Happy accidents

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.

10:32 · jump to transcript →

So we were so lucky to have Thomas E. 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 Dougray 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,

36:12 · jump to transcript →

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.

10:16 · jump to transcript →

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.

37:44 · jump to transcript →

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.

1:13:24 · jump to transcript →

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.

9:29 · jump to transcript →

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.

20:32 · jump to transcript →

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.

22:40 · 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 →

There's a lot of blood around and there's a kind of madness around as well because she says, did any of it get in your mouth? And it's a warning about how infectious it is. And yet there's a kind of abandonment on her part in terms of, you know, she doesn't try and shield herself from blood the whole time. And I always thought she had that kind of, that had been a decision she'd come to. If she got, if it happened to her, it happened to her. But she wasn't going to, the only way that she could protect her life was being as...

29:46 · jump to transcript →

before it started pouring rain, and we would have been forced inside then, in some way. We'd have had to invent a reason to go inside. Something might have happened to me. I had to be alarmed. I couldn't risk it. But with other people... If it's a recording, for all we know, the soldiers who made it a day... But they are beginning to kind of bicker and bind together as a unit, really, in a way, before they know it, because they don't really have a choice. They've got to sort of stick together, really, or they're going to.

42:04 · jump to transcript →

That's the one we should have kept, but of course they were south of the river. This was filmed actually in Croydon, and then this is back to the Blackwall Tunnel, which is one of the main routes under the river in London. And we were very lucky to get... The actual tunnel itself is not one of the real tunnels, it's a disused tunnel.

43:30 · jump to transcript →

If you had to design the office of Hannibal Lecter, V.D., what kinds of things were on his desk and on his bookshelf? What curios does he collect? The script suggested some of them. But a great designer like Kristi Zea has a field day with this kind of opportunity. I was very lucky. Once I got the movie officially and I started going after the people who created Silence, I went after Kristi who I'd worked with in Family Man, so I had a prior relationship. I felt I was born to make this movie because ironically, I'd worked with Dante before. Even though he'd done Manhunter, I said, "I'm gonna send you the script. "I know you'll not wanna do it because you've done it before." Dante read it and said, "I want to do this." I said, "Come on, you've done this movie before." He said, "Monet painted the cathedral 13 times, what's the difference? "And this is a totally different movie." I also wanted to help myself with some of the credibility. Get some Academy Award-winning or nominated people aside from Ted who can be a part of this. The script to me, honestly, I'm not saying this 'cause Ted's here, but the script is everything. It allowed me to get the crew that I wanted because of the material, and especially the actors. I basically went after all the actors that everybody said I couldn't get. The first actor I had to get was Anthony Hopkins, and I didn't know this. I thought I was signing on to a Ted Tally script with Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter. But Dino, after he says, "You got the job, Brett," he said, "Go to New York and convince Anthony Hopkins to do the movie." After having already played the part twice, Tony needed a little bit of coaxing to do it the third time. He wanted to be convinced that he could find something new and different in this.

4:10 · jump to transcript →

I went to New York with Dino, and I was very nervous. This was Tony, Anthony Hopkins. The thing I did know and what I was confident about was the type of movie I wanted to make. Like I said, I went in there knowing the tone of the movie, my approach to the movie, how I wanted to not show any of the gore. I didn't want to make a horror film. I wanted to make a film that was psychological, emotional, and smart. That was what was on the page. And the only scene that Tony had a concern with when I sat with him was this scene right here. Tony was concerned that as originally written, his attack on Graham here was too graphic. By the way, it's an interpretation because 10 directors would direct a scene in 10 different ways and show various degrees of violence. It's about showing the details of the guts falling out of his stomach, or the blood, how much blood to show. And I chose to play it mostly on their faces. Once the attack happens... Here's my little homage to Silence. You see the... - I see the bug. You like that. So I chose to play the violence part of this scene on their faces. I love this book. This is an original. My prop guy, Brad, found this original book from France, Larousse... When I read it, I had no idea what the hell it was. It's the bible of cookbooks. - Yes, I learned that quickly. He found this real old French cookbook. There was a lot of dialogue about how do we sell his moment? It's really just a subliminal thing. It wasn't really supposed to be so pointed where it was like, "Oh, sweetbreads." I thought sweetbreads was brains but it's not. It's actually... Thyroid. -... thymus. I learned so much about anatomy on this film. If you work on a Lecter movie, you learn a lot about cooking. I thought Edward was fantastic. There is a tremendous intensity of performances in this movie. And really a dream cast as Brett already said. If you could have anybody in the world for these parts and be lucky enough to get them. It's pretty much what happened to us. Great actors want to play good characters. They want to play great characters and all of these characters, down to Freddy Lounds, and other smaller roles, were just written so well. They were interesting and dynamic. And these actors were interested in playing this. To convince these actors to do a third in the series, all that went out the window when they read the script. Certainly once they started working. There's our cold opening. I'm very proud of this title sequence because it was actually done two days before we had to lock picture. My editor, Mark Helfrich actually was the brainchild behind this because... You re-shot the journal here in a very interesting way. Initially, this was done in a much more straightforward way with the images very flat against the screen. Yes, a lot of times. Mark is kind of... Everybody on my team, from my AD to my production designer, are filmmakers. Mark is a filmmaker in his own right and he just understands the visuals and storytelling. I love how, you know... But this was written. - Yes, it was. But the way that the camera roams over these pages and when we go in very close and it gets grainy, the camera movement left to right, up and down, is all not scripted, of course. This is something I don't really have the patience for. Mark kind of took this book that he was fascinated by. I think he has a copy of it in his closet at home. He just knew every page, every frame and went with Dante and literally just shot. This is a wonderful opportunity. This kind of title sequence is sort of old-fashioned in a way. But it's a wonderful opportunity for a screenwriter to get information in quickly to cover a lot of ground between the arrest of Lecter and where we are when the movie is going to start. Covering a period of several years, you are doing that without any dialogue just by these images. It's a very useful shorthand. Danny did the same thing that Ted did with the script in this sequence that Mark did with the visuals in this sequence. Danny did the same thing with the music. I think the music here is so fantastic. It's very much like a Bernard Hermann score, which I knew was a big inspiration for Danny. Danny is a big fan of Bernard, and this was his chance. He's done darker scores, but they've had a kind of lightness, or comedic darkness to it. Danny did something here that kind of made people's skin crawl in the theater, like, "You're in for it. "If you're gonna sit through this movie, you'll experience some stuff. "Shit's gonna go down."

