Lighting

Gary Goddard

This is all part of our night shoots. We shot... I think we shot a total of about... I actually think we shot a total of like four and a half to five months, and probably half that was night shoots. And that was, again, for a very deliberate reason. When Ed Pressman came to me with this movie, the concept was, look, we have to do He-Man on a budget, so we want to bring him to Earth. I said, okay, well, if you bring him to Earth, you've got to shoot night, because at nighttime, we can create a look for the characters with lighting...

36:40 · jump to transcript →

Gary Goddard

that will keep them believable. But it's very difficult to have people like Tila and He-Man, Beastman, whatever, walking down Sunset Boulevard at high noon. But at nighttime, with the streets wet, with a little bit of mist in the air, a little bit of wind, it can be believable. So the decision was made early on that when we bring He-Man and the characters to Earth, we're going to do it at night. We're going to use lighting to...

37:09 · jump to transcript →

Gary Goddard

So we had to anchor off the camera again. Yeah, every one of those shots for Boss would always require at least two hours by the time you set up and by the time you do it. So back to the lighting issues. You'll see that when this door comes under attack that it's all nighttime. Soldiers played against night. Everything's played against night. We used lighting to, again, try and make the story seamless so that you're not sitting there going, you know, what...

38:08 · jump to transcript →

That says, good luck, by the way. That's Russian graffiti there. And Eddie can expound a little bit on the challenges of editing this. Yeah, this was, the coverage, the raw footage was extraordinarily good. And it's beautifully lit. It was quite an easy sequence to build an assembly of because there was just so many great options and great angles.

3:45 · jump to transcript →

And you had to. And we used every tiny, every single angle was in this. And it was hours and hours of it. This shot, we had 15 minutes at the end of the day. Look at that beautiful backlight there, the sunset. You just nailed it. It's a beautiful one-er again. It was dictated entirely by necessity. I had no time. And Tarzan is so good. Everything he's doing is so active in these scenes. He's phenomenal. Greg Tarzan Davis, who plays the character of Degau behind Briggs.

38:50 · jump to transcript →

We were just always there giving ourselves the options. I love this shot of Isai. So good. The light in this scene, all of this stuff. Again, another set designed by Gary Freeman. Yeah. And lit by... What's interesting is, watching this, you're not aware of the fact that that establishing shot of Gabriel walking in, or Isai walking in past Grace, was shot over a year before we shot this scene. Yes.

51:25 · jump to transcript →

to make it look more warm and passionate. So he came up with the idea of a color. He was suggesting using more of a red, orange, and green as a key color. That will make it totally different from the first one. The first one was a little cold and have a blue lighting, and even though the set is pretty dark, but I want this one a little more charm, more open.

22:03 · jump to transcript →

more warm and more passion. The thing I like about Tom Sanders, all of his designs just look so real. He like realistic. He like everything look real and also have a great passion feeling. He made model for every set so we could figure out about a camera angle and the atmosphere, the lighting and how everything work.

22:31 · jump to transcript →

What am I doing here? And I also want every scene in Spain, you know, they're all moving. So a lot of camera movement and special lighting to make every scene look pretty much like a dancing. No matter the party scene or the cartridge, the balcony scenes, every scene, whenever we see Spain, it's all moving. It's pretty much like ballet dancing.

23:01 · jump to transcript →

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

0:59 · jump to transcript →

You notice in these sequences, the camera is near the ground so the ceiling becomes more important than the floor and one is shooting up people's nostrils. This was an approach David Fincher wanted, which I think is terribly effective indeed and makes it more distinctive than the other three, rather, in my opinion. I tried to keep it fairly shadowy, so that it looks moody. Where I could, I brought the light from the top because it's unusual for the light to come from the floor, but one had to be careful about it obviously. The difficulty was getting light into the eyes SO we could see what the actors were thinking but not at the expense of the mood. I remember at Pinewood Studios when the sets were going up, Fincher would have us walk through the sets just looking at the scope of them. It was truly amazing to see these things go up. Norman Reynolds is a great production designer. He builds the world. It's very difficult to control him cos George would tell him on Star Wars "Don't build that. We're gonna paint it", and the next day - "It's too late. It's built." When they sent us over, we said "Why are we going to London?" They said "It's the sets, the set design, the artistry and the craftsmanship." And it really was very true. British actors is another good reason to go there. Somehow the British accent does a lot for these movies, I think. Vincent has had a deep, abiding interest in Luddite monks, and had done a great movie called The Navigator, where these monks dig their way through the earth, coming out into the 20th Century. It was a great movie. But, anyway, the original idea was that this was a wooden planet built by the Luddites and in the bottom of the planet, symbolically, the reactor was kind of hell. The technology that kept this thing going was emanating from the bowels of Lucifer. What drew me to the project first was that it wasn't a retread kind of sequel. It was a completely new idea, and some of it survived in the final script. David was entirely in control from the beginning. He put his stamp on it. He was the director and nobody ever questioned it. He was completely in control of the set and everybody hung on his words. He was definitely doing it. There was no weakness in it at alll. He was very, very confident in what he was doing and wouldn't be swayed. He had this vision and that was what he was going to do. He came under quite a lot of pressure from 20th Century Fox to hurry up or do it the quickest way or the most expedient way, but he wouldn't listen. He would do what he wanted to do, quite rightly, in my opinion. As I say, his compositions are marvelous and the use of the frame, and so on. David had been a cinematographer before he became a director, so he knew lighting. He knew what was good and what was bad. That's not to take away from David Worley, the operator. His contribution was enormous as well.

