Demolition Man (1993)

My name is Mark Obrambila, the director of Demolition Man, and welcome to the 4K restoration of the film originally made in 1993. And hey, I'm Daniel Waters, one of the writers, the writer who took an action movie and made it into a silly movie. But I think me and Mark are the people that upheaved the Joe Silver boilerplate. We made it into something very unusual and bizarre, but... With a lot of resistance, actually, as I recall. Now they're not resisting. No. When I'm drunk, I like to Google Demolition Man underrated and all these great things happen because I think the movie is getting more appreciated now than it ever was. Absolutely. It's become something of a cult film, especially in the UK. So the opening was actually based on this kind of post-riot apocalyptic present day. which was in the future, obviously, and it's in San Angeles. So San Diego and Los Angeles merged into one giant metropolis. And Sylvester Stallone is the old school police officer who's in charge of taking down the crime lord, Simon Phoenix, played by Wesley Snipes. Yeah, I think it was the original script was by Peter Lenkoff and it was definitely a solid. action futuristic thriller, and this opening scene is definitely of the mold that the original screenplay was in. As you'll see, I kind of came in like green pepper, only three weeks of work, but I made it into something else that I think people enjoy, but this is the pure action part of the movie. Yeah, and the stunt here is interesting because the stunt coordinator, whose name is Charles Petroni, and this was the first time anyone had used this kind of technology, this repeller technology to come out of a helicopter. And Ken Bates actually won an Academy Award for using this. And the building we scouted in downtown LA was an old school, I believe. And it was the first time They've allowed a demolition, an actual demolition of a building anywhere in California in years. And we were able to art direct and create a set within the building where the showdown between Sylvester Stallone's character, John Spartan, and Simon Phoenix happened, which you're about to see. And this was actually the first thing I shot. This was all night shooting. So we started... uh the film kind of chronologically and then we moved into stats so this was all on location and uh yeah i was there on on top of a building nearby watching waiting for the explosion wesley snipes was there his posse was there it was it was a long wait but it was worth it i can still remember have a sense memory of the heat the heat against my face it was a real explosion yeah i was too close i think i had 13 cameras and the safety checks for the cameras and the camera positions and all of that took the better part of the day and in fact once the building imploded the sun was coming up so it was right down to the wire wow now wesley brought brought a lot of improv into this. Yes. Not a lot of mine lines, a lot of Wesley's lines. Although, is it cold in here or is it just me? That's a piece of foreshadowing because he dies being headed. You can only appreciate it in multiple viewings. I tend to write too much for the third time viewer. Like, oh, now it's funny. And Wesley was... obviously very different style actor to Sly. And working with Wesley was like completely unpredictable from day to day. And we had every type of actor in the cast from Nigel Hawthorne, who's obviously an Academy Award winning actor and who was new to the genre, let's say. And then Stallone, who usually worked with directors who don't request too many takes. So this was something that was fairly new to him when we would go into 15, 20 takes sometimes. And he didn't always appreciate it at first, but then he came to me after rushes one day and actually thanked me for the kind of attention to detail and working with him and his performance. But him and Wesley, I think the two approaches to the acting style as well as the characters and all that really worked well together, made it very dynamic. Yeah, it definitely works. And I think... Like Stallone thought my script was a little too funny at times. Like I turned it into Woody Allen Sleeper and he's not Woody Allen. But he ends up being great, all the contrasts. Well, we ended up actually when Stallone was making Cliffhanger in Rome and Joel Silver, myself, and the Warner Brothers account team had to fly to Rome to convince... that the humor was actually consistent with this vision of the future. So looking back on it now, I think, what, 30 years later, we can see that so much of this has actually come true. But at the time, what Dan wrote and what Dan brought to the script was so experimental and so wacky that nobody had any idea how... Yes, now that we went through COVID, COVID really made this move even more of a cult classic. Absolutely. Because no toilet paper, no physical contact. No physical contact, yeah. You can see the building here. This is interesting because I looked at pictures of Dresden after the firebombing in World War II. as reference for the way the building would be collapsed, the way it would appear at the end. And it's interesting because it actually came very close to that. Like you see the building kind of... And this is something that with a lot of the CG work that's being done today on films, it lacks a certain organic realism. And in this case, this is all done absolutely for real. The implosion was for real. All the fires are for real. There's no... CG enhancement. There are a couple of optical shots at the very beginning that were done as film opticals, but this was one of the first films to kind of bridge the gap. We didn't really burn the Hollywood sign? No, that was a miniature, but it was all physical. Oh, wow. It is an amazing shot. It's all physical, other than there's three shots coming up here in the cryo prison. section and the cryo prism was interesting because the idea of cryogenic suspension had been done so many times before in films and there are so many flavors of the way the subject would be in suspended animation and in this case i wanted something that would break out of the convention of alien etc etc and i actually designed this set with the production designer to be a fully horizontal So you could see the prisoners from top and bottom as if you were looking at a library of these characters. And later on, I worked with Mike Myers recently, a couple of years ago, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of film. And we were talking about different references of films in science fiction. And I pointed out that he had ripped off this sequence. Oh, yes. Austin Powers. Austin Powers. Definitely. Definitely ripped it off. And those are all latex dummies inside pucks. So when they're frozen, we put latex dummies inside. And the one instance of, we had a problem where one of the dummies caught fire from the lights. while we were on a lunch break and we had to evacuate stage 16, which is the largest soundstage on the Warner's lot. And we had to stop shooting for a day. But all of this was really, really interesting because all the... Wait a second. Andre Gregory and Jesse Ventura. That's a great combination. That's a credit you don't see every day. That pretty much encapsulates the casting of this movie. Like we got my dinner with Andre and Jesse Ventura. The governor. Can I just say from a screenplay point of view that Stallone had a horrible lawyer. Like, the fact that he has to go to prison is a little sketchy to me. Like, what? And in this scene he insisted on we had a hydraulic mechanism that would shut the container and this was a combination of glycerin and a substance called propylene glycol that we used and there was a We gave him like a panic button so he could signal us if he was really in trouble. But he also insisted on swallowing some of the liquid substance so that he could spit it up. And you see it in the shot coming up now. He actually spits it up into the glass as he takes his last breath. Oh, wow. Before he goes. But that was Sly wanting to really make it physical. And here you're going to see the first... actual computer generated effect so um this is uh based this was inspired by a kurt vonnegut novel where uh i think it was a sirens of titan where there's a substance called ice ice nine that that's cat's cradle buddy okay it's cat's cradle okay don't try to try not don't try to out vonnegut me stay in your lane buddy So Ice Nine was the inspiration for this substance. Oh, no shit. You never told me that. That's amazing. That would instantly create the solid stasis for the character. We got some great people working on this movie. Bob Ringwood, David L. Snyder, and we just saw Stuart Baird, who I compare to Dr. Smith in Lost in Space. He was a... He can be very persnickety, but he did a great job. One of the best editors. He went on to be a director afterwards, actually, as well. And this is done with a snorkel camera. So for this scene, which is essentially the title sequence, it had to be shot in very, very... dense smoke to get the feeling of being inside the park. And it was shot... Wait, pause for my credit. Just want to know that this guy writes a great arbitration letter to get first credit, but that's another story. So the smoke in here was so dense that you could barely see the monitor. So we had to build tents within the studio just to contain all the smoke. Yay, Marco. There I am. And now this is a big flash forward, obviously. And this shot was particularly complicated because back then we didn't have techno cranes, et cetera. So this was done with two giant cranes, one suspended above the other. And this was the closest I came to being fired on the film because this shot took an entire day. to set up and rehearse, and the frequency of visits from Joel and then the studio executives, and then even Lisa Hansen, who was the head of the studio at the time, dropped by to casually say, are we going to have a shot today? So that was a very tricky shot to set up. Oh boy, the things I don't have experience. And this is Sandra Bullock, who plays Lenina Huxley, which is Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, and the female lead is named Lenina. So that was my lazy way of creating a character, but I love this character. She's obsessed with, basically obsessed with Joel Silver movies, and she's now stuck in a future without crime or violence. There's a great line, I don't know if I wrote it, but Andrew Gregory's, things don't happen anymore. That is a great line. I mean, I think I kind of based this San Angeles on, I went to CityWalk and I thought, what if all of Los Angeles was CityWalk? And this also predicts a couple of technologies. So this is kind of a precursor to the iPad. And obviously you saw a self-driving car earlier. And we were very lucky because one of the biggest costs on the production like this is the vehicles itself. So to make vehicles for science fiction movies is incredibly complicated. on the budget so we were able to work with General Motors who donated a lot of concept cars straight from car shows and also we designed a car with General Motors as the police car so we built about 12 of these cars which ran on a go-kart engine so they were very noisy but they looked very futuristic and this is also the first introduction here that there's a kind of underbelly to this perfect, seemingly perfect utopian civilization, which