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.

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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 Thandie 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.

58:43 · jump to transcript →

the film characters from the real characters, I think Lindsay's performance was very interesting because there was that dimension that she was married to a very famous writer. Exactly. And not only is he someone not really in the public eye, but his thoughts are in the public eye. So should those thoughts stray? Should there be, in Whitley's life, for example, where the line between fiction and nonfiction blurs?

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that kept coming back to me was, we don't want to do this because we don't believe it. Kind of a stupid remark because, you know, do you believe Raiders of the Lost Ark or any other Hollywood movie? But the fact that it was being pushed in the media as a true story actually inhibited people in committing to it. You're very right. Movies will... I mean, you will see studios throw $60 million at a Star Trek movie without batting an eye

11:20 · jump to transcript →

just could be described as classic symptoms of paranoia. And I think what Whitley did was, and I really do admire him as a writer, I think what he did was combining those classic archetypal fears and mixing it up with the subject of UFOs and aliens, certainly in terms of the book, was a masterstroke. Whether it's a true story or not, of course, we'll never know because we weren't there.

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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 Albin 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.

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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...

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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.

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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

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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 →

whole film is sort of wrapped up in that and the uncertainties of memory absolutely and then another hard cut out to our amazing uh replicate of isr footage which um simon and his team did awesome job with building this and this was kind of a last minute pivot as well a lot of the isr stuff that you're seeing that overhead black and white white hot imagery is was kind of a last minute addition well we tried to get the real

7:25 · jump to transcript →

These buildings, whatever they are, 300 meters away, thereabouts. And what we had was a film set, which was built just outside London in an abandoned airfield called Bovingdon. But what Mark Digby and Michelle Day and their team did was they built an entire street and some sort of streets off the street, replicating the real street in Ramadi. And so although we were on a set

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something horrific that happened to real people. And many of the real people were around the cast and the crew. Which, even if they weren't there, it would have been quite an extreme experience for those actors and for the crew as well. But they were there. And this is that transition moment just about to start. Yeah. I remember from here on out, I was like, yep.

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Jim Piddock

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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Jim Piddock

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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Jim Piddock

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

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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 Paull Goldin, 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

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Tony Scott

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.

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Tony Scott

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

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Tony Scott

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.

15:48 · jump to transcript →

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...

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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 Juliette's father in real life. Yes. No, nobody knows that. Every time I tell people that, they're surprised to hear it. Actually, Juliette 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 Allan 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.

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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 →

