"BEN AFFLECK:" "Okay, hi, I'm Ben Affleck." "I directed and co-wrote the movie and I'm here with..." "AARON STOCKARD:" "Aaron Stockard, and I co-wrote the movie with Ben." "BEN:" "And this is Gone Baby Gone, which you know, since you bought the DVD." "And these pieces of footage are some kind of documentary-type sort of footage that we picked up by just going around Dorchester and trying to..." "You know, John Toll picked up that shot." "The smoke going up is my favorite one in the neighborhood." "PATRICK:" "...that makes you who you are." "Your city." "Your neighborhood." "Your family." "People here take pride in these things." "Like it was something they'd accomplished." "The bodies around their souls." "BEN:" "I just kind of set this tone, as this very real movie set in this real place." "I wanted to use a lot of children." "Obviously, children feature pretty prominently in the movie." "And also just demonstrate that this was actually..." "Dorchester is Boston's largest and most diverse neighborhood..." "To kind of counter a lot of stereotypes that people might have going into the movie, about what kind of place it was." "And it just kind of grounds the audience and the setting." "And then introduce that Casey is..." "The character is a part of this neighborhood." "STOCKARD:" "Yeah." "I think I remember you had..." "You had kind of a version of this cut very early on with the music, and I remember you showing it to the crew kind of halfway through shooting and it really kind of energized them and they really kind of saw, I think, what you were doing." "BEN:" "Yeah." "It was a really..." "Really critical." "I also gave it to the actors and everybody was kind of..." "It was a way of saying, like," ""This is the level of reality I want this movie to be, "" "not elevated in any way, not imposing any kind of color palette, or a look or anything, any artifice on top of it." "And I wanted to kind of center everybody around this..." "Like you said, it was kind of a montage or a slightly longer version of this..." "I love this girl with her little grills in her mouth." "Saying, "Let's all be in this same movie together. "" "So it had that bonus to it, worked out good." "You know, to get Annette in high school, you have... (PEOPLE CHATTERING)" "I heard they had an opening." "Yeah, me, too." "BEN:" "I kind of segued into, you know, this stuff, which we created, obviously, having people around the missing girl." "But what we did was just..." "We would never say "Action" or "Rolling. "" "So we would only shoot when we..." "People thought we weren't rolling, to kind of get the effect of people just sort of..." "The extras standing around being bored." "...you just let her go." "Now, we won't charge you..." "BEN:" "I always liked that line because Amy Madigan behaving as if she had the ability to speak for the police and say that they wouldn't charge the person." "HELENE ON TV:" "She never caused no trouble..." "You fucking cops." "...she never got in any fights, she's a sweetheart." "STOCKARD:" "Is that our first curse?" "(BEN CHUCKLING)" "BEN:" "First." "There's something like 200-and-some swear words." "I mean, are the kidnappers coming back?" "JACK ON TV:" "Amanda McCready was taken from her home between 8:00 and 8:30 Wednesday night." "BEN:" "This was actually a re-shoot and we had this..." "Would you say we had the most trouble trying to get the movie to start because this was the fourth book in a series and we had a..." "You know, in the novel, obviously, the book really starts off with you understanding a lot about the characters and the world because you've read the other books." "But this, we had a tough time with this." "This is our hero." "Local." "Jill Quigg." "STOCKARD:" "Who has become a star in Boston, by the way." "BEN:" "She's the paradigm of authenticity, and I just think she's brilliant." "That was never even written or anything." "She was just so great." "That was the day she wrapped and I thought she was so magnificent and wonderful and spectacular and everyone had fallen in love with her that I pulled her aside and just grabbed a camera and just said "We're gonna shoot some news footage of you, "" "and started saying lines to her." "Those lines about, you know, having a rally and a vigil." "I think she misheard me say, "vigil", so she said "vigual" back." "Which is why we got that kind of lucky accident." "So, yeah, that worked out well." "We had a tough time at the beginning because we were, writing-wise, trying to figure out how to manufacture the exposition of the first few books." "STOCKARD:" "Right." "That was one of the challenges that we faced, was trying to..." "Kind of give these characters an arc within this story that I think" "Dennis Lehane, you know, establishes over the course of five books." "Good night." "And..." "You know, one of the things we did was make them 30, as opposed to 40." "But that presented its own challenges." "It's 7:00!" "." "Seven in the fucking morning!" "What?" "BEN:" "This scene is kind of where the book basically..." "This is like page four of the book or page three of the book, is them showing up." "So we had to fool around with telling the audience, you know, a bunch of other backstory about them and who they are, and what the neighborhood's like, what their relationship is to each other and what they do for a living" "before Lionel and Bea show up and hire them." "That's the real couple that the Hart to Hart TV series was based on, that little photograph." "STOCKARD:" "Right." "It's one of those things that shows up that I want to stop everybody who's watching it and explain that to him because it's such a good little detail that nobody, I think, understands." "BEN:" "We just did it." "I always thought it would take the sting off of the idea that..." "I was always nervous that they had a little bit of, you know..." "I never wanted them to be Frick and Frack, you know." "I always wanted to have this, like, distinction between the two of them." "The idea, if they were kind of self-aware enough to think it was funny that might, you know..." "Of course, if everyone missed it, then really, it was totally meaningless." "Hello." "I'm Bea McCready." "This is my husband, Lionel." "How do you do?" "They wanna hire us to augment the investigation." "You should talk to Precision Investigators." "Who?" "I..." "I don't know, I meant..." "Well, Iet's hear them out, Ange." "Well, aren't you missing persons detectives?" "Yeah, that's what your ad says in the paper." "Yeah, we are." "We are missing persons detectives." "I'm sorry, she..." "I think that what Angie means to say is, just for the sake of disclosure, up to this point, our experience has been primarily, you know, finding missing persons who've gone missing that they..." "You know, they just stop payments on their Jet Ski and they went to New Hampshire..." "BEN:" "I was kind of trying to establish them, you know." "Again, strike this balance of how inexperienced they were, that they are missing persons but their notion of missing persons is to..." "You know, find people and..." "The idea of "missing" as just chasing after people was tricky." "And trying to get that across to the audience in an expedient way was" "something that we really kind of struggled with." "STOCKARD:" "Right." "And we initially had, like, Casey following somebody who was essentially a dead-beat dad or something like that." "BEN:" "But we cut out a whole..." "A three-minute, four-minute scene at the beginning of the movie, exactly." "Look, she don't show it, but she's hurting right now." "BEN:" "That was..." "We hope that basically..." "Which I think is right, you know." "You kind of got it, just from him saying," ""This is the kind of thing we usually do. "" "It's kind of the opposite of the traditional, "Show, don't tell. "" "If the showing takes five minutes, and the telling is 1 5 seconds..." "Oh, you'II find us in that brown three-decker by the park." "You know where it is." "Be hard to miss today." "MAN:...so far police have been looking for the four-year-old girl..." "BEN:" "This shot is based on something that I actually saw, a news reporter wearing shorts." "It never quite worked." "I didn't quite get the shot right." "Because I think, for one thing, the news reporter that I saw had really heavy pancake make-up on." "On the real day that we shot it, they forgot to call in the guy, so I had to shave a different extra and get him over there and he doesn't have that kind of..." "You know, kind of that Joe Handsome, sort of, like..." "News Chopper Nine look to him." "So he looks a little bit more serious." "So, unfortunately, it doesn't quite have that absurdity..." "Level of absurdity to it and just seems a little weird, but, it's okay." "It's just one of many, many disappointments." "I don't wanna find a Iittle kid after they've been abused for three days." "BEN:" "This scene we shot, we had to go back and shoot an extra little bit of this, we had to come back, this was a re-shoot, and Michelle had gone off and done the Farrelly brothers movie" "and she had cut her bangs and so we had to put a little net in, to match her bangs and you could see the net." "So we had to do special effects there and paint in on her bangs." "And, so, that was a special effects shot." "Believe it or not." "Hi." "please, come on in." "LIONEL:" "Helene." "This is Patrick Kenzie, Angela Gennaro." "Hi." "I remember you from high school." "I see you're still a Iittle conceited, huh?" "LIONEL:" "Would you excuse us, Dottie?" "Dottie's my best friend, Lionel." "She could be in my house if she wants." "Helene, we don't wanna get in your hair." "BEN:" "Lionel with that mustache, you know, he had just come off of Deadwood and so he needed to kind of keep that mustache, but we cheated it and cut down a little bit of it and turned it into..." "One of those kind of like..." "It's a certain subset of Massachusetts, sort of Rhode Island kind of biker guy," "like a friend of my dad's when I was a kid had a mustache like that, and had a motorcycle and there is that kind of subset-Massachusetts, like, kind of..." "You could say, like, biker." "I thought it was kind of cool." "Don't you fucking yell at her, Lionel." "You ain't her father!" "Fuck you, Lionel." "Go fuck yourself." "Cocksucker." "Fuck you." "Get the fuck outta here." "I'm sorry." "I'm sorry." "Maybe we should go." "I understand." "I'm sorry." "It's all right." "Maybe we should go?" "Look." "Can we all just have a few words in the hallway, please?" "Excuse us, Helene." "BEN:" "It has this Jerry Springer on, and we were scouting locations..." "I'm worried about it being kind of a cliché, but..." "Literally, one in every two houses that I went into had Springer on while we were scouting during the afternoon, so I thought," ""You know, I'm gonna err on the side of verisimilitude." ""If it's got Springer on, you know, play it for truth. "" "This is the first real music cue in the movie that comes in here." "And it's the beginning of this theme that comes back throughout and it's really subtle." "It's Harry Gregson-Williams' theme and I think it's really nice." "Amy does a really beautiful job here." "She kind of knew this was where she was gonna come in and sort of be the first emotional representation of Amanda as a missing human being and..." "She came in and did this like, first or second take." "It was great." "What about Helene?" "Her friends?" "People she hangs out with?" "STOCKARD:" "It's just another one of those moments, I think, that we labored over in terms of like, what is the catch that kind of convinces these two to take the case and..." "And then one of those things that just comes down to this really simple idea of, like, the girl and Amy, kind of playing, or Bea playing on the heartstrings of her there." "I remember kind of running around those scenes," "like, "What's the thing that's gonna" ""get