Coverage

That says, good luck, by the way. That's Russian graffiti there. And Eddie can expound a little bit on the challenges of editing this. Yeah, this was, the coverage, the raw footage was extraordinarily good. And it's beautifully lit. It was quite an easy sequence to build an assembly of because there was just so many great options and great angles.

3:45 · jump to transcript →

And then we come in and redress whatever actors were in that coverage. Yeah, you can see here. Was it SweatCon 4, the highest? I think SweatCon 3 was the highest. Right now we are in SweatCon 3. Yeah, there we go. And that should give you a sense, by the way, of the atmosphere on this set. As much as this is a scene about extraordinary pressure and tension, it was a lot of fun. They really quickly became a crew. They were all enjoying this work enormously. Yeah.

5:01 · jump to transcript →

that tends to paint you into corners. I really wanted the movie to tell me what its look was, and obviously I want every mission to feel different. And Chunky Richmond, our camera operator, Fraser Taggart, cinematographer, Martin Smith, our gaffer, we were finding the look of the movie, of the sets, here on day one, and this was the first shot, was Carrie's close coverage. And what you're seeing

16:48 · jump to transcript →

And right away, you just know the division. One's on one side, one's on the other. I will give credit where credit is due. You watch this scene. And originally, there was a slightly different cutting order. And I was playing it as a sort of moment between you guys. I was playing more in the close coverage of you. And you said, no, no, no, no, no. It was like, make it about them. Don't worry about us until Scalpel and Hammer. You remember? Yep. And I thought that was a really great note. And it created this...

20:01 · jump to transcript →

Yeah. As you're editing it, go ahead and send me those surprises daily. I just look like, oh, my gosh, this is just amazing. This was originally not a hard cut. This was originally a long establishing shot, and there was more dialogue at the top of the scene. Great shot. And you're talking about 6 o'clock in the morning. You had to go there. You only had about an hour to shoot the establishing shots of the scene before you went into close coverage and we could hide that the sun was coming up.

46:48 · jump to transcript →

And also it meant he didn't have to walk around on his hips. But he just also understands story and understands this movie so well that he was able to... I mean, look at the stuff that he brings. Yes, and this whole scene was shot over two days. All this dialogue took so long because of all the coverage and all the little bits of storytelling that are required. And...

1:21:14 · jump to transcript →

And he wasn't very happy about that. Robbie is the kind of a guy that likes to envision a scene and the light that it's going to play in. And if it's natural light, you can't keep moving around to cover it. But often you need coverage in an American film to keep a scene moving. So there are several sequences that we shot that just didn't work because I didn't get coverage on them.

1:14:39 · jump to transcript →

A couple of cars have tangled in traffic there. Shouldn't take too long to get this to the shoulder. It's a very simple affair. No injuries involved. Shouldn't cost you more than a couple of minutes, though, if you're heading northbound on the 710. I'm Stacey Vinn for Metro Traffic Control. I think about my shots in my head. And I often, you know, I'll think about how I want a scene covered or if I want coverage at all or where. And I may even...

1:28:05 · jump to transcript →

write down some notes for myself so I don't forget the coverage the next day after I've worked it out the night before or even weeks before. And then I'll come to the set and tell the whole crew what I want to shoot. I'll say we're going to cover the scene this way, this is what's going to happen. I'd like to pick up the following setups and I will encourage the crew and the cast to make suggestions and I'll very often alter my plan

1:28:35 · jump to transcript →

Not right now, it isn't. I think I'll go get the car started. I've got it. The golden book of Amun-Rai's... Now, this next scene is another little fun thing. John Hanna was just petrified that this next shot would never work. He knew I wasn't going for any coverage. It's all done in one big one-er. And he was so nervous that he would come across badly or that it wouldn't work. There was no coverage.

1:24:21 · jump to transcript →

It was a big winner for audiences in every screening I ever saw. Sometimes you just got to go for it and do it with no coverage. This was one of those times. If you notice, Daniel's right arm, he's always having, it looks like he's always hiding it or playing with it.

1:24:47 · jump to transcript →

This was really difficult. That was Rachel acting to a blue screen out in the desert. This was a very complicated shot, sequence to shoot, just because of all the special effects and the mechanical effects involved and the amount of coverage. It was just, it seemed like, as well as we had it storyboarded and figured out, it always seemed like a jumbled mess until the special effects were completely finished.

1:33:36 · jump to transcript →

was shot at three separate times of day. Juliet's, all of Juliet's coverage in this scene is shot at 10 o'clock at night on a process trailer in a parking lot, and I am standing to her right, just outside the door. Wow. And I'm watching the monitor and jostling up and down with my fat ass on the trailer to create the motion of the car. That's good. Dick Pope's great. Dick's phenomenal. And who was the lighting guy?

23:26 · jump to transcript →

the surrogate mother notion. And here's Jeffrey Lewis. Steals a show. Always. Just point a camera at Jeffrey. This was one of the scenes where Ken, well, in every scene, Ken Koken would say, you've got to do more coverage. You've got to do more coverage. And I said, this is one instance where we will not need the coverage. Just let Jeffrey run. We both had worked with Jeffrey before. I was just going to bring that up. A pilot that we did.

32:49 · jump to transcript →

Dylan and Scott Wilson. Scott actually pushed me to add coverage to this scene. Originally, I was only covering the scene from this angle in my rather foolish obsession

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Commentary With Kathryn Bigelow And Jeff Cronenweth

So although we had a lot of... As we talked about earlier, we shot so much of it in the main C3, the main control compartment, that that in itself was a challenge to keep the scenes different and alive and not have the same coverage each time we arrived there. When we did get out of the submarine, we had a couple of really interesting...

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Commentary With Kathryn Bigelow And Jeff Cronenweth

Of course, you could build scaffolding on the submarine itself, but then, you know, once you get out in the open water, the ability to take away that scaffolding or move around on it certainly limits the amount of shots you can or the coverage and necessitates bringing it back to the harbor to remove that stuff. So Mark Manchester and Greg Musson, our two key grips, came up with a wonderful solution to that dilemma, and we got this vintage...

1:03:43 · jump to transcript →

Commentary With Kathryn Bigelow And Jeff Cronenweth

And what an honor to work with somebody that's gifted as Walter. I was quite intimidated at the beginning, thinking that I would be getting notes on a daily basis of what was wrong with the coverage. And it was so wonderful to see somebody that has such passion and is still so young-minded that whatever we presented to him, he was excited about and encouraged us to continue on those trains of thought and work the scenes, made these scenes really unique and covered it in a unique way.

1:11:07 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

Of course, this was just a little bloody tin shed, wasn't it, near the airport. It's always difficult to make studio sets look like they're really exteriors. It's always to do with the lighting, because you can't actually get the huge degree of light that you have from the sun. And the lights of the studio are too close. They're not as far away as the sun, so the angle of the light feels all wrong, and the coverage of the light, and it just, they always look a bit fake. But, you know, we did our best here. We've put a lot of smoke into it,

1:48:38 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

And Kieran did Frodo pretty much, didn't he? Billy worked very closely with Fawn, who was a female, a lady. And Billy really got on well with her and instructed her how to walk like him and perform like him. And she was very, very good. Some of these shots of Gandalf were little pickups that we did because we had all these wonderful big wide shots, great vistas, but we didn't really have much coverage of Ian himself.

2:29:54 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

because that's all we had time for. We started by shooting the closeups of Sean and Elijah and we shot them together. So we had one camera, our A camera on Elijah and our B camera on Sean, which you don't normally do. Normally you shoot one actor and then you turn the cameras around and you shoot the other actor separately, but I didn't have time for that. So I actually did what they call cross coverage where you're shooting them both simultaneously. And we did three takes.

3:24:03 · jump to transcript →

to filming each song in one take. I mean, interestingly in this, we shot some other coverage, you know, from the side and some wides, but through the editing process, we felt that the emotional power of the soliloquy was best served by this concentrated meditation on Hugh's extraordinary performance. Because, you know, when you come wide to show the world he's in, it's not really giving you an insight.

