Location & scouting

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

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So everything in this castle is basically... ... lmagine, carved into the rocks. Every room, every-- Imagine... There's, like, channels underground, a sewer system. Basically, everything... I didn't want a castle that look like a mediaeval castle... ...1n the middle of the countryside, but more like Petra. You know, those building carved in rock. That's why it feels very claustrophobic... . like, you know, every other Underworld. And there's not many windows. It's always quite dark. Which actually became a challenge in a period movie... ...because you light everything with candles or torches. And after a while, it sort of like, you know... ...becomes a bit of an issue, because it looks the same. SO we came up with a couple of ideas... . like green windows to protect against the sun... ...and things like that, which gave us a different tone. This is one location that changed a lot during the preparation of the film. We're trying to figure out... We were up against it with a budget, trying to figure out... ... how to have them get away from the castle... ...to have this tryst. Then Patrick came up with this idea of the ruined guardhouse. The set piece is actually quite small, with set extensions. And it works. It's just gorgeous, works really well. That's one that I... A set that I really love from Dan as well is Sonja's room. Because it feels still cold, but there's a bit more... ...of a feminine texture in there, which I think is great.

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That's one of my favourite shots of the film right there. Really beautiful. Steven Mackintosh was in the second film as well... ...playing Tannis, so he reprised his role. I Keep saying I wish Steven had more, more... There was more of him in the movie. Such an incre... I mean, really, I felt that every day. I totally agree with you. I was saying the same thing on Underworld 2. That I didn't have him in enough. And we had a pretty long scene with him on 2, remember? The scene was like.... - Yeah, I Know he's got... And a lot of people don't recognise he's the same character... ...because his look was so different. - True. That's a shot that came at the end, last minute. It would be nice to see the presence of the wolf... ...outside the castle so it's not always disconnected. Thank you, Clint, for coughing up that extra dough for us. And this is one shot, I gotta say, you know... ...when you have, like, a big bad-ass day, and you can't... You just-- One camera and you ba... You know, this is really.... When you feel a little cornered sometime... ...and you're like, "Okay, guys, we have to shoot this." You know, I remember this. This one, and then the scene against the fire... ... Where Rhona's talking to Bill. At the end, there's no time... ...had to kind of stack them up soap-opera style. And actually, it's great. - It worked very well. That scene is great. I love how she never really turns around to see him. That's cool. - Sometimes that works out. I gotta say that people are gonna think this is a set a la Sleepy Hollow thing. This is actually a real forest there. And really weird. The trees look like they're dead. All the foliage is really high in the tree. And we're, like, 200 feet from the water, from the sea. Yeah, there's people surfing 200 yards from... Incredible-looking forest. - Where we're shooting. And that was one of our key locations. All the forest scenes were shot there. I really love that place. It was very cool. lt was strange when we walked in there for the first time, remember? We all sort of looked at each other like, "Whoa, do we have to shoot here?" We're walking there with Richard. And we're looking at the trees, and then we started losing our minds. And we Say, "What if we use the tree?" We will make little miniature... We shoot them green screen people. Horses running through the trees, but the trees would be 50... Giant trees. Because that forest got a weird quality... ... almost like a gigantic forest. lf you're shooting miniature stuff in there.... We were losing-- We were a little... Well, it got to the point about New Zealand too... ...because when we first got the script... ...We Initially thought we were gonna shoot the movie in Romania. And then the idea of shooting a winter film in Romania... ...1S a little bit... - Exteriors. Exteriors was a little daunting. And one day, I had actually seen the making of The Lord of the Rings... ...and I said to Richard, "What about New Zealand?" And he kind of looked at me. "New Zealand?" And then we met this woman, Beth DePatie, who had worked... ... for us before, and she worked on Narnia. She came back with a budget that showed that New Zealand... ...WaS as inexpensive, if not less expensive... ...than Romania. And everybody wanted to go to New Zealand. We were on the plane two days later. I remember calling up Len. I said, "Is there a chance that--?" "What are the chances of you getting to Romania?" A pause. "But what are the chances of you going to New Zealand?" It was a big yes, So.... Have you been to Romania? - Yeah, I have. There was always the Romania discussion... ...and we've gone out there, and.... For the first one, we were almost set on shooting there, weren't we? We were very close, yeah. - Well, there were castles, and.... Transylvania and that. Hungary was a little bit more expensive. You were in love with how Budapest looked that we said the hell with it. We'll figure out some other way to save that money. We shot in Hungary instead. I was the only one that really wanted Romania in the first place on this... ...because I was worried New Zealand would be too pretty for us. I remember... - That was very... I was thinking... - Too green. Yeah, it's too green, it's too beautiful, and then we went there in the forest. But the other key thing was that we had to shoot... .1n January, February and March. And in Romania, that would have been minus 20 degrees. And we thought at that time we'd have to build the castle outside. So 40 pages of the script would have been outside... ...at night, in Romania, freezing to death.

