Stunts & stunt coordination

I don't remember that, so I... No, you were probably busy doing stuff. It was one of those longer shots, and I was sitting... I'll show it to you. But you guys were far away. And so by the time I got there, you guys were moving on to something else. Right, we were like, oh, whatever, that worked. That's good, you didn't die. Okay, keep going. You know, you did a lot of your own stunts, so... Oh, yeah. I mean, a lot. Because I remember you saying, you know, it's a bit like being on Glee.

21:36 · jump to transcript →

And the stunt coordinator goes, good fall, Laurie. Good roll. Because I hit the ground and I did a roll. And he's like, nice job. Okay. I want to back up and talk about some of the stuff that they cut out at the beginning of the film. Because they cut out the whole pre-credit sequence where they explain about the comet. They cut out... One of my favorite things that they cut out was the bedroom set. Because I recently talked...

23:00 · jump to transcript →

It's a comic book. That was awesome. I mean, she actually did that surfing on the... That's a stunt girl surfing on the tank. She actually did that without safety. I know. I'm just... That was... And then the leap, and that was incredible. Yeah, that leap just scared the Jesus out of me. And even the stunt guy's like... And the stunt coordinator was like, wow, that was really incredible.

1:12:46 · jump to transcript →

But in one take, he flicks the cigarette right into Baldwin's eye while it's flaming. And he freaked out and jumped at him and sort of shut the scene off. But I had a B camera on Benicio, so I was able to use the take where Baldwin gets hit in the eye. Right there. So that's real. There's no stunt involved in that cigarette hitting him in the eye. Yeah.

49:38 · jump to transcript →

Baldwin's a real trooper. Baldwin keeps saying, keep going, keep going, don't stop. Stephen did all his own stunts, and some of which, especially the one where he, at the end of the picture, where he falls face first onto the metal deck of the boat. Oh, five times? Five times, and... Smashing his face every time. Yeah. He's nearly fully recovered from the reconstructive surgery.

50:01 · jump to transcript →

It's really funny because all the Hungarian, of course, is done with our loop group. And so all the actors and the stunt people and all the people involved in the sequence spoke English. And then, you know, we laid the Hungarian over their voice. That quote, you see, belonged to Gary Jensen, our stunt coordinator. He gave it to us with his sole expressive purpose of blowing up. A whole lot has to be done. I've made one of them.

1:14:58 · jump to transcript →

You'd see that a lot on Entertainment Tonight. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was fun. Actually, that shot's coming up. I think it's the next shot. Yeah, this shot right here. Great hanging rig there that Simon Crane, our stunt coordinator, he'd just come off of Titanic and Saving Private Ryan, and it really looks like someone got hung. Brendan was just about to pass out there. Interesting, geeky, technical note here. Most of the scene is looped,

22:21 · jump to transcript →

Okay, here's where the stunt guy gets hurt coming up here. Oh, yeah, this guy got... And he... Now, in a different take, he wanted to... Actually, he was on a rig where he was going to fly, you know, 30 feet back and hit that pillar in the background, and he instead flew 60 feet back and over the top of the pillar and broke his collarbone and cracked his elbow. But like I said, he was more embarrassed than hurt. It's one of those things where you go, I guess we need another stunt guy. The stunt...

49:41 · jump to transcript →

Never want to be a fruit cart in the midst of a car chase. I always liked that eye poke. I always thought that worked out well. Here's another good little stunt right here. Just did a little wire removal and it looks like he hits the whole thing. If you notice carefully in some of the background shots right there you saw a light go by, one of our lights. It happened so fast we just kept it in the movie.

1:26:21 · jump to transcript →

the first stunts we did in the movie. The movie was choreographed by Vic Armstrong, my amazing, well, everybody's amazing stunt coordinator and action unit director. He was my partner in all of this madness and a greater guy you'll never find. His name is synonymous with

39:40 · jump to transcript →

went there and began to lay out how something that was on the move at 30, 40 miles an hour, whatever horses can do, was on screen for some six minutes and how to do all these stunts. And this was one of the best and most fun technical challenges I ever had because I had this one idea.

44:32 · jump to transcript →

the actors should do it all. And if you watch the chase, you will see that there are very few times when there are stunt actors in the chase. And Vic and I had to work really hard to figure out how to make Brendan and Maria and John Hanna, all of them, safe.

45:01 · jump to transcript →

I think the stunt team, they did a great job, and we figured out that I'm wearing lenses. I wanted to wear a suit, kind of our homage to North by Northwest. But it was freezing cold. We did it eight times. We were worried about bird strikes. We were worried about... Yes, that's the thing that's fascinating about these things, is you're looking at a perceived danger of Tom falling off the plane...

4:10 · jump to transcript →

And that what Ethan is doing within this sequence is reading a dynamic in the room and trying to find a toehold where he can start to create a division. Trying to find those chinks. Yeah. That's Wade. That's Wade Eastwood on the right, who is our stunt coordinator. Stunt coordinator. And the rabbit's foot. Yes. Another suggestion of Tom Cruise's and another reference to... MI3. MI3.

14:48 · jump to transcript →

And the fabulous, by the way, credit where it's due, Lucy Cork doing that stunt, being thrown out of that car, which was an amazing stunt. Less than 24 hours after we interviewed Benji Dunn about Ethan Hunt, he was on a plane to Vienna with tickets to the opera, and within six hours... And a really nice use, you remember when we put that pre-lap in later, picking specific shots so that when he's saying Benji Dunn, you're looking at Benji Dunn,

44:07 · jump to transcript →

Thank you. Bob, one of the things you said that I want to bring up... I think one of the earliest phone calls, maybe even the first phone call, you said, "You could end the film "right with him riding the bus, defeated, deflated, "and that could be a great short film about a day where nothing went right." Yeah. And that's the attitude that stayed with me throughout. The idea that this is a godsend. This moment of these guys... I think the original plan was to have Ave Maria playing in the background for this moment 'cause it was literally a godsend. It was amazing. That person yelling "bus," the character's Teddy Kuznetsov, played by... Sasha Pal. - Sasha Pal. And that man right there is Daniel Bernhardt. Daniel Bernhardt is the man who trained me to fight for two years. That guy right there. He's one of the... He's the greatest. He's maybe the best stunt actor working for the last 10 years. Man, he's great. And you might know him from the TV show Barry. And you might know him from the big fight in Atomic Blonde. And you would know him from John Wick movies and Hobbs & Shaw and every other great action movie of the last 20 years, 'cause he's the best, and he's a great actor too. Bringing a lot of character to this whole sequence. But from the moment things got real with the possibility of me doing an action movie, I started to train, 'cause I was a comedy writer for 25 years, and I did a normal workout of any suburban dad. I hope these assholes like hospital food. "That girl's gonna get home safe."

25:14 · jump to transcript →

Shit. This guy thinks he's gonna beat the crap out of these guys. Anyway, Daniel trained me, guys. I do my fighting in this movie, and I always wanted to do that. I won't say the name of the actor, but I told an actor once, who I like, that I'm gonna do an action movie and that I was training, and he laughed at me and he said, "Why are you training? "They have guys who do the fighting for you." And I was like... I didn't say it to him but I wanted to Say, "No, I want to do the action movie. I don't want to just be in one." You want to put in the work. I want to do what Jackie Chan does, my version of it, the best I could do. So I trained for two years with Daniel, and he took me from zero to wherever the hell I am here. But I do this fight that you're about to see, and I had fun doing it. I had so much fun doing the fight sequences. And there are no stunt doubles except for one shot in the entire sequence. Which is... It's one thing coming from me. It's another when... Our fantastic action choreographer, Greg Rementer, he said, "Ilya, enjoy it because you don't get this ever. "You don't get the dedication. "People just come in and they kind of, you know, Stretch a little bit "and then as soon as it gets a little bit uncomfortable "the doubles run in and do the hard work." It was fantastic that every shot, every action beat was done by you. And furthermore, the fact that, you know, we had to cut, and we wanted to make it a little more dynamic than just a steady camera single shot. But we could have done five, six connections in a row, no problem, without cutting away because you memorized the hell out of this whole thing and trained in this very bus. There were moments when you trained, right? Right before the production and prep? - Yeah, we trained in LA. We had a layout of this bus and we trained for this sequence. It changed over time. For different reasons, it changes. There's Daniel and me, head to head. There he is, the guy who trained me. And he's such a great fighter. He's such a great on-screen fighter, and he's such an amazing guy. An amazing, intelligent, upbeat, hardworking, just one of the best people I've ever worked with, known. And he got me here. What else can I say? I love him and I want to make more movies with him and... Then he gets thrown out of the bus. Our hero.

