Casting

Curtis and I had lunch and several phone conversations and probably a meeting or two and we found real common ground in how to mount the picture and the potential of populating it with different cast and that there would be a young cast and

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The last part chronologically to cast was Kevin Spacey's part. And it was the hardest, quite frankly. While all three actors are co-stars of the movie, I think in terms of screen time, that part had the least amount of screen time, but also had the trickiest part to pull off because he...

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A friend of mine just sold some reefer to Matt Reynolds. He's tripping to life fantastic with Tammy Jordan. Sorry, I lost you for a second, Sid. Contract players, Metro. You pinch him, I do you up nice feet. Kevin had worked with New Regency before on Time to Kill and had worked at Warner Brothers as well. He was on board, and we had locked our principal cast. No, it's not. It's felony possession of marijuana. Actually...

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Of course, in this sequence, I was dealing with relatives other than I knew the notion of some important mafiosi coming and being disturbed if photographers took pictures. But all in all, it was designed to introduce the audience to the cast of characters, let them be comfortable with who everyone was, and yet have it be in an ambiance that suggested the Italian-American

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instruments and don't really play but i find as a technique that having a real band enables you to kind of control the crowd and get them in the mood and and the fact that the band actually plays this is another expense so it was another one of my requests that to the producers i was just kind of spending money for nothing the casting of the mom uh she of course is uh

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well-known singer of sicilian descent morgana king a well-known jazz singer but when i met her in some audition situation she just made me think of you know the kind of handsome authentically sicilian woman that would be his wife also some of the judges they've all sent gifts there was a lot of tension on the set uh during the sequence this

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Did you have anything to do with the casting of the film at all? Because the cast is very interesting for this kind of film. Yeah, I did with some of it, and some of it happened when I was out scouting for locations and things and doing pre-production. But, yeah, a number of people I had interviewed or cast, and Bobby Leonard may be the most interesting of those because he had...

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been flown out. We'd been struggling to find somebody for this role. And he'd been flown out to Los Angeles from New York by Steven Spielberg for an audition for one of his movies. And by the time we heard about Bobby and that he was here, he was packing to leave. And we were in Century City. And so the producer and I grabbed a couple of scripts and raced over to Universal where he was.

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And the limo was waiting to take him to the airport as we rushed into his hotel room. And we did a very, very quick audition in which it turned out the two scripts that we had didn't match. They were different versions. And so as the producer was reading, was feeding lines to Bobby, Bobby had to figure out how to adjust them for the script that he had on the run. And it was pretty impressive how effortlessly he did it.

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I think it was a very painful day for her. I don't know personally what she was contemplating to get into this place, but I actually felt very protective and concerned for her on this day because she'd taken herself to this dark place. It's an extraordinary example of the kind of preparation that my ensemble cast did. I mean, Anne,

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I know a place where no one's lost. I know a place where no... Isabel Allen, what an extraordinary actress she is. I mean, I'm not aware she's acted in any professional acting before Nina Gold, my wonderful casting director, found her, but she's singing this live like all the other actors. And, you know, I think that song is incredibly important in terms of creating a connection between the audience and this character. But it does need to be sung well, and I think she sings it beautifully.

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Extra for the mice, 2% for looking in the mirror twice. He suggested that I watch Fiddle on the Roof, Norman Jewison's wonderful musical, which I'd actually never seen, and I must admit I did get very inspired by Topol and a couple of the sequences. There's a great sequence in it which ends up with this dance-off in a bar, which I found very inspiring for creating Master of the House. In fact, Sasha used If I Was a Rich Man as his audition piece in Los Angeles.

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Alan K. Rode

Another main attribute of The Killing is a cast of legendary character actors that I'll be discussing as the movie proceeds. The great Lucian Ballard was the director of photography, but it was Kubrick who chose every lens, arranged every setup, and every shot. More about that later. The art director was Ruth Sabatka, who was married to Kubrick during the production of The Killing, and more about that later as well.

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Alan K. Rode

I've read that this voiceover was imposed on Kubrick and Harris by United Artists, and some believe it detracts or dates the film. And I'm not one of those who feel that way. I grew up listening to Gilmore's voice on literally thousands of movie previews and television shows like Highway Patrol. For me, the voice of Art Gilmore is always a welcome presence. The cast of The Killing is a virtual character actor hall of fame, and this wasn't by happenstance.

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Alan K. Rode

There were no film schools back when Kubrick began. He was a movie savant. He watched literally every movie made in Hollywood and also internationally. He went through the Metropolitan Museum of Art's entire film collection twice. Kubrick knew every actor and knew exactly whom he wanted to cast in every role in The Killing.

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So now we're coming upon one of my favorite day players in the movie. Tell me where you found this guy. Well, he actually wasn't one of the real people who worked in the same role that he's playing in the movie. But he was from the area, and I don't know exactly how we discovered him or auditioned him, but he actually gets mentioned as one of the stars of the movie because he comes so early in the credits. So when you see the...

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the cast list in Leonard Walton or something. He's listed as one of the stars. David Drake. Oh, God. Now, all these parts were redone, like the trunk and the hood are aluminum to make the car lighter. There's fiberglass windows instead of glass windows on the side panels. Everything was authentic, the way it would have been done if you were building a car to race. Wow.

