"The blue Screen Gems logo is important." "Screen Gems always has a red logo and our movie is very blue, and so..." "I'm Scott Stewart, the director." "I'm Maggie Q, the actor." "I'm Paul Bettany." "The actress." "And I'm Cory Goodman, the writer." "We start the movie in the Sola Mira hive, in a sequence that..." "And there's an extended version of it, hopefully on the DVD, where you'll see the whole thing, but this was a choice late in the game to..." "The movie originally starts with the prologue, the animated prologue, and Bob Murawski, our..." "We had two editors, Lisa Churgin and Bob Murawski." "Bob came on late in the movie, and he was Sam Raimi's editor." "Edited the Spider-Man movies, and won an Oscar for Hurt Locker." "And he came up with this very smart idea about taking this scene, which was originally a flashback in the movie, and moving it to the very beginning of the story." "And making it a more, sort of, linear story." "Yeah." "I think it was very important, you know, in showing the film to people." "We actually have quite a lot of setup before we get to our main character, and this was an important way of setting up the major," "sort of key relationships in the film." "Yeah." "It's not just the origin of Black Hat, but it's also really the defining moment for Priest, ofwhat he's trying to deal with." "And, Cory, you'd had that scene, you had moved it around to various different places in the various different scripts." "Yeah, it was always tough to kind of shoehorn and find just the right spot, and, in the end, it seems like you guys came up with the right answer." "Here you're seeing this wonderful animated prologue, collaborated with Genndy Tartakovsky, who, for fans out there, created Samurai Jack, and the 2D version of Star Wars:" "Clone Wars, and Dexter's Lab." "And when I got involved in the project," "I gathered it had been in development for some years, and I gathered all of Cory's scripts..." "I loved the script, and I went back to the original spec that had sold, and this scene, in some form, was described visually." "The first draft I had been given, it was just a scroll on the screen, which would seem to indicate that the history of the world was something that was a little too expensive for us to actually have in the movie." "And so I really wanted to do it," "I just feel like people always, you know, they just..." "Scrolls are cool, but we rarely ever read them." "One of the things that made me happy when you came aboard, someone had actually said, "Okay, now we can do the prologue."" "Right." "Yeah, so, we had worked on it and we had played around with it, moving through these various different time periods." "I love World War I, so I wanted to get that one in, as the aesthetics of that." "But the studio, when they first looked at it as a live action sequence, they said, "No way, it's many millions of dollars,"" "and I came back to them with this sneaky plan, and said, "lf I can do it for just several hundred thousand dollars," ""will you let me do it?" And they said, "We don't know how, but sure."" "And I came back to them and said, "We're gonna do it fully animated,"" "and that Genndy would do it." "And this is, stylistically..." "It's Genndy's style, but it's also, at the same time..." "There's Maggie's..." "That's his better version of Paul and I." "That's Maggie and Paul there." "God, we're good, aren't we?" "That's what Paul and I aspire to be." "There's..." "We are good." "There was a thing that we wanted to do, was to be able to..." "We thought it was a kind of an homage to the graphic novel in some respects, but still doing what..." "Cory, what you had done in the prologue, and to kind of setting up, which felt was really important, 'cause we're setting up a really, truly alternate world, and an alternate history of man and..." "And we think that..." "I love this shot." "This shot in 3D is particularly..." "ln 3D is so incredible." "And I'm so good in this moment." "You are so good." "Look at your arms." "My shoulders are amazing." "And that's an interesting thing, too, 'cause we wanted to try to turn the Priest tattoo into an icon, and the idea of the cross in a circle, that was another way of kind of pushing the world into an alternate world," "that the cross..." "The plus in the circle was almost like a corporate logo for the Church, more than it was necessarily a religious symbol." "Here we are with Stephen Moyer." "And hopefully available at your local Halloween store, coming up on Halloween." "As an iron-on." "The beautiful Mädchen Amick." "And this is the scene that begins the movie here, in the present of the story, and we looked at..." "Here's Lily Collins." "We looked at this design." "Richard Bridgland, our production designer, we looked at Dust Bowl era housing and a lot of sort of anachronisms for advanced technology." "We call it retro-futurism." "So there's all sorts of advanced technology here that looks like it's in the past." "Why no cell phones?" ""Why no cell..." That's a very good question." "You know, I mean, the exterior with the turbines and all that stuff," "I mean, it's definitely an homage to John Ford." "And when I first read the script, that very first scene, which was this in the script," "I immediately thought of Ford." "Maybe you can talk about that, Cory." "Yeah, I've been a big Western fan for many years, sort of the purity of the Western, these grand open vistas, with these sort of morality tales of good versus evil." "And my whole life, I've sort of been inspired by a number of different directors," "Ford definitely being one, and I also love what a lot of more modern directors brought to the old Western and sort of updating it, whether it be an urban setting or a sci-fi setting," "like what George Miller would do, and what not." "And I thought that could be a great world for us to kind of play around in, and make for some exciting visual scenes and characters." "There's another thing that happened here, which is that in earlier drafts of the script," "Lucy's character was actually a very young girl, and over the development process," "I saw that it became an 18-year-old girl, 17, 18-year old girl." "She grew up right before our eyes." "She did, which allowed her to be able to be a love interest for the Sheriff Hicks character, where initially, there was not that relationship." "One of my favorite props in the whole movie is this gun here." "Look at that, by Max Brehme." "And, Scott, I love this touch that you added with the basement beneath the house, and hiding Lucy down there, and it being seen from her point ofview, or rather not seen from her point of view, I think is a wonderful touch." "Cory, you know you can lie and say that you came up with it." "Oh, really?" "I'll totally give you credit for it." "Okay." "All me, all mine, all the time." "I thought that it would be interesting to see it..." "This is a great scream, by the way." "Yeah, the best scream." "It's Lily Collins' first scream on screen and in her career, and we were very impressed by it." "But I thought it was interesting to be able to play the scene and it almost had a kind of holocaust imagery, and we thought a lot about that stuff." "And the idea of the scene playing out on her face and just hearing it, because I knew later in the movie, I would add a scene where you actually got to see a family attacked and you would see it." "And there's something about imagining it that felt more exciting." "Love that shot." "Look at that scream!" "lt was great." "So this is one of the very first things" "I storyboarded, and it was directly from the script that Cory had written, this idea of a montage of images that suggest a city made of smoke stacks." "And then I pushed things a little bit more science fiction, with the electronic billboards and it's meant to be very retro-futuristic." "Once again, very industrial Revolution." "That was all from the script and we're just trying to heighten it." "Yeah, the idea that this is a world that has been given over to industry, and kind of forgotten sort of what made it, you know, what it meant to be human almost, in a way." "And I also put these electronic billboards and all these signs, and the feeling that the population is being constantly sloganeered," "and that we're in the Orelas era, the Christopher Plummer era, that he is the ruler of this place." "Here, once again..." "This was exciting for me." "This was my first time coming to the set, was this shot with Paul here, and walking through the city, and it was so exciting for me to see these things that had always been in my head," "and now here they were in front of me with all these people and this life that everyone had brought to it, especially Paul." "It's something that I'll never forget." "This was shot at Warner Brothers, in the back lot at Warner Brothers, and of course, definitely the place where Blade Runner and other dystopian cities were created." "I love the idea of these automated confessional booths." "It's so cool." "There was a..." "In the first version of the script I got, we just never saw what was inside the confessional booth, and then I read earlier drafts where there actually was a confessional scene, and I wanted to put it back in the movie, I thought, a movie called Priest" "with this guy and people confess all day long, we want to see..." "It was a perfect excuse for a character to just literally say, "This is what's troubling me."" "Right." "And I love Christopher Plummer's automated response." "It's how I feel on the phone all the time when I'm trying to contact customer service." "Yeah, I mean, in the..." "Or your agent." "In the full resolution version of this, hopefully you could see, you know, if people want to freeze-frame, they can look, there's a list of sins and you have a citizen code and all that." "So it's very, very Orwellian." "And, of course, Max Headroom was an influence here." "I mean, the idea of this automated, simulated clergy confessional." "Paul, that scar that I just saw on your neck, is that you, or is that the make-up department?" "That's my brilliant make-up artist, Veronica Brebner, who I've worked with for 10 years, and I just don't go anywhere without." "Now she's