Rick Baker

“I do what I did as a hobby as a kid, you know, and make a living at it. And I just feel like I'm one of the luckiest guys in the world 'cuz I get paid to make toys and play with them.”

“I have a job that I truly love, and an enormous crew of people that can do things better than I can!”

“When you're working on a movie you always hope that people will go for it and enjoy what you're doing.”

“There are so many decisions in making a movie.”

“I can't tell you how many people would say to me as a teenager, 'Why don't you grow up and start thinking about getting a real job?'”

“I have always tried to stay current.”

“I feel like I have to top myself every film I do, and it gets hard.”

“I've said this so many times but there's a magic when you have a really good actor in a really good makeup.”

“So many people of my generation all grew up with that shock theater package on television of 'Frankenstein,' 'Wolfman,' 'Dracula,' 'Mummy,' all the Universal stuff.”

“I used to have to save my allowances to buy a quart of rubber to make a mask, and it's how I spent all my free time.”

“I wanted to make sure to always stay current, try to find new material and stay with the modern techniques.”

“I'm not a big gore hound but monster gore is different to me than killing a teenager in any way that you can when another human-like person does it. I don't know how I rationalize that really but it seems different to me.”

“I find it kind of disturbing when people cheer when someone just gets stabbed brutally.”

“Grinch had so many people in make up - virtually everybody. We had about 100 people a day for five months. And every day we would use 100 sets of appliances.”

“I'm not really listed anywhere; I don't know how people find me!”

“The first time I made myself up, I was looking at my reflection in the mirror and it wasn't me looking back. It allowed me to do things I couldn't do as myself. I found out how powerful that was and how much that can mean to an actor.”

“The problem I have with schools is, people are taught, 'This is how you do this.' They're not taught about why you do this.”

“It's fun doing new things.”

“It's a funny relationship that makeup artists have. I always feel kind of like a dentist. People look at me and think of pain.”

“I do fat people and these makeups are really hard to do, but I want to make monster movies.”