One little thing I noticed... I mean, I didn't catch it when I was directing Jeff with this, is that when he plays Clu, he plays it with this strange computer accent, this mechanical accent. And now, when he's being tortured, he loses that, and I wonder whether he noticed it. We got so caught up in being in the scene that nobody realized that at the time. Clu's torture sequence is a great example of how light is used to create emotion. Lots of different filters were used on him as a part of that torture sequence. There are, basically, ripple glass effects, there's silk screen steel mesh, exposure changes, hand-done animation. When he's energized by the MCP, there are other filters that were used on the camera to give him that multiple-effect look. In this particular case, it was silk screen mesh, steel silk screen mesh that was on the taking camera and was spun around on the lens as a part of that effect. Dillinger's arrival to ENCOM in his personalized chopper was an interesting sequence. I took drawings of the chopper, schematic drawings, and created the design motif that you see on the chopper. And then over a two-day period, I applied these designs to the chopper myself with these varying sized, 3M reflective tapes. So, when we are shooting this sequence, what we are basically doing is flying air-to-air in another chopper parallel to this chopper. And we have a very low-intensity light source right near the lens of the camera, which is shooting across and reflecting directly back at the camera off of this 3M material. And it was a red light source, so it gives you the appearance that the chopper is either backlit or has some kind of neon lighting system on it. Again, there was the attempt to, for the outside, the window, to have the grid type of atmosphere and, kind of, cross-pollinize the electronic world with reality. Oh, I remember this stuff. Nice desktop computer built right into the glass. Touch screen. - Touch screen. I still want this desk. This was done with rear projection under the desk. The whole set had to be built up on the stage so that we could put a giant mirror under the set and project it in the old-fashioned way. There were technicians who were basically controlling light switches to different light boxes underneath this desk to light up different areas. The type itself, when it writes itself on, is actually matted into the scene from a computer graphics created type. And again, the view behind Dillinger is indistinguishable from the electronic world. And whose voice is the MCP? It's David Warner's voice. - Yeah. Yeah. It was just electronicized a little bit. End of line. Someone pointed out that they finally figured out that the reason that Bruce Boxleitner's character was wearing glasses is because he was supposed to be a little bit of a nerd. I think that was the intent. Just the readouts on the computers in the real world had to be pre-programmed ahead of time so that they wouldn't have rolling bars on them when we photographed them. Here you see another attempt to link the electronic world with the real world. The cubicles that the office workers are in are not dissimilar to the cubicles that the game players are in. And the intent was to have them go on forever or almost for infinity. Now, what thematically is happening is that at the time, computer people... Programmers were very concerned that the IBMs were going to take over the world of computers and exclude people. That they were going to be... That the system was going to be tyrannical. And what we're trying to show here is that the... Corporately, they've put a stranglehold on the system, and that the programmers are not being allowed the access that they want. And access for them is vital for their work. This character, Alan/Tron, is still inside the world of ENCOM and is more in balance. He seems... He's one of the people that's going to deal with the system from the inside. He's got a very methodical program in Tron, whereas Flynn is no... He's a renegade now. He just doesn't fit in and he's at war with the Dillinger character. The name Tron is derived from electron. Some programmers think it refers to "trace on, trace off." But that... We learned about that afterwards. There's a program in Japan called TRON, which is an educational school program, which has been running since 1985. And ENCOM was the only name we could find that wasn't already registered as a corporate name. Whereas Alan and Flynn are aligned with their counterpart programs, Dillinger has aligned himself with the tyrannical Master Control Program. So, the MCP is the ultimate controller, the big mainframe, the antithesis of the personal computer. The sequences that take place at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory were interesting in their concept and in production. It was a very complex place to work. It was a very tight area, and we worked on this film with 65-millimeter equipment. And Bruce Logan, the DP, had his hands full. Sixty-five-millimeter film technology is quite cumbersome compared to Panaflexes and Panavision cameras. The size of the camera body itself, the limitations of the lenses, blimping the cameras... They're huge, so to get them in these cramped quarters was difficult. We were the only ones... Only film company ever allowed access to shoot in there. And nobody's been back since. A lot of this was lit, practically, by the fluorescents that are in there. It almost looks like a set. Yeah. We were very lucky that Lawrence Livermore let us use this facility. Because the cost of building a set this elaborate would have been astronomical. The Lawrence Livermore Lab is where they had the largest laser in the world. I don't know if it still does today. And they did a lot of research for NASA. Lawrence Livermore Lab was very cooperative with us, and allowed us to, really, kind of, run free through this particular area of the laboratory, which was their linear accelerator. So, we went into the one particular area, which we found most interesting for the area where Flynn gets de-rezzed, and where you first see the matter transportation effect, where the orange is digitized and deteriorated and then reassembled. In this particular case, we are seeing an orange, which was created by CGI by Triple-l. Animation that was done by the effects animation department, which was headed up by Lee Dyer and the effects animators, John Van Vliet, and John Norton, Barry Cook and Michael Wolf, Chris Casady. The name of that laser, by the way, Is Shiva, the Hindu goddess of creation and destruction. The 16 billion-year life cycle, she's got the drum of creation in one hand and the fire of destruction in the other. ...femain suspended in the laser beam. Then, when the computer plays out the model, the molecules fall back into place and voila! So simple. Why didn't I think of that? - That's right. Use that on Star Trek all the time. It's funny how they just kind of, just blow it off. Another afternoon's work down in the lab. Exactly. - Teletransportation, okay. Just digitized matter, no problem. Tomorrow we'll do watermelons. In a week, a human being. No, that comes sooner than that. A-ha! Oh, you're giving it away now.

