The editor

Of course, when it came out and he had that wonderful shot of Sean shooting down the gun barrel and all the dots coming down and all those things, I went up to him and I apologized because I thought whatever he did to the number only enhanced it and of course made the titles absolutely fabulous. Editor Peter Hunt recalls Maurice Bender. Marvelous man. Very inventive.

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The Bond films introduced a new and innovative style of film editing. Editor Peter Hunt explains his approach. It's all done for the drama of the scene. It made it more exciting. If I'd have done it as it was in single shots or in any other simple way of editing, it wouldn't have been as exciting. It was also able to exaggerate the sound noises.

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The window breaking is very exaggerated. All of that was exaggerated, but it made it exciting. It made it tension. Sound editor Norman Wanstall recalls Hunt's editing. When Peter started to see the rushes of Dr. No and had read the script, he began to get an immediate picture of the sort of film we were making. And I remember him saying, if this film's going to work, we've got to move it along very, very quickly so that people don't analyze things. Production buyer Ron Quelch.

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Ted Tally

I went to New York with Dino, and I was very nervous. This was Tony, Anthony Hopkins. The thing I did know and what I was confident about was the type of movie I wanted to make. Like I said, I went in there knowing the tone of the movie, my approach to the movie, how I wanted to not show any of the gore. I didn't want to make a horror film. I wanted to make a film that was psychological, emotional, and smart. That was what was on the page. And the only scene that Tony had a concern with when I sat with him was this scene right here. Tony was concerned that as originally written, his attack on Graham here was too graphic. By the way, it's an interpretation because 10 directors would direct a scene in 10 different ways and show various degrees of violence. It's about showing the details of the guts falling out of his stomach, or the blood, how much blood to show. And I chose to play it mostly on their faces. Once the attack happens... Here's my little homage to Silence. You see the... - I see the bug. You like that. So I chose to play the violence part of this scene on their faces. I love this book. This is an original. My prop guy, Brad, found this original book from France, Larousse... When I read it, I had no idea what the hell it was. It's the bible of cookbooks. - Yes, I learned that quickly. He found this real old French cookbook. There was a lot of dialogue about how do we sell his moment? It's really just a subliminal thing. It wasn't really supposed to be so pointed where it was like, "Oh, sweetbreads." I thought sweetbreads was brains but it's not. It's actually... Thyroid. -... thymus. I learned so much about anatomy on this film. If you work on a Lecter movie, you learn a lot about cooking. I thought Edward was fantastic. There is a tremendous intensity of performances in this movie. And really a dream cast as Brett already said. If you could have anybody in the world for these parts and be lucky enough to get them. It's pretty much what happened to us. Great actors want to play good characters. They want to play great characters and all of these characters, down to Freddy Lounds, and other smaller roles, were just written so well. They were interesting and dynamic. And these actors were interested in playing this. To convince these actors to do a third in the series, all that went out the window when they read the script. Certainly once they started working. There's our cold opening. I'm very proud of this title sequence because it was actually done two days before we had to lock picture. My editor, Mark Helfrich actually was the brainchild behind this because... You re-shot the journal here in a very interesting way. Initially, this was done in a much more straightforward way with the images very flat against the screen. Yes, a lot of times. Mark is kind of... Everybody on my team, from my AD to my production designer, are filmmakers. Mark is a filmmaker in his own right and he just understands the visuals and storytelling. I love how, you know... But this was written. - Yes, it was. But the way that the camera roams over these pages and when we go in very close and it gets grainy, the camera movement left to right, up and down, is all not scripted, of course. This is something I don't really have the patience for. Mark kind of took this book that he was fascinated by. I think he has a copy of it in his closet at home. He just knew every page, every frame and went with Dante and literally just shot. This is a wonderful opportunity. This kind of title sequence is sort of old-fashioned in a way. But it's a wonderful opportunity for a screenwriter to get information in quickly to cover a lot of ground between the arrest of Lecter and where we are when the movie is going to start. Covering a period of several years, you are doing that without any dialogue just by these images. It's a very useful shorthand. Danny did the same thing that Ted did with the script in this sequence that Mark did with the visuals in this sequence. Danny did the same thing with the music. I think the music here is so fantastic. It's very much like a Bernard Hermann score, which I knew was a big inspiration for Danny. Danny is a big fan of Bernard, and this was his chance. He's done darker scores, but they've had a kind of lightness, or comedic darkness to it. Danny did something here that kind of made people's skin crawl in the theater, like, "You're in for it. "If you're gonna sit through this movie, you'll experience some stuff. "Shit's gonna go down."

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Ted Tally

So that sequence, those two minutes of the movie, which could have been a very boring, dull sequence. I had a long conversation with Kristi Zea. It was wonderful. She called me up and said, "This book of Dolarhyde's. "What does it look like? What's in it? "How is the handwriting? What kind of photograph?" We had a long conversation which for a screenwriter... You don't often get a call from the production designer to talk about a prop. It was a wonderful opportunity to be part of the design of the movie in that little section. You've got a beautiful setup here, Will. This was actually in the Florida Keys. You know why I'm here? Was it Marathon? Yeah, I can guess. The location is meant to be Marathon, Florida. Dino wanted us to shoot in North Carolina because he had studios there and a house on the beach or Malibu because it's close to his house in Beverly Hills. But the truth is, I wanted to stay true. When I said I chose the tone, I'd really chosen the tone of the book, going back to the book. Everybody here was honoring the book. We really gave a lot of respect to Thomas' book. Tom Harris is a wonderful writer. When you're doing an adaptation like this, it's a great resource to everybody to be able to pick up the book, as you can go into more details than the screenplay. It's a help to both the production design and the actors, who can go back and find out details of motivation. It's helpful to everybody to have that bible to refer to. So when it said Marathon, Florida, I tried to stay true to that and actually go to the location in Marathon, Florida. It just felt like it was the tone and even the location, like Grandma's house in the same description of the rural area where it was, and the type of house it was. It was an old-age home once, which is really back-story, but Kristi incorporated that into the design. I was so happy that she and Ted really stayed true to the tone of the book visually as well when it described the locations. This was so much fun being down here, by the way. It was the end of the shoot, and we were just down there on the beach. This was probably the hardest scene I shot with these two guys. In what way? Because it's exposition? Anything with exposition... -/s tough. It's tough to make it sound like real conversation. But honestly, there's not a line in this movie that I'm not proud of. I mean I can't say there's a line... It was a tight script. We did cut a few lines and a few parts from scenes but Brett and I actually worked quite a bit on the script before the production started, and we had it pretty tight. And the shooting stayed quite faithful to the script. I have to say that every scene was hard for me because I'm used to scenes with not much dialogue. I, unfortunately, am a very talky screenwriter. So it was a clash of cultures. Coming from being a playwright, I guess. There is a lot of dialogue in this movie, I tell you. And it was not a single-spaced script. It's a long script, and I kept saying, "Make them talk faster. "Don't cut the thing, just make them talk faster." Ted's advice to me was, "Brett, when you're happy, "ask the actors for a take where they talk double speed." And I did that. Probably that's all the takes that Mark ended up using in the editor's room. He kept calling me, saying, "This movie will be four hours long "If you do not get them to speak faster." The thing you run into as a screenwriter, even with the best actors, is that you try to pace a scene to fit within an act structure and fit within the entire screenplay. But then actors wanna take very long, dramatic pauses. Actors want to look down and up, across the room, at each other, and finally say the line. - A lot of pausing. And that's what you're up against when trying to time out the length of the scene or act. I wanna say something about these actors. Once I got Edward Norton, I used Edward to get another actor. Once I got Ralph Fiennes, I used him, I got Emily Watson. - You parlayed them into each other. I said, "Philip Seymour Hoffman, I'm getting Mary-Louise Parker." I knew each one, who they were a fan of. I used them against each other to get them in the movie. I literally thought I'd be able to walk onto the set, and it would be the easiest movie I'd ever made because I had these brilliant actors. I could just say, "Action." I read one article or something about this movie that said this was the most distinguished cast that's been assembled in any movie in the last 20 years. But the truth is, it was probably the hardest movie I'd ever made because the smarter the actor, the more experience they have. It's a myth that these great actors don't need direction. They want direction more than any other actor. They want direction, but they have ideas of their own because in the end, it's up to them. They are the ones whose face is filling that whole screen. And they have to absolutely believe what they are doing, or they can't convince an audience of it. What I'm trying to say is, there was a lot of dialogue going on. A lot of intellectual discussions. And each of these actors are not only smart actors, but they're highly intelligent, all smarter than myself and... A lot of them have also directed or even written as well. They all had an opinion. And my job, I felt like it was my job to save the script. This was a script that worked to me. We had a table reading of it. It was fantastic. And Ted was

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Ted Tally

It's hard to pull off this stunt with rising excitement, meanwhile. I'm amazed by him in this scene. It is a very hard thing to pull off. This is an example of a scene that my editor, Mark, was particular about, collaborating with me and telling me, "Brett, how are you gonna pull this off?" I said, "I don't know, I'll just shoot it." He had me bring Edward to the edit room and took a video camera and shot the scene for me, before showing the way it might intercut since there are devices in here which are the flashes, and you've seen it in hundreds of films and I didn't want it to be false. He said, "I have an idea of how to do this." He shot the scene for me before I shot it. It was a great reference. We adjusted and tweaked things, but this is all protecting the cliché. You can see the power that editing brings to a sequence like this. It startles you and moves the story forward in a way that the story is always a leap or two ahead of the audience. And pulling them along behind it. That's a function of great editing. It is important here because once the audience is ahead of you, you're in trouble, they are sleeping. It's the same thing on The Silence of the Lambs, I used to worry that we were cutting so many tiny beats that the audience would be confused. And Jonathan Demme said, "Better if they're confused "for five minutes than bored for five seconds." And this film is very tightly edited. Gentlemen. Ladies. This is what the subject's teeth look like. The impressions came from bite marks on Mrs. Leeds. This degree of crookedness... Here we... Where was this? - This was shot in LA. This is shot in LA in a government building that the city gave us. Here's Bill Duke. - He's one of my favorite actors. Again, an example of the meticulousness that Brett brings to casting. These wonderful actors who could be the stars of their own movies, who are playing supporting parts in this. I literally called them and begged them to be in the movie. I love actors. I love great actors. I spend as much time on the smaller roles as I do on the bigger roles. It's important because an actor who has one line can take you out of the movie and hurt it in my opinion. It goes back to the whole question of tone. A single wrong note will make an audience self-conscious, and pull them out of the movie. This film is the opposite of any of the films I've ever done. Family Man, that had dramatic moments, was still a comedy. So you can go farther with realism, but this especially, when it's dealing with the FBI, forensics, and scientific... -[t has to be grounded in reality. - Very grounded. In order for the audience to accept the extravagant parts of the movie, the more baroque characters in the movie like Dolarhyde and Lecter, scenes like this have to be very credibly rooted in police reality, in procedural reality. Would you give that up? The other thing also is, when we're talking about the tone, the choice... I was thinking about It, why I really chose not to show, not only because of Silence, because even Silence might've shown more violence than this film. Really, because the only scene we have is the biting of the lips. We certainly tried to hold it down. But I think the reason was because when I went to the FBI at Quantico and started looking at all these visuals of serial killers' work, it was so disturbing to me. It really bothered me. I said, "Why do I want to do this to audiences? "It'll completely turn them off." As with Silence, what you really want to do with this movie is a detective story. You really want to do a psychological thriller, a detective story. You're not trying to make a horror movie at all. Sometimes they're referred to as horror movies. I've never understood that. To me, these are thrillers, detective movies. In this scene, Harvey's Jewishness really comes out. "You're the light of my life." He sounds like my grandmother. I love that line. I can't answer more questions. Here's Philip Seymour Hoffman, a great actor. Who we should not have been lucky enough to get for this small part. Yeah. He actually wanted to play Dolarhyde, and I wanted Ralph to do it. I had dinner with him, and then called them back a week later. He wanted to play Dolarhyde, and his schedule wouldn't let him do a bigger part anyway. And then I called him and said, "I think you should do Freddy Lounds." He said, "Let me read it again." Then he called and said, "I'll do it." He would've been good as Dolarhyde, in a different way. He would've been amazing. - I mean, a great actor is a chameleon. Remember? With the tubes hanging out of me? Forget that prick. This was a very difficult scene, too. This was difficult because... And this was a scene where Edward had a Iot of input as we were revising the script before we shot. Edward said, "This is a difficult transition for this character to make." Here he's out of the loop, he doesn't want to be involved in the investigation. He's sort of done a favor for his friend and mentor, Jack Crawford, but he doesn't want to get deeper into this 'cause of psychological and physical scars. Because of his commitment to his family, he doesn't want to do this. Now he has to do the most difficult thing he could possibly do, which is to confront Lecter again. There was a lot of back-and-forth and a lot of revision, and a lot of talk about how we might credibly motivate this transition in the story. Edward was actually very helpful here with his thoughts. I think it works. Because it's not the cliché of the guy jumping back... Getting back on the horse and showing off. I'm proud of how it turned out. Again, it was really Mark's editing of the scene. It's also Harvey's matter-of-fact performance here. It could, potentially, have been a real glitch in the story. Where the audience says, "He wouldn't go back to see Lecter again. "He's scared to death of Lecter."

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that I didn't have the first part. I never bothered to shoot the detail that was protecting the President of the United States. I sort of took that for granted in my own mind and then realized in the cutting room that we didn't have it, so we went out and shot it as a kind of aftermath, but a prologue to the film. I also remember saying to Jack Hughes and Nick Feldman, who are the group Wang Chung,

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when the cut is going to come and often where it's going to be. You often know what the next shot is because the editor and the director have established a cutting pattern that becomes boring and predictable. And I perceived a long time ago that a director whose work I really admired, the Italian neorealist, I guess you'd call him, Michelangelo Antonioni, his films used to

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a scene and then move on. Now, it's impossible not to repeat a shot occasionally, often not by design, often because something didn't work. You get in the cutting room and you find, well, I've got to repeat a shot. But in the films of like Antonioni and in films that I've made, there might be 60 or 70 shots without a repeat.

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Bubba was my best good friend. I had to make sure that he was okay. I think here's where the score by Alan starts to bring us into a level that just becomes more and more throughout the movie from here on out. The first time I ever watched the movie from beginning to end, I had Alan there. I had Alan there, I had my editor there, I had my assistants there, and I had...

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And the big controversy that we had at the beginning of the movie is when I announced that I thought the movie should be made in widescreen. And everyone said, everyone, meaning my producers, my cameraman, and my editor, said, widescreen? This isn't Spartacus. This is a story about this guy with a low IQ. And this is when I started talking about it with Don.

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me not fun the fun part for me is in the editing room because that's where i have the most fun because it's just me and my film and my editor and you know all the you know the actual shooting of a movie is always just surviving just getting getting through the day and getting enough in the can so you can make it work somehow he doesn't mean it when he does things like this it doesn't i would never hurt you jenny

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Scott Stewart Jason Blum Brian Kavanaugh-Jones Peter Gvozdas

Hi, I'm Scott Stewart. I'm the writer and director of Dark Skies. I'm Jason Blum. I'm the producer. I'm Brian Cavanaugh-Jones. I'm the executive producer. And I'm Peter Gavazdis, the picture editor. You know, I came to Jason and Brian with this idea of a story. I knew that they were making these films, these scary movies where they were letting directors, you know, kind of make some scary movies outside of the studio system

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Scott Stewart Jason Blum Brian Kavanaugh-Jones Peter Gvozdas

there's going to be a little non sequitur here we're going to get back to talking about the actors but it's important to say that this is our editor uh pete here who is doing the voice of uh he's doing his best david he shows up in a lot of our movies shows up in a lot of our movies which is great but but this is um you know in in keeping with what you were saying jason i mean what's one of the other things that's so great about about this model of making these movies is is that

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Scott Stewart Jason Blum Brian Kavanaugh-Jones Peter Gvozdas

And we just, it always made audiences jump, even just in the cutting room. And we liked it so much that even Fuse, which did, our visual effects vendor, did great work in the movie. But for some reason, that was one that we just really liked it. So we ended up keeping the temp in the movie. And your temp is actually a 2D bird. It's not three-dimensional. No, it's not. It's a 2D bird. That's great.

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Robert Golden, the editor, felt that Walter Schumann was next to Lawton, the most important person on the film. And I'll try to say some more things about the score later. Lawton perhaps felt that the most important person was Lillian Gish, who's the first person we'll see after the credits. Lawton was trying to recreate the power of the silent era, especially D.W. Griffith, and he loved Lillian Gish. Now, Terry, the

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book very much are in keeping with the book and some of them made their way into the final script you know isn't it true that lawton kept a lot of ag's lines and the lines from exactly he was an editor really exactly what i mean and the documentation that has turned up at the paul koner archive indicates that you know contrary to the accounts that ag was fired after 10 weeks he actually was hired for the final five weeks and so he under lawton's close direction cut the script

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Now, unusual for the time, and really for any time, Lawton had his art director, his editor, and his composer on the set with him, working as part of the creative unit all the time. Lawton didn't want Bob Golden to do any editing until all of the film was shot. This is the one scene in the picture that Bob Golden did start editing ahead of time because they wanted to be sure to clear it with the Breen office. It's a dicey, very dramatic scene.

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And it was exciting what developed in this scene. All of a sudden, the tension that developed, it was scary, really. And that was shot very quickly. About five, maybe eight takes, but hard to cut because we had to keep hitting those levels. And every now and then it'd go off to another level and it didn't quite hit right. It's just not natural in different takes, things would happen. And so we had to keep constructing back to the way it was written. Editor, Thelma Schoonmaker.

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There's a tremendous amount of improvisation because he knows the parameters of what he wants to say and do. So that allows him to change things as people come up with ideas. Whether it's a cameraman or a prop man, a set designer, he'll take all this and very often put it on film and then decide later on what he wants to do. Don't forget, Marty was originally an editor. So that's the process he likes to go through.

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Editor, Thelma Schoonmaker. When Ray Liotta's on his way to pick up his brother at the hospital, and he almost has an accident, and there's some very quick cutting of his feet flying around, and the car stops just before hitting the car in front of him, Marty had designed that all to be edited to the Who Live at Leeds. And so we wove a little texture of all those pieces together, just exactly the way he had conceived of it, and it worked like crazy.

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Like Frank Marshall, she's a California native. She was born in Berkeley. And she began her career in San Diego working at a local TV station as a camera operator and editor and whatever else needed doing. She ended up producing a local talk show for four years in San Diego before moving to Los Angeles in the late 70s to work in film production.

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Anyway, I guess once it was done or in the edit, at some point he decided, you know, let's make it taller or deeper. They also, you'll see a geode room at some point here too that was like an intricate set that in the publicity materials they talk about a lot, but in the movie you only see about one shot of it. And I can see why they wouldn't want to cut it because it looks pretty cool and it sounds like a lot went into making it, but it wasn't really necessary because it's happening...

1:21:39 · jump to transcript →

Yes, we definitely should talk about it. I mean, you know, again, as we've touched on throughout this commentary... Because this is probably the hardest part for her, I imagine, the climax with all of these different locations. Yeah, well, as we've talked throughout this commentary about, you know, just the sort of top level of talent involved across the board. I mean, the actors, the production designer, obviously Kennedy Marshall. You know, you get... This is a movie that represents, like, Hollywood craftsmanship at its peak, and the editor...

1:29:55 · jump to transcript →

Francis Lawrence

This was one of the tougher sequences to shoot. You know, leading up to this movie, quite honestly, I was afraid, even though I wanted Jen to do it, I was really afraid she wasn't going to want to do it. Because she really just had never done anything that had this kind of content before. So, before she had read the script, I started... We were going on a lot of press tours, and spending a fair amount of time together, promoting the Hunger Games, the last Hunger Games film. And so I would dole out information bit by bit. But really, she didn't know the full extent of what was gonna be in the movie, content-wise, until she read the script. And she read the script, and she thought about it for a little while, and then she said that she was ready to do it, and she wanted to do it. And we Started to have really lengthy conversations because I wanted to make sure that we got all these moments really tonally correct. And that she was prepared for what it was gonna be like to shoot these kinds of days. And I would talk a lot about how we would handle the days, and handle the content, both practically on the day, but also in the movie. I wanted to make sure that it was always really narratively important. The idea was never for the movie to be erotic in any way. But that it would become part of her survival story, and that there was always something tough about it. There was always a very specific emotional value to it. The scenes were always moving the story forward, and it was part of her struggle to survive. This idea of getting pulled into this horrible world of espionage from her uncle, and she was gonna have to do things that she didn't want to do to survive. One of the things that she and I spoke about was that I promised her that she would be the first person to see the movie. That Alan Bell, the editor, and I, and I think two of his assistants that were obviously gonna have to handle the footage and help organize things were gonna be the only ones to see all of the footage. So, you know, dailies like this scene were always held back from the producers and even from the studio, so that when we came up with our cut, which I think was about six weeks after we had wrapped production, I went to New York and I showed Jen the movie first, so that she had the first chance to Say, "Yes, this can be in," or "No, I want that to be out." So that she had the power to make those decisions before anybody saw anything. And she saw the movie, and she loved the movie. I think it was a fair amount longer than it is now. I think it was two hours and 35 minutes or something. But that's kind of the way we worked.

