The first day of shooting

a mile and a half square that we landscaped. All of the roads were built, the hobbit hods were built, the trees, often the trees were planted, the gardens were planted. None of this existed. It's a lot of work to go in for what's a relatively short amount of screen time really that we see the exterior of Hobbiton, but we felt that you just had to sell it. It couldn't look artificial or fake in any way possible. This shot here of Ian banging on the door was Ian's very first shot in the film.

15:22 · jump to transcript →

This is day one. He'd just come off X-Men, flown to New Zealand January 2000, and this was the very first scene that we shot. He really hadn't quite figured out Gandalf, but he was doing a pretty good job for his first day. The Ian Holm shots were actually done inside a studio from the location of Matamata, that's Ian McKellen, and then when you cut to Ian Holm, we're inside a studio. Andrew Lesney, our cinematographer, did a brilliant job of matching the indoors and outdoors. Now, some of the scale things

15:50 · jump to transcript →

We had very few injuries. We were very, very lucky. And obviously we planned things as well as we could. But one of the more serious injuries we had was this moment here that when those guys fall, one of the stuntmen actually dislocated his shoulder on set and had to be carted away to hospital. It was like one of those very simple things that shouldn't have gone wrong. And, you know, you would never have thought it would have led to an injury, but it was just a freaky accident. This was the first day, wasn't it? The first day of shooting, yeah.

52:46 · jump to transcript →

That's what my brother calls my bad-gas moment. This one here? Were you harnessed in? Insert sound effect there. - The extended version. You were way up in the tower, right? You were harnessed in? No, because eventually, I didn't. There was some... That's right. That was green screen. - No, it was just somebody else. Oh, okay. You refused. - I didn't. There were some shenanigans going on. Somebody made me feel unstable, and I wouldn't get on it. It is a bit bad-gassy-looking... - It is, isn't it? Now come think of it. We went up there. It ended up being Nicole. That first shot is Nicole. I can't believe she did that, jumped off. She did not. That's a rumour. I totally did it. Oh, I'm sorry. The funny thing is, so many people get fooled by that. That shot that's coming up, they do think it's me. I'm sure it was you. You did it a couple times, she did it once. That's not me. - There's you, in the hoodie. Oh, yeah, I'm brooding in the hoodie. Now, he's a potato farmer, apparently. - Really? He is, from Idaho. - Slash vampire? Yeah, apparently he is. My makeup artist was keen on him for a minute. Lovely strong hands. There he goes. But he didn't speak any English, right? - No. As did, like... Eighty percent of the crew didn't. Right. I mean, you barely spoke English. - I tried. Neither of you speak English. Thank you very much. - Okay. There I go. I really like how she did that. - Good knees on that. They're not my knees. - Those aren't your knees, no. This is where we just drenched you for hours. I was miserable. - The rain machines wouldn't work. I felt like they worked really well. I was soaking wet. All the people running up to you wearing 15 coats... I thought it was still cool that there were rain machines... ...and I was going to get wet. By the end, I was cursing water. I Kept falling there, slipping down. This is like-- Inside the subway was the very first week we did. Yeah, we did that fake set, right? - Yeah. Was that a fake set or a real set? - Wasn't it real? It was real. - No. You were there, weren't you? I was there. It was a subway station, but didn't we build something too? Well, yeah. It was actually... lt was a repair yard for the trains. Then we built that set around the train. - I knew I was on to something. There you go. - Here's love. Immediate love. - Damn it, I have a pimple. Do you? - You don't see that? I see it first. I thought we wiped that out. - No. Oh, my God, it was so tense. lt was so hot in that subway. Yeah, it was brutal. Boiling hot week there was in Budapest before it became arctic. And everybody's in these leather coats. This was the first thing we shot, right? - Yeah. Yeah, this was the second day of filming. The first day of shooting was you in the hospital. Then I came in with those horrible boots and tried to get your approval. Yeah, that's right. I remember I did not want to shoot that scene first. That moment I won't talk about. - No, neither did I. I felt like I'd had absolutely no preparation on firing the guns. They told me, "We're going to do a take." I said, "Oh, my God." Literally almost shook, afterwards. Felt like I'd drunk, like, 20 cups of coffee. I was worried I was gonna get in trouble, because it was a cheap movie. "You have one chance. We don't have money for another pillar." Like, "Oh, great." - You did great, though. No, there was all that stress... ...because we really didn't have a chance to re-squib things. He says, "No pressure, Kate, but we only got pillar with squibs in. The thing's going to be ruined if you mess It up." This sequence is still pretty much the same. Yeah, this stays the same. Here I go, panicking. I remember all this. You did an amazing skid. Did that make it? Yeah, it did. - That was fantastic. But I do grab her crotch, unfortunately. Right. I ass-grab her. - You did that in rehearsal too. She cried afterwards. Is that why? - Probably, it was real claw. She was terrified with this squib. She had never done one before. And she was horrified. - Yeah, she had a real sob after. There she is. I did not mean to. That was unintentional. They're all looking at it now. Remember when we were shooting that scene... ... for you peeking your head out, to get the reaction, I kept firing guns? Yeah. Yeah. I was asking you to do that, yeah. We ended up doing that the entire film. - Here I go. Ass-grab! She was really cute. Everybody was harassing her because of that. Really, everybody was harassing her. - Yeah. But not after my grubby hands got all over her. Oh, my stunt guys. Look. Hank, he's always the one who was, like, pulling. He was my favourite one to pull wires. - Oh, this is where you save me. Thank you for that, by the way. - Kind of a lady-boy.

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What to say? So many things to say. I Know. They were such nice guys. I think Rich looks like Jesus. - He does. Oh, he's scary. - Got a couple Jesuses going on. Do they have to be completely naked? - They weren't. They just rolled their knickers down, didn't they? Do we not say "knickers" in America? - You can say knickers. lf you're a 5 year old, you say knickers. Michael looks fantastic. - Yeah, he does. There is a bit of a Jesus theme going on there. You can see... - Look at that. You can see... How come in this cut--? It might just be... ...we're looking at something else. - They were really embarrassed. That is embarrassing. Gotta be naked in front of... It's not so much the naked. It's the wet perm that would bother me. They do have a bit of a wet perm. Here's the famous driving scenes. - Yes. Can't operate a bicycle. - ls this where the car wouldn't work? No, I couldn't drive. - No. We had to give her the basic lessons... ...of where the steering wheel is, where the gas pedal is. And don't I have pneumonia here? That was the day I was... First day I was back at work after getting pneumonia. Oh, nice passive smoke for me, there. This guy was great. - Yeah. What's his name? - Robbie Gee. Robbie Gee, that's right. He was great. Scott McElroy taught me everything about guns I know. Right on the right-hand side. - Yeah. He was the good cop to Brad Martin's bad cop. Till I found out Brad Martin is really nice.

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Now, was this the first day of--? - Dialogue. First dialogue scene we did... - No, no. No, it was the same set. It was the... Firing range. - Weapons-firing thing. This just took forever. There was just a lot of people to cover. None of us were really very good. Is that what you're saying? I remember it being so-- All of us madly negotiating those teeth the first time. It took about... - Oh, yeah. It took everyone three or four days. I can really see it, and everybody's: Well, everybody-- A lot of people kept licking their front teeth. That girl never stopped chewing gum, that girl with dark hair, Death Dealer. How she managed it with her teeth.... Well, she didn't have teeth. - She didn't have teeth? No. The people that didn't talk didn't have teeth. They just chew.

