Production design

Joss Whedon

And I love the two of them. I did at one point realise that I had sort of turned Maria Hill into a girl Friday in this movie, because there were too many heroes for her to do that much. But it makes it all the better, I think, when she shows up in her old gear, firing a gun like she should ought to. This shot was very difficult. Again, one of the last shots we got. Kevin is very leery of shots that feel artificial, and when you are flying with someone and you do a camera move around them, you're in great danger of feeling artificial. And so we worked hard in the colouring and the way New York was and in the textures, to try and mitigate that and keep it real. And then we went right through that glass, which is a beautifully crafted effect. This shot is something slightly similar to what I did in my first film, Serenity, in that every member of the team is in it. Not all of them speak, but they are all visible at some point. And we get, basically, a tour of the place. Obviously, because they come in through the "A," it has only been referred to as the "A-hole shot," but what it is for me is a very important way to explain the space of Avengers Tower to the audience. There is a bit of showing off. There is a bit of, "Look at all our grandeur." But what I'm really doing is explaining exactly where everything is in relation to everything else, because later on we will need to know. Robots are down here, and party's over here, and Pietro is gonna be standing on that glass later. Charlie Wood designed the set, and it's the biggest and one of the most beautiful things I've ever set foot on. It is glorious. Sometimes it's almost overwhelming. And besides wanting to show the scope of it, to play into the epic nature of the thing, it allowed me to come up with gags like Pietro getting... Like Hawkeye shooting out the glass from under him. And it allowed me to create action, and also to just have an enormous amount of fun. Sometimes the least fun. This particular space is so big and that sort of holo area so empty that it was sometimes difficult to shoot in, to figure out what to do with people. But every frame is such candy because the work these guys put into it, building it and dressing it, and the depth in frame that you can get in these instances is never not exciting. I literally finished shooting on this set, and on that day walked into a corner I had never been in downstairs, and was like, "Wait a minute, "there's 100 cool ideas I have for this area."

15:34 · jump to transcript →

Joss Whedon

This is actually in Seoul, Korea. One of the great things about doing this one and shooting from London meant we could go everywhere. Where, in the first one, we had to create places, in this one we could really go to them, and you find architecture like that, which you would not find, even perhaps in your own imagination. So it's very exciting. ...iS the next me. Most of the stuff in these labs was rewritten many times after the fact, and Claudia came in to re-shoot a bunch of it as it sort of got moved around. There was so much exposition that she and James had to give us, yet keep it dynamic, which they did a good job with. That shot of the house and barn is probably my last opportunity to explain that those places dont exist. They were built for the movie, and we shot them for one day. We shot one day outside there, and then they were gone. They built the interior of the house. The barn was an actual barn in England. And the design is not completely dissimilar to the farm that I spent a lot of my childhood on in Upstate New York. And it's a very comforting space. If that were real, I would want to live there. But actually what really exists on that field usually is not a house, but very angry cows. Angry, angry, bitter cows. I don't know what it is. They were just... They weren't pleasant. That I was an Avenger. That I was anything more... This scene, you only get the first two-thirds of the scene in the movie. We cut out the end. People thought it would be, and I agree in part, I do, that it would be better to leave the question of whether they were together without answering It. But if you watch the scene in the DVD extras, you see the whole scene, and you see just more of why I'm in love with these two people. And I'm in love with their love, and I'm in love with their pain. And they were so good on this day. And Mark and Scarlett only ever bring goofy, happy energy to the set. But then you Start the cameras, and they go to a place of pain that is just so human and so excruciating. This scene caused my first-ever completely un-ironic group hug because I was so proud of them and what they did. I insisted we have an extra day of shooting for this scene. We didn't need it. They just came out and nailed it. This moment from her... They sterilise you.