13:24 · jump to transcript →

were to a fixed tempo. So Mike Gibson's wonderful bit here. He's controlling the tempo and he's got complete freedom. And here we've gone back into a fixed tempo because it's quite tricky doing chorus stuff with free tempo, which also allows me to do, you know, coverage slightly more easily. And again in that intercut, we set up that sort of theme of

19:17 · jump to transcript →

The car crash in the musical happens significantly later, but I wanted it to happen earlier so that it would connect with the factory world, as it seemed to be less random when it sat in that one. I am damned I am the master of hundreds of workers They all look to me Can I abandon them? How will they live if I am not free?

37:42 · jump to transcript →

That's my friend, Irishman. And the answer to your question is yes. You fight for me, you get to kill the English. Excellent! Stephen is my name. I'm the most wanted man on my island. Except I'm not on my island. And Stephen of Ireland was referred to in the epic poem of Blind Harry the Minstrel about William Wallace. He figured big in it. He was kind of like the right-hand bodyguard watching over the shoulder of Wallace. And, uh...

1:09:32 · jump to transcript →

to display exactly what was going on, almost like sports coverage, so that there wasn't a dull moment where you lose interest because you don't know what's going on, where it just turns murky. So that was very, you know, we got a table and little plastic soldiers and myself and the stunt coordinator and the first AD and the camera guy and all the heads of department got together and we planned this battle. And we made it up as we went along. I mean, of course, we borrowed from medieval battles.

1:21:27 · jump to transcript →

But for time, we'd just do handheld stuff, you know, like this. And we were running out of day this day, and we just had a lot to do. John Toll is the master at handheld. He's able to anticipate stuff before it happens. He did a lot of it in the actual battle. And kind of knows, has a sixth sense about where something is going to happen next so that his movements are coordinated with the movements of everyone else, and it's not planned.

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Eng Commentary

Starting with this very first shot, which lasts nearly a full minute, you can see Bazin's protege, Francois Truffaut, striving for a kind of sincerity in his film, exactly as the master would have suggested, by prolonging the integrity of the individual shots. The 400 Blows is a treat for students of film and of what is termed visual literacy in many ways, not the least of which is the film's use is here of what we will refer to as expressive editing.

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Eng Commentary

Truffaut, who spoke and wrote often of his admiration for Alfred Hitchcock's films, in this scene emulates one of the master's more playful tricks. For Francois Truffaut himself can be seen, briefly and intermittently, as one of the adults also taking the ride along with Antoine. Truffaut is the slight dark-haired man in the dark cloth jacket. Right there. Several critics have pointed out, accurately I think,

22:22 · jump to transcript →

Peter Greenaway

with enthusiasms for the French Revolution in France's greatest enemy, which had been Great Britain. And William Beckford created this large estate called Fonthill Abbey, which on the opening night he invited Lord Nelson and his mistress Emma Hamilton to come and be the master and mistress of ceremonies. And the original intention was to create a scenario which was very much related to this place,

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Peter Greenaway

It suddenly becomes apparent that in all the relationships between the draftsmen and the women of the household, the owner of the house is absent. Various comments are being made about this, and gradually it'll be established that probably the master of the house is away in Southampton, probably on a sexual adventure

35:24 · jump to transcript →

Frank Morriss

Terrific shooting, colonel. It was beautiful. Beautiful, was it? Goddamn it! I had another stoppage. Interesting that... This is in the early days of Steadicam, which was being used a lot. But John Alonzo felt that he could operate hand-held... ...better than any Steadicam. And so what we're watching here, for the next several minutes... ...is all completely hand-held by John Alonzo, out in the desert. It no more looks like hand-held than something on a dolly... ...but he always felt that he had a flexibility to it... ...and he was able to manoeuvre quickly. So I would just turn him loose on these scenes. Stage the scene and say, "John, you shoot it." And he would go along and shoot the scene beautifully... ...get all the coverage. I almost could've gone home or taken a nap... ...while he was doing this. John said he was built for hand-held. Because he was not very tall... ...and he said his centre of gravity is low to the ground. And a taller person has real trouble staying as steady and stable... ...as he could do. But this is-- It's just wonderful, as I'm watching here... ...how steady the hand-held is and how manoeuvrable it is. We're on a rough desert floor... ...and no special kind of plywood floor laid down for him... Twelve sharp. On a hard surface, he had his little apple-box dolly too... ...that he would scoot around like a monkey with. Yes, apple boxes are kind of hard wooden boxes... ...that we'll use on a movie set for all kinds of things: For people to sit up higher or prop something up. And they're used all the time. And John attached casters to an apple box... ...and he would sit-- if it was on a concrete floor or a hard surface... ...he would sit on what he called his "silly dolly"... ...and push himself around with his feet. And it was another kind of wonderful operating trick that he had.

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Frank Morriss

Let's see what's on HBO tonight. Now, this movie is filmed in widescreen. Sometimes that's called Cinemascope, or anamorphic. And 35 mm film is not wide enough to contain this frame. It wouldn't fit. So Panavision and some other people... ...invented lenses that actually take this image that you're looking at... ...and squeeze it to the width of a 35 mm frame... ...which is almost half as wide as what you're looking at. If you hold up a piece of anamorphic film to the light and look at it... ...all of these guys would be tall... ...and skinny and mushed together. The whole image would suddenly get all squinched. When you project the image, then you have to have a similar lens... ...that unsqueezes the image. But this was an effort to make big, widescreen movies that-- Not necessarily in Cinerama or techniques like that... ...but that you could make on ordinary film, and have an experience that was... ...different from what you're seeing on television. It had a different aspect ratio, real wide screen. And the challenges of shooting it are quite interesting... ...because those lenses require a lot more light... ...and give you a lot less depth of focus. So you're always kind of struggling with it. It's a very special kind of look that I actually prefer. And it gives you some real challenges in composition and so on. But you don't see too many pictures shot in anamorphic nowadays. They have another process called Super 35... ...that isn't quite so difficult to shoot. I think, Frank, we did Bird on a Wire in Super 35. Right. Well, from the standpoint of coverage in this movie... ...it was an editor's tour de force almost. It was covered so well. You mean, in terms of you having the footage that you needed. Yeah. We had very, very, very few problems. Well, thank goodness we had enough time to shoot this movie... ...so that we could get the coverage that we needed... ...because it was so tricky to tell this story along the way.

51:44 · jump to transcript →

Robert Axelrod, that's who was in my Faith No More video. Do you remember him? He was one of the scientists. There's the blob. We forgot about it. Oh, yeah, that's right. Now he's coming back behind everybody. When you have a scene like this, though, like in terms of coverage, you know. Yeah, it's tricky. There's a trick. Eyelines. There's a lot of axes. There's a lot of eyelines. Look at that reverse gag. Simple reverse gag. Yeah.

1:18:49 · jump to transcript →

But you shouldn't be scared. But then you also run the risk when you have that master, having been through this myself, you run the risk of just becoming coverage friendly instead of going like working dynamic. I was an assistant director briefly on it. I say briefly because it's the only time I was ever fired. I had to fire somebody on Bay City Blues, which was a brief baseball series. And the angles, getting the angles in that series.

1:28:18 · jump to transcript →

this gentleman on stage, Henny Youngman, then he forgot his lines. That happened a couple of times. So that was kind of unfortunate. Take my wife, please. And that's a four-minute shot with no coverage. You can call it daring, or you can call it that he knows exactly what he wants, and that's what he gets. And there are other scenes.

34:21 · jump to transcript →

late at night they were all people who had to get up at seven in the morning and go to work and they were screaming stop shooting go home we're sick and tired of you and marty's mother came over and said look you got the master shot why don't you why don't we go home and he said go over there and stand in the corner it was the first time she ever saw him as a director instead of as her son

57:53 · jump to transcript →

The light coming from the top was a /K Zenon lamp, which gives you very straight beams, which I thought would be quite a good idea. I shot it up through a mirror because you can't tilt them down or the condenser burns. But we had a mirror above the set and I shined it from the floor onto the mirror. This autopsy scene was a favorite of Fincher's, too, because we had created a body of Newt that had multiple layers of tissue, skin and musculature that could be cut through, and the bones opened up. It's a lot of graphic coverage that's not in the final movie. The body of Newt was actually based on... Alec and I had done a life cast of Carrie Henn during Aliens, and while we were in London Bob Keen's shop actually had a casting of the head. We were able to get that and remold it, so we were able to duplicate what the actress had looked like some five or six years previously. There is intercutting here with the real girl as well. She has a lot of fuzz on her face. - Yeah. Backlit fuzz.

