Composition & framing

Alexander Payne

If you need a reaction shot, you're kind of getting it in the corner of the frame with Tracy reacting.

41:36 · jump to transcript →

Alexander Payne

And we have to learn that our actions, all of them, can carry serious consequences. Here I love the glimpse of a tub of, I can't believe it's not butter in the background. I agree. And I also think that certain young and naive people...

55:55 · jump to transcript →

Alexander Payne

I mean, there are barely any people of color at all. And typically George Washington Carver is the name of a high school in a black part of town, but not here. And in fact, early in the film when there's a pep rally and Jim McAllister is playing like a cowboy villain, in the background you see a guy dressed up as a peanut.

59:06 · jump to transcript →

Kat Ellinger

But Dupont's cultural background is from a very working class background. It's a background I also really feel kinship to and identification with because it's not dissimilar to my own experience. Dupont, as Gen X came out of the punk scene, she grew up in a working class family. She was raped at 17 and went off to Paris, left home, went off to Paris, became a sex worker for a couple of years.

7:50 · jump to transcript →

Kat Ellinger

was really immersed in this scene, this kind of underbelly. And I think if you've experienced that world, you know, my own background is I was in and out of local authority care. And the poem was actually institutionalized as a teen as well by her parents. But I was in and out of local authority care. By the age of 15, I was on the streets. I was living in squat communities. I was sleeping rough.

8:18 · jump to transcript →

Kat Ellinger

perhaps from a good background, middle-class background, who is assaulted, raped. It's seen as such a terrible thing, such an awful tragedy. And yet this kind of thing happens in these kinds of communities all the time. And there's almost a sense of the commonplace of normality to it, which is why Manu's reaction...

10:16 · jump to transcript →

It's pretty much up to that, and all Beijing photos, drawings. And the usual lousy background action. Sorry. Some things just will always bug me. Those two guys, like, fighting back there. What is that? What were you thinking? This is good stuff, though. I like this.

22:59 · jump to transcript →

That's my idea of a detective story. Like that. Well, it's also she's a great detective because she's empathetic. Because she actually can project her own feelings onto Zhang Ziyi's situation. Cinematic power, photogenic. Both women has that. They carry different things. That actually, I'm sorry to say, has nothing to do with acting. I came from a theatrical background. I used to believe in acting totally. But, no.

26:19 · jump to transcript →

This is also another first day of shooting. First day of shooting. We got the dailies back and everybody in the editing room was like, are they on some stage? Is that green screen, Dan? I mean, it looks so fake. Glazier in the background.

1:09:56 · jump to transcript →

Somewhere around here there's one of our deliberate mistakes coming up. I've always imagined that there's a car moving somewhere in the background. It's not here. Where is it? It's along the embankment. Alex is convinced there's a car somewhere there. It was while you were talking. We think he's just trying to undermine the film.

9:37 · jump to transcript →

This is a very busy part of London, Tottenham Court Road and Centrepoint, famous empty building, or partially empty now. When we originally, we used, we didn't use music at first in this sequence and that used to, that moment with the alarm going off used to give you a heart attack if you didn't have some kind of background music. So we used this track from Godspeed You Black Emperor, this French-Canadian anarchist who gave us permission to use their music, this driving, apocalyptic music.

11:54 · jump to transcript →

I think that's Frosty the Snowman you can hear in the background there on the music. That's the most expensive bit of music in the whole film. It's cost some phenomenal amount of money to pay for that. Really bizarre the way these things trip you up. Later on you suddenly find out something's hugely expensive. And suddenly there's just this big injection of warmth into the film as soon as Brendan Gleeson appears. Big smiling guy.