as much a part of creating the looks of characters that I've worked on as I am." "Her eye for detail..." "When you first go to the studio and say, "We wanna have nine, ten scars on the face,"" "everybody goes, "Oh, no!" "Not the lead, not our lead with scars."" "everybody goes, "Oh, no!" "Not the lead, not our lead with scars."" "But actually, it sort of creates this gritty feel that you, most of the time, you're not really..." "You know, I'm British, so I start from a butch deficit." "So it's kind of helpful to put some scars..." "B.D.D.?" "Yeah, exactly." "This is, you know..." "British Butch Deficit." "The scene in the elevator was actually a scene, when I got to that scene in the script, initially," "I knew I wanted to make this movie." "I loved it." "And one of the things that's really interesting about going from script to screen, you read it on the page and it said that the boy said, "Did it hurt?" in reference to the tattoo." "We realized that, while that was clear to us and clear on the page, that people might not know what that was, and so we actually had a conversation..." "It was an opportunity to turn it into a full scene where, because of the long pull out at the beginning, you realize that he's hiding in the corner and that people are talking about him, while he is like..." "It's like the homeless man or the Vietnam vet on the bus." "It was that sort of idea that mom and the kid are having a conversation" "like, "Stay away from him," and, "What is that on his face?"" "Because that was something that was not familiar to young people in the generation that came after the war." "And so we actually extended it even more to include the idea that the mother says, "We don't talk to Priests."" "Yeah, I wrote that line." "Originally, that scene that we just had with Cam approaching Priest," "I was kind of curious." "Originally it was, Priest got the information about his brother, and what happened was through this sort of punch card, if you will..." "Yeah, it was a videogram." "...and the choice of having the sheriff deliver the information, it's a really interesting choice." "And I was just wondering how you came upon that." "He means interesting in the sense that he hates it." "No, no, no." "He's like, "He meant that like, 'That's really interesting..." ""'...and it's wrong."'" "Curious." "Curious, that's all." "Actually, I was thinking about that earlier, and the idea of the punch card..." "I was actually just trying to..." "The Owen character lived in the original draft, and so he was the one that actually delivered the news, and I was determined to kill him, 'cause I thought that would make" "the sacrifice and the drama even more extreme." "Like he had really lost his whole family, and the girl was the one last piece of it." "The drama would be greater there." "So I didn't want him to be the one delivering it, and I felt like it was an opportunity to introduce the sheriff in a way where he was out of his element, and that it would become..." "So that it would be sort of a shorthand." "Like, so, a character delivers it, we would see how fast Priest was, how suspicious he was, and that later, when we would meet him again, we'd already have a familiarity with him." "So we didn't have to spend a lot of time introducing 'cause I knew we were gonna get moved along fast in our first act." "That was the reason." "Well, I'm not sure if it was the better idea, but it was an idea." "I wish we could make multiple versions of these things." "All with Chris Plummer." "Yeah." "Yeah." "And here's this scene, of course, we're in what we call the Clergy Chamber, and this is Paul's opportunity to square off against the great Christopher Plummer." "I said do I make myself clear, Father?" "Yes, Monsignor." "It's interesting, here we actually have..." "There's a motif of blindness in the movie that we've added in the higher res version of the movie than what we're seeing here on our low res screen." "than what we're seeing here on our low res screen." "We have a quote from the Bible that keeps referring to blindness, and there's a lot of things about the eyes and the blindness" "because the vampires..." "Can't see." "...can't see and they don't have eyes." "As Karl gets into it a little there, which is wonderful." "This is another moment here, which was originally later in the film, it was almost midway through the movie, about having the "Lucy on the train" scene here, and it was a bit of a stroke of genius, I think, by Bob Murawski." "He put this here and it just helped us understand what was at stake." "We see what jeopardy Lucy's in, because we were worried that coming 20 minutes later, we might have forgotten about her." "And it also establishes our villain quite early, and we also understand, again, that it's the man from his dream." "It's Fearsome Priest, which is played by Karl Urban." "One thing Scott and I were talking about, prior to sitting down for this, was how..." "Probably the largest changes from the original script to what ended up being on screen, was that there were several reveals that would occur later on, like Maggie's appearance, or Black Hat's appearance, that were much later in the script," "that ended up being pushed forward." "Which gives it a much greater sense of momentum." "And it's just interesting to see how something can read on the page one way and then find, when you actually shoot the sucker," "it takes on a whole other reality." "lsn't that funny?" "This is really true and that's something you learn, like, in the moment of it." "You know what I mean?" "It's like it really does." "It all made sense on the page and we followed it, and then you..." "That's what's so compelling about movies is that, you know, there's definitely the old saying, which is," ""There's the movie you write, there's the movie you shoot," ""the movie you edit, and the movie that people see."" "And none of them are the same." "This was the moment with Alan Dale, the great Alan Dale, the fans of Lostwill recognize him, and I really wanted someone that had a real sense of gravity." "And, you know, he's like the politician." "And we named him Chamberlain, which is a name we came up with, which made me think of Neville Chamberlain." "Monsignor Chamberlain." "I was curious how you guys picked this cloak," "if it was Scott or Paul or a costume..." "lsn't it great?" "Yeah, it gives the whole movie this extra layer of sort of like a fantasy type character," "almost like a medieval, sort of dungeon..." "The costume?" "Exactly, yeah." "That's Ha Nguyen?" "Did I get..." "Did I pronounce it right?" "Nguyen, yeah, Nguyen, yeah." "That's our costume designer, who just did an incredible job." "She's just so good." "She just blew us away when she first came in." "This is an interesting thing where we set up the idea of how fast Priest moves, and in the script it just said, "ln a moment, six guards are on the floor."" "And so I went, "Well, I gotta show something," ""but I need to show that he's that fast."" "And so each of the action scenes have..." "Here we go." "Sorry to interrupt you, Scott." "I lost my concentration." "Paul ate a pizza right after this scene, by the way." "Yes he..." "Yeah, exactly." "A massive pizza." "Maybe you should talk a little bit about how much muscle you gained." "And then lost immediately." "I have, naturally, the body of a reader, so I tend to revert very quickly, playing no actual sport." "I'd talk about what first drew me to the idea of playing Priest." "I had never had the opportunity to play this sort of stoic, cowboy, hero, and to be afforded that opportunity was great, but what I really loved about him was this sort of notion of a Special Forces officer," "who had been asked to now re-enter society, and yet had been rendered useless for normal life by the things that he had done and seen." "And that you'll see later in the Nightshade scene, this sort of sense that finally he is important again, that his skills have meaning again, you know, 'cause he has been reduced to sitting," "all of us, Priestess too, have been reduced to sitting, shoveling coal into fires, which was not really what our hands were made for." "That was something that..." "It's good to bring that up." "When they first gave me the script, I spent a lot of time thinking about what..." "It's a vampire story and there's been a lot of vampire, particularly sparkly vampires and romantic vampires, particularly sparkly vampires and romantic vampires, where the vampires are the metaphors about sublimated sexual desire, that kind of a thing." "And it's like, what can we tell that's different about this story?" "And I thought it was in the text that this was kind of an "after the war" movie, and it was really a story, for me, it really started to unlock, emotionally, when I realized it was a movie about sacrifice and about..." "I just started thinking about things like First Blood..." "Absolutely." "...the John Rambo character." "What I kept trying to focus on while writing it was the concept that, in a way, the entire film can almost seem like this was Priest's fantasy of what he would almost want to happen." "So it's like he can be vigilant again." "He can become his most self, if you will." "Absolutely." "I think every human being enjoys the experience of practicing something that you're good at, and if that happens to be kicking ass, yeah, you're in trouble." "You know what I mean?" "Yeah." "Priest was a weapon that had been put on the shelf, and he wanted to be taken off the shelf." "And this scenario occurs, so he can and forever be off the shelf." "And we keep hitting, over and over again, the word sacrifice keeps coming up in the movie and, for me, particularly thinking about where we are in the world, and the fact that it's a world," "and we live in a country that's been at war pretty much non-stop for the last 10-plus years on multiple fronts, that the idea of what war does, not just to the people who go off to fight, but the people they leave behind." "And that sort of breaks everything." "It breaks all the relationships." "And that was interesting to me." "In the roller coaster ride, let's-kick-vampire-ass movie, there would be a little bit of something of that, a