27:13 · jump to transcript →

Can we just talk for one second about our black Russian? Araya. Araya is a great actor, Araya Mengesha. Yep. And he has a great part in here, and he plays it so well. Now, is he a stuntman? - No. He is an actor from Toronto. Yeah. - A great guy. And I give him a lot of credit because he... When I talked to him, I said, "Look, I want him to be... "I want Pavel, the black Russian, to be speaking Russian "and to sound as Russian as possible." Yeah. - 'Cause he's based on... I don't know how to pronounce it. "Amalgamation"? Yeah. - Of a few Russian black guys that I know. 'Cause, obviously, we don't... You know, we're mostly predominantly a white nation. Right. But the story that Pavel, or Araya, the character talks about how he's the son of an Ethiopian Olympian from the Moscow Olympics. That's all... There's a certain group of people in Moscow or in Russia who were the result of the Olympics. Just people came over, had sex and left. And so these hyper-athletic kids from Olympian fathers or mothers, fathers, they grew up with a very different skin color in a country which... People were not used to that in the slightest. So they had a very, sort of, in a way, great experience 'cause they were getting the right kind of attention. But obviously, with the right kind of attention also comes, usually, the wrong kind of attention. So he is based on a real concept. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I said, "Araya, it'd be great if you can, you know, spend some time "and I'll coach you a little bit and let's get the Russian right." And he did. Like, we spent, before recording, you know... Yeah. Twenty minutes a day just going over... - He's fantastic in this. Such a great guy. A joy to work with too. As were all these guys, but... This is a team of people, mostly Canadian stunt people, but overseen by Greg Rementer and Daniel Bernhardt, who did some of the fight choreography, all the fight choreography. Well... -[t was Daniel and Kirk together. Yep. - Well, together. I mean, Greg Rementer is this... What is his title here? -/ think he's both... He's the stunt choreographer and the second unit director. Yes. Anyway, it was a team effort.

48:18 · jump to transcript →

And we shot this very close to the end, didn't we, Jacques? This was a little tabletop thing. Seems to me it was the last week. Yeah. I'm trying to remember if Robert did any of this stuff. It wasn't him, was it? No, no. I think it was his double. Yeah, it was all a little tabletop. Yeah, I think Tony did some of this. Tony Caesar, maybe. Could well be. Tony Caesar, the stunt coordinator. Yeah. And my racquetball partner for the last ten years. And there's Amanda. Yeah, it's Amanda Weiss.

0:44 · jump to transcript →

Jim Doyle's really tour de force here, where this entire set is rotating, and all of the light fixtures outside attached to it for the moonlight through the window are also attached to it, so the shadows don't shift. And the actress is simply told to go with the room. So now she is on the floor, really, and the camera's upside down, along with you, Jacques, and myself. Yeah, Mandy is so good at this scene. Wow. That was a stunt lady.

17:33 · jump to transcript →

so that the stunt lady could take over for the glass breaking shot. Right, because she was going to be seen. I don't think I did it that successfully. No, no, it worked very well. That's a great shot. Oh, we did this. It was the first time I think anybody's ever come out from a mirror, you know. Really? If anybody's ever used a breakaway mirror before, that's what they told me it was. That's a great shot. This, I remember we shot this at the end of an 18-hour day. Yeah. And all those feathers everywhere.

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Gary Goddard

It's a textbook in everything. Virtually every scene has either pyrotechnics, explosions, optical lasers you have to put in later, just stunts. It's one thing after another. This was to establish those doors, because later you'll see the doors play into the action sequence.

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Gary Goddard

The father there in that picture, her father was the actual stunt coordinator on the project. Deliberate choice. Fantasy is the theme of the high school prom. Maybe a foreshadowing of the

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Gary Goddard

This is good. This is the stunt double for Billy Barty making a little hop through the fire here. I always liked that shot. Now we have the detective, and he's going to take matters in hand. He's going to get out there. This is the shot coming up that blew out the windows on all the local businesses. Another interesting thing is you're going to see a lot of aerial shots later over this street in Whittier.

1:05:13 · jump to transcript →

That is the special effects coordinator going down there, Gary Combs. I mean, the fall is, of course, is Nancy, but the big fall is Gary Combs because the stuntwoman we had couldn't do it. So Gary took on, let's say, took a female part there. Gary Combs I worked with also in Hello Man and in Showgirls. He was my stunt coordinator on three movies. And he had a broken back, too.

18:47 · jump to transcript →

But we had all these other gags, like the gas spraying out and hitting the window, as you'll see, and this stuff. But the special effects guys had only read, the station blows up. And boy, the station blew up, but none of this stuff was ready. And so on the night of, we just had a terrible time trying to get the other gags going. And I remember that night, the stunt guy, because I went over to say, hey, we're going to be able to do this tomorrow. And I think he was going to hit me with an axe handle. He was so mad at me. What do you say we find out, huh?

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See here, this little spraying gas thing, this nearly cost me my life. Why was that? Because the stunt guy was so mad at me, he was going to hit me with an axe handle. Not the stunt guy, the special effects guy. He married the production controller and later was killed in an automobile accident, which I'm sorry about.

51:45 · jump to transcript →

Luckily, your emergency trip to Iran saved the day. Now, David, you directed this movie? Yes, the whole thing. David showed up every day. That's amazing. Part of every day. Now, this was a big surprise, wasn't it? Yeah. Now, is this the one where Leslie pulled out his back? I think he did. Well, you can see he already has a hump there. Yeah. How many of these stunts? He came up whining, as I remember. How many of these stunts did Leslie do himself? There were no stuntmen.

1:51 · jump to transcript →

The police station, you see. Time was spent on these names. You'll see, that's coming up, I think. The hospital. Is that one of the Everly brothers? Wait a second. Did you ever get negative mail on any of this stuff? Any of the stunts? Just from the studio. And to this day, you still get the negative. Oh, we love the police scientists.

25:53 · jump to transcript →

That's a stunt dancer. Great situation because he was wearing a mask. Couldn't ask for one. Yeah. So Leslie's on vacation during the shooting of this. Yeah. Didn't even know where he was. Most people don't know this song was written for this movie. We wanted him to write an original song. Didn't we meet with Randy Newman?

1:09:12 · jump to transcript →

And also, of course, the continuity of sequence... You show it through each shot separately, but you have to maintain the feel and continuity of light in each different shot. So this scene has some great overlapping imagery of effects. The first thing we'll see is the alien creature as it makes its way into the hospital room. It's done by seeing reflections and distorted angles of it through the different medical instruments. And it was a... This was a stunt man coming down on wires for part of it. Then he would invert, and then I was in the suit doing the actual attack through the plastic curtain.

1:03:37 · jump to transcript →

This attack was actually the first thing we shot - wasn't it, Tom? - with the alien, and as I recall the paint didn't quite match the arms. I'm always feeling like I'm seeing paler hands than arms on this shot. I think this was a stunt man, on wires, reaching down... Hanging down, upside down. So, you can freeze-frame it on DVD, and I think you'll see a clear demarcation between glove and suit.

1:09:55 · jump to transcript →

Here we have the beginning of the fire sequence, which was quite an operation, really. It was actually quite dangerous because one time we had a backdraft, I think they call it. And a couple of the guys got burnt, including one of the firemen. So these stunts were all shot by the second unit, in the capable hands of my dear friend Tony Spratling, who did a beautiful job here. Obviously, we shot the stuff with the main artists, but Tony matched my images beautifully, I thought. Tony Spratling, of course, had done two or three second units for me on other pictures, so we know exactly what each other's thinking. So our collaboration is always quite successful. We don't have to speak too much about what we're going to do. He's a very good man. Yeah, we were there for the set-up of it, and we thought maybe it would be better to watch this from behind the video monitors. But there were some huge explosions. They're also really seamlessly embellished by Richard Edlund and his guys at Boss Films, where they were shooting some miniature explosions and comping them in over the existing explosions. Really beautiful work. It was quite a sequence, this. And obviously, you know, as I say, difficult to shoot. Well, I mean, you can't underexpose flame. Flame is always going to be very bright. But the thing is to get the surrounding colors to match the firelight, so to speak, to suggest that the light is coming from the fire. Cos you do have to augment it. You can't just let firelight do the job. You have to also... Cos it's so bright that it just flares out everything. So you have to color the lamps, make them warmer, more orange to match the firelight. And the thing is to go for a deep exposure, if you can, to bring the light levels up, so that the flame is more orange. Because if you shoot it wide open, the flame is so bright that it just flares out, becomes so white it doesn't look like firelight, you know. So you have to color the lamps and get a good exposure so that you bring the level of the flame down to make it look natural.

1:20:27 · jump to transcript →

Jed played a character called Void, who was a punk rocker who ultimately gets chopped in half and walks around like this walking torso kind of guy. He also plays the soldier of Rohan who finds Thadred in the water in the very beginning of this extended cut. He's also played numerous elves. And stunt riders too, actually. Jed's a great rider and he did a lot of the horse kind of stunt work for us as well. And numerous orcs. Well, that's right. He's at the beginning of the movie with Miriam Pippin, isn't he? He's the orc that kind of...

2:00:22 · jump to transcript →

women and children. It sort of gives the battle a purpose really beyond just defending a stone castle you know you're obviously now defending the women and children and in a sense the future of your own race really. The stunt guys were amazing they just you know got drenching soaking wet because all this rain was coming from rain towers

2:49:16 · jump to transcript →

Another mixture of completely digital Uruk-hai with close-ups for real. We never actually had more than 100 Uruk-hai in any shots. We never built more than 100 costumes for Uruk-hai. And so we were limited in a sense of what we could actually shoot with the extras and the stunt guys. So any time that you're looking at more than 100 in a shot, you are looking at a lot of CG guys.

