Voiceover & narration

Ron Howard

It was wonderful having Anthony Hopkins as the narrator, particularly in this opening sequence.

6:49 · jump to transcript →

Ron Howard

All of this narration is very literally taken from the book.

1:11:48 · jump to transcript →

This is the scene where, as scripted, we began to hear the Dragon's voice. We dropped it because... We dropped it because it turned out that it's much more effective to just see Ralph hearing it without the audience hearing it. In a performance, a voiceover is used when you need to help tell a story... In fact his performance is telling the story, there are voices in his head. In a way, it might have just detracted from his performance. It's a great shot. It's actually on a stage. The character is in so much pain. He's very tormented. It's not something you usually see in the bad guy in one of these movies. He's fighting it. He doesn't want to be the bad guy. He likes her actually, he's fond of her. He is. And this is a great scene that really expresses that. I think this is where the audience Starts to go in... Usually, this kind of character in this kind of movie is just a sort of sadist. - Bad guy! He's a bad guy, a sadist, who really enjoys the things he does. The audience has to get empathy for him at this point. This character really doesn't enjoy what he does. He feels driven to do it. He feels that he's forced to do it by the Red Dragon. He would almost rather kill himself than go on in torment. It's an amazing thing for the bad guy in a thriller to be seen in that kind of light.

1:33:48 · jump to transcript →

That was a little storytelling thing, you know, helping, because you really couldn't hear her lines. Of course. There goes Grandma. There was a very complicated lighting set up for this. I read a cinematography article where Dante talked about how many different kinds of banks of lights that he had to set up for this one shot, right here. This is a real fire, but we enhanced it with CGI. This is a real fire. He's got this fire, but he's got to light the actors with extra instruments that are hidden out of shot. He's got the natural light of the cars. The lights flashing around. Francis Dolarhyde! Where is he? Look how many things are happening with light in this one nighttime shot. I put my hand in it. He set fire to the house. It's all justified because the headlights of the... It's red, it's blue, it's yellow. That was such a big explosion. You had to be half a mile away from it. All these stuntmen... I guess some people are wondering, "Why is there such a big explosion?" Actually, in the book, Dolarhyde has dynamite stored in this house for some unspecified future project. And you'd written a shot when we looked in the safe... I'd written a shot where we saw the dynamite, it didn't end up in the movie. We finally just decided, it's an old house, it's got... Let's lose the dynamite and keep... It's got oil tanks in it and the tanks blow up. I love this close-up of Emily. She just... What a face. Who could resist a charmer like me? You know, whatever part of him was still human... We really wanted that hair job to work, so we went crazy. You didn't draw a freak. Okay? It's a good scene for Edward, too. ...with a freak on his back. I should have known. No, sometimes you don't. Trust me... Initially, this scene was written as a sort of voiceover. Actually, it was one of Brett's, you know. Brett is very, very good on text, too. Just like Dino and Martha. And Brett said, "The audience loves this character "and we have to honor her by having a farewell with her." We have to see her. We have to give her some closure with him. They have to have a real scene together. The last time we saw her she was crying outside the house. And it was one of the best ideas that Brett had as the script was being revised, before we even started shooting. Dr. Voss, please call Pharmacy 4421. I love this scene that we came up with. This helped pay off the end. This is setting up the ending in a way that's not really in the book, I don't think. We needed for him to have knowledge of Dolarhyde that he could only have if he'd seen this big journal. So we went back and forth about how could he find this journal if that house blew up. Finally we thought, if we put the journal in the safe, it could conceivably have withstood that explosion. We were torn between, do we do a kid's drawing or a picture?

1:49:42 · jump to transcript →

We used to call this the pizza, didn't we? The pizza place. This was funny. We rewrote this voiceover about 50 million times and the last time was when Pete was about to record with Christopher Lee. I was in Malta actually doing ADR with Gimli and I was out shopping in a gift shop and my phone rang and it was Fran saying, we've got to fix this line, Pete's about to record it. Which was the line? It was the fires of industry line. The old ways of burning in the fires of industry. That's right, we couldn't get it right. It is, it's a Stephen line.

