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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

One little anecdote here is that the cameraman that was up on the platform shooting this, the viewfinder of his camera was broken, the pellicle mirror had shattered, and he couldn't see anything through the camera and he just aimed and shot. He didn't want to slow down the production by telling anyone that he couldn't see anything, and held his breath all the way till dailies, and the shot worked out. Oh, that's right. 'Cause there weren't very many 65-millimeter cameras available, and all this was shot in 65 millimeter. Yeah. When we opened these cameras, they still had the sand of Lawrence of Arabia in them. Well, Flynn's arcade was in Culver City. Yeah, it's across the street from the old MGM lot, which is now the Columbia lot, but now renamed as Sony Pictures. Now, there was actually a loft at the location. But then the re-shoot... The close-ups were the re-shoots on a stage. Yeah. That's the... The actual... The practical location. Space Paranoids. Space Paranoids. I take my son to the arcade in Westwood. We go once in a while. I have to bring my earplugs. But I've never seen an old couple like that in a video game arcade. That's right. We knew that Bally was going to release a video game simultaneous to the release of the picture, and therefore we wanted to have the design of the game in the arcade and the game in the real world that people would actually play be very similar. So, we go to Flynn's, and we see Flynn playing the electronic game and fighting off a Recognizer. That is the console which we created for the film that represented the game that Bally was going to create. Although, obviously, at that time, there was no way that a computer game could have real-time, interactive, full raster graphic imagery. So, it was a prediction of the future of the way games were going to evolve, and that is what we're now seeing in CD-ROM games and the games that are in home computers and arcades today. Jeff did get very good at video games. We had some on the set. Yeah, he was remarkable, and one day you suggested that we videotape him while he was actually doing it. And look at the neon in the back. I'd forgotten about that. OA, right. I don't think any of the actors actually went so far as to get themselves a computer and spend hours backstage... Programming. -... learning how to program and... That didn't happen, but they got as far as games. Battle Tank. We used to play a lot of Battle Tank. Battlezone. Yeah. Battlezone. There you go. Now, as! recall, you... We re-shot this sequence. Yeah, and I don't even remember... The lighting... To match, I think, the lighting of the game arcade. Well, I think, actually... - We changed dialogue. Did we? - Changed dialogue. And here's a little secret. We told the studio that we needed to redo it to match the lighting. Well, see, /... Still using the same excuse. That's right, you're still... You're still well-programmed... - /'// never tell. The lighting didn't match. The casting process was interesting. Originally, I'd pictured Jeff's character being younger and the Tron character being older. We were affected by some things that were definitely outside of our control. Tron predates Splash, and people forget that, really, Disney was having a hell of a time getting popular actors to work for the studio. And it had been a tough time for Disney. And it didn't help that we were saying, "Yeah, we want you to wear these funny costumes." And Jeff was always enthusiastic about being part of the picture. The Tron character... Bruce was... I don't think Bruce was quite as adventuresome at first, although he got into it after a while. I would have liked to have seen Bruce possibly be a little, I think... I had pictured him as sort of a younger Kirk Douglas. I think he would have been better if he had been a little older like he is now. I like the way he looks now. And I think Jeff... I was surprised at how physical Jeff was. I thought that... I pictured Flynn being a little more geekish or a pencil neck, and Jeff is very physically strong. So, in that sense, the two became somewhat similar, although their personalities and what they represent are completely different. One little anecdote is that... I can't point back at the character of Tron and say, "There were all these actors." Or, "It