Props

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

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Never get squared. You always have to work out the budget thing. This way, a lot of conversation about how gory to go with this. I like the idea of the whole design behind this and having it inside the rib cage. You got to just show it to see it. Who made that piece? This? I don't remember. The prop guys were doing the middle piece. Because that looks great.

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this is and this is practical this is practical yeah this is actually with with a stunt player um being suspended by a crane that's actually attached to the back of this of the stake bed of the truck props out to my boy joel wist yeah the man yeah that was i was we we actually we use that rig quite a bit and it makes the sequence it really does joel did a fantastic job with that because the guy could just right right here flying right alongside the truck

32:19 · jump to transcript →

And I'm Ted Tally, the screenwriter of this motion picture. Thanks for watching our DVD. I got a call from my agent who said Stacey Snider wanted to send me a script. Stacey called me directly. Stacey is the chairman of Universal for those of you who don't know. It said Red Dragon, and I said, "Red Dragon. Is this "the prequel to Silence of the Lambs?" I was familiar with the book but hadn't read it. At first, I was very insecure and said, "Am I like the 'Go-to' guy on sequels? "Why is she sending this to me? 'Cause no one can mess this one up?" And then, I saw Ted's name on it and said, "This is the guy who wrote Silence of the Lambs, "but didn't write Hannibal. "So, this must be special. "Why are they sending this to me? I'm not a dark guy. "I don't make dark movies. I do comedy." -/ think they sent it because you're cheap. - Exactly. So I read it, and I was completely blown away. Not to blow any smoke up anybody's butt in my presence, but the truth is the script was amazing. I called up Stacey and I said, "I want to do this." She said, "Now you get to meet Dino De Laurentiis." And I said, "Dino De Laurentiis "of Fellini fame?" - Scary thought! So I went to his house and first thing he says to me is, "Why do they like you? Who are you? "I never heard of you. What is Family Man, Rush Hour? I don't know these movies." I said, "Dino, I'm a talented guy. Trust me." And thank God, Ted had seen Family Man and Rush Hour, and his kids or someone in his family was a fan. Brett might not have been an obvious choice but Brett is an incredibly talented director and clearly ready to try something new that he'd never done before. He is a great fan of Hitchcock and of thrillers, and brings a tremendous energy and confidence to his work. I was such a big fan of Silence of the Lambs. You know what I was excited about? Most people asked, "Weren't you scared "of following in those footsteps?" First of all, I had three brilliant directors Michael Mann, Jonathan Demme, and Ridley Scott, who made three movies in the exact genre, but completely different. I was excited about it because, by watching those films, I knew what not to do or what I didn't want to do. I was able to decide on the type of movie that I wanted to make. And it helped me choose the tone of the movie. I realized I wanted to make a movie more like Silence of the Lambs. More Hitchcock-inspired. A movie that scared you by what you didn't see more than what you did see. I've read that the most important single decision you make in directing a movie is tone. - Absolutely. Because it's the direction of the film. It helps you with every choice that you make as far as the wardrobe, the production design, the music. The tone, to me, is really everything. Dante calls it, "The language of the film." We have to integrate what we're seeing now, Kristi Zea's set design with its dark, rich color in Dante's cinematography. The choice is even of the props. The integration of all of that, the wardrobe. It's sort of overlooked by people and it should be something that doesn't call attention to itself. But when all of those elements are integrated... Look at this moment here. You get a much more powerful movie if nothing sticks out. If everything is consistent in tone. Special Agent Graham. What an unexpected pleasure. I'm sorry to bother you again... If you see on the left-hand side over there, a little detail, I found this book of Sigmund Freud's office in, was it Vienna? That's where I kind of modeled Hannibal's office. I modeled the tchotchkes, the details.

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I went to New York with Dino, and I was very nervous. This was Tony, Anthony Hopkins. The thing I did know and what I was confident about was the type of movie I wanted to make. Like I said, I went in there knowing the tone of the movie, my approach to the movie, how I wanted to not show any of the gore. I didn't want to make a horror film. I wanted to make a film that was psychological, emotional, and smart. That was what was on the page. And the only scene that Tony had a concern with when I sat with him was this scene right here. Tony was concerned that as originally written, his attack on Graham here was too graphic. By the way, it's an interpretation because 10 directors would direct a scene in 10 different ways and show various degrees of violence. It's about showing the details of the guts falling out of his stomach, or the blood, how much blood to show. And I chose to play it mostly on their faces. Once the attack happens... Here's my little homage to Silence. You see the... - I see the bug. You like that. So I chose to play the violence part of this scene on their faces. I love this book. This is an original. My prop guy, Brad, found this original book from France, Larousse... When I read it, I had no idea what the hell it was. It's the bible of cookbooks. - Yes, I learned that quickly. He found this real old French cookbook. There was a lot of dialogue about how do we sell his moment? It's really just a subliminal thing. It wasn't really supposed to be so pointed where it was like, "Oh, sweetbreads." I thought sweetbreads was brains but it's not. It's actually... Thyroid. -... thymus. I learned so much about anatomy on this film. If you work on a Lecter movie, you learn a lot about cooking. I thought Edward was fantastic. There is a tremendous intensity of performances in this movie. And really a dream cast as Brett already said. If you could have anybody in the world for these parts and be lucky enough to get them. It's pretty much what happened to us. Great actors want to play good characters. They want to play great characters and all of these characters, down to Freddy Lounds, and other smaller roles, were just written so well. They were interesting and dynamic. And these actors were interested in playing this. To convince these actors to do a third in the series, all that went out the window when they read the script. Certainly once they started working. There's our cold opening. I'm very proud of this title sequence because it was actually done two days before we had to lock picture. My editor, Mark Helfrich actually was the brainchild behind this because... You re-shot the journal here in a very interesting way. Initially, this was done in a much more straightforward way with the images very flat against the screen. Yes, a lot of times. Mark is kind of... Everybody on my team, from my AD to my production designer, are filmmakers. Mark is a filmmaker in his own right and he just understands the visuals and storytelling. I love how, you know... But this was written. - Yes, it was. But the way that the camera roams over these pages and when we go in very close and it gets grainy, the camera movement left to right, up and down, is all not scripted, of course. This is something I don't really have the patience for. Mark kind of took this book that he was fascinated by. I think he has a copy of it in his closet at home. He just knew every page, every frame and went with Dante and literally just shot. This is a wonderful opportunity. This kind of title sequence is sort of old-fashioned in a way. But it's a wonderful opportunity for a screenwriter to get information in quickly to cover a lot of ground between the arrest of Lecter and where we are when the movie is going to start. Covering a period of several years, you are doing that without any dialogue just by these images. It's a very useful shorthand. Danny did the same thing that Ted did with the script in this sequence that Mark did with the visuals in this sequence. Danny did the same thing with the music. I think the music here is so fantastic. It's very much like a Bernard Hermann score, which I knew was a big inspiration for Danny. Danny is a big fan of Bernard, and this was his chance. He's done darker scores, but they've had a kind of lightness, or comedic darkness to it. Danny did something here that kind of made people's skin crawl in the theater, like, "You're in for it. "If you're gonna sit through this movie, you'll experience some stuff. "Shit's gonna go down."