little deeper that people could get into." "While we have Brad on screen, Scott, if I just could ask you," "I mean, you did a bang up job in casting some of the smaller roles," "like say with Christopher Plummer and Brad," "I was wondering ifyou could maybe talk a little bit about how you went about that process and made these excellent choices." "So many actors that I've loved throughout my entire lifetime." "Well, what's not to love about Brad Dourif?" "You know what I mean?" "I mean, it's just like there's a certain..." "You did such a great job in the script of creating these somewhat surreal and eccentric characters that feel like..." "I mean, there's just the wonderful and effortless anachronism to the world that you created in the script, that, like, we call it retro-futurism, or it's an old western town at the same time as it's futuristic," "and yet we're dealing with sort of iconic characters." "Like the snake oil salesman and yet he's talking about vampires and a crucifix..." "It was also a point of being able to have this moment where it's dispelling the myths that crosses and holy water don't work in this world, a gun does." "Stephen Moyer is another example of someone that came on." "It was actually very hard to find people that hadn't played vampires to cast in the movie." "But I thought that this was a really touching scene" "between Paul and Stephen here, and we did it in very few takes, and really tried to keep it as simple as possible 'cause when you have two actors this good, you don't need to do anything." "Just going back to vampires, you know, I love vampires, and I've always loved vampires, you know, since I first read Bram Stoker." "And I think that you can do many things with the genre and with the myth." "You know, in our movie they're sort of feral, they're almost another species, but the one thing that I don't think you can do is, sort of, take away their balls, if you will, and make them not frightening." "That's the one thing that they always have to be, and it's sort of..." "I became disenchanted with the idea of vampires that you can take home to your mum." "You know what I mean?" "That's not the point." "They can be many things, but they must remain terrifying." "You would think that's clear, but it's not." "Well, you know, every few years..." "I mean, I was gonna say every generation, but it's many more times a generation." "I mean, when I was growing up as a teenager, it was Anne Rice's vampires." "In the '70s it was exploitation vampires, you know?" "Like Blacula." "One of my favorite vampire movies." "And this was, once again, we sort of had different fish to fry, and it felt really appropriate to do that with the script that Cory wrote, was the vampires were just described as very different kinds of things," "and I just wanted to push that even further and say," ""Well, the human beings in our world that become infected by the vampires" ""become their slaves more than they become vampires."" "And, of course, the Karl Urban character is wholly unique." "In some respects, this movie is about the birth of the first vampire that looks like a person." "That does have the pointy teeth and is sexy and alluring." "...the bullets, anyways?" "And there was a great scene that unfortunately..." "Sorry to interrupt." "I like this moment because it's keeping with the theme of our rules of things that Priest never does." "He's never frightened, he never asks a question." "He always knows the answer, and, in fact, he knows the future of this scene." "He always knows the answer, and, in fact, he knows the future of this scene." "It's impossibly heroic and I think it's really lovely to imagine that there are human beings like that." "This was something..." "Cory had written the idea that there was a posse that was sent out, of Priests, and I just really wanted to see that, 'cause I thought that that would add tension if we knew that that posse was sent out." "And so this was a chance where we introduce Maggie." "This is the day when I..." "Do you remember how much I geeked out on this day when I saw Christopher Plummer?" "I got to my trailer and there was a little memo that said EPK would be there because they were interviewing Christopher Plummer, and I didn't know who we had casted for the Monsignor." "We didn't..." "I went on a trip, and you guys casted him while I was gone and, whatever, I hadn't heard anything." "So I saw this memo and I thought," ""No, this must be a guy who has the same name." ""It's not 'Christopher Plummer,' Christopher Plummer."" "Never thought about it again, I got to set, I went to video village," "I sat behind him." "I didn't even know who he was." "He was just a guy sitting there." "And he turned around and he looked at me, and he goes, "Hello, Miss Q."" "And I was like, "Oh, my God!"" "And I freaked out." "I just felt that my heart was palpitating." "I was having an anxiety attack." "That was pretty much everybody." "I mean..." "Maggie Q fancies Christopher Plummer." "You've heard it here." "Give me a man in his 70s with a deep voice, who was in the Sound of Music, and I'm good." "This is a..." "Who is in his 70s." "This is another thing that is kind of interesting." "In the color correction in the movie, one of the things we decided is that there would be..." "Don Burgess..." "This is an appropriate time to talk about Don Burgess." "It was one of my favorite shots of the movie, we just saw, where Priest walks towards Cam between the fence after the funeral." "And Don Burgess, the legendary camera man, who shot things like Spider-Man and Forrest Gump and Cast Away and The Book of Eli and many wonderful things." "And we really wanted to do a desert that felt..." "Actually, you weren't sure whether it was incredibly hot or incredibly cold." "It was incredibly hot." "Yes, in reality it was incredibly hot." "It was a 120-some odd degrees where we shot that." "The other thing was..." "And a woolen cloak." "Exactly." "The other thing was, it's just we didn't want blue skies and that kind of stuff." "This is the Nightshade Reservation, and I want to kind of push this idea" "that it was built..." "Are those chickens?" "...to just try to, everywhere we could, try to create a greater sweep and alternate world, and so, Jon Rothbart, our visual effects supervisor, came up with this idea that, since we knew it was going to be underground," "that what if it were built on a giant fault line, and where the prison was essentially stretched across a fault line?" "That shot in 3D is so spectacular, where you really understand" "the drop-away from the bridge." "Yeah, the drop-away, yeah." "And this is, once again, originally where we started to get to know our Familiars, where now we actually, in this current version, you actually see them, but now you get some explanation." "Maybe you can talk about what was..." "Where were you drawing from..." "During the development process, there were a lot of questions about, sort of, the hierarchy and the different sub-species of vampire, necessarily, and people really wanted it to be regimented, where you had your vampires," "you had your Familiars, and originally, there were actually even different stripes of vampires." "There was even a super vampire that appeared at the end almost." "And it was really important for people to have, sort of, pinned down rules and everything streamlined and sort of explained." "And that was something that I would always kind of wrestle with, 'cause I've kind of liked, I guess this sort of complicated world, where you can have all different types and sorts." "But I seem to be the only one who felt that way." "Well, we actually put a little bit more back in, because we did get..." "I mean, I like that, too." "We put the Hive Guardian in." "We called it a Hive Guardian as opposed to just a vampire that had been feeding, which was, I think, one of the things." "The original idea was that these vampires and Nightshade were starving, and one of the unfortunate budget restrictions made it so that we could build the Drone Vampire, is what we called it." "It was just like the worker vampire, the worker bee vampire, and they looked the way they looked and we couldn't do models that were skinnier and then fatter." "and we couldn't do models that were skinnier and then fatter." "But we were able to do a Hive Guardian, so he's like a big, giant bear vampire, and then we added the Queen, which is almost like this very elegant..." "We'll get to her later." "Sort of almost like a daddy longlegs or something." "I'm sorry, but with the Familiars, I just also wanted to say, what was kind of interesting to play with was the idea that these were actually, originally, the guards of this facility, of this reservation," "and who'd fallen, sort of, under the sway of their charges." "And this is kind of the end result." "Yeah, it's..." "Yeah, I remember..." "I don't remember how exactly it evolved to that way, 'cause I think I saw different versions." "There were versions where it was like the ultraviolet lights and all that." "Different kinds of stuff, I remember wrestling with the different..." "You know, this gives us the opportunity to say," ""Well, the inmates are running the asylum now and the guards have been eaten."" "This had initially all been above ground, and I forget where on the process it went underground, but it seems like it was..." "Can I just say, it's a really hard thing to come in and be a day player in a movie like this," "and this man who came in..." "John Griffin." "John Griffin is so spectacular in this scene and totally runs the scene, and you're entirely happy to have scenes stolen off you." "Yeah, I was gonna say, "Steals."" "Yeah." "Yeah, it's such a relief." "It was so great." "It was really fun." "John..." "It was..." "We thought it would be easy to find Familiars that would be interesting, and, you know, I mean, a lot of people played when they came in to read, and suddenly it was like Peter Lorre and..." ""Master," you know, and John just came up with an..." "We had this idea that he was having three different conversations at once." "You know, and there was like a little voice on over his shoulder and..." "This is Josh Wingate here, in the