True story / real events

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?

10:26 · jump to transcript →

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.

38:29 · jump to transcript →

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.

7:50 · jump to transcript →

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...

18:30 · jump to transcript →

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...

29:19 · jump to transcript →

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.

4:07 · jump to transcript →

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

12:02 · jump to transcript →

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

13:02 · 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.

28:30 · jump to transcript →

John Mackenzie

great weather that year. Now, here we have the gang. Now, half of these aren't actors. Half of them are the real thing. East End guys who've done a bit of bird, done a bit of robbery, done a bit of this, that, and the other. And they were, apart from being very natural actors, well, they're doing their own thing, aren't they? They're doing what they're used to.

53:40 · jump to transcript →

John Mackenzie

doing a scene where a gun comes out and one of them said john can i talk to you can i talk to you yeah yeah yeah he said look john he said uh you know i've been told i've been told he said but they really wouldn't do that they really wouldn't take the gun out like that not in this situation he'd take him around the corner wrap him a couple of times and then only take the gun out then he said you know he said that's the real way they would do it so i've been told

54:26 · jump to transcript →

John Mackenzie

Where the yanks gone? I've just bought some more brandies. Go home, Harris, go home. Don't look down your nose at me, Victoria. Makes you go cross-eyed. You can't even see that I'm not the real bastard he is. Aren't you? I'll get you a cab home, counsellor. I'll talk to you later. Okay. Bastard.

1:03:53 · jump to transcript →

There's a Ronnie card. There you go. Do you remember this night? This was one of the great nights. This thing weighs about 200 pounds. It's a magnetic drill. We had all the real guys there.

3:29 · jump to transcript →

a good four weeks before we shot. And I hung around with a lot of the thieves, a lot of the guys in Chicago. This, for example, Willie and I are in real life real good friends. I love the guy.

16:39 · jump to transcript →

Uh, including interruptions, very careful. Yeah, this lighter just, this happened. Stuff like this happened. That was so, so great. And the story. This is the real, this was the one of the stories that I told you about that Michael had researched and gotten from this guy. This is really a true story. I got into this problem with these two guys. They tried to turn me out. So I picked up, uh, nine more on, on manslaughter beef, some other things.

38:13 · jump to transcript →

Okay, so that's the real off-ramp by the University of Arizona, which we called Adams College. This was a very specially designed shot to take advantage of noses and glasses. And don't look up near the letterbox, because you'll see that we forgot to put the box on top of the car. I told you not to look. 6,127 students at Adams, 58% of which are girls.

3:03 · jump to transcript →

We never get to see them tarred and feathered with molasses or whatever they were tarred and feathered with, but we did shoot that. Now, we're all laughing, but imagine how that must have felt if it really happened to you, which it did. I was in a high school fraternity where I did get tarred and feathered like that, and it's a horrible feeling. And you kind of wonder why you're doing it. I mean, why is it worth taking this kind of abuse and humiliation just to be able to do it to some guys next year? Oh, yeah, that's why.

21:31 · jump to transcript →

president of Lambda Lambda Lambda, played by Bernie Casey, former pro football player, an excellent actor, and a brilliant painter, actually, in real life. And the first night on the set, we were shooting the bonfire scene. It was four in the morning. It was cold in Tucson. And I heard him whisper to somebody, I'm sick of this fucking movie already. But we actually had fun working together after that. But he did scare me.

33:28 · jump to transcript →

said let's go for the core here let's go for the real the true mediocre in her face to sniff it you don't find that offensive you don't find that sexist this is 1982. that's right it's 1982 get out of the 60s we don't have this mentality anymore well you should have seen the cover they wanted to do i don't care what they want my favorite moment from the from the pre-production process was we were looking for a cinematographer to shoot it and needed to have somebody with documentary experience and

14:39 · jump to transcript →

did this scene, and he now brags to everybody that he meets, you know, I'm the guy. I'm the real artist. I'm the kick-my-ass guy. Come on. I'm not asking, I'm telling with this. Kick my ass. The drug use in this scene is sort of a rare occurrence of that in this movie.

