Q. Steve Kroft: Greek Mythology, it came back in a big way in a lot of media. Recently you did the God of War II game for the Playstation 2 where you reprised the role of Perseus in an ultimate take on Greek Mythology. You actually fought the lead character Kratos in the game. What was the experience like for you where you see yourself recreated digitally in a video game where you play the antagonist to the main character?
HH: Well, I only saw a little bit of it and I thought it was really cool and I didn’t mind being killed off at all. From my understanding the game did very well and it was neat because those who didn’t know my from Clash of the Titans weren’t aware that I played that role before. That movie isn’t a young movie it’s 30-something years old.
Q. Steve Kroft: With the success of the roles that a lot of stars experience they quite often get type-cast with their roles [for example] everyone wants Johnny Depp to be Jack Sparrow. After you had done Clash of the Titans did you experience people giving you scripts with these [types] of roles in mind?
HH: After L.A. Law I got a lot of lawyer [roles]. Very few toga movies are made, though, and a lot of big actors who are my age all had their toga movies that they made back then when I was that age and 90 percent of the cases they all went away. No one remembers the Tom Cruise toga movie or the Richard Gere toga movie anymore. Somehow [everyone] remembers Clash of the Titans, which survived on and on and on; even now [after 30 years] it’s back. Somehow mine lives on.
Q. Nick Nunziata(Chud.com): Harry, when you were making this movie back in 1980, it was before people did roles that were meant to satisfy business concerns. Nowadays stars will do a movie like this to pay the bills and do their art film. While Star Wars and Indiana Jones were building their own legacy, did you have any idea what was going to be onscreen and any idea what type of legacy you were building?
HH: That’s a very interesting question. The word ‘franchise’ at that time had never been applied to movies. Star Wars was one of the first franchises and on the heels of that came Raideres of the Lost Ark. [Back then] If you did a movie then you did a sequel. For Clash of the Titans certainly no one thought it as the beginning of a franchise. I know that I did not think of Clash of the Titans as the beginning of a series and I still don’t think of it that way.
[Also] I’m afraid that I pissed the producers off so much during the making of the film that they never would have used me anyways. They were mostly angry with me because I refused to do a world wide publicity tour to kick the film off. The only reason I refused to do it is because they wanted the kick off party to be in Johannesburg, South Africa. I happened to be on a committee with anti-apartheid actors at the time. I just said to the producers that I’m sorry I cannot go to South Africa to celebrate this film when I’m on this committee with anti-apartheid actors. I told them that I would go anywhere else in the world you want me to go, but I can’t go to South Africa. They said well if you’re not going to South Africa then we’re going to cancel the tour.
As far as this being a franchise movie I certainly didn’t expect it to live on as it has lived on over the years. I thought it would come and go especially because there was an owl named Bubo. The definition of Bubo in the English language is that of a bleeding pus fill under the arm that drove the bubonic plague.
Q Sean O’Connell (Hollywoodnews.com): How do you feel about remakes in general? More specifically, how do you feel about them going after the original Clash of the Titans and remaking it? Part of the charm of the original was Ray Harryhausen creations and the way they fit with the live actors. [The remake] seems more polished this time. Do you like it when people go back and use technology to polish them up?
HH: I don’t know that I have a positive or a negative opinion about that. When Clash of the Titans came out there had been some early CGI in the Star Wars movie that had somewhat embraced the lost art, which we had hoped to get. People were getting accustomed to CGI even in its infancy. We were moving away from stop-motion and into this new world of computer animated generation. It’s a matter of taste and now, of course, the appetite [for special effects] is only for CGI. People who do stop motion it’s considered a relic. It gets appreciated as a relic, but it isn’t considered current. It will be very interesting to see Clash of the Titans using CGI. I think Sam Worthington is a great young actor and I’m hoping that he using the same sort of Joseph Campbell definition of the ‘hero’. I think it’s important for him to follow the hero’s journey, even in the updated version of the film; I’m pretty sure he will.
Q (Digitalchumps): Ray Harryhausen was the special effects guru on the movie. He has done countless films with his creatures/monsters in them. How did you prepare yourself to interact with these creatures, such as the giant scorpions, which weren’t there, and how odd/different did it feel doing so?
HH: The process is that we use our imagination. It’s just like when we were kids and we played with monsters or enemy soldiers in the backyard; you imagine that they’re there.
In the case of the giant scorpions [in the film], Ray Harryhausen and I had a big tiff over that. I thought that it would be cool if one of these scorpions comes down and tries to sting me, but I actually grab the stinger with my left hand and cut the [stinger] off with my sword. He said no, no, no. You can’t do that, it will never work. Just for shits and giggles, while the camera was rolling, I put my left hand up and I imagined that I was cutting off the tail of the scorpion and he was really pissed off at that [laughs]. He said, “What did you do that for?!” I responded, well you can cut it out if you want. [As you know] it ended up being in the movie.
[Anyway], back in the studio in Pinewood I was riding on an old barrel, which was the horse with a green screen behind me, with a couple of fans blowing wind and stuff. They do the same type of things today, but I guess when James Cameron is doing a scene like that he’s got you all tacked up to the monitors and the wind is all computer animated, so it’s a different story today. Still, the process was unknown to me at the time because I had never done green screen work before and it was not done that often, in fact. So, it was kind of interesting.
