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Making Wolverine’s Claws . The Artificial Arm

They have become synonymous with the X-Men movies, appearing on every poster, box cover, promotional tie-in, and collectable toy. By the third movie in the series, X-Men: The Last Stand, they joined the X-Men logo, blocking out the "X” itself. Wolverine’s Claws, those three razor-sharp retractable blades on each of his hands are as now as iconic today as Superman’s "S”, Batman’s "Bat Signal”, and Spider-Man’s red and blue mask. It can be argued that Wolverine is the only super hero created within the last 35 years to have reached the same status as the classic heroes of the 1940’s and 50’s.

When Twentieth Century Fox decided in 1991 to create the very first movie based on the X-Men comic books, they turned to Canadian special effects artist James Gawley, now affectionately known as "Jimmy Claws”, to bring the adamantium blades to a physical reality.

"I love solving technical puzzles,” Jimmy explains. "My background is a machinist, I’m a certified machinist, and I just got tired of a regular job, so I decided to get into film. I don’t have any relatives in the film business to open doors for me, I went in cold. I was fortunate that I got around with some people who could recognize my ability and help me move along and gain freedom.”

As the mechanical partner to Canadian make-up effects wizard Gord Smith, Jimmy has provided effects for a long list of movies including "Jacob’s Ladder”, "JFK”, "Johnny Mnemonic”, and "I, Robot”.

Director Bryan Singer and the producers insisted on creating a physical prop that could be filmed rather than using computerized effects. Jimmy was asked to create two props. The first would be an artificial arm, an exact duplicate of actor Hugh Jackman’s that would feature a set of mechanical claws that would spring out of the back of the hands, just like in the comics, and a second set of fake claws that he could simply slip over his hands like gloves.

As with all Super Hero powers and gadgets, they seem fairly straight forward until you actually sit down and think them through.

In the Marvel comics Wolverine is a temperamental, violent anti-hero born with the instincts and retractable claws of his animal namesake. The claws sit inside his forearms and at his mental command come shooting out through the spaces in between his knuckles on the back of his hand. The claws themselves are extremely long blades reinforced with Adamantium, a fictional metal alloy that described as being unbreakable, practically indestructable.

 

‘He was really excited about it, I fired it a few more times and everything was great.’

Satisfied with the mechanics, Jimmy and make-up wizard Gord Smith used silicone rubber to transform the mechanical arm to look like an exact copy of Hugh Jackman’s.

 

"We start off with the actor’s arm. We cast the arm, then what they would do is make a positive from that, and then they would make a negative from that, and they would then make a fiberglass core which would become the mold. The people making the rubber arm and me are working to the same piece. Now, I start cutting it apart and fitting my mechanics into it. I make the blades work within the core, then they come back to putting the skin onto the core.”

The "skin” is an eerie, creepy, silicone rubber reproduction of Hugh Jackman’s arm that is exact in detail right down to the individual pore and includes a convincing amount of human arm hair. Because the camera would be shooting the hand in close-up, it had to look as convincing as possible. This also meant that the silicone skin could not be designed with holes in it for the blades. The solution was to simply slide the skin over the fiberglass arm and let the blades cut their way through the skin naturally.

"The claws are pretty fast. I run the air compressor at about 70 lbs, not a lot. Enough to make it forceful and it’s never misfired. There’s never been a problem of having the blades spaced apart or pushing through the skin. That’s why they are so sharp, otherwise they won’t cut and they have to cut. If they don’t cut clean then the skin balloons out and looks stupid.”

As is always the case in making a motion picture, multiple takes of the claws in action would be needed, requiring the make-up team to create a supply of silicone skins to be used, take after take.

"The material’s expensive, but what’s more expensive is the labour involved, because they come out of the mold with a little bit of flash on them, so you have to clean that up, but then punching the hair, that’s all planted, every hair, every strand is punched in.”

Before taking on the task of planting the hair, the make-up team has to first make sure they were using hair that matches the actor’s.

"You know, the density of the hair, the colour, and the length. If you take an arm like mine, I practically have nothing and Hugh is sort of in the middle. I had to do the same for Will Smith’s arm in I, Robot only his hair is really curly and it’s really sparse. That’s a look that somebody has to do. I don’t. I make the tool that punches hair, but, to do each hair, oh man, I couldn’t do that. Punching the hair on one arm would take a day. "

With the illusion now complete, Associate Producer and Co-Writer Tom DeSanto sat down with Jimmy and began to explore a number of different styles for the blade edges of the claws themselves.

As with all comic book heroes, Wolverine has been drawn by several generations of artists, from his first appearance in 1974 by Herb Trimpe and Jack Abel to John Byrne in 1979 to Frank Millar in the 80’s. Over a dozen official Marvel artists, each putting their own personal touches to his costume, physique, and claws.

