Movie Sculptors Create More Than Monsters
You would be forgiven for not recognizing the actor Christian Bale in “Vice,” a new film in which he stars as the former United States vice president Dick Cheney.
Long creases run from his nostrils to his jowls, which sink into a starched collar. His jaw takes on the shape of a baseball, and heavy forehead lines hover over a thick, furrowed brow.
Even an actor as committed as Mr. Bale, who gained 18 kilograms for the role, could not pull off this metamorphosis alone. The filmmakers enlisted a team of Oscar-winning prosthetic and makeup artists, who created over a hundred pieces of encapsulated silicone to help him step into Mr. Cheney’s skin and to turn him into the former vice president at five stages of his life.
“Vice” received eight Oscar nominations, including one for makeup and hairstyling and one for Mr. Bale for best actor in a leading role.
Mr. Bale’s startling transformation is just the latest step forward in Hollywood for a booming prosthetics industry.
While they are often used to achieve hyper- realism, the initial purpose of prosthetics was the exact opposite. “For many decades it was just monsters and creatures,” said Brian Wade, an artist who sculpted facial pieces for “Vice.”
Mr. Wade grew up admiring the beasts in classics like the 1931 “Frankenstein” — which used crude materials like cotton and spirit gum to transform Boris Karloff into the creature — and the 1968 “Planet of the Apes.”
While the makeup artist John Chambers’s apes were revolutionary at the time, they look cartoonish by today’s standards. Despite his efforts and those of other pioneers, the makeup artistry of that era was held back by a minimal knowledge base, paltry budgets and low expectations.
In the 1980 film “The Elephant Man,” the director David Lynch initially planned to create the title character’s severely deformed face himself. Only after Mr. Lynch hit a dead end did he enlist Christopher Tucker, who honed his craft by reading chemistry books about foam latex and testing out concoctions in his mother’s oven in England.
Mr. Tucker forged a double-layered foam latex design, which enlarged the actor John Hurt’s facial contours, then overlaid the Elephant Man’s face on top. Mr. Hurt had to arrive on the set at 4 a.m. and sit in the makeup chair for eight hours as the prosthetic was applied. After shooting, he had to wait an additional two hours while it was removed.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences established a permanent makeup and hairstyle Oscars category the following year. (By that point, however, “The Elephant Man” was no longer eligible.)
Artists designed many striking and groundbreaking prosthetic- driven characters over the next decade, i ncluding “Beetlejuice,” “The Terminator” and “The Fly.”
But realism was still a long way off, in large part because of the limitations of foam latex. “It was horrible,” said Greg Cannom, the prosthetics and makeup effects designer on “Vice.” “Necks would wrinkle and buckle. If an actor smiled, they would get weird lines around the mouth and eyes.”
In the ’ 90s, leading prosthetic artists started experimenting with silicone. Kazuhiro Tsuji developed one silicone method to apply a humanlike skin to the disguised alien Edgar on “Men in Black,” while Mr. Cannom developed another for the android- centric “Bicentennial Man.” ( Mr. Cannom received a technical achievement Oscar for his silicone development in 2005.)
“It moved naturally, like no other material we had before,” Mr. Tsuji said of silicone.
As makeup improved, so did computer- generated imagery, which some artists viewed as a threat. But C.G.I. also allowed filmmakers to erase small mistakes around the edges of silicone pieces, taking away the burden of perfection.
Mr. Cannom said that no digital touch-ups were necessary for “Vice.” A three- dimensional mold identical to Mr. Bale’s head was created; an artist then sculpted models of the prosthetic pieces in clay. The clay pieces were used to make a syntactic dough and epoxy mold, which were used to create the silicone pieces. Those were then applied to Mr. Bale, with the most complex jobs taking up to four hours.
The goal was to both create a likeness and to allow Mr. Bale to be expressive. “The most successful makeups aren’t the ones where you’re trying to completely hide the actor,” said Mr. Wade, the artist.
Mr. Cannom said that Mr. Bale was pivotal in shaping the final design. When he suggested that his neck be thicker, Mr. Cannom heeded the request and built new pieces.
Mr. Cannom described the day that Mr. Bale arrived on the set as Mr. Cheney.
“He put on the suit, walked into the office with all of us and everybody just died,” he said with a laugh. “I was shocked. He looked just like him.”