7:08 · jump to transcript →

One little anecdote here is that the cameraman that was up on the platform shooting this, the viewfinder of his camera was broken, the pellicle mirror had shattered, and he couldn't see anything through the camera and he just aimed and shot. He didn't want to slow down the production by telling anyone that he couldn't see anything, and held his breath all the way till dailies, and the shot worked out. Oh, that's right. 'Cause there weren't very many 65-millimeter cameras available, and all this was shot in 65 millimeter. Yeah. When we opened these cameras, they still had the sand of Lawrence of Arabia in them. Well, Flynn's arcade was in Culver City. Yeah, it's across the street from the old MGM lot, which is now the Columbia lot, but now renamed as Sony Pictures. Now, there was actually a loft at the location. But then the re-shoot... The close-ups were the re-shoots on a stage. Yeah. That's the... The actual... The practical location. Space Paranoids. Space Paranoids. I take my son to the arcade in Westwood. We go once in a while. I have to bring my earplugs. But I've never seen an old couple like that in a video game arcade. That's right. We knew that Bally was going to release a video game simultaneous to the release of the picture, and therefore we wanted to have the design of the game in the arcade and the game in the real world that people would actually play be very similar. So, we go to Flynn's, and we see Flynn playing the electronic game and fighting off a Recognizer. That is the console which we created for the film that represented the game that Bally was going to create. Although, obviously, at that time, there was no way that a computer game could have real-time, interactive, full raster graphic imagery. So, it was a prediction of the future of the way games were going to evolve, and that is what we're now seeing in CD-ROM games and the games that are in home computers and arcades today. Jeff did get very good at video games. We had some on the set. Yeah, he was remarkable, and one day you suggested that we videotape him while he was actually doing it. And look at the neon in the back. I'd forgotten about that. OA, right. I don't think any of the actors actually went so far as to get themselves a computer and spend hours backstage... Programming. -... learning how to program and... That didn't happen, but they got as far as games. Battle Tank. We used to play a lot of Battle Tank. Battlezone. Yeah. Battlezone. There you go. Now, as! recall, you... We re-shot this sequence. Yeah, and I don't even remember... The lighting... To match, I think, the lighting of the game arcade. Well, I think, actually... - We changed dialogue. Did we? - Changed dialogue. And here's a little secret. We told the studio that we needed to redo it to match the lighting. Well, see, /... Still using the same excuse. That's right, you're still... You're still well-programmed... - /'// never tell. The lighting didn't match. The casting process was interesting. Originally, I'd pictured Jeff's character being younger and the Tron character being older. We were affected by some things that were definitely outside of our control. Tron predates Splash, and people forget that, really, Disney was having a hell of a time getting popular actors to work for the studio. And it had been a tough time for Disney. And it didn't help that we were saying, "Yeah, we want you to wear these funny costumes." And Jeff was always enthusiastic about being part of the picture. The Tron character... Bruce was... I don't think Bruce was quite as adventuresome at first, although he got into it after a while. I would have liked to have seen Bruce possibly be a little, I think... I had pictured him as sort of a younger Kirk Douglas. I think he would have been better if he had been a little older like he is now. I like the way he looks now. And I think Jeff... I was surprised at how physical Jeff was. I thought that... I pictured Flynn being a little more geekish or a pencil neck, and Jeff is very physically strong. So, in that sense, the two became somewhat similar, although their personalities and what they represent are completely different. One little anecdote is that... I can't point back at the character of Tron and say, "There were all these actors." Or, "It was between this one and that one." But I do remember one surprising actor who really wanted to play this part, and it was Peter O'Toole. - Yes. Oh, he wanted to play the part of Dillinger. No, it was Tron. Tron, that's right. I think we wanted him for Dillinger and he said, "No." And I had this amazing scene with him in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel where... In his hotel room where he said, "I can do this!" And he started leaping from one piece of furniture to the other and screaming that, "I want Tron on my tombstone right next to Lawrence of Arabia!" And who knows, maybe he would have been great, maybe I really missed it right there. All these interiors... Shooting them, these low-light interiors, in 65 millimeter is very difficult, because the depth of field, the focus plane is incredibly short, and it was a real struggle. And some of the close-ups, we actually had to run light stands up the backs of the actors through their jackets as braces, so that they would stay in the exact same spot, so that we could keep their eyes and faces in focus. You know, if your file was in there... - Hey, wait a minute. If we can get in there, I can forge us a Group 6 access. Well, shall we dance? And ENCOM was shot in downtown Los Angeles. I forget the building. Of, the Transam building? Oh, yeah, the Transamerica building. At the top of that was the helicopter pad. This sequence between these two heads of the company really expresses the philosophical problems that the other characters are going through. Again, the office is designed to mirror the other world in terms of its graphic look. Wasn't there something about the cold, corporate look as well, Steven? There's your door. - There's the door. The scene where they sneak into ENCOM and open the door that is 10 feet thick or 12 feet thick, that's a real door, that's not a prop movie door. That's an actual radiation door at Lawrence Livermore. ENCOM isn't the business you started in your garage anymore. In one scene, you see a number of things flip up into four corners. Images. That was a traditional optical that had to be done, and opticals in those days would take two, three, four, five weeks at least, and it was a big task. It was like making its own little movie. You know, you can remove men like Alan and me from the system, but we helped create it, and our spirit remains in every program we designed... That line is one of the key lines in the whole script, about the human element that the programmers put into the system. And it's this discussion between those two characters that really elevates the picture well beyond a video game movie. Now, the reverse was shot, actually, on the Iot, so there's a reverse... Getting into the Disney vaults? Yeah. Lawrence Livermore was quite proud of the fact that although this door weighed tens of tons, or whatever it was, it was so well hinged that you could open it by just pushing it. One person could. In fact, you found... I believe you saw that door as we were taking a tour of the facility and you Said, "This would be a great place for them to sneak in." So, you kind of re-wrote the scene to accommodate that huge door. And the irony is, as he punches the buttons, that the giant door opens, and no strength is exerted, but it's opened automatically. I kind of inherited the job of not only setting up the giant rear projector and the mirror and all that stuff, but I also had the job of putting together what would end up going onto the desk. That's an actual wireframe on there, for the carrier, as you See... Right. - ...in the film. I began searching around for footage to go onto the desk, and it was getting late, and we were about to shoot this thing in a couple of days, and I just ran out of stuff, so I put the flowchart from the film on there, and probably things out of my address book and anything I could... I was down to pulling things out of Life magazine and re-photographing those. I was just running out of stuff to put on the desk. What's interesting about this protagonist, Jeff Bridges' character, is that he's actually, um... He's a creative, technical type, and he's fighting for his creations, he's fighting for his work. I think that's pretty unique. He is somewhat of a paranoid character. But with some reason. With some... Yeah. - Some good reason. Dillinger will never know we've been in here. Good luck, hot shot.

