Weather problems

and it was, even then, extremely cold. Yeah, actually, when I finally joined up with you guys, it was in January, the dead of winter, and one of the interesting things is that we actually had thoughts of shooting in Murmansk, where the Mothballed K-19 is

1:04 · jump to transcript →

in the dead of winter, and it was an ice field with a few pieces of, I suppose you would call it, you know, grass that had managed to survive the ice, but it was otherwise just an incredibly barren, unforgiving landscape and painfully cold. And we were the first Western civilians ever invited to visit the naval base.

4:51 · jump to transcript →

remote checkpoint. We felt like the UN inspectors in Iraq and almost like at a German checkpoint. And we sat in a snowdrift as the snow flurries on, going outside while these young Russians all screamed at each other, arguing about whether they were going to let us in or not. And this was almost probably an hour, if not longer, that we sat there not knowing what was going to happen to us. It's rather surreal.

7:37 · jump to transcript →

Stephen Prince

Actually, this first episode, Sunshine Through the Rain, is based not so much on a dream as on a tale that his mother used to tell him about fox weddings held in the rain. We see the familiar Kurosawa telephoto perspective here, which creates a foreshortened, flattened perspective. This rain is the sort that Kurosawa liked, heavy and steady.

2:19 · jump to transcript →

Stephen Prince

and when he gives them the right answer to their implicit quiz about his feelings regarding the orchard, they consent to let him see it in bloom one more time. To conjure a vision of the orchard for the boy, they perform gagaku, a style of music and dance associated with the imperial court at Kyoto. It's performed on traditional wind, string, and percussion instruments, and the songs and music were associated with court rituals and Shinto ceremonies.

22:30 · jump to transcript →

Stephen Prince

Now they are weary and tired and have lost their way in the storm. As they grow more fatigued, the choice they face becomes more urgent. Give up, surrender to the elements, sink down into the snow and die, or continue to struggle to battle against the storm with the hope and belief that they will find the shelter of their camp.

28:19 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, we were lucky, right? We actually really lucked out on this. That was one of the weird things. We pretty much assumed, you know, when we had our first meetings with the studio, everyone was like, look, we've got to try to keep the movie a little bit more upbeat at the beginning if it's going to be so gloom and doom at the end with the rain. So then we were like, oh, man, it's going to be overcast every day. It's probably going to be raining every day. And I think literally we had only one day of exterior shoots where we didn't want it to rain, and it did. This day we had the worst process trailer rig ever.

8:03 · jump to transcript →

I had control. Exactly. I could imagine calling up the studio. I don't feel like shooting today. They're like, you don't feel like having a career today, do you? It's like, yeah, that 300 grand we're spending today, yeah, it's fine. We'll forget about it. And we had lots of nights. I mean, nights are like the worst. Six weeks a night in the rain. That was, yeah, challenging. Buddy! Buddy!

30:10 · jump to transcript →

I don't know. This is very good work. Again, another night. Another cold night. Yeah, luckily we weren't in the rain yet. But once the rain started, you know, once you're just out there in the cold nights, it's fine. But the rain, I mean, even with the best rain gear, that stuff gets in and your hands turn numb after 10 minutes. I don't even know. We had some great camera assistants. And these guys, a lot of the camera work's handheld. I don't know how they got two. We had these great operators.

31:47 · jump to transcript →

and this is part of a pre-shoot that we did in January because we wanted some snow on the ground and wanted a foggy landscape and a cold landscape. Anyway, here are the foxes. This is one of my favorite images of the movie. It was really hard to get because obviously we were afraid that this fox, they weren't really a family. The cubs were from a different mother, so we had to separate them, and we actually...

1:12 · jump to transcript →

the sun, the rising sun or the setting sun. Obviously this day here, there was no sun, even though we created the rain. It was the most miserable shooting day. These five, six actors here, they gave everything. And can you believe it? We shot 12 hours, I think, in this rain, in this manufactured rain. And in the last take, I said, all right, we need one take, one more take. They just started singing to...

20:16 · jump to transcript →

where it started snowing and we probably stood around for two hours until the snow was gone and we were able to shoot again. This is actually a scene from the book. The first night watch, they arrive and he gets shot in the helmet. I think it's pretty much like that in the book. The book, by the way, meant a whole lot to me. I read it when I was 15.

21:37 · jump to transcript →

shoved the Orc medicine down Mary's throat, which a lot of people, for some strange reason, remember. Yeah. What was it? Yeah, what is that stuff? I don't know, it looks like Coca-Cola, doesn't it? I think it was peach tea and... Oh, that's right, it was peach tea. No, you're right, it was cold tea with probably something added to thicken it up a bit. Yeah, and Coca-Cola, I think, I know, it was Coke syrup. It was concentrated, you know when you make your own soda?

15:41 · jump to transcript →

This village was built on the side of a really amazing area called Poolburn Lakes in New Zealand. And we built quite a few of the huts. Some of them are computer generated in the wide shot. But most of what you see here we did for real. It was this amazing little Scandinavian style village on the side of the lake. Now it wasn't actually raining on this shot, was it? No, this rain was added later. It was computer generated rain. We did use rain towers for the close-ups, but this is too big and wide to...

