Everybody knows the friendly alien in “E.T.,” the horrifying space monster from “Alien” and the giant gorilla in “King Kong,” but few are familiar with the shy man who created these fantastical creatures for the movies.
Now Carlo Rambaldi, considered the Da Vinci of special effects, or as Steven Spielberg said, “E.T.’s Geppetto,” is being honored with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, in collaboration with Cinecittà, the organization that promotes and preserves Italian films.
Now through Dec. 24, 15 movies that Rambaldi worked on are being shown. Rambaldi, who died in 2012, won visual effects Academy Awards for Spielberg’s 1982 blockbuster “E.T. The Exrtra-Terrestrial,” Ridley Scott’s film “Alien” in 1979, and John Guillermin’s “King Kong” in 1976. He also worked on Roger Vadim’s 1968 “Barbarella” and David Lynch’s 1984 “Dune.” He was posthumously awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, to be unveiled in 2026.
Carlo Rambaldi works on the Alien creature.
“My father collaborated very closely with these directors, because he needed to understand exactly what they wanted from the mechanical actor,” said his daughter Daniela Rambaldi, in an interview at MoMA Wednesday for the launch of the retrospective. “They would exchange ideas and even on set, my father would give advice.”
She recalled, for example, how there was a special effect that had E.T.’s pupil dilating to express emotion and her father advised Spielberg on the lighting. “It was so important to my father, to the movie, that it be seen,” she said.
Rambaldi recalled that her father created four versions of E.T., including a mechanical one with 85 points of movements, one with interchangeable heads for different expressions, and a costume version for walking. “I was there all the time, on the set with my father, or at his lab,” where he created special effects. “My father’s lab was in Northridge in California. After school, I would go to his lab and just sit around and do my homework. He would show me what he did, and said, ‘I did this today. This was a big challenge. What do you think?’”
Born in 1925 in Vigarano Mainarda, near Ferrara, Rambaldi studied painting and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna intending to be an artist. By chance, a friend doing a documentary on sturgeons asked him to create a replica. That fake sturgeon caught the attention of the director who needed a 16-meter dragon for the 1957 movie “Sigfrido.” That was Rambaldi’s first major project in cinema, in a career combining sculpture, engineering and storytelling in unprecedented ways.
Through the 1960s and 1970s, Rambaldi worked with several of Italy’s most innovative filmmakers, including Dario Argento on “Profondo Rosso” (1975), creating effects that heightened psychological intensity. He crafted elaborate mechanical figures for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “I racconti di Canterbury” (1972) and contributed to Federico Fellini’s “Giulietta degli spiriti” (1965.) For Luchino Visconti’s “Ludwig” (1973), he created a mechanized universe simulating a lunar cycle. According to a biography provided by Cinecittà, “While many of his contemporaries relied on optical tricks and miniatures, Rambaldi pioneered fully articulated animatronic systems built on anatomical accuracy and hydraulic precision,” though he never studied engineering or mechanics.
“He was self-taught,” Daniela Rambaldi said. “He did a lot of experiments before actually working on the animatronics, he would create, he would create a similar mechanism with cardboard, put the pieces together and see if it worked.” It’s not that he had a passion for science fiction or monsters. “Actually, it was about what he was asked to create. He had a fervid imagination.”
Daniela Rambaldi
Rambaldi moved to Hollywood after Dino De Laurentiis called upon him for “King Kong,” which De Laurentiis produced. De Laurentiis later asked him to create a large mechanical buffalo for the movie “The White Buffalo.”
His last special effects project for film was a 1994 Japanese movie called “Rex,” about little dinosaurs that befriend a girl. After “Rex,” he returned to painting and sculpting. “[Computer-generated imagery] put him out of work,” Daniela Rambaldi said. “He did say it’s a wonderful tool, but it takes away from an artist’s creativity. And then he used to say, ‘I got the Oscar. They gave an Oscar to Carlo Rambaldi. Creating something with CGI has a lot of people working on it for the same character. So who do they give the Oscars to?’ He believed that to give the public real emotion, the public had to feel it was something that you could touch.” Rambaldi retired in 2003.
“My father was very shy,” Daniela Rambaldi said. “He was very into his own world. He declared once that he never worked a day in his life because what he did was creative, so he would say he didn’t have to work. Hours for him were like minutes. He would go into the lab in the morning, come out at night, and not even realize the whole day had gone by. Even at home, he would bring homework at home, drawing and experimenting with new mechanisms. My mom used to say, ‘Your dad is married to his creations.’”
In past years, MoMA, working with Cinecittà, staged retrospectives for among many others, Federico Fellini, Sophia Loren, Claudia Cardinale, Bernardo Bertolucci, Luchino Visconti, and just last year, Marcello Mastroianni.
Rajendra Roy, MoMA’s chief curator of film, explained that Rambaldi’s special effects, whether with animatronic puppets, costumes, makeup, or splattered blood, ranged from the realistic to the more stylized. “If you think about the hand in King Kong specifically, he made that in a very realistic manner,” Roy said. “David Lynch’s ‘Dune’ is incredibly stylized, and Rambaldi’s creatures for that film are evocative of Lynch’s incredible mind.”
Asked if moviegoers in America know who Carlo Rambaldi was, Roy replied, “No. I can confidently say they’re familiar with his work, but not that it’s him.”
During the evening, Rambaldi’s granddaughter, Cristina Rambaldi, gave a moving address to the crowd in the theater, speaking to a note her grandfather left behind, encouraging the family to not discard any of what remained of his work in his studio. “David Lynch once said, ‘I have a theory about Carlo Rambaldi. He always builds himself,’ into whatever he creates for film. At first, it struck me as poetic but abstract. But then I, too, began to see it. Every creature my grandfather ever created carried something of him within it — his shyness, his tenderness, his stubbornness, his fears.”
