True story / real events

The real question is, does somebody else have a voice in the casting? No, it's all my voice. I mean, I cast the picture, period. And he was your first choice for that part? Yes. I mean, I would, of course, call Harrison Ford and say, Harrison, my idea for that is Gary Oldman. Is that okay with you? And he said right away, absolutely, yes. So, you know, if you have a movie star like Harrison for the main two, three parts, you double-check with him. You don't want to have somebody, when he feels totally uncomfortable, I wouldn't do it.

9:49 · jump to transcript →

This is a real plane, right here. This is a real plane, yes. This is the 747 that we rented and painted. And later on, when we come to more to the dramatic stuff, then I will tell you, always when this is the real plane, this is the model, because we had a huge model, but really big, like, I don't know, like 10, 12 meters long or so, really long, big model.

15:45 · jump to transcript →

enlarged a little bit because so many scenes laid on so many people there. But it is exactly the same room, just a tiny bit larger. This is a soundproof room also. When we were on the real Air Force One, we closed the door. It was really nice and comfortable there. Because when they have their conferences, they need a little bit quieter there.

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Under the circumstances, I think we'd recommend resetting the sensors to respond to a lighter load. How do you feel about 40 kilos, Miss Hall? Perfect. We want the movie to have the sexy feeling, but it's not necessary to see the real sex. Not because of the rating, because we all want this movie to look a little more elegant in every way. No matter the action, the sex, the love, or the good and evil, the thing.

16:31 · jump to transcript →

Is she going to betray Tom or suffering something or whatever, you know, just leave the question mark. And then leading the audience, follow the story, and then when they get into the biopsy scene, and then you will see her art, her change. And then they will give the audience a totally surprise, and then you will know who is the real love for Tandy and who she really loves, you know.

41:11 · jump to transcript →

the proper camera angle to bring out the great quality on the screen. And by the meantime, I like them to put the real experience from life, put it into the scene, into the character, and that makes the performance look more real, more touching. I love actors. I love performance. I like to see the great performance on the screen.

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E. Elias Merhige

And a lot of people were maimed and wounded severely on the battlefields of Europe. And after World War I, a lot of those advancements in opiates and drugs made their way onto the streets of Berlin. And the real Murnau was a fighter pilot in World War I. And he had crashed his plane twice and damaged one of his kidneys severely so that he from time to time took painkillers to

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E. Elias Merhige

that they're actually going and there's that frustration, that sort of friction between producer and director. Whereas in real life I had absolutely no friction between my producers and myself and I feel that Nicolas Cage and Jeff Levine were absolutely wonderful to work with and I look forward to it taking place again. I look forward to working with them again.

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E. Elias Merhige

Han Budala is a Slavic word meaning the inn of the fool, and that corresponds to the tarot card of the fool that Alvin Grau, being the esotericist that he was in real life, was very fond of the tarot and carried a tarot deck with him. Even on the set he had it with him. How long have you been here? Not long.

16:29 · jump to transcript →

So now we're coming upon one of my favorite day players in the movie. Tell me where you found this guy. Well, he actually wasn't one of the real people who worked in the same role that he's playing in the movie. But he was from the area, and I don't know exactly how we discovered him or auditioned him, but he actually gets mentioned as one of the stars of the movie because he comes so early in the credits. So when you see the...

6:25 · jump to transcript →

Nowadays, in so many movies, you see boys at the age of 45. I mean, the world has changed. The world of movies has changed anyway. Maybe the real world has changed too. Well, I think about all that these guys have probably been through at this point. Certainly Dennis had been through in his life and his career. I think it's just a different type of character that...

8:47 · jump to transcript →

And I don't think I let the actors look at dailies. I didn't think that was a good idea. I'll relieve you in six hours. I feel good. I can take it all the way. That line has become, you know, one of those lines that you kind of like take over and use in real life as a kind of motto. I probably, at least once a week,

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even though it has the feel of a governmental kind of office, not deluxe in any way, it's a workspace. This was a set along with the set they are probably just about to enter, if my memory serves. Now we're going back to the train, but when they come into the TA Command Center, which again, until I saw that it was filmed at a studio at the end, I kind of thought it was the real thing.

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But, I mean, it's not so far off. You know, it's okay. Well, sort of caricature. Yeah, a little bit. That's not too far. It doesn't throw anything out of whack, I don't think. And this whole thing about, Al, you've heard the three wise men, and then he's going, what are they going to say, Warren? You know, wondering what the political ramifications are. And what's great is that Doris Roberts, with her ultra-dry, sarcastic delivery, gets the real payoff line.

42:37 · jump to transcript →

What happens with the long lens is it compresses reality. And sometimes if you have to cheat, the long lens is a great way to sort of pull that off and maybe fool the audience. But with Pelham, the value of this picture and the value of all movies that are shot on location, but also movies that were shot on location in the 70s where they never cheated the real estate. The real estate was, you know, one of the stars of the movie. And in a sense...

