"This is John Cleese, and I'm gonna do my commentary on the movie." "One thing that annoys me when you're watching movies is they put the names of the starring actors up very frequently over pictures of other people." "So I deliberately here wanted to do the little thumbnail sketches in the right order, and with the right names up." "I guess this movie was largely my idea, but, in a sense, the inspiration for it came from all the people I was working with." "I already knew Michael, and loved working with him." "We always had fun." "Whatever I was gonna write, Michael was gonna be in it." "And I'd had the great pleasure of meeting Kevin Kline." "That was set up by my friend Michael Shamberg, who produced the movie." "Once I saw Kevin on-screen I thought "I'd love to do something with him."" "And then while I was still contemplating, you know, who Wanda should be and was assuming that she would be English, my daughter - who finished up in the movie playing my daughter " "Cynthia dragged me off to see a movie called Trading Places." "And I was knocked out by Jamie - and this is before she took her T-shirt off." "I thought to myself "This girl's energy is extraordinary."" "But of all the inspirations, all the reasons for doing this movie, the greatest was Charlie, Charlie Crichton." "Charlie, who is sadly no longer with us, was a wonderful director." "He started cutting film in 1932." "He always said he was an editor before Hitler came to power." "I never quite knew what the connection was." "In 1946, after 14 years of editing, he started directing, and he became one of the great Ealing comedy directors." "The Ealing Studios produced a wonderful output of very, very fine English comedies after the Second World War, up to, I think, the late '50s." "And I nearly worked with Charlie in 1967 or 8." "The producer, for some reason, wouldn't touch Charlie, didn't want him on the movie, so I walked away from it." "And I said to Charlie, who was much the most expert director I'd ever worked with" ""We'll do something one day." And, my God, how many years later?" "19 years later or something extraordinary, we did work together, and this was it." "And we sat down together." "I remember we started by meeting up in France, and we sat at a swimming pool, a little table, drinking coffee, and we figured out the story together." "And I knew at that point that I wanted Michael and Kevin in it." "I then started putting dialogue on it, discovered Jamie, who I'd never seen - the horror movies that she was famous for in America, I'd never seen." "And then Charlie celebrated, if you can believe this, his 77th birthday while we were shooting this movie." "And he was nominated, I think, both for an Oscar and by the Directors Guild of America." "It was the most extraordinary swan song." "After this he was offered a couple of movies, but I think he knew this had been a good experience, and that being surrounded by friends is always the best kind of movie experience." "He turned down all other offers and bought a wonderful place on the proceeds in Scotland, where he could spend his time fly-fishing for trout, which he loved more than anything." "He was famously irascible, although it was never really quite serious." "It was his way of communicating with the world." "But the place in Scotland was called Grumbles." "This is Maria Aitken, who is a pal of mine." "I knew how good she was, but I think she's absolutely wonderful in this movie, playing my wife." "The only character in the movie based on a real living person, and Maria actually met her at one point and recognised the similarity." "And this is my real-life daughter, Cynthia." "Shooting this, I kept making mistakes because I was so anxious about her, thinking she'd be feeling a bit awkward and nervous and making mistakes." "I made about eight consecutive mistakes and she made none at all." "One of the worst things you can do is worry about the person that you're trying to act with." "When Kevin saw the rushes, he thought he was playing this scene too quietly and that he needed to come up a bit." "I don't know that he's right." "There's something so strange and menacing about him that the fact it's played so low-key is a plus." "So next week we won't have to look for work." "And it won't have to look for us." "Oscar Wilde." "Wasn't Oscar Wilde." "It was said by somebody who nobody would have recognised the name of, so I said Oscar Wilde, just to make it sound good." "Know what Nietzsche said about them?" "He said they were God's second blunder." "Bye, sis." "Well, you t-tell him from me..." "Nietzsche said that God's first blunder was women." "It's typical of Kevin that he'd come up with that thing about looking through the stained glass." "He's an extraordinarily inventive actor." "And every take with Kevin is ever so slightly different." "Now, this is where Charlie comes into his own." "The reason that he's such a good director is he knows exactly what to do." "He never calls attention to the camera." "He simply knows where to put it, and, above all, which setup is gonna make the point of the scene best." "When Kevin had to shoot that, we assumed it was gonna take 20 or 30 takes before he hit the button." "He actually did it on the second take." "We're establishing that ordinary jewellery is of no particular interest." "They're after something far more valuable." "Little bit of plot there with the glass." "And the wonderful Patricia Hayes." "It's extraordinary, but by establishing her as an unpleasant old woman at the start, the audience simply dislikes her, and isn't the slightest bit worried when she finally has the heart attack." "It's a lovely economical bit of camera work we've just been watching." "Kevin's athleticism is extraordinary." "There's several things he does in the movie, and he invents them on the set." "He doesn't think of them beforehand." "The elegance with which he does these often slightly strange moves is so perfect." "And his technique's so good." "I mean, this is a very good English accent." ""George Thomason" is just a joke, because this is Tom Georgeson." "I'd seen Tom in a cops-and-robbers thing about a year before, and thought he was terrific - strangely tough and sinister - and I thought he was marvellous casting for this." "When I'd seen Manhattan a few weeks before I'd started to write this movie," "I'd been very struck by how Woody Allen had made an ugly city like New York City look so beautiful, so I tried to do the same for London." "Wherever I could find a beautiful location, we went for it." "Now, this scene probably contains the best-known line in the movie, when Kevin says "I'm disappointed"." "It's an interesting line, because it's almost impossible to write that sitting at a desk." "It comes out in the course of rehearsing." "One of the things I was able to do with Kevin was to stop for ten days before we got anywhere near shooting, and go through the movie with him, all the scenes, and see what he came up with." "And he came up with some wonderful lines, like this one." "OK." "I'm disappointed!" "And some wonderful physical stuff, like sniffing the armpit." "And all that came because we were very loose, very relaxed." "We had lots of time." "We were just able to play." "Jamie also contributed a lot of lines." "I was sending her early drafts of the movie, asking for anything that was colloquial from an American point of view, because I don't feel I write very good American dialogue." "So Kevin and Jamie were constantly phoning, faxing, making suggestions, and what I'm rather proud about is," "I think 13 different people contributed to the dialogue." "The guy on the right is Ken Campbell, one of my very favourite performers." "He's almost, though he's a very good actor, in the vaudeville tradition." "He used to do a thing called the Ken Campbell Road Show, that