Production design

Hello. My name is Jean-Pierre Jeunet. I'm the director of Alien Resurrection. Hi. I'm Dominique Pinon. I played Vriess, the guy on the wheelchair. And I'm Hervé Schneid, the editor. My name is Sylvain. I was a storyboard artist and a concept artist on Alien Resurrection. This was designed, composed, shot almost entirely and never used, because we couldn't complete it for budgetary reasons. But initially, in the first opening of the film, we looked at the mouth. The mouth of an insect. Except we didn't know it was an insect. We mistake it for an alien creature. And the camera backs out and actually reveals a little bug. And in one camera move, as it keeps on backing up, we see a finger crushing that insect and sticking the insect into a straw. And splattering that insect against the glass as we recede... And we go all the way back into outer space and actually reveal a giant spaceship, which is where the story begins. I remember especially about the main credit. When I arrived in LA, I was waiting for an offer from the studio. You can imagine - a poor French guy like me, I was very scared. I was in a hotel, waiting for the answer, and I didn't sleep because of jet lag and because I was scared. I thought "OK. To prove to myself I am able to make this film, I have to find a good idea for the main credit, for the first shot." Immediately, I found the story of the guy alone in a big spaceship, with the milk shake and the pipe. He scratches insects, he puts them in the pipe, he blows the insect on the camera. I was very happy about this idea. I told this idea to the studio and they were happy, too. We began to work on it, but it was very very very expensive. One day, my line producer told me, if you could find another idea, because we have not enough money to finish this idea. This is a secret - I was pretty relieved. In fact, I think it was a little bit too funny for the beginning of Alien. I didn't say anything to the people. I said "You want to cut my idea?!" But, in fact, I was very happy, and I prefer the credit we have now. This is a model, and at this time, we hesitated about to use CGI or models for the spaceships. And Pitof preferred to use models. Maybe it was one of the last films with spaceship in model. That was very impressive. I came once on the set while you shot the models, and it was really big. - Yeah. Not really big. It's never enough big. And Pitof made a lot of parts, and he mixed the different parts.

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We had a larger size for this close-up. They ended up making some oversize pinchers to hold it as well. But it gave us the detail we needed to articulate the face and have the head extrude from that silicone sheath. Nigel Phelps the production designer worked with Darius Khondji the DP. They worked during the preparation. It was very important for Darius to have some sets with the light included in the set, because there's some small corridor - it's very very small, very tight - and it was very important to include the light.

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Darius came to the set as it was being built, and Nigel would explain some of his intentions. Darius made suggestions and they created opportunities for lighting. They were like two siblings, plotting. It works well.

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We're coming up on Grant Hesloff, and he considered himself the comedian both on the set and in character, and is the guy he thought everyone in the audience, he's the one they'd relate to because he's the guy who's like, why am I here? How did I end up in this situation? He had to learn sign language to deal with Amy because he's supposed to act like he's done this for years.

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I don't even know if you'd call it turnaround, but Frank Yablans still had the rights to it until Jurassic Park. Right. On Jurassic Park, which Kathleen Kennedy produced, she was on the set with Crichton and sort of started out, he started telling her the whole saga and she began to think, oh, well, you know, with technology, like Jurassic Park obviously was a landmark film in terms of special effects technology. And so between the animatronics and the CG dinosaurs and all that, she thought, well, maybe this is the time to do it.

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She doesn't think that it would be a good fit for her. I think that's where Marshall ultimately landed as well. He said the only reason he went back to direct on Eight Below was just he couldn't resist the opportunity of having a bunch of dogs every day looking at him adoringly as he directed them. And so he basically, you know, he made that for the dogs. But he really, I think he's kind of the same way. They were very into their golden retrievers. Like they were on the set, right? Yes, their golden retrievers were on the set. And in fact, at one point got terrified by Amy. They thought Amy was real. So, or sort of barking or something. Well, and some, you know, as much as like Peter Elliot

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He did that, and I thought, yeah, this is great. My only thing with Benicio was that I had wanted a much older character to play opposite McManus. Which I like. I actually like that concept. It's just I couldn't find the right person. And then having seen what Benicio did on the set, I realized he was certainly the guy for the job. Benicio is a true artist. Very conservative with that word. Very special actor as well. Very bold.

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And then this morning, the day we shot this was the next day, and just the principal actors and myself had sort of a bonding lunch to try to see what, you know, was the difficulty. And we got sort of, it became like a love fest, and we got all giddy, and this giddiness carried over into the scene because none of the actors could stop laughing. That shot really plays it there. You could see that there was a lot of laughing on the set that day. It was hard to get anybody to be serious. I was not able to get one take...

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The most effortlessly complex actor. That's probably the most perfect description I've ever heard of Gabriel. Gabriel is also the most popular man on the set whenever Bryan would yell cut, hair, makeup, you name any sort of woman on the set that was working in any capacity would flock around Gabriel with Baldwin standing ten feet away going, when you're done with Mr. Byrne, I'm here.

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The way he first came up as a candidate to direct this movie is kind of interesting because it actually... Teague's name came up while Marquand was still technically assigned to the movie. What happened was Brenda Feigen was visiting her brother on the set of Oliver Stone's Wall Street. Now, this was obviously a couple years before Charlie Sheen, one of the stars of that film, was cast in Navy Seals. But Brenda Feigen's brother...

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was friends with Michael Douglas. So he was kind of hanging out on the set with Michael Douglas and Brenda Feigen went to visit the set. And when she was on the set, Oliver Stone saw her and he knew her kind of socially a little bit from being a William Morris agent or whatever. And Oliver Stone asked Brenda Feigen to be an extra in the scene they were shooting. And so she said, sure. And she spent this long day on the set of Wall Street and there were a bunch of breaks.

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So he wanted them all with him. So Emilio and Charlie, they were on the set of Apocalypse Now for eight months as kids. Charlie was like 10 years old. And...

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Tony Scott

And it was funny, I didn't think about that. The taxi driver referenced Robert De Niro's character until the end of that first day of shooting. And that's what put us both on the same page. The next morning came to the set, the second day in the bar and said, I got it. Now I know what you're talking about. So after that, we were in sync and right on track. The scene you're looking at here is the title sequence, which we actually shot in Detroit when we arrived in Detroit.

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Tony Scott

I'm, you know, some of what I regard as the best actors in the world, and everybody wanted to do it. Everybody wanted to do it. They wanted to come to the set and just do the words that were on the page. Nobody wanted to actually, you know, normally when you do a movie, people come to the set and they want to rethink the characters or rethink the words, but I had such a smorgasbord of brilliant cast, and everybody just wanted to come to the set every day and do the words that were on the page, which I have to applaud Quentin for.

