True story / real events

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

9:49 · jump to transcript →

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

15:45 · jump to transcript →

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

19:42 · jump to transcript →

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

23:32 · jump to transcript →

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

46:23 · jump to transcript →

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

55:01 · jump to transcript →

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.

35:46 · jump to transcript →

Michael Mann

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

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Michael Mann

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

1:04:41 · jump to transcript →

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.

6:43 · jump to transcript →

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

1:02:07 · jump to transcript →

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.

15:20 · jump to transcript →

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 →

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.

19:50 · jump to transcript →

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

28:04 · jump to transcript →

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

31:28 · jump to transcript →

That battle armor, all that Ripper material that was designed by Stan Winston, I mean, just brilliant. It was funny. I was always in makeup for 900 hours in the morning, and then the Rippers were in makeup in another room for 900 hours in the morning. I never saw Ice-T and all those guys without their costumes on. No, for months, never. But they saw me in real life, right?

39:09 · jump to transcript →

But I never saw them in real life, but they didn't know I couldn't see them. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, exactly. But they'd come up to me afterwards and say, like, hey, Lori, you want to go have a drink? And I would have no idea who that was. And, like, you know, he's, you know, Reggie. You know, it's Reggie Cathy. And I'm like, I think I know your voice. He's like, what are you talking about? We've been working all day.

39:38 · jump to transcript →

Well, still am, but really as a kid, I just loved musicals. And so I'm like, I'm going to do a Busby Berkeley, and I don't care. I don't need any justification. I'm just going to do it. I love this Cole Porter song. And we made up new lyrics to the Cole Porter song, and nobody ever said anything. Ouch, right there I cut my finger off in real life. Oh, that's right. You were really bleeding. No, really. And then you'll see me hiding my cast. But fortunately, of course...

52:51 · jump to transcript →

Alexander Payne

They're actually windowless in the Midwest, largely to save on heating and cooling costs in the winter and summer, respectively. But it also gives a sense to high school, gives a visual sense of high school being a factory or a prison, which then asks the question, who are the real prisoners? And maybe it's the teachers, not the students. Preparing them for the tough moral and ethical decisions that they'd face as adults.

5:24 · jump to transcript →

Alexander Payne

being a little kid still, and especially in this sexual situation, as being largely victimized. Since I grew up without a dad, you might assume psychologically I was looking for a father figure. And this really is the yearbook office in that school in Omaha. And he made me feel so safe and protected. Papillion La Vista High School. When was the first time somebody ever saw the real me?

10:32 · jump to transcript →

Alexander Payne

I want to point out that Reese actually fell and did that little stunt very well in one take. She didn't want to rely on a stunt person, and I didn't want to have to do that either. I like seeing the real thing, and we patted her a little bit, but she did it.

46:48 · jump to transcript →

Someone I got to work with, Maureen O'Hara... ...on a picture right after this... - Mm-hm? ...SO... - I did a day on that. Yeah. We cut your big scene with John Candy. You cut all my lines out. - Yeah. It was kind of like we were trying to duplicate Uncle Buck. Yeah, yeah. - I remember that, and it was just kind of... Felt like we had been there, in a sense. Um.... More people saw this picture, so you're Okay. Yeah, no, I'm.... Thanks, Chris. Now, this... - Ha-ha-ha. Thank you. We resorted to stock footage for any shots you'll see of airlines... ...coming up, shots of Paris. We had no money to go shoot those things. And this was a set that already existed... ... that we put back together so we could actually shoot. The, uh-- This is first-class when you could actually have real silverware on the plane. Yeah. - Yeah. Most of our sets, incidentally, were in a... A lot of them were in a high school outside of Chicago. We shot Uncle Buck there too. - New Trier High School. Yeah, yeah. - And, um.... Some of the sets-- I'm trying to remember where the house set was. We were in some warehouse, weren't we? Or was this New Trier as well? It was in the gymnasium. - Yeah. It was all in that school, the interiors. - Gymnasium. We also shot a lot at the house, at the real house. Oh, yeah. - The second one... ...[I think we spent half a day in the real house. Because they... The people who own the real house... ...wanted a little more money in the second one. Everybody wanted more in the second one, and rightly so. Me included.

