MYTHIC FOUNDATION

Inside the Harryhausen archive

“Ray kept everything,” says Connor Heaney, collections manager of the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation. “There are some 50,000 items in the collection, from models to artworks to moulds, tools, Ray’s library, his equipment, 35mm reels… everything. He established the Foundation so that this amazing collection could be kept together as a coherent whole, so that people could still learn from it after his passing. We’re very proactively restoring and where necessary repairing the models, as per Ray’s wishes.”

How does it feel to hold these iconic treasures of cinema? “It’s an otherworldly experience,” Heaney tells SFX. “On a practical level you have to be professional and treat them as museum objects. But there have been so many spine-tingling moments where you realise, ‘I’m holding the skeleton from The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad!’ The skeleton is now over 60 years old and it looks as though it could have just walked away from its fight with Kerwin Mathews. You never lose that feeling of excitement when you’re handling these models.

“He thought of them as living creatures, I suppose.

He didn’t want to see them locked away in an archive somewhere. He wanted people to be able to see them in person, and to be able to interact with them and learn from them in some way.”

Find out more at rayharryhausen.com