True story / real events

though that fake limp will connect to the real bum leg that Eastwood's character has and a very real limp that pops up later for Bridge's character. The car he's making a beeline for is a 1973 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, identifiable by the big hood bird and the egg crate grill. As the used car salesman, here we have Gregory Walcott.

4:26 · jump to transcript →

and Schickel quotes Fromwood. It is the essentially gentle Lightfoot with his indeterminate sexuality, his freedom from the constraints of normal gender roles, and his air of a pre-socialized child who constitutes the real threat to the culture. Finally, Biskind again. The lament, he says of the film, for an impossible and fugitive homosexual love

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got through. It is revealed that Thunderbolt, in fact, won the Silver Star in Korea, was all along the real hero, though he tried to deflect the attention. And the false hero, Red, meanwhile, speeds toward his final stand, which, as described, is a particularly gruesome one.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 →

Sark's carrier is an interesting object. It was designed also by Syd Mead and rendered by Information International. But because MAGI-Synthavision"s images had a line-drawing quality around the edges of them, which was an intentional design that we created, their software allowed them to do that very easily. So that there was a similar quality to the objects that were created by Information International, all those vector lines, or those little line-drawing edges that are put around the edges of Sark's carrier, for example, were all done by actually going back and beveling off the corners and having to create an actual rastographic type of beveled edge to give it a line-drawing kind of quality. That was the difference in the software between the two companies. When people get mad in the electronic world, they get red. When Sark is being tortured by the MCP, there are mattes that are being cell flopped underneath his costume design to create those moray patterns which move through his body. Then there are exposure changes happening to him and color changes happening to him, again, to create that kind of feeling. The environment here that the Solar Sailer is flying through was... The Sea of Simulation was all created... All these scenes were created by Triple-l. When you see the down views of Flynn and Tron looking down at the landscape below, those are fractal mountains. And that was the first time that Triple-/ had ever tried to do anything like that. And it's one of the few places where more complex CGI was used. There's some texture mapping going on. There are little hidden things, these hills and towers were all, in many cases, a first-time attempt at creating something with CGI that nobody had ever really done before. When you fly over the Sea of Simulation there, there is... At one point, the Solar Sailer flies over a lake that actually has the shape of Mickey Mouse's head. There's giant Mickey. - Giant Mickey. This whole sequence on the Solar Sailer that we did little things to keep it alive, there's a lot of dialogue that was going along here and a lot of standing around on the bridge talking. So, I came up with this idea of these zingers that go wailing by in the background. These electronic comets that blast by just to add the potential for sound to give you a sense that they're moving more, and just to create something interesting in the background, which we've tried to do a Iot. I mean, it was a simplified reality where we were here. It certainly isn't as complex as the real world we're in every day. And to keep it from being just monotonous and boring, you know, we were always trying to come up with little things in the background, things that could help keep it alive. It's interesting how bicycle helmets have evolved. I wish we had those helmets when we were doing the picture. And it's funny, the bicycle world is nothing but helmets and spandex now. Right. - We didn't know it, but we were pioneering Rollerblade and bicycle technology.

1:10:32 · 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 →

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 →

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 →

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 Kellermans 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 →

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 →

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 →

Barry Sonnenfeld

And here comes the toilet-bowl scene. Ever been to a water park? - I don't know. This was a real annoying day to shoot. Tommy doesn't mind getting wet, but Will hates it. I'm sure he bathes or showers, but Will doesn't like this kind of stuff. He's not comfortable around water. This was a big matte painting. And this really happened. This is two tanks with water in Times Square. The only thing we did Is, it looked too bright... ...SO Illusion Arts darkened the sky and added headlights on the cars. But that was not a blue-screen element. We were there at Times Square on that day, shooting that.

