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.

18:11 · jump to transcript →

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 →

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 →

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...

2:30:20 · jump to transcript →

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 →

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...

25:18 · jump to transcript →

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

44:49 · jump to transcript →

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

51:55 · jump to transcript →

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 →

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 →

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,

3:07:58 · jump to transcript →

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.

9:05 · jump to transcript →

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 →

knowing that a lot of this movie was performance. And so Will and Akiva and I really would workshop, and with Alice 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...

1:06:50 · jump to transcript →

Rob Cohen

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.

29:13 · jump to transcript →

Rob Cohen

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.

42:35 · jump to transcript →

Rob Cohen

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.

49:46 · 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 Kieślowski'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 Turin, 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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

Ron Howard

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →