Coverage

Now, this next scene is another little fun thing. John Hannah 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.

1:24:28 · 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, Daniels'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 →

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...

1:09:45 · 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.

2:09:23 · 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 4K xenon 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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

Tony Scott

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 →