Reshoots & pickups

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.

59:43 · jump to transcript →

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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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

2:45:59 · jump to transcript →

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

54:22 · jump to transcript →

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...

1:48:38 · jump to transcript →

We're in the French restaurant. You cannot tell by looking at everybody, but it is over 100 degrees in there. They turned off the air conditioning at this restaurant. No one told them to, but they thought they would help us by turning off the air conditioning. And the kids are just sweating. I mean, you can't even... If a take went wrong, we'd have to stop. You couldn't just keep rolling because they're dripping. And we actually had a guy, this poor English actor that we cast, who was actually really funny, who came in and was so hot and sweating so badly that he just couldn't focus. It's in the deleted scenes. You'll see some very funny scenes with a French waiter and some funny French waiter flashbacks. We just had to cut it, 'cause it wasn't... Featuring Jim Morrison and General Patton. The other thing... It'll come up again later, but them putting the food down leads to the food map joke, which will be coming. I'll tell that story later. It's good to-- We'll earmark it. - A little preview. This is the main Prague train station. And our production... - Again Allan and... Allan and Neno dressed it, so that people actually got off the train, a couple of people, and thought they were in Paris 'cause they saw the signs and they were very weirded out 'cause they had gotten on a train in, like, Hungary somewhere and they thought they were in Paris mistakenly. Michelle being a fantastic sport. The first of many indignities that she was forced to suffer. And Coca-Cola being a great sport. This is what shooting in a train station is about. Another one of these, "We are idiots, we don't know, so we'll set a scene in a train station." If you notice in the background... This is a game Alec likes to play: train, no train. Okay. This is my little game in this scene. Behind him, green train. That train is gone in the next shot. - Okay. No train. But who cares about the train, I mean... Train. - Again, the lesson learned... It's my game, I'll play it. - I know, but look at these backgrounds. No train. - These great, deep backgrounds. We are in a train station in Europe. We are not in Vancouver. No train. Train. - Michelle's scream turn is one that... She's just... - She did it fantastically. Different train. - We caught that attitude a little bit from our own little Seinfeld 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 The 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. ...| 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.

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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 Trip 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 Seinfeld 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 speak 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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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

47:50 · jump to transcript →

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...

1:29:22 · jump to transcript →

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

18:43 · jump to transcript →

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,

1:24:17 · jump to transcript →

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.

13:47 · jump to transcript →

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.

22:17 · jump to transcript →

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.

1:14:38 · jump to transcript →

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.

1:54:33 · jump to transcript →

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.

25:55 · jump to transcript →

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.

53:45 · 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

1:32:50 · jump to transcript →

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.

1:02:32 · jump to transcript →

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 →

Andrew Niccol

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.

1:33:35 · 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 →

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

1:05:05 · jump to transcript →

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 →

Might have been that we did a little reshoot, too. Oh, man. Matt's hair is pretty big. Yeah, his hair is bigger there than it is in other parts of the movie, but he wanted to give it a little bit of a... That's a handsome dude, though. He definitely photographs very well. He's got it all going on. He does. And he's also nice. I mean, think of that. Boom! End of story. They hook up the TiVo yet? Uh, no. What? They have digital cable, but... I mean, it's okay. No, no, no. Come on, man. It's not okay. It is not okay. This is somehow a chick-friendly movie, even though you don't see many ladies.

16:40 · jump to transcript →