Test screenings & previews

Sometimes I was worried about the humor. For example, for this shot, I asked me if it works or not. It was a big relief during the first test screening, because everybody laughed. It's too bad that Brad Dourif has to disappear so quickly. I'd have loved to have seen him go on for the rest of the film.

40:53 · jump to transcript →

The guy who did this explosion, he made the explosion of Star Wars. He was a specialist of the explosion of miniature. He was so good. He has a book and you can choose the... Choose the color... - Exactly. There is a story about the death of General Perez. At the beginning, it was a big deal. He was sucked by a hole on the spaceship. In fact, I kept the idea for the ending with the newborn, the new alien. I proposed to the studio a very cheap death for General Perez - I love this scene - but the studio didn't like it and they wanted to cut it. I proposed to Tom Rothman, I said: "OK. You have to ask the audience for the next test screening." It was in Las Vegas, if you remember. By luck, the audience loved this scene on the screening, and they saved my life, they saved this scene. We kept it because the audience is right. The shot was quite funny afterwards - we cut it here - afterwards he kept looking at his brain and then fainting in a very very humorous way. That was very nice. - It's a little bit too funny. But I love that. I remember, Sigourney didn't like it. I can't avoid humor, because I love it so much.

45:56 · jump to transcript →

It was a bit longer, this scene. - We had an additional hole. Exactly, an additional hole. You can see something strange on the hole, because... You can see something strange, because he's grabbed by the feet by the alien through a hole which doesn't exist here. He had to walk for an additional 10m or something to get there. It was too long. That was one of the remarks we had from the first test screening. They made, if I remember, something like 100 remarks. I remember, sometimes we were defiant, but we were pretty upset. And sometimes we said "They're right." And sometimes we said "They're right." We were very upset at first, but looking at the questions which were asked, we realized that, each time, it was somewhere where... we thought it could go like that. In the time we had for doing it, we thought it was OK. As we could have more time, that was... Most of the notes, we found an answer. We never really followed the propositions we had, but we found the creative answer to the question asked. I think that was what the studio was waiting for us to do. But it was a good lesson for me and for us. Since that time, for each film I'm cutting I'm organizing previews, which is not in the French tradition. For Amélie we did some test screenings. In fact, I copy the answer from Hollywood, but the big difference is: I have the final cut, I can choose. The difference is on the use you do from the answers. Exactly. But we don't have to complain. - I love this idea. This is a simple shot that was hard. That head was long and heavy, and trying to keep it smooth and even and not drag across Michael's face, and make it all the way up to that opening in the chest. You always said that this cut, the final cut, was your cut. We did it with the production notes and... If the studio would ask me to make a director's cut, I would say "That's mine." Yeah, that would be a problem, because we're very happy with what we have.

48:31 · jump to transcript →

Now, Stallone's got a missing daughter. We can talk about this more, but the missing daughter element never really... I mean, we ended up shooting something where he actually finds his daughter, but we cut it out because it was dragging the movie and with great actress Elizabeth Ruscio. But when you come to the sex scene, everyone in the test audience thought Sandra Bullock was going to be Stallone's daughter. So they're all like pulling their hair out and groaning. So we had to do some ADR to...

35:47 · jump to transcript →

which is generated by, let's say, what today would be artificial intelligence to tell them how to react to an emergency. So it's gone through every profession. That glow rod beat where he uses the glow rod on a civilian was always another great moment with a test audience. Like, okay, they're starting to get the movie now.

47:03 · jump to transcript →

had to show this film to a test audience, right? So we never had to... These sequences could actually afford to be bare. Like, you know, Elias walking through the room, the way we're using the overlap of the dialogue. I mean, this was all something... I remember constructing this at a visual level one night in my editing room. Like, the sequence was not quite working.

44:34 · jump to transcript →

I think what happened is that while we're... Well, you obviously are very involved in the script. You know, as we said, some of those themes were actually introduced early on because they had to be in the film itself. But there's also this space leading up to the mix where there is no test screening. Ultimately, we're just going with this movie. There's no distraction. There's no moment of panic.

1:30:30 · jump to transcript →

uh... fight that night because we were going out to a preview or something and i said i can't think of what to put in the beginning of this movie and he went he wrote any and was something that he and we've had this kind of scratch track out of the out of the synthesizer that we previewed with on you know and early previews so you know that was one of those things where the movie was definitely talking now i think is some of his greatest work that he that he had that he had in the movie you know he just went away and

52:36 · jump to transcript →

scarabs coming up here. What they were is little white ping-pong balls. So that's what the first preview audiences saw, is a little white ping-pong ball going up there. It looked like he was playing the lotto. But the preview audiences seemed to love the characters and the story so much that no one walked out, which we found really amazing, because our first preview screening had no special effects in it. And by the second one, these were all ping-pong balls. Thousands of ping-pong balls coming... cascading down there. Surrounding Beni, as if he was going to be eaten by a giant...

1:53:55 · jump to transcript →