them kind of charged up to do this?"" "And it was just that, you know." "Or it can be just that." "BEN:" "Yeah." "Congratulations." "Do you mind if we see her room?" "STOCKARD: "The plug in the jug. " Had you heard that before?" "That's a great line." "BEN:" "That's an AA, Boston AA, you know, 50-year-old AA slogan." "And then seeding Lionel's sobriety early on and making him a little bit prickly." "I thought it was really good." "STOCKARD:" "Give a shout-out to production design here." "BEN: (CHUCKLES) Yeah." "This is great." "STOCKARD:" "Remember, walking onto the sets that they built in Medford for this." "BEN:" "And it was also hard, because I didn't want to make it too horrible but I still wanted it to be kind of legitimate and honest, and there are many, many apartments that I went into as we were doing this that looked..." "This was pretty close." "Of course, Morgan's introduction." "Having Casey say that line, "Did they kidnap the furniture too?"" "I always found that really funny and also," "I like that it was kind of a bold line to have your protagonist say when he walks into the bedroom of a missing girl, you know." "I hoped that I would kind of set a tone for what kind of guy our protagonist was gonna be, that he was definitely gonna break some movie convention rules about, like, "You can't have your lead say that. "" "...with the neighborhood aspect of this investigation, the people, you know." "How old are you?" "BEN:" "Here we kind of take on, full front, this idea of Casey as, you know, he doesn't look old enough to be playing this role and making this, you know, making this guy younger and making this role younger," "and turn it into something that I think is a real asset, which is putting him at odds with all of the police officers and, in fact, using it to create more conflict and more tension and more drama." "In fact, you know, it helps us show him as stronger and more resilient and kind of tougher." "STOCKARD:" "Right." "Well, he's been hired by a woman who's the victim of a crime, and by law he's entitled as her representative to be cooperated with by the Boston Police Department." "So he expects to be." "And he will be." "He and his better half." "BEN:" "I kind of regretted that line because it implies that they're married, you know, and I always hoped that..." "It's supposed to be Morgan kind of, making fun of them..." "Doyle making fun of them a little bit." "And instead, a lot of people, I think, took it to mean that you know, they actually are married, which I think makes them..." "Says something really different." "I like his, kind of, reverting to that..." ""I've been contentious with you and now I'm going to revert to," ""'Hey, we're all in the same team." "I just want it done"' thing." "STOCKARD:" "Right." "BEN:" "Now, these guys were all guys that I found, for the most part..." "He's from a boxing club." "This guy..." "Was the guy..." "Actually, he was found in this bar that we shot and drinking when we got there to shoot, so..." "I just said, "Why don't you just stay there shooting. "" "That was me running by, behind him, by the way." "I accidentally ran by while they were photographing him, I just..." "STOCKARD:" "That's your little Alfred Hitchcock." "BEN:" "It wasn't..." "Actually, I just..." "I was running by and they were shooting him and then I didn't even realize it was..." "I used the shot..." "It was in the cut, and later on I was like," ""Who..." "What is?" "Who is running by there?"" "And eventually I realized it was me but I liked the shot." "And I said, "No, you know what, let's just leave it in." ""I really like it like that and you'll never be able to tell it's me. "" "STOCKARD:" "That's the first time I heard that." "BEN:" "There, there, right there." "But all these guys are guys that I found from location scouting and they'd be in these bars..." "Jay Giannone, who I believe worked with Leonardo DiCaprio on his" "Boston accent for The Departed." "STOCKARD:" "I think he really nails this scene too, actually." "I think he's great." "BEN:" "So if Jay's accent sounds like Leonardo's in The Departed, that's..." "Really?" "Oh, yeah." "Hot tempers, Iot of drugs, trust me." "So how often Helene come down here?" "Five nights a week." "Come on, guys, please." "She's a fucking coke ho, okay?" "BEN:" "Jay was great." "He worked really hard and he was terrific." "He really invested himself in this thing." "He was willing to do everything, I love that." "I was like, "Jay!" In the middle of the scene, he's, like, looking off to the side." "I really think he got distracted or something." "But it worked out terrific." "BEN:" "Oh, yeah." "Are you sure it was the same night?" "Fucking positive..." "BEN:" "We really didn't do much to this bar." "It's got a terrific feel." "It's very much..." "It's called Cataloni's." "It's in Dorchester." "It's great." "It's got all these real signs on it." "On the inside if you go in, it says," ""Anyone caught selling drugs in here will be banned for life. "" "I don't think they're up there for show." "What do you mean?" "These are my friends." "I know them for years." "What's the problem, guy?" "You said you weren't a cop." "Right, "guy"?" "Yeah, I'm not a cop." "Yeah, then why don't you fuck off?" "Why don't you mind your business?" "He's gonna come in here and be a smartass?" "You're awfully worried about people's asses there, Dave." "Yeah, you probably got a fucking ass like a Skippy jar." "BEN:" "That Skippy jar line was an improvisation, courtesy of Big Dave." "Listen, don't come in here running your mouth, thinking you're better than me." "STOCKARD:" "It's an effective image." "BEN: (LAUGHS) Yeah, it really is." "It is one of the more foul things..." "So is that, "I'm not the fucking one... "" "These guys had a very intuitive understanding of the dynamic between, like, local tough guys and the guy who came in the bar and thought he was better than other guys." "So they kind of were able to really run with that feeling in their..." "There were times when we were shooting the scene where it felt very kind of tense, you know." "Even kind of going over and saying," ""All right, let's try it this way or that way. "" "I kind of got the sense that they were like," ""You telling me what to do?"" "It was like just, "Only in a friendly way am I telling you what to do. "" "Open that door, rummy." "Open the door, Mike." "Now." "STOCKARD:" "And I think in the book, if I remember correctly," "Lenny is..." "It's actually..." "Skinny Ray who locks the door..." "BEN:" "Mmm-hmm." "...and Lenny here is Skinny Ray's dad." "And that's why they're kind of trying to be closed-mouthed about, like, not talking to anybody and he's trying to protect his son knowing that his son played some role, but it kind of took on this other thing" "as this first challenge for Casey, in a way." "And I think it's made..." "The scene is made with this right here." "Casey like, "What did I just do?"" " That little smile..." "Yeah, exactly." "BEN:" "And he had so much adrenaline." "That's real." "They were doing helicopter shots and they just went over where they were really arresting somebody there." "They just happened to fly by." "This is Dudley Square." "I sort of, again, put them in Dudley and had them walk by..." "As much as I could, try and insert them into the environment." "The idea of that, you know," "Poole and Bressant would have them come meet them at a diner where they kind of wouldn't necessarily have been before." "Oh, sorry." "Sergeant Detective Remy Bressant." "PATRICK:" "How you doing?" "Should we..." "Sit down?" "Something wrong?" "No!" "I just..." "I think Nick was expecting an older couple, maybe." "Life's full of surprises." "BEN:" "I like this shot a lot." "That's Matt Maher who plays Corwin Earle, who went to high school with Aaron and I and Casey and Matt Damon" "and all the rest of us at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School." "STOCKARD:" "Who I think is quite worried about being typecast after this part." "We don't know where they are, but we think Corwin's with them." "STOCKARD:" "People running away from him when they see him in the street." "BEN:" "This was kind of as a stylistic break to seeing them in life and their..." "And their, you know, having their mug shots taken." "Some people really reacted, you know, really were opposed to that in the rough." "I showed the film..." "I always..." "I sort of took it for granted and there are a few people who thought it was really distracting." "I was kind of surprised by that." "No, we got more." "BEN:" "We kind of slip in Lionel and Bea with airtight alibis." "...and we got a convicted finger-blaster..." "BEN:" "Just to make sure that people..." "To, like, subtly establish, you know, throw off the sort of scent against Lionel and Bea." "I don't know if that even landed enough to work there." "But it was all of a sudden, we shot the scene concerned that it was gonna be so obvious that..." "That they might be involved." "STOCKARD:" "I remember that being a concern of ours, and I think it'll probably come up as we go along through this, too, is that people are gonna figure it out before we want them to." "And I don't think they are, for the most part." "BEN:" "It's such a challenge really, because the book was so incredibly elaborate and complicated and kind of convoluted in some places, and if we had just adapted it straight, we'd have a seven-hour movie, so you have to simplify." "But if you over-simplify, obviously, it's too obvious." "And if you leave it too labyrinthine, then, you know, you can't follow it." "So a lot of it was just a balancing act in terms of plot." "And then, you know, you still..." "You don't wanna lose that, you know, that nuance and a lot of that." "This type of stuff here, we could have ended the scene right there." "STOCKARD:" "Right." "BEN:" "But they really wanted to keep this." "Well, it all depends on how you look at it." "BEN:" "This part of the scene is about relativity, you know, the nature of..." "You know, as he says." "It just depends on how you look at things and perspective and part of it's about these guys kind of already being at odds with each other." "How you been?" "You been good?" "Yeah." "Yeah?" "What's up, Angie?" "How you doing, baby?" "BEN:" "You know, you can cut that stuff." "But then you just have this kind of just straight procedural narrative." "What the fuck makes you think I know people like this?" "Bub, I know you don't pay your rent doing people's taxes." "STOCKARD:" "Another outstanding casting job by you, Ben, I think." "BEN:" "I can hardly take credit..." "He walked in..." "He was great." "Carolyn Pickman, CP Casting, brought Slaine in, and he was, I thought pretty obviously terrific." "I thought Ray was your boy." "Work for me?" "BEN:" "One of the things that I really liked about his casting is that he did something, that he's great by himself and really convincing and he doesn't seem like a fake tough or a hood and he feels very real, and part of it is because" "he's not completely muscle-bound but you do have a sense that he's..." "You know, he could easily be a real drug dealer because he seems like a real guy." "And you put him next to Casey, he also adds a certain legitimacy to Casey, because Casey hangs out with this guy." "You think, "Oh, he really does know these kinds of people. "" ""Cheese" Jean Baptiste?" "BEN:" "So that when Casey confronts Cheese, you know that he's already kind of lived, you know, travels in this circuit." "So he's kind of a bonus to Casey's performance, I think." "That's a line right out of the book and it's a spectacular line." "Dennis just..." "It was different when the character was white, but it's just a great line." "LIONEL:" "Helene, who is he?" "He's just a guy, Lionel." "Thank you." "BEN:" "These scenes are as close to verbatim from the book as any, you know, because they're just