Practical effects

There's going to be no sound. We're probably going to replace a lot of this. Just go up and have fun. They were in an osprey doing it for real. They were in an osprey. They got in an osprey with Eric Jenderson and were shooting their dialogue in the osprey. And we knew we would be picking up a lot of the stuff with the graphics back on stage. So all the pressure was off. They could just go up and have fun. This sequence represents what has to be...

32:16 · jump to transcript →

Haley gave us a whole cornucopia of different emotional. Yeah, versions where, and there's versions where Tom is charming and there's versions where, and what was nice. This was all done in camera, the magic tricks all in camera, just in case you're wondering. And we had to do it so many times to get it just right. I think that was like take 17 that you did. Yes, and you can feel Tom getting a little frustrated with the magic trick. What I love here is I remember when you pitched me the idea that you're not gonna see any of the pink pocketing.

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rather than just being in control. Oh, this is amazing. You absolutely shot this for real. And this was all for real. This was all for real. Although a lot of the people in the background there, anybody in the background there, they weren't there. Yeah. Look, this is real. That was, again, this was a lot of fun. It was amazing that you got that timed out. Oh, it's a real challenge getting all of these elements to line up and doing it in a very limited time and, again, doing it during COVID.

47:48 · jump to transcript →

Was ribbed part of your childhood as well? The actual ribbed event is a totally true story. I wish I could take credit for making that up because it's a good comedy gag. A guy from my high school really did go to a pharmacist before his date. It turned out right around the time the pharmacy closed, that night, after buying the prophylactic, he went home to meet the girl's father on a high school date, and that was the pharmacist he had just bought a prophylactic from. When, when, when? When the timing's right.

4:07 · jump to transcript →

Still remarkable to me. Yeah. That was all in camera. That was done today. That's 17 different visual effects plates. Easily. And there's something about the real thing that makes that small stud still. Maybe because I was there and I was on the edge of my damn seat. And the sun was coming up and we gotta go, we gotta go. Worried for everybody. This was, by the way, this was kind of the first film I shot in Hollywood in Griffith Park in the classic A Tree is a Tree shooted in Griffith Park. So all these scenes took place

12:02 · jump to transcript →

the classic thing you need to do as a director when you can, which is don't let the actress watch while you're rigging all this stuff. And it was terrifying looking, for real. What really worked best here for me was that in terms of directing, everything was neutralized. The audience feels like, oh, this is calm. Yeah. Everything's fluorescent. There's no shadows. There's no contrast. So that's, for me, as a lighting cameraman, I want to make sure that that is there. But to get into this room and then

23:51 · jump to transcript →

shots here where you see the shake that's also done in post-production the actors know that this is going to be done so you see them moving around a bit it allows steve to have more control over the way that it's done versus doing it in camera actors always feel totally ridiculous doing this stuff it's like pure star trek you know it's like shake and pretend we're pretend the room is shaking

14:25 · jump to transcript →

and you know this movie we just wanted the money had to take a huge leap forward thought island did a great job in the first movie but this movie had to be better and they really did it one of things it's so difficult about doing a shot like this is uh... when the shot was actually photographed uh... patricia who plays uh... milan on tsunami uh... had to perform that without anything there the other difficulty of course is that the camera operator has to operate the shot without emotive being there also so it's a

38:50 · jump to transcript →

This next shot coming up is pretty neat because it has in-camera speed changes, which you'll see come up here, and kind of puts us in their minds. It's very subjective. And if you listen to the soundtrack, you'll see that the sound design does the same thing. Very effective. I really pushed Leslie on that because if I did a shot like this again, I would have more movement in the background so you could really feel the slowdown and speed up.

1:09:42 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

This village was built on the side of a really amazing area called Poolburn Lakes in New Zealand. And we built quite a few of the huts. Some of them are computer generated in the wide shot. But most of what you see here we did for real. It was this amazing little Scandinavian style village on the side of the lake. Now it wasn't actually raining on this shot, was it? No, this rain was added later. It was computer generated rain. We did use rain towers for the close-ups, but this is too big and wide to...

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

I do love this scene. I mean, this was another favourite scene. I really did want to try to hang on to this stuff for the theatrical version. I love them talking about the Entwives. It's kind of just, you know, it's a shame. Anyway, it's here. Hey, we shouldn't mourn it too much. We have DVDs. Thank heavens for technology. But I am very happy with the way that the extended cut DVDs are now fleshing out the trilogy. This one was, I think, about 43 minutes longer than the theatrical version.

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

ripped off, we made it rip off but then the flag blowing in the wind and going over the rooftops is done for real. It just happened. It was so windy that it did a perfect flight path for what we wanted for the shot. We had a helicopter rig to shoot from up at Ediris but it was so windy when we were there filming that we didn't get many good shots and the one that you're looking at here was actually shot while we were building the set because we had a helicopter with a camera fly nearby and I said to them why don't you just roll a bit of film to show me how the set's coming along

1:16:03 · jump to transcript →

You see the snow starting and either you have to shoot before it covers the floor because you lose the continuity, or either you want to shoot with the snow coming into frame because it's perfect. And it makes everybody work faster and with more energy. And that's what's great. It shoots for real outside. Well, I guess when they walk in the street, you have no choice. They have to be really outside.

13:11 · jump to transcript →

So here John Bryan is playing all the theme that we will hear later with the piano and he's playing them like mixed up. It's like a remix but done directly on the piano. And we shift the light in camera to see. That was a big challenge for me to show the memory vanishing without using complicated special effect. There is just a ghost in front of the lens and we hit the ghost with the light.

21:58 · jump to transcript →

I asked him to hide for real and scare her. She didn't know where I would be. We did different takes on each time he would hide. Mark would hide in a different place. You should not have seen this. I apologize. I like the way she hovers here. This is a hoax, right? This is Clinton. I assure you. No. She should not have said that.

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lost all the weight to play the convict at the beginning. We shaved his head very roughly, and we shot all the convict stuff first. And, you know, so he had the scenes with Colm Wilkinson early on, which was great for him. And then with Annie, because she wanted very much to have her hair cut for real, you know, we needed to shoot the factory scene early on. With enough in your pocket to last for a week Play the landlord with a shot Keep on working as long as you're able Keep on working

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So Anne had her hair cut for real and she was very keen to do that I think because she wanted to go through some of the emotions of what it's like to lose your hair in that way and because she thought she could feed those into her performance and also you know both Hugh and Anne were always looking to make the film as real and ground as possible in terms of what she did with her characters. The set actually stank because we had

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an unbelievable amount of fish imported into the set, which then slowly rotted. So when you went onto the set, it really did feel real, and we left the heating off to keep that cold feeling, so it was pretty unpleasant. Join your sisters. Make money in your sleep. That's right, dearie. Show him what you've got. That's right, dearie. Let him have the love.

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Marco Brambilla Daniel Waters

uh the film kind of chronologically and then we moved into stats so this was all on location and uh yeah i was there on on top of a building nearby watching waiting for the explosion wesley snipes was there his posse was there it was it was a long wait but it was worth it i can still remember have a sense memory of the heat the heat against my face it was a real explosion yeah i was too close i think i had 13

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Marco Brambilla Daniel Waters

as reference for the way the building would be collapsed, the way it would appear at the end. And it's interesting because it actually came very close to that. Like you see the building kind of... And this is something that with a lot of the CG work that's being done today on films, it lacks a certain organic realism. And in this case, this is all done absolutely for real. The implosion was for real. All the fires are for real. There's no...

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Marco Brambilla Daniel Waters

Oh, wow. And of course, Elon Musk is working on Neuralink, which will plug in directly to your nervous system. Now, this is a scene where I hired a company called Colossal Pictures in San Francisco. And I loved what the work they did on the right stuff, where they shot a lot of practical effects.

1:10:05 · jump to transcript →

We'll see him later in the movie, but I thought it was great to be reunited again in a movie, finally. I did in Germany five films with him, including this boat, and now it's the first American in number six, even if this is just more like a cameo, you know, a little guest part. So this was all done all for real, no tricks here in Cleveland. And this big explosion, that's a special effect we did right there on that scene. Nothing was added later.

5:07 · jump to transcript →

Not really, but Harrison was so nice when they had their only scene together over the phone, because Harrison, of course, was on the plane and she was down here. Harrison came to the set and did his lines for real. So he was there on the phone, right a few feet away, and talked to her. I thought it was nice. And same with Gary Oldman, who, for example, for this scene here,

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He came also to the set of the White House and did it for real. I always like that if actors do that, because it's so hard for an actor to just talk maybe to the continuity or to first assistant, and you don't have the great actor on the other side. So I like that. And it was here the same. I think this is a very, very... I think I should...

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

One of our actors voiced that black rider. I don't know if you know who it is, but it's actually Andy Serkis who also voices Gollum. We wanted to get a great voice. We were recording some Gollum dialogue and we said to Andy, do you want to try a black rider voice for us? And so Andy did it. Now this is a scene that I really did regret cutting out of the theatrical version and we did it only for momentum reasons because I just love it. I love the song. Fran actually wrote this song for the boys to sing.

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

Yeah, she has a brilliant ear. She does. Very musical. All the translations were done by David Salem, an American scholar, all the Elvish, and in fact some of the other languages as well. This horse riding is all done for real. I mean, this shot here is amazing. I love the way the horse is pounding along. Shot down near Te Anau in New Zealand.

1:20:23 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

That's right, Fran actually directed quite a significant piece of this scene. John Mahaffey did it too. Well, John really did it. John Mahaffey, our second unit director, directed quite a bit of this scene with Fran. I think you were there too, weren't you? I was there. There were rice flakes.

1:55:08 · jump to transcript →

Now, I really did like the way the set looks. That's cool. That's footage from the first movie. Like the names on the monitors, they're all names of people who worked on the crew. Len picked them. Notice that Nate Robinson, who did those shots, gave himself the absolute longest shot with his name on it. You'll see there's the one that's like... Well, I used to do that. I was a prop guy for quite a while, and so it was my job to...

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They've done such an amazing job on this one. No, they really did. Yeah, no kidding. So what is the writing there? It's Greek. You know, it's funny. On pages, people don't always think. You have to draw every page, basically. So you have graphic artists that really step in. And you can come up with a little concept, but those guys know how to write. That's what they do. We had people that just do handwriting, especially. Do they actually write a story?

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brave enough to set me up. So Macintosh did a really good job. It really did. You got too much to drink over there. I was very happy with Stephen's performance because I wanted him to, I wanted Tannis to have this combination of, you know, this confidence that...

1:00:16 · jump to transcript →

Someone told me an expression of audition scenes are the hardest thing to film, and they're right. So this was one of the main audition scenes, as you can imagine, to check the chemistry between these two characters. So by the time we finally shot it for real, it was a lot of prodding each other to try and be interested. I mean, I could really use some help from a guy like that right now. Help? Really? What with? But they did a good job. You know I volunteer at the needle exchange. No, I didn't.

34:32 · jump to transcript →

So doing 3D moves were hard and... I mean, I think it's really cool what we ended up with, but there was a moment I thought this was gonna be laughable. And we didn't have the money to shoot it for real. That's why it's a comic book anyway, but that's an example of money suddenly making you come up with a better idea. Mindy was born. Marcus became the child's guardian.

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Play it for real. All you cavemen out there is fire. Nat gets a huge laugh. Fire. Fire is good. Fire is our friend. Yeah. Gentlemen.

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Commentary With David Kalat

It entails painting part of the scene onto a plane of optically clear glass and filming through it to create an in-camera superimposition, as opposed to an optical effect or process shot in which different aspects are combined after the fact in the lab. Tsuburaya uses both techniques throughout Godzilla, and you have to bear in mind that neither technique had been used very much at all at that point previously. Tsuburaya's team was starting from scratch. There was no body of experience to draw on.

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Commentary With David Kalat

This is another in-camera superimposition. The villagers in the puppet Godzilla were photographed at two different times, but on the same strip of celluloid. The result is a far superior looking image as compared to combining the plates in a lab, but it's a far riskier proposition. If anything goes wrong on either side and the film is ruined, you have to do the whole thing over again. But the art of Japanese optical effects was spotty at best, so the use of such opticals is very limited.

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Commentary With David Kalat

The film stock they used was exceptionally soft and vulnerable to dust. Fingerprints and hair, any kind of foreign particle could permanently mar the picture. Every time you handled the film, you increased its risk of contact to airborne contaminants. In-camera multiple exposures, basically any time Godzilla or a model are seen in the same shot as a living actor or a real patch of city, magnified the dust problem.

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Well, I thought you made it better than the script was, Carl. I really did. Well, I think you're supposed to if you're directing. If you make it worse, you shouldn't be there. I can name a lot of them who do. I love the little kick you do on the way out the door.

4:24 · jump to transcript →

You know, I was very aware when you were doing things like this and being this guy. I said, this is a guy who was a quarterback on the football team, for real. You were one of my... You see, to actors, a man who can get on a football field and play seriously like you did is something we admire. So I'm looking at this guy and I don't see... Well, that's a good thing. What a compliment. No, I'm not kidding. No, that's great. I take it as a huge compliment. Files on your students.

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am i well i might be asking yeah you like chinese i hate it yeah people always think of that when they watch your pictures they do these two get it on because dick van dyke and mary tyler moore everybody thought they had they really did love each other they they admitted later on that neither one would marry they would have made a team of it

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these people from outer space that are, you know, garbage pail kids. Well, we discovered they were from outer space because we didn't know that when we read the script. Right. But the fact that they happen to be, like, master seamstresses is, like, is pretty impressive. Yeah, they kicked ass. They really did. They were quite good at the 80s stud applications. Right. It was great. Tangerine was all over it. She was going to use the heck out of him. It was a bad, bad situation.

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Now this is, I think we're about to see a wig happen. I think, is this a moment where he's going to flip over? Anthony's going to become, Tony's going to become an acrobat? Oh, right. Yes, that's right. That was pretty impressive. He did the stunt himself. He did. That is so not true. Oh, but I have a story. I have a story real quick, completely unrelated to the film. So I really did become very, very good friends with Shelby Newley. And I practically lived at the Newley's house.

51:56 · jump to transcript →

We did. Okay. That's some psyche fucking right there. All right. Now, I had to be mean to him in this scene. Really, really mean. Oh, man. And he cried, and he really did a beautiful job. The kid's really trying as hard as he can to serve up a good performance. Yep. And I asked him, and I wasn't really talking too much to him because we were in that space of trying to seem super tough and like nothing mattered and we were all cool.

1:16:01 · jump to transcript →

That's the magic of movie making. I just love passing posts in front of the camera. He's a first-time director, so we like our dolly shots. It's good, though. All the things you've been writing for and the hits and misses, you were able to put all the positive stuff into your first picture. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I really did have a lot of fun. It's interesting that it's still...

