Rehearsal

You choreographed this pavan between Mike and the tall man. How many times did we rehearse that? I don't know. I just remember talking about the sort of Western style of it. I mean, like a Western movie, you know. Like a gunfight. Gunfight kind of thing, right. It had to be very precise.

37:45 · jump to transcript →

word here in the film i never realized it would have so much impact when we were first rehearsing it this thing was an afterthought as i recall and i had got a haircut and no one to this day has ever accused me they don't seem to notice that the tall man for the first time doesn't have his long hair anymore well get on upstairs get your gear that's right i didn't even remember

1:25:18 · jump to transcript →

He would write me these little notes that was like, you know, aim, you know, costumes went very. Wow. And then when we were going to rehearse, and I had never rehearsed before, so I didn't know what you were supposed to do. And I thought, okay, let's just all go to high school and we'll have a pretend class. Oh, wow. I didn't call it rehearsing, I called it pretending.

28:03 · jump to transcript →

How great. And so he said, well, okay, but I don't want to be in the class. I want to like, you know, barge in on it. And he decided him and his friends would like disrupt it and they'd bring Chinese food. And that was the only rehearsal we did. That's right. So his thing was he felt the other characters looked at Spicoli a little bit as a nuisance. Yeah. And so he was a nuisance to them. To them.

28:28 · jump to transcript →

I said, yeah, you know, that's fine, Steve. Let's rehearse it a few more times. And each rehearsal that he did, he'd bring it down more and more and more until we got to this. But you know what? He came in and he said, your secretary gave me the wrong scene to read. And I thought, fuck. You know what? We've only got one day to shoot this. It's winter. It's a dual aspect, Windows.

14:56 · jump to transcript →

I had no rehearsals with anybody. I didn't know what I was going to get until I got there. There was no time for rehearsals. I would have loved to have seen that performance before we were on set shooting it. That was the first time I saw it. It was almost too late to do anything about it at that point. This is what you're going to get, George. This is what you got.

44:31 · jump to transcript →

All the, you know, their vision being completely... Vision and sound. Non-existent. And the screenplay and some of the production value. It really was the blind leading the blind. It really was. But yet, we could not see and we walked forward. Did you have... We could not see. Did you have a lot of rehearsal? Speaking of all these things with all the heads and not being able to see, did you run through a lot or was it kind of just going for it?

19:41 · jump to transcript →

Well, I mean, I believe we rehearsed and shot like pretty much anybody rehearses and shoots, you know, on a motion picture. I mean, they did cover us. You know, we had our masters and we had our tights and we had our medium shots and what have you. But there was not a lot. I remember the, I don't think there was a table read. Was there not? I don't remember. No, not that I can recall. Yeah. I don't remember a table read. So this was Alligator and he was played by a fantastic actor.

20:09 · jump to transcript →

But Leslie's great. He never lets on that it's a comedy. He just... And was unaware we were shooting most of the time. Yeah. He thought this was a rehearsal. But he was terrific. Does he take a lot of takes to get it right? Okay. No, no. No, it's not him, but we do a lot of takes. Yeah, because? Mostly we can't remember which ones are the good ones.

39:24 · jump to transcript →

Remember they tried to build some baseball launcher thing? The ex-German rocket scientists we had in the effects department. That thing never worked. Probably just threw them up in the air. Is that the one we labeled the pigeon shooter? The pigeon shooter, yeah. That scared some people. They thought we were actually going to shoot pigeons with it. Those were the days, huh? Oh, you remember this? We rehearsed this. Well, do you remember we came in with all the dailies for this and the editor said, what's a rundown? Oh, yeah. It's like, uh-oh.

1:12:55 · jump to transcript →

the first introduction to Malcolm McDowell I have a very strong memory of, which is this was the first scene I shot with Malcolm. We'd been rehearsing together, and he was fantastic and very enthusiastic about doing the show and very happy to be off. He'd just done Star Trek, and he was happy to be doing something much more in tune with his past. But he walked on set in the scene and said...

7:42 · jump to transcript →

Those are my Michael Jackson tape fingers. I have Michael Jackson tape fingers and I'm League of Their Own too. Because that's how nerdy I am. And here's the Ripper dance, which Ice-T was like, there's no way I'm dancing. Ice-T was like, yeah, I'm not doing that. I'm just sitting in the chair and that's it. And I'm like, okay. Because Adam's like, he won't come to the choreography scenes, the choreography sessions, rehearsals. And it's like, okay, now I know why.