10:16 · jump to transcript →

The light coming from the top was a /K Zenon lamp, which gives you very straight beams, which I thought would be quite a good idea. I shot it up through a mirror because you can't tilt them down or the condenser burns. But we had a mirror above the set and I shined it from the floor onto the mirror. This autopsy scene was a favorite of Fincher's, too, because we had created a body of Newt that had multiple layers of tissue, skin and musculature that could be cut through, and the bones opened up. It's a lot of graphic coverage that's not in the final movie. The body of Newt was actually based on... Alec and I had done a life cast of Carrie Henn during Aliens, and while we were in London Bob Keen's shop actually had a casting of the head. We were able to get that and remold it, so we were able to duplicate what the actress had looked like some five or six years previously. There is intercutting here with the real girl as well. She has a lot of fuzz on her face. - Yeah. Backlit fuzz.

17:31 · jump to transcript →

the classic thing you need to do as a director when you can, which is don't let the actress watch while you're rigging all this stuff. And it was terrifying looking, for real. What really worked best here for me was that in terms of directing, everything was neutralized. The audience feels like, oh, this is calm. Yeah. Everything's fluorescent. There's no shadows. There's no contrast. So that's, for me, as a lighting cameraman, I want to make sure that that is there. But to get into this room and then

23:51 · jump to transcript →

And there is such a thing in nature, and they don't give a shit who you are. And you have to outwit them. How many days did you guys have to shoot this? Not a lot. Because I remember reading, wasn't this shot in January of 88, and it was released in August of 88? I couldn't tell you. It was January for sure. That's a pretty crazy turnaround. These guys are eating ice cubes to keep their breath from reading, and I couldn't backlight them. Oh, I remember this was a nightmare.

37:22 · jump to transcript →

that's insane like again I've seen this movie a million times and I feel like you can like especially now like you were saying before Chuck about like seeing a mat and you know maybe we were more forgiving back then than we are now with the technology that's there but how miniatures can still trick the eye and they're better for lighting a good miniature is amazing because it literally has depth even though it's smaller it's just scale and this was in a you know this was in a warehouse in Castaic

38:17 · jump to transcript →

before we were going to shoot, like the research we did in Russia, and then learning about nuclear physics and spending time with a gentleman from Massachusetts Institute of Technology who basically educated us on nuclear physics and working with that. There's a particular lighting effect from...

29:41 · jump to transcript →

glow that was effervescent in a way and wouldn't contaminate the actor's skin and can be lit from a top light UV source that doesn't actually light the actors. So you could still dramatically light the actors and stay true to the set and the available light that's in the set and get this magical hue that's coming off the flooded reactor compartment. And so through that process and trying to be economical, we found out that we could get powdered quinine. And so we

32:42 · jump to transcript →

where the conning tower itself was the most weight. And so then that presented problems for us because you don't want to compound the problem. So we couldn't bring lighting equipment in as close as we wanted it to, and we couldn't bring cranes. And we kind of had to counterbalance everything that you bring within a certain circumference of the conning tower itself.

51:46 · jump to transcript →

playing himself. They did a great job with the sets and the lighting. The cake is more and more like you every day. You know enough people have seen a movie when you can make fun of it and people know what they're talking about. Hammer and chisel. And when they knocked down this door, this is the day I was on edge because we had 300 scorpions and, I don't know, 200...

7:25 · jump to transcript →

Run away or head towards? Well, no matter what, I'm sure that Greg is really happy that you brought that up. This is the shot I was talking about earlier that, you know, there was clearly rain in the background. As these lights pan, you would see the rain being, you know, backlit by the light. I think you're looking at other things at this moment. Yeah, you are. You are, and I think it all works out. If you notice, there's no... You can't see anything in that pit back there on that shot. We still want to spend the money.

19:07 · jump to transcript →

Big shots like that, you don't think about, but not only do they have to be lit and we have to rehearse it and get everything ready, but then we have to light all those flambos and light all the torches and wet down the floor. And sometimes by the time you're done, the floor is dried up or the fires have gone out. It's a funny thing about torches. You see all these people use torches in movies and you think, well, they last forever. Those torches, any kind of torch like that, they'll stay lit maybe three or four minutes, max.

37:27 · jump to transcript →

I can see a few echoes of the lighting design in something like Inferno as well. Yes. The second of the Three Mothers films by Argento. Sure, sure, exactly. And, you know, we wanted a kind of future retro look. So it's film noir. It's a detective story. You know, a man, well, he's not a detective, but he's certainly investigating a disappearance.

13:13 · jump to transcript →

The look we wanted was a graphic novel style look to it, and hence the lighting, the gels, the colours. So we have Steven Berkoff here, who was riding high very much so at the time with, I think his play West had just come out, hadn't it, just before you started shooting this? Yeah, I think he just came off Beverly Hills Cop. He had indeed, yes. And he complained that he felt his acting was constrained and he was, you know...

14:02 · jump to transcript →

So the lighting's going to disappear around four o'clock. Yes, I think there's one shot where you can see that it's darkened slightly that was probably caught just at the end of the envelope that you had available. And I thought, how the hell is he going to, you know, read eight pages of dialogue or whatever it was and remember it? But bless him, look at him. Yeah.