16:15 · jump to transcript →

When we came to make a decision about what film format to use for Tron, we felt very strongly that we needed to shoot it on a larger negative than traditionally done. And it came down to a choice between 65 millimeter and VistaVision for the whole show. But the availability of 65-millimeter cameras was far better than the availability of VistaVision cameras, so we made the decision to shoot the entire show in 65 millimeter. And to keep a certain consistency, and as long as we had rented the cameras, we felt that we might as well go ahead and shoot the real world in 65 millimeter and not in 35 millimeter. It was kind of one of those nice to have things, and nobody objected strenuously to it, and also it would be the first time since Ryan's Daughter that a film had been shot entirely in 65 millimeter. And I think you can see the results. I mean, it looks wonderful. In the monitors in Lawrence Livermore, one of the things that Triple-/ had to do was create lots of imagery that appeared on monitors, and that imagery had to be shot and created long before we got to production. So, there was a lot of planning in creating all of the monitor imagery, and Triple-I did a great job on that. Spent a Iot of time on this shot. To accomplish the effect, what we did was get a 4-by-5 still camera and photograph Jeff Bridges in his position after he's been zapped, and then immediately moved him out and took another photograph, which was the background by itself. So, as you pull away chunks of Jeff, you see the background behind him, and then to put the laser and the grid and all that on top of him was basically the effects animation of John Van Vliet. When Flynn is de-rezzed and pulled into the computer, we go through one of the most interesting sequences in Tron, which is the real world to electronic world transition. This sequence was created by Robert Abel & Associates, primarily under the direction of Kenny Merman. It was a sequence which I had designed, knowing that the way that Robert Abel & Associates was making these computer graphic images with the Evans & Sutherland computers, and, really, using vector graphics to create this particular look, would give us a look that would be unique just for this transition. The three-space transition, the movement through all these binary bit patterns and this polygonal landscape, was done by making multiple passes through a traditional animation camera that was pointed at a high-resolution, vector graphic, Evans & Sutherland computer screen, and making multiple passes, frame by frame, using different colored filters, coming back, making multiple passes of rewinding other filters, until you finally end up with this, which seems to be solid objects. But it's really made out of lots of tiny, tiny lines put together to make solid blocks of color or objects. Oh, man, this isn't happening. It only thinks it's happening. When Flynn says, "This isn't happening, it just thinks it's happening," it's a key line, because it means that the reality that he finds himself in now, not even he can fully believe exists. And if anyone should appreciate and understand this alternate reality, it's him, and now he finds himself trapped in it. All right, now we see Sark standing on the bridge, and all of a sudden, he is enclosed with these shrouds of light as he begins to have his conversation with the MCP. The database for the MCP was a human figure that we had created at Triple-/ called Adam Powers and was originally on the Information International sample reel. And if you look at that sample reel, you'll see a juggler character who was juggling balls. Well, that face of that character is the face of the MCP. So, the first time that you see him, he is a polygonal drawing of a face. And that's basically the underlying database of the face. So, it's made of polygons. And those polygons, we play them out on the Triple-I computers as the line-drawing polygons, and made 12-and-a-half by 20-inch stills, high-con stills of those. But we created the mouth positions for the vowels and the syllables so that you could take these interchangeable transparencies and lay them down and make him Say, by whatever order you put them in, whatever you wanted him to say. 'Cause he was voicing a lot of different dialogue. Then those were backlit, and then we applied an effect to those line drawings of putting a steel mesh screen over the taking camera, and it made it have that much more, kind of, complex look. And then we also animated the exposure occasionally. Early on in the film when I started working with Steven, we did a lot of experiments to work out how these characters were created. The thing that we finally decided was that the characters needed to have this energy inside themselves. They are obviously in this electronic world. Now, these costumes were unlike any costumes anyone had ever created for a picture before, in that they were costumes designed to have effects treatments done to them. They were white with black drawing or black lines over them. All of the black elements on the costume were turned into circuitry which could be backlit and light could be pushed through there. We originally shot a 65-millimeter image of these people, live-action photography of them on these black sets. Then from that 65-millimeter film, we created some photo-rotoscope machines, which basically could project the 65-millimeter film down to large pieces of film, which were pre-punched with animation punches. This film was created by Kodak for us, and we would project down with these photo-rotoscope machines, which would hold this film into a vacuum frame and make a continuous tone positive print of each frame of the film. Then these continuous tone prints were taken to a light table, it was a vacuum light