58:53 · jump to transcript →

All of the sequences that were historic in context required a tremendous amount of research because we reenacted these perfectly, which required finding cast members that looked exactly like the people who were in the real live footage and recreating portions of the event so it looked like at one time you could be watching the real event and another one a recreation of it and not be able to tell the difference between the two.

23:32 · jump to transcript →

It always makes you feel great when you know that you haven't just created a setting that doesn't look like the real thing. And also in this area here, there were actual water moccasins that had to be cleared out before these guys went in there. Yeah, I think we put some charges in there to wake them up and scare them off, didn't we? The day we shot. That's right. And also some chain link down.

46:23 · jump to transcript →

planes had to be shot in two parts. One where we actually had Forrest or Tom Hanks running carrying Michael T. And then we cleared everybody out of the set and set off these explosions here on this island in South Carolina. And then blended the two parts of the shot together to look like he was actually running through the scene with the real explosions. And isn't there a rig also helping him carry Bubba?

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mercenaries from the coast oh who's that handsome fellow in the middle with the rather authoritarian looking corsair it's captain backwards oh that's terrible oh dear oh dear there's no respect however you wait till you see the real scene that's coming up later in this extended edition it's like back to its full glory but we have the white wizard that's got to count for something

54:16 · jump to transcript →

Faramir's duty, obviously, is to hold Osgiliath, which is really on the outskirts of Minas Tirith, the real target of the orcs. But to get there, they have to take over this ruined city. And Faramir is fighting as desperately as he possibly can. And it was important that there was nothing about what Faramir did that was a failure, that he was ultimately overwhelmed by the numbers of orcs. He just could do nothing about it. The size of his force was dwarfed by the enemy that they were against.

1:11:01 · jump to transcript →

This was later. A couple of these shots were later, yeah. And that's a transfer from a digital double to Sean Astin, where it's a digital double rolling off the back, and then when he lands, we do a little morph into the real actor.

2:25:05 · jump to transcript →

Kenneth Loring

Or chins, really, I suppose, literally speaking. Very, very sweet, in fact. And such wonderful stories they tell. At any rate, my point was that these technical insights come from the filmmakers themselves, in case you were wondering if I was speaking through the proverbial Khyber Pass. No, no, this is the inside story, the real deal, as the filmmakers so excitedly put it.

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Kenneth Loring

How did they do that shot? Car moving, not moving, in front of a blue screen, green screen, front projection, side projection. How? Well, that first shot, case in point, the shot of the character in the parked car, that was done with the car parked. And in fact, it was raining. And it was the real actor. Sometimes even the professional can look and still not know. All right, well, here's more talking, all in order. The characters staged facing each other as they should be in a scene where they converse, but they...

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Kenneth Loring

Movie sweat, of course, not the real thing, especially gathered from the flanks of Palomino horses. Can't claim to know the chemistry of the matter, but apparently it reacts better with the light. No, it's not pleasant for the actor, nor cheap, but you see how much it contributes to the mise-en-scene. You could have this scene without the sweat, certainly. You could have it without the fly, for that matter, but if they're not going to do the thing right, well... Well, these are not filmmakers who do things by half measures. Well, here the...

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Was ribbed part of your childhood as well? The actual ribbed event is a totally true story. I wish I could take credit for making that up because it's a good comedy gag. A guy from my high school really did go to a pharmacist before his date. It turned out right around the time the pharmacy closed, that night, after buying the prophylactic, he went home to meet the girl's father on a high school date, and that was the pharmacist he had just bought a prophylactic from. When, when, when? When the timing's right.

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Still remarkable to me. Yeah. That was all in camera. That was done today. That's 17 different visual effects plates. Easily. And there's something about the real thing that makes that small stud still. Maybe because I was there and I was on the edge of my damn seat. And the sun was coming up and we gotta go, we gotta go. Worried for everybody. This was, by the way, this was kind of the first film I shot in Hollywood in Griffith Park in the classic A Tree is a Tree shooted in Griffith Park. So all these scenes took place

12:02 · jump to transcript →

So this is a slice of... This is the true story, gang. In Park Ridge, Illinois, it really happened to a friend of mine. I'd be proud if it was me, but it was a famous story in our high school that this happened. Whatever happened after that? Could he be in the sequel? The real guy is now, you know... 12 kids later? Exactly. May I say, Ricky Paul Golden, the swagger this kid has is true to him, undirectable.

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Michael Mann

each one with seven or eight cannon. And these cannons, in real life, weighed about 20,000 to 30,000 pounds, and they were 32-pounders. And they had a range of about 500 to 600 yards. And there's a specific strategy. These are called gambions, the wicker devices that hold the earthworks.

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Michael Mann

and built the fort partially out of some of that lumber. So the fort was built as a real place on three sides, interior and exterior. All the work on built the set for something under a million dollars, they had the benefit of being real and practical. So when they enter through a sally port, as they're doing right here, into the interior, we really are walking into the interior of the real fort.

