"Hi, I'm Rian Johnson." "I wrote and directed this film." "I'm Joe Gordon-Levitt and I'm in it." "And this horse is coming right at us." " But this is the old logo, right?" " No." "We really wanted to get the old '90s TriStar logo." " It's pretty remnant of it." " No, this is new-school." "No, I wanted the old one, where the Pegasus comes and flies that optical effect happens, wings come out that were on those great old movies." " I just saw a Pegasus." " No, it's a different Pegasus." "This is going well already." "Already, I feel like we're giving the home-entertainment buyer their..." " Their money's worth." " Their money's worth." "So company logos." "What's your logo gonna be?" "I am not gonna have..." "It's a pet peeve of mine." "A great way to start by complaining about the logos of the people who financed it." "It's a huge pet peeve of mine, actually those huge, long, three-minute-long animated logos." "Anyway, hey, look, it's a movie." "So this first shot was kind of because we did this whole thing with your face that we'll go into at some length." "I felt like it was gonna be really nice to have..." "To have this first shot be something that just puts it right out there." "We start just looking at your face and we take a long look at you and kind of come around you and take the time to kind of absorb..." "Absorb what's going on, face-wise." "I remember when we shot this particular shot we went and did a whole touch-ups session." "We went back to the trailer and gave Jamie a half hour to make everything totally perfect with the face." "You never get a second chance to make a first impression." "And actually, in that same shot, and a lot of that field stuff you can see..." "Because we didn't have a lot of space to work with, with that corn you can actually see the outline of Sara's house there." " It's cane, not corn." " Oh, cane, yeah." " It was corn in early drafts." " In the script, it was corn." "Yeah, but you can't find corn in Louisiana, where we shot it." "This location, this power plant was..." "This kind of old, abandoned power plant was an absolutely gorgeous location and it was a safety nightmare." "And it was also..." "Kind of the backside of it is where we also shot the sequence where Bruce gets put in the time machine." "And also, kind of the flashback where you see..." "You see Zach closing his loop and you're explaining." " Right." " But this place was a..." "It just looked like this." "We didn't do a thing to it." "And it was stun..." "We put the hatch-type thing in but everything else is the way this looked." "And this was the first day of shooting, if I remember." "This was day, like, negative one." "Yeah, we cheated." "We did, like, a test..." "A couple of, like, quote-unquote "test-shoot days" where we actually snuck that in." "I feel like now..." " This is no longer the first day." " No, this is not." " How's the French?" " Slow." "We built this diner." "This was a build." "Both the exterior..." "It was an interior-exterior set which means that, you know, it was what it was." "There wasn't a separate set for in and out." "And we built it out there in the middle of nowhere, and..." "It was funny because locals would actually stop in and ask the construction team, like, when it was gonna open up." "They were really excited to have a new diner in the town." "So where did you get the term "blunderbuss"?" "Blunderbusses..." "I mean, that is an actual gun." "It's an old-style gun which is actually..." "I mean, the function of it is the same as this one." "It's kind of just a hand cannon." "Blunderbusses are flared at the end." "They're..." "In the old Thanksgiving paintings, they're what the Pilgrims are carrying." " Aaron Burr." " Aaron Burr, exactly." "This is back to day-night." "This was the first stuff that we shot with you, right?" " Right." "This was the same day as...?" " Yeah." "No, this was, like, day negative two." "That was my hair-loss joke that I threw in there." "That was Joe's." "Always happy when people catch that." "And all this kind of vamping at the beginning for whatever reason, for stuff with the loopers I had been watching a bunch of..." "I had gone back to Godard." "I'd gone back to watching a bunch of French New Wave stuff." "Because I wanted there to be kind of like a loose..." "The way that it feels when the people hang out in those movies and the kind of loose casualness of it." "And so that thing with the gun directly to the camera felt a little like that." "Belmondo." "So you can see the way that we kind of did the city here our approach to the city." "Everything is..." "This was a long stretch of O'Keefe Street in New Orleans." "And we dressed the entire length of it." "That was a huge, huge deal for us on our budget was dressing the length of that street." "Most of..." "I mean, all the stuff you see on the ground is actual dressing." "We'll be coming back to that street after this scene." "For instance, the broken-down buildings in the background and the graffiti, not there, but if we go back to the wide..." "No, we're not going to." "Basically, anything deep background, where huge stuff is done to..." "Like that little thing on..." "The big thing on the wall back there." "Obviously, the stoplights." "Those are added digitally." "But everything else, all this dressing you see back behind was all practical." "People in tents." "Ed Verreaux, our production designer." "This was a practical effect." "Paul actually had a little rig with the quarter on a little wire..." " Right." " ...he fed up through his finger." " Not a digital quarter." " No, no, no." "It was something..." "It was a big pain in the butt but I actually was really insistent on was for all the little stuff that was gonna float around in the movie that we put stuff on wires and shoot it for real." "Just because I always feel like, you know, if something is made digitally that's supposed to be floating, your eye goes to it." "You expect it to be a digital object, so you're scrutinizing it even more." " Yeah." " And there's that cartoony feel to it." " It alway..." "It still does." " Yeah, yeah, yeah." "One day, we'll actually believe the digitally created things..." " ...but, for me, it's not there yet." " No, it's..." "I mean, you see some great work that's done, but it's..." "I mean, the face was the first digital versus practical discussion we had." " It was a very brief discussion." " Right." "Yeah, we always wanted to do it with makeup." "Facial..." "Anytime you start digitally doing something to what's supposed to be a human face as opposed to an alien face, I just..." "There's..." " You can't do it." "It looks ridiculous." " I agree." " Piper." " There's Piper." "I'm excited to..." "On the DVD, there's..." "Because there was a..." "Originally, there was a little exchange there with you and Noah Segan." "See, right here, this is a practical quarter..." " ...just hung by a string." " Right." "And we tried." "We painted it out because the effects guys were like:" ""Don't you want the quarter to have more play and fly?"" "And I was like, "Give it a shot."" "And we tried it and it never looked right to my eye." "So I said, "Even though it's just gonna be hanging put it back and paint out the string." "Let's go with the original quarter."" "So you tried a cartoon quarter." "Yeah, we tried it." "We gave it a shot, yeah." "The blunder..." "Just like little technical things, the blunderbuss blast that was all..." "We shot kind of like a particular gun and matted in the blast..." " ...the flare effect, afterwards." " Right." "On set, we had a thing in the gun to create the smoke." "But the actual flare was after the fact." " Oh, look, there's Emily." " What?" "Look who's just shown up in the studio." "You are amazing actors." "Ladies and gentlemen, just appeared out of nowhere looper-like, Miss Emily Blunt." "Hi, loops." " Hi, Emily." " Hi." " How are you?" " Thanks for having me." "Thanks for being here." "Emily, you're great in this scene." "I am fantastic in this scene." "That's me, right?" " Yeah, that's you." " And that's me also." "That's it." "That's my cousin Adam who just went by." "There are like 30 Johnsons in this movie." "We already just