1:17:43 · jump to transcript →

I do have to ask, you know, why they would transport a little cube of jelly as opposed to a container of liquid. That's a big question. - It was square. That's a real big question. But anyway, the effect is funnier. - Yeah. At the beginning it was more complicated, but because of the time-consuming... The effect was very simple. We just had the glass with water, and then the cube, and then to check a little bit the water to have some effect, and a quick morphing in post. It's efficient. I love this one. I remember the story about the lemons. Dan Hedaya found this idea during the rehearsals. It was a good idea, but he had to eat lemons all the day. At the end of the day he was sick, because he ate maybe five, six lemons... to match the shots. But Michael Wincott had to smoke all day. Yeah, but it's not foreign for him. -

22:12 · jump to transcript →

So acting like you can see something when you can't see something. That's great. Was it a practical? - Yeah. We built some wax aliens to blow up for that moment when they blow up. The explosion's practical and the bubbles are real. Everything was really here. Tom was in this underwater - in the suit as well - for a couple of shots. That's a beautiful shot. - How deep was it? 15 feet? In a closed set. You couldn't swim to the surface if you wanted to. The difficult thing about this was that the rehearsals you performed with a mask on and breathing from a breathing apparatus. They were all calm. You were marking what you were going to do in that particular shot. You were gonna swim from here to here. This was your action. When they were satisfied that everybody knew what it was they were supposed to do, there's a countdown from six where you're asked to take six deep pulls of the oxygen. When you get to two the mask comes off. Then you're blind. The mask comes off then so there's no bubbles in the shot. You hold your breath for as long as it takes for them to slate, then start the action. In postproduction we put some noises, some voices, and we recorded the voices in a swimming pool with pipes, like... ...to put the pressure, to feel the pressure. This thing - there was no escape from this. You swam up into that thing. The only way to get out was to swim back down and out. Waiting in the wings would be stunt doubles with hookah masks for us, once the shot was completed, to give you air. In rehearsal you could go longer. It was calm, you were swimming gently. Once you were acting and the energy was up you used more oxygen and there was less time to stay under. Virtually every shot in the sequence you're in jeopardy, so the stakes are high. You're operating on pure adrenaline, which is not the case in a calm rehearsal. And then you got Jean-Pierre on a microphone screaming: "I want to see bubbles because they are making it look like you are afraid." So the bubbles are created by you getting rid of your whole store of oxygen and you're only good for about half of what you were during rehearsal. Made it difficult. I don't know about you, Leland, but I for one ran out of air on five separate occasions. Yes. - And started for the surface. Unfortunately the surface was a ceiling because this is a kitchen set. So there was no escaping it unless you knew where the escape routes were, and since you're blinded and disoriented as to where you are at any given time... I was literally saved five separate times by stunt divers who saw me panic, saw me swim for the surface, saw I wasn't gonna make it, followed me and stuck this thing in my mouth. We each had one assigned to us. I just remember the one time that the guy who was assigned to me that day decided to take a bathroom break during one of the takes. I ran out of air and there was nobody there. Remember? It was your stunt double who gave me... I shared air with you guys. He was so used to saving my life that he was just on guard.

1:11:06 · jump to transcript →

The way those shots are accomplished is that they're rehearsed initially... ...with Arnold Boslow in the scene with her... ...so that the eye line is figured out... ...and exactly what the performance is and the timing. And then the actor, Rachel, in this particular instance... ...has to go it alone and work without anything else in the scene. And, of course, the mummy is added in post-production. What is he doing here?

1:13:56 · jump to transcript →

We rehearsed this scene over and over without the rat. And then we put the rat in for this take. And Rachel, you know, here she is, she sees the rat, feels the rat, she sees the rat, and she turns and the rat happens to jump over onto the female mummy. And right as I called cut, the female mummy flapped off the altar screaming. She wasn't expecting the rat to jump onto her. She was petrified of it. But I thought she was a real trooper to just sit there and not move until I called cut.

1:40:13 · jump to transcript →

E. Elias Merhige

The interesting thing here is that I asked, it had been raining for hours and hours when we were shooting, and I had asked my production designers and art director's assistant to go down and ask a farmer for some grass. And you see this area here that they're all walking on. Instead of grass, they put down all horse manure. And while I was rehearsing with the actors, I was trying to figure out what smelled so bad.

22:46 · jump to transcript →

E. Elias Merhige

In other words, all you have to do is, as they say, relax, and the vampire will do all the work. You had me leave rehearsals in Berlin just to do that. Hey, watch it! Now, this is one of my favorite moments where you have Carrie, you know, taking his measurements for focus, and you have Willem very vainly and enjoying himself completely.

1:13:54 · jump to transcript →

Wes Anderson

Luke had to take three or four months off to grow the beard. So he was the-- Luke and I were the only ones who actually-- Luke and Seymour Cassel and I rehearsed together. We got a chance to work together because Luke was free. Because he couldn't get any other work with that beard.