24:44 · jump to transcript →

Forgive me, I'm getting excited watching my stuff all over again. Actually, that was a cut we made. We actually had the camera move up like this in one shot, but pacing, we had to do certain cutting. Nathan, come on, what are you doing? But I think Tori, or Jennifer, looks adorable, and I don't know, she was so cute and really did have a presence on the set and sort of a charisma, I'm sure, gave you...

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So these are the things that just drive you crazy, but, you know, overall, I guess it's only going to drive me crazy. We're, like, really scared. Stay here. I'm going to check it out. I'm chuckling because we really did have fun making this movie, and I, you know, just can't take it serious. And sometimes, you know, I got beat up a lot.

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Simon West

I thought she should do something beautiful, but also very athletic and daring. And this is a very impressive routine that Lara does every night before she goes to bed, but Angelina actually had to learn to do for real. Now, I never expected her to do all this. When I cast her, I never thought of her as a stunt person, but during her training program before the shoot, she just learned how to do this thing from top to bottom, and I realized I wasn't going to have to use stunt doubles at all.

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Simon West

I woke up this morning, and I just hated everything. Every day, we would go in and do more and more damage to these sets. And as I said, they started off beautiful, pristine copies of real stately homes. And every day, we would go and put more bullet holes in them, more explosions, more broken glass. And we really did wreck them. So by the end of the shoot, they were pretty uninhabitable. I just saw the name. It looked a funny name. I just asked her what the name was. Lara?

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Simon West

that was built to this kind of scale and this standard. It was just incredible. I also wanted to do everything for real as much as possible. So instead of doing a lot of green screen or blue screen work or computer generated stuff, almost everything in the film happens in front of the camera. So as well as this set being on a gigantic scale, it's also a mechanical set. You'll see later in the scene that, of course, the log gets released and flies across the...

46:17 · jump to transcript →

That was a little freaky, but then it became so much fun that I just wanted to keep doing it. Well, at least that part was fun. I think interacting with the banners was a lot less than fun. That was a really... That right there, that kind of free dive was something that I actually really did, and we shot that on a stage.

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and then complete her mission. Savandra, show them where you are. Do you see? It's interesting that we really did have a multinational cast. The hit squad, we hired them all out of Berlin. And...

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some more banner things to do. I think in this sequence, hydraulics did a really terrific job. No, they really did.

1:23:19 · jump to transcript →

We're actually going to jump out of the plane, aren't we? We have to do all of this for real. For real, while you're falling. While I'm falling, we're going to have to get and switch the tanks. Yes. This is the Grand Palais in Paris, France, which was kind enough to let us shoot there. Beautiful. DJ Harvey. Great, great choice. Thank you. Thank you. Look at this lighting. Awesome. Now, Peter Wenham, our production designer, was really amazing. We only had a limited amount of time in the Grand Palais, and so I said to Peter, I want you to build a set.

27:22 · jump to transcript →

The rig failed, and this was the first day. I said, what do you want to do? And he said, my brother, we've got to shoot. He got on the motorcycle and took off. We're going to go like hell, man. And that's it. And the whole design of the motorcycle chase went out the window on day one, and we went to old school, practical, we're doing it all for real. High speed. Yeah. No helmet. No helmet, no stuntmen. Averaging. Stunt drivers in these cars. Yep. These cars coming in, boom. And Lorne's score.

57:41 · jump to transcript →

And so here's a shot done in camera. Yes. We used a motion control camera so that you could do the same shot two times. And we are always trying to find a fun way to do the mask gags that isn't CG. And none of this required any CGI whatsoever. That shot's all done practically. And it's just a simple split screen. It's one of the oldest techniques there is.

1:23:29 · jump to transcript →

Tim Burton

or anything, or soul psych. I mean, we did everything that we could. We have a little bit of digital effects sometimes, but one thing that both Michael and I talked about, and I said to enter the studio, I go, I'm just, you can do anything with anything, CJ. You can do anything, but we don't want to do anything. We just want to do it. Even if it doesn't look real, the practical effects were important. So we did it with everything. We really did. Except for the sandworms, which was stop motion.

14:08 · jump to transcript →

Tim Burton

It just, like I said earlier, it just felt right, and for me, and then for him. But the things about, like, always doing practical effects, keeping it like we did, shooting it in the spirit, shooting it quickly, shooting it, you know, keeping that energy going, that was all very important. So those are the kind of things we talked about. We sacrificed a goat. Our first night of marriage...

26:29 · jump to transcript →

Tim Burton

weird spirit of we didn't really know what we were making but it was fun and you know everybody contributed and so it was it was unlike a lot of movies where it just had a very kind of experimental spontaneous feel to it and so you know then you kind of go on in hollywood and films get bigger and and they don't really you don't really get that sort of opportunity to feel that way so that was a reason too to kind of come back and treat it in the spirit of the first one you know all practical effects makeup sets

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My Question Initially To Jean-pierre Was

I love this shot because it's a simple effect. The ball is on the hand at the beginning of the shot, we do just a pan, and it works. I remember, Sigourney Weaver didn't believe me. She told me "Jean-Pierre, it doesn't work. It's so silly, so weird." I said "Believe me, I am sure." But I was pretty worried about this shot. And it works. There's a shot that you could claim, Pitof, as a digital shot, except it's real. When she throws that ball? It's amazing. This shot was supposed to be digital. What Jean-Pierre wanted is to make an impossible throw. Sigourney did it for real. This shot is real. Look at that. How many takes? I think it was six takes. - Six takes. Yeah. I was here when we shot that, and I feel in her eyes that something was weird. And she made it. Wow. - I had a little problem with Sigourney. The ball is going out of the frame and then back in the frame. I said "Sigourney, I'll fix that and I'll make a perfect path." So you feel the impression that the ball is always in the frame - like this ass - and... That's a silicone butt that we made. That's my favorite shot. I love this part of the film. And... Tell the story of this shot, Hervé. That's one of the famous Jean-Pierre Jeunet's favorite scenes, where somebody's putting polish on his shoes. When I got the rushes, I said to Jean-Pierre: "Well, you remember you did already that scene before." And you just didn't realize it. You didn't remember. The design of the wheels, something Eric Allard had developed way back, right after Short Circuit. Each wheel, instead of treads, they had ball bearings that would roll independently, so it could turn and maneuver. I think he had it patented, and I think NASA was using the design as well. This is a stupid idea. When you arrive in the States the first thing you see is the TV, because you don't sleep. And what do you see on TV? This kind of show. This miniature was not very big. This was pretty small - three meters diameter. That's nine feet to you non-metric folk. And this - you composited Aliens. Exactly. That's miniature and greenscreen. A very composite shot. Was a lot of passes to have the light and the texture and the depth and the atmosphere. For the alien, obviously, it's man in suit. It's very difficult to shoot an alien with a man inside, because it looks like a man inside. You are obliged to shoot very close. Here's Tom Woodruff. - Here's Tom. You were talking about being on the set. Here's the deal for me: being on set in these suits, it's even more claustrophobic than being on set, because I'm literally... I've got some slots for my eyes and breathing, but there's no real interaction between what I'm doing and anybody else on set, in terms of talking or just getting a break. I can interact with the actors and they can respond during the course of the action, but then, once the shot is over, it's like total isolation. But people love you when you're in the suit, Tom. Brad Dourif was great here. It was creepier for me on my side of the glass than it was for him being on his side watching me. I like Brad Dourif in this film. Yeah, he's twisted. Wonderfully imaginative actor. Brad and that creature were dating for a few months right after they completed this scene. I love what Darius did - the slime. He put a lot of care into shooting these and designing the lighting. He, at times, would almost build a cage of fluorescence around the alien, so that you'd get a million little kicks off of the slime. so that you'd get a million little kicks off of the slime. He kept coming back to us and asking for thicker slime, because the stuff in the other movies was too runny. He wanted a quarter-inch build-up, so we went to a slime that was almost like gel. It really had a different look. It was a pleasure to work with Winona Ryder. I remember, sometimes I tried to direct her, and she told me: "Jean-Pierre, take it easy." "I have a lot of imagination. I'm going to give you some improvisation." Remember, at the editing room, everything worked, all the time. In this scene, Winona was feigning drunkenness so she could slip out. Since she's a robot, she can't be drunk. This is a nice shot with the 10mm. It was a very short corridor and it looks so huge. This is a matte painting from a French guy, Jean-Marie Vives. He worked on Delicatessen and City of Lost Children, too. It's fascinating how there's a hint of City of Lost Children in the look of the sets. That's what I love about style, ultimately it just permeates everything that somebody does. That's a clever idea. That's gotta be Jean-Pierre. Very Jean-Pierre. It's great. This set is pretty high, and we used it again at the end of the film in the chapel. The same set but horizontal. - Really? Yeah. - I didn't know. When Jean-Pierre started the movie, he spoke little English - he always had an interpreter with him - and by the end spoke better English than me. Than I. - You see? That's what I'm talking about. It's amazing, because he didn't speak a word of English when he started. Sigourney Weaver loves to have the director very close to her. She hates when the director is very far away behind the video. It was a very good relationship, because, I remember, after a take she looked at me and it was unnecessary to speak. Just one look and we knew if the take was perfect or not. It was unnecessary to speak about the take - just a look. This is a scene that's almost vaguely erotic between Ripley and Call, the two females discovering each other inside of that tube.

27:46 · jump to transcript →

My Question Initially To Jean-pierre Was

I remember, I had to fight against the studio to get the smoke on the knife, because it wasn't on the budget. Here, same thing, it's for real. Sigourney gets it through the hand. No. Of course it's a cheat. On one side it's a retractable blade and on the other side it's a real one. A CG blade. So we CG-ed the second part of the blade. And the smoke is CGI? - The smoke is CGI, too. Lot of times, those little effects - like that - are the ones that have the most effect. Yeah, because it seems to be normal. It would be possible to have a fake hand... They talked to us about that, and it was impractical and too costly, because to give the hand enough life so it didn't look artificial was a lot of work. And to make it move, then stop... Too limiting in your shot. That was a great approach. On the shooting, it didn't take a longer time than just to play it. So it was very cost-effective. Tom, didn't you get together with Sigourney about the style of her movements? Yeah, right, because of her alien heritage now as a clone. We talked a little bit about movements that she saw me doing in the alien suit. We tried to find a way to integrate some of those into her performance. There's some later where she's swimming, there were some movements we worked out. Also when she escapes from her cell, there's an element where we were figuring out: "What is it about the alien when it's retreating that's the most noticeable feature?" The tail. And without a tail, we ended up doing something where she kicks her leg out as she's moving into the chamber and escaping from her cell. In the preproduction, I did some research for Jean-Pierre on animals, to find out the way for the alien to move, to find a halfway between feline and insects. So we did a lot of research on footage, to have an idea of this hybrid between feline and insect. It was cool. I met Ron Perlman in The City of Lost Children - he played One. I love him. I can't wait to work with him again. This isn't a modest thing to say, but I like the way the guns look in the film. Jean-Pierre's idea was: he'd seen the guns get bigger - especially in the second film - and he thought it can get quite absurd if we go too far, so it'd be a nice idea to shrink the sizes again and have guns that are more about efficiency. He wanted guns that snapped when they fired. He wanted to feel and hear every bullet as it ricocheted and hit the floor. He wanted something that was a bit more credible than the giant "Rambo" guns. So we designed with that in mind. It was something that felt very basic.

35:17 · jump to transcript →

My Question Initially To Jean-pierre Was

So out of the water and up onto the tower, up onto the ladder. From underwater to sparks and steam. After three weeks of being underwater we ended up... For another two, three weeks on this set. Climbing the ladder. High, too. Perilously high. Like, three stories high. The stunt people on this film really earned their keep. Big stunt. Big, big stunt. For real. We showed just Winona falling in the water, and I just remember staying up there with the stunt girl doing that thing. I was very impressed by what she did because I was at the same height. Oh, God. And I saw this little hole there and I thought she would never... Every day we received some sparks from the top and it was hot, if I remember.

1:14:52 · jump to transcript →

I mean, they do make flashes for real, but they don't do it every time you need it to, and sometimes the actor's not actually firing the gun for real, and we need them to shoot at a particular point. This whole sequence is just a blast to film. I mean, it was very hot. It was about 130 degrees in the desert, but just to have all these guys on horsebacks firing guns, I mean, you know, this was so much fun. We were just, the whole crew and I were just laughing. We were having so much fun doing this, as difficult as it was.

9:36 · jump to transcript →

And we find out, no, that's literally what they do. They just wander around the country firing their guns in the air and riding their horses aimlessly. And aimlessly is what they're doing in a lot of the shots. Actually, some of the wider photography, it's pretty interesting. If you go and take a look at it closely, you'll see that there's just guys going around in circles. And in fact, if you look at it closely, it's quite lame. But we try to move things along. We shot a lot of footage and cut quickly. And it turned out quite well. Now this is a practical effects.

11:02 · jump to transcript →

always key to me. I always told ILM, I've got to see through him. I've got to see through him. I kept really pushing them to make sure that we got to see through his head, see through his ribs. It can never feel like a man in a mummy suit. And I think they really did it. There's some very impressive work on those last couple of shots there. All those bandages that are dangling from him there, those are basically just a bunch of zeros and ones on a computer. None of that is real stuff, and it looks very convincing.

1:05:30 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

I love that shot of Billy when he's thrown out. Yeah, well, that's a little in-camera cheat. That's really clever. We had Kieran, our scale double, being thrown out, and we had Billy lying on the floor already in position so he could just pop up at the right time. Actually, it was Fon. It was Fon that got... Another one of our scale doubles that actually got thrown out. She always did Pippin, didn't she? Yeah. Yeah, Fon played Pippin. So all of the shots of Pippin running around in the streets amongst the big people is usually Fon. Mm.

2:29:25 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

And that's Sean really picking up Elijah, yeah? Yep, that's Sean and that's Elijah and they did it for real, yeah. Isn't that cool? Remember we sent that fax? We saw that we were back here and we'd seen the rushes and we sent the boys a fax and we made it look really formal, like it was a memo. On the next page we put, you made us cry. This is a very hybrid experience.

3:24:56 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

They're doing this stuff for real to get themselves worked up into the emotion. And we looked at it the following day and most of the footage was out of focus. It was actually one of the most disastrous days shooting that we ever did, particularly because of what it was. It was like we could not believe it. It was out of focus, most of the footage. And we actually, I had to break the news to the guys. I remember walking on set and saying, you know that Greyhaven stuff? Yeah, yeah.