35:06 · jump to transcript →

Ted Tally

To me, the relationship between these two characters was always the heart of this movie. It was a huge emotional part of the book. It had not been really dramatized to this extent in Manhunter, which had other concerns like the police procedural main plot. It was really Will Graham's Story. I thought, "Well, the book is "almost as much Dolarhyde's story as it is Will Graham's story." I was fascinated by this kind of Beauty and the Beast Iove story and the idea that he feels something very close to a strange love for this woman because she is not judging him, because she can't see the ugliness inside him, that he feels everyone can see. This is kind of the beginning of the relationship between Reba and... This shot coming up is my favorite shot with the people with the umbrellas, kind of silhouette in the background. This is a huge step for this character to take. He's scared she's... She has no reason to be scared, but he's terrified. This is actually the first thing -/ shot with Ralph and Emily. - Really? Yeah.

52:18 · jump to transcript →

Ted Tally

Clever work on his note, by the way. This mirror was kind of really disturbing, looking at it. It had this weird distortion. Put me next to him! That was tricky. It's similar to that shot in their first scene together. Where the character in the background is out of focus. Go on, then. I love that one. "Seduce me with your wares." It's not in the book, but it's the kind of thing that you figure out... He never says anything in the most simple and obvious way. There's always some kind of game going on where he's amusing himself with his word choice, too. Bit measly, don't you think? Tony did not change a word of this. I love this. He's an actor who does every line as written.

1:22:41 · jump to transcript →

Ted Tally

He's breathing heavy. It's probably the first time he's ever kissed a woman, or a living woman. Now, would you show me where the bathroom is? Then we went back and re-shot this. Why? For this insert. And that's digital blood in the water, believe it or not. It's done by the computer. It's just a wonderful little moment, because she can't see the teeth in the jar, or the shattered mirror. She doesn't realize the increasing danger she is in. Again, you're telling a story with visuals and not with dialogue, that really means very much. I have to do a little work. If I'm keeping you from work... - No. ...I'll go. - I want you to be here. I do. It's just a tape I need to watch. It won't take long. This is similar to my scene in Family Man, where he's watching the videotape. Another family movie, right! - Another family movie. I did the same thing with Danny, where he transitioned the recorded music on the tape into score. So now, this music in the background... - Right. Which is Duke Ellington. - Duke Ellington transitioning into the score. Right. No, it's great.

1:29:23 · 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 →

Yuri's journey, Nicolas Cage's character. He also starts life in Ukraine and eventually is responsible for the death of child soldiers. Hopefully this sequence sets the tone for the film. I wanted the film to be subversive. It's the reason this peacenik anthem is playing in the background. It's the same with Yuri's narration in the film. The narration was...

3:06 · jump to transcript →

Coming up, this shot of the ship leaving harbor. You can see Cape Town's famous Table Mountain in the background. Again, I was going to remove it digitally, but that budget thing again. One of the greatest heists of the 20th century.

51:41 · jump to transcript →

John Cameron Mitchell

with the short bus going by as we zoomed. It was actually when school was out when we started shooting that. How? Maybe they had a little summer trip. All buses in New York City are short buses, actually. Which means... Except for the one that's just about to pass in the background. Okay, so you see those two Chinese characters behind me? Oh, yeah. They are...

9:59 · jump to transcript →

John Cameron Mitchell

you know, trying to teach and learn wherever she can. And so she watches pornos, right? And in the pornos that I watch for, you know, background knowledge for the character. Of course. The straight pornos, people are always slapping their wahoos, you know? Their what? Their what? They're either spitting on their snatches or slapping their...

49:28 · jump to transcript →

John Cameron Mitchell

This was a scene that we also went way off script to have fun with and just loosen it up. And remember right after it, I ate pussy for the first time on that same couch. You did. I'm glad you did it after. I'm so anti-woman. I'm telling you, John, we're going to get ourselves some nice girls out of this thing. In the background is Dirty Martini, a Miss Exotic World 2000-something.

56:50 · jump to transcript →

our nickname for the Predalien. And he's establishing his dominance over the little newly shedding warriors. Bitch-smacked the warrior around and then gets to have his way with the homeless lady. And this is one of the homage shots, the original Predator. It's very, you know, the whole layout and composition of the shot was very similar to the opening of the original film. And again, obviously, this is a visual effects. You want to talk about hydraulics a second, guys?