1:04:38 · jump to transcript →

Joss Whedon

But the things about it that I love, I love very much. But I always think, "I could've done better there." He's uploading himself into the body. - Where? And this is Claudia, who is SO impressive, doing the hardest thing in the movie, emotional exposition, where we give her a ton of dialogue to say, then we add to it later, and she's still emotional and cool. No manifest. That could be him. There. It's a truck from the lab. Right above you, Cap. On the loop by the bridge. Coming to Seoul was a real opportunity for us. Not a lot of people had shot there. And we had to sit down with one of their ministers of culture, and explain what it was we were trying to do, and make sure that we were gonna show Seoul in a good light. And, in fact, why we liked the city was because we knew we were gonna have a chase throughout the whole city and... Not the whole city, it's one of the most enormous cities in the world. But through some lovely bits of it. And we wanted a place that was very modern and very exciting, and not gritty in the same sense. We wanted every place to register as itself. Johannesburg, Seoul. And then we wanted to fly under buildings, when clearly he could have flown over them, just because they were there and they were pretty. You know what's in that cradle? I've talked about ILM and the extraordinary work they did, which I can't say enough about. But, as is the case with movies like this, there's hundreds of houses doing various effects and various bits. This whole sequence, the Ultron portion of it, most of the major work in it was done by Dneg. And the houses are really good about helping each other out. Some of these shots were shared by, like, four different houses. Somebody's doing a background, somebody's doing a stunt face replacement, somebody's doing a digital creature. And with the Vision, somebody at one house did body, one did face, one did cape, one did background. It was just... But they're all very cooperative, they're very inventive, and everybody brings that extra quality. A lot of these low-angle shots you see of Cap going over camera, her going through alleys, were shot with a little remote-controlled car, which honestly is my favourite thing. I like the remote-control! car way more than the motorcycle because it's just so cool. This moment here, um, Bryan Andrews, storyboard artist, who has done a lot of great stuff for us, came in after the fact and looked at this. And we had knocked all the cars over. It was Bryan's idea to add Captain America to what we referred to as the "car ballet." And it took something that was pretty, but pointlessly destructive, and turned it into a moment of peril for one of our guys, and made it not just more exciting, but worthy. And that kind of feedback, and having those new eyes iS SO crucial and so exciting, because it just keeps getting better. The thing about a sequence like this is it's always about the connection between the players. The more you can connect them, the more we would add dialogue between them. It wasn't just stunt, stunt, stunt. You felt their humanity. There was an emotional thread going through here for Scarlett when we shot it, that she had been rejected by Banner very brutally. If you see the entire sequence on DVD, it's a rough thing, and it made her have this kind of self-destructive, just brave kind of fatalism. And then some of this stuff was shot after that had been cut, but most of it beforehand, and so you end up with someone who's playing something that is no longer in the film. And it's just a very delicate process to make sure that you don't have some inexplicable emotional malaise from her. But luckily she's the kind of person who hides that sort of stuff, and as a character, she plays on the surface as very in control. And so we were able to cut it together without it seeming strange. But it also means that one of the emotional arcs of this sequence disappeared, and then you end up relying on spectacle, which is the last thing that you want, even though the spectacle is beautifully put together. And you have the kids going from villain to hero, which is a major plot turn. And you have Ultron disappearing with Widow, so you're servicing the story, but emotionally there's not as much going on as there would have been. And that's complicated because once you start a sequence this massive without that particular emotional hook, it's very easy for people to get pummelled. But by bringing the kids in, by cutting it down, and just by the beautiful job Jeff did cutting it, I think it sustains. But I'm always gonna look at what's not. Almost all of that was in Korea, or shot with plates from Korea. This is actually in England, in Longcross, a place we used for a few of the sets and exteriors near Shepperton, where we shot most of it, that they dressed up very specifically and brought the trains. I think we brought them from Korea, the two train cars that we had. Dressed them in. One of the things I love about having all these characters is the way their alliances can shift and change, and Captain America's never expressed anything but sympathy for these guys, even while he was fighting them. So for him to suddenly say one mean thing, and then, boom, they're allies. It's exciting, but it also feels emotionally logical, and then it brings us back to the idea that Tony is the villain. One of the true villainous moments he has is telling Hawkeye, "Why don't you disappear?" and I'm gonna make an evil eyebrow face, because I'm about to do something crazy. And the idea that he's gonna lean into the very thing that is wrong with him is interesting to me, because the idea that the worst thing about us is useful gives this thing texture. Look at the reflection of Jarvis in Bruce's glasses. That's something that... That level of detail is... Because, of course, Jarvis is not there, that was added later. And that level of care and detail is in every frame of this movie. Our VFX head, Chris Townsend, was running 97 different houses. And one of the things I love about Marvel is that good enough is never good enough. And the level of texture and detail and character that they put into VFX doubles, this sort of amorphous character. It's so complicated figuring out, "How do we make him feel like a program that's talking?" Give him personality, but not too much. Make him not cartoony. Make him feel integrated into a universe that is, at its base, very grounded. We're asking that question about every effect, every day. And the stuff they gave me is so human on every level. And ultimately these stories never work. This scene was created in post. There was some amusement at the literal translation of what had been post-viz. On the left the... I don't want to say phallic, uh, implement of... But if you look carefully at it, oh, yeah. And we sort of laughed about it but then I decided I wanted to keep it, since, as he becomes more aggressive, the idea that his iconography becomes more male. When he's just a program, it's very Georgia O'Keeffe in the lab, and then now he's becoming pure aggression. This is also one of my favourite performances from James and ILM. The love and poignancy of his dream deferred, and how insane it makes him. We had another version of the scene that was just too civilised, something I do a lot, where people are just holding a cup of tea instead of ripping their own faces and guts apart. And Scarlett, with no lines, giving me beautiful stuff, and the idea obviously of somebody doing the infamous and, in fact, somewhat clichéd Nietzsche quote, but then putting a genuine spin on it. A very literal one. It was very exciting and fun. And designing his final armour to be different, it was super tough to find something that worked. It covers his face and some of the greatness of his delivery a little bit, and I think we all regretted that a little bit. But it also brings him more towards the Ultron that we know from the comics, and gives us that distance that we need to get into the final act. Shut it down! - Nope, not gonna happen. You don't know what you're doing. And you do? She's not in your head? Once again, internal conflict is the thing that makes these things work. And that's fairly badass of Banner. You don't Know what's in there. - This isn't a game!

1:19:28 · jump to transcript →

and the dynamics of the whole movie. Yeah, the idea that he really can hear anything. He has a good, well-trained ear. And the detail of the cross in the wall, which is an amazing job of Neiman Marshall, the production designer.

24:06 · jump to transcript →

You know what I mean? There's no way to fake that. There's no way to fake that. And me as a director, the last thing I want is to see a lot of that thing be faked too much. And actually, remember that Danny always tells the story that he actually asked you, like, you got to bring it, like, just bring it, like, I'll take it. But then at the end of that day, he was, I remember coming back to me, like, oh, man, he was terrified. But that's a great thing. I think that's something that you really brought to the film and the set that...

30:55 · jump to transcript →

Remember that with the context lenses that you were wearing, how much you could see? You couldn't really see a lot, right? So remember that somebody would bring you to the set and you were really becoming that character in so many levels. It's just the fact that you got to know that house pretty well and you really... I don't remember seeing you bumping against anything during the making of the movie. You could barely see with those. Right, right. I mean, you know, the lenses were extremely helpful because there are...

33:24 · 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 →

You know, and a classic, gorgeous city. You want a classic car. Yes. The green, you know. The green was, you remember Graham, who does our vehicles. He brought a BMW that's slightly older than this one. And it was that color. Oh, it's fantastic. And Peter Wenham, our production designer, he said, but that's, it's retirement green.

1:03:52 · jump to transcript →

The Grand Palais. That was just sitting on the stage. I showed up on the set. I'm like, what the hell are we doing? What are you doing? You guys threw this together in about 20 minutes. Oh, yeah. It was literally 20 minutes. Trust me. It's going to be cool. It's going to be cool. And it is. Oh, it's this whole section. And then to wake up, and it's another rule we've broken in Mission Impossible. We've jumped ahead to another place before we've established it. And you come out of it going, how much of this has been a dream? It was a really impactful cut.

1:16:32 · jump to transcript →

It hasn't any of her former iconography, but it might be her finest screen performance. She was more or less retired from films at this time, her roles in films like Goliath and the Barbarians long behind her, but she was present on the set as the wife of production supervisor Aldo Pomelia, whom she had met on the set of the Steve Reeves film Morgan the Pirate. She told historian Peter J. Hanley that she didn't want to play this part.

8:17 · jump to transcript →

Don't you love how this outlaw, commonly known to lawmen as the Rat, prepares his bath with heavy doses of fragrant bath salts? Tuco will probably leave this room smelling sweet enough to stand under that frilly pink parasol of his. The film's production designer, Carlo Simi, assisted by Carlo Leva, created some wonderfully baroque settings for this film, notably this abandoned, bombed-out hotel, the interior of which was filmed at Elio Studios.

1:46:45 · jump to transcript →

As was not unusual in Italian cinema, the production designer was also responsible for the film's costumes. In both capacities, Simi specialized in westerns, ranging from that early Franco and Ciccio spoof to Minnesota Clay, Django, the big gun-down face-to-face, Sabata, and Kiyoma, not to mention Once Upon a Time in the West. Was this the first sideways gunshot in film history? You tell me.

1:47:12 · jump to transcript →

even though it has the feel of a governmental kind of office, not deluxe in any way, it's a workspace. This was a set along with the set they are probably just about to enter, if my memory serves. Now we're going back to the train, but when they come into the TA Command Center, which again, until I saw that it was filmed at a studio at the end, I kind of thought it was the real thing.

