Classic Movie Make Up SFX with seasoned pro Rob Burman

This week I’m talking to Make Up Effects artist Rob Burman. Rob has worked in different roles on some absolute classic like John Carpenters The Thing, The Fly, Terminator 2, Batman Returns, Tremors,  The Goonies and Ghostbusters.

I talked to Rob about his incredible career and asked for advice for new people getting into Make up prosthetics.

Find out more about Rob on his website:
https://www.robburmanslaboratory.com

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Transcript

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[Music] hi Jim here and you're listening to the honest filmmaker podcast career advice from people in the business this week I spoke to makeup effects artist Rob Burman Rob has worked on some absolute Classics like John Carpenter's The Thing Terminator 2 Batman Returns Tremors The Goonies and Ghostbusters I talked to him about his incredible career and his advice for new people entering the industry enjoy I just wanted to jump straight into it so you've worked on some really good movies um before we talk about those uh can you tell me a bit about how you got into the uh industry in the first place uh you know I'll I'll give you the the the essential Burman story um my grandfather my dad's dad um he was an artist in the Midwest United States and things and he uh uh he sculpted monuments and things like that and lots of uh like the seal for the city and all that kind of thing so they uh then he decided that he would move to California and think well you know maybe they could use my talents maybe I could sculpt for films or whatever like that this is the late 1930s you know um and they uh uh so they moved to California and one of his earliest jobs was uh sculpting the head of a Cane which is what they used in The Wolfman the silver-headed cane to kill the wolf man with so um on that he met Jack Pierce who was doing the Wolfman makeup and Jack was a fabrication guy he just glued stuff to you and made it look good you know uh whereas my grandfather he was a sculptor fine artist he made molds he he built props did Scenic art all that kind of thing and so Jack said well you know you you don't tell anybody I I'll keep you busy and my Granda father's like well that's fine because my grandfather was very quiet to himself and so he would make things like a after that all of the one ended up being kind of the the bad rubber masks of Frankenstein and the mummy and all that for all the sequels all of those things um my grandfather made those things for Jack Pierce who went on and did the shows um you know he ended up doing things like uh the Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters movies and stuff like that so um he got involved with that well while my father was growing up around all that on the Summers he was kind of forced to work in my grandfather's shop as an assistant you know help him clean molds and all that kind of stuff so uh my grandfather grew up in or my father grew up in that environment uh then when uh uh when he was uh just getting out of the Marine Corps and he's you know 20 21 years old um he had they had me they my and uh um and my mom and all of that he got an apprenticeship at 20th Century Fox in the makeup Department because he was working at dawn post with my grandfather sculpting a giant king kong sculpture and they told him well they're they're having apprenticeship over at Fox you might as well go over there and check it out and so my dad took Friday off and went down there and applied on Friday and on Monday he started he and three other applicants out of out of a hundred guys only those three got picked and uh they started doing their apprenticeship well about six months into the apprenticeship they start uh Ben NY the department head comes in said oh my God we got a giant film coming in tremendous things it's going to revolutionize the industry we got to do it we got to get the best guys in the world and you know they started throwing names around and stuff like that and my grandfather or my my father suggested John Chambers John Chambers got brought in you know how to get a hold of him yeah God bring him in okay so he came in and he interviewed and talked to Ben NY and he came out with uh the script and looked at my dad and he said we're going to win an Oscar boy and uh it was Planet of the Apes wow he did yeah you know and uh so my dad finished off his apprenticeship over the next three years working on all the Apes movies and things like that that were being done um and then after that he and John Chambers went and started their own shop together outside of the studio system well nobody was successful doing that back then except for a few departments cameras lighting things like that they had their own companies and whatnot so for a make but for a makeup company to go out and you know and start on its own was kind of unheard of what nobody knew was they had a contract with the CIA and they were doing things that they couldn't show the studios that they were doing so uh so they had to have a private facility and you know so that was that way for a few years and then he and John parted John retired and my dad continued with the Burman studio is what it was called after that and uh when I graduated high school I kind of went in there and said hey I'll I'll clean your shop at night and I would