22:46 · jump to transcript →

be able to be covered by a rain tower. This is real rain, this is just coming off a tower now. The Fords of Isen is quite an evocative scene, which I really wanted to include it in the theatrical version, but I don't think any of it ended up in a theatrical version, did it? And it's establishing the character of Theodred, King Theoden's son. And this is sort of really our first glimpse of the people of Rohan, the soldiers of Rohan, certainly, and Aomea, it introduces Aomea.

23:16 · jump to transcript →

We put a guerrilla crew together so that you could film it with Andy. We were trying to figure out all the different ways we could use the set, which was really a little gully, a rock gully. So we drowned it in rain, we dried it out and drowned it in light, threw some greenery in. We just tried to give it variation and also to show, obviously, passage of time. That was a huge make-up, wasn't it? It was enormous. He was in there for how long? I couldn't tell you. Hours and hours and hours.

5:06 · jump to transcript →

on a day that it snowed. Now, you don't see the snow here, but we were at a place called Ruapehu, which is a volcano, and it was late summer, and it was absolutely not supposed to snow, but it was one of our days that we had several during our lengthy shoot where there was unseasonal weather, and it was like, oh, this is the first time it's snowed here for 65 years. It was like, oh yeah, sure, well, great. I remember you were standing out in the middle of, you know, the snow was sort of raining down on everybody, and you were saying,

6:29 · jump to transcript →

Snow, this isn't snow, it's volcanic ash. I was trying to be optimistic. And this was a big culvert. This is a set that we built and we took up to Ruapehu and you're looking at shots here that were done in the year 2000. And then we had Elijah and Sean come back to do some closeups. Now, when you look at them and they're talking and they're just the wall of the culvert behind them, there's four years between some of these shots.

6:58 · jump to transcript →

James Mangold

One of the struggles you have when you're making a film that is 95% outdoors is just the weather, the sun. We shot this in the winter. We started in October, so the days were extremely short. And on one side, it made the lighting really beautiful because the sun is always very long and casting long shadows. But on another side makes it extremely challenging because I only had about six hours a day that I could actually shoot.

13:56 · jump to transcript →

James Mangold

And on top of that, you know, an hour in the middle of that is lunch. And every day is changing. Different clouds, different kind of sun, different wind, different temperature. Up to this point in the film, except for maybe 20 seconds of stuff at night that opens the film in the Evans ranch house, it's all been outside.

14:26 · jump to transcript →

James Mangold

Here you have even Wade helping Dan Evans back to the cave. One incidental piece of information that might find interesting is this cave that they're having this campfire in is actually here in Los Angeles. And it's the actual cave that they shot the TV series Batman and the Batmobile coming out of. In the final week of production, it had gotten so cold in Santa Fe that we came back to Los Angeles for one week shooting.

1:09:16 · jump to transcript →

That's a very important rule to me. And there was simply no time to get that shot. There was no physical way to do it, to go from one C-17 to another. And Jody assured us that they could do it. And he did it. That blew me away. When you showed me that shot, I was like, what? Oh, I know. And part of what made the shot work, sorry we're dwelling so much on a 30-second shot, is all the imperfections that we poured into it. It's all the heat distortion, the planes. I said, this is the perfect shot. Now show me the shot I would really get

21:28 · jump to transcript →

By jumping out of the plane, the relationship between you and the camera is in a way that we could never have duplicated on a stage. No. No, we could not have gotten what we'd gotten. We actually... The bottle exchange... Oh, God. The bottle exchange is something that we actually... We built the largest wind tunnel in the world to train...

26:12 · jump to transcript →

When he goes, he's like, you're the one who caught him with a smile on his face. And I said, go home tonight and watch. It happened one night and gone with the wind. I said, you're Clark Gable. And we started talking about actors from another era. And you see that, that smile he's got, the confidence he had. Henry starts to become, he shows elements that he's a little bit of a rake. All of that was...

51:27 · jump to transcript →

piece that got trimmed out of the theatrical version. It's the return of the Sackville Bagginses back into our story after Bilbo says hi to Mrs Bracegirdle. He just gets wind that his feared relatives

21:56 · jump to transcript →

That black rider was looking for something. Or someone. Mount Victoria again? Yep. Night time? Yep. And that is not Mount Victoria. That's Nelson. That's Nelson, yeah. Now these shots of the horse are on Mount Victoria at night, at like 2 o'clock in the morning. These shots of the hobbits are at like 2 o'clock in the afternoon. That was another scene we shot in Nelson while we were waiting for the weather to clear on the mountains.

55:41 · jump to transcript →

sort of operated pumps that pump the water out of the Bucklebury ferry so that it wouldn't sink. Come on. This is in a, actually a sort of suburban hillside really. Yeah, very close to Wellington. I love the idea of using rain in the film. I wanted to get this impression that Middle Earth is organic and gritty and real and it doesn't, you know, it doesn't sort of feel like a movie world. It feels real. I was determined to just shoot in the rain.

