:40:01
I called him up, fishing, as it were,
for more Creature stories,
:40:05
and very, very casually, he told me
that he played the creature.
:40:08
He talked about how hot the suit was
and how tough it was to breathe.
:40:11
He told me he had a guy
fanning him all the time.
:40:14
He talked about how
he sweated in the costume
:40:16
and how the perspiration burned
when it got into his eyes.
:40:19
He talked about Jack Arnold. He
could not have sounded more casual.
:40:23
He sounded believable, but there wasn't
one word of truth in anything he said.
:40:27
It was the strangest conversation
I ever had with anybody about a movie.
:40:33
You'll notice these footprints don't
match the way the creature walked.
:40:37
He dragged his feet -
he didn't take those kinds of steps.
:40:40
Vision was a problem for both
Ben Chapman and Ricou Browning.
:40:43
For Chapman, they made
different sets of eyes.
:40:46
It all depended on how far away
from the camera he was. For close-ups,
:40:50
they gave him eyes that filled the whole
eye socket, and he could hardly see.
:40:54
Somebody would point a flashlight
in the direction they wanted him to walk,
:40:58
and Chapman, who could barely see
the light, would head off that way.
:41:02
For medium shots, the holes were
bigger and he could see better,
:41:05
and for long shots, he had eyes with
good-size holes, and could see fine.
:41:09
For Ricou Browning, working
underwater, it was a lot harder.
:41:12
At first, he tried to wear goggles
under the creature mask,
:41:16
but once water got in the goggles,
you couldn't get it out.
:41:18
They gave him a face mask,
:41:19
but that made the gill-man face
bulge out too far.
:41:22
Finally, they just gave up,
and he used his naked eyes.
:41:25
That was tough, because the creature
mask was bigger than his head,
:41:28
and sometimes the eyeholes were
a couple of inches from his real eyes.
:41:32
Seeing out was like lookin' through
a keyhole from a couple inches away.
:41:36
He said his vision was often very blurred,
and that a lot of it was kinda hit and miss.
:41:41
The creature suit we see
in the movie was not the first one
:41:44
the make-up department came up with.
The first one was very different
:41:48
from the eventual design,
and it was rejected pretty quickly.
:41:51
Ricou Browning described it as more
streamlined than the one we know.
:41:54
According to Ricou
"It had less scales, less fins,
:41:58
and the head was more like
you were wearing a tight stocking."