table, where they were contact printed to high-con film to make a number of high-con positive and negative images. So that you basically have for every character a large cel and you have high-con positives, negatives, and a continuous tone positive. Then these high-con elements were hand-inked and painted to isolate the circuits on the body, the whites of the eyes, the whites of the teeth and any other circuits that we wanted to treat as a separate exposure. The characters are more often than not... The live-action characters are shot on an all black stage. When there is a set, the set is also black, but is measured out to conform with what we're seeing in this artwork. So that if a character appears elevated in a shot, like this shot, there was an elevated platform for him to walk on, but it didn't look at all like the set. Then we would composite these actors over paintings, transparencies, and once that was done, we would add the light and the color separately. And to simplify it, you can describe it as a sort of perfect blend between live action and animation in that we took live-action film, photographed it in a way that we could break it down to individual frames, then blow up those frames into large slides or transparencies. And we had 75,000 of these, which seems like an appallingly large number, but it really isn't if you compare it to an animation film. And because we were at Disney, they were not overly swamped. That's an actual Frisbee, by the way, and those are actual Frisbees on their backs. We had a excellent Frisbee coach, Sam Schaiz. I like the fact that the deadliest weapon in Tron is a Frisbee. A Iot of effects animation in this sequence and in the film. And that is the animation that makes the glows, and as the Frisbee gets brighter, and you see the reflections of it on their costumes, all that has to be done frame by frame. This is hand-drawn animation that, although it is drawn, a negative is made of that, and it is placed over a light source and then re-photographed, and the ability of the effects animators was such that we were never waiting on the effects animation on the show. They always performed very well. It was never a problem. They did very few redos, and that's because they had had experience doing this beforehand, whereas everything else that we were doing, outside of the effects animation, was the first time through. So, that had a much tougher and steeper learning curve. In the holding cells for the game grid, those are backgrounds that are entirely hand-drawn by the background department, again using Rapidographs and line drawing and airbrushing and then turning those into high-cons. But those drawings are all drawn to match the actual physical sets, which were built so that when someone passes behind something, or leans on something, those are actual physical sets that were built. But again, the sets were just black on black. They're as if they were made of black velvet. Part of the interesting thing as a cinemagraphic problem that was presented to Bruce Logan was that he had to shoot, unlike anybody had ever shot before, sets that were entirely black with white line drawings and white characters running around on these sets. Bruce Logan's job in photographing these people was very difficult because, unlike most photography for most films, you try and get as much chiaroscuro in the picture as you can. You let there be a lot of dark and you create shadows and you create this moodiness, which a cinematographer takes great pride in. In this film, during the sequences in the electronic world, basically, he had to light them so that we could see as much of the costume as possible with as little shading as possible because all of the shading and all of that were done by hand by making different masks and airbrush elements that were used under these costumes in post. The ring game was an interesting technical exercise. The set itself, again, was black flock paper with the rings drawn on this paper with tape. The actors had to realize which rings were there and which ones were not as they acted out the sequence, imagining that they were hundreds of feet above the ground. One of the inspirations of Tron is the movie Spartacus. And there's quite a few similarities to the persecuted people who had to fight in the gladiatorial games. This game, of course, was inspired by Pong and jai alai. I think one of the interesting parts of Tron was the synthesis of new games that were created. The design, for example, of the glove that's being worn here, we took a traditional jai alai glove and then rebuilt it and made it out of foam, added other elements to it to give it a more technological quality, and then again, I put the designs over the outside of that to make it blend with the rest of the costumes. Shooting in 65 millimeter, from a director's standpoint, is a lot of trouble. The cameras are huge and bulky. The format requires an enormous amount of light to fill that negative, so if you are shooting Lawrence of Arabia or Doctor Zhivago and you've got lots of snow and big exteriors, it's fine, but in low-light-level situations, it's very troublesome. The depth of field is sometimes as little as a half an inch, and you find your cameraman is asking you, "Now, which part of the eye do you want in focus? "Do you want the front of the eye or the back of the eye in focus?" Or if the head of the actor is not square to the camera, they ask you the really insane question of, "Which eye do you want in focus? "I can give you the front eye in focus or the back, "but the other one's gonna be blurry." Now a lot of these shots where you see actors talking to each other and we're doing over-the-shoulders, the camera couldn't hold focus for the blow-ups to be made, and I had to shoot the actors on separate