MAX LANDIS TALKS ABOUT RAY HARRYHAUSEN

Max Landis opens up and talks about his mentor and family friend Ray Harryhausen. With "Ray Harryhausen Presents: Back to Mysterious Island" coming out in July - Max talks about what it was like to work on this project.

MAX LANDIS: Ray Harryhausen's films have always been important to me. Something about the personalization of monsters, something I'd been unfamiliar with when I first saw the movies as a child. I remember seeing seventh Voyage Of Sinbad for the first time when I was seven or eight, but I must've seen it a dozen times before then. See, I was a Godzilla kid. I was raised in a a very, very movie-reverrent household, and Godzilla was like mothers-milk. However, though I didn't realize it then, Godzilla was just a stepping stone.

I still have a great love for those films, but no man in a rubber suit could compete with the first time I saw the Cyclops chase that dick wizard out of the cave. ‘Holy shit!’ I thought, ‘How the heck did they do ~that~?’ Though it’s lost to the sands of time, somewhere out there is a drawing by a seven year old boy, detailing the hypothetical workings of a twenty five foot tall cyclops robot.
Because that was my only theory.

Keep in mind, of course, this was the early nineties. The hey-day of animatronics and advanced make-up effects that had dominated the eighties was slowly dying down thanks to the advent of some mystical process called “CGI.”

This new thing could Ed Harris’s face on water tentacle. It could make velociraptors vandalize a kitchen. And of course, most effectively, when combined with a brilliant performance, it could make the concept of a living metal assassin from the future a stark, surprisingly frightening reality.

But without a major budget and the best technology around, what it COULDN’T do was look REAL. In so many films my parents brought me to, I would find that I didn’t “believe” the monsters; there was no physicality to them.

And yet, when I went home and popped in the laser disc of It Came From Beneath The Sea, or Twenty Million Miles To Earth, the monsters were so fanatically present, so undeniably concretely in existence that it rocked my 8 year old world.

It continued to rock my eight year old world when I found out that my father, a man whose actual career and working life I’d never really understood, actually KNEW the guy who MADE THE CYCLOPS out of CLAY and it was only TWELVE INCHES TALL. Apparently this Harryhausen fellow was a friend of Uncle Forry (Forrest J. Ackerman, Dr. Acula to you), and I could actually go to his house and SEE GWANGI?

I’m surprised I didn’t have an aneurysm, I was simply bent with delight.

My fondest memory of Ray is, undoubtedly, when he came to visit when I was about twelve. This was out front of the guest house, back when we still had a guest house, he’d brought along one of the skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts. He showed me how the armature actually worked, which of course blew me away, and led to me asking if he was the one who’d made up the battling skeletons.

No, he replied, he’d just made them real.

Then who made them up? I wondered.

The writer, Ray said. A fellow named Beverley Cross.

That conversation, along with a healthy dose of Stephen King, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, drove me to become what I am today. I wanted to be the guy who got to work with a Ray Harryhausen. I wanted to make my monsters real.

So when I came across this job; found out I’d have the opportunity to take that Cyclops who’d diligently entertained me for so many hours, died a thousand deaths in his struggle against the dragon, into my hands, I was ecstatic. To make him walk, and talk, move and fight and exist, even if only on paper…Well, it was the answer to a question I didn't know I'd asked.