Release & marketing

This is a scene in the tattoo parlor. And to be honest, this was the one sheet or the poster that I wanted for the movie.

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but there's a real darkness to Dennis and a real strangeness, you know? And you look at the three characters in this scene together here, you've got Patricia and Christian and Dennis, and they all have their own very sweet side and very dark side. This particular scene in the trailer was actually done on a soundstage. You know, 90% of the movie was actually done on location, but this particular scene...

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It was done in a trailer, and a trailer is too tight and too tough to shoot in a real trailer because it's too confined a space. So this is one of the rare scenes that we did in the soundstage. And obviously, well, not obviously, but this scene and the next scene in the trailer, which was Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken, they were two major scenes in the movie, so...

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treated like an independent film. And honestly, the release was also treated like an independent film, which is unfortunate. TriStar was changing hands, and I was very disappointed with the kind of non-opening. But the fans have supported it, and the audience has grown for this picture over the years. Well, that's the thing, too. Speaking of which, if you look back, now when you talk to any horror fan, if you go to any horror convention or go on any horror blog or on Twitter or whatever,

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And that's stuff being shoved up his nose while it's being pulled back. He was such a good sport. We had an air tank in there for him, and he was game for all of it. There were safeties, but it's still a little bit probably like being waterboarded. It's a waterboarding visual effect. But it did elicit the shot that's in the movie, in the trailer, of Shawnee seeing him for the first time and being affected by that, right? And I also kept her off the set until that moment. So that's...

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Oh, dude. I'm coming over to your studio. I got to see those. We've got a lot of old video, too, that maybe we could pull out and share. These are all storyboards. Oh, we have to. I got to say, these are all storyboards. Now, I firmly believe that if anyone saw the poster for It Follows, there was the poster of It Follows where it's the side shot of the car, right? That's the shot from the blob. It's right there. You're right. Erica Laniak, who, Playboy Playmate, great, great role, great moment here. And I think

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Lardoni's trademark style was, like all popular things, widely imitated. A company called Biamante e Grisanti, for example, used his techniques to create the trailer and main title sequence for Mario Bava's Hatchet for the Honeymoon in 1969. And you can also see his influence in pop artist Guy Peyert's main titles for Alain Joshua's The Killing Game. Eugenio Lardoni died in Rome on May 15, 1986, at the age of only 61.

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When For a Few Dollars More was released a few months later, the poster read, The man with no name is back. The man in black is waiting. It's the second motion picture of its kind. It won't be the last. Another kept promise. Curiously, the advertising for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly played down the relationship between the three pictures with this tagline, For three men, the Civil War wasn't hell. It was practice.

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When The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly was first released to U.S. theaters in December 1967, it opened in many theaters on Christmas Day and became a smash success, considerably more profitable than the first two dollars films had been. It ultimately earned $25.1 million in its first release, which is close to $184 million in today's currency.

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with everything that had happened to them throughout the film. But in the editing, they decided to put these little pranks in the middle because they felt like the kids might get bored. And to this day, kids, I mean, child viewing audience. To this day, it concerns me when studios come in and the editing department or the marketing department says, no, the original story isn't going to fly. Well, we don't know that. You know, it's narrative. And when we sign on to a project...

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like posters that we were given when the movie came out. So from 1987, full-size, you know, whatever that standard one-sheet poster size is. I have three of them. You have three? Yeah, but don't talk to me about the poster. I'm still angry about the poster. I was supposed to be in it. All right, I'm sorry. I brought it up. You know, they're getting... Mac is just trying to get a word in edgewise in the first time. See, some things never change.

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What is he taking? He's on Oak, I think he's on Oakwood or something south of Santa Monica. And he's like blowing stop signs, which is not my dad's behavior. By which I mean, he was doing the California stop, like almost stopping and then going through. But I think I still ended up being late to that. No, we had, well, we, I didn't, I know we didn't stop before you got there. I don't remember whether or not we were late. This is like the small, the screening before the release of the film. Correct. It was just, it was inside the Atlantic building.

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It's really misleading because it's going to say it's all set on Earth. You're like, wait a minute. That was obviously clearly done when they had no director or maybe a story set in stone because it became this. I think the problem was the main topic of discussion was that they set a release date. That was it. It was all down to marketing. We had to have this movie out in December of 92 or something. And the heads at Fox...

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The warden, the one with authority, is profoundly working class. You might not pick up the accents, you'll be familiar if you're not British, but this is as working class as you can get, Brian Glover. He is the poster boy for working class. Whereas Charles Dance has this incredibly debonair, civilised, classically upper-class characteristics and speaks in this beautiful received English.

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the trailer line, you have no weapons of any kind, which is in every TV spot. But his attitude is just like what someone would probably say. It's got acid for blood and it's quite nasty and all this stuff. Why should I believe you? If I was Brian Glover, I wouldn't do anything Ripley says at any point in this movie. This facility is enormous. There's all kinds of places you can...

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Marco Brambilla Daniel Waters

He's still good in this. I think the contrast, his attitude is just fantastic. I like his throwaway meat eater. Lethal weapon poser always gets a laugh from me. That's the trailer line, an old-fashioned cop to get an old-fashioned criminal.

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Marco Brambilla Daniel Waters

It's so serious. It's so believable. His lines are great, too. Oh, my God. Desire to raid the Fed, yeah. Again, the audience seen the trailer and didn't expect scenes like this. I was like, yes, sir.

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Marco Brambilla Daniel Waters

character of hers, and he plays the disc here. The seashells. Now, if we do a sequel to the movie, the trailer's got to be him walking in a bathroom, going to seashells, and then turning to the audience and saying, wouldn't you like to know? That could be like the trailer from The Shining, just one shot. Yes, exactly. Just a teaser. I'd tell you we would make a billion dollars.

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Len Wiseman

Is that the hole down to the wolves? That's another jump. Cool. That wasn't easy, was it? - That was you. That was me. That was me. - There you go. Oh, I remember that day so well. He falls better than anybody. Look. So impressive. - That does look painful. Yeah. He never has any padding, either. It's fantastic. He didn't do it with back-padding. I used a walk up to him, do that thing, shoot him, then caper off like a girl. Yeah. He would just do that at lunch, in the lunch line. That's my least favourite shot of me. Why? - My nose looks like a big snout. I think it looks cool. - We both were not really... Don't like that. - Why? Because of the snout. - The snout looks great. Thanks. - Nice bullets. Thanks. They're all natural. Of course, that made the trailer, I think, too. I know. I was upset. - The shots you don't care for... ...always show up in every press junket, in magazines, and in trailers. Was that in a sequence where you said I look like I was humping a donkey? I believe that's the one. That was a cool one. That isn't me. That isn't me. - That isn't you. That was that disgusting champagne cellar. We got sick from the mould. What? - Were you in there? Where? - The champagne cellar. It was five inches thick with mould. My God, I got so sick. I got off scot-free. You did. - Pardon the pun, but I did. That really bothered me, that place. The toughest thing for me was the transformation stuff. But besides that, it was... I had a pretty easy schedule. Yeah. We made up for it in the water. - You did. Yeah, yeah. That's true. But you were like, "Hit me. Hit me. Harder," by that point. I Know. I did kind of go insane in this movie. I may be a chick in this movie, but I'm going to take... Yeah. - I'm going to prove it. I remember when we were doing the apartment scene... ...and she was throwing you up against the wall. And you kept going on about how you're not going to get hurt. I know, that last take, there was pain. - Which one? When she throws me? When she pins you against the wall in your apartment. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I don't remember any pain. Yeah. - No pain on that.