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One other interesting note about this scene, that is a real keg with real beer, and Jacob Pitts, our delightful Cooper, really liked these scenes a lot. It's what we like to call method acting. That's one of the things we learned. Or simply drinking. - Aren't they the same? I guess we should introduce our cast, now that you've been watching for ten minutes. Scotty Mechlowicz as Scott Thomas. - Which is why we cast him. Make it very easy on ourselves. The beautiful and talented Michelle Trachtenberg as Jenny. And Travis Wester is her twin, Jamie. And that's Jacob Pitts going off to take a leak. And this was another one of our delightful cameos that we got because we were in Prague. Yep, that's Matt Damon, which... Everyone in the theater sort of goes, "It can't be. Is it? Is it really?" Why is his head shaved? He was actually in Prague shooting Brothers Grimm for Terry Gilliam at the time. And we actually went to college with Matt years ago. So we've been sort of friendly ever since. And he was in Prague and we asked him to do a day of work for us, and he agreed. The biggest favor ever. - Thank you, thank you, thank you, Matt. Yeah, Matt's just hilarious here. Matt's not watching this DVD. We're going to make him watch it. That'll be another commentary. That would be the biggest favor he's ever done. But the band was actually started by some other friends of ours from college. I guess this is as good a time as any... A couple of them were of Matt Damon's roommates in college. The band Lustra... - One of them. The band Lustra, good guys. And they wrote the song, which is really fun. We've known each other since college. I'm going to just talk now 'cause no one's listening to what I'm saying, because there's a naked girl on the screen. I wasn't listening. What were you talking about? Now this, in the unrated version that we're watching, she started off topless. In the theatrical release, if you saw it, we actually cut a different version where she started off with her top on and Cooper talks her out of her top. - He convinced her to take it off. And it was very strange, sort of, when you get into this whole nudity thing. Obviously, it's a hot tub scene, but somehow when her top was on and he talked her out of it, while it was a very exciting moment that he talked her out of it, it oddly made her dumber, even though she is sort of a stereotypical dumb blonde. - Right. And we always liked it this way, the way you're seeing it. We liked the scene to answer the question, "What is beyond gratuitous?" That's the answer. - There it is. And there they are. The answers. The other stuff we added back into the scene is just more of him screwing around with her. Because, to us, once you're at the nudity, it's how far he goes. This scene... - It's not about nudity. No, this scene was always about the crazy extent to which he got her to play with herself, as opposed to just getting her to take her top off. By the way, the banner in the background originally... This is what happens when you work in Prague. It's a big congratulations banner. The first day when we got there, it just said "congratulation," like one singular congratulation, which is a word we didn't know existed. Sort of a funny story about this scene, which, hopefully, we can tell. We were actually rewriting another movie, which I guess we'll leave nameless, that had a hot tub scene in it and we came up with this idea, which was the fact that a guy saying, "You have a smudge. You've got something on you." And we were really enjoying what we were doing so much that we didn't put it in that script. And we're like, "We'll use it one day." And here it is. Screw it. The movie was called Out Cold, I think. Yeah, exactly.

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The shot just before this, the one outside, we actually shot at the Prague airport, which is another advantage to shooting in Prague. I don't think there's any way you could get a camera crew right on the departure gate of an American airport anymore because of security. Of course, one of the downsides of shooting at the real airport in Prague is that we had our day curtailed by a bomb threat. Bomb threat, which I still maintain... - Potato, potato. I maintain may have been because of us, and there was no bomb. There was no bomb. - I'm sure some... A grip left a bag of clamps somewhere and... But that was another scene, too, where, when we look at it, there was sort of a way of shooting it, two different ways of... We started shooting them sort of looking out where we were shooting into those boring offices, and obviously the prettier shot... I know I'm talking backwards... In hindsight, we should've shot the other direction. We should've shot in the other direction, because when they do turn around, you see that background. And again, these are lessons that were sort of both imparted to us as we were going along by our wonderful DP, who we should mention, David Eggby. - David Eggby, who saved us from ourselves every day. And there's a certain amount he can tell us, which he certainly did, and there's a certain number of times where we have to be wrong before you learn and certainly that was an example again, something we did where... The other thing in the deleted... - He warned us and we didn't. In between the courier counter and this scene, there's some fun stuff in the deleted scenes, which is they realize that they're gonna have to take all these courier packages, so they don't know what to do with all their clothes. They have to wear all of them onto the plane and through the airport. There was about 15 minutes of stuff which... Decide for yourself whether it works or not. It didn't work in the movie, but it's fun to look at. And by the way, Jacob's T-shirt says, "I'm rocking on your dime." Travis owned that T-shirt and we thought it was funny, so we put it on Jacob in the movie. These transitions-- That's my dog. These transitions were... That's my queen of England. - That's your beaded London flag. Yeah, it goes on the back of my cab seat. These transitions were also done by Kyle Cooper at Prologue. There's a few more of them coming up. You'll see. And this is our first big visual effects shot. Yeah, this was an amazing debate. That's not the real Jacob Pitts. That's a robot. This was shot in Prague by... There's a big river in Prague and that's all real. That's real. And we put a little British flag there, and basically the background was replaced. Not in these shots. In that shot. - In that shot, the background is replaced because on that side, I think, was... Is that where our hotel was? I don't remember. No, we were further down. - Further down, okay. And I guess we should mention Kevin Blank, who was our visual effects guru supervisor, who we found from the TV show Alias, where each week they do a lot of really amazing things like this. Right. If you look in the background, you see the buses on the bridge. The bridge is real and the buses are real, but the stuff behind that is not real. But the flag, for example, I don't think that's real. They added that. If you look at the clouds move... - There's cars moving on the side. The clouds are moving. They put those clouds in. And what Kevin allowed us to do, besides being a really good guy, as everyone on this movie was, he let us do a lot of big effects like that on sort of a TV budget which allowed... This was a "smaller budgeted movie," and it let us do some special effects without bringing in these, like, big effects companies where it would cost a lot of money. By the way, this is about the time that we should mention the Feisty Goat. This is the Feisty Goat pub. And we saw the sign out in front, which we misspelled. I think this is the right time to say that Alec, David and I went to Harvard and we didn't know how to spell "feisty." We spelled it wrong in the stage directions. Spelled it "fiesty." - The guys who made the sign just took our spelling. We showed up on the day and the crew was laughing and we couldn't figure out what they were laughing at. We shot an entire day without anyone noticing and on day two, people realized. - No, they knew. Did they know? Okay. - Oh, yeah. They were laughing their asses off at us. And then finally, it was like, "Did you guys know?" And they're like, "Yeah." - And this is the incomparable Vinnie Jones who, when we wrote the part of Mad Maynard, the chief hooligan, we hoped that maybe we could get Vinnie Jones. We wrote it with Vinnie Jones or a Vinnie Jones-type in mind, never thinking that we would get the real Vinnie Jones. The dream being Vinnie Jones or someone that would rip Vinnie off. And the pleasure of getting him was just so great. It was amazing. He scared the living daylights out of these two. They're not... This is, again, method acting. We told Vinnie that they were really... that the kids were really scared of him, and he did nothing to make them feel at home for this scene.