clean it at night and get everything done and all that stuff and then the next day he'd come in and and freak out and he'd call the school and the school would have to page me to the front office and I'd get to the office and he'd be like where is this where's that I need this thing I it's here it's there I never saw it I don't know you know whatever it was and then he say come in after school so I started coming in after school and then when I graduated they were in the middle of project so I just stayed and then I was full-time next thing you know I was kind of the foreman of the place because I was the only one that knew where anything was and so uh so after a a few years there um I I was getting laid off and my dad says well I got a phone call they want to talk to you over here at this on this show and I said okay great so I went over and I interviewed and got the job running foam latex for the thing and I'm like well I guess this is what I'm going to do yeah sounds like a good idea I think I'll do this for a while yeah not a bad place to start as well on the thing that's nut so so uh the one I was going to talk about first was the Mario Brothers movie and I've got you down as um prosthetic makeup designer so what does that mean exactly and what what did you design on the movie to to be honest what I did in the film is probably only on screen for about less than 20 seconds oh really um we do the end sequence that kills King Koopa from the time that Dennis Hopper gets his smile prosthetic where he worp you know morphs into that and then he morphs into the next character which is a different actor you know with the big teeth and all that stuff that gets blown up into the the cement bucket and then the two different stages of heads come out of there a third stage and a fourth stage that are all uh radio controlled puppets so that was my contribution uh Vincent gusi did all the other prosthetic work on the show um who was at makeup and effects Labs did uh the Goombas and little rat creatures and stuff like that and uh Mark MRI and and Dave Nelson did the Yoshi car which is just you know everybody everybody brought their aame on that show I think you know everybody but the directors nothing yeah um and uh so you've got your um uh Rob Burman Laboratories course that you run where you teach people Prosthetics what's the sort of what's the main thing that you teach your students what's kind of like most important thing you tell them you know I and and again it's the thing I talk about when they first walk into class the first thing I say is I got to teach you how to see to be able to you know because we all know what a face looks like right okay so if I give a guy some clay and say make me a nose he should be able to make me a nose right why does it always look like an airplane tail with fins and stuff on it you know why is it always and and what you people realize they've been looking at things they whole life and don't really know what they look like and so to teach them that if I can teach them that that's worth the price of the course in and of itself yeah you know um so and but you know in in learning to see they're learning also okay in sculpting a character how to make that character look like the character and not just look like a monkey poked clay you know um and anybody who's not played with clay in their life and comes into my class I end up getting them something that you know will will will probably suffice but you know they learn really fast that they really don't know what things look like I think that's single most important and then I focus on technique I focus on you know what uh um because you know the the the end result is one thing but getting there is everything you know 80% of the job is making molds and sculpting and cleaning casting parts and casting urethane and rubber and silicone and doing all that lab tech stuff the beginning of the job is sculpting yeah great okay so you know you get a you get a few days if you're lucky to sculpt and then the end of the job is maybe you get a day to paint because everything in the middle took so long that you've only got just enough time and you're painting it as it's going into the box you know it's like you know so th those guys that want to paint and sculpt that's all great but 80% of the job is technical it's you know lab tech stuff and and if you don't know how to do that you're not going to work on most of the job you'll work in the beginning and then you'll be laid off then you'll work at the end for a day but otherwise the guy who comes in as the mold maker he's usually brought in for the life casts up front so if that's the case then he's also going to um um then he's also going to be around while they're sculpting mol he's preting for all that so then maybe they might even ask him to help them sculpt then he's going to be making all the molds and all of that and casting Parts with the foam technicians and all that stuff and the figure finishers and all those people you're GNA be on that job from the beginning to the end if you know how to do that middle 80% otherwise you don't work much yeah and what about um apart from the technical and the Artistry of it what are the sort of personal attributes you think you need personality wise to to work in that industry well I I know you get gotta really love what this is you got to really love doing