Color & grading

tweaked it and did the color grade, and brought it to look like night. Now this is, everybody's aware, but when you shoot a movie, obviously you do many takes, and so that applies to everything. Eating, your actors have to eat. They do 12, 13, 14 takes, and so a lot of times what they do is they just keep a bucket for the actors so that after the take they can spit out the food, so they don't just keep

24:41 · jump to transcript →

there in post so we could pick up some POV shots. This is my favorite shot of the dungeon right here. I thought Simon did an amazing job on just, you know, you need to see it, you need to light it. Same time you want to keep it very dark and creepy and it's not an easy thing to do. So I thought he did a really fantastic job at it. Another thing too is that Simon was really good in the digital intermediate.

1:26:05 · jump to transcript →

which is the whole color timing process. Yeah, and Ziggy did the coloring over at Company 3. And again, he absolutely knows what I'm after and really helped us out with the style as well. That's my favorite shot of the werewolf. I think that's on your website now, right? Yes.

1:26:36 · 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.

19:29 · jump to transcript →

Francis Lawrence

This was a nice little gag piece of furniture that Maria and her propmaker made. It's a little tough to light to see the black discs in the black drawer underneath. So, they gave Jo Willems quite a challenge. But worked out really well. You know, Jo and I have worked together for a really long time as well. I mean, we go back to the music video days, I think, you know, pre-2000, doing music videos and commercials. And then I went off to do movies, and he went off to do some movies, and so we went kinda separate ways for a while. And then started working together again on a couple of pilots. We did a couple of pilots together, and then I brought him in for the Hunger Games movies, and we really haven't stopped working together since. But we decided to do, really, a completely different approach to the movie, visually, this time. Again, we had done three Hunger Games movies over the course of five years, and there was sort of a similar feel to all of that. I mean, one of the things that I wanted to do was handheld, to sort of maintain some of the naturalism that was in the first one, but sort of more along the kind of style that I had done in something like I Am Legend where there's a hint of immediacy and naturalism, but it was actually still rather formal in terms of shot selection. The other thing that we did was use a lot of kind of medium-wide lenses up close on people, so we felt very intimate with people, but still maintained a little sense of geography in those movies. But a lot of those movies played in medium and close-up shots, or very wide, but a lot up close. And we wanted to be completely different with this movie. I mean, I wanted, quite honestly, for it to have a bit of a colder approach, a much more formal approach. I mean, the color palette was certainly gonna be different. The landscapes, and costumes, and characters were all gonna be completely different and much more grounded. But I wanted the cameras to be much more formal, too. So, locked down. So, either on dollies or Steadicam, or cranes, or Sticks. No handheld. But also to let things play a lot wider. I went in close much more rarely and let things play in wider shots for a lot longer. It was something that I'd wanted to do for a long time, but it was not an aesthetic that I had kicked off on the Hunger Games, and so I didn't want to kind of change that partway through. But it was an opportunity that I wanted to take advantage of here, and I'm really happy about it. You see it quite a lot in places like Sparrow School, and at the ballet, and things like that, that I really stay back and let things kind of play out in a much wider way. And also try not to cut quite as quickly as we may have. I wanted there to be, you know, an aspect of a slow burn to this movie. I wanted it to take its time a little bit, and not play just to the people who have attention deficit disorder.

1:34:37 · jump to transcript →

Marco Brambilla Daniel Waters

Everything was built. I don't think there were any locations on that film. They didn't love you as much as Tim at that point. Yeah. So when you have to use locations, it gets very complicated to maintain the tone and maintain the feeling of being in this future. Yeah. I remember the first time I met David Snyder, he goes, every inch of the movie is future. So nothing is left to chance. And a lot of that is the color palette and the lighting. Yeah.

56:37 · jump to transcript →

Marco Brambilla Daniel Waters

That was, again, Alex Thompson working with Alex to create a color palette for San Angeles present day and then to create a color palette for this. And this was also shot in a kind of complex in San Diego. That was an amazing dress for San Diego.

57:07 · jump to transcript →

I think Don Burgess did a wonderful job here. If you notice the color palette he's dealing with and how you really can almost feel the harshness of the drug and what that's leading this character to experience. Yeah, I think if I recall, he changed the color palette to a much cooler sort of blue-green color palette and really desaturated it.

