Props

Paul M. Sammon

These nuke containers are very funny. Actually, what they really were were 1980s versions of contact lens fluid holders. And they were converted by the prop department and then just filled with little plastic tubes filled with colored water. But they were actually off-the-shelf contact lens holders. That...

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Paul M. Sammon

like a portable stereo, but it converted it into a nine millimeter automatic weapon, and it is a real weapon. That was not a prop. Okay, and now we have the fight, the obligatory fight, which incidentally, again, I find a little bit of fault with. I think the choreography of it is just a bit weak. Normally, you know, fight scenes are fight scenes, but I just, this one is a little...

29:55 · jump to transcript →

Paul M. Sammon

And, of course, all of the machinery we're seeing here is, at that time, state-of-the-art. Now, this is a prop, and it's an interesting one because anyone who has seen aliens will remember the facehuggers that were in the glass containers. I can't help but to think that this was something that was influenced by that. However, this was done by Rob Oteen's crew.

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Oh, he's gonna die. You're gonna get it. I'm gonna suck the water out of you. These were some great props that we had designed and built that came both from Catherine and Simon Murton and Jamie and Teddy's imagination.

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and all of Jamie's design props. That little kangaroo. I'm like, that's a real bear. Ew. And you have to remember that when we made this, it was...

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There's a guy in Pennsylvania who bought all the props that were available. And he has like a museum of... He bought the flyer. He couldn't buy the tank because they stripped the tank down. But he bought the flyer. He bought basically all the props that weren't either stolen or Catherine doesn't have or Ari doesn't have or I don't have because I still have a few things. And he has this massive museum of...

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Props department doing a brilliant job.

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hole. So that's why we keep such good track of that key and the two books and all the other really important props. And then in post-production we realize the audience doesn't really care. Right, exactly. In post-production then we blow huge holes in the movie just to make it faster. So all those things that you think are story holes, those were all taken care of in the script and were all photographed but just unceremoniously ripped out of the picture.

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It was funny, this prop, this big stone prop, it used to be a small stone tablet. We suddenly realized right a couple days before we got to this location, we said, well, if it was a little stone tablet, and you've got a thousand guys pounding on the door trying to get in, wouldn't they just lift it up and run out to their car? And so we quickly made it into a big, huge stone tablet so they couldn't pick it up and run with it. She had to translate it right here and now.

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Alexander Payne

This card was produced by Jeff O'Brien, the prop master, who was also the prop master on Citizen Ruth. Tracy's mom very much has a great sense of humor and one that goes well with these two films, with Citizen Ruth and Election. I want to say, too, that...

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Alexander Payne

I used many, many, many of the same people between Citizen Ruth and Election. The production designer, Jane Stewart, and the DP, Jim Glennon, and the editor, Kevin Tent, and the composer, Rolf Kent, and even the same assistant cameraman, and the same prop master, and a lot of the same grips and electricians, and Omaha crew people, a lot of the same actors. In a way, Citizen Ruth was something of a dry run for Election.

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Alexander Payne

choreography, not a complete circle, but again, trying always to associate Jim with circles and a guy who's going around in circles. Circles on his pajamas too. This is the actual basement of that house where we were shooting and this is all their crap, actually. All we did was remove some of it so we could get a camera and our props in there and our furniture, but their basement really has this wonderful

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Stephen Prince

the youngest of his three sisters. He was very fond of Momoyo and played often with her. His older brother Heigo didn't spend much time with him, so Kurosawa was often with his older sisters, especially Momoyo. He played with her on the day of the doll festival, and the family had an elaborate set of Hina dolls that included the empress and emperor, their attendants and musicians, along with numerous small props such as folding screens, lanterns, braziers, and serving trays.