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Tony Scott

You know, a handwritten page, nobody reads it. It's sticking on the back of the dolly or on their chairs and nobody pays any attention to it. But you give people pictures, you know, you give them a comic strip, you know, and they can digest the day's work in a heartbeat. You know, we're shotless, they've got to think about it. It's a great, great document to have on the set for the whole crew so they know what they're looking at for that particular day. Would you like to get pie after you see a good movie? Yeah, I'd love to get pie after a movie.

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You notice in these sequences, the camera is near the ground so the ceiling becomes more important than the floor and one is shooting up people's nostrils. This was an approach David Fincher wanted, which I think is terribly effective indeed and makes it more distinctive than the other three, rather, in my opinion. I tried to keep it fairly shadowy, so that it looks moody. Where I could, I brought the light from the top because it's unusual for the light to come from the floor, but one had to be careful about it obviously. The difficulty was getting light into the eyes so we could see what the actors were thinking but not at the expense of the mood. I remember at Pinewood Studios when the sets were going up, Fincher would have us walk through the sets just looking at the scope of them. It was truly amazing to see these things go up. Norman Reynolds is a great production designer. He builds the world. It's very difficult to control him cos George would tell him on Star Wars "Don't build that. We're gonna paint it", and the next day - "It's too late. It's built." When they sent us over, we said "Why are we going to London?" They said "It's the sets, the set design, the artistry and the craftsmanship." And it really was very true. British actors is another good reason to go there. Somehow the British accent does a lot for these movies, I think. Vincent has had a deep, abiding interest in Luddite monks, and had done a great movie called The Navigator, where these monks dig their way through the earth, coming out into the 20th Century. It was a great movie. But, anyway, the original idea was that this was a wooden planet built by the Luddites and in the bottom of the planet, symbolically, the reactor was kind of hell. The technology that kept this thing going was emanating from the bowels of Lucifer. What drew me to the project first was that it wasn't a retread kind of sequel. It was a completely new idea, and some of it survived in the final script. David was entirely in control from the beginning. He put his stamp on it. He was the director and nobody ever questioned it. He was completely in control of the set and everybody hung on his words. He was definitely doing it. There was no weakness in it at all. He was very, very confident in what he was doing and wouldn't be swayed. He had this vision and that was what he was going to do. He came under quite a lot of pressure from 20th Century Fox to hurry up or do it the quickest way or the most expedient way, but he wouldn't listen. He would do what he wanted to do, quite rightly, in my opinion. As I say, his compositions are marvelous and the use of the frame, and so on. David had been a cinematographer before he became a director, so he knew lighting. He knew what was good and what was bad. That's not to take away from David Worley, the operator. His contribution was enormous as well.

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My name is Paul McGann. I played Golic in Alien³. It's fairly standard practice, particularly on such a big venture, that things are necessarily going to change. Until that point, I'd never worked on anything on that scale. But there seemed to be these characters moving around, particularly when Fincher was there, in unison, watching him or watching us. Any shenanigans or machinations behind the scenes tend to be kept from the actors, but we were well aware of the atmosphere and the changes coming down from on high. That said, the atmosphere was good. If there were changes in the strands of the story, then we'd get decent warning. But it became apparent, even just after two weeks, that there was a chance that that sequence we just shot may not make it, so we're gonna shoot another version of it. It seemed expensive... and just unsure. I remember when I first met Fincher, Fincher was incredibly energetic. It was at the start of this 12-month process. I remember seeing him in LA towards the end of the thing and he was exhausted, naturally. But at that time, meeting him, he was full of beans, full of ideas. Don't forget, Walter Hill, David Giler, these people were very experienced filmmakers. Any of the things that were happening, obviously the advice Fincher was receiving was from highly experienced people. It was a nice idea that Sigourney's wearing a contact lens in the left eye. And the bruising, I think that's a rather nice touch there. Most of the sets had ceilings on because we saw the ceilings so often, so one used to have to hide the light where you could to the best effect. This going in and out of light... I put a cukaloris on the lamp. A cukaloris is a shape - just cutouts on a piece of wood. It creates patches of light that she goes in and out of. Sometimes it doesn't work because the actors are concentrating on what they're saying, and they forget to find a light on their faces. and they forget to find a light on their faces.

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The light coming from the top was a 4K xenon lamp, which gives you very straight beams, which I thought would be quite a good idea. I shot it up through a mirror because you can't tilt them down or the condenser burns. But we had a mirror above the set and I shined it from the floor onto the mirror. This autopsy scene was a favorite of Fincher's, too, because we had created a body of Newt that had multiple layers of tissue, skin and musculature that could be cut through, and the bones opened up. It's a lot of graphic coverage that's not in the final movie. The body of Newt was actually based on... Alec and I had done a life cast of Carrie Henn during Aliens, and while we were in London Bob Keen's shop actually had a casting of the head. We were able to get that and remold it, so we were able to duplicate what the actress had looked like some five or six years previously. There is intercutting here with the real girl as well. She has a lot of fuzz on her face. - Yeah. Backlit fuzz.

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over the top. I think it's nice. I think though they're vibrant, the palette is terrific. Yeah, I had a great production designer, Naomi Slotky, who really designed the sets, and she was very good, and I think she was somewhat new. I know she's off doing great things now, but a lot of people have gone on to do better stuff. Not that this wasn't the best, but...

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For some reason, this blue dress you're going to see is one of my favorites. She has blue shoes. Holly Davis, who was terrific, was our wardrobe girl. I just think that was a nice outfit for her, and we should have kept her in that dress. She has beautiful legs. Yeah, cute. Notice I put mushrooms there in front, our production design. That's a colorful little mushroom, plastic mushroom. Again, trying to kind of get a...

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It was nice. I was actually, after the fact, I was very impressed that I actually got through it, and it actually looked pretty good. There's the shoes. See, again, nice lighting by Levy with the light through the window, and, you know, the set looks good. Yeah, it's a very nice scene to introduce him in contemporary times. Yes. Here you go.

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And this shot here done by ILM, it's a combination of live action and matte painting. The whole background, the moon, the sky, a lot of those statues are visual effects. I love this shot. This will be fun. This is Allan Cameron, my production designer at his finest. Alan also did The Jungle Book with me. This sequence was a problematic sequence editorially.

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We only shot one take, that's it. Rachel's now crawling in as the stuntwoman is crawling under the camera and I told her to stand up and perfect. Take one, one take only, that's it. 12,000 bucks. Steve called me from the location saying, okay, so what does it look like? Do we need to shoot it again? And I thought, well, I'm not sure what else you'd do to that shot. I think it's about as good as it could be. Yeah, it was a real pain because we arrived on the set

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I don't think we have his real voice here. I wish we did. He's Scottish. He has a very thick Scottish accent. I used to tease him on the set all the time, asking for an interpreter. Because literally the second I'd call cut, he'd go right into his thick Scottish accent. And he was nervous about playing this role because he had to play English. And I told him, no worries, he'd do it. He'd have no problem.