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In the 30s, James Stewart was a man in his mid-20s. A lot of the actors were men at a very young age. And I think maybe society's changed. Maybe people just aren't that mature. Also, maybe we just cast more boyish types because that's what the audience wants. Well, I do think, too, that you were given more freedom...

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I'm, you know, some of what I regard as the best actors in the world, and everybody wanted to do it. Everybody wanted to do it. They wanted to come to the set and just do the words that were on the page. Nobody wanted to actually, you know, normally when you do a movie, people come to the set and they want to rethink the characters or rethink the words, but I had such a smorgasbord of brilliant cast, and everybody just wanted to come to the set every day and do the words that were on the page, which I have to applaud Quentin for.

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And, you know, people say to me, God, it's such a great movie, you know. But honest truth is I have to give the real applause to Quentin Tarantino because he's the guy who put it on the page. And this is the first movie where all I did was to support what was on the page in terms of my casting, in terms of my look, and in terms of my styling and how I shot the movie. But it's a much easier process when you have a blueprint which you're so confident about.

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God, Patricia's so beautiful. So beautiful and so... ...and so sweet and so childlike. But on the other hand, she's such an odd, strange little bird. I think she was so great for the show. I didn't think of Patricia when I was first starting to cast the movie. I was looking at other people in other areas and then I saw...

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Hello, this is Bill Friedkin, the director of To Live and Die in L.A., and I'm gonna do this commentary now about the film without referencing the film itself. I'm just gonna give you my impressions, thoughts, and feelings about what went into the making of it, why we made it, what I saw in the material, a little background on the cast, and about some of the things that we were trying to do.

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The casting director was a guy named Bob Weiner, who's since passed away. He was a brilliant young guy who was not really a casting director. He was a writer for The Village Voice, which is a counterculture newspaper in New York, still going. And he would see every play and every unusual or foreign film. So he had a wide range of knowledge about actors around the world.

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And he cast the French connection. He brought me Roy Scheider and Tony LoBianco and others. Several years later, I guess it was about 12 or 13 years later, when I decided to live and die in L.A., I contacted Bob Wiener. He was living in Paris then and writing journalism. And I said, listen, why don't you come back here

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Yeah, you weren't working on the chopper that morning, John, were you? No, I was actually watching the chopper go up with you in it. So, again, the casting on the movie was a really fun but also at times difficult process because a lot of the bit parts had to come from the Vancouver actor pool. Yeah, and at the time Vancouver was really busy, so the pool was smaller than it normally would be. Fan 4-2 was up there shooting.

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They got up there and got started before we did. So a lot of the good local talent up there got sort of sucked up by the bigger movies. But we were fortunate. The young girl, who I think is both very pretty and very good, who you're going to see at the door in a second, we found her in Toronto. Yes, Kristen Hager. She's great. And this is Johnny Lewis here. Yes. Mindy Marin was our casting director.

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We needed to find people in the casting process who were really kind of people you would believe were in this town. We didn't want to break the wall of reality here by having really familiar faces. And so we were able to find really very, very accomplished actors who hopefully you haven't seen in a lot of movies before. And it was also the cool thing, too, a lot of our main leads were all stage actors from

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My name is Alex Cox, and I am the director and writer of Repo Man. And my name is Vicki Thomas. I'm the casting director. And I'm Michael Nesmith. I was the executive producer. My name is Cy Richardson. I was Light and the guy who did Bad Man. It's Juicy Bananas. My name is Xander Schloss. I am a PA and the late Fox Harris' driver-turned-actor. I play Kevin. I'm Del Zamora, and I played Lagarto Rodriguez, the older...

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And the actors really didn't like us, and they would eat our food, and we'd put a padlock on the refrigerator, and they broke the padlock to steal our food. And the only actor who would speak to either of us was Fox Harris. And so before Repo Man was even conceived, I'd formed this very, very favorable opinion of this guy Fox. He seemed really nice. And then when we were casting the film, Harry Dean Stanton said, there's an actor that you need to meet, because the only guy who can play this role is a guy called Fox.

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We used my car initially to cast this movie at UCLA Film School. That's right. I auditioned in that car at UCLA. My Chevy Impala was on a soundstage at UCLA Film School, and Biff Yeager was the very first actor. We read for the film. And I came with my girlfriend in separate cars, and she thought Alex was the strangest guy she'd ever met, and she left. Well, Alex had orange hair at the time, didn't he?

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But that's not what it really is. She ages with makeup. And so she read the script, and she was signed on in a second. She just completely got it. Now, it's interesting that the character of young Forrest came to us very serendipitously in that this young boy saw an open casting call.

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that was taking place i believe in memphis tennessee and he lived in northern mississippi and uh... his mom encouraged him to go ahead up and and try out for the film ellen lewis our casting director brought this tape out to us in los angeles and we were all i mean you had a big smile on your face because you had just seen this unique character that so far you hadn't seen anywhere and so we invited a number of boys out for uh... uh...

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All of the sequences that were historic in context required a tremendous amount of research because we reenacted these perfectly, which required finding cast members that looked exactly like the people who were in the real live footage and recreating portions of the event so it looked like at one time you could be watching the real event and another one a recreation of it and not be able to tell the difference between the two.