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We're in the French restaurant. You cannot tell by looking at everybody, but it is over 100 degrees in there. They turned off the air conditioning at this restaurant. No one told them to, but they thought they would help us by turning off the air conditioning. And the kids are just sweating. I mean, you can't even... If a take went wrong, we'd have to stop. You couldn't just keep rolling because they're dripping. And we actually had a guy, this poor English actor that we cast, who was actually really funny, who came in and was so hot and sweating so badly that he just couldn't focus. It's in the deleted scenes. You'll see some very funny scenes with a French waiter and some funny French waiter flashbacks. We just had to cut it, 'cause it wasn't... Featuring Jim Morrison and General Patton. The other thing... It'll come up again later, but them putting the food down leads to the food map joke, which will be coming. I'll tell that story later. It's good to-- We'll earmark it. - A little preview. This is the main Prague train station. And our production... - Again Allan and... Allan and Neno dressed it, so that people actually got off the train, a couple of people, and thought they were in Paris 'cause they saw the signs and they were very weirded out 'cause they had gotten on a train in, like, Hungary somewhere and they thought they were in Paris mistakenly. Michelle being a fantastic sport. The first of many indignities that she was forced to suffer. And Coca-Cola being a great sport. This is what shooting in a train station is about. Another one of these, "We are idiots, we don't know, so we'll set a scene in a train station." If you notice in the background... This is a game Alec likes to play: train, no train. Okay. This is my little game in this scene. Behind him, green train. That train is gone in the next shot. - Okay. No train. But who cares about the train, I mean... Train. - Again, the lesson learned... It's my game, I'll play it. - I know, but look at these backgrounds. No train. - These great, deep backgrounds. We are in a train station in Europe. We are not in Vancouver. No train. Train. - Michelle's scream turn is one that... She's just... - She did it fantastically. Different train. - We caught that attitude a little bit from our own little Seinfeld experience. It's what we like to call a Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Elaine move. The sort of being sweet, screaming and then going back to sweet. And Buffy was a hilarious show. - Can't say enough about Michelle. And I don't know if Michelle always got a chance... You know, she was sort of a supporting character on that show. And on this, she got to really shine with her comedy. Anyway, here's the maps. What I wanted to say is this is a Raiders of the Lost Ark map parody, which is a joke that is about, I don't know, ten years old. It's something we wanted to do a million years ago and again something we saved. There's the Jackie Collins book again. And the headline, "Merde Alors! L'Hooligan! I actually-- I don't know if I even told you guys this, but I was at an Iron Maiden concert about six months ago and I saw a guy wearing that Deep South Monster Truck 1987 shirt. Was that guy you? - Or whatever it is-- Rally '79. No, it wasn't me, but I envied him. Fred Armisen. - As what we... In the script, he's called the Creepy Italian Guy. Not, as some people wrote down in the test screenings, the Train Homo. We actually call him Creepy Italian Guy. And, again, just production-wise, we're shooting on a moving train here, which is yet another of our naive mistakes. - Do not shoot on a moving train. We thought, "Just put them on a train. It'll be easy." Just the most cramped quarters, limited angles. We actually shot this one scene in three different compartments. We had a compartment where we could look one way, a compartment where we could look another way... We pulled out walls so we could shoot different ways. And then we had one compartment where we were shooting in, one that we were shooting out. It was madness. - Plus... Fred, by the way, is just so funny in this. We, last minute... - We also... I'm sorry. I do wanna say that we also then shot it both moving and then did other shots not moving so that we could do the light effects of the tunnel. Which is a poor man's process, because there's no tunnel. This is obviously on a moving train. - 'Cause you can see the window. And then when we do the shots where it goes from light to dark or from dark to light, we pulled the train inside a barn and blacked it all out and then did the lighting effect by hand. So, the Creepy Italian Guy, Fred Armisen from Saturday Night Live... This was another thing where we originally went into this thinking we will find a genuine Italian guy. And, again, we searched the world for a real Italian guy. A lot of Europeans are not funny. They just didn't get the joke. - It's a language problem. They were simply performing the words of the script, but didn't necessarily have any idea what they actually meant. And Fred is someone who's just fantastic on SNL. That little shrug is awesome. So, that shot, for instance, is inside. I think we hired him... - And that's inside. We hired him on a Sunday and he was out there on Tuesday. Yeah. - So, really amazing. And, again, these are all these little touches that he added. I think Travis, who plays Jamie, is fantastic with him. They were a great pair. This was something we never landed on. - I don't think we ever got this right. We had a bunch of different things we shot for this darkness sequence. We had a lot of flashing lights and weird little things of Fred in various stages of undress. - What was going on in the dark. In the end, it was just undercutting... - This end reveal. Which, again... - And, I think, for the unrated version, we put this back. For the theatrical release, we kind of cut right here somewhere. No, exactly. - And then, for this one, we decided to let it roll. - This is something we just enjoyed. It's just that a guy with no pants sees more people and goes in. Actually, that's where we're sitting. That's the compartment where we are sitting with the monitor. To do it all over again, one thing that might've been enjoyable was had we come running out of the compartment. Just, the idea that the man with no pants... This is the very first thing we shot. - First shot ever. It's actually an interesting way to see our cast. The train revealing our cast and us seeing them for the first time. It was a neat experience. - A horrible-looking little train station. The first time we visited it was in winter and just looked awful. And, again, Allan and his guys just came in there... And I think, actually, the manager of the train station asked them to leave everything. Left it all, those flower boxes and the shutters, and just turning it into this beautiful, little French countryside place. That was always a fun shot, where he lays down and jumps back into it. You know, and again, day one, we must've done 30 takes on everything on day one. One of the things about comedy... - We also shot close-ups of everything. Every angle. Everything. - This is more toward the end. This is one of the two days we shot outside of Prague. This is not a great example, because this is more towards the end, but I also think we screwed up here. That's the thing, you look back... - We did it all in one shot. Which I think is the way to do this. We did do it all in one shot, but... One of the things, I think... When I look back at the movie, a lot of our starts of scenes, I find we... Definitely something we were never thinking enough about. So that you're kind of going, "We're going to this beach." And then they're just sort of walking. And maybe had we come off a sign... - That was one of my favorite things. Definitely a fun joke. - Also, it was freezing. You can see Scott... - It's freezing. The gray sky. Wish we'd gone in and maybe colored the sky blue a little more. 'Cause the sun does come out. But just something that maybe... If the camera had moved or something to kind of say "beach," as opposed to that weird stock shot of nothing and then this. And this scene seems to get a lot of people in an uproar. Everyone sort of sees it-- and people... There we are. - Right. This is one of the two days we shot outside of Prague. This is in Rostock, in former East Germany. This was apparently one of Hitler's favorite beach resorts. It's very close to where Wernher von Braun used to develop the V-2 rocket. Wall of cock. - Speaking of V-2 rockets... Everyone seems to laugh at this scene and also go... It is everyone's favorite and least favorite. In all the test screenings we did, it was the most favorite scene and also the least favorite scene. And I think a lot of it had to do with... There were a lot of, like, 18, 19-year-old guys who felt obliged to put it down because they needed to state that they weren't gay. We originally started off shooting it with sort of an idea towards an Austin Powers kind of a thing. You know, you could even see a couple of guys with ridiculously long cameras and stuff trying to cover penises. - Kind of strategically... And once we were there, it just looked dumb and we realized, to some extent... I mean, to us, the only rule is ever: "What's the funniest thing?" And, ultimately, 50 penises was the funniest thing. Everyone goes, "How did you get those guys to take their clothes off?" It's like, "This is Germany. We showed up with a camera. They were already naked." The most surprised people on the set were those 50 naked German guys when they found out they got paid. It was really weird. Like, we'd take a ten-minute break and usually if there's any nudity on an American set, people dive into their robes. These guys were just letting it hang out. If these guys could've taken more clothing off, they would've. We had this amazing German AD that day. Andreas. - Andreas. Who just yelled at them and yelled at their penises. By the way, Michelle, who was very nervous about the bikini scene, couldn't look more beautiful. She was, you know, "The bikini scene, the bikini scene." And it was sort of this big thing in her mind, which... She was nervous about it for no reason 'cause she... But I think also David went out of his way to make her feel comfortable, and also to light her beautifully. Also, again, this was very near the end of the shoot. And I think there was more of a comfort level with the crew, too, and the main camera team. The comfort level was bothered a lot by the fact that Jacob, once he took his pants off for that first naked shot, wouldn't put them back on 'cause he knew it bothered everybody. I think he really enjoyed how nervous he made everyone. And poor Eggby. Poor Eggby had to go up there with the light meter. That guy-- There was a lot of protest, a lot of discussion about the old man yelling, "Chica, chica." Which... For whatever reason, it's one of our favorite things. You get a shot of him. There he is again. "Chica, chica." Which always gets a nice rise out of the crowd. This is the most beautiful shot in the movie. Not shot by us. Shot by... - Gary Wordham. ...Gary Wordham and his unit, his second unit. And it's just absolutely beautiful. And here we are on another train. But, again, we are... Because it's a night shot, we are faking this. It's a poor man's process. Occasional lights moving on the side. Because we could not do a moving train at night. So, we are inside for all of this. SO, this is, like, our fourth version of a train car. And, originally, there was... You'll see in the original script. There was another train in the deleted scene. There was another train scene of them running onto a train. This had happened earlier. It was just too many train scenes and the movie just not moving. That, again, was another one of the lessons we learned. As a writer and then a director, there are lots of things on the page that are really funny, but sometimes, when you're actually then watching the movie, "Why are they still in Paris? Why is it taking so long? Why have they not gotten to the next place?" There were too many train scenes. That one flew out, this one was in. Even if the individual scenes are funny, sometimes the cumulative effect of all these funny things makes it worse. - That's exactly it. This is a joke we created after we had shot what we did. Thanks to our music supervisors extraordinaire, John and Patrick Houlihan, who found this amazing music that was playing under this fantasy. They found this piece of music and said, "What do you think of this?" We thought it was hilarious. We said, "What is it?" And they said, "Well, it's David Hasselhoff." We thought it was so much funnier if you knew that it was David Hasselhoff. So we were like, "Is there a video?" "Yes, there is." And not only is there a video, but this is the video. And it looks something like this. Which is incredible. - That is a real David Hasselhoff video. We're still not sure whether David Hasselhoff knows that his likeness appears in this movie. I think we licensed this... - David Hasselhoff, if you're watching this with Matt Damon, thank you. Thank you both. If the two of you are just hanging out and watching this, you were fantastic. But, yeah, the German company licensed it to us and he may or may not know. And Fred back again. Which makes everybody very happy. When we were cutting the TV spots and stuff, we tried to use this lick. It's one of the things that people felt we couldn't put in television spots. We had a really hard time cutting spots that... Even though it's an R movie, I guess spots for TV need to meet both... They have to be G. - They have to be G. 'Cause trailers need to be G. You can't have anything in the commercial that isn't in the trailer. Plus, you also have to meet network standards. So, we had a really hard time putting things in the commercial. - Showing people what's in the movie. Yeah, telling people this is a good movie. Now we're in Amsterdam. This is interesting... Except we are in Prague. - We're still in Prague. This is... Yeah, it's the Kampa section of Prague. Again, one of these early locations, they found this little canal from the original scouting photos. "My God, we can even do Amsterdam there." This is also-- In Prague, there's a very famous bridge called the Charles Bridge, which is basically right above the kids. There are just hordes and hordes of tourists lined up watching this. Yeah, it was like shooting with bleachers there. This was spring, when it was packed with tourists. And this is an example where on the deleted scenes, originally when they arrive, they go to a youth hostel for a very funny scene that we ended up cutting out because, basically, there was too much Amsterdam. They had an adventure and then they had these separate adventures. It's another one of these tough things, where the scene itself was funny, but its overall effect on the movie was negative. And then actually, oddly, if you go back, originally, Amsterdam was actually very different. Originally, in the script we sold, there was a scene where, instead of going to this sex club... - With Cooper. Instead of going to the sex club with Cooper, there was this whole nother scene. Actually, everything was completely different. The original spec script we sold is on the DVD, so you have to go back and check that out. Definitely worth checking out. - By the way, we should mention her. Lucy Lawless. - Lucy Lawless. Just funny, just hilarious, obviously, and gorgeous. The entire crew was just in love with her. So we shot long on these two days. By the way, when we were shooting on these days, you've never seen more grips and crew members holding lights that used to be held by stands and holding fans that used to be hung. Everyone needed to be in this room at this time for some reason. And she also-- She, being from New Zealand, knew our A camera operator, who we should also mention. - Peter McCaffrey. Peter McCaffrey, who is absolutely fantastic. The whole A camera team, our main guys, were just incredible. Just never a problem, and just really patient and wonderful with us. The brownies. I remember these brownies... Michal, our Czech prop man, would always come in and say, "I've got more brownies for you." He'd show up with these piles of different kinds of brownies from every bakery in Prague. Which, oddly, social decorum dictated that we eat. We didn't want to be rude. So we'd start these meetings looking at all these props with all these brownies and by the end, you had chosen a brownie and also eaten it. You weren't sure which one you actually liked. You were sick to your stomach because of the meeting and how badly it went and also because we'd eaten 50 pounds of Czech brownies. This is the lovely and talented Jana Pallaske who we found in Germany. We did casting in... - London. Here. We started in LA. We did casting in New York. We did casting in Chicago, Vancouver, Atlanta, I believe, Miami, and then we went to London, Munich, Berlin, Prague. We had people in Paris. We had people in Italy. - Rome, Paris. She came out of this, and again, this was another area where things moved around in the script. Originally, this was in London. - In the original script, this was Cooper... This was Cooper in London before they met the hooligans. When Scott and Cooper first got to London, they went to a pub and they met these girls, and this was a Cooper scene. Cooper went out in the alley and was getting blown and got robbed. Which happened to a friend of ours, by the way. And we just decided that there was... - Named Out Cold. There was too much... There was too much stuff going on in London, so we moved it to... You wanted to get to the hooligans. And originally in our script, Jamie was with Scott and Jenny at the brownie bar. While Jacob was at the Anne Frank House. We just decided that they should all split up and have their own stories here. And also, what if Jamie has all their money and all their stuff and he's the one who gets robbed... - It seemed like a good plot point. I mean, it is sort of traditional, but with Jamie playing... I'm sorry, with Travis playing Jamie as sort of the somewhat traditional, you know, stick-in-the-mud, him having a little bit of a sexual escapade as opposed to Cooper, who's more lascivious, it became a funnier scene. It also helped Cooper out because Cooper wants sex and he keeps getting... He gets a version of it in this scene, but not what he wanted. Not quite the version that he wanted. - Not what he was expecting. As opposed to going to London immediately, hooking up with a girl. It oddly felt a little strange that we were going to get him together with Jenny at the end of the movie after he had gotten blown in an alley. Also, he's looking for crazy European sex and he got it right off the boat. That is a crazy outfit. - Yeah, that's the sex superhero. She is the sex superhero. As are these guys. - One of these guys is a Czech policeman. Vilem. Guy on the left. - I can't remember what the other guy does. The other guy is a large Czech clown. They were just sweaty and having a ball. Their names are Hans and Gruber, which is a small inside joke, the name of Alan Rickman's character in Die Hard. Hans Gruber. And this is a very odd scene. Anytime you're not actually seeing our two main actors, a lot of this was done second unit. - Like the shot of his ass, the shot of him with the clamps was second unit. We had a limited amount of time with Lucy. We had two days. - That's second unit, not Jacob's hand. So everything that we had to get done with her and him, we did, and then what was really helpful was we edited it... Not we, our editor edited it. - Roger. Oh, yeah, mention him. The whole editing staff, actually. We had them over in Prague with us for reasons like this. Roger Bondelli and his assistant. Marty Heselov. - Marty Heselov and Davis. Davis Reynolds. And basically, he edited what we shot and it allowed us to go... "We need this, we need that." This is things we're missing which we could instruct the second unit to get, such as guy wheeling in cart, close-up of guy doing the shocking. And it did help having the editor there, which was something originally... The editor was not going to be with us in Prague. Very helpful to have the editor there to be able to look at scenes to know what we wanted to change. That-- We're a little behind. That was Diedrich Bader from The Drew Carey Show, who was hilarious. Really funny in Office Space and in The Drew Carey Show. And flew all the way out to Prague to help us out and did a day of work. He said the last time he was there, he'd actually been here in '89. He'd gotten drunk, climbed up a statue, fallen down and broken his arm, so he was happy to come back. The pot brownie scene-- It's so funny. When you show them in front of an audience, all the sort of younger kids, just the very fact... The mention of Amsterdam got people to go... And then the fact that they're actually doing pot makes them laugh. This, we were writing on the fly. We realized the scene needed something. He needed to say something embarrassing. So he came up with the gay porno stuff. But we tried, like, three or four things. When he was a little kid, he ate dog poo. "They told me it was a candy bar!" - Really high-class stuff. But this guy, who plays the Rasta guy... - Go Go Jean Michel. ...| think we did probably ten takes with him and he got each line right one time and we ended up using it. But he cuts together great. I'm not sure, when we were doing it, I ever actually thought the microphone was picking up a word he said. Yet, oddly, it was there when we got to the edit room. Helder with his walk-off home run right there. "These are not hash branches." Because I think he had been eating hash branches earlier. Yeah, he was not an actor as much as a man who had smoked a lot of pot. And again, ultimately, this was a longer scene. There was more to do about not being able to name the safe word and the monkey was originally brought out and you just start trimming 'cause, again, you're just in Amsterdam too long. We went into this scene... There was another beat where she brought out golf shoes with big spikes and was hitting him in the ass. - We cut that almost immediately. That we cut on the day we never filmed, because we were way over time. And we ended up shooting... - This actually cuts together great. These few moments. It's a huge charge to see this thing. That is a huge charge. - Then to the f#ugelkenhaimler. The flugelkenhaimler. Gotta mention Jeff Jingle real quick. Jeff created that. - Jeff designed and built that and then came over to Prague with it, traveled with it. How he was not arrested and thrown into jail by the customs people, I don't know. - Just did an amazing job on that. There you can see the Charles Bridge. - Yeah, the Charles Bridge is behind him. We lost out. We should be making these Vandersexxx T-shirts. Someone is selling them on eBay, but they're one color. They're wrong. If you're the person who's making them on eBay, just make them the same way. But it's a fun shirt. You can see all the bugs that are flying around there. We did it as a crew shirt, actually. We gave it out to the crew. Well, this is dawn. We shot all night. This is dawn for dawn. No, no. We shot this... This is dusk for dawn? - This is dusk for dawn. This is the first shot. We were shooting nights on the bridge, and that was the first thing we did, because we were shooting that Jamie thing and we ran out of time 'cause It was getting too dark. If you go to your deleted scenes, you will see a scene that sort of happens right about now, which is Jenny... Michelle Trachtenberg-- saying, "Look, boys, I'll take care of it," and she tries to sort of strip to get them to hitchhike on the autobahn, which is impossible. Again, we were out here on this highway way too long. This is the same deserted highway where we shot the bus driving around. Also, it was freezing. - We were here way too long. It was 30 degrees and drizzling. - This was, again, continuing the rule of every time we tried to do a close-up on Michelle, it rained or hailed. She was such a trouper. Cooper's shirt, by the way, says, "I Love Ping-Pong." This phone joke was interesting. We originally had the first one which took place on the bridge in London, and that always got a good laugh. And this one never really gets that good a laugh. But there's a third one later, the comedy rule of threes, that only really works as good as it does because the second one sort of exists. And so we left it in, even though we never loved it. This is Dominic Raacke, who is basically like the Dennis Franz of Germany. He's a big cop show star in Germany. Our casting woman-- What was her name? Risa Kes found him. And actually, there's another... We were talking about the clearance stuff earlier. God, yeah. - We shot about eight takes of this guy and you can see that thing hanging from his rearview mirror. Originally there was a Tweety Bird, a Warner Brothers property, hanging from that thing and we shot about eight takes and we moved on to a different shot and somebody was looking at playback and said, "Is that Tweety?" And we looked at the playback. "We'll never clear that." - And we just decided we'll never clear. So we had to go back and reshoot everything we had done. And the camera guys thought it was so funny that we had screwed up that it became a running joke. They kept the Tweety Bird and they began adding it. Every time we would set up to do a shot, they would roll a little film before we ended up doing the shot and they would put the Tweety Bird in front of the camera, so we have a reel somewhere of that Tweety Bird in every location that we shot. - And it's fantastic. He's wearing a pope hat. He's in the hot tub. We'd love to show it to you, but Tweety doesn't clear, so we can't. So just imagine every shot in the movie with a Tweety in it.