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Francis Lawrence

For any of you that have read the book, this sequence used to have them swimming next to each other, and even starting to race and things like that. But the sort of last remnant of that is this, where he says something to her in Russian, which is that you're a good swimmer. But there used to be a race, and then I realized it would be a lot of shooting time, using underwater cameras and things like that, for something that would probably end up getting cut from the movie. Do you miss it? You know, food, people. So what do you do in Budapest? In terms of the development of the screenplay, there are always these kind of tent pole moments. And the tent pole moments in the relationship between Dominika and Nate here, this is one of the first big, big moments because he's initiating contact, right? She's made the pass-by. So she was just, in the most subtle of ways, starting to bait him at the pool, but he's clearly already onto her and sort of insinuating that he knows that she's followed. Would you like to get something to eat with me? I know a Turkish place at the station. What's always been really interesting to me is this idea of, is she really bad at it because she's new, and he's really good at it? Or is she purposely allowing him to know that she's following him? So, we would actually shoot various things so that we could modulate how strong those feelings might be. So you can see this close-up here. You can see here she's actually sort of excited by the moment between the two of them, and she smiles a little bit. But we had one where we shot more concern. So if we ever felt in the edit that it was leaning too much toward the kind of obvious sense that she was purposely letting him know, we could then use a moment there where she seemed a little more nervous. Your ID is missing. But you can see here that her plan is starting to work, right? That she's swapped the name. She's not using her fake name or her alias, and instead has used her real name on the card. Take your time. She came in under the name Katerina Zubkova. Registered as a translator for the Embassy. This location here, I think we were shooting in another one of these universities. It was kind of interesting that Budapest has these various buildings around town that are very specific kinds of universities. And I don't remember what kind this was, but this was one of the universities that we shot in and we used as the U.S. Embassy, CIA headquarters within the embassy for this scene. And, again, you get these great wood walls, and this socialist architecture, and odd green marble everywhere. So just another wonderful find from Maria. Deputy director of the SVR? I have nieces. And fun stuff here. There's not much levity in this movie, but some of it, almost all of it in fact, brought by Bill Camp's character. So, some fun moments and some good laughs in this scene. Okay. See what you can find out. Thanks. - Just go slow, all right? All right. Nate? - Mmm-hmm? If she does let you fuck her, she's definitely SVR... because she's way out of your league.

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Francis Lawrence

One of the things that we did a Iot, which is kind of interesting, and this is something that Alan Bell, my editor, is really good at, is he does a lot of tricks often in scenes like this where, you know, to maybe speed things up or pace things up he might do split screens and speed ramp either side, SO you can speed conversations up and things like that. What we ended up doing a lot here that he's also very good at is makeup augmentation. So, Jen's makeup artist did a great job, but we had decided sort of after the fact when you see the cut come together that she should have a little more bruising and a little more damage to her lip than she had on the day. And so we did a lot of digital wound work. And even this, that vomit there, that vomit is actually digital as well. That she kind of dry-heaved. But we decided that because she dry-heaved in the beginning in the movie that maybe she should actually vomit here. But we added that all in later. This now becomes another one of the tent pole moments in terms of Dominika's trajectory and what her objectives are. When the uncle comes in, and she corners the uncle in a way. And it's one of those moments where you really wonder what side she's working on. Jen just did a great job in this scene.

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Hi there. I'm Dean Fleischer-Kamp, writer, director, editor of the film with the people sitting beside me. Hi, I'm Jenny Slate. I play Marcel the Shell, and I'm also a writer on this movie. And I guess I'm a producer too, huh? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you are. I was in there. Oh, there's my beautiful little girl. Oh, that's gorgeous. Thank you.

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And my name's Nick Paley. I'm a writer on the film and also an editor. And here's our beautiful sunbeam. It's so nice. It is really nice. I love it. This is the first shot of the film. We're supposed to say it at each shot? This is shot number one. Shot number one. Shot number two is coming up next. All right.

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aesthetic of it where because it gives you a freedom to detach the image from what you're hearing yes yeah and then and then you can kind of be more dreamlike and you know uh looser or something yeah yeah it was a editor's paradise but also nightmare because there was so much control i think i'm gonna cry

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I am writer, producer, director Christopher McQuarrie. Hi, my name is Eddie Hamilton. I'm the film editor on Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part 1. The extraordinary editor on Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part 1. Chris hates it. Chris knows that I'm very embarrassed when he says things like that. Eddie doesn't like compliments. Yeah, exactly. That's not the reason why I do it, but it's the reason why I enjoy doing it. Yeah. This sequence...

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of the subway and takes us all the way through to Venice. It's one of the places where people might feel that they can take a break. That's right. But the way that you developed the music cue with Lorne and Cecile Tornesac, our music editor, meant that we just keep our foot on the gas here so that you...

1:10:55 · jump to transcript →

Yes. And it stayed on the movie for two years. Yes. Longer even. And then right at the end, the Paramount Music Department helped us find around 200 different dance tracks. Yes. And Cecile Tornesac, our music editor, worked with Chris to identify three and then spent a couple of days cutting all these tracks with stems so that every piece, every transition and every character...

1:19:33 · jump to transcript →

Hello, I'm Tim Lucas, film critic and editor of Video Watchdog magazine. In December 1981 and March 1982, it was my privilege to be the only journalist allowed to visit the set of Videodrome, whose production I covered for Cinefantastique magazine. My research ultimately took the form of a book on the making of David Cronenberg's film, which initiated Millipede Press's studies in the horror film series in 2008. I'm here to share my insights about the film, as well as some memories of the time I spent on set.

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But let's take a moment to admire the production design of Carol Speer, who is working here like DP Mark Irwin and editor Ron Sanders on her third Cronenberg picture. The glass blocks suggest television screens and the open slats of the Venetian blinds emitting blue light evoke the resolution lines that were present on all analog TV picture tubes. You may note in this scene that Max's preferred format is Betamax, which video insiders of the day considered a far superior format to VHS.

15:07 · jump to transcript →

To abbreviate the shot to a length the MPAA considered acceptable, Cronenberg and editor Ron Sanders inserted a dissolve that allowed the shot to get to the point prematurely.

17:55 · jump to transcript →

Hi, I'm Steve Summers, the writer-director of this thing. And to my left is Bob Doucet, the executive producer and editor. Hello, everybody. Here we go. Didn't we just finish this movie? So, as we sit here in ADR 6 on the Universal lot a couple months after this movie is open, the picture is closing in on about $200 million at the domestic box office, and

0:01 · jump to transcript →

I don't think he agreed. But, you know, it's fun. I mean, if I was designing London, I'd have put them all so you could see them all at the same time instead of spreading them all over, because with London traffic, which is miserable. It's a much better design. So some of our... In post-production, we had a... The visual effects editor was a British guy, and he was always appalled by that shot. This sequence here was shot in...

21:55 · jump to transcript →

And, of course, the cast is from everywhere, so... My co-editor, Kelly Matsumoto, cut all of this fight sequence here and did a fantastic job. There's a ton of footage and fight cutting is always very complicated. I think she really kept things moving here very well. You go back there, there's a good bent...

30:00 · jump to transcript →

Hi, this is Asif Kapadia. I'm the director of Amy. I'm here with two others. I'm James Garrison, the producer of this film. And I'm Chris King, the editor of the film. And we're going to talk our way through the film, give you a bit of a commentary of how the movie was put together and hopefully give you a bit of background. Yeah. Although this is the very beginning of the film, this material was some of the latest that we ever received, wasn't it? And that was mostly down to the efforts that it took you to get in contact with Lauren and Juliet.

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Did we de-interlace this footage, Chris? Oh, honestly, this, Jamie Leonard, the online editor, took this away and worked on it for weeks and came up with various different ways. It was torn to pieces. I mean, actually, the image fell to bits and it got worse when we projected it on a big screen. It almost couldn't work out. So it's a miracle that we can see what we can see with this. I think he blended various different versions of it

1:15:58 · jump to transcript →

It was definitely a question of just keeping in the moment and playing what was actually happening. He came with cameras and audio guys. But she worshipped the ground he walked on. And these slow-mos caused our online editor the most trouble, I think, of anything. They came up again in the game. It's sort of pitch-shifting on a lot of footage.

1:38:46 · jump to transcript →

Filmmaker Paul Davis

who conceived and created a lot of the sounds that you hear in this film. And then Jerry Humphries, who was a legendary sound recording editor. They took an elephant trump and played it backwards and added reverb. That sound that you hear right there is pigs from a distance. But the main howl was an elephant.

15:08 · jump to transcript →

Filmmaker Paul Davis

A little trivia for you. The young lady in the background with the two kids, that's George Falsey's wife and kids. And George Falsey was the producer on the movie. Who John met as an editor. He met him when he was making Schlock. He was introduced to him by a publicist called Sol Kahn, who worked on Kelly's Heroes. And John came back to the U.S.,

1:17:02 · jump to transcript →

Filmmaker Paul Davis

who went on to become the editor of UK Penthouse magazine. And has a very successful actor in her own family, her son, Tiger Drew, honey, from Outnumbered. The genius of this sequence is the fact that

1:23:28 · jump to transcript →

Frank Morriss

I'm Frank Morriss. I'm the editor. Lucky enough to be the editor of this movie. It's a very interesting picture because though a lot of people... ...thought it was science fiction... ...we always looked at it as science fact. And so the message here is mostly true. And many of the things that are not quite true... ...were not quite true at the time... ...such things that we'll run into as "whisper mode" and so on. And yet, a lot of these innovative things... ...weren't actually happening at the time. Reiss. Maloney. The Los Angeles helicopter squad... ...is one of the best in the country... ...and it's the only way that they're able to cover this huge area of Los Angeles. They're up in the air almost 20 hours a day. Where we're shooting right here is a brand-new facility... ...that they had not moved into, and they let us use it.

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Frank Morriss

And actually, when we did mix the sound... ...I was working on another film called WarGames at the time... ...and had to be shooting on that film. So I would come by late at night to the mixing stage... ...and Frank was working there. Frank had his own opinions about this music. Do you remember? - Oh, yeah. It wasn't something that I think you were crazy about. It was not your favourite-- Well, Frank has been a music editor for a lot of his life... ...before he became a film editor. So he has very strong... ...powerful opinions on music. Well, I think Arthur did a terrific job on this... ...but we lost a lot of it due to the fact that it didn't quite work... ...with the action, or whatever and... Or it just didn't fit the character of the movie. Two or three cues is all it was. - Yeah.

27:31 · jump to transcript →

Frank Morriss

Let's see what's on HBO tonight. Now, this movie is filmed in widescreen. Sometimes that's called Cinemascope, or anamorphic. And 35 mm film is not wide enough to contain this frame. It wouldn't fit. So Panavision and some other people... ...invented lenses that actually take this image that you're looking at... ...and squeeze it to the width of a 35 mm frame... ...which is almost half as wide as what you're looking at. If you hold up a piece of anamorphic film to the light and look at it... ...all of these guys would be tall... ...and skinny and mushed together. The whole image would suddenly get all squinched. When you project the image, then you have to have a similar lens... ...that unsqueezes the image. But this was an effort to make big, widescreen movies that-- Not necessarily in Cinerama or techniques like that... ...but that you could make on ordinary film, and have an experience that was... ...different from what you're seeing on television. It had a different aspect ratio, real wide screen. And the challenges of shooting it are quite interesting... ...because those lenses require a lot more light... ...and give you a lot less depth of focus. So you're always kind of struggling with it. It's a very special kind of look that I actually prefer. And it gives you some real challenges in composition and so on. But you don't see too many pictures shot in anamorphic nowadays. They have another process called Super 35... ...that isn't quite so difficult to shoot. I think, Frank, we did Bird on a Wire in Super 35. Right. Well, from the standpoint of coverage in this movie... ...it was an editor's tour de force almost. It was covered so well. You mean, in terms of you having the footage that you needed. Yeah. We had very, very, very few problems. Well, thank goodness we had enough time to shoot this movie... ...so that we could get the coverage that we needed... ...because it was so tricky to tell this story along the way.

51:44 · jump to transcript →

You may feel that, to your taste, the mood has already been sufficiently set, but, of course, it is a matter of taste, and the editor of the picture apparently thought that we could use a little more mood-setting, and, well, he's the professional, so let us defer. Let's appreciate his art. Every cut, I think, well judged, a frame earlier or later, here or there, and quite a different mood, but this is the mood, so let's revel in his art.

20:29 · jump to transcript →

Nope, no, we've got some warm light, which I think for a nighttime scene is rather the better choice. Oh, and we're back to cold again, back to cold light. So mixing again, mixing and matching. Oh, yes, I'm not sure I like that jump in, but that's the editor's art, isn't it? And we are not he. No, nor he.

21:28 · jump to transcript →

This doorway here is not actually at the same location as the bar with the cash register. Through the magic of the editor's art, we think the two are in the same place, one just by the other. But in fact, this door was in an econo lodge right across town, but it has a nice dusty rug in front of it that the filmmakers simply fell in love with. So they shot that bit at the econo lodge, and then through the magic of editing, they implied that the doorway was part of our bar, and they got that lovely dust effect. And who would know?

44:23 · jump to transcript →

You should have somebody write it down, you know. We found out about halfway into this picture that that was somebody's job. Because somebody can't tell you. I think three was good. You know what they do? They put like a circle around the number. Amazing. And then you go back. You know, because we found out in the cutting room that the ones with the circles were pretty good. I heard Coppola did that on Ghostbusters. It worked great. And he did a good job. Was that the second one? Two and a half went much faster after we knew what those damn circles were. I know. There's something I ought to tell you. No. No need to tell me anything. What's in the past...

39:50 · jump to transcript →

Remember they tried to build some baseball launcher thing? The ex-German rocket scientists we had in the effects department. That thing never worked. Probably just threw them up in the air. Is that the one we labeled the pigeon shooter? The pigeon shooter, yeah. That scared some people. They thought we were actually going to shoot pigeons with it. Those were the days, huh? Oh, you remember this? We rehearsed this. Well, do you remember we came in with all the dailies for this and the editor said, what's a rundown? Oh, yeah. It's like, uh-oh.

1:12:55 · jump to transcript →

I like that editor. Yeah. I know this is hard to believe, but apparently the umpires have got Crescione in a rundown. Who's Crescione? Is that another one of your high school people? No, I think that was... I don't know who that was. Your name's all friends? One of the wardrobe people's friends. Or was it the accountant or somebody? Yeah, Tony Crescione. No, this is...

1:13:26 · jump to transcript →

So I just kind of recut it. I remember when Susan Shipton, my editor, came in in the morning. This is the last film I edited on film, actually. So she came in the morning, and there was this mess of film on the floor. Because I was just madly trying to kind of put all these scenes together and overlap and kind of create this feeling, knowing that I could then hand it to you, Michael, and that it would all...

44:52 · jump to transcript →

How did the composing community allow that appropriation of their own responsibility as artists? I don't quite get... Well, I think it goes even earlier in the process than that. It's very... In the typical process, the picture editor, as soon as assembly, you know, while the footage is being shot and assembled, the picture editor nowadays absolutely...

1:28:06 · jump to transcript →

universally will start putting in temporary score music from other films and therefore making huge decisions without really very much thought and and not from a knowledge of being a composer from being a picture editor and they cut to this music so that if you take this temporary music out the film isn't even cut to its true self it's being cut to music that is not even

1:28:34 · jump to transcript →

Peter Hyams

Steve Kemper is an editor I've worked with in the past four films. He is a truly gifted editor. A lot of this is editing. I thought what would be interesting when I designed the sequence was to have three different vantage points, three different series of

48:10 · jump to transcript →

Peter Hyams

A good film editor can make a director look a lot better than he or she really is. I got complaints when I was shooting the film, specifically in this scene, that things were too dark. I must say, when people saw it together, they didn't feel that way. So quite often, when you're taking chances photographically, people will complain when they see dailies.

1:24:30 · jump to transcript →

Peter Hyams

This is about, you want to scare people, don't show everything. So to me, not to know where the hand was going to come from and not to telegraph where the hand was going to come from. And then I was trying to make you look down. That shot there I thought was a very clever touch by the editor, to make you look down before the hand comes to the roof.

1:41:17 · jump to transcript →

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland

They're not going to say, oh, it's a British film, we won't mind if the explosions aren't very good. They want it to be as good as a Mel Gibson film, as whatever's out there, really, that you're competing with in the multiplex. So I think it's money well spent and it's the end of our first reel. So you have this extraordinary sequence which starts with London empty and builds eventually to this incredible explosion across it. We used many, many cameras. It's brilliantly cut, I think, by our editor, Chris Gill, who did some wonderful...

16:46 · jump to transcript →

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland

watching this editing process and seeing just exactly how much one can change the thread of the story in the edit suite. And they weren't in the same room. They weren't, in fact. When we put them in the same room together, we kind of... As you often do, concertina things that you keep separate. It's often better to, especially once the film...

1:09:11 · jump to transcript →

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland

These scenes are always a nightmare for when you film them. Dinner party scenes, because it's all about left to right, right to left. Who's he looking at when he's looking that way? And you end up, basically, the truth is, no matter who you are, you end up going round the table, shooting everybody, and you double up sometimes because you want to make sure the editor's got enough in editing where the editor can control the pace of the scene and shape it a bit, you know? But it's basically...

1:14:58 · jump to transcript →

This is Len Wiseman, director of Underworld Evolution. And sitting in here with me today, far too close for my liking, I've got to say, if I can scoot over a bit, is Patrick Tatopoulos, our production designer. Say hello. Hey, how's it going, man? Remember that voice. And Brad Martin, our second unit director and stunt coordinator. Hello. And Nick Tatoth, our editor. Hello. Are you going to do that the whole time? Is that going to be your... Hello.

0:04 · jump to transcript →

He affected all the flashbacks. It actually takes a very long time to do all that. It does. It goes by really fast, but it's a lot of tweaking in the edit. Right, yeah. Actually, that chopping off of the head right there, and then also the chopping off of the head at the village right there, I know that you and Gary, the visual effects on-set supervisor, were at odds for a while saying that, well, he was thinking that it's not going to look good in 2D, and you're saying, well, no, it's going to look fine. And it ends up looking great in both shots where it takes his head right off.

15:29 · jump to transcript →

I was like, can I take off my shirt in this scene? I'm like, Scott, you're not even in this scene. He's like, no, no, I know. The thing is, because he has a thing about it, he's actually tortured over any time he has to do a torso shot. He kind of begs me if there's a way to get around not doing it. You know, it's really weird because he'd always show up in the cutting room with his shirt off.

49:44 · jump to transcript →

I mean, I have three cameras running on the song. The original master I planned was a slow track in from a medium shot to a close-up over the length of the song. And for a long time in the edit, we kept this tracking shot in. And I remember one day Eddie Redmayne came in, who's been a friend ever since Elizabeth I, when we worked together, and I showed him Dream to Dream, and he was knocked out, but he said, why aren't we using the big close-up that he'd seen in the teaser trailer? And Melanie, my editor, tried the big close-up in, and...

28:52 · jump to transcript →

Interestingly, our original idea from rehearsal was that as she died, she would see Javert coming down, and so she would have a kind of tragic death where she died, realizing that her daughter was perhaps not safe. And I remember Karen McIntosh in the edit saying something very interesting about how we should allow her to have a peaceful death, a beautiful death. And I realized there was an echo between the death of Valjean and the death of Fontaine, that this idea that

43:06 · jump to transcript →

you get purer and purer sound. So you introduce the rain at the beginning and with the movement she makes towards this building, it gets quieter and the sound gets purer. Again, this is an example where I didn't necessarily, you know, I wasn't totally committed from the outset in playing it in one. But we just discovered in the edit that this song had most emotion when you played it all on Eponine's close up rather than cutting out wide. Again, it's because when you go wide, a bit like in Dream to Dream, you're not,

1:29:55 · jump to transcript →

And you remember, right the last night of the mix, we went in and I flew in, I was shooting, we flew in, we went through the mix and I put in the... Yeah, we were like, there's something else, you were like, it needs something, what is it? And you said, get a microphone, I got it. And so, yeah, at 11.30 at night, you were making all these noises in the mic and 15 minutes later, the editor had dropped them in, did an amazing job. Amazing.

1:08:16 · jump to transcript →

This guy did an amazing job. I looked at him, great sound editor. And it was so disturbing the first time we heard it. We knew that was going to work. All of these little bubbles, everything you're seeing in the water, all of that is added after the fact because the water is so clear. Yeah.

