John Landis on why Ray Harryhausen's effects are still so special
King Kong bowled him over, and in turn Ray Harryhausen bowled over millions with his stop-motion magic in the likes of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason of the Argonauts
Thu 17 Jun 2010 16.29 EDT First published on Thu 17 Jun 2010 16.29 EDT
Stop-motion magic … Ray Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts. Photograph: The Kobal Collection
In 1933, the 13-year-old Ray Harryhausen went to see King Kong at Grauman's Chinese theatre in Los Angeles. That is the moment his life changed. In 1958, the eight-year-old John Landis went to see The 7th Voyage of Sinbad at the Crest theatre in Los Angeles. That is the moment my life changed. I asked my mom: "Who makes the movie?" She answered: "The director." So from that moment on, a director was all I wanted to be.
When you ask someone for their favourite movie, they can usually tell you how old they were, the name of the theatre and who they were with when they first saw it. An argument can be made that, indeed, the movies are our collective memory, contemporary man's new mythology. Harryhausen was overwhelmed by his experience watching "the 8th Wonder of the World".
All films require "suspension of disbelief" to work effectively. And every film creates its own unspoken rules to accomplish this. The filmmaker uses lighting, actors, montage and narrative to convey the "reality" of the story being told. And by "reality", I do not mean the actuality of the situation and characters. I mean that the audience should care about what is taking place before them. In 1975, I worked as one of the writers of the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. Guy Hamilton was the director I was trying to please. (Neither Guy nor I ended up working on the final film.) I mention this only because Guy told me a marvellous thing. When explaining why every Bond film had to start with a particularly outrageous prologue, he said this was the way the film-makers said to the audience: "Right, please put your brains under your seats and here we go!"
What does all this have to do with Ray Harryhausen? Ray was inspired by the brilliant stop-motion work through which Willis O'Brien made King Kong a reality – not only an awesomely powerful physical presence, but also a sympathetic being with thoughts and emotions. After he saw King Kong, Ray's encouraging and tolerant parents encouraged him in his pursuit of his craft. He cut up his mother's fur coat to cover his puppet of a woolly mammoth, and his father helped him with the steel armatures (or skeletons) of his creatures. (His father continued to create armatures for Ray for many years.)
Ray served in Frank Capra's army film unit in the second world war. When it ended, he moved into making shorts, then started generating special effects for features. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, which became a tremendous box office success for Columbia, was the first colour movie he worked on, and he was credited as an associate producer. That is an important moment in the history of the movies: Harryhausen, a below-the-line special effects technician, had become his own genre. In fact, Ray is truly unique in the history of movies as a special effects technician who is really the auteur of his films. The stop-motion creatures and vehicles Ray created were not only the stars of those movies, but the main reason for them to exist at all. Ray would conceive the stories and create illustrations and storyboards to guide the picture's art directors and crew. He created reality – audiences cared about what was being put before them.
Jason and the Argonauts remains my favourite of Ray's films, probably because it has the best script of all of his pictures. But all of his films hold a special place in both my heart and my mind. Maybe it is the tactile reality of movement generated by Ray's hands and the extraordinary personalities his figures display that makes his work so special. I don't know. But I do know that Ray Harryhausen is a true giant of the cinema, and I am proud to call him both my mentor and my friend. Ray's 90th birthday is rapidly approaching. And all of his fans, and we are legion, wish him well.
Ray Harryhausen: A Birthday Celebration Hosted by John Landis is on 26 June at BFI Southbank, London SE1.
• This article was amended on 18 June 2010. In the original, we refered to Ray Harryhausen as the exectutive producer of The 7th Voyage if Sinbad in 1958.