"Okay." "So, here comes Fargo." "I'm Roger Deakins, and I was the director of photography on the movie." "It's a long time since I've seen this film." "It's interesting." "Just watching the opening credits, I remember that we shot in Minneapolis." "St. Paul, based in Minneapolis, in Minnesota." "(CHUCKLING) And most of the film is meant to take place in, like, snowstorms." "And this opening sequence, we had to wait for weeks and weeks before we got our first snowfall." "And the day it really snowed, we were actually shooting on the 14th floor of a tower block, a different sequence." "(CHUCKLING) So, actually, I sent out my assistant to shoot this shot with the transport guys, and off they went." "We'd scouted the locations and we knew exactly the camera angles." "(CHUCKLING) So off he went and shot this really lovely material." "But neither Joel or Ethan or myself were actually there." "It was one of the least snowy winters on record, I believe, in Minnesota." "So a lot of the snow you see in the rest of the film is actually created with an ice-chipping machine." "But this was for real." "I just love the music." "These shots, we stood there in these empty fields when we scouted, and there was no snow or anything, and we just marked spots on the ground where the camera was gonna be, and what lens we were gonna shoot on," "'cause we knew when we actually got to shoot it, we wouldn't have much time." "The great Bill Macy." "I'd worked with Bill, actually, on a film called Homicide with David Mamet, a few years previously, so I knew him pretty well when we did this." "This was a wonderful little bar." "We really didn't do much to it." "Just changed a few light bulbs, and had these guys sitting in this little pool of light above the table." "CARL:" "Shep said you'd be here at 7:30." "What gives, man?" "Shep said 8:30." "We've been sitting here an hour." "He's peed three times already." "I'm sure sorry." "Shep told me 8:30." "It was a mix-up, I guess." "You got the car?" "Yeah." "You bet." "It's out in the lot there, brand-new, burnt umber Cierra." "Yeah, okay." "Well, sit down, then." "I'm Carl Showalter." "This is my associate, Gaear Grimsrud." "Yeah." "How you doing?" "So, we all set on this thing, then?" "Sure, Jerry." "We're all set." "Why wouldn't we be?" "Yeah, no, I'm sure you are." "Shep vouched for you and all." "I got every confidence here in you fellas." "DEAKINS:" "I've worked with Joel and Ethan a lot now, many times." "Actually, we've just finished the seventh film together." "And they're incredibly well prepared." "They know exactly the angles they want, the kind of feel of the scene." "Everything's very structured." "So the shoot becomes..." "On a shoot like this, where the conditions weren't exactly the easiest to work in, it was actually made a lot more comfortable, easier to do, because we knew exactly what was needed for the scenes." "I'm not gonna debate you, Jerry." " Okay." " I'm not gonna sit here and debate." "I will say this, though." "What Shep told us didn't make a whole lot of sense." "Oh, no." "It's real sound." "It's all worked out." "You want your own wife kidnapped." "Yeah." "You..." "My point is, you pay the ransom, what, 80,000 bucks?" "I mean, you give us half the ransom, 40,000, you keep half." "It's like robbing Peter to pay Paul." "It doesn't make any sense." "Okay, see, it's not me paying the ransom." "The thing is, my wife, she's wealthy." "Her dad, he's real well-off." " Now, I'm in a bit of trouble." " CARL:" "What kind of trouble you in, Jerry?" "Well, that's..." "I'm not gonna get into..." "See, I just need the money." "Now, her dad, he's real well-off." "So, why don't you just ask him for the money?" "Or your fucking wife, you know?" "Or your fucking wife, Jerry?" "Well..." "It's all part of this..." "They don't know I need it, see?" "Okay, so there's that." "And even if they did, I wouldn't get it, so there's that on top, then." " See, these are personal matters." " Personal matters?" "Yeah, personal matters that needn't..." "Okay, Jerry." "You're tasking us to perform this mission, but you won't..." "You won't..." "Fuck it." "Let's take a look at that Cierra." "DEAKINS:" "Preproduction is the most important part of any movie, really." "We spend a number of weeks just going through storyboards and looking at locations and really working out exactly what we want out of a sequence." "This film is different, in a way." "I was gonna come to that." "Fargo is like..." "The caption says at the beginning it's based on a true story." "Well, it's based on a number of different incidents." "(CHUCKLING) It's not really a true story, obviously." "But there were some events that happened, I think, that the boys constructed the script from." "And because of that, we wanted to make it much more observational than, say," "Barton Fink or Hudsucker Proxy." "So it's much more..." "The camera work is much more restrained, really." "There's not a lot of fast tracks and flowery sort of camera work and camera moves." "It's much more observational, much more restrained." "I mean, you see just the last sequence in the bar there with Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare and Bill Macy." "It's just basically played on two simple angles." "And here, again, in this kitchen scene, it's just very simple angles, played very sort of straight and direct, as though you're just observing these people in this crazy situation." "I think it really enhances this sort of story." "You don't need to add visual pyrotechnics to gloss it up, because it is this sort of very bizarre story." "But it's more bizarre because it's played so straight, you know." "And they're such wonderful performances." "I mean, you don't need to do much to that." "This could work out real good for me and Jean and Scotty." "Jean and Scotty never have to worry." "DEAKINS:" "This was cold." "Again, this whole scene between these two guys in the car, it's just played on these two cross angles, these two cross single shots." "It's very, very simple, but it's kind of all you need, I think." "You know, a lot of times filmmakers get too involved in showing off with the camera, but it's really about characters and performance and atmosphere, you know." "We can stop outside of Brainerd." "DEAKINS:" "That said, obviously, we did a few pyrotechnics, or, you know, like a few dizzy camera things in Hudsucker or something like that, but it's a different concept, a different kind of film." "A lot of the locations we went to..." "It was funny." "With Rick, the designer, we would look at these locations, and Joel and Ethan would look at each other and say, "No, it's too interesting."" "They wanted, really, the feel of bland Middle America." "And this location here, which actually was a little build-on-location, the important thing was to have this traffic behind Bill Macy's shot here, this endless stream of people going back and forth." "It's a subtle thing, but it's just a comment on, you know... (CHUCKLING)" "I don't know." "It's a comment." "Take it any way you want." "It's a visual gag." "All right." "I'll talk to my boss." "DEAKINS:" "Especially as he's a car salesman." "See, they install that TruCoat at the factory." "There's nothing we can do, but I'll talk to my boss." "These guys here." "These guys." "It's always the same." "It's always more." "You going to the Gophers on Sunday?" "Oh, you betcha." "You wouldn't have an extra ticket?" "You kidding?" "Well, he never done this before, but seeing as it's special circumstances and all, he says I can knock $100 off that TruCoat." "One hundred?" "You lied to me, Mr. Lundegaard." "You're a bald-faced liar." "WOMAN:" "Bucky, please." "DEAKINS:" "That's one of the problems of shooting in Minnesota in the winter, is the amount of daylight you get." "So you have to shoot around the daylight." "Like that scene, we shot the shot towards Bill while we had light." "By the time we were shooting the other angle, there was no light, but you're not seeing the window, so it's all lit." "That statue was built for us and stuck by the highway." "It was funny." "I don't know what people thought when they drove by it, but it was there for a long time." "(MOANING)" "MAN ON TV:" "From Hollywood, The Tonight Show, starring..." "I am talking about your potential." "Mmm-hmm." "You're not a C student." "Yeah." "Yet you're getting C grades." "It's that disparity there