Location & scouting

Patrick Tatopoulos

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.

4:04 · jump to transcript →

Patrick Tatopoulos

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.

12:13 · jump to transcript →

Patrick Tatopoulos

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.

16:25 · jump to transcript →

What luck you've got. It's worth it. So we've just gone from Chatham, where the interior of the factory and her exterior journey to the docks, to the historic dock of Chatham, and now we're actually at Pinewood Studios, where we built this set. Eve's wonderful set we built partly because we couldn't find any locations in the UK that gave us the kind of dockside.

23:28 · jump to transcript →

but we were very lucky to shoot in it. My location manager, Camilla, tracked it down. I didn't even know it existed. It's an entire building built as a sort of mini recreation of Versailles in the English countryside. So this is our big investment, the street set that we built on the Richard Attenborough stage. It took a vast army of people to create this, and it was an amazing set because I could put

1:10:38 · jump to transcript →

And this was an example where we had to lock off a tempo because One Day More involves many different characters on different days of the shoot, on different locations. So it would have been impossible to have a kind of freedom of tempo as the whole thing wouldn't have overlaid on each other. I love that moment with Sam.

1:32:55 · jump to transcript →

This right here, I was location scouting, and this idea of just, boom, boom. I remember just coming up with it on the day of, we hadn't discovered exactly how he was going to escape here. And I thought, you know, you always see in all these movies and airports and things when people are being chased, and, you know, the police, everybody down, and boom, a gunshot goes off. Everybody drops, and it leaves the suspect standing. And then they locate him and find him. I thought, why doesn't the suspect ever just drop down?

46:21 · jump to transcript →

This was not a set. This was a location that we just altered. Came in, there's a lot of wood in here. So we put up like that fireplace and other things to make it a little bit more of a kind of a neoclassic design within. Hello, I'm Len Wiseman, director of Total Recall. And we are watching the director's cut, which I'm very excited about. I'm really happy with the theatrical cut.

55:07 · jump to transcript →

I had two days to do all this, I believe, and very tense because two days for an extremely long scene, and we had an action scene in it as well. We also couldn't, you know, you couldn't build in there because you can't drill into walls. You know, it's funny, when you location scout and you're deciding, do we build a set or do we find a location? I always try to build a set if I can because you can, of course, do anything to it. When you get into a location, even though it's cheaper, then you find it's such a pain in the ass

1:20:14 · jump to transcript →

Now, was this all shot on Back Lot, Terry, or did they have locations near L.A. that served? I think it was the Columbia Ranch, was it? It was the Rollin' V. Lee Ranch in Chatsworth. Okay, in Chatsworth. It was all... But then they... But the studio was... Yeah, I think it was in Culver City. Oh, Culver City, yeah. This is a stock shot, actually from an old Fox picture made during World War II, interestingly enough, that Stanley Cortez had remembered and mentioned it to Lawton, and Lawton found it and used it.

13:29 · 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 →

And not since Cortez had used it for Wells in Magnificent Ambersons. True. And this is not an optical. This is done live right there on the location. Yeah, they're doing it with the camera lens and the device on the camera. Focusing on the children. Anyhow, just to finish the thought. And great on the cutaway there, too. Schumann didn't want to dignify Mitchum's murderous madness by taking a real hymn and using that as a theme.

45:01 · jump to transcript →

and he named one or two others, and this person said, well, that's not a cast, that's a dinner party. A point well taken, and why wouldn't somebody want to be with the dinner party rather than just a cast? They were all either friends of mine or people I had admired. The location was interesting, which is always of some importance to me. It's nice to work outside of Los Angeles and in a place as...

11:46 · jump to transcript →

in a different form, but it is all happening at once. You can come in, Tommy. Don't be embarrassed. We did a lot of handheld work. We were shooting in natural locations, and they were virtually motel. A lot of them were just motel rooms. And the question of fitting people in, we just had no space for dollies. It was before the Steadicam.

43:17 · jump to transcript →

thought about in a different way. It was all shot on location, the whole film was shot on location, except for a tiny bit in the special effects studio. A couple of days at all. We were there in New Mexico, eight weeks, nine weeks maybe. I think five days in Los Angeles. The distances were the main thing. Pretty big area.

50:47 · jump to transcript →

Paul Davis

makes it an American Werewolf in London. This was all shot around Earls Court, which is where the exterior location was for Jenny's flat. Look at those prices.

37:35 · jump to transcript →

Paul Davis

this movie about a friendly alien now. We're not going to do Night Skies. And, of course, that became E.T. And so at that point, everything then went gung-ho on American Werewolf in London. But this was October 1980, and they were going to start shooting in February. So that's always astounded me, the fact that they got all this stuff together so, so quickly, despite the fact that Rick...

1:11:08 · jump to transcript →

Paul Davis

But that sequence, man, Piccadilly, they shot that over two nights. Well, the main stuff at the location, they shot over two nights. This is all in the documentary, but I'll give you the abridged version. On location, it was two nights. It was a Saturday into Sunday, Sunday into Monday. And they essentially had to do the stunt in two minutes. They would do the stunt, clear the street.

1:30:19 · jump to transcript →

So they took from you, Al. Well, I mean, it's quite a favorite shot, I think. Another repo first. But I suspect this has been used a lot, this location, because it's so picturesque. And San Pedro's popular with filmmakers, isn't it? You notice the glass break before we hit the shooting. Right. A little mistake.

49:45 · jump to transcript →

Ooh, ah, you know, because it was so beautiful. And we were so startled at realizing we were making a movie and that Robbie Mueller was shooting it and he was shooting it, you know, great. Yeah. And that was the scene where the lights went out on the bridge, wasn't it? I think it was that scene. I think it was that scene. It was really beautiful. Mr. Knickerbocker. That was a great thing also about doing this movie, just all the shooting in downtown L.A., East L.A., nothing really you'd think that L.A. didn't exist.

1:09:52 · jump to transcript →

like $600 a bucket, put it on there. That paint job goes like $6,000. Oh my God. 11 years of re-pulling cars and what have I got? Shit. Bud, listen to me. The art of negotiation. And I do know a lot of people, by the way, that came to live in that part of LA, south of downtown Los Angeles, from this movie. They were looking for all these locations. Really? Very strange.

1:23:40 · 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 Daley's? Location directors, yeah. This is the one where the guy cut down the tree.

52:20 · jump to transcript →

What happened to the hair in that one? Oh, she's distressed. They gave her a funny haircut. Well, plus, you remember it was windy up there. Oh. And the combination was brutal. It doesn't really look like a backdrop, though. You can't tell. It's another one. Our location looks complete fake. Here it is. Dew glistening on a newly formed leaf. Stoplights.

1:19:34 · jump to transcript →

Macaulay Culkin

We shot a lot of this film on location in Chicago. This was shot at O'Hare Airport, actually. That was just chaos because it was still a functioning airport... ...while we were running through it. And the key is, here, is we were shooting... When we were shooting this first picture... ...N0 one knew who Macaulay was. In contrast with shooting Home Alone 2... ...where there were busloads of people following you around. That was crazy. - You suddenly became... ...one of the Beatles, um... ...which was a whole different vibe in terms of... We wouldn't have been able to shoot the way, you know... The way-- On this budget, the way we did. Duck into any airport and, you know.... I

16:25 · jump to transcript →

Macaulay Culkin

There's a Barry Bonds baseball card. - Yep. For those who wanted to see Barry in his younger, thinner days. Um.... Now, this was actually the real house here, which was in Winnetka, Illinois... ...and, um.... It was interesting because we were... We were able to shoot a great deal of the film at this house. None of the interiors that you see in the film were shot here... . UM... ...but this house worked out very well for us. Strangely enough, you know, with today's budgets... ...we would've built the back of that house completely... ...because the fact that we did all of those stunts later in the film... ...on the actual location was just ridiculous. And they were very friendly. - They were great. They had T-shirts made up. - They loved it. They used to have hot chocolate and stuff for us... ...and invite us in. They were great. They were a great family. It's incredible because I see... ...the things people do to people's apartments and houses... ...when they rent them out, like, you Know, for production. I'm like, "I'd never do that." - No, I know. Once you learn... Once you've seen it done, you know... Not to discourage any of you guys out there listening... ...to renting out your houses to future productions. But make sure you're paid very well. - Yes. That voice on the answering machine was Raja Gosnell... ...who was the editor of this picture... ...who's gone on to become a director in his own right. I

37:15 · jump to transcript →

Macaulay Culkin

Old Man Marley. Roberts Blossom... - Mm-hm. ...who, uh, was in several horror films in the '70s, I remember. I worked with him again later on, on some... It was some commercial. Something to do with Ellis Island. - Really? Yeah, yeah, I worked with him pretty much right after this. Like about a month after we wrapped up. Did you guys do something together? - We didn't speak or anything. But it was, like, a part-- Like, he played my grandfather and it was a... It was something to do-- I think when they reopened Ellis Island after... As a tourist thing or whatever. But, yeah, worked with him right after. This was all shot in the neighborhood of Winnetka, Illinois, on location. That was one of our lead stuntmen... ...who got his daily workout here. Another scene that was shot in a ridiculous amount of time. Again, we had no time to really shoot anything... ...and no time to do more than one or two takes.

39:31 · jump to transcript →

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 →

Jefferson 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.

16:47 · jump to transcript →

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 Conn 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 Longbow. 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 Longbow? And it was like playing chess.