17:31 · jump to transcript →

There was a makeup on that guy's face, too. But it was hard to see. Well, that's a classic example of less is more, like the hugger in the original Alien. It was a few frames, but it sticks with everybody forever. Yeah, that was great coverage and editing. It really makes the puppet work well. We always depend on editors and sound-effects people to make us look great. You watch this stuff in dailies and you go "How's it ever gonna work?" And then the sound effects of whipping tails... Jim Cameron used to say that as a way to make us feel better after a shot - I think he thought he made us feel better - "Don't worry. This is all 70% sound effects." I guess that means we only accomplished 30% of our goal!

39:02 · jump to transcript →

Any of the scenes like with Tom and Gary in his apartment or anything like that, I would never waste an artist's time to draw coverage and over the shoulders and things like that. But whenever you have to do something that you have an army of people that have to work on the shot, it's always a good idea to have storyboards. Being there and seeing these actors pull this stuff off was really a lot of fun.

1:07:34 · jump to transcript →

My ultimate vision for everything is ultimately compromised. And I think that that's what you have to do as a filmmaker. You have to just turn it over. You have to give up. Because in the morning, you're going to the set, and you've got this long list of 20 setups to do this sequence really great and get all the coverage you need and have everything you need. And then by lunch, you haven't gotten one single shot yet. And you just start crossing them all off. And at the end of the day, you've been able to scramble and get four setups.

1:08:31 · jump to transcript →

My Question Initially To Jean-pierre Was

Can you imagine? This is almost 20 years later. She's still playing Ripley. Yeah, and you have to understand, this is take after take, after day after day with this emotional commitment. Very, very heavy. All the permutations from where that character started in the Ridley movie to where she sort of journeys, leading... This is, like, the culmination of it all. The future and the present and the past all sort of melding together. And you're right, she really... You see sequels, you see people kind of walk through them. She's... you know... She has a notebook filled with... She keeps herself up to the moment, connected with her character, for every take, every scene, every day of shooting. It's an amazing thing, especially in a genre like this, in sci-fi. It's not like Terms of Endearment here. But just as an acting exercise to play the same character for almost 20 years, as you grow as an individual and you see that character in so many different situations and grappling with technologies and the relationship of where she finds herself with regard to her humanity. It's fascinating and she is in this film. Her commitment to it is off the chart. These were the victims of the chestbursters. We had to come up with a very simple way to do this because of the numbers of them. We sort of took our cue from those T-shirts that came out after Alien and Aliens that just had these rubber bones applied to them and we made these slip-on appliances that had the broken-out ribcage and all the guts. We made a male and a female version and I think there were a couple of guys that ended up getting women's torsos on them. They were lucky. There he is, ladies and gentlemen. The beautiful and talented Mr Leland Orser. My friend and, if you knew him, yours. This is Leland Orser. I love this actor. I saw him in a very small character in Se7en of David Fincher. For this scene I used maybe four cameras because I had just one day to shoot this. I remember. I hate that because I prefer to shoot with a short lens very close to the character but I had no choice for this scene. I had quite a lot of material for this one. This is pretty rare I use many cameras, because I prefer to make a storyboard to be very precise, and usually for all my films I put maybe at the end one minute and a half in the garbage, especially with Amélie, the last. But I remember at the editing room you didn't have a lot of material. I prefer to shoot exactly what I need and it's better for everybody. You save money. You save time. You save energy. I don't understand a director - they make some film with three hours and you have to cut one hour at the end. It's so silly. I prefer to think before. That's the reason I like to make a storyboard, because it's a pretext to find ideas when you have the time to think. Because when you are on the set it's too late. You have to run. The master is the clock. It's too late to find ideas.

1:01:40 · jump to transcript →

My Question Initially To Jean-pierre Was

This shot was a complicated one, to be able to get inside the mouth. There he is. Oh, look at that. Oh, it's beautiful. Birth is a lovely thing, isn't it? It's a miracle, really. - And that's the end of me. It started with the camera in my throat, pulling it out, and then reversed the film. Oh, is that how they did it? - Yeah. This scene was gonna be shot upside down. All these cocooned humans were actually upside down above a pool of blood and guts and alien goo that was quite liquid. As we drew closer to the end of the shoot, which pretty much happened chronologically, Ripley was supposed to be upside down on the wall, free herself and wind up on the floor. The reason is it became too complicated and too costly to turn the set into a liquid set. It would have had to be waterproof and that cost too much money. But the whole idea is the queen was lying in that pool of goo. All you saw was her belly just stick out of the water and she gave birth like that. Ripley fell into the pool, freed herself and then battled a few aliens. But there were all kind of logistical problems. If the actors were hanging upside down, you'd have had to have had swiveling panels on the walls so you could relieve them from that position every few minutes. So it was just too costly to build. When you have some close-up on Sigourney, the set was unfinished, and she had to imagine exactly what's happened in front of her. I remember we worked exactly like for a silent movie. I spoke with her. "And now the newborn moved, and now the queen is going to die." And she listened to me. It was pretty funny to make. Pitof made all this, this scene with the newborn. So this is the birthing of the newborn. The concept behind the newborn was to show a creature whose genetic makeup had been as affected as Ripley's had been, but in the opposite way. Instead of it being a human tainted by alien DNA, it's an alien that's been tainted by human DNA. Even down to the eyes. The big concept change on this was to show an alien creature that had eyes. So much has been made of the fact that these things don't have eyes and there's no way of telling how they're aware of what's going on around them. But because this thing had been tainted, Jean-Pierre's feeling was that the eyes would be a great way to lock that whole idea in. A rather momentous event in the Alien saga. This was a big day. We had 30 puppeteers to do the queen and the newborn. The newborn was completely hydraulic. I think we had ten puppeteers on the newborn and maybe another ten on the queen. We had another handful inside that egg sac. I think it was 30 puppeteers. - I guess it was 40. Yeah, 30 or 40. I had five cameras. It was a crazy day. Pitof, you directed most of this. We did some stuff with Sigourney like this over-the-shoulder stuff, but then everything else was broken down into pieces. You told me the story of Sigourney when she acted with gorillas. Exactly. She made a film with gorillas and she knows you have to avoid to look on the eyes of the beast as always and she looks on the side. Was that an accident? I don't remember if it was something that was directed or... Sometimes we'd get weird little lurching movements. I can't remember. Oh, there's that tongue.

1:33:55 · jump to transcript →

Actually, the first time I saw that weapon, that's the shot I had in my mind. Right. Sticking in someone's head. Yeah, sure. Why does his head look so much like a, I don't know, like a pumpkin or something? Yeah, back to the master thing. Yeah. It's utterly very important. I think in the, at least in the martial art film, or in the Jianghu world,

38:19 · jump to transcript →

and what kind of rules I have to follow, what kind of guidance I took from him, take that as your honor. But it's also about the level of skill and keeping your skills below those of your master, because if you're better than your master, how do you master? Because the master is always hiding the highest skill to himself or herself. Right. That's why the Chinese get worse and worse from 3,000 years down. Because it's a tradition.

39:13 · jump to transcript →

Jonathan Lynn

and that means you have to shoot a lot of what we call coverage, different sizes, different angles. I worried about whether people would be concerned about why they were visiting a jazz club like that in the middle of the day. Nobody's ever worried about it at all. In all the other takes, we had a sign outside the club that said lunchtime jazz,

45:13 · jump to transcript →

Jonathan Lynn

Because there are no laughs in this scene, I was able to shoot it in a sort of a long, lingering crane shot. I didn't have to do any coverage because I didn't have to risk... I didn't have to, you know, envisage the possibility that something might be unfunny and have to come out.

