Composition & framing

at Shepperton Studios, or Pinewood Studios, actually, this one. Can you tell about the roller skating guys, Bob? Yeah, if you look deep in the background there, you'll see the guys in the fence just in the back there. They seem to be, I don't know, skating almost. One of the tricks that the visual effects company will be very unhappy that we pointed out to you. So we set this next shot up, and with all the burning flames, and it was...

3:53 · jump to transcript →

kind of painful setup of about four hours getting the shot together and then of course we warned everybody and said nobody moves it doesn't matter unless the rock himself catches on fire nobody moves and of course the minute the background caught on fire which it was supposed to do a Moroccan fireman with a pith helmet shiny silver pith helmet ran in so we had to remove him in post this sequence here was photographed

4:22 · jump to transcript →

And they walk right out onto sound stage six, Shepperton Studios. Or D, D stage. Now this shot here, the foreground element was shot in Morocco with the horses coming in there and the background is an ILM matte painting. And a lot of the reasons...

8:33 · jump to transcript →

There's some wind going, but if you had sand going, her eyes would be filled with sand. So we had her acting that she was getting particulates in her eyes. This is a wonderful shot. I absolutely love the composition and the way the camera moves to introduce that character. To introduce this character we refer to as Braid. Yeah. Who's actually played by, I believe, five different women throughout the sequence because of the places where we shot it. Yeah.

14:20 · jump to transcript →

assemblage of people. This was a very challenging scene to shoot. It was our first day on stage after coming back from working on location. And it's a very challenging set to shoot in. And all the compositions are more or less the same. I love how you're introducing the geography with a big close-up of Carrie in the foreground. I love the way the camera inches around. Well, and that was the beginning of the visual language of our film. We didn't come to this movie with a specific sense of this is how we want to shoot it.

16:18 · jump to transcript →

I think we had 200 extras. So ILM extended all the people in the background, but there were a lot of people there to make it feel as real as possible. Just extraordinary, extraordinary actor. Rob Delaney, Mark Gatiss, Charles Parnell, who came back from Top Gun for us. And here's Marcello, our man of mystery.

17:46 · jump to transcript →

Paul M. Sammon

Now, as this progresses, you'll see Frank Miller kind of making a commentary about the destructiveness and corruption of this particular society. I love those Dayglo graffiti things in the background. I get flashbacks of all that badass that I took in 1973 at all those concerts. All right, now, here we have the Violin Hookers. Anyone who knows anything about Frank Miller's oeuvre

3:54 · jump to transcript →

Paul M. Sammon

And that comes across, I think, in some of the effects. Now, this was, again, an empty office building in downtown Houston. And all of these machines you see in the background, this is supposed to be sort of the militarized showroom for all of the product that Omniconsumers are selling to the military. And there's Ed 209 back there.

24:25 · jump to transcript →

Paul M. Sammon

which I did on VHS-C cassettes. So every time you're seeing these shots, I'm usually just out of the frame with my little camera shooting the setups, shooting the direction, shooting everything else. And I remember doing this particular scene in the video arcade. It was very late, and Irv Kirshner, who at that time was seven years old, fell asleep in his chair. And I've got a shot of him sleeping and snoring.

31:18 · jump to transcript →

It's sort of rotten, rotten blood inside that. Yeah, and he doesn't clean it very properly either. It's very basic. It's not so hygienical. No, it's not the issue here. In the background, you hear the weather report.

7:31 · jump to transcript →

this thing that in this movie horrible things happen, but it's always right in the corner of your eye. Somebody, if they just turned their head in the wrong or the right direction, they would have seen it. Somebody can always see what's happening, but nobody does. Yeah, it's very close. It's always close to others, the violence. And you could see the cars moving in the background too. It's very neat. Lighting here by Hoyte van Hoytema and the lighting crew.

9:25 · jump to transcript →

And we started off with a very complicated shot. This is made in one shot where Eli does the entrance in the film here outside frame. She's being helped up on this playground thing outside the frame. And I think this is maybe take 15 or something. Okay.