3:56:34 · jump to transcript →

James McTeigue

That speech, because it's such a muscular piece of writing... ... It needs to be attacked with great kind of gusto and flair. And passion and belief. And so, if that's all there, it's a wonderful introduction to the classic masked man. He just appears and you get that persona very, very clearly and very, very quickly. I would say there's not enough talking in films, nowadays. And, you know, there's not enough use of language. I think that introduction, you know, when he first turns up in the Fingerman Alley... ... throws the Shakespeare out to you, then you get the big alliteration speech. I think it's, like, it's nice to use words. And, you know, he uses them beautifully. I thought it was a cool way, also, to preserve from the graphic novel... ... how each chapter has a V word, which I love that. And I was like, I wish we could've kept that in the movie. But that sort of structure... ... 1S sort of condensed into that crazy use of V's in that speech. The important thing about that speech Is you're never gonna understand it. I mean, you know. But you're gonna understand the intent of it. The performance gives you the intent of what that speech Is. And then Natalie's reply is sort of, you know... ... you're the audience, you know, "Yes, what are you, a crazy person?" V does say that he's a humble vaudevillian veteran. He's an actor. I mean, he is an actor. The character is an actor. He's an actor activist. Or something. Who has been picked up and chucked inside... ...and then experimented on and tortured. Hugo's ability to use his physicality and his voice so expressively.... You're so intrigued by what's going on behind that mask... ...as an actor, as a character, as an audience member... ... that you're always going, okay, is he crying now? Is he happy? Is he angry? And because you're so, sort of, entwined in his emotions... ... you become V. And at the end, everyone is V. Because they've been trying to figure out his emotions... ... you know, everyone's trying to play him at the time... ...because they're trying to figure out what's going on under that mask... ...SO it's an amazing, sort of, engagement tool. And afterwards, you'll return home safely. All right. When you go up on the rooftop and you start hearing the music... ...I wanted you to be able to look out over London... ...and have some recognizable landmarks... ...even though it wasn't true to the direction that we were looking. We went up onto a rooftop nearby. We shot stills at night that we bracketed to get the full range of lighting information. Then we removed a few obvious buildings. The St. Paul's Cathedral stands out, there. It's very obvious. And just added a few extra skyscrapers and so on. Painted all the lights out for much lower levels... ...to sort of fit in with a late-night curfew. The Old Bailey Justice Courts itself is always a miniature... ... whenever we see it in this picture. And that's partly because the real building, if you go there at night is not properly lit... in any way that you'd, you know, really want to do it... ... If you were focusing on it like we were. We also made some slight design changes to the Old Bailey miniature. We changed the, flattened the, sort of dome roof, slightly... ...and enlarged the statue that's at the top... ...because she's quite an important part of the story, there. I still went with building miniatures for all of the intricacy and detail that you get... ... IN a very complex pyrotechnic explosion. To do that with a computer, although aspects of that are feasible now... ... the simulations are hugely complicated. And there are always these little happy accidents... ...and things that you get from doing something for real... ... that you're not... Not totally in your control. Which is a big reason why we do it. How beautiful, is it not?

6:41 · jump to transcript →

James McTeigue

Mmm. It's delicious. - Good. God, I haven't had real butter since I was a little girl. Where did you get it? A government supply train on its way to Chancellor Sutler. You stole this from Chancellor Sutler? - Yes. You're insane. I dare do all that may become a man. Who dares more is none. Macbeth. - Very good. My mum, she used to read all his plays to me... ...and ever since, I've always wanted to act. Be in plays, movies. When I was 9, I played Viola in Twelfth Night. Mum was very proud. Where is your mother now? She's dead. I'm sorry. Can I ask about what you said on the telly? Did you mean it? - Every word. You really think blowing up Parliament's going to make this country a better place? There's no certainty, only opportunity. You can be pretty certain that if anyone does show up... ...Creedy'll black-bag every one of them. People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people. And you'll make that happen by blowing up a building? The building is a symbol, as is the act of destroying it. Symbols are given power by people. Alone, a symbol is meaningless, but with enough people... ...blowing up a building can change the world. I wish I believed that was possible. Every time I've seen this world change, it's always been for the worse. Roger Allam, who plays Prothero, is a fantastic theater actor. Those shock jocks exist in every country... ...whether it's America or whether it's England... ...or whether it's Australia or wherever you are. I think the common denominator is they are in every country in some form. And he really embodied that. All the awfulness... ...and the disgustingness and the duplicity that a lot of those guys have. He's the voice of Britain, so he runs a television program... ...in which he rants his particular beliefs... ...which are also the beliefs of the government. I mean, very much like, I suppose... ...some of those evangelist kind of programs that you have in the States. Only his evangelism is a kind of nationalistic fascism, I Suppose. Roger really relished the role. I thought that he really did a good job. So, you know, I made him.... You know, he has those shirts that have the, like, the squeezing neck... ...and I put him, like, in a fat suit... ...and I made him a bit colorful and really made him over the top. One's initial impulse is to be quite big. Then you think, this is a movie. I better be smaller. And they were sort of also, "Oh, no, be big." You know, so. So, you know, you pick up influences... ...and direction and encouragement from wherever you can, really... ...and just sort of hope it all stitches together. Don't worry, I've made sure our reunion won't be disturbed by... ...any pesky late-night phone calls, commander. Stop. Why do you keep calling me that? That was your title, remember? When we first met, all those years ago. You wore a uniform in those days.

31:22 · jump to transcript →

James McTeigue

Oh, God. I hope I didn't wake you. No, I just thought you were fighting. I mean, for real. My favorite film: The Count of Monte Cristo, with Robert Donat as Edmond Dantes. It is not my sword, Mondego, but your past that disarmed you. It gets me every time. Never seen it. - Really? Would you like to? - Does it have a happy ending? As only celluloid can deliver. Okay. Put the sword away. Forensics just wrapped. No prints, no hair, no fibers. The guy is like a ghost. You won't believe what they found on Prothero. Drugs? - Could've started his own hospital. Interesting. - Why? Did you know Lewis Prothero was one of the richest men in the country... ...before he was the Voice of London? Drugs? - Legal ones. Major stockholder in Viadoxic Pharmaceutical. Viadoxic and St. Mary's in less than a week. Coincidence? When you're at this as long as I've been, you stop believing in coincidence. May we come up? You find your own tree. - You find your own tree.

36:08 · jump to transcript →

John Cameron Mitchell

It was a combination of public domain. And Jay's domain. And Jay's domain. And also, as you'll see in the deleted scenes, originally the stalker is on the phone while watching the national anthem. We have some patriotic themes in this film. Sook-Yin Lee demanded we shoot this before we had finished lighting. Because why? Well, because I wanted to, you know, I wanted to be for real.

37:48 · jump to transcript →

John Cameron Mitchell

You know, it's all for real, right? So I had drunk, like, three bottles of water, and I couldn't take it anymore. I was going to pee my pants. So I was like, guys, get in there and pee. We ended up using fake pee sounds. Thanks for this position, by the way. It gives us all great abs. Yeah, John, thank you. The rotate. No one can hear you saying carpet burn. Because everybody's laughing at rotate. Oh, Jay got carpet burn, didn't he, on his bum? This...

38:16 · jump to transcript →

John Cameron Mitchell

This is shot in our friend Michael Warner and Sean Bellman's apartment. They kindly gave us their apartment. Don't ever give your apartment to a film because you never know what they're gonna do in it. Or what they're gonna do on your piano. Yeah, and those are all their real books. Those guys are a couple eggheads for real. Brainstuds, we call them. They're brilliant. Brainstuds. They also have a salon every once in a while. They had one last Sunday. Brilliant performances.

43:54 · jump to transcript →

At a certain point, you really can do the entire dialogue. It's not so hard in this one because they don't talk. There's 12 lines in the movie. But we loved shooting this one. When me and Bjérn... We do it, like, every second day. But there's one exception is that if one day goes on until the next day... ...we don't change. And I think this one took two days to shoot this whole thing. And I loved this because If you think about what she's talking about... ... you know, it's hard to do this for real. She's talking about Werewolves and so on. But she does it for real. - She sells it. Yeah. She sells it. Yeah. - She really does. Yeah. And, I mean, every good actor finds truth in anything. They can find truth in anything. And then they get... And it was also-- I remember when... - Hang on. This scene here. This scene is one of the trippiest scenes in any of the Underworld films. And it is real. - Yes. No CG. That's so fun. Because it's an entire thing... ...we built up. - That's CG. That's CG. Other than that. - That's CG. No, but the shot is actually done... It's actually set up so that we could do it live in-camera. Todd Masters and the guys did a great job with his stomach. This is your revenge on Theo. - Bollocks. That's a real stomach. The blood pouring? - Yeah. Well, yeah. But the stomach is real. - Now, now, boys. Boys. The old hand squeezing. The heart-squeezing shot. Well, remember she has the blood of Alexander Corvinus. That's right. That's the old Corvinus injection... ... that he's gotten there. I always call this the Videodrome shot. Yes. - Yep. That of course Is... - "Long live the new flesh." ...a prosthetic chest that's put on top of him. His body is underneath. - No, it was me cutting Theo. We knew you wanted to. The audience was applauding when they saw this scene. They thought it was great. - Yeah. Here is Richard's shot coming up. Thank you. I like that shot. - It's a great shot. You said we needed it so we got it, and I'm happy we got it. It's in every trailer. - Slow-motion too. Yeah. This worked out well too. - Yeah. This, I thought was a waste of money, these two shots. And it's really, really cool in the end result. This was one... My biggest fear actually... ...because Goth people don't look good at daytime. They are born... They are made for the night. They're plain silly in daylight. Exactly. So I was concerned that will she look silly in daylight. Yeah. This is the darkest-looking daytime... ...and maybe that's the Swedish influence. Don't you have half the year where it's dark? This is sun everywhere. It is, but it's inside a dark... - It's not a beach. Scott lit it... - I agree. What else did we shoot this day? That was cool. The old cowboy switch there. Yeah. - Love it. Then we think-- I think we shot the exterior of her coming out... ...of the tunnel or something and the Lycans following her? That's it. Yeah. - There's something called ADR... ...which means additional dialogue recording. It's when you get bad sounds so you re-record the sound. Right. - This scene was ADR"d... ...and you usually hate ADR because you always lose performance. It's not the same when the actor's standing there with... ...a cup Of latte in their hand and everything. Or mocha latte. - Mocha latte. Whatever. In Burbank rather than in the real world. But that scene was so good in ADR. Because she was able to whisper... ...which she couldn't do on the real set. Right. And get the... - Yeah. So she-- It's so much better. It was so noisy, so they wouldn't have heard each other... ...If she whispered. - Yeah. This is one we call the All the President's Men scene. Yep. Our homage to... I loved this ceiling. - ...Investigative reporting movies. Yeah. - And this is the-- What was this? It was the legal library of the university. That was being rebuilt. It was gorgeous. It's not there anymore? It's gone? This is the last thing that happened... ...and then they tore it down and rebuilt it. That's just brutal. - Yeah. That was brutal. To destroy something brutal as that. But you see the squares and the concrete. Yeah. Wow, what a place. We talked for hours what kind of concrete should be used. Some concrete was wrong. And this concrete is right. Michael. Cool guy. - Yep. Loved him. - Yep. First thing that-- The scene we just saw. He walks up to the set. He never worked with Kate. Kate says, "So, Michael, sexiest black guy on the planet." That rocked him on his heels. He should have said: "SO, Kate, sexiest woman on the planet." He could have. And if he was British, probably he would have said that. Who are the two ugly gimps next to them? That's not fair.

50:54 · jump to transcript →

I think there was a huge concern before shooting this... ... that: "Will we see the other ac--?" Because there's three actions going on. Oh, yeah, that's true. - SO.... We were always kind of sure that... You know, it's a movie. So when we are in the sequence, we're there. We don't think about anything else. - Yeah. When you start thinking about it, then it's almost like you can't shoot it. Otherwise you drive yourself crazy. - Yeah. And we know how that place looks, and it's so hard. It's so hard to get geography for an audience. Watch out for her. She's pissed. He's also pissed. Everybody's pissed here. Not a lot of love going on. - Stephen did a good performance. It was just that we didn't have time for talking here. Right. We didn't have time. - No. There's no space for it. That was the suspension of disbelief of everything happening... ...at the same time here. If you have a long dialogue there... . it's like, "Isn't there a couple of fights going on in the background?" You would start to listen for them and say, "It's awfully quiet in here." And here's a really good thing, I think, coming up. Todd Masters and the guys did a really good job with the Werewolves... ...but we were never happy with the way he looked. We thought-- Although he looks perfect, picture real. I think it was Bjorn, you came up with... ...S0 let's shoot him in the face. - Right. So this is all post. - Right. Suddenly he turns.... Swedish company called Fido did it. Very proud of those. - Go Sweden. He looks really, really gnarly. - It really works, yeah. And when he headbutts her, coming up here.... With his bloody head, yeah. - It's so cool. The other thing we decided... ...IS we really did like Theo's performance earlier in the movie. So he'd come back to life. You know, Selene brought him back to life. And we thought, "Let's put him in this finale." This is my favorite part of the whole end fight, where she's in here. Yeah, it's so gritty, and he looks so big. Yeah, so big. - And here we throw Alicia again. Yeah. Just never stopped throwing that girl. - Wait a minute. ls that a grenade? - Yeah. Maybe it's good. I thought it was too on the head. "On the nose" you say, right? - Yeah. On the nose. But maybe it's necessary. - That poor Lincoln Continental. And it's all show off. He can just walk-- Pass by. Okay, coming up.... Yeah. - And the blood spatters? Yeah. - Okay, this one.... No, wait, where is it? - No, it's coming up. This is one of the things that we asked: "James, can we please have a head popping off?" "We can't afford it." Then you came with a surprise. Look at this little bonus. - "Look what I got you."

1:11:42 · jump to transcript →

I liked the rehearsal. Let's do it for real.

1:23:07 · jump to transcript →

Scott Stewart Jason Blum Brian Kavanaugh-Jones Peter Gvozdas

There was a little bit of technical snafu with these, but it did allow, particularly Caden, the six-year-old, the chance to really play the scene for real. Did you do any magic tricks on this? Well, performance-wise, it's great because the kids are playing off each other. Sound-wise, it was a technical issue because there's all this popping and squawking when they're releasing the button on and off between each other's lines.

6:44 · jump to transcript →

Scott Stewart Jason Blum Brian Kavanaugh-Jones Peter Gvozdas

of this scene here in the kitchen, he would just play and that's great because that's real. So he's playing for real here and what we would just do is we'd start to just fold the scene in around him and I wouldn't yell action or cut. Carrie and Josh and Dakota would just start to do the dialogue of the scene or work their way toward the dialogue of the scene and that way we were able to get a much more naturalistic performance out of him and fortunately because we were shooting digitally we had the ability to run the cameras for quite a long time.

