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When Rick Baker was 22 years old and laying the first bricks of what would become one of the great Hollywood careers, he travelled to Hatra in Iraq with director William Friedkin to assist with Max von Sydow’s makeup on The Exorcist. “Oh, he was definitely a lunatic,” Baker recalls of Friedkin, his signature goatee and ponytail still intact, if a little more salt than pepper these days. “But he made a great movie.” Friedkin had been travelling with a fake passport, and the production was plagued by extreme heat and dust storms – but the show went on. “I did von Sydow’s hands,” Baker says. “I pretty much just held a glue bottle.”
We are speaking in Locarno, Switzerland, during the film festival, where Baker has accepted a lifetime achievement award and introduced screenings of An American Werewolf in London and The Nutty Professor – the first and fourth of his seven Oscar wins. When he completed his last big production, Maleficent, in 2014, it ended a more than 40-year career in which he made some huge contributions to popular culture. The monsters in Michael Jackson’s Thriller video? They were Baker’s handiwork. The Mos Eisley cantina band in Star Wars? That was him, too. In 1999, he leaked a story to the press to stop the studio from simply painting Jim Carrey green instead of using his designs for How the Grinch Stole Christmas; he won the argument and a sixth Oscar followed.
It is an interesting time to speak with him. Back in 2019, on the podcast WTF with Marc Maron, Baker explained that he had stopped worrying about the threat of CGI when he realised it couldn’t compare with the things that he and his team were doing. When I ask if he thinks similarly about AI, Baker appears surprisingly acquiescent: “I hate the fact that they’re stealing from everybody, including myself, but it’s also another way to do things, and I’ve seen some really cool AI-generated stuff. It’s like when CGI first happened: it’s a new toy and everybody thinks that’s the way to do it. I feel eventually that’s going to wear off. Everything’s going to be so homogenised, and somebody is going to want to hire an artist to design something. Hopefully there’ll still be artists around.”
If there are, Baker will have had plenty to do with it. Since retiring, he has continued to nurture the next generation of special makeup effects artists. “What I’m proudest of is the people I trained. Rob Bottin started with me at 14 and went on to create The Thing. Steve Johnson, too. That openness came directly from Dick Smith, who shared everything he knew. I wanted to do the same for the industry.” Johnson is perhaps most famous for rendering Ghostbusters’ Slimer, while Smith – Baker’s avowed idol – created scores of pioneering effects in the 1960s and 70s, including a 121-year-old Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man, and an aged-up Marlon Brando in The Godfather.
On most days, Baker can still be found tinkering away in his workshop. Last year, he assisted Bill Corso with recreating the Thriller video in the hugely successful musical biopic Michael, even loaning out the dead singer’s life mask. “I’ve always been kind of a hoarder,” he says. Silvia Abascal, his wife of almost 40 years, offers a knowing nod from across the room. “I kept things that were close to my heart.”
In the weeks leading up to Locarno, I rewatched a number of Baker’s films, including Gremlins 2: The New Batch, a Hollywood cash grab that, after the studio offered Joe Dante final cut and a budget of around $50m to come back on board, ended up being one of the great masterpieces of the director’s career. To make full use of that creative freedom, Baker and Dante dreamed up a genetics laboratory within the story that allowed them to splice Chris Walas’s original designs with bats, spiders and even a giant brain, resulting in one unforgettable Susan Sontag joke. One creation, with a face made of vegetables, looked as if it had come from the 16th-century portraits by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. “Yeah! That was the inspiration for it. But I don’t know where the inspiration comes from half the time. It just comes.”
These days, when Baker’s work gets quoted by younger film-makers, it tends to be the gnarlier stuff. You can see a nod to his elaborate Videodrome creations, for example, in Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. (“[Videodrome’s] breathing television was built from a flexible urethane casting with bladders inside, and we rear-projected on to a dental dam screen that could inflate and deflate,” he explains, in case you were wondering.)
But Baker is nothing if not a Hollywood traditionalist. He worships Boris Karloff, and made his first Frankenstein mask at the age of 13. His IMDb page boasts seven ape projects – including the 1976 remake of King Kong, for which he built and wore the monster’s suit – and six involving werewolves, but Baker assures me the number of both was higher. I wonder, given the choice between simian or lupine, which creature he prefers: “That’s a hard one. For a long time I was on a quest to make the ultimate gorilla costume,” he says. “But I’ve always just been fond of hairy creatures.”