1:08:41 · jump to transcript →

And this, you know, Eddie with the sound design, bringing the sound out, Eddie Hamilton, our editor, and pushing this to its absolute limit, that every time I watch it, I can't quite predict where it's all gonna kick in again. And this kind of gun plays a lot of fun, too, what Wade did with that. It's also, you said, look, I want you blocking her. Yes, you're blocking her, and then she's, and you're training the weapon, and it becomes, again, hand in glove. It's all behavior, and they all, each one knows what the other one is doing.

1:54:46 · jump to transcript →

Nia DaCosta

Be back soon. So in the movie, I really want to have moments where you see Jimmy Crystal looking like he idiot that he is, because that's how I feel about these kinds of leaders, like... Usually, like, with a cult leader or, you know, or a garbage, like, president or prime minister, whatever, the way that they get people to follow them isn't necessarily that they're intelligent in any way, shape or form. It's, like, the charisma, but also it's power. And I think... when you look at those people outside of that context, you also see how silly they are. And so there are moments in the movie where, even though he has a lot of power over these kids, I also wanted to show that he's a silly, ridiculous human being as well. So there are moments in here where you see a bit of that slip, and, also, he's funny, so you can laugh at him and with him a bit. So that was really important to me. But this is even more important. This... This, we did in the edit, which is having this moment where Samson's brain is rearranging. I mean, I think what Alex wrote was, like, "Samson's brain is rearranging," and we were like, "Okay, what's that gonna be?" And Jake Roberts, who's my amazing editor, and I, found this way of... showing that. And I love this scene. This was something that we... I did this in one way initially and during the shoot, which again made... Jack, as Jimmy Crystal, look a bit silly and ridiculous. However, my producer, Peter Rice, he was like, "I really feel like we should... "we need to see him in the temple, actually." And I was like, "You're absolutely right." So, we shot this, which I really love.

59:08 · jump to transcript →

Nia DaCosta

You must stand. His little smile here. Just amazing performances in this film, and this scene in particular, I just find so... wonderful. Loved shooting it. And also my editor, because we only had Alfie for three hours a night we had to shoot, like, really out of order. SO, like, I think, on the second day we were shooting this, my editor emailed me, and he was like, "Bro, where is the coverage of the scene?" I was like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "We don't have this or this..." And it was really great because he was just like... I was like, "That's because we don't have Alfie. "So we had to wait for Alfie." But also, it was really helpful just to, like, keep us all on the same page and get a good road map for making sure we get everything we need 'cause it's a complicated scene. It's a long scene, and a lot has to happen. And, you know, when you have one of your actors who can't be there the whole time, you know, it just makes it trickier. So, having a shot list, first of all, helps, but also having an editor who is so on top of it and who is so brilliant. Also, any director will say, "This helps bring everything together."

1:29:04 · jump to transcript →

Nia DaCosta

You have a bit of a score coming in here. Hildur Guénadottir and her music editor, Jason Ruder, who's amazing, just knocked it out of the park, I think, with this score. It's weird. It's different. But then also when the theme, which will kick in again in a few minutes, it's like this mix of, like, brutal and disturbing, but also beautiful. And I just love what they did and what we got to with this.

1:30:23 · jump to transcript →

Hi, my name is Jonathan Rosenbaum. I'm the author of Discovering Orson Welles and the editor of both This Is Orson Welles and two Orson Welles unrealized scripts, The Big Brass Ring and The Cradle of Rock. And I'm James Naramore. I wrote a book called The Magic World of Orson Welles, and I edited a volume of essays called Orson Welles' Citizen Kane.

0:15 · jump to transcript →

John Houseman was a very important figure for Wells during the 30s and early 40s because he basically was the story editor on the radio shows, the partner in the theatrical productions, and in a way what he did on Citizen Kane was carry over the role of story editor in working with Herman Mankiewicz.

50:47 · jump to transcript →

you know, there was something to what we were doing after all. I know Walter Murch, the editor in Sound, although he was not an editor at this point, he was more in Sound. I think The Conversation was the first film Walter

1:28:20 · jump to transcript →

long movie with a bunch of guys sitting around in chairs talking. I remember the assistant editor who was rewinding the reel said, yeah, I guess you're right. But, you know, every film kind of creates its own identity and it's possible to rivet an audience even

2:49:29 · jump to transcript →

The car, incidentally, is a 1973 Buick Riviera. The cutter who is making this all come together so well is Clint's usual guy during this period, whose career goes back to the late 30s, who at this point had very recently handled the race scenes in the 1971 Le Mans with Steve McQueen. The first Eastwood film that Webster cut was 1972's Joe Kidd,

27:04 · jump to transcript →

had gone to Michigan State University, where he graduated with a BA in graphic arts and was the art director and managing editor of the school humor magazine Spartan. From there, Cimino proceeds on to Yale, where he picks up a BFA and MFA in painting. Interesting, because there are not a great, great number of filmmakers who come to cinema through painting. Catherine Bigelow immediately comes to mind. I'm sure there are others. Um...

37:02 · jump to transcript →

Peter Greenaway

and the other extreme, which is to do with what Picasso would say, painting what you imagine rather than what you see. I would have found, as I suspect many other people would be, this is a rather insular, elitist academic persuasion, but I found it of sufficient interest to wish to somehow want to debate it in the wider circle, and since I had no intention of continuing to be a documentary filmmaker, film editor,

3:24 · jump to transcript →

Peter Greenaway

and I'm determined to confront that eventuality well protected. And who will accuse you? As a filmmaker and as a film editor, in the years before this film was manufactured, I had developed for myself, I suppose, a personal style which often consisted of massive over-editing. So often the shots were extremely short and the whole scenic appearance of the manufacturer of the film would be very quick and frenetic. But I was learning to

1:06:11 · jump to transcript →

And the other person that should be mentioned here is Rick Shane, the editor, who did a magnificent job cutting this film. Has there been any background in the text about Freddy Krueger at this point? Uh, no. No. What do you mean, in the text? I mean, who he was and...

27:21 · jump to transcript →

to harass us, not to be in touch with it. What was their response after they saw the first cut that you did? The first cut, the editor's cut, when I first arrived, they showed it to me and Bob turned around and looked at me and says, well, do you think we have a film here at all? I'll never forget that. That's a nice vote of confidence. And then he told me that he wanted a complete cut in two weeks. I think we ultimately did it in five weeks.

1:18:56 · jump to transcript →

and funnier looking Rodriguez brother. The one with the hairnet. Right. Fox Harris, who is the first character that we see in the film. Is no longer with us. Is no longer with us. But I met Fox Harris when I and Nancy Richardson, the editor, were guards or caretakers at the actor's studio in Los Angeles.

0:46 · jump to transcript →

And Dennis Dolan, who was the editor, said, I really think you've got to pay off the death of Archie because otherwise there's something missing here. And it was really Dennis that came up with the idea that we would do this whole new ending to this scene where they open the trunk the whole way and Archie gets it. Yeah, well, at this point you were searching for this ending and you kind of didn't know what you were shooting, so it was all starting to get magic. You can almost see the stars. Oh, shut up.

58:36 · jump to transcript →

In fact, even the editing I had no control over. I wasn't allowed near the editing rooms. And I didn't know what I got until I got it. Right, that's very surprising. Why was that? Why were you not invited to the edit? Why were you not part of the edit? Well, the editor said, you know, you don't need to be here, George. On Rawhead, I insisted on being in the editing room.

1:23:03 · jump to transcript →

But yeah, so there was lots of things I had no control over. I presume the editor himself would not have been the person making the decision that you should be there. No, he was. I think it was him. Oh, was it? It wasn't the producers, I don't think. He said, I just want to get on with it, George, and deliver to you when it's finished. Right. I mean, did you have notes at the end?

1:23:26 · jump to transcript →

That absolutely happened, the crashing of the head. That was totally accidental, and we left it in. Now this, we had a wonderful editor, Peter Frank, but we were in such a short schedule, but we also had Garish doing digital editing of our dance things, and it was Garish who did this montage and did the finale. Garish had worked with Emil on other dance things and did a brilliant, wonderful job on it, and I'll show you in a minute.

37:26 · jump to transcript →

did this fabulous job for us and we changed it because he was a video editor and Peter was editing on film we had to change it back into film and it was a mathematical conversion and Emil and I kept saying it's wrong and people kept saying to us no no the numbers work it's right and we knew in our hearts that it was wrong and finally we got to this scene where Patrick jumped down and jumped up again without his feet hitting the floor

1:32:36 · jump to transcript →

Gary Goddard

Ann Coates, editor of many films, Lawrence of Arabia among them. Richard Edlund had recently left the Lucas organization. We were able to bring him on to handle the effects. Bill Stout came on board as a production designer and did a fantastic job.

2:12 · jump to transcript →

Gary Goddard

You didn't have to do that. It isn't even in the box. She had a great quality about her, and she did a great job. Shooting this whole movie, by the way, it was great. This whole company, Courtney and Chelsea and Ann Coates, the editor, it was more like a family, and it was almost like a wonderful kind of magical summer that we spent together making this movie. I think we all had a great time. It was a lot of work, and it was a lot of long nights. Half this movie was night shoots, which we'll get into later.

20:47 · jump to transcript →

Lea Thompson

This montage, remember, was one of the first things Seth Flaum, who became an editor that I worked with for the rest of my movies, cut. Bud Smith was the lead editor, a famous editor, who did The Exorcist and a lot of big movies with Billy Friedkin, was the lead editor on this movie, and, you know, just an absolute genius, as far as I'm concerned. Seth was an apprentice or an assistant, and he and I would squirrel away working on things like this montage, and I thought he did such a good job, that I ended up doing the next five, six movies with him after this.

1:00:30 · jump to transcript →

Lea Thompson

Montages are funny, 'cause when you get them cut together, lots of times, they save your butt. They look like they're designed, but... At least, Seth, my editor, in this case, saved my butt, because it wasn't designed as well as it looks.

1:01:20 · jump to transcript →

Lachlan Craig. Now, I've often thought since making it, and in the edit, I thought, how am I going to get time out of this? And I figured I didn't need this scene. As all this talk goes on about, you know, doing this and doing that and, you know, how he picks the fight and all this kind of stuff, when it would have been really simple to just walk or ride up to the guy and just nail him over the head with a mace and say, okay, the fight's picked, and then ride off.

1:19:58 · jump to transcript →

I mean, I was lucky, yes, but, and fortunate, but to have an editor as good as Steve Rosenblum was to really bring his own thing to it. I mean, he took what I gave him and he managed to sort of make it better, you know, which is, when it comes right down to it, the edit's just the final rewrite. And he's a master of it.

2:03:35 · jump to transcript →

It is, and the whole idea about that is make it seamless. That's the goal, so that later on an audience forgets about all kinds of techniques you use to just follow the story and that you get the feeling of reality. That's what I always like, that you have a feeling of reality to it, that it feels real and not, oh, we watch a movie here, look at that, great shot, great effect here, great effect there. You should forget that. You should just go with the story and the drama. Who was your editor?

1:25:37 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, I mean, at least I try, because sometimes it's so time-pressed situation in post-production that you have, especially if it's sort of not so important dialogue with smaller parts, you give it to your editor, you know, who does the dialogue. But no, normally I would try to be always there, especially with the big parts and the important stuff, yes. Because it's, you know, it's acting. It's important to be there. That's a big part of post-production. Yes.

1:38:39 · jump to transcript →

Alexander Payne

I used many, many, many of the same people between Citizen Ruth and Election. The production designer, Jane Stewart, and the DP, Jim Glennon, and the editor, Kevin Tent, and the composer, Rolf Kent, and even the same assistant cameraman, and the same prop master, and a lot of the same grips and electricians, and Omaha crew people, a lot of the same actors. In a way, Citizen Ruth was something of a dry run for Election.

13:48 · jump to transcript →

Alexander Payne

Her dad's a golfer. Not that it's that important, but something. What happened at the speeches was an unconscienceable travesty. That little bitch Tammy Metzler wanted to make a fool out of me. Well, it wasn't going to work. If all those students who cheered for Tammy Metzler only knew how hard I worked for Carver. Like all the late nights I spent at the yearbook office just to give them their stinking memories. I actually was editor-in-chief of my high school yearbook when I was a senior, so...

45:16 · jump to transcript →

When I'm making the action sequence, I would like to use a different speed and a different camera movement to get a shot. Like if I have three or four cameras, okay, one camera maybe use 120 frames, and the second camera maybe 60 frames. The third camera maybe 30 frames, and the main camera stay on 24 frames. After I get all the shots at all the different speeds, and then I work it out in the cutting room.

46:30 · jump to transcript →

how I'm going to work. Until I see the real thing, then I could tell you, you know, okay, oh, this is right, this is wrong, and oh, maybe this is a little too much, you know, or this is not enough, you know. I usually will let the actors do it first, and then I will, okay, I think that is fine, you know, I think it's okay. Usually, I'm not going to say much. I just love whatever they do, you know. Even though the shot wasn't that perfect, even the performance wasn't that enough, but I could work it out in the cutting room.

1:03:33 · jump to transcript →

Jonathan Lynn

Or when we zoomed in or zoomed out, that's the camera moving, and there's a newspaper just spinning on a piece of black velvet. So we were able to do that sequence for about $1,000 instead of vastly more if we'd done it computer-generated or optically. And it was beautifully cut by my editor, Tom Lewis. That was an ad lib by Bruce, which is pretty funny, I thought. He just improvised that on that take, and only that take.

8:20 · jump to transcript →

Jonathan Lynn

I lent it to my neighbor. He went fishing. This neighbor. And they are very much in the style of the rest of the film, which is important. Jimmy Jones. We did a number of takes of Matthew nearly falling out of that chair and several when he fell out of it, which were hilarious. But somehow at this point we felt he was less of a klutz and we opted in the cutting room for the shot where Matthew nearly fell out of the chair. At last we thought he's learning something. He doesn't.

1:19:31 · jump to transcript →

Commentary With Kathryn Bigelow And Jeff Cronenweth

One of the greatest compliments that I received after this picture was finished was from the editor, Walter Murch, and legendary Walter Murch, who just being in the same room with him is good enough, but let alone have him cut our movie for her, cut footage that I shot. But anyways, he was taken back by the depth of...

59:33 · jump to transcript →

Commentary With Kathryn Bigelow And Jeff Cronenweth

There was a kind of calm that settled over us, and it was a great... Those were great, great, great days. Once we had all the footage, I would say that we were fortunate enough to work with the legendary Walter Murch, and this is an editor whose reputation certainly precedes him, and he...

1:08:20 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

This to me, this scene where Owen is shining his shoes, was sort of one of the key scenes of the movie of their relationship. He asks him very directly about... why he never sought him out. And there's something in the dynamic between Bill and Owen in real life that's reflected in this. When we were shooting this scene, Owen, who went to military school, he said they had some stuff for him to shine his shoes with, and Owen said, "We always just used a cotton ball." So we said, "Well, get him a cotton ball." And then he sat there, and while we shot this scene for a couple of hours, he shined those shoes the entire time. In between the takes, he was shining the shoes the whole time. He was very carefully shining the shoes, and he was, I feel like, connecting with something from his past. And I love both of them in this scene. This is one scene where I feel like they've really brought more than what was written or anything. And then, of course, we have this correspondence doc which has now arrived. Which, again, I guess it sort of plays into Zissou's need to sort of name things, and classify things, identify things. It's also a correspondence doc, a sort of, you know-- I get fear of intellectualizing too much, but it is sort of almost like a uniform. It's a way to identify yourself in a formal way. Yeah, and in this case, he's renaming him in a way he prefers. Right, it's a way for Zissou to kind of, yeah, exactly, create his idea of Ned. Now, you know, sometimes I feel like maybe we needed to give more time to Jane. There's a backstory for Jane about an editor that she's had an affair with, who's the father of the baby. It's really just barely hinted at. But hopefully it's enough to say, well, here's this mystery of what's going on in her mind.

31:02 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

See, Renzo, this is what I'm talking about... The character of Renzo, the editor, is played by Pawel Wdowczak, who is our sound man. And so he's the sound man on camera during the documentary stuff whenever we see him, and he's also the sound man of the film, which sometimes is very difficult because he's gotta do the sound, but he's also gotta look right. But he's a great-- He's from Poland, and he's worked on all of my films. And he has a wonderful spirit about him. And we wrote Renzo for Pawel to play. Yeah, we always had that idea. I don't know if you wanna talk a little bit about sort of like using... You know, what is it that it does for you as a director to, like, have-- You know, to have people who sort of mean something to you in your life or in your work actually then on-screen in some way. Yes. Well-- Yeah, because sometimes I feel like on a commentary like this, I'm saying, "This guy is Tony Shafrazi." - Right. "This is Isabella Blow." - And it can sound kind of superficial, "These are people I know I put in the movie." But I think that, you know, there's something-- For me, I-- For me, you know, I've worked with virtually the same crew on all my films, many of the same actors, and the parts that we've written are generally, you know, a lot of personal experience that goes into these characters, you know, that's-- Because these movies aren't adapted from something else, they're just made-up, and they come from, you know, our lives, and then other inspirations. But for me, they're also movies about people who are struggling with their relationships and their affection for each other, and they're always all kind of a group of people who are sort of locked together in one way. I feel like they're movies that are also made by a group of friends. As much as they're about a group of friends and their struggles, it's made by a group of friends. And that's why I often like to have people who are familiar, and when they show up on the set, it's like a reunion, you know? And it always means something to me to see those people in the film and to feel them interacting, and often there's a lot of non-actors in the midst with people who have a lot of experience acting. That's sort of what it's about for me. - Yeah, and I think-- I mean, from my experience directing too and doing that, it can-- You know, I think in any way, as a director, that you can kind of emotionally connect yourself to the material, you know, in both very deliberate, literal ways, and also in ways of, you know, just sort of having people you care for in front of the camera or, you know-- Or wearing clothes with colors that mean something to you or whatever. I think any of that can help if you're making films that are kind of personal in any way. - Yeah. One thing we didn't mention 'cause we were talking through the balloon scene, but that is sort of Steve facing very-- When she says that he-- She had a picture of him in the pose that he's in in the balloon, and him dealing directly with the image of himself and the sort of self-made, you know, version-- Self-invented. - Self-invention. Well, that line that he says, "I never saw myself that way," something like that, "I don't see myself that way, I never did." In fact, he meant to, you know. He tried to see himself that way. He made himself that way. He just never bought it. - Right. And-- Yeah, I mean, I think it's... You know, something-- You know, that we were sort of both putting ourselves in the shoes of Jane, who, you know, like us, would have had a picture of one of these guys tacked up over a bed or over a desk, and, you know, but also been thinking, "But these guys exist. These are real people who've got their real lives." And I think we've both had the experience of what it's like to get to know one of your heroes. - Right. And it's always nothing like what you would have imagined. But the one thing I will say is, sometimes, you know-- Something happens, you're disappointed. But generally what happens is, your hero was interesting in one way or another. And you learn about them and, you know... I feel like I wouldn't be disappointed with what Steve Zissou is. I would just feel sympathetic for somebody like that because, you know, he's a character, and he's filled with conflict and contradiction and capable of all kinds of terrible behavior. But there's something unique about him and, you know, I don't know. Right. Well-- And, you know, once you're dealing with this person as an actual person, you know... - Everybody has his reasons. They're gonna be bringing all this other stuff you're not gonna get from watching the specials. Yeah, more or less standard boilerplate, I guess. Here they go to Alistair Hennessey's sea lab, a high-tech facility. All Hennessey's stuff is chrome and black and white as opposed to Zissou's colors. Everything Zissou has is faded and dated and old and doesn't work properly. And Hennessey's stuff is computerized, flat screen, everything. But we built this on the tank in the back lot of Cinecittà. And... And... It was quite an experience working at Cinecittà. The place is sort of steeped in Fellini. Even today, people talk about Fellini every day on this... At this studio. And the stage where we filmed, the boat chopped in half, was Fellini's stage, Stage 5. And somehow, we always felt this movie owed some great debt to Fellini. Yeah. Well, and again, we talked about Fellini and Antonioni, which, you know, in a kind of-- In one way is also the difference between kind of highly artificial, you know, shooting on sets, Cinecittà, and then the Antonioni way, which at least I associate more with, like, shooting on the open water and, you know, the real-world landscape is sort of a character. And Zissou sort of deals and operates in both worlds. Here, again, we use the cross section as when they go up the... Which is a kind of a fun way to play out the scene. Have it be one continuous take. This whole thing is one continuous take, and then there could be-- They have a lot of places to run around, and I feel like the actors always bring something into it when they have this kind of room to play the scene. What I like about this too-- It's sort of like in movies now, cameras go through walls anyway, but they're not sort of acknowledging... You kind of accept it and it doesn't take you out of the reality. And I feel like, you know-- I think it's the same effect, but at the same time, it's really acknowledging that they're on a set. Right.