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Because the shoot kept getting delayed, so it was molting, right? This is like the only eagle we found that's not molting in the region. So where did that eagle go? Like right into the lap of the trainer who was about three inches off screen. This is the first shot we got, the pretty shot, since we were in the desert. That was like a week into the shoot. I see the whole poultry motif now starting to emerge.

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

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You know, glaciers, streams, and also the lighting. He's lighting a lot on their faces here. Because it's so baggy, the glacier, so much reflection. But it gives it a very, you know, mystical kind of feel. This was a miserable day, first day. We did the opening ceremony, we prayed to the water, which symbolized money.

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Jonathan Lynn

is totally in character for a dentist. This is not Matthew Perry's tongue. He didn't fancy standing there all afternoon while we shot shots of teeth and tongues and things. And the first shot of Matthew is the one when we pull out and see him. This music, which, as you can hear, has suddenly taken a kind of French turn with that accordion, is part of Randy Edelman's wonderful score.

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Jonathan Lynn

in a bathing suit, one piece bathing suit and a sun hat. And we thought we weren't sure whether people would see the rain or not, so we put her in a dress and in fact it was a good choice anyway. This was a scene that was six pages long and we had to shoot it in one day. And to complicate matters, it was our first day. Normally you

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Jonathan Lynn

shoot big and difficult scenes a little later on in the schedule when the actors know each other well enough and when the crew will be working together, but we had no choice. Miraculously, we shot this whole scene within a 12-hour period on the first day. And we had rehearsed it first. The actors were just wonderful, remembered everything we'd rehearsed. Whatever. It seems that our dentist friend here knows where Yimmy is. Oh.

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This is Catherine Bigelow. I'm the director of K-19. Jeff Kronoweth, the cinematographer on K-19. Jeff and I went to Russia about four months before we started shooting in the fall of 2000.

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Initially, when we started looking at locations in Moscow, I had a lot of reservation about what we'd find there and what the equipment would be like and what situations we'd find ourselves shooting in. And one of the first places we scouted, and it was actually the first shot of the film, the first shot that we shot of the film, was in the real Moscow, an operating subway.

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own demise, sacrificing themselves for the life of the others. And I found it a very emotional experience. I think the crew did, too. Our first day of shooting of really with both actors' principal photography began in Moscow in the cemetery, which is actually the end of the picture.

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you know, what's the first shot? And then I thought the mountains. I love the idea of hearing the voices coming from the first movie. It occurred to me, it's reminiscent of what Zemeckis did on the Back to the Future Part II when the characters were sort of, you know, went back to the first film again. And I love the idea of we hear something that's familiar coming from inside the mountain, but it's not really the first film, although it's sort of going back to halfway through the first film, which is kind of neat.

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And on the very first day at Weta, way back in maybe 1997, you know, I had the designers around and I said, listen, the biggest challenge is going to be to design an ent, to design something that doesn't make us laugh. Daniel Faulkner, one of Richard's great designers, went away, drew a pencil sketch.

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you felt the character needed. Well, what was interesting about that performance in the audition is that we were videotaping the audition even though we were just looking for the voice. What was compelling was actually seeing what he was doing. It wasn't just the voice he was using. It was actually seeing the expressions on his face. Because I remember it was a pretty rough, bad quality video that we ended up with. But I remember coming back to New Zealand and having the first kind of Gollum conversations with Weta. This was long before we started shooting. And I remember dragging the Andy Serkis tape in to show them

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Andrew Niccol

It was a great idea of Zach's to add the painter, but it's not a good idea for your budget. Ethan Hawke is one of those actors who'll do whatever it takes for a role. This was Ethan's first day of shooting in South Africa. Ethan, welcome to South Africa. Now get into that inflatable in six-foot swells and act.

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Andrew Niccol

He will go down and snort powder off a dirty old carpet. This here is actually the first day of shooting in South Africa. We used Cape Town Customs House to play JFK Airport. We almost got away with it, I think. And here's the first legal day of shooting in New York.

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Andrew Niccol

Right from the first day of shooting, I should have realized I was being far too ambitious with this movie. Coming up is a drive-by shot we did prior to main unit filming. We called it a camera test. It's just a way of conning the producers.

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Every take, she was present and there. It made it easy for me. She is someone, when I worked on Felicity with her, she was so incredible at accessing that emotional place. And it was just, I was so excited to have you guys work together. Because you both have a very similar ability. Well, every take. She's amazing. She didn't work up to it. She was on. I remember seeing her the first day. She was right there. I was so glad. This is where Maggie had the other fight scene.

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you are crouched down behind phil waiting to go up we push in and we're dialing in the whole time we whip over to her and it's the classic magic trick of the beautiful assistant when we blew that car up i was holding my kids yes penny gracie and we were already we just left yes that's right it was the first day shooting okay that was the first day look at that day

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This is a scene that you wrote ten minutes the day before we started shooting. We figured out literally the day before we were shooting. You figured out. Well, we figured out. You're dead, Mr. Davy. This is the scene where I was behind camera truly just laughing at how much fun it was to watch you two go up against each other. This was so much fun playing this scene. I'll meet you in the bathroom. And you're going to tell us everything. Every buyer you've worked with. Just for fun, to point out the things that...

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

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The Chinese characters for John, what is it again? Help me. We were very careful about all of our characters' decor. All the actors had input. I really like the lighting in this scene for some reason. I just love those. This is our first day of shooting. This is our very first day of shooting. We're so excited. First scene. It was a rough day. I loved arriving on set with you guys in the van.

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It's totally stolen from another part of the scene. Yeah, it looks like it to me. I thought there was some handiwork in the editing. In some ways, this scene had the most editing work on it than any other scene. You're kidding. Because it was our first day, we really didn't quite have our rhythm yet. You guys were nervous. I was nervous. Frank was nervous. And the scene was very long. The original scene was 14 minutes. A lot of the scenes were a lot longer.

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The fights are really nice in this picture, Patrick. They're really on par with the other two, certainly. Allan Poppleton was our New Zealand stunt coordinator. He did a fantastic job. - He did a great job, yeah. So, what you're seeing here is actually the set... ... you're gonna see later in the movie, an early stage of the castle. We tried to minimalise the dressing so it felt a little different. But it's basically the same space that you'll see later. And this was the first day of shooting. - Yeah, the balcony part. Yup. The big reveal. Wanna tell you a story about the castle. The castle is such a gigantic structure. Of course, there was no way to build this. We ended up building the, what you would call, the courtyard of the castle. How many feet tall, Richard? - About 20 feet. Twenty-five, 30 feet, yeah. Which was a little challenging for the lighting... ...because we were there on top of the set. When we started, it was difficult for CGI guys to kind of extend that. Yeah, it was terrible for Sound too. Every time it rained, we'd stop shooting. The train outside, the train station? - Yeah, the train... Note to self: Do not build set next to railroad tracks next time. We have a few transformation... ...but this one actually is not a transformation. It looks like one, but everything is practical. There's nothing mechanical or anything. I love it. It's a little more American Werewolf in London approach. There is no CG help whatsoever, though. Unlike the others.... This took a while to get right, just this whole prelude... ...and Kate's voiceover, and getting people caught up. There is a lot of history, and to decide, you know, where exactly to start... ...and how much to prep it with. Hopefully, we covered everything we needed to. It looks like we moved really quickly through. I wish we had a little bit more space, a little bit more in the... Yeah. - There's so much story to....

