LA TIMES: HERO COMPLEX: "Beastly:" Alex Pettyfer gets his monster on

‘Beastly’: Alex Pettyfer gets his monster on

March 04, 2011 | 10:46 a.m.
 In the new film “Beastly,” opening Friday, Alex Pettyfer plays a cocky high school student who finds himself transformed into an alien-looking outcast after he runs afoul of a young woman dabbling in witchcraft. Taking him from beauty to beast was makeup artist Tony Gardner, the same man who helped James Franco amputate his own arm for his Oscar-nominated turn as Aron Ralston in “127 Hours,” a veteran whose other credits include Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video and the horror comedy “Zombieland,” in addition to “There’s Something About Mary” and “The Hangover.” Hero Complexcontributor Whitney Friedlander recently caught up with Gardner to find out exactly how he turned model-turned-actor Pettyfer into a creature only costar Vanessa Hudgens could love. It turns out, Alex Flinn’s 2007 novel, on which the movie was based, was just a starting point.
Alex Pettyfer and Vanessa Hudgens in "Beastly" (CBS Films)

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.

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LOS ANGELES TIMES | ENTERTAINMENT: “Addams Family Values,” How did they do that? Featuring Tony Gardner and Alterian Inc.

The Sleight of Hand in 'Addams' : Movies: How did they do that? Tony Gardner's Alterian Studios was responsible for much of the special effects in 'Values.' It's all a matter of 'illusion,' he says.

November 23, 1993|MARISA LEONARDI | SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Wednesday Addams is standing against the wall at Alterian Studios. As soon as her wig comes back from the production company, Wednesday will join Darkman, the Tommyknocker and a life-size hippo on permanent display of Alterian's most beloved children.

Much of the special-effects work that Tony Gardner's Alterian Studios did for "Addams Family Values" ended up as "blink and you'll miss it" moments in the film, but if you don't blink, you'll go home wondering, "How did they do that?"

And that's just the reaction Gardner hopes for.

"I think it all goes back to starting as a magician," Gardner said. "The whole thing was the illusion and being able to fool somebody."

Gardner, now 30, got his start apprenticing with three Academy Award-winning special effects artists--Rick Baker, Stan Winston and Greg Cannon (who won for his work on "Bram Stoker's Dracula"). Two particular illusions Gardner created with his studio stand out in "Addams Family Values": Wednesday's blending into the woodwork--literally--and Baby What, Cousin Itt's new offspring.

For the scene in which Wednesday (Christina Ricci) camouflages herself as part of a wall to spy on the sinister new nanny, Debbie (Joan Cusack), Gardner and his crew had to make a full body cast of Ricci and manufacture a stand-in dummy. Instead of needing two hours to be put into full makeup, Ricci could simply lean into the dummy's fake neck, leaving only her face needing to be made up.

Gardner didn't have to worry about dealing with a potentially prickly actor with Baby What: the tyke is entirely mechanical. There were other challenges, though. The guidelines he received from director Barry Sonnenfeld and visual effects supervisor Alan Munro: "Here's a ball of fur: make it cute, make it happy, make kids want to relate to it, make adults think it's precious and want to hold it, and . . . good luck."

The resulting Baby What gets one of the biggest laughs in the movie, but more rewarding to Gardner was the reaction of the film's crew. "I think the reward," he says, "really comes from going on set and taking something that's a bunch of motors and foam wrapped over fiberglass, creating something that's alive and watching a film crew--probably your most jaded audience in existence, because they've seen it all--get excited about it, whether there's a person in it or not."

Gardner's studios also built the miniatures that stand in for the Addams house and Uncle Fester's new house ("We called it Debbie's Dream House" for the nanny character played by Cusack, who plots to wed Fester). The Addams house is in many shots, but Debbie's Dream House was built for one main purpose--to blow up.

"It was designed to explode and obliterate itself instantaneously, like a Looney Tunes cartoon," Gardner said.

Though called a miniature, the exploding house was actually 16 feet tall and 28 feet long, taking up a large chunk of the warehouse where Alterian is situated, in Irwindale.

"Everyone had to work around it and walk around it," Gardner said. "(Then) all this stuff drives out to the set one day on a Friday and they come back on Monday with two milk crates"--all that was left of Debbie's Dream House. Even the tables the house was built on were destroyed.

The house wasn't hard to build, Gardner says, because "we'd done a lot of exploding bodies in the past and we were able to use a lot of the existing technologies for it," and there was a certain amount of professional satisfaction in those two milk crates.

As a child, Gardner might have had a premonition about the line of work he would eventually end up in. He was fascinated by the magic set his grandparents bought him when he was 6.

"I picked up this box where you put a card in and it's got a fake bottom and (the card) falls. Well, I picked it up without reading the instructions, put a card in it, closed it and opened it and the card was gone. . . . Then I turned it over and I shook it and the card fell out from the fake bottom. Then I got it. I was like, 'It's fake! It's not real!'--and I was hooked."

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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....

Original Article

 

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