Studio notes

kind of running around in the studio and I just took it and I put it right in his hands without a word and said, here, Marlon. And he, of course, you know, he loves children and animals and he immediately took to the cat and the cat took to him and it became part of the scene. Not at all planned and just a random idea. But now you come to me and you say, don't call me on it, give me justice.

4:22 · jump to transcript →

basically making a mistake, but I guess no one else notices it. It's an interesting story. I chose to work with Nino Rota to write the score, and the studio was not very comfortable with this choice.

24:43 · jump to transcript →

And when I finally brought back the music that Maestro Rota had done, put it in the picture, the studio hated it. Bob Evans hated the music and said it would never stay in. He had just done a movie called Love Story in which the music was very popular. So he considered himself quite an expert on that. And we were at a stalemate. I kept saying to him, well, I mean, you can't take the music out. You can fire me and get another director.

25:12 · jump to transcript →

Now, New Line started to impose rules on us, which they'd never done before. They started to say, well, you can have a prologue, but it's got to be no longer than two minutes. And our prologue's actually seven and a half minutes. And it was really, in a way, it was one of the biggest fights we ever had with the studio. And it was strange because it was the very last thing that happened before the film was finished. We'd been making this movie for three or four years with a very good relationship. And needless to say, we won the battle because we just felt...

5:40 · jump to transcript →

There's only so much time you can take establishing Hobbiton before you really move your plot ahead and we felt we were lingering there too long and it wasn't furthering the story for us so it didn't stay. Bag End was obviously an exterior set on the location on the farm and then this was the studio when Frodo comes in the door. This is actually a case where we changed the timeline in the book.

36:01 · jump to transcript →

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

44:53 · jump to transcript →

Hello. My name is Jean-Pierre Jeunet. I'm the director of Alien Resurrection. Hi. I'm Dominique Pinon. I played Vriess, the guy on the wheelchair. And I'm Hervé Schneid, the editor. My name is Sylvain. I was a storyboard artist and a concept artist on Alien Resurrection. This was designed, composed, shot almost entirely and never used, because we couldn't complete it for budgetary reasons. But initially, in the first opening of the film, we looked at the mouth. The mouth of an insect. Except we didn't know it was an insect. We mistake it for an alien creature. And the camera backs out and actually reveals a little bug. And in one camera move, as it keeps on backing up, we see a finger crushing that insect and sticking the insect into a straw. And splattering that insect against the glass as we recede... And we go all the way back into outer space and actually reveal a giant spaceship, which is where the story begins. I remember especially about the main credit. When I arrived in LA, I was waiting for an offer from the studio. You can imagine - a poor French guy like me, I was very scared. I was in a hotel, waiting for the answer, and I didn't sleep because of jet lag and because I was scared. I thought "OK. To prove to myself I am able to make this film, I have to find a good idea for the main credit, for the first shot." Immediately, I found the story of the guy alone in a big spaceship, with the milk shake and the pipe. He scratches insects, he puts them in the pipe, he blows the insect on the camera. I was very happy about this idea. I told this idea to the studio and they were happy, too. We began to work on it, but it was very very very expensive. One day, my line producer told me, if you could find another idea, because we have not enough money to finish this idea. This is a secret - I was pretty relieved. In fact, I think it was a little bit too funny for the beginning of Alien. I didn't say anything to the people. I said "You want to cut my idea?!" But, in fact, I was very happy, and I prefer the credit we have now. This is a model, and at this time, we hesitated about to use CGI or models for the spaceships. And Pitof preferred to use models. Maybe it was one of the last films with spaceship in model. That was very impressive. I came once on the set while you shot the models, and it was really big. - Yeah. Not really big. It's never enough big. And Pitof made a lot of parts, and he mixed the different parts.

0:03 · jump to transcript →

This was actually a tunnel. You can see the floor on one end where the light is glowing. And this was actually just a vertical tunnel which was stood straight to make it into a tube. I love this scene. It's very different with the other Aliens. Sigourney loved to do that. She was almost naked when we shot. She is very courageous. She tries everything. She is ready to do everything, all the time. This is a set that was reused. In this instance, this is the birthing room for Ripley. This is a very symbolic and beautiful, almost religious, image of her coming to life. This was designed by Darius and Jean-Pierre - dreamt it up and shot it, quite late in the day, actually. It's actually very stunning. It's quite beautiful. What we're looking at - the light glowing from the floor and fanning in the back - is exactly where Darius and Nigel gave each other opportunities to generate so much excitement out of these openings, where, basically, light actually comes alive in the metal everywhere you look. I love Brad Dourif. I was a fan. All my life I will remember the test with Brad Dourif. He was perfect. I saw a lot of actors for Wren, the bad guy, and I saw a lot of actors. It was a pleasure because I made some tests with them. It was only because the studio didn't want to pay a lot for the main bad character. I remember, I proposed to the studio it was a good idea to have a woman for the bad guy. It was a good idea, but at the end the marketing service said "No. Definitely no." "Because you have two women in this film, two heroes, and not a third one. Definitely." Too many women. - Yeah.