1:47:09 · jump to transcript →

Oh, we started watching the movie. - Yeah. This is cool. - Will she make it? Got her clothes on. One of the things that we were very keen on... ... that we wanted, was that we wanted.... We had this ambition... ... that the audience should have their first breath... ...after the first 10 minutes... ...when she gets dropped off the truck... ...which we will see. And when I was watching the premiere yesterday with my wife... ...when she get-- She: At exactly that spot and I felt, "Wow... ... this was exactly what we were aiming for." I think the audience was a little surprised too. We had the premiere last night so we got to watch... ... the movie with a big audience. But they were surprised at the level of violence of the movie. This is a tougher movie than the other movies. Selene is a lot more badass in this movie. She kills a lot of people. - Yeah. Went through a lot more buckets of blood too. A sign of the times, I suppose. Yeah, you'll wish you hadn't done that. This was one of the big scenes in the trailer... ... that we had shown Screen Gems right at the beginning. I love the little splat of blood hitting there. That was sweet. I repeat, full containment... No, there was buckets of blood. I mean, it's.... Violence Is an aesthetic I think that, I mean, goes a hundred years back. Yep. Have we actually done a body count in this? It's a lot. You know what? I did once. Did you? What'd it end up being? - I can't remember. Counting Lycans and humans. Yeah, dead-- Corpses. Now, this moment was an additional shoot moment. It was the first thing we sh... - Wes Bentley, yeah. It's the last and first... - The uncredited Wes Bentley. The first and the last... - This jump was the first thing we shot. First day of shooting. - Look at this boom here. There. That hit in that shot, was Alicia... ...our excellent stunt girl, who just smacked... It sounded like the worst sound I ever heard. It's like, "We killed the stunt double on the first shot." And then you said, "Let's go again." The first day of shooting went so well... ... that I walked away thinking, "God, this is gonna be an easy movie." Oh, my God! - You were wrong. I was wrong. It was so difficult. This was the toughest by far we've done. They're not supposed to be easy. No. - There's a direct correlation... ...between the amount of suffering to do a movie... ...and how well it turns out. We never did a film, like, with this big budget kind of thing... ...but I think you always end up in the same position, you know? You don't have enough money. You always... Imagination can always outrun money. Yeah. - Yeah. The 3D made it more complicated too. Yeah, the 3D really-- You know, nobody had really done it. You know, how to plan it and how to shoot it and.... This is where we want people to breathe. Yeah, here. Here's brutalism again. - Yeah. I was talking with the cinematographer... ...ocott Kevan, last night and... Who did a great job. - He did a great job. And the person... I introduced him to my daughter. My daughter said, "Was this your first 3D movie?" He said, "No, my second. I made all my mistakes on the first one... ...So this one I could get right." Yeah, he was the only guy kind of who had done it. Yes. - And he kept telling us: "It'll take a long time." I remember-- Gary, you said: - It did. "If we go down the Amazonas, it'd be nice... ... to have someone who's been there." Done that trip. That was true. Scott was really there. - Yeah. He was great. But it's also-- It has been very... ...weird. - First shot of Kate. This was the first shot of Kate. Yeah. - First night. That terrible night when it would not stop raining. This was one of those.... - There's a gale right now. When the duck flew into the light? - Yeah. It was a duck who came from the sky... ...and landed in the middle of the set. The camera broke down about four times. Yeah. No, just shooting 3D was a weird experience in that sense... ... that we hadn't done it before and all the rules that you get... ... from various people who has done it... ...Just turn out to be not true or.... - Bullshit. Total bullshit. I don't know if the Red Epic that we used, the camera... ... kind of discarded some of them so it actually works now... ...and it's also.... You have to realize you're telling a story... ... you're not doing a 3D ride. Although this movie is like a ride but... No, but I think what.... True, because... .all these people that we talked about, they were technicians... ...and not filmmakers or storytellers. So they speak about the perfection of everything... ...and that's not really interesting, perfection... ...ecause what you go for is emotion, and emotion is not always perfect. It's also... You know, 3D is in its infancy. People really don't know the rules. When we took those classes... ... there'd been like six movies made and so people didn't know. Half of them were not real 3D, either. - Correct. Where you actually were using binocular cameras... ...to shoot the entire movie, which we did. I don't think any... There wasn't a rule they gave us... ...that we didn't break. - No. I mean, it was... - No. Everything. This is that hybrid POV, as we Call it. It's when Kate starts seeing through.... She thinks she sees through Michael's eyes... ...but it's actually India's. Eve, her daughter. This is so hard, I think, to decide as a filmmaker... ...when you do this. What it should look like? - No. Not technically, but I'm saying the suspension of disbelief... ...of is it Michael or not, and.... We didn't know... All the marketing now you've seen... ... you know, It's all out that she has a daughter in this one... ...which, you know, when we were planning this.... Hopefully that would be the secret. It's gonna be a surprise, yeah. - "Wow, she has a daughter." But.... And I think what helps us Is that we... - Michael Ealy, by the way. Michael Ealy. - Appearance of Michael Ealy. What helps us is the pace that we had to this. You just move so fast that, you know... ... you don't leave time for the mind to think that much. But it's.... Yeah, it's interesting. One of the scenes we shot here is outside in Vancouver. Vancouver-- When we heard we're shooting Underworld... ...and we're shooting it in Vancouver... ...we thought that was pretty strange because it's not gothic. But as Bjorn was talking about... ...when we found the neo-Goth and the brutalism... ...Vancouver Is fantastic. - We'll start counting... ...how many times that word comes. - You do that. It might be even more people than die. Yeah. A couple of words about Kate.... She's a movie star and a really, really good actress. Sometimes that's not the same thing. But she is, and she's very fun to work with. And she... You know, she's British, she always... Theo James. - Theo James. Very witty, yeah. - Young English actor making his... Who's also extremely funny. - Those damn Brits. Yeah. He's so funny. And you're around people who are gorgeous and funny... . It takes its toll on you. Yeah, it doesn't go together usually, yeah. No, and you just stand there in the middle and talking really bad English. I love this shot we did with Stephen. I remember we were shooting it, he was really somewhere else. He was... That was a scene we added after we had started shooting. It was Gary's scene. - That was my idea. We initially had a scene outside of here that l.... I remember seeing this location. I thought it was beautiful... ...but I couldn't wrap my head around a desk being in an exterior atrium... ...so I was struggling with that, but I'm sure glad we did it. I think it looks beautiful. I think you said when you saw it, "It's outside?" It started raining. - "It's outside?" And it was freezing cold. You remember how cold it was? Oh, my God, it was freezing. - God. This is the second... - Then we said: "We have all this concrete and it's freezing cold. Let's get water everywhere. That'll make it really comfortable." This is day one. Day zero, we did the jump we saw before. This is day one where it was full-on, all teams... ...SO this is the first scene that we shot of the whole film. And this shot was actually blown up. We had shot it wider, but we were able to push in on it. We did that with an enormous number.... One of the beauties of using the Red Epic camera... ...was the ability to push in and resize afterwards... ...1N postproduction. That's 175 percent. - Yeah. One of the things I believe that Mans and Bjérn should discuss... ...because we experienced it our first day of shooting... .IS that they are slightly unorthodox in terms of a directorial team. Slightly? They alternate the days they're shooting. So the first day, I believe it was Bjérn, right? You were directing the first day... ...and then Mans would direct the second day. And so, you know, you guys may wanna enlighten the audience... ...as to your procedure. - This was Mans. The prior one in the corridor, I did. I can't remember, but we always have the producer flip a coin... I did. I remember I flipped a coin. Yeah, flipped a coin and whoever gets the tails... ...whatever we decide, begins the day. The thing is, when I'm directing, Bjorn's my best buddy... ...as we Call it, and he doesn't do anything... ...except helping me. Nobody's allowed to talk to him. - Wait. We'll miss Wes getting thrown through the window. This is a totally reshot scene. - Yeah. We had another scene that was... - Just not working. No, it was a bit of a disaster. We got the opportunity to reshoot this, and I love this scene. I love it too. - It's great. This whole spider-webbing window thing.... That was actually Len Wiseman's idea of having him... ...be pushed through the window as it spider-webbed behind him. Yeah, we had.... Yeah. Fantastic idea. - Yeah, great shot. In the background, you see he's got little stuffed animals... ...because we wanted him to be a tinker... ...because he's been tinkering with her... What? I never saw those stuffed animals. I love this shot. I love this. It's too short. - Way too short. Yeah. It's way too short. You know, if you're starting to do movies or anything.... Please listen up, because Bjérn is saying something important. If you get into doing green-screen stuff, stay on it longer... ...because the visual effects will come in and you'll go: "Why the hell didn't we stay longer?" You had 36 frames of tail handle that you didn't use. So it's... So there. - Bollocks. I did not see that. - The famous.... Larz. Thank you, Larz. This is a 300-pound dummy in steel. Oh, God. Nothing.... I mean... Larz is the visual effects... - Special effects. Special effects. We thought, "There's no way. That's not gonna smash the car." Larz was like, "It's gonna smash the car." It did. - It smashed it great. Larz was right. It worked. And I love this shot of the camera pulling up... ...and catching Theo there. - Yeah. SO we are boosting up the mystery here. Theo, who is this guy. - The mystery man. And hopefully you don't know that he's a Vampire yet. He could be anyone, probably a human. Yeah, that was one of the challenges, as well, with the introducing. We introduce Michael Ealy, who plays Sebastian... ...and we have introduced David. We had introductions of a character called Quint, which is... Love this knife. - Yeah. The Uber-- Who was a Lycan, but it was taken out. Because there were too-- Yeah. Kris. - Kris Holden. Brilliant. - Brilliant guy, brilliant actor. It was taken out because there were too many people presented... ...and he gets presented after the car chase... ...and we only see him once. I'm not sure if that was perfect. In hindsight, maybe we should have. - But it's tough. That's... This is a movie where there's only one character... ... left over from other films. Every character has to be introduced. At a certain point, it's a struggle... ...trying to figure out ways to do it without overwhelming the audience. So we just caught a glimpse of the lower Lycans. And one of the things that we really loved in this one... ...was that we could expand the mythology and the universe... ...by inventing new creatures. And we liked the idea that they have been living in the sewers. There's one now. Yeah. And, you know, we thought, you know.... Here we thought Gollum. We thought rabid dog. We thought puss-- Run... Is that what you call it? Puss? Pus. - Pus running. Yeah. Saliva. Fucking crazy in the head. Rabid crazy. That... - Syphilitic. We wanted to because there's... One of the most wonderful lines... .In the history of Underworld is: "You're acting like a pack of rabid dogs! And that, gentlemen, simply won't do." That Michael Sheen says in Underworld 7. And we said, well, let's turn them into those rabid dogs now. They-- You know, they have lived here underground for so long... ... that they actually became these rabid dogs. Yeah, we actually don't see these guys as being human anymore. They're just Lycans. - And they... They turned out beautifully, James. Really beautiful. - These are my favorite Lycans. I think if there is a part five, there should be just these guys. I love them, just those.... The horde. - Yes. Really sick. It was the first time we moved away from suits. We always relied on practical prosthetic suits... ...and this was the first. This and the Uber are the two creatures that are purely CG. The Uber was hard to cast, so we had to go CG. This is an important moment. I loved shooting this. - This is where Selene sees... ...this child for the first moment. Without realizing who it is. - Right. She thinks it's Michael. I remember when shooting it... - She expected to find Michael. Right. Exactly. And she was so beautiful, and she looks so scared. Vulnerable. - Yeah. And the whole thing here we set up, you know.... We're gonna reveal later in the van, when she rips the Lycan's head apart. Hopefully that works, because we set up this girl as weak... ...as we see here, and vulnerable and so on... ...but she is the daughter of Selene, which means the girl's got powers. She's got the kick-ass gene. - Her name is Eve... ...which is never pronounced. - No. It isn't? We never say it? - We never say it. She says, "I'm Subject 2. You're Subject 1." So we might give her another name if we want to for the next one. Eve is perfect, I mean. No, but I think Selene is so beautiful... ...because Selene means moon in Greek. Is that right? - Yeah. Selene means moon in Greek? - Don't you know your Greek? Apparently not. Good Lord. Yeah. So here's the car chase, as we Call it. And it is pretty much... ...on the money on every shot that we storyboarded... ...which is extremely rewarding for a director... ...to see that it pulls off. This is also a triumph of visual effects. Probably half of the scene it was pouring down rain... ...and shooting in 3D, which means you can't really shoot. Shooting in 2D. We shot most of it in 2D. Because you can't shoot in 3D, the rain hits the mirror. The half-silvered mirror that you use in a 3D rig. So this whole thing was pieced together... ... from very, very rudimentary pieces.

10:50 · jump to transcript →

By the way, there's my daughter, I should say. In the car. Ashley McQuaide, her big cameo. She's great. She's gonna go do good. She's very sought after in Hollywood. The one thing I can say is this. This crash coming up was a bit of a fuckup. The taxi was supposed to fly over the other car. SO we were disappointed... ...but I think that the shot still looks pretty bitchen. It looks fantastic. Your eye is drawn to the Lycan. Which is what it should.... - Could have been better. And here-- You know, Paul Haslinger did the music here. I love this, you know, how we changed into this new... ...Style in the music exactly when we get into close combat here. Paul, being an old hand... ...having done the score for Underworlds 7 and 3. He did an amazing job. - Amazing job. Yeah. - Yeah. Every-- All these Lycans are CG Lycans... ...but they mostly are.... There were guys dressed in blue with funny heads. So they look like really big... - Suits kind of looking like... This was a big moment. - Looks great. And India's face.... We really didn't do anything to it. She was able to scrinch up her face. - Yeah, she's a badass. Well, there's a bit of CG going on. We changed her eye shape and the color of her skin, obviously. But she was good. - This is an old trick, you know. The guy dry his fist across his mouth. I told Theo to do that. But it really always looks good, I think. It's the moment too, where Selene realizes... ...that this creature back there has... ls connected to her. - ls connected to her. She saw a level of power in there she hadn't imagined. Here's the Kris Holden-Ried introduction. Yeah. Here's where he comes in. Might have... And it's not even the last new character. In the script, this is the third time we see Kris... ...or Quint. - Quint. And here, we talked about that scene... In the apartment when she throws the guy out of the window. If you look at the monitor, there's actually a shot from... ...coming out of the club... ...which was Prey. So we used footage for that as well. lt was not a waste of time shooting there. Very expensive stills. - Those two days... ...that we spent shooting there. - That town is all CG, and then we.... Somebody gave us that in the last... There were so many people working so hard... ...for no money for this one. I love it. - Yep. How did you find me? Now we have an actual conversation. An actual dramatic scene. Yeah. - The first of the entire film. There's not a lot of talking. - Yeah. I think Michael Babcock, who did the sound design... Which is so beautiful, I almost cry when I think about it. When we heard about... "What did you do, Michael?" "I did Inception and Dark Knight." We're like, "Okay, good." And I think when he showed us the first reel... ...we had, like, no notes. lt was perfect. Anyway, he said... ... after we'd done this, "I really enjoyed working with this. ll even do a talkie with you guys." That's nice. - Yeah. I remember at the end of this scene, when we did India's side... ... that Kate went up to her and complimented her and said: "You did a really great job." - Yeah. And it was a.... It shows Kate's consideration... ...for other actors, and really the.... The person that Kate is. You know, because here's this young girl... ...who was clearly a little bit nervous acting... ... against a movie star, and an actress of Kate Beckinsale's quality. Yet Kate was very generous with her. The funniest thing-- Not funny, but extraordinary thing about India... .IS that she is like a very old soul in a young body. Oh, my God, yeah. She's 17 when we shot this movie. But she's incredibly mature. - Yeah. Incredibly. And sometimes when I talk to her, I feel very like a kid... ...and she's the old-- Yeah. Yeah. - She's the grownup. But she knew this character. And so many times, "No, let's do it like this." And she always stood her ground, saying, "No, she wouldn't do that." And I love being told that... ...because that means the actor knows. Are your fingers crossed? - No. No. No. Okay. All right. Okay. No, I like it when the actors know their characters, so they... Yeah. This is also our first day shooting. I loved shooting this scene. Oh, God. This scene. "Blight of nature." That's, you know, epic Underworld dialogue. It's one of those scenes that in 2D doesn't look great. In 3D, it looks spectacular. - Yeah. Why is it raining? Because it looks nice. Why is it thunderstorms? - Because it sounds nice. Theo James, stunt driver. - Yes. You can actually see that a bit. Yeah, and if you look at the van, I mean.... All the.... We wanted everything to be low-tech... ...as all the other movies. The low-tech is very important. That combined with the Vampire aesthetics that you see. The Celtic signs of Kate's corset... ... the weaponry and stuff like that. This area here is actually shot in that dam. In the actual hydroelectric dam. What's the name of that dam, Richard? I can't remember. Spencer Dam or something? - I don't know. It's outside... Up above Vancouver. - Up above Vancouver. Nobody shot there. Like, 20 years ago... ...someone shot there. I can't remember what film. It's been closed down, so.... We were the first to... - Part of the water supply. Amazing location. - Yeah. Absolutely beautiful. And brutal. - And remember how it--? Brutal as well? - Brutalism. But it also rained... ...torrentially before we shot. We thought we'd get two streams of water... ...and we got the whole megillah. lt was fantastic. This is one of the things I love about Underworld. These, you know.... The looks. And it feels... It makes me believe that this world exists. Now we're also back in... This is Underworld. We've been in brutalism. - Yeah. Now we're back in-- Oh, yeah. This is a wonderful set that Claude Pare designed. Our production designer. Wonderful production designer. Award-winning production designer, might I point out. And this, actually, was fun... ...ecause I was walking the streets and suddenly: Here in L.A. before we started shooting. I started talking to Kate and Len, and Len... And Kate says-- I don't know how she came up with it... ...but she says, "I know Russian." So I said, "We must get some Russian in, then." So.... Because I think it's so sexy. - Yeah. Of course that means Charles Dance... ...as to Know Russian too. Yes, and Theo James. That's Kate's mother, by the way. The Sony people, when they heard that, were excited. Because internationally, Russia is now a big territory. So.... At a certain point, they said, "Can you have more Russian in the movie?" This, again, being Charles Dance... ...a well-known British actor. Charles Dance is one of those fantastic old-school actors who... ...when you give him direction, he looks at you and he says: "Thank you, sir." Then he does exactly what you asked him to. He does exactly what you ask for... ...and It's such a pleasure to work with him. Listen to me. I start speaking British. And the actress here playing the doctor is... Her character's name is Olivia. Is Catlin Adams... ...who is Kate's.... Acting coach? - Occasionally. Kate recommended her. - Happy family. That's how Underworld is. - Yeah. Or SCars. I've never seen a child... We should have had more Swedish in the film. We have a little. Underworld 5, actually, I've heard that there's a big Swedish subplot. I had Kate say: Which all Swedes will understand, but she said it. It's very cute and.... So she, you know.... Because she's.... The musicality of it here. Her Russian is perfect and it... She speaks, I don't know, how many languages? Five languages. - A lot. Yeah. And she could just start speaking Swedish. That was insanely fun. I love this sequence... ...because it's so many things at the same time. I think it's terrifying, but I also think... ... It's, you know, touching, but also sexy. I think it's one of the most disturbing scenes in the movie though. Where you realize that this girl... ...who you thought was this innocent child... ...now has this voracious taste for blood... ...and has now gone to a different place. She is a creature of the night. - Yep. The blood on her face was great. You added that afterwards, James? - It was all CG, yeah. Good.

25:58 · jump to transcript →

I think in the very early draft... ...we actually started cutting her up. Yeah. And then we realized, but she's healing instantly... ...SO actually that will just be a problem. It'd be kind of comical. Cut, cut, cut. - "She's healing!" Also here we.... I remember we just had scrubs on them, but Monique... ...who did the costume, she made this Antigen Labs.... The scrubs. Yeah. - Yeah. They were special. Michael Ealy's big moment. The blooper gun. This is the first time that this gun is used on film actually. Is it? - Yeah. We're trendsetters. Yep. Yep. This big black one. - Yep. Parking Level 3. Doesn't sound menacing, though. Blooper gun. No. It sounds like a joke. - Yeah. But the gun guys, who are really cool guys in Vancouver... ...when they were talking about... ... there had been this convention in Las Vegas. A gun convention in Vegas, and I said, "I actually wanna go there." God bless America. Yeah. God bless America. Here's a shot while we're in... While editing... - Great shot. While editing, everybody hated this because it looked so silly. And James, when you came in, "I think it looks pretty bitchen." And it does. - I know. It's funny when you go through all editorial with gray-scale animation... ... approximating what people are gonna look like... ...and then you finally see it done... ... it transforms the movie. It goes from being really bad to go to very exciting. It's... Yeah. - That's a huge step. That's a nice step, though. I like it when that happens. I remember shooting this. Kate was like, "Where's the camera?" "It's right behind here." "Naughty. Naughty." And also, you know, seeing all the gray scale and stuff... That's why we didn't test the film because it's pointless. You can't see what it looks like. It does look silly and just like a bad cartoon... ...So there's no point in testing it. Because, you know, even we, who are supposed to be really good at this... ...when you see it all together... ... you know, the final product, so much happens... -.,.be@Cause... - Let's be honest. And James can speak to this better than anybody... ...but my recollection was that in the last week prior to delivery... ... there were still 200 shots you hadn't received. Easily. - Yeah. I'd walk into his office every morning and it was like... These are things... - "How is it?" What's it like?" "A hundred and forty shots left." It was Wednesday and we had to deliver it Friday. The studio was saying, "You have to deliver the film three weeks earlier... ...than you thought you had." - That was a blow. There are versions of the visual effects that are different in the IMAX version... ...to the theatrical 2D to theatrical 3D, the video master. It was all depending on what the schedule would allow for. We kept working until... ...we couldn't do any more. I'm very happy here. We never shot the reverse of the guy getting shot. And people were angry at me because I was directing this day. But it's because the effect is there. When the effect wasn't there, it didn't work. I Know. But I think that's cool. Because I think it looks very '70Os. - It's like, "Shut up. Just get out of my way." - Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Shaft kind of cool. Then this is one of my favorite blood splatters. That one. - That's real, actually. That was beautiful. Real? Did we shoot those guys? - Yes. Yeah. I love them. I will now resign. Did we kill people? - They meant they had squibs. Selene has to make the choice, does she go back to her husband or lover? Or does she go after her daughter? - Yep. Or does she try to have both? - The dilemma. One of the things that we were struggling with... ...In this script was that we thought, "Can we have a good third act?" Because the second movie, it's... The setting is so beautiful... ... with its old castle and underwater and so on. And, I mean, we scouted so many parking lots, it was obscene. Yep. Another example of how we wanted to hurt her so much. Yeah, that was Alicia, our stunt double, taking that hit. She landed on it. She's insane. - Yeah, well... Here's a shot that we don't think Is silly. No. No. It works. - Works. At least we think so. I hope you guys watching this think so as well. But it was always like: "Oh, so only his hand will grow very, very large and hairy. This will look so extremely silly." But it actually worked. This is when I think homage is really in a good way. Yeah. - It's not a fucking steal. It's you take something from 7... ...and you do it... - Underworld 7. The drop through the floor, right? - Yeah. And you update it. - Invert it. It's inverted. So I think that that's... That works really good. Len's-- That was Len's idea. The whole-- It's very scripted... ...how he shoots it.

