The cinematographer

Come on. Yeah. You know, take a chance. What's the worst they could do? If he's going to try to kill you, you could maybe duck, you could punch him. Some guys would separate. There are a lot of guys there. They'll probably separate him. You know what I'm saying? But he doesn't do that. He doesn't have the balls to do it. He's a dead man in that group, in a sense, socially. He won't be invited to the next dinner party, you know? Director of Photography, Michael Ballhaus. We had, like, two cameras rolling.

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You know the look of the movie. You know the rhythm of it. And that's something very interesting and very good for a director of photography to know. Without using a gun, and we did the right thing. We gave Paulie his tribute. Actor Paul Cervino. In the scene where we're looking at the spoils of the robbery when the money is there, and we have to all be laughing, we did about eight takes. And before each take, I told a joke. I just told a joke.

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In the scene when you see Karen on top of Henry, I remember it being very difficult to shoot, especially since when you learn filmmaking with Morty Scorsese. I really did that to the camera, not so much to Ray. Michael Bellhouse, who was our director of photography,

1:13:20 · jump to transcript →

Gary Goddard

some theatrical lighting. I kept pushing with the cinematographer, saying, look, this is kind of a hyper-reality. We want this to, when we're shooting these characters, it's a fantasy adventure story. It should not be like a documentary. It should be rich, and let's find ways. There's that sign I was telling you about. That sign is strictly there to let us, you have a source to throw on them. This is Gwildor.

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Gary Goddard

And notice the lighting in these first scenes, the theatrical lighting I'm talking about is not in these first scenes, and that was discussions that I had with the cinematographer at the time. I was not happy with this look. I said, this is too flat. This is too much like a documentary. That's not what we're doing. We need a little more theatrical. So this was a result of that first week. You'll notice everything from the first week has a bit of a flatter look, and I was not happy with it. And I think you see...

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Gary Goddard

that plays in contrast to the other scenes. But that part of it wasn't by design. That was a learning curve of me saying to the DP, look, we must have a more theatrical look to this. We must have some fantasy element. We must have what I kept calling a hyper-reality, not just real, but a hyper-real. If there's a red light, let's use the blue light. Let's use that to key. Let's try and create some texture to this. But as I said, it worked out okay because there is a contrast now to this

49:11 · jump to transcript →

um no sort of venetian atmospheres nor north of italy uh territories being shown it's um it it's quite clear that is it's something different yeah it definitely is and um if you're watching the credits here you'll see some names here that are familiar but not always in the ways that they were before this uh for example we had a credit on here for the cinematographer here was uh massimo divinanzo who was the son of uh

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frequent Federico Fellini cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo, but he was a camera operator on Paprika who moved on to becoming the DP on All Ladies Do It, Così fan tutte, which you and Troy did the honors for, as well as the Boyer, Monella, this film, and after this, Black Angel or Senso 45, which I think is probably one of the more beautifully shot of his later films. But again, as we said, this is sort of a transitional one towards that direction. And then we also had our

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a camera operator on this film, who is Andrea Doria, who went all the way back to films like Miami Cops, the Bud Spencer, Terrence Hill film, and Cross of the Seven Jewels. But he went on to become a full-fledged cinematographer at the very end of his career with Mon Amour and Kick the Cock, which is kind of one that gets overlooked. It's not a feature film, it's kind of a long short, I guess, but it's sort of a little bit of a footnote in his career after he stopped making full-on features. Yes, well, I was...

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weren't making any money off those films. So I actually did, I wore a button cam on certain cases in New York and stuff. And so when it was suggested, I think by Roxanne, that the wraparound could be the eyes, I leapt for that right away. So even though when you see shots from the perspective of the button cam, what it is is generally my cinematographer, Taryn Anderson, who's like a tiny woman, like 5'3", is wearing this weird rig with a 5D strapped to her chest.

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Kelsey Abbott, the redhead in these scenes, is basically addressing her lines to Larry, looking at my cinematographer's forehead. This is where you can see Larry's not wearing any underwear. See that whole, oh, there we went. Larry is an indie film actor through and through. He was like, Simon, do you want me to have underwear? And I was like, I feel like your character would have underwear. He's like, well, I don't.

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We were just thinking that. But you know, the shitty thing about that is now everybody's gonna know what a retinal implant looks like and they're gonna look at my footage and be like, that just looks like he's got a fucking red epic attached to him. Oh, yes. I'm a fucking asshole. So to film this stuff, Adam is wearing this giant rig similar to what... Actually, it's the same rig that my cinematographer is wearing for the wraparound, but he has a giant red epic on his shoulder.

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I mean, a lot of these shots, basically, where Joost Vakano, my German cameraman that was the DP on this movie, found some really good angles by putting the camera in an extremely low position, so that you get enormous distortion. And here, there is the multiple image stuff here going on, when two things happen at the same time, the playback and what's happening in reality.

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And here, of course, comes the... The very simple trick stuff there is just shooting it twice and by a little glitching, try to go from one shot to the other, isn't it? Oh, I thought you were talking about TJ Laser, the stuff that I shot. Oh, that's great. Oh, yeah, thank you. Very important, too. Yeah, now watch the gun stuff there, because that's really great. Michael Miner shot that, actually, DP, for me.

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I see a lot of names there. Annette Victoria Hellermak. Hellermak, who was the fiancée of Joost Vukano at that time. And later married Rob Bottin. Married Rob Bottin and worked on a lot of my movies, her second unit. She did the second unit on Starship Troopers. And again, she did all the second units as a DP and partially operating on Hollow Man.

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One of the things that they did is they worked with Casey Cannon and Van Ling, who are the people who actually did these screens. And they worked to develop screens that were bright orange, or that read orange, you know, where computer screens always read blue. Because Alan Davia, the DP, it drove him crazy how he would have to light a scene basically for the computer monitors instead of...

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interact with but it was also rigged to fall down at the end so it's meant to kind of crumble and um be destroyed so they they crawled around on it for months and then like over the course of three weeks they destroyed it all would this be a good time for me to talk about alan daviau at all yeah sure um the cinematographer you've mentioned him uh earlier in terms of the monitors and stuff but he's definitely somebody

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amassing whatever knowledge he could. And at one point, he crashed the set of Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks and watched cinematographer Charles Lang creating the gorgeous VistaVision images of that film. And that's what really hooked him on the idea of becoming a DP. When he graduated from high school, he bought a 16mm camera and started shooting everything he could, you know, student films.

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

This is day one. He'd just come off X-Men, flown to New Zealand January 2000, and this was the very first scene that we shot. He really hadn't quite figured out Gandalf, but he was doing a pretty good job for his first day. The Ian Holm shots were actually done inside a studio from the location of Matamata, that's Ian McKellen, and then when you cut to Ian Holm, we're inside a studio. Andrew Lesney, our cinematographer, did a brilliant job of matching the indoors and outdoors. Now, some of the scale things

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

that represents that sort of foggy area at the beginning of the shoot. Another brilliant shot coming up. I think this is one of the best moments in the film, actually. Why they're going on like this is that some of this was directed by Philippa and Fran. The shots of the Witch King, the stuff of the Witch King coming towards camera were particularly their shots. That moment there, I got called by Pete saying, watch the sharps on the blade, and I turned to Alan Guilford, our DOP, and said, Pete wants the blade sharpened.

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

The model of the caverns below Isengard had already been packed away, so I got them to drag the model out and set it up again just to do this shot. And we did the blue screen with Christopher Lee very late as well. He flew back out to New Zealand to do that. These are all miniatures? All miniatures, yep. This was a huge big model that Alex Funke, our miniature DP, shot. One of the very first miniatures ever to be shot for the film. Yes. This was a hellish...

1:54:38 · jump to transcript →

and to create this feeling of that we are there with them. And then James gave me the wonderful, James the cinematographer gave me the wonderful tip to let's just concentrate on one shot at a time, because otherwise we're gonna go insane. And that really helped me to not get bugged down with the whole of it, just to say, all right, this is the shot, we'll do this, and once we have it, we take it off the list, we'll do the next.

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the cinematographer, the wonderful cinematographer. So Tribe 7 lenses, and we had another set, I think another set of Panavision lenses. So there's a lot of mixing going on, but each had its purpose. This is a scene that very much symbolizes the Prussian sort of war ethos, the Prussian soldiers.

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after we had done a tech recce or after we'd done some tech checks there, I wanted to drive home and I couldn't find my cinematographer. He wouldn't show up in the car. And so I get out of the car and suddenly it's getting dark. Suddenly hear this voice going, help, help, help. And we go to the field, we go to this battlefield and oh, I love this shot. This is some VFX.

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Alan K. Rode

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

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Alan K. Rode

And as Sterling Hayden grabs a bottle of suds, check out this tracking shot following him through the apartment. The design of this shot, using the lens and other aspects of the photography, created tension between Kubrick and his DOP, Lucien Ballard. Second build, Colleen Gray, is getting dressed. Since the production code couldn't show them in bed together, this shot of her finishing dressing with an assist from Hayden establishes the intimacy of their relationship.

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Alan K. Rode

Luke Ballard was a legendary Hollywood cameraman who began with Joseph von Sternberg, who was probably the only director before Kubrick who could light a set by himself. Kubrick himself literally knew everything about lighting and photography, beginning with working as a photographer for Look magazine for four years before he embarked on a career as a filmmaker. British cinematographer Jeffrey Unsworth, who shot 2001,

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The DP on the film is Frank Stanley, on the third of four Eastwood-starring films that he'd shoot, the others being 1973's Breezy, the aforementioned Magnum Force, and the Iger Sanction the following year, the shoot of which comes with a story that we'll get to in due time. A few cracks to the head and an asthma attack are enough to put red on his ass and also to...

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And that hastiness is something that would make Eastwood some enemies along the way. You may recall earlier I mentioned the cinematographer of this film, Frank Stanley. It's worth saying that his collaboration with Eastwood ended rather acrimoniously when...

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And this is how you keep a career going for as long as Eastwood has, by rolling with the punches, adapting to exigencies, keeping to a schedule. This is also how you wind up occasionally accidentally dropping your cinematographer off of a cliff. There's a paradox in that Eastwood-Chamino comparison that I find troubling but fascinating, because on the evidence of Thunderbolt, on some levels I think Chamino may have...

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Computer Simulation Division Richard Taylor

One little thing I noticed... I mean, I didn't catch it when I was directing Jeff with this, is that when he plays Clu, he plays it with this strange computer accent, this mechanical accent. And now, when he's being tortured, he loses that, and I wonder whether he noticed it. We got so caught up in being in the scene that nobody realized that at the time. Clu's torture sequence is a great example of how light is used to create emotion. Lots of different filters were used on him as a part of that torture sequence. There are, basically, ripple glass effects, there's silk screen steel mesh, exposure changes, hand-done animation. When he's energized by the MCP, there are other filters that were used on the camera to give him that multiple-effect look. In this particular case, it was silk screen mesh, steel silk screen mesh that was on the taking camera and was spun around on the lens as a part of that effect. Dillinger's arrival to ENCOM in his personalized chopper was an interesting sequence. I took drawings of the chopper, schematic drawings, and created the design motif that you see on the chopper. And then over a two-day period, I applied these designs to the chopper myself with these varying sized, 3M reflective tapes. So, when we are shooting this sequence, what we are basically doing is flying air-to-air in another chopper parallel to this chopper. And we have a very low-intensity light source right near the lens of the camera, which is shooting across and reflecting directly back at the camera off of this 3M material. And it was a red light source, so it gives you the appearance that the chopper is either backlit or has some kind of neon lighting system on it. Again, there was the attempt to, for the outside, the window, to have the grid type of atmosphere and, kind of, cross-pollinize the electronic world with reality. Oh, I remember this stuff. Nice desktop computer built right into the glass. Touch screen. - Touch screen. I still want this desk. This was done with rear projection under the desk. The whole set had to be built up on the stage so that we could put a giant mirror under the set and project it in the old-fashioned way. There were technicians who were basically controlling light switches to different light boxes underneath this desk to light up different areas. The type itself, when it writes itself on, is actually matted into the scene from a computer graphics created type. And again, the view behind Dillinger is indistinguishable from the electronic world. And whose voice is the MCP? It's David Warner's voice. - Yeah. Yeah. It was just electronicized a little bit. End of line. Someone pointed out that they finally figured out that the reason that Bruce Boxleitner's character was wearing glasses is because he was supposed to be a little bit of a nerd. I think that was the intent. Just the readouts on the computers in the real world had to be pre-programmed ahead of time so that they wouldn't have rolling bars on them when we photographed them. Here you see another attempt to link the electronic world with the real world. The cubicles that the office workers are in are not dissimilar to the cubicles that the game players are in. And the intent was to have them go on forever or almost for infinity. Now, what thematically is happening is that at the time, computer people... Programmers were very concerned that the IBMs were going to take over the world of computers and exclude people. That they were going to be... That the system was going to be tyrannical. And what we're trying to show here is that the... Corporately, they've put a stranglehold on the system, and that the programmers are not being allowed the access that they want. And access for them is vital for their work. This character, Alan/Tron, is still inside the world of ENCOM and is more in balance. He seems... He's one of the people that's going to deal with the system from the inside. He's got a very methodical program in Tron, whereas Flynn is no... He's a renegade now. He just doesn't fit in and he's at war with the Dillinger character. The name Tron is derived from electron. Some programmers think it refers to "trace on, trace off." But that... We learned about that afterwards. There's a program in Japan called TRON, which is an educational school program, which has been running since 1985. And ENCOM was the only name we could find that wasn't already registered as a corporate name. Whereas Alan and Flynn are aligned with their counterpart programs, Dillinger has aligned himself with the tyrannical Master Control Program. So, the MCP is the ultimate controller, the big mainframe, the antithesis of the personal computer. The sequences that take place at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory were interesting in their concept and in production. It was a very complex place to work. It was a very tight area, and we worked on this film with 65-millimeter equipment. And Bruce Logan, the DP, had his hands full. Sixty-five-millimeter film technology is quite cumbersome compared to Panaflexes and Panavision cameras. The size of the camera body itself, the limitations of the lenses, blimping the cameras... They're huge, so to get them in these cramped quarters was difficult. We were the only ones... Only film company ever allowed access to shoot in there. And nobody's been back since. A lot of this was lit, practically, by the fluorescents that are in there. It almost looks like a set. Yeah. We were very lucky that Lawrence Livermore let us use this facility. Because the cost of building a set this elaborate would have been astronomical. The Lawrence Livermore Lab is where they had the largest laser in the world. I don't know if it still does today. And they did a lot of research for NASA. Lawrence Livermore Lab was very cooperative with us, and allowed us to, really, kind of, run free through this particular area of the laboratory, which was their linear accelerator. So, we went into the one particular area, which we found most interesting for the area where Flynn gets de-rezzed, and where you first see the matter transportation effect, where the orange is digitized and deteriorated and then reassembled. In this particular case, we are seeing an orange, which was created by CGI by Triple-l. Animation that was done by the effects animation department, which was headed up by Lee Dyer and the effects animators, John Van Vliet, and John Norton, Barry Cook and Michael Wolf, Chris Casady. The name of that laser, by the way, Is Shiva, the Hindu goddess of creation and destruction. The 16 billion-year life cycle, she's got the drum of creation in one hand and the fire of destruction in the other. ...femain suspended in the laser beam. Then, when the computer plays out the model, the molecules fall back into place and voila! So simple. Why didn't I think of that? - That's right. Use that on Star Trek all the time. It's funny how they just kind of, just blow it off. Another afternoon's work down in the lab. Exactly. - Teletransportation, okay. Just digitized matter, no problem. Tomorrow we'll do watermelons. In a week, a human being. No, that comes sooner than that. A-ha! Oh, you're giving it away now.

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Computer Simulation Division Richard Taylor

We just passed a Cray computer, that large, refrigerator-like computer. That was, at the time, the most powerful computer in the world. This Is... - Was this set at Triple-/? Where is this? No, this was picked up at... Wasn't this picked up at Lawrence Livermore? Yes, I think this is right, this is Lawrence Livermore. And again this is another kind of discovery. As we were getting the tour, you said, "Well, we could use this for their transition." This is a Set. So, af this point we've got two hackers, one, in essence, illegal, and the other one legal, both trying to correct the system, get on the network, what we now call the Internet. Bruce Logan, the cinematographer on the film, and Peter Anderson, the cinematographer on the second unit, did a miraculous job of lighting up the set with a lot of light, but taking all the light off of the desk so that you could see the rear projection come up through it. It's pretty clever.

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Computer Simulation Division Richard Taylor

