Interviews
How Ralph Ineson Breathed Life into Practical Effects-Heavy ‘The Green Knight’ [Interview]
Writer/Director David Lowery‘s adaptation of the anonymously written, 14th-century poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” sends young Gawain (Dev Patel) on an arduous, existential quest. Every step of his journey inspires new growth, and hard lessons won; fitting considering it all begins with an invitation to play a deadly game. In The Green Knight (read my review), the eponymous character, played by The Witch‘s Ralph Ineson, rides into King Arthur’s court on Christmas day and issues a beheading challenge.
True to his name, the Green Knight is a being of nature, a giant tree of a man with an otherworldly presence. So much so that, outside of Ineson’s distinct and commanding voice, it’d be easy to assume that VFX brought the character to life. But Lowery insisted on practical for his medieval epic, which meant an arduous makeup and prosthetic process for Ineson.
Ineson explains, “it involved getting up very, very early because the prosthetic makeup took three-and-a-half hours. [Prosthetic Makeup Designer] Barrie Gower and [SFX artist] Jessica Brooks had to spend three-and-a-half hours with me every morning, putting it on. And it’s very heavy, obviously. The head itself is asymmetrical. You’re constantly having to keep adjusting the weight because it weighs quite a lot. So you have to keep your neck straight because it was weighted more on one side than the other. The armor as well is pretty bulky. And the cloak he wears is also quite stiff. So yeah, getting around was quite tricky. And then getting on a horse and riding a horse with all that was again quite demanding physically.”
The process of getting into the makeup wasn’t the only complicated aspect of bringing the character to life; the heavy prosthetics and contact lenses significantly impaired Ineson’s senses. He tells us, “Sometimes the best performances come out of the being under physical or emotional kind of stress, which kind of is the truth. There was an element whereby it was hard to get to do that, and you have to concentrate very much on how to move. It became quite meditative in a way. It’s a bit like being underwater when you’re in a full prosthetic like that. You can hear, but not clearly.”
It turns out, though, that it enhanced the one sense not limited by the makeup transformation. Ineson recounts how it helped his performance, “One very specific thing is with all your senses dulled by contact lenses and not being able to hear properly, your sense of smell becomes heightened because it’s one thing that you do have. When we filmed the green chapel scenes at the end of the film, the location was flowering wild garlic. It just smelled really intense and really beautiful. And that in itself helped me. It got me into a weird, intense place, which was good. So sometimes the trickiest things make you find something a bit more interesting.”
The daunting process and weight of the prosthetics wasn’t an initial concern for the actor, but whether it would impede his ability to imbue the Green Knight with personality. Ineson says of his worries, “I was worried when I took the part that the prosthetics would be so heavy that I wouldn’t be able to act, in a sense, that they would be an impressive physical presence, but you wouldn’t be able to see anything that I was doing in the face. It’d be like wearing a mask, a very impressive-looking mask. But the detail around the cheeks and the nose and the eyes, I think, makes it very readable and helped me to make the character a bit more playful and a bit more fun, hopefully. Even though it’s this huge, hulking tree monster, hopefully, there’s some joy. You know?“
Ineson is referring to the more pleasant, soothing nature of the Green Knight. Despite laying down a potentially lethal challenge to Sir Gawain, there’s a playfulness about the Green Knight.
When asked if prosthetics could become a deterrent in future projects, Ineson replied, ‘I’m doing prosthetics at the moment. I’m doing a job that has quite a lot of prosthetics. No, I tend to try and not make the potential comfort or discomfort of a job a deciding factor. It’s always a case of trying to keep the filmmaker, the script, the part being much more important than the physical comfort whilst doing the job, as it were.”
Ineson currently has a lot of upcoming projects on his plate, including Robert Eggers’ The Northman. Could his reunion with The Witch director be the prosthetic-heavy role to which he’s referring? Only time will tell, but it’s clear that the actor is hitting his stride in working with auteur filmmakers within the genre space.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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