1:04:06 · jump to transcript →

Jake Szymanski

I'm Jake Szymanski. I had the pleasure of directing this film. And I think I may have just ruined my mic, hold on. Is this... Did I ruin it? - Hey, hi. Is the mic okay? - Yeah, the mic's great. Just don't touch it like that. Okay, /'m sorry. - Yeah, that's okay. I was worried I might have turned it off accidentally. No, no, no, you're fine. Do you need water or coffee or anything like that? No, I'm so good. I've got water right here. - Do you... Okay. - What's your name again? I'm Margie. - Margie, thank you so much. Of course. All right. - Appreciate it. Let me know if you need anything. Okay. Will do. Thank you. Okay, oh, and please don't press any of those buttons. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I'm sorry about that. Okay, that's okay. - Okay. Um... As you can hear, we are here on the Fox lot in the ADR room. This is where the magic of DVD commentary happens. So, into the movie. Mike and Dave. They need wedding dates. Here we go. Well, this is a fun little scene. We actually... The whole beginning of the movie takes place in New York City. But we shot all of this in Hawai. Fun fact. Downtown Honolulu. We doubled for New York. Which, I literally didn't think could be done. But, um, there were four angles. There are four angles and two locations that you can shoot in Honolulu and it looks like New York. Um, there's Zac, there's those beautiful, blue eyes just shining through. Um, this is a fun little scene. We got Marc Maron to come out to the island and shoot with us, kind of our intro to the boys here. Adam Devine, Zac Efron, playing Mike and Dave Stangle. And we almost cut this scene. We almost lost this. At some point there was a worry if we needed it, but I think it's really a fun way to set up that these guys, right what Marc says right there, they're funny, they're weird. We give them a win early on. We let them know they think they're awesome. And before their family kind of puts them in their place. Was it the hat? - I just found this over there. And here we go. At the opening credits. This was a fun journey, finding the song for this. We ended up finding this great song that we kind of remixed a little bit and redid some of the lyrics even before this opening montage here. This montage was great. Doing our Fourth of July, a family wedding and a 50th anniversary party here, shooting this. We shot all this, uh... The anniversary party and the outside wedding are the same location, actually. We shot all this down in Hawaii. Got all of our stunt guys in. A little secret about Zac Efron, very good at the trampoline. He did not need a stuntman or wires. He got on that trampoline and started doing flips immediately for camera. And Adam Devine was like, uh, "You need to strap me up "and swing me around with some wires here. "I can't do this." Um... Very uncomfortable, I remember, also, the straps on that trampoline. Um, we shot this right across from the hotel we were shooting at. This is, uh, the fireworks stuff there. Our wonderful crew here. Let's just talk about, uh, the Chernin company real quick. You see our producers here. Produced by Chernin, Peter Chernin. Jenno Topping, David Ready. Our excellent team of producers, who were with us on the whole movie. It was fantastic. Here's downtown Honolulu. We're trying to hide the palm trees. You put some stickers up on light poles, looks like New York. If you wear two, they break. It's an urban legend... - No, it's not. And here we go. Let's meet the family. Putting this together, it... First of all this is actually based on a true story, which is fun. The Stangle brothers are real and they really did get told they had to bring dates to a family wedding. God, look at this, look at this family we got here. Just the best cast we could have asked for. We got Mom and Dad here. We got Stephen Root and Steph Faracy. Stephen Root, man. How lucky are we to get these guys as Mom and Dad here. Stephen Root was, uh... We were already down in Hawaii and we were about to shoot and we still hadn't cast Dad. And we talked with a bunch of great people. And, um, I had to do a little Skype session to meet Stephen Root who I had never met. And, uh, we were just like, "You know what? If you can ever cast someone "who you think is, one day, gonna win an Oscar, cast that guy." And we were lucky enough that Stephen Root said yes to doing it. Here we go. Um, hey, Jake... - Mmm-hmm. I just want to interject here. Um... - Oh, yeah? Be careful of the heavy breathing. - Oh, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I just want to make sure. I mean, it's not an issue yet, but... I was gonna Say, is it coming through or... Not really. - Okay. But I can sense that it might. - Okay. So just be careful. - Okay. No, fair... Yeah, okay. No worries. - You're doing great. Should we... So did we cut or how does this... No, we're not cutting, no, no, no. 'Cause we're still... - Oh, okay. Keep going. I can't cut. - Should we go... Oh, so this is a one... Continuous, got it. - This is a one, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. I'll watch the, uh... Watch the breathing. Um... Where are we here? Oh, well, we're doing our little reveal. Kind of the big idea here of our grandiose opening montage where the guys are kings of the world. We see the reality of those situations. Oh, this poor guy. Our grandpa. When we were shooting this, we were dancing... And I kept thinking that he was acting out the death scene too early. And I kept yelling from behind the camera, "No, no, no, don't stop yet. "You're still having fun, you're still having fun. "You're not dying yet." But he wasn't acting. He was, for real, getting too tired and almost having a heart attack. And I was yelling at this poor man. "No, no, no! Smile, smile! Be happy! Dance, dance!" And everyone was like, "Jake, this is real. He's actually having trouble." And I felt so horrible about that. But he made it. You know what? He made it and I can't wait for him to see the film. You can each talk to one girl. Um, uh-oh, guys. Here's the idea for the movie. Two dates. Um... By the way, we also have not talked about... Look at these two handsome gentlemen who you believe are brothers somehow. Are you insane? - Oh, you're kidding. I love these guys together. Adam and Zac had a really, really fun time. Um, I mean, when we went to Hawaii to film this, we filmed in Hawaii, and they were just... We were trapped on that island together. So even when we shot all day together we just had each other to hang out with at night. And, um, I think Zac and Adam got really, really close. Which helped the chemistry and the brother relationship stuff. Everyone got along really, really well. It was a lot of fun. By the way, let's talk about the wonderful Sugar Lyn Beard playing our sister Jeanie here. And also the equally excellent Sam Richardson playing Eric here. Um, God, she's so great in this. Sugar... First of all, her name's Sugar. And we shouldn't overlook that. That's an important factor when you're casting someone. Look for the most interesting name to be written somewhere. Um, she was one of the last people we saw in auditions. And, um, we weren't sure who we were gonna cast yet for the sister. And we didn't feel like we quite had it yet. And then she, literally, was maybe the last person that came in. And she came in to the casting office and just nailed it. Just... We were all laughing so hard. She completely became the sister. I think we did the audition with the Ecstasy scene and the horses scene. And, uh, she was just so, so funny. She walked out of that room and we immediately went, "Wow, well, that's Jeanie right there." Same thing happened with Sam for Eric, by the way. He was just so, so funny in that role. That's the kind of guy Mike is. So, think on that... This is one of my favorite Zac jokes of the whole movie here. "Think on that, Dad." Having us laugh. You can see Dave's little... Dave's at his little art station there in the apartment. And that's a little thing that comes back Iater that, uh, isn't... We're not really showing you very clearly there. And then here we have the ladies. Tatiana and Alice. Aubrey Plaza and Anna Kendrick. These two, who are actually very good friends in real life and had taken random trips together to islands and to beaches in Mexico, it was really fun to put these two together. And, uh... And have that kind of built-in chemistry going in here. He's already paid. God damn it! But a lot of green screen taxi shoot that we did. You should kick us out! - You should kick us out of this cab. Little bit of a hustle on the cab driver here. Three more blocks up on the right... and then kick us out! The Apple Pay bit I really, really liked. We came up with that on set. I think that was a pitch from Andrew Cohen, one of our writers. Andrew Cohen and Brendan O'Brien... I got a good idea. ...gave us a wonderful script to start with here. The writers of Neighbors, Neighbors 2 and upcoming, The House. Um, very lucky and happy to meet and work with those guys on this. Really funny stuff. And, uh, they would also just send in new jokes every day. That's kind of the way we did things, is we had the script and then me and the writers and other on-set writers would just bring a bunch of new jokes every day to pitch and to try. And so we would always play around a little bit on-set. Jake Johnson. Your little buddy is shit-faced. Jake Johnson, who we said, "Why don't you just come to Hawaii for a couple days? "And to do that you have to be in a scene in the movie." And he said, "That sounds pretty good, man. "That's... All right, yeah. I could do Hawaii." Um, and that's literally how we got him out here. We said, "I know Jake a little bit." I said, "Hey, if I could bring you out to Hawaii for a week "would you shoot for one night?" Boom. Done. Because it's my right. Playing Ronnie the boss here. Look at these, look at these, just New York rat women here that they're playing. The hair, that's a wig we have on Anna, which was really fun. Hey, Jake. - Yeah? Um, I just want to say if you don't have anything to Say... Mmm-hmm. - ...then you don't have to say anything. You... - Does it sound like I'm... Oh, just calling this "rat women" is a little... Oh, I wasn't... Okay. - Just... I didn't think I was stretching... - Yeah, no, it's fine. -/ just want to... I just want... - Are we still recording? You're doing great. What's that? - Are we recording right now? Yeah, yeah, all this is... Yeah. - Okay. Yeah, that's what we're doing. All right. I just... - Right? Yeah, I just didn't... Okay, yeah, I just... Yeah, I'm just... It's very clearly your first time and it's... It is. - /'m just trying to help you out. Okay. No, I appreciate... I definitely want... - Okay. If you have any tips or... - Great. I just feel like I'm not doing the comments here... Okay. Okay, sure. So I should get back to this. - Of course. Yeah, yeah. Just keep breathing, and move through it. Okay, I think... Okay. - Okay. I didn't... 1... Thank you. I appreciate it. Okay. - Thank you. Okay. Um, we're in the apartment. I'm tired of living like this. I don't know if I have anything to say about this. We've got a great little package we're selling here, man. A week in a tropical paradise... with two fun-loving, yet surprisingly well-read bros? I'm just gonna talk. Um... We got the boys here. So the ladies in the apartment, first of all. These were both sets that were built in real locations, downtown Honolulu. Um... We found spaces for the boys' apartment, girls' apartment right around the corner from each other. And then we built these kind of walls up against the real windows and built out our little apartments here. We met this couch on Craigslist. This was actually the scene, this scene right here, was one of the earliest scenes that we had worked with and that we shot for the chemistry read. We did a little chemistry read early on before we ever got into production with Adam Devine and Zac Efron. I think Zac was shooting a movie in Atlanta. We all flew out there and did a chemistry read and this was one of the scenes we did to see the brothers together. And, uh, obviously it was great. And we loved seeing Adam and Zac together. And, uh, so this is one that had kind of... We actually shot this... One of the last things we shot in the movie. Um, but they had had it in their mind for six, seven months by that point. I love the... We got these girls together, really, really fun. This was a last-second shoot we did just to get a little sense of the ad going viral and going around the world. And we got all these great performers, all these great actresses to just come in and do little cameos for that little thing here. You guys want to go to a wedding? Got a little classic date montage here. All the dates here we cast out of Hawai. This was all local casting and we found some great, great people. Those twins are actual professional gymnasts in training. And they're twin gymnasts who are very good. And luckily they were also great at acting. We got them in there. We found all these... Met all these great people. This is my buddy Bob Turton. Um, who, uh... We go way back. And, actually, we did not... Again, we did local Hawaii casting and I said, "Man, I got this bit I really want you to do. "But we're casting locally." And he just hopped on a plane and came on out. And said, "Let's do it." And Bob is one of the funniest, funniest guys. Uh, I went to college with him back in the day. And we've done some videos and shorts together. And I was so glad he could come out and be Lauralie, as I believed, what we named his persona of this guy who's in such a bad period of time in his life. He decides to try to pretend he's a girl to get this date from these boys. What did you say? - Nothing. Sounded like you said... None of this... Do you wanna fuck? None of this was scripted. None of the entire date sequence was scripted. I think the script just said they go on a bunch of dates. So we really had a lot of fun playing with this entire sequence with everyone who came in. I think, in real life the Stangle brothers ended up on... What was it, Ricki Lake? I know they ended up on, uh, the Today show. And maybe also Ricki Lake. And we got... The ad went viral. We wanted to make it a little more current. We got Wendy Williams. We got her to come out to Hawaii. We actually filmed... Even her set, we faked in Hawai. So we really did everything out there. Got to thank the Hawaii Film Board. Getting to shoot out there. It was fun. ...fo go with us to Hawaii for our sister's wedding. And I just want to reiterate... we're footing the bill for this because we're gentlemen. Free trip to Hawaii? I'm awake! Come on. Craigslist. - What's up? That's where you go to buy old patio furniture. Is there any, um... Excuse me. Is there any... ls there any water? - What's that? Is there water in here? -/s there water? - Yeah, there's... Yeah, we have water. - Is there any... Can I get a water? ls there any way to get a water? - OA, sure. /'Il... I asked you at the beginning. You didn't... You said... I know. I didn't realize. I'm sorry. I'm just... Now I'm thinking about whether I'm talking too much, based on what you said earlier, and I'm getting nervous. I think it's just drying my throat out a little bit. Okay, yeah. No, that's fine. I'll go get you water. I don't need you to get it if you can't... /'m the one working here. So... Okay. I... You can tell me where it is, I can get it. No, you have to... You're the director. And you have to do the commentary. Um, okay, I'll be right back. All right. Sorry about that. - It's fine. Thank you. You need to get over that, once and for all. Oh, man, I feel really bad asking for that water now. Oh, there is a water here. Hold on. There's a water on the floor here next to my desk. Okay, here's your... I actually found one. There was a water... There was a water down here by the desk. -/ found... - Yeah. I think I brought this... - Did you not look around you when you... We gonna go to Hawaii! Um, sorry, I just found... I think I brought it in at the... When I first walked in earlier and I forgot. Right. Okay, well, here's another one. We don't look like nice girls. Thank you. Yeah, I guess I haven't showered in a while. Oh, man. Thank you very much. I really do appreciate it. Yeah, of course. - Okay. We're gonna look respectable as fuck. Like nice girls. "Like nice girls. Like nice girls." This was actually, um... It's like that Jesus rag! "Jesus rag," one of my favorite bits. Nice girls was actually, um, an early studio note. I remember the studio coming in and saying like, "We feel like we just need to say, like, 'Let's push the nice girls angle.' "We should have the boys get told they need to bring nice girls. "And the girls need to look like nice girls." And it really worked. We ended up taking that and hitting that. And it's one of those great notes that really helps simplify and clarify a thing and everyone gets exactly what we're doing. So that's why you hear "nice girls" a couple of times. That was actually one of the earlier studio notes