19:22 · jump to transcript →

You know, they have the same evil sort of sense of humor as us. We got along with them really well. And they also come from a similar background from us. I mean, they both own the company, like me and Greg own Hydraulics. And they're also both artists, which me and Greg also still are. So it's like everything we do, we're very much in tune with each other. And, you know, it's just in different parts of the same field, basically. So this is the extended scene inside of the Predator crash ship.

20:48 · jump to transcript →

And why did you pick the name Hawkins? Well, it's a little throwback to Predator 1. Okay. You know, if you actually read closely, there's actually a couple of the guys from Predator on some of these tombstones here. On the different tombstones. Somehow they all managed to come back to Colorado to be buried. Yeah, I think Jesse Ventura's character was in there as well, but it was in the background. I don't think I ever really see. But we thought the Hawkins thing was kind of just a cool little, you know, a little throw-in for people that noticed it to get a little chuckle out of it. This is also our anti-smoking PSA. Yeah.

57:50 · jump to transcript →

I'm Hit-Girl. And that's Big Daddy. Hopefully you don't notice the visual effects in this film, because this is, um, you know, we didn't shoot it in New York. I mean, these are all sound stages, and we put New York in in the background and stuff, and, you know, DNA did the work, and I think they did a fantastic job. We had hardly any money. I mean, I think we ended up, I think we budgeted for 100 visual effects shots. We ended up doing 820 and, uh, around 820, and, um,

42:21 · jump to transcript →

I think it's very important, pacing-wise, just to have a little bit of a calm before the storm, and a huge storm is now coming over the hill. It's pretty obvious what's going on here, why the framing is. And we cut an earlier scene where you see he used to go to the graveyard to read comics at his mother's grave, but Mark Millar was in the shot as well. Trying to do a Stan Lee.

1:09:59 · jump to transcript →

back office, which we ran out of money and we couldn't afford to build another set. So we just nicked all the guns from the set we had built and changed the color of the background and put them all up again. So low-budget filmmaking at its best. If you look at the radio, I mean, that really is a crappy little storeroom in Elstree.

1:20:24 · jump to transcript →

periodocs that we needed, but also just the complications of shooting at night and capturing live sound. We thought it'd be better to commit to doing some of these big set pieces in a studio environment where we can control it. And so what we do is we do sky replacements where in shots like these, the foreground separates it off the studio ceiling and we put night skies in.

23:52 · jump to transcript →

I was born inside a jail. I was born a scum like you. I am from the gutter too. In the musical construction, Valjean is singing something over the top. So I never really heard those lyrics. And when I was reading the lyrics for the first time, I saw the huge power of this idea that Javert comes from exactly the same background as Valjean. And in fact, in the novel, we learn that his father was a convict and he grew up in a prison. And early on in life, Javert felt he had two choices in life.

44:57 · jump to transcript →

And here, another addition in the film is the role of the grandfather that's actually explaining something I thought was very interesting, that Marius is from a wealthy background and has given his wealthy heritage up in order to pursue his political cause and lives in this, you know, shithole of a slum by choice.

1:09:42 · jump to transcript →

Wes Anderson

Exactly. The thing I love working with digital effects and things is compositing things. It's the ability we now have to take something and replace it, or reposition it, or change text, or modify things in the frame that are absolutely indistinguishable from if we had filmed it that way. All the time we rewrite text and it disappears. But that's a different kind of effects work, I guess. You know, it's often the signage. Probably, I would say, 80% of the shots in the movie have some kind of visual effect. And that all happened in postproduction.

6:42 · jump to transcript →

Roman Coppola

Well, yeah, I wouldn't even-- You know, what could I say? Bob is a very... He wants-- You start. - [Anderson] I have one thing. First of all, over all these years we've done different kinds of movies together, but more and more we've kind of geared ourselves towards being more free and being a little more New Wave with the way we make the movies. Well, this particularly takes advantage of... one of Bob's especially great strengths, which is he's a very, very good camera operator. One of the best. And very dynamic, and he can do things that other people just-- that I've seen other people incapable of doing. And he's-- - [Becker] Camera movements? Keeping the frame you want to see through movements?

