116: Simon Sayce: Puzzle-Box Creator

Ryan, Jose and Rob met Simon Sayce, designer of the Hellraiser puzzle box and former member of Image Animation.  How does Hellraiser relate to “Harvey” or to hobgoblins?

Show Notes

Quick clarification, José asked Simon about Anna Lovatt and Warwick Sayce working on the box in Hellbound: Hellraiser II, this wasn’t meant to imply that they had in any way changed or collaborated in any changes to the box, but it was meant as a prompt for Simon to reminisce about the team work in the process at Image Animation. Here’s a quick update from Anna Lovatt herself:
“Hiya, just a quick message. I know its not that important in the grand scheme of things, but im quite upset that people think i said i worked on the original box. I would never claim this. I was in the mouldmaking and general fx part of the studio. Myself and Mark Roberts made all the moulds for all the prosthetics and sculptures. I also assisted on practical effect operation and prep for filming. Please can you let anyone in future know this? Thanks. As a pro art director and designer, i would never take credit for someone elses work. x“

Jorte Calendar: Use the custom link http://bit.ly/pinheadcalendar  so they know you heard it from the Clive Barker Podcast!

Simon on Leviathan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcX2sYlTq2U

Follow Simon Sayce on Facebook to keep up with his upcoming projects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_(film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%BAca

Vincente Castiglia (Blood Paintings): http://vincentcastiglia.com/
BMW LMP: https://www.google.com/search?q=bmw+lmr&oq=bmw+lmr&aqs=chrome..69i57.2472j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#newwindow=1&q=bmw+lmp

BMW LMR (Black) http://www.dome.co.jp/e/news/enews0008.html

Heidelberg Printer: https://www.heidelberg.com/us/en/index.jsp

Louise Rosner: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0743118/

http://www.pyramid-gallery.com/FiligreeAndShadow.html

Episode Transcript

DANHAUSER: Hi, and welcome to episode 116 of the Clive Barker Podcast. The episode today is with Simon Sayce, puzzle box creator and special effects guru who was part of Image Animation during Hellraiser, Hellraiser II, and Nightbreed. Before we get started on that I just wanted to say that this episode, we are proud to be sponsored by Jorte Calendar. Jorte is a very customizable calendar and organizer with icons, themes wallpaper and settings available to make your calendar look the way you want.  If you have an iPhone or iPad it can sync to your old iOS calendar so you don’t have to enter in appointments separately. If you don’t have an iPhone it’s also available on Android. If you use Google calendar it can sync to your Google calendar events, and they also have their own cloud service called Jorte Cloud to keep your calendars and events backed up. Jorte has a unique feature that’s called calendar events where you can follow sports and other things. They have a special one for the horror blog Shock Till You Drop. You can follow them. You can look at the weather forecast, and there are many other event calendars available on Jorte. To add them just tap on the calendar icon in the lower left toolbar, and then tap on add event calendar and browse or search directly for any event calendar you are interested in. So we’d love you to give Jorte a try, of course it’s free to try. Search for it now in the app store or Google Play it’s spelled J-O-R-T-E, Jorte. Use the custom link http://bit.ly/pinheadcalendar That’s our custom link so they’ll know you heard about it from the Clive Barker Podcast, and we thank them for their support.

Okay so back to episode 116. This is with Simon Sayce. Jose and Rob and I had a long talk with him and at first due to his health we were a little concerned, and also he had warned us that we may have to cut it off after about half an hour, but that ended up not happening and we stuck it out for a good hour, hour and a half or so. So here it is, puzzle box creator and special effects guru Simon Sayce.

Welcome, this is episode 116 of the Clive Barker Podcast. We’ve got special guest Simon Sayce the creator of the puzzle box from Hellraiser and Image Animation.

SAYCE: Yes, indeed, hi.

LEITAO: It’s great to talk to you. On a personal note I want to say I’m very happy to be able to chat with you because I’ve always admired your work in Hellraiser, and I found out that you also design other stuff for some other movies that I love, but especially the Lament Configuration. It’s been such an iconic horror artifact it’s almost akin to Freddy’s glove or Jason’s mask, only much better looking with an almost other worldly clockwork aesthetic, so it’s beautiful. 

DANHAUSER: One think you’ll notice, no matter how bad the Hellraiser sequels get there are two things that they always want to keep the same. One is that there’s a puzzle box following that same design, and the other is Pinhead. 

RIDENOUR: Yeah, those are the only things that stayed the same.

DANHAUSER:  The two consistent things across all ten movies so far.

SAYCE: Yes of course you definitely can’t ignore Pinhead can you? I think the puzzle box has just become something that they build the stories around.

DANHAUSER: Yeah, exactly. They can even take a script that’s not a Hellraiser script and throw a puzzle box and Pinhead into it and make it a Hellraiser movie. 

SAYCE: I’m going to go away after this phone call and do that. 

LEITAO:  So would you like to tell us a little bit about how you came up with the design for the box? I know that there has been a great documentary which I totally recommend from Gary Smart and other people who we’ve had on the podcast before. Of course I’m talking about the documentary Leviathan. There’s a segment where you explain everything with visual aids, but would you tell us a little bit of the story about how you got approached to make the Hellraiser box? 

SAYCE: It was pure luck. I was a working artist. I had been to art college. One day I watched a film called Harvey with James Stewart about a big invisible white rabbit. In the film, I guess the film was made in the 30s or something like that, maybe 40s, they look up what Harvey is in an encyclopedia and Harvey was a spirit. He was a pooka.  I went into one of the Oxford libraries just to see if a pooka really did exist, if you’d like to call it existing, and found out that it was one of a series of mythical little people that can change shape. 

