Another great interview by the X-Files Fan Retrospective documentary team, this time with Ken Hawryliw, props master for seasons 1-5. This is relatively fresh off another detailed interview with him and he still has many stories to tell.
Notes below [with some comments]:
- He hit it off very well with Chris Carter, he knew all about the sources for the mythology/conspiracy and the UFO lore. Both had seen a TV rerun of the “Mysterious Island” (1961) with Ray Harryhausen stop-motion effects which inspired them to get involved in the movie business. [I grew up with that movie too!]
- Early on, Paul Rabwin was busy and Ken would be the one directing the insert shots; then he was stopped because he was not part of the directors guild.
- It was shot on 35mm film. The mandate to all teams was to do work that would be worthy of a feature film. The props were made so they would hold up to high definition.
- By season 5 the props team grew to 15 people, they had 1st unit, 2nd unit, an inserts unit, a photos unit. By then he’d rarely have the time to show up on set himself, he was too busy with prep [preparation of an episode before shooting takes place]. Shooting the photos [which were then used as props, like crime scene photos or evidence or portraits] was just as important as the main work, because it was guaranteed that these photos would get an extreme closeup shot and would drive the story.
- The biggest compliment for him was that sometime in season 3 Chris stopped coming to the “show and tell” meetings, where the props were shown to the director and producers, he was trusting him.
- Shooting “Blood”: they spent 2 days shooting crime scene photos. The director David Nutter called Ken to show him the dailies: they had used all the many photographs, in slow panning shots, to show him that his work was appreciated. [That must have been the shots during Mulder’s profiling early in the episode.]
- Don McGill was the on-set props guy.
- Shooting “Fearful Symmetry”: Ken had worked with the person in the gorilla suit before in “The Clan of the Cave Bear” (1986) and that person had previous similar experience [Ken is not credited in that movie, and the person that is credited in the episode, Jody St Michael, either…I suppose a lot of people with small roles go uncredited !]. That person asked for a toy prop for the gorilla to play with. A props guy was sent off to buy it; the director of photography John Bartley purposefully delayed the lighting setup just so much so that the props guy would have time. They made it just in the nick of time. There was a lot of solidarity between the teams, everyone was doing their best.
- Shooting “Ice”: the episode was airing that Friday and on Wednesday he was still shooting two insert shots. It was too late to ship the reels to LA, they sent them via optic fiber. They made it just in time to be inserted into the already edited episode.
- “It was ordered chaos.”
- Importance of doing research pre-internet. Amazing help of researcher Jeanne Lister who eventually joined them [she is also credited only in two episodes, but obviously she worked on much more]. The story of an army Colonel in DC that got them the photos they wanted, for what the security police at Andrews Air Force Base looked like [see other interview for details; still unclear which episode this refers to, not “Deep Throat” as Lister was not preseant that early, possibly “The Red and the Black”]. They had a great relationship with the military. The relationship with the FBI had ups and downs, there was a before and an after Waco; some years they had props with “US Bureau of Investigations”, others “FBI”.
- Ken designed the props too, not the art department. He worked with production designer Richard Hudolin as an art director and learned a lot. [They share some credits in the 1980s like “Stakeout”; Hudolin was also the production designer in “Stargate SG-1” and they worked together again in RDM’s “Battlestar Galactica”.]
- On designing the faceless alien fire wand: Chris told him to “make it look like it came out of the same factory as the stiletto”. [to keep a consistent look for alien tech, or is there more to this?]
- There was no 3D printing, it was all done on a CNC mill and a lathe, they worked a lot with metal.
- Preference of doing practical effects over CGI. Importance of prep. Attention to detail.
- The philosophy with Carter was that, if you made the show look as realistic and true as possible, then the viewer would be ready to follow you on the supernatural ride.
- He learned everything about props and props design thanks to watching as a kid all the 1960s Irwin Allen shows on TV: “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, “Lost in Space”, “The Time Tunnel”, and the 1966 “Batman”. He has put various Easter eggs in his shows to those inspirations.
