Taiwanese-American special effects artists Steve Wang (王孫杰) and Eddie Yang (楊積誠) have made names for themselves by designing monsters and superheroes for scores of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters in the past three decades.
Wang and Yang, the creative brains behind Los Angeles-based Alliance Studio, said in an interview that both of their families were appalled by their decision to drop out of college and pursue a career in movie special effects.
Most Taiwanese-American immigrants want their children to be doctors, lawyers or accountants, and their parents were no exception, they said.
Photo: CNA
Wang said his teacher scolded him by saying his obsession with monsters and his failure to apply himself at school would make him “a loser,” but these days loser is not a word people in Hollywood use when they talk about Wang and Yang, whose resumes include work on Predator, Blade, The Dark Knight Rises, Avatar, Iron Man, Avengers and Man of Steel.
Wang emigrated from Taipei when he was nine and it just so happened that he arrived in the US at Halloween, leading to a lifetime of fascination with monsters and costumes.
After becoming an avid reader of Monsters magazine, Wang said he started making his own monsters at home and sometimes used his mother’s cosmetics to experiment with makeup.
Photo: CNA / Akihito Ikeda
By the time he was a teenager, he was virtually a hermit, never leaving his bedroom.
Yang was born in the US and was a huge fan of movies featuring monsters, especially An American Werewolf in London.
When it was time to apply to a college, neither could find a school that taught special effects and so they decided to forge their own paths.
“It is not that we avoided college, but back then college film departments only taught how to direct movies. They offered no classes on makeup and special effects. That was what we were interested in,” Wang said.
Wang and Yang decided to get jobs in the movie industry and they worked together under Hollywood legends such as Stan Winston of Alien fame, seven-time Oscar winner Rick Baker and Dick Smith, the revered “Godfather of Makeup.”
By the late 1980s, the duo had made a name for themselves, with Wang receiving broad recognition for creating the monsters for Predator and Gremlins 2, which was a Steven Spielberg production.
Having worked on the Blade franchise, director Guillermo del Toro approached Wang to work on The Shape of Water, which became an Oscar-winning film, but he had to decline the offer due to a scheduling conflict.
Outside of the US, he has worked on La Belle et la Bete with the French director Christophe Gans, who, unlike Hollywood directors, demanded a creature design that was aesthetically pleasing rather than to inspire fear, Wang said.
Yang designed Anne Hathaway’s look as Catwoman in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises.
He came up with the idea of using a pair of flipped up motorcycle goggles to represent her ears, he said.
Yang quoted Nolan as saying, after taking a quick look at his design: “That is what I want.”
Yang is also proud to have worked on the first film in the Iron Man franchise, which was a technically innovative film that set new milestones for the industry, he said.
Recently, the two began doing character designs for video game giant Blizzard Entertainment, with Wang being commissioned to create a statue of the iconic character Arthas the Lich King to mark Blizzard’s 25th anniversary in 2016.
A team of 30 people worked on the bronze statute for more than nine months and the final creation is on display at the Calligraphy Greenway Cultural District (草悟道) in Taichung.
The pair said they have big plans working with South Korean director Kim Jee-woon, who has set his sights on breaking into Hollywood.
Special effects makeup and creature design is a painstaking artistic endeavor, they said, adding that too many people today go to art school just as a hobby.
“We are professionals who get paid doing what we love. We take pride in our professionalism and craftsmanship,” they said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,