Structure

James Mangold

Aristotelian terms, and there's an antagonist, and the antagonist opposes the efforts and forward motion of the protagonist. Russell is not the antagonist of this film. In that sense, it's kind of, if you took away all the Western attributes and looked at its structure, it's kind of a buddy film with a struggling rancher and a super criminal somehow tied together on a journey.

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James Mangold

is that he seems to me to be someone with a kind of admirable and unique value structure. Everywhere you turn in the world that we created for the movie is compromise and evil in more masked forms. The railroad, the men who hold the lien on the Evans Ranch, the people enslaving the Chinese to build the tunnels.

22:56 · jump to transcript →

James Mangold

Also with action, it allows you to tie things together, the shooter and what they're firing at. One thing I tend to take a lot of time with in all my films is what you'd call the first act or the introduction of all the characters. And by structural definitions, we're pretty far in the movie, but in a way, it's only really just beginning. And while that might be perhaps for some viewers a struggle, I think the effort we go to to set everyone up in this first act

37:07 · jump to transcript →

which is a little Sicilian, and that music is used in the first movie. So the Godfather Part II had taken upon itself a very ambitious structure, which was that it was going to tell its story in two entirely different time periods, basically going back and forth in a kind of parallel structure between them. And actually, this was an idea before I knew I was making this Godfather Part II.

10:44 · jump to transcript →

Again, the film was photographed by Gordy Willis, and the art direction was by Dean Tavallaris, and so it had the same vivid beauty image and photography that the first Godfather had. Gordy Willis was very rigid about the structure that he wanted, you know, which I think he was correct in doing, and the second film was made in, you know,

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really the same philosophy and structure. It's just that the ease between us was much greater and there was room to express ideas. I didn't feel as I did on the first film, up against this, you know, kind of crotchety school norm that just said it had to be this way. And I think I felt more free with the second Godfather. I was running the production. I pretty much had no one to answer to.

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Darren Aronofsky

Um, and although we're not talking about spirals here, um, we didn't really want to mention it right now to be right in people's faces. We wanted, uh, people just sort of to put it together themselves of what was going on. Then we would start talking about the golden spiral, um, later in the second act. This is the last scene of the first act. Um...

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Darren Aronofsky

the world, the earth. And she's trying to pull him back and pull him in. But he turns away from it and presses return. And immediately he notices that those picks are wrong. And then suddenly Euclid starts to fall apart on him. Blackout. End of the first act.

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Darren Aronofsky

of Euclid. We've been hiding it from the audience and so we wanted to create a little suspense that there was something new going on. It's also our introduction of the drill. The drill sort of, I wanted to sort of place it throughout the film just so the audience would be prepared for the big climax in the third act. So what you're looking at is a very, very simple aluminum frame

19:49 · jump to transcript →

...more convincing just to really commit to the sung-through form... ...and not keep reminding people of naturalistic dialogue. But in doing that, you know, I've relied myself... There were very few films that did that. I mean, I think Tommy, Evita, Umbrellas of Cherbourg... ...there are very few examples of films that have been through sung. Most films stick with this dialogue interspersed with song structure. What pretty hair. What pretty locks you've got there.

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...then that it would have a completely different meaning in the film structure. And she applied a kind of raw devastation to the song... ...that revolutionized her take on it. But it's very much a response to where it's placed in the story... ...and the brutality of what it's a response to. You've got some gore. By Christ, you'll pay for what you've done. I guarantee. I'll make you suffer!

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Rebecca, don't report me, sir. I'll do whatever you may want. Excuse me. Excuse me. Tell me quickly what's the story Who saw what and why and where Let him give a full description Let him answer to Javert The effect it did have on the structure, though, was the scene with Bamatabwa, which is more involved in the musical, and actually we shot a longer version of it. It became...

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explain it rationally, but that's why I think the film does have this psychoanalytic sort of structure, right? It is about revealing these layers and being able to strip them away so that the characters themselves are able to come to terms with what they've experienced. They know what has happened to them, but they haven't fully absorbed the levels at which that's affected them.

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And so the film does have this structure, which is very unusual, where it's peeling away. And that's where the music is essential, because music, like in this theme, which is in a very nascent sort of form, is gradually going to become more explored, right? It's going to go further. And go to the darker places that aren't really suggested here. Right. But I think that that's a really, you know, I mean, if you look at the films...

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before this films like The Adjuster you know again someone who has access to other people's lives someone who's able to kind of make these inventories of what it is they've lost someone who has this at least superficial sort of sense of being able to understand things structure them in that case actually put things back together again but you know is dealing with such inexplicable kind of confusion in his own life

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

We really wanted to create a nice story between Boromir and Aragorn because really from this point on until the end of the film, the relationship between Boromir and Aragorn becomes one of our central pieces of dramatic structure, really. Ironically, one of the first scenes you shot with them together was the last scene that they had together. And the connection was so great and they worked so brilliantly together that we tried...

1:34:41 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

All who look upon her fall under her spell. Introducing Galadriel and the concept of Lothorian was difficult. It was also difficult in terms of the story of the film because it's one of those situations where if you were writing an original screenplay, Lothorian probably wouldn't exist because you'd be wanting to keep the momentum up straight through to the climax. We always regarded Lothorian as being potentially problematical because of the...

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

The Lothlorien sequence was always very difficult for us in the movie because it's a point in the film where you naturally would be wanting to increase the pace and be building up a sense of momentum to head towards the climax of the movie. But obviously the sequence in Lothlorien is very, very significant in the book. It's significant in the movie as well because it's the point that Frodo has to decide whether or not he really is best staying with the Fellowship or leaving, and Galadriel obviously gives him advice.

2:33:53 · jump to transcript →

And how all of this serves to lay up the cut to credits. We were always struggling with where do the credits go? Yes. And once we built this structure and presented it to Tom, we had the credits in a different place. Tom was very happy with the structure and the only note he had was the credits are in the wrong place. He says the credits have to come after a cake. Come after a win. They should come after, you should have a lift when you go into the music. Correct. You want to feel a cheer. And we said, yes, but that's 28 minutes into the movie. I know. Nobody does that. And he said, yeah, but.

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all four of these actors working together, really, really carrying one another through the scene. And then here, this was, boy, this was a challenge to edit. And we knew we had to get into the third act, but we also knew we had to tell this very important story, which is Luther's departure. Luther has to leave the story. This was twofold. One, really wasn't anything for Luther to be doing in the third act of the movie.

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at Ultra HD and 4K and we can review them without having to compromise. Now this was a- And the reason I work with Eddie Hamilton is so I don't have to understand any of that. All that nonsense, but there's people out there who will hear it and enjoy it. Now what were you gonna say about the training? Well, this whole scene was interesting because we had a different setup for the third act. Yes. And we leaned into this slightly different

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These scenes at Los Angeles International Airport were filmed after shooting was completed in Las Vegas. The film unit then shot the climax on an oil rig off the coast of California before returning to Pinewood, where the scene of Bond confronting Blofeld inside Willard White's penthouse was first on the schedule. The attendants who take Bond for a ride are played by Mark Lawrence, about whom we'll hear more later, Sid Haig, and Mike Valenti. The scenes were shot on a single day.

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That's rather than just racing up streets, which is so ordinary, that the only way you can do a car chase is this is something fresh and new. So let's try one in a car park. And we had little models, little dinky toy cars, and laid out what the chase would look like. And off we went from there, and knowing that the climax, what the climax would be. Come in, Larry. Larry? Larry?

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We couldn't get one of those at Vegas, so we had to make do with some smaller machinery. The scenes of Bond inside the pipe were completed back at Pinewood Studios. After seven weeks of filming exterior scenes and location shots, the crew returned to Pinewood to film interiors on Ken Adams' sets. These shots of Bond inside the pipe are reminiscent of the climax of Connery's first James Bond film, Doctor No,

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head that was Michael Lantieri and he is in charge of the hippo so ILM had him doing that and then they also have Scott Farrar doing the computer part and that comes in mostly in the climax and then Stan Winston did the apes so that was kind of the delineation of duties um but Michael Lantieri he had done like you know Jurassic Park kind of things um dinosaurs won an Oscar for it um

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in the climax and it's kind of fast and you know you don't have too much time to spend there um but some of the crystals that they put into the the ceiling and the walls were hundreds of dollars a piece so it was it was quite a an endeavor this so all the amy stuff here really gets me yeah no she's really adorable

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lava from methylcellulose, which I guess is in tons of things, like even milkshakes. I don't know anything about methylcellulose. But that and plastic beads, which I guess kind of gave a bubbly structure to it. And the beads would go wherever the flow went. And it was actually white. So then they controlled the color and made it glow and made it red and different colors in the post-production process.

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He should have a drink with the kid. That's your little Kubrickian. Also, on the sonogram machine, which you'll never see, it says Robin Sarno is the patient's name. Maybe when High Def comes out. I love that the OBGYN chills out in the stirrups after hours. That was my nice little touch, my little point of having a movie filled with prostitutes, you know, the third act filled with prostitutes, and you only see a naked man. Dirty dancing? Oh, this was just...

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is the beginning. This is where we're really entering the second act. And the second act is the theater of imagination. And if you're not willing to participate in the little clues that I'm giving you, the second act is fairly uninvolving because I'm not giving you anything. It's a really strong rewatch in that way because once you get through the film and you understand where it's going and what the film

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that I actually painted myself into some pretty ugly corners in the second act of the film. So there's a lot of essential information that you want to convey, but there's no way to cut to it any quicker. You painted me in a corner. Yeah, I certainly did. And I guess if you're going to, Neil Pollack, who's a director friend of mine. And the interview guy in the beginning. Right, the interview guy at the beginning of the film. Neil spoke to me the day before I

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He's the one that breaks out in hypodermic needles from Nicole's powers, let's say. How would you describe the situation in a film like this where you have two, in a sense you have two villains, don't you? Because you have Savory and Motherskill and they're kind of sort of in cahoots with each other to a degree. Did you feel that that was a strength or a problem in how you deployed the climax of the film? Because you've got two...

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So what kinds of things... I know that we'll talk about the climax when we get to it because I know that was affected by financial and time constraints. But what other kinds of things did you have to drop as a result of the sudden slashing of the budget or your more realistic budget? Well, just a lot of scenes, really. And the way it's shot, I would have liked far more set-ups. Yeah. Yeah.

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ropes in terms of how you would structure a movie narrative i think it was all to do with with him wanting to create a character who's lost and unconnected with the world um and his love for nicole um gives him that connection again yeah well something i noticed in in clive's draft uh reading through it was that um he's afraid a lot of the time as well

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And the shot in on Robo's eye. It's such a neat moment. Because I think Paul was trying to get the eye. He was trying to find his humanity before we revealed the third act's face. And watch this right here. It's so fucking cool. I think I also have to credit Joost Vecano there in making the shot really work, you know, because...

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I mean, otherwise it would have been... It would have been fucked. It would have been a good move. And I think it's a nice move that you finally see in this scene these two people coming together, isn't it? Well, it's a third act scene. Actually, this scene violates a little bit the idea of third act exposition. But, you know, you don't mind it so much. And you really do... I didn't know it then because I was a younger writer. You really do want to see the forces against the hero coming together. Well, I guess we're going to be friends after all.

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Richard. Now this is a oblique joke about Richard Nixon, the poor guy. He gets to be the butt of every joke. But here we go. Now here we go. There's some third act exposition. You're going to need some major firepower.

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And hopefully we'll remember some of that and talk about it. We always shoot an elaborate ending to each movie that never makes it. No, that's always rejected. And you never know that it's not going to make it? You never get a sense of it? We always hope for the best and we hope no one will notice, but... It was almost midnight when I got to my door. I just wanted a glass of vodka... Pretty good structure. You talking about the set or...? Do you still see stuff you want to change?

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I think that Vincent Ludwig was involved in a number of... Again, there was some laughter at that point. No, it's a compelling... There you go. That's pretty funny. Big laugh. Isn't this the part in the second act where you can go have a drink or something? This was another concession break. Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm worried about you. I don't trust you. But there was a very good, faint, you know, physical thing coming up. It's coming up right now. We're in the famous pass-out scene that she does not notice at all. Oh, yes. Done in the background.

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Where were you? Without walking. Oh, so this marks, this scene marks the end of the second act. How do you know that? Because... The small sign on the set that says it. How do you know that, David? How do you know that? This is where she says they're going to be at the baseball game, and then that marks the start of the third act. Launches them into the third act, which is the baseball game? Yeah. And that's the whole third act, the baseball game to the end? Yeah. What have you got? I overheard Ludwig. I couldn't think of anything else. Ludwig is planning to have someone assassinate the queen. Where?

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Film Stephen Prince

Although other characters appear in the dreams, what we mostly have is a dyadic structure involving the encounter between I and the other principal character or groupings of characters like the foxes in this dream or the Hina dolls in the next one. The interesting thing about all of this is its bearing on drama in the Noh theater. Noh plays work in this way. The main characters are a traveler known as the Waki,

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Film Stephen Prince

and the warrior, ghost, or demon that the Waki encounters, who has a story to tell and is known as the Shde. Kurosawa has fashioned his dreams to approximate this structure. The I character is a kind of Waki, and those that he meets are the film's Shde. And like Noh plays, many of these dreams have a lesson or a virtue that they are presenting. Kurosawa has always loved the Noh theater, and it's not surprising that it found its way indirectly into this film.

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Film Stephen Prince

He's already there when we meet him, as a full participant in the action. He is one of the characters who inhabit the strange landscape of this segment, not a visitor to it. This dream then has a different structure than the others, which tend to borrow the dyad of Wacky and Stay from the Noh theater. There's no dyad here, no passages of declamatory dialogue that present a lesson or a moral to the audience.

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Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

Actually, the other thing that this scene does, ironically, is it shocks all the fans of the book. All the people who know the end of this story are now on the edge of the seat, because if we can do that, what the hell else are we about to do? This was originally edited to be continuous after Faramir leaves the hall. So he talks to Denethor, and then we go straight into this. But in rearranging the structure, we put a little bit of a time gap and went to Frodo and Sam on the ledge.

1:28:57 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

how the film was gonna play, and we just wanted to push forward to the climax of the movie on Mount Doom as quickly as we possibly could. The one thing that these wonderful scenes, these beautiful scenes did was emotionally drain you so that by the time you got to the end, you kind of were all emotioned out, weren't you? And the weight of the front of the movie started to crush the end. Well, hopefully, most people that are watching this extended cut will be watching it over two nights, I would hope, and this is like the second night. Yeah.

2:55:24 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

just exclude other plot lines because we felt we wanted to concentrate and tighten up the climax. But this is nice, and this does certainly earn you the moment of them being together at the coronation. It is in the book that their hands meet and hold like that. I think it's fantastic. I think it's really great that Erwin and Faramir, who are two troubled men,

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Francis Lawrence and Akiva Goldsman

It's something that's in the movie but never actually mentioned in the movie anymore. But we liked it. So we like there sort of being architecture even if you didn't really understand it. We also like the idea of juxtaposing that time cover with who he is now. These scenes are what would in another movie typically be your first act, get to know your characters by hearing them talk to other characters' scenes. And here instead, it's all behavior and performance.