saw your dad." " Did I miss your dad?" " I didn't mention..." "Yeah, we'll come back to it." "My dad plays the bouncer." "I love your dad in the movie." " I love this shot." " Yeah." "So we actually..." "The way that we shot this..." "This was Steve Yedlin's idea, the cinematographer." "We shot it full-frame." "We didn't shoot it anamorphic." "We shot basically a square format and then we went in and cropped it and did the spin digitally, so we'd get it perfect." "We knew it would be a nightmare if we tried to physically spin the camera." " This kid was so good." " Yeah." "Natural." " Where did you find him?" " Just local casting." "He was in New Orleans." "And I wish I remembered his name." "But he was just so good." "He was a trouper because it was cold." "And so we'd have heat lamps." "And then we would pull the blankets off him, we'd do a take really quick." "And there was..." "It might be in the deleted scenes." "I'm not sure." "Originally, he flips Joe off." " Yeah." " He didn't know what flipping off was." " Oh, bless his heart." " So I asked his dad if it was okay and then I showed him how to hold his hand." " He didn't know what it meant." " Oh, good." "And then I worked his hand, like, from underneath like a puppeteer and jerked it up into frame." "I'm probably gonna get arrested by Child Services now." "What, fourth loop closed this month?" "Loop closed." "Here we go." "Here we go, man." "It was amazing for me watching this part of the movie..." " ...because I wasn't privy to any of it." " You weren't around for it." "Schedule-wise, we did the first half of the shoot in New Orleans in the city and you only showed up when we moved out to Thibodaux..." " ...for the farm stuff." " Right." "So, yeah, this is all new." "This music track, this is one of, like, a montage segment set to this music track, so we can talk a bit about Nathan Johnson." " This music is phenomenal." " So good." "I mean, he's such a talent, it's spooky." "Yeah, he did..." "Did you guys see those videos that he...?" "Saw the first, gotta watch the second." "He put this video online, Emily, that's showing how he created the score just using found sounds mostly." "Because that's his..." "That's really what he works from a lot, is that right?" "In this one it was." "In Bloom, it was more traditional instruments." "Brick was kind of like found sounds." "But this, it was really heavily digitally manipulating the sounds and slowing them down 3000 percent and just..." "And, like, what's an example of a found sound?" "He would record..." "Like, for the percussion, for instance he had Noah bring the gat gun into his studio and he recorded all the clicks and clacks it made." "And then, he basically manipulated those sounds and built a drum kit out of it." "And..." "But he would also..." "He recorded, like, the treadmill in his apartment in New Orleans and then slowed it down and found this natural rhythm in it." "Also worth mentioning Son Lux, his collaborator, who's really good at that." "Son Lux was a heavy-duty collaboration." " I love Paul in this scene." " Paul Dano." " He's great." " Yeah." "...so I don't know why I asked." "This was fairly early in the shoot and I remember this..." "I don't know, but this might have been the first heavy, heavy scene we did." " Yeah, I think that's right." " And I remember there..." "Like, when Paul came in and brought it up to that level of emotion there was definitely a shift on the set of how people kind of, you know..." "The guy with the sack over his head, he was a local extra." "He was a really sweet guy and he was the..." "I told him to sing a song underneath the sack." "He asked what song and I said, "It doesn't matter." "Just something you can sing over and over again."" "And so he sung a..." "I see the producers out there looking at me nervously." "I'm not gonna say a copyrighted song." " No, you can say it." " He sung a..." "I believe it was a LSU fight song." "And he just sung it over and over and over." " What's LSU?" " It's a university." " Louisiana State University." " Oh, okay." "And he sung it over and over and over again and for the rest of the shoot, we'd be hanging around the camera cart and someone would say the first verse and everyone would hate them." "...so I know I've got about 15 strides until he's out of my range." "And they come and they go..." "That location, that..." "I mean, that's another thing where we just stepped into and found it like that." "Joe's apartment was a build." "This was one of our few on-stage builds where we..." "We had all the gag with jumping out the window and falling into the den and everything." "We decided to..." "Ed Verreaux..." " To not actually let Joe jump out." " Not actually..." "We figured, because it was early in the shoot." " We needed him a little more." " A lot to get done." "To get to the real stuff." "That sound is amazing." "I remember we worked on that sound." " You did?" " I was like, "No, it's more of a..."" "He thought I was a little nuts." "Noah Segan, ladies and gentlemen." " Here comes Kid Blue." " Here comes Kid Blue." "Kid Blue's entrance is the funniest moment in the movie." "And no one ever laughs at it." "I think me and you are the only two that find it really funny." "And it has yet to get a laugh in the theater." "But I think it's really funny." "I gotta say, one of the hardest things to play is sheer terror and I think Paul does an amazing job." " It's a tough thing to play, you know." " Yeah." "To play over and over, you know." "I can't imagine how exhausted he was at the end of this." "This was such a grueling, emotional scene and we just spent the whole day doing it." "That little thumbs-up that he does, Paul came up with that." " It's funny." " It is." "Isn't it great?" " It is funny." " Jesus." "You know as he comes through the door that he's not great with a gun." "You just know it's all for show." " It might be funnier if you know Noah." " Maybe, maybe." "That's maybe the trick to it, yeah." "But, yeah, Mr. Paul Dano." "It was real..." "I was just so blown away that he was down for coming out for doing that part." "I remember when I found out that he was gonna do it." "Like, "Really?" "That's fantastic."" "Yeah, me too." "The fact that we could, you know, get an actor of his caliber and that he was psyched about doing these couple of scenes." "It just..." " Where was this location?" " This was another build." "This was..." "Like, all that concrete is actually just foam." "It's just terrific set design." "But this, I..." "For some reason, I had this really specific layout in my head where it was a temporary space and the door was set up high in the wall." "And there was just like an ad hoc ladder that they had set up." "For whatever reason, I just had this really specific layout in my head." "And we were never gonna find it, so we decided to just build it." "And Noah did a lot of training." " Gun-spinning training." " Noah is super..." " He's really..." "He got really good at it." " Yeah." " He got calluses on his index finger." " Oh, he did?" "Yeah, he was really into the gun." "He found, like, a guy who trained him." "That little fumble he did with the gun was an actual mistake that he's probably pissed that I left in." "He worked for months so he could do it flawlessly and then you used the mistake." "This is my other favorite moment in the movie." "This is what it's like between me and Noah." "It's true." "It's a typical lunch." " Amazing." " Yeah." "We had to work a lot on that moment." " How did you do that?" " I mean, it's just perspective." "I mean, the thing just swipes back behind his head and he moves with it." "The sound that..." "Like, having that distinct, cartoony scream was something we add..." "His... was something we added kind of late because we found that it needed it." "Yeah." "That moment took a lot of playing with to find how to get it to land." "It was playing flat for a while." " Is this Jeff Daniels' first scene?" " This is Jeff Daniels' first." " I love him." " Yeah, he's so good in it." "He was so cool, man." " This is my second movie with Jeff." " Is it?" "Yeah, we were in a movie together called The Lookout." " Mr. Scott Frank." " Scott