A Conversation Between Horror Auteur Ti West and Special FX Maestro Christian Beckman

     For an industry worth billions, Hollywood’s entertainment machine is much smaller than you think. There are minute degrees of separation, because when you break in, you stay in. (Especially if you’re afraid to leave—mwahhahahaha!) Director Ti West met special effects guru Christian Beckman when appointed Beckman’s shop, Quantum FX, to execute the gory bits of West’s Cabin Fever 2 (2002). They worked together again in 2009 on West’s critically acclaimed film The House of The Devil. Their mutual adulation of one another is apparent, and here they discuss what brought them together: a love of blood and guts. 

TW: I know for my friend [make-up artist] Ozzy Alvarez, KISS was a big inspiration for getting into makeup. Was there anything that you remember being a moment where you decided that’s what you were really excited about?  

CB: You know, yeah I do: John Carpenter’s The Thing. 

TW: What do you think about this debate of CG versus practical effects? How much of it is just our nostalgia? I think audiences are lazy and kind of take what you give them. But there is the reality that CG has become so accepted that for a lot of people, even if it is more expensive, they have so much more control. You can sit in a room looking at a computer screen, changing it all day long. Whereas if you have practical effects once you get to set, it is what it is. Maybe we’re just being old-timey about it, or do you think that it is actually better, the practical effect way?

CB: I do practical effects; I don’t do CG effects. But also, I am the first to say that there is a space for each and I know that they work together very well if the people in charge will work together with it. When it comes to characters and storyboards, you say, ‘Well, we can’t really achieve that or, if we do, it’s going to be really expensive and time consuming. And may not even work very well.’ I’ll be the first one to say that. There’s a shot in King Kong where I thought, ‘That’s pretty darn cool.’ And I only say that because I know the fur is hard to do, the organic stuff. That’s probably the best example. 

TW: I remember when I first came here for a meeting, which was about all the gags. The first thing we did was build this fiberglass dummy that we were going to run over with a school bus and hopefully it would explode into a wall of liquid. This was the first thing we talked about. I remember sitting in the conference room and being like, ‘Here’s what I was thinking,’ and everybody looking at me like I was nuts for a second. And then everyone thinking, ‘This might be awesome.’  

CB: I remember the head in the pool that turned over and that school bus hit—it was great. You had specific things in your head and I wanted to get that out and make sure you were happy with the direction we were going. And you turned to me and said, ‘Some of these films I’ve done before, these guys have bubblegum and shoestrings.’ At that point, I was like, ‘This is going to be good.’  

TW: It was appealing to me to do a lot over-the-top makeup fantasies. Like full frontal discharging male nudity. Or I wanted to hit this head with a fire extinguisher and have it cave in. As far as gore effects go, we were doing them as gory as gore effects could be. So, there was this element of, how do we make it exciting for all of us? From my director side of things, I knew if I could get you all hyped for whatever I was doing, then I could just walk away and you guys could take over. I want things a certain way, but I’ve always thought if you can get people onto your enthusiasm and are like-minded, then there becomes an easy shorthand.

CB: I’ve got to say there were a lot of things that were over the top. I was like, ‘Are they going to use that in the movie?’ First of all, nothing is always the same to us. It’s always a new thing; we just try to draw from experience from what we did before. That whole fire-extinguisher-head-bashing thing, we approached that in several different ways. 

TW: There was a point of pride to some degree: That movie had to be the most blood ever used before. Just barrels and barrels of blood. 

CB: [Laughs.] One of these magazines quoted that as the most blood on set.  

TW: I heard a story a couple years later, there was so much blood that when we cleaned it up, apparently something happened where the school’s water was coming out red. The local authority got called that the water got polluted and they had to research what it was and they found it was the 250 gallons of fake blood that washed away. I remember coming here for The House of the Devil. We did a whole lot of creature designs for one of these characters and then we did satanic paraphernalia. But the most memorable seems to be for everybody, we did this one head explosion. The way we did it was a fake head that was pre-cut and basically a giant air cannon full of blood in the back of the head and we did a countdown. And I remember everyone saying, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen.’ With any sort of special effects, you practice it or you see the test or whatever, but you never really know what will happen on the day and low budget movies are scary because you don’t get a lot of tries. We had one chance to get it. And so I remember the countdown and waiting to see what would happen—I think to this day it gets the same reaction every time it shows. People just lose their minds over it. Which was the point, to have a moment that changed the rest of the movie and I think the makeup effects and the way it was done was a big part of that.

