Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. When Stan Winston passed away those around him decided to honor his memory by passing on his knowledge to a new generation. Thus the Stan Winston School was born.
As a movie fan this is incredibly important. There will always be amazing artists working in film, no matter what their tool of choice is, but keeping the tricks of the make-up trade that have been developed over more than a century of filmmaking alive and flourishing is something that's close to my heart.
On top of that, the folks at the school comb through the archives from time to time and drop some really rad BTS pictures, which explains the origins of today's image. It's not a super huge file, so apologies for that, but it's really damn cool.
Predator fans will know one of the most interesting bits of trivia about the film is that the monster they had initially looked a lot different from the icon we know today. Not only that, but this monster was portrayed by, and I shit you not, Jean-Claude Van Damme. Van Damme and the monster were scrapped during filming and the Predator we know was designed and implemented with the late, great Kevin Peter Hall in the latex.
There's not a whole lot of footage or images of Van Damme at work, but the Stan Winston School folks dug up a nifty shot of the action star in the rough rig for the monster and just released it. I saw it yesterday and knew instantly it was going in this column. Check him out:
JCVD looks a bit miserable under all that, doesn't he?
Tomorrow brings a BTS shot from a film with another iconic Stan Winston creation in it and even better, it's an image that has never appeared online (or so I'm told). It's a good one. See you guys then!
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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