Frank wrote and directed." "Yes." "And, yeah, so it was so cool to get back with him." " Yeah." " Like, right away, easy, comfortable." "I mean, that's a big part of why..." "I mean, besides the fact that it's Jeff Daniels that was why I thought it'd be so good." "Just the dynamic you guys had I could see it translating really well to what was gonna happen here." "And he was so excited, I remember, about..." "He told Sharen Davis, our costume designer how excited he was about his costume." "It was basically a velvet robe." "It was so comfortable." "I was just gonna say." "He was like, "I can die in this."" "I mean, he's so comfortable." "Not only in the robe, but on-screen in general." "Just..." "He is eased back in that chair." "Jeff, he would also..." "He was the coolest dude." "He would have his guitar." "He had, like, a little portable electric guitar with headphones." "And in between takes, he would just sit and, like, work on his guitar." " A guy who's been on a lot of sets." " Yeah." " And you gave me one as a wrap gift." " I did." "That's right." " Very sweet." " Figured you'd use it." "You can see on the table the hammer right there." "And there was actually originally a beat in this scene where..." "I forget if we put it in the deleted scenes." "There was originally a beat in this scene where halfway in there in the conversation, at a random point, there's a lull and your eyes flit..." "It's after..." "It's a ways after he's said:" ""We're not gonna smash your hands with a hammer." Your eyes flit down." "And he looks down and he goes, "That's here for something else later." "That's a bad coincidence."" "But for some reason, it played better on paper than it did..." "Just for whatever reason, the scene didn't end up needing it." "It's an interesting thing, what you..." "When you get into it, what you end up cutting and why." "We have so many deleted..." "Some of my favorite individual scenes are in the deleted scenes or on the cutting-room floor." "That scene with you and Garret in the basement." " How dare you cut us out?" " I know." " How dare you?" " Maybe if you had been a little better." "Garret's work would be in the movie." "I obviously didn't bring it." "Sorry, Garret." " Yeah." " It's funny, though." "It must be even more surreal for you when you write a script and..." "What works on the page is sometimes not what translates and what you think will be an average scene is gonna be way more than you ever anticipated." "I mean, that's all you guys, you know." "That's the fun of it, being surprised by, you know, seeing how you guys bring it to life." "But there..." "It's true, there's..." "If there was one writing superpower I could ask for it'd be the ability to see in the writing phase what's actually not necessary." "But there's..." "And maybe as I, you know, get better, that'll..." " Because you're terrible right now." " I'm pretty awful." "You get to the end of editing and you're like, "Oh, my God." "There's like 45 minutes of scenes that we didn't need."" "Shouldn't I have been able to see that in the script phase then have all those production days to spend shooting the stuff we are gonna keep?" "But it's just a consistent thing where until you get the thing together as a living thing you don't know what needs to go and what needs to stay." "Especially with a movie with this kind of complexity too." " It's probably better to get more." " Right." "The makeup in this shot." "If the makeup was ever going to hold up or not hold up it was in a shot like this." "And Kazu Kazuhiro Tsuji, who's our makeup designer was just a genius." "Yeah, I love Kazu so much." "He and I..." "Kazu and I..." "I'll take the time to say at this point, I guess Kazu and I first worked together on G.I. Joe:" "Rise of Cobra." "He did my crazy prosthetics on that." "And then when Rian and I were speaking about this character and how we were gonna do it..." "From the very beginning, we were like, "It's a makeup thing."" "Because we talked briefly about doing it digitally..." " ...and neither of us liked that idea." " Not really, yeah." "So it would be a makeup thing." "And I instantly was like, "We should really talk to Kazu." "I know he normally does, like, bigger-budget things than this but he and I made friends." "And I think he might really get a kick out of this."" "It was..." "I was so happy when he agreed to do it." "And Jamie, who applied the makeup every single day..." " Jamie Kelman." " Jamie Kelman, yeah." "Because it was an art form unto itself." " The application." " The application and the maintenance." "You found out during the course because when you would sweat, bubbles would rise in it." "So he had to go in with a pin and pop those." "It was..." "I gotta say, you, Joe, giving the performance that you did with the amount of face prodding you dealt with..." " ...throughout the movie..." " Lot of needles." "Just endlessly prodded at the entire day." "After each take, they were like, "Hold on."" "So this actor here, Frank Brennan, was a local actor." "And he was just fantastic." "He spent..." "I forget how many nights we ended up shooting this scene." "And originally, this was a much more protracted and much longer sequence." "We probably cut it down by about half." "There was more business with him running and things disappearing but once we got in the edit, we just realized, you know..." " He's great in this." " A short, sweet..." "Yeah, I mean, that thing you were talking about of just..." "Without any words at all, just having to communicate." "It's funny." "This is a scene that when we first put it in the editor, our editor, Bob Ducsay, who's a fantastic editor he said, "I bet you're gonna end up..." "This scene should go." "I think you're gonna end up cutting this scene because it's a..."" "First, we had it in without the effects, so it wasn't as effective as it was." "It's so hard to know when you're not looking at it finished." "But also, it is a little narrative cul-de-sac." "It doesn't connect to anything else." "It sets up this piece of information and it's an effective scene, but..." "Those are my arms, by the way, in his pant legs." "Faking that." "But it's completely necessary." " That's where we ended up." " If you haven't seen it, how do you...?" "Where are the stakes once it starts happening...?" "That's what we ended up with." "This was one of our more complicated effects shots in the whole movie." "This is actually like three shots stitched together." "And by the end here, the whole street has been, like, digitally replaced." "And his pant leg is actually digital." "It took a lot of manipulating." " And then this was actually a..." " How did you do that?" "That one shot from behind, that was another actor we brought in who didn't have arms, actually." "And we just made up the back of his head with a wig to look like Frank." "And he came up and..." "So it's a combination of low- and high-tech." "Noah working his little gun spin in there, anywhere he can." "But it's just..." "He makes it look easy because he practiced so much." " So hard." " That gun is 7 and a half pounds." " It's absurd." " Very difficult to spin it on your index." "It is absolutely absurd how huge that gun is." "And, yeah, it just takes a lot of skill." " Piper." " Piper." "Piper Perabo." "This scene is interesting because we..." "And this..." "I don't think this has ever happened before where the scene as written when we went into production, I wasn't..." "I still felt like it was a little off." "I don't know if you remember, but in production we took some time and you and Piper came over." " I remember." " We just worked through the scene and did kind of a..." "And just kind of talked through it." "And I ended up rewriting the scene and finding what the heart of it was." "And I feel like we really..." "I feel like we really kind of found it and made it better." "Starting the scene off with that watch, or with the clock was supposed to kind of mirror, you know, Joe's pocket watch." "And to me, there's..." "There was a real..." "More..." "Even more than the parallel between Piper and Emily's character the real parallel was between Piper and Joe's character." "And the notion that