I then came up with the concept of creating a range of Leprechauns, if you want or derivations of those, which I put into bottles round about 12 inches high. I gave them the real history behind each one which I researched in Oxford, and I sold them at the market in London called Camden Lock which is a big artistic haunt. I used to once a week go and sell my hobgoblins as I called them down at Camden Lock and they were pretty successful immediately. 

I used to sell out regularly and one day a guy called Bob Keen turned up and he bought a hobgoblin and asked me if I’d be interested in doing some work on a film, Hellraiser, which was all a bit weird because I had nothing to do with the film industry. It’s one of the interesting things.  You don’t think you can get a job in the film industry it’s one of those sort of mythical things almost. So I said yes, we had a few phone calls, chats, and he said he’s working with a guy called Clive Barker who I’d never heard of. So I’d never heard of Bob Keen. I’d never heard of Clive Barker and pretty much didn’t know my way to Shepperton Studios and they said yeah we are starting in, I think it was two months time, three months time they were going to start on pre-production.

 So I immediately threw away all my molds. Decided I was going to make a lot of money in the film industry and then spent six months with no money coming in because I had forgotten the film industry is notoriously rubbish with start times. So that was it. It was pure luck and happenstance that Bob Keen turned up and saw my work and said ‘Do you want to become part of the team?’

LEITAO: Excellent

RIDENOUR: Cool story.

DANHAUSER: When I was a teacher in a little arctic village in Nightmute they believed that little people there. It was just common belief like ‘Why would you even question it?’ They were kind of like leprechauns. If you ran out of gas on your snow mobile they would fill up your gas tank for you so you could keep going. 

SAYCE:  I don’t doubt, it I mean when I get into this sort of stuff I kind of absorb myself. So there were leprechauns there were cluricauns, there were bogarts, Kublini, which were little goblins that worked down the mines in Wales, and the miners would take down a gift of a little bit of food when they went down there and on the Isle of Wight which is just off the south coast of England if you go into any cottage over 3-400 years old you’ll find that there’s a hole in the side of the cottage, and that was so when you locked up your house you didn’t lock one of the little people into your house by mistake. 

DANHAUSER: Oh wow, that’s amazing.

SAYCE:  So these things exist in people’s minds and even when I was selling the little hobgoblins in jars. I didn’t get many letters but maybe two or three letters over a period of a couple years from people who’d bought them and said since we bought your little hobgoblin my son’s whooping cough has gone away, and I bought it because this one was known for curing whooping cough. And you think oh okay, fine. My mum still speaks to little people. She goes into her cellar, has a chat with them. I hate to tell her.

LEITAO: Well you mentioned the pooka, and Harvey and for example the pooka has been in several movies. Donnie Darko has a giant rabbit named Frank. You got [Night] of the Lepus? You got all these movies that talk about giant rabbit monsters it’s part of the certain folklore it does emerge in movies every once in awhile. 

SAYCE:  It’s a nice thing I think it’s nice if there’s a thread, especially in a horror film,  if there’s a thread that goes back to something that’s not necessarily dark and scary. 

LEITAO: It’s my understanding that you also designed in other movies like Nightbreed you came up with the design for Decker’s mask which is another iconic villain in the horror genre. 

SAYCE: I think it’s wrong to say I came up with it. The box, the Lament Configuration obviously was very much Clive’s idea because of the nature of the way the movie was made. I pretty much designed it at home in Oxford on my own. 

DANHAUSER:  Of course people know in The Hellbound Heart it was a black lacquered box. There was a story that you guys tried that and it just didn’t look good on film. Is there any truth to that? 

SAYCE: I don’t think it was tried, no. 

DANHAUSER: Oh, okay.

SAYCE: I think it was probably pointed out to me that… I mean the box was lacquered. The box had about three or four layers of lacquer on every side, but it was a matte lacquer. 

LEITAO:  Applied one side at a time right?

SAYCE: Yes, oh my god. 

LEITAO: So it multiplied the workload to six times-

SAYCE: You’ve got no idea. I don’t even have an original box I was sick and tired of them I pretty much gave them away I think Clive’s got one, Bob probably has one I gave one to Jeff I gave one to pretty much any member of the crew who walked by me. 

RIDENOUR: That’s cool

SAYCE: But I don’t have one myself.  Going on from that on the box I’ve got no problem taking credit for the design and the detail because it was all done away from Sheparton Studios. It was done in Oxford and researched at the Pitt Rivers Museum, a place I still frequent probably twice a month in terms of just doing research on different projects. When it came to Decker’s mask I think Clive had a pretty good image in his head of exactly what he wanted.

LEITAO: Buttons for eyes and stuff like that.

SAYCE: Everything from slightly off-set and blah blah blah. So I was working to a pretty tight brief which kind of implied on the mask. Obviously as the artist and sculptor you play with it or move things around, exaggerate things and hopefully bring something to the equation that Clive either didn’t have or just didn’t have the time to do. He’s running around directing his first big movie.

LEITAO: Was it made in two pieces? The mask and the cowl, and then put together?

SAYCE: Sorry, say it again?

LEITAO: Was it made in two pieces, the face and the cowl and then put them together when you apply them?

SAYCE: No. The mask was made just as a mask with a zip at the back.

LEITAO: Okay.

SAYCE: I can’t even remember how many I made of them. They became quite horrible, smelly, places to be after a couple of days shooting. A director like David Cronenberg doesn’t like a smelly rubbish thing being put on his head every day. 

LEITAO: I think doubles did a lot of those scenes.

SAYCE: I mean if it was an unknown actor hidden behind it then you say shut up and put up with it but David Cronenberg…

RIDENOUR: Can’t say that to him.

