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Michael Westmore - Star Trek Make-up Chief

Make-up on Next Gen
  How did you you start working on the Next Generation?

At first I hesitated - I wasn't used to having a steady job, I was used to going from film to film and living in motels around and hotels around the world. I talked with my wife for a minute and we decided that it'd be great. At least if the show went for a year I could stay home for a year, and, of course, that's fifteen years ago.

In the very beginning, the only two characters we had to deal with was Worf, who going to be the Klingon, and Data, who was an android. So we did many film tests with Brent Spin basically for colour. Pencilling in his hair line to give him a patent leather look through his hair. It finally got down to three colours, it got down to a yellow-gold, a battleship grey and bubblegum pink. And actually Gene Roddenberry kind of liked the pink. Then they kind of liked the grey, it's like yellow was the afterthought. Data's make-up is literally the only make-up that hasn't changed one iota since the original application, still the same steps. Everybody else had tweaking to it.

Michael Dorn, at that time, was willing to shave his head, they thought it might save time if we had a bald Klingon that we could just glue spines across his head. It wasn't - it was going to take more time doing that than it would have been to build a new rubber forehead. What I wanted to do for television was to create the ridges heavier than they've ever been before.

All the Klingons since that time have had very gnarly dentures and the ridges and bones come down into the face with a stylised nose.

The Ferengis, the original look, they had big bat-like ears and long chins. [We] took off the bat-like ears 'cos they looked like large Vulcans, and rounded the ears off. We did away with the chin, as a time saver. Although, later on, we did add cheek bones, because we found that it justgave them a better look, taking away from the human look, by having the head, the cheek bones, and the nasty little teeth.

Modern make-up
  What technical resources do you have available to you now that weren't available to the original series?

The one thing they didn't have on the original series was time, and they didn't have a lot of money. We still don't have a lot of time and a lot of money but we've learned how to budget it quicker.

I actually have a laboratory here on the lot at Paramount, where we build, manufacture, paint and put it all together. The old series, Fred literally made things at home, he made Spock's ears at home in the kitchen. There are some interesting stories on the original Vulcan ears how they did a test and they did them out of wax and tissue paper and everything, and it looked terrible, and they finally sculpted them out clay and made moulds on them for Leonard Nimoy.

With me, it's easy, it was all established, it's a matter of doing the plaster cast on somebody's ears, sculpting up the new ears and making the moulds and pouring the rubber and gluing them on, and away we go.

DS9 vs Next Gen
  Are the aliens in The Next Generation different from those on Deep Space Nine or Voyager?

The aliens in The Next Generation were, I would say, an overall look, soft and smaller. When Deep Space 9 came along I was able to expand, because we had the promenade and we wanted to put more into the promenade.

There's a single episode in Deep Space where, on a single day, I had five hundred aliens working. It was very aggressive in the amount of aliens that we would punch into it.

When The Next Generation and Deep Space 9 overlapped it was quite a large undertaking, because the pilot for Deep Space 9 was Cardassians, which were full make-ups, and Bajorans, which is even noses, but it meant everybody, everybody had something on.

Morn
  How a head became a regular character

A character called Morn, who was really just a background character, one of the original nine heads that we designed for Deep Space 9, and when he walked in, the Director looked at him and said, 'I want that one, put him at the bar.' And he sat at the bar for the next seven years.

We called him Morn almost like Norm on Cheers, who's sitting at the bar the whole time. The same man played for the entire seven years. It was nice. And the funny part was the scripts would come out and there would be lines for him, and then, by the time we got down to shooting, the lines were gone, so he never spoke in the seven years.

Types of alien
  What's the easiest way to turn a human into an alien, is it with the ears or the nose?

We have different categories for the aliens. We have the straight humans, and then we have what we know as the mild humanoids, and that usually means maybe just a little something on the nose.

Then we get into what we call a medium humanoid, and that would be possibly a forehead with maybe the nose attached to it.

A partial alien would be the full face with hair and a wig, and then I've got the full alien, which is the entire head, which is bald and no hair on it at all. And it just depends on what the producers decide on once we get the script. They might tell me, 'Ah, go ahead, make him a full alien.'

Voyager
  What look did you create for Voyager?

