Budget

Andrew Niccol

four months after the main unit was completed, and after we'd already cut the film together. It was always in the script, but I'd run out of money, and I couldn't afford to do it with the main unit. I had to beg my French producer to let me go back to South Africa and do it. To his credit, he eventually agreed. It still had to be done very cheaply, and I had to call in a lot of favors.

1:39 · jump to transcript →

Andrew Niccol

I mean, one thing is getting the idea, but executing it's another. Shot required placing a 100-foot crane on a very rickety wooden pier. In the original script, we got to see Yuri's childhood in Ukraine. Ten-year-old Yuri comes up with the idea to pretend to be Jewish to escape the Soviet Union. But that part of the story had to be cut for budget reasons.

4:37 · jump to transcript →

Andrew Niccol

We intentionally try to change the characters too much over the 20 years the film takes place. Those fashion changes often look very contrived and financially we just couldn't afford to. My schedule was actually so tight that I could be shooting a scene in the early 80s and an hour later a scene in the late 90s.

7:33 · jump to transcript →

put his gun to the head of the cashier and was screaming to this guy to give him the money. And everyone in the store just was looking at each other and very slowly getting on the floor as if they were saying, oh, there's Nicky.

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Jeffers and Obecks have done such a good job of watching her. This is literally the first time she's been alone. And when we found this location, that elevator we built. Oh, cool. Door and everything? Elevator, door, everything. We built it there. I walked into this location. How did you make it go up the floors? I'm kidding. Stop it. No, we built everything. In fact, half of our budget went into remodeling this entire location. This is your loft from downtown, right? It looks a lot like it.

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Hollywood. This film is an allegory from my experience in independent film with Ken. And Parker and Longbaugh end up at the end of the first scene and the end of the film bloody and beaten and completely savaged for being who they are. Right. And the money drives away with somebody else. And that the scene in the birthing room towards the end of the film...

39:47 · jump to transcript →

So Dan was the art director on Lord of the Rings... ...and I met through a friend of mine, Gino Acevedo, the makeup artist. And we met and.... Since we already had a sense of what I wanted to see as a castle... ...came with some drawings at the beginning. Dan was perfect for that. Just took the drawing. As an art director, just became clearly someone that expanded the vision. But he's textured the style, you cannot recognise, I mean... Yeah, we were really lucky to get him. He was actually working on a different show when we got to New Zealand. And we thought maybe we wouldn't get him. But that other show had money problems... ...and shut down the production. And we were very lucky that he was able to step right into Underworld. Now, this was a scene that, at least, my recollection... ...when we originally sort of storyboarded it... ...wWe had a lot of werewolves in it, and then we couldn't afford them. So we went back and we begged Clint Culpepper... ...to give us about a hundred more werewolves. And he did. - Which he did. We also had to build this canyon right here. And I do think it makes a difference of just... Before, we were talking about doing a version... ... Which is just all within the trees. And, you know, Patrick, you and I talked a lot about... I liked the idea of you going from... There's a separation. You got the forest, and then this canyon, that then leads into... Leads into the meadow, yeah. Into the castle. Yup, and this castle, obviously, is a location that doesn't exist. So basically... - Neither do the rocks. What we had, it's basically like a golf course-looking... There was no rocks, nothing. It's very flat, very boring. And there was a lot of work to be done later on post and, you know.... The trees and the grass are basically all that were there. Yeah. The big crossbows. We only had one working crossbow, correct? Yes. - We still have it in storage too. We should take it out and play with it. We had a lot of, like, one thing working out of everything. We had one werewolf head mechanical. And we had to make it, you know, out of that stuff. So this wall behind. This is again basically the outside of the set. That set already, basically. - Yup. The whole courtyard and the little bit of the outside was built. We tried that shot right there, where the werewolf comes in. We tried that practically. And it just looked like.... Just dragging in a muppet. - A piece of rubber. Now, this is Rhona. - She is.

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It was interesting with Rhona because she had to create... ...a new character, you know, somebody... It's a different time. It's a much more rougher time. I mean, I think the warrior that she created... ...IS, In a sense, quite different from the Kate character. I think she did a fantastic job there. And I think she fits the tone of the movie very well. I was very happy. I mean, she looks great. And she has a very special quality of.... What I like best about Rhona is also the looks, how she looks... ...and tell a love story just by the looks on them. You'll see that through the movie, little moments like this, she really.... Beyond being a great... She works great with swords and things. Look at the shape Michael's in. It's incredible. This was-- He started.... He came off of Frost/Nixon I think in the end of October... ...and started shooting this in January... ...and had three months to go through incredibly intense physical training... ...to get into the shape that he's in in this movie. It was a Startling transformation that he was able to do to himself. It's good to be a Lycan. I'd like to be one. Yeah. That helps. Now, this is one of the great Dan Hennah sets. I remember Len and I came from California... ...in, what was it, for the first day of shooting... ...and we walked through the sets. And not only were they beautiful to look at... ...but the flooring was all corrugated. It looked like natural cement. And apparently, Dan had some sort of formula... ...where he could lay down these floors. And they made them look absolutely... They brought in a cement mixer and dumped it on the floor. And then there's this team of guys with forms and moulds... ... sort of going along with the cement mixer. So the entire floor is actually made... ...of two or three inches of actual concrete. It makes a huge difference. On the first film, we would've liked to, in the crypt, do that. Just didn't have the money for it. It was, you know, any way that you can possibly do it... . like a faux paint job. It just doesn't pick up the light. It doesn't work. The texture, yeah. - Here's a transformation. This was late in the game. This is Michael's suggestion or no? Am I wrong about that? - This was a scene, he was really... We actually tried to cut it. And he was so adamant that we had to shoot it. This one here. This turned out really well. Who did this? A company called Intelligent Creatures. From Toronto. - This one came out really good, yeah.

