Influence & homage

Noah Baumbach

And I'm Noah Baumbach. We're the co-writers, and I'm the director of The Life Aquatic. This is the Criterion Collection edition of the movie, which I think is the only one. Right. And we are at Bar Pitti in New York, sitting at a table where we wrote the film. Right, we actually came here every day from-- Usually for lunchtime around 1:00, sometimes 1:30, sometimes 2, depending what-- It was later. When we got up or when we went to bed the night before, and we would write together all day and into the evening. And have two meals. - Yeah. The films within the film, maybe we could say something about... Right. - Steve Zissou, his documentaries are sort of inspired by... Jacques Cousteau's films, and are more than a little... And we shot these on Ektachrome stock, a reversal stock, to get this highly saturated, dated feeling. To feel like a 16 millimeter. A number of the parts were written for the people who play them. Bill Murray's role and Owen Wilson's... Anjelica Huston's, Bud Cort... - Right. The Bond Company stooge was always Bud. - Yes, the Bond Company stooge. And then also on Team Zissou we have a favorite actor of ours, Noah Taylor, who plays Wolodarsky. Robyn Cohen, came out of Jeff Goldblum's acting class. Right. - She plays Anne-Marie Sakowitz, the topless script girl. It's not all science.

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Noah Baumbach

These are the Team Zissou interns, who are all typecast. One of them is an actual intern of yours, or was. Yes, Matthew. Matthew Gubler. Cousteau was always an interesting figure to us because as kids, we idolized him and watched his shows. But he was one of those characters that seemed just like a... You know, a star incarnate in some way. You know, it was like Jacques Cousteau, Evel Knievel, and, you know, Bill Murray or something. And I think the... Zissou, what was fun for us writing this was, sort of, Zissou in some ways is like a kid's idea of what an adult is. It's sort of like-- Or what a celebrity is. And then at the same time, we're dealing with a character, Zissou, who is in some ways, you know, has to get in touch with his own humanity, his own past, in some way strip away this identity that he's created for himself. Right, yeah, right. We always liked the idea of starting-- The idea of one of these movies, which I guess you generally associate with a kind of like ABC special, you know, that's where we saw them on television. And you generally associate them with TV or sort of educational films. But we always liked the idea of this playing a world where this kind of movie would play at a major film festival. Yes, yes. It could be-- It's a world where there's such things as hit documentaries. Right. - Although there actually are now. Fahrenheit 9/1 1. - Documentaries-- Remember we called them-- We like the idea that they might be called swimming films, but I don't know that they ever made it into... We never quite got swimming films in there, a genre. The festival director is played by Antonio Monda, a friend of ours in New York, who's a teacher at NYU, a film professor, and who also hosts a kind of a salon where he has people over, all sorts of interesting people over to his house, and a good friend of ours. And we wrote this part for him. Yeah, we always... Somehow it just seemed like Antonio would be this guy, I think, who, you know... He's done it a million times. At the MoMA and the Guggenheim. And he's Roman. Right, so you knew he could speak Italian. And at the premiere of the movie in New York, he introduced the film before the film. In very much the same way. - Yeah. This is the opera house in Naples, the Teatro di San Carlo. It's a great setting for something, and we always liked the idea of the film festival being set in a place that's like an opera house, and in this case it is an opera house. Isabella Blow plays Antonia Cook, the new head of the film commission. I had, I guess, first come in contact with Isabella when I was at Brasserie Lipp in Paris with my girlfriend, and she walked by and looked at us and said, "Très sexy." Beaucoup de sexe. - Beaucoup de sexe. And I came back and told you I'd seen this very interesting woman, and you said, "Would this woman be out of place in a matador's outfit?" Yes, because I had seen her previously in a hotel lobby in Paris where she was dressed as a matador. It was amazing my story was so specific that you knew exactly who it was. And it was her. We're here at a film festival, which can be the most awkward thing. You're in the midst of all these people watching, and in the case of this character, it's exposing all these different problems that he has in his life that are kind of just laid out in front of him over the course of one miserable evening. We'd talked about 8 1/2 as in some ways an inspiration for this, the Guido character that Marcello Mastroianni plays, because he sort of-- That movie opens with a dream, it's different, but at the spa, he's sort of faced with all these people from his life who keep kind of appearing. Here it's less surreal, but it's, you know, Steve is sort of dealing with, in some ways, every aspect of his life. Yeah. It is surreal to go through the experience of presenting a movie in this kind of context. - Right. The one thing I think that-- We often talk about all the-- We're both big movie buffs. We often talk about the movies that have influenced us and the different inspirations, but for this movie, for me, in the end, a lot of it has to do with my own feeling about making films, and just the luck of being able to do it and being in a situation to have been able to make some movies, and how, for me, that's just the central event of my life was, you know, getting to do this. Right. - I feel like that's part of what the movie is about, is somebody who is-- That is, the thing that kind of clicked with him, getting together a group of people to go make these things. Mm-hm. You know, there's something kind of magical about movies to me. And Steve is dealing with, in some ways, the toll that... I mean, he's sort of at a point, you know, unlike you, I guess, where he is not sure what he wants to be doing next. You know, these... You know, at a real sort of crisis in his career and his life, and also dealing with the fact of the toll his career has taken on his life. ...my little nephew, Werner, he wanted to meet you. How you doing, Werner? He brought you a present. A crayon pony fish. Steve Zissou is obviously and clearly partly inspired by Jacques Cousteau, but just as much of an inspiration for him is Bill Murray, who I had gotten to know for a long time and who Noah also knows. And... I remember when we were writing, we were sort of in the middle of this scene. You had actually seen a movie with Bill, I think, at the Sunshine Theater. And you had a... You could tell that story. The guy came up to Bill... Yes, this is interesting. Bill and I had an episode where we went in to see a movie at a theater on Houston Street. And while we were-- You know, we went in, some kid said hello, and then when we came out, there was a gang of kids who were waiting there with things to sign. Rushmore DVDs and Bill Murray paraphernalia. And Bill was signing all the things and we talked to the kids. And then-- Should I tell this? And then at the end of it... It was funny because one of them then came up after we finished and came up and asked Bill for $10. And Bill said... "Get lost. Get out of here." And the guy turned and walked away. And it was funny because there's something about the way Bill handles that situation that is in Zissou, and I remember when we were filming it, I said, "Well, the way you really said it in real life was like this." And then Bill went into some crazy hysterics over the idea that it was something that had happened. He had no memory. - He had no recollection. But I'm not sure if this story should go on there or not. An abridged version of it maybe, or maybe not. Yeah. Don't put this in until Wes has maybe called Bill and asked if it's okay if he puts it in. Well, Bill badmouthed me in Esquire saying he'd kill me if the movie wasn't one of the best films of all time. Oh, really? - Yeah. He didn't run that by me.

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Noah Baumbach

This is his ship, the Belafonte. We bought this ship in South Africa and sailed it up to the Mediterranean and renovated it and made it into this research vessel. It never ran that well, but we really did fall in love with this ship. The crew of the film was always very sort of loyal to it. Now, we have Michael Gambon, who plays Oseary Drakoulias, the producer, a sort of Carlo Ponti, Dino De Laurentiis-style mogul, although he does produce these documentaries. He has the longest fingers that I think I've ever seen in real life. He understands. Amin needs to make a projection of the world grosses to see if he can get a tax break and run it through his output deal. I think that Zissou sees himself and wants to be the kind of person who gives kids secret messages in the cereal boxes. Right. That's an inspiration for him. And the movie is about this, theoretically, a real person, but he's inspired by a sort of fantasy version of himself. And there's things sort of peppered throughout the movie, but this whole red caps and the uniforms and the whole thing. And Owen, in some ways, is our stand-in, I mean, of the child who looks up to this person. And I think another layer of that that we were always dealing with was how our cinematic idols in some ways were like surrogate fathers for us. Movies we loved that sort of took the role of things we looked up to, things we sort of wanted to live vicariously through. And I think Owen and Ned's character sort of stands in for that. This is a kind of an unusual role for Owen Wilson, I think. Right. He has a sort of recognizable comic persona that he's developed. And this is, I think, very different from that. I think when we were writing it, we often talked about that even though Ned was, as written, very naïve and kind of an innocent, I think there's always a kind of somewhat devilish nature to Owen. You can see the light is on behind his eyes all the time. There's some Zissou in him. Yeah, that's interesting. And I think also it made us feel more comfortable writing such a naïve character because I think if it was played too much that way, it would kind of wash out. Yes, and I think Owen's concern was, he was like, "What am I gonna do?" Because he felt like the character is so innocent and so sincere that he's not used to playing someone who's that sincere. He usually plays somebody who's a little bit wily on some level, or something like that anyway. And I think for him, when he really became comfortable with it was because we were sitting on the roof of this hotel in Rome, and he told me this funny story about Will Patton on the set of Armageddon, and he did Will Patton's voice, this southern accent. And I asked him, "Do you think you could do this whole movie in that voice?" And what he ended up doing-- He liked it. We read through the whole script reading all his lines with that, and it was funny and it gave him a sort of genteel feeling and something a little bit not quite real. And the accent's certainly not real. The accent hasn't existed certainly since the Civil War. Right. - Even if then.

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Kent Jones

And the film is inspired by the writings of Stefan Zweig.

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Wes Anderson

Exactly. The film is inspired by the writings of Stefan Zweig. I mean, maybe it's inspired by the movies of Ernst Lubitsch more than the writings of Stefan Zweig, but somehow, to me, it starts with Stefan Zweig.

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Kent Jones

A Klubeck. [laughs] - [Anderson] It's inspired by a Klubeck.

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The whole opening was, I suppose, really inspired by the book. There's a wonderful description of how the convicts in this era were used to refit, build, maintain the warships in Toulon. And so they were kind of used as slave labor. And so this idea of the convicts effectively doing a chain-gang song, pulling in this wounded warship, I found very interesting because the warship is both an image, a symbol of state power,

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That's pretty much it for the film. At this moment, I was originally inspired by this first draft of the screenplay that William Nicholson wrote, where he immediately saw...

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But the process of creating this scene went from Bill Nicholson, who wrote a dialogue version for me. Claude Michel then came up with a melody. Alain Boublier then wrote lyrics in French inspired by Bill Nicholson's English dialogue. And then Herbie Kretzmer did his version of English lyrics based both on Alain's French lyrics and Bill's original dialogue, all fitting the number of lines that Claude Michel's melody allowed. So I had the actual experience of

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Film Stephen Prince

He moved away from the kind of suggestion and indirection that irony makes possible. There's very little of that in these last three films. In them, Kurosawa speaks directly with viewers, speaks openly and with sincerity, rather than through the masks that a dramatist wears. Dreams is nonlinear. It's not a narrative. We have eight episodes that Kurosawa tells us are inspired by dreams that he has had since childhood.

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Film Stephen Prince

and Kurosawa's visual treatment presents them as if they were an ensemble in a play wearing masks. So the episode then is a kind of warrior ghost play, not done in the style of Noh, but influenced by its general template. He salutes their passage and the music score provides some martial notes on the trumpet.

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Film Stephen Prince

So the eye character in this episode is the incarnation of Kurosawa's youthful dream. And the episode is an homage to Van Gogh, as well as an account of why Kurosawa did not follow his original plan in life. This is the Langlois Bridge at Arles with women washing, one of the early masterworks done at Arles in 1888.

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

...to where you were a year ago watching The Fellowship of the Ring... ...and to reorientate you into the world of the movie... ...before you have to start giving new information... ...and having people think about new things. There was also that great John Howe painting that you fell in love with, Peter. Yeah, well, that's true. This entire scene way, way back in our scriptwriting days, years ago... ...was inspired by one single John Howe painting... ...because I would have never, ever thought about showing... ...the fight between Gandalf and the Balrog, but...

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

very evocative spooky dead marsh stuff in the book i love the the corpses lying under the water of course a few people have said that tolkien got the inspiration if you can call it inspiration for this stuff from the first world war when he saw bodies of soldiers lying in the shell holes the flooded shell holes and no one's going to really realize if they haven't read the book but the

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

The elven cloaks that they were given at Lothlorien have a very magical quality in which they camouflage and blend into anything that they're surrounding. So if they're against rocks, then the cloaks are grey. If they're against trees, then the cloaks are green. And we could never really do that properly in the film. And this is almost like tipping our hat, the only time really that we ever do it, to this special elven cloak. But I remember this...

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Fistful of Dollars had been inspired by a visit to a Japanese movie, namely Kurosawa's Yojimbo. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly was inspired by a visit to a Leone movie, end quote. Screenwriter Luciano Vincenzoni, who was additionally involved in that first sequel's overseas sales through United Artists, had attended a packed house screening with some colleagues, including Arnold and David Picker of United Artists, who were bowled over by it.

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may have been inspired by Mario Monticelli's 1959 film The Great War, which also happened to be a United Artists release. In brief, The Great War is a film starring Alberto Sordi and Vittorio Gassman as two rogues conscripted into the Italian army in 1916 at the height of the Austrian-Italian conflict of the First World War.

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a film that had taken its template from a samurai film by Akira Kurosawa, namely The Seven Samurai, much as he, Leone, had done with A Fistful of Dollars, which had been inspired by Yojimbo. According to interviews with Wallach by Christopher Frayling, the actor was approached by Leone at a time when he was not too pleased with the roles that had been coming his way in films, which had been anything but heroic.

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Si's a real cool cat in real life, too. Well, this is my film to try. I had quit acting for two years and did nothing but go to school. So when I came back to this film, it was Si Richardson's doing his thing. I had to find my place in this industry. And my place was supposed to be a black Humphrey Bogart. Oh, yeah. That's the inspiration. So the first thing you do is steal a Camaro. That's what I would do. Yeah.

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Oh, here comes a great line. And there they go. And how long did that take? 60 seconds. Wow, that's beautiful. This is my favorite scene. Yeah, it's one of the best scenes. We've got a little homage to Robbie Muller here in Kings of the Road, the glasses. The glasses, yeah. I love this, the tape.

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Fox and McTaggart Pharmaceutical Company. Because J. Ray Fox was J. Ray Fox and Linda Burbank's previous name was McTaggart. What are they humming there? Valkyrie. Right, right, right, I forgot. And that was meant as a little homage to Clockwork Orange to show you that they're not really as bad as... No, I mean, it's really hot. Very nice of you, Al. Yeah, it's kind of like a mix between Apocalypse Now and Clockwork Orange. Exactly. Exactly.

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

And even though our movie obviously is stylistically very different and the design is different, there is one shot which I regard as my homage to the cartoon, because it did inspire me to want to read the book, and that's the shot of Proudfoot shouting Proudfeet, where I deliberately copied the angle that Ralph Bakshi used, which I thought was brilliant. If you look very closely in the wide shots, you'll actually see that the cake is on fire.

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

And that was done with a rubber puppet that we morphed a rubber puppet into Ian's face for a few frames. So it's half Ian, half rubber puppet. It's like a combination of the two. It's absolutely a moment from the book, though, that. Yes, it is. It is, where it says a shadow passes across Bilbo's face and suddenly Frodo sees something horrible and grasping and groping. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, definitely inspired by the book.

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

informed Tolkien's view of life, his Catholic faith. The sequence in the Dwyerdale Hall was inspired by a painting that Alan Lee did for the centenary edition of The Lord of the Rings. Wonderful watercolour painting of these huge towering columns that seem to go on and on forever with these tiny little group of people

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But sometimes you just have to disregard those rules and think, well, actually the rule is that I want to be having a good life and stay alive. Marcel's waddle is, I think, one of my favorite things about how he's different from the shorts. Because the shorts, he was one chunk. Right. He's such a cute little git now. Yeah, it's really nice. Here's our risky business. Risky business homage with the blowing leaves. But...