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It was interesting with Rhona because she had to create... ...a new character, you know, somebody... It's a different time. It's a much more rougher time. I mean, I think the warrior that she created... ...IS, In a sense, quite different from the Kate character. I think she did a fantastic job there. And I think she fits the tone of the movie very well. I was very happy. I mean, she looks great. And she has a very special quality of.... What I like best about Rhona is also the looks, how she looks... ...and tell a love story just by the looks on them. You'll see that through the movie, little moments like this, she really.... Beyond being a great... She works great with swords and things. Look at the shape Michael's in. It's incredible. This was-- He started.... He came off of Frost/Nixon I think in the end of October... ...and started shooting this in January... ...and had three months to go through incredibly intense physical training... ...to get into the shape that he's in in this movie. It was a Startling transformation that he was able to do to himself. It's good to be a Lycan. I'd like to be one. Yeah. That helps. Now, this is one of the great Dan Hennah sets. I remember Len and I came from California... ...in, what was it, for the first day of shooting... ...and we walked through the sets. And not only were they beautiful to look at... ...but the flooring was all corrugated. It looked like natural cement. And apparently, Dan had some sort of formula... ...where he could lay down these floors. And they made them look absolutely... They brought in a cement mixer and dumped it on the floor. And then there's this team of guys with forms and moulds... ... sort of going along with the cement mixer. So the entire floor is actually made... ...of two or three inches of actual concrete. It makes a huge difference. On the first film, we would've liked to, in the crypt, do that. Just didn't have the money for it. It was, you know, any way that you can possibly do it... . like a faux paint job. It just doesn't pick up the light. It doesn't work. The texture, yeah. - Here's a transformation. This was late in the game. This is Michael's suggestion or no? Am I wrong about that? - This was a scene, he was really... We actually tried to cut it. And he was so adamant that we had to shoot it. This one here. This turned out really well. Who did this? A company called Intelligent Creatures. From Toronto. - This one came out really good, yeah.

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I remember that was in, that was out. I wanted it out. - Do we add CG to it? I Know, and it was just... It made more sense story-wise to keep it in. And that shot basically was given to us. You know, we had shot practical werewolves there. It didn't come out exactly the way we wanted. And those guys at Duboi said: "We've done the rest of the sequence. We want to make this one great." And basically-- Is that right, James? They wanted to do it. - That's so cool. They weren't happy with the elements as well. What did she put? What is that she's putting in there? Incense? - Or something like it. She's making a little soup. - She looks beautiful. I love how Viktor just pops up in the background there. I love that shot. And we had to darken on the wide one because he appeared... Yeah, we were just kind of like, with the DI, make him a little darker... We actually removed him from the first shot when she walks in. That's right. Yeah. He was there. So deep have I been in my own anguish at Lucian's betrayal... ...I gave no thought... One of those famous green window that protects you from the sun. The first time we got that shot, he was green like Hulk. And it was so insane. We had to tone it down quite a bit, then. I do like Bill when he's slightly, you know... Kind of riding the camp. Yeah. I just love that. But it's him. Perhaps. And then he becomes really real at moments like...

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This was John Hannah's first day of filming. It was real fun to get back together with him.

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And so even though it was slightly out of focus, it just had all the elements. That was the best. And in fact, the take had Arnold Vosloo in it, and he was painted out. This was when I'd been in Morocco a few weeks shooting. I'd already gone to Jordan and Egypt, and this is when Rachel, John, and Brendan show up for the first. This is their first shot in the movie. One thing you'll notice about that previous shot, that big shot, it was one of those horrible white...

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But I thought it'd be so much more... There was about three weeks before he started shooting, I thought, I came up to Allan Cameron and said, Alan, wouldn't it be more dramatic if there was blasting flame and steam and everything was moving and rocking? And he got all excited about it, but of course the set hadn't been designed for that. So, well, we had a lot of nervous firemen standing behind Cameron during the shooting of this entire sequence because there was four guys with World War II flamethrowers in the backgrounds of each of these shots, blasting flame all over. And many times the set caught on fire.

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Mr. Metcalf, do you still have the Jacobis' check stubs and credit card statements? We're looking for any kind of service call or purchase that might've required a stranger to enter the house. A repairman or a delivery guy. When you would watch these dailies with Dino and Martha, I was only there once or twice, but again, it seemed to me like they had a very shrewd sense of where the best takes were. Their shrewdness came in length. Dino is very sensitive to pace, I think. - Right. He, like myself, likes to get on with things. Not just within an act or within the whole movie, within a scene. Within a scene, yeah. - A true sense of what you can do without. Yeah, exactly. Sometimes you get lost. When you're making it, you get too close... Where I got the most out of Dino was right before we wrapped the shoot. He started going through the script with me, he started pulling pages out. Remember we... - He would say, "We already know this. "We'll understand this without it being said." I guess if you've made as many movies... - Making 600 movies, you Kind of... ...aS Dino and Martha you really begin to learn something about storytelling. They were a huge help in that way. It's Chromalux. This was a great stock shot. We just got a fax. This is the first thing I shot. First day of shooting. It wasn't in my first cut. I ended up putting it back. Because it helped explain that... - That Dolarhyde is in some transition. Or, maybe, he's trying to stop. - Maybe. Which helps us explain the story of why he's eating that painting. But, unfortunately, which comes later. If it came before or while seeing the scene it would have helped more. But here... - You weren't happy with the way that scene came out in some versions. It seemed like very important information, emotionally. I love this location. This is a real photo lab that we just took over and... This is a long nighttime shoot. - Yeah. This exterior and the interior of this location are two different places. This is why I wish she was hurrying more, so that it would catch his interest more. Why is she running into the office? - That was my fault. That was one of the days we didn't talk on the cell phone. I would usually call Ted and say, "Ted, this is what I'm doing." Pick his brain.

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That was a little storytelling thing, you know, helping, because you really couldn't hear her lines. Of course. There goes Grandma. There was a very complicated lighting set up for this. I read a cinematography article where Dante talked about how many different kinds of banks of lights that he had to set up for this one shot, right here. This is a real fire, but we enhanced it with CGI. This is a real fire. He's got this fire, but he's got to light the actors with extra instruments that are hidden out of shot. He's got the natural light of the cars. The lights flashing around. Francis Dolarhyde! Where is he? Look how many things are happening with light in this one nighttime shot. I put my hand in it. He set fire to the house. It's all justified because the headlights of the... It's red, it's blue, it's yellow. That was such a big explosion. You had to be half a mile away from it. All these stuntmen... I guess some people are wondering, "Why is there such a big explosion?" Actually, in the book, Dolarhyde has dynamite stored in this house for some unspecified future project. And you'd written a shot when we looked in the safe... I'd written a shot where we saw the dynamite, it didn't end up in the movie. We finally just decided, it's an old house, it's got... Let's lose the dynamite and keep... It's got oil tanks in it and the tanks blow up. I love this close-up of Emily. She just... What a face. Who could resist a charmer like me? You know, whatever part of him was still human... We really wanted that hair job to work, so we went crazy. You didn't draw a freak. Okay? It's a good scene for Edward, too. ...with a freak on his back. I should have known. No, sometimes you don't. Trust me... Initially, this scene was written as a sort of voiceover. Actually, it was one of Brett's, you know. Brett is very, very good on text, too. Just like Dino and Martha. And Brett said, "The audience loves this character "and we have to honor her by having a farewell with her." We have to see her. We have to give her some closure with him. They have to have a real scene together. The last time we saw her she was crying outside the house. And it was one of the best ideas that Brett had as the script was being revised, before we even started shooting. Dr. Voss, please call Pharmacy 4421. I love this scene that we came up with. This helped pay off the end. This is setting up the ending in a way that's not really in the book, I don't think. We needed for him to have knowledge of Dolarhyde that he could only have if he'd seen this big journal. So we went back and forth about how could he find this journal if that house blew up. Finally we thought, if we put the journal in the safe, it could conceivably have withstood that explosion. We were torn between, do we do a kid's drawing or a picture?