42:13 · jump to transcript →

Jerry Bruckheimer production values. There's a moment coming up soon where you see this painter on the back of the ship in a wide shot and the paint is digitally added later. There it is. This is where it's a good idea and a bad idea to have Zack Steinberg, editor of the Matrix films, editing your movie because

21:00 · jump to transcript →

At four and a half months old, a human fetus has a reptile's tail, a remnant of our evolution. Jeff Buckley's version of Hallelujah was suggested by our music editor, Julie Pierce. And the scenes were emotional without it, but even more so with it. I've been here so long, you're starting to get on my nerves.

1:32:35 · jump to transcript →

John Cameron Mitchell

Again, that was stuff that you told us to scream at each other. We thought that it was going to be before the beginning of the scene. This is trying to get us into the mood, and then you used it in the final cut. You never know. You sneaky little thing. You know, Brian Cates, master editor, he used every ounce of common sweat in the editing of this film. So the screams that we used to give you guys energy...

42:33 · jump to transcript →

John Cameron Mitchell

When we were shooting this, PJ watching this for the first time... It was extremely emotional. It was very intense. Marin, our assistant editor, edited it secretly. He was with me that day, and after the tape, I would break down because it was like watching your lover's suicide tape again and again and again, and yet so beautiful. Cyril's classically rendered cacophony

1:23:52 · jump to transcript →

Again, the work of Chris Gill, the editor, is really, really amazing. We found together all these great ideas, because that wasn't exactly in the structure of the original script. Yeah. The parallel editing is improving a lot the tension of this sequence. And... This sequence was really difficult to shoot. It was made in one day. That was the first day of the premiere of Catherine's play.

42:06 · jump to transcript →

Aerials are really, really nice. It's the way to see how they escape. And in this moment I think, clearly, we see how these people are attacked by not only the infected - militaries are another menace in this movie. So now they are in the middle between two menaces. Now, the running away, it's so difficult. Two weeks after the final shooting, the editor, Chris Gill, showed us this sequence, basically by him. And it was very close to this thing, and we were, "Wow". "We probably can have a movie here." He was also the editor in the first one, Danny Boyle's film. We mainly worked with most of the crew of the first movie.

1:17:49 · jump to transcript →

this was a very good proposal from dino who has the editor of the film he said that why don't we postpone the moment where we read the message on this little cardboard thing and it's a little secret that he carries for yet another 15 minutes or something what what the text is there and he's so

58:35 · jump to transcript →

days and weeks to put that together again. But I think you had something like that, but it didn't show clearly enough what it was. Dino, the editor was teasing me every time we came to this scene that Eli is coming with one...

1:21:19 · jump to transcript →

of this editor, emperor, not the editor. The editor was ruthless in other ways. Anyway, the fact is that his drive across China led to untold millions of deaths and enslavements, executions, torture, and suppression of books and Confucian

2:50 · jump to transcript →

All that stuff you hear in the soundtrack was stuff that I did with sound designer and sound effects editor Bruce Stambler, who's done Triple X, Fast and Furious, Stealth for me, the wonderfully vivid sound environments that are created around those films. The soundtrack is literally half of your impact in the viewing.

1:20:21 · jump to transcript →

I got an argument with my editor. He thought it was funny. He was thinking, then, did you see this cat? And they're implying that they just ate it. Which I didn't think was that funny a joke, but it was John Harris' one. I thought, I was like, why would that? And he's saying all Koreans eat cats. I said, no, that's true. So that was an editor thing, not me. Oh, great.

28:34 · jump to transcript →

And my editor thought we were nuts again. I said, go on, put it in. And he said, it's never gonna work. But I think it sort of sums up the movie. One minute you're scared, then you're laughing, then you're scared, then you're sad, then you're happy. And I don't know. We've got a way with Blue Murder on this movie, and I don't know how, but probably because we had no one telling us what to do. Because it's weird watching it here with just an earpiece in and stuff.

1:03:00 · jump to transcript →

Hutch here. Last night, that was you, huh? And then here, we got a great phone call with RZA calling his brother from who knows where and... I think, originally, he was supposed to be on an island. That's what we had in one of the lines. But then we kind of thought, "Well, how does he get there from an island so quick?" So it was changed to a nondescript location. I always like how you step into the shadow when you take this call. Yeah. - Hopetully it's not too on the nose, but I kind of like that the family's light in the back, and then here you are in a little bit of darkness. And he mentions The Barber. - The Barber. And that was not what he said in the original script. No. This is where... So this is act two and act two was very, very different. And I don't know how much in detail we should go, 'cause there's a lot of them. But the idea is that now Hutch gets the call, gets the message to go see The Barber, gets the message to go see The Barber, he gets the phone message, a text message, he goes, and basically what we used to have Is... What we have now is a compact montage of a much bigger act two than we originally had shot and envisioned, which makes the film much, much better. And that was something that David Leitch set down with Evan Schiff, our second editor. I finished... This is right as Corona was hitting the US, and we all had to go home, and I flew home. And David spent time working with Evan over Zoom to put the sequence together. By the way, if you pay close attention to the clothes on Hutch's character, you'll see that it's very lucky that he's always wearing blue. And may I say the reason why you're wearing blue, Bob? Yeah. So, early in preproduction Bob said that, "Guys, I think we should get some blue stuff on me." I'm like, "Why?" He's like, "Well..." I think you said your mother saw you wearing blue... - In the Spielberg film The Post. She saw The Post, she liked it. And she goes, "Your eyes aren't that blue." And I go, "Actually, yes, they are. They pop blue more if I wear blue." You see the blue in my eyes if I wear blue. They're kind of a blue-green, I think. SO anyway... So your mother... We have to thank your mother for putting us in this direction because it saved us in the cut. She will not be seeing this movie. Really? - No. Can we do a cut-down version without... She's 84 and does not watch violent films at all. ...to the tune of eight and nine figures. Anything good? - Fuck if I know. But what I do know is, if he doesn't know who you are yet, he will soon. Now, Colin is amazing. Colin Salmon. Oh, my God, what a great actor. And there's your wife. That's not much. There's my wife. Ten-year anniversary today. Dasha. - That's right. She's a filmmaker herself. - She is now. I have competition in my own household. Good luck with that. - Yeah. I have the same situation. My wife is a manager, but also a producer and a creative, and it's great. You gotta figure it out. It might take you awhile. Now, you guys have 10 years, so you're probably doing pretty good. We're all right. - But it can be hard. Yep. What the fuck? This guy's like, "Wait. Some of these pictures are me. "Who's got them?" - This is J.P. Manoux. He was actually... Bob, he was the second person cast in this film. Obviously, you were first and J.P. was the second. Well, he's great. He's freaked out, working at the Pentagon, and Colin's telling me who Yulian is, and who I've just gotten myself involved with, and about the Obshak. And how Yulian's men are overseeing the Obshak, which is obviously something that's causing him a great deal of stress, but also, he takes a certain amount of pride in protecting it. Goddamn Obshak. He's kind of like, I think, the... Not kind of... For me, the goal was to have Hutch be the quiet guy that's hiding a storm inside himself. Whereas Yulian is living the storm but doesn't really want to. Yeah. - So their trajectories are clashing. There's not a goddamn thing about Hutch in all the documents he can find. It's all blacked out, except for some awesome pictures of the people he's killed. And Dasha decides, "Fuck this. I'm not part of this." And now he realizes what he already knew because that character's smart. My brother tangled with a bad guy. I

42:46 · jump to transcript →

Well, he's gonna get into his car and then he decides, "Forget about that. "Remember that car that neighbor told me about that was so good? "Let's take that and do that." I love how his neighbors come out of their houses to see his house burning down. This was the first scene that I storyboarded because it's a music video and I thought I'd start with easier stuff. Right. - And... I just loved the idea of everybody seeing... And then Hutch, he doesn't give a shit, 'cause he steals the car in front of everybody, while everyone's seeing. Yeah. - One thing I do miss, though. lf I was a little bit smarter, I would have had Paul Essiembre, as Jim the neighbor, run out after screaming. That would've been a perfect ending to this drive off. Yeah. But I realized in the edit, great. My character's probably upstairs in his bedroom with a stripper, knocked out from two nights of drinking and partying. Wait. The nursing home? What's this? Yeah, remember he warned his dad that he was tangling with some big, bad guys and to watch out. And speaking of big bad guys, there's Ilya Naishuller, our director, right there on the right. My first Hollywood part.

1:02:07 · jump to transcript →

SFX Maestro Christien Tinsley

to stick with something or not stick with something because he knew the outcome was ultimately something he was going to have to work with in post. And the one thing I've always given Damien ample amounts of credit for is, you know, being a good editor, putting this stuff together, putting a good effect sequence together is really hard to do because you want to hold on it long enough that everybody

59:10 · jump to transcript →

SFX Maestro Christien Tinsley

has made Terrifier so successful for Damien is he really balances all of that. And he does it really well in editing. And I'm not taking away from his directing abilities or his makeup effects. He's obviously done really, really well in both those categories. I've just, you know, to be a really good editor is hard. But I always feel like the better editor you are, the better director and overall, you know, designer slash artist.

1:00:08 · jump to transcript →

And welcome to the commentary track for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Mark of the Vampire. I'm novelist and critic Kim Newman, and with me is... Editor and writer Stephen Jones, and this is the first time we've done one of these commentary tracks in Los Angeles, rather than our native London. And we start with big billing for Lionel Barrymore, obviously the major star in...

0:05 · jump to transcript →

Commentary With David Kalat

Nakajima's the one with the pencil behind his ear. Tezuka plays the editor who just walked in. This is the only moment in the film where you get to see their faces, but they appear throughout the movie in another role. They're the actors who played Godzilla, trading turns inside the monster suit.

34:34 · jump to transcript →

Eng Commentary

Bazin wrote in protest against filmmakers' habits of cutting films thoughtlessly and particularly of the effect of phoniness that is created when film is chopped up. Truffaut absorbed these lessons and put them into practice in his early films before challenging them in his later ones. The three shots that comprise this final sequence are the longest in the film, as if the film were breaking free of the editor's knife at the same time that Antoine is breaking free of the reform school gates.

1:35:11 · jump to transcript →

The film was begun with only one editor aboard, Eugenio Alibizo, who had cut for a few dollars more. But the task of cutting together such a long picture with a set opening date was more than Alibizo could manage alone, so Nino Barali was brought aboard. Of the two men, Barali had the more accomplished career, going all the way back to 1950, and whose past work included many of the Pasolini films that Tonino Delli Coli had photographed.

2:10:34 · jump to transcript →

Joey Chitwood flew in, did it first shot out of the box. Went straight in, everybody cheered. Lean over. And, well, here we go. And so I designed a thing where Shawn says to her, lean this way, and the whole car tilts. That was a physical impossibility, if you watch this. I mean, when Cubby found out about it, Guy found out about it, we were back in England. And the editor said...

1:07:28 · jump to transcript →

Hello, I'm Barry Fulshaw. I'm the author of such books as British Crime Film, British Gothic Cinema, and various other books on film. And I'm sitting with a man who's very recognizable. Sherlock Holmes is one of the most instantly recognizable characters in fiction, but so is a man who's written some of the very best modern Holmesiana, which is Kim Newman. Kim is a movie critic. He's an author and a broadcaster. He's a contributing editor to Sight and Sound and Empire Magazines.

0:03 · jump to transcript →

worked on this dubbing, it was a cutting room where we dubbed French films into English, so I was in the lowest, lowest possible position. I was watching the editors and they were doing this lip-sync work on editolas then they had in those days. In the lunch hours, I'd sit at the editor and have it run it back. Again, this time thing happened, you know, running back in life and forward, running backwards, you know, put people back...

35:05 · jump to transcript →

constant ups and downs of the horror film. It's here to stay on a recurrent basis. Now, Don, do you miss being the, in films that you make nowadays, do you miss not being your own DP and not being your own editor? I know that in your last film you didn't, you don't take an editing credit and you didn't obviously operate the camera.

1:27:32 · jump to transcript →

go out into the street. Come along, come along. Over here. The editor put on this nice car squeal.

1:27:25 · 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 →

Outside? Yeah. Come on. I'm not suggesting the worst will happen. You know, this is a kind of bureau chief, a kind of editor who really existed in the time. There used to be a lot of them were Irishmen with big hearts and who had this feeling of family for the people who worked for them.

1:13:20 · jump to transcript →

John McTiernan

While I was temp-tracking the movie, we used some Aaron Copland. I guess I have since learned the name of the pieces, Fanfare for the Common Man. It just, it just got introduced there. And Alan Silvestri later on parodied it beautifully. And we... It's playing in the background here. In the cutting room we call it Fanfare for the Common Mercenary.

52:12 · jump to transcript →

suspicious that the movie would be over. Yeah, I got a big argument with the editor, Mr. Frank Uriosti, who's a great editor, and I just said, look, you gotta go longer. You gotta go 15 seconds and pull the track out. Like, there should be no sound. And he looked at me in horror, like, you can't do that. So they didn't, the chickens. In fact, we chickened out a little bit. We compromised, and I think we should have added five seconds, yes. And taken the track out. Yes.

26:44 · jump to transcript →

And you had two editors on the film, right? That's why I don't remember Post. They did an interview with me. They asked me on Post. It's funny. I barely remember Post. It's because we were still shooting blob bits, second and third unit. While you were back here, right? Yeah, while I was editing. It was crazy. Because you worked with Terry again from Nightmare 3, right? And then you had another addition. If you don't mind my asking, was the use of an additional editor just for expedience? Yes.

41:01 · jump to transcript →

Film Stephen Prince

When Yamamoto directed Horse, for example, in 1941, Kurosawa scripted the picture and worked as second unit director and editor, and Honda served as the assistant director. When Kurosawa directed Stray Dog in 1949, Honda was his chief assistant director. It's a striking coincidence that they both made, as directors, a pair of tremendously influential films that were released the same year, in 1954, Seven Samurai and Godzilla.

1:15:27 · jump to transcript →

Macaulay Culkin

There's a Barry Bonds baseball card. - Yep. For those who wanted to see Barry in his younger, thinner days. Um.... Now, this was actually the real house here, which was in Winnetka, Illinois... ...and, um.... It was interesting because we were... We were able to shoot a great deal of the film at this house. None of the interiors that you see in the film were shot here... . UM... ...but this house worked out very well for us. Strangely enough, you know, with today's budgets... ...we would've built the back of that house completely... ...because the fact that we did all of those stunts later in the film... ...on the actual location was just ridiculous. And they were very friendly. - They were great. They had T-shirts made up. - They loved it. They used to have hot chocolate and stuff for us... ...and invite us in. They were great. They were a great family. It's incredible because I see... ...the things people do to people's apartments and houses... ...when they rent them out, like, you Know, for production. I'm like, "I'd never do that." - No, I know. Once you learn... Once you've seen it done, you know... Not to discourage any of you guys out there listening... ...to renting out your houses to future productions. But make sure you're paid very well. - Yes. That voice on the answering machine was Raja Gosnell... ...who was the editor of this picture... ...who's gone on to become a director in his own right. I

37:15 · jump to transcript →

Commentary With Author CG Paul M. Sammon

by Curtis Harrington, which was a Roger Corman special, where Roger Corman took a Soviet science fiction film, filmed American scenes with Basil Rathbone, and the guy on the left is Forrest J. Ackerman, editor and publisher of Famous Monsters of Filmland. John Davison, the producer of this film, got his start with Roger Corman at New World Pictures. In fact, he was his publicity department. And John's first film was Hollywood Boulevard with Joe Dante. John also did Piranha.

52:05 · jump to transcript →

There should be. Why isn't there? It's not the actors. It's, like you say, the editor. I think the score, by the way, which we haven't mentioned yet. I don't know what you make of it, but I freaking love the atmospheric side of it. I don't know about the themes. I didn't really notice them too much, to be honest. But the general sort of ambience is brilliant. Yeah, I love... Yeah, I mean, Eric Goldenthal combines electronic with, like, orchestral stuff, but also...

54:15 · jump to transcript →

My name is Terry Rawlings. I'm the editor of Alien 3. And it was a thrill to work with David Fincher on his very first film, which was a very difficult task, in a way. And it was nothing to do with David Fincher, who I think did an incredible job. And I wish that he had fought for it harder in places because it became very difficult handling sort of the front office at Fox. They never let us properly complete the film in Pinewood Studios before we left, so there were things outstanding for the film. So when we first got it all together, it just didn't quite work because of the areas that were missing.

0:03 · jump to transcript →

Fred Dekker

In terms of the editing of the picture, was there anything that changed dramatically during the post-production that you had shot? Was there anything cut from the movie that was left on? Was it pretty much the movie that you intended? Looking at it now, I'm really pleased with the editing of this movie. Burt Lovett was the editor, and he's a guy. He had worked with Scorsese on New York, New York, and some of the documentaries that Scorsese did years ago. Just a terrific guy and a great editor.

1:11:12 · jump to transcript →

And there's Kenneth Cochran's credit. Yes, our co-producer. We have a neat little group. Kenneth Cochran, our co-producer. Chris and John Ottman, editor and composer. And myself. And we've known each other for a long time. Chris and I went to high school together. And I know Ken and John from film school at USC. San Pedro last night. The idea for the titles... We debated that one forever, as to exactly how to do that.

1:48 · jump to transcript →

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

0:03 · jump to transcript →

Taylor Hackford

And Mary Ann, who's innocent, just like she was in the beginning... ...she's right alongside. What I wanted to do at the end of this film, and that's why at this point... ...you see Neal Jones morph into Al Pacino... ...you realize you can't beat the devil every time. You might win one battle, but he's back there the next morning. I would not leave this film with you having a happy ending. I did that with Officer and a Gentleman. I want to basically say: Every single day of your life you can't get smug... ...and you have to confront morality. I think we all do. And that's why this is a moral tale. I'm not deeply religious and I don't think of this as a religious film... ...but I do think that it is a film of somebody who still feels... ...a certain idealism, and a realization that we have responsibilities in our life. And I think that all the people that worked on the film worked on it... ...in a fairly righteous way. You know, Andrew Neiderman wrote a novel at the beginning. Four writers contributed to the screenplay. And I want to mention the people I haven't mentioned. There's Mark Warner... ...who is my collaborator, my editor, fabulous collaborator through... ...this process. You can feel the pace of this film. Everybody put themselves into something here. I also want to give credit to Per Hallberg, who was the sound designer. All the way through this I think there are subtle effects in addition to the score... ...that really give you the feeling that there is something else going on. There are a lot of artists that worked on this film, and when you go through... ...the process of collaboration, you have a vision as a film maker... ...and you want to get that vision on the screen. But you can't do it alone. I know it's trite to say this, but you utilize... ...and when someone has a great idea, you grab it. I encourage that, and I worked with a wonderful group of collaborators... ...on this film, and I'm very proud of it. After having gone and talked for two hours here, almost nonstop... ...this must be a lot of dribble. I apologize if, in fact, it's gone on... ...ad nauseam, but, again, we had an opportunity to make a film. I appreciate Warner Bros. was very tough to work for. We had a lot of disagreements, but they did allow me to make a film... ...and, they did, ultimately, give me final cut of the film... ...so that I was able to make the film I wanted. No excuses. I'm very proud of it. I hope you enjoyed it. Subtitles conformed by SOFTITLER

2:17:38 · jump to transcript →

Here's a little glitch. I just realized no one's going to ever hire me now. You might want to rescind that. He's just kidding. It works out well. I love cutting pictures very sharply. I mean, the movie's really fast-paced, and yet we understand everything. That's the key. Yeah, what I strive for as a picture editor is jarring and slowly paced.

49:06 · jump to transcript →

Kat Ellinger

Hello and welcome. My name's Kat Linger and I'm an author, editor and critic. And welcome to my commentary for 2000's Bes Moi, co-directed by Coralie Trin-Thy and the original novelist of the controversial novel published in 1994, Bes Moi, Virginie Dupont.

0:00 · jump to transcript →

We were working so quickly. It was only when I was in the cutting room. But you felt later like you didn't need it, right? No, I'll always feel like I need it. Maybe I would have taken it out, but there's no excuse for not having it. What I love and what people seem to, I guess, be offended by, I guess, though, is the sort of unflinching way that you look at...

1:39:49 · jump to transcript →

immediately presents one of the decisions we made later rather than in the screenplay and that Pietro Scali, my editor, was actually rethinking certain order of things when he was editing and suggested that it actually might be a perfect way to begin the movie was to show

0:47 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

And one of their key and mandatory notes was, you must have a prologue, which was for us sort of like, oh, God, we're back there again. It had become a sort of hell for us. And so we found ourselves in England recording the score with an Avid machine jammed into one of the rooms in the house. Our editor, John Gilbert, came over with a bunch of footage.

1:59 · jump to transcript →

Tom Tykwer

Well, six days a week, ten hours a day, ten months. Not a real holiday in between. And Mathilde Bonfoy, the editor who I've been working with since Run, Lola, Run, who for me is one of the real geniuses behind this work, she really made me...

49:56 · jump to transcript →

Barry Sonnenfeld

I love Patrick's ability to cry. That girl, who you'll see again... ...iS Sasha Erwitt, who is my stepdaughter. Very smart, very beautiful. Photo editor of a magazine.