that concerns your dad and me." "Uh-huh." "You know what a disparity is?" "DEAKINS:" "This is a case of the simplicity of shooting." "Just playing this scene in that simple two-shot, and then the boy turns round and you go into singles." "It's very, very simple coverage." "I love that way of doing it, really." "Yeah." "Hon!" "Yeah, he's here." "Yeah, I'll catch him for you." " Hon!" " Yeah?" " It's Dad." " Okay." "Look, Dad, there's no fucking way..." " Scotty!" " Hey, let's watch that language there." " JERRY:" "How you doing there, Wade?" " What's going on there?" "Nothing, Wade." "How you doing there?" "Stan Grossman looked at your proposal." "He says it's pretty sweet." " No kidding?" " Might be interested." "DEAKINS:" "Everything is storyboarded." "In a way, not so much on this film, on Fargo, but we still had storyboards of basically every setup." "I think maybe a little bit more was made up on Fargo than normally." "Obviously with a film like Barton Fink or Hudsucker Proxy, it's more important that every shot is actually boarded, 'cause some of the shots are quite elaborate." "But this was boarded too." "I mean, Joel and Ethan like to do that." "They like to be really prepared, and they like to be able to see the storyboards to see how the film actually flows together." "I think it really helps them visualize and sort of pace it." "You know, so just a simple shot like this, when Bill Macy walks in to the car mechanics there, we knew we were starting on a single and revealing the guy working under the car." "It's very well laid out." "I mean, that's not to say that when you're on location that doesn't change." "It does, and obviously the shot is developed to suit the location or suit what the actors are actually gonna do with it." "You see, it's just one shot." "Brings Bill in, play the dialog and Bill walks off again." "We had to shoot these close-ups in the car against this concrete side of the freeway because there was no snow left, and there's meant to be snow." "This was the only place we could find where we could get away with the fact that there wasn't any snow." "And that one's from another place." "...or John Hancock building, whatever." "You ever been to Minneapolis?" "No." "Would it kill you to say something?" "I did." ""No." That's the first thing you've said in the last four hours." "That's a..." "That's a fountain of conversation, man." "That's a geyser." "I mean, whoa, daddy." "Stand back, man." "Shit." "I'm sitting here driving." "I'm doing all the driving, man, whole fucking way from Brainerd, driving." "Just trying to chat." "You know, keep our spirits up, fight the boredom of the road, and you can't say one fucking thing just in the way of conversation?" "Oh, fuck it." "I don't have to talk either, man." "See how you like it." "(SIGHS)" "Just total fucking silence." "Two could play at that game, smart guy." "We'll just see how you like it." "Total silence." "Mr. Lundegaard, this is Reilly Diefenbach from GMAC." "How are you this morning?" "Real good." "How you doing?" "DEAKINS:" "Even a simple little shot like this is storyboarded, this push-in." "We decided to do it through the blinds, so you got the effect of these bars in front of Bill." "A subtle thing, but it's kind of nice." "I already got the..." "What?" "The..." "DIEFENBACH:" "Yeah, the 320,000." "You got the money last month." "Yeah, so we're all set, then." "Yeah, but the vehicles that you're borrowing on," "I just can't read the serial numbers on your application." "Maybe if you could just read..." "Yeah, but the deal's already done." "I already got the money." "Yes, but if we have an audit here..." "DEAKINS:" "And instead of cutting, the camera's just slowly pushing in, you know, as the conversation gets more and more tedious." "He gets more and more trapped." "He gets more and more flustered." "I don't have them in front of me." "Why don't I just fax you over a copy?" "MAN:" "No, well, no, fax is no good." "That's what I have, and I can't read the darn thing." "Yeah, okay." "I'll have my girl send you a copy, then." "Okay, because if I can't correlate this note with the specific vehicles, then I got to call back that money." "Yeah, how much money was that?" "320,000." "I got to correlate that money with the cars it's being lent on." "Yeah." "Okay, no problem." "I'll just fax that right over." "No, no, no." "Fax..." "I mean, send it over." "I'll shoot it right over to you, then." "Okay, okay." "Fine." "Okay." "Real good, then." " We're back with Katie Carlson." " Hi." "DEAKINS:" "That's a great television set, isn't it?" "I mean, look at that." "MAN: ...will be leading a two-week riverboat trip down the Nile." "It's a terrific time." "I know you've heard about it." "We want all of you to come with, and that's the truth." "(LAUGHING)" "Okay, now, for those of you that just joined us..." "DEAKINS:" "This was the first day's shooting, actually, in this house." "We were kind of lucky, 'cause we had this snow outside and we had this lovely gray light, which always makes it easier to do this sort of thing, where you're looking inside out." "It just really suited this scene, too, this really soft, gray light." "It's very funny." "I always wondered what the neighbors were thinking." "(SCREAMING)" "(GRUNTING)" "(GROANING)" "DEAKINS:" "Again, you can see the way it's constructed, it's just very simple shots." "It's all worked out." "She falls out, down onto the floor." "Cut." "Going up the stairs in an over." "It's all done in very simple cuts." "You don't have to cover all the action." "You can just do it in pieces." "Now this bathroom was a set, because we had to do more in there than we could do in the real bathroom, so there's a little roof set piece outside the windows." "(CARL GRUNTING)" "CARL:" "You want to do it?" "GRIMSRUD:" "Push." "DEAKINS:" "This was a funny shot." "A very particular shot the guys had thought about, basically, before the set was built or anything." "They wanted this effect of him looking in the mirror and then looking at the screen on the bath, you know, the curtain." "And that." "It's all very calculated." "And then she's running around like she's some ghost." "That's back on location again, obviously." "Yeah, this is the building." "This is the office we were shooting in the day of the blizzard, when my assistant went out and shot that opening title shot." "We were up here because we wanted to see the view of the countryside in the snow out the window." "(CHUCKLING) And it was, like, snowing so hard." "It was the only day we got a blizzard in all the shooting." "It looks okay, there, you can just see it, but it's almost white outside the windows." "We could have been on the ground floor and just papered the windows." "But you do see it here." "You see it a little bit." "Yeah." "But we never talked about your fee for bringing it to us." "No, but, Wade, see, I was bringing you this deal for you to loan me the money to put in." "It's my deal here, see." "DEAKINS:" "It's kind of a struggle to shoot a scene like this on the 14th floor of a building, 'cause you can't put any lights outside the window to light the set." " What are you saying?" " You're saying we put in all the money, and you collect when it pays off." "(BOTH LAUGHING)" "No, no." "See..." "But I'd..." "I'd pay you back the principal and interest." "Heck, I'd go one over prime?" "DEAKINS:" "A bit frustrating, when you go up there and the point of being there is for the view." " He's at North Star." " He's at..." "No, no." "See, I..." "I don't need a finder's fee." "I need..." "Finder's fee is, what, 10%?" "Heck, that's not gonna do it for me." "I need the principal." "Well, Jerry, we're not gonna just give you $750,000." "What the heck were you thinking?" "If I'm only getting bank interest, I want complete security." "Heck, FDIC." "I don't see nothing like that here." "Yeah, but I..." "Okay." "I..." "I guarantee you your money back." "I'm not talking about your damn word, Jerry." " Jeez!" "What the heck are you..." " We're not a bank, Jerry." "Well, look." "I don't want to cut you out of the loop, but this here's a good deal." "I assume, if you're not interested, you won't mind if we move on it independently." "DEAKINS:" "This top shot here was interesting." "We basically had..." "I think we had like 50 cars that we were gonna put into the parking lot here." "And we got in, in the morning, and set up the