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So that sequence, those two minutes of the movie, which could have been a very boring, dull sequence. I had a long conversation with Kristi Zea. It was wonderful. She called me up and said, "This book of Dolarhyde's. "What does it look like? What's in it? "How is the handwriting? What kind of photograph?" We had a long conversation which for a screenwriter... You don't often get a call from the production designer to talk about a prop. It was a wonderful opportunity to be part of the design of the movie in that little section. You've got a beautiful setup here, Will. This was actually in the Florida Keys. You know why I'm here? Was it Marathon? Yeah, I can guess. The location is meant to be Marathon, Florida. Dino wanted us to shoot in North Carolina because he had studios there and a house on the beach or Malibu because it's close to his house in Beverly Hills. But the truth is, I wanted to stay true. When I said I chose the tone, I'd really chosen the tone of the book, going back to the book. Everybody here was honoring the book. We really gave a lot of respect to Thomas' book. Tom Harris is a wonderful writer. When you're doing an adaptation like this, it's a great resource to everybody to be able to pick up the book, as you can go into more details than the screenplay. It's a help to both the production design and the actors, who can go back and find out details of motivation. It's helpful to everybody to have that bible to refer to. So when it said Marathon, Florida, I tried to stay true to that and actually go to the location in Marathon, Florida. It just felt like it was the tone and even the location, like Grandma's house in the same description of the rural area where it was, and the type of house it was. It was an old-age home once, which is really back-story, but Kristi incorporated that into the design. I was so happy that she and Ted really stayed true to the tone of the book visually as well when it described the locations. This was so much fun being down here, by the way. It was the end of the shoot, and we were just down there on the beach. This was probably the hardest scene I shot with these two guys. In what way? Because it's exposition? Anything with exposition... -/s tough. It's tough to make it sound like real conversation. But honestly, there's not a line in this movie that I'm not proud of. I mean I can't say there's a line... It was a tight script. We did cut a few lines and a few parts from scenes but Brett and I actually worked quite a bit on the script before the production started, and we had it pretty tight. And the shooting stayed quite faithful to the script. I have to say that every scene was hard for me because I'm used to scenes with not much dialogue. I, unfortunately, am a very talky screenwriter. So it was a clash of cultures. Coming from being a playwright, I guess. There is a lot of dialogue in this movie, I tell you. And it was not a single-spaced script. It's a long script, and I kept saying, "Make them talk faster. "Don't cut the thing, just make them talk faster." Ted's advice to me was, "Brett, when you're happy, "ask the actors for a take where they talk double speed." And I did that. Probably that's all the takes that Mark ended up using in the editor's room. He kept calling me, saying, "This movie will be four hours long "If you do not get them to speak faster." The thing you run into as a screenwriter, even with the best actors, is that you try to pace a scene to fit within an act structure and fit within the entire screenplay. But then actors wanna take very long, dramatic pauses. Actors want to look down and up, across the room, at each other, and finally say the line. - A lot of pausing. And that's what you're up against when trying to time out the length of the scene or act. I wanna say something about these actors. Once I got Edward Norton, I used Edward to get another actor. Once I got Ralph Fiennes, I used him, I got Emily Watson. - You parlayed them into each other. I said, "Philip Seymour Hoffman, I'm getting Mary-Louise Parker." I knew each one, who they were a fan of. I used them against each other to get them in the movie. I literally thought I'd be able to walk onto the set, and it would be the easiest movie I'd ever made because I had these brilliant actors. I could just say, "Action." I read one article or something about this movie that said this was the most distinguished cast that's been assembled in any movie in the last 20 years. But the truth is, it was probably the hardest movie I'd ever made because the smarter the actor, the more experience they have. It's a myth that these great actors don't need direction. They want direction more than any other actor. They want direction, but they have ideas of their own because in the end, it's up to them. They are the ones whose face is filling that whole screen. And they have to absolutely believe what they are doing, or they can't convince an audience of it. What I'm trying to say is, there was a lot of dialogue going on. A lot of intellectual discussions. And each of these actors are not only smart actors, but they're highly intelligent, all smarter than myself and... A lot of them have also directed or even written as well. They all had an opinion. And my job, I felt like it was my job to save the script. This was a script that worked to me. We had a table reading of it. It was fantastic. And Ted was

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Barry Sonnenfeld

Right, then! Smoke 'em if you got 'em. Again, Bo just designed, along with Doug Harlocker, the prop guy... ...and Cheryl, the set dresser, just a wonderful bunch of dumb things. As high-tech as a deneuralyzer was at headquarters... ... that's how low-tech this thing was.

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Barry Sonnenfeld

Notice the little flying-saucer motif stuff? That's Cheryl. That's her ideas. She's brilliant. She puts all the little props and stuff on the set. The tables, the lights. We gotta figure out where it goes. - I know where. No. Not yet. - MiB code 773 clearly says... I

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Barry Sonnenfeld

You'll discover why Jarra has this long coat in about 10 minutes. I'll give you whatever you want. We were running out of money and needed one more alien. On the set, I said to Doug Harlocker, the prop guy: "How hard would it be to make this trash can get pulled invisibly?" Which he did. There's a little wire we had removed... ...but basically, that became Gatbot.

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There was discussion about adding a scene where... ...Kate's in front of a mirror with just a razor blade... -... just shaving her head. - Wow. The hair was becoming a problem. - That'd be cool. I think it'd be good, do the Sigourney Weaver... SO people can say you're ripping off Alien as well Matrix. That'd be great. - Brilliant. Do people say that? - Yeah. Oh, far too many, because it's a black suit. You know, what are we gonna put a vampire in, like, fuchsia? You know what? - Number two.... It'll all be pastels. Look, I warned her. I warned her, but she didn't listen. I should've told you sooner. - Told me what? Her human, Michael... ...he's not a human at all. He's Canadian. - I'm Canadian. What? Canadian? - No, not another Canadian! Jesus! - Get them out of the industry. Stunned. They'll kill you. That was the one I was terrified was gonna be in the preview. Was it ever in the preview? - The, "Who are you people?" Yeah. And it was. We knew it was. There's certain lines, when you're shooting, you know... ... they're gonna be used in the trailer. I Knew that when Kate was saying, "The war between Vampires and Lycans." That's right. And that was. - Yep. This looks complicated. This was a nightmare. - Walking with those things. Walking, there's guys on top that are.... The prop guys are trying to move that thing around on top to mimic him. He was so great. - He was so cool, man. Yeah, he was. - He was such a cool guy. Is. I guess he had the toughest makeup, right? He had six hours every morning. Leave us. But he was great. He was like the visiting rock star. He's so cool, man. We love you, Bill. - Bill, we love you. I wanted him to come to the premiere, but he didn't come. We wanted him to sleep over, and he wasn't interested. I was interested either. Werewolves. There we go, right in the trailer. I'm glad we did those flashes. It's always really difficult to have that scene where it's... "These are aliens," or "These are"-- - It's a tough scene. It's tough for the normal person. So you just kept that bewildered look... ...and I threw in some inserts there and really helped you out. Thanks, man. - You're welcome.