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This transponder chip is completely untraceable. It transmits your location to a satellite, which can be read by only this computer. We can then track you to within three feet. Anywhere. Since your arrest, I've been sending news bulletins to every law enforcement agency in the world. I know Sean Ambrose. And I guarantee that after that airline crash,

33:36 · jump to transcript →

Like in this movie, we have spent some time staying in Spain and looking for the wood, looking for the music. And then I found the guitar. The guitar really gets the passion and the romance. So Hans Zimmer and I were suggesting using the guitar as the theme music. While we were shooting in Australia, he brought in the guitars. He was from Brazil. And then we created on the set.

1:13:08 · jump to transcript →

From the motorcycle chase to the fish fight, it was really hard to make. Because the tour scene was so complicated and the location was awful. We shot the whole scene up on a cliff. And the weather was so bad, it just kept raining every day. All the time we're just waiting for the sunlight. Whenever we get a little moment of sunlight, we get a shot right away. And then sometimes we wait the whole day just for nothing.

1:51:19 · jump to transcript →

Jeffers and Obecks have done such a good job of watching her. This is literally the first time she's been alone. And when we found this location, that elevator we built. Oh, cool. Door and everything? Elevator, door, everything. We built it there. I walked into this location. How did you make it go up the floors? I'm kidding. Stop it. No, we built everything. In fact, half of our budget went into remodeling this entire location. This is your loft from downtown, right? It looks a lot like it.

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There was a strip club across the street. Every time they turned on the faucet, we heard it. They have faucets in strip clubs? I don't want to know what for. And here you can see a highway behind Benicio. We picked this location because it had the high rock across the street. It had everything we needed, but there's an interstate running through it. And as a first-time director...

1:12:41 · jump to transcript →

Jimmy Caan always reminds me of the stunt show at Universal here. Just popping out of the blinds of the shutters. Trying to make sense of all... This was, by the way, meticulously, meticulously storyboarded. We had a map of the location, and my brother and I took plastic cowboys and Indians. Wow. And I said, okay, for a moment, you're Parker and Longbaugh. Now, where are you going to go to get to the money? And then said, stop, and now be the bag men. And where are you going to go to get Parker and Longbaugh? And it was like playing chess.

1:47:09 · jump to transcript →

Carla Cipriani and we commented obviously on the fact that as most people know she was most often than not this continuity or script supervisor for her husband although we we know that she she was also very much involved in the casting in the pre-production and even in the locations but it is first with the frivolous Lola

24:48 · jump to transcript →

I would say, in a non-definitive era. There are obviously mobile phones from the time and it's obviously set in, as we said, in an urban context, but always Brass is never really faithful entirely to whatever city or location setting he's placing his stories in.

38:21 · jump to transcript →

Or it was an unopened, it's since been opened, an unopened section of tunnel in Limehouse and part of the Limehouse link. And we were very lucky to get that because this kind of thing is impossible to do without a real location. And again, Tilsley and the art department did a brilliant job piling up these cars. And again, we got this idea of where are all the cars then? There'd be so many cars around. So we thought we'll put them all here as though there's been some huge pileup.

