Studio notes

Edward Berger

Just to distinguish everyone. And I didn't know what to write. And also the rhythm of the movie was perfect at that moment. And I said, like, I can't make it any longer. I really got to get back into the story and so forth. And then I found this letter and I knew, oh, this is a good idea. And it became my favorite scene. So, you know, there you go for studio notes. They sometimes can be really helpful. So I found this scene.

46:57 · jump to transcript →

Edward Berger

And these carriages, these train carriages, we put them again outside of Prague. We built this. This was shot again in the studio. This was one of the very few scenes that was shot in the studio with an LED screen outside the window. And these train carriages, the outside, they go outside in a second, is shot outside of Prague. And you see...

1:02:39 · jump to transcript →

Tim Burton

or anything, or soul psych. I mean, we did everything that we could. We have a little bit of digital effects sometimes, but one thing that both Michael and I talked about, and I said to enter the studio, I go, I'm just, you can do anything with anything, CG. You can do anything, but we don't want to do anything. We just want to do it. Even if it doesn't look real, the practical effects were important. So we did it with everything. We really did. Except for the sandworms, which was stop motion.

14:08 · jump to transcript →

Tim Burton

And then sometimes very, very quickly he would come around with it, which was, you know, keeping it all in the spirit of improv. And like I said, with physical effects, that's very hard to do. I think it is strangely difficult because everybody, you know, gotten so used to CG, but I mean the studio, look at the end of the day, even if they had any reservations, it was very clear about making this movie. If I was ever going to do it, it had to just be simple.

1:21:32 · jump to transcript →

And Clint Howard. Clint is actually an old friend. I did his makeup on The Grinch 25 years ago or something like that. And again, I don't think I'm gonna be ruining anything here if I said when Clint came into the studio, it was great. We've spoken over the years. We've seen each other a couple times over the last 25 years. We live in the same neighborhood.

46:08 · jump to transcript →

In fact, I had a new sculptor that I hadn't worked with named Emily Fonce. I hope I'm pronouncing her last name correctly. We always kind of like joked about the pronunciation of it. But Emily was a new sculptor in the studio. And I noticed that she had, you know, she had some really, really, you know, she had a great eye.

1:20:06 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, this is one of my favorite tracks. Yeah, this is great. I remember on our board when we were working in the studio downtown, there was something that said, everything should take forever, like for Marcel to do. Yeah. And I remember thinking, this is not going to be a commercial film, if that's the case. But I feel like this sequence really captures the idea of that, but still making it fun. But it's so exciting, yeah. Yeah.

7:36 · jump to transcript →

This scene is really crucial narratively, but I hate it to death because it's frontlit. There just should not be any frontlit exteriors. It's borderline not professional. But when we were in Iceland, we had an incredibly small schedule, and also the head of the studio was there, so I couldn't just sit around and wait for the light to be right. And it was a shame, too, because when we arrived in the morning, it was very gloomy and...

41:15 · jump to transcript →