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And then I took the transcripts and re-edited the transcripts to make it the scene, which was then inserted into the script. And that was very carefully worked on on the set at the Hawaii Kai restaurant on 49th Street and Broadway, wherever it is. I don't know if it's still there. It was above the place that we showed Cats. Cats was there for like 100 years. The Winter Garden was above there. And that day we did that. And I remember that it started to go another way. And I kept saying, no, you've got to go back to the script, the script based on

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As we're walking off the set, you know, Bobby doesn't talk a lot. He just stands there, and he's a great actor, that's all. So we're walking off the set, and surprisingly, he just turns to me, throws his arms around me, and he says, Paulie, you're great, which was really a wonderful thing to happen. That was a very, just personally, I'm not talking about my acting. I just think he just meant it was great to work with me, but it was a wonderful thing from a man who I esteem greatly as an artist, as a fellow artist. They always wanted to talk to Henry about this or that.

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Marty's parents don't come to the editing room much... ...but they always are on the set, and they used to work on the set. They used to press the collars of the shirts that the people... ...particularly in the Mafia films, wear... ...because only they, Marty said, knew how to do them properly. But it was great how much they were involved in his filmmaking.

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section and the cryo prism was interesting because the idea of cryogenic suspension had been done so many times before in films and there are so many flavors of the way the subject would be in suspended animation and in this case i wanted something that would break out of the convention of alien etc etc and i actually designed this set with the production designer to be a fully horizontal

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Are you sure? Joel, absolutely. Joel showed them scenes from this movie and that got her speed. And anytime I run into Sandra Boggs, she acts like we started a career, which I'll take. And this is, again, the set design is, we worked very hard to make everything work practically. Even the...

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Sandra Bullock, I remember. Yeah, that dress weighed about 30... Yes. It weighed about 35 pounds. She had a hard time walking around it. I remember visiting... I visited the set that day, and she was... I was complimenting her about her performance, but she was, like, complaining that she's weighing a 900-pound dress. And that was Dan Cortez, who was a MTV personality. Definitely a 1990s icon, singing the Jolly Green Giant song. We should add more...

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really magnificent. I mean, he's able to create like a little city here using what remained of the ruins of castles and building onto them and around them. That was no exception. Speaking of the sets, I mean, he...

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He's, uh... He was actually one of the funniest guys on the set. I'm a lassie.

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huge pitch battle but I knew that the you know the set piece was yet to come and I didn't want to overdo it here so we found a shortcut we managed to shoot this entire sequence in a day and wherever we got the opportunity to burn a set we simply burnt it whether it was in the script or not

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They actually let you on board Air Force One so you can take a look at the interior? Yes. What we see right now that Gary gets a tour of the plane. I got the same tour together with Harrison Ford and Michael Ballhaus and our production designer. And so we, this, you know, this plane is so protected. Nobody gives you any information about the plane. So when President Clinton invited us to go and see his real plane because he just loves the idea of Air Force One, the movie with Harrison and so on.

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And so we talked about Wendy. Here's the kiss. And now I tell you a little bit about the set again because we now cut upstairs to the MCC. That's the communication room right here.

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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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You just have to feel it. You're just there on the set. You know, that's not working. It's got to be like this. You're doing that too self-consciously. You've got to do that straighter. The humor comes from the fact that you don't understand you're being funny. It's all inspired by the screenplay, definitely. It's inspired by the screenplay, but then I think what the director does is he has to hold on to it and keep it from falling off. Of course, the movies that work best are

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planes had to be shot in two parts. One where we actually had Forrest or Tom Hanks running carrying Michael T. And then we cleared everybody out of the set and set off these explosions here on this island in South Carolina. And then blended the two parts of the shot together to look like he was actually running through the scene with the real explosions. And isn't there a rig also helping him carry Bubba?

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My ultimate vision for everything is ultimately compromised. And I think that that's what you have to do as a filmmaker. You have to just turn it over. You have to give up. Because in the morning, you're going to the set, and you've got this long list of 20 setups to do this sequence really great and get all the coverage you need and have everything you need. And then by lunch, you haven't gotten one single shot yet. And you just start crossing them all off. And at the end of the day, you've been able to scramble and get four setups.