6:02 · jump to transcript →

It's hard to pull off this stunt with rising excitement, meanwhile. I'm amazed by him in this scene. It is a very hard thing to pull off. This is an example of a scene that my editor, Mark, was particular about, collaborating with me and telling me, "Brett, how are you gonna pull this off?" I said, "I don't know, I'll just shoot it." He had me bring Edward to the edit room and took a video camera and shot the scene for me, before showing the way it might intercut since there are devices in here which are the flashes, and you've seen it in hundreds of films and I didn't want it to be false. He said, "I have an idea of how to do this." He shot the scene for me before I shot it. It was a great reference. We adjusted and tweaked things, but this is all protecting the cliché. You can see the power that editing brings to a sequence like this. It startles you and moves the story forward in a way that the story is always a leap or two ahead of the audience. And pulling them along behind it. That's a function of great editing. It is important here because once the audience is ahead of you, you're in trouble, they are sleeping. It's the same thing on The Silence of the Lambs, I used to worry that we were cutting so many tiny beats that the audience would be confused. And Jonathan Demme said, "Better if they're confused "for five minutes than bored for five seconds." And this film is very tightly edited. Gentlemen. Ladies. This is what the subject's teeth look like. The impressions came from bite marks on Mrs. Leeds. This degree of crookedness... Here we... Where was this? - This was shot in LA. This is shot in LA in a government building that the city gave us. Here's Bill Duke. - He's one of my favorite actors. Again, an example of the meticulousness that Brett brings to casting. These wonderful actors who could be the stars of their own movies, who are playing supporting parts in this. I literally called them and begged them to be in the movie. I love actors. I love great actors. I spend as much time on the smaller roles as I do on the bigger roles. It's important because an actor who has one line can take you out of the movie and hurt it in my opinion. It goes back to the whole question of tone. A single wrong note will make an audience self-conscious, and pull them out of the movie. This film is the opposite of any of the films I've ever done. Family Man, that had dramatic moments, was still a comedy. So you can go farther with realism, but this especially, when it's dealing with the FBI, forensics, and scientific... -[t has to be grounded in reality. - Very grounded. In order for the audience to accept the extravagant parts of the movie, the more baroque characters in the movie like Dolarhyde and Lecter, scenes like this have to be very credibly rooted in police reality, in procedural reality. Would you give that up? The other thing also is, when we're talking about the tone, the choice... I was thinking about It, why I really chose not to show, not only because of Silence, because even Silence might've shown more violence than this film. Really, because the only scene we have is the biting of the lips. We certainly tried to hold it down. But I think the reason was because when I went to the FBI at Quantico and started looking at all these visuals of serial killers' work, it was so disturbing to me. It really bothered me. I said, "Why do I want to do this to audiences? "It'll completely turn them off." As with Silence, what you really want to do with this movie is a detective story. You really want to do a psychological thriller, a detective story. You're not trying to make a horror movie at all. Sometimes they're referred to as horror movies. I've never understood that. To me, these are thrillers, detective movies. In this scene, Harvey's Jewishness really comes out. "You're the light of my life." He sounds like my grandmother. I love that line. I can't answer more questions. Here's Philip Seymour Hoffman, a great actor. Who we should not have been lucky enough to get for this small part. Yeah. He actually wanted to play Dolarhyde, and I wanted Ralph to do it. I had dinner with him, and then called them back a week later. He wanted to play Dolarhyde, and his schedule wouldn't let him do a bigger part anyway. And then I called him and said, "I think you should do Freddy Lounds." He said, "Let me read it again." Then he called and said, "I'll do it." He would've been good as Dolarhyde, in a different way. He would've been amazing. - I mean, a great actor is a chameleon. Remember? With the tubes hanging out of me? Forget that prick. This was a very difficult scene, too. This was difficult because... And this was a scene where Edward had a Iot of input as we were revising the script before we shot. Edward said, "This is a difficult transition for this character to make." Here he's out of the loop, he doesn't want to be involved in the investigation. He's sort of done a favor for his friend and mentor, Jack Crawford, but he doesn't want to get deeper into this 'cause of psychological and physical scars. Because of his commitment to his family, he doesn't want to do this. Now he has to do the most difficult thing he could possibly do, which is to confront Lecter again. There was a lot of back-and-forth and a lot of revision, and a lot of talk about how we might credibly motivate this transition in the story. Edward was actually very helpful here with his thoughts. I think it works. Because it's not the cliché of the guy jumping back... Getting back on the horse and showing off. I'm proud of how it turned out. Again, it was really Mark's editing of the scene. It's also Harvey's matter-of-fact performance here. It could, potentially, have been a real glitch in the story. Where the audience says, "He wouldn't go back to see Lecter again. "He's scared to death of Lecter."

