Shooting schedule

Now we're getting started on the sex scene, and.... Was it early on in the schedule or no? This is pretty late. - It was toward the end, actually. We felt like it was better for the both of them... ... to, you know. You take a chance some time. To get to know each other a little bit more, you know, to be.... Now, this scene, I gotta say, I have to say. I wanted to do more with it. You know, we had to kind of feel the moment... You got your shot in there at the end. You and I were like: But it was an idea, I mean, to have them... ...carrying on making love on the side of the rock face. On the rock face. I never completely understood where Patrick was going. It's a French thing, though. - Yeah, that's right. That's French lovemaking right there. - That's right.

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

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Originally, I remember, it was gonna be raining... ... during that whole sequence, and we couldn't afford it. So it just rained at the end. It does rain. It does start raining, which is part of the gag. But it was supposed to be pouring rain the entire time, and we just realised... Now, budget-wise, are we--? Am I correct when I say 35? lam, right? Yeah, yeah. - So we're 35. Everybody always asking what if when I was... You know, checking out DVDs, I was always curious... ...at what the budget was. So we're 35 and... What was the first one? - The first one was 23. But that was when the dollar was a lot stronger. So in actual purchasing power... ...wWe really didn't have that much more this time. The dollar was I think at like 94 cents to the euro. And when shot this it was 1.50 to the euro. And what was the second one, 45, 48? The second one was 51. Fifty-one, right. - Yeah. But... - We got a lot for the money. We had fewer shoot days. We had fewer shoot days on this one than we did on the first one. First one, I think we had... What did we have on this, 55? We had like 60 on the first one. That's not fair. What's the deal? Just trying to make it interesting. Make it interesting.

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And we only shot a couple of takes. Scenes like that don't hit the schedule, do they? They don't hit the schedule. Or the call sheet. No, and the studio don't even know. Nobody knows they're there. You've just got to bang them out the day before and then go try and squeeze them in somewhere. Pages are distributed after lunch. Yeah. This was a sequence that we deleted from the theatrical version of the film. And it's actually a sequence in which a couple of stills, a couple of photographic images have appeared in lots of books and magazines. And I'm sure...

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One of the very first things we filmed, this was done at the very beginning of our shooting schedule, so we were all a little bit green and naive, and, you know, it's amazing when you start shooting a movie how awkward things are at the beginning, just from the point of view of directing the movie and getting your head into what you're doing, and I always look upon Weathertop as being one of those scenes, in my mind, that...

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something in which we planned for a long, long time. We knew what we were going into. We had a lot of it planned, but nonetheless, it was a seat of your pants operation, really, that we were revising the script. We were editing the movie as we were going, figuring out ways to improve it all the time. The art department got to the point that they started the movie with lots of sets built and complete, but of course, as the schedule moved on, they had less and less time because sets would have to be torn down

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Andrew Niccol

The unifying element is actually Donald Sutherland, who provides the Colonel's voice. Originally, I hoped to get Donald to play a role on screen, but the shooting schedule just didn't work out. However, he liked the script, so he wanted to participate in some way, and he generously agreed to lend his voice.

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Andrew Niccol

Coming up is the next in the long line of Vitaly's girlfriends. I noticed Jared never had any problems on these shoot days. Cape Town's full of beautiful models since that's where Europe and the US do fashion shoots in the Northern Hemisphere winter. That's a good moment, I think,

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Andrew Niccol

I say we had a very limited shooting schedule in New York. And so when Ava enters the container, it's a different container than the one that Yuri entered. It's actually recreated on a parking lot in South Africa.

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This was kind of a last-minute.... Once things got going, the schedule kept getting tighter and tighter... ...and days were getting chopped, and locations changing and all that... ...we had to, almost on the spot, think of a way to get rid of Kahn. There was this elaborate scene that we storyboarded, just no time to shoot it... ...so I did a little bit of a jack-in-the-box little moment here. I like that it goes completely quiet too. Yeah, that was good. The sound guys over... We mixed this thing in Germany... ...and he showed it to me as an option, like: "What if we just take all the sound out?" It's cool, because when you're in the theatre, everything drops out. It almost sounds like the projector stops.

