You've undoubtedly seen Mike Marino's work, well... everywhere. From The Batman to The Dead Don't Die to his Oscar-nominated work in Coming 2 America. A protégé of legendary makeup artist Dick Smith and now a master of the craft in his own right, most recently Marino's work appeared in the HBO mini-series The Staircase, recounting the real-life story of Michael Peterson, a crime novelist accused of killing his wife Kathleen after she is found dead at the bottom of a staircase in their home, and the 16-year judicial battle that followed. The Staircase stars Toni Collette and Colin Firth, and we would argue Marino's work takes center stage in a starring role as well.
As owner and designer of Prosthetic Renaissance (AKA ProRen FX), Marino and his team designed disturbingly realistic crime scene recreations including renditions of Collette as Kathleen post-mortem, (big emphasis on disturbing!) The extra challenging aspect here of course being that the wounds and such are based on a real-life event (in the age of the internet, nonetheless), meaning Marino and the ProRen FX team could not take liberties with the placement of those wounds and designs in order to suit the building of those elements.
Marino stopped in to chat with us about creating the FX with lots of behind-the-scenes photos and praise for The Staircase director Antonio Campos, who Marino calls "a great friend and a great artist." As for their collaboration, Marino says, "He did an amazing job. When you have a director who respects who they hire and who cares as much as Antonio does, that project is sent over the top. We have a great working relationship and friendship, and that’s very important when working on intense projects to have a director that really trusts their crew and their designers and collaborators."
In this instance, you’re creating work based on an actual event. Did you utilize crime scene photos, police reports, or how did you go about the process of placing certain wounds, etc?
All of the above. They had extensive access to the crime scene photos, and we mimicked them as best we could given the limitations of Toni’s own body and head shape; but, we were as accurate as possible based on the crime scene photographs and police reports.
Is this process very different from creating FX for a fictional story, does it present additional challenges?
This is harder, to be honest, because you don’t have much leeway with changing something or making it different because it has to line up with the real thing. Today, people have access to the internet, and they can find things. There are always critics out there, so you have to be as accurate as possible…medically, paint colors, positioning, what happens to the skin…when you die there are things like lividity that happen, which is blood sinking in certain areas, so we were very accurate with how that was all put together.
What was it like for the actors to see these? I mean, you open up these photos, and it’s very clearly BAM, the corpse of Toni Collette. I imagine that has to be strange on some level because it’s so damn realistic. And there’s no question about who it is. So kudos to you and your team. That is not vaguely reminiscent of Toni Collette. That is straight-up I am staring at Toni Collette’s lifeless face, impressive and disturbing as hell.
I never witnessed Toni’s reaction but maybe Antonio Campos can answer that. The other cast and crew couldn’t believe how real the bodies looked. Instead of traditional lifecasts, because the technology has improved so much now, I was able to get very accurate scans of Toni in difficult positions that a lifecast could not duplicate. There have been a lot of advancements in the art, technically speaking. So if, for example, you see the veins bulging out of Toni’s head at certain angles, that was really her own skin doing that when we scanned her in that certain position and then we accentuated it a little more to make it more dramatic and realistic.
Take a look below for loads of impressive ProRen FX work. Warning: We aren't being euphemistic when we say this is also disturbingly graphic.
