The screenplay

working out how you came to work with the group of people that this film involves, particularly with Clive Barker, the writer of the film. Yes, so I met Clive in around 1981, 82. A friend of his that had been to university introduced me to him. And we both had a keen interest in films. He was a writer. His books hadn't been published at that time.

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decided, let's work together. And he wrote Underworld, 10 pages. I understand that when you read the Books of Blood, you saw them in galleys before they were even published. Correct. But Underworld isn't actually a story from the Books of Blood, is it? This is an original screenplay. So how did that decision to go with a new original screenplay come about? Well, I guess the reason for that was, you know, he wanted to write something new, but also maybe those stories had already been

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know committed for publishing to a publisher and um i guess it would have been more difficult to uh extract one of those stories with the rights issues and all that oh i see yes so having an original uh screenplay was was a clearer path to production than having to get the rights to one of the stories at the time i think so yeah i think so

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My name is Brian Singer. And I'm Christopher McQuarrie, the writer. I'm the director. And this is the usual suspects. These are the credits. That's my production company, Bad Hat Harry, named after a line in Jaws.

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the foreboding porthole music, is, okay, this was shot in my backyard, not this. This, that's John Ottman's hand and my foot. And we built that little bit in my backyard. Not the ropes, but those two shots. Yeah, and Verbal's supposed to be hiding behind the ropes. That's the idea of the ropes. Some people seem to be confused by that. These ropes are to replace the base of the crane, which is cut out of the script.

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That was cool. Are you sure you brought enough guys? My favorite of the arrests, Benicio del Toro. Yeah, with the little steel drum in there. I was actually adamantly against the casting of Benicio in this film. And if you ever read the script and see the changes that we made because of the character that he created completely from thin air, you'll see that I was totally wrong in my instincts. No, but, uh...

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run into the crowd as they're coming towards us and start punching the women as hard as you can. And he said, well, they'll kill us if we do that. And I said, well, they're going to kill us anyway, but they're going to have to go home with the women and we're just going to have to go to the hospital. And at least you'll steal their victory. You're going to lose, but you can take away their victory. Right. Let me ask you, with the first draft of the script, where the whole thing had that other, the meaning of the scene is different.

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I mean, part of it is that she's sort of hinting. I'm going to assume that people who are listening to this have seen the movie already. And she's sort of hinting at her pregnancy much earlier and much more blatantly than ended up in the film. Yes. And she sort of comes off more, I think, more sort of in a Hollywood way twisted. And I wondered, did that change in the writing or when you started working with Francesca? It changed. Well, it was there in the writing sort of to convey to the reader that she was a horrible woman.

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Mother. Candidate for motherhood. Yeah, that when she says the last line in the film, I want the audience to feel like, oh, that's a happy, oh, that's horrible. And I knew that once a character or an actor came to give that character life, that those things would become unnecessary. She was also much older in the script and the notion of a much younger wife and this sort of strange distance between the two characters started to...

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Tom Tykwer

Hello, my name is Tom Tikva. I'm the director of Heaven, the movie you're about to see. And I will try to guide or lead you a little bit through the making of this film, which has become quite an adventure in my filmmaking career. The screenplay of Heaven reached

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Tom Tykwer

X-Film, the production company that I'm part of in Berlin, in the year 2000, in early 2000. And it was offered to us as a co-production offer by Miramax, who had obtained the rights, I guess, a couple of years earlier. It was a Polish screenplay written by the late filmmaker, famous filmmaker, Krzysztof

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Tom Tykwer

I had been a great fan of Kieslowski's film work for, let's say, half of my life. And I was really surprised to be connected in this way with a project that still was there, although he wasn't among us anymore because he died surprisingly in 1996, aged only 54. And the screenplay, Heaven, was something like

