1 Welcome to Imaginary Worlds, special holiday edition. I’m Eric Molinsky. I interview a lot of people for this podcast, and sometimes a lot of that tape ends up on the proverbial cutting room floor. So, every year, I like to play a full-length interview of a previous guest who had so much more to say than I could it into their particular topic. Last summer, I did an episode called Making Up Creatures where I talked with the creature designer Neill Gorton, who is best known for working on the reboot of Doctor Who under the first two show runners, Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat. He also worked on the Doctor Who spin-off shows Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. Neill specializes in practical effects, meaning special effects that don’t use CGI. I grew up watching movies and shows with practical effects, so I find this topic endlessly fascinating. And Doctor Who is famous for being jam packed with aliens that need to be created on a very limited budget. And this is a perfect time to play a long interview with Neill because -- even though he doesn’t work on Doctor Who anymore -- the show is coming back for their annual holiday special, featuring the classic villain, the Daleks. By the way, Neill was recording himself at home. And around 10 minutes into our interview, he discovered his recorder was not on. I was recording a back-up over Zoom, so that’s what you’ll hear in the beginning. And then his high-quality audio will kick in after the break. I started out by asking Neill if there was anything he saw as a kid that inspired him to go into the field of creature effects. NEILL: Well, I remember a big influence on me actually was I grew up in Liverpool, just up the coast from Liverpool is Blackpool, which is a popular whole holiday resort. And they had a, a Doctor Who exhibition there, and there was something about seeing those, all those pops and the costumes and the masks in person. You suddenly realize someone made them. And I think that kind of really stuck with me. Do you remember what creatures specifically, you saw the Doctor Who exhibit that you're like, oh my God, I have seen that on TV? NEILL: There was definitely a Davros in there. That was the one that really caught my eye because I remember as a kid seeing Davros for the first time and being really creeped out by him on, on the show and not understanding that it was a makeup. I 2 mean, I must've only been about five or six and just thinking, where did they find this strange little withered math? Hah! DOCTOR: Davros, for the last time consider what you’re doing. Stop the development of the Daleks DAVROS: Impossible. It is beyond my control. The workshops are already fully automated to produce the Dalek machines. NEILL: And then, yeah, they, you know, they had the chair and the figure and the mask was obviously on a mannequin and there, it was in the exhibit. Well, how did you get involved with Doctor Who? I mean, you must've been ecstatic when you, uh, first got, did you first just get a call out of nowhere? NEILL: It was almost, it was, um, I'd heard the show was happening. And then I heard that a friend of mine, a makeup artist called Davy Jones. Cause he'd worked with Russell T. Davis before. And so I just kind of went, Oh, well, there you go. It's gone. Davy's got the gig. And what had happened is Davey had said, it looked at the first script. He did initially been told that it was, you know, it wasn't a big creature sort of prosthetics job. So he kind of, Davey kind of works as a one man band. So he kind of said, okay, I'm sure we can handle it. And then when he saw, I had seen the scripts and there was eight foot, Slitheen and all the rest, he immediately just went. Now this is too big for me to take on, on my own. One of the things I think is so fascinating about the new series is the way the aliens from the classic series were redesigned. I did a whole episode about the Daleks, so I know that there was a lot of pressure to keep it Daleks similar, but, but with other aliens like the Cybermen, or what is the name of the big egghead aliens that are like, cloned soldiers? NEILL: Sontarans? Sontarans, right. DOCTOR: And your name? STYRE: General Styre of the 10th Sontaran fleet! Styre the undefeated! DOCTOR: Aw, that’s a very good nick name. What if you do get defeated? Styre the undefeated but not anymore never mind? So tell me, what was that was like in terms of, you know, you grew up with these classic creatures and, and to have the opportunity and even the challenge of making them seem believable with modern technology and, and even much better TV sets to which people could really see your work? 3 NEILL: It comes with a whole host of issues. So there's people who are just like, you can't touch anything. It doesn't matter what you do. They will freak out. I mean ultimately if, if, if I made a Sontaran and looked like a Sontaran and looked in the seventies, it'd be laughed off the screen nowadays because they really weren't just like a giant rubber head that did not move with a big cutout where the guy poked his lip out and his tongue out and they were completely immobile. And of course, like the costume, you know, that was very, that quilted sort of finished was it was done because it was a very cheap solution, you know, fast forward and you get to do that. And of course, you're going to make it more expressive. You're going to bring it up to date. You've got to make these changes. You're going to, and of course you're going to upset somebody. So you just have to take it on the chin. I mean, it is funny. I mean, it was like people kind of get frustrated and they like all the Cybermen have changed and it's like, go back. I mean, they, they looked, there was kind of five different versions of the Cybermen from the sixties, seventies and the eighties. Yeah. It was changing all the time anyway, Can you, can you pick maybe one example of, of like one of those alien types characters that there was a lot of back and forth between you and either Davies or Moffitt about like, how are we going to do this? And you sort of like, like there were just a lot of questions you needed to, to answer. NEILL: The Cybermen with Russell where it was a huge thing because it, you know, they're such a, they kind of second, only to the Daleks. So we did the Daleks in the first series anyway. So, so really bring back the sideman and it was, it was a huge, you know, two-parter and then they're in the finale and all that kind of thing. So it was, uh, uh, budgetary wise with massive undertaking and just the whole redesign. And by that time, of course it was the second series of the new series. So the first series you could have done whatever. There was no one to complain, no one had even seen the new series, no one even thought it was going to be a success. So come the second, there was a massive amount of interest, lots of media interest, lots more pressure. And it did, it went back and forth for a long time. Just really trying to figure out what the best approach was. How would we make them look? CYBERMAN: You will be deleted DOCTOR: But we surrender! We surrender! CYBERMAN: Man is inferior. You will be reborn as Cybermen. You will perish. Prepare for maximum deletion. NEILL: The were massive, um, fan reaction, especially amongst younger generations. The voice change helmet of the Cybermen was the number one toy at Christmas that year that's kind of a real badge of honor in UK is to have the number one Christmas toy. And that was it. You know? So, so I'd like to think, you know, that that alone kind of justifies that we got it. Right? 4 So is the idea that it's easier to relate to humanoid aliens? Like the more humanist they look, there's more room for the actor to perform. There's more room for the audience to sort of identify with them. NEILL: That's the principle you get. I get into this discussion a lot because you go into meetings where basically you get directors, who've not shot with people in rubber costumes basically going right. If I haven't got eyes, I haven't got a mountain. I haven't got, you know, the, the, those humanoid features, those standards are, how can I tell a story? So that's a constant kind of battle. Sometimes is the, the, there is often a push to make them as human order as possible, but I'm always kind of pulling the other way.