6:30 · 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 →

So I don't know whether they even knew about it. Did we bill them? We should bill them now. It was interesting to figure out how to start this film because the studio were quite insistent for a long time that we have a prologue, the same as the first film. They wanted Cate Blanchett, in actual fact, to give us a sort of a backstory of what's happened so far in this movie, you know, the Fellowship of the Ring, and to set us up. And we resisted doing that, didn't we? Yes, yes.

0:33 · jump to transcript →

were again part of the pickups that we did. And this sort of shows you what pickups can be like, where you're inserting a couple of new lines of dialogue into a scene you've already shot before. We just did these in the studio. That's a studio shot. That's a studio shot. And now we're back on location again, just... Two years earlier. Yeah, two years ago. Just coming up about...

6:46 · jump to transcript →

I think with the help of a bit of lightning and flashing lights and stuff, and we sort of soldered, and the big plummeting down and the deathfall and the landing, it really sells his death better than anything that Gandalf can do with a sword, really. Was that a mini? It was a big miniature, yeah, the tower and the snow. Everything's fake in that shot. This sequence was debated a lot amongst ourselves in the studio. You know, you could have done without it, but on the other hand, I thought that just having Gandalf showing up as Gandalf the White needed some form of additional explanation.

54:17 · jump to transcript →

Kenneth Loring

during the slower mood-setting scenes. Perhaps now I can begin to tell you about the plot of the movie as originally envisaged by the filmmakers. You see, quite a different movie. The filmmakers' cut was previewed for a test audience, but after the preview, the studio insisted on certain changes which were rather ham-handedly implemented. Rather an old story in Hollywood, I'm afraid. So what you see here is, to no small degree, the result of studio bastardization.

25:18 · jump to transcript →

Kenneth Loring

This character was introduced lighting himself a hand-rolled cigarette with an engraved cigarette lighter, and he puts the lighter down on the desktop in a close insert. Well, I'd urge you to go back and examine that insert carefully, because, you see, it's not the actor's hand depositing it on the desktop. It's someone else's hand. For that insert was shot well after the movie was finished, after the studio preview. That insert showing a cigarette lighter engraved Lauren, presumably the character's name.

31:15 · jump to transcript →

Kenneth Loring

marvelous Texas character who appears to be related to an Eastern European communist dictator. How did he come to this lonesome backwater, this dark, dark place where he attracts flies? Well, the studio was having none of it, perhaps believing that the reference to Todor Zivkov would be too obscure for a mainstream audience.

32:14 · jump to transcript →

on his prison were going to be chased by this alien and killed. And yeah, I didn't have that much of an issue with it. It was only kind of later on you kind of see the sort of the failings of the studio manipulating the film and changing it and not knowing what they wanted. David Fincher making a movie without a finished script.

1:20 · jump to transcript →

Not very communicative, but Alex Thompson could photograph these large-scale sets with ease. He'd photographed Excalibur and Ridley Scott's Legend. I mean, Legend's one of the most visually interesting films ever made. But it's interesting that the executive producers, well, head of production was John Landau, who's unfortunately passed away recently at the age of 63. And he looked... I saw recently, like...

15:53 · jump to transcript →

which I remember reading about years ago and obviously doing the research, gone back into that and the feud he had with the studio over that. And I just can't, I can't see Richard E. Grant in that role. Can you? I love Richard E. Grant, but... Well, if we had him and Paul McGann, it would be with Dale and I too. And Ralph Brown. Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. This is it. I mean, this is... When Ollie and I record these commentaries, we generally put a little poster behind us on Zoom

29:07 · jump to transcript →

And they were saying, like, can't you get some adult characters and have nostalgia in here so it'll be like American graffiti? And that was our whole battle, I remember, is to convince the studio that, you know, young people would actually show up if they had a movie about them. Well, one thing I loved about the book was that teachers and parents, they were not part of their world. It was like there was the world of the teenagers. Right. And you were...

20:44 · jump to transcript →

This amendment to our Constitution has a profound impact upon all of our... Where is Jeff Spicoli? I saw him earlier today near the first floor bathrooms. Is he still on campus? This is good. Anyone? Yes, Desmond? Now that's Frank Price's son. Yeah. Ahead of the studio. I love that bring him in. What is this fascination with truancy?

23:28 · jump to transcript →

I love what you said about Spicoli has to be the spice. It's so true. Because people have... I know you've probably been bombarded over the years on people saying, hey, let's do a Spicoli sequel. Just Spicoli. You remember the first day we saw the movie in Westwood, and I guess, who was it from the studio? Was it Tom or Shona? Somebody said, okay, guys, Spicoli goes to college. Yeah, they were just ready to go. They're ready to go. It wouldn't have been the same. Spicoli without Brad.

29:26 · jump to transcript →

There was a big battle over that, and ultimately the studio came across and loved this choice of song. And you were victorious. I was victorious here. And there'll be many battles discussed over the next hour and a half. But that was one. And every time I hear the song, I just am reminded how much I like the choice of both the music and having the female singer and the gravelly, slightly off-tone voice.