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of what I remember of Dean, your grandmother, Dina. Mm-hmm. You know. I was going to say, you said your grandmother's never gardened or never farmed or gardened, but... Well, Rochelle did. That's right. And she has an accent because she's from the garage was definitely about my grandmother. That was definitely inspired by Rochelle, yeah. But that's right. My grandmother Rochelle, when they were in hiding during the Holocaust...

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I think these spiders were inspired by the crabs in the Red Turtle. Oh, yeah, they were. Which came out in 2016. Red Turtle is this animated movie. I forget what it's about, honestly. I just remember the crabs. I always thought they were like the spirited away... Is that? Yeah, the dust mites. I think the crabs are descended from the spirited away dust mites, and then our spiders are descended from the crabs, but they definitely are, yeah.

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Richard Curtis

Bad hair for the prime minister, wasnt it, really? I think I was still shooting another film and I couldn't change it. That's such a pretty shot. This guy is a real vicar. Now if I can just say a little bit about this scene here. This was in fact inspired by Jim Henson's funeral, which was the most moving thing I've ever been fo, and at the end of it Frank Oz was talking and he suddenly lifted up Kermit's puppet and started to sing this song called One Voice. And it turned out that all the guys in the memorial service had brought their puppets with them and they lifted them up, and when you turned around and looked backwards, there were 50 puppets, all singing. And Big Bird walked down the aisle of St. Paul's Cathedral and they all came forward and just this massive chorus of puppets, all singing. It was an extraordinary thing. So this was our little stab at that. ... that can't be done It... Nothing you can sing... This is David Lynden Hall, who is such an adorable man. When he came in to talk to us in the offices, he sat there with his guitar and charmed the girls more than I think was necessary.

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Richard Curtis

This is not quite so influenced by Sergio's work.

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Richard Curtis

This next scene is inspired by

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I think the stunt team, they did a great job, and we figured out that I'm wearing lenses. I wanted to wear a suit, kind of our homage to North by Northwest. But it was freezing cold. We did it eight times. We were worried about bird strikes. We were worried about... Yes, that's the thing that's fascinating about these things, is you're looking at a perceived danger of Tom falling off the plane...

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And that whole sequence, by the way, before we move on to the title sequence now, we shot in a total of four days, short winter days. So we really had 24 hours to accomplish all that A400 material, which is pretty great work by the team. This title sequence, these guys who designed the sequence did an absolutely bang-up job. Thank you, guys. Beautiful bit of foreshadowing throughout the entire sequence, and also the Mission Impossible folder from the original TV series. Bit of an homage.

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Yes, and the homage, my credit over the shot of me once again doing something horrible to you. Yes, doing something horrible to me. I love that. I love it. The many ways I could... Between Edge of Tomorrow and Valkyrie, the number of times I've killed you, and I kill you in this movie, actually. Yes, it's nothing personal. I know, I don't take it personal. Okay, good. Great friends. Love working with you. All of these little asides are...

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Peter Greenaway

a long way back to be influenced by classical Roman drama, but of course very much organized around contemporary subject matters. But there was a way in which the actors on stage presented themselves very formally and very frontally. You must remember that the theatrical apparatus of that time would not have allowed for very many great theatrical effects. Notions of artificial light would be very limited.

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Peter Greenaway

sheer use of color. I can think of a number of films which would relate directly, in a sense, to be a homage to painting. I can think of films based upon the paintings of Renoir, for example, or even Luce Lautrec, which would deliberately pastiche and borrow the coloring. But apart from one or two films, maybe like Godard's Pierre Le Fou, who uses primary colors in a very, very self-conscious way.

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Peter Greenaway

was a whole new phenomenon again influenced by a frenchified italian painting i've mentioned the names claude lorraine and poussin whose influence was now pervading uh france and traveling across the continent to england and very shortly a few years after this period

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Civic TV was inspired by Toronto City TV, launched there in 1971 on UHF Channel 79, very much a progressive maverick station. One of their early distinctions was a Friday night broadcast called Baby Blue Movies, which ran softcore erotic features after midnight. Because of the City TV connection, it's often said that Max Renn was based on its founder, Moses Neimer, but that's not really true. Max's partners, Moses and Raphael, are played by Reiner Schwartz and David Bolt.

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Its cover art by H.R. Giger may have influenced some of this film's ideas. This was practically Lali Kado's first feature film, but she became a major Canadian television star in such shows as Hangin' In, Road to Avonlea, which won her the Genie Award for Best Actress in a Continuing Leading Dramatic Role, and Five Years of X-Men, episodes before the feature franchise was launched. Her character of Rena King is said to have been inspired by Dini Petty,

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My wife Donna reminded me that there was a payphone on this set, and that during the scene blocking, Jimmy asked David if he might go over to the payphone and fish around inside it for loose change. David vetoed this idea, but as I look back, I think Jimmy must have been inspired by Roger Corman's cameo in Joe Dante's The Howling, which was in theaters around this time. Roger is briefly seen in the film, waiting to make a call in a telephone booth, and when he gets inside, he fishes around in it for loose change.

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the man who just dropped two and a half hours of an interview that will probably be cut down to 11 minutes. I couldn't stop talking about myself. They had a million questions. And also the blob itself, co-writer and director Chuck Russell. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you all for joining us. Guys, this is a commentary. 31 years in the making for me, even before there were commentaries, I was hoping to get you guys in the room because this film is the film that made me want to be a filmmaker. I was so influenced by this film.

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Ghost Town USA to having a huge football event, like, that was designed in the script? Oh yeah, that's from the script. The whole town is at the game. It didn't, it helped the extras budget though. I didn't have to populate the town at that point. This is a lot, this is really inspired by my life in Park Ridge, Illinois and some of my crazy friends. Honestly, some of these stories are true. Some of the interactions with the kids and all this.

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It's not like a third party, you know. These are all inspired by things that were going on in high school. Yeah, but like you were just saying, like there's four to five different uses. By the way, you're right. The tentacles were very good right there. Yeah. Those were great. So now you're looking at a sideways car in a gravity gag. What do you mean by gravity gag? When the blob comes up over him a couple of shots ago.

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He did all this. There he goes. He wiped that guy's forehead himself. Here's our homage to the Three Stooges. Not many people realize this movie's based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. Yeah. Which started the same way.

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A lot of stuff was cut out of this scene. After testing? Yeah. Actually, we discovered that stuff that took a long time to shoot, was enormously expensive, was not as funny as Nice Beaver, so... Out it went. The cheapest stuff got the biggest laughs. Now, this started off as an homage to Jacques Tati. Jacques Tati, yeah, we had them. And ended up as a critical care patient in the Joe Clinic. This is, yeah, we had to apply the paddles to this scene. Yeah, got to defibrillate this.

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Cut to the statue's smile. See, he's a little dazed, and that's how we... That's almost a Clockwork Orange homage. It is. It is very good. Thank you. This is Mayor Bradley's office again. This is Nancy Marchand. This is the real Mayor Bradley. This is the real Mayor's office, because we were so cheap.

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

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We got so much mileage out of that set too. Yeah. - It just looks like it goes on forever. And most of all, it looks really real. Yeah. The texture-- The scenic painting and the texturing is first-rate. Claude, the production designer, said that he took great pride in detail. He said, "That's my middle name." And also in the wood too. The way they sandblasted the wood... ... to make it look ancient, it's just great. Yeah, I remember I talked to Gary, who was the art director. When they presented to Claude... ...Claude just... Like I said, they were working so hard with the detail... ...and Claude had been doing some other stuff, came back... ...and walked around, and then took Gary's head and kissed it. On the forehead. And he said, "Thank you. It's gorgeous." - Sounds like Claude, yeah. And here we are. - This is a fantastic scene. Yeah. There's a shot coming up that is just... ...beautiful, that Brad Martin, the second-unit director, shot. It's just... This oner. This is one of the things we.... This one. This one here. It's fantastic. There was no way we would have staged this shot as we did... -.../f it wasn't a 3D movie. - Yeah. Yeah. We wanted much more, actually, than we... That's all one shot. - Yeah. All with CG. It's... - That was a blend of CG and suits. Here, it's just CG. In the end of that scene, it was suits as well. Yeah, everything mixed. Like every trick we had In one shot. Here's suits and CG mixed. - That's a suit. Suit, suit. Background guy's CG. - Background guys are CG. That's a real one. Yeah. - If they're moving, they're CG. I remember at a certain point too... I remember at a certain point, for budget reasons, we had to cut... ...a lot of the CG shots of this sequence. You look at the sequence now and you can't imagine.... Well, Clint did give us more money. No. But I remember once we got the rule... James just said, "We can only have--" - There she goes. "We can only have 36 Uber shots in the movie." It's more. - Oh, yeah. There are 275 creature shots in this movie. Is that right? - The other thing is... ... for the audience, we keep using this word Uber because... It's not in the movie. - It's not referred to in the movie... ...but this larger than... This five-times-the-size Lycan. We sort of... - Nine foot tall. We... - We called it the Uber-Lycan. The inner circle called it the Uber-Lycan. He's not 9 foot tall. - Twelve feet tall. Fifteen feet tall or something. Theo, extremely... - Nine hundred pounds. Did all the stunts himself. The Necklace. - Yes, the Necklace. We give all these kind of moves aname. That was the Necklace. You threw that in, the head getting blown off. Had to happen. - Yeah. It's an Underworld movie. I love that when she bites him. - What? Where'd that come from? This one's great too. - Yeah. It's great. Oh, I remember... - The blood spray. We had to fight for that ax in the head, which I don't understand... ...because it's kind of given, I think. Always... - Was that a gibe? That was a gibe. No. And always put people in water. - Oh, this too. Yeah. Because they like it. - Yeah. Actors really like being cold and wet. No. It was freezing cold. Theo was extremely cool. Yeah. Not cold. Cool. - I really hate Theo, actually. I sincerely hate him for being gorgeous... ...and he played me the first two days, and I thought: "Oh, is he slow, this guy?" And he was so much smarter than me. And he was pulling my leg and just, you know, he was.... He's a perfect human being and so kind. So, you know.... I hear he's single. - Yeah. I hope he can't draw. He actually had a very nice... He has a very nice girlfriend. Even the sun has spots, I guess. Anyway, he's just one of those perfect human beings... ... that walk around there which makes you feel not perfect. Yeah. - The weaponry here... ... you saw that little glint there, or what do you call it? The: On her gun. I mean, the weaponry Is real important... ... for the Underworld movies. One of the things that we also love. I don't know how many hours or days we actually talked about what kind of... ...guns shall she have and when and where. It's an enormous amount of research. This was inspired, by the way, to shoot... To have the Uber-Lycan appear... ...and to do his first shots where you didn't see him... ...and then have a second reveal. We actually-- This... That came up because of the set. We didn't plan that. Then we saw the set, and I think... . James, it was your idea that we should have... This is the Uber-Lycan. And this is what we talked about. We really wanted to hurt Selene. We really wanted to, yeah. Although she hurt him, didn't she? Yeah. - That'll teach him. That's a setup for later on. You know, look, the fact of the matter is, when we shot this, we had... ...Kate or her stunt double in the foreground doing all the stunts. That's Kate there. - The Uber-Lycan... ...was placed in afterwards and.... - Yeah. Just brilliant. Just brilliant. - Yeah. Remember the giant to-scale Styrofoam gray Uber head? Which we all laughed at on the set. - No, I remember... Kate doesn't like shooting these kinds of things. She's like-- Because she feels like... You know, she does it perfectly, but it's, you know.... It's not her favorite thing to do. - No. It's hard. Because you look at the Styrofoam thing... ...and it's hard. - Yep. But she does it perfectly. - Yep. There's our dam. The Suede pose. - Yeah. This is beautiful in 3D. Yeah. He looks like Brett Anderson in Suede. Beautiful death. Death position. Yeah. Yeah. He died with style. - Like a dying dandy. One of my favorite Swedish paintings, The Dying Dandy. Yes. Wow, you really snuck that one in, didn't you?

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At a certain point, you really can do the entire dialogue. It's not so hard in this one because they don't talk. There's 12 lines in the movie. But we loved shooting this one. When me and Bjérn... We do it, like, every second day. But there's one exception is that if one day goes on until the next day... ...we don't change. And I think this one took two days to shoot this whole thing. And I loved this because If you think about what she's talking about... ... you know, it's hard to do this for real. She's talking about Werewolves and so on. But she does it for real. - She sells it. Yeah. She sells it. Yeah. - She really does. Yeah. And, I mean, every good actor finds truth in anything. They can find truth in anything. And then they get... And it was also-- I remember when... - Hang on. This scene here. This scene is one of the trippiest scenes in any of the Underworld films. And it is real. - Yes. No CG. That's so fun. Because it's an entire thing... ...we built up. - That's CG. That's CG. Other than that. - That's CG. No, but the shot is actually done... It's actually set up so that we could do it live in-camera. Todd Masters and the guys did a great job with his stomach. This is your revenge on Theo. - Bollocks. That's a real stomach. The blood pouring? - Yeah. Well, yeah. But the stomach is real. - Now, now, boys. Boys. The old hand squeezing. The heart-squeezing shot. Well, remember she has the blood of Alexander Corvinus. That's right. That's the old Corvinus injection... ... that he's gotten there. I always call this the Videodrome shot. Yes. - Yep. That of course Is... - "Long live the new flesh." ...a prosthetic chest that's put on top of him. His body is underneath. - No, it was me cutting Theo. We knew you wanted to. The audience was applauding when they saw this scene. They thought it was great. - Yeah. Here is Richard's shot coming up. Thank you. I like that shot. - It's a great shot. You said we needed it so we got it, and I'm happy we got it. It's in every trailer. - Slow-motion too. Yeah. This worked out well too. - Yeah. This, I thought was a waste of money, these two shots. And it's really, really cool in the end result. This was one... My biggest fear actually... ...because Goth people don't look good at daytime. They are born... They are made for the night. They're plain silly in daylight. Exactly. So I was concerned that will she look silly in daylight. Yeah. This is the darkest-looking daytime... ...and maybe that's the Swedish influence. Don't you have half the year where it's dark? This is sun everywhere. It is, but it's inside a dark... - It's not a beach. Scott lit it... - I agree. What else did we shoot this day? That was cool. The old cowboy switch there. Yeah. - Love it. Then we think-- I think we shot the exterior of her coming out... ...of the tunnel or something and the Lycans following her? That's it. Yeah. - There's something called ADR... ...which means additional dialogue recording. It's when you get bad sounds so you re-record the sound. Right. - This scene was ADR"d... ...and you usually hate ADR because you always lose performance. It's not the same when the actor's standing there with... ...a cup Of latte in their hand and everything. Or mocha latte. - Mocha latte. Whatever. In Burbank rather than in the real world. But that scene was so good in ADR. Because she was able to whisper... ...which she couldn't do on the real set. Right. And get the... - Yeah. So she-- It's so much better. It was so noisy, so they wouldn't have heard each other... ...If she whispered. - Yeah. This is one we call the All the President's Men scene. Yep. Our homage to... I loved this ceiling. - ...Investigative reporting movies. Yeah. - And this is the-- What was this? It was the legal library of the university. That was being rebuilt. It was gorgeous. It's not there anymore? It's gone? This is the last thing that happened... ...and then they tore it down and rebuilt it. That's just brutal. - Yeah. That was brutal. To destroy something brutal as that. But you see the squares and the concrete. Yeah. Wow, what a place. We talked for hours what kind of concrete should be used. Some concrete was wrong. And this concrete is right. Michael. Cool guy. - Yep. Loved him. - Yep. First thing that-- The scene we just saw. He walks up to the set. He never worked with Kate. Kate says, "So, Michael, sexiest black guy on the planet." That rocked him on his heels. He should have said: "SO, Kate, sexiest woman on the planet." He could have. And if he was British, probably he would have said that. Who are the two ugly gimps next to them? That's not fair.