59:46 · jump to transcript →

Peter Becker

Can we talk a little bit about music for a minute? You know, we move fairly seamlessly, especially in this film. And here I'm hearing in the background...

1:19:44 · jump to transcript →

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

28:04 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, I suppose it's sometimes now when we look at visions of the future, what we see are the absences of things like the internet and mobile phones that we absolutely now have as central to our lives, but mysteriously will have disappeared by the time of the Star Trek series. Something we haven't talked about here, as we see the drones on the screen, is that there's currently a furore about actors playing something which is outside their own actual ethnic, whatever, background. Yeah.

35:24 · jump to transcript →

the thing that runs throughout his films. And it's odd that we were talking earlier about how the science fiction aspect of this film, the background, the world building, is very poor. But on a micro level, the technology is very good. It's very credible. And it's almost like that was what he was interested in. I mean, the writers of this script, who are a very...

41:23 · jump to transcript →

And so what we did is we looked through all the shots and after I had said cut, there would be maybe a few feet of just empty corridor and we took those. And you'll see later in the sequence when you cut to an empty corridor, those are just the little ends of shots that happened to be after the actor walked out of the frame, there was a little piece. So advice to directors, very often the most important stuff that you get

1:02:33 · jump to transcript →

He's locked up. What the hell are you doing here? What happened to the men who were guarding my father, Captain? That actor along who has the lines in the background there is Sonny Grasso, who is one of the real fellows from the French Connection that that story is written about. Phil, take him in. The kid's clean, Captain. He's a war hero. God damn it, I said take him in. What's the Turk paying you to set up my father, Captain?

1:08:43 · jump to transcript →

We of course didn't go to Las Vegas for the sequences in Las Vegas. These are second unit shots of signs of the period and we actually shot the scene, the interior in the hotel in New York. This is one of those really cheap second unit shots we did. I was very embarrassed by this because in the background you see there's like hippie looking guys that are not correct for period. Now we're in New York where we shot the Las Vegas sequence.

2:19:19 · jump to transcript →

And I had this really, really bad flu. I could barely stand when we were shooting this. And I was just in the background saying, oh, my God, I wish this day would end. Dual aspect. So with an actor like Stephen Berkoff, who presumably could command a reasonable salary at that point, how many days were you able to book him for across the whole film?

16:11 · jump to transcript →

really yeah we only have 30 days to shoot this whole film and uh there's a lot going on frankly uh quite a few locations it must be quite difficult to shoot directly into such a bright light and yet preserve detail around the edge of the frame that's quite a quite an ambitious shot really and comes off perfectly so

52:29 · jump to transcript →

questions about how on earth you can make a character who's a pimp with such a questionable background work as a heroic character, he would have found a way and said, yes, I guess you're right, let's see if we can pull him up by his bootstraps a bit and sort that problem out. I think he would probably have gotten in there with a bit more time, solved those problems with and for you. I believe so, yeah. But that's...

1:14:36 · jump to transcript →

Fred Dekker

Beautiful backing there, by the way. That's fake. Yeah, that looks as real as anything. Okay, he jumps. Now, we were actually going to do a stunt and put him on a rappel line with a camera and follow him all the way down. Oh. And the night before, I could see Dick just had little beads of sweat on his brow like, okay, this will be great. Yeah, Fred, I'm looking forward to it. And then we just decided, you know what, it's really funnier if we just see him in the background splat to the ground.

46:57 · jump to transcript →

Fred Dekker

A gag, which was a gag that ended up being repeated in The Shadow about a year later. Oh, is that true? Yeah, there's a very similar gag where someone is thrown out a window and then they cut two characters walking out and then you see them in the background falling. Was that Russell Mulcahy? Yeah. Yeah, he stole it. Bastard. Now, we talked about tone earlier and the first Robocop movie, it's a very specific tone and I don't think...