0:29 · jump to transcript →

pre-digital, so the majority of the effects were all optical, not digital, which was a huge deal. So all the models, we had to build models and do it the old-fashioned way. Shot on film, cut on film. Things that people don't even know what they are now. I'm sad that the studio didn't give us more than 10 days in the theaters.

13:11 · jump to transcript →

And that's how people, I mean, women respond to that. They just cannot look at that image and not go, I want, I am this person. I mean, that's how I felt when I first saw the comic too. I have to do this. This is the most important thing I could possibly do. And you had the same response. And then I went and pitched it to Jim Cameron's company. And I didn't have Jim, James wasn't there, but I, you know, I pitched it to the executive and they said,

17:35 · jump to transcript →

I suppose the obvious technique is, you know, we've got this archive footage that you see visually, but the voices were all recorded... You know, we recorded those interviews. We did over 100 during the process of making the film. And actually, the studio where we are now doing this DVD extra of doing the commentary was in the very studio we interviewed Nick and pretty much everyone in the film. So it feels like we've come full circle ourselves now. I love that film. So here's a very brave first boyfriend who...

8:22 · jump to transcript →

music as well i mean what was her sort of she would describe it sort of fusion of jazz and hip-hop wouldn't she yeah but they somehow she fitted in with that that world immediately there was no questions about whether she was authentic whether she was a white girl trying to do black music or anything like that they just knew i mean i think commissioner gordon even had a very funny story where i mean some of the dvd extras but i'll tell it anyway where he um he overheard her singing and thought on the first day in the studio

28:02 · jump to transcript →

I felt like there was a lot of questions arise about why we use this footage but they for me show Amy at a very particular moment in time and without them you lose track of her and you can see even though she can be really she looks great in the studio this is not long after once she's back in Camden out drinking again this is really what she looks like and so we made a conscious decision that we would use footage shot by photographers and paparazzi because it felt like the most honest way to tell the story to show what was really going on and

45:16 · jump to transcript →

dense smoke to get the feeling of being inside the park. And it was shot... Wait, pause for my credit. Just want to know that this guy writes a great arbitration letter to get first credit, but that's another story. So the smoke in here was so dense that you could barely see the monitor. So we had to build tents within the studio just to contain all the smoke. Yay, Marco. There I am.

11:01 · jump to transcript →

to set up and rehearse, and the frequency of visits from Joel and then the studio executives, and then even Lisa Hansen, who was the head of the studio at the time, dropped by to casually say, are we going to have a shot today? So that was a very tricky shot to set up. Oh boy, the things I don't have experience. And this is Sandra Bullock, who plays Lenina Huxley, which is

11:53 · jump to transcript →

kind of nailed at the time and this was all the subtext that uh we had the hardest time selling to the studio and to stallone okay now we have to take a pause because this is where the he says he doesn't understand the three seashells which is the bathroom which which i was joking with marco has become the legacy of the movie i'm sure we've both been plagued by people on the street asking us how to use the three seashells can i i'll just say like i was asking all my friends

38:07 · jump to transcript →

David Kalat

He acquired a print of King Kong for his own personal use and spent his nights examining it frame by frame to reverse engineer its secrets. He approached his employers at the studio and implored them to authorize a full-scale attempt to develop similar techniques. In the rigid hierarchy of the Japanese film industry, Tsuburaya was but a lowly cameraman, and the executives could not imagine that he had any business advice worth their attention. Conventional wisdom in the Japanese industry held that trick effects were just that, tricks, cheating.

20:35 · jump to transcript →

David Kalat

Honda was assistant director at the time. The two worked together variously in the late 1940s and early 1950s on war films, gradually cementing a partnership and a friendship. Honda was born in 1911, and he'd studied art at Nihon University. In 1933, he joined Photochemical Laboratory, the studio that later morphed into Toho. Honda was called away to war in China in 1938, the first of three times that he was drafted to the Imperial Army.

23:38 · jump to transcript →

David Kalat

Then it was Godzilla. Now the mantle had returned to Kurosawa once again for Kagemusha, which would find Tomoyuki Tanaka overseeing things, Ishira Honda credited as creative consultant. Honda co-wrote all five of Kurosawa's last films, that's Kagemusha through Matadeo, directed most or all of the location footage, and co-directed in the studio. Another commingling of monster movies and Kurosawa art films.

24:56 · jump to transcript →

but he was willing to go along with it. Now this restaurant here on the Eiffel Tower, unfortunately we never went, we went to the Eiffel Tower, we never went to the restaurant. This was all constructed in the studio until the month set. I remember one

15:16 · jump to transcript →

We're actually inside the set on the studio, which is supposed to be inside City Hall. I can tell the London Financial Times. Yes. My readers may like to know why Zoran is pumping seawater into his pipeline instead of pumping oil out. Seawater is used to test the integrity of the pipeline. When you go in and say, well, we're going to show you the Bond film, it's not like we're going to shoot a film X. And we'd like to use this.

