I Am Legend (2007)

And he's definitely got the inside track. Word is that they're having some problems with injuries. Really? And are they looking into free agent signings, last second, anything like that? Possibly. And they've got a strong farm club, too. They've got some AAA ballplayers they might be bringing up. But again, Peter... We should probably introduce ourselves now. Really, now? Yeah. I'm Francis Lawrence, the director. I'm Akiva Goldsman, writer, producer. That's my logo. Know what it means? What? I'm not telling. It means something. I know. It has meaning. I wonder if all logos have meaning. Okay, so we're looking at New York, Chicago, World Series, Possible, Los Angeles. That's Jameson Wells' logo. Yup. You know what Overbrook is? Yes, their high school. Just checking. That's my friend April. April. We shot this at CNN in Nancy Grace's studio. We redesigned it, and this was the very last thing that we shot, isn't it? And it wasn't supposed to be here. We put it at the front of the movie, sort of halfway through editing, right? No, it was a very good idea that you had. This was actually meant to be during a sequence that's now cut called The Fever Dream. And it was going to be on the televisions in the Tower Video Store, but the information was very useful, and so it was a great idea to put it right up front and get the information out about the disease and where the disease came from and how it started. And we luckily got Emma Thompson to play Dr. Crippen, which was a coup. We really wanted to sort of start really hard. We ended up thinking it made sense to start really hard with something that was essentially real science fiction and a promise of hope for the future. You always had this notion that Crippen shouldn't be mustache twirling, that this should come out of something that really had sound ambitions so that then when this cut happens, You know, it's pretty striking, always very effective. Yes, yes. Yes, we have. I can't believe this shot actually worked, by the way. Yeah. We shot this over at 10th Avenue in a location that got cut from the movie as well, this car dealership. did this big motion control move, and that was one of our earliest conceptual illustrations that we did of the Lincoln Tunnel all flooded out so that the bridges had been bombed out and the tunnels had been blown so they were all flooded. And I like that the water's clear, because you never expect the water to be clear in Manhattan, but after three years. These are really Fifth Avenue, which we shut down for the movie. Again, for a sequence that's not in this cut. We shot a lot of material we didn't use. And the movie sort of found its way as we were honing it. But one thing that sort of becomes clear right off the bat is Empty New York is a character in this movie. And that is really important because there aren't that many characters in the movie. It is a tour de force for Will. That was an idea that we all had very early, which was to kind of smuggle an independent movie into a big sort of sci-fi action shell. subversive or what we were trying to be. And so it's in large part a silent movie. And we landed on something very early with the city that you can see in this sequence very well, which is this idea of nature reclaiming the city. So that instead of it just being that sort of typical apocalyptic view of dark and gloomy and gray and ash covered with dark stormy skies, The idea was that nature is just taking the city back over and the streets are breaking and grass is growing in the streets and the air is cleaner and the skies are beautiful and we chose to place the movie during summer so that the trees would be full and the city would take on that beautiful quality that the city has during those summer months. And it was a lot of fun and it actually enhanced the emptiness to suddenly see the nature growing in the streets and to see animals in the streets more so than just being vacant. You saw earlier in that, as the car came speeding around, this God still loves us wild posting on a truck. And that's actually the beginning of this sort of faith or lack thereof theme in the movie. We sort of embedded it in various places throughout the movie, this idea that there might or might not be larger forces at work. None of those deer are real. Yeah, except I remember shooting the sequence, we had to shoot a lot of this stuff on weekends. And so this driving sequence itself was actually spread out over the entire shoot of you know, nine months over various weekends in New York City. And every time we went out there and we had a shot that had deer in it, we had to have our visual effects supervisor push around this little deer we named Dolly on this cart with wheels. And so it was always amusing to see him running up and down Park Avenue with this stuffed deer. This is our only blue screen sequence. Our only exterior blue screen sequence. Well... one of our two only exterior blue screen sequences. We wanted very much for the shoot to have an authentic New York feel. We wanted the truth of the city to bleed in, which I think it did really nicely. It was really too hard to shut down Times Square and make it this distressed and turn out all the lights. So this was shot in a giant armory. It's actually a very good piece of special effects work. Yeah, it really is. This was the way that the studio actually originally thought and wanted us to do this, was to sit in L.A. and be on sound stages and create it all later. But we refused. Yeah, and Will and Akiva and I really fought, fought, fought to just be out on the real streets. It just informs everybody in such a different way when you feel the real wind and air, you know, on your back, and you're standing in the middle of an empty street and where there should be cars and should be people, and it's just such a different experience. informs the actors and informs where the camera should be in a much different way than being in a void. But having said that, I still am very proud of the way this sequence turned out and the way it looks and feels and matches the other environments.

One thing that is always elusive about movies like this is these visual effects components you work on endlessly towards the end of the movie. And you work on them until you literally have to have them wrenched from your hands. So the versions of these visual effects shots that we're looking at now, honestly, we've probably seen twice before. We probably saw them once to approve them, right at the end, and once in the final print. And we've seen hundreds of iterations leading up to them. And they're literally as far as you can get just before the movie comes out. And there is, of course, the Superman, Batman logo. That Akiva stuck in. This was Akiva's domain, which were what were all the movie posters going to be three years from now.

oh, look, there are the bombs on the trash cans. There are bombs, right, which we barely use now, and our location at Washington Square. And for a long time, actually, in the conception of this, there were moments where he was living in a fire station that we were researching on 8th Avenue, and then we decided to bring it back to his home just so you at times could forget that you were in a science fiction film and you'd have this feeling of home and family and domestic safety there. at times when he's in his house and you could forget that you're in a science fiction film. That liquid he was pouring on the stoop is vinegar, which we decided the dark seekers couldn't smell through. It's utilized in order to mask his aroma and therefore mask his location. It's something that's in the movie but never actually mentioned in the movie anymore. But we liked it. So we like there sort of being architecture even if you didn't really understand it. We also like the idea of juxtaposing that time cover with who he is now. These scenes are what would in another movie typically be your first act, get to know your characters by hearing them talk to other characters' scenes. And here instead, it's all behavior and performance. was a lot of fun i think it was the thing that really appealed to the three of us was the idea of being able to do most of this very very quietly and very very simply and without a lot of use of dialogue and i remember i was sort of inspired my wife and i had just had a baby and i watched the piano and with the sound off so that the baby wouldn't wake up and i remember being able to follow and and feel it and we tried to sort of use that idea as a template which is how can you follow the story and feel it emotionally without the use of dialogue and without the use of music, just with behavior. It was a big challenge but a lot of fun. We started moving to a place where during rehearsals we were almost trying to understand the scenes without the dialogue to just sort of finally get to what the behavior of a scene was and how much of the storytelling is really in that and I think We are all used to a lot of, especially in American movies, we're used to a lot of words. And it was really exciting to strip them down in rehearsal, in the making, and even in the editing of the movie, just to let the composition, performance, and story architecture sort of shine through. Yeah, but we had to be very, very specific too in the creation of the scenes and the layout and what kind of information emotionally we're sort of doling out. You know, are we doling out the feeling of family? with the dog? Are we doling out the feeling of loneliness and isolation and being very specific with what we're selling with each bit so we can carry the audience through and be very, very clear? It's really important, which is, you know, we sort of look at each scene and as Frances is saying, what are we trying to communicate specifically from each moment?

Interestingly, we have arguments over the course of the movie whether the light was on or off in Marley's room. But, you know, one thing that was part of our storytelling, which, you know, I'm not even finally sure people ever really connected to, was it was important to us that they didn't know where he was. And that there was, you know, he was sort of quiet and hiding and under siege, not actively, but sort of under siege because he was alone in a city. that was infested with something, something that we couldn't understand. What happened here is Francis ended up building what I think is kind of a very classic horror movie moment where you're terrified, but you're not quite sure what you're terrified of. And in part, that's clearly helped by the fact that Will is terrified. And there's nothing scarier than when your protagonist is frightened of something in the dark.

