How Oscar-winning makeup artist Bill Corso got Steve Carell’s Foxcatcher look
By Marriska Fernandes on February 20, 2015
One of the hot topics last year was Oscar-nominee Steve Carell‘s transformation to John Du Pont in Foxcatcher. Steve played an eccentric millionaire who invited Olympic wrestlers to live and train at his estate. As you can see, Steve (right pic) is almost unrecognizable.
For this, credit goes to Academy Award-winning makeup artist Bill Corso. He won an Oscar for his makeup work on Jim Carrey in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. He is currently nominated for an Oscar for his remarkable work in Foxcatcher.
Just before heading for the Oscars, Bill chatted with us about Steve’s transformation and about his upcoming work on the highly anticipated Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Deadpool.
First of all, congrats on your Oscar nomination, you must be really excited about that.
I am. To get recognized by your peers and the Academy is amazing. It’s unbelievable.
Steve is practically unrecognizable in this film. How extensive was the preparation that went into getting the right look for him?
I read the script, which was amazing, and and then I had a follow-up conversation with director Bennett Miller and I said to him, “I can’t picture Steve in this movie.” When you read the script you always try and picture the actors and I couldn’t picture Steve at all and he goes, “Well, you’re right, I cast Steve because I think as an actor he’ll bring something really unique to the role, but he can’t look like Steve Carrell at all.” And I said, “Well, do you want him to look like John Du Pont?” And he said “I’m not concerned if he looks like John Du Pont.” What concerned Bennett was that Steve had to look like a guy who came from a lot of money and he looked like he lived in that world of upper New England, blue-blooded wealth.
That was what was really important, so I met with Steve a few times. We did five make-up tests ranging from very subtle to very extreme, trying to come up with who that guy was and I started to just use Du Pont as a reference because he looks so different from Steve. The irony being that Steve, who couldn’t look more unlike Du Pont, wound up looking quite a bit like him in the end. We didn’t really go for that, it was just an amazing accident.
Du Pont had a very specific appearance, how did you emulate that look?
Well, it’s strange that Du Pont referred to himself as the Golden Eagle, and I doubt if he was thinking that he had a very eagle-like profile, because he was a bird watcher and wrote books about birds and he just loved the majesty of the eagle, but by having a really prominent nose – Du Pont has a more prominent nose than what I did on Steve – it gave Steve something to use as part of his character. Steve has a very Mediterranean look about him. He’s half Italian – he’s got a very distinct coloration and sculptural quality to his face – which Du Pont did not have. We experimented with a lot of different things to help us get away from who Steve was and closer to who we thought this character Du Pont would be, so every little thing we did I think helped us.
How did you transform Steve to made him look so different?
We obviously changed his profile, which is what everybody focuses on, but in doing so, he wears a prosthetic that completely covers his eyebrows and his eye area. What that allowed me to do was totally change the shape of his eyes and brow bone and get rid of his eyebrows, as Steve has very strong, distinctive eyebrows. That was a huge thing and it allowed me to put really thinning eyebrows on him. I noticed Du Pont also had a very full, soft mouth and lip area, which Steve does not. Steve has very sharp, defined features and lip area, so we put dentures in his mouth to change his teeth. Du Pont had very tiny teeth. In doing so we also added some plumpers, which are little stand-offs on the fake teeth, which plumped out his whole mouth area and distorted and changed the shape of his mouth. Very similar to Marlon Brando and what he wore in The Godfather. [Laughs] It also helped because we were trying to make Steve a little older than what he was. Then we shaved and changed his hairline and allowed a lot of his natural grey to show through and even greyed it some more. That was also a huge change.
The last two things, which were really important, was to try to color him. Bennett was very insistent that he didn’t want the actors to look like they were wearing makeup. He wanted everybody to look very natural. The irony being that all three of our leading actors had to wear a lot of makeup. We had to paint Steve to look like he’s a pale blue-blooded guy, which literally means you can see the veins under the skin when, in reality, he naturally has very healthy, tanned skin. And finally, I put really dark brown contact lenses on him because Steve has light eyes and the brown eyes really did a huge number on giving that soulless Du Pont look where you looked into his eyes and you weren’t sure what he was thinking or where he was going. That was a big part of the character. To me, it didn’t really look like Du Pont until we put the lenses in and that’s when we left Steve behind.
Did you find it intimidating to be responsible for his major transformation?
No, because it’s such a big collaboration. The responsibility to the director and to the movie is to do a good job. If the makeup is bad, it takes you out of the movie and no one wants to be responsible for that. All we really tried to do is do it as best we can and make it believable and this tells me that we obviously did that to some degree.