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This was part of what we described as our Spartacus sequence... ...where we wanted to have the slaves working on the rocks. Yep. This again, Dan Hennah and his.... It's an astonishing scale that we were able to get for the limited budget. Look at Larry. Larry's got the cruellest villain face. Ever. - Yeah, he was. I mean, Larry Rew's fantastic. He's just great, great expressions. And he was a local New Zealand actor, right? We found good actors in New Zealand. He was from there, and when we started to consider him... ... he actually decided to move to England. He came back from... What's the deal? - Yeah, that was weird. You will not always be his favourite, and when you fall... ...I will be there. I gotta say about Michael, really, because I was talking about Rhona. We just went through this. Michael... The first thing when I did the movie, I thought this is a bit of a fun little ride. He took the character and the part so... You guys saw that. He was so into it. And he was a real, real strong.... He was very big part of actually the way the character developed. He was very professional. Completely professional. And brings so much to the-- Yeah. I think you have to, you know, for these, it's.... You know, It's a different kind of film, but, you know, people that are... You know, If you were really into this kind of genre... ... you'd take it as seriously as anything else. And he is, actually. When you ask him what he likes, he likes Stephen King. He like that kind of stuff. - Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. These two actors are actually very well-known New Zealand actors... ...normally doing theatre and considerably more high-brow stuff. But they had a great time playing these roles. Orsova and Coloman. - Yeah, he's great. I remember seeing him early on... - David Ashton, yeah. David Ashton, yeah. Yeah, when we were going through all the casting and everything. He popped out. He was great. They're very solid actors. They're fantastic people. We're very lucky to have them onboard. And Elizabeth as well. - Yeah. This is so different from the type of roles... ... that she normally gets to play. They had such a good time, though. And who was the--? I Know we had a couple of different... . like, arrangements for their costume design. Who was doing for this stuff here? Who did these--? - Because I know that... Beanie did all the costume except for Rhona. Except for Rhona, right. Wendy Partridge did Rhona. Jane Holland, New Zealand? - Yeah. She did absolutely every costume in the movie. The only thing she didn't touch was basically Rhona's wardrobe. I remember when I showed up on set telling Gary that, you know... ...producing this one rather than, you know, directing... ... that I was jealous of the detail that you guys got out of it. It's like, in the costumes, in the sets, everything. I wanted to make you jealous about some things. I heard that, and you did, and you did. I'm already terribly, over the accent itself.

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It had to be built, and we stroked the set just a day before the station opened, and people were starting to ski again. So it's hard to believe it's a ski station, but that's what it is. But when we went there for prep, which was on a Friday, just to go look at the whole set and everything, there was no snow. And we were shooting on Monday, and we had to have snow there. Well, the thing is, we didn't seem to be able to get enough cash to get fake snow. No, we didn't. It's funny, because we didn't have the money to bring in fake snow. But then the thing is, once you're actually shooting in snow,

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budget looks better, but somehow you're probably going to end up spending more money on location, like you're saying. Yeah, this next shot coming up here, we built the floor. The background of this is actually from Underworld 1, and we just reused the shot. And so these guys coming in are on green screen just to save a bit of cash. There's a lot of great shots like that. Yeah, and the shot, actually, those guys that came in, originally was a shot with Kate coming in through in the first Underworld. That's right. And we removed her and hit her, and we hit her in the group of people. Yeah, we did. She's actually there, but you can't see it.

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This is a lot from Underworld 1 as well, just taking pieces. And when the coffin rises, that's all from the first one. I forgot about all that. Yeah. So that's new, huh? That's new. That's old. But what we did is we just... We didn't... This was a scene that we were possibly... I think we didn't have the money to do it. And so I was trying to set up how we could do it with a lot of the footage from Underworld 1 and not have to build so much. And...

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Jonathan Lynn

So you just gas me, pull the tooth out, and we'll still be friends, okay? Good. This dentist's office was a location, actually. There are very few built sets in the film. Partly for financial reasons, the film was made for a fairly low budget. And here we are in one of the most famous squares in the old town of Montreal, and this is Amanda Peet.

5:29 · jump to transcript →

Jonathan Lynn

And the jokes with the tulip here I asked Mitchell to put in on the very first rewrite as part of several places where I wanted to boost Bruce's character and give him some more laughs. This scene was originally going to be shot in a little cobbled street in the old town. We couldn't afford to go there because all the shop owners got together and...

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Jonathan Lynn

agreed to charge us to such an extent that we couldn't afford to shoot there anymore. And then we found this location, which is just wonderful and shows a panoramic view of Montreal. I was really pleased that, yet again, financial considerations forced us into making a change, which turned out to be for the better. After the ensuing scandal and bankruptcy and embarrassment, my wife and her mother decided it would be best that we move back here. That's the St. Lawrence River in the background, of course.

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steaming toward another $200 million in the foreign box office. And the great thing about that is not the money specifically, but the fact that so many people have seen the movie. And when you make a movie like this, there's really nothing more important than people seeing and enjoying the film. That strange slurping sound you're hearing is not a problem with your sound system. It's just me drinking coffee. Okay, what can we say about this? I feel like I just shot it, like, a month ago. Extras are always a difficult...

