Reshoots & pickups

And so we had about an hour every day at Magic Hour to attempt to get that shot. And on the fourth day, we got it. And this is Abu Dhabi, the empty quarter in Abu Dhabi. And here, of course, is Rebecca Ferguson. This, we went back and reshot, gave her more of a prominent introduction. I had shot it originally in this set and just wasn't satisfied with it. It just wasn't.

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this, you couldn't go back and reshoot. So I just had Tom walk through the airport saying adverbs, probably, maybe, definitely, permanently. And knowing that I could then write the rest of their... And you have to remember, this was filmed at the height of the pandemic. And so...

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If I get them in this corner, I can then reshoot any coverage I need. And a lot of this is, oh, by the way, that camera move. The camera move around Hayley. Going around Hayley. That's Chunky and Hayley working together. She actually is walking at multiple speeds. She feels like she's walking at one continuous speed, but she's actually working with Chunky to give him the time to get around. And it's extremely delicate, delicate dance. The graphics of the sunglasses, by the way, we worked on those for...

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Lea Thompson

This is the first scene I remember where we got up to about 25 takes. Something went wrong. And also reminds me that Eric's hair was shoulder-length when we first shot this scene. We had to go back and reshoot it because Ned Tanen decided after he saw it, rightfully, that he didn't like his hair that long. And I hadn't told anybody that his hair was that long because this was only my second movie and I didn't really know everybody had to know that his hair was that long. I mean, nobody had seen Polaroids of him because I came back to the movie after another director had been replaced by me. So, a lot of things that are normally checked and double-checked weren't happening, and as a result, we had to kind of reshoot about two days after we gave him his haircut, and he wasn't happy about his haircut. You know, you got to remember Eric Stoltz did a movie called Mask where his whole face was covered up, and had a great time doing that. So, here I cut his shoulder-length hair off, which was, you know, a little bit like Samson, I think, to him, and he felt a little naked, understandably. So we got off to a rocky start. Look how it doesn't even match from those two shots. It's a completely different hairdo.

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Lea Thompson

Actually, now that I remember, that's the scene that we had to reshoot where Eric's hair was to his shoulders and we had to cut it, and redo this. This was the first scene I shot.

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Lea Thompson

This was an additional shot we did. I kind of remember we didn't... We wanted just to emphasize and punctuate how important the earrings were. Oh, this is afterwards? Yeah, 'cause his hair changed. We did the party, too, remember? We reshot part of the party. Yeah, but I mean, this shot of the earrings was something we did later, when we realized we wanted to emphasize that he picked them out. He went on a trip and picked them out with Mary Stuart.

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

Not in the way that the Uruk-hai were. The Uruk-hai, we managed to get a lot of menace out of them in the Helm's Deep scenes and stuff, but we actually set aside some time during pickups, and we had Richard Taylor and his guys redesign the prosthetics of the orcs, redesign the costumes, and what you see in the finished Return of the King now is a combination of some of our old orcs, but a lot of the close-ups and featured characters are the new orcs that we reshot on pickups just to make them look a little bit more scary.

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

which I think he did a really good job. I remember we had to reshoot some of this because I wanted the horse charge to be just with the armour plated Gondorians and that word hadn't got through to second unit so they shot, they mixed it up with some rangers like Faramir's rangers in the green and brown costumes and it just didn't look so I actually had them.

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

fighting so intensely that she'd bring herself to tears and we'd have you know we'd stop and we'd reset and she'd go again and she was just really brave she she was castle the bruises she was black and blue she looked like she'd been beaten to a pulp we actually had miranda doing a fight scene with the witch king in his old helmet back in the days of the principal photography and we made that decision to redesign the helmet and that meant that we had to basically reshoot the fight and we also changed the weapon too because we

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and altered some of the dialogue as we were designing the story. And one of the things I learned about writing a Mission Impossible movie is whenever you can, jam as much exposition as you can into small spaces that you can recreate. Yes. You know, when you're doing all the exposition. No, and we were very careful about doing that. Yes. You'll notice there's not a lot of exposition when you're running across the wing of the airplane. No, no. I don't have to go back and reshoot that. I won't stop until I do.

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Six months later, I was like, oh my God, we can shoot you. And I was so excited that we were gonna shoot it. One more abuse. Yeah, one more, one more. It's fun. One more thing. Can I shoot him in the head? There was a moment here in this scene, which is actually Alec Baldwin's closeups were out of focus. Did you know this? Yeah. Oh yeah, you remember this. And we had to re, so this is actually a reshoot and Jeremy was not there. We did a split screen.

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And we had Alec come back and reshoot his dialogue, speaking with another actor for the eye line. Yeah. And he was so funny that day. He was torturing this other, this stand-in. Playfully, playfully torturing. Look at this, you can't even tell. No, you can't tell. It's amazing. It is amazing. Again, really great visual effects. See, that's the stuff where it's very helpful to be able to do that. Yes, and to never panic when you have some sort of technical disaster. No.

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And we shot it over the entire production of the film. The last day of filming, we were shooting. And every time... This shot was a reshoot. We went back and reshot it because we needed to make the geography clearer in the bathroom. Geography is just a little bit confusing. With all the mirrors and everything, it was really... Yes. This is like Henry, the training, and you're going to see Li Yang, who we met on All You Need Is Kill. Yes.

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No. That's literally just... It's very slippery in there. It's uneven. And you guys just let the space kind of... Yes. The space is beating on you as much as... But also, and it's like, look at what Henry did to sell everything. Oh. Just... Yes. Into it. Yes. You know? And then... Into the character, like this moment you picked up on the last day. That was a reshoot later. Boom. To focus on... I threw focus to the gun. Yep. And it allowed me to show him getting shot in the head. Now, we introduced...

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is on the other end of the alley where we shot the plutonium scene. At the beginning of the movie. It was all in the same location. And for all these, we kept having a camera issue and a focus issue, and we kept having to go back. We actually shot this scene three times. Yeah, we had focus problems. We had to reshoot, unfortunately, Sean's close-up. But the value of that was it allowed us each time to get deeper into the scene.

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the appalled henry reed doesn't know exactly why so he is actually in this version he has gone and tracked down henry reed's apartment this is a reshoot that i did later on i just i wanted to have just because eyes open and kind of fade out so that in the first cut of it we didn't have that she her eyes didn't open and i felt it's just

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And as well, it just seemed a bit silly. He takes all his time, gets in the helicopter, about to take off, and then boom, he just lifts up and then gets shot right back down. It just seemed a bit silly. So there was some reshoots that I had done to have him actually stay out of the helicopter. And it gets taken out, and he runs over and just bypassed that whole moment.

