Aboard the high-tech Nautilus submarine, Harker (Peta Wilson, left), Dr. Jekyll (Jason Flemyng) and Sawyer (Shane West) prepare for arrival in Venice. ™ & ©2003 Twentieth Century Fox. Photo Credit: Jurgen Vollmer.

You couldn’t ask for two films with two more different approaches to the action adventure genre than Ang Lee’s The Hulk and Stephen Norrington’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Where Lee’s film is often purposefully slow and methodical, LXG is in your face and explosive from the get-go. The two movies also take extremely different approaches to how they create the monsters that are central to their storylines, the eponymous Hulk in Lee’s film, and the legendary Mr. Hyde in LXG.

For starters, one question that comes to mind is, with the two films in production simultaneously, was there any competition for who could build the better monster? Steven Johnson, whose Edge FX created the monster, addressed this and other monster-related topics. (Edge’s credits include Dreamcatcher, The Cat in the Hat and Dr. Octopus for the second Spider-Man film.)

“Some of the filmmakers were a little concerned, knowing the films were coming out at the same time, that they might look similar,” recalled Johnson. “But it was an afterthought. Long after we finished shooting, some people were saying, ‘Hulk’s coming out at the same time, they’re both big giant muscle men, what are we going to do?’ But, no, it wasn’t a conscious effort to use a different technique.”

Where the Hulk creature was done with a petulant child in mind, League’s Mr. Hyde is arguably scarier. This is not just because he’s an intelligent, articulate, focused — yet raging — mass of violent strength, but because you really believe you’re looking at a creature burst from the repressed id of an extremely angry man. One of the things that makes Hyde such a powerful creation is how realistic he looks. You believe in his existence, his presence. Hyde was not, as Hulk was, a computer-animated creation, though Double Negative provided some CG work during the transformation scene under water. In LXG, the same actor — Jason Flemyng — who played Jekyll also played Hyde.

“The director, Stephen Norrington, has quite a background in visual effects and makeup effects as well as animatronic effects. He wanted this character to be grounded in reality, to make it a performance-based piece, meaning he wanted the actor, Jason Flemyng, to actually wear the suit and be able to perform as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

If you’ve seen the film, you know that Hyde is intimidating and yet charming in his way, which somehow makes him all the more terrifying. And he’s one of the good guys! According to Johnson, “We made about seven suits and 12 different types of arm extensions, mechanically operated in different ways to perform different functions. But in the close-ups, and most of the full body shots, when you could really see what was going on, it was Flemyng wearing the suit. There was also a stunt performer sometimes wearing the suit, particularly for the Paris rooftop scene.”

Flemyng is the one wearing it most of the time, though. “He really wanted to wear it, because he wanted to play the character, so he was great to work with,” Johnson said. “A lot of times we were shooting with two characters at once and that really helped the filmmaking process. We could do stunts and long shots with the stunt guy, and performance-driven shots with Jason.”

You’re probably wondering, how did they get average-sized Flemyng to look like he was the nine-foot-plus Hyde? Can one person wear enough prosthetics to make him seem that much bigger and taller?

“We made an enormous device, a contraption the performers could wear, a contraption — as opposed to a suit,” Johnson added. “Typically, a prosthetic creature suit is a solid foam rubber thing that fits the actor snugly on the inside and then alters the appearance on the outside. This was not the case with Hyde. Because the creature was so large, we actually had to build up layers of muscles individually, and in some cases skeletal parts such as the spine and scapulas that were driven by the performer. So, in actuality, the external surface you see on screen is really just a quarter-inch skin, over the entire body of the Hyde character. Underneath that are all the individual muscles and in some places actual heart/bone plates. It’s interesting that all of this work went into something you don’t see, meaning that it’s all under the skin. But I think that’s what makes it feel so natural, because it does have all that stuff under the suit and it doesn’t feel stiff, it doesn’t feel like a contrived sculpture that someone’s wearing — because it actually is moving under the surface. I think that’s what makes it so successful, actually.”