Winston, Stan

WINSTON, Stan

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Makeup and special effects artist. Nationality: American. Born: Virginia, c. 1946. Career: 1969—Walt Disney Studios makeup department; 1971–1977—freelance televsion and motion picture makeup and prosthetic effects artist; 1978—Stan Winston Studio; 1993—Digital Domain. Awards: Academy Award, Aliens, 1986 (effects); Academy Award, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, 1991 (effects, makeup); Jurassic Park, 1993 (effects); Emmy Award, Gargoyles, 1972 (makeup); The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, 1974 (makeup).

Films as Director:

1988

Pumpkinhead

1991

Adventures of a Gnome Named Gnorm

1996

T2 3-D: Battle Across Time

1997

Ghosts

Films as Makeup and Special Effects Artist:

1972

Gargoyles (television)

1974

Masquerade (television); The Autiobiograhy of Miss Jane Pittman (television)

1975

The Man in the Glass Booth

1976

Pinocchio (television); W. C. Fields and Me

1977

An Evening with Diana Ross (television); Roots (television)

1978

The Wiz

1980

The Exterminator

1981

Dead and Buried ; Heartbeeps ; The Hand

1982

The Thing ; Parasite

1983

Something Wicked This Way Comes

1984

The Terminator ; Starman

1985

The Vindicator

1986

Aliens ; Invaders from Mars

1987

Monster Squad ; Predator

1988

Alien Nation

1989

Leviathan

1990

Edward Scissorhands ; Predator 2

1991

Terminator 2: Judgement Day

1992

Batman Returns

1993

Jurassic Park

1994

Interview with the Vampire

1995

Tank Girl ; Congo

1996

The Island of Dr. Moreau

1999

Instinct ; Lake Placid ; Inspector Gadget ; End of Days ; Galaxy Quest

Publications

On WINSTON: articles—

Hogan, D. J., "How Makeup Expert Stan Winston Solved an Unusual Effects Problem on The Entity," in Cinefantastique, no. 5, 1983.

Salza, G. "Bio-filmografia dei nuovi tecnici di effetti special," in Segnocinema, January 1986.

Genild, P., "Effektive Marsmonstre," in Levende Billeder, 1 June 1987.

Vincenzi, L., "A New Direction," in Millimeter, September 1987.

Magid, R., "A Planetful of Aliens," in Cinefex, November 1988.

Pollack, Andrew, "Computer Images are Staking Out Star Roles in Movies," in The New York Times, 24 July 1991.

Duncan, J., "A Once and Future War," in Cinefex, August 1991.

Stephens, C., "Master of Animatronics & Makeup," in On Production, no. 5, 1992.

Moerk, Christian, "Jurassic Looks Like an f/x Classic; Tech Industry Expects Pic to Revolutionize Field," in Variety, 7 February 1992.

McGowan, Chris, "IBM, Movie Veterans Enter Digital Technology Domain," in Billboard, 3 April 1993.

Biodrowski, S., "Stan Winston," in Cinefantastique, no. 2, 1993.

Duncan, J., "The Beauty in the Beasts," in Cinefex, August 1993.

Magid, R., "Effects Team Brings Dinosaurs Back from Extinction," in American Cinematographer, June 1993.

Impoco, Jim, "Big Blue Goes Hollywood," in U.S. News and World Report, 19 September 1994.

Johnson, Ross, "Winston Gratification," in The Hollywood Reporter, 16 June 1995.

Diorio, Carl, "Mighty Morphin," in The Hollywood Reporter, 16 June 1995.

Duncan, Jody, "Moreau's Menagerie," in Cinefex (Riverside), December 1996.

Duncan, Jody, "On the Shoulders of Giants," in Cinefex (Riverside), June 1997.

* * *

Stan Winston, has, at various points in his career, been typecast as a makeup artist, a special effects whiz, a computer animator, and a puppeteer. Yet, while all of these terms are accurate, they do little to either define the man or his unique art. He is perhaps most accurately described as a storyteller and a creator of characters. In fact, his resume includes creating memorable persona in some of the biggest grossing films in the world including Aliens, Terminator 2, Batman Returns, and Jurassic Park. He has even directed two creature-based films, Pumpkinhead and Adventures of a Gnome Named Gnorm. As a result of an early fascination with the acting profession, focused in particular on those roles that involved bizarre characters such as werewolves or Jekyll and Hyde transformations, Winston discovered that it could be more fulfilling to go beyond human actors playing parts and to actually create artificial characters that could act. As a result, he now bases his creations, whether puppets, computer images or prosthetic makeup effects, within the context of the performances being given by live actors in a well-told story. Audiences, he believes, do not walk out of a movie theater remembering makeup or creature effects. They will remember them only if they are a realistic part of a ground-breaking story or paired with an actor's powerful performance.