When we came to make a decision about what film format to use for Tron, we felt very strongly that we needed to shoot it on a larger negative than traditionally done. And it came down to a choice between 65 millimeter and VistaVision for the whole show. But the availability of 65-millimeter cameras was far better than the availability of VistaVision cameras, so we made the decision to shoot the entire show in 65 millimeter. And to keep a certain consistency, and as long as we had rented the cameras, we felt that we might as well go ahead and shoot the real world in 65 millimeter and not in 35 millimeter. It was kind of one of those nice to have things, and nobody objected strenuously to it, and also it would be the first time since Ryan's Daughter that a film had been shot entirely in 65 millimeter. And I think you can see the results. I mean, it looks wonderful. In the monitors in Lawrence Livermore, one of the things that Triple-/ had to do was create lots of imagery that appeared on monitors, and that imagery had to be shot and created long before we got to production. So, there was a lot of planning in creating all of the monitor imagery, and Triple-I did a great job on that. Spent a Iot of time on this shot. To accomplish the effect, what we did was get a 4-by-5 still camera and photograph Jeff Bridges in his position after he's been zapped, and then immediately moved him out and took another photograph, which was the background by itself. So, as you pull away chunks of Jeff, you see the background behind him, and then to put the laser and the grid and all that on top of him was basically the effects animation of John Van Vliet. When Flynn is de-rezzed and pulled into the computer, we go through one of the most interesting sequences in Tron, which is the real world to electronic world transition. This sequence was created by Robert Abel & Associates, primarily under the direction of Kenny Merman. It was a sequence which I had designed, knowing that the way that Robert Abel & Associates was making these computer graphic images with the Evans & Sutherland computers, and, really, using vector graphics to create this particular look, would give us a look that would be unique just for this transition. The three-space transition, the movement through all these binary bit patterns and this polygonal landscape, was done by making multiple passes through a traditional animation camera that was pointed at a high-resolution, vector graphic, Evans & Sutherland computer screen, and making multiple passes, frame by frame, using different colored filters, coming back, making multiple passes of rewinding other filters, until you finally end up with this, which seems to be solid objects. But it's really made out of lots of tiny, tiny lines put together to make solid blocks of color or objects. Oh, man, this isn't happening. It only thinks it's happening. When Flynn says, "This isn't happening, it just thinks it's happening," it's a key line, because it means that the reality that he finds himself in now, not even he can fully believe exists. And if anyone should appreciate and understand this alternate reality, it's him, and now he finds himself trapped in it. All right, now we see Sark standing on the bridge, and all of a sudden, he is enclosed with these shrouds of light as he begins to have his conversation with the MCP. The database for the MCP was a human figure that we had created at Triple-/ called Adam Powers and was originally on the Information International sample reel. And if you look at that sample reel, you'll see a juggler character who was juggling balls. Well, that face of that character is the face of the MCP. So, the first time that you see him, he is a polygonal drawing of a face. And that's basically the underlying database of the face. So, it's made of polygons. And those polygons, we play them out on the Triple-I computers as the line-drawing polygons, and made 12-and-a-half by 20-inch stills, high-con stills of those. But we created the mouth positions for the vowels and the syllables so that you could take these interchangeable transparencies and lay them down and make him Say, by whatever order you put them in, whatever you wanted him to say. 'Cause he was voicing a lot of different dialogue. Then those were backlit, and then we applied an effect to those line drawings of putting a steel mesh screen over the taking camera, and it made it have that much more, kind of, complex look. And then we also animated the exposure occasionally. Early on in the film when I started working with Steven, we did a lot of experiments to work out how these characters were created. The thing that we finally decided was that the characters needed to have this energy inside themselves. They are obviously in this electronic world. Now, these costumes were unlike any costumes anyone had ever created for a picture before, in that they were costumes designed to have effects treatments done to them. They were white with black drawing or black lines over them. All of the black elements on the costume were turned into circuitry which could be backlit and light could be pushed through there. We originally shot a 65-millimeter image of these people, live-action photography of them on these black sets. Then from that 65-millimeter film, we created some photo-rotoscope machines, which basically could project the 65-millimeter film down to large pieces of film, which were pre-punched with animation punches. This film was created by Kodak for us, and we would project down with these photo-rotoscope machines, which would hold this film into a vacuum frame and make a continuous tone positive print of each frame of the film. Then these continuous tone prints were taken to a light table, it was a vacuum light table, where they were contact printed to high-con film to make a number of high-con positive and negative images. So that you basically have for every character a large cel and you have high-con positives, negatives, and a continuous tone positive. Then these high-con elements were hand-inked and painted to isolate the circuits on the body, the whites of the eyes, the whites of the teeth and any other circuits that we wanted to treat as a separate exposure. The characters are more often than not... The live-action characters are shot on an all black stage. When there is a set, the set is also black, but is measured out to conform with what we're seeing in this artwork. So that if a character appears elevated in a shot, like this shot, there was an elevated platform for him to walk on, but it didn't look at all like the set. Then we would composite these actors over paintings, transparencies, and once that was done, we would add the light and the color separately. And to simplify it, you can describe it as a sort of perfect blend between live action and animation in that we took live-action film, photographed it in a way that we could break it down to individual frames, then blow up those frames into large slides or transparencies. And we had 75,000 of these, which seems like an appallingly large number, but it really isn't if you compare it to an animation film. And because we were at Disney, they were not overly swamped. That's an actual Frisbee, by the way, and those are actual Frisbees on their backs. We had a excellent Frisbee coach, Sam Schaiz. I like the fact that the deadliest weapon in Tron is a Frisbee. A Iot of effects animation in this sequence and in the film. And that is the animation that makes the glows, and as the Frisbee gets brighter, and you see the reflections of it on their costumes, all that has to be done frame by frame. This is hand-drawn animation that, although it is drawn, a negative is made of that, and it is placed over a light source and then re-photographed, and the ability of the effects animators was such that we were never waiting on the effects animation on the show. They always performed very well. It was never a problem. They did very few redos, and that's because they had had experience doing this beforehand, whereas everything else that we were doing, outside of the effects animation, was the first time through. So, that had a much tougher and steeper learning curve. In the holding cells for the game grid, those are backgrounds that are entirely hand-drawn by the background department, again using Rapidographs and line drawing and airbrushing and then turning those into high-cons. But those drawings are all drawn to match the actual physical sets, which were built so that when someone passes behind something, or leans on something, those are actual physical sets that were built. But again, the sets were just black on black. They're as if they were made of black velvet. Part of the interesting thing as a cinemagraphic problem that was presented to Bruce Logan was that he had to shoot, unlike anybody had ever shot before, sets that were entirely black with white line drawings and white characters running around on these sets. Bruce Logan's job in photographing these people was very difficult because, unlike most photography for most films, you try and get as much chiaroscuro in the picture as you can. You let there be a lot of dark and you create shadows and you create this moodiness, which a cinematographer takes great pride in. In this film, during the sequences in the electronic world, basically, he had to light them so that we could see as much of the costume as possible with as little shading as possible because all of the shading and all of that were done by hand by making different masks and airbrush elements that were used under these costumes in post. The ring game was an interesting technical exercise. The set itself, again, was black flock paper with the rings drawn on this paper with tape. The actors had to realize which rings were there and which ones were not as they acted out the sequence, imagining that they were hundreds of feet above the ground. One of the inspirations of Tron is the movie Spartacus. And there's quite a few similarities to the persecuted people who had to fight in the gladiatorial games. This game, of course, was inspired by Pong and jai alai. I think one of the interesting parts of Tron was the synthesis of new games that were created. The design, for example, of the glove that's being worn here, we took a traditional jai alai glove and then rebuilt it and made it out of foam, added other elements to it to give it a more technological quality, and then again, I put the designs over the outside of that to make it blend with the rest of the costumes. Shooting in 65 millimeter, from a director's standpoint, is a lot of trouble. The cameras are huge and bulky. The format requires an enormous amount of light to fill that negative, so if you are shooting Lawrence of Arabia or Doctor Zhivago and you've got lots of snow and big exteriors, it's fine, but in low-light-level situations, it's very troublesome. The depth of field is sometimes as little as a half an inch, and you find your cameraman is asking you, "Now, which part of the eye do you want in focus? "Do you want the front of the eye or the back of the eye in focus?" Or if the head of the actor is not square to the camera, they ask you the really insane question of, "Which eye do you want in focus? "I can give you the front eye in focus or the back, "but the other one's gonna be blurry." Now a lot of these shots where you see actors talking to each other and we're doing over-the-shoulders, the camera couldn't hold focus for the blow-ups to be made, and I had to shoot the actors on separate passes. So, in a shot like this, where you see all three actors talking to each other, it wasnt filmed that way. I filmed them separately and they were composited. And there's quite a few shots like this. Whenever you see them walking around and they're separated by more than a couple feet, those are all separate shots, and then the actors are composited. So, it's very difficult for the actors because not only do they not see the environment they're in when we're filming, all they see is an all black stage, but they don't even see the actor they're talking to. Forming of the Lightcycles, again, is almost entirely done by hand-done animation done by the effects animation department in creating the way that these cycles form around these characters. We built an object that the actor could sit upon, and it was literally a mechanical shape that was the seat and the handlebars, so he could sit down and it would thrust his arms forward and pull him down into that locked position. So that everything that he sits upon and touches, it was, again, drawn by the animation department, and not until you see the final completed cycle, which is actually a CG/ rendering of the cycle, is any of it done by computer. The Lightcycle sequence was done by MAGI. Their way of creating an object were to take basic geometric shapes, cones, cubes, spheres, cylinders, and make an object by collaging those particular pieces together and creating an object. And that's how the Lightcycle was created. All wide shots that you see are computer-simulated. All of the shots, other than the very tight shots of the figures inside the canopies, are computer-simulated. The shots inside the canopies are actually hand-drawn artwork of parts of the Lightcycles, and the animation that's happening over the Lightcycle windshields is hand-done animation to give them a sense of speed. But virtually every scene that you see of the Lightcycles is entirely computer-generated. And there's not even effects animation in those scenes. If there's an explosion when a Lightcycle hits the wall and a tire bounces across, I think those were basically all CGI. Syd Mead worked really hard on designing these motorcycles so that they would incorporate the characters. But if you look closely at them, you'll see that the second half of the bike is flattened and sort of two-dimensional, and that was done because the computers couldn't handle too many compound curved surfaces. So, we restricted those curves to the wheels and the windscreens, and then the rest of the bike was simplified. The ability to move the camera through 3D space with these computer-graphic-looking landscapes is just great. The Recognizers are a sort of King Kong. There's a little head on top of that gate structure... Suggestion of a face, but it, sort of, got lost. The Recognizers were created by MAGI-Synthavision. As I mentioned, there are graphic vector lines, red lines outlining all of these objects, the same way with the tank. The tank was another unique design of Syd Mead, who is a futurist, a fabulous designer. Once Ram, Tron and Flynn have escaped the Lightcycle grid and are off through the canyons being pursued by the tanks, we cut inside the tanks and see another example of a Syd Mead set that was built as a three-dimensional set, again with black background, and all of the elements on there graphically put on so they could later be treated. So the camera, you can see, is moving through scenes in ways that no physical camera or no model shot could possibly do. The animators that I worked with to create the choreography for all of the CG/ sequences were Bill Kroyer and Jerry Rees. But to communicate all this information to the computer technologists, the people that are sitting at monitors at that time, took a new language which we had to create. So, what we did was, first of all, we had to think of each sequence as a real physical reality. Not only would they draw the point of view that they saw as an animator that we would work out together, that was the story point that Steven wanted to make, and also the point of view that we wanted to take. But after we would draw the original storyboards in a traditional, kind of, storyboard manner, we would have to go back and draw a top view, side view and front view of the objects, where they were in time, where the camera was in time, and what the camera's point of view was. So, we really had to define everything to the CG/ technologist in a three-world, three-dimensional space. And that was the first time that that had ever been done. They must've gone right past us. We made it...this far. Now, all of this, this revolt, it's all being led by the user who's gone in the system, Flynn. The Tron character and Ram character, they would have toed the line and gone through the software the way they're supposed to. We'd better, Null Unit. Null Unit. Get the computer dictionary out. Look up "Null Unit." What does that mean? In this sequence, you can really see some of the flaws. I don't really mean the flaws, but the imperfections in the cels, little bits of dirt that pop on and off. Yeah, but they're few and far between considering. Yeah. Come on, you little bugger. Come on. Look at that. A lot of pops and a lot of glitches in there that we would always Say, "Well, that's what happens in an electronic world." When we started there were going to be no differentiations between the flesh tones and the rest of their uniform. But at a certain point they looked, well, not very good. So as a result, that added, approximately, 120,000 extra frames, extra elements to the shot, so it did grow in many aspects. The cave sequence where Flynn, Tron and Ram finally re-energize their selves with this liquid energy was a very interesting technical problem to solve here. In the sequence in the cave when the water is being handled by the actors, literally, frame per frame, rotoscope animation is isolating the water from the body so that it can be treated with a different filter and a different exposure. And again, this is an example of how light is used to portray motion or energy, as Tron drinks and you see his circuits light up and they become energized. The set itself was a complex geometric shape, which was designed by Peter Lloyd, and we built into this set, basically, water channels, and the water itself was reflecting light sources that we put in angle so they would reflect to the camera, and the water was in black tanks so that all we're really seeing are the highlights on the water. Yeah, but the biggest problem at that time was do we fill this with colored water or clear water? Had to do tests, you know. - Right. That was your problem. Do we put milk in there and make it purple? I think that what Flynn is surprised now, ironically, to see that there's parts of this mirror world that are more alive than he anticipated. So, it's not just the harsh computer reality, there's something living about it. It's a very complex shot, again, with all the elements. Probably about 30 different elements, 30 different separate exposures for each frame. Normally in a special effects movie, you get a very bad bottleneck effect in that all these things have to be composited through one or two optical printers. Now we have digital compositing machines. But by putting it into a manufacturing system like this, where it became like an animated film, we could use 14 or 15 animation stands, and we could use a slew of effects animators and ink and paint people to do all of this work simultaneously. As far as I know, we still have more shots with human beings composited into an artificial environment than any other movie. I believe there's 1,100 special effect shots in the film and 900 of which have human beings composited in them. And that number is just very, very large. Just the organizational task alone was monumental, not even considering the creative side of it. For every frame you would have an additional five to 15 cels that isolated the different colors and the different... We had body mattes, we had face masks, continuous tones. You made print backs on top of print backs. So, those 75,000 original cels grew to over half a million. I think we ended up with something like 600,000 cels, all of which had to be kept in order. We had to pull trailers, literally these large house trailers, kind of, industrial trailers onto the lot. We ran out of space and we ended up with 10 trailers that would house all these cels and had to be organized and sent over... 80% of them were sent overseas and had to be numbered and then painted and kept in order. At one point we thought if we had 1,000 scenes, and this was around Christmas time, the film was going to come out later that summer, and we had no idea of how we were going to get it all done in that short a period of time. And we thought, "Well, it's summer vacation. We have two weeks. "We'll get college students, 500 college students in a room." We really believed this might happen. We discussed this for about an hour and we Said, "You'd have 500 students in a room. "We'll teach them how to do inking and painting and rotoscoping, "and they only have to do two scenes each. "And so they do one scene a week. "At the end of that time, we'll be done, "and we'll just go and shoot them on the animation stands." It didn't work out. So, we brought on Arnie Wong, who was an animator. We put him in charge of supervising Cuckoo's Nest, which is a ink and paint service that was in Taiwan. Approximately 80-some employees in a single room. And what we did is we went through and we made a videotape of every situation and what to do in that situation. So that if an inker over there, who didn't even have to understand English to do this, could go to a TV monitor, roll to this particular problem and see exactly what you'd do in that situation. And then he was there to answer questions that were unusual. And the most interesting thing, and one of the things that I'm particularly proud of with this technique is that in spite of what a pyramid it was to build, we managed to get all of this post-production done in six to nine months. And that is using a technology that we had developed. It had never been done before and we developed it and used it on this picture and delivered on time. And that was only possible because of this manufacturing technique. It's interesting the computer animation iS the simpler part of the set. - Yes. Ironically, one of the things that was a creative philosophy that we enjoyed and were proud of was that we were taking computer animation and letting it stand on its own. We weren't trying to make computer animation mimic reality. And the job was then to make reality, the actors and the sets, look like the computer animation. We used to say, "Well, if you've got lemons, make lemonade." Everybody else, and certainly since this point, has been going nuts trying to make computer animation mimic reality perfectly. And I found that the limitations of computer graphics at the time were the most exciting thing. If computer graphics... If computer animation is no longer different from reality, maybe we've lost something in that. Certainly you gain special effects technology and you can do certain things, but it's the limitations, I find, to be the creative challenge. I think at the time we were using four computer animation companies... Yes. -... which were probably the only animation companies that existed in the country at the time. Yeah, I had been visiting some of these companies for two years before we started making the movie. Maybe even longer than that. And I used to show up at their doorstep and Say, "One day I'm gonna make this movie. "You know, we're gonna do this and this is gonna be great." And they'd say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." I'd come by every six months and say this is really gonna happen, and I think they were more surprised than anybody else when we really did this movie. And they got to show their stuff. The way the de-rezzing effect was created, for example, when Ram passes away and he's in the cabin of the Recognizer, there's a combination of the original photography of the character, and then that is overdrawn with literally hand-done, line-drawing animation done by the animation department. And between that animation and light exposures, you can make it just, basically, run off, dissipate and fade away. Also, upon viewing this again, for so many years, you tend to kind of lump it all together visually in your memory and we forget, I forget, how much detail, how much layering of texture was put into this film. - Mmm-hmm. Ai! these shots are all completely storyboarded. Even the electronic world and all the simulated shots were all on storyboards. There must have been thousands of storyboards. Yeah, it was very detailed. Because rendering times in computer graphic imagery, the time it takes for the computer to draw each frame, are high. They're even high by today's standards. It takes sometimes as long as an hour or more for each frame of film. Probably the most complicated CGI images that were in Tron were done by Information International. The Solar Sailer hangar, the Solar Sailer, its formation, the walls of that environment, that's all CGI. As far as Cindy Morgan's involvement, she was very brave to get involved because a lot of actresses Said, "What am I going to wear? "You're going to put what on my head? "I've got to have a helmet and headgear "and wear all this spandex?" And that scared a lot of actresses away. Yeah, it was very hard to get anyone to take us seriously. You'd call people up, they'd come in for casting sessions, and Steven would do his best to present the film, and they'd look at you askance, think you were crazy. You'd run some video on them, and they just didn't believe it was going to happen. And as a result, it was very, very difficult. And I think that was one of the last major parts that was cast. Yes, it was two or three days before the first shot or something. Yes. - It was very close. And one of the people we tried was Deborah Harry. Right. We screen-tested Deborah Harry. The Bit was created by Digital Effects Incorporated, and we didn't have the time to choreograph a CGI Bit for every scene. So, what we did was created a series of stills that could be cell flopped, and these transparencies were created by Digital Effects so that the Bit could be rotating and have these different pulses in it, and then when it wanted to express itself, we flipped to the next sequence of stills, which would make it become more spiky or change its shape, and literally those were cell flopped and then flown around by moving the animation camera on the object to give it its motion from left to right or up or down or wherever it moved, we got it closer to you. That was all put in by moves on the animation camera, on these stills that were being cell flopped. These characters were very interesting. I especially liked the one that looked like a vacuum tube. Other programs... - Other programs and... ...in the system. The Recognizer sequence is another set that was built based on designs by Syd Mead. The interior of the Recognizer, as the interior of the tanks, was all a physically complex shape that the actors moved around on with white line-drawing vector material over the surface of it, and isolated animation coming back and colorizing and animating those elements. I think one of the most successful pieces of computer choreography in Tron is the whole Recognizer sequence, when the Recognizer hits a bridge and becomes multiple pieces and Flynn pulls them all back together with his energy and the choreography of the way those parts all fall back into place and tumble. The thing that people don't realize about computer simulation, especially at this time, is there were no programs that imitated the effects of nature on choreography. Every piece and every part of every computer-simulated object had to literally be choreographed frame per frame by an animator. When the Recognizer moves along and bounces off the ground floor and the pieces separate and then come closer together and have that real, elastic, rubber-banding kind of quality to them... Simple things in choreography... I mean, when an object goes around a corner, does it just swing around the corner or does it have back animation? Does it weave left and right? Does it back animate before it moves forward? Those are the things that the animators brought to this and that the computer-simulation people did a terrific job of interpreting.

28:30 · jump to transcript →

It was very small, very hands-on by everyone. No one had a lot of assistance. The sound person was a one or two man band. The camera operator and the focus puller and the director of photography, that was it on the camera. And just a few key grips, just a few guys to do lights.

1:11:53 · jump to transcript →

He actually did not shoot any of the chase scene. Robbie didn't feel too comfortable filming a chase. That was the director of photography and operator on the chase was a guy named Bob Yeoman. But I loved Robbie's sensibility and I liked the idea of not doing a lot of cutting in this film as I had in previous and subsequent films.

1:13:47 · jump to transcript →

if I get what I think are better suggestions, you know, especially from the director of photography or the camera operator or somebody. And so it's very much a collaborative effort, but I come in with a total plan. I don't show them drawings of, you know, I say, we're going to come in here and do a shot, you know, this big on Peterson, and that's all. May not even shoot the other side.

1:29:05 · jump to transcript →

Dennis Skotak

My name is Dennis Skotak. I was supervising director of photography on this project.

4:27 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

Bill, isn't there dialogue that you have on this that people have used in video games? Yeah, I think so. "Game over, man" and things like that. You get anything for that? - I don't think so. I'm not even getting anything to sit here and do this commentary. They expect us to do it for no money. You got a beer out of it, though. No, it's just fun. I got a beer out of it, so that's cool. This was an amazing set, this concourse A. And it was long. And later on when all hell's breaking loose, Jim had that little video camera. He had everybody on the crew having coffee while we would run at him and do different things. It was SO amazing to see this gigantic set, one of the biggest sets I'd ever seen, and there's Jim by himself with this little camera. When did the bust-out almost happen? He was gonna move the movie. When did that happen? I remember there were some problems. There were some union problems. The crew weren't used to working the same way. With Jim. They weren't used to working. That's unfair. They were craftsmen, but they had an indentured way of doing everything. Jim needs something, he just grabs it. If he needs a light moved, he'll grab it himself. We punched a hole through somewhere cos he needed to run a line. He didn't wanna wait around. He just said "Give me a hammer." But this was an ambitious schedule. Jim was running from stage to stage. I think we had about three big sound stages with giant sets. And then there were two sound stages with miniatures. And then there was a stage with all those tunnels. I remember them putting you in that damn tunnel. That pipe. We had gone to the power station to shoot the atmosphere-processor scenes and come back to the set after it had been wrecked. So we're into Adrian Biddle's photography here. He was the second DP. I encouraged Adrian, to save time, to use as much built-in lighting as possible. This is lit by the fluorescents in the set, with just a little additional lighting. Adrian liked to work on a raw and edgy look and work with the practical lights a lot more. This is another thing that is important. With a lot of science fiction movies that are all interior, you often lose track geographically of where you are and it becomes incredibly confusing and it's hard to build the tension and the suspense. Jim was aware of this from the script stage and made sure that we established through the helmet cams, through the motion trackers, where they are, and then ultimately, later on, where the aliens are. Even in this version, you're left to fill in what happened. We don't see the baittle. We'll see plenty of battles later and this is promising you that. We have a shot coming up here where there were acid holes - acid... holes... eaten into the floor by these so far unseen aliens. And, of course, these sets were not double-deck sets. Jim wanted a scene where a character looks down through one of these holes. I think Bill spits down into it to give some perspective. So this down-view we shot on our miniature stage. We layered the set and photographed that. This is where you spit and they did it in miniature. They even did a miniature spit. - Is that what that is? To get that spitting effect, it was actually not spit. It didn't work very well, so it was a combination of milk... Milk and water in an eyedropper right underneath the lens. The complaint from the studio was that the film went on too long without anything really happening. I was winding the suspense tighter before you actually saw anything. The studio said we were just jerking around. Too many movies that I see now, it's all upfront. You start seeing stuff right away and there's no sense of a build. So this is the miniature APC that was built by Bob and Denny Skotak. Pretty good size. I remember it being five or six feet long. Most people don't twig that as a miniature. That's the real APC pulling in. They matched the lighting pretty nicely. I think Jim did some of his live-action stuff undercranked. He ran the camera slightly slower on the APC so that it felt slightly more as if it were a miniature but you knew it was real because you could see people interacting with it. So if any of the miniature stuff didn't quite work for whatever reason, it took the curse off that cos it felt that the two were blended together. I think he wound up undercranking because the APC, the full-size one, didn't move as fast as he wanted it. I think it could only go eight or ten miles an hour. One difficult thing about making this movie was 7erminator wasn't out in England and the perception of Jim Cameron, who looked about 20 when he directed this movie, and myself as the directing-producing team was met with a great deal of resistance because back then the system in England was that you had to put in years and years to rise up to the level of being a producer or a director. And we were simply not treated with a great deal of respect and it was very hard every day of the shoot. We were being second-guessed and every decision we made was questioned and the tremendous thing, of course, having Stan on the film was that... I was old. - No. ...was that you were a cheerleader for both of us. By demonstrating the respect and enthusiasm that you did, I think other people gradually relented. I knew it was the best thing for me and for everybody on that set. There are people that you know, no matter how they do it, what they're doing is special. This particular directing-producing team had been a win for me in my career and stayed that way. I never thought our facehuggers looked as good as the one in A/en. We had to make lots of 'em and they had to run around and do things, but, texturally, the one in the first film looked great. It really held up. The bits of oysters and stuff inside it looked great. But I did wanna see the disgusting thing that had been down the inside of Kane's throat in the first film. You never see it in the movie, in A/en, so I figured we'd gross everybody out. All of Giger's designs have a real sexual undercurrent to them. And that's what horrified people about the alien as much as anything, is it worked on a kind of Freudian subconscious level. And Ridley and Giger knew that and they went for that. This film was never intended to be as much of a horror film as the first one. It was working on a different thematic level but I still wanted to be true to some of those ideas, some of those design concepts. It would be natural to assume I'd wanna work with Giger, but it just didn't occur to me at the time. Maybe it was because we really only needed to design one new creature and I had already designed her by the time I wrote the script. The alien queen. I guess maybe it was my own ego as an artist. I just felt like he'd made his stamp and I knew from what I'd read that he had to do everything his way and I had a very specific idea for the alien queen to extrapolate beyond what had been done before. I got the impression from what I read that I wasn't gonna get the dynamic character that I wanted. In a funny way, part of what attracted me to doing this film was the opportunity to do cool design stuff. So maybe I was just a little bit too in love with the idea of designing the creatures and the weapons and doing all that stuff.

47:57 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

Another technique that's not used any more to create the size of that set. A hanging miniature that was the previous shot, where you saw the expanse of the inside of this alien virtual universe, which is what you're seeing here, setwise, the cocoon aspect of what these aliens do. A hanging miniature, which is a technique, is a small set piece that hangs in front of the camera and then the full-size set is behind it and the actors are behind it. The illusion is that the set is huge and expanding up and over everyone, when, in fact, the foreground of the set piece is a miniature, the background of the set piece and all the actors is normal size. It's basically a forced-perspective shot. This is my first on-camera line coming up. This was the first day. We started at Acton. We started here. I thought you guys had already been shooting. They had to reshoot. We went back and picked up here. I see. And Dick Bush, the cinematographer, was replaced by Adrian Biddle somewhere in this area at the same time. A few changes were made in the lineup about two weeks in.

1:07:05 · 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 →

But I think he had Parkinson's for a long time, but Ezra, the executive producer, turned up and goes, yeah, he's got Parkinson's. He has energy, he says, but he couldn't do certain things where a guy has to crawl into certain bits and measure the light and stuff. He just couldn't do that. You can't put a cinematographer with Parkinson's at the top of a ladder to check the light levels, can you? No, no.

30:05 · jump to transcript →

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

1:53:04 · jump to transcript →

My name is Alec Gillis. I am the codesigner of the creature effects for Alien 3 of Amalgamated Dynamics Incorporated. I'm Tom Woodruff, Jr. I'm Alec's partner in Amalgamated Dynamics, cocreator of the Alien effects, and I was in the rubber monster suit. I'm Richard Edlund. I was the visual-effects supervisor on the show. It's the last movie we ever did totally photochemically, actually. Right. This was on the cusp of the digital age. We did have some digital elements. When the alien's head cracks at the end it was a digital shot. That was the only one. Styrofoam floor. - Yes. We had a better Styrofoam floor for that where we'd covered it with metallic dust. It made a more interesting effect. I've always been a little self-conscious of those Styrofoam floors. Plus, that alien juice is pretty mean stuff. I think it's interesting that you can fly through space in a Styrofoam ship! Hey, there's a glimpse... Was that it? That scan, that was a fun scan. There it is - the multilayered sculpture. Are those your star fields too, Richard? - Yeah. I'm Alex Thomson. I was the director of photography on this movie, Alien 3. I actually got involved because the original cameraman was Jordan Scott Cronenweth, who did Blade Runner for Ridley Scott, beautifully in my opinion. But Jordan became ill in the first four days of shooting and had to leave the production. I was asked to take over, and I was honored to be able to try and match to his lighting. All I heard, and I wouldn't know if there was any other reason whatsoever, was the fact that Jordan wasn't well. We knew he had got Parkinson's. We knew he had that. You could see he wasn't a fit man obviously when I used to go and talk to him. He was a great character. I liked him very much. I knew him from Blade Runner. I'd met him on Altered States, too, cos Stuart cut that, didn't he? But I'm convinced it was the fact that he wasn't well enough to continue. I Know it was a sad loss, but at the same time, I love Alex's work. I did Legend with him. I did Legend with him. Yeah, and I love him anyway. And I did The Saint with him. I love this shot, and I love the fact that it's a model. I just still feel that these miniatures have a quality that CGI spaceships just don't have. Do you think that, Richard, or is that just me? Am I being old-fashioned? Well, it can and it can't. I mean, it depends. On Air Force One I would never have made any models now. It depends on the kind of stuff. This is obviously special effects. These are models shot by the second unit, by Tony Spratling, up in the north of England.

0:59 · jump to transcript →

You notice in these sequences, the camera is near the ground so the ceiling becomes more important than the floor and one is shooting up people's nostrils. This was an approach David Fincher wanted, which I think is terribly effective indeed and makes it more distinctive than the other three, rather, in my opinion. I tried to keep it fairly shadowy, so that it looks moody. Where I could, I brought the light from the top because it's unusual for the light to come from the floor, but one had to be careful about it obviously. The difficulty was getting light into the eyes SO we could see what the actors were thinking but not at the expense of the mood. I remember at Pinewood Studios when the sets were going up, Fincher would have us walk through the sets just looking at the scope of them. It was truly amazing to see these things go up. Norman Reynolds is a great production designer. He builds the world. It's very difficult to control him cos George would tell him on Star Wars "Don't build that. We're gonna paint it", and the next day - "It's too late. It's built." When they sent us over, we said "Why are we going to London?" They said "It's the sets, the set design, the artistry and the craftsmanship." And it really was very true. British actors is another good reason to go there. Somehow the British accent does a lot for these movies, I think. Vincent has had a deep, abiding interest in Luddite monks, and had done a great movie called The Navigator, where these monks dig their way through the earth, coming out into the 20th Century. It was a great movie. But, anyway, the original idea was that this was a wooden planet built by the Luddites and in the bottom of the planet, symbolically, the reactor was kind of hell. The technology that kept this thing going was emanating from the bowels of Lucifer. What drew me to the project first was that it wasn't a retread kind of sequel. It was a completely new idea, and some of it survived in the final script. David was entirely in control from the beginning. He put his stamp on it. He was the director and nobody ever questioned it. He was completely in control of the set and everybody hung on his words. He was definitely doing it. There was no weakness in it at alll. He was very, very confident in what he was doing and wouldn't be swayed. He had this vision and that was what he was going to do. He came under quite a lot of pressure from 20th Century Fox to hurry up or do it the quickest way or the most expedient way, but he wouldn't listen. He would do what he wanted to do, quite rightly, in my opinion. As I say, his compositions are marvelous and the use of the frame, and so on. David had been a cinematographer before he became a director, so he knew lighting. He knew what was good and what was bad. That's not to take away from David Worley, the operator. His contribution was enormous as well.

10:16 · jump to transcript →

Will I Be A

It's part of the artistry of a cinematographer, if you have a leading lady who's probably getting on in years, you have to put the light where they'd look their best, unless, of course, they are playing a part where they have to look bad, but that's rare. You have to kind of iron out the wrinkles if you can, make them look their best. This is not confined, of course, to female actors, but male actors as well cos they get old in the same way that anybody else does.

1:00:06 · jump to transcript →

as if he was saying to you, listen, this is a reality which I take away, and I'm giving you my reality, so look at the elements that I'm telling you to look at. You know, I remember translating for my Italian colleagues back in the days a book written by John Alton, who was the head of school cinematographer in the time of the film noir.

1:22:13 · jump to transcript →

The scene between Guy and myself was a very long scene, and it went all night. It was a very powerful scene. There was a lot to be said, a lot of dialogue. I just remember cinematographer. I mean, the light that you walk into, and that's a lot 40s lighting and your beauty light and the way a lot of things are not done anymore. So that's so specific and so...

1:34:28 · jump to transcript →

You're so enveloped in this aweness, you know, from a cinematographer. And you don't ever really, you don't have those many moments in film the way it's really done today, you know? So that was spectacular in itself. I see Bud because I want to.

1:34:57 · jump to transcript →

E. Elias Merhige

In here, Wolf, the first cinematographer, he says, more light. As if this illness, this kind of hallucination that he's having, this fever that he's in, has sort of taken the light away from him. And as a cinematographer, he needs more light.

17:57 · jump to transcript →

E. Elias Merhige

The cinematographer who wanted more light is now in the deep cavern inside the tunnel. I also remember at the end of that night's shoot

26:58 · jump to transcript →

E. Elias Merhige

60 or 70 feet onto this landing pad that was inflated from below. So now it's out with the old and in with the new. The old cinematographer has been replaced with the new enthusiastic one who brings new techniques, new ideas, new energy into the film.

54:38 · jump to transcript →

Commentary With Kathryn Bigelow And Jeff Cronenweth

This is Catherine Bigelow. I'm the director of K-19. Jeff Kronoweth, the cinematographer on K-19. Jeff and I went to Russia about four months before we started shooting in the fall of 2000.

0:35 · jump to transcript →

Commentary With Kathryn Bigelow And Jeff Cronenweth

the control and we had a very gifted second unit director DP named Gary Capo who came in and helped complete some of the sequences that we weren't able to finish or pick up some of the pieces that we had missed along the way and without all the subtle details and inserts and the movie wouldn't have

1:29:00 · jump to transcript →

Commentary With Kathryn Bigelow And Jeff Cronenweth

He did them so flawlessly, marrying stuff that we shot live action to the CG work, to the models and anything else that was involved. For me as a cinematographer,

1:33:28 · jump to transcript →

The interior at night was done on stage. And I made sure that the ceiling was sealed. Because if you don't do that, the DP and the gaffer, they open the ceiling and they put big lights because they want to make sure there is enough depth of field to have a sharp focus and it looks theatrical. What was the reason to have the actual apartment and then have a mock-up of it?

13:40 · jump to transcript →

And that's it, he doesn't need anymore. He never looks at the dailies or anything. He's just there doing his job. I'd like to mention Hélène, the DP, the director of photography. She always wanted to put smoke in the scene, which sometimes I would argue, but I have to say there is a sensation of being real. That's exactly what we wanted.

27:29 · jump to transcript →

That was one of those days when they, despite my recommendation, they open the ceiling and put a strong light. And there is some of the shots where when we look at them with Hélène, the DP, she goes, I should not have done that. And it's fine, nobody notices. You can tell it's a little more theatrical.

51:35 · jump to transcript →

There are times when people work for nothing on a movie. In this case, people actually paid the production to work on the sequence. The background plates were done in three days without a motion control camera, which is something of a miracle and something none of us want to try again, especially my gifted cinematographer, Amir Mokri, who had to operate himself.

2:08 · jump to transcript →

The cinematographer Amir Makri can't actually even watch this scene because the weather kept changing as it does in South Africa or in Cape Town. And the skies don't match, but of course only Amir is looking at the sky. This scene has an actual precedent.

19:29 · jump to transcript →

It will shoot whether it's covered in mud or filled with sand. Amir Mokri, the cinematographer, and I have a lot of experience making commercials, which probably helped in the making of this scene. The Kalashnikov has become the Russian people's greatest export. I wanted it to be lovingly shot, almost like a car commercial. One thing's for sure, no one was lining up to buy their cars.

45:16 · jump to transcript →

James Mangold

about Christian's character if Christian wasn't offering something magnetic and interesting to a man as bored and disinterested as Wade that he might lock onto. This is my third film with director of photography Faden Papamichael. And he's a great friend of mine and we really enjoy making movies together. And I think he did incredible work here. And one of the things that I think is most important

34:40 · jump to transcript →

James Mangold

when working with a director of photography is that you are on the same page about how the film's going to look. And it doesn't mean that every shot is planned or storyboarded. Much more importantly, it means that you both understand what you're doing with the camera and the actors in this film. And we thought a lot about the Spaghetti Westerns, which featured many close-ups and did not emphasize the landscape as much as they did the eyes.

35:08 · jump to transcript →

James Mangold

The day I was shooting this sequence where the marshal walks out, I literally went downstairs and we were shooting their surrender, where they put down their guns, which is going to happen in a moment. And I watched them putting down their guns and stepping outside, and Faden Papamichael turned to me, he's the director of photography, and he said, don't you think this looks stupid? And I said, yeah, it does. They should kill him. And we decided there and then, on the set that day we shot it,

1:31:44 · jump to transcript →

really understood the genre well. They were unbelievably prepared to do this movie, but until they rolled a foot of film, we actually had no idea what we were gonna get. And literally seeing the first day and these dailies and how they shot it and the DP they picked was great and his visual style and the way they boarded and shot this scene, it was the first beginning of a sense of, oh my God, this could be and will be a great film. These guys really not only know this,

5:10 · jump to transcript →

not only great visual effects artists, but they're actually going to be able to direct a film that's going to be really awesome. And this scene in particular I really like with what Daniel Pearl, who's our cinematographer, brought. His whole big thing is getting shafts of light and making the forest look like that. It was just such an amazing thing. Guys, how long did it take to do a lot of these visual effects? What's the process?

5:39 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, well, there was a scene that got cut out. Here's the really uncomfortably long other butt shot. That was actually a funny thing was because editorially we had a blocking issue where Ricky was standing and we actually couldn't cut to a different angle to get around it. So we're like, I guess we're holding on her butt for a little bit longer. And yeah, so we just kind of had to deal with that. Yeah, here again, it seems like this where I'm really grateful for our DP because I thought a lot of this stuff he lit and shot so beautifully.

48:32 · 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.

12:09 · jump to transcript →

He's off singing and I'm burning down his whole fucking everything that he has. I love the final look that you give as you walk away. That was a late find. We had to really dig deep in the dailies to find this moment. That's, for me, the best part of the montage. That one look, perfect. Well, you made me look great. And so did Pawel Polkerzeski. Pawel. - We were very lucky to have Pawel Pogorzelski, who was our DP on this film. Great man. Sweet man. - Great talent. Brilliant, brilliant artist. And super fun to work with. Like, just honestly, one of the most fun DPs I've ever had the pleasure of working. I wanna say that Pawel... The great DPs don't need a lot of lights to work. l've had some of them on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, but Pawel, I think, wins the award for working with minimal equipment.

1:08:29 · jump to transcript →

And props to Greg Rementer and Larry who was... I forgot Larry's last name, but Larry who was a DP, who did second unit on films like Top Gun, so he's got quite an experience. And they had to shoot... So we shot all the stuff with you, and then we went off to do more dialogue scenes. And quite a bit of this was done by Greg on the coldest possible Winnipeg night. Brutal. Yeah. The second unit was shooting at night, we were shooting day, so I went over after... I think it was one of the kitchen scenes that we shot. I went over afterwards and it was just... You know, I had two jackets on, three pairs of pants, snowboarding pants... it just... lt was so cold that you really felt it in your bones. Not just the saying. It really was that bad. So the fact that they were able to pull all this off and, you know, Stick to the storyboards when needed to, and step away and do slightly their own thing... -/'m super excited by how great they did. - Yeah. Yeah. As a director, you're like, "I don't wanna have second unit," but you have to. There's no other way we can get this filming done in days. Very important that he pulls into the owner's spot 'cause he bought the place. I think it's very important. It's... lt matters to him. Jesus. That car is a wreck now. His neighbor's not gonna like that. Here they come.

1:14:20 · jump to transcript →

Nia DaCosta

So here you can see a bit, 'cause of the way Jimmima was moving just then in that scene, that the shutter angle is changed. It's not sort of a standard angle. And that's something that Danny did in the first film. Whenever the infected were attacking, the shutter angle would change, the image would appear more choppy to the human eye. And... Sean Bobbitt, my DP, and I, we really wanted to use that, in a way. It was really the only visual reference from the other films that we took. But because, again, we're starting this film with the Jimmies as the real mortal threat, we thought the Jimmies and the infected should have the shutter angle change when violence happens. And this is the first infected of the film coming up, which, again, wasn't written in, but we added, 'cause we were like, "We need infected." And I like infected scenes and things like that, so, yeah.

6:42 · jump to transcript →

Nia DaCosta

I really love the way Sean Bobbitt, the DP, does moonlight, and it really speaks to me as someone who loves mercury vapor lighting. I just think it's really beautiful. So, you have this mix of this, like, greeny light and this orange firelight, which I think is really beautiful. Here's the sound of the train over the moon.

39:03 · jump to transcript →

Nia DaCosta

I see. When I watch this scene, I just think about Sean Bobbitt, my cinematographer, really intensely focusing on the grass and, like, wanting, like, singular blades of grass to be removed or added to the foreground, which I really enjoyed.

1:10:17 · jump to transcript →

Eng Commentary

As the family leaves the film, we get actual night shots of the Champs-Élysées, Paris' grandest street, particularly at night at Christmas time. The Doinelves own a modest little Renault, and as Truffaut's own low-budget production could not afford the usual studio's process shot, in which rear projection is traditionally used to simulate a car ride, Truffaut actually had cinematographer Henri Decas mount the camera on the hood of the car while Albert Rémy really drove through the streets.

52:09 · jump to transcript →

Eng Commentary

The questions were actually put to Jean-Pierre Léo by Jacqueline Descartes, the cinematographer's wife, who was perched beside the camera as it was being operated by Jean Rabier.

1:29:10 · jump to transcript →

we should mention some of the people that worked on this. Bob Caramico was the director of photography. He directed one film that I had the pleasure of seeing theatrically and something we had sold for years. It's called Sex Ritual of the Occult. Oh yeah, I heard about that for years. Yeah, and it's 1970 was released and it has a lot in common with this. It's all on one stage. One central stage. I never saw that. A fog machine.

53:13 · jump to transcript →

Now, Paslov says this is a real skeleton. That's what he told me. Yeah. He's got some nice camera work on this. Well, I think... I think Karamiko knew his stuff. You know, what's interesting about Karamiko, he did all these number of low-budget films. Guess what happened to Count Dracula? Stuff on that level. And then, years later, he's shooting Dallas. He became a big TV DP. You know? He's passed away now, but...

1:08:27 · jump to transcript →

ducked down to clear themselves from flying debris and suddenly come face to fuse with the truth about where they've been standing. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly was Sergio Leone's first collaboration with director of photography Tonino Delli Colli, replacing Massimo Dallamano, who had just been promoted to the ranks of directors, with the 1967 film Bandidos, starring Enrico Mariah Salerno.

2:06:09 · jump to transcript →

Once we get under the bridge, Delli Colli's camerawork becomes masterfully sinuous as it navigates these wooden supports. The camera operator on this film, worthy of a separate hand of applause, was Franco Di Giacomo. He would graduate to director of photography in 1970, and his credits would include such titles as Bernardo Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem, Dario Argento's Four Flies on Gray Velvet, Aldo Lado's Who Saw Her Die,

2:09:41 · jump to transcript →

Roger Moore

You know, Chunky Huse, who was a camera grip... ...Was the sailor at the table at Piazza San Marco. Practically every Bond film that I made has a man with a wine bottle... ...being absolutely amazed at what is happening, always doing a double take. And, of course, the man doing the painting was our DOP, Jean Tournier.

40:52 · jump to transcript →

Roger Moore

Jean Tournier, of course, was the director of photography, the DOP.

49:27 · jump to transcript →

Filmmaker Paul Davis

the book and the documentary, I found out that it was actually minus, it was recorded as minus 11 degrees on the 28th of February in London, where they filmed that night. So it was cold. And those poor guys, they were the only two that had to get wet under those, under the rain trees. And the scene was lit by the DP Bob Painter,

13:38 · jump to transcript →

Filmmaker Paul Davis

shortly before the movie, he actually imposed a smoking ban on the set. Much to the behest of a lot of the British crew, because a lot of them were chain smokers, especially Bob Painter, who was the DP. He was a big smoker, and John would not let any of them smoke. And Bob actually confided. He said he actually quit smoking on this movie. So, you know, all worked out.

54:42 · jump to transcript →

This was the first experience that David Cronenberg and his DP, Mark Irwin, had of shooting on video, and they both told me they were very uncomfortable working with the medium, and they were very relieved to move on to 35mm about a week later. A $20,000 Barco monitor allowed Mark to light his shots for video with greater precision, and I know he was very proud of the end result. The name of the actress has not been passed down to us. The shot revealing the wooden dildo was cut from the initial theatrical release.

4:16 · jump to transcript →

But let's take a moment to admire the production design of Carol Speer, who is working here like DP Mark Irwin and editor Ron Sanders on her third Cronenberg picture. The glass blocks suggest television screens and the open slats of the Venetian blinds emitting blue light evoke the resolution lines that were present on all analog TV picture tubes. You may note in this scene that Max's preferred format is Betamax, which video insiders of the day considered a far superior format to VHS.

15:07 · jump to transcript →

Michael Bolhaus was such an important part of the spirit of this picture. His gifts are all over the place. And in those days, it wasn't quite legal for the cinematographer to hold the camera himself.

1:19:38 · jump to transcript →

but he did frequently, and it was always so great when he did. And one of the things that happens when you hold the camera yourself is that you're not just trying to hold the frame. You're not just trying to keep everything. His wife was an actress. Michael's wife was an actress. And so that when a cinematographer with that kind of sophistication, that kind of feeling for actors puts his eye to it, he'll go wherever his instinct takes them because of feeling what they're doing.

1:19:59 · jump to transcript →

Commentary With Author CG Paul M. Sammon

And by the way, Belinda Bauer always saw me with a recorder, tape recorder, when I wasn't shooting film because I was writing a lot about this film. As some of you may know, I did a lot of journalism for magazines like Cinefix, Cinefantastique, American Cinematographer, and so on. And she actually asked to borrow my tape recorder. So that's my tape recorder, my audio tape recorder right there that she's using. And here we are in L.A. again. And...

1:07:38 · jump to transcript →

Commentary With Author CG Paul M. Sammon

I have to admit that, you know, basically it just, of course, does not hold up to the first one. However, the first one is a completely different kettle of fish, not done under the extreme pressure and circumstances of this particular film. And considering everything that happened on this movie, I think that it has aged fairly well. I'm amazed that the new Mark Irwin, by the way, the director of photography,

1:51:26 · jump to transcript →

This is sort of my homage to it, but if you notice, there's a lot of bold colors that probably somewhat are cartoony colors, especially when we get into the house, and that was by design. And I did have a terrific DP, Levi Isaac, who obviously gets credit for shooting this and making it look like a great movie.

2:25 · jump to transcript →

And it's funny, I look at, there's Levi, Levi Isaacs, who really, this is my first directing ever. I had written and produced a lot of television, but this is my, you know, my intro into directing, and Levi was terrific because your DP, as everyone knows, is your right-hand person. And he was, he taught me a lot, actually. Ah, that was our...

5:01 · jump to transcript →

This here is a second unit shot in Moscow, Red Square, done by Michael Ballhaus, the cinematographer's son, Sebastian Ballhaus. And he did much more there in Russia and Moscow. We will come later back to that. This, of course, is back in Los Angeles in reality, even if it's meant to be in Russia. But it's a big, I don't know, banquet room somewhere here in Los Angeles where we did that.

5:36 · jump to transcript →

He has such a dry sense of humor. It's amazing. We were cracking up. We called the whole shoot Air Force Fun because we had so much fun. We had a lot of jokes. Maybe it had also to do with, first of all, the personalities was great. I mean, Harrison Ford, myself, and Michael Ballhaus, the cinematographer, a great guy from Germany also, Gary Oldman. We just...

31:48 · jump to transcript →

We had a larger size for this close-up. They ended up making some oversize pinchers to hold it as well. But it gave us the detail we needed to articulate the face and have the head extrude from that silicone sheath. Nigel Phelps the production designer worked with Darius Khondji the DP. They worked during the preparation. It was very important for Darius to have some sets with the light included in the set, because there's some small corridor - it's very very small, very tight - and it was very important to include the light.

5:28 · jump to transcript →

I remember these signs - this is the psychological tests - and Jean-Pierre had something specific in mind, in terms of the primitive drawings of apples and pears and cows and cherries and things. He went through an amazing amount of artists trying to get primitive-looking drawings of fruits and little tidbits. It turned into such an assignment. He couldn't find anybody who could nail that style. Which had something to do with what he had seen as a Child - basic, primitive illustrations, which actually come back in his film Amélie. We get a sense of that naive, childlike graphic thing, which comes from a children's book, which, I think, is a really big deal in Jean-Pierre's imagery. I love Dan Hedaya. I love the Coen brothers' movies. You remember, he played in Blood Simple, the first movie of the Coen brothers. Interesting casting. I wondered if Jean-Pierre would have picked Dan Hedaya had Jean-Pierre grown up in America and seen Cheers. I love the lighting. You had a lot of lights coming up from the floor. Exactly. We used an optical process, and the folks were very nice with me because they made all the prints in the world with the process. And it was very expensive. And they made maybe 3000 prints with the process. The name of the process is ENR. It was invented by Storaro, the Italian DP.

8:49 · jump to transcript →

Darren Aronofsky

Brooklyn in the mid-80s, I was really a product of hip-hop culture. Matty, too, the DP, was from Queens, and Eric was from Oakland. And, you know, there's always been hip-hop music, rap and hip-hop dance, breakdancing, hip-hop art, graffiti, but hip-hop techniques haven't really quite made it into film. And so the idea was to sort of, you know, just sample different types of shots and create some type of story element out of it. So we sort of wanted this repetition of the film montage through the film

25:04 · jump to transcript →

Darren Aronofsky

This bodega we shot in is actually the bodega beneath the building where me and Eric shared an apartment while filming the film. Actually, while we were there, Matthew Libetique, the DP, who lives in L.A., as well as Laura Zuckerman, the first AD, and occasionally some other people lived in that apartment. It was five or six filmmakers living there, working 24 hours a day to get the film done.

27:19 · jump to transcript →

Alexander Payne

I used many, many, many of the same people between Citizen Ruth and Election. The production designer, Jane Stewart, and the DP, Jim Glennon, and the editor, Kevin Tent, and the composer, Rolf Kent, and even the same assistant cameraman, and the same prop master, and a lot of the same grips and electricians, and Omaha crew people, a lot of the same actors. In a way, Citizen Ruth was something of a dry run for Election.

13:48 · jump to transcript →

Alexander Payne

like the school mascot. So that's the one visual reference we have to George Washington Carver. I have exactly 48 minutes to make all the arrangements. You finish early, just sit quietly and check your work. I'll be right back. Jim Glennon, the cinematographer, is very proud of this shot because it involved a, I think a seven stop

59:30 · jump to transcript →

And Adrian and I, my cinematographer, had gone over it and discussed it, and when I arrived, the lights were... He had already pre-rigged the whole thing, but unfortunately the lights were at the top on the ceiling, and I realized once we got there that we were going to see them. And Adrian tried to talk me into doing a 180 camera move instead of a 360-degree camera move. And I kind of held out, and he and everyone else was very pleased when it worked.

14:00 · jump to transcript →

Now, this scene, I was running out of time. I shot this entire sequence in one day, the whole camel race, and with my cinematographer on his back in a truck. Very, very sick. I think almost every member of the crew got sick at some point. I, however, did not. I learned in India making Jungle Book that when I was in Morocco, every day all I eat is mashed potatoes and chicken. I don't know what it is, but in India I almost died from being...

38:03 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

We flew around in the helicopter and shot it being set on fire. But what you see here is real. None of this is a special effect apart from the distant beacon that lights at the very end. But the hills are real. Those beautiful clouds that are in the valley were all real. It was all just absolutely the way it was in the morning that we shot it. And then we just added in those distant flames. This is a helicopter sequence that David Knoll, wonderful aerial DP, shot for us. Obviously, none of these fires are actually there. We added the flames in later on the computer.

1:06:15 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

One or two shots. So here we are at the beginning of the second disc. We're only halfway through. And I can't believe that some of you are still listening to this. Shouldn't you get some sleep or something and maybe come back tomorrow? This was the cameo scene, wasn't it? Where everybody thought it would be fun to dress up as a pirate for the day. We've got Andrew Lesney, our DP, Rick Porius, co-producer. Richard Taylor and Gino from Winter Workshop are there.

2:07:32 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

This actually was filmed in Rome. You know, the whole film was shot in Italy. The Explorers Club was at a palazzo in Rome, and Zissou has taken to wearing an earring at the beginning of the film. Here's where he decides he's humiliated out of-- He loses his confidence. Did you place a second earring there that Owen knew where it was? I don't quite remember. - Probably. I think it was more Owen just went over and acted like he was picking something up because he could never quite find it. This is revealing some of the secrets of the trade. The deliberately low-tech effects. Yes, yes. Something I was thinking about this ship, which we didn't say in the cross-section area, but I do think is definitely another thing about the film, is the sort of deliberately artificial and sort of the things that are invented, certainly the fish and the cross section of the boat, sort of living in the same world with stuff that's very real. You know what? Okay, so this is one of the big concerns for me. How-- We want to make, you know... Most of our time is spent in how do we bring our characters to life. That's what we're inspired by, that's what we spend all our time with as writers. And then as a director, I'm working with actors, and those are my actors, and then the cinematographer, the production designer... And how can we have them come to life and have a feel for them in an environment that is so strange and unreal? Well, and I think what's sort of interesting about that too is that Zissou is somebody who, you know, makes his living sort of, you know, in some ways... - Making fake documentaries. Making fake documentaries or documentaries that are highly indulged or embellished upon. And, you know, so, you know... Yeah, so the artifice of it, for me, it doesn't actually-- This is like intellectualizing something, but for me, part of the inspiration of the movie is to create this world that's going to be set, and they're gonna wear these crazy outfits, which comes out of his character, and he's going to fly for Air Kentucky, and, you know, we're going to make these animals. But the hope is that through the fact that we've made so much, and invented so much, and through the artificial feeling, that it would make it interesting enough or have enough excitement in just the fact we're trying to create so many things. That's basically what I feel like. We're just trying to try as hard as we can to put as much life into it as we can and as many ideas into it as we can. And there's even something that you were saying, which was that the fact that the animals being this sort of handmade, stop-motion, old-fashioned style, and how it's not very real, is related to the whole concept of a movie being about people who make things and create their own world. That's what the movie's kind of about, some sort of self-invention, and making their own art and all those things. Which in this instance, there's a bunch of plastic domes with light bulbs blinking inside them on a beach in the south of Italy.

18:16 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

And Bill's reading one of your actual notebooks. Yes, the notebooks in this-- Jane's notebooks are modeled on the notebooks that these movies are written in. So The Life Aquatic is-- Originally, while we would sit here talking, I would write everything down in longhand in these notebooks like this, then take it home and type it up, then bring in the pages next day, then we'd write more in the notebook, more on the pages. That's what the notebook-- I mean, I guess it's worth noting that the way we write these things or not, we don't both do separate scenes and then bring them in together and try and sort of edit them or anything. We actually come up with everything together in the room. I mean, stuff is done later in rewriting or when you're directing and stuff, but... You know, it is a... We make the story sitting here together. Yeah, in Jane's notebooks. - Yeah, in Jane's notebooks. Why don't we talk about some of the people who work on these films? Maybe we start with Robert Yeoman, the cinematographer. He shot all my films, Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and Royal Tenenbaums, as well as your most recent film. The Squid and the Whale, yeah. Yeah, from my perspective, I tried to hire Bob for the first movie I did, Kicking & Screaming, and... Only to hear later that he was shooting a movie called Bottle Rocket by some neophyte Texan writer, director, actors. Yeah, I think we both probably responded strongly to Drugstore Cowboy, which was a film Bob had shot. - Right. And, you know, Bob, he lights his movies, he's drawn to very natural lighting, and I feel like he's sort of a Nestor Almendros kind of... His style of director of photography. He's also a very good operator, camera operator. He's great at hand-holding and he knows how to get the image. And he's tireless too. This is probably a good-- Now we're underwater, in the underwater forest, a good time to talk about Mark Friedberg. And you did this in a tank in Cinecittà? Yes, this is in a tank, where we built this undersea forest, and it was very difficult to do. It's hard to keep the water clean, hard to get the temperature right. You've got to build the whole thing, and the set starts to disintegrate. It's very complicated, but a bizarrely exciting thing to film. You know, it's just a crazy experience. And, you know, it's very-- It's-- You know, it looks fake and... It's fake to X degree, and not fake to some other degree, although it's pretty fake. And the thing we liked the most here was we took a scene that could be staged in a broom closet somewhere or in somebody's living room, but we just put the scene at the bottom of the ocean, where they have to push buttons to say each sentence. It's just really a scene about, "Can I call you 'Dad'?" And, "No, you can't." Yeah, I think maybe we'd initially written this scene on deck-- - On land. Yeah. - And then... Then we decided to go underwater with it. It's also a scene where we sort of, you know, where Zissou manipulates-- We get to see Zissou sort of first-hand manipulate the reality of his film. Yes, we see how it works. We're restaging.

52:14 · jump to transcript →

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

11:53 · jump to transcript →

It's a great example of Stuart Dreiberg, our cinematographer, and Andrew, Michael Pond, just working so well together. I don't need that to kill you. But it would be easier, wouldn't it? Everything changed when I saw you. I know you, and you know me.

34:45 · jump to transcript →

Oh, we started watching the movie. - Yeah. This is cool. - Will she make it? Got her clothes on. One of the things that we were very keen on... ... that we wanted, was that we wanted.... We had this ambition... ... that the audience should have their first breath... ...after the first 10 minutes... ...when she gets dropped off the truck... ...which we will see. And when I was watching the premiere yesterday with my wife... ...when she get-- She: At exactly that spot and I felt, "Wow... ... this was exactly what we were aiming for." I think the audience was a little surprised too. We had the premiere last night so we got to watch... ... the movie with a big audience. But they were surprised at the level of violence of the movie. This is a tougher movie than the other movies. Selene is a lot more badass in this movie. She kills a lot of people. - Yeah. Went through a lot more buckets of blood too. A sign of the times, I suppose. Yeah, you'll wish you hadn't done that. This was one of the big scenes in the trailer... ... that we had shown Screen Gems right at the beginning. I love the little splat of blood hitting there. That was sweet. I repeat, full containment... No, there was buckets of blood. I mean, it's.... Violence Is an aesthetic I think that, I mean, goes a hundred years back. Yep. Have we actually done a body count in this? It's a lot. You know what? I did once. Did you? What'd it end up being? - I can't remember. Counting Lycans and humans. Yeah, dead-- Corpses. Now, this moment was an additional shoot moment. It was the first thing we sh... - Wes Bentley, yeah. It's the last and first... - The uncredited Wes Bentley. The first and the last... - This jump was the first thing we shot. First day of shooting. - Look at this boom here. There. That hit in that shot, was Alicia... ...our excellent stunt girl, who just smacked... It sounded like the worst sound I ever heard. It's like, "We killed the stunt double on the first shot." And then you said, "Let's go again." The first day of shooting went so well... ... that I walked away thinking, "God, this is gonna be an easy movie." Oh, my God! - You were wrong. I was wrong. It was so difficult. This was the toughest by far we've done. They're not supposed to be easy. No. - There's a direct correlation... ...between the amount of suffering to do a movie... ...and how well it turns out. We never did a film, like, with this big budget kind of thing... ...but I think you always end up in the same position, you know? You don't have enough money. You always... Imagination can always outrun money. Yeah. - Yeah. The 3D made it more complicated too. Yeah, the 3D really-- You know, nobody had really done it. You know, how to plan it and how to shoot it and.... This is where we want people to breathe. Yeah, here. Here's brutalism again. - Yeah. I was talking with the cinematographer... ...ocott Kevan, last night and... Who did a great job. - He did a great job. And the person... I introduced him to my daughter. My daughter said, "Was this your first 3D movie?" He said, "No, my second. I made all my mistakes on the first one... ...So this one I could get right." Yeah, he was the only guy kind of who had done it. Yes. - And he kept telling us: "It'll take a long time." I remember-- Gary, you said: - It did. "If we go down the Amazonas, it'd be nice... ... to have someone who's been there." Done that trip. That was true. Scott was really there. - Yeah. He was great. But it's also-- It has been very... ...weird. - First shot of Kate. This was the first shot of Kate. Yeah. - First night. That terrible night when it would not stop raining. This was one of those.... - There's a gale right now. When the duck flew into the light? - Yeah. It was a duck who came from the sky... ...and landed in the middle of the set. The camera broke down about four times. Yeah. No, just shooting 3D was a weird experience in that sense... ... that we hadn't done it before and all the rules that you get... ... from various people who has done it... ...Just turn out to be not true or.... - Bullshit. Total bullshit. I don't know if the Red Epic that we used, the camera... ... kind of discarded some of them so it actually works now... ...and it's also.... You have to realize you're telling a story... ... you're not doing a 3D ride. Although this movie is like a ride but... No, but I think what.... True, because... .all these people that we talked about, they were technicians... ...and not filmmakers or storytellers. So they speak about the perfection of everything... ...and that's not really interesting, perfection... ...ecause what you go for is emotion, and emotion is not always perfect. It's also... You know, 3D is in its infancy. People really don't know the rules. When we took those classes... ... there'd been like six movies made and so people didn't know. Half of them were not real 3D, either. - Correct. Where you actually were using binocular cameras... ...to shoot the entire movie, which we did. I don't think any... There wasn't a rule they gave us... ...that we didn't break. - No. I mean, it was... - No. Everything. This is that hybrid POV, as we Call it. It's when Kate starts seeing through.... She thinks she sees through Michael's eyes... ...but it's actually India's. Eve, her daughter. This is so hard, I think, to decide as a filmmaker... ...when you do this. What it should look like? - No. Not technically, but I'm saying the suspension of disbelief... ...of is it Michael or not, and.... We didn't know... All the marketing now you've seen... ... you know, It's all out that she has a daughter in this one... ...which, you know, when we were planning this.... Hopefully that would be the secret. It's gonna be a surprise, yeah. - "Wow, she has a daughter." But.... And I think what helps us Is that we... - Michael Ealy, by the way. Michael Ealy. - Appearance of Michael Ealy. What helps us is the pace that we had to this. You just move so fast that, you know... ... you don't leave time for the mind to think that much. But it's.... Yeah, it's interesting. One of the scenes we shot here is outside in Vancouver. Vancouver-- When we heard we're shooting Underworld... ...and we're shooting it in Vancouver... ...we thought that was pretty strange because it's not gothic. But as Bjorn was talking about... ...when we found the neo-Goth and the brutalism... ...Vancouver Is fantastic. - We'll start counting... ...how many times that word comes. - You do that. It might be even more people than die. Yeah. A couple of words about Kate.... She's a movie star and a really, really good actress. Sometimes that's not the same thing. But she is, and she's very fun to work with. And she... You know, she's British, she always... Theo James. - Theo James. Very witty, yeah. - Young English actor making his... Who's also extremely funny. - Those damn Brits. Yeah. He's so funny. And you're around people who are gorgeous and funny... . It takes its toll on you. Yeah, it doesn't go together usually, yeah. No, and you just stand there in the middle and talking really bad English. I love this shot we did with Stephen. I remember we were shooting it, he was really somewhere else. He was... That was a scene we added after we had started shooting. It was Gary's scene. - That was my idea. We initially had a scene outside of here that l.... I remember seeing this location. I thought it was beautiful... ...but I couldn't wrap my head around a desk being in an exterior atrium... ...so I was struggling with that, but I'm sure glad we did it. I think it looks beautiful. I think you said when you saw it, "It's outside?" It started raining. - "It's outside?" And it was freezing cold. You remember how cold it was? Oh, my God, it was freezing. - God. This is the second... - Then we said: "We have all this concrete and it's freezing cold. Let's get water everywhere. That'll make it really comfortable." This is day one. Day zero, we did the jump we saw before. This is day one where it was full-on, all teams... ...SO this is the first scene that we shot of the whole film. And this shot was actually blown up. We had shot it wider, but we were able to push in on it. We did that with an enormous number.... One of the beauties of using the Red Epic camera... ...was the ability to push in and resize afterwards... ...1N postproduction. That's 175 percent. - Yeah. One of the things I believe that Mans and Bjérn should discuss... ...because we experienced it our first day of shooting... .IS that they are slightly unorthodox in terms of a directorial team. Slightly? They alternate the days they're shooting. So the first day, I believe it was Bjérn, right? You were directing the first day... ...and then Mans would direct the second day. And so, you know, you guys may wanna enlighten the audience... ...as to your procedure. - This was Mans. The prior one in the corridor, I did. I can't remember, but we always have the producer flip a coin... I did. I remember I flipped a coin. Yeah, flipped a coin and whoever gets the tails... ...whatever we decide, begins the day. The thing is, when I'm directing, Bjorn's my best buddy... ...as we Call it, and he doesn't do anything... ...except helping me. Nobody's allowed to talk to him. - Wait. We'll miss Wes getting thrown through the window. This is a totally reshot scene. - Yeah. We had another scene that was... - Just not working. No, it was a bit of a disaster. We got the opportunity to reshoot this, and I love this scene. I love it too. - It's great. This whole spider-webbing window thing.... That was actually Len Wiseman's idea of having him... ...be pushed through the window as it spider-webbed behind him. Yeah, we had.... Yeah. Fantastic idea. - Yeah, great shot. In the background, you see he's got little stuffed animals... ...because we wanted him to be a tinker... ...because he's been tinkering with her... What? I never saw those stuffed animals. I love this shot. I love this. It's too short. - Way too short. Yeah. It's way too short. You know, if you're starting to do movies or anything.... Please listen up, because Bjérn is saying something important. If you get into doing green-screen stuff, stay on it longer... ...because the visual effects will come in and you'll go: "Why the hell didn't we stay longer?" You had 36 frames of tail handle that you didn't use. So it's... So there. - Bollocks. I did not see that. - The famous.... Larz. Thank you, Larz. This is a 300-pound dummy in steel. Oh, God. Nothing.... I mean... Larz is the visual effects... - Special effects. Special effects. We thought, "There's no way. That's not gonna smash the car." Larz was like, "It's gonna smash the car." It did. - It smashed it great. Larz was right. It worked. And I love this shot of the camera pulling up... ...and catching Theo there. - Yeah. SO we are boosting up the mystery here. Theo, who is this guy. - The mystery man. And hopefully you don't know that he's a Vampire yet. He could be anyone, probably a human. Yeah, that was one of the challenges, as well, with the introducing. We introduce Michael Ealy, who plays Sebastian... ...and we have introduced David. We had introductions of a character called Quint, which is... Love this knife. - Yeah. The Uber-- Who was a Lycan, but it was taken out. Because there were too-- Yeah. Kris. - Kris Holden. Brilliant. - Brilliant guy, brilliant actor. It was taken out because there were too many people presented... ...and he gets presented after the car chase... ...and we only see him once. I'm not sure if that was perfect. In hindsight, maybe we should have. - But it's tough. That's... This is a movie where there's only one character... ... left over from other films. Every character has to be introduced. At a certain point, it's a struggle... ...trying to figure out ways to do it without overwhelming the audience. So we just caught a glimpse of the lower Lycans. And one of the things that we really loved in this one... ...was that we could expand the mythology and the universe... ...by inventing new creatures. And we liked the idea that they have been living in the sewers. There's one now. Yeah. And, you know, we thought, you know.... Here we thought Gollum. We thought rabid dog. We thought puss-- Run... Is that what you call it? Puss? Pus. - Pus running. Yeah. Saliva. Fucking crazy in the head. Rabid crazy. That... - Syphilitic. We wanted to because there's... One of the most wonderful lines... .In the history of Underworld is: "You're acting like a pack of rabid dogs! And that, gentlemen, simply won't do." That Michael Sheen says in Underworld 7. And we said, well, let's turn them into those rabid dogs now. They-- You know, they have lived here underground for so long... ... that they actually became these rabid dogs. Yeah, we actually don't see these guys as being human anymore. They're just Lycans. - And they... They turned out beautifully, James. Really beautiful. - These are my favorite Lycans. I think if there is a part five, there should be just these guys. I love them, just those.... The horde. - Yes. Really sick. It was the first time we moved away from suits. We always relied on practical prosthetic suits... ...and this was the first. This and the Uber are the two creatures that are purely CG. The Uber was hard to cast, so we had to go CG. This is an important moment. I loved shooting this. - This is where Selene sees... ...this child for the first moment. Without realizing who it is. - Right. She thinks it's Michael. I remember when shooting it... - She expected to find Michael. Right. Exactly. And she was so beautiful, and she looks so scared. Vulnerable. - Yeah. And the whole thing here we set up, you know.... We're gonna reveal later in the van, when she rips the Lycan's head apart. Hopefully that works, because we set up this girl as weak... ...as we see here, and vulnerable and so on... ...but she is the daughter of Selene, which means the girl's got powers. She's got the kick-ass gene. - Her name is Eve... ...which is never pronounced. - No. It isn't? We never say it? - We never say it. She says, "I'm Subject 2. You're Subject 1." So we might give her another name if we want to for the next one. Eve is perfect, I mean. No, but I think Selene is so beautiful... ...because Selene means moon in Greek. Is that right? - Yeah. Selene means moon in Greek? - Don't you know your Greek? Apparently not. Good Lord. Yeah. So here's the car chase, as we Call it. And it is pretty much... ...on the money on every shot that we storyboarded... ...which is extremely rewarding for a director... ...to see that it pulls off. This is also a triumph of visual effects. Probably half of the scene it was pouring down rain... ...and shooting in 3D, which means you can't really shoot. Shooting in 2D. We shot most of it in 2D. Because you can't shoot in 3D, the rain hits the mirror. The half-silvered mirror that you use in a 3D rig. So this whole thing was pieced together... ... from very, very rudimentary pieces.

10:50 · jump to transcript →

Now you got it, right? - This is what I love. Once the gre... That's it going off. Okay. - Yeah. Well, I didn't know. Last night was the first time I had seen this shot finished. The MPAA, remember, was really worried... ...we were gonna put a giant set of genitalia on him. Oh, they did. - Oh, they did. Yeah, that's the director's cut version. This was hard, I think. Because we had just been in this violent extravaganza. And now for emotions. But I think it works. - It works great. Because Kate is good and India is good. "You came back for me." - Yeah. And I remem-- This-- All... The tears and so on on Kate is completely real. Yeah. - But this is why she is, you know... This is why Kate is a movie star. She times it so the tear comes exactly where you want it. And I remember.... You only get that from professional actors. They know their body like, you know, true musicians. Go. I'll send them... ...on a different path, buy you some time. This is a part of the movie where we struggled... ...tried to figure out what to do now. How do we end the movie? - Yeah. We went through so many different permutations. We did film Michael watching them. - Yep. From the roof. - Yep. This scene was always in the film. - Yeah. That she comes back and finds the.... There was a period where we weren't. No. This was actually decided... It was not in the script. This was halfway through the shoot, we realized we needed this scene. We didn't wanna end on a rooftop... ...because it's kind of cliché a little bit. We did it in our Swedish film, Storm, actually... So then we ended it on a rooftop. - So-- But, you Know.... Sometimes cliches work. - Yeah. I think it's better than a forest. lt worked for the voiceover. Yeah, it was in a forest. Yeah. That was-- Yeah. But you want a nice wide shot. - Right. You see the city, see the world. And.... - The close-ups. I remember waiting for Len to write this voiceover, it took forever. But then he got it, and it was great. - Then he delivers. Because you get this "fuck, yeah" feeling. I've always thought that it's Kate that writes them... ...but Len actually does write them. Well, we'll never know, will we? I like those guys. That's those Swedish guys, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Wonderful writers, John Hlavin... ...Michael Straczynski, Allison Burnett. Yep. There's Len again. - Len and John Hlavin. Kevin Grevioux, shout-out to Kevin. - That's right. Anyone fancy a pint? - We have to trash everyone. We have to trash those guys for sure. - Producers. David Kern, there he is. - And David Coatsworth. Good on you, mate. Yeah, that's it. - That's it. Scott Kevan, DP. Excellent. Yep. - In the house. Claude Pare. - Yes. Award-winning production designer. Jeff McEvoy, the gentleman. - Yes. He was there the whole time. - Monique Prudhomme, costumes. Paul Haslinger, Underworld veteran. Are you gonna go through all of these? I'm just reading. It's not that hard. Tricia and Deb did all of the Underworlds too. Couple of small words here. - Needs no introduction. India, she was the third girl or second girl in the room. Remember that? - Yes, absolutely. And we just looked at each other. "This is the girl." "This is the girl." In, like, five seconds. Me and Bjérn never did big Hollywood movies. But you sure as hell had before. - Yes. "Does it work like this? Can we say yes?" You were like, "Yeah, yeah. I think we should go." That was amazing. That'll be the last time that ever happens in your career. When we saw Theo, we all liked him... ...from the very beginning too. - Yeah. But India was... She was the first day of casting. But Theo we cast in London, though. Yeah, but the moment we saw the tape, it was done. But that was after going through a lot of people in L.A. Yeah. A lot. - Yeah. Richard Wright. - Yeah, how about that? Yeah. Love that guy. Yeah. - Yeah. Paul Barry. I Know it sounds funny but... We forgot to shout-out to Paul Barry. Paul and Nee Nee. - Best first AD ever. And here it says.... - Brad Martin. Gets his own card, damn it. - Yes. As he should. You should work with him if you wanna do good action. Oh, you know-- I actually am right now. How about that? Good for you. I thought this Evanescence song worked too, quite frankly. Yep. America's biggest Goth band. They're Americans? Yeah. - Yeah. Dude. - Yeah. "Dude." - What? But there's-- It's... When you sit here... ...and look at the names of all the people that worked on the movie... ... you realize what a collaborative effort these things always are. The fact that the five of us can sit in a room... ...and talk about it is one thing... ...but the filmmakers are really everybody on this list. Well, but the other.... I agree, but at the same time l.... After we finished shooting the film, which was a very difficult shoot... ...we came back to Los Angeles and we cut at the Lakeshore offices... ...and Mans and Bjérn were there religiously every day... ...putting their heart and soul into the movie. And I think they were... They put their heart and soul into the movie... ...from the moment we met them to the moment the movie was finished. So as producers, I think we have to really thank them. Thank you very much. - Yeah. That was very nice words, Gary. Thank you. - You're welcome. We are as tall as we are... ...because we stand on the shoulders of giants. Yeah. - And I kept saying to myself... And this is the part where everybody turns this stuff off. Nobody's listening right now. - We worked our asses off. But James McQuaide delivered on those visual effects. I Know. I gotta tell you, man.... It only took five years off the end of his life. Oh, jeez. The best he's ever done. lt was fantastic. It is very therapeutic to watch this. It is, isn't it? Yeah. - Now it is done. We can move on. - It's done. Yep. And it's Friday night at 6:20 p.m. And.... Film's opening tonight. - Yeah. Have we got numbers back? Have we got numbers about how it's doing? Yeah, very good so far. The advance New York early-screening report... Excellent. Didn't you say that it did great in Thailand? Taiwan. - Taiwan. Thank you, people of Taiwan. - Yeah, thank you, Taiwan. Shout-out to Taiwan. All right, so this is pretty much it. Thanks, everybody, for listening to our babbling. And have a good night or a good day or whatever. Are you gonna say something in Swedish?

1:16:16 · jump to transcript →

Scott Stewart Jason Blum Brian Kavanaugh-Jones Peter Gvozdas

And then we introduced some of their friends. And the idea here, we had David Boyd was our cinematographer on the movie, and one of the reasons why I wanted to work with David is he'd shot the pilots for Friday Night Lights. And one of the things we had talked about early on in this process was...

5:14 · jump to transcript →

Scott Stewart Jason Blum Brian Kavanaugh-Jones Peter Gvozdas

also from a practical point of view no one really wants to you know night shooting is hell and a cinematographer friend of mine on my first movie described it as akin to waterboarding and said never make any major decisions in your life while shooting nights don't refinance the house don't buy a car don't have an affair don't do any of these things because you're under tremendous emotional and physical distress um

20:48 · jump to transcript →

Jeff Goldblum

He was very interesting. - [Anderson] A great cinematographer.

53:14 · jump to transcript →

Wes Anderson

Along with being a great cinematographer, he's a great operator.

1:26:33 · jump to transcript →

Joss Whedon

Cap is the guy who can't stop seeing war, even at a party for the end of the war. Who, when asked to imagine a life of normalcy, comes up with nothing. Which, by the way, was Drew Goddard's idea. I was asking him about Cap and fretting over the dreams, and... We call them dreams, by the way, simply because we can't call them visions, because it was too confusing with having a character called the Vision. But this moment where he turns around, yeah, Drew pitched it, and it ended up being the central moment. I don't know when I'm gonna get to the part where I start talking about Ben Davis, the DP, because I'm not sure I can ever stop. The work in this movie is the most beautiful that's ever had my name on it. By the way, those three guys in animal masks standing in the arches there, they represent something I have never done before, which is an absolute balls-out Easter egg, which I will discuss later on. And not just a Marvel Easter egg, an actual... Having to do with my work.

50:31 · jump to transcript →

Joss Whedon

But inevitably you end up reorganising certain things and repurposing them, so we had to go in and kind of recolour certain things. Make certain things more pre-dawn purple, and then brighten up some other things. Occasionally the seams show, but, in general, they did a really good job of keeping it all together. And the main plot points were all where they were supposed to be, so most of the footage we were able to use intact. And, again, Ben Davis, our DP, who is just a phenomenal master, really leaned into the difficulty of what it was he was going to have to accomplish. And there was so much to get, and so much footage, and so much epic stuff. And then I started putting restrictions of time and when we could shoot, and he just worked it all out. Just one of those guys who does not ever remark upon the fact that his job is impossible, and I'm grateful for it.

1:41:12 · jump to transcript →

goes off or whatever, so it's a nice piece of suspense. And here for me, it's one of the, it's the first time that, I think in the movies, when Pedro Luque, the DP, starts showing off. He's showing off big time here, it's beautiful. In good ways, because it's one of the most beautiful shots, and how the light from the street hits her eyes as she's realizing that, oh, there's something in this house that's a bit more than what they might think. This is a really, really interesting beat. Oh, I love that beat. The picture upside down.

19:20 · jump to transcript →

pretty quick we knew that we were going to have this full dark scene this this took so much uh preparing thinking like it's just in the early stages of pre-production like with uh with pedro the dp we were like okay there's many things we need to solve here but the main one is how are we gonna do the darkness scene like there on the page it says well he flips the switch and everything goes

50:06 · jump to transcript →

Francis Lawrence

Red Sparrow was a novel by Jason Matthews, and it was sent to me by Fox as I was finishing working on the Hunger Games movies. I think we were actually in post-production on the final Mockingjay, and had actually started to promote the final Mockingjay film when the book landed on my desk. I took a look at it and immediately fell in love with it. I've always loved spy movies. And this spy story I thought was quite unique. It's by far I think the most genre-specific story that I've ever done. But I just found the character of Dominika, as you can see here, played by Jen Lawrence, to be quite a unique and unlikely hero, and a really unique way in to a spy Story. It becomes a much more personal spy story with her in the lead. I actually, even while reading the book, Started to think of Jen immediately for the part. You know, she and I had done three Hunger Games films together over the course of five years. I thought she was a fantastic actress, and we had a great time working together. So I thought it would be fun to find something new to do together. And specifically, because we had done this... We'd been working together with the same character over the course of five years it would be really fun to do something totally different, use different muscles. And I thought she could also look Russian, but thought it would be fun for her to look different and speak differently and move differently, and push herself into new territory. So when I had read the book, and I was gonna go pitch the studio, I actually called her first, and said, "Hey, hypothetically, would you be into doing a Story like this?" And she said yes, and, you know, I just pitched it very briefly. And then made my pitch to Fox about my approach in the story, which was to make Dominika the kind of heart and soul of the story, and to follow her story, and I had a couple of tweaks that I wanted to do to the last act of the book. And also spoke a lot about the tone, and the kind of hard-R quality that the movie... I thought the movie was gonna need. And everybody agreed. We got cracking, and I went to work with Justin Haythe, who is a writer that I've known for a long time, and we had developed something together before that had never been made. But we had a great time working together. And he also saw eye to eye with me in terms of the tone and the point of view of the story. And so we got working and it came together really quickly. So that by the time we had finished and released the final Mockingjay film in the Hunger Games series, we were pretty ready to go, and we were almost ready to start prepping this. We ended up bringing a bunch of people from the Hunger Games film with us. Jo Willems, the cinematographer that did my three films came with us, and our camera operator, who's worked with me since I Am Legend, and has also done numerous other films with Jen, 'cause he does the David O. Russell movies, came with us, and Trish Summerville, who did costumes. The new big addition for me, in terms of crew here, is Maria Djurkovic, the production designer. She had done Tinker Tailor and many other great films, and I just really enjoyed her work. And we really bonded over the references that we had found, and the kind of color palette that we both thought that the movie should follow. And she joined us, and we shot the film in Budapest. And primarily all practical locations. Some little set builds within locations, but primarily all practical locations.

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Francis Lawrence

Here's a little cameo. This is one of Jen's best friends, Laura, who also acted as her assistant on the movie. What a pleasure. May I join you? There's a fair amount of cameos in this movie, probably more than I've ever done in terms of people who work on the movie. And friends, and things like that. If you notice the policeman in the beginning of the film that's on the subway train with Joel, in the furry hat, is actually Chris Surgent, my first assistant director, who I've worked with since I Am Legend. I actually met him on I Am Legend. He was the first assistant director of the second unit, and did all the big New York City lockdown sequences for us, for the opening, and I was really impressed with him. And we've become good friends, and work together all the time now. Tell me the real reason you are here. This was actually a really, really beautiful location in downtown Budapest. It's the New York Cafe, which is attached to the hotel that we used for the exterior. And it's become a very popular tourist attraction, and a place to go eat because of its opulence. But I just thought it would be a fantastic spot for this character, for Ustinov's character to hang out. One of the things that I wanted to do, and also Maria, the production designer, was to show different facets of Russian architecture, right? The kind of classic, opulent stuff like places like this, or the ballet, the kind of socialist, Brutalist structures like her uncle's office. Some of the government housing-type environments like where she lives with her mother. But one of the things that really excited me that we got into was the idea of color. I think, honestly, people tend to expect in movies like this for it to be very gray, you know, just bleak. And what Maria and I found in our research was that there is plenty of color throughout the environments. And we had decided to really try and utilize that, and she pulled, I don't know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of photos that we used, that gave us a real sense of color palette and a sense of mood and a sense of light. And we ended up using that also for Jo, the cinematographer and I, in terms of how the movie kind of looks in terms of lighting styles as well. And that led us into a direction of, you know, post-World War I/ Russian art, and found that a lot of the, kind of, colors that are in that art were also found in a lot of these environments that we were finding in Central and Eastern Europe. And we ended up really trying to utilize those. And it was something really exciting for me, because to discover that this movie could be quite colorful was a lot of fun.

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Commentary With David Kalat

Time to give proper respect to cameraman Masayo Tamai, who, along with Eiji Tsuburaya, was one of the founders of what is now known as the Japanese Society of Cinematographers. It's been through a number of name changes since when they banded together. Tamai is also the cinematographer behind Mikio Naruse's When a Woman Ascends the Stairs.

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Give Maxwell his cue. The cinematographer of Diamonds Are Forever was Ted Moore. Moore shot seven of the first nine James Bond films. His association with Cubby Broccoli began when he photographed the Warwick film A Prize of Gold. Moore shot several other Warwick pictures before beginning work on Dr. No. Tom Mankiewicz recalls working with Ted Moore. He had shot Man for All Seasons with Fred Zinnemann. He's a wonderful cameraman. He did several.

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I think Globe Photos sent somebody at one point. So it was a combination. Most camera crews involve having a stills person as well as the director of photography and the operator and camera assistants. It's part of the union requirement that you have a stills photographer. For pinks. Pink slips? You mean for cars?

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to the movie. And, you know, now that we're in the darkness, you know, I found some interesting things from cinematographer, Owen Roisman. Now I got to know Roisman, not personally, but his work when I saw the French connection, which is also, this would be a great movie to run with Pelham as well. The Owen Roisman gritty street double feature. And, but Owen Roisman,

23:09 · jump to transcript →

Interestingly enough, he serviced his directors as accurately as any cinematographer has ever done and with apparent, complete, literal understanding of the text. Pictures like Fahrenheit or Far From the Man in Crowd or pictures that are seen through Nick's eye and yet are films made by very strong directors. Rogue.

1:47:20 · jump to transcript →

There were so many rats and the question how to control them was always problematic. How to position them correctly. This is Anja Schmidt-Zäringer who worked on production. Walter Saxer, who had grand battles with Kinski. Ann Poppel, costumes. Michael Edols, an Australian director who came to visit. Gisela Storch, who worked on the costumes. Martin Gerbl, gaffer. And here, Isabelle. Do you want to drink with us? I actually like showing the people who were so important for the film. This is almost the whole team. Only the cinematographer and the sound technicians are missing. Other than that, that's pretty much it. Again, a still life. - Yes. Even though this time it is in motion. The definitive ironic interpretation of a still life. Well, I don't get irony. I have no sense for it. In that regard, I'm horribly... But you do have a sense of humor because... Yes, but that is different. I understand jokes and laugh about them, but irony takes everything of one level and relates it to something that is not directly connected. My perspective is too direct, almost verbatim. Florian Fricke called me one day. Without changing his voice, he said he was the minister of the interior. Unfortunately, there was a mistake at the ministry and I should not celebrate because I did not win the German Film Award after all. I said, "What is wrong in your ministry?" "You are responsible for the borders." "The document was signed by three different people." After a lengthy discussion he started laughing out loud. That was the moment when I finally realized that was Florian Fricke, a man who, at that time, I talked to daily. I'm terrible. This is Martje, my wife back then. She took a beta blocker to look completely lifeless. ...and without superstition.

1:32:11 · jump to transcript →

constant ups and downs of the horror film. It's here to stay on a recurrent basis. Now, Don, do you miss being the, in films that you make nowadays, do you miss not being your own DP and not being your own editor? I know that in your last film you didn't, you don't take an editing credit and you didn't obviously operate the camera.

1:27:32 · jump to transcript →

for all this, and there were people kind of standing at bay in that neighborhood. I believe like an older couple had this house. Not having any idea what was gonna happen in this house, they let us use it, right? Yeah, and as I recall, it had like metallic flower wallpaper before we did it over. And the sun, as you can see, is going in and out and in and out with, you know, the DP and the script woman going insane.

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Frank Morriss

A lot of the shots we actually used were test shots... ...that turned out to be very useful. As we were trying to figure out: How do you photograph something at night... ...and it doesn't look like it's got huge spotlights all over it? It was a very tricky, technical challenge because the film... ...at the time, was not nearly as fast as the Kodak film that we have now. So John Alonzo, the cinematographer, was stretching it to its limits.

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Um, yes, Heather Langenkamp. I play Nancy Thompson. I'm John Saxon. I play her father, Lieutenant Thompson. I think it was lieutenant or captain. Lieutenant. You sure? All right, enough time, enough time. I'm Wes Craven, writer-director. I'm Jacques Haidtken, the director of photography.

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And the interplay of light and shadow, the play betwixt them here, as you see only in movies photographed with distinction. This is the cinematographer's art. Cold light and then warm light. We don't usually mix them, not to this extent, but I don't think we want to quibble, do we? We seem to have settled, I think, here on darkness.

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And it's only a truncated version, I think, although this may be longer than it originally was. I'm not sure. I must say, looking at the film, this is the DP's best work he ever did. Yeah, or Dick Bush's work. Dick Bush, yes. I mean, it really is. I've forgotten how good it was. It's absolutely impeccable. And it's really an interesting contrast, seeing these shots of Grady at home and the naturalism of it. Yeah, yeah.

20:55 · jump to transcript →

because The American Friend was such a perfect film. I think we were shocked he even responded, Alex. I think that was what we were shocked at. And in fact, you know what that was? Because I had actually said to you, Michael, that I was thinking of using another guy. I won't say who it was, but he was like a New York-based cameraman. And we looked at a little bit of something he'd shot, and you said, I don't know about this guy. Why don't you think if you could have anybody that you want, who would you like to have be the DP? And that was when I thought of Robbie Muller. That's a nice shot there, too. That's just beautiful.

34:31 · jump to transcript →

Everybody had very specific bits here. I was the lucky recipient of all that and kind of the coordinator, although I did write Lamar's rap, and I want my children to know that. This was the last shot of the night, and I'm so glad that King Bag at the DP forced me to shoot it because I was getting tired and cranky, and I think I was saying, we don't need it, but I love that shot.

1:14:06 · jump to transcript →

That was very pleasant. I like shooting in France, in the studios, because the French don't start till midday. And they don't have tea breaks. They just shoot from 12 till 7.30. And then you can go out to dinner. And you don't have to get up at six or five in the morning. And so Louis Gilbert, when we were working in Paris, would say, we'd be called, he'd say, I give Claude, director of photography,

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Lea Thompson

Is that the refinery back there? Yeah, that's the refinery. And this set is the value of someone like Jan Kiesser, the DP, because we didn't know where to shoot it, and he just created and kind of manufactured this setting. I remember he spotted the car there and we dressed the back with the hubcaps and kind of created it instantaneously that day because we were stuck. We had lost... We didn't lose the location, but we changed the schedule, and we had to shoot this scene, and... Anyway, not that important. But again, I'm remembering stuff as I'm seeing it, and... The light's beautiful.