57:28 · jump to transcript →

There's some wind going, but if you had sand going, her eyes would be filled with sand. So we had her acting that she was getting particulates in her eyes. This is a wonderful shot. I absolutely love the composition and the way the camera moves to introduce that character. To introduce this character we refer to as Braid. Yeah. Who's actually played by, I believe, five different women throughout the sequence because of the places where we shot it. Yeah.

14:20 · jump to transcript →

And then the most important part was to mix in a level of bass so that you actually feel the storm. Yeah, so if you're watching this at home, your subwoofer will be getting a very good workout in this little bit of the movie. Although we now go into much more subjective, dreamy sound design here. And we played with the end of this sequence, how it would end and where the credits would fall in the beginning of the movie many, many times. And finally settled on this. I love the dissolve here as well because...

15:19 · jump to transcript →

very astutely pointed out. It has a cold feel, it's not warm. Yeah, exactly. It's just easier to look at, actually. One of my favorite inserts in the movie. Fantastic insert. Beautiful hand acting, great flair in the background. All these things coming together in a very elegant way. It's a very tricky shot to get. These are all shot practically. This is all inside an Osprey. That's really an Osprey flying behind them. And all of this stuff

29:24 · jump to transcript →

Len Wiseman

That's what my brother calls my bad-gas moment. This one here? Were you harnessed in? Insert sound effect there. - The extended version. You were way up in the tower, right? You were harnessed in? No, because eventually, I didn't. There was some... That's right. That was green screen. - No, it was just somebody else. Oh, okay. You refused. - I didn't. There were some shenanigans going on. Somebody made me feel unstable, and I wouldn't get on it. It is a bit bad-gassy-looking... - It is, isn't it? Now come think of it. We went up there. It ended up being Nicole. That first shot is Nicole. I can't believe she did that, jumped off. She did not. That's a rumour. I totally did it. Oh, I'm sorry. The funny thing is, so many people get fooled by that. That shot that's coming up, they do think it's me. I'm sure it was you. You did it a couple times, she did it once. That's not me. - There's you, in the hoodie. Oh, yeah, I'm brooding in the hoodie. Now, he's a potato farmer, apparently. - Really? He is, from Idaho. - Slash vampire? Yeah, apparently he is. My makeup artist was keen on him for a minute. Lovely strong hands. There he goes. But he didn't speak any English, right? - No. As did, like... Eighty percent of the crew didn't. Right. I mean, you barely spoke English. - I tried. Neither of you speak English. Thank you very much. - Okay. There I go. I really like how she did that. - Good knees on that. They're not my knees. - Those aren't your knees, no. This is where we just drenched you for hours. I was miserable. - The rain machines wouldn't work. I felt like they worked really well. I was soaking wet. All the people running up to you wearing 15 coats... I thought it was still cool that there were rain machines... ...and I was going to get wet. By the end, I was cursing water. I Kept falling there, slipping down. This is like-- Inside the subway was the very first week we did. Yeah, we did that fake set, right? - Yeah. Was that a fake set or a real set? - Wasn't it real? It was real. - No. You were there, weren't you? I was there. It was a subway station, but didn't we build something too? Well, yeah. It was actually... lt was a repair yard for the trains. Then we built that set around the train. - I knew I was on to something. There you go. - Here's love. Immediate love. - Damn it, I have a pimple. Do you? - You don't see that? I see it first. I thought we wiped that out. - No. Oh, my God, it was so tense. lt was so hot in that subway. Yeah, it was brutal. Boiling hot week there was in Budapest before it became arctic. And everybody's in these leather coats. This was the first thing we shot, right? - Yeah. Yeah, this was the second day of filming. The first day of shooting was you in the hospital. Then I came in with those horrible boots and tried to get your approval. Yeah, that's right. I remember I did not want to shoot that scene first. That moment I won't talk about. - No, neither did I. I felt like I'd had absolutely no preparation on firing the guns. They told me, "We're going to do a take." I said, "Oh, my God." Literally almost shook, afterwards. Felt like I'd drunk, like, 20 cups of coffee. I was worried I was gonna get in trouble, because it was a cheap movie. "You have one chance. We don't have money for another pillar." Like, "Oh, great." - You did great, though. No, there was all that stress... ...because we really didn't have a chance to re-squib things. He says, "No pressure, Kate, but we only got pillar with squibs in. The thing's going to be ruined if you mess It up." This sequence is still pretty much the same. Yeah, this stays the same. Here I go, panicking. I remember all this. You did an amazing skid. Did that make it? Yeah, it did. - That was fantastic. But I do grab her crotch, unfortunately. Right. I ass-grab her. - You did that in rehearsal too. She cried afterwards. Is that why? - Probably, it was real claw. She was terrified with this squib. She had never done one before. And she was horrified. - Yeah, she had a real sob after. There she is. I did not mean to. That was unintentional. They're all looking at it now. Remember when we were shooting that scene... ... for you peeking your head out, to get the reaction, I kept firing guns? Yeah. Yeah. I was asking you to do that, yeah. We ended up doing that the entire film. - Here I go. Ass-grab! She was really cute. Everybody was harassing her because of that. Really, everybody was harassing her. - Yeah. But not after my grubby hands got all over her. Oh, my stunt guys. Look. Hank, he's always the one who was, like, pulling. He was my favourite one to pull wires. - Oh, this is where you save me. Thank you for that, by the way. - Kind of a lady-boy.

