Exclusive: Artist Dan Ouellette Discusses Splice and Why to Always Get It in Writing
Dan Ouellette designed the creatures in Splice — thin, alien, and beautiful, evolving — forged from thematic obsessions present in Ouellette’s work even before the film ever went into development. Director Vincenzo Natali hired Ouellette based on these themes to drive the look and feel of Splice’s antagonists, much like Dan O’Bannon and Ridley Scott utilized H.R. Giger’s artwork as the template for their monster as well as part of the production design in Alien. But unlike Giger, Dan Ouellette will never be (properly) credited for his creation.
As Splice was greenlit, Dan was left behind. His creature, now fatherless, became real on screen without him.
The following interview contains Dan’s side of the story. We are now making every effort that we can to get the other side’s point of view. Let this tale be a lesson to all those working in film or any creative endeavor:
Always get it in writing.
And now let me introduce you to Dan Ouellette, artist and monster-maker.
Heather Buckley: How long have you been an artist?
Dan Ouellette: I began drawing as a child and simply kept drawing. At nine, I got a Super-8 camera and also began making movies. I’ve been doing both since childhood.
HB: How would you describe your subject?
DO: They’re pretty much psychosexual nightmares. Most of them explore bodily identity, androgyny, and our problematic mind/body split, human beings turned inside-out, both psychologically and physically.
I was strongly influenced by Egon Schiele’s art. As a child I looked at album cover art as well as being fascinated with M.C. Escher’s mind-bending work. Later I saw Ernst Fuch’s art and eventually got to H.R. Giger’s.
HB: When did you first meet Vincenzo Natali?
DO: We met in Toronto in early 2000. I was part of an initial roundtable brainstorming for Splice to develop creature ideas alongside biologists, EFX make-up artists, and other artists.
HB: Where you the only artist asked to participate in this phase of the project?
DO: Well, everyone working at the roundtable was an artist of one sort or another in various disciplines, like biology or EFX. We all did drawings. I seem to recall there were about five people all together.
HB: Do you remember their names?
DO: I don’t recall them. It was ten years ago and only lasted a week. I’d have to dig out some old files. It wasn’t a very social event since we all just sat around and did drawings or talked about the script; it was work.
HB: Was he familiar with your work?
DO: He discovered my art in a book called ‘Bio-Mannerism’ published by a Japanese company. It is an anthology art book with my drawings alongside the paintings of H.R. Giger and Beksinski among others. After finding this book, he tracked me down working as Production Designer on a horror film in Michigan called Chasing Sleep.
HB: When did you start working with Natali on Splice?
DO: I started working in those brainstorming sessions, which lasted a week. Many ideas that eventually became the main creature in Splice started there. After the roundtable there was a lull, and I returned to NYC. Then Vincenzo contacted me to become the sole creature designer from the roundtable group to work with him on developing creature ideas further.
HB: Did you and Natali share ideas, or was authorship left solely to you when it came to the creature design?
DO: That’s a tricky question. I brought many ideas with me before Vincenzo and I began our work. I love creatures, and obviously Giger’s Alien had a huge impact on me. In other words, many of the creature concepts had already existed in my fine art drawings, and I carried them over into the needs of the Splice story. The story had specific actions that required particular anatomical attributes so we had to solve those.
Generally he dictated his concerns, and I tried to address them on paper. I can’t remember very many conceptual ideas that he actually contributed — for instance, leg anatomy or head shapes or such. He admitted himself that his drawing ability was not well suited for the work, having done mostly cartoon type drawing early in his career versus the more realistic type of drawing I learned.
Vincenzo would kind of redraw my designs in his own hand. So mostly it was him reacting to my drawings and me reworking the ideas accordingly. Often we’d have one specific element that we discussed the logic of or reasons for, and I would go play around with that particular element. Also I worked in NYC for the duration of the design work while he was in Toronto so our conversations were mostly by phone and email. He did visit NYC for a week or so in the middle of my ten weeks of work.
HB: Did you like working with Natali as a collaborator?
DO: I got along with Vincenzo at the time, although it pains me now to admit that. We had many discussions about movies and monsters and really both wanted to make something unique and new. We did disagree about specific things, but I always deferred to him since he was the director and my design career has trained me to respect his position. The debating is fun, but it is important for there to be a final say in the process.
In retrospect I think I also gave him more allowance being a Canadian. I trusted him and believed that our work would become a movie and I would be there to enjoy the end result. I genuinely thought that I didn’t need to be wary of the lies and corruption normally associated with the Los Angeles movie business mindset. I had a false notion, since my wife is Canadian and I had up until then only good experiences working on jobs in Toronto, that Vincenzo would be naturally fair and generous. He turned out to be neither.
