"I'm John Hughes, I wrote and directed "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"" "This house was in Long Beach, California" "It's disappointing that the first shot in a "Chicago" movie is in Long Beach" "The opening scene and the end were shot at the back of the schedule,   which was important for the film" "You "met" him after he'd been playing the part for two months" "So in this first piece he was very practised" "He was practised in talking to the camera and in the character" "I wanted him to play it very broad" "The broader he could play it, the funnier it would be" "The parents really wanted to believe that he was telling them the truth" "His sister, who is one of his two nemeses,   knows that he's lying" "And he's a little cruel He does taunt her a little bit" "I needed to motivate her sufficiently   to justify her obsessiveness in catching him   and putting him in his place" "After the film wrapped, Mr and Mrs Bueller, in real life, got married" "At the time we shot this, Jennifer Grey and Matthew were dating" "It was a strange situation, because everyone in this scene is in love" "He's wonderful in this scene He played it as a child" "Parents' most affectionate memories of their children   are when they are children Ferris knew this very well" "His parents bought it completely, which drives his sister insane,   because she's always one-upped by him" "Originally she was a middle child I cut out two young characters" "That put her in the middle, which explained a lot of her aggression" "I actually decorated a lot of the room myself" "It looks like my room in high school" "I had every square inch covered with pop music record sleeves   and photographs from English pop magazines" "I thought his room should reflect his mind" "It should be filled with interesting and related stuff" "That's an old MTV logo I liked it because it was very noisy" "I used a song by Sigue Sigue Sputnik" "It was a good song, it fit well" "But at the time it was a crass piece of pop commercialism,   which worked well for the story" "There's a squirrel outside his room on a telephone wire,   which I thought I needed This was shot on the stage at Paramount" "To avoid it looking too false, I wanted something real" "So we trained two squirrels to run along the wire The first ran away" "He's probably still in that stage" "The second had stage fright He just clung to the wire" "Everybody thought it was a fake It wasn't He was just catatonic" "The graphics were done in post-production" "I thought the scene was a little flat It was just pure exposition" "So I re-positioned the shot, and wrote these instructions, which were stupid" "We played this shower sequence   as if he were, again, a child He does things kids do at bathtime" "He plays with his hair and he sings to the microphone" "He covers the camera while washing his privates, while talking politics" "I thought it was a good context for him to discuss his political views" "This was shot after the parade scene where he sings "Danke Schön"" "I made a lot of references to the song, and we used it whenever we could" "This is a very good moment for him This is the essence of Ferris" "He's quoting the Beatles, this very obvious remark from John Lennon" "He has the right amount of smirk You don't know if he believes it or not" "That's the key to Ferris" "You'd think you'd know him after the shower, but you don't really" "Ben Stein was an easy and early choice for the role of the teacher" "He wasn't a professional actor" "He had a flat voice, he looked like a teacher" "He looked dispirited A bright guy Very interesting and funny" "He was quite brilliant at playing a dull, boring person   who's talking to people who are disinterested" "This is the only shot of Ferris in school It's just his empty desk" "That's the only connection to him at school" "This is a nice moment of non-communication" "She doesn't care what he says, he doesn't care what she says" "Cameron's house is a very beautiful house designed by   a student of Mies van der Rohe, a very important Chicago architect" "That's my hand" "I needed a really overly dramatic button-push,   and nobody on the set was getting it right, so I did it myself" "If you notice, the quilt" "I realised that the form the quilt had taken was a bit like a sarcophagus" "So I tucked it in further to make it look more so An Egyptian prince" "A nice piece of score here One piece of music going between the beach   and the crypt" "That's my hand again" "A nice piece of morning hair there The horn" "And this is the first time " " I played Ferris as being somewhat superhuman" "He was able to anticipate what Cameron was going to say" "Cameron was based, in large part, on a friend of mine in high school" "He was sort of a lost person" "His family neglected him,   so he took that as licence to really pamper himself" "When he was legitimately sick, he actually felt good,   because it was difficult and tiring to have to invent diseases" "But when he actually had something, he was relaxed" "This is Mrs Bueller at work A terrible set, I never liked it much" "This is really done to show Ed Rooney" "He's a guy that deals with children all the time" "He's not very good at dealing with adults" "His conversation with Mrs Bueller is a little clumsy" "This is ad libbed She had a very sprayed hairdo" "I thought it would be fun to stick stuff in there" "I once worked with a woman who kept pencils in her hair" "There was more than pencils in there A little piece of dirt there" "He was so concerned about it, it helped set up what happens later" "A pompous guy He's the emperor of this little kingdom of children" "When he speaks to anyone on the outside, or anyone near his age,   he's really not very good at it" "I tried to delay his appearance as long as I could" "The number nine is another Beatle reference It's also a funny word" "When you say "nine", it becomes nasal You have to say it that way" "And it sounded funny coming from him" "I cast him off of "Amadeus", where he played the prince" "I thought that character's modern equivalent is Rooney" "Took it down to two, which is a good number" "Their relationship She doesn't drink coffee, she sniffs Liquid Paper" "Grace drives him crazy, but she's the only one who admires him" "He's stuck with her" "She flatters him She thinks he's smart, she buys a lot of his stuff" "This was ad libbed There was a clarinet on the set" "Matthew said he could play it, which of course he couldn't" "That little line of his is my favourite:" ""Didn't never have one lesson"" "Occasionally he slips into his New York dialects, which I like very much" "We had no dialogue for this I just asked him to talk about economics" "We thought political economics was the worst thing to discuss with kids" "The Smoot-Holly Act, an example of adults making a mess of things" "They're not just bored, they hate him They resent him They can't stand him" "She looks kind of like Alex in "Clockwork Orange"" "And she's furious She's gonna get him at some point" "He's probably bored He's kind of a nice guy, he wouldn't be aggressive" "And this is a stupid joke, but" "I remember being awakened many times by my drool cooling" "She was able to pop the bubble without blinking" "It took a while" "We used "voodoo" economics, which goes into "I Dream of Jeannie"" "Blue tennis shoes You may notice that he changes clothes a lot" "Every time you see him, he's changed clothes When you're home sick,   you amuse yourself in ways you wouldn't normally" "This high school is actually the "Breakfast Club" high school" "It was an abandoned high school, so we were able to get it" "These are all real kids I wanted to use real high-school kids   and put the principal cast, who are all in their 20's,   into this world of real kids, so there would be a greater contrast" "When you're a kid, you want to be his age This is a good example   of Matthew, who's 21-22, talking to actual freshman boys" "I couldn't have got it in performance" "You've got to have the look and the vocal tone a freshman boy has" "This was a really early emulator, " " Ferris being fairly technically adept, for the times, anyway" "This is a nice moment which speaks to   youth's feelings about life and death" "Ferris is dying, but she wants to know if he'll be around on the weekend" "Matthew had a good time with this He was able to play with the sounds" "He enjoyed it very much" "She was just an extra who we gave the phone to" "She did a very good job" "This is just childish showing off This is his best camera-take here" "I enjoyed developing the relationship between Rooney and his secretary" "He takes himself so seriously,   and she's one of those sweet, non-professional school employees   who knows the kids, likes the kids, and they like her" "He can't figure out why he's not respected" "He doesn't care if they like him He wants their respect and doesn't get it" "He shows here how out of touch he is with the students" "She has an understanding of how high-school society works" "A key to Grace is that she's very practical" " She takes things at face value" " He speaks in clichés" "She interprets a lot of those clichés literally, which annoys him" "If you consider yourself important, having Grace around will annoy you" "I've used Edie McClurg a number of times in pictures" "She's wonderful at this A lot of this we made up on the spot" "Originally, Ferris was doing this Modigliani on his computer,   and he'd wired it into a JumboTron downtown in the city" "So as he's composing this picture, it's appearing downtown" "It's part of a larger theme Signs and JumboTrons linked to his computer" "I ultimately didn't use it" "A lot of shots of Chicago It's my city, and I really wanted to show it   at its best" "This is Ferris at the office, getting his plan together" "He's starting to get dressed in his final outfit" "This is a nice moment of a father not really knowing how   to deal with his son He knows he should give him some sort of advice" "We thought of the worst advice for the flu:" "Put a towel on your head" "Lyman Ward is a very funny guy A really good light comedian" "I like this scene very much" "It really shows Cameron's madness" "He's a passive-aggressive, to the extreme" "He doesn't want to do this" "He knows he'll end up with Ferris, and do whatever Ferris wants him to" "The only thing he can do is get angry He gets angry at his car here" "I've done this a few times You just let the engine suffer a bit" "He's had it, he's going in the house He puts his foot down a lot" "Which is really his problem He puts his foot down and then backs off" "I like the headrest in focus, and him having a tantrum in the background" "This is Del Close from Second City" "The father of improvisational comedy in Chicago" "I didn't really have anything in the script for him" "So we just sort of worked it out while we were there" "I wanted corny things Putting bars through the word "prison"" "He had an idea to come up with a really annoying speech pattern" "You put the pauses in the wrong places,   which is a good way to put people to sleep There's a few sleeping there" "And this is the old dead grandmother ruse,   which I used because it is such a common thing" "I wanted them to use the worst excuse,   so you'd say, "There's no way you'll get out of that old excuse"" "They're getting him to say that it's an excuse, setting him up for the next fall" "That's Mia Sara She was very good I needed someone pretty and elegant,   who looked as though she could tolerate and control Ferris" "Here's Grace, with her sympathy getting in the way" "She believes it 100 grandmothers die each day, and she grieves for them all" "He doesn't buy it at all, which is exactly what Ferris wants" "He's about to step into a nice trap here" "Jeffrey Jones was I can't imagine anybody else playing this part" "This is" "Alan Ruck was doing an impression of a stage director he'd worked with" "It was an in-joke between Matthew and Alan" "It didn't mean anything to me, but I thought it was a very funny voice" "It was a good voice for a kid to use in playing an adult,   for a teacher" "It's all right It's Ferris Bueller I'm gonna set a trap and let him fall into it" "Grace flatters him She thinks he's brilliant, that he's figured it all out" "I like that she's participating in it, I think that's kind of funny" "We tried to think of words that he didn't normally use in his vocabulary" ""Dipshit" and "pucker up, buttercup" were not things he would normally say" "He heard them in the halls" "We held this close-up for a long time" "As long as he could go without blinking" "He plays it all with his eyes" "I added these bells on the telephone, which was stupid, but kind of funny" "I had her hold that expression for a long time" "It's nice to see Cameron asserting himself here" "But he can only do it in the guise of someone else" "He looks very boyish here That little twisting motion was his idea" "That really felt good for him, to call this guy an asshole" "But of course in the guise of someone else" "Cameron will go too far He's getting really confident" "I liked James Bond movies, especially when I was in high school" "This was great, running these two in and out of that room" "She's doing Rooney" "I don't have all day to bark at you, so I'll make this short and sweet" "I want my daughter in front of the school in ten minutes, by herself" "He's