Costume & wardrobe

It was cold and misty wept, and honestly, the Camps of Hells didn't look like South Africa. It looked like the Camps of Hells. And then about sort of 10 o'clock, we got word up that there'd been a revolt, and they refused to put on the costumes. They said they were too flimsy. So we had to abandon the shoot that day and reschedule it for the next day. And we couldn't get any black actors. We had to get white actors.

52:02 · jump to transcript →

And one of the reasons why they're so good is because of the costumes. They're so meticulously researched and done by Jim Acheson, who's won three Oscars for costumes. But just look at Eric's shirt there. It's so correctly tailored for the period. And Graham's costume and makeup, it makes him into a period character. It's meticulous costuming, brilliant stuff. Any other problems I can reassure you about?

54:38 · jump to transcript →

And it's really hard to deal with criticism. It's, you know, one's being very defensive, protective, critical of everything. And to be able to then step back years later and look at it and just see how good the work is here, it just knocks me out. I think it's really nicely done. Again, the costumes with the helmet all hacked to pieces. It's sort of a lot of thought. Jim pays such attention to detail, and he's full of ideas. It just makes a little difference, you know.

56:00 · jump to transcript →

Eleanor Bergstein

This is a man who has a post office named after him, who is a king in his world, because I had based him in some way on these kings I had met, like Paul Grossinger and Murray Posner from Brickman's. And Jack listened to me very carefully. And you had a postage stamp, really, that would say Kellerman's or Grossinger's, as it were. And he said, I wouldn't wear this tie. And he pulled off the bow tie he was wearing and raced to wardrobe. And he came back.

4:16 · jump to transcript →

Eleanor Bergstein

Costume designer took my memories from the Catskills, and I had described seeing when I was a little girl a woman in a pink backless dress. So she made this and called this Eleanor's dress. And every time I look at this, I think of it as Eleanor's dress. You see how brilliantly they're dancing and how they absolutely look like the kings of their domain. And then you will see how...

10:40 · jump to transcript →

Eleanor Bergstein

Cynthia having understood that her character needed it, and David coming up with this wonderful scene, and Hilary making this charming costume which showed process. I guess you've probably figured by now that the thing that interests me the most, and that was one of the places also that Emile and I joined so sweetly, is process interests me much more than performance. What you need to do to get there is so fascinating, and that's why I loved He Makes Me Feel Like Dancing, Emile's...

45:44 · jump to transcript →

Gary Goddard

building the props, building the costumes, while we were shooting these things. This is pretty funny. Gwildor's the first one to discover food. He's got that little grappler hook that he used before, and he smells something. An interesting thing is we had no second unit on this. I had to shoot every frame of the film. I requested a second unit, but Canon was very tight on money.

23:13 · jump to transcript →

Gary Goddard

This would be a good time to talk about the costume design. Julie Weiss was involved in manufacturing the costumes based upon designs that Bill Stout did. They worked collaboratively. The tribute to the costumes here is that, you know, everyone just accepts it. This is kind of interesting.

27:05 · jump to transcript →

Gary Goddard

All of these guys are in costumes. All of these guys are... You cannot believe what goes through in these scenes because things fall off and things fall apart. And you have to go back and do it again and again until you get it right.

35:52 · jump to transcript →

For one, you get all PMS'd out, there's no room in your purse for no hairbrush. Robin put a lot of thought into his wardrobe for this. I recall him being specific on the jackets and stuff. He did? Yeah. Completely works. The hair, everything. This is our new foreign exchange student, Anna-Maria Mazarelli. Anna Maria is from Milan, Italy. She's about to brush up on her English skills before the fall semester begins. Well, I guess...

17:33 · jump to transcript →

People have asked Carl about these shirts that Shoop wore in this movie and they were the old style Hawaiian shirts and the wardrobe mistress went out and found them from collectors everywhere in big sizes. But I remember thinking that Shoop would have worn them.

18:57 · jump to transcript →

Wardrobe ministers found all these T-shirts and stuff. I remember this is, I don't know, Diablo Valley College or something, and amazing the amount of mail I would get from people who went there. No kidding. Yeah. Remember she chased a guy down the Venice boardwalk who had a Wheaties T-shirt on one day to try to buy it from him to use in the movie. But she was terrific. Got a radio, blanket, beach chair, dark glasses, dog. Why would I want to go back to you guys?