1:29:59 · jump to transcript →

So it made you sort of feel all the lack of warmth and anything of that nature in the scenes that make you feel like everything's been drained out of her life, just like he did with his color palette.

1:30:27 · jump to transcript →

in their truest nature, we're able with this process to make it more vivid or less vivid. But in the case of To Live and Die in L.A., extremely vivid and full of color. We're able to make the blacks blacker and the whites whiter so that the film has more contrast. The densities are all perfectly timed. And that's the process of digital color timing.

1:52:24 · jump to transcript →

but we wanted them to move the story forward. They couldn't just stop and be a number. On the other hand, we didn't want to cut away, and we had a lot of discussions of this in the editing room, trying to figure out exactly where to cut away. Now here, when we first saw it, by the way, in the color timing, that's why I tend to think everything is a story decision, we had to decide when we first see Johnny and Penny whether we see Johnny's eyes or his knees. So did Baby remember

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Will I Be A

So these in this extended cut, I do think you get a better sense of who these characters are. I think one of the problems with the film is that, by the time the third act is coming around, you see a lot of bald-headed guys getting killed. But they're fun characters. They each did have an identity. And particularly, I think, Golic. The little crazy guy got some of his stuff excised a little bit much. The little crazy guy got some of his stuff excised a little bit much. When he releases the creature, you see that he's nuts. And his experience in meeting the creature, he has sort of interpreted it a little differently than someone who's not quite as bent might, and so therefore he feels it's his duty to release the creature. Sort of like a Renfield and Dracula kind of relationship, which I thought was interesting. And it added a little bit of clarity to this whole scene here. This is, again... Look how beautifully this stuff is shot. Fincher was very much into these browns and sepias. Well, the alien in Alien 3 was still more of the blackish... The black, black alien. But because of the lighting and the color timing and so on, he does pick up this sort of overall sepia tone of the color scheme of the film. Whereas in the second film, even though there were browns in the body of the alien, there was a lot of blue light that was being used, and that reflects off the glistening slime. So they feel more blue-black. And this one feels a little more sepia. And actually, in Giger's work, if you look through Necronomicon, you really do see two different tones. You can see the blue-black and the brown-black. And so we opted more towards the brown-black. And, again, every one of these films... What's great about the Alien series is that every one of the films has the stamp of each director on it. No matter how you interpret that, or whether you like that or not, each movie is stylistically its own film. All owing to the original, but still maintaining some of its own quality.

1:28:41 · jump to transcript →

Wes Anderson

The whole movie, the color timing is extremely warm and kind of yellow, and a little extra red. And here we go cold as it can be, and it's blue. The way we shot this was just one angle with jump cuts, and which is, you know-- I don't think there's anything else in this movie that's done that way. To me, it's sort of just interesting to see him doing this. I don't know. I have heard it described as incredibly boring, but I don't think that. To me, it's not. I feel like I kind of connect with Luke in this scene. Right here, especially.

1:09:58 · jump to transcript →

Commentary With Kathryn Bigelow And Jeff Cronenweth

In other words, it just makes the... It's something where they don't extract as much out of the negative as they normally do. They skip the bleach process. But essentially what happens is you get a richer black in your film and you get a slightly more desaturated image. And so we went into production with that in mind. And the end result...

1:20:55 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

And then in the extended cut, we've got exactly the same scene. It hasn't changed, but it's now nighttime, which is what you can do with film. You can fiddle with little buttons, turn the knobs, and either make it day or night now. With computer-controlled color timing, it's a bit less important to know what time of the day it is when you're actually shooting it originally.