47:38 · jump to transcript →

Now he could do it and he wouldn't notice. Rick, our drummer, the real drummer in this film, when we went on the road, one of the things that he expressed most amazement and delight about was the fact that we were staying in pretty first-class hotels. They give you all this free shampoo. I've got a two-year collection of it. He had this huge, this bag full of, like, dozens of little bottles and packets of shampoo. And he really thought he was getting away with something. Like, they don't have a clue. I'm taking all this shampoo home.

56:25 · jump to transcript →

Pat McClung

This scene was shot really quickly. It was pretty much all handheld, 48 or 60 frames a second. I think 48. Then Sigourney had to loop all her lines at slow speed, which is always odd. Our first effect in the movie. It's great, because it's what you expected to happen and then it's not what you expect. She was actually under the bed for that sequence. We built an artificial body from her neck down. Someone is under the bed with her. I can't remember who the lucky guy was that created the illusion of the chestburster. Pushing its way through her. It sets up the character. This is her nightmare. You know that she never wants to have to face it in real life again because she's haunted by it in her dreams and her nightmares. This effect is as if you're outdoors. When the camera dollies over, you see it's just a video projection. The idea was that in outer space there would be places you could go to get a feeling you were in a natural environment. So that plate behind her was shot out in the garden at Pinewood Studios. It was a VistaVision plate. Originally, there was supposed to be a birdhouse in the background in that garden, and she would have Jones on her lap and a bird would fly in and Jones would jump up and hit the screen and that's how the audience would find out that she wasn't actually on the earth. This scene was cut from the release version of the film, which became the source of some controversy with Sigourney. She later said in print that she had based her entire character on this scene, and she was devastated when it was removed. At the time she first screened the film, she told me she didn't like the scene, and then we wound up reading interviews where she had a big problem with that. We didn't have a chance to talk about it because of the postproduction schedule. We were working in England, kind of in isolation.