is... As you mentioned, Robert Renaud kind of is the credited writer that came up with The Underground, not me. But Robert Renaud and I have since become friends. We have never discussed Demolition Man. I'm afraid I think I made it too silly. And I run into Peter Linkoff. I used to run into him at Laserdisc stores, and he's also like... I'm not sure if he wants to kill me or strangle me, but now he's got to love me because the movie's got a great reputation now. Even Elon Musk talks about this movie. Yes, absolutely. He posted it on Twitter. He says we're both time travelers. So Dennis Leary, you saw earlier, and he came into the project bringing his own particular brand of humor because it was a big stand-up comic and then becoming... a film actor at the time. And here, this is Rob Schneider, who I cast from Saturday Night Live. And this is one of the few actual practical locations in the film. So we found a kind of office campus in San Diego where we shot the police headquarters and built in a lot of the technology. I love the use of character actors delivering very silly dialogue, but they make it seem real. That's Troy Evans. Bill Cobbs, who recently died, is coming up. Yeah. And I think, as you say, it's played so straight that it develops. The more you see the film, especially looking at it in retrospect now, there's a very specific style to the humor. And I think that's what makes it... become more cultish because it has a very particular vernacular. Yeah, I think the original audiences who, because the movie is not advertised with any comedy at all, like the trailers were very serious. They didn't know what they were getting into, but I think now they do. Sotto voce violation. What a great line. Thank you, Waters. And we missed greetings and salutations from Rob Schneider, which is a reference to my movie, Heathers, which is a reference to Charlotte Webb. This is Lenina Huxley's office, which is... Oh my God, so great, with the Raiders hat and the Lethal Weapon poster. Yeah, filled with all the memorabilia from the more violent century. And Benjamin Brant plays Alfredo Garcia, another name that's a reference to the very violent Sam Peckinpah movie. But he's so good in this movie, too. They have a great chemistry. They had a really good relationship in the film. I think they kept being surprised by what movie they were in. Like, wait a second, we thought we were doing a Stallone movie and we get to do comedy bits too? Yeah. So you can see Sandra Bullock. This is actually Sandra Bullock's, I think she made, she had shot, you know, Speed. Oh, she hadn't shot Speed. No, I think she had shot Speed. No, this movie got her Speed. Are you sure? Joel, absolutely. Joel showed them scenes from this movie and that got her speed. And anytime I run into Sandra Boggs, she acts like we started a career, which I'll take. And this is, again, the set design is, we worked very hard to make everything work practically. Even the... the chairs and all the devices were custom made for the film. And often they tend to reuse things. And in this film, we were able to create original, a very original look. And I wanted it to be very monochrome. I hired Alex Thompson, whose work I really liked from David Fincher's Alien. And he was just marvelous to work with. And the lighting and the camera was fantastic. this film i just want to say i was the first person to do the severed eye uh opening a door trick which now movies yes that's become a staple staple demolition man we were there first we're going to keep saying that and wesley trained he trained for a couple of months with uh martial arts experts and he did a lot of his own stunts which was really adds a lot of authenticity to it yeah you you play a lot of us you play a lot of his stuff in the long shot like gene kelly like really showing that he can do it i think this was actually ripped off almost directly in minority report uh it's almost a direct it's almost a direct lift crazy The other thing about this, which is interesting, is that we relate, somehow we relate to Wesley Snipes' character because he is a breath of fresh air in this kind of over-sanitized world that we see. Yeah, I mean, Sandra Bullock has that great transition line. What would I do for some action? What I wouldn't give for some action? And I think the audience is thinking the same thing. And then we cut to Wesley and it's perfect. And this was very early computer graphics. So I remember shooting this for what seemed like weeks to get all the interaction between the actors and the prerecorded videos because at that time we weren't able to generate any of the visuals on the screens in real time so the actors were working with these graphics and kind of reacting to them so there was a lot of time spent to to get this uh what at the time was this was state-of-the-art computer graphics at the time so you can see um It morphs into the real surveillance camera footage, and then you're able to geolocate the people, which is also, I think, a first in a film, being able to locate people this way and to find they're able to track down the perpetrator remotely. And obviously, they've never seen anything like this, so that's Rob Schneider throwing up, actually. And even Bob Gunn plays the tough guy, but even, I love that his pathos, like he really doesn't understand how there could be murder. It's a great piece of acting. Now some people, I'm afraid more people are gonna accuse us of like being racist because the one black guy getting released from prison ruins the society. But I asked Wesley Snipes about it and he go, I got all the best lines. I got the best character and I'm getting paid money. How can that be racist? I mean, Bullock sells this so much, like just the way she does first and last names. She's so into the character. I mean, I can't imagine... I mean, we're not going to bring up Lori Petty, but I can't imagine anybody else in the movie. So he was around when Phoenix... Bill Cobb's character, if you don't recall, is the helicopter pilot with Stallone at the start of the movie. It takes you about eight viewings to get that, but... And now she's solving the crime remotely, so she's locating... phoenixes and then we go back into the main cryo prison parking zone enhancing image tracking dr mostai 187 deceased do you wish to assign it's funny most of the most of the script was written i only had two weeks to write it i most of it was written standing in line with a friend of mine martin shank waiting to see one of johnny carson's last episodes we had to wait in line 20 hours So we had a lot of time to come up with future stuff. That's where you came up with the three seashells, right? No, three seashells, that was at another time, but I came up with a lot of stuff. Wilshire and Santa Monica is where CAA used to be. I don't know if that is a reference. It wasn't mine. There we go. They're so smug. Unit 12, protect, sir. Apprehend fugitive. Proceed with extreme assertiveness. Doctor's vehicle has been code-fixed. I love the no-contact high-fives. Who knew that we were predicting the future with that, too? And this was, I think, this was just outside of San Diego, and these were all General Motors concept cars with, this is a very, this is a nice piece of art direction. we came up with, which was basically a teleporting, there was an interesting Philip K. Dick novel where you have a psychiatrist in a briefcase called Dr. Smile. So the inspiration for this was from Philip K. Dick and it gives you this kind of inspirational greeting and you're able to talk to the computer here and be motivated. Yes, I want an ego boost button on my ATM. You made a lot, when we were working together, you made a lot of references to Philip K. Dick. Absolutely. Well, I'd worked on two film adaptations, which never went anywhere. So I ended up using a lot of what was to be in Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge and Flow My Tears. Those were the two Philip K. Dick novels. Oh, wow. So a lot of that crept into this film. And now the important plot point here is that he... had been rehabilitated. All the prisoners are rehabilitated while they're in cryostasis. But in this case, he's been also rehabilitated with incredible knowledge about this operating system that the world works with. So he's able to- And isn't there, there's a Philip K. Dick character, I believe in androids, Buster Friendly. Yes. And so Edgar Friendly is kind of a little nod to Buster Friendly. I mean, there's so much Philip K. Dick has crept into. I remember Cronenberg's Existence when he used percupate layouts in Existence as well. So a lot of the more obscure Philip K. Dick references actually made their way in various films. Watching the movie again, I'm surprised how you didn't miss one cuss word. Anytime anybody cusses, no matter what, there's a buzz. We had someone special. We had a special, there's a person printing out Like I was thinking, surely I'll catch a shit or a fuck that they didn't buzz. And no, it was perfect. This is one of my favorite scenes when the police officer... This is definitely a scene I remember seeing with an audience. It's like, what the fuck is this movie? Because when you're working with Joel, the violence always has to be real. Like I've done comedies with... Josh, but Joel, but the violence always is like really hurts. Look how smug they are. That's great. I'm laughing. Sorry. So he goes in now. Is he able to hack into the graffiti removal wall, which was introduced earlier, and he's able to use... various tools to get rid of the police here. And that's how it's so easy for him to get around in San Angeles in the future. And later we find out that Cocteau, there he is. So now he's using the graffiti removal wall that was introduced previously to eliminate one of the officers. Yeah. It's quite an alchemy that you had to pull off of like making it fun, but making it really draw blood. Well, there was a lot of, I mean, the pre-production process was very lengthy. So I didn't really pre-vis so much of this. You know, now with a lot of sci-fi and action films, everything is pre-vis. But this was, again, before pre-vis. So it was all done with storyboards. And I worked with a very good storyboard artist called Robbie Consig. who's working now on all the Marvel action movies, actually doing previsits. So this scene was storyboarded extensively with all the elements that had to be used to create the sequence. Now, when the Warner Brothers sees this scene, do they start to lay off you a bit? Yeah, totally. No, no. I mean, we never had... People ask me about the production and what was it like to work with Stallone, what was it like to work with Joel, and it was actually... uh, not that difficult. It was, uh, it was a very ambitious film to make. And I was 20, I was 28 or 29 years old that made commercials before then. So I'd shot a lot of very high production value commercial was a lot of extras, et cetera, but it prepared me for, you know, working on something like this. And I was very, Joel actually was very protective of the process. Great. Like the. making fun of the star spangled banner always always name your villain simon so they can do the simon says runner it's always gold now they've never seen anything like this before he's already figured out how to do this yes sandra bullock has seen this in movies but she's never seen it in real life an actual explosion