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Hey, that's you. - That's me. So this was, uh-- I guess we... We could start about... Talking about the beginning of how this whole movie came about, really. I was in dire straits at the time, in terms of my career. I had just come off of a complete disaster, a big bomb. I didn't know if I was gonna direct again. I thought I'd have to go back to writing. So I was in Chicago staying at my in-laws' house... ...and my first daughter was just born... ...and John Hughes sent me, out of the kindness of his heart, two scripts. One was called Reach the Rock and the other was called Home Alone. One of them, it was rumored... I think it was this one. was written over a weekend... ...which some critics would probably jump on the bandwagon... ...and say, "Well, we always knew that." - Exactly. Ha, ha. So I read Home Alone and immediately responded to it. I thought it was just a great, great piece of material. And it talked about some of the things that I was interested in making a film about. Now, we had a meeting, I remember, in New York. I just-- It was-- You and my father were talking most of the time... ...and I was just imitating everything you were doing. Everything I was doing. - Yeah. You'd drink your water, I drank my water. Like that. I think I did that... I think I way overdid it. I think I just kept doing it the whole, like, hour. Well, you know, the interesting thing is we... Again, it was the kind of situation where we looked at hundreds of kids, again. And I was like-- Even though I didn't know if I'd ever direct a film again... ...I was like, "Well, you know, Macaulay was in Uncle Buck... ...and I don't wanna just cast him based on John Hughes producing the movie... ...because then it looks like I'm gonna give in to John Hughes and be a wimp." And I met all these... I met hundreds of kids. And when I met Macaulay, there was just no one else who came close... ...to what we needed for this film. I mean, really, in terms of an actor... ...a Child actor, at the time, you were the most unique, original kid I'd ever seen. So that was pretty... - Oh, thank you. I mean, I totally agree with you, but thank you anyway. But it really is-- It's sort of, uh... Because it was the fact that you, um... The camera loved you, obviously. You see the shots from the film. The camera loves you, but at the same time, uh... ... you were relatable to every kid in America... ...because you weren't an idealized version of a kid. Kids are used to-- Accustomed to seeing this ridiculously... Shirley Temple, and the curls and the whole thing, you know. And there was just something enormously real about you. That, and I could remember my lines and I had a lot of energy. That is true. You did have a lot of energy. Almost a sad amount of energy. It was, I mean.... Still do too. Uh, now, do you remem--? Like, this particular scene. We're starting from the beginning of the film. And I'm curious, because there were so many scenes in the film... We were talking before we started. where we would shoot your coverage first and then send you home... ...or I'd still be in jail. - Child labor laws. Yes, I'm still well-versed in the child labor laws. So there are obviously certain elements of the film-- Like this. Do you remember this being shot? - No. Because you weren't here. - I remember we did the whole... There was a whole sequence with, you know... ...people coming up the stairs, down. - Right. He's there, and the pizza guy's there. I remember that, and just like, you know, trying to coordinate that whole thing. But, no, in general, there's a lot of stuff... There's a lot of holes in it... In my memory. And this guy went on to do something on Nickelodeon. My kids know him. Yeah, Pete & Pete. - Yeah, Pete & Pete. Is it still on the air? - No, no. It lasted a couple years. It was actually a really kind of neat show. Yeah, my kids loved that show. But what was interesting about the whole look of this film... I guess we could talk about it a little bit. You'll even notice... Some people will think, "Well, this wasn't intentional." But we intended the film to feel like Christmas sort of. I wanted the house to feel very warm. You look at... - Greens, reds. Macaulay's wearing greens, a green and red shirt. There's a green and red jumper sweater on this guy back here. The wallpaper is all... - That's very clever. All conveying a warmth of Christmas and something that, uh... It just was interesting to us. So it wouldn't be over-the-top, but it'd feel warm. I wanted the house to feel like a warm place. Joe Pesci. What do you remember about Joe Pesci? What is, like, your first--? My first-- Gosh, I don't even... I have-- I still show this. I have a scar on my finger. - Uh-huh. We'll get to that part near the end... - Ha-ha-ha. ...when, you Know, he says, you know: - Okay. "I'm gonna bite each one of your fingers off, one at a time." During rehearsal, he actually bit my finger a little harder than I think he thought. I still have a little scar on my finger. It's my little Joe Pesci tooth mark. I'm telling you something, I believe... And I know Joe would probably get a little upset with me about this... ...but there was a little professional jealousy from a lot of the actors on set... ...because you were the star. There's this little kid who was the star, who we were all paying attention to... ...who was carrying the film. And there was a lot of passive-aggressive stuff going on. And I don't think Joe meant to bite through your finger... But, heck, you know, you never know. He was not particularly happy during the course of making this film. And I don't-- I think he would probably say the same thing. He had just come off of Goodfellas and Raging Bull, and he was... I don't know, did he win the Academy Award? He won for Goodfellas. His acceptance speech was, "Thanks," and that was it. Okay. Well, there you go, so, um.... And when he... I remember I was such a fan of his. Asking him to do the Goodfellas... The clown speech, you know. "Make me laugh," you know? "What do--? Am I funny to you like a clown?" And he would do that every day, and it was great. But at the same time, I could feel it from the actors. Because there's always a sense of rivalry between actors. There was this feeling of, you were the star of this movie, and that was un... That was not really common at the time. - Yeah, yeah. It created an interesting tension on the set, I have to say. Yeah, see, I never really felt that, but I was 9. Everyone around here knows he did it. It'll just be a matter of time... ...before he does it again. What's he doing? He walks up and down the streets every night... ... Salting the sidewalks. Maybe he's just trying to be nice. No way. See that garbage can full of salt? That's where he keeps his victims. The salt turns the bodies... ... Into mummies. Wow. - Mummies!

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That's also the reason I got the part. I'm such a ham. You are such a ham. - I'm such a ham. But what's amazing is, at the time... ...I was only the father of an infant, really. My daughter... - It was Rory's age. They were both born same month. Yeah, and, uh.... So I was, uh.... I thought, "Well, he's-- This kid is really kind of over-the-top... ...In terms of the way he treats his family. He's kind of a brat." Little did I realize then, after four children later, that this is kind of par for the course. This is the way kids just treat their parents. John knew what he was talking about. - Oh, yeah. He had lived through it. John-- The meetings on this film... We would be in preproduction before we'd shoot... ... then I'd have to go to... John was a night owl, so I'd have to go to John with a... John Hughes' house from about 9 at night to 5 in the morning. I would get home and get in a half-hour's sleep and go back to the set. It was just insane, and he liked to work those hours, and we'd... That's how we basically worked on the script... ...and worked on the production design. It was literally a 24-hour-a-day job. Now, oddly enough, you know, which is gonna sound odd to some people... .all of this sort of imagery... ...Was inspired by David Lean's Great Expectations. So I was-- Obviously, we didn't fully get to that point... ...but some of the black-and-white photography in that film... ... really inspired this sequence for me.

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Someone I got to work with, Maureen O'Hara... ...on a picture right after this... - Mm-hm? ...SO... - I did a day on that. Yeah. We cut your big scene with John Candy. You cut all my lines out. - Yeah. It was kind of like we were trying to duplicate Uncle Buck. Yeah, yeah. - I remember that, and it was just kind of... Felt like we had been there, in a sense. Um.... More people saw this picture, so you're Okay. Yeah, no, I'm.... Thanks, Chris. Now, this... - Ha-ha-ha. Thank you. We resorted to stock footage for any shots you'll see of airlines... ...coming up, shots of Paris. We had no money to go shoot those things. And this was a set that already existed... ... that we put back together so we could actually shoot. The, uh-- This is first-class when you could actually have real silverware on the plane. Yeah. - Yeah. Most of our sets, incidentally, were in a... A lot of them were in a high school outside of Chicago. We shot Uncle Buck there too. - New Trier High School. Yeah, yeah. - And, um.... Some of the sets-- I'm trying to remember where the house set was. We were in some warehouse, weren't we? Or was this New Trier as well? It was in the gymnasium. - Yeah. It was all in that school, the interiors. - Gymnasium. We also shot a lot at the house, at the real house. Oh, yeah. - The second one... ...[I think we spent half a day in the real house. Because they... The people who own the real house... ...wanted a little more money in the second one. Everybody wanted more in the second one, and rightly so. Me included.

18:20 · jump to transcript →

Paul M. Sammon

Then I had a three-man team, a guy named Mike Ripple, who was wonderful. He was the artist. I was the supervisor. And then we had another guy on set who would feed the things into the monitor's live time. Basically, we would dump all our computer graphics that we did there in the office, production often in Houston, onto a three-quarter cassette, run down to the set, throw it into the recorder, onto the monitor, and there you go.

17:07 · jump to transcript →

Paul M. Sammon

So he told me the day before this was going to shoot, we need mug shots of people. So I ran around the set, and I would literally grab who was ever there, throw them up against a wall, take a Polaroid on full facial, and then turn them on a profile, run that up, scan them in our incredibly primitive scanner, and then have Mike Ribble put a layer of...