8:27 · jump to transcript →

Scott Stewart Jason Blum Brian Kavanaugh-Jones Peter Gvozdas

And what we did is we put Lexan up here, and the reflection is then composited on. And she just went to town. Yeah, she really did go to town on that. And when we first saw her doing it, she started kicking the glass. We thought she had really hit her head, and everybody jumped out of their seats. Everyone leapt up. It was one of those things where you just knew it was going to work. This was a funny moment we learned just screening it for people.

41:46 · jump to transcript →

scenes that really did i mean you know a lot of what we do is sort of opportunistic stylistically isn't it that you kind of you see something that works and then if you see any other examples of it then you you work with that as well and definitely her looking directly into the camera and being very comfortable early on and then looking increasingly uncomfortable as her fame grew was something that started with that very piece of footage that we looked at the epic landscape of east finchley yeah not

6:14 · jump to transcript →

quite serious and she really did push things really quite far and suffer a lot of kind of personal self-degradation in a way you know when Lauren was saying that she went around to the house and it looked like someone had squatted in it

40:47 · jump to transcript →

These issues which are, you know, films about Amy, but the audience definitely, the number of people that come up to me saying that's such an important point to get across for young girls now, or, you know, the audience watching this film, fans of Amy, to realise that this was an issue that really did a lot of harm. And it isn't really talked about, it's not something that came up a lot.

53:42 · jump to transcript →

And as I said, of course, the Godfather. But Owen Roisman has said that when he went to that set, he didn't have to light it. They would turn the lights on and they had these fluorescent lights and they really did little or no lighting. They would use like a white bounce card occasionally, but the fluorescents were probably, you know, brighter than normal fluorescent lights, but he didn't have to light this. And, you know, one of the things about this movie is

25:04 · jump to transcript →

and steering them. But again, most of what's here was in the book, although Doris Roberts from Everybody Loves Raymond, who plays the mayor's wife, Jessie. And Remington Steele. Yeah. And she is sort of a construct for this scene. But again, Stone not missing opportunities for real humor. And again,

41:38 · jump to transcript →

Filmmaker Paul Davis

And he kind of put it into a crouching position and built a fake back and shoulders. And they had an additional mold of the head. And that was just a little thing that was rod puppeted from underneath. But that transformation sequence, for me, that and Rob Bottin's work on the thing are still completely untouched in terms of practical effects.

1:01:29 · jump to transcript →

Filmmaker Paul Davis

But yeah, that's an American Wolf in London and you know, here we are 38 years later and it still holds up. And you know, I don't think that we'll ever have a movie with practical effects quite like this. It's still the benchmark when people talk about

1:34:42 · jump to transcript →

Frank Morriss

Is that right? Warren was so terrific in this scene. Oh, yeah. Warren had a wonderful, dry humour. With the other actor, Jack Murdock, I wanted somebody who sounded like... ...he could piss Jack Daniel's. Like he had had so much... ...go through his system with that gravelly, gravelly voice. Now, at the time that we did this picture... ...computer technology really did not exist. So that almost all the day footage... ...that we see here in the helicopter, was shot up in the sky. And our guys are actually up in the sky... ...as we fly along with them. And we're looking not at a computerised background here... ...but shooting from the little control tower that we had built on top of... ...what's known as the Piper Tech facility in Downtown Los Angeles. And it's where the city of Los Angeles keeps all of its vehicles... ...and including its helicopter that's on-- Helicopters, that is on the top pad.

2:42 · jump to transcript →

Hoyt Yeatman

Were you up there much? I got to go up there lots and lots. I really love flying in a helicopter. It's quite exciting... ...and Gavin was actually teaching me how to fly, a little bit. Roy Scheider really did learn how to fly it. I'll show you some shots where he was actually flying the helicopter... ...and not just being a passenger pretending to fly the helicopter.

1:17:58 · 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

That school really did look like a prison, didn't it? Look at that. Yeah, it did. - Here comes Ron Dean. Chicago's own. - Looking at her like, "She's going to blow your ride?" "Who's the chickie?" - Yeah I like how he looked at her ass out the window there. "That's a class act from Chicago." - "That's my boy." Yeah. "From a Chicago guy."

1:33:09 · jump to transcript →

Pat McClung

Even though I liked the symmetry of the fact that she had had a daughter and lost her - that's Sigourney's mother, so there's an interesting inversion here. She's looking at the face of her mother but playing it as her daughter. As an actor, it allowed her to work the connection. All my movies are love stories. This one is about parental love, protectiveness and a sense of duty, and the ultimate sacrifice that a person would make, given that sense of duty. That was a nice touch. That was Sigourney's idea. This was one of the seminal scenes in the movie and was one of the ones that had to be deleted and omitted from the theatrical version because of length. We didn't have multiplexes, and there were only so many showings a day that you could have of a film, and we had to get it no more than two hours ten minutes in order to get the maximum number of screenings per day. Peter Lamont came up with a simple and austere look for our future sets. I watched this film recently and I was amazed at how little we see of the conventional future world, as opposed to the spacecraft interiors. She's actually on Gateway Station here. She hasn't returned all the way to earth. She never sets foot on earth in the whole series of films, which is interesting. This is as close as she gets until the end of the fourth movie, where she's re-entering the atmosphere. But this is earth for all intents and purposes. This is everyday life circa a couple of hundred years from now. And Peter came up with a very spartan look. It's not overworked at all, which I think was quite clever. We wanted to do it minimalist. We didn't have her walking around corridors. We didn't create a world because we weren't interested. We were interested in the through-line of her story and her character's dilemma and problems, the fact that she's not believed, that she understands there's this great threat. The same applied to the costumes. We didn't wanna suggest a wildly separated future from our present one. This might be one of the first science fiction movies where men still wear coats and ties. The thinking was people will still wear coats and ties. They may not look exactly the same. We turned up the collar on the jackets. It's no big deal but it's a subtle change. We wanted to have a place to go. We wanted the space environment once they get to the colony planet to be exotic and so we didn't wanna overwork earth. We also wanted to understand who these people were, and a Suit Is a suit. These characters are suits and we wanted to reinforce that. If everybody's in Star Wars type costumes, it's harder to relate to them as characters. I was thinking more of a writer than a designer when I was making my picks of what things should look like from amongst the suggestions made by the costume designer. Denny, did they shoot at 25 frames per second for all the video playback stuff? Do you remember? They did. The 24-frame issue was messy. It can be done, but it's such a big procedure. Shooting 25 frames per second on the camera puts the video in sync with the film camera very easily. There's a slight speed differential but it's almost impossible to perceive. In Britain they have a different television system, a 25-frame-per-second system. 625 resolution instead of 525. Later in the film there's some video footage that was used, appearing on video monitors. But the PAL system is better than NTSC, which is our system here in the United States. It almost looked like a slightly too fuzzy version of film, sort of in between. It's not as good as it should be for film, but it wasn't obvious it was video. Jim realized and made the video images noisier or break up more often so it was more obvious. The tag of this scene is gonna be a throw to this big sequence that takes place on the colony which is before the aliens attack. That's cut out of the release version, so coming up Is the biggest single change from the release version of the film. It's an entire reel. I'll never forget Gale Hurd, who was my wife and producer at the time, trying to shorten the film by 20 minutes. I just could not see how it was possible to do a cut here, a cut there, a few seconds, a bit of a scene, the tag of a scene maybe. She said "I've been thinking about this for days." I said "Go ahead." She said "Reel three." Which starts here. "You can take out reel three." I immediately rejected that as completely absurd. Then I thought about it. Reel three ends with Newt's scream when her father has the facehugger on his face. It works flawlessly. It's a brilliant cut and I have to credit Gale with that. I had poured a lot of energy into the design of these scenes and the alien derelict ship. The problem for me was that I couldn't imagine this film without the cognitive tether to the first film of the alien derelict, but it turns out that it works perfectly. A little dialogue bridge and it works fine. I like this tractor a lot, this tractor with this articulated leg design. This is one of my favorite effects. You see the big tractor driving by and in the background you see these people struggling to put a tarp over that tractor. That was done in perspective. There were full-size people back there, and a miniature in the foreground with distance between. It put everything in camera all at one time without any opticals or anything beyond that. The trick was that the actors had to act at double their normal speed of acting, because the camera was running at 48 frames per second. We had a Ritter fan on them to really kick those tarps around in excess of what it would be in real time, but because we were overcranking, that motion would then look normal. The multi-wheeled vehicle at the beginning is a fifth-scale miniature, radio-controlled, that Jim designed. On the airplane coming over from Los Angeles to London he just doodled it. Ron Cobb, I believe, fleshed it out.

10:08 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

James Horner came up with this music sting here and I always thought it was totally over the top. When I saw the whole film put together with the score, I thought "No, that's what we need." I thought "How can you sting somebody opening their eyes?" But it works. Oh! Mm-hm. She shouldn't have had the bangers and mash. Kill it. Fry it. Come on. What are you doing, Hicks? Bad-ass nasty shot. That's a nasty shot of that thing. That's a good shot of it there getting fried. Gosh. Here they come. I think our chestburster looks a little cooler than the one in the first film. Stan Winston's guys really did a good job on it. John Rosengrant and Shane Mahan. Look who's back. Another one of our problems to solve for this movie was creating the whole army of warrior aliens and being legitimate to the original movie but having to improve on it for movement and for the look of being able to study them. In the original A/ien they were rubber suits and very difficult for the actor to move around in. And yet he was very tall and very skinny. And Jim wanted to do a lot of very interesting moves with the warrior aliens, so we came up with a technique to create the suit that really involved a lot of spandex and pieces on it. And then we designed the set pieces for the aliens to fit into the walls, like the one that is behind him there, so that the camouflage would work. An enormous amount of wirework for all of these stunt alien performers, which required that the alien costumes be extremely user-friendly. This was inspired by the scene in the first film where Dallas is in the air vents and they see the signal moving and get a little freaked, and Veronica Cartwright says "Get outta there" and he makes the wrong move and gets killed. That's one of the most suspenseful scenes in the first film. I took that idea that they're getting these readings that are getting them spooked and then they make some bad moves. Form follows function. This is a perfect example of it. You start with what it is you wanna achieve, and once you have that, you can design it, so the actions and the performance is consistent with what you want in the finished film. Believe it or not, very few people work that way. They just wanna come up with something that's cool, and then you spend hours and hours trying to get it to work for the ultimate film. I happen to agree with Gale. My background is as an actor. I really come from a place where the creatures and the characters are wonderful to look at, but it's always about their performance. We have to figure out how they're gonna be able to act, and create a good performance, or it's a waste. And so that's really always at the top of the priority list when we're creating any creature - what is it gonna do and how is it gonna do it? What he does is create a character, and that's why I think his work is So unique. When you look at a film, you can always tell who's done the creatures, if they actually have a character. Because he creates a character that can act and perform. The whole film builds to this moment, where the power transfers from the authoritarian structure to the individual who takes action. Ripley's not supposed to do anything. She's just there as an observer. We're coming up to a sequence where Sigourney takes control of the APC and this sequence is comprised of live-action shots, but as it comes down this hallway and is banging into pipes and walls and sparking, that's all done in miniature. In some cases, the cameraman - cos the set was mounted at an angle - was on a cart, a wheeled cart, and was rolling backwards as the radio-controlled APC was coming at camera. There was a point when he was just put into free fall, rolling backwards downhill, photographing what was in front of him as he went backwards. Here we go. - This is the shot. This is also miniatures. There was a shot with the full-size when the brakes didn't work, and took out the camera, and luckily it was a remote-operated camera. It was the shot where we were actually crushing an alien warrior, when it broke through. This is the shot, actually, when it took the camera out. Then there's another shot where it takes down an alien.

1:12:00 · jump to transcript →

Oh, man, why does a guy like that have to lose? And the audiences felt the same way. They really did. They did. I think they went this far. I think many in the audience overcame their anti-Semitism. It's one of the killer facts of life, I think, that the kind of intimacy they have as friends...

57:37 · jump to transcript →

I did relate to it, I really did. It was unusual for you to cut to yourself when you teared up, and that might not have been my choice. You know, maybe that's the beginning, the beginning of what could have led to love, I guess, you know, when you begin to challenge your own thoughts because somebody else represents the alternative. Okay. Okay.

1:12:20 · jump to transcript →

Gary Goddard

This was one of the largest sets built in Hollywood in probably the 10 years or so before that. This throne room set is the real deal. It was so large, we actually used two sound stages. And that hall right there that he's walking by, it connects two sound stages. That's actually outside. That runway you're seeing there is a real runway. Now, of course, we've matted in the upper shots on top. That's a matte painting. But the actual runway and the throne room and the scale of that is all for real.

3:05 · jump to transcript →

Gary Goddard

and to meet the budget and schedule and get it out for summer, but we did do that. I like this shot also, this shot where you have Skeletor overpowering on an epic scale, dominating the screen, and you introduce your hero here against him as he turns in camera. It was very deliberate, pitting him, hero, who is watching the devastation of his world, Eternia, and the overpowering presence of Skeletor.

5:16 · jump to transcript →

It really did. Just personally, it's one of those things you always keep way down deep inside. I remember finally being in a situation with the girl that I really, really, really wanted to be with. What about this scene, though? I know. I'm going to wrap this up quickly so I can talk about this scene. But I shivered, and she felt protective of me, and I was so embarrassed about it. I was embarrassed for a very long time that I was just so unused to being in this position with something that's unattainable that I shook.

53:38 · jump to transcript →

Just a little side. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. 13 years. I always thought you connected to this stuff. I did. I obviously did. You really did. In a pretty primal kind of way. Yeah, I really think I really did. But I know what you mean. Like, if this had happened with my dad, I don't know. Yeah, just think. I don't know if I would have been able to cut him off. But her ideals and her standards are such because. Well, it's not a, you know, it's.

1:21:24 · jump to transcript →

In the scene when you see Karen on top of Henry, I remember it being very difficult to shoot, especially since when you learn filmmaking with Morty Scorsese. I really did that to the camera, not so much to Ray. Michael Bellhouse, who was our director of photography,

1:13:20 · jump to transcript →

When I watched the movie this morning, and I just fell in love with him all over again. I really did. I have to say, I think he's extremely gorgeous, sexy, exciting man. And I'm sure that the real Henry Hill for the real Karen Hill was all of those things. And I think we got that right. Every day when we walked into Hair and Makeup, we were Karen and Henry.

1:40:09 · jump to transcript →

Commentary With Author CG Paul M. Sammon

And he's not playing the violin. He's mimicking it, but he is for real. And this whole thing, this silliness with having this fundraiser for the city of Detroit, I get it, but the lines are open. But as far as I'm concerned, except for the violinists, this is a bit of dead air. Okay, and now we are in the hideout, excuse me, with the remaining people.