was one of the most extraordinary things I've ever seen." "I got him to do an Amnesty International concert." "But he used to put ferrets down his trousers." "Ken's got the fish food." "He'll be in later." " Thanks." " De nada." "The reason for "de nada" is that the criminal fraternity in Britain spend a great deal of time in southern Spain, and most of them have villas there." "The difficulty about this scene was that George would be very suspicious of Otto." "It was a question of trying to get the tone right and still make sure that George had not decided" "that Otto was definitely guilty of betraying him, merely that it was a major possibility, but not one he could necessarily act on." "Because otherwise he would probably have got Michael Palin's character, Ken, to shadow Otto all the time, and that wouldn't have led anywhere from the point of view of plot." "It would have slowed everything down." "Again, notice the economy of the camera." "Most directors would have had about 15 cuts in this scene." "So we have to establish that Jamie's also acting for all she is worth to persuade George that she didn't shop him, and that she might suspect Otto, but... not really." "Now we have the first major coincidence of the movie, which is, of course, that Jamie spots my character and is able to introduce herself." "I have to tell you this was the first time in my life that I'd ever played a proper romantic scene - for obvious reasons!" "But on this occasion I was playing one, mainly cos I'd written it." "I had no idea how to play this kind of scene, and Jamie was very helpful." "But there's a moment when I used a little trick." "I'd seen a movie called Outrageous Fortune, and I was impressed by the way that one of the actors in that had indicated to the audience that they'd fallen in love with someone, at least superficially." "It was a particular look at the other actor's mouth that did it." "And I actually pinched that moment." "I think it works reasonably well." "I knew it!" "You're Archie Leash!" " Leach." " Right!" "The little joke there that Cary Grant, of course, had a real, non-stage name of Archie Leach." "So I popped it in." "I thought it would amuse about 25 people, and, to my amazement, about eight million people got the joke." "The gag coming up with the briefcase is one we thought of actually on location." "I believe so much in planning and working together and rehearsing that 99 per cent of the stuff in the things that I do is in the script by the final draft, even if it's emerged in the course of rehearsal." "Wonderful performance by Kevin, and, of course, he got an Oscar for it." "And my dear friend Michael Palin got a British Oscar, a BAFTA, for best supporting actor, which is terrific." "I felt guilty at one stage, because although Michael had always been in my mind to be in this movie, whatever it was about, when I showed the script to a very close friend of mine," "Ron Eyre, one of London's best theatrical directors, he ticked me off for offering Michael such a small part." "I was very surprised, cos I know sometimes a character can have a small amount of screen time but can still score very heavily." "So when Michael got the BAFTA, I felt a little vindicated." "The great thing about Kevin's acting is he does something different in every scene." "I remember the editor, Johnny Jympson, saying to me that it drove him crazy trying to get the continuity right but it was always worth it." "You literally never knew what Kevin was gonna do, and I don't think Kevin knew." "The moment the clapperboard clicked, he went into another place in himself." "What came out was often extraordinary, and sometimes absolutely awful." "But it doesn't matter on movies, because the awful stuff, no one ever sees." "È molto pericoloso, signorina." "Molto pericolo..." "I don't know where I got the idea of using the Italian." "It could've been any good-sounding language." "I think the English have always thought French was a sexy language." "But round about this time there were so many Italian restaurants, and I thought if all he ever speaks is menu Italian, that could be funny - with the odd guidebook phrase in there, too." "Forgot his lines there, but it didn't matter." "This is crucial." "If Ken realised there was something going on between them and they weren't brother and sister, then everything is blown." "But instead, we're able to advance the plot." "It's funny." "This moment always got a laugh in a British cinema, because the idea of Otto pulling a gun at this point on Ken is so ludicrous, it used to get quite a big laugh." "It never got a laugh in America." "People are so used to seeing people with guns in America that the idea that it was inappropriate would not really occur to an audience." "So now we advance the plot." "We know where the key is now, and we know that Wanda knows where it is." "She's trying to get him out so he doesn't know Kevin's there, but Kevin knocked something over." "There's a very favourite moment of mine coming up, which was Kevin improvising." "The idea of somebody sitting on the toilet with trousers on struck me as very funny." "What I like about this series of scenes is that people talk about the necessity of conflict in comedy, but always think the conflict has got to be between the characters." "Actually, what's more fun is conflict within the characters, in other words, where one character is really feeling something but pretending that he's feeling something else." "So when there's different levels within a character, as it were, squabbling between themselves, and one level dominant at one point and then perhaps another, another part of the character's personality becoming dominant at another point," "that seems to me the essence of the very best kind of comedy." "There are always problems." "For example, if Kevin is as stupid as he is most of the time, why does he come up with such a clever idea as pretending that he's gay to put Ken off the scent?" "And, fortunately, audiences aren't too worried by little inconsistencies like this." "Now we know, of course, that Jamie's got the key." "She's certainly not gonna be telling anyone else." "So she's ahead of the game." "I love the way Michael plays this, trying not to be rude." "Just can't wait to get out of there." "As Kevin said earlier, the British are so polite." "So now Jamie's getting on with the manipulation, trying to find out what that could be a key to." "A thing I started with when I was working on Michael's character is I simply had the idea for the scene at the end." "I think it was the first idea I had for the whole movie, someone with a stutter trying to get information out and not being able to although they're really trying to." "The reason I knew that would be beautifully played by Michael is that his father had quite a stutter, and he was able, therefore, throughout his childhood to observe it." "And there's a very obvious way of doing a stutter, which I guess, frankly, most actors would do, which wouldn't be right and wouldn't be funny." "And it's the little sort of subterfuges, the little tactics that people with a stutter or a stammer use to try and hide it, that Michael knew about and was able to incorporate in his performance." "One of the hardest parts of the movie was to decide what Kevin and Jamie would be doing at this stage to try and find out where the loot was." "We had to establish that they had almost no leads." "That's Michael Shamberg, who produced the movie." "And here's Tom Georgeson." "Or George Thomason, I'm sorry." "Now, this was the second romantic scene that I'd ever played in my life, and Jamie was terribly, terribly helpful." "What she said was "We mustn't rehearse these scenes too much."" "In comedy, I believe in endless, endless, endless rehearsal, just doing it again and again and again, because each