26:17 · jump to transcript →

Wes Anderson

Most movies, somebody gets shot or somebody dies, things happen that are very dramatic, more dramatic than real life. In the movies we'd made before, the only time anybody dies is if it happened a few years before the movie starts. And one thing I really wanted to do is to make a movie where it was going to be possible for someone to die. Because in the other movies we'd done, it just didn't seem like it could happen. It was a tonal violation of the movie. I sort of felt like, it was like we wanted to stay on the surface of some stuff. Not that those movies are superficial-- I don't think of them that way. --but that there's a lightness to them that it's hard to break out of. And this one, I think, is probably a lot darker. And, you know, there's somebody who tries to commit suicide, and there's death that really occurs in the movie. There's wounds that are kind of deep and sharp that I don't know if you find so much in the other movies, where they're wounded people, but there's not as much violence to the emotions in a way, maybe. This is a scene where... There's certain scenes where Gene Hackman would show up and we'd do our rehearsal, and he'd have a kind of different approach. Uh, what it usually was was he'd wanna do a scene moving fast. And you'd see him do it, and I'd throw out the whole plan I'd had and have a new way to kind of shoot the scene. That's the best thing that can happen. Somebody comes in, and you say: "Throw out whatever we thought of before. This is better." And his thing was to just bring a real charge into something. Richie!

1:14:24 · jump to transcript →

And we had rehearsed the scene for a couple of years, so. You got it right. You got it right by now. We got it right by now. So we didn't have to do anything digital, which was, I think, really great. And we kind of tried to do that as much as possible in this film to try and stick with as much reality as we possibly can instead of just throwing a green screen up or taking the easy route out. And I like that. We have an assignment.

4:31 · jump to transcript →

into one of the hardest places I think a producer can be in, which is where your actor gets hurt. I herniated a disc doing a back handspring on our tenth day of filming. Yes. It was an accident. It wasn't even while we were filming. I was just kind of rehearsing, and my foot slipped, and I landed on my neck. And I think, you know, once we realized what it was, and I realized...

21:12 · jump to transcript →

James Mangold

Meaning that when an actor first comes on board a film in the period where they're first starting to rehearse, the other thing that's happening so that the costumes are ready when the movie begins is that they're being fitted and trying things on. It obviously happens weeks and weeks before the first frames get shot on the film. So what that does and what that means is that those first fittings are incredibly transformative for the actor. They become a chance for them to walk

1:14:19 · jump to transcript →

James Mangold

Well, I did what you said. I read that Bible from cover to cover. Took me three days. She never came back. Now, two things I want to say about this piece of Russell's here. One was when I rehearsed it with him and he was sketching in this book, what I thought was so powerful was the way

1:40:11 · jump to transcript →

Roman Coppola

So this scene is a... Here the conflict is brewing among the brothers, the suspicions and the questioning. And I remember we decided that-- I thought there was something nice about working in the compartment and not having cuts. And sort of-- You know it's a real space, and we'd also get this building kind of tension that's happening here. So anyway, to shoot this, I remember we built a mock-up of this compartment on the... At our art department, which was actually at the-- Which was actually, like, on train tracks. It was some kind of train-- At the train station. Yeah, it was like a train station. We built a train station in it, in fact. And I remember we rehearsed that shot-- It's one of the few times I remember actually rehearsing an entire shot with a dolly and the camera and everything on a completely different location. You know, in a-- You rarely rehearse with a crew present before you start a movie. But that one, we wanted to make sure we'd be able to do it, because the space was so compact, just because it's a real train rolling along.

16:18 · jump to transcript →

Roman Coppola

I really liked this temple. We went many times to this temple in the center of Jodhpur. I think we brought the cows ourselves. Okay. Spray in face. - Spray in face. This was shot much later, as I recall, actually at the location where we had the final convent, if I remember correctly. Yeah. - Yeah, outside of Udaipur. I remember when we were scouting, there was a day when it looked like this. It was all women. And I don't remember what the occasion was, but we recreated what we saw there. We invited back all the people who had been there on this day that we had scouted at the location and this ceremony was happening. This is a scene I remember we rehearsed in the temple itself and really kind of found the scene, the three of us sort of improvising it and acting it out. And we had a little text we were reading from, but sort of, you know, realizing it just the three of us. Yeah. When we were writing the script and we went to India on our reconnaissance mission, it was like a writing session and it ended up being a location session. And we found this temple and went back and shot there many months later. But as Roman said, this is-- We were walking around, we found this, we went in, we took our little micro scripts out, we rehearsed the scene to see if it was working and saw what worked and what didn't. And then we actually became so attached to this place that we went back and shot the real scene there.