was between this one and that one." But I do remember one surprising actor who really wanted to play this part, and it was Peter O'Toole. - Yes. Oh, he wanted to play the part of Dillinger. No, it was Tron. Tron, that's right. I think we wanted him for Dillinger and he said, "No." And I had this amazing scene with him in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel where... In his hotel room where he said, "I can do this!" And he started leaping from one piece of furniture to the other and screaming that, "I want Tron on my tombstone right next to Lawrence of Arabia!" And who knows, maybe he would have been great, maybe I really missed it right there. All these interiors... Shooting them, these low-light interiors, in 65 millimeter is very difficult, because the depth of field, the focus plane is incredibly short, and it was a real struggle. And some of the close-ups, we actually had to run light stands up the backs of the actors through their jackets as braces, so that they would stay in the exact same spot, so that we could keep their eyes and faces in focus. You know, if your file was in there... - Hey, wait a minute. If we can get in there, I can forge us a Group 6 access. Well, shall we dance? And ENCOM was shot in downtown Los Angeles. I forget the building. Of, the Transam building? Oh, yeah, the Transamerica building. At the top of that was the helicopter pad. This sequence between these two heads of the company really expresses the philosophical problems that the other characters are going through. Again, the office is designed to mirror the other world in terms of its graphic look. Wasn't there something about the cold, corporate look as well, Steven? There's your door. - There's the door. The scene where they sneak into ENCOM and open the door that is 10 feet thick or 12 feet thick, that's a real door, that's not a prop movie door. That's an actual radiation door at Lawrence Livermore. ENCOM isn't the business you started in your garage anymore. In one scene, you see a number of things flip up into four corners. Images. That was a traditional optical that had to be done, and opticals in those days would take two, three, four, five weeks at least, and it was a big task. It was like making its own little movie. You know, you can remove men like Alan and me from the system, but we helped create it, and our spirit remains in every program we designed... That line is one of the key lines in the whole script, about the human element that the programmers put into the system. And it's this discussion between those two characters that really elevates the picture well beyond a video game movie. Now, the reverse was shot, actually, on the Iot, so there's a reverse... Getting into the Disney vaults? Yeah. Lawrence Livermore was quite proud of the fact that although this door weighed tens of tons, or whatever it was, it was so well hinged that you could open it by just pushing it. One person could. In fact, you found... I believe you saw that door as we were taking a tour of the facility and you Said, "This would be a great place for them to sneak in." So, you kind of re-wrote the scene to accommodate that huge door. And the irony is, as he punches the buttons, that the giant door opens, and no strength is exerted, but it's opened automatically. I kind of inherited the job of not only setting up the giant rear projector and the mirror and all that stuff, but I also had the job of putting together what would end up going onto the desk. That's an actual wireframe on there, for the carrier, as you See... Right. - ...in the film. I began searching around for footage to go onto the desk, and it was getting late, and we were about to shoot this thing in a couple of days, and I just ran out of stuff, so I put the flowchart from the film on there, and probably things out of my address book and anything I could... I was down to pulling things out of Life magazine and re-photographing those. I was just running out of stuff to put on the desk. What's interesting about this protagonist, Jeff Bridges' character, is that he's actually, um... He's a creative, technical type, and he's fighting for his creations, he's fighting for his work. I think that's pretty unique. He is somewhat of a paranoid character. But with some reason. With some... Yeah. - Some good reason. Dillinger will never know we've been in here. Good luck, hot shot.