they're, you know..." "That this is their job." "A big part of the reason why the nudity in this scene was really important to me the same way that we didn't pull..." "That the violence is right there and in your face when he shoots the people." "It was very plaintive that this is her job." "This is what she's here to do." "And the fact that Joe is asking for more than that..." " ...is the big disconnect of the scene." " Right." "I think Piper just plays it beautifully." "And you're pretty good too." " Hey, thanks." " Hey." "We had the camera on its side for this shot." "If you remember the mag, it didn't like it." "The film mag, like, started squealing." " Oh, yeah, I do remember that." " Yeah." " Did you ADR it?" " No, actually." "We managed to get away with it." "Might be one or two little things but didn't end up using much ADR in most of the movie, actually." "We ended up saving most of the production." "Little insert of the clock." "That and all the other second-unit shots basically any shot that's totally disconnected from the actors most of those were done by our incredible second unit shot by Jaron Presant, who's a fantastic DP who Steve and I have known since college." "He did a great job with that and a lot of the cutaways and inserts like that shot of the silver going in." "That's not shot on the main unit." "This was your hand, though." "I remember distinctly doing this." "A lot of the other hands, though, are not me." " It's true." " No, it's true." "At one point, in Brick Steve, our DP, we discovered, was a great hand substitute for you." "And not anymore because he's worked so much." "His hands are all messed up." " You calling me dainty?" " Yeah." "Joe, you haven't worked a day." "You have lily-white hands." "He actually works for a living." "So that took him out." "And here we go with the man." "Can't wait." "Love that dude." " Who?" " This..." "Yeah, exactly." " "Who?"" " I was about to go into a thing about the pocket watch." "It's actually..." "I believe it's Turkish." " Oh, really?" " Yeah." " It's 100 years old." " Real interesting thing." " Beautiful." " You get to keep it?" " No." " No?" " No." "No." " No." "This way that Bruce appears the way that everyone appears in the movie I remember that was something really difficult to communicate." "Just because I wanted it to be absolutely nothing when they showed up." "And I'll say this, for instance, is like..." "All those little inserts and stuff it's all pasted together from shooting over, like, a couple days." "But, yeah, the way that they instantly snap on was something that..." "Because once, you know, effects guys look at that the instinct is to do something, like a, you know, time-warp effect or to do, like, a Stargate effect." "And I figured it would..." "The one thing I hadn't seen that would be more cool is just unadorned." "They're not there one moment, they're there the next." ""Are you sure you don't want a little space ripple?"" ""Just a little flare." "Put in a little flare."" " "Little puff of smoke?" " Yeah." "We can do smoke."" "In this sequence there's some beautiful matte-painting effects." "Digital matte paintings which Atomic Fiction..." "It's a company based up in Northern California that did those." "What did you say?" "Matte-painting effects?" "Matte paintings." "Yeah, all the city stuff where it's big vast landscapes but it looks otherworldly, or the cities are burning or on fire." "You know, they're digital matte paintings." "They're composites." "And I mean, they used to..." "I mean, you see pictures of how they used to do glass matte paintings, where they would..." "Somebody would paint it on glass, like the parts that were gonna be changed." "Set it in front of the camera and photograph the plate." "It was such an incredible art form, which is now basically gone." "Kid Blue comes in here with these two jokers." "We said we should do a spinoff called Shorty and the Kid." "The big guy was named Shorty and they'd fight crimes." "That handle on the door looks like a cross which Bob Ducsay, our editor, when we were bored and getting goofy would start looking for crosses in the background and say we had to do a whole thing about the Crucifixion symbolism we've baked into it purposefully." "So this thing here, we actually..." "We did this practically." "A fantastic stuntman took a dive in there." "And then Lex, the bravest stuntman in the world put his hand up and there's a steel rod that caught the trap doors that came down." "But the trap door actually came straight down and slammed right..." " Oh, no." " Resting on his hands." " Oh, no." " Scariest thing..." "Scarier than taking a jump off a building." " I had to slam it down on there." " Yeah." "Did he scream?" " Did he break his hand?" " No, no, no." "No, but he gestured with his hand as if it hurt." " To make it look..." "Yeah." " Yeah." "We ended up having to do some digital stitching between shots." "But it's mainly practical." "And this..." " My 30th birthday." " Your 30th birthday." "That's entirely practical." "All we did was remove wires." "We just..." "We lowered Joe down and he did the whole fall onto some pads." "We followed him down with the camera on a Technocrane." "So that shot, besides wire removal was entirely in camera." "If you are looking for things to do on your birthday consider jumping off backwards three stories off a building." "That's right." "We brought out a cake, sang to him when he was suspended 30 feet in the air." "It's hard to beat." "It was pretty cool." "That's a good one." "This sequence was the one we worked with most in the editing room." "And this is because it took us a while to really figure out how to get storytelling clear." "Big sticking point." "It's still one of the more confusing, tricky things that we do." " Not my hands." " But..." "There you go." "They looked a little beefy." "They looked masculine." " Veiny." " They look feminine." "Yeah." "Oh, yeah?" "So, what was I saying?" " This sequence..." " Sorry." "How dare you?" "Originally, it was set in Paris." "And originally the plan was, you know, Joe wants to go to Paris." "The thing is we were faced with the prospect of faking Paris in New Orleans." "And our Chinese distributor approached us and said:" ""If you're willing to set the sequence in Shanghai we can make this a co-production." "Pay for you to come over to Shanghai."" "And so basically we got to shoot for real in Shanghai for two weeks." "Was that the shot my parents were in?" "Yes." "Right at the very beginning." "If you pause it, that shot where first Joe goes over to see the city if you pause it at the beginning, Dennis and Jane are in the background." "My parents came to China." "How was that nightclub?" "I was sick when we were shooting in that nightclub." "It was a cool nightclub, but a nightmare for me and Steve because we were both absolutely ill during it." "I remember you let me pick the music." "You were like, "Put something on."" " Nobody was dancing." " Yeah." "They were just, like, staring at us." "All right." "It's okay." " Put on some Skrillex." "Damn it." " Yeah." "I gotta say that one with Bruce with the long hair that's where he really looks most like you." "It's really cool." "The concept of this was to bring them closer together." "And then originally that was cut as a more elaborate thing." "We did intercutting between that push-up on Bruce and you shooting up and aging." "There was a point where it switched to him." "But I think this..." "I think you get it from this." "Summer, who was our Chinese actress here was absolutely wonderful." "She was fantastic." "Yeah." "Originally, there was..." "Some will be in the deleted scenes." "There was a lot more with Joe and Summer where..." "There was a thing where she couldn't accept him because he was a murderer." "So he threw his guns away." "And there was a..." "That fed into the whole thing." "But it just..." "During the course of cutting it, it just slimmed down to the bare essentials." "You still get what you're saying, though." " He does throw his guns away." " Yeah." "That's what you realize." "And that's part of the cutting process, I think, is realizing what's..." "What the audience will