11:53 · jump to transcript →

Peter Greenaway

And since my background had been very much about documentary filmmaking, where essentially the address is made from the film directly to an audience, that I should consider probably film narrative conventions, and instead of getting people talking to the microphone, get people to talk to one another. So I went away, and after about six or eight weeks, I came up with a script called The Draftsman's Contract.

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Peter Greenaway

The background to the draftsman's contract, I suppose, is very much related to my experiences as an art student in London in the early 1960s. I was as much interested in painting theory as I was in painting practice. And amongst many, many subjects of discussion in consideration of Western cultural painting was one particular idea, was does a painter

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Peter Greenaway

I eventually reorganized the script to push it back, certainly to 1694. The circumstances of the history of that time, of course, are riddled into the background. But I suppose like all certainly historical novels, although it might be laid over known and authenticated historical periods,

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Barry Sonnenfeld

Although this part of the scene was actually shot in Pasadena... ...but the reverse was shot in New York City. This is a composite of many different buildings along Central Park South. This dust was a dust element shot on a stage... ...and the ship is totally, in these shots... ...computer graphics. We did build a ship, but we only used it as a maquette... ...a model for ILM to scan the ship into their computers. Even this dirt is all electronic elements. The foreground was shot on-stage in L.A... ...and the background was a composite of buildings at Central Park South. This was also shot in Pasadena.

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Barry Sonnenfeld

Obviously, this is all computer graphics element... ...done by Industrial Light & Magic. Mary Vogt is a wonderful, sweet costume designer... ...who worked with me on Big Trouble and Men in Black I. Elfman did a fantastic score for this movie. VICTORIA'S SECRET This is probably the longest shot in production. This took over eight months of work in the computer. We kept trying to make the heads better and the eels wetter... ...and figuring out the speed that both the foreground guys should move... ...and how quickly the deep background stuff... ... should look like flesh and underwear... ...as this creature is creating... ...What will become Lara Flynn Boyle. Graham Place, the co-producer, has done about 20 things with me. He's my best friend. Just last night, I bought him dinner at Chinois on Main... ...With his wife and daughters. Hey, pretty lady. We're back in Pasadena. This was done with a series of shots which were seamlessly connected. For instance, that thing where his legs went up. Now, this is a separate shot. We've made a perfect dissolve. Rick Baker designed Lara's stomach here. She realises there's a problem between the picture she wants to look like... ...and what she turned herself into. It's all about Lara's stomach. I love the way Lara walks across there, just kind of trampy. Again, this was another dissolve. She walked across... And this is about an hour later... ...because we had to take her stomach off and add makeup to her. Robert Gordon was the first writer hired. Then Robert and Barry Fanaro, who worked on several movies with me... ...and went to film school with me... ...did a lot of work on the movie as we progressed. Now we're at New York City... ...on Sixth Avenue in the upper 40s, lower 50s. Patrick Warburton, who is Agent Tee, was also The Tick... ... which I directed the pilot for and produced... ...and also had a role in Big Trouble, a movie I really am quite proud of.

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Barry Sonnenfeld

Now, that flower is really there... ...but there never was a 600-foot worm. So this is all computer graphics... ...and the background plates were shot on Sixth Avenue.

7:28 · jump to transcript →

Now it is unimaginable to me that it could be anybody else. No, that it could have been anyone else. And also, we were talking about at some point maybe having Benji and Luther there also. Yes, that's right. And it was originally going to be much more long-lensy, esoteric, hard-to-see-the-background white. It was going to be less about the environment, a much more dreamy effect. And the more we refined the situation, the more it really became clear that it had to be. And I can't imagine not doing it without...

0:59 · jump to transcript →

It made more of these compositions. Which I love those compositions. And it's very rare that you have a star of the movie come in and say, stop cutting to my close-up. Cut me out. Push me into the background. And see, that's Angela's natural temperature when she's playing a scene like this. And Angela and I were always working together. I was like, hold on to that. You know, just let...

20:29 · jump to transcript →

We would not have been with Ethan. And now you're due to spin. Now you're in my face. I'm up on my back. He's going up and around. It really is a dance between the two of us. I had to always make sure that the sunset was on my left shoulder. That's actually a guy there. And Craig is having to keep the frame for all of that storytelling. It's nothing he's ever done before. He hasn't done narrative storytelling. So keeping that frame open. And we're traveling at 200 miles an hour at times toward the ground.