14:17 · jump to transcript →

Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens

which I thought was a really lovely idea. Nice idea to play it all in the back of his head too. Remember this was a scene that was really largely developed in the cutting room. Quite a bit of the dialogue that he sang to himself didn't really exist at it earlier than when we were putting it together in the edit. We knew where we wanted the scene to end, but how he got there...

2:27:02 · jump to transcript →

Richard Curtis

She loves it. What is this song? This is Eva Cassidy's version of Christine McVie's... Fleetwood Mac's Songbird. This was found by our sound editor, Mike Price. He put it on one day.

1:09:46 · jump to transcript →

but this idea was the best. Like for instance here it's to show, we can mention Valdi's editor and I think we should have mentioned her many times because she contributed so much to bring the film to life. Here she was the one to make the decision to not have dialogue

1:26:19 · jump to transcript →

We're in the French restaurant. You cannot tell by looking at everybody, but it is over 100 degrees in there. They turned off the air conditioning at this restaurant. No one told them to, but they thought they would help us by turning off the air conditioning. And the kids are just sweating. I mean, you can't even... If a take went wrong, we'd have to stop. You couldn't just keep rolling because they're dripping. And we actually had a guy, this poor English actor that we cast, who was actually really funny, who came in and was so hot and sweating so badly that he just couldn't focus. It's in the deleted scenes. You'll see some very funny scenes with a French waiter and some funny French waiter flashbacks. We just had to cut it, 'cause it wasn't... Featuring Jim Morrison and General Patton. The other thing... It'll come up again later, but them putting the food down leads to the food map joke, which will be coming. I'll tell that story later. It's good to-- We'll earmark it. - A little preview. This is the main Prague train station. And our production... - Again Allan and... Allan and Neno dressed it, so that people actually got off the train, a couple of people, and thought they were in Paris 'cause they saw the signs and they were very weirded out 'cause they had gotten on a train in, like, Hungary somewhere and they thought they were in Paris mistakenly. Michelle being a fantastic sport. The first of many indignities that she was forced to suffer. And Coca-Cola being a great sport. This is what shooting in a train station is about. Another one of these, "We are idiots, we don't know, so we'll set a scene in a train station." If you notice in the background... This is a game Alec likes to play: train, no train. Okay. This is my little game in this scene. Behind him, green train. That train is gone in the next shot. - Okay. No train. But who cares about the train, I mean... Train. - Again, the lesson learned... It's my game, I'll play it. - I know, but look at these backgrounds. No train. - These great, deep backgrounds. We are in a train station in Europe. We are not in Vancouver. No train. Train. - Michelle's scream turn is one that... She's just... - She did it fantastically. Different train. - We caught that attitude a little bit from our own little Se/nfe/d experience. It's what we like to call a Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Elaine move. The sort of being sweet, screaming and then going back to sweet. And Buffy was a hilarious show. - Can't say enough about Michelle. And I don't know if Michelle always got a chance... You know, she was sort of a supporting character on that show. And on this, she got to really shine with her comedy. Anyway, here's the maps. What I wanted to say is this is a Raiders of the Lost Ark map parody, which is a joke that is about, I don't know, ten years old. It's something we wanted to do a million years ago and again something we saved. There's the Jackie Collins book again. And the headline, "Merde Alors! L'Hooligan! I actually-- I don't know if I even told you guys this, but I was at an Iron Maiden concert about six months ago and I saw a guy wearing that Deep South Monster Truck 1987 shirt. Was that guy you? - Or whatever it is-- Rally '79. No, it wasn't me, but I envied him. Fred Armisen. - As what we... In the script, he's called the Creepy Italian Guy. Not, as some people wrote down in the test screenings, the Train Homo. We actually call him Creepy Italian Guy. And, again, just production-wise, we're shooting on a moving train here, which is yet another of our naive mistakes. - Do not shoot on a moving train. We thought, "Just put them on a train. It'll be easy." Just the most cramped quarters, limited angles. We actually shot this one scene in three different compartments. We had a compartment where we could look one way, a compartment where we could look another way... We pulled out walls so we could shoot different ways. And then we had one compartment where we were shooting in, one that we were shooting out. It was madness. - Plus... Fred, by the way, is just so funny in this. We, last minute... - We also... I'm sorry. I do wanna say that we also then shot it both moving and then did other shots not moving so that we could do the light effects of the tunnel. Which is a poor man's process, because there's no tunnel. This is obviously on a moving train. - 'Cause you can see the window. And then when we do the shots where it goes from light to dark or from dark to light, we pulled the train inside a barn and blacked it all out and then did the lighting effect by hand. So, the Creepy Italian Guy, Fred Armisen from Saturday Night Live... This was another thing where we originally went into this thinking we will find a genuine Italian guy. And, again, we searched the world for a real Italian guy. A lot of Europeans are not funny. They just didn't get the joke. - It's a language problem. They were simply performing the words of the script, but didn't necessarily have any idea what they actually meant. And Fred is someone who's just fantastic on SNL. That little shrug is awesome. So, that shot, for instance, is inside. I think we hired him... - And that's inside. We hired him on a Sunday and he was out there on Tuesday. Yeah. - So, really amazing. And, again, these are all these little touches that he added. I think Travis, who plays Jamie, is fantastic with him. They were a great pair. This was something we never landed on. - I don't think we ever got this right. We had a bunch of different things we shot for this darkness sequence. We had a lot of flashing lights and weird little things of Fred in various stages of undress. - What was going on in the dark. In the end, it was just undercutting... - This end reveal. Which, again... - And, I think, for the unrated version, we put this back. For the theatrical release, we kind of cut right here somewhere. No, exactly. - And then, for this one, we decided to let it roll. - This is something we just enjoyed. It's just that a guy with no pants sees more people and goes in. Actually, that's where we're sitting. That's the compartment where we are sitting with the monitor. To do it all over again, one thing that might've been enjoyable was had we come running out of the compartment. Just, the idea that the man with no pants... This is the very first thing we shot. - First shot ever. It's actually an interesting way to see our cast. The train revealing our cast and us seeing them for the first time. It was a neat experience. - A horrible-looking little train station. The first time we visited it was in winter and just looked awful. And, again, Allan and his guys just came in there... And I think, actually, the manager of the train station asked them to leave everything. Left it all, those flower boxes and the shutters, and just turning it into this beautiful, little French countryside place. That was always a fun shot, where he lays down and jumps back into it. You know, and again, day one, we must've done 30 takes on everything on day one. One of the things about comedy... - We also shot close-ups of everything. Every angle. Everything. - This is more toward the end. This is one of the two days we shot outside of Prague. This is not a great example, because this is more towards the end, but I also think we screwed up here. That's the thing, you look back... - We did it all in one shot. Which I think is the way to do this. We did do it all in one shot, but... One of the things, I think... When I look back at the movie, a lot of our starts of scenes, I find we... Definitely something we were never thinking enough about. So that you're kind of going, "We're going to this beach." And then they're just sort of walking. And maybe had we come off a sign... - That was one of my favorite things. Definitely a fun joke. - Also, it was freezing. You can see Scott... - It's freezing. The gray sky. Wish we'd gone in and maybe colored the sky blue a little more. 'Cause the sun does come out. But just something that maybe... If the camera had moved or something to kind of say "beach," as opposed to that weird stock shot of nothing and then this. And this scene seems to get a lot of people in an uproar. Everyone sort of sees it-- and people... There we are. - Right. This is one of the two days we shot outside of Prague. This is in Rostock, in former East Germany. This was apparently one of Hitler's favorite beach resorts. It's very close to where Wernher von Braun used to develop the V-2 rocket. Wall of cock. - Speaking of V-2 rockets... Everyone seems to laugh at this scene and also go... It is everyone's favorite and least favorite. In all the test screenings we did, it was the most favorite scene and also the least favorite scene. And I think a lot of it had to do with... There were a lot of, like, 18, 19-year-old guys who felt obliged to put it down because they needed to state that they weren't gay. We originally started off shooting it with sort of an idea towards an Austin Powers kind of a thing. You know, you could even see a couple of guys with ridiculously long cameras and stuff trying to cover penises. - Kind of strategically... And once we were there, it just looked dumb and we realized, to some extent... I mean, to us, the only rule is ever: "What's the funniest thing?" And, ultimately, 50 penises was the funniest thing. Everyone goes, "How did you get those guys to take their clothes off?" It's like, "This is Germany. We showed up with a camera. They were already naked." The most surprised people on the set were those 50 naked German guys when they found out they got paid. It was really weird. Like, we'd take a ten-minute break and usually if there's any nudity on an American set, people dive into their robes. These guys were just letting it hang out. If these guys could've taken more clothing off, they would've. We had this amazing German AD that day. Andreas. - Andreas. Who just yelled at them and yelled at their penises. By the way, Michelle, who was very nervous about the bikini scene, couldn't look more beautiful. She was, you know, "The bikini scene, the bikini scene." And it was sort of this big thing in her mind, which... She was nervous about it for no reason 'cause she... But I think also David went out of his way to make her feel comfortable, and also to light her beautifully. Also, again, this was very near the end of the shoot. And I think there was more of a comfort level with the crew, too, and the main camera team. The comfort level was bothered a lot by the fact that Jacob, once he took his pants off for that first naked shot, wouldn't put them back on 'cause he knew it bothered everybody. I think he really enjoyed how nervous he made everyone. And poor Eggby. Poor Eggby had to go up there with the light meter. That guy-- There was a lot of protest, a lot of discussion about the old man yelling, "Chica, chica." Which... For whatever reason, it's one of our favorite things. You get a shot of him. There he is again. "Chica, chica." Which always gets a nice rise out of the crowd. This is the most beautiful shot in the movie. Not shot by us. Shot by... - Gary Wordham. ...Gary Wordham and his unit, his second unit. And it's just absolutely beautiful. And here we are on another train. But, again, we are... Because it's a night shot, we are faking this. It's a poor man's process. Occasional lights moving on the side. Because we could not do a moving train at night. So, we are inside for all of this. SO, this is, like, our fourth version of a train car. And, originally, there was... You'll see in the original script. There was another train in the deleted scene. There was another train scene of them running onto a train. This had happened earlier. It was just too many train scenes and the movie just not moving. That, again, was another one of the lessons we learned. As a writer and then a director, there are lots of things on the page that are really funny, but sometimes, when you're actually then watching the movie, "Why are they still in Paris? Why is it taking so long? Why have they not gotten to the next place?" There were too many train scenes. That one flew out, this one was in. Even if the individual scenes are funny, sometimes the cumulative effect of all these funny things makes it worse. - That's exactly it. This is a joke we created after we had shot what we did. Thanks to our music supervisors extraordinaire, John and Patrick Houlihan, who found this amazing music that was playing under this fantasy. They found this piece of music and said, "What do you think of this?" We thought it was hilarious. We said, "What is it?" And they said, "Well, it's David Hasselhoff." We thought it was so much funnier if you knew that it was David Hasselhoff. So we were like, "Is there a video?" "Yes, there is." And not only is there a video, but this is the video. And it looks something like this. Which is incredible. - That is a real David Hasselhoff video. We're still not sure whether David Hasselhoff knows that his likeness appears in this movie. I think we licensed this... - David Hasselhoff, if you're watching this with Matt Damon, thank you. Thank you both. If the two of you are just hanging out and watching this, you were fantastic. But, yeah, the German company licensed it to us and he may or may not know. And Fred back again. Which makes everybody very happy. When we were cutting the TV spots and stuff, we tried to use this lick. It's one of the things that people felt we couldn't put in television spots. We had a really hard time cutting spots that... Even though it's an R movie, I guess spots for TV need to meet both... They have to be G. - They have to be G. 'Cause trailers need to be G. You can't have anything in the commercial that isn't in the trailer. Plus, you also have to meet network standards. So, we had a really hard time putting things in the commercial. - Showing people what's in the movie. Yeah, telling people this is a good movie. Now we're in Amsterdam. This is interesting... Except we are in Prague. - We're still in Prague. This is... Yeah, it's the Kampa section of Prague. Again, one of these early locations, they found this little canal from the original scouting photos. "My God, we can even do Amsterdam there." This is also-- In Prague, there's a very famous bridge called the Charles Bridge, which is basically right above the kids. There are just hordes and hordes of tourists lined up watching this. Yeah, it was like shooting with bleachers there. This was spring, when it was packed with tourists. And this is an example where on the deleted scenes, originally when they arrive, they go to a youth hostel for a very funny scene that we ended up cutting out because, basically, there was too much Amsterdam. They had an adventure and then they had these separate adventures. It's another one of these tough things, where the scene itself was funny, but its overall effect on the movie was negative. And then actually, oddly, if you go back, originally, Amsterdam was actually very different. Originally, in the script we sold, there was a scene where, instead of going to this sex club... - With Cooper. Instead of going to the sex club with Cooper, there was this whole nother scene. Actually, everything was completely different. The original spec script we sold is on the DVD, so you have to go back and check that out. Definitely worth checking out. - By the way, we should mention her. Lucy Lawless. - Lucy Lawless. Just funny, just hilarious, obviously, and gorgeous. The entire crew was just in love with her. So we shot long on these two days. By the way, when we were shooting on these days, you've never seen more grips and crew members holding lights that used to be held by stands and holding fans that used to be hung. Everyone needed to be in this room at this time for some reason. And she also-- She, being from New Zealand, knew our A camera operator, who we should also mention. - Peter McCaffrey. Peter McCaffrey, who is absolutely fantastic. The whole A camera team, our main guys, were just incredible. Just never a problem, and just really patient and wonderful with us. The brownies. I remember these brownies... Michal, our Czech prop man, would always come in and say, "I've got more brownies for you." He'd show up with these piles of different kinds of brownies from every bakery in Prague. Which, oddly, social decorum dictated that we eat. We didn't want to be rude. So we'd start these meetings looking at all these props with all these brownies and by the end, you had chosen a brownie and also eaten it. You weren't sure which one you actually liked. You were sick to your stomach because of the meeting and how badly it went and also because we'd eaten 50 pounds of Czech brownies. This is the lovely and talented Jana Pallaske who we found in Germany. We did casting in... - London. Here. We started in LA. We did casting in New York. We did casting in Chicago, Vancouver, Atlanta, I believe, Miami, and then we went to London, Munich, Berlin, Prague. We had people in Paris. We had people in Italy. - Rome, Paris. She came out of this, and again, this was another area where things moved around in the script. Originally, this was in London. - In the original script, this was Cooper... This was Cooper in London before they met the hooligans. When Scott and Cooper first got to London, they went to a pub and they met these girls, and this was a Cooper scene. Cooper went out in the alley and was getting blown and got robbed. Which happened to a friend of ours, by the way. And we just decided that there was... - Named Out Cold. There was too much... There was too much stuff going on in London, so we moved it to... You wanted to get to the hooligans. And originally in our script, Jamie was with Scott and Jenny at the brownie bar. While Jacob was at the Anne Frank House. We just decided that they should all split up and have their own stories here. And also, what if Jamie has all their money and all their stuff and he's the one who gets robbed... - It seemed like a good plot point. I mean, it is sort of traditional, but with Jamie playing... I'm sorry, with Travis playing Jamie as sort of the somewhat traditional, you know, stick-in-the-mud, him having a little bit of a sexual escapade as opposed to Cooper, who's more lascivious, it became a funnier scene. It also helped Cooper out because Cooper wants sex and he keeps getting... He gets a version of it in this scene, but not what he wanted. Not quite the version that he wanted. - Not what he was expecting. As opposed to going to London immediately, hooking up with a girl. It oddly felt a little strange that we were going to get him together with Jenny at the end of the movie after he had gotten blown in an alley. Also, he's looking for crazy European sex and he got it right off the boat. That is a crazy outfit. - Yeah, that's the sex superhero. She is the sex superhero. As are these guys. - One of these guys is a Czech policeman. Vilem. Guy on the left. - I can't remember what the other guy does. The other guy is a large Czech clown. They were just sweaty and having a ball. Their names are Hans and Gruber, which is a small inside joke, the name of Alan Rickman's character in Die Hard. Hans Gruber. And this is a very odd scene. Anytime you're not actually seeing our two main actors, a lot of this was done second unit. - Like the shot of his ass, the shot of him with the clamps was second unit. We had a limited amount of time with Lucy. We had two days. - That's second unit, not Jacob's hand. So everything that we had to get done with her and him, we did, and then what was really helpful was we edited it... Not we, our editor edited it. - Roger. Oh, yeah, mention him. The whole editing staff, actually. We had them over in Prague with us for reasons like this. Roger Bondelli and his assistant. Marty Heselov. - Marty Heselov and Davis. Davis Reynolds. And basically, he edited what we shot and it allowed us to go... "We need this, we need that." This is things we're missing which we could instruct the second unit to get, such as guy wheeling in cart, close-up of guy doing the shocking. And it did help having the editor there, which was something originally... The editor was not going to be with us in Prague. Very helpful to have the editor there to be able to look at scenes to know what we wanted to change. That-- We're a little behind. That was Diedrich Bader from The Drew Carey Show, who was hilarious. Really funny in Office Space and in 7he Drew Carey Show. And flew all the way out to Prague to help us out and did a day of work. He said the last time he was there, he'd actually been here in '89. He'd gotten drunk, climbed up a statue, fallen down and broken his arm, so he was happy to come back. The pot brownie scene-- It's so funny. When you show them in front of an audience, all the sort of younger kids, just the very fact... The mention of Amsterdam got people to go... And then the fact that they're actually doing pot makes them laugh. This, we were writing on the fly. We realized the scene needed something. He needed to say something embarrassing. So he came up with the gay porno stuff. But we tried, like, three or four things. When he was a little kid, he ate dog poo. "They told me it was a candy bar!" - Really high-class stuff. But this guy, who plays the Rasta guy... - Go Go Jean Michel. ...I think we did probably ten takes with him and he got each line right one time and we ended up using it. But he cuts together great. I'm not sure, when we were doing it, I ever actually thought the microphone was picking up a word he said. Yet, oddly, it was there when we got to the edit room. Helder with his walk-off home run right there. "These are not hash branches." Because I think he had been eating hash branches earlier. Yeah, he was not an actor as much as a man who had smoked a lot of pot. And again, ultimately, this was a longer scene. There was more to do about not being able to name the safe word and the monkey was originally brought out and you just start trimming 'cause, again, you're just in Amsterdam too long. We went into this scene... There was another beat where she brought out golf shoes with big spikes and was hitting him in the ass. - We cut that almost immediately. That we cut on the day we never filmed, because we were way over time. And we ended up shooting... - This actually cuts together great. These few moments. It's a huge charge to see this thing. That is a huge charge. - Then to the f#ugelkenhaimler. The flugelkenhaimler. Gotta mention Jeff Jingle real quick. Jeff created that. - Jeff designed and built that and then came over to Prague with it, traveled with it. How he was not arrested and thrown into jail by the customs people, I don't know. - Just did an amazing job on that. There you can see the Charles Bridge. - Yeah, the Charles Bridge is behind him. We lost out. We should be making these Vandersexxx T-shirts. Someone is selling them on eBay, but they're one color. They're wrong. If you're the person who's making them on eBay, just make them the same way. But it's a fun shirt. You can see all the bugs that are flying around there. We did it as a crew shirt, actually. We gave it out to the crew. Well, this is dawn. We shot all night. This is dawn for dawn. No, no. We shot this... This is dusk for dawn? - This is dusk for dawn. This is the first shot. We were shooting nights on the bridge, and that was the first thing we did, because we were shooting that Jamie thing and we ran out of time 'cause It was getting too dark. If you go to your deleted scenes, you will see a scene that sort of happens right about now, which is Jenny... Michelle Trachtenberg-- saying, "Look, boys, I'll take care of it," and she tries to sort of strip to get them to hitchhike on the autobahn, which is impossible. Again, we were out here on this highway way too long. This is the same deserted highway where we shot the bus driving around. Also, it was freezing. - We were here way too long. It was 30 degrees and drizzling. - This was, again, continuing the rule of every time we tried to do a close-up on Michelle, it rained or hailed. She was such a trouper. Cooper's shirt, by the way, says, "I Love Ping-Pong." This phone joke was interesting. We originally had the first one which took place on the bridge in London, and that always got a good laugh. And this one never really gets that good a laugh. But there's a third one later, the comedy rule of threes, that only really works as good as it does because the second one sort of exists. And so we left it in, even though we never loved it. This is Dominic Raacke, who is basically like the Dennis Franz of Germany. He's a big cop show star in Germany. Our casting woman-- What was her name? Risa Kes found him. And actually, there's another... We were talking about the clearance stuff earlier. God, yeah. - We shot about eight takes of this guy and you can see that thing hanging from his rearview mirror. Originally there was a Tweety Bird, a Warner Brothers property, hanging from that thing and we shot about eight takes and we moved on to a different shot and somebody was looking at playback and said, "Is that Tweety?" And we looked at the playback. "We'll never clear that." - And we just decided we'll never clear. So we had to go back and reshoot everything we had done. And the camera guys thought it was so funny that we had screwed up that it became a running joke. They kept the Tweety Bird and they began adding it. Every time we would set up to do a shot, they would roll a little film before we ended up doing the shot and they would put the Tweety Bird in front of the camera, so we have a reel somewhere of that Tweety Bird in every location that we shot. - And it's fantastic. He's wearing a pope hat. He's in the hot tub. We'd love to show it to you, but Tweety doesn't clear, so we can't. So just imagine every shot in the movie with a Tweety in it.

