Makeup FX Interview with Prosthetics Master Conor McCullaugh

Conor McCullaugh with one of his IMATS LA 2011 creations

Makeup enthusiasts will probably recognize Conor McCullaugh as the first winner of Syfy's prosthetic makeup reality show Face Off. For everyone else, you're probably more familiar with Conor's work than you think. With two decades of experience in the movie magic business, Conor has created some really memorable makeups including Freddy Kreuger, Shallow Hal, Osmosis Jones, and even the old men from Jackass: The Movie.

Since his Face Off victory, Conor's career has really taken off. He graciously took some time to chat with us about his beginnings in the industry, recalls some of his more challenging moments on set, and provides some advice for budding makeup artists.

S: What extra training besides formal makeup school would you recommend?

C: This does depend on your focus. I would say personally, before I got into makeup school, I was a sculptor first. For me it always was and still is about improving my sculpture skills. So even though you can take sculpture classes, there’s really no substitute for just having your reference material and just practicing. I’m always sculpting. To this day, I have a project in the workshop whether I’m getting paid for it or not. And I can still see improvements with each sculpture and I’ve been doing this for twenty years now.

S: What inspired the move from sculptor to makeup artist?

C: Just my enthusiasm for the business. It was those movies. It was Aliens and The Thing and Poltergeist. The idea that I could do all that and make a living creating this stuff, it was huge for me. Once I got into it, there wasn’t anything else. There was no other options. I really couldn’t see anything else for myself other than making monsters.

Freddy Kreuger sculpture

S: If you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice when you were starting out, what would it be?

C: I think it would’ve been to keep up my beauty skills. That was something I never practiced after makeup school. And for about fifteen years I didn’t need those skills. But when I left LA and found myself in a different market on the East Coast. I ended up making a huge portion of my income by doing on set makeup and miscellaneous hair work, having to lay mustaches and beards and so on. This was stuff I hadn’t actually practiced. Thankfully I was able to pick it up again relatively quickly. Now that I’m not in LA anymore, having diversity has been the key.

S: What's some of the crazier places you've had to do effects in?

C: I’ve been in rock quarries in Peru. I’ve been in Japan. I’ve been in South Africa. We just finished Hunger Games over the summer which turned out to be more difficult than any of us had anticipated. We were shooting in the mountains of North Carolina which aren't particularly treacherous, but it was excruciatingly humid and hot. And for three solid months no matter what we did, we were just sweating our butts off. That alone makes a shoot miserable and difficult to deal with. It’s nine in the morning and you’re already breaking a sweat and spending most of your day dabbing sweat off actors when you’re just trying to make your makeup look good.

S: Can you describe one time on set when something went really wrong and how you fixed it the problem?
C: I can tell you a whole bunch! There was an incident on Freddy vs Jason where Katherine Isabelle had this effect… it was supposed to look like she’d been impaled. She’d been impaled in her dreams so all we see in real life is the hole and discharge coming out of her chest. We showed [the effect] to the director and he didn’t like it. So on the fly, we started having to re-rig this whole thing. She was basically wearing what comes down to a foam-fabricated bra with all the plumbing built into it. And now we’re being asked to completely re-rig it in the moment. And we’re re-rigging, re-rigging. We keep showing it to him and just when we’re at the point where we have the look that the director wanted, we realized that our tubing that we had made out of latex had been over-saturated with water by all these tests. It would just turn into this big balloon inside her bra and nothing was coming out.
We’re five minutes from shooting this gag and right on the spot, I took the thing off her, ripped out all this tubing that we had spent hours making and threw in a piece of vinyl hose from home depot, glued it into place, and got it rigged, and got her onto set, and shot the effect and everything went fine. Sometimes you don’t know what you’re capable of doing until you don’t have a choice.

S: What do you think are the upcoming trends in Special FX?

Col. Thrull zombie for Ghost Trek

C: I think that the days of the big creature suit are dwindling. I think what we’re gonna be doing are more subtle, the character makeups. Things that are much easier to do with makeup than in post-production using CGI. The big fear these days is how much CGI is taking over. But it’s really impacted creature effects more than it has makeup. And this is just my opinion, I’d be happy if someone proves me wrong.

S: And with shows like The Walking Dead...

C: I worked on two episodes of the first season myself. I have a working relationship with KNB Efx Group now, which by the way are great people to work with. Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger are two of the nicest guys in the business. That show employs a lot of makeup artists and they still use CGI to exaggerate some of the carnage that’s going on in certain effects. But it's still a largely makeup oriented show in terms of the zombies.

S: What's the most rewarding thing about being a makeup artist?

C: Seeing what you’ve worked so hard on in the big screen. There’s a misconception on this business that this show’s fun. On my last film, I was working a minimum fourteen hours a day, sometimes seventeen, eighteen hours a day. That’s not really fun but if you enjoy your work then it’s still extremely rewarding. Seeing the reaction from other people when an effect goes off really well. For me, that’s where it’s at.


S: What's something in your kit that’s saved you on-set that you never thought would be in there?
 
C: There’s so many things… here’s one thing. Those little silicone earplugs at the pharmacy. I keep those in my kit. All of a sudden they told me to give this kid a set of Dumbo ears on the set of Stuck on You back in Miami in 2003. I had no options. It was way to hot for a wax buildup or something like that. I ended up putting some prozaid on his ears and I took these silicone putty earplugs and I shaped big ear extensions right onto them. Covered them in prozaid, colored them with some Skin Illustrator and he was camera ready.

Creations for IMATS LA 2011

 S: What’s something you’ve had to do onset that you’ve never ever thought you’d have to do?
 
C: On Hunger Games, I had to paint a goat.

S: [bursts out laughing] No! Really?!

C: Yeah, I did him all with streaks and tips. Hunger Games is coming out in the spring. It’s gonna be huge.

S: And you worked with some of the judges from Face Off on Hunger Games, right?

C: I worked with Ve Neill and Glenn Hetrick did some of the prosthetics for the show. Vee was the department head and she called on me, this was actually last April, we ran into each other at Monsterpalooza in LA. And she immediately asked me to join her on Hunger Games. I was completely honored that she gave me that opportunity.

From the Face Off episode "Out of This World"

Posted by SnapDragon