EXCLUSIVE: ComicBookMovie Sits Down With STAR TREK BEYOND Makeup Artist Joel Harlow

Joel Harlow: Thank you, haha, that's going way back. Oh man.

Joel: Nah, I was one of many on that movie, I was working for someone else, so I think I sculpted a sword or something and then some helmet stuff. I can't remember exactly, but it wasn't as sort of interesting as you might think. There were some interesting sculptures, that was back when I was just sculpting.

Joel: Well, when I started, there were no - I mean now, you can find makeup schools anywhere - but when I started, there weren't any, so I knew that I wanted to do something with it. I had seen the original King Kong, the black-and-white King Kong, with my father and I knew that I wanted to do something where I could create characters like that, so since there were no makeup schools, makeup classes, I decided to go into animation, so I moved to New York City and I went to school for animation out there.

Eventually found like a weekend class in Times Square where they were teaching makeup, so I did that and a buddy of mine landed a low, low, low-budget film down in Florida and I went down there and I build like seven characters, seven zombie-like characters for like a thousand dollars and then I moved out to Los Angeles and started shopping my small portfolio around and eventually landed a job at Steve Johnson's company and gradually went from one shop to another until ultimately I got into the union where I was applying makeups that other people were building wheras before, since I wasn't union, I was building makeups and sending them to set and other people were applying them. I eventually got a place in my career where I was able to build and apply makeup, so I combined two things that I loved.

Joel: Yeah, I mean it can be anything really. It all depends on the project. For this one particularly, Star Trek Beyond, I have some designers that I work with, so I brought them on and we all just started designing, two-dimensionally, three-dimensionally, traditional, computer, and presenting images to Justin Lin and once you started thinking about aliens, different alien characters, and scaling them up to full-size practical makeup and practical animatronics.

I've been on projects in the past where I've been given designs and we do our best to translate them, but designs always change from what you see on the screen or on paper to a full-size movie with practical makeup. There's always a change that happens, because you're then translating something into the real world. In the computer or on the page, you can control the lighting, you're not going to see any of the potential problems because you are presenting an image of what you want whereas when you translate into a makeup, you do your best to maintain that character and the aesthetic of that character, but you're at the mercy of the lighting, you're at the mercy of all the practical, real-world elements that affect what you see. 

Joel: No, not at all. I mean even though I wasn't available for Star Trek: Into Darkness, it doesn't mean that I didn't see the film and that I'm not a fan of Star Trek. It doesn't take much if you're a fan of the material to reacquaint yourself with it because you never really distance yourself from it and certainly the first Star Trek is very dear to my heart, it was a high watermark for me in my career, but I had a lot of really talented artists on this film that loved Star Trek just as much as I did, so we were all kind of working toward the same goal and there is an aesthetic to Star Trek that if you're not careful, you can deviate too far from that. It still pays to pull in elements from outside that aesthetic, but you still want to remain true to the Star Trek universe, which is quite different from other sci-fi genre universes. Sort of what I feel about the Star Trek universes as far as makeup and makeup effects go is that it's very makeup driven as opposed to animatronics or puppet drivel, so a lot of those characters they should be makeups, they should be worn by performers and the performers should drive the character as opposed to blue-screen and that kind of stuff. 

Joel: Well, no, I mean certainly when you're filling out the background with characters that aren't going to be featured, you can go a little farther as far as - I don't want to say the impracticality of the makeups - but, just the silhouettes of the makeups whereas when you're dealing with main characters, you really have to keep that performance at the forefront of your design process because you don't want to lose that behind inches of makeup. Certainly we spend more time on the featured characters than the background characters, but that's not to say the background characters were quick-and-easy, they were very time-consuming in their own rights, but there is a little more freedom with them I think because there were so many of them and they didn't need to perform like the heroes in makeups did.

Joel: Well, I mean it's a marriage. I try to have a good working relationship with the visual effects supervisors  and the visual effects company because ultimately, what you're doing is that you're both there to, when it comes to something like this, create a character. It's not us doing the makeup or them doing the character in a computer, it's us working in tandem to create a character and say that character is supposed to have four arms, it's probably going to be easier for them to add arms in the computer versus us to add arms in a practical arms set makeup because then you're dealing with the ramifications of that. And makeup is an additive process, so if you're alien character is going to have extremely thin bifurcated arms, you're not going to be able to do that without the help of the computer graphics department who can take some green screen material and put that on the arms and then replace that with the backgrounds. I think we're both working toward the same goal when it comes to creating characters like this, we certainly try to do as much of it in camera as possible and on this one that was a vast amount and then whatever we can't do, they pickup the baton and take it across the finish line.

Joel: No, no, there's no reason for that other than I just didn't get the call. *Laughs* But, I just did Logan, the last Wolverine movie, and I'm starting Black Panther with Ryan Coogler pretty soon, so I guess I'm knee deep in superhero films for the next year.

Joel: You try to make it as comfortable for them as possible and I've done quite a bit of work with Johnny Depp and he's a fan of makeup, so he makes it very easy, it's very collaborative. When we're doing makeup, when we're creating a character, he's just as much involved as I am, so he knows when he's suggesting should he do a prosthetic nose, should he do a prosthetic forehead, whatever it is, he knows what's coming, he knows about those hours in the chair are coming and he's not just okay with it, he's enthusiastic about it cause I think he uses makeup to help him achieve a character just as much as I do.

Joel: I can't say anything! *Laughs* I can really say nothing, I'm sorry. 

Joel: Oh, it was great, a really fun time. I think you're in for a real treat when it hits theaters.

Plus, here's a awesome new Mondo poster:

After stopping off at Starbase Earhart, a remote outpost on the fringes of Federation space, the USS Enterprise, halfway into their five-year mission, is destroyed by a powerful, unstoppable wave of unknown aliens. With the crew stranded on a unknown planet and with no apparent means of rescue, they find themselves in conflict with a new ruthless enemy who has a well-earned hatred of the Federation and what it stands for.