camera, and just one truck had gone through to leave that one tire track." "And I said to Joel, you know, "Let's not have any more cars."" "It's just such a great graphic, this little figure and this one car in this empty lot." "So we went the way you see it." "You know, that's how things change and ideas come on the set all the time." "They're really great to work with." "It's a real collaboration." "You really feel you're involved in helping to make the film and helping to create little subtleties in there." "I mean, this was such a great piece, too." "Bill was so great in this scene." "Look at that." "I think that was just one take." "(CHUCKLING) He'd just had it." "It was just, like, crazy." "Hon?" "I got the groceries!" "Yeah, Wade, hi." "It's Jerry." "I..." "Wade, it's Jerry." "I don't know what to do." "It's Jean." "I don't know what to do." "It's my wife." "I don't know what to do." "It's Jean." "DEAKINS:" "And again, as I say, the preproduction period is so important." "We all spend that time together going through the locations, and talking about the shots and how something's gonna work and how one scene goes to another." "You know, no great big heavy conversations, but just sort of technical conversations and aesthetic conversations about the look of the film and how we're gonna do it, and what's the most productive way of shooting it." "You know, it's a great way of working, really." "It's why a film like this..." "I mean, it was very low-budget, really." "I don't know exactly what it was, but it was pretty low-budget." "They make every cent count, really." "This was interesting, doing this sequence, because..." "Well, it comes off me just saying that it wasn't a very large budget, and you come and do a sequence like this, where these guys, or characters, are driving along the road, in the middle of nowhere at night," "and this whole sequence, and you think, "What's the light source?" "What do you actually want to see?"" "I mean, just the practicality of trying to light, you know, empty Minnesota plains covered in snow at night." "You think, "Well, what do you want to do?"" "So, thinking about the next cut after this sequence, as you see the aftermath during the day, we went with the idea that you..." "The night scenes, these characters are surrounded by blackness, and then you cut to the day and the next characters are surrounded by whiteness." "And so we sort of played that concept off, really." "So, decided just to go with the idea of the headlights being the only light source." "Which it would be." "I mean, it's quite naturalistic." "You know, but there is a temptation sometimes to give yourself a horizon or light a landscape at night and see more, but, actually, the interesting thing here, I think, is seeing less." "So you get this inky blackness." "Hey, I'll take care of this." "DEAKINS:" "This was really cold, shooting this sequence." "In fact, a lot of the closer shots, like this one here of Steve Buscemi and the cop coming and leaning in the window, they were actually done in a little garage that we found in Grand Rapids or something." "We were a bit north of Minneapolis at this time." "Basically, it was just a tin shed, and it was just as cold in there as it was outside, so you see the characters' breath in the light and everything." "But, again, 'cause there was no background, we could do that, we could shoot the close-ups in this little stage, as it was." "That would have been inside, too, this two-shot." "You know, to be in full compliance, but it must have..." "It must have slipped my mind." "So maybe the best thing to do would be to take care of that right here in Brainerd." "What's this, sir?" "My license and registration." "Yeah, I want to be in compliance." "I was just thinking we could take care of it right here, in Brainerd." "DEAKINS:" "We had a problem with the exteriors, again, that there was very little snow that year, and it was melting fast." "We were shooting a little late in the winter, I guess, and we kept on having to move our location." "In a moment, you'll see, the later part in the scene, there's a car wreck." "Well, we shot the car wreck in a number of different places, just to have snow around it." "It kept melting." "We were almost about two miles from Canada, I think, by the time we finished the sequence." "And nobody notices the landscape's different, 'cause it isn't really different." "It's just this flat, white plain." "Whoa." "Whoa, daddy." "You'll take care of it." "You are smooth, smooth, you know?" "Oh, daddy." "Just clear him off the road." "Yeah." "DEAKINS:" "I guess it was about minus 20-odd, when we were shooting this." "Pretty cold." "We had some equipment problems." "It's mainly batteries and stuff that you get problems with." "I mean, the cameras themselves, you change the lubricant in them and they're supposed to go down to minus 60, so we didn't really have any problems with the cameras." "But, as I say, the batteries, we made up heater blankets and stuff for them." "But it's just actually working in the conditions, you find..." "I remember, my key grip, he had so much gear on." "He had this huge, huge suit." "Wonderful." "It was a North Face suit, I think." "And it had polystyrene in it an inch deep, something like polystyrene foam or something inside it." "And it kept him really warm, but he couldn't move." "He couldn't do any rigging or anything." "His arms stuck out from his sides and he just looked like a scarecrow, and he sort of waddled around in it, but he was really warm." "It just takes a long time to work in these conditions, because, you know, as soon as you take your gloves off, your hands stick to anything metal." "Your fingers stick to it, you know." "And you're on an insert car, and it's, like, out in the open and bumping along." "That was great." "I liked this little sequence here." "I boosted the rear lights, the red lights on these cars and stuff, just to..." "I love that, just that red and the white." "And the fact the headlights are just giving you the sense of this snow going off into the distance." "And then the car comes back, so we had to pick the angles so when Peter gets out of the car, he's silhouetted against the background." "And the boys wanted..." "J. Todd, who's actually the storyboard artist, is the guy that's getting killed right now." "He's the guy running away with the red jacket." "So it's like the red of the brake lights and the red of his costume." "But, yeah, that's J. Todd." "That's the guy that draws all the storyboards for them." "It's funny, actually, he's just done a George Clooney film that's just about to come out, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind." "It's interesting the way the guys..." "You know, you cut off this kind of quite active, brutal sequence and then go into this lyrical shot to introduce you to these new characters." "I think it's..." "It was just a wonderful little change of tone." "The camera just closes in on this couple in bed." "It's a wonderful little introduction to another world." "You've just been with these two crazy guys." "(PHONE RINGING)" "Oh, jeez." "Hi." "It's Marge." "DEAKINS:" "There was no cut." "It's just one long, little, subtle move, comes in, and, you know, the scene plays out in this one nice shot." "Real good, then." "DEAKINS:" "I think a lot of directors, a lot of filmmakers, don't have the confidence to do that, actually." "They really feel they have to cover everything." "Look, the camera just pulls back as she gets up and reveals her husband." "It just sort of plays." "I'll fix you some eggs." "You know, I think we did a number of takes on this." "We probably did 10 or 12 takes." "But that's it." "When they've got it, they've got it." "That's it." "We don't shoot any cover." "They know what they want." "They have confidence that that's the shot that's gonna work for that particular part of the film, and then we just move on." "It's a very economic way of shooting." "And as she gets up, she reveals her pregnant stomach." "I mean, it's just all there in this one little shot." " Love you, Margie." " Love you, hon." "DEAKINS:" "And here, like, we wanted this sense of the blue dawn, first light." "And we wanted this location where you could see the kitchen table but you could see outside, so you could see Marge getting into the police car outside the door." "I remember we spent a long time looking for this