33:13 · jump to transcript →

It's very interesting how the music builds, especially big on Brian Tyler's name. I don't know how he timed that out. We keep teasing him about that. We should quickly do our thank yous. We want to thank 20th Century Fox for allowing us to make the movie. Alex Young, who was our executive, who's now president of production, who was a fanboy all the way. And Hutch Parker, who worked through the whole process with us and provided a lot of guidance. I'd like to thank Dan Zimmerman, our editor, who just did a fantastic job and

1:35:35 · jump to transcript →

Patrick Tatopoulos

I love the music there as well. Again, just wanna say that there's something there, the tone. I wanted something that feels a bit Byzantine. Not just like... There was an Oriental flavour to it. And the whole movie had a bit of that in the architecture. But also Paul Haslinger sort of brought some of that in the music as well. So you'll see, what we did here was that chamber is... It has a look that is very similar. We made sure that there was... You know, that the arches, the seal, the background, the fire pits... ... if you compare the two films, they... It's definitely getting as close as we could... ...with just doing it the way that honestly I'd always wanted to. And we had to make a decision of, okay, do we stick with something... ... that quite honestly I was not ever thrilled with... ...1n terms of reusing a set... ...and not having the image of Sonja that I really wanted... ... that would fit with the story. Or do we get a chance to just now do it properly? And so that's the decision that was made. And I hope it hasn't caused too much confusion. The only thing, Len, is If we had attempted that... ... It would have felt like a shock in the middle of the movie. Something that didn't blend at all. It would have actually hurt it as well. I'm glad we said, you know, let's go for it. Because texture-wise, it was such a different look. What's sad also is that we reused the set again. We still didn't get away from that. We built these big dishes, all this motif to kind of bring it back here. Yeah, right here. This is the chamber when the humans walk in. The great hall. - The great hall. That is that set. And then we brought in other pieces. I remember on the day we just kind of grabbed the different walls... ...and set pieces and made it. It's my favourite set. - A great-looking set. And it's really-- You get so excited when you're able to do that... ...because you go from, what are we gonna do with this small chamber. So you put it in a grand hall. You light it differently. You put the thing. And then you have this amazing set that you didn't have to pay for. We paid for it, but, you know, don't have to pay for it twice. This is one that Dan really pulled out of his butt too. He did this for almost nothing. And at the top part of the ceiling again... ...IS part of this feeling of change from the original movie... . Slightly different design, Forét Bleue did the... And again, It's just... - Did the CGI work. Because also, this has... There was a bit more detail in the design... ...of having a chance to create a lot more in this one. And the other, you know... What I did in the first one, again, you know... . it was an add-on, you know, a last-minute scene. And it's like a little miniature, like a disc. Somebody's just kind of pushing out of the way. A 3-foot model, yeah. I just wanted to mention the two piece of chain... ... that are pulling both ways at one point... ... you saw two minutes ago was actually stolen from Underworld 2. This was a-- William thing. - When William... You mean the two--? - You know who noticed that? That is a great shot. - At the premier? That is such a beautiful shot. Nick De Toth, our editor. - Did he? I really wanted this to happen really quickly. And we have some, you know... I thought it was great. lt was enormously tragic. Beautiful, beautiful effect. And I loved to go... Remember when we did the temp music on this? This was hard music to get. You just gotta hit it right with not being too overboard... ...and not being too dark, because It's still tragic. We did probably five, I don't know, different versions... ...I remember that we were looking at. The one, remember, we had in the temp music... ...Was actually getting... There was something in there we like, and we went to Paul. We said, you know, there's something interesting in there.

1:07:08 · jump to transcript →

a reshoot that I had done, so that he still has enough of the wounds and just making it to the end, just enough to save them. There's a couple different versions of this one, too, that I shot. I always try different things while you're shooting. You never know what you're gonna exactly need in the edit room, and there's a version of this, which we first did, where I pull away from this, and then we come back, and he wakes up right there. He gasps and wakes up, and ultimately decided it was more effective this way. Tell us your fantasy.

1:46:20 · jump to transcript →

But also the way that Jeff McEvoy, our editor on the film... ...Was able to mine different areas for tension. And this whole-- This is very suspenseful, this whole piece there. The way he was able to stitch it all together was really genius. Jeff did an excellent job. - Shout-out to Jeff. I totally agree. Jeff was one of the finest editors I ever worked with. He was a true gentleman and he was really fast. Yeah. - He had edited Lincoin Lawyer for us. Yeah. - We had a great experience with him... ...SO we recommended him to you guys and we were really happy that... ... you accepted him. It's funny, because he's such a nice, pleasant gentleman... ...but he has a sort of a black heart, which is nice. Yes. - It's always nice. So, what she's blowing up here is the silver nitrate bombs. And we wouldn't know that if we hadn't read "silver munitions" earlier. Exactly. Exactly. But I'm so happy, James, when you showed us... ...because the silver nitrate that glows is all CG. Yeah. - This Is.... I've said it all the time, this is one of my favorite parts. But I remember when we were doing the mix here... ...and I said, "Paul, I can't help it... ...but, you know, this music, this guitar is kind of, you know... ...kind of too simple, but I love it." And he says, "Yeah, it's a guilty pleasure."

1:02:39 · jump to transcript →

It means that there's lots of opportunities for motion blur. And that means that I can kind of, in the edit, then find an opportunity to kind of cut between the blur and pick the best takes. Gareth, man, I've got to say, is a master of fucking joining two different cuts together and presenting it as if it's one continuous cut. He even fucking do three or four fucking different cuts. And also to say, like, you fucking edit this film, right? Yeah. Fucking hell, man. Shut up. All right, so this scene...

1:03:08 · jump to transcript →

That was the piano moment there. Remember the sitting on the piano? Yeah, I remember. I loved that. I think he actually can hear some of that. But it's... And also, like, there's... There's a great job of Garner Gould, the editor, when he... Who basically decided...