1:11:29 · jump to transcript →

Sorry. This, of course, is the real thing. The interior of the offices we shot in the studio, but this is the real McCoy. We're looking for a low tonight of 57, high tomorrow, 75.

1:12:29 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

Bill, isn't there dialogue that you have on this that people have used in video games? Yeah, I think so. "Game over, man" and things like that. You get anything for that? - I don't think so. I'm not even getting anything to sit here and do this commentary. They expect us to do it for no money. You got a beer out of it, though. No, it's just fun. I got a beer out of it, so that's cool. This was an amazing set, this concourse A. And it was long. And later on when all hell's breaking loose, Jim had that little video camera. He had everybody on the crew having coffee while we would run at him and do different things. It was SO amazing to see this gigantic set, one of the biggest sets I'd ever seen, and there's Jim by himself with this little camera. When did the bust-out almost happen? He was gonna move the movie. When did that happen? I remember there were some problems. There were some union problems. The crew weren't used to working the same way. With Jim. They weren't used to working. That's unfair. They were craftsmen, but they had an indentured way of doing everything. Jim needs something, he just grabs it. If he needs a light moved, he'll grab it himself. We punched a hole through somewhere cos he needed to run a line. He didn't wanna wait around. He just said "Give me a hammer." But this was an ambitious schedule. Jim was running from stage to stage. I think we had about three big sound stages with giant sets. And then there were two sound stages with miniatures. And then there was a stage with all those tunnels. I remember them putting you in that damn tunnel. That pipe. We had gone to the power station to shoot the atmosphere-processor scenes and come back to the set after it had been wrecked. So we're into Adrian Biddle's photography here. He was the second DP. I encouraged Adrian, to save time, to use as much built-in lighting as possible. This is lit by the fluorescents in the set, with just a little additional lighting. Adrian liked to work on a raw and edgy look and work with the practical lights a lot more. This is another thing that is important. With a lot of science fiction movies that are all interior, you often lose track geographically of where you are and it becomes incredibly confusing and it's hard to build the tension and the suspense. Jim was aware of this from the script stage and made sure that we established through the helmet cams, through the motion trackers, where they are, and then ultimately, later on, where the aliens are. Even in this version, you're left to fill in what happened. We don't see the baittle. We'll see plenty of battles later and this is promising you that. We have a shot coming up here where there were acid holes - acid... holes... eaten into the floor by these so far unseen aliens. And, of course, these sets were not double-deck sets. Jim wanted a scene where a character looks down through one of these holes. I think Bill spits down into it to give some perspective. So this down-view we shot on our miniature stage. We layered the set and photographed that. This is where you spit and they did it in miniature. They even did a miniature spit. - Is that what that is? To get that spitting effect, it was actually not spit. It didn't work very well, so it was a combination of milk... Milk and water in an eyedropper right underneath the lens. The complaint from the studio was that the film went on too long without anything really happening. I was winding the suspense tighter before you actually saw anything. The studio said we were just jerking around. Too many movies that I see now, it's all upfront. You start seeing stuff right away and there's no sense of a build. So this is the miniature APC that was built by Bob and Denny Skotak. Pretty good size. I remember it being five or six feet long. Most people don't twig that as a miniature. That's the real APC pulling in. They matched the lighting pretty nicely. I think Jim did some of his live-action stuff undercranked. He ran the camera slightly slower on the APC so that it felt slightly more as if it were a miniature but you knew it was real because you could see people interacting with it. So if any of the miniature stuff didn't quite work for whatever reason, it took the curse off that cos it felt that the two were blended together. I think he wound up undercranking because the APC, the full-size one, didn't move as fast as he wanted it. I think it could only go eight or ten miles an hour. One difficult thing about making this movie was 7erminator wasn't out in England and the perception of Jim Cameron, who looked about 20 when he directed this movie, and myself as the directing-producing team was met with a great deal of resistance because back then the system in England was that you had to put in years and years to rise up to the level of being a producer or a director. And we were simply not treated with a great deal of respect and it was very hard every day of the shoot. We were being second-guessed and every decision we made was questioned and the tremendous thing, of course, having Stan on the film was that... I was old. - No. ...was that you were a cheerleader for both of us. By demonstrating the respect and enthusiasm that you did, I think other people gradually relented. I knew it was the best thing for me and for everybody on that set. There are people that you know, no matter how they do it, what they're doing is special. This particular directing-producing team had been a win for me in my career and stayed that way. I never thought our facehuggers looked as good as the one in A/en. We had to make lots of 'em and they had to run around and do things, but, texturally, the one in the first film looked great. It really held up. The bits of oysters and stuff inside it looked great. But I did wanna see the disgusting thing that had been down the inside of Kane's throat in the first film. You never see it in the movie, in A/en, so I figured we'd gross everybody out. All of Giger's designs have a real sexual undercurrent to them. And that's what horrified people about the alien as much as anything, is it worked on a kind of Freudian subconscious level. And Ridley and Giger knew that and they went for that. This film was never intended to be as much of a horror film as the first one. It was working on a different thematic level but I still wanted to be true to some of those ideas, some of those design concepts. It would be natural to assume I'd wanna work with Giger, but it just didn't occur to me at the time. Maybe it was because we really only needed to design one new creature and I had already designed her by the time I wrote the script. The alien queen. I guess maybe it was my own ego as an artist. I just felt like he'd made his stamp and I knew from what I'd read that he had to do everything his way and I had a very specific idea for the alien queen to extrapolate beyond what had been done before. I got the impression from what I read that I wasn't gonna get the dynamic character that I wanted. In a funny way, part of what attracted me to doing this film was the opportunity to do cool design stuff. So maybe I was just a little bit too in love with the idea of designing the creatures and the weapons and doing all that stuff.