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I don't think I'm gonna have an experience like this again. I mean, it did feel like, you know, a family... ...and that it was a bit like making a student film... ...where everybody was really passionate. Everybody was. It was like everybody's first... It was my first time playing a part like that... ...and Speedman's, and Brad's first time stunt coordinating. Wasn't it? Yeah, and first time, I think, doing second-unit directing as well. lt was a first time for a lot of people. I think Bruton Jones, my production designer... ...who I had worked with on videos and commercials and things... ...fight there, had not done a feature. And, you know, it was Danny's first... Danny McBride's first screenplay. And it was the first time for a lot of people. It was really special, and it was really, really great. Thank you for being so nice then... ...and such an asshole now that you've gone all Hollywood on me. No, I had, really... Just the support and everything that I had from everybody.... And like I've told you, it's because when you have... ...from the actors and everybody... ...when they're trying to make the best project... ...and they're really as passionate as you... ... you can kind of just put yourself in this bubble with the actors... ...and it helps take away the stress and nightmares you're dealing with... ...with the studio and the schedule and all that stuff. And it was such a great help. Forrest. So everybody, thanks again... ...to all of the 12 of you who are listening to this track... ...and we will see you again. We'll probably see you on Easter... ...because that's probably Mom Wiseman, right? Yes. Thanks, guys. We'll see you again. - Bye.

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Not that cursing. - Still makes me laugh. This kid... I swear, if Nial lived in Los Angeles... - Comedy gold. ...he would be on every sitcom in the world. He's a Star. - Every week, you'd just see him on different sitcoms, playing this exact part. I think he worked, like, six days for us, and I think we probably paid him about $130. It was $166. His character Bert, because we paid him $166, we began to discuss all expenses in terms of Berts as a method of payment. A very expensive dinner might be a Bert. Yeah, or like, "Oh, God, that's going to cost us two Berts." And it was-- One of the great things about shooting in Prague was cheap labor, cheap construction. Later in the movie, we get to the Vatican. Good labor and good construction. Fantastic. - The artisans are unbelievable. Great infrastructure, just great people that make movies. I mean, we put a crew together out of, you know, just really very few people from out of Prague and they were just fantastic. Especially because we'd never done this before. Our background was originally sitcoms. We all worked together on Seinfeld. Also Conan, Saturday Night Live, and so... I'll never forget it. I'm sorry. Bruce, the drummer of the band, has to sit next to Kristin and Matt and they all have to have their shirts off and Bruce says, "I don't know if I want to, because I have a rash." No, he said, "I'm just getting over the shingles." Shingles. That's what he said. He said it in front of Kristin. Kristin was like, "Oh, God, what have I gotten myself into?" I'm like, "He's joking, he's joking. He's a very funny musician." Without shingles, I promise. Actually, I remember we shot Mieke talking in English and in German, and we decided to use the German with the subtitles. We didn't think German would sound sexy or attractive, but she's Jessie. Somehow, when it comes out of Jessica Boehrs's mouth, she sounds sexy. Yeah, she's so warm and charming that even German sounds great. This is Jeff's favorite thing in the entire movie, that stupid jackalope T-shirt, which is not funny, but he swears is a joke. I don't think it's a joke. I just think it brings pleasure to those who see it. To you. - It's really a terrible T-shirt, especially compared to the many good T-shirts. This is actually-- I would almost... This is my favorite scene in the movie. This is the scene where the movie, to me, works the best, where these two guys were just sort of dialed in and their relationship... It helped very much that we shot this scene way toward the back of the shooting schedule. Yeah, if you look at the first bedroom scene where we already were, which is one of my least favorite scenes in the movie... Day three, we did not know where to put the camera. We did not get... We didn't take a wall out that we should have. It would've saved us time. We should've taken a wall out to get a master shot, a shot that allowed everything to happen and the camera to get it. We did not get that shot and got everything in little pieces and just then edited together the little pieces, and it just created... It took the entire day, which it just shouldn't have taken, and in this scene, which is basically a month and a half later, probably, we shot it... - Yeah. ...we knew which wall... We took the front wall out from when Jacob first walks into the room. Got our master shot, a really nice master. I think they were there performance-wise, in terms of their friendship. And, if I may, the jackalope T-shirt... - And the jackalope T-shirt... Also, it's sort of what we learned doing this movie that... The longest we ever shot in one location on this movie was three days, and this was probably the third day we were shooting on this set and we learned how to shoot this set. We definitely learned how to shoot the set. What wall to move and how to shoot it. The larger issue, I think, would be that I think any other... any person who had ever directed would've known, get a master. And so, an excellent lesson learned. - Yeah. I also think the actors were more comfortable with each other, we were a little bit more comfortable, and also we knew the set and we knew how to shoot it a little bit more. And that was one of the hardest things about this movie is, every day, we were shooting one, sometimes two, sometimes three locations, and you didn't have any time to learn each set and learn how to shoot it and what the easiest way to shoot it was, and as soon as you learned, you were done shooting there. - We had a location fall out, a Vatican location sort of fall out, which is how that other bedroom scene got moved up. And the initial schedule was sort of built to accommodate a little bit easier scenes with guest casts, things that maybe weren't as important and then that bedroom scene kind of got moved up and I do think it suffers.

