For our third Q & A session, we asked you to pose your queries to Michael Westmore, the veteran Star Trek make-up designer and supervisor. The Westmore name should be familiar to followers of Star Trek, or movies in general—Michael comes from a famous dynasty of Hollywood make-up artists that dates back to the early days of motion pictures.

Once again we would like to thank all of the STARTREK.COM users who participated in the interview process by submitting their questions.

And now, we take you to the interview?

Question: Have you ever made something that looked TOO real for your liking when up close and personal?
Mike H.

Michael Westmore: Yes, that's the whole purpose of make-up is to have it not look like make-up. When I was with [Sylvester] Stallone years ago doing the cuts and bruises on him for "First Blood,? he went to the doctor after hurting his ribs (after falling through the trees). At the hospital, the doctors wanted to sew up the cut on his arm! The same thing happened when I was working with De Niro on "Raging Bull.? He was walking around the streets in between shots and people would look at him and go, "I didn't know De Niro looked like that!? They didn't even know he had make-up on. I would say that, most of the time, we try to make it look as real as possible.

Q: During the Voyager years, which set of alien make-up has been the most enjoyable for you to work on and why?
Miles L.

MW: On Voyager there are so many make-ups that are interesting because every single show creates another challenge. I think one of the more interesting [races] we had to deal with over the years would be the Vidiians. They were this patch-work quilt, and we had to figure out how they would look with different layers of skin overlaid and put together with hair on some and slick scales on others. Some would have rotting teeth and contact lenses.It was a lot of fun, along with the challenges it posed.

Q: How much lead-time do you have to produce a make-up, and is the actor needed before you can start on a design?
R.Q.

MW: The lead-time is very short. Sometimes we are lucky and if there's an extensive script they may get it to me two to three weeks ahead of time. Normally it's less than two weeks we have to get things ready. Sometimes the turnaround is so short we have to pre-make something on a head just to have it ready because we may not have the actor in time to make it for him. We have to design something that is adjustable where we can either let it out or tuck it in.

Q: The greatest Hollywood legends relied on the skill of a Westmore to ensure they looked their best on the Silver Screen. Your skills are certainly part of that legacy. Is there a new generation of Westmores who are likely to carry on this esteemed family tradition?
Holodoc DR

MW: I'm in the third generation and there is a fourth generation of Westmores doing make-up now. My cousin, Pamela, is a make-up artist and she's been with Sandra Bullock for years. My nephew, Kevin, has been working on the X-Files and my niece, Candy, has been with Baywatch for years. My son's an editor and my daughter's an actress and my [other] daughter, Michelle, is an account executive with a management firm.

Q: The aliens on the show look fantastic and this is a credit to your work and craft. I would like to know which character takes the longest to make-up? Is there a limit to how many hours you can sit an actor in the make-up chair and create that alien?
Paul W.

MW: We don't have any time limits put on us, although you have problems with turnaround time the next day if the person is going to work two days in a row. We figure the longest period of time to do a make-up is about three hours. If it's going to take more than three hours to get it done, then we'll have two make-up artists working at the same time if it's an extensive job of gluing them in and having to add hands and everything. It could be a four or five hour make-up job, but you cut it down to three hours if you double team on the person. The make-ups range anywhere from 20 minutes for the simple ones, up to three hours.

The original Borgs used to take five hours for make-up and costumes and there was no way to make it shorter as two people couldn't even do it. It just took so long on "First Contact,? but since that time we've been able to streamline it by pre-painting and having things all ready to go. One of the longest make-ups we've ever had on Star Trek was Brent Spiner when he played Dr. Soong [Brothers], which was a five-hour make-up. The longest we ever did was LeVar Burton (Geordi La Forge) when he had to transform into a lizard [Identity Crisis] because we had to glue veins over his whole body and paint them with luminous paint. His make-up took six hours.

Q: How long did it take you to create the look of the Jem'Hadar?
Shaun W.

