He said, “My head was in the neck. My hands were in the forearms, and there were cables [attached to my fingers to move the creature’s head and jaws]. My feet were in his calves, so I was on [stilts]. It was a disgusting outfit… When Joel asked me to jump, I knew it was gonna be a bad one. I said, ‘This is impossible, Joel. I think we’re gonna have a problem.'”
However, some crew members denied this version of events. First AD Beau Marks said, “We shot some [footage with the original suit], sent it back to the studio, and the decision came back that we were to shoot everything we could without the creature in the suit, and we were to go back and redesign [the creature]. And when we went back to redesign it, we went to Stan Winston. And Stan decided that the way to do the suit is to start with the tallest, biggest guy he could find, not someone who was the agile mover that Van Damme was.”