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Len Wiseman

All right, here we go. - That's it, jump out the window. This is my favourite thing, I think. No, it isn't. - This isn't it. It can't be. You are nowhere near it, Soeedman. - There we go. Dogs! Dogs and everything. You're really good with the "Oh, shit" look. Here we go. I was legitimately scared with these dogs. Oh, come on. They were being whipped into a frenzy by these Hungarian people. I love how you fall down. I loved it in the trailer. You gave me a hug after that, because I worked hard. Remember? I did. - You did. I was... You were good. - I was big on the hugs. Weren't you sick that night, Speedman? No, I was... - He wasn't sick. He was a baby. He was sick. - I was the opposite of a baby. No, you were. - He was sick. Sorry, guys. He was totally sick. - Were you sick? I don't remember. - Well, I do. I was keeping a detailed notebook and diary. That's right. Maybe I was sick. But, hey. What you don't see after this shot is you put the gun down... ... flapping your hands around. - Why? Because the impact of the guns. You don't remember that? - No. That didn't happen.

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Len Wiseman

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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in a film. But now, you know, in Approaching Phantasm, I really had this, it was like a quest, which was to offer some payoff, because I tell you, as a child, I loved horror films, and was frequently frustrated by, you'd see the ad or the trailer on TV, and they would be so, appear to be so suspenseful and terrifying, then you watch the film, and there was really nothing there.

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Don had approached me. We hadn't really talked about the tune. We talked about it this day, just before we shot it. And while they were setting the shot, I was sitting in the trailer with my guitar and Sheryl Quinlan was in there, who was a lovely friend and a lovely lady. Did my makeup, her makeup every day. And I remember just playing the tune. I only had eight bars.

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Trying to sort of distort reality and having this kid having these nightmares, you know, waking up in the middle of a graveyard and really deluding the audience and thinking they're still in his bedroom. And you pull back and you find out Rory has great pains to try to match everything. There's a couple of crew members of them. And there's Rory's posture from the poster. That's right. Yeah, they used that for the original key art in the domestic release.

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You have a lot of hair. It made it sort of into the poster even. I know. There's something about your hair that's very powerful. In fact, I didn't want to tell you this, but it attacked me several times. Like Medusa. That's why we were there, Mom. Maybe at this point I should mention that this entire idea for this film came out of a series of newspaper articles in the LA Times about teenagers from Southeast Asia that had emigrated with their families to the United States.

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They had rented Wim Wenders' apartment for me. This miserable little German cell. Ronnie's husband. Yeah. And I would watch the Olympics at night. I got tickets to the Olympic field hockey, I remember. That's all I could get. I'll have to do a separate laser disc. I'm just on the Olympics. Here comes the poster shot. I was off. And now I lay me down to sleep.

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And it's always interesting how the newest technology always finds its way into movies. You know, how the first cell phone used in a film was kind of... Now it's almost in everything you see. This is a great shot. I love it. Is that a freeze frame? Oh, no. That was used in the poster. Yeah, that was the poster shot. Grim determination.

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Commentary With Author CG Paul M. Sammon

The whole problem with RoboCop 2 in terms of quality is the fact that it had a locked-in release date. When John Davison finally agreed to Orion to say, okay, I'll do RoboCop 2 because they were in trouble and he didn't want to be the person that killed Orion, he was given a release date. And essentially he had nine months from the moment he said yes to when the film had to come out. That's without a script, without a director, without a crew. And really an amazing job by everyone.

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Commentary With Author CG Paul M. Sammon

One of the things that was the constant pressure as we go on to this long dialogue about you don't get permission, our boss is gone, I need my drugs, etc. One of the pressures of this film was, of course, the release date being locked in. Now, the way that...

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Commentary With Author CG Paul M. Sammon

The fact that they were real. And what you're seeing here again are, I love the cannon that comes up. That behave yourselves line was used in the trailer over and over and over. This is a combination of Peter Weller in the suit and Russell Towery in the suit. And this is rather nice where he zeroes in and like he shot the fellow who had the telescopic rifle, he now takes the cannon off.

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But it's obviously a play on words and on the poster you can see brackets and it kind of hints to the presence of another word within it, tradire, to cheat. So there we go. Yes, it's one of many brass titles that is impossible to do an accurate translation of into English because he does a lot of this sort of cheeky wordplay, you might say.

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It did have a theatrical release, national release. But what was quite noticeable at the time was that it really didn't stir scandal. There was some issues that arose from the poster itself.

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was his first anthology film but um in a way that almost feels like a spoof of say penthouse letters in a way when he made it and the fact that he's the one who's presenting all of these stories i think is what kind of that's what that's why the film still coheres in a way um whereas fallow doesn't quite so much it's just a bunch of random episodes kind of stuck together um as you mentioned that's the uh the shot that he's on the poster there with her skirt flying up with the hat and the umbrella um very famous shot um but nowhere near as scandalous i think as the poster for something like all ladies do it you know which had claudia's you know

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

off his horse later on this day and cracked a rib and couldn't get on a horse so we couldn't shoot anything of orlando actually jumping into the saddle which was our original plan then much later on in post-production i realized that we had forgotten to actually shoot anything of orlando jumping up on his horse and so the only way i could figure to get him on his horse was to turn him into a cg guy and actually spring him up on there with this one shot that i had which was you know the only thing i could think of and this was about six months before the release of the film

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

So what was the point of sort of talking about something that people weren't going to see for a year? But this DVD is coming out, what, about a month or six weeks before the release of The Return of the King. So it's a great opportunity just to set up where they're going and what that actually means. They're going to a very, very bad place. A very bad place for Frodo and Sam. Stay tuned.

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

that we were able just to jump in. And it was only a year ago. That's what I kept saying to the journalists. Well, it's only a year ago. Surely you haven't forgotten what happened in the movie. Plus you'd just had the extended cut DVD released of Fellowship, which was very clever. The DVD, the video release helped a lot because it was able to put everybody back into a Fellowship of the Ring frame of mind two or three months before the release of Two Towers.

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Yeah, I think that's because Atwell was perceived as a supporting actor, whereas Lugosi, when he wasn't a star, which he was on Poverty Row, was a guest star actor. Right, he was the end credit nowadays. An end with, yeah. Or little box round the name on the poster, if he'd had a better agent who could get that kind of stuff. If Lugosi had had a better agent, it would have been Lionel Barrymore and Bela Lugosi in Mark of the Vampire. But he didn't.

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Svengali. Even Dracula is a kind of hypnotist. Yes, he certainly uses his hand gestures. We don't in this film actually get many close-ups of Bela Lugosi's glowing eyes, which is a key image of the genre at the time. And I think one of the great things about this is anybody who sees the trailer, which will be on this set, is actually a trailer shot especially for this movie, where Lugosi actually has probably more dialogue in the trailer than he has in the movie. And he addresses the audience directly, which is a very innovative...

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Commentary With David Kalat

The Japanese press noted that as the first human being killed by the H-bomb, he was Japanese, just like the only humans killed by A-bombs. Slightly over a month after the radio operator finally died, a movie opened in Japanese theaters that begins like this. A fishing boat at sea is afflicted by a mysterious and unexpected flash of light. The ship goes down. Its radio operator is the first to die.

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Commentary With David Kalat

What science and mankind could learn from examining this prehistoric thing is incalculable. This is the way the elderly scientific advisor in Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was depicted. But a better point of comparison would be The Thing from Another World, which opened in Japan in the spring of 1952. In that film, there's a deadly monster threatening the human race, a military expedition trying to kill the thing, and a dissenting scientist who wants to spare the monster for study.