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Run away or head towards? Well, no matter what, I'm sure that Greg is really happy that you brought that up. This is the shot I was talking about earlier that, you know, there was clearly rain in the background. As these lights pan, you would see the rain being, you know, backlit by the light. I think you're looking at other things at this moment. Yeah, you are. You are, and I think it all works out. If you notice, there's no... You can't see anything in that pit back there on that shot. We still want to spend the money.

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Well, it's a really great movie house because, I mean, it's just so excessive and so much fun. It's interesting, in the development of the script, this fight sequence that you're going to see in a few minutes was originally staged... Jonathan was going to have a casino, and that was one of the few concessions that was made to get the budget down a little bit.

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James Mangold

We begged and borrowed the entire way to get the pictures made. In Walk the Line's case, that was with Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix both working for relative pittance and a budget of $25 million. And there wasn't a single studio except 20th Century Fox willing to make it. And the materials went to every single financing entity in Hollywood. Same, of course, as I said, is true here.

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James Mangold

Those tracks you see in the distance extending out of the town are nothing more than two by fours stacked one after another in a row. All that cutting off in the distance onto the hills. We literally just took black two by fours and put them crossways and painted silver two by fours and made them the other way. We couldn't afford to build any more than about a half, not even a half mile, a quarter mile I guess of track, actual track, which we built for the steam train to run on. Just enough for it to pull into town and just enough to pull out of town.

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James Mangold

That's about the fourth time he's gotten shot in the film. He's one of our band of stuntmen who we carry with us to every town, and he's literally been shot three previous times, and he'll get killed one more time in sequence shortly, as I'll point it out. When you're a low-budget film, you can't carry so many stuntmen and fly them in that you can each afford to kill them once and then bring a new guy in.

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Kat Ellinger

And as much as Baise-moi can be considered a statement in feminist terms and a statement about rape and a statement about female anger, for example, it wasn't part of any kind of intellectual movement. Some of these choices were made aesthetically and some were made because they were working on a very, very small budget of less than two million francs.

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Kat Ellinger

the mode of production was no longer limited to distribution via studios or these kind of established routes. You had a sense of anarchy come out. And so in America, for example, throughout the mid-'80s, you had the SOV movement, the shot-on-video movement, which, again, wasn't really a coherent movement, but very transgressive, very low-budget, very gory horror coming out of America.

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Kat Ellinger

in the original novel and it is the sister character who tells them to go I think she's cleaning for him sort of tells them that the money's there but the way he says to Nadine you must have really suffered and he tries to be sympathetic to her now this scene is incredibly powerful because at first glance you think this guy

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It takes a long time to do human sound. Yeah, exactly. The Chops Aki movies I've seen before have had a lot more... They spend like three hours doing it. So this is new, I think, for the Chinese sound men and also for the sound crew here. The density and the variation is a lot higher than the big-budget film they did here. They all say that it's the most difficult film they've ever done. In terms of sound, I agree with that. Yeah, the sound.

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Sony Pictures Asia, Barbara Robinson, right, in Hong Kong. And then Tom Bernard and Michael Barker and Marcy Bloom here also got other, convinced the rest of the Sony empire, I think, to take on more. So. This all happened in pre-production, right? It all happened while you were in Beijing, while Bill was in Hong Kong, while Hsu Li-kong, the other producer, was in Taiwan. Presuming we will have the money someday. Yeah, you guys were. Doing this craziest Chinese film ever made.

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Movie magic. All right, that's one. What was number two? What was the other thing you learned? The other is when you have a few fighting sequences that match the Hong Kong standard for the 80s and 90s, you have nothing really left for the drama, for anything else. A good fighting scene can take you way up to Vermont to shoot. It's very time-consuming. It eats up most of your time, creative energy, and budget as well.

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Simon West

course the gag with the sequence is that you're supposed to think she's out on a mission and maybe even in somewhere like Egypt or some ancient temple but of course it's really just in her house in a training area this set was actually tiny originally I planned this to be a gigantic ballroom in the house with all these effigies and statues in but when we were cutting back the budget I had to reduce this set and it's actually

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Simon West

Well, one Tomb Raider is good, two, better. I couldn't afford to take the helicopters to Iceland, so when you see them taking off after they've dropped off their passengers, that shot is actually taken in England on Salisbury Plain, and then the opposing shot, when they're walking away from camera,

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Simon West

This is another of Kirk M. Petruccelli's amazing sets. Originally, this was to be set in Venice, as there were to be three pieces to the triangle hidden in three different tombs. To ease the budget, this was cut down to just two tombs, and I merely combined the idea of this planetary orrery machine with an icy tomb that I had set in Siberia. Chris Corbould again enhanced this set by the use of steam, water, bubbles, atmosphere,

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All the people lying down, all those corpses that you see in the church are actually volunteers who turned up for us and I think we gave them a free cup of tea or something, some huge generous offering to ask them to turn up for a couple of hours. They were students because we couldn't afford to hire extras in a conventional way. We didn't have the kind of money to do that. There were people who just turned up and helped us. The man who played the priest was an enormous help to us. He did lots of workshops with us early on about movement. He's a brilliant kind of movement artist.

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people pushing the car with her a hold of it, you know, and all that kind of stuff really. It's also the thing that led to a lot of these multiple endings because Jim has been shot and that was the key point. It was what happens from that moment in a way. Yeah. This was as far as we got with our first budget. In fact, this next shot was our last.

1:43:50 · jump to transcript →

Waking up. And Fox gave us the money to go to the Lake District and actually shoot this ending and another ending that you'll see on the deleted scenes, really. But to be fair, this was always, this scene, although in a slightly different way, was always in the original script, the idea of going to the Lake District. In the shooting script, it was there, yeah. But the film changed so much during the filming. I mean, quarantine and...

