Perivale Industrial Park. I get a demonic thrill from starting a piece with those three words, like I’m daring you to go and read something else. But if you can hang around for five more minutes, there are some men in the car park and they’re just about to blow up a tiny house. This industrial park is home to Artem, a special-effects company run by Mike Kelt and staffed by a gigantic team of dedicated sculptors, pyromaniacs and wound fanatics.
Their USP right now is that they did the special effects for the second Trainspotting film, T2. Later, I intend to try on Robert Carlyle’s fake stomach with a hospital drip coming out of it. We’re extremely careful about spoilers, so I shan’t be telling you why Doug Hedges was trying to make some bug eyes move on their own, or why Emily Pooley was fashioning some giant toes – but I think, with Trainspotting, it is a pretty foregone conclusion that Carlyle would end up putting on a fake stomach for a hospital scene.
Artem is the kind of outfit George Osborne would have taken a press trip round, back when we wanted to be a nation of makers and sell stuff to people. It does everything related to film special effects, from animatronics to prosthetics to making weather (most recently for Macbeth, a film whose FX needs were were almost entirely rain and fog, although there was a severed head that didn’t make the final cut). Its technicians have devised a wind machine so good they’re thinking of starting a separate company for the export of fake wind.
A lot of the stuff an amateur might assume was CGI is actually old-school SFX, so when a house has to be devastated by a tornado, Artem will make one in miniature. It’s not actually that small, a third of the actual house’s size, and it takes weeks to build. Then the team destroy it against a green screen and drop the footage into the film. “We did it in Hot Fuzz,” Kelt remembers. “That police station was a miniature. What I like is working out exactly how it will burn. Because it can’t just look like a big fireball. It really annoys me when things look like a big fireball.” Such an amateur’s error – thinking a thing on fire will look like a fireball.
While there’s seemingly no explosion they don’t remember with alarming affection, the effect they’re all most proud of was their most controversial: blowing up a bus on Lambeth Bridge, London, for The Foreigner, which offended the sensibilities of the Sun, because it reminded people of 7/7. “Well, yes, it looked exactly like 7/7 because that’s the reference,” Kelt says with indignant pride.
“That was the best day ever,” agrees Toby Stewart, who left Artem briefly to join the army, then came back because military life was too slow-paced. “We did maybe 200 tests. We had to find a way of doing it,” he reminisces, as if recalling a brainteaser in the back of a magazine, “without killing anyone.”
Pyrotechnics is one of those interests you’re born with: Toby lied about his age when he was 14 to get a job with a fireworks company. Personally, I am more interested in gore: getting shot, knifed, maimed. That’s where the artisanship comes in. And that’s how I end up in a pink charity-shop jacket with two explosives and a load of fake blood stitched into it, ready to “take” two bullets.
“You will feel it,” Toby keeps saying. “It doesn’t hurt, but you will feel it. That one,” he says, pointing to the explosive in a more sensitive area, “in particular.” It’s interesting on TV how men never get shot in the knackers. In real life, that must happen, just by the laws of probability. But I can’t recall ever having seen it.
“You have two explosives strapped to your chest,” says Toby soberly. Right, I’ve got that. “Do you want to know it’s going to happen, or do you want a surprise?” I’m not sure how surprising this is going to be, given how long we’ve been talking about it. But no, I don’t want to know it’s going to happen. “One more thing,” he says, “definitely don’t put your arms in front of your chest. When we were doing [insert name of top secret show that I can’t tell you in case you identify the fabulously handsome but apparently quite-bad-at-taking-instructions actor], he brought his hands to his chest every time he got shot. Nightmare.”
I never figured out why it was a nightmare, whether it prevented the shots from detonating or just covered him in blood. I was just about to ask when – WHAM! – the first shot rang out and blood suddenly spurted from my chest. But that wasn’t the shocker. The truly amazing thing was that we’d been talking about it for a full 20 minutes and I was still incredibly shocked – surprised like I would be if a stranger had thrown blood on me for precisely no reason.
It doesn’t hurt, by the way. Which is lucky, because then it happened again, and I was astonished again. You learn something quite useful about your reaction to danger in a fake-shooting scenario. Some people have reflexes and try to protect themselves. Others have a flight response. And others still are just blankly amazed, immobile.
“Is this that edible blood?” says Amelia Horattides, who does sales and marketing, but somehow finds the time to occasionally get fake-shot in her lunchbreak. She dips her finger into my chest wound and licks it. “It’s tasty.”
Kelt started out at the BBC, which in the 1970s and 80s had a remarkable in-house artisan stable – designers, chippies, special-effects people. They made everybody redundant for some daft Thatcherite reason that has probably cost them millions and Kelt set up on his own, after this peerless, trial-and-error apprenticeship.
“My first job was doing the inside of a Dalek,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Have you got any drawings?’ And they said, ‘Just make it up.’ I couldn’t make it up! It was part of my childhood.” After some decades, he now knows most things about the simulation of destruction and terror. The process hasn’t really changed much: someone will ring up and ask for something – a singing toilet, nine moving gremlins, the bloody, ripped-off stumps of 1,000 legs – and he will figure out how to do it.
Artem is basically a toy factory for large, macabre, highly skilled children. Emily Pooley, at 26 one of the youngest and least large, was recruited five years ago from Wimbledon Art School. While sculpting feet, she wears a white boiler suit, like a fixer in a Quentin Tarantino movie. She keeps a giant horse’s head on her desk, which looks pretty sinister and Godfather-ish, but was in fact for a Lloyds Bank ad.
Next I’m going to have a wound opened up on my arm, in latex, a bit like Ewan McGregor in T2 Trainspotting, but I really will spoil it if I tell you any more about that. I consider myself a pretty tough person. I do not mind blood – which is good, because I’m still drenched in it from earlier, and getting home later is no picnic, even in a car. I get a lot of obscure looks, which I interpret as: “I’m assuming you don’t need me to call the police, but signal if you do.”
However, there is something uniquely stomach-churning about having a wound on your arm, the casual slice, the hideously realistic subcutaneous swamp. “It’s interesting,” Pooley says. “Your brain finds it hard to compute looking at it without thinking there’s an actual wound. Some people say it even hurts.” Yes, it’s interesting, but I’d be leaning more towards words like “nauseating” and “grotesque”. It is look-away-and-wince bad, and also a bit shaming – to react so strongly to something unreal.
Removing the wound takes Pooley about a year and a half. “This is a platinum silicon prosthetic,” she says approvingly. “They take a long time, but they’re so superior.” Probondo, on the other hand, is very cheap and quick. “What would you use that for?” I ask. “Oh, you know, crowd scenes, a war, a load of zombies.” When it comes to it, I can’t put on Robert Carlyle’s stomach because I don’t want to. Not in an unprofessional way. I just really really, really don’t want to – it looks so like an actual stomach, it would be like climbing inside Robert Carlyle.
Apparently, Danny Boyle is legendary among directors for understanding what a long and intricate job prosthetics is. Most film-makers are clots and hurry you along, little realising that a zombie with a shabby wound is suspension-of-disbelief suicide.
“There isn’t a great deal of training involved,” Kelt muses. While you need a licence to store explosives, he adds, “there isn’t a little certificate you get saying you’re allowed to blow things up”. All you need is a bus, a couple of buses really, a lifelong interest in explosions, and the right kind of temperament. “I go back to this question – what would happen for real? Does the roof blow off, or the sides? Is the knife going in straight, or at an angle? Are you going to get a flap of skin or an opening?” Kelt is as cerebral and mellow as a stonemason. “Well, you only get one go at it. So you don’t want to be stressed.”