1:14:21 · jump to transcript →

Ted Tally

This is a great editorial thing. This line... I feel like I need a shower. ...' I need a shower" was on camera. Some lines you don't need to see the actor Say. No, of course not. So, yeah, I'm okay with it. I wish we had something better, but there's only ten days till the next full moon. We've got to rattle his cage. For me, the next shot coming up Is... This is one of the most beautiful shots, with this golden light on the street here. - We talked about cutting this at one point, but I like this little scene with the newsie here. I'm not sure that the audience can really follow exactly what's going on here, which is that this is a place where you can get a newspaper before anybody else can get it, which turns out to be important to the plot. I'm not sure they can follow that. Originally, it was written in an airport. - At an airport terminal. I just like the moment he gets here to be menacing. You told me what? It's another guy, part of the Ratner ensemble of actors, Gianni Russo, who was actually Carlo in the Godfather, who was married to Sonny's wife. I love this car. The Hoffman mobile. It scrapes the bottom. This is fun because it played in one. I shot coverage of it, but it just... Camera moves in... It's more of a surprise. This is great. His getting knocked out. Look how much acting went into that arm. This is just a fantastic set. Here's a chance to see more of the set, and a very difficult scene for the two actors. Difficult to play. It's very stressful and emotional, and to get the intensity they need for it, it took take after take probably. I got yelled at at least four times by Philip during this scene because he was in his underwear, glued to this chair. He wasn't actually glued. - Some kind of glue. Not stuff that ripped his hair out. - It's not much fun to sit there. It was uncomfortable, I can tell you that. It's not fun for Ralph, who had to be naked in so many of these scenes.

1:10:28 · jump to transcript →

Ted Tally

Really, in the next scene, about how to link these together. It's amazing when you're pressed for time, how you come up with creative ideas, and I end up shooting this in one. This camera just moving around, building tension, and it worked so well. I didn't originally intend on doing this, but I had no time, so I couldn't do the coverage. I had to figure out how to do this in one, tell the whole story, then I went back, and shot the overhead shot later. The overhead shot is actually two extras, right? These are body doubles. That's one double. Mark really wanted it. He said, "You gotta show this tattoo. "You gotta go back and..." I was against this whole thing, even the spit. Here we are again with something we went back and forth on, whether it's necessary or useful to show that.

1:17:29 · jump to transcript →

Joss Whedon

This is another one of those shots that I don't get to take the credit for. We had so many extraordinary cameramen, and our pilot was amazing. And Matthew went out to Bangladesh, where these shipyards exist. We had originally been going to Wakanda, but since we weren't using anybody from Black Panther, it became... We kept going less and less to Wakanda, till I referred to it as "Wa-kinda." We're just sort of on the outskirts. And it became a tease, and not worth it. But we wanted the vibranium dealer, and the arms dealer, and all that. So Klaue was the suggestion. It was actually going through... When we thought of it Jeremy went through and looked at images of Klaue online, and some fan had put up Andy Serkis. "What if Andy Serkis played Klaue?" And obviously, we were already working with Andy. He and his Imaginarium were guiding both Mark and James in their movement, since he is the master of mo-cap. But we realised that we wanted him for something else. And when he showed up looking exactly like that on the day, I thought it was mo-cap. I could not believe how different he had become. And he's just the sweetest guy, but also an extraordinary player. He's not onscreen for that long, but you do not forget him. ...intimidating someone?

42:03 · jump to transcript →

Joss Whedon

and that wasn't all the time, but was as much as possible. Obviously, that scene was a little bit longer. All of Stellan's stuff, there was more of. Again, enjoy your DVD extras. The "Thor and Stellan go to a cave together" subplot is one of the more complicated issues in the movie. People either think there's too much of it or not enough, but what we have gets us where we need to go. I contacted our friends at the Nexus about that. Nexus? This scene, difficult, not unlike the scene in the lab, even though we had the table. Just difficult to get the energy. It's a very bucolic kind of setting. It's very deliberately the opposite of the Helicarrier. I mean, he mentions the Helicarrier, Fury does, on purpose, because it's important for him, A, because later on he's gonna show up with it and if you had forgotten it exists, you don't want that moment of like, "What?" But also because this portion of the movie last time, where everybody's sort of searching their soul and wondering what the heck to do and conflicting, came on the Helicarrier last time. And it was a very kind of science-fiction, kind of comic-book-y space, and the whole point of coming to the Bartons' farm was to do the opposite of that. To bring them, literally, back down to Earth. But having done that, you then have to allow for this moment of respite from the giant action set pieces, two more of which are coming up, and, at the same time, keep some kind of energy and momentum. For some reason, every time we did a shot on Mark, when he got to the line, "Has anybody seen Helen Cho?" he called her Anita. I mean, we came back the next day and did more coverage, and as soon as we were off him, he was fine. And as soon as we came back on him, it was Anita. I have no idea why. Nobody knows why. But, oh, my God, it made us laugh so hard. Poor man. It's so random. "Anita Cho." But when he did nail it, he did nail it. You look at that shot where he says, "

1:12:06 · jump to transcript →

And, you know, in a way, you can see a development of the idea of the first film Welles originally wanted to make in Hollywood, Heart of Darkness, which was going to be done through the idea of subjective camera and point-of-view shots and everything. And in a certain way, there's a kind of modified point-of-view aspect to the way that William Allen is used. Yeah, it's over the shoulder. Yeah. Whoever hated his guts. I don't mean go through the city directory, of course. I'll get on it right away, Mr. Olsen.

13:57 · jump to transcript →

Well, Guy shot it intentionally with no coverage. So you had to keep it in the movie. So Cubby was just steaming. And after the movie came out, and it was a huge hit, Guy said to Cubby one day, we're about to start Live and Let Die. And he said, you know, I was in Paris. I saw Diamonds Are Forever in Paris. And La Rochefoucauld got a big laugh.

1:43:39 · jump to transcript →

Sargent goes on and says, any responsible filmmaker would if he stumbled onto something that could spread into a new form of madness. You know, he would just sort of, he just kind of accepted it. And again, in that insurance policy, it was known as kook coverage. I read that and it was in quotes. And again, referencing later, in later years, the kook coverage was

55:26 · jump to transcript →

don't apply in this world. The gel that we saw in Eastwood's quiff at the beginning seems to have bounced out of the hair, which has now regained the volume and bounce that we've come to expect. Chimino's going between fairly close coverage in which we get the jostle and the ragged breathing, and then these expansive widescreen vista shots that dwarf the two men in counterpoint. And now,

7:13 · jump to transcript →

Wait, the master is coming. Who is coming? What I associate with this is being a medium for forces that exist, and there is only one person who can articulate it because... Sure, that touches on the question what to do when you make a movie. Which position do you assume? I still think it's remarkable that I can have this job. I was neither born with it nor can I explain where the desire for it comes from. And in actuality, this is not even a profession, working with a man like Roland Topor... Neither before nor after would I have ever dreamed this could happen. So you believe that chance played a major part? Trying to repeat something like this now would be impossible? Yes, it would be unthinkable. This film is a product of its time. It was a time in my life when I worked intensively and a lot with Kinski. Don't forget that five days after we finished this, I continued shooting. I shot "Woyzek." Here again the beautiful images of the bats in extreme slow motion. This is the moment when the vampire appears and the Maat jumped in the water, and we both almost drowned.

59:21 · jump to transcript →

Computer Simulation Division Richard Taylor

And then the transition of the electronic world back to its beautiful self is entirely all done by hand-done animation. When you see the large spheres floating over those rolling hills and those moray patterns moving through them, those are actually just... Everything in that scene is basically hand-painted or hand-drawn or hand-animated and then backlit. Well, it's interesting that several years later, it wasn't the Master Control Program or the mainframe computer which really changed technology and the world of cyberspace, it was the home computer, the personal computer has become so powertul, and it became an expression for the individual rather than the mainframe. This is now called the world of cyberspace. Yeah. It's true. We intentionally avoided that use "cyber" because I thought it was... It would alienate people and make it sound like a brain movie.

