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"  Popular Mechanics: With all the advancements in CGI, you have all these really great tools at your disposal. So why did you decide to go old school with The Wolfman and put Benicio del Toro in makeup? Joe Johnston: I sensed a certain negative reaction to the whole CG thing over the past couple of years. Because you can do anything in CG, I think a lot of filmmakers do just that, and sometimes they cross the line and break the laws of physics or they go beyond what is believable to an audience. I wanted the Wolfman to be restricted by the fact that he is a guy in a suit, basically, with great makeup on. He looks like the classic version of the Wolfman from 1941. It&amp;#039;s an updating and retelling of the story, for sure, and it&amp;#039;s sort of a revisualization of the Wolfman. But it is definitely grounded in reality in that he can only do what an athlete or a man, a stunt man or Benicio del Toro can do. We did use computer graphics for the transformation, for taking him from Benicio to the Wolfman because it just ... you know, it gives you so much more flexibility to be able to change your mind. If you&amp;#039;ve built the process of the transformation in foam rubber or some kind of prosthetic or mechanical devices, you have to determine up front exactly what those are and what they have to do. So if halfway through the process you say, oh, would it be neat if his nose did something weird here, or if his whole head changed shape--you&amp;#039;re sort of stuck with what the physical devices can do. But if you use CG, you can pretty much do anything you want, and you can change your mind halfway through. It&amp;#039;s an issue of flexibility.  PM: What happens during the transformation? JJ: The transformation process is like an arc. He starts as Benicio and ends as the Wolfman. It became apparent very early in the process that the most interesting part of the transformation--right now it&amp;#039;s made up of eight shots. I mean, there are several different cuts in the sequence, but there are eight moments where things are transforming, whether it&amp;#039;s hands, feet, face or body. So I felt that the most interesting part of the transformation was when he was neither Lawrence nor the Wolfman. It was all the things in between. Once he gets close to being the Wolfman, I wanted to speed that process up and get him there as quickly as we could, because that to me was the less interesting part.  But most of all I wanted it to look like something you hadn&amp;#039;t seen in a wolfman transformation before. Because, you know, we all go into a theater with expectations in mind, and I really like it when the reality goes beyond what your expectations are. When you go &amp;quot;Wow! That&amp;#039;s not what I expected to see. It&amp;#039;s cooler than I thought it was going to be.&amp;quot; Part of that whole thing is keeping it believable. Sometimes when we were blocking out the computer graphics, we&amp;#039;d go too far, and you think wait a minute, that doesn&amp;#039;t feel like it&amp;#039;s really happening.  PM: What was an instance where you went too far and had to dial back? JJ: In one of the closeups of his face, in the middle of the transformation, where we had his teeth growing too fast. We just went too far. We had the snout growing too fast, and the teeth popping out, and his eyes were bulging, and it was sort of a startling image, but it definitely looked like we were breaking our own rules, so we backed off on that. We experimented with a lot of stuff before we put the final textures and hair and color to it.  PM: Did your CG guys look at the anatomy of guys and wolves? JJ: Yeah. We did. It&amp;#039;s mostly human anatomy because we--this came up several times during the production: Let&amp;#039;s watch the way wolves move, and let&amp;#039;s listen to the way they howl. But it became apparent fairly early on that he&amp;#039;s not a wolf, he&amp;#039;s a wolfman. And we want to keep him more human than anything. We want to be able to see that there&amp;#039;s a human underneath this exterior that looks like an animal. So while we studied wolves and how they move, we very quickly said, let&amp;#039;s just take that little bit of influence from the animal world and apply it to this creature who is not a wolf. Underneath, he&amp;#039;s a man.  PM: Did you take scans of Benicio as well? JJ:  We did. And we also, of course, lifecast him. And Rick experimented with a lot of different designs over a lifecast of Bennie. He used the same principles that we did with the CG. He realized in places that he was going too far, and he pulled back. When it works perfectly, you see Benicio under the makeup. I have my favorite shots in the movie. You can tell it&amp;#039;s him, even though his entire face is changed. The important thing is that you see his eyes, and that he&amp;#039;s able to perform through the makeup. We wanted this to be a classic retelling of the story, but with a new face. In the original Wolf Man, you can see Lon Chaney Jr. under the makeup, which is why I think it&amp;#039;s so successful. You introduce the character, then you transform him; you know who&amp;#039;s underneath the makeup, and I wanted to do the same thing with Benicio. The more you see the man through the suit, the better off you are. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a5315/4345379/>