23:08 · jump to transcript →

means bath in Swedish. This is one of the most complicated track shots in the film. We had a lot of differences to avoid the reflections in the windows here. We had to rehearse it for like three hours before shooting it. And actually, this is, it's in the movie too, but actually Mr. Avila, the gym teacher here, he's actually the only good adult in the book.

1:42:11 · jump to transcript →

This was, of course, this sequence was very complicated to do, to work underwater. And I think we made this in like two days, this sequence. And it contains a lot of complicated shots and a lot of rehearsals to...

1:43:18 · jump to transcript →

Interestingly, our original idea from rehearsal was that as she died, she would see Javert coming down, and so she would have a kind of tragic death where she died, realizing that her daughter was perhaps not safe. And I remember Karen McIntosh in the edit saying something very interesting about how we should allow her to have a peaceful death, a beautiful death. And I realized there was an echo between the death of Valjean and the death of Fontaine, that this idea that

43:06 · jump to transcript →

This was, I think, an idea that came out of rehearsal. We had a wonderful nine-week rehearsal, which is very unusual in a movie. In King's Speech, we had three weeks, and that was considered long. But this moment of, I suppose, the hesitation about whether they should give up, it's the little kid Gavroche who recommits them to the cause of the People's Song.

1:58:10 · jump to transcript →

the director's cut aspect of it and what's there, but also just the production of it as well. This was Kate's first day. She had just come off of Underworld, kind of just put her on a plane and flew over. She had about two days in between the two and threw these guys in together. We did this scene and then right after this scene started the fight scene within the same set, which was quite a tall order to come right in from another production, just no rehearsal, no practice. Luckily, she'd been doing a lot of training on Underworld as it is.

5:28 · jump to transcript →

Brian and Colin didn't have much time to rehearse their fights either, and Brian came into it, and we had a stuntman set up to do it, just in case, and he was just so into it. I was very impressed with him. He did the majority of that. So that right there, you'll see that when that... That's the first time we see the watch.

1:41:37 · jump to transcript →

Jeff Goldblum

Ah. - [Anderson] And I said, "Well, why?" You said, "Because I don't know this fact, and it was actually proven that this is correct..." And it was a logic thing. I was like, "Oh, yes, you're right. Yes, that would be the proper thing." So we added an "ostensibly." [laughs] - [Goldblum] Oh, thanks. Hey, thanks. And remember-- I don't think everybody did this, but remember how we rehearsed. Remember? I kind of cornered you that day at the hotel, months before, as you were preparing. I was coming through town for something else.

29:31 · jump to transcript →

Wes Anderson

Yeah. Oh, yes. I remember it very well. In fact, that hotel where we filmed it, it's the Hotel Börse in the middle of Görlitz, and it was the center of everything for us. When we first scouted the place, I saw this location where we made the hotel and thought, "Well, that could work. What can we build around here?" And the first thing we did after that was we walked through the town and went to all the hotels, and we found this place, Börse. I said, "You know, this could be a makeup area. And this is big enough for us to have our dinner each night here." And there's this many rooms, but they have some other rooms across the street. And a lot of things like that happened in that hotel. That's where we had our first rehearsal with Deputy Vilmos Kovacs.

30:17 · jump to transcript →

There we see they have a past. She's got a... They're in kind of an adventurous place in that photo. And you can think that maybe this couple has had an interesting and exciting past with some adventure. Anyway, there's the sweetest little girl in the world, played by Paisley Cadorath. Paisley Cadorath was an amazing little actress. We did auditions in Winnipeg because we knew we couldn't fly another person out from anywhere, and she was the only girl that could take directions. But more importantly, you can tell that she was really enjoying the process. And we, you know, make them do four or five takes of the same thing just to see how they'll fare. And she was just excited. Every time she'd run out of the room, we'd get the cameras all ready, Every time she'd run out of the room, we'd get the cameras all ready, and she'd run in and we'd rehearse, and she was perfect all the time. And I think when you watched the audition tapes... I remember getting a message from you saying, "We have to get this girl. I'm so happy that we matched perfectly on her." Fuck!

8:17 · jump to transcript →

We did not have Bobby Digital for too long. He was only there for what, three days? -/ think four, including the rehearsal. Yeah, this is a lot of work to do, but, you know, he's done action before, many times. Directed it, starred in. Of course, you know, he knows... He's definitely seen more action movies than I have. Yeah. - Which is rare. It's hard to find. - Yeah.