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Michael Mann

And if you look at the braid on General Montcalm's coat, they have woven in shadow as if the braid, in fact, three-dimensional and cast a shadow on it. This is also highly accurate and elaborate, but it's not the kind of thing you could just rent from a costume house. You have to do it yourself, which we did. And it was, again, one of those fortuitous circumstances, such as the fort, where either the real uniforms didn't exist

1:04:41 · jump to transcript →

And, you know, people say to me, God, it's such a great movie, you know. But honest truth is I have to give the real applause to Quentin Tarantino because he's the guy who put it on the page. And this is the first movie where all I did was to support what was on the page in terms of my casting, in terms of my look, and in terms of my styling and how I shot the movie. But it's a much easier process when you have a blueprint which you're so confident about.

6:43 · jump to transcript →

I was originally gonna shoot in the real hotel room, but it was too confined for what we had to do in there, especially with the scene that was about to come up with Patricia and Virgil. And so I photographed the shit out of this hotel room and then said, okay, it needs to be a little bigger here, a little bigger there. And I always try and find some sort of concept or theme. The hotel room that we photographed did not have a Hawaiian sunset on the walls, did not have a four-poster bed, but I kept thinking about elements that I could use

1:02:07 · jump to transcript →

except it's more deluded, you know, it's better. Again, I constructed the set. The set was based on that set, the Sahara Motel, which was the real motel down off Van Nuys in the valley. But then I put the Hawaiian motif on the walls and put mirror on the ceiling because I knew that when I was storyboarding the sequence ahead of time, I knew that I wanted Patricia, who'd been badly beaten, to be able to see the elements in the room.

1:19:28 · jump to transcript →

came in television, most notably in the pilot episode of the TV series Lancer, which Quentin Tarantino fictionalized the making of in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The TV show within the movie that Leonardo DiCaprio is making is, in fact, the Lancer pilot, and DiCaprio is playing the role that Joe Don Baker played in the real pilot, albeit under a different character name. Baker was a staple of television westerns like Bonanza and Gunsmoke.

9:15 · jump to transcript →

Something I didn't know is he was married to Joanna Going and Melora Walters. I didn't know anything about his personal life. But also in that scene, well, here we have James Caron, who is, I know him best as the bad guy in Poltergeist. He's the real estate developer in Poltergeist. He's also in Return of the Living Dead. He's a great horror guy, but in a zillion things. I think he's in all the President's Men, all kinds of stuff. Yeah, I mean, he's been in more things than Stuart Penkin. He's in a lot of stuff. Mulholland Drive. Mulholland Drive. Yeah, and also every TV show, you know.

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ton of things. But also, so Dylan Walsh, he's playing a character named Peter Elliott, but the gorilla choreographer on this movie is Peter Elliott. And Crichton kind of cheekily says it was not based on the real guy. I think that's probably true date-wise. But anyway, he's like the guy you call when you need any consulting on apes.

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It was really great. They were all getting on the floor saying, you know, is this what we do? Are we supposed to? This is what they do on television. They were completely frozen. Well, it's sort of become reversed because I think in the beginning, people were, you know, in the 70s, TV shows were sort of writing what was happening in real life. And now people, these things happen in real life and they react to it like it's a TV show. Exactly. They've all seen too many movies. I wanted to say one thing, too. I love how with the face mask and the pantyhose on his head. Yeah. It's...

15:35 · jump to transcript →

for any sort of comparison. Or thank you for the compliment. Oh, please. This is an insult. But Jeffrey was so funny in this scene, putting the hand against his head. Did a great job. And it's a good thing that most people don't know straight off the bat that he's really Juliet's father in real life. Yes. No, nobody knows that. Every time I tell people that, they're surprised to hear it. Actually, Juliet was surprised to hear it. We had to do a blood test on the set.

34:27 · jump to transcript →

And all these names are mixed up first and last names of guys that I used to work with at a detective agency run by Joe Sarno, the real Joe Sarno. Yeah, I was gonna ask you about Sarno. I guess it's come out that Sarno is also the name of some Joe Sarno, like a pornographer. That was completely coincidental, right? Well, believe me, Joe Sarno was certainly surprised to hear that, and he was reading press on the film. Right. And here I am. I thought you named him after me. Oh, sorry.

34:57 · jump to transcript →

Part of the reason we didn't shoot this stuff in Egypt at the real locations is because this is in the 30s when this was supposed to take place. Everything looked different than it does now. Not everything, but now there are skyscrapers and Abu Simbel has been moved completely. They had to brick by brick take it apart and move it across the river. So we wanted it to look authentic. That and the fact that we were banned from Egypt for...