2:50:17 · jump to transcript →

Richard Wright, producer. Mans, director. Bjorn Stein, director. Gary Lucchesi, producer. James McQuaide, executive producer and visual effects supervisor. What, you get two titles? - Well, you know. Big shot. So here we are... ...at the beginning of the fourth Underworld movie. That's right. Been a lot of them. The first appearance of Len Wiseman's... ...new logo. - New logo. The world premiere. - In 3D, no less. Oh, my God. It's like our life flashing before our eyes. Yeah. We've lived through these. Exactly. I think it's fun to say that... ...I think we cut the... Edited the whole film for eight weeks... ...and then we spent three weeks editing the first three minutes. That's exactly right. - It was crazy how to get it... And it was, "Shall we do a recap or shall we not? Does it feel cheesy with a recap or is it good?" But I think that everybody agreed in the end... ... that we have this wonderful library or cupboard of wonderful images... ...SO let's use it. And it's a wonderful way to get into the mood... ...and this is the world. lt has been a while too, since Underworld 2... ...where this one picks up from. We're reminding ourselves of all the characters. It's not cool, but in the end it... Wow, it really works. Yeah, I had a friend-- We had a premiere yesterday, actually... ...and I had a friend who hasn't seen the prior ones... ...and she said it was helpful... ...to just get into the soul of what this is, so.... And it's so nice to see Michael Sheen... ...and Scott Speedman and Bill Nighy. Yeah. - Losing their heads. killed the elders.... Yeah. One of the things we really liked when we got the script... ...was that number four... That it was the beginning of something new. That it was not just number 17 or something. It was.... The trilogy was done... ...and now we got into something new... ...which is exactly what we're watching right now. And this was a big thing how... That we wanted it to be brutal... ...and hand-held and gritty, using a camera language... ... that hasn't been used in Underworld before. Yeah. To turn everything upside down. This is another part of the film where we did... ...a tremendous amount of work trying to figure out... ... how to frame the fact that we're 15 years in the future... ...and the world has changed... ...and how you do that economically... ...In a different camera style than the rest of the film. Because this is in 2D, not in 3D as the rest of the film is. One of the biggest inspirations for this intro... ...Was actually the Gavras video, the M.I.A. video. What's the name of that? "Born Free." - "Born Free." Oh, that guy. - He's great. This guy, he's just at casting... ...and we realized that we need something... ...and we cut this rollout and then suddenly we needed him... ...SO this is his casting tape. - His audition tape, yeah. Yeah. - Yep. Used it in the film. I love that head shot. James really enhanced this with the visual effects he put into it. These creatures, yeah. The creature shots. Because they weren't shot that way. Yes. They're hard to come by, these creatures. That one was a real one. That's a real one. - Yeah. A real Werewolf. Yeah, we had a few. - Yeah. We can cast them in the forests of Vancouver. What we just saw... That girl on the wall... ...IS Kate's stunt double. - Yeah. She did... - Alicia. Alicia Vela-Bailey, yeah. She took iPhotos of her body for each bruise she got. She was black and blue, this girl... ...and she's the toughest girl I've ever met. Went to the hospital more than once too. Yeah. - Yeah. But as he said, the toughest girl I ever met. Yeah, always with a smile. Always with a smile. And you will see her getting thrown around a lot in this one. All of those flying-into-the-wall sort of things... . It's actually a person, Alicia, getting thrown in. Or Kate sometimes, as well. - Yeah. So we wanted to start off in 2D, gritty... ...and then since this is 3D movie... ...we wanted it to... Really make it big... ...when we see Kate for the first time, and that's when we switch to 3D. This shot was actually planned to start inside the fire... .In the beginning, inside a skull... ...and then going through the flames... ...a Vampire skull, but it became too tedious. That was the four-hour version. Yeah, this... We're very European. European version. Very... It was also a shot that we fought to keep in... ...and there was some obstacle to that... ...but we succeeded in keeping it in. Obstacle being money. - I love the way you say that. We ran out of money. And you see the surroundings here is-- We tried to create... Since this is the first time we introduce a man really... ...In the Underworld franchise... ...we wanted to find architecture... ... for the city that wasn't, you know, just another city. And after a lot of thinking and looking.... You know, we were thinking the first film was shot in Budapest... ...and it had that gothic feel to it and... By the way, great blood splatter there. - I love it. That was beautiful. And then we found something-- If you haven't been to Eastern Europe... ... you see all these beautiful houses... ...but next to them you have these concrete, hard, depressing buildings. And there's something called brutalism. You mean brutalism? - Brutalism, yes. A word we've heard 700,000 times during the making of this film. You were insanely annoying by just trying to put brutalism in... ...brutalism in, put brutalism in... ...to find what we call neo-Goth. Which is a new Goth. - Neo-Goth, yeah. This plate's actually from Underworld 2. This was.... We were doing tests for that boat that exploded... ...and we went back and found the footage... ...and stole that plate and revamped it here for what you see. Yeah. The secret of every great artist is knowing where to steal. Where stuff is hidden, in this case. - Yeah. It was one of the biggest challenges that we didn't have Scott Speedman. So that was a face replacement of a stuntman... ...and I think that was the trickiest part to pull off, I think, in the movie... ...because we're setting up this love story. She's running for her love and we don't have the real guy. Yeah. - But I think because of the recap... ...we do get that.... Do you see that city in--? That city is all CG behind her that's burning. And I remember James had said, "What do you think?" And I remember we asked about that, like, months ago... ...or half a year ago, and I forgot about it... ...and then you just come up with this. It was like a birthday present. I was so happy. All these backgrounds in it... ...makes It so much richer. And remember this next shot coming up too of Kate swimming... ...was really the last footage that we shot on the movie. Yeah. In the tank. We all had this great concern that, you know... ...can Kate swim or not? She ended up being a fantastic swimmer. She was great. She was.... This is more than swimming. It's performing underwater. She held her breath so well. lt was unbelievable. We were.... - Yeah. Well, that's typical Kate, you know. Everything she does, when she does it is, like, perfect. Yeah. - Yeah. But filmmaking's about being afraid... ...things aren't gonna work. - Right. We had anticipated the worst and we were wrong. And this is-- Originally the Underworld title was here. This is our homage to Tree of Life. - Yes. We had the title here at one point... ...and this is a transition... ...which is very abstract and weird, actually. But I'm happy with it. These were the things... ...that I remember it was hard to describe. We were very sure exactly how we wanted it... ...but we couldn't really say "this is how to do it"... ...because we'd never seen it before. But now when I see it... James, who did this? - Celluloid. Fucking great. - It's great. Yeah. It's great too, because we added the spin... ... sort of late in the equation. This may be an intellectual idea. Hopefully it works. To sort of make the audience... ...particularly when you see it in 3D, disoriented. Kind of like Kate was as a result of being underwater... ...being Knocked out and waking up 12 years later. There's something about spinning... ... that sort of makes you visually confused. Also, not only the spinning, but also the kind of... ...stop and motion feel to it, that it's... - Time passing? lt has a time-lapse feel to it... ...which, you know, was a subtle way of saying time has passed... ...actually, 12 years. - It's one of my favorite shots. Yes. - This is beautiful. Another very disorienting shot, though. So this is actually Alicia hanging here... ...and it's Kate's face replacement on her. Yeah. And the ice is CG. - Yeah. Smoke is CG. I am glad that we put the name on the glass there, "Subject 1." Yeah. So nobody would get into the wrong tank. No, but the thing is, I don't think it's just for like: "Oh, it's for the idiots." But I think it looks good. Subject 1 sounds brutal, I think, in a very good way. There's that word again. - Yeah. And remember that set initially... ...when we first saw it, had all these shower curtains in front of it... ...and we asked Claude to remove them. Yeah. - Oh, right, yeah. One thing that we really wanted to do in this movie was that... And we told Brad, who was the excellent second-unit director... ...and stunt coordinator, we said that we very.... We want to hurt Selene a lot. "Could you find somebody we can do that to?" Yeah. Because she wasn't that hurt in the other movies. We said, "We really want to--" Do you think anybody's listening to you right now? The naked girl, I'm watching that instead. Everybody's so nervous when you shoot something like this... ...but Kate was so cool. She was. Yeah. - Yeah. It was nothing. - Here we have Stephen Rea. Yep, there he is. Our Irish. - Yeah. I think, yeah... I really liked working with him. He was... Stephen is a handful, but he's also.... He gives you what you need. Is there anybody in this film that ended up doing their native accent? The North Americans were doing English... Kate. - Yeah, Kate, that's true. Everybody else was doing a different accent. Sandrine Holt there. - Sandrine Holt. Hurry. Releasing... ...maximum dose of fentanyl.