1:16:34 · jump to transcript →

Paul Davis

you know, amongst all these, you know, local British country folk. And, you know, that's the brilliance of the costume designer, Deborah Nadolman, because her approach was to almost make them look as if they were men on the moon. And it works for the terrain because, you know, when these guys are on the moors in pitch darkness, they do look like men on the moon.

11:11 · jump to transcript →

Paul Davis

And there's the tree stump that's covering the phone box. But back to the costumes, you know, it was, you couldn't find like North Face Parkers in London, Levi jeans or anything like that, Timberland boots. So Deborah had to get all of the costumes. She had to buy multiples of their costumes in the United States and then bring them back.

11:42 · jump to transcript →

Paul Davis

It took you out of the moment, but they did shoot the reverse point of view shot of Jack on the floor looking up at the wolf as it was kind of tearing him apart, but they didn't use it for some reason because they had the entire wolf costume there that night. And I remember being told that they did shoot a sequence where the two boys look straight into camera and they say that it's in front of us. We were supposed to cut to their reverse angle and you just saw this huge outline.

16:25 · jump to transcript →

Peter Greenaway

by certainly taking our knowledge of, for example, the costumes of the period, but extending them and exaggerating them. So a lot of the characters have, the male characters, really excessive wigs, which completely cover and disguise their features. The circumstances of the actual wig manufacture, for example, is not entirely fictional.

9:17 · jump to transcript →

Peter Greenaway

always somehow gets it wrong, so when all the members of the aristocracy are dressed in white, he always comes in black. And then halfway through the film, after the essential pivotal plot change, the reverse of costume and colour coding changes completely, so the draftsman turns up in white when everybody else is in black. Like a classic outsider, he always gets it wrong.

11:49 · jump to transcript →

Peter Greenaway

But there's a deliberate use of the actual costumes to indicate showmanship, to indicate egotism. The costumes are very, very multi-layered. Everybody's wearing a huge amount of petticoats and overcoats and undercoats and waistcoats so that they all strut about the house and gardens of this estate like peacocks.

12:13 · jump to transcript →

Now this is the boiler room at Lincoln Heights Jail. Lincoln Heights. Lincoln Heights. I've actually shot there quite a bit recently, but not in this space. This space is condemned now. Right. And I think a wardrobe note, the nightgown had to have a certain see-through quality, as I remember, when we all... Yeah, I tried on many nightgowns before we found the right one. But this was the boiler room of the jail.

2:19 · jump to transcript →

garden tool in my garage. Wes's whole garage is filled with bizarre paraphernalia. Don't try to take it away either. I kept the wardrobe from this film for 10 years because they were going to throw it away. And we used a lot of it in the new Nightmare, Nightmare 7. I think I'm...

9:36 · jump to transcript →

But, Heather, I don't think you fit in tonight. Well, I think the wardrobe kept mixing up Johnny's jeans and my jeans, so some days when my jeans look particularly tight, I think I'm wearing Johnny's leg right here. The day we did jean splitting, I think. I think it was one size fits all. I think the wardrobe budget was probably about 10 cents. Everything was from Kmart. Nike.

9:57 · jump to transcript →

Pat McClung

This is Pat McClung. I was the model-shop supervisor on the film. They're wearing modified costumes from Outland, or the basic suit is from Outland and it's been redesigned and they put some stencils on it. This is microglitter and fuller's earth blown on there. I remember in this scene the batteries in the flashlights kept going out. You would think this would be an easy scene to do, but, as with everything in this movie, it was harder than it looked. There are no easy scenes with Jim. There's that nice dissolve, the contour of the earth matching her face. When we shot this, a matte painting combined with miniature and perspective, there are some perspective gags going on there. We used a clip of Sigourney's face in the viewfinder to line up the curvature of the earth, so we had a nice match. I wrote the piece obviously with Sigourney in mind for the character. I was told she was on board and I should just toddle off and write the film when in fact no deal had been made with her whatsoever. So here was a script that was written that everybody wanted to make, in which she was in every scene, and they hadn't made a deal with her yet. That's why she got her first big payday of her acting career. She got a million bucks, which was a big deal. She might have been the first actress to get a million dollars for a movie in movie history. It was all because it was mishandled by the producers. She was the main character and they hadn't made the deal. She was worth every penny of it and more. When people saw the film, they realized that. I Knew what a phenomenal actress she was. I'd never met her. I had her picture up while I was writing the script. I went off the character that had been created in the first film, took her much further. Of course, this is Paul Reiser. I certainly had no idea what a great comic actor he would prove to be, and certainly that's how people think of him, not as a dramatic actor. I just read him in a lineup of actors in the normal casting methodology, and I thought he was really interesting, that he could play this really sincere but slightly smarmy guy who could then turn evil. This is a dream sequence, but you don't know that yet. I remember from the premiere screening of the film that the incomplete chestburster scene here really got people cranked up and on edge, set the tone for the whole movie, that you were here to be messed with, which is a good way to start off, I think. The way you get a cat to hiss like that is you put another cat close to it. I had no idea. I didn't know what you did to make a cat do that. But that's standard procedure. Bring a cat it doesn't know close to it and it'll do that.

