Camera movement

And here, we had a different line originally, when we were still finding Hayley's character. That's right. And it was just too frivolous, and so we slipped this other line in, basically turned the sound off, read her lips, and said, what other words can I slip in there? This is getting exciting, is what you put in there. This is, now what you're gonna see here, the camera that we're using, we're using a combination of, that's a Rialto, it's a small handheld camera.

39:18 · jump to transcript →

There's Steadicam, and then there's a camera called a Stableye. We're gonna get real nerdy. We're talking about editorial. Exactly. Everyone loves this stuff, Chris. Stableye is like a handheld remote head. So you have somebody sitting at wheels operating the camera, and you have a camera operator who's carrying it, and the person operating the wheels, Chunky, is talking to Ross, the operator, who's moving the camera around while Chunky is panning and tilting the head.

39:47 · jump to transcript →

And you'll see there's some extraordinary camera work that you can't do with a Steadicam. Graphics on the bomb, again, very specific graphics that are exhaustive and really, you have so few frames to communicate so much information and you always want it to be fluid. And here comes one hell of a shot. This is done with a stable eye. Couldn't do that with a Steadicam. Yeah, going all the way down to the floor. To be able to jib down like that.

40:14 · jump to transcript →

grasslands per se but this place I thought was a great stand in for Rohan because it has these interesting rock formations. You know those moving shots where you had both with Aragorn and Legolas, how did you do that? Well that was just a dolly that was trekking along the front of them and even though you're not getting closer to them or you're not getting further away it actually just makes the background roll around the back of them and that was just my obsession with keeping the camera moving as I say I just didn't want to do a static shot.

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I love that shot of the horses all turning around it's like one of those flock of birds isn't it that kind of sweep around and come back and then I shot I shot all this other drama in one day which is quite a lot of work to do in a single day of shooting and I knew I had to get through it really quickly so I said to the guys look we're just going to shoot it handheld we're going to not worry about tripods not worry about dollies not do any of that

32:01 · jump to transcript →

I only had a day, and I had to get through it really quickly, this entire dialogue scene. So that's kind of why it has a slightly loose, handheld feel, because it was done for speed reasons. I had two cameras rolling at the same time, so one camera would be aiming at Aragorn, one camera would be aiming at Gimli or Legolas, and it was just a way of blasting through the footage. It's good, though. It suits the scene. Yeah. We recolorized Legolas' eyes in this scene. In the computer? Yes.

32:31 · jump to transcript →

help build up the stamina he'd need to sing day in day out on a shoot. And this was our master close-up that Zach Nicholson shot on the Steadicam. And apart from one cut to a wide shot, it's all the same take, take 16. One of the challenges of shooting live music with live accompaniment is that

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a platform on a crane which then whizzed him about 70 foot into the air so it was quite precarious for Zak because he had to climb onto a platform which immediately lifted off so the timing had to be perfect. The end of that shot is then embedded into a visual effects shot which is based on a helicopter plate of Gordons, the French town and this Oxfordshire church is inserted onto this mountaintop but the mountain is created in CGI and we re-project photos

14:49 · jump to transcript →

I mean, I have three cameras running on the song. The original master I planned was a slow track in from a medium shot to a close-up over the length of the song. And for a long time in the edit, we kept this tracking shot in. And I remember one day Eddie Redmayne came in, who's been a friend ever since Elizabeth I, when we worked together, and I showed him Dream to Dream, and he was knocked out, but he said, why aren't we using the big close-up that he'd seen in the teaser trailer? And Melanie, my editor, tried the big close-up in, and...

28:52 · jump to transcript →

No, it's the burial. It's the frame around the grave. I know, but I think it's... There's a dolly right there. No. No, there was no dolly near you. Remember, this was a long lens. Look, there's a... I know. There's no way that you would have seen the camera. I sent you a piece of mail from Berlin and asked us to call you when it arrived. It came this morning.

31:10 · jump to transcript →

I started a hallway. Come on, I love Get Smart. But that hallway, this is back on set in L.A., but that hallway was, I just remember, you know, walking down a hallway and seeing a place and thinking, oh, my God. That's Caserta in Italy. Caserta, yeah. The Steadicam in low mode. Here we go. I love this. That's another camera there.