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The other thing I was gonna mention... We're constantly behind in the mentioning. Part of the reason we ended up in Prague and actually ended up with Allan was because of Neno. - Yeah. Neno Pecur, who was Croatian. We hired him as an art director to scout Prague and to scout the real European locales before we knew we were going to Prague. Basically, he would go to Paris and go, "This is what it really does look like." Then he went to Prague and said, "We could do something like this here." And from his pictures, we used some of his actual locations that he took photos of and made the decision to go to Prague. And then Neno has worked with Allan for many years as his art director, and he helped us get Allan. The two of them, their team... They brought Bill... Cimino. Our set decorator. - Cimino. That's right. Just fantastic and along with the guys from Prague. I think it's now time to mention, though, at the robot scene, which was the first time... We've been writers for a long time and you sort of go, "Look, I think we know what this is gonna be. This is gonna be really funny. It's gonna be a slow-motion kung fu fight scene between two people being robots." You write it and it seems funny. There's the old joke about the writer writes "Rome burns," and the director has to realize that. We were on the spot here because it was easy when we wrote it to just hand it off, but now we handed it off to ourselves. Actually, this is one of the things... - At one point, we cut this, actually. At one point... - We cut it from the script. We talked about cutting it. We were afraid we didn't know how to realize it. We just were like, "What is this? This could be bad." Left it in for a table read. - We left it in for the table read. And it got such huge laughs at the table read that we realized, "We gotta at least try and shoot it." We then initiated a worldwide search for a robot man. This is J.P. Manoux, who's an incredibly talented actor. We found him here in Los Angeles. Yeah. We looked at all these mimes... We looked at real French guys. - ...weird acrobats, and French guys whatever, and, of course, a guy from LA who was actually a friend of a friend and was in the Groundlings, of course, ended up being a really good guy. He is just outstanding. - And he came in with this ability... I mean, a lot of what you're seeing, like him laughing and just his attitude as a French guy, was in his audition. We were also very lucky that Scott... - Scott, exactly. ...knew how to robot. I guess Scott grew up watching Shields and Yarnell... No, no. J.P. - Was that J.P.? Scott had an acting teacher... - Who was in the Barney costume. Yeah. - Okay. And we went there on a Saturday to basically work it out. And we had blocked off an entire Saturday. We choreographed the fight with little bits of Enter the Dragon and some Matrix in about... Twenty minutes. - Yeah, like, 20 minutes. And the first time we did it in Our crazy wide shot... because we knew to get a master... the crew laughed, and we were like, "Oh, okay." It was also-- This was pretty early in the schedule. And I think it was maybe the first time the crew thought, "Okay, these guys actually know what they're doing." Like, "This is something we haven't seen." Wrongly, but they thought that. - But they assumed it.