location just to get this shot and the look of the shot." "You know, and then once you've got that, then you schedule it, so that you can do it at the right time of day to get the blue light outside, 'cause obviously if it was a bright, sunny, midday light," "you would never be able to do it." "This was difficult." "This was the whole thing I was saying about..." "You see this at night with the criminals, and then now you see it in this kind of blinding, white light." "We were lucky, in many ways, that this became quite soft, misty light, because we got there in the morning and it was bright blue sky, and not a cloud in sight, and it was just like..." "I just didn't want to shoot in it, 'cause it just didn't feel right." "You just wanted the sense of this horizon bleeding into the..." "The land bleeding into the sky." "So we waited, and luckily, we just managed to shoot it in little bits of cloud that came along." "And, as I say, this isn't actually where the car crashed in the night scene, this is somewhere totally different, 'cause by the time we came to shoot this, all the snow had melted," "so we had to move north, you know." "Where's the state trooper?" "Back there a good piece, in the ditch next to his prowler." "Okay." "So we got a trooper pulls someone over." "We got a shooting." "These folks drive by." "There's a high-speed pursuit, ends here, and then this execution-type deal." "DEAKINS:" "This scene in particular, it was storyboarded but I know that we actually worked the shots out on the location." "I don't think it really reflects the storyboard as closely as most of the time." "You see something down there, Chief?" "No." "I just think I'm gonna barf." "Jeez." "You okay, Margie?" "Yeah." "I'm fine." "It's just morning sickness." "Well, that passed." " Yeah?" " Yeah." "Now I'm hungry again." "You have breakfast yet, Margie?" "Oh, yeah." " Norm made some eggs." " Yeah?" "Well..." "What now, do you think?" "Let's go take a look at that trooper." " There's different footprints here, Lou." " Yeah?" "Yeah." "This guy's smaller than his buddy." "Oh, yeah?" "DEAKINS:" "I'm looking at that trooper on the ground now." "I'm wondering if it's a dummy, but I know we used a guy." "How he actually laid down there in that snow..." "It's pretty good." "Didn't monkey with his car there, did you?" "No way." "Well, somebody shut his lights." "I guess the little guy sat in there waiting for his buddy to come back." "Yeah, it would have been cold out here." "Heck, yeah." "You think is Dave open yet?" "Dave?" "You don't think he's mixed up in..." "Oh, no, no." "I just want to get Norm some night crawlers." "Did you look in his citation book?" "Yeah." "Last vehicle he wrote in was a tan Cierra at 2:18 a.m." "Under plate number he put "DLR."" "I figure they stopped him or shot him before he could finish filling out the tag number." "So, I got the State looking for a Cierra with a tag starting "DLR."" "They don't got no match yet." "I'm not sure that I agree with you 100% on your police work there, Lou." " Yeah?" " Yeah." "I think that vehicle there probably had dealer plates." ""DLR."" "Oh." "Jeez." "Say, Lou, did you hear the one about the guy who couldn't afford personalized plates, so he went and changed his name to J3L-2404?" "Yeah." "That's a good one." "DEAKINS:" "That was a shot..." "I remember we just grabbed it before we did the scene in the morning when we got there." "Just drove the police car through the shot." "Just 'cause the light looked nice." "Here's another case of a simple location." "All we wanted was this café with a freeway behind it." "And the guys knew they were just gonna play the scene in this three-shot, so it really didn't matter what the interior of the café looked like." "We just moved the table round so we could see the cars going back and forth outside, this theme of people constantly going back and forth." "No." "No cops." "That's final." "This is my deal here, Wade." "Yeah." "Jean is my wife here." "I gotta tell you, Wade, I'm leaning to Jerry's viewpoint here." "Well..." "We got to protect Jean." "These..." "We're not holding any cards here, Wade." "They got them all." "So they call the shots." " You're darn tooting." " Oh, damn it." "I'm telling you." "Well, why don't we..." "Stan, I'm thinking we should offer them a half a million." "Now, come on here!" "No way, Wade." "No way." " We're not horse-trading here, Wade." " Yeah." "We gotta just bite the bullet on this thing." "Yeah." "So, well, what's the next step here, Jerry?" "They're gonna call me up and give me instructions for a drop." "I'm supposed to have the money ready tomorrow." "Damn it!" "How was everything today?" "Yeah." "Real good, now." "(WADE SCOFFS)" "How you doing?" "DEAKINS:" "Both Joel and Ethan, they write the script." "They both really..." "I know Ethan's named the producer and Joel the director, and on set in the end, I think, it's Joel's decision that counts." "But because they've written the script and they've developed the projects together, they're so in sync, it's not a case of them ever being in conflict over anything." "And you'd be on the set, and I'll ask either of them a question about a shot or something, whatever, and I know they're so in sync that it doesn't matter who I ask, really." "Same with the actors, you know." "They'll both talk to the actors, and give the actors directions between takes." "It works wonderfully well, really." "When I first started working with them, which was Barton Fink, I was nervous." "I was thinking, "If you've got two people, isn't that gonna be confusing?"" "But it's quite the reverse, really." "It gives them, and everybody working on the film, actually, more chance to have access to the director, because both of them really count." "Granddad and I, we're, we're making sure this gets handled right." "I really think we should call the cops here." "No." "No." "No one can know about this thing." "We gotta play ball with these guys." "You ask Stan Grossman, he'll tell you the same thing." "Yeah." "But, Dad..." "We're gonna get Mom back for you, but we gotta play ball." "You know?" "That's the deal here." "So if Lorraine calls, or Sylvia, you just say Mom's down in Florida, with Pearl and Marty." "That's the best we can do here." "DEAKINS:" "This cabin was a great location." "And obviously we got a big crane in there to get this high shot." "Again, a very sort of specific shot they wanted to start with." "Yeah, this was quite a bit further north, so it had a lot of snow round this lake." "It was kind of easier to work." "This was all real." "I say that, but actually we enhanced it around the cabin, and all the snow in the trees around the cabin there, actually we did put that on the trees, I remember now." "No!" "Whoops!" "(CARL LAUGHING)" "CARL:" "Oh, God." "(CRYING)" "Lunchtime." "Thanks, Margaret." "Hi." "Hey." "Willy." "Carol." "Janie, two more of those Skin So Soft, please." "Sure thing." "Hiya, hon." "I brought you some lunch, Margie." " What are those?" "Night crawlers?" " Yeah." "Oh, thanks, hon." "You bet." "Thanks for lunch." "Yeah." "Looks pretty good." "What do we got here, Arby's?" "How's the painting going?" "Pretty good." "Found out the Hautmans are entering a painting this year." "Hon, you're better than them." "They're real good." "They're good, Norm, but you're better than them." "You think so?" "Hey, you got Arby's all over me." "(KNOCK AT DOOR)" "Hiya, Norm." "How's the painting going?" "Not too bad." "You know." "How we doing on that vehicle?" "Well, no motels registered any tan Cierra last night, but the night before, two men checked into the Blue Ox, registering a Cierra and leaving the tag space blank." " Jeez, that's a good lead." " Yeah." "Blue Ox, that's that truckers' joint out there on I-35?" "Yeah." "Owner was on the desk then." "Said these two had company." " Oh, yeah?" " Yeah." "GIRL 1:" "Yeah, we both did." "She went to college, too." "GIRL 2:" "I went to Normandale for about a year and a half." "GIRL 1:" "Yeah, that's where we met." "DEAKINS:" "This was a real location, obviously, with the girlie bar." "But I went to high school in White Bear Lake." "I remember, we all thought these two girls were putting the accent on, but actually they spoke exactly like that." "They were really quite cute." "In what way?" "I don't know." "Just funny-looking." "Can you be any more specific?" "I couldn't really say." "He