LEITAO: I remember seeing the deluxe set of the Nightbreed director’s Cut Where several members of Image were reminiscing about the beserker suits. That they had to put them on when they still had the sweat of the actors who had them on the whole day just to do a few extra reshoots. They didn’t even have time to dry them out. So they just had to put those soggy things on and go and do some more shoots- 

SAYCE: We did a terrible film once called The Unholy with Ben Cross.

RIDENOUR: Yeah, Ben Cross. He was in it playing a priest. 

SAYCE: We had to reshoot the end of the movie and I think Bob directed it out in L.A. So myself and Little John, John Cormican were in charge of sculpting this monster. I pulled the short straw and was actually in the suit and it was just a horrible thing. In that particular case it wasn’t a clever monster it was a bit like the cow from hell. I was the front half of the donkey if you want and my feet were strapped to the back of the guy behind me and he was bent over and then I had to walk on stilts with the weight of this animatronic head on my back. I had to walk down the aisle of a church for the end of the film. I think there must have been about 16 people hidden behind each aisle because after three or four steps I’d fall over and fall into one of the aisles and someone would catch me, and it was all edited out, but nevertheless that was a horrible smelly place to be, especially when you’re upside-down. 

LEITAO: So how was it like to work at Image Animation? I’ve read a lot of funny stories about the shop and someone setting fire to some sort of solvent. Then everybody had to open the windows to get all the smoke out. It must have been very fun to do that. I remember seeing a picture that had like a dummy on the door of the shop holding a sign. It seemed like a really fun place to work at the time. 

SAYCE: I think it was a brilliant place, a brilliant atmosphere. Definitely in the early days.

RIDENOUR: A lot of imaginations going around floating around ideas. It seemed like a lot of those guys were into that. Just coming up with cool looking creatures, something that’s really missing I think from film today. 

SAYCE: Sometimes it wasn’t even about being cool. I kind of think that the interesting thing was that some of us have been brought into Image Animation who didn’t come from a film background so Little John didn’t come from a film background. He started on the same day as me. Basically we spent two or three years just waiting for the tap on the shoulder to say what are you doing here mate? As a result of that we brought in different thought processes which was interesting.

 I think there were a couple of, you’ll probably know this better than I, there were a couple of very important special effects makeup magazines going around at the time that everybody who knew anything about makeup effects bought. I can’t remember what they were called. I didn’t read them. So when somebody said sculpt this or do the makeup on someone for this way I never…  There was no traditional place for me to go so I would always start by probably going down the road if you like and that worked quite well because obviously you’ve got your great makeup artists like Geoff Portass, who would come along and say this is what you need to do. Well I’d just spent two days going down this route. The wrong route, but in fact halfway down that wrong route you’d discover something else. 

So Image Animation was… I guess it was almost bit like a rock band in some ways where an idea was being thrown around and you’re discarding the traditional routes. The box is a good example. There was no way, nowadays, that a designer would be given the freedom and leeway. I think I had two months at home with my large architecture drawing board, going into Oxford doing some research, taking photographs, getting them printed out, and then doing this in pen and ink, very slowly and carefully. Subsequent boxes though, being designed by other people. You can tell they were probably, probably had two days to get the design out rather than two months and so-

LEITAO: -Also they worked from your original design. They kind of reverse engineered it and use elements of the original box to come up with their own interpretations of the box.

SAYCE: Yeah, I think so, but going back to Image Animation. It was like working in a sweet shop. It really, we used to get in at eight o’clock every morning, and a lot of us took in sleeping bags because we’d rather just keep sculpting. It was wonderful… You were surrounded by clever people. Just clever brilliant people. You didn’t know it and then you’d have people like Dave Keen who’s Bob’s brother, and Jason Reed. They were all in the engineering section and they did stuff with radio controls and cables that would blow most people away.  John and Geoff who were just brilliant sculptors you know and you’re thinking why am I here? The authorities are surely going to pick me up soon. 

SAYCE: Somehow you kind of squeezed by every day and got in the next morning and thought OK I’ll keep my head down put my headphones on. I’ll sculpt this, and I don’t know what’s it going to look like and see what happens from there. And also remember I wasn’t a makeup artist. On the first film Hellraiser they probably recognized it. They probably thought “Okay look we’ve got Simon here he’s a bit of a nerd. Tell you what let’s give him a box to make and he can do that for two films.” So they were making monsters and angels from hell and I was just doing a bloody box. 

LEITAO: Well was it almost 30 years later, I mean look at the box it’s still so widely recognized it’s such an integral part of the whole Hellraiser mythology I would say that you had every right as an artist to be recognized for that. 

LEITAO: Even one of the sequels really focused on the box and that was Bloodline.

DANHAUSER: Oh yeah.

LEITAO: It’s true, yeah. They brought back the toymaker and showed how the box was made. 

SAYCE: I think, I thought I saw it online. 

LEITAO: You’re not missing out on much.

SAYCE: That’s sort of what I gathered. Which is why when I revisited the box last year and produced not a new box but a reimagining of the box. You’ve probably seen them they’re made out of wood, their burnt.

LEITAO: Oh yeah you’re amazing product the Lament Configuration Obscureta box.

SAYCE: Thank you. Yes, absolutely. So it’s just a revisiting of the same thing and almost taking it backwards so it’s not shiny it’s almost like the box before it became the box if you will. So it was nice to revisit the design from that aspect I think, and we’re still playing with it. I was lucky enough when I made the original etching, the brass etching for the box, it was etched by a company in Oxford. Part of the printing process is they give the artist a copy of the etching before the print run starts and they gave me one and I kept it and it’s 6 ft away from me now. That’s been the basis for every piece of renewed artwork I’ve done relating to the box because we can scan it now in awesomely high resolution and play with it a bit more. 

DANHAUSER: …And we’ll have show-notes on where people can find those.

