‘Crimes of the Future’: Ear Man Needed 36 Prosthetic Pieces

08.06.2022 - 00:33 / variety.com

Jazz Tangcay Artisans EditorOne of the most talked-about moments in David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future” is the Ear Man. The character performs in an underground performance art show with his eyes and mouth sewn shut and his entire body covered in ears.Alexandra Anger and Monica Pavez were the prosthetics co-designers behind the magic in putting 36 prosthetics pieces together on Tassos Karahalios, who played Klinek.Anger explains that early discussions with Cronenberg had the character with two additional ears behind his real ears.

“But then while we were in Greece, David had an epiphany and decided that he wanted ears all over his body,” says Anger.The ears were made from silicone prosthetics. Anger says, “It became a discussion of how many ears.

We would send it to him and he’d say, ‘Let’s try a few more. It kept going and going until it became, ‘However many you can get on him.'” Cronenberg’s latest feature is about Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), who suffers from a disease called “Accelerated Evolution Syndrome” which causes unusual organs to grow inside his body.

His partner (Léa Seydoux) surgically removes them in front of a live audience.Pavez reveals the Ear Man/Clinic sequence was one of her favorite makeup scenes. “It was most involved for what we did in terms of makeup, but we also shot that on the final day.

Pavez adds, “Visually, it was very impactful.”One key sequence during the art show is the autopsy on Brecken, played by Sozos Sotiris, the young child who dies early in the film. For that sequence, they made two artificial bodies.Says Anger, “We were trying to build as much in our shop in Toronto as we could before we flew over to Greece because those big builds are complicated.”When it came to in