Pacing & rhythm

There's only so much time you can take establishing Hobbiton before you really move your plot ahead and we felt we were lingering there too long and it wasn't furthering the story for us so it didn't stay. Bag End was obviously an exterior set on the location on the farm and then this was the studio when Frodo comes in the door. This is actually a case where we changed the timeline in the book.

36:01 · jump to transcript →

I think from memory 17 years goes past in the book from the time that Gandalf leaves to find out about the ring to the time that he arrives back in Hobbiton to warn Frodo that this is Sauron's ring. In our movie we felt that 17 years was just too long a time so we reduced it to seeming like a few months had gone by. Well for those who know the book they'll know that there are fairly leisurely time frames.

36:28 · jump to transcript →

Please frame it. Yeah, no, there's no sticker on that apple. It's really stupid. Yeah, there you go. One rumour put to bed. We now had a major sequence that was deleted from the theatrical version just for pacing reasons that, you know, we had to move the film along. This was a real swamp. It wasn't a studio set or anything. It was a genuine swamp.

1:07:14 · jump to transcript →

There's a thing I should be talking about. There's certain things that are... There's shots that have been cut out... ...that, really, a lot of them were taken out for just pure pacing. You never want someone coming at you with those gloves and that expression. Yeah, I can't really see anything that's that different. Is it small stuff? A lot of stuff, you're not going to notice... ...because you fell asleep during the premiere anyway. He's going to wake up now, because he's on-screen. And most of the stuff that's cut has... Nine times out of 10, it's because I didn't like Scott's hair. Well, that makes sense. - Yeah. It is kind of unruly. Oh, Forrest.

19:53 · jump to transcript →

There should have been a sinister laugh there. I love evil, sinister laughs. Those are the best. They're so funny, man. Michael should have belted one out. - If anyone could, it's him. He definitely can. See, we just bashed open one door. I was quite feeble in this one. It took a wee bit. Well, remember you kept locking your wrists? Like a ballerina? - Yeah. Those days are gone. - Gone. What's that? - No idea. Where are we? - This is a movie called Underworld. It's about vampires fighting... I'm glad you didn't make me blow dust off it. Wasn't there a movie we saw where... ...someone blew dust off five things? It irritated me. No, don't say what it was. - Yeah, I won't say the movie. What was it? - I'm not telling. Screw it. It was poor. - It was a poor movie. There was a lot of... - Dust blowing. Dust blowing. - Yeah, that sucks. Did you draw these, babe? - I didn't draw these. No, I didn't. - You can draw? I try. This is an extended scene. Let me talk about this. Okay. I'm not in it, so... - No, this is actually... ... Just goes into depth a little bit more about... ... how the Lycans were taken as slaves, and you see the branding here... ...and how they were all... - Why wasn't this in? It's cool. It's pacing. It was just taking too long... Who's Korgel? - Yeah, who is Korgel? I think he was, like, one of the transportation guys. And it shows that everybody-- Like, with the actual brands that, you know... ...Lucian has the brand of... With a V in it, so he was kind of... as a... Like Viktor's cattle, of sorts, so... I think this should have been in. This is cool. I agree with you. - Yeah. That's helpful. This is an extended version, ithas some stuff... ...that would have been in a director's cut... ...but then also some stuff that's in here that... ...was taken out for good reason. - I really like this. It looks thick for skin. It is, and looks like Play-doh when it's ripped off. Now, who's that? That is Lucian, who's in this movie called Underworld that.... I didn't see his head, man. Did you get a script? - Yeah, I read it. We don't know Lucian, even though we've seen him. It's him. He's got that necklace. So I'm just wondering... I mean, I know... lf you were asking me, I would have said Lucian, but I wanted to know. We're coming out with an animated version for children. You can get that. He only read his bit. You know that. - They only sent me my scenes. This is good. I like this. - This movie? Yeah, it's good. - You should maybe rent it. I should rent it. It's funny now. I get really... - Protective? In Blockbuster, some guy next to me was deciding whether or not he was... ...going to buy Underworld or Pirates of the Caribbean. And it really makes me quite nervous now when I see stuff like that. What did he buy? - I actually had... Pirates of the Caribbean. - I actually had to-- The good thing is... I said, "Oh, I would kind of go for that one right there. That's a good one." You did? - I did. And he said, "You know, I would have bought it... ...but I've rented it three times, and I should've bought it the first time." So that was good. - That's cool. Look at you exposing yourself. There's Forrest going in for the kill. Look, there's, again, there's close, close talking. This is the very first day for me. For everybody. Do you remember the conversation about repeating the lines? Me? - No, just with anybody. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then I did it. Did I do it? You did it once, and I said I liked that. When I do it, it's great. - You can pull it off. No, but I actually like this scene. I actually... No, I think this worked well. It's because I wasn't there. - You can tell it's, like, our first day. We don't look tired and... - I was really stressed. That was stressful. - It was the first scene I've done. lt was a really small set. Everybody was, like, crammed in. lt was a tense day. Everybody was there. That's always a tense day, but, for whatever reason, it was extra tense. Between reels, we were talking a bit about the Internet. And apparently, Kate found a site where it's discussed in a forum... ... that's discussing whether or not Len Wiseman... ...iS the worst person on the planet. - What? Based on what? And I say, "Yes." - Based on what? "He's a liar, a thief, a coward, a highwayman, something." How does he know you so well? Who is it? They're talking about whether-- It's, like, listing about, "He's a coward." Why would they call you a coward? - Because he's a big, old fraidy pants. But no, seriously. Did you read on or just turn it off? We read on. It's actually a bunch of... - They said he poses like a gangster. I pose like a gangster. - That is quite humourous. Sounds like a lot of jealousy to me. - It's a lot of jealous 16, 17 year olds. I thought it was all true. - Did you? This was the day you were mean to me, babe. Why were you mean? Because she was slowing down our day. I was not. - No, I don't even... You slow down your own damn day. - I don't even remember. I think there's a few witnesses to that. - Well, that's true. That's true. I know what it was. - What was it? I had arrived at 6 in the morning, and you wanted me to work through... ... Without lunch until 4, because it was convenient to you. But my child arrived three hours before, and I was... ... feeling a little bit like, you know, "Could I please go see my child... ...for the half-hour I'm promised?" - No, it actually... That's what it was. - I was not aware of that. You may not have been aware, but you were still an asshole about it. Crap. - There's a certain way that a movie... I feel like the child of divorced parents, I really do. I'm not aware when people eat lunch. That's the AD's thing. I wasn't talking about lunch but about parenting. Sometime, I'll take you through how a movie set operates. Oh, like you know, Mr. One-Movie. Oh, crap. This does not fare well.