16:15 · 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 →

Oliver Stone

because the nights don't last that long we had rain mosquitoes real mosquitoes and bob richardson my dp and i was our first big film together and bob was struggling with you know lighting nights in the jungle it's not easy with very limited equipment we went with the idea of at least in the day times of a hard to see look in the jungle nothing is

27:01 · jump to transcript →

Oliver Stone

Chris continues writing. Home. But he stops writing here, he says. This is rain against sun. This is tough. We were scheduled for rain, too much sun, but we lit it anyway. I mean, the sun pops the rain out, so we went with it. It's a strange look, but it did happen in Vietnam. We would occasionally have rain and sun.

1:03:16 · jump to transcript →

Oliver Stone

Towards the end of the schedule, we're running out of time. Shit. In struggling to deal with how do we light this huge battle at night with a limited amount of time and money, we didn't have the money for the lighting, certainly,

1:37:15 · 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 →

Barry Levinson

I thought John Seale did a terrific job in the lighting of this. It's sort of a very handsome kind of look to the film. We talked about it. We didn't want it to be overly pretty or in some ways to make it look much a little harder than that. So it was kind of finding a middle ground where you might say it's sort of what I refer to just as a kind of a handsome photography.

40:56 · jump to transcript →

Barry Levinson

but it was fairly loose. We let the camera people know basically where we were going to be, and we let the actors work very freely within that. I thought John Seale did a terrific job because it's all basically lit from the various vehicles and the flares. We didn't do any big lighting overhead. It is supported by all of the headlights. You want to get off the highway, Zach? Would that make you happy? Yeah. Yeah, well, you've got to

49:23 · jump to transcript →

Barry Levinson

Yeah. Again, I think John Seale's lighting of this was very good. Very simple. Handsome kind of look. Has some nice depth to it. Yeah, you go right where you like it. 18 and a bit.

1:16:25 · jump to transcript →

There's the reveal of Ricardo's very clever lighting trick that we did. And you actually didn't notice that till the premiere. No, I had no idea Bob Stevens handled the whole thing. See, wet paint. A lesser talent would have been tempted to cut to the sign. But you, secure in your art. Here's the old pie in the face. See, that's a classic gag.

6:50 · jump to transcript →

We shot, that was the least, that was most under the top one. That's why we used that one. Oh really, he made bigger facial reactions? Oh yeah, he was much bigger. As big as all outdoors. Because you wanted him to, or? Now here's the one, this is the scene that Bobby Stevens lit, and it actually looks like an interior. Yeah, this is a location that we made look like a stage. Which takes a lot of doing, by the way. We were out there freezing, and it took us off, and it looks completely fake. How long did it take him to light that so it could look fake? A couple weeks.

51:51 · jump to transcript →

We had a big canasta game while he was... It does look like a set. It looks like a set. It looks like from Batman 3 or something. Big expense. How many trucks did we take out there? We were lighting for a... Now, did you know that immediately when you saw dailies? Location directors, yeah. This is the one where the guy cut down the tree.

52:20 · jump to transcript →

stuffed animals. It just shows you how beautiful a boiler room can be. I mean, just the shadows it creates. I mean, I haven't seen this in a while. Well, again, it's beautifully shot, too. It's just the lighting shot that you did.

1:17:21 · jump to transcript →

Tony getting hit over the head again. Was that you, John? Did you actually put that? I think that was you doing that. Geez, I don't remember. This is a great gag. We used an arc welder instead of a lighting effect. It's just a great look to it. And locked off that shot for the bed. For the healing.

1:24:48 · jump to transcript →

Jim Piddock

And now what's this? Some very elaborate lighting effects, once again, from moving lights simulating headlights. And here we have the sex scene, I'm afraid. But these are the realities of the motion picture business, you know. I really must have the sex scene. Leave your Aunt Mabel at home, by all means. And here we are, the proverbial morning after. The coitus finito, or what you will. And he's...

5:02 · jump to transcript →

Jim Piddock

This character was introduced lighting himself a hand-rolled cigarette with an engraved cigarette lighter, and he puts the lighter down on the desktop in a close insert. Well, I'd urge you to go back and examine that insert carefully, because, you see, it's not the actor's hand depositing it on the desktop. It's someone else's hand. For that insert was shot well after the movie was finished, after the studio preview. That insert showing a cigarette lighter engraved Lauren, presumably the character's name.

31:15 · jump to transcript →

Stan Winston

I'm Stan Winston. I created the creature effects and the alien effects for A/ens. I remember Jim trying to figure out how he could make the beginning of this movie impressive. He said he wanted to use a robotic laser. It was an afterthought and it wasn't in the budget and I remember having the gall to say to him "If you wanna use it, you have to pay for it." And he did. - Is that right? This robotic arm and the laser came out of his pocket. I wanted a seamless blend from the end of the first film into the beginning of the second film. I certainly wanted to honor all the things that were good about the first film. So I went to school on Ridley's style of photography, which was quite different from mine, cos he used a lot of long lenses, much more so than I was used to working with. But the smoke, the backlight, the textures, the way he forces the frame by putting a lot of equipment, machinery and foreground pieces, I really studied all that. I wanted there to be a stylistic continuity. I also wanted to have my own style grafted onto that so that I felt enough of a sense of authorship to make it worth doing.

