Props

All right, props to Sean again. Handcock Memorial Hospital? Well, you know, Handcock. God, I'm just picking up the nuances now. Ray Wilson'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 →

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."

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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 Bedeck, who was in charge of the counterfeit money. And so for weeks, if not months, the Treasury...

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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.

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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.

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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...

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

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Macaulay Culkin

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

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Fred Dekker

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

1:34:43 · jump to transcript →

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

53:49 · jump to transcript →

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

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

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You're kidding. Well, just don't shoot me. Sometimes things happen when you actually put a costume on. Something changes. And I suspect that I began to discover, you know, as you do, when suddenly you have a prop or you have another actor or you have a set where it's no longer a concept. It's now flesh and blood and you've got to deal with the environment. So all kinds of things just occur. And very often my favorite...

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 →

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 →

This was one of the funniest things I think I've ever shot. Sasha would just constantly improvise stuff with the props and just at the end of singing that section would just go back and re-sing and again because you're live he could just pick up and start and stop.

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