RANDY COOK INTERVIEW

Randall William Cook—everyone calls him Randy—graduated from UCLA film school in 1975 with the dream of becoming an actor and director. While his career in the intervening 47 years has allowed him to do both, his greatest success has come in the realm of visual effects.  

Inspired by Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion animation in “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” and “Jason and the Argonauts,” Cook’s earliest efforts were on 1970s low-budget films such as “The Crater Lake Monster,” “Laserblast” and “The Day Time Ended.” He went on to create stop motion and other visual effects for the original “Ghostbusters,” “Fright Night” and “The Gate,” and served as animation supervisor on “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

Through his cinematic work, Cook has been a bridge between the stop motion techniques that brought the original “King Kong” to life and the modern motion capture technology that made possible the hobbit-gone-mad Gollum. In the process he has won three Academy Awards and three BAFTAs, but he is most proud of his friendship with idol Ray Harryhausen.

I first met Randy in 1983 when I covered “Ghostbusters” for Cinefex Magazine. In early 2020 we sat down for a retrospective interview at his home in Woodland Hills, CA, just as the pandemic was beginning to take its horrible toll on the film industry and the entire world. Two years later, my profile appeared in VFXv Voice:

RANDALL WILLIAM COOK: AN OSCAR WINNER’S JOURNEY FROM HARRYHAUSEN TO HOBBITS: