Casting

John Mackenzie

Have a bloody memory. She thinks Paula is an angel and I'm the devil in disguise. Ah, well, me and Paula have only been divorced ten years. I was really delighted to be able to cast Helen Mirren as Victoria in the film. Yeah, it's coming along. It's one of the things we really felt about the Victoria character, that she wasn't... She should certainly not just be your usual gangster's maul, you know.

11:18 · jump to transcript →

John Mackenzie

It's quite interesting, a lot of these characters have sort of gone on and become, you know, quite well known in other areas. Now here we had a guy who came out of the blue. We cast about three different people for this part of Charlie until, for one reason or another, it fell through. And then we had this, I think, a brilliant idea to cast Eddie Constantine.

17:34 · jump to transcript →

John Mackenzie

They were all Irish, these guys, who are cast in those parts. This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Happy are those who are called to his supper. It was nice to show that, you know, the Hoskins character, the Sian character, was such a sort of...

19:53 · jump to transcript →

And here's the introduction of our hero, Peter, or Murphy. Of course, when we were casting, we were not only looking for a good actor, we were also looking for an actor that had a good jawline. Because that's the only thing that you can see when he puts the mask on later, the robot mask. And we felt that if it would be a weak jawline, that that part of the face that was visible would make him look weak. So it was not only that Peter...

3:29 · jump to transcript →

Nicely done, Mr. Verhoeven. Yeah. I don't know if it was a stuntman. I think it was an actor. No, no, that was one of the stuntmen that... We had a lot of stuntmen who had to have lines in this, and they did really well. Right. Well, we cast 80% of the movie in Dallas, isn't it, John? Yes, because we could not take the entire cast from Los Angeles. Because we had no money, isn't it? Right, of course. And it worked out very well, because we were forced to be extremely creative, and the casting women...

35:49 · jump to transcript →

Well, it was written, isn't it? I mean, probably just the way it was shot and nice. Yeah, but watch the way the close-up comes in here. I really like this right here. Bump, that one. And that one. Look at her. She's great. Yeah. Originally, remember, we had cast Stephanie Zimbalist as a role. And a few weeks before principal photography, for whatever reason, she bowed out and we lucked into...

47:32 · jump to transcript →

This was all fun to do for the most part. You know, it was a movie. We were both working on a movie. We were both working on a major motion picture produced by, you know, a big company. That, by the way, everyone auditioned for. Everyone? All of the young actors and all of the young actresses from the 80s that became, some of them became A-listers and some of them didn't. They saw them all. And we wanted the choices. No kidding.

6:34 · jump to transcript →

They were so supportive of us, I think, because the whole cast, I think, just really felt very supportive of the young actors. You know, that was Mac and myself. Just like to point out, I think that's the first act of overt violence, the Garbage Pail Kids. Okay, now it's important to say this, and I'm going to say it. In the original script, all of this stuff that they do,

29:39 · jump to transcript →

for this project, for the Garbage Pail Kids movie. Those were the real guys. They showed up in their motorcycles and everything. Amazing. That guy actually lost a toe during filming. He did, but in another part of the movie. Right. Not at the hand of Alligator. Yeah, no, these were real biker dudes. These were real tough dudes. These were not central casting experts. These were the real guys. Amazing.

45:34 · jump to transcript →

That guy happened to have that birthmark. That's how you cast him? Yeah, he had the birthmark. It was going to save time. Did anybody ever notice it's in the shape of North Vietnam? No, no one commented. A wasted joke. Well, there was going to be a contest, you remember, like a geography thing. We never did it. I meant Gorbachev's real birthmark. It's actually in the shape of Vietnam. Do you remember our worries when we released the picture? We were concerned that the Ayatollah would kick off before the picture came out ruining this joke.

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And of course, the ubiquitous bear trap, a signature of David's work. In every movie, there'll be a bear trap. Now, did O.J. do that whole thing himself? Absolutely. Or we cut the stuntman. I think the stuntman fell out of the... But everything else was O.J. Everything else was O.J. Amazing work. And the entire cast is on that plane. I think we're coming up on my dad here. Every family member's in this, right? Yes. Always. There he is with the camera there. Third from the left or second from the right.

7:20 · jump to transcript →

Many people mistake him for George Kennedy. And there is George Kennedy. How did you cast George? It was just a question of cash, really. No, actually, what we wanted to do was have, you know, credible actors that people had seen before and make this seem like it was a legitimate picture. I think, who played it in the TV shows? Alan North. He was actually a wonderful actor. Great actor, but...

7:49 · jump to transcript →

obviously very different style actor to Sly. And working with Wesley was like completely unpredictable from day to day. And we had every type of actor in the cast from Nigel Hawthorne, who's obviously an Academy Award winning actor and who was new to the genre, let's say. And then Stallone, who usually worked with directors who don't request too many takes.

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while we were on a lunch break and we had to evacuate stage 16, which is the largest soundstage on the Warner's lot. And we had to stop shooting for a day. But all of this was really, really interesting because all the... Wait a second. Andre Gregory and Jesse Ventura. That's a great combination. That's a credit you don't see every day. That pretty much encapsulates the casting of this movie. Like we got my dinner with Andre and Jesse Ventura. The governor.

8:27 · jump to transcript →

a film actor at the time. And here, this is Rob Schneider, who I cast from Saturday Night Live. And this is one of the few actual practical locations in the film. So we found a kind of office campus in San Diego where we shot the police headquarters and built in a lot of the technology. I love the use of character actors delivering very silly dialogue, but they make it seem real.

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Fred Dekker

Now, in terms of the people that you've worked with throughout your career, I mean, you've had very interesting and very eclectic casts for all of your movies. And this one's no exception. In fact, re-watching the movie again, I was reminded of the fact that even the small parts, like you've got C.J. H. Pounder and Stephen Root and Daniel Von Barg and a lot of really great character actors in these roles. How much input did you have into casting?

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Fred Dekker

I directed the movie. I mean, those were all my choices. And I think this is one of the best casts that I worked with. I mean, in terms of the amount of talent, and I feel like I didn't give them enough to do. But boy, it was an embarrassment of riches, this cast. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about Daniel Von Bargen. He recently passed away not too long ago.

11:23 · jump to transcript →

Fred Dekker

Yes, I was going to ask about Phil's. This is not the first time Phil's has come up for you. It's been in every film so far. There's Jeff Garlin, who you know from The Goldbergs, which I think he created. And Curb Your Enthusiasm. Yeah, and he has two lines in this movie. This cast is pretty amazing. Yeah, again, that was when I was watching the movie. It's like, oh my God, there's Jeff Garlin there for a couple minutes. You put some really great faces on camera, even for the small roles in this movie.

12:46 · jump to transcript →

Peter Hyams

Wow. She's doing my job. C.C.H. Pounder is a wonderful actress. I had seen her in Baghdad Cafe. She has great eyes. Oh, yeah, we got all liquored up this morning. We start every day, then. I thought it was, again, essential with a film like this to try to cast it with the best actors in the world. What? He has no tongue. There are a lot of times when I put actors in half-light, and when you have eyes like C.C., it's really quite wonderful.

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Peter Hyams

silly girl in distress, and she gave it something. She gave it, you know, actors bring what they are. 90% of directing actors, no matter what anybody will tell you, 90% of directing actors is casting. This guy is no ordinary hitman. No, this one's extraordinary. Let's get the hell out of here. This place is making me itch. Don't move! Don't move!

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Peter Hyams

That to me is a very important effect in this film, and I'm pleased with it. I think it worked. I've never seen a film, frankly, that's bad or sloppy in only one area. So to me, the smallest parts have to be cast with the same amount of devotion as big parts. What an extra is wearing.

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Simon West

Oh, he's in real pain right now. We named the robot Simon, and the initials, the letters of that name are supposed to stand for something, and it's one of the puzzles I put in the film for people to work out what those letters stand for. Oh, well, that would be a no. But you said make it more challenging, so... I cast Noah Taylor after seeing him in Shine a few years earlier, and I thought he was such an unusual character that...

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Simon West

I thought she should do something beautiful, but also very athletic and daring. And this is a very impressive routine that Lara does every night before she goes to bed, but Angelina actually had to learn to do for real. Now, I never expected her to do all this. When I cast her, I never thought of her as a stunt person, but during her training program before the shoot, she just learned how to do this thing from top to bottom, and I realized I wasn't going to have to use stunt doubles at all.

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Simon West

This you must prevent at all costs. I'd always been a big fan of John Voight, and so it was great fun for me working with him. Every day I could come in and ask him about films that he'd worked on as I was growing up. And so one day I would get an anecdote about Deliverance, and the next day I'd get an anecdote about Midnight Cowboy. So as a film buff, it was a great piece of casting for me because it kept me entertained every day that he was there on the set. I told you I'd have

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Peter Becker

We should talk about the casting of the two leads.

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Wes Anderson

So it was very clear when Roman and I had finished this script that the crucial thing was going to be who plays Sam and who plays Suzy, our two main characters. And that's really-- There's no movie if they aren't great. Well, we got our casting director, Doug Aibel, on very, very early, and we spent, I want to say, six or eight months or something searching for them. And along the way, we picked up all our scouts. There were lots of people auditioning, and we'd say, "Well, this one's still not quite the right one for Sam, but this is a great one. This is a kid at this moment in his life who's gonna be very interesting." And so by the time we did find the two of them, which was quite late in the game, we had all the other kids too. Jared, I remember, in his audition, was just... It wasn't his audition, it was him that really was entertaining. And Kara, in her audition, she played this scene as if she was making it up completely herself and just seemed completely authentic. And they were great to work with. They were very invested in the movie. And sometimes when you work with very young people, they learn the script and they know it better than anybody on the set. And they know everybody's lines. And they brought some special kind of emotion that only they know that has to do with they're really that age. They're really like these people. They understand them in a way we can only try to recall. If the movie works for them, it works because of these guys. Yeah, I remember seeing the tests, and Jared just stood out. I remember thinking, you know, he had such a different energy than I expected in our lead role 'cause we had sort of described him with his corncob pipe and kind of a little bit of a JD, and he had just this other quality, but I couldn't totally see it at first. But then, of course, it just couldn't have been better. It was just so right for it. But it wasn't really written in the way that he portrayed it. At least my mind's eye didn't see someone like Jared, but he's so one of a kind, it's hard to even imagine that till you meet him.

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Wes Anderson

Yeah, also I remember when we were casting Rushmore, Jason was not really what we had in mind. We had in mind somebody that I had always said-- Owen and I had this description of a young Mick Jagger, which Jason is a completely different-- Jason's like a young Dustin Hoffman.

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There we see they have a past. She's got a... They're in kind of an adventurous place in that photo. And you can think that maybe this couple has had an interesting and exciting past with some adventure. Anyway, there's the sweetest little girl in the world, played by Paisley Cadorath. Paisley Cadorath was an amazing little actress. We did auditions in Winnipeg because we knew we couldn't fly another person out from anywhere, and she was the only girl that could take directions. But more importantly, you can tell that she was really enjoying the process. And we, you know, make them do four or five takes of the same thing just to see how they'll fare. And she was just excited. Every time she'd run out of the room, we'd get the cameras all ready, Every time she'd run out of the room, we'd get the cameras all ready, and she'd run in and we'd rehearse, and she was perfect all the time. And I think when you watched the audition tapes... I remember getting a message from you saying, "We have to get this girl. I'm so happy that we matched perfectly on her." Fuck!

8:17 · jump to transcript →

What do we got, a rat or a possum? - Don't know. I hope you'll notice... I hope everyone noticed that the employee of the month mostly is Charlie, played by Billy MacLellan. But go ahead. Sharon is the... Go ahead, Ilya. So the cat lady, the receptionist, that was Sharon. We had a bit of a faux pas where we were supposed to shoot her scene right here in this reception where Charlie is standing. And we arrived and we painted it the wrong color. And it's the only time during the production where Pawel, the DP, and I were like, "Nope, can't shoot it here. "We gotta repaint these walls. Let's go..." We found that spot, and while we were shooting, Bob, remember, on one of the takes, she hit... She was so into beating the crap out of the ceiling, the tile fellon you guys as you walked past. Yeah. Safety's on. And how about this guy? Billy MacLellan was great. Isn't he great? Charlie, my brother-in-law, who's a huge jerk to me, waving a gun in my face. And he doesn't even know the safety is not on. So, take it. And he's such a tough guy. Billy's a good guy. What a great cast we had. So, keep my sister safe, bro. "This is a matter of need, principle of need." Tough guy. And I don't think the slap was written. I think he came up to me between the takes, said, "Ilya, what do you think of... "It feels like Charlie should be more of an asshole and buddy slap on..." Such a condescending slap. But he was so afraid to suggest it to you. And now you look at him and you go, "This guy's messed with guns before, "and he's not sure he wants one in his life again." But look out. Well, hide it in the fridge. That's always a good place for your extra guns. It's almost like he knew it might come in handy in act three. Yeah. - It's Chekhov's ridge, pretty much. What's that? - Chekhov's ridge. You know, the Chekhov's rifle? Chekhov's gun? If you see it on the wall in the first act, and it fires in the third, well, that's our fridge. Yes, that's right. Michael Ironside. - Yay, Michael Ironside. A great, great actor. - The man, the legend. And he's really good in this role. Kind of supportive, kind of friendly, but also hard on Hutch. Everybody's hard on Hutch. Bunch of hard-ons around him. If I'm gonna sell it, I want it to be... But he's a great actor and he delivers here, big time. Ilya, you put together a hell of a cast around me. Boy, the best. The best. I do. Well, it's pretty easy to get a great cast when you say that Bob is the lead. SO... You know, one thing that was concerning to me, and I love seeing Charlie and I love seeing the father-in-law here, and I love seeing Charlie and I love seeing the father-in-law here, is my character is so down for such a huge chunk of this movie. There's a... I mean, he starts to smile when he starts to cut loose and let out all his rage and frustration. But that's a long time in, and we talked a lot about this. This movie has always been... Has an offbeat construction with this long prelude, longer than most, with a lot of hard feeling and kind of... This guy's got an internal struggle that takes over this whole first 40 minutes, half-hour, 40 minutes. I think in the script, the bus fight used to happen around page 30. And I remember we saying, "Whenever... We'll get to it quicker. "It'll be like minute 25 at most." 'Cause I remember looking at several films as examples, and I think my favorite example was Oldboy, where the first real fight happens on minute 41. But there is a little pre-fight around 27. But it's also a much longer film than this was ever intended to be. Right. So it was that balance of, "Yeah, we want to set up the pins "before we shoot the ball," but at the same time, you're also releasing a film in 2020. Well, now it's 2027. But there's a certain expectation, a certain pace that you can't really rely on as a comfortable pace for a bigger audience. Hopefully, we'll have a bigger audience when it does come out. We are recording this six months before the film hits theaters, which is a little early. But you're absolutely right. There was a lot of discussions on how long and what we should spend time on before we hit what everybody paid to see. It's a different kind of action movie. It's trying to be... Just have more story, more character, more complexity, and I think a more delicate kind of complexity to these family relationships. The son's annoyed with the dad, the wife and the husband love each other but are estranged, but in the house, you know, together, they have a past. We don't quite know what it is. The little girl's oblivious and bringing nothing but sunshine into their lives. And then there's a feeling that this guy just has his own issues, his own challenge of being who he is. And all that turns out to be true and comes clearer as the story goes.

