In 1813, renowned writer Jane Austen published a book called Pride and Prejudice, which tells the story of the Bennet sisters, who are gussied up and married off to wealthy suitors, one by one. The only sister who seems to question this system is Elizabeth, the rebellious member of the family, who feels strong disdain for the system that treats her more like property than a proper citizen. In 2009, author Seth Grahame-Smith put a new twist on the old tale by creating a parody novel called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which loosely follows the same basic outline, but adds an entirely different obstacle to the tale: the living dead.
In Grahame-Smith’s story, the girls are not only fighting for the right to be married into regal families, but also battling for their lives on a daily basis. An outbreak has occurred within these humble streets, and now flesh-eating zombies roam the land in search of fresh meat. Luckily, in this version of the story, the Bennet sisters are trained by their father to become fierce warriors, and are actually capable of defending themselves when faced with a reanimated corpse. However, with death lurking around every corner, and the population of the living slowly dwindling more and more each day, the girls still must take extra precautions at all times, lest they, too, become one of the sorry stricken forced to wander the earth in a mindless haze, on the hunt for brains for all of eternity.
The zombies in this film look absolutely incredible, which comes as no surprise, since it is none other than legendary makeup and special effects artist Mark Coulier who designed the look of the creatures and applied makeup to the actors daily on set. Coulier has over fifty working credits to his name and has worked on a multitude of projects over his career, including Hellbound: Hellraiser II, The Fifth Element, the Harry Potter franchise, X-Men: First Class, The Iron Lady, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and, of course, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
Last week I was lucky enough to not only speak with Coulier on behalf of Daily Dead, but to also don the makeup myself, as applied by Coulier’s own gifted hands. Together, we discussed how he got his start in the industry, the designs he’s become the proudest of over the years, and the planning that went into the look of the undead featured in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which hits DVD and Blu-ray on May 31st. Check out our chat below, and make sure to take a look at the awesome pictures of Coulier’s phenomenal work, which he shockingly completed in under thirty minutes’ time.
He may be a world famous two-time Oscar winner now, but believe it or not, Mark Coulier got his start with a film that many horror fans are extremely familiar with: Waxwork. That’s right, the man who was recently recognized at the 88th Academy Awards for his splendid work on Tilda Swinton in The Grand Budapest Hotel started out contributing to some of the greatest low-budget horror films ever made, such as Nightbreed, Candyman, Hellraiser II and III, and the wonderfully blood-soaked Event Horizon. When asked about his introduction into the world of makeup and special effects in horror movies, Coulier explained how he began just like the rest of us: as a fan of the genre.
“I just got really interested in it as a kid. I used to watch Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and see all those beautiful Jack Pierce makeups and at some point, you put two and two together as a kid and think, ‘Wow, somebody makes all that stuff and somebody does it for a living,’ and I always had it in the back of my mind,” Coulier explains.
“I wanted to work in the film industry. I just thought, ‘There must be a job for me here.’ My passion for art as well as actually loving movies fused together. I found a book on prosthetics when I was at art school and I was totally fascinated by it, I thought it was amazing, so I got my friend to do a lifecast of me and then I started making masks and I really, really loved it, and then that was it—hooked. It was also the dawn of all those amazing movies in the ’80s like The Howling and An American Werewolf in London, and it just opened. There was a real explosion with makeup effects and practical werewolf transformations and all that stuff, so when I was sixteen or seventeen it was really cool.”
Although by now he has created ghoulish creatures himself, Coulier still cites an old George A. Romero classic as his favorite zombie movie of all time. “I love Dawn of the Dead!” Coulier exclaims with great enthusiasm. “I went to the cinema to see that when it came out. Yeah, I’m that old [laughs]. It was great and a lot of fun. I still love that film, it’s my favorite zombie movie ever. I love Night of the Living Dead as well, but Dawn of the Dead is probably my favorite because it was at that same time that I was thinking about it as a career.”
Despite the fact that he’s been working on a film that features some fairly fast-paced zombies, when it comes to his personal preference, Coulier reveals that he’s actually much fonder of the old-school approach. “I’m a slow zombie person, for sure” Coulier confesses. “I just love that build of tension where you think humans get a bit cocky. It’s a great allegory for how things can creep up on us, like climate change. It creeps up on us and we think it’s not gonna get us, but ultimately, it will. That’s scarier to me, the fact that you think you’re safe and, ‘Oh it’s okay, they’re slow,’ and all of a sudden, they start coming out of the woodwork.”