time a little smoothness creeps in." "You discover something else, you find a new rhythm." "Jamie said to me "It isn't like that with romantic scenes."" "Cos there's just about no laughs in this." "There's a smile or two." "But we had to have a sort of really-falling-in-love kind of scene." "She said "We don't want to rehearse."" "And she'd catch me sitting in the corner, running the lines, and she'd wave her finger at me and say "No"." "So for the first time in my life I suddenly found that acting was not about this strict rhythm that comedy demands." "Like, I had no idea she was going to put this wig on like that." "It was rather fun, because when you're playing comedy, normally, the demands of the timing are so great that it sometimes seems to me as though there's some huge metronome" "at the back of my head just clicking, and I've gotta do everything on the click." "You know, I've gotta do the line on two clicks." "Another line, one click." "Another line, three clicks." "Turn head on second click." "And I get it very, very, very grooved, and I can reproduce almost exactly the same performance again and again." "It surprises people, but I'm a very technical performer." "So I found that going into these scenes with Jamie, not quite knowing how we were gonna play them, was intensely liberating." "I was suddenly released from the metronome, and just able to play in the moment." "I suddenly thought "This kind of acting's rather fun,"" "because rather like Kevin's performances I mentioned earlier," "I didn't know what I was gonna do during the scene." "Sometimes you do the right thing, sometimes something inappropriate." "Only the director and editor see those, nobody else." "So I began to enjoy this." "It was like being in a little rowboat, and pushing off from the shore, and then throwing the oar away." "There was a problem writing this scene, a big cultural difference between England and America." "I realised after talking to a lot of lawyers that in England," "Archie would actually be making the presumption that his client was innocent, whereas in America, the presumption would be the opposite, which was that George Thomason was guilty." "And so we needed to get that confusion... possible confusion in the audience's mind sorted out, which is one of the main reasons for the length of this scene." "Then we have to establish that Jamie's attempt to find out the information from Archie is totally unacceptable in English law, because once Archie discovers that she is connected to George, whom Archie is defending, then he absolutely is not able to speak to her." "It would be professional suicide." "I like the way that Jamie's character at this point - she's so smart this character, like Jamie " "she immediately realises she's got to change tack, which she does seamlessly." "And what's funny about this is you don't see the join." "It is seamless." "I found it very difficult to play this right, and, erm... they had to cut off me at that point cos I started to smile." "That was the only take I got it right on." "And I knew I'd got it right, and I started to smirk out of pure self-satisfaction, so the editor had to come off that shot a little early." "Now, again, all this kind of nonsense is invented by Kevin." "But he invents it very easily, because he does move with extraordinary precision and grace." "And it's very helpful for this scene, because Jamie, I felt, as the writer, needed to come in and tell Kevin what had been going on, so that we kind of know how much Kevin knows," "but it's boring, because the audience is aware of everything." "So it's enormously helpful that Kevin is up to this ridiculous nonsense, which entertains the audience while we give them almost redundant information." "And the idea of contrasting the courtship behaviour of Kevin and Jamie with what goes on in the Archie Leach household occurred to us quite late, and Kevin and Jamie had already shot their stuff, and Maria and I pretty much improvised the English end of it." "I think Jamie looks so beautiful in that shot." "And she wasn't feeling great that day, which is amazing." "But she's a terrific pro, and she'll always give it her best shot." "I love the way Maria starts folding up that shirt." "Kevin, of course, improvised this, and then on the soundtrack" "John put in the horns when he was scoring the music." "As I said, that sniffing the armpit was improvised when Kevin and I were rehearsing." "We met up for a few days on a Caribbean island, if you can believe that, and a lot of this stuff started to emerge as we got deeper into the character." "I don't like, usually, leaving stuff to the last minute and hoping to improvise it properly." "But on this occasion we had a feeling we were getting it right, so it was rather fun." "And this remains almost my favourite moment in the entire movie." "I think Kevin's expression here is just wondrous." "It's very naughty, really, but no one ever objected." "Good night, Wanda." "Good night, who?" "I like this moment, obviously, because it just tells us how obsessed he's becoming." "This is very much a plot scene, and very much peopled by actors that I've worked with before." "It gives me great pleasure to see them." "Michael Percival, who was one of the great farce actors, and playing an almost completely straight role here." "John Bird sitting there at the front." "One of the great satirists, who, in the early '60s, was famous for his impersonation of Harold Wilson, who was the prime minister then." "And John is still doing the best satire on British television 40 years later." "There's Ken Campbell again, one of my favourites, who did a wonderful performance in an episode of Fawlty Towers." "The great thing about having these people on set is you're really fond of them." "They, hopefully, are fond of you, and you just get on with the work." "You don't have to worry about the fact that they're nervous, or maybe they've got a big ego, and you have to find out how big it is and work round it." "Working with friends, it's just kind of..." "It's easy." "Now we know what's going on." "That got a huge, huge laugh in England, where "bugger" is a very soft, friendly, warm, strangely inoffensive word." "In America, it's got a harder edge to it, and it bothered the audiences more." "This was Kevin improvising." "This is Andrew MacLachlan, who some of you may recognise from Life of Brian, where he played many roles, including a wonderful scene as a Roman centurion." "We decided that that bursting into tears there would be kind of done badly, but still quite good enough to fool Archie." "Now we come to the scenes where Michael is trying to kill the old woman." "One of the difficulties I had in constructing the movie was what both Michael and Kevin were going to do in the middle of the movie." "I knew what was happening at the beginning with them, and at the end, and I knew what was happening in the middle between me and Jamie, but the puzzle was "What was Ken up to?" And "What was Otto up to?"" "And I tried at the very beginning to create a totally separate thread of the story for Kevin," "but I discovered it didn't work or go anywhere, so I abandoned those scenes." "Then I got the idea that he would be extremely jealous of what was going on between my character and Jamie." "And from then on, every time I wrote a romantic scene with me and Jamie," "I put Kevin in the background being jealous." "That took care of what Kevin's character was up to." "Now, this is the beginning of one of my favourite sequences in the movie, because I've always had a terrible weakness for farce." "I should add "for good farce"." "There's nothing worse than bad farce." "Bad farce is where none of the characters are believable at all." "But I do love it when relatively sane, ordinary, respectable people get in situations in which they are maximally