13:22 · jump to transcript →

You know, he did. But generally, no, not with most of his films. He didn't really shoot scope all that much. Yeah, I know Pollock loves scope because he he I remember reading at some point he said, I want to see what's to the left and to the right of the close up. He always wants to get a sense of the set and the people. Again, all of this stuff of Garber in the command center. This is what's happening here.

30:04 · jump to transcript →

They tend to get worn down from repeat wearing. Everything that Garber is wearing, that raincoat that he's got on, does not look new. It does not look like it's fresh from the rack. One of the things that American television used to do, again, in the 70s, is they used to have their characters wear new clothes every week. And then these new clothes look like they were literally just brought to the set for the first time. Mm-hmm.

1:26:42 · jump to transcript →

It's not meant to have a mind. That's what makes it perfect for this place, right? I remember one day Rip came onto the set in a particularly stompy mood. I loved Rip, I must point out. I thought he was a wonderful guy. Really sort of Hemingway or Mailer or something about him. So thoroughly American, East Coast. And he said, he headed in for Nick that day for some reason. He said,

23:32 · jump to transcript →

You're going to treat me like a dog. I'm going to react like a dog. Nick looked at him and said, we won't be shooting Mr. Torn today. Took the camera off and just left him there on the set, fuming. We were all agape every morning, waiting to hear his last night's exploits. Come through barbed wire fences and be found in ditches. I'll tell you what happened last night. Every day and night was a huge adventure for Rip.

23:59 · jump to transcript →

I remember that I came to the set the first time with between three and four hundred books because I didn't have a permanent place because I was on the road such a lot. I used to take my entire, at that time, entire library with me and I remember sitting in a very stone state in the living room in the hotel and Nick and Candy came in to talk with me and I was rushing from one book to another from the complete works of Francis Bacon.

40:25 · jump to transcript →

Roger Moore

Now, this sequence... ...I was called for 8:30 in the morning and this was the back... This was before the Fenice Theater burnt down... ...and this was shooting just across from the back of the theater. In fact, that's the stage door over behind us. And... ...I was ready at 8:30, and came on the set, and we were all standing there... ...feady to go, and there were adjustments being made... ...and, you know, I have a cup of coffee and this went on. And I finally said, "Lewis, why can't we get on with this? You know, we must do this shot." And he said, "Well, it's a little embarrassing." You see, it was the time of the high tide of the equinox... ...and the boat that had all the props on it... ... had been tied up with the tide very high... ...and then when the tide started to drop, one of those numerous poles... ... that are in the water in Venice was underneath the boat. And as the tide went down... ...the pole came up through the bottom of the boat. Then the boat went up again and the water rushed in... ...and the prop boat sank. And on the prop boat, apart from all my wonderful Ferragamo luggage... ... that I was looking forward to stealing... ...Was a prop that was essential in this scene. ...Was a prop that was essential in this scene. And they had to get somebody to dive down and find it. Now, this shot of the Concorde landing... ... has a bit of a story for me. We had been ready to leave Paris to come to Rio... ...to shoot our sequences there. And Lewis Gilbert and Ken Adam and Letitzia... ...and my then wife, Luisa, we were... ...at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, all ready to leave. We got on to the Concorde, and then they said there was a slight problem... ...and we would have to disembark and wait in the lounge. They then said, well, there'd be a little time... ...8O we could go into any one of the five restaurants in the terminal... ...and have lunch. So off we went. We had something. I wasn't feeling that good, and I sort of just picked at something. And then before we finished, I said, "Lewis, I really don't feel good at all. Would you come with me to the pharmacy? I think I'm beginning to have a Renal colic." Meaning that-- Something that had happened to me... ...before with kidney stones. And they're extremely painful when they start on the move. And really pethadin or morphine... ... 1S necessary to stop you falling on the floor... ...with your knees underneath your chin and start screaming. So I went to the pharmacy in the airport, and they said: "No, I'm afraid we can't." And I said... They could tell that I was very ill and in great pain. But they did suggest that there was a doctor in the airport. You know, a surgery. So I went to see him. He took one look at me... ...and pulled a syringe out and started drawing off painkiller. Lewis never liked needles... ...and started shuffling sideways... ...With the "Lewis Gilbert shuffle," I call it. And he said, "Well, I think I'd better tell the others what is going on." And that was the last I saw of Lewis.

54:35 · jump to transcript →

Roger Moore

But lunch went on for a long time. And the brothers have wine... ...from the different areas that they come from. And the first assistant was trying to get me back on the set. I was having a very good time.

1:14:50 · jump to transcript →

Roger Moore

This, again, is the genius of Ken Adam... ...and all the team that worked with him... ...to get all these things that worked in the set... ...working at the same time. All those television screens.