He points to 1986's Aliens as a case in point. Although, he constructed 15 warrior aliens for the film, it was his full scale 14-foot tall Queen Alien who came to life and slugged it out with the film's star Sigourney Weaver "live on the set" and helped her to achieve an Academy Award nominated performance. Although the Queen rig was operated by a two man crew assisted by a cable rig and a team of cable controllers, in Winston's view, his technicians were actors giving a performance in creating the alien character who would take part on an equal basis with any other performer in the film. In the finished film, the Queen emerges as an actual character. According to Winston, she comes across as elegant in her form, feminine but nasty—definitely a woman you do not want to mess with.

What makes Winston unique in a profession that thrives on labeling its practitioners and forcing them into pigeonholes is that he is constantly reinventing himself and his craft. Early in his career, he carved out a reputation as a makeup artist who specialized primarily in realistic facial prosthetics. However, building on his childhood experiences with puppetry, he graduated to the more specialized field of makeup effects and was soon designing characters with animated faces that were controlled and operated externally. He then extended the external animation to the entire creature, pioneering the new art form of animatronics and robotic design which was to reach its high point through his collaborations with director James Cameron on Terminator 2 and Steven Spielberg on Jurassic Park. At the Stan Winston Studio which he founded in 1978, Winston's staff routinely works with images of virtually every creature existing in nature including man. The characteristics of these creatures are then excerpted and incorporated in designs of beings that have no existence outside of the imagination. Yet, the reality of these new creatures is heightened by the fact that they reflect expressions, gestures, and movements that build on the audiences' own memories and experiences. Regardless of how exotic the creature is, whether alien or Terminator, something about it is strangely familiar to the viewer. The bottom line, Winston emphasizes, is to do what has never been done before—to take the writer's wildest ideas and somehow turn them into cinematic reality—on a daily basis.

Winston's art was expanded in 1993 when he teamed with Industrial Light and Magic designer Scott Ross and director James Cameron to form Digital Domain, a firm focusing on digital and other "high tech" special effects for motion pictures. D.D.'s first project was the fall 1994 release Interview with the Vampire which Winston considered to be a major turning point in his career.

Although he had started out successfully as a makeup artist, he had become typecast as a "creature maker" as a result of the phenomenal success of Jurassic Park. He had to literally do some fast talking to get the job. "I realized that there were still things that I wanted to try with subtle nuances of makeup but nobody would give me the chance because I was the guy who does dinosaurs," he stated in 1995. "That job was very important to me."

Winston's reason for selecting Vampire was his profound interest in creating characters. Director Neil Jordan's film called for a more subtle, elegant, almost spiritual type of effect than did a film dealing with 20-ton dinosaurs. The merger of makeup and small scale mechanical effects with the computer's potential for creating and cloning realistic images extended Winston's range in a remarkable way. Winston's studio took care of the prosthetics, makeup and the mechanical effects—one of which was a crawling robotic Tom Cruise in Lestat's near death scene—while Digital Domain provided computer-generated imagery, miniatures and digital compositing.

From an artistic point of view, the blending of puppetry with computer animation, usually results in the computer getting the credit. For example, out of 16 minutes of dinosaur footage in Jurassic Park, 60 percent was actually Winston's full-size creatures and not electronic images. Similarly, in Interview With the Vampire, the prosthetic and mechanical touches were seamlessly interwoven with the computer-generated effects. Yet, most viewers credited the work to Industrial Light and Magic's computers in the former and to Digital Domain in the latter, because the effects were simply too realistic to be puppets.

However, Winston sees this as vindication of his approach to creature building. He views the computer and other technological innovations as simply new tools to help with the creation of characters in order to create an undetectable blend between what is alive and what's on computer. In Winston's view, if he has done his job correctly, the mechanical characters and the computer-generated images are no less real than the human actors appearing in the finished product. The bottom line is that all three have to be able to act and to make the viewer believe in them. "If you look at a film that I have contributed to," he says, "and my work is apparent, I have failed. But, if it is instead identifiable as a Tim Burton, a James Cameron, or Steven Spielberg film, that's a pat on the back to me."

—Steve Hanson