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Francis Lawrence and Akiva Goldsman

What am I doing? I'm not gonna let this happen. Let? This isn't up to you. You can't... There's our next scare. And, you know, the scares are built sort of sequentially. And, you know, we're already a ways into the first act, and clearly there have been no monsters. So even though you know you've come to a monster movie,

15:05 · jump to transcript →

Francis Lawrence and Akiva Goldsman

knowing that a lot of this movie was performance. And so Will and Akiva and I really would workshop, and with Alisi too, workshop a lot of this. So it had a structure to it, and Akiva had written it very specifically. And then we went way off track in terms of workshopping and coming up with ideas and different things for people to say and not to say, and who are you looking at and who are you paying attention to, and what are you thinking about, and is it your family, and are you disappointed, and...

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since they're both, he's Kyle 6'1", Luke 6'3", but Kyle's a Krav Maga guy, which is how I got to Krav Maga for Brendan in this film. Krav Maga is an Israeli martial arts system of great brutality and directness, which is what we train Brendan in to fight Jet Li in the third act in the mano a mano sequence.

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break and reform, and this was all very complex algorithms that we did at the Rhythm and Hues, the visual effects company that did all the horses and this chase through Shanghai. The other company was Digital Domain, who did the conversion to Terracotta when the emperor is cursed, and as you'll see, the entire battle sequence in the third act.

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But again, little moments of levity and fun as we're getting all of the loose ends wrapped up from the previous first act of the film and the second act rules being laid out, the goals. This was a good scene.

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This is avuncular, pipe-smoking Gene Herschelt, whose name is immortal because it's read out at the Academy Awards every year. They give a Gene Herschelt Humanitarian Award for somebody in Beverly Hills who's given a lot of time and effort to charitable works as well as the usual backstabbing and crawling that gets you awards in Hollywood. And this is an unusual role for him in this film. He normally played the nice guys in movies. Well, he started out as kind of baddies. He was the Karloff role in the first version of The Climax, which

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If we look at this film again as being entirely about making a fool of Gene Herschel, yeah, and imagine all the other characters are giggling a bit when he gets more and more scared. Exactly. It makes sense. It's like when they say you should watch backwards. Yes, yeah. From the climax and watch it backwards and see actually how clever it is as a piece of construction.

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But it's great. I mean, again, by this point in the film, we're now building towards the climax. We're only into the end of the second act. We've pretty much got all the other stuff out the way now. Yeah, and the climax then goes off in a completely different direction. Absolutely. We've spent all this time and money setting up this vampire scam to get the guy, but they do something else. You know, it's the old... And this, I think, is one of the creepiest moments in it. Well, particularly because they should know that it's not true between the two of them. Yes, that's right. They're acting. I mean, yeah.

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Alan K. Rode

With Hayden in tow, United Artists guaranteed $200,000 to finance the killing, but not a penny more. And of course, their money would come back off the top, just like Marvin Unger's front money in the movie. This scene was shot at the old Hollywood Greyhound bus station at 1409 Vine Street, which is now occupied by a parking structure and a McDonald's.

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Alan K. Rode

near Normandy and Exposition Boulevard, close to the Coliseum, to ask for assistance. I don't think Ted's motto is to protect and serve. This overhead shot tracks DeCourcy's police car from Grand Street as the car turns north from 3rd, heading towards 2nd Avenue. The main aspect that attracted Kubrick and Harris to adapting Clean Break was the structure of the book with its unique,

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Alan K. Rode

non-sequential, non-linear, episodic vignettes to tell the story of the heist. So the killing was filmed copying Lionel White's narrative structure. So everyone was pleased until the film was previewed in Huntington Park.

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Science fiction, of course, already sets up a kind of sensibility of its own. It frees the poetic sensibility to a certain extent because you can play with ideas, some of them completely loony and some of them very reasonable. You know, the metaphorical structure is already built in and the audience will allow things to happen that they'd never allow to happen if they're watching what they consider to be real people doing real things in real time.

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It's a tremendous film in its sense of reality. All those young people were not like actors. They all seemed the real thing. And from a class structure that wasn't unusual, it was not rich, it wasn't desperately put, it was just like a wonderful... I enjoyed it tremendously. As a foreigner, when I was watching it in England, it had a...

33:36 · jump to transcript →

The painter is never finding, oh, that's my masterpiece. That's it, isn't it? Only nature has masterpieces. The rest is, never quite made it. Otherwise it would be complete. Now they had a similar physicality, the fine skin, the bone structure, very fine, very slim.

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What a great nose this man has. He also did a really good job. Obviously none of these people had ever been in front of a camera before. Casting Bruno and Isabelle...? Because of "The Story of Adele H", Isabelle was already a big star, which wasn't true of Bruno... - No, he was a star of the theatre. ...even though he had just done "The American Friend". There were several films that had made him very well known. He wasn't a big international star, but he was already quite important for the European cinema. Did you choose the cast yourself, or was that...? Yes. I decided that myself. And Kinski as we will see. We always knew we would not make the film without Kinski. That makes sense. For Kinski... The strange thing is that even though we haven't seen him yet, you can already feel his presence. The whole film works towards that. You get closer to him. Right, that is the result of the dialogue, images, and the text. We planned how we would work towards that. In total, I believe that Kinski is in the movie for less than 17 minutes runtime. Nevertheless, he dominates it completely. ...in the graves and the undead. That is great dialogue with the undead and... For this I read a lot of the vampire literature of the 18th and 19th century, and then used parts of it. Neither Bram Stoker nor Murnau have that. You have always been interested in liturgy and things like that, right? Maybe that's the result of a traumatizing religious period when I was younger. When I was 14, I converted to Catholicism. Texts like that, liturgies, or very ritualistic things... The ritual itself. All that resonates somewhere in the background in many of my movies. Along the street... The ritualistic and liturgy necessarily are connected with the film structure and the music. Yes. I also noticed that frequently you use references to the music of the Middle Ages... Yes. Without it being spherical. It confuses me... Then I'll just have to walk. It confuses me that you see yourself in connection with the Middle Ages. I see a lot of Biedermeier here. Laurens, this is not the Middle Ages. That would be mistaken. I am fascinated by the Middle Ages where everything that had been valid for centuries... Knightly life, thinking, and behavior... suddenly fell apart and new ways came about. I'm similarly fascinated with the Migration Period where 1,000 years of antiquity were lost. Afterwards, that knowledge was only preserved in monasteries. It was no longer common knowledge. - Ah, I understand. So here we have a Goethe-like person on his way to the monastery. Here you can associate pretty much anything. It has something very gloomy, and it was shot in fast motion. Here we jump... This was built in the Partnachklamm in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. You enter right behind the ski jumps. I absolutely wanted to shoot there because it is such an impressive location. This is also a theme that already appeared in "Aguirre" or with the waterfalls in "Fitzcarraldo". The interesting ritualistic element reminds me of church choirs. Beautifully done by Florian Fricke. This was a so-called choir organ. It wasn't electronic at all. It sounds as if it was half-natural and half-electronic, but it does sound idiosyncratic and weird. It was not easy to shoot here because it is so very narrow. You can see here that there is barely enough space to let someone pass by. And again Jörg did a great job, I think. Yes. Here we jump to the High Tatras. This is a white water on one of the highest mountains of the High Tatras. These landscapes work seamlessly together. My home, Bavaria, and this landscape have something that makes them look interchangeable. Yes.

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Completely unthinkable. Everything is perfect here, the structure, the furniture, the candles. The fireplace we built. The monkey columns were made by Henning von Gierke. Have you ever seen the movie in a sold out theater in Mexico? Was there a murmur when he appears? Yes, there was. - Cries of fear? No, no cries of fear, but silence, absolute silence. Just like us, we also went silent. It makes you be quiet.

32:36 · jump to transcript →

All of this was also shot in Delft. You have to know that this was tricky in Delft at that time. They had had a problem with rats for years and had finally gotten it under control. With difficulty, we obtained a permit to release 11,000 rats. Where you see the water were nets. All manholes, entrances, everything was hermetically sealed. In the back of the frame near a small alley was a wooden wall which was carried out when the rats came to close. Nevertheless, we got into trouble with the population, even though we didn't lose a single rat in Delft. Really? - Yes. Unfortunately, that complicated our lives for a while. This is LU beck. Murnau also shot a scene right in front of these buildings. Oh, this is Lübeck? - That is Lübeck. I was confused because the structure does not match Delft. Granaries in Lübeck, I believe. They still stand today. In Murnau's film you see some bushes. To the left or the right you see the large old trees they've become.

1:07:28 · jump to transcript →

You know, the simple structure of the movie, it just worked for me. The second I read it, I remember saying when I said, I don't know what to do, there's a movie, Revenge of the Nerds. It's going to make $100 million, but it's Revenge of the Nerds. I mean, you could see at the time. You could if you weren't a Fox distribution executive. Right.

1:16:32 · jump to transcript →

I thought it's there. I mean, the structure of just the classic structure of they win, we win, they win, we win. The way that lays out and the introducing of Betty's turn, especially when you added that giving her head is what makes her life turn towards, you know, I mean, the the the nerds. Better way to a woman's heart. You know, it amazes me that you think that.

1:16:59 · jump to transcript →

Tim that you because I wouldn't well it's just the way my mind works I would never have seen a hundred million dollars when I read that script I remember saying those words I said this movie is going to make a hundred million it's going to work and if I can find I don't know if I want to be in it because it's Revenge of the Nerds but the script works I can see that this from first read that the structure of the script worked I mean we made it much better I believe with a lot of the stuff that we came up with through Jeff's supervision thanks

1:17:25 · jump to transcript →

I like to have events just unfold without the audience's expectation of what's coming or what it's leading to. That's what I prefer in all of the arts that I care about, whether it's music. I love, for example, the compositions of Stravinsky, where they're completely unpredictable as to where the rhythms are taking off, the melodic structure, the films that I most

37:33 · jump to transcript →

value. Films like Citizen Kane and All About Eve and The Treasure of Sierra Madre and Paths of Glory and any number of others are films that are unpredictable in their structure. You have no idea where this story is going. You have no idea, for example, in Citizen Kane that the meaning of Rosebud will ever be determined for the audience but not to the characters in the films.

38:03 · jump to transcript →

You want the photography to almost be caught by surprise by what the characters are doing. And so I let that attitude follow me into the cutting room, where I'm improvising not only the structure of scenes, but the order of scenes. I'll very often change the order of one scene or another while the film is telling me what it wants to be in the cutting room.

1:35:53 · jump to transcript →

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?

12:19 · jump to transcript →

And, you know, you had to get rid of a lot of stuff. The book is the book, but a movie is a movie. And so we got rid of all that Army stuff and a whole lot of Henry stuff that was irrelevant. And oddly enough, we both came back with a structure that was so similar that we said, well, this is a structure. We just began blending the scenes, and we locked in each scene structurally to see how it would work. He and I sat in a room in his old office with his...

12:49 · jump to transcript →

What's interesting about that is that there's no climactic scene in the film. That's the climax of the movie. The climax of the movie is stirring the sauce and watching out for a helicopter and going to pick up his brother and Jimmy with his blue terrycloth robe with a cigarette in his mouth saying, those drugs are making your mind into mush. When we closed the door, he started laughing. De Niro and Ray Liotta started laughing because of the way he said it, the way he had that, he just threw in there with the cigarette in his mouth and he looked like some

1:53:53 · jump to transcript →

Tom Tykwer

The strange effect that reading the screenplay on me had was that I completely got lost in it immediately and that I so quickly identified with not only the characters but also its structure and the way it was conceived that I suddenly forgot about everything that I had thought before that this would be something I could never connect with because it was Kieslowski's work and all that.

4:27 · jump to transcript →

Tom Tykwer

It is something like a prison, a prison's iron that comes out of the structure, that geometric structure that is very much in right angles. And if you look at the city map of Turing, you could think for a first split second that this is something like New York. And have these people in the beginning being somehow in this very beautiful town, but somehow locked in, in a...

1:08:06 · jump to transcript →

Tom Tykwer

geographic and topographic structure that is totally over-organized and have them, when they open up and when they start to discover what's deeply and in fact riding them, have them change into a landscape that is much more fluid and much more open, much more inviting to open your mind and the way you look at things. Then to change to Tuscany, which is only like a couple of

1:08:34 · jump to transcript →

The idea to choose District One, Isle of Dogs, as the main place for the new life in the city, is because the vertical structure of that place allows to bring a lot of people and at the same time you can control them, which is, in this process, in this new beginning of the city, is crucial for the militaries to have an area that they can control and they can... they can help these people. It's also the idea that we want to improve something new from the first movie, 28 Days Later, which is a film, well, it's a masterpiece. It's a classic now, and it's really difficult to add and to add new things from this first movie. Our idea was to work in the contrast, no? Because this city is very close to other modern cities in the world, but it is very far from the idea we have of the iconic London. What we like to do in the beginning is to... to bring this city as a character in the first half of the movie, and the second half to work with this iconical and gothic London - Danny Boyle's work in the previous film.

16:46 · jump to transcript →

Again, the work of Chris Gill, the editor, is really, really amazing. We found together all these great ideas, because that wasn't exactly in the structure of the original script. Yeah. The parallel editing is improving a lot the tension of this sequence. And... This sequence was really difficult to shoot. It was made in one day. That was the first day of the premiere of Catherine's play.

42:06 · jump to transcript →

Jane Petrie was the designer... and that was really difficult for her to work in day-for-night. You have to think about the colours, about the luminosity, the brightness of these... of these shots, no? When you shoot in day-for- night, you need to pay attention to costumes, because the technique implies that you need to reduce the light later on, so that's why you can't use, you know, specific colours, and you need to... you need to control these things. And makeup is very important. - Makeup is very important. Here, for example, we don't see Robert Carlyle's eyes, which is really nice. This first appearance of Carlyle, I think is really cool. It... This movie, in this sense, is a kind of chase. These kids are chased by their father now. And, you know, the run away, in terms of the structure, is clear now, because apart from the fact that the soldiers, the militaries, are trying to kill everybody, the infection and the infected are chasing them. Clearly, with the figure of this father infected, now the moment's more difficult in terms of emotion as well.

1:03:43 · jump to transcript →

In real geography. And he is in that helicopter. Yes. That was shot in the helicopter. Those are real French Special Forces who come with the helicopter. Incredible, incredible guys. It's a great box set. You get the helicopter, the French Special Forces. I know, and the helicopter, he couldn't bring all the weight on it because the structure, so he had to keep it just a little off. Yeah, it was weighted for four tons, and I think that helicopter was 14. Yes. And no helicopter had ever landed on that helipad.

50:33 · jump to transcript →

I don't care how many rubber boots you're wearing. And the other thing about the scene that we just went through, it's the exposition that's setting you up for the third act of the movie. We're introducing new stakes yet again. And these scenes are always a challenge. And normally we tend to shoot these scenes in as confined an environment as possible so we can go back and reshoot them and retweak them.

