Maker of monsters

Come with us on a tour of the workshop of Academy Awardwinning special effects artist John Cox.

Come with us on a tour of the Gold Coast workshop of John Cox, an Academy Award-winning movie special effects artist.

YOU CAN TELL a lot about someone from what’s on their bookshelf. I’m talking to Oscar-winning monster-maker John Cox at his Creature Workshop in Molendinar, on Queensland’s Gold Coast. His office doubles as an exhaustive reference library of anatomy, animation and special effects history, the shelves bulging with titles such as Cyclopedia Anatomicae and A Pictorial History of Horror Movies; hardbacks dedicated to bones, big cats, insects and elephants; and long forgotten fanzines from his childhood.

“A hoarder? Me? No!” says John, showing off his signed copy of Ray Harryhausen’s Film Fantasy Scrapbook. “I just never got round to throwing anything away.”

Much of his collection dates back to the days when John, aged 12, would catch the train into Sydney’s CBD from Caringbah, in the city’s south. Obsessed with King Kong, he would spend his Saturday mornings browsing Gould’s Book Arcade, the Anchor bookshop andWeirdo’s Magic Shop in the now demolished Crystal Palace Arcade on George Street.

“In ’74, if you were into dinosaurs and giant gorillas, you had to research endlessly. There was no internet back then. I spent a lot of time in libraries and bookshops,” he says. “That’s how I discovered King Kong wasn’t actually 48ft tall, but an 18-inch puppet made of foam, rubber and rabbit fur, over a steel ball-and-socket armature.Then, for the next four years, I dedicated myself to making my own.”

Aided by supportive parents, and working from the garden shed, John taught himself stop-motion animation. Religiously he studied the techniques of Harryhausen – a visual effects pioneer responsible for the duelling skeletons and mythical beasts of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963). So that by the time StarWars came out in 1977, creating a special effects boom, John was perfectly primed for a career in monster-making.

Working with sculpture, moulds and cast replicas in the 1980s, he eventually graduated to animatronics (lifelike robotics), creating the sharks for the Australian thriller Dead Calm (1989); later fashioning the giant croc in Rogue (2007), the aliens for Pitch Black (2000), the Bundaberg Rum polar bears, and the sheep, mice and puppies for the massive hit Babe (1995), for which John received an Academy Award for Visual Effects.

Today, there are traces of these creations strewn across his 1100sq.m workshop.A werewolf here, a 15ft, fourarmed Martian there, assorted body parts in boxes. Remarkably, when I visit, he tells me the majority is on display elsewhere – at the Gold Coast Arts Centre for the final run of his How to Make a Monster exhibition.

Rather than a predilection for the macabre, it’s a lifelong fixation with the animal kingdom that has underpinned John’s work. “A believable monster, or creature, can’t exist without a basic grasp of comparative anatomy,” says John, waving a silicon komodo tongue in the air.“We live with cats and dogs and horses, and are accustomed to their actions and movements.We need to see something on screen we can believe in.”

And this he has been able to achieve with great effect. He relays a story from the set of Babe, where the animal-handlers couldn’t tell the real sheep from his own, mistakenly laying out feed for the animatronic livestock.

So how exactly does he bring a creature to life? John leads me to a shelf of assorted animal skulls – replicas of gor illa heads through to meerkats, Tasmanian tigers, otters, pandas and grizzly bears – manipulating their jawbones as he speaks.“It’s important to study an animal down to...its skeletal system,” he tells me, “to get an idea of how that creature has evolved and found its niche in the world.”

Then it’s a matter of poring over his personal library and working closely with trainers and handlers to understand how and why an animal moves the way it does.“You need to question every aspect,” adds John. “How many teeth do they have? How often would they fall out? When do their ears twitch? Why do a

tiger’s shoulder-blades jut out when it walks? Essentially, you need to ask: why is a cat a cat and not a dog?”

Initially, John would go through the process of sculpting the creature in plasticine, making very precise moulds of many pieces, before adding fibreglass sections (inside which the animatronic components fit), and applying external silicone skin to conceal the mechanics. It could take anywhere from eight to 10 weeks from start to finish, depending on the beast. His largest was set to be a 15m, fully operational, prehistoric crocodile for Peter Pan (2003) but budgetary cuts left John with just the head and a 2m jaw.

And then, around the tur n of the century, computer-generated effects arrived. All of a sudden, directors could animate and manipulate a monster with just a click of a button and slowly but surely the demand for real-life animatronics dried up (a trend that is currently experiencing somewhat of a backlash since the release of 2015’s StarWars:The Force Awakens, which re-employed old techniques).

“When the film industry didn’t need my creatures anymore,” says John, “I went back to sculpture.” Nowadays, the workshop is used primarily to create sculptures, models and prototypes, on a giant scale. On the shop floor, two gigantic bronze surf lifesavers rest on trolleys, leftovers from John’s involvement in the Swell Sculpture Festival.

Back in 2004, John and his partner, Julie Anderson, invested in a five-axis router. It’s a beast of a machine, 3m long and 1.5m wide, with the capacity to cut 100 per cent accurate, large-scale foam sculptures and realworld 3D objects directly from digital files.

Commercially, John has banged out prototypes for everything from race cars to theme park rides. But he’s still found a way to explore his love of nature. He provided models of Aslan the lion for The Chronicles of Narnia:The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010). And, in 2013, the Gold Coast was peppered with a series of over-sized painted koalas, as part of the Animals with Attitude public art project – raising awareness for the plight of the koala, and funds for the Currumbin Wildlife Hospital Foundation.

“We did a lot of research on the shape of koalas, especially with how the public might react to seeing sculptures around town. So we took the claws off, made the ears smaller, made the faces friendlier. We had to build them so that nobody climbed on them, but of course everybody did.”

His contributions to the Swell festival included a 2.2m-high breaching whale sculpture that lit up at night, entitled See Life, and a polar bear on a melting iceberg, which was named Rising Tide.

Reserved at first, the more he talks, the more animated John gets.And despite the spectacles on a string around his neck and a smattering of grey, he appears far more youthful than his 57 years might suggest. Four decades may have passed since he left his garden shed, and yet you can still catch a glimpse of the boy from Caringbah.“I’ve always been a daydreamer,” John says. “I allow myself five minutes a day, daydreaming time, where I can sit and just let the mind wander. There are some amazing places you’ll go.”

John’s banged out prototypes for everything from race cars to theme park rides.

“To mimic an animal’s movement, you need to get under its skin and into its very bones,” says John, pictured above with a koala maquette. “Often, our ideas of how we think an animal should move are really incorrect.”

“I was always a daydreamer,” John says. “It wasn’t until my mid-30s that I realised not everybody else was.”