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Stephen Prince

The dolls and their props were arranged on an altar with a red felt covering, as we see in the movie. Kurosawa sat with Momoyo, whom he called Little Big Sister, as she made offerings to the dolls and shared a little sake with Akira. The tiered display in the movie, attended by the I character and his sister, is a transposition of what Kurosawa remembered from his own youth. He remembered Momoyo as being very fragile and delicate,

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This scene makes me laugh a little bit, because in the pre-production meetings, David Fincher was joking that he didn't want any miscommunications. He said, "This is a team of oxen, not dachshund." He said, "I don't wanna show up on the beaches in Northern England with 12 little dachshund. I want oxen." Of course he tells it better than I do. Again, Sigourney-- You can tell how lean she was in this movie. She had really worked out and I guess she had just a... I don't know if it was a few months, six months maybe, after having her baby. So this was what became of the beloved characters from Aliens. There's Bishop and the rest of them. All of which we labored over. And there's Hicks. Yeah, that's Michael Biehn, that likeness. A broken jaw and a twisted hand. I think Fincher kind of liked... He liked messing with the audience in that way. I think it was his way of putting his stamp on it by eliminating the previous characters except for Ripley. He wanted to create a world that did not make you feel safe. He wanted you to be thrust right back into danger and throw your equilibrium off. Which I think is part of the reason why fans, when this movie came out, fans didn't have a great reaction to it, because they expected something more along the line of Aliens. And as we know now, as we see how Fincher's films have developed, he is a unique filmmaker, a unique director with his own vision. And I think that's part of what he wanted to establish with this movie. And there's the team of dachshund. And that full scale EEV, which was a very cool prop, very nicely detailed.

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It's interesting, there's a couple of movies that were saved because the effects props didn't work very well. And one was Alien. In the movie Alien, if you had the camera on that thing for more than a second it gave itself away. Ridley set it up So you saw it for less than a second. And it actually made the movie more... That first movie really helped establish a technique for this horror-action stuff. And Jaws was a nightmare for Steven. He couldn't get this big rubber shark to work. But the few frames that it did worked really wonderful. Whereas maybe, if it had worked better, he'd have overdone it. Left it on the screen too long, which is always the...

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Tony Scott

and executes Dennis and puts the gun to Dennis's head. Dennis didn't like the idea of anybody putting a gun against his forehead. Obviously, it wasn't loaded and firing it. He just said it just made him, you know, it made him squeamish, didn't like it. And I said, come on, you wimp, I'll show you. Look, so I said to the prop man, you're in front of Dennis, and Chris said, rehearse on me, show me. You know, Dennis, the chamber's empty. It's not going to, what's it going to do to you? You know, I need that gun right up against your forehead, though, you know?

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Tony Scott

So the prop man put the gun against my forehead, pulled the trigger, but we didn't realize the barrel came out of the gun about almost a third of an inch here and put a perfect hole in my forehead. So I rolled back. I didn't roll back. I was punched back on the floor, laying on the floor with a dream of blood coming from my forehead down into my eyes. And Dennis Hopper said, I fucking told you. So there's no way I'm fucking doing that scene.

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The hold the door, that was... That's hilarious, I love that. The bloody hand is great too. I seem very angry at all those people. They're not doing anything. This was nice. Oh, and this was a lot of production. A lot of production there. Yeah, props department. But then we have this amazing shot.

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This was Jay and I making sure you didn't get delayed. We said, let's really make Dave wear no shirt. Damn! And a banner graphic. One of the greatest newspapers ever. If only the props department had put... I think it's because we changed the city on them. It's another strange coincidence. Yeah.

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There's a tremendous amount of improvisation because he knows the parameters of what he wants to say and do. So that allows him to change things as people come up with ideas. Whether it's a cameraman or a prop man, a set designer, he'll take all this and very often put it on film and then decide later on what he wants to do. Don't forget, Marty was originally an editor. So that's the process he likes to go through.