1:27:37 · jump to transcript →

and he gives them the most basic logline of the film and stops the show cold with the sheer brilliance of the idea. So it had that effect on people, and the idea had to be carefully protected. I was only permitted to be on set because Cinefantastique guaranteed the production that our coverage would not reveal anything sensitive until after the film had been released. The problem with Videodrome was that its Canadian producers Victor Salnicki and Pierre David evidently made their alliance with Universal with a release date attached,

55:26 · jump to transcript →

and do primarily have to do with the arcana of union agreements. I'm not quite sure, by the way, how that effect was achieved. Certain things I wasn't terribly anxious to touch upon in my interviews with the filmmakers. The extended say, as I was saying, penalty which is levied and wordless glances here among the characters. The master storyteller often doesn't need words. He dispenses with words.

23:55 · jump to transcript →

Fascinating, eh? Very. And this is shot at UCLA? This is all shot in the, yeah, in the master control, TV master control at UCLA. And I remember the UCLA police came and thought they were going to shut us down because they had never seen so many, you know, normally it's a student film, you don't have all these trucks and everything around and they have all these trucks around and then when we showed them the permit, they walked away really sad. Well, I had my student card because I'd enrolled at UCLA to get to, so we could have access to the

52:40 · jump to transcript →

I was well-known, having made The Saint and The Persuaders and sort of Maverick. Over a period of years, you do a lot of things, but Bond is just mega, mega in terms of the amount of exposure, coverage it gets. You don't have a Bond film show all the time on television today. Here we are 20...

1:48:53 · jump to transcript →

Was there a lot of local news coverage? Because usually cities tend to get, especially back then, cities would get really excited when there was a movie being shot in their town. You know, I don't remember anything like that going on. I don't remember any interviews, any press people around. We had a press guy from L.A. who came there, but he was doing national press, and I just don't remember much local interest. But Houston was great. We had...

38:02 · jump to transcript →

That shot right there is what I thought we were shooting when I sat down in that chaise lounge. And I sat down awkwardly because I thought I was sitting into the shots and that we were not going to see below my waist. And I think Harvey just forgot to tell me that it wasn't Harvey Jenkins, who was our wonderful cinematographer, forgot to tell me that it was not a master shot. But there have been some very inappropriate memes, kind of disrespectful to the 15-year-old version of myself.

34:02 · jump to transcript →

And then we realized that wasn't good because then why bother watching the rest of the movie? That's right. So we cut that out. It actually took three or four pictures before we got the hang of that. Yeah. So all done and a master. Pretty good. All done and a master. No time for coverage. Yeah, no coverage. Was that intentional? You knew that going in? Not a chance. And they're cutting the queen's face.

54:10 · jump to transcript →

Film Stephen Prince

He stays with it for so long not because it conveys story information, but for its poetic meanings. These derive from his use of the fog. He's always been fond of fog and created memorable scenes using it, part of the extraordinary way he's used weather in general. The master swordsman Kyuzo in Seven Samurai slips off into the fog to capture an enemy gun and then reemerges from the fog dramatically, prize in hand.

1:22:17 · jump to transcript →

Macaulay Culkin

Hey, that's you. - That's me. So this was, uh-- I guess we... We could start about... Talking about the beginning of how this whole movie came about, really. I was in dire straits at the time, in terms of my career. I had just come off of a complete disaster, a big bomb. I didn't know if I was gonna direct again. I thought I'd have to go back to writing. So I was in Chicago staying at my in-laws' house... ...and my first daughter was just born... ...and John Hughes sent me, out of the kindness of his heart, two scripts. One was called Reach the Rock and the other was called Home Alone. One of them, it was rumored... I think it was this one. was written over a weekend... ...which some critics would probably jump on the bandwagon... ...and say, "Well, we always knew that." - Exactly. Ha, ha. So I read Home Alone and immediately responded to it. I thought it was just a great, great piece of material. And it talked about some of the things that I was interested in making a film about. Now, we had a meeting, I remember, in New York. I just-- It was-- You and my father were talking most of the time... ...and I was just imitating everything you were doing. Everything I was doing. - Yeah. You'd drink your water, I drank my water. Like that. I think I did that... I think I way overdid it. I think I just kept doing it the whole, like, hour. Well, you know, the interesting thing is we... Again, it was the kind of situation where we looked at hundreds of kids, again. And I was like-- Even though I didn't know if I'd ever direct a film again... ...I was like, "Well, you know, Macaulay was in Uncle Buck... ...and I don't wanna just cast him based on John Hughes producing the movie... ...because then it looks like I'm gonna give in to John Hughes and be a wimp." And I met all these... I met hundreds of kids. And when I met Macaulay, there was just no one else who came close... ...to what we needed for this film. I mean, really, in terms of an actor... ...a Child actor, at the time, you were the most unique, original kid I'd ever seen. So that was pretty... - Oh, thank you. I mean, I totally agree with you, but thank you anyway. But it really is-- It's sort of, uh... Because it was the fact that you, um... The camera loved you, obviously. You see the shots from the film. The camera loves you, but at the same time, uh... ... you were relatable to every kid in America... ...because you weren't an idealized version of a kid. Kids are used to-- Accustomed to seeing this ridiculously... Shirley Temple, and the curls and the whole thing, you know. And there was just something enormously real about you. That, and I could remember my lines and I had a lot of energy. That is true. You did have a lot of energy. Almost a sad amount of energy. It was, I mean.... Still do too. Uh, now, do you remem--? Like, this particular scene. We're starting from the beginning of the film. And I'm curious, because there were so many scenes in the film... We were talking before we started. where we would shoot your coverage first and then send you home... ...or I'd still be in jail. - Child labor laws. Yes, I'm still well-versed in the child labor laws. So there are obviously certain elements of the film-- Like this. Do you remember this being shot? - No. Because you weren't here. - I remember we did the whole... There was a whole sequence with, you know... ...people coming up the stairs, down. - Right. He's there, and the pizza guy's there. I remember that, and just like, you know, trying to coordinate that whole thing. But, no, in general, there's a lot of stuff... There's a lot of holes in it... In my memory. And this guy went on to do something on Nickelodeon. My kids know him. Yeah, Pete & Pete. - Yeah, Pete & Pete. Is it still on the air? - No, no. It lasted a couple years. It was actually a really kind of neat show. Yeah, my kids loved that show. But what was interesting about the whole look of this film... I guess we could talk about it a little bit. You'll even notice... Some people will think, "Well, this wasn't intentional." But we intended the film to feel like Christmas sort of. I wanted the house to feel very warm. You look at... - Greens, reds. Macaulay's wearing greens, a green and red shirt. There's a green and red jumper sweater on this guy back here. The wallpaper is all... - That's very clever. All conveying a warmth of Christmas and something that, uh... It just was interesting to us. So it wouldn't be over-the-top, but it'd feel warm. I wanted the house to feel like a warm place. Joe Pesci. What do you remember about Joe Pesci? What is, like, your first--? My first-- Gosh, I don't even... I have-- I still show this. I have a scar on my finger. - Uh-huh. We'll get to that part near the end... - Ha-ha-ha. ...when, you Know, he says, you know: - Okay. "I'm gonna bite each one of your fingers off, one at a time." During rehearsal, he actually bit my finger a little harder than I think he thought. I still have a little scar on my finger. It's my little Joe Pesci tooth mark. I'm telling you something, I believe... And I know Joe would probably get a little upset with me about this... ...but there was a little professional jealousy from a lot of the actors on set... ...because you were the star. There's this little kid who was the star, who we were all paying attention to... ...who was carrying the film. And there was a lot of passive-aggressive stuff going on. And I don't think Joe meant to bite through your finger... But, heck, you know, you never know. He was not particularly happy during the course of making this film. And I don't-- I think he would probably say the same thing. He had just come off of Goodfellas and Raging Bull, and he was... I don't know, did he win the Academy Award? He won for Goodfellas. His acceptance speech was, "Thanks," and that was it. Okay. Well, there you go, so, um.... And when he... I remember I was such a fan of his. Asking him to do the Goodfellas... The clown speech, you know. "Make me laugh," you know? "What do--? Am I funny to you like a clown?" And he would do that every day, and it was great. But at the same time, I could feel it from the actors. Because there's always a sense of rivalry between actors. There was this feeling of, you were the star of this movie, and that was un... That was not really common at the time. - Yeah, yeah. It created an interesting tension on the set, I have to say. Yeah, see, I never really felt that, but I was 9. Everyone around here knows he did it. It'll just be a matter of time... ...before he does it again. What's he doing? He walks up and down the streets every night... ... Salting the sidewalks. Maybe he's just trying to be nice. No way. See that garbage can full of salt? That's where he keeps his victims. The salt turns the bodies... ... Into mummies. Wow. - Mummies!

