THE INDEPENDENT: Bad Grandpa: When Jackass was nominated for an Oscar...
Bad Grandpa: When Jackass was nominated for an Oscar...
The make-up and hair team of Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa have been nominated for an Oscar
“The producer overheard a 10-year-old kid saying, ‘Dad, that’s Johnny Knoxville.’ His dad didn’t believe him. It turned out the dad was a doctor!” Bryan Christensen
In Bad Grandpa, the latest movie from the Jackass stable, an 86-year-old named Irving Zisman takes a kooky, cross-country road trip with his young grandson. Along the way, the pair shock, unnerve and offend a succession of unsuspecting bystanders, before making a subversive appearance at a child beauty pageant. So far, so Little Miss Sunshine.
Yet what sets the former film apart from its influences is that the witnesses to its wacky set-pieces are not actors but real people, and Zisman is played not by a real eightysomething, but by Johnny Knoxville, who is 42. That his elderly disguise was so convincing explains why Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa is this year’s most unlikely Oscar nominee, in the Make-up and Hairstyling category.
Tony Gardner, one of the make-up special- effects specialists behind Zisman, says, “If the make-up doesn’t work, the movie doesn’t work. Most of the time comedies aren’t recognised [by the Academy Awards]. But the platform that this film’s make-up stands on is the fact that the character worked in the real world, in real light, in front of real people.”
Alterian’s HQ is a warehouse on a non-descript industrial estate in the unremarkable LA suburb of Irwindale. But hidden behind its beige facade is a workshop filled with weird creations coming to life, and an office decorated with previous on-screen triumphs: a dog in a full-body plaster cast from There’s Something About Mary; John Travolta’s female fat-suit from Hairspray; the titular robot from the sci-fi dramedy Robot & Frank. One memento sadly missing is a 14-foot replica of David Hasselhoff that the firm made for The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie – now being used as the base of a glass-top table at the Hoff’s home.
Turning heads: Tony Gardner and Lilo Tauvao work on ideas for ‘Bad Grandpa’ (Bryan Christensen)
Irving Zisman’s features were based in large part on Gardner’s grandfather, Fred. The face was made from silicone, paper-thin and translucent. The ears and the back of the head were latex. Then there was the wig, the eyebrows, the moustache, the dental veneers, and the liver-spotted backs of his hands. The team also made a wrinkled torso for Knoxville to wear in scenes where he removed his shirt, as well as some other anatomical items that it would be inappropriate to describe in the pages of a family newspaper. Each make-up element had to be mass-produced so that Knoxville could be disguised anew for every day of the 60-day shoot.
Remarkably, his cover was rarely blown. “There was a scene when he went to a Jacuzzi and dropped a colostomy bag in the water,” Gardner explains. “The producer overheard a 10-year-old kid turning to his dad and saying, ‘Dad, that’s Johnny Knoxville.’ His dad didn’t believe him – he said: ‘Look at all the wrinkles on his stomach. It’s a real guy.’ It turned out the dad was a doctor!”
Gardner, who is 50, grew up in Ohio but moved to California in the 1980s to study film at USC. Ostensibly as part of his studies, he engineered a meeting with legendary special-effects man Rick Baker, who offered him a four-week job as a production runner. “Four weeks turned into four years,” Gardner says. He subsequently worked with Baker on projects as varied as the music video for Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Gorillas in the Mist, and established his own company while working on the cult horror The Return of the Living Dead in 1985.
One of the key members of the Jackass gang is writer-director Spike Jonze, whom Gardner met while working on David O Russell’s Gulf War movie Three Kings, in 1999. “Spike was one of the people I was doing make-up on,” Gardner recalls. “He kept saying, ‘I’ve got to get back and edit my movie.’ I was like, ‘Oh God, this is one of those actors who wants to be a director.’ But we really hit it off, and it turned out later that he was in the middle of editing Being John Malkovich.”
Gardner worked on Jonze’s second film, Adaptation, and then Jonze introduced him to Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, better known as the enigmatic French dance duo Daft Punk. Alterian was instrumental in the design of the helmets worn by the band for their public appearances. Gardner and Bangalter bonded over a shared love for the 1950s sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, and the helmets were influenced by the Gort, that movie’s alien robot.