4:32 · jump to transcript →

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 →

Bill Paxton

I encouraged the actors to customize their own costumes and armor, to give the impression they had been out a lot, that they were seasoned, that they had been away from command authority on their own a lot and were good enough at their jobs that they were allowed these kind of latitudes. This is a continuation of the motif from the first film, where they're wearing Hawaiian shirts and all kinds of strange stuff, all of which was a new idea in science fiction. People always wore uniforms on spaceships. That's how it worked from Star Trek on. Every science fiction film ever made, there was the general-issue uniform. Alen broke that mold and it just seemed so right to people. They recognized the archetype instantly. "Oh, these guys are truck drivers." "They dress however they want. There's nobody to tell them not to." And so the idea here was extrapolated to a military unit that's worked at the extreme fringes of human civilization. The power loader was not designed by anybody in drawings per se. I had done some preliminary drawings, but it evolved basically from trying to figure out how to make it work. We built full-size mock-ups of the arms and legs in foam core. There's a guy inside that thing, a big, strong English stunt man moving it. It's supported by cables. It's completely an on-set gag. The English visual effects guys thought we were crazy the way we wanted to do it. I said "It's the gag where the dad lets the daughter walk on his feet, his three-year-old." So standing behind Sigourney right now is this big 270-pound body-building English stunt man. He's raising the arms himself and he has in his hands a control that allows him to raise the forearm of the power loader. And then when they walk, they have to walk together. The weight of the machine is held by a crane which is off-camera, or some kind of overhead track rig - we had two versions of it. If we didn't need the machine to turn, we mounted it on a pylon, a boom-arm thing, and if we needed it to pivot we hung it on wires.