44:46 · jump to transcript →

This was on the Paramount lot. This is on the stage above that basement where we shot earlier. This is one of the shots that I love as well. There were, I think, eight people in the camera crew, the dolly grips, the operator focus. You'll see in the shot as the bodyguard walks past, the camera just misses itself in the mirror. I love that. I love that. Look at that. And from that close up to her looking, look at this.

51:51 · jump to transcript →

Stunt girl going down the stairs. I think it's always good when you kill a sweet old lady in the first three minutes. Exactly, yes. There's Naomi. And there's our crane. They gave me a crane that day. This is all a set in a soundstage. And they let me go right up. And if you notice, his ears move mechanically, I guess. Right, right. We had a rig that we would bring out sometimes that was attached to a skull cap and two servos.

5:31 · jump to transcript →

I'm sure everybody was going, that's kind of dangerous next to that actress. Like how he's torturing him. Yes. Now that actually was a pull back that we reverse printed to get a push in. Because you never know when you get into editing, we wanted to push in and all we had is camera pulling back, so.

9:07 · jump to transcript →

But again, this was Simi Valley, Little House on the Prairie sets. We had a crane. I remember this was a beautiful intro shot. I remember Isaac up there on the crane. It was excellent. And there's Jennifer, who's adorable and was wonderful to work with. And again, I always have to apologize for putting her in this movie. I'm sorry, Jennifer. Forgive me. But it was her first movie, my first movie, and we had a lot of fun. Yeah, she's great.

11:27 · jump to transcript →

This scene was written about a year before there was even an idea. That's right. You wrote this scene for another movie idea. It was just a cool opening scene. I wrote this and sort of lost it in the computer. We switched the dialogue a bit, I remember, because in the initial... Gabriel was hit by a swinging crane in the earlier draft, and we changed the line, and it was, I think, my spine is...

3:04 · jump to transcript →

the foreboding porthole music, is, okay, this was shot in my backyard, not this. This, that's John Ottman's hand and my foot. And we built that little bit in my backyard. Not the ropes, but those two shots. Yeah, and Verbal's supposed to be hiding behind the ropes. That's the idea of the ropes. Some people seem to be confused by that. These ropes are to replace the base of the crane, which is cut out of the script.

4:23 · jump to transcript →

Originally, the crane was sort of a central piece to this whole thing. And the notion of ropes entangled, we thought, very interesting for the story. And this was sort of a... This was supposed to be done over black, but we thought this would be more interesting. Well, we removed the scene. Chris wrote a fantastic deposition piece, which it was a bit too long for, but that sort of encapsulated the idea.

4:52 · jump to transcript →

We used quite a bit of Steadicam. We had these slider rigs that we would slide into position and use remote head cameras and whatnot. But it's great to be able to tell a story and block sequences where you can actually have characters play into different shots in a compartment that's that small and not have locked off cameras. And the thing that I remember,

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If the camera's going with it, sometimes you would appreciate the motion and sometimes you wouldn't. So we had to be, you know, we used a learning curve and developed, you know, through a series of different things like crane arms and Steadicam and locked-off cameras that you would appreciate the submarine diving and surfacing and actually feel the bodies, you know, the pull that they actually felt when they had that.

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I think in those cases we oftentimes would open up the side of the submarine and work off a crane arm. And even though the gimbal was moving the submarine or moving the compartment itself, the camera was working independent of that movement. And so that was the only way we were able to convey that kind of extremity. Otherwise, if the camera was attached to the compartment itself,

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Fred Dekker

I mean, I would imagine... Back then, I mean, the PG-13 rating was not even 10 years old at that point yet, so I would imagine it's difficult to try to figure out when to pull back and when to, you know, try to push it to as far as you can, certainly in a movie like this. I imagine that's a challenge. This is my Empire of the Sun homage here. This is completely Empire of the Sun. You know, because we want to love this... We'll talk about Remy Lyon's character, Nico. We'll talk about her more, but I really wanted us to love her, and this...

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Fred Dekker

So how do you choreograph that? Well, she comes down here. She was up with Robo. Now she comes down. We push in a little bit. She makes a wisecrack remark. She's our sort of Howard Hawks woman. Walks over here, and then he spins around, and now we're into a new setup. And I was just very pleased. I felt like a real professional director doing this scene. This is one of my favorite scenes in the movie, just in terms of the way that it was choreographed and the way it was shot.