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Richard Donner

My name is Dick Donner, and I directed this wonderful film Scrooged. And Danny Elfman did the music. Paramount put up the money. A lot of great actors, a lot of great fun. And Scrooged was supposed to be advertised as, "You've been Scrooged." But, you know, people are chicken, and they were worried about the, you know, the right. You know which right I'm talking about. And, so we never said, "Scrooge," but I'm saying it now. And if you guys don't want to buy it, then go Scrooged yourself. How's that? Now, okay, this is a great little set. A wonderful little set. I have a lot of this at home. I know I shouldn't, but... And these are all the little people. We got little people from all over to come, and some of them turned out to really be Santa's helper. We didn't realize it and... But they showed up, because they heard about the casting and figured it would work. That... Last time a star appeared like that, it was Joel Silver. You should pardon the expression.

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Richard Donner

This is amazing. You know, we happened to be out there doing a documentary, and these guys... We actually were filming this, and then these guys showed up, and the attack started and we were lucky. Bob Goulet. Did I really make this movie? Robert Goulet in the Everglades. Cajun Christmas. Great man. Well, it's a great cast. Great names, great people. All a lot of fun.

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Richard Donner

Sure. "Hi, Mom." "Dad's in jail." "Oh, no, not again." "Yeah, yeah, yeah." That's it. We also got away with that. "Father Loves Beaver." How do you like them apples? Try that today with the you-know-what right. "Why, you can't say that." Don't they know what beavers are? These wonderful animals get trapped. There he is. William F. Burray. Look at that. He is so cute. The movie could not have been made without Bill. And Alfre Woodard. Alfre Wood... What a cast.

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The character of Stevens is played by Antonio Casas, born in 1911 in Galatia, Spain. Stevens' wife is played by one of its more conspicuous cast members, Cuban-born Chelo Alonso. Born Isabel García, Alonso was a former folie bergère dancer and one of the most prominent female stars of the Italian sword-and-sandal films of the 1960s, yet she plays this Mexican housewife and mother without a hint of glamour.

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that Leone courted her for the role relentlessly and that she was finally tricked into doing it when another actress, who had supposedly been cast, had to withdraw at the last moment. It was a two-day job for her. It's not mentioned in the film, per se, but Stevens wears a gray, weathered military shirt that, in combination with his stiff way of walking, suggests a man who's been excused from military service by some kind of wartime injury.

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and a number of West German crime pictures, including The Carpet of Horror, Hypnosis, and The White Spider. Strangely, no German director ever had the vision to cast him in a Carl May western, though Franz Josef Gottlieb later cast him in Wild Kurdistan, an adaptation of one of Carl May's Orient adventures. It took his casting in Sergio Corbucci's Minnesota Clay to get him started in westerns.

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Hello, this is David Naylor, and welcome to the audio commentary for Diamonds Are Forever. On this audio commentary, we'll be joined by director Guy Hamilton and many members of the cast and crew. The stories which you're about to hear reflect the personal recollections and opinions of those who provided the interviews. Some comments have been edited for time and clarity. They're not meant to provide the definitive history of the film. Diamonds Are Forever, the seventh James Bond film, marked the return of Sean Connery to the role of 007.

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He loves it. Roger, who I wrote for and I love dearly, Roger would fight on screen like a man fighting. Sean fights, fought like a man who really enjoyed it and enjoyed getting his licks in. He has that wonderful grin when he's fighting as if he already knows he's going to win. Joe Robinson, an actor and stuntman, had been Sean Connery's judo instructor before being cast as diamond smuggler Peter Franks. Robinson recalls his reaction to filming the elevator fight.

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met and worked with this man and have been the beneficiary of his fine direction. In the novels of Ian Fleming, Bond's CIA friend Felix Leiter was a Texan. Tom Mankiewicz recalls the approach to casting Norman Burton as Leiter in Diamonds Are Forever. Now, here we meet Felix Leiter. There had been several Felix Leiters. Guy tried in the whole style of this movie, when he had a fussier Blofeld, less of a thuggish Blofeld, he tried to find a Felix Leiter.

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Get your father's good looks. OK, profiles, profiles. They have the same nose. And that was kind of a gift in the casting process. We didn't cast based on the nose, but it was a plus. Little sound effect coming up here. Not believable, but got a laugh. I remember I didn't like that sound effect.

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Boy, talk about your great introduction to an evil character. Yeah. And he's not even the evilest of the evil characters. He's the sidekick. It's just... And he's 50. I know. Well, he got held back, you know? He was actually a stunt person who came in to audition as Ogre. He was way too old. He had a beard. I told him, you look too old and you have a beard.

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How old was everybody? I was born in 57, and we did this in 84. I was 27. Not yet. I was 26 while we were shooting. I was 29. You were 29, and I was 30-something. That's another thing that they would never do now is cast people as old as we were to play kids going into their first year in college. Now they'd get actual kids who were that age. Right.

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done a movie with her. I can't remember the name of the movie. She was in a film called Dream Child, wasn't she? That's right, Dream Child. Thank you for reminding me. It was 40 years ago. My memory's gone. Yes, so Nicola, he recommended Nicola and we liked her so we cast her as Nicola. Did you view the film to sort of get a sense of what she was like or was it a casting?