Now, this is a matte painting. Craig Pangrazio made a series of matte paintings for the White Shots in Futuristic LA. Is it the LA Convention Center? That was the LA Convention Center, but with all these extensions. Oh, great. And I'm very proud of this scene because this kind of predates Zoom and teleconferencing. So I designed this so that... people in boardroom would actually be virtually, only virtually present. And all the stands and TV screens were on motion control motors, which you usually use for special effects to track the motion of Cocteau here. It's amazing. It's definitely outzooms a Zoom conference. Absolutely. And it makes it very theatrical. I was going after a very theatrical look for all the technology. If we have another play, I'm sure these things will be built.

Nigel Hawthorne, who was nominated for an Oscar for Madness of King George. I got the sense he thought he was slumming here, but he really does a great job. Absolutely. And just when you think things are getting serious, Glenn Shaddix, who I work with on Heathers and from Beetlejuice, comes in. I cast him because of Beetlejuice, actually. That was the reference. And then the hairdo and the kimonos and all that. And he's a great character because he actually has an arc. He actually, like, he just goes from... Whoever's the main villain or the main hero in the movie, he becomes their best friend, which I thought worked out pretty funny. Be well. Enhance your calm. Be well. Those are the things that I came up with on the Carson line. All the political correctness, I think, in the language at the time sounded... like complete well this is what's hilarious that we've become this bastion for libertarians they think that we we've told it like it is and so now i think like they're this is the libertarian like i've been sent youtube videos of like how we predicted the world and i'm like okay okay lighten up guys but people do actually today i mean people express themselves using language that's not so dissimilar to this. Yeah, you have to. My favorite line in the movie is, you can't take away people's right to be assholes, that Snipe says later on. It's definitely... Okay, and this is the idea of coming up with the idea of defrosting Stallone's character, which... sets everything in motion. Yeah, the original scripts, they just had it, but they didn't play up the real, I tried to play up the contrast really, really a lot. Oh, and I love this. This is the biggest laugh of the movie coming up. With the child. With her going, fuck you, lady. But I told the Warner Brothers wanted to change it to screw you, lady, and we had to fight for it. Is that true? Yeah, absolutely. I shot that on the first night of the night shoots, actually, all these videos. Oh, wow. She's so good. I was going to lie in the director's commentary and say that little actress turned out to be Sidney Sweeney or somebody, but I don't know who she is. He's still good in this. I think the contrast, his attitude is just fantastic. I like his throwaway meat eater. Lethal weapon poser always gets a laugh from me. That's the trailer line, an old-fashioned cop to get an old-fashioned criminal.

And this is when Mike Myers steals from us? Yeah. And we spent weeks and weeks. The shooting in the cryo prison was the most challenging, just technically challenging. So all these devices actually had to work and be tested and retested. We actually had to shut down for a week to get this all working because this was very, very complicated. I think the pucks weighed over a thousand pounds. So to be able to have it function and to move in the right way took a long, long time of testing and all of that. Al Desaro was the physical effects coordinator and he did a great job in making all of that happen and making it work without any problems. So much easier to be the writer where you just come up with this stuff in your underwear at two in the morning and then you guys got to deal with it. And again, this was very early computer graphics used for the visuals of how someone is defrosted. Again, making it very theatrical. I wanted it to be not absolutely scientifically accurate, but making it as theatrical as possible, including the introduction of Sylvester Stallone in the future here. This was based on a Renaissance painting. And this is Stallone at the peak of his bodybuilding. Did he have any problems with nudity? Not at all. Not at all. Just like, show my body. Absolutely. He worked out specifically for that scene. The two scenes he had the specific attention for and required a whole regimen was the first scene when he goes into the bucket, that scene, which we shot right after. Yeah, this has got a lot of stuff. The big one of 2010. But this is interesting because we were able to communicate a lot of the backstory here. So in the explanation here, we cover a tremendous amount of ground, how we got to where we are today. And we're seeing it through Stallone's eyes for the first time. Yeah, Sandra Bow's got to deliver a lot of exposition, but it doesn't feel like exposition because you'd understand why he... And I think Stallone's baggage to the film works... to the film's advantage here because he's definitely, you believe him as that character from the very first time you see him. Yeah, no, it has to be played. John Spartan's got to be played by an action icon. There's also a reference in the film to Schwarzenegger being the president. Oh, yes. That was actually in the original Peter Linkov script, but I marinated it and made it even sillier and funnier.

Now, Stallone's got a missing daughter. We can talk about this more, but the missing daughter element never really... I mean, we ended up shooting something where he actually finds his daughter, but we cut it out because it was dragging the movie and with great actress Elizabeth Ruscio. But when you come to the sex scene, everyone in the test audience thought Sandra Bullock was going to be Stallone's daughter. So they're all like pulling their hair out and groaning. So we had to do some ADR to... to make sure that people knew the daughter had to be older. Joel pitches a sequel. He goes, we've got to get Meryl Streep to play the daughter, and she's the new Cocteau. I'm like, oh, my God.

Oh, here comes the big... Oh, this is the swearing. He sets the machines off constantly. Yes, anything good for you is bad. Smoking, alcohol, caffeine, chocolate, gasoline... Well, I think you got that from Sleeper. Definitely, there's a lot of... Don't call me on my Sleeper rip-offs, but there's definitely some... And I like that not only abortion is illegal, but also pregnancy is illegal. And, of course, this was just... silly lark on our part, but now it's just like all this stuff is real. Like when we shot this movie, you could smoke in bars. Now you can't even smoke outside. If there's a civil war, we'll be spared, Marco, because they think we're conservative heroes by being anti-political. We'll just say, we made Demolition Man. Don't kill us. Trump don't execute us it's interesting to watch this you know 30 years later and to see how I mean you can't really out satirize you can't really satirize the present day today and at the time of course you could do almost anything and there were so many ways to go and this I find it really interesting when I talk to people about this film how many aspects of contemporary culture we kind of nailed at the time and this was all the subtext that uh we had the hardest time selling to the studio and to stallone okay now we have to take a pause because this is where the he says he doesn't understand the three seashells which is the bathroom which which i was joking with marco has become the legacy of the movie i'm sure we've both been plagued by people on the street asking us how to use the three seashells can i i'll just say like i was asking all my friends Help up me with future stuff. I call my friend Larry Karaszewski, who wrote Ed Wooden, People vs. Larry Flint. Give me some future stuff. I go, can I call you back? I'm going to the bathroom. I'm like, well, give me some bathroom stuff. And he goes, well, my wife's got these seashells next to her. And I go, seashells, got it. I can work with that. But what do you say to people when they ask you? Well, I had a bailiff. I was in jury duty, and this female bailiff comes up to me and goes, because I had to list my credits for the judge. And she goes, tell me if my seashells theory is correct. Like, this is a bailiff pitching me. And she goes, okay, the first seashell is to pinch your ass open. The second seashell is to pull the shit out. And the third seashell is a hose to clean your ass. And I'm like, can I get out a jury, dude, please? I've never heard that in my life. That's as good a theory as any. Almost too graphic. Yes. but I love it, it was a total stranger pitching me. And this is, we had a great writer, Jonathan Lemkin, who came in for a production rewrite. He came up with that joke of him cussing and using the paper's toilet paper, which I thought was a great, I love when a rewriter actually improves my stuff instead of trying to change it, and that was a great example. Now, this is also very precedent. This is about the chips installing machines biometric chips to track people so everyone can be tracked. And again, post-COVID, this is interesting because with all the restrictions, especially in China with facial recognition and all that, social demerits, all of that. This is going to be quaint in another five years. We're all going to have it.