1:45:19 · jump to transcript →

But they said if you spend more than 5,000 feet tomorrow, you're sacked. It was really funny. Was that them talking or was that from the studio? Well, it's more from the Bond company. You know, they see the Bond company is a company who makes sure you don't go over budget. And they charge a lot, in fact. But there are people who like movies. Not all of them, but the ones we work with, they like movies. You know, we can talk with them. So...

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But it's the expense. If you spend the money for one week after one day of shooting, they talk to you and make sure you stop doing that. This is horrible, this image.

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So initially, this sequence was much more effective, the way it was written and the way we thought we would do it. And when we decided to go for New York and no Canada, we have to limit the budget and special effects. And I think it turned out to be more touching. It's less technical. Look, our files are confidential.

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which was a pretty good idea. And then we do some animation on the sunglass and also make the sunglass more computerized. We almost lose the scene because of the budget time concern. We did try to shoot it in a simple way, but we were so lucky and never give it up. So I'm so glad that we got a scene and also got a pretty good impact about the sunglass. We had decided this is the love story.

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Sign effect is very important. Sign effect, sometimes you make the scenes look so much different. And on the set, you could never get a perfect shot. You could never get a perfect scene. Sometimes because of the time or because of the budget, you only could get the major shot done. And then you have to put everything together very cleverly. Time, Mr. McCloy.

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Ridley Scott

He's in. Now he's in. But I think he's very insecure about what he's done. I don't think he's happy, even though he has the money. Very thoughtful. But he loves his wife.

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Ridley Scott

The Third Man, that's one of my favorite films. And I kind of would like this to have been at night. Would have been more dramatic. And I liked it to have been lit so I could control the lighting with such dramatic scale like The Third Man. But we couldn't do that either. We couldn't control it. We couldn't afford to do that. And the amount of lighting it would require to light at night would have been enormous. So that went out the window. But basically, I think it works out fine.

1:36:31 · jump to transcript →

you use for beer because obviously you can't use real beer because otherwise you'd have actors rolling around on the floor. And sometimes you do have actors rolling around on the floor anyway. In the movies we use a low alcohol beer. It's real beer, it's brewed with hops and it tastes pretty much like beer but it's very low alcoholic. We had a brewery in Nelson actually create a special low alcohol Hobbit beer for us to use in the film. Well that's why our budget went through the roof. So where did that drinking song come from? Phil wrote it.

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In terms of the narrative momentum, it sort of slowed things down at a time when we couldn't afford to have it in the theatrical. No. It's really nice. Yeah, it was great. And it was written again to get that bond between her and Mary. Yeah. It's also when she says, courage, Mary, for our friends before she rides into battle, she's actually referencing this moment.

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The shot just before this, the one outside, we actually shot at the Prague airport, which is another advantage to shooting in Prague. I don't think there's any way you could get a camera crew right on the departure gate of an American airport anymore because of security. Of course, one of the downsides of shooting at the real airport in Prague is that we had our day curtailed by a bomb threat. Bomb threat, which I still maintain... - Potato, potato. I maintain may have been because of us, and there was no bomb. There was no bomb. - I'm sure some... A grip left a bag of clamps somewhere and... But that was another scene, too, where, when we look at it, there was sort of a way of shooting it, two different ways of... We started shooting them sort of looking out where we were shooting into those boring offices, and obviously the prettier shot... I know I'm talking backwards... In hindsight, we should've shot the other direction. We should've shot in the other direction, because when they do turn around, you see that background. And again, these are lessons that were sort of both imparted to us as we were going along by our wonderful DP, who we should mention, David Eggby. - David Eggby, who saved us from ourselves every day. And there's a certain amount he can tell us, which he certainly did, and there's a certain number of times where we have to be wrong before you learn and certainly that was an example again, something we did where... The other thing in the deleted... - He warned us and we didn't. In between the courier counter and this scene, there's some fun stuff in the deleted scenes, which is they realize that they're gonna have to take all these courier packages, so they don't know what to do with all their clothes. They have to wear all of them onto the plane and through the airport. There was about 15 minutes of stuff which... Decide for yourself whether it works or not. It didn't work in the movie, but it's fun to look at. And by the way, Jacob's T-shirt says, "I'm rocking on your dime." Travis owned that T-shirt and we thought it was funny, so we put it on Jacob in the movie. These transitions-- That's my dog. These transitions were... That's my queen of England. - That's your beaded London flag. Yeah, it goes on the back of my cab seat. These transitions were also done by Kyle Cooper at Prologue. There's a few more of them coming up. You'll see. And this is our first big visual effects shot. Yeah, this was an amazing debate. That's not the real Jacob Pitts. That's a robot. This was shot in Prague by... There's a big river in Prague and that's all real. That's real. And we put a little British flag there, and basically the background was replaced. Not in these shots. In that shot. - In that shot, the background is replaced because on that side, I think, was... Is that where our hotel was? I don't remember. No, we were further down. - Further down, okay. And I guess we should mention Kevin Blank, who was our visual effects guru supervisor, who we found from the TV show Alias, where each week they do a lot of really amazing things like this. Right. If you look in the background, you see the buses on the bridge. The bridge is real and the buses are real, but the stuff behind that is not real. But the flag, for example, I don't think that's real. They added that. If you look at the clouds move... - There's cars moving on the side. The clouds are moving. They put those clouds in. And what Kevin allowed us to do, besides being a really good guy, as everyone on this movie was, he let us do a lot of big effects like that on sort of a TV budget which allowed... This was a "smaller budgeted movie," and it let us do some special effects without bringing in these, like, big effects companies where it would cost a lot of money. By the way, this is about the time that we should mention the Feisty Goat. This is the Feisty Goat pub. And we saw the sign out in front, which we misspelled. I think this is the right time to say that Alec, David and I went to Harvard and we didn't know how to spell "feisty." We spelled it wrong in the stage directions. Spelled it "fiesty." - The guys who made the sign just took our spelling. We showed up on the day and the crew was laughing and we couldn't figure out what they were laughing at. We shot an entire day without anyone noticing and on day two, people realized. - No, they knew. Did they know? Okay. - Oh, yeah. They were laughing their asses off at us. And then finally, it was like, "Did you guys know?" And they're like, "Yeah." - And this is the incomparable Vinnie Jones who, when we wrote the part of Mad Maynard, the chief hooligan, we hoped that maybe we could get Vinnie Jones. We wrote it with Vinnie Jones or a Vinnie Jones-type in mind, never thinking that we would get the real Vinnie Jones. The dream being Vinnie Jones or someone that would rip Vinnie off. And the pleasure of getting him was just so great. It was amazing. He scared the living daylights out of these two. They're not... This is, again, method acting. We told Vinnie that they were really... that the kids were really scared of him, and he did nothing to make them feel at home for this scene.