15:21 · jump to transcript →

Simon West

I got the idea for this robot fight while I was staying in LA. I had jet lag, I was in a hotel room, I couldn't sleep, so I turned on the TV, and there was this infomercial for a boxing training device. This thing looked like a big plastic dummy of a man, and it had lights for its eyes and lights for its mouth, and when one of these lights lit up, you were supposed to punch or kick it in that spot. And when I was thinking up ideas for what Lara would do in her training, I thought, well, she's gonna have something a lot more advanced

1:06 · jump to transcript →

Simon West

This scene shows up particularly Peter Menzi's beautiful lighting. Everything in the film is just exquisitely shot. I'd worked with Peter before on my previous film, The General's Daughter, and I loved the look of that film, but I think in this film he really surpassed himself, and every single shot and every single scene is quite exquisite, and this is a very good example of it, with the light flooding in through the window on Lara at the desk. Spanish galleon?

9:34 · jump to transcript →

Simon West

careful and pernickety about how they were doing their research. Lara would wade in there with a hammer and just cut to the chase and get on with it and just smash the thing so she could get the information she needed. This clock was beautifully made by a real clockmaker and it really lit up inside and every piece worked on it and it was a beautiful piece of workmanship made of solid brass and we had two or three different versions of it that did different things and also we built a gigantic I think three or four foot across

17:23 · jump to transcript →

but somehow it seems to suit you. It's my home. But it is in need of some soft lighting, and I know a little restaurant quite close. I never mix business with pleasure. Well, neither do I. Good. Then we can start by saving the cute remarks until after you. Between You Only Live Twice and Diamonds Are Forever, Ken Adam served as production designer on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Goodbye Mr. Chips, and The Owl and the Pussycat. Here's Ken Adam. But what I always try to do is to do other films differently.

20:28 · jump to transcript →

kind of patio windows. They came from a big manufacturer before they really got into vogue. And we bought all these units which was built into the set. And the interior of the set, you know, is well lit. But we wanted this kind of rostrum where the actual diamond satellite was being erected in the center. And I remember we wanted like a scaffold that was something different.

57:55 · jump to transcript →

And he said, what do you want? And I had no idea at that time of what to use. I knew Vegas quite well. And I thought, let's say we want to shoot in downtown Vegas for four nights or five nights because there's all that free lighting, which is terrific. And we do a car chase. Let's do what you couldn't do it in Piccadilly Circus. Let's do what you can't do in Piccadilly Circus. Let's do it in Vegas.

1:03:11 · jump to transcript →

You know, the one thing that we really attempted in the photography of this film is we really tried to get motivated natural sources as much as possible. And even on a low-budget picture, we were always trying to work the lighting into how the film was made from the design point of view, even though the design was primitive in a lot of ways. And so fire came into a lot. You know, we tried to light a lot of the sequences, either with candles in that particular scene. We have a couple of scenes by firelight.

10:31 · jump to transcript →

you know, trying to make it like a creepy little storage room and kept it really dark. Here was our attempt at shooting using natural lighting again. We got the flame. We used like a little flickering effect, which is one guy walking along with the light sort of flickering it. It might have been a little obvious. I probably shouldn't have mentioned it. This was supposed to be a cat, but we didn't have a cat, so somebody, I think our...

33:00 · jump to transcript →

You know, we went to great lengths to actually rent this flashlight from a special effects house that had this really powerful beam. Because once again, trying to use the motivational lighting in the film. Have that lamp in the middle that's going to be an integral part of the fight sequence. Because he's going to turn the light on and it's going to be swinging around and give you some impressionistic lighting during the fight scene.

46:15 · jump to transcript →

Expressionistic, non-set set. I love the way Cortez lit this. It's like you're peeping through a keyhole at her. That's an uncredited lady named Gloria Paul. And this is the first of many sets which really is no set. It's just the chairs and the gentleman sitting there and the lighting.

4:01 · jump to transcript →

And it was beautiful, too, the way they were both facing in the same direction, you know, to show the inner divorce. Now, this is an interesting scene, I think, from a rear projection point of view, because originally a lot of this was shot with Emmett Lynn and then thrown away. Instead of going back to the lake again, this is done with rear projection, and it's extremely well lit by Stanley Cortez. You wouldn't really know it, I think, that it wasn't made on location. Absolutely right. You mind my cussing, boy? No.

31:10 · jump to transcript →

Now, this is a set that's not a set. It's just all background. The bed is in the foreground, but there are no other walls except the background wall, which, as you can see, is designed and lit sort of like a chapel for this human sacrifice. Answer me. It's a very ritualistic scene. And doesn't some of the scene remind you of Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, too? Absolutely. Expressionistic. Again, it's a silent, expressionistic influence.

38:34 · jump to transcript →

John Mackenzie

Next to nothing. In fact, only one engine worked, I think. As far as I remember, it slightly tilted to one side as it moved. Don't worry. But as a film set, it was okay. But all of this is the wonders of art direction. And lighting, of course. Right outside that window, you would now see Heron Dock. I bought this pub about two years ago, Charlie.

47:42 · jump to transcript →

John Mackenzie

and a lighting man's nightmare. You get reflections everywhere. We've got people sitting in front there, but that floor, believe me, is a mirror. And you've got to keep the light off it, otherwise you get the light coming in the wrong direction. Phil Mayhew, who was my lighting cameraman, did brilliantly. That sort of thing doesn't happen twice in one day. You should level with us.

57:02 · jump to transcript →

John Mackenzie

Victoria, unless you tell us what Harold's bad problems are and how he's dealing with them, I'm going to tell you what we're going to do. Tony and me, we're going to leave the table. We're going to check out of the Savoy. And as they were going to have us, so we put up with all the inconveniences and all the problems like the mirrors, reflective light and all that. And Phil actually lit it. You see, he couldn't hang lights or anything. He's lit almost this entire scene. You see these bulbs of light on the table? That's how he did it.