0:10 · jump to transcript →

Oh, we started watching the movie. - Yeah. This is cool. - Will she make it? Got her clothes on. One of the things that we were very keen on... ... that we wanted, was that we wanted.... We had this ambition... ... that the audience should have their first breath... ...after the first 10 minutes... ...when she gets dropped off the truck... ...which we will see. And when I was watching the premiere yesterday with my wife... ...when she get-- She: At exactly that spot and I felt, "Wow... ... this was exactly what we were aiming for." I think the audience was a little surprised too. We had the premiere last night so we got to watch... ... the movie with a big audience. But they were surprised at the level of violence of the movie. This is a tougher movie than the other movies. Selene is a lot more badass in this movie. She kills a lot of people. - Yeah. Went through a lot more buckets of blood too. A sign of the times, I suppose. Yeah, you'll wish you hadn't done that. This was one of the big scenes in the trailer... ... that we had shown Screen Gems right at the beginning. I love the little splat of blood hitting there. That was sweet. I repeat, full containment... No, there was buckets of blood. I mean, it's.... Violence Is an aesthetic I think that, I mean, goes a hundred years back. Yep. Have we actually done a body count in this? It's a lot. You know what? I did once. Did you? What'd it end up being? - I can't remember. Counting Lycans and humans. Yeah, dead-- Corpses. Now, this moment was an additional shoot moment. It was the first thing we sh... - Wes Bentley, yeah. It's the last and first... - The uncredited Wes Bentley. The first and the last... - This jump was the first thing we shot. First day of shooting. - Look at this boom here. There. That hit in that shot, was Alicia... ...our excellent stunt girl, who just smacked... It sounded like the worst sound I ever heard. It's like, "We killed the stunt double on the first shot." And then you said, "Let's go again." The first day of shooting went so well... ... that I walked away thinking, "God, this is gonna be an easy movie." Oh, my God! - You were wrong. I was wrong. It was so difficult. This was the toughest by far we've done. They're not supposed to be easy. No. - There's a direct correlation... ...between the amount of suffering to do a movie... ...and how well it turns out. We never did a film, like, with this big budget kind of thing... ...but I think you always end up in the same position, you know? You don't have enough money. You always... Imagination can always outrun money. Yeah. - Yeah. The 3D made it more complicated too. Yeah, the 3D really-- You know, nobody had really done it. You know, how to plan it and how to shoot it and.... This is where we want people to breathe. Yeah, here. Here's brutalism again. - Yeah. I was talking with the cinematographer... ...ocott Kevan, last night and... Who did a great job. - He did a great job. And the person... I introduced him to my daughter. My daughter said, "Was this your first 3D movie?" He said, "No, my second. I made all my mistakes on the first one... ...So this one I could get right." Yeah, he was the only guy kind of who had done it. Yes. - And he kept telling us: "It'll take a long time." I remember-- Gary, you said: - It did. "If we go down the Amazonas, it'd be nice... ... to have someone who's been there." Done that trip. That was true. Scott was really there. - Yeah. He was great. But it's also-- It has been very... ...weird. - First shot of Kate. This was the first shot of Kate. Yeah. - First night. That terrible night when it would not stop raining. This was one of those.... - There's a gale right now. When the duck flew into the light? - Yeah. It was a duck who came from the sky... ...and landed in the middle of the set. The camera broke down about four times. Yeah. No, just shooting 3D was a weird experience in that sense... ... that we hadn't done it before and all the rules that you get... ... from various people who has done it... ...Just turn out to be not true or.... - Bullshit. Total bullshit. I don't know if the Red Epic that we used, the camera... ... kind of discarded some of them so it actually works now... ...and it's also.... You have to realize you're telling a story... ... you're not doing a 3D ride. Although this movie is like a ride but... No, but I think what.... True, because... .all these people that we talked about, they were technicians... ...and not filmmakers or storytellers. So they speak about the perfection of everything... ...and that's not really interesting, perfection... ...ecause what you go for is emotion, and emotion is not always perfect. It's also... You know, 3D is in its infancy. People really don't know the rules. When we took those classes... ... there'd been like six movies made and so people didn't know. Half of them were not real 3D, either. - Correct. Where you actually were using binocular cameras... ...to shoot the entire movie, which we did. I don't think any... There wasn't a rule they gave us... ...that we didn't break. - No. I mean, it was... - No. Everything. This is that hybrid POV, as we Call it. It's when Kate starts seeing through.... She thinks she sees through Michael's eyes... ...but it's actually India's. Eve, her daughter. This is so hard, I think, to decide as a filmmaker... ...when you do this. What it should look like? - No. Not technically, but I'm saying the suspension of disbelief... ...of is it Michael or not, and.... We didn't know... All the marketing now you've seen... ... you know, It's all out that she has a daughter in this one... ...which, you know, when we were planning this.... Hopefully that would be the secret. It's gonna be a surprise, yeah. - "Wow, she has a daughter." But.... And I think what helps us Is that we... - Michael Ealy, by the way. Michael Ealy. - Appearance of Michael Ealy. What helps us is the pace that we had to this. You just move so fast that, you know... ... you don't leave time for the mind to think that much. But it's.... Yeah, it's interesting. One of the scenes we shot here is outside in Vancouver. Vancouver-- When we heard we're shooting Underworld... ...and we're shooting it in Vancouver... ...we thought that was pretty strange because it's not gothic. But as Bjorn was talking about... ...when we found the neo-Goth and the brutalism... ...Vancouver Is fantastic. - We'll start counting... ...how many times that word comes. - You do that. It might be even more people than die. Yeah. A couple of words about Kate.... She's a movie star and a really, really good actress. Sometimes that's not the same thing. But she is, and she's very fun to work with. And she... You know, she's British, she always... Theo James. - Theo James. Very witty, yeah. - Young English actor making his... Who's also extremely funny. - Those damn Brits. Yeah. He's so funny. And you're around people who are gorgeous and funny... . It takes its toll on you. Yeah, it doesn't go together usually, yeah. No, and you just stand there in the middle and talking really bad English. I love this shot we did with Stephen. I remember we were shooting it, he was really somewhere else. He was... That was a scene we added after we had started shooting. It was Gary's scene. - That was my idea. We initially had a scene outside of here that l.... I remember seeing this location. I thought it was beautiful... ...but I couldn't wrap my head around a desk being in an exterior atrium... ...so I was struggling with that, but I'm sure glad we did it. I think it looks beautiful. I think you said when you saw it, "It's outside?" It started raining. - "It's outside?" And it was freezing cold. You remember how cold it was? Oh, my God, it was freezing. - God. This is the second... - Then we said: "We have all this concrete and it's freezing cold. Let's get water everywhere. That'll make it really comfortable." This is day one. Day zero, we did the jump we saw before. This is day one where it was full-on, all teams... ...SO this is the first scene that we shot of the whole film. And this shot was actually blown up. We had shot it wider, but we were able to push in on it. We did that with an enormous number.... One of the beauties of using the Red Epic camera... ...was the ability to push in and resize afterwards... ...1N postproduction. That's 175 percent. - Yeah. One of the things I believe that Mans and Bjérn should discuss... ...because we experienced it our first day of shooting... .IS that they are slightly unorthodox in terms of a directorial team. Slightly? They alternate the days they're shooting. So the first day, I believe it was Bjérn, right? You were directing the first day... ...and then Mans would direct the second day. And so, you know, you guys may wanna enlighten the audience... ...as to your procedure. - This was Mans. The prior one in the corridor, I did. I can't remember, but we always have the producer flip a coin... I did. I remember I flipped a coin. Yeah, flipped a coin and whoever gets the tails... ...whatever we decide, begins the day. The thing is, when I'm directing, Bjorn's my best buddy... ...as we Call it, and he doesn't do anything... ...except helping me. Nobody's allowed to talk to him. - Wait. We'll miss Wes getting thrown through the window. This is a totally reshot scene. - Yeah. We had another scene that was... - Just not working. No, it was a bit of a disaster. We got the opportunity to reshoot this, and I love this scene. I love it too. - It's great. This whole spider-webbing window thing.... That was actually Len Wiseman's idea of having him... ...be pushed through the window as it spider-webbed behind him. Yeah, we had.... Yeah. Fantastic idea. - Yeah, great shot. In the background, you see he's got little stuffed animals... ...because we wanted him to be a tinker... ...because he's been tinkering with her... What? I never saw those stuffed animals. I love this shot. I love this. It's too short. - Way too short. Yeah. It's way too short. You know, if you're starting to do movies or anything.... Please listen up, because Bjérn is saying something important. If you get into doing green-screen stuff, stay on it longer... ...because the visual effects will come in and you'll go: "Why the hell didn't we stay longer?" You had 36 frames of tail handle that you didn't use. So it's... So there. - Bollocks. I did not see that. - The famous.... Larz. Thank you, Larz. This is a 300-pound dummy in steel. Oh, God. Nothing.... I mean... Larz is the visual effects... - Special effects. Special effects. We thought, "There's no way. That's not gonna smash the car." Larz was like, "It's gonna smash the car." It did. - It smashed it great. Larz was right. It worked. And I love this shot of the camera pulling up... ...and catching Theo there. - Yeah. SO we are boosting up the mystery here. Theo, who is this guy. - The mystery man. And hopefully you don't know that he's a Vampire yet. He could be anyone, probably a human. Yeah, that was one of the challenges, as well, with the introducing. We introduce Michael Ealy, who plays Sebastian... ...and we have introduced David. We had introductions of a character called Quint, which is... Love this knife. - Yeah. The Uber-- Who was a Lycan, but it was taken out. Because there were too-- Yeah. Kris. - Kris Holden. Brilliant. - Brilliant guy, brilliant actor. It was taken out because there were too many people presented... ...and he gets presented after the car chase... ...and we only see him once. I'm not sure if that was perfect. In hindsight, maybe we should have. - But it's tough. That's... This is a movie where there's only one character... ... left over from other films. Every character has to be introduced. At a certain point, it's a struggle... ...trying to figure out ways to do it without overwhelming the audience. So we just caught a glimpse of the lower Lycans. And one of the things that we really loved in this one... ...was that we could expand the mythology and the universe... ...by inventing new creatures. And we liked the idea that they have been living in the sewers. There's one now. Yeah. And, you know, we thought, you know.... Here we thought Gollum. We thought rabid dog. We thought puss-- Run... Is that what you call it? Puss? Pus. - Pus running. Yeah. Saliva. Fucking crazy in the head. Rabid crazy. That... - Syphilitic. We wanted to because there's... One of the most wonderful lines... .In the history of Underworld is: "You're acting like a pack of rabid dogs! And that, gentlemen, simply won't do." That Michael Sheen says in Underworld 7. And we said, well, let's turn them into those rabid dogs now. They-- You know, they have lived here underground for so long... ... that they actually became these rabid dogs. Yeah, we actually don't see these guys as being human anymore. They're just Lycans. - And they... They turned out beautifully, James. Really beautiful. - These are my favorite Lycans. I think if there is a part five, there should be just these guys. I love them, just those.... The horde. - Yes. Really sick. It was the first time we moved away from suits. We always relied on practical prosthetic suits... ...and this was the first. This and the Uber are the two creatures that are purely CG. The Uber was hard to cast, so we had to go CG. This is an important moment. I loved shooting this. - This is where Selene sees... ...this child for the first moment. Without realizing who it is. - Right. She thinks it's Michael. I remember when shooting it... - She expected to find Michael. Right. Exactly. And she was so beautiful, and she looks so scared. Vulnerable. - Yeah. And the whole thing here we set up, you know.... We're gonna reveal later in the van, when she rips the Lycan's head apart. Hopefully that works, because we set up this girl as weak... ...as we see here, and vulnerable and so on... ...but she is the daughter of Selene, which means the girl's got powers. She's got the kick-ass gene. - Her name is Eve... ...which is never pronounced. - No. It isn't? We never say it? - We never say it. She says, "I'm Subject 2. You're Subject 1." So we might give her another name if we want to for the next one. Eve is perfect, I mean. No, but I think Selene is so beautiful... ...because Selene means moon in Greek. Is that right? - Yeah. Selene means moon in Greek? - Don't you know your Greek? Apparently not. Good Lord. Yeah. So here's the car chase, as we Call it. And it is pretty much... ...on the money on every shot that we storyboarded... ...which is extremely rewarding for a director... ...to see that it pulls off. This is also a triumph of visual effects. Probably half of the scene it was pouring down rain... ...and shooting in 3D, which means you can't really shoot. Shooting in 2D. We shot most of it in 2D. Because you can't shoot in 3D, the rain hits the mirror. The half-silvered mirror that you use in a 3D rig. So this whole thing was pieced together... ... from very, very rudimentary pieces.