RIDENOUR: Did you have any other symbols in mind for the box other than the beautiful woman, the crouching man, or was that pretty much something that Clive wanted? 

SAYCE: No, Clive didn’t know about them. 

RIDENOUR: Oh he didn’t? Oh, okay.

SAYCE: In fact nobody knew about them. The only one that they knew about was…

RIDENOUR: I didn’t know about them until I watched this recent documentary to be honest with you. [laughter] It was the first time I learned about them.

LEITAO: The only one I knew about was the engineer when the box was solved-

RIDENOUR: I didn’t even know that one. 

SAYCE: The engineer, that sort of blew me away a bit really because my wife at the time was a math teacher and she was specializing in trigonometry — how shapes are put together and things. And as I said I was at home designing the box. So I was able to talk to her about what sort of shapes we could do and change and things. The original change from a box to a star, if you want,, was just done with a piece of cardboard and a pin through the middle just to see if it worked and then you go, ‘Yes this works! It actually does work. You can change the shape of a box into this!’ But then of course I had to work out if you’re doing two-dimension with a piece of cardboard, that’s one thing when you’re doing it with wood and you have to change a three inch by three inch box into a different shape it became something of a nightmare. In terms of the icons within it I was really happy with the engineer. I really liked that. 

LEITAO: I actually own a star box that’s made of wood with the brass things and stuff and you can just pull it out and reorient it and put it back into the solved position. It’s really fascinating the see the care and the attention to detail that was put into the engineer shape. Not many people I think notice it but now that Leviathan is out I’m sure people will be able to look and track all the beautiful women, the crouching man, Frank Cotton’s face. So that was great to see that segment on Leviathan, I bet that that was really fun to make. 

SAYCE: Well actually, as you can probably tell I was very ill during the making of that and pretty much … wasn’t really about to turn up. I’m far better now.

LEITAO: That’s awesome.

SAYCE: It was very enjoyable. The team behind Leviathan are really nice people. In fact they came down to Oxford and we had lunch only a couple of weeks ago.

DANHAUSER: Have you watched the entire Leviathan documentary?

SAYCE: No one has watched the entire…

LEITAO: We watched all 11 hours of the set.

DANHAUSER: Yeah we did for to do an episode about it.

LEITAO: I could have gone for another 11 hours to be honest.  

RIDENOUR: So much cool stuff.

SAYCE: I believe one of them has been brought out which is edited down to about two hours.

RIDENOUR: On The Scarlet Box set they released by Arrow Video they separated. Hellraiser disc has one hour and Hellbound has the second hour. 

SAYCE: It was a bit like they just couldn’t afford an editor. 

LEITAO: So in Hellbound, I think I’ve talked to someone who was at Image Animation her name was Anna Lovatt. I think she told me that she remembers working with you and your brother making boxes for Hellbound. Because your brother was also working at Image Animation, Warwick, and on Nightbreed as well. So how was the process in Hellbound? I’m sure it was more streamlined at the time because you were already had done a lot of work for Hellraiser so…

SAYCE: I’ve got to say that, nobody did boxes apart from me. This was my life you know. I was stuck in the corner doing boxes. I don’t think Anna, who I know and again she came down about six months ago and we had lunch, I don’t think she ever worked on the boxes. She did make her squishy box.

DANHAUSER: She donated one to us for one of our fundraisers. 

SAYCE: Excellent.

RIDENOUR: Oh yeah.

SAYCE: Excellent. No she didn’t actually work on the box.  It really was a one man operation because you had to be pretty anal and absorbed in what the box was in order to do anything. It was very much a one man operation. I hardly remember anything else that went on with the film because I would be sniffing in the things I was covering the box with and…

LEITAO: Picking it up when the actors dropped it?

SAYCE: Yes, bastards! 

DANHAUSER: Well and I think you’ve kind of answered this question already but David Anderson had asked, he said many years ago there was a puzzle box maker who said he interviewed Bob Keen and supposedly said that some of the symbols on the box came from a book Clive Barker had on Mesopotamia. He relayed that info a couple of times before and he realized the guy could have been making stuff up in order to sell more puzzle boxes. So he just wanted to run that question by you and see what your response was. 

SAYCE: Ah, no. 

DANHAUSER: [chuckles] Okay.

SAYCE:  That’s the long answer. 

LEITAO: So returning to the Obscurita box, you have a series of lithographic prints about to come out soon as well right?

SAYCE: We’re working on it. I’d pretty much walked away from the whole Hellraiser thing for 25 years. I went and worked in advertising and writing and formula one engineering.

DANHAUSER: Oh wow.

SAYCE: It was pretty much when I got diagnosed as being ill. My partner Cathy looked at some of the stuff that was online and it was inaccurate. I thought it might be time if I wasn’t going to be around much longer to at least put the record straight and put some stuff online and talk to some people and of course Gary Smart and the Leviathan crew came along at the right time so I was able to put the record straight there. Then I was able to revisit it and there’s the Obscurita Box but as I said I do have this original etching and I love artwork and I love engineering. What we’re doing is we’re producing, or I’m producing, no it is we cause I can’t operate the machine. We’re using an old 1930s printing press called a Heidelberg and we are going to be producing a limited edition run of lithographs on the Heidelberg. If we could make it operate without it taking our arms off. It’s a dangerous machine, but we’re using lovely old printing technology.

LEITAO: Is that eight color?

SAYCE: No it’s not. No, It’s going to be black ink on paper that is… The paper we’re probably going to use is actually from America from a company called Cranes & Co. and it’s made out of 100% cotton and the company traces its roots back to before the American Civil War.

DANHAUSER: Whoa.

SAYCE: I’m not going to knock something out just to have another print of another box out there so I’ve got to have a story behind anything I do because obviously it’s important to me.