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Oh, and you weren't here for this whole... Were you very glad, because the other babe was there? Yeah. That helped take some of the pressure off... ...but the-- Well, actually, this whole costume, we had a "wardrobe flaw"... Her whole boob escaping. - ...aS Janet Jackson would say. Poor you. Poor baby. - I rushed in as soon as I heard. Yeah, you're really good like that. How have you done that? That's CG, right? That's CG, which I don't think you've even seen yet. We shot that practically, and it just looked horrendous. It looked like three blind mice kind of popping up. And this was all a reshoot that we did. - Oh, really? Yeah, this was all back in L.A. We had a good time. It was just blood and guts. That's me throwing the paint across the window. Oh, is that you? - Yeah. Can you do a bit, like, when my coat flaps around, you're flapping it? That's the prop guy. - Very hands on. Yeah. What were you thinking right here? - "Is it nearly lunchtime? Should I buff my bottom? Am I gonna worry about my camel toe?" Remember how many people were on camel-toe watch because of that suit? No, it became "CT." I would just yell out, "CT," and, "Okay!" There were four people who made it their mission. This is new. This is a new shot here that's just showing Speedman... ...dreaming about the Olsen twins. And so we had some flashes that were supposed to happen right there. This is in the original. Coming up, there's a section where Viktor takes out some of the implants... ...and you see him unhooking himself from that stuff... ... that we had cut out of the original. This isn't it, right? - Yeah, this is. These shots, though.... These, I did all those in post. None of those shots... We didn't take any of the lights down. lt was something we did as an afterthought... ...and just darkened it to make it look like all the lights went down. It actually worked okay. I was worried I wouldn't catch it. I didn't have my glasses on. I couldn't find the takes to put on the outtake reel, but... There weren't that many, because I'd been practising like crazy. Oh, it didn't show. - Oh, really? Look at that. Yeah, look at that. Look at that now. - I was so proud of that. lf someone throws something at me, I tend to duck and wince. The amount of windowpanes we had to replace in the background.

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So this is new as well. And I kind of abandoned this scene... ...early on, and I put it in now just to show that... ... he does unhook himself and gets out... ...and so it kind of makes a bit more sense. But.... He hasn't gone Hollywood. He doesn't have an assistant. That's why it's not in, right? Doesn't have somebody to help him out. I would've actually shot it a bit different. I had different little props at the....

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All right. Yes, I'm very busy and important. How can I help you? Don't laugh. That line was improvised. That's the first time you guys have laughed. -/ didn't write that line. - No, it's not the first time we've laughed. It's Hugh's line. - You're just oversensitive. You used to know that Em was Hugh's sister earlier in the film and you used to know that Alan and Emma were married earlier in the film. This is better though. - Clever, much cleverer. The idea was that you should be thinking about the Heike-Alan story, "A fun story, funny, let's see what happens." And then you suddenly realize the flip side of it's not so good. I've always wanted a shot like that where one side of your face is dark and the other side is moody. I can't begin to tell you how critical Emma was of these two dolls. And she said, "I can't lift these up "because they're clearly just Ken dressed up." And I'd told the prop department, "Just dress up Ken." And it's a brilliant idea.

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In your head as the writer, who do you think she really prefers? Her husband or this bloke, now? No, she's got no time at all. I mean, she likes this guy as a friend. But when she runs out later and kisses him. - That's just being nice. That's my favorite bit of acting. - Well, that's interesting. That wasn't my reading. I thought, "Dirty bitch, she wants them both." Keira looks like to me like a girl who's done that, who's just found a way of being kind to men like Bill who, you know, want more to do with her than that. - But she kisses him on the lips. I never kiss anyone anywhere else except the lips. God. I think Andrew cannot believe this was the take we used. This was like a joke take. I couldn't believe he was gonna go for it the third time. No! Yep, he's done it. Good heavens. - More times than... He Zips... This is the fantastic Dido. She sent us her new aloum and there was one so beautiful, sort of hidden track on it that we wanted to put in the movie. But it's weird how a movie will demand its own songs and you cant just put stuff you adore on it. There was a song by Ron Sexsmith, Gold in Them Hills, I just spent days trying to fit into the film. Just couldn't. Wow. - That's great. He's doing a very good job of walking. Bill, do you find walking very difficult on camera? -/ do. Yeah. - Particularly if you haven't got a prop? Something to do with your hands? - Yeah. Well, that's why he did that thing of scraping along the wall. Yeah, I could see all the tricks. Hands in pockets. She had a little problem there, walking across the room. Colin's a very good walker. Yeah. She was so good. She didn't make a single mistake. Sweet girl. - Attractive, too.

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That's a heck of a mustache. Do you know, that's not a prop mustache? That's fantastic. We paid him 100 quid for the night's work. And the mustache 250 quid. I love this. She looks so fantastic in this scene. This is a restaurant in Marseilles. - Poor Colin. Poor Colin, did you say? Acted off the screen? Just sort of outshone. You can see him trying his little heart out here. Come on, Col. He learned Portuguese and everything. It wasn't my idea, this. You've even had to cut away from him to these people. This Romeo and Juliet thing was the luck of the find of the place, that we found a place with two levels. I hadn't written this.

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Coogan handles it again. Yeah, he really does. Man, he was all over him with the prop test and when he's got to get this up. Yeah, he had a lot of stuff. You shouldn't have to be, man. He knows it's all got to time out. Yeah, no, he had to. He was just so spun at that point he couldn't hit his ass with both hands. No, he didn't. You broke him down. You broke that motherfucker down. He's one of the best actors I've ever experienced, worked with. That's seen a lot, Ben. Yeah. That's true. You worked with Robert De Niro. Yeah, Robert De Niro, Robert De Noni.

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You know, he had his monologue, and he just had to do this monologue a lot, and he really brought so much to it. And he's such a good classical actor, too. He's got that, you know, he was really creating a real guy here. And I love that the whole movie's sort of about his character up until this point. He had a lot to deal with. A lot of bags, a lot of props, a lot of maps and things. I just love how cocky he is right now. He's going a little crazy. Look at that. Look at Ben glaring at him.

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Thunder chips. Did Jay Baruchel get a nomination for supporting actor in Million Dollar Baby? I don't believe so. And there you go eating the bat. Why the hell, man? That was a crazy old prop. Now, why do you throw it twice? I like that you throw it twice. Oh, because I wanted it to really go far. And I didn't...

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Ron Howard

Everything about the film had to be sort of run through the Sousa meter, and trees, clouds, clothing, every prop needed to be designed and thought through, and as I said, myself and the rest of the creative team spent a couple years in this Sousian mindset.

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Ron Howard

I think we took this line of dialogue out. He's so desperate. He had lived a line where he said, eat my dust, which is a throwback to one of my old Roger Corman car crash comedies. But I don't think I left it in. Great little prop, that car. We had a blast with it.