21:36 · jump to transcript →

It was one of those lucky moments where an actor didn't absolutely stick to their guns and finally she just did it. Now, Hugh, this was... This was a... This is the scene I look forward to more than any. We had some fights over this. Hugh wouldn't rehearse, wanted not to do it. I thought it was funny on paper but un-actable. I don't know. Take a look. Wow. Did you think about doing it in time, or did you think, "No, why?" - I say I did do it in time and you edited it wrong. - We moved the music. Yes. Oh, it's brilliant. - l'm in time there. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah! Oh, no. - This is in time. This is brilliant! Well done. That bit's not, I grant you. And the disaster here was that you mimed, "I'll take you down." So we've had to totally cut a minute and a half out of the song in order to get there. It was a disaster on the day. Oh, God. - Was there supposed to be more? Well, no, we just let the song run, but we then had no choice how long the song had to be. - It's brilliant. This is almost my favorite scene just in terms of how pretty it is.

45:31 · jump to transcript →

I'm very lucky I've got one of those constitutions where I never put on weight. Hello. This scene, which isn't in the extras in the DVD, originally, when he answered the phone, he spoke to Heike, who was his ex-girlfriend. But we cut that whole thing and then we gave him the different girlfriend at the beginning. Really? - Yeah. It just shows you that movies are just... Why is Heike no longer his ex-girlfriend? - ...things in shots and patches. I think because it actually made this next scene, when he gets a crush on Lucia, made it like he was damaged rather than actually falling in love. It made it seem more compensatory. There was such a huge wind machine behind them. The sound here was So... All these lines had to be dubbed. Stop! Stop.

47:00 · jump to transcript →

This is a good bit, I grant you. A happy accident. Happy accident or directed? I think happy accident. Thomas, if you have to grow up to be one of those actors, Hugh or Colin, whose career do you think you'd prefer to pursue? -/ don't know. - Just say Hugh, Thomas. Just say it. Just say it. "He's bad," and we can all move on.

51:18 · jump to transcript →

Hey, there's our writing credit. Look at that. I'm first. And here we've got a little extra bit of nudity, courtesy of Kyle Cooper and Prologue. That was not in the theatrical release. I guess we should talk about the directing credit. Sure. Why don't we talk about the directing credit? It says that Jeff Schaffer is the director, and I guess there's a little history behind this. The three of us wrote the movie and we wanted to have a three-person directing credit. So we went to the Directors Guild of America and we asked if we could have a three-man directing credit, and they have a lot of reasons why they said no. So ultimately we had to pick one of us who would receive that directing credit. And actually, on this DVD, there's a special feature called "How to Pick a Director" that shows exactly how we decided to choose who... A historical video document, if you will. No one should be listening right now because everyone is looking at the wonderful and talented Kristin Kreuk who did us an enormous favor and flew out for a part in the movie, and she was excellent and just the sweetest woman. She flew out to Prague where this was filmed, and actually, as we go through the movie, only two days of the entire filming schedule... we shot 54 days... only two days were shot outside of Prague and its surrounding areas. This was shot at the international school, which is, I guess, a bunch of foreign diplomats' kids going to school outside of Prague. And that's our friend Jeffrey Tambor, who we worked with on The Grinch who, lucky enough, was in town shooting Hellboy and we were able to steal him for a day to be Scotty's dad. Yeah, we were actually... we were location-scouting at a hotel and he was staying there. - That's right. He was staying at the hotel and just came out of the elevator. Sort of, "What are you doing here?" "What are you doing here?" "Will you be in our movie?" "Yes." And so that's how we... A lot of the familiar faces that you see were either in Prague or on their way from somewhere that they could sort of be taken out of the sky and put in Prague. It was not easy. Kristin did us a giant favor, Kristin Kreuk, by flying... I think she was shooting Smallville in Vancouver and we flew her from Vancouver to Prague. It was hard to get people to fly because SARS was sort of at its peak. It was an amazing time. The Iraqi war had started and then SARS was going on. So it was very tough to convince people, "Hey, come to Europe where they're protesting and fly on a 14-hour flight with people coughing." On a plane that just turned around in Hong Kong.

2:46 · jump to transcript →

The other thing I was gonna mention... We're constantly behind in the mentioning. Part of the reason we ended up in Prague and actually ended up with Allan was because of Neno. - Yeah. Neno Pecur, who was Croatian. We hired him as an art director to scout Prague and to scout the real European locales before we knew we were going to Prague. Basically, he would go to Paris and go, "This is what it really does look like." Then he went to Prague and said, "We could do something like this here." And from his pictures, we used some of his actual locations that he took photos of and made the decision to go to Prague. And then Neno has worked with Allan for many years as his art director, and he helped us get Allan. The two of them, their team... They brought Bill... Cimino. Our set decorator. - Cimino. That's right. Just fantastic and along with the guys from Prague. I think it's now time to mention, though, at the robot scene, which was the first time... We've been writers for a long time and you sort of go, "Look, I think we know what this is gonna be. This is gonna be really funny. It's gonna be a slow-motion kung fu fight scene between two people being robots." You write it and it seems funny. There's the old joke about the writer writes "Rome burns," and the director has to realize that. We were on the spot here because it was easy when we wrote it to just hand it off, but now we handed it off to ourselves. Actually, this is one of the things... - At one point, we cut this, actually. At one point... - We cut it from the script. We talked about cutting it. We were afraid we didn't know how to realize it. We just were like, "What is this? This could be bad." Left it in for a table read. - We left it in for the table read. And it got such huge laughs at the table read that we realized, "We gotta at least try and shoot it." We then initiated a worldwide search for a robot man. This is J.P. Manoux, who's an incredibly talented actor. We found him here in Los Angeles. Yeah. We looked at all these mimes... We looked at real French guys. - ...weird acrobats, and French guys whatever, and, of course, a guy from LA who was actually a friend of a friend and was in the Groundlings, of course, ended up being a really good guy. He is just outstanding. - And he came in with this ability... I mean, a lot of what you're seeing, like him laughing and just his attitude as a French guy, was in his audition. We were also very lucky that Scott... - Scott, exactly. ...knew how to robot. I guess Scott grew up watching Shields and Yarnell... No, no. J.P. - Was that J.P.? Scott had an acting teacher... - Who was in the Barney costume. Yeah. - Okay. And we went there on a Saturday to basically work it out. And we had blocked off an entire Saturday. We choreographed the fight with little bits of Enter the Dragon and some Matrix in about... Twenty minutes. - Yeah, like, 20 minutes. And the first time we did it in Our crazy wide shot... because we knew to get a master... the crew laughed, and we were like, "Oh, okay." It was also-- This was pretty early in the schedule. And I think it was maybe the first time the crew thought, "Okay, these guys actually know what they're doing." Like, "This is something we haven't seen." Wrongly, but they thought that. - But they assumed it.