19:18 · jump to transcript →

But when we came to cutting it, we wanted to create a much more emotional ending. And so all of what you're hearing Sam say is something that we had him go into a recording studio and record for us. It was never originally shot. It exists here only as voiceover. Thank God we had him walking over to the window and at least starting to say something. Yeah, you could cut away. Because it enabled us to create this feeling of a resolution. And in a sense, it's tying the separate threads of the story together, isn't it? Yeah. That's why we did it. In the end, you have to think what

3:22:03 · jump to transcript →

Andrew Niccol

Yuri's journey, Nicolas Cage's character. He also starts life in Ukraine and eventually is responsible for the death of child soldiers. Hopefully this sequence sets the tone for the film. I wanted the film to be subversive. It's the reason this peacenik anthem is playing in the background. It's the same with Yuri's narration in the film. The narration was...

3:06 · jump to transcript →

Andrew Niccol

There was a line of narration here about, I think Yuri says there's a shortage of coffins in Sierra Leone because demand is so high. But I took it out because it was too flippant, even for Yuri. This shot coming up in the truck is actually a pickup. It was done in the Czech Republic because I didn't have time to do it in South Africa.

1:46:25 · jump to transcript →

James McTeigue

I know there's no way I can convince you... ... this is not one of their tricks, but I don't care. lam me. My name is Valerie. I don't think I'll lve much longer. I wanted to tell someone about my life. This is the only autobiography that I will ever write and, God... .../'m writing it on toilet paper. There is always that great history of the first people... ...picked on or imprisoned are minorities. And it was important to, you know, show the Valerie character... ...and where she starts off with... ...and where, you know, where her life leads her... ...and then, you know, how the government come in... ...and they sweep up all those people... ...and then... ...and then how it affects Evey... ...and how Evey comes to, like, understand what has happened to those people... ...and how it, I guess it really sparks her political consciousness after her parents. Natasha, who plays Valerie is really, really lovely. And she, I mean, incredible actress. And James had her on set so that when I was reading the letter... ... that she would be reading it live for me... ...Which made it so much more human, instead of... I mean, not to disparage script Supervisors in any way... ...but a lot of times when there's voiceovers that you hear... ...the script supervisor will just read it from the script. And obviously they shouldn't be trying to act it out or anything... ...but that can be a very cold feeling. When you have the actual actor there, that's pretty amazing. For me, it's a point in the film where you're both propelled on... ...and also you're propelled backwards. And so you're going down this fantastic rabbit hole... ...at a point in the film where it expands the film... ...and it expands your mind. And you have to stay on the train you're on, but also at the same time... ...get onto another train. And I love it when films do that. So It's a fantastic thing to do at that point in time. It also is a very important back-story for V as well. Because it's to that note... ...1S something that links all three characters. And, you know, I love that all that... The thing that changes them... ... IS written on a piece of toilet paper. I think that is, like, totally fantastic. You would. I'd always known what I wanted to do with my life... ...and in 2015 I starred in my first film, The Salt Flats. lt was the most important role of my life. Not because of my career... ... but because that was how I met Ruth. The first time we kissed... ...I knew I never wanted to kiss any other lips but hers again.

1:12:51 · jump to transcript →

James McTeigue

I wanted to trick the audience, I guess. You know, I absolutely wanted you to keep guessing... ...or not really Knowing. And because Tim Pigott-Smith, the Creedy character... ... had just been up there, and he'd just... ... he'd just bashed Stephen Fry, yeah, the Deitrich character. When you got into the interrogation, I wanted you to think it was him. Maybe it was Creedy. But I changed his voice. You know, I got Tim Pigott-Smith... ...but I got another actor to come and voice over him... .1n the same way that when Natalie gets her head dunked... ...it's done by Hugo. And it's done by, like, the V character. But I put a different voice on the guy. I also wanted to play into, you know, with the Creedy character.... The two characters are actually broken up. Which you sort of get, but you don't get. One's called the interrogator and one's called Rossiter. It's essentially like the good cop and the bad cop. And the Creedy character was the bad cop... ...and the stuff that Hugo says... ... IS essentially the good cop, Rossiter. He comes and he pleads with her. "Just one little piece of information." And they're little, they're just one-liners. So you can kind of get away with that. Yeah. - Yeah. Then you have no fear anymore. You're completely free.

1:18:52 · jump to transcript →

Don't touch me. Len, can I take off my shirt? I mean, do you mind if I, like... Like, Speedman, man. Look. At some point. Len, if I wear high heels, nobody will see me because you shoot me from the waist up. Why does Kate get to wear them and I don't get to wear them? What's up with that? We, at one point, did have that line over the close-up of the hands. Yes, there was a voiceover of Alexander saying...