57:19 · jump to transcript →

By the way, the car, in order to get rid of the engine noise, we had to pull it up the driveway with a rope. Wow. And the crane crashed into the car and there was all kinds of disasters. So the money, Benicio. The money, Benicio came to me and he said, how much does $15 million weigh? And my immediate response was, who cares? And he said, look, I want to know if I'm going to be carrying this bag. I went to the prop guy, Ian, and I said, all right, figure this out. How much does it weigh in thousands?

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Every time I see you coming around the corner, I see the barrel of your gun or I see your foot, I know you're coming. You've got to just come around the corner. And then as we were choreographing the scene, I looked down and saw the stunt guy's foot. And I just said, shoot him in the foot. And it got us out. It would have taken forever. There were squibs and all this other. It was this long choreographed scene and shooting him in the foot worked so much better. It's funny. Of course, sending a prop guy down to the prop truck to rig an exploding shoe unexpectedly.

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Simon West

smaller than a tennis court and just by careful shooting and using different areas of it and moving the props around for each shot it looks like a much bigger area. As I said this full-size

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Simon West

This is where great prop people come in when you're in the middle of nowhere and you want to build an Inuit village and they have to come up with tents and dead fish and dogs and sledges and things like that. And I had a great prop master with Terry Wells who put all this together and built this, what I thought looked like a very atmospheric Inuit village in the middle of Iceland.

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Help her to come out and do this crazy stuff she's doing. It's really funny, we did all this oversized props. It's always a good time to shoot like that. It's always better than to do blue screen.

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who gives the props to the actor is not the same guy who gives the props to the extra. And the plates were a different color. So I was like, why? How would you believe they are part of the same party? And it's just stupid. It's a detail. But sometimes you get upset with very stupid things.