8:55 · jump to transcript →

paid Alan Cameron, my production designer, to leave everything because it's actually, doesn't look, they don't have any of these lamps or rugs or it doesn't look anything really like this. It's really beautiful here. And the real thing's a little cold. No offense, guys, but. I think this house was used in The Omen. I think that was about the last time it was used, yeah. Right on the lot, very convenient. Nice try.

22:52 · jump to transcript →

a roller in the background that creates that feeling that they're passing lights and such on the city street. We actually shot this outside of London City College because the real British Museum is having a makeover. They look very similar, actually, the exteriors, but the real one was having a makeover and there's all this really bad mobile homes and dumpsters and stuff like that and scaffolding outside the real one, so we used this.

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Noah Baumbach

These are the Team Zissou interns, who are all typecast. One of them is an actual intern of yours, or was. Yes, Matthew. Matthew Gubler. Cousteau was always an interesting figure to us because as kids, we idolized him and watched his shows. But he was one of those characters that seemed just like a... You know, a star incarnate in some way. You know, it was like Jacques Cousteau, Evel Knievel, and, you know, Bill Murray or something. And I think the... Zissou, what was fun for us writing this was, sort of, Zissou in some ways is like a kid's idea of what an adult is. It's sort of like-- Or what a celebrity is. And then at the same time, we're dealing with a character, Zissou, who is in some ways, you know, has to get in touch with his own humanity, his own past, in some way strip away this identity that he's created for himself. Right, yeah, right. We always liked the idea of starting-- The idea of one of these movies, which I guess you generally associate with a kind of like ABC special, you know, that's where we saw them on television. And you generally associate them with TV or sort of educational films. But we always liked the idea of this playing a world where this kind of movie would play at a major film festival. Yes, yes. It could be-- It's a world where there's such things as hit documentaries. Right. - Although there actually are now. Fahrenheit 9/1 1. - Documentaries-- Remember we called them-- We like the idea that they might be called swimming films, but I don't know that they ever made it into... We never quite got swimming films in there, a genre. The festival director is played by Antonio Monda, a friend of ours in New York, who's a teacher at NYU, a film professor, and who also hosts a kind of a salon where he has people over, all sorts of interesting people over to his house, and a good friend of ours. And we wrote this part for him. Yeah, we always... Somehow it just seemed like Antonio would be this guy, I think, who, you know... He's done it a million times. At the MoMA and the Guggenheim. And he's Roman. Right, so you knew he could speak Italian. And at the premiere of the movie in New York, he introduced the film before the film. In very much the same way. - Yeah. This is the opera house in Naples, the Teatro di San Carlo. It's a great setting for something, and we always liked the idea of the film festival being set in a place that's like an opera house, and in this case it is an opera house. Isabella Blow plays Antonia Cook, the new head of the film commission. I had, I guess, first come in contact with Isabella when I was at Brasserie Lipp in Paris with my girlfriend, and she walked by and looked at us and said, "Très sexy." Beaucoup de sexe. - Beaucoup de sexe. And I came back and told you I'd seen this very interesting woman, and you said, "Would this woman be out of place in a matador's outfit?" Yes, because I had seen her previously in a hotel lobby in Paris where she was dressed as a matador. It was amazing my story was so specific that you knew exactly who it was. And it was her. We're here at a film festival, which can be the most awkward thing. You're in the midst of all these people watching, and in the case of this character, it's exposing all these different problems that he has in his life that are kind of just laid out in front of him over the course of one miserable evening. We'd talked about 8 1/2 as in some ways an inspiration for this, the Guido character that Marcello Mastroianni plays, because he sort of-- That movie opens with a dream, it's different, but at the spa, he's sort of faced with all these people from his life who keep kind of appearing. Here it's less surreal, but it's, you know, Steve is sort of dealing with, in some ways, every aspect of his life. Yeah. It is surreal to go through the experience of presenting a movie in this kind of context. - Right. The one thing I think that-- We often talk about all the-- We're both big movie buffs. We often talk about the movies that have influenced us and the different inspirations, but for this movie, for me, in the end, a lot of it has to do with my own feeling about making films, and just the luck of being able to do it and being in a situation to have been able to make some movies, and how, for me, that's just the central event of my life was, you know, getting to do this. Right. - I feel like that's part of what the movie is about, is somebody who is-- That is, the thing that kind of clicked with him, getting together a group of people to go make these things. Mm-hm. You know, there's something kind of magical about movies to me. And Steve is dealing with, in some ways, the toll that... I mean, he's sort of at a point, you know, unlike you, I guess, where he is not sure what he wants to be doing next. You know, these... You know, at a real sort of crisis in his career and his life, and also dealing with the fact of the toll his career has taken on his life. ...my little nephew, Werner, he wanted to meet you. How you doing, Werner? He brought you a present. A crayon pony fish. Steve Zissou is obviously and clearly partly inspired by Jacques Cousteau, but just as much of an inspiration for him is Bill Murray, who I had gotten to know for a long time and who Noah also knows. And... I remember when we were writing, we were sort of in the middle of this scene. You had actually seen a movie with Bill, I think, at the Sunshine Theater. And you had a... You could tell that story. The guy came up to Bill... Yes, this is interesting. Bill and I had an episode where we went in to see a movie at a theater on Houston Street. And while we were-- You know, we went in, some kid said hello, and then when we came out, there was a gang of kids who were waiting there with things to sign. Rushmore DVDs and Bill Murray paraphernalia. And Bill was signing all the things and we talked to the kids. And then-- Should I tell this? And then at the end of it... It was funny because one of them then came up after we finished and came up and asked Bill for $10. And Bill said... "Get lost. Get out of here." And the guy turned and walked away. And it was funny because there's something about the way Bill handles that situation that is in Zissou, and I remember when we were filming it, I said, "Well, the way you really said it in real life was like this." And then Bill went into some crazy hysterics over the idea that it was something that had happened. He had no memory. - He had no recollection. But I'm not sure if this story should go on there or not. An abridged version of it maybe, or maybe not. Yeah. Don't put this in until Wes has maybe called Bill and asked if it's okay if he puts it in. Well, Bill badmouthed me in Esquire saying he'd kill me if the movie wasn't one of the best films of all time. Oh, really? - Yeah. He didn't run that by me.