LEITAO: I’m sure that set a standard. For the box we usually say that the artist puts blood, sweat, and tears into his work, but it’s actually went ahead and you actually put some of your own blood into it you want to tell us how that went?

SAYCE: It’s a bit sick isn’t it? 

LEITAO: Not at all

RIDENOUR: It’s a great idea.

SAYCE: There is a Brazillian artist who just paints in blood and it’s interesting stuff but he gave himself a collapsed lung by doing it. You do have to be a bit careful. My cancer treatment means that every three weeks I have blood taken. When I started coming up with the concept of the artwork, I would ask for an extra vial or two. I get my blood taken every three weeks and I asked for extra vials to be given to me. Which I thought they weren’t going to do but eventually they decided that it’s my blood and I can do what I want with it. I keep it in the fridge and it doesn’t need much. Strangely enough,h blood goes far further than you’d think on a piece of artwork. I thought with the boxes I would just, because you can’t sign an Obscurita Box cause it’s highly textured, the best way of signing it is just to add blood and of course when you photograph it with a flash the blood flashes back which is quite nice.  I also used the blood on… I very rarely that I do produce a three food by two foot canvas pieces of artwork on about the box one it is on a black background, one is on a cream antique background and Clive has two of those hanging in his house. I do splats of blood on them probably a bit heavier than I do on a box, but it’s quite nice. It means in a hundred years you can on it crime check for a forgery and in terms of signature you’ll be able to actually check the DNA of a piece of… 

LEITAO: Oh yeah that’s completely unfakeable, yeah. 

RIDENOUR: That’s pretty cool.   

DANHAUSER: That’s a good point.

RIDENOUR: I think I know the author, the painter you were talking about earlier I think it’s Vincente Castiglia.

SAYCE: Yes!

LEITAO: He talks about blood being like the psychic force. His artwork is amazing. II remember especially maybe Ryan or Rob you might be aware of this Marvel Comics did a special issue involving the band Kiss. The gimmick for that comic book, I think this was from the 80s, was that each of the members of the band Kiss had donated a small vial of blood, and they had added the blood into the ink for the printing process and So I remember that. It’s not unheard of for artists to sign in their own blood.

SAYCE: Well that’s quite new, quite interesting because I’m going to steal that idea off you now if you don’t mind.

LEITAO: Go ahead.

SAYCE: When we do the lithographic prints, I’ll take a vial or two of my blood and we’ll put them into the core ink.

LEITAO: Brilliant!

SAYCE: Take it from there. It’s really fantastic. Do you mind if I do that?

LEITAO: No of course not. 

DANHAUSER: That’s awesome.

RIDENOUR: Yeah, do it.

SAYCE: Thank you very much. I’m glad about that cause I didn’t have enough blood to do each one individually, not without passing out, so this is going to be a way around that.

DANHAUSER: That’s cool, and Steve Dillon had a question that he wanted Jose to ask you.

JOSE: He says, question for Jose to ask Simon Sayce on the Clive Barker Podcast. Are there any plans for a book of the man who did the art for the box from that movie I would buy that.

SAYCE: Yes I responded to that on Facebook and said I’d buy it too.

SAYCE:  No, I think it’d be a very boring book to be totally honest I mean there are some amazing artists out there. Do you all know of Eric Gross? 

Various: Yes

LEITAO: Actually, if I can go ahead and say this I actually designed one box for the pyramid gallery once.

SAYCE: Wow!

LEITAO: It was never produced as it was a strange looking design. It was a design I attributed to having been discovered by Rasputin the monk. I know this was written years ago so bear with me, but the whole box was shaped like the Star of David and I called it filigree and shadow. It’s somewhere in the pyramid gallery website there’s a design. There’s a story that I came up with. That was the extent of my contribution.

SAYCE: I think one of the wonderful things… Sorry, I didn’t mean to say wonderful about my own work. One of the wonderful aspects of the box is that people can take it and personalize it their own way, do their own things with it. Star of David, absolutely, and of course Eric’s work on his Pandoric book is fabulous. I’ve got to write a forward for the next one I believe I’ve been told I have to. I’ve written what my interpretation of the history of the original box is. Because it essentially, if you want to go back to our research in Pitt Rivers, it’s not a Chinese puzzle box because if you look at the beginning of the film there is a Chinese or Asian man with the dark fingernails, but he’s not in China and he actually looks like he’s in an Arab country. The artwork and the stuff in the background if you look at it. It is quite interesting but it’s not oriental, so I did a backstory based on my original research which linked the making of the box by LeMarchand to the whole French colonial empire time. The French colonial empire covered France and it covered Arabia and it covered India I believe. For a while it did go very far east but only for a short time, and so I liked the idea that there was a story behind the design of the box that was related to one person’s journey as opposed to a simple thing. Sorry I’m wandering I don’t know what or where that came from. 

RIDENOUR: No it’s fascinating it’s really cool background information.

LEITAO: Is It going to be published somewhere? You were talking about Eric Gross and his Followers of the Pandorics and then you went into this story so is that going to be a part of any project that’s published?

SAYCE: I’d like to write it. It may go as some sort of pamphlet it may go as a forward to somebody else’s book I’m not going to write it to publish it. I moved from the film industry to the writing industry for a long time. In fact I won the international screen writer’s award for a film that never got made. 

DANHAUSER: Oh wow!

LEITAO: You had two movies optioned right?

SAYCE: That’s right, yes. One was called The Hitmen which was about two out of work actors who get muddled up as being two hitmen in Italy. That was optioned for a stupid amount of money but didn’t get made. The second, the one that won the international screenwriters award was a film called Without President which was about a gang in London who are doing a heist on a bank and it all goes wrong and they accidently kidnap the President of The United States. 

DANHAUSER: Oh, Jeez!