1:42:30 · jump to transcript →

We cut to that shot sooner to show your face. And it was Eddie Hamilton who was like, no, no, no, stay with the helicopter. And that was not our instinct. Our instinct was, boom, how do you get to the shot sooner? And it actually had real impact. And this is one of the lovely discoveries that the teams that begin forming in this third act all came from the necessity of who's where and doing what. And the whole design of the bomb and the doomsday scenario all...

1:52:36 · jump to transcript →

Eng Commentary

Our interview with Marcel Mousty can be heard later in this commentary. The screenwriter explains why Truffaut requested his collaboration and how he was called on to give structure and memorable dialogue to embody Truffaut's novelistic prose. Philippe de Broca, indicated here as one of Truffaut's assistant directors, would later have a successful career in his own right. He would direct King of Hearts, for instance, in 1966.

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Eng Commentary

The fade to black that indicates a night's passage here helps to accentuate the film's sense of structure and rhythm. That rhythm is strengthened by the now familiar shot of Antoine leaving for school the next morning to the chipper melody of Jean Constantin's original music. The snitch or spy whom we've seen watching the boys before now runs into the Doinel's building.

31:07 · jump to transcript →

spill out better that way. And he's, well, whose point of view is it? Gordon was a real purist. I said, well, I don't know. It's my point of view. It's Orson Welles' point of view. You know, you can have camera angles like that. I learned a lot from Gordon. Gordon's concept of structure was, you know, very disciplined. And I learned that from him. And I'll always be grateful. I mention the shot of the oranges because whenever I see it, I always think of Gordon. I'm a little embarrassed. I cut that sequence myself, too. And I deliberately...

44:38 · jump to transcript →

firm ideas about structure and how things should be done. And on the second picture, the second Godfather picture, I think it was much more mutually harmonious and respectful. But, you know, on the first film, I was, like, not really... The crew didn't kind of understand what I was doing there, why I was chosen to be the director. And, you know, the crew, you know, these kind of New York...

1:14:05 · jump to transcript →

And this, of course, is later what the character uses to realize that she can bring Freddy himself back if she holds on to him at the exact moment when she's being awakened. I know. The structure is really impressive. It's great the way it all is plotted out. And it was the key point. It was the story breaker. It was the thing that I could not figure out how to... You know, once you have a guy this powerful who is able to be your killer in a dream, how can you not sooner or later sleep and be at his mercy? And it finally occurred to me...

51:21 · jump to transcript →

See, even a scene like this, to me, shows good structure. You set up the thing of the mother coming in, you reestablish her character, because later you're setting up for her entrance later. Instead of it just her coming in at that time, that's important. That's what makes it weave nicely. I actually ran into this actress in Oregon at a film festival last year. She's not in the business anymore. Do you remember me? I was Johnny Depp's mother.

1:01:45 · jump to transcript →

Judd Nelson

I never did it, either. At this point, too, just where the industry was, there was no video village, so one of my best memories is of John being there. He would just sit behind the camera. He would be sitting on the floor with us, just like the camera operator would be on the floor to get these low angles. He was really there, part of it all. It was great. Was he a good audience? - He definitely was. Yeah. And he was a real audience. He wanted to be moved. In fact, that was a great lesson, to see a director lens his project like that, to be that invested in it. It was cool. It's a tricky thing where you have a director and sometimes it can be, everything you do is great. Like they want you to feel comfortable and they want you to feel like, "Everything you do is great!" But there's a bullshit meter that I think you get as an actor, where you go, "No, it wasn't." And you gotta get that level of trust, where if John says it's good, it's good. Yeah. - That kind of thing. Was he pretty good about that, too? Without telling you, you suck or something. No, that's the thing, you have to be very pragmatic as a director, always aware of the clock, so in lieu of all that, I never felt like he was rushing us. It was just the opposite. I think he would work on your performance with you. It was cool. And he would give us the freedom to try things. He would allow us to know that we maybe tried something that was no good, too. If you did something that was no good, he wouldn't say, "That's not very good." He would look at us and be like, "Yeah, I guess that one wasn't so good." You know what I mean? He would let us find it for ourselves. There's a paternal instinct, I think, that directors need to have. But with him, he felt more like a big brother. He wanted us to shine. He wanted to see us get the best out of it. So, he was never really precious about his words or anything, which I found to be really cool. - It was cool that even after all that rehearsal, even once you get on set, the crew's around, the pressure is on a little bit, like you said, time is a factor, trying to get the day. And he still gave you time, even after all that. You know that classic image of... It was a saying of, I guess, Jack Lemmon's, where he talked about "magic time." John was a director that appreciated that. When the camera's rolling, he was the first audience. He was the guy right there with you, watching as if it was one of your parents in the bleachers or something. So, that was a really cool thing because he was the writer, and, of course, in that sort of paternal spirit, we wanted to impress him, him to be happy with what we were doing. At the same time, it was never any finger pointing. He just guided you through the performance. And he had a great way of, I think, empowering all of us to put our best foot forward. It was cool. His scripts have a lot of heart, and Hughes has a lot of heart. He can hear the truth, I think, and if we did something that had strayed that sounded like that color of truth that he wanted, then it would stay. He also was... I just found him very encouraging. Yeah. - As a person and as a director. And that's like a captain. If the director is the captain of the ship, I would like the captain to be encouraging if we're gonna come upon some high seas or dangerous times. Crunch time, you want the captain to not be treating you like you're something he wants rubbed off the bottom of your shoe. Because I think we would have done anything for him. I think we probably still would. It's interesting, too, because in the structure of the film, it all leads back to these scenes. I guess for everybody it becomes therapy at the end here, where we're all sitting around literally like a group therapy, as is the image of the wide shot. - Yeah, that trust is important. You want your other actors to be alive in the scene. And because this, in real time, came later for us, as it does in the movie, shooting in sequence, you don't have to earn the respect from the people around you. Right. - It's already done. Suddenly, the only redemption that we can find is with each other, and that's the surprise, I think, at this point. Where everyone is peeling away, becoming naked to each other. I think that's part of the reason why it's so important, too, the way they cut this. Emilio is doing the thing, and the camera pans around him, right? And then we go and we get everybody's reaction shot while he's still talking because you guys are going through it, too. - Yeah. He's like this... He's like this mindless machine that I can't even relate to anymore. "Andrew! You've got to be number one! "I won't tolerate any losers in this family. "Your intensity is for shit! Win! Win! Win!" You son of a bitch.

1:10:08 · jump to transcript →

Judd Nelson

Hughes was so ahead of the curve on music. Yeah. He would work with it, he would bring in tapes, he would be doing compilation CDs and tapes on the weekend. Yeah, and he would bring them to us on the set. When there were tapes. Those of you younger... Cassette tapes, yeah. - Don't remember tapes. He had cool-looking ones, even, those metal-looking ones and clear. Very cool. - We're old now. We're past CDs, it's MP3s and stuff now, right? Remember when they invented the wheel? That was incredible. People banged rocks together, and we sang. We made this sometime after World War II, I think. The Great War. - Yeah. But he used to take you guys to concerts and stuff, right, Mike? Yeah, he was cool. Like Judd said, he was really ahead of the curve on music. He was into it. He was aware of Art of Noise, which was this Trevor Horn project. People know their stuff now. So, even with that piece of music, I'm sure he was probably trying to go for that kind of thing. How about the fact that in Sixteen Candles, Molly's got a notebook that says "Psychedelic Furs" on it, and I don't think they had an album out yet. Hughes knew. Well, and Pretty in Pink comes out however long after that. But, yeah. And he wrote to music a lot, too, so a lot of times these sequences, I'm sure he knew that there would be a certain piece of music playing through it. Nowadays, it's funny, you watch shows that are network shows, like Grey's Anatomy, it's so much a part of the formula, where they have these musical interludes that tie things up or bring the audience into the third act. It's interesting, there's a psychology to that, just like editing. It's interesting to see it work. It was cool. I like that. I like that the music stops right on that, too. And now we're done. Here's the bit where you're nice to Carl. Group therapy is done. Right, there's that moment, yeah. Tie it all up. It's great. And that pose right there is now a classic janitor pose. There's the guy on Scrubs. That's Hughes right there. That's great. - There is Mr. Hitchcock. There he is, baby! "Mr. Hitchcock." Mr. Hughes. I like that Ally shows inhuman strength pulling this off.

1:30:47 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

James Horner came up with this music sting here and I always thought it was totally over the top. When I saw the whole film put together with the score, I thought "No, that's what we need." I thought "How can you sting somebody opening their eyes?" But it works. Oh! Mm-hm. She shouldn't have had the bangers and mash. Kill it. Fry it. Come on. What are you doing, Hicks? Bad-ass nasty shot. That's a nasty shot of that thing. That's a good shot of it there getting fried. Gosh. Here they come. I think our chestburster looks a little cooler than the one in the first film. Stan Winston's guys really did a good job on it. John Rosengrant and Shane Mahan. Look who's back. Another one of our problems to solve for this movie was creating the whole army of warrior aliens and being legitimate to the original movie but having to improve on it for movement and for the look of being able to study them. In the original A/ien they were rubber suits and very difficult for the actor to move around in. And yet he was very tall and very skinny. And Jim wanted to do a lot of very interesting moves with the warrior aliens, so we came up with a technique to create the suit that really involved a lot of spandex and pieces on it. And then we designed the set pieces for the aliens to fit into the walls, like the one that is behind him there, so that the camouflage would work. An enormous amount of wirework for all of these stunt alien performers, which required that the alien costumes be extremely user-friendly. This was inspired by the scene in the first film where Dallas is in the air vents and they see the signal moving and get a little freaked, and Veronica Cartwright says "Get outta there" and he makes the wrong move and gets killed. That's one of the most suspenseful scenes in the first film. I took that idea that they're getting these readings that are getting them spooked and then they make some bad moves. Form follows function. This is a perfect example of it. You start with what it is you wanna achieve, and once you have that, you can design it, so the actions and the performance is consistent with what you want in the finished film. Believe it or not, very few people work that way. They just wanna come up with something that's cool, and then you spend hours and hours trying to get it to work for the ultimate film. I happen to agree with Gale. My background is as an actor. I really come from a place where the creatures and the characters are wonderful to look at, but it's always about their performance. We have to figure out how they're gonna be able to act, and create a good performance, or it's a waste. And so that's really always at the top of the priority list when we're creating any creature - what is it gonna do and how is it gonna do it? What he does is create a character, and that's why I think his work is So unique. When you look at a film, you can always tell who's done the creatures, if they actually have a character. Because he creates a character that can act and perform. The whole film builds to this moment, where the power transfers from the authoritarian structure to the individual who takes action. Ripley's not supposed to do anything. She's just there as an observer. We're coming up to a sequence where Sigourney takes control of the APC and this sequence is comprised of live-action shots, but as it comes down this hallway and is banging into pipes and walls and sparking, that's all done in miniature. In some cases, the cameraman - cos the set was mounted at an angle - was on a cart, a wheeled cart, and was rolling backwards as the radio-controlled APC was coming at camera. There was a point when he was just put into free fall, rolling backwards downhill, photographing what was in front of him as he went backwards. Here we go. - This is the shot. This is also miniatures. There was a shot with the full-size when the brakes didn't work, and took out the camera, and luckily it was a remote-operated camera. It was the shot where we were actually crushing an alien warrior, when it broke through. This is the shot, actually, when it took the camera out. Then there's another shot where it takes down an alien.

1:12:00 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

A Iot of the shots of it scuttling along the floor were done on our miniature stage. That shot where it just scuttled by was done right next to the twelfth-scale cargo lock. At the base of the twelfth-scale cargo lock there was a little set there. So Jim would have five or six or seven little setups poked in between our miniatures. We'd fog up the stage and get ready to shoot, but he needed to shoot with no fog, so we'd clear the stage, he'd shoot his thing and then we would continue on. So it was like one giant filmmaking unit but we were doing two or three miniature shots simultaneously and he was doing four or five live-action inserts. A concentrated dose of Aliens filming. It's very hard to see Paul Reiser as such an evil guy, after so many years of his TV series. He used to hate to ride to work with me. I used ride to work with him. And he didn't like it? - Hated it. I was like a real primitive. He's a sophisticated comic. - What were you doing? I was always grunting and groaning. Smoking, burping. - He hated everything about me. What a boring ride that was. You've been carrying this baggage a while. This is a good forum. - Let it rip, baby. It was because of the character he was playing. He's such a prissy, corporate guy in this. It's tough in these kind of movies. Especially when you're young, if you're playing a good guy, you're always hanging with the good guys. You don't trust yourself as an actor to be friendly with the bad guys. "One of the bad guys might wreck my big scene." We were too serious as actors to be able to hang with Paul. He was reading the paper the whole time. It was like I was interrupting if I talked to him. You didn't wanna ride to work with me? I was in a different area. You were right round the corner. You didn't want me with you. - Bullshit. We're yanking these facehuggers around. I called them rubber-chicken facehuggers cos they were these floppy ones. The crawling one had a mechanism inside it. That was shot backwards. We pulled the tail off and shot it backwards. There was a pretty good mechanism built into the ones that are really articulated, but a lot of the time we were just yanking them around on fishing line and doing it in cuts. People probably wonder why I had him shoot the window before he jumped through it. The idea was it's tempered glass. You have to get the crystal structure of the glass to shatter before you can go through it. So this is a bunch of grown people fighting a rubber chicken, basically. But, of course, it's the actors that make the effects real in our minds. Great sequence. I love the red light that he uses in this too. The warning light. That happens in the other sequence too when the aliens are coming through the roof. Look. This is another scene that James Cameron sets up as the family scene. There's just the three of us there as a family, ready for Aven 3. David Fincher did a really good job photographically and so on. I think it's really a well-made film, visually. It's just kind of a slap in the face of the fans who invested in Newt and Hicks and all of those character relationships. I understand the instinct, of course, which is you have to make it your own. I just don't think you should make it your own at the expense of what people like, personally. But everybody's gonna make their own decisions. But I had to change some things and make it my own on my film. And I know that Ridley probably watched it and wasn't pleased with a lot of things. He probably wasn't pleased with the fact that he hadn't made it. But I think it's tough. It's tough to see somebody continue on something that you've started. But then you learn to just get over it because that's the nature of this business. I think the trick to this type of film is you just take it utterly seriously. You don't step outside yourself and try to have fun with it and wink at the audience. You take it absolutely seriously and you don't give the audience a chance to question it. And if the actors can sell it, then it works. This is a distinction. I never got the sense in the first film that the alien had an intelligence that allowed it to manipulate their technology, but I didn't see that necessarily as a barrier here because certainly these creatures have been around longer. The alien in the first film had only been alive for 24 hours. It was still an infant, even though it had grown full size. These aliens have had weeks or months to figure things out. There's no reason why they couldn't figure out the electrical system. Not that they're technological, but the rudimentary stuff. The implication is that they're pretty clever. It's clear by the end of the film that the alien queen knows how to operate an elevator. It's amazing how such a low-tech little device that Jim sets up early on really builds the tension. You don't have to see them. You just see that locator and you realize they're getting closer with a little sound effect. This is one of the first films we worked on that we worked with a video to look at our effects. Prior to that you would shoot a shot and go by your perception at the moment as to whether it worked or not and looking at dailies the next day. You didn't see an instant replay. But on this film we used a video tap and offside video camera on some of the shots to analyze what worked and what didn't. It was fairly expensive to have a video tap camera. In most effects stuff, the cameras used were... These old Mitchell cameras were great but they didn't have video tap. It was an expense a lot of times you couldn't afford. More welding. - Just don't look at it. Look away or you'll be blinded. Weld it but don't look at it. Put your hand there. Don't look at it. Is this where you bite it? - Yeah. Well, pretty soon. I'm gonna keep talking, even if I'm dead.