1:25:28 · jump to transcript →

One little thing I noticed... I mean, I didn't catch it when I was directing Jeff with this, is that when he plays Clu, he plays it with this strange computer accent, this mechanical accent. And now, when he's being tortured, he loses that, and I wonder whether he noticed it. We got so caught up in being in the scene that nobody realized that at the time. Clu's torture sequence is a great example of how light is used to create emotion. Lots of different filters were used on him as a part of that torture sequence. There are, basically, ripple glass effects, there's silk screen steel mesh, exposure changes, hand-done animation. When he's energized by the MCP, there are other filters that were used on the camera to give him that multiple-effect look. In this particular case, it was silk screen mesh, steel silk screen mesh that was on the taking camera and was spun around on the lens as a part of that effect. Dillinger's arrival to ENCOM in his personalized chopper was an interesting sequence. I took drawings of the chopper, schematic drawings, and created the design motif that you see on the chopper. And then over a two-day period, I applied these designs to the chopper myself with these varying sized, 3M reflective tapes. So, when we are shooting this sequence, what we are basically doing is flying air-to-air in another chopper parallel to this chopper. And we have a very low-intensity light source right near the lens of the camera, which is shooting across and reflecting directly back at the camera off of this 3M material. And it was a red light source, so it gives you the appearance that the chopper is either backlit or has some kind of neon lighting system on it. Again, there was the attempt to, for the outside, the window, to have the grid type of atmosphere and, kind of, cross-pollinize the electronic world with reality. Oh, I remember this stuff. Nice desktop computer built right into the glass. Touch screen. - Touch screen. I still want this desk. This was done with rear projection under the desk. The whole set had to be built up on the stage so that we could put a giant mirror under the set and project it in the old-fashioned way. There were technicians who were basically controlling light switches to different light boxes underneath this desk to light up different areas. The type itself, when it writes itself on, is actually matted into the scene from a computer graphics created type. And again, the view behind Dillinger is indistinguishable from the electronic world. And whose voice is the MCP? It's David Warner's voice. - Yeah. Yeah. It was just electronicized a little bit. End of line. Someone pointed out that they finally figured out that the reason that Bruce Boxleitner's character was wearing glasses is because he was supposed to be a little bit of a nerd. I think that was the intent. Just the readouts on the computers in the real world had to be pre-programmed ahead of time so that they wouldn't have rolling bars on them when we photographed them. Here you see another attempt to link the electronic world with the real world. The cubicles that the office workers are in are not dissimilar to the cubicles that the game players are in. And the intent was to have them go on forever or almost for infinity. Now, what thematically is happening is that at the time, computer people... Programmers were very concerned that the IBMs were going to take over the world of computers and exclude people. That they were going to be... That the system was going to be tyrannical. And what we're trying to show here is that the... Corporately, they've put a stranglehold on the system, and that the programmers are not being allowed the access that they want. And access for them is vital for their work. This character, Alan/Tron, is still inside the world of ENCOM and is more in balance. He seems... He's one of the people that's going to deal with the system from the inside. He's got a very methodical program in Tron, whereas Flynn is no... He's a renegade now. He just doesn't fit in and he's at war with the Dillinger character. The name Tron is derived from electron. Some programmers think it refers to "trace on, trace off." But that... We learned about that afterwards. There's a program in Japan called TRON, which is an educational school program, which has been running since 1985. And ENCOM was the only name we could find that wasn't already registered as a corporate name. Whereas Alan and Flynn are aligned with their counterpart programs, Dillinger has aligned himself with the tyrannical Master Control Program. So, the MCP is the ultimate controller, the big mainframe, the antithesis of the personal computer. The sequences that take place at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory were interesting in their concept and in production. It was a very complex place to work. It was a very tight area, and we worked on this film with 65-millimeter equipment. And Bruce Logan, the DP, had his hands full. Sixty-five-millimeter film technology is quite cumbersome compared to Panaflexes and Panavision cameras. The size of the camera body itself, the limitations of the lenses, blimping the cameras... They're huge, so to get them in these cramped quarters was difficult. We were the only ones... Only film company ever allowed access to shoot in there. And nobody's been back since. A lot of this was lit, practically, by the fluorescents that are in there. It almost looks like a set. Yeah. We were very lucky that Lawrence Livermore let us use this facility. Because the cost of building a set this elaborate would have been astronomical. The Lawrence Livermore Lab is where they had the largest laser in the world. I don't know if it still does today. And they did a lot of research for NASA. Lawrence Livermore Lab was very cooperative with us, and allowed us to, really, kind of, run free through this particular area of the laboratory, which was their linear accelerator. So, we went into the one particular area, which we found most interesting for the area where Flynn gets de-rezzed, and where you first see the matter transportation effect, where the orange is digitized and deteriorated and then reassembled. In this particular case, we are seeing an orange, which was created by CGI by Triple-l. Animation that was done by the effects animation department, which was headed up by Lee Dyer and the effects animators, John Van Vliet, and John Norton, Barry Cook and Michael Wolf, Chris Casady. The name of that laser, by the way, Is Shiva, the Hindu goddess of creation and destruction. The 16 billion-year life cycle, she's got the drum of creation in one hand and the fire of destruction in the other. ...femain suspended in the laser beam. Then, when the computer plays out the model, the molecules fall back into place and voila! So simple. Why didn't I think of that? - That's right. Use that on Star Trek all the time. It's funny how they just kind of, just blow it off. Another afternoon's work down in the lab. Exactly. - Teletransportation, okay. Just digitized matter, no problem. Tomorrow we'll do watermelons. In a week, a human being. No, that comes sooner than that. A-ha! Oh, you're giving it away now.

7:08 · jump to transcript →

We just passed a Cray computer, that large, refrigerator-like computer. That was, at the time, the most powerful computer in the world. This Is... - Was this set at Triple-/? Where is this? No, this was picked up at... Wasn't this picked up at Lawrence Livermore? Yes, I think this is right, this is Lawrence Livermore. And again this is another kind of discovery. As we were getting the tour, you said, "Well, we could use this for their transition." This is a Set. So, af this point we've got two hackers, one, in essence, illegal, and the other one legal, both trying to correct the system, get on the network, what we now call the Internet. Bruce Logan, the cinematographer on the film, and Peter Anderson, the cinematographer on the second unit, did a miraculous job of lighting up the set with a lot of light, but taking all the light off of the desk so that you could see the rear projection come up through it. It's pretty clever.

26:45 · jump to transcript →

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 →

Was this on Hollywood Boulevard? Yeah, it was down east of Hollywood Boulevard. And then we dressed the set, I remember, too. A good pop. That's what she's about to get. Nicely put.

12:29 · jump to transcript →

She's totally unaware. A lot of the shots I notice are almost metaphorical in a way. Yes, they are. The way you've placed these actors in this frame. It's very good dialogue. Forgive me, Lord. I speak not in vain, but this little bitch provokes me so. Oh, Jesus. At least I can stay in character. That's all on the set, isn't it? Yeah. Tell me, what did you...

32:54 · jump to transcript →

Ken was very conscious of the color coordination of her apartment. We had to change the set a couple times because he didn't feel the color coordination really reflected the psychology of that character. He was very specific. Well, in most of his films, he's very conscious of the texture and the color schemes and how they reflect the people in the scenes.

1:14:00 · jump to transcript →

And that's finished, and it dries, and then, you know, in a sheet of bills. And then you do the other side, the so-called gray side and the so-called green side. And a lot of bills that we made, we only needed one side for. Somebody on the set had taken some of this money, it was lying all over the floor on the set, one side or even two sides, and took it home.

14:11 · jump to transcript →

Every day on the set, he was always ready, always there with good, fresh ideas. He called himself the Funky Man. And I introduced my young son to Steve as the Funky Man. And my son, who was at the time about six years old, he only knew Steve as the Funky Man. Whenever he'd see him, he'd say, hi, Funky Man, how are you? And Steve had a great, great sense of humor and

51:55 · jump to transcript →

write down some notes for myself so I don't forget the coverage the next day after I've worked it out the night before or even weeks before. And then I'll come to the set and tell the whole crew what I want to shoot. I'll say we're going to cover the scene this way, this is what's going to happen. I'd like to pick up the following setups and I will encourage the crew and the cast to make suggestions and I'll very often alter my plan

1:28:35 · jump to transcript →

Richard Donner

Look at these sets, folks. Look at these sets. First of all, starting with Santa's workshop and... The office is okay, that's common. But this had great, great, great production designer. I forget his name. No, Michael Riva. This is all a great cast. So, Michael Riva... he was the first son of Bill Riva. Who was married to Maria Riva. Who is the daughter of Marlene Dietrich. And... I don't Know why I'm telling you about this. Except I knew Michael since he was an infant, having worked with his father, Bill. What a great actress too. And then, I was fortunate enough to find out Bill was back designing. He was in designing and... I mean, Mike was. And I grabbed him for this, and we've got a good relationship ever since. He turns me down on everything. But he did a great job on this one.