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but, you know, whatever. That father ghost is Brian Udovich, producer of All the Boys Love Mandy Lane and The Wackness and a bunch of other films. Oh, yeah, and I should real quick mention also that I had Owen, the sound designer, who worked on both VHS films, to steal a bunch of sound effects from Radio Silence, just short for this section right here as an homage, and to kind of just subtly tie in the two movies together. So those are literally...

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inspired by this whole Kubrickian sort of madness. Yeah, it was kind of like we wanted this kind of carnival atmosphere for this part. You know, this whole idea. I mean, it is kind of borderline Wicker Man almost as well. Yeah, it is. In terms of like the... You can totally imagine if they're fucking British. Yeah. Epi is basically the Christopher Lee of Indonesia. Exactly. But yeah, I mean, for me, it was this thing of like, we wanted this kind of sense of just chaos and, you know, this horrible...

1:04:06 · jump to transcript →

This segment and the next few segments were really inspired by a lot of the antics me and Jason did growing up. Remember we used to just go to his house after school and anybody was free and just go to his shed and take out whatever crazy water guns and water balloons and we'd just rampage whoever. We'd throw them up in the backyard, throw them at his cousins who lived next door.

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So this is a little homage to him for having the courage to make this movie first. But look at how long the shot goes. And look at Kat's face, how he listens to the letter and how Felix reads it kind of off the cuff. And Kat gets tears in his eyes when they talk about the dead son. And such a beautiful long shot. I love holding on it and just letting these actors play it out.

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and then the factory where they get to. And so this 10-minute sequence was actually just one sentence in the book, but sometimes it tells you how you get inspired by small things in books. And since we had the rights to the book, it's a gift to use a book like that with great imagery to get inspired from turnip, by the way, turnip bread.

53:00 · jump to transcript →

And to be honest, I was inspired of this editing sequence by a sequence in Luca Guadagnini's A Bigger Splash, when Matthias Schoenharts, I loved getting inspired by the filmmakers, by good movies, by great filmmakers like Guadagnini is. And he has a sequence

1:57:12 · jump to transcript →

This scene was much talked about as some kind of technical innovation. Actually, it isn't one, although it's better used than most. It was one sequence that Wells wrote himself. Yeah, right. What we're going to have is time passing with little vignettes and what they called flash pans that take us to a later stage in the marriage. And he drew a lot of the inspiration for it from a one-act play by Thornton Wilder with a family seated around a dinner table, I believe.

52:01 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, but I don't think he wrote that song. No, I don't think he wrote it. I can't remember. He was inspired by something that Wells saw. One of the things I really regret is that I at one time had the names of all these black musicians that are in the film. They aren't credited. And I've looked everywhere for it and I can't find it. But I'm not sure anybody has it. Where did you get that from? Ron Gottesman dug it up and found it for me. Ron Gottesman was a Wells scholar.

1:42:06 · jump to transcript →

This is sort of like was inspired by him throwing the sterno in the direction of House. I suspect it was already written, yeah. Wells himself, I gather, said after the shot of him destroying the room was over, he said, I really felt that. I think it's a scene in Hollywood that's not like Hollywood at all because of its intensity. It makes you feel uncomfortable. In the same way as Agnes Moorhead's...

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Eng Commentary

Once again and somewhat paradoxically, the limited means of the New Wave directors helped to create a new dimension of realism in the movies by leaving the artifices of the studio behind. These scenes of the family coming back home from the movies are the first scenes of family joy and mirth that we've seen. It's hard not to be aware that it's a film, a movie, that has put them in this good mood. If Marcel Carnet's 1945 classic Children of Paradise had been cinema's homage to the theater, with the New Wave we begin to get cinema's homage to the cinema,

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Eng Commentary

Antoine protests his innocence, and in a way we know he is right, for the passage he copied was in his memory, and his act of plagiarism was more of an homage and an act of expression of admiration than it was the lazy dependence of a cheat. But the schoolroom rules leave no room for emulation, the beginnings of a real love of literature.

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Eng Commentary

The 400 Blows is not an autobiographical film, but I was inspired by certain circumstances in my life. I could have chosen another subject and used my memories or thoughts in the same way. I wanted most of all to paint a portrait, the most accurate portrait possible, of a particular time during adolescence. That is to say, a moment teachers and sociologists are quite familiar with, but which parents generally don't know about, and the existence of which they apparently don't even suspect.

1:21:08 · jump to transcript →

In the Richard Maybaum script, the primary villain was to be Goldfinger's twin brother, back for revenge. When Tom Mankiewicz came on board, the storyline changed, influenced by a dream of Cubby Broccoli's. Broccoli dreamt that he'd gone to visit his old friend Howard Hughes, but when he called out Hughes's name, the man who turned around was a total stranger. Using that idea as a launching point, the producers decided to bring back Bond's arch-nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who is impersonating a Howard Hughes-type industrialist.

35:15 · jump to transcript →

This was with kind of the ambient lighting. He said, you know, we don't really need any. And of course, when you look around down in that place when they were doing the car chase, there's still crowds of people watching. There's nothing you could really do about it. The part of the chase scene that takes place in the parking lot was filmed at Universal Studios in Hollywood. Director Guy Hamilton remembers the inspiration for the parking lot sequence.

1:05:35 · jump to transcript →

The tunnel which Wint and Kidd drive through was inspired by a real location, as Guy Hamilton recalls. Yes, Hoover Dam. It was a tunnel at Hoover Dam which I had a look at. Obviously, that was a possible Bondian set that we never found anything interesting to do with Hoover Dam, but we used that, then built a little bit of set here just to release them back into the desert.

1:19:16 · jump to transcript →

Pat McClung

The Sulaco. This was a Syd Mead design that was fiberglass body. Some of the detailing was based on that Syd Mead sketch and then Pat and Dennis and myself did a lot of the fine detailing for the front, the side, the top, all the microscopic detailing. This was not a particularly large model. It was about five or six feet long. The detailing we would do after hours because we had to be on the stage to shoot all this stuff, get everything organized, and once everybody went home, we'd go up to our little effects office and start another shift of microdetailing. It was so cold, we were wearing our winter coats. It was hard to move around and use these tiny little Exacto knives, and these pieces of plastic that were maybe half the size of acomma on a textbook, sticking them on meticulously, one after the other. So this was our biggest set, I guess. Or the biggest volume, I guess. The hanging chains, these little widgets and things, this was all inspired by the tone and feel of the opening scenes of Ridley's film. We were trying to create that same sense of the ship having its own life and being an eerie, interesting place.

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Bill Paxton

My crew actually helped dress this whole set because it had to be cocooned bodies, and so we created all these bodies and all the dressing over it, to help out the art department. I remember being terrified that the set wouldn't be ready in time. Because it was very complicated. Everybody had to pitch in and make the movie work. It was a lot to do in a short period of time. No one else would have really been able to do it, even this stuff. I even doubled for Vasquez. Did you? Do you remember the shot? Of course I remember the shot. I'll show you later on. Our homage to what everyone needs to see in this movie is about to come up. This was a very tough scene to create, which was the chestburster scene. Again, a duplication of head and entire body and then we built an entire puppet of her for the chestburster and the burn sequence.

1:10:46 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

James Horner came up with this music sting here and I always thought it was totally over the top. When I saw the whole film put together with the score, I thought "No, that's what we need." I thought "How can you sting somebody opening their eyes?" But it works. Oh! Mm-hm. She shouldn't have had the bangers and mash. Kill it. Fry it. Come on. What are you doing, Hicks? Bad-ass nasty shot. That's a nasty shot of that thing. That's a good shot of it there getting fried. Gosh. Here they come. I think our chestburster looks a little cooler than the one in the first film. Stan Winston's guys really did a good job on it. John Rosengrant and Shane Mahan. Look who's back. Another one of our problems to solve for this movie was creating the whole army of warrior aliens and being legitimate to the original movie but having to improve on it for movement and for the look of being able to study them. In the original A/ien they were rubber suits and very difficult for the actor to move around in. And yet he was very tall and very skinny. And Jim wanted to do a lot of very interesting moves with the warrior aliens, so we came up with a technique to create the suit that really involved a lot of spandex and pieces on it. And then we designed the set pieces for the aliens to fit into the walls, like the one that is behind him there, so that the camouflage would work. An enormous amount of wirework for all of these stunt alien performers, which required that the alien costumes be extremely user-friendly. This was inspired by the scene in the first film where Dallas is in the air vents and they see the signal moving and get a little freaked, and Veronica Cartwright says "Get outta there" and he makes the wrong move and gets killed. That's one of the most suspenseful scenes in the first film. I took that idea that they're getting these readings that are getting them spooked and then they make some bad moves. Form follows function. This is a perfect example of it. You start with what it is you wanna achieve, and once you have that, you can design it, so the actions and the performance is consistent with what you want in the finished film. Believe it or not, very few people work that way. They just wanna come up with something that's cool, and then you spend hours and hours trying to get it to work for the ultimate film. I happen to agree with Gale. My background is as an actor. I really come from a place where the creatures and the characters are wonderful to look at, but it's always about their performance. We have to figure out how they're gonna be able to act, and create a good performance, or it's a waste. And so that's really always at the top of the priority list when we're creating any creature - what is it gonna do and how is it gonna do it? What he does is create a character, and that's why I think his work is So unique. When you look at a film, you can always tell who's done the creatures, if they actually have a character. Because he creates a character that can act and perform. The whole film builds to this moment, where the power transfers from the authoritarian structure to the individual who takes action. Ripley's not supposed to do anything. She's just there as an observer. We're coming up to a sequence where Sigourney takes control of the APC and this sequence is comprised of live-action shots, but as it comes down this hallway and is banging into pipes and walls and sparking, that's all done in miniature. In some cases, the cameraman - cos the set was mounted at an angle - was on a cart, a wheeled cart, and was rolling backwards as the radio-controlled APC was coming at camera. There was a point when he was just put into free fall, rolling backwards downhill, photographing what was in front of him as he went backwards. Here we go. - This is the shot. This is also miniatures. There was a shot with the full-size when the brakes didn't work, and took out the camera, and luckily it was a remote-operated camera. It was the shot where we were actually crushing an alien warrior, when it broke through. This is the shot, actually, when it took the camera out. Then there's another shot where it takes down an alien.

1:12:00 · jump to transcript →

Macaulay Culkin

That's also the reason I got the part. I'm such a ham. You are such a ham. - I'm such a ham. But what's amazing is, at the time... ...I was only the father of an infant, really. My daughter... - It was Rory's age. They were both born same month. Yeah, and, uh.... So I was, uh.... I thought, "Well, he's-- This kid is really kind of over-the-top... ...In terms of the way he treats his family. He's kind of a brat." Little did I realize then, after four children later, that this is kind of par for the course. This is the way kids just treat their parents. John knew what he was talking about. - Oh, yeah. He had lived through it. John-- The meetings on this film... We would be in preproduction before we'd shoot... ... then I'd have to go to... John was a night owl, so I'd have to go to John with a... John Hughes' house from about 9 at night to 5 in the morning. I would get home and get in a half-hour's sleep and go back to the set. It was just insane, and he liked to work those hours, and we'd... That's how we basically worked on the script... ...and worked on the production design. It was literally a 24-hour-a-day job. Now, oddly enough, you know, which is gonna sound odd to some people... .all of this sort of imagery... ...Was inspired by David Lean's Great Expectations. So I was-- Obviously, we didn't fully get to that point... ...but some of the black-and-white photography in that film... ... really inspired this sequence for me.

11:55 · jump to transcript →

Macaulay Culkin

That was the key. Some reviewers at the time... Some people complained that the film was too violent, you know? Yeah, I remember that. - But that is... I think that's what made it funny to adults as well as kids. It's because there's this theory about soft comedy and hard comedy... . ll talk about in a bit... ...but it's like, when it hurts, the more it hurts, the funnier it is. It's Three Stooges, you know? - Itis Three Stooges. It is, and I was always reluctant to say I was inspired by The Three Stooges... ...because I was more inspired by the Marx brothers. But nevertheless, when you see The Three Stooges, you realize it is that kind of pain... And it's funny today. It's fun-- It just-- There's something about people getting hurt. Now, these are our stuntmen. This was just Leon. And the hook. Try to get the crowbar to fall at the right time. Oh, yeah. - I remember this.

1:17:40 · jump to transcript →

Macaulay Culkin

Again, you can understand why an Academy Award-winning actor... ...would be a little concerned that he's doing something like this... ...at this stage in his career. But, uh, it's important to always get back there... ...and remember how much fun you had doing these kinds of goofy, silly things. This was our little homage to Raiders of the Lost Ark.

1:20:11 · jump to transcript →

English Commentary

wanted to know in the preparation for the role was what were her attitudes towards courtship, towards marriage, towards what do I do with my life? To what extent am I influenced by what my father thinks or what is expected of me because of my station? And so when Hayward advises her that what her father thinks and what he thinks

13:39 · jump to transcript →

English Commentary

Much of the war paint that you're seeing among the Huron was inspired by the artwork of Catlin, that's C-A-T-L-I-N, who moved throughout the plains, I believe, around the 1820s.

1:13:36 · jump to transcript →

English Commentary

The design on these canoes is an homage to Wyeth. It's lifted right out of his work. When you fall into British hands again,

1:19:49 · jump to transcript →

Marco Brambilla Daniel Waters

actual computer generated effect so um this is uh based this was inspired by a kurt vonnegut novel where uh i think it was a sirens of titan where there's a substance called ice ice nine that that's cat's cradle buddy okay it's cat's cradle okay don't try to try not don't try to out vonnegut me stay in your lane buddy

9:54 · jump to transcript →

Marco Brambilla Daniel Waters

So Ice Nine was the inspiration for this substance. Oh, no shit. You never told me that. That's amazing. That would instantly create the solid stasis for the character. We got some great people working on this movie. Bob Ringwood, David L. Snyder, and we just saw Stuart Baird, who I compare to Dr. Smith in Lost in Space. He was a...

10:17 · jump to transcript →

Marco Brambilla Daniel Waters

we came up with, which was basically a teleporting, there was an interesting Philip K. Dick novel where you have a psychiatrist in a briefcase called Dr. Smile. So the inspiration for this was from Philip K. Dick and it gives you this kind of inspirational greeting and you're able to talk to the computer here and be motivated. Yes, I want an ego boost button on my ATM.

23:17 · jump to transcript →

The city had a whole different feel, and I thought, wow, this can work for us, not against us. So I redesigned that morning, I did my storyboards, and I redesigned the boards based upon shooting that day with Snow, and I think we captured something which was unique and very much in character with the rest of the movie, which was this opening title sequence in Snow. I think what also is a big part of the opening title sequence is the music, and the music was inspired by...

