True story / real events

Peter Greenaway

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

1:29:20 · jump to transcript →

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

45:29 · jump to transcript →

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

1:19:17 · jump to transcript →

for this project, for the Garbage Pail Kids movie. Those were the real guys. They showed up in their motorcycles and everything. Amazing. That guy actually lost a toe during filming. He did, but in another part of the movie. Right. Not at the hand of Alligator. Yeah, no, these were real biker dudes. These were real tough dudes. These were not central casting experts. These were the real guys. Amazing.

45:34 · jump to transcript →

Again, the sound of Who's on First from Raymond to the real Abbott and Costello. As I say, again, because we shot in continuity, I thought it might be worthwhile to show the audience the real Abbott and Costello, the real routine of Who's on First, because I'm sure there's a generation or not that's familiar with it, and two, that he actually sort of experienced it himself to see if he can make any sense out of it.

1:50:26 · jump to transcript →

Cut to the statue's smile. See, he's a little dazed, and that's how we... That's almost a Clockwork Orange homage. It is. It is very good. Thank you. This is Mayor Bradley's office again. This is Nancy Marchand. This is the real Mayor Bradley. This is the real Mayor's office, because we were so cheap.

47:56 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, I remember he came in to the party and you were trying to... Barbra Streisand's son. Barbra Streisand's son, Jason Gould. He's great. As Mike Cameron. With the hair that he tried to have to simply red, but it was simply shit. That's right, that's right. That's right. I got the Keymaster thing from the real Corey, which is a girl named Corey Ford, who I met through Michael Gilmore.

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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 →

Fred Dekker

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.

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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...

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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 →

he will actually lose the prosthetics and go for the real thing. In fact, in that film, we even see an oral sex done for real and the use of actual pornographic performers, both in male and female roles, something that we still don't have here. But you definitely feel that maybe Brass, and this is, I'm thinking out loud here, maybe Brass...

29:25 · jump to transcript →

Well, they want to get to know me, do they? They want to spend a little quality time. Here's the first good look at the Grinch. I guess I could use a little social interaction. One of the real attractions for me in choosing to direct this film was going to be the opportunity to direct Jim Carrey in this particular role. Incredibly challenging trying to bring a character like the Grinch to life in a live-action

5:56 · jump to transcript →

Simon West

late at night, obviously, and so it's quite a different lighting look to the first time we were in this room. And we shot this in the middle of the night, I think, because of the size of the windows in this building was so great that we couldn't tent the whole building to make it look like night, so we had to wait for the real night. And there's always a downside with shooting at night, because although it's very quiet, there's no aeroplanes, there's no traffic, there's no telephones ringing, everyone is working at four o'clock in the morning. And to try and be creative

1:05:11 · jump to transcript →

Ted Tally

I was amazed to see the dailies. This is a scene you sent me dailies of. I was amazed to realize that the adult male tiger in this scene is not even sedated. - I called up Mark and I said, "I think we're gonna have to re-shoot this." There's a new law that you're not allowed to sedate the animals because there's been a lot of deaths from sedation. You can't see it as you watch the movie, but just to the left of this tiger, near its head, is its trainer sitting there, trying to coax it into being still, while this terrified actress... When you saw the dailies, did you think we didn't have a scene? Also, the real-life tiger is roaring like crazy. You can hear some of it. In the dailies he's roaring so loud sometimes you can't hear the dialogue. Every once in a while, he starts to... We actually adjusted the scene on the set, where he said, "He's a bit noisy." Of course, Emily has to reach out and start stroking this unsedated tiger that's probably 10 feet long and weighs 800 pounds with all of its teeth, and the trainer is at the other end of the tiger, just to the left there holding out little tidbits to feed it. I thought, "The audience will never understand the courage it took to have the concentration that these actors had..." The only thing that we wouldn't let her do for insurance purposes was this shot right here. This had to be another trainer. She's actually fondling the testicles of the tiger. She couldn't even be with a male in the room, the one that she is petting is a female because they seem to be calmer than the males. In the dailies of this scene, what you see again and again, is the tiger start to get up and the actors take three or four very quick steps back. But Ralph never moved. - Everybody else clears away very quickly. Ralph remained very still. And I couldn't believe that the animal was not sedated for this scene. I went in without the tiger and did all these emotional things. I love this, where she hears the tiger's heart beating. It's in the novel and it's a wonderful moment. What was the meaning of that scene, can you articulate that? That scene is about... - The parallel of The Beauty and the Beast? It's about him trying to give her something that she has never experienced. She's never seen a tiger, and she had the whole story about the cougar she saw as a Child. It's one of her last visual memories. It's his way of trying to give her something in this strange... It's also a foreshadowing of what she'll be fondling... Yes, it also is very sexual. They're becoming more sexually interested in each other. That scene's a brilliant invention by Thomas Harris. It's from the book. What a weird kind of date. If you're going on a date with Francis Dolarhyde, what would it look like? You're at a Zoo, and a tiger is lying on a table. What do they want to know? I love both performances in this scene. I really can't take my eyes off of these two actors. I think they're hypnotic. It's strange, if you notice in this, she's looking directly into the lens, the angle is straight on, not really a standard kind of... You totally believe that she's... You feel her blindness. I just looked at the lens and found the right position for her. She asked, "Am I looking in the right direction?" I said, "You're blind. There's no really right direction. "Why don't you look right into the lens?" It really worked.