1:15 · jump to transcript →

Len Wiseman

This was miserable, in this location. It was. It was the hardest. lt wasn't the coldest. There was something about that spongy mould. It was actually nice to go from... Because it actually went in order. We went from the subway, which was unbearably hot... ...to this cellar, which was... - Full of fungus. Yeah, which was pretty cold. It just stunk, and it was miserable for everybody. I thought the locations were hard. Weren't they? Yeah, they were. I guess locations in general are usually pretty hard.

10:41 · jump to transcript →

Len Wiseman

You got off lightly with the costumes. - Me? Yeah, you. - I had one. Well, then I got screwed. Why? - With my second costume. I remember some producer trying to get him into a beige cardigan. What was it? - Yeah. Yeah. That was the first time I ever met you. That's right. Horrifying. - Yeah, I think Richard had brought in.... We were talking about how much rain there was going to be... ...and all of that. And so he comes in with a... I think it was a beige sweater from... I think it was, like, a Gap sweater. I wasn't liking it. No offence to Richard. That was quite funny. We used to have meetings about whether we should shave you or not. We still do. - Oh, we did. What, shaving my face, my head? Do you know we had conversations about that? We did the test. We did a test, you still had the scruff... But it looked stupid. With the lighting, it didn't look right. I agree. No, actually, I remember, because we... - You couldn't decide. You were so damned attractive. Because we went up to my room, and we checked oult.... We checked out that tape. And there was some younger pictures of you. Oh, yeah, those horrifying... - No, you looked nice. I think I didn't decide to actually shave your beard until the day... ...of the first-- The first day. - Pretty much. Who's that? What's going... - That's your best friend. Have you seen this movie, Scott? - Who is that guy? What was his name? - Oh, him. Erwin. Erwin. - Erwin Leder. Loved him. - Erwin, the set poet. How do you pronounce his name? - Leder. Yeah, it is, right? - Yeah, I guess. He wrote, like, three poems a day. He did? - Yeah, he did. Did you read them, ever? Well, a lot of them were in German, so I had a good try.

17:50 · jump to transcript →

And that's all the job I did. The pitch was pretty short, though. It was like five minutes. It went surprisingly well. Yeah, it was great. Maybe we can talk about the image. We wanted to have snow. You had written a lot of snow in the script. I wrote snow many, many times. But we found out really quick that we could never afford it. So you wrote again without the snow. I just...

1:58 · jump to transcript →

I just erased the snow. I mean, it was a big ordeal because I really wanted it. We all really wanted it. But we didn't know if there was going to be snow or it was going to be a cold winter. We had no way of knowing, so we had to do without it. And then we had this amazingly cold winter with a lot of snow. So it was fortunate. Yeah, it was great. But the thing we found out is that it was a contradiction. Basically, to do a movie with snow, it means that it's all special effects. And then if you want to do it like a

2:27 · jump to transcript →

But the funny part is that it was so much snow we had to, like in this scene now, the beach was cleared from the snow. It was completely snowy all around. Oh really? Wow. How long did that take? I don't know. During the night they put some protection and then they have to wipe it. So this shot, all this is shot really in Montauk.

3:24 · jump to transcript →

It had to be built, and we stroked the set just a day before the station opened, and people were starting to ski again. So it's hard to believe it's a ski station, but that's what it is. But when we went there for prep, which was on a Friday, just to go look at the whole set and everything, there was no snow. And we were shooting on Monday, and we had to have snow there. Well, the thing is, we didn't seem to be able to get enough cash to get fake snow. No, we didn't. It's funny, because we didn't have the money to bring in fake snow. But then the thing is, once you're actually shooting in snow,

2:02 · jump to transcript →

That takes its own money to just be equipped to shoot in snow, which is a bit of a beast. But in fact, we're very blessed that day because, you know, I mean, the day before, the thing was dry. And the day before, a couple of days before we shot. Yeah, and I was really depressed about it. The night after that meeting, it just started dumping. Yeah, literally, what was it, the day before we started shooting, the snow came in. I was very depressed because of the whole reason we went on this mountain.

2:31 · jump to transcript →

and went up here and built this was in hopes to have snow there. I feel sorry for Zita. Yeah, the voice. Her voice got dubbed over. I did, too. It was very hard for a lot of the audience to understand. Yeah, and there were technical problems, too. She was not available at the time of ADR, right? How long were we shooting this, do you remember? This was my portion of the first unit, I think,

2:59 · jump to transcript →

We didn't have enough rain, and the first days, we had a rain machine, I think something like one day, and so we took every shot we could find in Virginia so that we'd be able to use it. You see there we have what is presumably rain. This is, now again, as I said, we had the most brilliant production designer, David Chapman, who is one of the unsung geniuses of this, who made it look so wonderful.

