Creature effects

My name is Alec Gillis. I am the codesigner of the creature effects for Alien 3 of Amalgamated Dynamics Incorporated. I'm Tom Woodruff, Jr. I'm Alec's partner in Amalgamated Dynamics, cocreator of the Alien effects, and I was in the rubber monster suit. I'm Richard Edlund. I was the visual-effects supervisor on the show. It's the last movie we ever did totally photochemically, actually. Right. This was on the cusp of the digital age. We did have some digital elements. When the alien's head cracks at the end it was a digital shot. That was the only one. Styrofoam floor. - Yes. We had a better Styrofoam floor for that where we'd covered it with metallic dust. It made a more interesting effect. I've always been a little self-conscious of those Styrofoam floors. Plus, that alien juice is pretty mean stuff. I think it's interesting that you can fly through space in a Styrofoam ship! Hey, there's a glimpse... Was that it? That scan, that was a fun scan. There it is - the multilayered sculpture. Are those your star fields too, Richard? - Yeah. I'm Alex Thomson. I was the director of photography on this movie, Alien 3. I actually got involved because the original cameraman was Jordan Scott Cronenweth, who did Blade Runner for Ridley Scott, beautifully in my opinion. But Jordan became ill in the first four days of shooting and had to leave the production. I was asked to take over, and I was honored to be able to try and match to his lighting. All I heard, and I wouldn't know if there was any other reason whatsoever, was the fact that Jordan wasn't well. We knew he had got Parkinson's. We knew he had that. You could see he wasn't a fit man obviously when I used to go and talk to him. He was a great character. I liked him very much. I knew him from Blade Runner. I'd met him on Altered States, too, cos Stuart cut that, didn't he? But I'm convinced it was the fact that he wasn't well enough to continue. I Know it was a sad loss, but at the same time, I love Alex's work. I did Legend with him. I did Legend with him. Yeah, and I love him anyway. And I did The Saint with him. I love this shot, and I love the fact that it's a model. I just still feel that these miniatures have a quality that CGI spaceships just don't have. Do you think that, Richard, or is that just me? Am I being old-fashioned? Well, it can and it can't. I mean, it depends. On Air Force One I would never have made any models now. It depends on the kind of stuff. This is obviously special effects. These are models shot by the second unit, by Tony Spratling, up in the north of England.

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And the warden - was that Brian Glover? Is that who that is? - was a wrestler or something? Cos I know all the British guys on the crew were very excited to see him. They loved him cos he was a wrestler. And everybody was excited from him being in American Werewolf in London, and doing his lines over and over. That's right. - "That's enough." "That's enuff." I think by this time I'd said "Why can't we see the lamp, guys?" And we pulled it into the shot. It had a sort of curious bluey-green feel to it, which I kind of re-echoed in the close shots. This is Lance Henriksen. I bought the big winding staircase from this movie. I had it shipped home and I put it in my house. That big cast-iron staircase. That big cast-iron staircase. The decision to go away from the ox as a vehicle for the birth of the alien was, as I recall, in our postproduction phase, because generally it was felt that an ox is sort of a cumbersome, slow, non-threatening animal. And that a faster-moving four-legged animal, more aggressive animal would be a more interesting host for the alien and that if it had picked up any of its host's characteristics it would be better if it came, for instance, from a Rottweiler than from a beast of burden, which was probably a good move. Although all of this stuff with the ox has much more scope to it, which I love. And there's always something about the... When you go back in and retroactively change a script, it's like a house of cards. If you can keep the whole thing from collapsing that's great. But somehow, sometimes little changes make it a difference. And not always for the better. But it's understandable. I think that the creature... You know, an ox... An ox alien... Eh, you know. Not very interesting. But it's actually quite a nice thing and it was weighted very... We built it so that it had an armature in it that we could just add more weight to it. Sandbags and what have you. It really was weighing at probably about 300 pounds for this scene, because it had to... This actor's kicking it. It can't just bounce around like a foam teddy bear.

23:29 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, there's that... There's all those cuts now. So now we're back into footage that was shot with the creature in LA. And this was actually... We built what we called a teenage alien and retrofitted it to use in this scene. Originally we built what we call a "Bambi-burster." That's the teenage alien which spits acid at one of the guys in the vent shaft and served us double duty here. And we built a little rod-puppeted version. This is a CGI version, which we had the benefit of the CGI in the 21st century here, which we didn't really. We built a rod-puppeted version, and we also tried a little dog in a costume. We tried a whippet in a costume. And he did pretty good at the audition. Then once you got him in front of the camera with all the rubber on, he kind of froze up a little bit. It was pretty funny. He was a nervous little doggy. And once we got him in situ, with all those frightening chickens around him in their cages, he kind of seized up and couldn't perform. But we built a Bambi-burster rod puppet, which was a one-to-one scale rod puppet, which had some mechanical stuff in it. I think we may have shot some elements with it. But it was never comped, it was never completed. The decision came down that they were going to go... Use the Rottweiler instead. And then when we got back to LA, we started building Rottweilers and mechanical dog parts and stuff like that for the scene.

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Commentary With David Kalat

In Kayama's original story, this typhoon sequence would have marked the first appearance of Godzilla. Director Ishiro Honda's decision to delay the unveiling of the monster until 20 minutes into the movie was just one of his alterations, most of which were focused on character development and subtext. But while the instinct might be to get your monster on screen as quickly as possible, Honda opted to build suspense patiently to maximize the effect of the monster's first appearance.

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Commentary With David Kalat

Grant, an A-list star of light comedy and amiable action films whose popularity would keep him a top marquee name for many decades. In contrast to Kochi's insecurity, Takarada swaggered onto the set and introduced himself as the star. The grizzled crew chuckled, Godzilla's the star. And since the monster is the star of the show, to talk about the cast, we really need to talk about the special effects director, Aiji Tsuburaya.

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Commentary With David Kalat

What science and mankind could learn from examining this prehistoric thing is incalculable. This is the way the elderly scientific advisor in Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was depicted. But a better point of comparison would be The Thing from Another World, which opened in Japan in the spring of 1952. In that film, there's a deadly monster threatening the human race, a military expedition trying to kill the thing, and a dissenting scientist who wants to spare the monster for study.

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Fred Dekker

An end to crime. An end to poverty. Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this very special audio commentary track for the film Robocop 3. My name is Michael Felsher with Registered Pictures, and I'm here today with the film's director, the one and only Mr. Fred Decker. How are you, sir? I'm good. So here we are with Robocop 3. We've done your other two films together for DVD and Blu-ray releases, Night of the Creeps and, of course, The Monster Squad, and now we've come to Robocop 3. So...

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Fred Dekker

and their guardians. And that was the edict from the get-go. We want a PG-13 RoboCop. And I think one of the reasons they hired me was that the Monster Squad had sort of straddled that line fairly well as far as being edgy enough and scary enough that it wasn't wimpy, but it also didn't go too far. Right, right.