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Yes! You're having a great time. - I was. All I can see is you having fun. - "All right, Mac, this is what you do. You're standing at the door. You cheer, go, 'Yes, he just burned his hand. ' And then you run off the screen. And action." It could've been worse. Now, this... Audiences screamed in pain. First they all screamed, and then they released it with laughter. Dan, of course, sells this to a point where you actually feel... . like he's really in total pain. He just gives up on that front door. Yeah. Now, this was a gag... Because we didn't have... We certainly had no access to ILM or any money at this point. This was all done with mirrors. There was a mirror in the camera... ...and it actually made the flame look as if it was, you know, frying Joe. This is Troy, the stuntman. Then, of course, we go back to Joe. I still, you know, have this lovely prop of this fake head. I actually had the hand, the model that they made the M hand on. It's probably somewhere, some box somewhere. The fake head's obscene-looking, so you don't wanna keep it around. Yeah, you don't keep in the living room. - No.

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What was the budget on this movie? $24.5 million. That's not a small amount. That's pretty decent for a film like this. In $91. Yeah, so that would be what? Like $60, $70 now? That sounds right. Yeah. And of course you got the ticking clock. You know what's funny is we didn't build that. That was actually from a prop house. It already existed.

1:34:43 · jump to transcript →

visual palette right because this takes a tremendous amount of commitment and talent on the part of you know the art directors and the props people and you know the costumers you know but the actors here look at what you know is happening between elias and bruce i mean they are not you know they're not even looking at each other they're completely separated but each of them is in this very very particular place and they are very connected to these

53:49 · jump to transcript →

See, you look at a scene like this, and how as an art director are you supposed to comment on putting a bunch of buses around and a giant hippie camp with tons of props in the background as though that has any real meaning? And yet, that's the only thing that makes it different than if you were a tourist in Washington, D.C. today as far as the staging. But that's not something that you're really even going to look at. You absorb it, but...

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I was thrilled when I watched this scene, because Ripley was carrying my gun. I can't tell you what a charge that was. It was great. I was, one night, looking at Sigourney Weaver and she was harnessing this gun, and I thought "I designed this." I was back to being a kid watching the first Alien movie, and thinking about Ripley running down the corridors, dreaming about what that meant. Many years later, here I was in Los Angeles, and Sigourney Weaver was playing Ripley, and she was harnessing my gun. It's hard to explain, but it's such a high. This is like traveling through time and grabbing the kid inside of you and saying: "Here's what you've been missing." "Here's something for you and for years of frustration - wishing to make something out of your life that's very specific, and the obstacles." And suddenly there's this woman - she doesn't know I exist and couldn't care less - but she's got a prop, and it can mean the world to somebody. Nigel Phelps, the production designer, designed chunks of corridors, and this was really the essence of what the set of The Auriga was about. Some chunks of it were actually reusable. The whole idea about this set was that you can make it go on endlessly - there's different layers and levels. One of the original design ideas that Nigel had, which he explored with Darius Khondji, was that as the story progresses and as the characters go through the ship the walls change colors and become more and more ominous. Since Darius uses a very specific lighting and processing technique for his film - by which he extracts the blacks and reprints them later to get that very very crisp, sharp contrast - the idea was that the walls would be painted and the paint change as the film progressed. They actually tested this and Darius shot plates, and we experimented with the exposure, etc. They collaborated closely. Ideas that one had were integrated by the other. Frequently, Darius would come down to the set as it was being built, and Nigel would explain some of his intentions. Darius would make suggestions and they would create opportunities for lighting. It works extremely well, actually. You could walk through that set and it was prelit. You could have taken a home movie and it would look like a million dollars. It was unbelievable. I remember, Sigourney laughed at this time because I misspelled a word. Instead of saying "Easter bunny", I said, for two or three takes, "Eastern bunny".

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Sometimes things happen when you actually put a costume on. Something changes. And I suspect that I began to discover, you know, as you do, when suddenly you have a prop or you have another actor or you have a set where it's no longer a concept. It's now flesh and blood and you've got to deal with the environment. So all kinds of things just occur. And very often my favorite...

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