58:24 · jump to transcript →

Darius came to the set as it was being built, and Nigel would explain some of his intentions. Darius made suggestions and they created opportunities for lighting. They were like two siblings, plotting. It works well.

6:12 · jump to transcript →

I remember these signs - this is the psychological tests - and Jean-Pierre had something specific in mind, in terms of the primitive drawings of apples and pears and cows and cherries and things. He went through an amazing amount of artists trying to get primitive-looking drawings of fruits and little tidbits. It turned into such an assignment. He couldn't find anybody who could nail that style. Which had something to do with what he had seen as a Child - basic, primitive illustrations, which actually come back in his film Amélie. We get a sense of that naive, childlike graphic thing, which comes from a children's book, which, I think, is a really big deal in Jean-Pierre's imagery. I love Dan Hedaya. I love the Coen brothers' movies. You remember, he played in Blood Simple, the first movie of the Coen brothers. Interesting casting. I wondered if Jean-Pierre would have picked Dan Hedaya had Jean-Pierre grown up in America and seen Cheers. I love the lighting. You had a lot of lights coming up from the floor. Exactly. We used an optical process, and the folks were very nice with me because they made all the prints in the world with the process. And it was very expensive. And they made maybe 3000 prints with the process. The name of the process is ENR. It was invented by Storaro, the Italian DP.

8:49 · jump to transcript →

I love this shot because it's a simple effect. The ball is on the hand at the beginning of the shot, we do just a pan, and it works. I remember, Sigourney Weaver didn't believe me. She told me "Jean-Pierre, it doesn't work. It's so silly, so weird." I said "Believe me, I am sure." But I was pretty worried about this shot. And it works. There's a shot that you could claim, Pitof, as a digital shot, except it's real. When she throws that ball? It's amazing. This shot was supposed to be digital. What Jean-Pierre wanted is to make an impossible throw. Sigourney did it for real. This shot is real. Look at that. How many takes? I think it was six takes. - Six takes. Yeah. I was here when we shot that, and I feel in her eyes that something was weird. And she made it. Wow. - I had a little problem with Sigourney. The ball is going out of the frame and then back in the frame. I said "Sigourney, I'll fix that and I'll make a perfect path." So you feel the impression that the ball is always in the frame - like this ass - and... That's a silicone butt that we made. That's my favorite shot. I love this part of the film. And... Tell the story of this shot, Hervé. That's one of the famous Jean-Pierre Jeunet's favorite scenes, where somebody's putting polish on his shoes. When I got the rushes, I said to Jean-Pierre: "Well, you remember you did already that scene before." And you just didn't realize it. You didn't remember. The design of the wheels, something Eric Allard had developed way back, right after Short Circuit. Each wheel, instead of treads, they had ball bearings that would roll independently, so it could turn and maneuver. I think he had it patented, and I think NASA was using the design as well. This is a stupid idea. When you arrive in the States the first thing you see is the TV, because you don't sleep. And what do you see on TV? This kind of show. This miniature was not very big. This was pretty small - three meters diameter. That's nine feet to you non-metric folk. And this - you composited Aliens. Exactly. That's miniature and greenscreen. A very composite shot. Was a lot of passes to have the light and the texture and the depth and the atmosphere. For the alien, obviously, it's man in suit. It's very difficult to shoot an alien with a man inside, because it looks like a man inside. You are obliged to shoot very close. Here's Tom Woodruff. - Here's Tom. You were talking about being on the set. Here's the deal for me: being on set in these suits, it's even more claustrophobic than being on set, because I'm literally... I've got some slots for my eyes and breathing, but there's no real interaction between what I'm doing and anybody else on set, in terms of talking or just getting a break. I can interact with the actors and they can respond during the course of the action, but then, once the shot is over, it's like total isolation. But people love you when you're in the suit, Tom. Brad Dourif was great here. It was creepier for me on my side of the glass than it was for him being on his side watching me. I like Brad Dourif in this film. Yeah, he's twisted. Wonderfully imaginative actor. Brad and that creature were dating for a few months right after they completed this scene. I love what Darius did - the slime. He put a lot of care into shooting these and designing the lighting. He, at times, would almost build a cage of fluorescence around the alien, so that you'd get a million little kicks off of the slime. so that you'd get a million little kicks off of the slime. He kept coming back to us and asking for thicker slime, because the stuff in the other movies was too runny. He wanted a quarter-inch build-up, so we went to a slime that was almost like gel. It really had a different look. It was a pleasure to work with Winona Ryder. I remember, sometimes I tried to direct her, and she told me: "Jean-Pierre, take it easy." "I have a lot of imagination. I'm going to give you some improvisation." Remember, at the editing room, everything worked, all the time. In this scene, Winona was feigning drunkenness so she could slip out. Since she's a robot, she can't be drunk. This is a nice shot with the 10mm. It was a very short corridor and it looks so huge. This is a matte painting from a French guy, Jean-Marie Vives. He worked on Delicatessen and City of Lost Children, too. It's fascinating how there's a hint of City of Lost Children in the look of the sets. That's what I love about style, ultimately it just permeates everything that somebody does. That's a clever idea. That's gotta be Jean-Pierre. Very Jean-Pierre. It's great. This set is pretty high, and we used it again at the end of the film in the chapel. The same set but horizontal. - Really? Yeah. - I didn't know. When Jean-Pierre started the movie, he spoke little English - he always had an interpreter with him - and by the end spoke better English than me. Than I. - You see? That's what I'm talking about. It's amazing, because he didn't speak a word of English when he started. Sigourney Weaver loves to have the director very close to her. She hates when the director is very far away behind the video. It was a very good relationship, because, I remember, after a take she looked at me and it was unnecessary to speak. Just one look and we knew if the take was perfect or not. It was unnecessary to speak about the take - just a look. This is a scene that's almost vaguely erotic between Ripley and Call, the two females discovering each other inside of that tube.