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We're in the French restaurant. You cannot tell by looking at everybody, but it is over 100 degrees in there. They turned off the air conditioning at this restaurant. No one told them to, but they thought they would help us by turning off the air conditioning. And the kids are just sweating. I mean, you can't even... If a take went wrong, we'd have to stop. You couldn't just keep rolling because they're dripping. And we actually had a guy, this poor English actor that we cast, who was actually really funny, who came in and was so hot and sweating so badly that he just couldn't focus. It's in the deleted scenes. You'll see some very funny scenes with a French waiter and some funny French waiter flashbacks. We just had to cut it, 'cause it wasn't... Featuring Jim Morrison and General Patton. The other thing... It'll come up again later, but them putting the food down leads to the food map joke, which will be coming. I'll tell that story later. It's good to-- We'll earmark it. - A little preview. This is the main Prague train station. And our production... - Again Allan and... Allan and Neno dressed it, so that people actually got off the train, a couple of people, and thought they were in Paris 'cause they saw the signs and they were very weirded out 'cause they had gotten on a train in, like, Hungary somewhere and they thought they were in Paris mistakenly. Michelle being a fantastic sport. The first of many indignities that she was forced to suffer. And Coca-Cola being a great sport. This is what shooting in a train station is about. Another one of these, "We are idiots, we don't know, so we'll set a scene in a train station." If you notice in the background... This is a game Alec likes to play: train, no train. Okay. This is my little game in this scene. Behind him, green train. That train is gone in the next shot. - Okay. No train. But who cares about the train, I mean... Train. - Again, the lesson learned... It's my game, I'll play it. - I know, but look at these backgrounds. No train. - These great, deep backgrounds. We are in a train station in Europe. We are not in Vancouver. No train. Train. - Michelle's scream turn is one that... She's just... - She did it fantastically. Different train. - We caught that attitude a little bit from our own little Seinfeld experience. It's what we like to call a Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Elaine move. The sort of being sweet, screaming and then going back to sweet. And Buffy was a hilarious show. - Can't say enough about Michelle. And I don't know if Michelle always got a chance... You know, she was sort of a supporting character on that show. And on this, she got to really shine with her comedy. Anyway, here's the maps. What I wanted to say is this is a Raiders of the Lost Ark map parody, which is a joke that is about, I don't know, ten years old. It's something we wanted to do a million years ago and again something we saved. There's the Jackie Collins book again. And the headline, "Merde Alors! L'Hooligan! I actually-- I don't know if I even told you guys this, but I was at an Iron Maiden concert about six months ago and I saw a guy wearing that Deep South Monster Truck 1987 shirt. Was that guy you? - Or whatever it is-- Rally '79. No, it wasn't me, but I envied him. Fred Armisen. - As what we... In the script, he's called the Creepy Italian Guy. Not, as some people wrote down in the test screenings, the Train Homo. We actually call him Creepy Italian Guy. And, again, just production-wise, we're shooting on a moving train here, which is yet another of our naive mistakes. - Do not shoot on a moving train. We thought, "Just put them on a train. It'll be easy." Just the most cramped quarters, limited angles. We actually shot this one scene in three different compartments. We had a compartment where we could look one way, a compartment where we could look another way... We pulled out walls so we could shoot different ways. And then we had one compartment where we were shooting in, one that we were shooting out. It was madness. - Plus... Fred, by the way, is just so funny in this. We, last minute... - We also... I'm sorry. I do wanna say that we also then shot it both moving and then did other shots not moving so that we could do the light effects of the tunnel. Which is a poor man's process, because there's no tunnel. This is obviously on a moving train. - 'Cause you can see the window. And then when we do the shots where it goes from light to dark or from dark to light, we pulled the train inside a barn and blacked it all out and then did the lighting effect by hand. So, the Creepy Italian Guy, Fred Armisen from Saturday Night Live... This was another thing where we originally went into this thinking we will find a genuine Italian guy. And, again, we searched the world for a real Italian guy. A lot of Europeans are not funny. They just didn't get the joke. - It's a language problem. They were simply performing the words of the script, but didn't necessarily have any idea what they actually meant. And Fred is someone who's just fantastic on SNL. That little shrug is awesome. So, that shot, for instance, is inside. I think we hired him... - And that's inside. We hired him on a Sunday and he was out there on Tuesday. Yeah. - So, really amazing. And, again, these are all these little touches that he added. I think Travis, who plays Jamie, is fantastic with him. They were a great pair. This was something we never landed on. - I don't think we ever got this right. We had a bunch of different things we shot for this darkness sequence. We had a lot of flashing lights and weird little things of Fred in various stages of undress. - What was going on in the dark. In the end, it was just undercutting... - This end reveal. Which, again... - And, I think, for the unrated version, we put this back. For the theatrical release, we kind of cut right here somewhere. No, exactly. - And then, for this one, we decided to let it roll. - This is something we just enjoyed. It's just that a guy with no pants sees more people and goes in. Actually, that's where we're sitting. That's the compartment where we are sitting with the monitor. To do it all over again, one thing that might've been enjoyable was had we come running out of the compartment. Just, the idea that the man with no pants... This is the very first thing we shot. - First shot ever. It's actually an interesting way to see our cast. The train revealing our cast and us seeing them for the first time. It was a neat experience. - A horrible-looking little train station. The first time we visited it was in winter and just looked awful. And, again, Allan and his guys just came in there... And I think, actually, the manager of the train station asked them to leave everything. Left it all, those flower boxes and the shutters, and just turning it into this beautiful, little French countryside place. That was always a fun shot, where he lays down and jumps back into it. You know, and again, day one, we must've done 30 takes on everything on day one. One of the things about comedy... - We also shot close-ups of everything. Every angle. Everything. - This is more toward the end. This is one of the two days we shot outside of Prague. This is not a great example, because this is more towards the end, but I also think we screwed up here. That's the thing, you look back... - We did it all in one shot. Which I think is the way to do this. We did do it all in one shot, but... One of the things, I think... When I look back at the movie, a lot of our starts of scenes, I find we... Definitely something we were never thinking enough about. So that you're kind of going, "We're going to this beach." And then they're just sort of walking. And maybe had we come off a sign... - That was one of my favorite things. Definitely a fun joke. - Also, it was freezing. You can see Scott... - It's freezing. The gray sky. Wish we'd gone in and maybe colored the sky blue a little more. 'Cause the sun does come out. But just something that maybe... If the camera had moved or something to kind of say "beach," as opposed to that weird stock shot of nothing and then this. And this scene seems to get a lot of people in an uproar. Everyone sort of sees it-- and people... There we are. - Right. This is one of the two days we shot outside of Prague. This is in Rostock, in former East Germany. This was apparently one of Hitler's favorite beach resorts. It's very close to where Wernher von Braun used to develop the V-2 rocket. Wall of cock. - Speaking of V-2 rockets... Everyone seems to laugh at this scene and also go... It is everyone's favorite and least favorite. In all the test screenings we did, it was the most favorite scene and also the least favorite scene. And I think a lot of it had to do with... There were a lot of, like, 18, 19-year-old guys who felt obliged to put it down because they needed to state that they weren't gay. We originally started off shooting it with sort of an idea towards an Austin Powers kind of a thing. You know, you could even see a couple of guys with ridiculously long cameras and stuff trying to cover penises. - Kind of strategically... And once we were there, it just looked dumb and we realized, to some extent... I mean, to us, the only rule is ever: "What's the funniest thing?" And, ultimately, 50 penises was the funniest thing. Everyone goes, "How did you get those guys to take their clothes off?" It's like, "This is Germany. We showed up with a camera. They were already naked." The most surprised people on the set were those 50 naked German guys when they found out they got paid. It was really weird. Like, we'd take a ten-minute break and usually if there's any nudity on an American set, people dive into their robes. These guys were just letting it hang out. If these guys could've taken more clothing off, they would've. We had this amazing German AD that day. Andreas. - Andreas. Who just yelled at them and yelled at their penises. By the way, Michelle, who was very nervous about the bikini scene, couldn't look more beautiful. She was, you know, "The bikini scene, the bikini scene." And it was sort of this big thing in her mind, which... She was nervous about it for no reason 'cause she... But I think also David went out of his way to make her feel comfortable, and also to light her beautifully. Also, again, this was very near the end of the shoot. And I think there was more of a comfort level with the crew, too, and the main camera team. The comfort level was bothered a lot by the fact that Jacob, once he took his pants off for that first naked shot, wouldn't put them back on 'cause he knew it bothered everybody. I think he really enjoyed how nervous he made everyone. And poor Eggby. Poor Eggby had to go up there with the light meter. That guy-- There was a lot of protest, a lot of discussion about the old man yelling, "Chica, chica." Which... For whatever reason, it's one of our favorite things. You get a shot of him. There he is again. "Chica, chica." Which always gets a nice rise out of the crowd. This is the most beautiful shot in the movie. Not shot by us. Shot by... - Gary Wordham. ...Gary Wordham and his unit, his second unit. And it's just absolutely beautiful. And here we are on another train. But, again, we are... Because it's a night shot, we are faking this. It's a poor man's process. Occasional lights moving on the side. Because we could not do a moving train at night. So, we are inside for all of this. SO, this is, like, our fourth version of a train car. And, originally, there was... You'll see in the original script. There was another train in the deleted scene. There was another train scene of them running onto a train. This had happened earlier. It was just too many train scenes and the movie just not moving. That, again, was another one of the lessons we learned. As a writer and then a director, there are lots of things on the page that are really funny, but sometimes, when you're actually then watching the movie, "Why are they still in Paris? Why is it taking so long? Why have they not gotten to the next place?" There were too many train scenes. That one flew out, this one was in. Even if the individual scenes are funny, sometimes the cumulative effect of all these funny things makes it worse. - That's exactly it. This is a joke we created after we had shot what we did. Thanks to our music supervisors extraordinaire, John and Patrick Houlihan, who found this amazing music that was playing under this fantasy. They found this piece of music and said, "What do you think of this?" We thought it was hilarious. We said, "What is it?" And they said, "Well, it's David Hasselhoff." We thought it was so much funnier if you knew that it was David Hasselhoff. So we were like, "Is there a video?" "Yes, there is." And not only is there a video, but this is the video. And it looks something like this. Which is incredible. - That is a real David Hasselhoff video. We're still not sure whether David Hasselhoff knows that his likeness appears in this movie. I think we licensed this... - David Hasselhoff, if you're watching this with Matt Damon, thank you. Thank you both. If the two of you are just hanging out and watching this, you were fantastic. But, yeah, the German company licensed it to us and he may or may not know. And Fred back again. Which makes everybody very happy. When we were cutting the TV spots and stuff, we tried to use this lick. It's one of the things that people felt we couldn't put in television spots. We had a really hard time cutting spots that... Even though it's an R movie, I guess spots for TV need to meet both... They have to be G. - They have to be G. 