Practical effects

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 →

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.

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