lead, taking swipes at Cam." "Save your bullets." "Now we get to watch Paul kick some bully with an ax." "He's been spoiling for a fight." "Very excited about the..." "That's my friend Theo, he's a stuntman." "Amazing, one of the greatest guys in the air." "He's also Johnny Depp's stuntman." "He's brilliant." "From the Arsenal." "From the Arsenal in London." "From the Arsenal." "The fun thing..." "Hopefully viewers at home can be watching the unrated version of the movie, and that's where you'll get to see what's a little bit more red in the film." "Where you actually get to see red blood, where we had to darken it for the MPAA, for the PG-13." "The other thing was, in this scene in particular, they required us to make the sound design of the actual impacts of blades and broken bones and all that stuff, considerably less intense." "And, of course, that was an agonizing thing for me to do, and I'm glad that there'll be an opportunity for people to hear it the way it's intended." "I remember Josh had a virulent chest infection during the scene, which is why his voice is so deep, and then you've just seen him spit in my mouth." "lt was an incredibly pleasant experience." "And you now have..." "A virulent chest infection for the rest of the movie." "There was also, like..." "What I really liked about what Paul was doing in this scene was the sense of rage." "And also, he really wants this moment." "He's just so expectant." "I love the line, you know, where you're saying." "It's like the unhinged aspect, that's coming out finally in Priest, it's really nice to see how you played that." "And, once again, getting back to that iconic Western, they get your gun arm." "You know what I mean?" "It's just..." "It's a great world to play in." "Someone described it to me as familiar ingredients in a new recipe." "And it's the way you do it, Paul." "It's the way you do it." "Because it is all coming and you are expectant and you do want it, but everything with you is so internal and you're so strong." "She's like, "Can you be my agent?"" "Really, I mean it." "You know, that's so low." "I think, publicist." "Thank you." "This was another, you know..." "Obviously, Tippett, it's a great visual effects facility." "Phil Tippett's place up in Northern California, and they were the sort of lead facility when it came to doing our creatures, and they did this scene and, in addition to that, you know, we shot this down in, I think, San Pedro." "It was like at an abandoned army battery, which looked like a skate park." "And Richard Bridgland and his magicians did an incredible amount of redressing to make it feel like a sunken prison." "This was our first day and..." "First night!" "First night." "And I remember running here, jumping up into the air and stomping a blue pillow." "Really not very threatening at all." "And I ran to Scott afterwards and said," ""Please, Scott, just look at me in the eyes and tell me" ""that, at the end, this is gonna look more like a vampire and less like a blue pillow."" "And I was like..." "Turn and look at Jon Rothbart and he would say," ""You know, I don't know what to tell you, Bettany." "I hope so."" "This was, you know, another aspect of it, too, was just, you know, the design of the vampires and..." "Here comes one of our big jump scares in the movie." "Sometimes you write a line, and you just know you wrote it for the trailer, and the, "You have no idea what's coming, Priest,"" "and, of course, sure enough it's like the most used moment." "We studied football." "But with great delivery." "We studied football tackles for that there." "Yeah." "And..." "The make-up for the Familiars is just incredible." "Yeah." "They look so good." "Yeah." "Ve, our key make-up..." "Ve Neill." "Yeah, she did such a great job and..." "Paul makes a very funny kind of sound that we all laugh at." "He's just passed something." "You know, once again, when you're looking at the design and all that stuff..." "Max Brehme had designed this really interesting map, and he took a, you know, topographical map, and it's etched into lead and bound, and it was like all these different, you know, futuristic, past..." "In the design, it's just so exquisite in the movie." "I think, you know, of all the..." "Even, you know, the knife that I have, which is called the double shadow knife, you know, and the idea is that you can catch the knife, the enemy's knife within it" "and disarm him." "Control it." "Yeah." "But this knife actually did separate into two." "Transforming weapons was a big thing, and it was an idea that was in the script and we took even further in the movie, which was the idea of, like, particularly religious icons, symbols, for example, the crosses that become shuriken," "was something that was in the script and we said," ""What a cool idea." "Let's see if we can keep doing that."" "We did it with a rosary that turns into a rope-dart for Maggie, and, you know, of course, the cross that he has that appears to be, you know, in the opening scene of the movie," "appears to be something that he gains, sort of, strength from, and we reveal later in the movie is actually a blade, and is the weapon that's used to defeat one of our two antagonists." "We should also talk because, you know, we have these motorcycles." "TyRuben Ellingson is the principal designer of vehicles and weapons and the train in the movie." "TyRuben is a friend back from my lim days, and he's just an absolutely brilliant engineer and designer, and has designed Hellboy's gun, designed vehicles and weapons for Avatar, designed aliens and spacecraft from Battle:" "Los Angeles, and he's just amazing." "Yeah." "I love this scene." "Yes." "I think Brad is just..." "He's got such a great mix of comedy, yet it's grounded and it's..." "He's just delicious to watch work." "It's just an incredible, incredible meter to the way he speaks, and this also has one of my favorite costumes that Ha created, which was the snake oil salesman's jacket." "It's made of, like, moldy feathers and it's moth eaten, and his tattered hat." "It's just a great character." "A Priest?" "And this is..." "lt really helps the scene, also helps everybody understand the transformation to Familiar, which, I think, is great." "Yeah, that was another thing, it was something that, you know, as Cory said, there's a constant," ""We wanna know the rules and we wanna know..."" "You know, and so I thought, "Okay, well, maybe this is an opportunity" ""to show what happens, how you can be turned into a Familiar."" "From a storytelling point of view, this is a really clean way of putting forward that idea." "And he says..." "Of course, he says, "Put him to work."" "Of course I really wanted Dourif to be on the team of Familiars later in the movie, but, alas, we had only two days with him." "Here, you know, we're starting to get more insight that Maggie's character, Priestess, is separate from the other three, in the sense that she just senses something." "There's something going on in her head, and we don't know whether she's good or bad, yet, really, but there's something going on here." "But she's on the right trail." "And that she is..." "Yes, in the pursuit" "that the posse's closing in." "This Priestess is awesome." "You wear that robe really well." "That's the best shirt." "That's the..." "Thank you." "This is great in 3D." "That was the audition, we put robes on, walked around." "The zone was something that..." "You know, this was originally shot up at Trona Pinnacles, which, of course, has got these amazing rock formations that are very famous, particularly from things like Planet of the Apes." "And we..." "I mean, at a certain point, we just kept wanting to figure out ways to..." "Every chance we could get to try to make the world seem..." "Like tell a little bit more story about the way the world is and..." "You know, so we had this idea, once again, Jon Rothbart had suggested this idea..." "We talked about how much water there was in the world and how little water there was in the world, and then we thought," ""What if we saw a port city and it was dried up," ""and there were, you know, big ships that were just buried in the sand and..."" "But Owen wasn't the easiest man to talk to." "You know, at one point I thought about making it up like an old mall." "So you'd see, like, all these corporate logos, you know, and I thought that was really interesting." "But once again, that sort of started to feel a little Planet of the Apes-ish." "And so we decided to stay away from that." "I think for the Sony tie-in, once we talked about the idea of maybe just having a bunch of old PlayStations." "An old PlayStation store." "'Course, this is the moment..." "No, some old Xboxes, 'cause people will still be playing PlayStations." "ln the future, right?" "Exactly." "This is, you know, the moment where we introduce the threat." "If she's infected, that Priest will kill her." "I tried to do that classic shot over the hip." "I like how that, just that concept, adds this degree of tension throughout the rest of the film." "What will he do?" "There was a bit in..." "You know, we had a longer version of that scene, where the sheriff character, you know, sort of talked a little bit more about why he became sheriff so young." "And I think in the original script he was the deputy, but was there a sheriff?" "No, there's always been a sheriff." "There was a..." "There was always a sheriff." "Absolutely." "But there were different degrees of where you would hear his back story and whatnot, and who he represented." "I mean, the idea here was that, I mean, he..." "But was he the deputy sheriff at one point?" "His father was one sheriff." "That was one idea that, I think, was bandied about in the script for a little bit, and then his father was killed and he took over at a very young age." "Yeah, that's actually what the entire scene was, it did have that." "His father was the sheriff, and his father before him, and, you know, you just make these decisions for flow, and the amount of time and the amount of..." "It's just one of those things and you kind of want to put it all in, but sometimes it's not always good." "This was another Bob Murawski grace note here, which was to literally flash back to this moment." "To just keep reminding the audience that this is a place of significance, and that this threat ofwhat happened, this old wound ofwhat happened at the Sola Mira hive is still very present for Priest, and that's why this place has significance for him." "We were shooting on Stage 30 at Sony, and it was just miserable because it was such a small..." "I mean, it's actually the largest stage they have there." "And it's actually that many, very..." "You can actually do sunken..." "They can actually fill it with water and do all sorts of stuff, and many, many great, great films have been shot there." "But despite how large it is, it's never big enough to capture the scope of what was meant to be this massive vampire hive, and so we had to significantly enlarge it." "For instance, this tunnel ran about six feet long." "Yeah." "And then they had a mirror at the end of it, and we just kept walking up and down the same tunnel." "I brought my son to the set one day, and he just loved walking around these tunnels." "They were beautiful, weren't they?" "He was fascinated by the concept of the mirror at the end, you know." "Yeah, Richard Bridgland had this idea, you're actually seeing a mirror, you're looking straight at a mirror right there, and, you know, that's one of those things." "We also..." "Here comes Maggie." "I love the way this is set up." "It's very scary." "It usually gets a jump, which is good." "This is a good time, actually, to talk about the," "I guess, the love motive between Priest and Priestess, which, I think, is..." "What's especially beautiful about it is the impossibility of it, you know." "I think the romance of that plays beautifully, that they will never be together, you know, and it's heart rending." "I think it plays really well, I'm really proud of that in the film." "Especially, there's this scene that's coming up in a minute between Maggie and I, and I'm very proud of that scene." "I haven't seen it." "I wanna be proud of it." "I think you will be." "I know that we had all..." "You know, there were different ideas being thrown around, and we were sort of trying to find the moment." "I think it's the version that you..." "This is the scene where I don't listen to Maggie," "when she says, "Let's rehearse this stunt."" "Right." "Then I bust my foot." "Yeah, Paul really hurt..." "Yes, he really..." "Paul, we had a very close call." "Yeah, and Cam has a very funny moment there, where..." ""Who's this?"" "You know, and we all were having a very difficult time not laughing." "And this is the big bear vampire, the Hive Guardian that the folks at Tippett created, and it started in the script as just the idea of a vampire that had been feeding, and, once again," "I just sort of wanted to take that idea and then push it even further." "This is Priestess saving Priest's ass and then they..." "I love this sort of unspoken, you know..." "Yeah." "...quality to their relationship that she knows and he knows, they both know what each other are thinking and how to deal with this situation." "It's almost like the physical equivalent of finishing each other's sentences, right?" "Which is really cool." "Jesus!" "And then, you know, maybe talk about how you came up with the idea of dancing on the rocks and..." "Well, I mean, the question again, would always kind of come up was, "What can a Priest do and what can a Priest not do?"" "And to me, it was always about..." "They didn't have any superhero abilities." "It was more..." "If you could be incredibly focused and you could have enough will and enough discipline, you could actually do something like this, you know." "I mean, for me, Priest has always been a little bit of my version ofwhat I would like superheroes to be, you know." "Not about the spandex, not the cape, something a little darker" "Not about the spandex, not the cape, something a little darker" "and interesting." "I love that." "Yeah, that's awesome." "And so Priest is really just like a dark superhero to me." "We..." "Here comes another one of the bigger..." "Yes." "The big jumps in the movie." "Point A, meet point fucking B." "Language." "And this is..." "You can say that in PG-13?" "You get one." "You get one." "And we gave it to Cam?" "And it has to be in a non-sexual..." "And we gave it to Cam?" "And it has to be in a non-sexual way." "It actually gets our biggest, you know..." "We get..." "Yeah, Priest is a pretty dark, dark movie." "Yeah." "But we get one really big laugh there for that." "Good." "Good!" "One?" "One's good." "Yeah, 'cause God knows we're not smiling much, you know." "And so, this is the moment, the scene that Paul was talking about." "I love it, too, because this is the first time you've seen two Priests talking, and you get a glimpse into their world, and it is very sad and it is not complete and, you know, you don't know everything, but you know it hurts." "It's cool." "Yeah, there's something just deeply sad about these two people who we feel, we can tell, belong together, but have never had that opportunity, and possibly never will." "And for so many reasons," "which is interesting, too." "Yeah." "And there's also this, you know, the idea of..." "The interesting way that Lisa Churgin cut the scene and when we're on Paul's face, hearing what Maggie's saying, and knowing that she's, you know, referring to a dream..." "That she has these dreams, and we know that Paul has these dreams, and that they're all sort of haunted by the same things and..." "Except she has good nights, occasionally." "She does have good nights." "And it's cool because the way you've now brought that flashback in a bunch of times already, we've set up that, yes, that there's so much that bothers them." "I like that she leaves without answering the question." "Yes." "Two versions." "We did two versions where Maggie felt very strongly that she wouldn't answer the question, and I just, because it was on the page, I wanted her to answer the question." "We did." "You can't..." "And Lisa Churgin, my editor," "who's cut many, you know..." "Love her." "... The Cider House Rules and Gattaca and other things, that she felt very strongly," "agreed with Maggie." "Yeah." "That you wouldn't." "Well, the thing is, it's hard to fight with Scott because there is no stone that you leave unturned." "Scott knows all and has an answer for everything." "I mean, you are incredibly wonderful." "No." "That's completely fakery." "Absolute fakery." "But, you know, you sort of like..." "Sometimes you just do, you just feel it, and I think that was a woman's moment," "which is why..." "Absolutely." "You sell it, Maggie." "I mean, you don't have to say it." "It's all right there on your face, you know." "Yeah." "Right." "This was a moment..." "You know, this was a scene that was not in many of the earlier cuts in the movie, and, you know, Bob put it back in the film, and we talked about it, and we thought it was a good opportunity" "to continue to foreshadow what would later be revealed in the movie, that Priest's great sacrifice that he made was that he left a child, a baby, which would turn out to be Lucy." "I know, I've spoiled it to you." "And, you know, that Shannon was, at one point, the love of his life." "And so that was an opportunity to kind of, once more, set up the rules a little bit." "What?" "Do you remember when we stepped out of that cave and it looked like a massive vagina?" "Vagina." "I was so wanting to bring that up." "You know, we stepped out, we looked up and then we turned around," "and it was a massive vagina." "lt was a massive vagina." "What did it feel like in the inside?" "Warm and comforting?" "Not really." "For me, it was a first." "Paul can tell you more about that." "Back in his teen days." "lt was the biggest vagina that I've ever seen." "This was a fun thing, was to try to..." "I think in the original script we actually never saw the raid of Jericho, and I really wanted to get our great villain off the train, and sort of show..." "Once again to sort of..." "Because we weren't gonna go into the city and see all that kind of stuff at the end, that this was a way of at least suggesting what the vampires would do to people, and what was really at stake." "And, of course, there's nothing..." "I just..." "You know, it's not a period film, but in a weird way it's a period film," "and I just love this stuff." "It's so beautiful, sorry." "Look how beautiful..." "And this guy's face is so expressive and Don did such a great job." "Hello?" "Had a great voice, doesn't he?" "He does." "And U.C. Stedman, who's one of our sound designers, he did the design for the train, and it just sounds like..." "I want it to feel like a character in the movie." "Cory, you called it the night train, right?" "Yeah." "And, you know, once again, it was Ty's design of this, like, black, knifing behemoth that would just cut the desert, and it's part steam train and part, you know, diesel." "And just give Karl a chance to chew the scenery." "Love that, that shadow before he..." "Yeah, the idea behind the train is that, since it's filled with vampires," "no sunlight can come inside." "Yeah." "no sunlight can come inside." "Yeah." "So it's sort of been modified for that." "Modified, we had that with this..." "I love this, what you did here." "And then we added this scene, which is 'cause if we're gonna hide the attack at the beginning," "I wanted to be able to show an attack later." "And of course we're playing Mozart's Requiem, and this is our..." "My friend, Julie Mond..." "Which is really appropriate, bearing in mind he died writing it." "Yes, exactly." "Right?" "I don't see anything." "Should have looked harder." "And they did..." "Tippett did such a good job here." "And hopefully in the unrated version, you'll see what that's really supposed to look like." "Oh, my God." "I love this scene so much." "We're neck and tendons and..." "So I actually played this for Karl, on the set." "I mean, look at that." "And miraculously, our great team of effects folks, practical effects, special effects, people on set," "just did such a great job with, you know, timing the explosions." "I'd love to take credit for it, but look at that." "It's