Location & scouting

Not like, you know, we came to each place and had, like, a whole comic book of what it would look like. I mean, we had planned what shots we would be doing and where the camera would be and what we would need when we did the location scouting. Except for, you know, stunt scenes where you've got to have, you know, a really good plan, so. You really want me to put this stuff back on? Yes, I do. Show a little pride. Yes, sir. All right, now we're getting to the cool girl.

1:00:55 · jump to transcript →

And it worked really nicely. I'm trying to remember. I think I shot the crushing of the building after we decided to pull it out on the Crimson Permanent out of the main film. And it just became another way of ending that little sequence. When we came to shoot this scene, we originally, Harry, our production designer, wanted to use the same restaurant location that we had for the

1:17:30 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

Here's a panning shot of the armored personnel carrier. This was done with the twelfth-scale armored personnel carrier. We had the camera flat on the ground and at the beginning of the shot, behind the APC, is the fiftieth-scale colony complex. Because we're flat on the ground, the audience doesn't see the scale differential that's going on there. Literally, the bumper of a twelfth-scale was next to a fiftieth-scale. The shots of the APC driving into the atmosphere processor were also done as miniatures. There was no full-size entryway that was built for the film. That's why we built one as a miniature. The sequence inside the atmosphere processor is a location that was a decommissioned power station at Acton, inside London or just outside of London. Rather than building a set from scratch, they used what was there and then added the alienesque bits to it. Look at that. - This was my first day. At Acton? - First day ever on a film. You won't see me there. - Ever on any film. I'd no idea what "back to one" meant or anything. What does it mean? 30 years later I'm still trying to figure it out. That's a real gun. That's a German Sten gun. It was cool until we started firing the weapons and then this fine snow started raining down on everybody. I think they checked it out. - It was just asbestos. We had to practice shooting flame-throwers. We did the close-quarter battle stuff. Approaching a building or going down a hallway, you leapfrog along. We did that. Al Matthews who plays Sergeant Apone had some kind of military background. I think he had served in the Vietnam War, and after the war he had come to England, where he'd become a radio disc jockey, I think. He was either really good at bullshitting us, but he seemed to know what he was doing. His orders were so authoritarian that we followed him.

1:04:49 · jump to transcript →

Oliver Stone

And this is a rainforest about two hours out of Manila. We're based in Manila, I think, at this point. We went back and forth every day. Charlie has a heat spell and faints. This is a very difficult location to get to. Tough shot. A lot of close helicopter work. We almost got wiped out a couple of times.

8:10 · jump to transcript →

Eleanor Bergstein

place before. And again, one might say it was because we didn't have enough money and couldn't have that many locations. But I really like the idea of completely different moods taking place in the same place. This is where they decided to go and go to the log and then the lifts in the lake. And now here they are and so much has happened and they're in a different place. And I think in some way you feel the echo of a location where you have been happy and now you're sad.

1:21:14 · jump to transcript →

We didn't have any really sets built on this show. This was all practical location. Yeah, this was great. Hey, that's right. There was not one set built. I don't think so. I always wondered how they managed to get it just as it exploded. The cinematography is great on this. I know. David M. Walsh did a wonderful job. Yeah, he did. Maybe.

39:06 · jump to transcript →