leap to." "What you need to connect the dots on." "And what they'll make the leap to." "This is in New Orleans." "Anything that's..." "Because Bruce didn't travel to China." "Anything that has Bruce in it is actually set in..." "We shot New Orleans for China." "I remember that detail of her hand on his foot." "That was in the script." "That's the level of detail..." " ...that's in a Rian Johnson script." " Yeah." "That was a specific thing I had..." " ...in my head." " But it's real." " I've gotta say that's a real thing." " And we mirror it later with you..." " ...with Cid's face." " Yeah." "Yeah." "That kind of casual, natural thing." "And here we're back to our power plant." "And the time machine itself was..." "The design of it, we..." "I wanted it to be really foreboding..." " ...but also really primitive-looking." " Yeah." "The design..." "And dangerous-looking." "The design of it is based on the Gadget." "It's based on the first test bomb that they set off at the Trinity Test Site." " And..." " What's the Trinity Test Site?" "Trinity Test Site was..." "It was the first test of an A-bomb." "Of an atomic bomb." "Out in the desert of New Mexico." "And they..." "And I..." "There was a video game I was obsessed with when I was younger called "Trinity," which was a game kind of that was this surrealistic beautiful game by Brian Moriarty." "It was kind of a surrealistic journey through the history of the atomic bomb." "And it came with this comic book that had a picture of the device." "And it looks like that." "And that had just always stuck in my head and..." " Bruce doing the fighting." " The moral of that story is don't mess..." " ...with Bruce Willis." " No." "What is that amazing move where he drops to his back?" "I love that move." " He came up with all of this." " He did?" "He worked with the fight chor in there..." " ...but really Bruce just..." " He's just done a ton of..." "He has and he knew what he was doing." "It was..." "It was cool to see." "This is in camera right here." "We cranked the frame rate." "We ramped the frame rate down so that it started jittering." "And Bob Hall, our first AC actually pulled the lens off the camera while he was shaking the lens and its seating back and forth." "Bob Hall's also Chris Nolan's focus puller." "He pulled focus on Inception and Dark Knight Rises." "And this was an incredibly difficult show, focus-wise." "We did a lot of stuff to put Bob in a really tight spot." "We were shooting wide open which means that the aperture of the camera is wide open shooting in low light." "That also means that your focal plane, the amount of leeway you have where something is in or not in focus, is really small." "And we were shooting close-up stuff really wide open." "It's just very, very difficult to hit, and Bob is just..." "He's kind of the Yoda of..." " Yeah." " Of camera assistants." "An intense job, especially when you're shooting film because you have to hit it so exactly..." " ...in terms of the focus." " Yeah." "A shot like this pushing in on Bruce, he's gotta carry it." "He's gotta dial it exactly in." "You don't have a reference." "Not like you're looking through the eyepiece and you can see." "You're just going based on distance." "You're going based on the numbers on the dial dialing it down three feet, two feet, and just a sense of it." "You don't know whether you hit it until a few days later when they get the dailies back." " Right." " It's really an incredibly difficult high-pressure job, and Bob Hall makes it look easy." "Yeah, the guys who are really good at it, it's like..." " They're performers along with..." " Yeah." " They..." "Because they..." " Yeah." "They adjust that focus ring along with the performances." "So they have to have a sense of timing along with the actors the way that the scene is paced." "When we were in China, we had another AC." "A first AC who came out who's as good and his name is John Connor, crazily enough." " Love it." " Terminator." "Little love there." "Fucking Kid Blue." "I think Bruce ad-libbed that line actually." "Bruce ad-libbed..." "I ended up cutting it." "He ad-libbed, "This motherfucker's still alive?"" "Yeah." "Which I thought was really funny, but..." "This moment here where the thing explodes inward gets a good reaction." "I like the dripping." "I had always pictured more blood actually." " But..." " Rian." " I know." "I know." " You're so dark." "This was a really long, complicated shot." "This was, like, a whole night's shooting." "What's happening here is there's actually two stuntmen and Joe involved in this." "There's a guy who we've painted out who was doing the initial crawl." "There's a guy who was hanging out down below who did the fall onto the hood." "And then once we panned back up, Joe, you were hiding behind the car." " You switched with him." " We switched." "This was actually all done in one shot and it was this elaborate thing." "The guy falling at the end we added in digitally afterwards." "How did that feel being just yanked off..." " Yanked out of there." " ...one-handed by Bruce Willis?" " With broken glass all over." " Exactly." " Exactly." " It's fine." "It's great." "Right." "Stupid little shit." "I can fix this." "I really love Kid Blue's character." "That sounds..." "I'm allowed to say that." "But just what..." "What Noah did..." "The way that Noah..." "What Noah brought to that character." "And specifically his dynamic with Jeff is just wonderful." "Even now that I've seen the movie 3000 times it's one of my favorite things in the movie." "That shot was one of those examples of very difficult to get into focus." "Oh, my God." "Yeah." "Just no play at all." "You just gotta hit it." "And you gotta know that you hit it." "All the helicopters were added in post." "They were all digital and..." "I was very iffy about that just because I'm kind of a curmudgeon when it comes to digitally created vehicles." "And I remember I had seen on the Blade Runner DVD extras the optical comps of the flying cars before they added the flaring headlights in." "I was like, "Oh, my God, without the headlights, it looks like an optical." "Terrible."" "And those headlights just cover all ills." " Right." " And so I..." "I had them just really go heavy on the flare that was coming down from all the vehicles to..." "To make them these points of light in the sky." "These are my little cousins actually." "I solicited my family for pictures of babies to put on the map." "There's never a shortage of Johnson babies." "That's really true." "Plastic on the books was something Ed Verreaux just came up with." "I thought it was a really cool idea." "Yeah, that books are being phased out." "That shot worked out nice." " The scale of it." " Yeah." "We had incredible greensmen on this movie because when we were shooting there was no sugar cane, basically." "It was dead." "And so anything you see there is dead sugar cane that's been propped up..." " ...and painted green." " Yeah." "And it's basically artificial." "So we really..." "They..." "And our guys just did an incredible job." "It died because of the weather?" " Or the wrong time of year?" " Wrong time." "We were there the exact wrong time of year." "And here's the diner scene." "So this was..." "Is it...?" "All said, including the escape, I think, was three days of shooting." "We had..." "At various points we had two cameras going for a lot of it." "And our favorite statistic was in the course of these three days we shot more film than we did for the entirety of Brick." "I think that's actually true." "I forget what the footage count was, but..." "Tracie Thoms who came in and did the part of Beatrix." "Very, very graciously." " She's a terrific actress." " She's terrific." "Between her and Bruce, I felt like I was in a Tarantino movie." "Yeah." "Completely, completely." "Yeah, yeah, yeah." "Yeah, Tracie's just the best." "This is also one of those scenes where..." "Oh, wait a minute, this..." "The business between the two of you here when he says the thing about three letters and you say, "That'd be better."" "That's one of the few ad-libs in the scene, actually." " Yeah." " That always gets a laugh." "I love this profile