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But what I ended up doing is that I needed Colin to have enough wounds and such that he shows up right here in this scene to where he just took all of his energy just to survive, and then he's dead, or possibly dead. So right here, that's a pickup shot that Colin has been bleeding out. And so to do that, that's why I have Kohegan in the beginning of the fight comes in and he stabs Colin in the side first.

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Because of the production, it basically halted at Pinewood and they went over to do reshoots in LA because he wasn't invited back. They just kill him off by having him scream down one of the corridors when the alien's chasing all the prisoners. So yeah, he gets no death scene. But yeah, certainly for British television, anyone who's familiar with British television, that you're going to see a lot of people you grew up with, ultimately. From Charles Dance, obviously the most...

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Fantastic storyboarding. Aliens, what, 16 million maybe? Yeah, something like that. So then it's gone from that to 50 million for Alien 3. And I don't know if that accounts for the reshoots. Well, 20 million of that they'd spent before they even started filming, didn't they? Because they'd spent 7 million on, according to the figures I've come across, they spent 7 million on sets for versions of the movie that were then abandoned. So the sets were just destroyed.

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So after everyone else had gone home, he just got Sigourney Weaver and the cameraman, basically a skeleton crew, and just did it anyway. And it's like, Jesus Christ. So it didn't... Because they'd said, during the reshoots, like, Terry Rowland said, OK, we need... And he and Dave Fincher decided, OK, what we need to fill the gaps, we need A, B, C, E and F, right? And then they go, oh, you can only have, like, B, E and F, right? And then they shoot it...

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I tried to convince people that I was the mark and try mark, but it didn't work. There you go. Look, they kept my name on it. Actually, there's a story to this limousine. It originally was white, and they wanted to, the studio did say, let's change it to black and reshoot this part because they thought black was scarier.

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Right, Samantha's in the booth to the left. Okay, this is a very interesting thing that there's a rumor on the internet that we had to reshoot this because he came in and takes a box of Lucky Charms and spits them out. And then we showed it. There it is, Lucky Clovers. This is the only thing we ever shot. This was always shot this way, but there's a rumor that somehow Kellogg or whoever does Lucky Charms saw

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him take a bite and spit it out and said, we don't like that. And we don't like the movie, so you have to reshoot it and put a different cereal. And at the end of the movie, when the kid says, fuck you, Lucky Charms, and gets him with a slingshot, that was my way of getting back at the cereal company. And none of that is true. We always had Lucky Clovers for copyright problems. And we always shot this. And this is the only thing we shot.

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I don't know. Look, that's my way. That's not consistent. All right, all right. That is not consistent amount of blood. I think you were doing continuity, Jim, that day. So I'm glad you pointed out now. It's a little late. Look at the amount of blood there. Can't reshoot it. Now he's clean. Well, we love that. I love that. I love that scene. The idea that every movie where they just wash off and the suit's now all clean. Here it just stayed there. People didn't want to see a bloody guy for the rest of the movie. I get that. Mm-hmm.

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With Kevin. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. I did not know that. Life was real. You know, I felt for the first time that I belonged somewhere. This was the reshoot? No, not yet, because I'm still there. Only on the high angle shot. We do this high angle crane shot that we couldn't afford on the first run. Cleveland sounds good to me. But we get married. Right. This is the reshoot. Yeah. This was reshoot. Oh, right, because Dave, the first time he kissed her...

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It was so not sexual that we felt we had to reshoot it. I don't think that was the problem. I don't think that was the problem. The audience has walked out on the kiss. They said, what is that? I don't think that was the problem. It's like he really hates women. I think. There was a weird thing about the testing and then Jennifer did a great job. It was very good. Yeah. And Dave nearly killed himself because he does not have a lot of upper body strength. No, that was great. As you could see when he showed the shirtless scene.

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Pretty unbelievable. Most movies of this size would go back and shoot many weeks of pickups and reshoots and that sort of thing. This actually was on a sound stage. We didn't feel that it was as necessary to have

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It's a little sterile. They've had to move it up onto an island because of the Aswan Dam. These low-angle shots were shot on the backlot at Pinewood. We shot them the first time in Morocco, but the sky was so black with a sandstorm going on in the background, it just looked terrible. So we reshot these low-angle shots behind Pinewood. Now, this, of course, is in Morocco because we're wider. Can't get away with that trick.

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At the end of the day, I can shot list and storyboard the hell out of it, which I always do, but it really comes down to myself. I have to remember everything. If I forget one thing, we can really screw ourselves because we'll have to come back and reshoot. It's like we spend many hours lighting one section of the set, and I have to make sure that you can't... Storyboards are great, but they're not everything. No matter how much you storyboard and shot list, you just...

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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 then, of course, they're hooking up. And this was, you know, very fun and liked this joke and maybe it's a little bit of a pile-on onto the church in that they are-- we will reveal they are in a confessional. I'm not sure this is the answer to what was wrong at the end of the movie, but I also Know that what we shot was not the answer. This is better than we had, 'cause there are jokes and it is fun. Mindy Sterling doing us a huge favor. Yeah. Mindy Sterling, who was Frau Farbissina in the Austin Powers movies. - And there's a lot of her in the outtakes. There's a lot more of this scene. There's a different version where she is enjoying it more and stays in there and starts directing it a little bit. We even tried then bringing back Fred Armisen, Creepy Italian Guy, as the head of the magistrate of the Rome court. This is an excerpt from that scene that we then took Fred out of. And, again, I'm not sure what the answer is or was. It was clearly the end of the movie. You wanted it to happen as soon as possible, but... It was interesting. After he got to Mieke, it felt like, "Okay, the movie's over. Let's end this thing." And it just felt like we had 17 endings. Definitely multiple ending syndrome. And, again, there's still multiple endings, but at least it is shorter than it was and none of these are angering anyone. Also, I think, the nice thing is, people wanted them to get together and now we see they got together. And you get a nice, big laugh out of them getting together. Also, when they didn't get together, people questioned the entire movie. Like, "What was in those emails? What made him come?" And there is no answer to that. The emails are fake. But oddly, when they do get together, where she's as into him as he seems to be into her, you don't question those things. Again, this is where you kind of go, in hindsight, "I don't have the answer." Lots of things have occurred to me, but this is the movie we made. And this scene, again, was a lot longer. This is pieces of two different scenes, a reshot version, and then this is what we did in Prague, which is up near the Prague Castle. We found this wild building that looks like this neat Roman café and just filled it with tables. And then... - Patrick Malahide. Yeah. Patrick Malahide. The audience is always ahead of this, that he turns out to be Frommer. Michelle is sort of falling asleep. - She falls asleep right there. We are calling her on it right there. And he was fun, you Know, a voice of authority, a little bit prickly. Of course, then has his Leica and then has the same exact wallet. And, again, this is Jamie's reward for having sacrificed everything. And people really like Jamie and are happy for him.

1:19:45 · jump to transcript →

This is where we had the bomb threat. We actually had to shoot... - We had to come back for this. The whole airport we shot in one day. Well, actually, two days because... - It could've been done in a day. This part we had-- This was the end. We had an hour to shoot this whole scene. And I remember, there was a woman from the airport standing there and... We're distracting her with bad questions. I was talking to her and I speak a little Czech, and I was telling her that I used to drive a cab. She was talking about cabdrivers from the Czech Republic that are now Americans. And I'm like, "I used to drive a cab." Just anything to stall while we were shooting. The other thing is, 66 and 67, we're controlling. Those are our lines. And I think 77 there we're controlling. The rest is the real airport. - Everything behind is the real airport. And there's an outtake where someone comes and tries to get in our line. And the Czech AD had to, like... - Mirek. Mirek had to grab them and pull them out of line, which was funny to us. I don't know why everyone laughs when they say "flight from Rome to Cleveland." Cleveland is a major destination. - No, it's crazy. If anyone ever flies to Raleigh-Durham, you can go from Rome to Cleveland. That's my only point. This is incredibly inadvertent and we lucked into it, but as they actually hug and are happy as brother and sister, even though they made out, we really lucked into it, the fact that they both ended up in green, sort of dressed together, as they are twins again. I always thought that was really cool. Nothing we had any control over. You always hear about directors talking about color schemes and stuff. We had no control. This scene-- There was a lot of dialogue with Jenny and Cooper talking. We realized we didn't need any of it. It was just... It was an attempt at flirting, and at a certain point it was like, "No, this entire movie has been the flirt. Let's just do the payoff." And, obviously, get him in there. And there's a weird little thing in there, where it took a little too long for the door to shut. There's a little jump cut in there. That's masked by the sound of the door. - And then we tried that line there, which no one ever liked. It was weird. The first time we put it in, the first time we screened it it got a big laugh and subsequently not a... Something about that stock shot. That has appeared in every movie Montecito has ever made. It's Harvard. - It's Harvard. It's a helicopter shot of Harvard. I believe they used it in Road Trio and Old School and we've used it too, now, as Oberlin. So, that will be in every movie we ever make. And then you get into these scenes and you start having these weird discussions, like... This, by the way, the "Eat Me" shirt, awesome. The "Eat Me" shirt is awesome. And this is also a reshoot. Originally, we had Jacob in his dorm room. It felt very claustrophobic. - Very shuttered. This is actually one of the few things that was shot in the United States. That's Caltech. And most of what happens happened in the other scene, but it just opened it up. I mean, Jenny being there... Although, originally, she was reading a Jackie Collins book. So, we miss that. And then we added this American robot and people either like it or don't like it. I think the problem with this is that people don't remember Cooper hating the robot from the other scene. They just remember Scotty fighting the robot. SO, it's not as funny that Cooper fights the robot here. That's Pat Kilbane as the robot, who's a really funny guy. We used him on Seinfe/d as Bizarro Kramer. He was really funny and it just... unfortunately, I'm not sure... Again, it's a writing problem. But he's just very funny, just trying to still be a mime. This, by the way, it was 110 degrees on this day. No air-conditioning on the set in the middle of summer. And the college we eventually got cleared was Oberlin, which to people who've never heard of Oberlin... Who live in Central Europe. ...looks like "O, Berlin," which they think is some sort of a joke. Yeah, and the only reason we used it, it was literally the only college on earth that we could clear. And, again, as director, things you don't worry about... I remember lots of discussions about when he is using that computer. How is he using it? What is it plugged into? I remember arguing about what bag she's carrying into this scene. Again, there are just days where you get bogged down in things that you have no idea you were ever going to get bogged down in. Colors of walls. Things that just don't matter at the end of the day. But the trouble is, every once in a while, something does make a huge difference. Exactly. - So, you have to obsess over this stuff. I always loved just... The Green Fairy coming back, I thought, was a perfect ending to what is a really strange, perverse fairy tale. When we changed the ending and kind of made it happy all the way through, without the original downside and then the surprise happy ending... it started to-- We began to worry, "Is it all just too pat?" And the Green Fairy just going, "Fuck this," sort of, I don't know, it helps us as writers somehow feeling like we didn't just give in. This is something we always wanted to do. There are a lot of funny scenes that you can see in the deleted scenes, but like Joanna Lumley here... Joanna Lumley, which you can see in its entirety. This is the youth hostel in Amsterdam. She's hilarious. - We wanted to put some of these in, mixed in with the bloopers, and just be able to hear the song one more time. I think people end up really loving it. It's weird. Everyone always would almost get up and then sit. And later, in the airing to the movie, people just knew to just sit there and watch. It also, by putting all the major funny guys in... You get to see Vinnie again. You get to see Robot Man. You get to see Creepy Italian Guy. It reminded anybody that wasn't as big a fan of the Vatican and stuff, reminded you of things earlier that you liked. And that sort of made people leave in a good mood. It shows, "Hey, this was a crazy, wild, fun time." Look, when we shot this, it was a hundred-ring circus: three locations a day, new cast every day, strange country, people that didn't soeak English or spoke seven different languages. And it was unbelievably fun. And that's what this actually... I think this reflects that pretty well. There you go. That's the line we were talking about. You can see that scene. That's our day-one porno shoot. Our day-one porno shoot, where literally on the first take, it's running and running... - Hey, there she is. But running and running and running because we have no idea that one of us is supposed to call, "Cut." That was day one. - I remember that. Our first AD Chris was accustomed to saying, "Action," because he had worked with a couple of actors who directed themselves and they didn't wanna yell, "Action." So, Chris was used to yelling, "Action," so he yelled, "Action," and we shot. And I remember we looked at each other kind of going, "You good? Yeah, I'm good. You good?" And then we suddenly realized that somebody had to say, "Cut." While we're wrapping this all up, I guess we should mention Montecito. That's Jeff with the Hitler Kid, teaching him to walk. Greasing the wheels of the train straight to hell. I was just gonna say, the entire time we were there, we had Danny Goldberg and Jackie Marcus with us as on-set producers, helping out with a lot of things. And then we always had Ivan, Tom Pollock and Joe Medjuck. With Ivan, it was an interesting thing of... We didn't always agree, but it was always interesting because we'd talk about stuff and you'd talk about these kinds of movies and you always are referencing Animal House and Stripes and whatnot. And, of course, he made those. And that was always an amazing, sort of... It was a great... "You know how in Ghostbusters..." Yeah, of course you know. A good consigliere, so to speak.

1:22:35 · jump to transcript →

John Cameron Mitchell

Photography, beautiful shots from the window. And this scene was done afterwards? We reshot the scene because we didn't have much time to do it on the day, and we wanted to do a little rewriting. Also, we had a lot of airplanes going overhead, which whenever Paul had an emotional scene, there was a plane. And we shot this in our friend's Heath...

1:16:30 · jump to transcript →

John Cameron Mitchell

Perfect, because he had cut his hair between principal photography and the reshoots. I can't believe Frank made that look like that was actually a basement. I know. With a little, that's like a little well. Wow, the sound is so good. When Peter's...

1:17:25 · jump to transcript →

John Cameron Mitchell

But Peter, who played the stalker there, he wanted his collar to be post-it yellow. And that was something we added in the reshoot, is to clarify that the Seth... What it was about. He was trying to get Seth so Jamie wouldn't be alone after the suicide. And also giving a purpose to the...

1:18:25 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, it was always, you know, we were wondering how that was going to look and does it explode in just a spray and a splat? Do we see chunks? Actually, a lot of thought goes into just how somebody's head gets cut off. This was a reshoot for lighting-wise. We did Kate's close-ups. We shot actually, I think, the last day of shooting. We did some of those over.

15:58 · jump to transcript →

the whole time through it. There's no way around it. I mean, it is an uncomfortable thing. We actually tried to push the scene till just as far down the schedule as possible to the fact of like, can we please do this when we're doing reshoots? You think that's bad. Try cutting it for the husband of the wife.

37:03 · jump to transcript →

This is all CG, right? And the birds add such a depth to the shot. Yeah. This was a reshoot. Not a reshoot, sorry. A pickup shot. We did all this stuff with Lily right here. I put her... That's actually a shot of her that I stole from the other sequence and then comped it onto a boat. Made it look like she was traveling to the entrance. She actually saw that and, you know, a bit outraged. I wasn't on a boat. How did you put me on a boat? You didn't use me for that shoot?

1:18:12 · jump to transcript →

So obviously, you pretty much immediately know these glasses. Very important. We didn't... This is a pickup shot. These two shots, the glasses on the ground, just to tell you what you can do. Glasses on the ground and this from Loewings, actually shot in a parking lot on a shoot, on a pickup shoot. We had one day of pickup, two days of pickups where we thought we didn't get it quite right. We were missing something. And so we shot this in the parking lot because we were...

31:17 · jump to transcript →

And I was panicking because I was thinking, I'm going to have to reshoot this. If tomorrow there's no snow of this afternoon, I knew in the afternoon we're shooting inside the barn. So we were safe. But the next day, if it didn't snow overnight, we would have to reshoot this. I can't sort of shoot in the snow and next day everything is melted and you're outside.

1:51:39 · jump to transcript →

Malte, my producer, and Mark Nolting, the line producer, had thought of a solution for us because they witnessed what we had shot and they said, this is so beautiful, we can't cut it, so we're going to have to keep it. So within those five hours, remaining hours, they came at wrap and I thought, oh, they're going to come. I saw them coming and I thought, oh, they're going to tell me tomorrow we're going to reshoot this. But in fact...

1:52:33 · jump to transcript →

They will always wait till the weekend to fire you because in their minds they feel that they'll be able to be a transition and the new director will come on a Monday and there'll be no loss of time. So I suggested on the Wednesday, why can't I go and I'll reshoot the scene with Marlon if you don't like it. I mean, it was his first big scene and even though he is such a great man, he's nervous about playing the role.

37:26 · jump to transcript →

I myself fired four of who, in my opinion, were the traitors in my myths. It was sort of like The Godfather. I fired the assistant director. I fired a number of people as a preemptory strike on that Wednesday. And it threw Paramount and everybody in a total dither because, you know, they were going to fire me that weekend. And here I had gone and fired three, four people, and I went right upstairs and I reshot

38:23 · jump to transcript →

Right. Sweet. It's wrong. It's like it should be sexy and he should wind up awkwardly twisted up with her and so I was sick and Art did a reshoot and do you remember this? Yes. Where they like, I don't even remember what happened. They were making out and some sort of physical comedy but it just was really awkward and

42:06 · jump to transcript →

pulled me in and they said, you know, you don't know about football. And I go, no, I don't. And so they planned to reshoot and got the stunt guys and Art and everybody all together and they added a lot of this footage. Flying through the air. Flying and... Although I do love that guy by the sidelines, the blonde guy with the crew cut that goes... Oh, the...

47:49 · jump to transcript →

Hoyt Yeatman

So this was an extremely complicated scene to shoot. Here, we're on the stage doing the actors... ...against rear projection. And now these images here, there was-- It had to be done in a very low-tech way. All the actors were put in white suits and had white makeup on. So we shot them in this room, doing all of this action... ...in their normal wardrobe. And once we had finished shooting the scene, we sent them off... ...where they put on the white suits and the white makeup. They came back and we reshot it... ...on a black stage that duplicated the same office. And now you had these weird images... ...that were run through all kinds of video process... ...to make them look like the way they are... ...reflecting, supposedly, the heat of the bodies. This is in kind of a pre-digital era, too, when we're doing this. We had television effects, but we really didn't have digital technology for film. If I remember right, this was done at Warner Bros... ...in one of their little video studios that the man built... ...who kind of invented 24-frame video for movies.

1:02:38 · jump to transcript →

Hoyt Yeatman

And you didn't have a camera ship in here? In that parking lot? - Yes, here are the pictures. Well, we had it down the street, and then we're-- Now we've got a helicopter following the other helicopter. This is amazing stuff. - It is amazing. This was a kick to edit, trying to figure out which was the best... ...because I had at least six angles on every shot... ...and they were all terrific. Well, we wanted to cover everything. The close-ups that you see here of Malcolm McDowell... ...he was scared to death. We were actually flying up in the air through these traffic patterns... ...and, I mean, it's very scary when you come close to those buildings. And his eyes were wide as saucers. We had to actually go back and reshoot his close-ups for this... ...because he looked so terrified in the first version we did. That's beautiful right there. Gosh. They just did a great job.

1:40:28 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

Another technique that's not used any more to create the size of that set. A hanging miniature that was the previous shot, where you saw the expanse of the inside of this alien virtual universe, which is what you're seeing here, setwise, the cocoon aspect of what these aliens do. A hanging miniature, which is a technique, is a small set piece that hangs in front of the camera and then the full-size set is behind it and the actors are behind it. The illusion is that the set is huge and expanding up and over everyone, when, in fact, the foreground of the set piece is a miniature, the background of the set piece and all the actors is normal size. It's basically a forced-perspective shot. This is my first on-camera line coming up. This was the first day. We started at Acton. We started here. I thought you guys had already been shooting. They had to reshoot. We went back and picked up here. I see. And Dick Bush, the cinematographer, was replaced by Adrian Biddle somewhere in this area at the same time. A few changes were made in the lineup about two weeks in.