And this actually replaced something we had written originally. There used to be a sequence where he sat and watched surveillance monitors. And it just wasn't getting the feeling across that I think we were looking for. And it was falling sort of flat and felt a little false and wasn't as scary and wasn't as lonely and wasn't as desperate. And so we refashioned a new sequence and shot it. And I think it sort of ended up as one of the more iconic moments of him in the fetal position in the bathtub with his dog and his gun. 30 minutes to what? The ceiling off the island. This was the luxury of shooting in New York through the seasons. All the flashbacks are in winter and in a fully populated New York. As Francis said, the movie takes place in story time, in summer. It was actually shot in spring and fall. Well, in some late summer. And so it really gives the movie... a sense of scope to, you know, if you can carry the picture, if you can carry a picture through seasons in a specific location, it necessarily unconsciously delivers something more of an epic to the audience, I think. And this is part one of our three flashbacks to the past and to the, what we call the evacuation of New York City. And this was actually done on a green screen stage just because we were dealing with Willow, Will's daughter, who was very young and so couldn't work the late hours we would need to shoot a sequence like this at night in the streets of New York and so we shot it and then went and shot the plates of Little Italy that you see surrounding them there. This was over the course of a week after our Christmas hiatus and we had Will went off and grew a beard and gained some weight because he had gotten very thin and sinewy for the role, the majority of the movie. And so he could, you know, soften up a little bit and grow his hair out and grow a beard over the month we had off for Christmas. And he came back and we shot these flashbacks right away. And then we had, I don't know, five or six days for him trying to slim down and shave and cut his hair again to get back down to present day Neville size. But it was nice. It's a nice little touch that we were able to physically change him a bit for the past when he was eating a little more fat in his diet. What are you doing?

What am I doing? I'm not gonna let this happen. Let? This isn't up to you. You can't... There's our next scare. And, you know, the scares are built sort of sequentially. And, you know, we're already a ways into the first act, and clearly there have been no monsters. So even though you know you've come to a monster movie, You know, we're doling them out slowly. Here's the sinews that Francis was talking about. This is real, and Will can do this more than any human being should be able to. Yeah, it's actually kind of disgusting. Yeah. Bastard. You know, what you may be hearing already from our conversation is, you know, we like the idea of a movie that is evolving organically, and that we are, we believe... Francis, Will, and I very much in this kind of constant adjusting and letting the movie teach you what the movie wants to be. So we tried things and then often tried other things. At every point in the process, we always try very hard not to get stuck in an idea, but let the best idea, even if it's a new idea, rise to the surface. And I think that one can find some success in that.

Then we get down to the lab here, and a lot of this, this is all real equipment that we got. And Will and I did a lot of research while we were conceiving this and went to the CDC and went and met with virologists literally around the country. And in this scene, we had met with a guy, Dr. Derisi in San Francisco, who sort of keyed us into this idea that even though people haven't found a cure for viruses, The idea is that there are many, many compounds on this earth that can kill viruses. The problem is they also kill the host of the virus, meaning the person that has them or the animal that has the virus. And so that really helped us, and we decided that's what Will is trying to do here, that Neville's trying to do, is to test all these different compounds to see if it A, kills the virus, but also does not kill the host. So you can see he's running one of his tests here, which virologists would do, which is you would start on rats And if something worked, you might move on to monkeys. And in the case of Robert Neville, you would move on to the infected humans. These are real rats from Francis's house. This is a set that we built in the Bronx or Brooklyn, which armory is this? This is Brooklyn, Marcy. And, you know, we built Neville's house. We shot the exteriors in Washington Square Park and then built the inside of the house for... identical floors. And we were very lucky with the weather because we basically jogged in and out of sets. You have to remember that the storytelling of this movie takes place over the course of a few days. So your weather had to be very consistent. So when we had weather that matched, we were outside. And when we had weather that didn't, we were inside. And we were lucky in the universe's desire or willingness to accommodate our shooting schedule. Number six. Next candidate for human trials. Hang in there, number six.

There's Goodfellas hidden in there. You did that, right? Because you love that movie? Goodfellas, yeah. Just went through the Gs. It was all based out of this idea of his routine for the day and going to the video store. I loved that idea that he went to the video store and dropped off a DVD and got a new one and was just running through the alphabet. And so when we picked the Gs, it was going through the Warner's library and seeing what some of my favorite movies are. And Goodfellas is one of my all-time favorites. And so to get it in there was great. That's Abby. We haven't said anything about Abby. She's a doll. She played Sam. Well, she played Sam most of the time. Yeah, almost all the time. Yeah, we had three dogs. We had Sammy, Kona, and Abby. And Abby is the one you saw there and see in most of this. And what's surprising is that she was not a movie-trained dog. She was actually a rescue. She was about two years old, had been debarked by one of her previous owners, I guess, and was found by our trainer. He had shown me some pictures and I didn't like the original pictures he showed me of some of the choices because the faces, the dogs didn't look warm and nice enough. And I wanted a German Shepherd with a lighter face and lighter eyes and that had a warmth. And then he found her. And I think he had about a month and a half to work with her and with Will to, you know, she didn't even know her name when she started. It's just amazing how great she was to work with. You know, we had a rule on set that she wasn't allowed to deal with anybody except Will and the trainer, so she could keep her focus. But man, she was so, so easy to work with. This is a scene that's inspired really by the original Omega Man that we took as our source material, both the Matheson novel and the second adaptation. filmed adaptation, which is Heston's Omega Man that Boris Segal directed. And there's a wonderful sequence where a woman is hiding amidst mannequins. So we took that as the basis for this scene. There are also all kinds of little hidden jokes around here. There's a Fred Claus II DVD. There's a Teen Titans poster. There's a Constantine poster. just because when you spend that much time on something, you start to amuse yourself. And that mannequin, that girl that we focused on, became a big thing. I remember in pre-production, our costume designer, you know, we knew we were looking for mannequins, and he was walking by some clothing store on Broadway and saw her and thought, she's the one. We've got to have her as the mannequin. And I remember it became this big ordeal because there was this shop owned by this Italian family, and Akiva, your assistant, spoke Italian, and so she went down there to go speak Italian and say that their mannequin could be in this big movie. and she ended up being our key mannequin. What I really like about that scene, though, is this idea that it's sort of the first time you see that the guy's lost his mind and that he's just on the verge of completely losing it, that he's... the line of reality and fantasy has been blurred for him.

You did so good. Yes. Now, I cite again that although we're in a horror movie, very little horrific has happened. But this scene is utilizing the audience's expectations that something is going to go boo in the dark. We have a bunch of interesting versions of this scene. In fact, the version we filmed had a bunch of talk in it, sort of what we used to call whistling in the dark, you know, kind of talking to keep himself... from being bothered by the nightmare that is, you know, a family having been lost. And as we started looking at the scene once it was done, it just became, again, another example of how the movie wanted to be cleaner and more direct and less talky. And we just ended up taking it all out. And that became a running theme. We kept pulling dialogue that we had put in, pulling them out of scenes. Just because that's what the movie wanted. The movie wanted to be quiet. A couple of setups that have whizzed by us. One was there were butterflies in the Central Park scene, which is the butterfly stuff, as was when Willow sort of said, it's a butterfly daddy in the car. And then just as Neville opened the door, you see the infected dogs come out at dusk. All the signage, all the books, all the DVDs, all the photographs are... thoroughly researched, chosen, written. If you freeze frame and close in, each one of those articles and quarantine bulletins are actually precise. We wanted the world to be true and rich in texture. We spent a lot of time doing that.