because you can really see how masterful the prosthetic is." "With the nose and the lips..." " It's really cool." " This is where it pays off." "This is the first time that we had shot the two of them together." "And so it was kind of a sigh of relief for everybody when we saw them lined up." "We were like, "Oh, yeah, that really works."" "This scene is an example where we were talking about..." "When we were talking about what to cut and what not to and connecting the dots with time-travel logic." "Because, originally, there was a whole section in this scene where..." "And it was kind of a gag that after..." "At some point, Bruce says:" ""I don't wanna be making diagrams with straws."" "He gets frustrated trying to explain it and he goes:" ""Hand me those straws." Starts making a diagram." "And he started explaining not a timeline, but more of a visualization of how his head was becoming hazy." "And it was nice, but it was one of those things where we just..." "You figure out you don't need it." "The audience..." "Not what the audience cares about or is thinking about at that point." "And you just..." "You have to be brutal and cut anything that isn't just attached to the spine." "So you know what's gonna happen?" "You've done all this already?" "I don't want to talk about time travel shit." "That gets a big laugh." "Making diagrams with straws." "Well, that's..." "Being able to just kind of dismiss it like that..." " It was so smart, though." " Well, the approach to time travel..." "Because the movie's not about time travel." "That was one of the challenges in writing it was figuring how to get time travel to lay down so that the audience isn't having to process..." " ...the rules of it the whole time." " Right." "Because the heart of the movie is really in the characters and largely in the back half with you and Cid." "And so getting it to the point where it felt like it made sense, which it doesn't." "No time travel in any movie makes sense." " No." " It's complete balderdash." "It's a matter of tricking the audience into believing that it makes sense." "And so that was a big part of the challenge." "One of the pleasant surprises was how much of even the explanation we shot and put in there, we could end up cutting out..." " Right." " ...during the editing realizing that the audience is making these jumps and is not confused." "Sometimes more information serves to make it more confusing." "It's messy." "This was the first time Bruce really heard you do him." " That's true." " Right?" " That's right." " He was nice." "He was very happy." "Yeah." "The way he reacted to that." "Pretty." "She's gonna save your life." "Yeah." "There was originally a lot more in this scene." "That quiver, that's not actually..." "That's a hand double." "It's not Bruce's hand." "Nervous to be Bruce's hand." "He had..." "It's tough actually." "And if you rest your hand on a table and look at it there is a bit of quiver to it." "Especially if you're being filmed." "You know?" "I think he had some coffee in the morning or something the guy who did it." "There's a trick you can do for something like that where you slow it way, way down." "And we did that a few times to steady a really tight shot of a hand." "You can slow it down, whatever, you know 300 percent, and that can steady it." "Bob was gonna put that on there." "I asked him not to." " I liked that quiver." " Yeah." "Something that's hard to fake." " Something when you see it..." " Right." "Someone trying to fake hand quivering is a tough thing to do." " I can do it." " I know you can." "For lesser actors, it's difficult to fake." "You ask me to fake anything, I'll do it for you." "This was another big editorial decision, was..." "Because, originally, a lot of this stuff with Summer that happens in this little flashback here was placed in the main montage." "And holding that off for this..." "Because originally we revealed..." "Right now, as it is, in the big China montage." "This we cut out, basically, once he goes down on his knees." "And you see the house burning." "And we hold off..." "And now..." " Right." " We hold off the reveal that she comes in, gets shot until this." "That wasn't the way it was." "We saw that in the original montage, and the diner scene just kind of played more straight." "And during the course of cutting it was something that came up, that was..." "I think it was actually..." "It might have been Jim Stern who had the idea and threw it out there." "It just..." "It played so well holding that piece out." "And it also helps to break up the diner scene." "Break the diner scene in half so you have this kind of burst of visual information in the middle of a scene." "Summer is so..." " Love her performance." " So wonderful." "Both of them here." "What she conveys just with her eyes." "Have you heard of the Rainmaker?" "Yeah, Seth said that night." "Neither of you eat the food." " No." " Smart." " Because after take 20..." " After take 20." " ...you're like:" " Under those lights." " I made that mistake in my first film." " Oh, yeah?" " They handed me a fried breakfast." " Oh, no." "Good British fry-up." "And then you had to..." "I felt so ill at the end of the day." " You wolfed down those bangers?" " Yeah." "Oh, boy." "You can see Joe's eyes really well in this close-up and..." "It's..." "Because..." " So, Joe, you have brown eyes." " I have brown eyes..." " ...and I'm wearing blue contacts." " Which is the toughest thing to do." "It requires the most uncomfortable lenses..." " ...to turn brown eyes blue." " Yeah." "Because they're so thick?" "It's easier if you have blue eyes, you wanna turn them brown." "It's a matter of laying brown on top of them." "Basically, this is like a painted blue ring on it." "But we noticed a weird thing, which is it would..." "The lenses, the color of them, would fade over the course of, like, a few weeks." "And then they would pop new ones in, and they would be vibrant bright blue." " Yeah." " There actually is some..." "I think it's realistic." "People's eyes look different in different lighting conditions." " Blue eyes, they change a lot." " Yeah." "Oh, yeah." "In this county." "And I'm gonna use..." "And it was amazing how..." "Even with the face stuff, I feel the eyes were still maybe the biggest difference." " The biggest kind of..." " Absolutely." "When I..." " When you pop those in." " I would do the whole makeup..." " Not the eyes." "The eyes you do last." " Yeah." "And it would feel incomplete until you put the eyes in." "Then I'd look in the mirror and go, "There it is."" "Right." "Right, right, right." "...swallow up all the memories, right?" "This whole bit here..." "And this ties the whole thing in together." "And this specific thing was, again..." "This was maybe the one other thing in the movie that we all came up with together." " When we were rehearsing." " Yeah, we were rehearsing." "This bit about, "Just show me the thing and I'll do it," and, you know..." "This is so stu..." "You know, and that turn..." "He really hit me there." "That's one of my prouder moments." " I got hit." " He smacked you." ""Hit me in the neck."" "At least one of the takes." "There was definite impact between Bruce Willis' fist and my head." "If you don't get hit in our movies, we're doing something wrong." " I got hit for real in Brick." " Yeah, Noah..." "Noah tagged you." " Other Noah." " Other Noah." "That shot, that little twisting shot we did using shuffleboard wax." "We put this super-slippery wax on the ground and just slid the camera over." "Steve had this trick." "Which we actually figured out from Brick." "We first did it in Brick." "What the hell is everybody doing?" "The music over this scene was, I think, the very last thing we dropped in." "For a long time, I resisted having any music over this scene." "But what Nathan did for it worked really well." "Shit!" "That really happened." "And when that happened, everyone was like:" ""We have to do it over." And I was like, "What?" "That's great."" "I like Kid Blue's limp also." " Yeah." " He did this ridiculous limp." "It's kind of like the sad villain." "For the slat bike too, we..." "Similar to the way that I wanted all the