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That shot right there is what I thought we were shooting when I sat down in that chaise lounge. And I sat down awkwardly because I thought I was sitting into the shots and that we were not going to see below my waist. And I think Harvey just forgot to tell me that it wasn't Harvey Jenkins, who was our wonderful cinematographer, forgot to tell me that it was not a master shot. But there have been some very inappropriate memes, kind of disrespectful to the 15-year-old version of myself.

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Hi, everybody. My name is Joe Lynch. I am a filmmaker. And I would not be here today if it were not for this film that you are watching right here. And it wasn't for this man and the other men that are in the room with me right now. Welcome to the remake of The Blob. And with me to my right is cinematographer Mark Irwin. Say hi, Mark.

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Film Stephen Prince

They interceded with Warner Brothers on Kurosawa's behalf. Warner agreed to distribute the film worldwide, and on that basis, Kurosawa Productions was able to get funding for the movie. So Kurosawa was back in the director's chair with his son Hisao as co-producer and with familiar collaborators like cinematographer Takao Saito and art director Yoshiro Muraki.

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Fred Dekker

And it was interesting in that some of the scenes earlier with some of the homeless people and the rebels reminded me when I was watching it again of some very similar scenes in They Live. And of course, the DP you have on this movie, Gary Kibbe, had been Carpenter's DP. That's right. That's right.

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a wonderful shorthand to watch between the two of them sometimes in terms of how they find the honesty of the scene and exactly where they want to have the camera to tell the story at that moment. And it's a real collaboration between the two of them. You choose a cinematographer by looking at his work and looking at his artistry and how he's able to light and how he's able to compose

1:19:42 · jump to transcript →

In the picture. Oh, that's right. You've got to stop hiding behind me. It's true. She did. She would do that. She would hide behind you. She would find the only... And Gail, the cinematographer, would say, you can't find the only dark spot in the room. You actually want to be lit and on screen. I told her. I said, you won't be in the movie if you can't see the camera, okay? So if you can't see the camera, then move to where you can see it.

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So that this is the character that came out of this, which I think is a much better character. The sort of stock, angry police captain was really the most embarrassing part of the script. I quit. This won't be an interrogation. Just a friendly chat to kill some time. He will not go into the interrogation. Then someplace else? Where? No, no, no, no, no, no. If this was a dope deal, where's the dope? I was very happy that Tom Siegel, the cinematographer,

19:02 · jump to transcript →

So, gentlemen, what made us write this movie? I asked you to. Right, okay. That was part of it, wasn't it? Oh, there's David Bacon, great director of photography, also one of the many Davids on the production team. We are executive producers. Oh, yes, you were starting to say it was an idea. That's the guy, Martin Walters, that's the guy who wouldn't give us money, right? Yeah, we were already... Do we need that joke? On every joke. Do we need that joke? John Slann, yes. John Slann. We bankrupted. Oh, look at that. Look at that.

1:16 · jump to transcript →

They haven't talked yet about the lighting style of the film, and particularly your choice of Peter Bao as a director of photography, and how this relates to some of the world. Seeing like Lizzie go totally artistic, the oil painting, what have you, Bermuda, Hammershaw,

46:23 · jump to transcript →

Well, Clint cracks me up. It was great to have him in a meaty role here. He made the most of it, as he always does. He's a terrific character actor. Don Peterman was the cinematographer on this film. Don and I had worked together many times. One of the things that we decided to do was...

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Jonathan Lynn

in the sort of style of Stephan Grappelli, the great French jazz violinist. And this scene, like every scene in the movie, had to be shot on the day it was scheduled. There's no room for worrying about the weather changes. And David Franco, the director of photography, managed to disguise the fact that in some shots,

6:28 · jump to transcript →

In the soundstage floor there, we were dawling back, trying not to fall into them as we were following Brendan, but I just thought it'd be really neat. And there's two guys on either side of the camera with flamethrowers lighting Brendan's face. And I thought it was really just kind of a neat shot, spur-of-the-moment idea. Well, it's a really great introduction to him in the scene. And much of the scene, in fact, is lit with flamethrowers. Adrian Biddle, the director of photography, did a really fabulous job on the scene.

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Tom Tykwer

the way that I know that my direction works best, which is a way of trying to stay as close as possible to the actors, having a very clearly prepared setup for the technical part of the film, which I did to a large degree together with the director of photography, Frank Riebe, the guy I always work with and who's

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Richard Curtis

Just to share with you the filmmaking process, this was the trickiest scene to grade because the light was far too bright, coming in off the window. We were in all sorts of trouble. Mickey Coulter, director of photography, very mediocre. Shut up. Mickey did Notting Hill and Four Weddings and Sense and Sensibility, so Hugh's career basically depends on him. And he is a great genius. - Yeah.

19:27 · jump to transcript →

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

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John Cameron Mitchell

terrain that I remember a lot of this footage we're using right now we did in these long 20 minute takes. Remember you would be sexual and then it would settle and then it would go into the scene and I let you guys go very free and Frank DiMarco the cinematographer and Dave were very free with the camera and letting you guys move around. It's a beautiful night actually. Yeah it was. You guys are doing some real nice work here in terms of the acting. I remember Frank

39:15 · jump to transcript →

our director of photography, who just... We meshed very early on, and, you know, I'm very involved in just where the shadows fall, the whole look and design of the photography, and he just gave me exactly what I was looking for, and I would love to work with him in a heartbeat again. I thought he did an amazing job on creating such a look for this.

1:13:21 · jump to transcript →

From this moment, the style is completely different from the beginning because now the infection is... is... IS close. This is something that, with Enrique Chediak, the director of photography, we talked a lot about when the infection is around, the camera is infected, as well. And the editing is so fast... to deliver that the attack and the infected people are really, really dangerous. So this is probably one of the keys in terms of the style of the movie.

6:41 · jump to transcript →

Francis Lawrence and Akiva Goldsman

the dark very very very low light source francis was very insistent with the dp that it appear to be source as much as possible and to the exclusion of things that typically people are worried about like seeing the actor or you know i mean it really is dark and it's wonderful um and will's performance is that of somebody who's very very frightened and as i said earlier that makes the audience scare we were i think really

27:37 · jump to transcript →

Here's the only time that the V word is spelled out. It's quite cool that he asks straightforward if she's a vampire. The DOP, Hoyte and I, we tried to find...

1:19:25 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, I mean, I actually had major, major arguments with Ben, the DP, about this, because he wants to... I think, you know, when you read the script, you think, oh, this is edgy, gritty filmmaking. Let's shoot it edgy and gritty. But I thought, no, I thought, let's just shoot it like a Spider-Man glossy Hollywood film and let the grit and the edge come from what's on screen. It'll be far more impactful. And I think it worked.

17:44 · jump to transcript →

Peter Becker

Another important collaborator we haven't really talked about at all today. The question is about Bob Yeoman. And what is it about how he works that you guys have worked together on...? Every film, right, pretty much? - [Anderson] Every film. And Roman's worked with Bob many times without me. Bob's the director of photography of CQ, Roman's film CQ, and lots of other short-form projects that Roman's done too. Should we go back and forth on this one, Roman, as we--?