1:36:08 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, this is real water. Is it? Real water. We shot this in Vancouver. This is actually a... We were kind of actually, honestly scraping by to find something for the voiceover. Originally, the voiceover was just in black. And we didn't have anything to put behind Kate's voiceover. And so we pulled some of the Vancouver aerial footage that we shot to put in behind it just because the voiceover ended up being a bit longer than... It was too long in black.

1:38:05 · jump to transcript →

Ridley Scott

a voiceover from Mason Verger from his bedroom. He calls in Cordell, says, get me the Justice Department. It's oblique, it must be oblique, because you can't be that much on the nose. In fact, to me, that was almost too on the nose, but I needed it. I needed to suggest something, and if you heard it great and got it, that's perfect. If you didn't really understand what it was later,

12:31 · jump to transcript →

Simon West

And some small parts of that scene are still in this version, but as you can see, it was curtailed down to this voiceover and montage sequence of the letter, which is much shorter and quicker.

38:06 · jump to transcript →

then this sequence started to feel like there was just too much narration. To some degree, that's probably true, but it is such a delightful sequence that I just felt that it deserved to be seen. And so, you know, for good or bad, here it is on this extended cut. Obviously, it establishes the book that Bilbo is writing, which we now see later in Rivendell.

9:01 · jump to transcript →

because we got a friend of ours, Jukka, to do the voiceover at the end of the finished pilot. But sadly, we couldn't change the markings on the plane either. So that's a moment of hope, really, at the end of the film, and it's interesting

1:47:45 · jump to transcript →

Tom Tykwer

So thank you for joining me on this trip through the film. I hope you got some fresh information and enjoyed it. And of course I hope you will see the film without my nerve-wracking voice over it all the time again and enjoy it much more without me. Okay, bye-bye.

1:34:22 · jump to transcript →

The line that he was saying to Sam was the very last shot. In fact, the bit at the end when he says, there's room for a little more, was the very last moment. Bilbo once told me. We had Elijah recording a lot more voiceover, but it just felt too much talking. I can't even remember now what we ended up using. Not a great deal, because a lot of this just played better with music. No, we used there some. Yeah, we used like a fraction of what we ended up writing, what we actually originally wrote and recorded. Yeah. Where are we going?

3:52:06 · jump to transcript →

It's definitely one of the first things that grabs you when you watch the animated series. It's very unusual, very well done. This was always very interesting to me, to create a world that wasn't a futuristic world that felt like this kind of dreamt-up world, but something that had some kind of reality based on the issues that we're dealing with today. So I always liked that little write-up and that this world of Bregna with this voiceover that

1:07 · jump to transcript →

Dogs. People. Sort of our nod to Sam. Sam. And Pippies, apparently. Dedicated his life to the discovery of a cure and the restoration of humanity. This ending, we felt, actually, interestingly enough, with this voiceover, is consistent with the idea of telling somebody's story. Right, of legend. He gave his life to defend it.

1:31:06 · jump to transcript →

The fights are really nice in this picture, Patrick. They're really on par with the other two, certainly. Allan Poppleton was our New Zealand stunt coordinator. He did a fantastic job. - He did a great job, yeah. So, what you're seeing here is actually the set... ... you're gonna see later in the movie, an early stage of the castle. We tried to minimalise the dressing so it felt a little different. But it's basically the same space that you'll see later. And this was the first day of shooting. - Yeah, the balcony part. Yup. The big reveal. Wanna tell you a story about the castle. The castle is such a gigantic structure. Of course, there was no way to build this. We ended up building the, what you would call, the courtyard of the castle. How many feet tall, Richard? - About 20 feet. Twenty-five, 30 feet, yeah. Which was a little challenging for the lighting... ...because we were there on top of the set. When we started, it was difficult for CGI guys to kind of extend that. Yeah, it was terrible for Sound too. Every time it rained, we'd stop shooting. The train outside, the train station? - Yeah, the train... Note to self: Do not build set next to railroad tracks next time. We have a few transformation... ...but this one actually is not a transformation. It looks like one, but everything is practical. There's nothing mechanical or anything. I love it. It's a little more American Werewolf in London approach. There is no CG help whatsoever, though. Unlike the others.... This took a while to get right, just this whole prelude... ...and Kate's voiceover, and getting people caught up. There is a lot of history, and to decide, you know, where exactly to start... ...and how much to prep it with. Hopefully, we covered everything we needed to. It looks like we moved really quickly through. I wish we had a little bit more space, a little bit more in the... Yeah. - There's so much story to....

1:59 · jump to transcript →