47:30 · jump to transcript →

Fred Dekker

just do these really big wide shots and just do this really... This part of the movie feels really expensive. Well, that's very heartening. This was basically just a street in Atlanta. Yeah, and it feels... It's got a nice lived-in quality to it. Now, that tower in the background, that's actually a hotel, but it resembles a tower in downtown Detroit, does it not?

1:22:40 · jump to transcript →

Peter Hyams

And this is all Los Angeles. Air One, make a final sweep. This is Los Angeles and actually the buildings in the background were added in because it was a wide open street.

15:47 · jump to transcript →

Peter Hyams

rooms lead into other things. I'm fixated on the depth of a frame. The width of the frame is not as important to me as the depth of the frame, and I like having a fairly dark foreground and having an archway or a doorway that leads into a lighter area. It's not the most unique thing in the world. It's been done by people far greater than I, except I like when the eye is drawn to the depth of the frame.

33:28 · jump to transcript →

Peter Hyams

and you didn't want to see him put in this position. You'd be amazed what you agreed to when you're on fire. Don't do it, Bobby. You're better than this. You're better than him. You know, considering how you've lived your life when this is all over... I love long lenses. I guess you could see that because this film was shot with long lenses. It's gonna happen. Why shouldn't you have the best seats? Look what it does, though, when you take a close-up and you push in on somebody and you... Everything in the background is soft and the eyes are pin sharp.

1:36:45 · jump to transcript →

Simon West

Now, the company wouldn't actually lend us one of their cars for the film, so I had to go to a private owner. But unfortunately, the insurance was so steep and expensive to have that car on the set that I could only afford it for one day. So we had to make a polystyrene double for the car. And so all the wide shots in the action sequence in the background, the McLaren is actually just a very crude styrofoam version of the sports car. After a fashion...

31:13 · jump to transcript →

Simon West

operator David Emmerichs flying so the shot looking between the guys is all I had of the rocks falling towards us and the frame later all you see is the camera hitting the ground and then clouds and sky so I think David was very upset that he didn't manage to get the great shot from the front and I had one take at it but that's why you have three or four cameras because I had the side angles and they work perfectly as you see so that's what ended up in the film.

42:46 · jump to transcript →

Simon West

that I would love to go back and shoot there again. Now, when Lara falls through the hole in the ground and she's tumbling through the earth, I shot this in one of the oldest techniques possible. It's not blue screen or green screen. It's not CGI. It's literally her standing on the ground with a rolling background

44:51 · jump to transcript →

Len Wiseman

Yeah, that could be a real problem. Now that I know you better, as well, how am I ever going to look at you? Here's the scene that was cut... This is something I think... - What's she got on? A flesh-coloured bra? - Right now. When you're watching at home, you're not gonna see.... We're watching something that doesn't have the letterbox. I don't understand. What do you mean? She has pasties. - Yeah. And so they-- You can actually see them in this cut. But once everybody watches at home, like now, they're not gonna see that. What does that mean? You digitally removed pasties? No, no. It means that the letterbox.... The black bars on the top and bottom of the frame... Oh, I see. Right, okay. - It's within that frame... ...So you're not going to see it. It's cut out. But we did. We saw them. - We did. You knew that was going in the trailer as soon you saw my shiny bottom. I told you that day. - Yeah, I was so pleased. I think I even apologised upfront to say... ...that this will be in the trailer. - Why would you apologise? It's an ass shot. - Yeah. It also shows the mansion. It's also a dynamic shot. But if she was wearing a coat, it wouldn't be in there. Okay. Well, all right. If you wanna get all cynical about it.

