Happy accidents

That guy happened to have that birthmark. That's how you cast him? Yeah, he had the birthmark. It was going to save time. Did anybody ever notice it's in the shape of North Vietnam? No, no one commented. A wasted joke. Well, there was going to be a contest, you remember, like a geography thing. We never did it. I meant Gorbachev's real birthmark. It's actually in the shape of Vietnam. Do you remember our worries when we released the picture? We were concerned that the Ayatollah would kick off before the picture came out ruining this joke.

1:21 · jump to transcript →

That's a snot. Now what did you use for the snot? It was actually snot. Bob had a cold at the time. So it was real snot. It happened to be convenient. They didn't have the technology. Leslie's kind of a method guy and insisted on it. Yeah, there's only three channels and no snot. Today, of course, there's digital mucosas. You don't have to. CGI. Exactly, whatever that means. But I think that's only common sense.

12:03 · jump to transcript →

And that's important to future writers? It is. Fluker dialogue? Know your Fluker. How many pages of Fluker dialogue is in a good script? Most of it. That's right, we have the whole glossary of terms. I know. Well, we might talk about some of those. Terms, rules, well, nothing worked. And here comes the joke from the set-up. This actually happened to our rabbi. Was it based on that story or did it happen after the fact? He was with the mayor guarding the queen. Life imitating art.

14:33 · jump to transcript →

Here it comes, everybody. Get out of the way. A big, big movie with a lot of action and a lot of heart and a lot of recognizable family feelings. And trauma. And blood, blood. Hi, everyone. Bob Odenkirk here. - And Ilya Naishuller. And we are two of the people who helped to make the movie Nobody happen. We're gonna talk about all the people who helped make this movie happen, a lot of people. There I am. Jesus. What happened to that guy? Not good day. Ouch.

0:10 · jump to transcript →

So, I have to do a report on a veteran for history class. Maybe I could just interview you? Yeah, sure, son. You know, I was an auditor, so, kind of a nobody. That makes for a pretty dry story. Yeah, I really don't care. I just want to finish up the project and call it a day. And this kid's a good actor, man. Gage Munroe. He delivers. Look at this. He's just suffering his fucking father, which, yeah, a boy that age often is doing. And also he's mad at him for what happened last night. And, boy, is Connie Nielsen great in this movie, and are we lucky to have her playing Becca, the wife of Hutch Mansell. And these two have a Iot of feeling between them, a deep well, and an estrangement that is unexplained. And yet I think anybody who's been married for more than 10, 15 years, somewhere in there, can Start to feel these complex feelings and kind of a strange feeling of, you know, warmth and obviously acceptance after all those years, and love, but also not real sure if the spark is all there, and if you can bring it back and if you're looking for a new spark...

9:21 · jump to transcript →

What is happening is very complex, you know. But this tells you where her head is at, what happens next. This is beautifully done, Ilya. That she just removes that wall of pillows between them and reaches out to him, sort of saying, I think, you know, "Let's try to make this work, you know. "Whatever it is, whatever happened to you, whatever you got involved in." Now, in the mythos of this movie, Now, in the mythos of this movie, the grand mythos from Derek Kolstad's head, there's a bigger bunch of bad guys like Yulian out there in the world who Hutch has interacted with many years before. Some version of these guys, some group of guys, and she knows that, the wife knows that, and she also maybe suspects that he's back in the game, as they Say. And we find out that inadvertently he is back in the game of big, high stakes bad guys, because he went after the wrong Russian on that bus. So here comes Yulian. Tell us about this actor, would you? Because he's great. This is Alexey Serebryakov. - Say that name again. I'm just pronouncing it the Russian way. I think in English it'd be Alexey Serebryakov. Alexey Serebryakov, a great, great actor. Yep. Before we decided we're gonna do the authentic Russian way, there were all these considerations of who can go against Hutch, who can we have that's right. And ultimately, I'm incredibly glad that we have Alexey. He's the real deal. He's a great actor. He's a presence, physically capable. And when I hear my American friends say, "Well, yeah, Russians are scary," that's what I imagine they imagine to be the scary Russian, the guy who you can't really reason with too much and who will do stupid, kind of, unexpected and violent things.

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David Kalat

The crew of the Daigo Fukuro Maru, that's lucky dragon number five to you, figured that they were being extra clever. By heading out to trawl for tuna, there's no competition, they congratulated each other. Then there was a flash in the sky like a second sun. The light was so bright, it could be seen as far away as Okinawa.

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David Kalat

The lucky dragon was so far from the blast, they didn't hear its accompanying thunder for another eight minutes. It was clear to them that they'd made a mistake, but the consequences were now impossible to outrun. They pulled in their nets, stowed their catch, and returned to the mainland as quickly as possible. They were sick. The radio operator, a fellow named Aikichi Kubayama, would die from radiation sickness. And let's be clear.