floating things on strings I didn't wanna have to..." "Although this is obviously a comp." "I didn't wanna..." "One of the..." "Yeah." "Oh, well." "I..." "Rian. "Oh, well."" " Right, well..." " They can't all be gems." "When the slat bike is flying, I didn't wanna have to just comp it in." "And so we actually built a truck with an arm coming off the side holding the slat bike up and drove with it." " Emily Blunt." " Oh, she's arrived." " Yeah." " That chopping..." "Why don't you talk about that?" "Well, I had never chopped wood in my life before this film." "And I just didn't wanna chop like a sissy." "So I had the props guy drop off some logs in my back garden in L.A and I practiced for about a month beforehand." "That was the easier chopping-wood scene." "There's a scene later on that Joe and I have where I chopped wood for about six hours straight." "I could hardly brush my teeth that night, you know." "It messed up your shoulder for the rest of the shoot." "I felt so bad." "It was..." " It's all part of it." " It's all part of it?" "To the point where, you know, even holding the gun up was..." "I think that was the thing that did it, holding up that rifle." " Yeah." " This I really..." "I fought..." "Not really other people but I fought myself to keep this in up till the very end." "I just loved the way that you played this long moment." "It was something that obviously could go and..." "You know, it's something that is like this long strange moment that plays." "I really loved taking this long a breath at this point in this story." "I do too." "Yeah." "Letting you absorb this new person." "Because we're meeting you late in the story having this long moment to stare at this new person." "And it's so different." "The whole world is different from what we've seen." "Yeah." "I felt like it was really important." "And you learn a lot about her just..." "In that moment." "Yeah." "That was really beautiful." "This house is a house that we found in Thibodaux, Louisiana which is about an hour or so outside of New Orleans." "And we did a lot of scouting to find this house because it..." "This is like a traditional Midwestern farmhouse." "And those just don't exist in Louisiana around New Orleans." "This was an anomaly." "It's miraculous we were able to..." "Our location guys found it." "So..." "And it's basically as is." "We knocked..." "We built the staircase in it." " Yeah." " And we did some adjusting to the walls and we extended the porch." "But other than that, the house is as it was." "This was you telling me to go Full Metal Jacket." " Right." " You remember?" "I told you to go Sam Jackson." " You did, yeah." " I said, "Go full Sam Jackson on this."" "...cut you the fuck in half!" " That was my agent's favorite line." " Yeah." " You should make that your ring tone." " My agent now calls me saying:" ""If you don't ring me back, I'll cut you the fuck in half."" "So, yeah, all this cane is on life support." "Any time you see cane in the movie, it's..." "It's basically the..." "Our incredible greensmen." "Hap." "Remember Hap?" "Hap was the one to give me..." " ...amazing massages as well." " Yeah." "Massages." "He had all these crazy oils." "I was intensely jealous." " The way the frame warped like that..." " Didn't have the magic hands." "That was Bob Hall again." " The way that frame warped then." " Right." "Because we were shooting anamorphic, which is not a spherical lens..." "It's like a compressed lens." "When you do a focus rack any time, you can see the whole frame breathes." "And so I told Bob just rack it back and forth real quick see what we get, and he was having fun..." " ...jiggling it." " Yeah." "So that's just an artifact of the type of lens we were using." " And their work is always invisible." " That's true." "So to step out into the foreground with something you can see..." "Yeah." "This is a really beautiful scene between..." "I really love the work Noah does here." "So sad." "And there was..." "Originally, there..." "And this'll..." "It'll be in the deleted scenes, there's a second half to this scene where after he hits him with the hammer the guys drag him out back." "Kind of a Miller's Crossing scene where they're dragging him the guy's gonna shoot him." "And at the last minute, Kid Blue pulls a gun out of his..." "An ankle holster that he has, gets the guy first and runs into the rain." "And it was a really nice scene." "Noah did a great job." "Both Noah and the stuntman did a terrific job with it." "But we realized that the scene, dramatically, was..." "It was over at this point." "And we realized that the real meat of the scene was right there and everything else after that, as cool as it was was kind of, you know, an epilogue." "So Noah had to be face down in a dirty alley." "More than that, this emotional scene he did begging for his life." "The toughest thing I had..." "Because there were a lot of Kid Blue scenes that were cut." "We're gonna hopefully have Noah on in the commentary to talk about on the deleted scenes." "Again, they're some of my favorite scenes in the movie." "But because of the nature of that character they were connective tissue." "Connecting dots from A to B to C to D." "And for a lot of them, we just realized we didn't..." "We didn't need them." "Steve..." "The stuff Steve Yedlin did out here with those distant lights, with this and letting it go that dark." "Yeah, it's so cool." "He did a great job with the exterior night, which is always..." "Exterior night is always a tricky thing to deal with." "You stop!" "Stop right there!" " And here is Ponce, who played..." " Ponce." "He was so cool, man." " You fall down a lot in this movie." " Come on!" "She's a chick, you know." " I remember..." " It's true." "You do." "You fall down a lot." " You're a klutz." " She's always..." "Such a klutz." "This is really well done, this puking." "That is not easy, actually." " I'm an expert on vomit takes." " Yeah." "I think I actually, on the day, went:" "He made me gag." "Look up at the light." "Look up at me." "This scene was a pain." "Seems like it's really simple but there was a lot more exposition..." " ...and it just was not working." " Yes." "It felt like, you know..." "It felt like, "Why is she saying all this..." " ...explaining this?"" " Right." "And we..." "I remember we worked with it on the day and simplified it." "And this just works so much better." "Now, here comes the real star of the movie." "Little man." "What was the story...?" "Do you remember the Pierce story?" "It's a great way to introduce Pierce." "Who was he talking to?" "Was he talking to you?" " His mom..." " It was Rebecca." " His mom told me a story." " His mom." "Yeah." "About..." "I forget exactly." "I remember it." "Okay, so he was..." "He was saying..." "They were next to you and they..." "It was something like, you know..." "It was something like you were doing some work or something like that and she said to him, "Now, you see, Pierce even though Joe's the star of the movie, he's still working hard and doing all this stuff, so that's..." "So, you know..." "That's something for you to look at."" "Pierce looked at her really seriously, his face just fell, and he said:" " "Joe's the star of the movie?"" " Yeah." "I remember him in the auditioning process which was the scary part of casting this kid." "Because you needed that kid who was just spooky good and had something kind of heightened about him." "That's hard to find in a 4- or 5-year-old, you know?" "Jaron Presant did this shot also." "This is a beautiful, cool shot." " Pierce just..." " I remember you asking Pierce to do something in his audition." "And he said, "I'll only do it if you give me the movie."" "Yeah." " That's almost why..." " I haven't heard your impression." " That's kind of why he got the part." " That was really good." "At some point in the audition, we had auditioned the poor kid like six times." "We kept bringing him back and back and back." "And at some point, he was like, "I kind of don't wanna do this."" "You were emotionally asking him to go to a deep place." " He was like, "No."" " Seriously, like..." " "I'll do it..." - "I'll do it when the cameras are here."" " Says, "I'm