1:48:04 · jump to transcript →

They were so supportive of us, I think, because the whole cast, I think, just really felt very supportive of the young actors. You know, that was Mac and myself. Just like to point out, I think that's the first act of overt violence, the Garbage Pail Kids. Okay, now it's important to say this, and I'm going to say it. In the original script, all of this stuff that they do,

29:39 · jump to transcript →

So also, we're kid actors. And so the structure of the screenplay is the Bible for us. And our job is to go know your lines, say them correctly, say them on time, be there on time, hit your mark, and provide the emotion that is called for by the screenplay. So the idea of improv, I think, gosh, in some ways, probably still to me, is something that you don't necessarily do because you stick to the script.

1:03:19 · jump to transcript →

is second to none, especially back then. She's great. When you were casting the film, you were saying before how Donovan was such a great archetype for the hero, only to subvert that later on, kill him off, and then now we're left with... It's the old Psycho. ...Mulletron 2000 with Kevin Dillon. It was very purposeful on my part trying to emulate what Hitchcock did in Psycho, which is Janet Leigh's dead at the end of the first act. How did that go over with the studio, though? We were very... This was...

7:18 · jump to transcript →

The audience sees everything in the first act. And not to make it dark and moody and creepy and scary. Because people can see in the dark. You can't scare them from that point on. If you show where everything is and then turn off the lights, then you can scare the audience as well. So you're doing aesthetic exposition. Yeah, exactly. Especially, we just established the bridge in daytime. And here's the tree, here's the thing, and here's the gully. And the can man. And now we're going to see him again at night. And now, oh, we know who this is.

10:55 · jump to transcript →

Setting it into the context of the structure. Maybe in your mind's eye, you think it's all going to play on one close-up, and that's the only thing. So your mind starts to say, oh, they cut away on this line, and that was the important line. I think you just start to be basically neurotic. So if I came in and said I didn't like it, because I think that seems...

42:26 · jump to transcript →

What is it like to act with Mahoney, you guys? I've done two. I keep thinking of, you know, jazz music with everybody in the movie and the whole relationship. But no matter what you throw, you know, you're going to get it back. You still come in on time, on beat. I mean, the scene has got a progression. It's got a structure. But within that, you know, there's nothing I ever did that threw John or Ione. I mean, and actually the...

1:01:05 · jump to transcript →

Alexander Payne

Another visual theme that's in the script and that I wanted to bring out a lot in directing is trash and throwing things away, since that's, in fact, later in the film, the climax of the film or the big turning point. So we establish it early on. And if you watch the film, there's kind of an obsessive use of garbage cans and the theme of people throwing things away. This guy, the janitor, actually was the janitor at our offices in Omaha.

3:06 · jump to transcript →

Alexander Payne

I have special affection for this scene, I guess because I still wash my car this way. Now, the thing about circles and straight lines here, just before the climax of the film, Jim McAllister makes the largest circle. Jim? Jim? Yeah. Walt wants to see you. Okay, thanks.

1:27:17 · jump to transcript →

Commentary With Kathryn Bigelow And Jeff Cronenweth

over my shoulder, and behind me a gravestone caught my eye. And it was a metallic structure in the form of a kind of ribbon, which is meant to be the honor of the red banner, which is quite a high honor. And on it was written in Russian, but it was translated for me, was three words, wife, mother, soldier.

38:47 · jump to transcript →

Commentary With Kathryn Bigelow And Jeff Cronenweth

around at its base, and you see how it's like how ant-like their size is in relation to this giant metallic structure, the submarine. And it really does introduce how formidable a character it is. I mean, most people never have the opportunity to see a submarine out of the water, and it's

44:35 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

But it would be fair to say that it was given the least amount of thought during the writing because there was so much focus on the beginning of the story of how we introduce everybody. Do we spend too long in Hobbiton before they hit the road? How do we get all this incredibly complicated backstory about Isildur and the ring across? Then on the other side of it, we were focusing on the return of the king of wanting to climax the story in a great way of really trying to shape the end of what happens in the third act, Return of the King. And in some respects, this one slipped through the cracks of it.

3:36:27 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

that we couldn't go through that entire Battle of Helm's Deep and with the climax of Frodo and Sam and then go into what was going to basically be a seven or eight minute sequence of returning to Isengard. And the reason why it's not in either the theatrical version or the extended cut is because it is somewhat anticlimactic. It's a much better beginning for a film than it is a climax for a film. And so therefore we made a decision last year when we were cutting the two towers that that entire sequence of the basically...

3:39:16 · jump to transcript →

James McTeigue

That speech, because it's such a muscular piece of writing... ... It needs to be attacked with great kind of gusto and flair. And passion and belief. And so, if that's all there, it's a wonderful introduction to the classic masked man. He just appears and you get that persona very, very clearly and very, very quickly. I would say there's not enough talking in films, nowadays. And, you know, there's not enough use of language. I think that introduction, you know, when he first turns up in the Fingerman Alley... ... throws the Shakespeare out to you, then you get the big alliteration speech. I think it's, like, it's nice to use words. And, you know, he uses them beautifully. I thought it was a cool way, also, to preserve from the graphic novel... ... how each chapter has a V word, which I love that. And I was like, I wish we could've kept that in the movie. But that sort of structure... ... 1S sort of condensed into that crazy use of V's in that speech. The important thing about that speech Is you're never gonna understand it. I mean, you know. But you're gonna understand the intent of it. The performance gives you the intent of what that speech Is. And then Natalie's reply is sort of, you know... ... you're the audience, you know, "Yes, what are you, a crazy person?" V does say that he's a humble vaudevillian veteran. He's an actor. I mean, he is an actor. The character is an actor. He's an actor activist. Or something. Who has been picked up and chucked inside... ...and then experimented on and tortured. Hugo's ability to use his physicality and his voice so expressively.... You're so intrigued by what's going on behind that mask... ...as an actor, as a character, as an audience member... ... that you're always going, okay, is he crying now? Is he happy? Is he angry? And because you're so, sort of, entwined in his emotions... ... you become V. And at the end, everyone is V. Because they've been trying to figure out his emotions... ... you know, everyone's trying to play him at the time... ...because they're trying to figure out what's going on under that mask... ...SO it's an amazing, sort of, engagement tool. And afterwards, you'll return home safely. All right. When you go up on the rooftop and you start hearing the music... ...I wanted you to be able to look out over London... ...and have some recognizable landmarks... ...even though it wasn't true to the direction that we were looking. We went up onto a rooftop nearby. We shot stills at night that we bracketed to get the full range of lighting information. Then we removed a few obvious buildings. The St. Paul's Cathedral stands out, there. It's very obvious. And just added a few extra skyscrapers and so on. Painted all the lights out for much lower levels... ...to sort of fit in with a late-night curfew. The Old Bailey Justice Courts itself is always a miniature... ... whenever we see it in this picture. And that's partly because the real building, if you go there at night is not properly lit... in any way that you'd, you know, really want to do it... ... If you were focusing on it like we were. We also made some slight design changes to the Old Bailey miniature. We changed the, flattened the, sort of dome roof, slightly... ...and enlarged the statue that's at the top... ...because she's quite an important part of the story, there. I still went with building miniatures for all of the intricacy and detail that you get... ... IN a very complex pyrotechnic explosion. To do that with a computer, although aspects of that are feasible now... ... the simulations are hugely complicated. And there are always these little happy accidents... ...and things that you get from doing something for real... ... that you're not... Not totally in your control. Which is a big reason why we do it. How beautiful, is it not?

6:41 · jump to transcript →

Evey

Shit. He must have had a hidden trip on his file at the Finger. But how'd he know it was you? What do we do? I'm a cop. I have to know. I think it was a good choice just to have him sitting there. There's no movement. You're forced to listen to what he's saying. And, you know, he knows that Finch is on the cusp of putting it all together... ...but he needs to, like, tip him over the edge. He just needs to go, "Okay, here's all the chess pieces. Here's how it all fits together and, you know, I needed you, inspector." I really love that writing. I mean, it's exposition. But it's really, really important to know it. And you're also finding out a lot of information about... ...particular members of the government... ...and how they got to where they are now... ...and how corrupt the whole government structure Is. From the point of view of the disguise, I'm in that kind of.... It was like dress-ups, you know? This kind of crazy false nose... ... false beard, you know. All sorts of-- A ridiculous wig. - Hat, fat suit. Fat suit, hat, cane. I was like, "Hey, give me a parrot," you know? "Give me an eye patch." I don't quite have enough here to disguise myself. And also, it was relatively gloomy in that particular space. And so, even with all that on... ... you don't really see the face that much. The only time he's on camera you can't see him. And Rokewood, of course, is a name of one of the group.... One of the conspirators from the original gunpowder plot. You know, when they're looking at the computer screen... ...and they're going ""Rokewood" and "Catesby"... ... they're giving you some of the other conspirators of the gunpowder plot. and then imagine that you and you alone have the cure. But if your ultimate goal is power, how best to use such a weapon? Well, it's at this point in our story that along comes a spider. Here's a man seemingly without a conscience... ... for whom the ends always justify the means. He suggests that their target should not be an enemy of the country... ...but rather, the country itself. Three targets are chosen to maximize the effect of the attack: A school, a tube station and a water-treatment plant. Several hundred die within the first few weeks. Three Waters has, in fact, been contaminated. Authorities are attempting to control its deadly spread. sent destruction through the Underground. Fueled by the media, fear and panic spread quickly... ... fracturing and dividing the country until, at last... ... the true goal comes into view. Before the St. Mary's crises... ...10 one would've predicted the results of the election that year. No one. And then not long after the election, lo and behold, a miracle. Some believed it was the work of God himself. But it was a pharmaceutical company controlled by certain party members... ... that made them all obscenely rich. A year later, several extremists are tried, found guilty and executed... ...While a memorial is built to canonize their victims. But the end result, the true genius of the plan, was the fear. Fear became the ultimate tool of this government. Through it, our politician was ultimately appointed... ...to the newly created position of high chancellor. The rest, as they say, is history. Can you prove any of this? - Why do you think I'm still alive? All right. We'd like to take you into protective custody, Mr. Rookwood. I'm sure you would. But if you want that recording, you'll do what I tell you to do. Put Creedy under 24-hour surveillance. When I feel safe he can't pick his nose without you knowing... . I'll contact you again. Till then, cheerio. Rookwood... ...Why didn't you come forward before? What were you waiting for? Well, for you, inspector. I needed you.

1:31:55 · jump to transcript →

So the story is still unfolding as you're watching this. You know, that whole structure is that wooden structure there that we built. So there's... This was used to sort of get rid of the rest of the team so that Ethan could sort of have the stage in a way. There's the shot where you know where you are. Yeah, you just give a little geography there. Boom. That was fun sliding. That was good. That was fun. And then all of a sudden you see the chopper there. Boom.

1:05:10 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, with that helicopter that he's got. Isn't that nice? Ethan, get in. We don't want to use force here. You know we will. Ethan, get in. Tell me you came here. I just like how your structure, you know. Just when this thing is happening, it's like, you know. And reading the script, it was a real page turner. That's where it is. Again, I love your running here. It became this sort of theme in the movie, inadvertently, that Ethan, you know...

1:12:37 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, this is a good... It's a very Hitchcockian way to design the structure of the scene. Now let's see.

1:34:43 · jump to transcript →

Since you talked about a lot of people who worked with you in the movie and Dennis Magnusson was the one who helped me out in the final versions of the script with the structure and so on and did that very well. So, Dennis Magnusson. He's not mentioned very often. Here is an idea we tried to... That's really one thing I'm not so happy about. The background turning red and then black again. I think it's too...

1:51:26 · jump to transcript →

Wes Anderson

In this movie, there are two of your costars-- You play an attorney. You're married to Frances McDormand. That was my first casting thought of this movie was, "Boy, I would like to have Bill and Fran together, to have them married in this story." And the other interesting relationship I liked was Bill and Bruce Willis, who plays Captain Sharp. Maybe, Bill, you could talk about these two collaborators. Well, the scenes with Frances were... that was like dancing. That was like dancing at night after a few glasses of champagne. It was really-- We were pleasing each other and moving together and doing things effortlessly and exchanging, matching each other's energy and progressions. I think the scene I did, the bed scene I did with Frances, where we're in separate single beds, was one of my favorite scenes I've ever done in the movies. I really enjoyed it. I could have done it all day long. So we just kept doing it. I don't think anyone wanted it to stop. It was really, really a delight. She's really, really talented. Now, with Bruce, that was my first time working with Bruce, although I have some history with Bruce, knowing him. And the first timers in all of Wes's movies have a difficulty with the sort of precision, the insistence on a very specific script, you know. And it's a hard thing to wrap your head around. And Bruce is a kind of a natural, he doesn't necessarily, in most of his movies, he just sort of lets it go, he feels a certain way and he lets it go. Precision dialogue was never something that was too demanded because it wasn't his natural way, and he was able to do it in his own words most of the time. So it was a little different for Bruce doing that in Wes's because it's sort of-- It's very mathematical. It doesn't bounce the same way. So he needs it to be a certain way, and you have to really get on yourself to get the lines right. And there are tongue twisters. There's lots and lots of tongue twisters that are hard to say. I just remember being in a car and doing some car scenes, and just enjoying the heck out of it and saying, "Let's do some more of this." We did many, many scenes of it. Many, many takes. And it was always interesting. I think we were both enjoying it. I really enjoyed being on the other side, you know, just hearing him go. And he has his own funny timing that's, you know, unique. And it was fun to play. "Okay, let's see." And we did just wonderful stuff. He's really wonderful. But I really had fun with it. I really enjoyed it. And when people are giving, you're just like, "Okay, I like that. Try this one." And we just kept throwing them at each other and really having a good time. I've worked with him again since. We really had a wonderful time working on Moonrise Kingdom. And I think I told him when I saw the film that when I saw the ending shot, the climax shot on the bell tower, I laughed. That was the biggest, hardest laugh I've had in movie history. That's the biggest one I've ever seen. It made me laugh so hard when I saw that. Bruce holding on to the kid. It really killed me.

35:14 · jump to transcript →

Sam

Well, it's one of my favorites, if not my favorite. It's just a spectacular film. And it's sort of what I would aspire to make if I could make a movie like that. I can't remember at this second what the heck I was thinking about in relation to Red Beard. And this-- Oh, we were talking about emotional things that were-- The thing about Red Beard that's so wonderful is the plot is very straightforward. But along the way, these sort of... These sort of little, you know, rabbit snares are set along, these little things are set along the side of the road. And there's a kind of a rhythm to the plot where your internal clock, you know, goes off and says, "Well, it's time for the climax of the movie now." But that's not what happens in this film. What happens instead are that all these sort of subplots, these little sort of traps, these little tricks that are set up along the way, they all go off at once. They all burst into flower at once, one after another, I should say. And there is this emotional, I mean, just a drubbing that you get. You just get just punched in the solar plexus, just repeatedly for several minutes, for like a whole reel that you're not-- You didn't see it coming. You sort of didn't see it coming. And it pounds you because the plot has been so straightforward and clean that your intelligence is elevated and you're available for this emotion that comes all at once, and I think that... That that movie Rushmore had a similar kind of construct, in that it seems like, "Okay, now we're gonna do this stuff." A lot of action has happened, you know, there's been this struggle between the man and the young man and the girl, and you think it's all gonna go off, and then a whole bunch of other things happened.

42:34 · jump to transcript →

and be able to just have that still be alive in some form. When I was growing up, DVD commentaries and such were kind of their own form of film school, really, and get to see why things were cut out and why certain choices were made. And often, and so that's something that's a bit more layered throughout this structure, you know, and it's prepped by that opening scene.

3:27 · jump to transcript →

You can, you know, replace visuals, replace anything, but you can't replace a feeling. And that ultimately, as corny as it may sound, that, you know, that love conquers all. And that, you know, that that's too powerful to overwrite. And so that's something that's a bit more layered throughout this structure, you know, and it's prepped by that opening scene.

1:25:07 · jump to transcript →

Scott Stewart Jason Blum Brian Kavanaugh-Jones Peter Gvozdas

And with Josh Hamilton, the qualities that I was looking for in a Daniel was somebody who, in the third act of the movie, when he buys a gun to protect his family, that this is not something that would be comfortable for him. My father didn't look like an action star, and a lot of people's fathers don't. And so it was kind of about trying to keep true to that idea.

23:29 · jump to transcript →

Scott Stewart Jason Blum Brian Kavanaugh-Jones Peter Gvozdas

10, 15 years ago, he was like them. Maybe he was like Josh Hamilton's character and had a wife, like Keri Russell, and maybe lost a child. And his whole life went off the rails, but he became committed because he, you know, any parent that loses a child in an abduction situation, we'll talk about this more at the very, you know, as the climax of the film, the end of the film,

1:08:39 · jump to transcript →

Seat of the pants, I would say. Seat of the pants, but also just being honest with each other. Things that don't work and really trying to keep each other true. Yes. The story, the structure. And when you're not feeling it, it's just... But we had this thing where it was really interesting. For example, Alec is throwing a stack of papers on the table. There's actually just random things stuffed in those plastic sleeves. We didn't shoot the inserts until later. We knew...

24:10 · jump to transcript →

Didn't we? Oh, my God. We were talking about that a year ago. We talked thematically, and it all kind of found its way in different ways. Yes. Tonally, the relationship. You spoke about also what you wanted to do with the female character right from the beginning. Yes. You know, we were going over that. It was your idea right from the beginning. She's an outsider, and she's keeping you off balance, and we don't know if she's good or bad. She tempts you to come away. But remember, it was originally a thing where she had all this money in the second act of the movie and was like,

1:02:16 · jump to transcript →

all the time in this just well don't do anything just do whatever you'd normally be doing like if i weren't here yeah that's you're stating like the main challenge of something in this format which is like how do you how do you structure it and control it in a way that a feature requires but not get rid of all the docky stray hairs on the couch i mean the one thing in this movie that is

5:35 · jump to transcript →

Nick wrote that It Will line. I remember we were, like, you know, trying to write and rewrite the climax of the scene. The night before we recorded it. The night before we recorded it. It all just felt, like, way too much. I think we probably had, like, a long monologue at one point. And It Will just delivered happily as... That's it, man. You're Sherry. You're Sherry. Yeah. Is that okay? Can I film while you guys are shooting? Whoa, those gentlemen were not wearing feodorants. Ha, ha, ha.

56:06 · jump to transcript →

Look at this guy. He's not even gonna eat his frigging eggs, he's so frustrated and blue. One of the additions that we wanted in the script is that Hutch doesn't eat until the morning after the fight, when he becomes himself again, the real Hutch. Yeah. Whereas Yulian eats before and doesn' eat after. And we kind of re-cut some of the Yulian stuff, so that doesn't land. But I've always enjoyed the juxtaposition of you chucking the eggs out in the bin here compared to the second act which starts with you biting into a pancake with bacon. That's right. He's got his mojo back. - Which was my everyday breakfast on set. Gotta go. I'm sorry for your loss. Now, who is this neighbor? Paul Essiembre. - Paul Essiembre. Isn't he great? He's a real dick. He's not a dick, but his character is a dick to me. Single guy, no doubt. Maybe divorced. Having a great time in his dad's old speedy car and laughing at the married guy next door who... What was he supposed to do? Take out a gun and shoot the bad guys? Come on. Meanwhile, Hutch has taken the bus to his blasé job.

10:52 · jump to transcript →

What do we got, a rat or a possum? - Don't know. I hope you'll notice... I hope everyone noticed that the employee of the month mostly is Charlie, played by Billy MacLellan. But go ahead. Sharon is the... Go ahead, Ilya. So the cat lady, the receptionist, that was Sharon. We had a bit of a faux pas where we were supposed to shoot her scene right here in this reception where Charlie is standing. And we arrived and we painted it the wrong color. And it's the only time during the production where Pawel, the DP, and I were like, "Nope, can't shoot it here. "We gotta repaint these walls. Let's go..." We found that spot, and while we were shooting, Bob, remember, on one of the takes, she hit... She was so into beating the crap out of the ceiling, the tile fellon you guys as you walked past. Yeah. Safety's on. And how about this guy? Billy MacLellan was great. Isn't he great? Charlie, my brother-in-law, who's a huge jerk to me, waving a gun in my face. And he doesn't even know the safety is not on. So, take it. And he's such a tough guy. Billy's a good guy. What a great cast we had. So, keep my sister safe, bro. "This is a matter of need, principle of need." Tough guy. And I don't think the slap was written. I think he came up to me between the takes, said, "Ilya, what do you think of... "It feels like Charlie should be more of an asshole and buddy slap on..." Such a condescending slap. But he was so afraid to suggest it to you. And now you look at him and you go, "This guy's messed with guns before, "and he's not sure he wants one in his life again." But look out. Well, hide it in the fridge. That's always a good place for your extra guns. It's almost like he knew it might come in handy in act three. Yeah. - It's Chekhov's ridge, pretty much. What's that? - Chekhov's ridge. You know, the Chekhov's rifle? Chekhov's gun? If you see it on the wall in the first act, and it fires in the third, well, that's our fridge. Yes, that's right. Michael Ironside. - Yay, Michael Ironside. A great, great actor. - The man, the legend. And he's really good in this role. Kind of supportive, kind of friendly, but also hard on Hutch. Everybody's hard on Hutch. Bunch of hard-ons around him. If I'm gonna sell it, I want it to be... But he's a great actor and he delivers here, big time. Ilya, you put together a hell of a cast around me. Boy, the best. The best. I do. Well, it's pretty easy to get a great cast when you say that Bob is the lead. SO... You know, one thing that was concerning to me, and I love seeing Charlie and I love seeing the father-in-law here, and I love seeing Charlie and I love seeing the father-in-law here, is my character is so down for such a huge chunk of this movie. There's a... I mean, he starts to smile when he starts to cut loose and let out all his rage and frustration. But that's a long time in, and we talked a lot about this. This movie has always been... Has an offbeat construction with this long prelude, longer than most, with a lot of hard feeling and kind of... This guy's got an internal struggle that takes over this whole first 40 minutes, half-hour, 40 minutes. I think in the script, the bus fight used to happen around page 30. And I remember we saying, "Whenever... We'll get to it quicker. "It'll be like minute 25 at most." 'Cause I remember looking at several films as examples, and I think my favorite example was Oldboy, where the first real fight happens on minute 41. But there is a little pre-fight around 27. But it's also a much longer film than this was ever intended to be. Right. So it was that balance of, "Yeah, we want to set up the pins "before we shoot the ball," but at the same time, you're also releasing a film in 2020. Well, now it's 2027. But there's a certain expectation, a certain pace that you can't really rely on as a comfortable pace for a bigger audience. Hopefully, we'll have a bigger audience when it does come out. We are recording this six months before the film hits theaters, which is a little early. But you're absolutely right. There was a lot of discussions on how long and what we should spend time on before we hit what everybody paid to see. It's a different kind of action movie. It's trying to be... Just have more story, more character, more complexity, and I think a more delicate kind of complexity to these family relationships. The son's annoyed with the dad, the wife and the husband love each other but are estranged, but in the house, you know, together, they have a past. We don't quite know what it is. The little girl's oblivious and bringing nothing but sunshine into their lives. And then there's a feeling that this guy just has his own issues, his own challenge of being who he is. And all that turns out to be true and comes clearer as the story goes.

12:09 · jump to transcript →

That's all I've got. Coming up is another moment that seems to forecast important gags or story points in Once Upon a Time in the West. As Tuco prepares to leave, he takes the closed shingle off the door and makes the shopkeeper open wide and clench it in his mouth. This moment rhymes with Charles Bronson's placing his harmonica in the mouth of Henry Fonda at the climax of Once Upon a Time in the West.

37:00 · jump to transcript →

more trained actors can help them along, kind of give each other a balance that's very nice, because the untrained actor gives a sort of natural feel to the trained actor, and then there's a kind of structure that the trained actor can give. Well, I think that generally what happens is the non-professional, untrained actor, whatever you want to call them, real people, have an effect on the actor.

27:56 · jump to transcript →

where he's basically taking Inspector Daniels and Garber and putting them together so that they figure into the climax. I love the wardrobe of these guys. I believe the wardrobe was designed by a woman named Anna Hill Johnstone. And Anna Hill Johnstone was just one of those names that I noticed on lots of New York pictures.

1:25:18 · jump to transcript →

Hey, can we have some new cream here? What's wrong with it? What's wrong with it? It's cottage cheese. The warden there was Joe Regan. It's a lot of difficulty in having a dialogue scene like this in the middle of a movie that goes on for about 10 minutes. They require a lot of structure built in. Oh, it was wonderful.

37:45 · jump to transcript →

Peter Greenaway

And Michael Nyman and myself, for a long time, tried seriously to consider the possibility of a true unity between the uses of music, not just as additional ways in which to create mood, but also to find a way to structure. And a long time before the film was ever committed to camera, we had had discussions about ways and means in which