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By the way, there's my daughter, I should say. In the car. Ashley McQuaide, her big cameo. She's great. She's gonna go do good. She's very sought after in Hollywood. The one thing I can say is this. This crash coming up was a bit of a fuckup. The taxi was supposed to fly over the other car. SO we were disappointed... ...but I think that the shot still looks pretty bitchen. It looks fantastic. Your eye is drawn to the Lycan. Which is what it should.... - Could have been better. And here-- You know, Paul Haslinger did the music here. I love this, you know, how we changed into this new... ...Style in the music exactly when we get into close combat here. Paul, being an old hand... ...having done the score for Underworlds 7 and 3. He did an amazing job. - Amazing job. Yeah. - Yeah. Every-- All these Lycans are CG Lycans... ...but they mostly are.... There were guys dressed in blue with funny heads. So they look like really big... - Suits kind of looking like... This was a big moment. - Looks great. And India's face.... We really didn't do anything to it. She was able to scrinch up her face. - Yeah, she's a badass. Well, there's a bit of CG going on. We changed her eye shape and the color of her skin, obviously. But she was good. - This is an old trick, you know. The guy dry his fist across his mouth. I told Theo to do that. But it really always looks good, I think. It's the moment too, where Selene realizes... ...that this creature back there has... ls connected to her. - ls connected to her. She saw a level of power in there she hadn't imagined. Here's the Kris Holden-Ried introduction. Yeah. Here's where he comes in. Might have... And it's not even the last new character. In the script, this is the third time we see Kris... ...or Quint. - Quint. And here, we talked about that scene... In the apartment when she throws the guy out of the window. If you look at the monitor, there's actually a shot from... ...coming out of the club... ...which was Prey. So we used footage for that as well. lt was not a waste of time shooting there. Very expensive stills. - Those two days... ...that we spent shooting there. - That town is all CG, and then we.... Somebody gave us that in the last... There were so many people working so hard... ...for no money for this one. I love it. - Yep. How did you find me? Now we have an actual conversation. An actual dramatic scene. Yeah. - The first of the entire film. There's not a lot of talking. - Yeah. I think Michael Babcock, who did the sound design... Which is so beautiful, I almost cry when I think about it. When we heard about... "What did you do, Michael?" "I did Inception and Dark Knight." We're like, "Okay, good." And I think when he showed us the first reel... ...we had, like, no notes. lt was perfect. Anyway, he said... ... after we'd done this, "I really enjoyed working with this. ll even do a talkie with you guys." That's nice. - Yeah. I remember at the end of this scene, when we did India's side... ... that Kate went up to her and complimented her and said: "You did a really great job." - Yeah. And it was a.... It shows Kate's consideration... ...for other actors, and really the.... The person that Kate is. You know, because here's this young girl... ...who was clearly a little bit nervous acting... ... against a movie star, and an actress of Kate Beckinsale's quality. Yet Kate was very generous with her. The funniest thing-- Not funny, but extraordinary thing about India... .IS that she is like a very old soul in a young body. Oh, my God, yeah. She's 17 when we shot this movie. But she's incredibly mature. - Yeah. Incredibly. And sometimes when I talk to her, I feel very like a kid... ...and she's the old-- Yeah. Yeah. - She's the grownup. But she knew this character. And so many times, "No, let's do it like this." And she always stood her ground, saying, "No, she wouldn't do that." And I love being told that... ...because that means the actor knows. Are your fingers crossed? - No. No. No. Okay. All right. Okay. No, I like it when the actors know their characters, so they... Yeah. This is also our first day shooting. I loved shooting this scene. Oh, God. This scene. "Blight of nature." That's, you know, epic Underworld dialogue. It's one of those scenes that in 2D doesn't look great. In 3D, it looks spectacular. - Yeah. Why is it raining? Because it looks nice. Why is it thunderstorms? - Because it sounds nice. Theo James, stunt driver. - Yes. You can actually see that a bit. Yeah, and if you look at the van, I mean.... All the.... We wanted everything to be low-tech... ...as all the other movies. The low-tech is very important. That combined with the Vampire aesthetics that you see. The Celtic signs of Kate's corset... ... the weaponry and stuff like that. This area here is actually shot in that dam. In the actual hydroelectric dam. What's the name of that dam, Richard? I can't remember. Spencer Dam or something? - I don't know. It's outside... Up above Vancouver. - Up above Vancouver. Nobody shot there. Like, 20 years ago... ...someone shot there. I can't remember what film. It's been closed down, so.... We were the first to... - Part of the water supply. Amazing location. - Yeah. Absolutely beautiful. And brutal. - And remember how it--? Brutal as well? - Brutalism. But it also rained... ...torrentially before we shot. We thought we'd get two streams of water... ...and we got the whole megillah. lt was fantastic. This is one of the things I love about Underworld. These, you know.... The looks. And it feels... It makes me believe that this world exists. Now we're also back in... This is Underworld. We've been in brutalism. - Yeah. Now we're back in-- Oh, yeah. This is a wonderful set that Claude Pare designed. Our production designer. Wonderful production designer. Award-winning production designer, might I point out. And this, actually, was fun... ...ecause I was walking the streets and suddenly: Here in L.A. before we started shooting. I started talking to Kate and Len, and Len... And Kate says-- I don't know how she came up with it... ...but she says, "I know Russian." So I said, "We must get some Russian in, then." So.... Because I think it's so sexy. - Yeah. Of course that means Charles Dance... ...as to Know Russian too. Yes, and Theo James. That's Kate's mother, by the way. The Sony people, when they heard that, were excited. Because internationally, Russia is now a big territory. So.... At a certain point, they said, "Can you have more Russian in the movie?" This, again, being Charles Dance... ...a well-known British actor. Charles Dance is one of those fantastic old-school actors who... ...when you give him direction, he looks at you and he says: "Thank you, sir." Then he does exactly what you asked him to. He does exactly what you ask for... ...and It's such a pleasure to work with him. Listen to me. I start speaking British. And the actress here playing the doctor is... Her character's name is Olivia. Is Catlin Adams... ...who is Kate's.... Acting coach? - Occasionally. Kate recommended her. - Happy family. That's how Underworld is. - Yeah. Or SCars. I've never seen a child... We should have had more Swedish in the film. We have a little. Underworld 5, actually, I've heard that there's a big Swedish subplot. I had Kate say: Which all Swedes will understand, but she said it. It's very cute and.... So she, you know.... Because she's.... The musicality of it here. Her Russian is perfect and it... She speaks, I don't know, how many languages? Five languages. - A lot. Yeah. And she could just start speaking Swedish. That was insanely fun. I love this sequence... ...because it's so many things at the same time. I think it's terrifying, but I also think... ... It's, you know, touching, but also sexy. I think it's one of the most disturbing scenes in the movie though. Where you realize that this girl... ...who you thought was this innocent child... ...now has this voracious taste for blood... ...and has now gone to a different place. She is a creature of the night. - Yep. The blood on her face was great. You added that afterwards, James? - It was all CG, yeah. Good.