42:02 · jump to transcript →

Jake Szymanski

I'm Jake Szymanski. I had the pleasure of directing this film. And I think I may have just ruined my mic, hold on. Is this... Did I ruin it? - Hey, hi. Is the mic okay? - Yeah, the mic's great. Just don't touch it like that. Okay, /'m sorry. - Yeah, that's okay. I was worried I might have turned it off accidentally. No, no, no, you're fine. Do you need water or coffee or anything like that? No, I'm so good. I've got water right here. - Do you... Okay. - What's your name again? I'm Margie. - Margie, thank you so much. Of course. All right. - Appreciate it. Let me know if you need anything. Okay. Will do. Thank you. Okay, oh, and please don't press any of those buttons. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I'm sorry about that. Okay, that's okay. - Okay. Um... As you can hear, we are here on the Fox lot in the ADR room. This is where the magic of DVD commentary happens. So, into the movie. Mike and Dave. They need wedding dates. Here we go. Well, this is a fun little scene. We actually... The whole beginning of the movie takes place in New York City. But we shot all of this in Hawai. Fun fact. Downtown Honolulu. We doubled for New York. Which, I literally didn't think could be done. But, um, there were four angles. There are four angles and two locations that you can shoot in Honolulu and it looks like New York. Um, there's Zac, there's those beautiful, blue eyes just shining through. Um, this is a fun little scene. We got Marc Maron to come out to the island and shoot with us, kind of our intro to the boys here. Adam Devine, Zac Efron, playing Mike and Dave Stangle. And we almost cut this scene. We almost lost this. At some point there was a worry if we needed it, but I think it's really a fun way to set up that these guys, right what Marc says right there, they're funny, they're weird. We give them a win early on. We let them know they think they're awesome. And before their family kind of puts them in their place. Was it the hat? - I just found this over there. And here we go. At the opening credits. This was a fun journey, finding the song for this. We ended up finding this great song that we kind of remixed a little bit and redid some of the lyrics even before this opening montage here. This montage was great. Doing our Fourth of July, a family wedding and a 50th anniversary party here, shooting this. We shot all this, uh... The anniversary party and the outside wedding are the same location, actually. We shot all this down in Hawaii. Got all of our stunt guys in. A little secret about Zac Efron, very good at the trampoline. He did not need a stuntman or wires. He got on that trampoline and started doing flips immediately for camera. And Adam Devine was like, uh, "You need to strap me up "and swing me around with some wires here. "I can't do this." Um... Very uncomfortable, I remember, also, the straps on that trampoline. Um, we shot this right across from the hotel we were shooting at. This is, uh, the fireworks stuff there. Our wonderful crew here. Let's just talk about, uh, the Chernin company real quick. You see our producers here. Produced by Chernin, Peter Chernin. Jenno Topping, David Ready. Our excellent team of producers, who were with us on the whole movie. It was fantastic. Here's downtown Honolulu. We're trying to hide the palm trees. You put some stickers up on light poles, looks like New York. If you wear two, they break. It's an urban legend... - No, it's not. And here we go. Let's meet the family. Putting this together, it... First of all this is actually based on a true story, which is fun. The Stangle brothers are real and they really did get told they had to bring dates to a family wedding. God, look at this, look at this family we got here. Just the best cast we could have asked for. We got Mom and Dad here. We got Stephen Root and Steph Faracy. Stephen Root, man. How lucky are we to get these guys as Mom and Dad here. Stephen Root was, uh... We were already down in Hawaii and we were about to shoot and we still hadn't cast Dad. And we talked with a bunch of great people. And, um, I had to do a little Skype session to meet Stephen Root who I had never met. And, uh, we were just like, "You know what? If you can ever cast someone "who you think is, one day, gonna win an Oscar, cast that guy." And we were lucky enough that Stephen Root said yes to doing it. Here we go. Um, hey, Jake... - Mmm-hmm. I just want to interject here. Um... - Oh, yeah? Be careful of the heavy breathing. - Oh, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I just want to make sure. I mean, it's not an issue yet, but... I was gonna Say, is it coming through or... Not really. - Okay. But I can sense that it might. - Okay. So just be careful. - Okay. No, fair... Yeah, okay. No worries. - You're doing great. Should we... So did we cut or how does this... No, we're not cutting, no, no, no. 'Cause we're still... - Oh, okay. Keep going. I can't cut. - Should we go... Oh, so this is a one... Continuous, got it. - This is a one, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. I'll watch the, uh... Watch the breathing. Um... Where are we here? Oh, well, we're doing our little reveal. Kind of the big idea here of our grandiose opening montage where the guys are kings of the world. We see the reality of those situations. Oh, this poor guy. Our grandpa. When we were shooting this, we were dancing... And I kept thinking that he was acting out the death scene too early. And I kept yelling from behind the camera, "No, no, no, don't stop yet. "You're still having fun, you're still having fun. "You're not dying yet." But he wasn't acting. He was, for real, getting too tired and almost having a heart attack. And I was yelling at this poor man. "No, no, no! Smile, smile! Be happy! Dance, dance!" And everyone was like, "Jake, this is real. He's actually having trouble." And I felt so horrible about that. But he made it. You know what? He made it and I can't wait for him to see the film. You can each talk to one girl. Um, uh-oh, guys. Here's the idea for the movie. Two dates. Um... By the way, we also have not talked about... Look at these two handsome gentlemen who you believe are brothers somehow. Are you insane? - Oh, you're kidding. I love these guys together. Adam and Zac had a really, really fun time. Um, I mean, when we went to Hawaii to film this, we filmed in Hawaii, and they were just... We were trapped on that island together. So even when we shot all day together we just had each other to hang out with at night. And, um, I think Zac and Adam got really, really close. Which helped the chemistry and the brother relationship stuff. Everyone got along really, really well. It was a lot of fun. By the way, let's talk about the wonderful Sugar Lyn Beard playing our sister Jeanie here. And also the equally excellent Sam Richardson playing Eric here. Um, God, she's so great in this. Sugar... First of all, her name's Sugar. And we shouldn't overlook that. That's an important factor when you're casting someone. Look for the most interesting name to be written somewhere. Um, she was one of the last people we saw in auditions. And, um, we weren't sure who we were gonna cast yet for the sister. And we didn't feel like we quite had it yet. And then she, literally, was maybe the last person that came in. And she came in to the casting office and just nailed it. Just... We were all laughing so hard. She completely became the sister. I think we did the audition with the Ecstasy scene and the horses scene. And, uh, she was just so, so funny. She walked out of that room and we immediately went, "Wow, well, that's Jeanie right there." Same thing happened with Sam for Eric, by the way. He was just so, so funny in that role. That's the kind of guy Mike is. So, think on that... This is one of my favorite Zac jokes of the whole movie here. "Think on that, Dad." Having us laugh. You can see Dave's little... Dave's at his little art station there in the apartment. And that's a little thing that comes back Iater that, uh, isn't... We're not really showing you very clearly there. And then here we have the ladies. Tatiana and Alice. Aubrey Plaza and Anna Kendrick. These two, who are actually very good friends in real life and had taken random trips together to islands and to beaches in Mexico, it was really fun to put these two together. And, uh... And have that kind of built-in chemistry going in here. He's already paid. God damn it! But a lot of green screen taxi shoot that we did. You should kick us out! - You should kick us out of this cab. Little bit of a hustle on the cab driver here. Three more blocks up on the right... and then kick us out! The Apple Pay bit I really, really liked. We came up with that on set. I think that was a pitch from Andrew Cohen, one of our writers. Andrew Cohen and Brendan O'Brien... I got a good idea. ...gave us a wonderful script to start with here. The writers of Neighbors, Neighbors 2 and upcoming, The House. Um, very lucky and happy to meet and work with those guys on this. Really funny stuff. And, uh, they would also just send in new jokes every day. That's kind of the way we did things, is we had the script and then me and the writers and other on-set writers would just bring a bunch of new jokes every day to pitch and to try. And so we would always play around a little bit on-set. Jake Johnson. Your little buddy is shit-faced. Jake Johnson, who we said, "Why don't you just come to Hawaii for a couple days? "And to do that you have to be in a scene in the movie." And he said, "That sounds pretty good, man. "That's... All right, yeah. I could do Hawaii." Um, and that's literally how we got him out here. We said, "I know Jake a little bit." I said, "Hey, if I could bring you out to Hawaii for a week "would you shoot for one night?" Boom. Done. Because it's my right. Playing Ronnie the boss here. Look at these, look at these, just New York rat women here that they're playing. The hair, that's a wig we have on Anna, which was really fun. Hey, Jake. - Yeah? Um, I just want to say if you don't have anything to Say... Mmm-hmm. - ...then you don't have to say anything. You... - Does it sound like I'm... Oh, just calling this "rat women" is a little... Oh, I wasn't... Okay. - Just... I didn't think I was stretching... - Yeah, no, it's fine. -/ just want to... I just want... - Are we still recording? You're doing great. What's that? - Are we recording right now? Yeah, yeah, all this is... Yeah. - Okay. Yeah, that's what we're doing. All right. I just... - Right? Yeah, I just didn't... Okay, yeah, I just... Yeah, I'm just... It's very clearly your first time and it's... It is. - /'m just trying to help you out. Okay. No, I appreciate... I definitely want... - Okay. If you have any tips or... - Great. I just feel like I'm not doing the comments here... Okay. Okay, sure. So I should get back to this. - Of course. Yeah, yeah. Just keep breathing, and move through it. Okay, I think... Okay. - Okay. I didn't... 1... Thank you. I appreciate it. Okay. - Thank you. Okay. Um, we're in the apartment. I'm tired of living like this. I don't know if I have anything to say about this. We've got a great little package we're selling here, man. A week in a tropical paradise... with two fun-loving, yet surprisingly well-read bros? I'm just gonna talk. Um... We got the boys here. So the ladies in the apartment, first of all. These were both sets that were built in real locations, downtown Honolulu. Um... We found spaces for the boys' apartment, girls' apartment right around the corner from each other. And then we built these kind of walls up against the real windows and built out our little apartments here. We met this couch on Craigslist. This was actually the scene, this scene right here, was one of the earliest scenes that we had worked with and that we shot for the chemistry read. We did a little chemistry read early on before we ever got into production with Adam Devine and Zac Efron. I think Zac was shooting a movie in Atlanta. We all flew out there and did a chemistry read and this was one of the scenes we did to see the brothers together. And, uh, obviously it was great. And we loved seeing Adam and Zac together. And, uh, so this is one that had kind of... We actually shot this... One of the last things we shot in the movie. Um, but they had had it in their mind for six, seven months by that point. I love the... We got these girls together, really, really fun. This was a last-second shoot we did just to get a little sense of the ad going viral and going around the world. And we got all these great performers, all these great actresses to just come in and do little cameos for that little thing here. You guys want to go to a wedding? Got a little classic date montage here. All the dates here we cast out of Hawai. This was all local casting and we found some great, great people. Those twins are actual professional gymnasts in training. And they're twin gymnasts who are very good. And luckily they were also great at acting. We got them in there. We found all these... Met all these great people. This is my buddy Bob Turton. Um, who, uh... We go way back. And, actually, we did not... Again, we did local Hawaii casting and I said, "Man, I got this bit I really want you to do. "But we're casting locally." And he just hopped on a plane and came on out. And said, "Let's do it." And Bob is one of the funniest, funniest guys. Uh, I went to college with him back in the day. And we've done some videos and shorts together. And I was so glad he could come out and be Lauralie, as I believed, what we named his persona of this guy who's in such a bad period of time in his life. He decides to try to pretend he's a girl to get this date from these boys. What did you say? - Nothing. Sounded like you said... None of this... Do you wanna fuck? None of this was scripted. None of the entire date sequence was scripted. I think the script just said they go on a bunch of dates. So we really had a lot of fun playing with this entire sequence with everyone who came in. I think, in real life the Stangle brothers ended up on... What was it, Ricki Lake? I know they ended up on, uh, the Today show. And maybe also Ricki Lake. And we got... The ad went viral. We wanted to make it a little more current. We got Wendy Williams. We got her to come out to Hawaii. We actually filmed... Even her set, we faked in Hawai. So we really did everything out there. Got to thank the Hawaii Film Board. Getting to shoot out there. It was fun. ...fo go with us to Hawaii for our sister's wedding. And I just want to reiterate... we're footing the bill for this because we're gentlemen. Free trip to Hawaii? I'm awake! Come on. Craigslist. - What's up? That's where you go to buy old patio furniture. Is there any, um... Excuse me. Is there any... ls there any water? - What's that? Is there water in here? -/s there water? - Yeah, there's... Yeah, we have water. - Is there any... Can I get a water? ls there any way to get a water? - OA, sure. /'Il... I asked you at the beginning. You didn't... You said... I know. I didn't realize. I'm sorry. I'm just... Now I'm thinking about whether I'm talking too much, based on what you said earlier, and I'm getting nervous. I think it's just drying my throat out a little bit. Okay, yeah. No, that's fine. I'll go get you water. I don't need you to get it if you can't... /'m the one working here. So... Okay. I... You can tell me where it is, I can get it. No, you have to... You're the director. And you have to do the commentary. Um, okay, I'll be right back. All right. Sorry about that. - It's fine. Thank you. You need to get over that, once and for all. Oh, man, I feel really bad asking for that water now. Oh, there is a water here. Hold on. There's a water on the floor here next to my desk. Okay, here's your... I actually found one. There was a water... There was a water down here by the desk. -/ found... - Yeah. I think I brought this... - Did you not look around you when you... We gonna go to Hawaii! Um, sorry, I just found... I think I brought it in at the... When I first walked in earlier and I forgot. Right. Okay, well, here's another one. We don't look like nice girls. Thank you. Yeah, I guess I haven't showered in a while. Oh, man. Thank you very much. I really do appreciate it. Yeah, of course. - Okay. We're gonna look respectable as fuck. Like nice girls. "Like nice girls. Like nice girls." This was actually, um... It's like that Jesus rag! "Jesus rag," one of my favorite bits. Nice girls was actually, um, an early studio note. I remember the studio coming in and saying like, "We feel like we just need to say, like, 'Let's push the nice girls angle.' "We should have the boys get told they need to bring nice girls. "And the girls need to look like nice girls." And it really worked. We ended up taking that and hitting that. And it's one of those great notes that really helps simplify and clarify a thing and everyone gets exactly what we're doing. So that's why you hear "nice girls" a couple of times. That was actually one of the earlier studio notes that I thought was a great note. That worked out a Iot. Ultimatum. - Well, we gotta figure something out... The old tomato joke is a joke that early on I was told, "You know, you can cut this joke. You don't need that joke." And I said, "No. This joke is what the movie's about." Not really what it's about. But the vibe of the movie. I fell way too in love with the old tomato joke. And I think our first cut of this movie, the editor assembly of this, was about five hours long. Because we had done so many alts and so much improv. And they just put everything in. And, I think, when I showed my producers one of the three-and-a-half-hour cuts that I was like, "You know, this isn't a real cut. "This is just kind of everything we're working with." They were like, "I mean, you can lose so much. "You can lose this. You can lose that. You can lose the old tomato joke." And I was like, "No, no, no, not... All those other things, sure, "but the old tomato joke we keep." So you can imagine that joke in a three-hour thing that's way too long. And, uh, well, it ended up in the movie. As I predicted. Anna had a really fun, uh... We had a lot of fun with this. There's a lot of stuff on the DVD, deleted scenes and bit runs about other lies she does here. This is a really fun reveal. See these girls in these nice dresses here. And coming up, we've got one of our first big stunts of the movie. This was always really fun. We had a great, great stunt coordinator, Gary Hymes, who did all of our stunts on this movie. He did the stunts for Terminator and Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. And he was great. So any time we had something like this, with getting hit by a car... That's a big stunt, but it's always really fun watching the audience watch this. And this is like one of those moments early on where I think it clicks in like, "We're doing this kind of movie. We're doing, like, a giant car hit. "And she's perfectly okay." It just sucks you right in. This was really fun to shoot. This is, again, downtown Honolulu. Outside of the one bar we could fake as New York. And if you look very closely, I shouldn't even say it, people will hate that I say this, the effects guys, there's a split second shot when Tatiana hits the car from inside the car looking out the windshield at her body. And in that shot, it only lasts a couple frames, and it's a blur, but there is a palm tree. That is the one palm tree that's in our New York footage. Um, but obviously it's so fast no one sees it. Are you okay? I am now. I saved her life! - She's okay! She's okay? - I saved her life! Thank you! I think, I'm pretty sure a lot of this, the just yelling, "I saved her life," and a lot of the yells, that was... Adam can go very hot. And Adam just added a lot of that in and it was so perfect. It's really fun to just tell Adam like, "Hey, go nuts on this one. Get excited." And he will. He can just go at 100% all day long. And it is the most fun thing to watch. So hard! This is always a really fun scene for me. This is like, when we did the editing, it was kind of always like, "Let's get to here faster. How do we get to here faster?" 'Cause it's really just seeing our four leads all together for the first time. And see it play out. See the con of the girls play out. See the boys falling right into it. So this was always kind of like, especially in editing we realized, "This is where it starts to feel so fun. "Let's just get here as fast as we can. "Let's get through all that other stuff." Got two waters now. It's actually quite nice. We can hear all of that. - Hmm? You drinking. Oh, I'm sorry. SO sip quieter? "How's the hedging coming? You been hedging? You hedged much?" Yeah, we're picking that up. - Picking that up still. Corporate greed, bailouts. Should I, should I cover... Does this help? On the floor of the NASDAQ and the U.N. Um... If I cover the microphone with my hand, does this help? That makes it worse. - Okay. Sorry. Um, just try not to drink anything. "But what I do have..." Just my mouth gets a little dry, so... It's not important. Uh, anyway. Um... "Skills that make me a nightmare..." Zac nailing the Liam Neeson impression in this. You may notice Zac Efron throws out a couple great accents in this movie. He's got the Australian at the bar at the top. He's got Liam Neeson here. He's about to have all of this different liquor bottle drawings which all have a different accent. And he added a lot of that in in a great way. He does a little research for each one. And he nails each one of those accents. That's a little post joke we put in. Little post image. Little ADR joke from Zac right there. A lot of dick jokes in this movie. Not gonna say I'm proud of it. Not gonna say I'm ashamed of it. Just gonna say there's a lot of dick jokes in this movie. And it is what it is. Done. Some of them are kind of smart. Maybe a couple smart dick jokes, maybe not. Maybe I just tell myself that to make myself fee! better. I don't know. What's the hardest thing about being a teacher? I don't know. Oh, um... The hardest thing... I think this was the whole... We did a whole run here with Adam and Aubrey that was just kind of, none of that, was not in the script, either. We're just like, "Let's check in with these two." And we Set up two cameras. We did a lot of cross-shooting on this movie. And we just let people go through 10 different ideas. And try a bunch of jokes. God, Anna's so, so funny here. Matt Clark, our wonderful DP on this, who... I know! I said, "I got to warn you, I want to cross-shoot a lot of this movie." And cross-shooting's where you have two cameras pointing opposite directions, so you can capture both people talking to each other at once. And some DPs won't do it 'cause some DPs, they just want to perfect the light facing one direction, 'cause it's the lighting that, really, you have to tweak. And you start worrying about compromises if you cross-shoot. But Matthew Clark took that challenge and ran with it. And we cross-shot so much on this movie. Um, probably even more than I needed to, I had him do. And he just did a great job with it. I love the look of it, that it doesn't look too Photoshop, airbrushed, perfectly shiny and bright on everything. I like that it kind of feels a little real world-y. I think Matt did a great job on that. ... like we're talking it over... like we're not sure if we wanna go or not. Oh, like... So fun to see Anna do these big jokes. I feel like... This was the fun part for me. I feel like I've never got to see Anna Kendrick do this kind of stuff before in a movie, ina hard R movie. Yes! And, God, I just think she really nailed it and knocked it out of the park. I think, Aubrey, who's so great, and you kind of expect that she can do it. And I think it was a little more like, I think, for the audience it's a little more of seeing her in a new kind of movie. Which I think is really, really fun. Here we are, shooting at the wonderful Turtle Bay Resorts. Um, on the north shore of Oahu, Hawaii. We turned into our little fake resort. A funny story about this hotel, this is the exact hotel that they shot Forgetting Sarah Marshall at. And that movie takes place almost, the whole thing in that hotel as well. So, first of all, we did a lot, me and my DP, we did a lot of like, "Let's make sure things look different. "We're not copying the same locations and shots of Forgetting Sarah Marshall." The other funny thing is, in the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I'm pretty sure they call the resort Turtle Bay. Say, "Welcome to Turtle Bay." And it was an advertisement for Turtle Bay in a way. Turtle Bay was like, "Yeah, we'll give you a better rate on the room if you mention our name." So, when we started scouting and decided to shoot the movie in Hawaii, we were like, "We can do it at Turtle Bay. "We'll get a little discount on the locations." And the management for Turtle Bay read our rated R script and they were like, "Absolutely you cannot say this takes place at Turtle Bay. "Please, please don't show any of our Turtle Bay signage. "We don't want any of our guests to think our masseuses would do this at Turtle Bay. "We don't want to think we condone..." And we were like, "Oh, my God, can we shoot it?" They were like, "Yeah, please shoot here. You just have no discount." And, no, I mean, they were a lot of help. But we had to cover every sign that said "Turtle Bay" and make our own. And make our own logos and hotel names. And I always thought that was pretty great. And, you know, there's some stuff in Sarah Marshall, I think that's rated R. I mean, there's a penis flopping around in that movie. Hey, Jake. - Yeah. I just want to say you're doing great. Okay. Just calm down. - Okay. You've said "penis" and "dick..." - And, again, I'm just... About 10 or 15 times... - Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the Iast, like, five minutes, so. I don't think... I think it was just, kind of, the once. Oh, no. It was many, many times. Okay. And just, Margie, I'm sorry, but... And, again, is there any way to go back now to where you cut in and rerecord from there on out? Um, oh, you know, that's a great idea. Why don't I just forget that this is my job and that I know what's going on. And why don't you come in here and you take care of all of that. No, obviously I'm not... I just presumed that if you... Can only I hear you? 'Cause I'm... We're recording right now, right? Yeah, we're recording. But, you know, what you do when you presume, you make a... I think that's the wrong word for that phrase. So anyway, I just want to let you know that you're doing great. And this is really good stuff. Just remember to breathe and relax, and just enjoy it. Okay. I just want to do the commentary. Just kind of run it through and... Sure. - I just feel like I've heard a lot of... I've listened to a lot of commentaries. Have you? - Yeah. I think... Yeah, what do you mean, have I? That surprises me. Why does that surprise you? I mean, it's just, you know, you're doing great. ...With Alice. Well, I just don't think I've ever heard the sound engineers coming in during a DVD commentary. So I'll say that, as well. Well, you know, normally we don't. But if it's someone who's just kind of aimless, we'll try to help out a little bit. Um... So, my commentary has been aimless? It's been... No, it's great. It's so exciting. I mean, I don't even see how... Even if it was aimless, I don't see how telling someone that helps them. 'Cause now all I'm doing is thinking about if this commentary's aimless or not. Okay, so we're in a new scene, so if you want to... I am a teacher, yeah. Uh... The key to teaching children is repetition. Uh, okay. Uh... The meet and greet. Uh... I think I missed talking about the whisper scene. Another good dick joke in there. And, uh, this meet and greet, very colorful, very poppy. This, uh... sorry, I'm just really in my head now about this aimless thing. And I feel like it makes me sound more aimless. No, no, no. You're doing great. That was just constructive criticism, you know. Aimless rambling is what you're doing. And that's constructive, honestly. It doesn't. I'm trying to find the constructive part of that criticism. Um, the part where I said, "Aimless rambling is..." Right. So, okay. Like, build off that. You know, I'm good. I'll take, I'll do... I'm okay if it's aimless. -/'m good from here on out. - Are you sure? Yeah, I'll just be good from here on out, okay? All right. I'll just keep him on a leash. And there's no way we can Start over or go back? Unfortunately there is no way. This is set in stone. Okay, Sure, sure, sure. Uh, all right. So, listen. This was our first day of filming. And, uh, filming this meet and greet here. And, uh, there was a lot of very specific things that happened in this scene. And, uh, uh... God, this is so fucking aimless now. Jesus. Talk about the lady in yellow. If this is bad news, I'm gonna eat your ass. Sorry. - Okay. The bridesmaid, Becky. That was our horrible bridesmaid, Becky, played by the wonderful Mary Holland. Um, yeah, I should talk about everyone in the scene. Mary was great as a bridesmaid. Mary actually... I know Mary from the UCB world out in Los Angeles. And I think I had her come out and audition for, like, five different roles in the movie. I think it was kind of like, "I don't know how, where you're gonna be in this movie. "I just know I want you in the movie." And, um, we were lucky enough to get her. This whole scene, this whole sequence, by the way, of the meet and greet was our first day filming. And if there's any tip I can give to a first-time filmmaker, it is this. This was one of the biggest mistakes I made on the movie. Don't have your first day of shooting on your first studio movie be a giant meet and greet scene with 100 extras and seven main characters all in the same scene. And all of the actors on their first day. And everyone feeling each other out. And also, outdoors in Hawaii, where the weather changes every five minutes. lt was sunny. It was cloudy. The wind's going crazy all day. It was a real trial by fire at the top of this shoot. We spent our first two or three days out in this location with so many people. So, if you're out there making something and you want any tips, ask for the schedule, first day, first day you're shooting, to be indoors, two guys eating pizza. That's really the best you can hope for. Just two people sitting at a table talking back and forth. Maybe one person. If you have any scenes with just one of your actors in there, get going that way. Everyone's getting to know each other. You're feeling each other out. You're figuring out how to work with the crew. The actors are warming up to the characters. You don't need 100... You don't need to figure out where to put 100 people and how to get seven of your leads in there. That's crazy. You can do that week two. You can do that week two on a movie. That was the one crazy thing. But I will say, after we did that day one and two, we were kind of ready for anything for the rest of the shoot. Where are you going? Hi! So you know what? I guess, do it. I guess, do do it. I guess, do shoot with as many people as you can. 'Cause it kind of all felt downhill from here. Um... I'm fine. Yeah! Let's just forget about the past... God, yeah, we were out here for a couple days. This is, again, at the wonderful Turtle Bay, which I highly recommend to go out and stay there with you, your loved ones, your family. Um... I mean, we're drinking 'em like they're shots... but I don't think... But the wind, I mean, I hate to even bring it up, but if you just watch these scenes and watch people's hair or the backgrounds, you will see that the wind was just going crazy. So many takes where just the wind went in front of people's faces that we're trying to cut around here. So many shots, some shots are in the sun, some shots are cloudy, that we've spent days in our color correction, trying to even out. It was great. This is the wonderful Alice Wetterlund who plays cousin Terry here. You may recognize Alice from Girl Code and Silicon Valley. I swear I was watching Season 1 of Silicon Valley right when we were casting this, and saw Alice. And then she came in and read for us for this. And, oh, my God, she's so funny. Her and Adam in the scene, we have... There was just a ton of footage on the floor of these guys playing back and forth here. And she really became cousin Terry a little bit. Anytime the camera was on, she would end up being a very method actress, which I really liked. She really scarily became this crazy, rich asshole of cousin Terry. Very aggressive here. I like this little offensive sex song here. By the way, the real Mike and Dave Stangle right here. This is their cameo. They came in, they came down to visit the set. We wanted to try to work them in. And got one of the better jokes in the movie there. The old chlamydia joke comes out of those guys. And why do you think you're such a hotshot? Um, the real Mike and Dave came to set and you think maybe the antics that these guys are known for in their book or the story of this movie is a little overdone. They, pretty sure, showed up drunk to the set. They had already been drinking that whole morning. And then after we shot a couple takes, I was like, "Hey, you guys, if you could try to stand here more "and look this way more... "Try this." And they were like, "Hey, yeah, sorry if we're screwing this up. "We are just gone right now. "We've been drinking a lot of the wine, too, "In these cups that are being passed around." And that's not real wine. Like, the trays that the waitresses have in the background of that scene are filled with either rancid wine or just dark liquids to look like wine. And the Stangle brothers immediately got on set and started grabbing everything that they thought was a real alcoholic drink and downing it. So, they're the real deal. That is a true story. From the meet and greet. Well, from before that. One second. Um, Tatiana and Alice here kind of letting loose, letting their guard down a little bit after a long day of pretending to be nice girls. And then poor Mike just still trying to push it way too hard here. ...do whatever you wanna do. Being a little bit inappropriate. 