27:46 · jump to transcript →

Everything else is ILM. Didn't they do a good job here? Thieves. City of the living. Crown jewel of Feral Seti I. This shot here is another ILM matte painting composite shot. And it was done, actually finished before that previous shot. So you can actually see some differences between the two and the lighting. No other man was allowed to touch her.

1:03 · jump to transcript →

Joe got run over by a camel. That wasn't supposed to happen. Would you do that for any amount of money? I mean, I'm sorry. They get thrown off a camel and get trampled by it. It doesn't seem right. Shooting inside this volcano was a little difficult just because of the lighting. We were always losing lighting, and it was just changing dramatically throughout the day. So, as you can see... White sky, blue sky. White sky, blue sky. Sort of like...

39:25 · jump to transcript →

Jaws. But in the desert. But in the desert. In fact, when we were shooting this scene, sequence, we shot one side and it was so beautiful. The lighting was just, the sun was just so perfect.

39:55 · jump to transcript →

Ted Tally

He's also, like Edward Norton, an actor who can accomplish incredible things with stiliness. He's hardly moving here. But his intensity is like a laser beam. If one were nude, say, it'd be better to have outdoor privacy for that sort of thing. You think the yards are a factor when he selects victims? Yes. And there will be more of them, of course. Victims. You'll be wanting lots of these little chinwags... I love that line. "lots of little chinwags, I take it." I need your opinion now. Then here's one, You stink of fear under that cheap lotion. You stink of fear, Will, but you're not a coward! That's a nice shot. Yeah, this is my editor's favorite shot in the movie. Mark said this was his favorite shot. And I held on it, which I was... You could've cut away from it, but it's very powertul. Edward was very good here. The lighting was great and it just worked. ...poor dullards.

35:24 · jump to transcript →

Ted Tally

This is my least favorite shot in the whole movie only because it felt like the camera was attached to his back. Maybe I should've scripted it so that there were more specific reactions to him there. No, there was. I shortened it, actually. I love the lighting in here because it's an infrared lab. It's supposed to be black, but how do we see if... It's supposed to be pitch dark. And Dante just... The highlights. Here was a moment that I was sort of proud of as a screenwriter. We've never got a really good look at Dolarhyde's face in this movie. We've seen him from behind, in the stocking mask, in the shadow. We've held him back like the shark in Jaws. We havent really seen the killer. And now, we're going to see him for the first time as a blind woman can't see him. That's the kind of effect that you love to make happen as a screenwriter. I'm very proud of the fact that we didn't know she was blind here until this moment, which is written so beautifully. It's held back. She's moving around like she's seeing. You don't notice it unless you know the Story. And then this little moment and then his reaction to it.