35:31 · jump to transcript →

One little anecdote here is that the cameraman that was up on the platform shooting this, the viewfinder of his camera was broken, the pellicle mirror had shattered, and he couldn't see anything through the camera and he just aimed and shot. He didn't want to slow down the production by telling anyone that he couldn't see anything, and held his breath all the way till dailies, and the shot worked out. Oh, that's right. 'Cause there weren't very many 65-millimeter cameras available, and all this was shot in 65 millimeter. Yeah. When we opened these cameras, they still had the sand of Lawrence of Arabia in them. Well, Flynn's arcade was in Culver City. Yeah, it's across the street from the old MGM lot, which is now the Columbia lot, but now renamed as Sony Pictures. Now, there was actually a loft at the location. But then the re-shoot... The close-ups were the re-shoots on a stage. Yeah. That's the... The actual... The practical location. Space Paranoids. Space Paranoids. I take my son to the arcade in Westwood. We go once in a while. I have to bring my earplugs. But I've never seen an old couple like that in a video game arcade. That's right. We knew that Bally was going to release a video game simultaneous to the release of the picture, and therefore we wanted to have the design of the game in the arcade and the game in the real world that people would actually play be very similar. So, we go to Flynn's, and we see Flynn playing the electronic game and fighting off a Recognizer. That is the console which we created for the film that represented the game that Bally was going to create. Although, obviously, at that time, there was no way that a computer game could have real-time, interactive, full raster graphic imagery. So, it was a prediction of the future of the way games were going to evolve, and that is what we're now seeing in CD-ROM games and the games that are in home computers and arcades today. Jeff did get very good at video games. We had some on the set. Yeah, he was remarkable, and one day you suggested that we videotape him while he was actually doing it. And look at the neon in the back. I'd forgotten about that. OA, right. I don't think any of the actors actually went so far as to get themselves a computer and spend hours backstage... Programming. -... learning how to program and... That didn't happen, but they got as far as games. Battle Tank. We used to play a lot of Battle Tank. Battlezone. Yeah. Battlezone. There you go. Now, as! recall, you... We re-shot this sequence. Yeah, and I don't even remember... The lighting... To match, I think, the lighting of the game arcade. Well, I think, actually... - We changed dialogue. Did we? - Changed dialogue. And here's a little secret. We told the studio that we needed to redo it to match the lighting. Well, see, /... Still using the same excuse. That's right, you're still... You're still well-programmed... - /'// never tell. The lighting didn't match. The casting process was interesting. Originally, I'd pictured Jeff's character being younger and the Tron character being older. We were affected by some things that were definitely outside of our control. Tron predates Splash, and people forget that, really, Disney was having a hell of a time getting popular actors to work for the studio. And it had been a tough time for Disney. And it didn't help that we were saying, "Yeah, we want you to wear these funny costumes." And Jeff was always enthusiastic about being part of the picture. The Tron character... Bruce was... I don't think Bruce was quite as adventuresome at first, although he got into it after a while. I would have liked to have seen Bruce possibly be a little, I think... I had pictured him as sort of a younger Kirk Douglas. I think he would have been better if he had been a little older like he is now. I like the way he looks now. And I think Jeff... I was surprised at how physical Jeff was. I thought that... I pictured Flynn being a little more geekish or a pencil neck, and Jeff is very physically strong. So, in that sense, the two became somewhat similar, although their personalities and what they represent are completely different. One little anecdote is that... I can't point back at the character of Tron and say, "There were all these actors." Or, "It was between this one and that one." But I do remember one surprising actor who really wanted to play this part, and it was Peter O'Toole. - Yes. Oh, he wanted to play the part of Dillinger. No, it was Tron. Tron, that's right. I think we wanted him for Dillinger and he said, "No." And I had this amazing scene with him in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel where... In his hotel room where he said, "I can do this!" And he started leaping from one piece of furniture to the other and screaming that, "I want Tron on my tombstone right next to Lawrence of Arabia!" And who knows, maybe he would have been great, maybe I really missed it right there. All these interiors... Shooting them, these low-light interiors, in 65 millimeter is very difficult, because the depth of field, the focus plane is incredibly short, and it was a real struggle. And some of the close-ups, we actually had to run light stands up the backs of the actors through their jackets as braces, so that they would stay in the exact same spot, so that we could keep their eyes and faces in focus. You know, if your file was in there... - Hey, wait a minute. If we can get in there, I can forge us a Group 6 access. Well, shall we dance? And ENCOM was shot in downtown Los Angeles. I forget the building. Of, the Transam building? Oh, yeah, the Transamerica building. At the top of that was the helicopter pad. This sequence between these two heads of the company really expresses the philosophical problems that the other characters are going through. Again, the office is designed to mirror the other world in terms of its graphic look. Wasn't there something about the cold, corporate look as well, Steven? There's your door. - There's the door. The scene where they sneak into ENCOM and open the door that is 10 feet thick or 12 feet thick, that's a real door, that's not a prop movie door. That's an actual radiation door at Lawrence Livermore. ENCOM isn't the business you started in your garage anymore. In one scene, you see a number of things flip up into four corners. Images. That was a traditional optical that had to be done, and opticals in those days would take two, three, four, five weeks at least, and it was a big task. It was like making its own little movie. You know, you can remove men like Alan and me from the system, but we helped create it, and our spirit remains in every program we designed... That line is one of the key lines in the whole script, about the human element that the programmers put into the system. And it's this discussion between those two characters that really elevates the picture well beyond a video game movie. Now, the reverse was shot, actually, on the Iot, so there's a reverse... Getting into the Disney vaults? Yeah. Lawrence Livermore was quite proud of the fact that although this door weighed tens of tons, or whatever it was, it was so well hinged that you could open it by just pushing it. One person could. In fact, you found... I believe you saw that door as we were taking a tour of the facility and you Said, "This would be a great place for them to sneak in." So, you kind of re-wrote the scene to accommodate that huge door. And the irony is, as he punches the buttons, that the giant door opens, and no strength is exerted, but it's opened automatically. I kind of inherited the job of not only setting up the giant rear projector and the mirror and all that stuff, but I also had the job of putting together what would end up going onto the desk. That's an actual wireframe on there, for the carrier, as you See... Right. - ...in the film. I began searching around for footage to go onto the desk, and it was getting late, and we were about to shoot this thing in a couple of days, and I just ran out of stuff, so I put the flowchart from the film on there, and probably things out of my address book and anything I could... I was down to pulling things out of Life magazine and re-photographing those. I was just running out of stuff to put on the desk. What's interesting about this protagonist, Jeff Bridges' character, is that he's actually, um... He's a creative, technical type, and he's fighting for his creations, he's fighting for his work. I think that's pretty unique. He is somewhat of a paranoid character. But with some reason. With some... Yeah. - Some good reason. Dillinger will never know we've been in here. Good luck, hot shot.