gone too far here" "A great face Pagliacci The "operatic clown" look" "A very rubbery face He would make wonderful expressions" "In fixing it, he's made it worse now" "These guys have worked together on Broadway for quite a while" "They had some wonderful routines that they did together" "This is an example of two actors who are really in sync with one another" "I really enjoyed working with Matthew, who had so much stage experience" "He wasn't being Ferris, he was playing Ferris" "His performance is a performance It wasn't supposed to be real" "He's playing an ideal I think his stage experience really helped" "The fact that they had worked on Broadway   really made this scene work" "It's the first time Cameron stands up to Ferris" "Ferris hit him, and he's really embarrassed" "I gave him a Detroit Red Wings jersey to wear" "It's where I grew up Gordie Howe, number 9, was my hero" "Hockey is not a sport that Cameron would be interested in" "Here's a nice little ad libbed moment I had him running down the hall" "He doesn't want to be seen panicking, so he stops in front of every door" "This is Ferris has hit him and now he's drawing him back in and making him pay for his mistake" "He gets Cameron to make a mistake, so that he can get the car" "Cameron has to pay for his getting too confident with Rooney" "This is the price he's got to pay" "This is a Yello song I'd had it in mind to use for a couple years,   but I didn't find the right spot for it until here" "The insert shots of the Ferrari were real, of the 250 GT California" "The cars we used in the wide shots were obviously reproductions" "There were only 100 of these cars, so it was way too expensive to destroy" "We had a number of replicas made They were pretty good" "But for the tight shots I needed a real one,   so we brought one in to the stage and shot the inserts with it" "That thing with his finger was a squeak with a woman's voice underneath it" "This is Ferris really working hard on Cameron" "He really wants to drive this car This car was really made for him" "Matthew played this as if it were his first date" "The car really had become a woman to him" "He's probably seen it many times at Cameron's and wanted to take it out" " He knows the mileage" " He doesn't trust you?" " Never has, never will" " Look, this is real simple" "Whatever miles we put on, we'll take off" " We'll drive home backwards" " No" "No!" "Forget it You'll have to think of something else" "I think Cameron really wanted him to take it" "He's offering him alternatives here Alan was just ad libbing" "He crosses himself" "This is my old high school, actually" "I had Jeffrey play this as if he were a funeral director" "We hear Ben continuing his economics lecture Could be the same class" "This is just platitudes We were looking for these horrible clichés to say   to someone who'd suffered a loss" "And she's aloof" "He's trying very hard to be sincere" "I liked that she was able to play this   with such confidence" "She owns him at this point, and I think she made it quite obvious" "He always stood   as if he were the funeral director Tilted, a little bit" "She's safe She's far enough away that they've escaped,   so they throw a huge kiss on one another" "She lifted her leg like in the old movies" "From the stage, Matthew is very good at entering and exiting frames" "I took advantage of it whenever I could He had a wonderful body language" "What are we going to do?" "The question is:" "What aren't we going to do?" "Don't say we're not going to take the car home" "If you had access to a car like this, would you take it back right away?" "Neither would I" "The song is by the Flowerpot Men" "I listened to as much obscure English music as I could" "It was a good song It was "Beat City", and it had to do with cities" "A good guitar sound I thought it fit well" "And it was obscure I didn't want to use music you had heard,   unless you listened to that kind of music I didn't want to use top 40 stuff" "This is nothing but how pretty Chicago is, the architecture of the city" "We sent a helicopter up the Chicago river" "This was my first chance, making a movie,   to get outside Up to this point, my pictures had been pretty small" "This was a chance to use helicopters and a slightly longer schedule,   and do things I couldn't do before because of the story or the budget" "I really wanted to capture as much of Chicago as I could" "Not just in the architecture and landscape, but the spirit" "Again, these are all high-school kids" "To put her, at 22, in this context makes school all the more awful" "Although this is a very flat delivery" "I made great use of answering machines in this movie" "It would be different today, it would be voice mail or e-mail" "Scratching her head with a pencil This woman I worked with also did" "Those hairdos are so hard, you've got to use a pencil to scratch your head" "I didn't achieve my position by having a punk leave my cheese out in the wind" "That was a completely nonsensical line we made up on the spot" "I just wanted him to say something profound that meant nothing" "We thought "leaving your cheese out in the wind" would suffice" "She loves when he's tough 15 years from now, when he looks back on the ruin his life's become,   he is gonna remember Edward Rooney" "He's gonna go across the line soon, for which he'll have to pay a price" "I don't know why I used the beret If it were today, I don't think I would" "I like Cameron's hat, I didn't care for this one too much" "I met Richard Edson, who plays the parking lot attendant,   and I was fascinated by him Every reading he did was different" "And they were all really on the edge of collapse" "Halfway through the reading, I thought he wasn't going to get through it" "And he always did" "There was something nice and natural about it He certainly looked the part" "But he had also this incredibly suspicious look about him" "Not the kind of person you'd want to give a $200,000 car to" "He's got a very interesting style" "But Cameron's entirely too polite to say no, which is part of his problem" "He's always doing what he doesn't want to do" "This guy immediately senses that he's weak,   and he takes full advantage of him" "That last lingering touch on the car" "I deliberately brought the mother home to make it a bit more difficult for Ferris" "The game should be over now" "She's gonna come home and go check his bedroom" "You should think that it's over" "We play this very arch music" "This is the trophy thing he was doing early in the movie Tying the string to it" "I like that there was a Union Jack in all the close-ups of the door" "I made those little video print-outs of "Jailhouse Rock"" "I thought it would be kind of interesting wallpaper" "It wasn't "Jailhouse Rock", it was his appearance on Ed Sullivan, I think" "I don't think I needed this It explains it a little too much" "This was" "We improvised this, basically" "The guys with the hats just showed up, we didn't bring them there" "They came from Germany for the Germany Day parade we shot later" "I was terrified of leaning against glass in high buildings when I was a kid" "This is kind of a nice shot You see them upside down and right side up" "The guy making this 2nd unit shot actually got sick" "They had to hold him over the side" "We used the actual sound of their heads hitting the glass" "This was the commodities market" "This was something that came up when Alan was watching the hand signals" "This scene was really there   just to hit Cameron's family situation,   which would be important later I think it's a little too obvious" "I'd rather have done it differently" "And Alan had that nice little dripping sound effect that he made" "I like this moment between Matthew and Mia,   about marriage She sort of catches him on what he's doing there" "He doesn't want to get married He's just provoking her" "A lot of that was Cameron's self-indulgence" "He's now playing the "I'm from a home with problems"" "This friend of mine that I based the character on did that sort of thing" "He played for sympathy, because he got no natural sympathy" "So he was always trying to elicit it somehow" "This guy was very good He was a comedian out in Los Angeles" "I liked him very much He did a very good job   of playing the snooty maitre'd" " Is there a problem?" " You're Abe Froman?" " The sausage king of Chicago?" " Yeah, that's me" "I'm very busy Why don't you kids go back to the clubhouse?" "That was Jonathan's line, going back to the clubhouse I thought it was funny" "Playing them very much as children" " Okay, Abe, let's go" " No, I'm not going anywhere" "It hasn't worked for him, so he's getting a little aggressive now" "It's a little different than any of his other reactions" "It isn't going well He can't lose If he did lose, he wouldn't be Ferris Bueller" "When I was done with this, I had no more telephone tricks left" "We did a thing with him Whenever he turned, he turned the wrong way" "When he gets out from the podium, he turns the longer, unnatural way" "In the hallway he does the same thing" "I cut part of this scene" "At the end, they were ordering, and it was in French" "Rather than admit that they'd made a mistake ordering,   they went ahead and ate it, and it turned out to be pancreas" "Cameron had to eat it" "He discovered what it was while he ate it, which didn't make him feel good" "There's a reference to it later, when they're in the traffic jam, in the taxi" "Cameron doesn't think he's done anything good that day He mentions it" "A reference to the scene that was cut" "This was a restaurant in Los Angeles that we took over for the day" "A very pretentious interior Huge floral arrangements" "This was them playing adults" "He thought he would play it as a kid pretending to be an adult" "Pretending that his water is wine" "There were these references that we made often to childhood" "Matthew played a lot of this as a child" "This is a really terrible, shaky, bouncy shot" "It was on a big old Western dolly We didn't have much time to do it" "The only thing you can say for it is that it's in focus" "What makes him so goddam special?" "Screw him" "I used to think my family was the only one with weirdness in it" "That used to worry me Then I saw how Cameron's family functioned" "His home life is really twisted" "This was originally intercut with Cameron eating his pancreas" "Not his pancreas The pancreas he was served" "There it is" "He ate it heartily, then discovered what it was and didn't know what to do" "So I used those moments to intercut with this restaurant scene" "This was after he had discovered he'd eaten it, cleansing his palate" "This whole long bit is just to support this little joke coming up here" "That his father is at the same restaurant" "I don't know if it was worth it" "Jeanie and Grace didn't get along too well" "She's a lot like Rooney" "The difference is, Rooney's an egoist, and she's insecure" "But they're both obsessive and aggressive,   and they both blame other people for their problems" "This is an homage to my old advertising days,   where you have to talk somebody into doing something they don't want to do" "It's a very stylised thing here" "I put the sunglasses on They make a very deliberate exit" "Sort of like those old war movies Sneaking past the Nazi guards" "I didn't have much time It was going to rain I didn't really get it perfect" "The cab that replaces it isn't really stopped when he turns" "A nice piece of score here Ed has gone too far He's left school" "He's made it personal It isn't a school matter anymore It's a personal issue" "We found these ridiculous glasses that flipped up" "I don't know why, but we made a little bit out of it,   to score the flipping of the glasses" "This is all of the thrillers and mysteries and spy movies coming back to him" "This is a pizza place in Brentwood we used to go to with our kids" "It's no longer there" "This is Rooney in the real world" "It shows how poorly he fits" "Jeffrey asked me He thought it would be a good idea   if Rooney spoke a little French He had this line: "The game is up"" "To Rooney, this is very important This is a real war for him" "This isn't just being late for school" "Moriarty has Holmes where he wants him Of course it's not Holmes" "She doesn't go to school, so he has no power She's free to spit in his face" "This scene was really about what an awkward person he was" "Outside of school, he was nothing" "Inside of school, he was a man of distinction, deserving of respect" "But outside he was really very clumsy and awkward and ill-equipped" "He doesn't know about sports here" "He thinks he should make conversation" "This guy was Porky on the original "Lassie" programme, which I watched" "So it was a big moment for me But he knows nothing about sports" "But he thinks, when he's with a working man, he should talk about that" "We had him throw the napkin   so that it didn't look manly, though he was trying to be manly" "Never was a Cub fan, never will be, but the White Sox didn't play day games" "So I had to shoot at Wrigley Field, which is nice, but it's the wrong team" "This is one of those references to the jumbotrons" "As word of Ferris's illness spread around the city" "I hate him" "Ferris had gone to a radio station and talked about how he would be   the first American teenager to go up in the space shuttle,   which I had to