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Ted Tally

And I'm Ted Tally, the screenwriter of this motion picture. Thanks for watching our DVD. I got a call from my agent who said Stacey Snider wanted to send me a script. Stacey called me directly. Stacey is the chairman of Universal for those of you who don't know. It said Red Dragon, and I said, "Red Dragon. Is this "the prequel to Silence of the Lambs?" I was familiar with the book but hadn't read it. At first, I was very insecure and said, "Am I like the 'Go-to' guy on sequels? "Why is she sending this to me? 'Cause no one can mess this one up?" And then, I saw Ted's name on it and said, "This is the guy who wrote Silence of the Lambs, "but didn't write Hannibal. "So, this must be special. "Why are they sending this to me? I'm not a dark guy. "I don't make dark movies. I do comedy." -/ think they sent it because you're cheap. - Exactly. So I read it, and I was completely blown away. Not to blow any smoke up anybody's butt in my presence, but the truth is the script was amazing. I called up Stacey and I said, "I want to do this." She said, "Now you get to meet Dino De Laurentiis." And I said, "Dino De Laurentiis "of Fellini fame?" - Scary thought! So I went to his house and first thing he says to me is, "Why do they like you? Who are you? "I never heard of you. What is Family Man, Rush Hour? I don't know these movies." I said, "Dino, I'm a talented guy. Trust me." And thank God, Ted had seen Family Man and Rush Hour, and his kids or someone in his family was a fan. Brett might not have been an obvious choice but Brett is an incredibly talented director and clearly ready to try something new that he'd never done before. He is a great fan of Hitchcock and of thrillers, and brings a tremendous energy and confidence to his work. I was such a big fan of Silence of the Lambs. You know what I was excited about? Most people asked, "Weren't you scared "of following in those footsteps?" First of all, I had three brilliant directors Michael Mann, Jonathan Demme, and Ridley Scott, who made three movies in the exact genre, but completely different. I was excited about it because, by watching those films, I knew what not to do or what I didn't want to do. I was able to decide on the type of movie that I wanted to make. And it helped me choose the tone of the movie. I realized I wanted to make a movie more like Silence of the Lambs. More Hitchcock-inspired. A movie that scared you by what you didn't see more than what you did see. I've read that the most important single decision you make in directing a movie is tone. - Absolutely. Because it's the direction of the film. It helps you with every choice that you make as far as the wardrobe, the production design, the music. The tone, to me, is really everything. Dante calls it, "The language of the film." We have to integrate what we're seeing now, Kristi Zea's set design with its dark, rich color in Dante's cinematography. The choice is even of the props. The integration of all of that, the wardrobe. It's sort of overlooked by people and it should be something that doesn't call attention to itself. But when all of those elements are integrated... Look at this moment here. You get a much more powerful movie if nothing sticks out. If everything is consistent in tone. Special Agent Graham. What an unexpected pleasure. I'm sorry to bother you again... If you see on the left-hand side over there, a little detail, I found this book of Sigmund Freud's office in, was it Vienna? That's where I kind of modeled Hannibal's office. I modeled the tchotchkes, the details.

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Ted Tally

If you had to design the office of Hannibal Lecter, V.D., what kinds of things were on his desk and on his bookshelf? What curios does he collect? The script suggested some of them. But a great designer like Kristi Zea has a field day with this kind of opportunity. I was very lucky. Once I got the movie officially and I started going after the people who created Silence, I went after Kristi who I'd worked with in Family Man, so I had a prior relationship. I felt I was born to make this movie because ironically, I'd worked with Dante before. Even though he'd done Manhunter, I said, "I'm gonna send you the script. "I know you'll not wanna do it because you've done it before." Dante read it and said, "I want to do this." I said, "Come on, you've done this movie before." He said, "Monet painted the cathedral 13 times, what's the difference? "And this is a totally different movie." I also wanted to help myself with some of the credibility. Get some Academy Award-winning or nominated people aside from Ted who can be a part of this. The script to me, honestly, I'm not saying this 'cause Ted's here, but the script is everything. It allowed me to get the crew that I wanted because of the material, and especially the actors. I basically went after all the actors that everybody said I couldn't get. The first actor I had to get was Anthony Hopkins, and I didn't know this. I thought I was signing on to a Ted Tally script with Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter. But Dino, after he says, "You got the job, Brett," he said, "Go to New York and convince Anthony Hopkins to do the movie." After having already played the part twice, Tony needed a little bit of coaxing to do it the third time. He wanted to be convinced that he could find something new and different in this.