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Grilling him is Rhode Island-raised soul singer Claudia Linnear, a former Iket who was on the road with Ike and Tina Turner. She was apparently the inspiration for both the Rolling Stones' 1971 Brown Sugar and David Bowie's 1973 The Lady Grinning Soul. And in the year after the release of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot appeared in a Playboy pictorial titled Brown Sugar, her lone solo album, Few,

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Apparently, Kennedy had a lot of difficulty getting through his go-fuck-a-duck line reading, breaking up repeatedly. Now Lightfoot gets ready to swagger back into the trailer where he and the boys are playing house, and he's going to tell the tale of the woman in the window. And when he does, the air will be thick with resentment and envy and sexual jealousy, particularly the jealousy of Redd,

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Pat McClung

This scene was shot really quickly. It was pretty much all handheld, 48 or 60 frames a second. I think 48. Then Sigourney had to loop all her lines at slow speed, which is always odd. Our first effect in the movie. It's great, because it's what you expected to happen and then it's not what you expect. She was actually under the bed for that sequence. We built an artificial body from her neck down. Someone is under the bed with her. I can't remember who the lucky guy was that created the illusion of the chestburster. Pushing its way through her. It sets up the character. This is her nightmare. You know that she never wants to have to face it in real life again because she's haunted by it in her dreams and her nightmares. This effect is as if you're outdoors. When the camera dollies over, you see it's just a video projection. The idea was that in outer space there would be places you could go to get a feeling you were in a natural environment. So that plate behind her was shot out in the garden at Pinewood Studios. It was a VistaVision plate. Originally, there was supposed to be a birdhouse in the background in that garden, and she would have Jones on her lap and a bird would fly in and Jones would jump up and hit the screen and that's how the audience would find out that she wasn't actually on the earth. This scene was cut from the release version of the film, which became the source of some controversy with Sigourney. She later said in print that she had based her entire character on this scene, and she was devastated when it was removed. At the time she first screened the film, she told me she didn't like the scene, and then we wound up reading interviews where she had a big problem with that. We didn't have a chance to talk about it because of the postproduction schedule. We were working in England, kind of in isolation.

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Pat McClung

Even though I liked the symmetry of the fact that she had had a daughter and lost her - that's Sigourney's mother, so there's an interesting inversion here. She's looking at the face of her mother but playing it as her daughter. As an actor, it allowed her to work the connection. All my movies are love stories. This one is about parental love, protectiveness and a sense of duty, and the ultimate sacrifice that a person would make, given that sense of duty. That was a nice touch. That was Sigourney's idea. This was one of the seminal scenes in the movie and was one of the ones that had to be deleted and omitted from the theatrical version because of length. We didn't have multiplexes, and there were only so many showings a day that you could have of a film, and we had to get it no more than two hours ten minutes in order to get the maximum number of screenings per day. Peter Lamont came up with a simple and austere look for our future sets. I watched this film recently and I was amazed at how little we see of the conventional future world, as opposed to the spacecraft interiors. She's actually on Gateway Station here. She hasn't returned all the way to earth. She never sets foot on earth in the whole series of films, which is interesting. This is as close as she gets until the end of the fourth movie, where she's re-entering the atmosphere. But this is earth for all intents and purposes. This is everyday life circa a couple of hundred years from now. And Peter came up with a very spartan look. It's not overworked at all, which I think was quite clever. We wanted to do it minimalist. We didn't have her walking around corridors. We didn't create a world because we weren't interested. We were interested in the through-line of her story and her character's dilemma and problems, the fact that she's not believed, that she understands there's this great threat. The same applied to the costumes. We didn't wanna suggest a wildly separated future from our present one. This might be one of the first science fiction movies where men still wear coats and ties. The thinking was people will still wear coats and ties. They may not look exactly the same. We turned up the collar on the jackets. It's no big deal but it's a subtle change. We wanted to have a place to go. We wanted the space environment once they get to the colony planet to be exotic and so we didn't wanna overwork earth. We also wanted to understand who these people were, and a Suit Is a suit. These characters are suits and we wanted to reinforce that. If everybody's in Star Wars type costumes, it's harder to relate to them as characters. I was thinking more of a writer than a designer when I was making my picks of what things should look like from amongst the suggestions made by the costume designer. Denny, did they shoot at 25 frames per second for all the video playback stuff? Do you remember? They did. The 24-frame issue was messy. It can be done, but it's such a big procedure. Shooting 25 frames per second on the camera puts the video in sync with the film camera very easily. There's a slight speed differential but it's almost impossible to perceive. In Britain they have a different television system, a 25-frame-per-second system. 625 resolution instead of 525. Later in the film there's some video footage that was used, appearing on video monitors. But the PAL system is better than NTSC, which is our system here in the United States. It almost looked like a slightly too fuzzy version of film, sort of in between. It's not as good as it should be for film, but it wasn't obvious it was video. Jim realized and made the video images noisier or break up more often so it was more obvious. The tag of this scene is gonna be a throw to this big sequence that takes place on the colony which is before the aliens attack. That's cut out of the release version, so coming up Is the biggest single change from the release version of the film. It's an entire reel. I'll never forget Gale Hurd, who was my wife and producer at the time, trying to shorten the film by 20 minutes. I just could not see how it was possible to do a cut here, a cut there, a few seconds, a bit of a scene, the tag of a scene maybe. She said "I've been thinking about this for days." I said "Go ahead." She said "Reel three." Which starts here. "You can take out reel three." I immediately rejected that as completely absurd. Then I thought about it. Reel three ends with Newt's scream when her father has the facehugger on his face. It works flawlessly. It's a brilliant cut and I have to credit Gale with that. I had poured a lot of energy into the design of these scenes and the alien derelict ship. The problem for me was that I couldn't imagine this film without the cognitive tether to the first film of the alien derelict, but it turns out that it works perfectly. A little dialogue bridge and it works fine. I like this tractor a lot, this tractor with this articulated leg design. This is one of my favorite effects. You see the big tractor driving by and in the background you see these people struggling to put a tarp over that tractor. That was done in perspective. There were full-size people back there, and a miniature in the foreground with distance between. It put everything in camera all at one time without any opticals or anything beyond that. The trick was that the actors had to act at double their normal speed of acting, because the camera was running at 48 frames per second. We had a Ritter fan on them to really kick those tarps around in excess of what it would be in real time, but because we were overcranking, that motion would then look normal. The multi-wheeled vehicle at the beginning is a fifth-scale miniature, radio-controlled, that Jim designed. On the airplane coming over from Los Angeles to London he just doodled it. Ron Cobb, I believe, fleshed it out.

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Again, in the tradition of film noir detective movies. Every script we put in a lonely walk and it gets cut because they don't mean anything. Except it stayed. Well, actually, we have a tradition of using stuff that was cut out of the movie and subsequent versions of the film or things that were for the trailer that then turned into scenes. Yeah.

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There's the big guy with no lines again. Exactly. That's the way we like him. Now this would be Reggie Jackson? Oh, you ruined the reveal. I'm sorry. I hope they can slip better. Oh, jeez. Slip better. Moving back. You can back that one up. How hard to get Reggie? Was he expensive? Actually, you know, in our movies we make the poster and all the stars are in little boxes at the bottom. And we put a little thing under each box, like, you know, the mayor, she ruled the city, the way she made love with an iron fist.

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Fred Dekker

So when the movie came out, did you feel that, I mean, because obviously Orion at that point was, you know, on its last legs, it was pretty much on life support. How did you feel about the release? Because my perception of it as a moviegoer at that time was they just kind of threw it out there. Movie marketing is really hard. Yeah. You know, we've talked a lot about the Monster Squad, which has gotten kind of short shrift due to its...