29:59 · jump to transcript →

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.

33:13 · jump to transcript →

James McTeigue

Gotcha. What I wanted to do there... ...was make everyone inside the TV station feel a little trapped. I guess. So, I said it was important, uh... ...to make it like a classic TV station... ...but to make it very.... You know, there's a little element of green in the paint... ...which sort of gives you that, sort of, sickly, kind of, neon-y feel. And then, I wanted not only for V to feel like there was no way out... ...but, sort of no way out for Evey... ...and the other characters that come into the TV station. You know, the Deitrich character's in there, the Finch character. Dominic. You know, Dascomb. You would get the overall feel that... ... everybody couldn't get out of the TV station once V laid siege to it. Including V himself. This looks serious. Her parents were political activists. They were detained when she was 12. - What happened to her? Juvenile Reclamation Project... ...for five years. - Shit. We're gonna need backup, but keep it minimal. You sure about that, sir? I want a chance to talk to her... ... before she disappears into one of Creedy's black bags.

15:14 · jump to transcript →

James McTeigue

V, yesterday I couldn't find my ID. You didn't take it, did you? Would you prefer a lie or the truth? Did you have anything to do with that? Yes, I killed him. - YOu.... Oh, God. - You're upset. I'm upset? You just said you killed Lewis Prothero. I might have killed the Fingermen that attacked you. I heard no objection. What? - Violence can be used for good. What are you talking about? - Justice. Oh, I see. There's no court in this country for men like Prothero. And are you going to kill more people? Yes. Take a look at this. Prothero's military record. What do you see? lraq, Kurdistan, Syria, before and after, Sudan. Busy boy. - But after all that... ... they put him in charge of a detention facility at Larkhill. Well, no good deed goes unpunished. You think there's a connection between our boy and Larkhill? It might explain the connection between him and the Hammond girl. Problem is, I can't find any other record of it. Larkhill? Larkhill? I cannot recall that particular facility, inspector. You're welcome to review our records. - We've been through your records. All it says is that there was a detention facility at Larkhill... ... approximately 10 miles north of Salisbury. Well, there you have it. This is a matter of some urgency, major. We need to know if there was anything different about this facility. I'm sorry, inspector, I simply cannot recall. Was there a specific profile for those being sent there? Usual undesirables, I should think. - But do you know? Of course not. I wasn't stationed there. - Do you know who was? I cannot recall specific names, but if you look through our records... Your records are either deleted, omitted or missing. As head of the Detention Program at that... Before you go further, let me remind you things were very chaotic back then. Now we don't have the problems we had back then. We all did what we had to do. And in those circumstances, we did the best we could. That's all I have to say about that. I think there is a lot of fear-based politic now. And not that there hasn't always been, you know, because tt's, like, the good tool... ... that you can use to really, you know, keep the population under wraps. The Evey character becomes, like... ... you know, becomes encased in that sort of subtle fear, I guess I would call it. I also think that fear is at the heart of the film. In a totalitarian state... ... fear is the major weapon that's used. And fear is the state in which everybody in that state lives. Not just your average person in the street... ...In fact, even the top echelons of government. They're living in fear. And it's true in the film. - Also, the other extreme... ... fearlessness, which, obviously we deal with too... ... 1S also equally dangerous. I mean, fear is a socially necessary... It's how you save your life. - It's-- Yeah. It's how you learn from your past experiences... ...and protect yourself in the future from further pain... ... that you've experienced in the past or you've heard about from other people. And obviously it is exploited by governments, by media... ...to control people. But fearlessness is another extreme of a dangerous position to be in... ...where people are willing to do things that do put themselves or others at risk. The character of Evey in the graphic novel is a... ...well, let's call her, like, a very unconscious, you know... ... young girl. Almost like a, you know, a caricature of a blond, young, kid. And she becomes, in the graphic novel like a piece of clay that, you know, V molds... ...and sort of pushes this way and pushes that way. We thought it'd be better to make her a little politically aware... ... you know, like, through her parents. But not, you know, super conscious. It's like she tried to push that back because of what happened to her parents... ...and how her life as a child was and how it had been affected by her parents. And on that point as well... ...by giving her certain strengths that she may not have in the graphic novel... . it actually humanizes V as well... ...because it forces him to change and it forces him to be... ...more than just this all-powerful figure who kind of is a step away from that... ...a step removed from humanity. And it actually gives him, forces feelings upon him... ... that he may not necessarily feel otherwise. In the graphic novel it really feels like... ...V can almost, like, do anything he wants to her... ...and I think when you give the Evey character... ... you make her a little stronger... ... it makes her push up against V a little bit... ...and makes the conflict a little more interesting, I thought. One thing is true of all governments: The most reliable records are tax records.