LEITAO: Oh, wow!

SAYCE: I can send you the… I had to pitch it to producers and writers so then I think that’s a file on my computer I can probably send it to you.

LEITAO: That’d be brilliant. They sound really awesome. When we had Peter Atkins on the-

SAYCE: -I heard him I-

RIDENOUR: Peter told me to tell you, he said “Hey”. I talked to him through email and he wanted me to say he was looking forward to this episode. He hoped you were doing well.

SAYCE: Nicest man in cinema, that man. He’s just a nice guy you know. I wish I had had time and circumstances had been different so I could’ve gotten to know him.

LEITAO: He’s an excellent conversationalist, and he’s very generous with his time. The reason why I brought him up was because he told us that when you are a screenwriter you make a lot of money if you sell one of your stories as option and if a movie is made that’s better, but sometimes they just option and the movies don’t get made but you still get the money. So he’s like that’s mostly like what screenwriter’s get is a lot of their money comes from scripts being optioned not necessarily to make a movie but you know that’s how the industry is.

SAYCE: That is absolutely the case in Los Angeles. It’s not the case in Oxford. The film industry in America is an industry. I seem to remember reading, maybe 15 years ago, film was the largest import after weapons. It’s a huge industry. In England, we’re a cottage industry. It’s not connected. Finance for movies is limited, it’s low budget. I won’t say it’s not professional but It’s a different industry entirely. There was a point where I thought of moving to Los Angeles. I had optioned some children’s books based on Dracula, and they were re-optioned by a company called Klasky Csupo who were the animation company behind The Simpsons or one of the companies. A lot of time over in Hollywood thinking I was going to be one of the wealthiest men on the planet and it was pitched to Fox and came second and no place for second in the TV industry. There’s only one Friday night slot if you will. So it didn’t happen. At the time I was paid quite well. There was lots of money floating around. That is the industry that’s in the States and that’s why Pete I guess operates. If he was trying to do the same work as he does in the UK he’d probably find it more difficult but tell you what next time he comes over to England I’ll meet up for a pint with him and we can have a chat about it.

LEITAO: That’s brilliant. I think he’s going to enjoy listening to you saying that.

RIDENOUR: You’ll probably get an email he said he’s going to listen to this so.

SAYCE: That’s cool, one of my best moments was on Night- I was going to say on a film called Nightbreed like you don’t know about it. I’m talking to three geeks aren’t I?

LEITAO: Me and Ryan and another friend [inaudible] that pushed for the release of the director’s cut. It was a lot of work but it paid off at the end. That was wonderful to be in L.A. with Clive Barker in the room and see the director’s cut being projected. That was a fantastic experience.

SAYCE: I bet it was amazing. There was one time on the film set of Midian where it was all rope ladders and rope bridges and everything else, and I remember just standing there and it was just me and Pete looking down. Obviously we weren’t filming at the time, and I don’t even know, I can’t even tell you. It was 30 years ago. I can’t remember what the hell we were talking about but it was just a nice normal conversation and had nothing to do with media or the film industry or money it was just, ‘This is nice. I like this man. I’ll go for a pint with him any day of the week.’ 

LEITAO: I know that there were a lot of people who worked in the movie that ended up as extras in background scenes. Did you ever end up in the set somewhere in like a scene because I know Peter did.

SAYCE: No I didn’t. I was going to bullshit you a bit and say I played Decker with a mask on three scenes. 

RIDENOUR: You should’ve done that. 

SAYCE: Yeah, I should’ve done that. Just see what happens. It would have set the world alight.

LEITAO: Would you like to tell us a little bit about the work you did on the Peloquin makeup?

SAYCE: Peloquin, oh my god what a nightmare. As soon as I said I wasn’t a makeup artist. I was an artist, a designer, and I also knew about engineering. I was not a prosthetic makeup artist and so the box was a natural thing for me to do because it was art and engineering. The Decker mask was great because it wasn’t a prosthetic appliance it was something that you put over your head and did the zip-up. So those I was very comfortable with. When it came to Peloquin I was excited by what I designed. It was my first model was about two foot tall and it was very athletic, not strong, not overly muscular, but athletic fast creature. The idea was always that this was a sleek and fast abomination, if you will, that didn’t rely on strength it just relied on pure speed and athleticism. And so I was really happy with the design. Clive very much influenced the markings once I’d started on the actual face design. In fact I think he came up with a paint brush and started bloody doodling all over my work. 

LEITAO: Sounds like Clive.

SAYCE: Yeah, that was typical. He was great on that but the mistake we probably made (It may not have been a mistake but it felt like one personally), it was that we decided that it be really clever to use compressed air to put a small tube in each tentacle. So that it worked a little bit like a, you’ve all seen the film where there’s a hosepipe with the water coming out and the hosepipe whizzes all about the place. Steve Martin I think did the film didn’t he?  Steve Martin in Roxanne where there’s a fire engine. Probably not talking about films you’ve ever seen now. 

DANHAUSER: No I’ve seen it. 

RIDENOUR: It’s a classic. 

SAYCE: I’m just saying. Anyway, so we just decided to do this work with compressed air and it did, but it meant that not only did we have to sculpt each tentacle and cast each tentacle we then had to feed tubing into each tentacle. 

LEITAO: So they had to be hollow? That’s where the engineering part comes in.

SAYCE: Yes, and it worked but it was a nightmare the guy had to wear, Oliver Parker who played Peloquin, he had to wear a small compression valve on his back. It’s before the days of Health & Safety so there’s a lot of compressed air going into this thing and they did work they flip. They could have taken your eye out but the work that had to be put in, so rather than taking a foam tentacle and letting it hang  there would have been probably fine. He could have just flicked his head like a Loreal advert and it would have been fine we decided no use compressed air. My right hand, my wingman at the time was a youngling called Paul Spiteri who went on to do a lot of the Harry Potter films I think recently. The Poor guy he was stuck there till the early hours of the morning doing this with me. It was a nightmare, but at the end of the day Peloquin turned out to be something I’m quite proud of as a design. 