1:02:02 · jump to transcript →

Fred Dekker

But going back to the release of the film, did you feel that, I mean, at the end of the day, that they did the best they could in marketing it at that time? I suspect that they were hampered a little bit by the amount of money they had to market it. Yeah. But, I mean, I saw TV spots.

1:04:06 · jump to transcript →

And, you know, already, as we're reading scripts or, you know, as I'm writing scripts, I'm much more aware of the fact that other people have to be looking at the film at various stages because the levels of investment are that much higher. And people want to know what the marketing of the film is before it's even finished. And that wasn't the case with a film like this. It seems crazy looking at Exotica now because it's still probably...

51:27 · jump to transcript →

where Thomas and Eric had that moment in the washroom. So now we're hearing that same music. So mentally or emotionally, we're being triggered for a similar moment of reconciliation, which is about to happen. And it's not a moment of violence, which is so crazy. I remember when I saw the Miramax trailer, because they kept repeating the image of the gun, and they actually put a gunshot in the trailer, which was the whole point of the film, was that the gun didn't go off.

1:33:54 · jump to transcript →

From that, we built the poster, and the poster was much like the one that you see that came with the film, with the tagline, all of you can go to hell. And this is something that I presented to Brian, and Brian liked it very much, and to make a long story very short, he told me to proceed writing The Usual Suspects, which we started writing in or around February of 1993.

1:21 · jump to transcript →

I was sitting in the break room and I looked up at the bulletin board, which was made by Quartet in Skokie, Illinois. And that was essentially the birth of this movie. Well, the second birth, the first birth being the poster. Yes. And again, another location, sort of a...

1:10:49 · jump to transcript →

This was actually a tunnel. You can see the floor on one end where the light is glowing. And this was actually just a vertical tunnel which was stood straight to make it into a tube. I love this scene. It's very different with the other Aliens. Sigourney loved to do that. She was almost naked when we shot. She is very courageous. She tries everything. She is ready to do everything, all the time. This is a set that was reused. In this instance, this is the birthing room for Ripley. This is a very symbolic and beautiful, almost religious, image of her coming to life. This was designed by Darius and Jean-Pierre - dreamt it up and shot it, quite late in the day, actually. It's actually very stunning. It's quite beautiful. What we're looking at - the light glowing from the floor and fanning in the back - is exactly where Darius and Nigel gave each other opportunities to generate so much excitement out of these openings, where, basically, light actually comes alive in the metal everywhere you look. I love Brad Dourif. I was a fan. All my life I will remember the test with Brad Dourif. He was perfect. I saw a lot of actors for Wren, the bad guy, and I saw a lot of actors. It was a pleasure because I made some tests with them. It was only because the studio didn't want to pay a lot for the main bad character. I remember, I proposed to the studio it was a good idea to have a woman for the bad guy. It was a good idea, but at the end the marketing service said "No. Definitely no." "Because you have two women in this film, two heroes, and not a third one. Definitely." Too many women. - Yeah.

6:30 · jump to transcript →

My Question Initially To Jean-pierre Was

Almost everything was designed to be four, five times bigger than what it ends up being in the film. As budgetary bad news came in everything shrank. Pretty much every set invented in the script is in, with the exception of one or two. But everything is a lot smaller than was intended. What's in-fucking-side me?! A parasite! I love this sentence. It was in the trailer. I worked with Darius on City Of Lost Children. Then he went and did Se7en, which was just spectacular from a cinematographic... How would you say that? - I'd say, uh... "A good picture". Yeah, it was nice to look at. Beautiful film. And then he came and did this with Jean-Pierre again. You were in Alien because you did City of the Lost Children with Jean-Pierre. Correct? - Yeah, probably. I worked with Darius on Se7en. - You worked on Se/7en. You were spectacular in that film. - Thank you.

1:05:40 · jump to transcript →

was shot at three separate times of day. Juliet's, all of Juliet's coverage in this scene is shot at 10 o'clock at night on a process trailer in a parking lot, and I am standing to her right, just outside the door. Wow. And I'm watching the monitor and jostling up and down with my fat ass on the trailer to create the motion of the car. That's good. Dick Pope's great. Dick's phenomenal. And who was the lighting guy?

23:26 · jump to transcript →

Dick just did a phenomenal job. Dick the Pope. Well, here, walking into the POV. And look at the sky there. Okay, that I stole from Peckinpah. That is the poster to The Wild Bunch employed in a shot. That was the only time, I think, in the entire movie I ever consciously did anything. In fact, you consciously didn't. You stayed away from slow-mo. Well, a lot of people say, when people talk about this movie and talk about the Peckinpah influence, it's not the style, it's the situation. It's a bunch of guys in a whorehouse in the desert. Yeah.

1:45:50 · jump to transcript →

Richard Curtis

Right, okay, let's go. Who do you think the costume is tougher on? Which one, mine or... Yours or Gregor's? -/ see. Yours makes you look as though you don't exist and Gregor's looks as though he's a wrestler. Yeah. Love is all... Fuck, wank, bugger, shitting ass head and hole. I'm sorry about that. You're a Shakespearean actor, basically. Yeah, I know. I never... I know. Shakespeare would have written those words if they'd existed in his day. So this is singing... Love Is All Around was... Everyone in England knows, but it was number one here for 15 weeks after the release of Four Weddings and a Funeral. Bloody hell. And I couldn't think of a funnier way to start the film than actually making them listen to the same song again. Very good. Now, that's kind of good. Take a look, Tom. This must be excruciating for you, isn't it, watching middle-aged men doing hip-grinding.

2:30 · jump to transcript →

Richard Curtis

So here we go, this was Sandown. - That's Sandown just outside London? Yeah. Yeah, sprayed. - For Milwaukee? Sandown? - Yeah, I think so. Have they got an airport? No, they haven't got... That's dress design, that's Jim Clay. I thought we did the races. I think there's always too much snow in your films anyway, Richard. -/ like a bit of snow. - Snow on the poster this time. Now, this was one of the best days of the shoot, 'cause these American girls came in and they just tore the script apart. Really? - Yeah, all the English actors are so respectful, but they just said, "There's not enough funny stuff in here. "Can we try and pep it up a bit with some good lines?"

1:23:47 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

But I think he came to connect with it with this Air Kentucky pilot. The "Life on Mars" we didn't comment on. I see you tried some other songs there. You tried a New Order song which played in the trailer, actually. Yeah, yeah. But it really-- "Life on Mars" feels like it was almost written for that. Right. Well, you know, maybe we should refer to, you know... We wanted to use a lot of David Bowie songs in the movie. We wanted Seu Jorge to play-- At a certain point we made this character. It was a character who was gonna be playing music on the deck of the ship. And then we decided to make him Brazilian. And we decided to do David Bowie. So it sort of just emerged that it was gonna be Bowie songs in Portuguese. Which Seu Jorge adapted himself. And he made these beautiful versions of this. But David Bowie is woven through the whole movie. I wonder why. Yeah. We did talk about Steve Miller at one point. I remember we-- Somehow, Jane maybe was going to listen to Steve Miller. That's funny. - Which is a funny idea. Yeah. David Bowie seems somehow more appropriate. Save Steve Miller for another one. I've been a member of the Zissou Society since I was 11. Well, I'll be damned. Look at that. Wanna kill this? Frankly, I better not. I don't usually try grass.

