Bob Bottin worked on the special effects and makeup for the film and, to put it mildly, the man was no slouch. Some of his other credits include “RoboCop,” “Total Recall,” “Seven,” and even served as an uncredited assistant makeup artist on “Star Wars.” This to say, Bottin knows what he’s doing. But with “The Thing,” he truly pushed his limits to help bring Carpenter’s vision to life. In a behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of the film, Bottin revealed just how hard he worked.
“I was so, you know, wanting this stuff to come out so great, I actually lived at Universal for a year and five weeks without taking a day off. I worked, you know, seven days a week, never took a day off. I was there night and day, I’d sleep on the sets, and you know, Carpenter would come in, ‘Oh where’s Rob,’ ‘Oh, you know, he’s in the locker room, or he’s in the lab.’ And then he’d wake me up, ‘Hey, you know we’ve got to shoot this thing,’ or whatever. And I ended up working so hard that I ended up in the hospital. At the end of the show John looked at me he said, ‘You don’t look well.’ He goes, ‘Someone take this guy to the hospital.’ But since then I’ve wised up and it’s – I don’t do that anymore.”
Indeed, Bottin worked himself so ragged that he ended up taking a little trip to the hospital once the work was done. Though it’s pretty impressive that the man got all the way through the shoot before Carpenter had to be the one to tell him to go seek some help. If that isn’t dedication, I simply don’t know what is.
