Weather problems

Barry Sonnenfeld

We're about to see Will Smith for the first time at MiB headquarters. You'll notice just then that Rosario, the actress Rosario Dawson... ... Started to cry, and it started to rain. I wonder if that'll be important to us by the end of the movie.

17:02 · jump to transcript →

Barry Sonnenfeld

Okay, homey, I keep it downstairs next to the snow blowers.

38:48 · jump to transcript →

Barry Sonnenfeld

We had a lot of wind... ...and a lot of hot dogs and hot dog buns being thrown at them.

1:04:25 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

This jellyfish, electric jellyfish scene, I kept Cate separated from all the other people so she hadn't been introduced to any of the actors. And we shot all of it with Cate in the trailer. And we didn't bring her out until we filmed her shots. So for Cate, it was very strange because it was about 5:00 in the morning by the time we got to her angle, and the wind's blowing, and these electric jellyfish are blinking on the beach and there's Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Owen Wilson, our friend Waris, Niels, Noah, all in their pajamas on this beach with a crew of people she's never met, and she's brought out, and it was very strange. And I've not really been that big on doing those kind of stunts, but I felt like it might be something, that something might come out of it. And there was, there was a crazy energy on it. And she played this whole scene with them confronting her, and then as soon as we finished it, everybody was introduced to each other and it was... And the sun came up.

22:34 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

Which in some ways, again, because we've seen Wolodarsky working on the piece, you can kind of imagine it's what Zissou would do also. You know, would want it to be more symphonic when the action kicked in. Right, yes. And in fact, this whole sequence... Basically, what happens is they do a raid on this island, go all the way in there, and end up with nothing. On their way out, it turns out their guy they wanna rescue is there after all. But first, it's just a lot of running. Yeah, it's almost like indicating an action scene. Yes, exactly. Yeah, there's a lot of meta-something in all this. I referred to the movie to somebody at a party, I think after a few drinks, as Godardian, and was laughed at, and I probably shouldn't be saying that again, but I actually think it's true. That's part of what set us back at the box office. Godard never did 25 million domestic. An interesting thing right here. This is filmed in Ostia, the coast of Italy near Rome, like the Santa Monica of Rome. But the day we were filming this-- - Putting it in my speak. The day we filmed this, it snowed for the first time in 17 years. It snowed in Rome. So you can sense the rain, but there's actually a little bit of snow. And then Bill Murray had to fly from this set. From this set, he went to a helicopter, to an airport, to the Golden Globes, where he went to win one for Sofia Coppola's movie, Lost in Translation. Did he come back before--? He had to for the Oscars. He was gone for just a couple days, and then he was back to work. Back to the back-breaking-- - What did you shoot while he was away? You had to find... - Not much. Some Ned-Jane stuff. - This shot right here. We shot this while he was away, later that afternoon. And this we shot the following Monday, or maybe it was Tuesday. This whole idea of Zissou getting down on himself and speaking to himself in the third person. "I'm disappointed in myself." "Damn it, Steve." Damn it, Steve. This sucks. I'm disappointed in myself. We have so many animals in this shot. There's a sloth, two monkeys, a snake. All kinds of stuff crawling around in that lobby.