59:16 · jump to transcript →

Jake Szymanski

I'm Jake Szymanski. I had the pleasure of directing this film. And I think I may have just ruined my mic, hold on. Is this... Did I ruin it? - Hey, hi. Is the mic okay? - Yeah, the mic's great. Just don't touch it like that. Okay, /'m sorry. - Yeah, that's okay. I was worried I might have turned it off accidentally. No, no, no, you're fine. Do you need water or coffee or anything like that? No, I'm so good. I've got water right here. - Do you... Okay. - What's your name again? I'm Margie. - Margie, thank you so much. Of course. All right. - Appreciate it. Let me know if you need anything. Okay. Will do. Thank you. Okay, oh, and please don't press any of those buttons. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I'm sorry about that. Okay, that's okay. - Okay. Um... As you can hear, we are here on the Fox lot in the ADR room. This is where the magic of DVD commentary happens. So, into the movie. Mike and Dave. They need wedding dates. Here we go. Well, this is a fun little scene. We actually... The whole beginning of the movie takes place in New York City. But we shot all of this in Hawai. Fun fact. Downtown Honolulu. We doubled for New York. Which, I literally didn't think could be done. But, um, there were four angles. There are four angles and two locations that you can shoot in Honolulu and it looks like New York. Um, there's Zac, there's those beautiful, blue eyes just shining through. Um, this is a fun little scene. We got Marc Maron to come out to the island and shoot with us, kind of our intro to the boys here. Adam Devine, Zac Efron, playing Mike and Dave Stangle. And we almost cut this scene. We almost lost this. At some point there was a worry if we needed it, but I think it's really a fun way to set up that these guys, right what Marc says right there, they're funny, they're weird. We give them a win early on. We let them know they think they're awesome. And before their family kind of puts them in their place. Was it the hat? - I just found this over there. And here we go. At the opening credits. This was a fun journey, finding the song for this. We ended up finding this great song that we kind of remixed a little bit and redid some of the lyrics even before this opening montage here. This montage was great. Doing our Fourth of July, a family wedding and a 50th anniversary party here, shooting this. We shot all this, uh... The anniversary party and the outside wedding are the same location, actually. We shot all this down in Hawaii. Got all of our stunt guys in. A little secret about Zac Efron, very good at the trampoline. He did not need a stuntman or wires. He got on that trampoline and started doing flips immediately for camera. And Adam Devine was like, uh, "You need to strap me up "and swing me around with some wires here. "I can't do this." Um... Very uncomfortable, I remember, also, the straps on that trampoline. Um, we shot this right across from the hotel we were shooting at. This is, uh, the fireworks stuff there. Our wonderful crew here. Let's just talk about, uh, the Chernin company real quick. You see our producers here. Produced by Chernin, Peter Chernin. Jenno Topping, David Ready. Our excellent team of producers, who were with us on the whole movie. It was fantastic. Here's downtown Honolulu. We're trying to hide the palm trees. You put some stickers up on light poles, looks like New York. If you wear two, they break. It's an urban legend... - No, it's not. And here we go. Let's meet the family. Putting this together, it... First of all this is actually based on a true story, which is fun. The Stangle brothers are real and they really did get told they had to bring dates to a family wedding. God, look at this, look at this family we got here. Just the best cast we could have asked for. We got Mom and Dad here. We got Stephen Root and Steph Faracy. Stephen Root, man. How lucky are we to get these guys as Mom and Dad here. Stephen Root was, uh... We were already down in Hawaii and we were about to shoot and we still hadn't cast Dad. And we talked with a bunch of great people. And, um, I had to do a little Skype session to meet Stephen Root who I had never met. And, uh, we were just like, "You know what? If you can ever cast someone "who you think is, one day, gonna win an Oscar, cast that guy." And we were lucky enough that Stephen Root said yes to doing it. Here we go. Um, hey, Jake... - Mmm-hmm. I just want to interject here. Um... - Oh, yeah? Be careful of the heavy breathing. - Oh, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I just want to make sure. I mean, it's not an issue yet, but... I was gonna Say, is it coming through or... Not really. - Okay. But I can sense that it might. - Okay. So just be careful. - Okay. No, fair... Yeah, okay. No worries. - You're doing great. Should we... So did we cut or how does this... No, we're not cutting, no, no, no. 'Cause we're still... - Oh, okay. Keep going. I can't cut. - Should we go... Oh, so this is a one... Continuous, got it. - This is a one, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. I'll watch the, uh... Watch the breathing. Um... Where are we here? Oh, well, we're doing our little reveal. Kind of the big idea here of our grandiose opening montage where the guys are kings of the world. We see the reality of those situations. Oh, this poor guy. Our grandpa. When we were shooting this, we were dancing... And I kept thinking that he was acting out the death scene too early. And I kept yelling from behind the camera, "No, no, no, don't stop yet. "You're still having fun, you're still having fun. "You're not dying yet." But he wasn't acting. He was, for real, getting too tired and almost having a heart attack. And I was yelling at this poor man. "No, no, no! Smile, smile! Be happy! Dance, dance!" And everyone was like, "Jake, this is real. He's actually having trouble." And I felt so horrible about that. But he made it. You know what? He made it and I can't wait for him to see the film. You can each talk to one girl. Um, uh-oh, guys. Here's the idea for the movie. Two dates. Um... By the way, we also have not talked about... Look at these two handsome gentlemen who you believe are brothers somehow. Are you insane? - Oh, you're kidding. I love these guys together. Adam and Zac had a really, really fun time. Um, I mean, when we went to Hawaii to film this, we filmed in Hawaii, and they were just... We were trapped on that island together. So even when we shot all day together we just had each other to hang out with at night. And, um, I think Zac and Adam got really, really close. Which helped the chemistry and the brother relationship stuff. Everyone got along really, really well. It was a lot of fun. By the way, let's talk about the wonderful Sugar Lyn Beard playing our sister Jeanie here. And also the equally excellent Sam Richardson playing Eric here. Um, God, she's so great in this. Sugar... First of all, her name's Sugar. And we shouldn't overlook that. That's an important factor when you're casting someone. Look for the most interesting name to be written somewhere. Um, she was one of the last people we saw in auditions. And, um, we weren't sure who we were gonna cast yet for the sister. And we didn't feel like we quite had it yet. And then she, literally, was maybe the last person that came in. And she came in to the casting office and just nailed it. Just... We were all laughing so hard. She completely became the sister. I think we did the audition with the Ecstasy scene and the horses scene. And, uh, she was just so, so funny. She walked out of that room and we immediately went, "Wow, well, that's Jeanie right there." Same thing happened with Sam for Eric, by the way. He was just so, so funny in that role. That's the kind of guy Mike is. So, think on that... This is one of my favorite Zac jokes of the whole movie here. "Think on that, Dad." Having us laugh. You can see Dave's little... Dave's at his little art station there in the apartment. And that's a little thing that comes back Iater that, uh, isn't... We're not really showing you very clearly there. And then here we have the ladies. Tatiana and Alice. Aubrey Plaza and Anna Kendrick. These two, who are actually very good friends in real life and had taken random trips together to islands and to beaches in Mexico, it was really fun to put these two together. And, uh... And have that kind of built-in chemistry going in here. He's already paid. God damn it! But a lot of green screen taxi shoot that we did. You should kick us out! - You should kick us out of this cab. Little bit of a hustle on the cab driver here. Three more blocks up on the right... and then kick us out! The Apple Pay bit I really, really liked. We came up with that on set. I think that was a pitch from Andrew Cohen, one of our writers. Andrew Cohen and Brendan O'Brien... I got a good idea. ...gave us a wonderful script to start with here. The writers of Neighbors, Neighbors 2 and upcoming, The House. Um, very lucky and happy to meet and work with those guys on this. Really funny stuff. And, uh, they would also just send in new jokes every day. That's kind of the way we did things, is we had the script and then me and the writers and other on-set writers would just bring a bunch of new jokes every day to pitch and to try. And so we would always play around a little bit on-set. Jake Johnson. Your little buddy is shit-faced. Jake Johnson, who we said, "Why don't you just come to Hawaii for a couple days? "And to do that you have to be in a scene in the movie." And he said, "That sounds pretty good, man. "That's... All right, yeah. I could do Hawaii." Um, and that's literally how we got him out here. We said, "I know Jake a little bit." I said, "Hey, if I could bring you out to Hawaii for a week "would you shoot for one night?" Boom. Done. Because it's my right. Playing Ronnie the boss here. Look at these, look at these, just New York rat women here that they're playing. The hair, that's a wig we have on Anna, which was really fun. Hey, Jake. - Yeah? Um, I just want to say if you don't have anything to Say... Mmm-hmm. - ...then you don't have to say anything. You... - Does it sound like I'm... Oh, just calling this "rat women" is a little... Oh, I wasn't... Okay. - Just... I didn't think I was stretching... - Yeah, no, it's fine. -/ just want to... I just want... - Are we still recording? You're doing great. What's that? - Are we recording right now? Yeah, yeah, all this is... Yeah. - Okay. Yeah, that's what we're doing. All right. I just... - Right? Yeah, I just didn't... Okay, yeah, I just... Yeah, I'm just... It's very clearly your first time and it's... It is. - /'m just trying to help you out. Okay. No, I appreciate... I definitely want... - Okay. If you have any tips or... - Great. I just feel like I'm not doing the comments here... Okay. Okay, sure. So I should get back to this. - Of course. Yeah, yeah. Just keep breathing, and move through it. Okay, I think... Okay. - Okay. I didn't... 1... Thank you. I appreciate it. Okay. - Thank you. Okay. Um, we're in the apartment. I'm tired of living like this. I don't know if I have anything to say about this. We've got a great little package we're selling here, man. A week in a tropical paradise... with two fun-loving, yet surprisingly well-read bros? I'm just gonna talk. Um... We got the boys here. So the ladies in the apartment, first of all. These were both sets that were built in real locations, downtown Honolulu. Um... We found spaces for the boys' apartment, girls' apartment right around the corner from each other. And then we built these kind of walls up against the real windows and built out our little apartments here. We met this couch on Craigslist. This was actually the scene, this scene right here, was one of the earliest scenes that we had worked with and that we shot for the chemistry read. We did a little chemistry read early on before we ever got into production with Adam Devine and Zac Efron. I think Zac was shooting a movie in Atlanta. We all flew out there and did a chemistry read and this was one of the scenes we did to see the brothers together. And, uh, obviously it was great. And we loved seeing Adam and Zac together. And, uh, so this is one that had kind of... We actually shot this... One of the last things we shot in the movie. Um, but they had had it in their mind for six, seven months by that point. I love the... We got these girls together, really, really fun. This was a last-second shoot we did just to get a little sense of the ad going viral and going around the world. And we got all these great performers, all these great actresses to just come in and do little cameos for that little thing here. You guys want to go to a wedding? Got a little classic date montage here. All the dates here we cast out of Hawai. This was all local casting and we found some great, great people. Those twins are actual professional gymnasts in training. And they're twin gymnasts who are very good. And luckily they were also great at acting. We got them in there. We found all these... Met all these great people. This is my buddy Bob Turton. Um, who, uh... We go way back. And, actually, we did not... Again, we did local Hawaii casting and I said, "Man, I got this bit I really want you to do. "But we're casting locally." And he just hopped on a plane and came on out. And said, "Let's do it." And Bob is one of the funniest, funniest guys. Uh, I went to college with him back in the day. And we've done some videos and shorts together. And I was so glad he could come out and be Lauralie, as I believed, what we named his persona of this guy who's in such a bad period of time in his life. He decides to try to pretend he's a girl to get this date from these boys. What did you say? - Nothing. Sounded like you said... None of this... Do you wanna fuck? None of this was scripted. None of the entire date sequence was scripted. I think the script just said they go on a bunch of dates. So we really had a lot of fun playing with this entire sequence with everyone who came in. I think, in real life the Stangle brothers ended up on... What was it, Ricki Lake? I know they ended up on, uh, the Today show. And maybe also Ricki Lake. And we got... The ad went viral. We wanted to make it a little more current. We got Wendy Williams. We got her to come out to Hawaii. We actually filmed... Even her set, we faked in Hawai. So we really did everything out there. Got to thank the Hawaii Film Board. Getting to shoot out there. It was fun. ...fo go with us to Hawaii for our sister's wedding. And I just want to reiterate... we're footing the bill for this because we're gentlemen. Free trip to Hawaii? I'm awake! Come on. Craigslist. - What's up? That's where you go to buy old patio furniture. Is there any, um... Excuse me. Is there any... ls there any water? - What's that? Is there water in here? -/s there water? - Yeah, there's... Yeah, we have water. - Is there any... Can I get a water? ls there any way to get a water? - OA, sure. /'Il... I asked you at the beginning. You didn't... You said... I know. I didn't realize. I'm sorry. I'm just... Now I'm thinking about whether I'm talking too much, based on what you said earlier, and I'm getting nervous. I think it's just drying my throat out a little bit. Okay, yeah. No, that's fine. I'll go get you water. I don't need you to get it if you can't... /'m the one working here. So... Okay. I... You can tell me where it is, I can get it. No, you have to... You're the director. And you have to do the commentary. Um, okay, I'll be right back. All right. Sorry about that. - It's fine. Thank you. You need to get over that, once and for all. Oh, man, I feel really bad asking for that water now. Oh, there is a water here. Hold on. There's a water on the floor here next to my desk. Okay, here's your... I actually found one. There was a water... There was a water down here by the desk. -/ found... - Yeah. I think I brought this... - Did you not look around you when you... We gonna go to Hawaii! Um, sorry, I just found... I think I brought it in at the... When I first walked in earlier and I forgot. Right. Okay, well, here's another one. We don't look like nice girls. Thank you. Yeah, I guess I haven't showered in a while. Oh, man. Thank you very much. I really do appreciate it. Yeah, of course. - Okay. We're gonna look respectable as fuck. Like nice girls. "Like nice girls. Like nice girls." This was actually, um... It's like that Jesus rag! "Jesus rag," one of my favorite bits. Nice girls was actually, um, an early studio note. I remember the studio coming in and saying like, "We feel like we just need to say, like, 'Let's push the nice girls angle.' "We should have the boys get told they need to bring nice girls. "And the girls need to look like nice girls." And it really worked. We ended up taking that and hitting that. And it's one of those great notes that really helps simplify and clarify a thing and everyone gets exactly what we're doing. So that's why you hear "nice girls" a couple of times. That was actually one of the earlier studio notes that I thought was a great note. That worked out a Iot. Ultimatum. - Well, we gotta figure something out... The old tomato joke is a joke that early on I was told, "You know, you can cut this joke. You don't need that joke." And I said, "No. This joke is what the movie's about." Not really what it's about. But the vibe of the movie. I fell way too in love with the old tomato joke. And I think our first cut of this movie, the editor assembly of this, was about five hours long. Because we had done so many alts and so much improv. And they just put everything in. And, I think, when I showed my producers one of the three-and-a-half-hour cuts that I was like, "You know, this isn't a real cut. "This is just kind of everything we're working with." They were like, "I mean, you can lose so much. "You can lose this. You can lose that. You can lose the old tomato joke." And I was like, "No, no, no, not... All those other things, sure, "but the old tomato joke we keep." So you can imagine that joke in a three-hour thing that's way too long. And, uh, well, it ended up in the movie. As I predicted. Anna had a really fun, uh... We had a lot of fun with this. There's a lot of stuff on the DVD, deleted scenes and bit runs about other lies she does here. This is a really fun reveal. See these girls in these nice dresses here. And coming up, we've got one of our first big stunts of the movie. This was always really fun. We had a great, great stunt coordinator, Gary Hymes, who did all of our stunts on this movie. He did the stunts for Terminator and Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. And he was great. So any time we had something like this, with getting hit by a car... That's a big stunt, but it's always really fun watching the audience watch this. And this is like one of those moments early on where I think it clicks in like, "We're doing this kind of movie. We're doing, like, a giant car hit. "And she's perfectly okay." It just sucks you right in. This was really fun to shoot. This is, again, downtown Honolulu. Outside of the one bar we could fake as New York. And if you look very closely, I shouldn't even say it, people will hate that I say this, the effects guys, there's a split second shot when Tatiana hits the car from inside the car looking out the windshield at her body. And in that shot, it only lasts a couple frames, and it's a blur, but there is a palm tree. That is the one palm tree that's in our New York footage. Um, but obviously it's so fast no one sees it. Are you okay? I am now. I saved her life! - She's okay! She's okay? - I saved her life! Thank you! I think, I'm pretty sure a lot of this, the just yelling, "I saved her life," and a lot of the yells, that was... Adam can go very hot. And Adam just added a lot of that in and it was so perfect. It's really fun to just tell Adam like, "Hey, go nuts on this one. Get excited." And he will. He can just go at 100% all day long. And it is the most fun thing to watch. So hard! This is always a really fun scene for me. This is like, when we did the editing, it was kind of always like, "Let's get to here faster. How do we get to here faster?" 'Cause it's really just seeing our four leads all together for the first time. And see it play out. See the con of the girls play out. See the boys falling right into it. So this was always kind of like, especially in editing we realized, "This is where it starts to feel so fun. "Let's just get here as fast as we can. "Let's get through all that other stuff." Got two waters now. It's actually quite nice. We can hear all of that. - Hmm? You drinking. Oh, I'm sorry. SO sip quieter? "How's the hedging coming? You been hedging? You hedged much?" Yeah, we're picking that up. - Picking that up still. Corporate greed, bailouts. Should I, should I cover... Does this help? On the floor of the NASDAQ and the U.N. Um... If I cover the microphone with my hand, does this help? That makes it worse. - Okay. Sorry. Um, just try not to drink anything. "But what I do have..." Just my mouth gets a little dry, so... It's not important. Uh, anyway. Um... "Skills that make me a nightmare..." Zac nailing the Liam Neeson impression in this. You may notice Zac Efron throws out a couple great accents in this movie. He's got the Australian at the bar at the top. He's got Liam Neeson here. He's about to have all of this different liquor bottle drawings which all have a different accent. And he added a lot of that in in a great way. He does a little research for each one. And he nails each one of those accents. That's a little post joke we put in. Little post image. Little ADR joke from Zac right there. A lot of dick jokes in this movie. Not gonna say I'm proud of it. Not gonna say I'm ashamed of it. Just gonna say there's a lot of dick jokes in this movie. And it is what it is. Done. Some of them are kind of smart. Maybe a couple smart dick jokes, maybe not. Maybe I just tell myself that to make myself fee! better. I don't know. What's the hardest thing about being a teacher? I don't know. Oh, um... The hardest thing... I think this was the whole... We did a whole run here with Adam and Aubrey that was just kind of, none of that, was not in the script, either. We're just like, "Let's check in with these two." And we Set up two cameras. We did a lot of cross-shooting on this movie. And we just let people go through 10 different ideas. And try a bunch of jokes. God, Anna's so, so funny here. Matt Clark, our wonderful DP on this, who... I know! I said, "I got to warn you, I want to cross-shoot a lot of this movie." And cross-shooting's where you have two cameras pointing opposite directions, so you can capture both people talking to each other at once. And some DPs won't do it 'cause some DPs, they just want to perfect the light facing one direction, 'cause it's the lighting that, really, you have to tweak. And you start worrying about compromises if you cross-shoot. But Matthew Clark took that challenge and ran with it. And we cross-shot so much on this movie. Um, probably even more than I needed to, I had him do. And he just did a great job with it. I love the look of it, that it doesn't look too Photoshop, airbrushed, perfectly shiny and bright on everything. I like that it kind of feels a little real world-y. I think Matt did a great job on that. ... like we're talking it over... like we're not sure if we wanna go or not. Oh, like... So fun to see Anna do these big jokes. I feel like... This was the fun part for me. I feel like I've never got to see Anna Kendrick do this kind of stuff before in a movie, ina hard R movie. Yes! And, God, I just think she really nailed it and knocked it out of the park. I think, Aubrey, who's so great, and you kind of expect that she can do it. And I think it was a little more like, I think, for the audience it's a little more of seeing her in a new kind of movie. Which I think is really, really fun. Here we are, shooting at the wonderful Turtle Bay Resorts. Um, on the north shore of Oahu, Hawaii. We turned into our little fake resort. A funny story about this hotel, this is the exact hotel that they shot Forgetting Sarah Marshall at. And that movie takes place almost, the whole thing in that hotel as well. So, first of all, we did a lot, me and my DP, we did a lot of like, "Let's make sure things look different. "We're not copying the same locations and shots of Forgetting Sarah Marshall." The other funny thing is, in the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I'm pretty sure they call the resort Turtle Bay. Say, "Welcome to Turtle Bay." And it was an advertisement for Turtle Bay in a way. Turtle Bay was like, "Yeah, we'll give you a better rate on the room if you mention our name." So, when we started scouting and decided to shoot the movie in Hawaii, we were like, "We can do it at Turtle Bay. "We'll get a little discount on the locations." And the management for Turtle Bay read our rated R script and they were like, "Absolutely you cannot say this takes place at Turtle Bay. "Please, please don't show any of our Turtle Bay signage. "We don't want any of our guests to think our masseuses would do this at Turtle Bay. "We don't want to think we condone..." And we were like, "Oh, my God, can we shoot it?" They were like, "Yeah, please shoot here. You just have no discount." And, no, I mean, they were a lot of help. But we had to cover every sign that said "Turtle Bay" and make our own. And make our own logos and hotel names. And I always thought that was pretty great. And, you know, there's some stuff in Sarah Marshall, I think that's rated R. I mean, there's a penis flopping around in that movie. Hey, Jake. - Yeah. I just want to say you're doing great. Okay. Just calm down. - Okay. You've said "penis" and "dick..." - And, again, I'm just... About 10 or 15 times... - Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the Iast, like, five minutes, so. I don't think... I think it was just, kind of, the once. Oh, no. It was many, many times. Okay. And just, Margie, I'm sorry, but... And, again, is there any way to go back now to where you cut in and rerecord from there on out? Um, oh, you know, that's a great idea. Why don't I just forget that this is my job and that I know what's going on. And why don't you come in here and you take care of all of that. No, obviously I'm not... I just presumed that if you... Can only I hear you? 'Cause I'm... We're recording right now, right? Yeah, we're recording. But, you know, what you do when you presume, you make a... I think that's the wrong word for that phrase. So anyway, I just want to let you know that you're doing great. And this is really good stuff. Just remember to breathe and relax, and just enjoy it. Okay. I just want to do the commentary. Just kind of run it through and... Sure. - I just feel like I've heard a lot of... I've listened to a lot of commentaries. Have you? - Yeah. I think... Yeah, what do you mean, have I? That surprises me. Why does that surprise you? I mean, it's just, you know, you're doing great. ...With Alice. Well, I just don't think I've ever heard the sound engineers coming in during a DVD commentary. So I'll say that, as well. Well, you know, normally we don't. But if it's someone who's just kind of aimless, we'll try to help out a little bit. Um... So, my commentary has been aimless? It's been... No, it's great. It's so exciting. I mean, I don't even see how... Even if it was aimless, I don't see how telling someone that helps them. 'Cause now all I'm doing is thinking about if this commentary's aimless or not. Okay, so we're in a new scene, so if you want to... I am a teacher, yeah. Uh... The key to teaching children is repetition. Uh, okay. Uh... The meet and greet. Uh... I think I missed talking about the whisper scene. Another good dick joke in there. And, uh, this meet and greet, very colorful, very poppy. This, uh... sorry, I'm just really in my head now about this aimless thing. And I feel like it makes me sound more aimless. No, no, no. You're doing great. That was just constructive criticism, you know. Aimless rambling is what you're doing. And that's constructive, honestly. It doesn't. I'm trying to find the constructive part of that criticism. Um, the part where I said, "Aimless rambling is..." Right. So, okay. Like, build off that. You know, I'm good. I'll take, I'll do... I'm okay if it's aimless. -/'m good from here on out. - Are you sure? Yeah, I'll just be good from here on out, okay? All right. I'll just keep him on a leash. And there's no way we can Start over or go back? Unfortunately there is no way. This is set in stone. Okay, Sure, sure, sure. Uh, all right. So, listen. This was our first day of filming. And, uh, filming this meet and greet here. And, uh, there was a lot of very specific things that happened in this scene. And, uh, uh... God, this is so fucking aimless now. Jesus. Talk about the lady in yellow. If this is bad news, I'm gonna eat your ass. Sorry. - Okay. The bridesmaid, Becky. That was our horrible bridesmaid, Becky, played by the wonderful Mary Holland. Um, yeah, I should talk about everyone in the scene. Mary was great as a bridesmaid. Mary actually... I know Mary from the UCB world out in Los Angeles. And I think I had her come out and audition for, like, five different roles in the movie. I think it was kind of like, "I don't know how, where you're gonna be in this movie. "I just know I want you in the movie." And, um, we were lucky enough to get her. This whole scene, this whole sequence, by the way, of the meet and greet was our first day filming. And if there's any tip I can give to a first-time filmmaker, it is this. This was one of the biggest mistakes I made on the movie. Don't have your first day of shooting on your first studio movie be a giant meet and greet scene with 100 extras and seven main characters all in the same scene. And all of the actors on their first day. And everyone feeling each other out. And also, outdoors in Hawaii, where the weather changes every five minutes. lt was sunny. It was cloudy. The wind's going crazy all day. It was a real trial by fire at the top of this shoot. We spent our first two or three days out in this location with so many people. So, if you're out there making something and you want any tips, ask for the schedule, first day, first day you're shooting, to be indoors, two guys eating pizza. That's really the best you can hope for. Just two people sitting at a table talking back and forth. Maybe one person. If you have any scenes with just one of your actors in there, get going that way. Everyone's getting to know each other. You're feeling each other out. You're figuring out how to work with the crew. The actors are warming up to the characters. You don't need 100... You don't need to figure out where to put 100 people and how to get seven of your leads in there. That's crazy. You can do that week two. You can do that week two on a movie. That was the one crazy thing. But I will say, after we did that day one and two, we were kind of ready for anything for the rest of the shoot. Where are you going? Hi! So you know what? I guess, do it. I guess, do do it. I guess, do shoot with as many people as you can. 'Cause it kind of all felt downhill from here. Um... I'm fine. Yeah! Let's just forget about the past... God, yeah, we were out here for a couple days. This is, again, at the wonderful Turtle Bay, which I highly recommend to go out and stay there with you, your loved ones, your family. Um... I mean, we're drinking 'em like they're shots... but I don't think... But the wind, I mean, I hate to even bring it up, but if you just watch these scenes and watch people's hair or the backgrounds, you will see that the wind was just going crazy. So many takes where just the wind went in front of people's faces that we're trying to cut around here. So many shots, some shots are in the sun, some shots are cloudy, that we've spent days in our color correction, trying to even out. It was great. This is the wonderful Alice Wetterlund who plays cousin Terry here. You may recognize Alice from Girl Code and Silicon Valley. I swear I was watching Season 1 of Silicon Valley right when we were casting this, and saw Alice. And then she came in and read for us for this. And, oh, my God, she's so funny. Her and Adam in the scene, we have... There was just a ton of footage on the floor of these guys playing back and forth here. And she really became cousin Terry a little bit. Anytime the camera was on, she would end up being a very method actress, which I really liked. She really scarily became this crazy, rich asshole of cousin Terry. Very aggressive here. I like this little offensive sex song here. By the way, the real Mike and Dave Stangle right here. This is their cameo. They came in, they came down to visit the set. We wanted to try to work them in. And got one of the better jokes in the movie there. The old chlamydia joke comes out of those guys. And why do you think you're such a hotshot? Um, the real Mike and Dave came to set and you think maybe the antics that these guys are known for in their book or the story of this movie is a little overdone. They, pretty sure, showed up drunk to the set. They had already been drinking that whole morning. And then after we shot a couple takes, I was like, "Hey, you guys, if you could try to stand here more "and look this way more... "Try this." And they were like, "Hey, yeah, sorry if we're screwing this up. "We are just gone right now. "We've been drinking a lot of the wine, too, "In these cups that are being passed around." And that's not real wine. Like, the trays that the waitresses have in the background of that scene are filled with either rancid wine or just dark liquids to look like wine. And the Stangle brothers immediately got on set and started grabbing everything that they thought was a real alcoholic drink and downing it. So, they're the real deal. That is a true story. From the meet and greet. Well, from before that. One second. Um, Tatiana and Alice here kind of letting loose, letting their guard down a little bit after a long day of pretending to be nice girls. And then poor Mike just still trying to push it way too hard here. ...do whatever you wanna do. Being a little bit inappropriate. 'Cause that's what we were doing before. They've got Cockbusters. We had a fun run there of different porn names for Anna to try while we were shooting that scene. Which was very fun. She says the craziest stuff in her sleep. It looks like his dick is gonna pop. It's So veiny and hard. This is also... My student. I'm doing a Skype class session... This is one of the scenes, I think we have an extended version of this scene on the DVD. There's a lot of... He walks, if you notice, Adam walks up to the door with a bucket of ice and we used to have a lot of dialogue about that ice that is no longer in the movie. It's fun when you're shooting, and especially for me, I think, first studio feature, ... you are getting an A plus. I just wanted to make sure I got all the possibilities. Try a bunch of different lines. Try a bunch of jokes. And then you get into that edit room, and you are just lifting as much as you Can away as possible. Just trying to make it go like, find the joke, find the one that works best. Boom, move on. Boom, move on. Keep the story moving. This actually, this whole sequence of the girls here is from a cut scene in the movie. It's from the bocce ball sequence, which they even used in our trailer a little bit. And it's a great sequence that's on the DVD. And this is actually from them walking up to the bocce game. And that sequence is cut. But we still had to somehow capture the vibe that these girls were in their own element. And being themselves a little more and deciding to have fun. And so we ended up using that shot of them walking up the beach and stealing drinks by themselves before they join the group to kind of get that idea across a little bit. But it's part of this whole other sequence that's now just a DVD special feature. Much like this commentary. Jake, this is the DVD. "Welcome..." What? "...to Jurassic Park." Um, you just keep saying "on the DVD." This is a DVD special feature. But you could just say "on here." - Right. On here. Well, yeah, but it's not on here, the commentary track, it's... Do you currently know what this is for? Why do you need to tell me that, though? Why are you even telling me that? l'm sorry, Margie. - You're fine. I just want to make sure you know what's going on. I mean, does it really matter if I say "on the DVD" or "on here"? If people are watching it, the worst that happens is it's a little redundant to say "the DVD." Okay, if you don't care about maintaining any reality or like... What are you talking about, "maintaining reality"? Why are we having this discussion right now? Look, you know what? You're right. I'm just, I'm... What am I talking about? I've just done a million of these and... No, that's not... I know you've done this a lot. That's not what I'm trying to say. Okay. Look. I forgive you. Okay? I forgive you. This is great. I'm having a lot of fun. You're doing so well. This is where the dinos ran in the prairie! Really? Yeah. I'm a T-Rex. I'm coming to get you! Okay, thank you. Are you crying? - No. I'm not crying. What? Just, thank you. Wasn't this where Jurassic Park was filmed? This scene right here? Yeah, this is actually where they shot Jurassic... Yeah, how did you know that? Yeah, this is where they shot Jurassic Park. Yeah, I can tell. This was the real location where... And I think they shot some of Jurassic World here, too. And by the way, so fun to get to go shoot where they shot Jurassic Park. That's like a little kid dream, to go shoot in that location for the joke of ATV-ing where they shot Jurassic Park. This is also, this ranch, by the way, Kualoa, is where they not only shot Jurassic Park and Jurassic World, it's where they shot... They have signs up all over for movie tours. It's where they shot Godzilla. It's where they shot 50 First Dates, part of it. The most excited I was by a sign was there's an area that's apparently where they shot part of the movie You, Me and Dupree. So, we join a pretty special lineage of movies, all the way from Jurassic Park to You, Me and Dupree that have shot in this beautiful location, when shooting in Hawai. I still think we should go around. She just got some serious air, bro! Um, this sequence was a blast to shoot. And, again, the stunts and stunt drivers that we brought in on this were great. And we had to find the smallest, the best smallest ATV stunt riders in the country. Yeah, baby! To match, to body-double match the girls who are the ones who are obviously good at this and doing the tricks. So, that is a male ATV stunt driver. And one of the smallest male stunt drivers we could find to double for Aubrey Plaza. And same goes with Anna Kendrick. Um... And I think there was, we initially had a female ATV stunt rider coming in and I feel like something happened with her schedule. She had a show to do, she had an X-Games-type event to go do. And then, so she dropped out, and so we had to find, um, small men. Small men with... Your turn, Mike! Don't be a pussy! ... with, uh, adrenaline junkies, basically. I'm not gonna do it. Um... Mike, it'll turn me on... I think the only disappointing part of this scene was for Zac. He just wanted to ride that ATV so bad. Zac is a guy who already knows how to ride ATVs. And was so into being on that ATV. Like, every time I said, "Cut," he'd be off zipping around, driving around, going up the mountains on ATVs. And, literally, it's like Aubrey and Anna get to drive this ATV, and look like they're jumping it and have little shots like this. Where they're all actually on it and driving it. Adam and then Aubrey did this. And poor Zac is the only guy, because Dave is the character with enough common sense to not do this jump, that couldn't go zipping around on this while we filmed. And that was, I think, the only, only bummer of shooting this scene, was for him. Oh, boy. Oh, no, God! God, this sequence was originally... A lot of people comment on how long this jump is, how long he's in the air, how long I stretch this sequence out for. And I just want you to know, originally, it was another 25 seconds longer, that Adam was just screaming, floating down on her. We originally had it so long. But this is actually one of the scenes that changed the least from our rough cut of the movie that was three hours long to the final version. That ATV sequence was kind of always in that form. Our little transition here inside, off the blackness, onto Mary's wonderful, horrified face. Your face is making me think it's gonna be bad. This is one of those scenes that where if I'm really analyzing the movie, it doesn't make sense if you think about it. But you're having so much fun after that surprising ATV hit and watching her face and seeing everyone make jokes, that no one thinks about it. But if I actually looked critically at it, I'm going, "So she got hit in the face. She should be dead." Right? She's not dead. She should be dead. And then we cut to the next room and she's just standing up in the middle of a room with an ice bag on her face. She's not sitting down. And I was looking at her. And everyone's standing staring at her to wait to see what the face looks like. I have little rationalities I can tell myself to get around this and how it can work. "Maybe it swelled up. "The bruising got worse under the ice bag." Blah, blah, blah. But if you really think about it, it probably wouldn't go like this. That's what they call suspension of disbelief, guys. Welcome to movie making 107. Enough dancing! You and you... outside, now! God, this was So fun. Just telling, letting Stephen Root get mad at these guys. Calm down. Do you understand they've deformed our little girl... We were really worried this joke wouldn't work. She looks like Seal, for Christ's sake! "Looks like Seal." And we were kind of like, "Is that too dated? Do kids today..." And it kills. Everyone always loved that joke. I always thought... I had like three alts for that joke. I always thought we'd change it. Never had to. This was great, coming up with this on the day. Which actually is based on my own life. If I'm ever too tired and run into one of those doors, I can never figure out how to close them. And I asked Stephen Root if he could try trying to close it with the door that won't go all the way 'cause the other one's open. And, God, he's so funny. He's so great at just boiling over at these guys. There was another door, though. He can just close the other door. What? Well, he didn't see the other door. He just closed the one. But he was trying to close one but it was the other door that was open. Yeah, Margie, that's the joke. That he kept trying to close the door but there was another one to close. But he kept trying to close the other one. Did he not see the other door? I can't, I can't get into this with you right now, Margie. Okay. Everyone gets the joke. And this is not, I don't think this is... I mean, you said you've been doing this for a while. But I cannot believe that you think this is the right time to get into this. When there's a room, and there's usually one door, but sometimes there are two. And if there's two, I don't know why you wouldn't be aware of that. Well, to each his own, I guess. Agree to disagree. - Um... It's all fucked now. It's all fucked. Yeah. Yeah, okay. So, yeah, you agree to disagree. Great. Okay, well, yeah, I agree to disagree. Sounded like you wanted to say no. Sounded like you wanted to say you don't agree to disagree. I don't want to make this any harder than it already is. Do all the booths in the building have the mic inside your room like that? The mic to... - No, it's just this one. Yeah, sure. That's what I thought. Perfect. Um, let's get back to the old movie here. Thanks again for letting me join your spa day, ladies. I'm getting a little feedback in my mic here. Um... This is a fun little run here. Spa day. This is, so Alice now is trying to... Feels really bad about ruining the bride's day here, since she was a bride herself. And understands how big of a deal that would be. She's really trying to make it up to Jeanie. But poor Alice. She just, her heart's in the right place, the right intentions but she's gonna go a little crazy here. I didn't actually end up having one, So... Why? Every bride needs a bachelorette party. I'm sorry... By the way, Anna did great with that run, that giant run about dressing up like a prostitute. I'm pretty sure I threw that on her. She had never seen that written down. lt was maybe the third or fourth take where we tried something new. And I said, "Hey, try this really long run about your..." And just instantly, the next take, had it memorized. Had it better than I told it to her with perfect timing, perfect jokes. She just nailed it. She's awesome. Anna Kendrick might be the most professional person I've ever worked with. Little facts about working with her that you might want to know. She is always, always has her lines ready. Always on set ready to go. When you're filming a movie, you kind of have your actors, they take a break, they sit down between takes. You have, what's called, a second team of stand-ins to come in and adjust the lighting on... And then, when you Say, "Second team out, first team in," that's when your actors come back to set to start filming. Anna was always, you'd Say, "Second team out, first team..." Anna would be there. Waiting for everyone, Anna was always the first person back on set. Another fun thing about Anna, she's a woman of the world. She's a very knowledgeable person. She was always reading when she was in between takes, off set. Which is great. She's always got a book of new subject that she's into. And there was about three weeks on this movie where she was reading a book on the rise of Nazism in 1930s and '40s, Germany. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. How did you know that? It's one of my favorite books. Physically, no penetration. Why? /'m a history buff. All right. All right. Well, I hope so. Anyway, that's what Anna was reading as well on set. But the funny image would be, every now and then between takes, you'd look over at her sitting in her chair and she was just... You just saw her eyes popping over this giant book with a swastika on it. And we were like, "Anna, you got to... Let's put a different cover on that thing. "It just does not look right, that you're reading that book." Poor, sweet little Anna Kendrick with a giant swastika in front of her face. Oh, my God. How have I not Started talking about Kumail yet? When we had to cast this scene for the masseuse, whose name is Keanu, I don't think that's in the movie anymore, but in the script his name is Keanu, I wanted Kumail to do this and he... I think we went out to him and we asked him to do this scene. Said, "Would you come in and do a cameo and be this crazy masseuse?" And immediately he said yes. We got the word, he said, yes, he's in. And then he read the scene. And three hours later it was, "He needs to talk to the director before he'll agree to do this." And we actually... That was our problem with this scene is how do we explain that the scene of two naked people rubbing butts on each other for a happy ending massage, that this will be funny and not crazy and weird and something you'll regret doing. So, I think Kumail was actually in Greece with his wife on a vacation. Like, the first vacation they had had in a couple years. And he took a break from it to Skype-call me. I was in Hawaii, prepping. And he was just like, "Listen, man, I just got to know. "What are we gonna be showing here? And what kind of scene?" Like, "I'd love to do it, but are you gonna screw me on this?" Basically, he was saying, "Are you gonna screw me on this?" And I showed him some storyboards I had made up for this scene that had some of the crazy positions they were in. And I just sent him a picture of one or two of those. Said, "This is what I'm thinking." And he instantly was like, "Oh, I get it. It's a full comedy scene. "It's full weird-position comedy scene. I'm in." And then, also, three weeks later he shows up buff as hell. I did not know he was packing muscles like that. And he said he was worried about doing the nude scene. So he started hitting the weights even more. I mean, we're alone. How's Mike? Um, this scene we shot in an actual sauna. We did almost no set work on this entire movie. Everything was real, which is great for the production value of the background of Hawaii. But, God, this was a tight, this was maybe an 8'x6' sauna that we just actually shot in. So it was real tight to get in here and try to get these shots. And obviously, this scene, even from the early stage of the script, this was kind of the question of like, "And, uh, are we keeping the sauna scene in the movie? "What do you think of the sauna scene?" That was always the biggest question about this movie, is that, "Do you think this is the kind of movie "that keeps the sauna scene or loses it?" And I always thought you kept it. Originally in the script, cousin Terry was a man. It was a man. And we came upon the idea, someone had suggested during the prep of this movie, of, "What if you make it a woman?" And it's kind of a woman who's really forward and kind of almost a predator-ish, just a bisexual. It's not that she's straight, it's not that she's gay. It's just that she is down for anything, is her vibe. And so we decided to... We changed the role maybe a week or two out from production. Changed that role to a woman. Which I think adds a fun layer that you haven't really seen before in a movie. I love these little cut-ins here on Mike's face here and the sound she's making. Mike, I'm coming. - No! Oh, my God! I think that was, we were on set. And besides Adam screaming, we just said, "What's the worst thing that could happen "If you've already walked in and see your sister in the middle of a happy ending? "What's the worst possible thing that the sister could say to you?" And the answer was, just looking you dead in the eyes and saying, "Mike, I'm coming." And that's where that came from on the day, I believe. Terry! Poor Mike, just falling apart here. Shut the fuck up, Mike. Ugh. From one to the next. Cannot handle it. I'm gonna kick your ass. Adam Devine at 100% again, wonderfully. Poor, poor Mike. Mike's... This is where, I think, actually, you go from Mike being like an overly sex-crazed, like, "Who is this guy," to like, "I actually start to feel a little bad for him here." Here and in the next scene in the lobby with Tatiana. Um... God, so funny. And here we go. Back to Kumail again. Kumail is great. Kumail and Sugar were great together here. Just playful. And it was so fun having Kumail in to shoot because we would do the scene and then he would just come over to me and Say, "Hey, what other jokes do you want to try? "What should we... Should we try this, should we try that?" And he was so fun and great about just, "Let's keep thinking. "What else could be fun here? "What other jokes should we try?" And we would just sit on the side of the set for five, 10 minutes before each setup and just come up with more stuff for them to play with. And this is a perfect example of Kumail. You could develop cancer. Going off on his own, "Develop cancer." It's great. Um... Wait, you did that? These two. It's so funny. And that was another thing in the script is that we had to try to balance, and it's interesting. You'll see in the deleted scenes, there's a lot of scenes that got cut. But it was making this a true four-hander and balancing Alice and Tatiana and Mike and Dave throughout this movie, and having four leads is like... We shot a lot of stuff to make sure we could put it together in different ways. 'Cause when you're trying to balance that many people, I just wanted to make sure we didn't get back to the edit room and go like, "Oh, we wish we had this." Or, "We need this moment." And in truth, we had so much. We had too much stuff that we couldn't fit it all. The movie would have been two-and-a-half hours long. And I kind of think you don't want it to go that long if you're doing a comedy. You want to get people in the theater. Make them laugh. Make the story work. Feel for the characters a little bit. Send them on their way. But I think there's a lot of deleted scenes and extra jokes and bits on this that we put on the disc here. God, this, the banyan trees, by the way, so pretty to shoot in. And this is one of those scenes, these emotional connection scenes that I remember shooting and going, "You know what? We'll probably cut this way down in post "because we've got so much crazy, funny stuff going on. "We'll probably want to get back fo it." And the opposite is true. We got into the edit room, and you put this together and it's like, "Yeah." What a great reminder to check back in with the characters and where they are and what they want out of things. And we just were like, "What else do we have? What other lines did we try? "Let's put everything in this scene." Um, and it's so nice to take a break for a second with these two. And just re-establish the stakes and where we are. And I think it helps. I think those scenes with Anna and Zac in the movie help drive the whole movie and help reset for the comedy in the next scenes after that. And that was... Yeah, that was fun to see working as we put it together. Yeah, I'm totally overreacting. God, this is another, one of the ones from the first time I read the script. Tatiana's little run here about what she did and what it's like. lt was one of those things in the script where it was like, "Yeah, we got to do this in the movie. I haven't seen this scene before." It's just like Tinder. We did, we probably tried about 50 different things that we made poor Aubrey do and describe here before we got it down to three things for the movie. ...contracting them. Are you deliberately trying to hurt me? Is that what you're doing? What? No! I was just trying to get RiRi tickets... to make my best friend feel better, okay? We're on vacay. By the way, Adam Devine. Have we talked about him yet? What a great dude. We were lucky on this movie. Literally, everyone we... I'm so happy with our cast. Not only our main cast, our main four, but our secondary cast. I mean, just literally couldn't have asked for a better group of people. Not only with how funny and talented they are, but just great dudes. I didn't really know Adam very much before this movie. We had met a couple times about various things that we never really worked together. And then, I mean, when we first met about this movie, he was like, "I feel like I am Mike. "Like I know how to do this role more than any other role I've read." And I think he was right. He just really put everything into it. And always, he was always the best about, "Do we need another take? "Do you want me to try this?" He'll do it. No complaints. Always full of energy. And so funny, man. God, I just want fo... Hey, Jake. You coughed a second ago. ls there a bug in the room? Not that I know of. Did I cough? So you didn't choke on a bug? Made it up. All of it. No. What do you mean? I don't think I did. Why? Has that happened? You just coughed and it sounded like... I just assumed you choked on a bug. Well, I don't think that's a reasonable assumption, Margie. I mean, unless you know something I don't about the bugs in this room. I don't think I choked on a bug. That's the thing about a sound booth. It's always bugged. Oh, come on, man. Is that a pun? ls that what you're doing? Did you just try to put a joke on the DVD commentary? I don't... That was just a fact. I don't joke. I don't understand humor. Mmm-hmm. - So, I don't... Is that what you do when you work in the booth for this long? Do you just sit on something like that for, like, 10 years and just Say, "One of these days I'm gonna put the bug joke in. "I'm just gonna hit the mic button and pop on in"? Um, I will be telling my family and friends about this commentary and the fact that I'm a part of it, if that's okay. - Oh, my God. Yeah, I guess. I mean, I think that's clearly what's going on here. You lied? By the way, I think there is a way to stop and go back and rerecord sections. I know earlier you told... I mean, it's too late now. We're an hour into the movie. But I think... Yeah, there's no way we can go back now. There was a couple points at the beginning where we could've. We could've, right? I knew it. We're too deep, we're in too deep, as they Say. Well, for the first time, I agree with you. This is just what it is by this point. And I've got way too busy of a day to redo this. So it is what it is. You got any thoughts on this scene here? "Love hurts." How did they get up in that tree? "Love wounds..." We just had... We just stepped them. We had a ladder. They just crawled up in the tree. Climbing trees is dangerous. I don't have children, but if I did, I would say, "Please, avoid climbing trees because when you fall you could hurt yourself." I mean, I guess in a way that's reasonable. But, also, kids love climbing. I mean, you got to climb a tree. Kids love climbing trees. You got to let your kids climb trees. Well, I'll never have children anyway, so it doesn't matter. That's not... I don't want to open that door with you, Margie. I'd actually love to talk about it if you are... Yeah, no, I had a feeling you might. And I don't, let's not make that... Let's do that... That's another disc, okay? I just, I'm not sure if I'm firm on that decision to not have kids, or if I should consider... Should I freeze my eggs? A clear line in the sand. Well, all 1 can say is I would support you if you did. l'm gonna support anyone who wants to take that route. And it's a decision you got to make for you. All right, but let's really not go farther than that into this discussion. If/ freeze my eggs, will you go in on it with me? They're liars! No, I won't go in on it with you. It costs a lot of money to do that. /'m sure it does. But that's not my problem, Margie. I mean, you can decide to freeze those eggs or not, that's up... You said you'd support me, though. You got... I know you work, Margie. I know you work. I'm looking at you do your job right now. If you want to save up... Well, no... I mean, how much do you need? Uh... Tatiana was jerking off our cousin Terry. Are you crying? Cousin Terry has a dick? No. It's hard to see you through the glass. /'m fine. Let's just... - Oh, my God, I'm so sorry. We can talk about it later. Listen, if you need help, let's talk. No, no, no. I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. I can't do that, David. Oh, boy. What? I mean, just... I just had a kid. And I love having a kid. And I get it if you need... I mean... I would love to know what that feels like. She really had to pee? Anyway it's... Let's talk... Let's seriously... Let's, you and me, let's talk afterwards. /... Okay. - Okay. That'd be great. I can't believe what's happening here. I do want to remind you, though, about the heavy breathing. Thank you, thank you. Appreciate that. I'm gonna walk in on Mom... I ama heavy breather. I'm kind of worried about breathing heavily in this thing. Careful, when you scratch your face it brushes the mic and then it fucks me up. But have you seen this Push Pop scene? I forgot to talk about this Push Pop scene. Um, love the... Zac went full Brad Pitt in Se7en here. He did a full what's-in-the-box on what's-the-Push-Pop. Also, a little thank you to my good friend, Lauryn Kahn. A hilarious writer who I know from back when I started at Funny Or Die, and she started at Gary Sanchez Productions, who we're out of the same office. And we've been friends ever since that website launched. And she was one of our on-set writers. She came out for two or three weeks pitching jokes. And, um, she pitched that phrase Push Pop. I think, initially, we had a different phrase in there and she's like, "Let's try 'Push Pop." It was great. You're out of control! By the way, we cut right out of this shot before Tatiana's about to throw a drink in Becky's lap. Which you can see all about it on the deleted scenes. There's a really funny runner of Tatiana continues to throw her champagne glass into Becky's lap and make it seem like she peed her pants. And that was one of the things I hated losing in this movie as we got it down to time. It was a really funny runner throughout the movie. Talk about the centipedes. Oh, there were centipedes that... Yes, I forgot. We shot... We're back at the banyan trees here, shooting at night. We shot for three nights out here. Like The Truman Show. And centipedes were falling from the tree on all the crew and actors. And they were the biggest centipedes you've ever seen. They were six, seven inches long, a centimeter thick. They were nightmare centipedes. And apparently what had happened was, people were so worried about how many bugs there were gonna be in the forest at night that they had sprayed for mosquitos the day before we shooted. And it... "Before we shooted," before we shot. And it got rid of a lot of all the mosquitoes and small bugs. But apparently it just kind of slowly stunned the centipedes 'cause they were so much bigger than the other bugs that it didn't kill them. And so, six hours later after they sprayed as it was shooting, the centipedes finally started dropping from the trees in a daze 'cause they couldn't hold on to the branches anymore. And it was raining centipedes as we shot. That is terrifying and the stuff of nightmares. And it is true. That is absolutely what happened. And then one of the crew guys took one of the centipedes and put it into a cup. And started walking around showing it to everyone while it would crawl in and out of the cup on his hand. Ugh! Did you guys eat them? No, no one ate them. That would be... You could, though. If you were trapped, that's exactly what you would eat for the protein. I would eat them without being trapped. What, why? What? Why on Earth would you do that? Well, if you want... Can we have that conversation about freezing my eggs again? I'd like to... I think we should wait. And honestly, not even for me or the commentary's sake at this point. I think for you we should wait till after this. Well, you're the director. I deserve to have a little fun. What is that? Is that... Are you mad at me? Do you agree with me? I have no idea now, Margie. This is gonna be so much fun! I just... Yeah, this is... It's gotten out of control. I apologize. I feel like I'm... I'm sorry. I feel like this is too much. It's... No, no, no. - It's... You're... You're fine. Please, don't. This is how we do it, baby. Come on. Let's just try to get through this commentary. Absolutely. Let's both do our jobs here. Right? - Absolutely, let's do that. We'll just get this thing done. - Please, Iet's do that. Um, You love that movie. We were shooting on... How's it a bad idea if you love the movie? We were shooting on a prime lens here. Probably about 40 millimeters. Oh, my God, commentaries are So... -... boring. - And we were... It's, like, what is this? - Margie. /'m just... You're talking about... -... hearing him and sitting in here. I'm listening to this guy... - Can she hear me? ...ramble on about things he thinks about. Oh, my... Do you know you put the mic on? - It's just, when... What the fuck are... What... What am I even... What is my life? She doesn't even know she put the mic on. - What is my life? I just can't believe it. I can't believe... It's just a waste of his time and my time and everybody's time. Jesus. This makes me feel really shitty about the commentary. Oh, shit. Yeah, you got the... Your elbow"s on the button! What's that? Your elbow"s on the mic button. - Did you... Hello, everyone. Oh, no, I know, I wanted that. Um, I'm just gonna adjust a couple of levels. And I'll be right back. They're two of the sweetest... Where'd she go? She's running out of the booth. All right. Our first soeaker tonight... Where... Oh, my God. Well, God, I don't know what she's doing or where she went. Fricking Margie. My eyes are dry. Just give it to me. Uh, all right, listen, let's... I'm sorry. Uh, let's get back into this. "...my speech." Doing a little Chris Rock here. God, I'm sorry. I'm just thinking about, I don't know what's going on with her right now. She's talking about these eggs. She's talking about how boring commentaries are. I don't think she's happy. I don't know where she went. I'm starting to get a little scared. I feel like I should try to lock the door to this room. I don't know what's going on. Um... Why aren't you on my side, Dave? All right. Let's talk about, let's talk about this movie again right here. Fucking Zac Efron bringing it strong and hard right here. Boom. We thought this was so funny of Zac being such a good actor and just straight up yelling as seriously as he could, "I'm gonna draw. Like an artist." We even used that phrase. By the way, Lavell, our Keith. I haven't had a chance to talk about Lavell yet. So funny. Such a funny guy. Loved him on Breaking Bad. And we were able to steal him out. And, God, there's another... There's a great whole runner with him that got cut that's on the DVD that in every scene he just talks about how he's on vacation and he still hasn't been in the pool yet. That he's living in paradise and he just wants to get in that pool. But he's been so busy getting the wedding ready. That couldn't make it on. But, man, he was so funny. Um... The mics are on! - You're just fucking pissed off... Here we go, guys. ... because Tatiana finger diddled Terry. There it is! By the way, great pitch coming up here from Mary Holland who a little later here, where I was like, "If you have any ideas for this scene let me know." I told all the actors on this movie, "Anything you want to try or any ideas you have, "or jokes you want to pitch, let me know." I'm always down to try stuff 'cause that's how I run it and I want them to try things I say, so if they got things, let's try it. And that's why Mary's holding that champagne glass there. When she snaps it and breaks it in her hand, that was her pitch. That just, she said, "Can I please, please, have a glass "that I just shatter in shock and ruin my hand with?" And I said, "Absolutely. Call props." Said, "Please get breakable champagne glasses for her." And we did it. There we go. Love it, love it. And we actually had to remove it from her hand, digitally, in the next shot 'cause we're using a take where she hadn't broken it yet behind Eric there. And so, then, uh, we digitally removed it from the shot after she breaks it. They got so... This was one of those nights where it was raining. Kind of every 25 minutes we'd have to break while it rained for five minutes. And it was very hot and very humid. And Zac and Adam doing that fight was really hard on them, actually. And they got so sweaty by the end of it when they were lifting each other up. I think Adam literally almost hyperventilated at one point. When we finally cut for lunch there, um... Adam just stripped off every piece, Stripped all the way down to his underwear. Took the suit off, took the shoes off, took the socks off. He was just so hot and the air was so thick and humid that he was having trouble breathing after that. It's 'cause these guys give it their all. They're pros. By the way, you will notice that we are doing night scenes here. And we shot so many nights. It's actually rare for a comedy. I think we shot three or four weeks of nights on this movie. And it's tough. You do one week in the day then you got to switch your clock and get up where you're shooting from 8:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. all day. And we were also shooting in Hawaii in the summer. Which meant the days were really long and the nights were short. And it can really mess with your schedule and the actors' schedule getting used to shooting all through the night for weeks at a time. They usually don't do it that much on a comedy. I think we shot a lot of nights for a comedy. Drama you might see it. People just change their schedules. They're up all night for a month while they're shooting. And I think we started doing, or at least once we did, we had nightcap drinks after shooting.