stressed and start behaving more and more oddly - favourite form of my comedy." "Some of the happiest nights of my life have been spent at the National Theatre in London watching Feydeau farces." "When I started to write this sequence," "I made a little map, almost a model of the set." "I got little figures and started moving them around." "In fact, at one point, I had Michael Palin's character, K-K-Ken, following these guys on his little moped, and he then got into the house in the big farce sequence." "But that didn't work out, unfortunately." "It would have been wonderful if it had." "But sometimes you just find if you just go over all the logical possibilities that certain apparently good ideas just don't lead anywhere, and it's rather sad when you have that moment." "So the idea that Jamie comes into the house to try and further her relationship with me - of course, only in order to get information out of me - that is the start of the farce sequence." "We've established that Maria and Portia, Maria's daughter, have had the puncture, so we kind of know that they are coming back." "But we forget that, and when they arrive, it's a small surprise because we have partially forgotten it." "What I like about this is that Jamie is absolutely charming and immensely alluring, and we know perfectly well that none of it's real, and that she's just there to try and get some information." "Archie's managed to convince himself that professionally it probably would be OK if they actually got together, provided, of course, that they don't discuss the only subject that Wanda is remotely interested in discussing." "I like the fact that Jamie is for ever postponing any moment of real sexuality." "At the same time, we get the feeling she doesn't actually dislike Archie." "She doesn't find him utterly horrible and repulsive, she's just not actually attracted to him." "Which means that when she decides later on that he is actually rather nice and maybe she is interested in him, it's not too much of a change of direction." "Now, we had to go to this shot because there was a sequence of shots involving Kevin outside that we cut in the original, and the only way we could use the shots of Kevin was coming to them very late on." "And that's why we started on that shot of me embracing Jamie when we came to edit the movie." "Incidentally, Jamie thought I was a rotten kisser, and I did actually point out to her that I was trying to kiss in character," "because I don't think Archie's a very sexy man." "Whereas, of course, I am enormously so." "This gives Jamie the chance to, first of all, reveal her real attitude towards the lovemaking, and, secondly, to be able to see Kevin coming in." "And I just love this sequence now, and the way that Kevin is kind of directing her." "What I love about Jamie's character is that she never, ever is telling the truth." "In fact, there is a moment in a later scene where I remember putting in brackets on one line "She is telling the truth", meaning, really, it's the first time in the movie at that point" "that she's said something that she actually means." "This is a very hard type of scene to shoot." "People have always agreed farce is wonderful on stage because you can see everything." "It's very hard in movies because you start, inevitably, moving to close-ups." "But notice how economical Charlie is here." "I mean, there hasn't been a cut for what... 15, 20, 25 seconds?" "That's to remind the audience that there's lots of stuff that has to be cleared up." "Now Archie has the worst moment of his life." "Now Jamie's realised that she's dropped the little locket." "And this is my favourite moment in the entire movie, when Kevin comes in and actually helps me out of this situation, claiming some kind of acquaintanceship, which, of course, I have no knowledge of." "I find this a really, really funny performance, where Kevin's stupidity totally takes over from any cunning that he may have as a result of a genetic inheritance." "Not unless you're congenitally insane or irretrievably stupid, no." "Don't call me stupid." ""Don't call me stupid" was something that came out of rehearsal." "When we realised how funny it was, we scattered it liberally through the movie." "Again, look at the economy with which this is shot." "My daughter, at this stage, was still at school, and she handled these scenes with Kevin and Jamie with extraordinary aplomb." "She just walked on the set, and Charlie told her what to do, and she just did it." "And I was standing in the..." "in the background, kind of watching, and I'm just amazed at how calm and professional she was." "I liked this moment, of course, because the "W", or the "wuh", as Maria calls it, enables her to think that it has been purchased for her." "It's one of those little felicities that gradually emerge if you stay with a script long enough." "One of the problems with scripts now is that people have to write first drafts in ten weeks, and the studio heads can't wait to get the first draft and give their notes." "Nothing ever gets the chance to marinate." "The great thing about good comedy is that there's an awful lot of levels and an awful lot of stuff in them." "And the way that studio executives work, a function of their anxiety, trying to get scripts immediately, means that there just isn't the time to let them marinate in the writer's mind for the sort of periods that are necessary." "I love the way Maria plays this." "Quite clearly, last night intimacy took place, probably for the first time for three decades." "Now we come to the other thread of the story in the middle of the movie." "And the idea that Michael's character, Ken, was trying to kill the old lady came to me as the last funny structural idea that I had." "And I reached it by pure logic." "I could not think what Michael was up to in the middle of the movie." "I remember, my wife at the time, Barbara, and I took a house in Malibu to get away from the English winter, and I sat there, and for two weeks I thought" ""What is Michael Palin's character going to do in the middle of the movie?"" "And I slowly got there by starting from the fact that he would be trying to kill the old lady." "Then I thought every time he tries, something else happens." "Then I thought" ""What's he gonna kill instead?" "Obviously a pet." Then I got to dogs." "Then I thought "OK." "That's much funnier and more ironic if Michael is an animal-rights activist."" "And so the whole thing was constructed entirely logically." "One of the things I often say to people when I do comedy classes for students is very frequently the funny idea is inherent in what you've already got." "You don't have to have a new idea." "You just have to try and examine as closely as possible the nature of what you already have, and try and see what might be missing." "Now, in order to keep Kevin busy in the middle of the movie, via his jealousy, he now has to get a bit of information about where Archie and Wanda are gonna meet next time." "One great thing about working with Jamie is that she just doesn't care what she looks like." "This is a very ordinary scene." "It's perfectly OK, not badly written or anything, but it is transported into being a very funny scene by Maria, who is magnificent." "Now, this is our first visit to this beautiful apartment by the Thames that was in sight of Tower Bridge." "And the first time, here, we get the fun out of the fact that Otto knows where Jamie's coming." "Jamie's wonderful at doing those little things, little bits of private behaviour that people indulge in when they're not being watched by people." "She's always coming up with those kind of things." "We needed this scene to move the relationship forward between Archie and Wanda." "She's gone there, after all, because she thinks that she's gonna get the locket." "But she's