Props

John Mackenzie

Varga Street. And it lent itself beautifully to filming because very often, you know, the interiors are too small. You can't get a camera in, never mind a camera crew. It was quite spacious in a way. We did a few bits of little bits of rebuilding, but not much. And a few extra props we put in, but apart from that, it was really easy to use.

41:35 · jump to transcript →

And you came in and you went, Jimmy, bust the beat. Where's the props? They had no props, you remember? And that thing bucked in the middle of it. And when I did it, I got a round of applause from the guys. That was terrific. What Jimmy's talking about is there were no props on the film. There's no reason to have props. There was a reason, Michael. We didn't do it that way because it kind of limited the authenticity.

3:50 · jump to transcript →

All right, props to Sean again. Handcock Memorial Hospital? Well, you know, Handcock. God, I'm just picking up the nuances now. Ray Walston's in this movie a lot. He's so adorable. He's good. Didn't he ride a bike every day?

1:13:28 · jump to transcript →

One little anecdote here is that the cameraman that was up on the platform shooting this, the viewfinder of his camera was broken, the pellicle mirror had shattered, and he couldn't see anything through the camera and he just aimed and shot. He didn't want to slow down the production by telling anyone that he couldn't see anything, and held his breath all the way till dailies, and the shot worked out. Oh, that's right. 'Cause there weren't very many 65-millimeter cameras available, and all this was shot in 65 millimeter. Yeah. When we opened these cameras, they still had the sand of Lawrence of Arabia in them. Well, Flynn's arcade was in Culver City. Yeah, it's across the street from the old MGM lot, which is now the Columbia lot, but now renamed as Sony Pictures. Now, there was actually a loft at the location. But then the re-shoot... The close-ups were the re-shoots on a stage. Yeah. That's the... The actual... The practical location. Space Paranoids. Space Paranoids. I take my son to the arcade in Westwood. We go once in a while. I have to bring my earplugs. But I've never seen an old couple like that in a video game arcade. That's right. We knew that Bally was going to release a video game simultaneous to the release of the picture, and therefore we wanted to have the design of the game in the arcade and the game in the real world that people would actually play be very similar. So, we go to Flynn's, and we see Flynn playing the electronic game and fighting off a Recognizer. That is the console which we created for the film that represented the game that Bally was going to create. Although, obviously, at that time, there was no way that a computer game could have real-time, interactive, full raster graphic imagery. So, it was a prediction of the future of the way games were going to evolve, and that is what we're now seeing in CD-ROM games and the games that are in home computers and arcades today. Jeff did get very good at video games. We had some on the set. Yeah, he was remarkable, and one day you suggested that we videotape him while he was actually doing it. And look at the neon in the back. I'd forgotten about that. OA, right. I don't think any of the actors actually went so far as to get themselves a computer and spend hours backstage... Programming. -... learning how to program and... That didn't happen, but they got as far as games. Battle Tank. We used to play a lot of Battle Tank. Battlezone. Yeah. Battlezone. There you go. Now, as! recall, you... We re-shot this sequence. Yeah, and I don't even remember... The lighting... To match, I think, the lighting of the game arcade. Well, I think, actually... - We changed dialogue. Did we? - Changed dialogue. And here's a little secret. We told the studio that we needed to redo it to match the lighting. Well, see, /... Still using the same excuse. That's right, you're still... You're still well-programmed... - /'// never tell. The lighting didn't match. The casting process was interesting. Originally, I'd pictured Jeff's character being younger and the Tron character being older. We were affected by some things that were definitely outside of our control. Tron predates Splash, and people forget that, really, Disney was having a hell of a time getting popular actors to work for the studio. And it had been a tough time for Disney. And it didn't help that we were saying, "Yeah, we want you to wear these funny costumes." And Jeff was always enthusiastic about being part of the picture. The Tron character... Bruce was... I don't think Bruce was quite as adventuresome at first, although he got into it after a while. I would have liked to have seen Bruce possibly be a little, I think... I had pictured him as sort of a younger Kirk Douglas. I think he would have been better if he had been a little older like he is now. I like the way he looks now. And I think Jeff... I was surprised at how physical Jeff was. I thought that... I pictured Flynn being a little more geekish or a pencil neck, and Jeff is very physically strong. So, in that sense, the two became somewhat similar, although their personalities and what they represent are completely different. One little anecdote is that... I can't point back at the character of Tron and say, "There were all these actors." Or, "It was between this one and that one." But I do remember one surprising actor who really wanted to play this part, and it was Peter O'Toole. - Yes. Oh, he wanted to play the part of Dillinger. No, it was Tron. Tron, that's right. I think we wanted him for Dillinger and he said, "No." And I had this amazing scene with him in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel where... In his hotel room where he said, "I can do this!" And he started leaping from one piece of furniture to the other and screaming that, "I want Tron on my tombstone right next to Lawrence of Arabia!" And who knows, maybe he would have been great, maybe I really missed it right there. All these interiors... Shooting them, these low-light interiors, in 65 millimeter is very difficult, because the depth of field, the focus plane is incredibly short, and it was a real struggle. And some of the close-ups, we actually had to run light stands up the backs of the actors through their jackets as braces, so that they would stay in the exact same spot, so that we could keep their eyes and faces in focus. You know, if your file was in there... - Hey, wait a minute. If we can get in there, I can forge us a Group 6 access. Well, shall we dance? And ENCOM was shot in downtown Los Angeles. I forget the building. Of, the Transam building? Oh, yeah, the Transamerica building. At the top of that was the helicopter pad. This sequence between these two heads of the company really expresses the philosophical problems that the other characters are going through. Again, the office is designed to mirror the other world in terms of its graphic look. Wasn't there something about the cold, corporate look as well, Steven? There's your door. - There's the door. The scene where they sneak into ENCOM and open the door that is 10 feet thick or 12 feet thick, that's a real door, that's not a prop movie door. That's an actual radiation door at Lawrence Livermore. ENCOM isn't the business you started in your garage anymore. In one scene, you see a number of things flip up into four corners. Images. That was a traditional optical that had to be done, and opticals in those days would take two, three, four, five weeks at least, and it was a big task. It was like making its own little movie. You know, you can remove men like Alan and me from the system, but we helped create it, and our spirit remains in every program we designed... That line is one of the key lines in the whole script, about the human element that the programmers put into the system. And it's this discussion between those two characters that really elevates the picture well beyond a video game movie. Now, the reverse was shot, actually, on the Iot, so there's a reverse... Getting into the Disney vaults? Yeah. Lawrence Livermore was quite proud of the fact that although this door weighed tens of tons, or whatever it was, it was so well hinged that you could open it by just pushing it. One person could. In fact, you found... I believe you saw that door as we were taking a tour of the facility and you Said, "This would be a great place for them to sneak in." So, you kind of re-wrote the scene to accommodate that huge door. And the irony is, as he punches the buttons, that the giant door opens, and no strength is exerted, but it's opened automatically. I kind of inherited the job of not only setting up the giant rear projector and the mirror and all that stuff, but I also had the job of putting together what would end up going onto the desk. That's an actual wireframe on there, for the carrier, as you See... Right. - ...in the film. I began searching around for footage to go onto the desk, and it was getting late, and we were about to shoot this thing in a couple of days, and I just ran out of stuff, so I put the flowchart from the film on there, and probably things out of my address book and anything I could... I was down to pulling things out of Life magazine and re-photographing those. I was just running out of stuff to put on the desk. What's interesting about this protagonist, Jeff Bridges' character, is that he's actually, um... He's a creative, technical type, and he's fighting for his creations, he's fighting for his work. I think that's pretty unique. He is somewhat of a paranoid character. But with some reason. With some... Yeah. - Some good reason. Dillinger will never know we've been in here. Good luck, hot shot.