38:13 · jump to transcript →

James McTeigue

I know there's no way I can convince you... ... this is not one of their tricks, but I don't care. lam me. My name is Valerie. I don't think I'll lve much longer. I wanted to tell someone about my life. This is the only autobiography that I will ever write and, God... .../'m writing it on toilet paper. There is always that great history of the first people... ...picked on or imprisoned are minorities. And it was important to, you know, show the Valerie character... ...and where she starts off with... ...and where, you know, where her life leads her... ...and then, you know, how the government come in... ...and they sweep up all those people... ...and then... ...and then how it affects Evey... ...and how Evey comes to, like, understand what has happened to those people... ...and how it, I guess it really sparks her political consciousness after her parents. Natasha, who plays Valerie is really, really lovely. And she, I mean, incredible actress. And James had her on set so that when I was reading the letter... ... that she would be reading it live for me... ...Which made it so much more human, instead of... I mean, not to disparage script Supervisors in any way... ...but a lot of times when there's voiceovers that you hear... ...the script supervisor will just read it from the script. And obviously they shouldn't be trying to act it out or anything... ...but that can be a very cold feeling. When you have the actual actor there, that's pretty amazing. For me, it's a point in the film where you're both propelled on... ...and also you're propelled backwards. And so you're going down this fantastic rabbit hole... ...at a point in the film where it expands the film... ...and it expands your mind. And you have to stay on the train you're on, but also at the same time... ...get onto another train. And I love it when films do that. So It's a fantastic thing to do at that point in time. It also is a very important back-story for V as well. Because it's to that note... ...1S something that links all three characters. And, you know, I love that all that... The thing that changes them... ... IS written on a piece of toilet paper. I think that is, like, totally fantastic. You would. I'd always known what I wanted to do with my life... ...and in 2015 I starred in my first film, The Salt Flats. lt was the most important role of my life. Not because of my career... ... but because that was how I met Ruth. The first time we kissed... ...I knew I never wanted to kiss any other lips but hers again.

1:12:51 · jump to transcript →

Not because of some big stunt or anything. No, I was just walking down some steps with some heels on. And with Stuart watching. Yes, and with Stuart watching. This was an interesting scene because when it was scripted, we never knew we were talking about shooting it or going in with special effects to kind of see the tongue taking the pill. And then we never did anything digital because I was lucky enough to get my real boy there.

4:02 · jump to transcript →

and Bauhaus and that sensibility in terms of architecture. Mm-hmm. We did get really lucky with our locations, really incredible locations where we got to shoot. And that's one of the interesting things, I think, about Berlin is that in Peter Chung's animated series, it's a divided city. And, of course, the recent heritage of Berlin as a divided city really worked. Yeah, definitely. For this film.

10:41 · jump to transcript →

She was so game. She's always so game. I was lucky to do another film right after this with her. And it doesn't matter if she's showing up for three days of work or three months. I mean, just such a great attitude, this woman. And she's so committed. So committed. She became creatively involved as, of course, Charlize is.

13:26 · jump to transcript →

So Dan was the art director on Lord of the Rings... ...and I met through a friend of mine, Gino Acevedo, the makeup artist. And we met and.... Since we already had a sense of what I wanted to see as a castle... ...came with some drawings at the beginning. Dan was perfect for that. Just took the drawing. As an art director, just became clearly someone that expanded the vision. But he's textured the style, you cannot recognise, I mean... Yeah, we were really lucky to get him. He was actually working on a different show when we got to New Zealand. And we thought maybe we wouldn't get him. But that other show had money problems... ...and shut down the production. And we were very lucky that he was able to step right into Underworld. Now, this was a scene that, at least, my recollection... ...when we originally sort of storyboarded it... ...wWe had a lot of werewolves in it, and then we couldn't afford them. So we went back and we begged Clint Culpepper... ...to give us about a hundred more werewolves. And he did. - Which he did. We also had to build this canyon right here. And I do think it makes a difference of just... Before, we were talking about doing a version... ... Which is just all within the trees. And, you know, Patrick, you and I talked a lot about... I liked the idea of you going from... There's a separation. You got the forest, and then this canyon, that then leads into... Leads into the meadow, yeah. Into the castle. Yup, and this castle, obviously, is a location that doesn't exist. So basically... - Neither do the rocks. What we had, it's basically like a golf course-looking... There was no rocks, nothing. It's very flat, very boring. And there was a lot of work to be done later on post and, you know.... The trees and the grass are basically all that were there. Yeah. The big crossbows. We only had one working crossbow, correct? Yes. - We still have it in storage too. We should take it out and play with it. We had a lot of, like, one thing working out of everything. We had one werewolf head mechanical. And we had to make it, you know, out of that stuff. So this wall behind. This is again basically the outside of the set. That set already, basically. - Yup. The whole courtyard and the little bit of the outside was built. We tried that shot right there, where the werewolf comes in. We tried that practically. And it just looked like.... Just dragging in a muppet. - A piece of rubber. Now, this is Rhona. - She is.

4:04 · jump to transcript →

This was part of what we described as our Spartacus sequence... ...where we wanted to have the slaves working on the rocks. Yep. This again, Dan Hennah and his.... It's an astonishing scale that we were able to get for the limited budget. Look at Larry. Larry's got the cruellest villain face. Ever. - Yeah, he was. I mean, Larry Rew's fantastic. He's just great, great expressions. And he was a local New Zealand actor, right? We found good actors in New Zealand. He was from there, and when we started to consider him... ... he actually decided to move to England. He came back from... What's the deal? - Yeah, that was weird. You will not always be his favourite, and when you fall... ...I will be there. I gotta say about Michael, really, because I was talking about Rhona. We just went through this. Michael... The first thing when I did the movie, I thought this is a bit of a fun little ride. He took the character and the part so... You guys saw that. He was so into it. And he was a real, real strong.... He was very big part of actually the way the character developed. He was very professional. Completely professional. And brings so much to the-- Yeah. I think you have to, you know, for these, it's.... You know, It's a different kind of film, but, you know, people that are... You know, If you were really into this kind of genre... ... you'd take it as seriously as anything else. And he is, actually. When you ask him what he likes, he likes Stephen King. He like that kind of stuff. - Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. These two actors are actually very well-known New Zealand actors... ...normally doing theatre and considerably more high-brow stuff. But they had a great time playing these roles. Orsova and Coloman. - Yeah, he's great. I remember seeing him early on... - David Ashton, yeah. David Ashton, yeah. Yeah, when we were going through all the casting and everything. He popped out. He was great. They're very solid actors. They're fantastic people. We're very lucky to have them onboard. And Elizabeth as well. - Yeah. This is so different from the type of roles... ... that she normally gets to play. They had such a good time, though. And who was the--? I Know we had a couple of different... . like, arrangements for their costume design. Who was doing for this stuff here? Who did these--? - Because I know that... Beanie did all the costume except for Rhona. Except for Rhona, right. Wendy Partridge did Rhona. Jane Holland, New Zealand? - Yeah. She did absolutely every costume in the movie. The only thing she didn't touch was basically Rhona's wardrobe. I remember when I showed up on set telling Gary that, you know... ...producing this one rather than, you know, directing... ... that I was jealous of the detail that you guys got out of it. It's like, in the costumes, in the sets, everything. I wanted to make you jealous about some things. I heard that, and you did, and you did. I'm already terribly, over the accent itself.

