If you catch this summer’s “Green Lantern” flick, watch for the work of Hockinson sculptor Guy Wilson. It rocks.
His contribution to “Green Lantern,” which opened this weekend, was a rock environment. He created a plaster model about 15 feet square to simulate the kind of rocky landscape you’d see in Utah. It provided the template for digitally created images in scenes that include hundreds of warriors.
“What we made, they would scan into a computer,” and it read his miniature as actual terrain, Wilson said.
Wilson has worked on some 40 movies, and “Green Lantern” is his second superhero film to premiere in three weeks.
In “X-Men: First Class,” Wilson and a team built a spy plane from foam for a crash scene.
That work took him to Georgia, while the “Green Lantern” work was done in New Orleans.
For “Armageddon,” Wilson and his team made a foam meteorite. For “The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas,” he worked in a California rock quarry.
“One of my more interesting moments was working on the ‘Planet of the Apes.’ I worked in the costume department. They made body casts of the main actors and we sculpted the helmets and all the body armor.”
Wilson’s sculptures aren’t all for Hollywood. About half his work is traditional commissioned sculptures. Wilson was featured this year in a Columbian story about “Sower’s Dream,” a bronze sculpture that will be dedicated in Riverside, Calif., on Aug. 5.
But movie work lets him collaborate with some famous folks. Ron Howard, who directed “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” really likes full-scale foam sets. Wilson said he loved working on that film because his team could build life-size sets of foam.
“Everything that you could think of was made out of foam, including Whoville and Mount Crumpit. We took the largest stages that Universal has. It was like being in Disneyland.”
Seeing some stars
“I was working on the Grinch’s lair. I was up on a tall ladder and somebody said, ‘You guys do great work.’ I looked around and it was Tony Curtis. You don’t know what to say.”
Wilson often leaves before shooting starts, but says he’s worked with director Tim Burton and met Robert De Niro and other stars on sets.
He’s worked in studios that have been around for decades and said he’s awed with “the sense of history, with all the movie-making through the years.
“The movie sets require hundreds and hundreds of artisans who are incredibly gifted. And it takes an army to make a movie.”
His talents also became part of a music video.
“I did a three-dimensional clay likeness of (Queen’s) Freddy Mercury for the Wyclef Jean video ‘Another One Bites the Dust.’ That was fun.”
While Wilson’s film work is seen by more people, it doesn’t have the shelf life of a bronze sculpture. In Hollywood, there’s always another film to make, so everything bites the dust.
“When the shooting is done,” he said, “they bring in a big machine … and it just crushes the sets.”
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