50:59 · jump to transcript →

Ted Tally

I've always tried to hang on to what that cougar looked like. But by now, to tell the truth... This was made-up stuff that was not in the book. But I knew that they were going to have that scene later with the tiger, the sedated tiger, and I wanted to set up some deeper meaning to that scene for her. So I added this little section. You don't say much, do you? There was actually a scene that was left out. That was his arrival, but Mark thought it was unnecessary and Nis... - When they first arrived and walked into the apartment for the first time here. One of the things that amazes me about Ralph is that he... The script so often gives him so little to work with. The character is painfully shy, he speaks in monosyllables. This was a scene that I used to test the actors. - I remember seeing the test at the auditions. This is the scene that helped me decide that the actors that we tested werent right for the role because they can get the Dolarhyde torturing Freddy Lounds scene, but to have a vulnerability here... But you still have to fear this guy. It's a tremendous feat of acting to accomplish as much as he does with so little to say. My biggest worry going into production was that we would not be able to find an actor who could do everything that this part needed. This is a part where the actor has to bring so much, and the script doesn't help him as much as it does other actors. This is really where you see his imperfection, which is his cleft lip, which Matthew Mungle, who is a brilliant make-up artist and effects make-up artist did such a realistic job of. I tend to do a Iot of tests for hair and make-up and the tattoo. We spend a Iot of time. When you work with Dino and Martha, do they want input into those kind of choices or is that left mostly to you? I love working with Dino. Not only is the guy a legendary producer, but it's great working with Dino and Martha together because... It's a whole other energy. - Each one has their own opinion of things. Right. They are a great producing team. -/ never work with a producing team. - They are very shrewd about script. You did a lot of work with Dino and Martha before I even came on board and you delivered a first draft, basically, that was shootable. - The first draft was green-lit by the studio and it had a lot to do with Dino and Martha's notes because they are very shrewd about what the audience needs to know, and when they need to know it. The sense of the rhythms of the story, and the rhythms of the acts, they have a really good grasp. This is my favorite section of the film. This is where the pace really... It seems like it really takes off here. This is Run from Run-D.W.C. who unfortunately, I cut out of the film, not completely, but... That was him. - That was the top of his head? That was a wonderful appearance. The story really takes off here. The pacing of this section, to me, is very exciting. The music and the editing. This is where I was telling Harvey, "Can you do it twice as fast?" Harvey tends to pause in the strangest places. But it always comes out very natural. He's a brilliant actor. You had always wanted to work with him? - Always, yeah. You had always wanted to work with Harvey. Ever since I was a kid, I was just... I grew up on him. ... possibly from the Tooth Fairy. This was a Dante shot. - It's a spin. "Let's go around him." I said, "I don't want to get dizzy." He said, "No, it's an urgent scene." It does create the urgency of what's going on here, that events were spinning out of control as suggested by that. Because of 9/11 we couldn't fly a helicopter through the Washington skyline. So that was one of our few CGI shots. It's really called a composite, because we shot a plate and then we took a shot of a real helicopter. This was done on the set. Ralph read this on the set. - Standing next to them? Not when we were doing the scene, but he just read it once and this was the take we ended up using. This is a one-take performance. He was just so in the mode. He reads this letter very well. I love all this sort of hi-tech, FBI forensic stuff, and it's something that we couldn't get a whole lot of into the script because of just sheer space considerations. So where we could do these kinds of things, it was really fun. I love that shot, and that shot... All the shots of Lecter in this... Brett, you love all your shots. - I know, not all of them, but those specific ones. I like all the lighting changes through this. This is Tony Hopkins' stand-in. This is the only... I wondered why he had a British accent. I wondered why the superintendent of a hospital in Baltimore had a British accent. He migrated. This is Ken Leung who's been in three of my other movies. On the right? He's a great stage actor from Broadway, and he was the villain in the first Rush Hour, and he was in Family Man. He's just a... He's very good with this part. - He's excellent. He's really very real. ...are transparent to infrared. These could be the tips of "T's" here... This whole sequence is quite close to the book. Tom Harris is very well-grounded in all of these procedures. It's just a real gift to the screenwriter to have an author have done so much research, and be so on top of these things. ...they made that up. Three "T's" and an "R" in "Tattler." How do you communicate through a tabloid? You got what? News stories. This scene was much longer really, but we realized in the playing of this scene that the audience... This is an example where the audience was ahead of everybody. We shortened it because the characters just seemed like they were... The audience already knows who Dolarhyde is at this point. We held him back for as long as we could, but once we've shown him, the audience is just getting ahead of you. - That's my favorite shot!

55:10 · jump to transcript →

One little thing I noticed... I mean, I didn't catch it when I was directing Jeff with this, is that when he plays Clu, he plays it with this strange computer accent, this mechanical accent. And now, when he's being tortured, he loses that, and I wonder whether he noticed it. We got so caught up in being in the scene that nobody realized that at the time. Clu's torture sequence is a great example of how light is used to create emotion. Lots of different filters were used on him as a part of that torture sequence. There are, basically, ripple glass effects, there's silk screen steel mesh, exposure changes, hand-done animation. When he's energized by the MCP, there are other filters that were used on the camera to give him that multiple-effect look. In this particular case, it was silk screen mesh, steel silk screen mesh that was on the taking camera and was spun around on the lens as a part of that effect. Dillinger's arrival to ENCOM in his personalized chopper was an interesting sequence. I took drawings of the chopper, schematic drawings, and created the design motif that you see on the chopper. And then over a two-day period, I applied these designs to the chopper myself with these varying sized, 3M reflective tapes. So, when we are shooting this sequence, what we are basically doing is flying air-to-air in another chopper parallel to this chopper. And we have a very low-intensity light source right near the lens of the camera, which is shooting across and reflecting directly back at the camera off of this 3M material. And it was a red light source, so it gives you the appearance that the chopper is either backlit or has some kind of neon lighting system on it. Again, there was the attempt to, for the outside, the window, to have the grid type of atmosphere and, kind of, cross-pollinize the electronic world with reality. Oh, I remember this stuff. Nice desktop computer built right into the glass. Touch screen. - Touch screen. I still want this desk. This was done with rear projection under the desk. The whole set had to be built up on the stage so that we could put a giant mirror under the set and project it in the old-fashioned way. There were technicians who were basically controlling light switches to different light boxes underneath this desk to light up different areas. The type itself, when it writes itself on, is actually matted into the scene from a computer graphics created type. And again, the view behind Dillinger is indistinguishable from the electronic world. And whose voice is the MCP? It's David Warner's voice. - Yeah. Yeah. It was just electronicized a little bit. End of line. Someone pointed out that they finally figured out that the reason that Bruce Boxleitner's character was wearing glasses is because he was supposed to be a little bit of a nerd. I think that was the intent. Just the readouts on the computers in the real world had to be pre-programmed ahead of time so that they wouldn't have rolling bars on them when we photographed them. Here you see another attempt to link the electronic world with the real world. The cubicles that the office workers are in are not dissimilar to the cubicles that the game players are in. And the intent was to have them go on forever or almost for infinity. Now, what thematically is happening is that at the time, computer people... Programmers were very concerned that the IBMs were going to take over the world of computers and exclude people. That they were going to be... That the system was going to be tyrannical. And what we're trying to show here is that the... Corporately, they've put a stranglehold on the system, and that the programmers are not being allowed the access that they want. And access for them is vital for their work. This character, Alan/Tron, is still inside the world of ENCOM and is more in balance. He seems... He's one of the people that's going to deal with the system from the inside. He's got a very methodical program in Tron, whereas Flynn is no... He's a renegade now. He just doesn't fit in and he's at war with the Dillinger character. The name Tron is derived from electron. Some programmers think it refers to "trace on, trace off." But that... We learned about that afterwards. There's a program in Japan called TRON, which is an educational school program, which has been running since 1985. And ENCOM was the only name we could find that wasn't already registered as a corporate name. Whereas Alan and Flynn are aligned with their counterpart programs, Dillinger has aligned himself with the tyrannical Master Control Program. So, the MCP is the ultimate controller, the big mainframe, the antithesis of the personal computer. The sequences that take place at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory were interesting in their concept and in production. It was a very complex place to work. It was a very tight area, and we worked on this film with 65-millimeter equipment. And Bruce Logan, the DP, had his hands full. Sixty-five-millimeter film technology is quite cumbersome compared to Panaflexes and Panavision cameras. The size of the camera body itself, the limitations of the lenses, blimping the cameras... They're huge, so to get them in these cramped quarters was difficult. We were the only ones... Only film company ever allowed access to shoot in there. And nobody's been back since. A lot of this was lit, practically, by the fluorescents that are in there. It almost looks like a set. Yeah. We were very lucky that Lawrence Livermore let us use this facility. Because the cost of building a set this elaborate would have been astronomical. The Lawrence Livermore Lab is where they had the largest laser in the world. I don't know if it still does today. And they did a lot of research for NASA. Lawrence Livermore Lab was very cooperative with us, and allowed us to, really, kind of, run free through this particular area of the laboratory, which was their linear accelerator. So, we went into the one particular area, which we found most interesting for the area where Flynn gets de-rezzed, and where you first see the matter transportation effect, where the orange is digitized and deteriorated and then reassembled. In this particular case, we are seeing an orange, which was created by CGI by Triple-l. Animation that was done by the effects animation department, which was headed up by Lee Dyer and the effects animators, John Van Vliet, and John Norton, Barry Cook and Michael Wolf, Chris Casady. The name of that laser, by the way, Is Shiva, the Hindu goddess of creation and destruction. The 16 billion-year life cycle, she's got the drum of creation in one hand and the fire of destruction in the other. ...femain suspended in the laser beam. Then, when the computer plays out the model, the molecules fall back into place and voila! So simple. Why didn't I think of that? - That's right. Use that on Star Trek all the time. It's funny how they just kind of, just blow it off. Another afternoon's work down in the lab. Exactly. - Teletransportation, okay. Just digitized matter, no problem. Tomorrow we'll do watermelons. In a week, a human being. No, that comes sooner than that. A-ha! Oh, you're giving it away now.

