An SFX mas­ter­class with Won­der Woman’s Paul McGuinness

“There’s a dead baby in one cor­ner of the gar­den and a head and a few oth­er bits knock­ing around. The neigh­bours all know me now though, so it’s okay.” Upon meet­ing Paul McGuin­ness you quick­ly realise that his work­ing day is any­thing but ordi­nary. A spe­cial effects expert with an impres­sive body of work span­ning 30 years, McGuin­ness spent the ear­ly part of his career in edi­to­r­i­al illus­tra­tion before mov­ing into film and tele­vi­sion, set­ting up the BBC’s visu­al effects depart­ment after a 13-year stint with the com­pa­ny. Here, he tells the behind-the-scenes tales of six of his weird­est and most won­der­ful creations.

“I had to make a pros­thet­ic dum­my of Ter­ence Stamp. He was one of the main char­ac­ters in it so I did a full body cast of him which is an expen­sive busi­ness. If you came to me and said ​‘I want a com­plete dum­my of me, one that I can have cut open and all the guts tak­en out of it’, that’s going to set you back about £25,000. It’s an awful lot of work, even just punch­ing all the hair in. I had to res­culpt Terence’s body with­out any skin on it, so all the mus­cles and bones and gory bits were exposed. We made his skin sep­a­rate­ly and that was nailed to a wall in the cas­tle that he lived in, which was inter­est­ing. Ter­ence refused to look at it on set. He was a real­ly love­ly guy but he would not look at this body I’d made of him, nev­er mind the body-less skin.”

“There’s a scene at the end where Rachel McAdams hangs from a con­vey­or belt con­trap­tion. It’s the cliff-hang­er scene set in an abat­toir, with Robert Downey Jr busi­ly try­ing to save them. She’s head­ing towards this mas­sive rotat­ing saw – the teeth were about an inch and a half long and it’s rotat­ing at an incred­i­ble rate – and it’s saw­ing whole pigs clean in half. We’d bought in a load of pig car­cass­es from Smith­fields, the big meat mar­ket in Lon­don, but lit­tle did we know they’d already been gut­ted. We want­ed them to look whole, so I spent a cou­ple of days stitch­ing pigs up. That was an inter­est­ing weekend.”

“The props depart­ment made Won­der Woman’s shield, which was beau­ti­ful but very heavy. The stunt woman had to do a lot of div­ing around with this shield, so they came to me and asked if there was any way I can make this lighter. So I repro­duced an iden­ti­cal ver­sion made out of very light­weight car­bon fibre. Which of course is fine until Gal Gadot picked one of the stunt shields up and said, ​‘Hang on, how come this is so light? I want mine to be this light!’ So I end­ed up hav­ing to make one for her too. Before I knew it I was mak­ing lots of car­bon fibre shields, light­weight swords and all sorts. It’s often these almost hid­den things that I’ll spend my time on.”

“It was a lengthy and all-encom­pass­ing shoot. We con­vert­ed a stu­dio into a vast tank made out of ship­ping con­tain­ers. It was two metres high by bout eight or nine metres long, and then the whole of the inside was lined with rub­ber and filled with water. This was where the cast were sup­posed to be adrift at sea for months being chased by this whale. It was a real­ly long tough shoot and the humid­i­ty in there was some­thing else. The cast were on hor­ren­dous diets, only con­sum­ing some­thing like 500 calo­ries a day, so they were very grumpy. Cil­lian Mur­phy reck­oned he could smell choco­late at 200 yards by the end of it.”

“The sto­ry is about a guy who got stung by a wasp. The open­ing sequence is him hav­ing to cut his wrist because the wasp is still inside him. So I made a sil­i­con repli­ca of the actor’s arm and a hard mechan­i­cal wasp shape on a rod which we could manip­u­late under the skin until it popped out and flew away. One of the scenes fea­tured the birth of The Skin­ny, which was this real­ly tall char­ac­ter. I did a body cast of the actor and then sculpt­ed this com­plete sil­i­con suit which he wore. It had a real­ly weird rip­pled skin and a mouth that wouldn’t open. The actor wasn’t around at the time so I did the fit­ting. We had this great idea of cov­er­ing it all in mag­gots, which was great except that the mag­gots – real mag­gots, we had gal­lons of them – got inside the sil­i­con. They were in between my skin and the oth­er skin and they were nib­bling on me for bloody hours. I was like a pin cush­ion when I came out, cov­ered in lit­tle red blotch­es. The things you do for art!”

“I was only on Padding­ton for a few days, we did loads of snow and snow­ball fights out­side Paddington’s house. But I was main­ly there for an oven explo­sion. It was Nicole Kidman’s stunt dou­ble get­ting blown up in this oven. We had a real oven and we cut the back out of it. We rigged up the whole thing with a fun­nel and a pres­surised hose which would allow in a cer­tain amount of gas. Then you can reg­u­late it, to get the same sized fire­ball every time. You have the stunt per­son at a set dis­tance so that the fire­ball won’t actu­al­ly hit her It’s all very very con­trol­lable. That’s the whole point of my job, to make some­thing dan­ger­ous – or some­thing that looks real­ly dan­ger­ous – safe.”