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Yes, it was a cast meeting. I can't remember if I saw the film or not. I mean, in terms of casting the actors in this film, some of that must have come through connections with the producers or perhaps through you. But did you, as a director, see people in other things and think, I want to work with them and let's see if we can reach their agent or let's see if they're interested?

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Well, the casting director was Gail Stevens. She was actually married to... ...Danny Boyle at the time. And Danny wasn't famous, actually, when we were doing this... ...but why he became so famous after that. But Gail was doing the casting and...

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And I don't remember because I'm 84. No, but you did. And then you cast everybody in the appropriate roles you felt they were right for. But you read everyone for Chainsaw. Now, this young lady really was a surprise. No, she's great. Kelly. Yes. Kelly Jo. Yeah, Kelly Jo. I almost felt that she came with the part in her.

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Freddie Shoup, remedial English, right here. Everybody just calls me Shoup. Okay, Shoup. Why am I here? Oh, thumbtacks. What a talent, though, huh, Carl? I remember when she came in to read and how torn away you were with her. She was terrific. You know, the same reaction I had to her is the reaction that when she first came out from the Midwest, Kansas, and the first audition was for

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Sweet Bird of Youth, I don't know. What was the play? Yeah, she had done that at the Taper. Yeah, Sweet Bird of Youth. Maggie the Cat. She hadn't done anything big before and back home. She came and auditioned and got the job. Yeah. I mean, that's an extraordinary talent. I saw her in that. She was wonderful. For someone to reach on down through the sleaze and the slime, pick him up and hose him off. I mean, who knows? If we fail with even one shot, we might be losing the next Ted Koppel.

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It's really what I call action horror, adventure horror. Oh, absolutely. It's definitely adventure horror. It's save the girl, save the city. And honestly, Shawnee saves Kevin as much as he saves her, which is a little progressive for the 80s. You were working with casting director Joanna Ray. Correct. Who does all of David Lynch's movies and everything. I mean, her eye for talent, especially young talent.

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is second to none, especially back then. She's great. When you were casting the film, you were saying before how Donovan was such a great archetype for the hero, only to subvert that later on, kill him off, and then now we're left with... It's the old Psycho. ...Mulletron 2000 with Kevin Dillon. It was very purposeful on my part trying to emulate what Hitchcock did in Psycho, which is Janet Leigh's dead at the end of the first act. How did that go over with the studio, though? We were very... This was...

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I heard a story about how he became involved. Do you remember at all? Tell me. Well, he was unavailable originally. And then it was like a commercial or something like that fell through. And then all of a sudden it was like, oh, shit, I actually need a gig. And then that's how we show up. When you were casting with Joanna, was it something that she offered? Who came up with the idea? I don't know who, but the two people I loved were him and...

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some of these stills. And I'm reminded what an amazing, amazing cast we ended up with. Thank you Pam Dixon for putting together just an incredible cast that's gone so far since the film. Oh yeah.

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has a little Tank Girl debt to pay. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Which is fine. No, I'm not mad about it. You know what I mean? I'm not mad about it at all. No, it's cool. It's totally cool. But people call me and they think it's like I'm in a video. I'm like, no, that's Madonna being Tank Girl. No, that's Gwen Stefani being Tank Girl. Exactly. No, that's... And, you know, we're responsible for creating the Spice Girls as well. Because when we did these open casting calls... I remember that. ...which...

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three of the Spice Girls got tired of waiting in line to be part of the open casting call and said, screw this, we're going to start a band. And they always talk about it. They always credit it as how they got together because three of them met just waiting in line for the open casting call. Oh, there's our homage to Clockwork Orange right there. Yep. You mean the bowler hat? Yeah, the bowler.

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You know, I always like to add as much reality as I can to the film, so casting is a key already to try to get real faces, real, you know, Russians in this case. And there she is, and Glenn Close. Story has it that this movie originally was written for somebody else besides Harrison Ford. I believe it was Kevin Costner? Correct, yes. Beacon Communications, the company who developed the project,

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And now comes for a little bit of an inside situation. I cast for Radek, the Russian general here, Jürgen Prochnow. He's the star from Das Boot. Your old friend. Yeah, and I think if you have not yet bought Das Boot, you should do it now. Especially the new director's cut. Yeah, especially the new director's cut is very, very good. So here's Jürgen, and they get him out, and...

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So this is back on LAX airport, but it's meant to be, of course, Russia, where Gary and his bad boys are coming. And this was, I think, Gary Altman's first day. Yeah, it was. We shot that pretty early on. And boy, from the first day on, when I saw him doing this part, I just fell in love with this guy. Great choice. He was very good, very good. Yeah, I thought he's great. He's wonderful. Did you have a voice in the casting? That's always people ask me, do I have a voice?

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The audition piece for Irwin was about four pages of almost undiluted text from the book, and it was a very, very difficult read. A lot of people were struggling with it. And we hadn't found Irwin, had we? She was a big, big search. But I remember Fran very, very early on had been tracking Miranda and keeping her in mind and had asked her to come in and read. Miranda was the only person who actually rang and wanted to talk about this character and what the scene actually meant.