13:25 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

This jellyfish, electric jellyfish scene, I kept Cate separated from all the other people so she hadn't been introduced to any of the actors. And we shot all of it with Cate in the trailer. And we didn't bring her out until we filmed her shots. So for Cate, it was very strange because it was about 5:00 in the morning by the time we got to her angle, and the wind's blowing, and these electric jellyfish are blinking on the beach and there's Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Owen Wilson, our friend Waris, Niels, Noah, all in their pajamas on this beach with a crew of people she's never met, and she's brought out, and it was very strange. And I've not really been that big on doing those kind of stunts, but I felt like it might be something, that something might come out of it. And there was, there was a crazy energy on it. And she played this whole scene with them confronting her, and then as soon as we finished it, everybody was introduced to each other and it was... And the sun came up.

22:34 · jump to transcript →

is one of those lines you know the studio's gonna put in the trailer. And they did. In the original script, I was going to cut to Ethan Hawke's character up in this helicopter. But we had to scale back the shoot in New York. The helicopter's actually digital. Of course, a new breed of gun runner requires a new breed of cop.

1:05:33 · jump to transcript →

I do this when they are watching all of my espies. Where there's a will, there's a weapon. Come on, where's my fucking money? That's another line that you know they're gonna put in the trailer. Where there's a will, there's a weapon. It is delivered. This is not for me. This is for my neighbors to the west. The west? We're going to Sierra Leone. Oh, yes. And my son.

1:39:20 · jump to transcript →

Oh, we started watching the movie. - Yeah. This is cool. - Will she make it? Got her clothes on. One of the things that we were very keen on... ... that we wanted, was that we wanted.... We had this ambition... ... that the audience should have their first breath... ...after the first 10 minutes... ...when she gets dropped off the truck... ...which we will see. And when I was watching the premiere yesterday with my wife... ...when she get-- She: At exactly that spot and I felt, "Wow... ... this was exactly what we were aiming for." I think the audience was a little surprised too. We had the premiere last night so we got to watch... ... the movie with a big audience. But they were surprised at the level of violence of the movie. This is a tougher movie than the other movies. Selene is a lot more badass in this movie. She kills a lot of people. - Yeah. Went through a lot more buckets of blood too. A sign of the times, I suppose. Yeah, you'll wish you hadn't done that. This was one of the big scenes in the trailer... ... that we had shown Screen Gems right at the beginning. I love the little splat of blood hitting there. That was sweet. I repeat, full containment... No, there was buckets of blood. I mean, it's.... Violence Is an aesthetic I think that, I mean, goes a hundred years back. Yep. Have we actually done a body count in this? It's a lot. You know what? I did once. Did you? What'd it end up being? - I can't remember. Counting Lycans and humans. Yeah, dead-- Corpses. Now, this moment was an additional shoot moment. It was the first thing we sh... - Wes Bentley, yeah. It's the last and first... - The uncredited Wes Bentley. The first and the last... - This jump was the first thing we shot. First day of shooting. - Look at this boom here. There. That hit in that shot, was Alicia... ...our excellent stunt girl, who just smacked... It sounded like the worst sound I ever heard. It's like, "We killed the stunt double on the first shot." And then you said, "Let's go again." The first day of shooting went so well... ... that I walked away thinking, "God, this is gonna be an easy movie." Oh, my God! - You were wrong. I was wrong. It was so difficult. This was the toughest by far we've done. They're not supposed to be easy. No. - There's a direct correlation... ...between the amount of suffering to do a movie... ...and how well it turns out. We never did a film, like, with this big budget kind of thing... ...but I think you always end up in the same position, you know? You don't have enough money. You always... Imagination can always outrun money. Yeah. - Yeah. The 3D made it more complicated too. Yeah, the 3D really-- You know, nobody had really done it. You know, how to plan it and how to shoot it and.... This is where we want people to breathe. Yeah, here. Here's brutalism again. - Yeah. I was talking with the cinematographer... ...ocott Kevan, last night and... Who did a great job. - He did a great job. And the person... I introduced him to my daughter. My daughter said, "Was this your first 3D movie?" He said, "No, my second. I made all my mistakes on the first one... ...So this one I could get right." Yeah, he was the only guy kind of who had done it. Yes. - And he kept telling us: "It'll take a long time." I remember-- Gary, you said: - It did. "If we go down the Amazonas, it'd be nice... ... to have someone who's been there." Done that trip. That was true. Scott was really there. - Yeah. He was great. But it's also-- It has been very... ...weird. - First shot of Kate. This was the first shot of Kate. Yeah. - First night. That terrible night when it would not stop raining. This was one of those.... - There's a gale right now. When the duck flew into the light? - Yeah. It was a duck who came from the sky... ...and landed in the middle of the set. The camera broke down about four times. Yeah. No, just shooting 3D was a weird experience in that sense... ... that we hadn't done it before and all the rules that you get... ... from various people who has done it... ...Just turn out to be not true or.... - Bullshit. Total bullshit. I don't know if the Red Epic that we used, the camera... ... kind of discarded some of them so it actually works now... ...and it's also.... You have to realize you're telling a story... ... you're not doing a 3D ride. Although this movie is like a ride but... No, but I think what.... True, because... .all these people that we talked about, they were technicians... ...and not filmmakers or storytellers. So they speak about the perfection of everything... ...and that's not really interesting, perfection... ...ecause what you go for is emotion, and emotion is not always perfect. It's also... You know, 3D is in its infancy. People really don't know the rules. When we took those classes... ... there'd been like six movies made and so people didn't know. Half of them were not real 3D, either. - Correct. Where you actually were using binocular cameras... ...to shoot the entire movie, which we did. I don't think any... There wasn't a rule they gave us... ...that we didn't break. - No. I mean, it was... - No. Everything. This is that hybrid POV, as we Call it. It's when Kate starts seeing through.... She thinks she sees through Michael's eyes... ...but it's actually India's. Eve, her daughter. This is so hard, I think, to decide as a filmmaker... ...when you do this. What it should look like? - No. Not technically, but I'm saying the suspension of disbelief... ...of is it Michael or not, and.... We didn't know... All the marketing now you've seen... ... you know, It's all out that she has a daughter in this one... ...which, you know, when we were planning this.... Hopefully that would be the secret. It's gonna be a surprise, yeah. - "Wow, she has a daughter." But.... And I think what helps us Is that we... - Michael Ealy, by the way. Michael Ealy. - Appearance of Michael Ealy. What helps us is the pace that we had to this. You just move so fast that, you know... ... you don't leave time for the mind to think that much. But it's.... Yeah, it's interesting. One of the scenes we shot here is outside in Vancouver. Vancouver-- When we heard we're shooting Underworld... ...and we're shooting it in Vancouver... ...we thought that was pretty strange because it's not gothic. But as Bjorn was talking about... ...when we found the neo-Goth and the brutalism... ...Vancouver Is fantastic. - We'll start counting... ...how many times that word comes. - You do that. It might be even more people than die. Yeah. A couple of words about Kate.... She's a movie