Creep show
Need a creature for your next movie? Mike Elizalde is your go-to guy
By Sandra Barrera, Staff Writer
When M. Night Shyamalan set out to bring the fantastical creatures of "Lady in the Water" to life, he turned to Mike Elizalde and his creative team at Spectral Motion.
At 45, Elizalde is a wizard of special effects who's building a reputation as someone who can put flesh on the bones of the most hideous nightmare, from a Lovecraftian demon in "Hellboy" to Kelsey Grammar's blue mutant beast in "X-Men: The Last Stand."
Of course, as an artist, he sees his dark, otherworldly creations prosthetics, models, animatronics, digital effects as nothing short of "beautiful."
"If you see the process of what it takes to actually make it, I think that removes some of the fear and lets you see that it really is an art form," he
says from his Glendale studio, where his team is hard at work on advancing the fabric technology of Michael Chiklis' Thing costume for the next installment of "Fantastic Four."
But Elizalde isn't at liberty to talk about his work in the comic-book adaptation, or any of his other projects just yet. And so the conversation inevitably circles back to "Lady in the Water."
For that film, Elizalde and his team breathe life into the sinister inhabitants of Shyamalan's imagination.
"He has a very spiritual touch to all of his films, and this is by far no exception," he says. "It's a very tenderly told story with some horrorific elements going on."
The "horrorific" is where Elizalde comes in.
"This is another instance where we're able to come up with new technology to achieve something that hadn't really been done before," he says, calling up test footage of an animatronic wolf whose head, jaw and neck move as it runs.
The idea was for the wolf (which is made of grass in the film) to interact in real time.
"We did have some freedom in tweaking the design so that we could make it work mechanically in the context of the story, but, by and large, those were all Night's ideas," he says, also referring to the gorilla made of branches. "That guy, he's got some scary stuff going on in his head."
He's not alone.
All one has to do is look around Elizalde's office at Spectral Motion, where he is surrounded by maquettes of winged demons with rams' horns and hissing vampires, framed photographs of werewolves and dummy corpses.
The decor screams fire and brimstone, except for the occasional family photo and some of his 7-year-old daughter's drawings.
One is of a ghoul.
Like his children now, Elizalde grew up around monsters.
He has memories of staying up late on Friday nights to watch old black-and-white horror films like "Frankenstein" and "The Creature From the Black Lagoon" and then transforming himself into those characters by using reconstituted paints from his elementary school projects.
"That's how into it I was as a kid," says Elizalde, who came to Southern California from his native Mexico with his parents when he was 5.
It wasn't until 1987, when his eight-year Navy career was nearing an end, that Elizalde decided to pursue special effects for a living.
Nearly 20 years and more than 45 films later, Elizalde has established himself as a go-to makeup artist, sculptor and one of the top animatronics designers in his field. His Spectral Motion now has 15 full-time employees, half of whom are artists.
But it wasn't his resume that won him "Lady in the Water." So says Mark "Crash" McCreery, the designer who illustrated the film's creatures according to Shyamalan's descriptions.
"It was really just meeting him as a person," says McCreery, who introduced the "Lady in the Water" filmmaker to Elizalde, who he befriended while working on "Jurassic Park" and has remained close to ever since. "He's just so easy to get along with, which is a rare attribute in this industry because you deal with a lot of egos, and I think that's probably the biggest obstacle sometimes."
Elizalde says he was grateful for the opportunity.
"We just went into it, did our maquettes and designs, and took them to Night's ranch in Philadelphia. The rest is on film."
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Sandra Barrera, (818) 713-3728 [email protected]