9:10 · jump to transcript →

So this is work... I mean, we had two companies doing the CGI werewolf on this movie. I need to mention that. The very first section of the movie, Sonja attacked... ...coming to the castle we saw before and this... ...was done by a French company called Duboi. And later on, the other part of the movie... ... you'll see werewolves again, the same one... ...done by another company called Luma. I need to say something about those guys. When the French started to do the first werewolf... ... they had a way of making those guys look quite elegant and sexy... ...but they were lacking a bit of weight, we felt. So we talked about that. The opposite came from Luma, giving them a lot of weight... ...but they were a little bit too brutal in some ways. And that's a typical example. When we met those guys, we had them looking at each other's work. And at the end, it sort of, like, you know, got better by looking at... Each other's work. - Yeah, covertly, and that really helped. There's a lot of practical wolf there as well, like, this is practical stuff. But there are probably 35 CG wolves in this sequence. Yeah. How many CG shots were in the whole movie, James? About 400. - Four hundred. But not just for the wolf. Everything. There's, like, 80 CG wolves. But this scene in particular, it's mixed from shot to shot to shot. And you really have to look closely now to tell the difference. Yeah, - Even in here, these three, four shots... ... they're back and forth, back and forth. That's a suit. And.... That one's CG. - Yeah. Sonja! Remember it took us, like, three different days to shoot that tunnel? That was such a nuisance, that thing. It was incredible. We really tried to prep ourselves, like great storyboard laid out. It was still a difficult scene to shoot. We're also talking over the appearance of Kevin Grevioux, and.... Fire. Who was obviously Raze in the first film... ...and, you know, a big part of the creation... ...of the writing of the first script. That's a Luma transformation. It was a great transformation. - It looks really good. And Luma's the only visual effects company that has worked in all three. That right? - True. How many visual effects companies ended up on Underworld? Is that 11, was it? Ten. - Ten. There's tons of them. This is one of the latest... - This is Kevin, guys. additions in the script of having Michael... ... actually do this roar that has the others back off. And it kind of.... It really opened up his character, and.... Yeah. Michael was really specific at the beginning. He asked if he could actually be doing the entire transformation... ...and being shot all the way to the end to bring his language. And I thought that helped everybody. CGI looking at him. He basically kept screaming almost like at the end of the transformation. And then he was replaced, but they got a good guideline. I wished we could have done a transformation back-to-human shot. Am I not master of this house? There's another shackle add-on right here. you are forbidden to remove your shackle. lt was added in later. you break my law after I gave you your life. Your days of plush living are over... We were lucky to have Bill Nighy on this movie. I mean, he's just a wonderful actor. He really is. He's fanta... And just a really, really great guy as well. He's always fun to work with and have on set. You couldn't have an Underworld without Viktor, Bill? I doubt it. - God, I don't know. It's tough because, like, you know, you kill these people off. And, you know, we'd always intended to do, you know, kind of a... In hopes and fantasize about doing a trilogy... ...which we've been able to be very lucky to do so now. And then you kill a lot of these great actors off. And, you know, I don't know. Don't know if it would feel the same without him. I mean, he wasn't... You know, it was great that we had him start in Underworld 2. You know, he wasn't in Underworld 2 for the beginning part of the film. Okay, that of... This is the best shot in the movie to see the size of the set. So now, we're in CG world. And we're entering now the practical set. So that's actually the set that Dan Hennah built for us... ...the last 20 feet of that, if you may. And there was this wall across to try to separate.... ...on the different flavours on both side. Yeah, this is one of my favourite shots. When I saw this, I was just... - Gorgeous. That's beautiful. - Thrilled. It looks fantastic. I was worried about that too. When we showed up... ...the sets were amazing, but they weren't very tall... in terms of how grand the space is. You know, to actually capture that on film... ... you're gonna have to see that it stops pretty short. Shoot off the edge. - And so it just meant... Every time you see that, it's a visual effects shot. It was basically the choice for that. Either wide or a little taller. But I felt the wise choice was to be wider for what we... The only other way to build it taller would've been to build it outside. Which would have been a disaster.

20:49 · jump to transcript →

Kat Ellinger

in the process of looking at Baise-moi, because I think the film exposes a lot of that on this very subtextual, subtle level that's almost undetectable unless you know it, unless you've been there. But as soon as you've been raped and you say, I've been raped, all of a sudden you are a victim and these judgments are made about you and what happened to you.

5:30 · jump to transcript →

Kat Ellinger

what had happened to me back in on myself because I had nowhere else to express it. I know a lot of people have problems with the rape-revenge genre as a genre, and I've certainly got into these conversations over the years. How can you watch that? This assumption that I wouldn't understand, like this assumption that...