7:08 · jump to transcript →

We just passed a Cray computer, that large, refrigerator-like computer. That was, at the time, the most powerful computer in the world. This Is... - Was this set at Triple-/? Where is this? No, this was picked up at... Wasn't this picked up at Lawrence Livermore? Yes, I think this is right, this is Lawrence Livermore. And again this is another kind of discovery. As we were getting the tour, you said, "Well, we could use this for their transition." This is a Set. So, af this point we've got two hackers, one, in essence, illegal, and the other one legal, both trying to correct the system, get on the network, what we now call the Internet. Bruce Logan, the cinematographer on the film, and Peter Anderson, the cinematographer on the second unit, did a miraculous job of lighting up the set with a lot of light, but taking all the light off of the desk so that you could see the rear projection come up through it. It's pretty clever.

26:45 · jump to transcript →

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 →

the lighting effect is yes yeah yeah and all the time we're getting themes from the new world symphony i think they made some remarks and they weren't very good so we cut them out now this is grady's place where he his little business security business i think

10:09 · jump to transcript →

How many times did you have to recut the film to get it down to an hour? Like about five or six times? Yeah, and then it was taken away finally and cut by the projectionist and the company lawyer, as far as I remember. It looked like it, too. So this is the original? This is the original. This is your cut. Gosh, that lighting is good. I'd forgotten how good it was.

14:16 · jump to transcript →

So he used that dummy as kind of a poetic imagery. We're going back to the lighting, to the visual look of the film, what Ken was going for in contrasting this garish neon underworld of China Blue and Shane, contrasted with this very kind of bright naturalistic suburbia that we see in the home of

1:03:50 · jump to transcript →

I had such a hassle with Harry Dean because I wanted him to jump out and get his feet wet. And we had all kind of extra shoes and socks prepared for him, but he would never put his feet in the water. Of course you don't know. You know, I eventually ended up laying in that river as a lighting stand-in on a science fiction shortly after this film was done. And it was basically I was instructed by Del, if you want to be an actor, you have to do everything. That includes lighting, stand-in, whatever you have to do.

23:40 · jump to transcript →

Sandbag, whatever it takes. So I was a lighting stand-in on a science fiction, and in that last scene where I show up on the gurney, that was an actual infection that I got in my eye. As a result of lying in the L.A. River. Yeah, and all the malathion that they were spraying all over the place. Hey, but you earned your dues.

24:09 · jump to transcript →

You did get a graduate degree in Repo Man, didn't you, Zane? Here's the scene you were talking about. Yeah. And the reverse. Oh, that right there. That's beautiful. And that's what I call a split diopter on the lens. So it's got two focal points. It's got one on Cy and one on Harry Dean. It's vertical, right? But you'll see his hand will go out of focus. Look at the lighting on Cy and the lighting on Harry Dean. Yeah. Very, very good. Cy, did you ever think about getting a roach clip? No.