2:56:40 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

One thing that was always appealing to us was the idea of having Bill Murray, who'd never-- I don't know if he'd fired a gun in a movie before. In Ghostbusters it was kind of a gun. And he'd fired some guns in Razor's Edge, he's at war. I know he shoots out some headlights in Razor's Edge. Right. - But here he was for an action hero. The first one time as action hero, but he plays the giant action scene-- I say "giant," but-- For us, giant. The action scene in a striped Speedo, a bathrobe, and flip-flops. Well, we'd also talked about sort of the choice of the music, you know, the-- You know, the-- Like you were saying about the color timing and the, you know, the sort of score you use... here, sort of breaks into sort of the Iggy Pop song, which I think sort of brings us back into the sort of playful Zissou world, you know, that sort of-- - The Iggy Pop. The Iggy Pop does. You'd talked about at one point maybe doing it all silent. At one point, we had a version that didn't have any gunshots or anything like that, and all the sound was gone. It was totally silent, we had some music playing, and the effect was much more grave. When we put this music on-- I liked the other way too, but this seemed maybe to be more right for the way the whole movie needed to work. I don't know if I-- I feel like I could've shot more coverage on this. We were struggling. It's got an energy though. I'm not a professional action-sequence director, but I can do better. I guess Bill Murray also fired a gun at the end of Stripes. I think they go to Argentina to rescue some people. One thing with Bill, put a gun in his hand and he can't wait to empty the magazine. This is interesting. We had to throw this gun into the-- Well, you can't throw a gun into the ocean. So actually, he switches hands with the prop guy who's out below the frame and gives him a rubber gun to throw. But we did, when he knocks that guy out and throws him overboard in the earlier part of that scene, we lost a gun. Bill actually accidentally hit the guy, and the guy went in the water, was knocked out by Bill hitting him, and his gun fell, and Bill's gun fell into-- The gun Bill was grabbing out of his hand fell in the water. And then they said we couldn't shoot anymore, and they called the police, who came out and flew over helicopters while our Marines searched for it. I was like, "Can't we keep shooting while we look?" "No." And we were worried our stunt guy was going to get arrested. But then the Marine guys found it in the bottom of the ocean there, which is only like 20 feet deep or something there. But they found the gun, brought it back up, and we were allowed to continue when the helicopters went away. That's why you went a few days over. Things like that. - Variety of things, yeah. How you holding up there, intern? Doing okay?

1:03:18 · jump to transcript →

You know, because what could be worse than seeing a creature that makes trophies out of predators? So that was kind of the idea with it. Didn't end up making it in the film. Didn't end up making it in the extended cut either. But, you know, we didn't have the time or money to paint them out of the back of that shot, so we just took all the green out. Hopefully no one will notice. Yeah, in the digital intermediate process.

24:29 · jump to transcript →

Francis Lawrence and Akiva Goldsman

then Akiva, you wrote the speech, which was great, and then we decided to name Willow's character Marley, and we started to use the songs, and I'm just so excited that we got to use, nobody uses Bob Marley songs in movies. And it's unbelievable, and especially Redemption Song, we get Redemption Song in there as... There's a little costume gap there, that's actually the, he's wearing the shirt from the first day, but we decided to... Tweaked it in the DI. Yeah, a little bit.

1:17:22 · jump to transcript →

Patrick Tatopoulos

I remember that was in, that was out. I wanted it out. - Do we add CG to it? I Know, and it was just... It made more sense story-wise to keep it in. And that shot basically was given to us. You know, we had shot practical werewolves there. It didn't come out exactly the way we wanted. And those guys at Duboi said: "We've done the rest of the sequence. We want to make this one great." And basically-- Is that right, James? They wanted to do it. - That's so cool. They weren't happy with the elements as well. What did she put? What is that she's putting in there? Incense? - Or something like it. She's making a little soup. - She looks beautiful. I love how Viktor just pops up in the background there. I love that shot. And we had to darken on the wide one because he appeared... Yeah, we were just kind of like, with the DI, make him a little darker... We actually removed him from the first shot when she walks in. That's right. Yeah. He was there. So deep have I been in my own anguish at Lucian's betrayal... ...I gave no thought... One of those famous green window that protects you from the sun. The first time we got that shot, he was green like Hulk. And it was so insane. We had to tone it down quite a bit, then. I do like Bill when he's slightly, you know... Kind of riding the camp. Yeah. I just love that. But it's him. Perhaps. And then he becomes really real at moments like...

52:03 · jump to transcript →

Phenomenal. And here's what's amazing is all of this detail, all of this sky and all this, when you're watching this film in the editing room before you've gone in and doing what we call color timing, which is where you actually pull out the fullness of the negative, none of this color was there. This was a very gray scene, you remember. Yes. And Asa Scholl and the nice guys at Filmograph, or not Filmograph, Molinere in London, who are our colorists,

17:21 · jump to transcript →

you know, looking at a lot of documentaries, finding a lot of images that we assigned to scenes, colors that we assigned to scenes, the yellow that you just saw in the fire scene. We also didn't want this movie to be monotonous gray, green, brown, because that's usually the color palette you find in the mud. And so we tried to introduce a lot of color, yellow, blue morning,

1:43:56 · jump to transcript →