Composition & framing

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 →

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.

7:35 · jump to transcript →

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?"

14:55 · jump to transcript →

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.

18:17 · jump to transcript →

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.

27:51 · jump to transcript →

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.

42:41 · jump to transcript →

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.

51:35 · jump to transcript →

Again, this is another kind of sequence that would usually be, like, a big montage of a whole lot of quick shots, so it was difficult to, like, not be boring, have a lot of drama, show the storm, have the gimbal not look like a gimbal and really sell that water in the background so that it really feels real, see everybody struggling, but really it's just a shot that's slowly dolling in from wide into Alex's face.

38:17 · jump to transcript →

You can kind of see it, Iceland. This, unfortunately, though, is not Iceland. This is Ireland again. Those rock formations that were way on screen left were some rock formations photographed in Iceland and comped in. And then this background, of course, is Iceland that we comped in. And the sand was made black. And this is basically because of COVID.

39:50 · jump to transcript →

Our core enslaved people were all really great, great, great, great sports and good. I mean, you know, the extras in this film are good. I am quite lucky. So many things can be, you know, ruined by bad background performers, but we lucked out.

1:25:05 · jump to transcript →

be aware where weapons are. So, you know, great, you can composite a shot, but can you walk and chew bubblegum as well? And Dave is one of those rare, I think, camera operators that can do both. Very, very rare. He's kind of brilliant because in and around all of that, he will just also have this framing instinct at play.

30:20 · jump to transcript →

So there's noise, there's danger, there's movement, there's complex choreography, but he's framing at the same time. And other things besides as well. And he's tough in a good way. He sort of like runs to it. You know, he's a man. He took some hard falls. Yeah, he ate shit a bit one time. He went fucking flying a few times, yeah, absolutely.

30:47 · jump to transcript →

Because it's... I don't know if that is the right word. Because artsy sort of implies like interpretation or like... Well, yeah, but we use like that lens that you like. You know, you get into the... I guess it gives us the freedom to kind of go into this, you know, what you're about to see, which is like things go quiet. It's like slow-mo, dreamy world. I guess maybe artsy is the wrong word, but it gives us... By framing it of like they're concussed, it allows you...

54:02 · jump to transcript →

being so important to us in the sense that it's going to lead to the Nana Connie reveal that she has memory issues. Like the whole idea with the ginkgo berry was that she was going to need it. That he was collecting them for her to ingest. But then we just didn't pay that off ever, and it's sort of a nice mystery to the action. I think there's so much of that because of the way that we made this movie. That's like... Part of what feels doc about it, in a way I'm proud of, is that it feels like the end of the frame isn't the end of the world.

4:34 · 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 →

Thank you. Bob, one of the things you said that I want to bring up... I think one of the earliest phone calls, maybe even the first phone call, you said, "You could end the film "right with him riding the bus, defeated, deflated, "and that could be a great short film about a day where nothing went right." Yeah. And that's the attitude that stayed with me throughout. The idea that this is a godsend. This moment of these guys... I think the original plan was to have Ave Maria playing in the background for this moment 'cause it was literally a godsend. It was amazing. That person yelling "bus," the character's Teddy Kuznetsov, played by... Aleksandr Pal. - Aleksandr Pal. And that man right there is Daniel Bernhardt. Daniel Bernhardt is the man who trained me to fight for two years. That guy right there. He's one of the... He's the greatest. He's maybe the best stunt actor working for the last 10 years. Man, he's great. And you might know him from the TV show Barry. And you might know him from the big fight in Atomic Blonde. And you would know him from John Wick movies and Hobbs & Shaw and every other great action movie of the last 20 years, 'cause he's the best, and he's a great actor too. Bringing a lot of character to this whole sequence. But from the moment things got real with the possibility of me doing an action movie, I started to train, 'cause I was a comedy writer for 25 years, and I did a normal workout of any suburban dad.

25:14 · jump to transcript →

So, Adam Hurtig on the right, he was the casting director's assistant in Winnipeg, and he was helping me out with all the auditions, and as he was playing all these parts, I thought it would be great to get Adam in the movie. Yeah. He's very good. And who's the other detective? It's Kristen Harris. Yes. - Kristen Harris. Both fantastic. And right this way, we've got the beautiful dining room. The walls used to be a lot darker, but it's been recently renovated to have a brighter look. Here's a little addendum. Which is nice to know that they're back together. And they need a new house. We knew that. Seem to be getting along pretty well. And this was... Remember, this was the first shooting day. It's the first scene we ever filmed in this movie. Jeez Louise. Really? - Yep. Now you're reminding me. That's hard to do. Yeah. It felt pretty strange. - I remember... - Yeah, it just feels strange, right? I was talking to Kelly and David, they were like, "If you're doing more than seven takes, then something's wrong." I was like, "Okay, that makes sense. Fine." I'm used to a lot more back home, but here I was like, "Okay, these are rules of the game." And I remember, at the very end, the final, the basement line, we did that 15, 16 times. But Connie really nailed the... Oh, boy. Yeah. - The step into the frame and just... The very sort of pop aspect of it. Well, I guess he's finding out that they're probably still after him, or they know... He's on somebody's radar.

1:24:52 · jump to transcript →

Tim Burton

He's not a big action star, but he's got a crazy look in his eye. You can understand why this guy would dress up like a bat. So that made a psychological sense. But in Beetlejuice, it was very clear that sort of manic energy and, you know, in Michael's background in comedy and all that sort of thing, which helped in sort of improv and making things up, was very exciting to work with. Mike and I talked about On and Off over the years, and I don't think he had ever any burning desire to do another one, only if it felt right.

25:59 · jump to transcript →

Did you see the mic come into the frame? No, I didn't. See the mic at the top of the... That was hilarious. Anyways, I hope they find that. I'm going to tell Damien about that. You didn't see it? No. I came like a foot into frame. It was like down to here. Anyways.

1:21:30 · jump to transcript →