1:26:11 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

One of the main things we were kind of wanting to write about was about a guy whose family is really his collaborators. So I feel like for Zissou and for all these guys, they were people who were looking for something to plug into in their lives, and they found this. They found somebody who wanted to lead them and who was excited to do that. And I think Zissou, he just needs that in his life. And I think anybody who makes movies is kind of familiar with that because you end up becoming very intimate and close with a group of people for this short period of time that you're working with them, and then you go away. But it sort of heightens the awareness of how connected you get with them. Yeah. Is this actual rain or fake rain? That's fake rain that's made by Renato and Daniel, the effects guys at Cinecittà. Two great guys who did all our explosions and guns and fire and rain and snow, and everything else. And Renato is Italian, and his brother-in-law, Tonino, took us on a lot of scouts, when we went out in boats and scouted on ships and things, and he would make what I called spaghetti al Tonino, which is spaghetti with a can of tuna fish and tomato sauce. We'd make it on the boat and we'd eat that. And Daniel is American. He's an Italian-American from Brooklyn, and they work together. Daniel translates for Renato, and Renato's kind of a great sort of... prince at Cinecittà. They're going together in the revolving door. The "I'm a Pepper" T-shirt, whose idea was that? That was, when we made our Bottle Rocket short, a 16 mm thing we'd made years and years ago, there was a man who was a security guard that we had gotten to know, that really Owen somehow managed to entangle us with. And then we put him in the movie, and Temple had taken us out to shoot pistols. None of us were real hunters. But Temple, the security guard we met, took us out to shoot these guns. And Temple had this shirt, "I'm a Pepper" shirt, that he would wear. And when we made our short, we put him in the movie in his "I'm a Pepper" shirt, and they talked to him, and he takes them shooting. In fact, when we filmed the scene, Bob Musgrave shot-- One of the actors, his gun went off pointed at his foot, and the bullet grazed his shoe. He almost shot off his foot. Because, of course, in most movies, we use blanks. When we were making our short, we used live rounds because we didn't have any blanks. - It's just easier to get real. We would've had to buy blanks, and we really had no budget. But Temple had a lot of bullets in his trunk. But so then we then worked that into the script for the feature film. When they do this big robbery, Bob's character kind of almost shoots himself in the foot in the middle of the robbery, which actually... It seems to cause another one of the characters to have a heart attack and the whole thing begins to go wrong. But back to The Life Aquatic. And so the "I'm a Pepper" shirt, you hadn't used since Temple. We didn't get to use it in the real movie of Bottle Rocket because we couldn't get it cleared. We managed to get it cleared. - Now you had the muscle. Yes, now we can get an "I'm a Pepper" shirt at will.

1:30:18 · 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 →

identical floors. And we were very lucky with the weather because we basically jogged in and out of sets. You have to remember that the storytelling of this movie takes place over the course of a few days. So your weather had to be very consistent. So when we had weather that matched, we were outside. And when we had weather that didn't, we were inside. And we were lucky in the universe's desire or willingness to accommodate our shooting schedule. Number six. Next candidate for human trials. Hang in there, number six.

17:49 · jump to transcript →

and we thought we'd be insured, and we weren't insured, or the insurance doesn't cover those kinds of things, and it was a disaster. It turns out that you're not insured for when your orange helicopter breaks down as a hydraulic fuel leak because of the cold. Who knew? Get your hands off my wife! Get your hands off my wife! Stand down! Stand down, soldier! Stand down!

41:11 · jump to transcript →

Must be cold in there. I know I'm going to get whacked now. Yeah. Now, Jimmy. We should go back. Jimmy in this script appears on screen much, much earlier. Yeah. In the film. And I re-edited this and unfortunately didn't tell Jimmy. So he was kind of surprised when he sat down to see the film for the first time. This scene also had that monologue at the beginning between.

38:28 · jump to transcript →

that I realized had been missing the whole time. Every time I see this shot, I just wonder what your relationship with your father's like. It's a great relationship, I assure you. A lot of nosebleeds. Yeah. And I love this look that Dylan brings. Well, this was a scene where I fought with you about the music. I didn't want to go so up here. I thought it should be really creepy and cold, and you really convinced me not to do that.