2:51 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

Bill, isn't there dialogue that you have on this that people have used in video games? Yeah, I think so. "Game over, man" and things like that. You get anything for that? - I don't think so. I'm not even getting anything to sit here and do this commentary. They expect us to do it for no money. You got a beer out of it, though. No, it's just fun. I got a beer out of it, so that's cool. This was an amazing set, this concourse A. And it was long. And later on when all hell's breaking loose, Jim had that little video camera. He had everybody on the crew having coffee while we would run at him and do different things. It was SO amazing to see this gigantic set, one of the biggest sets I'd ever seen, and there's Jim by himself with this little camera. When did the bust-out almost happen? He was gonna move the movie. When did that happen? I remember there were some problems. There were some union problems. The crew weren't used to working the same way. With Jim. They weren't used to working. That's unfair. They were craftsmen, but they had an indentured way of doing everything. Jim needs something, he just grabs it. If he needs a light moved, he'll grab it himself. We punched a hole through somewhere cos he needed to run a line. He didn't wanna wait around. He just said "Give me a hammer." But this was an ambitious schedule. Jim was running from stage to stage. I think we had about three big sound stages with giant sets. And then there were two sound stages with miniatures. And then there was a stage with all those tunnels. I remember them putting you in that damn tunnel. That pipe. We had gone to the power station to shoot the atmosphere-processor scenes and come back to the set after it had been wrecked. So we're into Adrian Biddle's photography here. He was the second DP. I encouraged Adrian, to save time, to use as much built-in lighting as possible. This is lit by the fluorescents in the set, with just a little additional lighting. Adrian liked to work on a raw and edgy look and work with the practical lights a lot more. This is another thing that is important. With a lot of science fiction movies that are all interior, you often lose track geographically of where you are and it becomes incredibly confusing and it's hard to build the tension and the suspense. Jim was aware of this from the script stage and made sure that we established through the helmet cams, through the motion trackers, where they are, and then ultimately, later on, where the aliens are. Even in this version, you're left to fill in what happened. We don't see the baittle. We'll see plenty of battles later and this is promising you that. We have a shot coming up here where there were acid holes - acid... holes... eaten into the floor by these so far unseen aliens. And, of course, these sets were not double-deck sets. Jim wanted a scene where a character looks down through one of these holes. I think Bill spits down into it to give some perspective. So this down-view we shot on our miniature stage. We layered the set and photographed that. This is where you spit and they did it in miniature. They even did a miniature spit. - Is that what that is? To get that spitting effect, it was actually not spit. It didn't work very well, so it was a combination of milk... Milk and water in an eyedropper right underneath the lens. The complaint from the studio was that the film went on too long without anything really happening. I was winding the suspense tighter before you actually saw anything. The studio said we were just jerking around. Too many movies that I see now, it's all upfront. You start seeing stuff right away and there's no sense of a build. So this is the miniature APC that was built by Bob and Denny Skotak. Pretty good size. I remember it being five or six feet long. Most people don't twig that as a miniature. That's the real APC pulling in. They matched the lighting pretty nicely. I think Jim did some of his live-action stuff undercranked. He ran the camera slightly slower on the APC so that it felt slightly more as if it were a miniature but you knew it was real because you could see people interacting with it. So if any of the miniature stuff didn't quite work for whatever reason, it took the curse off that cos it felt that the two were blended together. I think he wound up undercranking because the APC, the full-size one, didn't move as fast as he wanted it. I think it could only go eight or ten miles an hour. One difficult thing about making this movie was 7erminator wasn't out in England and the perception of Jim Cameron, who looked about 20 when he directed this movie, and myself as the directing-producing team was met with a great deal of resistance because back then the system in England was that you had to put in years and years to rise up to the level of being a producer or a director. And we were simply not treated with a great deal of respect and it was very hard every day of the shoot. We were being second-guessed and every decision we made was questioned and the tremendous thing, of course, having Stan on the film was that... I was old. - No. ...was that you were a cheerleader for both of us. By demonstrating the respect and enthusiasm that you did, I think other people gradually relented. I knew it was the best thing for me and for everybody on that set. There are people that you know, no matter how they do it, what they're doing is special. This particular directing-producing team had been a win for me in my career and stayed that way. I never thought our facehuggers looked as good as the one in A/en. We had to make lots of 'em and they had to run around and do things, but, texturally, the one in the first film looked great. It really held up. The bits of oysters and stuff inside it looked great. But I did wanna see the disgusting thing that had been down the inside of Kane's throat in the first film. You never see it in the movie, in A/en, so I figured we'd gross everybody out. All of Giger's designs have a real sexual undercurrent to them. And that's what horrified people about the alien as much as anything, is it worked on a kind of Freudian subconscious level. And Ridley and Giger knew that and they went for that. This film was never intended to be as much of a horror film as the first one. It was working on a different thematic level but I still wanted to be true to some of those ideas, some of those design concepts. It would be natural to assume I'd wanna work with Giger, but it just didn't occur to me at the time. Maybe it was because we really only needed to design one new creature and I had already designed her by the time I wrote the script. The alien queen. I guess maybe it was my own ego as an artist. I just felt like he'd made his stamp and I knew from what I'd read that he had to do everything his way and I had a very specific idea for the alien queen to extrapolate beyond what had been done before. I got the impression from what I read that I wasn't gonna get the dynamic character that I wanted. In a funny way, part of what attracted me to doing this film was the opportunity to do cool design stuff. So maybe I was just a little bit too in love with the idea of designing the creatures and the weapons and doing all that stuff.