4:52 · jump to transcript →

The music that was used in a movie called Badlands, which was a composer called Karl Orff. And when I met with Hans Zimmer and talked to Hans about the music for the movie, I said, I want to pay homage to Badlands. Badlands is one of my top five favorite movies. And so therefore, I didn't have any qualms about wanting to pay homage to that particular film. So that's why we took Karl Orff as a basic idea for our music.

5:20 · jump to transcript →

It is a classic in Mexican standoff, and I say I was inspired by a lot of John Woo's movies. I looked at Better Tomorrow Part II, I think, was the one that inspired me the most. It was actually Quentin who said, you got to look at a lot of John's movies, yeah. So we cut from the insanity of all the guys screaming to the bathroom with Elvis. And this is the first real look we got at Elvis, or the closest we got to seeing Elvis, is a very soft focus shot of Val Kilmer in the bathroom mirror looking like Elvis, but it's so soft that...

1:48:18 · jump to transcript →

You just have to feel it. You're just there on the set. You know, that's not working. It's got to be like this. You're doing that too self-consciously. You've got to do that straighter. The humor comes from the fact that you don't understand you're being funny. It's all inspired by the screenplay, definitely. It's inspired by the screenplay, but then I think what the director does is he has to hold on to it and keep it from falling off. Of course, the movies that are always the

10:21 · jump to transcript →

That was inspired by finding this piece of footage where he turned around in the Oval Office and looked back at the camera. And so we said, okay, that's where we could put the punchline of a joke. And then we figured out this whole peeing thing, which backed into that piece of film. So it was a very complicated process, constantly changing, going back and forth. Hello, I'm Forrest, Forrest Gump. How many gives a hoes you said who you are, post-ball? You're not even low-life scum-sucking maggots.

31:20 · jump to transcript →

The scene, like, you know, Mama always had a way of explaining things, you know, in between lines of dialogue. So I had to get a rough idea of how Tom was going to do that. And I had those with me, and we tried our best during the shooting to build in those pauses. Then, like I said, I had Tom perform on film because, see, I was inspired by Amadeus.

32:44 · jump to transcript →

three of the Spice Girls got tired of waiting in line to be part of the open casting call and said, screw this, we're going to start a band. And they always talk about it. They always credit it as how they got together because three of them met just waiting in line for the open casting call. Oh, there's our homage to Clockwork Orange right there. Yep. You mean the bowler hat? Yeah, the bowler.

12:14 · jump to transcript →

A little homage to Spielberg jumping across the moon. That's cool. Backwards E.T. The too hip for Spielberg moment. That's awesome. How sweet is boo-boo? I know. Then we get into the banquet. This was fun. I like my little flip, too. I like my little...

1:15:21 · jump to transcript →

Just something you've never seen before was the hope. Well, that's what I was going to say. You know what? It's not art if people are comfortable with it. Then that means they've already seen it. Then that means, who cares? It's another plaid shirt, you know? But like you said, love it or hate it, but just don't go, eh, okay, don't say that, you know? Yeah, that was all I wanted. That's why, you know, when Jamie and... You see my homage to Michael Jackson tape on my fingers I have in every movie? That's where he came.

1:17:17 · jump to transcript →

My Question Initially To Jean-pierre Was

This gun - "Taxi Driver" guns we called them - they were inspired by Robert De Niro's wonderful Taxi Driver shoot-out, where he's actually got a device like that.

17:40 · jump to transcript →

My Question Initially To Jean-pierre Was

At the beginning I thought "Okay, they are going to fire me after one week." And, no, because it's like another movie. After a while, you are inside and you work, you're friends with good guys. And it's just a process. Like when I did my first short film. But when I made a short film, we were five. And for Alien Resurrection, 905 people. But, then again, it's the same thing. And I'm very proud, because for me, it's my own thing now. I am very proud because I did it. It was so heavy, so big, and the inspiration was Giger, and he is very happy about the film. I know, because I met him recently in Paris, and I'm very happy and proud of that. You wonder about what it's like to direct a film in a language that isn't really your mother tongue. And you wonder whether or not somebody fully understands, um... It's interesting. Something I've wondered. I don't know if Jean-Pierre is actually familiar with all of the actors

1:27:28 · jump to transcript →

My Question Initially To Jean-pierre Was

You are going to see in a couple of minutes the nest. It was a kind of homage to Giger because in the script it was an action scene and I didn't like it. I prefer to imagine this disgusting nest with tails and parts of alien. It was really disgusting with lots of slime and Sigourney loved that, to jump on this very disgusting nest. I love this idea when she catches the tongue. It hasn't happened yet, but this whole business about getting Ripley away from the rest of the pack... She falls into this ocean of alien... alienness which I quite like, actually. And she's supposed to sink into this like into an ocean, which was a precursor to this bit at the end of the film where they were floating in alien goo and the aliens swam in it like crocodiles. This shot seems very easy. It was a nightmare because it's a Steadicam. You can't see the crew, you can't see cables. You can imagine the nightmare because we turn around Sigourney and Winona.

1:28:42 · jump to transcript →

and the moon was put in and it was processed to look like day, as was this shot. To look like night. To look like night, rather. And if, in fact, if you go back to the beginning of the picture, you'll see a shot from the sequence with Ardith Bay. We used the same close-up twice. That we stole from this scene. Again, trying to clarify that problem in the first scene, which... But you don't notice because one's during the day and one's at night. Now, all this is, if you know, sky replacement. This was a, we shot this early in the morning.

36:34 · jump to transcript →

almost everything in here you're going to say pulled it out of our ass weren't you? Yeah, I was going to say that. Almost everything in this movie is based on some sort of fact, but actually we just stole that name from Sam Neill played Colonel Bryden in Jungle Book, and I just thought it was a little homage to my own movie. We originally, or for a time rather, we had the front end of the scene cut off, you know, again for pace reasons, but what it did was it removed the

1:08:47 · jump to transcript →

I love these shots, this one and the next one of the chariot taking off. They're totally reminding me of, I don't know, Ghostbusters or something along those lines. Really 80s fantasy visual effects shots. Right, a lot of stuff with the soldier mummies and the priest mummies. I was always a big fan of Ray Harryhausen's movies, especially Jason and the Argonauts, the big skeleton battle in that movie. In fact, I used Ray Harryhausen's name several times in the script just to pay homage to the man who...

1:50:39 · jump to transcript →

Ted Tally

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 →

Ted Tally

And here we had sort of a challenge as we were working over the script and getting ready to make the movie, because we're going here to a second house of murder victims. You don't want it to be repetitive, and you've got to find a way to make it quite different and move more quickly. Mark Helfrich, the editor, had some wonderful ideas for increasing the pace of this, which was a little bit longer. In the script, initially, I believe Graham goes into the house and has a few moments in it. Anything repetitive will never be in the film with Mark's editing. So we eliminated a couple of brief moments of him going into the house because it was too much like the other house he went into. And you try to move ahead to what's really new, dramatically, in the story. I love this shot. Jimmy Muro, my Steadicam and first camera operator, did this as one. A lot of good shots in this movie are in one, which I love, you feel like you're with him. And this was built. It's like the most incredible tree house in the world. It took about a week to build it. -/t looks pretty real. The tree is real, but we built the tree house. A platform, so that we didn't have to have Edward climbing up there. And it was awesome. It was so much fun that it was scary. Now he's looking from the killer's point of view at the murder victims' house and figuring out that the killer must have sat in the same place. But you cut the shot where he imagines the killer's point of view here. Yes. - Why was that? I cut it because I didn't want people to think he was psychic. I was worried that the audience... No. It was scripted that he would see in a sort of flashback what the killer saw, which was the woman walking past the window. I was really worried about it. I mean, it worked. I was worried that some people might be confused about his visions. I only wanted the visions when he was drinking in his hotel room alone. Where people sometimes have visions, you know? This was a great location. There was a real house here that was from 1770, that was the home of two congressmen. This is outside Baltimore, I guess. - Yeah. And here's the house that we built that we transitioned here... To a house built. ... that was inspired by the house from 1770 that they wouldn't let us use because... This entire house was built just for the movie outside of Los Angeles. - On the Disney Ranch. And here we have Kristi Zea in full-blown design glory. This is the voice of Ellen Burstyn, believe it or not, uncredited. That's interesting. You didn't know that? -/ did know that. I had Kristi do the still photographs because she's so great. In every single shot here, you see hundreds of separate decisions made by Kristi Zea and her team. Take off your nightshirt, and wipe yourself... I love this upstairs kind of lair of Dolarhyde. This was a big debate about the voice and... Now! - Please! Yeah. Should we... What are these voices? ls it Grandma's voice that has been transitioned into the Dragon's... Is it the imaginary voice of the Red Dragon? Originally, it was scripted that we heard the Red Dragon's voice in Dolarhyde's head. I got great actors reading the Dragon's voice, but I just could never make it work. I just felt it became hokey. It was a potential for people laughing where you didn't want them to. This is a CGI shot where we erased his teeth. So that you just see gums. - Yes, you just see gums.

39:12 · jump to transcript →

Ted Tally

He didn't take this character for granted in any way. He tried to find every possible nuance within him. Mrs. Jacobi in human form. Do you see? - Yes. I love the William Blake stuff. The painting and the inspiration for him. It goes much deeper in the book. Personally, I always thought we shouldn't see any more photographs here. I would not have shown these photographs. I would have only shown reactions on their faces, but it's the kind of thing you go back and forth on forever in postproduction. No what? Not me. Philip was really terrified here. Both these guys together, the excitement of having two great actors in the room. Ralph talks about how when you're working with great actors, it raises your game. You give a performance you didn't even know that was in you for that day. Yeah. I am the Dragon... This is the performance. You are privy to a great becoming... It's his monologue. ...and you recognize nothing. You are an ant... Is he saying this right into the camera, or is he saying it to Philip on the set? Philip's there. It is a little close to eye line, because I feel like... The camera is pushed almost into his face. He has to ignore it while performing. And then I love this move, which comes around. I like the light on his eye. You owe me awe.

1:15:36 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

to pull a mat off the edge of people's hair and replace the sky above them, especially because sometimes the sky tends to burn out and you lose your edges around the hairline and it gets a bit tricky. This was inspired by a scene in the book of Frodo swatting invisible flies, walking along, which I always remember that passage and wanted to portray it in the movie. This particular scene is Sean Astin's last scene that we ever shot.

3:15:14 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

This was another moment which I always imagined too, which is just this fade to black. So I wanted a real feeling that it might've been the end and I wanted this long black patch. And then I just wanted this image. This was an image that was based or inspired by a painting that John Howe did. It was this moment, this exact moment. And I remember seeing the painting. It was while we were in pre-production on the film. We hadn't shot anything yet. And that painting just gave me

3:39:17 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

No, well he did obviously meet with her afterwards. But beforehand it was just this instinct, it was pure instinct that she would be the right person and she so was. Into the West was a song that was actually inspired by a young man called Cameron Duncan. Going into our last...

4:04:24 · jump to transcript →

This opening shot looks like a production designer's fantasy, but it's inspired by an actual photograph by a photojournalist after a gun battle in Monrovia. There really was a carpet of bullets like this. I suppose it's obvious, but a military consultant pointed out to me that for every bullet that kills or wounds the enemy, thousands of rounds of ammunition are expended.

0:40 · jump to transcript →

Unfortunately, Kalashnikov kids like these are all too common in Africa. Both sides use child soldiers. In Liberia and Sierra Leone, where much of the film takes place, this was very common. Some of them wear wigs, or masks, which is inspired by old West African tribal superstitions.

58:14 · jump to transcript →

the idea that even shredded paper can be put back together if given enough time. This jail set also looks like some sort of homage to Gattaca.

1:07:59 · jump to transcript →

Again, in this part of the movie, we linked the family concept with the introduction of the kid arriving to London. And how now they are prepared to... to start a new life in their city which is now... with the presence of the militaries, trying to help these people to live again in this part of the city, which is the Isle of Dogs. This is the main location that we used in the movie as District One, the place that now the Londoners, the newcomers, are trying to live. Probably American audiences are not going to notice, but the T-shirt that Mackintosh Muggleton is wearing is a Real Madrid T-shirt. We are not supporters of Real Madrid, but this is one of our things we add from Spain. Yeah, this is a kind of homage of our country.

14:58 · jump to transcript →

This is the iconic London we talked about. We were inspired by the Charles Dickens movies, by the photography of the Second World War, the bombing of London. Most of these scenes were shot in... at sunrise. That means six o'clock in the morning, five o'clock in the morning. It was the only way to get control in these places, because, as everybody knows, London is a very busy place and the only way to, you know, to deal with a city that... That was the Millennium Bridge. ...there is no life there. This is the theatre, the district of theatres. In a way, we are making a trip through the city, through this iconic city, which is London, and... discovering every place through the eyes of the survivors, or through the eyes, in a way, of the infected people taking over the place.

1:08:18 · jump to transcript →

Well... - And cut. That's the end. We hope you enjoyed it. Our Spanish crew was really small. One was obviously Jesus Olmo, he's a co-writer with us. He's one of the infected which are... In the car park when the infection is triggered, you see a lot of people getting infected, and Jesus was one of them. I think it was a kind of homage to his work in this movie. The other one is Kote Camacho. Kote Camacho was the storyboard artist. Absolutely amazing work. This is work... Normally, you don't see the images but it's underlying every time in any moment of the film. We worked with him shot by shot, and his work was really amazing, and I really want to thank him. This film would be impossible without Fred Chandler. Fred Chandler is a Fox executive in postproduction. And he really not only helped us to bring to the film all his knowledge and all his... his... great approach to the genre. I think his experience is pretty important, you know, if you want to... Specifically, when you are dealing with a lot of elements in terms of visuals, effects and audio, music. So I think Fred was very precise, you know, and he helped a lot in this postproduction. And, for me, the most, and for Juan Carlos I think it's the same thing, the most important help was from DNA and Fox. From DNA, from Andrew MacDonald, Allon Reich and their crew. A fantastic crew. They were very supportive, and Andrew and Allon, not only extraordinary people but also very creative at the same time, very supportive to all our crazy ideas. and always trying to bring the logic to these crazy ideas, so I think we made a fantastic team together. We'd love to make more movies with them. And also, obviously, the people from Fox were very supportive, having in mind we had to do all this postproduction in barely two months. Thank you for everybody, because I think we had an amazing crew, and, you know, having in mind the difficulty of the postproduction... So they... they did an amazing job, so thank you to everybody. Thank you for listening to us. And I think our movie is a good example of all the things that we wanted to make, and I hope you enjoyed it.

1:33:23 · jump to transcript →

our nickname for the Predalien. And he's establishing his dominance over the little newly shedding warriors. Bitch-smacked the warrior around and then gets to have his way with the homeless lady. And this is one of the homage shots, the original Predator. It's very, you know, the whole layout and composition of the shot was very similar to the opening of the original film. And again, obviously, this is a visual effects. You want to talk about hydraulics a second, guys?

19:22 · jump to transcript →

So I like this scene a lot because it's not too often you get to use the word dickhead in a movie. We're sort of bringing that back. That's a real throwback to it. Yeah, it was like, well, it's also how me and Greg talk to each other. We always call each other, like, asshole and stuff like that. So, like, in the sewer scene, he's like, oh, you're accused, asshole. You know, that was very much influenced by the way we talked to each other. So we were going over the script stuff for Shane. We're like, that's some of the brotherly kind of stuff you got to put in there. And, by the way, this was unusual in that

1:00:37 · jump to transcript →

It's like, it was impossible. We would have needed two weeks to film that scene. And it was like, and we literally had a day to film it all. So that's why, that was actually the original reason why we picked the APC more than just homage to aliens. It was like, we needed a contained set with no rain in it that we could actually shoot. And we kind of didn't like the idea of a minivan. No, yeah, minivans, we hate minivans. Which is one of the things when you're going to have military vehicles in a movie, it's always very difficult.