This was the, is something going to jump at you? People seemed to think they would. And again, something I'm really proud of with this movie, which is you can be in what feels like a horror beat and then land here in this moment, which I think is really powerful. Those are my godchildren's names. Of seeing the cribs, of somebody was expecting twins, and you getting hit with emotion rather than a scare.

Now, is this the first use of music in the movie? Yes. Now, this is the first bit, other than there's a sting on the title, but this is where the first, his theme comes in. Hey, remember when that was outlandish? Yes. 663 a gallon? Yeah. We actually, that used to get a laugh. Do you remember? No, now it's a reality, which is scary. We shot the gas station down in Chinatown, and this is a pier that we actually built. You know, we knew we had a big, you know, a bunch of sequences out here. And so we put a spud barge out under the Brooklyn Bridge and man, our location manager, Paul Kramer, deserves a gold medal for this one. You know, dealing with every single department and agency in New York City to get the spud barge connected and security next to the bridge and to shoot this sequence and the evacuation sequence and some plates and things for our, what we call our demolition derby sequence. Starting with that wonderful shot of the two bridges and him sitting at the desk, and then here we're really doing our iconography of New York, where we've now ratcheted up the idea of this isolation. By showing those bridges there, we've landed again in science fiction, and now we sort of open our arms a little bit. The breadth is wider, and we start to... celebrate the scope of it. So he's playing golf on the Intrepid, and this really is the Intrepid. And then he's going to run down the West Side Highway. And we're trying to fulfill now the promise that the movie started with, which is we're not pretending to be in New York. We are in New York. It's that in this sequence, too, I like what I think also attracted us was a little of the wish fulfillment of what would you do if you got to live in New York by yourself? And, you know, yes, it would be... really bleak and grim and you'd be lonely and would probably lose your mind but there is some fun to be had so if it's tearing around the city in the mustang or if it's hitting golf balls off of you know uh what is that an sr71 on the the intrepid i know i'm gonna get the airplane number i can't believe you just even said that i know

And I like this area, so it was fun too, because, you know, I eat in this area, the Meatpacking District a lot. Akiva, you actually have an apartment in this area, and it's fun to be in areas you know and love and shoot. This is such a fascinating construct, because we had a sequence here that we were working on, and we realized we didn't love it, but we were in the location. So Frances, Will, and I, in a kind of fantastic Hail Mary, we decided to literally shoot this piece Right up until when he went inside. Yep. And then stop and come back because we hadn't actually decided what was going to happen once he went in the door. Right. But we knew that we wanted a different kind of scary sequence than we had designed. And so what we did was we knew, let's make it emotional. So let's throw the dog in. So we knew the dog was going to chase the deer into the building and that we would, over our Christmas break... refashioned the sequence into something else and we came up with this which is our haunted house sequence which is go into the dark which he would never do and so it was key that his dog went in there because it would be the only reason he would ever ever ever go into the dark and we built this what I think is arguably the most frightening sequence in the movie yes absolutely it's interesting because it reminds us of what we're scared of what you have fundamentally here is the dark very very very low light source francis was very insistent with the dp that it appear to be source as much as possible and to the exclusion of things that typically people are worried about like seeing the actor or you know i mean it really is dark and it's wonderful um and will's performance is that of somebody who's very very frightened and as i said earlier that makes the audience scare we were i think really influenced by the Blair Witch Project for this sequence. And I think one of the key ideas was that the actors in that film were really horrified in all of those sequences. They weren't the hero that were going up against the villain, you know, with courage. But here we have Will petrified, and you just never see that. And I think we are just living in this world in his shoes, and if he's petrified, we have to be petrified. Remember we had a version of this sequence years ago that was in the U.N.? Yes. That originally started, the sequence originally started taking place, they chased the deer into the UN, and the UN wouldn't let us shoot there. And we were going to have to build it, and then we realized to build the General Assembly was going to be ridiculous amounts of money. And it was actually, it was kind of much more action-y, do you remember? It was much more action-y, yes. Neville had these strobe weapons. Yep. It's funny, you know. I'm an endless believer in... Just work the object until it finds out what it wants to be. Yeah. Where did we shoot this? This is uptown. We shot this in an old bank on, I think, I want to say like 7th Avenue up in the 30s. Mm-hmm. somewhere it's a yeah it was a closed actually it was a closed hotel well it's next door we would go in through a closed hotel the hotel was taking it over right right right but yeah we found this vault which is one of the reasons i wanted to shoot here it had these great stairwells and narrow tunnels and it was sort of wrecked and we went with the idea that it was a burnt out bank and i also loved the idea of this money this you know that in our world now all that cash laying on the ground is so enticing but here in this world it means absolutely nothing We always, for whatever reason, liked this idea of the creatures sleeping, standing up. I think it's something that, out of early development, kind of stuck with us. You know, this is actually intro creatures scene. Even so, they're more hidden than not. But now, probably, you know, what are we, 30 minutes into the movie? Yeah, this is about 30 minutes in. And this is the time we actually say, well, you knew they were in it. Here's what they look like. Yeah, but still, let's keep a glimpse. I think it's always more interesting to keep the... The visuals, yeah, just fleeting glimpses of them is a little more interesting. So as soon as they become too clear, they're just not scary anymore. It's sort of true with any monster. When you see the shark and jaws too much, it's not very scary, including the alien. One of the most effective things in Ridley Scott's Alien was that you barely ever saw it.

Yeah, it was good. I never run. Some of this stuff was tricky. When you're trying to light something only with the spotlight on the end of somebody's gun, you're running through a dark building. This was the trickiest stuff to shoot in this whole sequence.

This sequence, actually, we screwed around with the order of it. But you always were so enamored of this. The kind of the... The booby trap? The mechanics of... Yeah. And the precision of the mechanics of how one would... Actually do it? Yeah. Yeah, it's a little... faked well it's closer than it might otherwise yeah no i mean the idea of it is all right in terms of counterweight and how you set a snare and things like that but the actual positioning of the loop getting caught is wrong but i think you know the little cheat is okay and nobody's picked up on that one actually i haven't seen that on the internet out of everything he was putting vinegar on his uh jacket there that's our more use of it oh and by the way while i have the chance and i'm thinking about it if you look earlier in the movie there are generators in his house for all of those who say we left the power on there are generators in his house he gets gas and there's a pump in the bathroom even though new york is gravity fed so up until the first four floors you can get water unless all the water mains have broken somehow i just thought i would get that out there you feel better i do for sure yeah i mean you know when you have even you know A quarter of the critics out there saying that they've left the power on. All right. Okay. You know? Yeah, that's why they... People that don't know what generators are. All right. Okay. All right. Don't make me turn this theater right around. This was kind of a fun sequence. I love this idea of him snaring and capturing one of the infected.

This is all relocation work downtown in the Meatpacking District. Yep, under the High Line, which they're now turning into a park.

These are our, now that we're gonna start to see our creatures and things here, what we did was early on we were actually gonna use prosthetics. And we had cast a group of 40 dancers and parkour acrobats to be our creatures. And we had outfitted them with all these prosthetics and these skin suits and clay and ash and all this kind of stuff. It was very elaborate and we got them out in the first night in Washington Square Park. and it just looked utterly ridiculous. It looked like a bunch of mimes running through the park. It was Attack of the Angry Mimes. Yeah, it was really, really bad. And so we canned that instantly, and we kept our group because they had trained for, you know, a month and a half, two months together to figure out how to move and how to breathe rapidly and what the behavior was. But what we did was we then put them in motion capture suits, and they became our creatures. So we had them on set doing performance, and this was Joanna. who was our alpha female, and we had a guy named Dash Mihawk, who's a very good actor, playing our alpha male, and then our core group as the rest, as our Praetorian guard and the rest of the group that's in the film. And what would happen was we would shoot with them on set and do anything we normally would, and then once our shots were chosen and the cut was put together, we would hand it off to the visual effects company and Sony Imageworks, and they would then replace them with our computer-generated creatures. And we designed these creatures sort of from the disease out. And the idea was we sort of came up with what the disease did, which you learn a little bit about here, which is that it makes you, spikes your metabolism and your heart rate is up and your oxygen usage is way up and only the strongest can survive and it's encephalitic and it affects your brain and how you think. And we went with how does that change somebody physically? and so it gets, you know, rid of most of the body fat because the metabolism's burning, so there's almost a translucent quality to the skin, and they're very muscular and sinewy and fast and strong, and they need to eat voraciously, which is sort of their need for protein and their kind of hunger, and they're feral. 104 and decreasing. We may have something here.

