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How did you come up with the new, long nosed look for the Whos?
That was the biggest challenge. At first, we tried doing as literal a translation of the Seuss drawings as we could do on a human face, and it turned out to be hideously grotesque. A distorted human face is always kind of tricky. It's a very fine line between grotesque and cute. We started with something we decided was wrong, and switched very last minute. And since we need new rubber face pieces for each day an actor works, we need some lead time to prepare the pieces. We were just about pulling stuff out of the oven and sticking it on their faces.

How do you keep the stars happy and quiet when they're sitting in the makeup chair for hours?
I have this big mallet. I just hit them in the head with it. No, it's hard because you're so focused that you're not being very entertaining. And you don't want to encourage them to talk, because it takes longer when they're moving their mouth, because you can't glue the stuff down. Eddie Murphy likes to watch TV and channel surf, so we have one in the makeup trailer with a satellite dish that we put directly behind him and he watches in the mirror. Kazuhiro Tsuji [who applied Carrey's makeup] told me Jim would listen to the Bee Gees every day. When I did Vincent D'Onofrio [as the buglike farmer] in ''Men in Black,'' his makeup took closer to six hours, which is horrible to put somebody through. I was saying, ''This is ridiculous to put him through this. We HAVE to be able to cut some time out,'' but we just couldn't.

What are we going to see in the new ''Planet of the Apes''?
Oh, boy, there's hundreds of apes to do. It's another enormous job with very little preproduction time. I really can't talk about it too much, but it's a more realistic approach [to the apes] than in the original movie. But they are still humanized in that they are biped, and they can talk.

Are monkey suits second nature for you now?
I thought I was done making apes after 1988's ''Gorillas in the Mist.'' It was always my goal to do a gorilla that people wouldn't know from the real thing, so after that I said, ''Okay, I've accomplished that; it's time to move on.'' But it's kind of like Christopher Lee saying he'll never play Dracula again. When I was approached about ''Mighty Joe Young,'' I had a real hard time turning that down. [The 1949 original] was always one of my favorite films. I did the Dino De Laurentiis version of ''King Kong'' in 1976 and was always disappointed because I wasn't able to do it as realistically as I wanted, and I thought this would be a good way to make up for that. And after that I thought, ''Okay, I'm DEFINITELY not gonna do any more.'' And then Tim Burton called me. It was such a landmark makeup picture, and I just had the hardest time turning it down. I'm a big makeup geek and a big ape geek, and I just thought, I really have to do this.