1:54:14 · jump to transcript →

I went to New York with Dino, and I was very nervous. This was Tony, Anthony Hopkins. The thing I did know and what I was confident about was the type of movie I wanted to make. Like I said, I went in there knowing the tone of the movie, my approach to the movie, how I wanted to not show any of the gore. I didn't want to make a horror film. I wanted to make a film that was psychological, emotional, and smart. That was what was on the page. And the only scene that Tony had a concern with when I sat with him was this scene right here. Tony was concerned that as originally written, his attack on Graham here was too graphic. By the way, it's an interpretation because 10 directors would direct a scene in 10 different ways and show various degrees of violence. It's about showing the details of the guts falling out of his stomach, or the blood, how much blood to show. And I chose to play it mostly on their faces. Once the attack happens... Here's my little homage to Silence. You see the... - I see the bug. You like that. So I chose to play the violence part of this scene on their faces. I love this book. This is an original. My prop guy, Brad, found this original book from France, Larousse... When I read it, I had no idea what the hell it was. It's the bible of cookbooks. - Yes, I learned that quickly. He found this real old French cookbook. There was a lot of dialogue about how do we sell his moment? It's really just a subliminal thing. It wasn't really supposed to be so pointed where it was like, "Oh, sweetbreads." I thought sweetbreads was brains but it's not. It's actually... Thyroid. -... thymus. I learned so much about anatomy on this film. If you work on a Lecter movie, you learn a lot about cooking. I thought Edward was fantastic. There is a tremendous intensity of performances in this movie. And really a dream cast as Brett already said. If you could have anybody in the world for these parts and be lucky enough to get them. It's pretty much what happened to us. Great actors want to play good characters. They want to play great characters and all of these characters, down to Freddy Lounds, and other smaller roles, were just written so well. They were interesting and dynamic. And these actors were interested in playing this. To convince these actors to do a third in the series, all that went out the window when they read the script. Certainly once they started working. There's our cold opening. I'm very proud of this title sequence because it was actually done two days before we had to lock picture. My editor, Mark Helfrich actually was the brainchild behind this because... You re-shot the journal here in a very interesting way. Initially, this was done in a much more straightforward way with the images very flat against the screen. Yes, a lot of times. Mark is kind of... Everybody on my team, from my AD to my production designer, are filmmakers. Mark is a filmmaker in his own right and he just understands the visuals and storytelling. I love how, you know... But this was written. - Yes, it was. But the way that the camera roams over these pages and when we go in very close and it gets grainy, the camera movement left to right, up and down, is all not scripted, of course. This is something I don't really have the patience for. Mark kind of took this book that he was fascinated by. I think he has a copy of it in his closet at home. He just knew every page, every frame and went with Dante and literally just shot. This is a wonderful opportunity. This kind of title sequence is sort of old-fashioned in a way. But it's a wonderful opportunity for a screenwriter to get information in quickly to cover a lot of ground between the arrest of Lecter and where we are when the movie is going to start. Covering a period of several years, you are doing that without any dialogue just by these images. It's a very useful shorthand. Danny did the same thing that Ted did with the script in this sequence that Mark did with the visuals in this sequence. Danny did the same thing with the music. I think the music here is so fantastic. It's very much like a Bernard Hermann score, which I knew was a big inspiration for Danny. Danny is a big fan of Bernard, and this was his chance. He's done darker scores, but they've had a kind of lightness, or comedic darkness to it. Danny did something here that kind of made people's skin crawl in the theater, like, "You're in for it. "If you're gonna sit through this movie, you'll experience some stuff. "Shit's gonna go down."

6:02 · jump to transcript →

This next sequence, with this thing on fire... Ken Pepiot was our special effects coordinator and... These are real flames. This is real fire. I couldn't even walk into this room. You could only shoot for 10 seconds. Ten seconds and then the actors' clothes would start smoking. Then the technicians would have to rush in with fire extinguishers and shut everything down. The flames are gas, they're controlled. They're controlled, but it's hot. - They're real flames and smoke. Take me with you. And, actually, quite dangerous to shoot. Take you with me? This was probably the hardest stuff for the actors in the movie, especially with the fire, once we're in it. And they've got to stay in character. It's kind of like the scene with the live tiger. You've got to stay in character while everything's going crazy around you with flames and smoke and technicians and fire marshals. And she's blind. She's blind so she's not supposed to be able to see the flames. He lights it. She knows there's a gun being pointed at her face. She sees the gun being pointed at her, which is hard enough. She feels the heat. She has to be in a highly emotional state. And she could only shoot 10 seconds at a time before they cleared the set again. And she can't blink... - Right, she can't blink. ...when the gunshot goes off because she can't anticipate it. She wouldn't see it coming, So... If you know a gun will be shot in front of you, you'll blink. She can't blink even though she'll be splattered in the face. In the face with blood, which is right below the frame line. When she did this, it was mind-blowing. I think it was one take. I think she did it in one take. And when she did this, and had to scream at such a feverish pitch... It's incredibly hard to do that just... And you couldn't imagine how hot it was, because the fire was 360 degrees, you know, around. We had multiple cameras because we didn't want to shoot... We had another camera shooting the reverse. It was...