24:47 · jump to transcript →

The nice payoff is that Lillian Gish is actually the avenger of these women. Right. I have to say that in this shot, too, the backgrounds are my shots. And this was processed in Hollywood, yeah? Right. And they blend in very well. They're called background plates.

2:52 · jump to transcript →

Actually, in some of the outtakes that we found for the film, in this scene, Mitchum at the end of a take just starts giggling and kind of shakes his head like, God, how can I say these lines? But, of course, he does a beautiful job anyway. And this is all your wonderful footage, Terry, in the background. Right, all the background plates. Of the cemetery. Now what's coming up is the...

3:38 · jump to transcript →

Now, this is like a lake or a pond at the Rollinvillee Ranch. And you had footage you had shot. That's the Delta Queen, yeah. Yeah. It was very successfully integrated, so it looks like a river. There's a match shot coming up that combines Bertie's wharf boat with the boat in the background. That's it. There it is. And for the period, it's pretty good, at least briefly. Yeah.

15:47 · jump to transcript →

And that's where the dialogue came from. We shot this restaurant, we built this restaurant out of the lobby of the Herald Examiner building. And it used to be a little longer scene with Edie and Keaton, but we brought it down so I didn't get to see it. It was probably one of the prettiest sets. My folks are in the background. My dad actually and his wife. But you can't see them. You do see them at the end of the movie. They're out of focus.

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And of course, here at my hero, Gabriel Byrne, I do everything I can to get in the frame with Gabriel.

11:18 · jump to transcript →

And there's the side of your face, Chris. There we go. Before you had your... The hand with the ring. The hand with the ring. He was... He didn't blink during this, and I couldn't... You can't see my eye out of the frame there. I'm continuously blinking, because I was trying so hard not to blink when I looked at Gabriel, and my eyes were going like... Ow, Gabriel. Yeah.

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Stephen Prince

and hold the boy in the foreground. They sense he's there, perhaps they can smell him, but they don't yet know for sure. There's not a lot of camera movement in Dreams, and what there is tends to be fairly subtle, which is consistent with the evolution of Kurosawa's style in his later films.

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Stephen Prince

As we'll see, many scenes are shot with a camera in a lockdown position, filming from a distance, using long focus lenses, and watching while events pass by. This is very masterful widescreen composition. This is not the anamorphic 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio that Kurosawa used from the late 50s into the middle 60s.

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Stephen Prince

bringing them back into the frame and giving us another glimpse of them. So he establishes this connection between the peach blossoms and the doll festival in the opening moments. And as the action develops, the dolls themselves will become kami, or divine spirits that live in the peach orchard. The blossoms become the dolls. They are kami, and their energy is associated with an important person from Kurosawa's past. The ceremonial dolls are assembled on a tiered altar covered with scarlet felt.

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Hi, this is Asif Kapadia. I'm the director of Amy. I'm here with two others. I'm James Gay-Rees, the producer of this film. And I'm Chris King, the editor of the film. And we're going to talk our way through the film, give you a bit of a commentary of how the movie was put together and hopefully give you a bit of background. Yeah. Although this is the very beginning of the film, this material was some of the latest that we ever received, wasn't it? And that was mostly down to the efforts that it took you to get in contact with Lauren and Juliette.

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In the background there is Ian Barter, who was Amy's first MD, who helped her learn to play the guitar and play instruments, or worked with her on her first album particularly.

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We knew we were going to have to explain or go into the background because this song was such a powerful song and it's very autobiographical. It's about her childhood and about her parents and so hence the previous sequence which filled you in on the kind of what she felt, the trauma that she felt from her upbringing and the various separations and the way she grew up.