that I thought was a great note. That worked out a Iot. Ultimatum. - Well, we gotta figure something out... The old tomato joke is a joke that early on I was told, "You know, you can cut this joke. You don't need that joke." And I said, "No. This joke is what the movie's about." Not really what it's about. But the vibe of the movie. I fell way too in love with the old tomato joke. And I think our first cut of this movie, the editor assembly of this, was about five hours long. Because we had done so many alts and so much improv. And they just put everything in. And, I think, when I showed my producers one of the three-and-a-half-hour cuts that I was like, "You know, this isn't a real cut. "This is just kind of everything we're working with." They were like, "I mean, you can lose so much. "You can lose this. You can lose that. You can lose the old tomato joke." And I was like, "No, no, no, not... All those other things, sure, "but the old tomato joke we keep." So you can imagine that joke in a three-hour thing that's way too long. And, uh, well, it ended up in the movie. As I predicted. Anna had a really fun, uh... We had a lot of fun with this. There's a lot of stuff on the DVD, deleted scenes and bit runs about other lies she does here. This is a really fun reveal. See these girls in these nice dresses here. And coming up, we've got one of our first big stunts of the movie. This was always really fun. We had a great, great stunt coordinator, Gary Hymes, who did all of our stunts on this movie. He did the stunts for Terminator and Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. And he was great. So any time we had something like this, with getting hit by a car... That's a big stunt, but it's always really fun watching the audience watch this. And this is like one of those moments early on where I think it clicks in like, "We're doing this kind of movie. We're doing, like, a giant car hit. "And she's perfectly okay." It just sucks you right in. This was really fun to shoot. This is, again, downtown Honolulu. Outside of the one bar we could fake as New York. And if you look very closely, I shouldn't even say it, people will hate that I say this, the effects guys, there's a split second shot when Tatiana hits the car from inside the car looking out the windshield at her body. And in that shot, it only lasts a couple frames, and it's a blur, but there is a palm tree. That is the one palm tree that's in our New York footage. Um, but obviously it's so fast no one sees it. Are you okay? I am now. I saved her life! - She's okay! She's okay? - I saved her life! Thank you! I think, I'm pretty sure a lot of this, the just yelling, "I saved her life," and a lot of the yells, that was... Adam can go very hot. And Adam just added a lot of that in and it was so perfect. It's really fun to just tell Adam like, "Hey, go nuts on this one. Get excited." And he will. He can just go at 100% all day long. And it is the most fun thing to watch. So hard! This is always a really fun scene for me. This is like, when we did the editing, it was kind of always like, "Let's get to here faster. How do we get to here faster?" 'Cause it's really just seeing our four leads all together for the first time. And see it play out. See the con of the girls play out. See the boys falling right into it. So this was always kind of like, especially in editing we realized, "This is where it starts to feel so fun. "Let's just get here as fast as we can. "Let's get through all that other stuff." Got two waters now. It's actually quite nice. We can hear all of that. - Hmm? You drinking. Oh, I'm sorry. SO sip quieter? "How's the hedging coming? You been hedging? You hedged much?" Yeah, we're picking that up. - Picking that up still. Corporate greed, bailouts. Should I, should I cover... Does this help? On the floor of the NASDAQ and the U.N. Um... If I cover the microphone with my hand, does this help? That makes it worse. - Okay. Sorry. Um, just try not to drink anything. "But what I do have..." Just my mouth gets a little dry, so... It's not important. Uh, anyway. Um... "Skills that make me a nightmare..." Zac nailing the Liam Neeson impression in this. You may notice Zac Efron throws out a couple great accents in this movie. He's got the Australian at the bar at the top. He's got Liam Neeson here. He's about to have all of this different liquor bottle drawings which all have a different accent. And he added a lot of that in in a great way. He does a little research for each one. And he nails each one of those accents. That's a little post joke we put in. Little post image. Little ADR joke from Zac right there. A lot of dick jokes in this movie. Not gonna say I'm proud of it. Not gonna say I'm ashamed of it. Just gonna say there's a lot of dick jokes in this movie. And it is what it is. Done. Some of them are kind of smart. Maybe a couple smart dick jokes, maybe not. Maybe I just tell myself that to make myself fee! better. I don't know. What's the hardest thing about being a teacher? I don't know. Oh, um... The hardest thing... I think this was the whole... We did a whole run here with Adam and Aubrey that was just kind of, none of that, was not in the script, either. We're just like, "Let's check in with these two." And we Set up two cameras. We did a lot of cross-shooting on this movie. And we just let people go through 10 different ideas. And try a bunch of jokes. God, Anna's so, so funny here. Matt Clark, our wonderful DP on this, who... I know! I said, "I got to warn you, I want to cross-shoot a lot of this movie." And cross-shooting's where you have two cameras pointing opposite directions, so you can capture both people talking to each other at once. And some DPs won't do it 'cause some DPs, they just want to perfect the light facing one direction, 'cause it's the lighting that, really, you have to tweak. And you start worrying about compromises if you cross-shoot. But Matthew Clark took that challenge and ran with it. And we cross-shot so much on this movie. Um, probably even more than I needed to, I had him do. And he just did a great job with it. I love the look of it, that it doesn't look too Photoshop, airbrushed, perfectly shiny and bright on everything. I like that it kind of feels a little real world-y. I think Matt did a great job on that. ... like we're talking it over... like we're not sure if we wanna go or not. Oh, like... So fun to see Anna do these big jokes. I feel like... This was the fun part for me. I feel like I've never got to see Anna Kendrick do this kind of stuff before in a movie, ina hard R movie. Yes! And, God, I just think she really nailed it and knocked it out of the park. I think, Aubrey, who's so great, and you kind of expect that she can do it. And I think it was a little more like, I think, for the audience it's a little more of seeing her in a new kind of movie. Which I think is really, really fun. Here we are, shooting at the wonderful Turtle Bay Resorts. Um, on the north shore of Oahu, Hawaii. We turned into our little fake resort. A funny story about this hotel, this is the exact hotel that they shot Forgetting Sarah Marshall at. And that movie takes place almost, the whole thing in that hotel as well. So, first of all, we did a lot, me and my DP, we did a lot of like, "Let's make sure things look different. "We're not copying the same locations and shots of Forgetting Sarah Marshall." The other funny thing is, in the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I'm pretty sure they call the resort Turtle Bay. Say, "Welcome to Turtle Bay." And it was an advertisement for Turtle Bay in a way. Turtle Bay was like, "Yeah, we'll give you a better rate on the room if you mention our name." So, when we started scouting and decided to shoot the movie in Hawaii, we were like, "We can do it at Turtle Bay. "We'll get a little discount on the locations." And the management for Turtle Bay read our rated R script and they were like, "Absolutely you cannot say this takes place at Turtle Bay. "Please, please don't show any of our Turtle Bay signage. "We don't want any of our guests to think our masseuses would do this at Turtle Bay. "We don't want to think we condone..." And we were like, "Oh, my God, can we shoot it?" They were like, "Yeah, please shoot here. You just have no discount." And, no, I mean, they were a lot of help. But we had to cover every sign that said "Turtle Bay" and make our own. And make our own logos and hotel names. And I always thought that was pretty great. And, you know, there's some stuff in Sarah Marshall, I think that's rated R. I mean, there's a penis flopping around in that movie. Hey, Jake. - Yeah. I just want to say you're doing great. Okay. Just calm down. - Okay. You've said "penis" and "dick..." - And, again, I'm just... About 10 or 15 times... - Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the Iast, like, five minutes, so. I don't think... I think it was just, kind of, the once. Oh, no. It was many, many times. Okay. And just, Margie, I'm sorry, but... And, again, is there any way to go back now to where you cut in and rerecord from there on out? Um, oh, you know, that's a great idea. Why don't I just forget that this is my job and that I know what's going on. And why don't you come in here and you take care of all of that. No, obviously I'm not... I just presumed that if you... Can only I hear you? 'Cause I'm... We're recording right now, right? Yeah, we're recording. But, you know, what you do when you presume, you make a... I think that's the wrong word for that phrase. So anyway, I just want to let you know that you're doing great. And this is really good stuff. Just remember to breathe and relax, and just enjoy it. Okay. I just want to do the commentary. Just kind of run it through and... Sure. - I just feel like I've heard a lot of... I've listened to a lot of commentaries. Have you? - Yeah. I think... Yeah, what do you mean, have I? That surprises me. Why does that surprise you? I mean, it's just, you know, you're doing great. ...With Alice. Well, I just don't think I've ever heard the sound engineers coming in during a DVD commentary. So I'll say that, as well. Well, you know, normally we don't. But if it's someone who's just kind of aimless, we'll try to help out a little bit. Um... So, my commentary has been aimless? It's been... No, it's great. It's so exciting. I mean, I don't even see how... Even if it was aimless, I don't see how telling someone that helps them. 'Cause now all I'm doing is thinking about if this commentary's aimless or not. Okay, so we're in a new scene, so if you want to... I am a teacher, yeah. Uh... The key to teaching children is repetition. Uh, okay. Uh... The meet and greet. Uh... I think I missed talking about the whisper scene. Another good dick joke in there. And, uh, this meet and greet, very colorful, very poppy. This, uh... sorry, I'm just really in my head now about this aimless thing. And I feel like it makes me sound more aimless. No, no, no. You're doing great. That was just constructive criticism, you know. Aimless rambling is what you're doing. And that's constructive, honestly. It doesn't. I'm trying to find the constructive part of that criticism. Um, the part where I said, "Aimless rambling is..." Right. So, okay. Like, build off that. You know, I'm good. I'll take, I'll do... I'm okay if it's aimless. -/'m good from here on out. - Are you sure? Yeah, I'll just be good from here on out, okay? All right. I'll just keep him on a leash. And there's no way we can Start over or go back? Unfortunately there is no way. This is set in stone. Okay, Sure, sure, sure. Uh, all right. So, listen. This was our first day of filming. And, uh, filming this meet and greet here. And, uh, there was a lot of very specific things that happened in this scene. And, uh, uh... God, this is so fucking aimless now. Jesus. Talk about the lady in yellow. If this is bad news, I'm gonna eat your ass. Sorry. - Okay. The bridesmaid, Becky. That was our horrible bridesmaid, Becky, played by the wonderful Mary Holland. Um, yeah, I should talk about everyone in the scene. Mary was great as a bridesmaid. Mary actually... I know Mary from the UCB world out in Los Angeles. And I think I had her come out and audition for, like, five different roles in the movie. I think it was kind of like, "I don't know how, where you're gonna be in this movie. "I just know I want you in the movie." And, um, we were lucky enough to get her. This whole scene, this whole sequence, by the way, of the meet and greet was our first day filming. And if there's any tip I can give to a first-time filmmaker, it is this. This was one of the biggest mistakes I made on the movie. Don't have your first day of shooting on your first studio movie be a giant meet and greet scene with 100 extras and seven main characters all in the same scene. And all of the actors on their first day. And everyone feeling each other out. And also, outdoors in Hawaii, where the weather changes every five minutes. lt was sunny. It was cloudy. The wind's going crazy all day. It was a real trial by fire at the top of this shoot. We spent our first two or three days out in this location with so many people. So, if you're out there making something and you want any tips, ask for the schedule, first day, first day you're shooting, to be indoors, two guys eating pizza. That's really the best you can hope for. Just two people sitting at a table talking back and forth. Maybe one person. If you have any scenes with just one of your actors in there, get going that way. Everyone's getting to know each other. You're feeling each other out. You're figuring out how to work with the crew. The actors are warming up to the characters. You don't need 100... You don't need to figure out where to put 100 people and how to get seven of your leads in there. That's crazy. You can do that week two. You can do that week two on a movie. That was the one crazy thing. But I will say, after we did that day one and two, we were kind of ready for anything for the rest of the shoot. Where are you going? Hi! So you know what? I guess, do it. I guess, do do it. I guess, do shoot with as many people as you can. 'Cause it kind of all felt downhill from here. Um... I'm fine. Yeah! Let's just forget about the past... God, yeah, we were out here for a couple days. This is, again, at the wonderful Turtle Bay, which I highly recommend to go out and stay there with you, your loved ones, your family. Um... I mean, we're drinking 'em like they're shots... but I don't think... But the wind, I mean, I hate to even bring it up, but if you just watch these scenes and watch people's hair or the backgrounds, you will see that the wind was just going crazy. So many takes where just the wind went in front of people's faces that we're trying to cut around here. So many shots, some shots are in the sun, some shots are cloudy, that we've spent days in our color correction, trying to even out. It was great. This is the wonderful Alice Wetterlund who plays cousin Terry here. You may recognize Alice from Girl Code and Silicon Valley. I swear I was watching Season 1 of Silicon Valley right when we were casting this, and saw Alice. And then she came in and read for us for this. And, oh, my God, she's so funny. Her and Adam in the scene, we have... There was just a ton of footage on the floor of these guys playing back and forth here. And she really became cousin Terry a little bit. Anytime the camera was on, she would end up being a very method actress, which I really liked. She really scarily became this crazy, rich asshole of cousin Terry. Very aggressive here. I like this little offensive sex song here. By the way, the real Mike and Dave Stangle right here. This is their cameo. They came in, they came down to visit the set. We wanted to try to work them in. And got one of the better jokes in the movie there. The old chlamydia joke comes out of those guys. And why do you think you're such a hotshot? Um, the real Mike and Dave came to set and you think maybe the antics that these guys are known for in their book or the story of this movie is a little overdone. They, pretty sure, showed up drunk to the set. They had already been drinking that whole morning. And then after we shot a couple takes, I was like, "Hey, you guys, if you could try to stand here more "and look this way more... "Try this." And they were like, "Hey, yeah, sorry if we're screwing this up. "We are just gone right now. "We've been drinking a lot of the wine, too, "In these cups that are being passed around." And that's not real wine. Like, the trays that the waitresses have in the background of that scene are filled with either rancid wine or just dark liquids to look like wine. And the Stangle brothers immediately got on set and started grabbing everything that they thought was a real alcoholic drink and downing it. So, they're the real deal. That is a true story. From the meet and greet. Well, from before that. One second. Um, Tatiana and Alice here kind of letting loose, letting their guard down a little bit after a long day of pretending to be nice girls. And then poor Mike just still trying to push it way too hard here. ...do whatever you wanna do. Being a little bit inappropriate. 