1:18:06 · jump to transcript →

It's odd because this scene has no narrative purpose at all. It is just atlas. As you say, there's nobody watching it at all. They don't need to do this if they really were actors. Maybe they're method actors. It's like rehearsal, yeah. In fact, in the recent Shadow of the Vampire, they explain the director tries to pass off the real vampire he's hired by saying, oh, he's worked with Stanislavski, he always is in character. Of course, there's a little bit too much of this already in the film. Yes, the comedy made. Not, I think, anybody's particular thing.

15:20 · jump to transcript →

be caught on film. So in a sense, he was filming his rehearsals as well as his final takes. Yes, that's right. I mean, of course, not all the takes were a full 10 minutes long, but some of them were. Yes, but the point is that as long as they were shooting, the camera was rolling. Also, he felt it would help the actors concentrate on their character, not to have to stop and start with the slits. I think he's right, too.

49:58 · jump to transcript →

these electrodes in my arms, put airplane dope all over my arms, and explained to me what to do. They were very, very careful about it. They said, when we say cut, don't put your hands straight out. Don't put them up in the air. Don't do this. And then they rehearsed it through one time. And they did it, ignited it, and did that. And it was fine.

1:57:11 · jump to transcript →

At least you're being authentic when you're insecure about what the bigger picture is that you're doing. I think the actors worked so well together because of a rehearsal period that we had before the movie started. I remember...

1:17:59 · jump to transcript →

I guess when they were rehearsing the scene beforehand, I guess Shaw accidentally banged his toe, kind of stubbed it, and the spark shot out of it. Apparently it just scared the crap out of him. So it's funny to imagine Robert Shaw being terrified by one of his props is an amusing idea. But yeah, apparently he didn't realize exactly what that shoe was going to do. Oh, sure. Yeah, but it's still a funny story. This got a huge laugh. And then...

1:35:49 · jump to transcript →

Hoyt Yeatman

Now, we're looking at a lot of stunt people running around... ...because they all participated in this sequence that came up... ...as the F-16s lock in on the heat source... ...of our Blue Thunder helicopter. And Scheider gets his plane where it's up against the sun reflection. He's hoping to decoy the helicopter into this. That was the miniature helicopter, too, going across right there. There's the miniature helicopter. Certainly the idea of it going into a building like this... ...was viewed by us as complete fantasy. And it never, ever occurred to us... ...that somebody would actually do something like that, you know. It's just beyond the range of thinking. At the time of 9/11, you couldn't have shown an image like this. Everybody got so sensitive. And then, suddenly, they realised... ...that people weren't as terrified of it... ...as we were saying they were going to be. Remember, people were saying, "We'll have nothing but Doris Day movies." Or, you know, whatever today's version of Doris Day movies is. But then, suddenly, the video stores started telling us... ...that every terrorist movie they had was gone from the shelves... ...that everybody was suddenly fascinated... ...with the very thing we said they wouldn't be... ...which proves William Goldman's old adage of, "Nobody knows anything." And you'll remember, when I talked about the first shot... ...with Malcolm McDowell. Well, here it is. This is the one where he comes... ...and has to jump inside the helicopter and take off. We probably won't be able to get permission... ...to do practical work like was done on Blue Thunder. In other words, I think the laws have changed... ...and people's concern for safety has increased. So we won't be seeing the same kind of amazing, live stunt work... ...which is really, you know, just some of the best ever done. They would depend on visual effects, other methods, to achieve the look... ...but it wouldn't be the real thing, which is what we got here... ...which is a real treat. So he didn't know he had the option of-- No option here. No, no option. But it looks really good. I mean, it looks like he's taking that helicopter off. And the pilot, Karl Wickman, was-- I don't know where Karl was, but I couldn't see him. At that point in Los Angeles, in the early 1980s... ...lots of new, giant structures were being built... ...and here we got to use one where we could shoot through it. And this is where we lost this helicopter... ...this little Hughes 500 helicopter. Its engine blew up. And the helicopter auto-rotated down to the ground... ...onto those parking lots that you see. And only because we had cleared the lots out... ...and had no traffic down there and no cars, no people, was it safe. And we thought we had killed Karl Wickman... ...because the engine blew up. But he was a Vietnam helicopter pilot... ...and he had rehearsed auto-rotating to the ground hundreds of times... ...and he took his helicopter down to the ground... ...and it only bent a couple of skids. And as it hit the ground, he actually was jumping out of it... ...right simultaneously backwards with a fire extinguisher... ...in his hand to put out the flame. But now you can see, we're down 40, 50 feet... ...above the Music Center in Los Angeles. That was not Bill Ryusaki. Good for him.

1:34:03 · jump to transcript →