By MICHAEL GINGOLD
When Dracula emerges from below decks to prey on the crew of the titular ship in THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER, he’s doesn’t resemble a suave or even savage human being, but is rather a literal monster. Performed by longtime creature specialist Javier Botet, he’s a batlike ghoul who figures in numerous bloody and nightmarish moments in Andre Øvredal’s film, currently in theaters from Universal (see our review here).
Overseeing the prosthetics that transformed Botet into this animalistic menace was Göran Lundström, fresh off his Oscar-nominated work on HOUSE OF GUCCI. After starting his career as a writer, producer and makeup creator on the 1995 Swedish shocker EVIL ED, Lundström has risen through the ranks to work on major movies including THE WOLFMAN, CLASH OF THE TITANS, HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS and THE BATMAN, among many others. He spoke to RUE MORGUE about the opportunity and experience of putting his own stamp on one of horror’s most legendary characters.
Every makeup effects creator does vampires at some point in their career, but is it every artist’s dream to create Dracula?
Totally, and especially when Universal is involved, that’s even better. It didn’t really hit me until the trailer came out; it was like, the Universal logo on a Dracula movie–that’s really cool. I mean, being on it was great, but when you get away from the project and have some distance from it, it especially strikes you.
How did you become involved with LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER?
It was toward the end of the pandemic, and I got an e-mail from the producer, Brad Fischer, through Amblin, asking if I was available to do it. I think I’d been recommended by someone else, and I was on HOUSE OF GUCCI at the time, filming that one in Italy. It was kind of a strange offer to get all of a sudden, because I’m based in Sweden, and I do character makeups most of the time; I don’t do creatures so much. So I’m not the obvious choice to do something like this. Not that I don’t want to; I’ve done monsters, I was on THE WOLFMAN, but I’m not known for them. So then I had to make a decision: Could I do this timewise? Because the schedule overlapped with HOUSE OF GUCCI, and it was hard to find a crew at that time, because all the projects that had been postponed because of the pandemic were now up and running, so it was hard to find people.
I actually turned it down at first; my decision was, “I can’t do this, I don’t have the time.” And then Brad helped me find some crew; he started calling around while I was on HOUSE OF GUCCI, and helped me fill those positions. So then I took the job.
Since you’re known for character makeups, do you think you were hired for LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER to bring a humanity to this monstrous incarnation of Dracula?
Maybe, I don’t know. I think the recommendation came from one of my colleagues who does both characters and creatures. And I realized that this particular creature was still a human character; he’s not an alien or something like that. I just tried to put, as you said, some more human elements into him.
Andre Øvredal has said that another artist had initially worked on Dracula for DEMETER. Did you look at or draw from any of his work?
Yes, definitely. Andre was on the film a lot earlier than I was, and other makeup people were involved before me. He had a picture of a maquette, a small sculpture, that was kind of rough. I spoke to that artist about it, and he even said, “Well, that’s not finished, you can’t even do anything from that.” But I believe the picture had a nice atmosphere that Andre responded to; it was in a setting with light that was very scary, and because he liked the picture, he liked the creature design. We tried to do something based on that, and it didn’t really work, because it was so unfinished. So I tried to figure out, what does he actually like about this? Because it wasn’t the shapes, it was something else. Then I began sculpting based on another design, an even earlier one that was more worked out, and we started discussing what we had. It was much easier to talk about something that was there, that could be changed. I kept some things that were in the photo he liked, and then did my own kind of zombified, skeletal old-man look on the actor, Javier Botet.
Every day we’d have meetings, saying, “Maybe more like this…”, trying to figure things out. I like that way of working; I don’t like the concept-design way, where you have artists throw out finished art pieces that are beautiful, because you’re basically giving away the decision-making to people who are filmmakers, obviously, but they might not always make the best choices for the character. When you do it the way we did, I had more input, and could explain to them why I liked certain things. And I could change the things they wanted, while still adding things I liked. There was a fluidity to the process that I enjoyed.
Did you go back to Bram Stoker’s novel to take any cues from his descriptions?
No, not really. I didn’t have time, honestly. We started so late, I had crew working in my studio while I was designing; I hardly had time to read the script, and it felt like I didn’t have time to dive into the book. It was just a matter of listening to the input, trying to figure out what I wanted to put in there, to underline what we were talking about. Often, it’s about listening to filmmakers–not specifically to what they say, but to understand what they mean. They can’t always put words on exactly what they want, so you have to listen to them closely. For example, Andre really liked something about that picture, and I had to figure out what that was. In the end, we kind of got away from that image, and turned it into something of our own.
Getting back to Dracula being more of a monster in DEMETER, whose original inspiration was that?
I believe that came from Brad, because this was his baby, this whole film; it’s been around for 20 years. And that was the idea they told me; it’s not pretty Dracula, you know? The design Andre had looked a little bit like a zombie that had been in the water for a while, and it comes out and it’s kind of falling apart. It had something, definitely, but it didn’t have character to it. One element that Andre wanted to keep was revealed eyeballs–basically no eyelids, so half the eyeballs were showing, We kept that, and then I tried to give it more character. At a certain point, we had four stages, and they were all referred to as “Nosferatu stages.”
At a certain point, the bat creature started to evolve from what I was doing, so I figured, let’s not just take what I’m doing and take everything away and turn it into a bat. So I kept the stage four look and made a copy, basically, of that sculpture, and we started making it more animal-like. We put bigger ears on, and changed the head shape so that the ears didn’t feel too big on that head.
The smile he has was something Steven Spielberg asked for, supposedly; that’s what I heard. It comes from a ’60s TV series where someone had a permanent smile on his face, and they wanted that eerie kind of feel. So I added that smile and tried to make sense of it, with the eyeballs Andre wanted. We had two things that didn’t really go together, and it was like, I had the big ears, I had the bat look; how would I balance this out and make it all work together? And then make it look shriveled and old-looking. So there were a bunch of different parts I had to put together, because there was input from different sides. It’s not a unique take; it’s basically ideas that came together to create something new.
How was it working with Javier Botet?
What a marvelous person to be around; he’s always positive. Sitting still and getting his makeup done–it took a long time, it was like a four-hour application. They’re never as long as actors say they are, but I don’t think Javier has exaggerated this one. Usually we aim for three hours, which is a normal makeup time for full coverage, but for this creature suit, sticking things on and gluing things down and covering it, it was a four-hour job. And he was just lovely. He’s just entertaining as a person, and then when he turns into a creature, he’s even better. The whole interaction with him was terrific.
How much did you collaborate with the CGI team who created Dracula for some of the later scenes?
We didn’t work together that much. I think it’s a shame that it’s there’s still a disconnect between the on-set team and the postproduction team a lot of the time. So at the end of the last shooting day, we’re done, and we’re not really involved anymore. I find that a little bit sad, because it doesn’t have to be that way, but it just seems to be the way most films are made. We did interact a little on set; I showed them what we had, I gave them scans of all our sculptures, they took photos of all the eyeballs we had made to put in front of Javier’s eyes, and they scanned him on set in the suit. But for the rest of it, we weren’t really involved, which is a shame. It’s very hard to get to be part of that, and I don’t believe it should be that way.