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Because you're so cute. And Canadian. - You're Canadian and blond. I love that scene. - Really? Yeah. I think you did a great job. Oh, thanks. Thanks, man. Yeah, I was very happy with that. With both of you. That really is some makeup. My God. I felt so great on this movie. I had the shortest makeup call of everybody. All the boys had to come in before me. lt was so unusual. Well, I didn't, not until that last week. You were always having your nipples painted blue. No. - Had to get highlights. I don't have highlights. - Blond streaks. No, no, I don't do that. Remember I asked you? Early on, I thought that you did. Everybody does. - He does! I do not. - Please. Oh, my God. I swear to God, I do not. - I'm sick of this. And those are natural buttocks too, right? No, those-- That's fake. No, my ass Is fake, but my hair is real. - But his hair, I mean, come on. ls he--? What? No, that's a belt. - But he's basically in a skirt, isn't he? Yes. - I love that. You are so weird. You so don't look like a guy who'll design, like, a man-skirt. Yeah, it looks like he's got... I would wear a man-skirt. What's wrong with that? Without the makeup... - I do think people... ...when they meet me, they think I'll be some Goth with eyeliner. I did. I thought, especially with your name being Len Wiseman... ...I imagined you having a shoulder-length mullet... ...and a lab coat. Like, a white lab coat. Thank God I changed and got a haircut before I met you. Did you ever have mullet, Len? Do you like it right now? - Yeah. That's not a mullet, though. I had a mullet in high school. I didn't know I did, but I guess I did. Because it was behind you. - Yeah. I see pictures now and realise it's a mullet. You also thought I was Jewish. - I did not. Didn't you? - No, everyone else does. Why? - I thought you'd be about 52, though. Len Wiseman? - Len Wiseman. It's like a butcher's name. Maybe. What's going on here? What's happening? This is-- Thank you. This is another added scene. This was cut, again, for pacing. It just shows, again, that... ... she's involved in this plot, just helping it along its way... ...to get Kraven a bit more pissed off with Selene. That's a new shot as well. I always liked that shot... ...but couldn't fit it in. - You were in the position... ...of having to shave and shave stuff out of it, right? Yeah. I mean, we got down to where every second was counting. How long is the movie? Putting a stopwatch to us to take out things. I think it was-- Man, I don't Know. That's a new shot right there too. That's actually Nicole. Yeah, I don't recognise that. I don't remember being there. Where was I? Was I sick? - You went home and... You were never planned to be shot... ...because it was just gonna be a car pulling up... ...and then, since she was in the suit, we had her do the walk. It was cold in this set. - This set was cool. I love this. I really had a good time with it. You were sick. - You were very sick. We stopped one day and didn't film it and came back, right? No, we didn't. We were going to. We stopped, because you came down with pneumonia... ...and we ended up having to build this set on stage. Yeah. That's right. - All right. That was so fun, when we did it on the stage. Yeah, it was. So this-- Where was it? No, this was actually on location. Yeah. That was that freezing, freezing... This is when you were, like, coughing and hacking after each take. What are these for? Lycans are allergic to silver. All the women on the set walked past that tray. They'd be like, "Damn, I must get a pap smear." Why is my nose so red? You know, it's becoming a theme. - I think it really is. I look like a semi-coke addict or something. It was cold in there. It was cold, but I didn't know it. I didn't know. I'll get your back next time. - Please. Didn't I? Pull some hair out of your nose? That's why my nose is so red... ...because I kept getting her to pull hairs out of my nose. It's because you're so blond... ...and the way you had your head, it was twinkling. I really-- You know, I'm not good at cutting all that stuff. Somebody got ahold of it. Your eyes were watering up. Yeah. This is the same, right? Yeah. After-- There's a scene coming up after... ...oelene talks about her family and everything. The scene that we originally cut of... - Oh, yeah. ...ocott, when he's telling about how he got into... My back-story. Your back-story. Everything that builds and... I like that that was in Budapest. ...and kind of creates your character, we decided to cut. Did you put that back in? - We put it back in, yes. So we have the pleasure of it now? - We do. We should have some silence... - I don't think we need to. I think we can just talk over it and talk about how my nose... ...isn't red or something. - And it was-- It was a couple reasons. One, it was pacing, because this scene... ...it took a long time, and... - Scott, you were boring. People were kind of falling asleep, including Scott himself at the premiere. I wasn't even at the premiere. - Oh, even more committed. Well, I was at the premiere, but I left. A serious reason why we did cut it is... ...because it came right after Selene's back-story, and so it seemed like: "Here's my weepy story," and he's like, "Yeah? I've got one to top that." Actually, you were very good. Yeah, that's how it felt too. I mean, that's what it was. It was like, you Know, "Yeah'"-- - It was like a sort of AA meeting. "My name is Selene, and these are my problems." That's fine. There's his tunic. Look at that. What is that? You guys have a problem with that? - It's a man-skirt. He gave me the strength to avenge my family. Since then, I've never looked back.

55:50 · jump to transcript →

to bring the two love, Ethan Hunt and Naya, and bring them together. And also, I like the rhythm. I like the very strong flamenco dance rhythm using the footstep. And the rhythm is so strong and so full of great energy. So that really excites us. I try to use the sound of the footstep as a, to represent, you know, Tom and Tim, these heartbeats, you know, and also use the kind of sound for the car chase scene.

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The whole scene just feel like it's funny and sexy and romantic. You know, when I'm designing an action sequence, I usually like to listen to the music. And the music usually give me a lot of inspiration and how to get into the rhythm, how to get the idea of the action, you know. So when I decided the cartridge scene, I was listening to the windmill of your smile so I could get the mood

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So when I cut a scene, I like to base on the music. So I cut with the music, and then I follow the rhythm, follow the pace, and then make the choice. If the pace goes a little bit stronger, I would like to use the 120-frame shot, or that little piece, put it into that section. And then before that, I might use another angle for 60 frames, you know, and then put everything all together, make it feel like musical.

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We didn't try too hard to get many expressions into his face because we thought that the more expressions there were, the less he'd actually come across like a tree. In fact, there are times when he lapses into being a tree, doesn't he? Yeah, which is great. I always think if he forgets to move for too long, he's going to sprout roots and kind of find it hard to move again. This shot was about the first Gollum shot we ever did. We didn't have a clue what Gollum was going to really look like when we shot Frodo and Sam walking up this hill.

41:35 · jump to transcript →

When we looked at it in that position, because that's where it was at the end of that scene, it was like it went into a flashback and then it came out of a flashback as the Nazgul scream happened. We decided that the momentum of the film was getting a little bit too slow. And we also felt that we didn't know Gollum that well at this point in time, and to actually then learn a lot about his backstory was maybe slightly too premature. And so the decision was made to take that scene out, not...

49:19 · jump to transcript →

again for pacing reasons and one of the background kind of themes that we did delete a lot of from the theatrical was the whole story of Fangorn and the trees and this was good stuff for setting up the concept that the forest coming alive and that it'll be dangerous and that the Ents who are basically don't get involved in the affairs of the outside world are going to realise that their strength is actually needed and you know Gandalf refers to all of this in the scene and

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Now this is a scene that I'm glad is back in. Yeah, it's one of my favourite scenes between the two of them picking up on the tension between the father and the son. I mean, it's one of the problems with the film when you're under time pressure and without being rude to either David Wenham or John Noble, because, you know, they both do superb work in this scene, but they're secondary characters. It's just one of those real difficulties that you have so much in the film, it's too long.

1:14:58 · jump to transcript →

We'd never bothered with the scabbard anymore, that he only just carries a sword around with him the whole time because it was just, the thing was so huge that it was actually, physically it was too long to be able to do anything with. He straps it to his horse. He doesn't put it around on his belt. We just carry the sword into the paths of the dead as a naked sword. You cannot abandon the men. With our tiny set that we have here, and this was particularly memorable this day because it was in the middle of a storm.

1:42:43 · jump to transcript →

It was like an event that threatened to happen, but then didn't. And we really felt it in the pacing of the film. I mean, we just tried to make it a bit more cinematic and more kind of exciting. I'm off. I won't tell you, even though I've disowned you. I'll come back to you. Probably my favourite scene in this movie. I mean, I like the stuff on Mount Doom with Frodo and Sam, but for some reason, this scene, I feel most proud of this scene.

2:32:14 · jump to transcript →

Rob Cohen

break and reform, and this was all very complex algorithms that we did at the Rhythm and Hues, the visual effects company that did all the horses and this chase through Shanghai. The other company was Digital Domain, who did the conversion to Terracotta when the emperor is cursed, and as you'll see, the entire battle sequence in the third act.

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Rob Cohen

There are over 1,000 3-D effects in the film. It's a huge load that we got done in record time... ...using two companies, primarily Rhythm & Hues and Digital Domain... ...as well as my old friend Sid Dutton at Illusion Arts. We used CIS Hollywood and Pacific Title... ...all of which worked very well together, and CaféFX.

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Rob Cohen

He hated me, but he got with it, and we've now become good buddies. And I love the spontaneity of his performance. Here, the Rhythm & Hues, creating these icicles, and creating the Yeti, and the mountains, and the under mummies created by Digital Domain, and both visual effects houses had to work together.

