I met Harryhausen in 2010 in the grand Holland Park house in which he lived with his wife Diana a descendant of the explorer Dr Livingstone. We had spoken on the phone to make the appointment and he'd seemed gruff forbidding. He was a strikingly powerful looking man even at the age of 89 but when we sat and talked and drank tea there was a delicacy to his movements and a stillness that I attributed to his long years of animating delicate creatures by hand.
Harryhausen had been he said a loner I preferred to work alone so I wouldn t be talked out of doing certain things. When Harryhausen began there weren t any guides to stop motion animation so Harryhausen had to work out how to do it by himself. He got his father a machinist to make the metal endoskeletons and armatures for his creations which he then covered in latex. His mother sewed the costumes. Later he would cook his models in the oven to the dismay of his wife.
Somewhere in the house were his legendary monsters. He had tried to hang on to as many as he could but was powerless to stop the rubber models from disintegrating. As he said at the time rubber is like humans it s fine material but it will rot I don't think it's fanciful to say that Harryhausen's creations had heart. CGI animations are beneath the surface lines of code Harryhausen's creations brought to life second by second by hand have the breath of life. They weren't realistic but inhabited some other realm of magic perhaps. Fantasy is a strange thing he told me. If you try to make it too real you lose the effect of fantasy. So there s a very strange line of demarcation there.
It wasn't a surprise that Harryhausen was less than enthusiastic about modern movie making although he spoke fondly of Peter Jackson's Weta Workshop and the artistry of Industrial Light and Magic. He had worked to tight budgets planning each shot with an almost neurotic degree of precision. Just by moving the camera to a certain level you could save thousands of pounds he said. They don t seem to care today. They spend $200 million on pictures which is just pathetic
Harryhausen's final film the original Clash of the Titans (1981) starring Maggie Smith and Laurence Olivier alongside some of his most ambitious creations was given a vicious review by Variety. Harryhausen was disillusioned he quit the movies because he'd had enough of darkened rooms. He had he said lost his drive. His animating spirit will live on all the same.
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