'Cause that's what we were doing before. They've got Cockbusters. We had a fun run there of different porn names for Anna to try while we were shooting that scene. Which was very fun. She says the craziest stuff in her sleep. It looks like his dick is gonna pop. It's So veiny and hard. This is also... My student. I'm doing a Skype class session... This is one of the scenes, I think we have an extended version of this scene on the DVD. There's a lot of... He walks, if you notice, Adam walks up to the door with a bucket of ice and we used to have a lot of dialogue about that ice that is no longer in the movie. It's fun when you're shooting, and especially for me, I think, first studio feature, ... you are getting an A plus. I just wanted to make sure I got all the possibilities. Try a bunch of different lines. Try a bunch of jokes. And then you get into that edit room, and you are just lifting as much as you Can away as possible. Just trying to make it go like, find the joke, find the one that works best. Boom, move on. Boom, move on. Keep the story moving. This actually, this whole sequence of the girls here is from a cut scene in the movie. It's from the bocce ball sequence, which they even used in our trailer a little bit. And it's a great sequence that's on the DVD. And this is actually from them walking up to the bocce game. And that sequence is cut. But we still had to somehow capture the vibe that these girls were in their own element. And being themselves a little more and deciding to have fun. And so we ended up using that shot of them walking up the beach and stealing drinks by themselves before they join the group to kind of get that idea across a little bit. But it's part of this whole other sequence that's now just a DVD special feature. Much like this commentary. Jake, this is the DVD. "Welcome..." What? "...to Jurassic Park." Um, you just keep saying "on the DVD." This is a DVD special feature. But you could just say "on here." - Right. On here. Well, yeah, but it's not on here, the commentary track, it's... Do you currently know what this is for? Why do you need to tell me that, though? Why are you even telling me that? l'm sorry, Margie. - You're fine. I just want to make sure you know what's going on. I mean, does it really matter if I say "on the DVD" or "on here"? If people are watching it, the worst that happens is it's a little redundant to say "the DVD." Okay, if you don't care about maintaining any reality or like... What are you talking about, "maintaining reality"? Why are we having this discussion right now? Look, you know what? You're right. I'm just, I'm... What am I talking about? I've just done a million of these and... No, that's not... I know you've done this a lot. That's not what I'm trying to say. Okay. Look. I forgive you. Okay? I forgive you. This is great. I'm having a lot of fun. You're doing so well. This is where the dinos ran in the prairie! Really? Yeah. I'm a T-Rex. I'm coming to get you! Okay, thank you. Are you crying? - No. I'm not crying. What? Just, thank you. Wasn't this where Jurassic Park was filmed? This scene right here? Yeah, this is actually where they shot Jurassic... Yeah, how did you know that? Yeah, this is where they shot Jurassic Park. Yeah, I can tell. This was the real location where... And I think they shot some of Jurassic World here, too. And by the way, so fun to get to go shoot where they shot Jurassic Park. That's like a little kid dream, to go shoot in that location for the joke of ATV-ing where they shot Jurassic Park. This is also, this ranch, by the way, Kualoa, is where they not only shot Jurassic Park and Jurassic World, it's where they shot... They have signs up all over for movie tours. It's where they shot Godzilla. It's where they shot 50 First Dates, part of it. The most excited I was by a sign was there's an area that's apparently where they shot part of the movie You, Me and Dupree. So, we join a pretty special lineage of movies, all the way from Jurassic Park to You, Me and Dupree that have shot in this beautiful location, when shooting in Hawai. I still think we should go around. She just got some serious air, bro! Um, this sequence was a blast to shoot. And, again, the stunts and stunt drivers that we brought in on this were great. And we had to find the smallest, the best smallest ATV stunt riders in the country. Yeah, baby! To match, to body-double match the girls who are the ones who are obviously good at this and doing the tricks. So, that is a male ATV stunt driver. And one of the smallest male stunt drivers we could find to double for Aubrey Plaza. And same goes with Anna Kendrick. Um... And I think there was, we initially had a female ATV stunt rider coming in and I feel like something happened with her schedule. She had a show to do, she had an X-Games-type event to go do. And then, so she dropped out, and so we had to find, um, small men. Small men with... Your turn, Mike! Don't be a pussy! ... with, uh, adrenaline junkies, basically. I'm not gonna do it. Um... Mike, it'll turn me on... I think the only disappointing part of this scene was for Zac. He just wanted to ride that ATV so bad. Zac is a guy who already knows how to ride ATVs. And was so into being on that ATV. Like, every time I said, "Cut," he'd be off zipping around, driving around, going up the mountains on ATVs. And, literally, it's like Aubrey and Anna get to drive this ATV, and look like they're jumping it and have little shots like this. Where they're all actually on it and driving it. Adam and then Aubrey did this. And poor Zac is the only guy, because Dave is the character with enough common sense to not do this jump, that couldn't go zipping around on this while we filmed. And that was, I think, the only, only bummer of shooting this scene, was for him. Oh, boy. Oh, no, God! God, this sequence was originally... A lot of people comment on how long this jump is, how long he's in the air, how long I stretch this sequence out for. And I just want you to know, originally, it was another 25 seconds longer, that Adam was just screaming, floating down on her. We originally had it so long. But this is actually one of the scenes that changed the least from our rough cut of the movie that was three hours long to the final version. That ATV sequence was kind of always in that form. Our little transition here inside, off the blackness, onto Mary's wonderful, horrified face. Your face is making me think it's gonna be bad. This is one of those scenes that where if I'm really analyzing the movie, it doesn't make sense if you think about it. But you're having so much fun after that surprising ATV hit and watching her face and seeing everyone make jokes, that no one thinks about it. But if I actually looked critically at it, I'm going, "So she got hit in the face. She should be dead." Right? She's not dead. She should be dead. And then we cut to the next room and she's just standing up in the middle of a room with an ice bag on her face. She's not sitting down. And I was looking at her. And everyone's standing staring at her to wait to see what the face looks like. I have little rationalities I can tell myself to get around this and how it can work. "Maybe it swelled up. "The bruising got worse under the ice bag." Blah, blah, blah. But if you really think about it, it probably wouldn't go like this. That's what they call suspension of disbelief, guys. Welcome to movie making 107. Enough dancing! You and you... outside, now! God, this was So fun. Just telling, letting Stephen Root get mad at these guys. Calm down. Do you understand they've deformed our little girl... We were really worried this joke wouldn't work. She looks like Seal, for Christ's sake! "Looks like Seal." And we were kind of like, "Is that too dated? Do kids today..." And it kills. Everyone always loved that joke. I always thought... I had like three alts for that joke. I always thought we'd change it. Never had to. This was great, coming up with this on the day. Which actually is based on my own life. If I'm ever too tired and run into one of those doors, I can never figure out how to close them. And I asked Stephen Root if he could try trying to close it with the door that won't go all the way 'cause the other one's open. And, God, he's so funny. He's so great at just boiling over at these guys. There was another door, though. He can just close the other door. What? Well, he didn't see the other door. He just closed the one. But he was trying to close one but it was the other door that was open. Yeah, Margie, that's the joke. That he kept trying to close the door but there was another one to close. But he kept trying to close the other one. Did he not see the other door? I can't, I can't get into this with you right now, Margie. Okay. Everyone gets the joke. And this is not, I don't think this is... I mean, you said you've been doing this for a while. But I cannot believe that you think this is the right time to get into this. When there's a room, and there's usually one door, but sometimes there are two. And if there's two, I don't know why you wouldn't be aware of that. Well, to each his own, I guess. Agree to disagree. - Um... It's all fucked now. It's all fucked. Yeah. Yeah, okay. So, yeah, you agree to disagree. Great. Okay, well, yeah, I agree to disagree. Sounded like you wanted to say no. Sounded like you wanted to say you don't agree to disagree. I don't want to make this any harder than it already is. Do all the booths in the building have the mic inside your room like that? The mic to... - No, it's just this one. Yeah, sure. That's what I thought. Perfect. Um, let's get back to the old movie here. Thanks again for letting me join your spa day, ladies. I'm getting a little feedback in my mic here. Um... This is a fun little run here. Spa day. This is, so Alice now is trying to... Feels really bad about ruining the bride's day here, since she was a bride herself. And understands how big of a deal that would be. She's really trying to make it up to Jeanie. But poor Alice. She just, her heart's in the right place, the right intentions but she's gonna go a little crazy here. I didn't actually end up having one, So... Why? Every bride needs a bachelorette party. I'm sorry... By the way, Anna did great with that run, that giant run about dressing up like a prostitute. I'm pretty sure I threw that on her. She had never seen that written down. lt was maybe the third or fourth take where we tried something new. And I said, "Hey, try this really long run about your..." And just instantly, the next take, had it memorized. Had it better than I told it to her with perfect timing, perfect jokes. She just nailed it. She's awesome. Anna Kendrick might be the most professional person I've ever worked with. Little facts about working with her that you might want to know. She is always, always has her lines ready. Always on set ready to go. When you're filming a movie, you kind of have your actors, they take a break, they sit down between takes. You have, what's called, a second team of stand-ins to come in and adjust the lighting on... And then, when you Say, "Second team out, first team in," that's when your actors come back to set to start filming. Anna was always, you'd Say, "Second team out, first team..." Anna would be there. Waiting for everyone, Anna was always the first person back on set. Another fun thing about Anna, she's a woman of the world. She's a very knowledgeable person. She was always reading when she was in between takes, off set. Which is great. She's always got a book of new subject that she's into. And there was about three weeks on this movie where she was reading a book on the rise of Nazism in 1930s and '40s, Germany. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. How did you know that? It's one of my favorite books. Physically, no penetration. Why? /'m a history buff. All right. All right. Well, I hope so. Anyway, that's what Anna was reading as well on set. But the funny image would be, every now and then between takes, you'd look over at her sitting in her chair and she was just... You just saw her eyes popping over this giant book with a swastika on it. And we were like, "Anna, you got to... Let's put a different cover on that thing. "It just does not look right, that you're reading that book." Poor, sweet little Anna Kendrick with a giant swastika in front of her face. Oh, my God. How have I not Started talking about Kumail yet? When we had to cast this scene for the masseuse, whose name is Keanu, I don't think that's in the movie anymore, but in the script his name is Keanu, I wanted Kumail to do this and he... I think we went out to him and we asked him to do this scene. Said, "Would you come in and do a cameo and be this crazy masseuse?" And immediately he said yes. We got the word, he said, yes, he's in. And then he read the scene. And three hours later it was, "He needs to talk to the director before he'll agree to do this." And we actually... That was our problem with this scene is how do we explain that the scene of two naked people rubbing butts on each other for a happy ending massage, that this will be funny and not crazy and weird and something you'll regret doing. So, I think Kumail was actually in Greece with his wife on a vacation. Like, the first vacation they had had in a couple years. And he took a break from it to Skype-call me. I was in Hawaii, prepping. And he was just like, "Listen, man, I just got to know. "What are we gonna be showing here? And what kind of scene?" Like, "I'd love to do it, but are you gonna screw me on this?" Basically, he was saying, "Are you gonna screw me on this?" And I showed him some storyboards I had made up for this scene that had some of the crazy positions they were in. And I just sent him a picture of one or two of those. Said, "This is what I'm thinking." And he instantly was like, "Oh, I get it. It's a full comedy scene. "It's full weird-position comedy scene. I'm in." And then, also, three weeks later he shows up buff as hell. I did not know he was packing muscles like that. And he said he was worried about doing the nude scene. So he started hitting the weights even more. I mean, we're alone. How's Mike? Um, this scene we shot in an actual sauna. We did almost no set work on this entire movie. Everything was real, which is great for the production value of the background of Hawaii. But, God, this was a tight, this was maybe an 8'x6' sauna that we just actually shot in. So it was real tight to get in here and try to get these shots. And obviously, this scene, even from the early stage of the script, this was kind of the question of like, "And, uh, are we keeping the sauna scene in the movie? "What do you think of the sauna scene?" That was always the biggest question about this movie, is that, "Do you think this is the kind of movie "that keeps the sauna scene or loses it?" And I always thought you kept it. Originally in the script, cousin Terry was a man. It was a man. And we came upon the idea, someone had suggested during the prep of this movie, of, "What if you make it a woman?" And it's kind of a woman who's really forward and kind of almost a predator-ish, just a bisexual. It's not that she's straight, it's not that she's gay. It's just that she is down for anything, is her vibe. And so we decided to... We changed the role maybe a week or two out from production. Changed that role to a woman. Which I think adds a fun layer that you haven't really seen before in a movie. I love these little cut-ins here on Mike's face here and the sound she's making. Mike, I'm coming. - No! Oh, my God! I think that was, we were on set. And besides Adam screaming, we just said, "What's the worst thing that could happen "If you've already walked in and see your sister in the middle of a happy ending? "What's the worst possible thing that the sister could say to you?" And the answer was, just looking you dead in the eyes and saying, "Mike, I'm coming." And that's where that came from on the day, I believe. Terry! Poor Mike, just falling apart here. Shut the fuck up, Mike. Ugh. From one to the next. Cannot handle it. I'm gonna kick your ass. Adam Devine at 100% again, wonderfully. Poor, poor Mike. Mike's... This is where, I think, actually, you go from Mike being like an overly sex-crazed, like, "Who is this guy," to like, "I actually start to feel a little bad for him here." Here and in the next scene in the lobby with Tatiana. Um... God, so funny. And here we go. Back to Kumail again. Kumail is great. Kumail and Sugar were great together here. Just playful. And it was so fun having Kumail in to shoot because we would do the scene and then he would just come over to me and Say, "Hey, what other jokes do you want to try? "What should we... Should we try this, should we try that?" And he was so fun and great about just, "Let's keep thinking. "What else could be fun here? "What other jokes should we try?" And we would just sit on the side of the set for five, 10 minutes before each setup and just come up with more stuff for them to play with. And this is a perfect example of Kumail. You could develop cancer. Going off on his own, "Develop cancer." It's great. Um... Wait, you did that? These two. It's so funny. And that was another thing in the script is that we had to try to balance, and it's interesting. You'll see in the deleted scenes, there's a lot of scenes that got cut. But it was making this a true four-hander and balancing Alice and Tatiana and Mike and Dave throughout this movie, and having four leads is like... We shot a lot of stuff to make sure we could put it together in different ways. 