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Barry Sonnenfeld

We added all the raster lines. This was shot on 35mm film. Now, here's the opening title sequence, which was done by Sony Imageworks. We had four or five visual-effects houses on this movie. Industrial Light & Magic, Sony Imageworks... ...Rhythm & Hues did most of the Frank the Pug, talking dog, stuff.

1:58 · jump to transcript →

Barry Sonnenfeld

Almost all of Frank's mouth animation was done by Rhythm & Hues... ...who did the animation for Babe. A little bit of it was done by Industrial Light & Magic. But I would say, what you're seeing in the movie... ...IS about 80% Rhythm & Hues and 20% ILM. Jay, wait up. I appreciate the shot, man. The name of this dog is Mushu. Mushu plays Frank the Pug. Mushu loved being in that suit. He just had the best time. He would prance around. I think he really felt, when he was in the suit, that he was a Men in Black. I felt it was really important that Will have a different car... ...that it didn't feel like exactly the same movie over again. Bo Welch and I wanted to upgrade some of the stuff and make it sexier. We love also the fact that a black Mercedes probably fits in better... ...1N New York than a 40-year-old Ford LTD. before I roll it up in there. Got it. This was a last-minute decision to have him sing that song. It actually was a long monologue... ...and on the set on the day, we thought it would be funny. Frank just said, "For

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Barry Sonnenfeld

Again, this is all on the stage. The dog didn't have a cigar. There was no smoke. The cigar and the smoke was added by Rhythm & Hues... ...and they also, obviously, added his mouth movement. The worms were all puppeteered, we erased the worm puppeteer guys. But this is all done in postproduction by Rhythm & Hues. Frank?

1:11:45 · jump to transcript →

Ridley Scott

This computer hacking is all totally accurate. We jumped one hurdle in that it just took too long. But for him to get into the VICAP, which is basically right inside the FBI computer, you require a number and a code, which I think is probably changed once a week. I'm not even sure it's that thorough. But any FBI agent has it in the United States.

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Ridley Scott

But it wouldn't be a good idea. Besides, I think subtext to Hannibal was, as he says to her, I've been underground too long. I'm getting bored. I need some action. And I think he enjoys the process. He enjoys the chase. So he insults him there by saying, you're a patsy of the patsies. The Pazzis were an aristocratic family, fundamentally lost their money.

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Ridley Scott

circle the problems circle the areas that were possibilities for biting the dust to get to the main plot and main characters um then he went away and got that down which was actually really rather good 135 page screenplay which was too long but it was great it was very entertaining um we had a couple of bridging problems that we didn't like

1:44:15 · jump to transcript →

And here we had sort of a challenge as we were working over the script and getting ready to make the movie, because we're going here to a second house of murder victims. You don't want it to be repetitive, and you've got to find a way to make it quite different and move more quickly. Mark Helfrich, the editor, had some wonderful ideas for increasing the pace of this, which was a little bit longer. In the script, initially, I believe Graham goes into the house and has a few moments in it. Anything repetitive will never be in the film with Mark's editing. So we eliminated a couple of brief moments of him going into the house because it was too much like the other house he went into. And you try to move ahead to what's really new, dramatically, in the story. I love this shot. Jimmy Muro, my Steadicam and first camera operator, did this as one. A lot of good shots in this movie are in one, which I love, you feel like you're with him. And this was built. It's like the most incredible tree house in the world. It took about a week to build it. -/t looks pretty real. The tree is real, but we built the tree house. A platform, so that we didn't have to have Edward climbing up there. And it was awesome. It was so much fun that it was scary. Now he's looking from the killer's point of view at the murder victims' house and figuring out that the killer must have sat in the same place. But you cut the shot where he imagines the killer's point of view here. Yes. - Why was that? I cut it because I didn't want people to think he was psychic. I was worried that the audience... No. It was scripted that he would see in a sort of flashback what the killer saw, which was the woman walking past the window. I was really worried about it. I mean, it worked. I was worried that some people might be confused about his visions. I only wanted the visions when he was drinking in his hotel room alone. Where people sometimes have visions, you know? This was a great location. There was a real house here that was from 1770, that was the home of two congressmen. This is outside Baltimore, I guess. - Yeah. And here's the house that we built that we transitioned here... To a house built. ... that was inspired by the house from 1770 that they wouldn't let us use because... This entire house was built just for the movie outside of Los Angeles. - On the Disney Ranch. And here we have Kristi Zea in full-blown design glory. This is the voice of Ellen Burstyn, believe it or not, uncredited. That's interesting. You didn't know that? -/ did know that. I had Kristi do the still photographs because she's so great. In every single shot here, you see hundreds of separate decisions made by Kristi Zea and her team. Take off your nightshirt, and wipe yourself... I love this upstairs kind of lair of Dolarhyde. This was a big debate about the voice and... Now! - Please! Yeah. Should we... What are these voices? ls it Grandma's voice that has been transitioned into the Dragon's... Is it the imaginary voice of the Red Dragon? Originally, it was scripted that we heard the Red Dragon's voice in Dolarhyde's head. I got great actors reading the Dragon's voice, but I just could never make it work. I just felt it became hokey. It was a potential for people laughing where you didn't want them to. This is a CGI shot where we erased his teeth. So that you just see gums. - Yes, you just see gums.

39:12 · jump to transcript →

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

55:10 · jump to transcript →

This is an example of great operating. You go from his face down to that anamorphic... Camera operation? - Camera operation, yeah. We were back and forth about this, remember? My editor fought me on this. I thought, "Let the glove be hanging out of his pocket." When Lecter sees it, then perhaps Lecter starts to think, "Something's up." It doesn't really pay off. It doesn't pay off, but I just thought it would be intriguing. It does in a subtle way. He says, "Nice..." "Nice work with that blackout." So that's what you think tips it off. I think that's what Mark wanted. I'll have to say this. This next cut is my favorite cut in the movie. Not my favorite shot, but my favorite cut. - Going from this scene? Going from this shot, once the camera lands to when he hands him the paper. It's just my favorite edit. It's the most seamless edit in the film. Watch this. It's very subtle, but you might catch it. "_...Luke 1:7." - Code. Watch this. I love that. Only a director could get excited about that. I have to tell you... It's exciting. - lt is a great passing of a piece of paper. It's just cut beautifully. I'm thinking it's a book code. - Code? I like the pace of this. It reminds me of old films with Sterling Hayden in it. Lot of quick talking here. You need to go quickly through this. People do normally talk over each other, like we're doing now... But in a movie it's confusing, unless it's an Altman movie. But in the movies in the '40s, they would have... His Girl Friday. That movie, the script was probably 300 pages long. They got it all in in an hour-and-a-half because they were talking so quickly. Shakespeare, this is a lot like Shakespeare, you have to race through it. If we sweat him, we lose the connection. If the Tooth Fairy picked the book, he knew Lecter would have it in his cell. Can we get a list of his books? - From Chilton, maybe. No! Wait! Rankin and Willingham, when they tossed his cell took Polaroids so they could put everything back in place. Ask them to meet me with pictures of his bookshelves! Where? - The Library!

1:01:58 · jump to transcript →

I appreciate this a little bit more. I think they were. I think somebody did understand everything that they were saying and was like translating online or something. Isn't that Grey DeLisle who's doing the shaman's voice or whatever? She does a great job. Something plagues their land. Champion after champion. Especially in the beginning we wanted to keep the pacing very different than the pacing on Coruscant.

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where Coruscant's all action, really fast cutting. We wanted to really slow it down here. So you're not going from fast to fast to fast. You have a nice rhythm in the cutting and the pacing of the story. Until, of course, Anakin's story. You gather speed, and then we're just going to full-out climax. Yeah, in the first batch, they were so small, and we wanted to do action, piece, action, piece, action, piece. And so when you watch it all together, it gets a little hectic. And so it was nice to have some time to slow down and do some slower parts in between things.