22:52 · jump to transcript →

Kat Ellinger

Despentes has her own sort of grammatical way. She doesn't... And she was and still is like a huge lover of fiction. I mean, when she's raped, she says in King Kong theory, the first thing she does is go to literature for some identification, for something to make sense of what's happened to her. But she breaks the literary mould and she just writes this really incredibly angry...

27:38 · jump to transcript →

Jonathan Lynn

We got really lucky. Feeling better? Yes, thank you. Okay. Let's go for a drive. A drive? Yeah, a drive. Well, I don't know anyone else in town. This was a slightly complex, difficult crane shot. It doesn't look difficult when you watch it.

11:20 · jump to transcript →

Jonathan Lynn

expect. For me, some of the comedy of the scene lies in the fact that it's not lit in a kind of spooky way, but the fact that these macabre happenings are all taking place in ordinary light as if it's ordinary daily activity. That's what Harry Lefkowitz thought. What happened to Harry Lefkowitz? I don't want to know what happened to Harry Lefkowitz.

1:09:27 · jump to transcript →

Jonathan Lynn

But that's what they've always been called. I use them just to create a sense of unsettlement, as it were. A sense that things are not quite right. Audiences don't generally notice them. There's a great many. Some are really almost too subtle to notice. You're a lucky guy. This scene on the boat was shot in one day. You're about to find out if the woman you love really loves you. And...

1:27:31 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

Let me tell you about my boat. This is something when you first brought the idea of the character and the story to me, this was something you always wanted to include. I remember you said, you know, idea of this character, originally named Steve Cousteau. We later made him Steve Zissou. Oceanographer. He has this show. And then you said, "I want to do this--" Visual. - This visual. So this set, this is sort of inspired by, you know, World Book Encyclopedia, and Time-Life books, and, you know... elementary school books with fold-outs. And so that's kind of where it comes from, but making it in three dimensions. And for me, it was just something that I was inspired by. And it was years and years ago that I was planning to do this. And it was very kind of thrilling to be able to build this set because it was such an unusual one. And so many people-- For us, the movie is about all these characters who we made up, but they relate to people we know and they're characters we really love. We don't really have a lot of bad guys or anything. We just have these people we connect with. And the idea of having them all in there at once in this environment, that sort of encapsulates something about the movie. I think it goes back to what you were saying about your-- That this is also about what you love about making movies, and how you feel, you know, sort of lucky and privileged to be able to do it. And here, you know, in a way, this is like your dream of, "If I could make a movie, I want to do this." I mean, you've had this for so long. - Yes. And we shot it... It was like shooting a play. Explorers Club? - Right. You were on the set. - Yeah. This is-- Yeah, I spilled an entire espresso on my shirt. During the filming of this scene? Yeah. I was so jet-lagged. I was listening with a headset and it somehow disconnected from the headphones, the little mic part, and it knocked the espresso out of my hand and all over my shirt. Yes. You know, I always like paintings. - You do have a lot of paintings in your movies. - Yeah. And those tell about the character of his mentor, Lord Mandrake, and then we have Zissou, and then we have... And this story was actually based on something a friend of ours had been talking loudly in L.A... Chris Eigeman. Chris Eigeman had been talking loudly at an Indian restaurant in L.A. He thought that there was somebody who looked like a famous action hero, and he was talking very loudly about what happened to this guy, and it turned out to actually be the guy, and Chris was humiliated. And we lifted it wholesale and dropped it right into the film. And at one point you were going to have Chris play the guy until then you decided to make him Italian. It seemed nice to be able to put it all in subtitles. The Explorers Club is also-- This place is inspired by a club in New York who actually let us use their flag, which you can see in the background. And it's the Explorers Club on 70th Street, a block away from where I used to live.

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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

At the bottom of the ocean, he cries about Ned's death and everything else. Esteban, and finding this shark, and that it actually does exist, and whatever this thing is he actually did accomplish, and all the things he didn't. And the day we shot it, Bill, you couldn't even speak to him that day. I mean, he's locked in a submarine with 12 actors, and he doesn't say a word to them the whole time, and he's reading a book. And he just... I felt like he put everything of himself into it. And then afterwards, it was like a weight was lifted off for the rest of the movie. It was like he'd finished the movie at that point. I don't know if that really sounds like anything, but it's something about what happened to him during this scene... Someone in an interview asked me about, you know, what the shark means, and I didn't have a good answer because I think, as we've talked about, we don't really know. But I do think it's significant that it takes a kind of something that is... You know, in some ways, looks very deliberately artificial. I mean, I think it's beautiful, but it's very artificial-looking. And something that maybe comes out of Zissou's mind. It's almost like something he would have invented. It takes something like that for him to become emotional and to cry, you know, in a way that he hasn't been able to the entire movie with all the kind of complications of real life that happened to him. And I think that's... It is beautiful, Steve. ...probably significant. Yeah, it's pretty good, isn't it?

1:47:13 · 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...

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You probably do it all over the world with people like Oskar. 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 →

He really has a bad day, Lacke. Yeah. So many bad things happened to him. Everything is taken away from him by Eli, really. And I remember us also removing this whole police investigation bit around Håkan from the script because of...

1:24:14 · jump to transcript →

Here comes what? Here comes some more blood spraying the face. Here it is. Look at that, right on his own face. It's a tricky thing to fake that you accidentally are spraying yourself with something by accident. It's counterintuitive. Yeah. That's Jeff Imada. He's a very accomplished stuntman. Oh, gut shot. It looked a lot like Egg Fu Young, I remember, on the day. Well, we did a test with real animal guts, and that was too realistic, so we went with more cartoony sort of guts.

6:32 · jump to transcript →

Spit that shit out, man. There it is. Man, I was having a ball that day. Crazy eyes. Look at that. That's it, dead eyes. I ain't even in my body. That's one of those things you just can't explain, but to me it's one of the funniest things I've ever seen in a movie, ever. I'll just say it, dead eyes. And there, look at how we got lucky with that. The boom right in front of the face there. And we are trained actors, motherfucker. And I ain't gonna sugarcoat it.