47:57 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

I heard that some of the studio execs were screening footage back in the States, and they were a little perturbed and asking "Where's the effects shot?" Gale Hurd said "You just saw an effects shot." She was referring to that perspective shot. They were completely fooled by it. They thought nothing had been shot. They thought they were spending huge amounts of money on these sets. They said "You spent so much and there's no miniature." She said "No, that is the miniature." It was a smart move on Cameron's part, to do it that way very quickly in the film, so the studio wasn't worried quite as much about what was going on 5,000 miles away in London. It does make it a bit tricky to shoot, though. If anything goes wrong, you're stuck with it or you have to fix it later but with a reshoot. You can't really fix it later. So that worked out quite well, but with actors and everything there's a lot on the line. Something we've lost sight of over the years is that with this era of filmmaking, not only for live-action but for miniatures, there wasn't much ability to go back and fix something. Now, digitally, you can change an actor's face, you can get rid of wires, do all kinds of tricks, split-screen, take elements and change shots. But at that time you had to plan these things and make it work within a narrow tolerance, otherwise that was it, that's what wound up in the film. IIt reminds me of a stage play. You're doing it live, in a sense. What was on film was it. There was no going back. You could only do it so many times. There was a limited budget to work with and it had to work on film, no matter what.

1:08:47 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

I like these really advanced laptops they have. We thought we were being so advanced here. This is an added scene with these sentry guns. This is a scene that got the ax as a result of the studio's idea that we were wasting too much time not really getting on with the story. I actually think this stuff really ups the ante and increases the fear a lot.

1:29:55 · jump to transcript →

out a message where he was sequestered in his jury saying, please don't choose anybody else until I can talk to you. I'm the best person in the world for this. So unlike Emil to say something like that, that every time I reminded him of it, he blushed. But he was exactly right because he was a brilliant director of dance and just a brilliant and wonderful man. And at first, the studio was not sure that they wanted him because he had this huge ballet background and they wanted

7:39 · jump to transcript →

the most respect and love and gratitude for Patrick and Jennifer. I love the way she pulls her dress down. That was just wonderful. The first day Patrick came in that day, he and Jennifer had worked together on Red Dawn. Then they came out and did a dance, and I told Jennifer just to circle around behind him and put her hand down on his rear, as finally she does in the cry to me scene. And we were all standing around, everybody from the studio, everyone,

20:34 · jump to transcript →

unturned wayable and I still think is the heart of this movie is the way they are together just something extraordinary happens and I should say that we got a steady stream of concerned notes from the studio which was pretty supportive in fact they had found Virginia from us two of the executives on the plane had found the Virginia place but they kept saying Johnny and Penny look so great together who will ever believe that he's going to go off with Jennifer and we sat down and we talked about it and we said no

21:53 · jump to transcript →

John McTiernan

Trying to sell stuff to the studio, he is a knife maker. He had a special knife that blah-blah-blah. And I wasn't real impressed with that but I said, "Could you make us a machete?" Which has to do with the jungle. So he made this thing that basically looks like a Thracian short sword but, what the hell. It's Arnold's... Arnold's machete. He gave it to me at the end, I've still got it. And the one liner came from that. The "Stick around" came from, came out of looking at the machete.

28:11 · jump to transcript →

John McTiernan

This joke, is Shane's joke. It's entirely Shane's joke. Shane didn't write in an official way but he wrote in an unofficial way like the joke, the pussy joke. He was just there, and he would come up with stuff. Now, the heat vision here, when we first did the heat vision, they had a real heat vision. From the folks in New York City that did the effects stuff. And it was this enormous thing with the umbilical that was six-inches thick and it would, could only get maybe four-feet from the truck. And it really would see someone based on temperature. But there was this little tiny problem, which was the ambient temperature in Mexico was in the 90s. Consequently... People were the same temperatures as the background and they were perfectly camouflaged. So in order to deal with that, the splendid folks in the special effects field said, "Well, it's no problem. "We will put ice water on the jungle. "And we will have the actors stand next to a fire just before their, "the shot," So, they literally were doing that, and they spent about, I don't know, a week getting one shot, maybe two shots. It was just a nightmare, it cost a... Every shot cost a fortune. So, finally, I went off to a video special effects house. They did commercials and things. And I sat down for about three hours, we had to do this in secret. One of the studio...