18:20 · jump to transcript →

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

37:15 · jump to transcript →

What money? These would sort of be our split days. We'd shoot you in the morning, the first part of this... ...and then later that night, we'd go back to the house and shoot. Plus, am I--? I think this is the real house... ...and then this is the sound stage, isn't it? Yes, exactly. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the, um.... But it really... In terms of shooting the film... ... It was possible to shoot it with someone so young... ...because you were separate from.... And that was really helpful. And we used this gag twice too. I Know, and it worked. It seemed to work twice. Although that's because Danny Stern just brought it to another level... ...when he's at the door coming up, SO.... Yeah, we used... Because of budget again, we used a lot of Chicago actors. This guy was one Chicago actor that we found in the city... ...and then later moved to Los Angeles.

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So, yes, this is the footage of Charles Dance's character approaching, finding the Ripley character on the beach. For this scene, we at Amalgamated, with our U.S. and British crew, had to build a replica of Sigourney Weaver. And it was based on a life cast of her, a head cast only. She had just had a baby when we had a chance to do it. That's actually-- I believe that that is an actress, although I can't tell if that's a stand-in or our dummy. But that, of course, is Sigourney Weaver. But she had told us that she would be losing weight, so we had to... She had just had the baby and we had to extrapolate what her body would look like, and so you can see how accurate it looks in these shots. There it is. There. That looks just like Sigourney. It's funny, because we really labor over a lot of these things and that's the real Sigourney. So I think that's about it for the dummy. But it was a beautiful sculpture. Gary Pollard, who is a very talented British sculptor, sculpted that and it was used to save Charles Dance's back. So that he could carry Sigourney. Those are all the little lice. They're actually crickets, I believe, that ended up in Tom's suit. Because the crickets were all over the place and when Tom was wearing the alien suit, he had them crawling down his neck and into his briefs and all that. And in fact, there's a fake ox here, coming up, that was covered with the crickets as well. And even when we shipped all of our stuff back to LA months later, we opened the crate and there were full-grown crickets in the ox's body. So they're very hardy and tenacious little-- Just like the alien, I guess.

5:04 · jump to transcript →

The light coming from the top was a 4K xenon lamp, which gives you very straight beams, which I thought would be quite a good idea. I shot it up through a mirror because you can't tilt them down or the condenser burns. But we had a mirror above the set and I shined it from the floor onto the mirror. This autopsy scene was a favorite of Fincher's, too, because we had created a body of Newt that had multiple layers of tissue, skin and musculature that could be cut through, and the bones opened up. It's a lot of graphic coverage that's not in the final movie. The body of Newt was actually based on... Alec and I had done a life cast of Carrie Henn during Aliens, and while we were in London Bob Keen's shop actually had a casting of the head. We were able to get that and remold it, so we were able to duplicate what the actress had looked like some five or six years previously. There is intercutting here with the real girl as well. She has a lot of fuzz on her face. - Yeah. Backlit fuzz.