0:21 · jump to transcript →

You have to match it on the coverage, and you have to make sure that the lightning hits at the same time, and then in editing. But flashing light and a little bit of thunder, and it does work. Oh, and this was shot, by the way, Little House on the Prairie, Big Sky Ranch in Simi Valley. The exterior, that was some of the exteriors we used. There's Mark Amin, who was the head of Trimark, who greenlit the picture. And here I think you can see the colors that are a little bit...

4:00 · jump to transcript →

And in this scene, I think, I don't think I had one dishonest moment from either of my actors. I never had to search or look. You know, I think I only did three takes with Chris all the way through. It was a master shot, and I think I did three for the first part of Dennis' scene and five for the second part, and that was it.

56:47 · jump to transcript →

Anyway, interestingly, her movie after this is Primal Fear, directed by Gregory Hoblet, who directed that pilot. So her two big breakthrough things happened off of this little pilot that never went, which is pretty fun. And she was kind of marveling about that in the press coverage for this. And she also, the day she was supposed to hear about Congo, she...

8:24 · jump to transcript →

Darren Aronofsky

but there's a really, really good dessert place right on the corner where that guy makes little egg, these little egg things. I don't know what you call them, but they're really slamming. I like this scene a lot because it's all shot from behind, this two shot. We didn't go in for any coverage.

46:56 · jump to transcript →

Some of the difficulties of a film like this are all of the logistics involved and getting things like this to match. All the wide coverage is photographed in a real outside exterior location and the closer coverage in the studio. Again, if it was a daylight scene, you couldn't shoot it on a soundstage because interior day just doesn't work. You can't recreate the sun. It always looks fake. They do it all the time in television. You can always smell it a mile away, but you can never get away with it on a feature film. So this, again, is...

1:25:46 · jump to transcript →

Wes Anderson

You can see Buckley's leash is still dangling there on the right side. Poor Buckley. ...but there's nothing we can do for him at the moment. Come on. Ben Stiller asked me... He knew the way that we tend to shoot the stuff, without coverage. Sort of staging the shot so it all just plays through more in pieces. But he specifically asked if it was possible to have coverage of this scene here. And I told him that scene, we are gonna have coverage. We'll have close-ups. This whole thing is gonna be... And it made him more comfortable. Then on the day we were doing it, I suddenly saw that we could just play it all the way straight through, and I remember Ben kind of realizing it and kind of saying: "So it's just gonna be one shot, isn't it?" And I was like, "Ah, well, it could be," and he just kind of went: "Okay." But I really love both of them in this scene. You know, this is Take 18. They had to do this a number of times. And I really think that that, to me, is sort of just about the most important moment in the whole movie, and I feel like they did their best work in it.

1:36:54 · jump to transcript →

Not that cursing. - Still makes me laugh. This kid... I swear, if Nial lived in Los Angeles... - Comedy gold. ...he would be on every sitcom in the world. He's a Star. - Every week, you'd just see him on different sitcoms, playing this exact part. I think he worked, like, six days for us, and I think we probably paid him about $130. It was $166. His character Bert, because we paid him $166, we began to discuss all expenses in terms of Berts as a method of payment. A very expensive dinner might be a Bert. Yeah, or like, "Oh, God, that's going to cost us two Berts." And it was-- One of the great things about shooting in Prague was cheap labor, cheap construction. Later in the movie, we get to the Vatican. Good labor and good construction. Fantastic. - The artisans are unbelievable. Great infrastructure, just great people that make movies. I mean, we put a crew together out of, you know, just really very few people from out of Prague and they were just fantastic. Especially because we'd never done this before. Our background was originally sitcoms. We all worked together on Senfe/d. Also Conan, Saturday Night Live, and so... I'll never forget it. I'm sorry. Bruce, the drummer of the band, has to sit next to Kristin and Matt and they all have to have their shirts off and Bruce says, "I don't know if I want to, because I have a rash." No, he said, "I'm just getting over the shingles." Shingles. That's what he said. He said it in front of Kristin. Kristin was like, "Oh, God, what have I gotten myself into?" I'm like, "He's joking, he's joking. He's a very funny musician." Without shingles, I promise. Actually, I remember we shot Mieke talking in English and in German, and we decided to use the German with the subtitles. We didn't think German would sound sexy or attractive, but she's Jessie. Somehow, when it comes out of Jessica Boehrs's mouth, she sounds sexy. Yeah, she's so warm and charming that even German sounds great. This is Jeff's favorite thing in the entire movie, that stupid jackalope T-shirt, which is not funny, but he swears is a joke. I don't think it's a joke. I just think it brings pleasure to those who see it. To you. - It's really a terrible T-shirt, especially compared to the many good T-shirts. This is actually-- I would almost... This is my favorite scene in the movie. This is the scene where the movie, to me, works the best, where these two guys were just sort of dialed in and their relationship... It helped very much that we shot this scene way toward the back of the shooting schedule. Yeah, if you look at the first bedroom scene where we already were, which is one of my least favorite scenes in the movie... Day three, we did not know where to put the camera. We did not get... We didn't take a wall out that we should have. It would've saved us time. We should've taken a wall out to get a master shot, a shot that allowed everything to happen and the camera to get it. We did not get that shot and got everything in little pieces and just then edited together the little pieces, and it just created... It took the entire day, which it just shouldn't have taken, and in this scene, which is basically a month and a half later, probably, we shot it... - Yeah. ...we knew which wall... We took the front wall out from when Jacob first walks into the room. Got our master shot, a really nice master. I think they were there performance-wise, in terms of their friendship. And, if I may, the jackalope T-shirt... - And the jackalope T-shirt... Also, it's sort of what we learned doing this movie that... The longest we ever shot in one location on this movie was three days, and this was probably the third day we were shooting on this set and we learned how to shoot this set. We definitely learned how to shoot the set. What wall to move and how to shoot it. The larger issue, I think, would be that I think any other... any person who had ever directed would've known, get a master. And so, an excellent lesson learned. - Yeah. I also think the actors were more comfortable with each other, we were a little bit more comfortable, and also we knew the set and we knew how to shoot it a little bit more. And that was one of the hardest things about this movie is, every day, we were shooting one, sometimes two, sometimes three locations, and you didn't have any time to learn each set and learn how to shoot it and what the easiest way to shoot it was, and as soon as you learned, you were done shooting there. - We had a location fall out, a Vatican location sort of fall out, which is how that other bedroom scene got moved up. And the initial schedule was sort of built to accommodate a little bit easier scenes with guest casts, things that maybe weren't as important and then that bedroom scene kind of got moved up and I do think it suffers.

14:17 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

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

1:03:18 · jump to transcript →

Kent Jones

Yes, he certainly is, and he's in The Master, but he's also in that Robert Frank film... that he made with Rudy Wurlitzer about the guitar-- Candy Mountain.