passes. So, in a shot like this, where you see all three actors talking to each other, it wasnt filmed that way. I filmed them separately and they were composited. And there's quite a few shots like this. Whenever you see them walking around and they're separated by more than a couple feet, those are all separate shots, and then the actors are composited. So, it's very difficult for the actors because not only do they not see the environment they're in when we're filming, all they see is an all black stage, but they don't even see the actor they're talking to. Forming of the Lightcycles, again, is almost entirely done by hand-done animation done by the effects animation department in creating the way that these cycles form around these characters. We built an object that the actor could sit upon, and it was literally a mechanical shape that was the seat and the handlebars, so he could sit down and it would thrust his arms forward and pull him down into that locked position. So that everything that he sits upon and touches, it was, again, drawn by the animation department, and not until you see the final completed cycle, which is actually a CG/ rendering of the cycle, is any of it done by computer. The Lightcycle sequence was done by MAGI. Their way of creating an object were to take basic geometric shapes, cones, cubes, spheres, cylinders, and make an object by collaging those particular pieces together and creating an object. And that's how the Lightcycle was created. All wide shots that you see are computer-simulated. All of the shots, other than the very tight shots of the figures inside the canopies, are computer-simulated. The shots inside the canopies are actually hand-drawn artwork of parts of the Lightcycles, and the animation that's happening over the Lightcycle windshields is hand-done animation to give them a sense of speed. But virtually every scene that you see of the Lightcycles is entirely computer-generated. And there's not even effects animation in those scenes. If there's an explosion when a Lightcycle hits the wall and a tire bounces across, I think those were basically all CGI. Syd Mead worked really hard on designing these motorcycles so that they would incorporate the characters. But if you look closely at them, you'll see that the second half of the bike is flattened and sort of two-dimensional, and that was done because the computers couldn't handle too many compound curved surfaces. So, we restricted those curves to the wheels and the windscreens, and then the rest of the bike was simplified. The ability to move the camera through 3D space with these computer-graphic-looking landscapes is just great. The Recognizers are a sort of King Kong. There's a little head on top of that gate structure... Suggestion of a face, but it, sort of, got lost. The Recognizers were created by MAGI-Synthavision. As I mentioned, there are graphic vector lines, red lines outlining all of these objects, the same way with the tank. The tank was another unique design of Syd Mead, who is a futurist, a fabulous designer. Once Ram, Tron and Flynn have escaped the Lightcycle grid and are off through the canyons being pursued by the tanks, we cut inside the tanks and see another example of a Syd Mead set that was built as a three-dimensional set, again with black background, and all of the elements on there graphically put on so they could later be treated. So the camera, you can see, is moving through scenes in ways that no physical camera or no model shot could possibly do. The animators that I worked with to create the choreography for all of the CG/ sequences were Bill Kroyer and Jerry Rees. But to communicate all this information to the computer technologists, the people that are sitting at monitors at that time, took a new language which we had to create. So, what we did was, first of all, we had to think of each sequence as a real physical reality. Not only would they draw the point of view that they saw as an animator that we would work out together, that was the story point that Steven wanted to make, and also the point of view that we wanted to take. But after we would draw the original storyboards in a traditional, kind of, storyboard manner, we would have to go back and draw a top view, side view and front view of the objects, where they were in time, where the camera was in time, and what the camera's point of view was. So, we really had to define everything to the CG/ technologist in a three-world, three-dimensional space. And that was the first time that that had ever been done. They must've gone right past us. We made it...this far. Now, all of this, this revolt, it's all being led by the user who's gone in the system, Flynn. The Tron character and Ram character, they would have toed the line and gone through the software the way they're supposed to. We'd better, Null Unit. Null Unit. Get the computer dictionary out. Look up "Null Unit." What does that mean? In this sequence, you can really see some of the flaws. I don't really mean the flaws, but the imperfections in the cels, little bits of dirt that pop on and off. Yeah, but they're few and far between considering. Yeah. Come on, you little bugger. Come on. Look at that. A lot of pops and a lot of glitches in there that we would always Say, "Well, that's what happens in an electronic world." When we started there were going to be no differentiations between the flesh tones and the rest of their uniform. But at a certain point they looked, well, not very good. So as a result, that added, approximately, 120,000 extra frames, extra elements to the shot, so it did grow in many aspects. The cave sequence where Flynn, Tron and Ram finally re-energize their selves with this liquid energy was a very interesting technical problem to solve here. In the sequence