26:08 · jump to transcript →

Richard Donner

Oh, my golly, I forgot. That little commercial with... one of the great clowns of all time, with Emmett Kelly in it, was filmed by me. And production design by Bill Riva, Mike's father. As I said earlier, Mike is doing this. That was-- Oh, well...

39:38 · jump to transcript →

Richard Donner

Now, an interesting story... And Mike Riva, my production designer, my little buddy who I knew since he was a little boy.

48:41 · 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 →

as a father figure talking to her about her romance, which 300 years ago, people just don't say that. Yeah, or even two years ago. Yeah, two years ago. This is kind of for the worldwide audience, also to some degree to Chinese audience, the modern audience. In the past, people don't really have conversations like that. Right. This is the big pain shot here, just to show off the set.

7:30 · jump to transcript →

It's this cameraman's nightmare. He's probably the only cameraman who also works as almost like an AD, assistant director. He's the guy who runs the set. He's so bossy, you know, whatever. He's not going to put up with any gut from anybody. Not Peter. Yeah, but usually they're enemies. It's like contractor and house designer and interior designer. They should be enemies. One wants more time, the other wants to make it on time, but he's doing this...

48:16 · jump to transcript →

scary and our camera equipment just arrived 10 o'clock the previous night so camera crew was checking equipment until like like two o'clock in the morning and leave the set at four leaving the hotel and that was our first day shooting i thought i was gonna die how was the rest of five months and you know the rest of five months it was pretty much the same thing it didn't really change that much

1:11:14 · jump to transcript →

Jonathan Lynn

Initially, the idea came to move to Montreal purely financially. But David Snyder, my production designer, had worked in Montreal before. And he said, it's a really beautiful city. Let's make the movie set in Montreal and show Montreal on screen for the first time in a mainstream American movie. I'm really glad we did that. This film has a different, cool look about it. And it's in a city that...

4:32 · jump to transcript →

Jonathan Lynn

Hey, it's been good. I'm glad we got to know each other. This joke was improvised by Matthew and Bruce on the set. Me too. You can go now. Right. I love it. Oz! Yes, dear? Thank God you're home. Thank God I'm home? I had an idea. I figured out a way we can pay off Daddy's debt. Rosanna's Montreal accent is...

14:44 · jump to transcript →

Jonathan Lynn

That joke was contributed on the set by David Willis. We had a fairly kind of easygoing, relaxed, improvisational atmosphere. Anyone who came up with a good idea was welcomed. Oz, how you doing? I don't know what to do. I've done something terrible. Oh, come on. Oz, what could be so terrible? You've got to get out of town. Get out of Canada. Just get the hell out. Bruce liked to be seen with a martini in nearly every shot. Yeah, I heard about that. Which I thought made him chic and elegant.

29:19 · jump to transcript →

And now we're at last going down below into the tomb of the dragon emperor. This is a very large set I had built in Montreal. My wonderful production designer, Nigel Phelps, shining in this set and in all the sets in their scale, their beauty, their period correctness, and the way they gave me a setting to

17:19 · jump to transcript →

I'm proud of this scene, the scale of the set, which you see here. And it's a hope that you all get to Xi'an, or at least look it up, Google it, so you can see how much verisimilitude is actually in the film. Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist, a guy I actually personally knew in college when my girlfriend was going to Sarah Lawrence,

24:25 · jump to transcript →

And again, we're off to Shanghai. Now it's a few months later. It's Chinese New Year, which takes place in February usually. It's a two-week celebration. Here's a set we built and refurbished on the Shanghai studio lot. The set, most of it existed before, but we gave it quite the facelift. And here is a set also right there in Shanghai.

26:24 · jump to transcript →

I told him, I want to destroy the images. I don't want to beautify them. I don't want to sentimentalize. I don't want to make them pretty. I want to destroy it. And this is what he came up with. And the third was, find a sound. You know, this should be a sound that, you know, everything is there to, you know, whatever it is, costume, makeup, production design, camera, VFX, music.

13:36 · jump to transcript →

So we try to, as you see here, we try to not show off the production design, the production value. We try to play a lot on this kid's face, his fear. Sometimes we have wide shots like here, but we try to stay on him as here. We're behind him, walking up a hill. Again, all in one shot here. Camera goes around.

15:53 · jump to transcript →

And that breaks the period, that doesn't make it like a period movie with beautiful production design. Something that destroys it. And for me, that music was the perfect fit for that. See on Cut's uniform, these little details, he has a...

1:38:07 · jump to transcript →

Now, Terry, were you present for any of the filming of these? I was pretty much back east, and Dennis was the dialogue coach. You know, he would read lines with actors, and so, you know, I heard... Occasionally, when I came back from the second unit, I hung around the set. What kind of stories would Dennis tell you? Were there any that come to mind?

22:32 · jump to transcript →

Now, unusual for the time, and really for any time, Lawton had his art director, his editor, and his composer on the set with him, working as part of the creative unit all the time. Lawton didn't want Bob Golden to do any editing until all of the film was shot. This is the one scene in the picture that Bob Golden did start editing ahead of time because they wanted to be sure to clear it with the Breen office. It's a dicey, very dramatic scene.

29:22 · jump to transcript →

Stanley Cortez remembered that they had to pack a lot of set onto a very small soundstage, so much so that they didn't even have the legal three or four feet between the edge of the set and the wall that you usually had to have. It was hard to light and shoot, he remembered. I read that Stanley Cortez once referred to light as that incredible thing that can't be described, and he said, of the directors I worked with, only two have understood it, Orson Welles and Charles Lawton.

1:10:46 · jump to transcript →

Alan K. Rode

him to shoot the scene with a certain lens and a certain track and Ballard changed it without telling him. When Kubrick called him on it, Ballard downplayed it saying, hey, don't worry about it. No one will know the difference. Now, Stanley Kubrick was not a screamer or temperamental, but he quietly told Ballard that he would either accept his direction or have to leave the set permanently. Ballard acquiesced and as Kubrick became granularly involved in the staging and lighting of every shot in the movie,

8:18 · jump to transcript →

Alan K. Rode

Money to be divided in safety at a later date. After what he had seen and not knowing the cause or the circumstance... Regarding his back injury, Hayden was able to return to the set after a 10-day hiatus that he rested his back for the final scenes that were shot at Burbank Airport. Ten minutes later, he bought the largest suitcase he could find. Hayden buys a suitcase in a pawn shop located at 831 West 3rd Street in downtown L.A.,

1:14:33 · jump to transcript →

Alan K. Rode

Two instances of perfect casting, Robert B. Williams and the hulking Charles Kane as the two plainclothes coppers staking out the airport. Back to Colleen on Ruth Sabatka, said that she would leave and then the set decorator would come and straighten the shade and make it horizontal. Then Sabatka would reappear and make it askew. Colleen laughed. This went on and on. I've seen The Killing many times, but until I watched it for this commentary, I didn't recognize the old woman and the dog as actress Cecil Elliott.