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Fred Dekker

And I think Office Space is kind of his real claim to fame. But he's in the Finding Nemo movies as well. Oh, yes, yes. And King of the Hill. Oh, right. That's right. Yes, of course. Bill, the next door neighbor. There was a push in there, so take a drink. Oh, right. Time for a shot. A push in for those of you at home is when the camera moves in on something. It's something that I've always enjoyed. It's very old school.

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how we did it, we put the camera, we had this device called a stable eye that we carried, that we hooked the camera up to and two grips carried it and then eventually to get it out of the trench we had to hook it on a techno crane who then lifted it out of the trench and then we created this diversion because it takes a bit of time for the camera to come off this

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come off this crane, this techno crane. So we hooked it up. So we created this diversion, this explosion. And in order to gain three, four seconds in the time Heinrich Gerber could in the time sort of duck and be afraid of the explosion. And that was the time that the grips needed to get the camera out of the techno crane hookup and then carry it with this kit.

4:03 · jump to transcript →

our actor and pan down at the right time. There's someone, the operator sits at a wheel and operates it from the wheel. Again, I think you can probably see it in the making of footage, how it works. And if not, Google a YouTube video of Stable Eye. They also used it on 1917. And that's where we actually sort of had the idea from to use this piece of equipment to be able to follow our actors in this mud. It's not a Steadicam territory.

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built our mausoleum set in this small warehouse. And this warehouse had just gorgeous cement floors. They were brand new. And for a low budget picture like ours, it was really great because we were able to use our dolly. And you can see the floor there was so flat without laying any track. We were able to get a lot of movement in the picture moving around, something that's difficult for independent films on a budget.

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Trying to sort of distort reality and having this kid having these nightmares, you know, waking up in the middle of a graveyard and really deluding the audience and thinking they're still in his bedroom. And you pull back and you find out Rory has great pains to try to match everything. There's a couple of crew members of them. And there's Rory's posture from the poster. That's right. Yeah, they used that for the original key art in the domestic release.

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It was always a struggle to try to get some camera movement, because we couldn't afford to set up dolly track. And so consequently, a lot of this film, when you're outdoors, you'll find that we're handheld. And this is a shot which I'm particularly proud of. We shot it a number of times, just a handheld little shot, keeping some suspense, but not having to just be riveted down all the time. We were able to keep some movement. And you operated camera on this whole film, did you not? Yeah, absolutely. And at my own risk in a lot of spots.

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Pat McClung

This scene was shot really quickly. It was pretty much all handheld, 48 or 60 frames a second. I think 48. Then Sigourney had to loop all her lines at slow speed, which is always odd. Our first effect in the movie. It's great, because it's what you expected to happen and then it's not what you expect. She was actually under the bed for that sequence. We built an artificial body from her neck down. Someone is under the bed with her. I can't remember who the lucky guy was that created the illusion of the chestburster. Pushing its way through her. It sets up the character. This is her nightmare. You know that she never wants to have to face it in real life again because she's haunted by it in her dreams and her nightmares. This effect is as if you're outdoors. When the camera dollies over, you see it's just a video projection. The idea was that in outer space there would be places you could go to get a feeling you were in a natural environment. So that plate behind her was shot out in the garden at Pinewood Studios. It was a VistaVision plate. Originally, there was supposed to be a birdhouse in the background in that garden, and she would have Jones on her lap and a bird would fly in and Jones would jump up and hit the screen and that's how the audience would find out that she wasn't actually on the earth. This scene was cut from the release version of the film, which became the source of some controversy with Sigourney. She later said in print that she had based her entire character on this scene, and she was devastated when it was removed. At the time she first screened the film, she told me she didn't like the scene, and then we wound up reading interviews where she had a big problem with that. We didn't have a chance to talk about it because of the postproduction schedule. We were working in England, kind of in isolation.