7:47 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

Bill, isn't there dialogue that you have on this that people have used in video games? Yeah, I think so. "Game over, man" and things like that. You get anything for that? - I don't think so. I'm not even getting anything to sit here and do this commentary. They expect us to do it for no money. You got a beer out of it, though. No, it's just fun. I got a beer out of it, so that's cool. This was an amazing set, this concourse A. And it was long. And later on when all hell's breaking loose, Jim had that little video camera. He had everybody on the crew having coffee while we would run at him and do different things. It was SO amazing to see this gigantic set, one of the biggest sets I'd ever seen, and there's Jim by himself with this little camera. When did the bust-out almost happen? He was gonna move the movie. When did that happen? I remember there were some problems. There were some union problems. The crew weren't used to working the same way. With Jim. They weren't used to working. That's unfair. They were craftsmen, but they had an indentured way of doing everything. Jim needs something, he just grabs it. If he needs a light moved, he'll grab it himself. We punched a hole through somewhere cos he needed to run a line. He didn't wanna wait around. He just said "Give me a hammer." But this was an ambitious schedule. Jim was running from stage to stage. I think we had about three big sound stages with giant sets. And then there were two sound stages with miniatures. And then there was a stage with all those tunnels. I remember them putting you in that damn tunnel. That pipe. We had gone to the power station to shoot the atmosphere-processor scenes and come back to the set after it had been wrecked. So we're into Adrian Biddle's photography here. He was the second DP. I encouraged Adrian, to save time, to use as much built-in lighting as possible. This is lit by the fluorescents in the set, with just a little additional lighting. Adrian liked to work on a raw and edgy look and work with the practical lights a lot more. This is another thing that is important. With a lot of science fiction movies that are all interior, you often lose track geographically of where you are and it becomes incredibly confusing and it's hard to build the tension and the suspense. Jim was aware of this from the script stage and made sure that we established through the helmet cams, through the motion trackers, where they are, and then ultimately, later on, where the aliens are. Even in this version, you're left to fill in what happened. We don't see the baittle. We'll see plenty of battles later and this is promising you that. We have a shot coming up here where there were acid holes - acid... holes... eaten into the floor by these so far unseen aliens. And, of course, these sets were not double-deck sets. Jim wanted a scene where a character looks down through one of these holes. I think Bill spits down into it to give some perspective. So this down-view we shot on our miniature stage. We layered the set and photographed that. This is where you spit and they did it in miniature. They even did a miniature spit. - Is that what that is? To get that spitting effect, it was actually not spit. It didn't work very well, so it was a combination of milk... Milk and water in an eyedropper right underneath the lens. The complaint from the studio was that the film went on too long without anything really happening. I was winding the suspense tighter before you actually saw anything. The studio said we were just jerking around. Too many movies that I see now, it's all upfront. You start seeing stuff right away and there's no sense of a build. So this is the miniature APC that was built by Bob and Denny Skotak. Pretty good size. I remember it being five or six feet long. Most people don't twig that as a miniature. That's the real APC pulling in. They matched the lighting pretty nicely. I think Jim did some of his live-action stuff undercranked. He ran the camera slightly slower on the APC so that it felt slightly more as if it were a miniature but you knew it was real because you could see people interacting with it. So if any of the miniature stuff didn't quite work for whatever reason, it took the curse off that cos it felt that the two were blended together. I think he wound up undercranking because the APC, the full-size one, didn't move as fast as he wanted it. I think it could only go eight or ten miles an hour. One difficult thing about making this movie was 7erminator wasn't out in England and the perception of Jim Cameron, who looked about 20 when he directed this movie, and myself as the directing-producing team was met with a great deal of resistance because back then the system in England was that you had to put in years and years to rise up to the level of being a producer or a director. And we were simply not treated with a great deal of respect and it was very hard every day of the shoot. We were being second-guessed and every decision we made was questioned and the tremendous thing, of course, having Stan on the film was that... I was old. - No. ...was that you were a cheerleader for both of us. By demonstrating the respect and enthusiasm that you did, I think other people gradually relented. I knew it was the best thing for me and for everybody on that set. There are people that you know, no matter how they do it, what they're doing is special. This particular directing-producing team had been a win for me in my career and stayed that way. I never thought our facehuggers looked as good as the one in A/en. We had to make lots of 'em and they had to run around and do things, but, texturally, the one in the first film looked great. It really held up. The bits of oysters and stuff inside it looked great. But I did wanna see the disgusting thing that had been down the inside of Kane's throat in the first film. You never see it in the movie, in A/en, so I figured we'd gross everybody out. All of Giger's designs have a real sexual undercurrent to them. And that's what horrified people about the alien as much as anything, is it worked on a kind of Freudian subconscious level. And Ridley and Giger knew that and they went for that. This film was never intended to be as much of a horror film as the first one. It was working on a different thematic level but I still wanted to be true to some of those ideas, some of those design concepts. It would be natural to assume I'd wanna work with Giger, but it just didn't occur to me at the time. Maybe it was because we really only needed to design one new creature and I had already designed her by the time I wrote the script. The alien queen. I guess maybe it was my own ego as an artist. I just felt like he'd made his stamp and I knew from what I'd read that he had to do everything his way and I had a very specific idea for the alien queen to extrapolate beyond what had been done before. I got the impression from what I read that I wasn't gonna get the dynamic character that I wanted. In a funny way, part of what attracted me to doing this film was the opportunity to do cool design stuff. So maybe I was just a little bit too in love with the idea of designing the creatures and the weapons and doing all that stuff.

47:57 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

These shots of the aliens hanging from the ceiling are just shot upside down. It's just guys standing there in an alien suit. And we set up some alien puppets made out of foam and filled them with gak and guts and yellow goo, and blew the hell out of them, as I recall. Made a big mess. Miniscule things we had to do, like creating burn appliance make-up for when the acid would hit. Here's a case right here. Alien comes up, splats, and the blood is right here. Quick cut. Quick cut. But prosthetics used. John Richardson was the physical effects supervisor. I was at his shop on the lot, and they were testing one of these flame-throwers and it was a real flame-thrower that they had built. This thing would go about 20 or 30 feet. So every time you see flames coming out, it's the real thing. It was a little scary. When we did the fire in the APC, there was something used to age the set, some kind of wax-based substance that the art department had dabbed on to make the set look more like a used military vehicle. And the heat caused it to vaporize and the actors got this strong sense that they couldn't breathe. It caused their throats to close up. Bill tells the story Jenette is going "Ugh!" And Bill remembers thinking "She's coming up with some great stuff." And she really couldn't breathe. I don't remember what we did. Probably just kept shooting. I think we just kept the fire out of the inside, kept going. Because the full-size APC was incapable of spinning its wheels, all those shots of Ripley when she hits the gas and you see the wheels spin and smoke are all the miniature, because the full-size vehicle again weighed some 20 or 30 tons. We had put A-B smoke... A solution on the wheel and B on the ground. And as the tire turned, it would mix that A and B together and give the smoke. We had somebody holding back the front of the APC for a moment, so that the tire'd spin, then we'd let it go. That A-B smoke is really toxic. We don't like to breathe that stuff.