1:18:25 · jump to transcript →

My name is Laurens Straub. I'm sitting here with Werner Herzog, writer, director and producer of the movie "Nosferatu" that you are currently watching. And we now want to talk about that movie. Werner Herzog and I have known each other for about 20 years and have worked together on many different projects. What do we see here? These are actual mummies in the Mexican city of Guanajuato. You have to realize that Guanajuato is located in a gorge. Because of that the cemetery was very narrow and there was no space. So they dug up the bodies every eight years or so, and because of different climatic conditions and the soil, they mummified without human preparation. They leaned them against the walls on both sides in a long underground hall and a hallway. I saw them there many, many years ago in the early 1960s. The story behind this is that I was in the U.S. on a scholarship but I resigned from it a few days in and gave up my legal status in the US because I had to earn some money. Out of desperation I went to Mexico because otherwise they would have returned me to Germany. I went to Central Mexico and Guanajuato and lived there for a while. I did all kinds of crazy things. For example, at rodeos, the so-called charreadas, I rode on wild bulls. Like a complete idiot because I don't even know how to ride a horse, but with the money I could live one week at a time. And there I saw these mummies. Are they similar to the ones at the volcano Vesuvius and formed from lava? No, those are real dried human beings. They barely weigh anything. They were in display cases so we had to take them out and carry them somewhere else. They weigh very little... 10, 12 pounds maybe. Is this something like a culture of death? No, it's completely normal. Isabelle Adjani. She is great at acting scared. That was a real and very large bat we brought in for this. The bat you saw earlier I could not shoot myself. The footage came out of a science documentary because bat's flapping motions are extremely fast, and this was shot with 500 or 800 frames per second. The bats had to be trained with food for that because it took very strong lighting, and normally they would not move under those conditions and not leave their hideout. Here we see Delft. In the Netherlands. That's my city. And I know when Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein teaches students cinematography he first introduces them to Flemish and Dutch painters. Why was Delft chosen as an alternative to Wismar where Murnau shot? Yes, but Wismar was not Murnau's location. I believe that was Lübeck. There is one single shot later in the movie where you see a few buildings that Murnau actually used and that are still standing. I used those as well. We chose Delft because the continuity of the architecture was uninterrupted and we only had to make very few changes in order to shoot there. We took down some antennas and moved a few cars. Other than that it was very easy to shoot there. The concept of "Nosferatu" was definitely to do a variation on Murnau's movie, not a remake in the classical sense. A Biedermeier image like this, for example, is unthinkable in a Murnau film. Moreover, this is in color and the movie's character is completely different. We had to show a very secure bourgeois world. We deliberately planned this, especially the furniture. That was done very thoughtfully by Henning von Gierke who is a painter by trade. With the furniture and the lighting, you can tell that a painter was involved. It reminds me of "Kaspar Hauser" which was done by Henning as well. What era are we in here? That is the Biedermeier era as you can see clearly by the costumes. We researched how to best do the building arrangement and the urban landscapes. Schmidt-Reitwein and I wracked our brains over that. I didn't simply want to recreate paintings. That was never planned. With one exception because we knew we had to work a lot in darkness with nothing but candlelight. Therefore, we studied the painter de La Tour and thought about how to do it if we only had one or a few candles. How do we light that? And Schmidt-Reitwein is exceptionally good at working with light and darkness. This is Roland Topor. - Yes. The famous illustrator, poet, and crazy man. Unfortunately he is already dead, I believe. Yes. - How did you find Roland? I coincidentally saw him in debate on French television. And he laughs in such a mad way. He laughs after every sentence he says. But in such a desperate and strange way that it impressed me deeply. Afterwards I contacted him I told him I was going to shoot a vampire movie and asked if he would play Renfield. Roland Topor immediately agreed. Unfortunately his voice is dubbed in some versions. And it is impossible to fully recreate his laughter. It was his strangest characteristic. What I love about this... I recently saw an exhibition with English surrealistic works from the 19th century. It reminds me of an old office, the cloth, and this blue. It was very carefully lit, and the costumes had to match. Bruno Ganz. And also the faces we chose. Those are not faces that fit into the 20th century. You have to carefully select actors who match. So Bruno Ganz is a great fit for this. The beautiful paper. - Yes. That was so much work, and it was prepared very, very thoughtfully. A beautiful country. Here I see a recurring theme of yours... maps. I already know that from "Aguirre" and other movies. In "Fitzcarraldo" geography is a crucial dramaturgic element. I'm a map fanatic. Oddly, I'm pretty good at determining locations ahead of time, too, because I understand maps. I know which formations you should find in a certain area. I was rarely wrong. It is always about uncharted territory, the Dorado, or doom. Yes, at home I don't have pictures on the wall. A few photographs every now and then, but generally, I can't stand my walls being covered in pictures. If there is anything on my walls of my home it's maps. Oh no. - You will be in danger. This was your first film in English, the first with big stars and a big budget, correct? Well, not really. "Aguirre" is also a big movie with a big star and great effort. But I have to say, we shot "Aguirre" for about 700,000 deutschmark... $360,000. What matters is what you manage to get on screen with the resources you have. To come back to paintings, I like this vase. Yes. Okay. This reminds me of a painting by Seurat. I think the still life-like and emotional atmosphere is phenomenal. But be careful, I always want to show inner landscapes. This was done very quickly, by the way. On that day we happened to have some time and drove to the beach. It was freezing cold, windy. There was foam. We set up the camera in three minutes and sent the two actors, Bruno Ganz and Isabelle Adjani, into the image. We only told them that the music would most likely be slow and solemn. We already had received ideas for the music from Florian Fricke from Popol Vuh. These two, three shots here we did in 15 minutes. We never thought about paintings. It was born out of the situation... - Spontaneously. ...that we found there. Bruno Ganz has tears on his cheek because it was freezing cold. Lotte Eisner came to visit for a few days. We had to wrap her in 20 blankets because it was so cold. I was so proud that she could be there. She was very important for me and maybe for the new German film in general because she bridged the gap to the expressionistic movies back then that she knew very well. She also knew all the representatives of that time. She was friends with Fritz Lang, Murnau, Pabst. She knew them all. For us she was like a bridge to the generation of our grandfathers. We were a generation of orphans who did not have the generation of our fathers. Here I see your wife. Yes, Martje. Martje Herzog on the left. Essentially everyone who was there is in the movie at some point. Later you see the executive producer, the costume designer, the sound technician, and the gaffer. It was also a matter of how quickly can you get something done with very little money. This is the farewell. Bruno Ganz was actually pretty good at riding horses, which was great for me. Now he travels to Transylvania. The choice of the production company... Was this a Century Fox production? No, I produced it myself. Many people believe that 20th Century Fox produced it. But 20th Century Fox only bought an advance guarantee to the U.S. rights for very cheap. They only bought the rights for the U.S. A distribution guarantee. I believe this was... - German Romanticism. Well, you have to be careful. There is a hint of that, but I always try not to be connected with Romanticism because I myself have no real connection with that cultural epoch. Usually I refer to eras before that. The Late Middle Ages speak to me much more. They inspire me. This was shot in Eastern Slovakia. I was not allowed to shoot in Romania where I had scouted locations for months in the Carpathian Mountains. But you also have to see the context. That was when Ceausescu had just been awarded the honorary title of the new Vlad Dracula by the parliament. So he was named the new Count Dracula. That was an honorary title because the historic Count Dracul had been an important figure in the defense against the Turks. This is in the High Tatras, just 1,000 feet to the left was the Polish border. Bohemia? No, Slovakia. - Slovakia? Eastern Slovakia. This is a real group of gypsies that I had brought in from the very East of Slovakia. Among them are a few Czech actors. The gypsies actually speak their own language. Unfortunately I don't remember what it was called. ...my food. I still have to get to Count Dracula's castle today. This is a scene that in a very typical way fulfills all the criteria and conditions of a genre movie. This is one of those traditional scenes. He has to go see Count Dracula, and everyone immediately freezes in fear and the maid drops the dishes. Do you really have to go there? I wanted to integrate certain general rules of the genre into the movie. From there you can go farther and expand. But this right here is a very typical and traditional scene for this genre. The space has this wonderful of depth in the back. And the bed in the background. The set design was by Henning von Gierke who has a spectacular sense for these things. Yes. Spectacular. Parts of this we also built ourselves. The oven and things like that. It was a former hunting lodge of party functionaries. At that point there were only lumberjacks living there. During the day you only found lumberjacks there. ...were already on the other side. Here you have this sense of foreboding and doom. I liked the gypsies so much. They were very good. Watching this reminds me of Degas' "The Execution of Emperor Maximilian" in Mexico. Yes. Careful. Not too many paintings, otherwise... That's just a sign for how interesting and good this is. This is a wonderful face. I also enjoy the way they speak. Yes, definitely. He says you should... They said the dialogue I wanted but in their language, which I believe was not Romani. They translated it themselves and did it very well. You can see this was outdoors and at night which was always a problem for me because I'm not a night person. I had to stay awake until very late, and I've always hated night shoots. I had to force myself to stay up with gallons of coffee. This is also a recurring theme in your films... Native Americans, Mexicans, and Gypsies. Something completely foreign. But also the dignity of these people.