2:21 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

This is his ship, the Belafonte. We bought this ship in South Africa and sailed it up to the Mediterranean and renovated it and made it into this research vessel. It never ran that well, but we really did fall in love with this ship. The crew of the film was always very sort of loyal to it. Now, we have Michael Gambon, who plays Oseary Drakoulias, the producer, a sort of Carlo Ponti, Dino De Laurentiis-style mogul, although he does produce these documentaries. He has the longest fingers that I think I've ever seen in real life. He understands. Amin needs to make a projection of the world grosses to see if he can get a tax break and run it through his output deal. I think that Zissou sees himself and wants to be the kind of person who gives kids secret messages in the cereal boxes. Right. That's an inspiration for him. And the movie is about this, theoretically, a real person, but he's inspired by a sort of fantasy version of himself. And there's things sort of peppered throughout the movie, but this whole red caps and the uniforms and the whole thing. And Owen, in some ways, is our stand-in, I mean, of the child who looks up to this person. And I think another layer of that that we were always dealing with was how our cinematic idols in some ways were like surrogate fathers for us. Movies we loved that sort of took the role of things we looked up to, things we sort of wanted to live vicariously through. And I think Owen and Ned's character sort of stands in for that. This is a kind of an unusual role for Owen Wilson, I think. Right. He has a sort of recognizable comic persona that he's developed. And this is, I think, very different from that. I think when we were writing it, we often talked about that even though Ned was, as written, very naïve and kind of an innocent, I think there's always a kind of somewhat devilish nature to Owen. You can see the light is on behind his eyes all the time. There's some Zissou in him. Yeah, that's interesting. And I think also it made us feel more comfortable writing such a naïve character because I think if it was played too much that way, it would kind of wash out. Yes, and I think Owen's concern was, he was like, "What am I gonna do?" Because he felt like the character is so innocent and so sincere that he's not used to playing someone who's that sincere. He usually plays somebody who's a little bit wily on some level, or something like that anyway. And I think for him, when he really became comfortable with it was because we were sitting on the roof of this hotel in Rome, and he told me this funny story about Will Patton on the set of Armageddon, and he did Will Patton's voice, this southern accent. And I asked him, "Do you think you could do this whole movie in that voice?" And what he ended up doing-- He liked it. We read through the whole script reading all his lines with that, and it was funny and it gave him a sort of genteel feeling and something a little bit not quite real. And the accent's certainly not real. The accent hasn't existed certainly since the Civil War. Right. - Even if then.

9:42 · 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 →

He signed a release for a certified check of $1,000. How'd he do that? My father made him an offer he couldn't refuse. What was that? Luca Brazzi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract. That's a true story.

20:08 · jump to transcript →

frightened of not getting the scene in time that I focused just on getting the real hardcore scenes, the meat, so to speak, of Al in the corridors. And I didn't shoot any shots of just the empty corridors. And so my friend George Lucas went through the footage and he said, well, you gotta have, to build suspense, you gotta have some empty corridors.

1:02:10 · jump to transcript →

He's locked up. What the hell are you doing here? What happened to the men who were guarding my father, Captain? That actor along who has the lines in the background there is Sonny Grasso, who is one of the real fellows from the French Connection that that story is written about. Phil, take him in. The kid's clean, Captain. He's a war hero. God damn it, I said take him in. What's the Turk paying you to set up my father, Captain?