1:06:42 · jump to transcript →

Len Wiseman

Oh, and you weren't here for this whole... Were you very glad, because the other babe was there? Yeah. That helped take some of the pressure off... ...but the-- Well, actually, this whole costume, we had a "wardrobe flaw"... Her whole boob escaping. - ...aS Janet Jackson would say. Poor you. Poor baby. - I rushed in as soon as I heard. Yeah, you're really good like that. How have you done that? That's CG, right? That's CG, which I don't think you've even seen yet. We shot that practically, and it just looked horrendous. It looked like three blind mice kind of popping up. And this was all a reshoot that we did. - Oh, really? Yeah, this was all back in L.A. We had a good time. It was just blood and guts. That's me throwing the paint across the window. Oh, is that you? - Yeah. Can you do a bit, like, when my coat flaps around, you're flapping it? That's the prop guy. - Very hands on. Yeah. What were you thinking right here? - "Is it nearly lunchtime? Should I buff my bottom? Am I gonna worry about my camel toe?" Remember how many people were on camel-toe watch because of that suit? No, it became "CT." I would just yell out, "CT," and, "Okay!" There were four people who made it their mission. This is new. This is a new shot here that's just showing Speedman... ...dreaming about the Olsen twins. And so we had some flashes that were supposed to happen right there. This is in the original. Coming up, there's a section where Viktor takes out some of the implants... ...and you see him unhooking himself from that stuff... ... that we had cut out of the original. This isn't it, right? - Yeah, this is. These shots, though.... These, I did all those in post. None of those shots... We didn't take any of the lights down. lt was something we did as an afterthought... ...and just darkened it to make it look like all the lights went down. It actually worked okay. I was worried I wouldn't catch it. I didn't have my glasses on. I couldn't find the takes to put on the outtake reel, but... There weren't that many, because I'd been practising like crazy. Oh, it didn't show. - Oh, really? Look at that. Yeah, look at that. Look at that now. - I was so proud of that. lf someone throws something at me, I tend to duck and wince. The amount of windowpanes we had to replace in the background.

1:14:38 · jump to transcript →

Len Wiseman

I think you arranged that hair yourself, didn't you? Oh, I always arrange the hair. We gotta figure something out for the sequel, some kind of moulded shell... ...some helmet that looks perfect, that doesn't move. I might do that Olsen-twins movie myself. Well, it sucks because there's so many elements in a shot... ...and the fact that the hair makes you do the shot over is really frustrating. But if the hair falls in your actor's face... ... you just can't use it. And it was just an ongoing battle. Did you ever let the art department do this... ...or were you busy all over this thing as well? No, I let them do it. For these shots, I would arrange it... ...and just pick a bunch of stuff off and put it together. They went crazy around the office. Actually, the first attempt to do that bulletin board... ...which I said should look like some really creepy homicide board, was... They went and took a lot of pictures of people in the production office. You actually see people at drafting tables. And other people are kind of looking and smiling into the camera. And I said, "It's supposed to be surveillance photos." It's a little bit too chummy. - Yeah, a little bit too aware. You've got a guy with an illustration of a crypt set in the background.

1:27:19 · jump to transcript →

We are all used to a lot of, especially in American movies, we're used to a lot of words. And it was really exciting to strip them down in rehearsal, in the making, and even in the editing of the movie, just to let the composition, performance, and story architecture sort of shine through. Yeah, but we had to be very, very specific too in the creation of the scenes and the layout and what kind of information emotionally we're sort of doling out. You know, are we doling out the feeling of family?

10:31 · jump to transcript →

You know, we wanted to shoot this in front of Grand Central. It was one of the trickiest things. The city had never shut this viaduct down before, and we needed it for six days. So they let us do it over three consecutive weekends, six days. So we would actually shoot for two days, go away for a week, shoot for two days. We really lucked out again with weather. You know, there was one moment where you see the mannequin move, and we had actually had a little thing running where we cast people to play our mannequins. And in the background of some shots, you can see they're real people playing the mannequins and not

46:17 · jump to transcript →

This is fine. There's a gas tank. That's an actual practical explosion and things being pulled with wires. And that's not a real person. Yeah. I like that bit there. Yeah. And that's surprisingly, like, stunts usually suck the first time you do them, and that was the first time. That was actually kind of nice, that whole explosion and Will in the foreground. You just said splosion. Explosion? Explosion. Boy, he's fast. Yes.