I love that shot of the teeth, and Akiva hates it. My nail makes you happy. I love that shot. This was a fun sequence. It's a good opportunity to sort of take a moment to talk about Will, because, you know, the reason that the movie is successful, finally, is his ability to carry it. You know, it's a performance piece. As we said earlier, it's hiding. In action movie or horror movie or sci-fi movie, clothing alternately but what he's doing is he's actually delivering a character an unexpected character on screen alone for most of the picture and it's uniquely his ability to create a kind of intimacy with the audience that pulls us through and Part of why he is so good at this, I think, is not only does he have a tremendous amount of talent, but he works on the movie as a filmmaker the way Francis does or I do. We all sort of get into it and try to make the movie as thoughtful and to understand it as thoroughly as possible. And I think what you find is in everything from the production design to those... paintings that are brown-bagged by the stairway, which we'll talk about next time we see them, to the way the camera is positioned, the scenes are written, and the way the movie is finally acted, it's on purpose. It doesn't mean that we get it right, but we're trying at every point to do something intentional and that we've thought about, and no one is more exemplary at that than Will is. Yeah, we were definitely not winging it. That's for sure. One thing to note in that lab scene that we just passed, it was sort of the second kind of mile marker for our original ending, which was this idea that he had lost touch with any sort of emotional connection with these creatures as human beings, sick human beings. And this idea that he's testing his cure and the thing dies in front of him. And what he's upset about is that the cure didn't work. Not that this living creature has died right in front of his eyes. And we always... imagined it like a fisherman who sort of takes his time de-hooking a fish that's sitting there suffocating on his line, that there's a careless quality about it with the creature's life. Social de-evolution appears complete. Typical human behavior is now entirely absent.

Why are we stopping? This is the second flashback. And the beginning of a big, big sequence for us. I think we start to move towards the I've never been colder in my lifetime. Yes. We shot this in the end of January in New York City under the Brooklyn Bridge. This is, what was this? Is this Dover Street? Yeah. Dover Street leading down. This is all practical location. This is real. Yeah. Our big spider cam shot here. And this is not a small setup. There were how many extras? 1,500 people, including the National Guard, the NYPD, the fire department, you know, going through the FDR here. We had the Black Hawk helicopter, you know, that the National Guard had gotten us, taking off Coast Guard ships, Coast Guard helicopters, shooting from boats, closing all the stuff down. Just kind of a ridiculous amount of work. And... What was amazing about it just production-wise was that, you know, again, we were working with a small child. And so we could basically shoot from 5 to 10, shoot anything that had willow in it. And then from 10 to 11, we would do helicopter stuff because after 11, the city wouldn't let us have helicopters take off or land. And so over five nights, we basically shot until about 11 or 12 o'clock at night and then kind of called it quits because there was really not much else to shoot. Yeah, thank God. But it did get down to about seven degrees, and I remember that it was our second or third night out there, and we were gonna, you know, one of the big characters in the sequence is this Coast Guard dolphin, you know, bright orange helicopter, and the landing gear had frozen and cracked and was leaking hydraulic fluid, and when that happens, they only have one more landing in them, and so they, obviously, they land at base so they can replace the landing gear, and so that ain't even shut us down for a night, so that cost us a night. and we thought we'd be insured, and we weren't insured, or the insurance doesn't cover those kinds of things, and it was a disaster. It turns out that you're not insured for when your orange helicopter breaks down as a hydraulic fuel leak because of the cold. Who knew? Get your hands off my wife! Get your hands off my wife! Stand down! Stand down, soldier! Stand down! I am Lieutenant Colonel Robert Neville. I'm ordering you to scan her again. Scan her again! All right, scan her again. It's clear. It's clear. And the guy taking a scan there, that's actually Dr. Sharma. He was our medical consultant, which is kind of fun. So he was on set every day whenever we needed, you know, IVs and injections and anything sort of medical, non-virus but medical.

This was fun. And we actually did this in really long takes. So we pretty much would shoot everything from them coming through the crowd and down and out here and up to the helicopter and into the helicopter in one, which was kind of fun that we set them up as big masters and let everything run. And obviously it goes without saying, so I'll say it anyway. The movie alternates between really intimate and really giant, which is a fun rhythm. And this was... very much another place where we wanted to land the audience in the kind of epic reality, just as we had come from the kind of deep emotional reality of the previous scenes with Neville working on The Cure. And this is now the beginning of, you know, Neville's a little bit Job. Will always used to say Neville was Job, you know, and so here we have the beginning promise of that which is taken from nebel which is by the end of this movie everything he loves and we get to see how he gets sam here that sam was actually the puppy that his daughter had and she gives him sam and this is our another butterfly reference

went back and forth back and forth and where to end this particular dream flash and where to start the next one I mean just in terms of little bits of scene but there was finally this idea of yours Francis I think that there's a kind of repetition to dream logic and to memory and I think that that's sold nicely in the way it's patched together

And that transition I really like too because one thing that we did between the flashbacks and our present day stuff has to do with sound and color. We had to be very careful with the empty city that the sound is all nature and that you don't have even the slightest electrical hum. And so to go from this scene that is packed with people and screaming and other voices and helicopters and electricity and electric lights and color to suddenly this dead silence inside of his room with his eyes. I just always loved that because it just reminds you of how quiet it would be with everybody gone. 25 patients have already died. Dr. Neville has ordered local hospitals to stockpile antiviral drugs and to begin preliminary quarantine protocols. It's my birthday. We are fully confident that Dr. Neville can see us through. You know, there's very little exposition in the movie, which I think we're very proud of. Interestingly enough, a bunch of it actually occurs in this scene on a news broadcast, which we dropped in right at the end of post. It used to be... Wasn't that where Good Night and Good Luck was? Yeah, we used to be watching Good Night and Good Luck, which was the next one after Goodfellas. And instead, we wanted to cover our bases, so we did. There's the other dog, by the way. Oh, yeah. Who is that? That's Tona. You can tell by the run, right? Yeah, the run is funky. It's like a little hippity-hop run. But we wanted to provide the exposition required, and then we mixed it so no one could hear it, just so we knew we had done it. This is an interesting beat, because this scene was actually filmed... With Elise. With Elise. And that's the dog. That's Abby laying down there. That was actually Abby laying down on the wing of the aircraft when he's golfing, and we cut her out of that and stuck her there. And we created... Entirely in post, this sort of moment alone with Neville and the dog fishing in the Met, which was really fun. In the Temple of Dendor. In the Temple of Dendor. Which Francis wanted to shoot in literally since he heard the words Temple of Dendor. And then this was another one of those very complex scenes. This is one of my favorite sequences in the movie. It's a nice long sequence and Neville goes through a lot. You know, we wanted to shoot this in front of Grand Central. It was one of the trickiest things. The city had never shut this viaduct down before, and we needed it for six days. So they let us do it over three consecutive weekends, six days. So we would actually shoot for two days, go away for a week, shoot for two days. We really lucked out again with weather. You know, there was one moment where you see the mannequin move, and we had actually had a little thing running where we cast people to play our mannequins. And in the background of some shots, you can see they're real people playing the mannequins and not And it was to sort of nod at the idea that Will or Neville thinks these mannequins are real. And I think it's pretty effective in the sequence and quite frightening. And it sort of draws you into his state of mind here. But this was pretty amazing to come out here and shoot this and be up on this viaduct and have Will shooting this. this machine gun basically on top in front of Grand Central. And through visual effects here in a minute, we see him shooting at the buildings and blowing windows out and all this kind of stuff. And it was just very, very strange. But we also had to be very careful because right down below, there are the Grand Central police squads that are there to watch out for terrorism. So we always had to make sure we let them know we were about to start shooting.