This is where he begrudgingly releases Stallone to let him do what he needs to do. Well, not to keep bragging about my great transition lines, but the only place you can find a gun is a museum. I mean, come on. That was actually the line that I got. Okay, I get the movie now. Like, okay, he's got to go to a museum to get the guns. Of course... I don't know why the museum puts live ammunition inside the guns, but that's... It's very authentic. Who's going to quibble? You think he wants to start a business? Phoenix is going for a gun, plain and simple. Trust me. I love his style art. It's fantastic. Oh, shit. It's my Gilligan's Island upbringing where these transitions, like, what?

And I love the Hall of Violence coming up here. I used Robert Longo as a reference here. Oh, no kidding. Robert Longo was a big artist at the time. I got Robert to lend us one of his very early sculptures, which is in the background somewhere. It's like this gargoyle-style sculpture. And then the museum was actually designed around the action sequence that are going to take place there. So there's a glass floor, which becomes... very important to the fight they're going to have a little bit later and it's this kind of rube goldberg situation with the glass shattering and then them going into another environment so the museum was very functional yeah no it's fantastic i live in downtown l.a now so i love that downtown l.a is basically a museum under glass piece now love these sunglasses

These cars were very difficult to work with because they were all prototypes. I remember this took about 12 takes to get the doors to open and close properly. And we were able to find some really interesting architecture around mostly San Diego, Irvine, California, these industrial parts because I wanted it to be very bland and reflect this vision of the future. I got very lucky finding a lot of corporate architecture that we didn't have to do very much, uh, to, to make it futuristic. And this is the jingles coming up now. Well, I had a, I had a CD of jingles and like, I just remember we'd play them one after the other and go, who, who would, why did I buy this CD? The CD is so grating. And like, I'm like, oh, wait, wait a second. And then when I got hired to do this movie, I'm like, wait a second. What if this is the music of the future? But this is interesting because I wish I'd taken more advantage of that because I think the corporatization of everybody becoming a brand and even recording artists now being considered brands and it's such a kind of porous world between commercial spots. Like the Barbie movie. The Barbie movie is essentially a TV commercial for a product as well as being a movie. So again, I wish I... taken advantage of this idea a little bit more overall. But in this scene, we used the jingles. Yeah, because nostalgia is so crazy now. There's nothing new happening. It's all great shot. There's nothing new. And the jingles of the 70s, the jingles of my childhood were much better than the jingles now. Well, they weren't market researched at the time. Exactly.

And no one, the staff at the museum has no idea how to deal with anyone like this. So you see the character coming up, offering to help, completely unprepared for what's about to happen. The small characters are all. And I love the art direction in the window. I had the gangsters. It's kind of chronological. There's a gangster and then there's different warriors from different eras there in the window. What seems to be your boggle? What seems to be your boggle? Got to give credit to my friend Martin for that one. Oh, geez. Again, just gentle comedy, and then when people get hurt, they get hurt. Yeah, and I think that's the Robert Longo sculpture in the background. Oh, cool. There, the metal one. And this is where it switches gears again, and this is where we go into action territory. And then, you know, we... shift gears quite a bit in the film and it feels surprisingly fluid actually it's definitely a there's definitely a roadrunner coyote element to the there because because there's no there's really no other villains at this point so it's really going to be just stallone and snipes using the future as a playground exactly So he's being introduced now to technology that technically in the script he's supposed to know about all of this, obviously, because he was programmed with all the knowledge of this century. Yes, a little bit cheating the premise of where only 80s and 70s stuff, but now we've got to have a little futuristic weaponry. Come on. Honestly, I don't think I wrote... He may have written, maybe wrote 12 Snipes lines, most of it. He liked the script, but he had his way with it. Absolutely. But I think, again, he just fit right, he slid right into the character. And the freewheeling improv that he, I let him go a lot of the time. Well, he's definitely like a cartoon character. He's a live wire. He's almost like, I know I referenced Roadrunner and Coyote, but he's more like Bugs Bunny. Absolutely. Bugs Bunny with a gun. This is similar to what, you know, they're getting all the prompts are. It's basically like Apple store employees now. Or if you work at Uniqlo or Apple or any big corporation, you're given a script of how to deal with your customers. So here, even the police officers have a script. which is generated by, let's say, what today would be artificial intelligence to tell them how to react to an emergency. So it's gone through every profession. That glow rod beat where he uses the glow rod on a civilian was always another great moment with a test audience. Like, okay, they're starting to get the movie now. Okay, now this is Stallone as the hero. So this took a long time to shoot to get Stallone to be, you know, kind of the myth of Stallone from other films. And I shot him and I intentionally shot him in a way that the audience would be familiar with, even in this setting. Well, it's great. He's got that constrictive uniform, but he's still, you can see Stallone struggling against the uniform. He's so professional. He's done this so many times before that he was, again, so easy to work with in the action sequences because the action sequences only took two or three takes. Elliot Goldenthal, another artistic type slumming a bit, but he does a great job. This is an interesting scene. score that makes his features i think this is one of his first i'm wondering if this was his first score because i hired him based on um again there was a lot of resistance to hiring elliot because he was not the conventional choice for this kind of film but i really loved his his music yeah no he was did really interesting work i think he's part of our team of trying to make it a little different than a joel silver movie Typical Joseph movie. Married to Julie Taymor at the time. Yeah, I think he did a score for her before this movie. You may be wrong. Oh, yeah. And here we go. So this is all disinformed the way I designed the museum so that the sequences could take place. So we had the glass floor, which exposes the old downtown L.A., And of course, now the glass floor is used by Stallone to create this situation. Oh boy. It's interesting watching this because when you're looking at films pre-digital, pre-visualization, there's a kind of artisanal quality to the action sequences, which sometimes is much better. Absolutely, because you have to plan it out. You have to curate it. What I find to be a problem with a lot of the kind of Marvel universe films is they come from one previsualization kind of factory, and they're farmed out to different films. So a car chase in one film will resemble a car chase in another film because They used assets across different projects, which is very efficient for the studio. Yeah, you didn't have the luxury of saying, we'll take care of it in post to every action sequence, which they do now. And things tend to make sense. As theatrical as all of this is, there's certain physical things that make sense. And now in film, we've kind of moved away from that. Like people can fly and people can... to stop time and teleport for no apparent reason in the film to further the plot. I think they've stopped holding us to a realism at this point. So Spartan is not successful here and Phoenix gets its way back into the world. Well, that's always a funny thing about action movies. You can't let the hero be successful before the movie's over. And here is, again, this is an interesting location, Irvine, California. This is an industrial campus, basically, for, I think it was for, just all for a company. And it was a corporate campus. And here comes Phoenix. And now you can start to feel that there's something going on between Cocteau and Phoenix. There's little villains and big villains. And there's programming. There's some kind of mind control that's happened where he's... There he is. He's unable to shoot Cocteau. Nigel's great in this. It's a great scene, the juxtaposition of those two characters. Exactly, exactly. He's the only guy who can shut Wesley up. We don't play... We reveal right away that Nigel Hawthorne's the real villain. I think, you know, Alan Rickman and... Well, Joel's very famous because he plucked Alan Rickman from just stage work and put him in Die Hard. Yeah. And I think this may have been Joel's idea, actually, to cast Nigel Hawthorne as well. Oh, cool. Yeah. I like those magical bushes. Oh, we can't chase after him because these magical bushes are keeping us. It's like, okay, move along. Let's not dwell on that. I was going to invite him to Taco Bell. for dinner. When we were in pre-production, I tried to get, we tried to get McDonald's. It was actually McDonald's. It was Burger King in the script. Burger King turned us down. And then McDonald's turned us down. And then McDonald's turned us down. And Taco Bell, it's so much better. It is. It's so much better. It is. Now it is. Now it is. And the way Nigel delivers the line, join me tonight in Taco Bell. And Stallone in the audience's reaction is also amazing. Do you know why McDonald's turned us down? Just R rating. Yeah, R rating. Yeah, but Taco Bell, they're made for R rating people. In some regions, there was an alternate. I had to shoot an alternate with a different franchise. Pizza Hut is in the British version. Pizza Hut also works. Pizza Hut's better than McDonald's and Burger King. But Taco Bell's the best. And Taco Bell has really... embraced it like they have like they they for the anniversary of the film they built the futuristic taco bell which i thought was great oh here we go the sanctity of human life namely my own i would like to invite you to join me to dinner tonight the both of you please i insist i would like you to accompany me oh so we're watching the pizza hut cut but but but it's it's It's Taco Bell, just for people watching, it's Taco Bell and Pizza Hut on a two different version. It's funny. And Sandra being excited about it. Like, you can take your Madness of King George Oscar nomination. I think Taco Bell is the best. And also, I try to have fun with the, I'm not a macho guy, so I try to have fun with the macho elements of this movie. So I have Sandra Bullock say things like, matched his meat and really licked his ass, and Stallone having to correct her. I do that all throughout the movie. In fact, when she goes, let's blow this guy and let's, you mean blow away. Like I'm always making fun of the homoerotic element of all action movies, of all hero villain relationships. And I love that she's completely oblivious to what she's actually saying, which really sells the comedy. Benjamin Bradbury did a movie with my brother and I ran into him at the premiere and he's like such a big Demolition Man fan. He had such a great time making the movie. This is again one of his first films. Certainly he never had a role like this. Great plan. Thank you. He likes your plan, Chief. And this is, I believe, this is John Wayne Airport. Again, looking for locations anywhere I could find them because the budget on the film was approved originally at about $48 million. And then it, you know, it went up to $70 million. So we had to cut back on a lot of location shooting. I had locations scouted in different parts of the country where I would shoot plate shots, et cetera, et cetera. But we were... We had to shoot everything in California, basically. So we were able to find some very futuristic locations. That's something people don't understand is when the budget balloons and we think we have all the money in the world, you never have all the money in the world. I wrote Batman Returns. It was basically a $100 million budget. And we're still acting like we're shooting a Roger Corman movie because we're scraping. Well, Batman Returns was, if I'm not mistaken, that was all built. Everything was built. I don't think there were any locations on that film. They didn't love you as much as Tim at that point. Yeah. So when you have to use locations, it gets very complicated to maintain the tone and maintain the feeling of being in this future. Yeah. I remember the first time I met David Snyder, he goes, every inch of the movie is future. So nothing is left to chance. And a lot of that is the color palette and the lighting. Yeah. That was, again, Alex Thompson working with Alex to create a color palette for San Angeles present day and then to create a color palette for this. And this was also shot in a kind of complex in San Diego. That was an amazing dress for San Diego. Sandra Bullock, I remember. Yeah, that dress weighed about 30... Yes. It weighed about 35 pounds. She had a hard time walking around it. I remember visiting... I visited the set that day, and she was... I was complimenting her about her performance, but she was, like, complaining that she's weighing a 900-pound dress. And that was Dan Cortez, who was a MTV personality. Definitely a 1990s icon, singing the Jolly Green Giant song. We should add more... 90s cameos. See, I guess that food works for Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. And now franchise, you know, the idea of franchise even... high-end restaurants. They're all franchised everywhere. Now you have restaurants showing it. And again, the Dubai-ification of the world as it relates to restaurants and hotels. Exactly. Globalization has affected even... This is Taco Bell, obviously, so this is clearly a satire. But now, if you go to a Japanese restaurant called Zuma, which has... chain everywhere in dubai uh los angeles new york uh all london all over the world and the food is identical it's all that kind of trader vicks mentality yes of finding like soho house which has expanded everywhere in the world and there's kind of generic environment that exists everywhere that's correct that's a great point and it all speaks the same language so uh you know exactly what you're going to get and you're not going to get anything unpredictable or specific to the geographic location. And we've made, you know, and then people love that now. Exactly. Oh, Stallone, you're ruining the vibe. This is where Cocteau lets loose on his philosophy. So he gives us a brief... history of how he's impacted society for the better in his eyes. I mean, and you totally believe him. I love when the villain's coming from a place of not just pure evil, but he really thinks he is doing good. The tradition of all the Bond villains. Yeah, his plan's kind of simple. Just kill the one revolutionary. Laura Harris is an actress. She's great here. I've run into her at a couple of parties where the first time she acted like she was slumming by doing this silly science fiction movie. Dan, this was her big break. And then the next time she's like, it's a classic, of course. She was a model at the time. I don't know. She had been in a music video. She had done a movie with Charlie Sheen called No Man's Land. And these are the scraps coming out. And Stallone's the first person to spot this. See, we're not just libertarian. I think that we're like, you know, this is against like the thugs and hooligans mentality. But we turn out that they're actually just trying to get some food to eat. And And I love the wardrobe design here because Bob Ringwood, I hired Bob because of his work on Dune, actually. Oh, no kidding. This is where he gets closest to the aesthetic of, you know, the brief for him was very simple. I told him to make the costumes had to be repurposed from other things. So you're seeing characters here wearing all sorts of recycled tires and objects that they could find on the ground. And this was the stunt coordinator, actually, he's fighting right now. Oh, wow. Get him! Yeah, for all we know, these are just more villains, but, you know, I like the revelation. This is very cartoony. I love Dennis Leary's line, what a fucking hero.