1:24:39 · jump to transcript →

I just love that you're just sort of numb. I like this. That goes out of focus. There he is. Now... Watch him. It's great. Now, watch the performance. You see where he was before, and I love that you say it's complicated. It's complicated. Come on, just... You know, the whole thing. It's just, what a great... It's like seeing the audience. Again, when I read that, I went, come on. You can't just... Come on. We had to make sure you brought the real thing. The rabbit's foot. Now we know.

1:38:20 · jump to transcript →

This was the way that the studio actually originally thought and wanted us to do this, was to sit in L.A. and be on sound stages and create it all later. But we refused. Yeah, and Will and Akiva and I really fought, fought, fought to just be out on the real streets. It just informs everybody in such a different way when you feel the real wind and air, you know, on your back, and you're standing in the middle of an empty street and where there should be cars and should be people, and it's just such a different experience.

6:16 · jump to transcript →

Roman Coppola

I really liked this temple. We went many times to this temple in the center of Jodhpur. I think we brought the cows ourselves. Okay. Spray in face. - Spray in face. This was shot much later, as I recall, actually at the location where we had the final convent, if I remember correctly. Yeah. - Yeah, outside of Udaipur. I remember when we were scouting, there was a day when it looked like this. It was all women. And I don't remember what the occasion was, but we recreated what we saw there. We invited back all the people who had been there on this day that we had scouted at the location and this ceremony was happening. This is a scene I remember we rehearsed in the temple itself and really kind of found the scene, the three of us sort of improvising it and acting it out. And we had a little text we were reading from, but sort of, you know, realizing it just the three of us. Yeah. When we were writing the script and we went to India on our reconnaissance mission, it was like a writing session and it ended up being a location session. And we found this temple and went back and shot there many months later. But as Roman said, this is-- We were walking around, we found this, we went in, we took our little micro scripts out, we rehearsed the scene to see if it was working and saw what worked and what didn't. And then we actually became so attached to this place that we went back and shot the real scene there.

23:08 · jump to transcript →

Patrick Tatopoulos

What? - Stop this. He is one of our protectors. - They are but beasts. This could stir up... It's a first movie and thing. This is to me probably my favourite scene of the movie. I like from the moment you see him. That dialogue with Bill, I was very happy with how this thing came out. I mean, you kKnow.... This one felt good. Bill's fantastic, and now again. And he looks like a vampire. - That's right. Did you actually count back and see if there was 21 lashes before then? Oh, yeah. - There was? Oh, yeah, yeah, of course, yeah. - That's another big set. This is the dungeon. And we miss Kevin before on the wolf. I don't think we talked too much. So Kevin's back. Kevin Grevioux, you know, Raze. And nobody believes that that's his real voice. I'll actually go on record saying it is his voice. We spent a lot of time with Kevin, and it's.... It's always been his real voice. That's his voice. He's not faking. - It's even more insane in real life. In the movie, you think... But when you hear him in real life, you just don't believe it first. was most touching. So this is the scene we were talking about earlier where.... And I remember, Patrick, you were kind of stressed of that, you know... ...the fact that all the blocking... The blocking initially had them walking around rooms... ...and turning to hide their reactions. And it just, we were running out of time... ...and had to stack them up just right next to each other. Actually, like you said, I think this one worked okay. The other, I think, would be a problem for them. Bill and....

26:59 · jump to transcript →

That was shot with a helicopter looking down. We kept some of the real buildings of Toronto, and then we built our CG around it. So you get the real scale. You always have something to relate to.

1:13:14 · jump to transcript →

and just why are we looking at people we don't know that are watching them you know and that balance between you know they're having the real problems with their with their kids the jeopardy is is growing and growing and you know caring you want to make sure that they're not being superficial and like overly caring about what other people think about them so that certainly wasn't the idea when you know their kids lives or health is at stake or or their their health

54:29 · jump to transcript →