What was the biggest challenge for you during this process?
I think the biggest challenge is always just keeping it real and trying to keep everything believable so that it doesn’t get in the way of the actors, but yet give the actors what they want and what they need. Channing used to say, he was so out of his comfort zone, him and Steve really, and they would sometimes get lost in their performance and their character and what they were doing. Channing would say he would just go sit in the mirror and stare at himself and he would get right back to where he needed to be because he just saw Mark Schultz looking back at him and that’s huge. It’s huge when you can help an actor like that.
What was it like working with Steve, Channing and Mark?
You couldn’t ask for three better guys. They were so into the movie, they were so into the work. You couldn’t ask for better collaborators; they were unbelievable.
You have a portfolio of outstanding work including Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, X-Men: The Last Stand and The Amazing Spider-Man. What would you say has been your most memorable job?
Lemony Snicket was great and in that too I got to work with a very well-known actor who I got to change and do some really fun makeup on. I’ve been very fortunate; I get to do what I love, so everything to me is memorable and wonderful.
What’s next for you? You have a handful of big films for 2015, including Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Yes, I have that little Star Wars movie [laughs]. That’s very exciting, can’t wait for that one and I’m starting a movie called Deadpool, which is also very exciting. Lots of really fun stuff coming up.
Bill, it’s been a real pleasure talking to you and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for you at the Oscars!
Thank you so much!
How Oscar-winning makeup artist Bill Corso got Steve Carell’s Foxcatcher look « Celebrity Gossip and Movie News
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Contender – Makeup Artist Bill Corso, Foxcatcher
January 2, 2015 08:59 | By Scott Essman
Though most movie stars work on successive projects with their regular makeup artist, occasionally assignments get transferred around, leading to fortuitous results. In the case of comedy star Steve Carell, Dave Anderson, himself a multiple Oscar-winner, handles Carell’s duties on many projects. But when a producer called Bill Corso, Oscar winner for Lemony Snicket’s A Serious of Unfortunate Events, about a new Carell project, Foxcatcher, concerning John du Pont, a wealthy Pennsylvanian who undertakes the job of coaching the American wrestling team, Anderson gave his blessing to Corso to do the show. “I knew Steve from working on Burt Wonderstone and Bruce Almighty,” Corso said. “We got on pretty well. I read the script and couldn’t picture Steve at all. It doesn’t work with Steve Carell. Bennett Miller, [the director] said, ‘It can’t be Steve Carell. It hinges on the fact that the audience believes Steve is du Pont.’”
With that challenge under foot, Corso knew that the Carell makeup, in addition to several others on the project, had to break new ground. “No matter how good the makeup is, everybody is just going to see Steve Carell and ruin the movie,” Corso recalled, but Miller put his mind at relative ease. “I’ll direct it in a way that the audience will believe the character,” he told Corso. Henceforth, Corso went forward with a mantra which drives him on many projects: “to create a makeup that is completely believable in person; a makeup tight enough to fool somebody standing right in front of them.”
On many projects concerning real-world figures, the task of the makeup artist is to create a likeness makeup that approximates the actual characters depicted in the story. But Miller did not care if the Carell makeup looked exactly like du Pont. Instead, for Foxcatcher, du Pont needed to look like a New England blue-blooded wealthy man, “an older pale guy with the aura of entitlement. You look at Steve and he’s not that guy,” Corso reflected. “They set me up with Steve. I was leaving to do another movie, but I said, ‘I‘d love to do a quick test on Steve before I go. When I get back, we’ll have to jump right into it.’ I had four hours before I went to the airport. I threw a baldcap on him, a wig, nose putty and that first test was encouraging.”
After Corso sent Miller the pictures from the test, he created additional Photoshop renderings on top of the test makeup photos. “The whole point was to just do a rough test for me to do Photoshops on,” Corso noted. “I drew hair in and did different versions of him that the director and I discussed. When I came back from 42, I said we should pull the trigger on doing a real proper test. I think we can do it with appliances. They green lit a full makeup test.”
After Anderson gave Corso a lifecast of Carell from Get Smart, Corso set about doing a full makeup test. First, Corso shaved his hairline back and used Carell’s own hair. “I cut his own hair back and punched up the silver,” Corso stated. “I started with just a nose and brow piece and a full silicone baldcap. From that, we decided to use his own hair. I had teeth made for him, but we decided to change the teeth. We did a full lower lip piece as du Pont has very sharp lips. I did four tests. I refined and changed the nose piece every time. I would change the eyebrows. I kept altering it each time. We added upper and lower dental plumpers which totally changed his mouth shape. Chris Gallaher made the teeth and plumpers. Mark Nieman and Chris ran all of the appliances in silicone. Mark sculpted one of the lip pieces, which added detail.”