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And it makes you a little like, ooh. I was furious, because they didn't tell me they were taking it. I could have told them that the schedule was being pushed back. And meanwhile, you guys, do you all have hard-ons right now? What's going on? They're not just rosy-lipped, they're flushed, sweating, and their acting in that is highly...

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We had a wonderful mixer too, Laura Hershberg, who works at Skywalker, who did the mix for this, and also mixed Borat. She must have slipped him that wizard sleeve joke. She's seen a lot of asses here. And I love this little transition that John came up with. This is a nice shoot day too, isn't it, Justin? It was.

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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.

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it's amazing and i think from this this point on this is uh this was second unit so brad you want to talk about this oh yeah um i had the uh penis digitally erased right there yes i um first time i ran that scene for len i ran it with a lady in red playing in the background that's right now this was that we this was uh um i think it was right in the middle of the the schedule that and that's that's

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Guys, what's it like shooting for 52 days? What's it like towards the end of the schedule? How rigorous is it? It was pretty nuts because what we would do is we would show up on second unit, talk with the second unit director, go over stuff, go to editorial for a few hours, and then, like, our day would start. And then at the end of the day, when most people would probably want to throw themselves in front of a large bus or something, we would then have to go. We had to do dailies and do visual effects dailies. Yeah, I mean, it was insane. It's quite grueling. I mean, and you don't get the two days off on the weekend.

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working out when the rain starts and trying to cross your fingers and hope that it wasn't going to, you know, Mother Nature wasn't going to ruin a night of shooting because there was nothing else we could shoot. You have these things in the schedule called cover sets that are set up and ready to go as a backup plan. So if you're, you know, if it looks like the weather report says it's going to rain, you go to a cover set. But once you've shot all those scenes out, you don't have those in reserve anymore. So you're...

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Jonathan Lynn

shoot big and difficult scenes a little later on in the schedule when the actors know each other well enough and when the crew will be working together, but we had no choice. Miraculously, we shot this whole scene within a 12-hour period on the first day. And we had rehearsed it first. The actors were just wonderful, remembered everything we'd rehearsed. Whatever. It seems that our dentist friend here knows where Yimmy is. Oh.

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It had all the nuances that he needed. And he would, starting slowly, move through the set with a level of precision. And then this is over a period of weeks and weeks. We didn't do this particular scene until later in the schedule because we knew we needed a lot of preparation for it. And then he would increase his speed

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Of course the score takes off. This is something that Dino said, "You gotta shoot this, Brett." I was gonna leave this out because we didn't need it. Leave out him in his van. - He runs out the next time we see him. This is the only scene I re-shot. I made a mistake when I shot the first scene. Goes to show you the importance of blocking. I shot them all sitting down. There was no urgency. I shot it so soon in the schedule I didn't realize at this time in the movie, at the end of it, you need to have the energy... The only scene that was totally re-shot. - Totally re-shot. You got them overlapping their lines, which they were not doing originally. I got the pace up. I got the energy up. The truth is because this scene is a type of scene that at this point, you want to get to the end. And this is kind of... This scene was originally written in two parts with something else in between. You and Mark ran it together as one scene and made it shorter. He maintains the equipment for tape transfers. Would he have access to people's home videotapes? He has access to every tape that comes through here. Thanks for dinner, and thanks for letting me vent. Look, no problemo. Reba, listen, I Know it's not my place to say this... That's Frank Whaley, who I loved in Pulp Fiction and I'm a fan of. I've seen Swimming with Sharks that he was great in. This is the last character I cast. Yes, he was the last we cast. You had a hard time deciding how much we should like this guy and how much he should be a buffoon. And finally, of course, it was decided he should be a real regular guy. A regular guy trying to sleep with a blind woman. Who just was attracted to her. But not a jerk, not a fool, not somebody that you can just simply, easily dismiss. Again, it's wonderful casting for a very small part. It's a very small part that he made stand out. I don't know if you really felt for him when he got killed. Well, I did. I liked him. I liked the character. I heard some sighs in the audience. He's brash and everything, but he's not without feeling. You see in that scene he's concerned for Reba beyond being attracted to her. I remember calling you and saying, "You think he's sincere here?" I love calling Ted, because Ted, you know... It's very unusual for a screenwriter to be called on his cell phone from the director on set, I don't know if it's happened to me before, maybe once. Ted is my partner. You know, this came from Ted and also Thomas Harris. I went down and saw Thomas because I was worried. I said, "Ralph Fiennes is gonna Say, "What is Dolarhyde thinking here?' I don't know what a killer is thinking." But it was really all in the book. All the answers were there. That's the benefit of having a novel. It's going back and referring to that stuff and staying true to it. It was really helpful. You wandered around in the house while I was asleep, didn't you? What? The other night, did you find something odd? Did you take it and show it to somebody? Did you do that? D? What is it? What's happening? Sit still or he'll hear us! - Who will? He's upstairs.

