Sir Richard Taylor, a five-time Oscar winner and the co-founder of special effects and prop company Wētā Workshop, discovered his love of cinema later in life. "I grew up in a small rural area of New Zealand," the England-born, Patumāhoe-raised Taylor explains, "so I didn't have a significant movie-going experience before my wife, Tania, and I started our company when we were 17."
Taylor and Tania Rodger started what would become Wētā Workshop out of their apartment in Wellington. "Practical puppetry has been part of our company's DNA for 35 years now," Taylor says. When he began collaborating with Peter Jackson on the director's second film, 1989's Meet the Feebles, the company eventually moved into prosthetic makeup effects too.
Taylor won his first two Oscars in 2002: Best Makeup and Best Visual Effects for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring; he won his next two, Best Costume Design and Best Makeup, for 2003's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. His final Oscar win came in 2006, when he took home Best Achievement in Visual Effects for Jackson's take on King Kong.
Now the creative director and CEO of Wētā, Taylor's latest project is Sting, for which he created the practical effects. The film tells the story of a young girl who finds a spider and makes it her pet — and then watches in horror as it transforms into a flesh-eating monster. "The scale of a film or the experience of the director is irrelevant to us," he says. "It's all about the fact that they want to do practical effects."
Below, Taylor shares with A.frame the five films that had the greatest impact on him. "I grew up watching the TV show Thunderbirds, which greatly influenced me. Ray Harryhausen movies were highly inspiring. But then I saw Blade Runner when it first came out, and that had a massive impact on me."
Directed and Written by: Hayao Miyazaki
Porco Rosso is my favorite film of all time. I love that film hugely. I love the spirit within it. I love that the pink pig — who was once a man, a former fighter pilot turned bounty hunter — has such immense pride, even though he is now a pig because of a curse. There is still an unrequited sense of love between him and the woman he's never quite managed to win the arm of. I love the beauty of the imagery; it just creates awe in me. I love to watch things that do that.
Directed by: Ridley Scott | Written by: Hampton Fancher and David Peoples
Blade Runner is my second favorite film of all time. It is visceral but still has that quality of awe. I'm originally from Northern England, and my wife and I love Blade Runner so much that we visited the U.K. and followed Ridley Scott's life. We went to where he was born, and Redcar, Hartlepool, and Middlesbrough, which are the influences behind the burning stacks at the opening of the movie. We also went up to Newcastle, which was an inspiration for the rooftops where Roy Batty dies. Years later, Ridley came down to Wellington, because he was trying to get a movie off the ground. He spent three days with us, and I talked with him about this journey we had been on, this almost pilgrimage in acknowledgment of the movie.
The opportunity to work on the second Blade Runner was mind-bending for us. To get to do the miniatures and do them for a director as sophisticated and unique as Denis Villeneuve was mind-bending.
Directed by: John Carpenter | Written by: Bill Lancaster
A challenge for me is that there are practical effects in movies that rate more than the actual film for me and mean more to me as I think about films I love. The work of Rick Baker has had such an imprint on me, as well as the makeup effects of Dick Smith. Dick is a real hero to me. But The Thing is a hugely important movie to me. The filmmaking is at a phenomenally high level, but the practical effects by Rob Bottin had such an incredible impact at the time and still do today. It is still such an amazing and powerful movie.
Directed by: Jean-Pierre Jeunet | Written by: Guillaume Laurant
Amelie is one of my favorite films, because I love quirky beauty. I'm a great romantic at heart. Amelie has a minimal number of effects in it, but they're all digital and exquisitely done. I love the smiling pig in the lamp when she turns into water and falls to the ground. It's an utterly magical, beautiful, sweet movie.
Directed by: Don Chaffey | Written by: Beverley Cross and Jan Read
Most people of my era will say that 1933 King Kong by Willis O'Brien and the Marcel Delgado puppets were their first experience with this kind of work, but I didn't get to see that early in my life, whereas I did get to watch Ray Harryhausen's work. Jason and the Argonauts is so concentrated in the sense of wonder he achieved within that movie, and the awe and wonder are why it's so special to me. We are very lucky to have grown up in that period where it used to be on the television so often, and we had the great fortune of being so inspired by these things. These were seminal moments.
10 years before we won the Oscar, had made another pilgrimage back to England where we actually met with Ray Harryhausen. We thought we'd meet for an hour. We turned up at his doorstep an hour early, we gave a bunch of flowers to his housekeeper thinking that she was his wife, Ray had forgotten that we were coming, so he came down the stairs in his bathrobe with his comb over flopped over the other side of his head. It was all very awkward. But we hit it off with him and his wife, Diana, and we spent the whole day with them and had this most magical dreamlike time. We didn't talk movies at all, because there was nothing that I didn't know about him. I'd already read it all! So, we talked adventures, the places they've visited.
When we won the first Oscars, I wrote to Ray and Diana and asked if we could fly them to New Zealand for two weeks, and they agreed. They flew right across the world and we picked them up at the airport and they spent two weeks in the workshop. We had the most unbelievable odyssey. We'd been working on King Kong, so we had the stop-animation puppets of the dinosaurs, and Ray was fascinated by that. Anyway, we had a beautiful time.