actually quite liking Archie." "He's a decent guy, so easily manipulated." "She's feeling friendly towards him." "I think if he gave her the locket, she'd probably give him one in return." "And where are they?" "Hong Kong." "Ah so." "The reason I set this up about the people being in Hong Kong is that in the next sequence that's set in this... in this apartment, when the family come in when I'm stark-naked, it's based on something that happened to a friend of mine." "But here we wanna see them getting on much better." "And for the first time, we see her relaxing in his company and actually saying one or two things that she genuinely means." "And since the only reason that I could think why Jamie would be at all attracted or, you know, not exactly attracted, but wouldn't find Archie relatively repellent - as one critic said "I've seen more attractive farm animals than Cleese" " "then I thought that the fact that they laughed together would make the fact that some kind of incipient relationship between them was beginning to bloom more believable." "And this speech about the English is probably the most personal thing I've ever put in a movie." "I think it's true to say about the English that their main aim in life, at least the lower-middle class that I came from, is to get safely into their graves without ever having being seriously embarrassed." "What I love about the economy of the way Charlie shoots this is just notice how few cuts there are." "Kevin is coming up with all sorts of stuff in the background." "The idea of the stethoscope which he produces in a moment is entirely his." "But, you know, most directors, I think, would be cutting to close-ups of Kevin, which to my mind is a bit like underlining a joke in the text." "And now, of course, in terms of plot we have to make it clear that Jamie is still only interested in Archie inasmuch as he can get her the locket." "Notice there still aren't any cuts." "Now there's a cut, but that's mainly because we couldn't really get Kevin into the position from which he could make his next entrance without a cut." "I think otherwise Charlie would have liked to have panned back onto Jamie." "So we have a couple of cuts here." "Now you can feel they genuinely like each other." "This is where there's a line in the script that says after Jamie's line" ""She is not lying"." "Now we come to the bit, of course, where Kevin dangles me out of the window." "And I have to tell you, I've never learned a speech in my life as... as carefully as I learned that speech once I realised I was going to be hanging upside down for 30 seconds." "There is a moment here when Kevin said something very, very rude to me and I said "You're a real vulgarian, aren't you?"" "And he said "I've never even been there", which I thought was funny, and nobody else did." "I kept trying to hang on to that line and eventually it had to be cut." "You're a true vulgarian, aren't you?" "You're the vulgarian, you fuck!" "Now apologise!" ""You're the vulgarian, you fuck" was a much funnier line and got a big laugh." "As I say, I knew this speech." "I'd been rehearsing it about six weeks." "I'd also rehearsed hanging upside down, which is quite unpleasant when you first start doing it." "You feel a bit sick after a few minutes." "And they had a marvellous arrangement here, by which they were able to push out a platform from the window below, the one you can see behind my head now." "After we'd done a couple of takes they'd push it out, and they were able to lower me onto it." "I had a body harness on and steel wires up both legs - two wires, not one " "and by that method, they were able to lower me down onto the platform below, and then pull the platform out and lift me up again when we needed to do takes." "Now, of course, we're back to Michael Palin having a go at the second dog, although he doesn't know it, and there's Patricia Hayes being rude to pedestrians." "And it is extraordinary once someone is established as being unpleasant, the audience has no problems at all with them being killed." "Charlie and I made a big mistake here because once we went to the close-up of the squashed dog..." "In the original close-up, Charlie had got a bucket of innards from a local butchers and had lovingly arranged them round the dog." "And when we started previews, the audience absolutely froze, and the laughter stuck in their throat." "So we shot that other close-up that you've just seen, which doesn't look like a squashed dog if you look for over three seconds." "It looks like it's made of raffia." "But anyway, it did not bother the audience and so they went on laughing." "And this was a scene that we actually reshot." "We had it indoors originally, and it was absolutely wonderful in rehearsal." "Jamie was very low-key and extraordinarily funny." "But because of the way Charlie staged it - and we all make mistakes - he put Kevin foreground punching a big punch bag." "That made Jamie's performance in the background too low-key." "She had to try and bring it up and it didn't work so well." "So we reshot it and she said "Can I go into it on lots of energy?"" "And we shot this almost the last thing in the movie, the reshoot, down by the river." "And she was on a roll, and we were able to do all these insult jokes, which I had lovingly culled from various sources." "I had a friend called Glenn Palmer-Smith in New York City who sent me good gags, mainly the anti-British gags that Kevin came up with." "But we put all these gags together and gave them to Jamie, who was absolutely on a roll this day." "Those are all mistakes." "I looked 'em up." "I like the fact that she looked them up." "So what are you gonna do about it, huh?" "What would an intellectual do?" "What would Plato do?" " (mumbles) Apol..." " Pardon me?" "Apolo..." "It's so hard for someone with an ego like Otto to apologise." "And I thought it was a funny situation, and I wrote several short scenes about Otto practising apologising." "And we dumped them all and just came straight to this." "Oh, I'm so very, very, very, very s..." "Fuck you!" "I'm s..." "When you get a funny idea you can make the mistake of trying to get too many laughs out of it." "And every funny idea has only so many laughs in it, and that's the number you should go for, not one more." "Just look at the way that Kevin gets into this position." "And look at this movement now." "Isn't that just amazing?" "Now, this was almost the most original idea in the movie, I think, which was Archie burgling himself" "and then being caught by Otto, who, of course, doesn't have an honest bone in his body..." "But because he's trying to do something to gain Archie's favour, he intercedes and attacks Archie." "I like that bit of construction." "And nice, also, that Archie's a barrister." "There's a little moment coming up that I'm fond of here." "Some knick-knack... that Maria Aitken's character has bought - there - which Archie has always hated and now has a chance to destroy anonymously." "The great problem with shooting this part of the movie was that Kevin would do this fine, but once he got the bedpan, he absolutely would not hit me hard enough." "And in the end, after four or five takes, and I'd managed to get a particular skullcap that the rugby players wear when they're playing in the scrum, of course, I couldn't see what was going on," "and I had this odd feeling that he wasn't hitting me quite hard enough." "We were gonna print a take, and I said to the first assistant, Jonathan Benson, who's an old friend of mine, we've been on several movies together, and just before we broke the set up and moved on to the next shot," "I said to Jonathan "Did he hit me hard enough?"" "There was that moment in his face when I knew he didn't want to cause trouble." "But he hadn't hit me hard enough and, thank God, I said "OK, let's do one