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Ted Tally

I went to New York with Dino, and I was very nervous. This was Tony, Anthony Hopkins. The thing I did know and what I was confident about was the type of movie I wanted to make. Like I said, I went in there knowing the tone of the movie, my approach to the movie, how I wanted to not show any of the gore. I didn't want to make a horror film. I wanted to make a film that was psychological, emotional, and smart. That was what was on the page. And the only scene that Tony had a concern with when I sat with him was this scene right here. Tony was concerned that as originally written, his attack on Graham here was too graphic. By the way, it's an interpretation because 10 directors would direct a scene in 10 different ways and show various degrees of violence. It's about showing the details of the guts falling out of his stomach, or the blood, how much blood to show. And I chose to play it mostly on their faces. Once the attack happens... Here's my little homage to Silence. You see the... - I see the bug. You like that. So I chose to play the violence part of this scene on their faces. I love this book. This is an original. My prop guy, Brad, found this original book from France, Larousse... When I read it, I had no idea what the hell it was. It's the bible of cookbooks. - Yes, I learned that quickly. He found this real old French cookbook. There was a lot of dialogue about how do we sell his moment? It's really just a subliminal thing. It wasn't really supposed to be so pointed where it was like, "Oh, sweetbreads." I thought sweetbreads was brains but it's not. It's actually... Thyroid. -... thymus. I learned so much about anatomy on this film. If you work on a Lecter movie, you learn a lot about cooking. I thought Edward was fantastic. There is a tremendous intensity of performances in this movie. And really a dream cast as Brett already said. If you could have anybody in the world for these parts and be lucky enough to get them. It's pretty much what happened to us. Great actors want to play good characters. They want to play great characters and all of these characters, down to Freddy Lounds, and other smaller roles, were just written so well. They were interesting and dynamic. And these actors were interested in playing this. To convince these actors to do a third in the series, all that went out the window when they read the script. Certainly once they started working. There's our cold opening. I'm very proud of this title sequence because it was actually done two days before we had to lock picture. My editor, Mark Helfrich actually was the brainchild behind this because... You re-shot the journal here in a very interesting way. Initially, this was done in a much more straightforward way with the images very flat against the screen. Yes, a lot of times. Mark is kind of... Everybody on my team, from my AD to my production designer, are filmmakers. Mark is a filmmaker in his own right and he just understands the visuals and storytelling. I love how, you know... But this was written. - Yes, it was. But the way that the camera roams over these pages and when we go in very close and it gets grainy, the camera movement left to right, up and down, is all not scripted, of course. This is something I don't really have the patience for. Mark kind of took this book that he was fascinated by. I think he has a copy of it in his closet at home. He just knew every page, every frame and went with Dante and literally just shot. This is a wonderful opportunity. This kind of title sequence is sort of old-fashioned in a way. But it's a wonderful opportunity for a screenwriter to get information in quickly to cover a lot of ground between the arrest of Lecter and where we are when the movie is going to start. Covering a period of several years, you are doing that without any dialogue just by these images. It's a very useful shorthand. Danny did the same thing that Ted did with the script in this sequence that Mark did with the visuals in this sequence. Danny did the same thing with the music. I think the music here is so fantastic. It's very much like a Bernard Hermann score, which I knew was a big inspiration for Danny. Danny is a big fan of Bernard, and this was his chance. He's done darker scores, but they've had a kind of lightness, or comedic darkness to it. Danny did something here that kind of made people's skin crawl in the theater, like, "You're in for it. "If you're gonna sit through this movie, you'll experience some stuff. "Shit's gonna go down."

