Adventures in the Skin Trade
How many people can say they've been responsible for giving Xena a black eye? Or turning Gabrielle into one of the bacchae? Or transforming Callisto from immortal to demon to angel, all within the space of one episode? It's all in a day's work for Francia Smeets, Make-up and Hair Supervisor on Xena: Warrior Princess for five seasons. Kate Barker finds out just what is involved...
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 12
Francia Smeets has been in the make-up business for over 20 years. Her career began in 1980 when the New Zealand film industry as a whole was still quite new. With basic make-up and beauty industry training behind her, Smeets began working with international make-up artists on small co-productions with English and German film companies. Since then, her credits have included the academy award-winning feature film The Piano and the Anthony Hopkins/Mel Gibson adventure The Bounty, as well as the mini-series adaptation of horror writer Stephen King’s The Tommy-Knockers.
She has been with Pacific Renaissance since its first Hercules telemovie, Hercules and the Amazon Women, in 1993, and only left her position on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys in 1995 to take up her role with Xena: Warrior Princess. At the time of this interview, Xena’s fifth season had wrapped and Smeets was about to leave the studio to move onto other projects, with Jane O'Kane stepping into her shoes for the sixth season, but she’s suitably proud of the seven years she has spent with Renaissance Pictures. “I’ve been here since day one,” she confirms with a smile. “I’m an old-timer!”
While working on Hercules, Smeets was the make-up artist for Lucy Lawless when she appeared in her guest roles as Xena. When Xena became a fully-fledged series in its own right, she found that doing make-up for Lawless while running the entire make-up department was a little too much to handle. These days, Smeets deals with the conceptual organisational and ‘prepping’ aspects, and leaves the actual day-to-day application to the rest of the team.
The lead actors each have their own personal make-up artist: Vanessa Hurley is now the make-up artist for Lawless, and Barbie Cope for Renee O'Connor. There are also two other Main Unit artists - Linda Hal-Cooper and Debbie Watson - who alternate between any guest performers on a particular episode. In a nutshell, says Smeets. “There are five |make-up] people on Main Unit, two on Second Unit and additional casual people or day-to-day basis.”
That seems pretty straightforward and not a lot of work, until you realise just how much is involved in a make-up artist’s day. First, there’s the basic make up for the lead actors, which takes a fair amount of time in itself. “The women usually take 45 minutes to an hour,” says Smeets. “The guys - depending what sort of character they are and whether they need any special effects - take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour as well. It’s very dependent on what look is required for that character.”
It’s not exactly a nine-to-five job, either. “If the crew want the [actors] out on set at 7am, which is crew call, then our timings are taken back from that,” Smeets reveals. “If we had several people required by 7am, then we’d be really busy until got them all done. So we get in more helpers if we got a lot of extras. Sometimes we might start at 5.30am, sometimes we might start at 6am.”
So is it just a matter of arriving early enough to do your job, then leaving an hour later? Not with different scenes filming at different times and that make-up being baked by hot lights and damaged by the intense action. “Sometimes the producers call all the actors at different times of the day,” Smeets explains. “Quite often some actors may be called after lunch, for example, if they’re in a scene that’s at the other end of the day.”
The make-up artist is also needed on set to maintain and refresh the make-up between shots and to make sure the actors are looking their best for each take. “If it's a warm day and people are hot and sweaty, we’re constantly busy on set,” Smeets says. “If there's something that keeps rubbing off like a wound, or something that needs re-applying, we do it.
“We have a standard 12-hour day of shooting and our calls are usually an hour or so before that, so our days are quite often 14 hours long. Our department will be there all day.”
Even when you’re working a 14-hour day, time can be the greatest enemy. At the organisational level, Smeets often has to deal with overseeing the make-up on three different episodes at once: the episode currently being filmed, the Second Unit shots for the previous episode, and prepping for the next episode on the schedule.
And it’s a pretty fast turnaround between the design of a character's make-up arriving to actually completing the finished product. “Most guest actors don’t arrive until a few days before they start filming,” Smeets explains. “You have a vague idea of the look when you read the script, which would be eight days prior to the shooting date. From that point on, you’re working towards completing the look. Most of it happens when you first see the person who’s playing that character, and often that’s just a few days prior to the shoot starting. It’s a fairly fast process from that point!”
It all seems a little hectic, especially when the look of a character or characters in one episode may be literally half a world away from the look in the episode before. However, the conditions, camaraderie and creativity all serve to render the make-up department of Xena a fun and rewarding place to be. There’s something to be said for being involved in the creation of such weird and wonderful looks then seeing them transform an actor into a character whose species may not even exist.
Smeets reveals the Pacific Renaissance make-up department make their own special adjustments which give Xena a very exclusive look of its own. “We’ve invented quite a lot of our own products,” she explains, “for colour and texture and consistency. We have a really good supply shop here in Auckland called Facemakers, where we buy a lot of our products. We also buy stuff from overseas.”
