NAPOLEON
For Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (director’s cut) I was asked by Charley Henley to orchestrate and film these two shots for the Marengo charge sequence in which Napoleon, played by Joaquin Pheonix, chops off some poor man’s head. The job involved creating a silicone replica of actor Joss Carter and puppeteering it so it looked appropriately ghoulish.
To achieve this I went to master headsmith Waldo Mason, a man who specialises in this sort of macabre act,
What I was after from the head was a sense of ignomy. Whenever I’ve seen pictures of real severed heads (something that are plentiful in the job of make-up fx artist) it always struck me how confused and annoyed they looked, like they were caught by the camera just having woken up. So I wanted to capture that moment of realisation. A sense that maybe the head had made the wrong decision in life.
A rough sculpt trying to figure out how much meat to put on the head slice.
With that aim, I asked Waldo to construct a head with a loose jaw and the floppiest silicone imaginable. As we were going to shoot in 120fps slow motion we really wanted to see the gravity affect the skin in the way that you see in slow motion videos of people getting hit. If it looked a bit silly, so what? It would look real.
Joss Carter was then headcast and the resulting clay pour resculpted byJustin Pithketly so that the eyes were open. The hair and finishing was then completed by Nikki Grimshaw.
We quickly worked out that the sequence was Ridley’s homage to 2001’s bone sequence, or at least had the same rhythm, so the shots had to have some weight and poetry to them. To assist this the silicone head has a detachable handle down the back so it could be slammed down onto the ground with accuracy. This was then doubled byJoss who slammed his head again and again against the mud with gusto. We spent a whole day shooting the head, throwing it around a field in Windsor, having a lot of fun, with over a hundred of takes in total.
Joss’ eyes, blood, horses, smoke and bodies were then arranged using Adobe After Effects, retimed and revised until Ridley was happy. I was very pleased with the result.