like..." "We had more special effects in this film than in any film I've..." "They were in every scene." "Really?" "Every scene, literally..." "I mean, those guys were there every day." "Yeah." "Die Hard 4 you didn't have..." "No." "Not every day." "Right." "You know, not like the way..." "And they were involved with us, they were very close to us all the time, with their fans, or their debris, or whatever it was." "By the way, there's no visual effects there, that man" "actually moves that fast." "Actually did all that, yeah." "He really does." "He actually really does." "I know." "I know Arnold." "Arnold." "I've done many films with him." "He is incredible." "Yeah." "The weapon he was using is called the Sun and Moon blades, and I thought it was really fun." "The other thing we did here was," "Svengali, who is the effects company that did..." "Made this Jericho, this kind of industrial western town, 'cause I wanted to stay away from gable roofs and, like, the really specific language of a western town, at the same time pay homage to it," "and make it sort of feel like it's part of our world, so Richard Bridgland dressed the first story and then the digital effects took in." "This is a particularly excellent digital matte painting, you know, where very little of that is real, and it's just unreal." "And the hanging box and all that stuff is all digital, and it's really, really well done." "And this was..." "You know, another aspect of Jericho was to try to say, you know, that it's the biggest town right before you reach the cities, and it carries, you know, the basic elements of..." "There's coal and it's like a mining town, right?" "It's the last stop before the big cities, exactly." "So there was a chance for the vampires to feed and, yeah..." "And you'd have Augustine, so we portrayed Augustine as a smaller, tiny little outpost town, and Jericho's a much bigger town." "One of the things in this scene that precedes this..." "We put the bats back in." "That's one of our cheap scares, that would reveal dynamite." "Worth every penny." "Why would we be seeing dynamite?" "It's the..." "What we did during that night scene, I knew I wanted floating embers..." "We knew that the film was gonna be in 3D and I thought it would be a particularly fun 3D atmospheric effect, and it kind of creates this almost magical quality to this scene that's horrific." "Paul did such a good job selling that." "Too many mouths to feed." "Everybody's just so good here." "That's such a creepy line." "Yeah, it's great." "And here is..." "We haven't..." "I love this scene." "We haven't had a chance to talk much about Chris Young's score, but Chris Young, who is a mad genius, he just did such a great job." "Yeah." "That's so grisly." "So good." "We played around a lot with the..." "What's interesting, the first time we scored it, we scored it as a very..." "As horror." "And then, in this version, we played it horrific, and then tilted it into sorrow." "And it was an idea that Clint Culpepper, the head of the studio, had and it was the right one." "And I think that was really kind ofyour intention in the script, too." "Absolutely." "Absolutely." "You know, it's..." "This was one of those scenes." "Now this is shot..." "I remember it!" "Now, just a..." "Just a..." "I remember this day." "I'll talk a bit quick about the digital chicanery that's going on here." "So this was shot down in Long Beach." "Literally, there are..." "There's ocean right next to us." "There's a big parking lot." "We're just outside of a warehouse in Long Beach, and we added all desert tracks, all the environment around them, the dust and wind, of course, to try to make it feel like we were at the same location." "Everything to the right is just not real, and to the left there." "This is just one of those scenes where it's a pipe laying scene." "You're just laying plot, and all I was trying to do is block it in an interesting way and try to get through it simply." "And everybody was..." "We were all..." "No we weren't." "We didn't have a lot of time to shoot it and no one was particularly comfortable about it." "But somehow, it just worked." "People will never know that." "Yeah." "Just watch and be like..." "And we took all morning pulling our hair out." "Yeah, I just wanted everyone to be in triangles." "This was a scene that got added..." "Was once again to allow Karl an opportunity, and it was really something that Karl wanted to do and it was a really good idea." "Was to just give Lucy and Black Hat another opportunity..." "And let Black Hat articulate his philosophy." "Philosophy." "Literally, it's like the devil dancing in her ear a little bit." "And this, Scott, is something that you came up with completely." "And it really adds a lot to his character." "Well, it was..." "It was..." "Karl and I talked about it a lot, and once again, he's hitting on the idea of, you want to be free from a life of suffering and sacrifice, you're hitting that line of sacrifice, which mirrors what Lucy says earlier." "When Owen says, "We all have to make sacrifices."" "She says, "'Sacrifices'?" "You mean living out here like a prisoner?"" "Here she steals the knife, of course, an homage to Raiders of the Lost Ark, and..." "Of course." "Shameless homage to" "Raiders of the Lost Ark and then..." "Karl's so good here, and of course, once again, mirrors and eyes." "And that since vampire evolved..." "The vampires evolved without eyes, that it was a soulless creature, that we can eradicate them because we believe they have no soul." "There's something about the shade of gray, which I really like." "There's another thing which the Familiar says earlier, at Nightshade to Priest, where Paul says, "They were murderers."" "And he says, "They were what nature made them to be." "Just like you."" "And I really liked to try to get as much gray in there." "And with multiple villains and..." "Scott, can you explain, actually, in the vampires, you went with the really bold choice of them having no eyes, which plays into the dialog here, too, of course, but..." "Yeah, we talked about..." "That was actually something we were looking at..." "Looking at nature documentaries about nocturnal creatures, and creatures that live in caves and all this kind of stuff, and it made sense if they lived in hives, and the kind of stuff that you would eventually evolve." "You'd lose your eyesight 'cause you live in darkness, and that you would gain other senses." "And then it started to go from there." "It's like, "What would that mean?"" "And then we went, "Eyes, eyes, eyes, blindness."" "You know, eyes are the window to the soul, and then it would be, sort of, the things that, physiologically, would be then interpreted by the government or the Church as" "a reason to..." "A justification for slaughtering them." "And so the vampires, in some respects, are an enemy, even though it's like this existential threat that they're..." "That we've been fighting them for so long that people, maybe, don't even really know why we're fighting them." "And it's a hard thing to nuance in a movie like this because you're supposed to just make it a very clear threat, and yet, I think the desire is to try to..." "'Cause I think there are some parallels to the world we live in today." "Is "the other," this one that we can't understand." "We don't subtitle what they're saying, but we did want to suggest that they do have a language and they do have an intelligence, and they can organize and you know." "This was an important scene to me, in the sense that it really hits home the idea that Priest, as a character, has somewhat lost his way when we meet him in the beginning of the story." "The fact that he's been rejected by society, and feeling estranged from the Church is very disturbing to him, and he's questioning himself and his faith that resulted..." "It somewhat affects who he is and his powers, whereas Priestess' character is someone who, no matter what's happened to her, in the time that's passed since the war, she's managed to hang on to her faith, realizing that it doesn't necessarily" "have to come from an external source." "That it comes from within." "And I think that's what she's really trying to communicate here, along with the longing that she has for him." "I really wanted it to feel like he was going to accept the embrace and..." "Do it!" "Which I think is so much more..." "So much more romantic that they can't." "And Maggie's this..." "When I saw this take, and we just did a few takes, it was just like we all..." "It was just heartbreaking." "And Maggie just absolutely killed the scene." "Great moment, Maggie." "I think if it was anybody a fraction less good, we'd be in trouble." "You know, because there's a lot of weight to have to carry, which is, you're not just carrying the basic emotional moment between two people that should be relatable, but you're also carrying a whole history," "that happens to be an alternate history than the one that we're experiencing." "And yet it's through a close-up of a face emoting and that performance" "And yet it's through a close-up of a face emoting and that performance that allows you to track and keep it all..." "Make it feel like the world is..." "That even though it's an extraordinary world, that there's something very familiar about it, emotionally." "Right." "And if we were ever lucky enough to get into Priestess' back-story, it will make this scene even more powerful because" "her back-story's pretty interesting." "I also love the symbolism of just coming into the scene with something that was his and..." "Sorry?" "No." "Microphone." "Sorry." "Sorry." "Just coming into the scene after so many years with something that was his..." "Right." "...and important to him." "And just the idea that she's hung on to so much more than just this piece of metal." "Then, of course, it turns into, once again, an object that isn't just" "a symbol." "It becomes a weapon." "Right." "Right." "Absolutely." "Which is fun." "The thing that saves him." "And we had a lot of discussions about this." "I think Cam is really great in this scene and we had..." "That gun is both a revolver, and has a magazine." "Which is another one of those