1:23:31 · jump to transcript →

including sharing proprietary software, passing backgrounds and foregrounds back and forth, depending on who was responsible for what. So there you have a Rhythm and Hues background and a digital domain under mummy, and here we're back to a Rhythm and Hues terracotta mummy. Dad, what are you doing?

1:06:31 · jump to transcript →

We built this huge head of jet in the deserts of Tian Mo, a very inaccessible place, way above Beijing. It's a site where the original wall actually still ruins of it. You can still see the northern wall and that wall that you see in the background we built.

1:24:47 · jump to transcript →

Oh, that was Mark Petrie dancing by there, my co-producer, right-hand man. Thought I'd give him a plug for all the hard work. That's Derek Spears, the little guy looking down the girl's dress. There to the right are Brendan and Maria. Maria in a beautiful silver lame dress that Sonya designed. Vic Armstrong is dancing with his wife in the background. And if you go back and you see this bald little guy dancing with the tall, beautiful pregnant goddess,

1:40:34 · jump to transcript →

Brian Stonehill

Note that the signature shot, that is, where the director places his own name, occurs at the unique moment of perfect framing by the base of the Eiffel Tower. The film on many levels will seek such a balance of the unsteady handheld look of cinéma vérité, the disorderliness of life itself, and yet the perfection of form, the balance that comes only from art. It's one of the light touches of mastery that gives The 400 Blows its charm. As if it were a novel and he its author, Truffaut dedicates his film to his mentor, André Bazin,

2:35 · jump to transcript →

Brian Stonehill

Without denying the imagination, the artistry, and the great filmmaking craft that have gone into the making of The 400 Blows, such biographical background helps us to understand the ways in which the film's story is so deeply felt and so sincere.

1:22:29 · jump to transcript →

At war's end, he remained in Europe and became a theatrical and vaudeville booker. Director Guy Hamilton recalls Harry Saltzman's reaction to filming on location at Circus Circus. I think Harry was very happy with the Circus Circus, using it as background, because before the war, he'd worked for an agent in France who, amongst other things, handled circuses when they were out on the road.

47:06 · jump to transcript →

And I think we had to build it on a platform to accommodate him being shoved overboard. And I think for the background, I put a lot of crinkly material on the backings to give it the sea effect. We didn't use plates or anything like that. And it's a very funny scene. Very, very funny scene. Shashlik. Tidbits.

1:55:22 · jump to transcript →

It's a pretty neat sequence now that I think of it. We resurrected all that machinery to make the fountain work. It was sort of, I believe, a theater that wasn't being used, but it had once been used like this. I've done this in movies since I was a kid, but I remember in the early days when I was doing some nudie film, I had sort of some burlesque dance going on. I had these two actors sitting at the table in the background to see this show going on,

1:35:27 · jump to transcript →

fascinated with the use of a camera that ultimately didn't move and actors would walk in and out of the frame and sometimes you'd be looking at nothing or sometimes it would kind of a visual style that I had evolved with Bill Butler a photographer that did the conversation but I I was feeling more

1:47:54 · jump to transcript →

Remember that scene by the riverbank with bridges in the foreground, Clint in the distant background, both perfectly in focus. Characters in foreground and background all sharp and lucid. We are here in Montana in big sky country and Chimino's just going for it, getting that whole overarching bowl of the sky. Also a somewhat suggestive crotch shot if you really want to get into the

33:08 · jump to transcript →

but it's not the usual trajectory, particularly into narrative filmmaking. That background will be reflected in a very impactful, graphically bold visual style, and this will also be a point on which some critics will harp over the years. Singling out Cimino is a style over substance filmmaker.

37:32 · jump to transcript →