32:42 · jump to transcript →

John McTiernan

Studio post-production guys set it up for me. And we did it behind the back of all the executives and stuff. And the producers.

34:45 · jump to transcript →

So this is Long Beach now. This is a little area that we... You have to realize the politics of the movie were very interesting at the time because when we were shooting in Pittsburgh, that was the end of the movie. And we had already shot too long, according to the studio and our own schedule. I had gone over schedule. And John said, you know, we have no time to finish the movie this way. And...

19:37 · jump to transcript →

So we have to satisfy Orion and get out of Pittsburgh. And of course, he realized that there was one scene that could never be omitted by the studio, which was the death of Murphy. So we didn't shoot it.

20:00 · jump to transcript →

I mean, it's sort of like you're a fly. No, you're a small animal, and the boys have got you, and they're going to tear you apart. With Paul, lots of things tend to become Christ metaphors, so he would always go to the studio to defend how violent the scene was by saying you have to have the crucifixion so we can have the resurrection of Peter as Robocop. Here we have a little bit of stigmata coming up right here, you know, just a little bit. Nice Roman centurion here.

21:30 · jump to transcript →

Macaulay Culkin

This is a... You know, this is an interesting scene... ... because, again, the comedy... These two really worked well together. You believe them as a couple... ...and the comic timing is really pretty sweet, I have to say. I remember when I watched a lot of the dailies... ... they would always fool around whenever you... You wouldn't yell, "Cut," and they kind of just... They'd keep going a little bit and do some silly stuff. I think they really-- You know, again, it was a kind of... At times, it was tense being on the set... ...because these actors, who are so good, didn't know why they were there. And on the second one, that eased up completely. Because everyone felt that they had a responsibility... ...because they knew a lot of people would see this movie. Now, here's something I always felt pretty horrible about because... ...particularly once you have your own kids, this is the last thing you want them to do. This was a big worry, I remember. - Oh, yeah. Whether or not this was gonna stay or not. See, no one really ever understood when I'm lining up the sled... . that it doesn't exactly line up with the door. There's people who watch it who actually giggle, I remember... ...saying, "That doesn't line up. How is he gonna do that?" Yeah. You would've smashed into the wall. Yeah. But that was Larry. I remember watching the dailies. That was hilarious. Larry, our stuntman. - Yeah. Stuntman, literally. - He was probably 20... No, maybe he was about 30 back then. - Yeah. And he was your size. - Yeah. He was built like me too. Now, he was amazing. He would do anything. There's one moment coming later when we'll talk about Larry. Where he falls? - Where he falls, and he froze that day. He didn't wanna do it, but Larry had... As most of the stuntmen did in this movie... I don't know if these types of stuntmen exist anymore. Yeah, I know. - Willing to kill themselves for... It's amazing. I have a lot of that, yeah.... ...a lot of memories of these guys doing all kinds of crazy stuff. Oh, yeah. - They were my favorite, the stunt guys. The stunt guys were great. - When you're 9... ...they can do all kinds of neat stuff. - That's true. Ha, ha. Oh, yeah. They were always my best friends. We'll talk about-- A little later, we'll talk about Troy Brown and Leon Delaney... ...the two stuntmen for Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern, who were truly... Truly went above and beyond the call of duty. I haven't spoken to them in years... ...but they probably are still in a great deal of pain... ...because of some of this stuff. Daniel Stern is interesting... ...because Dan Stern was my first choice for this role... ...and the studio didn't wanna pay him at the time. We cast another actor, unfortunately-- This is the only time in my career this happened. and we did a screen test with the other actor and Joe Pesci. And the screen test was flat... ...and the other actor just couldn't really improvise with Joe... ...and you didn't believe him in the role. And I had the-- I had the horrible situation of actually telling the actor... ...I couldn't use him. Basically firing him. Oh, boy. And then the studio then understood. They saw the screen test, and they were willing to hire Danny... ...which was really an amazing working situation for me. He's one of the funniest guys I've met. And he truly was up for anything, as we'll see later in this commentary. I still have that sled in my office.... In my office here in San Francisco. I just saw it before I came over here. Signed by everyone. Signed by everyone. That's really cool. - Yeah. And when I get a little older, and things start not working out in the career... ...1 can sell it. - EBay. Yeah, eBay.

25:39 · jump to transcript →

Macaulay Culkin

Hyper on 2." Any luck? No. You know, I... The studio rejected my idea of a sequel, which was years... You know, now, you actually... You being in jail... ...coming back to take revenge on Joe and Danny... ...who live in the suburbs next to each other, and they've got their families. Gone straight. - Gone straight. And you've got your... - That's great. I see something there, but they... For some reason, the studio just won't go for it. Crazies.