1:07:05 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

I heard that some of the studio execs were screening footage back in the States, and they were a little perturbed and asking "Where's the effects shot?" Gale Hurd said "You just saw an effects shot." She was referring to that perspective shot. They were completely fooled by it. They thought nothing had been shot. They thought they were spending huge amounts of money on these sets. They said "You spent so much and there's no miniature." She said "No, that is the miniature." It was a smart move on Cameron's part, to do it that way very quickly in the film, so the studio wasn't worried quite as much about what was going on 5,000 miles away in London. It does make it a bit tricky to shoot, though. If anything goes wrong, you're stuck with it or you have to fix it later but with a reshoot. You can't really fix it later. So that worked out quite well, but with actors and everything there's a lot on the line. Something we've lost sight of over the years is that with this era of filmmaking, not only for live-action but for miniatures, there wasn't much ability to go back and fix something. Now, digitally, you can change an actor's face, you can get rid of wires, do all kinds of tricks, split-screen, take elements and change shots. But at that time you had to plan these things and make it work within a narrow tolerance, otherwise that was it, that's what wound up in the film. IIt reminds me of a stage play. You're doing it live, in a sense. What was on film was it. There was no going back. You could only do it so many times. There was a limited budget to work with and it had to work on film, no matter what.

1:08:47 · jump to transcript →

Gary Goddard

and they didn't want to do a second unit. So when you see shots that would normally be a pickup shot, like that one of the grappler hook grabbing that bucket chicken, I shot that. I mean, every single shot. Normally those would be done by a second unit, be done as pickups later. Sure you were. Taylor? Mmm, good food. Yes, I've never tasted anything like it.

23:42 · jump to transcript →

Gary Goddard

Cannon and I said, look, there's no end to this movie. These guys are battling, and he breaks the staff, and that's as far as we got right there. Okay, now that was actually a pickup shot later, but the last shot, I'm coming down. This we shot, all the follow-up, everything except that insert of the staff breaking. We shot this, we got this. All of this. But now, from about the next shot on, this was shot about two months later. Skeletor.

1:35:26 · jump to transcript →

How do you know this car? Definitely know this car. It's a 1949 Buick Roadmaster, straight eight, fireball eight, only 8,095 production models. Dad lets me drive slow on the driveway, but not on Monday, definitely not on Monday. Who's your dad? Sanford Babbitt. Sanford Babbitt? 10961 Beachcrest Street, Cincinnati, Ohio. That's my address. What is it with this guy? Hey, who's your mother? Eleanor Babbitt. This scene was one of the few scenes we reshot.

19:15 · jump to transcript →

We went back to Cincinnati at the conclusion of principal photography and spent a day picking up a couple of scenes. This was one of the scenes that we can improve upon from the original version. Dustin always said that we reshot the first three weeks of the movie. I kept telling him, actually, we only reshot about, all told, probably about two days.

19:42 · jump to transcript →

And he was a little bit in love with them. That's great. The very beautiful Ione with Mortarboard. And John Mahoney, who we've just got to talk about. Such an amazing actor for a first-time guy to be able to work with. Now, that was a reshoot. It was indeed. Right? I came back from there. I remember that was one thing.

1:33 · jump to transcript →

Right? Didn't we reshoot this? We shot this. We believe that your father operates from a large pool of cash that comes from phony billing, phony patients. We've been investigating him for five years. I loved in the boombox scene, which we can talk about later, I loved that everything...

1:18:36 · jump to transcript →

Will I Be A

And she was the harbinger of the new look. You know, the skull head. That's right. And when they had to reshoot the scenes at the end, she had to wear a skullcap. She wasn't gonna do that again. Right.

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Will I Be A

The American Humane Society was involved. Which ones were those? Not the ones in England. They were on set documenting everything, when we did the reshoots here with the Rottweiler, and having a representative there when the dog's face was shaved, for finger and grip marks. The Society was responsible for insisting on the sedative for the dog, cos Fox just sent over a hammer. It is good to say no animals were hurt in the movie, and then we'd go out and just beat animals all night long. But it wasn't for the movie, it was just for fun. I loved Harold Ramis' comment that no animals were hurt during this movie, but many hundreds were eaten.

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

And by the time we'd put the film together, we wanted to have different information. And so we basically had to get them back to New Zealand and reshoot virtually the entire conversation because what they were saying now was different. We just simply wanted them to convey different information to the audience. Well, part of it was identifying Sauron as giving him an identity separate to

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

You see, people often talk about actors coming back for reshoots, but it's never really reshooting. It's always what you call pick-ups. And this is a great example that we cut the film together and we felt that we somehow needed to... We needed to return to the ring, that Frodo was carrying this ring, and yet our Rivendell sequence that we originally cut hadn't really got any reference to Frodo and the ring. But more importantly, that he wanted to go home. Yeah. That was the critical part of it. Yeah, and that this scene with Elrond and Gandalf is...

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Danny Boyle and Alex Garland

it never felt quite right to me. And in fact, we shot this scene twice, didn't we? Yeah, we reshot a whole section of it. We rebuilt half the shot in the studio later and reshot a section of it, really, to take a slightly different exposition, yeah. I think there's a couple of lines that work. One of them is when Jim starts asking about where are people's parents, and they just say, well, they're dead. And it seems like

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Danny Boyle and Alex Garland

time it, so that when the camera came onto him, he was saying the right words, so that was a real bit of professionalism. That's a scene that was actually shot by a different cameraman, because Anthony wasn't available to do our pick-ups, and we did that as a pick-up later, a kind of sort of reshoot, really. They were shot by this cameraman, Alvin Kuchler, who was very generous. He stepped in because Anthony wasn't available,

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Barry Sonnenfeld

Let me ask you a question. Why did you join MiB? We shot the first month of the movie in New York City... ...because of the impending actors' strike. We got all the New York shooting out of the way... ...So that if there was a long strike, we didn't have to reshoot... ...come back in the winter and shoot Men in Down Coats or something.

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Barry Sonnenfeld

I know what I saw. Tell me what I'm supposed to believe. This is a theme we'll hear throughout the movie as their love theme. I'm a member of a Secret organisation that monitors alien activity on Earth. Ben was an alien. So were his killers. I don't Know why they did it, but I promise I'm gonna find out. Okay. We're back in that diner on West 23rd. Okay. This is actually a reshoot. This is the first two days of shooting. We gave Rosario really long hair and a different outfit. We looked at the dailies and said she didn't look cute. We had made her look unsympathetic and cute... ...SO we Cut her hair and reshot the scene.