more,"" "and that's where Kevin really clunked me with that bedpan." "And, of course, it didn't hurt at all." "Now, I do love this bit." "Again, as a writer, the fact that he is trying to apologise and loses his temper in the middle of it, I think that's a nice conceit." "A wonderful bit of Pink Panther acting from Kevin there." "Archie realises he's only got a few seconds to get that locket back, or else... it's all gonna be right back at first base and he won't have achieved anything at all." "Johnny Jympson did a wonderful cheat in the editing." "Look at these three shots." "This is the middle one." "They don't cut, and yet they look as though they do." "It's one of those things a great editor can do." "Your father has finally gone completely mental." "I wish we'd done a better line there." "We never quite got the line right." "This is the sequence I mentioned earlier that's based on something that actually happened to a friend of mine." "They loaned him a key to their apartment, said that they hardly ever used it and if he ever needed a place in London, he could use it to change for a black-tie event, and exactly that happened a few months later." "What they had omitted to tell him was that, in the meantime, they had sold the apartment." "They'd forgotten they'd given him the key." "So the result of this was that he used the apartment one night, thinking that he was a welcome guest." "After the black-tie, he came back, poured himself a whisky, and was having a bath when the family who'd bought the apartment from his friend walked in and were very surprised to discover there was someone in the bathroom that they'd never set eyes on before." "And so I owe my good friend Alan Hutchison the inspiration for this scene." "The great thing about romantic comedy is that, at least until consummation, there's a kind of tension between the characters, and the audience is thinking "Will they, won't they?"" "And it enables you to stop the jokes for a bit and take the pace down, without losing a little bit of tension on-screen and without the audience losing interest." "That's why romantic comedy's such an attractive genre, cos you can have very, very funny sequences, but you can also have these low-key sequences that enable the pace to come down, which somehow makes the comedy funnier once you get back to it." "I've always thought Russian's the most beautiful language ever, so it occurred to me fairly naturally that Archie would be fluent in it and that Jamie would find it even more of a turn-on than she finds Italian." "Now, when we came to shoot this scene," "Jamie started doing stuff we'd not talked about in rehearsal." "It was so funny, and had such a wonderful reaction when we started showing it to the audience, that we actually extended the Lermontov poem that I'd learned by an extra verse, and Johnny Jympson, the editor, was able to use the footage we had." "We didn't shoot anything else, but he was able to double the length of it by, as I say, using the footage that we had" "and using my voice mouthing Lermontov." "And now, of course, we come to one of the big laughs in the movie and..." "I had spent a few months trying to get fit because I didn't want to look too disgusting." "And Jeremy Child comes in, another English actor that I know well." "And the two little girls." "The little girl on the right is Sophie Johnstone, daughter of a very close friend of mine that I wrote Fierce Creatures with, and she's absolutely adorable, and has just finished at Oxford." "This flat belongs to Patrick Balfour." "He's in Hong Kong and he lent me the key." "Now get out!" "But we leased it from the agents last weekend." "As a lawyer, Archie realises, perhaps more quickly than most people would, that he's now not on very firm ground." "And now the ultimate embarrassment - his anonymity is gone." "You bought our house in Lissendon Gardens." "Hazel and Ian Johnson." "What a coincidence!" "Ha." "How nice to see you." "This is the only bit of sad acting that I've ever done." "I actually did one really good take and got a tear in my eye, to my surprise." "But as I turned I hit a bit of Styrofoam that was being held by one of the guys that was on the lighting crew, and we couldn't use the take." "Otherwise I would have had one moment in my life when I cried on the screen." "And we had a completely different gag at this moment, and this was part of the reshoot that came because of some helpful advice we got." "We showed the movie in Los Angeles at one point, and Robert Towne, the great screenwriter, was terribly kind." "Came up afterwards and he said" ""The relationship between Archie and Wanda needs to be warmed up a bit."" "He advised us to do one cut, which we did immediately." "And we put this scene in in the reshoot so that we realised that Jamie was actually beginning to like Archie." "And I like the fact that this is the saddest day of Archie's life, and yet, when he gets back home, Otto is waiting for him." "Otto is going to apologise again." "I remember we had great fun shooting this, obviously after dark, and I felt it was a very good scene, and we had a lot of fun shooting it." "And I remember that three-quarters of the way through the evening, the DP, or lighting cameraman, Alan Hume, whom I liked enormously, just said very quietly to me "I think this film is gonna be funny."" "And it was very funny, because it was about over halfway through, and the fact that Alan had reached the conclusion that it might be funny at such a late point cheered me up enormously." "It was my fault." " That's true." " Yeah." "I love the fact that Archie's so terrified that he admits it was his fault, and then, of course, that's the way, really, that Otto sees it." "Now we come back to the third killing, and we shot this, I think, quite early on in the movie." "And I think it's fair to say that Charlie Crichton was more worried about how he was going to shoot this particular sequence than any other sequence in the movie." "And I remember there was a massive amount of storyboarding, and he was noticeably more relaxed after he'd shot this scene." "The fact that the model dog moves its head just before the block falls on it makes this nearly perfect, and I love the prolonged take that Patricia Hayes does at this point, without realising where the dog has gone." "Charlie was quite anxious shooting this, and at one stage I made a suggestion to the crowd" "about how they should be reacting at this point." "And Charlie looked at me and said simply "Fuck off"." "So I wandered quietly away, and he directed them instead." "And I like the fact that Michael is so happy." "But when I originally got the idea for this sequence, I was very worried about whether the audience would accept Michael trying to kill the old woman." "And during the entire time that I was out publicising the movie and going to screenings and all this kind of thing, not a single person was worried by the fact that this lovable animal-rights activist spent most of the movie trying to kill an old woman." "What did upset them was when Kevin started eating his fish." "This shows how completely scrambled audience morality is in the movies, and how hard it is to guess what's going to worry 'em," "and indeed, to be sure that other things that may seem offensive when you start writing them don't worry them at all." "So now we come into the scene that caused quite a lot of trouble, and when Kevin started to push the French fries - the "chips" as we'd say in England - up Michael's nose," "the audience became very, very distressed." "Because when Kevin put the apple in Michael's mouth, they really started to worry about whether Michael could breathe properly, which is extraordinary when you think that it is a movie, and the whole thing does consist of a series of cuts that are cut together," "and that this man