Casting

I don't think that works either. I think that's a bad idea too. Sigourney Weaver has explained that she sees Ripley as a loner type, and I agree with that. I think that's the right way to do it. I think they did have to separate Ripley. I know Michael Biehn is really upset about not being cast in this, and in the documentary he makes a passing comment about how Sigourney Weaver may have been behind that.

10:50 · jump to transcript →

But he does come across as quite level-headed and quite fair with his kind of putting his foot down with Fincher. But it's interesting that all the cast and a lot of the technical guys really liked Fincher. Obviously, Alex Thompson, you know, the DP had come in to replace the guy who had photographed Blade Runner, who clearly had Parkinson's. But he said, you know, David was a little bit kind of short with him and

15:26 · jump to transcript →

happy ending. It undoes the entire point of Aliens because Aliens is about saving Newt. That's what Aliens is about at the end of the day. She's the only one who matters to anyone in that movie. Ripley doesn't give a... Hicks doesn't give a shit. They're trying to save Newt. So to start by killing her undoes all of that. But then they're big enough problems in their own right but then you assemble a cast without a single...

20:23 · jump to transcript →

That's Cole, our stunt supervisor, right? That was. That was Cole McKay, who was our stunt coordinator. Sneaking a cameo in as the limo driver. Yes, yes. He made him buy me a drink for this. Yeah, Shea Duffin. What's going on here is we're rich. Did you have fun during the casting process for all these characters? Yeah, I tell you, I...

2:49 · jump to transcript →

Lisa London and Catherine Stroud were my casting ladies and they brought me great people and I sort of wanted to cast this thing and sort of get different looks and especially when the kids who are painting and Jennifer, I think they all sort of have a unique look. I like everybody to be ID'd immediately when you see them. I don't like three people with dark hair or three people with blonde.

3:15 · jump to transcript →

And that was dry ice. And it really, it kind of works. Everybody has to forgive me. It's been a while since I've seen this. There was our casting, Lisa London. These are fun shots how the characters introduced. You're getting glimpses and silhouettes and wise ass. Yes.

6:31 · jump to transcript →

an episode of Law and Order. Mostly a lot of theater, though. And she came to the project because that pilot that I mentioned, Class of 61, was an Amblin project. Which was the company that Spielberg formed with Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall back in the early 80s. So they were all kind of aware of her, fans of her. So she was always in the casting pool for their movies and had been for a while. And this was the first one where it got this far.

7:54 · jump to transcript →

And he got small film roles in movies like Cool Hand Luke and Blake Edwards' western The Wild Rovers. But he didn't really get noticed until Sam Peckinpah cast him as Steve McQueen's brother in Junior Bonner. That came out in 1972. And the following year, Baker had his sort of star-making role in the revenge picture Walking Tall. That same year, 1973, he appeared in two other great movies, Charlie Varick and The Outfit. And then after that, he was in a pretty eclectic role.

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Trainor studied broadcast journalism at San Diego State University, where Kathleen Kennedy was majoring in film. And she worked in radio and TV news for a while, as did Kathleen Kennedy, before landing a job as a producer's assistant on 1941, which is the Steven Spielberg movie written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale that came out in 1979. Trainor married Zemeckis in 1980, and she appeared in her first movie when he cast her in Romancing the Stone in 1984.

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Alexander Payne

Dave was one of those guys who taught because they never wanted to leave high school in the first place. But basically, he was a good guy. I'd always liked Matthew Broderick a lot. I was so happy to be able to cast him in a movie, and I'm sure by the time you hear this on your DVD at home, I will have seen the film, but today when I'm recording this commentary, I still have never seen Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

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Alexander Payne

I was actually given the tape recently, so I have to see it soon. His casting has, for a lot of people, played with his image, almost his iconography as Ferris Bueller. But not for me, because as I said, I haven't seen the film. I just had always admired his acting, and I was happy to have actually something, an actor kind of approaching

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Alexander Payne

This guy... He wasn't... I didn't audition him or anything. Just on that day, I said, just go up to Mr. McAllister, up to Matthew Broderick, and tell him that...

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did make the inquiry. I don't think Gandalf had been cast when you approached him, and he did ask. One of the first questions was, who's playing Gandalf? The smoking scene is one that I thought I would have to fight for. I was sure at some stage, because it's Hollywood,

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And I don't quite know whether that comes across like that, but I guess it's sort of interesting. I think it does. Yeah. I remember seeing audition tapes for worms and spiders and earwigs. Oh, it was horrible. I hate them. Yeah. But that was really funny, after seeing hours and hours of audition tapes of actors that have to audition spiders and worms. Oh, yes. But the weirdest thing was we had, was it a weta? And that big centipede. Yes, we had a weta and a centipede. And a weta is, you know, this New Zealand, it's rather...

54:44 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, a five foot tall gymnast on three foot high stilts that made them look like big people. We had fun casting this scene because we basically wanted to get extras that were the most unusual, odd, seedy looking people that we could possibly find. Because I thought Bree was a great moment to make the hobbits feel very much like fish out of water that...

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in an environment as small as a submarine for months and months, not just with the cast, but with the crew, with equipment. When I first met Jeff, I was working out of some offices, pre-production offices in Santa Monica, and I had just a kind of very rough foam core mock-up of a submarine and a hatch, and, you know, I asked Jeff if he would, you know, we could kind of figure out

19:24 · jump to transcript →

But our camera operator, on the other hand, often with his eye to the camera, we learned very early on that we would need to wear a helmet. And his helmet certainly got a workout because you would always run into gauges or handles and whatnot. And poor Liam Neeson, you know, being the tallest member of the cast, continually...

23:25 · jump to transcript →

and they were both very selfless and collaborative with a very young rest of the cast, some of whom had never been in a film before, and let alone on anything this rigorous, this demanding, or in an environment this claustrophobic for a period of months. And it was a, it was pretty extraordinary watching them work, watching them work together,

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Richard Curtis

We never decided... Here we go. Stop, Hugh's turned up. Okay, this is the first time they've seen the film. Don't be ridiculous. - No, it's true. I'm just recovering from the sight of myself in that dodgy shirt. Yes, you do, you look terrible. - Yeah, I know. See what I mean. When Hugh first got the film, you were quite cross about Bill's part, weren't you? I'm still quite cross about it. I still think it could be trimmed, to be absolutely honest. You felt that you would take some of the attention. This was a controversial piece of casting. What do you think about this guy, Hugh? Very bad. - Oh, yeah. No, no, no. No, he has been good. - Who is he? He just looks a little long in the fang. I love you. - I Know. SO... - Who's that girl? That's not part of... No, that's Sienna Guillory, who's... -/ think we're watching the wrong film. She's so beautiful it hurts. We in fact shot this scene later. We thought we wanted to know a little bit more about Colin. Oh, good God. Bloody hell. - That was a tough shock. I've never seen this scene. Let's see that... Can we wind back? Right, so... - So what's the idea, that she dumps him? Yeah. That's the girl who, with the brother, dumps... So here we have Liam. It's very odd, just looking at that phone, it was very odd, talking on the phone to Liam Neeson, trying to ask him if he'd do the part. It's such a legendary voice, it strikes you that you're probably talking to an impressionist, not to the real person. Understood. Emma"s very good with vegetables. - Yeah. You used to always have food in your films. Yes, I used to get letters about it from my Japanese fans.

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Richard Curtis

love I've never seen any of this. This is looking very good, this scene. Very good, this film. - This is terrific. Look, it's Pikey. Who's that, with the guitar? Is that... He's a friend of our friend, Adams, and is an exceptionally good guitarist. - Oh, God, we're back to the boring bit. What the hell are you doing here? I just popped over to borrow some old CDs. The lady of the house let you in, did she? - Yeah. Lovely, obliging girl. - Yeah. This is Dan, who was one of our favorite actors, who came in for... To audition for some part, ended up with this one, and the next time I saw him, he was actually in Claudia Schiffer's house. So he's rather well-connected in a slightly annoying way. Blimey. - So he's the evil... Do you hang out with supermodels, Bill? - Not... No. Thomas? - No. But you, Hugh...