1:49:42 · jump to transcript →

This whole thing was in the script. The first shot was exactly the way it was in the book, which was, it took place on an open beach. Right. I said, "Ted, I just feel like... "I don't know how to shoot suspense on an open beach. I just don't know." We changed the ending of the book, and everybody had a contribution. Dino and Martha said, "The boy has to be in more jeopardy. "The son has to be in more jeopardy, that's what will make this work." Brett said, "It has to be more claustrophobic. "Interiors are scarier than exteriors. "We have to have hallways with doors where he could appear from anywhere." And then this great, great moment with the mirror which is pure Brett Ratner. It was not in the screenplay originally. It was Brett's idea that the reveal to this character should be the broken mirror. It was wonderful. This sequence is an excellent example of how a screenplay evolves from the producers, from the director, and from the writer. And what I wanted, which was not in the original ending of the book, was for Will Graham to be more heroic. And then we added... In the ending of the book, he's injured by Dolarhyde on the beach. The kid hooks Dolarhyde with a fishing rod. Graham Is injured on the beach and runs away and hides, leaving his family to deal with the bad guy. And I wanted Graham to be more heroic at the end here. So we each had a shopping list for this sequence and got what we wanted. I also wanted Graham to show cleverness here. He can't overwhelm Dolarhyde physically. But he can outthink him. That's what he's good at. And taking all this, because Ted even said to me, "Brett, I don't write action. I don't really do that." And so I said, "Okay." I sat down with my stunt coordinator, Conny Palmisano. We went through beat by beat of what could possibly happen physically. We called Ted and went through it, and he came up with this whole thing... Where he stabs his leg with a... He's got a second knife hidden. But the whole thing about him using what he saw in the book, which is much more heroic than anything else he could do physically. This was where we took quite a leap. And tried to use things that the book suggested but didn't actually dramatize. And it really worked. And Tyler Patrick Jones who's... Wonderful little boy. Who did an amazing job and went through hours and hours of being thrown to the ground and being yelled at, berated. And very smart and... He's the sweetest little boy. We should have put at the end, "No children were harmed during the making of this." It's not his first movie. - Yeah. He actually worked with Spielberg on Minority Report. He had a small part. He said he actually liked me more than he did Spielberg. So I was happy about that. Don't cry at me, you little faggot! He said my beard wasn't as big as Spielberg's. Nor your bank account. "I'm a freak." Say it! No. - Say it! Dad! - Say it, or I will cut it off! "I'm a dirty little beast." Ralph did a great job here, and he was nervous about this. "Is this gonna work, Brett?" That was his question. And I said, "Let's shoot it and find out." - We won't know until we finish. Sound Dogs did a great job on the sound design here. They did Family Man with me, and they work... I love how you drove this whole sequence. This just goes like a freight train, this sequence. It's a classic. It's like the end of Psycho or something. It's just a great, great suspense sequence. Every shot selection and the pauses. Josh? - Mom? Will? Where are you guys? I thought I heard some kind of... Will? Great set. It was great. It was modeled after a real house that we saw in the Keys. It had very narrow hallways. These types of doors. Rattan louvered doors. We needed the doors to be louvered, because Molly has to be able to reach through the door here in order to unlock it.

1:53:32 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

Was there a picture of Antonioni also? Yes, Antonioni and some Avedon photographs that were taken in Italy. I'm just gonna comment further on Roman. Roman Coppola, who then-- Roman kept saying he would help us with the second unit of the movie, which I'd never had second unit before and I never knew what to ask him to do. And finally, Roman just showed up and started shooting things, and ended up shooting all kinds of shots. Shots of the boats at sea, from the helicopter, and things that were difficult to get, and things that we couldn't do, and Roman made a great contribution to the movie with a variety of shots, and did it with a lot of enthusiasm. That's true. What happened to me? Did I lose my talent? Am I ever gonna be good again? This sequence is set in Ravello, above the Amalfi Coast. It's supposed to be Alistair Hennessey's villa. Villa Hennessey. - In West Port-au-Patois. West Port-au-Patois, maybe kind of like Haiti or something. In the background, down below here, when Zissou and Eleanor are on the balcony at Hennessey's place. There's a guy who she calls Javier, her research assistant. His name is Muzius, and he lives there. He was the guy who showed us the place. So we cast him in the scene because he sort of comes with the house. I was thinking, like, "What perfect casting." But he actually came with the house. - He was local. That was also based on a photo. There's two cigarettes kissing. Yeah, it was.

1:15:53 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

And I remember when you were in Rome, when you started shooting, you played me "Queen Bitch" over the phone. You said, "What do you think about this for the ending?" And it really has a great energy. You know what? I think it's Bowie during a period of time when he was hanging out with Lou Reed or something. It almost sounds like it could be a Velvet Underground song. Is this on Hunky Dory? I feel like I might have read somewhere that it's about Lou Reed. Is that possible? "Queen Bitch." - Could be. "I'm up on the 11th floor and I'm watching the cruisers below."

1:52:11 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

Well, I hope we don't sound phony and pretentious on this thing. I hope not. We talk a lot about ourselves. - Yeah. And about work. And some intellectualizing that we never would have... - Done in any other circumstances? Nor stuff did we think about when we were writing it because we tried to write it just more as honestly as we could without really overthinking anything. We're trying to make it something funny and entertaining. But you can't say that for two hours, so you keep trying to say-- And then you talk about wallpaper and costumes. Then you start saying things like, "Well, he's an invention of a child's imagination, trying to connect to..." But I don't know if that's true. We just thought he was a funny character. You know, I'll say one thing here. This thing they're walking on, we were out, and this is in Naples, where they're walking along this and the credits are going. We're driving along and we see this breakwater thing with rats on it. I asked if we could get off there, and the guy didn't want us to. He said the cops were gonna come, and then I said... Anyway, he let us get off. And this is the most strange, bizarre thing. It doesn't connect to any land. It's just a cement thing in the middle of the water. I said we have to shoot something here. This is what I came up with, which is a, you know... It's almost, you know... You would say it's inspired by, if not stolen, from the end of Buckaroo Banzai, which is why I said Jeff Goldblum was in it too because he's in that as well. We probably talked about Buckaroo Banzai, you know, and using this kind of idea before we knew Jeff was gonna play Hennessey. That's true. - So in some ways, Jeff playing it makes it seem less of a steal and more of an homage, but it's pretty much just a steal. I wonder if we'll ever get to see this ship again. Where is the ship now? - It's in Malta, in drydock, and Ian, the marine coordinator, theoretically owns it now. But it was such a beautiful ship. It was such an amazing thing to be able to go on. This must be totally boring for people to hear me say this. And then there's Ned smoking the pipe, up at the top. Yeah. There he is at the top. In whatever dream this is. This is something that Bogdanovich had talked about. He used it in The Last Picture Show, which I feel like you do in a lot of your movies. But it is that idea of a curtain call, of like, you know... Someone might argue that, you know, when you finish a movie, you wanna sort of throw people into the credits and their own lives. And for different movies, then there's this idea of, you know, letting people ease their way out of the movie by giving a kind of, you know, whatever a film version of a curtain call. Yeah, and also, you know, with Ned, because he dies and everything, it's kind of nice to bring him back at the very end. Yeah. And nice to see that Werner joins the team. And the intern becomes official. And he didn't get an incomplete. Who cares what he got because he's dropping out. And going full-time. And this is Seu Jorge playing in the opera house in Naples. We didn't have a real plan for exactly how all these Seu Jorge performances were gonna work in there. I was shooting them wondering, "Am I really gonna make this work?" But somehow, his energy and this thing of it... For some people, it's probably, "Oh, no, we're gonna cut back to the guy playing these songs again? They don't have enough story to tell?" But I think for a lot of people, he works. He weaves something together in the movie, and for me, anyway, he brings something special to it. That makes me wanna go back to him over and over. It's funny, what you were also saying about Roman's second unit stuff, it's funny how when you're filming a movie, sometimes, you know, you shoot some stuff on a whim, and then it ends up becoming a huge part of, you know... A whole other texture to the movie. Yes, it was only because of Roman's second-unit work that made it possible for us to do this thing day one. You know, setting at sea, and day 14, you know, the Belafonte, et cetera. Roman collected a lot of these shots, and the movie needed that sort of simulation of structure that it kind of provides. Instead of it seeming like a basic stream of consciousness, which is closer to what it was. Makes it seem like it's not stream of consciousness. Although we do think structurally, but it's a different structure. Yeah, it's our structure. - Yeah. What we see as structure instead of what Eric Rohmer might refer to as structure.