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Len Wiseman

Oh, and you weren't here for this whole... Were you very glad, because the other babe was there? Yeah. That helped take some of the pressure off... ...but the-- Well, actually, this whole costume, we had a "wardrobe flaw"... Her whole boob escaping. - ...aS Janet Jackson would say. Poor you. Poor baby. - I rushed in as soon as I heard. Yeah, you're really good like that. How have you done that? That's CG, right? That's CG, which I don't think you've even seen yet. We shot that practically, and it just looked horrendous. It looked like three blind mice kind of popping up. And this was all a reshoot that we did. - Oh, really? Yeah, this was all back in L.A. We had a good time. It was just blood and guts. That's me throwing the paint across the window. Oh, is that you? - Yeah. Can you do a bit, like, when my coat flaps around, you're flapping it? That's the prop guy. - Very hands on. Yeah. What were you thinking right here? - "Is it nearly lunchtime? Should I buff my bottom? Am I gonna worry about my camel toe?" Remember how many people were on camel-toe watch because of that suit? No, it became "CT." I would just yell out, "CT," and, "Okay!" There were four people who made it their mission. This is new. This is a new shot here that's just showing Speedman... ...dreaming about the Olsen twins. And so we had some flashes that were supposed to happen right there. This is in the original. Coming up, there's a section where Viktor takes out some of the implants... ...and you see him unhooking himself from that stuff... ... that we had cut out of the original. This isn't it, right? - Yeah, this is. These shots, though.... These, I did all those in post. None of those shots... We didn't take any of the lights down. lt was something we did as an afterthought... ...and just darkened it to make it look like all the lights went down. It actually worked okay. I was worried I wouldn't catch it. I didn't have my glasses on. I couldn't find the takes to put on the outtake reel, but... There weren't that many, because I'd been practising like crazy. Oh, it didn't show. - Oh, really? Look at that. Yeah, look at that. Look at that now. - I was so proud of that. lf someone throws something at me, I tend to duck and wince. The amount of windowpanes we had to replace in the background.

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Len Wiseman

So be it. Like, this scene right here, this scared me... ...because it had the potential of being really corny... ...having somebody crawl across... - And grab your knee, yeah. I was really happy with that, how that whole thing... The blade coming out. Michael does his own stunt here. What I think is cool is Michael starts out looking so pathetic... ...that you think, "Oh, dear. Poor thing." And then you'd expect the nice thing to come out. That sand was cold. Do you remember they buried hot-water bottles under the sand--? Well, you had hot-water bottles all over. You had them stuffed in your costume. - Because I couldn't wear anything. Other people could wear a thermal vest... ...or an undershirt underneath. I couldn't. The girls always get screwed, I must say. So they were so cute. And there was a sandy place. Scott's got, like, three hot-water bottles under there, buried. And I've got one under my ass. And that's Ildiko's mouth, isn't it? - Yeah. Was I was doing Van Helsing by then? Yeah. That was during the reshoots. The first attempt that we did, we had this blood rig set up... ...and her mouth was blocking the tube. So it just built up in her mouth to where... ...when she actually opened her mouth, it just squirted out... ...and actually, like, hit the perms. It was pretty violent. I should have kept that. You don't mean anything to do with hair? No, it's a whole bladders conversation. Oh, is it? Okay. - Yeah, it goes in that whole file. No, the perms are the support beams and stuff on a stage. Okay. You could stop showing off, because It's nearly over.

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Patrick Tatopoulos

This scene's been compared to the... - You know, that... I'm sorry, that insert helps so much, because the first cut... ...I didn't see that. And just showing those blades, I've noticed now in a few... Just in the theatre, when people are watching, and just by seeing that... ... you'd have few ooh's and aah's on a... Makes a big difference in whether you think he's just being whipped. Or you see those... Just that quick insert. And you know what's happening after that. And we shot that at the end. By the way, we shot the, for we have... You know, If anybody is interested, we shot the movie with a Genesis. And all the reshoot was done with the Red camera.

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Patrick Tatopoulos

He's a consummate actor. He flew all night from Germany... ... from a Valkyrie premiere to come to our premiere. Did he? I didn't realise that. Remember that we had to let him go for two weeks... ...In the middle of the schedule to do... - Valkyrie? Reshoots? - Probably. No, he was going back to do something in England. Oh, yes, he was going-- Yeah. For the Richard Curtis movie. So he went around the world twice in like two weeks. Now this is Bill... This is Viktor biting Sonja. Genetic memories. It's all that visual language we used from Underworld 7 and 2. lt was something we had to kind of keep going. Father, please... I wanted to believe your lies though I knew it could not be true.

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SFX Maestro Christien Tinsley

You can rent out the home that they shot Terrifier 3's torturous sequence here. There was a moment in post-production that we had to come back and do a couple days of additional photography. And we weren't able to use Scott's dad's house. And so they built...

1:47:51 · jump to transcript →

SFX Maestro Christien Tinsley

to these more mangled hand moments. Her opening this box right here, this moment, it's all additional photography. You know, when you watch a movie, you think that they're

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cemented his role. But why he's got an award named after him is he really helped found the Motion Picture Relief Fund for down-and-out old actors. He's also Leslie Nielsen's uncle for trivia fans. I mean, for me, the first time I really noticed him was, of course, in the other MGM horror film, The Mask of Human Chew, where he's in that room that's slowly closing in on you with a spike. Well, that's a famous reshoot, isn't it? Because they decided that it would be scarier if a chubby bloke were trapped in a spike instead of thin Lewis Stone.

17:48 · jump to transcript →

constant reiteration. Now here we're on the sound stage. We're going to go back and forth all through this because they shot the scene originally on the ranch and then must have realized that they didn't have enough closer shots and details. So they brought Mitchum back because he was already working on Stanley Kramer's movie, Not As A Stranger, by then. They said, can we bring you back for one Sunday to reshoot the stuff that we need for that crucial scene outside Lillian's house? So going

1:17:26 · jump to transcript →

in the desert surrounding the plant, and second-unit pickup shots of the car chases were filmed in mid-May. According to Tom Mankiewicz, director Guy Hamilton had a prejudice against American automobiles and delighted in showing them crashing and breaking down. Mankiewicz remembers filming the chase scene. Now, those little ATVs were new, too. They were just about a year old, those little three-wheelers. I guess they're still very popular.

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They didn't see dailies. We saw the dailies. We had a little portable projector, and I'm not sure if we were able to run sound, so we just ran picture dailies just to make sure there were no serious problems or we would have to reshoot something. We'd usually get two or three days at a time and watch them together. Right.

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While he was making this, he had just shot the cowboys, and he actually had to go back and do some reshoots on the cowboys while making this. And that made him not a national treasure, but a national hate figure, because he was the long-haired outlaw who shot John Wayne in the back. And it was actually billed...

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Civic TV is Channel 83. Videodrome was written and produced with the intention of opening in theaters in 1982, so the number 83 was meant to point to the future. However, the film was not completed by the end of 1981 as intended, and reshoots continued well into June 1982. The film was ultimately released in February 1983, which advanced the even more frightening thought that the future is now.

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We did some non-dialogue stuff with a double, and we had to reshoot it because his persona came through in his body, even in wide shots, you couldn't double it. Yeah, the body language, the mime, everything is perfect for him. Yeah, the one double scene we have here, you pointed it out. It was not up to par. Reshoot it. Well, I've been, you know, all throughout Europe doing appearances with Robert at one time or another, and it's always sobering to...

1:30:34 · jump to transcript →

which two they have now violated, by the way. Yes, where the end credits once was scored with a young Zivkov singing, now it blares a jangling pop tune. Where it once had all the P's and R's printed wrong way round to give you a little bit of the Cyrillic flavour, now it's printed in an utterly undistinguished font. Well, they had to reshoot it, I suppose. Couldn't very well leave in a credit for The Boy Zivkov or Magda or Test Your Arm Man, names that mean...

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And the flute mirrors every drop of urine from his penis. Which was six. Six drops. You'd have to reshoot it though, huh? Now we are downtown again. Yeah, the music took on like a more dramatic effect. Here's Grady.

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You said, I want you to take these shirts home and hang on to them in case we need them to do reshoots. And I think what you knew is that if they ever got back to the lockup at Paramount, they'd be gone. Did you get them? I got quite a few of them. I still have them. They're kind of in a safety closet area. Well, after this, they go to Smithsonian. Oh, sure.

1:23:44 · jump to transcript →

Now, what is this, David? What did we do? Did we reshoot that? I can't remember. What is this? You put a beacon on the wall? This is David's car. An electric car. This is actually a miniature, isn't it? On a cart? This is on a cart, and they were different sized lights and carts depending on where we were. Right. And the camera was strapped onto the back of this. This was an actual car wash. And who came up with this idea? If you like it, it was my idea. Oh, you know what? This is from M-Spot. O.J. Simpson was in this?

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Macaulay Culkin

So this, uh.... What's interesting about a lot of this movie is we would always put fake snow down. The foam and stuff. - The foam, and that's really... We had a Wisconsin ski... A bunch of guys who worked for this ski resort in Wisconsin put down snow. But... - That poor statue. Yeah, the statue was a running gag, and this guy... A lot of this movie was made on an extremely small budget. At the time, the picture was at one studio... ...and that studio didn't wanna make the movie, because of a $2-million difference... ...and it went over to Twentieth Century Fox. And we still were... We still made the film for a little above $18 million... ...which at the time was still a small budget. So we had to make things stretch, which we'll talk about through the picture. One of the great things about working with Pesci, I have to say... .IS his improvisational skills were terrific. And it was because of his training with Scorsese that... ...even on a picture like Home Alone, really comes in handy. He's a very funny guy, Joe. - Yeah. And his comedic instincts were really something I'd never seen before. Little snippets in pictures like Raging Bull and Goodfellas. But his ability to improvise was just phenomenal. And then John Heard. I cast John Heard because John Heard was someone I was always a big fan of. He was in this picture... It was called Cutter and Bone. Now it's called Cutter's Way. And his performance should've gotten an Academy Award. I've never seen it. It's Jeff Bridges and John Heard, and he is just amazing in that film. I was a huge fan, and it was always a dream to work with him. He also did this old film called Head Over Heels. And he was kind of a leading man back in his day. He's just a wonderful actor... ...and another guy who didn't really know why he was in this movie. At the time, he was sort of like, "Why am I doing this?" I remember feeling a certain amount of discomfort from him. He was like, "Why do I have to do this? Why am I in this kids' movie?" You know? "I'm a good a--" Understandable. No one really knew what this movie had the potential of becoming. We had always hoped it would be successful, but we never knew. Um.... Pfft. I always knew. You always had an idea. - I always knew. Now, this scene. Do you remember coming in on a Saturday to rehearse this scene? Yeah. - We had to rehearse this because it was so... Which was so chaotic with everybody. We ate so much pizza. I didn't wanna eat lunch. And this is something that was interesting. We... You'll notice that there's a rare shot in the film where... There's your brother. - Yeah, there he is. How are you guys--? He's working now, right? He's doing very well. Oh, yeah. He's doing very good, very well for himself. Un, this is typical of the style of this movie. Not the vomiting, obviously... ...but the separation of actors in certain scenes. Because Macaulay's time was so valuable... ...we needed to shoot Macaulay separately... ...and sometimes other kids as well. So you'll always see... I tried to block sequences where I could sort of keep Macaulay off by himself... ...and keep the other actors in another space... ...so I could shoot people separately. Child labor laws again. - Child labor laws. And we're-- And Kiery had to reshoot the chair in the face, I remember. Oh, yeah. - Like, he had to come back later. He was upset he had to get his hair cut like Fuller again. Oh, he was? - Ha-ha-ha. Well, he-- We made a special, very light rubber chair... ...so when it... - Yeah, that's... Yeah. That's-- I remember that. Catherine O'Hara was someone who I had, uh... ...Just loved her work on Second City TV. - Yeah. I mean, I was, uh... Aside from Saturday Night Live at the time in the '70Os... ...9econd City TV was the-- Sort of the place where you learned about comedy. And for me it was... I was just such a huge fan... ...SO It was, again, a real honor... ...to be able to work with her on both of these films. Yeah, no, she's incredible. Even just the stuff she's doing now. She's still--? Oh, it's great. It's great stuff. Both of his kids are still going to school here. I guess he missed the family.... You got a pretty good cast. Yeah, it's kind of interesting for a film that... But we treated it... The weird thing about this film... ...and the reason I think the film has kind of stood the test of time for a lot of kids... ... IS because we always treated it with respect. We never felt that we were making a movie for kids. We were making a movie for the parents as well. It had a lot of appeal. And you never-- You wanted to... You wanted the photography to have a certain elegance about it... ...and the camera to be moving. And it was really never... So many times today, people try to make kids' movies... ...and they always cheapen them. And we never-- I mean, certainly we got cheap with our jokes. Let's not pretend that we didn't. - Ha-ha-ha. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, it's Three Stooges, you know? - Anything for a laugh. I

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Commentary With Author CG Paul M. Sammon

close to Robitu's arm, was the last shot that was done during production in Houston. And at that point, there was a skeleton crew left, and I remember everyone applauded loudly. Kirsch and his wife then took off and took a drive across country by car to decompress for a couple of weeks, and then we immediately started to shoot in L.A. for pickup shots, and the

1:40:06 · jump to transcript →

I thought actors liked that. To be tortured that way. I think this was our last second unit shot right here. Shot this, what, two months after principal photography? Yeah, the only reshoot. That was it? Mm-hmm.