1:17:48 · jump to transcript →

And here, this is our love letter to a John Williams-style score. Obviously heavily influenced by Superman. And I think this scene illustrates how difficult to get this movie right, because if we pitched it one degree left or right, this would really be an embarrassing piece of crap to watch.

11:28 · jump to transcript →

internalize it so that you can see it instead of externalizing it and not feeling real. We gotta get the hell out of here! Here's my homage to a classic Superman superhero shot.

1:04:58 · jump to transcript →

Because I'm sure we've all been in a discotheque in our youth and liked the strobe coming on and doing stupid things to it. So that was really the inspiration to this. And I've got to say, even watching it now, I'm amazed I did this scene. I think it's cool as hell. We go to Robin's revenge! And the kryptonite code in Robin's Revenge, that we made up on the day.

1:28:48 · jump to transcript →

It's hard. It's hard. He can't fix everything. Yes. And you're feeling that, like he saved her. First of all, I love this car. When you chose this car, you chose this car. I'm so glad we have. It's Paris. Look, we love Rendezvous. McHugh and I, we love movies. We watch movies all the time. Check it out. It's Claude Lelouch's Rendezvous. And so the thing is, is that it's also, you know, our whole homage...

1:03:25 · jump to transcript →

So we still got the jump, but we got it with character and not spectacle. And not spectacle. And seeing something that... His performance here. Performance is wonderful. And then this, remember, we originally... Dude, I love your design, though. Always, you write it, you're like, okay, no, he's staring at me when I get there. And it's just so funny. Every time, we get a laugh. And I was totally inspired by that, just in the writing of the scene.

1:37:24 · jump to transcript →

You're there going, you're going to be okay. We're going to get through this. It's going to be all right. We're going to live. Come with me if you want to live. And you can see, I would not be the filmmaker that made this movie had I not been making movies with you since Valkyrie. And you can see a clear delineation between the first film I made and the three subsequent films I made with you. And so all of those things that you're saying, which are on the one hand very kind, they're also greatly influenced by...

2:22:39 · jump to transcript →

Obviously, Johnny Fontaine was inspired by a kind of Frank Sinatra characters. And my impressions of the young Frank Sinatra was of, you know, girls screaming when he crooned. And so I had the teenagers jumping up and down and screaming while the scene was going on. But again, I remind you that the shot of Al and the shot of Kay were shot at night and just lit to match with the party. Gordon did a very

19:07 · jump to transcript →

culminates in his massacre at the toll gates and you know it's no secret that this scene really was inspired by Arthur Penn and his wonderful movie Bonnie and Clyde at the end of that film when Bonnie and Clyde are are killed and I'm a big admirer of Arthur Penn and you know as my dad used to say steal from the best and

1:56:45 · jump to transcript →

homage, Douglas Sirk's 1955 film Captain Lightfoot, an adventure movie concerning early 19th century highwaymen in the foothills near Dublin, Ireland, starring Rock Hudson as Michael Martin, a.k.a. Lightfoot, and Jeff Morrow as John Doherty, same name as the Eastwood character here, a.k.a. Captain Thunderbolt. The source material was a book by W.R. Burnett, though Martin lore had a real historical basis. Michael Martin

41:12 · jump to transcript →

Grilling him is Rhode Island-raised soul singer Claudia Linnear, a former Iket who was on the road with Ike and Tina Turner. She was apparently the inspiration for both the Rolling Stones' 1971 Brown Sugar and David Bowie's 1973 The Lady Grinning Soul. And in the year after the release of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot appeared in a Playboy pictorial titled Brown Sugar, her lone solo album, Few,

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Filmmaker Paul Davis

here we're gonna have one of the uh one of the it's now become a huge horror trope i mean john took this from repulsion but i think everybody who who does this little trick now with the mirror does it as an homage to an american wolf in london

43:02 · jump to transcript →

Filmmaker Paul Davis

just turned around a corner and gone from Piccadilly Circus to Clink Street, which is down by Borough Market. And this street looks completely different now, but it's still there. You can still go down and pay homage to the final resting place of David Kessler. There was a moment here that was actually cut, where one of the police officers actually chases the wolf first.

1:31:44 · jump to transcript →

Was that a series of articles? Yeah, it was three articles spread over a year and a half. And the LA Times never correlated them. They never commented from one article to the next. Incidentally, that movie was Sam Raimi's, I believe, Evil Dead. Because he had to put a poster of one of my films in the basement of one of his films. Who's an homage to whom? Sam Raimi. This is so romantic that he climbs up my rose trellis.

34:55 · jump to transcript →

She's having a spasm. She's off the scale. That's my homage to The Exorcist. We couldn't afford to fly her. The famous gray streak.

50:23 · jump to transcript →

It was like a rock musical or whatever. So that's a fucking nonsense, really, if you don't mind my French. The actual look of it was influenced by a French graphic artist, illustrator called Nicolette and Kellek. And it was something that Clive and I had discussed and looked at their works, Nicolette and Kellek.

12:14 · jump to transcript →

cemented in some critics' minds the idea that the film was influenced by pop video, that that kind of music seemed to have that sort of MTV vibe to it in a way that you'd not anticipated. Yeah, undoubtedly. I mean, nowadays, it's very modern, this kind of music, isn't it? It's in practically every film. Well, the guys that were in Frere ended up forming, as you probably know, a group called Underworld.

1:21:41 · jump to transcript →

Gary Goddard

These guys are mine. This was inspired by one of the renderings that Claudio Mazzoli did, a production designer. Skeller's coming into his own, making preparations for the moment the great eye opens. Chosen by destiny! Frank delivers just a great performance. The details, the costume, look at the staff he's holding, every element, every amount combines now to the total end result. Witness to it.

1:27:27 · jump to transcript →

Gary Goddard

It was done two months after the production shoot. Now here, this was a little homage to Wizard of Oz. The idea here was this is, you know, after the battle, everyone's returned. You can see everybody's cleaned up. Detectives decide to stay there. Life is better on Eternia. Why would he go home? Gwildor is a bit of a tribute to the Cowardly Lion, the bows and the hair. And in fact, there was a larger scene here.

1:36:54 · jump to transcript →

I had that sort of... I had that in me, but I didn't do it, you know, I didn't do it as much. And then I really started hanging out with women more during the making of the movie. And I was kickboxing all the time, so I wasn't really... I just was... I got inspired by seeing in the reaction women had to Lloyd that, man, maybe they don't need Fabio. You know what I mean? Like, they... They... Certainly they like good-looking...

49:53 · jump to transcript →

And that's how we came up with the end of the movie. And it's a little bit of an homage to The Graduate that ends on the faces of two people facing a dare-to-be-great situation. But it ends on them waiting. Yeah, it ends on them waiting. Where's the ding? It's coming. Any second now. Any second now.

1:34:28 · jump to transcript →

Commentary With Author CG Paul M. Sammon

for Roger Corman, and John is a, John loves Roger Corman. He learned everything he could. So that was a little homage to John Davison's background on that monitor. Let me clear my throat. Okay, now I don't sound like I've got five bullfrogs. Yeah, so this shootout here, again in downtown Houston with the Little League team was very much a Frank Miller kind of thing. And it's very funny because this is RoboCop not being violent.

52:34 · jump to transcript →

Commentary With Author CG Paul M. Sammon

And, of course, all of the machinery we're seeing here is, at that time, state-of-the-art. Now, this is a prop, and it's an interesting one because anyone who has seen aliens will remember the facehuggers that were in the glass containers. I can't help but to think that this was something that was influenced by that. However, this was done by Rob Oteen's crew.

1:12:04 · jump to transcript →

Fred Dekker

I mean, I would imagine... Back then, I mean, the PG-13 rating was not even 10 years old at that point yet, so I would imagine it's difficult to try to figure out when to pull back and when to, you know, try to push it to as far as you can, certainly in a movie like this. I imagine that's a challenge. This is my Empire of the Sun homage here. This is completely Empire of the Sun. You know, because we want to love this... We'll talk about Remy Lyon's character, Nico. We'll talk about her more, but I really wanted us to love her, and this...

5:57 · jump to transcript →

Fred Dekker

Donald Wilkes' character from the movie Angel, which had come out in 84. The hooker with, you know, the high school student by day, hooker by night movie. You're referring to Angel 1. There were actually, I believe, four of them. Yeah, there had been four, yeah. And so I always thought it was strange. Like, someone was paying homage to that, I think. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I always thought that was like, well, that's interesting. They look exactly the same. See, now, if we did this now...

1:09:19 · jump to transcript →

that we don't have a rap like that. And I believe that. I think that's probably not true. But for our story with the escape scene with all these hostages flying off the plane, we just invented that. But they don't have that now. This press conference, by the way, was a little bit inspired by that Alexander Haig press conference in 1981, remember? When Ronald Reagan got shot. Yes, especially at the beginning of it.

1:18:47 · jump to transcript →

The secretary there was talking about, I have no idea what happened, I don't know, blah, blah, blah. It was done basically, you know, it was very much inspired by that. Alexander Haykin of press conference. Great job here again with Glenn. And you see also, if you take, again, the work of the first assistant director, if you get the right extras, look at how real I think this press conference really feels. And they're all extras. They're not even actors, they're extras.

1:19:16 · jump to transcript →

how brilliant the song choices were in the soundtrack. And they made the transitions from character to character really punch home. But I thought the actual theme was such a beautiful combination of something that was fresh because you hadn't heard it for a while, but it was something that was so completely influenced by the period that the film was set in. I'll take the results.

36:38 · jump to transcript →

But besides from that, I was not an expert in film noir movies, which made Curtis Anson very happy. Great big one. Here. As I say, I think the inspiration from Robert Frank and seeing these old photographs and working with Janine and obviously with Curtis, one day I remember telling Curtis, hey, you know, Curtis, it could be maybe a good idea

1:22:41 · jump to transcript →

Darren Aronofsky

like that, a rotary phone, to sort of create this timeless space. We were sort of inspired by Terry Gilliam's Brazil of taking old technology and reinventing it for the present. We didn't have anywhere near his production value, but we tried to learn from a master. That's Joanne Gordon, who is my mom's best friend, helped raise me, and was actually craft services on the film, playing the mean landlady.

5:04 · jump to transcript →

Darren Aronofsky

Sean is really deep in it here. I mean, the amazing work he's doing here. You can't pay for a look like that. You gotta work for it. The whole phone in the background is, for any of you film buffs out there, is a lift or an homage to Sergio Leone in Once Upon a Time in America.

58:13 · jump to transcript →

Kat Ellinger

Things like Last House on the Left, for example, which was inspired by Bergman's A Virgin Spring. The male family member or the boyfriend or the husband or the father wanting to take back that honour as if it's a family thing. You know, it dresses that. That's what sends Manu over the edge. And then with Nadine, it's the constant criticism. It's the showdown between the flatmate. Now, this is exaggerated.

20:33 · jump to transcript →

Kat Ellinger

that punk period, or was coming of age in that punk period, and pay homage to that. Certain aspects of that are played down in Besmois, but the music is still there, played down compared to the book. But it is still a really huge part of Virginie Dupont and her work, her writing, and her film work.

55:16 · jump to transcript →

I admit, arguing to keep this in. Music up. But it's really, to me, this is almost, this is my homage to Hong Kong cinema right here. Forget the martial arts stuff. But it was fun to go full throttle on this kind of thing. As I said, very operatic.

1:07:57 · jump to transcript →

We talked before about tradition. And there's this one, obviously the wonderful, the homage that's being made here is that wonderful sequence in King Hu, I assume in King Hu, Touch of Zen, which had that great, great fight sequence in the bamboo forest. Of course, they were always on the ground in the bamboo forest. In the middle section sometimes. A little bit. Well, he used to use those trampolines. He would position trampolines just outside of frame.

1:35:27 · jump to transcript →

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland

which was sort of influenced by stories that we'd heard about, particularly like stuff you read about Rwanda and places like that with corpses ending up in churches and things like that. And we thought it'd just be a dumping house for corpses, some kind of mortuary or makeshift cemetery for the corpses. And it gave us the next kind of... It felt like the film was evolving then out of the circumstances and that he was understanding as he went along in the way that

14:20 · jump to transcript →

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland

the clear, the digital house, we'd paint them out, the neon lights. So they're actually self-lit by the lights in the supermarket store. So we didn't have to do any lighting, but they just took it all out in post and we tried to avoid it as much as possible. That was a little Homer Simpson homage there. And in a way, the whole scene is a respectful nod towards George Romero's Dawn of the Dead set in a shopping mall, which is...

47:53 · jump to transcript →

Tom Tykwer

but still to me as i'm considering myself something like a spiritual agnostic this is not a religious movie it is a movie that is heavily influenced by spiritual knowledge that of course recurs to to religion and to theology and of course there's a many theology

1:10:56 · jump to transcript →

Tom Tykwer

But they don't go into the confession booth. They don't follow the rituals. They just are inspired by them, which is a small but important difference to me. We've just seen that scene with the shaving of the heads, which is a rather shocking element when you read a screenplay. You know you have an idea of an actress, because I was very early thinking of Kate to play Filippa.

1:11:50 · jump to transcript →

And the interior of this location was inspired by a fencing facility that we location scouted that was adjacent to the Olympic Stadium from the 1930s. But we weren't able to shoot in that location, but we did replicate it in CGI and on the stages at the Babelsberg Studios, which have quite a history. Mm-hmm.

9:40 · jump to transcript →

It would be impossible to do that. And I thought that Enzo Angeleri, who designed and cut this hair, thought that he did such a great, it was such a great throwback and homage to the original and yet something that we could work with. I just thought he did such a brilliant job. And it was also one of the first things that Peter Chung said when he came to the set was that he loved the hair, which was really great.

40:29 · jump to transcript →

John Cameron Mitchell

Some of James' film we shot before principal photography, like his face in the water and the band-aids and all kinds of little bits and pieces. I remember me biting my nails and letting them bleed. How much was inspired by Jonathan Coet's Tarnation? Well, you know, Paul documents his life also with photography over the years, and there was a little bit of that and a little bit of Jonathan...

51:17 · jump to transcript →

John Cameron Mitchell

was perfect. You're doing an homage there. That was a filmic reference. I didn't want to tell you because I didn't want to make you self-conscious about laying, but it happened anyway. Remember, it just fell out of your panties. Look at how gorgeous Justin looks. This is not a shot of Justin. That's Justin. That's Kurt and Bart. I have to say, yes, thank you, Kurt and Bart. They did a good job on making me these fantastic costumes. I was so jet-lagged and tired and

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Francis Lawrence and Akiva Goldsman

influenced by the Blair Witch Project for this sequence. And I think one of the key ideas was that the actors in that film were really horrified in all of those sequences. They weren't the hero that were going up against the villain, you know, with courage. But here we have Will petrified, and you just never see that. And I think we are just living in this world in his shoes, and if he's petrified, we have to be petrified. Remember we had a version of this sequence years ago that was in the U.N.?

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Francis Lawrence and Akiva Goldsman

Or are you excited to see somebody? And what's funny is it all informs the behavior in the scene, but then it all landed exactly back to the way that it was written, Wishes. It now exists again in its simplest form, yet the performances are now influenced by all of that play and workshopping, and I really enjoy that. And it's a scene that I'm really proud of just because I think it's entirely accurate.

