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.
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