1:14:08 · jump to transcript →

a more polished version that he subsequently did. Then it goes through to her in the studio, listening to it just through the cans. And then, actually, although there are several elements, when it goes through to the main song, there is the actual recording, the master recording that was released, and then there are elements of bass and other parts of the arrangement, which, again, we remixed and put around in the surround so that the audience just get that massive, massive sound and realise

48:37 · jump to transcript →

here of course is our long hero shot that's gonna basically the goal obviously to get from the start it's basically the shot that switches points of view in the movie that shows you the story from their point of view and it's gonna end up over the shoulder of the blind man showing how how scary is for him to be home invaded without him knowing it

20:23 · jump to transcript →

So It Meant We Had Bloody Marys At 5

By the way, check out those horses. Another big training stunt. We had to ship horses in from the mainland to get the properly-trained horses. 'Cause, again, there's a whole horse sequence of stunts that didn't make it into the movie, but that should be in the cut features here. We did so much work with those horses. And now it just seems like, "They have one scene where they let horses out." We spent, like, a whole week of nights filming horses. And there's so much more footage on the DVD. But that's how it goes. Got to learn to not be precious when you get in that edit room. And just follow... Make the story work. Follow the jokes, follow the story. Clean it up. This is a fun scene to shoot where these two actually connect and get serious here. We shot this over two different nights, I think. Which I was worried about breaking up the flow of the scene, how we had to shoot it. But I think we shot all the wide shots one night. And then we went in for these close-ups another night. And we shot this towards the end of our schedule and towards the end of our stay at Turtle Bay. And I remember the actors, there was a little bit of how, "We've been so goofy and crazy for so many weeks shooting this, "how are we supposed to get a little serious and shoot this scene now?" It was like we all had to take a moment and reset and Say, "Okay, how are we gonna shoot this "like a real connection and still get some jokes in there, "but make sure we don't undersell the connection here?" Can I assuage you a few questions? That's always a little tricky, to switch modes when you're kind of used to doing one thing. Pop into another. You got to make sure everyone's on the same page. ...8O people listen to me. And it's fucked up. Me, too. I'm a natural born leader. Like George Washington. Yeah. Or another leader. Oh, she's back, she's back. - Jake. Oh, yeah, hey. - Hi. Hey, Margie. All right, here's one. I had to go to the bathroom. Okay. You don't have to tell me that. - I had to pee. You don't have to Say... I don't know, why would you tell anybody that? A stranger, me, but definitely at work. Why would you... You don't have to tell me that. I just want you to know. I had to pee, okay. I was not overwhelmed, emotionally. Sure, okay. I'm not gonna press you on that. I'm just gonna let you say that and I'm gonna give that to you. I peed in there if you want fo... - You don't have to keep saying it. The more you Say it, the more it's pretty obvious that you're lying, in fact. So I would just... - Okay, why would I lie about pee? That doesn't make any sense. You were gone a long time. lll say that. I will say that. If you really want to get into it, no, I don't think you left to pee, 'cause you were gone way too Iong. And I heard very heavy breathing and heaving outside the doors. These doors are supposed to be soundproof and I heard you. Okay? So there. I don't... That must have been in your movie or something. It wasn't in the movie. Ooh! My little cameo in the movie. Margie... - Who was that guy? Not important. Listen... Dave! Hi. Now I have to pee. 'Cause you have... All this talk about pee. What's going on? Are you okay? - Me? Um, I should have done this before we started. There's no way to stop the recording? - No. We cantt. Once we start, we can't stop. It's just like a Snickers bar. Okay, I'm just gonna run really... "Just like a..." I'm gonna just run really quick. Will you, um... I know this is crazy and probably something you haven't done before, but would you just mind filling in commentary for me for the next minute here? - OA, uh... Okay. Sure. - Okay, I'm gonna run. Okay? - I've never done the... Okay. Okay, just keep it... I just don't want there to be a blank spot in this. So I'm gonna run to the bathroom. Go for it. Okay. This a really good time. Uh, Jesus. This is a naked woman. There are horses. Um... I'm a woman, Dave. Deal with it. I done... It's vagina, vagina hair. I didn't come from that bush. There's, um... He's in a Suit. This is an attractive woman. Hi, Becky! - God, your bush is huge. And then... Margie, I'm sorry, I actually don't know where... Where's the bathroom? I'm so sorry. I ran down the hall. I went to the... Where... Oh, sure. It's down the hall and it's to the right. Down the hall, to the right. Okay, is it going okay? It's going really, really good. -/ think I'm doing well. - Okay, awesome. I will be right back. Just keep going. Okay. Why the fuck would you do that? I don't think you're supposed to go into the mystery bag... the night before the wedding. This is excruciating. Um... But Mike was right about you two. Uh, different gestures. Dave, I'll be honest with you. This is a scene that was shot at nighttime. There's fire in the background. The wind feels so nice. They... You have to be careful when you shoot with fire 'cause you might get burned. I'm so thirsty! Dave, we should get in the ocean. Um, and there's a bridge. Just be quiet. Oh, my God. What is the point of any of this? /, um, can't swim. That's a fun fact about me. I never learned. Okay, okay, okay. Thank you. - Oh, God. Hey, thank you very much. Did that go okay? Yeah, my pleasure. It went really well. -/ think I got some really good info in there. - Good, good. I'm trying to think of where we're at. Where did I leave? I left in the horses scene. So, I know you didn't know a lot of the same details I know. But, uh, just fun facts about that scene. Got... What... If was shot at night. Jeanie had to be naked. There's a vagina. There was fire. You got to be careful when you shoot with fire. People got to be worried about that. And there's a thing on a bridge. And here... - I covered all of these points. You know, I'm gonna listen to this at some point. I'm amazing. What? Really? You covered all that? Yeah, I got all... I got about how fire is dangerous. Fire is dangerous. You got to have a special fire guy on set when you have any fire. Talked about naked. - They were naked. Really? Did you really talk about that? Yeah, I... Yeah. Wow. But you didn't... I mean, they're real naked... You probably didn't go into the detail of we had to cover the vagina with a merkin and all that. You probably didn't say that word. - No... Yeah, I did. Yeah, I did. It's not important. I don't even know why I'm saying that word. But mostly just sad. Listen, this is a really emotional moment of the movie here. Dad! - Don't! And, gosh, Zac doing that Rastafarian accent will always get me. And you can see behind the parents in that shot a little hint of our deleted scenes. There was an exploded pig in the background of that shot right there that is part of an entire story line about a roasted pig that did not make it into the movie. And, again, is on the deleted scenes. And it's still left over, you can see that. That scene was initially horses running through and destroying the place and digging up a roasted pig that Eric was so excited about doing a traditional pig for his Hawaiian wedding. And it's all gone now. A little 'round-the-horn here of everyone depressed the next morning. This is a real hotel room that we're shooting in here. We changed the walls, changed the furniture a little bit. By the way, have I taken the time to just stop and say how wonderful of a person Zac Efron is, and how fun it was to make an entire movie with him? Zac is one of those guys, just one of the sweetest dudes you'll ever meet. And you're not... You know what I mean? And I think it's good for people to know that he is one of the nicest, nicest guys I've ever worked with. And so good at what he does. And takes it so seriously. And always has thoughts to bring to the scene. And it was a pleasure. When I first... I actually first met Zac years and years ago for a very guerilla-style Funny Or Die video back in the day. I think, around when the 17 Again movie came out. We made a little Funny Or Die video that Zac was in. And when I first met him for this, to talk about doing this movie, which is, you know, six years after that thing. He was like, "Wait, do we know each other?" And I was like, "Yeah, back in the day we did this little Funny Or Die video "for an hour one day. It was real quick," and da, da, da. And he goes, "Yeah, yeah, I remember. We shot that that Funny Or Die video." He goes, "Man, people really thought that video was cool. "I got some, like, good props for doing that video. "Thank you so much for doing it." I was like... That was the first kind of thing after being a Disney star that people are like, "Hey, man, that's really cool that you did that." He was like, "I always loved doing that video." And I was like, "I got him." I was really, really excited and hopeful that we would actually be able to get him in the movie after that. And we did. He was in after our conversation that day. And it was really fun to spend time working on the character and working on the movie with him. It was fun to spend time with all these guys. Aubrey Plaza, I mean, come on. Who else can play the crazy Tatiana? 'Cause Aubrey is so funny and so good. And also a legit weirdo who can be a very weird person in the... And I mean that in the best way. I love Aubrey. And she's Tatiana in a way that, I think, other people, you would have known they were acting to be the crazy girl, a little bit. And I believe Aubrey somehow, a little bit more. Um... But I think occasionally... we should think about how we make... Here we go. We did a lot of work on this scene. This scene is kind of cobbled together from another scene that's not even supposed to go here that we put at the end, put at the end here. I love these girls here, kind of, learning empathy for the first time. Learning to feel for other people. Deciding they have to run off and save the wedding. Poor Mike. He's less special, but I played him so hard. They must be so mad at us! They must hate us. Fuck! I would hate us. I would fucking hate us! I hate us, man. I hate us! Believe it or not, that cut was not planned. Originally, the guy scene and the girl scene was very separate here. And then we decided to put the girl scene in the middle. 'Cause our guy scene was getting a little long. And we found that footage where they both said the same stuff and it seems very planned, and it was not. It was a very happy accident. Don't let your loser older brother... This was actually, this entire ending here was exactly what I mean about how great Zac is and how much thought he puts into it. And when we were about to film this scene, Zac called me into his room before we shot and he said, "You know, I really feel like these are brothers "and this is about them loving each other and trying to build each other up "and they should be talking about stuff from childhood." And Zac was a big part of writing a lot of the options we shot here and that it made it in the movie. Like, the whole Ninja Turtles run to do here was Zac's idea about doing a run about the Ninja Turtles. We had a couple other ones that we cut out. But it's like I can't imagine the movie without it now. And that was all, that was all Zacky. We're not going anywhere... until our little sister, Jeanie Beanie Weanie... The best compliment we got about this movie when people started seeing it is like, "I actually believe these two guys are brothers." I actually, it's not one of those movies where people feel forced together. And I think that speaks to, um, how good they both are and how well they both got along. I love them high-fiving over breaking a TV. We are so stupid. This scene right here actually, end of the movie here, one of my favorite scenes to shoot, and one of the first scenes we shot right after the meet and greet, after we had already made the mistake of starting with everyone in the meet and greet, we went to this location, this is week one of shooting, and shot six characters in a small room together. So it was a real fun first week for me as a director. Just dealing with, figuring out all our characters right away. We want you guys to love each other. Love each other. This is a fun one to shoot. I think, actually, I love this scene. I think the Fox execs saw the dailies from this scene, and they said, "Jake needs to move the camera more. "We're nervous. It's week one. "He's never done a movie before. "Is this going... Is this going okay?" And, I think, in fairness to them, I did a lot of long takes where we did many runs of different takes and it seemed very Static. But I think it turned out okay. I think the scene works. Pacing's in the editing. I hope it does. Maybe I should have moved the camera more. I don't know. ... read this same paragraph for 20 minutes. Another early talk that was fun to have of notes that came in were about the outfits. And I think there were some people who were worried that Mike and Dave were wearing too many crazy floral prints or that seemed too crazy. And I was a big, big believer that that is exactly who those guys should be. And they should be excited about their Hawaiian vacation and wearing big prints. There's something kind of dumb and loveable about the costumes in this movie that our main four wear. That I'm very, very glad we kept in. And that I fought to keep in on these guys. I'm hoping when Halloween comes around I will see two dummies in Hawaiian suits, walking around, pretending to be Mike and Dave. We'll see. If that happens, that is all 1 need. That is my measure of success on making a film. Will anyone, the following Halloween, be dressed as anyone from the movie? We shall see. I was drinking puddle water and I had to go to the hospital... 'cause puddles are really dirty. One time I was on peyote... and I signed up for a T-Mobile plan. One time I got high. Listen, I don't want to be too rough on T-Mobile here. I got a T-Mobile plan on my iPad. And it was just a, maybe it was an easy joke to go for. We went for it, guys. I'm sorry. Damn it! Sixty percent of my investments are in some pretty... It's so satisfying to see Eric here just get mad and blow up. You can hear the whole, when we did our test screenings, you just hear the whole audience kind of open up and love it, and just love to see him get mad after this whole movie of being kind of timid and polite to everyone. And, God, Sam does it so well. This was one of the audition scenes for sure. Bam! Two hot air balloon tickets for our honeymoon. Saving the day. Saving the day with that hot air balloon. Surprise. Aww! Now another thing about shooting this, one of our first days, again, and we were doing really long takes. It was week one on the shoot and I was, again, wanted to make sure we got everything, got all the options we could get to make sure we could cut it together any way we wanted. And we spent the first half of the day shooting Zac and Adam and Anna and Aubrey. And Sug and Sam, Jeanie and Eric were just kind of waiting off-screen, feeding their lines to everyone. Being great, great actors and great partners. And then all this coverage on them we kind of shot in the last 45 minutes of the day. And I felt bad we had to rush through it. But while they were waiting off camera the entire day, they came up with this wonderful hand-clapping to do and pitched it to me to do it. And I think it was literally because they were bored all day just waiting to be on camera, that they started doing this. And, of course, immediately put it in and wanted it in the movie. And it's such a wonderful little accidental by-product of making them wait all day to shoot. Do you have Zac Efron's number? This way! What was that, Margie? Do you have Zac Efron's number? I'm good. So what part you like, brah? We need the whole pig. Mmm. No. But we need to feed 100 people. Could we please, please have the wedding here? Just wondering if he might be interested in going in on freezing my eggs with me. You can't ask Zac to help you freeze your eggs, Margie. You just can't do it. You don't know him. Please? You asked me but you don't really know me. You can't just go asking people to help pay to freeze your eggs. That's not how it works. Start a GoFundMe page or a Kickstarter if you're gonna be asking strangers, but don't just ask for people's numbers in my phone so that you can call them and ask for money. Come on. Okay, /'m sorry. And don't... You got a little nest egg built up, I'm sure, a little savings account. You've been working... How long have you worked here? I have a gambling problem. Oh, Margie, you can't bring a kid into that world. You got to get that straightened up before you're even thinking about the kid thing. I can't swim. What?