in the cave when the water is being handled by the actors, literally, frame per frame, rotoscope animation is isolating the water from the body so that it can be treated with a different filter and a different exposure. And again, this is an example of how light is used to portray motion or energy, as Tron drinks and you see his circuits light up and they become energized. The set itself was a complex geometric shape, which was designed by Peter Lloyd, and we built into this set, basically, water channels, and the water itself was reflecting light sources that we put in angle so they would reflect to the camera, and the water was in black tanks so that all we're really seeing are the highlights on the water. Yeah, but the biggest problem at that time was do we fill this with colored water or clear water? Had to do tests, you know. - Right. That was your problem. Do we put milk in there and make it purple? I think that what Flynn is surprised now, ironically, to see that there's parts of this mirror world that are more alive than he anticipated. So, it's not just the harsh computer reality, there's something living about it. It's a very complex shot, again, with all the elements. Probably about 30 different elements, 30 different separate exposures for each frame. Normally in a special effects movie, you get a very bad bottleneck effect in that all these things have to be composited through one or two optical printers. Now we have digital compositing machines. But by putting it into a manufacturing system like this, where it became like an animated film, we could use 14 or 15 animation stands, and we could use a slew of effects animators and ink and paint people to do all of this work simultaneously. As far as I know, we still have more shots with human beings composited into an artificial environment than any other movie. I believe there's 1,100 special effect shots in the film and 900 of which have human beings composited in them. And that number is just very, very large. Just the organizational task alone was monumental, not even considering the creative side of it. For every frame you would have an additional five to 15 cels that isolated the different colors and the different... We had body mattes, we had face masks, continuous tones. You made print backs on top of print backs. So, those 75,000 original cels grew to over half a million. I think we ended up with something like 600,000 cels, all of which had to be kept in order. We had to pull trailers, literally these large house trailers, kind of, industrial trailers onto the lot. We ran out of space and we ended up with 10 trailers that would house all these cels and had to be organized and sent over... 80% of them were sent overseas and had to be numbered and then painted and kept in order. At one point we thought if we had 1,000 scenes, and this was around Christmas time, the film was going to come out later that summer, and we had no idea of how we were going to get it all done in that short a period of time. And we thought, "Well, it's summer vacation. We have two weeks. "We'll get college students, 500 college students in a room." We really believed this might happen. We discussed this for about an hour and we Said, "You'd have 500 students in a room. "We'll teach them how to do inking and painting and rotoscoping, "and they only have to do two scenes each. "And so they do one scene a week. "At the end of that time, we'll be done, "and we'll just go and shoot them on the animation stands." It didn't work out. So, we brought on Arnie Wong, who was an animator. We put him in charge of supervising Cuckoo's Nest, which is a ink and paint service that was in Taiwan. Approximately 80-some employees in a single room. And what we did is we went through and we made a videotape of every situation and what to do in that situation. So that if an inker over there, who didn't even have to understand English to do this, could go to a TV monitor, roll to this particular problem and see exactly what you'd do in that situation. And then he was there to answer questions that were unusual. And the most interesting thing, and one of the things that I'm particularly proud of with this technique is that in spite of what a pyramid it was to build, we managed to get all of this post-production done in six to nine months. And that is using a technology that we had developed. It had never been done before and we developed it and used it on this picture and delivered on time. And that was only possible because of this manufacturing technique. It's interesting the computer animation iS the simpler part of the set. - Yes. Ironically, one of the things that was a creative philosophy that we enjoyed and were proud of was that we were taking computer animation and letting it stand on its own. We weren't trying to make computer animation mimic reality. And the job was then to make reality, the actors and the sets, look like the computer animation. We used to say, "Well, if you've got lemons, make lemonade." Everybody else, and certainly since this point, has been going nuts trying to make computer animation mimic reality perfectly. And I found that the limitations of computer graphics at the time were the most exciting thing. If computer graphics... If computer animation is no longer different from reality, maybe we've lost something in that. Certainly you gain special effects technology and you can do certain things, but it's the limitations, I find, to be the creative challenge. I think at the time we were using four computer animation companies... Yes. -... which were probably the only animation companies that existed in the country at the time. Yeah, I had been visiting some of these companies for two years before we started making the movie. Maybe even longer than that. And I