RIDENOUR: It’s a fan favorite for sure. 

LEITAO: A lot of people have him as their favorite Nightbreed. It’s a very striking design. 

SAYCE: Thank you.

DANHAUSER: So we have a question from Esther, she actually sent in a voicemail so I’ll play that.

MULLINGS: Hi guys this is Esther Mullings. Hi Ryan, hi Jose, hi Rob, and hello Simon. Just a question to you Simon I was just wondering if there was something out there in that big wide world that you’d love to get your teeth into using your fabulous mind as it is. Something you hadn’t got round to doing or something’s that been approached to you and you’re really looking forward to doing something that really sort of challenges you and anyone out there that you love to work alongside with and who you admire. That’s it really thank you very much for your time.

SAYCE: That’s a big question isn’t it. Right, in terms of things I’d like to do, I’d have liked it if either my films had been optioned and been made. That would have been nice, and I might find a way of at least publishing the scripts and see if that can do something. I’ve also written a children’s book called The Nit Before Christmas which is about a nit. Do you call them nits in the States? These things that go in children’s hair? 

DANHAUSER: OH Yeah like a louse.

SAYCE: So The Nit Before Christmas is a children’s story and it’s about a nit that basically goes round with Santa Claus and as Santa Claus is laying presents at one end of the bed the nit jumps off and lays eggs in the heads of the children as he’s going round. 

LEITAO: Where exactly is this nit cuddling with Santa Claus? In his beard?

SAYCE: Yeah, he pings. I don’t have it at hand but I think the first line was something like it was the night before Christmas and Santa awoke with a scalp sort of itchy so he gave it a poke. It goes on from there. That’s an ongoing saga I’d like to work on. This is probably total nonsense I don’t know but I was approached only 24 hours ago by a Canadian company that are doing a low budget horror film and asked if I’d be interested in designing the key horror masks for that so again that’s something. After the film industry I moved away, I worked with formula one. I worked in formula one I worked on a call called the BMW LMR and I was part of the design team for the car and it won the Le Mans 24-hour race.

LEITAO: That’s fascinating, in 1999?

SAYCE: Ah well done you’re quick on that Google!

LEITAO: My Google-fu is very strong. I’m looking at the car right now it’s beautiful.

SAYCE: Yeah, so I worked on the air intake system and the braking system on that. If you google the LMP which is the Le Mans prototype you might see it in black I don’t know if there are any photographs. I’ve got a photograph which I’m quite happy to scan and send over to you.

LEITAO: I see the LMP in black, Very, very sleek and sexy. 

SAYCE: Yes it’s like a batman car. 

LEITAO: It’s fascinating. We’ll let this one do the show notes for sure.

SAYCE: Going back to Esther’s question, I’m pretty much open to anything. I suffer from stage 4 cancer which I was diagnosed with three and a quarter years ago and had the wonderful experience of being told you’ve got two years to live which is one of those lines you only hear in films. You kind of come away going alright okay two years what’re we going to do? And in fact…

LEITAO: Turn it into four years and then six years and then eight years.

SAYCE: I’m working on it.

RIDENOUR: You’re working hard. 

SAYCE: Yeah, I’m working on it. We’re like, what, three and a quarter years out? We’re doing well we’re enjoying it I’ve just gone through my forty-sixth chemotherapy cycle and it tires you out . It doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t apply yourself to projects and work so the film company in Canada for instance I said fine you got to understand that you need to send me the head cast of the actor. I’ll do the sculpting and that’s it, and it goes off to some genius to do the molding and everything else and it will go off to somebody else to do the prosthetic applications and so in some ways I’m limited but in others I’m not. Basically I’m up for any creative challenge still and in fact the Leviathan producers have asked me to look at the possibility of designing a new box. 

LEITAO: Wow! That’s exciting.

SAYCE: …And have asked me to see if I could apply my mind to it. I’ll be doing that shortly but, obviously I prioritize. 

LEITAO: Certainly, but again just wondering if we’re still good for time. I have pretty much covered everything that I wanted to ask but you guys have any more questions?

RIDENOUR: I just have one more. I was curious if you ever were approached to do Hellraiser III or be involved for the series after Hellbound?

SAYCE: No. I think Hellraiser I and II were where Clive was involved. I really wouldn’t have wanted to work on a Hellraiser film without Clive. 

RIDENOUR: Yeah, I understand.

SAYCE: You’ve got to remember that when we did all the Hellraiser designs and work this was not a corporate studio environment. We’re sitting in Clive’s kitchen with big sheets of paper and Jeff or Little John or Nigel or myself would be, big black marker pens, would be what we call in the advertising, we scamp, which meant we would get big black markers and just draw anything pretty much and so the original sketches of pinhead or what came out is very dirty. Just quick and cheap sketches and I think that that was something that carried on through Hellraiser I and II. It definitely carried on through Nightbreed and of course basically the core group who were behind one and two had all left Image Animation by three and so no…

RIDENOUR: I was just curious if ever you were approached or-

SAYCE: I was disappointed with some of the redesigns of the box. I was disappointed that my box was marketed, with letters of authenticity, signed by somebody else which was strange.

LEITAO: That was strange I mean I think I have a piece of cinematic history which was the Lylesburg medallion from Nightbreed. )Which actually when I got it I found it made out of a section of sawed-off PVC pipe). That’s movie props for you, but the certificate came signed by Bob Keen so I’m hoping that is a real signature so I do have a little bit of a prop from Nightbreed. But yeah it’s weird that someone else would sign certificates about the box if they didn’t design it. I think that’s not a cool thing to do.