lose" "The trailer went out with some of that material, and had to be recalled" "The day before the trailer was to play, Friday night,   the tragedy happened with the shuttle Paramount had to pull all those prints" "The address on this house was my address when I was a kid" "The house is in Long Beach It bothered me that there were eucalyptus trees,   but I was looking for trees that would look somewhat like the Midwest" "This is a nice little moment for Jeffrey,   where he's playing to a recording" "He's come to the house as a school administrator on official business" "He's coming to confirm   the illness of a frequently-absent student So he's within his rights here" "But he's soon to exceed his rights" "On the refrigerator is a portrait of me done by my son, who was six then" "One of my more favourite pieces of art" "He's supplied a lot of my refrigerator art" "I think I could have made him a little slower to learn that this is a trick" "Now he has to decide if he's going to go a little further with this" "I think he thinks he's got some licence because he was duped at the door" "He feels justified now in looking in the windows, but still a little nervous" "I wanted to play this from inside the house looking out" "His little fall there" "It was such a wonderful character He was so pompous   and so arrogant He thought of himself as being so dignified" "To run him through all of these pratfalls was a lot of fun" "And he was a very good sport about it, stepping into the mud" "This happened to me all the time And when you pull your boot out,   you end up standing in the mud in your socks Then he turns the" "We needed to get him from the front door to the back door" "I used every obstacle I could to put in his way, on the way to the back door" "This is really about his decline now" "Now he chases the hose We let these things happen naturally" "Jeffrey did a wonderful job of reacting to them" "We increased the pressure on the hose so it would be hard for him to grab it" "Then he actually split his pants here" "He really enjoyed this" "This was a post-production thing" "The car going over sort of looks like "Star Wars"" "So we thought, here lies a very cheap joke" "We're lucky we got the rights I don't think another song would have worked" "I wanted to show the unbridled joy of these two guys out in this beautiful car" "It's a seductive car It seduced Ferris and these two guys" "Now we're back to Ed getting dressed, putting himself back together" "Now he sees the doggy door I like the idea of a school official   considering climbing through a doggy door   in pursuit of a student, not knowing if they have a dog" "We've heard the dog bark a few times, but haven't seen it until now" "This is very nice This is Rooney in the animal kingdom" "And he's just as inept in the animal kingdom" "It proves once again that he's really only good in his office at the school" "And Grace is really the only living thing that has any respect for him" "He played this very well This got a little dangerous,   because this dog, by the time we got to shooting him, was really pissed off" "Jeffrey had to get the trainer between him and the dog very quickly" "This is a self-indulgent scene of mine This is the Chicago Art Institute,   which was a place of refuge for me" "I went there quite a bit I loved it I knew all the paintings, the building" "This was a chance for me to go back into this building   and show the paintings that were my favourites" "Kandinsky" "Picasso It's one of my favourites "The Old Guitarist"" "I thought this was very relevant to Cameron" "The tenderness of a mother and child, which he didn't have" "There's a Matisse" "The museum hadn't been shot in, until we approached them" "This is a nice moment here These were all things we did on the spot" "These three Picassos were favourites I put each of them in front of them" "I always thought this painting was like making a movie, in point of style" "You don't have any idea what you've made until you step back from it" "I used it in this context to see" "He's looking at that little girl, which again is a mother and a child" "The closer he looks, the less he sees, with this style of painting" "Or any style, really But the more he looks at it, there's nothing there" "He fears that, the more you look at him, the less you see There's nothing there" "That's him" "This is the German Day parade There's many German references in the film" "The town I grew up in The original citizens were Germans" "There's a lot of German street names, a lot of Germans in Chicago" "There I go with my 80's haircut" "Bueller was a German name I used a number of those references" "It just happened that this was an actual parade, which we put our float into,   unbeknownst to anybody, all the people on the reviewing stand" "Nobody knew what it was, including the governor" "This is a nice scene, where he pulls up next to his father" "Cameron's whining and complaining He's always looking for a parent" "He's always in search of a parent Ferris is his father figure and friend" "He's running down all the things that he's done for him here" "Again, this is his great, rubbery face His monkey face A primate face" "I had to do this all in one" "As soon as I got off him, Matthew had to jump down, and she had to sit up" "In wardrobe, I gave him a rabbit's foot, which I thought would be a nice little touch" "Down in the footwell, they came up with the idea of using the rabbit's foot" "It's kind of an icky moment, isn't it?" "He gave her a very good goosing here" "This is all really natural" "Of course he's made it into the paper" "I saw this hole in the door and thought his eyeball there would be pretty funny" "I've got something about shoes, I don't know what it is" "I've done a lot of shoe jokes Teachers always had odd shoes" "I thought his shoe being chewed up by the dog would be the final humiliation" "Like I said, this was a real parade We shot it over two days" "The first Saturday was the real parade The second one, we did pick-up shots" "Ladies and gentlemen, you're such a wonderful crowd." "We'd like to play a little tune for you, it's one of my personal favourites." "It's dedicated it to a young man who doesn't think he's seen anything good." "Cameron Frye, this one's for you." "Matthew lip-synched this song It was the most awful song of my youth" "Every time it came on, I just wanted to scream, claw my face" "I was taking German in high school,   which meant that we listened to it in school" "I couldn't get away from it" "I can't recall how many cameras we had We had some up in the buildings" "We had people on the street Five or six, probably" "The woman playing the accordion didn't realise we were doing a comedy" "I think she thought it was a tribute to Germany" "This was shot on the second day Those are extras in the background" "A nice little walk and talk with Cameron and Mia Sara,   which says a little bit about their relationship" "I think Cameron probably was secretly desperately in love with her" "And she was like a sister My wife, who was my high-school girlfriend" "We were always three Me, my wife, and one of my friends" "One of my troubled buddies" "That's a Calder statue behind them" "Matthew got into this pretty good" "Then we went to "Twist and Shout"" "What happened, for real,   was that people from all over the immediate area   showed up and were singing along" "We got thousands of people That guy, for example" "I noticed we was up there dancing, and asked the 2nd unit guy to grab it" "The people run all the way down, as far as you can see" "At the end of the shot we had a crane As it came up,   we realised there were thousands of people" "They came from all over the immediate area, and thought it was a real event" "We used lots of local talent This was a dance group we used" "We held open auditions for people who did interesting things Like him" "That's my prop man" "These were triplet lawyers" "That's a Chagall mosaic I tried to show as much of the city's art as possible" "The window cleaner was one of our people" "These were just real people singing along with the song" "It was a wonderful day" "This is in Los Angeles, shot quite some time later" "Paul McCartney said in an interview that he didn't like the horns on this,   and that, if they'd wanted horns, they bloody well would have put them in" "I felt really bad because I had offended a Beatle" "But it wasn't really part of the song" "We saw a band and we needed to hear the instruments" "So I'm sorry I offended him, but it put the song back on the charts" "It was the first time in years a Beatles song was on the "Billboard" charts" "I think Matthew was really driven by the crowd" "That little thing where he fell back He missed his cue and almost fell" "This is Louie Anderson I don't think Louie's ever forgiven me for this" "That was his role I had to cut it out" "So now Rooney is accepting deliveries at the Bueller house" "That was just a little ad lib I wanted to have something,   and I thought the "shave and a haircut" thing was kind of nice" "This was the town I grew up in" "I don't know why, but they let us paint on their water tower" "It was there for a while A lot of people remember this If you go to this town   and ask what was painted on the water tower, they'll say "Save Ferris"" "This, of course No animals were hurt" "It's hard to get them to lay down like that, though" "She discovers what she already knew I enjoyed   taking two pursuers and putting" "They miss the prey but attack each other, which I thought was fun to do" "Jeanie's just awful to everybody" "If you don't give her what she wants or say what she wants you to say,   she mistreats you" "Now he's really crossed the line because now he's in the house" "Of course she thinks it's Ferris It's a little cat-and-mouse game" "This was all shot in that same house in Long Beach" "A little tight, but the floor plan worked really well for the picture" "There's a little fly here We saw the fly and added the fly sound" "It was an accident, but it was nice to have a fly chase him, in his condition" "We sped that up just a little bit, because she didn't run fast enough" "This was nice a nice shot" "We originally shot in super 35, wide-screen I was able to do all this in one, without any scanning" "But in television versions it had to be recomposed" "The licence on this was "Nervous"" "I milked those licence-plate jokes pretty hard in the 80's" "I liked to detail things as much as I could" "We couldn't use the garage's name, so we made it A1-EZ OK Park" "This is not a phoney phone call There's an intruder:" "Male, Caucasian, possibly armed, certainly weird, in my kitchen" "My name is Bueller" "It's nice that you hope my brother is feeling better, but I'm in danger" "It's hard to play one-sided phone calls" "She did a really good job of making it appear as if she's talking to somebody" "She was probably talking to me I usually do the other side" "This is Charlie Sheen's character" "There was a little bit more to do with his family" "I had to lose it because of the shuttle stuff His dad owned the tow company" "The tissue in the nose was a cheap joke, but I thought it was funny" "I thought he would have developed a hole in his pocket by now" "It was necessary for him to leave some evidence that he was in the house" "This is a really sad, pathetic shot here" "It reminded me of an old 30's "The Little Rascals" or something" "The end of one, with the guy running down the road, chasing the car" "This is a very pretty shot down Michigan Avenue" "Cameron is very relaxed here" "He's got the car back, everything seems to be going fine" "Matthew's beginning to notice that there's a problem here" "Cameron, of course, remembers exactly how many miles" "That's a nice little camera-take" "We had a really hard time doing this" "It was very bright and it was painful for him to keep his eyes open" "This took a while" "This is really just another attempt on his part to get some attention" "God bless the police I'm saved" "Here we get a little hint of her religious convictions" "That's Louie again" "This scene was supposed to be done down at the beach,   but the surf was pretty bad The pier we were going to use was underwater" "So we had to redo it, bring it up to this bluff" "It was very windy" "It was early on, and Matthew was uncomfortable talking to the camera" "He would see his reflection, it was like working in a mirror,   which was distracting It was difficult to do" "We were both feeling our way through this technique" "I discovered that when he looked at the camera, he couldn't look away" "When looks away, he breaks the illusion" "To make and break the illusion was really distracting" "Here he had to stare up into the sky, which is hard I didn't want him to blink" "She's very tender with him here I think he's enjoying her attention" "But my discomfort with this scene, and Matthew's, I think worked ultimately" "This actually happened to a friend of mine" "The story's about a guy I know" "You can see him wincing a bit there, because he's looking right into the sun" "This is Ferris's therapy,   which is to help Cameron, but to do it somewhere where he can also relax" "We never identified where this was or whose house this was" "I always presumed it was just someone else's house" "It certainly wasn't Matthew's house or Cameron's house" "They just stopped and used someone's