17:31 · jump to transcript →

And then we had Sigourney on the stage to shoot her in bluescreen, and she signed a picture for me "Help, get me the hell out of this movie!" "Love, Sigourney." - We see bald-cap shots soon, that were shot months later in LA. And Greg Cannom did a beautiful bald cap on her. More than a bald cap - it had to have that stubble. It was much more difficult than a bald cap. You'd think he'd done samurai movies with the quality of the bald cap. This was fun, having Lance back in the role too. And it's so brief, when Lance gets hit with this lead pipe. But we showed his ear had become dislodged, as Fincher wanted to show that this is the real guy, and not a synthetic person. The script had Bishop I and II. And to play the creator of Bishop, who would be this guy, I literally didn't have to do anything, as an actor, because to play the creator of a guy you make Bishop in your own image. You'd build an android in your own image. It's like when you read the Bible - it's God made man in his own image. And I thought the outrageous part was Fincher being... He was a young guy, 27 or something, and when he talked to me about this scene he was so articulate and so supportive, I was shocked, because he was such a young guy. He sort of saw inside you. It was a really amazing thing. For Lance's human character, when it's revealed that he is actually a scientist who the Bishop model was patterned after, Fincher wanted a wound. So we created a torn ear where the whole ear was lifted forward. And Nick Dudman applied that beautiful application on it and some blood tubes and that sort of thing. Obviously I've got flicker boxes working on these lamps, to give the effect of firelight and the hot furnace. You can just see it in the background. You can see the light fluctuating. Just giving the effect. Once again, it's nice to flicker on several sources at the same time, because if you do it just on one lamp, it never looks quite right. It's either too regular or too irregular. But if you use one more than one lamp at a time, it comes across much better.

2:12:22 · jump to transcript →

Now, you came up with the premise of a guy on the run from no one. Yes. Right? Yes. On the run from no one. Yeah. And that where they know who the real killer is. Know who the killer is and he just runs. Yes. And we did have scenes that had the girlfriend in it. But coming up as, yeah, this is. And we have Mark. Yeah, but I remember giving you a note to.

9:04 · jump to transcript →

And we have the killer actually doing open heart surgery. Making an attempt. Yeah. To save the cops. Yeah. And it doesn't work. He's not good at it. He's not really good. He's not a doctor. No, he's a killer. He's an actual killer. He's the opposite. And they're consoling him so he can't escape yet. What's going to happen in this next frame is something that I do in real life.

42:50 · jump to transcript →

This is my wife's least favorite line is coming up. Uh-huh. Not from around here, are you? What makes you say that? Is that it? No. I've lived here all my life, and I've never seen you before. Oh, then no, I'm not from around here. Where are you from? Oh, that doesn't matter. The real question is, where am I going? Oh, where are you going? Can't say. Oh. Is that the one she hates? When she says, do you think I'm pretty? Yeah.

47:37 · jump to transcript →

We also had a mechanical baby that is in some shots that Stan Winston's people made, which was really quite wonderful. Obviously, all the close-ups on the face of the real baby. I've been accused many times of making things too dark. I personally don't think

6:16 · jump to transcript →

It took months and months to do. And hopefully it's considered worth it. Again, we had no shortage of actresses who wanted to do this role. And I kept on saying, you understand you're naked. You understand this is, you know, the real stuff. And they all said, it's with Gabriel Byrne. I said, yep. They said, we want to do it. If I had been in high school with Gabriel, I would have been a very, very good friend of his.

40:05 · jump to transcript →

This is the real thing. This was New Year's Eve. As cold as anything I ever remember. And this was shot in what was the old Herald Examiner building, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner building, which is a now defunct newspaper. Gorgeous, gorgeous old building. This scene obviously scared me.

1:29:38 · jump to transcript →

And they did this movie had it was a 16 week production and they did half of it there in Virginia, including their two weeks of training and like, you know, Navy SEALs type training. And then they did the other eight weeks in Spain. So we're about to go to, you know. I don't know if I'm guessing this is exactly where, you know, the real courses. I don't know what they were allowed to show, but it's supposed to approximate it, I guess.

41:53 · jump to transcript →

legit you had to kind of put your actors through that but i don't think i don't think anybody put him through as hard of a situation as stone did like stone really yeah i mean in that case he had been through it yeah in real life so i don't imagine he had a lot of sympathy but um paul sanchez was also in oliver stone's born on the fourth of july and he was also in zemeckis's castaway and a lot of tv uh one of the other guys on the team is cyril o'reilly um who was he he

1:13:11 · jump to transcript →

when they kill his girlfriend and he gets revenge is actually something that really happened. The sheriff, Lanark, actually did do away with his spouse. And when he went back in, he didn't just ride in slow and whack people on the head. He just burnt the place at night while they were asleep. He just did it right, you know? And he was very funny. The stories of him was that he always smelled of smoke.