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all these cobblestones are. And the other thing to remember is the phenomenal lighting by Rob Hardy and Martin Smith, our Gaffer Martin Smith cinematographer, Rob Hardy. The choice of this sort of greenish light on one end. White there. Yes, well, it's tungsten. He's got a tungsten color that he really likes that's given this entire movie this feel, this almost...

8:29 · jump to transcript →

is faithfully recreated by our animation cinematography team and Eric Adkins, our animation DP, so that, you know, every one of those shadows is timed to a tree passing or whatever, but it's then programmed on the animation stage with a flag or a kookalurus to be, you know, enhanced frame by frame. That is insane. And perfectly matched with the background.

34:54 · jump to transcript →

worked so hard with me and Jaron Blaschke, the DP, on being able to articulate our vision. And with the horse falls and all this stuff, I mean, it was a nightmare. And we spent, I don't know how many times we visited this location with a viewfinder, restaking all these buildings so that they would all be built in such a way that we could achieve this shot and move the dolly through it and have enough room for the horses and see down the different alleyways to get enough depth.

26:53 · jump to transcript →

that tends to paint you into corners. I really wanted the movie to tell me what its look was, and obviously I want every mission to feel different. And Chunky Richmond, our camera operator, Fraser Taggart, cinematographer, Martin Smith, our gaffer, we were finding the look of the movie, of the sets, here on day one, and this was the first shot, was Carrie's close coverage. And what you're seeing

16:48 · jump to transcript →