anachronisms, a double-barreled revolver, that has a magazine and is a semi-automatic." "The gun weighed about 100 pounds." "So he's actually" "really struggling to hold it up." "He's shaking." "But aided in the performance." "Yeah." "Dude, you're so right." "But we actually had a lot of discussion about who would say the line." "It was originally Priest's line, "She's my daughter."" "We changed it." "One of the reasons why you have good actors in your movie is 'cause they come up with better ideas than you have." "It also reinforces that tragedy of our relationship again, which is that I think both know that the fact that his..." "He's sacrificed his family to go fight the war." "Yeah." "He left his family and..." "It's huge." "...he loved his wife and the fact that she is now dead does not alter that in one way." "It's so romantic." "Again, I'm retracing old ground, but the impossibility of their relationship is so wonderful to play, I think." "This is another fun bit of magic." "A company called spin, post, up in San Francisco, did a lot of these digital train shots and motorcycle." "So what you're really experiencing is a variety of different tricks and techniques." "Here we are now on a set." "And our train sets were always shaken." "The effects gang were doing a great job of" "The effects gang were doing a great job of having the sets always be dynamic." "So what we have here is we have real people on motorcycles, and we have..." "Here, this is a..." "That's actually a train that is not moving." "And what we did is we built it using shipping containers." "Richard Bridgland built three or two lengths of car and it's being pulled by a big rig." "This is one of my favorite sequences, by the way." "It's just..." "Nitro." "Oh, my God!" "That's a really killer stunt." "Yeah, that is hard." "And so, the tracks are always digital." "The engine is always digital." "Obviously, all the cars, except for two." "Here, we're at the vampire pods, and this was something that on the day we had stuff that just looked like..." "Well, they just looked like plastic testicles." "Giant testicles." "They were really unappealing." "It is a good moment to talk about dealing with the blue screen and stuff." "You know, and people say, "That's amazing!" But when you're traveling across a salt flat at 50 miles an hour, on a bike, which is attached to a follow car, and then you have a wire between you and a truck," "you don't care that somebody's gonna paint in the rest of the train." "All you're trying to do is survive this moment where you stand on a motorbike and think," ""I'm 39 years old." "I have a wife and two children." ""What am I doing on top of a motorcycle jumping onto a train?"" "There was a fun..." "The idea of trying to create an interconnectedness between the two moments, outside and inside the train, was something that Bryan Andrews, one of my storyboard artists, came up with." "The idea that the bike itself caused him to fall into the..." "So this was a scene which was integral to trying to understand who Black Hat was, and why was he special in our world." "Here's the Queen that we briefly see." "And it's just stated unequivocally, and then, once again, the eye." "Join me." "Accept the blood..." "There was quite a bit more dialog, quite a bit in the script, and quite a bit that we actually shot, and we kept reducing, reducing, reducing." "Just 'cause it's one of those things." "You hate to lose every line, and the lines that Cory wrote were really beautiful and really cool, and we all really liked them, and it's one of those things where you just" "need the two guys to start fighting." "Sure, absolutely." "I wanna see some ass kicked." "'Cause, you know, they're on top of a train going 100 miles an hour." "This was another thing about it, which was like wrestling with how extraordinary their moves could be, and they started out even more extraordinary and we kept reducing them." "Here's Maggie." "One of my favorite shots of her in the whole movie is when she stands seeing..." "Here come the Familiars, and she stands." "This is super beautiful, the city behind her." "Just such confidence." "Yeah." "Jesus." "Maggie's just silently watching 'cause she hasn't seen the whole movie yet." "She's gonna see it tonight." "Yeah, I'm riveted." "This is my..." "You know..." "These guys were amazing." "Yeah, they just did a great job." "And once again, terrific job by Steve Ticknor and his sound crew." "The slow motion motorcycles, and working in concert with Chris Young's score, which is just kicking ass all over the place here." "The great moment." "And just Maggie's ferociousness." "I just love that scream." "Digital characters on top of the train." "Paul, talk about how Karl almost kills you in this scene." "Yeah." "Right there." "Speaking of wife and two kids." "It would be inelegant but..." "No, he nearly killed me in a rehearsal." "Which is fine, you know?" "As long as it wasn't during the actual shoot." "Yeah." "We're..." "So we're bouncing around between..." "I just love this parallel action stuff." "Yeah, they're great." "I also love how that's such a Western fight on top of the train." "We almost felt like it was so funny when we had the girl on top of the train, the damsel in distress here and I always felt like it was one of those things that we could actually strap her to the train tracks." "This is great." "Snazzy whiplash stunt." "I love this." "I love that." "Yeah." "Once again the..." "Not a good way to go." "This is my favorite!" "Bike into another bike." "Watch this." "This is just..." "This is great." "Now, there you go." "What a crowd pleaser." "Miraculously, I remember we first showed this movie to our producers." "Sam Raimi was sitting in the audience and I was so nervous, and when that moment happened, he stood up and went, "Awesome!"" "I was just like, "Okay, I can die a happy man."" "Also, on a side note, I'm a vegetarian and there was a guy on a fork lift..." "Also, on a side note, I'm a vegetarian and there was a guy on a fork lift..." "Throwing meat at you." "...throwing big pieces of animal at me." "And I was gagging." "I mean just genuinely gagging." "Really?" "'Cause that kind of describes my Sunday." "The other thing is we're in a dry lake bed here in Apple Valley, outside Los Angeles, and it's really only a mile or so to the..." "You know, in this particular case, the actors are on a non-moving set at the Hansen Dam, which was just..." "We were trying to get as much view of sky as possible." "We wanted to shoot it outside instead of on a stage, so we would actually be, even though we're comping-in a desert all around them, that it would be..." "We'd be still working in daylight 'cause it's so difficult to make that stuff look real when you're shooting on a stage." "Another ode to Indiana Jones." "But Paul and Karl did an extraordinary amount of rehearsal for that, and Bryan Andrews, who is our board artist, and he was doing a lot of great action." "He also worked with Genndy." "He's somebody that's really terrific at action." "This is our digital pods." "Good folks at spin, who created these." "And this was something, also, that was one of those things that changed a lot from various versions of the script." "It was like..." "There was a version where he did find her in a cage and rescued her, and then he got conked on the head, and a Familiar took him out." "I guess I struggled with that a little bit, because I just thought," ""How could he not hear?"" "It's one of those things that..." "We're not gonna think too highly of him." "Well, it seems at this point, it's all about momentum and expediency, and just getting down to it." "So this is the thing that I really like." "We had originally intended, which is a great scene that Cory wrote, which we always labeled" ""The Butch and Sundance scene," where they're back-to-back and there's vampires coming from both directions, and they just have to kill a hundred of them." "And unfortunately, we're not a huge, huge, huge budget movie, and we couldn't afford to do it, and so it was that we had to truncate." "This is where we're running through exploding plastic testicles." "Oh, Jesus." "Priest is just getting his ass kicked!" "And it's the magic of the movies here where they just did some great stunts where we're on a set, Cam gets thrown through a wall, and then stunt folks get thrown out on real desert." "And that's a digital train and they just did a remarkable job with all that stuff." "One of the question marks was," ""How was Sherriff Hicks gonna be able to get back to the aftermath?"" "I went, "Okay, motorcycle."" "Motorcycles." "One of the Familiar bikes." "Yeah, 'cause he got dropped off by the dead Familiar." "David Backus." "This is where we're strongly hinting..." "We pay off the knife and we strongly hint that Lucy may have powers." "I like that." "She's so badly..." "She was like," ""Maggie, we got to do another one 'cause..." "Let's fight together!"" "And I was like, "That would be fun!"" "Lily was somebody we cast off an audition tape." "We literally had never even met her." "I saw her and I saw so many tapes, and I just saw her and she was just so good." "And, of course, you know, she'd only been in The Blind Side, and we hadn't even seen that." "That hadn't come out yet at that time, and then we put her in the movie and now, she's..." "You know?" "'Cause she's awesome." "She's just in everything suddenly, and deservedly so." "She was just so sweet and sincere." "She and Karl had a really good time with this." "We digitally added quite a bit of fire." "What a great shot." "And then, here's something where..." "And then, here's something where..." "This was an idea that Cory had in the script, and it dropped out of the script for a very long time, which was this scene." "And then Mike De Luca suggested it and we brought it back, which was that this prayer continues." "So, we did do that?" "Right." "Yeah." "See?" "That's nice." "It's really great because, what it does, is it really helped connect them, spiritually." "Both, in terms of their special powers, but also in terms of their relationship, and it makes it so that you suggest that Priest was gone." "Like he really had lost the