'Cause when you're trying to balance that many people, I just wanted to make sure we didn't get back to the edit room and go like, "Oh, we wish we had this." Or, "We need this moment." And in truth, we had so much. We had too much stuff that we couldn't fit it all. The movie would have been two-and-a-half hours long. And I kind of think you don't want it to go that long if you're doing a comedy. You want to get people in the theater. Make them laugh. Make the story work. Feel for the characters a little bit. Send them on their way. But I think there's a lot of deleted scenes and extra jokes and bits on this that we put on the disc here. God, this, the banyan trees, by the way, so pretty to shoot in. And this is one of those scenes, these emotional connection scenes that I remember shooting and going, "You know what? We'll probably cut this way down in post "because we've got so much crazy, funny stuff going on. "We'll probably want to get back fo it." And the opposite is true. We got into the edit room, and you put this together and it's like, "Yeah." What a great reminder to check back in with the characters and where they are and what they want out of things. And we just were like, "What else do we have? What other lines did we try? "Let's put everything in this scene." Um, and it's so nice to take a break for a second with these two. And just re-establish the stakes and where we are. And I think it helps. I think those scenes with Anna and Zac in the movie help drive the whole movie and help reset for the comedy in the next scenes after that. And that was... Yeah, that was fun to see working as we put it together. Yeah, I'm totally overreacting. God, this is another, one of the ones from the first time I read the script. Tatiana's little run here about what she did and what it's like. lt was one of those things in the script where it was like, "Yeah, we got to do this in the movie. I haven't seen this scene before." It's just like Tinder. We did, we probably tried about 50 different things that we made poor Aubrey do and describe here before we got it down to three things for the movie. ...contracting them. Are you deliberately trying to hurt me? Is that what you're doing? What? No! I was just trying to get RiRi tickets... to make my best friend feel better, okay? We're on vacay. By the way, Adam Devine. Have we talked about him yet? What a great dude. We were lucky on this movie. Literally, everyone we... I'm so happy with our cast. Not only our main cast, our main four, but our secondary cast. I mean, just literally couldn't have asked for a better group of people. Not only with how funny and talented they are, but just great dudes. I didn't really know Adam very much before this movie. We had met a couple times about various things that we never really worked together. And then, I mean, when we first met about this movie, he was like, "I feel like I am Mike. "Like I know how to do this role more than any other role I've read." And I think he was right. He just really put everything into it. And always, he was always the best about, "Do we need another take? "Do you want me to try this?" He'll do it. No complaints. Always full of energy. And so funny, man. God, I just want fo... Hey, Jake. You coughed a second ago. ls there a bug in the room? Not that I know of. Did I cough? So you didn't choke on a bug? Made it up. All of it. No. What do you mean? I don't think I did. Why? Has that happened? You just coughed and it sounded like... I just assumed you choked on a bug. Well, I don't think that's a reasonable assumption, Margie. I mean, unless you know something I don't about the bugs in this room. I don't think I choked on a bug. That's the thing about a sound booth. It's always bugged. Oh, come on, man. Is that a pun? ls that what you're doing? Did you just try to put a joke on the DVD commentary? I don't... That was just a fact. I don't joke. I don't understand humor. Mmm-hmm. - So, I don't... Is that what you do when you work in the booth for this long? Do you just sit on something like that for, like, 10 years and just Say, "One of these days I'm gonna put the bug joke in. "I'm just gonna hit the mic button and pop on in"? Um, I will be telling my family and friends about this commentary and the fact that I'm a part of it, if that's okay. - Oh, my God. Yeah, I guess. I mean, I think that's clearly what's going on here. You lied? By the way, I think there is a way to stop and go back and rerecord sections. I know earlier you told... I mean, it's too late now. We're an hour into the movie. But I think... Yeah, there's no way we can go back now. There was a couple points at the beginning where we could've. We could've, right? I knew it. We're too deep, we're in too deep, as they Say. Well, for the first time, I agree with you. This is just what it is by this point. And I've got way too busy of a day to redo this. So it is what it is. You got any thoughts on this scene here? "Love hurts." How did they get up in that tree? "Love wounds..." We just had... We just stepped them. We had a ladder. They just crawled up in the tree. Climbing trees is dangerous. I don't have children, but if I did, I would say, "Please, avoid climbing trees because when you fall you could hurt yourself." I mean, I guess in a way that's reasonable. But, also, kids love climbing. I mean, you got to climb a tree. Kids love climbing trees. You got to let your kids climb trees. Well, I'll never have children anyway, so it doesn't matter. That's not... I don't want to open that door with you, Margie. I'd actually love to talk about it if you are... Yeah, no, I had a feeling you might. And I don't, let's not make that... Let's do that... That's another disc, okay? I just, I'm not sure if I'm firm on that decision to not have kids, or if I should consider... Should I freeze my eggs? A clear line in the sand. Well, all 1 can say is I would support you if you did. l'm gonna support anyone who wants to take that route. And it's a decision you got to make for you. All right, but let's really not go farther than that into this discussion. If/ freeze my eggs, will you go in on it with me? They're liars! No, I won't go in on it with you. It costs a lot of money to do that. /'m sure it does. But that's not my problem, Margie. I mean, you can decide to freeze those eggs or not, that's up... You said you'd support me, though. You got... I know you work, Margie. I know you work. I'm looking at you do your job right now. If you want to save up... Well, no... I mean, how much do you need? Uh... Tatiana was jerking off our cousin Terry. Are you crying? Cousin Terry has a dick? No. It's hard to see you through the glass. /'m fine. Let's just... - Oh, my God, I'm so sorry. We can talk about it later. Listen, if you need help, let's talk. No, no, no. I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. I can't do that, David. Oh, boy. What? I mean, just... I just had a kid. And I love having a kid. And I get it if you need... I mean... I would love to know what that feels like. She really had to pee? Anyway it's... Let's talk... Let's seriously... Let's, you and me, let's talk afterwards. /... Okay. - Okay. That'd be great. I can't believe what's happening here. I do want to remind you, though, about the heavy breathing. Thank you, thank you. Appreciate that. I'm gonna walk in on Mom... I ama heavy breather. I'm kind of worried about breathing heavily in this thing. Careful, when you scratch your face it brushes the mic and then it fucks me up. But have you seen this Push Pop scene? I forgot to talk about this Push Pop scene. Um, love the... Zac went full Brad Pitt in Se7en here. He did a full what's-in-the-box on what's-the-Push-Pop. Also, a little thank you to my good friend, Lauryn Kahn. A hilarious writer who I know from back when I started at Funny Or Die, and she started at Gary Sanchez Productions, who we're out of the same office. And we've been friends ever since that website launched. And she was one of our on-set writers. She came out for two or three weeks pitching jokes. And, um, she pitched that phrase Push Pop. I think, initially, we had a different phrase in there and she's like, "Let's try 'Push Pop." It was great. You're out of control! By the way, we cut right out of this shot before Tatiana's about to throw a drink in Becky's lap. Which you can see all about it on the deleted scenes. There's a really funny runner of Tatiana continues to throw her champagne glass into Becky's lap and make it seem like she peed her pants. And that was one of the things I hated losing in this movie as we got it down to time. It was a really funny runner throughout the movie. Talk about the centipedes. Oh, there were centipedes that... Yes, I forgot. We shot... We're back at the banyan trees here, shooting at night. We shot for three nights out here. Like The Truman Show. And centipedes were falling from the tree on all the crew and actors. And they were the biggest centipedes you've ever seen. They were six, seven inches long, a centimeter thick. They were nightmare centipedes. And apparently what had happened was, people were so worried about how many bugs there were gonna be in the forest at night that they had sprayed for mosquitos the day before we shooted. And it... "Before we shooted," before we shot. And it got rid of a lot of all the mosquitoes and small bugs. But apparently it just kind of slowly stunned the centipedes 'cause they were so much bigger than the other bugs that it didn't kill them. And so, six hours later after they sprayed as it was shooting, the centipedes finally started dropping from the trees in a daze 'cause they couldn't hold on to the branches anymore. And it was raining centipedes as we shot. That is terrifying and the stuff of nightmares. And it is true. That is absolutely what happened. And then one of the crew guys took one of the centipedes and put it into a cup. And started walking around showing it to everyone while it would crawl in and out of the cup on his hand. Ugh! Did you guys eat them? No, no one ate them. That would be... You could, though. If you were trapped, that's exactly what you would eat for the protein. I would eat them without being trapped. What, why? What? Why on Earth would you do that? Well, if you want... Can we have that conversation about freezing my eggs again? I'd like to... I think we should wait. And honestly, not even for me or the commentary's sake at this point. I think for you we should wait till after this. Well, you're the director. I deserve to have a little fun. What is that? Is that... Are you mad at me? Do you agree with me? I have no idea now, Margie. This is gonna be so much fun! I just... Yeah, this is... It's gotten out of control. I apologize. I feel like I'm... I'm sorry. I feel like this is too much. It's... No, no, no. - It's... You're... You're fine. Please, don't. This is how we do it, baby. Come on. Let's just try to get through this commentary. Absolutely. Let's both do our jobs here. Right? - Absolutely, let's do that. We'll just get this thing done. - Please, Iet's do that. Um, You love that movie. We were shooting on... How's it a bad idea if you love the movie? We were shooting on a prime lens here. Probably about 40 millimeters. Oh, my God, commentaries are So... -... boring. - And we were... It's, like, what is this? - Margie. /'m just... You're talking about... -... hearing him and sitting in here. I'm listening to this guy... - Can she hear me? ...ramble on about things he thinks about. Oh, my... Do you know you put the mic on? - It's just, when... What the fuck are... What... What am I even... What is my life? She doesn't even know she put the mic on. - What is my life? I just can't believe it. I can't believe... It's just a waste of his time and my time and everybody's time. Jesus. This makes me feel really shitty about the commentary. Oh, shit. Yeah, you got the... Your elbow"s on the button! What's that? Your elbow"s on the mic button. - Did you... Hello, everyone. Oh, no, I know, I wanted that. Um, I'm just gonna adjust a couple of levels. And I'll be right back. They're two of the sweetest... Where'd she go? She's running out of the booth. All right. Our first soeaker tonight... Where... Oh, my God. Well, God, I don't know what she's doing or where she went. Fricking Margie. My eyes are dry. Just give it to me. Uh, all right, listen, let's... I'm sorry. Uh, let's get back into this. "...my speech." Doing a little Chris Rock here. God, I'm sorry. I'm just thinking about, I don't know what's going on with her right now. She's talking about these eggs. She's talking about how boring commentaries are. I don't think she's happy. I don't know where she went. I'm starting to get a little scared. I feel like I should try to lock the door to this room. I don't know what's going on. Um... Why aren't you on my side, Dave? All right. Let's talk about, let's talk about this movie again right here. Fucking Zac Efron bringing it strong and hard right here. Boom. We thought this was so funny of Zac being such a good actor and just straight up yelling as seriously as he could, "I'm gonna draw. Like an artist." We even used that phrase. By the way, Lavell, our Keith. I haven't had a chance to talk about Lavell yet. So funny. Such a funny guy. Loved him on Breaking Bad. And we were able to steal him out. And, God, there's another... There's a great whole runner with him that got cut that's on the DVD that in every scene he just talks about how he's on vacation and he still hasn't been in the pool yet. That he's living in paradise and he just wants to get in that pool. But he's been so busy getting the wedding ready. That couldn't make it on. But, man, he was so funny. Um... The mics are on! - You're just fucking pissed off... Here we go, guys. ... because Tatiana finger diddled Terry. There it is! By the way, great pitch coming up here from Mary Holland who a little later here, where I was like, "If you have any ideas for this scene let me know." I told all the actors on this movie, "Anything you want to try or any ideas you have, "or jokes you want to pitch, let me know." I'm always down to try stuff 'cause that's how I run it and I want them to try things I say, so if they got things, let's try it. And that's why Mary's holding that champagne glass there. When she snaps it and breaks it in her hand, that was her pitch. That just, she said, "Can I please, please, have a glass "that I just shatter in shock and ruin my hand with?" And I said, "Absolutely. Call props." Said, "Please get breakable champagne glasses for her." And we did it. There we go. Love it, love it. And we actually had to remove it from her hand, digitally, in the next shot 'cause we're using a take where she hadn't broken it yet behind Eric there. And so, then, uh, we digitally removed it from the shot after she breaks it. They got so... This was one of those nights where it was raining. Kind of every 25 minutes we'd have to break while it rained for five minutes. And it was very hot and very humid. And Zac and Adam doing that fight was really hard on them, actually. And they got so sweaty by the end of it when they were lifting each other up. I think Adam literally almost hyperventilated at one point. When we finally cut for lunch there, um... Adam just stripped off every piece, Stripped all the way down to his underwear. Took the suit off, took the shoes off, took the socks off. He was just so hot and the air was so thick and humid that he was having trouble breathing after that. It's 'cause these guys give it their all. They're pros. By the way, you will notice that we are doing night scenes here. And we shot so many nights. It's actually rare for a comedy. I think we shot three or four weeks of nights on this movie. And it's tough. You do one week in the day then you got to switch your clock and get up where you're shooting from 8:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. all day. And we were also shooting in Hawaii in the summer. Which meant the days were really long and the nights were short. And it can really mess with your schedule and the actors' schedule getting used to shooting all through the night for weeks at a time. They usually don't do it that much on a comedy. I think we shot a lot of nights for a comedy. Drama you might see it. People just change their schedules. They're up all night for a month while they're shooting. And I think we started doing, or at least once we did, we had nightcap drinks after shooting.