it because that's you know you you're G to spend all your time doing it when you get a job half the time especially I'll use this one job I did as an example back in the 1980s when I was talking to a guy for almost year about doing his film you know okay that's great just let me know when you got the money let me know when you got the money that's great that's fine and then at the end of a year he like okay here's a check for$45,000 I'll see you in Africa in six weeks with a monster uh yeah okay sure you will you know uh and then all a sudden you realize your your ass is on the line for that kind of money to show up with something that's shootable not just you know I mean we we only make rubber monsters but it can't look like a rubber monster you know yeah so um that's that's that's really critical is being able to to deliver and um just going back to the thing so did what did you say you did on that your foam I was the foam latex Department my my best friend and I who uh after leaving my dad shop uh we went over to Rob Bin's and basically they just gave us the whole department because nobody else wanted to do it so we kind of the first guys to establish that process as its own Department it was usually H whoever's not busy just go run the phone you know but then they never got good quality they never got all consistency and all of that and then once it came in and and Dale and I started we uh um you we made it a department and and that film in particular has got some real just horrific special effects in it absolutely what did you think you know seeing those things getting put together what was your impression of it because it's pretty I mean at that time as well it's kind of when we were doing it none of us had ever seen anything like that so we were looking at it going yeah I don't know I hope it works um we'll see you know we tested the hell out of everything all kinds of stuff but Rob botin was brilliant mind who came up with so many ideas to do so many different things and like I said not all of us were sold on it we some of us were like well we hope it works out and looks good I can't imagine what the movie is going to be like but uh after seeing the movie I think that of all of the films up to that time in the history of film um it's the best most iconic effect sequences ever done without a computer and they still hold out and even with a computer they really haven't done it better they've just kind of copied the same yeah I feel really honored to have been one of the guys contributing to what to me is the ult the sequence where Charles H halahan starts to have his heart attack and and all the stuff happens and the arms get bit off and his head stretches off and every's on fire and the spider head's going and like is the most amazing sequence on film I don't think anybody's done a better one yeah no it's a great movie reallyy good movie um another film I saw pop up on your Facebook feed was some work you'd done on on Batman Returns so what was what was you up to on that I was brought in because they brought a a team from England to do everything here in California and uh they didn't have enough people so they had a coordinator who was uh local from here and she went around searching out people that that were good lab technicians good mold makers good people like that so they brought me in at first to do um mold making on all the Danny DeVito stuff he's wearing a full bodysuit of prosthetic thing underneath and underneath his clothing and all of that there was originally going to be a nude scene of him getting out of a bathtub oh ni but I guess they didn't do it um but he uh uh so I did full body molds off of Danny Devito's body and things like that and and lots of Parts cast his undersuit things that went into his costume um and then when all of that was kind of completed they moved me on and I did fine finishing where I fixed imper Perfections in the castings of the Batman costume the Catwoman costume and anything else penguin related you know anything we did in the shop would come by if there were little bubbles or cracks or seams and things like that I fixed all that stuff in the in the suits before they got fabricated and assembled and I'm I'm making an assumption that you love that kind of genre of movie you know these kind of genre movies is that true or am I just making the assumption it's the effects that you like doing you know it's what's really funny is my favorite movies in the entire world are mostly animated oh really Incredibles is probably the best film ever you know right okay I just I I love Pixar I love a lot of that um I love just pure entertainment what the subject matter or what the uh the the the method that they use to achieve is not as important to me but the kid in me does like animation stop motion all of that kind of thing um I tend to steer away from these days anyway anything traumatic right you know it's it's just doesn't doesn't feed me as a person and make me feel good it makes me feel icky icky but you've you've contributed to years of trauma with the thing that I'll te I'll tear your damn head off I I'll rip your guts out I'll do everything all over the place you know but if I see a drop of blood I'm going oh fair enough fair enough um talking of uh uh movies to kids well kids teenagers Mighty Morphin Power Rangers film so you what did you do on that you did costume as