39:37 · jump to transcript →

and you can see life in every corner of the frame here. This will later be where Johnny comes to find Baby. Here we are in the rain. One day the camera crew came to me and said, Eleanor, we see that you have a camera instruction here which says the air is hung with silver. Do you mind telling us how you plan for us to do that? And I said,

40:02 · jump to transcript →

Well, you know, the air is hung with silver. You know what I mean. And they laughed and laughed at me. And I said, OK, if you can get the air hung with silver, I will buy champagne for the camera crew. So we will be coming up to the scene in a little while. Let's see. Always be careful what you owe. This is in North Carolina. These are the staff quarters. And this is one of the few times we had a rain machine. And this is in Virginia.

40:30 · jump to transcript →

Pretty soon I found that there was very little point in stopping for rain. It's probably raining right there, but you can't see it. Rain doesn't really register on screen unless it's teeming. I told you to stay. Well, I finished my work. Where are we going? Young James. Kid hadn't acted before, except in school plays. We found him in Ayrshire.

2:24 · jump to transcript →

And this guy, wow. And the endless rain, of course. I think we might have manufactured some here so you could see it.

28:16 · jump to transcript →

Ah, Ian Wallace. Grand, soft evening, huh? Ah, it's that. I was wondering if I might have a word with your daughter. What do you want to have a word with her about? Well, I'm... Murren, would you like to come and ride with me on this fine evening? In this? You're out of your mind. Oh, it's good Scottish weather, madam. The rain is falling straight down. Oh, slightly to the side, like.

28:52 · jump to transcript →

Peter Hyams

All the light used in this film is light that is warmed so that there is an amber and an ochre tone in every sequence in the movie. I thought to have a blue or a cold look to this film would give the opposite emotional effect of what I wanted.

4:15 · jump to transcript →

Peter Hyams

That's as difficult as it gets. I am terrified of heights, so I always wind up doing sequences, designing sequences that have to do with people hanging from high places. I guess, obviously, because it's my idea of something frightening.

18:41 · jump to transcript →

Peter Hyams

the week before, all through the city. It was as cold as anything I remember. I grew up in New York. I lived in Chicago. I lived in Boston. I don't remember anything as cold as this. That's a real devil's sign. I describe it as Marlowe Thomas's hair and that girl.

38:20 · jump to transcript →

It was raining while we were shooting it. The snow is artificial, but you can't see the rain. But we were pushing the dolly down the hill, and then we had to then, at the very bottom of the hill, push it forward. And it took a whole lot of muscle to make that work. And then this camera move here...

19:38 · jump to transcript →

required a special head an oculus head which just does not perform well outdoors particularly in the rain and was constantly short-circuiting so that was quite tricky it was pretty much raining virtually all the time and because

20:05 · jump to transcript →

believe in this, and it was a very difficult thing to sort out. We worked with Marie-Gabrielle Rohde, a Butoh choreographer, and all these berserkers and old hithnars, and I'm trying to get there. And I mean, Alex is really great and ferocious. We went for it. I got to say, we went for it. Those guys went for it. It was not an easy thing to ask of them, especially in the pouring rain, take after take.

24:49 · jump to transcript →

Look, I told you before, we had a falling out a long time ago. My mother died when I was two. It was just him and me. We just didn't get along. One of the things that always I thought that Tom did a very good job is he has to work between being emotional and being cold in a way, that in a sense he has just found out that his father has died, and yet he doesn't seem to indicate any kind of real feelings towards him.

7:44 · jump to transcript →

I mean, it leaves at midnight, Ray, you know, but Delta, how's Delta? Delta crashed August 2nd, 1985, Lockheed L-1011, Dallas-Fort Worth. Terrible wind. All airlines. 135. All airlines have crashed at one time or another. That doesn't mean that they are not safe. Qantas. Qantas? Qantas never crashed. Qantas? Never crashed. Well, that's...

45:37 · jump to transcript →

Same thing as the rain. You get a little wet. What do you say, Ray? What do you say? Huh? Of course, your shower's in the bathroom. It's the end of that conversation. Again, just jump time, jump time to kind of keep the segment going. Stu, Stu, Stu.