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This, by the way, we did not build, we did not dress. I mean, we put some clothes in. There's a little bit we did, but when we showed up, we showed up in winter to scout this location and the trees were all barren and there was dirt and stuff everywhere. Basically looked exactly like this and we said, "This is absolutely perfect." I do think Allan added some of the garbage and some of the cool graffiti. - Yeah, garbage, trees and stuff. But what's funny is our location people didn't quite understand what we were going for, and at one point they cleaned the whole place up. It was like, "No, no, no." They told us, "It's clean." We said, "No, put it back." So they had to spend the money to put all the dirt back. Also, the trees were growing leaves and we had to kill the trees. We basically paid some sort of fee to the government to kill the trees. The dog with the hand we should throw in there. Yeah, that's a highfalutin allusion to Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo. For those of you who have seen Yojimbo and this movie, all six of you. And there was also another shot that showed the desolation of Eastern Europe. As they're walking, they see the dog. They see the guy bathing. - Horrified. And there was a girl, a little girl who they smile at and wave to who then basically cops a squat and starts peeing, which is in the end credits of the movie, as sort of a little joke, and basically people were just sort of... I don't know. It's one of these things where in the movie... You love it or you hate it. - Yeah. We love it. And apparently more powerful people than us hated it. We wanted it to be in the body of the movie, especially in this unrated cut, and it is not. And I guess we'll just leave it there. I guess we should mention, also, Tibor who you just saw. - Yeah, Rade Šerbedžija. All of our casting in this movie is based on the works of Guy Ritchie, so having cast Vinnie and then needing someone to play Tibor... By the way, that money, $1.83, we actually didn't have... We forgot. - ...61.83 in American money on the day. We had to scrounge up... It ended up being $1.46. I think I had a quarter in my backpack. Just what people had. We didn't have the money. We'd been in Prague for so long. - This, I think, was our second day. Yeah. - No, this was our first day. We shot the train station in the morning. - This was day one. Or at least bits and pieces of it. - And this... This was actually the first thing we ever, ever shot, which we've now added back. - Yeah. Originally, when they're on the side of the road and Michelle is trying to get the cars to stop, Scott mentions that you can't... No one's pulling over 'cause she's showing her bra. - He says, "This is Europe. They have orange juice ads with lesbians and dildos. You gotta give them something they haven't seen before." Then later in Eastern Europe... You see the orange juice ad with lesbians and dildos. And in the theatrical version, we actually cut the orange juice ad completely because it just felt like the joke of the opulent hotel was better if it was just shorter. So we got to this stuff quicker. The guy who just ran out, the waiter, is like... Dustin Hoffman. - ...Jim Carrey. Miroslav Táborský. - He's like the Jim Carrey of Prague, and he's really funny. I'm not sure he ever... He never trusted us. No. We had to explain. He didn't want to slap with the backhand and we had to explain that in America... - We had to lie to him... "In America, it's called a bitch slap, the most degrading thing you can do." - We made up this crazy excuse to get him to do what we wanted to do. He just didn't trust us. Nothing you can do about that. That was something we wanted designed, which was the keyboard in the radioactive box played with gloves. Didn't quite work. - No, I'm not sure anyone cares. But we know it's there. This was a factory... It's a high-voltage testing facility. It's a real, working, high-voltage testing facility. And they have it in the movie XXX, but we shot it very differently. And David really went all out here. I mean, especially those sort of finger lights that you see, he put into the background of every shot and Allan gave a lot of neon. And this is some of the best-looking stuff in the entire film. Michelle does look beautiful. - Michelle looks incredible. Of course, the only problem is this place has a horrible, cavernous echo, and there are things in here we just had to sort of loop. We had no choice. The stuff in that bottle, by the way, is so toxic... Poisonous chemical. ...that when they were dancing with the bottles later and two bottles met and broke, they literally had to clear the floor, scrub it down, decontaminate before we could go again. Anyway, our actors are hovering over the fumes right now. It's fine. Again, look at the lights in the back of all this. That big piece of equipment, that's really there. Michelle's close-up here... That is such a gorgeous shot. - That's incredible. That stupid VIP sign behind him was awful. That was there for all day and we never saw it until too late. Well, you can't, you know... You look at a tiny monitor on the set and you can't see everything that the camera picks up. And then you get in the editing room, you go, "Oh, my God, you can see all that stuff." But also, I don't know if it was us being first-time directors or what. On any given day, there are two or three things you're really obsessing on because you feel that those are the most important things, and you solve those only to realize later that there was one minor thing, like that stupid VIP sign, and there's one of those in every scene where you just go, "What was I thinking?" - Sometimes you're obsessing on something that ultimately turns out to be insanely unimportant, and the massively important thing is sitting right in front of you and you screw it up. - In that scene, we were obsessing on a line when they were flirting. That we ended up just cutting. Yeah, he said he was the black sheep of the family and then she was trying to be witty and she was sort of saying, "That's okay. I have an uncle who 'blank. And we must have done take after take after take. "You think you're the black sheep of the family. My aunt's a female bodybuilder." Just take after take after take of stuff, nothing that was ever used, and it makes the VIP sign all the more, sort of, laughing at us. By the way, the Green Fairy is played by Steve Hytner... So great. - ...who played Bania on Seinfeld. We worked with him also. - A real good friend too. He really did us a huge favor. - Yeah. He was going to a wedding in Italy, I think, and he stopped into Prague on his way to... Here's a little added extra. Yeah, this was just a little something we cooked up. Jacob was really funny doing this. In the theatrical version, we cut it. There's no time for this in the theatrical version, but we felt we'd subject you to it. And he just... He got it, you know, that he was... Again, we're into the production at this point, and his Cooper had become a character. - He was dialed in. Exactly. And here we go. - On the day this happened, Travis comes up to me and says, "I have a cold." I say, "You're not going to tell Michelle you have a cold because your tongue is going to be down her throat." Also on that day, Michelle's mother, sister, and sister's boyfriend... Decided to show up. - ...came to visit. And it was just like, "Oh, God." But ultimately, they went for it. They went for it, and it's all about the tongue. Yeah.