22:34 · jump to transcript →

Nia DaCosta

And I love this shot, just, like, showing the... the... the overgrowth and the destruction of the world on one part of the frame. And then in the distance, you see the smoke from Kelson's fire. And then this awesome handwritten title by Matt Curtis, who does all of our... well, all of my titles, really. He also did the first and 28 Years Later. So I really wanted to, like, show a change between the craziness and the madness of the world of the Jimmies and this sort of bucolic beauty and steadiness of Kelson's world. Which is why we go from all of that madness to these, those two wide shots, this one being the one that slowly shows us the woods. this one being the one that slowly shows us the woods. And we're like, "Wow, how peaceful." And then, of course, it's about to get not so peaceful.

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Nia DaCosta

And I love this scene a lot that's coming up, And I love this scene a lot that's coming up, because we see him in the first movie and he seems like this whimsical sort of kook who's like, "I'm gonna kill your mom." And in this movie, we get more of who he is and what he believes in, which I find really beautiful, and also, like, who he was. Like, in those pictures or the music he listens to. I love this hand-cranked power thing he's jerry-rigged. So, you see, there's, like, poppies... dried poppies in the background, and there are poppies growing outside. So, we kind of were like, "Is that how he's still creating these darts "and being able to sedate the infected when he needs to?"

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Nia DaCosta

We're using the Cinefade on this shot, which is why the background looks like it's melting a bit. Basically keeping the frame the same size, we changed, like, the depth of field essentially while the shot goes on.

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Stan Winston

I'm Stan Winston. I created the creature effects and the alien effects for A/ens. I remember Jim trying to figure out how he could make the beginning of this movie impressive. He said he wanted to use a robotic laser. It was an afterthought and it wasn't in the budget and I remember having the gall to say to him "If you wanna use it, you have to pay for it." And he did. - Is that right? This robotic arm and the laser came out of his pocket. I wanted a seamless blend from the end of the first film into the beginning of the second film. I certainly wanted to honor all the things that were good about the first film. So I went to school on Ridley's style of photography, which was quite different from mine, cos he used a lot of long lenses, much more so than I was used to working with. But the smoke, the backlight, the textures, the way he forces the frame by putting a lot of equipment, machinery and foreground pieces, I really studied all that. I wanted there to be a stylistic continuity. I also wanted to have my own style grafted onto that so that I felt enough of a sense of authorship to make it worth doing.

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Pat McClung

This scene was shot really quickly. It was pretty much all handheld, 48 or 60 frames a second. I think 48. Then Sigourney had to loop all her lines at slow speed, which is always odd. Our first effect in the movie. It's great, because it's what you expected to happen and then it's not what you expect. She was actually under the bed for that sequence. We built an artificial body from her neck down. Someone is under the bed with her. I can't remember who the lucky guy was that created the illusion of the chestburster. Pushing its way through her. It sets up the character. This is her nightmare. You know that she never wants to have to face it in real life again because she's haunted by it in her dreams and her nightmares. This effect is as if you're outdoors. When the camera dollies over, you see it's just a video projection. The idea was that in outer space there would be places you could go to get a feeling you were in a natural environment. So that plate behind her was shot out in the garden at Pinewood Studios. It was a VistaVision plate. Originally, there was supposed to be a birdhouse in the background in that garden, and she would have Jones on her lap and a bird would fly in and Jones would jump up and hit the screen and that's how the audience would find out that she wasn't actually on the earth. This scene was cut from the release version of the film, which became the source of some controversy with Sigourney. She later said in print that she had based her entire character on this scene, and she was devastated when it was removed. At the time she first screened the film, she told me she didn't like the scene, and then we wound up reading interviews where she had a big problem with that. We didn't have a chance to talk about it because of the postproduction schedule. We were working in England, kind of in isolation.