SAYCE: Have you got one of the pencils used in Nightbreed that were signed by Bob Keen?

LEITAO: No. 

SAYCE: Okay, hold on. I’m signing it now. [chuckles]

LEITAO: Okay. 

SAYCE: There you are. I’ve just written Bob Keen on this pencil. 

LEITAO: I see what you did there.

SAYCE: I’m going to send that to you.

LEITAO: Luckily I got a third party confirmation from someone who worked on Nightbreed and they said yeah that looks like the one we did yeah that looks like the real, but you never know.

SAYCE: Well Bob is my eldest son’s godfather. 

RIDENOUR:  Really? He actually, he lives in I think in…

LEITAO: Texas?

RIDENOUR: Greensboro? Does he live in Texas now because he was teaching at the University of North Carolina School of Arts here. I live about three hours from where he was teaching in Greensboro North Carolina but I guess he’s moved. 

SAYCE:  Yeah, maybe. Unfortunately we don’t stay in touch. The falling apart of Image Animation was a bit like the falling apart of a rock band if you will getting back to what my earlier analogy was. I don’t think it could have been helped. You’re talking about a bunch of 27-28 year old’s who were all creative with egos. Not quite sure how they got together in the first place. We all know that that’s a sign at some point is probably going to implode or explode or do something. 

LEITAO: I guess people move on to other projects and they have other opportunities and they follow their dreams and other directions. 

SAYCE: Yeah, and it’s amazing I mean, God, you look at the people who were part of Image Animation and you got Mark Coulier with his two Oscars. You got Louise Rosner who doesn’t get mentioned in anything and it would be wrong to say she was my P.A. is anybody googling quickly? 

LEITAO: I’m sorry what’s the name again?

SAYCE: Louise Rosner, R-O-S-N-E-R.

LEITAO: Okay, yes! She’s on Internet Movie Database. Here it is, if it’s the same person she’s a producer and production manager known for The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and Mean Girls 2004. It’s fabulous. The Hunger Games was a franchise so there you go.

SAYCE: Yeah, exactly. And to be executive producer on that… 

DANHAUSER: That’s amazing.

SAYCE: So she was Chris Figgs assistant on Hellraiser and then she, when I was made managing director of Image Animation she was essentially my assistant I guess but I might get sued by a law firm in Los Angeles now but yeah it was a bit like that.  

LEITAO: In some ways listening to the Leviathan documentary I kind of got the idea from what Bob Keen was saying that even though a lot of people like you were mentioning were not particularly into the whole movie special effects world, but they got brought into Image Animation. The fact that some people were a little lost kind of helped them to discover new ways of doing things and innovate, and so that’s what Image Animation’s biggest strength was, was the fact that they innovated a lot ‘cause people were trying to come up with different ways of doing things. 

SAYCE: I think Image Animation could have been on the edge of doing something amazing and it’s something that I always look back on and think could we have done it differently. I mean Clive Barker found me at home when I resigned and basically asked if I would reconsider and I couldn’t. I had a list of maybe five, ten things which made it unworkable. I’ve long ago thrown away the list but still can’t quite remember but I know that it didn’t’ work. It wasn’t working and it was just one of those things. I’m sure that there’s lots of 1980s rock bands that kind of go why did we break up? It’s just not always that easy talking about. Not including me, you’re talking about pretty talented people out there. We’ve gone to Oscars and Little John now is senior sculptor over at Madam Tussauds. I’m amazed when I occasionally google some of the people we brought in and then look at what they’ve gone on to achieve. You kind of go, wow so maybe Image Animation did that. Maybe that’s what it did. Because of its open access policy to young talented craftsman who didn’t necessarily have any history in the film industry. It allowed them to enter the film industry, spread their wings and do actually better things than we did maybe. 

LEITAO: Or go into engineering and help you know design cars for formula one. 

SAYCE: Or write The Nit Before Christmas! 

LEITAO: Yeah, so gosh. I guess I think we got everything in this one episode here. 

RIDENOUR: Yeah, it was a great conversation. 

LEITAO: Absolutely I would say that this is going to be a great episode. 

DANHAUSER: And thanks so much for joining us.

RIDENOUR: Yes. Taking the time out. 

SAYCE: Thank you all of you for taking the time. It’s very much appreciated that you appreciate what we did.

LEITAO: All of this stuff is going to be still influencing pop culture and movie culture even after we’re all gone.

SAYCE: Yeah, well I’ll try and hold on at least a couple of weeks because Pete Atkins can buy me that pint. 

LEITAO: That’s right!

 RIDENOUR: I’m going to e-mail him right now. Tell him that. Get him to hold to that. 

SAYCE: Okay guys, thanks an awful lot. 

RIDENOUR: Take care.

DANHAUSER: Thank you.

LEITAO: Thank you for your time I hope you’re doing well and lets stay in touch. 

RIDENOUR: Fight the good fight.

SAYCE: God bless. Bye.

DANHAUSER: The Clive Barker Podcast, or Barker Cast is an independent editorial fansite and podcast that is not affiliated with or under contract by Clive Barker or Seraphim Films. This podcast and site are a labor of love by the fans for the fans. News, features, and show notes for this episode can be found at www.clivebarkercast.com. Go to iTunes and please leave us a review. Reviews really help us get the word out about Clive Barker. You can also find us on Podematic, xbox music store, tune in radio, stitcher, double twist, blackberry and pocketcast. We have a Facebook page so come on and like our Facebook page and join the occupy Midian group for lots of discussion about Nightbreed and other Clive Barker stuff. On twitter we’re @barkercast and @occupymidian. Opening theme by Mark Buckle.