58:03 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

One of the main things we were kind of wanting to write about was about a guy whose family is really his collaborators. So I feel like for Zissou and for all these guys, they were people who were looking for something to plug into in their lives, and they found this. They found somebody who wanted to lead them and who was excited to do that. And I think Zissou, he just needs that in his life. And I think anybody who makes movies is kind of familiar with that because you end up becoming very intimate and close with a group of people for this short period of time that you're working with them, and then you go away. But it sort of heightens the awareness of how connected you get with them. Yeah. Is this actual rain or fake rain? That's fake rain that's made by Renato and Daniel, the effects guys at Cinecittà. Two great guys who did all our explosions and guns and fire and rain and snow, and everything else. And Renato is Italian, and his brother-in-law, Tonino, took us on a lot of scouts, when we went out in boats and scouted on ships and things, and he would make what I called spaghetti al Tonino, which is spaghetti with a can of tuna fish and tomato sauce. We'd make it on the boat and we'd eat that. And Daniel is American. He's an Italian-American from Brooklyn, and they work together. Daniel translates for Renato, and Renato's kind of a great sort of... prince at Cinecittà. They're going together in the revolving door. The "I'm a Pepper" T-shirt, whose idea was that? That was, when we made our Bottle Rocket short, a 16 mm thing we'd made years and years ago, there was a man who was a security guard that we had gotten to know, that really Owen somehow managed to entangle us with. And then we put him in the movie, and Temple had taken us out to shoot pistols. None of us were real hunters. But Temple, the security guard we met, took us out to shoot these guns. And Temple had this shirt, "I'm a Pepper" shirt, that he would wear. And when we made our short, we put him in the movie in his "I'm a Pepper" shirt, and they talked to him, and he takes them shooting. In fact, when we filmed the scene, Bob Musgrave shot-- One of the actors, his gun went off pointed at his foot, and the bullet grazed his shoe. He almost shot off his foot. Because, of course, in most movies, we use blanks. When we were making our short, we used live rounds because we didn't have any blanks. - It's just easier to get real. We would've had to buy blanks, and we really had no budget. But Temple had a lot of bullets in his trunk. But so then we then worked that into the script for the feature film. When they do this big robbery, Bob's character kind of almost shoots himself in the foot in the middle of the robbery, which actually... It seems to cause another one of the characters to have a heart attack and the whole thing begins to go wrong. But back to The Life Aquatic. And so the "I'm a Pepper" shirt, you hadn't used since Temple. We didn't get to use it in the real movie of Bottle Rocket because we couldn't get it cleared. We managed to get it cleared. - Now you had the muscle. Yes, now we can get an "I'm a Pepper" shirt at will.