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Yeah, it's a lighter scene. It's a scene that actually has something of the spirit of the relationship in the books, doesn't it? I mean, everybody seems to remember of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit. They do. It's a great, memorable chapter. Yeah. And it was one that we really wanted to put into the movie. Yeah. We met Andy through the Hubbards, who did the casting in England, and they did an initial sweep through the main roles, and they presented Andy on a tape...

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you felt the character needed. Well, what was interesting about that performance in the audition is that we were videotaping the audition even though we were just looking for the voice. What was compelling was actually seeing what he was doing. It wasn't just the voice he was using. It was actually seeing the expressions on his face. Because I remember it was a pretty rough, bad quality video that we ended up with. But I remember coming back to New Zealand and having the first kind of Gollum conversations with Weta. This was long before we started shooting. And I remember dragging the Andy Serkis tape in to show them

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Francis Lawrence

One of the fun things for me about this whole sequence is the intercut. I just thought that it could be a great introduction to the two characters and to the two worlds. And one of the things that I played with throughout the sequence is screen direction. So if you notice even from the very beginning, I typically have Jennifer facing left to right, and Joel facing right to left, as you can see here. It was a trick that I learned. I remember watching old Hitchcock movies, and watching Strangers on a Train, and there's... In the opening sequence, you see the two men who are moving toward one another, and eventually gonna meet. And it's something that I've employed a lot, I think, that screen direction is actually a huge benefit in storytelling. But especially in a sequence like this where you feel like these two characters are gonna end up on a collision course with one another, that narratively, you know that at some point, that they're gonna come together. American! Most of this ballet sequence here was shot in the Budapest opera house. And we had support of the Budapest opera, and the Budapest ballet company. And most of the other dancers there are all dancers with the Budapest company, and from a variety of places. There's some Americans, actually, and some Hungarians. Great group of people. And there was our nice leg break, one of the first specific, kind of, tonal hits in the movie. It was something I wanted to do with the movie, was to not hold back too much in terms of some of the shock, and audacity of some of the moments that take place within the story. And so to see the real damage done to her leg there... I just remember seeing, you know, there's been sports injuries over the years. And not too long before we shot this, there was a French athlete in some, I want to say some Olympic games or something, who had done some vaulting, and just kind of landed slightly wrong and bent his leg at this really horrible angle. And it was really difficult to look at, but we basically modeled the bend in her leg based on the images of this French Olympian. Word is they were vice cops, looking for Chechen dealers... or some family guy getting a blow job in the bushes. They weren't there for Marble. They just got lucky. Chances are they would have questioned you, and let you go. You can see here, one of our really cool locations. Maria, my production designer, was just really fantastic at looking for locations and scouting. And I think she had gone out to Budapest a few months before me. And we had also hired Klaus, who was our location manager for the Berlin portion of the Hunger Games films, and we liked him a lot. And he was nearby, and so he came down to Budapest and they worked together, and they found these fantastic places. These old abandoned hospitals, where the surgery Is, and where she's about to wake up, was this old, abandoned maternity hospital. And this fantastic space is part of a library in the seventh district of Budapest. Undercover narcotics agents saw what they thought... was a drug deal in process. You can see outside of Jen, too, that we really put together a fantastic cast for this movie. Jeremy Irons, who's an icon and a fantastic guy, and I think one of the best actors to have ever existed, was my first choice to play Korchnoi. And luckily he said yes. And Matthias, we brought in. I'd been a fan of his since seeing him in Bullhead and Rust and Bone and things like that. And he's so versatile. But he became a choice when we actually decided to skew the age of Dominika's uncle down a little bit. I wanted to add a little bit of creepiness to their relationship. And so the idea that, you know, maybe her father had a much younger brother, so that, as she was growing up, there was this, you know, charming, handsome, much younger uncle, you know, somebody that she might have even been attracted to, and he might have been attracted to her, was something that I wanted to play with in the course of this. And I thought he was just perfect for it. He's such a fantastic actor.

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Francis Lawrence

This is actually something that Justin and I, Justin, the writer, Justin Haythe and I debated quite a bit. We spent a lot of time thinking about Dominika"s living conditions. And part of it was from research that even though it seems like quite a glamorous job to be a principal ballerina with, you know, a real high-end ballet company in Moscow, that the living conditions would be quite modest. And I also thought it was important that they remain modest, because as she's fighting for survival, when she needs help from her uncle to survive, it's not about material things. It's not about getting a nicer place to live in, or keeping a nice place to live in, or keeping a nice car or anything like that. It's just keeping things as they are, in terms of the simple life that she actually has with her mother. And her mother is played by the great Joely Richardson, who was I think one of the last people we cast for no real reason. I think it was the last role that we got to. But she came in, and it was a bit tricky for her, and she was a trooper, because I think we cast her maybe 10 days or so before she started shooting, and she had a lot to do, you know? We had decided that her character, although you never hear it, had MS, and so we wanted her to meet with experts about MS, so she would know how to move, and how to make it look like she had trouble using her hands and trouble getting up. And she had to learn the subtle Russian accent that everybody had been training for, and she also had to learn how to play the violin. It's now a scene. I'm sure she's not happy about it, but we ended up cutting it 'cause she spent a bunch of time learning a song on the violin while giving a speech to Dominika. But she was a real trooper. She also did something interesting that I had never seen an actor do before, which was that she was really curious about the tone of the movie as she came in, and wanted to immerse herself in it. And so she came to Budapest a few weeks early, and she would come to set on days we were shooting other things, and she would just, kind of, watch and see what other people were doing, and see what I was doing, to get into the tone of the world a little bit. And I think it's honestly gonna be something that I carry into other movies that I do now, and inviting actors as they come in, so that nobody really starts completely cold again. Sonya? Hey. How are you? What is it? /'m scared. I went to see her at the hospital. The way she looked at me, she knows. She doesn't know. What we have done is a sin. They've always favored her. No one else ever got a chance. Is that fair? This was a fun sequence. This is another one of the dynamic sequences in the movie that really sets up the tone, and really specifically sets up how Dominika is truly an unlikely hero. I think without this, and this is something that we, you know, the producers and the studio and the writer and I debated about a fair amount, just in terms of how violent this sequence gets. Really sets up what Dominika's capable of. We shot this in a basement of an art school in Budapest, and Maria brilliantly changed this empty basement room, series of rooms, into a steam room, and locker room, as if it was at the bottom of a ballet company. And I think it looks really beautiful.