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David Kalat

I started out with that story about the Lucky Dragon as a way of demonstrating that this movie had an urgency and a relevance to current events for Japanese audiences. I'm going to talk more about this. I'm going to talk about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about Robert Oppenheimer and the nuclear arms race. All kinds of big historical issues which have been deftly folded into the fabric of what has at times been misapprehended as just another monster movie.

5:23 · jump to transcript →

He told me that, yes, they were interested in selling it. And he also happened to casually mention that Marty Scorsese, who was in Chicago shooting The Color of Money, was interested in the story as well. So I proceeded to negotiate. Regardless of Marty's interest, I thought the story was good. So I started negotiating with the

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provoking Henry, saying, Do you think I'm funny? Why do you think I'm funny? Ray Liotta. It was in rehearsal. We were talking, and Joe was telling a story about he was with somebody, and the guy was saying something funny, and it's just something that happened to him. It supposedly is a true situation. I know that, to a certain extent, I mean, just the way he moves and what he says, I know it's true. So Pesci has too much of a familiarity with what happens in that scene. It's too real.

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And we all wanted Joe from the very beginning. And we were very lucky to get the Bob, who we didn't think would want to do that character, because he's not the most... Well, he doesn't have that... He doesn't have as much to do as either Joe or Ray did, but Bob is not that kind of actor. He liked the part and wanted to work again with Marty, and he accepted it, and then everybody fell into place after that. Writer Nicholas Pelleggi.

38:56 · jump to transcript →

Warwick was so good and just he never complained and he had to go in three hours in makeup or whatever hours it took and so I was very lucky to get him. It's great I remember once he was cast about almost a week later he came to the States and we did the head mold hand mold measurements and then he went

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Right, Samantha's in the booth to the left. Okay, this is a very interesting thing that there's a rumor on the internet that we had to reshoot this because he came in and takes a box of Lucky Charms and spits them out. And then we showed it. There it is, Lucky Clovers. This is the only thing we ever shot. This was always shot this way, but there's a rumor that somehow Kellogg or whoever does Lucky Charms saw

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him take a bite and spit it out and said, we don't like that. And we don't like the movie, so you have to reshoot it and put a different cereal. And at the end of the movie, when the kid says, fuck you, Lucky Charms, and gets him with a slingshot, that was my way of getting back at the cereal company. And none of that is true. We always had Lucky Clovers for copyright problems. And we always shot this. And this is the only thing we shot.

46:24 · jump to transcript →

boy's eyes are being examined or it was all done to still photographs. The story of the boy getting marked and then having to be on quarantine in Ellis Island was told to me by my Aunt Caroline and this had happened to her when they came over on the original immigrant ship. She was a little girl of nine or so and she had glaucoma or some

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Interestingly, this set is really a platform up overlooking the window of the fish market, which had the Ellis Island set in. It wasn't even a room out there. Of course, his number is number seven, my lucky number since I was a child. Everything in my movies, I'm sure there will always be a number seven somewhere.

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Look, I don't have your brain for big deals, but this is a street thing. I obviously got very lucky with Michael Bigazzo because he was just a wonderful character and actor with that extraordinary voice, and he was so authentically Italian, you know, like one of your uncles. And to think that was such an important part that ultimately was just cast like a day before it started to shoot really is a wonderful tribute to Michael.

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And one of the things we came up with for this was Joel Meyerowitz, who was great at photographing cities, and this took place in Washington, D.C. He gave us this whole notion of red, which you're gonna see again and again in the film. This is the young Bill Hurt we're looking at right now. I think one of the things that happened to us that I was...

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And there I started to hang around with some news people, and that's basically what this came out of. You know, I felt the pressure because I had a friend, my late friend Jerry Belson, who used to heap the pressure on me every day that you're not going to be able to follow it up, and that was an adaptation. You haven't done an original. He used to just do this to me every morning. But it was just... Because of what happened to me on the first movie I directed, it was surreal. I mean, there's no way that you...

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wore it as something that happened to you. It was always a little beyond belief, so it didn't impact me as if I had done five pictures and this happened. It was just weird, but I felt... So doing broadcast news was sort of, not that you don't go crazy and not that you don't always have the pressure and not that you don't go to bed sometimes hating the pages you've written, but the research was great. I was fascinated by the subject.

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And he tries to hug her and then pushes away. It's really, really brilliant. I don't know if you remember, because do you remember that we were filming in a home for people with Down syndrome? And they asked us to come for an assembly. One of the most surreal things that ever happened to me in my life. So you and John Mahoney and I said, sure. They said, will you come and say something? They're all gathered in this assembly.

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To me, it seemed like all of them stood up and booed me. Oh, man. And I just, like, time stopped, and I started laughing and, like, crying at the same time. And we all just sort of, like, walked down and then shut the door to the auditorium, and it was just, like, quiet. Isn't that surreal? That's surreal. And we never mentioned it. Don't go in there! That was one of the most surreal things that ever happened to me.