MW: The Jem'Hadar really didn't take that much time. I was given a little clue in the script that they were supposed to have hard shells on the outside and they kind of had rolls of skin around their neck. I literally picked two animals to work with; one was a rhinoceros and one was a dinosaur. So I made a combination of those two things to come up with the Jem'Hadar. You'll notice the hair on the back of the head looks like a rhinoceros horn turned upside down. That was the purpose of it—to make these guys look hard, scaly and tough so they would be these robotic- type soldiers that nobody could hurt. That's why it's always humorous when someone hits them in the face and knocks them over because supposedly their skin is like iron. In the beginning the concept was they really are genetically formed so they all look alike. Then the theme more or less changed and they wanted to have a differentiation between them, so we came up with different types of bone structures that were added to the basic Jem'Hadar look.

Q: Have you ever had a nightmare about any of the alien faces you make?
Nosocks

MW: No. I actually don't take the work home with me. When I leave here at night I leave the creative process, unless I'm reading a magazine at home and I see something I like, or come across a piece of research. I really try to separate home from work. If I'm having a problem, then I usually solve those problems by waking up at four o'clock in the morning with a solution and then go back to sleep again.

Q: Hello Mr. Westmore, my question to you is just what gives you inspiration, how do you come up with a new alien?
Fox

MW: Ever since starting here [at Paramount] with the Klingons, back on the Next Generation, I draw most of my inspiration from the old planet Earth. Every year, before the season starts, I'll go to the bookstore and pick up all the latest books on dinosaurs and birds and reptiles and insects. And I subscribe to magazines on all those subjects and I just peruse through them looking for little pieces of bat ear, or giraffe noses or rhinoceroses or microbes or dust mites. I find little pieces. Most everything you see on Star Trek you could find here on Earth, if you just knew where to look.

Q: What was the most challenging make-up job and why?
Picard

MW: One of my most favorite make-up jobs was from Next Generation and it was Leonard Crowfoot [the featureless Lal in "The Offspring?] when he had to become an android (who later turned into a human girl). Between the electronics and make-up, the contact lenses, his hearing was also impaired, his mouth wasn't lined up so he couldn't eat or drink during the day, there were no nostrils in the mask, he had to wear a rubber chest, he had to wear a rubber diaper so he couldn't go to the bathroom during the day?Most people would say, "No, I'm not doin' that,? but he did it and the make-up turned out spectacular. It was one of those things that if you did it for a movie you'd get an Oscar for it.

Q: Having done community theatre lighting and stage managing for (gasp) 20 years now, I'm fascinated by the entire process of make-up. Where did you start your training, and did you ever think you'd be doing aliens when you started?
M.K.B.

MW: I started my training at Universal Studios in 1961 and I apprenticed with John Chambers and my uncle Bud [Westmore]. I learned my beauty make-up and the hair work and things like that with my uncle Bud, but I learned the lab work from John Chambers who was the man that won an Oscar for the original "Planet of the Apes.? When you go into the business, you hope to do a lot of things. I hadn't really done any sci-if prior to Star Trek except for "Masters of the Universe? [1987] and I really enjoyed that, so when Star Trek came along it just afforded an opportunity to have a very creative career although it's not only aliens here—we still have beauty make-up to do with our leading ladies. And we go through old-age make-ups and we have a lot of burns and things. We do everything you do on normal shows too.

Question: With several years of prosthetic work for Star Trek under your belt now, how feasible do you think it would be to produce an 'all alien' show (i.e. a show based on the Klingon homeworld) in terms of money spent on make-up and the time making up each actor for every shoot? Also, how long before CG [computer graphics] replaces the majority of your work?
Marc M.

Michael Westmore: It would be feasible to have everybody be an alien. We just finished a two-parter with the Hirogen that had a very big budget. We had a lot of make-up artists on it. If there were a script with a lot of aliens and the studio liked it, they would put it into the works.

CG is doing very well and they are already using it, but it isn't absolutely perfect yet. There are still a few little glitches. I don't think the world will ever become totally CG because then you won't have anybody for the National Enquirer and there won't be any stories, no famous actors, no Oscars, nobody walking down the red carpet. As long as people are enamoured with movie stars and the glamour of Hollywood showbiz?CG will have its moments and there will be movies that are all CG. It's just a matter of time, but in the long run it will never replace actors.