11:19 · jump to transcript →

Francis Lawrence

And off to the side, in some side room, was this broken down bathroom that had this really strange tile. And you can see the tile here. We duplicated it. But it's based on a tile that was actually used in a bathroom. And it was this green, splotchy tile. And if you were to see the detail of it it actually looks wet, which I thought was really strange, because it basically makes it look like the bathroom is wet and moldy. And Maria and I really fell in love with it. And she did a mock-up of it. And at first, this is the only set that she and I went back and forth on a little bit. The rest we were in complete agreement right away. But this one, for a while, I was worried was too striped. It wasn't the color that bothered me, and it wasn't the tile specifically, but it was once you put all the tile together, it felt a little too designed for me. And what we ended up doing, and Maria ended up doing, was working on the contrast between the dark green stripes and the lighter stripes in the middle, so that it didn't become sort of too hypnotizing. It was almost gonna be too distracting before. I'll be able to take care of us now. You don't have to do this. Sparrow School. It was so well-described in Jason's book as being this place out in the middle of nowhere. And I think in the book, you actually have to take a hydrofoil over some sort of water to get there. But here we didn't do that. We just had that big snowy landscape with that drone shot of the car driving. But we found this place about an hour and a half away from central Budapest called Castle Dég that was a private estate at one point. And then I think, post-war, it became an orphanage. And oddly, I think an orphanage for Greek boys or something, which was really strange. But now it's, kind of, a museum and empty, and they really let us use it a bunch. And this was toward the beginning of our schedule. It was quite cold, and everybody was really sick. Pretty much people were sick from the first day we started shooting, but by the time we got here, which was about three weeks in, it had really spread like wildfire, and everybody was really sick. Which of course had to marry up with primarily shooting outside in sub-zero temperatures, which was pretty brutal. But I loved this location. And of course, this was the beginning of our work with Charlotte. I'm a huge fan of Charlotte's work, always have been. Loved her movies, think she's a fantastic actress. But the idea to cast her as Matron came when Justin Haythe and I were working on the script, and he had seen 45 Years, which had come out recently, and suggested I see it. And I did, and just fell in love with it, and just started to think about her. I mean, it's completely a different character, but just started to think about her for this role. And so we sent her the script, and at first she was interested and she was intrigued, but she thought that her character was a little thin. And Justin and I had some ideas, and so we ended up flying out to Paris where she lives and meeting her in an apartment that she uses to paint in. And we had a great little meeting. And I think sat with her for maybe an hour, hour and a half, and pitched her the take that we had on her, and some of the secrets that I have about her. So that if we get to make another one of these, that we can carry on into new stories. And then she said yes. And we got very lucky. And it ended up being really good for Jen, because she was there for one of Jen's, probably Jen's hardest scene to shoot in this movie, which was something that's coming up in, I don't know, 15 minutes or so. But it was great for Charlotte to be there for Jen.

28:11 · jump to transcript →

Paul Davis

John said, what the hell is a red phone booth doing in the middle of Wales? So they cover it up with the tree stump, which you see later when they leave. And of course, here's the slaughtered lamb. Half of the actors in this scene were cast from the Royal Shakespeare Company.

6:49 · jump to transcript →

Paul Davis

um he literally tried to cast every there's a young rick male there um and he was into john landis was introduced to rick male and adrian edmondson via frank oz who was in london making the muppet show and frank had seen their double act and took john to see it and john just fell in love with the two guys and offered them both roles in the pub um and of course rick said yes he was just joking joking i remember the alamo

7:46 · jump to transcript →

Paul Davis

So John had to take a swig of the beer and demonstrate, which must have been a great sight for the rest of the crew. Uh-oh. It's David Schofield, who at the time, or right before this, played the Elephant Man on stage and was supposed to be in the David Lynch movie, but David Lynch went on to cast John Hurt.