jacuzzi" "By looking up here he indicates that he's doing this deliberately" "This is an example of them having worked together a lot They play it well" "Cameron, wake up!" "Hey, wake up!" "Oh, shit!" "Cameron!" "Come on, wake up!" " What is that?" " Ferris Bueller, you're my hero" "He is genuinely angry here He really does not like being one-upped" "Ferris is not really a nice guy" "He's an interesting guy He's not necessarily virtuous" "This was maybe the best day I had making this picture" "I really enjoyed shooting this scene" "I worked with Charlie's brother on "Breakfast Club"" "It was very similar to working with Emilio" "He was very good in this scene Very subtle, very flat He looked great" "And it's Jeanie with someone that she would never look at otherwise" "She's getting advice from him, and everything he says to her is right" "We made him up to look slightly sickly, not a lot of colour in his face" "There's a wonderful vocal quality in this" "They really worked together well" "There was no rehearsal on them He was just hired for the day,   so they didn't have much time to work on this" "They might have worked together before There was a nice chemistry" "Part of Ferris's character" "He dealt with everybody equally, so he can be as close with this guy   as he can with Cameron His friends were from everywhere   in that high school social strata" "Spend more time dealing with yourself, and less worrying about your brother" "It's painful to get advice from someone who you think is below you" "She's really very rude to him, and it doesn't bother him at all" "This doesn't work It would be a wonderful thing if it did" "It would've saved a lot of my friends, when I was young" "But running the car in reverse doesn't work" "By the time we were shooting this sequence, it was around October,   so every day, before shooting, we had to paint all these leaves green,   and be very careful we didn't knock them off" "This is a nice moment" "This says a lot about high-school friendship" "It's so painful when he says, "What are we going to do next year?"" "These three have a really close relationship" "It appears as though there's a certain maturity to these three relationships" "Cameron mentions that they've known each other since fifth grade" "So I'm sure that she knew,   when she started dating Ferris,   that she was going to get Cameron, too" "That's a very nice moment from Alan,   where he has to admit, in expression, that he watched her undress" "We got this house It was actually a place where a guy kept his cars" "It was built over a ravine in Illinois" "We feared that breaking one of the window panes, as we'd have to,   would affect the structural integrity of the building, breaking all the windows" "And these windows had aged, so a new piece of glass would be obvious" "So we had to remove all of the glass and replace it with new glass,   so that, when we were done, we could put back the original glass, not break it" "So it was complicated negotiations, but it was important" "It's very unusual to find a steel and glass Miesian building   in the woods, over a ravine It was an absolutely perfect location" "Ned knew the guy who owned the house, because he collected Ferraris" "So they had something in common, and we didn't have any problems" "Here's Cameron realising that he has to stand for something,   that he can't continue to be pushed around" "That was quite a good dramatic moment" "He's quite a volatile character He's got a lot of anger and frustration" "He doesn't speak his mind, then whips himself for not doing what he wants to" "It builds up a lot of aggression in him" "The car has really come to symbolise his alienation from his father" "He sees his father's the care he takes with this car not with his son" "That decision to kick the car is life-changing for him" "You see not only how frustrated and angry he is,   but how strong he is, in a way He knows now he's gone too far" "This will define his relationship with his father for the rest of his life" "He's lost his temper We saw him lose his temper earlier, with his own car" "Now he's vented all his anger on this extremely valuable car" "Now he feels guilty He realises what he's done and how much it will hurt" "But he's still willing to take it" "He's not backing off He's taken a stand" "This is the only thing that Ferris hasn't anticipated" "He probably thought that Cameron would get caught taking the car,   and that he'd deal with it, as he should He'd have to confront it" "But I don't think he realised he would go this far" "And now he's made it much worse" "We hoped the car would clear the building" "We feared the impact would slow the car, that it would fall out,   but it actually shot out of the building   and flew over the mark that we had hoped for" "Fortunately it hit a fence, which kept it from going over to another property" "The town made us protect the ravine,   so every little seedling had to be protected" "We put down burlap, cut holes, and put the seedlings and trees through it,   so that we could remove all the glass We didn't leave a single piece of glass" "The ravine was left exactly as we had found it" "It's kind of a scary shot, dollying up to this hole" "Again, this was all composed for wide-screen" "We also didn't know what a replica car was going to do when it hit We didn't know if it was going to split" "We used a metal body, so it would bend rather than shatter, like fibreglass" "You can see in that window how advanced autumn was" "Those leaves have fully turned colour, at the top they're gone" "This was shot later We didn't need to paint the ravine This was all painted" "Cameron, it's my fault I'll take the heat for it We'll wait for your father   and I'll tell him I did it He hates me anyway" "This is the first time we see Ferris frightened This is beyond his control" "Now he's morally obligated to solve the situation he set up" "The change in Cameron's character comes when he rejects that" "When the car flew out, he was very frightened Now he finds his strength" "I think they have their friendship He's accomplished the day" "If he didn't know exactly what the day was going to mean,   he put in motion circumstances that have led to this" "He knew it involved Cameron Since it was near graduation,   their relationship would change, and he had something to fix in Cameron" "He didn't know the specifics, but set up circumstances so he could deal with it" "It was nice to leave Jeanie furious with this guy, ready to punch him,   and then come back and see that, in that time, she's fallen for him" "When it played in the theatres, I was surprised people got that" "When they first kissed You saw it in the background there" "She gives a nice look to Charlie Sheen" "A nice, motherly look" "A great look of anger and disgust" "She's embarrassed She played hard, now her mother treats her like a child" "This is the first time you see any innocence from her at all" "There's a softness in her, which really came from somebody listening to her" "It's a key thing Her problem is that she's uncomfortable with herself" "She isn't happy with herself or her name,   so she uses a pseudonym" "It's a nice thing in the score The voices in the background   begin singing "Shauna, Jeanie", which I thought was a nice touch" "I like the maturity of their relationship They seem like a married couple" "Their romance is something deeper" "It's not really teenager" "It doesn't have the urgency of early teenage romances" "They're very comfortable with each other" "I think she enjoyed this scene" "I don't know about him" "Now this is just the chase" "We shot this all over the place This took forever" "We were chasing the weather" "Some of it was done in California, some in various suburbs of Chicago" "I had three sisters growing up I know all about mother-daughter arguments" "This is extremely and deliberately contrived,   that they should meet eye-to-eye She's in the car, he's on foot" "These are the backyards I used these houses in "She's Having a Baby"" ""16 Candles" and "Uncle Buck" were basically shot in this neighbourhood" "They're beautiful houses" "This oblivious father" "They should be facing the other way, but we were running out of light" "Like I said, it was a very contrived scene" "This song I didn't want to do a score It was a long sequence,   and I didn't have any ideas, so I was looking for songs that could play" "There you can see a palm tree, which drove me nuts" "A palm frond that was cut off so it didn't show in the movie,   then they put it in a trash bin and set it in the shot" "I found a song by The English Beat It was a twelve-inch dance remix" "I'd been a big ska fan in the 70's and early 80's" "I found this song It was the right length and the right feel" "We just licensed it and used it here" "I needed something that was going to drive this scene" "It wasn't a high-speed chase, no stunts, so I needed something with drive to it" "This was a really contrived moment They both look right at each other" "So it was vital that he, up to now, played an oblivious suburban dad" "This is a nice scene, he actually ran through this house" "A lot of this we made up as we went along I knew I needed a chase" "In the script, I probably just said that he runs home" "We added these bits as we went along This is in Long Beach" "I did this under an overcranked shot,   so that I could really time things precisely" "If I had him hanging in the air, it bought me a little time A cheap trick" "I kind of liked that he's gone so mad, he's hiding in the bushes, waiting for him to come home" "How would you feel about another year of high school   under my close, personal supervision?" "Thank God you're all right We've been worried sick about you" "And the sister comes to rescue him, which is the idea that you can say what you want about your brother, but no one else can" "She's not going to let Rooney walk off with her brother" "And she's learned a few things from Charlie Sheen" "That was a nice camera-take This is a great moment That little cough" "Jeanie's learned something about" "She probably will not go to school after this, several times" "She's certainly got the genes" "And he's back to the dog again" "The idea here was to do a very heavy score,   as if it were the end of some war movie   and the bridge is about to blow up, and the train is coming" "All he's doing is getting in bed What happens if he gets caught?" "Nothing" "We thought it was funny to play it so hard" "All these little parts had to match up" "He's got to turn the music off The baseball that he catches, the foul ball" "I got that nice picture of Bryan Ferry behind him" "It worked very nicely for him, the running and sweating" "He appears to have a fever, so he may not go to school tomorrow, either" "Now he's slipping back into being the little boy" "There's a nice little thing he does here, with the "blankie"" " How'd you get to be so sweet?" " Years of practice" "The blankie" "I mean, he's six there, and it's just what they want" "He bites his finger here" "Matthew's very good at this" "This might have been the last day, or very close to it" "When this played in the theatres" "This was the point where people That beautiful smile" "Just as the fade began, people started to stand up" "And then this came on, and they thought it was just a title sequence" "Some would continue out, some would stand" "Then they realised it wasn't over yet" "This sequence had actually come in a little earlier" "I thought it would be interesting   to really not end the picture where you thought it would" "And there's nothing worse for a school administrator   than to have to ride the bus with the kids,   and suffer the humiliations that they have to suffer themselves" "And what could be stranger for a kid on the late bus   than to look up and see the dean of students,   regardless of the condition he's in here, get on your bus?" "It was a wonderful moment of" "They had this thing between them" "They both were startled that this was happening" "That the teacher was on the bus, humiliated to have to ride with them" "I never rode a bus in high school I was too terrified" "I went four years without ever getting in a bus Even field trips" "These were all real kids" "We shot the interiors and it started to rain,   so we finished two months later in Burbank" "We had this girl's glasses made for her" "They were so thick They distorted her vision so badly   that I think she got sick She was nauseous all the time" "They weighed a lot, so she had to hold her head so they wouldn't slide down" "I told her that she had a cold I wanted her to offer him her gummi bears,   having just rubbed her nose" "She's struggling to keep those glasses from sliding down her nose" "I don't think he even knows what a gummi bear is" "You really see here, he hates kids He just hates them" "And now he's right in the belly of the thing He's right inside of it" "It was nice that the bus wasn't in good shape It shook as it pulled away" "Now the people that were heading for the door stopped and turned back" "Also, people were coming in from the lobby,   when they heard that the movie wasn't over" "The studio also had no idea what this footage was in dailies" "They checked the script and had no idea what was going on" "I thought it was important that Ferris get everybody at the end of the movie" "He's made fools of all of