It's rather unnerving standing in the middle of a make-up room that looks something like a science lab in a horror movie. Of course, there’s a perfectly rational explanation for this, as Smeets explains. “This used to be a laboratory, so that’s why there are a lot of sinks here. It’s really fantastic because we can work in all these different areas and make a big mess!”
Of course, there is more to the make-up department than just facial alterations. For instance, there’s the wig section, which has a variety of wigs made up of both synthetic and human hair. Most of the wigs get recycled and reused for different characters, unless that particular character may be likely to come back, in which case their wigs are kept under lock and key until such time as they’re required again.
There are standard synthetic wigs that may or may not require additions such as plaits woven into them, and this process can often take quite a while.
“It takes a tremendously long time to do all the hand-woven work,” Smeets admits. “It takes quite a few hours just to build a wig.” Smeets is in fact referring specifically to a collection of Egyptian wigs, used for episodes of both Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, set amid feuding Egyptian royalty. “The initial wig was made a long time ago,” she says, “and it took me about three days to make it! I had to make three of them because of the doubles. But then I got better at it; we got the character of Cleopatra back, and then Xena went into disguise as Cleopatra [in Antony and Cleopatra] as well, so we had to have lots of doubles and wigs.”
Then there are the human-hair wigs, used for ‘special’ characters and for the leads. “If you're putting on a three-quarter wig and just using the front of your own hair, then that’s fine. In fact we do that a lot. But we do lots of extensions, and if we’re blending fake hair into someone’s real hair, then we use human hair because blending with synthetics doesn’t really work.”
So how about the highlights - not in the hair, but of the series? “There have been a number of highlights throughout the last five years of Xena,” says Smeets. “I liked the India episodes and The Debt, where we had such a particular look. That's an example of when you’re creating something really different; those are the episodes that stand out.”
So where do all these different looks come from? “It’s usually a collaborative process,” Smeets explains. “It comes from upstairs, from the producers; it comes from the costume department; it comes from me and it comes from the actors. Everybody has these great ideas, and it’s just a blending of all those ideas with a common theme at the end. We’re all working towards that common character goal. We put it all together and it all goes into the mix and comes out somehow. We all have our own input, which is really great.”
Smeets has nothing but gratitude and praise for her colleagues, both in her own departments and amongst the cast and crew. “We’ve developed such a good system now, having done it for so long,” she remarks. "Everyone’s refined their skills. We like to be as efficient as we can, for the actors’ sake as well as our own!”
This efficiency stretches to doing the work which might in other studios fall to another department, and Smeets admits that everyone is always happy to pitch in on occasions when a very specific look is required, although time constraints sometimes mean that some of the work has to be farmed out to another company. “Quite often we don’t have the time to be able to do the prosthetics,” she says, citing a particular example. “That’s then done by the people from KNB EFX Group.”
But for the dramatic fifth season opener Fallen Angel, everybody had the chance to be a part of the creation. “With Fallen Angel” says Smeets, “we put some great make-ups on. The team had a really good time with it - we actually all got involved with the whole look - which was really fun. It was quite different for us, because a lot of our ‘own’ characters were in prosthetics and we just needed so many people. So we all got in there. We were all there at 5am, sticking on prosthetics, gluing on bits of face and painting them up. It was a really great episode for our team.”
As is often the case when you’re involved in make-up, providing the look for the constantly changing aspects of Xena and her colleagues can be a lot of hard work, but also immensely satisfying and frequently a lot of fun.
Smeets sums it up nicely in one short sentence. “It is difficult, but when you look back and see the result of all that effort, it is also very rewarding.”
SIDEBAR: Seeing Red
According to Smeets, one of the most fun parts of the make-up department’s job is creating the most stomach-churning things we see on screen: the blood and gore…
“Things like dirt, blood and various skin gels we make ourselves,” Smeets explains. “It's expensive to buy a lot of these products, and many of the special effects products are only available from overseas anyway, so we've become pretty good at making up lots of blood and things like that in bulk.
“We've developed a whole series of different textures of blood for different effects,” she continues. Further research uncovers just a small selection of the blood types that Smeets and the team have created: normal, thin, congealed, congealed with clots, gelatine, scab and edible.
Sounding somewhat like a mad scientist, Smeets tosses out an example of just one situation where a certain blood texture would be used. “We once made a gum-blood which we put some spirit gum into,” she remembers, “so that it was really, really sticky. It's semi-dry, so if you put a wound on with it, it will stay there all day. We use that a lot on extras so that it isn't a constant case of having to repair wounds all the time. When we have really big war-and-wounding episodes, with extras getting slashed and cut and wounded with swords all the time, we can make our wounds fairly resilient so they stay on very well.”