Tom Woodruff remembers Mortal Kombat’s Goro FX

Initially, Tom Woodruff’s name isn’t on the first-name basis as other creature makers like a Stan Winston or a Rick Baker, but it should be. His career has offered us some of the coolest creature ever to hit the silver screen. Fear these: The Terminator (in 1984′s The Terminator). The Alien (in Aliens, Alien 3, and the two AvP films). Tremors. The creature in Pumpkinhead. Monster Squad. And the list goes on and on, and while taking a little break from his upcoming projects like The Thing prequel and X-Men: First Class, Tom Woodruff talks to Killer Film about one of the coolest creatures he’s done in 1995′s Mortal Kombat: Goro.

Jon: Let’s rewind back to 1994, Paul W.S. Anderson comes in with the Mortal Kombat script, so how did your team come up with how to do Goro?

Tom Woodruff: It was the producers who came to us, Lawrence Kasanoff that first contacted us. This was all pre-CG days, we wouldn’t have the opportunity today to do the creature practically. It’s funny, because I literally just saw the movie again, and I felt good on how Goro still looks up on the screen. He’s still one of the coolest thing I’ve done. The producers came to us and wanted it to be practical, state-of-the-art, and to push the technology you know – blah blah blah. Then they told us how much money and time we would have to do it, so it was really stretching the parameters at the time for what we could do.

Based on that, we knew that they wanted to self-contain Goro, and they wanted a big performance out of it. The big motor board we had smaller motors up in the head and the neck, but to power them appropriately we had larger scale versions in a big box that was connected to Goro via cables that was 6-inches in diameter. So there was this big umbilical cord coming out of his back to this card that was full of these high-speed motors. Those motors were controlled by by one of our motion control persons in order to puppeteer it.

Jon: Did any of this cause problems when Goro had to square off against Johnny Cage (Linden Ashby)?

Tom Woodruff: Well, it did as much as it could. We considered that one the hero version. We never really had a lot of contact fighting with that version. Certainly, that’s the version that takes the groin shot from Cage at the end there, and doubles over. We built eyes that could dilated and all of that facial expressions. Luckily, we cam up with a system that operated the arms, where whatever a puppeteer did with his arms, Goro would do. On a wider shot, with the fight with Art Lean (Kenneth Edwards), and some of the Johnny Cage stuff, we had a slightly lighter weight version to dance and bounce around as the fight choreographer laid out for me. I say light weight, but that was 125 lbs. version of Goro. Very heavy, and taxing.

Jon: Was Goro one of the hardest creatures you performed? I was this picture with that rig on your head, and you just looked worn out.

Tom Woodruff: Yeah! To this day, that was one of the most physically challenging suits we have ever built.

Jon: What was some of your inspirations for the look of Goro? It’s pretty faithful to the video game as I recall, did creators John Tobias and Ed Boon help?

Tom Woodruff: Only in as much as the producers directed. We had to keep it like the game they said. Was that Acclaim at the time? I don’t remember who released the game back then but they provided some art work and also a 5-foot standee of Goro, and we’re told to stay close to that. Proportionally, we changed some stuff to make it work. It was stocky in the original art, and we considered my arm placement to Goro’s upper arms, so we didn’t have to lengthen his torso, but in all of our earlier attempts there was no mechanical way of doing that, so we had to place his shoulders above mine, so that move was based on mechanics and practically.

Goro was originally a yellowish color, like the game, so we thought it would be fun to work in that color palette, but we were told to make it more like a dark skinned human type of tone.

Jon: As you said with the mechanics at the time, was any of the fight scenes cut because of that or was it filmed as scripted?

Tom Woodruff: Everything was filmed as scripted. For us, the disappointing thing was since it was a low budget movie, that means not a lot of money and also means you’re moving around really fast to get each shot in a shorter shooting schedule, there wasn’t a lot of time to develop nuances in the performance that we would have wanted. We had a little bit of practice that we did on our own, but once on set, we were running and gunning it. If it had been a slightly more relaxed production and time, a director like Paul [W.S. Anderson] could have got in with us to work out a better performance. To me, it didn’t feel as interactive, because of a lot of Goro’s coverage of him and another character together, where they could play off of each other .We had the capability. Outside of the lip-sync, everything else was live. There just wasn’t enough time to play with him on set.

Jon: Was Paul there for the LA shoot or was it second unit?

Tom Woodruff: No, it was Paul for all of it.

Jon: I heard you had to deconstruct Goro for a creature in Bedazzled?

Tom Woodruff: (laughs) Hmm, did we do that? Let me remember here…we used his legs for something. Maybe it was Bedazzled? Mechanically, for better or worse, mostly worse, he’s still intact. We had his muscle molds of his legs that we used for, yeah, for this Goat Demon in Bedazzled that were ultimately not used in the film. I mean there are times we reuse things, because most of the time it cuts back on time if we already have a like-minded mechanics for something. Yeah, that’s funny about Bedazzled. The truth got out somehow. (laughs)

Jon: Is that budgetary reasons to reuse prior mechanics like that or is it you just don’t have the storage space?

Tom Woodruff: It’s more about time. We do a handful of characters and we’re contracted to do a character with a certain amount of money, and we try to put the best creature on screen. It’s a generic enough muscle mass, it fits my legs, we use it to save time. It won’t cost them extra money. It’s good for us. We’re always like we may not make money on every show, but we want it to look as good as possible.

Jon: I believe Goro exists now as a fiber glass model…

Tom Woodruff: Yeah, we did that as one of our first displays. The actual suit would just rot away.

Jon: Well, I can’t wait to see Goro again in 1080p when the Blu-ray streets in here soon.

Tom Woodruff: Does it really? Wow, I haven’t heard that! Glad I did this interview. I’m so disappointed nobody contacted me because I have all of this great video that would have made a great DVD extra. What a shame. The fun part to me about re-releasing this stuff on Blu-ray, beside the upgraded picture quality, but an opportunity to put some cool, new behind-the-scenes stuff on it, which fans and buyers love. Well, I’m disappointed no one chose to follow up on this opportunity, like you did. I guess, hopefully, someone will think twice about this down the line instead of a quick remastering in HD.

Visit ADI’s (Amalgamated Dynamics, Inc.) official site here. Look for Mortal Kombat on Blu-ray for the first time in HD April 19th.