42:08 · jump to transcript →

Computer Simulation Division Richard Taylor

When we came to make a decision about what film format to use for Tron, we felt very strongly that we needed to shoot it on a larger negative than traditionally done. And it came down to a choice between 65 millimeter and VistaVision for the whole show. But the availability of 65-millimeter cameras was far better than the availability of VistaVision cameras, so we made the decision to shoot the entire show in 65 millimeter. And to keep a certain consistency, and as long as we had rented the cameras, we felt that we might as well go ahead and shoot the real world in 65 millimeter and not in 35 millimeter. It was kind of one of those nice to have things, and nobody objected strenuously to it, and also it would be the first time since Ryan's Daughter that a film had been shot entirely in 65 millimeter. And I think you can see the results. I mean, it looks wonderful. In the monitors in Lawrence Livermore, one of the things that Triple-/ had to do was create lots of imagery that appeared on monitors, and that imagery had to be shot and created long before we got to production. So, there was a lot of planning in creating all of the monitor imagery, and Triple-I did a great job on that. Spent a Iot of time on this shot. To accomplish the effect, what we did was get a 4-by-5 still camera and photograph Jeff Bridges in his position after he's been zapped, and then immediately moved him out and took another photograph, which was the background by itself. So, as you pull away chunks of Jeff, you see the background behind him, and then to put the laser and the grid and all that on top of him was basically the effects animation of John Van Vliet. When Flynn is de-rezzed and pulled into the computer, we go through one of the most interesting sequences in Tron, which is the real world to electronic world transition. This sequence was created by Robert Abel & Associates, primarily under the direction of Kenny Merman. It was a sequence which I had designed, knowing that the way that Robert Abel & Associates was making these computer graphic images with the Evans & Sutherland computers, and, really, using vector graphics to create this particular look, would give us a look that would be unique just for this transition. The three-space transition, the movement through all these binary bit patterns and this polygonal landscape, was done by making multiple passes through a traditional animation camera that was pointed at a high-resolution, vector graphic, Evans & Sutherland computer screen, and making multiple passes, frame by frame, using different colored filters, coming back, making multiple passes of rewinding other filters, until you finally end up with this, which seems to be solid objects. But it's really made out of lots of tiny, tiny lines put together to make solid blocks of color or objects. Oh, man, this isn't happening. It only thinks it's happening. When Flynn says, "This isn't happening, it just thinks it's happening," it's a key line, because it means that the reality that he finds himself in now, not even he can fully believe exists. And if anyone should appreciate and understand this alternate reality, it's him, and now he finds himself trapped in it. All right, now we see Sark standing on the bridge, and all of a sudden, he is enclosed with these shrouds of light as he begins to have his conversation with the MCP. The database for the MCP was a human figure that we had created at Triple-/ called Adam Powers and was originally on the Information International sample reel. And if you look at that sample reel, you'll see a juggler character who was juggling balls. Well, that face of that character is the face of the MCP. So, the first time that you see him, he is a polygonal drawing of a face. And that's basically the underlying database of the face. So, it's made of polygons. And those polygons, we play them out on the Triple-I computers as the line-drawing polygons, and made 12-and-a-half by 20-inch stills, high-con stills of those. But we created the mouth positions for the vowels and the syllables so that you could take these interchangeable transparencies and lay them down and make him Say, by whatever order you put them in, whatever you wanted him to say. 'Cause he was voicing a lot of different dialogue. Then those were backlit, and then we applied an effect to those line drawings of putting a steel mesh screen over the taking camera, and it made it have that much more, kind of, complex look. And then we also animated the exposure occasionally. Early on in the film when I started working with Steven, we did a lot of experiments to work out how these characters were created. The thing that we finally decided was that the characters needed to have this energy inside themselves. They are obviously in this electronic world. Now, these costumes were unlike any costumes anyone had ever created for a picture before, in that they were costumes designed to have effects treatments done to them. They were white with black drawing or black lines over them. All of the black elements on the costume were turned into circuitry which could be backlit and light could be pushed through there. We originally shot a 65-millimeter image of these people, live-action photography of them on these black sets. Then from that 65-millimeter film, we created some photo-rotoscope machines, which basically could project the 65-millimeter film down to large pieces of film, which were pre-punched with animation punches. This film was created by Kodak for us, and we would project down with these photo-rotoscope machines, which would hold this film into a vacuum frame and make a continuous tone positive print of each frame of the film. Then these continuous tone prints were taken to a light table, it was a vacuum light table, where they were contact printed to high-con film to make a number of high-con positive and negative images. So that you basically have for every character a large cel and you have high-con positives, negatives, and a continuous tone positive. Then these high-con elements were hand-inked and painted to isolate the circuits on the body, the whites of the eyes, the whites of the teeth and any other circuits that we wanted to treat as a separate exposure. The characters are more often than not... The live-action characters are shot on an all black stage. When there is a set, the set is also black, but is measured out to conform with what we're seeing in this artwork. So that if a character appears elevated in a shot, like this shot, there was an elevated platform for him to walk on, but it didn't look at all like the set. Then we would composite these actors over paintings, transparencies, and once that was done, we would add the light and the color separately. And to simplify it, you can describe it as a sort of perfect blend between live action and animation in that we took live-action film, photographed it in a way that we could break it down to individual frames, then blow up those frames into large slides or transparencies. And we had 75,000 of these, which seems like an appallingly large number, but it really isn't if you compare it to an animation film. And because we were at Disney, they were not overly swamped. That's an actual Frisbee, by the way, and those are actual Frisbees on their backs. We had a excellent Frisbee coach, Sam Schaiz. I like the fact that the deadliest weapon in Tron is a Frisbee. A Iot of effects animation in this sequence and in the film. And that is the animation that makes the glows, and as the Frisbee gets brighter, and you see the reflections of it on their costumes, all that has to be done frame by frame. This is hand-drawn animation that, although it is drawn, a negative is made of that, and it is placed over a light source and then re-photographed, and the ability of the effects animators was such that we were never waiting on the effects animation on the show. They always performed very well. It was never a problem. They did very few redos, and that's because they had had experience doing this beforehand, whereas everything else that we were doing, outside of the effects animation, was the first time through. So, that had a much tougher and steeper learning curve. In the holding cells for the game grid, those are backgrounds that are entirely hand-drawn by the background department, again using Rapidographs and line drawing and airbrushing and then turning those into high-cons. But those drawings are all drawn to match the actual physical sets, which were built so that when someone passes behind something, or leans on something, those are actual physical sets that were built. But again, the sets were just black on black. They're as if they were made of black velvet. Part of the interesting thing as a cinemagraphic problem that was presented to Bruce Logan was that he had to shoot, unlike anybody had ever shot before, sets that were entirely black with white line drawings and white characters running around on these sets. Bruce Logan's job in photographing these people was very difficult because, unlike most photography for most films, you try and get as much chiaroscuro in the picture as you can. You let there be a lot of dark and you create shadows and you create this moodiness, which a cinematographer takes great pride in. In this film, during the sequences in the electronic world, basically, he had to light them so that we could see as much of the costume as possible with as little shading as possible because all of the shading and all of that were done by hand by making different masks and airbrush elements that were used under these costumes in post. The ring game was an interesting technical exercise. The set itself, again, was black flock paper with the rings drawn on this paper with tape. The actors had to realize which rings were there and which ones were not as they acted out the sequence, imagining that they were hundreds of feet above the ground. One of the inspirations of Tron is the movie Spartacus. And there's quite a few similarities to the persecuted people who had to fight in the gladiatorial games. This game, of course, was inspired by Pong and jai alai. I think one of the interesting parts of Tron was the synthesis of new games that were created. The design, for example, of the glove that's being worn here, we took a traditional jai alai glove and then rebuilt it and made it out of foam, added other elements to it to give it a more technological quality, and then again, I put the designs over the outside of that to make it blend with the rest of the costumes. Shooting in 65 millimeter, from a director's standpoint, is a lot of trouble. The cameras are huge and bulky. The format requires an enormous amount of light to fill that negative, so if you are shooting Lawrence of Arabia or Doctor Zhivago and you've got lots of snow and big exteriors, it's fine, but in low-light-level situations, it's very troublesome. The depth of field is sometimes as little as a half an inch, and you find your cameraman is asking you, "Now, which part of the eye do you want in focus? "Do you want the front of the eye or the back of the eye in focus?" Or if the head of the actor is not square to the camera, they ask you the really insane question of, "Which eye do you want in focus? "I can give you the front eye in focus or the back, "but the other one's gonna be blurry." Now a lot of these shots where you see actors talking to each other and we're doing over-the-shoulders, the camera couldn't hold focus for the blow-ups to be made, and I had to shoot the actors on separate passes. So, in a shot like this, where you see all three actors talking to each other, it wasnt filmed that way. I filmed them separately and they were composited. And there's quite a few shots like this. Whenever you see them walking around and they're separated by more than a couple feet, those are all separate shots, and then the actors are composited. So, it's very difficult for the actors because not only do they not see the environment they're in when we're filming, all they see is an all black stage, but they don't even see the actor they're talking to. Forming of the Lightcycles, again, is almost entirely done by hand-done animation done by the effects animation department in creating the way that these cycles form around these characters. We built an object that the actor could sit upon, and it was literally a mechanical shape that was the seat and the handlebars, so he could sit down and it would thrust his arms forward and pull him down into that locked position. So that everything that he sits upon and touches, it was, again, drawn by the animation department, and not until you see the final completed cycle, which is actually a CG/ rendering of the cycle, is any of it done by computer. The Lightcycle sequence was done by MAGI. Their way of creating an object were to take basic geometric shapes, cones, cubes, spheres, cylinders, and make an object by collaging those particular pieces together and creating an object. And that's how the Lightcycle was created. All wide shots that you see are computer-simulated. All of the shots, other than the very tight shots of the figures inside the canopies, are computer-simulated. The shots inside the canopies are actually hand-drawn artwork of parts of the Lightcycles, and the animation that's happening over the Lightcycle windshields is hand-done animation to give them a sense of speed. But virtually every scene that you see of the Lightcycles is entirely computer-generated. And there's not even effects animation in those scenes. If there's an explosion when a Lightcycle hits the wall and a tire bounces across, I think those were basically all CGI. Syd Mead worked really hard on designing these motorcycles so that they would incorporate the characters. But if you look closely at them, you'll see that the second half of the bike is flattened and sort of two-dimensional, and that was done because the computers couldn't handle too many compound curved surfaces. So, we restricted those curves to the wheels and the windscreens, and then the rest of the bike was simplified. The ability to move the camera through 3D space with these computer-graphic-looking landscapes is just great. The Recognizers are a sort of King Kong. There's a little head on top of that gate structure... Suggestion of a face, but it, sort of, got lost. The Recognizers were created by MAGI-Synthavision. As I mentioned, there are graphic vector lines, red lines outlining all of these objects, the same way with the tank. The tank was another unique design of Syd Mead, who is a futurist, a fabulous designer. Once Ram, Tron and Flynn have escaped the Lightcycle grid and are off through the canyons being pursued by the tanks, we cut inside the tanks and see another example of a Syd Mead set that was built as a three-dimensional set, again with black background, and all of the elements on there graphically put on so they could later be treated. So the camera, you can see, is moving through scenes in ways that no physical camera or no model shot could possibly do. The animators that I worked with to create the choreography for all of the CG/ sequences were Bill Kroyer and Jerry Rees. But to communicate all this information to the computer technologists, the people that are sitting at monitors at that time, took a new language which we had to create. So, what we did was, first of all, we had to think of each sequence as a real physical reality. Not only would they draw the point of view that they saw as an animator that we would work out together, that was the story point that Steven wanted to make, and also the point of view that we wanted to take. But after we would draw the original storyboards in a traditional, kind of, storyboard manner, we would have to go back and draw a top view, side view and front view of the objects, where they were in time, where the camera was in time, and what the camera's point of view was. So, we really had to define everything to the CG/ technologist in a three-world, three-dimensional space. And that was the first time that that had ever been done. They must've gone right past us. We made it...this far. Now, all of this, this revolt, it's all being led by the user who's gone in the system, Flynn. The Tron character and Ram character, they would have toed the line and gone through the software the way they're supposed to. We'd better, Null Unit. Null Unit. Get the computer dictionary out. Look up "Null Unit." What does that mean? In this sequence, you can really see some of the flaws. I don't really mean the flaws, but the imperfections in the cels, little bits of dirt that pop on and off. Yeah, but they're few and far between considering. Yeah. Come on, you little bugger. Come on. Look at that. A lot of pops and a lot of glitches in there that we would always Say, "Well, that's what happens in an electronic world." When we started there were going to be no differentiations between the flesh tones and the rest of their uniform. But at a certain point they looked, well, not very good. So as a result, that added, approximately, 120,000 extra frames, extra elements to the shot, so it did grow in many aspects. The cave sequence where Flynn, Tron and Ram finally re-energize their selves with this liquid energy was a very interesting technical problem to solve here. In the sequence in the cave when the water is being handled by the actors, literally, frame per frame, rotoscope animation is isolating the water from the body so that it can be treated with a different filter and a different exposure. And again, this is an example of how light is used to portray motion or energy, as Tron drinks and you see his circuits light up and they become energized. The set itself was a complex geometric shape, which was designed by Peter Lloyd, and we built into this set, basically, water channels, and the water itself was reflecting light sources that we put in angle so they would reflect to the camera, and the water was in black tanks so that all we're really seeing are the highlights on the water. Yeah, but the biggest problem at that time was do we fill this with colored water or clear water? Had to do tests, you know. - Right. That was your problem. Do we put milk in there and make it purple? I think that what Flynn is surprised now, ironically, to see that there's parts of this mirror world that are more alive than he anticipated. So, it's not just the harsh computer reality, there's something living about it. It's a very complex shot, again, with all the elements. Probably about 30 different elements, 30 different separate exposures for each frame. Normally in a special effects movie, you get a very bad bottleneck effect in that all these things have to be composited through one or two optical printers. Now we have digital compositing machines. But by putting it into a manufacturing system like this, where it became like an animated film, we could use 14 or 15 animation stands, and we could use a slew of effects animators and ink and paint people to do all of this work simultaneously. As far as I know, we still have more shots with human beings composited into an artificial environment than any other movie. I believe there's 1,100 special effect shots in the film and 900 of which have human beings composited in them. And that number is just very, very large. Just the organizational task alone was monumental, not even considering the creative side of it. For every frame you would have an additional five to 15 cels that isolated the different colors and the different... We had body mattes, we had face masks, continuous tones. You made print backs on top of print backs. So, those 75,000 original cels grew to over half a million. I think we ended up with something like 600,000 cels, all of which had to be kept in order. We had to pull trailers, literally these large house trailers, kind of, industrial trailers onto the lot. We ran out of space and we ended up with 10 trailers that would house all these cels and had to be organized and sent over... 80% of them were sent overseas and had to be numbered and then painted and kept in order. At one point we thought if we had 1,000 scenes, and this was around Christmas time, the film was going to come out later that summer, and we had no idea of how we were going to get it all done in that short a period of time. And we thought, "Well, it's summer vacation. We have two weeks. "We'll get college students, 500 college students in a room." We really believed this might happen. We discussed this for about an hour and we Said, "You'd have 500 students in a room. "We'll teach them how to do inking and painting and rotoscoping, "and they only have to do two scenes each. "And so they do one scene a week. "At the end of that time, we'll be done, "and we'll just go and shoot them on the animation stands." It didn't work out. So, we brought on Arnie Wong, who was an animator. We put him in charge of supervising Cuckoo's Nest, which is a ink and paint service that was in Taiwan. Approximately 80-some employees in a single room. And what we did is we went through and we made a videotape of every situation and what to do in that situation. So that if an inker over there, who didn't even have to understand English to do this, could go to a TV monitor, roll to this particular problem and see exactly what you'd do in that situation. And then he was there to answer questions that were unusual. And the most interesting thing, and one of the things that I'm particularly proud of with this technique is that in spite of what a pyramid it was to build, we managed to get all of this post-production done in six to nine months. And that is using a technology that we had developed. It had never been done before and we developed it and used it on this picture and delivered on time. And that was only possible because of this manufacturing technique. It's interesting the computer animation iS the simpler part of the set. - Yes. Ironically, one of the things that was a creative philosophy that we enjoyed and were proud of was that we were taking computer animation and letting it stand on its own. We weren't trying to make computer animation mimic reality. And the job was then to make reality, the actors and the sets, look like the computer animation. We used to say, "Well, if you've got lemons, make lemonade." Everybody else, and certainly since this point, has been going nuts trying to make computer animation mimic reality perfectly. And I found that the limitations of computer graphics at the time were the most exciting thing. If computer graphics... If computer animation is no longer different from reality, maybe we've lost something in that. Certainly you gain special effects technology and you can do certain things, but it's the limitations, I find, to be the creative challenge. I think at the time we were using four computer animation companies... Yes. -... which were probably the only animation companies that existed in the country at the time. Yeah, I had been visiting some of these companies for two years before we started making the movie. Maybe even longer than that. And I used to show up at their doorstep and Say, "One day I'm gonna make this movie. "You know, we're gonna do this and this is gonna be great." And they'd say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." I'd come by every six months and say this is really gonna happen, and I think they were more surprised than anybody else when we really did this movie. And they got to show their stuff. The way the de-rezzing effect was created, for example, when Ram passes away and he's in the cabin of the Recognizer, there's a combination of the original photography of the character, and then that is overdrawn with literally hand-done, line-drawing animation done by the animation department. And between that animation and light exposures, you can make it just, basically, run off, dissipate and fade away. Also, upon viewing this again, for so many years, you tend to kind of lump it all together visually in your memory and we forget, I forget, how much detail, how much layering of texture was put into this film. - Mmm-hmm. Ai! these shots are all completely storyboarded. Even the electronic world and all the simulated shots were all on storyboards. There must have been thousands of storyboards. Yeah, it was very detailed. Because rendering times in computer graphic imagery, the time it takes for the computer to draw each frame, are high. They're even high by today's standards. It takes sometimes as long as an hour or more for each frame of film. Probably the most complicated CGI images that were in Tron were done by Information International. The Solar Sailer hangar, the Solar Sailer, its formation, the walls of that environment, that's all CGI. As far as Cindy Morgan's involvement, she was very brave to get involved because a lot of actresses Said, "What am I going to wear? "You're going to put what on my head? "I've got to have a helmet and headgear "and wear all this spandex?" And that scared a lot of actresses away. Yeah, it was very hard to get anyone to take us seriously. You'd call people up, they'd come in for casting sessions, and Steven would do his best to present the film, and they'd look at you askance, think you were crazy. You'd run some video on them, and they just didn't believe it was going to happen. And as a result, it was very, very difficult. And I think that was one of the last major parts that was cast. Yes, it was two or three days before the first shot or something. Yes. - It was very close. And one of the people we tried was Deborah Harry. Right. We screen-tested Deborah Harry. The Bit was created by Digital Effects Incorporated, and we didn't have the time to choreograph a CGI Bit for every scene. So, what we did was created a series of stills that could be cell flopped, and these transparencies were created by Digital Effects so that the Bit could be rotating and have these different pulses in it, and then when it wanted to express itself, we flipped to the next sequence of stills, which would make it become more spiky or change its shape, and literally those were cell flopped and then flown around by moving the animation camera on the object to give it its motion from left to right or up or down or wherever it moved, we got it closer to you. That was all put in by moves on the animation camera, on these stills that were being cell flopped. These characters were very interesting. I especially liked the one that looked like a vacuum tube. Other programs... - Other programs and... ...in the system. The Recognizer sequence is another set that was built based on designs by Syd Mead. The interior of the Recognizer, as the interior of the tanks, was all a physically complex shape that the actors moved around on with white line-drawing vector material over the surface of it, and isolated animation coming back and colorizing and animating those elements. I think one of the most successful pieces of computer choreography in Tron is the whole Recognizer sequence, when the Recognizer hits a bridge and becomes multiple pieces and Flynn pulls them all back together with his energy and the choreography of the way those parts all fall back into place and tumble. The thing that people don't realize about computer simulation, especially at this time, is there were no programs that imitated the effects of nature on choreography. Every piece and every part of every computer-simulated object had to literally be choreographed frame per frame by an animator. When the Recognizer moves along and bounces off the ground floor and the pieces separate and then come closer together and have that real, elastic, rubber-banding kind of quality to them... Simple things in choreography... I mean, when an object goes around a corner, does it just swing around the corner or does it have back animation? Does it weave left and right? Does it back animate before it moves forward? Those are the things that the animators brought to this and that the computer-simulation people did a terrific job of interpreting.