hero. Wish I could take credit for it. See, Marco, we're liberals, so if the liberals take over, we'll win this civil war, too. Either way, we're not going to a concentration camp. I love this scene with Huxley finally seeing what he's been only, you know, being able to see in old movies, seeing it live, and she's so blown away. ...sewers and abandoned tunnels. They're a constant irritation to our harmony. Thugs and hooligans. That's straight out of, like, riot, politician riot talk. Anytime there's unrest, they just blame it on thugs and hooligans. It's better live than on Laserdisc. Only a man who owns 10,000 Laserdiscs could write that line. God made me rich too early in my life. Like, I spent so much money on Laserdisc. What an idiot. Do you still have them? No, I had a crazy old man buy them from me. I mean, didn't make a big profit, but he took my entire Laserdisc collection. He was excited about Rob Lowe and Youngblood. That was the one Laserdisc that he got excited about. I'm like, what? When I'm watching the movie, I'm going, Marco, why didn't you use the Pacific Design Center? And then I knew you wouldn't let me down. Yeah. I mean, the location search took months and months and months. And we actually used a lot of the locations for Rising Sun. Remember the Kaufman film? Oh, yes. It was with Wesley Slipes. Yeah. And actually, Wesley Slipes was shooting that film, I believe, when we first approached him. I remember visiting him in this trailer and giving him my take on the script. And we convinced him to do the film on that set. Just when he talks about his daughter. He talks about his daughter. Oh, my God. Setting up the audience moaning. Audience thinking for sure it's Sandra Bullock. I mean, this scene was originally much longer. So I cut down. for the sake of rhythm, Stuart and I cut down quite a bit of the kind of backstory that Chris Stallone had. But I think it improves the film tremendously. Yeah, when we get to it, I'll show where the daughter scene happened. I mean, you'll see like, oh my, you know, even though it was a fine scene, you just can't stop the movie like that.

Oh, I love this set. Okay, so this set was, David, we played with the scale originally. The fireplace was like one quarter the size, et cetera. So we played with scale. Again, the theatricality of it is quite impressive. And it sets up the tone for the scene, obviously. So this is the first confrontation between Wesley and his new boss here. I'll send you a memo. Raymond? Raymond, we got to talk. How did you get in? Oh, I was going to bring up a point. Sandra Bullock says subject change during the conversation that we just saw, and I'm always like, there's so many times I'm writing a script, I'm like, can't I just have the character say subject change on Devil, Mession, Man? Can't I just make it my thing that characters get to say subject change? What other films have used that? So many other films have used that. No, so many other films, so many other scripts I've written where I go, can I have the character say subject change? Because it's so handy. Because you end up having your characters change the subject. I'm like, what? But if you have them say futuristic subject change, I'm trying to bring it back to the lexicon, Mark. I'm trying to make it okay. That's just lazy writing, Dan. Lazy writing. I had two weeks. I had two weeks.