34:59 · jump to transcript →

Barry Sonnenfeld

Jay! This is a great set designed by Bo Welch. The ceilings are about 5 feet tall... ... forcing any normal human to have to crouch. Some of these shots, the worms are puppets. The puppeteers are underneath the floor. We built the whole stage up about 6 feet. Their close-ups... That really happened. That's a real puppet. That's a real puppet. And they have little worms, or rods, that get removed in postproduction. But when you cut to a close-up of one of the worms... ... that's an oversized 6-foot head. I think we got one of those coming up. That is a puppet shot against blue screen... ...and we added the green bar in the background. But all of these are regular puppets... ...and all the puppeteers are underneath the stage. Watch out, Will. You're gonna get kissed. I think these worms are Jewish. There's a lot of, "Oy." Listen. You're gonna-- In a minute.... You'll hear, "Oy, Neeble" after the guy says, "Your mama." Which one of y'all is Neeble? - Yo, mama! Him, right there. It's fine. At least some of the worm guys are Jewish. Twister!

50:40 · jump to transcript →

Barry Sonnenfeld

This is outside the real headquarters in lower Manhattan.

1:03:50 · jump to transcript →

Two minutes, two and a half minutes by 737 is taking off about 50 feet away. It was like roaring. The actors just had to keep on going. And if you listen to the real sound, because obviously this soundtrack has been enhanced and changed and there's additional, you know, there's other dialogue been put over the top and so it's all been cleaned up, but the original location sound is just interrupted by the roar of aeroplanes all the time. They could have been Nazgul. Well, they could have been loud Felbys, couldn't they? Yeah.

51:06 · jump to transcript →

Now this is an interesting shot because this is basically the set that we built in a quarry filmed with a big crane and half the people again are CG and half are real. The set is being extended with a digital extension blended into the real set. It's a difficult shot but it does really sell the idea of what's happening. You know, again, it was a very important story point to end the battle at that stage with the feeling that everybody was retreating, that the battle was hopelessly...

3:05:27 · jump to transcript →

Chromedicates the box 101. The shots of them galloping down the shell slide are entirely CG. It's a miniature of Helms Deep that we're using, but it's CG horses, CG Uruk-hai. It's all very artificial, I guess is the word I'm after. Fake is the real word. No, it's all real, and it did happen. But these ants are real.

3:17:07 · jump to transcript →

Richard Curtis

We never decided... Here we go. Stop, Hugh's turned up. Okay, this is the first time they've seen the film. Don't be ridiculous. - No, it's true. I'm just recovering from the sight of myself in that dodgy shirt. Yes, you do, you look terrible. - Yeah, I know. See what I mean. When Hugh first got the film, you were quite cross about Bill's part, weren't you? I'm still quite cross about it. I still think it could be trimmed, to be absolutely honest. You felt that you would take some of the attention. This was a controversial piece of casting. What do you think about this guy, Hugh? Very bad. - Oh, yeah. No, no, no. No, he has been good. - Who is he? He just looks a little long in the fang. I love you. - I Know. SO... - Who's that girl? That's not part of... No, that's Sienna Guillory, who's... -/ think we're watching the wrong film. She's so beautiful it hurts. We in fact shot this scene later. We thought we wanted to know a little bit more about Colin. Oh, good God. Bloody hell. - That was a tough shock. I've never seen this scene. Let's see that... Can we wind back? Right, so... - So what's the idea, that she dumps him? Yeah. That's the girl who, with the brother, dumps... So here we have Liam. It's very odd, just looking at that phone, it was very odd, talking on the phone to Liam Neeson, trying to ask him if he'd do the part. It's such a legendary voice, it strikes you that you're probably talking to an impressionist, not to the real person. Understood. Emma"s very good with vegetables. - Yeah. You used to always have food in your films. Yes, I used to get letters about it from my Japanese fans.

3:45 · jump to transcript →

Richard Curtis

This next one is the one I like most. Look at that. - Yeah. Thomas, there you are! What do you think? Pretty good, huh? - Good sad look. Yeah, I know. It's good, isn't it? - Well done. Did you do that trick of staring at a light for a very long time and not blinking? -/t makes your eyes water. - No, I haven't tried that. You see, Hugh's acting is all tricks. That's the tragedy. That's actually none of the real stuff. I do that sometimes to make me smile or sneeze. - Sneeze? Looking at the sun is... Yeah, that's got a million uses. But it also makes you blind. - ls that why you wear such thick glasses? Yes, quite.