all so great." "Why don't you go suck a nigger's dick, Bea?" "You listen to me!" "You don't disrespect my wife, and you don't make racial remarks in my kitchen." "BEN:" "That line was so, as in the book..." "And it's so hardcore that I really, I was concerned about it." "But I just thought, you know, "It's really consistent" ""with who this character is, and I think it should be included. "" "Because I thought it was real." "It struck me as very real to..." "To who she was and to people who I knew and that, you know, in that world..." "Also, I thought it even worked even better when in the longer version of this movie, you knew that she had had..." "She had slept with and been with Cheese..." "You know, had slept with him." "You think I'm fucking around, here?" "You think I'm playing games, here?" "'Course it matters." "LIONEL:" "Better answer his question, Helene." "BEN:" "I love that Amy plays this scene in a kind of flip way like..." "You know, her attitude is like "Once or twice." ""Don't make a big deal out of it. "" "As if these people are being, you know, hysterical and overreacting in discovering that she's..." "Piece of work." "It may have contributed in some way to the disappearance of her daughter, by associating with a drug dealer." "STOCKARD:" "Right." "It just seems like the way that she reacts to any kind of conflict in her life is just, she reverts back to, like, you know, this defensiveness." "BEN:" "Kind of attacking the people who were attacking her." "STOCKARD:" "Exactly." "So, I still know some of those guys real well." "BEN:" "This transition from one room to the other was a source of a lot of discussion when we were shooting it." "A lot of the actors and everybody going, "Why are we moving rooms?"" "A lot of talk about how it would seem awkward or feel awkward." "And ultimately, I feel like it didn't, but it was a lot of..." "It was a lot of work." "I think Ashton's great here." "Very soft, seductive." "We care about your child." "So come on." "STOCKARD:" "I read a lot of comments about people very pleased that you brought" "Taggart back to the big screen for the first time that folks have seen in a while." "BEN:" "I think of him as Marvin Dorfler." "Marvin Dorfler, of course." "How much?" "How much?" "BEN:" "Ed's integrity and intensity of performance in this movie is just unwavering and spectacular for me." "There's just not one single frame in this movie that I do not think Ed is excellent." "How'd you do it?" "Me and Ray had to do this run up Nashua, right?" "BEN:" "See now she's..." "This transition is so great because as finally she gets to be talking about..." "As soon as she has to get caught and admit something, she immediately will start to blame it" "on somebody else." "STOCKARD: "It's all fucking Ray. "" "BEN:" "She'll..." "STOCKARD:" "This whole thing." "BEN:" "This was..." "Wouldn't you say we had this written..." "It was kind of from the book, adapted, basically, except what we had to change to fit the rest of what we had changed." "But, and it stayed almost exactly as it was and never changed, these two or three scenes." "And Amy's performance was so great, it was, kind of, this stuff that was really always the anchor of the movie." "We always knew that she was the best character in a lot of ways and..." "These scenes were gonna be the bulwark of the movie, certainly from the investigative sense." "And definitely from that kind of, like, her as the character that everyone has some kind of relationship, a relation to." "Here we have, with Bea picking up the socks," "I wanted to have some sort of subtextual you know, not even really subtextual, some undercurrent of her relationship to the girl and you know, Bea 's, really, the only one whose motives are pure in the whole movie." "She's the only reason the girl is..." "The only reason that any of this happens and the only reason that the girl gets brought back." "Amanda." "All the helicopter shots, all the car shots, all the traveling shots are totally in the right neighborhoods and completely accurate." "STOCKARD:" "Talking about, this was from the opening sequence that we did that you ended up cutting and found a way to get those kids on the bike." "BEN:" "Yeah." "I really wanted that." "I love the moment." "I love those kids saying..." "The idea that you are living in a world where you see this kid who'd, like..." "I felt like it was real again." "And I also liked the idea of this kid is on his way to going from innocence to, maybe, you know, where Helene is and that it's a complicated world." "These kids out on the street says something about the place they're in." "You know, and that he's existing somewhere along that gamut." "Oh, who's a faggot now?" "You're dating a faggot." "(LAUGHING)" "BEN:" "Here, I like this because Casey, kind of, goes along..." "Patrick kind of goes along with her you know, "He's a faggot now" thing in order to ingratiate himself with her to get more information, you know, because he's smart and because he does know the kind of people who don't talk to the police." "And I always saw this scene as, you know, showing how he, you know, is smart and can get information and does in fact know what he's doing." "And she just finds her..." "Michelle just finds her so objectionable, she just can't bear it." "STOCKARD:" "Right, and it was another spot, where I think, folks were a little objectionable to our hero using that kind of language, right?" "BEN:" "Yeah, there were some people worried." "There were some people who thought, like," ""You know, if you have him, say," ""use the word 'faggot'..." "He's the lead in the movie. "" "But I just thought that, you know, those kinds of rules versus the reality of the characters." "I think you have to let the reality of the characters win out." "And I think..." "I think it was definitely right." "I think it makes him smart and it's not about him, you know, using slurs." "I think it's about him, you know, currying favor with her, so that he can, you know," "like I said, get the information from her." "(EXHALES)" "Looks like somebody had a Iittle talk with Ray before they shot him." "Looks like he held out pretty good." "He didn't have it." "He couldn't tell them where the money was, because he didn't know." "Helene hid it." "(SCOFFS)" "Ray made poor relationship choices." "Guess they didn't believe him." "Poor prick." "HELENE:" "I'm not waiting in a fucking car." "(BREATHES HEAVILY)" "Where's the money, Helene?" "I give a fuck about the money." "BEN:" "This is back by..." "Also in Chelsea by the water." "You hear the sounds of the..." "This isn't sound design, it's just the sound of the water back there." "Although we started shooting this scene in the morning." "It was overcast, you'll see, it gets sunny by the end of the day." "That's, they're referring to Rousseau, and the other cartoon is Barbapapa, where all the Barbapapas are born in the backyard." "Barbapapa 's backyard." "Really?" "Never understood that." "I let you run with that in the film." "BEN:" "I just used it." "STOCKARD:" "I love Barbapapa." "But, no idea why that came." "...is go to Cheese, swap the money for her and walk away." "BEN:" "You did great." "I love the color correction in the DVD that they were able to do, we had a great colorist." "I think it really holds the contrast and the color here, you can see." "You can really get a lot of contrast, but still see a lot of detail." "And take..." "There's different color spaces for, you know, film and video and..." "So you do different corrections but what you are looking at, I really like, and this is definitely the color and contrast that I like for the movie." "It still has that, like, rich kind of, feels like a '70s urban movie to me." "Maybe with a little more color." "She's not still hungry?" "I don't know." "BEN:" "And those, right there, are where they keep all the salt that they use to salt the roads in the winters, was underneath those tarps." "This is going back over the" " Tobin Bridge." " Yeah." "BEN:" "And this is..." "John Toll was operating this as the sun was going down and we didn't have any time." "I said, "John just jump in the car and" ""shoot Amy just going over the bridge." "Just stay on her." "I wanna hold on her. "" "She's so great." "She kind of knew exactly what to do." "He came back and I was like, "Was it good?"" "He was like, "It's great." "She's great, she's great. "" "I was, "Okay, great, great. "" "This was Amy's first day of shooting." "I said, "When you get out, I want you to just" ""think about that it's your fault." ""It's just, it's all your fault." ""By the time you get across the street, understand that. "" "It didn't even take her halfway across the street." "Cross my heart." "It's all right." "We're gonna find her, Helene." "You have to." "You promise?" "Yeah." "I'm gonna try." "I will." "BEN:" "We were supposed to get a little bit further so that those guys with the cameras wouldn't have necessarily have seen them." "But this was by far the best take performance-wise." "STOCKARD:" "Right." "It was always the little thing that I've always seen, like..." "These guys were so busy shooting." "Why aren't they shooting her breakdown?" "BEN:" "It would have been better a little further over, but the performance was by far the best." "These girls fighting over by Roxbury," "I always liked that little shot." "We went around again at night and shot a bunch of stuff around by it." "Roxbury by where Cheese's place was." "That we shot when it was raining." "Of course, the wipers were moving." "It's a mistake." "I mean, it doesn't match." "It started raining very briefly on the drive over there and stopped." "ANGIE :" "AII you're gonna do is scare him." "The more you scare him, the worse it is for her." "(PEOPLE CHATTERING)" "AII right." "Go ahead." "BEN:" "See, now we kind of had to assume that" "Ed and John would have had to make the calculation that, you know, they know that Cheese doesn't know what they're talking about when they go in there." "And so they were planning on going in there and making the arrangement with Cheese themselves to make this, to basically bribe them to go up to the quarry." "And now when Casey and Michelle kind of force their hand and pressure them to go in there, they have to let them go in there knowing that Cheese is gonna say he has no idea what they're talking about." "And they're gonna have to go in there, basically, you know, gonna have to wait and grab Chris Mullen after." "So, you know, it's this whole complicated calculus that we had to do with Ed and John, talking every scene about," ""Okay, here's what the scene's about." ""Now, Ed and John, what are you guys thinking?"" "And Aaron and I had to work out what was happening underneath the scene with the guys who were, you know, stringing them along with the conspiracy." " That was a lot of work, wasn't it?" "STOCKARD:" "Yeah, it sure was." "I think that this is a movie too that, like, is interesting to watch a couple of times." "I'm not just saying that because I want you to buy the DVD and watch it over and over again, but..." "BEN:" "When you watch it a couple of times it's only interesting if you buy the DVD," "a new DVD again." "STOCKARD:" "Exactly." "But just in the sense of, you know, you want, kind of, the turns in the third act and at the end to kind of resonate and be surprising for people, but then there is a lot of stuff that, you know," "we, kind of, had operating because of all these agendas that aren't clear at the beginning of the movie." "BEN:" "Yeah, because everybody is dealing with..." "You know, has this whole as you say, this other agenda that's never really revealed until the very end." "And some of it, we don't do the whole, "I was thinking this then." ""And you were thinking that then. "" "So you have to go back and watch and think," ""So what were they doing at this point?"" "We did actually