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They're so in love with the drama, it's so great. It's so amazing. That's like, they so believed in these characters. He hugs her, have sex with me. Yeah, it's true. It's such a unique feeling. That's why people love that. If you're lucky enough to have written it. Then he just goes for the beer after that. So great, yeah, I love this. Lloyd now needs a beer. Here's the keys, give me a beer. Why am I yelling? I don't know. But when you get Lily and Lauren Dean

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which was a pretty good idea. And then we do some animation on the sunglass and also make the sunglass more computerized. We almost lose the scene because of the budget time concern. We did try to shoot it in a simple way, but we were so lucky and never give it up. So I'm so glad that we got a scene and also got a pretty good impact about the sunglass. We had decided this is the love story.

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So we were so lucky to have Tom Sanders as a production designer. He's a great guy. He did Dracula, Braveheart, Saving Private Ryan. He's just incredible. So in this movie, all I want is a

21:33 · jump to transcript →

It's the romance with the evil, with the devil, you know, so it's a totally different feeling. Computer's up. You got him. By the other hand, I must say that we were so lucky to have Douglas Scott. He's a wonderful actor. The thing we like about him is he had a great feature, and his face was so much of a character. He looked evil, but by the meantime,

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That's one of my favourite. Yeah, that's my favourite shot too. It's incredible. When I saw that shot, that was like one of the first times you really felt this guy's going to work. I love the blanket spinning around. Yeah, well that was because Andy spun it around with his feet. We didn't plan on that, we used it. The image of Frodo with the sword at Gollum's throat while Gollum's got Sam is straight out of an Alan Lee painting. We actually had Alan's painting on the set.

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And he was really driving both stories. And so we would take time out, as Tolkien does in the book, really, to speak to that and to speak to the bigger conflict that Gandalf has with Sauron in terms of the struggle for power over Middle-earth. You also artificially link stories together, don't you? Like Aragorn is tracking what happened to Merry and Pippin and you intercut Merry and Pippin running at night, then you go back to Aragorn.

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Didn't they paint it and then you came back and all the paint had been stripped because of the wind? Yeah, well, I was shooting the Ediris one day. I mean, what happened to me one day is very high winds and I was walking along to where the crew were and my glasses got blown off my face and I turned and I just saw them sailing and tumbling over the cliff in the wind and I had to spend the rest of the day kind of with blurry vision. It was weird. It was quite a very vicious kind of climate.

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John Cameron Mitchell

It's like a gay rumble. Oh. We should get back to short bus. Okay. This is a great moment. That short bus was totally random. It just happened by accident. And we did that shot three times. It just went by. Oh, and the yoga ball. Hilarious. We did that shot three times that zoom in on the character of Caleb the stalker. It happened three times.

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John Cameron Mitchell

They're so beautiful. There's so many great bodies of all shapes and sizes. Well, this place, Dumba, a queer arts collective, would have parties like this. Those women up on the bomb live there. That's true. That was Sienna and Pamela. Everyone's having a lot of fun in this room. They were so lucky. So fun. I was kind of a little mad that I wasn't a Sextra. I was a Sextra, but I couldn't relax. There he is. Johnny. And that's Brent.

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John Cameron Mitchell

And we have a deleted scene that's going to be on the DVD with the two of them. You wonder what happened to them when they go off after this. Jay's not here right now, but he would tell you how much he hates looking at his hair. I love his hair in the film. Now he has very, very short hair. And that little joke he just did with the camera is something that he used to do in real life, and I said that is going in the movie. It's a great moment.

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My name is Laurens Straub. I'm sitting here with Werner Herzog, writer, director and producer of the movie "Nosferatu" that you are currently watching. And we now want to talk about that movie. Werner Herzog and I have known each other for about 20 years and have worked together on many different projects. What do we see here? These are actual mummies in the Mexican city of Guanajuato. You have to realize that Guanajuato is located in a gorge. Because of that the cemetery was very narrow and there was no space. So they dug up the bodies every eight years or so, and because of different climatic conditions and the soil, they mummified without human preparation. They leaned them against the walls on both sides in a long underground hall and a hallway. I saw them there many, many years ago in the early 1960s. The story behind this is that I was in the U.S. on a scholarship but I resigned from it a few days in and gave up my legal status in the US because I had to earn some money. Out of desperation I went to Mexico because otherwise they would have returned me to Germany. I went to Central Mexico and Guanajuato and lived there for a while. I did all kinds of crazy things. For example, at rodeos, the so-called charreadas, I rode on wild bulls. Like a complete idiot because I don't even know how to ride a horse, but with the money I could live one week at a time. And there I saw these mummies. Are they similar to the ones at the volcano Vesuvius and formed from lava? No, those are real dried human beings. They barely weigh anything. They were in display cases so we had to take them out and carry them somewhere else. They weigh very little... 10, 12 pounds maybe. Is this something like a culture of death? No, it's completely normal. Isabelle Adjani. She is great at acting scared. That was a real and very large bat we brought in for this. The bat you saw earlier I could not shoot myself. The footage came out of a science documentary because bat's flapping motions are extremely fast, and this was shot with 500 or 800 frames per second. The bats had to be trained with food for that because it took very strong lighting, and normally they would not move under those conditions and not leave their hideout. Here we see Delft. In the Netherlands. That's my city. And I know when Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein teaches students cinematography he first introduces them to Flemish and Dutch painters. Why was Delft chosen as an alternative to Wismar where Murnau shot? Yes, but Wismar was not Murnau's location. I believe that was Lübeck. There is one single shot later in the movie where you see a few buildings that Murnau actually used and that are still standing. I used those as well. We chose Delft because the continuity of the architecture was uninterrupted and we only had to make very few changes in order to shoot there. We took down some antennas and moved a few cars. Other than that it was very easy to shoot there. The concept of "Nosferatu" was definitely to do a variation on Murnau's movie, not a remake in the classical sense. A Biedermeier image like this, for example, is unthinkable in a Murnau film. Moreover, this is in color and the movie's character is completely different. We had to show a very secure bourgeois world. We deliberately planned this, especially the furniture. That was done very thoughtfully by Henning von Gierke who is a painter by trade. With the furniture and the lighting, you can tell that a painter was involved. It reminds me of "Kaspar Hauser" which was done by Henning as well. What era are we in here? That is the Biedermeier era as you can see clearly by the costumes. We researched how to best do the building arrangement and the urban landscapes. Schmidt-Reitwein and I wracked our brains over that. I didn't simply want to recreate paintings. That was never planned. With one exception because we knew we had to work a lot in darkness with nothing but candlelight. Therefore, we studied the painter de La Tour and thought about how to do it if we only had one or a few candles. How do we light that? And Schmidt-Reitwein is exceptionally good at working with light and darkness. This is Roland Topor. - Yes. The famous illustrator, poet, and crazy man. Unfortunately he is already dead, I believe. Yes. - How did you find Roland? I coincidentally saw him in debate on French television. And he laughs in such a mad way. He laughs after every sentence he says. But in such a desperate and strange way that it impressed me deeply. Afterwards I contacted him I told him I was going to shoot a vampire movie and asked if he would play Renfield. Roland Topor immediately agreed. Unfortunately his voice is dubbed in some versions. And it is impossible to fully recreate his laughter. It was his strangest characteristic. What I love about this... I recently saw an exhibition with English surrealistic works from the 19th century. It reminds me of an old office, the cloth, and this blue. It was very carefully lit, and the costumes had to match. Bruno Ganz. And also the faces we chose. Those are not faces that fit into the 20th century. You have to carefully select actors who match. So Bruno Ganz is a great fit for this. The beautiful paper. - Yes. That was so much work, and it was prepared very, very thoughtfully. A beautiful country. Here I see a recurring theme of yours... maps. I already know that from "Aguirre" and other movies. In "Fitzcarraldo" geography is a crucial dramaturgic element. I'm a map fanatic. Oddly, I'm pretty good at determining locations ahead of time, too, because I understand maps. I know which formations you should find in a certain area. I was rarely wrong. It is always about uncharted territory, the Dorado, or doom. Yes, at home I don't have pictures on the wall. A few photographs every now and then, but generally, I can't stand my walls being covered in pictures. If there is anything on my walls of my home it's maps. Oh no. - You will be in danger. This was your first film in English, the first with big stars and a big budget, correct? Well, not really. "Aguirre" is also a big movie with a big star and great effort. But I have to say, we shot "Aguirre" for about 700,000 deutschmark... $360,000. What matters is what you manage to get on screen with the resources you have. To come back to paintings, I like this vase. Yes. Okay. This reminds me of a painting by Seurat. I think the still life-like and emotional atmosphere is phenomenal. But be careful, I always want to show inner landscapes. This was done very quickly, by the way. On that day we happened to have some time and drove to the beach. It was freezing cold, windy. There was foam. We set up the camera in three minutes and sent the two actors, Bruno Ganz and Isabelle Adjani, into the image. We only told them that the music would most likely be slow and solemn. We already had received ideas for the music from Florian Fricke from Popol Vuh. These two, three shots here we did in 15 minutes. We never thought about paintings. It was born out of the situation... - Spontaneously. ...that we found there. Bruno Ganz has tears on his cheek because it was freezing cold. Lotte Eisner came to visit for a few days. We had to wrap her in 20 blankets because it was so cold. I was so proud that she could be there. She was very important for me and maybe for the new German film in general because she bridged the gap to the expressionistic movies back then that she knew very well. She also knew all the representatives of that time. She was friends with Fritz Lang, Murnau, Pabst. She knew them all. For us she was like a bridge to the generation of our grandfathers. We were a generation of orphans who did not have the generation of our fathers. Here I see your wife. Yes, Martje. Martje Herzog on the left. Essentially everyone who was there is in the movie at some point. Later you see the executive producer, the costume designer, the sound technician, and the gaffer. It was also a matter of how quickly can you get something done with very little money. This is the farewell. Bruno Ganz was actually pretty good at riding horses, which was great for me. Now he travels to Transylvania. The choice of the production company... Was this a Century Fox production? No, I produced it myself. Many people believe that 20th Century Fox produced it. But 20th Century Fox only bought an advance guarantee to the U.S. rights for very cheap. They only bought the rights for the U.S. A distribution guarantee. I believe this was... - German Romanticism. Well, you have to be careful. There is a hint of that, but I always try not to be connected with Romanticism because I myself have no real connection with that cultural epoch. Usually I refer to eras before that. The Late Middle Ages speak to me much more. They inspire me. This was shot in Eastern Slovakia. I was not allowed to shoot in Romania where I had scouted locations for months in the Carpathian Mountains. But you also have to see the context. That was when Ceausescu had just been awarded the honorary title of the new Vlad Dracula by the parliament. So he was named the new Count Dracula. That was an honorary title because the historic Count Dracul had been an important figure in the defense against the Turks. This is in the High Tatras, just 1,000 feet to the left was the Polish border. Bohemia? No, Slovakia. - Slovakia? Eastern Slovakia. This is a real group of gypsies that I had brought in from the very East of Slovakia. Among them are a few Czech actors. The gypsies actually speak their own language. Unfortunately I don't remember what it was called. ...my food. I still have to get to Count Dracula's castle today. This is a scene that in a very typical way fulfills all the criteria and conditions of a genre movie. This is one of those traditional scenes. He has to go see Count Dracula, and everyone immediately freezes in fear and the maid drops the dishes. Do you really have to go there? I wanted to integrate certain general rules of the genre into the movie. From there you can go farther and expand. But this right here is a very typical and traditional scene for this genre. The space has this wonderful of depth in the back. And the bed in the background. The set design was by Henning von Gierke who has a spectacular sense for these things. Yes. Spectacular. Parts of this we also built ourselves. The oven and things like that. It was a former hunting lodge of party functionaries. At that point there were only lumberjacks living there. During the day you only found lumberjacks there. ...were already on the other side. Here you have this sense of foreboding and doom. I liked the gypsies so much. They were very good. Watching this reminds me of Degas' "The Execution of Emperor Maximilian" in Mexico. Yes. Careful. Not too many paintings, otherwise... That's just a sign for how interesting and good this is. This is a wonderful face. I also enjoy the way they speak. Yes, definitely. He says you should... They said the dialogue I wanted but in their language, which I believe was not Romani. They translated it themselves and did it very well. You can see this was outdoors and at night which was always a problem for me because I'm not a night person. I had to stay awake until very late, and I've always hated night shoots. I had to force myself to stay up with gallons of coffee. This is also a recurring theme in your films... Native Americans, Mexicans, and Gypsies. Something completely foreign. But also the dignity of these people.

0:04 · jump to transcript →

The sound and the music are used very sparingly here. These sounds are so strange to create a certain atmosphere. Even though this is very carefully designed, you are an opponent of overly designed sets... It does look overly designed, but... No, I don't think so, but I think a normal studio production would have to work on this for weeks. No, it was a great find, and I was quite lucky. You don't find locations like this easily. For example, the hallway in the back. And the wood. The light here is beautiful, too.

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This was a gypsy boy who could barely play the violin, but sometimes I... A well-known Herzog theme, exactly. In "Fitzcarraldo", there is a similar boy. He plays in front of the prison. The prison guard feels sorry and lets "Fitzcarraldo" go because you just can't resist something like that. You already have the theme of madness in "Signs of Life", if I'm not mistaken. Yes, that's right. There is a situation where four German soldiers are imprisoned as convalescents on a Greek... In a Venetian fort at the end of the World War. Also the sense of confinement and breaking free from it... ...play a big role. That is one of the central themes. Obviously, this was shot in fast motion. But on film with single-frame exposure over a long period of time. In your movies, what makes them go insane? Something inside of them or other occurrences? I don't think that they are really insane. They are the core of what makes us human. I believe it's more that everything around them is insane. But there is always this slight hallucinatory... That's possible, yes. With this image we were also lucky because it was so foggy and strange. We took advantage of that situation. I always had the impression of an inner landscape. In my work, landscapes are never merely a beautiful and scenic backdrop, like in commercials or many Hollywood movies. This is different. The whole time I've wanted to ask what the importance of this movie for you is. Seeing Bruno here... For Wim "The American Friend" was something like the qualifying exam for the international film culture, to be accepted as a legitimate European filmmaker. You are talking about legitimacy or legitimization of German culture after the war. That took a long time. There was a gap of 25 or 30 years. The connection was lost. What was very important to us, which may be difficult to understand for people outside of Germany or Europe, was to rebuild a legitimate cinematic culture. Lotte Eisner was the person who reconnected us with our grandfathers, Expressionism, and these films. After finishing this movie, I felt that I had rebuilt the connection and reestablished the continuity of the German cinema. Only a few years earlier, Lotte Eisner had been on her death bed. I walked to Paris on foot in the winter to forbid her to die. And she actually did survive. She lived for another eight or nine years, and was very important for us. What we had created was still too fragile, too feeble, and too sensitive. Lotte Eisner had experienced the entire film culture, beginning with the Lumiere brothers, Méliès, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Kurosawa. Everybody knew and respected her. It was her who said, "Now we have a legitimate German cinema again." That helped so much and was enormously important. In contrary to the films of the 1920's and 30's, which were quite crude, this is much more delicate. It also already has a universal atmosphere, I think. Possibly, but if you watch Kinski especially in this movie I have to say that he was the last expressionistic movie actor over all.

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What's fascinating to me about the two versions, if you are lucky enough to see them both, is that in one version, the MPAA unapproved version, there's a huge laugh when Johnson says, someone call a paramedic. But because they cut out the overhead shot where the guy is just made into a hamburger, that you don't get a laugh anymore.

12:25 · jump to transcript →

and then develop it. So it's not an optical printer technique. So you develop after the painting is added. Yes. So you're guessing to a large degree, isn't it? Yep. Especially as a director, of course. You have no idea. Anyhow, I had no idea about special effects when I started to do this movie, which was the first one I did, a special effects movie. And I was very lucky to fall in the hands of John Davidson, who knew all these people, like Rob Boutin and Phil Tippett and Greg. And Pete Coran. And Pete Coran.

14:42 · jump to transcript →

Well, he signed the release forms when he joined the force. Now, again, the other thing that was fun for me as a writer on this show was this scene and a scene coming up where they're celebrating were scenes we just made up based on props that showed up that day. And I remember, you know, I literally, this was Mary Kay Cosmetics. I ran down the hall. I wrote a scene on a selector typewriter in somebody's office, brought it back, and they shot it. It was the most satisfying thing that's ever happened to me as a writer. Come here, Arthur.

27:34 · jump to transcript →

She can't go with you? No. Oh. Not now, anyway. Not now. Not now. We'll see you later. Oh, the weather's just fine. It's hardly raining. Did you not hear what I said? Warren! Warren! It's you she takes after. See, it's just built for that anamorphic frame. The whole landscape. Got lucky with some birds.

29:22 · jump to transcript →

I mean, I was lucky, yes, but, and fortunate, but to have an editor as good as Steve Rosenblum was to really bring his own thing to it. I mean, he took what I gave him and he managed to sort of make it better, you know, which is, when it comes right down to it, the edit's just the final rewrite. And he's a master of it.

2:03:35 · jump to transcript →

I saw him copy this bit on pizza commercials and stuff, you know. The monk running up the top of the mountain. But it's phenomenally beautiful, Scotland. You get lucky with the patchy sunlight. And initially this whole montage, you know, with those people talking about Moses and the Red Sea and all that, that was much earlier in the film. It was like in the first act or the beginning of the second act.

2:17:51 · jump to transcript →

We were lucky here because this landscape on the slopes of Ruapehu actually had a fire, a forest fire. About six months before we were due to shoot there, it had all been burnt through with a blaze. And so we had this great landscape that was sort of ashy and volcanic looking, but it was actually the result of a fire had swept through and killed all the undergrowth. It's a great location for a World War I film, burnt trees and scorched land and yeah.

8:53 · jump to transcript →

All shot in a tiny little studio and we used a blue screen behind Billy and Dom but we just had this little bit of trees and a piece of the wall and it was very cramped and very claustrophobic and you're sort of lucky that in the movie people don't think about that too much. That's why we use those big miniature shots to try to bust it open a bit to give a sense of scale when no scale actually exists.

10:34 · jump to transcript →

just in case. We didn't throw it away, which was lucky because three years later we kind of came up with the idea of this banquet and we were able to drag this bloody big set out and stick it in the warehouse again and we had it back for filming. The drinking game was meant to be a bit of leaven really, wasn't it? Just to lighten the front of this film that it's not all doom and gloom.