us" "I'm John Hughes, I wrote and directed "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"" "This house was in Long Beach, California" "It's disappointing that the first shot in a "Chicago" movie is in Long Beach" "The opening scene and the end were shot at the back of the schedule,   which was important for the film" "You "met" him after he'd been playing the part for two months" "So in this first piece he was very practised" "He was practised in talking to the camera and in the character" "I wanted him to play it very broad" "The broader he could play it, the funnier it would be" "The parents really wanted to believe that he was telling them the truth" "His sister, who is one of his two nemeses,   knows that he's lying" "And he's a little cruel He does taunt her a little bit" "I needed to motivate her sufficiently   to justify her obsessiveness in catching him   and putting him in his place" "After the film wrapped, Mr and Mrs Bueller, in real life, got married" "At the time we shot this, Jennifer Grey and Matthew were dating" "It was a strange situation, because everyone in this scene is in love" "He's wonderful in this scene He played it as a child" "Parents' most affectionate memories of their children   are when they are children Ferris knew this very well" "His parents bought it completely, which drives his sister insane,   because she's always one-upped by him" "Originally she was a middle child I cut out two young characters" "That put her in the middle, which explained a lot of her aggression" "I actually decorated a lot of the room myself" "It looks like my room in high school" "I had every square inch covered with pop music record sleeves   and photographs from English pop magazines" "I thought his room should reflect his mind" "It should be filled with interesting and related stuff" "That's an old MTV logo I liked it because it was very noisy" "I used a song by Sigue Sigue Sputnik" "It was a good song, it fit well" "But at the time it was a crass piece of pop commercialism,   which worked well for the story" "There's a squirrel outside his room on a telephone wire,   which I thought I needed This was shot on the stage at Paramount" "To avoid it looking too false, I wanted something real" "So we trained two squirrels to run along the wire The first ran away" "He's probably still in that stage" "The second had stage fright He just clung to the wire" "Everybody thought it was a fake It wasn't He was just catatonic" "The graphics were done in post-production" "I thought the scene was a little flat It was just pure exposition" "So I re-positioned the shot, and wrote these instructions, which were stupid" "We played this shower sequence   as if he were, again, a child He does things kids do at bathtime" "He plays with his hair and he sings to the microphone" "He covers the camera while washing his privates, while talking politics" "I thought it was a good context for him to discuss his political views" "This was shot after the parade scene where he sings "Danke Schön"" "I made a lot of references to the song, and we used it whenever we could" "This is a very good moment for him This is the essence of Ferris" "He's quoting the Beatles, this very obvious remark from John Lennon" "He has the right amount of smirk You don't know if he believes it or not" "That's the key to Ferris" "You'd think you'd know him after the shower, but you don't really" "Ben Stein was an easy and early choice for the role of the teacher" "He wasn't a professional actor" "He had a flat voice, he looked like a teacher" "He looked dispirited A bright guy Very interesting and funny" "He was quite brilliant at playing a dull, boring person   who's talking to people who are disinterested" "This is the only shot of Ferris in school It's just his empty desk" "That's the only connection to him at school" "This is a nice moment of non-communication" "She doesn't care what he says, he doesn't care what she says" "Cameron's house is a very beautiful house designed by   a student of Mies van der Rohe, a very important Chicago architect" "That's my hand" "I needed a really overly dramatic button-push,   and nobody on the set was getting it right, so I did it myself" "If you notice, the quilt" "I realised that the form the quilt had taken was a bit like a sarcophagus" "So I tucked it in further to make it look more so An Egyptian prince" "A nice piece of score here One piece of music going between the beach   and the crypt" "That's my hand again" "A nice piece of morning hair there The horn" "And this is the first time " " I played Ferris as being somewhat superhuman" "He was able to anticipate what Cameron was going to say" "Cameron was based, in large part, on a friend of mine in high school" "He was sort of a lost person" "His family neglected him,   so he took that as licence to really pamper himself" "When he was legitimately sick, he actually felt good,   because it was difficult and tiring to have to invent diseases" "But when he actually had something, he was relaxed" "This is Mrs Bueller at work A terrible set, I never liked it much" "This is really done to show Ed Rooney" "He's a guy that deals with children all the time" "He's not very good at dealing with adults" "His conversation with Mrs Bueller is a little clumsy" "This is ad libbed She had a very sprayed hairdo" "I thought it would be fun to stick stuff in there" "I once worked with a woman who kept pencils in her hair" "There was more than pencils in there A little piece of dirt there" "He was so concerned about it, it helped set up what happens later" "A pompous guy He's the emperor of this little kingdom of children" "When he speaks to anyone on the outside, or anyone near his age,   he's really not very good at it" "I tried to delay his appearance as long as I could" "The number nine is another Beatle reference It's also a funny word" "When you say "nine", it becomes nasal You have to say it that way" "And it sounded funny coming from him" "I cast him off of "Amadeus", where he played the prince" "I thought that character's modern equivalent is Rooney" "Took it down to two, which is a good number" "Their relationship She doesn't drink coffee, she sniffs Liquid Paper" "Grace drives him crazy, but she's the only one who admires him" "He's stuck with her" "She flatters him She thinks he's smart, she buys a lot of his stuff" "This was ad libbed There was a clarinet on the set" "Matthew said he could play it, which of course he couldn't" "That little line of his is my favourite:" ""Didn't never have one lesson"" "Occasionally he slips into his New York dialects, which I like very much" "We had no dialogue for this I just asked him to talk about economics" "We thought political economics was the worst thing to discuss with kids" "The Smoot-Holly Act, an example of adults making a mess of things" "They're not just bored, they hate him They resent him They can't stand him" "She looks kind of like Alex in "Clockwork Orange"" "And she's furious She's gonna get him at some point" "He's probably bored He's kind of a nice guy, he wouldn't be aggressive" "And this is a stupid joke, but" "I remember being awakened many times by my drool cooling" "She was able to pop the bubble without blinking" "It took a while" "We used "voodoo" economics, which goes into "I Dream of Jeannie"" "Blue tennis shoes You may notice that he changes clothes a lot" "Every time you see him, he's changed clothes When you're home sick,   you amuse yourself in ways you wouldn't normally" "This high school is actually the "Breakfast Club" high school" "It was an abandoned high school, so we were able to get it" "These are all real kids I wanted to use real high-school kids   and put the principal cast, who are all in their 20's,   into this world of real kids, so there would be a greater contrast" "When you're a kid, you want to be his age This is a good example   of Matthew, who's 21-22, talking to actual freshman boys" "I couldn't have got it in performance" "You've got to have the look and the vocal tone a freshman boy has" "This was a really early emulator, " " Ferris being fairly technically adept, for the times, anyway" "This is a nice moment which speaks to   youth's feelings about life and death" "Ferris is dying, but she wants to know if he'll be around on the weekend" "Matthew had a good time with this He was able to play with the sounds" "He enjoyed it very much" "She was just an extra who we gave the phone to" "She did a very good job" "This is just childish showing off This is his best camera-take here" "I enjoyed developing the relationship between Rooney and his secretary" "He takes himself so seriously,   and she's one of those sweet, non-professional school employees   who knows the kids, likes the kids, and they like her" "He can't figure out why he's not respected" "He doesn't care if they like him He wants their respect and doesn't get it" "He shows here how out of touch he is with the students" "She has an understanding of how high-school society works" "A key to Grace is that she's very practical" " She takes things at face value" " He speaks in clichés" "She interprets a lot of those clichés literally, which annoys him" "If you consider yourself important, having Grace around will annoy you" "I've used Edie McClurg a number of times in pictures" "She's wonderful at this A lot of this we made up on the spot" "Originally, Ferris was doing this Modigliani on his computer,   and he'd wired it into a JumboTron downtown in the city" "So as he's composing this picture, it's appearing downtown" "It's part of a larger theme Signs and JumboTrons linked to his computer" "I ultimately didn't use it" "A lot of shots of Chicago It's my city, and I really wanted to show it   at its best" "This is Ferris at the office, getting his plan together" "He's starting to get dressed in his final outfit" "This is a nice moment of a father not really knowing how   to deal with his son He knows he should give him some sort of advice" "We thought of the worst advice for the flu:" "Put a towel on your head" "Lyman Ward is a very funny guy A really good light comedian" "I like this scene very much" "It really shows Cameron's madness" "He's a passive-aggressive, to the extreme" "He doesn't want to do this" "He knows he'll end up with Ferris, and do whatever Ferris wants him to" "The only thing he can do is get angry He gets angry at his car here" "I've done this a few times You just let the engine suffer a bit" "He's had it, he's going in the house He puts his foot down a lot" "Which is really his problem He puts his foot down and then backs off" "I like the headrest in focus, and him having a tantrum in the background" "This is Del Close from Second City" "The father of improvisational comedy in Chicago" "I didn't really have anything in the script for him" "So we just sort of worked it out while we were there" "I wanted corny things Putting bars through the word "prison"" "He had an idea to come up with a really annoying speech pattern" "You put the pauses in the wrong places,   which is a good way to put people to sleep There's a few sleeping there" "And this is the old dead grandmother ruse,   which I used because it is such a common thing" "I wanted them to use the worst excuse,   so you'd say, "There's no way you'll get out of that old excuse"" "They're getting him to say that it's an excuse, setting him up for the next fall" "That's Mia Sara She was very good I needed someone pretty and elegant,   who looked as though she could tolerate and control Ferris" "Here's Grace, with her sympathy getting in the way" "She believes it 100 grandmothers die each day, and she grieves for them all" "He doesn't buy it at all, which is exactly what Ferris wants" "He's about to step into a nice trap here" "Jeffrey Jones was I can't imagine anybody else playing this part" "This is" "Alan Ruck was doing an impression of a stage director he'd worked with" "It was an in-joke between Matthew and Alan" "It didn't mean anything to me, but I thought it was a very funny voice" "It was a good voice for a kid to use in playing an adult,   for a teacher" "It's all right It's Ferris Bueller I'm gonna set a trap and let him fall into it" "Grace flatters him She thinks he's brilliant, that he's figured it all out" "I like that she's participating in it, I think that's kind of funny" "We tried to think of words that he didn't normally use in his vocabulary" ""Dipshit" and "pucker up, buttercup" were not things he would normally say" "He heard them in the halls" "We held this close-up for a long time" "As long as he could go without blinking" "He plays it all with his eyes" "I added these bells on the telephone, which was stupid, but kind of funny" "I had her hold that expression for a long time" "It's nice to see Cameron asserting himself here" "But he can only do it in the guise of someone else" "He looks very boyish here That little twisting motion was his idea" "That really felt good for him, to call this guy an asshole" "But of course in the guise of someone else" "Cameron will go too far He's getting really confident" "I liked James Bond movies, especially when I was in high school" "This was great, running these two in and out of that room" "She's doing Rooney" "I don't have all day to bark at you, so I'll make this short and sweet" "I want my daughter in front of the school in ten minutes, by herself" "He's