In some versions Wolverine’s claws are rounded, curved needles like the animal wolverine’s, others have drawn them to look like long, straight, manufactured knives with angled points, and later variations show an almost Japanese Katana-like quality to the blades with a refined curve.

For his first prototype, to make it easier for the blades to cut through the silicone skin, Jimmy had used a set that looked like standard knives, with the tips tapered up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Having created a plastic version of his metal blades, Jimmy then had to create a way to bind three of them together so they could be worn.

"I cut the scalp out from the start of the blade, so that it could fit over the hand, and then I drilled a hole up the inside of the blade, in the centre of scalped section, so I could attach it to a wearable appliance. "

 

The result was an angled handle that rests flush against the upper palm of your hand with a system of curved wires that wrap around your knuckles to the blades themselves. It seems like a fairly simple solution at first, until you try to put them on and you begin to realize there’s a trick to getting them on your hand right. Most people outside of the movie set get it wrong.

"The idea is to just roll into it” Jimmy told me as he instructed me for my first fitting.

 

The wires have a special curve bent into them that you don’t see at first, but if you play with them your hand can feel it. They go in between your fingers, and then your hand has to be pushed in and down in order to position the beginning of the blades down the back of your hand and angle them into the skin to complete the illusion.

As I pushed them in place, I could see the blades create temporary divots in my skin.

"They should push on your hand, but just be gentle, so you buy the illusion that it’s coming from the skin”

Getting the right fit for the perfect illusion was a puzzle that Jimmy worked on again and again.

"I didn’t have it on the first one. A lot of R&D in that area. On the first pair I used round wires instead of square ones and fitting was a nightmare. A lot of bending and tweaking to try to get them right, so I said when the next movie came along, ‘I’m going to come up with a system’.

The pair designed for the first X-Men movie used a system of rounded wires that were designed to pivot. The idea was to be able to adjust the blades to make them splay apart really wide or really tight as needed.

In the Marvel comics, illustrators often took liberties with Wolverine’s claws, giving them a kind of personality and using them as an extension of their owner’s moods and feelings. They might appear really tight together to show him simmering with rage or casually wide apart to express mischief.

"They were desirable for the gag these were used in, but lousy when he’s doing action. He’d do a move where he’d sweep his arm through the air and all of a sudden the claws would swing apart from each other, which isn’t supposed to happen, so I ended up welding them in place. It was tedious at best.”

In creating a second generation of the wearable claws, Jimmy decided to tackle another issue, which was that actor Hugh Jackman wasn’t the only man wearing them and the claws had such a special angle for wrapping around the hand, they would fit differently from one person to the next.

"There were ten different people with their own sets, three photo doubles, two sets for Hugh plus stunt ones, then stunt guys needed them, choreographer wanted a pair…. So I came up with the square wires and I decided to graduate them like shoes, all the different sizes. I can take a stock size, I can put them on somebody and see whether there’s a gap between the beginning of the blades and the hand or if they are pressing down into the flesh. In your case, I would change your pair to a bigger size, because that will hurt after awhile.”

He actually has a special fitting case he carries with him and even a numerical system for the sizes.

"When they send a guy to me, for instance they sent Scott, a stunt double, to me saying ‘We need you to fit him up with a set of claws’. I have him come over to my truck, I pick up my standard set, give them to him to try on, and then look at the numbers. For example, in your case I’d bump you up from a 450 to a 500 until they fit just right and then I’d have to do a little tweakage, because there’s the splay. They should be four and a quarter inches apart. "

Four and a quarter inches apart became the magic distance. On a movie set continuity is an obsession. Everything has to remain consistently the same from one take to the next. The claws were made of rubber and the appliance out of wire stock. Both were ideal in that it made the claws light and comfortable to wear, but Hugh Jackman was wearing them and he was in peak, physical condition. After using them in stunts and action scenes, the claws were bound to get bent, to change a little and even a difference of a millimeter had to be guarded against.

"One of my tasks was to check the claws before every take, he’d be standing, ready to go and I’d check them to make sure they were still four and a quarter inches apart. I made a special gauge which I’d keep in my pocket. I’d just go up and hold it next to the blades before each take to make sure they had not bent out of place, that for every take they were always four and a quarter inches apart. It always got a laugh from the crew that I had to come out with my little gauge and check it before they rolled camera. "

"I was always the last guy to see Hugh before they rolled camera. Hair and make-up would do their tune up on Hugh and then I’d step in and put the claws on him, step out and sometimes they caught my ass on camera as I was leaving the shot. Not what I want to be known for, but…”

The physical demands of the movie on Hugh Jackman, and thus on his costume and props, was not to be underestimated.

