Rick Baker talks Men In Black III's retro aliens

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"Based on ’50s and ’60s B-movies"

It's often a throw-away, backslapping comment for film folk to talk about how much they enjoyed a project but make-up designer Rick Baker sounds genuinely happy about his work on Men In Black III .

“The thing that’s cool is there is a time travel element. Where I had fun is that we go back to the Men In Black headquarters of the ’60s," he told Shock Till You Drop.

"The first thing I said is that we should have retro aliens not aliens of 2012, more based on B-movies of the ’50s and ’60s. So a lot of the aliens are based on that - space suits with fish bowl helmets and ray guns.”

Baker also talked about Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes , which he was initially worried about because they didn't use any practical effects (unlike Tim Burton's Planet Of The Apes which he worked on).

"It won me over," he admits. "I went in totally expecting to hate it and loved it. I got a call from Fox very early on telling me about the project. 'It's going to be really great because we're not going to use any make-up for the apes' is what they told me. That sounded horrible and against what Planet Of The Apes is. I didn't want to know about it. Then I went to see it and thought it was a terrific story and what WETA did was fantastic."