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Richard Curtis

Okay, this was all shot by the river. What's going on? Oh, yeah, he's a caterer. - Yeah, that's right. How much will you pay me not to reveal the secret of this scene? Taste explosion? No, you can reveal the secret of this scene. Okay, so this highly amusing scene coming up now about catering, with this girl, is a reworking of a highly amusing scene about catering which bore a remarkable resemblance, down to the last line, which was originally in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and which was one of my audition scenes, but which got cut from the final film. But waste not, want not. - Do you know what's most shaming about it is that when I put it in the film, I forgot to change the name on one of the lines. So it said, "Colin says this, Colin says this," and then, "Charles says this," for some reason. So this woman is the most extraordinary actress. I think you'll get to know her very well in the future. I've just worked out why I can never find true love. Why is that? - English girls. Now, this was Abdul's first film, I think, and I have never known a man be happier on a set. Yeah. He was lovely. I really liked him. - He had no nerve. Just always completely perky. Unlike some people. Hugh, over to you. What was my cousin like on the film set? Deep. - Was he? Yeah. Completely unflustered. We're talking about Thomas here, who is related to Hugh. Did you know that? Is that something you'd been talking about at school or were you shocked and ashamed when you found out? -/ think he's played it down. - Did you know? Did you know? I knew, yeah. - Yeah, okay. No, I mean, I wouldn't talk about it if it was me. His great-grandmother... - Yeah. ... Aunt Bala... Bala? -... yes, is my grandmother's sister. There you are. - Nice. And I used to play cricket with his Uncle George. Now these two... This was a very, very brave part to accept. Martin is a star of The Office, and the first time I saw The Office, I just thought, "He just has to be in the next film we do." - Crikey! Yeah. - And I mean he is the most wonderful actor. And Joanna here is so divine. She's marvelous. - And so guilelessly sweet. Yeah. - Nice face, too. She's getting married in a few weeks' time, and I spoke to her about her wedding and she said that her best friend wasn't going to be the bridesmaid because she'd had a breast job and she wasn't having a woman with enormous breasts walking behind her down the aisle. down the aisle. And then I said, "Well, who's taking her place?" And she said, "The dog." She's actually going to have a dog dressed in white. And I said, "If you thought that the people in the audience were going to be distracted "by a large-breasted woman, I promise you, a dog's gonna be worse." Now, this is clearly a sad scene. And the girl in the pictures is a girl that I've been in love with a long time called Rebecca Frayn. Yeah. - She's a director and a writer and her dad's Michael Frayn and her husband is Andy Harris. I managed to get her to agree that we could have all the prettiest pictures of her from her whole life. ls that... I see, in the photographs. - Yeah. Get out. Get out. - Yeah. No, I meant get out. So there we go, that's actually Rebecca as a baby and there's this wonderful... Oh, God, she's lovely.

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Tim Lucas

This would tend to support the view that Clint Eastwood's character is not a continuation of the others in this series, but rather the return of a great heroic archetype, much as Duccio Tessari did with his two Ringo films, A Pistol for Ringo and The Return of Ringo, both made around this same time, with the same cast playing very different characters.

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Tim Lucas

These questions may well have led to Lee Van Cleef being cast in a pair of Italian westerns as the anti-hero Sabata, the so-called man with the gun-side eyes, who wears much the same clothing and whose name means Sabbath. The bartender here is Ricardo Palacios in a very early screen appearance. He went on to much bigger roles. In fact, this same year, he managed to get bit parts in Dr. Zhivago, as well as a funny thing happened on the way to the Forum.

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Tim Lucas

Manco is greeted by a little hustler named Fernando, played by Antonito Ruiz, who the following year would be cast as the youngest son of Stevens, the boy we see riding the mule in circles to operate a watermill in the opening scene. As you know, this film is going to set up a kind of father-son relationship between Mortimer and Manco. And in this relationship between Manco and Fernando, we see a kind of son-grandson relationship taking shape.

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shot purse and a beret and a writing crop. I am the von Stroheim of my book. That's my book. I put the music in if I want music. I cast the book. I describe people I want to do. The movie has nothing to do with the book except it is the basis of the movie. But the vision of it and the mood of it and the color and the real casting for the movie, all of that's the work of the director. What the author of the book has to do

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of a world filled with gods. You know, this guy who had been up there with the gods up in Olympus and then was cast down. But he'd look back and he'd say, ah, there was Jimmy two times, you know. And he'd go, I mean, disreputable characters all, but in his mind as a young person, they were gods. And yeah, great warmth and affection between them all, even though within maybe a year or two they'd be shooting each other. Beautiful.

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You see, you are really writing what is basically a shooting script for the director who will be shooting the movie. It is probably the only way to really write a movie. Of course, you can never do it because it's so rare when that can ever happen. But a film, it was an education to me because a film is so clearly the vision of the director. He picks the cast. He picks the movie. He picks the color and the tone.

25:04 · jump to transcript →

you know, they're not cast-driven. You know, it's about casting who you think is really right for the role, and a lot of times because of various considerations and the cost of movies, you know, getting exactly the right actor for the role isn't necessarily always the first, you know, thing on everyone's mind.

17:05 · jump to transcript →

Sometimes it's about casting an actor that has a particular value that's going to help you get financing for the picture or have a certain name recognition in a particular kind of movie or kind of role. Well, I think the joy of that, too, I look as somebody who works with the financiers on this, the joy of it is that we allow the stars to be really the director and the producer, Jason. I think that those are the stars that we build the world around.

17:28 · jump to transcript →

There we see Josh. He gets into it. In terms of casting, as we talked about Carrie and all the qualities she brings, she's beautiful and she's warm and she's empathetic and she feels reliable. She feels like a reliable narrator and I felt like that was an important quality for Lacey because she's the first adult character to believe in the movie as to what's happening.

23:06 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, I've heard this one before. The first time I saw this was in the editing room, and I actually didn't know that your dick was on camera. I was here on this location, but I was upstairs flirting with the girls upstairs. I think Mindy was just really happy when she showed up on set and there was an actual crew there, as opposed to me and my iPhone. I mean, it didn't really help that during all the auditions you just had that American flag Speedo on. And just kept rubbing butter on my chest. But that set the tone.

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And that was his choice. And Simon respected that. I was like, all right, Larry. You cast filmmakers like Larry and Kelsey in a movie because they can move the story forward with improvisational things like that.

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This role was originally written for... Adam wanted to work with the Angry Video Game Nerd, James Rolfe. But he was busy doing his Angry Video Game Nerd movie and then Adam was like, you know, I'm gonna have to... Well, yeah, and I was like, you know, like, I'm gonna... If I'm gonna cast an actor in this role, he's gonna be off-screen anyways the whole time and I don't wanna let an actor do the camera work because it's just gonna take forever because they're just not gonna understand, you know, what I want and everything.

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did not have a great deal of experience, with the exception of the three officers, Marcin, Ivan, and Zachary. Some of them are stuntmen that were recruited to fill in the seats. We had more seats than we had actors. And a lot of them were cast based solely on their faces. I had about 200 recruits of different levels of acting experience.

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I sent the faces to Eric, who really had the world of submarines in his head. I said, just from these, pick the ones that you feel are of the appropriate age and bearing for their different positions on the boat. And Eric sent me his selections of all of these actors. And regardless of their level of acting experience, I cast them for the simple thing that Eric said. Each one of these guys has a face that says...

2:46 · jump to transcript →

All the faces are great. And I remember what Chris likes to do when he's editing is work on a scene almost completely silent. And when I sketched out an assembly of this scene, I remember we used to watch it silent just to enjoy the feeling of pressure that we were getting from the cast. You should talk about the sweat con levels as well. Yeah, talk about the sweat con levels. So throughout the script of this scene,

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I always like to use a lot of improvisation when we rehearse and big, long improvisations. And what we did in this sequence in Lake Tahoe in Godfather Part II is we had the cast there a couple of weeks right on that location. And I went around and said, okay, this is...

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A playwright, I think he wrote A Hat Full of Rain, and a fabulous improvising actor and just a wonderful character. Well, you know, kind of right up there with the people from the cast of the first film. I believe he had a nomination for this picture. I'm not sure, but I think he did.

30:01 · jump to transcript →

of the arch-villain Fanucci, played by wonderful actor Gaston Moschini. Of course, in my mind, I had no assurance that Robert De Niro was really gonna work out in this audacious casting idea to have some young contemporary actor portray Marlon Brando at an equivalent age, so it's one thing now that the film is

47:00 · jump to transcript →

especially the geography above ground, is all completely accurate. And I'll talk a little bit more about that later on when we get to it. Again, this is a set. And one of the things that's so amazing about this picture, well, there's so many things amazing about it, starting with the casting. That guy who's at the board is a guy named Robert Wheel.

