R.I.P. STAN WINSTON - APRIL 1946 - JUNE 2008



We look back at the best creations of the late Stan Winston, Hollywood’s special effects genius.  The man who gave you the special effects for The Wiz, The Thing, Aliens, Predator, Edward Scissorhands, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Batman Returns, Jurassic Park, Artificial Intelligence, Interview with the Vampire, Ironman, Indiana Jones – Crystal Skull and Constantine.

Hollywood is often called “The Dream Factory” and one of its most powerful dreamers, Stan Winston, died on June 15. Creating fantasy is Hollywood’s core business and thousands of people work on the make-up, special effects and CGI techniques that go into blockbusters. Most of them remain anonymous, just another name in the production credits.

It is the measure of Stan Winston’s genius that his passing, at the relatively young age of 62, made headlines on every showbusiness newspaper, website and blog in the world. He was a trend-setting original, and as you read this, the last two movies on which he worked, Iron Man and Indiana Jones and the Country of the Crystal Skull, are reaping mega million-dollar profits .

Winston came to fame in the early ’80s when James Cameron, Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton were expanding their visual imaginations. Winston was the guy who helped them to realise their screen dreams. Consider the indelible, defining film images of that period: Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands in his black, buckled suit, his tousled hair above his fragile face and his terrifying hands, a nightmarish jangle of lethal blades with which he created beauty.

Can anyone forget Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator peeling back his skin to reveal the metal exo-skeleton that betrayed his sinister mission? Or the ghastly mother-alien, so caring of her offspring yet so savage in her defense of them in Aliens? Or Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as period vampires in Interview with the Vampire? Or the creatures that populated Jurassic Park?

Whether it was a fairly standard horror-movie like Lake Placid; the haunted comic-book world of Tim Burton’s two Batman movies; the epic drama of Pearl Harbor or the totally artificial world of Spielberg’s A.I., Winston created environments and creatures that not only transfixed audiences, they also expanded the expressive power of the film medium.

In terms of screen illusion and special effects Winston and his rival, Rick Baker, were the best of the best, and Winston had four Oscars to prove it. However, in an interview in 1993, just after he had won his Jurassic Park Oscar, he said: “I don’t do special effects. I do characters.”

Winston said: “Special effects, by themselves, don’t mean diddly-squat in a movie. If the characters I create can’t perform, can’t act and aren’t interesting, it just is not going to work. ”

That’s why his work for Tim Burton was so effective. Johnny Depp’s Edward Scissorhands with his lethal hands could have been as terrifying as Freddie Krueger, but he wasn’t. Instead, he seemed tender and fragile. Winston’s make-up designs and those amazing metal hands created the frame in which Depp could give one of his signature performances.

The dazzling Terminator designs reinvigorated the careers of both James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Winston did not just design the look of a creature, he also created its life and spirit. His vision of the shape-shifting, liquid-metal assassin in Terminator 2 accomplished the same goal.

Not surprisingly, Winston’s first ambition was to be a puppeteer and he also dallied, unsuccessfully, with being an actor. His true talent asserted itself when he took up an apprenticeship at what was, in the ’60s, the epicenter of all screen magic and enchantment — the Disney studios, where he learned the essentials of his craft.

He is on record as saying that when he saw Franklin Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (1968), he knew what his future would be. By the early ’70s Winston had established his own studio and was doing award-winning work for TV. His breakthrough came with his make-up effects for The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, in which actress Cicely Tyson aged from 19 to 110. It won him one of his two Emmy awards.

Then came the acclaimed TV series Roots, the Diana Ross musical The Wiz (1978), John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and then Terminator in 1984, which put him on the map. It was the perfect meeting of the man and the moment, when an industry’s ambition was exactly matched by an artist’s vision, able to create images of power and terrible beauty unlike anything the screen had ever seen before.