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Pat McClung

Even though I liked the symmetry of the fact that she had had a daughter and lost her - that's Sigourney's mother, so there's an interesting inversion here. She's looking at the face of her mother but playing it as her daughter. As an actor, it allowed her to work the connection. All my movies are love stories. This one is about parental love, protectiveness and a sense of duty, and the ultimate sacrifice that a person would make, given that sense of duty. That was a nice touch. That was Sigourney's idea. This was one of the seminal scenes in the movie and was one of the ones that had to be deleted and omitted from the theatrical version because of length. We didn't have multiplexes, and there were only so many showings a day that you could have of a film, and we had to get it no more than two hours ten minutes in order to get the maximum number of screenings per day. Peter Lamont came up with a simple and austere look for our future sets. I watched this film recently and I was amazed at how little we see of the conventional future world, as opposed to the spacecraft interiors. She's actually on Gateway Station here. She hasn't returned all the way to earth. She never sets foot on earth in the whole series of films, which is interesting. This is as close as she gets until the end of the fourth movie, where she's re-entering the atmosphere. But this is earth for all intents and purposes. This is everyday life circa a couple of hundred years from now. And Peter came up with a very spartan look. It's not overworked at all, which I think was quite clever. We wanted to do it minimalist. We didn't have her walking around corridors. We didn't create a world because we weren't interested. We were interested in the through-line of her story and her character's dilemma and problems, the fact that she's not believed, that she understands there's this great threat. The same applied to the costumes. We didn't wanna suggest a wildly separated future from our present one. This might be one of the first science fiction movies where men still wear coats and ties. The thinking was people will still wear coats and ties. They may not look exactly the same. We turned up the collar on the jackets. It's no big deal but it's a subtle change. We wanted to have a place to go. We wanted the space environment once they get to the colony planet to be exotic and so we didn't wanna overwork earth. We also wanted to understand who these people were, and a Suit Is a suit. These characters are suits and we wanted to reinforce that. If everybody's in Star Wars type costumes, it's harder to relate to them as characters. I was thinking more of a writer than a designer when I was making my picks of what things should look like from amongst the suggestions made by the costume designer. Denny, did they shoot at 25 frames per second for all the video playback stuff? Do you remember? They did. The 24-frame issue was messy. It can be done, but it's such a big procedure. Shooting 25 frames per second on the camera puts the video in sync with the film camera very easily. There's a slight speed differential but it's almost impossible to perceive. In Britain they have a different television system, a 25-frame-per-second system. 625 resolution instead of 525. Later in the film there's some video footage that was used, appearing on video monitors. But the PAL system is better than NTSC, which is our system here in the United States. It almost looked like a slightly too fuzzy version of film, sort of in between. It's not as good as it should be for film, but it wasn't obvious it was video. Jim realized and made the video images noisier or break up more often so it was more obvious. The tag of this scene is gonna be a throw to this big sequence that takes place on the colony which is before the aliens attack. That's cut out of the release version, so coming up Is the biggest single change from the release version of the film. It's an entire reel. I'll never forget Gale Hurd, who was my wife and producer at the time, trying to shorten the film by 20 minutes. I just could not see how it was possible to do a cut here, a cut there, a few seconds, a bit of a scene, the tag of a scene maybe. She said "I've been thinking about this for days." I said "Go ahead." She said "Reel three." Which starts here. "You can take out reel three." I immediately rejected that as completely absurd. Then I thought about it. Reel three ends with Newt's scream when her father has the facehugger on his face. It works flawlessly. It's a brilliant cut and I have to credit Gale with that. I had poured a lot of energy into the design of these scenes and the alien derelict ship. The problem for me was that I couldn't imagine this film without the cognitive tether to the first film of the alien derelict, but it turns out that it works perfectly. A little dialogue bridge and it works fine. I like this tractor a lot, this tractor with this articulated leg design. This is one of my favorite effects. You see the big tractor driving by and in the background you see these people struggling to put a tarp over that tractor. That was done in perspective. There were full-size people back there, and a miniature in the foreground with distance between. It put everything in camera all at one time without any opticals or anything beyond that. The trick was that the actors had to act at double their normal speed of acting, because the camera was running at 48 frames per second. We had a Ritter fan on them to really kick those tarps around in excess of what it would be in real time, but because we were overcranking, that motion would then look normal. The multi-wheeled vehicle at the beginning is a fifth-scale miniature, radio-controlled, that Jim designed. On the airplane coming over from Los Angeles to London he just doodled it. Ron Cobb, I believe, fleshed it out.

