Structure

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...

17:52 · jump to transcript →

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.

18:49 · jump to transcript →

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 →

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.

25:13 · jump to transcript →

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...

25:36 · jump to transcript →

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

26:04 · jump to transcript →

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

1:01:06 · jump to transcript →

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

1:22:08 · jump to transcript →

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.

1:25:18 · jump to transcript →

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,

4:01 · jump to transcript →

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.

4:27 · jump to transcript →

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.

27:23 · 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 →

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 →

Lords of Discipline, The Terminator, Aliens, Tombstone, and Navy Seals. And also, for years, I thought the actress Sarah Paxton was his daughter. And I was told, no, they're not related at all. But then when I did my research, I found out they're seventh cousins. So you were sort of right. I was sort of right. I was distantly right about that. So now we're starting to get into the climax, the climactic mission.

1:19:39 · jump to transcript →

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 →

It's also interesting because this is one of the very few sequences where Clarice is completely absent from. So, you know, was the escape actually just like we see it in the film? Or is this just kind of like her vision of what it could have been like? And it should be noted, too, that this is the beginning, essentially, of the third act. But there was originally meant to be a fairly lengthy sequence after this.

1:22:13 · 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 →

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 Alien³ 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 →

Michael Mann

The canoes were built by Wolf Kroeger. 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 →

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 →

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 →

Tony Scott

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 →

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...

2:06:07 · 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 →

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 →