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Yeah, we tried a couple different ones, and it didn't really work as well as this one. Yeah, and it doesn't really, I forget the stunt rider's name. So, oh, there's Bette. So, yeah, that was obviously a stunt rider. Yeah, a stunt rider. Up to this point, and then... It didn't translate as hardcore as that trail was. That thing was pretty badass. On the big screen, it's pretty good. Yeah.

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Now this is Jay here. Yeah, we cut those stunt guys. But then we had a stunt guy going down the hill. Yeah, and then this is Jay here. And again, like, you know, directorially, it always kind of bugs me that we could never, you know, you're shooting this whole thing in four days, so we never really had time to, you know, reset stuff the way we wanted. So the grass is all stomped on. That's just like, you can't do anything with the grass. It's just...

30:46 · jump to transcript →

And then here, to elevate the camera, we actually strapped a box to the side of Jay's head. You've got to keep it a foot off the ground. Jay has a cardboard box taped to his head. Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous. I mean, very unrewarding job, man, for very little screen time, at least with his face, you know? Yeah, and so the stunt riding Jay didn't do, the roll down the hill he didn't do, and then there's a stunt coming up that he...

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Roger Moore

This sort of stunt had not been seen on the screen before this as well. This was entirely new. We've had space shuttles and free fall.

4:48 · jump to transcript →

Roger Moore

Now, when you look at a set like this... ... you know that the glass is going to get broken. Purely because the stuntman and the stunt arranger... ...don't have to pay for it.

46:16 · jump to transcript →

Roger Moore

The stunt work on this was done by Dickie Graydon... ...and by Martin Grace, my.... Who was then my stunt double, and then became the arranger... ...after this film. Dickie Graydon doubled me. And Martin Grace, who is just a fraction shorter than I am... ... doubled Richard Kiel. And it is attitude... ...that works. And Martin is a very, very good actor. In fact, he doubled in The Spy Who Loved Me. He doubled Richard Kiel on the top to the temple of Karnak.

1:06:56 · jump to transcript →

The stunt here, I remember being there when you guys shot this. This was really fun to watch. Yeah. I mean, you got water in the dead. There'd be a puddle on that campus. This is that cool kind of geekazoid techno music that was just becoming very popular then, and Tom Newman did a great job creating our own version of it.

6:33 · jump to transcript →

You might think that that was all set up, and it was. You know, Gilbert, I feel different already. And here comes this big bicycle stunt. Again, I mean, I'm not Michael Bay, put it that way. How many times do you have to carry that thing? A lot. And didn't you have the whole thing was filled with stuff? You had really, I mean...

7:06 · jump to transcript →

Boy, talk about your great introduction to an evil character. Yeah. And he's not even the evilest of the evil characters. He's the sidekick. It's just... And he's 50. I know. Well, he got held back, you know? He was actually a stunt person who came in to audition as Ogre. He was way too old. He had a beard. I told him, you look too old and you have a beard.

8:06 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

I encouraged the actors to customize their own costumes and armor, to give the impression they had been out a lot, that they were seasoned, that they had been away from command authority on their own a lot and were good enough at their jobs that they were allowed these kind of latitudes. This is a continuation of the motif from the first film, where they're wearing Hawaiian shirts and all kinds of strange stuff, all of which was a new idea in science fiction. People always wore uniforms on spaceships. That's how it worked from Star Trek on. Every science fiction film ever made, there was the general-issue uniform. Alen broke that mold and it just seemed so right to people. They recognized the archetype instantly. "Oh, these guys are truck drivers." "They dress however they want. There's nobody to tell them not to." And so the idea here was extrapolated to a military unit that's worked at the extreme fringes of human civilization. The power loader was not designed by anybody in drawings per se. I had done some preliminary drawings, but it evolved basically from trying to figure out how to make it work. We built full-size mock-ups of the arms and legs in foam core. There's a guy inside that thing, a big, strong English stunt man moving it. It's supported by cables. It's completely an on-set gag. The English visual effects guys thought we were crazy the way we wanted to do it. I said "It's the gag where the dad lets the daughter walk on his feet, his three-year-old." So standing behind Sigourney right now is this big 270-pound body-building English stunt man. He's raising the arms himself and he has in his hands a control that allows him to raise the forearm of the power loader. And then when they walk, they have to walk together. The weight of the machine is held by a crane which is off-camera, or some kind of overhead track rig - we had two versions of it. If we didn't need the machine to turn, we mounted it on a pylon, a boom-arm thing, and if we needed it to pivot we hung it on wires.

35:31 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

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

1:12:00 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

I think editorially it's a fun moment. I like the build. I didn't do any editing directly on this film. Because it's film-based editing, with rapid cutting, I thought it had really good energy. You see that cutting now with the Avid cos you don't have to make each splice manually. This is the Alamo told with six people. So the sentry guns are the equivalent of the first couple of attacks. I think it's great foreboding. It's just coming at them like a wave. If these guns don't stop them, they're screwed. I think it works pretty well, but the studio talked me into taking it out. So I'm happy to see it restored in this extended version. Ray Lovejoy was our editor and it was a tremendous responsibility. And this is before you had all of the Avid and Lightworks and any kind of digital editing. There was so much film and we had a pretty short postproduction schedule and he did just a tremendous job. I hired Ray for one simple reason - cos he had worked with Stanley Kubrick. It took him a while to really get what I was trying to do with this movie. A lot of his early cuts I didn't really care for. It's not that there was ever any tension between us. I just didn't feel I was getting what I wanted. Ray was getting really frustrated. I remember toward the end he cut the alien queen battle, the power loader queen battle at the end of the film. He was really nervous, cos he hadn't given me the action cutting that I wanted and I'd had to mess with it a lot and there was another editor who was cutting some stuff, and I was liking his action cutting better than Ray's. Ray is just a dear guy and a really good editor, but he was struggling with it. SO, finally, he just grabbed all the film, locked himself in his room, said "Don't bother me." Not mean or anything, but "I just gotta do this." And he went in and he cut the entire last eight minutes of the picture. He showed it to me very nervously. He cut in a day or two. He showed it to me very nervously and I watched the whole thing and I said "It's perfect. It's absolutely perfect. Don't change anything." And that was that. He felt like it was such a huge victory because he had actually got it. He had mastered the style for the film. Sigourney, she's very liberal politically and despised the idea of any kind of guns or anything, and tried to talk me out of them having weapons. I said "They're marines. They'd have weapons." She said "Do I have to carry a weapon?" I said "Yes." She said "Why?" I said "Because it's not Sigourney Weaver in the film. It's Ripley. And Ripley wants to survive." So I took her out shooting a Thompson machine gun, out behind the studio, and she fired off a 50-round magazine from the hip. And then she looked up at me with this sly grin and said "That's really fun." Another liberal bites the dust. There were a few things she asked if she could do when we had our first meeting. She wanted to die in the film, she wanted to not use guns and she wanted to make love to the alien. And between the third and fourth film she got to do all of those things. But fortunately for this film, I said no to all of them, even though I was petrified. I thought she'd bolt from the project, but she didn't. She had a lot of good ideas. But she did have certain specific things she thought should be done in the Aven mythos. When she got to a position of power on the later films, she made that happen. This scene coming up with Ripley and Newt, which is the attack of the facehuggers, was a really tough scene to orchestrate, prepare for, as far as we think we're now back 16 or 17 years. So we don't have any kind of digital animation and there's not gonna be any stop-motion animation, and these facehuggers have gotta come to life, so we created I think a half dozen different facehuggers that would do different things to create the performance coming up, including our hero, which had completely articulated hands, multiple cables that had to be controlled by six puppeteers for one facehugger. We had one that would run across the floor. We called him our pull toy. We had stunt facehuggers that we could throw to hit the wall. We had actually two different heroes. There's the one that crawls up over the counter coming at Newt. And then a completely articulated one with tongue and fingers that Ripley would fight off with all of the cables down her arms through the whole sequence. And there's so much that happens in that. You think of the facehugger that's coming after them, and multiple to create that one scene.