16:25 · jump to transcript →

Richard Curtis

Come on and let it snow." All the people in the world I most admire are people who are honest, like this. I could never be. But it's the sort of John McEnroe type of John Lennon person who alarmingly manages to tell the truth in public situations. in public situations. I've never been able to pull it off. Yes, yes. I fear this is going to be a difficult one to play. Alex. This is when people start to be chilled by the authority of your performance, Hugh. It's when I'm chilled by the fact that you cut out the first half of the scene. Yeah. There used to be a bit where they discuss which record was gonna be number one at Christmas. Hugh said, "I've got a very, very important thing to discuss." But we cut it because it looked like the prime minister was just a joke. But we wanted to make you more serious. - A joke? This is an exact replica of the cabinet, I think. Yes, with some of the real cabinet members in there. See if you can spot them. See if you can spot the actual minister for transport.

22:16 · jump to transcript →

to me was very important because, I don't know, those scenes were very delicate and it's not like much happening. And to shoot in the real place, the place that you had mentioned, meant a lot to me because there's a way I had nothing to grab on. Right. And for a while there, we didn't know if we were going to even shoot in this country. They were talking about sending it to Canada, which was...

3:54 · jump to transcript →

about it but that was really perfect for her character because the way they like making fun of her it's exactly the same way she would react in the story and in real life. I like here how she gets pissed off with the delay she carry on being cuddly and kissing him.

45:04 · jump to transcript →

This idea that you can drown into your dream and suffocate in real life is really scary. Because that shows that most people would think anything can happen in your dream and you'll be fine, or your memory in this case. But if you find a limit where there is actually some real danger, it makes you feel really the dangerous situation.

1:09:15 · jump to transcript →

The performance with the contact lenses is, for all the people who worked with this, was very difficult, especially for Robert because he, in this moment, he is showing us, you know, that he's infected, but at the same time he's connected with something from the past, which is this woman, and attacking this woman who has given him a lot of suffering. The connection between the rage and the suffering, it's one of the... one of the big concepts in this moment. I think that the eyes, the idea of the eyes, is not only because of the gore. It's not gratuitous. It's the idea of the guilt, no? He doesn't want to see her eyes because he feels guilty. That was the real... the real reason. We know that's really extreme and... Yeah, and how the guilt is putting you in a difficult situation. And, you know, this guilt becomes a kind of rage and you destroy everything around.

44:52 · jump to transcript →

It's driving them crazy, because, you know, it's so difficult to see who is infected and who is not infected. And, again, a character taking a difficult decision, which is one of the leitmotifs in the movies... in the movie. A right decision or a wrong decision? But always it's a decision that implies destruction. Yeah, and all these decisions have been taken from the fear. The fear is... Everything is around the fear here. Everybody takes a decision in this... in the presence of the fear, which is moving everything forward. When you're watching the movie you understand why people take these decisions, because I think when we feel this fear in the real life, you're in trouble. It's not a cold decision, it's not a decision taken from a quiet moment. It's... when you're surrounded by something really powerful as the infection. This tune, this theme, was taken - musically - was taken from the first movie. This is a tune we always loved from the first movie, from John Murphy's soundtrack. And we had no time for John's... He had only two weeks to compose the music of the film. This is absolutely amazing to say that, but it's the truth. And we decided to bring this theme again back here in this sequel, and to work it in different ways. For me, it's hypnotical. I... I like the way we use it here. I like the way that John orchestrated and arranged absolutely in a different... It's different from the first one. We are going to hear this tune four times in the movie, in key moments. This is one of them. And that... this sound, this music, reminds that the infection is a building process. The infection is spreading. That's why the music is building up and, you know, getting this kind of big, intense moment with the guitars, which is the best combination with the infection around. On the other hand, the music has a kind of heart, emotional heart, which is telling that this movie is about character, it's about people... who try to survive. Now there's the moment of Doyle's dilemma. Another decision to take, another difficult decision to take, which is to put out of his misery his colleague.