wasn't circumcised." "Was he funny-looking apart from that?" "Yeah." "So, you were having sex with the little fella, then." "Uh-huh." "Is there anything else you can tell me about him?" "No." "Like I say, he was funny-looking." "More than most people, even." " What about the other fella?" " He was a little older." "You know, he looked like the Marlboro Man." " Oh, yeah?" " GIRL 1:" "Yeah." "But maybe I'm saying that, you know, 'cause he smoked a lot of Marlboros." "You know, like a subconscious type of thing." " Oh, yeah, that can happen." " Yeah." "Hey, they said they were going to the Twin Cities." " Oh, yeah?" " GIRL 1:" "Yeah!" "Yeah, is that useful to you?" "You betcha." "Yeah." " Yeah." " Yeah." "CARL:" "Come on!" "(POUNDING)" "Goddamn it!" "DEAKINS:" "We actually shot in the cabin, so we didn't build a set or anything, like quite often you do." "Basically, as much as anything, 'cause the guys wanted the breath coming out." "This was really important." "You could see the breath coming out of this hood that the wife's got on." "It's a little thing, but it's kind of funny." "Goddamn it!" "Unbelievable!" "Come on!" "DEAKINS:" "Going stir-crazy in this cabin." "I think this is a wonderful little scene." "CARL:" "Come on, plug me into the ozone, baby!" "Come on!" "Come on!" "Fuck!" "Fuck!" "Fuck!" "Fuck!" "DEAKINS:" "It's the sort of scene that reminds me of The Man Who Wasn't There, really." "There's so many things, in that scene, and a few scenes in Fargo, that really are very similar, the way they're looking at characters, to the way The Man Who Wasn't There was" "in terms of its observation of character." "Well..." "I'm turning in, Norm." "Oh, yeah?" "MAN ON TV:" "Here it is, throwing off the larval envelope." "(PHONE RINGING)" " Hello?" " MIKE:" "Yeah." "Is this Marge?" " Yeah." " Margie Olmstead?" "Yeah." "Who's this?" "This is Mike Yanagita!" "You know, Mike Yanagita." "Remember me?" "Mike Yanagita?" "Yeah!" "Well, yeah!" "Course I remember you." "How are you doing?" "What time is it?" "Oh, jeez." "It's 10:45." "I hope I didn't wake you." "No." "That's okay." "Yeah, I'm down in the Twin Cities, and I was just watching on TV about these shootings up in Brainerd." "And I saw you on the news there." "Yeah." "I thought, "Jeez, is that Margie Olmstead?"" "I can't believe it." "Yeah, that's me." "Well, how the heck are you?" "Okay." "You know." "Okay." " Yeah?" " Yeah." "DEAKINS:" "Yeah, we never..." "I think we re-shot one shot on this film, actually." "It was like the exterior of the bar where Bill Macy drives up, right in the opening." "Because they didn't like it." "It didn't look bleak enough the first time we shot it." "But, you know, in like seven films, I think that's maybe..." "About the only time we've ever re-shot anything." "Very, very seldom." "And very seldom do pick-ups or anything after the principal photography." "We did a few inserts on one little..." "Well, not a sequence, a couple of shots on Hudsucker." "But other than that, I think there was one insert done on Barton Fink, you know, after principal photography." "But very little." "I put it down to the fact that it's so..." "You know, they conceptualize it so clearly in their heads." "They know exactly what they want." "They know the beats they need to make the film they see in their heads." "How's Jean?" "So it ends up..." "They really don't pick up anything or do re-shoots or shoot new endings or, like, you know..." "That seems to be the favorite thing to do in Hollywood these days." "We'll shoot four different endings and let the audience decide before you release the film, you know." "No, I mean, they have a really clear concept of the kind of film they want." "They work a long time on the script." "We never, for instance, you know..." "A number of films I've been on, by the time you end shooting, the script'll be like a multicolored script, pink pages, yellow pages, green pages, all the colors of the spectrum by the time you finish," "because there's been so many changes done before and during shooting." "But I can honestly say I've never seen a colored page on a Coen brothers script." "The script is there when we start preproduction and that's the script we shoot, and that's the film you see on the screen." "On Barton Fink, it was the first time I worked with them," "I remember looking at the film and counting the shots that we'd done that weren't in the final film." "And there was one little sequence, which was a little effects sequence, when the John Goodman character is killing the lift man." "And we shot this sequence where his head falls off and rolls down the floor in the corridor." "I mean, it just didn't work, so they didn't use it." "But that's honestly the only time I can really remember a sequence not being used." "There's odd shots, but in Barton Fink, I counted 10 shots that we'd done that weren't in the final movie." "But otherwise it's just as we shot it." "It's very rare, actually, they even do structural changes." "I mean, the order of things sometimes does change." "I think it changed a little bit in Hudsucker." "But as far as I remember, in Fargo, in this film, it's very, very much as the script, I think." "Maybe one or two things are ordered slightly differently, but minor things." "Hi, Norm." "How you doing, Margie?" "How's the fricassee?" "Pretty darn good." "You want some?" "Oh, no." "I got..." "Hey, Norm, I thought you was going ice fishing up at Mille Lacs." "Yeah." "After lunch." "DEAKINS:" "We shot a little sequence where Norman's ice-fishing, we did, in his hut out on the ice." "They never used that." "I remember we shot him sitting by the glow of the heater, with this little hole in the ice and his fishing rod." "(CHUCKLING) it was kind of funny." "I never knew why they didn't use that." "'Cause there's kind of a number of sequences in this film that don't really progress the plot, if you like." "They're so much more about characterization and mood." "I never really understood why we never saw Norm ice-fishing." "(WADE GROANING)" "Damn it, I want to be a part of this thing." "No." "Wade, they were real clear." "They said they'd call tomorrow with instructions, and it's gotta be delivered by me alone." "It's my money, I'll deliver it." "What do they care?" "Wade's got a point, there." "I'll handle the call if you want, Jerry." "No, no." "See, they..." "No." "See, they only deal with me." "You feel this nervousness on the phone there." "They're very..." "These guys are dangerous." "All the more reason." "I don't want you..." "With all due respect, Jerry, I don't want you mucking this up." "DEAKINS: interesting that this scene is shot with over-the-shoulder shots instead of just clean singles." "Again, it was partly the idea of the audience observing this real story." "We shot more overs, I think, in Fargo than on other films we've done together." "Hi." "How you doing?" "Real good." "How are you doing today, ma'am?" "I'm doing really super there." "Thanks." "I'm Mrs. Gunderson." "I have a reservation." "Yep." "You sure do, Mrs. Gunderson." "Is there a phone down here, you think?" "Detective Sibert?" "Yeah, this is Marge Gunderson from up Brainerd." "We spoke." "Yeah." "Well, actually, I'm in town here." "I had to do a few things in the Twin Cities, so I thought I'd check in with you about that USFI search on Shep Proudfoot." "Oh, yeah?" "Well, maybe I'll go visit with him if I have..." "No." "I can find that." "Yeah." "Well, thanks a bunch." "Say, say, would you happen to know a good place for lunch in the downtown area?" "The Radisson." "Oh, yeah?" "Is it reasonable?" "DEAKINS:" "All this..." "Yeah, this was... (CHUCKLING)" "All this snow was put in, every little bit of snow here." "If you look in the far distance in this shot, the airport roof car park, there's no snow in the far distance." "It had all, by that time, melted in the whole of Minneapolis." "So all night this effects guy with his ice-chipping machine covered this parking lot in snow." "And, obviously, we just did one take 'cause the car had to come in." "It was gonna take too long to cover up the tracks, so that was it." "But it's fine." "You know, again, confident." "One take, that's fine." "This is the only scene in the film where we've got this bright blue sky, which I kind of hated at the time, but I guess it's all right." "We really wanted the whole film to be kind of gray and overcast." "I mean, I