1:17:31 · jump to transcript →

Eleanor Bergstein

such a tribute to all of them that what the world has responded to is the real emotional precision of their work, which was so careful. And everyone in the crew would come up to me, which I invited, with ideas about what they thought about the characters or what was happening or who was doing what. And you know that wonderful line in Renoir, in this world there is one thing that is terrible, and that is that everyone has his own good reasons. And I wanted...

1:11:25 · jump to transcript →

Eleanor Bergstein

And now there are Dirty Dancing Weekends at those two hotels that we took in both North Carolina and Virginia. But as I said, the real Kellerman's doesn't exist. They were bridges that we built. They were a construct of two states. But people do come, and the mimeographed sheets are given out and guided tours and things. And that's only a pleasure, really. We are going to get to...

1:12:14 · jump to transcript →

Eleanor Bergstein

that you were there with a girl. But lots of people from the Catskills called me. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Grossinger would say, when we saw that, we knew you really had been to the Catskills. Because that's the real sign that anybody but Lisa would know. And there is Miranda, of course. And then I think maybe we did shoot this at night. I think I'm wrong. And then we're going to have the two magic hour scenes, which I will show you. Shut up, show me no. Shut up, show.

1:15:39 · jump to transcript →

Hey, I mean it. You know, I love this part of the movie because there's no silver lining. They're still going to fail. I know. But the point is they worked as hard as they could. And here's a new Bob. Look, I found Bob. It's not the real Bob.

1:19:54 · jump to transcript →

He would only fetch the real Bob.

1:20:22 · jump to transcript →

I didn't know. I know you came up with it, but it actually happened in real life. Oh, it did, yeah. That's the story I told you, and then you worked it in, yeah. Yeah, oh, yeah. It's the most fitting ending to this movie, and then an extra goody that was accidental. Well, and then you dropped in, like, those little pieces all the way through, just a use of a chapstick. I think we only did it, like, three times, but it planted it. Right.

1:25:10 · jump to transcript →

Photographing this helicopter at night was a serious challenge. Because the normal way that they had done it... ...was to have another helicopter fly along... ...and spread light all over the chopper. But it looked just terrible, you know. It looked all lit up and phoney. And Alonzo came up with the idea-- He said: "I'm gonna make this helicopter light itself." I said, "What did you mean?" And he said, "I'm gonna put lights all over it that are hidden... ...and wherever it goes, it will have light on it." So he and his electricians built lights that are... ...hidden along the bottom of the skids of the helicopter. They're hidden up in the tail, all over the place. Just little tiny guys spreading light along the body of the helicopter... ...so you could see it against the real night sky. And it took them a long time to develop it. And they would keep coming back with test footage... ...where I'd say, "Oh, this looks very nice. When do we get to see the helicopter?" And they'd say, "Well, it's right in the middle of the frame." But it was so pitch black. Because we had to make a helicopter... ...that was, like, midnight blue. And, of course, that was terrible. The only thing worse than that... ...would have been if it were painted black. Then we never would have seen it at all. Well, we're actually very lucky, because right now... ...we've just been joined in this session... ...by an absolute genius in the area of special effects. Hoyt, would you introduce yourself?

56:36 · jump to transcript →

I understood you weren't really able to fly the Blue Thunder... ...over populated areas? Is that correct too? Because it wasn't really FAA approved. So you had to clear areas out... ...when you flew. That's why you flew on weekends. Was this a rumour, or was that true? - Well, it's-- That's a partially true story. When you fly below 1000 feet... ...you have to be in an area that is controlled. So the Blue Thunder helicopter flew all over Los Angeles. I mean, everywhere, but above 1000 feet. But when we got to Downtown Los Angeles for later sequences... ...that we'll come up on, we were sometimes only at 50 feet... ...flying around. And so those areas were locked off... ...and we could only shoot in Downtown Los Angeles on Sundays. So Sundays in Downtown Los Angeles, unlike New York-- I mean, the place is deserted, and... You know, nobody is down there. Or at least at the time. So we could clear out eight or 10 blocks... ...and just work in that area... ...and control the pedestrians and the traffic going there. John, when you remix this, do me a favour. What? - Put the finger snaps in. Put the finger snaps in. Oh, yeah, this was a big argument with Columbia, constantly. The crack of the fingers that you just heard: How loud should it be? It seemed no matter how much we turned it down... ...people were still horrified by it if you could hear a little bit. They just go: Because everybody knows what that must feel like... ...even if you've never had it done.