54:07 · jump to transcript →

In the script, this sequence was meant to be during night, night-time. It was so complicated to do it, we decided to choose, on the run, to make it in daytime. It was a critical choice, because, you know, some of this stuff at night-time brings another... another flavour. But we had to make a lot of work with the helicopter and we hadn't had permission to do it at night-time. We had to spend a lot of money in trying to light this place - absolutely impossible. And... We decided to do it at sunrise. I think it brings something absolutely different. It's really dreamy. And again, Chediak's photography is absolutely gorgeous. This sequence is important. In terms of storytelling, we are assisting in the beginning, in a way, of a new family. You know, these kids with these soldiers. They are connected and they are trying to escape and... Now we know the real task of these soldiers, which is to take these kids out because they represent a kind of faith in the new vaccine, or in a new way to... The blood of the kids is the key now to save the world, in a way. So there's a mission now.

1:12:01 · jump to transcript →

James Mangold

is a villain or a bad guy. But the real truth is he's not the antagonist of that film. He's, in a sense, the associate of the protagonist, trying to help them solve the murders. And that if you frame the movie and you look at the film as simply as seeing as Russell as a bad guy, then I think it's really tough to swallow the journey of the film from that moment on. And I think if you view the film

19:08 · jump to transcript →

James Mangold

One of the real challenges for Christian Bale in this movie is to find a kind of tone for his performance of Dan Evans, which is neither pitiable nor heroic, but a man riding the fence between those two places. He could go either way and his life could go either way. But what I admire so much about what Christian did is at the same time, he's a guy who hasn't lost his own pride or his own belief

26:25 · jump to transcript →

James Mangold

but actually because it's so imaginatively fruitful a place to drop stories into because it's such a moment of transition. And that when you're making a film like this, this landscape has as much in common with science fiction or fantasy epics like The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings as it does more than it does with aspects of historical filmmaking in which you're telling the true story of, you know, the Battle of the Alamo.

45:42 · jump to transcript →

This is Amari. The whole point about this scene, you're thinking, oh shit, a cop's just broken in and you're just, you know, you need to put what I call a reality figure into this madness of their apartment and their life. And that's what Marcus is. And this is where we see the real Damon. First of all, you know, we see their backstory in the second on the comic book. But secondly, you know, this is, it's very important to put balance in and this is,

49:03 · jump to transcript →

I just can't believe he's dead, that's all. Oh, I know. And here, this sequence, we nearly did cut, but without it, the audience, what happened is they were so confused that the next scene, they weren't laughing, enjoying themselves, because they were just trying to put two and two together, going, does that mean he's dead or he's alive? What's going on still? Because, you know, and then some smartass said to me, well, how do they know it's a kick-ass impersonation if it's not the real kick-ass?

54:26 · jump to transcript →

That is on location. I think there's one sort of thing where the CG looks fake and it's the real thing. It's like typical. How about both of us being dead? Is that serious enough for you? Dead? I think these two knock it out. I think there's really good acting between them. Look at Chris really... I'm so glad people are responding to Chris in this movie. He deserves it because he has been sort of labelled with the McLovin syndrome.

1:16:33 · jump to transcript →

art-directed barricade standing by in the next-door studio, ready to shift in when we finished that sequence. But Eve and I both looked at this thing that the students had created and said, this is so great, it really looks like the real thing. So rather than getting rid of it and weaning in the one that she'd prepared, we stuck a few nails in the one that the students had created and went with it. I must admit I did a bit of art directing, things like the tusks at the front and the two coffins as sort of teeth.

1:40:23 · jump to transcript →

But I felt in the end it was the real story was the two men coming face to face. And here we did everything we could to try to create the momentary illusion that Valjean might be about to do something to Jaber.

1:49:23 · jump to transcript →

which is so powerful emotionally. It's the real beginning of that unhinging, which you can see in Russell's eyes so brilliantly. In fact, in one of these all-in-one takes, see that sewer entrance where there's a tube that runs from that, which basically came out where my monitors were. So in the middle of this battle sequence, suddenly, Unity turned up sort of under my monitors covered in mud.

2:03:46 · jump to transcript →

Well, in real life, you don't really see your eyeball go up and down, or your eyelids at all. It really is just like a black frame. And I actually went back and watched Enter the Void and realized it looked like that's exactly what he was doing in that film as well. So that actually was like one of those things that kind of helped out.

