TJ: You can see the octopus on the Life Aquatic bus shelter ad, right?

HS: Yeah. And it’s in the background of another shot. It’s just in there in a subliminal way.

TJ: What were the creatures made of?

HS: The traditional thing is metal armatures and foam latex — they call it Schram — but in most cases we still use metal armatures as the skeleton, and then we use this type of silicone called Dragon Skin. It’s in a lot of new toys, human prosthetics — people who’ve been in a war and half their face is missing. They make prosthetics that are incredibly lifelike and fleshlike out of this stuff. So that’s what we used for body and skin.

TJ: Has anyone used that before in animation?

HS: We’re certainly among the very first. We may not be the first, but it’s just happening now. It’s a brand-new idea. In the past, silicones were the rule, but they’re too heavy. You couldn’t paint them. They wouldn’t take color. And they only had so much give before they would tear. This new stuff is phenomenal. It’s very, very elastic, and it takes the color well. The only downside is it’s pretty heavy compared to the foam, so you have to hollow things out, build inner shells.

TJ: There are clouds of little red fluorescent snapper in the film. How many of them did you actually build?

HS: We only made a few, but we animated them many times at different angles. They were multiplied in compositing. We just animated them at so many different speeds and so forth. Rather than totally switch over to CG when nothing else was CG, it made sense to hand-animate a very small school and then cut and paste that.

Goldblum (left) and Murray check out the hydronicus inverticus (rat-tail envelope fish).

TJ: The puffer fish in the film looks very elaborate.

HS: It was. What’s elaborate about it is that it blows up, and so figuring out and sculpting that material so that we could blow it up like a balloon and get the right shapes was one big engineering issue. We do it a frame at a time with a pump, and lock it off while moving the fins and the tail. And then the other issue is just getting all those spines to stand up. That was an engineering nightmare.

TJ: How many were there?

HS: [laughs] Like a 100. We went all-out. It was always Wes’ desire that these look like creatures that might not really exist, but you’d like to believe exist. So it’s much more realistic than anything I’d ever done. That rat-tail envelope fish, also known as the hydronicus inverticus, was an engineering challenge and design challenge. And another creature that was given background status — it was our first one so we tried to make it really impressive — was the golden barracuda. It used to be featured in the first part of the movie, swimming in the foreground when those divers appear, in the documentary that’s being shown at the festival. It swam from the background to the foreground and then ate this swimming school of starfish. We put in gills and mouth parts that expanded, we made every scale that the fish really has, and attached those to its skin.

TJ: Wasn’t the starfish going to be translucent, with a shrimp inside?

HS: Yeah — we lost the shrimp part, because it just wasn’t going to read. We had a school of them spiraling through the water, spinning themselves. And it was really beautiful, but Wes at the last minute decided it was a long beginning, it was too violent, or something. So that’s more background stuff. Hopefully all of that will get out there.

TJ: That’s why we have the Criterion Collection. This article won’t include a picture of the jaguar shark, for obvious reasons, but the creature does look uncannily like an unholy merger between those two species. Was the puppet itself a monster?

HS: Yeah. We actually had Ray Harryhausen come and visit our set while we were working on that. He was very happy to see stop-motion being used for a major motion picture, a live-action film. He also was astonished at how big it was. He said that was by far the biggest stop-motion puppet in his memory. It was eight feet long — and we had to make it huge, because of the scale of the lenses we were using. Our D.P., a guy named Pat Sweeney, he’d actually shot a lot of those submarine movies like Hunt for Red October, and he knew how big those had to be in order to move people through the scale. It wasn’t as difficult as, say, the blowfish and some of the other creatures in its individual engineering problems, but the fact that it was so big was difficult in itself. And it was the climax of the movie — is this thing going to be a joke, a big stop-motion puppet, or can we make it beautiful and mysterious and pull it off? So it was a huge challenge.