16:05 · jump to transcript →

And I think it just, the casting of Shaw and bringing that aspect of the character to a mercenary soldier, I thought was a just nice little choice. Somebody once said to me, a successful movie is all or are all the little things you do right. Well, you know, in casting somebody like Shaw and then Matthau and Hector Elizondo and Martin Balsam, et cetera, et cetera, these actors bring a lot of the character's life

22:39 · jump to transcript →

and um the buck stops the unit goes oh shit um but the character is playing in the movie is named warren lasalle which is a far more waspy version than the name of the character in the book which was murray lasalle um and you know at the time especially if you were casting out of new york if you were casting wasps you would cast tony roberts or william devane uh again uh guys who um

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And without understanding that, you didn't understand most of the story. That's the kind of line that you later realize is so important and only when you consult people. Here, of course, is our wonderful Patrick. I should talk a little bit about casting and how we first found Patrick, but first I'd like to talk about Emil Artelino, also...

6:43 · jump to transcript →

We spent days and days rehearsing the dirty dancing steps, and we had a theory. We had eight dirty dancers who we had cast in New York, and Kenny Ortega, our wonderful choreographer, and I had danced for them, and we'd hired these kind of gypsy dancers who were great, who you will see. And then we had a whole crew of dancers here in North Carolina, and we, for three days, shot the dirty dancing sequence. When...

13:58 · jump to transcript →

Jennifer is absolutely wonderful. We had had a camera running in the dance department all the time that we were doing rehearsals, which was very useful, because when Jennifer went back to dance, she said, I was never that bad, and we had to show her the early sequences to show her. There is Cynthia, who is so beautiful. I think it's just wonderful. And now comes the sequence that I think everybody remembers so well, when a baby comes up. Now, we were talking about casting earlier,

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So, yes, this is the footage of Charles Dance's character approaching, finding the Ripley character on the beach. For this scene, we at Amalgamated, with our U.S. and British crew, had to build a replica of Sigourney Weaver. And it was based on a life cast of her, a head cast only. She had just had a baby when we had a chance to do it. That's actually-- I believe that that is an actress, although I can't tell if that's a stand-in or our dummy. But that, of course, is Sigourney Weaver. But she had told us that she would be losing weight, so we had to... She had just had the baby and we had to extrapolate what her body would look like, and so you can see how accurate it looks in these shots. There it is. There. That looks just like Sigourney. It's funny, because we really labor over a lot of these things and that's the real Sigourney. So I think that's about it for the dummy. But it was a beautiful sculpture. Gary Pollard, who is a very talented British sculptor, sculpted that and it was used to save Charles Dance's back. So that he could carry Sigourney. Those are all the little lice. They're actually crickets, I believe, that ended up in Tom's suit. Because the crickets were all over the place and when Tom was wearing the alien suit, he had them crawling down his neck and into his briefs and all that. And in fact, there's a fake ox here, coming up, that was covered with the crickets as well. And even when we shipped all of our stuff back to LA months later, we opened the crate and there were full-grown crickets in the ox's body. So they're very hardy and tenacious little-- Just like the alien, I guess.

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The light coming from the top was a /K Zenon lamp, which gives you very straight beams, which I thought would be quite a good idea. I shot it up through a mirror because you can't tilt them down or the condenser burns. But we had a mirror above the set and I shined it from the floor onto the mirror. This autopsy scene was a favorite of Fincher's, too, because we had created a body of Newt that had multiple layers of tissue, skin and musculature that could be cut through, and the bones opened up. It's a lot of graphic coverage that's not in the final movie. The body of Newt was actually based on... Alec and I had done a life cast of Carrie Henn during Aliens, and while we were in London Bob Keen's shop actually had a casting of the head. We were able to get that and remold it, so we were able to duplicate what the actress had looked like some five or six years previously. There is intercutting here with the real girl as well. She has a lot of fuzz on her face. - Yeah. Backlit fuzz.

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And the warden - was that Brian Glover? Is that who that is? - was a wrestler or something? Cos I know all the British guys on the crew were very excited to see him. They loved him cos he was a wrestler. And everybody was excited from him being in American Werewolf in London, and doing his lines over and over. That's right. - "That's enough." "That's enuff." I think by this time I'd said "Why can't we see the lamp, guys?" And we pulled it into the shot. It had a sort of curious bluey-green feel to it, which I kind of re-echoed in the close shots. This is Lance Henriksen. I bought the big winding staircase from this movie. I had it shipped home and I put it in my house. That big cast-iron staircase. That big cast-iron staircase. The decision to go away from the ox as a vehicle for the birth of the alien was, as I recall, in our postproduction phase, because generally it was felt that an ox is sort of a cumbersome, slow, non-threatening animal. And that a faster-moving four-legged animal, more aggressive animal would be a more interesting host for the alien and that if it had picked up any of its host's characteristics it would be better if it came, for instance, from a Rottweiler than from a beast of burden, which was probably a good move. Although all of this stuff with the ox has much more scope to it, which I love. And there's always something about the... When you go back in and retroactively change a script, it's like a house of cards. If you can keep the whole thing from collapsing that's great. But somehow, sometimes little changes make it a difference. And not always for the better. But it's understandable. I think that the creature... You know, an ox... An ox alien... Eh, you know. Not very interesting. But it's actually quite a nice thing and it was weighted very... We built it so that it had an armature in it that we could just add more weight to it. Sandbags and what have you. It really was weighing at probably about 300 pounds for this scene, because it had to... This actor's kicking it. It can't just bounce around like a foam teddy bear.

23:29 · jump to transcript →

That was cool. Are you sure you brought enough guys? My favorite of the arrests, Benicio del Toro. Yeah, with the little steel drum in there. I was actually adamantly against the casting of Benicio in this film. And if you ever read the script and see the changes that we made because of the character that he created completely from thin air, you'll see that I was totally wrong in my instincts. No, but, uh...

5:49 · jump to transcript →

This was... The shot, almost exactly the way I envisioned it when I wrote it. Now, to the left is... To the left is you, and to the right is David Duncan, who's a dear friend of ours from New Jersey. Who was cast five minutes before the scene. Before the scene, and he's the one speaking. He's actually doing the talking. Yeah. And it was interesting, because I said, are you nervous? Because he knew all the actors from their work, and all of a sudden they parade in front of him, and I said, are you nervous? And he said...

8:01 · jump to transcript →

I think he sort of knew how important the line was to me in that scene. And he, without any sort of insistence on my part, Benicio ended up working the line into his character. Me and Fenster heard about a little job. Why don't you just calm down? What do you care what he has to say? I've never understood why he's telling him to calm down. I cast Gabriel in my head off the line.

14:46 · jump to transcript →

And that did generate some talk, debate, mainly because it felt like something different. It was definitely a throwback to prior films such as Indeed the Key or Salon Kitty for the 1940s Nazi Germany setting. And for the cast. I mean, Brass has always...

15:07 · jump to transcript →

made interesting casting choices. And definitely Black Angel is one of the most bizarre. You have an actress like Anna Galena, very different from kind of the brass actresses. And then a soap opera actor like Gabriel Garco. So that definitely generated a lot of attention, although it didn't generate significant box office takings. Yeah.

15:36 · jump to transcript →

Carla Cipriani and we commented obviously on the fact that as most people know she was most often than not this continuity or script supervisor for her husband although we we know that she she was also very much involved in the casting in the pre-production and even in the locations but it is first with the frivolous Lola