19:11 · jump to transcript →

James Mangold

What I like to believe makes this sequence stand out is that these men look so completely comfortable with the weapons, on their horses, et cetera. And one of the ways I was really lucky in putting this film together with Kathy Conrad, my producer and partner, was that when we cast the film with Russell and Christian, what we got were more than just two of the best

9:32 · jump to transcript →

James Mangold

You got green eyes. I always loved the scene. The actress here is Vanessa Shaw. Again, a director is really lucky when wonderful actors come in. You know, Vanessa worked all of a week on this movie, but... That's all right. She does remarkable work, and it's a very, very small role, and that reality sometimes will scare a really good actor away because they don't want to play a, quote, small role. What I found over and over again, though,

25:24 · jump to transcript →

James Mangold

but at the same time had a dream for their families to start something clean and new. And that their views and fears, some of them racist about what had happened to New York City, were not dissimilar to the way I thought frontier men might have looked at the Native Americans in their own quest to find a safe place to raise their children, free from quote, savagery. I hope you're proud of yourself

41:02 · 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 →

Yeah, we were lucky, right? We actually really lucked out on this. That was one of the weird things. We pretty much assumed, you know, when we had our first meetings with the studio, everyone was like, look, we've got to try to keep the movie a little bit more upbeat at the beginning if it's going to be so gloom and doom at the end with the rain. So then we were like, oh, man, it's going to be overcast every day. It's probably going to be raining every day. And I think literally we had only one day of exterior shoots where we didn't want it to rain, and it did. This day we had the worst process trailer rig ever.

8:03 · jump to transcript →

it kind of almost looks like the skin guy's penis is hanging there. And it just happened to be that when they were doing one of the resets on that shot, part of the intestine got put down there. And then we noticed after we put in the cut, we're like, oh, God, there's a skin junk just right there. So that's something funny, I think, when people watch the movie. That wasn't intentional. Yeah, it's like once you see that, that's all I see now. Every time I watch that scene, I'm like, ah, there's the skin penis scene.

36:24 · jump to transcript →

a very hard surface, like if it was marble or a very stiff table, that mixture. And this snowfall wasn't planned to be included in the movie in the beginning, but you just saw this beautiful snowfall, filmed it and decided to include it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that is the...

1:53 · jump to transcript →

You probably do it all over the world with people like Oscar. That was one of the things that actually did happen to me. This story is quite autobiographical, but just things of a similar significance happened to me, not the actual things, but this thing I remember, yeah.

49:21 · jump to transcript →

This was expensive, a very expensive camera crane here. And here's the thing that you added, which is not in the script, this suitcase that Lucky is carrying around all the time. It is explained eventually what's inside it, but it's not in the script. I thought that

1:10:41 · jump to transcript →

her family and to people who obviously, the whole process became quite difficult but also in the end quite therapeutic I think to pretty much everyone I'd spoken to because it was the first time they'd spoken about Amy and about their feelings and about everything that had happened to an outsider. When I met with a lot of the people that I interviewed, they all, they looked to me like they were quite troubled, like they had been quite shocked by and traumatised by the whole experience of seeing what had happened to Amy

19:57 · jump to transcript →

And so many of them he didn't keep or he lost, but that was one particular one that he did still have. And obviously when you realise what happened to their friendship and their relationship, it became more and more powerful for him to have this memento of Amy. It took a lot for both him and Salaam to share that with us, I think. Salaam has never shown his pictures to anyone. He took a long time to get him on board. I flew out to meet him in his house in Miami, met him in that very room where Amy recorded these songs. Unbelievable.

42:07 · jump to transcript →

astonishingly intimate, close. I think she bought him this camera and he was testing it out. I think that's what we found out. It was a new video camera that she bought for him and he was making sure that it works and checking all the levels. Blake shot quite a lot of footage. It was one of the parts of this movie of trying to find what happened to all of the footage that Blake shot and then the challenges. A lot of it seemed to have gone missing. Yeah, I think this is obviously some of it.

1:08:33 · jump to transcript →

We were lucky this one floor was empty. It's a great sort of graphic glass building with the busiest elevators in the entire world. In every shot, there's an elevator flying by. Don't even worry about matching it. No, don't even worry. Tell me what you make of him. I don't know. He's taking up scrapbooking. Look at the photographs done. Here we're going through, we're still... We were working out the story. Kind of had an idea, but the way we work, it's...

23:43 · jump to transcript →

working in the background of the sequence because we were determined to shoot it all as a piece. This is a fantastic idea Wade came up with to get you down there. These were all things that we were working out on the location. And then this shot here, this is one of my favorite shots in the entire film. This moment, Eddie Hamilton found this music and dropped it in from the moment you come out the door. And this just happened to line up with the edit.

32:19 · jump to transcript →

Oh, purely by accident. We drive to set in the mornings together. Oh, yes. A lot of mornings going through, and it was such a pleasure. Such a pleasure. Oh, thank you. I really... I feel the same way. Oy. Oh, my God, the mask. Let's talk for a moment about the mask. The amount of time that goes into designing. You can't buy that mask at your local scuba store. And getting that mask to not leak was... Here we go.