44:40 · jump to transcript →

Paul M. Sammon

Frank Miller was rewriting the script on a daily basis. And by the way, there is a rumor that he was off the film. He was not. He was there. He was enthusiastic. He was right across from my office. I was right next to John Davison's office, right next to Kirsch's office, right next to Miller's office. Frank was literally writing every single day and running dialogue down and scenes down to the set. So this was a film that was written as it went along, which is never a good idea.

47:29 · jump to transcript →

is his own, but it's like, you can see some of the production design where you've got this kind of religious aspect, the guys are all religious as well, you have, you know, where their clothes, how their clothes are hung is a bit like monks as well, and they'd be getting all the big coats on and the hood, so you kind of, there is that sort of, the building blocks of what he'd wanted is kind of there in structure, but it's, it has become this, just a prison planet, which, you know, I'm not...

7:36 · jump to transcript →

But I mean, there's nothing wrong with the way it looks, is there? Clearly, the sets are absolutely fantastic. I didn't realise, again, until digging in research, that they are all sets. I figured that at least some of it must be some horrendous foundry in the north somewhere that they've found that's been abandoned since the... But no, it's all built. It shows you, though, like the first Alien, $8 million it cost. Also, we all know it was like four that doubled due to Ridley Scott's

31:03 · jump to transcript →

Fantastic storyboarding. Aliens, what, 16 million maybe? Yeah, something like that. So then it's gone from that to 50 million for Alien 3. And I don't know if that accounts for the reshoots. Well, 20 million of that they'd spent before they even started filming, didn't they? Because they'd spent 7 million on, according to the figures I've come across, they spent 7 million on sets for versions of the movie that were then abandoned. So the sets were just destroyed.

31:33 · jump to transcript →

Michael Mann

The most fascinating about this set was that we built it in a place called Sawyer's Cove, and everything you're seeing was real. It's not a set. We built the cabin out of felled logs, all the set dressing, antiques that had been purchased. In deciding to build it, it became both cost-efficient, practical, and aesthetically much more rewarding to just go ahead and build a real cabin. Even the crops...

4:32 · jump to transcript →

Michael Mann

and built the fort partially out of some of that lumber. So the fort was built as a real place on three sides, interior and exterior. All the work on built the set for something under a million dollars, they had the benefit of being real and practical. So when they enter through a sally port, as they're doing right here, into the interior, we really are walking into the interior of the real fort.

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Michael Mann

The canoes were built by Wolf Kroeger. Wolf did a fantastic job building the fort and every other structure in this piece, as well as constructing the cave behind the waterfall. I mean, he was just a great, great production designer. Nothing is too intimidating for him. He'll take on anything and just relish the challenge. The detail he afforded me at the poltroons was quite amazing.

1:20:33 · jump to transcript →

Now, you mentioned Hilda Stark before, your production designer. She does some really, truly amazing work in this movie, some really diverse set pieces, some very real, natural, lived-in stuff like the catacomb sequences and very arch-stylized sets like the James Bond set pieces you mentioned before. How did you come to work with Hilda on this, and what was she like? I love Hilda. She just had a wonderful portfolio, very inventive, very humble. She wasn't brassy or, you know, it's got to be this, it's got to be that, just really complicated.

41:44 · jump to transcript →

collaborative. And she had also done a show for Michael Mann called Crime Story, which I was a big fan of. And so I knew that she could pull off that kind of stylized kind of retro stuff that I gravitate towards. Because I think this was her first feature as a full-fledged production designer. Yeah. She had done work before this, obviously, but this was her first big feature as a production designer.

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Although it's funny, our sound mixer, Kirk Francis, you know, he's got his headset on all day, so he hears everything. And we had a lot of looky-loos. We had a lot of onlookers, and some of them were sort of inner-city folk, and they would say amusing things at the periphery of the set, and he would write them all down. And I think we actually had a crew T-shirt. I love this shot of Nico when it goes back to her. You know, looking at this again recently, I mean, she's good. Look at her.

55:50 · jump to transcript →

Stephen Prince

It's really quite a nice set that Kurosawa has achieved with his production designer. It may not be fully convincing as a natural landscape, but that's quite all right. Often in movies where you want to strike a slight tone of fantasy or the unreal, it's best not to emulate photographic realism.

41:58 · jump to transcript →

Stephen Prince

The I character strolls past it to view Vincent's bedchamber, but then the painting of the bridge pulls him back, and indeed it will pull him in. He stands before it and he puts on the white cap, which is Kurosawa's token, a style of hat that he often wore on the set, and the I character steps into the painting dressed as Kurosawa.

1:04:42 · jump to transcript →

Stephen Prince

Sets and landscapes are painted to evoke Van Gogh's images of the fields and buildings of Arles, and this use of painted production design is reminiscent of Kurosawa's work in Dodecadene, his first color film. There, buildings and landscapes were painted in vivid, highly saturated colors to create a very stylized world where dreams and fantasies held sway over reality.

1:06:01 · jump to transcript →

was able to create. And you're right, they actually are the best part of the score. So actually, in some ways, maybe we should stop this and bring Steve in. Parrot. That's right. You know, here is a very good example coming up of something which is sort of ominous and mysterious, I mean, in terms of the set. I mean, you can sort of see this, you know, it's very unattended to. It's like, you know, he's obviously this pet store, which is something he's inherited from his parents, something that he...

22:58 · jump to transcript →

So this particular song is in Calendar, and then we imported it here. I just love this club. I remember coming to the set, and it was incredibly hot, and there was no air conditioning. Oh, it was terrible. It was hell. And the thing, sweaty to the extreme. Well, listen, I'll tell you the story about this club. I really liked it. Look, we had no money, so how did we get all these...

33:59 · jump to transcript →

very threatening. He's saying, if you don't do this, you're going to go to jail. And this now leads us into this other section of the film, one piece of music. It's the snake dance music. But what's happening here is so, in terms of the set, you have three different levels of observation. You have Francis outside.

1:08:41 · jump to transcript →

And seeing Stan Winston's credit and all the things that he did for us, which when we get to some shots of the Rippers, we can talk about. But how much I learned from that man. Arianne Phillips, one of the greatest costume designers. And Catherine Hardwicke, a production designer who has gone on and become quite the amazing director. She twilighted the world. Yes, exactly.

1:56 · jump to transcript →

Because I remember just sweating, and I remember watching the crew just sort of back up, like, okay, this is the testing point. I loved working with him. You know what? I love professionalism. I love people that are, you know, 20 minutes early and stay 20 minutes late. I mean, that's what I got from him. He was always prepared, always fresh. You know, just loved him. I just loved him, too. And every single woman and girl on the set had a crush on him. It was great to watch. Well, those sparkly blue eyes you got.