1:13:18 · jump to transcript →

Commentary With Author CG Paul M. Sammon

And we finally found a piece I cannot remember where. By the way, the music on RoboCop 2, people have asked, why did not Basil Polidorus do the music for RoboCop 2 when he did such a great score for Robo 1? The answer is quite simple. Because the film came together so quickly, Kirshner really did not have a lot of choices as to the crew members. John Davison was the one who was primarily responsible for putting a lot of the package together.

1:34:43 · jump to transcript →

And this actually resonated quite a bit for me because it really did feel like, even though we were on the East Coast, it felt like a very similar situation. You know, when I came up from L.A. to San Francisco and marched to Golden Gate Park,

1:06:08 · jump to transcript →

that I'd be your first mate. Well, here I am. I am a man of my word. Now, in those days, you did that the old-fashioned way. For real. I like to compare this whole debate, I guess, or question about digital effects to the microphone. You know, nobody says...

1:32:55 · jump to transcript →

Wallace really did have an idea that he could unite people. He was a kind of a revolutionary who was way ahead of his time. How is the time to declare a king? And you're prepared to recognize our legitimate succession? You're the ones who won't support the rightful queen. Those were lies when you first wrote them. That's true.

1:34:12 · jump to transcript →

and how to react, and the stunt guys work with them to minimize injury and so that people wouldn't get all excited about it and flustered and start whacking one another for real, because that can happen if they're not experienced. And we told them that whole thing about, what does a camera see? And if you close one of your eyes, it sort of takes the three-dimension aspect out of what you can see. You can see things, but you can't see depth as well. So there's no depth perception.

1:51:48 · jump to transcript →

rate his contribution to this I mean as you say all of these because I mean I think all of these changes are part of like why he's a great screenwriter like he really did you know Michael Crichton was really good at like the cliffhangers you know read like a movie anyway but I think the the changes improved it yeah especially for a movie I wanted to really quick before we move on

41:18 · jump to transcript →

we want to talk about. He had worked with Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy on three of the Steven Spielberg movies they were involved with, E.T., The Color Purple, and Empire of the Sun. He basically, his interest in cinematography started when he was a young man. He worked in camera stores and film labs as a teenager.

1:14:04 · jump to transcript →

Tom Tykwer

And so the decision to stay inside the building for that explosion was more or less very logical and consequent. That's just for those people who wonder whether we changed that shot because of September 11th or whether we discussed the whole issue. We never really did because we also never felt that this film was a film that in any way discusses

11:36 · jump to transcript →

Tom Tykwer

Of course, you know that the actress will say, are you sure? And you might have some discussions about it because, of course, cutting off your hair, you can't really fake it. If you want to show it, you have to do it for real. And luckily enough, Kate is not an actress that even discusses these kind of things. She knew when she had read the script that we had to do it and we had to do it for real.

1:12:17 · jump to transcript →

Richard Curtis

I think you've changed the cut since I saw this. 'Cause it all used to play in the wide shot. No, it does jerk around. - Did it always? This is one of those things that makes me think you actors are very good. No, it's just the way that you actually have to do it. You've got... We were 40 people around you in a room, and guys with microphones and everything like that, and then suddenly, you've actually got to do something for real. Bill, can you cry? -/ can if you give me... A day? - A day in the corner thinking bad thoughts. Thomas? - Me? Can you cry to order? Cry now. I'm not sure. - Stop. For God's sake. Here, there's a hanky. But she does it so... She's completely brilliant. It's not just that she cries, it's the way she cries. Yeah, but she is on the verge of a nervous breakdown as a human being. That's true. You can't bear it, can you? There we go. That stuff. Well, there we go.

1:29:40 · jump to transcript →

Richard Curtis

Well, Bill... It was a weird day, this, wasn't it, Bill? We were in some strange flat in Maida Vale or something like that. This wasn't a set, this really did feel like where a manager would end up. It was a very witty set, like a shrine.

1:40:23 · jump to transcript →

Len Wiseman

lt was so-- It was the most fun I think I've ever had... ...making a movie. Everybody was so great. But it's not a film set I would be dying to be naked on. No. - For so many reasons. What do you mean by that? - It was freezing. But I don't know. I would have felt really funny about it. What film would you feel comfortable about being naked on? You know, more comfortable. There was something giddy about the whole thing. You felt like people would have just laughed at your ass or something. All right. - You know? Sophia was... - Horrified. Quite horrified. - She was? Yeah. - Did she have--? Was covered--? Yeah, it was covered, and... - That's good. Which makes it difficult. - This was so hard for me. This was hard. This was difficult. He was showing me some outtakes, the number of times... ... you and I were cracking up. You can't make me kiss him in the second one, or I won't get through. Every kiss, there's about 12 takes of you guys laughing. I had so much fun with you, I must say. I really did. We had fun. - I had so much fun. I would have more fun if I wasn't looking at my watch. It's got to be tough. But we did laugh a lot. We were laughing. We were laughing. There's something, when you had the gun... ...and you would do that Charlie's Angels stunt. My God, I still laugh about that. That's me trying not to laugh right there. Well, in the outtakes, that's what you're... Yeah. - We had it tough here, a tough time. You kept getting "silver round" and "single round"-- Now, what did I say? What'd he say? - What'd he say?

1:05:04 · jump to transcript →

Len Wiseman

God, this day.... Again, it was.... You guys were just cracking up the whole day. We had to actually look full in the face and kiss each other. This kiss is actually taken out of the original. Oh, yeah, that's right. And you put It back in. Michael does not look happy about that. It's quite a long kiss there. - Yeah. What's going on? - Don't you remember, you and I? Remember, we were just like, "Why is he leaving us here?" Why am I leaving you? I was behind the camera going, "Excuse me." Most directors will shout "Cut" when they're done. I was yelling "Cut" and doing the clap. - You were not. You just had the drool coming out of one side of your mouth. A lot of wandering about that was cut. Again, this isn't a director's cut, this is an extended cut. And a lot of the stuff, you can see why it was taken out. It was just like things like this. lt wasn't necessary at the end of the day. Essentially, a director's cut, the difference... An extended cut is basically a longer movie that the director says: "This has got nothing to do with me." Yes. I mean, there's stuff in here that I wanted to see back in... . like Scott's back-story and Singe's original reveal. But a lot of the stuff, I was glad to see it go. That's my favourite shot of a werewolf... ...that low-angle roar. I thought he looked the most like a real animal. Good old Bill. I mean, he really did so much of that stuff himself. Oh, yeah. That's like, when he stabs with the sword here... ...this look that he's got with the baring the fangs. No, when he was doing all the fighting... ... he'd never even done a stage fight in his life. And he was in that water for hours at the end. Oh, yeah. And he's, you know, going up against, you know, Scott. Scott and the stunt guys, and.... No, he hung in there. We just beat the shit out of him too. It was really.... He was just exhausted and was... Freezing in that water too. - Yeah, it was. But he never, you know, put his hands up and said: "It's just, you Know, it's too much." Everybody was pretty good like that. - Oh, they were all-- They were great.

1:50:35 · jump to transcript →

This, by the way, we did not build, we did not dress. I mean, we put some clothes in. There's a little bit we did, but when we showed up, we showed up in winter to scout this location and the trees were all barren and there was dirt and stuff everywhere. Basically looked exactly like this and we said, "This is absolutely perfect." I do think Allan added some of the garbage and some of the cool graffiti. - Yeah, garbage, trees and stuff. But what's funny is our location people didn't quite understand what we were going for, and at one point they cleaned the whole place up. It was like, "No, no, no." They told us, "It's clean." We said, "No, put it back." So they had to spend the money to put all the dirt back. Also, the trees were growing leaves and we had to kill the trees. We basically paid some sort of fee to the government to kill the trees. The dog with the hand we should throw in there. Yeah, that's a highfalutin allusion to Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo. For those of you who have seen Yojimbo and this movie, all six of you. And there was also another shot that showed the desolation of Eastern Europe. As they're walking, they see the dog. They see the guy bathing. - Horrified. And there was a girl, a little girl who they smile at and wave to who then basically cops a squat and starts peeing, which is in the end credits of the movie, as sort of a little joke, and basically people were just sort of... I don't know. It's one of these things where in the movie... You love it or you hate it. - Yeah. We love it. And apparently more powerful people than us hated it. We wanted it to be in the body of the movie, especially in this unrated cut, and it is not. And I guess we'll just leave it there. I guess we should mention, also, Tibor who you just saw. - Yeah, Rade Sherbedgia. All of our casting in this movie is based on the works of Guy Ritchie, so having cast Vinnie and then needing someone to play Tibor... By the way, that money, $1.83, we actually didn't have... We forgot. - ...61.83 in American money on the day. We had to scrounge up... It ended up being $1.46. I think I had a quarter in my backpack. Just what people had. We didn't have the money. We'd been in Prague for so long. - This, I think, was our second day. Yeah. - No, this was our first day. We shot the train station in the morning. - This was day one. Or at least bits and pieces of it. - And this... This was actually the first thing we ever, ever shot, which we've now added back. - Yeah. Originally, when they're on the side of the road and Michelle is trying to get the cars to stop, Scott mentions that you can't... No one's pulling over 'cause she's showing her bra. - He says, "This is Europe. They have orange juice ads with lesbians and dildos. You gotta give them something they haven't seen before." Then later in Eastern Europe... You see the orange juice ad with lesbians and dildos. And in the theatrical version, we actually cut the orange juice ad completely because it just felt like the joke of the opulent hotel was better if it was just shorter. So we got to this stuff quicker. The guy who just ran out, the waiter, is like... Dustin Hoffman. - ...Jim Carrey. Miroslav Taborsky. - He's like the Jim Carrey of Prague, and he's really funny. I'm not sure he ever... He never trusted us. No. We had to explain. He didn't want to slap with the backhand and we had to explain that in America... - We had to lie to him... "In America, it's called a bitch slap, the most degrading thing you can do." - We made up this crazy excuse to get him to do what we wanted to do. He just didn't trust us. Nothing you can do about that. That was something we wanted designed, which was the keyboard in the radioactive box played with gloves. Didn't quite work. - No, I'm not sure anyone cares. But we know it's there. This was a factory... It's a high-voltage testing facility. It's a real, working, high-voltage testing facility. And they have it in the movie XXX, but we shot it very differently. And David really went all out here. I mean, especially those sort of finger lights that you see, he put into the background of every shot and Allan gave a lot of neon. And this is some of the best-looking stuff in the entire film. Michelle does look beautiful. - Michelle looks incredible. Of course, the only problem is this place has a horrible, cavernous echo, and there are things in here we just had to sort of loop. We had no choice. The stuff in that bottle, by the way, is SO toxic... Poisonous chemical. ...that when they were dancing with the bottles later and two bottles met and broke, they literally had to clear the floor, scrub it down, decontaminate before we could go again. Anyway, our actors are hovering over the fumes right now. It's fine. Again, look at the lights in the back of all this. That big piece of equipment, that's really there. Michelle's close-up here... That is such a gorgeous shot. - That's incredible. That stupid VIP sign behind him was awful. That was there for all day and we never saw it until too late. Well, you can't, you know... You look at a tiny monitor on the set and you can't see everything that the camera picks up. And then you get in the editing room, you go, "Oh, my God, you can see all that stuff." But also, I don't know if it was us being first-time directors or what. On any given day, there are two or three things you're really obsessing on because you feel that those are the most important things, and you solve those only to realize later that there was one minor thing, like that stupid VIP sign, and there's one of those in every scene where you just go, "What was I thinking?" - Sometimes you're obsessing on something that ultimately turns out to be insanely unimportant, and the massively important thing is sitting right in front of you and you screw it up. - In that scene, we were obsessing on a line when they were flirting. That we ended up just cutting. Yeah, he said he was the black sheep of the family and then she was trying to be witty and she was sort of saying, "That's okay. I have an uncle who 'blank. And we must have done take after take after take. "You think you're the black sheep of the family. My aunt's a female bodybuilder." Just take after take after take of stuff, nothing that was ever used, and it makes the VIP sign all the more, sort of, laughing at us. By the way, the Green Fairy is played by Steve Hytner... So great. - ...who played Bania on Seinfe/d. We worked with him also. - A real good friend too. He really did us a huge favor. - Yeah. He was going to a wedding in Italy, I think, and he stopped into Prague on his way to... Here's a little added extra. Yeah, this was just a little something we cooked up. Jacob was really funny doing this. In the theatrical version, we cut it. There's no time for this in the theatrical version, but we felt we'd subject you to it. And he just... He got it, you know, that he was... Again, we're into the production at this point, and his Cooper had become a character. - He was dialed in. Exactly. And here we go. - On the day this happened, Travis comes up to me and says, "I have a cold." I say, "You're not going to tell Michelle you have a cold because your tongue is going to be down her throat." Also on that day, Michelle's mother, sister, and sister's boyfriend... Decided to show up. - ...came to visit. And it was just like, "Oh, God." But ultimately, they went for it. They went for it, and it's all about the tongue. Yeah.

58:03 · jump to transcript →

That's a little clip from the Summer at Sea. Trying to look at any other cast people and things we should be mentioning. I guess... - The prop guys, by the way. Just Lukas and Michal. Good guys. Really good guys. Lots of the stuff that you're seeing here you can see in their entirety in the... Including probably a little more of that. We were one of the few movies that have ever gone in and used a lot of key Czech people as heads of big departments. Usually... We did have some guys shadowing guys that we brought in, but we really did try and use a lot of Czech crew. And I think we were rewarded for it. - They were awesome. I think it was a really good set. People seemed to go out of their way to tell us that. Anyway, so that's the movie. It was, hopefully, as fun for you guys to watch and hear about as it was for us to make it. Very odd for us to watch it. - Yeah. Hopefully, it was less odd for you. It was Maurice Chevalier, not Charles Aznavour. Oh, God. Jesus. James Venable. Yes. Our composer. And, by the way, there'll be... If you're watching the unrated DVD, there's another commentary you can enjoy, and also secretly buried on the DVD elsewhere is us doing three separate commentaries where we talk about each other. But James Venable is the composer. He's done stuff for Kevin Smith. I worked with him on the Clerks animated show, and he kicked ass. There was just-- Creepy Italian Guy's theme, a couple of the other pieces were... I love the music. He was a real pleasure. It's like the end of the Oscars. I know, I know. It's like, "Who did we forget?" Everybody was great. Everyone was great, except the guy who did coke and tried to steal that we had to fire. - But he was still good. And here's our favorite thing. That's why we made the movie. A little reward for those of you who sit in your seats. Good night, everybody. - Goodbye. Bye.

1:29:52 · jump to transcript →

a more natural look. Some of these shots that you see, like this one, are done in camera, where the people in the plane are in the same shot. And others like these are composited together.