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Or was? So these guys, the Russian Mob guys, these are all immigrants from Russia living in Winnipeg. There's a community of about five or six thousand people, which was perfect for us. So there was an audition Saturday and Sunday where I looked at 200 people. And these three were... - They're great. Right away, I was like, "Well, they're not professional." This is the first time they ever appear on camera. And I thought they did a really good job. -/ think they do a great job. Boy, they look like great actors to me. And Alexey, he works all the time. Boy, they look like great actors to me. And Alexey, he works all the time. We were very lucky to get him 'cause he also lives in Canada. Yep. - Part-time. So, tell us about Alexey"s acting career in Russia. Will he walk again? There's a lot of films to talk about. I think the one that I suspect some people have seen in the West would be Leviathan. The Zvyagintsev film which was nominated for an Oscar, which I think had a very good chance for winning if it wasn't for the political situation at that particular point in time, unfortunately. Alexey, he's just always been...

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to have an innocence in their face. And so we really cast a lot of kids that you don't know yet, that you haven't seen in any other movie. By the way, Wiesengrund 53, the address, that's my best friend's address when I grew up. So it's a little Easter egg I put in there just as an ode to my best friend as a kid.

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quite old-fashioned, not typically handsome. Don't tell him that. And he... I immediately liked that. So we flew him in into casting, but I'm not the type of person who jumps at the first decision, because I really want to see everyone. So I saw a couple hundred more, and we kept inviting him back. And our wonderful casting agent, Simone Béat,

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when he made this movie. And the main character is 18. And in the beginning I thought, this character has to be 18. You know, this actor. I've got to find an actor who can play it. And then I cast a lot of 18-year-olds. And I realized after a while, they're too young. They just don't have that... Because Felix needs to play the arc from, you know, youth and innocence and enthusiasm, the laughter that you saw in the end, in the beginning, to complete...

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Christien Tinsley

two films, he used the same prosthetic. And so the piece was actually never made for David, but it created this character based off of the old sculpture working on David's face. And so when we got the cast of David and re-sculpted it, we had to re-sculpt it with the idea of what the old prosthetic

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Christien Tinsley

And he had the molds already, so we read it. We just cast new pieces out of his molds, and we made a chest piece for her and the arm piece there and stuff just to kind of, you know, give it a look. And he was like, yeah, I want tubes in it. I want, you know, blood pouring down her face. And we were like, okay, yeah, we can, you know, get some tubes in there. And so Heather and Ryan...

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Christien Tinsley

He thought that we had just cast from his mold or duplicated his mold somehow and cast prosthetics. But the truth of it is we sculpted it from scratch, copying his original piece as best we could, but basically side-by-side sculpture as opposed to the casting and molding process.

1:19:36 · jump to transcript →

David Kalat

Here he is as Dr. Yamane, a role he reprises in the sequel, Godzilla Raids Again. The Times sniffed at Godzilla's cast. Not a one of them can act. What's that again? Did you mean the best actor in the world can't act? Yowza. Not all of Godzilla's cast were experienced veterans of Kurosawa's demanding sets. Akihiko Hirata as the

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David Kalat

Grant, an A-list star of light comedy and amiable action films whose popularity would keep him a top marquee name for many decades. In contrast to Kochi's insecurity, Takarada swaggered onto the set and introduced himself as the star. The grizzled crew chuckled, Godzilla's the star. And since the monster is the star of the show, to talk about the cast, we really need to talk about the special effects director, Aiji Tsuburaya.