24:48 · jump to transcript →

Ted Tally

I went to New York with Dino, and I was very nervous. This was Tony, Anthony Hopkins. The thing I did know and what I was confident about was the type of movie I wanted to make. Like I said, I went in there knowing the tone of the movie, my approach to the movie, how I wanted to not show any of the gore. I didn't want to make a horror film. I wanted to make a film that was psychological, emotional, and smart. That was what was on the page. And the only scene that Tony had a concern with when I sat with him was this scene right here. Tony was concerned that as originally written, his attack on Graham here was too graphic. By the way, it's an interpretation because 10 directors would direct a scene in 10 different ways and show various degrees of violence. It's about showing the details of the guts falling out of his stomach, or the blood, how much blood to show. And I chose to play it mostly on their faces. Once the attack happens... Here's my little homage to Silence. You see the... - I see the bug. You like that. So I chose to play the violence part of this scene on their faces. I love this book. This is an original. My prop guy, Brad, found this original book from France, Larousse... When I read it, I had no idea what the hell it was. It's the bible of cookbooks. - Yes, I learned that quickly. He found this real old French cookbook. There was a lot of dialogue about how do we sell his moment? It's really just a subliminal thing. It wasn't really supposed to be so pointed where it was like, "Oh, sweetbreads." I thought sweetbreads was brains but it's not. It's actually... Thyroid. -... thymus. I learned so much about anatomy on this film. If you work on a Lecter movie, you learn a lot about cooking. I thought Edward was fantastic. There is a tremendous intensity of performances in this movie. And really a dream cast as Brett already said. If you could have anybody in the world for these parts and be lucky enough to get them. It's pretty much what happened to us. Great actors want to play good characters. They want to play great characters and all of these characters, down to Freddy Lounds, and other smaller roles, were just written so well. They were interesting and dynamic. And these actors were interested in playing this. To convince these actors to do a third in the series, all that went out the window when they read the script. Certainly once they started working. There's our cold opening. I'm very proud of this title sequence because it was actually done two days before we had to lock picture. My editor, Mark Helfrich actually was the brainchild behind this because... You re-shot the journal here in a very interesting way. Initially, this was done in a much more straightforward way with the images very flat against the screen. Yes, a lot of times. Mark is kind of... Everybody on my team, from my AD to my production designer, are filmmakers. Mark is a filmmaker in his own right and he just understands the visuals and storytelling. I love how, you know... But this was written. - Yes, it was. But the way that the camera roams over these pages and when we go in very close and it gets grainy, the camera movement left to right, up and down, is all not scripted, of course. This is something I don't really have the patience for. Mark kind of took this book that he was fascinated by. I think he has a copy of it in his closet at home. He just knew every page, every frame and went with Dante and literally just shot. This is a wonderful opportunity. This kind of title sequence is sort of old-fashioned in a way. But it's a wonderful opportunity for a screenwriter to get information in quickly to cover a lot of ground between the arrest of Lecter and where we are when the movie is going to start. Covering a period of several years, you are doing that without any dialogue just by these images. It's a very useful shorthand. Danny did the same thing that Ted did with the script in this sequence that Mark did with the visuals in this sequence. Danny did the same thing with the music. I think the music here is so fantastic. It's very much like a Bernard Hermann score, which I knew was a big inspiration for Danny. Danny is a big fan of Bernard, and this was his chance. He's done darker scores, but they've had a kind of lightness, or comedic darkness to it. Danny did something here that kind of made people's skin crawl in the theater, like, "You're in for it. "If you're gonna sit through this movie, you'll experience some stuff. "Shit's gonna go down."

6:02 · jump to transcript →

Ted Tally

So that sequence, those two minutes of the movie, which could have been a very boring, dull sequence. I had a long conversation with Kristi Zea. It was wonderful. She called me up and said, "This book of Dolarhyde's. "What does it look like? What's in it? "How is the handwriting? What kind of photograph?" We had a long conversation which for a screenwriter... You don't often get a call from the production designer to talk about a prop. It was a wonderful opportunity to be part of the design of the movie in that little section. You've got a beautiful setup here, Will. This was actually in the Florida Keys. You know why I'm here? Was it Marathon? Yeah, I can guess. The location is meant to be Marathon, Florida. Dino wanted us to shoot in North Carolina because he had studios there and a house on the beach or Malibu because it's close to his house in Beverly Hills. But the truth is, I wanted to stay true. When I said I chose the tone, I'd really chosen the tone of the book, going back to the book. Everybody here was honoring the book. We really gave a lot of respect to Thomas' book. Tom Harris is a wonderful writer. When you're doing an adaptation like this, it's a great resource to everybody to be able to pick up the book, as you can go into more details than the screenplay. It's a help to both the production design and the actors, who can go back and find out details of motivation. It's helpful to everybody to have that bible to refer to. So when it said Marathon, Florida, I tried to stay true to that and actually go to the location in Marathon, Florida. It just felt like it was the tone and even the location, like Grandma's house in the same description of the rural area where it was, and the type of house it was. It was an old-age home once, which is really back-story, but Kristi incorporated that into the design. I was so happy that she and Ted really stayed true to the tone of the book visually as well when it described the locations. This was so much fun being down here, by the way. It was the end of the shoot, and we were just down there on the beach. This was probably the hardest scene I shot with these two guys. In what way? Because it's exposition? Anything with exposition... -/s tough. It's tough to make it sound like real conversation. But honestly, there's not a line in this movie that I'm not proud of. I mean I can't say there's a line... It was a tight script. We did cut a few lines and a few parts from scenes but Brett and I actually worked quite a bit on the script before the production started, and we had it pretty tight. And the shooting stayed quite faithful to the script. I have to say that every scene was hard for me because I'm used to scenes with not much dialogue. I, unfortunately, am a very talky screenwriter. So it was a clash of cultures. Coming from being a playwright, I guess. There is a lot of dialogue in this movie, I tell you. And it was not a single-spaced script. It's a long script, and I kept saying, "Make them talk faster. "Don't cut the thing, just make them talk faster." Ted's advice to me was, "Brett, when you're happy, "ask the actors for a take where they talk double speed." And I did that. Probably that's all the takes that Mark ended up using in the editor's room. He kept calling me, saying, "This movie will be four hours long "If you do not get them to speak faster." The thing you run into as a screenwriter, even with the best actors, is that you try to pace a scene to fit within an act structure and fit within the entire screenplay. But then actors wanna take very long, dramatic pauses. Actors want to look down and up, across the room, at each other, and finally say the line. - A lot of pausing. And that's what you're up against when trying to time out the length of the scene or act. I wanna say something about these actors. Once I got Edward Norton, I used Edward to get another actor. Once I got Ralph Fiennes, I used him, I got Emily Watson. - You parlayed them into each other. I said, "Philip Seymour Hoffman, I'm getting Mary-Louise Parker." I knew each one, who they were a fan of. I used them against each other to get them in the movie. I literally thought I'd be able to walk onto the set, and it would be the easiest movie I'd ever made because I had these brilliant actors. I could just say, "Action." I read one article or something about this movie that said this was the most distinguished cast that's been assembled in any movie in the last 20 years. But the truth is, it was probably the hardest movie I'd ever made because the smarter the actor, the more experience they have. It's a myth that these great actors don't need direction. They want direction more than any other actor. They want direction, but they have ideas of their own because in the end, it's up to them. They are the ones whose face is filling that whole screen. And they have to absolutely believe what they are doing, or they can't convince an audience of it. What I'm trying to say is, there was a lot of dialogue going on. A lot of intellectual discussions. And each of these actors are not only smart actors, but they're highly intelligent, all smarter than myself and... A lot of them have also directed or even written as well. They all had an opinion. And my job, I felt like it was my job to save the script. This was a script that worked to me. We had a table reading of it. It was fantastic. And Ted was