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films? One of them was Beast from Haunted Cave that I had made. And one was the picture that was shot back to back with that that Roger had directed called Ski Troop Attack. And then two films that he had done in Puerto Rico, Creature from the Haunted Sea, which was a remake of Beast from Haunted Cave, and The Last Woman on Earth, which was Robert Towne's first screenplay. And also he starred in it.

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I'm thinking about you taking the script to the studio with so little dialogue. How did that whole process happen? Well, there was another script by Will Corey, which they bought. Not Universal, by the way. We were at another studio before. And then I was permitted to, quote, hire somebody to do...

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a slight rewrite, and we wound up writing a new script. Rudy Wurlitzer wrote a completely new script. And so, you know, the gears were in motion, and the thing kept moving on and moving on, and got to the point where we did screen tests and cast actors.

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did the same thing to me, essentially, that they had done to Al Pacino or Marlon Brando. Charlie kept saying, listen, you've got to do it. Give me any terms you want. If you'll do a second Godfather, anything you want. I said, one, no studio involvement, no Bob Evans, nothing to do with it whatsoever, to know what it is or read the script or have any say about anything. Number two, you know, I want a million dollars or whatever the number was. I don't remember now. Whatever was considered a wonderful...

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So we conceived in the script to start in the very old days when there were family feuds and hills and massacres in the land of Sicily. Much of that was based on real stories, and even the death of the boy is from an actual famous photograph of, I think his name was Paolo Ricobono, who was killed and his body was found in exactly that position in a...

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The Godfather Part II, it was a very smooth production. And so unlike the first Godfather, I found that writing the script and producing and then directing a film that was to take place in a Lake Tahoe setting on their estate, LA, Las Vegas, New York, Sicily, Cuba, a tremendous amount of ambitious filmmaking moving and what have you.

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My name is Mark Obrambila, the director of Demolition Man, and welcome to the 4K restoration of the film originally made in 1993. And hey, I'm Daniel Waters, one of the writers, the writer who took an action movie and made it into a silly movie. But I think me and Mark are the people that upheaved the Joe Silver boilerplate. We made it into something very unusual and bizarre, but... With a lot of resistance, actually, as I recall.

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which was in the future, obviously, and it's in San Angeles. So San Diego and Los Angeles merged into one giant metropolis. And Sylvester Stallone is the old school police officer who's in charge of taking down the crime lord, Simon Phoenix, played by Wesley Snipes. Yeah, I think it was the original script was by Peter Lenkoff and it was definitely a solid.

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action futuristic thriller, and this opening scene is definitely of the mold that the original screenplay was in. As you'll see, I kind of came in like green pepper, only three weeks of work, but I made it into something else that I think people enjoy, but this is the pure action part of the movie.

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I think the beginning of the movie was probably the hardest thing, both in terms of conceiving it and writing it, and then when we edited the film, it was really difficult. But everything else seemed simple in comparison. Very early on, though, you knew you wanted something quite lyrical as the very, very opening thing, and you knew very early on that you wanted to open in black. When we did early drafts of the script, we attempted to write the prologue.

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One of the most significant changes from the theatrical version into this extended cut is the way that we introduced the Hobbits and particularly Bilbo Baggins. At the time that we thought, we didn't think we were going to have a prologue and we were going to open the movie with the writing of Bilbo's book and hearing his voice describing Hobbits. Once we decided to go back to the concept of including the prologue and the prologue became seven minutes long,

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It was just a situation where if we did a few of these complicated shots, time-consuming, difficult shots, I thought it would sell the concept of scale for the rest of the film. Now, when Gandalf bangs his head here, that was actually a mistake, that Ian didn't intend to do that. It wasn't in our script. It was something that he did accidentally, and we decided to keep it in the film. Fortunately, he kept acting. He didn't stop. He sold it really well. He never stops. He always keeps going.