gone too far here" "A great face Pagliacci The "operatic clown" look" "A very rubbery face He would make wonderful expressions" "In fixing it, he's made it worse now" "These guys have worked together on Broadway for quite a while" "They had some wonderful routines that they did together" "This is an example of two actors who are really in sync with one another" "I really enjoyed working with Matthew, who had so much stage experience" "He wasn't being Ferris, he was playing Ferris" "His performance is a performance It wasn't supposed to be real" "He's playing an ideal I think his stage experience really helped" "The fact that they had worked on Broadway   really made this scene work" "It's the first time Cameron stands up to Ferris" "Ferris hit him, and he's really embarrassed" "I gave him a Detroit Red Wings jersey to wear" "It's where I grew up Gordie Howe, number 9, was my hero" "Hockey is not a sport that Cameron would be interested in" "Here's a nice little ad libbed moment I had him running down the hall" "He doesn't want to be seen panicking, so he stops in front of every door" "This is Ferris has hit him and now he's drawing him back in and making him pay for his mistake" "He gets Cameron to make a mistake, so that he can get the car" "Cameron has to pay for his getting too confident with Rooney" "This is the price he's got to pay" "This is a Yello song I'd had it in mind to use for a couple years,   but I didn't find the right spot for it until here" "The insert shots of the Ferrari were real, of the 250 GT California" "The cars we used in the wide shots were obviously reproductions" "There were only 100 of these cars, so it was way too expensive to destroy" "We had a number of replicas made They were pretty good" "But for the tight shots I needed a real one,   so we brought one in to the stage and shot the inserts with it" "That thing with his finger was a squeak with a woman's voice underneath it" "This is Ferris really working hard on Cameron" "He really wants to drive this car This car was really made for him" "Matthew played this as if it were his first date" "The car really had become a woman to him" "He's probably seen it many times at Cameron's and wanted to take it out" " He knows the mileage" " He doesn't trust you?" " Never has, never will" " Look, this is real simple" "Whatever miles we put on, we'll take off" " We'll drive home backwards" " No" "No!" "Forget it You'll have to think of something else" "I think Cameron really wanted him to take it" "He's offering him alternatives here Alan was just ad libbing" "He crosses himself" "This is my old high school, actually" "I had Jeffrey play this as if he were a funeral director" "We hear Ben continuing his economics lecture Could be the same class" "This is just platitudes We were looking for these horrible clichés to say   to someone who'd suffered a loss" "And she's aloof" "He's trying very hard to be sincere" "I liked that she was able to play this   with such confidence" "She owns him at this point, and I think she made it quite obvious" "He always stood   as if he were the funeral director Tilted, a little bit" "She's safe She's far enough away that they've escaped,   so they throw a huge kiss on one another" "She lifted her leg like in the old movies" "From the stage, Matthew is very good at entering and exiting frames" "I took advantage of it whenever I could He had a wonderful body language" "What are we going to do?" "The question is:" "What aren't we going to do?" "Don't say we're not going to take the car home" "If you had access to a car like this, would you take it back right away?" "Neither would I" "The song is by the Flowerpot Men" "I listened to as much obscure English music as I could" "It was a good song It was "Beat City", and it had to do with cities" "A good guitar sound I thought it fit well" "And it was obscure I didn't want to use music you had heard,   unless you listened to that kind of music I didn't want to use top 40 stuff" "This is nothing but how pretty Chicago is, the architecture of the city" "We sent a helicopter up the Chicago river" "This was my first chance, making a movie,   to get outside Up to this point, my pictures had been pretty small" "This was a chance to use helicopters and a slightly longer schedule,   and do things I couldn't do before because of the story or the budget" "I really wanted to capture as much of Chicago as I could" "Not just in the architecture and landscape, but the spirit" "Again, these are all high-school kids" "To put her, at 22, in this context makes school all the more awful" "Although this is a very flat delivery" "I made great use of answering machines in this movie" "It would be different today, it would be voice mail or e-mail" "Scratching her head with a pencil This woman I worked with also did" "Those hairdos are so hard, you've got to use a pencil to scratch your head" "I didn't achieve my position by having a punk leave my cheese out in the wind" "That was a completely nonsensical line we made up on the spot" "I just wanted him to say something profound that meant nothing" "We thought "leaving your cheese out in the wind" would suffice" "She loves when he's tough 15 years from now, when he looks back on the ruin his life's become,   he is gonna remember Edward Rooney" "He's gonna go across the line soon, for which he'll have to pay a price" "I don't know why I used the beret If it were today, I don't think I would" "I like Cameron's hat, I didn't care for this one too much" "I met Richard Edson, who plays the parking lot attendant,   and I was fascinated by him Every reading he did was different" "And they were all really on the edge of collapse" "Halfway through the reading, I thought he wasn't going to get through it" "And he always did" "There was something nice and natural about it He certainly looked the part" "But he had also this incredibly suspicious look about him" "Not the kind of person you'd want to give a $200,000 car to" "He's got a very interesting style" "But Cameron's entirely too polite to say no, which is part of his problem" "He's always doing what he doesn't want to do" "This guy immediately senses that he's weak,   and he takes full advantage of him" "That last lingering touch on the car" "I deliberately brought the mother home to make it a bit more difficult for Ferris" "The game should be over now" "She's gonna come home and go check his bedroom" "You should think that it's over" "We play this very arch music" "This is the trophy thing he was doing early in the movie Tying the string to it" "I like that there was a Union Jack in all the close-ups of the door" "I made those little video print-outs of "Jailhouse Rock"" "I thought it would be kind of interesting wallpaper" "It wasn't "Jailhouse Rock", it was his appearance on Ed Sullivan, I think" "I don't think I needed this It explains it a little too much" "This was" "We improvised this, basically" "The guys with the hats just showed up, we didn't bring them there" "They came from Germany for the Germany Day parade we shot later" "I was terrified of leaning against glass in high buildings when I was a kid" "This is kind of a nice shot You see them upside down and right side up" "The guy making this 2nd unit shot actually got sick" "They had to hold him over the side" "We used the actual sound of their heads hitting the glass" "This was the commodities market" "This was something that came up when Alan was watching the hand signals" "This scene was really there   just to hit Cameron's family situation,   which would be important later I think it's a little too obvious" "I'd rather have done it differently" "And Alan had that nice little dripping sound effect that he made" "I like this moment between Matthew and Mia,   about marriage She sort of catches him on what he's doing there" "He doesn't want to get married He's just provoking her" "A lot of that was Cameron's self-indulgence" "He's now playing the "I'm from a home with problems"" "This friend of mine that I based the character on did that sort of thing" "He played for sympathy, because he got no natural sympathy" "So he was always trying to elicit it somehow" "This guy was very good He was a comedian out in Los Angeles" "I liked him very much He did a very good job   of playing the snooty maitre'd" " Is there a problem?" " You're Abe Froman?" " The sausage king of Chicago?" " Yeah, that's me" "I'm very busy Why don't you kids go back to the clubhouse?" "That was Jonathan's line, going back to the clubhouse I thought it was funny" "Playing them very much as children" " Okay, Abe, let's go" " No, I'm not going anywhere" "It hasn't worked for him, so he's getting a little aggressive now" "It's a little different than any of his other reactions" "It isn't going well He can't lose If he did lose, he wouldn't be Ferris Bueller" "When I was done with this, I had no more telephone tricks left" "We did a thing with him Whenever he turned, he turned the wrong way" "When he gets out from the podium, he turns the longer, unnatural way" "In the hallway he does the same thing" "I cut part of this scene" "At the end, they were ordering, and it was in French" "Rather than admit that they'd made a mistake ordering,   they went ahead and ate it, and it turned out to be pancreas" "Cameron had to eat it" "He discovered what it was while he ate it, which didn't make him feel good" "There's a reference to it later, when they're in the traffic jam, in the taxi" "Cameron doesn't think he's done anything good that day He mentions it" "A reference to the scene that was cut" "This was a restaurant in Los Angeles that we took over for the day" "A very pretentious interior Huge floral arrangements" "This was them playing adults" "He thought he would play it as a kid pretending to be an adult" "Pretending that his water is wine" "There were these references that we made often to childhood" "Matthew played a lot of this as a child" "This is a really terrible, shaky, bouncy shot" "It was on a big old Western dolly We didn't have much time to do it" "The only thing you can say for it is that it's in focus" "What makes him so goddam special?" "Screw him" "I used to think my family was the only one with weirdness in it" "That used to worry me Then I saw how Cameron's family functioned" "His home life is really twisted" "This was originally intercut with Cameron eating his pancreas" "Not his pancreas The pancreas he was served" "There it is" "He ate it heartily, then discovered what it was and didn't know what to do" "So I used those moments to intercut with this restaurant scene" "This was after he had discovered he'd eaten it, cleansing his palate" "This whole long bit is just to support this little joke coming up here" "That his father is at the same restaurant" "I don't know if it was worth it" "Jeanie and Grace didn't get along too well" "She's a lot like Rooney" "The difference is, Rooney's an egoist, and she's insecure" "But they're both obsessive and aggressive,   and they both blame other people for their problems" "This is an homage to my old advertising days,   where you have to talk somebody into doing something they don't want to do" "It's a very stylised thing here" "I put the sunglasses on They make a very deliberate exit" "Sort of like those old war movies Sneaking past the Nazi guards" "I didn't have much time It was going to rain I didn't really get it perfect" "The cab that replaces it isn't really stopped when he turns" "A nice piece of score here Ed has gone too far He's left school" "He's made it personal It isn't a school matter anymore It's a personal issue" "We found these ridiculous glasses that flipped up" "I don't know why, but we made a little bit out of it,   to score the flipping of the glasses" "This is all of the thrillers and mysteries and spy movies coming back to him" "This is a pizza place in Brentwood we used to go to with our kids" "It's no longer there" "This is Rooney in the real world" "It shows how poorly he fits" "Jeffrey asked me He thought it would be a good idea   if Rooney spoke a little French He had this line: "The game is up"" "To Rooney, this is very important This is a real war for him" "This isn't just being late for school" "Moriarty has Holmes where he wants him Of course it's not Holmes" "She doesn't go to school, so he has no power She's free to spit in his face" "This scene was really about what an awkward person he was" "Outside of school, he was nothing" "Inside of school, he was a man of distinction, deserving of respect" "But outside he was really very clumsy and awkward and ill-equipped" "He doesn't know about sports here" "He thinks he should make conversation" "This guy was Porky on the original "Lassie" programme, which I watched" "So it was a big moment for me But he knows nothing about sports" "But he thinks, when he's with a working man, he should talk about that" "We had him throw the napkin   so that it didn't look manly, though he was trying to be manly" "Never was a Cub fan, never will be, but the White Sox didn't play day games" "So I had to shoot at Wrigley Field, which is nice, but it's the wrong team" "This is one of those references to the jumbotrons" "As word of Ferris's illness spread around the city" "I hate him" "Ferris had gone to a radio station and talked about how he would be   the first American teenager to go up in the space shuttle,   which I had to