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David Kalat

This scene represents another of the transformative changes wrought by Honda on the material, casting such an admired actor as Takashi Shimura turned Yamane from an alienating kind of mad scientist into a heroic central figure. Yamane's upset that the government's response to the problem is to try to kill Godzilla. He wants to study it.

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kind of long-haired, pin-up type guy. And there were plenty of actors around who had that sort of wounded angel martyr counterculture look. Well, isn't it his very presence in these scenes, which are slightly problematic for an audience, because we're on his side because the guys he works with are all a crowd of jocks. Yes, that's right. And they're deliberately cast. Actually, I understand that the...

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From this point on, from this point on, we stop looking at him in the same way. Yeah, he also becomes... Yeah, there is... He's also mad. I mean, that's... Yeah. He's right and he's romantic, but he is also insane. Isn't there a touch here of Jack Nicholson in The Shining that really he's pretty much over the edge right from the beginning? Oh, yeah, yeah. There's nowhere for him to go. He's Bruce Stern. In fact, Jack Nicholson wouldn't have done this film because he was a bit... He'd moved on to doing different types of movies. But he would have been in the frame for the casting.

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Again, according to Mark Hermod's book, the original casting for this was Larry Hagman. Of course, later on known for Dallas. But at that time, he'd been in I Dream of Jeannie playing an astral, hadn't he? And that probably was... But he decided he'd been offered a chance to direct a film.

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I got to go. I think there's been an accident out there. This was a practical location also, I believe, in Venice, if I'm not mistaken. That's right. We were in Venice. The end of this scene is the scene that we used for the audition. I remember really clearly when I read for Wes at the audition, they picked this one scene with Tina. And it seemed like I did it a million times by the time we finally got to it.

6:44 · jump to transcript →

There's an interesting story with Johnny's casting. We headed down to four guys, and the other three were like surfer dude and, you know, the typical handsome kid and everything else. And at the time my daughter was visiting, she was about 13, with a friend of hers, and I said, what do you think, surfer dude? And they both at the same time said, Johnny Depp. There was like absolutely no doubt in their mind. It was completely unknown at that time, but they just fell in love with him by seeing him once or twice in casting sessions.

7:16 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, it's all there. You had that quality of the girl next door, the all-American girl, right? The first casting, I just thought, well, I found Nancy. The brick. The brick. Is it the brick? I think it was Marilyn Monroe. Their hair looks a lot better than mine. You know what I mean. Yeah, well, the camera likes you. Thanks, Josh. That's very kind of you to say that.

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sort of get your mates around you to work, it's always much more pleasant. So I always have a list I give a casting director of people I like and it would be nice to be working with. Of course Cubby Broccoli was the producer and Michael Wilson, who produced together with Cubby, would always

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was in the whole stealing there. Patrick also, Patrick McNee also was my Watson when I played Sherlock Holmes, which we shot at 20th Century Fox with a wonderful all-star cast. John Huston playing Moriarty and Gig Young.

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David Huddleston, Jackie Coogan. Amazing, amazing cast. Produced and directed by Boris Segal, whose daughter, Boris's daughter, who is so wonderful, the crass American series that I love, The Al Bundy Show.

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Pat McClung

This is Pat McClung. I was the model-shop supervisor on the film. They're wearing modified costumes from Outland, or the basic suit is from Outland and it's been redesigned and they put some stencils on it. This is microglitter and fuller's earth blown on there. I remember in this scene the batteries in the flashlights kept going out. You would think this would be an easy scene to do, but, as with everything in this movie, it was harder than it looked. There are no easy scenes with Jim. There's that nice dissolve, the contour of the earth matching her face. When we shot this, a matte painting combined with miniature and perspective, there are some perspective gags going on there. We used a clip of Sigourney's face in the viewfinder to line up the curvature of the earth, so we had a nice match. I wrote the piece obviously with Sigourney in mind for the character. I was told she was on board and I should just toddle off and write the film when in fact no deal had been made with her whatsoever. So here was a script that was written that everybody wanted to make, in which she was in every scene, and they hadn't made a deal with her yet. That's why she got her first big payday of her acting career. She got a million bucks, which was a big deal. She might have been the first actress to get a million dollars for a movie in movie history. It was all because it was mishandled by the producers. She was the main character and they hadn't made the deal. She was worth every penny of it and more. When people saw the film, they realized that. I Knew what a phenomenal actress she was. I'd never met her. I had her picture up while I was writing the script. I went off the character that had been created in the first film, took her much further. Of course, this is Paul Reiser. I certainly had no idea what a great comic actor he would prove to be, and certainly that's how people think of him, not as a dramatic actor. I just read him in a lineup of actors in the normal casting methodology, and I thought he was really interesting, that he could play this really sincere but slightly smarmy guy who could then turn evil. This is a dream sequence, but you don't know that yet. I remember from the premiere screening of the film that the incomplete chestburster scene here really got people cranked up and on edge, set the tone for the whole movie, that you were here to be messed with, which is a good way to start off, I think. The way you get a cat to hiss like that is you put another cat close to it. I had no idea. I didn't know what you did to make a cat do that. But that's standard procedure. Bring a cat it doesn't know close to it and it'll do that.