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re-edited the sequence because in the original in the book and in the script the tormentors come into the to the toilet and they bully him in there but we thought that when we had edited the film too much violence came too early so it sort of punctured the pressure so we wanted to wait a little

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Yeah. When I wrote the book, this is the starting scene of the book. I'm more like, when I wrote the book, I wanted to kickstart the violence, the violent part of it. So that's actually the first scene in the book. And one of the things we discussed very early on and decided upon as transferring the book into a script was that we would concentrate completely on the love story between Oskar and Eli, and everything that didn't have anything to do with that story would go. And also...

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I could say that. And also, I really love this shot, what happens in the end when Eli sinks down onto his back. It comes later anyway. But because Eli, in my original story, Eli doesn't really feel that kind of remorse. Eli is a more, not evil, but less light character in the written story. But still, when I saw this, because this isn't in the script, Eli sinking down afterwards, I really, really liked it, the way it was portrayed.

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Hey, I'm Fede Alvarez. I'm the director and the writer of this film. Hello, this is Rodos Haguez. I'm the writer. And this is Stephen Lang, and I play the blind man in this film. And we've gathered to a screening of the film with our commentary. It's a bunch of logos, but there's definitely something that I think it's...

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As you get closer to the characters, you realize there's a lot more, you know. Totally. You see it. Don't breathe. I've come to really like the title of this film. Cool. It used to be called Men in the Dark. At the time, I was so wedded to that title. Me too. I mean, Rhoda and I, we love Men in the Dark because it's a name that we stamp on the script when we finish it, but...

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But I guess, you know, I'd like one. If we can pull it off, I think it's good. Yeah, make it more classy. But that was the whole approach of this movie. Like, since day one, it's trying to do this, you know, in a very classy way, not doing anything that was, you know, top-of-the-line CG or visual effects or anything like that, because stuff like that gets old, and a good story, I think, will never get old. Was this script inspired by...

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It gets a laugh. Oh, I never thought it was that funny. I kind of resisted that. I thought it was kind of stupid, but it was in the script, so I shot it. What was great about this movie is that a lot of what you see is the contribution of a lot of different people, not just the screenplay, not just the director, but the actors were instrumental in the way they looked and the way they laughed. Bobby's honking laugh, I believe, started with Jamie Cromwell, who plays his dad.

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Stair diving. It was in the script, but nobody really knew what it was, so we kind of made it up as we went along, and now I feel like it's something that's always existed. And I wonder if in any real college context they do this or have done this ever since, but it looks like fun. What's missing from this scene is when Gable gets a phone call from his secret nerd brother. Well, Gilbert, here's our new home. Can't believe we finally made it.

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and things. Are you kidding, Gilbert? We can put a fridge and a microwave right there. I never noticed Gilbert actually has one of the Skolnick pocket protectors. Well, yeah, because, you know, we both work for my dad. Ah, yeah. Many people don't know this, but Gilbert's original name was Pinsky in the screenplay, but it was changed because there were too many Jewish nerds. The women, too.

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Fred Dekker

I was thrown a life raft by Robert Zemeckis and Dick Donner and Walter Hill and David Giler to do Tales from the Crypt. So I did that for about a year. I wrote a bunch of them and I directed one. But I really wanted to make a feature. And Michelle had taken over at Orion and she thought that this would be a good fit for me. And she initially asked Shane Black and I to write the screenplay.

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Fred Dekker

essentially, you know, homeless people and rebelling at the big corporation. We don't really know them, so I don't know that we're invested in them, and I think that's a mistake that I made. Bringing back ED-209 was not a mistake. That was kind of... No, well, yeah. We kind of had to do that. Now, in terms of the script by Frank Miller, had that already been completed before you came on, and how much involvement...

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Fred Dekker

did you have with Frank at all during the process here? Well, this has to be said because it really affected what this movie was. I was a huge fan of Frank's work in comics at that time, especially The Dark Knight Returns and Batman Year One and Ronan and Hard Boiled. I was just an enormous fan. So the fact that there was an existing script by Frank Miller, I was just thrilled. A lot of people have problems with the cute little...