For Voyager we started off with a new charact Talaxian, Neelix. They wanted a very nice, calm, vegetarian type of an alien. At that time The Lion King was very popular, and I thought the little boar was really nice and the meerkats. So, I took a combination of the two characters, to create the Talaxian.

Jeri Ryan came in, Seven of Nine, and she was going to be a Borg. Those had already been established, mainly through the movie, First Contact, the new Borgs as opposed to the old Next Generation Borgs - balder and scarier looking. And Jeri rolled right into that and for the several episodes she was Borgified until we de-Borged her and still left her with a few little pieces here and there that would could come and go from operations and things. But she always had something - she always had a reminder that she was a Borg.

Klingons
  Prehistoric Klingons

With the Klingons, the original ones were dark make-up and black hair, then, when the movies started, they put a little forehead on them, that was all, just a small little ridge and a couple of little bumps in the centre of the forehead.

When I came on, in 1987, I wanted to give them a stronger forehead with the nose and it was all approved and so I was able to to design the Klingons that way. I had a book on dinosaurs and their vertebraes were all cut in half, and so I could take a little section of a dinosaur vertebrae and duplicate that, flip it over and duplicate it on the other side, and then duplicate it in rows. So the Klingon foreheads that have been done since 1987 are all based on a little chunk of dinosaur vertebrae.

Borg
  How has the Borg make-up evolved?

I had to figure out what to do with the hands and the head. They had these helmet-like devices on that had openings in them, and they could be scarred. It was a very quick make-up that way, the helmets were all pre-painted, even if there was a hole and an opening, that area could have been pre-painted with the same colour make-up that we'd use on their face.

It was just a matter of putting a foundation on their face, air brushing some shadows into it, slipping the helmets onto them and just gluing down around the edges and putting on the eye piece, of which the original eye pieces didn't have any mechanical workings or lights to them at all.

So, a Borg make-up, in its original state, The Next Generation, was about a two-hour process to put one all together.

When it came down to the feature [First Contact], when we changed them, it turned into a five hour process, between getting dressed. It was very complicated, in dressing them so putting their head, sending to a wardrobe to get dressed, and then coming back to us to do the tweaking and finishing the hands and everything. They became lean, meaner in First Contact. That same look carried over into Voyager where they are today.

The Jem'Hadar
  Where did the Jem'Hadar come from?

I was given information that this was a genetically engineered race of people that had very tough skin, and they could just fight and not get hurt. What has tough skin? An elephant has tough skin, a rhinoceros has tough skin. So I based the skin - basically the rolls and everything like that on rhinoceros skin, and I used a dinosaur plate on the top of the head. The horn then [came] from the rhinoceros.

Actors and make-up
  How did the actors respond to the make-up process?

I would say, most of the actors, 99% of them, do not have a problem with rubber. I mean, with Odo, with Arman Shimmermann, Michael Dorn, it's all part of what they signed on to do, so they knew that they had to do that.

The rubber really doesn't get hot. It doesn't get uncomfortable. What it does do, it makes you have to come in at four o'clock in the morning for make-up, and it means when everybody else has gone home, you're still sitting here

With the appliance make-ups, I think everybody enjoys it in the beginning. When you finally reach your seventh season, I think it starts to get tiring, everybody knows that they're going to be going on and doing something else, and it becomes just an old memory. You know, when I see Ethan Philips and Rene [Auberjoinois], they're off onto other things, and that seven years was something that was part of their career and is over with.

Gossip
  William Shatner said that the make-up room was always the social hub of the programme. Is this true?

The make-up room becomes a social centre, because it's where the actors come in first thing in the morning. Anything that's happened in their life, we're the first people they see in the morning, the first people that they share their life with, whether it's good, bad or indifferent.

You learn an awful lot about personal lives of them, and, of course, they expect you not to go ahead and tell the world what's going on.

Cardassians
  Inspired by modern art

I was eating in a restaurant one night, and there was an art gallery next door, and there was an abstract painting of a woman, and she had a spoon in the middle of her head. And I said, 'Some day, I'm going to use that.'

And it took me a couple of years - when I was doing the Cardassians, I happen to remember the spoon and the head, and it wound up on the Cardassians.