Harryhausen and Leonard Maltin talk during the George Pal Lecture on Fantasy in Film last month at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. © A.M.P.A.S.

BD: Does it gratify you to see your stamp everywhere on Lord of the Rings?

RH: Yes, it does.

BD: Because you look at those creatures and it just takes you back, not to mention the presence of Randy Cook, one of the supervisors and a protégé of yours.

RH: Yes, he was an unusual fan who finally got into the profession. I get a lot of fan mail from young people and they say where can I get this done, where can I get that done? You have to learn to do it yourself. I had to because there were no books on the subject. Very little information. So I worked alone because it requires enormous concentration and I prefer to work alone. And Clash of the Titans is the only picture I’ve ever had help in the animation.

BD: How many people did you have working?

RH: Just two.

BD: So it’s probably incomprehensible to you when you think of the thousands of people that work on these big effects pictures.

RH: I know. The screen credits are almost as long as the film.

BD: Another one that’s going to be remade is The War of the Worlds by Steven Spielberg. That one must leave a bitter taste, judging from your account in the book about your meeting with George Pal.

RH: I wanted to make it long before Pal made it. I made drawings and did a test of it, but nobody was interested.

BD: And you wanted to make it in period, which apparently they’re not going to do this time either.

RH: Yes, I wanted to keep it in the turn of the century because it had an innocence, and now you have to have the atomic bomb to get rid of it or you have to do something of that nature.

Harryhausen regarded his work on The 7th Voyage of Sinbad as an experiment. © Animation Art Gallery London.

BD: Speaking of Spielberg, it’s interesting how you noted in the book that while you appreciate the CGI dinosaurs in Jurassic Park the photorealism bothers you.

RH: It gets to the point when it becomes too real that you lose the fantasy element. That’s always what I strived for.

BD: I imagine it must have been an extra technical burden working in color eventually.

RH: It was. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was an experiment. I’d worked in color before and I worked on my own characters, but projecting color with what was a rear projector was a different matter, and at that time there was only one stop and the contrast would build up enormously so that when you inter cut the special effects with the live action there was quite a strong contrast of difference and color values.

BD: So tell me about taking on greater technical feats with Dynamation.

RH: Yes, well, I’ve used it all through every film that I’ve worked on. It’s basically photograph and re-photograph with rear projected image on a miniature scale. And then coding an animated model. That’s the basic principle and — through mapping processes and various other [methods] they get on the screen things that are quite amazing or used to be amazing.