53:25 · jump to transcript →

Macaulay Culkin

So this, uh.... What's interesting about a lot of this movie is we would always put fake snow down. The foam and stuff. - The foam, and that's really... We had a Wisconsin ski... A bunch of guys who worked for this ski resort in Wisconsin put down snow. But... - That poor statue. Yeah, the statue was a running gag, and this guy... A lot of this movie was made on an extremely small budget. At the time, the picture was at one studio... ...and that studio didn't wanna make the movie, because of a $2-million difference... ...and it went over to Twentieth Century Fox. And we still were... We still made the film for a little above $18 million... ...which at the time was still a small budget. So we had to make things stretch, which we'll talk about through the picture. One of the great things about working with Pesci, I have to say... .IS his improvisational skills were terrific. And it was because of his training with Scorsese that... ...even on a picture like Home Alone, really comes in handy. He's a very funny guy, Joe. - Yeah. And his comedic instincts were really something I'd never seen before. Little snippets in pictures like Raging Bull and Goodfellas. But his ability to improvise was just phenomenal. And then John Heard. I cast John Heard because John Heard was someone I was always a big fan of. He was in this picture... It was called Cutter and Bone. Now it's called Cutter's Way. And his performance should've gotten an Academy Award. I've never seen it. It's Jeff Bridges and John Heard, and he is just amazing in that film. I was a huge fan, and it was always a dream to work with him. He also did this old film called Head Over Heels. And he was kind of a leading man back in his day. He's just a wonderful actor... ...and another guy who didn't really know why he was in this movie. At the time, he was sort of like, "Why am I doing this?" I remember feeling a certain amount of discomfort from him. He was like, "Why do I have to do this? Why am I in this kids' movie?" You know? "I'm a good a--" Understandable. No one really knew what this movie had the potential of becoming. We had always hoped it would be successful, but we never knew. Um.... Pfft. I always knew. You always had an idea. - I always knew. Now, this scene. Do you remember coming in on a Saturday to rehearse this scene? Yeah. - We had to rehearse this because it was so... Which was so chaotic with everybody. We ate so much pizza. I didn't wanna eat lunch. And this is something that was interesting. We... You'll notice that there's a rare shot in the film where... There's your brother. - Yeah, there he is. How are you guys--? He's working now, right? He's doing very well. Oh, yeah. He's doing very good, very well for himself. Un, this is typical of the style of this movie. Not the vomiting, obviously... ...but the separation of actors in certain scenes. Because Macaulay's time was so valuable... ...we needed to shoot Macaulay separately... ...and sometimes other kids as well. So you'll always see... I tried to block sequences where I could sort of keep Macaulay off by himself... ...and keep the other actors in another space... ...so I could shoot people separately. Child labor laws again. - Child labor laws. And we're-- And Kiery had to reshoot the chair in the face, I remember. Oh, yeah. - Like, he had to come back later. He was upset he had to get his hair cut like Fuller again. Oh, he was? - Ha-ha-ha. Well, he-- We made a special, very light rubber chair... ...so when it... - Yeah, that's... Yeah. That's-- I remember that. Catherine O'Hara was someone who I had, uh... ...Just loved her work on Second City TV. - Yeah. I mean, I was, uh... Aside from Saturday Night Live at the time in the '70Os... ...9econd City TV was the-- Sort of the place where you learned about comedy. And for me it was... I was just such a huge fan... ...SO It was, again, a real honor... ...to be able to work with her on both of these films. Yeah, no, she's incredible. Even just the stuff she's doing now. She's still--? Oh, it's great. It's great stuff. Both of his kids are still going to school here. I guess he missed the family.... You got a pretty good cast. Yeah, it's kind of interesting for a film that... But we treated it... The weird thing about this film... ...and the reason I think the film has kind of stood the test of time for a lot of kids... ... IS because we always treated it with respect. We never felt that we were making a movie for kids. We were making a movie for the parents as well. It had a lot of appeal. And you never-- You wanted to... You wanted the photography to have a certain elegance about it... ...and the camera to be moving. And it was really never... So many times today, people try to make kids' movies... ...and they always cheapen them. And we never-- I mean, certainly we got cheap with our jokes. Let's not pretend that we didn't. - Ha-ha-ha. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, it's Three Stooges, you know? - Anything for a laugh. I

7:04 · jump to transcript →

Macaulay Culkin

Uh, the key here was-- You know, which you'll see a lot of in the film... ...Was to go against the traditional concept that comedies have... ...to be shot in a bright way. Kept things dark, kept things a little scary, a little sinister... ...which you don't see in a lot of comedies. You still don't. There's this in... You know, this feeling that everything has to be bright and cheery. And that's why I think this film appealed to kids... ...because kids actually... - Yeah. They're sold on the danger. And the interesting thing is the, uh.... When I was a kid, one of the things that scared me were burglars. In Cold Blood was the most frightening movie I'd ever seen... ...So this was a movie I wanted to do because of that as well.

29:13 · jump to transcript →

Macaulay Culkin

This is one of those nights... Again, I don't think we were able to shoot with you past 10:00, right? Something like that, yeah. Luckily, we were in the winter, so it was dark in Chicago around 4:30, but... I remember we had one of those days where it was... It got unseasonably warm. Like, it was like 80 degrees. And they were bringing in trucks of ice and foam and all that stuff. I just remember that day, where we just couldn't keep the snow on the ground. When the audience saw you scream like this, it was just-- It was a roar. They-- Because, for some reason, you just did... Your expression was just hilarious. And this, we just decided to do for the fun of it... ...and it actually worked. Why it worked, I have no idea. Again, there's-- There's-- We start... Stylistically, you looked into the camera a couple of times, and it seemed to work. It seemed like you could break the rules a few times. He was a good screamer, that Culkin kid, I swear. He could scream like nobody's business. Hold on. This was in the high school. Now, we had to b... In editing this scene... ...we had to build this entire scene... ... around where this guy's doughnut fell on the phone. I mean, it sounds like a ridiculous way to edit a sequence... ...but because he was this-- Larry Hankin was such an improvisational actor... ...Wwho appeared in a bunch of John Hughes' films... ...we were sort of stuck following his cue for this entire scene. You'll see this... The doughnut thing drops on his receiver... ...and we had to cut back to him as it fell off, so these are the... These are the things that drove us crazy as we were editing this film. just to check on him? Yes!