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The location manager, Alex Gladstone, phoned this for us, which I'd never seen before. It was a fantastic... When you get a good crew working, people add things to the script, in a way. And he brought this idea up of someone with them to stop for a picnic. And, of course, I loved the idea of the past, really, again, that they were surrounded by something very, very old, and obviously the horses, very beautiful. But one area that almost looked like...

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Tom Tykwer

will be over and then you can come back to reality. It's their final game and they take it very serious. There's a strong sadness but a determination in them that I can only think of when I think of children. Finding this location, the whole farmhouse and the surroundings was one of the most difficult.

1:25:44 · jump to transcript →

Tom Tykwer

getting closer to eternity and of course closer towards their own end but finally doing what this movie was waiting for all the time for their unification. I was so happy to have found this location because it gave me the opportunity to

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Rob Cohen

So with the magic of movies, we basically made three locations into one. And again, here's Rick about to get a blast from the past and look at this costume of his from the French Foreign Legion, which is the actual costume he wore in the first Mummy, and to long for the days

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Rob Cohen

I thought I'd just put in my political plug. Hopefully, by this time, you're getting this DVD. He's the president-elect of the United States. Here, this crash landing is totally CG. We, of course, never could go to this kind of location, and to do a crash landing on a glacier would be very hairy indeed, as you now see.

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Barry Sonnenfeld

This was all ad-libbed. The speech was much shorter. We did many takes and had Will say angry, mean things to those people. We combined a lot of different takes. We're sometimes on his back because we're adding additional comedy lines. And we're about to be back actually shooting in New York City. This was at Central Park West

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which we fought against. Yeah, it was scary for me. Already shooting in New York was scary because I didn't know it. So I came six months before and I did millions of pictures on Location Scout. And we went two, three times in Montauk. It's great. I mean, I ended up really falling in love with the city, which sounds like a cliche, but New York is really very different from a lot of places.

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For three nights we closed down Trafalgar Square... ...1N Whitehall and outside the Houses of Parliament. And logistically it was really tough. We could only shoot from 12 a.m. to 4 a.m. We had, probably, between the cast and the crew members, 1000 people... ...every night to move around in a very concise and succinct manner... ...and Terry Needham, who was the first A.D... ...I think he did an incredible job on that. When you do crowd replications... ... you know, the traditional way, and people will have seen... ... you shoot various passes and versions with the crowd standing in different places... ...and then you can add all those layers together to create your final shot. The shooting restrictions we had when we were on location... ...at Trafalgar Square and down at Parliament... ...Was SO, SO tight, that the amount of time we had... ...there was no opportunity to do anything special for visual effects. It was literally, try to get what they could for the main photography. What it does is you also have to be very concise... ...about your storytelling. We were able to use a lot of alternate takes, different angles... ...to build up the crowds. And the digital V figures were mainly used for the overheads. Obviously, a normal film day is 12 hours. And when you're condensed down into a 4-hour period... ... your appetite is always bigger than what you can ever achieve. That was a microcosm of that kind of, you know, filmmaking.

1:59:35 · jump to transcript →

We're shooting in the New Yorker Hotel, which is a landmark in the city. And this is our last day of shooting. Mm-hmm. The SWAT. Such a good SWAT. She's like, she's not a dominatrix in real life, but she sure took to it. Yeah. Look at this. Yeah. It accelerates the film. Okay, here's Miriam Shore and her husband, Justin, or boyfriend, Justin, who...

1:15:30 · jump to transcript →

James Mangold

an incredible effort by the entire crew. Many of the locations in this canyon, which is national park land that we worked at, we had to get to them by mule. At that point you were just seeing the sniper campos firing from up on a hill. There's only one way to get there, and that's to climb. One of my requirements for the gang was that anyone even thinking about playing

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