33:30 · jump to transcript →

Macaulay Culkin

Now, this was... Now, that was something that really bugs me about the movie... ...IS that was a note from someone, somewhere in the studio... ...that we had to dub that line: "

44:45 · jump to transcript →

Tom and I were very interested in using materials that were more translucent, and that led us to create a Bishop dummy here that was made out of gelatin. The only problem was that gelatin doesn't do well in steam and rain, and if you'll notice there's steam and rain in this shot, but there wasn't supposed to be. Not at first. We got the go-ahead that it'd be OK. It was gonna be cool and dry. See that little rag around his wrist? We had to wrap that around his wrist cos his wrist just split in half somewhere in this, so we had to kind of dress it around. The whole thing was melting! Take after take, he was losing a layer of skin with each successive take. We should have been warned because Yuri Everson, one of our main guys, was working on that model in the studio, doing some meticulous work with the gelatin, and he had a desk lamp posed right over the head. When he moved the desk lamp, it was a little too close to the face and it all sagged, like it was palsied from a stroke or something. So there was a little bit of a history to that choice of materials.

49:30 · jump to transcript →

There's a miniature shot of the alien running up, then it cuts to a close-up of Tom. We did do a fake head of Charles Dance - it's coming up here in a minute - where the creature punches a hole in his head. And we had to do a head cast of Charles in an extreme expression. And as I recall, he was great about it. He's actually, for as serious as this character is, he was a very jovial guy. Yeah, I guess it was like an animatronic head, dripping. In order to do this movie, we built a complete silent motion-control dolly that could go at running speed, which we wound up never needing to use. You could actually run with it at high speed and it would repeat, and it was quiet enough to shoot sound. Of course, when we got to England to set it up for the first shot, nothing worked. We were tearing our hair out and found out the system wasn't grounded because they had run an extension cord into the hallway. But then, once we found that, we didn't have any problems. But that was in order to enable us to shoot scenes with pans and tilts, and then scale those moves to shoot the scenes back at the studio with a rod-puppet alien one-third scale... with a moving camera, so it wouldn't skate around in the scene. I think this rod-puppet technique is very interesting. I think it still has some validity now, even in the digital era. Yeah. - And probably now, I don't know... Well, I guess you'd still have to do the motion-control stuff to match moves. Or track it now. If you're gonna do a CG character, you can track it. But you wouldn't be able to track like that with a miniature puppet, would you? You'd have to use motion control. It's a real mechanical lollapalooza. But there is a nice presence to it that really looks like a physical thing. It gets around some of the difficult issues of CGI, in that the lighting is playing on it. And the director can direct it. Fincher could come by and direct the puppet. Five guys, you know, operating this character against bluescreen, there were some pretty bizarre mountains of equipment to get these shots working. And flags, and stands, and wires everywhere. And flags, and stands, and wires everywhere.

1:04:35 · jump to transcript →

This movie seems to have... My take on it was it was more popular in England and Europe than perhaps the second one was, or that at least they admire it more. And it is the movie that seems to grow on people. It's not what people expected, but they can't deny the quality of it, and that it is really a pretty uncompromising vision. It's just relentlessly grim, which is exactly what Fincher wanted. And it was gonna be the last. - Yeah. Yeah. Which was why the whole suicide thing at the end. Right. Which I thought was a very bold idea from the studio - to give them credit - to say yes to that, Fincher and Sigourney, you know. I thought it was very brave of everybody.

1:15:01 · jump to transcript →

where all the action took place. But in this version of the film, we thought it was very important to be tied correctly to the continuity of the previous film. So we basically added these new shots of the mothership instead of a little scout ship flying away from Earth with Scar's body on it, and then added new scenes of that scene, the little scout ship kind of taken off from the mothership. Yeah, what happens, obviously, when the studio sees a movie, sometimes they like

0:32 · jump to transcript →

Now, by the way, it was exciting for me to be involved with this process because as a producer, the very first movie I worked on, the very first movie I produced was Predator. I got to do Predator 2 also. And I came up with this notion of convincing the studio to do Alien versus Predator that had been done in a comic book form and all that stuff. But it took a while to convince the studio that there was a fan base to combine these two and that it would support the

3:13 · jump to transcript →

And then we had to kind of scramble quickly to get it all completed in time for release. That's right. This wasn't scripted originally. And we all felt that it would be a lot better to open this movie up and to connect with, you know, where the Predator's home planet is and how that relates to the movie if we could shoot it. So it took us a while to convince the studio to let us do it. Thankfully, they did. Yep. Yeah, it was just we thought it was important to add something, you know, show something that no one had seen before.

6:34 · jump to transcript →

A schism within MGM. I mean, it's possible that the entire history of the studio, indeed the history of Hollywood, boils down to an argument between Irving Thalberg, who is credited by F. Scott Fitzgerald as the one man who held the whole equation of moving pictures in his mind, and Louis B. Mayer.

3:00 · jump to transcript →

Thorberg wanted to make interesting movies. I think we have to remember that these films form a very, very small part of MGM's output in the mid-1930s. As far as the studio was concerned, they are pretty much B-movies compared to the musicals and the other big-budget films they were making. It's only because we as horror fans see them now as, as you say, this group of half a dozen really classy horror movies from this period. None of which were particularly successful at the time. And...

3:57 · jump to transcript →

We have to say, I think the main reason that they weren't huge hits is that the studio didn't get behind them. I mean, when you've got an 80-minute film, you cut down to 60 minutes on release. You've got no confidence in it. Yeah, there's a sense that, oh, well.