10:11 · jump to transcript →

Macaulay Culkin

Hey, that's you. - That's me. So this was, uh-- I guess we... We could start about... Talking about the beginning of how this whole movie came about, really. I was in dire straits at the time, in terms of my career. I had just come off of a complete disaster, a big bomb. I didn't know if I was gonna direct again. I thought I'd have to go back to writing. So I was in Chicago staying at my in-laws' house... ...and my first daughter was just born... ...and John Hughes sent me, out of the kindness of his heart, two scripts. One was called Reach the Rock and the other was called Home Alone. One of them, it was rumored... I think it was this one. was written over a weekend... ...which some critics would probably jump on the bandwagon... ...and say, "Well, we always knew that." - Exactly. Ha, ha. So I read Home Alone and immediately responded to it. I thought it was just a great, great piece of material. And it talked about some of the things that I was interested in making a film about. Now, we had a meeting, I remember, in New York. I just-- It was-- You and my father were talking most of the time... ...and I was just imitating everything you were doing. Everything I was doing. - Yeah. You'd drink your water, I drank my water. Like that. I think I did that... I think I way overdid it. I think I just kept doing it the whole, like, hour. Well, you know, the interesting thing is we... Again, it was the kind of situation where we looked at hundreds of kids, again. And I was like-- Even though I didn't know if I'd ever direct a film again... ...I was like, "Well, you know, Macaulay was in Uncle Buck... ...and I don't wanna just cast him based on John Hughes producing the movie... ...because then it looks like I'm gonna give in to John Hughes and be a wimp." And I met all these... I met hundreds of kids. And when I met Macaulay, there was just no one else who came close... ...to what we needed for this film. I mean, really, in terms of an actor... ...a Child actor, at the time, you were the most unique, original kid I'd ever seen. So that was pretty... - Oh, thank you. I mean, I totally agree with you, but thank you anyway. But it really is-- It's sort of, uh... Because it was the fact that you, um... The camera loved you, obviously. You see the shots from the film. The camera loves you, but at the same time, uh... ... you were relatable to every kid in America... ...because you weren't an idealized version of a kid. Kids are used to-- Accustomed to seeing this ridiculously... Shirley Temple, and the curls and the whole thing, you know. And there was just something enormously real about you. That, and I could remember my lines and I had a lot of energy. That is true. You did have a lot of energy. Almost a sad amount of energy. It was, I mean.... Still do too. Uh, now, do you remem--? Like, this particular scene. We're starting from the beginning of the film. And I'm curious, because there were so many scenes in the film... We were talking before we started. where we would shoot your coverage first and then send you home... ...or I'd still be in jail. - Child labor laws. Yes, I'm still well-versed in the child labor laws. So there are obviously certain elements of the film-- Like this. Do you remember this being shot? - No. Because you weren't here. - I remember we did the whole... There was a whole sequence with, you know... ...people coming up the stairs, down. - Right. He's there, and the pizza guy's there. I remember that, and just like, you know, trying to coordinate that whole thing. But, no, in general, there's a lot of stuff... There's a lot of holes in it... In my memory. And this guy went on to do something on Nickelodeon. My kids know him. Yeah, Pete & Pete. - Yeah, Pete & Pete. Is it still on the air? - No, no. It lasted a couple years. It was actually a really kind of neat show. Yeah, my kids loved that show. But what was interesting about the whole look of this film... I guess we could talk about it a little bit. You'll even notice... Some people will think, "Well, this wasn't intentional." But we intended the film to feel like Christmas sort of. I wanted the house to feel very warm. You look at... - Greens, reds. Macaulay's wearing greens, a green and red shirt. There's a green and red jumper sweater on this guy back here. The wallpaper is all... - That's very clever. All conveying a warmth of Christmas and something that, uh... It just was interesting to us. So it wouldn't be over-the-top, but it'd feel warm. I wanted the house to feel like a warm place. Joe Pesci. What do you remember about Joe Pesci? What is, like, your first--? My first-- Gosh, I don't even... I have-- I still show this. I have a scar on my finger. - Uh-huh. We'll get to that part near the end... - Ha-ha-ha. ...when, you Know, he says, you know: - Okay. "I'm gonna bite each one of your fingers off, one at a time." During rehearsal, he actually bit my finger a little harder than I think he thought. I still have a little scar on my finger. It's my little Joe Pesci tooth mark. I'm telling you something, I believe... And I know Joe would probably get a little upset with me about this... ...but there was a little professional jealousy from a lot of the actors on set... ...because you were the star. There's this little kid who was the star, who we were all paying attention to... ...who was carrying the film. And there was a lot of passive-aggressive stuff going on. And I don't think Joe meant to bite through your finger... But, heck, you know, you never know. He was not particularly happy during the course of making this film. And I don't-- I think he would probably say the same thing. He had just come off of Goodfellas and Raging Bull, and he was... I don't know, did he win the Academy Award? He won for Goodfellas. His acceptance speech was, "Thanks," and that was it. Okay. Well, there you go, so, um.... And when he... I remember I was such a fan of his. Asking him to do the Goodfellas... The clown speech, you know. "Make me laugh," you know? "What do--? Am I funny to you like a clown?" And he would do that every day, and it was great. But at the same time, I could feel it from the actors. Because there's always a sense of rivalry between actors. There was this feeling of, you were the star of this movie, and that was un... That was not really common at the time. - Yeah, yeah. It created an interesting tension on the set, I have to say. Yeah, see, I never really felt that, but I was 9. Everyone around here knows he did it. It'll just be a matter of time... ...before he does it again. What's he doing? He walks up and down the streets every night... ... Salting the sidewalks. Maybe he's just trying to be nice. No way. See that garbage can full of salt? That's where he keeps his victims. The salt turns the bodies... ... Into mummies. Wow. - Mummies!