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I was trying to show you stuff. I remember it. I literally, I think I managed to wake up Frank. And we had to figure out a way to squeeze into the schedule because we're rushing to finish before Christmas. We have to wrap and suddenly there's a new scene to shoot. And I remember it caused everybody a lot of anxiety. But, you know, we managed to squeeze it. And I shot it very simply. I shot it basically in like two shots really. And the guys just did a few takes for us. And we did it in a couple of hours, you know. We shot it and squeezed it in.

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Oh, man. So this is where most of the bleep box stuff came in. And also, unfortunately, it's like because of the schedule we had, you know, poor Korea, you know, some stuff they'd be able to handle.

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maybe like 15 seconds of the continuation of it on another place. But the incredible thing about Charlize's performance is she's able to maintain that same intensity or the same emotion, regardless of whether we filmed it at the beginning of the schedule, the end of the schedule. Sometimes we started at the end of the scene and picked up the beginning of the scene later on. That's very nice.

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That was one of the most difficult sequences in all the film. Yeah. I think this sequence, we took a lot of work in this sequence because it's a very, very intense action moment. In terms, also, of tone, because we also wanted to keep the realism always, but now we are assisting to a very genre-orientated sequence that is dealing with the helicopter in a very spectacular way, the infected, and it's mainly a chase. In a way, this moment is a kind of explosion in terms of tone and in terms... To deliver that these people are in danger and... and the war between the infection and the human beings is so tough, that's why the sequence that we are about to see, it's a clear... It's a war sequence, but with the introduction of the blood and the... and the, kind of, killing, which is, you know... Obviously, Harold Perrineau is not the real pilot in these scenes. We had a fantastic pilot... Yeah, called Marc Wolff. Marc was one of the pilots in the Vietnam War. And... - He's a legend. As we see here, he managed very well this crazy moment with the helicopter spinning around. This is a real helicopter. This is something that we need to say, because we only used special effects in the moment that the infected are killed by the helicopter, but these shots are real. And it was a very, very intense shooting, because we were shooting with two helicopters at the same time. Well, one other thing we have to say is Juan Carlos and I got sick in the helicopter. We vomited over London... many times. This shocking and very gory scene is one of the most polemic sequences in the film because it's breaking the tone of the movie. Now we are not in the realism, we are in something different. It's more surrealism than realism. Absolutely. I think that, in a way, we discovered that... As I mentioned before, the war, the terrible war between the infection and the people, and it's a moment of craziness which is necessary to understand this war. That was an idea we had on the run during the shooting, the idea of the collision between the infected and the helicopter. So, we had to imply and to experiment a lot. It was really difficult with the tightness of the schedule, so we had to work Saturdays and Sundays on this. Amazing work, from not only the CGs, but also the... special effects department.

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identical floors. And we were very lucky with the weather because we basically jogged in and out of sets. You have to remember that the storytelling of this movie takes place over the course of a few days. So your weather had to be very consistent. So when we had weather that matched, we were outside. And when we had weather that didn't, we were inside. And we were lucky in the universe's desire or willingness to accommodate our shooting schedule. Number six. Next candidate for human trials. Hang in there, number six.

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