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Bill Paxton

I encouraged the actors to customize their own costumes and armor, to give the impression they had been out a lot, that they were seasoned, that they had been away from command authority on their own a lot and were good enough at their jobs that they were allowed these kind of latitudes. This is a continuation of the motif from the first film, where they're wearing Hawaiian shirts and all kinds of strange stuff, all of which was a new idea in science fiction. People always wore uniforms on spaceships. That's how it worked from Star Trek on. Every science fiction film ever made, there was the general-issue uniform. Alen broke that mold and it just seemed so right to people. They recognized the archetype instantly. "Oh, these guys are truck drivers." "They dress however they want. There's nobody to tell them not to." And so the idea here was extrapolated to a military unit that's worked at the extreme fringes of human civilization. The power loader was not designed by anybody in drawings per se. I had done some preliminary drawings, but it evolved basically from trying to figure out how to make it work. We built full-size mock-ups of the arms and legs in foam core. There's a guy inside that thing, a big, strong English stunt man moving it. It's supported by cables. It's completely an on-set gag. The English visual effects guys thought we were crazy the way we wanted to do it. I said "It's the gag where the dad lets the daughter walk on his feet, his three-year-old." So standing behind Sigourney right now is this big 270-pound body-building English stunt man. He's raising the arms himself and he has in his hands a control that allows him to raise the forearm of the power loader. And then when they walk, they have to walk together. The weight of the machine is held by a crane which is off-camera, or some kind of overhead track rig - we had two versions of it. If we didn't need the machine to turn, we mounted it on a pylon, a boom-arm thing, and if we needed it to pivot we hung it on wires.

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Bill Paxton

My kids remember all the dialogue and one thing they did was "Bay 12, please." And Newt's line: "They're dead, all right? Can I go now?" How about "Get away from her, you bitch"? The most classic line in the movie. And obviously this was another interesting idea that Jim had, which was to use a Steadicam harness that's normally used for holding a camera to make a futuristic weapon out of. Everyone said it couldn't be done, which is at least at the beginning of Jim's career typical of the response to Jim's ideas, and then, of course, it worked beautifully.

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And this was actually, again, this is a set built by Jim Bissell. This was all on a stage at Leavesden Studios. And I think we only had four days to shoot this entire sequence. And that's where the decision to go handheld played into it. Usually I like to shoot in a pretty formal style, but handheld was the one way we could move with real speed to shoot the sequence. And one of the things that's very important to me about handheld is that you don't try to emphasize the...

13:27 · jump to transcript →

the use of handheld. It's kind of minimizing the shakiness of the camera. But most of the shots within the sequence are handheld. And that character, Venter, is an actor who came in. There's only going to be one scene. Yeah, he was supposed to die after he hit his head on that pipe. And he did that fantastically. He sent a video.

13:56 · jump to transcript →

And we scrambled and... Yes. And I had... You did a great job. Simon did a great job with this stuff. Oh, he was just one of... The timing of this was doing all this with a steadicam on an active train platform. Because when we went back, we couldn't have the same control of the platform. And this was the very first shot on the movie that I designed. And they're very helpful to just give it to us, like, within hours. City of Vienna was incredible. I tolerated a lot. Look at this shot. That was the first shot of the film I designed. It was standing on there and said...

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John McTiernan

Ah, there is Painless! One of the trips at the beginning of this, when they hired me they sent me to the armorer, and I was looking around, and like, "How can I find some toys that are neat?" And I saw this thing, this gun that was supposed to be mounted on helicopters... In order to make that thing move, work in the movie, we had to slow it down, because the barrel went so fast, you couldn't even see it. You couldn't photograph it as it spun. What we didn't know was there was 100 pounds of battery standing behind the man when he ran and all the ammunition he could carry amounted to six seconds worth of firing, even at quarter speed shots. It would bury you up to your ankles in copper shells or brass shells, in the five-second burst that a man could carry enough ammunition for. 'Cause that was the whole issue about how much ammunition can the man carry on his back. How many bullets can he carry? And it turned out, it was really only a five-second burst, which is ludicrous. What the fuck would he carry anything like that for? It's nonsense. But it's a movie, who knows. Who knows, that he got reloaded. It was just the practical part was that, I am not sure how we mounted it the first time. 'Cause we were afraid that, they would buck loose on him. And I think we mounted it, hung it overhead, from a chain. With some safety lines on it. 'Cause what we were afraid of, was that it would spin back at him. And it could blind him easily. I mean, even with safety glasses and everything, it just cut the hell out of him. And then like, you know, who was it, who just got killed just from a single blank going off. Well, this thing, if you got too close to the front of it, 'cause they were big shells, they were 30-odd thick shells or whatever that is, or whatever that size Is, it's bigger than a .22. I got in a lot of trouble for this shot. And it was with a crane and a remote camera.