1:10:07 · jump to transcript →

Francis Lawrence

Once you know the end of the movie and you know some of the reveals, it's interesting to watch the movie again and look at scenes like this, and see what he's saying, and see the hints that he's dropping. Selfishness. Now, this ended up being probably one of the hardest scenes in the movie to shoot. I think it was probably the one that Jen was dreading the most as we were starting production. But, again, great to have Charlotte here. And it was one that Justin and Jen and I really worked really hard on, to get the tone just right, because the idea is that she's really in control, and that it's quite empowering. The tough thing is that when you do a scene like this, you end up spending most of the day getting the coverage that you need, and as you can see in a moment here when she starts to get undressed, that you're gonna spend most of the day completely disrobing in front of an entire classroom of people.

44:13 · jump to transcript →

to the dwelling of the ancient one, to seek the fated sword that matches your brutal rage. Why speak ye my fortune, witch? For where your path of ashes ends. The scenes with the witches tend to be shot, reverse shot, breaking from our long takes, so there's an occasional ping-pong match of coverage here and there. The norms have spun.

33:47 · jump to transcript →

SFX Maestro Christien Tinsley

So this is one of the first days of shooting. Art the clown. His body there. That was a combination of both David in a neck prosthetic that we built and them digitally removing his head, as well as a full puppet we made with rod articulation to the arm. So anytime you were over the shoulder, the gunshot wounds coming through him, or...

14:22 · jump to transcript →

Nia DaCosta

You must stand. His little smile here. Just amazing performances in this film, and this scene in particular, I just find so... wonderful. Loved shooting it. And also my editor, because we only had Alfie for three hours a night we had to shoot, like, really out of order. SO, like, I think, on the second day we were shooting this, my editor emailed me, and he was like, "Bro, where is the coverage of the scene?" I was like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "We don't have this or this..." And it was really great because he was just like... I was like, "That's because we don't have Alfie. "So we had to wait for Alfie." But also, it was really helpful just to, like, keep us all on the same page and get a good road map for making sure we get everything we need 'cause it's a complicated scene. It's a long scene, and a lot has to happen. And, you know, when you have one of your actors who can't be there the whole time, you know, it just makes it trickier. So, having a shot list, first of all, helps, but also having an editor who is so on top of it and who is so brilliant. Also, any director will say, "This helps bring everything together."

1:29:04 · jump to transcript →