As Corso worked through the four tests with Carell, Miller was integrally involved every step of the way. “He and I discussed it at length,” Corso recalled. “It was really involved, much more so than anything I had done. The final test was the camera test, the Wednesday before we started shooting. It was shot under very harsh unforgiving lighting. They used available, fluorescent light and light that was detrimental to a makeup. They were relying on me to be able to apply it.”
When the makeup went in front of the camera, it took Corso 30 minutes to put on the appliances and another hour to paint Carell. “Then tweaking, roughed up and aged his hands, and tweaking the hair,” Corso described. “He was in the makeup trailer for 2 ½ hours. Once I did him the first couple of times, I had reference photos blown up on the walls. Every day, I had the camera department bring LED lights into the trailer to see it under strong harsh lighting. You can see stuff in detail, which called for a lot of work balancing out the paint job. I used every type of paint. He has on illustrator colors, tattoo paints, alcohol paints, rubber mask grease paint - everything all layered up one on top of another to get a certain effect. I have a very specific way I paint. It’s quite different than most people. I paint all of this detail in my makeups.”
Over the course of four months, production shot 50 days with Carell as du Pont. Moreover, there were several other makeup challenges in the film. Channing Tatum, as featured wrestler Mark Schultz, is arguably the star of the movie and required a necessary wrestler’s makeup. Mark Ruffalo played David Schultz, Mark’s brother. “Channing was doing the White House Down movie and we didn’t get him until the Wednesday before we started shooting,” Corso stated. “He really wanted plumpers to make his mouth bigger. He had met the real guy. We made many sizes of plumpers. We weren’t sure about anything else at that point with Tatum’s final makeup. I made generic cauliflower ears — Mike Marino cast his ears. I sculpted a whole bunch of different types of cauliflower ears. I could have put them on anybody. Mark Ruffalo’s ears are so different, Channing’s ears wouldn’t fit on Mark at all. In the trailer, we took ear casts of Mark. I sculpted some nice ears for Mark, sent them off and had the guys run them in silicone. The first couple of days he shot, we used different ears.”
Since Tatum and Ruffalo engaged in full-contact wrestling with headlocks, the prosthetic ears would get destroyed, so Corso had another plan. “We made hard ears out of flexacryl,” he said. “If they held up nicely, we would powder them and use them again. Each one of them actually started to get real cauliflower ears. I sculpted up a bunch of swollen face pieces.”
To take care of Tatum on a daily basis, Corso recruited Dennis Liddiard who had worked with the actor before and had done Moneyball for Miller. “I needed somebody really talented to take care of Channing,” said Corso. “He did a great nose on Kurt Russell in Miracle. We tried different pieces. Dennis applied it and put it all together. We tried all of the different plumpers. Channing decided on big plumpers just on the lowers. We put plugs up his nose to make him look like a fighter. Channing’s upper nose pieces were sculpted to be bumps. It’s one piece that gives his nose a little bump. It’s almost like a band-aid turned sideways.”
For Ruffalo’s look, the actor decided he wanted upper dental plumpers to flatten out his nose area. “Doing the camera test, I asked the director if he wanted to see a broken nose,” he said. “We painted a bump on Mark’s nose to make it look like it was broken. We shaved eyebrows. Dennis and I traded back and forth on Mark, depending on who would finish first. Dennis has a really strong eye. He was my third eye. He would check me on what I was doing. It was a nice back-and-forth.”
In the end, Corso felt as though he met his director’s mandate with Foxcatcher’s makeup: complete, utter realism. “The guys don’t look like themselves. It’s always great to be able to give an actor that ability,” Corso revealed. “It’s very rare that a director or actor will let you completely change their appearances. They all want to see the face they paid for. It’s a cool magic trick. It’s a real visual effect, done by makeup, paint and powder. You are completely creating a human being. If it works, it doesn’t take you out of the movie. It’s rare. You never get to do that. They always want to see the actor. In this, they didn’t want to see Steve.”
출처 : https://www.btlnews.com/awards/contender-makeup-artist-bill-corso-foxcatcher/
Contender – Makeup Artist Bill Corso, Foxcatcher - Below the Line
Though most movie stars work on successive projects with their regular makeup artist, occasionally assignments get transferred around, leading to fortuitous results. In the case of comedy star Steve Carell, Dave Anderson, himself a multiple Oscar-winner, h
www.btlnews.com
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