11:13 · jump to transcript →

Ted Tally

It's hard to pull off this stunt with rising excitement, meanwhile. I'm amazed by him in this scene. It is a very hard thing to pull off. This is an example of a scene that my editor, Mark, was particular about, collaborating with me and telling me, "Brett, how are you gonna pull this off?" I said, "I don't know, I'll just shoot it." He had me bring Edward to the edit room and took a video camera and shot the scene for me, before showing the way it might intercut since there are devices in here which are the flashes, and you've seen it in hundreds of films and I didn't want it to be false. He said, "I have an idea of how to do this." He shot the scene for me before I shot it. It was a great reference. We adjusted and tweaked things, but this is all protecting the cliché. You can see the power that editing brings to a sequence like this. It startles you and moves the story forward in a way that the story is always a leap or two ahead of the audience. And pulling them along behind it. That's a function of great editing. It is important here because once the audience is ahead of you, you're in trouble, they are sleeping. It's the same thing on The Silence of the Lambs, I used to worry that we were cutting so many tiny beats that the audience would be confused. And Jonathan Demme said, "Better if they're confused "for five minutes than bored for five seconds." And this film is very tightly edited. Gentlemen. Ladies. This is what the subject's teeth look like. The impressions came from bite marks on Mrs. Leeds. This degree of crookedness... Here we... Where was this? - This was shot in LA. This is shot in LA in a government building that the city gave us. Here's Bill Duke. - He's one of my favorite actors. Again, an example of the meticulousness that Brett brings to casting. These wonderful actors who could be the stars of their own movies, who are playing supporting parts in this. I literally called them and begged them to be in the movie. I love actors. I love great actors. I spend as much time on the smaller roles as I do on the bigger roles. It's important because an actor who has one line can take you out of the movie and hurt it in my opinion. It goes back to the whole question of tone. A single wrong note will make an audience self-conscious, and pull them out of the movie. This film is the opposite of any of the films I've ever done. Family Man, that had dramatic moments, was still a comedy. So you can go farther with realism, but this especially, when it's dealing with the FBI, forensics, and scientific... -[t has to be grounded in reality. - Very grounded. In order for the audience to accept the extravagant parts of the movie, the more baroque characters in the movie like Dolarhyde and Lecter, scenes like this have to be very credibly rooted in police reality, in procedural reality. Would you give that up? The other thing also is, when we're talking about the tone, the choice... I was thinking about It, why I really chose not to show, not only because of Silence, because even Silence might've shown more violence than this film. Really, because the only scene we have is the biting of the lips. We certainly tried to hold it down. But I think the reason was because when I went to the FBI at Quantico and started looking at all these visuals of serial killers' work, it was so disturbing to me. It really bothered me. I said, "Why do I want to do this to audiences? "It'll completely turn them off." As with Silence, what you really want to do with this movie is a detective story. You really want to do a psychological thriller, a detective story. You're not trying to make a horror movie at all. Sometimes they're referred to as horror movies. I've never understood that. To me, these are thrillers, detective movies. In this scene, Harvey's Jewishness really comes out. "You're the light of my life." He sounds like my grandmother. I love that line. I can't answer more questions. Here's Philip Seymour Hoffman, a great actor. Who we should not have been lucky enough to get for this small part. Yeah. He actually wanted to play Dolarhyde, and I wanted Ralph to do it. I had dinner with him, and then called them back a week later. He wanted to play Dolarhyde, and his schedule wouldn't let him do a bigger part anyway. And then I called him and said, "I think you should do Freddy Lounds." He said, "Let me read it again." Then he called and said, "I'll do it." He would've been good as Dolarhyde, in a different way. He would've been amazing. - I mean, a great actor is a chameleon. Remember? With the tubes hanging out of me? Forget that prick. This was a very difficult scene, too. This was difficult because... And this was a scene where Edward had a Iot of input as we were revising the script before we shot. Edward said, "This is a difficult transition for this character to make." Here he's out of the loop, he doesn't want to be involved in the investigation. He's sort of done a favor for his friend and mentor, Jack Crawford, but he doesn't want to get deeper into this 'cause of psychological and physical scars. Because of his commitment to his family, he doesn't want to do this. Now he has to do the most difficult thing he could possibly do, which is to confront Lecter again. There was a lot of back-and-forth and a lot of revision, and a lot of talk about how we might credibly motivate this transition in the story. Edward was actually very helpful here with his thoughts. I think it works. Because it's not the cliché of the guy jumping back... Getting back on the horse and showing off. I'm proud of how it turned out. Again, it was really Mark's editing of the scene. It's also Harvey's matter-of-fact performance here. It could, potentially, have been a real glitch in the story. Where the audience says, "He wouldn't go back to see Lecter again. "He's scared to death of Lecter."

21:36 · jump to transcript →

One other interesting note about this scene, that is a real keg with real beer, and Jacob Pitts, our delightful Cooper, really liked these scenes a lot. It's what we like to call method acting. That's one of the things we learned. Or simply drinking. - Aren't they the same? I guess we should introduce our cast, now that you've been watching for ten minutes. Scotty Mechlowicz as Scott Thomas. - Which is why we cast him. Make it very easy on ourselves. The beautiful and talented Michelle Trachtenberg as Jenny. And Travis Wester is her twin, Jamie. And that's Jacob Pitts going off to take a leak. And this was another one of our delightful cameos that we got because we were in Prague. Yep, that's Matt Damon, which... Everyone in the theater sort of goes, "It can't be. Is it? Is it really?" Why is his head shaved? He was actually in Prague shooting Brothers Grimm for Terry Gilliam at the time. And we actually went to college with Matt years ago. So we've been sort of friendly ever since. And he was in Prague and we asked him to do a day of work for us, and he agreed. The biggest favor ever. - Thank you, thank you, thank you, Matt. Yeah, Matt's just hilarious here. Matt's not watching this DVD. We're going to make him watch it. That'll be another commentary. That would be the biggest favor he's ever done. But the band was actually started by some other friends of ours from college. I guess this is as good a time as any... A couple of them were of Matt Damon's roommates in college. The band Lustra... - One of them. The band Lustra, good guys. And they wrote the song, which is really fun. We've known each other since college. I'm going to just talk now 'cause no one's listening to what I'm saying, because there's a naked girl on the screen. I wasn't listening. What were you talking about? Now this, in the unrated version that we're watching, she started off topless. In the theatrical release, if you saw it, we actually cut a different version where she started off with her top on and Cooper talks her out of her top. - He convinced her to take it off. And it was very strange, sort of, when you get into this whole nudity thing. Obviously, it's a hot tub scene, but somehow when her top was on and he talked her out of it, while it was a very exciting moment that he talked her out of it, it oddly made her dumber, even though she is sort of a stereotypical dumb blonde. - Right. And we always liked it this way, the way you're seeing it. We liked the scene to answer the question, "What is beyond gratuitous?" That's the answer. - There it is. And there they are. The answers. The other stuff we added back into the scene is just more of him screwing around with her. Because, to us, once you're at the nudity, it's how far he goes. This scene... - It's not about nudity. No, this scene was always about the crazy extent to which he got her to play with herself, as opposed to just getting her to take her top off. By the way, the banner in the background originally... This is what happens when you work in Prague. It's a big congratulations banner. The first day when we got there, it just said "congratulation," like one singular congratulation, which is a word we didn't know existed. Sort of a funny story about this scene, which, hopefully, we can tell. We were actually rewriting another movie, which I guess we'll leave nameless, that had a hot tub scene in it and we came up with this idea, which was the fact that a guy saying, "You have a smudge. You've got something on you." And we were really enjoying what we were doing so much that we didn't put it in that script. And we're like, "We'll use it one day." And here it is. Screw it. The movie was called Out Co/d, I think. Yeah, exactly.

7:55 · jump to transcript →

The other thing I was gonna mention... We're constantly behind in the mentioning. Part of the reason we ended up in Prague and actually ended up with Allan was because of Neno. - Yeah. Neno Pecur, who was Croatian. We hired him as an art director to scout Prague and to scout the real European locales before we knew we were going to Prague. Basically, he would go to Paris and go, "This is what it really does look like." Then he went to Prague and said, "We could do something like this here." And from his pictures, we used some of his actual locations that he took photos of and made the decision to go to Prague. And then Neno has worked with Allan for many years as his art director, and he helped us get Allan. The two of them, their team... They brought Bill... Cimino. Our set decorator. - Cimino. That's right. Just fantastic and along with the guys from Prague. I think it's now time to mention, though, at the robot scene, which was the first time... We've been writers for a long time and you sort of go, "Look, I think we know what this is gonna be. This is gonna be really funny. It's gonna be a slow-motion kung fu fight scene between two people being robots." You write it and it seems funny. There's the old joke about the writer writes "Rome burns," and the director has to realize that. We were on the spot here because it was easy when we wrote it to just hand it off, but now we handed it off to ourselves. Actually, this is one of the things... - At one point, we cut this, actually. At one point... - We cut it from the script. We talked about cutting it. We were afraid we didn't know how to realize it. We just were like, "What is this? This could be bad." Left it in for a table read. - We left it in for the table read. And it got such huge laughs at the table read that we realized, "We gotta at least try and shoot it." We then initiated a worldwide search for a robot man. This is J.P. Manoux, who's an incredibly talented actor. We found him here in Los Angeles. Yeah. We looked at all these mimes... We looked at real French guys. - ...weird acrobats, and French guys whatever, and, of course, a guy from LA who was actually a friend of a friend and was in the Groundlings, of course, ended up being a really good guy. He is just outstanding. - And he came in with this ability... I mean, a lot of what you're seeing, like him laughing and just his attitude as a French guy, was in his audition. We were also very lucky that Scott... - Scott, exactly. ...knew how to robot. I guess Scott grew up watching Shields and Yarnell... No, no. J.P. - Was that J.P.? Scott had an acting teacher... - Who was in the Barney costume. Yeah. - Okay. And we went there on a Saturday to basically work it out. And we had blocked off an entire Saturday. We choreographed the fight with little bits of Enter the Dragon and some Matrix in about... Twenty minutes. - Yeah, like, 20 minutes. And the first time we did it in Our crazy wide shot... because we knew to get a master... the crew laughed, and we were like, "Oh, okay." It was also-- This was pretty early in the schedule. And I think it was maybe the first time the crew thought, "Okay, these guys actually know what they're doing." Like, "This is something we haven't seen." Wrongly, but they thought that. - But they assumed it.