just don't like the look of this." "Again, we put the snow in here." "I don't like the look of this light at all, but you just don't have the options." "You get lucky or you don't." "Well, what do you mean?" "You decided not to park here?" "It's not like you can say," ""We're not gonna shoot that scene today." "We're gonna do something else."" "Not on the kind of budget we were working with on Fargo." "You know, I'm not..." "I decided not to take the trip, as it turns out, so..." "Well, I'm sorry, sir, we still got to charge you the $4." "I just pulled in here." "I just fucking pulled in here." "Well, but..." "See, there's a minimum charge of $4." "Long-term parking charges by the day." "(CAR HORN HONKING)" "(SIGHS)" "I guess you think you're, you know, like an authority figure." "That stupid fucking uniform, huh, buddy?" "King clip-on tie there." "Big fucking man, huh?" "You know, these are the limits of your life, man." "Ruler of your little fucking gate here." "Here." "There's your $4, you pathetic piece of shit." "Where's Shep?" "Talking to a cop." "Cop?" "Said she was a cop." "MARGE:" "So do you remember getting a call Wednesday night?" "Nope." "You do reside there at 1425 Freemont Terrace?" "Yep." "Anyone else residing there?" "No." "Well, Mr. Proudfoot, this call came in past 3:00 in the morning." "It's just hard for me to believe you don't remember anyone calling." "DEAKINS:" "It's interesting." "When we shot this film," "I say we, I'd worked with the Coens on Hudsucker Proxy just previously, which was a lot bigger-budget film." "I think it was for Warners." "And you go in a film like that and you have expectations that it's gonna do well at the box office, and it doesn't, and then..." "I think it was disappointing." "I mean, it's almost like that film's been discovered more recently on DVD." "The number of people that come up to me and say," ""Hudsucker Proxy, what a wonderful film."" "And they are more open, I think, to the nuances of it now, because, stylistically, films are maybe of a much broader range now than they used to be, in America, anyway, and so it's more accessible in a funny kind of way." "But, anyway, at the box office it bombed." "You couldn't really say anything else about it." "It bombed." "And then the guys decided to do this small film, with, I guess..." "In a way, you know, there's no pressure." "It's not very much money at all." "And yet it did very well." "It didn't make huge money at the box office, but it made much more than its budget, and then obviously it went on to be very successful at the Academy." "Not that anybody..." "Certainly, they don't take any notice of that stuff, but I'm sure they're pleased that people saw this film and it was successful, and gave them a bit more freedom to get finance for the next film they did." "I mean, that's what they care about, is having the flexibility to make the films they want to make." "But it's interesting." "It's just impossible to know when something's gonna be successful, whatever that is, or not." "That's not to say it's a better or a worse film than another one, but somehow something will catch an audience's attention and something else won't." "You know, The Man Who Wasn't There, which I regard..." "I mean, it's my favorite film that I've worked on with them." "And, you know, it got critical acclaim, but I was surprised that that, in a way, didn't get seen by more people, maybe." "But it doesn't make it a lesser film, I don't think." "Have him..." " MAN:" "What?" " Oh, jeez." "DEAKINS:" "I love this scene." "Everybody loved this scene." "But it's got no relevance to the, sort of..." "It doesn't develop the plot or anything." "You think, "Well, why is it there?" But it's just such a wonderful scene." "It's so atmospheric and bizarre." "And unexpected." "Marge?" "(CHUCKLING)" "Jeez!" "Oh, you look great!" "Yeah." "So do you." "Easy there." "Easy..." "Easy there." "Easy there." "You do, too." "I'm expecting now." "I see that." "That's great." "What can I get you?" "Just a Diet Coke, please." "Great." "This is a nice place." "Yeah." "You know, it's the Radisson, so it's pretty good." "Yeah." "So..." "DEAKINS:" "I just love the awkwardness of it." "It's beautifully done." "It's actually Eden Prairie." "That school district." "So, Chief Gunderson, then!" "DEAKINS:" "And Joel and Ethan are so great at casting these characters, you know, just populating their films with these wonderful character actors." "...if you're allowed, you know, to discuss that?" "Oh, yeah, yeah." "But there's not a heck of a lot to discuss." "Okay." "Well, what about you, Mike?" "Are you married?" "You got kids?" "Yeah, yeah." "Well..." "I was married." "I was married to..." "You mind if I sit over here?" "I was married to Linda Cooksey." "No." "Why don't you sit over there?" "I prefer that." "Okay." "Sorry." "No, no." "Just so I can see you." "Don't have to turn my neck." "Sure, sure." "I understand." "I didn't mean to..." "No, no." "That's fine." "(LAUGHS)" "Yeah, sorry." "Sorry." "So, I was married to Linda Cooksey." "You remember Linda." "She was a year behind us." "Yeah." "I think I remember her." "Yeah!" "She..." "Oh, yeah!" "So, it didn't work out, huh?" "And then I've been working for Honeywell for a few years now." "Well, they're a good outfit." "Yeah, if you're an engineer, yeah, you could do a lot worse." "But it's not..." "It's nothing like your achievement." "Well, it sounds like you're doing really super." "It's not that..." "It's not that things didn't work out." "It's..." "Linda had leukemia, you know." "She was..." "She passed away." "No." "It was tough." "WAITRESS:" "There you go." "It was long..." "She fought real hard, Marge." "DEAKINS:" "The fact that they're just playing over-the-shoulders on this," "I think it is more observational, 'cause you're just outside of the conversation that little bit." "And if you look at Fargo, compare it with something like, you know, Barton Fink, in particular," "Barton Fink is much more formal, front, single shots." "Big Lebowski even more so, actually." "It's really all played in singles, but here it's that observation thing." "I think we're on, you know, probably a 40mm lens, which I think is probably..." "For me, it's closest to my eye." "Well, somewhere between a 32 and a 40." "And it just feels like you're sitting there watching it." "The idea is, I think, for my job, is that it's sort of, like, seamless, that the photography and the image doesn't really draw attention to itself, and you're just immersed." "You know, that might sound odd, if you think about a film like Hudsucker, where the photography is really quite," "in a way, self-conscious." "But stylistically, hopefully, it all sort of blends together so the audience is taken into this world and this kind of visual style that has a sort of consistency to it, you know." "Just in and out." "DEAKINS:" "I'd say Fargo is kind of simple, but we tried to give a slightly observational feel to it." "I..." "You been to the Celebrity Room before?" "With other clients?" "I don't think so." "It's nice." "Yeah, well, depends on the artist." "You know, Jose Feliciano, you got no complaints." "DEAKINS:" "This scene, we shot the theater and the performance angle, just the wide shot," "I believe, in one place, and then, I think, because of..." "It might have been availability or scheduling or something," "I'm sure this angle of Steve, at the table there, was shot at a different place, a different time." "WOMAN:" "Right." "Come on." "I'm hearing bells." "Come on." "DEAKINS:" "It was funny." "I remember on this scene, Joel was teasing me, because the whole thing's just lit with a 60-watt light bulb in the practical up there." "And he was just teasing me." "He said, "You just lit it with a 60-watt light bulb."" "And this was just..." "It's very minimal light." "There's just the light coming from the street outside." "MAN:" "Yo!" "Cut that shit out, man." "Trying to get some goddamn sleep here." "DEAKINS:" "It's a little thing, but scheduling that, it's the sort of scene that you might expect just to black the windows and do it, but it adds so much atmosphere if you actually shoot it at night" "and just get the feeling of the night light and the street outside." "Just that, just seeing a tree and a little bit of distance." "I actually remember arguing to do that at night." "But it wasn't so bad, 'cause the days were so