I had Hallowe'en parties every year, as it was my birthday five days before. My parents would actually put prosthetic noses on, and my dad would wear a top-hat and tails, put on a fake curly moustache, and hold a pipe.
In 2003, he was hit by a subway in Prague and lost both of his legs. It made me realize that we take for granted every step we take, and my brother now has to physically challenge himself to take each step in his prosthetic.
I was a telemarketer in my senior year at high school. I had to sell prosthetic limbs to paralysed veterans. I was making 150 bucks a week and it was horrible.
I had seen other comic friends of mine go to indie labels. Like David Cross and Pat Oswald went to Subpop, and Subpop didn't make total sense for me, but the metal version of that did. So I made a small list with Metal Blade, Prosthetic and couple of other labels, and Relapse was one of them.
We're always taught that we're building for permanence, but why? I like the idea of a prosthetic architecture! When a section is removed, the building readjusts its weight distribution, like a living body.
I had to get used to wearing a mask and wearing a prosthetic and performing with those things while singing and expressing myself through stylized movement, while keeping it as human as possible so the audience could be closer to the horror of the Phantom.
Rubber looks different to skin and it's very, very hard to make a prosthetic on a human look convincing if you don't light them correctly.
I did 'Vice' with Christian Bale and 'Foxcatcher' with Steve Carell - both of those films had significant prosthetic work. You do need to be cognizant of the fact that the material that you're photographing is not skin.
It's an interesting but useless bit of information that every single character in 'The Lord of the Rings' and 'The Hobbit' wears a wig, and many of them wears a prosthetic - false ears, feet, hands. In my case, nose.
You can't itch on the prosthetic, or else you will rip it, and it's really expensive.