Clearly Coulier holds some affection for the Romero-era style of the living dead, but when it came time to design the look for Burr Steers’ wickedly funny Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Coulier found that his methods needed to be slightly altered to fall in line with the type of story they were telling in this post-apocalyptic PG-13 Regency thriller.
“You’re not going to get into the zombies with their jaws hanging off and teeth hanging out and blood dripping everywhere,” Coulier explains, commenting on how he adjusted his technique to fit the rating system. “You know, those things tend to be too strong and gory for this kind of movie. It was very much trying to keep it a bit more—not tame—but not too terrifying.”
Despite making a movie for slightly younger audiences, it was still very important to director Steers to emphasize the parallels between the zombie outbreak and the Bubonic Plague in real life that claimed so many lives years ago.
“Burr really wanted to mimic the Bubonic plague and have a lot of rotting skin and goop and gore and different bloods,” says Coulier about his instructions for the look of the zombies. “So we did a lot of blood research, and we had a goop bag filled with all different colors of goop, we had a yellow one and a green one and a brown one and we just mixed all that with blood and it generally made everybody look hideous.”
Aside from highlighting the comparisons between the fictitious disease and the real-life tragedy of the Black Death, it was also crucial to Steers and Coulier to create a type of walking dead creature that could fit into a comedy, while not appearing too ridiculous to be featured in a movie with a feminist message.
“That’s one of the questions we had, because you go into this thing and you think, ‘What does the director think, does he want it to be really comedic, does he want it to be tongue in cheek, or does he want it to be pretty full-blown?’ Burr really did want to keep the zombies scary. He didn’t want them to look like comedy characters, so we did try to keep everything pretty realistic. All the skin rotting is based on real colors of corpses from photographs that we had as a reference. Because otherwise it could have gone the other way, they could have been more like caricatures.”
One of the greatest challenges of creating reanimated corpses for such a massive blockbuster was the fact that Coulier wasn’t just working on a few zombie makeups, but dozens upon dozens of designs, because he was working with a full-blown apocalypse, which meant that the zombies traveled in hordes. Because there was such a massive amount of people to cover, it would have been tragic to give every single actor the same exact style of prosthetics, because every single zombie would have wound up looking identical, which would have made the outbreak seem less believable. To battle this, Coulier brought on his own personal crew, who each had their own unique style that they brought to the table to help mix it up.
“I hired sculptors and they’ve all got a particular style, and I know what their strengths and weaknesses are, so I gave each person a different character to do, and they were all a slightly different style,” says Coulier in a simple manner. “Sculptors all have their own trademark, so naturally, if you get six sculptors to sculpt six different versions of the same design, you give them all the same design, and every version will look different because it’s just a different person that’s sculpting it.”
When it comes to his own personal favorite design of the film, Coulier knows right away which zombie won the race.
“I really liked the mother and baby,” comments Coulier with a gleeful grin. “We did a zombie baby and this female zombie, and we did tooth plates so her lips were missing, and she was very early on in the film. We made a fake arm for her, so her real arm was puppeteering the little baby, so she was making the baby move as she was walking around, so it looked pretty cool. It freaked everybody out.”
Of course, Coulier has crafted hundreds of creations throughout his many years in the business, so I had to ask which ones were his favorites overall from all of his different projects. The answers were actually quite surprising.
“I’m really proud of the makeup that we did on Will Ferrell for Zoolander 2,” responds Coulier. “We did this full-body makeup on him, so head to toe he was wearing a muscle suit and a ball cap. When we stuck it on him he looked like a real bodybuilder, and it’s only in the movie briefly, but it just worked really well and there were no issues with it and we shot the whole day. The director loved it and Will had a real good time doing it, so it was really rewarding.”
“And one of the things I did for Star Wars: Episode I was a character that I really enjoyed doing. It was called Orn Free Taa. He’s Twi’lek. You know Bib Fortuna? He’s of the same race. He’s got these big blue tentacles, two coming down the back of his head, and he’s a pretty cool looking thing. I spent about three months making it, and it’s in the movie for about a second. So nobody’s ever really seen it properly. The joy of movies, [laughs], we do a lot of stuff that either ends up on the cutting room floor, or it doesn’t even get filmed. We spend months making things that are only seen very briefly.”
---------
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is now available on Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K Ultra HD. Here's a look at Kalyn's zombie transformation process, and scroll down further for the trailer and release details:
Press Release: CULVER CITY, Calif. (Mar. 28, 2016) – Based on the best-selling novel by Seth Grahame-Smith and Jane Austen, PRIDE + PREJUDICE + ZOMBIES debuts on digital May 10 and on Blu-ray™, DVD and next-generation 4K Ultra HD™ May 31 from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. In this reimagining of the classic tale, the Bennett sisters and Mr. Darcy must unite to fight a zombie outbreak that has taken over 19th century England. Lily James (Cinderella) leads an ensemble cast featuring Sam Riley (Maleficent), Jack Huston (The Longest Ride), Bella Heathcote (Dark Shadows), Douglas Booth (Jupiter Ascending), Matt Smith (“Dr. Who”), Charles Dance (“Game of Thrones”) and Lena Headey (“Game of Thrones”).
Bonus content on the PRIDE + PREJUDICE + ZOMBIES Blu-ray, DVD and digital formats includes the featurettes “Courtship, Class and Carnage: Meet the Cast” and “From Austen to Zombies: Adapting a Classic.” Exclusive content on the Blu-ray and digital editions include deleted scenes, a gag reel and a Mr. Collins Line-o-rama, which features Mr. Collins’ most memorable moments. Also included are the featurettes “The Badass Bennet Sisters,” which goes behind the scenes as the ladies prepare for battle; and “Creating the Unmentionables,” where the design teams explain how they created the 19th Century zombies.
4K Ultra HD features four times the resolution of high definition, high dynamic range (HDR)--which produces brilliant highlights, vibrant colors and greater contrast on compatible displays--and Dolby Atmos audio, remixed specifically for the home theater environment, delivering captivating sound that places and moves audio anywhere in the room, including overhead.
Synopsis:
A zombie outbreak has fallen upon the land in this reimagining of Jane Austen’s classic tale of the tangled relationships between lovers from different social classes in 19th century England. Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet (Lily James) is a master of martial arts and weaponry and the handsome Mr. Darcy (Sam Riley) is a fierce zombie killer, yet the epitome of upper class prejudice. As the zombie outbreak intensifies, they must swallow their pride and join forces on the blood-soaked battlefield in order to conquer the undead once and for all.Written and Directed by Burr Steers and based on the novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, PRIDE + PREJUDICE + ZOMBIES is produced by Marc Butan, Sean McKittrick, Brian Oliver, Natalie Portman, Annette Savitch, Allison Shearmur and Tyler Thompson. Stephen Meinen served as co-producer with Sue Baden-Powell, Kimberly Fox, Edward H. Hamm Jr., Phil Hunt, Nick Meyer, Compton Ross and Lauren Selig as executive producers.
4K Ultra HD
• Feature film in 4K resolution with High Dynamic Range (HDR)
• Dolby Atmos soundtrack (Dolby TrueHD 7.1 compatible)*
• Also includes the film and special features on high-def Blu-ray
* To experience Dolby Atmos at home, a Dolby Atmos enabled AV receiver and additional speakers are required, or a Dolby Atmos enabled sound bar; however, Dolby Atmos soundtracks are also fully backward compatible with traditional audio configurations and legacy home entertainment equipment.DVD Extras Include:
• Two Featurettes
o “Courtship, Class and Carnage: Meet The Cast”
o “From Austen to Zombies: Adapting a Classic”Blu-ray Extras Include:
• Deleted Scenes
• Mr. Collins Line-o-rama
• Gag Reel
• Four Featurettes:
o “The Badass Bennet Sisters”
o “Creating the Unmentionables”
o “Courtship, Class and Carnage: Meet The Cast”
o “From Austen to Zombies: Adapting a Classic”Digital Extras Include:
• Deleted Scenes
• Mr. Collins Line-o-rama
• Gag Reel
• Four Featurettes:
o “The Badass Bennet Sisters”
o “Creating the Unmentionables”
o “Courtship, Class and Carnage: Meet The Cast”
o “From Austen to Zombies: Adapting a Classic”PRIDE + PREJUDICE + ZOMBIES has a run time of approximately 107 minutes and is rated PG-13 for zombie violence and action, and brief suggestive material.
ABOUT SONY PICTURES HOME ENTERTAINMENT
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (SPHE) is a Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) company. Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) is a subsidiary of Sony Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Sony Corporation. SPE’s global operations encompass motion picture production, acquisition and distribution; television production, acquisition and distribution; television networks; digital content creation and distribution; operation of studio facilities; and development of new entertainment products, services and technologies. For additional information, go to http://www.sonypictures.com.
Daily Dead's Official Podcast! Daily Dead's Official Podcast!