1:30:18 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

So now they're on their way out of Ping Island. Bill Murray's running to the safe, this yellow safe with Ned's inheritance in it. I always wonder if we're clear about things like the issues with Ned's money and all that kind of stuff, but I guess it's all in there. Yeah. I always like what Scott Rudin, the producer, does. Scott said about... I remember when he read the draft of the script, where we had come up with that idea of the hole in the back of the safe, and he said, "Well, he's looking for the money, but he finds Ned." And I always thought, wasn't that a touching idea, you know? I hadn't consciously thought of it. - He had a real way with words. Cody is left behind. I think you came up with the name Cody. Cody was... Well, there's some debate about who came up with the name Cody, but as we alluded to and as, I guess, basically suggested by the fact we're doing this commentary at the restaurant that we wrote it in, Cody's a regular here who we run into, and so... And at one point, I think it was literally like, I said to Noah, "What's your dog's name?" Doing Jeff's dialogue, and Noah thought for a moment and responded, "Cody." Cody. As he stared at Cody through the front window. It was the summer. I feel like I've said enough... What's that stand for over there? That's Esteban. It was working okay until late last night, but now the whole tracking system's gone completely on the fritz. Screw it. We'll sell it for scrap, along with the boat and the submarines. I'm going home. One thing about Willem is, Willem was always on the set. You know, he was there for the whole movie, and he doesn't like to hang around in his trailers. So he weaves himself into scenes, such as this one, where Owen says, "Ho," and Willem is standing in the background there. And you'll see, when they do the Team Zissou "ho" with the hands thing, Willem does it out of focus deep in the background. Did he do it in rehearsal then you included it? I don't remember. You know what? I think he was back there and I may have mentioned one thing to him. Well, it adds this whole other thing. And it's also, we know that Klaus feels left out, so at this point, though, it's almost a little bit of menace in the background, even though he's... This, again, also is something you do a lot, which I like, is this-- But he's also been touched by Ned, including him already. That's true. He hasn't saluted him yet. - He hasn't acknowledged it. I was gonna say, the thing I like that you do a lot, that I mentioned earlier, but this very deliberate cut to an insert of a written note, which it sort of has a... It has a kind of energy. It sort of brings energy to something that would be normally just static and feel like just, you know, information. Well, you know, one thing I always think of is, I remember reading Pauline Kael somewhere, Kael who really brought me into a certain kind of movie watching. You, your parents were well-versed in films and introduced you to all kinds of films, and your mother was a critic, and your father had done some film criticism as well, right? But I kind of got that stuff from reading Pauline Kael, some of the same kind of, you know, somebody's gotta tell you about it. Right. - And I got so many things from her. And I remember, you know, she certainly made me interested in Godard. We seemed to keep talking about him. And she talks about how Godard's movies are filled with... They're literary. They're filled with words. There's titles on the screen and there's letters and there's writing everywhere. And there's people quoting, people just reciting from books. And, you know, this movie here, now we're looking at another letter. It's filled with writing, something... And I like the-- I mean, it's sort of, again, something maybe, you know, he might do, but is... I mean, we see Ned reading a crumpled-up letter that's obviously been around for a long time, but then when we go to the insert, we go to the original letter in a very formal way, with the pencil above it and-- In fact, I think... One of the letters is situated in the environment where Zissou would have written it, and Ned's is situated in this place where Ned would have written it. Like his desk when he was 11 and a half. And it brings-- I mean, it's something that we've talked about, I mean, sort of how you use words and letter writing, and, you know, we were talking about, how in Adele H, when people write letters, they actually speak to the camera and they're often superimposed over other images. We should probably be talking about this scene. Well, actually, that shot of the feet falling was something I had thought of a long time ago, and Roman shot it for me. It was shot a couple of times by different people, and then when Roman got there, we talked about it, and Roman went out and shot it perfectly. And then we do this odd effect of, you know, the red and the thing-- I don't know what I was really thinking of, but something going into silence and, you know, trying to prepare the audience for the fact that we're gonna kill him, which is hard to do, actually. For me, I mean, I feel like I get so attached to these characters, and, you know, we're not really working from something that begins with a plot. It's more like, you know, trying to bring these people together, and I may be, you know what, probably overly sentimental about it, and probably indulgent about it, but it's hard for me to get to separate-- I feel like they're real people to me. So it's hard to kill them. But it was one of the ideas. We talked about people who read the script. Peter Bogdanovich, our friend, he was upset that we killed Ned. I think my brother Nico, who the intern is named after, also felt sort of... Was unsure about it, and I think, you know, it is a choice. That scene where he's in the water was crazy because the sea was rough, and we had this fire in the water, and we're all standing out there, and underwater are all these tubes with gas to make these fires and things, with hunks of cement and wire. But it was fun, and it brought this crazy energy to it.

1:33:50 · jump to transcript →

He's a New Zealand production designer who did such amazing films as The Piano. And we did have a limited budget, and I don't think that you would guess that, given what he was able to do. And also, I think it's interesting that Stuart Dryburgh, who was our director of photography, and Andrew had worked together before. They're both from New Zealand.

11:53 · jump to transcript →

Which is fine when you're dealing with an animated character, but a little less comfortable if you're... See, I said let's go for it, but then Gale was like, no. We just didn't have enough of a body makeup budget to cover the bruises. Yeah, no, that would have just been really impossible.

12:48 · jump to transcript →

And that's the real address. That's the real address, yeah. We were shooting it. It was the one thing we didn't look at when we were prepping the house. And that door opened, and we're like, oh, that's really long. And then we're thinking about, should we digitally paint that out so it doesn't look so crazy? And we're like, yeah, we'll just better put the money somewhere else. Exactly. Now, this is the part where Brian Tyler called originally. I don't think he made it on the CD with this name, but he called the score in this section...

17:32 · jump to transcript →

Again, I felt really lucky that we ended up with the young girl that we did because I think she really pulled it off for us. She did a good job. And we knew that we had to find her in Canada because of our budget parameters and shooting in Canada and the actors we could take and not. But there was a nice pool of actors for us. It's the first time we see a Claymore mine deployed. Basically, he sets these things in a passive mode and then...

39:52 · jump to transcript →

as well. And the fact that this is sort of a dual city film is something rare in his filmography. This isn't unique, but you don't see it too often. Usually, again, it tends to be around Venice or around another particular Italian town. But this is a little more ambitious than usual, even though, as we can see, the budget may not be as ornate as he had in some previous efforts. No, and speaking of budget...

7:45 · jump to transcript →

We couldn't afford to go there, and this is something he really, really wanted to do. And it worked beautifully. You remember in a really early version of the script, we also introduced Mary and Pippin in the scene. Yes. Remember that? Yeah. I think we had all three hobbits. Sam wasn't outside the window in that version. He was eavesdropping behind a door, and then when Gandalf pulls the door open, all three of them, Sam and Mary and Pippin, all kind of fall onto the floor, tumble onto the floor.

