40 Years Later, The Fly’s VFX Artist Reveals How A Masterpiece Came To Life
Chris Walas reflects on Cronenberg’s groundbreaking horror classic.
David Cronenberg's The Fly has entertained (and grossed out) audiences for going on forty years. The movie, a tragic story about man's hubris, follows scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) and his attempts to create a teleporter that ends up splicing his DNA with that of a common housefly. Suffice it to say, things get gooey very quickly.
"I was astonished at how much emotional impact it still has," special effects artist Chris Walas tells Inverse. Walas would win an Oscar for the fly transformation Seth goes through during the course of the feature. Now 40 years after the release of the iconic film, Walas reflects on the VFX of the film, and the fact that the movie almost didn’t happen quite the way it turned out.
For Walas, it was that emotional significance that made him want to do the project in the first place after initially passing on it. "I was first offered it, and I turned it down because everybody was making remakes," he says.
Producer Stuart Cornfeld urged Walas to at least give the script a read. "I read the script, and I went, 'Okay, this is not a science fiction horror movie. It's a Shakespearean tragedy in science fiction clothes." As a man who, as he describes himself, is a "rubber monster maker," Walas knew there wouldn't be a lot of opportunities to work on something this special.
Scanners helped pave the way for The Fly — but the VFX challenges were very different
He and Cronenberg had already worked together on the 1981 feature Scanners, so the pair already had a working relationship established. Walas was eager to get started; there was just a small hitch. "I said, 'I love the script. I really want to do it.' They said, 'That's great. There's only one bad thing. I know you need six months on a project this big. We have three'...I got all excited and then, wham, my legs are cut out from under me."
The time crunch was the result of the incentives offered by the Canadian Film Board at the time. There had to be a certain number of actual Canadians working on the project, and it had to film at least two weeks before the end of the fiscal year. "It was one of those projects that they kind of waited because they didn't have a star attached. They didn't have effects attached, and then it was suddenly time's up. We got to be filming in three months for at least two weeks."
Working on this film would be far different than Scanners, considering how much conceptual work needed to be done. "There wasn't really design work [with Scanners]," says Walas. "It's basically gore effects, so that was very straightforward." What this required was a far more cooperative relationship that would evolve constantly throughout the shooting schedule.
"Breaking all that stuff down was probably the hardest part because [Seth] had to be so far at a certain point, but he shouldn't be that far," said Walas. "We want to keep him, Jeff Goldblum, for as long as we possibly can. So it became a real time-consuming effort to break that all down into exacting specifics: how many stages? Where each one begins. Where each one ends. Do we want to vary each stage of makeup a little bit with a different hairpiece?... I think there was more conceptual planning on The Fly than any other picture I ever worked on."
How The Fly pulled off its most important transformation
The biggest element, that couldn't be skimped on, was the final "Brundle fly" transformation. "I was desperate to have it work as a guy in a suit because of the time constraints," said Walas. Though it was the easiest thing for them to do, Cronenberg refused that suggestion. "He wanted it to be definitely non-human. He wanted to make sure it was something that was so impossible to imagine as a human being."
Hoping to craft something impressive enough to please Cronenberg, Walas set up shop in Toronto while his crew worked on parts in California. "I'm there on set doing breaking wrists and all the early gags, and then literally a couple of times flying home on weekends to get into the shop for a day to make sure everything was on track." Ultimately, they went with a main puppet with extreme articulation, as well as different partial and full-body puppets employing cables and rods plus specialized insert parts. "My shop would take things about 90% of the way there, cosmetically, on the puppet stuff. Ship it to Toronto. And then I would do all the finish work in the little shop we had set up there, which is not the way to do it. It's not really a good way to do it, but it's the only way we could get it done in the schedule we had."
Walas may have been burning the candle at both ends, but there was a silver lining to working on the project (outside of the obvious elements). It's also where he met his wife, script supervisor Gillian Richardson. Richardson, like Walas, also had previously worked with Cronenberg, working with him on Videodrome and The Dead Zone (both 1983). Since this was a highly complex production, Cronenberg wanted someone who understood how to keep everything in order.
"She agreed because she was really curious about learning about the special effects," said Walas. "I was always the first one on the set in the morning and the last one to leave, working like a dog. She was also the first one on set every day, setting up for the day, and the last one to leave after doing all her notes. It was just one of those things where we'd be both working on the set and just kind of like, 'Hey, shouldn't you be going home?' There was a lot of this professional respect for the commitment we were both making to the project, and it just kind of grew from there."
Strange tales from the set of The Fly — and a history-making Oscar!
The crew, including Cronenberg, certainly knew love was going to bloom between the pair, even if they didn't know it. "David kind of had his fun with it because we were getting towards the end. This is at the final transformation where Jeff's coming apart. David wants to black out the scene where [Geena Davis's] Ronnie is being dragged by the arm by the space bug. So David's like, 'Gillian, can you just? I want to see this blocked out. And Chris? Can you just come here and grab her arm?’"
Geena Davis in The Fly.
It's ironic that a story that ends as tragically and gruesomely as The Fly can lead to romance. And while Richardson and Walas didn't have a Brundle fly to compete with, Walas did have a rival for her affections: Typhoon the baboon. "The baboon was absolutely in love with her," laughs Walas. "I mean, like, dangerously in love with her. Because I guess the baboon's original trainer was a short blonde woman, and Jillian's a short blonde woman. So it actually was this one-way romance going on with the baboon and my future wife. She was unaware of it, but the whole crew is kind of like, 'Can we get her off the set?'"
With all the personal highs going on, it's easy to believe Walas met hearing about his Oscar nomination with a "that's cool."
He explains that he was definitely happy but certainly didn't believe there'd be much more than a nomination, even when others were telling him he was going to win.
"Stuart [Cornfeld] said, 'Chris, you're going to win this.' That's never been a concept for me," Walas said. "I'm not reward-oriented. I'm goal oriented. Give me a job, I'm going to get from the start to the finish. That's the way I work…but it was obviously an honor to win the award, and I was pretty amazed because it's pretty gory effects and stuff for the Academy to deal with in the first place.”
In the end, Walas and make-up artist Stephan Dupuis took home the 1987 Academy Award for Best Makeup. Though it was a groundbreaking win at the time, today, nobody can argue with the result. Walas’ work on The Fly still looks astounding — and terryfing — four decades later.