16:15 · jump to transcript →

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

28:30 · jump to transcript →

Sark's carrier is an interesting object. It was designed also by Syd Mead and rendered by Information International. But because MAGI-Synthavision"s images had a line-drawing quality around the edges of them, which was an intentional design that we created, their software allowed them to do that very easily. So that there was a similar quality to the objects that were created by Information International, all those vector lines, or those little line-drawing edges that are put around the edges of Sark's carrier, for example, were all done by actually going back and beveling off the corners and having to create an actual rastographic type of beveled edge to give it a line-drawing kind of quality. That was the difference in the software between the two companies. When people get mad in the electronic world, they get red. When Sark is being tortured by the MCP, there are mattes that are being cell flopped underneath his costume design to create those moray patterns which move through his body. Then there are exposure changes happening to him and color changes happening to him, again, to create that kind of feeling. The environment here that the Solar Sailer is flying through was... The Sea of Simulation was all created... All these scenes were created by Triple-l. When you see the down views of Flynn and Tron looking down at the landscape below, those are fractal mountains. And that was the first time that Triple-/ had ever tried to do anything like that. And it's one of the few places where more complex CGI was used. There's some texture mapping going on. There are little hidden things, these hills and towers were all, in many cases, a first-time attempt at creating something with CGI that nobody had ever really done before. When you fly over the Sea of Simulation there, there is... At one point, the Solar Sailer flies over a lake that actually has the shape of Mickey Mouse's head. There's giant Mickey. - Giant Mickey. This whole sequence on the Solar Sailer that we did little things to keep it alive, there's a lot of dialogue that was going along here and a lot of standing around on the bridge talking. So, I came up with this idea of these zingers that go wailing by in the background. These electronic comets that blast by just to add the potential for sound to give you a sense that they're moving more, and just to create something interesting in the background, which we've tried to do a Iot. I mean, it was a simplified reality where we were here. It certainly isn't as complex as the real world we're in every day. And to keep it from being just monotonous and boring, you know, we were always trying to come up with little things in the background, things that could help keep it alive. It's interesting how bicycle helmets have evolved. I wish we had those helmets when we were doing the picture. And it's funny, the bicycle world is nothing but helmets and spandex now. Right. - We didn't know it, but we were pioneering Rollerblade and bicycle technology.

1:10:32 · jump to transcript →

Jim Piddock

the human face. And this fellow in the interesting wardrobe is on his way, leaving us with the sad man, leaving him to his thoughts. Some more chortling as he goes from the first fellow, and rather a lot of chairs piled up there. Tables and chairs, which I suppose will do for set dressing in a pinch, but then why wouldn't there be tables and chairs? So very commonly used as furnishings, aren't they? And now let's pay very close attention, because here, here is a...

9:16 · jump to transcript →

Jim Piddock

might have been. And yet, this actor, so strong. No complaints from the filmmakers. You get the actor you can afford and get on with it. Marvellous actor. At any rate, the wardrobe would have hung off a stair like a gunny sack. And so, no looking back. And here we are again, a new day, and again the actor playing the unpleasant fellow is squatting just out of camera range with his Dixie cup. A familiar drill at this point. The rim of the cup possibly somewhat worn at this point, or...

36:12 · jump to transcript →

Jim Piddock

Thank you, brave actors, for showing us ourselves. No blame attaches to you if that story which lent meaning to your pantomime has been butchered and violated and mocked. You donned your wardrobe and wielded your guns, your cigarette lighters, your money wads and walruses and all the rest of Thalia's arms. Soldiers in a cause the surrender to which ennobles us all. And in return you ask but for your modest pay and modest place in the credit crawls.

1:31:35 · jump to transcript →

into the frat house. Bobby still has the original pen holder that he swiped from the costume department. Hi, girls. Bobby has got the full nerd pack, which if you look in the nerd manual, he's got a slide rule. He's got the pen holder. He's got the belt installed, calculator, everything a nerd would need.