42:13 · jump to transcript →

I'm leery of letting Lecter's message run without Knowing what it says. The movie's really cooking now for me, at this point. You hope it has a continuous build. You introduce all the characters, you introduce, you know, the potential danger to Reba, you've got the FBI hot on the scent. I sent Kristi down here. I was unavailable to shoot this shot and she just did a fantastic job. - Kristi was the second unit director on this? Yeah, she did a great job on that. Very simple one shot, telling the whole story, cut into the insert, and then we're off to the races. You can feel the whole story shift gears here. This was another digital shot. He actually had a phone at his ear and we erased it. Amazing! That is amazing. This is another thing that Mark pointed out about the story. I didn't shoot this correctly, so you didn't know it was a cookbook. But you can tell it's a cookbook. - Now you do, but when I shot it, you didn't know it was a cookbook because the shot was on his face. So we did an insert. Okay, Lloyd. This is an example of Dino's and Martha's kind of shrewdness about storytelling. I wanted Mark and Mark wanted to lose... And myself and Andy Davis, kind of my creative producer, as well, and part producing partner came up with the idea of just cutting to the chase, and not hearing the message. Not hearing Lecter's message about "Marathon, Florida, kill them all." I am sure I asked you. - We talked about it again and again. Dino says, "Yeah, but the audience needs to know. "It's more frightening." It's more frightening for them if they've heard Lecter's entire message. This is another example of a scene that wasn't in the script, but after I saw the movie with an audience, forget about what they write... This was actually the last scene shot. This was added later. It was added later because I thought... Originally, it just cut to this next shot, where the helicopter arrives. He gets the phone call, cut, and they're safe. They were too safe, too quickly. -/ called Ted, I said, "Maybe we can put some suspense in here. "This is a psychological thriller that has suspense in it." The studio loved the cut of the movie so much that they gave me the money to go back to do it. Sometimes you don't know until it's assembled. You say, "Something's missing here." We had an opportunity that we didn't take advantage of to have a little more tension. I had food poisoning on this shot, I remember. On this shot? - I was So Sick. -/ did not feel good. - This is a great location. This was originally written to be at the... - This is where I am gonna shoot Superman. It's Smallville. I'm gonna just... - That's Smallville? I'm sorry. Mary-Louise is very, very good in this movie. Mary-Louise Parker, and again, is not really given that much to work with by the script. So she's got to make the most of every moment. Actually, in the first draft, the draft I read... Once I got Mary-Louise, I said to Ted, "Let's give something for women to really..." Let's give her a really dramatic moment that began the evolution of the ending of the movie as we revised it where she ends up shooting Dolarhyde herself. There's Barney, we had to get him in there. - That's Frankie again. ... your latest rejection slip from the archives. It was brought... I love this scene. It goes over a lot of people's heads. I don't know why. Sorry.

1:04:16 · jump to transcript →

They do. It's almost the flip side of the horrible brown liquid that the orcs pour down Mary's throat earlier, isn't it? It's like this is the crystal clear, beautiful, magical... But no, it's green. In the book it is, isn't it? It's glowing green. We didn't do that here. Why didn't we do that? I was going to ask that. Probably due to budgetary constraints. We couldn't afford some food colouring.

1:09:10 · jump to transcript →

She's a wonderful actress, this girl. Her name's Carla. Wait. Wait. And this set was what we spent half our budget on. This isn't Heathrow airport, it's Shepperton. lt was very good, actually. - The set? I know. Except I notice when I go to Heathrow, it's a bit clean. Very hot, as well. -[t doesn't really look as nice as that. Very hot. I love this guy's performance. No. Did you direct him? No. No, he just spontaneously... - He was great. Here we go. This was the return of the angel. And we actually did a scene after this where Rowan disappeared as he walked across, but it all went. Thank you. Hold those. Okay. - Yes! No, I must have left them where I was having... Thomas, this is where all your gymnastics disappeared. Yeah. - All that gymnastics you did. Originally, he was... - I was amazing. I did a back-flip over all these people. Did you? - Wasn't really you, was it? No, I know, but... Has it gone, then? It's gone because we never could establish it properly at the front of the movie, and therefore felt very odd. -/ do a little thing. Look at that! That's pretty impressive. This was Heathrow. - That was Heathrow, yeah, late at night. At 2:00 in the morning. - Pretty exciting. It's a stirring theme, this, don't you think? This could be in a war film. That looks good. - It's great. And I liked it first time around in Shakespeare In Love as well. Shut up! That's a great shot, Tom. What about that? We had to work through the night at Heathrow, didn't we? This was all real Heathrow here. Just running. Did you sleep all the next day? Yeah. Quite easily, actually. And then this is Shepperton. This next shot, rather annoyingly, was directed by Duncan Kenworthy, 'cause I was somewhere else. Very weak. -[t's a parody of The Graduate. Do you remember, when he shouts through that glass thing? Homage. - Homage, that's right, sorry. That's good. That's very good. - Cool. Yeah, very good. Brilliant. There's me. - Bill, watch out. Oh, no. I'd forgotten about this. - Watch out. Here it comes. I may have to turn away. No, look. It's important. That"s your bottom. - It's not actually me, it's Christina Aguilera. Oh, my God. You missed it. - Thank God. No, no, no. You're a very, very attractive man. - Tom, don't look, Tom. You'll have dreams about it that'll keep you awake. Joanna. sam?

1:59:14 · jump to transcript →