'Cause trailers need to be G. You can't have anything in the commercial that isn't in the trailer. Plus, you also have to meet network standards. So, we had a really hard time putting things in the commercial. - Showing people what's in the movie. Yeah, telling people this is a good movie. Now we're in Amsterdam. This is interesting... Except we are in Prague. - We're still in Prague. This is... Yeah, it's the Kampa section of Prague. Again, one of these early locations, they found this little canal from the original scouting photos. "My God, we can even do Amsterdam there." This is also-- In Prague, there's a very famous bridge called the Charles Bridge, which is basically right above the kids. There are just hordes and hordes of tourists lined up watching this. Yeah, it was like shooting with bleachers there. This was spring, when it was packed with tourists. And this is an example where on the deleted scenes, originally when they arrive, they go to a youth hostel for a very funny scene that we ended up cutting out because, basically, there was too much Amsterdam. They had an adventure and then they had these separate adventures. It's another one of these tough things, where the scene itself was funny, but its overall effect on the movie was negative. And then actually, oddly, if you go back, originally, Amsterdam was actually very different. Originally, in the script we sold, there was a scene where, instead of going to this sex club... - With Cooper. Instead of going to the sex club with Cooper, there was this whole nother scene. Actually, everything was completely different. The original spec script we sold is on the DVD, so you have to go back and check that out. Definitely worth checking out. - By the way, we should mention her. Lucy Lawless. - Lucy Lawless. Just funny, just hilarious, obviously, and gorgeous. The entire crew was just in love with her. So we shot long on these two days. By the way, when we were shooting on these days, you've never seen more grips and crew members holding lights that used to be held by stands and holding fans that used to be hung. Everyone needed to be in this room at this time for some reason. And she also-- She, being from New Zealand, knew our A camera operator, who we should also mention. - Peter McCaffrey. Peter McCaffrey, who is absolutely fantastic. The whole A camera team, our main guys, were just incredible. Just never a problem, and just really patient and wonderful with us. The brownies. I remember these brownies... Michal, our Czech prop man, would always come in and say, "I've got more brownies for you." He'd show up with these piles of different kinds of brownies from every bakery in Prague. Which, oddly, social decorum dictated that we eat. We didn't want to be rude. So we'd start these meetings looking at all these props with all these brownies and by the end, you had chosen a brownie and also eaten it. You weren't sure which one you actually liked. You were sick to your stomach because of the meeting and how badly it went and also because we'd eaten 50 pounds of Czech brownies. This is the lovely and talented Jana Pallaske who we found in Germany. We did casting in... - London. Here. We started in LA. We did casting in New York. We did casting in Chicago, Vancouver, Atlanta, I believe, Miami, and then we went to London, Munich, Berlin, Prague. We had people in Paris. We had people in Italy. - Rome, Paris. She came out of this, and again, this was another area where things moved around in the script. Originally, this was in London. - In the original script, this was Cooper... This was Cooper in London before they met the hooligans. When Scott and Cooper first got to London, they went to a pub and they met these girls, and this was a Cooper scene. Cooper went out in the alley and was getting blown and got robbed. Which happened to a friend of ours, by the way. And we just decided that there was... - Named Out Cold. There was too much... There was too much stuff going on in London, so we moved it to... You wanted to get to the hooligans. And originally in our script, Jamie was with Scott and Jenny at the brownie bar. While Jacob was at the Anne Frank House. We just decided that they should all split up and have their own stories here. And also, what if Jamie has all their money and all their stuff and he's the one who gets robbed... - It seemed like a good plot point. I mean, it is sort of traditional, but with Jamie playing... I'm sorry, with Travis playing Jamie as sort of the somewhat traditional, you know, stick-in-the-mud, him having a little bit of a sexual escapade as opposed to Cooper, who's more lascivious, it became a funnier scene. It also helped Cooper out because Cooper wants sex and he keeps getting... He gets a version of it in this scene, but not what he wanted. Not quite the version that he wanted. - Not what he was expecting. As opposed to going to London immediately, hooking up with a girl. It oddly felt a little strange that we were going to get him together with Jenny at the end of the movie after he had gotten blown in an alley. Also, he's looking for crazy European sex and he got it right off the boat. That is a crazy outfit. - Yeah, that's the sex superhero. She is the sex superhero. As are these guys. - One of these guys is a Czech policeman. Vilem. Guy on the left. - I can't remember what the other guy does. The other guy is a large Czech clown. They were just sweaty and having a ball. Their names are Hans and Gruber, which is a small inside joke, the name of Alan Rickman's character in Die Hard. Hans Gruber. And this is a very odd scene. Anytime you're not actually seeing our two main actors, a lot of this was done second unit. - Like the shot of his ass, the shot of him with the clamps was second unit. We had a limited amount of time with Lucy. We had two days. - That's second unit, not Jacob's hand. So everything that we had to get done with her and him, we did, and then what was really helpful was we edited it... Not we, our editor edited it. - Roger. Oh, yeah, mention him. The whole editing staff, actually. We had them over in Prague with us for reasons like this. Roger Bondelli and his assistant. Marty Heselov. - Marty Heselov and Davis. Davis Reynolds. And basically, he edited what we shot and it allowed us to go... "We need this, we need that." This is things we're missing which we could instruct the second unit to get, such as guy wheeling in cart, close-up of guy doing the shocking. And it did help having the editor there, which was something originally... The editor was not going to be with us in Prague. Very helpful to have the editor there to be able to look at scenes to know what we wanted to change. That-- We're a little behind. That was Diedrich Bader from The Drew Carey Show, who was hilarious. Really funny in Office Space and in The Drew Carey Show. And flew all the way out to Prague to help us out and did a day of work. He said the last time he was there, he'd actually been here in '89. He'd gotten drunk, climbed up a statue, fallen down and broken his arm, so he was happy to come back. The pot brownie scene-- It's so funny. When you show them in front of an audience, all the sort of younger kids, just the very fact... The mention of Amsterdam got people to go... And then the fact that they're actually doing pot makes them laugh. This, we were writing on the fly. We realized the scene needed something. He needed to say something embarrassing. So he came up with the gay porno stuff. But we tried, like, three or four things. When he was a little kid, he ate dog poo. "They told me it was a candy bar!" - Really high-class stuff. But this guy, who plays the Rasta guy... - Go Go Jean Michel. ...| think we did probably ten takes with him and he got each line right one time and we ended up using it. But he cuts together great. I'm not sure, when we were doing it, I ever actually thought the microphone was picking up a word he said. Yet, oddly, it was there when we got to the edit room. Helder with his walk-off home run right there. "These are not hash branches." Because I think he had been eating hash branches earlier. Yeah, he was not an actor as much as a man who had smoked a lot of pot. And again, ultimately, this was a longer scene. There was more to do about not being able to name the safe word and the monkey was originally brought out and you just start trimming 'cause, again, you're just in Amsterdam too long. We went into this scene... There was another beat where she brought out golf shoes with big spikes and was hitting him in the ass. - We cut that almost immediately. That we cut on the day we never filmed, because we were way over time. And we ended up shooting... - This actually cuts together great. These few moments. It's a huge charge to see this thing. That is a huge charge. - Then to the f#ugelkenhaimler. The flugelkenhaimler. Gotta mention Jeff Jingle real quick. Jeff created that. - Jeff designed and built that and then came over to Prague with it, traveled with it. How he was not arrested and thrown into jail by the customs people, I don't know. - Just did an amazing job on that. There you can see the Charles Bridge. - Yeah, the Charles Bridge is behind him. We lost out. We should be making these Vandersexxx T-shirts. Someone is selling them on eBay, but they're one color. They're wrong. If you're the person who's making them on eBay, just make them the same way. But it's a fun shirt. You can see all the bugs that are flying around there. We did it as a crew shirt, actually. We gave it out to the crew. Well, this is dawn. We shot all night. This is dawn for dawn. No, no. We shot this... This is dusk for dawn? - This is dusk for dawn. This is the first shot. We were shooting nights on the bridge, and that was the first thing we did, because we were shooting that Jamie thing and we ran out of time 'cause It was getting too dark. If you go to your deleted scenes, you will see a scene that sort of happens right about now, which is Jenny... Michelle Trachtenberg-- saying, "Look, boys, I'll take care of it," and she tries to sort of strip to get them to hitchhike on the autobahn, which is impossible. Again, we were out here on this highway way too long. This is the same deserted highway where we shot the bus driving around. Also, it was freezing. - We were here way too long. It was 30 degrees and drizzling. - This was, again, continuing the rule of every time we tried to do a close-up on Michelle, it rained or hailed. She was such a trouper. Cooper's shirt, by the way, says, "I Love Ping-Pong." This phone joke was interesting. We originally had the first one which took place on the bridge in London, and that always got a good laugh. And this one never really gets that good a laugh. But there's a third one later, the comedy rule of threes, that only really works as good as it does because the second one sort of exists. And so we left it in, even though we never loved it. This is Dominic Raacke, who is basically like the Dennis Franz of Germany. He's a big cop show star in Germany. Our casting woman-- What was her name? Risa Kes found him. And actually, there's another... We were talking about the clearance stuff earlier. God, yeah. - We shot about eight takes of this guy and you can see that thing hanging from his rearview mirror. Originally there was a Tweety Bird, a Warner Brothers property, hanging from that thing and we shot about eight takes and we moved on to a different shot and somebody was looking at playback and said, "Is that Tweety?" And we looked at the playback. "We'll never clear that." - And we just decided we'll never clear. So we had to go back and reshoot everything we had done. And the camera guys thought it was so funny that we had screwed up that it became a running joke. They kept the Tweety Bird and they began adding it. Every time we would set up to do a shot, they would roll a little film before we ended up doing the shot and they would put the Tweety Bird in front of the camera, so we have a reel somewhere of that Tweety Bird in every location that we shot. - And it's fantastic. He's wearing a pope hat. He's in the hot tub. We'd love to show it to you, but Tweety doesn't clear, so we can't. So just imagine every shot in the movie with a Tweety in it.