1:07:11 · jump to transcript →

Now, we're looking at a lot of stunt people running around... ...because they all participated in this sequence that came up... ...as the F-16s lock in on the heat source... ...of our Blue Thunder helicopter. And Scheider gets his plane where it's up against the sun reflection. He's hoping to decoy the helicopter into this. That was the miniature helicopter, too, going across right there. There's the miniature helicopter. Certainly the idea of it going into a building like this... ...was viewed by us as complete fantasy. And it never, ever occurred to us... ...that somebody would actually do something like that, you know. It's just beyond the range of thinking. At the time of 9/11, you couldn't have shown an image like this. Everybody got so sensitive. And then, suddenly, they realised... ...that people weren't as terrified of it... ...as we were saying they were going to be. Remember, people were saying, "We'll have nothing but Doris Day movies." Or, you know, whatever today's version of Doris Day movies is. But then, suddenly, the video stores started telling us... ...that every terrorist movie they had was gone from the shelves... ...that everybody was suddenly fascinated... ...with the very thing we said they wouldn't be... ...which proves William Goldman's old adage of, "Nobody knows anything." And you'll remember, when I talked about the first shot... ...with Malcolm McDowell. Well, here it is. This is the one where he comes... ...and has to jump inside the helicopter and take off. We probably won't be able to get permission... ...to do practical work like was done on Blue Thunder. In other words, I think the laws have changed... ...and people's concern for safety has increased. So we won't be seeing the same kind of amazing, live stunt work... ...which is really, you know, just some of the best ever done. They would depend on visual effects, other methods, to achieve the look... ...but it wouldn't be the real thing, which is what we got here... ...which is a real treat. So he didn't know he had the option of-- No option here. No, no option. But it looks really good. I mean, it looks like he's taking that helicopter off. And the pilot, Karl Wickman, was-- I don't know where Karl was, but I couldn't see him. At that point in Los Angeles, in the early 1980s... ...lots of new, giant structures were being built... ...and here we got to use one where we could shoot through it. And this is where we lost this helicopter... ...this little Hughes 500 helicopter. Its engine blew up. And the helicopter auto-rotated down to the ground... ...onto those parking lots that you see. And only because we had cleared the lots out... ...and had no traffic down there and no cars, no people, was it safe. And we thought we had killed Karl Wickman... ...because the engine blew up. But he was a Vietnam helicopter pilot... ...and he had rehearsed auto-rotating to the ground hundreds of times... ...and he took his helicopter down to the ground... ...and it only bent a couple of skids. And as it hit the ground, he actually was jumping out of it... ...right simultaneously backwards with a fire extinguisher... ...in his hand to put out the flame. But now you can see, we're down 40, 50 feet... ...above the Music Center in Los Angeles. That was not Bill Ryusaki. Good for him.

1:34:03 · jump to transcript →

Tim Lucas

You know, every shot of Debbie that was included in Universal's official still set was from a scene that had been cut from the picture. It was not her fault. The real problem was that the film had to go before the camera before there was a finished script. And as David and Ron Sanders rewrote the picture in the editing room, Debbie's scenes tended to be those that pointed the way to narrative directions no longer taken. But she figures in a number of Videodrome's most memorable scenes.

22:47 · jump to transcript →

Tim Lucas

would televise torture when it's easier and cheaper to fake it. Masha's lighting of the cigarette brought Max back to his memory of Nicki's challenge, and it should be pointed out that Debbie Harry now disappears from the film for roughly ten minutes. There were reportedly preview screenings where she dropped out of the film for significantly longer. Now that I think of it, isn't it possible that the real Nicki never comes back?