29:59 · jump to transcript →

We're in the French restaurant. You cannot tell by looking at everybody, but it is over 100 degrees in there. They turned off the air conditioning at this restaurant. No one told them to, but they thought they would help us by turning off the air conditioning. And the kids are just sweating. I mean, you can't even... If a take went wrong, we'd have to stop. You couldn't just keep rolling because they're dripping. And we actually had a guy, this poor English actor that we cast, who was actually really funny, who came in and was so hot and sweating so badly that he just couldn't focus. It's in the deleted scenes. You'll see some very funny scenes with a French waiter and some funny French waiter flashbacks. We just had to cut it, 'cause it wasn't... Featuring Jim Morrison and General Patton. The other thing... It'll come up again later, but them putting the food down leads to the food map joke, which will be coming. I'll tell that story later. It's good to-- We'll earmark it. - A little preview. This is the main Prague train station. And our production... - Again Allan and... Allan and Neno dressed it, so that people actually got off the train, a couple of people, and thought they were in Paris 'cause they saw the signs and they were very weirded out 'cause they had gotten on a train in, like, Hungary somewhere and they thought they were in Paris mistakenly. Michelle being a fantastic sport. The first of many indignities that she was forced to suffer. And Coca-Cola being a great sport. This is what shooting in a train station is about. Another one of these, "We are idiots, we don't know, so we'll set a scene in a train station." If you notice in the background... This is a game Alec likes to play: train, no train. Okay. This is my little game in this scene. Behind him, green train. That train is gone in the next shot. - Okay. No train. But who cares about the train, I mean... Train. - Again, the lesson learned... It's my game, I'll play it. - I know, but look at these backgrounds. No train. - These great, deep backgrounds. We are in a train station in Europe. We are not in Vancouver. No train. Train. - Michelle's scream turn is one that... She's just... - She did it fantastically. Different train. - We caught that attitude a little bit from our own little Se/nfe/d experience. It's what we like to call a Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Elaine move. The sort of being sweet, screaming and then going back to sweet. And Buffy was a hilarious show. - Can't say enough about Michelle. And I don't know if Michelle always got a chance... You know, she was sort of a supporting character on that show. And on this, she got to really shine with her comedy. Anyway, here's the maps. What I wanted to say is this is a Raiders of the Lost Ark map parody, which is a joke that is about, I don't know, ten years old. It's something we wanted to do a million years ago and again something we saved. There's the Jackie Collins book again. And the headline, "Merde Alors! L'Hooligan! I actually-- I don't know if I even told you guys this, but I was at an Iron Maiden concert about six months ago and I saw a guy wearing that Deep South Monster Truck 1987 shirt. Was that guy you? - Or whatever it is-- Rally '79. No, it wasn't me, but I envied him. Fred Armisen. - As what we... In the script, he's called the Creepy Italian Guy. Not, as some people wrote down in the test screenings, the Train Homo. We actually call him Creepy Italian Guy. And, again, just production-wise, we're shooting on a moving train here, which is yet another of our naive mistakes. - Do not shoot on a moving train. We thought, "Just put them on a train. It'll be easy." Just the most cramped quarters, limited angles. We actually shot this one scene in three different compartments. We had a compartment where we could look one way, a compartment where we could look another way... We pulled out walls so we could shoot different ways. And then we had one compartment where we were shooting in, one that we were shooting out. It was madness. - Plus... Fred, by the way, is just so funny in this. We, last minute... - We also... I'm sorry. I do wanna say that we also then shot it both moving and then did other shots not moving so that we could do the light effects of the tunnel. Which is a poor man's process, because there's no tunnel. This is obviously on a moving train. - 'Cause you can see the window. And then when we do the shots where it goes from light to dark or from dark to light, we pulled the train inside a barn and blacked it all out and then did the lighting effect by hand. So, the Creepy Italian Guy, Fred Armisen from Saturday Night Live... This was another thing where we originally went into this thinking we will find a genuine Italian guy. And, again, we searched the world for a real Italian guy. A lot of Europeans are not funny. They just didn't get the joke. - It's a language problem. They were simply performing the words of the script, but didn't necessarily have any idea what they actually meant. And Fred is someone who's just fantastic on SNL. That little shrug is awesome. So, that shot, for instance, is inside. I think we hired him... - And that's inside. We hired him on a Sunday and he was out there on Tuesday. Yeah. - So, really amazing. And, again, these are all these little touches that he added. I think Travis, who plays Jamie, is fantastic with him. They were a great pair. This was something we never landed on. - I don't think we ever got this right. We had a bunch of different things we shot for this darkness sequence. We had a lot of flashing lights and weird little things of Fred in various stages of undress. - What was going on in the dark. In the end, it was just undercutting... - This end reveal. Which, again... - And, I think, for the unrated version, we put this back. For the theatrical release, we kind of cut right here somewhere. No, exactly. - And then, for this one, we decided to let it roll. - This is something we just enjoyed. It's just that a guy with no pants sees more people and goes in. Actually, that's where we're sitting. That's the compartment where we are sitting with the monitor. To do it all over again, one thing that might've been enjoyable was had we come running out of the compartment. Just, the idea that the man with no pants... This is the very first thing we shot. - First shot ever. It's actually an interesting way to see our cast. The train revealing our cast and us seeing them for the first time. It was a neat experience. - A horrible-looking little train station. The first time we visited it was in winter and just looked awful. And, again, Allan and his guys just came in there... And I think, actually, the manager of the train station asked them to leave everything. Left it all, those flower boxes and the shutters, and just turning it into this beautiful, little French countryside place. That was always a fun shot, where he lays down and jumps back into it. You know, and again, day one, we must've done 30 takes on everything on day one. One of the things about comedy... - We also shot close-ups of everything. Every angle. Everything. - This is more toward the end. This is one of the two days we shot outside of Prague. This is not a great example, because this is more towards the end, but I also think we screwed up here. That's the thing, you look back... - We did it all in one shot. Which I think is the way to do this. We did do it all in one shot, but... One of the things, I think... When I look back at the movie, a lot of our starts of scenes, I find we... Definitely something we were never thinking enough about. So that you're kind of going, "We're going to this beach." And then they're just sort of walking. And maybe had we come off a sign... - That was one of my favorite things. Definitely a fun joke. - Also, it was freezing. You can see Scott... - It's freezing. The gray sky. Wish we'd gone in and maybe colored the sky blue a little more. 'Cause the sun does come out. But just something that maybe... If the camera had moved or something to kind of say "beach," as opposed to that weird stock shot of nothing and then this. And this scene seems to get a lot of people in an uproar. Everyone sort of sees it-- and people... There we are. - Right. This is one of the two days we shot outside of Prague. This is in Rostock, in former East Germany. This was apparently one of Hitler's favorite beach resorts. It's very close to where Wernher von Braun used to develop the V-2 rocket. Wall of cock. - Speaking of V-2 rockets... Everyone seems to laugh at this scene and also go... It is everyone's favorite and least favorite. In all the test screenings we did, it was the most favorite scene and also the least favorite scene. And I think a lot of it had to do with... There were a lot of, like, 18, 19-year-old guys who felt obliged to put it down because they needed to state that they weren't gay. We originally started off shooting it with sort of an idea towards an Austin Powers kind of a thing. You know, you could even see a couple of guys with ridiculously long cameras and stuff trying to cover penises. - Kind of strategically... And once we were there, it just looked dumb and we realized, to some extent... I mean, to us, the only rule is ever: "What's the funniest thing?" And, ultimately, 50 penises was the funniest thing. Everyone goes, "How did you get those guys to take their clothes off?" It's like, "This is Germany. We showed up with a camera. They were already naked." The most surprised people on the set were those 50 naked German guys when they found out they got paid. It was really weird. Like, we'd take a ten-minute break and usually if there's any nudity on an American set, people dive into their robes. These guys were just letting it hang out. If these guys could've taken more clothing off, they would've. We had this amazing German AD that day. Andreas. - Andreas. Who just yelled at them and yelled at their penises. By the way, Michelle, who was very nervous about the bikini scene, couldn't look more beautiful. She was, you know, "The bikini scene, the bikini scene." And it was sort of this big thing in her mind, which... She was nervous about it for no reason 'cause she... But I think also David went out of his way to make her feel comfortable, and also to light her beautifully. Also, again, this was very near the end of the shoot. And I think there was more of a comfort level with the crew, too, and the main camera team. The comfort level was bothered a lot by the fact that Jacob, once he took his pants off for that first naked shot, wouldn't put them back on 'cause he knew it bothered everybody. I think he really enjoyed how nervous he made everyone. And poor Eggby. Poor Eggby had to go up there with the light meter. That guy-- There was a lot of protest, a lot of discussion about the old man yelling, "Chica, chica." Which... For whatever reason, it's one of our favorite things. You get a shot of him. There he is again. "Chica, chica." Which always gets a nice rise out of the crowd. This is the most beautiful shot in the movie. Not shot by us. Shot by... - Gary Wordham. ...Gary Wordham and his unit, his second unit. And it's just absolutely beautiful. And here we are on another train. But, again, we are... Because it's a night shot, we are faking this. It's a poor man's process. Occasional lights moving on the side. Because we could not do a moving train at night. So, we are inside for all of this. SO, this is, like, our fourth version of a train car. And, originally, there was... You'll see in the original script. There was another train in the deleted scene. There was another train scene of them running onto a train. This had happened earlier. It was just too many train scenes and the movie just not moving. That, again, was another one of the lessons we learned. As a writer and then a director, there are lots of things on the page that are really funny, but sometimes, when you're actually then watching the movie, "Why are they still in Paris? Why is it taking so long? Why have they not gotten to the next place?" There were too many train scenes. That one flew out, this one was in. Even if the individual scenes are funny, sometimes the cumulative effect of all these funny things makes it worse. - That's exactly it. This is a joke we created after we had shot what we did. Thanks to our music supervisors extraordinaire, John and Patrick Houlihan, who found this amazing music that was playing under this fantasy. They found this piece of music and said, "What do you think of this?" We thought it was hilarious. We said, "What is it?" And they said, "Well, it's David Hasselhoff." We thought it was so much funnier if you knew that it was David Hasselhoff. So we were like, "Is there a video?" "Yes, there is." And not only is there a video, but this is the video. And it looks something like this. Which is incredible. - That is a real David Hasselhoff video. We're still not sure whether David Hasselhoff knows that his likeness appears in this movie. I think we licensed this... - David Hasselhoff, if you're watching this with Matt Damon, thank you. Thank you both. If the two of you are just hanging out and watching this, you were fantastic. But, yeah, the German company licensed it to us and he may or may not know. And Fred back again. Which makes everybody very happy. When we were cutting the TV spots and stuff, we tried to use this lick. It's one of the things that people felt we couldn't put in television spots. We had a really hard time cutting spots that... Even though it's an R movie, I guess spots for TV need to meet both... They have to be G. - They have to be G. 