Osgood Perkins film Longlegs was released last summer to huge box office numbers and became a social media sensation with Neon’s brilliant marketing campaign. It is the story of an FBI agent tracking down a serial killer in the 90’s. Maika Monroe is great as the FBI agent, Alicia Witt is excellent as her mother, and the incredible and unpredictable Nicolas Cage is the title character, who is shrouded in secrecy. His look was expertly crafted by special makeup effects designer Werner Pretorius who recently spoke with Immersive via Zoom about Cage’s transformation into this new horror icon.
[This conversation has been edited for clarity and length]
Tell me about how you first got involved with this project.
When I first read the script for Longlegs, I couldn’t put it down; it was disturbing and weird. I met with director Oz Perkins, and he ran me through what he wanted the characters to be and his vision. We went off and designed a couple of characters and the dolls.
We didn’t have a lead for the show until quite late into, I think they’d already started principal photography before they finally nailed that down. They had some people on the wishlist, but before Nic Cage came on board,
Let’s talk about Nic Cage.
He was awesome, I enjoyed his company. I enjoyed finding the character with him. He was very, very hands-on, and very involved in the project.
He genuinely likes genre films too.
He just wanted us to keep going with the makeup. He helped us find his lifecast so we could start the makeup. It’s an impression of the actor, and that’s what we used to sculpt on top of and find the character, and then those things ultimately become the makeup, the prosthetic.
Where did the design come from? Did you do the design?
I did the designs. It was a collaboration between Oz and me. Ultimately we decided that it was a botched plastic surgery. He was this old rocker guy that just kind of fell on hard times. Then became this character Longlegs where he was making these dolls and he was obsessed with the devil, totally obsessed.
Loves the band T. Rex…
He loved T. Rex, and he’s very much based on that Marc Bolan vibe… The hair was very, the first few versions of the design, he had T-Rex hair full on. Then eventually we went to the lighter wig because his face became paler. All sorts of things like that. We found the character in a different wig.
How many different variations were there?
I designed four of them. Small changes in some of them, but the makeup, started as plastic surgery gone wrong, then a burn victim from making these dolls. Maybe at some point, he burned himself and it was a bit more extreme. And Oz was like, no that’s grotesque. That’s not a character.
So we found some inspiration from the plastic surgery Cat Lady (Jocelyn Wildenstein). And then at the end, Nic helped me find that final character, with Oz. It was a collaboration of us trying on certain things on him, certain noses, and certain appliances.
How many parts were there?
A nine-piece makeup, and we whittled it down to about seven pieces. Every day. It was a fresh set that had to get applied because at the end of the night when you remove it, it gets destroyed. I had a specific on-set team that handled that. I was in the shop and we were producing the pieces, I was there for the initial application, and then my team took over and I was in the shops overseeing the running of the pieces, so we had consistency every day.
How many hours would he be in the chair? Every day?
I think initially, the first day we were there, it took about five hours to find the character, but we were putting noses on, taking them off, and it was just like experimental testing.
Different noses. How many noses would you have?
There were three different noses. And then ultimately Nic Cage is like The Phantom of the Opera. He wanted to be like Lon Cheney.
That’s beautiful. ‘The Man of a Thousand Faces’, much respect.
Nic Cage is a huge movie buff, so he knew exactly where he wanted to go with things. So we tried three noses. I was pushing for more of a classic plastic surgery nose, the smaller one, and I got voted out. He and the director were like, we tried it and they were right. It didn’t look as good as the final nose.
And what was it like working with Oz?
I’ve worked with him subsequently since Longlegs. He’s an easygoing director. He’s an amazing storyteller. So he’ll present you with his ideas. Then I would say the biggest compliment I can give him is that he just lets you do your thing. It’s not that he’s hands-off, but he lets you be creative and then when you come back, he feeds off that creativity and he presents you with his spin.
Every director is different. I’ve heard this kind of comment about Clint Eastwood who is famously hands-off and says… I hired so-and-so because I know he knows how to do his job…
What kind of challenges were there on this project? Did any of the stuff come off? Did his nose come off mid-scene?
Yes, of course.
Do you have to eat while wearing makeup?
You do. We have to feed you sometimes, depending on the makeup. We have to try and preserve the edges as best we can. Once they get greased up, there’s no gluing them back down. They just lift up during the day because just the natural process of being hot in there and sweating.
And everyone thinks actors have it easy. Any favorite moments in the film where you think, oh wow, that came off well? I mean, there’s the scene when he starts banging his head into the table…
It was awesome for that scene. We had Nic Cage and his normal makeup. Then he went off to the trailer and we applied smashed face makeup. Then it was intercut between him just doing this a couple of times, coming back to Maika Monroe and then back to him where he is in the smashed face makeup.
Then we had a dummy head for a couple of shots where the face kind of caves in. The dummy hit was designed to have several smashes and with every smash it’s phased with cave in more in the final cut. It’s a little bit more like one smash, and then he comes back up, and then there was makeup with a green screen nose to remove his nose digitally. Then we had the flapping nose. There was a bit of a nose flap and the cuts on the face and the smashing kind of skull. So it was all practical except for the removal of the actual tip of the nose.
Interesting. Let’s talk about the dolls…
For the dolls, we did some digital scans of the actors. Then on the computer, we basically turned them into dolls, separated the heads, and simplified their faces. Then those were produced in a hard resin essentially. We’ll make a mold of it, pour it up in clay, and I’ll have one of the artists just mess with it or finish it off or change it just because I feel like the machines take away the artistry and when we come back to it, it comes through in the final product.
The dolls were all animatronic as well. They had animatronic heads that could move and they could blink. The eyes were a real challenge because they were real old-school dolls. It’s like the one side is the lid and the other side is the eye. So to find that middle ground of it being able to be closed and open was, oh man, I can’t tell you how much work that was. It seems so simple.
Longlegs is the highest-grossing film in Neon’s history, and it is a very well-liked movie. I really liked it. What’s it like being on the other end of this now? I saw a lot of people did Longlegs as a Halloween costume…
Yeah, it’s surreal for me. I never expected that it, it is quite amazing. I remember one of the producers sent me a text message, “You’re in this world now.” It was someone doing Longlegs on TikTok, and I was like, I dunno what to say about that. That’s so weird. I saw lots of people do the thing he does with his hands. Longlegs is an icon now.
Longlegs is available to stream on VOD.