16:15 · jump to transcript →

Tom is good. He's a good guy. Yeah. Abby Wall, video coordinator. Tom Muska, producer and writer of Stand and Deliver. Ramon Menendez will show up here if he hasn't yet. Ramon's mother appeared earlier, actually, making tortillas, even though she doesn't really know how to do it. She's from Cuba. There's Tom Richmond. All the additional camera men on this. Bob Richardson, Tom Richmond, beautiful. Good work, those guys. There's Ramon, future director, writer, was our prop master.

1:30:59 · jump to transcript →

Judd Nelson

I don't even remember thinking that I understood that concept then, when we were making the film. That the simplicity of one room unlocking all of that potential, he really had something in mind here. And you're right, like you said, Jason, before, the school is definitely a character. These are the actual hallways of the school. And it was empty, so it was kind of... - And you get that feeling. They don't shoot that much outside the library, but you get the feeling it's this big, empty building. You really do. These hallways and the ADR with your footsteps and the whole bit. School on Saturday, who's gonna be there? Kids that get in trouble, the teacher unlucky to have the job, and the janitor. And then you set us out on this journey, which also represents risk here, like we're risking together to come back safely. Yeah, for all of you to agree to do it. 'Cause basically, I'm going to get my dope. Right. All these themes. - Look at that locker. It's very funny. The Doors, he's got The Doors going on in there. Yeah, all sorts of shit. Did you get to decorate the locker? I got to remove things that were incredibly bad, that I was like, "I ain't putting that in there." Meaning, for that particular character, I don't think we got... It was a little awkward. Most of the prop guys were like... "It's a little bit soft rock vibe for me, "so let's take Hall & Oates out."