used to show up at their doorstep and Say, "One day I'm gonna make this movie. "You know, we're gonna do this and this is gonna be great." And they'd say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." I'd come by every six months and say this is really gonna happen, and I think they were more surprised than anybody else when we really did this movie. And they got to show their stuff. The way the de-rezzing effect was created, for example, when Ram passes away and he's in the cabin of the Recognizer, there's a combination of the original photography of the character, and then that is overdrawn with literally hand-done, line-drawing animation done by the animation department. And between that animation and light exposures, you can make it just, basically, run off, dissipate and fade away. Also, upon viewing this again, for so many years, you tend to kind of lump it all together visually in your memory and we forget, I forget, how much detail, how much layering of texture was put into this film. - Mmm-hmm. Ai! these shots are all completely storyboarded. Even the electronic world and all the simulated shots were all on storyboards. There must have been thousands of storyboards. Yeah, it was very detailed. Because rendering times in computer graphic imagery, the time it takes for the computer to draw each frame, are high. They're even high by today's standards. It takes sometimes as long as an hour or more for each frame of film. Probably the most complicated CGI images that were in Tron were done by Information International. The Solar Sailer hangar, the Solar Sailer, its formation, the walls of that environment, that's all CGI. As far as Cindy Morgan's involvement, she was very brave to get involved because a lot of actresses Said, "What am I going to wear? "You're going to put what on my head? "I've got to have a helmet and headgear "and wear all this spandex?" And that scared a lot of actresses away. Yeah, it was very hard to get anyone to take us seriously. You'd call people up, they'd come in for casting sessions, and Steven would do his best to present the film, and they'd look at you askance, think you were crazy. You'd run some video on them, and they just didn't believe it was going to happen. And as a result, it was very, very difficult. And I think that was one of the last major parts that was cast. Yes, it was two or three days before the first shot or something. Yes. - It was very close. And one of the people we tried was Deborah Harry. Right. We screen-tested Deborah Harry. The Bit was created by Digital Effects Incorporated, and we didn't have the time to choreograph a CGI Bit for every scene. So, what we did was created a series of stills that could be cell flopped, and these transparencies were created by Digital Effects so that the Bit could be rotating and have these different pulses in it, and then when it wanted to express itself, we flipped to the next sequence of stills, which would make it become more spiky or change its shape, and literally those were cell flopped and then flown around by moving the animation camera on the object to give it its motion from left to right or up or down or wherever it moved, we got it closer to you. That was all put in by moves on the animation camera, on these stills that were being cell flopped. These characters were very interesting. I especially liked the one that looked like a vacuum tube. Other programs... - Other programs and... ...in the system. The Recognizer sequence is another set that was built based on designs by Syd Mead. The interior of the Recognizer, as the interior of the tanks, was all a physically complex shape that the actors moved around on with white line-drawing vector material over the surface of it, and isolated animation coming back and colorizing and animating those elements. I think one of the most successful pieces of computer choreography in Tron is the whole Recognizer sequence, when the Recognizer hits a bridge and becomes multiple pieces and Flynn pulls them all back together with his energy and the choreography of the way those parts all fall back into place and tumble. The thing that people don't realize about computer simulation, especially at this time, is there were no programs that imitated the effects of nature on choreography. Every piece and every part of every computer-simulated object had to literally be choreographed frame per frame by an animator. When the Recognizer moves along and bounces off the ground floor and the pieces separate and then come closer together and have that real, elastic, rubber-banding kind of quality to them... Simple things in choreography... I mean, when an object goes around a corner, does it just swing around the corner or does it have back animation? Does it weave left and right? Does it back animate before it moves forward? Those are the things that the animators brought to this and that the computer-simulation people did a terrific job of interpreting.

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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 →

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.

1:01:26 · 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.

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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

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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 Alias, 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.

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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.

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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 →

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 →

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 →