fight." "Right." "But, something about that..." "It's almost as if he's hearing her prayer." "It's as if she's willing him back to life." "Beautiful, huh?" "Yeah, it's a great idea." "I really liked that." "This is actually one of the more painful moments for me just because this was a fight that I fought, upcoming what happens with Priestess right now which is..." "And her sacrifice, or what it was supposed to be." "I think we all felt the same way." "We all felt that way." "Interestingly enough, we'll never know what the audience reaction would be to the other version." "This was also really important, was the ability for us to be able to get this to become a quiet moment." "There was a lot of fighting with the studio over the idea ofjust keeping the music intense, intense, intense." "It just didn't feel like the glamoring or the mesmerizing was really gonna be conveyed unless we just heard a heartbeat." "I love silence in this funfest." "Great stunt!" "What's happened in that stunt was actually caught in camera, with a stunt girl." "It's me jumping off and she's actually..." "We miraculously got it on one take, where I actually caught her hand." "So awesome." "I mean, it's so well done." "The other thing is..." "Karl, in the theme of Karl beating up on Paul," "Karl really did accidently step on Paul's hand there, and that scream is real, and led to an extraordinary amount of profanity as Paul then went away from it." "Here's another bit of..." "Jesus." "We cut this scene together and..." "So the idea, originally, is Priestess doesn't jump off the bike." "But the audience loved her so much," "we could not kill her." "Right." "The other thing is that you're seeing a combination of the folks at Kerner Optical who built a one-eighth scale train, which we actually blew up with high-speed cameras, and then digital train and all sorts of really great stuff." "So you're seeing a lot of different techniques involved and that's one of the things we try to do." "It's always mix up the gag." "Here's another moment." "He gets to be a father again." "He gets to be father here in this one moment." "I think that Chris Young's score really captures the feeling really nicely, their plaintive vocalist." "And then here comes the young sheriff." "And we initially had a slightly longer version of this scene where she said," ""You came for me," to him." "This is the warts and all version of the commentary, so people felt like," ""Well, her dad is the one that really saved her in that moment," ""and what was most important was that she convey her..." ""She's seeing someone that she loves and who's familiar to her in this moment" ""and they embrace and that was enough."" "I love this reveal." "Yeah." "I mean, if you're gonna have Priestess come back," "let her come back..." "Like that." "...like a Sergio Leone movie." "It's just beautiful." "Also, it's beautiful that he's looking for her." "Right." "Like he gets up, and he's like..." "And he's thankful and he's looking up to heaven, looking up to God." "And, of course..." "All he gets is a hat." "It's funny 'cause this is like a Rorschach Test for the audience." "A great many people took that to mean that Black Hat is dead because of the Wicked Witch, you know?" "Another contingent of audience took it to mean that" "Black Hat must still be alive out there." "And we'll leave it to the sequel gods to decide." "This was Plummer's first day and this was the most number of extras we had." "We did this in an old church building." "Not church building, a bank building downtown, which we wanted to be this gothic, industrial cathedral." "Plummer is just so good." "He's so good." "A man who would defy the Church for his own selfish crusade!" "And Dale, just is like..." "Instant cool movie when you see Alan Dale's face." "Practical head, digital head." "The real head when we threw it, well, the good folks at KNB did a great job with the design of the practical vampire's make-up effects." "...their Queen was not among them." "Well, when it actually hit the ground, it looked like rubber, so we had to replace it." "Tippett redid it." "I just love this idea of a church that is so..." "This big square and fluorescent lights and..." "No, it's just beginning." "And here we are, reinforcing the driving away from the city, under the black cloud that covers it." "Did we not use where they all stood up and they were all hitting their..." "We actually had an extended version of that..." "'Cause that's such a great shot." "Yeah, we actually..." "It feels like the moment was Priest's moment ending the scene." "We actually had a version." "I love that "Godspeed," Maggie's line here is the last line in the movie." "Yeah, that's pretty great." "In the earlier versions of the script..." "And this is Chris Young's amazing score that just is very elegiac and epic." "The original end, which you guys will see on the DVD, that we shot, was an end where Priest actually goes back to Outpost 10 and..." "We don't have that!" "...and says goodbye to all the other..." "I'm sorry." "I haven't seen the film yet." "...and says goodbye to Lucy." "That's actually really strong though." "And it just felt after showing the film and playing it a few different ways, it just feels like the end is the hero, the dark hero, riding off into the sunset to a place we don't yet know." "I wanna say that Picture Mill did a remarkable job with these titles, which are particularly cool, revisiting the iconography of the movie." "Wow." "That also leaves it open where Lucy's not settled, and she's not..." "I kind of like that." "That was another aspect." "I wanted it to be..." "When originally the idea..." "Paul and I wrote the scene." "In the original script, she goes back to her father, who was still alive, and there was this whole theme about a ring and whether Hicks would talk to the father about the fact that," ""l want to marry your daughter."" "And while those moments are wonderful and I loved them," "I really wanted to kill Owen." "So it just precluded that, 'cause it felt like it was her..." "Now, it was about Lucy becoming an adult." "That if there was a parent to go back to, it somehow diminished the relationship via the arc." "Absolutely, absolutely." "J." "Bart." "J." "Bart." "He's coming tonight, right?" "He is coming tonight." "Yes, we're having our dinner." "We haven't..." "The movie..." "For those that are listening at home, keeping track, the movie hasn't come out yet for us, so we hope people respond well to it." "I hope you guys have enjoyed this commentary." "I guess we can continue wrap over the very long credits scene." "One of the things in commentaries, for me," "I've felt like I've always learned so much from commentaries." "From good films, bad films, from everything." "For me, I always wanted them to be..." "The ones I enjoyed the most were the ones that felt the most generous, in terms of the filmmakers talking about what's worked for them, and it's always helpful for anybody, for any filmmaker, to hear what the experiences have been for others and things that are tough" "and that have worked and things that you learned and when you reorganize things." "And I still, to this day, listen to them and I feel like they're a kind of inexpensive film school, in some respects, and you can learn so much, particularly from some of the masters of..." "Yeah, maybe not us." "No, no, no." "You know what..." "It's unfortunate, what we didn't do, we didn't do the commentary which I've affectionately called that" ""lt Was Cold That Night" commentary." "Which is like, when you're watching the movies and everybody's sitting there going," ""Man, remember how cold it was that night?"" ""Yeah." "Wow, it was cold and I was wet, too."" ""And it was really cold." "God, it was cold that night."" ""Do you remember how cold it was that night?"" "And that's all you get." "You don't get any actual information." "Although, I am cold and wet right now." "increasingly." "Yeah, so there's..." "Fortunately, this is a chance to..." "I didn't really talk so much about the music." "This is the theme, what we call, the family theme of the story." "The..." "Chris had played a lot of different versions of something, and we talked about having a thematic score, a melodic score as opposed to..." "It's just a throwback." "It's to the days of John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith, where today's scores are more motivic." "When you think about things like The Dark Knight, which are really, really great but less melodic." "And we really did want to have a melodic score, and we think..." "We just like that." "It's fun to listen to, and Chris just did such a wonderful job." "One of the things we were very certain of from the beginning was that we wanted a soulful sounding score." "We absolutely did not want a Western sounding score." "You didn't want the..." "No harmonica." "But it would have matched Paul so well." "But at the same time, we didn't want an overly Western, religious sounding score." "So Chris came up with the idea of using this "up, up, up,"" "and an Iranian soloist singer." "And so, it has a plaintive, holy, spiritual, more spiritual than specifically religious, and I think that was really effective." "At the same time as having some gothic elements with the horns and all that stuff." "He just did such a great job with it." "And, you'll notice this is the first time, for the folks playing at home, you hear this melody, the first time you hear it is at Priest's apartment in the scene where Hicks comes to tell him" "and it's just being played on a piano that feels a little broken and distant." "We hear it again reprised in the house when he first sees the picture, the bloody picture, and then you hear it again with the conversation with Owen, the brother, we hear it." "And it keeps coming up throughout the movie and here is a moment where it is allowed to play with the full orchestra." "Which is really cool." "Sort of like that idea." "Well, thank you guys for watching and listening, and look forward to you guys enjoying other stuff on the DVD." "It's hopefully packed full of good stuff." "Thank you and goodnight." "Thank you." "Thank you." "Goodnight." "Goodnight, children."