2:20:46 · jump to transcript →

These are all the real clan guys, the real Wallace clan guys. They look real, except Brendan there. He's one of our guys.

2:47:10 · jump to transcript →

what is very much a man, Chris Sarandon, play the trans role of a trans woman in real life. But you still have this sort of humanity who is given some sort of characterization, even though the sort of reaction to that character is mixed, I would say, at best.

49:14 · jump to transcript →

If you do, the only way to maintain any kind of emotional truth thereafter is to have the surviving character, Ripley, utterly broken, completely destroyed. I mean, that's something Ripley doesn't get over in real life. There is no way to make her believable and have her get over that. Which means that our protagonist for the entire movie is a miserable zombie. And that's just not fun to be around, especially when everyone else is...

9:22 · jump to transcript →

on Night of the Creeps, although he brought way more than I could ever have imagined. And the other was John Castle. I saw a tape, Steve Jacobs showed me a tape from England because John is a, you know, he's the real deal British actor and he was in Lion in the Winter. He does Shakespeare on stage in England. He's a real English actor, not just sort of the guy who wants to come to America and be the villain in cheesy action movies. So he was a real pleasure to work with. He was great.

38:33 · jump to transcript →

onto that deck five times, and then the real hit with two full charges in his chest. Can you believe it? And ran more times in one night than I ever could have done it. In my lifetime. In my lifetime. That's Stephen, by the way, doing all his own little aerobatics. But yeah, and he had worked with John Huston. I mean, this guy, these stunt people are really extraordinary stories, and they're all incredibly excited to try anything and everything.

1:20:18 · jump to transcript →

Dominique Pinon plays in all my films, and for me he is the perfect actor. He's so inventive, so nice, so perfect. It was amazing for me to bring this actor to the States, because Sigourney Weaver and the studio asked me to have Dominique Pinon. I told this story a lot of times, Dominique, but it's true: I didn't hire you, the studio wanted to work with you. I was very happy, obviously, but, I remember, when Sigourney wanted to call you by phone, and we called you in Paris and you didn't believe me. You said... "No. It's a joke." I remember very well that call, actually. The studio were a little bit worried about Ron Perlman. They appreciated the guy, but they weren't sure it was the right guy for the character. By luck, it was the first day of shooting and they saw the dailies. They came to see me on the stage and they told me "You're right. He is perfect." The set is basically what we call the Betty cargo bay, which is just a lovely, beautiful industrial piece of design. All the rust in the back of it. It's hard to convey just how incredible it was in real life, when you walk through it. It was just absolutely staggeringly detailed and gorgeous. Pitof, none of the ships were digital. That's all models? Pitof, none of the ships were digital. That's all models? I would like to make more digital stuff, but Nigel really wanted to have the real texture. I guess he was right because... They're beautiful. They are gorgeous. Is that background digital? Or was that a model also? The background is a mix with the digital and models. We had a model, but the size had been enhanced in postproduction. Also, it's a lot of layers of small things to make the texture real. So it's not just shooting the miniature as it is. There's a lot of work after that - to have the texture, to get the smoke, to give the depth, and all these things. Is shooting miniatures more time-consuming than doing it digitally? It was more efficient to shoot miniatures because the technology of digi was not as flexible as today. The idea about this film is that these guys are a bunch of hoodilums that are smuggling weapons on board a military ship. The thought was: they'll get strip-searched, and they have to have weapons at some point, so Jean-Pierre's take was that the only way you could bring weapons is by hiding them in plain sight. The two places where he thought you could hide them was a Thermos - which somebody is carrying, which turns out to be a gun - and the wheelchair. The thing about the wheelchair was designing it as a breakaway piece of technology, where every piece could reassemble itself into a weapon. Although the idea's really good, at some point the focus on that was a bit lost - you see all the characters breaking out weapons. I'm not sure how clear it is that they're recombining the wheelchair. But that's the way it was designed, as you could actually take pieces of it apart and snap them into weapons when the scene demanded it at some point. That little wheelchair was built on a structure which we called a mule, which is a six-wheeled radio-controlled robot which is a six-wheeled radio-controlled robot that's designed to lift enormous pieces of equipment in industrial settings. That mule was available to us, so Fox said: "If you can design the wheelchair around this, it'll save us money." So that's what we did.