1:10:55 · jump to transcript →

The arms dealer I rented the plane from probably wouldn't be too happy if I took it apart for real. Once again, it was done by Jan Blundell from Lest in France. Ironically, this plane crashed a month later in Uganda, carrying what was described as a suspicious cargo, and all the crew were killed. Not the same crew who flew the plane

1:17:22 · jump to transcript →

Matt's voice was used for a majority of the shots, and he just used to do the Predator mimicking kind of as a joke, and then we were like, wait a minute, God, you're really good. Maybe we should actually try you out for real, and we sent him over to where the guys were recording all the voices, and he auditioned for it and actually ended up getting the role. It was definitely the best. Great party trick, huh? Hey, I'm the Predator. I'm going to do the Predator. Yeah, definitely...

22:19 · jump to transcript →

This is our much more intense version of Jesse getting pinned to the wall. We actually redid this in visual effects with her splitting in half and her guts dripping out. But yeah, that was her stunt double for her, and that was real-time, in-camera, actually hit the wall. I thought she snapped her neck when we did that first stunt. We probably did it four takes. I could not believe how hard that stunt woman was great.

1:21:55 · jump to transcript →

in his second day on the movie. Yeah, exactly. And he was thrilled. And he opened the door, walked out, and he said, what do you need me to do now? And I said, you can go home. We'll see you in a couple weeks. Look at her doing this. Boom. It's great. That was, again, one of the first things that she did on the movie. Yes. One of her first days. That was her first fight thing she did. And really did a fantastic job. And she and Sean are just great together. They had a really great energy.

49:43 · jump to transcript →

So the mask gag. Here comes the, we knew we had to do a mask gag. And what was really important to us, we were looking at, I said, it's been done this way, it's been done that way. I said, I want to do it in camera. I want to do it so there's absolutely no visual effects involved. And so what we ended up doing when we stood on the set is we designed a shot here in the mirror. Okay, those aren't my hands. That's not Tom Cruise on the left. That's Tom, and there's not really a mirror there.

56:58 · 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 →

So It Meant We Had Bloody Marys At 5

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 →

SFX Maestro Christien Tinsley

you know, gets what they want out of it, right? The audience gets what they're looking for, which are these, you know, visceral, long, everything exposed, practical effect moments. And at the same time, not give them so much that you're giving away the magic trick. You know, and there's a nice blessing here with Art the Clown's sort of comedy relief and sort of the lightheartedness juxtaposing the gruesome details. And that's something that I think

59:39 · jump to transcript →

SFX Maestro Christien Tinsley

We sculpted, we digitally printed the molds, and then we did traditional casting from all the digital work. I would say about 35% of the effects that we did for this film, we did digitally. And again, I just explained what I meant by that, but they are practical effects. But because we did them digitally, it really gave me the ability

1:25:39 · jump to transcript →

Nia DaCosta

Yeah, developing this with the prosthetics was super fun. But the first time I saw... The first person they showed me was LA, who plays Jane Ji. And Gareth and Carson, who are the amazing production designer and costume designers, they also were super inside of, like, those sorts of looks, like anything that was full-body like that in terms of prosthetics, they were really inside of that process creatively. And they called me in to see LA in her skinned look, and LA was, like, had tears in her eyes and she was performing, basically. And I was like, "Oh, my God." It was so disturbing. I was like, "This is very distressing," and I'm looking at it and I know it's not real, but it just felt so real. And that's just like a testament to the amazing work that the prosthetics team, John Nolan and his team, do on this film. That's real. Well, not... Obviously, it's not his skin, but that's, like, prosthetics. That's all in-camera. With a little bit of help from VFX to clean up anything.

35:03 · jump to transcript →

Nia DaCosta

And so we shot that and this at the same time, 'cause we wanted to... The building is actually burning, and so we would only be able to do so much shooting with it burning in the background. So we just... And this is the last night of our shoot. SO we... Yeah, we just had to keep going. And that's a really great VFX fire at the top there. That's all real fire in there. Again, it's like a good mix, like, I think, I'm not against VFX at all. I love VFX. But I think having a good mix of practical effects and visual effects is the way that you keep everyone invested in the story and engaged and not have their eye picking up all the stuff that's fake. And I thought the special effects and the VFX departments worked so well in this film.

51:12 · jump to transcript →

It's worth adding that, you know, Pauline Kael called this film a shallow masterpiece. And I think if there was ever a film that wasn't shallow, it's Citizen Kane. I mean, it seems to me that it fits within her idea that almost movies are not an art. They're just the greatest form of entertainment. And, you know, a very traditional idea. For real art, you go to the opera or the theater and the tux, you know, or an evening dress, you know. I think that basically her...

1:00:51 · jump to transcript →

when Lillian Gish fires the shotgun and goes off yelping into the barn. Lawton thought that was hilarious, but nobody else really did. I know I wondered about that, too. Lillian Gish felt the same way as you did. She said, in Griffith's day, you made as big a success, if not more, if you played a villain. Actually, Lawton filmed that scene twice. The first time, Mitchum runs out the screen door and doesn't do that. But the second time, Lawton says, don't forget the yips this time. And then Mitchum runs out and does that cackling laugh.

8:49 · jump to transcript →

Now let's return to Lana Wood, who talks about the next scene. They put a rope across this midsection of a pool, and they had two guys hanging onto the rope. They really did have my ankles tied loosely with a scarf to a block of cement. I could hear the underwater camera.

50:20 · jump to transcript →

This is a real picture once that my own son gave to me. It wasn't the same car. It was this Mercedes, and he drew a picture of it, and he said on it, do you like it? Yes, no. That's right out of my life, really. Did you see this? Diane Keaton always felt very comfortable with Al, and they really enjoyed each other, and she's such a bright,

34:33 · jump to transcript →

Oh. - Whoo! Now this little-- That was a great little-little dance there. I-I-I came up with that little dance step. Did you? - In seconds. And I don't know how I did it. And I've never been able to do it since. I could've killed you, because I could hardly do it. And Toguri kept telling me... I kept falling over. It was that wiggling on one foot, and I had high heels. We did it very easily and very quickly. I know. Did you make it up? In seconds. It's not from the "Time Warp"? - No. Or did we just follow you? Obviously. Well, Nell went... ... That looks good. That's good." And I don't Know where it came from, because you know I'm a terrible dancer. And we did it in seconds. And, uh, it was all over. But it looks rather good, that little leg movement. Yeah. Yes, I love this bit. "He's okay." Because when-when we did it in rehearsal, I gave Nellie a note for this. She'd hate the word "note." You know, and she goes, "He's okay." And changed it completely from however she'd done it before. And Tim Curry was so shocked, that he really did react to it like he was furious with her. Because she completely changed the tone of it. Mm-hmm. And I loved it because it was, like, it wasn't what he was expecting, so his fury was real.

38:13 · jump to transcript →

Roger Moore

This was shot for real, on location... ...in a room of the Danieli Excelsior. Beautiful hotel. It was the first hotel I ever stayed when I went to Venice.

49:57 · jump to transcript →

They really did play instruments, violins, horns... Was there ever a crisis during this shoot where you thought you couldn't continue? No, something like that didn't happen. No. We worked on this with great focus. There were problems, but crises... This is Henning von Gierke who is dancing with the buck. He is a painter by training. And now we will see part of the crew. Let's see. We have to wait and see who is sitting at the table.