Q: Are you using many techniques today that your family would have used in the 20s/30s? What is the one trick of the modern trade you wish you could have shown them?
Sarah P., UK

MW: A lot of the techniques we are using today are basically the same, but we have new products to do them with. The make-up foundations are better and the glues are better. One of the big problems today is the make-up artists are not as well trained as they were years ago. It's a lot easier to get into the business now so it makes it very lucrative for people who were trained in doing this because their talents are much in demand. So, techniques haven't changed so much as the quality of the materials to achieve them.

More than tricks, it's the products now that would have made life real easy; the make-up foundations was ground castor oil and pigment, of which you had to really watch and take care of, now, with the new opaque make-ups that we have it just makes life a lot easier. And you can do a lot more finishing because you can do the make-ups faster.

Q: Do you have creative control when creating a new piece, or do the producers come to you asking for a certain look?
Daniel K.

MW: Usually, the creative process depends on how many aliens there are going to be and [which actor] is going to be doing it. For instance, if it's a pretty girl, they don't want us to bury her in a lot of rubber. For a few aliens, they give us the opportunity to go ahead and do more with them. They more or less leave it up to me to go ahead and come up with some ideas and then submit them. Then, Rick Berman can say, "I like this one? or "I like that one.? Then I'll go and work in that direction. The scripts don't spell out ahead of time exactly what something's supposed to look like.

Q: If you could be any Star Trek alien, which would you be?
Nerys G., Canada

MW: Somebody lying on a cot on the planet Risa!

Q: I have trouble putting on my eyeliner! How do you get Chakotay's tattoo on straight everyday?
L. Randall

MW: I literally hand paint Chakotay's tattoo every day. (Some people think that I airbrush it or have a pattern.) As of today, the twentieth of September, I have painted him 675 times. So, I know exactly where that tattoo goes. I take a pencil and I draw the pattern on his forehead and then I take what is known as tattoo ink and with a fine watercolor brush I literally just hand paint it every day.

Q: Did the Cardassian masks generally consist of one piece, or were they glued on in smaller parts?
Julia B.

MW: No, the Cardassian has never been a full mask. It's a forehead, ears, the nose tip, chin and the shoulders.

Q: Do you enjoy making already established characters look like different aliens for certain episodes, such as the DS9 episode where four of the characters had to pose as Klingons, or when Neelix pretended to be a Ferengi?
Robbie J.

MW: It's fun to change the regulars into some other characters. Or even where they get to play themselves like the Deep Space Nine episode ["Far Beyond the Stars? where Armin Shimerman, Rene Auberjonois, Michael Dorn and Nana Visitor didn't use their normal alien make-up]. The actors enjoy doing it too, as opposed to playing the same character. It gives them a chance to get out of their skin and do something different.

Q: At the risk of being predictable, what was your favorite episode?
Tim S.

MW: I don't really have a favorite episode, there's so many of them. We're almost up to 500 of them now. I know there's one that might be my least favorite. I myself enjoy the shows, of course the ones that have more make-up in them and more visual effects—as opposed to talking shows.

Q: How do the actors manage to not sweat to death in those prosthetics, especially in hot weather?
K.H.

MW: They really don't sweat underneath the appliances. They are glued on with silicone adhesive, which is like having liquid adhesive tape, so they perspire out of other areas. If a person has been taking a prescription, certain drugs will affect the glue and that can become a problem through perspiration. Normally they stick on pretty good.

Q: Do you plan on doing make-up for the upcoming Star Trek series?
AMTCAD

MW: I would like to, but we haven't been given any scripts and we haven't been given a start date. I literally don't know anything about it—I haven't talked to anybody. There are a lot of rumors about what it's going to be and what's happening, but there have been no meetings so far. But, yes, I would like to.

Q: Have there ever been any rumblings about updating the old TOS enemy, the Gorn?
Bruce T.

MW: I love redoing the old ones. We've had the opportunity to do just a few of them. With the Gorn, we did update it for a CD-ROM, but it was a giant hand puppet as opposed to a mask. We made this big thing for an actor to wear, but the man I had paint it for me was a puppeteer and he had his hand up inside of it and he was puppeteering it when I walked in the door. They basically hired him to come do that, instead of putting it on an actor's head, because it had much more mobility in the mouth.

STARTREK.COM: Thank you for your time.

MW: Thank you.