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You can play more with the pacing. More like a solid through movie instead of lots of shorts tacked together. Yeah, that's true. I'd like to have a serious talk with your programmers. Come on, 3PO. Now we start into the, you know, Mace being amazing section. You always have to have a Mace being amazing section. I think we're all kind of fans of Mace because, you know, he's number two most powerful. So we always want to, you know...

28:11 · jump to transcript →

predator putting this syringe thing into his arm. And again, a lot of these extensions were just done because on the DVD version, we wanted to give the pacing a little bit more breath to the sequence and just turn this into a much bigger predator moment. Because we've never seen a predator in the other movies for so long and actually seen all of the cool type of ritualistic stuff that he does as he gets ready for a hunt.

23:12 · jump to transcript →

Kelly and her husband and basically this was just you know it was a scene that was cut out just from a pacing standpoint from the theatrical version but we liked it because it you know it just it gives you a little bit more time to kind of like like the father before he gets killed yeah I mean that was really the idea was set up the father a little more as this really likable guy makes it all the more tragic when he bites it later on yeah and there's nothing wrong with enjoying a little cabernet in a movie and on character moments even horror pictures are very important

26:10 · jump to transcript →

But here's the great payoff, which is four little chest bursties saying hi to everybody. So this is the cemetery scene. This was originally removed from the theatrical version just from a pacing standpoint, but I'm really glad we got this back in for the DVD version because I think it actually gives the movie a little bit of a breath in the middle that the film kind of needs. Yeah, I mean, really, the reason I wanted to bring it back was just because when...