0:21 · jump to transcript →

Macaulay Culkin

So this, uh.... What's interesting about a lot of this movie is we would always put fake snow down. The foam and stuff. - The foam, and that's really... We had a Wisconsin ski... A bunch of guys who worked for this ski resort in Wisconsin put down snow. But... - That poor statue. Yeah, the statue was a running gag, and this guy... A lot of this movie was made on an extremely small budget. At the time, the picture was at one studio... ...and that studio didn't wanna make the movie, because of a $2-million difference... ...and it went over to Twentieth Century Fox. And we still were... We still made the film for a little above $18 million... ...which at the time was still a small budget. So we had to make things stretch, which we'll talk about through the picture. One of the great things about working with Pesci, I have to say... .IS his improvisational skills were terrific. And it was because of his training with Scorsese that... ...even on a picture like Home Alone, really comes in handy. He's a very funny guy, Joe. - Yeah. And his comedic instincts were really something I'd never seen before. Little snippets in pictures like Raging Bull and Goodfellas. But his ability to improvise was just phenomenal. And then John Heard. I cast John Heard because John Heard was someone I was always a big fan of. He was in this picture... It was called Cutter and Bone. Now it's called Cutter's Way. And his performance should've gotten an Academy Award. I've never seen it. It's Jeff Bridges and John Heard, and he is just amazing in that film. I was a huge fan, and it was always a dream to work with him. He also did this old film called Head Over Heels. And he was kind of a leading man back in his day. He's just a wonderful actor... ...and another guy who didn't really know why he was in this movie. At the time, he was sort of like, "Why am I doing this?" I remember feeling a certain amount of discomfort from him. He was like, "Why do I have to do this? Why am I in this kids' movie?" You know? "I'm a good a--" Understandable. No one really knew what this movie had the potential of becoming. We had always hoped it would be successful, but we never knew. Um.... Pfft. I always knew. You always had an idea. - I always knew. Now, this scene. Do you remember coming in on a Saturday to rehearse this scene? Yeah. - We had to rehearse this because it was so... Which was so chaotic with everybody. We ate so much pizza. I didn't wanna eat lunch. And this is something that was interesting. We... You'll notice that there's a rare shot in the film where... There's your brother. - Yeah, there he is. How are you guys--? He's working now, right? He's doing very well. Oh, yeah. He's doing very good, very well for himself. Un, this is typical of the style of this movie. Not the vomiting, obviously... ...but the separation of actors in certain scenes. Because Macaulay's time was so valuable... ...we needed to shoot Macaulay separately... ...and sometimes other kids as well. So you'll always see... I tried to block sequences where I could sort of keep Macaulay off by himself... ...and keep the other actors in another space... ...so I could shoot people separately. Child labor laws again. - Child labor laws. And we're-- And Kiery had to reshoot the chair in the face, I remember. Oh, yeah. - Like, he had to come back later. He was upset he had to get his hair cut like Fuller again. Oh, he was? - Ha-ha-ha. Well, he-- We made a special, very light rubber chair... ...so when it... - Yeah, that's... Yeah. That's-- I remember that. Catherine O'Hara was someone who I had, uh... ...Just loved her work on Second City TV. - Yeah. I mean, I was, uh... Aside from Saturday Night Live at the time in the '70Os... ...9econd City TV was the-- Sort of the place where you learned about comedy. And for me it was... I was just such a huge fan... ...SO It was, again, a real honor... ...to be able to work with her on both of these films. Yeah, no, she's incredible. Even just the stuff she's doing now. She's still--? Oh, it's great. It's great stuff. Both of his kids are still going to school here. I guess he missed the family.... You got a pretty good cast. Yeah, it's kind of interesting for a film that... But we treated it... The weird thing about this film... ...and the reason I think the film has kind of stood the test of time for a lot of kids... ... IS because we always treated it with respect. We never felt that we were making a movie for kids. We were making a movie for the parents as well. It had a lot of appeal. And you never-- You wanted to... You wanted the photography to have a certain elegance about it... ...and the camera to be moving. And it was really never... So many times today, people try to make kids' movies... ...and they always cheapen them. And we never-- I mean, certainly we got cheap with our jokes. Let's not pretend that we didn't. - Ha-ha-ha. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, it's Three Stooges, you know? - Anything for a laugh. I

7:04 · jump to transcript →

Macaulay Culkin

Branch was never one of my favorite shots. Always looked fake breaking off there. We could never get it right. We never had money. Shh! Movie magic. Shh! Don't say anything. Movie magic from 17 years ago. - Mm-hm. It's hard to believe. - It really is. Now, this guy was my driver. I have a nasty habit of casting my drivers in my films. A lot of these guys are Transpo. - Both of those two guys are Transpo. And that guy was Pete, who drove me every day to both Home Alone films.

13:28 · jump to transcript →