17:58 · jump to transcript →

But most of all, you know, I think it was the drama that was already on the pages. Because I think that's where the real language of the movie starts. The choice and the search of a language really starts on the first word that is written on the screenplay. That's what sets off your work on constructing the images. And I watched LA Confidential again recently knowing that we were going to be talking about it. And I was yet again sort of awestruck by how...

26:56 · jump to transcript →

Taylor Hackford

And this scene in the elevator is one of my favorites. You know, you have to shoot a scene in very close quarters... ...with six people facing each other. And there's a lot of innuendo in this scene, both in terms of... ...what Milton is saying to his mother and what she's saying back to Milton. And, at the same time, there are these silent things that are going on. You know, here's Kevin standing next to his wife, being inches away from... ...the woman that he's lusted after and fantasized over. That woman, he's like raping her with his eyes. His wife sees him looking at them. And meanwhile there's a conversation going on between Milton... ...and his mother that he's not listening to. You know, it's one of those uncomfortable moments that... ...seems to last for an eternity, and they're only going up three floors. Then, as the wife and mother are going in the house... ...Milton turns to him... ...and asks him to come up and discuss the case. Now that's ostensibly what it's about. But what it's really about is these two beautiful women sitting in the back here... ...and obviously hot to trot. There's a sexual innuendo that's not just subtle here. It gets more and less and less subtle as it goes on. There is a ménage à trois about to happen, and Milton is inviting Kevin to join. He looks back, and what has he got on the other side? He wants to join, but what has he got? He's got his wife. And his wife is no dummy. She knows exactly what was happening. So now the cat is out of the bag. She's seen her enemy. She's sniffed her enemy. She knows who she is... ...and she's pissed at Kevin because Kevin, in fact, is denying everything. But, of course, she knows it. Alice Lomax notices this and we have a transition from night to day. And in the next morning Kevin gets up and, again... ...on the headlines of the paper is the opposition's next move. He realizes that the prenup that Cullen had with his wife who was murdered... ...is now on public record. You know, there was a motive for him to kill her, and in this instance he really... ...has to get to work and deal with it, and what does he find? He finds that his mother's leaving. She's going home. She came for a two-week stay. He was hoping she'd stay longer. Maybe she'd take care of Mary Ann. He has a real problem with Mary Ann right now. The case is heating up. His mother is here. Maybe she can... In a totally pragmatic way, he's hoping that she will baby-sit. And in reality, he starts to get short with her. She has seen how Mary Ann is reacting. She understands it's not right. She's trying to say it to him and he doesn't want to hear it. So when she says, "I'll take her home," now he has to confront his mother... ...in not a very nice way. "This is home and I'm not going back to Gainesville. "And get it through your thick skull," is what he's basically saying. Now, she comes up with scripture, and at this point the last thing he wants to hear... if you feel it, he's getting deeper and deeper and deeper into narcissism. He's getting deeper and deeper and deeper into his work. And he slams the door and says, "Do what you want." What we cut to is what his work is. These are horrible photographs. Basically, they are photographs that I recreated from real murder scenes. All those photographs were scenes that I researched from Manhattan homicides. And you see, in fact, the brutality of those murders. That's his work. That's what he's doing. And, you know, he's at it. He's now interviewing Melissa Black, who's played by Laura Harrington. Melissa is the assistant to Alex Cullen. She is a professional woman. She's a divorcee with a child. And she's basically saying, "Listen, I know Alex Cullen. "He couldn't kill those people. I see him every day. He's not an easy man. "But I'm telling you, he can do some tough things, but he's not a murderer." All these little elements are there to kind of convince you that