You know, this whole sequence is interesting because it is another one of these performance-driven tours of emotion. Because he goes through a series of emotions, you know, disbelief and then confusion, fear. Paranoia. Paranoia. And, again, he's doing it all on his own. You know, he doesn't have other characters to interact with. That's very, very articulate acting.

It's very interesting. This is really sort of... This is a very early Mark Protasevich idea. Yes, of getting trapped. Getting trapped. By the creatures. Hanging and we've moved it around. But it's something that's really abided, you know? And quite disturbing, I think. And that really is Will hanging there, by the way, guys. Yep. And very effective, too, because you've spent so much time setting up how scary the dark is so far and his alarms on his watches. And so to do this kind of fade out as he passes out and to wake up and it be dark and... the light, the shadows be cool and the bugs to be out and the alarm to be beeping, you now know it's very, very bad. Production wise too, this was tricky because we had these six days and light played a very specific part in all of these sequences. And so for the approach, we had to shoot in the mornings when there were shafts of light coming down through the street. And when he got snared, it was supposed to be midday, so we had an hour window each day to be shooting the snare portion when the sun was right down the canyon. And then this stuff on the back end had to be shot in the afternoon when the street all fell into shade. So we were splitting this up and shooting a bit of each part each day, which got sort of tricky for Will and his performance, but also for us, just kind of keeping track of what we had achieved each time. It's much easier to just sort of be able to shoot something in order and make your way through it than to split it up like that over six days, over three different weeks. But it worked out very well, and I'm very happy with the way this looked. And I really like the way this next sequence turned out. It's another one of our scary sequences, but sort of a slightly different value comes out of it. Sort of there's a little bit more suspense. And it sort of reminds me a little bit of the kinds of sequences you would find in old Hitchcock movies. The waiting for something bad and awful to happen and knowing it's going to happen and watching that sliver of light slowly disappear. What Will always used to say, which I always thought was very clever, he's like, the longer it takes before we cut away, the more the audience knows something bad is going to happen in this sequence. Because fundamentally, you could have cut him down, right? And then you could cut to the lab. And that would be okay movie grammar. Or here, you could keep dragging. You could cut him down. But you could pull the knife out. It'd be okay. But instead, he starts dragging. Now you could still cut out, and it'd be okay. But the longer he keeps dragging, the clearer signal you're sending to the audience that it ain't over yet. And that's really scary. And, you know, what starts to emerge is, of course, we hope, frightening. On the day... it couldn't have been more absurd. Right. But fundamentally, it's a guy with a green suit. And a dog puppet on his hand. And it was the least scary thing ever on the planet. Yeah. And this was nice. This was a combination of real light and effects. And so we had a big, powerful xenon that was cutting this swath of light across the ground, but the beam and the little bugs floating through the air, the little floaties, as we called them, We're all at it in post, but we had this sort of interactive light that was getting narrower and narrower as the sun was setting. Let's go. Come on. Sam, come on. And this is some of great Abby stuff. So Abby and her trainer worked really hard on this.

this we actually our dog trainer had these Mexican hairless dogs that were pretty frightening looking and so we based these off of the Mexican hairless dogs and me and the visual effects supervisor went up to his ranch and we videotaped this dog being sort of taunted by this bone and snarling and hopping around and that's what the movement of these dogs was based on which is uh It's pretty realistic in this sort of being kept back by this light until the light just finally disappears here and they charge. This was a very difficult sequence because it's an integration of CG dogs and actual Abby and... We were also wrestling with the next... the, in some ways, the more real-time phase of his Job journey, which is what's going to happen to Abby. And it's remarkable what happens when you start to work with the idea of the loss of an animal. This moment right there got people, when Abby is limping, got people making sounds and turning away. even on the day it was filmed. And surprisingly enough, that's just her with a bunch of smudge on her body and a piece of tape on her paw. That's how you make a dog limp, by the way, is putting a piece of tape on their paw. I've been putting tape on Francis' paw for a while, but he won't limp. Look at me, girl. Hey, you're okay. You're okay. Samantha, I've just got to get you home. I've got to get you. I've got to take you home. Let me take you home. All right, come here. Come here. Come here. Boy, you know, we worked on... what it looks like for Abby to be hurt and... Get sick. And then, you know, what it's gonna look like for Abby to die. And this was a very, very tricky sequence and is very, very shrewdly directed, you know, because, as you'll see, Abby dies... Off camera. Yeah, and Abby's death is entirely related to the audience through Will's performance. Mm-hmm. Now, having said that, this was, for us, right up until the end, one of the most controversial scenes. We felt that it was important to the movie and understood that it really was insufferable for some people. During our first preview, people walked out at this scene. And I think people, a certain percentage of people, found the movie finally. impossible to take because of this scene. Yeah, but that ends up being just kind of a reaction people have to animals. There's sort of a purity to animals and an innocence and, you know, people are much more willing to even see children die in movies than they are to see a dog die. But, you know, it's very interesting because we decided that we were more willing to have the audience alienate some people and really resonate for what we thought would be more the people like us than we were to sort of make the movie its most palatable. And I think that, you know, we tried to make those kind of decisions all the way through. And I think it really served us. I think it does too. And I think we realized if you were to sort of take this out, it just made the movie feel smaller. And it's not in a scope way. I guess it's an emotional scope versus a visual scope. It just felt like less complex and less emotionally complicated without this loss for Neville. It's an impossible thing to have to imagine. And that's really the shot, by the way, that saves the whole sequence, which is you need to know that Sam is no longer Sam, that Sam has turned. And it's very funny. In very early drafts of the script, Sam used to come back, and Francis and I were kind of like, nah, not so much. But so strong were the instincts. Yeah, we had to convince some people at Warner Brothers that no, Sam cannot come back. That would be a little too ridiculous. Here's Will again giving us the hardest idea, which is to kill something that you love to save. And also one of my favorite parts in the movie. Performance-wise, he just did a great job, but also the... I found the more simply we approached sequences, the more effective they were. And the idea of just holding on a close-up of Will and letting Will's performance tell the story was so appealing.

This was a big shot. Yeah, this was Seventh Avenue. There were so many people out. There were certain things we could close down and effectively evacuate. Others we couldn't. And there were a lot of people painted out of that shot. And this was day one of filming. That's right. Welcome to I Am Legend, Will. Today you're burying the dog. And I remember we were playing Adagio for Strings on a loudspeaker. And we shot this at sunset at the end of our very first day. It was Will's birthday. It was Will's birthday. And we were shooting out at an apple farm in northern, I guess it was like Westchester County. And we put blue out there and dropped in Central Park because... the people in Central Park won't let you do anything in Central Park, so you can't actually shoot there. Not if you want to have equipment there. Unless you're enchanted, apparently. I guess, yeah. You can somehow shoot there and the Time Warner building. Right. Even though we were a Time Warner movie but couldn't. And then another fun shot, which is our big 7th Avenue pullback, where you really sell he's lost everything and he's utterly alone.