1:50:23 · jump to transcript →

Tom Tykwer

We had to shoot clouds in different spaces and we reshot even clouds in South Africa to get the right movement into the clouds. And we endlessly processed on the way that helicopter vanishes into the blue and becomes just a pixel and that pixel slowly fades away. It is also very much representing my idea of the film to be something like a 180 degree movement from a person

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

We had to use our computer to recolour his nose because for some reason the lighting that we were using didn't bounce too well off the rubber and it made his nose look black. No, we had nose rot problems. Did you have nose rot? There was a tense week where we were waiting on the verdict from Weta as to whether they could recolourise his nose or we had to reshoot. Right.

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Richard Curtis

This is, in fact, the scene which we reshot, the one which confirmed that it wouldn't work for Laura and Rodrigo. The one which the test audiences begged us not to do. Look at Laura's acting here. I think it would be stupid for anybody to talk now. Just look at her little face.

1:35:00 · jump to transcript →

She learned from the best. Have a good shoot. There's not much of a tailing sequence coming up. Because both of the limos broke down. And I couldn't afford to go back and reshoot.

1:33:31 · jump to transcript →

The discovery of the mother is great. I think it's... Nobody thinks about that we are going to find the mother here. This was very difficult because in the first screenplay it was different. The way that the mother and the kid was encountered, it was a kind of jump. But we decided to reshoot the sequence because we needed to introduce a more emotional weight in this meeting, in this encounter, which is this kind of strange hug, and how now the mother is losing the control and the kid is scared about that. I think it's a transition who implies, you know, the difficulty of this encounter. And how now the mother is a kind of... - It's also important, the use of the sound, no? To build the tension here. I want to come back to talk about Quique Chediak's work. The film was shot in 16mm, most of them. And these locations are really, really difficult to light and to work with. It's strange because it's a 16mm film, but it's not so grainy. And that was one of the reasons we had Chediak. He's really a master in this. Especially because we dealt with a lot of locations and always it's difficult to maintain a style in the movie with these changes. I think Enrique made a fantastic work in terms of using a specific light in every location to convey this feeling about the survivor process.

36:03 · jump to transcript →

Those were actually reshot on a parking lot somewhere where we got the truck and that, because we just, again, it was because of a time thing. We had to finally go to a location where we could shoot before 7. Otherwise, we just were not going to get the shots we needed. And here's the first real big reveal on Robert Joy. I just love what he did here with the Colonel Stevens character. Originally, this character was going to be Garber from Predator 2, but we couldn't get him.

1:11:43 · jump to transcript →

Francis Lawrence and Akiva Goldsman

And it was something interesting to discover. And this moment here was also a little bit of a last minute act. This was, it's not a little bit, it's about as last minute as the last thing we shot, isn't it? In the reshoots. That's true. We shot the element of Willow and Sally here on stage with, I think, days before we were going to

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Roman Coppola

This is a smaller train for the mountains. And we decided this one, the Bengal Lancer, was going to have a tiger theme. So all the guys who had painted our elephants on the Darjeeling Limited train started painting tigers on the Bengal Lancer for us. And remember, while we were shooting this, I think we... The camera was mounted on the side of the train, and we crashed it into a railing. You remember that? Yeah. - And we got stuck. And we actually had to go back. You know, we had to go back and reshoot the shot, in fact. That was the-- One of the few things in the movie that we finished behind schedule. We actually had to do an extra day of work because we crashed into the side of a bridge.

1:26:35 · jump to transcript →

This is where the banana skin could have really applied. This was Nick Cage's idea to do the Adam West-style voice, because we were discussing how Batman hides his... If you're going to go to the full extent of wearing a costume, you would also hide your voice. Nick came up with Adam West, and it was a stroke of genius, although one of the editors, when they saw the rushes, were like, you have to reshoot this scene, this will not work, I can't cut around this, it's just...

44:45 · 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 →

Scott Stewart Jason Blum Brian Kavanaugh-Jones Peter Gvozdas

He knew he didn't need to take it. You can do it. It's your choice. It's your choice. And so you go home and you wrestle with it and you go, damn it, I think he's right. And you come back in and you make the change. It's a more fun way to work. Here was a, you know, when we talked about, Brian mentioned, we came back and we did do some additional photography here and one of the things we had come up with was to try to set a ticking clock

1:13:48 · jump to transcript →

Roman Coppola

Yeah. - [Anderson] Yeah. And then we shot a couple of little other-- Like a few tiny things. A tiny reshoot. - [Jones] L'Enfer. What a crazy project. The documentary about the making of it is just wild.

1:37:49 · jump to transcript →

Joss Whedon

This, again, is a frame you would never have seen in the first movie. This very tight close-up, long-lens thing is a different vernacular, but I never felt it was more effective than it was there. Natasha! Natasha! Now, this is an interesting piece of footage because I wrote this scene... We had a very different scene with the Hulk and Ultron, and it did not play. It was good, but you just... It didn't fit. And I kept saying, "Well, we've got to do something else." So I wrote this scene, and the scene in between the two of them that comes after, and we did it in reshoots. And what's interesting about it is we never actually got them on the same day. And I'll explain more when we see them again.

1:38:21 · jump to transcript →

Francis Lawrence

Learn how to be the missing piece, and they will give you everything. This is a scene that I've always loved. It's kind of a nice, quiet scene, but to get the sense of other Sparrows that have been through the program, that have lived the life a little bit, that are sort of tired, that are a bit desperate. I always found this scene interesting, and it was something we debated about cutting, and we decided to keep in to help establish a little bit of a bond between the two women, and a little bit of the history of Sparrows. Funny enough, this scene was actually lost the first time we shot it. And we thought we might be able to save the data, and we sent it, I think, somewhere in London or something to have the data saved, and it could not be retrieved. And we ended up having to reshoot that scene again. Which is always a bit of a drag, when you feel like you've already done something and you've already done it well, and to have to go back and take another shot at it. You get your card back when you return the key. Any questions? No.

53:37 · jump to transcript →