Release & marketing

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. Erika Eleniak, who, Playboy Playmate, great, great role, great moment here. And I think

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

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Tim Lucas

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 Solnicki and Pierre David evidently made their alliance with Universal with a release date attached,

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Jim Piddock

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...

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came in and wrote, where's the Malibu on the wall of the repo office? The smoking boots, that's left over from Timerider. That's a joke from Timerider 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.

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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...

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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...

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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.

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no scientific evidence because when you get down to it you could argue that basically you have to have faith just like or just like in religions at some point you have to have faith yes i believe what does the science say in fox molders office i want to believe that's the poster there you go i mean i you know karl marx um we're throwing everything else in existentialism the second world war you may as well throw karl marx into this karl marx said that uh... religion

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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,

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