star and a really, really good actress. Sometimes that's not the same thing. But she is, and she's very fun to work with. And she... You know, she's British, she always... Theo James. - Theo James. Very witty, yeah. - Young English actor making his... Who's also extremely funny. - Those damn Brits. Yeah. He's so funny. And you're around people who are gorgeous and funny... . It takes its toll on you. Yeah, it doesn't go together usually, yeah. No, and you just stand there in the middle and talking really bad English. I love this shot we did with Stephen. I remember we were shooting it, he was really somewhere else. He was... That was a scene we added after we had started shooting. It was Gary's scene. - That was my idea. We initially had a scene outside of here that l.... I remember seeing this location. I thought it was beautiful... ...but I couldn't wrap my head around a desk being in an exterior atrium... ...so I was struggling with that, but I'm sure glad we did it. I think it looks beautiful. I think you said when you saw it, "It's outside?" It started raining. - "It's outside?" And it was freezing cold. You remember how cold it was? Oh, my God, it was freezing. - God. This is the second... - Then we said: "We have all this concrete and it's freezing cold. Let's get water everywhere. That'll make it really comfortable." This is day one. Day zero, we did the jump we saw before. This is day one where it was full-on, all teams... ...SO this is the first scene that we shot of the whole film. And this shot was actually blown up. We had shot it wider, but we were able to push in on it. We did that with an enormous number.... One of the beauties of using the Red Epic camera... ...was the ability to push in and resize afterwards... ...1N postproduction. That's 175 percent. - Yeah. One of the things I believe that Mans and Bjérn should discuss... ...because we experienced it our first day of shooting... .IS that they are slightly unorthodox in terms of a directorial team. Slightly? They alternate the days they're shooting. So the first day, I believe it was Bjérn, right? You were directing the first day... ...and then Mans would direct the second day. And so, you know, you guys may wanna enlighten the audience... ...as to your procedure. - This was Mans. The prior one in the corridor, I did. I can't remember, but we always have the producer flip a coin... I did. I remember I flipped a coin. Yeah, flipped a coin and whoever gets the tails... ...whatever we decide, begins the day. The thing is, when I'm directing, Bjorn's my best buddy... ...as we Call it, and he doesn't do anything... ...except helping me. Nobody's allowed to talk to him. - Wait. We'll miss Wes getting thrown through the window. This is a totally reshot scene. - Yeah. We had another scene that was... - Just not working. No, it was a bit of a disaster. We got the opportunity to reshoot this, and I love this scene. I love it too. - It's great. This whole spider-webbing window thing.... That was actually Len Wiseman's idea of having him... ...be pushed through the window as it spider-webbed behind him. Yeah, we had.... Yeah. Fantastic idea. - Yeah, great shot. In the background, you see he's got little stuffed animals... ...because we wanted him to be a tinker... ...because he's been tinkering with her... What? I never saw those stuffed animals. I love this shot. I love this. It's too short. - Way too short. Yeah. It's way too short. You know, if you're starting to do movies or anything.... Please listen up, because Bjérn is saying something important. If you get into doing green-screen stuff, stay on it longer... ...because the visual effects will come in and you'll go: "Why the hell didn't we stay longer?" You had 36 frames of tail handle that you didn't use. So it's... So there. - Bollocks. I did not see that. - The famous.... Larz. Thank you, Larz. This is a 300-pound dummy in steel. Oh, God. Nothing.... I mean... Larz is the visual effects... - Special effects. Special effects. We thought, "There's no way. That's not gonna smash the car." Larz was like, "It's gonna smash the car." It did. - It smashed it great. Larz was right. It worked. And I love this shot of the camera pulling up... ...and catching Theo there. - Yeah. SO we are boosting up the mystery here. Theo, who is this guy. - The mystery man. And hopefully you don't know that he's a Vampire yet. He could be anyone, probably a human. Yeah, that was one of the challenges, as well, with the introducing. We introduce Michael Ealy, who plays Sebastian... ...and we have introduced David. We had introductions of a character called Quint, which is... Love this knife. - Yeah. The Uber-- Who was a Lycan, but it was taken out. Because there were too-- Yeah. Kris. - Kris Holden. Brilliant. - Brilliant guy, brilliant actor. It was taken out because there were too many people presented... ...and he gets presented after the car chase... ...and we only see him once. I'm not sure if that was perfect. In hindsight, maybe we should have. - But it's tough. That's... This is a movie where there's only one character... ... left over from other films. Every character has to be introduced. At a certain point, it's a struggle... ...trying to figure out ways to do it without overwhelming the audience. So we just caught a glimpse of the lower Lycans. And one of the things that we really loved in this one... ...was that we could expand the mythology and the universe... ...by inventing new creatures. And we liked the idea that they have been living in the sewers. There's one now. Yeah. And, you know, we thought, you know.... Here we thought Gollum. We thought rabid dog. We thought puss-- Run... Is that what you call it? Puss? Pus. - Pus running. Yeah. Saliva. Fucking crazy in the head. Rabid crazy. That... - Syphilitic. We wanted to because there's... One of the most wonderful lines... .In the history of Underworld is: "You're acting like a pack of rabid dogs! And that, gentlemen, simply won't do." That Michael Sheen says in Underworld 7. And we said, well, let's turn them into those rabid dogs now. They-- You know, they have lived here underground for so long... ... that they actually became these rabid dogs. Yeah, we actually don't see these guys as being human anymore. They're just Lycans. - And they... They turned out beautifully, James. Really beautiful. - These are my favorite Lycans. I think if there is a part five, there should be just these guys. I love them, just those.... The horde. - Yes. Really sick. It was the first time we moved away from suits. We always relied on practical prosthetic suits... ...and this was the first. This and the Uber are the two creatures that are purely CG. The Uber was hard to cast, so we had to go CG. This is an important moment. I loved shooting this. - This is where Selene sees... ...this child for the first moment. Without realizing who it is. - Right. She thinks it's Michael. I remember when shooting it... - She expected to find Michael. Right. Exactly. And she was so beautiful, and she looks so scared. Vulnerable. - Yeah. And the whole thing here we set up, you know.... We're gonna reveal later in the van, when she rips the Lycan's head apart. Hopefully that works, because we set up this girl as weak... ...as we see here, and vulnerable and so on... ...but she is the daughter of Selene, which means the girl's got powers. She's got the kick-ass gene. - Her name is Eve... ...which is never pronounced. - No. It isn't? We never say it? - We never say it. She says, "I'm Subject 2. You're Subject 1." So we might give her another name if we want to for the next one. Eve is perfect, I mean. No, but I think Selene is so beautiful... ...because Selene means moon in Greek. Is that right? - Yeah. Selene means moon in Greek? - Don't you know your Greek? Apparently not. Good Lord. Yeah. So here's the car chase, as we Call it. And it is pretty much... ...on the money on every shot that we storyboarded... ...which is extremely rewarding for a director... ...to see that it pulls off. This is also a triumph of visual effects. Probably half of the scene it was pouring down rain... ...and shooting in 3D, which means you can't really shoot. Shooting in 2D. We shot most of it in 2D. Because you can't shoot in 3D, the rain hits the mirror. The half-silvered mirror that you use in a 3D rig. So this whole thing was pieced together... ... from very, very rudimentary pieces.