0:04 · jump to transcript →

It is unusual that he has fangs like a viper. You only see that in Murnau's vampire movie, and he developed that. All the others have canine teeth. Here, Bruno Ganz. Isabelle Adjani. The way she does this is also very beautiful. Wonderful. Yes, an exceptional woman. This was a huge animal. It weighed almost four pounds. A really big and unpleasant animal. A so-called megabat because normal bats are much smaller. Feeding it and having it on the set was always a problem. Again, a first rate still life. Henning von Gierke, yes. Some of these foods he even cooked himself. He always liked to cook for the crew. It also represents the wealth. Things like the monkey or the fireplace. Or the chicken. They were done relatively quickly and with very little money.

33:15 · jump to transcript →

Here the ship lands with the dead captain. How was this movie interpreted back then? Or what did the press write? The press reacted well overall. For movies like "Aguirre" and "Kaspar Hauser", they beat me up badly. But those always had elements... Or "Even Dwarfs Started Small". That had to do with the trend at the time. "This is not a movie that postulates world revolution, so he has to be a fascist." That was the perception back then. Meanwhile this has been completely forgotten. The guy on the left who unties him is Uli Bergfelder. He often worked with Henning von Gierke, and he was the set designer in my last movies. Everybody who was part of the crew can be seen in the movie at some point. It was a relatively small crew, too. Don't forget that "Aguirre" was shot with eight people. That was the entire crew. And films like this one we shot with 16 people behind the camera or so. ...rats everywhere, but we have the logbook. Only 16 people? Yes, "Fitzcarraldo" was shot with 16 people. Imagine. Or movies like "Even Dwarfs Started Small" were always less than 10 people. But they require enormous logistics with the costumes and makeup... Right. Which we will see when the rats are in action. We had 11,000 rats from Hungary that had to cross all the borders that still existed in Europe. That was an awful ordeal. This theme I also know quite well from Bruges and Geneva when the scientists there... With the early anatomical studies and the human... I love this. The knowledge about science and Enlightenment in this movie and the perplexity at the phenomenon that is the human being, I do think that is a typical theme for you. Yes, and for vampire movies, too. There is always the dichotomy of Enlightenment and the inexplicable and sinister that resides somewhere within us. The genre has played with that since it first appeared in the literature. Since "Frankenstein." Especially since the English Romanticism, Bram Stoker, Murnau, and whoever else. "...14 knots." "It is getting scarier and scarier on board." "Only the First Maat and I are still alive." "There is something on board." "There are

1:04:09 · jump to transcript →

We had to shoot it during the daytime, but we had to shoot the mall overnight, so we had, like, about ten minutes where the mall was still closed, but the kids were allowed to work. You remember this? I do. And the reason I do is because you said, I want the writer on the set, and he should be able to be on the set as much as he wants, so I took you up on that. I was around all the time. You were. We didn't know that writers could sometimes disappear, but...

3:04 · jump to transcript →

now my parents were dying to come to the set and amy you had invited them and all that which was really cool the one day that they could make it was this day oh we were just in a little piece of wood on the stage and sean was not he was not a fan of having people on the stage that weren't part of our world and i snuck him in

1:15:48 · jump to transcript →

Doug, you're the one being childish. She pulled that off really well. She did. Now, on this day, John Landis came down to the set because the studio was feeling like I had screwed up. And they said, she's supposed to be making a comedy. Find out what's going on. And John came and was watching. And I thought, I met him once and I was a big fan, but I didn't know why he was hanging around. I thought, oh, all right.