was trying to kill an old woman for most of the movie." "But no, no." "That doesn't matter." "They thought that Michael couldn't breathe very well." "When I saw these scenes, particularly when he had the apple in his mouth, in rushes, I have never laughed so much in my life." "I thought this is the funniest... quite simply the funniest sequence that I've ever, ever seen." "It was a considerable disappointment, when we started playing it to audiences, to discover that it distressed them, and that we had to keep shortening it." "They worried about the chip up the nose - the old woman dead, no problem, but a chip up the nose..." "We actually did a publicity photograph after the movie had opened in New York in which I had chips put up my nose," "because I said I wouldn't want any actor in a movie I had anything to do with to do any stunt that I was not prepared to do myself." "And I remember saying, you know, the Gestapo were unpleasant people, but they really didn't put chips up people's noses." "It's not that bad." "The trouble is, Michael is just kind of lovable." "I don't think it would matter if you cast him as Martin Bormann." "Everyone would worry if anyone did anything the slightest bit unpleasant to him." "Now, I used to keep tropical fish, and I was actually really fond of them." "But the truth is, you don't form close personal attachments with them." "It's relatively unusual for them to be named." "What's this one's name?" "Well, not Wanda, anyway." "I'm going to call her Lunch." "So it's a function of Michael's great love for animals that he experiences such personal pain at the sight of them being eaten, because if you keep fish, they die all the time and you replace them." "We're just establishing here, obviously, that the Crown case is not that strong." "People couldn't stand to see Michael Palin suffer." "I suppose it's slightly disgusting." "I love the way that they play this." "It's completely real." "It's absolutely insane and it is completely real." "Oh, it's a pear, not an apple." "Now, I would have played about 20 seconds on Palin." "At an early screening, somebody said "It distressed me a bit, that shot."" "It was a friend of a friend, invited for a private screening." "And I was very puzzled." "I thought "Why?"" "Then they said "I did suffer from asthma as a boy."" "So I thought it was a personal worry and didn't take any notice, but when we started showing it to audiences, we discovered they were too distressed by the fact that Michael might not be able to breathe." "I love the way she goes all innocent and virginal now." "This is Geoffrey Palmer, one of the best funny actors that we have in England." "I've had the good fortune to work with him on several occasions." "He's a doctor in Fawlty Towers who wants his sausages, if anyone remembers that episode." "Now, this is the moment when she obviously dumps George, and that sets off the big chase with which we ended the movie." "And one of the reasons it sets off the chase is, of course, that in this scene" "Archie, in front of his wife, Wendy, makes it entirely clear that all Wendy's worst suspicions are true, which helps Archie realise he's burned his boats." "And that's what enables a fellow, a sort of decent and respectable... yearning for respectability from all his friends and relations..." "It gives him the impulse to go to South America." "Again, notice the small number of cuts here." "That's David Simeon shouting "Clear the court"." "Another old friend of mine." "I prefer it so much more when the shots in this kind of montage are held for longer because you see more of what's going on, it's not just created in the cutting room." "But it's much harder to do, because every setup has gotta have one really good take, and it's easier not to bother about whether the takes are that good, and then to chop it about much faster, have a much faster rhythm of cutting." "But I don't find it as satisfactory." "I love it when the shots themselves are a little more substantial." "You can stick this marriage right in your bottom!" "And I love the fact that in the height of fury," "Maria's character, Wendy, finally uses bad language and has absolutely no idea what to say." "This is breaking one of the rules of comedy, which is that when heroes or protagonists really change direction, they should do so primarily from their own volition, rather than having it forced on them by circumstances." "If that's the case, they kind of get credit for actually doing it." "What really happens to Archie here is that he's pretty much forced into giving up his present life because he begins to realise that it's lying in tatters." "And so the audience buys the fact that it is believable that he will leave, but they know he's such an inhibited guy that he would never really do so unless circumstances forced him." "Now, what I like about Tom Georgeson, or George Thomason, is that this is a man who has never trusted anyone." "And just because a barrister, dressed correctly, stands in front of him asking him questions, he doesn't believe any more that he is likely to be honest" "than cockney villains he's mixed with." "In addition, of course, he's just observed the behaviour in the court." "I remember really enjoying doing these action-hero scenes, you know, jumping into cars and driving off fast and thinking what fun it was." "Also, to be perfectly honest, how much easier it was than comedy." "There's a moment of symbolism for cineastes." "Several of these shots we did later on in the reshoot section." "We reshot twice, but this stuff with Jamie, we had quite a lot of difficulty with, as we did with the ending of the film in general." "So this was all reshot in something like January or February the following year, and you may notice there's rather less greenery around than there is in some of the other shots." "But this is the moment - and Jamie does it so well - when she shows she cares." "I never know if these kind of scenes work, but they're certainly necessary." "As a sort of actor and writer, you're absolutely the last person on earth to be able to tell whether they do work." "Anything like this makes me embarrassed." "I've never been there." "I don't know if it's awful or not." "So this is where you really have to rely on people saying "Yeah, it's OK, it really is."" "But the trouble is action hero." "I come out looking like a demented stick insect, and five seconds later, Kevin's in there moving so beautifully." "It's just as well I didn't try to be an action hero." "Now, when I was thinking of the story of Wanda, this was the first scene that I thought of." "English audiences fell about, seeing someone use a gun in that situation." "It didn't get much of a laugh in America." "But we're back to the scene, and when I sat with Charlie on the first day," "I said "I want to have a scene where a man with a very bad stutter is trying to tell someone some very important information, but he just cannot get it out."" "And Charlie said "All right." "We can do that, and I've got one scene I wanna do."" ""I wanna run someone over with a steamroller."" "So those were the two scenes that we started with." "Hotel." "Hotel?" "Which hotel?" "Ca..." "The Ca..." "The Ca..." " The..." " Goon." "Ca-ca-ca..." "All right." "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait." "Of course, when you've got a scene like this, the attitude of my character, even though I'm not really being funny, is terribly important in establishing the right balance with Michael's character." "If my attitude was wrong, Michael wouldn't be so funny." "So much comedy is about the interplay between two people, which is why I love two shots rather than close-ups so that you can watch..." "Even at a favoured or unfavourable angle, you can watch both people." "This is so much funnier in a series of two shots intercut than