'Cause trailers need to be G. You can't have anything in the commercial that isn't in the trailer. Plus, you also have to meet network standards. So, we had a really hard time putting things in the commercial. - Showing people what's in the movie. Yeah, telling people this is a good movie. Now we're in Amsterdam. This is interesting... Except we are in Prague. - We're still in Prague. This is... Yeah, it's the Kampa section of Prague. Again, one of these early locations, they found this little canal from the original scouting photos. "My God, we can even do Amsterdam there." This is also-- In Prague, there's a very famous bridge called the Charles Bridge, which is basically right above the kids. There are just hordes and hordes of tourists lined up watching this. Yeah, it was like shooting with bleachers there. This was spring, when it was packed with tourists. And this is an example where on the deleted scenes, originally when they arrive, they go to a youth hostel for a very funny scene that we ended up cutting out because, basically, there was too much Amsterdam. They had an adventure and then they had these separate adventures. It's another one of these tough things, where the scene itself was funny, but its overall effect on the movie was negative. And then actually, oddly, if you go back, originally, Amsterdam was actually very different. Originally, in the script we sold, there was a scene where, instead of going to this sex club... - With Cooper. Instead of going to the sex club with Cooper, there was this whole nother scene. Actually, everything was completely different. The original spec script we sold is on the DVD, so you have to go back and check that out. Definitely worth checking out. - By the way, we should mention her. Lucy Lawless. - Lucy Lawless. Just funny, just hilarious, obviously, and gorgeous. The entire crew was just in love with her. So we shot long on these two days. By the way, when we were shooting on these days, you've never seen more grips and crew members holding lights that used to be held by stands and holding fans that used to be hung. Everyone needed to be in this room at this time for some reason. And she also-- She, being from New Zealand, knew our A camera operator, who we should also mention. - Peter McCaffrey. Peter McCaffrey, who is absolutely fantastic. The whole A camera team, our main guys, were just incredible. Just never a problem, and just really patient and wonderful with us. The brownies. I remember these brownies... Michal, our Czech prop man, would always come in and say, "I've got more brownies for you." He'd show up with these piles of different kinds of brownies from every bakery in Prague. Which, oddly, social decorum dictated that we eat. We didn't want to be rude. So we'd start these meetings looking at all these props with all these brownies and by the end, you had chosen a brownie and also eaten it. You weren't sure which one you actually liked. You were sick to your stomach because of the meeting and how badly it went and also because we'd eaten 50 pounds of Czech brownies. This is the lovely and talented Jana Pallaske who we found in Germany. We did casting in... - London. Here. We started in LA. We did casting in New York. We did casting in Chicago, Vancouver, Atlanta, I believe, Miami, and then we went to London, Munich, Berlin, Prague. We had people in Paris. We had people in Italy. - Rome, Paris. She came out of this, and again, this was another area where things moved around in the script. Originally, this was in London. - In the original script, this was Cooper... This was Cooper in London before they met the hooligans. When Scott and Cooper first got to London, they went to a pub and they met these girls, and this was a Cooper scene. Cooper went out in the alley and was getting blown and got robbed. Which happened to a friend of ours, by the way. And we just decided that there was... - Named Out Cold. There was too much... There was too much stuff going on in London, so we moved it to... You wanted to get to the hooligans. And originally in our script, Jamie was with Scott and Jenny at the brownie bar. While Jacob was at the Anne Frank House. We just decided that they should all split up and have their own stories here. And also, what if Jamie has all their money and all their stuff and he's the one who gets robbed... - It seemed like a good plot point. I mean, it is sort of traditional, but with Jamie playing... I'm sorry, with Travis playing Jamie as sort of the somewhat traditional, you know, stick-in-the-mud, him having a little bit of a sexual escapade as opposed to Cooper, who's more lascivious, it became a funnier scene. It also helped Cooper out because Cooper wants sex and he keeps getting... He gets a version of it in this scene, but not what he wanted. Not quite the version that he wanted. - Not what he was expecting. As opposed to going to London immediately, hooking up with a girl. It oddly felt a little strange that we were going to get him together with Jenny at the end of the movie after he had gotten blown in an alley. Also, he's looking for crazy European sex and he got it right off the boat. That is a crazy outfit. - Yeah, that's the sex superhero. She is the sex superhero. As are these guys. - One of these guys is a Czech policeman. Vilem. Guy on the left. - I can't remember what the other guy does. The other guy is a large Czech clown. They were just sweaty and having a ball. Their names are Hans and Gruber, which is a small inside joke, the name of Alan Rickman's character in Die Hard. Hans Gruber. And this is a very odd scene. Anytime you're not actually seeing our two main actors, a lot of this was done second unit. - Like the shot of his ass, the shot of him with the clamps was second unit. We had a limited amount of time with Lucy. We had two days. - That's second unit, not Jacob's hand. So everything that we had to get done with her and him, we did, and then what was really helpful was we edited it... Not we, our editor edited it. - Roger. Oh, yeah, mention him. The whole editing staff, actually. We had them over in Prague with us for reasons like this. Roger Bondelli and his assistant. Marty Heselov. - Marty Heselov and Davis. Davis Reynolds. And basically, he edited what we shot and it allowed us to go... "We need this, we need that." This is things we're missing which we could instruct the second unit to get, such as guy wheeling in cart, close-up of guy doing the shocking. And it did help having the editor there, which was something originally... The editor was not going to be with us in Prague. Very helpful to have the editor there to be able to look at scenes to know what we wanted to change. That-- We're a little behind. That was Diedrich Bader from The Drew Carey Show, who was hilarious. Really funny in Office Space and in 7he Drew Carey Show. And flew all the way out to Prague to help us out and did a day of work. He said the last time he was there, he'd actually been here in '89. He'd gotten drunk, climbed up a statue, fallen down and broken his arm, so he was happy to come back. The pot brownie scene-- It's so funny. When you show them in front of an audience, all the sort of younger kids, just the very fact... The mention of Amsterdam got people to go... And then the fact that they're actually doing pot makes them laugh. This, we were writing on the fly. We realized the scene needed something. He needed to say something embarrassing. So he came up with the gay porno stuff. But we tried, like, three or four things. When he was a little kid, he ate dog poo. "They told me it was a candy bar!" - Really high-class stuff. But this guy, who plays the Rasta guy... - Go Go Jean Michel. ...I think we did probably ten takes with him and he got each line right one time and we ended up using it. But he cuts together great. I'm not sure, when we were doing it, I ever actually thought the microphone was picking up a word he said. Yet, oddly, it was there when we got to the edit room. Helder with his walk-off home run right there. "These are not hash branches." Because I think he had been eating hash branches earlier. Yeah, he was not an actor as much as a man who had smoked a lot of pot. And again, ultimately, this was a longer scene. There was more to do about not being able to name the safe word and the monkey was originally brought out and you just start trimming 'cause, again, you're just in Amsterdam too long. We went into this scene... There was another beat where she brought out golf shoes with big spikes and was hitting him in the ass. - We cut that almost immediately. That we cut on the day we never filmed, because we were way over time. And we ended up shooting... - This actually cuts together great. These few moments. It's a huge charge to see this thing. That is a huge charge. - Then to the f#ugelkenhaimler. The flugelkenhaimler. Gotta mention Jeff Jingle real quick. Jeff created that. - Jeff designed and built that and then came over to Prague with it, traveled with it. How he was not arrested and thrown into jail by the customs people, I don't know. - Just did an amazing job on that. There you can see the Charles Bridge. - Yeah, the Charles Bridge is behind him. We lost out. We should be making these Vandersexxx T-shirts. Someone is selling them on eBay, but they're one color. They're wrong. If you're the person who's making them on eBay, just make them the same way. But it's a fun shirt. You can see all the bugs that are flying around there. We did it as a crew shirt, actually. We gave it out to the crew. Well, this is dawn. We shot all night. This is dawn for dawn. No, no. We shot this... This is dusk for dawn? - This is dusk for dawn. This is the first shot. We were shooting nights on the bridge, and that was the first thing we did, because we were shooting that Jamie thing and we ran out of time 'cause It was getting too dark. If you go to your deleted scenes, you will see a scene that sort of happens right about now, which is Jenny... Michelle Trachtenberg-- saying, "Look, boys, I'll take care of it," and she tries to sort of strip to get them to hitchhike on the autobahn, which is impossible. Again, we were out here on this highway way too long. This is the same deserted highway where we shot the bus driving around. Also, it was freezing. - We were here way too long. It was 30 degrees and drizzling. - This was, again, continuing the rule of every time we tried to do a close-up on Michelle, it rained or hailed. She was such a trouper. Cooper's shirt, by the way, says, "I Love Ping-Pong." This phone joke was interesting. We originally had the first one which took place on the bridge in London, and that always got a good laugh. And this one never really gets that good a laugh. But there's a third one later, the comedy rule of threes, that only really works as good as it does because the second one sort of exists. And so we left it in, even though we never loved it. This is Dominic Raacke, who is basically like the Dennis Franz of Germany. He's a big cop show star in Germany. Our casting woman-- What was her name? Risa Kes found him. And actually, there's another... We were talking about the clearance stuff earlier. God, yeah. - We shot about eight takes of this guy and you can see that thing hanging from his rearview mirror. Originally there was a Tweety Bird, a Warner Brothers property, hanging from that thing and we shot about eight takes and we moved on to a different shot and somebody was looking at playback and said, "Is that Tweety?" And we looked at the playback. "We'll never clear that." - And we just decided we'll never clear. So we had to go back and reshoot everything we had done. And the camera guys thought it was so funny that we had screwed up that it became a running joke. They kept the Tweety Bird and they began adding it. Every time we would set up to do a shot, they would roll a little film before we ended up doing the shot and they would put the Tweety Bird in front of the camera, so we have a reel somewhere of that Tweety Bird in every location that we shot. - And it's fantastic. He's wearing a pope hat. He's in the hot tub. We'd love to show it to you, but Tweety doesn't clear, so we can't. So just imagine every shot in the movie with a Tweety in it.