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Fred Dekker

So when the movie came out, did you feel that, I mean, because obviously Orion at that point was, you know, on its last legs, it was pretty much on life support. How did you feel about the release? Because my perception of it as a moviegoer at that time was they just kind of threw it out there. Movie marketing is really hard. Yeah. You know, we've talked a lot about the Monster Squad, which has gotten kind of short shrift due to its...

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Francis Lawrence and Akiva Goldsman

imagined it like a fisherman who sort of takes his time de-hooking a fish that's sitting there suffocating on his line, that there's a careless quality about it with the creature's life. Social de-evolution appears complete. Typical human behavior is now entirely absent.

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Francis Lawrence and Akiva Goldsman

And our Wall of the Dead. Our Wall of the Dead, which is really more significant, although still significant in our current ending, was more significant in our original ending. In the original, right. Did all of them die? Yes. This is the theme which Francis and I have called Who's the Monster? Which is really a theme that's very consistent with the source material, the original novella. And our movie, although I think in its current form

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Francis Lawrence and Akiva Goldsman

We would have needed to have done some reshooting. Like another six weeks in Washington Square Park. And they weren't ever letting us near Washington Square Park again. No. You know, and here again you get this alternation of close-ups that are kind of good and some mediums that are bad. Not so good. Yeah. But some of this is kind of fun. I like some of this sort of chase. Yeah. And I really like it when he goes back upstairs and then you're back into this kind of, you know, the creature in the ceiling.

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Filmmaker Paul Davis

of something in the darkness. And they put scotch light in the eyes so that you could just see the eyes glowing in the background. But again, for whatever reason, I guess John wanted to conceal the monster as much as possible. And they kept it out of the movie. That guy laying there, right there, he was the former dean of British stuntmen, Paddy Ryan.

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Filmmaker Paul Davis

And John, for the longest time, thought that this clip was something that Frank Oz and Jim Henson made specifically for John for the movie, and that it was a commentary on violence and all this kind of stuff. But it turns out, after 20-something years, I asked Frank Oz about it, and he said, no, that was actually from a 1980 episode in which the special guest was the prolific puppeteer Senor Wintus.

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Filmmaker Paul Davis

The reason they did it as a post-production thing, it's actually very smart, you know, so that they could then whittle the crew down to the bare minimum, because this was on the sound stage at Twickenham, which was built about four and a half feet off the ground so that they could manipulate the floor, they could puppeteer the floor, and of course David is in the floor in this shot with a fake body.

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So this was the genesis of animatronics for our little dudes. It was unbelievable. I called myself the Snow White of the 80s because I was with the Garbage Pail Kids, and they were all played by the most extraordinary little people actors. Yeah, the other MVPs of the film. The MVPs. Those guys endured. It's just unbelievable what they put themselves through in order to play these characters.

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and they did it so beautifully. And we had, this was the genesis of animatronics. Like it was not what we now know of to be, I don't even know if they still use animatronics. Like they use CGI, they use a series of things. No, these were dudes that were behind the furniture, scenery, moving like wires to get their mouths to be open and their eyes to be. Here we go. There's a cutie on the screen.

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And they also couldn't hear us when we were talking to them because they got a giant foam head on them with all kinds of stuff happening. Terror and, you know, just... Right, so the animatronics, like, worked, you know, it was simple servos, pneumatic servos that, you know, like... What is it? The switch that you see thrown when the electric chair goes on in a movie. Like, that same size switch...

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My Question Initially To Jean-pierre Was

Pitof made this shot with the second unit. Pitof was a special effects supervisor for Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, and now he's a director. At the beginning, he made the shot just for the small things, the creature, and little by little, day by day, he began to make some big scenes. Jean-Pierre said to us that he thought that the eggs in Aliens, I think it was, which we worked on, were lifeless, mechanical. So we said "OK..." So we put all this squirming stuff and bladders in the lips of the petals. So there's lots of organic movement in the lips there, and inflated bladders on the inside. A lot of layers of silicone - especially inside - to you give the feeling of all the gelatinous layers of this inner egg, before we see the facehugger... I was ashamed, Pitof, this day, because I had told you that we'd put a facehugger tail in there. Somehow it didn't get packed with everything. At the last minute I discovered it, and you said "Where's the tail?" And I went "Oh, it's in Chatsworth." Yes, I remember that. You do remember that? I let you down. Sigourney Weaver was so proud to do everything herself. She wanted absolutely to put the ball inside the basketball without special effects. I was very worried, because I thought "We are going to make maybe 200 takes." I said: "Sigourney, we won't use a machine, but please work with your trainer, because I don't want to spend a lot of time." She was so upset about that. She wanted to do so herself, she did that. It was amazing. You will see Ron Perlman... No, you won't see it, because... I had to cut before. The close-up of Ron just after the basket is just incredible. I used it until the last possible frame, because the frame afterwards he was so astonished.

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My Question Initially To Jean-pierre Was

Sylvain Despretz, he works a lot with Ridley Scott's design, this chair. I love the idea with the weapons hidden on the char. These were tough shots - to show enough of the alien, but not give it away. The problem with the alien suit is that if you show too much of it, it's very clearly a guy in a rubber suit, but for wider shots, it was done effectively. Where you see the shadow, it was a matter of lighting so it wasn't revealing the body, but only the shadow across the grid. As an actor, I haven't seen often the monster on set. Remember, Jean-Pierre? As an actor, I haven't seen often the monster on set. Remember, Jean-Pierre? I remember, we changed the sense of the scene during the editing. He was supposed to listen, or to see an alien, and we put some different sound to explain the aliens are escaping from the cell. That's true. I don't like to do that, because an actor plays something, and if you change the sense it's not good. But that was good, because it added to the pressure he had to face, knowing that the complete ship was coming under the aliens' control. Another stupid idea. I love that shot, the Steadicam, where we speed the picture. Pitof put some flames from the guns, because the guns didn't work. Never. The actors had to pretend to shoot. It was a bit breakable as well.

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My Question Initially To Jean-pierre Was

The newborn was supposed to be digital, and, again, for budgetary reasons, it was decided Jean-Pierre would have to do everything with the newborn as animatronic. I think it was a problem for him because initially he wanted to have a real chase. He wanted Ripley to be chased down the halls by this thing. The beast was so big, the animatronic. It was a nightmare to shoot the scene when he tries to catch Winona Ryder. I remember I had to improvise, to change my mind, and it wasn't an easy time for me. I cheat on this shot because it's like a point of view of the newborn and it's fake, he is inside.

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early in the movie and we've already run across the dog. Anyway, so again, you have to admire the confidence there. If you're wondering, as I did, how they got the dog to do these various things on cue and walk to various places, well, of course, it all looks very natural, but if you think about whether you can get a dog to go to a specific place on cue without so much as a wayward step or glance, I think you'll appreciate that it's not so simple, though the explanation is indeed very simple. The dog you see is animatronic.

