|
For the outfit of Charles Dance, who plays the killer Mr. Benedict, it was not only done with a white linen suit and a pistol. The make-up artist's special "eye-catching" equipment was the left eye. McTiernan wanted the villain show his different moods by wearing glass-eyes. When Mr. Benedict wishes Slater a nice day, he takes off his sun glasses und instead of the iris in his left eye one sees a 'smiley face' as it is known from the 70s.
Jeff Dawn, the chief make-up artist, remembers: "There is so little space in the eye, that everything has to be built much tinier than you can imagine. We drew a hair-like smiley face on the lens, which appears on the movie screen so much bigger." Simple draws and lines are easier to make, like the concentric circles of a target. In the movie you can see more than a dozen different lenses. Some of them staggered even the director. "Charles had great fun by presenting McTiernan a new eye he had not known before", Dawn laughs. "He involved McTiernan in a talk and took off the sun glasses like purely accidental. Mostly the director reacted with: 'Wow! Looks great. We take this one!'" |
"I've got very sensitive eyes", Dance explains, "And to put it mildly, the idea of filling up one eye with different plastics gave me the creeps." Richard Snell developed a whole collection of soft contact lenses, Dance could wear over a long time. If the actor didn't need the lenses, Snell kept them in tiny bottles like valuable laboratory specimen.