short." "Night was, you know, 4:00 or 5:00 anyway." "You fucking, motherfucking, son-of-a-bitching, fucking cock!" "Jesus Christ!" "You fucking shitbag motherfucker!" "(PHONE RINGING)" "JERRY:" "Yeah?" "DEAKINS:" "If you look at it, just the construction of that last scene, it's all done again in very simple little..." "Down angle, up angle." "No sort of frantic camera work." "It's all just very considered and very, very simple." "And, I mean, it didn't take long to shoot at all, you know." "A few hours." "Okay, now, you stay away from Scotty, now." "CARL:" "Got it?" "Okay." "Real good, then." "DEAKINS:" "A shot like that, you don't storyboard." "That's sort of a shot that's just made up on the day, 'cause the location just lent itself to that kind of move." "SCOTTY:" "Dad." "It's okay, Scotty." "Where you going?" "I'll be back in a minute." "If Stan calls, you just tell him I went to Embers." "Okay." "Here's your damn money." "Now, where's my daughter?" "DEAKINS:" "I always laugh about this, because we'd shot half here..." "This close-up was done in a totally different car than he's actually in now." "I think this is a Lincoln or Pontiac, or one of those things." "(CHUCKLING) But actually I think the close-up was done in like a Hyundai or something." "It was the only car we'd got." "We had time and the guys needed this close-up, so..." "It's so tight, you don't know what it's in, really." "Who the fuck are you?" "I got your damn money." "Now, where's my daughter?" "I am through fucking around!" "Drop that fucking briefcase!" "DEAKINS:" "This was the coldest night on this parking lot." "This was really brutal." "Where's my damn daughter?" "No Jean, no money." "Drop that fucking money!" "No Jean, no money!" "Is this a fucking joke here?" "Oh, jeez." "DEAKINS:" "It's funny, the lighting in this, actually..." "We wanted this location with the city behind it, and the lighting's really just..." "I added lights to the poles." "We had so many angles to do." "I mean, it's not a lot of angles, but it was a lot of angles to do in one night." "So the lighting is really just what you see on those poles, they're sort of just gags put in to make them look like they're actually the real practicals." "And there's very little else on the floor." "I mean, the tower with the steam coming out of it, obviously, in the back, has got a light." "I think there was..." "There was very minimal lighting in the background, again, 'cause we didn't really have the money to do a big rigging job." "There's that one big tower you see in the back of that shot, there's some lights uplighting those buildings behind there, 'cause that's sort of a graphic shot there." "And then there's some other little coolant towers at the back of one shot that we put a few 2k lights on." "But it's very, very minimal." "And here, for instance, there was a couple of little lights put under these beams that he drove through." "But it's just sort of..." "On a small film like this, you just don't have the budget to do a big rig, and you just go with what's available and maybe tweak it with a few little units, rather than adding overall lighting." "But, you know, it's effective." "It's the kind of film..." "Again, the reality of it is fine." "You don't need a lot of big units and complicated lighting setups, really." "I mean, the crew on this was very small as well, obviously, 'cause the budget was quite low." "But again, you look at that, it's all specific shots." "The point-of-view, come back to him, panning through as he's looking." "Cut to his house and the car comes in." "It's all, I think, so beautifully structured." "And that's what Joel and Ethan do." "As they finish the script, they go through the script and they write their notes." "And Joel does..." "And Ethan..." "Well, they both do little pencil sketches." "And then we sit and talk about it and then J. Todd Anderson, the storyboard artist, comes in and over a period of weeks does a full storyboard of the whole movie, in detail." "Even if it's just two people sitting at the kitchen table scene, they'll storyboard it, to say that they want singles, or they want overs, or there's a two-shot involved." "And it's great, because when you start the day's work, you know, you'll have gone through the..." "You've gone through the schedule with the AD and the production manager, whatever, and worked out how best to structure the whole film in terms of shooting order." "But each day you'll know really the kind of shots that are needed for that day's work, and you can schedule how much time you spend on each shot." "You know by a certain time you'll have to be moving on to do a certain scene or a certain shot in a scene, otherwise you'll lose the light, or whatever, you know." "It makes it a much more practical way of shooting." "MOHRA:" "How you doing?" " Mr. Mohra?" " Yeah?" "Officer Olson." "Yeah." "Righto." "Well..." "So I'm tending bar down there at Ecklund and Swedlin's last Tuesday..." "DEAKINS:" "This is a funny sequence." "Originally, both these characters were gonna have the hoods over their heads so you didn't see either of them at all." "(CHUCKLING) I think after we shot the scene..." "Joel would have liked to have done it that way, but when we shot it, they opened them up so we could see this character's face a little bit." "Only he don't use the word "jerk."" "I think, in reflection, he'd have liked it if you just saw these two hoods." "He says, "What do you think about that?"" "And I says, "Well, that don't sound like too good a deal for him, then."" "You got that right." "Yeah, he says, "Yeah, that guy's dead, and I don't mean of old age."" "And then he says, "Jeez, I'm going crazy out there at the lake."" "White Bear Lake?" "Yeah, well, at Ecklund and Swedlin, that's closer to Moose Lake." " So I made that assumption." " Sure." "Anyway, he's drinking at the bar, so I don't think a whole great deal of it, but then Mrs. Mohra, she heard about the homicides down here..." "DEAKINS:" "The scene's inherently funny 'cause of the dialog and everything, but I think it's enhanced by the fact that you're just sitting watching these two characters in this one frame." "You know, you're not cutting around, you're not seeing their faces." "It's just two guys standing out in the middle of the snow." "You're right." "It's probably nothing, but thanks for calling her in." "Sure." "Looks like she's gonna turn cold tomorrow." "Oh, yeah." "Got a front coming in." "DEAKINS:" "Yeah, that's great." "Jesus Christ." "DEAKINS:" "It's pretty gruesome, isn't it?" "I love the little table napkin." "This was funny, 'cause we had to put the snow on the road here." "Again, the snow was just disappearing." "And Joel really wanted the snow bank, all the way down to where he's planting the briefcase." "You can see it's like really melting there." "But, yeah, we've got enough there." "I just love this fence." "The tricky thing working in snow like this, is you only get one take and then you've gotta kind of move down, you know." "Every take, you move down." "So by the end, if you've done six takes, there's six little holes all the way along the fence." "(CHUCKLING) I mean, I think that's really funny." "I don't know why, I think that's the funniest thing." "That was just one take." "And he just fell over." "It's just so great." "Valerie, I'm leaving this morning, back up to Brainerd." "Well, I'm sorry I won't see you." "DEAKINS:" "This was another location we really searched for." "'Cause the guys, again, wanted this freeway outside." "They wanted, again, this idea of people moving." " Who?" " Linda Cooksey." "DEAKINS:" "And, like, the idea, I guess, is like," ""Who knows who's in the next car to arrive in town?"" "Another couple of serial killers or whatever." "It could be anybody." "I know that was the idea." "But we never found exactly the right..." "You know, this room's pretty good, but it's still not quite right." "We really wanted this..." "I guess it's pretty hard to find a hotel where the road suddenly turns and goes directly away from you, you know." "Jeez." "That's a surprise." "Hello!" "Mr. Lundegaard, sorry to bother you again." "Can I come in?" "Yeah..." "No." "I'm kind of busy here." "I understand." "I'll keep it real short, then." "I'm on my way out of town, but I was wondering..." "Do you mind if I sit down?" "Carrying a bit of a load here." "No, I..." "Yeah, it's this vehicle I asked