'Cause that's what we were doing before. They've got Cockbusters. We had a fun run there of different porn names for Anna to try while we were shooting that scene. Which was very fun. She says the craziest stuff in her sleep. It looks like his dick is gonna pop. It's So veiny and hard. This is also... My student. I'm doing a Skype class session... This is one of the scenes, I think we have an extended version of this scene on the DVD. There's a lot of... He walks, if you notice, Adam walks up to the door with a bucket of ice and we used to have a lot of dialogue about that ice that is no longer in the movie. It's fun when you're shooting, and especially for me, I think, first studio feature, ... you are getting an A plus. I just wanted to make sure I got all the possibilities. Try a bunch of different lines. Try a bunch of jokes. And then you get into that edit room, and you are just lifting as much as you Can away as possible. Just trying to make it go like, find the joke, find the one that works best. Boom, move on. Boom, move on. Keep the story moving. This actually, this whole sequence of the girls here is from a cut scene in the movie. It's from the bocce ball sequence, which they even used in our trailer a little bit. And it's a great sequence that's on the DVD. And this is actually from them walking up to the bocce game. And that sequence is cut. But we still had to somehow capture the vibe that these girls were in their own element. And being themselves a little more and deciding to have fun. And so we ended up using that shot of them walking up the beach and stealing drinks by themselves before they join the group to kind of get that idea across a little bit. But it's part of this whole other sequence that's now just a DVD special feature. Much like this commentary. Jake, this is the DVD. "Welcome..." What? "...to Jurassic Park." Um, you just keep saying "on the DVD." This is a DVD special feature. But you could just say "on here." - Right. On here. Well, yeah, but it's not on here, the commentary track, it's... Do you currently know what this is for? Why do you need to tell me that, though? Why are you even telling me that? l'm sorry, Margie. - You're fine. I just want to make sure you know what's going on. I mean, does it really matter if I say "on the DVD" or "on here"? If people are watching it, the worst that happens is it's a little redundant to say "the DVD." Okay, if you don't care about maintaining any reality or like... What are you talking about, "maintaining reality"? Why are we having this discussion right now? Look, you know what? You're right. I'm just, I'm... What am I talking about? I've just done a million of these and... No, that's not... I know you've done this a lot. That's not what I'm trying to say. Okay. Look. I forgive you. Okay? I forgive you. This is great. I'm having a lot of fun. You're doing so well. This is where the dinos ran in the prairie! Really? Yeah. I'm a T-Rex. I'm coming to get you! Okay, thank you. Are you crying? - No. I'm not crying. What? Just, thank you. Wasn't this where Jurassic Park was filmed? This scene right here? Yeah, this is actually where they shot Jurassic... Yeah, how did you know that? Yeah, this is where they shot Jurassic Park. Yeah, I can tell. This was the real location where... And I think they shot some of Jurassic World here, too. And by the way, so fun to get to go shoot where they shot Jurassic Park. That's like a little kid dream, to go shoot in that location for the joke of ATV-ing where they shot Jurassic Park. This is also, this ranch, by the way, Kualoa, is where they not only shot Jurassic Park and Jurassic World, it's where they shot... They have signs up all over for movie tours. It's where they shot Godzilla. It's where they shot 50 First Dates, part of it. The most excited I was by a sign was there's an area that's apparently where they shot part of the movie You, Me and Dupree. So, we join a pretty special lineage of movies, all the way from Jurassic Park to You, Me and Dupree that have shot in this beautiful location, when shooting in Hawai. I still think we should go around. She just got some serious air, bro! Um, this sequence was a blast to shoot. And, again, the stunts and stunt drivers that we brought in on this were great. And we had to find the smallest, the best smallest ATV stunt riders in the country. Yeah, baby! To match, to body-double match the girls who are the ones who are obviously good at this and doing the tricks. So, that is a male ATV stunt driver. And one of the smallest male stunt drivers we could find to double for Aubrey Plaza. And same goes with Anna Kendrick. Um... And I think there was, we initially had a female ATV stunt rider coming in and I feel like something happened with her schedule. She had a show to do, she had an X-Games-type event to go do. And then, so she dropped out, and so we had to find, um, small men. Small men with... Your turn, Mike! Don't be a pussy! ... with, uh, adrenaline junkies, basically. I'm not gonna do it. Um... Mike, it'll turn me on... I think the only disappointing part of this scene was for Zac. He just wanted to ride that ATV so bad. Zac is a guy who already knows how to ride ATVs. And was so into being on that ATV. Like, every time I said, "Cut," he'd be off zipping around, driving around, going up the mountains on ATVs. And, literally, it's like Aubrey and Anna get to drive this ATV, and look like they're jumping it and have little shots like this. Where they're all actually on it and driving it. Adam and then Aubrey did this. And poor Zac is the only guy, because Dave is the character with enough common sense to not do this jump, that couldn't go zipping around on this while we filmed. And that was, I think, the only, only bummer of shooting this scene, was for him. Oh, boy. Oh, no, God! God, this sequence was originally... A lot of people comment on how long this jump is, how long he's in the air, how long I stretch this sequence out for. And I just want you to know, originally, it was another 25 seconds longer, that Adam was just screaming, floating down on her. We originally had it so long. But this is actually one of the scenes that changed the least from our rough cut of the movie that was three hours long to the final version. That ATV sequence was kind of always in that form. Our little transition here inside, off the blackness, onto Mary's wonderful, horrified face. Your face is making me think it's gonna be bad. This is one of those scenes that where if I'm really analyzing the movie, it doesn't make sense if you think about it. But you're having so much fun after that surprising ATV hit and watching her face and seeing everyone make jokes, that no one thinks about it. But if I actually looked critically at it, I'm going, "So she got hit in the face. She should be dead." Right? She's not dead. She should be dead. And then we cut to the next room and she's just standing up in the middle of a room with an ice bag on her face. She's not sitting down. And I was looking at her. And everyone's standing staring at her to wait to see what the face looks like. I have little rationalities I can tell myself to get around this and how it can work. "Maybe it swelled up. "The bruising got worse under the ice bag." Blah, blah, blah. But if you really think about it, it probably wouldn't go like this. That's what they call suspension of disbelief, guys. Welcome to movie making 107. Enough dancing! You and you... outside, now! God, this was So fun. Just telling, letting Stephen Root get mad at these guys. Calm down. Do you understand they've deformed our little girl... We were really worried this joke wouldn't work. She looks like Seal, for Christ's sake! "Looks like Seal." And we were kind of like, "Is that too dated? Do kids today..." And it kills. Everyone always loved that joke. I always thought... I had like three alts for that joke. I always thought we'd change it. Never had to. This was great, coming up with this on the day. Which actually is based on my own life. If I'm ever too tired and run into one of those doors, I can never figure out how to close them. And I asked Stephen Root if he could try trying to close it with the door that won't go all the way 'cause the other one's open. And, God, he's so funny. He's so great at just boiling over at these guys. There was another door, though. He can just close the other door. What? Well, he didn't see the other door. He just closed the one. But he was trying to close one but it was the other door that was open. Yeah, Margie, that's the joke. That he kept trying to close the door but there was another one to close. But he kept trying to close the other one. Did he not see the other door? I can't, I can't get into this with you right now, Margie. Okay. Everyone gets the joke. And this is not, I don't think this is... I mean, you said you've been doing this for a while. But I cannot believe that you think this is the right time to get into this. When there's a room, and there's usually one door, but sometimes there are two. And if there's two, I don't know why you wouldn't be aware of that. Well, to each his own, I guess. Agree to disagree. - Um... It's all fucked now. It's all fucked. Yeah. Yeah, okay. So, yeah, you agree to disagree. Great. Okay, well, yeah, I agree to disagree. Sounded like you wanted to say no. Sounded like you wanted to say you don't agree to disagree. I don't want to make this any harder than it already is. Do all the booths in the building have the mic inside your room like that? The mic to... - No, it's just this one. Yeah, sure. That's what I thought. Perfect. Um, let's get back to the old movie here. Thanks again for letting me join your spa day, ladies. I'm getting a little feedback in my mic here. Um... This is a fun little run here. Spa day. This is, so Alice now is trying to... Feels really bad about ruining the bride's day here, since she was a bride herself. And understands how big of a deal that would be. She's really trying to make it up to Jeanie. But poor Alice. She just, her heart's in the right place, the right intentions but she's gonna go a little crazy here. I didn't actually end up having one, So... Why? Every bride needs a bachelorette party. I'm sorry... By the way, Anna did great with that run, that giant run about dressing up like a prostitute. I'm pretty sure I threw that on her. She had never seen that written down. lt was maybe the third or fourth take where we tried something new. And I said, "Hey, try this really long run about your..." And just instantly, the next take, had it memorized. Had it better than I told it to her with perfect timing, perfect jokes. She just nailed it. She's awesome. Anna Kendrick might be the most professional person I've ever worked with. Little facts about working with her that you might want to know. She is always, always has her lines ready. Always on set ready to go. When you're filming a movie, you kind of have your actors, they take a break, they sit down between takes. You have, what's called, a second team of stand-ins to come in and adjust the lighting on... And then, when you Say, "Second team out, first team in," that's when your actors come back to set to start filming. Anna was always, you'd Say, "Second team out, first team..." Anna would be there. Waiting for everyone, Anna was always the first person back on set. Another fun thing about Anna, she's a woman of the world. She's a very knowledgeable person. She was always reading when she was in between takes, off set. Which is great. She's always got a book of new subject that she's into. And there was about three weeks on this movie where she was reading a book on the rise of Nazism in 1930s and '40s, Germany. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. How did you know that? It's one of my favorite books. Physically, no penetration. Why? /'m a history buff. All right. All right. Well, I hope so. Anyway, that's what Anna was reading as well on set. But the funny image would be, every now and then between takes, you'd look over at her sitting in her chair and she was just... You just saw her eyes popping over this giant book with a swastika on it. And we were like, "Anna, you got to... Let's put a different cover on that thing. "It just does not look right, that you're reading that book." Poor, sweet little Anna Kendrick with a giant swastika in front of her face. Oh, my God. How have I not Started talking about Kumail yet? When we had to cast this scene for the masseuse, whose name is Keanu, I don't think that's in the movie anymore, but in the script his name is Keanu, I wanted Kumail to do this and he... I think we went out to him and we asked him to do this scene. Said, "Would you come in and do a cameo and be this crazy masseuse?" And immediately he said yes. We got the word, he said, yes, he's in. And then he read the scene. And three hours later it was, "He needs to talk to the director before he'll agree to do this." And we actually... That was our problem with this scene is how do we explain that the scene of two naked people rubbing butts on each other for a happy ending massage, that this will be funny and not crazy and weird and something you'll regret doing. So, I think Kumail was actually in Greece with his wife on a vacation. Like, the first vacation they had had in a couple years. And he took a break from it to Skype-call me. I was in Hawaii, prepping. And he was just like, "Listen, man, I just got to know. "What are we gonna be showing here? And what kind of scene?" Like, "I'd love to do it, but are you gonna screw me on this?" Basically, he was saying, "Are you gonna screw me on this?" And I showed him some storyboards I had made up for this scene that had some of the crazy positions they were in. And I just sent him a picture of one or two of those. Said, "This is what I'm thinking." And he instantly was like, "Oh, I get it. It's a full comedy scene. "It's full weird-position comedy scene. I'm in." And then, also, three weeks later he shows up buff as hell. I did not know he was packing muscles like that. And he said he was worried about doing the nude scene. So he started hitting the weights even more. I mean, we're alone. How's Mike? Um, this scene we shot in an actual sauna. We did almost no set work on this entire movie. Everything was real, which is great for the production value of the background of Hawaii. But, God, this was a tight, this was maybe an 8'x6' sauna that we just actually shot in. So it was real tight to get in here and try to get these shots. And obviously, this scene, even from the early stage of the script, this was kind of the question of like, "And, uh, are we keeping the sauna scene in the movie? "What do you think of the sauna scene?" That was always the biggest question about this movie, is that, "Do you think this is the kind of movie "that keeps the sauna scene or loses it?" And I always thought you kept it. Originally in the script, cousin Terry was a man. It was a man. And we came upon the idea, someone had suggested during the prep of this movie, of, "What if you make it a woman?" And it's kind of a woman who's really forward and kind of almost a predator-ish, just a bisexual. It's not that she's straight, it's not that she's gay. It's just that she is down for anything, is her vibe. And so we decided to... We changed the role maybe a week or two out from production. Changed that role to a woman. Which I think adds a fun layer that you haven't really seen before in a movie. I love these little cut-ins here on Mike's face here and the sound she's making. Mike, I'm coming. - No! Oh, my God! I think that was, we were on set. And besides Adam screaming, we just said, "What's the worst thing that could happen "If you've already walked in and see your sister in the middle of a happy ending? "What's the worst possible thing that the sister could say to you?" And the answer was, just looking you dead in the eyes and saying, "Mike, I'm coming." And that's where that came from on the day, I believe. Terry! Poor Mike, just falling apart here. Shut the fuck up, Mike. Ugh. From one to the next. Cannot handle it. I'm gonna kick your ass. Adam Devine at 100% again, wonderfully. Poor, poor Mike. Mike's... This is where, I think, actually, you go from Mike being like an overly sex-crazed, like, "Who is this guy," to like, "I actually start to feel a little bad for him here." Here and in the next scene in the lobby with Tatiana. Um... God, so funny. And here we go. Back to Kumail again. Kumail is great. Kumail and Sugar were great together here. Just playful. And it was so fun having Kumail in to shoot because we would do the scene and then he would just come over to me and Say, "Hey, what other jokes do you want to try? "What should we... Should we try this, should we try that?" And he was so fun and great about just, "Let's keep thinking. "What else could be fun here? "What other jokes should we try?" And we would just sit on the side of the set for five, 10 minutes before each setup and just come up with more stuff for them to play with. And this is a perfect example of Kumail. You could develop cancer. Going off on his own, "Develop cancer." It's great. Um... Wait, you did that? These two. It's so funny. And that was another thing in the script is that we had to try to balance, and it's interesting. You'll see in the deleted scenes, there's a lot of scenes that got cut. But it was making this a true four-hander and balancing Alice and Tatiana and Mike and Dave throughout this movie, and having four leads is like... We shot a lot of stuff to make sure we could put it together in different ways. 'Cause when you're trying to balance that many people, I just wanted to make sure we didn't get back to the edit room and go like, "Oh, we wish we had this." Or, "We need this moment." And in truth, we had so much. We had too much stuff that we couldn't fit it all. The movie would have been two-and-a-half hours long. And I kind of think you don't want it to go that long if you're doing a comedy. You want to get people in the theater. Make them laugh. Make the story work. Feel for the characters a little bit. Send them on their way. But I think there's a lot of deleted scenes and extra jokes and bits on this that we put on the disc here. God, this, the banyan trees, by the way, so pretty to shoot in. And this is one of those scenes, these emotional connection scenes that I remember shooting and going, "You know what? We'll probably cut this way down in post "because we've got so much crazy, funny stuff going on. "We'll probably want to get back fo it." And the opposite is true. We got into the edit room, and you put this together and it's like, "Yeah." What a great reminder to check back in with the characters and where they are and what they want out of things. And we just were like, "What else do we have? What other lines did we try? "Let's put everything in this scene." Um, and it's so nice to take a break for a second with these two. And just re-establish the stakes and where we are. And I think it helps. I think those scenes with Anna and Zac in the movie help drive the whole movie and help reset for the comedy in the next scenes after that. And that was... Yeah, that was fun to see working as we put it together. Yeah, I'm totally overreacting. God, this is another, one of the ones from the first time I read the script. Tatiana's little run here about what she did and what it's like. lt was one of those things in the script where it was like, "Yeah, we got to do this in the movie. I haven't seen this scene before." It's just like Tinder. We did, we probably tried about 50 different things that we made poor Aubrey do and describe here before we got it down to three things for the movie. ...contracting them. Are you deliberately trying to hurt me? Is that what you're doing? What? No! I was just trying to get RiRi tickets... to make my best friend feel better, okay? We're on vacay. By the way, Adam Devine. Have we talked about him yet? What a great dude. We were lucky on this movie. Literally, everyone we... I'm so happy with our cast. Not only our main cast, our main four, but our secondary cast. I mean, just literally couldn't have asked for a better group of people. Not only with how funny and talented they are, but just great dudes. I didn't really know Adam very much before this movie. We had met a couple times about various things that we never really worked together. And then, I mean, when we first met about this movie, he was like, "I feel like I am Mike. "Like I know how to do this role more than any other role I've read." And I think he was right. He just really put everything into it. And always, he was always the best about, "Do we need another take? "Do you want me to try this?" He'll do it. No complaints. Always full of energy. And so funny, man. God, I just want fo... Hey, Jake. You coughed a second ago. ls there a bug in the room? Not that I know of. Did I cough? So you didn't choke on a bug? Made it up. All of it. No. What do you mean? I don't think I did. Why? Has that happened? You just coughed and it sounded like... I just assumed you choked on a bug. Well, I don't think that's a reasonable assumption, Margie. I mean, unless you know something I don't about the bugs in this room. I don't think I choked on a bug. That's the thing about a sound booth. It's always bugged. Oh, come on, man. Is that a pun? ls that what you're doing? Did you just try to put a joke on the DVD commentary? I don't... That was just a fact. I don't joke. I don't understand humor. Mmm-hmm. - So, I don't... Is that what you do when you work in the booth for this long? Do you just sit on something like that for, like, 10 years and just Say, "One of these days I'm gonna put the bug joke in. "I'm just gonna hit the mic button and pop on in"? Um, I will be telling my family and friends about this commentary and the fact that I'm a part of it, if that's okay. - Oh, my God. Yeah, I guess. I mean, I think that's clearly what's going on here. You lied? By the way, I think there is a way to stop and go back and rerecord sections. I know earlier you told... I mean, it's too late now. We're an hour into the movie. But I think... Yeah, there's no way we can go back now. There was a couple points at the beginning where we could've. We could've, right? I knew it. We're too deep, we're in too deep, as they Say. Well, for the first time, I agree with you. This is just what it is by this point. And I've got way too busy of a day to redo this. So it is what it is. You got any thoughts on this scene here? "Love hurts." How did they get up in that tree? "Love wounds..." We just had... We just stepped them. We had a ladder. They just crawled up in the tree. Climbing trees is dangerous. I don't have children, but if I did, I would say, "Please, avoid climbing trees because when you fall you could hurt yourself." I mean, I guess in a way that's reasonable. But, also, kids love climbing. I mean, you got to climb a tree. Kids love climbing trees. You got to let your kids climb trees. Well, I'll never have children anyway, so it doesn't matter. That's not... I don't want to open that door with you, Margie. I'd actually love to talk about it if you are... Yeah, no, I had a feeling you might. And I don't, let's not make that... Let's do that... That's another disc, okay? I just, I'm not sure if I'm firm on that decision to not have kids, or if I should consider... Should I freeze my eggs? A clear line in the sand. Well, all 1 can say is I would support you if you did. l'm gonna support anyone who wants to take that route. And it's a decision you got to make for you. All right, but let's really not go farther than that into this discussion. If/ freeze my eggs, will you go in on it with me? They're liars! No, I won't go in on it with you. It costs a lot of money to do that. /'m sure it does. But that's not my problem, Margie. I mean, you can decide to freeze those eggs or not, that's up... You said you'd support me, though. You got... I know you work, Margie. I know you work. I'm looking at you do your job right now. If you want to save up... Well, no... I mean, how much do you need? Uh... Tatiana was jerking off our cousin Terry. Are you crying? Cousin Terry has a dick? No. It's hard to see you through the glass. /'m fine. Let's just... - Oh, my God, I'm so sorry. We can talk about it later. Listen, if you need help, let's talk. No, no, no. I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. I can't do that, David. Oh, boy. What? I mean, just... I just had a kid. And I love having a kid. And I get it if you need... I mean... I would love to know what that feels like. She really had to pee? Anyway it's... Let's talk... Let's seriously... Let's, you and me, let's talk afterwards. /... Okay. - Okay. That'd be great. I can't believe what's happening here. I do want to remind you, though, about the heavy breathing. Thank you, thank you. Appreciate that. I'm gonna walk in on Mom... I ama heavy breather. I'm kind of worried about breathing heavily in this thing. Careful, when you scratch your face it brushes the mic and then it fucks me up. But have you seen this Push Pop scene? I forgot to talk about this Push Pop scene. Um, love the... Zac went full Brad Pitt in Se7en here. He did a full what's-in-the-box on what's-the-Push-Pop. Also, a little thank you to my good friend, Lauryn Kahn. A hilarious writer who I know from back when I started at Funny Or Die, and she started at Gary Sanchez Productions, who we're out of the same office. And we've been friends ever since that website launched. And she was one of our on-set writers. She came out for two or three weeks pitching jokes. And, um, she pitched that phrase Push Pop. I think, initially, we had a different phrase in there and she's like, "Let's try 'Push Pop." It was great. You're out of control! By the way, we cut right out of this shot before Tatiana's about to throw a drink in Becky's lap. Which you can see all about it on the deleted scenes. There's a really funny runner of Tatiana continues to throw her champagne glass into Becky's lap and make it seem like she peed her pants. And that was one of the things I hated losing in this movie as we got it down to time. It was a really funny runner throughout the movie. Talk about the centipedes. Oh, there were centipedes that... Yes, I forgot. We shot... We're back at the banyan trees here, shooting at night. We shot for three nights out here. Like The Truman Show. And centipedes were falling from the tree on all the crew and actors. And they were the biggest centipedes you've ever seen. They were six, seven inches long, a centimeter thick. They were nightmare centipedes. And apparently what had happened was, people were so worried about how many bugs there were gonna be in the forest at night that they had sprayed for mosquitos the day before we shooted. And it... "Before we shooted," before we shot. And it got rid of a lot of all the mosquitoes and small bugs. But apparently it just kind of slowly stunned the centipedes 'cause they were so much bigger than the other bugs that it didn't kill them. And so, six hours later after they sprayed as it was shooting, the centipedes finally started dropping from the trees in a daze 'cause they couldn't hold on to the branches anymore. And it was raining centipedes as we shot. That is terrifying and the stuff of nightmares. And it is true. That is absolutely what happened. And then one of the crew guys took one of the centipedes and put it into a cup. And started walking around showing it to everyone while it would crawl in and out of the cup on his hand. Ugh! Did you guys eat them? No, no one ate them. That would be... You could, though. If you were trapped, that's exactly what you would eat for the protein. I would eat them without being trapped. What, why? What? Why on Earth would you do that? Well, if you want... Can we have that conversation about freezing my eggs again? I'd like to... I think we should wait. And honestly, not even for me or the commentary's sake at this point. I think for you we should wait till after this. Well, you're the director. I deserve to have a little fun. What is that? Is that... Are you mad at me? Do you agree with me? I have no idea now, Margie. This is gonna be so much fun! I just... Yeah, this is... It's gotten out of control. I apologize. I feel like I'm... I'm sorry. I feel like this is too much. It's... No, no, no. - It's... You're... You're fine. Please, don't. This is how we do it, baby. Come on. Let's just try to get through this commentary. Absolutely. Let's both do our jobs here. Right? - Absolutely, let's do that. We'll just get this thing done. - Please, Iet's do that. Um, You love that movie. We were shooting on... How's it a bad idea if you love the movie? We were shooting on a prime lens here. Probably about 40 millimeters. Oh, my God, commentaries are So... -... boring. - And we were... It's, like, what is this? - Margie. /'m just... You're talking about... -... hearing him and sitting in here. I'm listening to this guy... - Can she hear me? ...ramble on about things he thinks about. Oh, my... Do you know you put the mic on? - It's just, when... What the fuck are... What... What am I even... What is my life? She doesn't even know she put the mic on. - What is my life? I just can't believe it. I can't believe... It's just a waste of his time and my time and everybody's time. Jesus. This makes me feel really shitty about the commentary. Oh, shit. Yeah, you got the... Your elbow"s on the button! What's that? Your elbow"s on the mic button. - Did you... Hello, everyone. Oh, no, I know, I wanted that. Um, I'm just gonna adjust a couple of levels. And I'll be right back. They're two of the sweetest... Where'd she go? She's running out of the booth. All right. Our first soeaker tonight... Where... Oh, my God. Well, God, I don't know what she's doing or where she went. Fricking Margie. My eyes are dry. Just give it to me. Uh, all right, listen, let's... I'm sorry. Uh, let's get back into this. "...my speech." Doing a little Chris Rock here. God, I'm sorry. I'm just thinking about, I don't know what's going on with her right now. She's talking about these eggs. She's talking about how boring commentaries are. I don't think she's happy. I don't know where she went. I'm starting to get a little scared. I feel like I should try to lock the door to this room. I don't know what's going on. Um... Why aren't you on my side, Dave? All right. Let's talk about, let's talk about this movie again right here. Fucking Zac Efron bringing it strong and hard right here. Boom. We thought this was so funny of Zac being such a good actor and just straight up yelling as seriously as he could, "I'm gonna draw. Like an artist." We even used that phrase. By the way, Lavell, our Keith. I haven't had a chance to talk about Lavell yet. So funny. Such a funny guy. Loved him on Breaking Bad. And we were able to steal him out. And, God, there's another... There's a great whole runner with him that got cut that's on the DVD that in every scene he just talks about how he's on vacation and he still hasn't been in the pool yet. That he's living in paradise and he just wants to get in that pool. But he's been so busy getting the wedding ready. That couldn't make it on. But, man, he was so funny. Um... The mics are on! - You're just fucking pissed off... Here we go, guys. ... because Tatiana finger diddled Terry. There it is! By the way, great pitch coming up here from Mary Holland who a little later here, where I was like, "If you have any ideas for this scene let me know." I told all the actors on this movie, "Anything you want to try or any ideas you have, "or jokes you want to pitch, let me know." I'm always down to try stuff 'cause that's how I run it and I want them to try things I say, so if they got things, let's try it. And that's why Mary's holding that champagne glass there. When she snaps it and breaks it in her hand, that was her pitch. That just, she said, "Can I please, please, have a glass "that I just shatter in shock and ruin my hand with?" And I said, "Absolutely. Call props." Said, "Please get breakable champagne glasses for her." And we did it. There we go. Love it, love it. And we actually had to remove it from her hand, digitally, in the next shot 'cause we're using a take where she hadn't broken it yet behind Eric there. And so, then, uh, we digitally removed it from the shot after she breaks it. They got so... This was one of those nights where it was raining. Kind of every 25 minutes we'd have to break while it rained for five minutes. And it was very hot and very humid. And Zac and Adam doing that fight was really hard on them, actually. And they got so sweaty by the end of it when they were lifting each other up. I think Adam literally almost hyperventilated at one point. When we finally cut for lunch there, um... Adam just stripped off every piece, Stripped all the way down to his underwear. Took the suit off, took the shoes off, took the socks off. He was just so hot and the air was so thick and humid that he was having trouble breathing after that. It's 'cause these guys give it their all. They're pros. By the way, you will notice that we are doing night scenes here. And we shot so many nights. It's actually rare for a comedy. I think we shot three or four weeks of nights on this movie. And it's tough. You do one week in the day then you got to switch your clock and get up where you're shooting from 8:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. all day. And we were also shooting in Hawaii in the summer. Which meant the days were really long and the nights were short. And it can really mess with your schedule and the actors' schedule getting used to shooting all through the night for weeks at a time. They usually don't do it that much on a comedy. I think we shot a lot of nights for a comedy. Drama you might see it. People just change their schedules. They're up all night for a month while they're shooting. And I think we started doing, or at least once we did, we had nightcap drinks after shooting.

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My sword will save them. And my sword will save them was added, which I like and it was helpful because before he says, my vision shows me you have two and she cries and Louise Ford, the editor, joked that she's crying because she found out she had twins.

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