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Bill Paxton

Everybody's archetypical in this thing. I don't remember all the stuff hanging off of Mark. Chicken bones. I look like a boy. That's what we liked about you. Was this the day, Michael, you were passed out by the lockers and Sigourney walked by and said "There's my leading man"? Am I mistaken with another day? Somewhere around in here. I had to audition. They made you audition for Fox. No, it wasn't for Fox. They had a limit on how many Americans they could bring over. So they auditioned a lot of Englishmen for that role. The casting director, Mary Selway, and I had to meet every member of the North American registry from British Actors' Equity who was interested in being in this film before we could bring anyone from the US. I think we must have met and auditioned 3,000 people.

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Bill Paxton

Carrie Henn, who plays Newt, was an astonishing find. Mary Selway, our casting director, and her associate, Sarah Jackson, searched throughout England and, in fact, I think the entire British Isles, trying to find a young girl who could portray this character. And we had every young girl who wanted to be an actress, or whose parents wanted them to act, to come in and audition. Almost all of them had done commercials, and every time they delivered a line they would smile. Of course, this is a little girl suffering from traumatic stress. She's watched her family wiped out, every other person on the mining colony wiped out, and I think we probably had 500 little girls on tape. And Carrie was found at a US Air Force base in England. Her father was a US serviceman serving there. And she came in and auditioned, never having acted even in a school play, and was dead on from the very first reading. She's such a good little actress. Has she done anything since this? She has a normal life. She did not pursue acting as her career. One of the things that we were very concerned about was whether or not this film would traumatize her. It's very intense and unlike now, where we could composite creatures in seamlessly, or create one digitally, she really was terrorized by the alien warriors in the film, and she understood it was make-believe. Her parents were tremendously supportive and she really had her feet on the ground. This really is acting.

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Gary Goddard

We were able to have a great cast headed by Frank Langella. I had seen him in Amadeus in New York on Broadway. I had already known his work from film. At the border between the light and the dark stands Castle Grayskull. This is, of course, the opening shot with Castle Grayskull. And the concept here was to create an entire world, a sense that you were in a different place. And the scale is quite epic. You see the sorceress there in the eye.

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Gary Goddard

Chelsea Field, Robert Duncan McNeil, Christina Pickles. I'm very happy with the cast and how they came together and formed a kind of a company. And again, I think that rapport between the shows and the film itself.

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Gary Goddard

And all the shots here now establish, you know, death, destruction, the fact that Eternia has been overrun, and that our heroes are essentially on the run. Now we're introducing another character that's going to, you know, be one of the key elements in the storytelling. And that is going to be Gwildor. We'll see him in a minute. Dolph is going to rescue him. This is Dolph Lundgren. This is his first movie after the Rocky movie. Ed had already lined him up for this movie, actually, when I came on board. He was the only cast member that was

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We asked another kid who came into audition. He said, you know, a kid that sort of vaguely resembles me or looks like he could be offspring. And he took me straight to this kid. So he was a real find because he had a lot of natural ability. Most of the other actors here we found in Ireland. This guy was from Dublin.

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I'd done virtually nothing before. I think she just finished a drama education at Oxford. And, you know, whenever I do the audition process for, you know, casting, it's... I don't make anyone read because I think you don't find much else out than whether they can read or not. It has very little bearing on...

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So of course I cast her. What does that mean? Beautiful. But I belong here. And it's John Toll again, ladies and gentlemen.

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Darren Aronofsky

We called him the mustache-less man. In fact, I think in the script it was the mustache man, but then I cast Stanley Herman and made it into the mustache-less man. He's always singing in my films also, so. This scene is supposed to be funny, but I think most people just get creeped out.

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Darren Aronofsky

Mark Margolis was actually cast by our casting director, Denise Fitzgerald. She ran into him in a supermarket and told him she had a perfect role for him. And he was like, there are no perfect roles for me. But he came in, read, and once again we cast him on the spot. He was perfect for the role. I thought he actually was too young when I first met him, which is amazing because...