1:41:44 · jump to transcript →

Fred Dekker

Beautiful backing there, by the way. That's fake. Yeah, that looks as real as anything. Okay, he jumps. Now, we were actually going to do a stunt and put him on a rappel line with a camera and follow him all the way down. Oh. And the night before, I could see Dick just had little beads of sweat on his brow like, okay, this will be great. Yeah, Fred, I'm looking forward to it. And then we just decided, you know what, it's really funnier if we just see him in the background splat to the ground.

46:57 · jump to transcript →

Fred Dekker

But, no, I wasn't kidding about the Jackie Chan stunt school approach and Chewie Hark. And, you know, I wish that when the shit hits the fan in this movie during the action scenes that you saw stuff you had never seen before. But, again, some of that are story choices. Now, we'll get to the ninja fight coming up. And I'm really, really unhappy with the ninja fight. I think it basically kills the movie. But in truth –

59:09 · jump to transcript →

Fred Dekker

We would have digitally put in the sparks at the bottom of the gun so you knew that the bullets were keeping it aloft. But we did that practically. Everything in this movie is analog. It's all practical. So you weren't utilizing any CGI really at this point? Except for the stuff that... The morph stuff. Yeah. And Delta City at the beginning. This is a terrific stunt coming up. Watch this.

1:09:46 · jump to transcript →

I think this is one of my favorite scenes, this thing in the med lab, where Ripley goes in and finally discovers what her true origin is, and where the audience discovers it, too. I think the reason I like it is because it's such a... Because we had a lot of creative freedom in coming up with the look of these alien clones. That was a big deal, to be able to go in and design all seven of these things, and have each one be so different. There was a lot of research into birth defects, as well as all the physical alien attributes that we would combine in various ways. We really wanted to get a feeling of pathos out of each one of these sculptures, so that you would see the pain and the torture that the evil corporate scientists had put these poor ghastly creations through. We had some great artists working on these, too. Jordu Schell was really key to the designs. Chris Cunningham did conceptual work on it as well. Steve Wang sculpted. Steve Koch. Mike Smithson did a great job sculpting as well. Mike Larrabee was painting. Didn't he paint all these? Him and Jim Hogue? Beautiful. These are all made out of translucent silicone. So many layers of skin to give them the right levels. The set design is just beautiful in this scene, too. Also having these things in these tanks of this badly-colored liquid is... It's made it very cool. Then the number seven clone, which was great, because Sigourney is so willing to stick her neck out and go through the grueling rigors of makeup, and she's OK making herself look bad. This was a mechanical body, with a silicone skin, that was grafted onto Sigourney. She was coming up through a slant board, through a hole in the table. Tom and I applied the neck makeup, along with Linda DeVetta, Sigourney's makeup artist. I really love the breathing mechanism on this in particular. The tube of liquids coming out of her body, there was some discussion as to whether or not we could get away with that. But look at her. And she sells it so well on both sides of this scene. Then we had to torch the actual one, didn't we? We built a stunt one for the fire gag, but, because it was so close in frame, we looked at it with Jean-Pierre and he said: "I know you want this for your display room, but it's gotta be in the foreground." So we said "Yep, you're right." And there it went. - That's it. We did get it back. It kinda turned into like an overcooked marshmallow. Luckily, for the rest of this scene, we got to make blow-up dummy copies of all of these clones. Look at her go. What impresses me about Sigourney is that she's... Look at the emotion there, while she's firing a big-ass flame-thrower. You know? It's really... She really makes this series, I think.

57:43 · jump to transcript →

So acting like you can see something when you can't see something. That's great. Was it a practical? - Yeah. We built some wax aliens to blow up for that moment when they blow up. The explosion's practical and the bubbles are real. Everything was really here. Tom was in this underwater - in the suit as well - for a couple of shots. That's a beautiful shot. - How deep was it? 15 feet? In a closed set. You couldn't swim to the surface if you wanted to. The difficult thing about this was that the rehearsals you performed with a mask on and breathing from a breathing apparatus. They were all calm. You were marking what you were going to do in that particular shot. You were gonna swim from here to here. This was your action. When they were satisfied that everybody knew what it was they were supposed to do, there's a countdown from six where you're asked to take six deep pulls of the oxygen. When you get to two the mask comes off. Then you're blind. The mask comes off then so there's no bubbles in the shot. You hold your breath for as long as it takes for them to slate, then start the action. In postproduction we put some noises, some voices, and we recorded the voices in a swimming pool with pipes, like... ...to put the pressure, to feel the pressure. This thing - there was no escape from this. You swam up into that thing. The only way to get out was to swim back down and out. Waiting in the wings would be stunt doubles with hookah masks for us, once the shot was completed, to give you air. In rehearsal you could go longer. It was calm, you were swimming gently. Once you were acting and the energy was up you used more oxygen and there was less time to stay under. Virtually every shot in the sequence you're in jeopardy, so the stakes are high. You're operating on pure adrenaline, which is not the case in a calm rehearsal. And then you got Jean-Pierre on a microphone screaming: "I want to see bubbles because they are making it look like you are afraid." So the bubbles are created by you getting rid of your whole store of oxygen and you're only good for about half of what you were during rehearsal. Made it difficult. I don't know about you, Leland, but I for one ran out of air on five separate occasions. Yes. - And started for the surface. Unfortunately the surface was a ceiling because this is a kitchen set. So there was no escaping it unless you knew where the escape routes were, and since you're blinded and disoriented as to where you are at any given time... I was literally saved five separate times by stunt divers who saw me panic, saw me swim for the surface, saw I wasn't gonna make it, followed me and stuck this thing in my mouth. We each had one assigned to us. I just remember the one time that the guy who was assigned to me that day decided to take a bathroom break during one of the takes. I ran out of air and there was nobody there. Remember? It was your stunt double who gave me... I shared air with you guys. He was so used to saving my life that he was just on guard.

1:11:06 · jump to transcript →

So out of the water and up onto the tower, up onto the ladder. From underwater to sparks and steam. After three weeks of being underwater we ended up... For another two, three weeks on this set. Climbing the ladder. High, too. Perilously high. Like, three stories high. The stunt people on this film really earned their keep. Big stunt. Big, big stunt. For real. We showed just Winona falling in the water, and I just remember staying up there with the stunt girl doing that thing. I was very impressed by what she did because I was at the same height. Oh, God. And I saw this little hole there and I thought she would never... Every day we received some sparks from the top and it was hot, if I remember.

1:14:52 · jump to transcript →

He's actually right-handed. Oh, yeah. And my brother was explaining to him, if you're gonna come down with a wall on your right side, you're gonna want to hold the shotgun left-handed. That's a good catch. And Tay spent all day practicing lefty. And then later in the scene, I said, you know, at this moment, you really don't need to be lefty. In the alley with the kitchen? Yeah, in the later alley. Nicky Cat driving all of his own stunts throughout the movie. And the seatbelt shot, by the way, is at the request of Dick Pope, who loves the scene in Bullet. Oh, right. When they all put on their belts. That's funny.

20:13 · jump to transcript →

Every time I see you coming around the corner, I see the barrel of your gun or I see your foot, I know you're coming. You've got to just come around the corner. And then as we were choreographing the scene, I looked down and saw the stunt guy's foot. And I just said, shoot him in the foot. And it got us out. It would have taken forever. There were squibs and all this other. It was this long choreographed scene and shooting him in the foot worked so much better. It's funny. Of course, sending a prop guy down to the prop truck to rig an exploding shoe unexpectedly.

1:43:47 · jump to transcript →

Jimmy Conn always reminds me of the stunt show at Universal here. Just popping out of the blinds of the shutters. Trying to make sense of all... This was, by the way, meticulously, meticulously storyboarded. We had a map of the location, and my brother and I took plastic cowboys and Indians. Wow. And I said, okay, for a moment, you're Parker and Longbow. Now, where are you going to go to get to the money? And then said, stop, and now be the bag men. And where are you going to go to get Parker and Longbow? And it was like playing chess.

1:47:09 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

This jellyfish, electric jellyfish scene, I kept Cate separated from all the other people so she hadn't been introduced to any of the actors. And we shot all of it with Cate in the trailer. And we didn't bring her out until we filmed her shots. So for Cate, it was very strange because it was about 5:00 in the morning by the time we got to her angle, and the wind's blowing, and these electric jellyfish are blinking on the beach and there's Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Owen Wilson, our friend Waris, Niels, Noah, all in their pajamas on this beach with a crew of people she's never met, and she's brought out, and it was very strange. And I've not really been that big on doing those kind of stunts, but I felt like it might be something, that something might come out of it. And there was, there was a crazy energy on it. And she played this whole scene with them confronting her, and then as soon as we finished it, everybody was introduced to each other and it was... And the sun came up.