18:00 · jump to transcript →

Ted McGinley suggested the do you know karate thing. You know karate? No. Good. Okay, I programmed him with all the rental units in the area. To achieve optimum efficiency, I've assigned each of you a different... We had a great costume designer on this movie, a guy named Eddie Marks, who's done a lot of great work. And a lot of the stuff that you're looking at is his ideas. And now you're going to see a montage of

24:48 · jump to transcript →

Not gay and not happy. Because they asked him if he would be an extra, and he agreed to it. And then by the time he got out of wardrobe and makeup, they'd made him Larry's. And the crew would not leave him alone. Thanks. Where are all those good-looking sorority girls you're supposed to have dates with? You know women. This was something we came up with right on the set, this song. We did? Yep.

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And it's got that Dashiell Hammett feel about it. So the reason for the look, the costumes, you know, it's got that 40s, 50s flavour. And that's what we were going for. So all this nonsense about MTV, frankly, is quite irritating. And I hope people take that on board.

13:41 · jump to transcript →

I quite honestly don't know how he achieved it. He did the same on Rawhead, you know, a very underfunded art department, and creating miracles as far as I could see. Even Jeff, Jeff Sharp, the costume designer, I mean, most of these clothes were specially made in a 40s, 50s noir style, you know, based on the old...

1:01:40 · jump to transcript →

detective stories of that period, the noir detective stories. So the art department, incredible how they managed to achieve what they achieved for the money that we had. Did you work closely with them in terms of devising things like, you know, for instance, Nicole wearing this kind of sort of semi-bridal veil sort of appearance? Or was that something that the costume department said, how about if we try this? And you were just there to say...

1:02:08 · jump to transcript →

They say, oh, from the back. But it's still, let's say, showing as little as possible and slowly making the audience aware of what the costume will look like. Of course, remember that in the scenes when he is, the subjective scenes that are before the scene.

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The first thing we shot with RoboCop was that scene in the police station. Yeah, that's right, grabbing the keys. It took 11 hours to get Peter Weller into the costume. And then, of course, because of the rubber glove, the keys just bounced right out.

33:52 · jump to transcript →

It was a big tragedy up in San Francisco. So this was kind of based on that idea. Of course, this has a much more happy ending than the real outcome did. Getting Robo in and out of the car and up the stairs, Paul... Took some time. Well, actually, the truth is, every time he's getting out of the car, he has no pants on. Because he could never get out of the car in the costume. And you could never shoot the costume from behind because the butt wiggled. Right.

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The worst misogynistic character you could have come up with, but he still made it lovable. That's what's so interesting. And plus the Van Halen guitar glasses was a nice touch, I must say, by the costume department. And then, of course, Del Close, the formidable Del Close, who was, I didn't know this until recently, I forgot he was in Beware the Blob. How are you? He was. Yeah. I still don't know it. Yeah.

13:27 · jump to transcript →

The brake light that's now above the truck. Oh, okay. In the 80s, that was like a new thing. So these guys are all carrying utility belts, which are actually batteries. They're carrying their own batteries for the movies. And they're lighting their own faces, because it's a giant plastic plexi screen. Do you guys know that these costumes are still being used today at Universal? Yeah. I was there last year shooting a show, and when you walk through that costume department in Universal, it's just like walking through time. There's a whole department...

52:39 · jump to transcript →

with these costumes. Do they acknowledge the blob or no? I asked the lady, I'm like, do you know these are from the blob? She's like, actually, they've been from this movie, that movie, this movie. They've been in so many movies. This is like the first time. Joseph Porro did this. He should be getting residuals for about 100 movies. This was, again, a team effort. Because one of the big problems was, done wrong, they're constantly would foam up, smoke up there, mist up the inside. So Joe had to work out the science with us and mark the lighting. You can see that.

53:09 · jump to transcript →

He would write me these little notes that was like, you know, aim, you know, costumes went very. Wow. And then when we were going to rehearse, and I had never rehearsed before, so I didn't know what you were supposed to do. And I thought, okay, let's just all go to high school and we'll have a pretend class. Oh, wow. I didn't call it rehearsing, I called it pretending.

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Okay, these were your buddies, right? The Martin brothers? Yeah, Doug and Steve Martin. And they're just two six-foot-tall, red-headed, identical twins. And they got a big laugh just on sight. It was a little lesson. I love his outfit. The pirate outfits, our costume designer, Marilyn.

