How Death Becomes Her Reinvented Special Effects in 1992 — and Why Meryl Streep Found the Process 'Tedious'

There was nothing like it Death becomes her before the 1992 camp classic achieved big-screen immortality. There hasn’t been anything like it since either — but his special effects left a lasting mark on the film industry.

Robert Zemeckis’ film stars Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn in a story about two women chasing youth with a magical potion. Starring Bruce Willis and Isabella Rossellini, the film was a box office success despite mixed critical reviews and has since become a Halloween season favorite.

Its visual effects, from Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), deserved it Death becomes her his only Oscar nomination and win. Partly because of the new territory they explored on film, the company created lifelike dinosaurs in 1993. Jurassic Park and insert Tom Hanks into historical footage in 1994 Forrest Gump — both also win Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects.

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It has been said that ILM’s artists were “inventing tools while we were making movies”. Death becomes her visual effects art director Doug Chiang in an interview with Yahoo in 2017. “We would often start projects without really knowing how we were going to achieve the effects.”

Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn in ‘Death Becomes Her’.

Universal/Courtesy of Everett Collection

With Zemeckis, 72, at the helm Death becomes her — a film in which Streep, 75, has her head thrown back after breaking her neck and Hawn, 78, has a shotgun hole in her stomach — that felt especially true. “With a lot of these movies, especially for Bob [Zemeckis]a large percentage of it feels impossible,” said the film’s visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston in a 2022 interview with Before & After. “So that’s the only way to get into it. If you achieve the impossible, you’ve just raised the bar for your own company.”

Computer-generated effects, noted Ralston, 70, were not used in studio filmmaking until the early 1990s. While films like 1991 Terminator 2: Judgment Day (also from the ILM team) used the technology, mostly for robotic characters made of metal. Challenge with Death becomes heras Chiang and Ralston explained, he was creating natural human skin for the film’s absurd body horror.

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Photoshop, now a popular tool, was cutting-edge technology when Chiang used it to achieve Streep’s twisted neck, he told Yahoo. “Most art departments were still very traditional, in terms of pen, ink and marker,” he said. Death becomes her was “one of the films that bridged that technology gap” and created “organic CG”.

‘Death becomes her’.

Shutterstock

As a behind-the-scenes video with Streep reveals, her head-turning effect involved three stages: filming the scene with the Oscar winner with a blue mask covering her head, then filming her in front of a blue screen with only her face visible, then digitally stitching them together.

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The hole in Hawn’s stomach, which the water oozes and the camera shoots through, used a piece of makeup that showed “what it would have been, a chewed-up form,” Ralston said of the before and after. The filmmakers then used rotoscoping (or manually altering the footage one frame at a time) to remove that part of her stomach.

“We had to create the feeling that what you were seeing was this three-dimensional space, even though it was absurd and cartoonish,” he said of the “simple concept.”

Meryl Streep in ‘Death Becomes Her’.

Mary Evans/Ronald Grant/Everett Collection

Other proven techniques of visual effects pepper Death becomes her: Rossellini’s mystical character’s palace is a miniature set, while Hawn’s fat suit and jaws are a combination of make-up and prosthetics. The scene where Streep’s character takes the potion of immortality and her breasts pop up on her chest was initially attempted using a pressure device, but eventually the star’s locker got behind her and pushed them higher.

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Despite audiences’ enduring love for the film, it was Streep’s “first, my last, my only” experience with “tiring” CGI, she told Entertainment Weekly in the year 2000. Comparing the process to “being at the dentist”, she said: “Whatever concentration you can apply to that kind of comedy is just shredded. You’re standing there like a piece of machinery – they should get machinery to do that. I liked how it turned out. But it’s no fun acting in front of a lamp.”

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Source: HIS Education