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We're in the French restaurant. You cannot tell by looking at everybody, but it is over 100 degrees in there. They turned off the air conditioning at this restaurant. No one told them to, but they thought they would help us by turning off the air conditioning. And the kids are just sweating. I mean, you can't even... If a take went wrong, we'd have to stop. You couldn't just keep rolling because they're dripping. And we actually had a guy, this poor English actor that we cast, who was actually really funny, who came in and was so hot and sweating so badly that he just couldn't focus. It's in the deleted scenes. You'll see some very funny scenes with a French waiter and some funny French waiter flashbacks. We just had to cut it, 'cause it wasn't... Featuring Jim Morrison and General Patton. The other thing... It'll come up again later, but them putting the food down leads to the food map joke, which will be coming. I'll tell that story later. It's good to-- We'll earmark it. - A little preview. This is the main Prague train station. And our production... - Again Allan and... Allan and Neno dressed it, so that people actually got off the train, a couple of people, and thought they were in Paris 'cause they saw the signs and they were very weirded out 'cause they had gotten on a train in, like, Hungary somewhere and they thought they were in Paris mistakenly. Michelle being a fantastic sport. The first of many indignities that she was forced to suffer. And Coca-Cola being a great sport. This is what shooting in a train station is about. Another one of these, "We are idiots, we don't know, so we'll set a scene in a train station." If you notice in the background... This is a game Alec likes to play: train, no train. Okay. This is my little game in this scene. Behind him, green train. That train is gone in the next shot. - Okay. No train. But who cares about the train, I mean... Train. - Again, the lesson learned... It's my game, I'll play it. - I know, but look at these backgrounds. No train. - These great, deep backgrounds. We are in a train station in Europe. We are not in Vancouver. No train. Train. - Michelle's scream turn is one that... She's just... - She did it fantastically. Different train. - We caught that attitude a little bit from our own little Seinfeld experience. It's what we like to call a Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Elaine move. The sort of being sweet, screaming and then going back to sweet. And Buffy was a hilarious show. - Can't say enough about Michelle. And I don't know if Michelle always got a chance... You know, she was sort of a supporting character on that show. And on this, she got to really shine with her comedy. Anyway, here's the maps. What I wanted to say is this is a Raiders of the Lost Ark map parody, which is a joke that is about, I don't know, ten years old. It's something we wanted to do a million years ago and again something we saved. There's the Jackie Collins book again. And the headline, "Merde Alors! L'Hooligan! I actually-- I don't know if I even told you guys this, but I was at an Iron Maiden concert about six months ago and I saw a guy wearing that Deep South Monster Truck 1987 shirt. Was that guy you? - Or whatever it is-- Rally '79. No, it wasn't me, but I envied him. Fred Armisen. - As what we... In the script, he's called the Creepy Italian Guy. Not, as some people wrote down in the test screenings, the Train Homo. We actually call him Creepy Italian Guy. And, again, just production-wise, we're shooting on a moving train here, which is yet another of our naive mistakes. - Do not shoot on a moving train. We thought, "Just put them on a train. It'll be easy." Just the most cramped quarters, limited angles. We actually shot this one scene in three different compartments. We had a compartment where we could look one way, a compartment where we could look another way... We pulled out walls so we could shoot different ways. And then we had one compartment where we were shooting in, one that we were shooting out. It was madness. - Plus... Fred, by the way, is just so funny in this. We, last minute... - We also... I'm sorry. I do wanna say that we also then shot it both moving and then did other shots not moving so that we could do the light effects of the tunnel. Which is a poor man's process, because there's no tunnel. This is obviously on a moving train. - 'Cause you can see the window. And then when we do the shots where it goes from light to dark or from dark to light, we pulled the train inside a barn and blacked it all out and then did the lighting effect by hand. So, the Creepy Italian Guy, Fred Armisen from Saturday Night Live... This was another thing where we originally went into this thinking we will find a genuine Italian guy. And, again, we searched the world for a real Italian guy. A lot of Europeans are not funny. They just didn't get the joke. - It's a language problem. They were simply performing the words of the script, but didn't necessarily have any idea what they actually meant. And Fred is someone who's just fantastic on SNL. That little shrug is awesome. So, that shot, for instance, is inside. I think we hired him... - And that's inside. We hired him on a Sunday and he was out there on Tuesday. Yeah. - So, really amazing. And, again, these are all these little touches that he added. I think Travis, who plays Jamie, is fantastic with him. They were a great pair. This was something we never landed on. - I don't think we ever got this right. We had a bunch of different things we shot for this darkness sequence. We had a lot of flashing lights and weird little things of Fred in various stages of undress. - What was going on in the dark. In the end, it was just undercutting... - This end reveal. Which, again... - And, I think, for the unrated version, we put this back. For the theatrical release, we kind of cut right here somewhere. No, exactly. - And then, for this one, we decided to let it roll. - This is something we just enjoyed. It's just that a guy with no pants sees more people and goes in. Actually, that's where we're sitting. That's the compartment where we are sitting with the monitor. To do it all over again, one thing that might've been enjoyable was had we come running out of the compartment. Just, the idea that the man with no pants... This is the very first thing we shot. - First shot ever. It's actually an interesting way to see our cast. The train revealing our cast and us seeing them for the first time. It was a neat experience. - A horrible-looking little train station. The first time we visited it was in winter and just looked awful. And, again, Allan and his guys just came in there... And I think, actually, the manager of the train station asked them to leave everything. Left it all, those flower boxes and the shutters, and just turning it into this beautiful, little French countryside place. That was always a fun shot, where he lays down and jumps back into it. You know, and again, day one, we must've done 30 takes on everything on day one. One of the things about comedy... - We also shot close-ups of everything. Every angle. Everything. - This is more toward the end. This is one of the two days we shot outside of Prague. This is not a great example, because this is more towards the end, but I also think we screwed up here. That's the thing, you look back... - We did it all in one shot. Which I think is the way to do this. We did do it all in one shot, but... One of the things, I think... When I look back at the movie, a lot of our starts of scenes, I find we... Definitely something we were never thinking enough about. So that you're kind of going, "We're going to this beach." And then they're just sort of walking. And maybe had we come off a sign... - That was one of my favorite things. Definitely a fun joke. - Also, it was freezing. You can see Scott... - It's freezing. The gray sky. Wish we'd gone in and maybe colored the sky blue a little more. 'Cause the sun does come out. But just something that maybe... If the camera had moved or something to kind of say "beach," as opposed to that weird stock shot of nothing and then this. And this scene seems to get a lot of people in an uproar. Everyone sort of sees it-- and people... There we are. - Right. This is one of the two days we shot outside of Prague. This is in Rostock, in former East Germany. This was apparently one of Hitler's favorite beach resorts. It's very close to where Wernher von Braun used to develop the V-2 rocket. Wall of cock. - Speaking of V-2 rockets... Everyone seems to laugh at this scene and also go... It is everyone's favorite and least favorite. In all the test screenings we did, it was the most favorite scene and also the least favorite scene. And I think a lot of it had to do with... There were a lot of, like, 18, 19-year-old guys who felt obliged to put it down because they needed to state that they weren't gay. We originally started off shooting it with sort of an idea towards an Austin Powers kind of a thing. You know, you could even see a couple of guys with ridiculously long cameras and stuff trying to cover penises. - Kind of strategically... And once we were there, it just looked dumb and we realized, to some extent... I mean, to us, the only rule is ever: "What's the funniest thing?" And, ultimately, 50 penises was the funniest thing. Everyone goes, "How did you get those guys to take their clothes off?" It's like, "This is Germany. We showed up with a camera. They were already naked." The most surprised people on the set were those 50 naked German guys when they found out they got paid. It was really weird. Like, we'd take a ten-minute break and usually if there's any nudity on an American set, people dive into their robes. These guys were just letting it hang out. If these guys could've taken more clothing off, they would've. We had this amazing German AD that day. Andreas. - Andreas. Who just yelled at them and yelled at their penises. By the way, Michelle, who was very nervous about the bikini scene, couldn't look more beautiful. She was, you know, "The bikini scene, the bikini scene." And it was sort of this big thing in her mind, which... She was nervous about it for no reason 'cause she... But I think also David went out of his way to make her feel comfortable, and also to light her beautifully. Also, again, this was very near the end of the shoot. And I think there was more of a comfort level with the crew, too, and the main camera team. The comfort level was bothered a lot by the fact that Jacob, once he took his pants off for that first naked shot, wouldn't put them back on 'cause he knew it bothered everybody. I think he really enjoyed how nervous he made everyone. And poor Eggby. Poor Eggby had to go up there with the light meter. That guy-- There was a lot of protest, a lot of discussion about the old man yelling, "Chica, chica." Which... For whatever reason, it's one of our favorite things. You get a shot of him. There he is again. "Chica, chica." Which always gets a nice rise out of the crowd. This is the most beautiful shot in the movie. Not shot by us. Shot by... - Gary Wordham. ...Gary Wordham and his unit, his second unit. And it's just absolutely beautiful. And here we are on another train. But, again, we are... Because it's a night shot, we are faking this. It's a poor man's process. Occasional lights moving on the side. Because we could not do a moving train at night. So, we are inside for all of this. SO, this is, like, our fourth version of a train car. And, originally, there was... You'll see in the original script. There was another train in the deleted scene. There was another train scene of them running onto a train. This had happened earlier. It was just too many train scenes and the movie just not moving. That, again, was another one of the lessons we learned. As a writer and then a director, there are lots of things on the page that are really funny, but sometimes, when you're actually then watching the movie, "Why are they still in Paris? Why is it taking so long? Why have they not gotten to the next place?" There were too many train scenes. That one flew out, this one was in. Even if the individual scenes are funny, sometimes the cumulative effect of all these funny things makes it worse. - That's exactly it. This is a joke we created after we had shot what we did. Thanks to our music supervisors extraordinaire, John and Patrick Houlihan, who found this amazing music that was playing under this fantasy. They found this piece of music and said, "What do you think of this?" We thought it was hilarious. We said, "What is it?" And they said, "Well, it's David Hasselhoff." We thought it was so much funnier if you knew that it was David Hasselhoff. So we were like, "Is there a video?" "Yes, there is." And not only is there a video, but this is the video. And it looks something like this. Which is incredible. - That is a real David Hasselhoff video. We're still not sure whether David Hasselhoff knows that his likeness appears in this movie. I think we licensed this... - David Hasselhoff, if you're watching this with Matt Damon, thank you. Thank you both. If the two of you are just hanging out and watching this, you were fantastic. But, yeah, the German company licensed it to us and he may or may not know. And Fred back again. Which makes everybody very happy. When we were cutting the TV spots and stuff, we tried to use this lick. It's one of the things that people felt we couldn't put in television spots. We had a really hard time cutting spots that... Even though it's an R movie, I guess spots for TV need to meet both... They have to be G. - They have to be G. 'Cause trailers need to be G. You can't have anything in the commercial that isn't in the trailer. Plus, you also have to meet network standards. So, we had a really hard time putting things in the commercial. - Showing people what's in the movie. Yeah, telling people this is a good movie. Now we're in Amsterdam. This is interesting... Except we are in Prague. - We're still in Prague. This is... Yeah, it's the Kampa section of Prague. Again, one of these early locations, they found this little canal from the original scouting photos. "My God, we can even do Amsterdam there." This is also-- In Prague, there's a very famous bridge called the Charles Bridge, which is basically right above the kids. There are just hordes and hordes of tourists lined up watching this. Yeah, it was like shooting with bleachers there. This was spring, when it was packed with tourists. And this is an example where on the deleted scenes, originally when they arrive, they go to a youth hostel for a very funny scene that we ended up cutting out because, basically, there was too much Amsterdam. They had an adventure and then they had these separate adventures. It's another one of these tough things, where the scene itself was funny, but its overall effect on the movie was negative. And then actually, oddly, if you go back, originally, Amsterdam was actually very different. Originally, in the script we sold, there was a scene where, instead of going to this sex club... - With Cooper. Instead of going to the sex club with Cooper, there was this whole nother scene. Actually, everything was completely different. The original spec script we sold is on the DVD, so you have to go back and check that out. Definitely worth checking out. - By the way, we should mention her. Lucy Lawless. - Lucy Lawless. Just funny, just hilarious, obviously, and gorgeous. The entire crew was just in love with her. So we shot long on these two days. By the way, when we were shooting on these days, you've never seen more grips and crew members holding lights that used to be held by stands and holding fans that used to be hung. Everyone needed to be in this room at this time for some reason. And she also-- She, being from New Zealand, knew our A camera operator, who we should also mention. - Peter McCaffrey. Peter McCaffrey, who is absolutely fantastic. The whole A camera team, our main guys, were just incredible. Just never a problem, and just really patient and wonderful with us. The brownies. I remember these brownies... Michal, our Czech prop man, would always come in and say, "I've got more brownies for you." He'd show up with these piles of different kinds of brownies from every bakery in Prague. Which, oddly, social decorum dictated that we eat. We didn't want to be rude. So we'd start these meetings looking at all these props with all these brownies and by the end, you had chosen a brownie and also eaten it. You weren't sure which one you actually liked. You were sick to your stomach because of the meeting and how badly it went and also because we'd eaten 50 pounds of Czech brownies. This is the lovely and talented Jana Pallaske who we found in Germany. We did casting in... - London. Here. We started in LA. We did casting in New York. We did casting in Chicago, Vancouver, Atlanta, I believe, Miami, and then we went to London, Munich, Berlin, Prague. We had people in Paris. We had people in Italy. - Rome, Paris. She came out of this, and again, this was another area where things moved around in the script. Originally, this was in London. - In the original script, this was Cooper... This was Cooper in London before they met the hooligans. When Scott and Cooper first got to London, they went to a pub and they met these girls, and this was a Cooper scene. Cooper went out in the alley and was getting blown and got robbed. Which happened to a friend of ours, by the way. And we just decided that there was... - Named Out Cold. There was too much... There was too much stuff going on in London, so we moved it to... You wanted to get to the hooligans. And originally in our script, Jamie was with Scott and Jenny at the brownie bar. While Jacob was at the Anne Frank House. We just decided that they should all split up and have their own stories here. And also, what if Jamie has all their money and all their stuff and he's the one who gets robbed... - It seemed like a good plot point. I mean, it is sort of traditional, but with Jamie playing... I'm sorry, with Travis playing Jamie as sort of the somewhat traditional, you know, stick-in-the-mud, him having a little bit of a sexual escapade as opposed to Cooper, who's more lascivious, it became a funnier scene. It also helped Cooper out because Cooper wants sex and he keeps getting... He gets a version of it in this scene, but not what he wanted. Not quite the version that he wanted. - Not what he was expecting. As opposed to going to London immediately, hooking up with a girl. It oddly felt a little strange that we were going to get him together with Jenny at the end of the movie after he had gotten blown in an alley. Also, he's looking for crazy European sex and he got it right off the boat. That is a crazy outfit. - Yeah, that's the sex superhero. She is the sex superhero. As are these guys. - One of these guys is a Czech policeman. Vilem. Guy on the left. - I can't remember what the other guy does. The other guy is a large Czech clown. They were just sweaty and having a ball. Their names are Hans and Gruber, which is a small inside joke, the name of Alan Rickman's character in Die Hard. Hans Gruber. And this is a very odd scene. Anytime you're not actually seeing our two main actors, a lot of this was done second unit. - Like the shot of his ass, the shot of him with the clamps was second unit. We had a limited amount of time with Lucy. We had two days. - That's second unit, not Jacob's hand. So everything that we had to get done with her and him, we did, and then what was really helpful was we edited it... Not we, our editor edited it. - Roger. Oh, yeah, mention him. The whole editing staff, actually. We had them over in Prague with us for reasons like this. Roger Bondelli and his assistant. Marty Heselov. - Marty Heselov and Davis. Davis Reynolds. And basically, he edited what we shot and it allowed us to go... "We need this, we need that." This is things we're missing which we could instruct the second unit to get, such as guy wheeling in cart, close-up of guy doing the shocking. And it did help having the editor there, which was something originally... The editor was not going to be with us in Prague. Very helpful to have the editor there to be able to look at scenes to know what we wanted to change. That-- We're a little behind. That was Diedrich Bader from The Drew Carey Show, who was hilarious. Really funny in Office Space and in The Drew Carey Show. And flew all the way out to Prague to help us out and did a day of work. He said the last time he was there, he'd actually been here in '89. He'd gotten drunk, climbed up a statue, fallen down and broken his arm, so he was happy to come back. The pot brownie scene-- It's so funny. When you show them in front of an audience, all the sort of younger kids, just the very fact... The mention of Amsterdam got people to go... And then the fact that they're actually doing pot makes them laugh. This, we were writing on the fly. We realized the scene needed something. He needed to say something embarrassing. So he came up with the gay porno stuff. But we tried, like, three or four things. When he was a little kid, he ate dog poo. "They told me it was a candy bar!" - Really high-class stuff. But this guy, who plays the Rasta guy... - Go Go Jean Michel. ...| think we did probably ten takes with him and he got each line right one time and we ended up using it. But he cuts together great. I'm not sure, when we were doing it, I ever actually thought the microphone was picking up a word he said. Yet, oddly, it was there when we got to the edit room. Helder with his walk-off home run right there. "These are not hash branches." Because I think he had been eating hash branches earlier. Yeah, he was not an actor as much as a man who had smoked a lot of pot. And again, ultimately, this was a longer scene. There was more to do about not being able to name the safe word and the monkey was originally brought out and you just start trimming 'cause, again, you're just in Amsterdam too long. We went into this scene... There was another beat where she brought out golf shoes with big spikes and was hitting him in the ass. - We cut that almost immediately. That we cut on the day we never filmed, because we were way over time. And we ended up shooting... - This actually cuts together great. These few moments. It's a huge charge to see this thing. That is a huge charge. - Then to the f#ugelkenhaimler. The flugelkenhaimler. Gotta mention Jeff Jingle real quick. Jeff created that. - Jeff designed and built that and then came over to Prague with it, traveled with it. How he was not arrested and thrown into jail by the customs people, I don't know. - Just did an amazing job on that. There you can see the Charles Bridge. - Yeah, the Charles Bridge is behind him. We lost out. We should be making these Vandersexxx T-shirts. Someone is selling them on eBay, but they're one color. They're wrong. If you're the person who's making them on eBay, just make them the same way. But it's a fun shirt. You can see all the bugs that are flying around there. We did it as a crew shirt, actually. We gave it out to the crew. Well, this is dawn. We shot all night. This is dawn for dawn. No, no. We shot this... This is dusk for dawn? - This is dusk for dawn. This is the first shot. We were shooting nights on the bridge, and that was the first thing we did, because we were shooting that Jamie thing and we ran out of time 'cause It was getting too dark. If you go to your deleted scenes, you will see a scene that sort of happens right about now, which is Jenny... Michelle Trachtenberg-- saying, "Look, boys, I'll take care of it," and she tries to sort of strip to get them to hitchhike on the autobahn, which is impossible. Again, we were out here on this highway way too long. This is the same deserted highway where we shot the bus driving around. Also, it was freezing. - We were here way too long. It was 30 degrees and drizzling. - This was, again, continuing the rule of every time we tried to do a close-up on Michelle, it rained or hailed. She was such a trouper. Cooper's shirt, by the way, says, "I Love Ping-Pong." This phone joke was interesting. We originally had the first one which took place on the bridge in London, and that always got a good laugh. And this one never really gets that good a laugh. But there's a third one later, the comedy rule of threes, that only really works as good as it does because the second one sort of exists. And so we left it in, even though we never loved it. This is Dominic Raacke, who is basically like the Dennis Franz of Germany. He's a big cop show star in Germany. Our casting woman-- What was her name? Risa Kes found him. And actually, there's another... We were talking about the clearance stuff earlier. God, yeah. - We shot about eight takes of this guy and you can see that thing hanging from his rearview mirror. Originally there was a Tweety Bird, a Warner Brothers property, hanging from that thing and we shot about eight takes and we moved on to a different shot and somebody was looking at playback and said, "Is that Tweety?" And we looked at the playback. "We'll never clear that." - And we just decided we'll never clear. So we had to go back and reshoot everything we had done. And the camera guys thought it was so funny that we had screwed up that it became a running joke. They kept the Tweety Bird and they began adding it. Every time we would set up to do a shot, they would roll a little film before we ended up doing the shot and they would put the Tweety Bird in front of the camera, so we have a reel somewhere of that Tweety Bird in every location that we shot. - And it's fantastic. He's wearing a pope hat. He's in the hot tub. We'd love to show it to you, but Tweety doesn't clear, so we can't. So just imagine every shot in the movie with a Tweety in it.