4:24 · jump to transcript →

I enjoyed quite a bit working on Godfather II by big contrast. I had this wonderful team, both of actors and art and photography, and I was able to pretty much make the movie the best way I thought and not have any interference from the studio and have to argue about things.

53:04 · jump to transcript →

Of course, one advantage I had was that the studio wasn't seeing any rushes, and so I wasn't getting any comment from them and no involvement from any of the executives that had been involved in the first Godfather. So from that standpoint of view, the relationship with the studio was great. I think this is the shirt that Alex made with his Pentel pen or his magic marker. I think you can see in the close-up that this is a handmade shirt.

1:23:59 · jump to transcript →

just being on this foreign location in the middle of my marriage at a vulnerable time. I was absolutely pleased with the production. I had no difference of opinion with the studio or anything. They totally kept to their word about the freedoms and the lack of interference. But maybe the demons of my own life were not serving me well. I can remember being in...

1:31:07 · jump to transcript →

My name is Alex Cox, and I am the director and writer of Repo Man. And my name is Vicki Thomas. I'm the casting director. And I'm Michael Nesmith. I was the executive producer. My name is Cy Richardson. I was Light and the guy who did Bad Man. It's Juicy Bananas. My name is Xander Schloss. I am a PA and the late Fox Harris' driver-turned-actor. I play Kevin. I'm Del Zamora, and I played Lagarto Rodriguez, the older...

0:16 · jump to transcript →

His whole, guess how many ties I got. That's right, right. Yeah, because we had these long monologues that we'd use as audition pieces, including that one. The Tracy. The one of Tracy about flying saucers and the one of Sy about the suits and ties. You know, I mean, to talk about memorable lines, how about that line at the end of the tune? You know, how can you tell your woman really loves you? How can you tell, Sy? Oh, I need somebody...

25:43 · jump to transcript →

Funnily enough, at the same time as we made this film, Penny Spears made Suburbia. And there are lots of little similarities. There's a point at which the executive producer of Suburbia appears on a television within the frame, right about where Michael does in Repo Man. There's a guy who's a murderer. He kills a little kid in the car, and he's wearing a Dodgers baseball cap. And all these little things happen that sort of have something to do with Repo Man.

1:01:02 · jump to transcript →

I didn't want to do something that was soulless. I wanted it to be a comedy, to be about an optimist, but I wanted to have those bottom notes and that soul. After a while, I knew that we were trying for the same thing. I knew that there was a certain point when Jim Brooks, I think, who really was very protective of the film and great to the film, he was our greatest champion. He also protected the movie at the studio, I know, because there was a lot of stuff early on, like, why does that dad have to be guilty?

45:52 · jump to transcript →

The boys were in Chicago and you'd met them. And you said, hey, what about these guys for these guys? And we put some riff down. We rehearsed. No, you guys made a film. That's right. We made a tape on it and sent it out to you. And you said you wanted them out there, but the studio didn't want to pay to have them out. So I think you and I flew them out. That's right. That's right. And then we shot this, I think somewhere in the first third of shooting, I believe. After that night.

1:10:05 · jump to transcript →

In the kind of terror that happens in a studio before they put a movie out and spend all the money to promote it, there was a real feeling at the studio at the time, like, who's gonna go see this movie? Is it for the family or is it for kids? There was a screening, and someone invited a writer who brought his daughter, and they just kind of quizzed them after the screening, and some people decided that it was gonna only appeal to kids. So the movie was never really... Kids? Kids? What do you mean, kids?

1:35:58 · jump to transcript →

which means that the dialogue was replaced in post-production. And not because the performances were bad, they were actually quite good, but the actors didn't quite project well enough to get over the crowd when the scene was being photographed, so we went back in the studio and revoiced those lines with them and had them projected more so that it could get up over the crowd sound effects that were put in later in post-production. Now, right after this shot, there used to be a whole other scene

22:49 · jump to transcript →

It may just give us the time we need to kill the creature. This shot coming up here, this effect shot of the eclipse, was a real pain in the ass because we'd actually finaled this shot, meaning that we'd approved it from, approved all the work from ILM, and we showed it, the picture to the studio, and people, you know, studio executives who had read the script and knew exactly what was supposed to be going on in the shot had no idea what the shot was supposed to mean. Of course, it's an eclipse, and it was in no way clear in our original shot.

1:15:44 · jump to transcript →

Every time the studio executives would see that scene, they'd go, can't you just cut that scene? Do we need that scene? Because all they saw was a guy being lifted up on wires, and then nothing happened. And then eventually Arnold Voss would walk in with LED lights on his cheek, and he would start chewing for no reason. Everybody would go, why does he start chewing? What's he eating there? I mean, we don't see him put anything into his mouth. Did he cut the thing where the candy bar he's eating or something? And we said, no, no, no. A scarab's going to come out of a hole in his chest, go up into his mouth. He eats a scarab.

1:21:09 · jump to transcript →