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I remember Lawton sent a memo to Agee during the script writing stage saying, I know that Mitchum's uneasy about talking to God there in the car, but frankly, I don't know how else to really introduce the character cinematically. Because there never had been a character quite like this in movies. Yeah. And Mitchum's low-key delivery is so perfect because you could read the words as very overheated on the page and he just delivers them cold.

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Now, there's been a lot of controversy about the screenplay, you know, that James Agee, a legend grew, you know, that Agee had turned in a screenplay that was about 400 pages and that it was full of all kinds of incoherent rambles. But fortunately, in recent years, the Agee family has found the actual first draft, which was 293 pages, exactly twice the number of pages of the shooting script, which was 148. Oh, yes.

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Well, before we get away from what you started to say about Agee's script, I wanted to say that we've talked about this, and I think you agree with me. On the one hand, the legend is true that the script was incredibly overlong at 293 pages, but it turns out that it is faithful in spirit and letter to Grubb's novel. It's as if he was writing the world's first miniseries before there was such a thing. Because even the things that he added that weren't in the

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Paul Davis

And then when they came back to the States, Jim actually produced John's first movie, Schlock. And they stayed great friends. And Jim was a great champion for John and for An American Wealth in London because John had already written the script at that point. He wrote it when he was 18 years old while they were making Kelly's Heroes. And sadly, Jim passed away from lung cancer right before An American Wealth in London came out.

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Paul Davis

It's a beautiful score of Elmer Bernstein. There's very little music, scored music, in an American world from London, because it's probably most notable for the use of songs that all have moon in the title. Not something that was anything significant on John Landis' part. He just says that it was a stupid thing that an 18-year-old writing a screenplay does.

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Paul Davis

American wealth in London to Jenny Agata saying that he wanted her to play Nurse Alex Price. But he didn't actually give her the script until he had the money to make it. So I think it was probably around November 1980 that she finally got the script. And she is admittedly not a huge horror fan. And had the script come from somebody else, she would have thought twice about it. Can I be of service, Nurse Price? Dr. Hush? Go about your duties.

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So it was a cross-pollination between the two companies. Now, do you remember how the film was pitched? Because at the time this came out, there were a lot of sort of teen-oriented kind of supernatural movies. You had things like Teen Wolf and My Demon Lover and Teen Witch. Do you remember what the concept was when you came on? It was just a script was just handed to me. There was no pitch. So I read it and liked it.

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And the limo was waiting to take him to the airport as we rushed into his hotel room. And we did a very, very quick audition in which it turned out the two scripts that we had didn't match. They were different versions. And so as the producer was reading, was feeding lines to Bobby, Bobby had to figure out how to adjust them for the script that he had on the run. And it was pretty impressive how effortlessly he did it.

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Now, one of the more interesting things about this cast, not at the time it came out, but later, is the fact the two moms in this movie have a really great connection together. You've got Fanny Flagg, who wrote the novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe, and then you've got Kathy Bates, who starred in the movie version of it. And, of course, Fanny was also one of the people who adapted the screenplay. So just kind of a funny coincidence that they had a huge hit after this together. Yeah, well, oddly enough, Kathy had been our original choice.

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The big daddy, he had all the pieces. He put all the pieces together. And so, you know, he made it whole. And without Erwin, I don't know, you know, well, Marty and I would have done it, but eventually, but who knows. But Erwin really made it comfortable and easy for everybody to do. And as soon as Marty finished The Color of Money, he and I started writing the script. In March, you think this is fun?

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Right around that time, I think it was, 86, all the way through 86 and 87, Nick and I were working on the script. And basically I went through the book, along with Nick, but primarily I started choosing sections. I mean, the book was the book, but now the movie was an entirely different thing, and you have to begin to cull the book for the structure that would make a movie, which is what we did. We both took the book, and he said, come back with a structure of the movie. What's the structure of the movie?