33:13 · jump to transcript →

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

1:29:52 · jump to transcript →

Now, this was Steve Melton's idea, our prop genius, that he would extricate himself from these handcuffs using the pen refill. Benjamin Dunn? It's me, Ethan. What? No. Really? The music here is terrific as well. I need a trace location. The last call made from this phone.

1:42:35 · jump to transcript →

He has, you know, risked his life God knows how many dozens of times. He finally gets to her, he's got a thing in his head that's going to kill her. It is literally so insane and so extreme that even though it's the I love you is a legitimate thing, it's like, it's such a sort of small drop in the bucket compared to the content. But you know it's so important to get that through. We're trying to figure out how does she see him? Oh, yeah. One of our prop guys just came in and put it right there. One of our prop guys said, you know, I just found this, this cart.

1:53:36 · jump to transcript →

And also, it did start to smell a little funky after a while. You can't describe the scent. Bentley and Yolan, who are props people, had to clean up after. I was like, oh, honey, let me just clean this up for you. Just big old buckets full of sloppy mops full of bleach. That's what my bedroom smells like anymore. Mr. Clean comes walking in. Yeah. Oh, God, this moment.

31:45 · jump to transcript →

We were in rehearsal and you had something sort of like that. I walked down, I walked into one of our early rehearsals. I had gone to Girl Props in Soho. I bought a big freaking flower and then it started to become part of our improvisation and we ended up incorporating it within Sophia's ensemble. Kurt and Bart are costume designers who were known for their rock and roll stylist's work and videos from Britney Spears, etc. This was their first film.

55:22 · jump to transcript →

Now, there's a very Underworld prop. Yeah, it shows up all over the place. - You know, this was something that.... There's many things to.... Actually, that I can actually address now. I'm hearing questions that are asked, and I don't really get to answer them. The.... The Sonja back-story... You know, Sonja was always the one that.... Well, Selene reminded Viktor of his daughter... ...and there was a similarity between them. And when we actually shot the death scene of Sonja... ... ln Underworld 1, we actually... People talking about, "Why is she blond?" "And now you've got Rhona Mitra, and she's got dark hair." "And couldn't the filmmakers just go back and watch the first film?" Of course we watched the first film. And it really just came down to a budget in the first one. And, Richard, you'd probably remember... ... that we literally, we had... We were given the okay to actually shoot that. One day. We got one day. - That back-story. One day, and no money, and one actress... ... that even remotely had an interesting look, but had blond hair. And at the time... Then we had, like, a day to find her too. And it bugged me at the time, I'm thinking: But it's supposed to be Sonja who reminded... Viktor. - Viktor. And so she has to have dark hair. And we asked the actress to dye her hair... ...she wanted more money. It was one of those things that you just think... And it just couldn't happen. We literally did not have the money to pay to dye her hair... ...and then have it coloured back again. And we didn't have time to build a wig that looked appropriate in one day. And so there we have it. And Sonja was more of a blond girl. And so that's.... I would actually now love to, in some version... ...take the death scene that we have now... ...and put it in Underworld 7. Funny you should say that. That's what I was doing all day today. - What do you mean? Recutting the genetic memories using footage from 3... For fun? - Yeah. For who? For a future... Exactly, just to have it in the bank. Cool. - Yeah. You know, there's a.... You know, I'd love to see this whole series all put together... ...because I think, unlike a lot of series... ... this actually does tie in fairly well, hopefully, to the other films... ...and actually arrange them in a proper timeline. With this one first. - Yeah, it really does. And therefore, kind of swap out... And also, just money-wise, we didn't have the ability... ...to do the kind of set and setting for her death scene in the original one. We had to revamp the crypt, which I never think really sold... There was an interesting thing when I watched it again... ...While we're doing this one, that there was actually Lycans... ...people standing around the room. Yeah. It was interesting. Actually, when you first talked to me about directing this one... ...I was thinking she was gonna be blond... ...because of that, because you had established that. I was not thinking. When I was starting to think about casting... ... I was like, "Oh, so she's Eastern European blond. That's what she's gonna be." - No, not at all. I was actually.... I was amazed at how many people actually, for a scene... ...that shows up for, you know, maybe 30 seconds... ...1n the original film, how much everybody really remembered... ... that she had, you know, blond hair, and.... I guess of course they're going to. For me, it's just... To do an entire film where the whole basis... ...of Viktor saving Selene is that there was such a parallel... ...to his own daughter that she had to be dark hair.

36:47 · jump to transcript →

Well, one of the things that makes Underworld so unique... ...1S that it's based on original material. There haven't been that many movies in the last few years... ...that have had two sequels to the original product... ... that weren't based on books or adapted material, you know. This isn't The Lord of the Rings. This is something that Len and, you know, Kevin Grevioux... ... sort of created out of their brains. And Len always had this great desire to make three movies... ...and son of a gun, we were able to. I love this wall. Today, I still get people, you know, say, "I don't get it. How did you go from being a prop guy doing, like, set dressing... ...to somebody handing you a comic book to direct? Like giving you the rights to a book, or giving you rights to a comic book." And I think a lot people just assume that it is developed... ...Off of a comic book already and it was already existing material. I think in fact the only reason I was able to direct it... ...1S because I had written it. Otherwise, I would not be here at all. - Yeah. lt would've gone to some other guy. We all had a good feeling about Len Wiseman when we first met him. I don't know what it was. I think it had a lot to do with your personality and your character. Well, being able to draw certainly helps too. You could show people what it is you wanna do. You'll find out soon enough.