That was a complex shot for them too. Yeah. It's just great how long it is. And then this is another one of my favorite little pieces. This whole string of scenes I really enjoy. And this for a while was sort of, we called it the please, promise my friend I would say hello. And that's the way the scene was written. And Will had this great performance of saying hello to her. And I remember I went up to him at one point and said, you know, when you say hello, play it as please say hello to me, hoping that the mannequin would say hello. But instead of just playing it that way, he actually said it. And somehow the scene changing and him actually saying it sort of like instantly everybody watching the monitor kind of broke out into tears. And it was really effective. Hello.

This used to lead into a longer sequence. There was a kind of detour here, which is actually pretty interesting. Finally, in terms of pace, wasn't for us in terms of the cut of the movie, but this was a gateway into even more content. The fever dream. There's our mannequin again from the Italian store. She's by the porn section, by the way. Yeah, which we got a little flack for. Yeah, we did, yeah. But you can't really tell. No, you see in the lower left-hand corner is the Da Vinci load. Right. Okay, now we crack ourselves up. Yeah. Yeah, we liked Francis. You said that this lifted out. There was a sequence between that. And the driving. Never mind, ignore all that. Emotional immediacy was better without it. Yes.

And so here we come to what we call the Demolition Derby. This is a digital map painting, right? And yep, we built this, a different version of our spud barge, our pier, in a huge armory in the Bronx, the same place where we shot the Times Square sequence. And this is sort of a big, elaborate sequence here. with uh r40 creatures and a car driving around and pretty elaborate rigs and i'm not entirely happy personally with some of the cg in the medium shots here well i'm not actually that happy with a lot of the cg in the medium shots in general yeah it's what what there's an interesting thing that happened sorry sony imageworks if you're listening to this but it's true um and we said it in the room with those guys, that there's kind of an amazing quality to the empty city shots with the augmentation that they did there, and also to some of the close-ups, which you would just think would be the hardest thing ever. And so some of the close-ups in the ending and of the girl on the table are just insane with the quality of the skin and the breathing and the performance and the light. And then you get some of these medium shots are just funky, and it's actually based on real people doing these real actions, and it just gets a little animated. You can just feel in some of the motion that it's not quite real. And it's unfortunate because, as Francis said, that which would seem to be harder was executed very easily. That is an unbelievable close-up. And that's hard to beat. And that's completely CG and so realistic. And then you just get into some of the mediums, and it doesn't hold up to the same quality. The idea behind this sequence, which I sort of enjoy, is this idea of multiple car collisions was kind of the thinking behind it. He's trying to ram these things and they sort of turn the tables and they turn on him. Also, this stuff is pretty amazing too, of Alpha. Just the quality and the eyes are just great. And then we have our reveal of somebody else using a UV flare. I'm running in on the haze. I always liked the idea that, you know, you might think it's his wife and daughter, but then you quickly see that it's not. It's kind of a hot Brazilian girl. Hot Brazilian girl. That's Lise Braga, whom we love. We cast her first off. She was the first person we met with. She was... beautiful and genuine and talented. We'd all seen her work in City of God. And we fell for her. Yeah, she was the only person that came in and met with us and read with Will. And we sort of played a joke on her and brought her back in one day when we were testing with all the creatures. Brought her back in and she thought she was going to be put through the paces again and we gave her the job on the spot the very next day. And one of the things I think that Will and I really liked about casting a girl from South America was that because our whole movie takes place in New York, and, you know, in and around Manhattan, that it suddenly made the problem we're talking about in this movie seem much more global when somebody with an accent shows up, and you find out that they've actually, you know, crossed from a different continent and come to America by boat, and the problem has been very, very global, and it's happening outside of Manhattan as well. Used to be a lot more backstory to that, too.

you know, sort of one of our signature sequences. Signature in a couple of ways. First, because when we talk about the differing and contrasting or complementary scales of the movie, you have arguably the most epic sequence in terms of visual effects. You have the destruction of all the bridges leading to and from Manhattan except the George Washington Bridge. And then you have the setup for what is going to be the worst loss in the movie. And we actually had one more shot that we pulled almost last minute, which was you actually saw the impact of the dolphin with the out-of-control helicopter, and you saw them fall to the ground and explode, and it just started to feel gratuitous. And oddly, you wouldn't think that that would be the case. You would think that that would give some sense of closure, but it actually flattened the feeling out, and you were sort of left feeling the way Neville does when you aren't quite sure, when you just about get to the impact and you come out. And it was something interesting to discover. And this moment here was also a little bit of a last minute act. This was, it's not a little bit, it's about as last minute as the last thing we shot, isn't it? In the reshoots. That's true. We shot the element of Willow and Sally here on stage with, I think, days before we were going to Turn it all in. Days before we were going to release the movie. And again, this brings us into the mindset of Robert Neville. Just like seeing the mannequin's head turn, he at first sees his family in the kitchen. It was always something we talked about as a motivation for the character as he moved into that room. And then we suddenly took the opportunity when we were back doing some pickups to actually put it in the movie, not so that we were, as Francis says, moving. you know, with Will's point of view, essentially. Because it is a point of view movie, not literally, but psychologically. And this was, you know, every movie has the key scenes and the scenes that all the actors focus on. And it's the one you sort of anticipate and dread and are excited about because they're sort of the pivotal scenes. And so our kitchen scene was definitely one of those scenes. That and our argument about God later. were probably the two big ones for Elysee and Will and the ones that get talked about the most. And then finally, of course, those are the ones that you manipulate the most in editing. Those are the ones that you search for on the day and in the cut. Yeah. This was an interesting lesson for me, too, in the creation of a scene because I went into this... knowing that a lot of this movie was performance. And so Will and Akiva and I really would workshop, and with Alisi too, workshop a lot of this. So it had a structure to it, and Akiva had written it very specifically. And then we went way off track in terms of workshopping and coming up with ideas and different things for people to say and not to say, and who are you looking at and who are you paying attention to, and what are you thinking about, and is it your family, and are you disappointed, and... Or are you excited to see somebody? And what's funny is it all informs the behavior in the scene, but then it all landed exactly back to the way that it was written, Wishes. It now exists again in its simplest form, yet the performances are now influenced by all of that play and workshopping, and I really enjoy that. And it's a scene that I'm really proud of just because I think it's entirely accurate. in terms of a person's response to having strangers in their house after three years, the disappointment of it not being his wife and daughter, somebody in his space touching his stuff, you know, the research we did and how people deal with interacting socially once again, you know, after they've been by themselves for so long. But, you know, you bring up this idea, which I think I'm now referring to in my mind, is the ham hock theory, which is, I think, very, very important in movie making, which is, Sometimes you create, like when you make a soup with a ham hock, you make the soup with the ham bone in it, then you take the bone out. You never intended to have the bone in the thing you serve, but it flavors it. And I think people get scared of taking detours, but in fact, if you get it the original way and then you get a bunch of detours, finally it's... flavoring what you leave in, even if you cut the detour out, whether it be dialogue or performance, it still informs the scene. Oh, absolutely. But the weird thing is, is on the day when you've got the time, you know, the clock ticking, what happens is all that workshopping, suddenly you are, you know, you roll cameras, you call action, they go in the scene and it feels like this big improv session and it doesn't feel like a scene and it's taking half an hour to get through the scene and you sort of suddenly panic and what have we done to the scene? And then on the day you have to reshape it and everybody's kind of super sensitive and defensive. But then it all informs itself and it's kind of fun, but you definitely need time to be able to do those kinds of things. And I think you've got to always remember, get it the way you planned on getting it first, I just mean in terms of structure, and then start screwing around. Right, absolutely.