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Eleanor Bergstein

And this was all that stuff done very, very late at night one night with just us and the camera and very little lighting just to kind of pick up some more stuff and the actors were exhausted. And Jennifer always used to giggle by the way. It used to tickle her and annoy everybody else in the dance rehearsal room because some of the

38:20 · jump to transcript →

Eleanor Bergstein

pushed in in the last few days, but I think is very, very important because, again, it is a sign of what's happening with them. Now, the scene coming up, actually, when they get to the hotel, I call Doro's scene because Doro Bachrach, while we were doing some dancing in a cabin, lit this so that we would have it. And this was an education for me as a filmmaker because I didn't understand why it was so important. I really wanted to spend some more time with the dancing to make sure that we got it right. And she said, we don't have enough ratio of inside to outside. And it wasn't

49:29 · jump to transcript →

Just feels like she's not acting. The door, by the way, I love that door, and that design was done by Linda Spheeris who was the set decorator. So here we have the first family scene... Which, by the way, Jan Kiesser, I feel when I look at it now after all these years and see the kind of lighting he did, but as you go... As you look at Some Kind of Wonderful, you can see the kind of camera moves and lighting that I think sets it apart from the usual teen genre movie that someone like Jan Kiesser shot. But I think John Hughes, in having this scene coming off the opening montage, it's a pretty interesting counterpoint where you've seen him out in the world and seen a montage of what he's dealing with and then you go back to this kind of typical family conflict. It kind of is an interesting dichotomy so early in the movie to me, having a look at it now after all this time. Anyway, John Ashton, who we meet here, who, I think, managed to pull off a great performance as Keith's dad, and the conflict and tension that a lot of sons have with their fathers is set up right here.

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This is funny. You can see the colors... Jan Kiesser... Just the way, how rich they are in this... Of that car. I mean, the way he lit this is amazing. That's a great shot. - Looks like a Fellini movie. That's a great shot. It's interesting you got away with her smoking cigarettes. It's hard to get away with that anymore.