know and have answers for all those things." " There are no cheats, but..." "STOCKARD:" "Most of them." "BEN: (CHUCKLES) This scene was way longer." "We cut it down." "This was a lot of funny stuff." "Kind of, more sort of slightly" "Pulp Fiction-esque." "But we sort of made it a little bit more grounded." "That's Edi Gathegi." "He's a really good actor and the character wasn't gonna be Haitian." "At first, it was gonna be exactly as written in the book." "I just couldn't find anybody who I really liked to do it." "So I said, "Okay." ""I don't want any constraints, you know, it's race-neutral." ""Anybody can come in and read for the part of Cheese. "" "So we just had everybody in the world come in and read for it." "And Edi came in and said," ""You know, I do this Haitian character." ""I'd like to try that for the part. " He came in and did this, basically what you see, and it was great." "Cast him right away." "There are a lot of Caribbean immigrants, and where I went to school there was a big Haitian ESL program." "So I knew a lot of Haitian kids growing up." "And I recognized all that Creole and stuff." "It was really cool." "It reminded me of that." "I also wanted to make it clear that" "I wasn't characterizing all Haitians as, you know, drug dealers and criminals." "So we put that line in from earlier where Casey says, "I knew. " She says, "You knew Cheese. "" "He said, "I knew his brother Jude." "He was a good guy. "" "Just to sort of qualify that." "'Cause I think it was important." "But his performance was great and" "Edi is a great guy and terrific actor and..." "STOCKARD:" "Right." "There wasn't an instance of us saying, like," ""You know what, we got a much better idea. "" "'Cause in the book he's a 400-pound Haitian." "Or, a 400-pound Scandinavian." "And it's not like we said, "No, he should be a really thin Haitian." " "That's a better idea. "" "It was just a performance thing." "STOCKARD:" "Is it important that he's 400 pounds?" "Not as important as..." "I'm gonna pay guys to go after your weak fucking crew..." "BEN:" "I mean, he had a really great other monologue too." "It just was too long and this scene was like six and a half minutes and the movie had gotten really long." "So we had to kind of trim it down." "And Michelle had more stuff and and this fucking retard right here is gonna be testifying against you..." "STOCKARD:" "I love this speech of Casey's here." "I think you scribbled this down, like, the day of shooting it, as well." "BEN:" "We had to give Casey a little bit more." "I was like, you can see his little neck pulse pumping there." "STOCKARD:" "And that swallow of Casey's." "BEN:" "This is in a place called the Roxbury Men's Club." "Those things on the wall are jigsaw puzzles." "It's actually a lot of senior citizens in this place." "And they all do these jigsaw puzzles." "And then they glue them together and hang them on the wall." "And we, basically, kept it as it was." "And kind of turned it into a, like, whatever you describe it as some kind of a lair..." ""Shitty, pool-hall, crime-syndicate headquarters. "" "STOCKARD:" "And that's such a Casey thing to say, too," ""Crime-syndicate headquarters. "" "(CHUCKLES)" "I thought you said you knew this fucking guy." "BEN:" "They play it really well because they..." "I love how they play it, because they know, of course, they're expecting him to come out and have failed." "So they play it with the subtle expectation that he'll have come out and completely, you know, blown it." "I also insisted that we not do any night-time wet-downs." "I find that really distracting and false, this idea," "like when they wet down the streets, you know." "A lot of time cinematographers like to do that because it gives a kind of sheen on the streets." "It hasn't always just rained, you know." "You know, if Amanda dies because of this," "(SIGHING)" "I won't have to hold it against you." "BEN:" "I love Ed's blue eyes." "They're so..." "They're so..." "Now, see that little wink to John?" "STOCKARD:" "Yeah, there's that thing, you know, I..." "That we didn't really write, that I think he brought to it, which I think, he found it in the book." "Was, like, just that little line that, you know, had Bressant in the book kind of stopping in front of every mirror he sees and kind of peacocking." "And Ed kind of came on to the set with that." "And like, it really added something to it, that... (PHONE RINGING)" "...kind of primping around." "BEN:" "But that wink in that shot." "If you pay attention, is the one thing that's revealed, like, if he really thought Amanda was in any danger," "he would never wink at John." "Right." "BEN:" "That's the one reveal that's clearly, you know, you can say," ""You're gonna hold it against yourself for a long time, "" "and turn around and wink, is a way of saying like, "We got him." ""Basically, we've manipulated him and we've got him now. "" "...to prove that he's got Amanda." "STOCKARD:" "And, like, a wholly appropriate thing for a dude from Boston to do." "BEN:" "You'll see Fanshen Cox opening the door here." "STOCKARD:" "You cut Fanshen..." "I know, she had a scene out there." "BEN:" "She's also a wonderful actress and an old friend of ours." "This is a transcript of a recorded call that came in this morning." "Care to read the highlighted portion?" "aloud?" "BEN:" "That's a little soft, unfortunately, but..." "A little out of focus." "It comes back into focus, but..." "I love that delivery." "The eyes, it was the only time he did the eyes." "PATRICK: "The caller:" "You know who the fuck this is, fool..." "BEN:" "This little kind of subtle acting that Ed and Morgan did." "You know, they had never been in a movie together and this was their..." "These days was their only chance to act with one another." "I think they were kind of..." "Just a few little tiny moments they did right there, I thought was..." "I don't know." "Got me excited, anyway." "...in just that location." "After some discussion, Detective Bressant was kind enough to produce this." "Recognize it?" "The four of you have involved me in an illegal activity without my knowledge or consent, and I don't fucking appreciate it." "You don't have to be a part of it, sir." "The hell I don't." "If I delay this now, after this agreement," "I just further endanger the life of that child." "Does that sound like something you expect me to do?" "No, sir." "I went in there." "I'II accept responsibility." "You'II accept nothing!" "Don't come in here trying to get noble, boy." "Let me see that note." "My God." "REMY:" "He wants to separate us." "The note instructs you guys to be on the east side and wait for Amanda..." "BEN:" "Here I started trying to establish geography for the quarry, kind of early on, because one of the big concerns I had was the audience getting some sense of what was gonna happen up there, what the idea was." "It had to fail or go wrong." "But in order for the audience to understand how it went wrong," "I wanted the audience to understand how it was supposed to go right." "I think probably, I was a little bit too worried about it." "Here we had, you know," "Morgan was gonna deliver this speech about his daughter and" "I thought that we had the opportunity to kind of play off of not just the convention of the police captain who was kind of sanctimonious and who had his..." "You know, this archetype, but also of his kind of image, as this almost saintly guy and these kinds of roles that he plays, you know." "I mean, he's played God." "And so that, using that to sort of our advantage in the hopes that people would expect him to be that guy and not expect him to be the guy that he kind of ends up being." "...and then you question the way I handle it." "No one's questioning you, sir." "I honor my child with this division." "STOCKARD:" "This was just such another concern of ours." "Was not tipping the hand that Morgan was gonna have Amanda at the end." "Or Doyle is not gonna have Amanda at the end." "BEN:" "These shots." "I just love these shots of this quarry." "With all this sort of graffiti and paint on it and the sun going down." "(EXHALES)" "Why'd he bring us all the way up here?" "I don't know." "It's big." "It's dark." "It's easy to get away." "No." "They're gonna kill her." "BEN:" "This is an effects shot." "There is no water in this quarry." "It was all filled in." "So that's all ground." "We had to put that water in there." "It was filled in by the Big Dig, which is this big tunnel that they dug out in Boston and they dumped all the dirt in there." "So, yeah." "This is our big special effects shot." "So was that." "This is where we part ways." "You guys'II be on top of that cliff." "We'II be right across from you." "Give us a call on the radio when you have her." "We will." "Well, good luck." "Let's go." "STOCKARD:" "This was a much more elaborate sequence in the book." "It involved" "Poole pretending to have a heart attack or inducing a heart attack on himself" "to get away with the money..." "BEN:" "And helicopters and snipers..." "This was really where we got into very..." "From here on out." "Really super-simplifying." "How are they gonna get Amanda up here?" "(GUN FIRING)" "NICK ON RADIO:" "Ambush!" "Ambush!" "Hey, Remy!" "Fucking Cheese!" "Where is she?" "(ANGIE GRUNTING)" "NICK ON RADIO:" "There she is." "I can see her." "It ain't the way it is!" "(CLAMORING)" "BEN:" "Some of this stuff is just like, get the operator to hold the camera on a stick, basically and kind of run through the woods." "Some of that perspective stuff." "REMY:...and then all hell broke loose." "ANGIE:" "Where's Amanda?" "Shots were fired from over there." "NICK:" "I don't know!" "Something went in the water!" "What?" "You sure you heard something?" "Yeah, something went in, but I..." "Where did it go?" "There!" "Right there!" "Oh, my God." "Oh, no." "STOCKARD:" "That's not an effects shot." "There was water there." "BEN:" "There was water, yeah." "She really jumped in." "STOCKARD:" "This was a cause of great debate on the set that night, right?" "'Cause Casey felt like he had to..." "If his girl jumps in he's gotta jump in too." "BEN:" "That's right." "Casey did feel as though..." "And then Casey did, eventually, also do the jump." "Which we did not, ultimately, include in the finished version of the movie." "STOCKARD:" "Which was his big thing." "He didn't want to jump in if we weren't gonna use it." "BEN:" "Yeah, we ended up with..." "We filmed Casey jumping." "STOCKARD:" "We realized his fears for him." "BEN:" "Part of the problem with that sequence for us was always trying to find a way to strike that balance of making it seem convincing that" "they had searched enough and she was gone." "But that also, you know, that we hadn't cheated the audience and lied to the audience." "You know, where they felt like..." "Didn't feel kind of betrayed when the actual ending came out, at the end." "STOCKARD:" "Right." "BEN:" "And this is kind of where..." "This is where it's kind of unusual for this movie because we always had this weird structural break." "It was in the book, it was part of the structural fabric of the book and we tried to..." "We fooled around with it in a lot of different ways." "It was just sort of bifurcation and ultimately, we just ended up sort of embracing it." "Rather than a perfect three-act structure, it has this kind of midpoint that we're coming to now." "And we just sort of said, "Okay." "Well, then," ""that's what the structure is." "That's how the story works. "" "Which is, there's this break in the middle." "And where, you know, it seems like Amanda is gone or we can't find her." "We don't know what happened, exactly." "It's kind of vague, but this..." "Looking for her is over now." "And with that ends the procedural aspect of the movie." "In other words, there's no more mystery or crime case or crime story." "Now what happens is it becomes kind