1:19:40 · jump to transcript →

Judd Nelson

I have a lot of gray now. Giving me everything inside and out and Love's strange So real in the dark Think of the tender things that we were working on Slow change may pull us apart When the light gets into your heart... Now there's a person... This is a woman I have to tip my hat to, Dede Allen. Incredible. - Before I knew what editing was about, this woman was really an interesting presence. And it was cool, too, how she would come to the set. Remember? She would really work closely with John, which was really cool to see. And also, that's the first time I'd ever been looping where she made me feel that the worst I could do would be the production draft. That it's possible, in looping, to improve a performance. Right. - So, from that moment on, it's like, now I don't get all like, "Why didn't we get that on the set?" And also, at the time, I think the studio, as well as John, I mean, I was too young to appreciate it, but I think everybody was thrilled that this woman who had cut all these classic movies, like Reds and Dog Day Afternoon... - Bonnie and Clyde. Yeah, it was a great choice to arm John with. She was a real ally for him. And also, there were a lot of overlaps which they, as a rule, don't like, which is when one character in the close-up is talking... And then somebody talks over like this. Yeah. - And somebody talks over... Sorry. Sorry. Judd and I both need a shave, and here we are. You wanna explain for the people at home that don't know what looping is? Looping is a slang term for post-sync dubbing, which is when, on a movie set, you've shot something, but a plane went overhead. Then, you have to redo that in the studio, and you have to get the picture synched up with the sound. The technical term is ADR, which stands for "Automated Dialogue Replacement," but in the industry we call it "looping." As Judd was telling that story before, it is a cool thing to learn. It's part of our craft that you can often make a performance better, and you can come back in and add some element or dimension to it, which helps. If you can help. And it's hard to take stuff that's off camera that overlaps on camera and keep it in the movie. If you're not on camera, and you talk over the guy on camera, they can't use either piece. She was able to save a lot of it, and that was very important to a lot of those high-octane scenes. Definitely.

1:11 · 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

Hughes was so ahead of the curve on music. Yeah. He would work with it, he would bring in tapes, he would be doing compilation CDs and tapes on the weekend. Yeah, and he would bring them to us on the set. When there were tapes. Those of you younger... Cassette tapes, yeah. - Don't remember tapes. He had cool-looking ones, even, those metal-looking ones and clear. Very cool. - We're old now. We're past CDs, it's MP3s and stuff now, right? Remember when they invented the wheel? That was incredible. People banged rocks together, and we sang. We made this sometime after World War II, I think. The Great War. - Yeah. But he used to take you guys to concerts and stuff, right, Mike? Yeah, he was cool. Like Judd said, he was really ahead of the curve on music. He was into it. He was aware of Art of Noise, which was this Trevor Horn project. People know their stuff now. So, even with that piece of music, I'm sure he was probably trying to go for that kind of thing. How about the fact that in Sixteen Candles, Molly's got a notebook that says "Psychedelic Furs" on it, and I don't think they had an album out yet. Hughes knew. Well, and Pretty in Pink comes out however long after that. But, yeah. And he wrote to music a lot, too, so a lot of times these sequences, I'm sure he knew that there would be a certain piece of music playing through it. Nowadays, it's funny, you watch shows that are network shows, like Grey's Anatomy, it's so much a part of the formula, where they have these musical interludes that tie things up or bring the audience into the third act. It's interesting, there's a psychology to that, just like editing. It's interesting to see it work. It was cool. I like that. I like that the music stops right on that, too. And now we're done. Here's the bit where you're nice to Carl. Group therapy is done. Right, there's that moment, yeah. Tie it all up. It's great. And that pose right there is now a classic janitor pose. There's the guy on Scrubs. That's Hughes right there. That's great. - There is Mr. Hitchcock. There he is, baby! "Mr. Hitchcock." Mr. Hughes. I like that Ally shows inhuman strength pulling this off.

1:30:47 · jump to transcript →

come what may, and he was frantically rewriting on the set whilst they were shooting it. And that was for tax reasons as well, that the film had to be shot within a certain window of opportunity, otherwise the money wasn't going to be there. Yeah, and even James Caplan, you know, he didn't have time to develop the screenplay as it should be either. And, you know, it's a very complex storyline, you know. It's film noir. It's investigative, you know, plot.

41:20 · jump to transcript →

but we didn't show Red Dog himself. We just ran out of time. And we were running out of time constantly. So I think we're extraordinarily lucky with the crew that I had to get the set-ups that we managed to get. Yeah, well, the interesting thing about this film, I think, is that it's narratively ambitious, conceptually ambitious, visually ambitious. So, you know, and all on a...

53:19 · jump to transcript →

So we're down here in the sets that were built by Len Huntingford and designed by Len Huntingford. Can you tell me a little about him? Yeah, Len, he was an art director on other movies. I think he did Chariots of Fire, was one of them. This was his first job as a production designer. It's extraordinary what he managed to achieve on the budget we had. I don't...

1:01:11 · jump to transcript →

I love that. It's funny how a line like that captures the whole character. You know, I remember, Carl, that you spent a lot of time rehearsing. You gave us an opportunity to take the set and rehearse. Well, there's no... Funny how that makes sense, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. I think in life. It was really a little bit like doing a play. Yeah, well, you can only get better by trying to discover what's in each scene.

15:07 · jump to transcript →

For people who didn't see the movie, what would you guess is making that guy sleepy? You're going to find out. You know, these kids, they weren't kids when they did the movie. They were all in their mid-20s and stuff, and they all worked so well together. They were there every day, this entire group, every day was on the set. The only one that didn't look like he belonged in high school was the man who went to the toilet.

21:08 · jump to transcript →

Good luck, gang. Ready? Begin. How many shirts did you wear? You know, I don't recall, Carl. I know that at the very last day of production, I was sitting there on the set next to you, and you had the wardrobe mistress roll up all the shirts on a rack, and she was closely followed behind by the UPM who was screaming at her, and...

1:23:17 · jump to transcript →

And that's stuff being shoved up his nose while it's being pulled back. He was such a good sport. We had an air tank in there for him, and he was game for all of it. There were safeties, but it's still a little bit probably like being waterboarded. It's a waterboarding visual effect. But it did elicit the shot that's in the movie, in the trailer, of Shawnee seeing him for the first time and being affected by that, right? And I also kept her off the set until that moment. So that's...

23:24 · jump to transcript →

When I was a kid, I was running coffee for Stunts Unlimited and learned that craft. So, water, late nights. The elements. Yeah. People can get hurt. So, from my point of view, it was Blob and the scale of some of these things. Like, the sets you're looking at now were pretty large-scale sets to light. Yeah. Come on. Let's hurry out of here.

1:10:23 · jump to transcript →

clearly not testing, or when we're on the set and it's just not going to happen, that's when you get to have the fun of some quick inspiration that works out well, too. Was there any gag in particular that just didn't work out? Some of the large-scale blobs I'm still uncomfortable with, when I say they didn't work out, they got the story told. But there's 25% of these big men, they're supposed to be full-scale blob.

1:16:04 · jump to transcript →