28:30 · jump to transcript →

And they've been joined by the bartender, who I think we do like. Oil on troubled waters. Now, now, off he finally goes. And this talking bit here is rather banal, so perhaps I shall take this opportunity to tell you something about this movie's original narrative structure. Oh, well, perhaps I'll do that later, because I see we've cut to the dog, and we'll really want a word about that. What is it they say? Never act with a dog or children or grandmothers. And still...

11:43 · jump to transcript →

When we were in previews, I remember a friend of mine was explaining that one of the scenes didn't make sense, that Penny was too upset. And I said, why don't you understand? And then I realized that nobody understood about the different kinds of help that they had there. They just thought it was the staff and the help. So here we have Jack saying there are two kinds of help here. And so we put this over as a voiceover line so that then everybody understood the class structure within the staff.

6:12 · jump to transcript →

John McTiernan

There's a movie with, John, called The Horse Soldiers, John Ford movie, with John Wayne and William Holden. And they hate each other, all through the movie. Holden calls Wayne Section Hand, and Wayne calls, calls Holden what, Bonecutter or something. And they just insult each other constantly. Fight all through the movie and at the climax of the movie, one of them says to the other, "Strip your blouse," meaning, let's go outside and have a punch up. And they do, they have a fist fight. All right, at the climax of the movie, it's wonderful. In the end, obviously, they respected each other, they actually respect each other. And there was a wonderful sort of redemption feeling at the end of the movie or the end of the climax after they start to have this fistfight. They get interrupted, obviously, in the fistfight, it never gets resolved, can ever have that. That fistfight resolved, it got interrupted by the confederate army attacking. But, anyway, I was looking for that sort of relationship which is why I turned Carl's character around and instead of just making him the bad, bad, bad CIA guy, instead, made him, a good guy who had a different set of instructions, that turned out to be wrong, and as a consequence got a lot of people hurt. And he was, he was more upset about it than anybody. So that, he and Arnold could fight, the way they do there. But alternately, they could, respect each other.

1:01:13 · jump to transcript →

Lea Thompson

Pretty much into the middle of the third act here. And I'm feeling like Mary Stuart's not getting her guy, which is why, again, I think the movie worked. You just don't know what's gonna happen till the very last moment.

1:22:54 · jump to transcript →

Commentary With Author CG Paul M. Sammon

There were so many different types of guns on Robo II, we lost count. There were automatic weapons, there were military-grade sniper rifles, there were bazookas, and just hundreds and thousands of rounds of ammunition, blanks, of course. And I clearly remember doing the final sequence down in Wortham Plaza, which you'll see when Robo and Robo II duke it out at the climax.

5:10 · jump to transcript →

is his own, but it's like, you can see some of the production design where you've got this kind of religious aspect, the guys are all religious as well, you have, you know, where their clothes, how their clothes are hung is a bit like monks as well, and they'd be getting all the big coats on and the hood, so you kind of, there is that sort of, the building blocks of what he'd wanted is kind of there in structure, but it's, it has become this, just a prison planet, which, you know, I'm not...

7:36 · jump to transcript →

Will I Be A

So these in this extended cut, I do think you get a better sense of who these characters are. I think one of the problems with the film is that, by the time the third act is coming around, you see a lot of bald-headed guys getting killed. But they're fun characters. They each did have an identity. And particularly, I think, Golic. The little crazy guy got some of his stuff excised a little bit much. The little crazy guy got some of his stuff excised a little bit much. When he releases the creature, you see that he's nuts. And his experience in meeting the creature, he has sort of interpreted it a little differently than someone who's not quite as bent might, and so therefore he feels it's his duty to release the creature. Sort of like a Renfield and Dracula kind of relationship, which I thought was interesting. And it added a little bit of clarity to this whole scene here. This is, again... Look how beautifully this stuff is shot. Fincher was very much into these browns and sepias. Well, the alien in Alien 3 was still more of the blackish... The black, black alien. But because of the lighting and the color timing and so on, he does pick up this sort of overall sepia tone of the color scheme of the film. Whereas in the second film, even though there were browns in the body of the alien, there was a lot of blue light that was being used, and that reflects off the glistening slime. So they feel more blue-black. And this one feels a little more sepia. And actually, in Giger's work, if you look through Necronomicon, you really do see two different tones. You can see the blue-black and the brown-black. And so we opted more towards the brown-black. And, again, every one of these films... What's great about the Alien series is that every one of the films has the stamp of each director on it. No matter how you interpret that, or whether you like that or not, each movie is stylistically its own film. All owing to the original, but still maintaining some of its own quality.

1:28:41 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, whenever you have problems in story or structure, just go to, like, a whip pan. That's something you learn. Here we go. This is the night. Actually, I have some behind-the-scenes video of this night where literally it was freezing. And Jennifer, after we cut, she'd wrap herself in a blanket. I mean, it was...

1:03:22 · jump to transcript →

English Commentary

The canoes were built by Wolf Kroger. Wolf did a fantastic job building the fort and every other structure in this piece, as well as constructing the cave behind the waterfall. I mean, he was just a great, great production designer. Nothing is too intimidating for him. He'll take on anything and just relish the challenge. The detail he afforded me at the poltroons was quite amazing.

1:20:33 · jump to transcript →

Marco Brambilla Daniel Waters

I don't know if I... I think it was your decision to have Stallone take out Sandra Bullock with a globe rod. I think I had in the climax, but I think you made the right decision. No, it had to be the duel. You know, it really had to be the duel between the two of them. And I think the cryo prison becoming this arena for them.

1:40:46 · jump to transcript →

And it never felt it was gratuitous. It felt it was part and parcel of the idea, part and parcel of the story and the characters. You know, when you're shooting scenes like this, you have to be careful when you're shooting club scenes or moody scenes. And you've got to be careful in terms of how you design and structure your set in terms of where your light is coming from. And I had a perfect excuse here with this swinging lampshade because I...

29:45 · jump to transcript →

Custom-made titanium alloy. It's what they use on the space shuttle. For Lieutenant Dan to now come around and you realize that he's now in the position sort of that Forrest was in relationship to his legs at this setting, it's just, I think that's the structure of the story, how it resolves the different...

2:06:01 · jump to transcript →

I saw him copy this bit on pizza commercials and stuff, you know. The monk running up the top of the mountain. But it's phenomenally beautiful, Scotland. You get lucky with the patchy sunlight. And initially this whole montage, you know, with those people talking about Moses and the Red Sea and all that, that was much earlier in the film. It was like in the first act or the beginning of the second act.

2:17:51 · jump to transcript →

So now, you know, what we needed, because here it looks like movie's over. It looks like, you know, it's solved. But it's not, of course. The drama goes on that the plane has no pilot. And also here, this was important. You still have the Secret Service guy. You still have to solve that problem here. And that helped a lot to keep the audience still on the edge of their seats. But I agree, it's an unusual structure.

1:41:55 · jump to transcript →

My Question Initially To Jean-pierre Was

Dominique Pinon plays in all my films, and for me he is the perfect actor. He's so inventive, so nice, so perfect. It was amazing for me to bring this actor to the States, because Sigourney Weaver and the studio asked me to have Dominique Pinon. I told this story a lot of times, Dominique, but it's true: I didn't hire you, the studio wanted to work with you. I was very happy, obviously, but, I remember, when Sigourney wanted to call you by phone, and we called you in Paris and you didn't believe me. You said... "No. It's a joke." I remember very well that call, actually. The studio were a little bit worried about Ron Perlman. They appreciated the guy, but they weren't sure it was the right guy for the character. By luck, it was the first day of shooting and they saw the dailies. They came to see me on the stage and they told me "You're right. He is perfect." The set is basically what we call the Betty cargo bay, which is just a lovely, beautiful industrial piece of design. All the rust in the back of it. It's hard to convey just how incredible it was in real life, when you walk through it. It was just absolutely staggeringly detailed and gorgeous. Pitof, none of the ships were digital. That's all models? Pitof, none of the ships were digital. That's all models? I would like to make more digital stuff, but Nigel really wanted to have the real texture. I guess he was right because... They're beautiful. They are gorgeous. Is that background digital? Or was that a model also? The background is a mix with the digital and models. We had a model, but the size had been enhanced in postproduction. Also, it's a lot of layers of small things to make the texture real. So it's not just shooting the miniature as it is. There's a lot of work after that - to have the texture, to get the smoke, to give the depth, and all these things. Is shooting miniatures more time-consuming than doing it digitally? It was more efficient to shoot miniatures because the technology of digi was not as flexible as today. The idea about this film is that these guys are a bunch of hoodilums that are smuggling weapons on board a military ship. The thought was: they'll get strip-searched, and they have to have weapons at some point, so Jean-Pierre's take was that the only way you could bring weapons is by hiding them in plain sight. The two places where he thought you could hide them was a Thermos - which somebody is carrying, which turns out to be a gun - and the wheelchair. The thing about the wheelchair was designing it as a breakaway piece of technology, where every piece could reassemble itself into a weapon. Although the idea's really good, at some point the focus on that was a bit lost - you see all the characters breaking out weapons. I'm not sure how clear it is that they're recombining the wheelchair. But that's the way it was designed, as you could actually take pieces of it apart and snap them into weapons when the scene demanded it at some point. That little wheelchair was built on a structure which we called a mule, which is a six-wheeled radio-controlled robot which is a six-wheeled radio-controlled robot that's designed to lift enormous pieces of equipment in industrial settings. That mule was available to us, so Fox said: "If you can design the wheelchair around this, it'll save us money." So that's what we did.

17:58 · jump to transcript →

And usually, in the best things, I find variations. I find new things. I find new things to write about. And that's what I concentrate on. And here, I've never seen Los Angeles quite treated in this way, in this mostly noirish way. And here, the climax is going to be at night. And it's, again, a completely brutal, bloody climax.

2:02:31 · jump to transcript →

this collage sort of effect the film has, this very episodic kind of structure and a lack of a very sort of a strong narrative, you kind of feel it. After a while, around this kind of entering the last act of the film, you kind of feel it's a lack of momentum, which I think comes from a

1:06:41 · jump to transcript →

Because they're subtitles. I sort of have to deliver both. You know that well. So I don't know how the mainstream audience who's used to the genre feels like. Fifteen minutes into the movie, you start a first fight. And the final climatic fight is not the climax of the movie. Yet another 15 minutes to come.

1:44:35 · jump to transcript →

just taking the story structure that we had worked out and developing the comedy. And he challenges everything, but he's a brilliant guy in an incredibly constructive way. And it was really fun to take the comedy to the next level. And he had such a wonderful sense of what the tone of the movie ought to be. And he was excited about making a film that families can enjoy together and still would be true

11:30 · jump to transcript →

That's George, my regular driver. Where is he? He's gone home sick. Touched the flu. Building up and running yet? That's not exactly it. Sorry, but this is a bio-site facility, a storage structure. I'll have it up in a minute. Okay, take a look at this. Start from the inside out.

1:05:01 · jump to transcript →

This entire third act of this movie was just not only hair-raising to shoot, very complex and difficult. I was going to say painful. It wasn't actually painful. It was just very difficult. But what was scary about it in post-production is that all the special effects didn't come in. They were all on schedule, but they didn't come in until literally six weeks before the movie opened, a lot of it. And so we were really holding our breath and going on faith.

1:53:25 · jump to transcript →

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland

But we were able to film almost sequentially. Those moments accepted where we had to go back for occasional things. Basically everything was done in sequence, which is very unusual for a film. And I think it's because of the nature of the story that we were able to structure it like that. Schedule it like that. Bob, our production manager, and Richard Stiles, our first, kind of scheduled it like that so that it gave the actors the opportunity. It's great for actors. Ken Loach does that...

37:27 · jump to transcript →

Ted Tally

So that sequence, those two minutes of the movie, which could have been a very boring, dull sequence. I had a long conversation with Kristi Zea. It was wonderful. She called me up and said, "This book of Dolarhyde's. "What does it look like? What's in it? "How is the handwriting? What kind of photograph?" We had a long conversation which for a screenwriter... You don't often get a call from the production designer to talk about a prop. It was a wonderful opportunity to be part of the design of the movie in that little section. You've got a beautiful setup here, Will. This was actually in the Florida Keys. You know why I'm here? Was it Marathon? Yeah, I can guess. The location is meant to be Marathon, Florida. Dino wanted us to shoot in North Carolina because he had studios there and a house on the beach or Malibu because it's close to his house in Beverly Hills. But the truth is, I wanted to stay true. When I said I chose the tone, I'd really chosen the tone of the book, going back to the book. Everybody here was honoring the book. We really gave a lot of respect to Thomas' book. Tom Harris is a wonderful writer. When you're doing an adaptation like this, it's a great resource to everybody to be able to pick up the book, as you can go into more details than the screenplay. It's a help to both the production design and the actors, who can go back and find out details of motivation. It's helpful to everybody to have that bible to refer to. So when it said Marathon, Florida, I tried to stay true to that and actually go to the location in Marathon, Florida. It just felt like it was the tone and even the location, like Grandma's house in the same description of the rural area where it was, and the type of house it was. It was an old-age home once, which is really back-story, but Kristi incorporated that into the design. I was so happy that she and Ted really stayed true to the tone of the book visually as well when it described the locations. This was so much fun being down here, by the way. It was the end of the shoot, and we were just down there on the beach. This was probably the hardest scene I shot with these two guys. In what way? Because it's exposition? Anything with exposition... -/s tough. It's tough to make it sound like real conversation. But honestly, there's not a line in this movie that I'm not proud of. I mean I can't say there's a line... It was a tight script. We did cut a few lines and a few parts from scenes but Brett and I actually worked quite a bit on the script before the production started, and we had it pretty tight. And the shooting stayed quite faithful to the script. I have to say that every scene was hard for me because I'm used to scenes with not much dialogue. I, unfortunately, am a very talky screenwriter. So it was a clash of cultures. Coming from being a playwright, I guess. There is a lot of dialogue in this movie, I tell you. And it was not a single-spaced script. It's a long script, and I kept saying, "Make them talk faster. "Don't cut the thing, just make them talk faster." Ted's advice to me was, "Brett, when you're happy, "ask the actors for a take where they talk double speed." And I did that. Probably that's all the takes that Mark ended up using in the editor's room. He kept calling me, saying, "This movie will be four hours long "If you do not get them to speak faster." The thing you run into as a screenwriter, even with the best actors, is that you try to pace a scene to fit within an act structure and fit within the entire screenplay. But then actors wanna take very long, dramatic pauses. Actors want to look down and up, across the room, at each other, and finally say the line. - A lot of pausing. And that's what you're up against when trying to time out the length of the scene or act. I wanna say something about these actors. Once I got Edward Norton, I used Edward to get another actor. Once I got Ralph Fiennes, I used him, I got Emily Watson. - You parlayed them into each other. I said, "Philip Seymour Hoffman, I'm getting Mary-Louise Parker." I knew each one, who they were a fan of. I used them against each other to get them in the movie. I literally thought I'd be able to walk onto the set, and it would be the easiest movie I'd ever made because I had these brilliant actors. I could just say, "Action." I read one article or something about this movie that said this was the most distinguished cast that's been assembled in any movie in the last 20 years. But the truth is, it was probably the hardest movie I'd ever made because the smarter the actor, the more experience they have. It's a myth that these great actors don't need direction. They want direction more than any other actor. They want direction, but they have ideas of their own because in the end, it's up to them. They are the ones whose face is filling that whole screen. And they have to absolutely believe what they are doing, or they can't convince an audience of it. What I'm trying to say is, there was a lot of dialogue going on. A lot of intellectual discussions. And each of these actors are not only smart actors, but they're highly intelligent, all smarter than myself and... A lot of them have also directed or even written as well. They all had an opinion. And my job, I felt like it was my job to save the script. This was a script that worked to me. We had a table reading of it. It was fantastic. And Ted was

11:13 · jump to transcript →

Len Wiseman

Is this different? - Look at those eyebrows. No, this isn't... I don't think anything's really been all that different. A lot of... Hold on. - Well, then why are we here? A lot of it's in the third act. There was a lot of stuff that we cut out. Third act. - Like your whole back-story. That thing. I don't want... We don't gotta watch that. Yeah, we are going to watch that. You say that now. You cried. - I did not cry. You cried. - I told you I was fine with it. ridiculous theory.