of a character story." "And that shift in both, sort of, tone and a little bit in pace and," "in, kind of, richness is unusual, but..." "Ultimately, I think we thought it was kind of interesting." "STOCKARD:" "Yeah." "But it did cause us great anxiety." "(BOTH CHUCKLE)" "BEN:" "It was just on account of, "Well, can you do this?" ""What are the rules?"" "STOCKARD:" ""They say we're not allowed" ""to do this. "" "And as you started shooting this, I was like, "You're really doing it?" ""All right. "" "PATRICK:...he ran into someone who wanted the money more than he did." "WOMAN ON TV:" "Twenty-nine-year-old Chris Mullen was gunned down last night in an apparent robbery." "The police commissioner defended the rising tide of crime..." "BEN:" "And this music, this theme, I really like, that Harry did." "PATRICK:" "Enough time went by and they called off the search." "They issued Helene a death certificate." "BEN:" "I always liked that Amy did this, that she just finally broke and then she realized that her daughter had died and it was like..." "There's a line in the book about, "All the grief and pain" ""finally came rushing out, " or something like that." "That was in the screen direction." "I found it surprising every time, that Bea is just stoic and she's the one just gushing." "You know I Iove you, right?" "Yeah." "I just wanna be alone for a while." "PATRICK:" "I don't know if she blamed me or if she blamed herself." "But when she didn't think I was home, or if she thought I couldn't hear," "she would cry." "I couldn't stop running it over and over and over in my mind, the vague and distant suspicion that we never understood what happened that night, what our role was." "(EXHALES)" "Or maybe it was just that, Iike the hundreds of other children who disappear each year and never return..." "Amanda was even more haunting for never being found." "What they did find was another big story, and I couldn't help but find it strange." "Not two months later and not far away, another child went missing." "...and community watch patrols are being formed." "WOMAN ON TV:" "A bicycle left roadside." "A tire left spinning." "Late-breaking news on that story." "Little Johnny Pietro is also wearing what this reporter believes might be a sign." "Johnny Pietro was wearing the medallion of St. Christopher, patron saint of..." "PATRICK:" "Johnny Pietro and his medallion." "BEN:" "I wanted to re-establish that Patrick also understood that, you know, there was something fishy and unusual about sort of not finding a body and not knowing what they were doing up there." "So if the audience felt like this is..." "This doesn't seem complete, that he was with them." "The audience was with them." "And we weren't trying to fool them." "STOCKARD:" "Exactly." "BEN:" "This is Slaine's..." "This is Bubba 's music here, him rapping on this." "(RAP MUSIC PLAYING ON CAR STEREO)" "That's base camp on your left." "It's one of the trailers, unfortunately." "(STOCKARD CHUCKLING)" "BEN:" "This is Everett." "STOCKARD:" "Well, in..." "You know, this is some great stuff." "So I don't want to, you know, get caught up in too much of it, but this was one of the original ideas" "I had for kind of trying to deal with the kind of odd structure that we had and also the issues of these guys not really having within this story" "much of a backstory, and was taking this..." "BEN:" "And moving it to the beginning." "...and moving it to the beginning which would then push the quarry stuff to be more of a traditional kind of end of second-act break." "And I was pretty convinced for a long time and kept going at you," "I think for three years that, that was the way to do it." "And praise God, you didn't." "I think it really works the way it is, but..." "BEN:" "I think..." "A lot of different ways of going about trying to convince you that that was the way to go." "You never bit." "Guess who?" "Jerome Miller?" "No, it's the coke fairy." "STOCKARD:" "Being that they were kind of involved in this really bad case with a kid that then in turn makes them reluctant to do this other case with Amanda," "once it comes up, was..." "I remember the argument..." "STOCKARD:" "You still wanna re-cut it, maybe?" "Chill!" "Chill!" "STOCKARD:" "But it didn't..." "But I think that..." "And you talked to Dennis about it, about this scene, and what it was used for, you know, then to kind of make it work as this kind of shift towards less of a procedural, more of this kind of character thing," "that this is really needed here for Casey." "Want me to change a roll of quarters for you, too?" "BEN:" "Yeah, that's the thing." "I think there's a reason why this scene is important here is because it informs what happens with the choice he makes at the end." "That's what..." "While having at the beginning would make him less likely to want to take the case, but that's a much less important choice than the choice about what he wants to do at the end." "But I let..." "I mean..." "And there is the traditional, like," ""Okay, here." "Let's see the end of that last case" ""and then start the new case. "" "That..." "I think that works more..." "STOCKARD:" "It just makes it a very different movie and I think it would have made it a better movie." "(BEN LA UGHING)" "STOCKARD:" "No, I'm just kidding." "BEN:" "Mark Margolis, who you've seen in a lot of excellent movies." "Trudi Goodman, who is excellent." "Who's doing a very good job of pretending to be hideous, but who's a lovely woman." "She's a teacher, in fact." "You could probably tell by the way she holds that gun." "You fat busted cunt." "You put a gun on me, you better use it." "Just give us the fucking wizza!" "BEN: "Wizza" is a made up word that I just thought sounded like a bag of drugs, like a slang term in Boston. "I got wizza. "" "There's Matt Maher." "ROBERTA:" "Corwin!" "Go back to your room!" "It's not a party?" "STOCKARD:" "No, it's not a party, Matt." "BEN:" "I think that was a Matt improv, that line." "STOCKARD:" "Want to know what those Robo Dudes are." "BEN:" "Yeah." "But we couldn't find anybody who would allow us to use their actual kid's toys t-shirts, so we had to make a fake one." "STOCKARD:" "Right." "In the book, I think it's a child's Red Sox cap, right?" "BEN:" "He's got a cap and he's got Underoos on, yeah." "Red Sox did not want to have the child molester wearing the hat." "Right." "Yeah." "And neither did Underoos want to have the child molester..." "I think we would have to look a long time before we found someone who thought that was a good advertisement." "On what?" "Cocaine." "Your friend tell you that, too?" "SWAT'II be here in five minutes." "You're not gonna wait for them?" "Did you or did you not tell me you saw Corwin Earle with the medallion of St. Christopher around his fucking wrist?" "I definitely saw Corwin Earle." "We're not waiting." "Stay here." "And don't fuck around, all right?" "Good job." "(GUN FIRING)" "BEN:" "And dropping the sound out here," "I thought, I wanted to have this like low-level ring, to sort of approximate what it might sound like if you went into shock, you know." "And for whatever reason, he had these kind of shakes as he sat down." "That was just so lucky." "(BREATHING HEAVILY)" "BEN:" "And this, we had the..." "Scott Sakamoto, camera operator, kind of following him hand-held." "And the two, Casey and John just did this great kind of" "long improvisation hand-held." "Him just sort of grabbing onto him and moaning and they had this" "little blood make-up rig John Jackson built, and, you know, that bled out of the neck and you know, with this little pump..." "I really like that little bit, the way he did it." "Billy Goldenberg, who's the editor, did an incredible job cutting this whole movie." "It's very unshowy editing, but it just makes the movie very, very..." "Just every little sequence, when I shot it, it just..." "You know, all the stuff you did, it was cut so effectively." "So that it's just much more effective than I ever could have hoped." "Casey does a great job here." "Feeling naturally nervous, intense." "STOCKARD:" "Yeah." "The sequence is really well done." "BEN:" "All the way through, my mantra..." "I felt like I'm not..." "Certainly not one of these guys who's gonna, you know, knows all the tricks, and stuff about doing..." "I've certainly been in some action movies, but not one of these guys who's a master at, you know, the visual genius." "I just thought, like, what I can do is just do..." "It has to all be super real, you know, and make it all just feel real, you know." "That's what I really like about it." "Just being..." "Breathing and scary and awkward and nervous and falling over..." "I don't know." "People, I think, sometimes don't wanna do that 'cause they feel like they might look stupid, you know, but I think that's..." "If you look stupid in a real way, I think that's really tense." "This is probably what would really happen." "Like this, just hearing Casey breathing and letting it go so dark that you just, you know, see his armband, basically." "I mean, I can't imagine anything more terrifying than this." "(DOOR CREAKING)" "It was an accident." "It was an accident." "BEN:" "Here, I wanted to do this as you would remember a trauma." "Almost, not as if it was happening in real time." "I was like..." "It just starts to be disoriented, the way he sees it in..." "In retrospect, in a way." "Flashbacks." "So we would just see only the bare minimum that we had to, to understand what happened and to understand the motivation for why he does what he does." "So as to not whitewash it and to feel the emotional impact of it." "Wait!" "BEN:" "I wanted to hold to that shot just long enough so that you thought he was gonna do the, you know," ""Maybe I'll shoot him." "But oh, no, you're not worth it. "" "Reconsider." "The audience could really feel as though it wasn't..." "He might not..." "It might not happen." "STOCKARD:" "I've heard some people talk about that scene and wondering like, why, you know," "Casey's not in trouble." "Patrick's not in trouble for shooting that guy and..." "BEN:" "Well, you see here, he's like giving his statements to the police officers and he's telling them basically, you know..." "That it was sort of..." "He went in there and he followed them and there were..." "People were shooting and they were shooting at him and it was self-defense and you know, a guy went to grab him and he turned around, got out of the way, and shot him." "And the police, with this sort of wink are knowing that..." "I like this idea of him staring at himself as this empty person, soul..." "You know, in other words, he's justifying it to them and they're completely willing to, you know, let him off the hook as shown later by the guy at the funeral who says, "Nice fucking job on Corwin Earle. "" "Because they've no interest in prosecuting somebody when a police officer's just been shot and this guy's killed a child." "So they kind of..." "As they're completely..." "It's completely within their power to go," ""Okay, we see." "You're right." "Good shooting." ""You got a gun license." "You're with this cop, who... "" "The cop also clearly..." "Bressant clearly vouches for him as well, who says, you know, "Most guys would have stayed inside. "" "So when the police all say, you know, "You did a good job, "" "that's it." "It's all over." "You know, in order for someone to say, "You're under investigation, "" "the police would have to say, "We're investigating you. "" "I could have had another scene to kind of show that shoe leather, but I assumed it would seem obvious by having both the Ed Harris character and the other character at the funeral say, "Hey, good work." ""We all approve of what you did. "" "STOCKARD:" "Right." "In the book," "I think Corwin Earle reaches for, like, a crossbow, or something." "That we didn't wanna do, necessarily, and I think we felt we could..." "I