1:07:18 · jump to transcript →

Patrick Tatopoulos

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

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Patrick Tatopoulos

That, if anybody is interested... I called that on the day when I saw that bloody scar. That was actually the same one that Guy used for Singe. For Singe. When he gets busted by... - Exactly. When Viktor punches him in the crypt in number one. You see, if you never said that, nobody would have known. Now they... Hey, cost-effective. - That's right. There's a lot of recycling like this in makeup effect. If you're clever, you know... - Of course. I love this scene between them. - Yeah. And just the tension and, you know. And the next time you see them together... ...when they go in that room is one of my favourite moments. That one was like the little homage I wanted to make... ...at Murnau's Nosferatu. You know that creature that comes into that room. It feels like you don't know if he's gonna strike at him or stuff. And then we were really worried about this whole daylight. Forest daylight. Not Knowing what colour to get. We'd never gone outside before in the Underworld series at all. It just popped out and felt kind of, we had our... ...Xena conversations and worries. You know, with the combination of just... The costumes could only be but so different, you know. These guys are supposed to break out of prison and grab what they can... ...from the other soldiers. And then putting them in the forest. You know, Lucy Lawless comes in and it's all over. So we finally got, like a... Went with a bit more of a green stylized than normal daylight. That's the shot. What's funny is that Steven and Bill were actually very, very close friends. And they had dinner every night together... ...and in between takes they'd be sitting there talking to each other. And then get time to get back on the set. And then Bill would be bullying... I need to make a-- Oh, yeah, here. Just to make a little note, we haven't talked about the music here. Paul Haslinger was just... That was a challenging one. You don't wanna be too over-the-top with the music. Yet you wanna create a little suspense. And I think... He did the first Underworld as well. He did the first one as well. - Yeah. I love that. That was a... It's a perfect display of what Viktor is about and what he's like. And then Tannis' reaction to that I really loved. This was another shot that was vastly improved... ... after Clint fattened the visual-effects budget. Before it was like three guys standing around. It was seven guys. Don't be... - There was smoke, no flame. And no fire. It was nothing. The whole mountain behind Michael was CG.

47:34 · jump to transcript →

real hand, but just, you know, putting another layer of skin and putting that LCD underneath. Pulling that nasty piece out there. This was also, you know, for those of you who have seen the original, I don't think it's that hard to make the connection of this as a bit of a twist on, you know, an homage to the pulling that device out of Arnold's nose. That always creeped me out when I was, what, 15?

38:22 · jump to transcript →

but it would be, you know, you guys are more the judge. I'm too, you know, I'm so close to it that, of course, it all makes perfect sense to me. So I'm going to have to ask you to step through the scanner again, please. This was a definite homage to the original. I wanted to switch it up and, you know, lead it up and tee it up as the red-headed lady that we're a bit familiar with and do a switch on that idea. How long is your stay? Three days.

45:19 · jump to transcript →

Now, speaking of best idea wins, this little montage that you just saw was completely packaged, not written into the script. We did want a character who was a bit numb from suburban life, from being a dad, and working a steady and difficult job, kind of hiding out in the suburbs, this fellow. So we wanted to start there. But we really just wanted to start with this sequence where there's a break-in in his suburban house, which is the part of this story, one part of this story, that comes from my real life. I have had two break-ins in my house, with people in my house, one of which, I won't go into the details, but was extremely traumatic for my family, and remains that way and will for the rest of our lives. So I had that inside me, and the feelings of... The complicated and difficult feelings that it conjured up inside me are still with me, and were some of the inspiration for even creating this story in the first place. Although, again, I have to give credit for the story to Derek Kolstad. I did share with Derek when we met that I wanted to do an action movie, and I shared that I felt that my time on Better Call Saul, a TV show, had set me up for a potential audience around the world who understood me as an earnest character who was a Striver, maybe willing to reach above his talents and able to get knocked down and get back up. And so this starts with a simple home break-in, and we can see these two criminals are very nervous and seem to be out of their element as well, but also can't quite tell what they're up to. But this character says no to them taking the wedding ring. So there's something more to him. Do you remember the wedding, if I may interject? Yes. - That it was only the watch... I think it was on set that once we put a light, the flashlight onto the ring, it was kind of like, "Wait a minute." Yes. They were just gonna take the watch, which he says "means something to me." But then I think it was Kelly who said, "What about the ring?" I mean, it's gold and it's gleaming in the flashlight. You have to say something about it. And then for the character to push back on that while he's got a gun in his face tells you there's maybe more to this guy besides for the fact that he wants his marriage to work and has committed his full life to being honest and stay married. It tells you maybe there's more to him than he looks like. What the fuck, Dad? The son rejects him for not fighting back when he could have. And, boy, oh, boy. - Perfect opportunity... There's a lot of feelings in here for me personally, as I shared with you, having had a break-in or two. It's not a good situation to be in. You don't quite know what to do and you wish you'd done more. You always wish you'd done more. But you also want to keep the damage to a minimum, as the character says here in the movie in a few minutes. Yeah. - And the golf club? I also have experienced this moment where the policeman sort of says, "I would have done something." And you're like, "Really? "I thought I was supposed to keep things cool." Anyway... Well, yeah, 'cause society teaches you not to get violent. I mean, you'd think a policeman, of all people, would say, "Thank you for not pulling a gun "and making a bloody mess for us to show up to." Instead, I've had the experience of... Not all the police who showed up, but one of them saying, you know, "That's not what I would have done." Which is an absolutely useless comment and all it did was... I mean, look, it's not a useless comment because all these things... It's great that you were able to take a traumatic experience and have that as a Starting point for this film. At least you got something good out of... -/ agree. -... what must have been pretty terrible. And I have not always been a person who believes that films or games, video games, are places where people get their rage out. I can see, too, where movies and video games sort of engender anger and rage.

3:18 · jump to transcript →

I love what goes on here. He gets home. If you remember the criminals from the night before, this frightened, scared, nervous couple, they grabbed the coins and whatever garbage is in that little bowl, and every family's got a bowl or a countertop like that, where they drop their keys, they drop their change, and maybe the little girl's kitty-cat bracelet would go there if it was on the floor or if that's where she left it 'cause she washed her hands or something, and everyone can relate to that. And he finds out they may have taken her kitty-cat bracelet, and that's really all it took for him to go, "Here we go." It's the excuse. As we were talking about, the sort of... Some of the more unique elements of the action genre we did here, what always really attracted me to the script was that a lot of it is driven by Hutch's inner conflict... Yes. ... father than bad guys going, coming in and, you know, doing something bad to him. It's not a revenge film. - Yeah. It's all about Hutch, you know, for 20 years, which we make quite clear in the speech later on, in the basement, that you make, is that he overcorrected. He became a regular dude, and he's just very unhappy, and all the violence stems from being unhappy because the first time Hutch smiles... You know, part of the inspiration for this journey, emotional journey, and the character, as I shared with everyone, was my personal experience and the feelings of frustration that don't go away. And the questioning you do as a dad if you have a break-in. And if it's traumatic, a feeling of "What else could I have done?" You can't help going over those moments and thinking about other things you could've done. Here he's looking for a tattoo. Tattoos are a big deal in this movie. They're the symbol that unlocks a lot of doors. In this case, obviously, I'm looking for the tattoo that was on the wrist of the woman who broke in as part of the couple. But here Hutch's tattoo will send a signal to this guy. Here he wants a fight. He just wants a fight. Yeah, well, you probably shouldn't flash cheese like that around here, bro. There are three types of people... But part of the inspiration I wanted to share here is an interesting one. Years ago, when I was in college, this would have been about 1983, I saw a speech by someone named Abbie Hoffman. Do you know who Abbie Hoffman was, Ilya? I'm drawing a blank. Yes. And you know a lot of history. Ilya, by the way, is Russian. If you didn't know.

19:26 · jump to transcript →

Tim Burton

when I should have been doing something else, thinking of those and, you know, asking people, how would you or not like, how would you not like to die? All that kind of stuff. And one of the first characters I decided was I wanted to do the winner or loser of a hot dog eating contest because I was inspired by Joey Chestnut in his annual 4th of July hot dog eating contest wins. 75 hot dogs or 76 in 10 minutes, I think is, I don't know, but it's up there. So, and I actually wanted to get him to play that character

19:31 · jump to transcript →

Tim Burton

I need a hard target search for two suspects. It's like a dead version of Chips or Adam-12. This is Wolf, you know, sort of inspired by those kind of cop shows or Hawaii Five-O and Adam-12 or Chips. Leave no gravestone unturned. Help sift through the sands of Titan if you have to. Men, this is what you've been training your entire deaths for. And remember,

1:10:10 · jump to transcript →

And it's only recently, I guess, relatively recently, that we can now see it and enjoy it. And obviously with this set, we can actually enjoy it even more. Yes. And here's some high-quality Wondria. It's been said that Charles Adams was slightly influenced by the look of Luna in creating Morticia. And that wouldn't surprise me at all. Yeah, I think that...

44:57 · jump to transcript →

And that was partly his infatuation with Lillian Gish, but he was inspired by D.W. Griffith in so many ways, and he wanted it to be a kind of post-Griffith film, but using a lot of that. Now, the underscore here is a waltz, and this becomes the theme for Shelley Winters.

27:56 · jump to transcript →

Alan K. Rode

Gangs smoothed Hayden's testimony with the committee so the actor came out looking like a hero. This is actor Sol Gorse that Hayden slugs and escapes. Hayden was also influenced by a man named Phil Cohen who was a psychoanalyst for many Hollywood left-wingers and party members.

1:09:23 · jump to transcript →

The sound man is right at Warren's feet there, you know. Right. With the mic, directional mic. So, you know, he's crouched underneath the overhang of the dashboard. And I'm there somewhere. I'm in that car. Coming up is my homage to Hitchcock, which is the kind of, you know, foreboding...

1:30:47 · jump to transcript →

Gerhard

And of course that was much more strongly influenced by the last Tango by Bertolucci than by Nachbottier.

50:36 · jump to transcript →

which is a 19th century mansion that sort of overlooks the Hudson in a neighborhood called Riverdale. Probably the inspiration for Riverdale on the Archie Comics universe. But yeah, they used Wave Hill as the interiors for Gracie Mansion, which I didn't know, and I was very surprised. But Riverdale is a neighborhood in the north...

39:25 · jump to transcript →

He takes his time. He does some thinking. This scene I also like very much. This odd hallway in Pernstejn Castle. It is very unusual to see black on black in the darkness like this. The networks would not accept something like that anymore. The movie lives through the interaction of light and darkness. For this, the scene by Murnau was recreated identically. For example, the way the vampire holds his hands was copied almost exactly. There are some very clear references to Murnau where I quote him directly. And that is the case here? I don't remember exactly. I would not call this a remake but an homage to Murnau. For me he was much more important than Fritz Lang.

45:16 · jump to transcript →

This next sequence coming up, which we called the Space Gate or Stargate Room at the time, it was kind of an homage of mine to one of my favorite pictures, of course, which was 2001. Me too. It was a great picture and probably what got me into filmmaking. And I always wanted to duplicate that effect of the glowing walls. And so...

1:10:13 · jump to transcript →

Yeah. Wow. Now I have to say this, ending shots that we have of the sort of closing up is like vastly influenced by the end of Mean Streets. Really? Yeah, because the very end is sort of after all the shooting and after all the aggravation and all the whole crazy stories happen, it's just sort of the neighborhood closing down. The Venetian blinds going down, the lights going off, the, you know, just like...