10:50 · jump to transcript →

It's like, "Thank you." - It's in the trailer. In the trailer. - Yeah. It's funny, there's moments... ...when you realize, "That's in the trailer." Yeah. - Yep. There's another one coming up.

42:38 · jump to transcript →

He's done quite a lot of this early material. When I was growing up, the music that was in the pop charts or the music that was... The interesting thing about making this film is that now that it's been shown, I've travelled around the world screening the film and then I, for example, met the person who did this interview at a screening and you start meeting the people who actually shot the footage and who are surprised when they see it in the film or they see it in the trailer and they kind of remember that's the Amy that I knew when they see the whole film because the person she became...

10:30 · jump to transcript →

During Back to Black, the release of Back to Black, she looked back at these events and she was quite candid about it. This was one of them. I think she did this interview with a Swiss radio station. But married with the contemporaneous photographs and little bits of footage, you get an idea about how powerful the split was for her.

37:47 · jump to transcript →

And I really enjoy that part before they run out. Here you see the poster again, you know, reminding us of his character and also adding a little bit of humor. Because humor can't ever hurt, right? Especially in a movie like this, where we don't have much of it.

1:04:06 · jump to transcript →

and we suddenly, and here, I'm sorry, I'm seeing the poster blowing in the wind that one of our characters has left on the wall. And so, and I go out to the battlefield, and we find James, the cinematographer, sunk up to his hips in the mud, and he couldn't get out anymore. He almost drowned, basically. It was so wet. And so we had to get a crane to get him out of this mud field.

2:15:13 · jump to transcript →

wanted to give a thank you to J. Edgar Hoover because all of his events when he was giving lectures at communist bookstores and stuff like this came from J. Edgar Hoover's file. Otherwise we wouldn't know about it. You also got to bear in mind that the big investigation begins with the release of Citizen Kane and almost simultaneously with the release of Citizen Kane

1:04:35 · jump to transcript →

Eng Commentary

We're familiar with such overlapping of image and sound now, more than 30 years after the release of this film. But in 1959, such a move was innovative and helped to define an important aspect of the new wave. One aspect of that movement was, as we've noted, the refusal to shoot films in a studio or on a soundstage, but to take the camera out into the streets and the locations themselves. Another new wave innovation was to trust the viewer to be able to look at one thing, yet hear another, and not be confused.

6:00 · jump to transcript →

Harry decided that she was entitled to screen credit for the work she'd done. The poster artwork for Dr. No featured for the first time the now famous 007 logo with the seven forming the handle of a handgun. Don Smolin, who supervised the advertising campaigns on many of the Bond films of the 1960s, recalls the campaign for Dr. No. The guy who started all that was Dave Chasman with, you know, with Mitch Hooks' painting, I think.

29:41 · jump to transcript →

Novelist Tim Lucas

exhilarating, such a daring stylistic advance over anything in the first film, and thrilling not only for Morricone's inspired frissons of sound, but in part because it confirms something that we won't actually learn for another couple of hours. Leone shows Mortimer and Manco occupying the same or at least similar space, and then he proceeds to contrast the laughing eyes of El Indio on the poster with Mortimer's pleasured bloodthirst as he identifies his next quarry.

24:25 · jump to transcript →

And I said, whoa, look at this. Criswell. Directed by Ed, you know, directed by, written by Ed Wood, who I knew Ed Wood was at this time. I think Ed Wood's name was on the poster, wasn't it? I don't know. I never saw the, I never saw the one sheet. I'm looking at what they're, oh, the one sheet. No, it's not on there. Oh, that's great. No, just Criswell and a bevy of beautiful girls. All right. But it seemed like something I should definitely see. Yeah.

10:21 · jump to transcript →

Robert

I think it was opened in 1930.

1:32:51 · jump to transcript →

And it's a movie that I think in some ways kind of gets better with age. I mean, I saw it the day it opened in a theater in New York. By the way, you see the wideness of the platform. The train is not as wide as it needs to be because this was, even though this is the IRT line and the trains on the IRT line were narrower, this was photographed, or a lot of the train stuff was done...

9:16 · jump to transcript →

Nurse, I need my medicine. Bruno Ganz is really great as well. All of that came together wonderfully. We had an excellent team. I always say that a director is barely needed if you have a good script and solid cast. That makes you largely redundant. But there were precise instructions for this, and it was stylized in detail as well. Naturally, everyone had to follow these instructions. I believe that strength plays a role, too. Someone has the strength and that person is the engine for all those wonderful energies. They would not have that without you. I think they have it, but it has to be channeled productively for the screen. Isabelle Adjani is a somewhat insecure person and Kinski a madman who is almost uncontrollable. You can see here that we made him taller. He is one or two inches taller. We gave him very high shoes so he would look more incorporeal. If you watch it on the big screen and you look closely, you can see that his shoes look weird. And here are the rats again. I always say about this topic that directing is like being a tour guide. Not for me, but I understand what you mean and what you want to say. It is the coordination of individual parts that have to come together at a specific point. And here the rats. Most of the time it was very cold. They just clung together to keep warm. I had to go over and separate them with my hands. On the day we shot this, I was bit 30 times or so. I was constantly being bit by rats. Everybody was kind of afraid of them. I remember we imported the rats to Holland and I had to go to the customs. They opened the trailer of the truck with 6,000 rats in it. The first customs officer passed out right way. For a whole hour we tried to bring him back to life.

1:25:52 · jump to transcript →

and he gives them the most basic logline of the film and stops the show cold with the sheer brilliance of the idea. So it had that effect on people, and the idea had to be carefully protected. I was only permitted to be on set because Cinefantastique guaranteed the production that our coverage would not reveal anything sensitive until after the film had been released. The problem with Videodrome was that its Canadian producers Victor Salnicki and Pierre David evidently made their alliance with Universal with a release date attached,

55:26 · jump to transcript →

Two things happened, it seemed, simultaneously at once. I felt myself being grabbed quite authoritatively from behind, my arms pinned back behind me. And I realised that the man in front of me was that marvellous actor, Nick Nolte. It was only much later, perhaps on the release of the film, I don't know, that I realised he must have been at the office preparing for Jefferson in Paris, a fitting or some such thing. At the moment, though, I only knew that I was being held from behind...

1:20:23 · jump to transcript →

came in and wrote, where's the Malibu on the wall of the repo office? The smoking boots, that's left over from Time Rider. That's a joke from Time Rider borrowed for Repo Man. In New York, they put that on the poster. That's right. And in England, yeah. Yeah, that was the British poster too. And there goes Alex. Ah, generic cans. Generic line of food. This particular scene was shot the day after my 21st birthday.

4:20 · jump to transcript →

What do you want? I got a writ I need you to sign. What kind of a writ? I need the release of a prisoner from San Luis prison to help me in a counterfeit case. Must be a big case. The target's a major counterfeiter involved in the murder of a federal agent. I never signed such writs. Why are you still here? I spent all morning working on this. The scene in the federal judge's office

59:52 · jump to transcript →

in his trailer. I think he gets stage fright every time and that's why James spoke. I mean, his hands were literally shaking when I was in the trailer with him talking about the character. He said, I want you played like a snake. I think his delivery, his lines, his motivation, he's, you know, he's a snake. Go for it. So this is...

29:42 · jump to transcript →

That's a whole other movie. It becomes a MacGuffin in some other story. Yeah. It could have been in part two if there had been one. Yeah. Do you remember how the release plans for this film? Because, I mean, it did really well on VHS. I remember it was all over the place when it hit the video stores. But theatrically, I don't recall it playing too widely. Well, there's a sad story there. One of the things that you don't ever want to hear when you're making a movie is that the producers or the...

30:34 · jump to transcript →

Well, he signed the release forms when he joined the force. Now, again, the other thing that was fun for me as a writer on this show was this scene and a scene coming up where they're celebrating were scenes we just made up based on props that showed up that day. And I remember, you know, I literally, this was Mary Kay Cosmetics. I ran down the hall. I wrote a scene on a selector typewriter in somebody's office, brought it back, and they shot it. It was the most satisfying thing that's ever happened to me as a writer. Come here, Arthur.

27:34 · jump to transcript →

And now you say he's a big producer. He is. I keep seeing that name. I didn't realize it's the same. Just before they shot this scene, I remember Ken coming into the trailer in makeup and asking someone to shave his rear end. And I remember being embarrassed the whole time we shot this. You and me both. I didn't want to be here.

48:46 · jump to transcript →

bought processor. So you had written this and we, we like kind of culled it down. Cause originally the scene is basically you saying, I love your daughter. Right. You know, just blurting it out. And, um, so we had the, we had this speech that you and I worked on in the trailer before we did it. And it's, it was so fresh that we fumbled a little bit as we went and I used the fumble to,

40:06 · jump to transcript →

For the two years you're making this movie, through the marketing, through the advertising, through the publicity, to the release schedule, you're running in front of this locomotive and you've got a call sheet that's as long as your arm. And the day that movie opens, nobody needs you for anything. It happens in 12 hours. Boom. That's it. Your agent calls you and says, hey, did you see the grosses? And that's the only call you get because the movie's over.