think it was there to then justify, probably answer that question." "BEN:" "Well, you know, we didn't wanna make it a justifiable murder." "But he can then say to the police, "Look, it was justifiable. "" "That's what that shot of him talking to the police and giving them his statement is intended to do." "STOCKARD:" "I'm not justifying the murder, Ben." "(BEN CHUCKLES)" "BEN:" "Here, this scene with him is where he's..." "He's..." "You know, we assume he's saying, "Hey, you know, good work. "" "We didn't have Ed that night." "Outside, with the police." "If we had, I would have had Ed, you know, standing next to Casey giving his statement." "But Ed's..." "Ed's time on the movie was finished." "Fuck him." "Murder's a sin." "BEN: "Depends on who you do it to. " There you go." "Corwin Earle." "The thing about this scene that I wondered about was, can you have a scene that dramatically works in a movie where it's two guys basically having a kind of a debate about, you know, their respective outlooks," "moral outlooks on the world, you know." "Granted, they're kind of complicated and they're grounded in their respective experiences." "Would that be dramatic enough?" "It serves to try to mask the reveal of, you know..." "The tell, the Skinny Ray..." "That he knew Skinny Ray." "These..." "Some of these lines are taken directly from the Drug Control Unit stories that I got from Boston police officers." ""Multiplication tables" and a couple of the other ones." "...was spotless." "No, I mean, he swept it, mopped it, it was immaculate." "The little boy's sitting on the bed holding onto his playstation for dear life." "There's no expression on his face..." "BEN:" "All of Boston Police Department, it should be said, was extremely helpful, in the course of this movie." "And in particular the Drug Control Unit." "...subsisting on Twinkies and ass-whippings, and this little boy just wants someone to tell him that he's doing a good job." "You're worried what's Catholic?" "I mean, kids forgive." "Kids don't judge." "Kids turn the other cheek." "What do they get for it?" "STOCKARD:" "I know it wasn't for me, Ben, but thank you for putting that line in." "I remember seeing a cut with that out." "Which one?" "STOCKARD:" "And my only note, first time I saw the movie, and I was like," ""Great." "Great." "Great job, Ben." ""I just missed that 'kids don't judge' line. "" "Found its way back in..." "Sure." "Not because you were listening to me." "BEN:" "That's absolutely why it was." "If you see me coming, you better run, because I am gonna lay you the fuck down!" "BEN:" "That's another one right here." "He went out of focus but I thought it was so intense." "Pat McArdle will not be happy, but it was very powerful." "STOCKARD:" "Yeah." "I remember watching this scene being shot and feeling pretty overwhelmed by my little kind of moment of being," ""What in the world is Ed Harris doing saying words" ""that I actually played some part in writing?"" "He's making me look really good right now." "BEN:" "Ed is one of those guys who..." "Because he's such a powerful actor and because he's also such a powerful theater actor, he's..." "Some actors when you watch them shoot a movie, you have to wait until you see the footage to see how good they are." "Ed, you get to see how good he is right there, when you watch him shoot..." "You know, everyone there is really aware of it and kind of quiet and respectful, particularly in an open arena like this." "It was kind of a stage..." "STOCKARD:" "It's like they were kind of..." "BEN:" "And it was really quiet..." "Hey." "Hi." "How's Remy?" "He lied to me." "What did Remy say about Ray back in Roxbury?" "Never heard of him." "Never heard of him." "BEN:" "I talked with Billy about whether or not you could prelap Casey to Casey as..." "It's something that Oliver Stone does a lot." "You know, with his own..." "Like, he'll be on one of his..." "Be on, you know, Anthony Hopkins in Nixon, and on his face, not saying anything and you'll hear his own voice saying something and cut to him saying something." "I think Oliver Stone's quite brilliant." "I copy him whenever I can." "I used to tell Billy all the time," ""Maybe we can do an Oliver Stone here. "" "Really." "I owe so much of this, things that are good in this movie to Billy Goldenberg." "STOCKARD:" "And Casey Affleck, by the way." "If we haven't talked about him enough here." "BEN:" "Casey Affleck did a terrific job." "That boot was something that I really wanted to try to get as the..." "And I found out they did that..." "That was in police funerals." "I thought they only did it when like, you know, when presidents died." "Here is the..." "It bugged me that he got back in line quicker than I wanted to, but that was the best version of that take." "'Cause otherwise, I would have taken it out but I thought it was important, because I thought it did go right to that thing we were talking about, about like why they don't arrest Casey." "We're trying to establish Devin there, which we've seen him, you know, now in the crowd, and we saw him briefly walking into Morgan's office." "Trying to kind of seed him there so that it doesn't feel like the friend who comes along conveniently when you need information." "This is at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts." "One of the most beautiful places that I know." "Sorry about Nick." "Yeah, thanks." "STOCKARD:" "Same guy who designed Central Park, Ben." "Olmsted." "BEN:" "Is that right?" "Yeah." "BEN:" "I was trying to go to this thing, where you go from a four-shot to a two-shot to a single on this one Steadicam thing." "They were on a..." "Some sort of like, bicycle rig with the Steadicam thing going backwards." "It was hot." "And all the extras were walking by..." "It turned into sort of a debacle that morning." "We were in the park for..." "In the cemetery for only one day and had a lot of work to do..." "This was a bit of a struggle." "(STOCKARD EXCLAIMING MOCKINGLY)" "STOCKARD:" "Single!" "Dana had lunch with him last week?" "Excuse me." "Hey, Dev." "Hey, how you doing?" "AII right, how you been?" "I can't complain." "Can I talk to you?" "Yeah." "Not here." "(SCOFFS) If it's like that, then you're gonna have to buy me lunch." "BEN:" "Chart House, turned out, was owned by our location manager's brother." "So, yeah." "It turned out that was our first location of our first day of shooting." "Charlie made sure that we..." "That's Boston for you." "STOCKARD:" "Yeah." "This is our first scene." "BEN:" "I'm just kidding, Charlie." "Might not wanna do that if you're a plumber." "(LAUGHING)" "So, what happened?" "BEN:" "This is Michael." "He did great." "He did a great job." "He's on The Wire and he's..." "Doyle brought Remy from Louisiana, back in '72." "You don't think that Remy's dirty, though, do you?" "What's "dirty"?" "I know he planted evidence once." "Oh, you do?" "Yeah." "Why?" "BEN:" "This was the one kind of location in the movie that had the classic Boston restaurant, you know, with the ship in it and..." "If you went outside, you would have seen the wharf and you know..." "The, sort of, postcard Boston." "And the idea that he..." "If he's gonna buy him food, he takes him to the really fancy place where you get..." "He gets a nice meal." "AII right, look." "BEN:" "Michael got that scar from some guy, it was like some kind of..." "Attacked him with a razor when he was younger." "...asking if anybody knew who robbed Cheese." "So what?" "So my informant tells me," "Cheese didn't even know he got robbed until two weeks later." "So Remy knew Cheese got robbed before Cheese did?" "How'd he know that?" "Let me tell you something." "You better think long and hard before you start running around here investigating the police." "You try and take food out their mouths, and they will fuck you up." "Thanks for the steak." "STOCKARD:" "That casting, too, was just not what you would imagine the typical Boston cop looking like." "BEN:" "Yeah." "The thing is, you know, a lot of those guys do, and I think..." "STOCKARD:" "No." "I think they do, but just..." "I got it." "STOCKARD:" "I did read a good line that somebody in praising, kind of, how you would..." "Represented Boston was like," ""He didn't just throw up a couple of Red Sox posters" ""and have everybody saying 'Chowda. "'" "Which I thought was a good line." "BEN:" "That was my fallback option." "(BO TH CHUCKLE)" "BEN:" "The idea that this was always kind of..." "I thought maybe people would think that this was like a panic re-shoot where you have a guy sit in a chair and play a voiceover of a phone call, but this was always an idea of a guy sitting there," "his life about to fall apart, and he's looking over all of the things that he had accumulated." "The little..." "Tiny little representations of what we put together in our lives and the symbols of, you know, what we believe and the little tchotchkes and pictures and..." "The things on his shelf that make up our life..." "Our lives." "He was thinking about this call he had and what he's gonna do." "It's just a miracle how much that kid looks like that picture." "I don't know how that happened." "I love that shot." "Now, this is actually South Boston." "This is the one location that's in South Boston." "The rest of it's in..." "Rest of it's in Dorchester, which is a little bit of a cheat, that he probably wouldn't go, you know, say, "Meet me at Murphy's. "" "I mean, he might, just if he wanted to be away from..." "Far away from everyone he knows, that was kind of the rationale." "Met him through the investigation of Amanda." "BEN:" "He's kind of making his decision." "How long you known Remy?" "What is this?" "They got the Internet, now, Lionel." "BEN:" "I like that line." "It's like..." "I'm always a little surprised when the people I've known for a long time, if they're really old, old people I've known, you know," "like back home, you know... (CHUCKLING) And they're like, "I'm on Google," "And think like..." "This guy is doing, you know, like programming on the Internet." ""Go to my Facebook page. "" "I haven't been honest with you." "It's just not something I'm proud of." "You know?" "I got in a bar fight back in the day." "The other guy cracked his skull." "At some point, I must've said, "I'II kill you."" "So they had me up for attempted." "It's my word against this other guy's." "Witness testified to my version and the jury believed him." "'Cause he was a cop." "Yeah, he testified for me." "BEN:" "His idea is that he kind of keeps surrendering information in stages and trying to sort of stop the..." "You know, like, when you..." "A submarine starts to flood and they stop at the first outer level and shut those flood doors and then those get flooded and he tries to stop it at the second level." "I love that smile that he does there." "STOCKARD:" "Yeah." "I think he's awesome in this scene." "And it's a tough scene, it's another long, like, I think..." "You guys did a really good job of breaking it up into kind of manageable chunks." "BEN:" "It was long." "It really verges on the danger of being seriously tiresome." "You took your niece, and you laid it off on a black guy." "BEN:" "He's trying to delay giving up this information and then stop and say," ""Okay." "Yes." "Well, I did do that. "" "And then they say, "But we know more of the story. "" ""Well, I did do that. "" "I thought..." "And I talked to him a lot about the way that people try to not give up information that they desperately want to hold on to." "This idea that he knows on some level, he's gonna have to..." "You know, he's gonna get..." "He's gonna go to jail." "He's gonna lose something really serious in his life." "He's gonna feel like he's gonna be destroyed but he's willing to go to jail for Amanda." "And he knows he's gonna be destroyed so he says, "Okay." "Well, at least I can drink again. "" "I think that was