8:50 · jump to transcript →

I know, to die for. And, of course, I'm this massive fan of Clockwork Orange. So a lot of our inspiration came out of, a lot of the additional production design inspiration came out of Clockwork Orange. Right. You want to talk about being ahead of your time, you can look at Malcolm McDowell. Yeah. I mean, his early films and that in particular. And I watch it every year and I'm blown away.

9:20 · jump to transcript →

So the more fertile the actor, the more surprises you get. When I designed this sequence and this set, I thought it was very important to lower the ceilings. We used the set again, and I thought the claustrophobia of it and the idea that you almost had a duck and that wherever you are, the ceiling is directly over your head had an impact on it.

37:24 · jump to transcript →

People weren't that quick to start eating apples on the set for a while after that. It's not difficult to take close-ups of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Robin Tunney. When you have wonderful faces and there's something going on in the face, it's really not that difficult. And you'd be amazed at the amount of time you're in an editing room and you're not crazy about the course of a scene. And when you have an actor like Gabriel or Arnold or Robin, cut to close-ups. There's something interesting going on.

57:00 · jump to transcript →

Right here, where Gabriel comes through the door, the set caught fire. The whole thing almost went. Luckily, we put it out in time, and we could then shoot just parts of it. Except it got hairy for a second. This film is filled with effects that you frankly couldn't have done 10 years ago. It takes digital effects

59:57 · jump to transcript →

There were five or six locations that I thought were going to be very problematic to find because the action that the story described was very specific. So I ended up making little post-its. I wrote six little post-its on my dashboard in my car. The name of the set, the action required, and any little descriptive elements from either the story or the novel or the script.

1:05:36 · jump to transcript →

Dante had studied the era and was very excited with whatever newest technologies in film that could be done today to make it look that way and have it all that more real for the era. His work speaks for himself. I mean, he shot a brilliant movie. Knowing Dante, his appreciation for life and his ability to work with people made the atmosphere on the set all that much more pleasant.