10:08 · jump to transcript →

finish off her background and get into how this movie came about, she kind of grew disillusioned with her private law practice that she was in. And after she lost that state Senate election, she was really looking for a change. And she was friends with Jane Alexander, the actress, because she was also very involved in feminist politics at the time. And so the two of them talked about starting a production company together and actually went into the initial steps of it.

5:01 · jump to transcript →

And she kind of acknowledged at the time that this was a strange debut film for her as a producer, given her feminist background and leanings to do this guy movie. But A, she thought that maybe if it was a big commercial hit, it would open doors that she could walk through later to make all the feminist movies she wanted. And what she said in the press at the time, you know, because the LA Times and places like that were noting how odd it was that this woman who was known for her associations with Gloria Steinem and Ruth Bader Ginsburg was making this kind of movie.

10:39 · jump to transcript →

a time to talk about Louis Teague in general. Yeah, I mean, I'll give a little bit of background on him. I mean, I've always been a huge Louis Teague fan. I think he's, you know, kind of a great unsung action director and just action director in general. He actually was in the military, which is one of the reasons that this film appealed to him. He dropped out of high school to enlist in the army when he was 17 and spent a few years stationed in Germany.

30:49 · jump to transcript →

But the background, you just saw that building with the Moskowitz painting. So I think nowadays it's so great. And we come back and talk a little bit later about that because so interesting then you can do that even with moving images now so easy. Not necessarily easy, but you can do it. So the illusion is really perfect. You don't have the static shots anymore for the matte paintings. You can move the camera.

8:54 · jump to transcript →

Then you see it's a crane shot, a moving camera, but still the background, the building is painted. Here, you see? The whole, yeah, LAX. But the whole back there, the thing is a painting, the building. It was just nothing there, just dark. So they sent you where, to the end of the runway? It was a special, yeah, a special area of a very more quiet, deserted area of the airport. And we shot it there. Where did the jet come from?

11:43 · jump to transcript →

These planes, the F-15s, these are partly computer-generated planes and partly models. If they come very close to the camera, it will be a model. If it's not so close, generally, basically, the first one here, foreground, model. The others, computer-generated. So these elements are then together. In the shot, we just saw our Air Force One as a model, big model, foreground F-15 model, and the other planes are

25:13 · jump to transcript →

You need to be very careful. You need to be very aware. And something that I learned from being at a party where someone had a gun and the gun accidentally went off, I won't go into it. Everyone freezes. Everything stops. It's not like there's a panic and people yell gun and run out. In fact, when all those people are sitting in the background earlier in the scene, that came from a... I was at a grocery store that was being robbed and a guy came in and just...

14:53 · jump to transcript →

could very possibly be the person who killed that very attractive woman lying in the foreground. Right. Well, what I love about that scene, there used to be a bit in the script where she said, where as they're talking here with Robin, she says, you know, Megan. And they're like, what? The guys are like, what? And she's like, Megan is the daughter of one of the guys you killed. Right. And instead, it's just we don't hear, we don't see the gunfight. We hear it, like directorially, what you did. We hear the gunfight. We come out, we sort of see the aftermath of it, which I think was cool. Oh, that was that way on the pitch.

18:24 · jump to transcript →

In the script, they sort of spoke a lot more of their thoughts than you needed to show in the movie. Well, again, there was a series of scenes. You cut back to this diner. I love this lady. She doesn't care less about getting them coffee. And by the way, to any first-time director, whenever you're directing a scene with extras in the background, after the first rehearsal, or during the first rehearsal, don't even watch the actors. Watch the extras.

50:18 · jump to transcript →

Is that right? Warren was so terrific in this scene. Oh, yeah. Warren had a wonderful, dry humour. With the other actor, Jack Murdock, I wanted somebody who sounded like... ...he could piss Jack Daniel's. Like he had had so much... ...go through his system with that gravelly, gravelly voice. Now, at the time that we did this picture... ...computer technology really did not exist. So that almost all the day footage... ...that we see here in the helicopter, was shot up in the sky. And our guys are actually up in the sky... ...as we fly along with them. And we're looking not at a computerised background here... ...but shooting from the little control tower that we had built on top of... ...what's known as the Piper Tech facility in Downtown Los Angeles. And it's where the city of Los Angeles keeps all of its vehicles... ...and including its helicopter that's on-- Helicopters, that is on the top pad.