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I have the animatronic dog again. Again, so persuasive ears going up. And now, oh dear, what's all this? A fight or a struggle, more accurately? The return of the unpleasant character. Well, you'd expect a struggle, wouldn't you, with him coming back in? And here it is. All this action, rapid cutting, battle royal, although not really much actually going on. Rather angry acting again from the unpleasant character.

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And there's a fly. He seemed to have drawn the attention of a fly crawling on his temple. Not a real fly, obviously. There's no such thing as a trained fly. And animatronics were out of the question, the scale here defeating the capabilities of even the finest fabricator. No, no, this fly was digitally created by computer artists long after the scene was shot.

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a couple, two or three days, unfortunately. Do you recall which scenes he tried to address during that period? I think it was in the underworld. I can't remember exactly which ones they were, but it was in the underworld. I mean, in this film, we do get a theme which emerges a lot in Clive's work, which is a commitment to the idea that the monster or the monstrous or the apparently monstrous is not your enemy.

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of blood and muscle and tissue. And these hypodermic needles erupt through his body. Now, it was an animatronic that was built by Peter Lind's crew. It was all ready to go. And the producer turned around and says, sorry, we can't spend three days filming this. We haven't got the money. You'll have to do something that you can shoot in the morning. And so this was the end result.

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But, you know, we must have been running out of money by this stage. You know, the money must have been tight. But it's funny, isn't it, that the effect had already been designed and the animatronics were ready to go. So that's a large part of the money that had been spent is now going to go to waste if you don't actually shoot it. It was annoying. I mean, it's sitting there. I could see it in the corner waiting to go, but it needed three days. They said, you can only shoot for a morning. I don't get the logic. And they did the same thing with me on Rawhead, you know.

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Stan Winston

I'm Stan Winston. I created the creature effects and the alien effects for A/ens. I remember Jim trying to figure out how he could make the beginning of this movie impressive. He said he wanted to use a robotic laser. It was an afterthought and it wasn't in the budget and I remember having the gall to say to him "If you wanna use it, you have to pay for it." And he did. - Is that right? This robotic arm and the laser came out of his pocket. I wanted a seamless blend from the end of the first film into the beginning of the second film. I certainly wanted to honor all the things that were good about the first film. So I went to school on Ridley's style of photography, which was quite different from mine, cos he used a lot of long lenses, much more so than I was used to working with. But the smoke, the backlight, the textures, the way he forces the frame by putting a lot of equipment, machinery and foreground pieces, I really studied all that. I wanted there to be a stylistic continuity. I also wanted to have my own style grafted onto that so that I felt enough of a sense of authorship to make it worth doing.

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Pat McClung

This derelict ship had been in Bob Burns' driveway. He'd been given it by Fox and it was starting to fall apart. We had to put it back together and fix it up. Fortunately, though, it existed, so it saved us a lot of model work because it was there and mostly intact, rather than building from scratch. My name's Carrie Henn and I was Newt. My name's Chris Henn and I was Tim Jordan. It's cool to see what James Cameron had in mind, cos at the time we didn't really know what was going on. Little did we know at this time that our life would change when they came back from inside. That was the first time we saw the facehugger, when we opened the door and we saw it on Jay's - who played our dad - neck. I was really sad for my brother that this got cut out, and for everyone watching it, because it shows everyone why I can't stand the aliens, pretty obvious anyway, but you find out that my dad was the one who brought it back to the colony. It shows how Sigourney and Newt get the connection, too, as mother-daughter, and they have the same enemy. This was interesting, cos it wasn't something we saw filmed. When it happened, they just got out of the car and that was it. It ties it to the first one. It's the same place they went in the first movie. We have another one of our first creature effects that is like the introduction of the facehugger. All of these things were so daunting to me psychologically, because these had now become iconic characters, the facehugger and the chestburster and the warrior aliens. Of course, the queen was brand-new, but we also wanted each of these to have their own life in this movie and at the same time be legitimate to the original. So, to the very discerning eye, if you look at the facehugger from the original, from A/en, and you look at the facehugger in Aliens, there are subtle differences in the detail, more attention to detail as far as the creature itself.

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Bill Paxton

We also had to replicate Carrie for this because of all the shots that Sigourney was gonna have to carry her. And she was too heavy. And it was also Sigourney's back. Exactly. So we built a little replication of Carrie's body. It was actually a really beautiful dummy that she carries through much of the scene after she saves her. It's not enough to build a 14-foot queen alien. It's gotta have a head that comes out of its helmet-like head. This was a great shot. This was a combination of miniature and then we built the last part of the egg sac and attached it to the full-sized queen. This is all full size. This is full-size 14-foot queen when we see her for the first time. That's a big puppet. And the extruding head. We had to come up with a new way of doing the teeth, making them translucent rather than metal, as with the alien warriors. When Jim first came to me, he had a painting of the queen alien. Just like with 7he 7erminator, he had already had her designed. I had some ideas and started doing some drawings myself, one of the rear legs. It ultimately ended up being virtually Jim's original design. I'll never forget the two of us sitting on drawing boards at his house where he would draw one part of her and I'd draw the other part, and it would be all coming together. He's one of the most talented artists I ever had working for me. I think he remembers it a little differently. You don't think he'd look at it like that, as an employee of Stan Winston's? I also love this sequence when Ripley is communicating with the queen. "See, I can wipe out your children." I shot that shot. She wants the queen to call off her warriors, and when the queen doesn't, she goes to town. Kill the eggs. Wasn't there a puppeteer whose hand was dropping the egg? That was Nigel. He would push it out. It was on a plex rod underneath the egg. Somebody was under the set to place it, otherwise it would roll over and fall down. My job was to take that egg and shove it back in. I know Sigourney still has liberal guilt over this whole scene. But this is the classic cathartic purging with fire. You purge the nightmare by burning it out. And the idea that this is the only way she's ever gonna have psychological closure. Not, by the way, a new idea in films. And probably one that doesn't have a whole lot of basis in real human psychology. It feels right to the audience, but if you're that traumatized, it wouldn't help you that much. But she sure unleashes holy hell on these guys. We had a sharpshooter fire a real bullet into the miniature egg sac. This is a miniature. That's a front projection shot. A lot of smoke in the air tends to take the edge off of it. It was a bit heavy. Obscuring the plate.

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That was kind of like the weirdest part. It's bordering on, I suppose, the creature he would design for species in that regard. Somewhat sexualized it a little bit with the third one. But this one basically kind of looks a bit like the arms and legs are a bit longer. It still just kind of looks like a xenomorph.