1:31:28 · jump to transcript →

Computer Simulation Division Richard Taylor

When we came to make a decision about what film format to use for Tron, we felt very strongly that we needed to shoot it on a larger negative than traditionally done. And it came down to a choice between 65 millimeter and VistaVision for the whole show. But the availability of 65-millimeter cameras was far better than the availability of VistaVision cameras, so we made the decision to shoot the entire show in 65 millimeter. And to keep a certain consistency, and as long as we had rented the cameras, we felt that we might as well go ahead and shoot the real world in 65 millimeter and not in 35 millimeter. It was kind of one of those nice to have things, and nobody objected strenuously to it, and also it would be the first time since Ryan's Daughter that a film had been shot entirely in 65 millimeter. And I think you can see the results. I mean, it looks wonderful. In the monitors in Lawrence Livermore, one of the things that Triple-/ had to do was create lots of imagery that appeared on monitors, and that imagery had to be shot and created long before we got to production. So, there was a lot of planning in creating all of the monitor imagery, and Triple-I did a great job on that. Spent a Iot of time on this shot. To accomplish the effect, what we did was get a 4-by-5 still camera and photograph Jeff Bridges in his position after he's been zapped, and then immediately moved him out and took another photograph, which was the background by itself. So, as you pull away chunks of Jeff, you see the background behind him, and then to put the laser and the grid and all that on top of him was basically the effects animation of John Van Vliet. When Flynn is de-rezzed and pulled into the computer, we go through one of the most interesting sequences in Tron, which is the real world to electronic world transition. This sequence was created by Robert Abel & Associates, primarily under the direction of Kenny Merman. It was a sequence which I had designed, knowing that the way that Robert Abel & Associates was making these computer graphic images with the Evans & Sutherland computers, and, really, using vector graphics to create this particular look, would give us a look that would be unique just for this transition. The three-space transition, the movement through all these binary bit patterns and this polygonal landscape, was done by making multiple passes through a traditional animation camera that was pointed at a high-resolution, vector graphic, Evans & Sutherland computer screen, and making multiple passes, frame by frame, using different colored filters, coming back, making multiple passes of rewinding other filters, until you finally end up with this, which seems to be solid objects. But it's really made out of lots of tiny, tiny lines put together to make solid blocks of color or objects. Oh, man, this isn't happening. It only thinks it's happening. When Flynn says, "This isn't happening, it just thinks it's happening," it's a key line, because it means that the reality that he finds himself in now, not even he can fully believe exists. And if anyone should appreciate and understand this alternate reality, it's him, and now he finds himself trapped in it. All right, now we see Sark standing on the bridge, and all of a sudden, he is enclosed with these shrouds of light as he begins to have his conversation with the MCP. The database for the MCP was a human figure that we had created at Triple-/ called Adam Powers and was originally on the Information International sample reel. And if you look at that sample reel, you'll see a juggler character who was juggling balls. Well, that face of that character is the face of the MCP. So, the first time that you see him, he is a polygonal drawing of a face. And that's basically the underlying database of the face. So, it's made of polygons. And those polygons, we play them out on the Triple-I computers as the line-drawing polygons, and made 12-and-a-half by 20-inch stills, high-con stills of those. But we created the mouth positions for the vowels and the syllables so that you could take these interchangeable transparencies and lay them down and make him Say, by whatever order you put them in, whatever you wanted him to say. 'Cause he was voicing a lot of different dialogue. Then those were backlit, and then we applied an effect to those line drawings of putting a steel mesh screen over the taking camera, and it made it have that much more, kind of, complex look. And then we also animated the exposure occasionally. Early on in the film when I started working with Steven, we did a lot of experiments to work out how these characters were created. The thing that we finally decided was that the characters needed to have this energy inside themselves. They are obviously in this electronic world. Now, these costumes were unlike any costumes anyone had ever created for a picture before, in that they were costumes designed to have effects treatments done to them. They were white with black drawing or black lines over them. All of the black elements on the costume were turned into circuitry which could be backlit and light could be pushed through there. We originally shot a 65-millimeter image of these people, live-action photography of them on these black sets. Then from that 65-millimeter film, we created some photo-rotoscope machines, which basically could project the 65-millimeter film down to large pieces of film, which were pre-punched with animation punches. This film was created by Kodak for us, and we would project down with these photo-rotoscope machines, which would hold this film into a vacuum frame and make a continuous tone positive print of each frame of the film. Then these continuous tone prints were taken to a light table, it was a vacuum light table, where they were contact printed to high-con film to make a number of high-con positive and negative images. So that you basically have for every character a large cel and you have high-con positives, negatives, and a continuous tone positive. Then these high-con elements were hand-inked and painted to isolate the circuits on the body, the whites of the eyes, the whites of the teeth and any other circuits that we wanted to treat as a separate exposure. The characters are more often than not... The live-action characters are shot on an all black stage. When there is a set, the set is also black, but is measured out to conform with what we're seeing in this artwork. So that if a character appears elevated in a shot, like this shot, there was an elevated platform for him to walk on, but it didn't look at all like the set. Then we would composite these actors over paintings, transparencies, and once that was done, we would add the light and the color separately. And to simplify it, you can describe it as a sort of perfect blend between live action and animation in that we took live-action film, photographed it in a way that we could break it down to individual frames, then blow up those frames into large slides or transparencies. And we had 75,000 of these, which seems like an appallingly large number, but it really isn't if you compare it to an animation film. And because we were at Disney, they were not overly swamped. That's an actual Frisbee, by the way, and those are actual Frisbees on their backs. We had a excellent Frisbee coach, Sam Schaiz. I like the fact that the deadliest weapon in Tron is a Frisbee. A Iot of effects animation in this sequence and in the film. And that is the animation that makes the glows, and as the Frisbee gets brighter, and you see the reflections of it on their costumes, all that has to be done frame by frame. This is hand-drawn animation that, although it is drawn, a negative is made of that, and it is placed over a light source and then re-photographed, and the ability of the effects animators was such that we were never waiting on the effects animation on the show. They always performed very well. It was never a problem. They did very few redos, and that's because they had had experience doing this beforehand, whereas everything else that we were doing, outside of the effects animation, was the first time through. So, that had a much tougher and steeper learning curve. In the holding cells for the game grid, those are backgrounds that are entirely hand-drawn by the background department, again using Rapidographs and line drawing and airbrushing and then turning those into high-cons. But those drawings are all drawn to match the actual physical sets, which were built so that when someone passes behind something, or leans on something, those are actual physical sets that were built. But again, the sets were just black on black. They're as if they were made of black velvet. Part of the interesting thing as a cinemagraphic problem that was presented to Bruce Logan was that he had to shoot, unlike anybody had ever shot before, sets that were entirely black with white line drawings and white characters running around on these sets. Bruce Logan's job in photographing these people was very difficult because, unlike most photography for most films, you try and get as much chiaroscuro in the picture as you can. You let there be a lot of dark and you create shadows and you create this moodiness, which a cinematographer takes great pride in. In this film, during the sequences in the electronic world, basically, he had to light them so that we could see as much of the costume as possible with as little shading as possible because all of the shading and all of that were done by hand by making different masks and airbrush elements that were used under these costumes in post. The ring game was an interesting technical exercise. The set itself, again, was black flock paper with the rings drawn on this paper with tape. The actors had to realize which rings were there and which ones were not as they acted out the sequence, imagining that they were hundreds of feet above the ground. One of the inspirations of Tron is the movie Spartacus. And there's quite a few similarities to the persecuted people who had to fight in the gladiatorial games. This game, of course, was inspired by Pong and jai alai. I think one of the interesting parts of Tron was the synthesis of new games that were created. The design, for example, of the glove that's being worn here, we took a traditional jai alai glove and then rebuilt it and made it out of foam, added other elements to it to give it a more technological quality, and then again, I put the designs over the outside of that to make it blend with the rest of the costumes. Shooting in 65 millimeter, from a director's standpoint, is a lot of trouble. The cameras are huge and bulky. The format requires an enormous amount of light to fill that negative, so if you are shooting Lawrence of Arabia or Doctor Zhivago and you've got lots of snow and big exteriors, it's fine, but in low-light-level situations, it's very troublesome. The depth of field is sometimes as little as a half an inch, and you find your cameraman is asking you, "Now, which part of the eye do you want in focus? "Do you want the front of the eye or the back of the eye in focus?" Or if the head of the actor is not square to the camera, they ask you the really insane question of, "Which eye do you want in focus? "I can give you the front eye in focus or the back, "but the other one's gonna be blurry." Now a lot of these shots where you see actors talking to each other and we're doing over-the-shoulders, the camera couldn't hold focus for the blow-ups to be made, and I had to shoot the actors on separate passes. So, in a shot like this, where you see all three actors talking to each other, it wasnt filmed that way. I filmed them separately and they were composited. And there's quite a few shots like this. Whenever you see them walking around and they're separated by more than a couple feet, those are all separate shots, and then the actors are composited. So, it's very difficult for the actors because not only do they not see the environment they're in when we're filming, all they see is an all black stage, but they don't even see the actor they're talking to. Forming of the Lightcycles, again, is almost entirely done by hand-done animation done by the effects animation department in creating the way that these cycles form around these characters. We built an object that the actor could sit upon, and it was literally a mechanical shape that was the seat and the handlebars, so he could sit down and it would thrust his arms forward and pull him down into that locked position. So that everything that he sits upon and touches, it was, again, drawn by the animation department, and not until you see the final completed cycle, which is actually a CG/ rendering of the cycle, is any of it done by computer. The Lightcycle sequence was done by MAGI. Their way of creating an object were to take basic geometric shapes, cones, cubes, spheres, cylinders, and make an object by collaging those particular pieces together and creating an object. And that's how the Lightcycle was created. All wide shots that you see are computer-simulated. All of the shots, other than the very tight shots of the figures inside the canopies, are computer-simulated. The shots inside the canopies are actually hand-drawn artwork of parts of the Lightcycles, and the animation that's happening over the Lightcycle windshields is hand-done animation to give them a sense of speed. But virtually every scene that you see of the Lightcycles is entirely computer-generated. And there's not even effects animation in those scenes. If there's an explosion when a Lightcycle hits the wall and a tire bounces across, I think those were basically all CGI. Syd Mead worked really hard on designing these motorcycles so that they would incorporate the characters. But if you look closely at them, you'll see that the second half of the bike is flattened and sort of two-dimensional, and that was done because the computers couldn't handle too many compound curved surfaces. So, we restricted those curves to the wheels and the windscreens, and then the rest of the bike was simplified. The ability to move the camera through 3D space with these computer-graphic-looking landscapes is just great. The Recognizers are a sort of King Kong. There's a little head on top of that gate structure... Suggestion of a face, but it, sort of, got lost. The Recognizers were created by MAGI-Synthavision. As I mentioned, there are graphic vector lines, red lines outlining all of these objects, the same way with the tank. The tank was another unique design of Syd Mead, who is a futurist, a fabulous designer. Once Ram, Tron and Flynn have escaped the Lightcycle grid and are off through the canyons being pursued by the tanks, we cut inside the tanks and see another example of a Syd Mead set that was built as a three-dimensional set, again with black background, and all of the elements on there graphically put on so they could later be treated. So the camera, you can see, is moving through scenes in ways that no physical camera or no model shot could possibly do. The animators that I worked with to create the choreography for all of the CG/ sequences were Bill Kroyer and Jerry Rees. But to communicate all this information to the computer technologists, the people that are sitting at monitors at that time, took a new language which we had to create. So, what we did was, first of all, we had to think of each sequence as a real physical reality. Not only would they draw the point of view that they saw as an animator that we would work out together, that was the story point that Steven wanted to make, and also the point of view that we wanted to take. But after we would draw the original storyboards in a traditional, kind of, storyboard manner, we would have to go back and draw a top view, side view and front view of the objects, where they were in time, where the camera was in time, and what the camera's point of view was. So, we really had to define everything to the CG/ technologist in a three-world, three-dimensional space. And that was the first time that that had ever been done. They must've gone right past us. We made it...this far. Now, all of this, this revolt, it's all being led by the user who's gone in the system, Flynn. The Tron character and Ram character, they would have toed the line and gone through the software the way they're supposed to. We'd better, Null Unit. Null Unit. Get the computer dictionary out. Look up "Null Unit." What does that mean? In this sequence, you can really see some of the flaws. I don't really mean the flaws, but the imperfections in the cels, little bits of dirt that pop on and off. Yeah, but they're few and far between considering. Yeah. Come on, you little bugger. Come on. Look at that. A lot of pops and a lot of glitches in there that we would always Say, "Well, that's what happens in an electronic world." When we started there were going to be no differentiations between the flesh tones and the rest of their uniform. But at a certain point they looked, well, not very good. So as a result, that added, approximately, 120,000 extra frames, extra elements to the shot, so it did grow in many aspects. The cave sequence where Flynn, Tron and Ram finally re-energize their selves with this liquid energy was a very interesting technical problem to solve here. In the sequence in the cave when the water is being handled by the actors, literally, frame per frame, rotoscope animation is isolating the water from the body so that it can be treated with a different filter and a different exposure. And again, this is an example of how light is used to portray motion or energy, as Tron drinks and you see his circuits light up and they become energized. The set itself was a complex geometric shape, which was designed by Peter Lloyd, and we built into this set, basically, water channels, and the water itself was reflecting light sources that we put in angle so they would reflect to the camera, and the water was in black tanks so that all we're really seeing are the highlights on the water. Yeah, but the biggest problem at that time was do we fill this with colored water or clear water? Had to do tests, you know. - Right. That was your problem. Do we put milk in there and make it purple? I think that what Flynn is surprised now, ironically, to see that there's parts of this mirror world that are more alive than he anticipated. So, it's not just the harsh computer reality, there's something living about it. It's a very complex shot, again, with all the elements. Probably about 30 different elements, 30 different separate exposures for each frame. Normally in a special effects movie, you get a very bad bottleneck effect in that all these things have to be composited through one or two optical printers. Now we have digital compositing machines. But by putting it into a manufacturing system like this, where it became like an animated film, we could use 14 or 15 animation stands, and we could use a slew of effects animators and ink and paint people to do all of this work simultaneously. As far as I know, we still have more shots with human beings composited into an artificial environment than any other movie. I believe there's 1,100 special effect shots in the film and 900 of which have human beings composited in them. And that number is just very, very large. Just the organizational task alone was monumental, not even considering the creative side of it. For every frame you would have an additional five to 15 cels that isolated the different colors and the different... We had body mattes, we had face masks, continuous tones. You made print backs on top of print backs. So, those 75,000 original cels grew to over half a million. I think we ended up with something like 600,000 cels, all of which had to be kept in order. We had to pull trailers, literally these large house trailers, kind of, industrial trailers onto the lot. We ran out of space and we ended up with 10 trailers that would house all these cels and had to be organized and sent over... 80% of them were sent overseas and had to be numbered and then painted and kept in order. At one point we thought if we had 1,000 scenes, and this was around Christmas time, the film was going to come out later that summer, and we had no idea of how we were going to get it all done in that short a period of time. And we thought, "Well, it's summer vacation. We have two weeks. "We'll get college students, 500 college students in a room." We really believed this might happen. We discussed this for about an hour and we Said, "You'd have 500 students in a room. "We'll teach them how to do inking and painting and rotoscoping, "and they only have to do two scenes each. "And so they do one scene a week. "At the end of that time, we'll be done, "and we'll just go and shoot them on the animation stands." It didn't work out. So, we brought on Arnie Wong, who was an animator. We put him in charge of supervising Cuckoo's Nest, which is a ink and paint service that was in Taiwan. Approximately 80-some employees in a single room. And what we did is we went through and we made a videotape of every situation and what to do in that situation. So that if an inker over there, who didn't even have to understand English to do this, could go to a TV monitor, roll to this particular problem and see exactly what you'd do in that situation. And then he was there to answer questions that were unusual. And the most interesting thing, and one of the things that I'm particularly proud of with this technique is that in spite of what a pyramid it was to build, we managed to get all of this post-production done in six to nine months. And that is using a technology that we had developed. It had never been done before and we developed it and used it on this picture and delivered on time. And that was only possible because of this manufacturing technique. It's interesting the computer animation iS the simpler part of the set. - Yes. Ironically, one of the things that was a creative philosophy that we enjoyed and were proud of was that we were taking computer animation and letting it stand on its own. We weren't trying to make computer animation mimic reality. And the job was then to make reality, the actors and the sets, look like the computer animation. We used to say, "Well, if you've got lemons, make lemonade." Everybody else, and certainly since this point, has been going nuts trying to make computer animation mimic reality perfectly. And I found that the limitations of computer graphics at the time were the most exciting thing. If computer graphics... If computer animation is no longer different from reality, maybe we've lost something in that. Certainly you gain special effects technology and you can do certain things, but it's the limitations, I find, to be the creative challenge. I think at the time we were using four computer animation companies... Yes. -... which were probably the only animation companies that existed in the country at the time. Yeah, I had been visiting some of these companies for two years before we started making the movie. Maybe even longer than that. And I used to show up at their doorstep and Say, "One day I'm gonna make this movie. "You know, we're gonna do this and this is gonna be great." And they'd say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." I'd come by every six months and say this is really gonna happen, and I think they were more surprised than anybody else when we really did this movie. And they got to show their stuff. The way the de-rezzing effect was created, for example, when Ram passes away and he's in the cabin of the Recognizer, there's a combination of the original photography of the character, and then that is overdrawn with literally hand-done, line-drawing animation done by the animation department. And between that animation and light exposures, you can make it just, basically, run off, dissipate and fade away. Also, upon viewing this again, for so many years, you tend to kind of lump it all together visually in your memory and we forget, I forget, how much detail, how much layering of texture was put into this film. - Mmm-hmm. Ai! these shots are all completely storyboarded. Even the electronic world and all the simulated shots were all on storyboards. There must have been thousands of storyboards. Yeah, it was very detailed. Because rendering times in computer graphic imagery, the time it takes for the computer to draw each frame, are high. They're even high by today's standards. It takes sometimes as long as an hour or more for each frame of film. Probably the most complicated CGI images that were in Tron were done by Information International. The Solar Sailer hangar, the Solar Sailer, its formation, the walls of that environment, that's all CGI. As far as Cindy Morgan's involvement, she was very brave to get involved because a lot of actresses Said, "What am I going to wear? "You're going to put what on my head? "I've got to have a helmet and headgear "and wear all this spandex?" And that scared a lot of actresses away. Yeah, it was very hard to get anyone to take us seriously. You'd call people up, they'd come in for casting sessions, and Steven would do his best to present the film, and they'd look at you askance, think you were crazy. You'd run some video on them, and they just didn't believe it was going to happen. And as a result, it was very, very difficult. And I think that was one of the last major parts that was cast. Yes, it was two or three days before the first shot or something. Yes. - It was very close. And one of the people we tried was Deborah Harry. Right. We screen-tested Deborah Harry. The Bit was created by Digital Effects Incorporated, and we didn't have the time to choreograph a CGI Bit for every scene. So, what we did was created a series of stills that could be cell flopped, and these transparencies were created by Digital Effects so that the Bit could be rotating and have these different pulses in it, and then when it wanted to express itself, we flipped to the next sequence of stills, which would make it become more spiky or change its shape, and literally those were cell flopped and then flown around by moving the animation camera on the object to give it its motion from left to right or up or down or wherever it moved, we got it closer to you. That was all put in by moves on the animation camera, on these stills that were being cell flopped. These characters were very interesting. I especially liked the one that looked like a vacuum tube. Other programs... - Other programs and... ...in the system. The Recognizer sequence is another set that was built based on designs by Syd Mead. The interior of the Recognizer, as the interior of the tanks, was all a physically complex shape that the actors moved around on with white line-drawing vector material over the surface of it, and isolated animation coming back and colorizing and animating those elements. I think one of the most successful pieces of computer choreography in Tron is the whole Recognizer sequence, when the Recognizer hits a bridge and becomes multiple pieces and Flynn pulls them all back together with his energy and the choreography of the way those parts all fall back into place and tumble. The thing that people don't realize about computer simulation, especially at this time, is there were no programs that imitated the effects of nature on choreography. Every piece and every part of every computer-simulated object had to literally be choreographed frame per frame by an animator. When the Recognizer moves along and bounces off the ground floor and the pieces separate and then come closer together and have that real, elastic, rubber-banding kind of quality to them... Simple things in choreography... I mean, when an object goes around a corner, does it just swing around the corner or does it have back animation? Does it weave left and right? Does it back animate before it moves forward? Those are the things that the animators brought to this and that the computer-simulation people did a terrific job of interpreting.

28:30 · jump to transcript →

How can I say? 40 extras were hired for the filming of this scene. What are we talking about? Videodrome. What you see on that show, it's for real. It's not acting. It's snuff TV. I don't believe it. So, don't believe. Why do it for real?

25:03 · jump to transcript →

The car exploded. It really did have an atomic bomb in it and it exploded and destroyed Los Angeles. Yeah, from the valley. Valley first. Yeah, the valley first. And then there was the ending, the revolutionary ending, where Otto gets lured into Central America and becomes a revolutionary. Same way he got lured into being a repo. Yeah. There was a line there in that last scene that I remember a lot of people quoting, which is that Manos Rodriguez don't approve of drugs. I've heard that one a lot.

38:05 · jump to transcript →

So the line in the script is, well, all a nerd thinks about from the time he's 10 is sex. It's better the way it is. Yeah, we made it more real. We're always going for real. But I don't think, in all honesty, that Poindexter would be a better lover than any human being on the planet. No. It wouldn't last more than three or four seconds. If that. If that. And it would be painful. I remember this being so cold. Yes.

1:11:46 · jump to transcript →

They're just putting each other on. I've been coming to this gym three or four times a week for five years. I'm an easy man to find. My reputation speaks for itself. The fact is that if you can't come up with the front money, you're not for real.