So this is where he's going to recruit his gang here. They're too uptight. So you're going to be the only mad dog killer type, right? Exacto. Fine. I love that Bob's completely immoral. Oh yeah, get those killers out of cryogenesis. Sure. Oh, Raymond, don't say that. And what do I get out of all this? I can only imagine. What was Nigel and Wesley like together on the same set at the same time? They had absolutely no interaction whatsoever other than the scenes they were in. And I think Nigel was a little bit thrown off by Wesley's improv. So this scene in particular, I had to work very hard. In fact, in this scene, I had to give Nigel... line reading sometimes which i felt very embarrassed to do considering you're working with an academy award-winning actor and he was completely discombobulated by wesley's constant improv from take to take so this was a very difficult scene to shoot there's actually a moment in the scene when he gets up from the table that's a kind of continuity problem which i i wasn't able to work around and edit I like that he sticks to the script and Wesley's going crazy, but you're still getting the information. And it kind of works, and it kind of works in the final cut. It works because in a way he's obviously not used to dealing with anyone like this. This is a little bit of over art direction on my part. No, you need it. So everyone lives in the same kind of habitation. So this was based on Moishe Safdie's building in Montreal, which I really love called Habitat, which was the first kind of modular housing. I went to school in Montreal. I love that building. So the idea is that everyone is given, as in Sleeper, everyone is given, depending on where you are in your social standing, you're given a habitation, but she's chosen to decorate it in her own particular way with all this memorabilia. What a line reading. I was wondering if you were willing to have sex. And Stallone is great here. I went this scene on his Lifetime Achievement Reel. He's so great throughout this scene of reacting to the sexual come on and then the non-sex. He's drawing from a great deal of life experience in this scene. Yes, I'm drawing... took some life experiences from the woman talking about sex, but then not coming out with a machine instead of actually having sex with me. And this is right up to the minute. So this is now the introduced Vision Pro this year. And I've worked a lot with VR since the beginning of VR. Actually, I shot the first 360 film for VR about six years ago. And everyone asks me about this scene. this is very advanced VR. So this is the kind of next generation where you don't actually have to have anything like augmented reality for your eyes. It plugs directly into your brain. Yes, again, this is not too hard to imagine this. This is actually, there's an app on the new Vision Pro, which can read certain prompts from your thoughts now, right now, just introduced a couple of weeks ago. Oh, wow. And of course, Elon Musk is working on Neuralink, which will plug in directly to your nervous system. Now, this is a scene where I hired a company called Colossal Pictures in San Francisco. And I loved what the work they did on the right stuff, where they shot a lot of practical effects. for the NASA rockets and for all the test pilots and the various airplanes, and it was all done practically. So I went up to San Francisco to work with them on this. You don't have an NC-17 cut of this scene in a vault somewhere. We do, absolutely. There was a lot of material. It was a body double, obviously, for Sandra. Oh, my God. Fluid transfer? And... Sorry, laughing at the scene and taking time to enjoy myself. What you see in the cut is probably one-tenth of the material that was shot for their virtual sex scene. And it was decided to, again, for pacing reasons and also for graphic nudity, it was decided not to include it in the cut. Always a wrong decision, but it's fine. We got a nude wrong number coming up, so I forgive you. And her speech here is like, It's so serious. It's so believable. His lines are great, too. Oh, my God. Desire to raid the Fed, yeah. Again, the audience seen the trailer and didn't expect scenes like this. I was like, yes, sir.

Soon again, these are supposed to be funny lines, but it's the real thing now. Absolutely. A lot of Russian oligarchs are creating 100 offspring, and they choose the fertilized eggs, and they decide how many are going to actually come into this world. And this is stuff that goes on today. Holy shit.

So you're getting the action Stallone, you're getting the comedy Stallone. Well, Stallone hadn't done, had he done any comedy before this, Dan? Well, he had done some unfortunate comedies like Rhinestone with Dolly Parton. Oh, right. That's why he was probably nervous about the movie getting too comic at times. Now he's in his own habitation here, which doesn't have any of the... character of hers, and he plays the disc here. The seashells. Now, if we do a sequel to the movie, the trailer's got to be him walking in a bathroom, going to seashells, and then turning to the audience and saying, wouldn't you like to know? That could be like the trailer from The Shining, just one shot. Yes, exactly. Just a teaser. I'd tell you we would make a billion dollars. I don't know if anybody's called you about this sequel, but nobody's called me. No, I've heard about it a couple of times, but three years ago actually was the last time. Yeah, I'm glad Stallone's excited about it. Doing some detective work? Oh, no, you can't write a movie about the future without having a naked wrong number. But I love this. I don't know. Did you write this, Dan? Yeah, so this is actually my friend in line at Carson. This is fantastic. Said, what if his rehab is sewing? And I'm like, okay, that's in the movie. And this was based on, I don't know whether we used Logan's Run or Sleeper for the wrong number on the phone. I can tell you directly it was a complete steal because I watched the movie again the other night. It's a complete steal from Logan's Run. Yeah. You saw it the other night? Yeah, I watched it the other night. Love that film. Logan's Run is a key movie of my childhood because it had rated PG nudity, which changed my life. Mine as well. Jenny Aguilar, still remember.

This is the great sweater. I love this. Love his upcoming line, I've become Betsy fucking Ross. We should have had a scene later on where everyone in the police station is wearing a red sweater. Well, maybe that's in the sequel.

I mean, we were so lucky. I was so lucky to get Sandra Bullock because we started the film with a different actor, actress. And the scene you just saw in The Habitation was shot originally with Laurie Petty. And there was no chemistry between the two of them. And we had really unfortunate, one of those terrible things that happened. sometimes happens where we had to recast the role. She's a great actress, but I can't imagine anybody else but Sandra Bullock. How'd you find Sandra Bullock, though? She had done a lot. There were, I think, three actresses that came in, and she came in for the meeting, and I always remember the first meeting where she just said, again, terrible negotiation tactic. She said, I'll do it for nothing. Oh, geez. That wasn't my negotiation tactic for writing the film.

Security overrides. Can't be right. Access granted, Officer Huxley. Accessing Simon Phoenix. How'd they start working together? Yeah, see, this isn't just a comedy. I can do plot. I can do plot, people. Don't say I can't do plot. No, and the plot, I mean, the plot works. I mean, it does shift. a bit between the action and the comedy and the futuristic references but it all tends to mostly make sense even looking at it now savage into our midst well that's a good question why don't we go ask him no john spine you do not accuse the savior of our city of being connected with a multi-murder death killer like simon phoenix i love that line i remember when the movie used to run on fox tv and depending on where people's career was at they would go like stallone snipes bullock and then the then the advertisers were stallone bullock snipes it's like i didn't know that then i was like bullock stallone that was the la convention center which i used for a lot of the establishing shots and then i used the the design of the building itself and the design in the office to carry over. The L.A. Convention Center was used in one of my favorite futuristic movies, The Apple, directed by Naumata Amagola. Oh, jeez. See? No cuss word goes unbuzzed. This display of barbaric behavior was unacceptable even in your time. Yeah. But it worked. Alright. Again, we'll Now the conservatives love this again. They were a little shaky with all the liberalism of the underground, but no. Now this is a great cut here. This is my favorite cut where you see... Yes, this is the scene you always wanted from The Wizard of Oz. Oh, yeah. The Brambilla touch. If you think you've got this maniac under control, trust me, you don't. No, I didn't think so. Detective, the only thing I haven't got under control is you. But that can be solved. You, my Cro-Magnon friend, are dead. Your family's dead, your past is dead. Dead things cannot affect the living. So, enjoy your moment of... Prehistoric bravado, because after you leave here, it will be over. Like everything else in your life. Return this man to cryostasis. That's a little harsh. Be well. Be fucked. Shaddix is so great in this. Yeah, again, we're pushing the line. We're pushing the tonal line, but it's... Our way here. Let's go. Oh, I don't know. Look, I do know. Now turn that thing on. What was Bill Cobbs like? He recently died. Yeah, he was great to work with. Really professional. I mean, he was great in Hot Sucker Proxy, which I think was his next film after this. Oh, wow. Which Joel also produced, and they shot in South Carolina with the Coen brothers. Underrated movie.