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is so much more work, and so much more goes into that than might be obvious. Because if you just let, because they obviously had this, so they shot the monster as a rod puppet against blue screens, and they shot clean plates on the set, and they used some sort of primitive version of motion control by the sounds of things to marry the two up and stick them together. And it sounds, or it looks to me like that's what they've done. They've just stuck them together.

1:22:45 · jump to transcript →

that shot, it gives it away. I think that shot we saw, it hangs on it too long. And it's not lit right either. And that shot, that scene there is a prime example because there's all this fire around and looked in detail. I dare say they've done something clever to try and reflect that fire in the surface of the monster. But whatever it is they did wasn't working for me.

1:24:02 · jump to transcript →

you would have the mechanism of the creature kind of lying all in pieces between takes. And this was an actual person in there. So they kind of wanted to treat her like she was an actor and like she was always there and she was always Amy. And they kind of, you know, again, she was like their pet. But Ernie Hudson tells kind of a crazy story. It's not really connected to this movie, except that...

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I don't even know if you'd call it turnaround, but Frank Yablans still had the rights to it until Jurassic Park. Right. On Jurassic Park, which Kathleen Kennedy produced, she was on the set with Crichton and sort of started out, he started telling her the whole saga and she began to think, oh, well, you know, with technology, like Jurassic Park obviously was a landmark film in terms of special effects technology. And so between the animatronics and the CG dinosaurs and all that, she thought, well, maybe this is the time to do it.

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So they had worked together before, but Stan Winston had gotten more into animatronics, which culminated in Jurassic Park. Actually, initially, Peter Elliott, the ape man, he was hired to play Amy himself.

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Patrick Tatopoulos

My name is Patrick Tatopoulos. I'm the director, this one. And I have something to do with the two other ones as well. Hi, Richard Wright, producer of all three. Gary Lucchesi, producer of all three. James McQuaide, VFX supervisor of all three... ...and executive producer of all three. See, we don't stray far from the family. We like to keep this in-house. - That's right. This is the first time you're gonna see a Sketch Films logo. I just want you to know that. - Won't be the last. My family and friends all cheered in the premiere at that. Viktor increased his army, creating... So, Patrick, do you remember the original concept... ... for how far we were gonna start, how far back we were gonna go? We were gonna go to the beginning of the story. I mean, the plague, with Corvinus and everything. But the thing is, we had a plan to actually shoot... ...some little elements of that and get to the little sequence at the beginning. So we'd see actually part of the plague... ...part of the first bite, you know, William. And, yeah, ultimately, we had to concentrate this... ...on something a little tighter, and that's what we got. You know, just ran out of money. And you know, when I first saw that baby right there... ...when I saw the dailies, I thought it was animatronic. When it was next to the werewolf. - It is. Actually, we were watching and... Real werewolf, though. - Yeah. I thought there's no way they're putting a real baby... ...next to a terrifying creature. What price stardom?

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Patrick Tatopoulos

We went for, like, one... One big transformation that I really like is the one where, you know... ...when Lucian regresses. We often see transformation one way, from a man to wolf. This time, it was like from the creature to the man. I was really pleased with that. Michael again gave us the whole choreography there. Beautiful shot. And Dan built us so many corridors. This is all like... I mean, we had a big chunk of corridors. We kept playing, turning around corners. lt was actually quite a big set. It was huge. lt was a three-storey set... ...basically all the way up to the ceiling of the thing. And with short ceiling on the lower floor... ...and then in the dungeon chamber, two storeys. And again, that's the big set. - The courtyard set. And this next action sequence too is an example... ...of just really squeezing everything out of what you've got... ...to make a sequence. I think we had, at the time... ...maybe two practical arrows that came in and maybe two hallways. And one real firing arrow, and just... We were able to be creative and make a whole sequence out of it. Well, this was one of the sequences that benefited the most... ... from Clint coming back with more money. I'm so glad we did that shot of the man in the face too. It was... - Excellent. Again, only one crossbow actually fires. Everything else was, you know, just editorial. You know, there's a huge culture of the weaponry... . like the machine gun in Underworld 7 and 2... ... that when you do a period, you just have bows and thing. lt was important that we have big bad-ass crossbow. They were more like machine guns than anything else. Just because I'm sure the audience liked what you had... ...with the guns, and the rifle and the other one. And that sort of like replaces it in some ways. The very powerful... We played with sound a lot there. So they look like when they shoot, they're really massively powerful. Same arrows. - Same arrows, yup. And who did the CG for the actual men that are getting pierced? We did extensive post vis with a company called Proof. And they had never done final VFX shots. Oh, Proof did that. - They came in and did the finals. They did a great, tremendous job. - Yeah, they're great. No! My lord. I wanted to do that shot so it feels like how big the corridor. I think it's kind of cool to see them walking across. It's a bit of an homage to Jacques Tati. Some things he's done, we see people walking for two hours before they... It's risky, but it sort of worked well with Bill in the foreground.

43:56 · jump to transcript →

Patrick Tatopoulos

I remember there was a whole other piece of sequence... ...before he actually landed that we cut out. Just didn't... I think it plays great without it, though. This is practical and CGI mixed together for the wolf again. With Luma not doing the effects. And it's... This was the one we struggled with the most. When the creature starts crawling up right here. You need to tell the story of him climbing to the top. Some angles just looks like a man in a suit. Completely. We just kind of cut around. I do love the breathing Mike Babcock did for this as well. I mean, this little breathing of... Before he.... The howl. - That's right. Call to the-- Call to arms. So that's a mix of, like, a bunch of different sounds together. Gorilla, tiger, lions and things. That's what he did, I think. Yeah, that right there you're talking about, right? With the nose. And the snarl. Yeah, that's cool. I love that. That little sound that he makes. This is unfortunately one of the places... ...Where you had to cut a bunch of effects shots out. Like the wolves arriving. No matter how much money they give us, you always need more. When it's your peak you have to kind of be selective... ...and just sometimes it's a better trim. Still, I would have loved to see them coming from the back there. Yeah.

1:12:18 · jump to transcript →

before 2001, where science fiction was basically, you know, big bugs and robots, right? And alien invasions and the Creature from the Black Lagoon and Flash Gordon. And after Star Wars, it was kind of back to being Flash Gordon, aliens from outer space. But there was this period between 2001 in 1968 and Star Wars in 1977, 78, when science fiction was seen as a sort of

1:51 · jump to transcript →

the alien beach ball with the creature from the Black Lagoon in her hands does a little finger-tapping thing, which is very like one of the moments with the drones. Very well spotted, yes, the tapping drone. But my guess is that Dark Star was made in 1974, so this was one of, apart from 2001, there weren't that many outer space type science fiction movies. Well, that brings me on to what I was going to ask you about. So 2001 is...