And I love this. This is where he finds the kid, Ethan. This is the only time that Shrek has ever been used actually outside of Shrek. And that was because Will called Jeffrey Katzenberg and said, could we please use it? But again, I love this idea that, you know, it's kind of a funny sequence, but what he's really seeing here and what I think he's playing a little in the beginning is this idea that he hasn't seen a child sitting in front of the TV watching Shrek since his daughter sat there. This scene's length we manipulate. This is, it's very interesting because Will actually did do this. And Francis' instinct, which I think is right, is that the more you can see of it in a run, the better it is. So what we ended up doing was actually sort of trying to take chunks that were entirely on will and then take chunks that were off will and not cut back and forth too much. And I think it kind of worked nicely. Yeah, but it's about half as long as the segment we shot. Yeah. We sort of thought that you could get that really long run, but you never quite know until you see it. But again, the scene not sort of saying exactly what it is, this was an apology, the beginning of an apology for Will. I like Shrek. That was really scary. And if you don't mind me saying, if that don't work, your breath certainly will get the job done, because you definitely need some Tic Tacs. How are you going to explain this one? This we did a bunch of times. This chunk, which we sort of call our day in, ended up, and our day out, ended up being the most work and editorial for us. And this is where the movie changed around. And this we shot, this scene here at the kitchen table, we re-shot at the very end. And it used to be a much different sequence. The information here and the transitions here, which are compressed, actually... took place over the course of 20 minutes of scene work and an extra day out. This was in order to accelerate and focus and keep the movie in a kind of more intense space. Right. Because remarkably what happened in our other sequences, although it increased in scope and scale, it took the air, it let the air out. Yeah, and what we wanted to do here specifically too was sort of restate Neville's and Anna's goals. So the idea is that Neville still exists in this sort of fantasy land of, no, this is my site. I'm not leaving. This is my site. This is my zone. I can still fix this, which to me is what this scene's really about. But you also get to see that Anna wants to leave and that she's heading to Vermont and to this idyllic place that she thinks exists out beyond Manhattan where there are people and survivors. I'm not going to let this happen.

I can still fix this. And again, another wonderful close-up, pulsing temple, the breathing, the eyelashes, everything about this shot is fantastic. And it's all CG. Yeah. Sorry. I called down to all of you. And there used to be, between that last scene and this scene, many, many, many exterior shots of Manhattan where Neville and Anna went out and spent a day. Some very cool stuff. There is some really cool stuff in there. And interesting, good scene work, too. And nobody notices the wardrobe jump. On Elisi, right. Because of time passage. Yes, exactly. Although, God, I seem to remember we were concerned about it. Yeah.

And our Wall of the Dead. Our Wall of the Dead, which is really more significant, although still significant in our current ending, was more significant in our original ending. In the original, right. Did all of them die? Yes. This is the theme which Francis and I have called Who's the Monster? Which is really a theme that's very consistent with the source material, the original novella. And our movie, although I think in its current form works with that theme in its original form, which we'll see when we talk about the alternate ending, really landed on it. Right. And you can feel it in this one, which is very interesting. You know, we sort of thought... It's the ham hock theory. Yeah, we created a new ending that we felt, you know, we really could put on this. And then, you know, when you watch it, you just see that working on a movie over time with a specific ending in mind, it's just built into the DNA of it. And a lot of that, you sort of feel the idea that these creatures are more intelligent than Neville thinks. Yeah. And this idea that he's kind of lost emotional connection with the creatures all plays into the original ending. You'll also notice in the other ending, that shot of Elisi walking in is not flipped. We flipped it because in this ending, she has a tattoo on her neck of a butterfly that doesn't exist in the other ending. And so we needed to hide that. And also, in this version, when he first examines the girl, there is no butterfly. There's no butterfly. And in the other version, there is, right? Right. Got it back in? Mm-hmm. Marley. It's probably the right time to say, because we just passed a Van Gogh, right? Yep. You know, we had this idea that he went to the museums and stole them, and they're all over the house, but we never say it. So we tried to find art that would be in New York and then construed traveling shows when we couldn't. But most of it's actually from New York museums. And I remember one of my favorite museum-going moments of all time was sort of going into MoMA and seeing Starry Night, not knowing it was there. And do you remember we once had a scene early on where he and Sam used to go and just sit in the museum? Yep, uh-huh, and have lunch. That's right. One of our few laughs in the movie. Yes. We have a few. This is one of them. I think six. And again, one of the things we've gotten the most flack for, which is how can a 20-something-year-old girl not know who Bob Marley is? But not everybody's educated in music. That's exactly right. So this scene went on for a while. Yeah, it used to be the love scene where they kissed. Yeah, and moved suggestively towards the couch. Yes, it did. Yes, it did. But we took that out. Yeah, I mean, it was interesting. What happened was, and again, these are the things that you learn as you make the movie, which is we were invested in his relationship with his wife and child. And even though they were dead... It felt too soon. Yeah, it felt too soon. And he still felt connected to them, which this ending really keeps, which is his connection to his wife and child. Performing a peace rally, gunmen came to his house and shot him down. This was the Bob Marley virologist philosophy, which is something that we sort of came up with as we were working through sort of character and theme and early version of the screenplay and then in rehearsals. Yeah, and we're all big Bob Marley fans. And I remember, I think, I think Will came up with starting the use of it, just he was looking up Legend, I Am Legend, and came up with, saw Legend on the internet and Bob Marley's album, you know, Bob Marley's album, and brought it up and started thinking about it and then Akiva, you wrote the speech, which was great, and then we decided to name Willow's character Marley, and we started to use the songs, and I'm just so excited that we got to use, nobody uses Bob Marley songs in movies. And it's unbelievable, and especially Redemption Song, we get Redemption Song in there as... There's a little costume gap there, that's actually the, he's wearing the shirt from the first day, but we decided to... Tweaked it in the DI. Yeah, a little bit. Hope no one noticed. This was the other scene that was our sort of anticipated, dreaded scene, which is the big sort of confrontation over God where Neville has... And his costumes go, she's actually in her post-coital guard here, which nobody notices. But this is where we see that sort of Neville has chosen faith in science and that Anna has chosen faith in God to sort of get them through because, you know, to survive this kind of apocalypse, you have to have faith in something. You have to have some sort of hope. And these two characters are just coming at their hope from different vantage points. I said, how do you know? How could you know? God told me. He has a plan. God told you? Yes. This is our first glimpse at, well, Anna might be a little crazy. Yeah. Oh, look, turns out Neville's not the only loony tune in the movie. Yes, exactly. And there used to be much more of Anna, this sort of buildup to Anna saying, God, basically speaks to me. Both of these characters are actually kind of diagnosably mad. Yeah. Which is something that I think we liked. I mean, it's a circumstance where you'd be crazy not to be crazy. Yes. And both of them are dealing with that, as Francis says, in very different ways. But fundamentally, the characters in their most extreme are the more interesting characters to work with, certainly as a writer and I think as a director. I always liked the idea, yeah, that also being crazy is normal. You know, the idea of being crazy is... a majority idea, right? That you're only crazy if you're different than the majority. But here, you are the majority, so you're actually not crazy even though you are crazy. That's right. Which is kind of fun. Dead. Crashed and bled out dead. Less than 1% immunity. It left 12 million healthy people like you, me, and Ethan. The other 588 million... This was the day Steven Spielberg came to set. Yes, he did, which made me very nervous. I thought the idea was very cool until he actually came and sat next to me in the chair. And we're all literally like, oh, my God, it's Steven. But luckily it was a very cool scene, and Will and Alicia were both great in it, and he came right after we had done some really powerful takes, and so we got to show him some stuff. Although he was there when we were doing some pretty boring stuff, I think just kind of locking doors and things, but... Still, I have to say that I don't think I can remember being as nauseous as when I showed up. What is that? And this is interesting because this is actually a little bit of a patch, too, because she used to go upstairs. Yeah, well, he used to say some other things. Yeah, the argument for a while, we had a version that got a little more heated, and we shot two endings to this. And one, he said some other things. She slapped him and... and then went upstairs, and she was already upstairs by the time he heard the sound. Right. And so now you'd revert back to either version of the movie. Yes. Here's again where the CG is maybe not its strongest, and this attack has gone up and down and up and down in scale. We finally ended up wanting to use the smaller, well, this is kind of a much, much scaled down version of what this attack once was. Yeah, there used to be a lot more of the bombs. The crowd of monsters used to be much larger. He set up many more bombs before, you know, this big final one here. We even have that exterior shot. Yeah, we had this huge explosion. It was much more of an action sequence. And I think, you know, In all honesty, this is probably my least favorite section of the movie. And I think, you know, what I always fell in love with was the man alone. And I think what happens here that we were always fighting and why we worked on this section so much is that it sort of, it reverts to genre a little and becomes a little less interesting to me. Although it's still pretty exciting and kind of fun, especially for genre fans. But it sort of now kind of goes from character and goes into plot. But there's still some fun stuff here.