it would ever be on close-up." "Michael's performance is magnificent, and the only reason it's so good was that he was able to study a stutterer, his dad, all those years." "This was the beginning of the second half of the scene, and this close-up and this little bit of the scene you're watching now was shot much, much later, because the original second half of this scene," "which read wonderfully on the page, didn't work when we shot it." "So we cut it and reshot this very much shorter scene to get them going to the airport." "A problem with comedy is not necessarily "Is the scene funny?"" "But "Is it the right scene?"" "Stephen Sondheim was talking to William Goldman and he said "Bill, I'm not likely at this stage of my life to write a bad song, but I may write the wrong song."" "And what he's saying is that the demands of narrative are so strong that you may write a scene, in this case a film like A Fish Called Wanda, a funny scene which is really, really, really funny." "But if it holds the action up, and the audience wants you to move towards the resolution of the movie, they're not gonna laugh, it's gonna irritate them." "So you have to start dumping scenes left, right, and centre, which seemed to work at the time that you shot them and edited them." "You discover, by showing to the audience, they just don't want that scene at that point." "They want to get on with the story." "Kevin does a little bit of business there." "Look how absolutely expert that is." "Do you have any idea how difficult that is to do?" "British Airways were nice to us." "They let us shoot here, and they also let us go out on the Tarmac and shoot in one of their planes, and it was very, very generous-spirited of them." "So now we see Jamie's heading for home, and we're into a classic chase sequence, everybody chasing everyone else." "We have to get Kevin Kline out of the cupboard or else he would be out of the proceedings." "This was reshot when Robert Towne said we had to warm the relationship up between Archie and Wanda." "We wanted to show that Wanda, though she was looking after number one, really did want Archie on the plane with her." "Now we have to get a boarding pass for Otto, so we got our friend Stephen Fry to help out." "There's a weakness here but no one's noticed it, so I'm blowing the gaff, as they say in England." "Here is Archie, and he's got a gun, and he's really got Otto, apparently, where he wants him." "And yet Otto taunts him into putting the gun down to engage in fisticuffs, and yet everyone forgets that the last time these two tangled, my character finished up dangling upside down out of a window." "So why he suddenly thinks that he has a chance against Otto, I don't know, but it's one of those plot inconsistencies you get away with because the audience simply doesn't notice." "The fact that Archie says he used to box for his university seems to validate it." "One of the reasons that there was so much abuse of the English by Kevin was to set up the anti-American outburst, all the references to the Vietnam War, that Archie allows himself towards the end of the movie." "Funnily enough, I was very worried about how it would go down in America, but actually, the Americans didn't mind at all." "I think they felt Archie had been so humiliated throughout the movie by this awful Otto that they were prepared to forgive Archie the jokes at the expense of Vietnam." "This was the bit Charlie had always wanted to shoot." "That's a rubber wheelbarrow, in case you wonder." "And as I said, this is the sequence that Charlie always wanted to shoot." "I won't say it was a childhood ambition of his, but when we sat down to write the movie, this was the one he wanted, somebody being run over by a steamroller." "And what is kind of funny about it is the sheer slowness of the approach." "Of course, the big problem in making the joke work is to make it believable that Kevin walks into concrete and it sets about his boots quickly enough to mean that he cannot escape from the somewhat gradual onrush of the steamroller." "So this is the bit that we argued about a lot, and I remember MGM wanted us to put up a sign saying "Danger, wet concrete"." "I think we just about got away with it the way we shot it, but it was the hardest single..." "Almost any great comedy sequence, and I think this is a great comedy sequence, there's always some kind of slight weakness, and you've somehow got to either direct the audience's attention away from it or give them just enough justification for them to buy it." "So Michael, having killed the old woman, is now going to run Kevin over with a steamroller because he ate his fish." "But no matter." "Everyone still loves Michael's character." "Because anyone would have done the same in these circumstances, I assume." "This is one of my favourite lines." "OK, you have the guts." "Good." "Wait!" "This was a great bit of shooting, and there was a huge slot down the middle of the front roller" "that you might be able to see there." "That enabled Kevin to do most of the take, although a great stuntman called Chris did the rest of it, and it's one of the most alarming stunts I've ever seen, disappearing under that." "Hey, I've lost my stutter." "I love this moment that Michael finally has got his aggression out and has totally lost his stutter." "In the original version, there was a Kevin-shaped strawberry patch in the concrete, but the audience didn't want Kevin killed, cos he was only a murderous psychopath and they'd come to like him." "So in the reshoots, we found a way of incorporating him right at the end." "And we shot this last scene about three times." "We shot it at the start, and it was quite feeble, really, then shot a second version, which was less embarrassing but still wasn't good." "We shot this finally when we did the reshoots in January or February of the following year." "And this moment of complete silliness here, you can get away with, right at the end of a movie." "If this was not the last scene you couldn't get away with it, because it's just too ridiculous and that means you can't follow it." "No scene could follow this, it would just be too ridiculous." "And off Archie goes to South America, and nobody has ever been bothered about the fact that he's left his daughter behind." "And I like putting these little jokes up at the end, although I have to say, the one about Otto is a little out-of-date now." "Well, I haven't watched this for many years, and I've got to say I got some good smiles watching it again, so I hope you enjoyed it." "I love the use of the saxophones here." "I'd never realised what a gorgeous instrument it was, and then John Du Prez scored it for the sax, and it just hits the right note." "So many people to thank." "Priscilla John I worked with many times before, just terrific on the casting." "Neil Binney, the operator, just the nicest man in the world, and a great operator, someone you can work with so closely." "Simon, focus puller, who after a thousand shots came and apologised to me cos he got one out of focus." "I said to him "You know, Simon, I think after a thousand, you're entitled to get one wrong."" "Diana Dill was a pleasure to have, on continuity." "George Gibbs." "Hazel Pethig, who did the Python series, so lovely." "Paul Engelen I've worked with several times." "Lovely to be with people you enjoy." "David Skynner, the son of Robin Skynner, with whom I wrote, or co-wrote, the psychiatry books." "Romo Gorrara." "All these lovely people, it's so nice to see them again." "It was a very happy production." "We did it in 52 days, plus I guess the reshoots." "And Charlie was so efficient." "We used to finish at 6.30 every night and nobody got too tired, and we really all had a rather good time, and I think that contributes to the good spirit that you see up there, on the screen."