20:55 · jump to transcript →

I like him very much in this scene. No one else has a stare like this one. You essentially gave the monster a soul with this, which significantly distinguishes it from Murnau. From Murnau, yes... That's what I wanted to say earlier that in Murnau's film he is a soulless insect. In mine, he can be happy. He suffers. He especially suffers because he can't die. He cannot partake in the basic human experience, love and death. He can't die, which makes him suffer horribly. All of that doesn't exist in Murnau's film.

29:11 · jump to transcript →

Then I will vanquish the monster alone.

1:25:07 · jump to transcript →

John McTiernan

And the external set of jaws that the creature has, I did not want him, would not have countenance to a racial suggestion as to what the predator look like.

1:29:40 · jump to transcript →

John McTiernan

The monster suit was physically really difficult and I think they found

1:37:37 · jump to transcript →

Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the blog. We're already off to a great start. I already regret inviting you. That was my blog voice. That's all I got. And next to Mark, we have makeup effects maestro, creature effects maestro, and all-around great guy, Tony Gardner. Hello, everybody. And we also have... This is like the dating game. I know. Door number three. And the man, the myth...

0:44 · jump to transcript →

It's within stunt crafts. Now, how did you engineer this blobular thing? Was this miniature with a hand? That's a big miniature puppet. That's Mark Satrakian and his team doing a miniature animatronic that was dressed with a blob quilt. It's not really a hand. It might have been, but it was a... You mean the blob anus? It's a little anus-y. It was actually a mechanical rig on a piston that came up and had flower petals that froze.

1:12:23 · jump to transcript →

Film Stephen Prince

Record of a Living Being was not terribly popular when it came out, whereas Godzilla memorably translated these fears into a format that endured, the monster awakened by radioactivity that goes on a rampage, destroying civilization. So Kurosawa pays homage to Honda's achievement in Godzilla by using his visual rhetoric of spectacular destruction and hysterical mobs of people running from a scale of disaster that is overwhelming.

1:17:14 · jump to transcript →

Film Stephen Prince

They provide an indicator of the creature's anguish. This scene amalgamates various folkloric and religious strands in which demons or ogres are a malevolent force in human affairs and inhabit either a world of the dead, a hell, or a zone between living and dying.

1:35:21 · jump to transcript →

the creature in there, it'll be perfect framing. Patricia was exceptionally good in working without her co-star next to her. This stuff is a lot harder than it might seem. I asked Alan Armstrong

39:49 · jump to transcript →

The creature sounds here for the pygmies are a great piece of work by Leslie. We always felt that they were somewhat comic creatures, but they also had to have some bite to them, which makes it a rather difficult thing to design their voices, and I think he pulled it off.

1:33:05 · jump to transcript →

Len Wiseman

I remember when Speedman first called me. He was really nervous about how much of a wolf he was gonna have to be... ...because he'd never played anything like this. And the conversation was all about, "Lam gonna have to roar?" When we went to the creature shop to get fitted for our teeth... ...and you were in Budapest, they made us, for the photos, roar. I was so horrified, and Speedman was even more horrified than me. Yeah, I think they had Guy Himber... We laugh about it now. I think, to get him into it, they had him crawling around or on all fours... ...IS the story I've been told. It may or may not have happened. And it just freaked Scott out... ...and he thought that's what he'd be doing in the movie. I like the little slow-mo thing there. The what? - That little slow-motion thing. Yeah, a little bit of Mountain Dew that we used in the syringe. Was it? - Yeah. All the blood was cranberry, right? - Yes. I'm really picky about blood. The colour, once again. It needs to be, like, a dark, almost brown, brown-red. I hate blood that looks like Kool-Aid or is a bit too bright. This is a new scene. Oh, yeah. I haven't even seen it. Was that longer originally? It was just to let the audience know he was actually calling for Selene... ...and that he's a bit nervous that he has to confront him... ...and let him know that he's screwed up once again. I sent for Selene. Bill's great. I had such a great time with Bill.

1:23:34 · jump to transcript →

Len Wiseman

So in the original one, he doesn't find him there? He finds him here, but what we were just talking over a second ago... ...when he comes in, and Speedman's hooked up and singing an A-Ha song... ...and leaves him there. And this as well. Again, just a lot of little pieces, going down these stairs... ...and all this stuff was cut out of the original, for good reason, I think. Run here, run there. Yeah, I had you guys go up and down those stairs... Because I didn't know, exactly, the geography of the underworld... ...when we were shooting that, I didn't know exactly what was on... ...the first level and second level when we were shooting. It's so random. And so I just had them do every version. I'd have Kate and Scott run up... - Run about. ...with guns, run up without guns, run single, run, you know. Lip gloss, no lip gloss. - Yeah. He practised for so long, those whips. - Oh, yeah. I remember, Scotty, he showed me... ... his whole whip routine at his apartment... ...1n the parking lot, and it kind of sold me on the idea, he and Danny. With the transformations that you have, I still get that fear every time I see it: "Oh, God. It's gonna be cheesy." And then it isn't. Because we've seen so many cheesy werewolf transformations in films. You did a really good job with that, because it's not at all. I was really happy with how they turned out in the end... ...because I wanted it to be shaky and look painful. I didn't want it to be smooth. I was telling the guys to try and make the transformations look... ...as much like an animatronic effect as possible. Actually, if it looked like there were guys in there with bladders and.... "Bladders"? - Bladders. What's a bladder? Come on, you know what a bladder is. Every woman knows what a bladder is. No, basically, It's a.... How can you toss a bladder in and not explain yourself? It's a balloon that, in the old days, where they'd have a transformation... ... you'd blow into them and make the cheeks and everything expand by air. They'd inflate these bladders. Stop saying bladders. - Do we have to take a break... ...because I said bladders? - I have to pee now. You have to dismiss yourself? This is a new scene with you. Again, cut for pacing. Again, it's just wandering about. I thought it was just... I remember you making it, and I ran up and down that thing so many times. Another one. "I'm not exactly sure... ...S0, again, 16 different versions of running about." I'm glad it finally got used. And that was cut out. It's an homage to Blade Runner.

1:43:00 · jump to transcript →

Michael and his father, like, waving his hand for him, you know, being the puppeteer. And this, to me, really was the end of the Godfather story. You know, he was left having won but having lost everything, started out as a good man. And in the film I'm working on now, I'm going to start out with an evil man who becomes good crossed with a good man who becomes evil.

3:16:00 · jump to transcript →

Robert

But in the end he is still the monster.

1:50:36 · jump to transcript →

At the end of the day. Yeah, and I'd done Freddy. I mean, I know how long it takes to do that makeup, but then you've got to add all the animatronic stuff to it. And it always worked. I mean, that's the other thing with Stan. Unlike the tank, you know, you're building all this stuff, you're putting it all in on, and all the animatronics worked always. So just Stan, genius. And I always loved that he kept a copy of all the Rippers in his museum next to the Alien and the Terminator. Oh, wow.