39:16 · jump to transcript →

Peter Hyams

Actors are using flashlights in a movie. They're using flashlights for the same reason we use flashlights, which is they can't see, except with the flashlights illuminating. So this scene was basically lit with flashlights and some sneakily hidden bounce cards. Well.

25:23 · jump to transcript →

Peter Hyams

Beautiful mystery to them. I love churches. I love the architecture of churches. I love the way light plays on churches. I'm always astounded as to how badly churches light themselves. So we had to completely change the way this church was lit. Lovely church. Just harshly and flatly lit. And again, I think that architecturally a church is so dramatic that it was...

35:26 · jump to transcript →

Peter Hyams

You snooped through her stuff without asking to? When I was looking for something. What are you looking for? A connection. I spent a lot of time on the color of these walls because I was going to put, obviously, skin tones against them. And I wanted them to be warm and complement the skin tones. Well, not really. It's mostly just kind of like a hobby with her. You're always trying to make things look like they're lit.

52:58 · jump to transcript →

all these cobblestones are. And the other thing to remember is the phenomenal lighting by Rob Hardy and Martin Smith, our Gaffer Martin Smith cinematographer, Rob Hardy. The choice of this sort of greenish light on one end. White there. Yes, well, it's tungsten. He's got a tungsten color that he really likes that's given this entire movie this feel, this almost...

8:29 · jump to transcript →

We're actually going to jump out of the plane, aren't we? We have to do all of this for real. For real, while you're falling. While I'm falling, we're going to have to get and switch the tanks. Yes. This is the Grand Palais in Paris, France, which was kind enough to let us shoot there. Beautiful. DJ Harvey. Great, great choice. Thank you. Thank you. Look at this lighting. Awesome. Now, Peter Wenham, our production designer, was really amazing. We only had a limited amount of time in the Grand Palais, and so I said to Peter, I want you to build a set.

27:22 · jump to transcript →

Yes, and remember, I didn't like the suit at the beginning. And then you're like, we went the day before. I said, keep it. Keep tailoring the suit. I was like, Jeffrey, thank you very much. Jeffrey Curlin, our costume designer. Fantastic, fantastic guy. And then look at that. Thank you, Jeffrey. It all looks like design. Yes. And it's actually the movie gods smiling on us, right down to Rebecca's eyes, your eyes. Look at that, the lighting. Yeah. And by the way, some of that is natural light.

1:13:59 · jump to transcript →

One of the things that seems to me so interesting is that it really, it begins much more like, almost like an experimental film. Yeah. It doesn't look like a Hollywood film at all. It seems much more like, and it doesn't seem like an American film, really. Well, to me, I think it does, it is redolent of RKO's particular kind of gothicism, the lighting and the production values at RKO. But it's a fantasy, it's a dream.

1:56 · jump to transcript →

And it's like Joseph K. in the trial coming before the courts of law. There's this strongly expressionist lighting similar to the stuff we saw in the projection room as we get into this room. And it's all about money being transformed into some kind of spirituality and myth. It's like you're bringing forth the holy tables to be observed here.

17:53 · jump to transcript →

Mr. Thompson, you will be required to leave this room at 4.30 probably. You will confine yourself, it is our understanding, to the chapters in Mr. Thatcher's manuscript. That lighting, by the way, was similar to Wells' stage lighting, and it's meant to be a kind of allusion to the Nuremberg Lights. Exactly, yeah. This is like from his Julius Caesar, right? Yes, yeah. And so it's about fascism. But you know, that's the funny thing about this film, and again, why it has the status it partly has, is it's all...

18:23 · jump to transcript →

You know, it has that sort of work a day, you know, fluorescent lighting, you know, office chairs and desks that have probably been there for decades. You know, the New York City subway system has been around for a long, long time. This tunnel, by the way, is again in and around the Court Street Station. And as you said before, Nathaniel, there's a New York City Transit Museum. And this was the station's

13:52 · jump to transcript →

And as I said, of course, the Godfather. But Owen Roisman has said that when he went to that set, he didn't have to light it. They would turn the lights on and they had these fluorescent lights and they really did little or no lighting. They would use like a white bounce card occasionally, but the fluorescents were probably, you know, brighter than normal fluorescent lights, but he didn't have to light this. And, you know, one of the things about this movie is

25:04 · jump to transcript →

It's lit mostly from practicals. Now, when they're in the subway tunnels, you will see these little lights periodically going away from camera. And those are real subway tunnel lights. But what Roisman did, which was really kind of ingenious, at least I thought so, was he put in...

25:33 · jump to transcript →

the chairs and all the devices were custom made for the film. And often they tend to reuse things. And in this film, we were able to create original, a very original look. And I wanted it to be very monochrome. I hired Alex Thompson, whose work I really liked from David Fincher's Alien. And he was just marvelous to work with. And the lighting and the camera was fantastic.

17:24 · jump to transcript →

Everything was built. I don't think there were any locations on that film. They didn't love you as much as Tim at that point. Yeah. So when you have to use locations, it gets very complicated to maintain the tone and maintain the feeling of being in this future. Yeah. I remember the first time I met David Snyder, he goes, every inch of the movie is future. So nothing is left to chance. And a lot of that is the color palette and the lighting. Yeah.

56:37 · jump to transcript →

Getting out of a manhole. See, again, the art direction here, all that I had at my disposal here, these backlights, these fluorescent lighting units, and you can see how using these all over the city in every location really tied it together. And here we go with war. Yeah, that's great. No explanation given. Show the elevator, show the car. We don't need to know how it actually all worked, but it's good.

1:30:40 · jump to transcript →