1:25:57 · jump to transcript →

Computer Simulation Division Richard Taylor

When we came to make a decision about what film format to use for Tron, we felt very strongly that we needed to shoot it on a larger negative than traditionally done. And it came down to a choice between 65 millimeter and VistaVision for the whole show. But the availability of 65-millimeter cameras was far better than the availability of VistaVision cameras, so we made the decision to shoot the entire show in 65 millimeter. And to keep a certain consistency, and as long as we had rented the cameras, we felt that we might as well go ahead and shoot the real world in 65 millimeter and not in 35 millimeter. It was kind of one of those nice to have things, and nobody objected strenuously to it, and also it would be the first time since Ryan's Daughter that a film had been shot entirely in 65 millimeter. And I think you can see the results. I mean, it looks wonderful. In the monitors in Lawrence Livermore, one of the things that Triple-/ had to do was create lots of imagery that appeared on monitors, and that imagery had to be shot and created long before we got to production. So, there was a lot of planning in creating all of the monitor imagery, and Triple-I did a great job on that. Spent a Iot of time on this shot. To accomplish the effect, what we did was get a 4-by-5 still camera and photograph Jeff Bridges in his position after he's been zapped, and then immediately moved him out and took another photograph, which was the background by itself. So, as you pull away chunks of Jeff, you see the background behind him, and then to put the laser and the grid and all that on top of him was basically the effects animation of John Van Vliet. When Flynn is de-rezzed and pulled into the computer, we go through one of the most interesting sequences in Tron, which is the real world to electronic world transition. This sequence was created by Robert Abel & Associates, primarily under the direction of Kenny Merman. It was a sequence which I had designed, knowing that the way that Robert Abel & Associates was making these computer graphic images with the Evans & Sutherland computers, and, really, using vector graphics to create this particular look, would give us a look that would be unique just for this transition. The three-space transition, the movement through all these binary bit patterns and this polygonal landscape, was done by making multiple passes through a traditional animation camera that was pointed at a high-resolution, vector graphic, Evans & Sutherland computer screen, and making multiple passes, frame by frame, using different colored filters, coming back, making multiple passes of rewinding other filters, until you finally end up with this, which seems to be solid objects. But it's really made out of lots of tiny, tiny lines put together to make solid blocks of color or objects. Oh, man, this isn't happening. It only thinks it's happening. When Flynn says, "This isn't happening, it just thinks it's happening," it's a key line, because it means that the reality that he finds himself in now, not even he can fully believe exists. And if anyone should appreciate and understand this alternate reality, it's him, and now he finds himself trapped in it. All right, now we see Sark standing on the bridge, and all of a sudden, he is enclosed with these shrouds of light as he begins to have his conversation with the MCP. The database for the MCP was a human figure that we had created at Triple-/ called Adam Powers and was originally on the Information International sample reel. And if you look at that sample reel, you'll see a juggler character who was juggling balls. Well, that face of that character is the face of the MCP. So, the first time that you see him, he is a polygonal drawing of a face. And that's basically the underlying database of the face. So, it's made of polygons. And those polygons, we play them out on the Triple-I computers as the line-drawing polygons, and made 12-and-a-half by 20-inch stills, high-con stills of those. But we created the mouth positions for the vowels and the syllables so that you could take these interchangeable transparencies and lay them down and make him Say, by whatever order you put them in, whatever you wanted him to say. 'Cause he was voicing a lot of different dialogue. Then those were backlit, and then we applied an effect to those line drawings of putting a steel mesh screen over the taking camera, and it made it have that much more, kind of, complex look. And then we also animated the exposure occasionally. Early on in the film when I started working with Steven, we did a lot of experiments to work out how these characters were created. The thing that we finally decided was that the characters needed to have this energy inside themselves. They are obviously in this electronic world. Now, these costumes were unlike any costumes anyone had ever created for a picture before, in that they were costumes designed to have effects treatments done to them. They were white with black drawing or black lines over them. All of the black elements on the costume were turned into circuitry which could be backlit and light could be pushed through there. We originally shot a 65-millimeter image of these people, live-action photography of them on these black sets. Then from that 65-millimeter film, we created some photo-rotoscope machines, which basically could project the 65-millimeter film down to large pieces of film, which were pre-punched with animation punches. This film was created by Kodak for us, and we would project down with these photo-rotoscope machines, which would hold this film into a vacuum frame and make a continuous tone positive print of each frame of the film. Then these continuous tone prints were taken to a light table, it was a vacuum light table, where they were contact printed to high-con film to make a number of high-con positive and negative images. So that you basically have for every character a large cel and you have high-con positives, negatives, and a continuous tone positive. Then these high-con elements were hand-inked and painted to isolate the circuits on the body, the whites of the eyes, the whites of the teeth and any other circuits that we wanted to treat as a separate exposure. The characters are more often than not... The live-action characters are shot on an all black stage. When there is a set, the set is also black, but is measured out to conform with what we're seeing in this artwork. So that if a character appears elevated in a shot, like this shot, there was an elevated platform for him to walk on, but it didn't look at all like the set. Then we would composite these actors over paintings, transparencies, and once that was done, we would add the light and the color separately. And to simplify it, you can describe it as a sort of perfect blend between live action and animation in that we took live-action film, photographed it in a way that we could break it down to individual frames, then blow up those frames into large slides or transparencies. And we had 75,000 of these, which seems like an appallingly large number, but it really isn't if you compare it to an animation film. And because we were at Disney, they were not overly swamped. That's an actual Frisbee, by the way, and those are actual Frisbees on their backs. We had a excellent Frisbee coach, Sam Schaiz. I like the fact that the deadliest weapon in Tron is a Frisbee. A Iot of effects animation in this sequence and in the film. And that is the animation that makes the glows, and as the Frisbee gets brighter, and you see the reflections of it on their costumes, all that has to be done frame by frame. This is hand-drawn animation that, although it is drawn, a negative is made of that, and it is placed over a light source and then re-photographed, and the ability of the effects animators was such that we were never waiting on the effects animation on the show. They always performed very well. It was never a problem. They did very few redos, and that's because they had had experience doing this beforehand, whereas everything else that we were doing, outside of the effects animation, was the first time through. So, that had a much tougher and steeper learning curve. In the holding cells for the game grid, those are backgrounds that are entirely hand-drawn by the background department, again using Rapidographs and line drawing and airbrushing and then turning those into high-cons. But those drawings are all drawn to match the actual physical sets, which were built so that when someone passes behind something, or leans on something, those are actual physical sets that were built. But again, the sets were just black on black. They're as if they were made of black velvet. Part of the interesting thing as a cinemagraphic problem that was presented to Bruce Logan was that he had to shoot, unlike anybody had ever shot before, sets that were entirely black with white line drawings and white characters running around on these sets. Bruce Logan's job in photographing these people was very difficult because, unlike most photography for most films, you try and get as much chiaroscuro in the picture as you can. You let there be a lot of dark and you create shadows and you create this moodiness, which a cinematographer takes great pride in. In this film, during the sequences in the electronic world, basically, he had to light them so that we could see as much of the costume as possible with as little shading as possible because all of the shading and all of that were done by hand by making different masks and airbrush elements that were used under these costumes in post. The ring game was an interesting technical exercise. The set itself, again, was black flock paper with the rings drawn on this paper with tape. The actors had to realize which rings were there and which ones were not as they acted out the sequence, imagining that they were hundreds of feet above the ground. One of the inspirations of Tron is the movie Spartacus. And there's quite a few similarities to the persecuted people who had to fight in the gladiatorial games. This game, of course, was inspired by Pong and jai alai. I think one of the interesting parts of Tron was the synthesis of new games that were created. The design, for example, of the glove that's being worn here, we took a traditional jai alai glove and then rebuilt it and made it out of foam, added other elements to it to give it a more technological quality, and then again, I put the designs over the outside of that to make it blend with the rest of the costumes. Shooting in 65 millimeter, from a director's standpoint, is a lot of trouble. The cameras are huge and bulky. The format requires an enormous amount of light to fill that negative, so if you are shooting Lawrence of Arabia or Doctor Zhivago and you've got lots of snow and big exteriors, it's fine, but in low-light-level situations, it's very troublesome. The depth of field is sometimes as little as a half an inch, and you find your cameraman is asking you, "Now, which part of the eye do you want in focus? "Do you want the front of the eye or the back of the eye in focus?" Or if the head of the actor is not square to the camera, they ask you the really insane question of, "Which eye do you want in focus? "I can give you the front eye in focus or the back, "but the other one's gonna be blurry." Now a lot of these shots where you see actors talking to each other and we're doing over-the-shoulders, the camera couldn't hold focus for the blow-ups to be made, and I had to shoot the actors on separate passes. So, in a shot like this, where you see all three actors talking to each other, it wasnt filmed that way. I filmed them separately and they were composited. And there's quite a few shots like this. Whenever you see them walking around and they're separated by more than a couple feet, those are all separate shots, and then the actors are composited. So, it's very difficult for the actors because not only do they not see the environment they're in when we're filming, all they see is an all black stage, but they don't even see the actor they're talking to. Forming of the Lightcycles, again, is almost entirely done by hand-done animation done by the effects animation department in creating the way that these cycles form around these characters. We built an object that the actor could sit upon, and it was literally a mechanical shape that was the seat and the handlebars, so he could sit down and it would thrust his arms forward and pull him down into that locked position. So that everything that he sits upon and touches, it was, again, drawn by the animation department, and not until you see the final completed cycle, which is actually a CG/ rendering of the cycle, is any of it done by computer. The Lightcycle sequence was done by MAGI. Their way of creating an object were to take basic geometric shapes, cones, cubes, spheres, cylinders, and make an object by collaging those particular pieces together and creating an object. And that's how the Lightcycle was created. All wide shots that you see are computer-simulated. All of the shots, other than the very tight shots of the figures inside the canopies, are computer-simulated. The shots inside the canopies are actually hand-drawn artwork of parts of the Lightcycles, and the animation that's happening over the Lightcycle windshields is hand-done animation to give them a sense of speed. But virtually every scene that you see of the Lightcycles is entirely computer-generated. And there's not even effects animation in those scenes. If there's an explosion when a Lightcycle hits the wall and a tire bounces across, I think those were basically all CGI. Syd Mead worked really hard on designing these motorcycles so that they would incorporate the characters. But if you look closely at them, you'll see that the second half of the bike is flattened and sort of two-dimensional, and that was done because the computers couldn't handle too many compound curved surfaces. So, we restricted those curves to the wheels and the windscreens, and then the rest of the bike was simplified. The ability to move the camera through 3D space with these computer-graphic-looking landscapes is just great. The Recognizers are a sort of King Kong. There's a little head on top of that gate structure... Suggestion of a face, but it, sort of, got lost. The Recognizers were created by MAGI-Synthavision. As I mentioned, there are graphic vector lines, red lines outlining all of these objects, the same way with the tank. The tank was another unique design of Syd Mead, who is a futurist, a fabulous designer. Once Ram, Tron and Flynn have escaped the Lightcycle grid and are off through the canyons being pursued by the tanks, we cut inside the tanks and see another example of a Syd Mead set that was built as a three-dimensional set, again with black background, and all of the elements on there graphically put on so they could later be treated. So the camera, you can see, is moving through scenes in ways that no physical camera or no model shot could possibly do. The animators that I worked with to create the choreography for all of the CG/ sequences were Bill Kroyer and Jerry Rees. But to communicate all this information to the computer technologists, the people that are sitting at monitors at that time, took a new language which we had to create. So, what we did was, first of all, we had to think of each sequence as a real physical reality. Not only would they draw the point of view that they saw as an animator that we would work out together, that was the story point that Steven wanted to make, and also the point of view that we wanted to take. But after we would draw the original storyboards in a traditional, kind of, storyboard manner, we would have to go back and draw a top view, side view and front view of the objects, where they were in time, where the camera was in time, and what the camera's point of view was. So, we really had to define everything to the CG/ technologist in a three-world, three-dimensional space. And that was the first time that that had ever been done. They must've gone right past us. We made it...this far. Now, all of this, this revolt, it's all being led by the user who's gone in the system, Flynn. The Tron character and Ram character, they would have toed the line and gone through the software the way they're supposed to. We'd better, Null Unit. Null Unit. Get the computer dictionary out. Look up "Null Unit." What does that mean? In this sequence, you can really see some of the flaws. I don't really mean the flaws, but the imperfections in the cels, little bits of dirt that pop on and off. Yeah, but they're few and far between considering. Yeah. Come on, you little bugger. Come on. Look at that. A lot of pops and a lot of glitches in there that we would always Say, "Well, that's what happens in an electronic world." When we started there were going to be no differentiations between the flesh tones and the rest of their uniform. But at a certain point they looked, well, not very good. So as a result, that added, approximately, 120,000 extra frames, extra elements to the shot, so it did grow in many aspects. The cave sequence where Flynn, Tron and Ram finally re-energize their selves with this liquid energy was a very interesting technical problem to solve here. In the sequence in the cave when the water is being handled by the actors, literally, frame per frame, rotoscope animation is isolating the water from the body so that it can be treated with a different filter and a different exposure. And again, this is an example of how light is used to portray motion or energy, as Tron drinks and you see his circuits light up and they become energized. The set itself was a complex geometric shape, which was designed by Peter Lloyd, and we built into this set, basically, water channels, and the water itself was reflecting light sources that we put in angle so they would reflect to the camera, and the water was in black tanks so that all we're really seeing are the highlights on the water. Yeah, but the biggest problem at that time was do we fill this with colored water or clear water? Had to do tests, you know. - Right. That was your problem. Do we put milk in there and make it purple? I think that what Flynn is surprised now, ironically, to see that there's parts of this mirror world that are more alive than he anticipated. So, it's not just the harsh computer reality, there's something living about it. It's a very complex shot, again, with all the elements. Probably about 30 different elements, 30 different separate exposures for each frame. Normally in a special effects movie, you get a very bad bottleneck effect in that all these things have to be composited through one or two optical printers. Now we have digital compositing machines. But by putting it into a manufacturing system like this, where it became like an animated film, we could use 14 or 15 animation stands, and we could use a slew of effects animators and ink and paint people to do all of this work simultaneously. As far as I know, we still have more shots with human beings composited into an artificial environment than any other movie. I believe there's 1,100 special effect shots in the film and 900 of which have human beings composited in them. And that number is just very, very large. Just the organizational task alone was monumental, not even considering the creative side of it. For every frame you would have an additional five to 15 cels that isolated the different colors and the different... We had body mattes, we had face masks, continuous tones. You made print backs on top of print backs. So, those 75,000 original cels grew to over half a million. I think we ended up with something like 600,000 cels, all of which had to be kept in order. We had to pull trailers, literally these large house trailers, kind of, industrial trailers onto the lot. We ran out of space and we ended up with 10 trailers that would house all these cels and had to be organized and sent over... 80% of them were sent overseas and had to be numbered and then painted and kept in order. At one point we thought if we had 1,000 scenes, and this was around Christmas time, the film was going to come out later that summer, and we had no idea of how we were going to get it all done in that short a period of time. And we thought, "Well, it's summer vacation. We have two weeks. "We'll get college students, 500 college students in a room." We really believed this might happen. We discussed this for about an hour and we Said, "You'd have 500 students in a room. "We'll teach them how to do inking and painting and rotoscoping, "and they only have to do two scenes each. "And so they do one scene a week. "At the end of that time, we'll be done, "and we'll just go and shoot them on the animation stands." It didn't work out. So, we brought on Arnie Wong, who was an animator. We put him in charge of supervising Cuckoo's Nest, which is a ink and paint service that was in Taiwan. Approximately 80-some employees in a single room. And what we did is we went through and we made a videotape of every situation and what to do in that situation. So that if an inker over there, who didn't even have to understand English to do this, could go to a TV monitor, roll to this particular problem and see exactly what you'd do in that situation. And then he was there to answer questions that were unusual. And the most interesting thing, and one of the things that I'm particularly proud of with this technique is that in spite of what a pyramid it was to build, we managed to get all of this post-production done in six to nine months. And that is using a technology that we had developed. It had never been done before and we developed it and used it on this picture and delivered on time. And that was only possible because of this manufacturing technique. It's interesting the computer animation iS the simpler part of the set. - Yes. Ironically, one of the things that was a creative philosophy that we enjoyed and were proud of was that we were taking computer animation and letting it stand on its own. We weren't trying to make computer animation mimic reality. And the job was then to make reality, the actors and the sets, look like the computer animation. We used to say, "Well, if you've got lemons, make lemonade." Everybody else, and certainly since this point, has been going nuts trying to make computer animation mimic reality perfectly. And I found that the limitations of computer graphics at the time were the most exciting thing. If computer graphics... If computer animation is no longer different from reality, maybe we've lost something in that. Certainly you gain special effects technology and you can do certain things, but it's the limitations, I find, to be the creative challenge. I think at the time we were using four computer animation companies... Yes. -... which were probably the only animation companies that existed in the country at the time. Yeah, I had been visiting some of these companies for two years before we started making the movie. Maybe even longer than that. And I used to show up at their doorstep and Say, "One day I'm gonna make this movie. "You know, we're gonna do this and this is gonna be great." And they'd say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." I'd come by every six months and say this is really gonna happen, and I think they were more surprised than anybody else when we really did this movie. And they got to show their stuff. The way the de-rezzing effect was created, for example, when Ram passes away and he's in the cabin of the Recognizer, there's a combination of the original photography of the character, and then that is overdrawn with literally hand-done, line-drawing animation done by the animation department. And between that animation and light exposures, you can make it just, basically, run off, dissipate and fade away. Also, upon viewing this again, for so many years, you tend to kind of lump it all together visually in your memory and we forget, I forget, how much detail, how much layering of texture was put into this film. - Mmm-hmm. Ai! these shots are all completely storyboarded. Even the electronic world and all the simulated shots were all on storyboards. There must have been thousands of storyboards. Yeah, it was very detailed. Because rendering times in computer graphic imagery, the time it takes for the computer to draw each frame, are high. They're even high by today's standards. It takes sometimes as long as an hour or more for each frame of film. Probably the most complicated CGI images that were in Tron were done by Information International. The Solar Sailer hangar, the Solar Sailer, its formation, the walls of that environment, that's all CGI. As far as Cindy Morgan's involvement, she was very brave to get involved because a lot of actresses Said, "What am I going to wear? "You're going to put what on my head? "I've got to have a helmet and headgear "and wear all this spandex?" And that scared a lot of actresses away. Yeah, it was very hard to get anyone to take us seriously. You'd call people up, they'd come in for casting sessions, and Steven would do his best to present the film, and they'd look at you askance, think you were crazy. You'd run some video on them, and they just didn't believe it was going to happen. And as a result, it was very, very difficult. And I think that was one of the last major parts that was cast. Yes, it was two or three days before the first shot or something. Yes. - It was very close. And one of the people we tried was Deborah Harry. Right. We screen-tested Deborah Harry. The Bit was created by Digital Effects Incorporated, and we didn't have the time to choreograph a CGI Bit for every scene. So, what we did was created a series of stills that could be cell flopped, and these transparencies were created by Digital Effects so that the Bit could be rotating and have these different pulses in it, and then when it wanted to express itself, we flipped to the next sequence of stills, which would make it become more spiky or change its shape, and literally those were cell flopped and then flown around by moving the animation camera on the object to give it its motion from left to right or up or down or wherever it moved, we got it closer to you. That was all put in by moves on the animation camera, on these stills that were being cell flopped. These characters were very interesting. I especially liked the one that looked like a vacuum tube. Other programs... - Other programs and... ...in the system. The Recognizer sequence is another set that was built based on designs by Syd Mead. The interior of the Recognizer, as the interior of the tanks, was all a physically complex shape that the actors moved around on with white line-drawing vector material over the surface of it, and isolated animation coming back and colorizing and animating those elements. I think one of the most successful pieces of computer choreography in Tron is the whole Recognizer sequence, when the Recognizer hits a bridge and becomes multiple pieces and Flynn pulls them all back together with his energy and the choreography of the way those parts all fall back into place and tumble. The thing that people don't realize about computer simulation, especially at this time, is there were no programs that imitated the effects of nature on choreography. Every piece and every part of every computer-simulated object had to literally be choreographed frame per frame by an animator. When the Recognizer moves along and bounces off the ground floor and the pieces separate and then come closer together and have that real, elastic, rubber-banding kind of quality to them... Simple things in choreography... I mean, when an object goes around a corner, does it just swing around the corner or does it have back animation? Does it weave left and right? Does it back animate before it moves forward? Those are the things that the animators brought to this and that the computer-simulation people did a terrific job of interpreting.