Now, this is where the budget became a real factor, where originally it was a very elaborate set which we had designed for the wasteland, and there simply wasn't the money left to build it. And I ended up using a location, a hangar location, and filled it with, you know, luggage containers from airports and all sorts of things to create this feeling of a culture that's reusing anything they can. So conceptually, it really worked, but it wasn't the original concept for this set. But I think it still worked really well because it had the production value. So we were able to find... Yeah, sometimes if you make the poor section of town too elaborate, it's like it's a cross-purposes. Exactly. This was in Eagle Rock. This was an old power station in Eagle Rock with a lot of It does come back. It does come back quite a bit. Okay. Okay. See, you bring it back. You see, you bring it back. That's a great reuse. Yeah, yeah. And now you're about to see the Dennis Leary's world here. Edgar Friendly. Dennis Leary, another man who took my script as a starting launching pad. Well, the biggest launching pad is coming up right now, Dan, because this is the first ever screen appearance of Jack Black. Oh, yes. Who I cast as, basically, it was a non-speaking role. And... He came onto the set the first day, and he was so energetic and so pumped to have a line that he wouldn't stop bothering me to have. There's Frida Kahlo. That was the reference. Oh, I didn't know. Oh, my God. I didn't even know. This character, yeah, this is the Frida Kahlo. I wanted to have Frida Kahlo in there. That's great. You don't let any artistic stone get unturned. That's funny. Yes, it's the classic scene where they don't know what they're eating, but I love that Stallone says, Ratburger, sure. Well, he feels more at home in this part of town. It's the first time meat appears in the movie. I didn't write that line. That's a great line. Do you see any cows around here? I think that may be a Lemkin. So Lemkin worked on it during the very late pre-production and production, basically. Yes.

I was willing to work with you more, but it was back in the day where they paid writers, actually paid them money. But were you moving? I think you were moving on to another project, no? I don't know. Don't know. I had a weird 90s career where I was failing upwards. I went from Ford Fairlane to Hudson Hawk and then did a Batman movie. And Warner Brothers was actually... I think it's a great movie, Batman Returns. Warner Brothers at the time were a little... Oh, I remember. They thought the movie was too weird. And so when Joel said, he's got to come on Demolition Man, they were a little hesitant, but I think... Yeah, but Batman Returns, for me, it's my favorite Batman film in the entire franchise. It's a comic book movie for people who aren't loyal to comic books, but... The best line ever, Christopher Walken gets the... One of the best lines ever, which is, next time I'll throw her out a higher window. Yes, that's a great line. Unfortunately, I didn't write that line. Oh, sorry, Dan. Who wrote that? Wesley Strick wrote that line, but it's all good. But I got sole credit. I wrote the arbitration letter. That's what I do. And the Mustang, that's also my friend Martin Shank. He said there's got to be a... No, no, it's an old 442. Oh, it was a Mustang in the scrap. It's a muscle car. But he wanted like an old-fashioned car chasing a futuristic car. And like I said, okay, I'll take that idea. So we set up a lot of things here that you're going to see later in the chase sequences. So the car is introduced here. And I think Chuck Black is going to show up soon. Guess what? Not happening. You tell Cocteau he can kiss my ass. Yeah, that's right. You tell Cocteau it's going to take an army. This is where Dennis Leary goes into his alter ego, which doesn't quite fit tonally. I like to think I wrote some pretty good lines. There's Jack. I wrote some pretty good lines for Dennis Leary, but he did his thing. It's okay. I think he works. Wait a minute. You're the guy outside Taco Bell. Yeah. What do you want? I guess you weren't part of the Cocteau plan. Greed, deception, abuse of power, that's no plan. That's why everybody's down here? You got that right. See, according to Cocteau's plan, I'm the enemy. Because I like to think. I like to read. Yeah, just to hear it, it works here. Yeah, we're politically all over the place, but it's all good.

This was actually taken from one of his stand-up acts. Yes. So he must have liked the character. I don't think he had a great time on this film. I have to say, of all the actors, he had probably the least rewarding experience for him. Have you talked to him since the movie came out? Yeah, I spoke to him only right after it came out. Okay. I wonder what he feels about it now. Then why don't you take charge and lead these people out of here? I'm no leader. I do what I have to do. Sometimes people come with me. All I want to do is bury Cocteau up to his neck in shit and let him think happy, happy thoughts forever. So overwritten. I'm sorry. Now there's a scene that was cut where Stallone and Snipes fight And Snipes goes, hey, did you ever figure out how the three seashells work? And you guys cut the line. And then there's a seashells at the very end of the movie where it says, how do the three seashells work? And nobody laughs. And I thought if you would have kept the middle reference to the seashells, you would have got a laugh at the end. But no, you didn't do it. We had no choice. The running time was just not, it was, the first cut was too long. two hours and 37 minutes oh my god really yeah well it's funny that the premiere that last line kind of didn't get the laugh we wanted and joel silver goes what it comes up to me goes what if we put a laugh track at the end no one will know will they just have the audience laughing at the last line we'll just put it on the soundtrack i'm like that's good for premiere but like if it's one person at the 4 30 show in anaheim like you know it's not gonna it's gonna be weird I can find no fault in your logic. Simon Phoenix is the perfect weapon to send out into the savage nether regions of which we stand. I am impressed, John Spartan. Yeah, you can't imagine him running. He runs into his daughter like the next scene. I mean, the scene before this, and it just kills the flow of the movie. And even the scene before, the boardroom scene, where he's meeting with all his henchmen, that was cut way, way down. That was originally a much longer scene. That's not my favorite scene. Yeah, it's just a beat now, so it doesn't really work because there's no information in the scene anymore. Yeah, well, it's a problem when it's a... You can't bring everything to a climax every 10 seconds. But that's one of Joel's... That was one of Joel's... Oh, yes. Hang-ups was the beat sheet. The whammo chart, he called it. Yeah, the beat sheet and whammo chart. Exactly. Every five pages. You have to wake the audience up every ten pages. So, sorry, Elizabeth Ruscio, who played the daughter. This was very complicated to shoot because we had to stunt men on this bridge that collapses. We didn't work the first time. And, yeah, this... Yeah, wasn't there a version where Stallone's hanging on the bridge with him? No. No, that's later. Uh-oh. But that was a crazy... That was three hours to reset the bridge and then to do it all over again. Oh, my God. It's one of those shots that you have to get the first time, and it didn't quite work the first time, unfortunately. Yeah.

This was shot in an elevator shaft, so there's three different locations here. There's a small set that was built for the diner. There's the Eagle Rock Power Station, and then there's an elevator shaft, and then there's a set for the elevator here. Yeah, you don't need more than that. Wow. Even doing that, I couldn't do. I would need a stuntman for that. Getting out of a manhole. See, again, the art direction here, all that I had at my disposal here, these backlights, these fluorescent lighting units, and you can see how using these all over the city in every location really tied it together. And here we go with war. Yeah, that's great. No explanation given. Show the elevator, show the car. We don't need to know how it actually all worked, but it's good.

There comes a point where it's, you know, we fought hard, Marco, but there's a point where the movie's got to become a Joel Silver movie at some point. And this took an incredible amount of time because all the traffic had to be shut down, obviously, and all the cars you see are picture cars with a lot of very expensive... General Motors concept cars in this scene, so we have to be very careful not to damage any of the cars. Oh, wow. The shooting for this took, I think it was six nights of shooting. Is this the Blade Runner tunnel? It's the tunnel that's used every time in downtown L.A., the Blade Runner tunnel. We closed the Brooklyn Bridge down for five days for Hudson Hawk, so... Auto-inflate! Auto-inflate! There's some great stunts in this scene, actually. I had to do very detailed storyboards for this because we had to build a piece of the road surface that was actually like a conveyor belt. So you can have the actor hanging out of the car and then getting back into the car. And then the most complicated stunt was actually jumping from car to car that had to be done live, obviously.