40:45 · jump to transcript →

There was a first big gun battle movie for me. So I asked the props guy demonstrate how to use a tool gun for me. And I said, I like to use a tool gun, feel like a machine gun. I like to continue firing and also have some kind of a musical drum beat feeling. And then the guy, they keep demonstrating the tool gun. I feel very interesting.

1:17:22 · jump to transcript →

And he gives it to Rachel, and it worked out. A lot of cobwebs. I like cobwebs. I think they kind of, you know, they're adventure movie stuff, but I don't know. I've never seen a place with that many cobwebs, except in movies. Don't tell anybody, but I may have kept that prop for myself.

13:51 · jump to transcript →

A little peckish. Just when you're waiting for the lunch break to happen and you look around and see if there's any nibbles and the craft services table's a bit far away, but there's always a lambus bread lying there in the prop department. Pete, that's desperate. Yeah, no, that's where it all went when the props people were complaining that somebody was stealing it. It was me. It wasn't Gollum after all. There should be enough. So these are the pick-ups. This stuff here that we're looking at, these close-ups, were done four years after the original shots. The journey home.

8:15 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

One thing that was always appealing to us was the idea of having Bill Murray, who'd never-- I don't know if he'd fired a gun in a movie before. In Ghostbusters it was kind of a gun. And he'd fired some guns in Razor's Edge, he's at war. I know he shoots out some headlights in Razor's Edge. Right. - But here he was for an action hero. The first one time as action hero, but he plays the giant action scene-- I say "giant," but-- For us, giant. The action scene in a striped Speedo, a bathrobe, and flip-flops. Well, we'd also talked about sort of the choice of the music, you know, the-- You know, the-- Like you were saying about the color timing and the, you know, the sort of score you use... here, sort of breaks into sort of the Iggy Pop song, which I think sort of brings us back into the sort of playful Zissou world, you know, that sort of-- - The Iggy Pop. The Iggy Pop does. You'd talked about at one point maybe doing it all silent. At one point, we had a version that didn't have any gunshots or anything like that, and all the sound was gone. It was totally silent, we had some music playing, and the effect was much more grave. When we put this music on-- I liked the other way too, but this seemed maybe to be more right for the way the whole movie needed to work. I don't know if I-- I feel like I could've shot more coverage on this. We were struggling. It's got an energy though. I'm not a professional action-sequence director, but I can do better. I guess Bill Murray also fired a gun at the end of Stripes. I think they go to Argentina to rescue some people. One thing with Bill, put a gun in his hand and he can't wait to empty the magazine. This is interesting. We had to throw this gun into the-- Well, you can't throw a gun into the ocean. So actually, he switches hands with the prop guy who's out below the frame and gives him a rubber gun to throw. But we did, when he knocks that guy out and throws him overboard in the earlier part of that scene, we lost a gun. Bill actually accidentally hit the guy, and the guy went in the water, was knocked out by Bill hitting him, and his gun fell, and Bill's gun fell into-- The gun Bill was grabbing out of his hand fell in the water. And then they said we couldn't shoot anymore, and they called the police, who came out and flew over helicopters while our Marines searched for it. I was like, "Can't we keep shooting while we look?" "No." And we were worried our stunt guy was going to get arrested. But then the Marine guys found it in the bottom of the ocean there, which is only like 20 feet deep or something there. But they found the gun, brought it back up, and we were allowed to continue when the helicopters went away. That's why you went a few days over. Things like that. - Variety of things, yeah. How you holding up there, intern? Doing okay?

1:03:18 · jump to transcript →

Andrew Niccol

New York and now South Africa. All these props and all these guns had to be recreated somehow to match the container we filmed in New York. I'm sorry to demystify the process, but if you're listening to this commentary, that's probably what you want.

1:35:42 · jump to transcript →

Goddamn it! That son of a bitch sat there... ...and spoon-fed me that bullshit, and I ate it up! So, what do we do now, inspector? We do what we should have been doing. We find him. I guess V, for the whole film, has... ...been playing everybody off against each other in his own way. And once we get to the domino sequence... ... it's about V putting all the pieces in place... ...and setting the train in motion. The inexorable, kind of, rush to the end of the film... . IS set in place by the dominoes. With this film and a film like this... ... there's a lot of talk about, you know, what it means... ...and the political content and the ideas that it expresses. Which I really like, but, at the end of the day... . itis a piece of fiction from a comic book. And I don't think that should really be lost, you know? Because I just want to make a piece of entertainment to start off with. And then if you get that stuff on the back side... ... then that's a good outcome. And so, there is a lot of devices like that... ...which is just straight out, movie devices. And the domino piece Is one. You know, it's just like a cool piece of... ... you know, set piece to put in there. That started off, funnily enough the props department had rigged... ...we had made a lot of dominoes... ...to do what we thought, essentially we would do... . like all things. And we set it up... ... where we had built a very flat floor... ...1n a kind of a ring which is about 12-foot in diameter... ...three-point-six meters in diameter... ... which was always in the design of the floor of the shadow gallery. And we'd set this up so that James could come and look at this with Larry and Andy. And so they came along and we had, I think... ...one or two rows of dominoes going through... ...to demonstrate the size and the shape and the look. And it went off and did exactly what it had to do. It went...right around and... ... stopped exactly where it should have. It might have just missed by one. But it was really close. But it was incredibly underwhelming. For want of a better word. Soa gentlemen was contacted from Holland... ...who's an expert in these things. Well, I'm Robin Weijers and also known as Mr. Domino. And that is because, well, I have my own company... ... solely based on the domino effect. And we are especially working with dominoes... ...and to communicate with dominoes all kinds of stories. We had to know exactly what it was about, here in the Shadow Gallery. How to make that shape. The size of the shape. But not only the size, of course. How should the dominoes be toppled? And for that we tested all kinds of different settings. Special small settings to get the V in the middle... ...the circle around it... ...and in the meantime, we wanted to have... ... really amount of dominoes filling out the black. So that made, in total, 22,000 dominoes. ...and all trapped by it.

1:39:13 · jump to transcript →

Certain roles, if you don't find the right people, then we would bring them up. Start flying them up. Yeah, by the way, I grew up in Colorado and was happy to leave because I found it such a boring place to grow up. So the fact that we destroyed this town made me very happy. Now this place, there's some funny stories about this. This house, there's not a single prop in here.

16:16 · jump to transcript →

the floor mop hairdo. And this I know is one of the things that has been suggested as merchandise for this movie, to be able to buy one of these kits. A murder kit. Yeah, Håkan's murder kit. When we were discussing these props, I said that I wanted it to be smelly. So when you see this stuff, you could really feel the smell of it.

7:02 · jump to transcript →