38:55 · jump to transcript →

terminate with extreme prejudice in Apocalypse Now. He's also an actor. I'm like, please let me have him. This is a great scene. I remember I was watching that off camera when it was being shot. Wow. John Mahoney cowering in the bathtub. And we were just watching, and it's one of those things where they're sitting there and lighting and setting up. Got an Omni magazine there in the trash. I know, we all watched scenes. I remember watching him prepare.

1:15:29 · jump to transcript →

That's a great next scene to go to. I was completely hungover that day. Because we're both fighting. You were hungover? Absolutely. If you would have lit a match around me, I would have exploded. Who's that? I went out with Piven and... Ah, yes. Gerald. Nick Carlson. Good actor. Wanted to work with him. Said he'd do that part. Mm-hmm. Lloyd, I'm sorry.

1:24:40 · jump to transcript →

Paul Davis

the book and the documentary, I found out that it was actually minus, it was recorded as minus 11 degrees on the 28th of February in London, where they filmed that night. So it was cold. And those poor guys, they were the only two that had to get wet under those, under the rain trees. And the scene was lit by the DP Bob Paynter,

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Peter Greenaway

and always puts the full figure into a frame, a quite elaborate interior frame here, which is very carefully lit with lots of references to European 17th-century painting, there is, I suppose, the disadvantage that the opportunity for psychological involvement by looking at characters' faces, by watching how the details of their glance or the use of the eye

1:16:40 · jump to transcript →

Photographing this helicopter at night was a serious challenge. Because the normal way that they had done it... ...was to have another helicopter fly along... ...and spread light all over the chopper. But it looked just terrible, you know. It looked all lit up and phoney. And Alonzo came up with the idea-- He said: "I'm gonna make this helicopter light itself." I said, "What did you mean?" And he said, "I'm gonna put lights all over it that are hidden... ...and wherever it goes, it will have light on it." So he and his electricians built lights that are... ...hidden along the bottom of the skids of the helicopter. They're hidden up in the tail, all over the place. Just little tiny guys spreading light along the body of the helicopter... ...so you could see it against the real night sky. And it took them a long time to develop it. And they would keep coming back with test footage... ...where I'd say, "Oh, this looks very nice. When do we get to see the helicopter?" And they'd say, "Well, it's right in the middle of the frame." But it was so pitch black. Because we had to make a helicopter... ...that was, like, midnight blue. And, of course, that was terrible. The only thing worse than that... ...would have been if it were painted black. Then we never would have seen it at all. Well, we're actually very lucky, because right now... ...we've just been joined in this session... ...by an absolute genius in the area of special effects. Hoyt, would you introduce yourself?

56:36 · jump to transcript →

He took all this stuff and turned it into weapons of war. Roger Pratt lit this. Roger had done Brazil with Maine, so this was a second chance to work together. And John Beard, who had been the art director on Brazil, came on as the production designer of this.

2:47 · jump to transcript →

Tim Lucas

would televise torture when it's easier and cheaper to fake it. Masha's lighting of the cigarette brought Max back to his memory of Nicki's challenge, and it should be pointed out that Debbie Harry now disappears from the film for roughly ten minutes. There were reportedly preview screenings where she dropped out of the film for significantly longer. Now that I think of it, isn't it possible that the real Nicki never comes back?

24:33 · jump to transcript →

in the right direction because I magnified any... It's like burning your retina. You could see everything. You could see all the camera equipment, everybody on the crew, if my glasses were in the wrong direction. They reflected everything. See, I'm looking... I can't look because all you see are the lights that are lighting everybody.

37:08 · jump to transcript →

Roger Moore

And the luxury of going on to a film where you have four months of principal photography, five months sometimes, you say, well, don't you get bored? There must be a lot of sitting around because lighting things take a little longer. Well, they never let me get bored on Bond because the publicity department would wheel in another interview. At one point while we were filming, they said that we'd had

1:01:47 · jump to transcript →

John McTiernan

It's funny, we had to do... It was one of the first early computer opticals we had to... Arnold's cigar wasn't really lit in that early shot. It wouldn't start or something, but... So we had to have the glow enhanced. I remember.

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