Jul 01, 2016 04:35 PM EDT
Earlier this year, Swiss Army Man, a new film starring Daniel Radcliffe, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and it was the oddest flick there: The Harry Potter actor plays a farting corpse that somehow Paul Dano uses as a raft to escape a deserted island. Now, the makeup artist behind all this weirdness explains the effect on a new featurette.
Last weekend, the very quirky film got a limited theater release, and so the studio took advantage of that to release a behind-the-scenes snippet of the most unique bit from the film: the corpse that farts its way out of an island, Manny.
In a featurette called "Making Manny," the makeup effects producer Jason Hamer talks about the voyage creating this odd bit of artistic makeup.
"I actually met with [directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Schneinert] and they gave me the script and I read it on the way to New York. I got on my computer when I landed and I said 'what is wrong with you ... I'm in,'" Hamer says in the clip, looking amused.
Obviously, the quest was quite the challenge: a film with a bloated corpse interacting via leftover bodily functions, as it meant, in Hamer's words, "building a body that can hold another body that's propelled by farts, going across the ocean."
A step-by-step video of the process behind the creation of the Manny doll follows, and it's both fascinating and disturbing to see how some plaster grows to look more and more like Harry Potter.
According to Variety, there were hundreds of people, fans and industry VIPs, during the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year waiting in lines to be able to see the film, probably in part due to Radcliffe's high profile. However, once the film began showing, many of the lucky few who actually got into the theater were less than impressed: the strange and potentially offensive nature of the film's premise had a huge number of walkouts.
Still, the movie managed to get a distributor, A24, which got the American and global rights to distribute it.
In the days since its release (and counting the original one in Sundance), the film has gotten mixed-to-positive reviews, with a 62 percent "fresh" rating on critic aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, with consensus reading "Disarmingly odd and thoroughly well-acted, Swiss Army Man offers adventurous viewers an experience as rewarding as it is impossible to categorize."