14:23 · jump to transcript →

I want the real Clarissa, and I want her to explain everything to me. So you don't have to worry. This scene was originally, there was a, I wrote a big expository chunk of dialogue here, part of which kind of played into the overall VHS mythology with her talking about how ghosts are just really electromagnetic impressions of people at their most extreme emotions left on their environment, kind of referencing the stone tape a bit.

19:21 · jump to transcript →

And I was like, you know, actually, Simon, you did talk about that short now that I think about it. And I was like, that was a reference point for you. And he was like, oh, yeah, yeah, forget everything I just said. When the camera goes into Adam's mouth here, it's actually the real button camera that we bought for the wraparound attached to the end of a pencil. And Adam is with a little light. I'm deep-throating it. And Adam is shoving it in the back of his throat. Yeah, just shove it in. So, yeah, no digital trickery there.

24:52 · jump to transcript →

Francis Lawrence

One of the fun things for me about this whole sequence is the intercut. I just thought that it could be a great introduction to the two characters and to the two worlds. And one of the things that I played with throughout the sequence is screen direction. So if you notice even from the very beginning, I typically have Jennifer facing left to right, and Joel facing right to left, as you can see here. It was a trick that I learned. I remember watching old Hitchcock movies, and watching Strangers on a Train, and there's... In the opening sequence, you see the two men who are moving toward one another, and eventually gonna meet. And it's something that I've employed a lot, I think, that screen direction is actually a huge benefit in storytelling. But especially in a sequence like this where you feel like these two characters are gonna end up on a collision course with one another, that narratively, you know that at some point, that they're gonna come together. American! Most of this ballet sequence here was shot in the Budapest opera house. And we had support of the Budapest opera, and the Budapest ballet company. And most of the other dancers there are all dancers with the Budapest company, and from a variety of places. There's some Americans, actually, and some Hungarians. Great group of people. And there was our nice leg break, one of the first specific, kind of, tonal hits in the movie. It was something I wanted to do with the movie, was to not hold back too much in terms of some of the shock, and audacity of some of the moments that take place within the story. And so to see the real damage done to her leg there... I just remember seeing, you know, there's been sports injuries over the years. And not too long before we shot this, there was a French athlete in some, I want to say some Olympic games or something, who had done some vaulting, and just kind of landed slightly wrong and bent his leg at this really horrible angle. And it was really difficult to look at, but we basically modeled the bend in her leg based on the images of this French Olympian. Word is they were vice cops, looking for Chechen dealers... or some family guy getting a blow job in the bushes. They weren't there for Marble. They just got lucky. Chances are they would have questioned you, and let you go. You can see here, one of our really cool locations. Maria, my production designer, was just really fantastic at looking for locations and scouting. And I think she had gone out to Budapest a few months before me. And we had also hired Klaus, who was our location manager for the Berlin portion of the Hunger Games films, and we liked him a lot. And he was nearby, and so he came down to Budapest and they worked together, and they found these fantastic places. These old abandoned hospitals, where the surgery Is, and where she's about to wake up, was this old, abandoned maternity hospital. And this fantastic space is part of a library in the seventh district of Budapest. Undercover narcotics agents saw what they thought... was a drug deal in process. You can see outside of Jen, too, that we really put together a fantastic cast for this movie. Jeremy Irons, who's an icon and a fantastic guy, and I think one of the best actors to have ever existed, was my first choice to play Korchnoi. And luckily he said yes. And Matthias, we brought in. I'd been a fan of his since seeing him in Bullhead and Rust and Bone and things like that. And he's so versatile. But he became a choice when we actually decided to skew the age of Dominika's uncle down a little bit. I wanted to add a little bit of creepiness to their relationship. And so the idea that, you know, maybe her father had a much younger brother, so that, as she was growing up, there was this, you know, charming, handsome, much younger uncle, you know, somebody that she might have even been attracted to, and he might have been attracted to her, was something that I wanted to play with in the course of this. And I thought he was just perfect for it. He's such a fantastic actor.