well as was it kind of molding everything or they they over a period of time piece by piece gave us the entire Ranger costume M so you know you know they we they first asked us if we could make helmets and then they were like well but you can make costumes right so you could make like an UND suit right and like well yeah oh but you can this can you do the gauntlets can you do and they just gave it to us P can you do a belt Yeah well yeah I think so you know so we ended up doing everything the Rangers head to toe they supplied us a couple of things like they supplied us the fabric that we had to use to make them because they had already had huge bolts of that manufactured ahead of time um they gave us the white leather gloves that were their gloves because they were super nice little made out of Kit leather and um and they gave us the boots because I don't remember was it Nike rebot whoever it was actually made the boots themselves but we detailed them painted them altered them and made them the Rangers boots not just you know big white boots yeah and do you get when you're building that up what do you get does somebody do a sketch and go right this is what it's got to look like exactly or are you following a what pattern what's the the whole film started with a different director a friend of mine Steve Wang who's a brilliant director brilliant artist he designed so many things in the 80s he's you know the guy anyway he uh um he started on that and we ended up seeing these drawings that production had give us and they looked like I'll call it bubble armor you know like round very anime very you know but but cumbersome and not real not mobile these guys would never be able to fight in them and things like that and you know and Steve came in and looked at we had body casts of two stuntmen they wouldn't give us the actors because they were working all day on the TV show so we we started building the suits on stuntmen and we uh um we started to sculpt it and Steve came in we were like this this just doesn't really work it's not he's like no they should be like this thick they should be thin and they they should look like Ferraris and I went okay let me see what I can do and then a week later Steve was out of the project and we were getting a new director but they just left me to go to design the suit the way I thought it was you know most appropriate and I tried to keep as true to any of the input that they gave me and whatnot and all that but uh ultimately they needed to be able to fight and move because uh uh the undersuit fabric that they gave us wasn't going to let them do that either it was very stiff and difficult to move in and you know and whatnot so um so there were a lot of difficulties and problems on putting the making superheroes is hard I bet it is I bet it is it is the hardest thing you'll ever do hard it's as hard as gluing a nose in the middle of your face and making it look real you you know it takes that much effort and and everything has to be polished and perfect and the slightest imperfection just shows you know so um so it took us three and a half months to make 36 suits 42 helmets and uh God knows how many power coins and chest emblems you know belts and whatnot and I'm assuming there's toys of those suits that you made there must have been yeah so did you get a piece of the money from the toys then doesn't work like that then unforunately no and if they had if they had set me up ah time say we want you to make the suits and design them that would have been in my contract I bet it would yeah because they peac Meed it to me a little bit at a time it was hard to be able to say that I didn't you know oh I'm only doing this piece I'm only doing this piece and then and then all of a sudden it's done you're like wow you know what I did all of that that so I don't know yeah it's aough they first came out with the toys they were the old toys repainted to look like our toys so oh really all right that's that's it was much later that they actually came out with a set that uh that was our original design so the another one that pops up because I'm obviously Facebook stalking you now is um Ghostbusters huge movie tons and tons of effects in that movie especially for that year um my favorite live action movie that I worked on ever oh really what what what do you remember from that uh film um again all we did was the foam latex like we did on the thing it was again my same uh best friend and partner at the time Dale Brady um I think what happened was is one of the guys steuart zff who was running the shop for everybody said uh you know asked around and said well who's the foam latex guy you know we need a foam latex guy and you know the people that they already had were people that I knew and I was pretty much the only one at the time so they called me and I brought Dale in and the two of us headed the department doing all that it was if we thought the stuff we did on the thing was big Ghostbusters was bigger you know um the thing our biggest thing took uh took five 20 Court mixers to fill the biggest body the end result the um uh what did they call him I don't know the Blair monster that's what it was and anyway uh in Ghostbusters the average thing took three to five mixers to fill you know the just the body of the terror dogs it was just monstrous and and uh and Slimer who we called onion head at the