44:07 · jump to transcript →

William Friedkin

And within five minutes, the store manager had the Treasury Department there. And they grabbed these kids, where'd you get this money? I got it from my dad. Where'd he get it? Visit him, boom, up props the name of our property master, Barry Bedig, who was in charge of the counterfeit money. And so for weeks, if not months, the Treasury...

15:11 · jump to transcript →

Oliver Stone

This is what we secure perimeters every night. In Vietnam, dug our holes. It's hard work, get the water out, get the resupplies. Another tough shot. You can see the actors are really struggling against the prop wash. On the feet, they're always getting swollen.

8:35 · jump to transcript →

By the way, what a great prop, Karen, cleaning out his office. It's not fair, Donny. Thank you, Jane. Thanks, sweetie. Good luck. I'm sorry. When we made this picture, there were still a lot of people who thought of these kind of layoffs as an outrage because costs could have been cut and...

1:49:36 · jump to transcript →

Gary Goddard

building the props, building the costumes, while we were shooting these things. This is pretty funny. Gwildor's the first one to discover food. He's got that little grappler hook that he used before, and he smells something. An interesting thing is we had no second unit on this. I had to shoot every frame of the film. I requested a second unit, but Canon was very tight on money.

23:13 · jump to transcript →

John McTiernan

That was one of the back to the drawing board parts. The only image of an alien life form that had captured the imagination or looked halfway plausible, or functional was this stuff that came from H.R. Giger. Illustrations that became Alien. You know, one of those images of the ultimately terrifying other life, only shows up once in a generation or more. You're not just gonna, you know, hire some cartoonist and say, "Come up with a next H.R. Giger." 'Cause H.R. Giger only comes along as I said, once in a generation. And I didn't see how you could do anything associated with it without just being that derivative also-ran. And, frankly, having seen what they did in the sequel, that's exactly what I thought. I thought it was, it was best that they didn't shoot it. Here you see Jesse actually carrying Painless. He had no ammunition at this point, that's why he could carry it. And there's obviously no battery connection and it wasn't operable that way. We shot this in Palenque, where we could get a real snake. The worry was that Painless would buck and get away from him, and spin. Even if you had everybody clear out in front for 50 feet, that the man firing it might not be able to control it. And that he could wind up in the way of all this wading and bits of brass and stuff that was flying out of the front end of it. So the first time, they fired it, they did a Iot of... They anchored it. And yet tried to give him a chance to figure out if he can control it, so it was like bungee cords and things. So that if it started to get out of control, they could yank it in and protect him. But to let him see, you know, what other... You know, what other concussive forces... You know, what happens when the thing starts spinning. We learned that there was enough gyroscopic force in the spinning of the cylinder, that it kept it online. That actually was very difficult to move it around or aim it, and in an odd way, it was very safe. You couldn't have it wind up aiming where you didn't want it, 'cause it wouldn't move. Because of all the gyroscopic force and the spin, but it took us a while of experimenting with it, and I think he first tried it out over, with the second unit. And it was like half a day, you know, we kept hearing reports of, "They're gonna fire Painless, "in 45 minutes. "Well, no..." It's like a count down to the moon launch or something, "They're gonna fire Painless." And I think later that afternoon it fired, and we were about a mile up the valley. I could hear tt. It sounds like, it's the loudest buzz-saw in the world. Some people, I guess, were concerned about how impractical it was, but the notion was that, Painless was... Look, it's a movie prop. You know, we never would've used it, but it's a lot of fun to watch. Here we got Bill Duke to fire Painless. You notice he is not walking while he does this. Now, this particular sequence, I made when I first went to work on this project, I had the feeling that people had a sort of perverse fascination with pictures of guns firing, literally almost a pornographic desire.

44:06 · jump to transcript →

These four rabbits, Carl, the one they're using as props right there, I took a couple of them home and put them in a plastic bag and put them in my icebox. And I just left them there. And then I heard a scream from Pam and she said, what is this? And I said, they're rabbits. And she said, well, what are we supposed to do? I said, I don't know, cook them? You are Mr. Shoop. Kind of become the character after a while. See, that's something I didn't know that you took...

24:33 · jump to transcript →

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.

27:24 · jump to transcript →

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.

1:20:50 · jump to transcript →

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...

1:12:17 · jump to transcript →

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".

51:13 · jump to transcript →

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...

48:02 · 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 →