1:08:43 · jump to transcript →

shot purse and a beret and a writing crop. I am the von Stroheim of my book. That's my book. I put the music in if I want music. I cast the book. I describe people I want to do. The movie has nothing to do with the book except it is the basis of the movie. But the vision of it and the mood of it and the color and the real casting for the movie, all of that's the work of the director. What the author of the book has to do

15:05 · jump to transcript →

And I think it gets you as close to the real world of living the gangster life as just about anything. It really happened. And people can remember Lufthansa. And they can remember the suite where all these things took place. They actually took place. So, I mean, mob guys all use this to be mob guys. Because that's what a mob guy is. You know, he's Bob De Niro.

1:00:41 · jump to transcript →

Joe Pesci and his Frank Vincent, I guess. Saturday night was for wives, but Friday night at the Copa was always for the girlfriends. And last week we saw Sammy Davis Jr. You gotta see this show. What a performer. He does these impersonations. I swear, you would think it was the real people. Oh, it's unbelievable.

1:01:11 · jump to transcript →

Paul M. Sammon

I spent a whole night with the ammunition crew just loading cartridges into clips. And it was hours. The most boring thing I ever did. Really something crazy. Now here we get an idea of kind of like a combination of the real and the unreal. The gun is real.

5:36 · jump to transcript →

Paul M. Sammon

And by the way, this is Houston City Hall, the real city hall that they're using for this press conference. And again, you're seeing a bit of the degradation that Peter Koran used by refilming stuff on videotape and slightly treating it to make it look like you're actually watching it during one of the media breaks. This is a complete map painting.

1:30:29 · jump to transcript →

Paul M. Sammon

but really it was pulled in real life on location by fishing line. Okay, now begins the giant, giant, incredibly impressive stop motion showdown between Robo 1 and Robo 2. The weapon that Robo was holding there is an actual 50 caliber sniper rifle. There were a number of amazing weapons, amazing being at least in the sense of

1:36:39 · jump to transcript →

It morphs into the real surveillance camera footage, and then you're able to geolocate the people, which is also, I think, a first in a film, being able to locate people this way and to find they're able to track down the perpetrator remotely. And obviously, they've never seen anything like this, so that's Rob Schneider throwing up, actually.

19:50 · jump to transcript →

making fun of the star spangled banner always always name your villain simon so they can do the simon says runner it's always gold now they've never seen anything like this before he's already figured out how to do this yes sandra bullock has seen this in movies but she's never seen it in real life an actual explosion

28:04 · jump to transcript →

sets everything in motion. Yeah, the original scripts, they just had it, but they didn't play up the real, I tried to play up the contrast really, really a lot. Oh, and I love this. This is the biggest laugh of the movie coming up. With the child. With her going, fuck you, lady. But I told the Warner Brothers wanted to change it to screw you, lady, and we had to fight for it. Is that true? Yeah, absolutely.

31:28 · jump to transcript →

guiding the ring on there because obviously this concept that the wraiths know where the ring is once you put it on your finger they can sense it and they can go after you and we thought well the ring is going to want to get on his finger as fast as it possibly can this stuff was pretty tough to visualize wraith world you know the twilight world of the ring the first thought was the real world is that a positive image then wraith world was the negative of it

1:02:09 · jump to transcript →

Every single ringwraith cry is actually her. Peter? Yes, it was five years of Lord of the Rings. It was all... Peter just told her that he'd bought the rights to the Silmarillion and she just didn't stop screaming for two hours. What really happened was that we didn't really have a cry which had a huge amount of energy behind it. So I knew what was required, but I had a throat infection at the time. So I said, look, I'll just...

1:05:19 · jump to transcript →

We had a forge and we sort of used to heat the swords up, hand them to the orcs who couldn't see very well. They were sort of waving these red hot bits of metal around and whacking them with hammers. But it's funny because things like that, you ultimately can't really figure out a good way to fake it. And you've got to use the real thing. And they, the foundry guys, were dressed up in orc makeup. That's right, yeah. The orcs themselves were the foundry workers that we dressed up as orcs. That's right. Lurtz is a character that we developed for the movie. He's not in the book. And, you know, the reason...

1:17:02 · jump to transcript →

And it was very fun and it all, sort of, interconnected, which was... Matt knowing the guys from the band made, sort of, I think, his performance more fun for him. The fact that the band that wrote the song was actually playing... Playing the song. It makes the scene look real. I hate these movies where you see four extras who were put there on the day, who can't play their instruments, pretending to play along. These guys were actually playing the real notes. There's Alec's least favorite thing in the movie. That purple toilet paper. The purple toilet paper which only exists in Europe kills me every time I see it. Also, watch this European toilet with the top flush. No toilet in America... - Like they have in Ohio. No toilet in Ohio flushes on top. But on the wall, by the way, were some comic books by some friends of mine, I'll shout out to them. One of the weirdest things about making a movie is everything has to be legally cleared. So if you see a book or a poster ina movie, everything has to be legally cleared, and we spent... Including this commentary, which no doubt will be censored. But everything you're seeing on the walls, toys, things on the table, whatnot, had to be cleared, and we spent more time clearing things and trying to call in favors from people we knew who had posters of things. There are actually... - Is this how real movies work? There were actually pieces of this scene that we had to cut because I remember there was a toy that didn't clear... and I'm probably not legally allowed to say what toy it was... sitting on Scotty's desk and we couldn't use... It was a toy from the movie Out Cold. But, yeah, I mean, we spent a tremendous amount of time trying to clear this, trying to clear college names. Also a special thank-you to my parents who went to the Cleveland Indians store when we had nothing to put on the wall. - And spent like drunks. Yeah, spent like drunks and shipped it all to Prague.