"Hugh was amazing. When we were doing the scene in the forest in X3, before every take he’d do push-ups. He had weights, and a trainer guy, he’d do running on the spot. If the crew took longer to get things set up, like another two minutes, he’d say ‘I’m exercising again, you need to wait for me now’. He was right into it. Man, he looked good. I went out and bought a set of weights after watching him.”

"I talked to him about it. I said ‘I really want to get into a bit of a fitness program’ and he told me ‘Think of it in threes. Do it for three days. Then do it for three weeks. Then do it for three months’ Ever heard of the Grouse Grind?”

"Well, out in Vancouver there’s Grouse Mountain. They have this tram that goes up the mountain, holds 40 people, it’s big, costs $20 to go up and back. Well, you can climb it. I don’t know how many thousands of feet it is in elevation through forest, but that’s become known as the Grouse Grind. And people who are fit are doing it in under an hour, I heard him doing it in under 43 minutes. I know a guy who did it with him and he said he couldn’t keep up with him.”

Through a combination of breakage and having to make pairs for so many different crew members and crafting special claws for special shots, Jimmy ended up manufacturing over 700 pairs of the wearable claws for the first X-men movie, 600 for the sequel, and another 600 for the third in the series, X-Men: The Last Stand”.

Of the many variations of the claws there was the set that had to be built into a pair of gloves for Wolverine’s costume.

"In the fist movie we bought gloves and cut slits in them. It was hokey. I mean you do your best job with an X-acto knife and trim it up and hopefully they are not really zooming in that close. For the second and third film they had them made by glove people. For the gloves I’d create a looser fit with the claws for comfort. It worked really well, Hugh would leave them on for long periods of time. Well, when we did the Alcatraz scene for X-Men 3, it was November. It was cold. "

"It was towards the end when they’re lining up against the mutants, ‘Whatever you do, hold this line’. They must have done sixty or seventy takes of the same thing, but you know, it was this camera angle, then this camera angle, that camera angle. And we’re shooting nights, and it was cold out. So you’d go to work and think ‘We’re still doing that same scene?’. And it’s hard to stay warm when you’re standing around.”

"They’d bring me in anywhere between 4 and 6 pm, it was early winter, so it’s getting dark early, and they’d shoot until the sun came up. They’d even shoot into ‘the sky’s too bright now, I don’t think we can use it’. ‘We’ve just got one more.’ ‘Nope’. "

"That Alcatraz scene was very lengthy. It was huge, there was three hundred extras, A lot of ‘em in gak, not only their own mutant gak, but then there was the army guys with their army gak, and a huge, huge thing for the props to be stored in. I got the easy job. I just had to be there with the claws when they called my name. I got so I could hear my name when I was sleeping. I’d go sleep in a hammock with a radio until I’d hear them call me.”

For the rare sequences in the movies that did require some computer generated claws, scenes with Wolverine impaling or stabbing objects with them, Jimmy created a series of special tracking claws. These included pairs with sawed-off blades with reflective tape and wireframe sets that featured reflective balls for the digital effects staff to use as a reference.

After the release of "X2: X-Men United” in 2003, Jimmy was asked to solve another strange puzzle. With his claws extended, could Wolverine carry and lick an ice cream cone?

"Baskin Robbins had a promo where they had Storm and Wolverine do separate commercials around coming up with a new ice cream design for Baskin Robbins. I went to Chicago and shot this, it opens with a tub with some ice cream in it. It’s kind of boring right? And the voice-over says ‘We asked Wolverine to whip us up a special sundae’ and then you see the hand come in with these claws on it.”

The problem was the claws were too long for a close-up on the ice cream and since Jimmy is the only man on the planet who can make them, he had to be brought in to make a special pair just for the ice cream sequence.

"They wanted short ones, so I actually custom-made them when I was in Chicago. I came prepared with regular ones, but we needed a short variation. I said ‘Where’s your shop?’ So I went into their prop shop and made them up. "

"They have a scene where they have Wolverine doing a bunch of moves, and then with vis effects the ice cream becomes all splattered, his claws are moving over it, everything’s moving very fast, and then it’s this really interesting, twisted, ice cream thing with blueberry ice cream on it. And then at the end he goes ‘tah-dah’ as he presents it. Then they come over with the voice announcer ‘For a limited time you can get the Wolverine special sundae at Baskin Robbins’. It has nothing to do with the movie.”

The latest version Jimmy has created is a special "Hero” version that have the benefit of "more love and three days spent sanding, painting, and perfecting”. These will be placed for charity auction by X-men producer Lauren Shuler Donner.

From the original prototypes in 1991 to the polished hero claws of today, the process has been sixteen years.

"X-men for me represents a very big part of a very big adventure” Jimmy explained. "I mean, it was huge for me. It took me to Vancouver which lead to six other movies out there and a whole new set of friends and a whole new level of credibility.”