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getting coffee from Marty. They just wanted to be in that world. But I didn't know enough. I just didn't know enough. I didn't know anything. Executive producer, Barbara DeFina. I think the writing of Goodfellas came at a time when he felt that he was going to make a huge contribution and wanted to finally be credited for his work. And in fact, Nick and Marty did write together and would share pages and basically they were a team on that one.

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Paul M. Sammon

And as you'll see, in this futuristic Detroit, it's not a good idea to jack a car. RoboCop 2 was written by Frank Miller. It was his first produced script. And here we have a little taste of the ultraviolence that Frank had done in his very famous mid-'80s comic book, Batman, The Dark Knight Returns.

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Paul M. Sammon

As is the violence. Now, what I find a little disturbing about RoboCop 2 is that Robo 1, with Paul Verhoeven and Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner, who wrote the script, and John Davison, who was the producer of both Robo 1 and Robo 2, had a much sharper take on their satire of then-contemporary society. Robo 2 is a little sloppier in that respect, but again, it was a rushed production. Now, this is an actual Taurus cruiser that...

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Paul M. Sammon

Now, Tommy Noonan goes through a lot of changes in this film's costumes, and interestingly enough, they didn't develop this in the final shooting script, but the idea was that he was not only a very powerful drug dealer, but he was a religious figure. In fact, that first shot you saw him sitting in the dark surrounded by the wall, the actual scripted version had him in a priest costume in an auditorium with 2,000 followers who were on their knees singing hallelujah.

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when I read the screenplay, the very first draft of the screenplay, and this is the Eric Roth screenplay, because there were many screenplays prior to that that were done over many years. I just kept turning the page to see what was gonna happen next. I mean, I had no real desire or compulsion to make a movie about a guy with a low IQ. It seemed to be the right character, and I kept wanting to know what was gonna happen to this character.

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And this strange story, you know, just kept wanting to know what was going to happen. How's this going to end? What was going to happen? And whenever you get a screenplay and that happens, as crippled as it was very early on, you know, that's always a good sign. The Feather always started the movie in the screenplay. It wasn't at the end, though. That we put in later. I mean, in later drafts of the script.

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I always saw Sally in this part. I don't know why. You know, Wendy Feinerman, the producer, suggested her in, like, the first day or first week that I, you know, signed on to do the movie. And it's just like, wow, yeah, Sally. And I sent Sally the script, and I was very worried about it because, you know, she has to play, you know, ultimately Tom. I mean, when you say it, it's not really that way. Say, Sally, why don't you play Tom Hanks' mother?

6:05 · jump to transcript →

I believe in America. America has made my fortune. And I raised my daughter in the American fashion. I gave her freedom, but I taught her neighbor to dishonor her family. The Godfather opening is an interesting situation. I had, of course, written the screenplay of Patton before this movie. And Patton had a very famous, striking opening.

0:51 · jump to transcript →

I was once out in a little cottage I had in Mill Valley writing the opening of The Godfather, working on the script just in the earliest phases. And I wrote maybe three or four pages. And a friend of mine came by, and I asked him to read them. And they started with the wedding and introducing all the characters. And he said to me, gee, Francis, you had such a terrific beginning.

1:20 · jump to transcript →

In contrast to the darkness of the private office was the exterior of the wedding and of course this exterior is where my script originally had begun with a big high shot of the people dancing and coming to the party so really this would have been

6:50 · jump to transcript →

This is Robocop. I'm the director, Paul Verhoeven. This is a stock shot, and I'm the producer, John Davison. And I didn't write anything on this. My name's Ed Neumeier. I'm the writer, along with Michael Miner, who isn't here, so I'll try to represent him. This shot was asked for by Mike Medavoy because he felt that the film needed a little bit establishing in the beginning, so that we added that shot very, very late. It's not in the script, but Medavoy insisted that there had to be something like that.