Again, this is all pre-CG, so there's no digital stunt doubles or anything like that. That was really different. Are the cars actually moving when you do that? Yeah, they're moving, and they're moving at speed. I kept wanting them to go faster and faster, so we started the scene with the cars going at about 25 miles an hour, and then by the time... We did a few takes. We were up to about 45 miles an hour. You're kidding. Yeah, which is actually very dangerous. That is very dangerous. We could be having a very different conversation right now. There was only one injury on the film, and it's because of an effect that's coming up soon, which is the safety foam that's activated in the event of a car crash. So instead of airbags, you have this safety foam. And we rehearsed it with a stuntman. And the stuntman was injured because of this rap. This is the conveyor belt scene. So that was actually shot in the studio. Oh, I get it. Yeah, I was wondering. But this shot as well was with a camera car being on a trailer. And I think we did some of it with rear projection, like old school rear projection as well with the two real actors. This is the conveyor belt. And this is the scene coming up with the safety foam. So you really shot it with... You shot it for real with the safety foam? We tested it for real with someone in the car. Oh, my God. You're a madman. And then we had to shoot the car into tempered glass. And here you'll see that... The tempered glass had special detonators to shatter the glass before the car comes. So one didn't go off, and there's the phone. And then you'll see the effect of the phone there. This is the first time the two worlds meet, so now you'll see the scraps coming out from the underground and the cops coming. Where's the foams in the Tesla? So in a weird way, Lenina Huxley kind of tonally holds, you know, she never deviates from her through line in the film. And she really kind of becomes this kind of metronome for the film. And regardless of what's going on around her. And then she discovers that violence is the way to solve this. She gets a little action beat coming up. But yeah, no, she was the character. I didn't relate to Stallone as Snipes, but Linda Huxley character, that was me. And she becomes kind of the conduit for the audience in a way, too. Oh, absolutely. Spartan, you... You caveman, you're under arrest. You are to be returned to the cryo prison immediately. I heard all about that. We'll talk later, Chief. And as you said, these are where the worlds all finally collide. This was a very tough shoot because of all the locations and the night shooting and the back and forth between location and stage work. And I remember this was right after... a lengthy daytime stint in the studio and then coming back to night shoots and back and forth. But I was much younger. God, we missed the Pancho Villa reference, which, like the upcoming Take This Job and Shove It references, are not going to last too long. I don't know if the new generation even knows Pancho Villa or the expression Take This Job and Shove It. Such a good setup, though. I wish I had another chance to come up with a better rhyme. There's not even that much of a twist. I mean, once you say, let's blow this guy, it's hard to top yourself. And this is actually a steal from Scarface, where they think Tony Montana is going to shoot him, and Tony Montana goes... Manning, shoot this piece of shit. Like, he's been programmed that he can't kill a Niger author, but nobody else has. And this is the most graphic, this is actually the most graphic moment in the script, which we nearly had to cut. Yeah, I don't know if you know this, Dan, but when they finally do dispose of Cocteau in this very graphic way, there was actually, we used a dummy. You're not allowed to throw people in fireplaces anymore? Not at the time. That was actually the big issue. Oh, wow. That's crazy. Jesse Ventura gets to do something? Was that your line, Dan? No, that was Wesley's. A great one. Oh, man. That nearly had to be cut. Why? Oh my god, it's like Wizard of Oz. It's pure fun. Oh, Associate Bob, quick on the uptake. I mean, he's essentially giving the same performance as Beetlejuice. Well, it's the Glenn Shattuck special. Glenn Shattuck didn't do a lot of Hamlet. He had his lane. Again, this is a little bit of art direction in the convention center, so... using some elements from the other sets and reusing a lot of elements and then staging these scenes inside the convention center and this is where huxley is forced to resort to violence and she's good at it what did sandra bullock get to think of this finally going to do some action she rehearsed i mean date again working with the same martial arts arts coach is Wesley Snipes. She worked for weeks. Oh, just for this one scene. Awesome. She's great. And when she says she watches Jackie Chan Laserdisc, that was actually a fresh reference at the time. Not everyone knew who Jackie Chan was. Man has died by my hand. Amazing. Always got big applause from certain people in the audience. You know, his name was Casper Cocteau and you changed it to Raymond. Why are you so mean to me? Why don't you like my alliteration? All right, we got a climax. This is the right thing to do at the right time. Random number. I don't know if I... I think it was your decision to have Stallone take out Sandra Bullock with a globe rod. I think I had in the climax, but I think you made the right decision. No, it had to be the duel. You know, it really had to be the duel between the two of them. And I think the cryo prison becoming this arena for them. Oh, I hope my butt didn't look like that. Okay, what do we have left that's good, huh? Now, before the showdown, I decided to play the theme from New Jack City when Wesley arrived on the set, and the theme from Rocky when Stallone came on the set. Oh, that's hilarious. So we had blasting on the speakers. Dueling nostalgia. Yeah. And it was really fantastic because they were both so energized for the showdown here. Yeah, I was starting to get fight fatigue with the movie, but this is definitely... This is the scene for the trailer. Definitely takes it. Finally, someone's going to die. And the set looks so good here because the lighting now is completely changed. I used the... I ripped off the lighting scheme from Alien, you know, with the strobe lights and kind of worked dramatic lighting here. You cut some violence out of this. I remember he graphically shoots... the technicians and now it's kind of more oblique exactly and this was from uh uh john woo the two gun that was from john oh yeah steal from the best

This took almost a day to shoot all of this, to have the claw working and Stallone was harnessed into the claw and having to break it apart with the cryo fluid. Yeah, no, that's tough. Another Wesley ad-lib. And this was all Sly doing his own stunts here. Oh, really? Wow. And it was really, this is the only time in the film where he was really exhausted. I mean, this was, I think, three or four nights of shooting. And even before we got to the fight scene, there was so much to do with this claw and the choreography between the hydraulics and squibs and all of that it it really was incredibly time consuming physically exhausting for for sly he was up there for a full day oh you're kidding inside yeah in beyond you know on and up but in the claw he was there there was a full day spent shooting that wow that scene

This is a lot of storyboard, so everything was storyboarded extensively here. That was a stuntman, and then now it's a sly.

That's sly. That was very dangerous. Wow. Now this was all done with opticals. So these effects, the laser beam and the lightning was all done as film opticals. And then later in the scene when... Stallone uses the water to finally stop Phoenix. That's the first use of computer graphics and one of the first uses of computer graphics in any film. Is it cold in here or is it just me? Good memory. I like that line that I wrote from the start of the movie. And then, of course, this is where multiple time viewers can know that I'd lose my head if I wasn't attached. Comes back to haunt us. This was working with Charles Paterni on the stunt choreography. And 90% of this is actually the two of them. No accidental real punches? Yes. Yes, but we had body... Actually, Wesley had the advantage here because he had this hockey body protection. Oh, yeah. And Stallone had some body protection, but not as much. And this is Ice Nine coming back. So this is what we set up at the beginning. Who knew I did a Vonnegut movie? All right. I learn something new every day. And now using Ice 9 to turn the tables here at the very last moment. This was done by a company called Art Greenberg Associates, which made Zelig for Woody Allen. Oh, wow. And they were pioneering the use of computer graphics. And this shot took a month to create this drop, the frozen drop. Yeah, it's such a money shot, though. Yeah. There we go. And that was one of the first examples of computer graphics. And then we cut to a dummy head here, obviously. And then as he comes around, this is all film opticals. Heads up! This was using a camera called a Photosonics film camera that could shoot at 400 frames per second. We were able to do the head exploding that way. And then, of course, in the tradition of all the great Bond films, if you build a set, you have to be able to destroy it. Got to walk away from it. Can't leave it for the museums. And again, there's something different about it. When you see this now and you look at a lot of... the kind of computer-generated action films, you can really see the difference in terms of the practical effects and the fact that that's really happening in front of the camera. But that explosion is computer, right? No, not at all. Oh, wow. No, the exterior is a fireball that was comped in in film, and the interior was all done practical. Oh, wow. This is a very abbreviated epilogue. this speech is very sweaty where you're gonna have to let it get a little dirty you're gonna have to get a little cleaner if i could solve all our critical problems if it was all that easy but but but i still still makes the movie lovable why don't you get a little dirty you will actually and somewhere in the middle this is where a suspension suspension of disbelief we're all gonna make it we're all gonna get along all political all political opinions And Bob, quick to jump on. Now he's going to work for Friendly. This is Glenn Shattuck's movie. And the location here was the penitentiary, the federal penitentiary in L.A. Oh, really? Yeah.

Sting came to the set when we were shooting in the wasteland, and he created the song for the end of the film here. Yeah, we got a good kiss. And she kisses him back. See, we're feminists. This is the gone with the wind. So the audience is like, So she's not her daughter, not his daughter. We missed all that laughter from the seashell line. And there's the federal penitentiary. It's been a pleasure commenting on the film. Thank you, Dan. Apologies to Peter Lenkoff and Robert Bruneau, the other writers in the film, if I made this too silly. I'm sorry. Google underrated demolition man before you leave. You'll get a lot of great stuff from critics. And people. Real people. Okay. I hope everybody enjoyed the remaster. Thank you very much.

I'm a demolition man.