22:34 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

And here's Bud. Bud in his first scene that we shot. And I-- Yeah, Bud is... Bud Cort, who we have admired in Harold and Maude and... Brewster McCloud. Brewster McCloud, the Altman movie, and all the way through to recent films like Pollock, and he had a great small part in Heat. And we had become friends with Bud. I got to know him in California. Noah, you met him in New York, right? - Yeah. And we just wrote this role for him because we wanted... This is where the little tag talks about that you're not supposed to fly these helicopters. And that's Waris Ahluwalia, who was standing on the deck, on the helipads we fly over. I remember the stunt guy saying, "We got a marvelous angle. You see the Indian perfectly as you approach." Waris was standing right next to him. You thought, "They still have a ways to go in Italy." Waris was next to him laughing as he described him as "the Indian." This is "Gut Feeling" by Devo that plays through this scene. You had talked about using this song, I think, pretty early on. I mean, when you were writing it. I think we played it a little while we were writing up the scene, this montage. You like montages. You use a lot of montages in all your movies. Yeah, I like a certain kind of montage where, basically, we can play some music and for a movie like this, anyway, I feel like we want to make as many... We want to get as many jokes into a montage like this. So I feel like each beat of the montage needs something. It's gonna tell the story, and hopefully we can make it into something like a joke. There's one in Rushmore where he has all these different clubs that he does, and we try to kind of make it a gag with each club. And that's sort of the way I always approach these. It's just a musical interlude and jump ahead in the story.

35:31 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

One thing that was always appealing to us was the idea of having Bill Murray, who'd never-- I don't know if he'd fired a gun in a movie before. In Ghostbusters it was kind of a gun. And he'd fired some guns in Razor's Edge, he's at war. I know he shoots out some headlights in Razor's Edge. Right. - But here he was for an action hero. The first one time as action hero, but he plays the giant action scene-- I say "giant," but-- For us, giant. The action scene in a striped Speedo, a bathrobe, and flip-flops. Well, we'd also talked about sort of the choice of the music, you know, the-- You know, the-- Like you were saying about the color timing and the, you know, the sort of score you use... here, sort of breaks into sort of the Iggy Pop song, which I think sort of brings us back into the sort of playful Zissou world, you know, that sort of-- - The Iggy Pop. The Iggy Pop does. You'd talked about at one point maybe doing it all silent. At one point, we had a version that didn't have any gunshots or anything like that, and all the sound was gone. It was totally silent, we had some music playing, and the effect was much more grave. When we put this music on-- I liked the other way too, but this seemed maybe to be more right for the way the whole movie needed to work. I don't know if I-- I feel like I could've shot more coverage on this. We were struggling. It's got an energy though. I'm not a professional action-sequence director, but I can do better. I guess Bill Murray also fired a gun at the end of Stripes. I think they go to Argentina to rescue some people. One thing with Bill, put a gun in his hand and he can't wait to empty the magazine. This is interesting. We had to throw this gun into the-- Well, you can't throw a gun into the ocean. So actually, he switches hands with the prop guy who's out below the frame and gives him a rubber gun to throw. But we did, when he knocks that guy out and throws him overboard in the earlier part of that scene, we lost a gun. Bill actually accidentally hit the guy, and the guy went in the water, was knocked out by Bill hitting him, and his gun fell, and Bill's gun fell into-- The gun Bill was grabbing out of his hand fell in the water. And then they said we couldn't shoot anymore, and they called the police, who came out and flew over helicopters while our Marines searched for it. I was like, "Can't we keep shooting while we look?" "No." And we were worried our stunt guy was going to get arrested. But then the Marine guys found it in the bottom of the ocean there, which is only like 20 feet deep or something there. But they found the gun, brought it back up, and we were allowed to continue when the helicopters went away. That's why you went a few days over. Things like that. - Variety of things, yeah. How you holding up there, intern? Doing okay?

1:03:18 · jump to transcript →

Patrick Tatopoulos

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

1:59 · jump to transcript →

Patrick Tatopoulos

Bring them in. SO, like, the nobles are coming now. When we just started to play with the movie... ...and the look, the nobles should be the one that... The only touches of colour in the movie. Because we're in the Underworld world... ...Which is very blue and brown. We're trying to bring colour from those guys. They're the only few people that should be looking... ...also like the actual period of time, which is 12th century. And, you know, the vampire world is a little tweaked. It goes, you know, it feels futuristic and past. Those guys should feel like the period. That's more or less, the way the people look at the time. So it was fun to do something, in some ways, truly period-y. This is our biggest set, the great hall set. When you see the wide shot, the entire thing is set. We built the entire thing. There's no set extensions at all. lt was a huge set, but it was one of the first things that we shot in the film. And being in that big cathedral-type space... ...Was great for everybody, because it really got everybody... ...1nto the spirit of the film, and really feeling positive... ...about the production design and how great everything was gonna look. Tim Raby, I mean, when we did the casting... -... Tim Raby is playing the, you know... - Janosh. I just love the way... Yeah, he was fun. He's good actor. He's fantastic actor. I also love the way you did when Viktor actually rushes over... ...I love that you stayed in Coloman. Yeah. - You just see that... It's almost like, watch this look, and it looks like: "Oh, God, here we go." And he just, I guess, supernatural freak of motion... ...and Coloman's look was like, "Oh, shit." It's coming now, and now. Remember this, though? The first time we shot this stunt, they forgot to turn the camera on. The guy had to go back and do it over again. "What do you mean the camera was not on?" It's, like, one of those classic movie moments. So I always felt we went slightly overboard on the impact. But, you know, it's an old castle. You could believe the rock Is bit... - I love that shot. Oh, yeah, this one. It was littlke much, but... Viktor giving benediction to the other nobles.

31:53 · jump to transcript →

Patrick Tatopoulos

It's nice when you have actors that can ride horses like that. You don't have to get stunt doubles. New Zealanders are like that. They're tough. That's the blood stuff. Bill loved it. He's so enjoying it. Bill is a very sloppy drinker. - Yeah. And fake blood doesn't taste very good.

57:09 · jump to transcript →

Francis Lawrence

So this motorcycle sequence is actually one of the few... There's a few little things that we did as second unit. I'm not usually a huge fan of second unit, but this stuff we did, but we mapped it out very specifically. I worked with Chris O'Hara, a stunt coordinator, and Cam, who used to be my assistant, and also is now an associate producer on the movie. You know, both kind of worked really closely with me in storyboarding, and we would go out to locations and do little video-vis things. So we were really specific about the kind of moments we would need. You know, it was just always a bit tricky to schedule all those little pieces of them traveling down the street. And we used Jen's double, Renae Moneymaker, on the back of a motorcycle. Over the course of various nights over the schedule, Chris O'Hara and Cam sometimes would go out with the motorcycle and shoot these various elements that we put together. Ustinov dismissed his security, so I saw an opportunity, and I took it. Why would he do that? She asked him to.

25:45 · jump to transcript →

Francis Lawrence

Yeah? Boucher is dead. This sequence that we're about to get to ended up being pretty logistically difficult, right? To shoot the sequence of Joel kind of chasing down Dominika's car, headed to Heathrow, and then a Heathrow sequence. There was a lot of planning, and really a lot of figuring out how we're gonna get the kind of control we need on certain streets and motorways going out to Heathrow. And one of the complicating factors was that we weren't gonna be in London until May. And we needed winter in London, and obviously it was gonna be spring in London. And so, Cameron, one of the associate producers who works closely with me, and one of the stunt coordinators, went to London basically with very specific video-vis and storyboards, and, like, really specific on the location scouts, went out and shot all the plates, and so all the driving for Joel and for Jen was all done on a tarmac on the outskirts of Budapest. And then we sort of laid in all the plates of the wintery London streets so that would work. And it was also just kind of a logistical nightmare to move from one spot to the other, 'cause we were, you know, using certain overpasses, driving, here as you can see, through Heathrow airport. And then one of the great bonuses, and I just never would have expected it, and I thought we were gonna have to, you know, shoot in some large convention center or something. But the people at Heathrow let us shoot there. And we got to shoot at one of their great brand-new terminals, the Queen's Terminal, and build our own little security line here. This is actually just outside one of the terminals, but walk our characters through the terminal to shoot the sequence where Joel, you know, narrowly misses Dominika here. She goes through security and waves him off.

1:39:15 · jump to transcript →

Francis Lawrence

What he's hitting her with is actually just, like, it's this very hollowed-out, plastic tube. And I remember showing Jen that it didn't hurt. So, I sat in that chair first, and had the stunt man do it. And when I went to go do this move, the guy actually punched me in the face by accident. So, he totally missed me with the baton and punched me in the face. I guess it's what I get for putting people through these kinds of things.

1:44:00 · jump to transcript →

raises some eyebrows but in general it seems like swords were really just for the wealthy so this raid of the slavic village is one of the sequences that i am proud of and do think is successful it took a lot of hard work cc smith the stunt coordinator

26:28 · jump to transcript →

That's C.C. Smith, the stunt coordinator, as the sword master back there.

43:11 · jump to transcript →

Those extras, stunt guys back there, really look like they're having a conversation, which is nice. Yeah, we don't know where slaves were kept, but, you know, probably some slaves that would be doing household things would likely have slept in the floors of the house, but it's also very likely that some slaves were kept with the animals, and certainly that was a choice that I liked because it seems quite primitive and harsh.

46:18 · jump to transcript →