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John McTiernan

with static cameras, yeah, this is that same shot set up with setting up with the crane. This stuff is all, the second unit, I don't know, work maybe, two-three weeks.

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John McTiernan

That shot was a dolly with 180 degree pan in it, which you couldn't at the time get an American cameraman to do. And it's just terrible trouble. Because Don McAlpine was Australian and they had a much looser style. I could get him to do a Iot. And he loved doing it. You know, like, this is another dolly move, watch this one.

31:28 · jump to transcript →

But it was another Steadicam shot. You know, after a couple of takes, we figured out when they had to say their lines, and they said it all to the camera, so they know when the camera was on them. So it wasn't easy, because all these shots are not easy to do. But we always got it, and not in a tremendous amount of time.

16:57 · jump to transcript →

prefers when he can absolutely control the framing of the shot and he doesn't have to, when the Steadicam operator sometimes is moving, he has to frame, he has to make framing decisions himself. And Marty would prefer to make those decisions. But as he's gone on, he's become more and more friendly to the use of the Steadicam. The famous Koppersad was, it was

32:58 · jump to transcript →

and he gave me some Christmas money. From then on, I kept my mouth shut. I knew Jimmy. Director of Photography, Michael Ballhaus. This, again, was a fairly complicated shot because it was a mixture of a crane shot and a Steadicam shot. So what happened is that we had Larry McConkie, who was the Steadicam operator on this movie, who was brilliant, he was the best in those days.

1:48:08 · jump to transcript →

Simon West

but we did actually build a full-size working maquette of the robot that was eight foot tall, weighed 500 pounds, and this was built by my special effects supervisor, Chris Cobalt. It had to be moved around on a crane, of course, because it was so heavy, and it was really only used for close-ups of bullet hits and when it was looking right into her face, eyeball to eyeball.

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Simon West

My stunt coordinator and second unit director, Simon Crane, and I went to see a dance group called De La Garda, who specialize in bungee work and running around walls. And it was such a great high energy performance that I thought I'd like to do something like that in the film. So between Simon Crane and I, we devised this whole action sequence that is the next two minutes of the film.

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Simon West

And we attached the ropes to it and then got 200 or 300 local Cambodian extras to tug on those ropes. And it was going to be a one-take thing. It took days to put those blocks in. And I was leaving the following day. So we had one chance to pull this thing down. And we rehearsed them and rehearsed them. And I had four or five cameras on it and one Steadicam.

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It's interesting to notice, too, how the camera is very light, almost like handheld in certain places, like when Peter Graves stood up and so forth, and the camera moves with the characters, which I think was fairly new to movies. Getting away from the static shots of the 40s here in the 50s is lighter equipment, I'm thinking. That's what I mean. It's a different lens, but it's the exact same angle. And again, very simple set. You've got a flag, the wooden...

7:22 · jump to transcript →

Now, it was Cortez's idea that they pull back here at this point. Originally, they were going to zero in from back and go into a close-up, but he had the idea of reversing it, and Lawton immediately said, oh, that's much better. I think that's the first time we've heard this. That's the Dixie Queen, yeah. Or the Delta Queen, excuse me. Delta Queen, probably, yeah.

15:24 · jump to transcript →

Now, these days, at least, I don't know about 55, that shot gets a laugh in theaters these days. Does it? Because it's so clear, I think. If they had murked it up a little bit, it would... But, of course, nobody could argue with this last shot there. It's like Dolly somehow. Yes.

44:22 · jump to transcript →

She was on a treadmill. She was on a treadmill attached to the dolly. This is even early days of Steadicam to a certain extent. Steadicam was not as extensively used as it is today. I'm scared. That's the 14.

3:14 · jump to transcript →

It's funny when you start to learn what you can do without. Here's the famous scene of you hear a noise outside and of course somebody has to go outside and investigate. Just this shot is so nice where we walk them without a cut, the three of them. That's nice. I think you had a big dolly track set up here, didn't you, from the porch? I'm serious. Yes, there is. That went out into the yard. That's right, all the way across the yard.

8:15 · jump to transcript →

Those pajamas, I still have those. I was able to wrangle them away from Wes before he put them in his garage. I still have the alarm clock and I have that telephone, too. Do you really? The tongue phone? Not the tongue phone. I have just the actual telephone. I think Jim Doyle got the tongue. Then I've entered my dream. Now, this was a very long Steadicam shot, if I'm not mistaken. And at the time, it was very, very new, the use of that kind of equipment. I remember.

36:54 · jump to transcript →

didn't like the ox scene either, apparently. He preferred the dog scene, but they've taken the dog scene out and put the ox scene into the cut that isn't the director's cut, but that everyone tries to make out is the director's cut. Yes, but then that keeps the continuity of the opening with the ox pulling the ship. In the theatrical, it's a big crane lifting it with a dog on board, and then you see shades of it. But earlier on, we got to see the ginormous facehugger, which is the super facehugger, which lays queen eggs.

45:19 · jump to transcript →

wheat field or something like the high sort of grass and you can see him coming in and that would do that with the alien we can see it from above shooting down with these guys getting chased i mean that was a great kind of setup where what we're about to see now is um the chase through the corridors um and alex thompson the dp said you know it all it's all great when they you know the steadicam operator flips the camera which you've never seen before but

1:53:04 · jump to transcript →

I remember this being a big deal. I can't remember if it was the trailers or TV spots or something, but I remember there being a lot of shots of this, the Steadicam charging down the corridors, which was really striking at the time. You'd never seen a Steadicam do that before. It's like now when you see an incredible CG monster and it just doesn't touch the sides, you don't notice it. But there was a time when that would have been really impressive.

1:56:12 · jump to transcript →

The stunt guys were fantastic on this. There was a fella called Mick Rogers and Simon Crane. I had to have two of them because it was such a huge job. Overall, I had a good team of guys.

51:00 · jump to transcript →

and Simon Crane, the stunt coordinators, and David Tomlin, the first AD, were, and myself, in fact, was just always pounding the S word, safety, you know? Every chance we could with the troops, with everybody, safety. And not only that, but the people who participated in the battles, we had the luxury of having them for, well, three weeks to train them in how to miss and how to make it look like a hit.

1:51:21 · jump to transcript →

But for time, we'd just do handheld stuff, you know, like this. And we were running out of day this day, and we just had a lot to do. John Toll is the master at handheld. He's able to anticipate stuff before it happens. He did a lot of it in the actual battle. And kind of knows, has a sixth sense about where something is going to happen next so that his movements are coordinated with the movements of everyone else, and it's not planned.

2:09:23 · jump to transcript →

By the way, the car, in order to get rid of the engine noise, we had to pull it up the driveway with a rope. Wow. And the crane crashed into the car and there was all kinds of disasters. So the money, Benicio. The money, Benicio came to me and he said, how much does $15 million weigh? And my immediate response was, who cares? And he said, look, I want to know if I'm going to be carrying this bag. I went to the prop guy, Ian, and I said, all right, figure this out. How much does it weigh in thousands?

1:18:24 · jump to transcript →

I didn't even watch Tay when he, I was sitting on the other side of that bureau and I watched the expressions of the crew as they watched him die. Do you watch the monitor when you're directing or do you sit by the director? I try to stay away from it as much as possible. Like sort of Lumet style, watch the acting? I try to stand as close to the camera and I got burned as a result a couple of times. That opening shot, the opening crane shot of the movie,

1:40:37 · jump to transcript →

And Benicio, in his reference to Papillon, I'm still here. Yeah, nice work with you and Dick on this shot. That shot, by the way, I swore I would do this. I didn't design it. Bill Clark, my AD, I had a completely different shot designed. The long dolly you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, because it works on so many levels.

1:48:06 · jump to transcript →

Jonathan Lynn

We got really lucky. Feeling better? Yes, thank you. Okay. Let's go for a drive. A drive? Yeah, a drive. Well, I don't know anyone else in town. This was a slightly complex, difficult crane shot. It doesn't look difficult when you watch it.