28:30 · jump to transcript →

And this, of course, was sort of a... It was a total homage to Little House on the Prairie. No, no, no, Walton. I mean the Waltons, yeah. And then there's somebody at the end farts or... I belch. You belch. Supposedly. And I know you wanted to put in some sound effects after all the lights were out. Do you remember? No, I don't remember. Oh, I wanted to...

22:27 · jump to transcript →

The character Masters is certainly inspired by the character in Jerry Petovich's novel. I think I went a lot farther in making him kinkier than Petovich intended. Petovich had written him as kind of a, just a cold criminal. But I was looking for the feminine inside that. To me, once I had cast Willem Dafoe...

1:38:58 · jump to transcript →

But I think this is an homage to the editorial process. And that's Jim. The bomb had been wired to the suspension bridge... Yeah, he wrote some beautiful stuff. 120 people were reported injured, at least 22 people dead. I wish I were one of them. Remember Brinkley's great line?

1:25:28 · jump to transcript →

There you go. And I didn't know how to seduce. I was 15. I didn't know what pheromones were. I was 15. But apparently Tangerine did. And somehow that managed to... And while I'm at it, I just want to take a second and pay homage to this character. We don't know where Tangerine comes from. She was from the wrong side of the tracks. She was on her own. She was a series of things.

1:00:59 · jump to transcript →

I did it in Mean Streets, too. And it comes a little bit from Evita Loni, but it comes from a certain style, not just Evita Loni. Evita Loni I saw after I saw Nights of Cabiria, after I saw La Dolce Vita, after I saw Divorce Italian Style. Then Evita Loni was shown around the early 60s, and that was a film made in the early 50s. And it hit me, to be honest about it, and just say, look, actually Mean Streets, quite honestly, is a picture that was heavily influenced by Evita Loni. But in any event, that style was happening. That style was happening. There was a kind of...

17:54 · jump to transcript →

This is sort of my homage to it, but if you notice, there's a lot of bold colors that probably somewhat are cartoony colors, especially when we get into the house, and that was by design. And I did have a terrific DP, Levi Isaac, who obviously gets credit for shooting this and making it look like a great movie.

2:25 · jump to transcript →

where he can now confess to this stranger the way that Christina has. He's been somehow inspired by something he's seen going up on that balcony, and he wants access to it. So he gets it in this very strange way, where... I'm going to move to the washroom. Now, he doesn't hear that. He doesn't know, but he can see from that same vantage point that Thomas is going to the washroom, so that in the same way that he had that moment alone with...

1:16:18 · jump to transcript →

for presenting yourselves on this battlefield. I give you thanks. This is our army. To join it, you give homage. I give homage to Scotland. And if this is your army, why does it go? We didn't come here to fight for them. Home! The English are too many.

1:16:27 · jump to transcript →

paid homage to that by giving them sort of club hands and they into the costume built these kind of they almost look like a stamp but or a stilt like connected to their fist the actors to make their arms like longer and more like clubs but they are humans in there um and uh they also did you know extreme workouts for the greys to make certain muscles big like

1:19:27 · jump to transcript →

We did a sketch where we copied Reservoir Dogs, and I had dinner with him once, and he was very excited that that was based on it. The Fell on My Keys, of course, was an homage to the producers. Sure. Just doing my job. I do, however, have a few questions. Gene Wilder falls, and then I fell on my keys. Spent some time in New York City. Yes. Well, Bob and I are going up there next week, and I was wondering if you could suggest a show. Of course. Moby the Musical, a must-see.

1:26:19 · jump to transcript →

Alexander Payne

I don't know, I've just never met anyone quite like her. Here's a little homage to Sharon Stone on the left. You might ask if I ever saw Tracy Flick again. Well, I did. Just once. I mentioned before a very light Abraham Lincoln theme. Lincoln just suggests honesty and...

1:36:17 · jump to transcript →

American accent or South African accent or Australian accent. And he did it pretty well. And he made this character a lot more interesting. And I must say that the triangle love story was inspired by Hitchcock's film, Notorious. In that film, it's also about the good and evil, the bullshit love of the same girl. But in this movie, we try to have a little more, not only about love and also about how to save the world.

39:46 · jump to transcript →

I think we hear a little bit suggestion of Goldberg variations here. Variations was always part of the book. And because we all loved the idea of the Goldberg variations, that became the seat of the kind of relationship. And so Hans was kind of influenced by that, and sometimes actually simply used it. Your life, Clarice. I thought we might talk about yours. What's the next cross street? Capitol Street.

1:34:30 · jump to transcript →

Wes Anderson

But eventually, the Margot character, I decided to have her be adopted because of other things that it would do for her character. And because of, you know, it was sort of inspired-- That detail was inspired by someone in real life. And it seemed like it just filled out the character in a better way. And then maybe it makes this relationship a little more plausible somehow.

1:21:03 · jump to transcript →

Len Wiseman

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

1:43:00 · jump to transcript →

James McTeigue

I'm not a character who is interested... ...in the company of young, pretty ladies. I'd be one of the few people who wouldn't give their eyeteeth... ...to have dinner with Natalie Portman. Though, I like her very much as a person. But that's another thing I have to hide. My character can't parade his sexuality in this brave new Britain... ...because that's outlawed. And so, what with my art and my sexuality... ... that's my little secret world. But I invite women from time to time... ...because that's expected of a successful man. And I've invited her, but she never makes it. But she trusts me. Um, and.... And after a few adventures on her part... ...she ends up at my house and I come out to her... ...in every sense. As an art-lover and as a gay man and everything else. And her bravery, I think, is what pushes me over... ...and makes me think, okay, I'm going to make a stand now and l... ...fip up the censor-approved script of my nightly show... ...and write one which makes vicious fun of the chancellor. The Deitrich show was the homage to Benny Hill, in a lot of ways. And it was also something that would really piss of Sutler... ... you know, in a very short amount of time. Because it was an attack on his personality in a lot of ways. And he's hailed as this icon in the government. And I thought it was a really good way for the audience... ...to see how Deitrich really got underneath his skin. This is Gordon's swan song. I mean, a part of him seems to believe... ... if we're to take him on trust... ... that he's gonna get away with it. That he'll be made to apologize in public... ...and have to sort of work in the salt mines of television for a while... ...before being reinstated. But actually what happens is he that he's beaten to a pulp by... ...oy the brute squad. - To be fair... ...that was one of John Hurt's ideas. I was gonna face-mold him, actually. And I got to talking to him about it one day... ...and he just said, "What about if I did that?" "I'll just play both guys. You know, we'll split them down the middle... ...and we'll see how it goes." I talked to Paul Engelen... ...the makeup designer... ...and he said, "Yeah, I could put, like, big pancake makeup on him"... ...and it looked like he had a mask, almost. And I like that idea that you kind of, "Is it him? Is it not him?" The little glasses girl, she's going, "Oh, it's him! Oh, it's the Chancellor." And he did a great job. And he really has a great physicality too. That's a lot of him rolling around on the floor... ...and falling over and tripping over. Faker! - Fraud! Ready! - Aim! Fire! - Fire!

1:04:47 · jump to transcript →

in Caserta. You know what I'm saying? I love how every shot is... This guy's from Caserta. This guy, by coincidence, in Los Angeles, from Caserta. See, these are the kind of things I'm talking about. Little pieces like this, where you see he's measuring how far, attaching it to the back, and then homage to the mission... Now, I hit the ground on one of these takes. Yeah, in the next take after that, you actually did hit the ground. This take I actually thought was a better take.

42:19 · jump to transcript →

James Mangold

so that the claustrophobia you'd feel in that hotel room in the end would even be more, in my mind, acute because you had felt what a large expanse they had crossed to get to this nine by 12 room to wait for this train. You ever been to Dodge City? One of the ideas that occurred to me in a film I've always loved and stolen from and been inspired by is Jaws. And one of the beautiful things in that film is

1:05:46 · jump to transcript →

Roman Coppola

I remember doing this scene was-- That driver? No, I don't remember the driver. Because he was-- That was a driver with henna hair who we always would see at the place where all the auto-rick drivers wait there. We would always see that same driver. He was our stunt driver for this shot. I remember this sequence, with the dialogue scene with the short story... Yeah. - ...we found a little hill so we could roll the rickshaw down the hill without having the motor on ruining the sound. Yes, that's right. We rumbled down the hill. And what's the name of that--? Of the boy on the bicycle? He was a... - Spot boy? He was a spot boy for us. He brought tea, chai, onto the set, and he was very bright. I'm trying to think of his name. One thing about Brendan's character, I just wanna-- Would just mention just as an homage is his hat-- There's a logo on his hat for Francis Whitman Industries, which is actually my father's business. I mean, he's retired now, but it was-- His business was called Mel Anderson Communications. That symbol was his-- It's his-- It's based on his logo. In this part of the train, we have Brendan's living quarters. I think this is the non-a.c. section. These cars on the Indian trains usually don't have windows. The engine, as you can see there, is-- The paint job on it is based on the Tata trucks that you see on the roads in India, hand-painted by the drivers.

27:32 · jump to transcript →

This cube, this Rubik's Cube, which is very 80s, is in fact, in my story, it was a sort of homage to Clive Barker and his film Hellraiser. I didn't know. No. Something called the Lament Configuration, a sort of box in the same size, which is used to come in contact with the Cenobites from the other side. And in this story, it's the very prosaic Rubik's Cube, which is used by Oscar to get in touch with the other side, with Ellie.

20:08 · jump to transcript →

Of course, he wanted to be immortal. This is based on truth. Now we're twisting this to say that the Terracotta Army came about not as an homage to a living man-god despot, but as a curse put on by this good witch. And now we see that his entire army

9:05 · jump to transcript →

Wes Anderson

Well, there is an island that I thought-- That was part of the inspiration for this setting. It's called Naushon. And so this is our-- We ended up combining things from many different places. We filmed the movie in Rhode Island. And this house, for instance, is a combination of many different houses, a place called Clingstone that's built on a rock in Narragansett Bay, and a house on Cumberland Island in Georgia that we visited. And there was another house that's in the, what do you call it, the Thousand Islands? Is that what they're called? - [Becker] It's a dressing.

4:33 · jump to transcript →

Scott Stewart Jason Blum Brian Kavanaugh-Jones Peter Gvozdas

Yeah, I wanted to play like a homage to Silence of the Lambs. That famous night vision scene. Yeah, yeah. It was so funny too because it's like, you know, the initial idea was she crosses the, you know, we conceived it, she crosses the frame and wipes on the alien and that would be, you'd see it. And we did it take after take after take and focal length changes just to sort of see if we could just vary the timing. And the first version of it that we did,

1:23:26 · jump to transcript →

But I guess, you know, I'd like one. If we can pull it off, I think it's good. Yeah, make it more classy. But that was the whole approach of this movie. Like, since day one, it's trying to do this, you know, in a very classy way, not doing anything that was, you know, top-of-the-line CG or visual effects or anything like that, because stuff like that gets old, and a good story, I think, will never get old. Was this script inspired by...

5:21 · jump to transcript →

Francis Lawrence

These kind of moments are always sort of fun to me, too, with playing around with editing. When you can sort of play with time a little bit, and make it feel like she might still be in the room as Marta's coming upstairs. But really she's been long gone and quite safe. That was him at the Embassy. It was. Playing hard to get, are you? No substitute for a good old-fashioned blow job in my experience. He's not like that. One of the things I often thought about with this movie, and I think I talked about it a little bit in the beginning, in terms of the screen direction thing, was Hitchcock, right? That this was not an action film. It's a mystery and suspense thriller. So to sort of play around with tension was really fun. You can even hear the Hitchcock reference a little bit in some of the music that James Newton Howard composed for the film. And not particularly in the beginning and the very end, in terms of the big, operatic ballet pieces, but in the more thematic material that's in the body of the movie, you can hear that influence, the Bernard Herrmann influence to the music. This is, I would say, I think it's my sixth movie with James. He started working with me on I Am Legend, and we haven't stopped since, in terms of movies. So he did all the Hunger Games movies with me, and Water for Elephants. And I wanted to bring him on here. He had quite a job. I mean, there's a fair amount of music to it, but it was also just really a unique opportunity for music. If you just look at the opening and the end sequences, the music there is really tricky. We had basically choreographed those ballet pieces, to pieces of The Firebird. But we knew we were never gonna do The Firebird. We were not specifically doing The Firebird. It was just inspired by The Firebird. So we maintained a very specific beats per minute, but the idea was for him to create a solid piece of music for those first I don't know, 10 minutes of the movie, that were gonna carry us through, that were gonna work for the Dominika sections, that were gonna work for the Joel sections, that were gonna have some sort of tension. It's also gonna feel like a ballet, because I wanted it to feel like a dance, and then it was then gonna lead into a ballet that was gonna truly work for both, the dance and also for the pieces of Joel running. And then we sort of do something at the end, and I'll get into that at the end. But the idea that there's almost a mirrored, book-ended dance sequence when she sets her plan into motion at the end, a new kind of ballet score comes up and plays to the end of the movie.

1:04:15 · jump to transcript →

more than ever jaron blaschke is an authorial voice in this film so many of the sequences he really spearheaded what the cinematic language was and i'm very grateful and inspired by our ongoing collaboration

1:16:04 · jump to transcript →

SFX Maestro Christien Tinsley

I think Damien was also being slightly inspired by, you know, making those little adjustments because he could. It's an evolved character now. And here we are, Terrorfire 3, Art the Clown. You know, I'm sure some fan out there has put up pictures of Art the Clown from each movie and

1:17:10 · jump to transcript →

Nia DaCosta

I love... So, basically, it's like RuPaul's Drag Race, like, she does a wig reveal. So she takes off this wig and reveals another wig. Because Erin has, like, beautiful, long ginger hair. And her little short-hair wig is truly horrific. And she looked like a Cabbage Patch Kid. So I thought, "You take it off when you're far away from camera. "How about that?" And then we have Antichrist on the anti-cross. And, you know, he has a stigmata. He has, like, the Lance. This, you know, the Lance of whoever... I don't know. I haven't read the Bible in a while, guys. But it was nice. We're doing a clear nod, an homage to Jesus on the cross here. And then, similar to Samson in the beginning, like, his head covered by skulls, we see now Kelson with his head covered by... surrounded by skulls.

1:37:15 · jump to transcript →