Sitting down with director William Brent Bell and producer Gary Lucchesi on set of Brahms: The Boy II revealed a lot of key details about what’s in store for the sequel. One thing we didn’t expect to uncover, though, was a key change that occurred during post-production that completely altered the look of Brahms in the final act of The Boy. The adult Brahms, that is. It turns out that major twist, which revealed that a very adult Brahms was living in the walls of the Heelshire mansion, would’ve looked very different had it not been for one major digital effect that, up until this point, has gone unnoticed.
In talking about the collaborative process working on these films has been, Lucchesi mused, “There is something about the process of making movies. You have a screenplay; you do all of this preparation but then there are certain things that occur during the making of the movie. I wish in hindsight, now we fixed it, but in hindsight, I’d wished we’d had a conversation in the first Boy about putting the mask on his face.”
Wait. What?
It turns out that when The Boy was filmed, the sudden appearance of the adult Brahms was shot without a mask. Bell shares, “I’ll tell you about the mask because I’ve always been surprised that that never came out. You guys know Javier Botet, right? That’s who I wanted to play Brahms in the walls. That just didn’t fly.” That Bell initially conceived of Brahms with Botet in mind, an actor known for his unique, slender frame and creating nightmarish characters in The Conjuring 2, [Rec], and more gives insight as to why Brahms didn’t have a mask initially.
When Botet wasn’t available, Bell elaborates, “Then we got a guy, who was great. To me, he was kind of like a more conservative Javier. Not quite as wild and weird and tall and crazy. But he was cool. But we shot the movie, and he had no mask on. He was just a guy with a beard and he looked crazy coming out of the walls. We tested the movie and the movie tested really well; everybody liked the movie. We were asking questions about the third act, when the twist happens, ‘Were you scared by the guy coming out of the walls?’ ‘Mm, yeah, you know, but not that scared.’ Huh. And Roy Lee, who’s one of the producers on the movie, asked, ‘Did you ever think about putting a mask on him?’” Lucchesi adds, “He had worked on a movie about 10 years ago where he had done that; he’d put a mask on somebody in post-production.”
“Yeah, The Strangers. Well, they’d put a mask in post on somebody. So, we thought, wow, that’s a great idea! We were so focused on creating the doll that we’d never thought about that. If you watch the movie, the mask was never on him. We never planned that,” Bell says before expanding that it took a lot of different designs before they settled on the final version that made it into the film. “We did tests of him coming out of the walls in totally different masks. It was just like, ‘Try another one. Try another one.’ Because you just click a button and another one is on him. It was so incredible, what they did. And had we had a real mask it never would’ve looked as cool. It wouldn’t have stayed on. And what we had to do with this movie, to some degree, is if we want to see that mask well then, we have to create it, right?”
Visual Effects Supervisor James McQuaide has a much funnier take on the situation while also hinting at just how complicated this effect really was, “It was a good looking guy; she’s running away from a good looking guy. It wasn’t very scary. We went through a couple of months of trying to come up with the right design. Something a little bit rougher around the edges, more sort of homespun. We came back to the idea that of course, it looks like a large version of the Brahms doll. I think it made it much more scary, that face, than a barista at Starbucks, which is kinda what he looked like.”
Unused concept art
Unused concept art
Unused concept art
“The design was the trickier part just because there’s so many cooks in the kitchen with an opinion about what it should look like. We had some really cool designs, but trying to come up with something that was organic to the movie was the place we ultimately went. But the execution was a little bit difficult because it wasn’t planned, so there’s no tracking marker. There’s nothing to really work off of. It was like 350 shots; it was a significant part of the movie. Probably 1 in 8 shots, something crazy like that, is CG mask.” McQuaide says the digital effect didn’t just stop at the mask, “And the burn at the end, you know when the mask breaks off, that’s all CG too. In the original version he was just, again, there was no damage from the fire. We had this idea that the house burned down and he carries the scars from it, as a CG element, to sort of make the movie maybe a little more substantial. So even that is CG.”
Bell still marvels at what they pulled off with this late game addition to The Boy, “Yeah, it made it so much weirder. Trying to kiss the mask, and it made his eyes more interesting. We did so much interesting development work on that, though. The mask was smaller, the mask was bigger, then darker, the mask was made out of paper mâché. To me, doing a movie like that where there was no planning, no tracking marks, and no plan to put a mask on and it was done a thousand percent perfectly, made me realize that anything is possible in making a movie if you need to change something.”
What would the paper mâché mask have looked like on Brahms? This clip shows the unused design in action:
It’s mind-blowing to think of how drastically different the final act of The Boy might’ve been without the addition of that creepy mask. As for the sequel, Brahms: The Boy II, a physical mask was created, but you’ll have to wait until the film’s release on February 21, 2020to see it.