just kind of beautiful and sad, you know." "He's always thought about, when he does drink again, he's gonna order..." "He's thought about his just three shots and his beer." "And thought that maybe it would be good, but it's also kind of sad, now that he has them." "Twenty-three years is something, right?" "BEN:" "His one accomplishment, you know?" "That's his one thing that he did in his life was be sober for 23 years." "Go." "I come up to check on Amanda." "She was alone as usual." "BEN:" "And this part of the confession, like all really good lies, is partially true." "I think it's really smart." "My man." ""If I wasn't so good in Iraq. " The man's just all improv." "The crack pipe here." "Oh, you know..." "I'm not..." "BEN:" "He improv-ed that, "I'll knock his teeth out. "" "STOCKARD:" "It's great." "There's another drug run up to Nashua." "Taking cocaine..." "And then what?" "We took her." "Remy laid out this plan." "It seemed easy." "We take her, force Helene and Ray to cough up the cash, then we put her back." "You know?" "Amanda gets to spend a weekend in the country." "My sister Iearns a lesson." "And fuck it, everybody gets paid on top of it." "I got no problem taking money from a guy like Cheese." "They were gonna handle the cops." "But Bea, she went nuts." "Started calling the papers." "Hired you." "Lionel don't want me coming here, now you don't want the job?" "BEN:" "I noticed, that in the beginning of the scene, saying" ""Lionel didn't want me coming here, " was kind of a tell." "STOCKARD:" "Right." "But is something that is in the book, and that they use to put it all together at the end." "Maybe Bea didn't want Lionel to come." "LIONEL:" "Panicking." "BEN:" "That was one of the hardest shots to get." "We ran a crane along the ground to get that rock to fall in and make that ripple at the same time the crane" "came over the edge and saw it." "STOCKARD:" "Right." "This is one of my favorite little moments here, that I think" "Titus really nails, which is just kind of describing the death of his niece in this manner and then in a couple of minutes when he tells this other story, kind of..." "Maybe I should hold off making a point until..." "Two hours." "Amanda literally roasted." "She was three." "Later on, I was holding her, trying to help her get to sleep." "My little Amanda, she was so hot." "She felt like something just come out of the oven." "Like a fucking pot roast." "So don't feel too sorry for my sister." "STOCKARD:" "So just to finish my point that kind of moment there where he doesn't break down and cry when he is describing the death of Amanda." "But does break down when he's actually telling a true story." "Because that death he's describing didn't actually happen." "It's part of his lie." "But the thing that really did happen, which was her getting baked in this car." "BEN:" "Yeah, it is a tough transition because he says, "She died in the water. "" "And she goes, "She was your sister's kid. "" "And, "You think I don't miss her?" ""Let me tell you a story about when we once took her to the beach. "" "It just seems like an odd thing to break into." "I always sort of worry that, like, "Is this gonna bump?"" "Oh, fuck, God." "Amanda McCready was taken by Remy Bressant!" "Wait." "Wait." "Jesus." "PATRICK:" "Remy Bressant." "God damn it." "Remy Bressant!" "BEN:" "We just wanted to try this thing where it's like as if this, the end of the shotgun could you know, hurt, like physically it was, like, hot, or a hot poker or something," "and both of those guys would sort of be wincing." "I think it helped that." "(GRUNTING)" "BEN:" "Casey and Ed wanted to do that." "Like, slam into the thing themselves." "I was..." "They really went for it." "(PANTING)" "The first time, they fell all over the place." "It was a disaster." "We had to use special effects to take the camera shadow off Casey's jacket there." "See again, it was, like, all..." "That's all the real location inside, outside." "We all sort of..." "At the real same contiguous places." "There's no cheating of any kind." "I tried shooting in and out and letting it go dark and coming out and letting in blow out and being hand-held and trying to keep it very raw and real." "Giving it almost sort of documentary feel." "Which I hoped sort of subconsciously would give the audience a sense of just" "the integrity of the reality of what they were seeing." "At least in certain segments." "Drop your gun." "Put it down!" "That bartender wasn't fucking around." "What did you do?" "Did you get her killed?" "Say yes." "Say yes." "Say yes!" "What're you gonna do?" "Shoot me?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah." "BEN:" "We thought that was nice, really subtle touch of his false confession." "Liked the thought of the idea that he would die with it there, when he realizes that Lionel didn't give it up." "I Iove children." "STOCKARD:" "This is another moment that in the book and then in several incarnations of the script was much longer and kind of..." "Giving Remy this kind of..." "BEN:" "Just one of those things where you get to shooting a movie and you have Ed Harris and you see this right here." "And kind of says all those things." "'Cause he's just so good." "And he says, "I love children. "" "He has that kind of smile in his eye and he's dying." "It doesn't really work with, like, a long prolonged scene where the guy is kind of dying and bleeding in his chest and he's got a three page scene." "Just feels a little silly." "You know, but with him kind of looking at him and playing that..." "It's beautiful, I think." "Did any of the witnesses at the bar contradict anything I've said?" "A police officer was killed today." "That's not looked on lightly." "Is corruption looked on lightly?" "Is a Iittle girl getting killed looked on lightly?" "OFFICER:" "Whoa, hold on." "You charge people money as a detective." "BEN:" "Bob Wahlberg." "The great Bob Wahlberg did a terrific job." "Very good guy." "Very good actor." "No, because, strange as it might seem," "I believe the police when they tell me something." "You're a fresh prick." "You know that?" "And because I had a ransom note and Amanda McCready's blanket put in my mailbox." "And because I read a transcript of a call that Cheese put into the station." "A 81 1 call?" "No, it was a call Cheese made to the station." "To Remy Bressant at the station." "Or that Chris Mullen made, pretending to be Cheese." "Or whatever the fuck it was, but it was recorded, and there was a call." "We don't record calls coming into the station, and we don't do transcripts, smart guy." "OFFICER:" "So, did you hear a tape?" "No, I didn't hear a tape." "Okay." "BEN:" "This was one where the set was built rather hastily and the walls looked really flat." "And like, I don't know, blank, and like nothing." "And so I told John that I hated it and so we took all the light off the walls." "And made it look like they were in a vacuum." "And that scene, walking out to see Michelle, we shot, like, right as the sun was coming up." "In Boston right after the Ed Harris scene with Casey outside the hospital." "LIONEL:" "You think I don't miss her." "She was more my kid than Helene's." "I Iove children." "This is the kind of thing that if you do, Patrick, you wanna be sure." "Are you sure?" "No." "BEN:" "This stuff is about two hours outside of Boston in Western Massachusetts." "Really beautiful in the summertime." "STOCKARD:" "Just one of those interesting things that once you get to shooting and editing, that you realize you wasted so much time." "Remember like, "How do they know where Doyle lives?"" "BEN:" "Yeah, we had a scene of them, him talking to Devin again and Devin saying like..." "Just go there." "T aking a trip?" "Patrick Kenzie." "T o what do I owe the pleasure?" "Remy Bressant died last night." "I was told." "It's a shame." "Yeah, it's hard to understand." "Because he seemed like a good man." "He was a good man." "We don't know why people do what they do." "Everybody looks out his own window." "STOCKARD:" "I like that line a lot." ""Everybody looks out his own window. "" "It seems like this thematic hit there..." "BEN: "Everyone's got their reasons, "" "that's from Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game." "That's where they got that line." "And boom, the big reveal." "She runs out." "It was always a struggle to figure out how big of a sound hit to put on that and whether it would feel, you know, too much like we were hitting it on the head, putting a hat on a hat." "Or to underplay that sound-wise or..." "We kind of played around with that a lot." "WOMAN ON TV:" "Twenty-nine-year-old Chris Mullen was gunned down last night in an apparent robbery." "You go back inside with Frannie." "Papa will come in soon." "Make you a sandwich, okay?" "AII right." "That's my girl." "BEN:" "She was sweet." "Morgan was great with her." "She's a really good kid, Maddy, and she's really easygoing." "But she could be a little shy with new people but with Morgan she just, boom, ran right up to him and did the scene." "He picked her right up and it was very easy." "To get these, Casey played everything very small, and so in order to get these little reactions, and back and forth stuff, he had to crank 1 20 frames." "(CHUCKLES) Land super tight stuff to get stuff that I could intercut to react with all this." "JACK:" "What about the uncle?" "REMY:" "He can never tell anyone." "Not even his wife." "Or he'II never see her again." "BEN:" "I think it was 96 frames, maybe." "JACK:" "How many children have we seen destroyed?" "REMY:" "Enough." "Does it make you feel better?" "Telling yourself you did it for the right reasons?" "That you took her to be saved." "From her own mother?" "We're just trying to give a Iittle girl a life." "Wasn't your life to give." "Helene's her mother." "If you thought she was a bad mother, you should've gone to Social Services." "Short of that, she's her mother, and that's where she belongs." "You turn around." "BEN:" "I like that." "I thought..." "You don't know what the world is made of yet." "BEN:" "That was Morgan who wanted to add that" "F-bomb in there." "I think he liked the transition from that guy he thought he was into this kind of undercurrent of like, "Hey, this is who I really am." ""This is who you are dealing with." ""You're just a kid and let me tell you, I'm a guy who's been" ""police captain for all these years and... "" "When the lights go out and you ask yourself..." "BEN:" "I love it." "I thought it was really effective." "And you always will." "You..." "You could do a right thing here." "A good thing." "Men live their whole lives without getting this chance." "You walk away from it, you may not regret it when you get home." "You may not regret it for a year, but when you get to where I am, I promise you, you will." "I'II be dead, you'II be old." "But she..." "She'II be dragging around a couple of tattered, damaged children of her own, and you'II be the one who has to tell them you're sorry." "You know what?" "Maybe that'II happen." "And if it does, I'II tell them I'm sorry, and I'II live with it." "But what's never gonna happen and what I'm not gonna do is have to apologize to a grown woman who comes to me and says," ""I was kidnapped when I was a Iittle girl," ""and my aunt hired you to find me." ""And you did, you found me with some strange family." ""But you broke your promise and you left me there." ""Why?" "Why didn't you bring me home?" ""Because all the snacks and the outfits and the family trips don't matter." ""They stole me." ""It wasn't my family and you knew about it" ""and you knew better and you did nothing."" "And maybe that grown woman will forgive me..." "BEN:" "There's always a question of how convincing Casey had to be here." "He was concerned. "Look, I gotta have a better argument than this." ""I gotta... " You know." "It was..." "And I thought that was