1:47:30 · jump to transcript →

Every time something moves in front of the camera, that's just guidance with straps. I like to see when the wind's blowing up and I step down to slam it back down. I know, I know. That was fun. This scene was the visual effects looking down into the... into the opening were done by Kevin Blank, who does all the visual effects. Now, that is violent. Yeah, that was... Throwing back was quite violent. Yeah, it was. That was pretty intense.

1:00:34 · jump to transcript →

The location of that number is Shanghai. There, I just told you, Shanghai. I've just aided and abetted an enemy of the state. That makes me laugh. Now, we shot all of these sequences with you before we ever went to China. Of course, knowing our locations, but never entirely sure what the weather was going to be like and if things would match. I knew we were going to go to a window. So what I love is this is interior LA going up, up, up to this. This is one of my favorite shots.

1:43:58 · jump to transcript →

in this film. That's Staten Island. And the lamppost, John, where did that, like, come from? It came out of desperation. Remember Howard? We didn't have it, like, six hours before we were shooting. Oh, this was a difficult day, too, because we wanted that to be a crane shot, and the crane operator got wind of what the film was about and didn't show up because he was a Christian fundamentalist and took exception to what we were doing. We had to get another...

1:21:27 · jump to transcript →

I remember the heat was on and it was really hot. I like it hot. Some like it hot. Such a good kiss. That moment always made me cry. Because I was like, if only it could just be like that. Yeah. It can be just like that. It's just like that. Well, it is in this movie. It was just like that that night. It is in, you know...

1:26:12 · jump to transcript →

Here, the use of a helicopter... - The flying cam. A mini helicopter. It's a mini helicopter because it wasn't possible to shoot with a normal one, having in mind that the environment doesn't allow that. And we used this mini helicopter to shoot, especially because we wanted to shoot really close to Robert Carlyle and to see how this man is feeling the guilt of abandoning his wife in the cottage. We used this tool previously in Intacto, our first movie, and, uh... I think it's very effective. Even if there is only four or five shots, they are very, very effective. This is another sequence that Danny Boyle helped us to shoot, especially this stuff in the boat when Don is trying to escape and he is surrounded by the infected. And Jacob tries to reach the boat, but it's not possible because the infected are really fast and they attack before he can reach the boat. That was great work from the stunts. This sequence was shot in November in England, so imagine how cold was the water.

9:12 · jump to transcript →

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

54:07 · jump to transcript →

But besides that, no, really all of them tried to pursue more quote-unquote legitimate acting paths. Yeah, absolutely. I should mention this scene here. This is one of many scenes where our quote-unquote male protagonist, he really unleashes an awful lot of really nasty language against his partner in this film, which makes you wonder why on earth we're supposed to be rooting for him to wind up with her at the end of the movie, because he's a bit of a jerk.

1:00:29 · jump to transcript →

Wes Anderson

The whole movie, the color timing is extremely warm and kind of yellow, and a little extra red. And here we go cold as it can be, and it's blue. The way we shot this was just one angle with jump cuts, and which is, you know-- I don't think there's anything else in this movie that's done that way. To me, it's sort of just interesting to see him doing this. I don't know. I have heard it described as incredibly boring, but I don't think that. To me, it's not. I feel like I kind of connect with Luke in this scene. Right here, especially.

1:09:58 · jump to transcript →

Tom Tykwer

I think it's one of the beautiful parts of filmmaking to be able to witness that. Okay, we've entered the final scene of the film. A very complex sequence that we had to shoot in I think four or five consecutive days. Having a lot of troubles with the weather conditions. Of course the weather was changing all the time and of course we had to do some sort of ballet

1:29:58 · jump to transcript →