1:05:28 · jump to transcript →

Congrats, Ben. Thank you. And look, look who's back. Look who's back. Oh, hi. Robert Downey Jr. Oh, man. He's finally made it. Congrats to you, Robert. Come on, man. Thank you. It wasn't easy. Jack, great work. Thank you. I feel very lucky to have worked with you guys in this movie. I am fine that you were late. It was the other brothers that were intolerant. I know. Look.

1:39:05 · jump to transcript →

start to get nervous. Yeah, the film was bonded. That means there's an insurance company that ensured that we could actually finish it, which was idiotic on their part, but lucky that we actually did. You shot for, what, five and a half months? Yes. In China? In every part of China. This sequence, like this fighting, little supporting role fighting, sidekick, like, have to...

34:40 · jump to transcript →

This is actually the first mean role that Cheng Pei-pei has ever done, isn't it? Or is she? Yes, she never played a mean role. Yeah, so this is really like Henry Fonda and... That western. Yeah. What's the point? What's the point? Yeah, that western. What was the point of that western? That one. That's terrible. Where have our minds gone after a year and a half working on this movie? We're lucky to still be talking even semi-coherently.

1:40:39 · jump to transcript →

It always sounds like he's saying, get me McQuarrie when he walks around the corner. Where is that bastard? What happened to my performance? I was in the first act of the script. Put the cantina scene back in the movie. Hey, drunk. Yeah, this was great. I always timed it so that when he turned off the cell phone there, it cut out the music. Did you really? I left the note going until he goes, beep. Very well done, Joe.

1:05:27 · jump to transcript →

and I'm not gonna cut into it. And I just, I love him here. And I love that his jacket, his skin, the wallpaper, everything in that one shot, it looks as though he's just blending right into the wall. It's a beautiful little happy accident. Yeah. Well, I love that this movie takes time to do those things. It's all the things that we get mad at other movies for not doing. Sure. Well, make the movie you wanna see, even if no one else in the world wants to. And to me, the irony is that

1:42:50 · jump to transcript →

And here, of course, is Thorin Oakenshield's map from The Hobbit, the map used by Bilbo and the Company of Dwarves and Gandalf to find the secret door into the Lonely Mountain. There was a little bit of a confusion as to what happened to Thorin's map. We had it written in there, and we had a note to check factually what happened to Thorin's map. And the person we sent on to that was Henry Mortenson. Viggo Mortenson's son was our researcher on that. And he went in there and double-checked what happened to Thorin's map and said, yes, no, it survived.

17:11 · 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 →

I had to throw some guys wrapped in bandages in here. In the gag reel, you'll notice that the outtake reel, I guess they're calling it, has a real funny shot. I'm trying to yell directions to the mummies, and one of the mummies holds his hand to his ear, trying to hear the direction. I always wonder what happened to those mummies. See how we wet down those floors?

37:01 · jump to transcript →

Skip framing and multiple other editorial tricks made it look really fun. Now, for those of you keeping track of things, how many mummies were chasing after the bus when it started and how many were eliminated? Well, four were chasing it and only three were eliminated. What happened to the fourth one? Well, there was a fourth one that got eliminated in a tiny little sequence that went right there.

46:51 · jump to transcript →

Tom Tykwer

that at least staying here will not allow them to have enough time to really understand what has happened to both of them and what's their future option. So this would finally lead them to leave this place and will make them understand that if they want to stay in this kind of strange bubble, which is probably also a chance and an opportunity for them,

59:47 · jump to transcript →

Tom Tykwer

appearance. You will only find out when you shoot it. Which is kind of amazing because that is something that very much represents anyhow the acting process but to a degree that is a little bit unknown because in the acting of course you wait for the unseen or unexpected moments but still you know you always have the chance if it doesn't work or it doesn't happen you can do it again. This we couldn't do again and we were so lucky that it's

1:13:12 · jump to transcript →

Yeah. Do I confess or not? Go ahead, because it was quite a bit of a problem for me. This actor here. Well, first... - This actor is such a nice actor. This is one of our deleted scenes... ...where Scott goes in to check on the gunshot girl. What's the story? - The story is, this lovely actor... He was such a nice guy. He was there for a short time. - Couple of days. Wentworth Miller. - Wentworth Miller. I happened to have gone to school with a boy called Forrest Wentworth. So I constantly called him Forrest Wentworth when I was referring to him. And it just messed everybody up. She would refer to.... She would talk to me about Forrest... .all the time, to where I would go up to Wentworth, and I swear to God... I may have just, like: "Forrest, can you take two steps?" "What are you talking about?" I don't think he knew that pretty much everyone on the set... ...Was constantly trying not to call him Forrest. Yeah, all your fault. Kevin with his G-string. Where? - He has a G-string... ... Just to hide the package.

20:39 · jump to transcript →

I mean, he will not die, this dude, huh? - No. This is my absolutely one favourite thing I did. This was great. I do wish we had more of this. I do too. I really do. Because that was something I had never done before, ever. One of the reasons you wanted to do something like this, right? Beat up some boys? No, I... Because I heard a lot of fight sequences got cut out of Serendipity. Yeah. - And.... I noticed I never got over that. No, this was my greatest achievement, the fight thing... ...because that was what I sucked at most when we started training. Like, I happened to be really good with guns right from the beginning... ...but I remember Brad's face when: "Okay, throw a couple punches. Let's see what we can do." He's going like, "Oh, Lord. Okay, don't tuck your thumb inside your hand like a girl." No, but they were quite impressed, and they were honest with me. They've been my friends for a while, so they would actually... They would give me their honest opinion. They were very happy with both you and Scott.

2:01:08 · jump to transcript →