31:36 · jump to transcript →

It was very cold if you remember. This was getting towards October or November in Simi Valley and it was absolutely freezing and people had to jump in a van to warm up. I actually have some behind the scenes that my assistant shot in high eight because we didn't have behind the scenes video when we made this.

54:31 · jump to transcript →

of Tori and everybody in the van trying to warm up between takes. Yeah, I remember I had my hooded sweatshirt underneath my leather jacket, gloves. I think you're in one of the tapes, and I'm going to find that, and hopefully we can put it on those Blu-ray extras. That would be great. I think everyone, including us, tends to forget in Los Angeles it gets really cold at night. Yes, it can. Yes.

54:53 · jump to transcript →

Yeah, whenever you have problems in story or structure, just go to, like, a whip pan. That's something you learn. Here we go. This is the night. Actually, I have some behind-the-scenes video of this night where literally it was freezing. And Jennifer, after we cut, she'd wrap herself in a blanket. I mean, it was...

1:03:22 · jump to transcript →

And this is the House of Culture in Berlin. Combined with the studio set, we had like a little set, right? Yes. That part. It's the rooftop. So much of it just runs so seamlessly onto each other. This was a freezing, freezing, freezing night. I felt so bad for everybody.

7:31 · jump to transcript →

It was actually, I think, below freezing. It was so cold. And everyone who was on the rooftop had to, because it was so icy, there was a lot of removal of safety wires. Not that it affected the action, but just to make it a safe location.

7:59 · jump to transcript →

One of the most difficult sequences. You wouldn't think it's this stuff. But it was a bear. Yeah. It's very difficult to shoot this stuff, too. And you do get kind of, you know, because you're stuck in front of the same green screen, different banner, different wind machine. You're hanging off all these very strange apparatuses and machines that they build to make you look like you're flying. But there's something really painful about it.

50:13 · jump to transcript →

Patrick Tatopoulos

So everything in this castle is basically... ... lmagine, carved into the rocks. Every room, every-- Imagine... There's, like, channels underground, a sewer system. Basically, everything... I didn't want a castle that look like a mediaeval castle... ...1n the middle of the countryside, but more like Petra. You know, those building carved in rock. That's why it feels very claustrophobic... . like, you know, every other Underworld. And there's not many windows. It's always quite dark. Which actually became a challenge in a period movie... ...because you light everything with candles or torches. And after a while, it sort of like, you know... ...becomes a bit of an issue, because it looks the same. SO we came up with a couple of ideas... . like green windows to protect against the sun... ...and things like that, which gave us a different tone. This is one location that changed a lot during the preparation of the film. We're trying to figure out... We were up against it with a budget, trying to figure out... ... how to have them get away from the castle... ...to have this tryst. Then Patrick came up with this idea of the ruined guardhouse. The set piece is actually quite small, with set extensions. And it works. It's just gorgeous, works really well. That's one that I... A set that I really love from Dan as well is Sonja's room. Because it feels still cold, but there's a bit more... ...of a feminine texture in there, which I think is great.

12:13 · jump to transcript →

Patrick Tatopoulos

Leave? We did-- This... Tried to match in as well as it could. This was all ADR in the end, right? - Yeah. It's just these wind machines and everything, wasn't it? We had to keep them warm enough because there was wind machine. Again, the space we had was great for its size... ...but the sound was not... We had a lot of work to do on post. Tilt-up concrete warehouses that had been built... ...to house sheep feed, those pellets that sheep eat. And they were definitely not sound stages. Also, there's little ADR add-ons in here.... I wish we could've gone in a little bit more detail... ...about the shackles around their neck that... Right, yeah. - The moon shackles. Yeah, that he actually said that if I can remove this shackle... ...and they've got the silver spikes in them that... I wish we had. We wanted to. I mean, we'd talked about it and had a scene for it. That you see, if they tried to transform, those silver spikes... What happens, of course, their neck grows, they get larger... ...and it immediately digs into their skin... ...and stops them from transforming. We never really had a chance to bring that across in the dialogue.