time was was just monstrous amount of mounts of foam and and and the thing is we only ran or only cast each of them maybe maybe three times because well because I'm good but uh but because it it worked well enough that you know we we used what we made and it was it was capable and and and performed what they wanted it to so we only made what we needed yeah and you know giant Shop full of cables running everywhere because there again no no real CG and uh and everything was levers like this you uh Slimer had what eight or nine puppeteers on them at any given time and you know they made six different stay puffed suits and everything because you could only shoot each suit from one side or another it was uh it was a lot of work for a lot about five months and do they so I don't if you've seen the new remakes of the reboots or whatever want to call them they um the dogs Terror dogs are in that aren't they are they all I think they might all be CG I think there's one in yeah I so too I I thought that the latest one that they did with the uh with the young girl um was pretty good it was a nice a nice followup to it because it's a kind of film that sits to itself Ghostbusters doesn't fit into any kind of world category it doesn't it's just an an isol ated Perfect film and even the sequels that they did after it where they tried to mimic it it all just felt like they were just copying but then this most recent remake felt like a felt like a true honorarium and and and a good update so I I like the way they pulled it off yeah um another thing I've got to mention filmmaker friend of mine Pat is obsessed with the octopus in Goonies um and I've seen a picture Rie from the shop with that in um I'm assuming that used a lot of latex did it or how was that created uh it it was polyurethane actually um instead of latex we needed it to be able to submerge underwater easily and stuff so it was like a a rubbery skin with uh uh with a very coarse open celled sheet foam on the inside of it that water would drain in and out of very easily um but all we did was that cosmetic end of it and all of that and and uh the uh production said oh we'll make it move we'll make it move we got a we got a rigging crew that'll do all that like okay great so the rigging crew did it and it looked like a cheap Edwood puppet you know I mean it look you can see it in the Cindy Lopper video it looks awful I am so glad that they cut it but uh that's how we started on the show was doing just the octopus uh we were in the middle of uh we're in the middle of Teen Wolf and they came to us and said we need a 30 foot octopus in eight weeks can we do it like sure no problem that was they called me no problem Rob sure no problem all right well let's try it and so we started doing that and in the middle of doing that they came to us and said we're having trouble with the artist and and getting getting results on the sloth makeup can you come in and talk to us and so they ended up giving us the sloth makeup too and we had about I don't know I think we had 11 days or something like that ridiculous to re-engineer and recreate the entire sloth makeup um but uh uh but that was great it was it was it's another one of the really great ones where I go ah yeah I'm so happy to have worked on that you know yeah no it's an absolute classic oh one other one I was going to mention was Tremors and the reason reason I mentioned Tremors is films that you've worked on that have got sequels lots of sequels for example do you watch those and often what happens with genre sequels is they have less money for the sequel uh so maybe the effects aren as good do you watch those and go oh or do you does it not affect you at all you just happy with the version you were involved with the shest way to disappointment is expectation and and if I have expectations of a film about what would happen later then I'm usually disappointed in the sequel you know um I'm usually watching it to see if it fits into the world that the other film was does it feel like the same film does it feel like they belong together um that kind of stuff uh yeah when I saw Ghostbusters 2 I was like H boy that looks and I I was kept thinking this is ilm these guys are great and I know these people and and it was disappointing to me you know Slimer doesn't look as good you know that that kind of thing and um the uh uh uh the two twin ghost things just kind of look like uh big bags of potatoes you know and it's like well I I I would have had so much more high hopes for that but again that's my expectation of the where things of where things go and the way things are I I have to take my expectations off of that yeah and how much has the technology changed around this sort of Industry not a lot not a lot I we have CG now so that that's a you know huge whole entire world into itself but um but what we do as far as live action effects the way we do it I'm still kind of doing it the way my grandfather did it you know and he he was taking latex and fabric and putting it over 2x4s and chicken wire and making dinosaurs you know we're kind of doing the same kind of thing yeah you know we're just refining it a lot more so that it looks as as as good as we can possibly make it thanks for listening if you want all the behind the scenes information that's going to help you with a career in a creative industry then please do[Music] subscribe