11:20 · jump to transcript →

Jonathan Lynn

Because there are no laughs in this scene, I was able to shoot it in a sort of a long, lingering crane shot. I didn't have to do any coverage because I didn't have to risk... I didn't have to, you know, envisage the possibility that something might be unfunny and have to come out.

1:14:21 · jump to transcript →

Jonathan Lynn

We didn't have any real backup. The camera was not on another boat We had with us apart from the actors we had the camera Handheld because there wasn't room for all the equipment to support the camera and dollies and things he had a light we had a piece of polystyrene to bounce light off and we had the sound mixer and the boom man and that for me and the ad that was it and

1:27:58 · jump to transcript →

OK, first, I think when we were thinking about the concept in this beginning, Enrique and I, we discussed a lot about the way that we should shoot that, and the main concept in this sequence was bringing realism to these survivors in this house. That's why we used a handheld camera... shooting the whole time, you know, really close to the actors to convey to the audience that these survivors are isolated in this house.

0:56 · jump to transcript →

This sequence was one of the ones we loved the most during the writing process. The first moment that the father confesses, in a way, his betrayal. But we see this in two different angles because we know the truth. We assist, in the first sequence, to the truth. In a way, in terms of the story, we put the finger on the big issue for this character, for Don, which is when he abandoned his wife in the cottage. Now he's with their kids and he needs to tell them what happened in the cottage, which is something really hard for him. And this is one of the moments, in terms of visuals, that the style of the movie, again, is changed because it's a confession. And I thought it's good to change from the handheld stuff to something static, which delivers, you know, the importance of the moment.

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Here, again, the challenge was to bring the realism of these extreme moments. The use of the handheld camera and documentary style in the editing is very important to feel the panic, and to see how everything is about to start again.

49:28 · jump to transcript →

Exactly. Here's actually a lead into one of our favorite parts of the new, the sort of new tone of this film versus the last one, which is we get to have an eight-year-old boy here that soon... Yeah, I don't like killing a kid in the beginning of the movie. ...soon bites the dust. And this is actually kind of a fun scene to shoot, too, because we actually had a helicopter in the techno crane for shooting where this crash site was. It was basically like a clear-cut...

4:13 · jump to transcript →

I don't know. This is very good work. Again, another night. Another cold night. Yeah, luckily we weren't in the rain yet. But once the rain started, you know, once you're just out there in the cold nights, it's fine. But the rain, I mean, even with the best rain gear, that stuff gets in and your hands turn numb after 10 minutes. I don't even know. We had some great camera assistants. And these guys, a lot of the camera work's handheld. I don't know how they got two. We had these great operators.

31:47 · jump to transcript →

And it's colder water. So it would have been better if it was like real rain actually hitting these people instead of this misery that we unleashed upon them from a giant crane. Yeah, on some of these scenes, it doesn't look cold because we had little fans hanging off just off the side of frame to blow their breath out of frame quickly so you didn't see it. But a lot of these, it's a lot colder than it appears. It's not always so glamorous making a movie, is it? No.

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So here's an example of what we call the gray point of view, this drift through the house that had these nodal pans, you know, which were floaty but somehow precise. And I stabilized all of these shots because, you know, when you shoot with a Steadicam, you get a natural, you do get a bit of shake. And so we try to make them even more perfect by stabilizing them in post. And we did have earlier sequences that had versions of that kind of moving through the house.

38:46 · jump to transcript →

You know, cinematically, it's interesting when you try to do these slow creeping shots versus handheld shots and what those feel like and how those mean. And this was, you know, it was always sort of choosing your time to which one was most appropriate to use and what it would mean. And once again, a live conversation, both actors were present that are talking to her on the phone. And then we get into this montage here, this sort of, you know, it's the obligatory, you know, web search.

43:43 · jump to transcript →

but still do it on this very, very rapid schedule. So here, once again, you know, very first person point of view and this, you know, all handheld camera all the way through this. And, you know, part of the idea was, you know, the dogs, the progression of dogs barking in the neighborhood. You know, as we learned from JK that, you know, the dogs keep them up at night, you know, when they, the greys come around. And so here we are, we have our first jump scare of the sequence.

47:21 · jump to transcript →