I’ve done many movies in my career as a Production Designer, and in any film work there is the element of trust. The more wary you are of a person you are sharing your ideas with, the less likely they will want to work with you. There needs to be a positive creative mood, and wariness doesn’t help very much. So you are forced to trust that your contribution will be respected, if you plan to collaborate with others in the business. It’s a risk.
We had numerous discussions about the fact that Giger got about one million dollars or so for his creature design on a nineteen-million-dollar movie in 1979 (Alien), and while I am nowhere near Giger in terms of financial clout, Vincenzo made it quite clear that he was not going to abuse me. I was making peanuts by comparison, of course, but I realized this was only development money and therefore I was consenting. But I made sure he realized that these ideas were creative inventions which I had been developing in various ways throughout my drawing life and that they were very dear to me. I was sharing concepts I had nurtured quite carefully and devoted enormous time and energy to over the years. He made me feel that this contribution would be respected. It was not.
HB: After the creature design was locked, then what happened?
DO: Serendipity, who held the script option, took the project to Alliance Atlantis, and I guess it didn’t go the way someone wanted it to go or something because Vincenzo apparently didn’t renew his script option with Serendipity. I had to get my lawyer, who was working gratis for me, to send another lawyer to the Serendipity office to retrieve my original drawings. This is a mistake I’ll never make again. The only thing anyone should have had were reproductions of the creature design art as they were not returning my actual drawings, of which I still retained legal ownership. Eventually I got them back after nearly a year of struggle and angry emails. Serendipity claimed they were still developing a project for which they no longer held any option.
Vincenzo had left a bit angry with them as I recall, so we were still friends at that time and both still strongly hoping that Splice would get made eventually. With this in mind, Vincenzo moved to Los Angeles, taking the development design ideas with him. I continued to draw, including a large format drawing entitled The Mewler, which was a version of the Splice infant, with biological attributes I preferred and had fought with Vincenzo to include in our designs.
In February, 2002, he asked my permission to show this new drawing, the development drawings, as well as some early personal drawings which preceded the whole process but which had become the basis for our designs, in a book he was printing (two of them are below with The Mewler on the right). Legally, I now realize, he had no real right to draw up a contract between us regarding the design work I’d done at Serendipity, unless he had bought the rights to the development work paid for by Serendipity. This was eventually done after Splice was greenlit in 2007. Our contract clauses included, among other things, the requirement that he engage me as Creature Designer if the film got greenlit, as well as a fee and producer credit. I agreed. I think because I had fought Serendipity so much, I wasn’t in the mood to fight over details in this simple contract with Vincenzo. Basically, I was still on his side.
He, no doubt, showed this book around Hollywood in the intervening years and eventually must have shown the images to Guillermo del Toro, who greenlit the production apparently. I heard about it online and contacted Vincenzo. This is when the shit hit the fan as they say.
HB: What happened after that?
DO: Vincenzo invited me to Toronto to “complete the creature design.” He showed me some 3D work done by a company in Los Angeles and based on the development work we had done. He really seemed to want me to come up and join them. But when his producer Steve Hoban offered me ten days of work at a daily rate which was half of what I make as a Production Designer, I was offended.
Basically I’d be finishing my designs for a greenlit movie, and they wanted me to work for the same rate I’d worked for initially, basically a prop person rate and for only ten days. From my perspective, I’d helped him get this project off the ground. Sure, he was the director with a resume and a script, but it certainly didn’t hurt him to have the designs I’d made; quite the opposite I feel sure. I told them via my lawyer that I needed something more.
HB: Why did you work through your lawyer and not try to negotiate in person?
DO: Well, “in person” would not have been possible being in two separate cities. I had my lawyer talk to them because I have no agent and I tend to cave in easily on negotiations for jobs when I really want them. That’s why you have an agent basically. And I definitely wanted to do this gig with Vincenzo. When I get gigs through my agent as a Production Designer, my agent negotiates the deals. It’s basic game-play really. Pretty much any crew whose deals are not standard rates are negotiated by agents: DP, Production Designer, Actors, etc. The logic is that if the agent, or in this case my lawyer, plays hard ball and conversations get testy, it isn’t me who has said the actual words, and once the gig starts, there are no hard feelings as a result.
The negotiations were almost nonexistent as it was. Vincenzo called me and told me they had no money. I had heard this line before; I’ve been around the block. But I even told him it wasn’t money I wanted per se, but they needed to offer me something else — art book rights, a percentage point, something. I asked him to talk to his producer. The whole time my airline was being booked and arrangements were being made for me to leave for Toronto. They dragged their feet as the flight date approached and at the very last moment offered me round-trip tickets to the movie’s premiere wherever that was going to be. If I’d have agreed to this, I’d have had a ticket to Sundance.