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They just kept doing more and more tongue. It was this progression where the first one was a little chaste and then the next one was a little looser and then by the end, they were just going for it, as we saw there, and they just did a great job, and I don't believe Michelle got sick. So I think it was... - It all worked out. The other thing, too, is we were always starting off shooting wide, which you do, and we probably had sort of a bad habit of doing too many takes in the wide, which you tend not to use. You end up going in. Luckily, by the time we got in, they were sort of going for it a little more, so it worked out. We needed to do the number of takes we did in the wide to get them ready. - To get them comfortable. Which is our excuse for doing the number of takes we did. This is one of the true great moments I love in the film where he's not speaking and he's just smiling. Gets a huge laugh. - Gets a huge laugh, and again, that's at least when it feels like these guys are real characters. It's also, this is a very kind of talky, frenetic movie, and this is one of the few scenes in the movie where we really get a laugh from silence and space. And also just sort of... We get a real laugh from them as who they are, as opposed to someone doing something to them or them seeing something, which, I guess, the movie definitely falls into that category. Also, the audience is warming up to these people who they've never met before. These are strangers when this movie starts. No one knows who Jacob Pitts is. And it hurts the top of the movie. Whether you love this movie or not, and having been so involved with it, we kind of like it most of the time, the audience just doesn't know who these people are and doesn't know... There's no benefit of the doubt, and there are things that I like to think were maybe funny that just weren't working because you don't know who they are. But by this point in the movie, you're liking Jacob, you're liking them. So you kind of get his smile and you go with it. And it's, you know, one of the prices of not using big stars. It's why the second they see Matt Damon people go crazy, but it takes them a while to warm up to the four. But most people, even people who disliked the movie, I think definitely felt that the four of them were good friends on screen, and I actually think that's great, that the story of the four, the friendship works. Well, we took a lot of time in casting. You're casting at an awkward age and you... Everyone has to look great on their own and also has to look of a unit. They're all from the same class, so... You know, Michelle, who was 17 when we shot this, and Travis, who was probably 25. But they end up looking... - Like brother and sister. They found their rhythm... We had a scene that we never got to, which was in there, which is, as he is driving them to Berlin late at night... he starts talking... Tibor starts talking about this area they're driving through. He used to be a great swimmer when he was a little girl. And, basically, the idea being that he was a... Taken by the government, given a lot of drugs. Given weird steroids and drugs and turned into this bearded man you see before him, but that he still hopes one day to get pregnant and have a little girl of his own. Unfortunately, we never got to it. The Cooper shirt, we ended up lengthening those shots because people could sort of see the Cooper shirt. Yeah. I wish-- This was a big mistake, which is we don't keep him in this shirt long enough. We switch the shirt when they go to Italy. The shirt of him with his own smiling face on it, with the word "Cooper" under it is just a great shirt. This is Walter Sittler, who's... - German. He's a German sitcom star. We're hoping this'll be very big in Germany because Jessica's a very big pop star and was on a soap opera, he's a big sitcom star and also Dominic, the truck driver, who is, aS we said, the Dennis Franz of Germany. So, that's gotta be something. Making this the Love Boat of Germany, I think. And this little old lady extra, where we gave specific instructions for them to find as an extra... We were looking at hundreds of photos of old women. We wanted the walking dead. Yeah, who is nearest to death. Find that person and bring them to the set. The thing of her being deaf really makes us laugh. Also, my guess is it annoys virtually everyone else. This is one of these scenes. That old woman is Czech and speaks no English. The German guy speaks some English. The little boy that we're about to see is Czech, playing German, and speaks no English. Also, luckily, he and his father, who was his guardian, I don't believe had ever heard of Adolf Hitler. So, that worked very well for us. 'Cause I'm not sure he ever knew what he was doing. But also... - And this is a scene that's really interesting in a theater because there's about a page of dialogue that starts here. It actually was originally about half a page. And we lengthened it because we knew we needed more jibber-jabber. None of this dialogue matters. And you can't hear a word. I've still never heard a word that's coming out of this guy's mouth. And that's one of the great things. As writers, we would write scenes that have pipe. We have to explain things, and we'd always try to put jokes in and people said, "You can't do that." "No, you're undermining the scene." - And we did it. And it works. When we had the chance to do it our own way, there's important information, you kind of get it, it's repeated here anyway and you got an amazing scene, as opposed to what would've been in a normal movie, which is just a boring scene of them talking about how she's going to Italy. And, once again, this very strange modern plaza that looks like we're in Germany is Prague. And it just, you know, coming out of our earliest discussions, as you're trying to make each city seem a little bit different... You know, Paris Is very pretty. What is Berlin? Berlin is modern and cold and steel. - Berlin is a new city. And this looks different, and also very un-American. I mean, even those bizarre trees. We're not in America. We're not on a back lot. We're not in Canada. And there was a movie theater there that serves beer, which was very interesting.