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Darren Aronofsky

And that's King Neptune, who's a character that I've dealt with in several different projects that I've written. King Neptune is actually the living King Neptune who's somehow lost his trident in this world of evil and is searching for it with a metal detector on the beach of Coney Island. And right there, he finds something else. It's not his trident, but it's almost as good. And it intrigues Max and brings him over. The original King Neptune that we cast was a...

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Noah Baumbach

Now, this is Noah, Noah Baumbach. That's me in the back there. Playing the role of Phillip, Zissou's aide-de-camp. I mean, Drakoulias's. I was cast during a writing session. You said, "Who could play Phillip? Well, you could play Phillip." That was casting. - That was it. We chalked that one off the list. Drakoulias's glasses, by the way, are modeled on Sergio Leone's. The stoplight on Owen's hat, I believe I saw on a kid outside of Bar Pitti. Oh, yeah. - He had a hat with a stoplight on it. So these things, the significance of them is left open.

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Noah Baumbach

We had-- This was actually something we did a little research on was sort of the more modern-day pirate situation, sort of inspired at least the sort of design of these pirates and the vibe that we get from these pirates. Yeah, I know we talked about the pirates being kind of-- Trying to make them feel like documentary style and that the movie would suddenly snap into kind of a William Friedkin-type of very real, very energetic. In the end, however, the pirates arrive while a guy's playing a David Bowie song on the deck of the ship, and Bill's sitting here in a blue-tiled-- There's so many things to undermine it, and it ends up being some-- And also, by the way, my idea of what the pirates would look like is not reflected in the film. This is what we kind of-- This was trying to do, but somehow it ends up being much-- They end up being funny and... We cast people who we had in Rome. They're not real pirates. They're-- And they brought-- You know, there's more about these-- You know, they brought themselves to it and the feeling on the set. And it ends up, I think, being different from what I envisioned and being more like the rest of the movie. I don't know. I think it affects different people in different ways. You're talking about... the editing style of the movie. I was thinking about it there with the quick cuts as the pirates come rushing in. Sort of... Another thing I've sort of thought about, which I didn't mention, is like when he opens the correspondence stock, and then suddenly we just cut right to the-- You know, rather than take the time to show him opening the-- Yeah. - You know, and-- You know, but at the same time, you like to do a lot of long takes and a lot of, you know, let the actors really kind of behave in scenes, and I think it's a-- We've talked about sort of a French New Wave style of editing... Yeah. - ...that we respond to, sort of, you know, just getting the boring parts out of the way, but taking time with the stuff you think needs to take time. And I feel for some people-- A movie like this, for a lot of people, I think it plays as deliberately paced. And then for other people, it seems like breakneck. But I think for a larger number of people, it's slow. But, you know, it's just sort of-- Now, here's something we do here. We go to a very... Very cool timing, in blue, for this section of the film. During this pirate attack thing here. And then it comes back to the warm, because most of the movie's time, very warm, very yellow, a lot of red. And... And in the end, I think the way the movie looks, it's also very saturated colors. The way most of the movie looks is sort of inspired by the way the Ektachrome stuff looks, which was not the original idea. It's just sort of what felt right as we went along. Although this sequence, to me, looks more like... Like Bud Cort looks like the way the photographs look, the way they're printed on the front page of The New York Times. - Right. The way that has some documentary kind of feeling. Yeah, there is that Friedkin feeling of sort of '70s color, or at least '70s color as we now experience it on television. Yeah. These things are filtered through things like that... I like how Bud does the Portuguese. Yes, Bud studied very carefully how to get his dialogue in Tagalog, I think, it's Filipino. He'd originally learned it in Indonesian, but then he had to switch. And he had it very precisely figured out, although we also had his Filipino translator on the set with us, who Bud ruled over and... ...is his sidekick.