1:18:53 · jump to transcript →

Taylor Hackford

At this point, seeing a guy walk up to him in the bar, Keanu is completely convinced... ...that one of his friends has put this guy up to it. And this actor, who is Ruben Santiago Hudson... ...is a fabulous actor. He won the Tony for an August Wilson play, Seven Guitars. I saw him on stage and just felt, "I want to work with this guy." So when the role of Leamon Heath came up, you know, I had Tony Gilroy... ...kind of tailor the role to fit Ruben, and then convinced Ruben to do the film... ...because he has a very unique quality. He's not your totally assimilated black character. He may have gone to Harvard, he may have gone to Yale... ...but he's maintained a lot of his own roots and integrity, and at the same time... ...he's smart like a whip and he knows he's got Kevin hooked. The next scene that you're about to see hot cut to Kevin's roots: A Southern church, and this congregation is real. Judith Ivey, who is being introduced here as Kevin's mother. You know Kevin was raised in this church, he's coming... ...and taking a look back at his past, was totally fundamentalist... ...and deeply, deeply rooted in Jesus and God. Judith Ivey is part of this group. I had to spend a lot of effort convincing Pastor Lovell and his church... ...in Gainesville, Florida to participate in this film, because I feel that... ...you know, the things that they believe in, the things they're after... ...have everything to do with establishing good and evil in the world... ...and fighting the devil, and that's what this film is about. But they were fabulous, and they really got the spirit of God in them. And I thought it was important to see that Judith Ivey is a believer. She is one with her God, she loves Him. And, you know, she's a formidable presence for good in this film. At the same time, she's a tough mother, and you can see that... ...she has raised him in a certain way and she doesn't particularly approve... ...of what he's done with his life. He's a lawyer, and you establish his wife... ...over at the car, Mary Ann, who obviously is a party girl, a liver, and not... Neither one of them are in church this morning, and Mother is not that happy. This sequence is important to understand that Kevin Lomax understands scripture. He may have made a choice at this point to stay outside the church. If you notice, he's half in, half out of the light. Tony Gilroy wrote this in the script. Kevin Lomax stands outside the congregation. He's half in, half out of the light. He is part of it and at the same time... ...he can't bring himself to walk in. There's a dichotomy in him, which you'll discover later. But in this instance, when his mother calls up and says: "Quote the Bible to me and mention scripture," he can quote it back to her. He knows what he's talking about. He was in that church and a devout member at one point. Now you get a sense of Mary Ann. She is a good person. She's trying to help this character. She doesn't want to get the company to repossess her car. But she's tough, and she's a businesswoman. You also have a sense, right here, of the fun that these two people have. Keanu, you know, biting off her earring and handing it back to her... ...that was totally spontaneous. He came in, did that. It was quite wonderful. Now you have a sense of the married couple. They've got Mother-in-law... ...and Mary Ann's no dummy... ...she knows exactly that she's persona non grata in that household. It isn't that she doesn't like her mother-in-law, but she understands... ...what she needs to do, like have a child. And right now you establish another theme of the film: "Let's give her a grandchild and everything will be all right." Mary Ann is ready. She's working. She's professional. But she's ready to start to have a family. But you hot cut to Kevin Lomax who's taken the deal. He's in New York. At the beginning it's just a vacation. He's going to consult on the selection of a jury. You see Foley Square, the seat of judicial power in New York... ...all the Federal buildings, the State buildings, the local... Everything is right there in one space. It's a very, very sobering look at the power of the legal community in New York City. And at the same time, for a guy from Gainesville, Florida, it's very impressive. Kevin's here. He's excited. He is working as a consultant... ...to one of Manhattan's best and most famous criminal trial attorneys. His name is Meisel, played by George Wyner. And in this moment I wanted people to see that Kevin Lomax truly has a talent. When you talk to criminal attorneys, you realize that they say... ...that between So to 95 percent of winning a case is selecting a jury. This is a scene that I think talks about the inside of lawyering... ...and the reality of how you win. You win by psyching-out everyone that's gonna be on that jury. Those are the people that are gonna make the decision of whether you win or lose. This is where Kevin Lomax shines. He has an intuitive spirit. At the end of the scene, you realize he's got something else. He's got a sixth sense. Now, it's important, when we see this courtroom, to understand... ...that I wanted authenticity in this film. You're in New York. You have some of the best looking courtrooms in, I think, the United States. At the beginning, Warner Bros. wanted me to go to Canada and shoot in Toronto... ...which is an entirely different judicial system and the courtrooms... ...don't look the same at all. I fought to shoot this film in New York... ...not only for the fantastic exteriors, but also for these interiors. This is a film about big-time lawyering, and you want to feel, when you see the sets... ...and these aren't sets, they're locations. You want to feel that this guy is in the big time. He's gone from Gainesville, Florida to the top of the food chain. We shot in probably seven or eight of the best courtrooms... ...you could find anywhere in the world. Look at these paintings up on the wall here in New York. You feel that this is the justice system. Now Kevin is exhilarated. He comes out of his first day... ...in the New York courtroom and he knows he's done well. He didn't know how he would measure up, and how he measures up is... ...he's smarter than they are. I mean, he has to feel great. He's walking down the street. He's saying I'm a guy from the hicks, and someone's watching him. This is the introduction of John Milton, who's played by Al Pacino. It was important to me to establish a very nice introduction to him. One thing that Al did, and you'll start to see into this... ...he chews on licorice all the way through this film. You don't explain it. You know he's doing something. And instead of just walking away, getting in a limousine, he goes downstairs... ...into the subway. Why would he do that? He's well dressed. That's it. But immediately I go into a time lapse sequence... ...and I wanted to see day and night change. I wanted it to also say that this trial's been going on for a long time. When Kevin walks in, Mary Ann says, "You're home early for a change." Time has passed here. You've seen it pass. But more importantly, you see Al Pacino going down into the subway... ...and you see that the next images are not real. There is a certain kind of power that this person... ...we don't even know who he is yet, exudes. I thought that the time lapse would be both unique in terms of time passage... ...and, at the same time, extraordinary in terms of the potential power... ...that this man has. Now you've got Wife and Husband in... Mary Ann's got room service all over the room. Clearly, they've been there for a long time. She's watching TV. She's having a good time. She's been shopping. She's been to a lot of things, but her husband's been gone every day. And now you see the way they play. Kevin looks like he's defeated. It looks like he's lost the case. She feels badly for him. You can really see how she would, you know, how warm and wonderful... ...and sweet she is. But he's kidding her. You can really see the slyness, I think, in Keanu Reeves here. And, at the same time, he killed 'em. He actually chose the jury... ...and won the case, almost an impossible case. It was like a savings-and-loan fraud. This is white-collar crime. The guy sitting there in the trial, with his white hair... ...looks extremely legit. But the fact is that, you know, he's like Charles Keating. You know, he stole not millions, but tens of millions of dollars. And in this instance, the next shot is, they are in John Milton's domain. This is Milton, Chadwick and Waters, and I wanted a location that immediately... ...established the power of this law firm. This is a real building. It's the Continental Plaza in Wall Street, in the financial district, Downtown... ...and you see what New York power is all about. That view is a three-bridge view. You're gonna see all the way up the island of Manhattan. But the important thing here was, this location was used before in other films. I didn't want to use that same look. There's a unique design look here. Bruno Rubeo, who is my production designer and my collaborator... ...on the last three films I've done... ...we spent probably six to eight months before this film began... ...talking about what we wanted from this film and the look. Right now you're looking at Christabella, the first time we see her... ...and if you notice as she walks forward, I slowed down. It goes in real time. There's no cut there. We ramped so she starts in real time... ...she slows down... ...and comes back out in real time. And Kevin Lomax, he doesn't know why he's fascinated by her. We'll find out later. But look at the design in this. It's ultra modern. We used both an Italian architect and a Japanese architect. This is the Italian. He used prefab concrete in the walls. Milton's office. You know, the rest of the building is very impressive... ...but this office is something else again. It's cold, it's austere, and it's incredibly impressive. Look at that fireplace in the background. It's set up off the floor. Bruno had a design in mind. The furniture in this place is... You have a big, massive place. But look at the furniture. That little settee in front of the fire: it's delicate, it's small. This whole room exudes taste and a certain stylistic quotient. John Milton, you know, it's a huge room, devoid of furniture, very minimal... ...this is a man who has real taste and real choices that he's made. At the same time, this whole law firm is very, very modern. For the design quotient of this film, I want you to be able to see this sequence... ...and then later on, when you see where Milton lives, see the dichotomy... ...the difference. This is cutting-edge modern architecture to the nth degree. What Bruno wanted to do, and I wanted to do in this instance... ...is establish Milton's environment. Here it's cold, corporate, but, at the same time, undeniably impressive... ...austere, ultra-designed. Milton is very smooth. You know, Al Pacino always gets this rap: "Oh, gee, he's over the top." He's not. Al Pacino can play everything. And everything he did in this film was calculated. I mean, it was one of the great experiences in my life to work with an actor of... ...his deep, deep ability, his deep, deep talent... ...and his uncompromising attitude towards all his work. At the same time, Keanu, who had this... I'm saying this because here's these... ...two actors meeting for the first time. Keanu, who had done a lot of young-man roles, a lot of teenage slackers... ...in this film is anything but that. Kevin Lomax is precise. He is not a Harvard educated, a Yale educated guy. He came from a small school in Florida, went to a small law school. But all criminal attorneys that are really great usually did that. They come from the street. He's street smart. He thinks on his feet. And he's up against a guy, for the first time, that seems to have a little bit more... ...on the ball than even he does. He's never met anybody before that is his equal. And Milton keeps blowing his mind, like he does right now. You see this office. All of a sudden, he goes and taps on the door... ...opens up, and I wanted this sequence to truly be a moment... ...that would blow everybody's mind, not only Kevin Lomax's. He walks out on a roof terrace and, effectively, I'm using... Again, this is from a Japanese design. Bruno and I saw an architect... ...that had a pond on the roof in Japan, and I said that is a perfect idea... ...for what we want to do here. Here is a man who has such a sense of design and such a sense of grandeur... ...that he has created for himself a balcony, if you will, a terrace, a park on top. But does it have greenery on it? No. It has water. He calls it calming, placid. And at the same time, he's going to take Keanu out there... ...and he's going to talk about his past. He's going to find out a little bit more about him. He asks about his father. Keanu says, "I never had one." He asks about his mother. And in this instance he's, you know, if you look at Al's reactions here... ...this is a long, talky sequence. This is what you do sometimes. By the way, this is real. This is not blue screen. We didn't put the artists in a studio. I fought to get this scene. I fought everyone, including Warner Bros. Nobody wanted me to go up and get this shot. It's on the roof of the Continental Tower. They had re-roofed the place. The building didn't want us up there. I just knew that this sequence was going to define this initial relationship... ...between Kevin Lomax and John Milton. And the two actors are basically 50 stories in the air right now. They're standing on an eight-foot platform. No, it's not right on the edge. It's about eight feet from the edge. But the fact is that they're standing there. We had to get this whole thing in one day, and they have to do... ...a very personal scene while they're perched on the top of this building. You can see Al, at that moment, trying to let us know a little bit how precarious it is. But do you notice any kind of nervousness from Pacino? Not at all. He's easy. And the whole essence here is that Keanu's sitting out there. One, his mind is blown... ...at the beginning, and then somehow he finds himself getting into it. And at the same time, he looks right here and says: "My God, John Milton's standing like a foot from the edge of a 50-story precipice. "What kind of guy is this?" He also wears elevator shoes, which I think is interesting. But the fact is, right here is what the film also is about. It's about pressure. It's about professionalism. And what John Milton has done is taken Keanu Reeves... ...or Kevin Lomax, in this case, up to the precipice. He's showing him: "All this can be yours." And what is it? It's Wall Street. It's the seat of capitalistic power in the world. And he's basically saying, you know, I know you're a hotshot... ...but can you take the pressure? Can you sleep at night? That little speech that Tony Gilroy wrote, I think, fits all professionals in this instance. When you have to deliver on a deadline, you know what he's talking about. Basically, Kevin is there. He's ready. He said, "What about money?" Milton laughs. "Money? That's the easy part." Kevin doesn't have any problem. He can sleep at night. He's a lawyer. He knows how to do it. We cut from that to Carnegie Hill, which is Fifth Avenue in the Nineties in New York. It's probably the most exclusive address in New York. Central Park is on one side. You have these beautiful, beautiful buildings with fantastic apartments inside. And the Heaths. You're meeting Jackie Heath for the first time. I reveal her with that wipe from the elevator, you see her in close-up. Leamon Heath and Jackie Heath, they are absolutely New Yorkers. They've maintained their integrity as black people, but at the same time... ...they are not about to resist the temptations of the city. They want it. They know how to deal with it. They're very sophisticated. Look at the clothes that Jackie's wearing. Leamon makes the money and she knows how to spend it... ...and she doesn't have any qualms about it. This apartment, I wanted to basically establish the sense of awe. You know, John Milton owns this building. He has it for his employees. Although it's usually for partners, and for Kevin Lomax to get an apartment first up... ...shows that he's a little special, and you can feel, right here... ...that they're a little jealous. "Took us six years to get in here." Every New Yorker will understand that when they really want to get into... ...a big building. This is a film about New York. Tony Gilroy, who lives in New York and understands it incredibly well... ...is able to put these nuances in here that are maybe not aimed at everyone. But certainly, you know, you make a film in New York... ...it was important to me that you do something real. Now, you know, Kevin has basically been offered the job. He's got to now sell his wife on it. And this is a big test. If she, you know... He says, "I'll take you home if you want." Of course, if she did, God knows what he'd think. She knows him. She knows what he wants. And at the same time, how could you turn this down? It's very important right now, at this moment... ...to understand that Mary Ann wants this as badly as Kevin does. I mean, who would resist? Come on. They're too big for a small pond. They both want this and, my God, she's looking at this and saying: "Hey, I want to have a family." She says right now, you know, she mentioned kids again. She's mentioned it in the back of the apartment... ...and she mentions it again right now, and she's saying, "I'm in. Let's go for it." And that moment is one of the last moments of true happiness... ...you're going to ever see them have. Now you're at the law firm, and I want to be able to show... ...what big time lawyering is about. These are all partners. It's an international law firm. John Milton has called a meeting. From all over the world, these partners have come. There's Eddie Barzoon, played by Jeffrey Jones, who is Milton's chief lieutenant. He's the managing partner of the firm. There are affiliate offices in major capitals all over the world... ...and you get a sense of what law is all about. It's about copyrights. It's about real estate. It's about EEC and EUC and those kinds of relationships.

