[A Conversation with Gordon Smith]

(Webmistresses' note: Please excuse any minor technical difficulties with the pictures; we're still in the process of working with them!)

This interview took place at the Toronto, Canada studios of FXSMITH on April 25, 2003 one week prior to the North American release of X2

aRvin: I would like to begin by asking you about the challenges of the second movie. The differences with the characters: the way they were constructed etc.

Gordon Smith: No.

(Laughter from both of us)

aRvin: No. Ok you won’t tell me that. Hmm… new question. Do you like monkeys?

(still laughing)

Gordon Smith: No.

(More Laughter)

Let me start with the simplest one. Wolverine was the most simple…he was far easier to deal with because he had his own hair. His own Beard. Pumped like Adonis. I don’t know how he did that. There was a tremendous amount of work…what ever he did… he was Wolverine. We just refined the claws. Which were… They were exactly the same in the first movie. His set blades, which are the things that he wore all of the time, were 3 blades mounted on to a little palm plate which is a bracket for three little wires between his fingers, and then into the blades. Each of those wires are custom bent so that the tighter that he squeezes the plate, The deeper the blades look like they are coming from under his skin. On the first film we made the wires going from the bracket to the blade round, and we got rotation. This time we made them square, locking the rotation, and also locking the distance between the blades which made them virtually… we’d hand them to him and that was it. He kinda looked over his own blades, They were injection molded plastic. We'd make about 500 of them a day. We went through hundreds of them on the first film. Not so many on this last one. Probably 100 sets maybe…we didn't use them very much. We rebuilt his mechanical apparatus. His mechanical arms. They were quite beautiful really. But we never used them once.They were used once on the first movie, and never used them at all on the next movie. I just sent down the skins for those mechanical arms to California so possibly that will be the last we'll see of them. But maybe not. I put them in a nice box ...

Storm was the next simplest one. We changed her hair style ...changed her wig. I didn't really like it, but I do like to now. I think I just really liked the way she was before ... I got used to her. Its how I saw her in my mind. Its just odd seeing a black girl with wavy hair. Straight straight I could kind of buy, because it was so extreme, but wavy ... I just wasn't buying it that much. But it was a beautiful wig, and it did work exceptionally well. She looked great! I think she looks a whole lot better in this picture than she did in the last one.

Who else...Jean Grey we did absolutely nothing with. Put scars on her belly. We were almost going to put the scars on my daughter. She volunteered. She wanted Hugh Jackman to put his hands up her shirt.

(laughter from both of us)

I told her that was not the kind of request she could ask her father. No matter how feasible it was.

(more laughter)

The next in simplicity was Mutant 143.(Who was) sort of the plot ... the thing that held the picture together. Never said a word I don't think. But he had been operated on by his father. His power was that he could manipulate people's consciousness. So that you would think that you were someplace else, or somebody else. He secreted from his brain this fluid. Embryonic sort of fluid ... a kind of green shit, that seemed to squirt out of the back of his neck.

We made these little hoses that collect the stuff coming out of the base of his skull, and refine it into this little mechanisms on the back of this very fucking cool chair that we didn't build, but a guy in Vancouver built. I really wanted to build it but I wouldn't have been that crude with it. And the crudeness was really cool.

The scene we had to deal with was ... how we had to deal with it was we had to give him a huge scar. Sort of a big "C" shape scar on the side of his head. To indicate where the skin had been peeled back and they had gone in. We did that live. No prosthetics or anything like that, just squeezed the skin together. It was a very long process trying to figure out what to do for him because Bryan (Singer director of X-Men 2) just kept yelling "lobotomy! lobotomy!" I kept yelling back "That's like 2 little things about a quarter of an inch underneath your eyebrows. Ya know?" Lobotomy is not what you are talking about. You mean they've cut the top of his head off. The first thing we did was cut off the top of his head off ala Hannibal Lector or an autopsy sort of thing. And that was not what he wanted. So the only description we really got was he pointed to the side of his head and went (makes a noise describing gunky sort of bits) and that was kind of it. So the day before he had to be on camera we had to sort of just keep doing things and showing them to him. And he finally liked one of them. I think his choice was the best by far. It was great, it was simple to do.

He also had one vibrant green eye and one vibrant blue eye. I bet no one will ever notice, but it really just ... it was very subtle and a lovely lovely twist. His alter ego who he becomes in somebody else's mind ... this young child also has the one vivid green eye, and one bright blue eye. And he also has this thing stuck up in the back of his neck. That's supposed to be ... they were shrieking and peaking on that. But that's my job, not to listen to anything. The two tubes going up into the back of his neck and going into this mechanism ... they wanted prosthetics for the tubes to go into and I (explained that ) we'll just cut the tubes off at an angle and put some tape over it. Like they would do. If you put a tube into somebody, you have to put a piece of tape or suture it or something, so that the tube doesn't drag out ...

aRvin: make a mess ...

Gordon Smith: Make a mess all over the place. There's clear beautiful wonderful tapes, so you can just cut the thing off at the side, put it on and it looks like its going in. So we cut the thing off, attached it with tape and everybody thought it was the best prosthetic that they ever saw. The big thing was to separate ... at one point he gets out of his chair, which was a hallucination. Because he was hooked to his chair, the tubes snap, and the mechanism comes apart on the back of his neck. To me that (didn't present) a big problem. You cut the hose where you want it to come apart. You put it together... put a little restriction or something like that, he moves and then it stretches and comes apart. But they didn't think that was going to work. So I set it up... I was lying underneath it with a syringe with the stuff going up into the thing so that when it came apart it would pour out or drip out or what ever. I guess everyone thought... that the nature of pulling on the piece of tape so the skin is yanking and it looks like these tubes are about to pull out from underneath the skin. Because that is where the bulk of the movement is. Its the skin moving. That was the whole deal. I didn't want to lose that. And just below that the thing kind of blows apart and then starts blowing all of the stuff out of it. But they loved it to death. First shot. Only shot it once. And then they decided to get another angle. First shot did it. Boom. Boom. Boom. It looked fabulous. But on a big CG picture anything like that the general conscious is... Its CG. Even if you say that its not really a problem, because a lot of live things are very difficult. But alot of them are just... well duuuh. Cut it with a pair of scissors. But people don't think of it because its considered an effect, and because its an effect most people don't think about it. They are going to have the effects guy think about it. So you end up in a room full of people who have never thought of it. Or were embarrassed to think about it. Or if they did think about it they were embarrassed to talk about it. Or they thought about it and figure there's no fucking way it can be done. When it's just really a piece of tape and a pair of scissors.

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