6:35 · jump to transcript →

Francis Lawrence

Here's a little cameo. This is one of Jen's best friends, Laura, who also acted as her assistant on the movie. What a pleasure. May I join you? There's a fair amount of cameos in this movie, probably more than I've ever done in terms of people who work on the movie. And friends, and things like that. If you notice the policeman in the beginning of the film that's on the subway train with Joel, in the furry hat, is actually Chris Surgent, my first assistant director, who I've worked with since I Am Legend. I actually met him on I Am Legend. He was the first assistant director of the second unit, and did all the big New York City lockdown sequences for us, for the opening, and I was really impressed with him. And we've become good friends, and work together all the time now. Tell me the real reason you are here. This was actually a really, really beautiful location in downtown Budapest. It's the New York Cafe, which is attached to the hotel that we used for the exterior. And it's become a very popular tourist attraction, and a place to go eat because of its opulence. But I just thought it would be a fantastic spot for this character, for Ustinov's character to hang out. One of the things that I wanted to do, and also Maria, the production designer, was to show different facets of Russian architecture, right? The kind of classic, opulent stuff like places like this, or the ballet, the kind of socialist, Brutalist structures like her uncle's office. Some of the government housing-type environments like where she lives with her mother. But one of the things that really excited me that we got into was the idea of color. I think, honestly, people tend to expect in movies like this for it to be very gray, you know, just bleak. And what Maria and I found in our research was that there is plenty of color throughout the environments. And we had decided to really try and utilize that, and she pulled, I don't know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of photos that we used, that gave us a real sense of color palette and a sense of mood and a sense of light. And we ended up using that also for Jo, the cinematographer and I, in terms of how the movie kind of looks in terms of lighting styles as well. And that led us into a direction of, you know, post-World War I/ Russian art, and found that a lot of the, kind of, colors that are in that art were also found in a lot of these environments that we were finding in Central and Eastern Europe. And we ended up really trying to utilize those. And it was something really exciting for me, because to discover that this movie could be quite colorful was a lot of fun.

19:29 · jump to transcript →

Francis Lawrence

One of the things that Trish and I worked on, Trish Summerville, the costume designer, and I was, the different kinds of looks for Jennifer. Because when you think about a character like this, right, she's actually playing two completely different people, right. You've got Jennifer the dancer in the beginning, right. And so dancers have their own culture and sense of style and how they dress when they're not at work and how they dress in rehearsals or how they dress on stage and things like that. But that's the real Dominika. And then you've got the Sparrow, right, in the uniform, and that's a bit utilitarian. And then you've got the young woman who's sent to Budapest that's playing a part, right. And so she's not supposed to be a dancer, she's actually supposed to be somebody else. So, the decision of how do you dress and how do you present yourself to the world when you're supposed to be a young woman from Moscow who's a translator at the Hungarian embassy. It's really interesting to dive in to doing different kinds of things. And also thinking about the seasons, because, you know, we Started in just before the dead of winter and then Sparrow School! took us through the dead of winter and then we decided that Budapest, it was the end of winter, and into spring. We never really wanted to see leaves on the trees at all, but we wanted to sort of get in at a slightly nicer, I would say maybe sort of damp weather, as opposed to icy weather as the story progressed. He told me about what happened at the park after I established trust. Hmm.

1:11:09 · jump to transcript →

One thing that's nice is all of the different textures that you get to see up close that you would probably pass over or not notice as a person in real life. Yes, totally. It's a nice little extra. I think that's what sold us on the house. It just looked perfectly, beautifully lived in.

3:18 · jump to transcript →

I don't like care care about this car because I can't Arthur There's a real Arthur in real life who is a dog And

10:25 · jump to transcript →

Well, we tried to get the real Arthur to be in the movie, but... He's bad at acting? No, it's actually his voice. But he's more of a voiceover actor. Yeah, the dog trainer was like, he's not going to cut it. There's another wonderful joke that we just passed by that I want to flag that sometimes is so low in the mix that some people don't hear it, but he's got hair and all the teeth. I know. That is so funny. That was all you, Jenny. It was so funny. I'm glad. You know, I...

10:49 · jump to transcript →

Nia DaCosta

This is also the only 28 film thus far that does not begin with a set piece surrounded by the infected. And for me, that was really important because it shows, you know, we're sort of shifting what we're saying about this world, which is that the infected, at this point, are just part of the flora and fauna. The real danger comes from people who know better, but don't do better, like the Jimmies. And so we start with a really chaotic, disturbing scene with this.