2:17:04 · jump to transcript →

kind of scrapped whatever Crichton had written in the early 80s I wonder if he was you know he already had the resentment feeling he had written it once now he felt like he had written it twice so maybe he was like I'm not doing it again yeah but it's funny because he actually is credited as a co-writer with Shanley on the posters and the trailer for this movie but not on the final film which leads me to believe there are a couple of things in this movie I mean it doesn't have that choppy feel I mean you've got Andy Coates cutting it but you know sometimes when a movie has had to cut down a lot it feels a little choppy and this doesn't

59:39 · jump to transcript →

But Harrison did that. We shot that fight scene one day. All day long, he was throwing Harrison to the ground. It was, I mean, it's unbelievable. And the next day, I went to the trailer to Harrison and said, Harrison, how does it look? He said, fine, it's okay. But I knew there was a lot of, you know, bruises and stuff like that. It is, look at this. Everything does itself. It's always Harrison.

43:52 · jump to transcript →

There's a violent streak running through him, but it's mitigated by the fact that it's towards men who beat women, which you also get the sense, I think, that it's ingrained in him from childhood. It's not a random thing he's trying to express. Nothing's what it appears to be, which I think is one of the ad lines or was on the poster or some version of that.

1:17:04 · jump to transcript →

Trying to make the audience understand the tone of this movie was an interesting problem. And at the end of the day, it really worked out. I think a lot of people in the first Ancient Egyptian sequence assume it's going to be a horror movie. But thankfully, the marketing campaign was so brilliant, the audience knew what they were getting into when they sat down. So the humor all played wonderfully.

21:27 · jump to transcript →

It's funny because Sonny put that... I wouldn't do that to actors. Only movie stars. It's funny because Sonny put that shot in the trailer, remember? And he kept saying, what's so special about that shot? But it's funny, those little shots, those little presentational shots can sometimes be really great. Now here's one of my big arguments with the art department. Hey, let's have a poster and let's put the exact image of one of our actors right on the poster. Completely giving away the entire plot.

30:37 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

is significant because Lembas Bread returns to the story in the second and third film and we film sequences in those movies with the Lembas Bread and yet we never introduced it in the theatrical version of The Fellowship of the Ring. So this is another reason why I'm glad that this DVD has an opportunity of being seen by people prior to the release of The Two Towers. Because actually one of the very first scenes in The Two Towers between Frodo and Sam involves

2:48:19 · jump to transcript →

That's why stuntmen are fantastic and you need them quite often, but you've got to get your actors in there. Even if it wrenches their ankle once. This was the last shot finished for the film. And I think that was maybe ten days before the release of the movie.

1:59:46 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

and there were things happening with Christopher that he's never talked about and he's not allowed to talk about. He knew the sound of the air escaping and the groan, the type of groan that is emitted. And that's what you're actually getting in this film, the authentic recreation. You know, the great thing with DVDs is that Christopher wasn't in the film for a few months and now with the release of this,

16:40 · jump to transcript →

And that was the image we picked for the poster. And it feels they are weightless here because Jim's feet, it seems that the leg is vertical and his feet are not touching. I don't know, something is weird. I know, I always look at his feet in this shot, more than her feet. I don't know why that is. Because they don't feel touching. They don't feel like it's touching.

15:35 · jump to transcript →

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 Se/nfe/d 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 7he 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. ...I 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 →

And so it was pretty interesting to go back to the trailer with all the little other doggy smells. My dogs were just constantly like, what the, what is going on, Mom? Who have you been hanging out with? Exactly. And it's also interesting that Charlize's dogs are also all rescue dogs. Johnny Lee Miller was another terrific addition to the cast. Great guy.

29:47 · jump to transcript →

John Cameron Mitchell

He says, do you love me? Yeah, and we had to remove a tear because... Oh my God, that gets me every time because I can completely identify with that. My mom watched the trailer online and she saw that part and she goes, I watched it and when you said, do you love me? I'm like, well, do ya? Do ya? Oh, I can totally relate that horrible feeling of having to put your heart out there when you're just not certain. I want to. Yeah. And then that tear. So that you digitally remove the tear.

58:33 · jump to transcript →

I didn't say anything, and maybe I should have, but when she falls down there and we use the shot, at first we're going to use the shot where she falls to the ground and profile, but you carried it all the way to the ground from the top shot. I mean, every time I know it's a pad she lands on, I can see that pad fold. Can you really? I can't at all. Nobody does. I don't think anybody does. You can watch it, dude. You see it fold in. And nobody can. My favorite shot right there. Yes. And we stuck it in the trailer. That looks killer. I love that. Yeah, those guys...

46:09 · jump to transcript →

These kind of sequences are always on the verge of the ridiculous because this is going to be the transformation of Robert Carlyle into something else. Especially because according to the reality that we would like to introduce, we shot in this quarantine cubicle, which was a tiny place. And, you know, the pact with Robert was: "OK, let... you know, let your feelings out with all the power of the rage," which is so difficult in this space. But I think Robert understood that... that this reaction should be in this extreme way. And, in seconds, we see how this man is passing through... through the sad and love... to the... to the violence. The kiss is... this is one of the highlights in the script, was one of the highlights, and II think it's still one of the highlights in the film. When we see this through a normal projection screening in the Chinese Theatre, Juan Carlos and I bought a ticket the first day of the release of the film in the USA, and we assist... We were very happy to see how the audience Is reacting to this sequence. It's a very, very extreme moment of the movie. Especially because in terms of... in an emotional way, the infection is here again for the characters, as I mentioned before. And... and in a way, we see how this family is cursed, and they are bringing the hell to this place again.

42:43 · jump to transcript →

Patrick Tatopoulos

Here they are. - Here they come. Coming out now. He can turn again. - Werewolf time. This is a great moment too. Lycan against vampire. - I love that shot. Him rising up. I think we used that in the trailer. It's such a great moment.

1:11:58 · jump to transcript →

Scott Stewart Jason Blum Brian Kavanaugh-Jones Peter Gvozdas

That was a great shot, the eyes. Everyone loved that. And that's in the trailer. Well, there's, yeah, I mean, there was this idea in the movie of the, you know, gothic tales of terror, which is what Jesse's reading his brother, and he's telling him, you know, he's reading these old, you know, scary stories, and he's reading E.T.A. Hoffman's The Sandman story. And The Sandman story is about, you know, the dark version of the story where the Sandman comes and he steals children's eyes and he feeds them to his children on the moon and it becomes a metaphor. Happy.

1:01:06 · jump to transcript →

That's what is strange and fascinating about the film as well. And so far, you know, today we're doing this commentary and the movie hasn't come out yet, but it's so far just a reaction of the world based on trailers and what the concept of the movie is. It's very interesting to see how much debate it caused exactly based on what you were saying. Like, they're going to get what they deserve and a lot of people see the trailer and they go like, well, they get what they deserve. And now the people said, well, but...

17:59 · jump to transcript →

And not an actor who wakes up in the morning dreaming about being in big Hollywood movies. Sean, when we would say to him, this is for the trailer, Sean. He'd be like, ah! He didn't want to hear it. I was like, come on, man. Go for it. Let's go. Go for it. Be the villain, man. And he's trying to bring something authentic. And we're like, it's time to be in a movie, Sean. Yes, exactly. And right here is where he originally said it. Yes. And he said, you should have killed me and pulled him away. And here, Walker said...

1:09:51 · jump to transcript →