1:02:33 · jump to transcript →

It may just give us the time we need to kill the creature. This shot coming up here, this effect shot of the eclipse, was a real pain in the ass because we'd actually finaled this shot, meaning that we'd approved it from, approved all the work from ILM, and we showed it, the picture to the studio, and people, you know, studio executives who had read the script and knew exactly what was supposed to be going on in the shot had no idea what the shot was supposed to mean. Of course, it's an eclipse, and it was in no way clear in our original shot.

1:15:44 · jump to transcript →

E. Elias Merhige

to these puppets. It's become the puppeteer. It's become the god of both of them. And now it is going to work out its awful ritual. The awful ritual that Shrek and Murnau are going to work out are a result of the camera manipulating the both of them. And in many sections in this film you see the camera irising in and irising out. I had that iris built

1:21:41 · jump to transcript →

All the photos in her room are... Maybe we had a character in Italy in the book... ...which is factual, which is about Il Mostro, the monster... ...which would be about the same time as Hannibal was there. But Il Mostro is fact. And they at one stage arrested one person who... Then they had to turn him loose because of lack of evidence. I think he subsequently died.

1:09:27 · jump to transcript →

Simon West

But then, of course, she presses the button on the back of her pack... ...and a whole new tree of clips drops out... ...and she's suddenly got all the bullets she could need. She then pounds those bullets into him again and again... ...and runs out of that ammunition. In the meantime, she's shot off one of the creature's faces... ...and he appears to be obliterated. But, of course, he just spins his head round and he's got a whole...

57:23 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

Watcher is one of those scenes that was a little bit of a fight with the studio that there was always a feeling that it was unnecessary that we could just have the door open and they'd just go straight into the mine and carry on going to the mine but I always I loved the notion of the scene I thought the film needed some more you know a good monster sequence at this point in time and so I kind of fought for it and obviously it's a little bit more than what's in the book even because in the book you don't see the creature as clearly as you do here you just see the tentacles

2:03:03 · jump to transcript →

Barry Sonnenfeld

Again, this is all on the stage. The dog didn't have a cigar. There was no smoke. The cigar and the smoke was added by Rhythm & Hues... ...and they also, obviously, added his mouth movement. The worms were all puppeteered, we erased the worm puppeteer guys. But this is all done in postproduction by Rhythm & Hues. Frank?

1:11:45 · jump to transcript →

Ted Tally

I have a screenwriter friend who said, "What has become of this prop?" I think the editor has it. I'm sure Dino has one. This book? - Yeah, there are two of them. Universal maybe has one. I should have one. - Yeah, and I should have one. You and I should have one. Why don't we have one? We could auction it in 20 years. Anyway, talk a little bit about how you got Ralph Fiennes into this cast. Like I said, I went after the actors that everyone told me I couldn't get. "Ralph's never going to do a movie like this, he's a Shakespearean actor." Basically, I sent him the script. And he loved it so much he agreed to fly in and meet with me. I gave him my vision of it. I told him he was not going to live in a haunted house. He told me he was very attracted to the idea of playing a monster who had a soul. That he had some kind of inner life and was not just a bogeyman. He loved the relationship between him and Reba, Emily Watson's character. He loved that there was humanity in this horrible person doing horrible things, but there was humanity in him. Here's a great sequence. We should talk about the way you staged it. This was originally written, if you remember, as an outdoor exercise scene. I said to Ted, "I can't see Hannibal Lecter "even if there were guards all around and they cleared the whole yard, "I can't see him in an exterior location, out of prison." The scene was originally through a fence. A sort of dog run or something, or a big mesh fence. And the dialogue between Will Graham and Hannibal was through a fence. It was an electrified fence. But I said, "Then there's no threat." There's no real threat. And I said, "Why don't we put him on a dog leash?" And I found this location, which is in an actual location for the mentally disturbed. There are mental patients all over this building. This was another case where Kristi would talk to Brett, and then she would send me drawings for the design for this knowing that it might help me as I thought about the scene and wrote it. Kristi had a lot of fun with the look of this scene and so did Dante. Dante did an amazing job because his interpretation put a lot of smoke in here so that the white lights would... Dante liked the way Lecter goes in and out of the brightness so that he almost seems to be a ghost. Which is like evil light as well. He said, "Evil light doesn't only have to be dark. It can be white as well." This leash thing, I love. He meant to use the bolt cutter to enter the house, but he didn't. That shot I did earlier, where you see the line saying, "Do not cross." It was the last shot of the night, and I almost forgot it, but I said, "In this whole scene, when I shot it, I don't remember seeing the floor. "I have to establish it so that the audience knows there's a do-not-cross line." Why is he standing there? The original idea for the scene was that you'd think it was a dream sequence. If you look, it's shot very close. The way you shot Edward's entrance into the room, we don't know at first where he is or whether it's a dream. And here comes Lecter walking towards him with no bars between them. Then we pop out and reveal that he's on a leash. It's a great moment in the film. When I was working on the first draft, I just thought, "This is a scene that's not in the book." Most of these Lecter scenes are not. I thought, "If I were directing this movie, I'd like to get away from that cell for once. "And give the actor a chance to use his whole body. "And have nothing between the two actors." To me, it was really the parallel of the scene with Jodie and Tony at the museum in Memphis, in that big cell that Kristi designed, which was amazing. I needed a set piece as magnificent as that, 'cause that really opened up the movie. I thought you'd be very grateful not to have the Plexiglass between them for once. And to have them be able to move together, walk together. Sometimes just the technical challenges you face force more creativity. It was only his first time. Already in Atlanta he did much better. Rest assured, my dear Will, this one will give you plenty of exercise. I love Will's reaction to that line. Edward's great when he's not saying lines, actually. You know, the mark of great acting is: How interesting is an actor when he's only listening? He's a very good listener. - Jodie Foster is a great listener. She listens with such intelligence and such engagement, and Edward can do the same thing, and so can Tony. It really is a hallmark of great acting. You see that a lot with Ralph Fiennes here. He doesnt have a lot of dialogue. He's listening, thinking and reacting. It's a very poignant performance by Ralph. It's easy to play the monster. It's hard to be the guy who's a horrible monster... It's hard to make the audience care about the character instead of just dismissing them. This is Azura Skye who is one of my favorite young actresses, who was in 28 Days. She had a small part in Bandits and she was awesome. Again, the importance that Brett gives to casting every part, even if it's an actor who only has a one-page scene. You want somebody who looks like they could star in their own movie. If this movie suddenly became about this bookstore, it would be interesting for the next 90 minutes. Even the voice of the girl on the phone, I cast the voice very specifically. Did you drive the studio crazy by waiting to cast some of these parts for so long? Till the last minute, yeah. ...darn it, she never did. I'm just a temp. Linda will be in on Monday. I have to catch FedEx in about five minutes. I hate to bother Dr. Bloom about it because he told Linda to send it and I don't want to get her into trouble. This was hard for timing because it's one shot and it's a lot of dialogue, and I wanted the camera to land at the right place. The camera and the lens that you pick help with the emotion, intensity, and realness of the scene. Is it hard to move in like this without changing lenses and keep the focus? Yeah. Especially anamorphic. The focus on this move is impossible. Mike Weldon was the AC on this movie. He's a genius. Anamorphic is the wide screen? Anamorphic is wide screen, but there's not a lot of depth of field at all. So it's impossible to focus when you're moving into a subject. It's just the hardest thing ever.