Alex Cullen... ...has the possibility of innocence. Meanwhile, while he's there working late with her... ...he notices that other people are working late. And he comes into this conference room and finds all the young associates... ...all the Nazi Youth, as it were, working for Eddie Barzoon... ...in some kind of very unorthodox and rather unethical procedure. In a law firm, you never destroy documents. You never shred documents. And there's a wholesale shredding going on here. So Kevin is, you know, he sees it. He keeps his cool and responds. He talks about the case, but he clearly saw what was going on. And Barzoon is a little nervous, but he's going to finesse it over. "You didn't see this. There's nothing going on." And Kevin, who's been so caught up in his own case... ...is completely unaware of what has been going on in this firm. There is an investigation going on, a Justice Department investigation. There is something unsavory, perhaps, about this law firm... ...and this has to do with what was just going on. Barzoon is saying, "You don't even know about it? My God." And out of nowhere appears John Milton. He actually appears over Barzoon's shoulder. But you want to have the sense that at the right moment, he's there. And what he wants to do is take the kid out on the town, go to the fights. And I put things in films that I like, and I love the fights. In New York City there's nothing like seeing a fight in Madison Square Garden. How do they go? They go by subway. Milton travels by subway. You want to be able to say, you know, that we're going to the fights... ...we're with the people. We're gonna go experience the noise... ...and the power and the brutality of fighting, which Milton loves. And in the process, when Kevin asks a hard question... ...Milton basically demurs... ...by staring at somebody else. "Has a lot of fingers in a lot of pies"... ...like he's looking at somebody else. Milton speaks various languages, and he was listening to that conversation... ...and he defuses and deflects Kevin by starting this thing... ...by staring at a guy that shouldn't be stared at, and this guy is a tough guy... ...he's an intimidator, and you expect, immediately, a guy like Milton to run... ...or Kevin grabs him, "I'm gonna protect you." Milton doesn't need any protecting. He speaks in fluent Puerto Rican Spanish. And what he's saying, Kevin can't understand... ...but the other guys understand, and what he's saying is... ...I think from an audience point of view, we, as an audience, immediately start... ...to recognize here, in this scene, that Milton is not exactly... if we have a question up to this point, we no longer have a question. He's not a normal guy. How would he know about Maricella. How would he know about the guy upstairs? How would he know what was going on right now? And somehow you feel it, and he totally talks these two guys down. He turns the situation. He's not even nervous for a second. You know, Kevin looks at it, he doesn't know what he said... ...but it's all impressive to him. Cut to Roy Jones, Jr., I think, pound for pound... ...one of the great fighters of this generation. Milton is showing Kevin what a night out on the town is... ...and Kevin is loving it. And I was fortunate enough to convince Roy and HBO, of course... ...HBO is owned by Warner Bros., to let us shoot this fight. I mean, right up there in the ring. That's the real stuff. And coming into the scene is one of America's most famous personages... ...Don King. Of course Don King would know John Milton... ...probably been represented by John Milton. I know Don from when I did When We Were Kings. I did that film documentary on Muhammad Ali... ...and it was Don King's first promotion. We cut and we are in a club in Downtown Manhattan... ...and one of my favorite music is flamenco. As I said, if I love boxing, I put it in my movie. If I love a particular type of music, I put it in. But I also felt if Milton's going to show Kevin life outside and... ...Milton's choice of music in terms of all its passion and sex and everything else... ...flamenco is just fabulous. It's noise. The devil loves noise. And Milton, this is a chance to really see him cut loose. He's showing Kevin, "I'm not just a corporate lawyer. "I can go out and have the best time you've ever seen." And meanwhile, Kevin's in the kitchen, calling home, talking to Mary Ann... ...who's basically saying, "Where are you? What are you