They basically stopped talking to us at that point. My scheduled flight date came and went. My lawyer asked if they had acquired the rights to my designs from Serendipity. She was angered by their lack of response and couldn’t get producer Steve Hoban on the line ever. She only managed to speak with his receptionist apparently, who didn’t offer anything. Finally, with little recourse, in order to get their attention, we sent them a Cease and Desist letter unless they could prove they had acquired the creature design rights. They ignored it.
My lawyer told me that even if they had acquired the rights to my designs, they would need to stand by the initial Serendipity contract. That contract stated that I receive a title credit as “Creature Designed By” so if nothing else, I’d come away with a good credit. The final straw came when I spoke to Vincenzo during pre-production. I felt that I should try to mend things a bit with him so I called him. When I mentioned my title credit, however, he informed me I would have received this credit only if I’d have gone up to Toronto. I was now in the tail credits with two other designers. I was pretty upset by this. The one remaining thing I stood to gain was now gone.
After the film was finished, my lawyer made an inquiry, contacting their film production lawyer and asking what contract they had regarding my design work to see if, in fact, they had one at all. After a lengthy delay, he sent a response saying that having a contract which granted them the creature design rights was irrelevant because none of my design ideas are retained in the final film.
This is, of course, a blatant lie. They were basically drawing a line in the sand, forcing us to prove something about the creature designs while not having any access to the film itself in order to prove or disprove their statement. But from movie stills leaked online, I could clearly identify design aspects that existed in my drawings I’d done from even before I was hired by Serendipity.
The irony of all this was that I could not afford a litigator to pursue it further, and my lawyer’s generosity, working for me this whole time for no money, was finally at an end.
Vincenzo sent one final email that was, as my close friend Scooter McCrae puts it, “the least apologetic apology ever.” My response basically indicated to him that he had really let me down. That, to the best of my knowledge, he really hadn’t fought for me. Once the film was greenlit, he had what he wanted.
HB: Any last thoughts on what was learned in the process or what you would do next time?
DO: I think the biggest lesson I learned was about contracts. Contracts don’t really amount to anything because any powerful lawyer can contest the wording in a contract or erect barriers by reading between the lines no matter how well written it may be. The real issue is whether you will actually have the cash to be able to hire a lawyer to fight for you, should it come down to that. Production companies have money and they have very good lawyers who know the wording in entertainment contracts inside and out. It isn’t about whether your contract is good or bad; it is about whether you will be able to fight for your contract, using your own money, once it is in dispute.
There’s a real genuine enthusiasm as a project is beginning, and it is very hard to scrutinize how money, credits, and verbal promises are going to end up between you and a production company or a director. You don’t want to think about what could go wrong or whether the friendly director sitting across the table from you is two-faced or not. It kind of takes the fun out of it.
So you start to wonder, who can you trust? I trusted Vincenzo. It seems to me that it fell on his shoulders to broker a deal. I understand that they may have felt I deserved nothing more than what they offered me. But when I disagreed with their assessment, it become a situation whereby Vincenzo needed to decide how important this was to him personally that I remain on his project. He was the only person on their end who could have opened the situation up by discussing it with producer Steve Hoban. They probably even did discuss it. And I’m sure he must have made a choice at that point. Whether he took a moment to consider all his promises, recall our extensive conversations and our contracts, and/or realize how much of my creative work went into getting his movie off the ground is anyone’s guess.
Although I cannot compare my design skill to Giger’s, his situation after winning his Oscar for Alien does come to mind. I’m sure 20th Century Fox had no legal obligation to bring Giger on board once James Cameron was greenlit to make Aliens. The letter Mr. Cameron wrote to Giger, well after the film had been made, excusing his total lack of response to Giger’s requests in pre-production (that letter is viewable on Giger’s site here) is a wonderful example of a director’s capacity to justify his self-serving actions.
I have no doubt he just didn’t want to face the hassle of negotiating with Giger’s agent even while he certainly was in Giger’s debt, at least in part, for his subsequent career success with the Alien sequel, resting on the laurels of perhaps one of the greatest monsters in movie history. Whether 20th Century Fox owned his designs or not, let’s face it: It was still Giger’s baby. It’s not about whether it was legal or not; it is about whether it was fair and respectful.
Our thanks to Dan Ouellette for taking the time to speak with us. Click here to see the full gallery of images Dan provided to accompany this interview. And for comparison’s sake, be sure to visit our Splice photo gallery as well.
For more on Dan and his work, see the official Dan Ouellette website.
– Heather Buckley
Categorized:News