Anna! And we shot this all at the very end. That Washington Square Park sequence was shot over about six weeks, but now is surprisingly whittled down to near nothing. It's like four shots. Yeah, it's like four or five shots. But some of the stuff is kind of fun. Yeah, this stuff. This, it gets back into something that's sort of more interesting again because the scale comes down again. Yeah, and you're back with him. Yeah. It was also, that was part of the problem was we did a real point of view break. we hadn't really done which is we're sort of out in the park running with the creatures and yeah i mean in fairness it was something we shot at the very beginning of our schedule yeah some of it was sort of additional unit photography and so what happened was i don't think we knew enough yet to be able to make a sequence that would have actually there's probably a version of that sequence that could have worked but god knows what it was yeah We would have needed to have done some reshooting. Like another six weeks in Washington Square Park. And they weren't ever letting us near Washington Square Park again. No. You know, and here again you get this alternation of close-ups that are kind of good and some mediums that are bad. Not so good. Yeah. But some of this is kind of fun. I like some of this sort of chase. Yeah. And I really like it when he goes back upstairs and then you're back into this kind of, you know, the creature in the ceiling. This is fine. There's a gas tank. That's an actual practical explosion and things being pulled with wires. And that's not a real person. Yeah. I like that bit there. Yeah. And that's surprisingly, like, stunts usually suck the first time you do them, and that was the first time. That was actually kind of nice, that whole explosion and Will in the foreground. You just said splosion. Explosion? Explosion. Boy, he's fast. Yes. and then we actually got away with, huh, my gun's empty, let me drop it. It goes up, searching for Anna and Ethan. And this is kind of fun, because we built all these floors separately, and then we had one big stairwell on our first floor set that we could use, so it was always like, how do you jump around with the stairwells and things? And then we had our guy Asa, our one Jewish creature. The Jewish Hema site. Yeah, he was... You know, and this I like. I think this is kind of good and scary and holding the... Except I did want the child to urinate. I really wanted him to urinate, and that was going to be what the creature smelled. But for reasons we won't talk about... No, we won't. We decided not to shoot. Not to do the peeing. Yes, the peeing. See, like, that's really good work. Yeah. This stuff is good, yeah. Yeah. is the creature signaling to the others. I love that shot too. Yeah, me too. The dying creature was good. Come on, come on. We come out and then we have the alpha who's about to come in. We experimented with length on this moment too. Longer, shorter. Pause, not pause. Yep. This takes us to the final reel. Don't love that shot. That's the trick, too, when you're doing a movie that has, you know, 800, I can't even imagine those movies that have 2,000 effect shots. But just trying to get it done, you know, when you could really use an entire another year of sitting in post and working on things and working and get into this stuff. It's like James Cameron will push a movie a year. Do you know what I mean? To get it right, and I get it. Absolutely.

and we're getting close to the moment where we sort of are... Branching. Our story splits into the ending we have now or the original ending. And what's interesting is both endings, again, fantastic shot for a close-up. I think that's just great. What's interesting is I really like both endings, you know? They're both entirely... They could not be more different. And they both work in their different ways. And I think we found that the original ending, which you'd see... lands on much more of a philosophical idea, whereas this ending lands on a much more emotional level. And what's fun about it is that when we knew we were going to do this new ending, we actually shot the ending on video, starting from about here. And we set up in our editorial office a fake little mock-up of the lab. And we had Will, and he had a fake gun. And we had our post supervisor acting as the alpha male here. office assistants, you know, as the different characters. And we sort of did a little moving storyboard, which is kind of fun to watch that we cut. So we knew specifically what we were going to need to shoot to get the new ending and to make it match. And Will had about 10 days, because he had just shot Hancock and had gained, I don't know, 35 pounds or something for Hancock. And we had 10 days, he had 10 days to drop. Butterfly. There's the butterfly in the cracks. He had 10 days to drop. This in ours, in the new ending, you see the butterfly occurs as an act of essentially God. And this triggers him to look at Anna and there's her butterfly. And so Marley's words, it's a butterfly daddy. This idea that there is a plan, that there's a larger sense of connectedness that Anna has been talking about is... It's triggered in that way in this version, which is slightly different than the way it's triggered in our original version. Exactly. Yeah, and this is sort of the idea that his revelation is that, you know, maybe it's not just all science. It's actually science and some other force that's out there. And this is all our new ending, which is the idea that his place is here with his family and that she is, her purpose is to... Go to Vermont with the blood. This thing that he has disputed is now because of his revelation that there is a world bigger than the world he lives in. He believes now that Vermont exists and that he gives her the blood. Stay until dawn.

to come full circle, which is to go home to his family. His purpose, which he started out the movie with, which was to find the cure and to save humanity, he has acquitted himself of this, we hope, or he hopes, and now his work here is done. The alpha's gonna break through. Pulls the pin.

I like this moment. More good performance with that. Very nice. And then we shot this next bit. Did you just say, very nice, to your own Louis? I like that part. It's very nice. The explosion, the little moment where you contact. And then we went out and we just caught the back end of fall. This was probably... two weeks before the movie came out or three weeks before the movie came out. And we shot it in Mount Airy, New Jersey. And we had Al Cirillo, who's the best helicopter pilot on the planet, shoot that stuff. And then we went out and shot our Vermont village in Mount Airy, New Jersey.

Another one for all of the critics, which would be, you know, getting on and off the island. If you were the only person and you needed to get on and off Manhattan, you would probably take a boat. You could, in fact, take a boat. Yes, or you could swim across the Harlem River. You could. It's not that big of a deal. But in fact... But that's not the same car she had on Manhattan because people seem to think she took that car. All right. Okay. I'm defensive. Breathe through it. Let it go. Church. Church. By the way, so not on purpose. That's actually what was there. Yeah. Big doors. Dogs. People. Sort of our nod to Sam. Sam. And Pippies, apparently. Dedicated his life to the discovery of a cure and the restoration of humanity. This ending, we felt, actually, interestingly enough, with this voiceover, is consistent with the idea of telling somebody's story. Right, of legend. He gave his life to defend it. And, man, this shot was down to the wire. Oh. By the way, there are different versions of this shot. Yeah, there are. This is the better one, actually, than what's on in the theaters. And then we have redemption song kicks in here, which I love. We love. Yep. And then credits. That's it. Thanks for coming. Thanks for watching.

and ships minutes after they took I from the bottomless pit but my hand was made strong by the hand of the almighty we forward in this generation triumphantly Won't you help to sing These songs of freedom Cause all I ever have Redemption songs Redemption songs Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery None but ourselves can free our minds Have no fear for atomic energy, cause none of them can stop the time. How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look? Some say it's just a part of it. We've got to fulfill the book. Won't you help to sing? These songs of freedom. Cause all I ever have. Redemption songs.

ourselves from mental slavery none but ourselves can free our mind oh have no fear for atomic energy cause none of them can stop at the time how long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look yes some say Just a part of it We've got to fulfill the book Won't you help to sing These songs of freedom Is all I ever had Redemption songs All I ever had These songs of freedom, songs of freedom.