DE. Yeah, you’d do it wrong. And you’d do it wrong over and over and over again, but by doing that—that’s always the best way to learn. There’s a wonderful feeling of experimentation that was connected to this sort of being like a mad scientist thing that also appealed to most monster makers and filmmakers. Looking back, I don’t know how I figured it out. I do remember an occasion where I tried take a life cast of myself for the first time; I’d never done it before and I couldn’t find anybody else who was interested to help me, so I figured I’d have to do it on myself. I remember I waited until my mom and dad went out and I put a blanket on the floor and I had like plaster of paris and vaseline and various bits all in bowls and some water all around me so I knew where it was with my eyes closed, because I knew I would have to cover my eyes up at some point. And I mixed it all up and I sort of put it on my face and kind of tried to build it up and I was sittin there waiting for it to go off, and it was getting hot, it had set, and it was plaster—plaster of paris that I had put on my face. And I heard the key go in the door and I knew that my parents were back and I’m just sitttin there with a plaster cast on my face all by myself. So I scrambled to get it off and it was stuck and I remember pulling my eyebrows and all my eyelashes came with it. So I was a kid with no eyebrows for weeks at a time. That wasn’t the only time that I did that, either.
FM. Let’s fast forward to THE WOLFMAN. How was it that you came onto the project? DE. Rick and I never thought that we would ever work together on anything. But we both like makeup and we’re friends and every time I used to hang out with Rick we’d talk about monsters. And then one day we were in Rick’s garden and I said “Have you heard that they’re making a Wolfman movie?” and Rick, who’s usually very laid back, went, “What do you know about that?!” And I said, “Well, I just read like a piece that says that they’re making it and I heard Benecio del Toro’s gonna be in it. And I know somebody that read the script—while I haven’t read it—and they say that it’s a good script.” And he’s like, “Oh. I really want to do that.” Eventually Rick emailed me and said, “Oh, they’ve asked me.” And it’s like, “Great, way to go Rick. You’re the person who should be doing it.” And that was it. And I didn’t really think I’d be involved. But I was living in Australia at the time, so I couldn’t have been farther away from London, from England, and in fact
From werewolves to X-MEN: FIRST CLASS good guy, Beast, Dave shows that his makeup skills have made him one of Hollywood’s premier “hair stylists”.
when Rick asked me to work on it I was in New Zealand because I’d just done a movie called BLACK SHEEP which was about werewolf sheep. And the reason I took that film on was, “I’m sick to death. No one’s ever going to ask me to do a werewolf picture” and I wanted to do transformations and things. And my friend Richard Taylor who runs WETA over there, offered me that. So I was over in New Zealand, I had gone over for the premiere of that movie and Rick emailed me and said, “Would you be willing to move back to England and do it?” And I was like “Yes!” Rick’s
FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND • JAN/FEB 2012 39
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