lose" "The trailer went out with some of that material, and had to be recalled" "The day before the trailer was to play, Friday night,   the tragedy happened with the shuttle Paramount had to pull all those prints" "The address on this house was my address when I was a kid" "The house is in Long Beach It bothered me that there were eucalyptus trees,   but I was looking for trees that would look somewhat like the Midwest" "This is a nice little moment for Jeffrey,   where he's playing to a recording" "He's come to the house as a school administrator on official business" "He's coming to confirm   the illness of a frequently-absent student So he's within his rights here" "But he's soon to exceed his rights" "On the refrigerator is a portrait of me done by my son, who was six then" "One of my more favourite pieces of art" "He's supplied a lot of my refrigerator art" "I think I could have made him a little slower to learn that this is a trick" "Now he has to decide if he's going to go a little further with this" "I think he thinks he's got some licence because he was duped at the door" "He feels justified now in looking in the windows, but still a little nervous" "I wanted to play this from inside the house looking out" "His little fall there" "It was such a wonderful character He was so pompous   and so arrogant He thought of himself as being so dignified" "To run him through all of these pratfalls was a lot of fun" "And he was a very good sport about it, stepping into the mud" "This happened to me all the time And when you pull your boot out,   you end up standing in the mud in your socks Then he turns the" "We needed to get him from the front door to the back door" "I used every obstacle I could to put in his way, on the way to the back door" "This is really about his decline now" "Now he chases the hose We let these things happen naturally" "Jeffrey did a wonderful job of reacting to them" "We increased the pressure on the hose so it would be hard for him to grab it" "Then he actually split his pants here" "He really enjoyed this" "This was a post-production thing" "The car going over sort of looks like "Star Wars"" "So we thought, here lies a very cheap joke" "We're lucky we got the rights I don't think another song would have worked" "I wanted to show the unbridled joy of these two guys out in this beautiful car" "It's a seductive car It seduced Ferris and these two guys" "Now we're back to Ed getting dressed, putting himself back together" "Now he sees the doggy door I like the idea of a school official   considering climbing through a doggy door   in pursuit of a student, not knowing if they have a dog" "We've heard the dog bark a few times, but haven't seen it until now" "This is very nice This is Rooney in the animal kingdom" "And he's just as inept in the animal kingdom" "It proves once again that he's really only good in his office at the school" "And Grace is really the only living thing that has any respect for him" "He played this very well This got a little dangerous,   because this dog, by the time we got to shooting him, was really pissed off" "Jeffrey had to get the trainer between him and the dog very quickly" "This is a self-indulgent scene of mine This is the Chicago Art Institute,   which was a place of refuge for me" "I went there quite a bit I loved it I knew all the paintings, the building" "This was a chance for me to go back into this building   and show the paintings that were my favourites" "Kandinsky" "Picasso It's one of my favourites "The Old Guitarist"" "I thought this was very relevant to Cameron" "The tenderness of a mother and child, which he didn't have" "There's a Matisse" "The museum hadn't been shot in, until we approached them" "This is a nice moment here These were all things we did on the spot" "These three Picassos were favourites I put each of them in front of them" "I always thought this painting was like making a movie, in point of style" "You don't have any idea what you've made until you step back from it" "I used it in this context to see" "He's looking at that little girl, which again is a mother and a child" "The closer he looks, the less he sees, with this style of painting" "Or any style, really But the more he looks at it, there's nothing there" "He fears that, the more you look at him, the less you see There's nothing there" "That's him" "This is the German Day parade There's many German references in the film" "The town I grew up in The original citizens were Germans" "There's a lot of German street names, a lot of Germans in Chicago" "There I go with my 80's haircut" "Bueller was a German name I used a number of those references" "It just happened that this was an actual parade, which we put our float into,   unbeknownst to anybody, all the people on the reviewing stand" "Nobody knew what it was, including the governor" "This is a nice scene, where he pulls up next to his father" "Cameron's whining and complaining He's always looking for a parent" "He's always in search of a parent Ferris is his father figure and friend" "He's running down all the things that he's done for him here" "Again, this is his great, rubbery face His monkey face A primate face" "I had to do this all in one" "As soon as I got off him, Matthew had to jump down, and she had to sit up" "In wardrobe, I gave him a rabbit's foot, which I thought would be a nice little touch" "Down in the footwell, they came up with the idea of using the rabbit's foot" "It's kind of an icky moment, isn't it?" "He gave her a very good goosing here" "This is all really natural" "Of course he's made it into the paper" "I saw this hole in the door and thought his eyeball there would be pretty funny" "I've got something about shoes, I don't know what it is" "I've done a lot of shoe jokes Teachers always had odd shoes" "I thought his shoe being chewed up by the dog would be the final humiliation" "Like I said, this was a real parade We shot it over two days" "The first Saturday was the real parade The second one, we did pick-up shots" "Ladies and gentlemen, you're such a wonderful crowd." "We'd like to play a little tune for you, it's one of my personal favourites." "It's dedicated it to a young man who doesn't think he's seen anything good." "Cameron Frye, this one's for you." "Matthew lip-synched this song It was the most awful song of my youth" "Every time it came on, I just wanted to scream, claw my face" "I was taking German in high school,   which meant that we listened to it in school" "I couldn't get away from it" "I can't recall how many cameras we had We had some up in the buildings" "We had people on the street Five or six, probably" "The woman playing the accordion didn't realise we were doing a comedy" "I think she thought it was a tribute to Germany" "This was shot on the second day Those are extras in the background" "A nice little walk and talk with Cameron and Mia Sara,   which says a little bit about their relationship" "I think Cameron probably was secretly desperately in love with her" "And she was like a sister My wife, who was my high-school girlfriend" "We were always three Me, my wife, and one of my friends" "One of my troubled buddies" "That's a Calder statue behind them" "Matthew got into this pretty good" "Then we went to "Twist and Shout"" "What happened, for real,   was that people from all over the immediate area   showed up and were singing along" "We got thousands of people That guy, for example" "I noticed we was up there dancing, and asked the 2nd unit guy to grab it" "The people run all the way down, as far as you can see" "At the end of the shot we had a crane As it came up,   we realised there were thousands of people" "They came from all over the immediate area, and thought it was a real event" "We used lots of local talent This was a dance group we used" "We held open auditions for people who did interesting things Like him" "That's my prop man" "These were triplet lawyers" "That's a Chagall mosaic I tried to show as much of the city's art as possible" "The window cleaner was one of our people" "These were just real people singing along with the song" "It was a wonderful day" "This is in Los Angeles, shot quite some time later" "Paul McCartney said in an interview that he didn't like the horns on this,   and that, if they'd wanted horns, they bloody well would have put them in" "I felt really bad because I had offended a Beatle" "But it wasn't really part of the song" "We saw a band and we needed to hear the instruments" "So I'm sorry I offended him, but it put the song back on the charts" "It was the first time in years a Beatles song was on the "Billboard" charts" "I think Matthew was really driven by the crowd" "That little thing where he fell back He missed his cue and almost fell" "This is Louie Anderson I don't think Louie's ever forgiven me for this" "That was his role I had to cut it out" "So now Rooney is accepting deliveries at the Bueller house" "That was just a little ad lib I wanted to have something,   and I thought the "shave and a haircut" thing was kind of nice" "This was the town I grew up in" "I don't know why, but they let us paint on their water tower" "It was there for a while A lot of people remember this If you go to this town   and ask what was painted on the water tower, they'll say "Save Ferris"" "This, of course No animals were hurt" "It's hard to get them to lay down like that, though" "She discovers what she already knew I enjoyed   taking two pursuers and putting" "They miss the prey but attack each other, which I thought was fun to do" "Jeanie's just awful to everybody" "If you don't give her what she wants or say what she wants you to say,   she mistreats you" "Now he's really crossed the line because now he's in the house" "Of course she thinks it's Ferris It's a little cat-and-mouse game" "This was all shot in that same house in Long Beach" "A little tight, but the floor plan worked really well for the picture" "There's a little fly here We saw the fly and added the fly sound" "It was an accident, but it was nice to have a fly chase him, in his condition" "We sped that up just a little bit, because she didn't run fast enough" "This was nice a nice shot" "We originally shot in super 35, wide-screen I was able to do all this in one, without any scanning" "But in television versions it had to be recomposed" "The licence on this was "Nervous"" "I milked those licence-plate jokes pretty hard in the 80's" "I liked to detail things as much as I could" "We couldn't use the garage's name, so we made it A1-EZ OK Park" "This is not a phoney phone call There's an intruder:" "Male, Caucasian, possibly armed, certainly weird, in my kitchen" "My name is Bueller" "It's nice that you hope my brother is feeling better, but I'm in danger" "It's hard to play one-sided phone calls" "She did a really good job of making it appear as if she's talking to somebody" "She was probably talking to me I usually do the other side" "This is Charlie Sheen's character" "There was a little bit more to do with his family" "I had to lose it because of the shuttle stuff His dad owned the tow company" "The tissue in the nose was a cheap joke, but I thought it was funny" "I thought he would have developed a hole in his pocket by now" "It was necessary for him to leave some evidence that he was in the house" "This is a really sad, pathetic shot here" "It reminded me of an old 30's "The Little Rascals" or something" "The end of one, with the guy running down the road, chasing the car" "This is a very pretty shot down Michigan Avenue" "Cameron is very relaxed here" "He's got the car back, everything seems to be going fine" "Matthew's beginning to notice that there's a problem here" "Cameron, of course, remembers exactly how many miles" "That's a nice little camera-take" "We had a really hard time doing this" "It was very bright and it was painful for him to keep his eyes open" "This took a while" "This is really just another attempt on his part to get some attention" "God bless the police I'm saved" "Here we get a little hint of her religious convictions" "That's Louie again" "This scene was supposed to be done down at the beach,   but the surf was pretty bad The pier we were going to use was underwater" "So we had to redo it, bring it up to this bluff" "It was very windy" "It was early on, and Matthew was uncomfortable talking to the camera" "He would see his reflection, it was like working in a mirror,   which was distracting It was difficult to do" "We were both feeling our way through this technique" "I discovered that when he looked at the camera, he couldn't look away" "When looks away, he breaks the illusion" "To make and break the illusion was really distracting" "Here he had to stare up into the sky, which is hard I didn't want him to blink" "She's very tender with him here I think he's enjoying her attention" "But my discomfort with this scene, and Matthew's, I think worked ultimately" "This actually happened to a friend of mine" "The story's about a guy I know" "You can see him wincing a bit there, because he's looking right into the sun" "This is Ferris's therapy,   which is to help Cameron, but to do it somewhere where he can also relax" "We never identified where this was or whose house this was" "I always presumed it was just someone else's house" "It certainly wasn't Matthew's house or Cameron's house" "They just stopped and used someone's