48:44 · jump to transcript →

Kevin Thompson. Kevin Thompson. Now, we should mention, we should mention, some of these guys, they were all hired to be inside these costumes, but they were not hired to have their voices on the film. And Kevin Thompson was one of the actors who was so great at creating this character, Alligator, that he did his own dubbing, his own shooting, I'm sorry, his own sound. Yeah. For Alligator. Yeah, Kevin...

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And that's what I'm talking about. Like they were very, they were very well organized. Phil was at the head of that. Everybody, all of the, all CG, I mean, I'm sorry, all animatronics, all art, all makeup, all wardrobe, they all kicked ass. They were all very good at their jobs. They all worked very hard on a very small budget. Everybody did their very, very level best on this project.

1:34:25 · jump to transcript →

So this was an extremely complicated scene to shoot. Here, we're on the stage doing the actors... ...against rear projection. And now these images here, there was-- It had to be done in a very low-tech way. All the actors were put in white suits and had white makeup on. So we shot them in this room, doing all of this action... ...in their normal wardrobe. And once we had finished shooting the scene, we sent them off... ...where they put on the white suits and the white makeup. They came back and we reshot it... ...on a black stage that duplicated the same office. And now you had these weird images... ...that were run through all kinds of video process... ...to make them look like the way they are... ...reflecting, supposedly, the heat of the bodies. This is in kind of a pre-digital era, too, when we're doing this. We had television effects, but we really didn't have digital technology for film. If I remember right, this was done at Warner Bros... ...in one of their little video studios that the man built... ...who kind of invented 24-frame video for movies.

1:02:38 · jump to transcript →

Tim Lucas

Costume designer Delphine White, who I remember removing her pullover sweater to reveal a t-shirt that said, Courage, my love. Video effects team Michael Lennick and Lee Wilson. Gaffer Jock Brandes, who held the coveted eye-popping syringe. Wardrobe master Arthur Rowsell. Set dresser Angelo Stea. Prop master Peter Lauterman. And me. I was the stiff's upper lip. Four Paniflex cameras were trained on the effect.

1:20:41 · jump to transcript →

Del, who's doing your costuming? Is this coming off of the set or are you coming to work? No, no, this was actually the wardrobe. Theda DeRamus. Theda did a great job. Good costumes. I wish I had that jacket. Good look. Yeah. The wife beaters and the hairnet. It would be great. And that jacket would still fit me now. Yeah. And there's me and Zandy and Zandy's sister Abby. That's right. Co-writer of Sid and Nancy. Co-writer of Sid and Nancy. The Untouchables. The Untouchables. Who were a mod.

41:50 · jump to transcript →

was fired for sexual harassment, and his job was filled by two women. So you know that there was a no-nonsense cloud hanging over that building, at least for a couple of days, and that's when we submitted our video. This is a scene where you can see just how small our wardrobe budget was, because I think most of us were wearing our own clothes at this point. I had dredged out this strange down coat that I'd bought to wear in New York a couple years before. We really were, you know, operating on a shoestring. We had this wonderful wardrobe lady named Renee.

26:16 · jump to transcript →

Roger Moore

Bond always has lots of suits. Whoever's designing the costumes would say, you know, I think in this, you know, we should have a dark gray and you have a light gray and then you should have a brown and maybe a blue. We'll be shooting against this and so that color would be better.

1:27:23 · jump to transcript →

William Friedkin

all the women parts are played by men, but Lesli Linka Glatter had danced with the kabuki troupe. And she was quite an extraordinary dancer and had studied choreography in Japan. And I had this idea to copy the Matisse chasubles as their costumes. So the costumes in that scene are copies of these chasubles that the great...

31:45 · jump to transcript →

We needed this particular idea, so we did it. Where did these clothes for the Vampire Brides come from? Do you remember? They're just some pretty wild outfits. I do not know. Just the wardrobe department just put them up from someplace? Yeah. Rona was our wardrobe lady, and she managed to do magic.

1:23:25 · jump to transcript →

I like that editor. Yeah. I know this is hard to believe, but apparently the umpires have got Crescione in a rundown. Who's Crescione? Is that another one of your high school people? No, I think that was... I don't know who that was. Your name's all friends? One of the wardrobe people's friends. Or was it the accountant or somebody? Yeah, Tony Crescione. No, this is...

1:13:26 · jump to transcript →