saw his biggest commercial and artistic success.

His work on Jason And The Argonauts helped inspire a generation of fantasy film-makers including Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, James Cameron and Tim Burton.

When presenting Harryhausen with a special Academy Award, actor Tom Hanks told him: “Lots of people say Casablanca or Citizen Kane is the greatest film of all time... I’d go for Jason And The Argonauts.”

High praise indeed, then.

More box office hits followed, including a cult addition from the Hammer House and 20th Century Fox studios – One Million Years BC, with an early appearance from Raquel Welch as a cavewoman – with mascara and full make-up, of course.

In the 1970s, Harryhausen continued to make a major dent in the box office with sequences for two revivals of the Sinbad series, The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad (1974) and Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger, which appeared three years later.

His final film featured acting great Laurence Olivier and the slightly less stellar Harry Hamlin on Clash Of The Titans, a staple of Christmas TV for the past couple of decades.

And in later years, Ray has even turned his talents to making cameos in Beverly Hills Cop III, Spies Like Us and providing the voice for the polar bear cub in the Will Ferrell festive movie, Elf.

STEVE HARNELL

Ray Harryhausen will be signing copies of his book, A Century Of Model Animation, at the Watershed at 5.30pm on Thursday, March 12. Tickets to the screening of Jason And The Argonauts, at 6.30pm, cost £6 (£4 concessions). To book, call 0117 927 5100, or buy online at www.watershed.co.uk

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Q&A with Ray Harryhausen

1) What was it about the original King Kong movie that you found so fascinating?
The fantasy and a huge creature that looked real but couldn’t be. I was aged just 13 in 1933 when the film was released and it impressed me as a story – a lost island inhabited by prehistoric creatures – and it also impressed me on a technical level. I wanted to know how it was all done. Sadly, unlike today, there were few references to find out how Kong “lived” so I began experimenting with string puppets.

2) How do you think modern-day blockbusters compare with the golden age of Hollywood?
I’m afraid I don’t keep up with new movies in general. Science fiction was never a genre I liked, although I have dabbled in it several times and one of my best friends has been Ray Bradbury. The movies I made were fantasy, even the ones about giant creatures terrorising cities. From a purely personal point of view, there is no comparison between the golden age of movies and what we see today. They are completely different things. Then, there were stars in every sense of the word, now there are celebrities.

3) Did you ever consider becoming a fully-fledged director of live action movies?
No. I never wanted to be a director because I had so much else to do, and besides, I did direct the models. They were my “stars”.

4) Receiving the honorary Oscar must have been a great privilege. How did it feel after all those years of hard work?
It was a great privilege to be awarded the Oscar as it has been to receive so many other awards from around the world, but it would have been nice to have received at least a nomination for one of the films we made.

5) What do you think of the new breed of CGI- animated films coming out of Hollywood?
CGI is another tool. Some films use the technique well and constructively but there are examples of over-use, and when this happens then the impossible or the fantasy becomes mundane.

6) If you had the chance to do it all over again, would you still use stop-motion animation or opt for computers?
It’s impossible to say. I loved the process of animating my models and figuring out how they would move and react. If I was part of a CGI team, I don’t think that creativity would be there in the same way.

7) Have you seen any of the Aardman Animations films such as Chicken Run and Wallace and Gromit?
Oh yes. I’m a huge fan of Peter Lord, David Sproxton and Nick Park at Aardman, they are the primary reason why we are visiting Bristol, to see them and everyone at Aardman.

STEVE HARNELL