5:26 · jump to transcript →

Nia DaCosta

So here you can see a bit, 'cause of the way Jimmima was moving just then in that scene, that the shutter angle is changed. It's not sort of a standard angle. And that's something that Danny did in the first film. Whenever the infected were attacking, the shutter angle would change, the image would appear more choppy to the human eye. And... Sean Bobbitt, my DP, and I, we really wanted to use that, in a way. It was really the only visual reference from the other films that we took. But because, again, we're starting this film with the Jimmies as the real mortal threat, we thought the Jimmies and the infected should have the shutter angle change when violence happens. And this is the first infected of the film coming up, which, again, wasn't written in, but we added, 'cause we were like, "We need infected." And I like infected scenes and things like that, so, yeah.

6:42 · jump to transcript →

Nia DaCosta

So, in my film, I really wanted the infected, if they were naked, to actually be naked, because I didn't want to have to shoot around modesty garments or do VFX and... And because Danny and I shot our film so differently, the way the infected look also had to be changed because I couldn't get away with some of the things that he was able to get away with, just because of the style, you know, shooting on iPhones, all that stuff, so... So, in my film, you see infected that are... more of them are clothed. And my reasoning for this basically was that you could say that, one, we're getting closer to civilization maybe, where we are in this part of the film or whatever civilization is left. And two, that one of these towns has just had, like, a big overtaking by the infected. So, you know, a town has fallen essentially and lost a bunch of people, and that was, in my head, why the infected in this movie have more clothes, mixed with some of the ones who are, you know, naked and skinny. Okay, So you just met Samson, who is great, love him, love his whole journey in this film. And then you meet his best friend, Kelson, his soon-to-be best friend, played by Ralph Fiennes, who is an icon of our times and a national treasure. So, that shot before was the real woman, and this is a dummy, obviously, 'cause we can't just be throwing women off of cliffs anymore.

8:57 · jump to transcript →

Brian Stonehill

And just as Antoine reads Balzac's search for the absolute, so this scene might be said to represent the moment of absolute purity in the film, children being made happy, the norm that ought to exist in the world. Robert Lacheney confirms the accuracy of the boy's exploit to raise money. The typewriter theft really happened because we had to find money to go to the movies with.

1:06:16 · jump to transcript →

Brian Stonehill

But after all, there were still times where you had to pay, and so we had to find some money. But the story of the typewriter, that really happened later, when he moved out of his parents' house. He had run away from home and he was living with me. He said to me, you know, I could steal a typewriter that's in my father's office.

1:07:13 · jump to transcript →

Brian Stonehill

We talk about movies for a while, but a week later, my father, who had discovered the announcement of the Film Addicts Club in L'Ecran Français, got his hands on me and turned me over to the police. The real article, not the juvenile authorities. I was spent two nights in the central police station, as the boy does in my film. Then they locked me up in Villejuif. At that time, 1948, Villejuif was half an insane asylum and half a house of correction.

1:17:24 · jump to transcript →

But I guess in reality, the reality is on the screen. The shadow was in the real life. If that makes any sense to you, I don't know. Yeah, it sounds rather like Verlaine, who said, I write stories and then let them happen to me. Yes, absolutely. The planned accidents of life. I couldn't agree more. Sure. Candy Clark is an amazing actress. I saw American Graffiti, and she was wonderful in Graffiti.

33:06 · jump to transcript →

It's a tremendous film in its sense of reality. All those young people were not like actors. They all seemed the real thing. And from a class structure that wasn't unusual, it was not rich, it wasn't desperately put, it was just like a wonderful... I enjoyed it tremendously. As a foreigner, when I was watching it in England, it had a...

33:36 · jump to transcript →

This was after publishing a novel or two that were highly thought of, and he was considered to be an up-and-coming major literary figure. And as his schizophrenia took hold of him, he became more and more part of the world he'd constructed, the crazy world, and less and less a part of the real world so that he finally wasn't able to write at all. And when...

1:12:29 · jump to transcript →