11:53 · jump to transcript →

The shot just before this, the one outside, we actually shot at the Prague airport, which is another advantage to shooting in Prague. I don't think there's any way you could get a camera crew right on the departure gate of an American airport anymore because of security. Of course, one of the downsides of shooting at the real airport in Prague is that we had our day curtailed by a bomb threat. Bomb threat, which I still maintain... - Potato, potato. I maintain may have been because of us, and there was no bomb. There was no bomb. - I'm sure some... A grip left a bag of clamps somewhere and... But that was another scene, too, where, when we look at it, there was sort of a way of shooting it, two different ways of... We started shooting them sort of looking out where we were shooting into those boring offices, and obviously the prettier shot... I Know I'm talking backwards... In hindsight, we should've shot the other direction. We should've shot in the other direction, because when they do turn around, you see that background. And again, these are lessons that were sort of both imparted to us as we were going along by our wonderful DP, who we should mention, David Eggby. - David Eggby, who saved us from ourselves every day. And there's a certain amount he can tell us, which he certainly did, and there's a certain number of times where we have to be wrong before you learn and certainly that was an example again, something we did where... The other thing in the deleted... - He warned us and we didn't. In between the courier counter and this scene, there's some fun stuff in the deleted scenes, which is they realize that they're gonna have to take all these courier packages, so they don't know what to do with all their clothes. They have to wear all of them onto the plane and through the airport. There was about 15 minutes of stuff which... Decide for yourself whether it works or not. It didn't work in the movie, but it's fun to look at. And by the way, Jacob's T-shirt says, "I'm rocking on your dime." Travis owned that T-shirt and we thought it was funny, so we put it on Jacob in the movie. These transitions-- That's my dog. These transitions were... That's my queen of England. - That's your beaded London flag. Yeah, it goes on the back of my cab seat. These transitions were also done by Kyle Cooper at Prologue. There's a few more of them coming up. You'll see. And this is our first big visual effects shot. Yeah, this was an amazing debate. That's not the real Jacob Pitts. That's a robot. This was shot in Prague by... There's a big river in Prague and that's all real. That's real. And we put a little British flag there, and basically the background was replaced. Not in these shots. In that shot. - In that shot, the background is replaced because on that side, I think, was... Is that where our hotel was? I don't remember. No, we were further down. - Further down, okay. And I guess we should mention Kevin Blank, who was our visual effects guru supervisor, who we found from the TV show A/as, where each week they do a lot of really amazing things like this. Right. If you look in the background, you see the buses on the bridge. The bridge is real and the buses are real, but the stuff behind that is not real. But the flag, for example, I don't think that's real. They added that. If you look at the clouds move... - There's cars moving on the side. The clouds are moving. They put those clouds in. And what Kevin allowed us to do, besides being a really good guy, as everyone on this movie was, he let us do a lot of big effects like that on sort of a TV budget which allowed... This was a "smaller budgeted movie," and it let us do some special effects without bringing in these, like, big effects companies where it would cost a lot of money. By the way, this is about the time that we should mention the Feisty Goat. This is the Feisty Goat pub. And we saw the sign out in front, which we misspelled. I think this is the right time to say that Alec, David and I went to Harvard and we didn't know how to spell "feisty." We spelled it wrong in the stage directions. Spelled it "fiesty." - The guys who made the sign just took our spelling. We showed up on the day and the crew was laughing and we couldn't figure out what they were laughing at. We shot an entire day without anyone noticing and on day two, people realized. - No, they knew. Did they know? Okay. - Oh, yeah. They were laughing their asses off at us. And then finally, it was like, "Did you guys know?" And they're like, "Yeah." - And this is the incomparable Vinnie Jones who, when we wrote the part of Mad Maynard, the chief hooligan, we hoped that maybe we could get Vinnie Jones. We wrote it with Vinnie Jones or a Vinnie Jones-type in mind, never thinking that we would get the real Vinnie Jones. The dream being Vinnie Jones or someone that would rip Vinnie off. And the pleasure of getting him was just so great. It was amazing. He scared the living daylights out of these two. They're not... This is, again, method acting. We told Vinnie that they were really... that the kids were really scared of him, and he did nothing to make them feel at home for this scene.