0:13 · jump to transcript →

Jake Szymanski

By the way, check out those horses. Another big training stunt. We had to ship horses in from the mainland to get the properly-trained horses. 'Cause, again, there's a whole horse sequence of stunts that didn't make it into the movie, but that should be in the cut features here. We did so much work with those horses. And now it just seems like, "They have one scene where they let horses out." We spent, like, a whole week of nights filming horses. And there's so much more footage on the DVD. But that's how it goes. Got to learn to not be precious when you get in that edit room. And just follow... Make the story work. Follow the jokes, follow the story. Clean it up. This is a fun scene to shoot where these two actually connect and get serious here. We shot this over two different nights, I think. Which I was worried about breaking up the flow of the scene, how we had to shoot it. But I think we shot all the wide shots one night. And then we went in for these close-ups another night. And we shot this towards the end of our schedule and towards the end of our stay at Turtle Bay. And I remember the actors, there was a little bit of how, "We've been so goofy and crazy for so many weeks shooting this, "how are we supposed to get a little serious and shoot this scene now?" It was like we all had to take a moment and reset and Say, "Okay, how are we gonna shoot this "like a real connection and still get some jokes in there, "but make sure we don't undersell the connection here?" Can I assuage you a few questions? That's always a little tricky, to switch modes when you're kind of used to doing one thing. Pop into another. You got to make sure everyone's on the same page. ...8O people listen to me. And it's fucked up. Me, too. I'm a natural born leader. Like George Washington. Yeah. Or another leader. Oh, she's back, she's back. - Jake. Oh, yeah, hey. - Hi. Hey, Margie. All right, here's one. I had to go to the bathroom. Okay. You don't have to tell me that. - I had to pee. You don't have to Say... I don't know, why would you tell anybody that? A stranger, me, but definitely at work. Why would you... You don't have to tell me that. I just want you to know. I had to pee, okay. I was not overwhelmed, emotionally. Sure, okay. I'm not gonna press you on that. I'm just gonna let you say that and I'm gonna give that to you. I peed in there if you want fo... - You don't have to keep saying it. The more you Say it, the more it's pretty obvious that you're lying, in fact. So I would just... - Okay, why would I lie about pee? That doesn't make any sense. You were gone a long time. lll say that. I will say that. If you really want to get into it, no, I don't think you left to pee, 'cause you were gone way too Iong. And I heard very heavy breathing and heaving outside the doors. These doors are supposed to be soundproof and I heard you. Okay? So there. I don't... That must have been in your movie or something. It wasn't in the movie. Ooh! My little cameo in the movie. Margie... - Who was that guy? Not important. Listen... Dave! Hi. Now I have to pee. 'Cause you have... All this talk about pee. What's going on? Are you okay? - Me? Um, I should have done this before we started. There's no way to stop the recording? - No. We cantt. Once we start, we can't stop. It's just like a Snickers bar. Okay, I'm just gonna run really... "Just like a..." I'm gonna just run really quick. Will you, um... I know this is crazy and probably something you haven't done before, but would you just mind filling in commentary for me for the next minute here? - OA, uh... Okay. Sure. - Okay, I'm gonna run. Okay? - I've never done the... Okay. Okay, just keep it... I just don't want there to be a blank spot in this. So I'm gonna run to the bathroom. Go for it. Okay. This a really good time. Uh, Jesus. This is a naked woman. There are horses. Um... I'm a woman, Dave. Deal with it. I done... It's vagina, vagina hair. I didn't come from that bush. There's, um... He's in a Suit. This is an attractive woman. Hi, Becky! - God, your bush is huge. And then... Margie, I'm sorry, I actually don't know where... Where's the bathroom? I'm so sorry. I ran down the hall. I went to the... Where... Oh, sure. It's down the hall and it's to the right. Down the hall, to the right. Okay, is it going okay? It's going really, really good. -/ think I'm doing well. - Okay, awesome. I will be right back. Just keep going. Okay. Why the fuck would you do that? I don't think you're supposed to go into the mystery bag... the night before the wedding. This is excruciating. Um... But Mike was right about you two. Uh, different gestures. Dave, I'll be honest with you. This is a scene that was shot at nighttime. There's fire in the background. The wind feels so nice. They... You have to be careful when you shoot with fire 'cause you might get burned. I'm so thirsty! Dave, we should get in the ocean. Um, and there's a bridge. Just be quiet. Oh, my God. What is the point of any of this? /, um, can't swim. That's a fun fact about me. I never learned. Okay, okay, okay. Thank you. - Oh, God. Hey, thank you very much. Did that go okay? Yeah, my pleasure. It went really well. -/ think I got some really good info in there. - Good, good. I'm trying to think of where we're at. Where did I leave? I left in the horses scene. So, I know you didn't know a lot of the same details I know. But, uh, just fun facts about that scene. Got... What... If was shot at night. Jeanie had to be naked. There's a vagina. There was fire. You got to be careful when you shoot with fire. People got to be worried about that. And there's a thing on a bridge. And here... - I covered all of these points. You know, I'm gonna listen to this at some point. I'm amazing. What? Really? You covered all that? Yeah, I got all... I got about how fire is dangerous. Fire is dangerous. You got to have a special fire guy on set when you have any fire. Talked about naked. - They were naked. Really? Did you really talk about that? Yeah, I... Yeah. Wow. But you didn't... I mean, they're real naked... You probably didn't go into the detail of we had to cover the vagina with a merkin and all that. You probably didn't say that word. - No... Yeah, I did. Yeah, I did. It's not important. I don't even know why I'm saying that word. But mostly just sad. Listen, this is a really emotional moment of the movie here. Dad! - Don't! And, gosh, Zac doing that Rastafarian accent will always get me. And you can see behind the parents in that shot a little hint of our deleted scenes. There was an exploded pig in the background of that shot right there that is part of an entire story line about a roasted pig that did not make it into the movie. And, again, is on the deleted scenes. And it's still left over, you can see that. That scene was initially horses running through and destroying the place and digging up a roasted pig that Eric was so excited about doing a traditional pig for his Hawaiian wedding. And it's all gone now. A little 'round-the-horn here of everyone depressed the next morning. This is a real hotel room that we're shooting in here. We changed the walls, changed the furniture a little bit. By the way, have I taken the time to just stop and say how wonderful of a person Zac Efron is, and how fun it was to make an entire movie with him? Zac is one of those guys, just one of the sweetest dudes you'll ever meet. And you're not... You know what I mean? And I think it's good for people to know that he is one of the nicest, nicest guys I've ever worked with. And so good at what he does. And takes it so seriously. And always has thoughts to bring to the scene. And it was a pleasure. When I first... I actually first met Zac years and years ago for a very guerilla-style Funny Or Die video back in the day. I think, around when the 17 Again movie came out. We made a little Funny Or Die video that Zac was in. And when I first met him for this, to talk about doing this movie, which is, you know, six years after that thing. He was like, "Wait, do we know each other?" And I was like, "Yeah, back in the day we did this little Funny Or Die video "for an hour one day. It was real quick," and da, da, da. And he goes, "Yeah, yeah, I remember. We shot that that Funny Or Die video." He goes, "Man, people really thought that video was cool. "I got some, like, good props for doing that video. "Thank you so much for doing it." I was like... That was the first kind of thing after being a Disney star that people are like, "Hey, man, that's really cool that you did that." He was like, "I always loved doing that video." And I was like, "I got him." I was really, really excited and hopeful that we would actually be able to get him in the movie after that. And we did. He was in after our conversation that day. And it was really fun to spend time working on the character and working on the movie with him. It was fun to spend time with all these guys. Aubrey Plaza, I mean, come on. Who else can play the crazy Tatiana? 'Cause Aubrey is so funny and so good. And also a legit weirdo who can be a very weird person in the... And I mean that in the best way. I love Aubrey. And she's Tatiana in a way that, I think, other people, you would have known they were acting to be the crazy girl, a little bit. And I believe Aubrey somehow, a little bit more. Um... But I think occasionally... we should think about how we make... Here we go. We did a lot of work on this scene. This scene is kind of cobbled together from another scene that's not even supposed to go here that we put at the end, put at the end here. I love these girls here, kind of, learning empathy for the first time. Learning to feel for other people. Deciding they have to run off and save the wedding. Poor Mike. He's less special, but I played him so hard. They must be so mad at us! They must hate us. Fuck! I would hate us. I would fucking hate us! I hate us, man. I hate us! Believe it or not, that cut was not planned. Originally, the guy scene and the girl scene was very separate here. And then we decided to put the girl scene in the middle. 'Cause our guy scene was getting a little long. And we found that footage where they both said the same stuff and it seems very planned, and it was not. It was a very happy accident. Don't let your loser older brother... This was actually, this entire ending here was exactly what I mean about how great Zac is and how much thought he puts into it. And when we were about to film this scene, Zac called me into his room before we shot and he said, "You know, I really feel like these are brothers "and this is about them loving each other and trying to build each other up "and they should be talking about stuff from childhood." And Zac was a big part of writing a lot of the options we shot here and that it made it in the movie. Like, the whole Ninja Turtles run to do here was Zac's idea about doing a run about the Ninja Turtles. We had a couple other ones that we cut out. But it's like I can't imagine the movie without it now. And that was all, that was all Zacky. We're not going anywhere... until our little sister, Jeanie Beanie Weanie... The best compliment we got about this movie when people started seeing it is like, "I actually believe these two guys are brothers." I actually, it's not one of those movies where people feel forced together. And I think that speaks to, um, how good they both are and how well they both got along. I love them high-fiving over breaking a TV. We are so stupid. This scene right here actually, end of the movie here, one of my favorite scenes to shoot, and one of the first scenes we shot right after the meet and greet, after we had already made the mistake of starting with everyone in the meet and greet, we went to this location, this is week one of shooting, and shot six characters in a small room together. So it was a real fun first week for me as a director. Just dealing with, figuring out all our characters right away. We want you guys to love each other. Love each other. This is a fun one to shoot. I think, actually, I love this scene. I think the Fox execs saw the dailies from this scene, and they said, "Jake needs to move the camera more. "We're nervous. It's week one. "He's never done a movie before. "Is this going... Is this going okay?" And, I think, in fairness to them, I did a lot of long takes where we did many runs of different takes and it seemed very Static. But I think it turned out okay. I think the scene works. Pacing's in the editing. I hope it does. Maybe I should have moved the camera more. I don't know. ... read this same paragraph for 20 minutes. Another early talk that was fun to have of notes that came in were about the outfits. And I think there were some people who were worried that Mike and Dave were wearing too many crazy floral prints or that seemed too crazy. And I was a big, big believer that that is exactly who those guys should be. And they should be excited about their Hawaiian vacation and wearing big prints. There's something kind of dumb and loveable about the costumes in this movie that our main four wear. That I'm very, very glad we kept in. And that I fought to keep in on these guys. I'm hoping when Halloween comes around I will see two dummies in Hawaiian suits, walking around, pretending to be Mike and Dave. We'll see. If that happens, that is all 1 need. That is my measure of success on making a film. Will anyone, the following Halloween, be dressed as anyone from the movie? We shall see. I was drinking puddle water and I had to go to the hospital... 'cause puddles are really dirty. One time I was on peyote... and I signed up for a T-Mobile plan. One time I got high. Listen, I don't want to be too rough on T-Mobile here. I got a T-Mobile plan on my iPad. And it was just a, maybe it was an easy joke to go for. We went for it, guys. I'm sorry. Damn it! Sixty percent of my investments are in some pretty... It's so satisfying to see Eric here just get mad and blow up. You can hear the whole, when we did our test screenings, you just hear the whole audience kind of open up and love it, and just love to see him get mad after this whole movie of being kind of timid and polite to everyone. And, God, Sam does it so well. This was one of the audition scenes for sure. Bam! Two hot air balloon tickets for our honeymoon. Saving the day. Saving the day with that hot air balloon. Surprise. Aww! Now another thing about shooting this, one of our first days, again, and we were doing really long takes. It was week one on the shoot and I was, again, wanted to make sure we got everything, got all the options we could get to make sure we could cut it together any way we wanted. And we spent the first half of the day shooting Zac and Adam and Anna and Aubrey. And Sug and Sam, Jeanie and Eric were just kind of waiting off-screen, feeding their lines to everyone. Being great, great actors and great partners. And then all this coverage on them we kind of shot in the last 45 minutes of the day. And I felt bad we had to rush through it. But while they were waiting off camera the entire day, they came up with this wonderful hand-clapping to do and pitched it to me to do it. And I think it was literally because they were bored all day just waiting to be on camera, that they started doing this. And, of course, immediately put it in and wanted it in the movie. And it's such a wonderful little accidental by-product of making them wait all day to shoot. Do you have Zac Efron's number? This way! What was that, Margie? Do you have Zac Efron's number? I'm good. So what part you like, brah? We need the whole pig. Mmm. No. But we need to feed 100 people. Could we please, please have the wedding here? Just wondering if he might be interested in going in on freezing my eggs with me. You can't ask Zac to help you freeze your eggs, Margie. You just can't do it. You don't know him. Please? You asked me but you don't really know me. You can't just go asking people to help pay to freeze your eggs. That's not how it works. Start a GoFundMe page or a Kickstarter if you're gonna be asking strangers, but don't just ask for people's numbers in my phone so that you can call them and ask for money. Come on. Okay, /'m sorry. And don't... You got a little nest egg built up, I'm sure, a little savings account. You've been working... How long have you worked here? I have a gambling problem. Oh, Margie, you can't bring a kid into that world. You got to get that straightened up before you're even thinking about the kid thing. I can't swim. What?

1:10:07 · jump to transcript →

Jake Szymanski

What did you say? I said, "/ can't swim." What does that have to do with anything? This is a beautiful wedding. Uh, thank you. Uh, yeah, it is. They really... Shooting in Hawaii has got its benefits. Am I right? By the power vested in me... I really want to know what in your brain makes swimming have anything to do with the gambling and the kid, but I don't want to get into it here. I just want you to know I'll be thinking about it for at least a month. That's great to hear. Where are you from, Margie? Ohio. That's a fake accent. Why did you just put on that accent that you haven't had the whole time? That... - Go, Cavs! All right, let's... All right. I don't trust anything you said anymore. "Go... Go, Cavs!" Is that how they even talk in Ohio? In fact, it's definitely not. I'm from Wisconsin. That's definitely not how they talk in Ohio. Can I come live with you? - No! Where? Why? No. I'm drawing the line. I got to go to the bathroom again! There she goes. What do you know about liquor? Man, I'm starting to hear it again through the door. Just a very... Great. When do I start? I mean, I mean, I mean... I mean... I can see you through the glass, now that you're back, Margie. You're just making pee sounds into the microphone. No, that was pee. I peed. Okay. - Okay. Well, it was a very short time to be gone peeing. I will say that. I think it was too short. What'd you say? - What? And, you know, to be honest, making this DVD commentary with Margie in away, you know, if I really think about it, is a lot like making a movie. There's adversity. There's things you don't expect that come up that you have to deal with. And you just have to get through it. And as we approach, you know, the end of our film here, it makes me realize maybe... 'Cause I'll be honest. You know, Margie, I was cursing you in my head a lot. And I was planning to immediately get out of here and call the producer and call the studio execs and ask for another voice-over session without you. And to do this over and... But, you know, I get to the end now and Igo, "You know what?" This is as, the most authentic commentary we probably could have done is showing the crazy shit you end up running against when you try to make a movie. We made a movie? No, we didn't... Yes, Margie, we made a movie. So you're part of that now. I just want to say, like, you know, guys, life is messy. Uh, it's never... Things don't go perfectly in life. And, uh, it's really how you get through the non-perfect things that make you who you are. I guess that's a good thing to get out of this. Just like Mike and Dave. And Alice and Tatiana. Just like Mike and Dave and Alice and Tatiana. Exactly. It didn't go perfectly. They didn't do all the right things. But at the end of the day, they pulled it together and got through it. And I think the family, the fictional Stangle family, is probably closer because of how much things went wrong and what they got through. But we just wanted everybody here to know... Wouldn't you say? Uh, yeah. Okay, suddenly not on board. Whatever. Um... We had some fun songs coming up here at the end of the movie. This, actually, also was added in halfway through production. I don't think these songs were in the script. We started wanting to do a fun little musical number at the end of the movie that also, hopefully, didn't feel too much just like tagging a musical number on the end of the movie, that we could get a couple jokes out of here. 7o me... Um, shooting at the barn here. We had to record these guys, we recorded these guys singing in the ballroom of the hotel we were Staying at. About two days, maybe the week before, we actually shot this scene. And, again, Zac's pitch to sing super-high like that, which was so funny. And it's like, the guys, they put the wedding together, all is forgiven. They're actually doing it here. They actually get a sweet little song out to their sister. Singing a very romantic song to their sister, which we'll overlook. They make it about the fact that she's their sister, so that's fine. And to you. To all of us. And then they just, they could taste it and they just had to go too far. They just have to go too far after this. Love you! So sweet. Thought they were gonna blow it. They did not. That's good. This is how we do itt... Also using one of my favorite middle school, high school dance songs to officially end the movie now, which makes me very happy. It's Friday night Oh, you don't throw... Throw it right in her face.

1:26:50 · jump to transcript →

Tim Burton

They built the house fairly quickly because it was just a facade. It wasn't like the first one where it was maybe a bit more solidly built, but luckily we had a death shroud over the whole thing, which was part of the story to me. I just felt that that was a very Delia thing to do and kind of a Christo kind of Delia interesting way to present the house. We were on location for a few days.

30:20 · jump to transcript →

Tim Burton

Just outside of Boston. That was the only other. We shot in East Corinth, and then we did a little bit outside of Boston for Jeremy's neighborhood and a few things. We couldn't find that location really in East Corinth, so we ended up in Boston. We were sitting in Vermont. It's like waiting for an election result. And the results were in, and it was not good. So it was strange because I think...

36:21 · jump to transcript →

Tim Burton

The exterior of the house, you know, and shooting in the East Corinth, which was the original location for the film, and building the house on the exact spot where we built the last one. You know, that was all kind of special kind of moments that I can relate to the first one. The model, it's like the house, the model. There was a few items like that that we didn't want to redesign the wheel. That's the model, that's the model. That's the house, that's the house. And so, you know, we put our energies into other things.

1:19:12 · jump to transcript →

David Kalat

Then it was Godzilla. Now the mantle had returned to Kurosawa once again for Kagemusha, which would find Tomoyuki Tanaka overseeing things, Ishira Honda credited as creative consultant. Honda co-wrote all five of Kurosawa's last films, that's Kagemusha through Matadeo, directed most or all of the location footage, and co-directed in the studio. Another commingling of monster movies and Kurosawa art films.

24:56 · jump to transcript →

David Kalat

Tsuburaya split his team into three units. The location photography, shooting things like the glass paintings on Odo Island. The second unit did the miniatures. The third handled optical effects, like this blast of Godzilla's atomic breath. That involved hand-painted cell animation in the grand Disney tradition, composited onto footage of the Godzilla suit in action.

59:19 · jump to transcript →

Alan K. Rode

This Bunker Hill location is Mission Apartments at 504 West 2nd Street in Los Angeles, even though the address provided was 504 West Olive, as written on the match cover by J.C. Flippen at the beginning of the film. Bunker Hill was the location for so many movies in the late 40s and 50s as the neighborhood deteriorated into rooming houses and once grand Victorian homes. It became an area synonymous with film noir.

23:47 · jump to transcript →

Alan K. Rode

This location was in Culver City as identified by Ted Evans' motorcycle shop across the street at West Washington Boulevard at Walgrove Avenue, kind of where Culver City, Marina del Rey, and Venice all meet up. The motorcycle shop was run by son Doug Evans until it closed up in the 1960s, and James Dean bought a 1955 TR5 Triumph at this shop. Would it be a film noir without Tito Vuolo, another unique character player cast by Kubrick?

35:05 · jump to transcript →

Tim Lucas

Castillo made only one known feature before this one, and it was made about five years earlier, during which time he garnered a great deal of attention as a stage actor. You can see this in his near-effortless commanding of this large space and its crowd of supporting players. This five-minute sequence takes place inside the hideout of Indio's gang, which happens to be an abandoned church. The actual location was the Castillo de Rodoquiar in Almeria.