1:09:13 · jump to transcript →

yeah and and she has this timeless look timeless quality to her she's somebody that doesn't age because of the lexithysing she's actually older than she looks um yeah you know i think uh lens achievements i think he did himself grand here he really did

1:03:34 · jump to transcript →

We could, and I'm going to get to that in a minute because we really did try very hard. And we were really good with each other. And sometimes it works out well, and sometimes it doesn't. And it doesn't mean sometimes that the work wasn't really very good. So this is a very happy story because the work got out. But take heart, all of you who have good work that hasn't yet seen the light of day because, you know, the breaks may come the other way. But you let me down, too.

1:20:14 · jump to transcript →

John McTiernan

He could barely move on his own, let alone put the 200 pounds of suit on him. He really did look like, when he moved he looked like the Michelin Man. So we had, we had to do a lot of work to try to create an impression of how he looked. How he might move, and that one shot of him running. He has this enormous, it's like four... Four hundred foot long strands of bungee cord on him. Lifting the weight of the suit, so that he can jump from rock to rock.

1:21:06 · jump to transcript →

Richard Donner

That's me. That's me. Upstaged by a great kiss. Those are my great writers and dear friends. Goodbye, Michael. Sorry you're not here. Art Linson, you deserve the first credit. You really did all the work on this one.

1:33:41 · jump to transcript →

Macaulay Culkin

No. But it's interesting. In a film like this, which is a highly... ... you know, at times over-the-top comedy, you play the scene very straight. And I have to hand it to you, you really did... You came in and you knew all your lines this day, which is hard. I now have a-- You were what, 9? We say you're 8 in the movie, but I think you were 9... I was actually 9 when we shot it. And I have a 9-year-old, and I wouldn't be able to convince her... ... to be able to memorize a three-and-a-half-page speech. Well, that's what they're looking for in child actors, though. The first thing that they look for is, can they remember their lines? Right. And, you know, it just... You have a certain relaxed quality. - It was easy. You don't-- It doesn't feel like... Well, you're not just saying words. Yeah, exactly. - You know.

1:09:09 · jump to transcript →

It's all practical, isn't it? It's all in camera. This looks bigger and more threatening. The stuff behind him now, when it's behind Pete Postle's throat, that's a good take. It's all nicely shot, but it's just not scary. That's the frustrating element of this movie.

2:00:01 · jump to transcript →

English Commentary

The verisimilitude in what this does for actors and extras and how they're imbued in every moment of their performance and all the work that they're doing in a place, when you build a place for real, is quite extraordinary. This set, the condors, the height of the condors, we had to import them because some of the condors were about 250 feet high. The scale of the...

38:37 · jump to transcript →

He didn't know what was ahead of him. He didn't know how his life was about to change. As we were when we worked on this. Well, we weren't that innocent. We were in our mid-30s, for God's sake. I was still living at my mom's house. Yeah, after a divorce. Come on, Michael. Let's really have the conversation. As the film ends, let's really talk about how this movie... This movie changed my life. It really did. It changed my behavior. And you see, talk about...

1:39:57 · jump to transcript →

And then finally when he stopped, I was hysterical, and I said, why didn't you stop? He goes, I couldn't see anything. No, he actually said I couldn't see anything. That's why he kept going, because I was laying over the hole where he looks through. My body was laying over the hole, so he kept going. Unbelievable. No, I almost really, really died, like for real, for real. And then I'm telling everyone, and everyone's like, yeah, whatever, you didn't die, we're busy. And I'm like, but, but, but.

21:11 · jump to transcript →

Taylor Hackford

...it's not just an accident that these people are having these apparitions. That, in fact, they are happening like that and that Debra Monk, pardon me... ...Pam Garrety, who's the character, is actually creating something to happen. They're setting the stage for Mary Ann to really just go nuts. Mary Ann realizes there's no way out at this point. Her husband has abandoned her. She's in a mental institution. She can't go back. There's nothing left in this. I think, right now, you see. You see the blonde-haired girl at the beginning... ...with the curly hair. You see now the hollow eyes... ...and all the torture that she's been put through. She's the human sacrifice in this film. This is what Kevin... The person who truly loved him... ...and that he ignored and absolutely abandoned... And at this point, she doesn't want to live anymore. So I think that this moment... ...again, very difficult for actors, to put them in a situation where... ...number one, Kevin has to do this very physical and emotional moment... ...of trying to save his wife's life, and Mary Ann has to be kind of oblivious. And although she's focused, "I love you," she really did... Charlize who, you know, was 21 years old when we made this film... ...I think just did a fabulous job all the way through. She's really a terrific, terrific actress... ...and has in her a professionalism... ...and a steadiness that I think, if she keeps her head about her, she will be a big star. To be able to have all this apparatus on her neck, to be able to actually stab... ...that moment and do it realistically and sit there for hours as we were rigging her. It is a discipline that's quite amazing for a 21-year-old girl... ...who could have easily freaked out. I also think Keanu is very, very believable here. This moment of hysteria, this moment of realization... ...that he's lost the last person, who really he could love and cared about him. So now Mary Ann is in that satchel, all her belongings. She's dead and he's alone, except for his mom.

1:51:35 · jump to transcript →

Peter Hyams

He really did that. The first cut inside this phony subway station, we actually built it in San Pedro. I made it red. And I can't tell you any reason why I made it red other than,

21:17 · jump to transcript →

he will actually lose the prosthetics and go for the real thing. In fact, in that film, we even see an oral sex done for real and the use of actual pornographic performers, both in male and female roles, something that we still don't have here. But you definitely feel that maybe Brass, and this is, I'm thinking out loud here, maybe Brass...

29:25 · jump to transcript →

She did it for real. She was very nervous. Oh, that shot, that's not a reverse shot? No. Usually you reverse. You pull the sword away. Swing as hard as she can and pause. Jeez. I didn't know that. I actually didn't. She was very nervous. Yeah, well, she'd been a character. I don't mean Zhang Ziyang, I mean Michelle. Yeah. I'm sure Zhang Ziyang was nervous too.

1:51:25 · jump to transcript →

as really the point of view character and the ultimate kind of hero of the movie in a lot of ways, was something that gave me a great deal of satisfaction. And Taylor really did a great job with it. Well, I'm glad. He's glad. You're glad. You're glad everything is gone. You're glad that the Grinch virtually wrecked, no, no, no, no, not wrecked, pulverized Christmas. Is that what I'm hearing from you, Luke?

1:20:21 · jump to transcript →

and yeah as as the score and the gunfire are coming together yeah and by the way that dirt it had rained the night before and that dirt was as hard as cement and watch how many times i mean watch how hard ryan goes down plops down and how many times he had to do it yeah he just took so many face plants wow ryan really did a great job and he did so completely committed himself

1:50:16 · jump to transcript →

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland

And Anthony's kind of following this cab in another cab. And Andrew's up on a crane, I think, getting a wide shot. So you can give... This is actually picked up later. We did this somewhere else later. But it does affect the actors to see something for real rather than just paint it all out afterwards. You do see it affect them. It helps them enter the world of it. This was very tricky, this, because how do you show it?

1:01:03 · jump to transcript →

Barry Sonnenfeld

These elevators really did work.

1:05:43 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

This is his ship, the Belafonte. We bought this ship in South Africa and sailed it up to the Mediterranean and renovated it and made it into this research vessel. It never ran that well, but we really did fall in love with this ship. The crew of the film was always very sort of loyal to it. Now, we have Michael Gambon, who plays Oseary Drakoulias, the producer, a sort of Carlo Ponti, Dino De Laurentiis-style mogul, although he does produce these documentaries. He has the longest fingers that I think I've ever seen in real life. He understands. Amin needs to make a projection of the world grosses to see if he can get a tax break and run it through his output deal. I think that Zissou sees himself and wants to be the kind of person who gives kids secret messages in the cereal boxes. Right. That's an inspiration for him. And the movie is about this, theoretically, a real person, but he's inspired by a sort of fantasy version of himself. And there's things sort of peppered throughout the movie, but this whole red caps and the uniforms and the whole thing. And Owen, in some ways, is our stand-in, I mean, of the child who looks up to this person. And I think another layer of that that we were always dealing with was how our cinematic idols in some ways were like surrogate fathers for us. Movies we loved that sort of took the role of things we looked up to, things we sort of wanted to live vicariously through. And I think Owen and Ned's character sort of stands in for that. This is a kind of an unusual role for Owen Wilson, I think. Right. He has a sort of recognizable comic persona that he's developed. And this is, I think, very different from that. I think when we were writing it, we often talked about that even though Ned was, as written, very naïve and kind of an innocent, I think there's always a kind of somewhat devilish nature to Owen. You can see the light is on behind his eyes all the time. There's some Zissou in him. Yeah, that's interesting. And I think also it made us feel more comfortable writing such a naïve character because I think if it was played too much that way, it would kind of wash out. Yes, and I think Owen's concern was, he was like, "What am I gonna do?" Because he felt like the character is so innocent and so sincere that he's not used to playing someone who's that sincere. He usually plays somebody who's a little bit wily on some level, or something like that anyway. And I think for him, when he really became comfortable with it was because we were sitting on the roof of this hotel in Rome, and he told me this funny story about Will Patton on the set of Armageddon, and he did Will Patton's voice, this southern accent. And I asked him, "Do you think you could do this whole movie in that voice?" And what he ended up doing-- He liked it. We read through the whole script reading all his lines with that, and it was funny and it gave him a sort of genteel feeling and something a little bit not quite real. And the accent's certainly not real. The accent hasn't existed certainly since the Civil War. Right. - Even if then.

9:42 · jump to transcript →

The character, the idea that I got to work with Carrie and have her kick ass and have a gun. Look at how tough she is. She worked for three months. She really did an amazing job. Now, there's Buster. There's Buster. Buster trained me into fighting. Yeah, he trained you and he made a number of appearances in the movie later on, you know, in different costumes. I love this moment.

19:53 · jump to transcript →

it was impossible to do for real because it was too dangerous to have real glass. And it was too tough to do that digitally. So if we saw the kiss, film kiss of the year before, I think this is film smile of the year. Yeah.

1:47:30 · jump to transcript →

Aryan language that very few people speak and today there's almost no one and we got the only oral Sanskrit speaker in North America to teach Michelle how to speak that curse for real. Here the horses to quarter the victim was a favorite form of execution of this emperor as well as

7:36 · jump to transcript →

Patrick Tatopoulos

You know those lenses they're wearing? You have no idea how many shot we have to adjust them later. They keep sliding. Bill actually, he prefers to keep his eyes in at all times, right? I remember talking to him on the first one. It is a little bit strange that he's our only vampire... ... that keeps his eyes glowing the whole time. I think it's... He really loves it, and it helps him with, you know, the... I guess Viktor's just, you know, a little more enraged... .at all times than anybody else. There's only one day when we shot... One or a couple of days? We shot the rain stuff? The fight with Sonja. That was really hard, remember, Richard? The lens just kept falling out. - Because they keep... I mean, the teeth would fall out. It was crazy. He had-- There was something... There was something wrong with Bill's teeth too. His teeth never stayed in. They were always falling out. Nobody's teeth really stay in. No. - There was always the teeth problem. There's probably 50 takes in the movie where Bill's tooth falls out. You had to shoot another take. Just to give credit for the guys. Those teeth are so thin. They're like little veneers so they don't deform the mouth. They, of course, have very little place to be supported. So, yeah, it becomes a bit of a headache, but... I always thought this was a very, very cool scene. You know, it's interesting how an actor like Michael Sheen... ...can absolutely command the screen still being very, very quiet. And he really did... Remember the pain it was to shoot in that dungeon? Yeah, it was tiny. - We basically built a real dungeon. And the walls are covered with concrete and stucco... ...S0 you couldn't take... - It was miserable in there, wasn't it? Oh, God, it was just hot. - It was small. lt was tiny and couldn't turn around. We'd also built it so there was only one or two ways out. So it really was a dungeon. - Yeah. It's a difficult situation where you're limited by what the scene Is. They're across the door. We shot first through the... And then we just, you know, you would just see them through the little... Little scene of eyeballs. - Exactly. It became really unbearable, and we decided, Richard... ...to give this a little time to re-shoot an exterior, because... It was impossible. - Yeah. It is claustrophobic. But it became too much, you saw nothing. It was just like, well... Plus, it's a big scene. It's where they're hatching the plot. The conspiracy. And you were so distracted by the fact that all you saw were eyes... ... through a hole in a grate. Now these were pick-up shots, these were later, right? All of these. This is practical, in front of a green screen. Kind of like the carriage, and this, you know, the background is CGI. And that's, again, Intelligent Creature, James? Yep. - Correct. That's right.

29:02 · jump to transcript →

So I don't want to take away from them at all. Whenever you get them on the wire or doing something very dangerous. But the actors really did a hell of a lot. And it's always exciting when you get a group of actors together that are like, put me in there, put me in there. Put me in the harness and do whatever. It's fun having to trick things.

33:13 · jump to transcript →

tweak whatever we can't do in the practical, in terms of practical make-up effects. If it just absolutely isn't possible, then he will step in and kind of fill that space for us. Like this. You want to talk about some of the practical effects then? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so for instance in this scene, right, it's actually a combination of a hollowed-out table

1:06:51 · jump to transcript →

Jeff Goldblum

Did Harvey just slap Tony for real? And how many times did he do it?

59:52 · jump to transcript →

I know. Dragging that poor girl down the street for real. That was a day. It doesn't look like she's too big, but she got real heavy that day somehow. Well, we did this shot, I think, two or three times. And I demand you to do the whole dragging.

1:14 · jump to transcript →

And that was written by Derek Kolstad, who wrote this movie. He also wrote the John Wick series of films. I mean, this all sprang out of his imagination. He's got a hell of an interesting head, and he loves action films, and he loves myths, and he loves creating them. And he's just the best guy ever. You enjoyed working with Derek, right, Ilya? I loved working with Derek. The first time that Derek was in the back of your office... Yeah. ...and first thing he says after we shake hands, "Ilya, welcome. Best idea wins." And I was quite blown away by that. Not "quite." I was blown away because... It's one thing if I would have said it. It's rare for someone who's accomplished, who's working with someone who is kind of new and just come in and say, "Let's sit. "You know, it doesn't matter whose idea, best idea." And that was something that this entire process, for the next, you know, a year-and-a-half, two years, we lived by that mantra. And we finished with that mantra, which is also very unusual. We really did, all the way through editing. Yeah.

1:59 · jump to transcript →

The stuff on the lens is post. I like just sort of putting that mud on the lens. But everything else is real, really shot for real. This is mostly real. Some background is like diving fog because obviously the battlefield is a bit too, you know, like the shots are too big to...

1:10:25 · jump to transcript →

one of my movies that has stayed. This was shot in a parking lot with a boat on tires and we're just rocking it and the ocean was in back of him and it's, you know, all practical effects. Very successful, I think.

21:34 · jump to transcript →