Q: What motivated you to work with special effects?

A: Throughout my childhood, my parents would take me to see weird movies, which were a major influence on me. When I was ten, my mom took me to see the movie, the Exorcist. I was very scared and had nightmares for days. On the weekend my father would take me to see old horror movies at the 42nd street Movie Houses. As I grew older, my fright turned into fascination and I knew that I wanted to get into the movie business.

Q: At what point in your life did you know you wanted to do Special Effects?

A: The day I saw John Carpenters movie, ‘The Thing’. Before I saw this movie, I was experimenting with make-up, doing ‘burns’ and other simple make-up effects. I was still undecided as to what area of the movie business I wanted to pursue. I still remember the scene from ‘The Thing’, where they were doing the blood test and the guy just hits the ceiling and turns into a monster. This geeky kid with glasses sitting behind me in the Theater jumped out of his seat and screamed @#&*%! I almost screamed, but he actually did it. That’s when I said to myself ‘this is the kind of reaction I would like to get from a movie that I created the special effects’. My quest from this point forward was to surround myself with projects that were original, weird and outlandish. I wanted to do something that would leave an impact, so that after viewing a movie reactions would be, ‘Wow’, ‘That was cool’, ‘Definitely something I haven’t seen before’. I went on a mission seeking out directors that I really wanted to work with and projects that were original.

Q: Well it certainly looks like accomplished your mission. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a walking crap monster,(AKA; NOMAN) before. How was the Monster created?

A: Thank you. It was a very difficult thing to come up with. When I first heard about this movie, I thought ok, this is gonna be some kind of cheesy, low-budget, B- movie stuff. The tough thing was trying to make the crap monster interesting, and different. The Marshmallow man and Slimer from the Ghost Busters movie had some influence on the creation of the crap monster. I wanted to make the monster work on a level that was funny but also accepted as real.

Some shots of the monster and the wings were CGI (Computer Generated Image). The scenes where the monster comes off the floor after the bile comes out of the toilet and when he shoots the crap balls at Linda, Bob and Jay in the bar were CGI. Alison Saitch, the project supervisor from Threshold Special Digital Effects created the CGI scenes for the crap monster. Threshold did a really good job of matching up the look of the crap monster. The rest of the special effects were done with the animatronic head and a man in a monster suit. Richard Payne from Station X supervised the CGI scenes done with the wings. Ben Affleck flying down from the top of the church and the shot where he is dropping people from the sky.

There are several other special effects in the movie. Alan Rickman shows that he has no genitals, which was a giant prosthetic piece from his waist down to his knees. The entire body armor used in the film for Matt Dameon and Ben Afflick had to be sculpted and had to have many different types of plating for Ben because of each wing function. There were static wings, which stayed open, and stunt wings. Each armor harness had to fit each component. I think it is the first time in movies where one pair of animatronic wings does everything. Which is flap, fold, close and spring open all in one piece.

Q: The scene in the movie where the wings were broken off and bleeding was interesting but disturbing to view.

A: Yea, a lot of people say that. Charlie Belardinelli was in charge of blowing up the wings. Louie Zakarian and Tom Denere Jr. were on second unit for that and it was really tough because he tried to blow them up the first time and the producers were not happy with it. They said they wanted these wings to be completly blown away. Charlie with some assitance from us re-rigged the wings, we added more blood bags and they worked. Afterwards I went back and added these little animatronic stubs that moved so you would see the bone and marrow that was left. All of the bodies that you see laying in the street near the end of the movie are all highly detailed dummies except for a few extras. There are no close ups, just over view shots because of how the scenes are used in the context of the movie. We also made a fake George Carlin that gets dropped out of the sky and an amimatronic Ben Afflick that blows up.

Q: Were there any scenes in the movie with your special effects work that was edited from the film?

A: There is a scene where the crap monster is in the hospital and one of the Stygian Triplet with red hair gets his face dunked in holy water and later on comes back to life with his whole face melted off and dripping. I saw the footage and it was horrific, I mean it looked great. I was really excited but it cut because the film was 3½ to 4 hours long. Kevin had to make editing choices and he re-shot a whole new ending. Unfortunately, my hockey Stygian Triplet scene, which I was really proud of, was edited from the movie.

Q: Were you happy with the way the movie turned out?

A: I did not see the movie until it came out into the theaters and I was pleasantly surprised that it was still an effects movie which I did not think it was going to be. Lions Gate was telling everyone that it was about people and emotions not an effects film. Finally, when I saw the movie there were heads being blown off, a crap monster and wings everywhere. I thought, ‘Wow, that was cool it’s definitely something I haven’t seen before’. ‘Dogma is a film about peoples emotions and it questions your faith, but it is definitely an Effects Film.’