about yesterday." "I was just wondering..." "Yeah, like I told you, we haven't had any vehicles go missing." "Okay." "Are you sure?" "'Cause I mean, how do you know?" "Because, see, the crime I'm investigating, the perpetrators were driving a car with dealer plates, and they called someone who works here, so it'd be quite a coincidence if they weren't, you know, connected." " Yeah, I see." " So, how do you..." "Have you done any kind of inventory recently?" "The car's not from our lot, ma'am." "But how do you know that for sure without doing a... (CHUCKLING) Well, I would know." "I'm the Executive Sales Manager." "Yeah, but I understand..." " We run a pretty tight ship here." " I know, but..." "Well, how do they establish that, sir?" "I mean, are the cars counted daily, or what kind of a routine here?" "Ma'am, I answered your question." "I'm sorry, sir?" "Ma'am, I answered your question." "(STAMMERING) I answered the darn..." "I'm cooperating here, and there's no..." "Sir, you have no call to get snippy with me." "I'm just doing my job here." "I'm..." "I'm not..." "I'm not arguing here." "I'm cooperating, and there's no..." "We're doing all we can." "Sir, could I talk to Mr. Gustafson?" "Mr. Lundegaard." "Well, heck!" "If you wanna..." "If you wanna play games here," "I'm working with you on this thing here, but..." "Okay!" "I'll do a damn lot count!" " Sir, right now?" " Yeah!" "Right now." "You're darn tooting!" "If it's so damned important to you." "Well, I'm sorry, sir." "What the Christ!" "Jeez!" "WOMAN ON PA:" "Bob Elcorona, line two." "(GASPS)" "For Pete's sake." "For Pete's sake, he's fleeing the interview." "He's fleeing the interview!" "How do I get an outside line here?" "All right." "Yeah." "Detective Sibert, please." "MAN ON TV:" "I told you it was over, and I thought I made myself very clear." "WOMAN ON TV:" "Oh, you did." "You made yourself perfectly clear." "But something's come up." "What?" "Well, it's something kind of small, but it might be a big problem." "I'm pregnant." "I'm pregnant." "I've had a doctor's test, I've got the certificate, and there's no doubt about it, I'm gonna have your baby." "(DOOR OPENING)" "MAN ON TV:" "Now, look here." "I can explain this." "See, Robin was..." "Is a student of mine." "(CHUCKLING)" "You should see the other guy." "MAN ON TV:" "No, no, no." "It wasn't anything like that." "You don't understand!" "WOMAN ON TV:" "I read that letter that she wrote." "I think I understand all there is..." "CARL:" "What happened to her?" "She started shrieking, you know." "Jeez." "Well, I got the money." "All of it, all 80 grand." "DEAKINS:" "The only thing I remember about this scene I was just looking at is that when you see the dead wife on the floor and the stove there, it's like, the stove's still on, the heating element's burning red," "and I remember we had a piece of neon made up like the stove element, so you could read it like the stove was on." "Silly little things, the things you remember." "But it did give the effect of it being cold." "It's a little touch." "Hold on." "No fucking way." "Did you fucking notice this?" "I got fucking shot!" "I got fucking shot in the face!" "I went and got the fucking money!" "I got shot fucking picking it up!" "I've been up for 36 fucking hours!" "I'm taking that fucking car!" "That fuck is mine, you fucking asshole." "You know, I've been listening to your fucking bullshit all week!" "Are we square?" "Are we square?" "Yeah, you fucking mute!" "And if you see your friend, Shep Proudfoot, tell him I'm gonna nail his fucking ass." "MAN ON TV:" "I'll call you..." "Later." "(SCREAMING)" "LOU ON POLICE RADIO:" "His wife." "This guy says she was kidnapped last Wednesday." " The day of our homicides." " Yeah." "And this guy was who?" "Lundegaard's father-in-law's accountant." " Gustafson's accountant." " Yeah." " But we still haven't found Gustafson?" " ..." "looking..." " Sorry." "Didn't copy, Lou." " Still missing." "We're looking." "Copy." "And Lundegaard, too?" "Yeah." "Where are you, Margie?" "I'm almost back." "I'm taking a drive around Moose Lake." "Gary's loudmouth." "Yeah, the loudmouth." "So the whole state has it, huh?" "Gustafson and Lundegaard?" "Yeah." "It's over the wire." "It's everywhere." "They'll find them." "Copy." "Yeah, we got a lead on this..." " There's the car!" "There's the car!" " Whose car?" "My car!" "My car!" "Tan Cierra!" "Tan Cierra!" "Okay." "Careful, Margie." "I'll send a couple cars." "(MACHINE WHIRRING)" "DEAKINS:" "I look at it, I'm just so surprised how simple it is, you know, the coverage." "I mean, it's really so simple." "This, here, is about the only time we actually tracked with a character, where we actually, you know, moved with somebody." "And it was just to get that little bit more sense of suspense there, you know." "(CHUCKLING)" "Of course, everybody talks about this sequence." "It was funny." "I forget the story behind that, but somebody bought it." "It became a valued prop." "Yeah, it was funny shooting this." "I mean, it's grotesque, but it was funny shooting it." "Ridiculous." "I'm surprised people weren't more aghast when they saw it." "But, like, this was something that, actually," "I think they'd read in a newspaper account or something." "You know, there was a story that this was how somebody tried to get rid of a body." "This was a funny thing." "You can read the price tag on the bottom of the boot." "And it's like $9.66." "I mean, and it wasn't intended at all, but when we saw the dailies, we just fell about laughing." "I don't know why." "Just 'cause it's got the price on the bottom of the boot." "It's a silly thing, but it was a really nice touch, but unexpected." "That's where we shot Norm doing his ice-fishing that they never used." "This was tricky, 'cause that point-of-view shot of the cloudy-day snow was done obviously at one time when we just managed to grab it, and then this shot here was done on a bright sunny day." "I think we did this poor man's process, 'cause it was a bright day and I just traced the back windows and stuff." "This was done another time." "And you can see..." "I mean, I hate it." "Probably other people don't really notice, but the back window on Fran's shot is blue, and on Peter's shot, it's white." "And it's just 'cause it's, like, different day, different light." "And then you're trying to match it with points-of-view." "I like the shot on Peter." "I like that sort of contrast on his face." "And here you are." "And it's a beautiful day." "DEAKINS:" "I remember we shot this with Fran twice, because we lost the light when we were scheduled to do it first time." "See, now, it's different." "Yeah." "Now, that's the day we shot it better." "And then, yeah, that goes back to the first sequence again." "Which really doesn't match the lighting conditions of the close-ups, but there you go." "Mr. Anderson?" "JERRY:" "Who?" "Mr. Anderson, is this your burgundy '98 out here?" "Just a sec." "Could you open the door, please?" "Yeah, yeah, just a sec." "Just a sec." "DEAKINS:" "It was interesting, this little piece, 'cause Joel really wanted this hand-held sort of news reportage effect." "You know, again, going to the sort of documentary-realism aspect of it." "Obviously it works just for covering it anyway, but it's a very particular moment to go hand-held." "There's none in the rest of the film." "And it's also a great contrast between that character's life and then this shot, just this static, kind of slow move on these other characters." " They announced it?" " Yeah." "So?" "Three-cent stamp." "Your mallard?" "Yeah." "That's terrific." "It's just a three-cent." "It's terrific." "Hautman's blue-winged teal got the 29-cent." "People don't much use the three-cent." "Oh, for Pete's..." "Of course they do." "Whenever they raise the postage, people need the little stamps." "Yeah?" "When they're stuck with a bunch of the old ones." "Yeah." "I guess." "That's terrific." "I'm so proud of you, Norm." "Heck, Norm, you know, we're doing pretty good." "I love you, Margie." "I love you, Norm." "Two more months." "Two more months." "(CHUCKLING)" "DEAKINS:" "I still like it as a movie." "I haven't seen it for ages." "But it's quite touching, isn't it?" "I think Fran's performance is quite wonderful." "It's very touching, and I think that end, it really resonates." "It's very interesting." "It's brought back a lot of nice memories."