jacuzzi" "By looking up here he indicates that he's doing this deliberately" "This is an example of them having worked together a lot They play it well" "Cameron, wake up!" "Hey, wake up!" "Oh, shit!" "Cameron!" "Come on, wake up!" " What is that?" " Ferris Bueller, you're my hero" "He is genuinely angry here He really does not like being one-upped" "Ferris is not really a nice guy" "He's an interesting guy He's not necessarily virtuous" "This was maybe the best day I had making this picture" "I really enjoyed shooting this scene" "I worked with Charlie's brother on "Breakfast Club"" "It was very similar to working with Emilio" "He was very good in this scene Very subtle, very flat He looked great" "And it's Jeanie with someone that she would never look at otherwise" "She's getting advice from him, and everything he says to her is right" "We made him up to look slightly sickly, not a lot of colour in his face" "There's a wonderful vocal quality in this" "They really worked together well" "There was no rehearsal on them He was just hired for the day,   so they didn't have much time to work on this" "They might have worked together before There was a nice chemistry" "Part of Ferris's character" "He dealt with everybody equally, so he can be as close with this guy   as he can with Cameron His friends were from everywhere   in that high school social strata" "Spend more time dealing with yourself, and less worrying about your brother" "It's painful to get advice from someone who you think is below you" "She's really very rude to him, and it doesn't bother him at all" "This doesn't work It would be a wonderful thing if it did" "It would've saved a lot of my friends, when I was young" "But running the car in reverse doesn't work" "By the time we were shooting this sequence, it was around October,   so every day, before shooting, we had to paint all these leaves green,   and be very careful we didn't knock them off" "This is a nice moment" "This says a lot about high-school friendship" "It's so painful when he says, "What are we going to do next year?"" "These three have a really close relationship" "It appears as though there's a certain maturity to these three relationships" "Cameron mentions that they've known each other since fifth grade" "So I'm sure that she knew,   when she started dating Ferris,   that she was going to get Cameron, too" "That's a very nice moment from Alan,   where he has to admit, in expression, that he watched her undress" "We got this house It was actually a place where a guy kept his cars" "It was built over a ravine in Illinois" "We feared that breaking one of the window panes, as we'd have to,   would affect the structural integrity of the building, breaking all the windows" "And these windows had aged, so a new piece of glass would be obvious" "So we had to remove all of the glass and replace it with new glass,   so that, when we were done, we could put back the original glass, not break it" "So it was complicated negotiations, but it was important" "It's very unusual to find a steel and glass Miesian building   in the woods, over a ravine It was an absolutely perfect location" "Ned knew the guy who owned the house, because he collected Ferraris" "So they had something in common, and we didn't have any problems" "Here's Cameron realising that he has to stand for something,   that he can't continue to be pushed around" "That was quite a good dramatic moment" "He's quite a volatile character He's got a lot of anger and frustration" "He doesn't speak his mind, then whips himself for not doing what he wants to" "It builds up a lot of aggression in him" "The car has really come to symbolise his alienation from his father" "He sees his father's the care he takes with this car not with his son" "That decision to kick the car is life-changing for him" "You see not only how frustrated and angry he is,   but how strong he is, in a way He knows now he's gone too far" "This will define his relationship with his father for the rest of his life" "He's lost his temper We saw him lose his temper earlier, with his own car" "Now he's vented all his anger on this extremely valuable car" "Now he feels guilty He realises what he's done and how much it will hurt" "But he's still willing to take it" "He's not backing off He's taken a stand" "This is the only thing that Ferris hasn't anticipated" "He probably thought that Cameron would get caught taking the car,   and that he'd deal with it, as he should He'd have to confront it" "But I don't think he realised he would go this far" "And now he's made it much worse" "We hoped the car would clear the building" "We feared the impact would slow the car, that it would fall out,   but it actually shot out of the building   and flew over the mark that we had hoped for" "Fortunately it hit a fence, which kept it from going over to another property" "The town made us protect the ravine,   so every little seedling had to be protected" "We put down burlap, cut holes, and put the seedlings and trees through it,   so that we could remove all the glass We didn't leave a single piece of glass" "The ravine was left exactly as we had found it" "It's kind of a scary shot, dollying up to this hole" "Again, this was all composed for wide-screen" "We also didn't know what a replica car was going to do when it hit We didn't know if it was going to split" "We used a metal body, so it would bend rather than shatter, like fibreglass" "You can see in that window how advanced autumn was" "Those leaves have fully turned colour, at the top they're gone" "This was shot later We didn't need to paint the ravine This was all painted" "Cameron, it's my fault I'll take the heat for it We'll wait for your father   and I'll tell him I did it He hates me anyway" "This is the first time we see Ferris frightened This is beyond his control" "Now he's morally obligated to solve the situation he set up" "The change in Cameron's character comes when he rejects that" "When the car flew out, he was very frightened Now he finds his strength" "I think they have their friendship He's accomplished the day" "If he didn't know exactly what the day was going to mean,   he put in motion circumstances that have led to this" "He knew it involved Cameron Since it was near graduation,   their relationship would change, and he had something to fix in Cameron" "He didn't know the specifics, but set up circumstances so he could deal with it" "It was nice to leave Jeanie furious with this guy, ready to punch him,   and then come back and see that, in that time, she's fallen for him" "When it played in the theatres, I was surprised people got that" "When they first kissed You saw it in the background there" "She gives a nice look to Charlie Sheen" "A nice, motherly look" "A great look of anger and disgust" "She's embarrassed She played hard, now her mother treats her like a child" "This is the first time you see any innocence from her at all" "There's a softness in her, which really came from somebody listening to her" "It's a key thing Her problem is that she's uncomfortable with herself" "She isn't happy with herself or her name,   so she uses a pseudonym" "It's a nice thing in the score The voices in the background   begin singing "Shauna, Jeanie", which I thought was a nice touch" "I like the maturity of their relationship They seem like a married couple" "Their romance is something deeper" "It's not really teenager" "It doesn't have the urgency of early teenage romances" "They're very comfortable with each other" "I think she enjoyed this scene" "I don't know about him" "Now this is just the chase" "We shot this all over the place This took forever" "We were chasing the weather" "Some of it was done in California, some in various suburbs of Chicago" "I had three sisters growing up I know all about mother-daughter arguments" "This is extremely and deliberately contrived,   that they should meet eye-to-eye She's in the car, he's on foot" "These are the backyards I used these houses in "She's Having a Baby"" ""16 Candles" and "Uncle Buck" were basically shot in this neighbourhood" "They're beautiful houses" "This oblivious father" "They should be facing the other way, but we were running out of light" "Like I said, it was a very contrived scene" "This song I didn't want to do a score It was a long sequence,   and I didn't have any ideas, so I was looking for songs that could play" "There you can see a palm tree, which drove me nuts" "A palm frond that was cut off so it didn't show in the movie,   then they put it in a trash bin and set it in the shot" "I found a song by The English Beat It was a twelve-inch dance remix" "I'd been a big ska fan in the 70's and early 80's" "I found this song It was the right length and the right feel" "We just licensed it and used it here" "I needed something that was going to drive this scene" "It wasn't a high-speed chase, no stunts, so I needed something with drive to it" "This was a really contrived moment They both look right at each other" "So it was vital that he, up to now, played an oblivious suburban dad" "This is a nice scene, he actually ran through this house" "A lot of this we made up as we went along I knew I needed a chase" "In the script, I probably just said that he runs home" "We added these bits as we went along This is in Long Beach" "I did this under an overcranked shot,   so that I could really time things precisely" "If I had him hanging in the air, it bought me a little time A cheap trick" "I kind of liked that he's gone so mad, he's hiding in the bushes, waiting for him to come home" "How would you feel about another year of high school   under my close, personal supervision?" "Thank God you're all right We've been worried sick about you" "And the sister comes to rescue him, which is the idea that you can say what you want about your brother, but no one else can" "She's not going to let Rooney walk off with her brother" "And she's learned a few things from Charlie Sheen" "That was a nice camera-take This is a great moment That little cough" "Jeanie's learned something about" "She probably will not go to school after this, several times" "She's certainly got the genes" "And he's back to the dog again" "The idea here was to do a very heavy score,   as if it were the end of some war movie   and the bridge is about to blow up, and the train is coming" "All he's doing is getting in bed What happens if he gets caught?" "Nothing" "We thought it was funny to play it so hard" "All these little parts had to match up" "He's got to turn the music off The baseball that he catches, the foul ball" "I got that nice picture of Bryan Ferry behind him" "It worked very nicely for him, the running and sweating" "He appears to have a fever, so he may not go to school tomorrow, either" "Now he's slipping back into being the little boy" "There's a nice little thing he does here, with the "blankie"" " How'd you get to be so sweet?" " Years of practice" "The blankie" "I mean, he's six there, and it's just what they want" "He bites his finger here" "Matthew's very good at this" "This might have been the last day, or very close to it" "When this played in the theatres" "This was the point where people That beautiful smile" "Just as the fade began, people started to stand up" "And then this came on, and they thought it was just a title sequence" "Some would continue out, some would stand" "Then they realised it wasn't over yet" "This sequence had actually come in a little earlier" "I thought it would be interesting   to really not end the picture where you thought it would" "And there's nothing worse for a school administrator   than to have to ride the bus with the kids,   and suffer the humiliations that they have to suffer themselves" "And what could be stranger for a kid on the late bus   than to look up and see the dean of students,   regardless of the condition he's in here, get on your bus?" "It was a wonderful moment of" "They had this thing between them" "They both were startled that this was happening" "That the teacher was on the bus, humiliated to have to ride with them" "I never rode a bus in high school I was too terrified" "I went four years without ever getting in a bus Even field trips" "These were all real kids" "We shot the interiors and it started to rain,   so we finished two months later in Burbank" "We had this girl's glasses made for her" "They were so thick They distorted her vision so badly   that I think she got sick She was nauseous all the time" "They weighed a lot, so she had to hold her head so they wouldn't slide down" "I told her that she had a cold I wanted her to offer him her gummi bears,   having just rubbed her nose" "She's struggling to keep those glasses from sliding down her nose" "I don't think he even knows what a gummi bear is" "You really see here, he hates kids He just hates them" "And now he's right in the belly of the thing He's right inside of it" "It was nice that the bus wasn't in good shape It shook as it pulled away" "Now the people that were heading for the door stopped and turned back" "Also, people were coming in from the lobby,   when they heard that the movie wasn't over" "The studio also had no idea what this footage was in dailies" "They checked the script and had no idea what was going on" "I thought it was important that Ferris get everybody at the end of the movie" "He's made fools of all of us"