36:21 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

Well, I hope we don't sound phony and pretentious on this thing. I hope not. We talk a lot about ourselves. - Yeah. And about work. And some intellectualizing that we never would have... - Done in any other circumstances? Nor stuff did we think about when we were writing it because we tried to write it just more as honestly as we could without really overthinking anything. We're trying to make it something funny and entertaining. But you can't say that for two hours, so you keep trying to say-- And then you talk about wallpaper and costumes. Then you start saying things like, "Well, he's an invention of a child's imagination, trying to connect to..." But I don't know if that's true. We just thought he was a funny character. You know, I'll say one thing here. This thing they're walking on, we were out, and this is in Naples, where they're walking along this and the credits are going. We're driving along and we see this breakwater thing with rats on it. I asked if we could get off there, and the guy didn't want us to. He said the cops were gonna come, and then I said... Anyway, he let us get off. And this is the most strange, bizarre thing. It doesn't connect to any land. It's just a cement thing in the middle of the water. I said we have to shoot something here. This is what I came up with, which is a, you know... It's almost, you know... You would say it's inspired by, if not stolen, from the end of Buckaroo Banzai, which is why I said Jeff Goldblum was in it too because he's in that as well. We probably talked about Buckaroo Banzai, you know, and using this kind of idea before we knew Jeff was gonna play Hennessey. That's true. - So in some ways, Jeff playing it makes it seem less of a steal and more of an homage, but it's pretty much just a steal. I wonder if we'll ever get to see this ship again. Where is the ship now? - It's in Malta, in drydock, and Ian, the marine coordinator, theoretically owns it now. But it was such a beautiful ship. It was such an amazing thing to be able to go on. This must be totally boring for people to hear me say this. And then there's Ned smoking the pipe, up at the top. Yeah. There he is at the top. In whatever dream this is. This is something that Bogdanovich had talked about. He used it in The Last Picture Show, which I feel like you do in a lot of your movies. But it is that idea of a curtain call, of like, you know... Someone might argue that, you know, when you finish a movie, you wanna sort of throw people into the credits and their own lives. And for different movies, then there's this idea of, you know, letting people ease their way out of the movie by giving a kind of, you know, whatever a film version of a curtain call. Yeah, and also, you know, with Ned, because he dies and everything, it's kind of nice to bring him back at the very end. Yeah. And nice to see that Werner joins the team. And the intern becomes official. And he didn't get an incomplete. Who cares what he got because he's dropping out. And going full-time. And this is Seu Jorge playing in the opera house in Naples. We didn't have a real plan for exactly how all these Seu Jorge performances were gonna work in there. I was shooting them wondering, "Am I really gonna make this work?" But somehow, his energy and this thing of it... For some people, it's probably, "Oh, no, we're gonna cut back to the guy playing these songs again? They don't have enough story to tell?" But I think for a lot of people, he works. He weaves something together in the movie, and for me, anyway, he brings something special to it. That makes me wanna go back to him over and over. It's funny, what you were also saying about Roman's second unit stuff, it's funny how when you're filming a movie, sometimes, you know, you shoot some stuff on a whim, and then it ends up becoming a huge part of, you know... A whole other texture to the movie. Yes, it was only because of Roman's second-unit work that made it possible for us to do this thing day one. You know, setting at sea, and day 14, you know, the Belafonte, et cetera. Roman collected a lot of these shots, and the movie needed that sort of simulation of structure that it kind of provides. Instead of it seeming like a basic stream of consciousness, which is closer to what it was. Makes it seem like it's not stream of consciousness. Although we do think structurally, but it's a different structure. Yeah, it's our structure. - Yeah. What we see as structure instead of what Eric Rohmer might refer to as structure.

1:52:47 · jump to transcript →

was actually the parking structure of the velodrome, which was in the former East Berlin and is a bicycle racing facility, an indoor bicycle racing facility. And in something that we became quite used to was freezing. We had two weeks of summer on the film and the rest of it was winter.

1:03:15 · jump to transcript →

John Cameron Mitchell

you often hit the same beats. Yeah, we knew where we were gonna go. But this is an example of how you open it up to the improvisational process within the structure. I remember we often did like really, you guys went way off the script, and then sometimes we kind of came back a little bit closer to the script later in the day. But it was a difficult day, even though the camera was very stationary. It was that perfect example of an actor trying to get back to the way it was in rehearsal.

47:36 · jump to transcript →

Really quickly, this is a scene that was added after the fact. Actually, Kate and her friend were watching this, the rough cut, and we go right from the climax of the love scene, cutting straight to this.

39:04 · jump to transcript →

Not a lot of time to shoot this. No, I mean, this was going to be a much... There was a whole way... It's typical, sorry. It's a much bigger battle thing. That battle was going to be like a little mini three-act story. And it just turned out we would have needed extra weeks of shooting, so we didn't really get every part that we had wanted.

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Roman Coppola

I remember, Roman, while we were writing it, we-- You always described it as being... That our writing process was that we were in a forest... Well, how did you--? How would you--? What did you say exactly? It was something to the effect that we were in a forest, and we had-- We were going someplace that we'd been to before, but we didn't have a map, yet we knew, when we had various signposts along the way or features, that was correct. It's like, "Oh, yeah, there's a stream, that's right. That's-- We're getting closer." So it was just a sensation of rediscovering something that we already knew-- You know, that already kind of existed. We were just finding it again. And you used to say-- Like, when we'd come up with something that felt right, you'd say, "Yeah, that's in the forest." - "It's in the forest." Yes, yes. We knew those woods. It seems like often when people are writing, they will-- They-- People describe this sort of metaphorical thing of, it's as if the thing already exists and you know it's right when it's-- That seems like the thing that was preordained to go there when you come up with that. But I guess it's not ever truly the case. I mean, it-- But it really is-- That is the sensation so often. - Yeah. When the thing really feels right, you say, "Gosh--" And often there's this thing that happens where there's something that you've written and sort of set it aside, some fragment of a scene or some idea for something that keeps getting rejected and not working out, and then all of a sudden, you say, "Oh, you know what? It's this." Hmm. - "It fits in here." Then you really do think there is some overarching structure that we're not totally aware of. Anyway, something subconscious is sometimes at work, it seems like, with making stories. Wake up, Jack.

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Patrick Tatopoulos

The fights are really nice in this picture, Patrick. They're really on par with the other two, certainly. Allan Poppleton was our New Zealand stunt coordinator. He did a fantastic job. - He did a great job, yeah. So, what you're seeing here is actually the set... ... you're gonna see later in the movie, an early stage of the castle. We tried to minimalise the dressing so it felt a little different. But it's basically the same space that you'll see later. And this was the first day of shooting. - Yeah, the balcony part. Yup. The big reveal. Wanna tell you a story about the castle. The castle is such a gigantic structure. Of course, there was no way to build this. We ended up building the, what you would call, the courtyard of the castle. How many feet tall, Richard? - About 20 feet. Twenty-five, 30 feet, yeah. Which was a little challenging for the lighting... ...because we were there on top of the set. When we started, it was difficult for CGI guys to kind of extend that. Yeah, it was terrible for Sound too. Every time it rained, we'd stop shooting. The train outside, the train station? - Yeah, the train... Note to self: Do not build set next to railroad tracks next time. We have a few transformation... ...but this one actually is not a transformation. It looks like one, but everything is practical. There's nothing mechanical or anything. I love it. It's a little more American Werewolf in London approach. There is no CG help whatsoever, though. Unlike the others.... This took a while to get right, just this whole prelude... ...and Kate's voiceover, and getting people caught up. There is a lot of history, and to decide, you know, where exactly to start... ...and how much to prep it with. Hopefully, we covered everything we needed to. It looks like we moved really quickly through. I wish we had a little bit more space, a little bit more in the... Yeah. - There's so much story to....

1:59 · jump to transcript →

Apart from the action, that's where I was really thinking about camera angles and making each action sequence have its own identity. So far, that's kept me out of trouble. I think there's too many movies where people think about the camera work before they do the sequence and then the narrative structure just goes out the window. Style over content is something I used to scream at directors when I was a producer. Content's more important. I mean, I think if people come out of a movie and say, hey, that cinematography and camera work was great, that means the film sucked.

57:50 · jump to transcript →

I think in the very early draft... ...we actually started cutting her up. Yeah. And then we realized, but she's healing instantly... ...SO actually that will just be a problem. It'd be kind of comical. Cut, cut, cut. - "She's healing!" Also here we.... I remember we just had scrubs on them, but Monique... ...who did the costume, she made this Antigen Labs.... The scrubs. Yeah. - Yeah. They were special. Michael Ealy's big moment. The blooper gun. This is the first time that this gun is used on film actually. Is it? - Yeah. We're trendsetters. Yep. Yep. This big black one. - Yep. Parking Level 3. Doesn't sound menacing, though. Blooper gun. No. It sounds like a joke. - Yeah. But the gun guys, who are really cool guys in Vancouver... ...when they were talking about... ... there had been this convention in Las Vegas. A gun convention in Vegas, and I said, "I actually wanna go there." God bless America. Yeah. God bless America. Here's a shot while we're in... While editing... - Great shot. While editing, everybody hated this because it looked so silly. And James, when you came in, "I think it looks pretty bitchen." And it does. - I know. It's funny when you go through all editorial with gray-scale animation... ... approximating what people are gonna look like... ...and then you finally see it done... ... it transforms the movie. It goes from being really bad to go to very exciting. It's... Yeah. - That's a huge step. That's a nice step, though. I like it when that happens. I remember shooting this. Kate was like, "Where's the camera?" "It's right behind here." "Naughty. Naughty." And also, you know, seeing all the gray scale and stuff... That's why we didn't test the film because it's pointless. You can't see what it looks like. It does look silly and just like a bad cartoon... ...So there's no point in testing it. Because, you know, even we, who are supposed to be really good at this... ...when you see it all together... ... you know, the final product, so much happens... -.,.be@Cause... - Let's be honest. And James can speak to this better than anybody... ...but my recollection was that in the last week prior to delivery... ... there were still 200 shots you hadn't received. Easily. - Yeah. I'd walk into his office every morning and it was like... These are things... - "How is it?" What's it like?" "A hundred and forty shots left." It was Wednesday and we had to deliver it Friday. The studio was saying, "You have to deliver the film three weeks earlier... ...than you thought you had." - That was a blow. There are versions of the visual effects that are different in the IMAX version... ...to the theatrical 2D to theatrical 3D, the video master. It was all depending on what the schedule would allow for. We kept working until... ...we couldn't do any more. I'm very happy here. We never shot the reverse of the guy getting shot. And people were angry at me because I was directing this day. But it's because the effect is there. When the effect wasn't there, it didn't work. I Know. But I think that's cool. Because I think it looks very '70Os. - It's like, "Shut up. Just get out of my way." - Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Shaft kind of cool. Then this is one of my favorite blood splatters. That one. - That's real, actually. That was beautiful. Real? Did we shoot those guys? - Yes. Yeah. I love them. I will now resign. Did we kill people? - They meant they had squibs. Selene has to make the choice, does she go back to her husband or lover? Or does she go after her daughter? - Yep. Or does she try to have both? - The dilemma. One of the things that we were struggling with... ...In this script was that we thought, "Can we have a good third act?" Because the second movie, it's... The setting is so beautiful... ... with its old castle and underwater and so on. And, I mean, we scouted so many parking lots, it was obscene. Yep. Another example of how we wanted to hurt her so much. Yeah, that was Alicia, our stunt double, taking that hit. She landed on it. She's insane. - Yeah, well... Here's a shot that we don't think Is silly. No. No. It works. - Works. At least we think so. I hope you guys watching this think so as well. But it was always like: "Oh, so only his hand will grow very, very large and hairy. This will look so extremely silly." But it actually worked. This is when I think homage is really in a good way. Yeah. - It's not a fucking steal. It's you take something from 7... ...and you do it... - Underworld 7. The drop through the floor, right? - Yeah. And you update it. - Invert it. It's inverted. So I think that that's... That works really good. Len's-- That was Len's idea. The whole-- It's very scripted... ...how he shoots it.

1:04:06 · jump to transcript →

Joss Whedon

There's a lot of buys in something like this. And to have a purple guy show up in the beginning of the third act, uh, it's a big buy. And so to be able to have these little moments that help explain the story of his rather convenient consciousness, it's both necessary and an exciting piece of texture. I can barely talk about how cool Bettany is, and what great work they did on his face, both in makeup, and then after the fact, because all the rendering of textures on his face made it very easy to give him what we refer to as digital Botox, to take away the expressiveness in his eyes, and so the little wrinkles and things that you wouldn't expect to see on an android, that you need for him to be what Bettany brought, is actually very difficult to render and very beautifully accomplished. This moment when he asks, "

1:34:29 · jump to transcript →

And Heike, the costume designer, was standing next to me looking at me and thinking, oh, now my plan for the makeup is gone because, yeah, he stuck half his face in the mud, but she always went with it and then used that and created this two-face structure in his face. So here's a shot coming up. We shot with four different cameras, just to explain in a second. There's a white shot coming up.

1:29:25 · jump to transcript →

Tim Burton

It sets the tone. Even though it's a bit organic and moving, there's a structure to what you're basing it upon.

1:28:31 · jump to transcript →