33:13 · jump to transcript →

She does something that's incredible. I just love the cast. Can you believe this cast? But the thing that's so amazing is watching... She makes it look so easy, especially in the Vatican sequence. That kind of strength and quiet, confident. She makes it look very easy. I love doing this. This is a very intense sequence to shoot. This whole... This stuff, you just...

18:26 · jump to transcript →

How did you get that out of her head? She was open to having a craniotomy. I was like, look. Carrie is so perfect. She will do anything for... Okay, now, here we go. We got Fish. You can't say enough about Fish, bro. Fish, I've known since I was a teenager. Isn't that amazing? I know. And I can't believe this is the first time that we've worked together. That's incredible. I know. He's one of those guys, and when we were talking about casting the movie, it was so important. Did we miss my... I missed the chocolate. Okay.

27:57 · jump to transcript →

He just said the chocolate line. Did I miss the chocolate line? I love the chocolate line. But it was so important that we cast the movie, for me, that we cast the movie with actors who, if I see them on screen with you, will hold their own. Because I did feel like it was a risk, given that it was you in this movie, that you wouldn't really be paying attention to other people. And so when you have actors like Billy and like Fish, who...

28:26 · jump to transcript →

James Mangold

Hi, my name is Jim Mangold and I'm the director of 310 Iyuma. And for the next two hours or so, I'm going to be talking about making this film and how we came to make it, cast it, shoot it and edit it and deliver it in the state it's in right now as you're watching the opening logos here. It seems to me the first question anyone would have about this film is why did you make it? And particularly because it's a remake of a film

0:07 · jump to transcript →

James Mangold

What I like to believe makes this sequence stand out is that these men look so completely comfortable with the weapons, on their horses, et cetera. And one of the ways I was really lucky in putting this film together with Kathy Conrad, my producer and partner, was that when we cast the film with Russell and Christian, what we got were more than just two of the best

9:32 · jump to transcript →

James Mangold

male actors in the world today, we also got extremely physical actors, men who are very, very comfortable on horses and with weapons and didn't necessarily need, you know, the three-month, quote, boot camp. While we did do that for many members of the cast, I think Russell, who owns a thousand-acre ranch in Australia, and Christian, who has done a slew of action pictures, both very well know how to stay on a horse

9:58 · jump to transcript →

Brian Stonehill

Truffaut also cast his film largely with unknowns or with actors whose chief exposure had been only on television. Guy de Comble, playing the teacher, is one of the few exceptions. French filmgoers would have recalled him from Jacques Tati's 1949 comedy Jour de Fête, among other films. The classroom itself is in the Parisian film school on the rue de Vaugirard. Since he's the victim of injustice, our sympathies with Antoine are now cemented.

5:10 · jump to transcript →

Brian Stonehill

They improvised and fashioned a bed for Antoine. We asked co-screenwriter Marcel Moussy how Truffaut had cast his first feature, and Moussy told us this. For the main role, Truffaut placed an ad in France World that said something like, seeking young boy of 13 to act in leading role in a new film. He didn't even spell out any physical characteristics. So lots and lots of boys came to audition, and they came from just about everywhere.

36:35 · jump to transcript →

Brian Stonehill

Francois was able to eliminate most of them on the basis of interviews. And then he had a few do some screen tests, including Jean-Pierre Léo. Jean-Pierre had run away from his boarding school in the southern provinces of France to take a train up to Paris to audition for the role because he had seen the ad in the paper. So quite apart from his actual screen tests, which were immensely successful because he showed a vivacity and a liveliness that were decidedly uncommon.

37:05 · jump to transcript →

That's 69 Rupert Gow. Okay. The money didn't come in at the last minute. Well, listen to this. Possum says, that's an address in Paris where I used to live. He said, it's a murder story like Rue Morgue. So I cast the picture, and I built the sets. Beautiful sets. It's the same place we shot Orgy. So the day before we started shooting, my art director tells me, boss, the checks are bouncing. The checks are no good.

1:00:48 · jump to transcript →

69 Rupa Gal was later released as an Ed Wood paperback. Many of the films were also released as paperbacks. Let me find, if you can carry it for a minute, Rudolph. The sad part is that the 69 Rupa Gal movie, the script was all done. I read the script. The casting was all done.

1:01:47 · jump to transcript →

And Ed had a small part in it as like an MC at a show. He cast himself. He was going to be in it. And T.C. Jones, the female impersonator, was going to be one of the lead characters. And like Apostoloff says, you know, at the last minute, the money didn't come through from one of the people that was going to finance the film.

1:02:16 · jump to transcript →