CB: It certainly was the pivotal point where you just thought, ‘Woah, there’s some bad people in here. Alright.’ I’ve got to say it was a great little effect. It was very effective. 

TW: The production designer I always work with Jade Healy, on the last movie we had a body in a bathtub. It was slit open and all bloody and everything and I remember Jade saying to the FX guy, ‘Dude, when Ti gets here, I’m telling you he’s going to say, “More blood.”’ And I finally came up and was like let me see the blood bottle and just started splashing it. Because one, I enjoy having outrageous amounts and two, I only think it looks right when there’s more. 

CB: That is part of your style, and it is very effective. 

TW: Watching FX can be very satisfying. The experience of making them though is very stressful. Everyone that will ever visit the set always visits that day because they heard the head is blowing up and they want to see it. Those are the days you don’t want extra people around. I actually want the most utilitarian group of people possible to do the job and nobody else. The process is incredibly difficult for everyone and very stressful. You’re trying to accomplish something technically very challenging. It requires a lot of expertise, and I think that’s why it is so satisfying when you see it. You have like ten people working really hard to get one second just right and make something work. When we hit the body with the bus, we had a fiberglass dummy filled with 12-gallon blood bags and explosives on the back. We had to time the explosives to blow up at the exact moment the bus hit it. I remember being in the bushes behind the monitor thinking, ‘Oh god, what if it doesn’t explode? What if it explodes too early? What if it doesn’t look right?’ We have no reset on that. There were just so many things to deal with. But it worked.

CB: But it worked. We had to make it fiberglass, but we got to make it to a certain fitness where it’s strong enough to hold up all the weight from the blood and the things that go into it, but you know it can’t be too strong where only a part of it breaks and it doesn’t work right. We need that thing to just shatter and explode and everything just go. It was a balance of things and the timing. There are so many things to rely on. You’re relying on other departments too, effects guys, set guys, whoever. 

TW: That’s probably my favorite thing that I’ve been a part of that I have seen accomplished. Do you have any top effects or favorite effects that you’ve done in the past? Like the ones you remember as being especially satisfying. 

CB: I mentioned Spider-Man 2. There’s a scene where I puppeteered a tentacle to crash through the window, and then grab the gear shift and tear it out. I’m standing right there, full-suited with a puppet tentacle. There were certain actions the director wanted, and yet we had to time the effects to explode the window that I’m maybe a foot-and-a-half from. You’ve got a million shards of glass being exploded in your face, and it’s hard to tell yourself it’s not real glass. You’ve got to focus. 

There was one effect we did on The Happening that didn’t make it into the movie because I guess it was too much for the R rating but there was an effect where there was a twelve-year-old kid shot point blank with a shotgun. And you mentioned Ozzy Alvarez who I love working with and they put us on this gag. It was a great effect. We made an appliance to sit on his head, so we can blend this into his actual hair and it’s a resettable prosthetic that was rigged with blood. And with prosthetics, it’s hard, it’s like a blend to try to build something up and get things in there that you need to explode it, yet still try to make it look natural and not lopsided, or it is what it is. We set this up on the kid’s head and it was only supposed to be the insert shot for the gag, but then when we got to set, the director said, ‘Hey, you can do lines with us.’ He didn’t see the difference with the prosthetic on. So, that was a good feeling. Because it was only intended to be used a certain way and he used it for dialogue and everything. It was like you mentioned, we’re shooting a kid in the head and everyone showed up. That first scene, boom. People were silent. It just had that feeling. There was originally the intention of adding CG enhancement, but the director said he didn't need the any extra. [The scene] didn’t make the final cut. 

TW: That’s always a good sign though. If it’s too much, that’s a compliment.