11:08 · jump to transcript →

Taylor Hackford

We rehearsed this scene for about a week. It was the one, I must say... ...for Warner Bros., a great thing they did for me. And although we had our differences, I was able to get my vision on the screen. I have no excuses. So, I do thank them. There was a great thing here in that Warner Bros. allowed us... ...to come back from New York. We built this set in Los Angeles. I had a week to prepare the set, to light it and to rehearse with the actors. Al, Keanu and Connie and myself, worked there alone... ...and really kind of built this scene. Tony Gilroy was there also, pardon me. It is not an easy scene to do when you realize it's basically a monologue. How do you keep it moving? How do you keep it visual? And it's basically a confrontation. And again, as I said... ...I want the devil to be confronting us. We all take credit for the things that we do in life that are good. When it's a good decision, "I made that decision. I'll take credit for that." But when they're wrong, we look for people to blame. That's exactly what Keanu is doing here, and Al won't have any of it. Milton is basically saying to him, "Hey. You made every decision yourself. "In fact, I told you not to. I said take care of your wife." I mean, I love the argument. And this is what we were trying to do. I give a lot of credit to my collaborative partner, Tony Gilroy, on this project... ...because this piece was a script that existed with a lot of special effects... ...and not many ideas, and it wasn't worth making. And every Hollywood star turned it down. Al Pacino turned it down five times. What we did with this script, from a page one rewrite... ...is try to give it some ideas, try to make it about free will. Not make it a special effects piece, a ghoul piece, a monster piece... ...but make it about something. Not just about lawyers... ...because lawyers are convenient and they happen to be a major target... ...and I think are the most pragmatic of all professions. However, all professionals find themselves in a position to blame... ...or be able to use their corporate entity, their boss, their organization... ...their professional oath as a screen against having to confront... ...moral realities, personal choices. If you can say "My personal, professional oath," pardon me, not my... "My professional oath says that I'm absolved from responsibility... "...because I have to represent my client to the best of my ability." Or, "My corporation says I need to do this, pollute this lake, and I'm doing it." It absolves you of your personal, moral responsibility. What this whole scene is about is confronting your own hypocrisy... ...and saying your ambition, your own vanity, in a world that's fiber-optically... ...interconnected to satisfy our every eager impulse, "You," meaning, "You humans"... ...as Milton says, "are exactly... "I've succeeded beyond my wildest dreams just by letting you do what you want. "You're so selfish. You're so self-involved." So that's what this scene is about. Kevin realizes that it's true... ...he was responsible for Mary Ann's demise... ...and when he does, he falls apart. Now watch Milton. He starts picking him up. He starts trying to say: "Hey, you know, think of it in a positive way. You have to think of yourself. "She wasn't up to you. Here's a woman who is. She's fantastic. "She happens to be your sister, but so what? She's beautiful. "She's smart. She's intelligent. You know, there's something more for you." And I think at this point, when confronted with the fact that he knows it's the devil... ...and now what Milton is gonna do, is talk about... You know, remember, Keanu is half and half. He's half Judy Ivey. He's half Al Pacino. He's half Alice Lomax. He's half John Milton. He's half God and half the devil, and this is relating to a lot of us. We all have our good side, our bad side. In this particular instance, this next sequence is, I think, really interesting... ...because Al Pacino is basically talking about his father. He's talking about his former boss. He's his own boss now. But if you think of Lucifer, the fallen angel... ...the brightest, the most honored and the most... ...you know, he was God's favorite... ...being thrown out of heaven because of ego, because he didn't want to take orders. That's what Pacino's doing here. Look. He's angry. He's losing control.

2:00:18 · jump to transcript →