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Tim Lucas

It's a nod to his reputation as what Mark Thomas McGee called the best of the cheap acts. If we think back to the offices of Civic TV with all the Roger Corman posters on the wall, they combine well with Jimmy's proposed ad lib to suggest that Roger Corman and Not City TV's Moses Znaimer might be the real role model for Max Renn. When Barry Convex refers to the eyeglasses that Max is wearing as machinery,

48:48 · jump to transcript →

Si's a real cool cat in real life, too. Well, this is my film to try. I had quit acting for two years and did nothing but go to school. So when I came back to this film, it was Si Richardson's doing his thing. I had to find my place in this industry. And my place was supposed to be a black Humphrey Bogart. Oh, yeah. That's the inspiration. So the first thing you do is steal a Camaro. That's what I would do. Yeah.

31:34 · jump to transcript →

But you look nothing like Fox Harris. No, I look nothing like Fox Harris at all. It was just so soft, though, you could get away with it. The sheriff hats are hilarious. Well, in fact, they were going to be Dodgers hats originally because they've all gone out with baseball bats. But then the Dodgers wouldn't let us use their hats. I brought the real repo man in to talk to him, Quentin, and he had the sheriff hats and the jackets that he would use when he repo cars. So Quentin Gutierrez loaned us those hats.

1:00:33 · jump to transcript →

Well, and I switched bats on him. I gave him a plastic bat when he wasn't looking. Yeah, and he was so mad. He was not happy about that. He was so mad, and it was so hilarious, too, because he wouldn't do it, because you had done that to him, he wouldn't do it again unless he had the real bat. And I remember he even hit the Ford Falcon with the bat. He whacked the Falcon with a big dent in the hood of the Falcon.

1:02:18 · jump to transcript →

I thought very hard about it and sort of figured my job was on the line. I was going to lose in any case, but I had to be honest about it. And I swear to God this is a true story. After Richie made that phone call to me, the next day as I was carrying the weight of this, the actor who was let go was passing underneath my little trailer, and I really... This is a true story. I heard him say...

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Once you have two days' work, they can't borrow you. It's my game now. That really happened in time and space. You never told me that. We spent a long time figuring out the right French song.

45:08 · jump to transcript →

I think it may be very hard to make out in video how wet he is, but there is the reveal. And this was a much longer scene, as I remember originally, with the sweating developing over a longer period of time. And I think this thing that happened with the map really happened. It was, I believe it was... And then we went back and did... That was a real accident that happened, and then we played with it.

1:25:03 · jump to transcript →

Gary Goddard

This was one of the largest sets built in Hollywood in probably the 10 years or so before that. This throne room set is the real deal. It was so large, we actually used two sound stages. And that hall right there that he's walking by, it connects two sound stages. That's actually outside. That runway you're seeing there is a real runway. Now, of course, we've matted in the upper shots on top. That's a matte painting. But the actual runway and the throne room and the scale of that is all for real.

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Gary Goddard

Now we're in that throne room, that throne room that covers two sound stages. I know he's here waiting for us. You're right. This was a pretty elaborate day. We're going to have tons of soldiers. And there again, you look at the depth as they pass this hallway. That's the real thing. That's not a matte painting. That is the real thing. It goes way down there to the big, massive doors. The big, massive doors at the end are actually against the far wall of the second sound stage.

11:35 · jump to transcript →

Gary Goddard

except for the shot here where we're going to use miniatures. Not there, of course. He's alive, but there you go. There's your maquette, and this is real, and off he goes. There's the big ship coming down the street. We had the real version of that and then the miniature version, which that is there for this sequence of shots.

1:11:28 · jump to transcript →

It was a big tragedy up in San Francisco. So this was kind of based on that idea. Of course, this has a much more happy ending than the real outcome did. Getting Robo in and out of the car and up the stairs, Paul... Took some time. Well, actually, the truth is, every time he's getting out of the car, he has no pants on. Because he could never get out of the car in the costume. And you could never shoot the costume from behind because the butt wiggled. Right.

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Oh, there, that should be me, but it isn't. And the real shot of Paul comes up here on the gong sound. That's me, that's me. I mean, I was trying to make everybody dance in a frenetic way, and basically at the end of the shot, I was just still stimulating the crowd.