43:19 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

This sequence was shot in the wet set. We call it the wet set because it's wet, I guess. It has water, but it's basically a pile of sandbags shaped like a big swimming pool, and it was on a parking lot. So we were standing on the asphalt of a parking lot. We flooded it. This was where we shot the outside the mines of Moria with that lake where the monster attacks them outside the entrance of the mine. We used it for the dead marshes in the two towers, and it also served as flooded Isengard, so it was a really worthwhile bit of set to build.

14:16 · jump to transcript →

James McTeigue

I wanted it to be like a fascist state but more about... ... how people live now. About more how... ... society is, and politic is... ...and people are controlled by capitalism. It's not about beating people into submission anymore. I think everyone's worked out that those manifestos don't work. Today, I think a dystopic vision... ...lncludes something more like, you know... ...material comfort, sort of, you know... ...quelling your desire to speak out against injustice, or something. It's more like an Iran totalitarian society... ... than a Soviet Union totalitarian society. You do have the creature comforts. Maybe your choice is limited. But it's not about being beaten into submission. It's about being complicit. He should conclude that the New Bailey will become the symbol of our time... ...and the future that our conviction has rewarded us. Mr. Heyer. Our surveillance cameras captured several images of the terrorist... ... though the mask obviously makes retinal identification impossible. We also managed to get a picture of the girl that Creedy's men were detaining. Who is she, Mr. Finch? - Not sure yet, sir. But we're working on several leads. - Anything else? We located the fireworks launch... ...and found traces of the explosives used at both sites. Unfortunately it appears that despite the heavy level of sophistication... ... these devices were homemade with over-the-counter chemicals... ...making them very difficult to trace. Whoever he is, chancellor, he's very good. Spare us your professional annotations, Mr. Finch. They are irrelevant. Apologies, chancellor. Gentlemen, this is a test. Moments such as these are matters of faith. To fail is to invite doubt into everything we believe... ...everything we have fought for. Doubt will plunge this country back into chaos, and I will not let that happen. Gentlemen, I want this terrorist found... ...and I want him to understand what terror really means. England prevails. England prevails. TV is so ubiquitous, you know. I mean, it's everywhere. You can't escape it. Part of it is a bastardization of what happened in the novel. There is, like, a TV station siege. Then, I think it's pretty obvious... ... that, you know, capitalism has won out, everywhere. Part of your social strata in some countries... ... 1S how big your TV is and how many TVs you've got. That's a way of disseminating information. And whether that information is right or wrong or it's bad or it's good... .or it's true or it's untrue. I think that's what I was trying to get at. It's also a part of the, obviously, part of the system of control. You have a government broadcasting station and it seems to be the only one. I mean, I can't remember. I might be wrong. But it seems like it's the only station that everyone.... And then you see everyone watching that very station... ...and Evey's working at it. And Deitrich is ready for his tea. I don't get it. Why does he wear a Guy Fawkes mask? Didn't Fawkes try to blow up Parliament? It's not too late. He's still got another 16 hours. Maybe he's just getting started. Yeah? Okay. A lead on the girl. Look, don't get me wrong, I love it. A cow getting crucified. It's hysterical. But you'll never get it approved. You've got to rewrite it, okay? Gotta go. I don't recall getting stood up by a more attractive woman. Mr. Deitrich... - Gordon, please. I don't need "mister" to make this body feel any older. Gordon... ...I was on my way last night, but there were Fingermen... ...and I got scared and went home. Sadly, after last night, I think our curfew will only get worse.