18:35 · jump to transcript →

And this we shot the same day that we shot Jeffrey... We had Jeffrey Tambor for one day. So we did the high school and then we ran down the street to this... It was about as close as we could find. Looks a little European, but it's okay. We thought that scene was gonna go when Scotty appears at the Vatican. But we ended up moving it... - We moved it up there. And something that makes me laugh for no reason. The mom there is reading this Jackie Collins book, which we cleared. And as the only book we cleared, that book appears a bunch more times. Scott's reading it a little later. It's the one book that's seen in this movie. A couple of these guys are English and a couple of them are Czech. The closer guys are actually English, which helps. And these guys were really good. I mean, the guy on the right there. John Comer. - Wow. That guy, who really makes me laugh. And these guys are really good. They found the camera. This was on this highway... We shot this on a moving bus. We're trailing the bus behind a big camera truck. And when we wrote the movie, we didn't realize how insanely difficult shooting on a moving bus was, so... Don't shoot on a moving bus. - There was a lot more stuff. Originally, the whole hooligan pub scene, when we sold it, was on the bus. They get on the wrong bus and they're trapped on this bus. We realized that that whole hooligan pub scene being shot on this bus would be impossible. It would be 16 days to shoot it. So we moved that to a pub. And shooting on a bus, just dealing with something that's moving, with the lights constantly changing... You'll see there's a lot of hot spots on Jacob there that we... I mean, that's the best that we ever got it. He is pretty overexposed. - Looks like a real bus. That's what makes it kind of look good. That's what is sort of neat about it. But in shooting this... This was one of the real downsides of having three of us doing this job, that one of us fit inside the bus and the other two were clinging to this tow rig. And it had just rained, so there was water all over everything. It was about 18 degrees. - It was like being on a motorboat. Like on a motorboat in the Baltic Sea. - We were under a tarp. In the bus, I was lying on my back on some camera batteries. It wasn't very comfortable. - But you were warm. I was warm. - They were warm batteries. This, again, was the same deserted highway. And Vinnie is just... - We just let Vinnie go. We just said, "Go bananas," and, boy, did he deliver.

25:15 · jump to transcript →

John Cameron Mitchell

So he was the creator of the Real Life Salon. The Real Salon that this was based on, he would show 60mm films. There's Jonathan Couette. Jonathan Couette, who directed Tarnation. He auditioned for Shortbus, and that's how we met him. And he had elements of his film Tarnation in his audition tape for Shortbus, which is how I became aware of it and tried to help him out.

21:27 · jump to transcript →

John Cameron Mitchell

And we have a deleted scene that's going to be on the DVD with the two of them. You wonder what happened to them when they go off after this. Jay's not here right now, but he would tell you how much he hates looking at his hair. I love his hair in the film. Now he has very, very short hair. And that little joke he just did with the camera is something that he used to do in real life, and I said that is going in the movie. It's a great moment.

22:40 · jump to transcript →

John Cameron Mitchell

just when Alan confesses to his sins. Can you imagine? If a real mayor might have done something like this? Yes, or if the real mayor saw this and thought, wow. I hope he does. They let me off the hook big time with this one. Well, we don't really say it's based on anyone, but we leave that up to the knowledge of many. See, this is an amazing scene in that when she's looking at me,

32:16 · jump to transcript →

The book that's coming up... ...is actually a scroll called The Oracle Bones in the movie. And if you look to the left... ...those bones with the writing on it are the true Oracle Bones. I had to give a form of concentrated knowledge... ...but the real Oracle Bones were discovered... ...in the early to mid 20th century...

6:07 · jump to transcript →

And, of course, what's a mummy movie without a few mummies? Here's number one. Anyway, all of these ideas in this tomb are based on the real tomb in Xi'an in terms of its layout and the hypothesis of where the army was and where the emperor was actually buried.

18:15 · jump to transcript →

and hope that the mystery would be even greater by not explaining it at this point. Here we have the Beijing Opera doing the Monkey King. We've really staged the opera with the real Chinese opera stars, and it was a fitting.

47:23 · jump to transcript →

My recollection is it was $800,000 back in 1954. Yes. Now Lawton tried to draw parallels between some of the characters and other characters in the story. For instance, note this shot, and then remember that it'll be repeated when the children's father, Peter Graves, is brought before the judge, so that there's a parallel visually between the real father and the phony father. This is the penitentiary in Moundsville.

4:52 · jump to transcript →

And those are the real sounds of the crickets, I believe, that you actually heard at that ranch. It's nice to see how, you know, these significant shots of John walking from place to place and how subtly that does allow him to claim the film and own it as the protagonist. You know, it's his viewpoint and his navigating the world.

25:40 · jump to transcript →

It's interesting that you mention that because in real life, Sally Jane Bruce grew up to become a teacher. That's right. In Central California, yeah. And on the other side of Billy Chapin is another wonderful child actress. Yes, Cheryl Calloway.

1:11:41 · jump to transcript →