1:52:47 · jump to transcript →

This was shot the first day. Yeah. It was the first... the first week. And always it's difficult to start, in terms of the shooting, to start with a sequence that demands, you know, a lot of emotional implication. But I think Imogen and Mac, they acted very well. And they delivered, you know, the feeling of: "Mum is not here now, but we need to bring back, you know, our stuff." "We need to see our house again to accept that now everything is different."

33:50 · jump to transcript →

Again, the work of Chris Gill, the editor, is really, really amazing. We found together all these great ideas, because that wasn't exactly in the structure of the original script. Yeah. The parallel editing is improving a lot the tension of this sequence. And... This sequence was really difficult to shoot. It was made in one day. That was the first day of the premiere of Catherine's play.

42:06 · jump to transcript →

These kind of sequences are always on the verge of the ridiculous because this is going to be the transformation of Robert Carlyle into something else. Especially because according to the reality that we would like to introduce, we shot in this quarantine cubicle, which was a tiny place. And, you know, the pact with Robert was: "OK, let... you know, let your feelings out with all the power of the rage," which is so difficult in this space. But I think Robert understood that... that this reaction should be in this extreme way. And, in seconds, we see how this man is passing through... through the sad and love... to the... to the violence. The kiss is... this is one of the highlights in the script, was one of the highlights, and I think it's still one of the highlights in the film. When we see this through a normal projection screening in the Chinese Theatre, Juan Carlos and I bought a ticket the first day of the release of the film in the USA, and we assist... We were very happy to see how the audience Is reacting to this sequence. It's a very, very extreme moment of the movie. Especially because in terms of... in an emotional way, the infection is here again for the characters, as I mentioned before. And... and in a way, we see how this family is cursed, and they are bringing the hell to this place again.

42:43 · jump to transcript →

in a forest we found outside of Vancouver that just happened to be almost the shape of a ship impact. And they let us go in there with big bulldozers and cranes and stuff and actually smash trees and kind of art direct the whole thing to look like where the crash site was. And then the ship was put in all digitally in post. As a producer, this was literally the first day of shooting some of this. And I was really heartened to see these dailies because the bros...

4:41 · jump to transcript →

really understood the genre well. They were unbelievably prepared to do this movie, but until they rolled a foot of film, we actually had no idea what we were gonna get. And literally seeing the first day and these dailies and how they shot it and the DP they picked was great and his visual style and the way they boarded and shot this scene, it was the first beginning of a sense of, oh my God, this could be and will be a great film. These guys really not only know this,

5:10 · jump to transcript →

that if this predator has come down to Earth to cover up all the tracks, this doesn't make any sense. We were like, eh, let's just practice for them. Two things here. One, the predator's coming to clean up any evidence of aliens, so leaving a skinned human isn't evidence of that. And two, it's just cool. We had to have it. So any chance to put skinned bodies in the movies, we took that chance. Now, there was a little funny note, something we didn't notice while we were shooting on that first shot where the bag was being zipped up.

35:56 · jump to transcript →

Ron Howard

This was a real world, a kind of a parallel universe. People loved this scene, and they loved wearing their costumes. These were the holiday jubilation costumes. And the first day that we shifted over from the shopping look into the holiday jubilation look,

36:13 · jump to transcript →

Ron Howard

I think this was the very first day of shooting, and an immediate indication that, again, Jim was going to be hilarious in bringing this character to life. Not that anybody had any doubts.

1:10:57 · jump to transcript →

E. Elias Merhige

I love this shot. It was the very first shot that we shot on the very first day of filming. It was a 35-day shoot. We had 36 days to shoot, but I wanted the crew to have a wrap party, so I made sure that we finished a day early so that we could enjoy our last night together, because I really enjoyed working with everybody that I worked with. But this shot just is such a beautiful shot.

18:59 · jump to transcript →

E. Elias Merhige

He animates it so effortlessly and so wonderfully that you really don't feel that A, it's Willem Dafoe, and B, that it's makeup. You just feel that there is this seamless reality created. This was the second shot that I did and the first day of shooting. And I wanted to create this idea of

35:03 · jump to transcript →

Wes Anderson

This is a naval training vessel that they let us kind of convert into an ocean liner for the movie. That was our first day of shooting.

7:45 · jump to transcript →

Wes Anderson

The movie was always meant to be a New York movie, but somewhere along the way it became, like, as I feel, basically everything that I've done kind of became sort of a fable. I didn't want to call it New York, and I didn't want it to be a familiar New York. So we sort of avoid all the landmarks, but we also kind of avoid... We kind of find some kind of stranger parts of New York. This neighborhood where this house is, which finding this house was a big deal for us. I mean, we found it a year before we started shooting and I'd just been working on the script for two years by then. And, you know, it was already kind of set, but this house had everything in it. It was really surprising to find a house that just had everything waiting to sort of be converted into the movie. You know, it was-- All the rooms were there, and it-- Immediately, it was apparent which room belonged to which character and which scenes were gonna go where, and all that stuff. It was there.

16:43 · jump to transcript →

That was sick-making. - No, no, no. Brilliant. See, and he can do funny, too. - Yeah. That was the first shot of the film.

1:48:50 · jump to transcript →

Abdul could not believe that day. It was his first film. I think it was his first day, and we Said, "This is what you've got to do now." I love that shot of you as well.

2:08:30 · jump to transcript →

And everything's energised back at the camp. The bit of Dunharrow that was built up by Mount Victoria in an old quarry, very close to where we shot the hobbits hiding under the tree on our very first day of shooting for the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring. A little bit different to the book, isn't it, the way that Mary gets told to stay behind? Well, sort of similar, but obviously the whole Durnhelm thing, which is coming up, I mean, I don't ever believe that...

1:49:39 · jump to transcript →

of 2003, we, Philippa and I went out. We went, we were shopping and Cameron at that point, he had gone to Houston, to a hospital in Houston to have an experimental chemo to try and beat these fast growing tumors in his lungs. And we got home from our first day out. We'd been playing the song and we were talking about

4:07:55 · jump to transcript →

They call themselves the Monicans. This was my first day, wasn't it? It was. Coming down the stairs here. Yeah, that right there is the first thing we shot. And let me tell you, those heels and those steps, trouble. Can you imagine? I twist my ankle just coming down steps and high heels on this film, Æon Flux, with all the special effects. I would be such a lame-o for that.

3:34 · jump to transcript →

Hotel Rwanda had not been released yet. And it was really exciting to see the success of that film and to have Sophie nominated for an Academy Award. She was great. She trained in London, where she lives, and I was training here in L.A. So we didn't really get to meet each other until three weeks before we started shooting. We trained for the last bit in Berlin and

15:18 · jump to transcript →

That takes its own money to just be equipped to shoot in snow, which is a bit of a beast. But in fact, we're very blessed that day because, you know, I mean, the day before, the thing was dry. And the day before, a couple of days before we shot. Yeah, and I was really depressed about it. The night after that meeting, it just started dumping. Yeah, literally, what was it, the day before we started shooting, the snow came in. I was very depressed because of the whole reason we went on this mountain.

2:31 · jump to transcript →

A lot of the other shots, that just doesn't happen to be one of her favorites. That is Lil, Lily's first shot, her first movie, actually. The first movie. Where's the shot? Is this the shot right here? No, the girl, the little girl. No, and Lily, she has the pendant. Not Lily, your favorite shot of Kate. Oh, earlier. It just passed. Yeah, the shot at the door before she walks in. Remain airborne for the moment. I'm sure they'll reappear. Yes, sir.

42:06 · jump to transcript →

Others we couldn't. And there were a lot of people painted out of that shot. And this was day one of filming. That's right. Welcome to I Am Legend, Will. Today you're burying the dog. And I remember we were playing Adagio for Strings on a loudspeaker. And we shot this at sunset at the end of our very first day. It was Will's birthday. It was Will's birthday. And we were shooting out at an apple farm in northern, I guess it was like Westchester County. And we put blue out there and dropped in Central Park because...

57:06 · jump to transcript →

then Akiva, you wrote the speech, which was great, and then we decided to name Willow's character Marley, and we started to use the songs, and I'm just so excited that we got to use, nobody uses Bob Marley songs in movies. And it's unbelievable, and especially Redemption Song, we get Redemption Song in there as... There's a little costume gap there, that's actually the, he's wearing the shirt from the first day, but we decided to... Tweaked it in the DI. Yeah, a little bit.

1:17:22 · jump to transcript →