36:18 · jump to transcript →

Tim Lucas

If you're familiar with much of the Italian cinema of this period, you'll know that it tends to be filmed in one of three places. One, on exterior locations that are either impoverished or familiar tourist spots. Two, sets or exterior constructions left over from other more expensive pictures. Or three, fairly rudimentary interior sets.

1:15:52 · jump to transcript →

John Mackenzie

Every inch is on location. There's no studio sets at all. We couldn't afford it. I think we did it for, what, 900,000 pounds in those days of budget. Well, under a million. We built sets, but exterior sets. We didn't, we shot everything else in real places, but we didn't shoot in a studio. It's the one way to do these things cheaply. Someone's been playing Guy Fawkes and my roles and a touch of George in the Lido. That's what's up, mate.

42:25 · jump to transcript →

John Mackenzie

cold storage of meat. Boy, did I think this was a great location. And did I hate it. Well, first of all, there was hanging these actors upside down and they all tended to be quite big guys with heavy guts and things. And it's very difficult for a poor actor to hang upside down. And you know, you can't do the scene in five minutes.

1:07:40 · jump to transcript →

Kenneth Loring

See, as he drags her towards the door, and so we move outside. Now, frequently in the making of a motion picture movie film, the location... Ooh, ow, ow. The location used for the exterior of a house will be completely... Ooh, ouch, nasty. Different from the location used for the interior of the same house, and the movie's spatial relations are completely fictive. The reasons for this, this rather obscure and technical... Good Lord, good Lord.

23:26 · jump to transcript →

Kenneth Loring

This doorway here is not actually at the same location as the bar with the cash register. Through the magic of the editor's art, we think the two are in the same place, one just by the other. But in fact, this door was in an econo lodge right across town, but it has a nice dusty rug in front of it that the filmmakers simply fell in love with. So they shot that bit at the econo lodge, and then through the magic of editing, they implied that the doorway was part of our bar, and they got that lovely dust effect. And who would know?

44:23 · jump to transcript →

This was a real shop, wasn't it? Off a shopping mall. It was a mall right off of Hollywood Boulevard. No, right off of Franklin, actually. Tiny. Some of it was done in the studio, wasn't it? In some one location. Yeah. Can't remember what. No, sort of half and half. Yeah, yeah. China Blues Bedroom was certainly studio.

11:37 · jump to transcript →

There's a lot of stuff you did operate on your own. I don't recall in this scene, though. I think I did it old. It's possible, yeah. We were at this location for a few days, I remember. Were we? Yeah. Because we had to shoot all... It was one factory that we'd rented out because we had to shoot all her stuff there. I don't know what's right or wrong anymore. Did you really believe it was her? So I'm a lousy guesser.

42:06 · jump to transcript →

Judd Nelson

See, this is where it was cool where we had John. He was definitely a collaborative director and sought to get the best out of us all, and was looking for behavior, you know. So, I think, the wisdom of he and Dede Allen and their choices in making this all work, 'cause we had so much footage, it was great to see. All these years later, we take it for granted, what we see the final cut to be. But the truth is that, like we were talking about, Dede would come to the set and she would closely work with John. And also, he gave us the freedom to play and just have fun. And certain things, like the stuff you're seeing with Judd spinning around. I'm sticking a pen in my mouth, stupid stuff. We had no idea whether it would arrive in the film or be a part of it. I didn't. We were just having fun. But once we knew what the space was, we had the parameters. Rehearsal was key. - Yeah, it was like shooting a play. That's how I recollect and look back at it. We shot this play for 35 days and we were... Mostly in sequence. - Yeah. Yeah, we were fortunate to be extracted from Hollywood, and all of a sudden in this suburban gym of Illinois, not far from where John had grown up. So, it was a fortunate thing that we felt like we were shooting a play, 'cause we also had a week of rehearsal, which was... No, we had more than a week. - Was it more? We had more than a week. In fact, we weren't done with our rehearsal time when Hughes went, "We're ready. Let's go." All the work we've done keeping our faces in the industry since and maintaining our careers, it's still... To this day, I don't think I've ever had that since. So, it was a real... A real rehearsal. - Yeah, it was a real luxury. It was also a lot of fun, 'cause it really bonded us and gave us a chance to get a sense of where we were all at, and also made the work better, yeah. And we built real history, as opposed to that you believe you've made up a history. We actually had real experiences. Even if it's something as simple as dinner four nights in a row, you at least have some real past and things will reveal themselves to you further along in the work. And Hughes really wanted it to sound authentic. So, he never limited us. If you came up with something, you never felt like, "Oh, wow, "we took it beyond the text." Big deal. And he was always looking for it to get to that point, anyway. The freedom that he gave us, the idea that he would trust us like that, which is the point of the film. Just because they are 17 years old doesn't mean they are 17 years dumb. There's a weird thing, though, about rehearsals and stuff like that, where you think... You even said, "I've never done that before or since." It always seems to work out when actors and stuff get those chances. You hear those stories over and over. But, for the most part, people, they just don't do it. Yeah, in terms of genre, too, this is something that broke a mold, in a way, 'cause it was, in the industry talk, a talking heads film. It's really about a bunch of people sitting around, talking. So again, the play analogy comes into play. We really felt like... I remember rehearsing, and we were in these positions. I remember walking into that space, and John going, "Okay, you sit over here." We would rehearse these scenes. So, by the time we shot them, we all had a good sense of each other. We were a solid group, and we also knew where we were going with it. Now it looks like a luxury, but to this day, I've often looked back and thought about that, that it was great intelligence in just doing that, putting us in together. We sat in a room... - I thought they were all gonna be like that. I really did. I look back on that and that is a high-water mark in terms of the importance of having everyone being on the same page. Right. If you get rehearsal time and if you shoot in sequence, it's not like you are trusting the other actor to know that in the scene before this they actually threatened to kill me. So, it's a little bit heavier. You don't have to do that because before we shot this scene, we shot the scene where he threatened to kill me, so we know that. It's a great collaboration. You don't realize it till you're blessed enough to work in the business. When you're on the set, you see that there's... You know, sometimes the best idea will come from the script supervisor, or sometimes it's the guy at the crafts service table. It's a great collaboration, even though it's a director's medium. I think that sense of support was instilled in us with John, 'cause he gave us these roles and we all knew what we were doing, but he always was collaborative that way. I think that was his intelligence, too, that he allowed his scripts to transcend even the beauty that they had, because he hired people that he believed in. But there's a great collaboration, always. When you're talking about rehearsal, you're talking about the five of you guys. Were Paul and Kapelos kept away a little bit, to let you guys have your thing, a little "us vs. them" a little bit for that? Well, that was happening right away. Also, 'cause Paul wanted to hang with us, so that was perfect, 'cause it gave us the power to say, "No." So, we could. But you guys rehearsed those scenes, right, with you and Paul? But he wouldn't necessarily be sitting there on a day when... Just the five of us. - ...it was the five of us in that rehearsal, if we were gonna get to that stuff. We wouldn't do necessarily whole read-through of it. We would be taking it from the first scene and rehearsing it till it made some sense to us, and John knew, basically, how he wanted to see it and how he wanted to shoot it. It's a business, at the end of the day, like anything else, so there's always such a sense of the clock and rushing, so, as Judd said, a high water mark in our careers to start with this great project, and we had these great roles and a well-developed script. But he was smart enough to sit us all down and get our input and let us work through it. So, once we got on our feet with this and we were shooting the scenes, we had a closeness and a vibe already flowing between us. But it's funny you said that, 'cause I thought the same, too. I thought it would be like this after, and usually the director is the most stressed-out, doesn't know what the next shot is. It's like the world changed after this. But part of it was the good fortune we had to be in Chicago and do this. It was at the beginning of his career, after Sixteen Candles did pretty well, even though it was a small film. I think I remember him telling us that his intent was to do this first. I think the studio was gonna make this film first and they flipped them. So, we were fortunate to be away from everything and... Flipped it and Sixteen Candles, you mean? Yeah, exactly, in terms of the making of the films. So then we did this project second, and then we were, again, just in Chicago, and that sort of remote quality helps it, too. It's a lot of the fun of it. 'Cause then you came back here to do Weird Science, right? Yeah, that was fun. There is something about that, pulling it out of Hollywood. That's clichéd, "Hollywood's bad and you can't get anything done." But there is something to be said about that. Well, the story takes place there, and that's where he lives. Why not put it there? It's easier, it makes the most sense, and for the actors, it's one less thing you have to imagine, and hope everyone else is imagining the same thing. In fact, it is the same room where we're gonna go every day. It's a school. - Right. I remember, I went to some local schools, too, in that area at the time. It was fun just to get a sense of what... 'Cause I hadn't had that kind of upbringing. I grew up in New York City at a liberal arts high school. It was a different experience. It was a boys' reformatory, wasn't it? I was away a lot and... Very religious, wasn't it? - That's part of the fun, actually, just to get out of the mix, to be somewhere else. As an actor, the gift is getting the job, and then the sense of exploration is enhanced, I think, by being somewhere on location. It's fun. Makes it part of joining the circus, I guess. So, what, you guys went to an actual school, went in, mixed with the kids, did that whole... Yeah. Yeah. - I did some of that, yeah. Yeah, Hughes arranged it for us to go. I know that Ally, Emilio and I went to this high school, and the principal knew, but most of the teachers didn't, and it worked out perfectly. It was a school that had two halls, one called Jock Hall and one called Freak Hall. And I was like, "Are you kidding me? That's perfect." I just waved to Emilio, "See you at the end of the day," and then went over to the other side. It's great 'cause I was over 18, so I met some guys and I could buy them beer. I was like, "Yeah, I got an ID that'll work. Come on, let's go get some beer." Just treating it so poorly, it was perfect. You didn't get put in detention at that school, did you? No, but I did get sent to the principal's office, the one guy who knew that it was okay for me to be there, so it was perfect. I hadn't found my classroom yet, out of Freak Hall, and I didn't have a classroom, so I was always going to be found out there. Bender, that's school property there, and it doesn't belong to us. It's something not to be toyed with. That's very funny. Fix it. You should really fix that. - Am I a genius? No, you're an asshole. - What a funny guy. Fix the door, Bender. Everyone, just... I've been here before. I know what I'm doing. No. Fix the door! - Shut up! God damn it!

8:42 · jump to transcript →

Judd Nelson

I never did it, either. At this point, too, just where the industry was, there was no video village, so one of my best memories is of John being there. He would just sit behind the camera. He would be sitting on the floor with us, just like the camera operator would be on the floor to get these low angles. He was really there, part of it all. It was great. Was he a good audience? - He definitely was. Yeah. And he was a real audience. He wanted to be moved. In fact, that was a great lesson, to see a director lens his project like that, to be that invested in it. It was cool. It's a tricky thing where you have a director and sometimes it can be, everything you do is great. Like they want you to feel comfortable and they want you to feel like, "Everything you do is great!" But there's a bullshit meter that I think you get as an actor, where you go, "No, it wasn't." And you gotta get that level of trust, where if John says it's good, it's good. Yeah. - That kind of thing. Was he pretty good about that, too? Without telling you, you suck or something. No, that's the thing, you have to be very pragmatic as a director, always aware of the clock, so in lieu of all that, I never felt like he was rushing us. It was just the opposite. I think he would work on your performance with you. It was cool. And he would give us the freedom to try things. He would allow us to know that we maybe tried something that was no good, too. If you did something that was no good, he wouldn't say, "That's not very good." He would look at us and be like, "Yeah, I guess that one wasn't so good." You know what I mean? He would let us find it for ourselves. There's a paternal instinct, I think, that directors need to have. But with him, he felt more like a big brother. He wanted us to shine. He wanted to see us get the best out of it. So, he was never really precious about his words or anything, which I found to be really cool. - It was cool that even after all that rehearsal, even once you get on set, the crew's around, the pressure is on a little bit, like you said, time is a factor, trying to get the day. And he still gave you time, even after all that. You know that classic image of... It was a saying of, I guess, Jack Lemmon's, where he talked about "magic time." John was a director that appreciated that. When the camera's rolling, he was the first audience. He was the guy right there with you, watching as if it was one of your parents in the bleachers or something. So, that was a really cool thing because he was the writer, and, of course, in that sort of paternal spirit, we wanted to impress him, him to be happy with what we were doing. At the same time, it was never any finger pointing. He just guided you through the performance. And he had a great way of, I think, empowering all of us to put our best foot forward. It was cool. His scripts have a lot of heart, and Hughes has a lot of heart. He can hear the truth, I think, and if we did something that had strayed that sounded like that color of truth that he wanted, then it would stay. He also was... I just found him very encouraging. Yeah. - As a person and as a director. And that's like a captain. If the director is the captain of the ship, I would like the captain to be encouraging if we're gonna come upon some high seas or dangerous times. Crunch time, you want the captain to not be treating you like you're something he wants rubbed off the bottom of your shoe. Because I think we would have done anything for him. I think we probably still would. It's interesting, too, because in the structure of the film, it all leads back to these scenes. I guess for everybody it becomes therapy at the end here, where we're all sitting around literally like a group therapy, as is the image of the wide shot. - Yeah, that trust is important. You want your other actors to be alive in the scene. And because this, in real time, came later for us, as it does in the movie, shooting in sequence, you don't have to earn the respect from the people around you. Right. - It's already done. Suddenly, the only redemption that we can find is with each other, and that's the surprise, I think, at this point. Where everyone is peeling away, becoming naked to each other. I think that's part of the reason why it's so important, too, the way they cut this. Emilio is doing the thing, and the camera pans around him, right? And then we go and we get everybody's reaction shot while he's still talking because you guys are going through it, too. - Yeah. He's like this... He's like this mindless machine that I can't even relate to anymore. "Andrew! You've got to be number one! "I won't tolerate any losers in this family. "Your intensity is for shit! Win! Win! Win!" You son of a bitch.

1:10:08 · jump to transcript →

Richard Donner

This little sequence was shot downtown in LA by the railroad yards. 3rd Street. I think it was really 3rd Street. I assume all these buildings are gone now. But there were things that don't exist on the lot. I don't think we shot very much on the lot. Locations were locations.

53:55 · jump to transcript →

Richard Donner

This was in that building actually, downtown. A location.

55:58 · jump to transcript →

To the tunnel and everything, that same road. Everyone goes there. Since probably silent films, Griffith Park has been the cheap go-to location. If you ever want to see a little bit of all the movies you've ever seen, visit Griffith Park. It's a museum of previous shoots. It kind of is. I did the big tribal camp in Scorpion King. In Griffith Park? The same place we shot Dreamscape, Bronson Canyon.

50:45 · jump to transcript →

Exactly. I'm not going to go to sleep. I'm taking control of my life. That's the moment that actually, it helps Kevin's character too because you're like, ah, you know what? The rogue will be back. At least we can hang our hat on this character, Shawnee. There's hope. She did such a terrific job. So this location, this was part of town. This was in Louisiana. This was the town hall in Abbeville. The real place. And just what you don't see is all the Spanish moss and the...

1:00:24 · jump to transcript →

I think that is one of the geniuses of any director in making their actors feel safe and loved. We rehearsed in the location before we started to film. So that gave us an incredible leeway to know the environment

1:44:20 · jump to transcript →

shows how a guy in his young age could slip into that group of people and become one of the low guys. I thought it was very important to show that. I wasn't planning to do a pretty-looking movie. It should have more like a dirty look. What we tried is when you walk into a location, like in a bar or a restaurant, I looked at it and said,

1:47:04 · jump to transcript →