2:42 · jump to transcript →

So a couple of things here of interest: This is a set that we built. Philip Harrison, the English designer... ...who did Outland with Peter Hyams... ...and several movies with me afterwards, built this set. And we wanted to see the background of Los Angeles... ...so we shot photographic plates at night... ...and we could project them during the scene. ...

14:26 · jump to transcript →

Warren Oates said something so interesting to me. As we were doing this scene, we were having trouble... ...with the background plates. And sometimes they would run out, or the film would break... ...so you'd just see a white screen behind him. So that wasn't any good. We have to do it again. So I apologised to him. At one point, I said: "I'm sorry, Warren, that we're having to go through this again." And he said, "Listen, son, I'll do this stuff all day long. I love doing this stuff." And that's the kind of professional actor he was, you know. Just brought all of his energy and all of his enthusiasm. All of these guys did. You know, what real pros are like... ...and how they can keep their enthusiasm take after take... ...and keep it fresh, so it doesn't sound robotic.

15:01 · jump to transcript →

pretty disappointing and so you know going in i think a lot of people knew going in that ripley was going to die yeah i'm trying to remember now i'm trying to see the guy in the background there with these uh with the ox he's the guy from batman beginning he's yeah yeah he's a he's a yeah the the guy yeah batman throws off the top no on top of the building isn't it yeah of course he just goes he goes who are you yeah

24:58 · jump to transcript →

knackered and dilapidated and broken and nothing works so there's no technology there's no you know they don't use technology in any kind of clever way to to try and stay alive or to battle the alien so it isn't sci-fi isn't horror it's essentially a character study of a woman in breakdown almost with this yeah with you know with a monster running about in the background yeah yeah yeah

39:05 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, it's a different type of emotional connection, I think, with that. And it's also hard to root for prisoners who are rapists. Exactly, especially when they're not really given any kind of redemption. There's no redeeming arc, really, for anyone other than David Webb, who... Yeah, yeah, who basically is a mouthy guy in the background who then becomes more centre stage.

57:51 · jump to transcript →

And this shot here done by ILM, it's a combination of live action and matte painting. The whole background, the moon, the sky, a lot of those statues are visual effects. I love this shot. This will be fun. This is Allan Cameron, my production designer at his finest. Alan also did The Jungle Book with me. This sequence was a problematic sequence editorially.

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Right as the camera would roll, he'd walk away, and we kept telling him, no, no, stay until you hear background action, background action. And after about take 12, I said, don't move until the stone hits you in the head. See, that's what we're talking about, throwing things at the extras. It doesn't seem like a good idea to me. We actually never threw anything at them. This shot worked out really well, so we wanted to get very close to his tongue before that guy slid in.

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somewhere in the south of England. A pond, actually. Frencham Ponds, they called this. And with a little help from ILM, we put the boat and the Americans in the background. The Americans aren't big enough, I think, at the end of the day. You don't really get to see them back there. Also, I had to do a little...

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onto the scene when we realized that the clouds were going to be with us for a few hours. Gollum. It's kind of weird to watch this because when we shot these plates, the background footage, it was about two years before we ever really saw Gollum.

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grasslands per se but this place I thought was a great stand in for Rohan because it has these interesting rock formations. You know those moving shots where you had both with Aragorn and Legolas, how did you do that? Well that was just a dolly that was trekking along the front of them and even though you're not getting closer to them or you're not getting further away it actually just makes the background roll around the back of them and that was just my obsession with keeping the camera moving as I say I just didn't want to do a static shot.

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We were keeping our fingers crossed about three years ago that one day there'd be a golem put there that would be looking all right. The Dead Marshes was primarily a set that we built in the parking lot of an old factory right next to a railway station. And a lot of times that we'd be shooting the Dead Marshes and there'd be trains rolling through the background. You'd actually see them in the film, the trains going right past the back of shot. And then later on, we painted it all out and put an extension to the marshes in here.