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Noah Baumbach

Willem is very touching here. Yeah, Willem brings something to it. Now, I mentioned Noah Taylor. Noah has obviously played a lot of much bigger, fuller roles. And he's a really wonderful actor. In our movie, he has a line here, a line there. But his presence on the set was quite strong and he was very-- He was really valuable to the movie in ways that you wouldn't know. He was sort of the one who-- There are a lot of non-actors in Team Zissou and he was the one-- A lot of people who had never been on movie sets and certainly a lot of people who had never been sent away to location for periods of time, and he was their guide for that, and he was kind of their acting coach too. And he was-- He was a great person to have on the set. Well, pretty much everyone... Cast and crew really committed to, you know, be sort of immersed in this for months. There wasn't-- I guess some actors came in and out a little bit, but certainly most of Team Zissou had to be there for the whole shoot. Yeah. See, in the background here is a cane with a dolphin, albino dolphin handle. Zissou has albino dolphins, but it's-- What you can't see is engraved in it is "T.E. Mandrake," Zissou's mentor. Right, we saw in-- The picture was behind Hennessey, when they were on the boat, in the background. Right. And actually the person who sort of plays that part in the photographs is Jacques Henri Lartigue, a French photographer who I've always admired. But the person we wanted to use was Nic Roeg, the director Nic Roeg, who we weren't able to get over to Italy. It was all kind of last minute, and he-- But you were always gonna pose him in the same position that Lartigue is in that picture, right? Holding the... Well, yeah, we were gonna pose him-- No, I mean, we were gonna pose him in the water... standing in the water with a fishing net and a kid running behind him, something like that. What the painting is, when you see the painting. Now, this shot in the hallway, by the way, is the only shot in the movie where we actually use the camera to suggest that the boat is moving. It kind of rocks back and forth, which is funny because we watched a lot of different movies that are about-- Set on boats and set underwater, those things, and they all use a different technique. There are lots of different-- They gimbal the whole set, or they make the camera move. The Black Stallion was one of the ones we liked, and those scenes on that one, they don't do anything to suggest. They just trust that you know we're on a boat, and it works the same way as any of the others, except for one shot where they look down a hallway when they rock the camera. I don't know why they had one shot to do that. I think because the boat is sinking, and they wanted to just get that feeling. But we did the same thing. We never did anything to suggest we were on a boat in terms of movement. But for one shot, we made it rock back and forth. I remember when we were looking at some of those undersea movies or movies-- People on boats, The Abyss commentary taught us the term "dry for wet." Yes, yes. The Abyss taught us dry for wet. The other person I learned dry for wet from was Roman Coppola. Who, Roman, early on I asked his advice about some of the things, and Roman was very excited about the movie. Roman knows a lot about things like stop-motion and dry for wet, which is shooting underwater without water, using smoke and lighting to suggest that you're underwater. Which you can only do with miniatures, you can't use actors. You can't use people, although it's been done. In wet-- In crazy suits. - Really? The way you'd shoot, like, the moon.

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They speak Russian with Armenian accents. The rest of you probably won't notice. And there really are Russian mobsters in Little Odessa. Some of them actually wanted to be in the film. Although I always find it's better to cast that kind of role with actors. Real people often don't seem to be very authentic for some reason.

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and coming up the mountains of Afghanistan. It was harder to find authentic looking extras, but I had a great extras casting director, Mito Skellen, who did an amazing job finding faces to populate the various countries that Yuri visits in the course of the film. That's not one of the extras.

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when half the rest of the world is at war. The moment gets a big laugh in screenings of the film, especially in L.A. When the screenwriter writes that he finds a young Iman and a young Naomi in his bed, casting better live up to it. Leah Cabidi and Jasmine Burgess

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John Cameron Mitchell

and I wanted a totally new character to fit into that slot of the film. And she gave an incredible audition, made me crack up, she made me cry. But it was really a year into the workshop process, which is the way we created the film, which was through improvisation over two and a half years with all you guys.

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John Cameron Mitchell

Paul and PJ were in a relationship before they were cast in the film. And, you know, the beautiful energy was... I just remember when I heard that you guys got together before the film got cast, and I was like... I just had this thrill in my heart. It's like, because I loved you both and admired you both as actors so much, and I'm like, oh, my God, they're together. And look, they're together there. And it's like this...

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John Cameron Mitchell

You know, I didn't want to tell you, but, like, I wanted all of you guys in the film before I started auditioning. But I wanted you guys to go through the audition process just in case something felt wrong or the other actors didn't have a rapport. But all four of you, I wanted you guys in.

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We did a DI grade, which film can't quite cope with, but HD can, the way of the future. Clark and Evan, who are Marty and Todd, they were in the first ever read-through. Before I go out to the public with a script, when I say the public, Hollywood, I like to do one read-through with the actors. So I actually flew to LA and I said to the casting director, just get me some,

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kids, you know, some American actors, so I wanted to make sure it feels American, so I didn't look like an idiot putting the script into the system. And we ended up casting Clark Duke and Evan as Todd and Marty, Lindsay as Katie, and Amari as Marcus, and Garrett Brown as the father of Dave, otherwise known as Kick-Ass. So, yeah, so that was...

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The one thing that I try to do, because Hollywood's so silly how the casting process, they sort of cast everyone individually. Or they'll say, hey, let's put George Clooney together with Tom Hanks. That's going to be great. And then it might not be great. You have to see chemistry. It's either there or it isn't. You can't create it. And it's naturally done. So the way I cast is I don't actually cast anyone until I get them all in a room. And I sort of mix and match. And it's pretty tough, because some poor kids got

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