Bart Mixon works on Johnny Knoxville’s make-up (Sean Cliver)
Alterian recently completed work on the comedy sequel Dumb and Dumber To, though the firm’s relationship with gross-out auteurs the Farrelly Brothers stretches back to There’s Something About Mary in 1998. “I had little kids at the time and I was taking phone-calls at home that involved asking people things like, ‘The sperm on Ben Stiller’s ear: is it clear or white? How long is it? Is it chunky? The boobs: do you want her nipples out or down? The balls in the zipper: do you want veins?’ These are not conversations you want your kids to hear!”
Today, the SFX industry is under threat from the rise of its rival, VFX, and Gardner explains that where Alterian might once have made creature suits for actors, film-makers now just cover their actors in coloured dots and add the creatures as post-production CGI. Though the company specialises in overweight and old-age make-up such as Zisman’s, even that business is being usurped. “There are films being shot as we speak, with younger actors playing older, and they’re experimenting with dots and digital make-up instead of physical.”
For the real-life survival drama 127 Hours, Alterian made the fake arm that James Franco sawed off using a blunt penknife. The prosthetic was so anatomically convincing that Gardner has started a side business creating life-like babies and combat wounds to help train emergency room doctors and army medics.
And yet, he says, manufacturing believable make-up is only half the battle. “Half the success of make-up is the person wearing it. With James Franco, the arm was great, but if he hadn’t made it real, you wouldn’t have bought it. We can make Johnny Knoxville look 80-something, but if he doesn’t own it and sell you on it, you’re not going to buy it. It’s a collaboration.”
LA TIMES: HERO COMPLEX: "Beastly:" Alex Pettyfer gets his monster on
‘Beastly’: Alex Pettyfer gets his monster on
WF: Pettyfer’s Kyle looks very different from most beasts we’ve seen on the screen. For starters, he’s not hairy the way he’s described in the book. How do you decide to go in this particular direction with his makeup?
TG: One of the main reasons is that there have been so many werewolf projects happening right now and [hairy beasts] seem so inclusive in that realm that we gotta make it stand alone. Daniel Barnez, [UPDATED March 5, 11:30 a.m.: A previous version of this article spelled the director’s last name as Barnes] the director, was the person who said it’s all about this character’s vanity and his hair is a major part of his vanity — it’d be interesting to make him lose that… We got into contact lenses for him and dental veneers. We left his eyes alone because that was where you really connected with the character.
WF: And the tattoos that were incorporated into the character design?
TG: A lot of the tattoos are sayings he’s flung at other people … We wanted some sort of skin texture, like tree bark. The tattoos were like trees. And the piercings couldn’t be something somebody would just take off. He’s really abusive and condescending to people. He’s vain enough to use makeup. We had to go beyond what he could cover up. If he’s hairy, the guy could just shave and put on makeup. There had to be stuff that took it further. It was Daniel Barnez’ idea to include pieces of mirror embedded in as part of a reflection — no pun intended — of the character’s vanity and how hung up you are in looking in the mirror all the time.
Vanessa Hudgens and Alex Pettyfer in "Beastly" (CBS Films)
WF: This re-telling of the classic fable of “Beauty and the Beast” is set in high school, with teens intended to be its core audience. Was that factored into your research? Did you research what a teen would find frightening or ugly?
TG: My daughter Brianna is 17 and my other daughter Kyra is 13, so I figured I’ve got the teen girl spectrum as a captive audience — especially Brianna. I was really curious as to how she would respond to it. In trying to find the balance between what is attractive and what is scary, there are a lot of stumbling blocks and the character has to hit those altitudes. At some times you’re supposed to be intimidating and the other you’re supposed to be sympathetic. It’s trying to find a style and look for the character that works for the female eye, which is where my kids come into play. They’re both photographers and they’re both artistic and they’re able to articulate the why in certain things.
WF: Did they get credit on the film?
TG: [Laughs] No, but they should have.
LOS ANGELES TIMES | ENTERTAINMENT: “Born to Be Wild,” movie review featuring Alterian Inc.
MOVIE REVIEW : The Gorilla's the Prize in 'Born to Be Wild'
It's a shame that the makers of "Born to Be Wild" went to such great lengths to create an absolutely convincing gorilla via technical wizardry only to waste their efforts on such a trite, predictable comedy-adventure. Both Katie the Gorilla--the creation of special animatronics effects expert Tony Gardner--and young Wil Horneff, who are the film's endearing stars, and its serious animal-rights theme, deserve much better....