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called action instead of background, and the thing just reared up and actually did the stunt in the wrong place, and everybody was okay, and everybody ran out there, but we ended up using it in the film. And we ate horse meat for, like, what, weeks at craft services. It was really bad. Remember, Patrick, this scene right here, I was actually stressing out quite a bit because we weren't prepared to shoot this wolf yet. Exactly. The wolf was in the radio at the time, and...

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um tony in the medieval village right yeah that was the original beginning right and the problem is there there's you know screened it and with uh there's you know a lot of people not knowing who singe was if singe was a lichen and just the a little bit more of the background of of underworld one needed to be stated first the human descendant of corvinus yes all of this was created way after the fact because we shot it i mean you shot it

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budget looks better, but somehow you're probably going to end up spending more money on location, like you're saying. Yeah, this next shot coming up here, we built the floor. The background of this is actually from Underworld 1, and we just reused the shot. And so these guys coming in are on green screen just to save a bit of cash. There's a lot of great shots like that. Yeah, and the shot, actually, those guys that came in, originally was a shot with Kate coming in through in the first Underworld. That's right. And we removed her and hit her, and we hit her in the group of people. Yeah, we did. She's actually there, but you can't see it.

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Edward Berger

And now we see what he sees, but only on a focus. We're actually on him. You know, in the background, we see this guy with a head wound and his face buried in the mud, which obviously means it's a very strong image for immediately, it means death beside him. And here, the sound, we stayed in Paul Bäumer's sort of inner perspective, his breathing, for a very long time and only came out of it quite late.

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Edward Berger

Guys we hadn't seen that much before. Franz, the guy who runs away, has never been in a movie before, is straight from drama school. I think he was still in drama school. Felix is in the background there, our main actor, is from a theater in Vienna. And my producer's wife, Sabrina, she sent me a picture before. This was actually the first picture I saw.

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Edward Berger

And here again, a little bit of laughter. And again, we focus on the foreground. We just focus on Paul. Everything is told through his perspective. Everything else is kind of out of focus in the background. We're back to Daniel Brühl driving through the countryside on the way to the peace negotiations.

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power theme, the motif that runs through the movie. The other thing he did was he showed the audience this sequence we're looking at without sound and then he talked about how music changes your perception of time. If you watch this without sound it seems to go by incredibly slowly but the pace becomes more interesting with the music in the background.

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as inside the union is being dissolved. In the foreground, we've got the extraordinary Agnes Moorehead looking a little like Whistler's mother here, and Harry Shannon as the father in the distance, and George Coulouris here in the middle.

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an astonishing moment. She is one of the great actors of all time, in my view. And she's only got a brief role in this film, but she makes a completely indelible impression. Notice how her head towers over the two men in the background. Also, now we're going to go outside, the camera panning. And it's amazing to do that within the same shot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. And I've always been struck by the fact that Charles Foster Kane looks like a little brat.

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And the fact that he becomes the major threat in the cold clothes is just such a great way to bring it all in. I would say ironic threat. That's not a bad blob right there. That's a miniature. And that's a mat, right? It's a composite of something. Yeah, it's a composite that worked. So this is a miniature street with him? That's a foreground miniature. Did you have any challenges lighting the blob? You were saying before the fact that it's pink.

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with her performance, seeing, oh, shit, that's my friend under that thing. This was pre-Jurassic Park, wasn't it? Oh, yeah. With the shaking water glass, and so this is the telltale, oh, my God, with the giant vibrations. I heard a rumor that Spielberg had a copy of the blob on set when he was coming up with the glass scene for Jurassic Park, just saying. He did. Now, wait, one of my favorite afterthought moments is in this shot coming up, you see in the background the grenades go off.

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I love that. It's coming up here. There it is. I love it. It's like a wet fart in the background. It's just like, oh, yeah, remember those grenades that almost went off? Yeah, fuck those guys. It's still in my stomach. This is looking old school. This is great. That's very Ray Harryhausen. But it works. Very Ray Harryhausen. It's a twofer because you get the slap and then the peel back where it's like flat man comes up. Gum on the shoe. And what about you, Mark? What do you think was your biggest challenge on this one?

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