1:04:45 · jump to transcript →

This is where we had the bomb threat. We actually had to shoot... - We had to come back for this. The whole airport we shot in one day. Well, actually, two days because... - It could've been done in a day. This part we had-- This was the end. We had an hour to shoot this whole scene. And I remember, there was a woman from the airport standing there and... We're distracting her with bad questions. I was talking to her and I speak a little Czech, and I was telling her that I used to drive a cab. She was talking about cabdrivers from the Czech Republic that are now Americans. And I'm like, "I used to drive a cab." Just anything to stall while we were shooting. The other thing is, 66 and 67, we're controlling. Those are our lines. And I think 77 there we're controlling. The rest is the real airport. - Everything behind is the real airport. And there's an outtake where someone comes and tries to get in our line. And the Czech AD had to, like... - Mirek. Mirek had to grab them and pull them out of line, which was funny to us. I don't know why everyone laughs when they say "flight from Rome to Cleveland." Cleveland is a major destination. - No, it's crazy. If anyone ever flies to Raleigh-Durham, you can go from Rome to Cleveland. That's my only point. This is incredibly inadvertent and we lucked into it, but as they actually hug and are happy as brother and sister, even though they made out, we really lucked into it, the fact that they both ended up in green, sort of dressed together, as they are twins again. I always thought that was really cool. Nothing we had any control over. You always hear about directors talking about color schemes and stuff. We had no control. This scene-- There was a lot of dialogue with Jenny and Cooper talking. We realized we didn't need any of it. It was just... It was an attempt at flirting, and at a certain point it was like, "No, this entire movie has been the flirt. Let's just do the payoff." And, obviously, get him in there. And there's a weird little thing in there, where it took a little too long for the door to shut. There's a little jump cut in there. That's masked by the sound of the door. - And then we tried that line there, which no one ever liked. It was weird. The first time we put it in, the first time we screened it it got a big laugh and subsequently not a... Something about that stock shot. That has appeared in every movie Montecito has ever made. It's Harvard. - It's Harvard. It's a helicopter shot of Harvard. I believe they used it in Road Trip and Old School and we've used it too, now, as Oberlin. So, that will be in every movie we ever make. And then you get into these scenes and you start having these weird discussions, like... This, by the way, the "Eat Me" shirt, awesome. The "Eat Me" shirt is awesome. And this is also a reshoot. Originally, we had Jacob in his dorm room. It felt very claustrophobic. - Very shuttered. This is actually one of the few things that was shot in the United States. That's Caltech. And most of what happens happened in the other scene, but it just opened it up. I mean, Jenny being there... Although, originally, she was reading a Jackie Collins book. So, we miss that. And then we added this American robot and people either like it or don't like it. I think the problem with this is that people don't remember Cooper hating the robot from the other scene. They just remember Scotty fighting the robot. So, it's not as funny that Cooper fights the robot here. That's Pat Kilbane as the robot, who's a really funny guy. We used him on Seinfeld as Bizarro Kramer. He was really funny and it just... unfortunately, I'm not sure... Again, it's a writing problem. But he's just very funny, just trying to still be a mime. This, by the way, it was 110 degrees on this day. No air-conditioning on the set in the middle of summer. And the college we eventually got cleared was Oberlin, which to people who've never heard of Oberlin... Who live in Central Europe. ...looks like "O, Berlin," which they think is some sort of a joke. Yeah, and the only reason we used it, it was literally the only college on earth that we could clear. And, again, as director, things you don't worry about... I remember lots of discussions about when he is using that computer. How is he using it? What is it plugged into? I remember arguing about what bag she's carrying into this scene. Again, there are just days where you get bogged down in things that you have no idea you were ever going to get bogged down in. Colors of walls. Things that just don't matter at the end of the day. But the trouble is, every once in a while, something does make a huge difference. Exactly. - So, you have to obsess over this stuff. I always loved just... The Green Fairy coming back, I thought, was a perfect ending to what is a really strange, perverse fairy tale. When we changed the ending and kind of made it happy all the way through, without the original downside and then the surprise happy ending... it started to-- We began to worry, "Is it all just too pat?" And the Green Fairy just going, "Fuck this," sort of, I don't know, it helps us as writers somehow feeling like we didn't just give in. This is something we always wanted to do. There are a lot of funny scenes that you can see in the deleted scenes, but like Joanna Lumley here... Joanna Lumley, which you can see in its entirety. This is the youth hostel in Amsterdam. She's hilarious. - We wanted to put some of these in, mixed in with the bloopers, and just be able to hear the song one more time. I think people end up really loving it. It's weird. Everyone always would almost get up and then sit. And later, in the airing to the movie, people just knew to just sit there and watch. It also, by putting all the major funny guys in... You get to see Vinnie again. You get to see Robot Man. You get to see Creepy Italian Guy. It reminded anybody that wasn't as big a fan of the Vatican and stuff, reminded you of things earlier that you liked. And that sort of made people leave in a good mood. It shows, "Hey, this was a crazy, wild, fun time." Look, when we shot this, it was a hundred-ring circus: three locations a day, new cast every day, strange country, people that didn't speak English or spoke seven different languages. And it was unbelievably fun. And that's what this actually... I think this reflects that pretty well. There you go. That's the line we were talking about. You can see that scene. That's our day-one porno shoot. Our day-one porno shoot, where literally on the first take, it's running and running... - Hey, there she is. But running and running and running because we have no idea that one of us is supposed to call, "Cut." That was day one. - I remember that. Our first AD Chris was accustomed to saying, "Action," because he had worked with a couple of actors who directed themselves and they didn't wanna yell, "Action." So, Chris was used to yelling, "Action," so he yelled, "Action," and we shot. And I remember we looked at each other kind of going, "You good? Yeah, I'm good. You good?" And then we suddenly realized that somebody had to say, "Cut." While we're wrapping this all up, I guess we should mention Montecito. That's Jeff with the Hitler Kid, teaching him to walk. Greasing the wheels of the train straight to hell. I was just gonna say, the entire time we were there, we had Danny Goldberg and Jackie Marcus with us as on-set producers, helping out with a lot of things. And then we always had Ivan, Tom Pollock and Joe Medjuck. With Ivan, it was an interesting thing of... We didn't always agree, but it was always interesting because we'd talk about stuff and you'd talk about these kinds of movies and you always are referencing Animal House and Stripes and whatnot. And, of course, he made those. And that was always an amazing, sort of... It was a great... "You know how in Ghostbusters..." Yeah, of course you know. A good consigliere, so to speak.