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What an elegant solution. It's so great. Thank you, Jon. And then we get to kill the bad guy. Now, I remember some people wanted the... One of the producers said the movie, we had to have the big fight with the robot last because that's what everybody wanted to see with ED-209. And not this scene because who cared about it? My sense was everybody needs to go to the real bad guy and get rid of him. And... Yeah. Then this ends up being the end of the movie. Now, we have some stuff after this that we cut out after this line. What's your name?

1:36:27 · jump to transcript →

I hope this is important, because I could be blowing a big deal. The movie is different from the book. The movie is sort of a fictional adaptation of the book. And the ticket scalper, in fact, did some different things in real life. But basically, Amy came and kind of took the experience of the book and consolidated it.

1:03:18 · jump to transcript →

in really beautiful ways and uh... there are little changes but nothing that really rocks the foundation of what the book was like uh... you know in real life it was the rat that ordered that pizza and it was delivered through the window in a science class i believe but for the movie it felt more like that was Spicoli's move and i think it was correct it was

1:03:46 · jump to transcript →

Roger Moore

He said, what about if James Bond came in? I said, but I am going to be James Bond. He said, I mean the real one, Sean Connery. My son Jeffrey never grew up. To describe the character of Bond though, he's a super spy.

1:05:06 · jump to transcript →

Roger Moore

Sorry. This, of course, is the real thing. The interior of the offices we shot in the studio, but this is the real McCoy. We're looking for a low tonight of 57, high tomorrow, 75.

1:12:29 · jump to transcript →

John McTiernan

Jesse Ventura. I had no idea. I mean, I found out that the guy was a lot brighter than he pretended to be. And a lot more of a professional. But I was truly astonished... To find out that, you know, that he'd been nominated for governor of, what is it, Minnesota? Minnesota. I think this was his first feature, maybe his only feature, I don't know. You wanna know how I really got hired? You wanna know the real truth about how this happens? My agent said, "Look, "you want this job. "I think you need to sign up "with this particular lawyer." It's Jake Bloom's law firm. Jake Bloom is a business lawyer, he looks like, he looks like Pancho Villa. He has a wonderfully phlegmatic manner and he looks, he looks like an old hippie. He's very bright. But his law firm also represented Arnold at the time. My agent was very astute. That 5% was what got me the job.

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John McTiernan

It was a budget issue but it was also just, it was nearly impossible to get that, the real, heat vision shots.

35:53 · jump to transcript →

It's interesting to me how much people still like this movie and remember this movie when I'm wandering around in the real world. Well, part of it is, I think, it seemed like this is a genre which is about the classic conflict of what your parents want you to do with your life and what you wanna do with your life and what would be the right path to take. And this scene is really intended to lay out the truth of that. And I don't think the stakes can be any higher for a kid, because you gotta make those kind of choices at that age. I mean, we're kind of going through it with our own kid right now.

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I guess what I'm saying is, she seemed like she was the real deal. She was a street kid, had a punk look, skater-punk look, and at the time, that was pretty ahead of its time. I know, but people still dress like that, which is what's crazy. Not like that, with the bow in the hair, but...

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Peter Greenaway

For a film of this complexity and this density and these production values, extremely small, and these objects on the table were the real items belonging to the house we used, and it was estimated that Christie's had insured those four items of ceramic on that table as ten times the total budget of our film. So we were very much indebted to the owners of the house to be allowed to use these real antique artifacts.

1:29:20 · jump to transcript →

The strange thing about being in these movies is that you see things that actors do that you sometimes have never seen in real life, and you're sitting there looking at a hanging man and you say, is that what a hanging man really looks like? You know, and you yourself don't really even know. So now my image of a hanging man is Nick Corri hanging from a sheet. Wasn't this the first day of, for me, I remember the first day of shooting was the cemetery. Was it? I believe so. Which cemetery was this, Wes? You probably know more. This is Boyle Heights.

45:29 · jump to transcript →

murdered in 2011 in Thailand when he was running a bar in Thailand. And I don't think anyone's really got to the bottom of what really happened, but apparently he died then, which we spoke about earlier, I believe you already knew about this. But, yeah, a very tragic incident happened in Thailand with him. Very tragic. Who would have thought that Kevin would have ended up that way as well? But sad, very sad.

1:19:17 · jump to transcript →