Release & marketing

Tony Scott

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.

17:45 · jump to transcript →

Tony Scott

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...

35:54 · jump to transcript →

Tony Scott

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...

36:21 · jump to transcript →

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...

13:32 · jump to transcript →

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.

46:34 · jump to transcript →

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...

1:01:30 · jump to transcript →

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.

32:21 · jump to transcript →

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.

1:11:32 · jump to transcript →

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.

1:13:06 · jump to transcript →

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.

47:58 · jump to transcript →

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...

1:08:08 · jump to transcript →

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.

1:37:09 · jump to transcript →

this film's depiction of transness or Buffalo Bill as an evil trans character, it was the fact that he was being read as being a self-hating gay. You know, this is a story about a gay man who hates himself, so he begins killing women. The same thing actually happened about a decade earlier in 1980 with the release of Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill, which is another movie about a killer transsexual, but was protested at the time for its depictions of

34:34 · jump to transcript →

There's the release of the adaptation of Fried Green Tomatoes, which was also very controversial for downplaying or even just like essentially removing the lesbian aspect of that story. There's also the release of Paris is Burning. And then right after Sounds of the Lambs, there's The Crying Game. Yeah, and I would have to say The Crying Game almost immediately because of the sort of sideshow.

41:07 · jump to transcript →

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 →

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 Bryan, and Bryan 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 →

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 →

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 →