Adrien Morot

SFX artist, Martyrs

Adrien Morot is a Montreal-born prosthetics and makeup artist who went on to win an Oscar for his work on The Whale. Years before that, he did the effects on Martyrs, the French extremity landmark that still empties rooms and turns stomachs. We talked about building practical horror that reads as real, the craft of making an audience flinch without the camera ever cutting away, and the long road from genre effects work to an Academy Award. Martyrs is a film I can only ever recommend with a warning attached, and a big part of why it lands the way it does is the work Morot put into it. Practical effects still hit harder than anything a computer does, and he is one of the reasons why.