15:12 · jump to transcript →

Patrick Tatopoulos

That's one of my favourite shots of the film right there. Really beautiful. Steven Mackintosh was in the second film as well... ...playing Tannis, so he reprised his role. I Keep saying I wish Steven had more, more... There was more of him in the movie. Such an incre... I mean, really, I felt that every day. I totally agree with you. I was saying the same thing on Underworld 2. That I didn't have him in enough. And we had a pretty long scene with him on 2, remember? The scene was like.... - Yeah, I Know he's got... And a lot of people don't recognise he's the same character... ...because his look was so different. - True. That's a shot that came at the end, last minute. It would be nice to see the presence of the wolf... ...outside the castle so it's not always disconnected. Thank you, Clint, for coughing up that extra dough for us. And this is one shot, I gotta say, you know... ...when you have, like, a big bad-ass day, and you can't... You just-- One camera and you ba... You know, this is really.... When you feel a little cornered sometime... ...and you're like, "Okay, guys, we have to shoot this." You know, I remember this. This one, and then the scene against the fire... ... Where Rhona's talking to Bill. At the end, there's no time... ...had to kind of stack them up soap-opera style. And actually, it's great. - It worked very well. That scene is great. I love how she never really turns around to see him. That's cool. - Sometimes that works out. I gotta say that people are gonna think this is a set a la Sleepy Hollow thing. This is actually a real forest there. And really weird. The trees look like they're dead. All the foliage is really high in the tree. And we're, like, 200 feet from the water, from the sea. Yeah, there's people surfing 200 yards from... Incredible-looking forest. - Where we're shooting. And that was one of our key locations. All the forest scenes were shot there. I really love that place. It was very cool. lt was strange when we walked in there for the first time, remember? We all sort of looked at each other like, "Whoa, do we have to shoot here?" We're walking there with Richard. And we're looking at the trees, and then we started losing our minds. And we Say, "What if we use the tree?" We will make little miniature... We shoot them green screen people. Horses running through the trees, but the trees would be 50... Giant trees. Because that forest got a weird quality... ... almost like a gigantic forest. lf you're shooting miniature stuff in there.... We were losing-- We were a little... Well, it got to the point about New Zealand too... ...because when we first got the script... ...We Initially thought we were gonna shoot the movie in Romania. And then the idea of shooting a winter film in Romania... ...1S a little bit... - Exteriors. Exteriors was a little daunting. And one day, I had actually seen the making of The Lord of the Rings... ...and I said to Richard, "What about New Zealand?" And he kind of looked at me. "New Zealand?" And then we met this woman, Beth DePatie, who had worked... ... for us before, and she worked on Narnia. She came back with a budget that showed that New Zealand... ...WaS as inexpensive, if not less expensive... ...than Romania. And everybody wanted to go to New Zealand. We were on the plane two days later. I remember calling up Len. I said, "Is there a chance that--?" "What are the chances of you getting to Romania?" A pause. "But what are the chances of you going to New Zealand?" It was a big yes, So.... Have you been to Romania? - Yeah, I have. There was always the Romania discussion... ...and we've gone out there, and.... For the first one, we were almost set on shooting there, weren't we? We were very close, yeah. - Well, there were castles, and.... Transylvania and that. Hungary was a little bit more expensive. You were in love with how Budapest looked that we said the hell with it. We'll figure out some other way to save that money. We shot in Hungary instead. I was the only one that really wanted Romania in the first place on this... ...because I was worried New Zealand would be too pretty for us. I remember... - That was very... I was thinking... - Too green. Yeah, it's too green, it's too beautiful, and then we went there in the forest. But the other key thing was that we had to shoot... .1n January, February and March. And in Romania, that would have been minus 20 degrees. And we thought at that time we'd have to build the castle outside. So 40 pages of the script would have been outside... ...at night, in Romania, freezing to death.

16:25 · jump to transcript →

Ethan onto the wing of the plane. At Christmas. At Christmas. And several months later, we were like, wait a minute. Look at that. We walked past this hill. It was like the Big W in Mad, Mad World. It was sitting in front of us the whole time. It was freezing these days. We were shooting out there in the winter. Bitter cold. Bitter cold. It's the one thing you really can't appreciate when you're watching this on film. So I did this eight times. I wouldn't have done it once.

3:11 · jump to transcript →

I think the stunt team, they did a great job, and we figured out that I'm wearing lenses. I wanted to wear a suit, kind of our homage to North by Northwest. But it was freezing cold. We did it eight times. We were worried about bird strikes. We were worried about... Yes, that's the thing that's fascinating about these things, is you're looking at a perceived danger of Tom falling off the plane...

4:10 · jump to transcript →

Anyway, there's Ving Rhames. I love his entrance. Ving's entrance was great. I love that entrance. Come on. Poor Ving. The wind kept ruining this line. I was trying to get this all as a piece. And Ving was having to take off time and time and time again. And I think he took off in that helicopter like 19 times. And he was starting to feel a little air sick. And Jeremy, the wind started blowing. Jeremy started doing his Michael Jackson impression. He turned around and he was like...

54:06 · jump to transcript →

You don't know whether to call it surreal or what, but it is playing with conventions that Hollywood wasn't making a great use of at this time. Right, and of course, part of the Gothic tradition is combined with a kind of German expressionist. Yes, yeah, right, right. Wells was fascinated with Snow. Snow shows up a lot in his films, and...

2:23 · jump to transcript →

always with this kind of nostalgic memory, a sense of death mingled with youth. He does it in Ambersons. He does it in Chimes at Midnight. Snow has a kind of compelling fascination for him. Maybe it's the Wisconsin boyhood. Yeah, in fact, Truffaut once said that you can divide Will's films into those with snow and those with gunshots. Actually, Mr. O'Connor's the only one that's got both, I think. Yes, that's right. That's right, yeah.

2:52 · jump to transcript →

parody, and yet you're also supposed to enjoy it. You're also supposed to sort of like be impressed by the show of power. Of course, hey, yeah, you do. And so it's not going to spoil even Donald Trump's fun with this movie. I like the way the camera pans across and sees the snow sled running in the opposite direction, destroying the neat handwriting.

18:50 · jump to transcript →