doing?" And he's, you know, bull-shitting. He's saying, "I've got to be here with the boss." Baloney. He's out here having a great time. He's making a choice to go be a single... ...guy on the town instead of being home with his mother, and watching Milton... ...every step of the way say, "You want to see what a good time is? "I'll take you to the fights. Let's go here. You want to see some beautiful women? "You want to see some alluring things? Listen to this music." The whole essence of flamenco music is just saying "let loose." And in this table that Kevin comes back to, it's filled with those kind of late night... ...vampires that are around Manhattan, the party people, beautiful women. He's surrounded on one side by a woman. On the other side, Milton has orchestrated that he's got two women on either side... ...who are surrounding him. And Milton's got a beautiful woman on his arm. And it's called, "Hey, Kevin, domestic life is one thing, but this is real life." And then to take it a step forward, I mean, 'cause I wanted this scene to be really... ...outrageous, you see Milton whisper something in her ear. She goes under the table, and Kevin goes, "Oh my God, what's going on here?" Milton's laughing like, "Hey, you don't know what life is like. "It can be everything your fantasy desires." Back home, Mary Ann's been left. She's sleeping and she wakes up. She hears something. Now in this sequence I'm trying to establish her state of mind. She's been abandoned. Kevin is gone. She hears someone come home. The whole essence of being alone in an apartment late at night... ...and you hope it's your husband that's come home, but you don't know. The idea of double cutting it was to basically utilize a moment of unreality. She is clearly dreaming. I shot this sequence, cut it straight... ...and then at the end I realized maybe we should go back and re-cut it... ...so that you see her see herself wake up, see herself walking away. It's clearly a dream. Or is it? And this is kind of your classic, "girl with a knife walking down... "...trying to protect herself, and what's at the end of the hallway?" It's building up the horror-suspense element here, but with a little surprise. Instead of a monster waiting down the hall to jump out and go "boo." Alien is basically a film where people jump out and go "boo." There's no monster here. It's a baby. It's absolutely her fantasy. What does she want most in the world? What is she trying to do? She's trying to get pregnant. And in this dream she's dreaming about what she wants most... ...and here is a beautiful little girl in the room... ...without any parent around. It's a strange image and she doesn't know whether she's dreaming or not... ...but it's awfully real. Now, anytime you shoot a scene with children... ...it's incredibly difficult. But in this instance, she's looking, everything seems nice. She starts to play, and then this baby lifts up this horrendous thing... ...these innards, and it is one of the more horrific moments in the film. It has a very, very strong effect on women, as you can imagine... ...and I cut to our time lapse, again, across men... ...across the reservoir. The next morning... ...Kevin is home after a night on the town, totally guilty... ...listening to what was clearly a nightmare. There's no blood on her nightgown. It was an apparition. It didn't happen. And at the same time, when you realize where he's been and what he's done... ...he's got to be feeling a certain amount of guilt. She is totally hysterical. She has been upset. She has been kind of crazed before, and now she's really going out on the deep end. And he's starting to realize, "I'm in the middle of a case. I went out on the town." Of course, he's not admitting that he went out on the town. He's not admitting his own guilt. He's now completely burying that, because it's easy. She's so freaked out. She's so psychotic at this point, he just like deals with it. "I'm gonna call a doctor. I'm gonna get you some help. "I'm gonna get you sedated. I'm gonna do something." In other words...

1:07:28 · jump to transcript →

The part where the mummy comes back to life, that's based on a true story, right? That happened to me when I was younger, yes. I love the photography in this scene. You really, well, you feel like you're there. Torch lit. Creepy. Although, before we added sound effects, it sounded like they were walking on...

41:51 · jump to transcript →