1:03:43 · jump to transcript →

Tim Burton

you know, as a teenager. And so I just thought, well, what happened to her like 35 years later? You know, it's kind of like that 35 up. You're kind of interested to see somebody that you thought was cool or interesting. What happened to them? Where are they now? So that got me into the feeling. And then seeing like the three, you know, what happens to a person? And, you know, what are your relationships? Do you have kids? And so the idea of seeing three generations of Dietz women, you know, mother, daughter, granddaughter,

2:18 · jump to transcript →

Tim Burton

What the hell happened to me? What am I? You know, and so sometimes in life, you need to kind of reboot and reconnect yourself to yourself. And so the ghost house to me was just a good sort of symbol for who she was and where she is now. Filming the little ghost house sequences, I mean, yeah, it's just, I think it was our first day of shooting and I always wanted to do a cheesy cable show. I feel a dark presence.

4:05 · jump to transcript →

Tim Burton

and they don't even have to say anything. And you can't say to them, act this sort of way. You kind of have to have it in your soul. And so, you know, I've been lucky to meet a few people over the years that have these sort of vibes. Is that mine? Who's texting me? Stupid stepmother. She's got texting diarrhea. I have to go. Lydia.

7:09 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, Mitchum was the idol of Elvis Presley, and you can really see why. Oh, yes. It's the way he moves with his whole body. It's interesting that Lawton originally wanted Gary Cooper for the part. He had worked with Cooper in the 30s. I don't see that at all. No, I don't. He was very lucky that it worked out with Mitchum. But the point is that he was always thinking in terms of a handsome leading man for this villainous part. He explained it to Davis Grubb. As Davis Grubb remembered it, Lawton told him, Davis, people who...

21:26 · jump to transcript →

Also, Gary Cooper moved beautifully, and that's what you need for the part. It's understandable that Lawton was thinking in those terms, you know. But wouldn't he have been too old at this point? Wouldn't Cooper have been too old at this stage of his career? Maybe the young Gary Cooper. He was still playing leading man. Well, he was. And the cragginess of his age might have actually fit Preacher. It's the high noon Gary Cooper period, but how lucky we are that it worked out how it did. Yes, Cooper didn't want to do it. He was scared off by it, and the rest is history.

22:01 · jump to transcript →

Now this, the close shot here of Mitchum, it's going to be wonderful. When the game begins, by a lucky accident, he does something with his eyes that is just able to catch the highlight. It's coming up here. See, this is where the game begins. Now watch this evil glint in Mitchum's eye. There you go. So that's the moment that was delayed from the ice cream parlor scene. One characteristic of the...

26:58 · jump to transcript →

as good as they would, and we were able to shoot a sequence in downtown Vegas, which I don't think you could do now. In the Las Vegas chase scene, the sheriff is played by Leroy Hollis, who just happened to be the production's Teamster captain. Hollis again worked for the Bond producers when they filmed Live and Let Die in New Orleans.

1:04:08 · jump to transcript →

which wasn't very difficult to do because we got one of the jackpot mechanics to come and fix the machine, and sure enough, the jackpot comes up every time. The mechanic is quite interested because he works very hard. On weekends, he has to tighten them all up, and on Mondays, which is the slack day, the ones outside by the door loosen them up so that people pull and say, oh, this is my lucky place, and come inside.

1:31:02 · jump to transcript →

But the oil industry was going down a little bit, and oil rigs were quite cheap to hire. So we plonked our own oil rig off San Diego, which is a convenient place, and the unit ran out in little boats every day, or if you were lucky, you got a ride on the helicopter.

1:41:22 · jump to transcript →

And if you just listen to this next scene, you'll see why Bobby's character has such a positive attitude and such a geeky laugh. This is one of my favorite scenes. You're going to do fantastic here. Try not to break too many hearts, I'll lose. That hasn't been a real problem yet, Dad. Oh, come on. You're going to make some lucky girl very happy. You're smart, easygoing.

5:04 · jump to transcript →

We never get to see them tarred and feathered with molasses or whatever they were tarred and feathered with, but we did shoot that. Now, we're all laughing, but imagine how that must have felt if it really happened to you, which it did. I was in a high school fraternity where I did get tarred and feathered like that, and it's a horrible feeling. And you kind of wonder why you're doing it. I mean, why is it worth taking this kind of abuse and humiliation just to be able to do it to some guys next year? Oh, yeah, that's why.

21:31 · jump to transcript →

I love the music. This piece of music, which is a bicycle built for two in Japanese, was just a lucky find and fits the scene beautifully, as some people have pointed out. Poindexter's wearing garters. A nice touch. Times are changing, Betty.

1:01:00 · jump to transcript →