enough and the argument was really self-evident, you know." "And I thought it was pretty strong." "Ultimately, I think, he came to see that as well." "I think there's a fear because, obviously, the emotional pull is have this little girl stay here at this house with Morgan Freeman." "STOCKARD:" "Ben, are you finding people falling on one side or the other more about whether Casey, or Patrick, does the right thing here?" "BEN:" "I haven't talked to too many..." "I've been in Europe since the movie came out, but" "I find most people say, "Well, what do you think?"" "She's better off here." "Why?" "Because he's got money, and he makes her sandwiches?" "STOCKARD:" "Yeah." "I think that our thing's always not what the right decision for Amanda is, necessarily, but like, whether Patrick's decision is, kind of, justified." "Whether, kind of, making the decision he is, is justified or not." "If that distinction makes any sense, you know, like" "I don't really know what the right decision is." "I don't think I have an opinion about what the right decision is." "Do I think Patrick is justified?" "Yes." "She is justified in wanting him to say yes." "BEN:" "I think the point is to just..." "To make a movie about a real situation that's compelling where the characters, like, face this situation and each character has something at stake and some motive to wanna do something" "different from the other." "And so the people who come and see it will naturally feel differently about it." "Where there is not one thing that the audience" "is supposed to be united in feeling." "STOCKARD:" "Right." "And I think that's what, you know, we saw when we first read the book and wanted to kind of do with the movie as well." "Always had that..." "BEN:" "I always liked this because I thought that the..." "Morgan kind of knowing in a way that this might be his last moment, and he's choosing to spend them with her, just sitting there." "I thought that was beautiful." "STOCKARD:" "Yeah, I didn't..." "Sorry, go ahead." "BEN:" "No, I just wanted to have..." "To do a reveal of something." "Where it happens in the distance and out of focus." "That the biggest event in the movie happens out in the background, kind of, from afar" "and then comes in towards you." " Yeah." "BEN:" "I wanted to try that and see what that would be like." "And just the way he played this, you know, we talked about it just being..." "He was totally up for it, like just, he knows them, you know what I mean, they really respect him and they are kind of intimidated." "He just makes it easy for them to arrest him." "You know what I mean?" "It's kind of he's sort of in control." "STOCKARD:" "Didn't he, on take one, bust out and come running across the porch?" "BEN:" "Yeah." "And run off into the bushes." "STOCKARD:" "I like that look on his face right there." "Feels like I've never seen him looking like that before." "BEN:" "Yeah, I was concerned to not have him do too much." "'Cause I didn't want to traumatize Maddy too much, like, too much crying or pulling or whatever in the acting of taking her away from..." "You know," "Kippy, the actress." "But still I had to have it be good." "I think they were considerate, the cops." "They were real cops." "Or, two of them were." "And the actors." "WOMAN 2 :" "Helene, how you feeling right now?" "How you feeling..." "WOMAN OFFICER:" "Back up." "Back up." "Back up." "Back up." "WOMAN 1 :" "Amanda, how do you feel to see your mom?" "Hey, Amanda." "BEN:" "The thing like about Amy is that she's playing it like this is her big moment in a weird way." "Oh, my sweetheart." "Oh, my." "Helene, the whole world wants to know what you're feeling right now." "How are you, sweetheart?" "Oh, my heart is brimming." "And just God bless to everyone and thank you to all..." "To all the policemen and the firemen," "I feel like 8/1 1 right now." "Oh, I swear to God, I mean, just..." "MAN ON TV:" "Do you have any comments for parents out there that might be in a similar situation?" "HELENE ON TV:" "Oh, just never let your kids out of your sight." "Don't trust them to no one." "And just keep them in your arms, as much as they're in your heart, you keep them in your arms." "MAN:" "How about that?" "A great end to that story." "Good news for everybody." "WOMAN:" "Yes, it is." "BEN:" "That 9/1 1 line was really just..." "You know, Amy had a hard time understanding what she just..." "It was like, "Why would she say this?" I thought, like, this is, in her mind 9/1 1 was the only time that she felt unity or" "camaraderie with police and firemen and everyone got together and was on the same side." "All other times she was an enemy of those people, particularly police, and that was a time everyone came together." "And now she's back together with them, because they helped her and she just feels happy." "Because 9/1 1 was also a happy time for her, strangely." "STOCKARD:" "And it involved the firemen..." "BEN:" "Involved the firemen and police." "She only has a, sort of, a dim understanding of the way all those things connect." "But, she knows that those are times of unity and sort of celebration, at least in the sense that everyone's together and no one's judging anyone else." "That's Gerry Speca." "Our drama teacher in high school." "Brilliant man." "And this young woman who, really, represented to me..." "The tattoo." "Everything that" "I wanted to say in the movie and what it was about and she was..." "She's in the beginning of the movie and there she is at the end." "Sorry for being rude, I gotta be out of here in, Iike, two minutes." "Do your thing." "(CHATTERING ON TV)" "BEN:" "This cartoon is from the 1920s because no other cartoons would allow us to use their cartoon in this scene with the mother leaving her kid alone and so on and so forth." "So we had to use public domain." "I'm like, "That's romantic." Right?" "How's your girlfriend?" "She's all right, she's at the North Shore with her sister." "Oh, hope she got better family than I do, right?" "Those dirty motherfuckers." "She don't get smart, I'II take you out." "How's Bea?" "Fuck Bea." "STOCKARD:" "I found a lot of people seem to be looking for an answer to what we were talking about earlier in this scene about..." "At least from Patrick or from the filmmakers about whether they're coming down on one side or the other as opposed to being, kind of, open and ambiguous and looking at every little moment in this kind of scene" "to see if Patrick regrets the decision that he's made." "Does he..." "You know, if he realizes he was wrong and they were right and..." "BEN:" "I think Patrick is coming here, probably on some level, with the hopes that he's gonna be made to feel a little bit better about the decision that he's made." "He's, you know, obviously, he's gone to this funeral and she's left him and he's alone and he's not had a lot of things in his life that are feeling good and he comes here to see," "you know, he knows that Helene has had a lot of..." "She's made a little money, she's been on TV." "She's gotten a little, kind of, neighborhood famous." "And he's hoping that she has gotten it together and maybe she's looking after her daughter in a good way." "And he gets here and he sees on the surface things are better but underneath, she's just the same as she ever was." "And I think that he sags inside." "You know, and he finds out she didn't even know the name of the doll." "And I think that kind of breaks his heart a little bit." "Right here." "STOCKARD:" "Right." "BEN:" "And then, I think Casey just does a magical job with that." "And I think that's what breaks his heart." "And then, whether he regrets it or whether he stands by it or whether, you know, I'm not sure he knows." "I think he just lives with it." "Right." "BEN:" "He lives with the choices he's made and who he is and what his life is and what her life will be." "STOCKARD:" "Which I think is what it always meant to us, was like, what this..." "And I love the fact that for all the changes and rewrites that we did on the script that this was always the end." "And it was always this shot." "You know, it feels to me that that's what it always was." "Like, you live with your choices." "Patrick living with the choice he made." "Well done, Ben." "Good job." "Excellent." "BEN:" "Thank you, Aaron." "Alexi Murdoch's song here at the end, which is lovely here." "I owe him a debt." "And yes, Aaron, thank you very much for your fine work..." "STOCKARD:" "I did a lot of associate producing." "BEN:" "And associate producing and adapting this with me." "I'm eternally grateful for you and your work." "And yeah, it's about..." "It's funny, I love that about it." "The consistency that we always saw that as the last shot and that stayed that way." "STOCKARD:" "Yeah." "BEN: (CHUCKLES) Everything else may have changed, but that stayed pretty consistent, which was nice." "STOCKARD:" "Josh Marchette, nice job as the dart player there." "BEN:" "Thank God we had him there." "Shauna Duggins was Jennifer Garner's stunt double in alias for all those years and then came in and doubled Angie." "This movie is definitely a sum of the efforts of many people." "And among them, Sheila G. Waldron there." "And it's certainly a..." "You know, I owe them all." "And it's to the extent..." "Their work's responsible." "It's because of all their efforts as well as mine." "That really bears being said." "It should be said." "STOCKARD:" "Yeah." "And one of the things that kind of..." "And this being kind of the first piece of writing I've done that has kind of got to this position to have it just be you and I for so long and then to as it gets cast and then shot and then edited." "To kind of explode with all of these other people that make all this stuff, kind of," "so much not your own anymore, in a way." "Not a very articulate way of saying that, but like..." "BEN:" "If it was just me and you, we'd be really in trouble." "STOCKARD:" "It would be like that Superman movie we made in 1 1th grade." "BEN:" "We'd still have the trucks at the beginning." "STOCKARD:" "Superman!" " That was a bad idea." "BEN:" "No, it was okay." "It was okay." "(CHUCKLING)" "It was all right." "STOCKARD:" "I think I don't want to do that anymore." "I don't like the idea anymore." "You won." "(BOTH CHUCKLING)" "I'm not pushing for it." "I wasn't, you know, was making the point earlier." "BEN:" "Skip Kimball was the colorist who did such a good job." "Skip Kimball." "John Toll shot the movie." "Billy Goldenberg." "Sharon Seymour, production designer was spectacular." "So many, so many folks." "STOCKARD:" "Chay Carter." "No." "STOCKARD:" "She wasn't that helpful, you're right." "She kind of sabotaged us on several occasions." "BEN:" "Yeah, lot of..." "Harry Gregson-Williams on the music." "We got one..." "I do have to thank" "Slash and the Guns N' Roses guys who did give us the You're Crazy track." "That's what I really wanted for the Fillmore scene, starts it out." "'Cause it's got that great guitar hook at the beginning and I think we got a good deal on it." "You know, another movie they would have gotten probably bilked and we didn't have it like, going, all the way through or anything, so they gave us the reasonable deal 'cause weren't trying to play, like," "you know, Sweet Child O' Mine and put it in the trailers and stuff." "They recognized that and they gave us a good deal." "STOCKARD:" "I loved it." "BEN:" "The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, we should thank." "We should thank..." "Disney, of course." "Miramax, everybody at those two companies." "City of Boston." "Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz." "BEN:" "All the Boston Red Sox 2007 World Champions, the Boston Red Sox." "Thank you, thank you all." "STOCKARD:" "Thank you." "(BOTH CHUCKLING)" "BEN:" "They're gonna be like, "Man, why did I listen to that?"" "STOCKARD:" ""That's not very compelling. ""