1:22:35 · jump to transcript →

with that original transition in mind. Yeah, what the original plan was, there was a sequence where we just held off on this. It was going to be the Underworld wrap-up, where Marcus, when he awakens, he bites Kraven's neck. Through those genetic memories of biting Kraven, he ends up getting what is basically the Underworld 1 wrap-up, and kind of last time on Underworld so that everybody gets to speed. And it just, it was a bit too long to wait for that to happen at that point.

9:27 · jump to transcript →

Of the movie. There was a whole sequence, actually. We played it all as a flashback now, but the whole sequence itself was about five minutes long. Involving... Yeah, it was a little bit too long to get going in the beginning. It played very well as a flashback. This was a difficult...

1:05:41 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, this is real water. Is it? Real water. We shot this in Vancouver. This is actually a... We were kind of actually, honestly scraping by to find something for the voiceover. Originally, the voiceover was just in black. And we didn't have anything to put behind Kate's voiceover. And so we pulled some of the Vancouver aerial footage that we shot to put in behind it just because the voiceover ended up being a bit longer than... It was too long in black.

1:38:05 · jump to transcript →

That rock is CG. The actual rock, you know, is in there, but you couldn't see it because it came through the frame too quickly, so it was replaced with a computer-generated rock. So there's lots of visual effects in the movie that you would never imagine are visual effects. I always wanted to tighten this little bit here, but it was... You had to show where Brendan found the key and...

13:21 · jump to transcript →

Actually, we're pretty anal about not having story holes, especially during the script writing phase. Bob goes over and over the script, and I will also, because we hate having holes. And then you get into post, and every once in a while you say, you know what, it's okay to have this little hole because no one really notices or cares. And you do that for pacing. Sometimes you say, you know, here's a story point, but the audience doesn't really care, and it's slowing the movie down, so let's cut it. Yeah, I think pretty much you'll find that any hole that exists...

53:28 · jump to transcript →

It's totally stolen from another part of the scene. Yeah, it looks like it to me. I thought there was some handiwork in the editing. In some ways, this scene had the most editing work on it than any other scene. You're kidding. Because it was our first day, we really didn't quite have our rhythm yet. You guys were nervous. I was nervous. Frank was nervous. And the scene was very long. The original scene was 14 minutes. A lot of the scenes were a lot longer.

11:17 · jump to transcript →

masochistic classic called Venus and Furs. Oh, wow. I wondered who it was, that or Belle de Jour. Belle de Jour, I realized later, was the name of Catherine Deneuve's character who was a masochist, but I thought it'd be good to have a dominatrix with a masochist name. From the film, I just saw the film Venus and Furs not too long ago. It was a film? Yeah. It's really bad, but it's kind of great.

29:08 · jump to transcript →

And as we have seen in this moment, the rhythm of the movie is quiet and calm, trying to feel how these characters are trying to start over.

5:48 · jump to transcript →

This is probably the only moment of calm in the second half of the movie. It's the only moment because the pace of the movie is so intense. I think it was... it was the right rhythm to deliver this crazy moment. And this is, as well, it's very important to understand why these people, why this doctor is helping the kids.

1:11:09 · jump to transcript →

to actors or stuntmen to bang the, to get the rhythm right. Right, so there's no real definition to it. And unless you're training for eight, ten years, it doesn't look like anything. Right. It's very difficult if you want to get it right. And it's elastic. It's hard. Mr. Yuen Woo-ping told me he never, of his career, like 30, 40 years, he never really done sword. It's hard.

12:56 · jump to transcript →

These scenes are always a nightmare for when you film them. Dinner party scenes, because it's all about left to right, right to left. Who's he looking at when he's looking that way? And you end up, basically, the truth is, no matter who you are, you end up going round the table, shooting everybody, and you double up sometimes because you want to make sure the editor's got enough in editing where the editor can control the pace of the scene and shape it a bit, you know? But it's basically...

1:14:58 · jump to transcript →

create a kind of acceleration in the pace, then you have this kind of understanding of our grasp on the physical reality in which these men are inhabiting. And I think it helps a lot in your kind of innate understanding of what they're going through. I mean, we expected an audience to understand

1:48:47 · jump to transcript →

That was a much longer scene too. I thought that was a good scene. In its original form. I mean, I think it's still a good scene. You mean it's run now? No, no, no, I don't mean that. I mean, you know, we had to cut it because it was way too long. But I think it worked, if it were just a short movie. Yeah, exactly. No, it's what I thought when we projected the scene. It was really totally captivating. It's just when you put the whole movie together, you have to find somewhere to cut that. Yeah.

49:03 · jump to transcript →

Andrew Niccol

but I buy it and I know it's fake. One of the few scenes we cut out of the film was Yuri and Ava's wedding. It was supposed to follow this scene. It was shot at the same synagogue where Yuri meets his first gun-running contact. But the wedding scene sort of slowed the pace of the film, even though it has a funny moment.

31:36 · jump to transcript →

It threw us forward. The thing is that Ving, of course, couldn't be driving doing that. That was a stunt driver driving. And as soon as the camera went away from the car, Ving ran in. He was off camera. God, what is that? You can't hear that? What's wrong with her? Now, Keri really set the pace for me later when I have that in my head... ...because I basically just did her version.

21:39 · jump to transcript →

This was fun. And we actually did this in really long takes. So we pretty much would shoot everything from them coming through the crowd and down and out here and up to the helicopter and into the helicopter in one, which was kind of fun that we set them up as big masters and let everything run. And obviously it goes without saying, so I'll say it anyway. The movie alternates between really intimate and really giant, which is a fun rhythm. And this was...

42:12 · jump to transcript →

But this struck me when the first time I saw the finished movie as a very brave shot to do, to include this, this very, very, very long shot of his face crying. Yeah, it's too long. But on purpose, too long. It's a way to start again, to give us a blank page for a short time, isn't it?

1:40:46 · jump to transcript →