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although seriously wounded. This whole situation that you see now was based originally, and Ed can tell something about that, about the scene, a massacre that happened in a donut shop, but that we never shot, that we took out of the script, in fact, at a certain moment. Yeah, in the 80s, you had to start action movies with action scenes, so we wanted to shock everybody and have a really awful scene of terror and viciousness, but in the end, we decided to start on a joke.

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I mean, we have to thank really my wife, Martine, who picked up the script from the floor and started to read it and then told me that I was a fucking idiot not to see what was hidden under the surface and what kind of layers were all there that we could use. Actually, I think what she said was, you know, there's a scene where they shoot the guy's arm off and they blow his hand up and Paul immediately got really excited and read the script.

11:46 · jump to transcript →

Buckle aboard, everyone. Buckle up. Spark them up. Drain the glass. Buckle in. Here we go. There are cards. Mm-hmm. On the way. Oh, go ahead. Katie, do you... Go ahead. Katie, do you remember the spaceship in the script?

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Cause I feel like when the movie came out, like suddenly there was a spaceship, a Garbage Pail spaceship. And I was like, what is that? I actually don't remember. I'm gonna have a lot to say about the script versus what came on the screen throughout this process. Like I feel kind of bad for Will because I feel like we're just gonna like take off and he's gonna be trying to get a word in edgewise. But I do not remember a spaceship. And that is not how the script, the script was written by Melinda Palmer.

1:12 · jump to transcript →

And the script was actually, yes, it was about the Garbage Pail Kids and these very, very famous tops-chewing dumb cards that just became like this phenomenon. But it was a very sweet story, actually. And that is what we both signed on to. And there are some parts of that script that unfortunately didn't make it into the final edit, but also didn't make it into the filming process. And I remember that that was a big concern for us at the time.

1:40 · jump to transcript →

This is the Lionsgate logo. I was waiting for the Trimark logo. This is Mark Jones. I'm the writer-director of the first Leprechaun, which I think we're watching. And next to me is... Gabe Barteles. I did the special makeup effects on Leprechaun. And he did a great job, and you're going to see his work, or at least part of his work, through the shadows. Do you remember where this...

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And as you can see, I really didn't want to take ourselves too serious. I really wanted to have not a straight-ahead horror movie, which my first draft of the script that Trimark bought, that was very horrific and no personality in a leprechaun. He was just kind of a killing... There's Gabe's credit. He was just a killing machine that became a monster, and then through rewrites and prepping this thing,

6:54 · jump to transcript →

At a party, after a few drinks, I told him I'm gonna direct a movie and you're gonna do the music and he said, sure, how many times have I heard that? And by next year, I made the movie and I called Kevin and I think his music is terrific and he still works and does great stuff. And those gunshots were not CGI as we do now. Well, there's Michael Prescott, my producing partner who came with me with the script and David Price.

7:46 · jump to transcript →

Because they're selling an image. They're selling it through movies, radio, and television. In the hit show Badge of Honor, the L.A. cops walk on water... I really believe the best way to get the movie greenlit was not to have Arnon read the script. The best way was for us to describe this movie, and most important was to have Curtis describe it, because Curtis was the movie, the movie was Curtis. ...color to the nth degree, and his number one bodyguard...

0:55 · jump to transcript →

original and independent as you could want. I didn't think he wanted an imbalance. For instance, if one of the detectives was George Clooney, the writing would be tilted toward the George Clooney character. But by using these three virtually anonymous actors, he was free.

10:40 · jump to transcript →

that he plays, his persona, really well. So he sort of upped it a little, to my mind. He sort of blew it up a little, but it was right for the guy, you know? It was, hey, here's one of these kind of guys, you know what I mean? Like this. So. The movie premier, Pat Busk. Take care of them right down at Hollywood Station. I'll get the evidence. I first heard about L.A. Confidential through Curtis Hanson, the director. I read the script.

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