11:00 · jump to transcript →

Richard Wright, producer. Mans, director. Bjorn Stein, director. Gary Lucchesi, producer. James McQuaide, executive producer and visual effects supervisor. What, you get two titles? - Well, you know. Big shot. So here we are... ...at the beginning of the fourth Underworld movie. That's right. Been a lot of them. The first appearance of Len Wiseman's... ...new logo. - New logo. The world premiere. - In 3D, no less. Oh, my God. It's like our life flashing before our eyes. Yeah. We've lived through these. Exactly. I think it's fun to say that... ...I think we cut the... Edited the whole film for eight weeks... ...and then we spent three weeks editing the first three minutes. That's exactly right. - It was crazy how to get it... And it was, "Shall we do a recap or shall we not? Does it feel cheesy with a recap or is it good?" But I think that everybody agreed in the end... ... that we have this wonderful library or cupboard of wonderful images... ...SO let's use it. And it's a wonderful way to get into the mood... ...and this is the world. lt has been a while too, since Underworld 2... ...where this one picks up from. We're reminding ourselves of all the characters. It's not cool, but in the end it... Wow, it really works. Yeah, I had a friend-- We had a premiere yesterday, actually... ...and I had a friend who hasn't seen the prior ones... ...and she said it was helpful... ...to just get into the soul of what this is, so.... And it's so nice to see Michael Sheen... ...and Scott Speedman and Bill Nighy. Yeah. - Losing their heads. killed the elders.... Yeah. One of the things we really liked when we got the script... ...was that number four... That it was the beginning of something new. That it was not just number 17 or something. It was.... The trilogy was done... ...and now we got into something new... ...which is exactly what we're watching right now. And this was a big thing how... That we wanted it to be brutal... ...and hand-held and gritty, using a camera language... ... that hasn't been used in Underworld before. Yeah. To turn everything upside down. This is another part of the film where we did... ...a tremendous amount of work trying to figure out... ... how to frame the fact that we're 15 years in the future... ...and the world has changed... ...and how you do that economically... ...In a different camera style than the rest of the film. Because this is in 2D, not in 3D as the rest of the film is. One of the biggest inspirations for this intro... ...Was actually the Gavras video, the M.I.A. video. What's the name of that? "Born Free." - "Born Free." Oh, that guy. - He's great. This guy, he's just at casting... ...and we realized that we need something... ...and we cut this rollout and then suddenly we needed him... ...SO this is his casting tape. - His audition tape, yeah. Yeah. - Yep. Used it in the film. I love that head shot. James really enhanced this with the visual effects he put into it. These creatures, yeah. The creature shots. Because they weren't shot that way. Yes. They're hard to come by, these creatures. That one was a real one. That's a real one. - Yeah. A real Werewolf. Yeah, we had a few. - Yeah. We can cast them in the forests of Vancouver. What we just saw... That girl on the wall... ...IS Kate's stunt double. - Yeah. She did... - Alicia. Alicia Vela-Bailey, yeah. She took iPhotos of her body for each bruise she got. She was black and blue, this girl... ...and she's the toughest girl I've ever met. Went to the hospital more than once too. Yeah. - Yeah. But as he said, the toughest girl I ever met. Yeah, always with a smile. Always with a smile. And you will see her getting thrown around a lot in this one. All of those flying-into-the-wall sort of things... . It's actually a person, Alicia, getting thrown in. Or Kate sometimes, as well. - Yeah. So we wanted to start off in 2D, gritty... ...and then since this is 3D movie... ...we wanted it to... Really make it big... ...when we see Kate for the first time, and that's when we switch to 3D. This shot was actually planned to start inside the fire... .In the beginning, inside a skull... ...and then going through the flames... ...a Vampire skull, but it became too tedious. That was the four-hour version. Yeah, this... We're very European. European version. Very... It was also a shot that we fought to keep in... ...and there was some obstacle to that... ...but we succeeded in keeping it in. Obstacle being money. - I love the way you say that. We ran out of money. And you see the surroundings here is-- We tried to create... Since this is the first time we introduce a man really... ...In the Underworld franchise... ...we wanted to find architecture... ... for the city that wasn't, you know, just another city. And after a lot of thinking and looking.... You know, we were thinking the first film was shot in Budapest... ...and it had that gothic feel to it and... By the way, great blood splatter there. - I love it. That was beautiful. And then we found something-- If you haven't been to Eastern Europe... ... you see all these beautiful houses... ...but next to them you have these concrete, hard, depressing buildings. And there's something called brutalism. You mean brutalism? - Brutalism, yes. A word we've heard 700,000 times during the making of this film. You were insanely annoying by just trying to put brutalism in... ...brutalism in, put brutalism in... ...to find what we call neo-Goth. Which is a new Goth. - Neo-Goth, yeah. This plate's actually from Underworld 2. This was.... We were doing tests for that boat that exploded... ...and we went back and found the footage... ...and stole that plate and revamped it here for what you see. Yeah. The secret of every great artist is knowing where to steal. Where stuff is hidden, in this case. - Yeah. It was one of the biggest challenges that we didn't have Scott Speedman. So that was a face replacement of a stuntman... ...and I think that was the trickiest part to pull off, I think, in the movie... ...because we're setting up this love story. She's running for her love and we don't have the real guy. Yeah. - But I think because of the recap... ...we do get that.... Do you see that city in--? That city is all CG behind her that's burning. And I remember James had said, "What do you think?" And I remember we asked about that, like, months ago... ...or half a year ago, and I forgot about it... ...and then you just come up with this. It was like a birthday present. I was so happy. All these backgrounds in it... ...makes It so much richer. And remember this next shot coming up too of Kate swimming... ...was really the last footage that we shot on the movie. Yeah. In the tank. We all had this great concern that, you know... ...can Kate swim or not? She ended up being a fantastic swimmer. She was great. She was.... This is more than swimming. It's performing underwater. She held her breath so well. lt was unbelievable. We were.... - Yeah. Well, that's typical Kate, you know. Everything she does, when she does it is, like, perfect. Yeah. - Yeah. But filmmaking's about being afraid... ...things aren't gonna work. - Right. We had anticipated the worst and we were wrong. And this is-- Originally the Underworld title was here. This is our homage to Tree of Life. - Yes. We had the title here at one point... ...and this is a transition... ...which is very abstract and weird, actually. But I'm happy with it. These were the things... ...that I remember it was hard to describe. We were very sure exactly how we wanted it... ...but we couldn't really say "this is how to do it"... ...because we'd never seen it before. But now when I see it... James, who did this? - Celluloid. Fucking great. - It's great. Yeah. It's great too, because we added the spin... ... sort of late in the equation. This may be an intellectual idea. Hopefully it works. To sort of make the audience... ...particularly when you see it in 3D, disoriented. Kind of like Kate was as a result of being underwater... ...being Knocked out and waking up 12 years later. There's something about spinning... ... that sort of makes you visually confused. Also, not only the spinning, but also the kind of... ...stop and motion feel to it, that it's... - Time passing? lt has a time-lapse feel to it... ...which, you know, was a subtle way of saying time has passed... ...actually, 12 years. - It's one of my favorite shots. Yes. - This is beautiful. Another very disorienting shot, though. So this is actually Alicia hanging here... ...and it's Kate's face replacement on her. Yeah. And the ice is CG. - Yeah. Smoke is CG. I am glad that we put the name on the glass there, "Subject 1." Yeah. So nobody would get into the wrong tank. No, but the thing is, I don't think it's just for like: "Oh, it's for the idiots." But I think it looks good. Subject 1 sounds brutal, I think, in a very good way. There's that word again. - Yeah. And remember that set initially... ...when we first saw it, had all these shower curtains in front of it... ...and we asked Claude to remove them. Yeah. - Oh, right, yeah. One thing that we really wanted to do in this movie was that... And we told Brad, who was the excellent second-unit director... ...and stunt coordinator, we said that we very.... We want to hurt Selene a lot. "Could you find somebody we can do that to?" Yeah. Because she wasn't that hurt in the other movies. We said, "We really want to--" Do you think anybody's listening to you right now? The naked girl, I'm watching that instead. Everybody's so nervous when you shoot something like this... ...but Kate was so cool. She was. Yeah. - Yeah. It was nothing. - Here we have Stephen Rea. Yep, there he is. Our Irish. - Yeah. I think, yeah... I really liked working with him. He was... Stephen is a handful, but he's also.... He gives you what you need. Is there anybody in this film that ended up doing their native accent? The North Americans were doing English... Kate. - Yeah, Kate, that's true. Everybody else was doing a different accent. Sandrine Holt there. - Sandrine Holt. Hurry. Releasing... ...maximum dose of fentanyl.

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Francis Lawrence

This was kind of a fun sequence. The tension here. Finding Marta, having been tortured and dead in the bathtub. We ended up creating... I've had great success with this kind of thing before, where you create very lifelike dummies so the person doesn't have to act dead, and they don't have to lay around in a bathtub all day. But this great practical creature effects company built this very, very lifelike dummy of Thekla that was molded to sort of lay in the tub, and it was interesting. The plastic bag was something that was just there to protect the dummy at one point, and so it was placed there, but I just liked the look of it. I thought it actually added a whole other layer of creepiness that the clear plastic bag was left draped over her head. And you can see, too, that sort of rectangular mark on the leg, which is a bit of foreshadowing for a sequence that's gonna come up later in the movie, in terms of a too! that Matorin, our assassin there, that just sort of shoved Jen's face down into the tub. There's a tool that he uses later in the movie, that that nods to. Close your door.

1:17:30 · jump to transcript →