not gonna waste it."" " Yeah." " I love that kid." " Bruce..." "Yeah." "Bruce does a really great job in this scene." "The first time I saw your face." "The first time I saw her face." "This scene, actually, largely just because of what Bruce brought to it it ended up playing really well in terms of communicating the emotion of losing the wife." "So much so that there was a later scene that was originally in the film where after he comes back and finds its Piper's daughter he's going back and forth again, having an internal moment of whether or not to throw away his guns and give it all up." "And that scene felt redundant because this one played so well." "It's one of those things that you just can only discover in the editing." " I like the blanket." " I like it too." "Science fiction." "And we took the scene out with the car as well." "That's gonna be on the deleted..." "Originally, there was a whole thing where..." "Again, it's connective tissue." "It was a really nice scene, but when it's gone, you realize:" ""Yes, it makes sense just to hop."" "Originally, you saw Sara actually dump him by the side of the road and then have a change of heart and bring him back into the barn and chain him up to the thing." "Right." " I'm about to finish cleaning." " Put it down." "I find that really funny." "That never gets a laugh." "That was, I think..." " This barn was another..." " That was real, by the way." "You tossed me those keys." "I couldn't move my wrist because I was handcuffed, and you managed to toss them so I didn't even have to move, I could catch them." " Well-tossed key." " Acting." "Acting." "Ed Verreaux built this barn, that was the other big build thing that we did." " This is where..." " I loved that farm." "...your shoulder was totally thrashed and you had to hold that gun up." "I think in this shot, one of the grips is holding the end of the gun." "I think after about..." " After a few takes." "Yeah." " After a few takes." "It's not the gun I'm not afraid of." "What are you gonna do, shoot in the air?" "You wouldn't let me die, you're not gonna kill me." "So that makes me weak?" "This is also the first time we get any of the back-and-forth with you two." "And this little kind of Looney Tunes:" "We shot..." "When we first moved out to the farm here, it was..." "I forget." "Our whole schedule was 50 days." "I think it was..." "Was it...?" "How many days...?" "Ram, do you..." "I'm looking at Ram now in the studio." "Was it 30 days in the city?" " And then 20...?" " I know I worked three weeks, so I..." " Yeah." " Something like that." "Something like that." "But when we first moved out there, the first thing that we shot was the whole scene in the field." " The whole end showdown." " Yeah, you're right." "Because we had Bruce for that overlapping week." "And so we shot him out in the field." "And we got so lucky because there was no rain." "It didn't rain a single day." "It was blue skies that first week." "We only realized when a week later we did have our first rain day how lucky we got, because when it rains because of the water table, there's nowhere for the water to go." "You're basically sitting in a mud lake, and the water has nowhere to drain to." "So if it had rained at any point in that first week..." " ...we would've just been screwed." " Right." " Continuity-wise." " We lucked out." "Yeah." "I can't go back to the city because Abe..." "That..." "That's back in New Orleans, the place that Bruce is." "And that kind of overpass, which is kind of the visual thing we decided to have tie that whole sequence together..." " Yeah." " ...is..." "It was a beautiful, big foreboding thing." "...to murder my son because he thinks he might be this Rainmaker?" "Remember, we tweaked in here also the information that was being given." "Another point where I was figuring out exactly what to say and what not to." "Another scene, I don't think we're including in deleted scenes where Bruce actually came up to Kamden who's the actor who plays Daniel, and had a conversation with him just to scope him out and make sure he was the real kid." "There was this really creepy conversation between the two of them." "It was really, really cool, actually but it was one of those things where it just wasn't the heart of the scene." "So this is the moment that from the very first moment that I'd finished the script and showed it to my intrepid producer Ram Bergman and we started to go out there, this was the moment coming up here that was obviously the biggest sticking point to the point where Ram might've been humoring me when he let me leave it in." "Ram, in the back of his head, was like, "Yeah, we'll end up cutting that out." "It's okay." "Leave it in." "It'll be okay." "We'll figure out a way to make it work."" "He always referred to it as "shooting the baby."" " Shooting the baby." " I'm like, "He's a toddler." "What are you talking about?"" " But it's..." " It's so good." "First of all, it's a testament to Ram and to Jim Stern and the whole team at Endgame that they trusted that this moment would work in the context of the movie as a whole." "And we actually..." "Once we actually shot it and got it in there and especially once we got this scene after it..." "Bruce's reaction to it is so heartbreaking." "I think that's really what earns it and what saves it is what Bruce brings to the scene right here." "His sort of sickness and self-loathing is what justifies it." "Yeah." "Yeah." "And so we..." "Once we actually got it in the movie we never had any..." "Surprisingly, we didn't really have any audience kickback." "I mean, it's not something that's good to watch or feels good." "People would say, "That makes me really uncomfortable."" "But they would also say, "But in the context of the story, it's necessary."" " I love the music." "It's so beautiful." " Nathan's." "Yeah." "Yeah." " So much of the score is rhythmic." " Gives me goose bumps." "Look at that." "Look at that." "She does have goose bumps." "It's true." "Yeah, Bruce just really took it all the way here." "It was really amazing to watch." "His ear, his right ear also..." "I don't know if you really even..." "You do notice it during the course of it but that appears the instant after Joe's ear gets shot in the apartment." "And poor Bruce had to..." "Can you believe poor Bruce had to have that thing on?" " That was tough." " It was really tough on him." "It took like 15 minutes to put that on every time." "I don't know how he stood it." "If he comes here, will you stop him?" " I'm asking, can I trust you?" " I don't care if you trust me." " It was your decision to go blond..." " It was." "...which is awesome." "I called you." "I said, "You know, she's outside all the time." " Yeah." " Bleached out and hot and sunny."" " Yeah." " I just felt that it would be good." "I asked you." "I said, "How did you picture her when you wrote it?"" " You said, "Actually, fair-haired."" " Yeah." "It made a lot of sense." "And I don't think..." "Have you been blond in another movie?" "It's such a different look, and it's so..." "You look really different looking back and forth between you and you on the screen." "This is still pretty light right now, but it's not like that." "Yeah." "That and the tan, just knocking all the blue blood out of you." " Pale Brit." " Pale Brits." "You limey!" "The pasty limey." "You pasty limey." "Cor!" "I haven't started doing our bad English impression." " Please don't start." " British accents." "You love it so much." "I know how much you love it." " Mary Poppins, step in time." " Oh, God." " That's all Joe says." " Well, that's..." "I'd love some cheese on toast." "I'd love a delicious strawberry Whipple." " Whipple!" "Whipple!" " I love me meat pasty." " Actually, that's not bad." " That's not bad." " Doesn't sound like me." "You sound Irish." " I watch a lot of Mike Leigh movies." " There you go." " That's really the trick." "I love the lighting in this scene." "Steve had a really specific idea to have this dim, warm lighting here so that when we see this which is one of the more pretty shots in the movie with the sunlight it makes sense logically that the sun is setting behind the house." "And Steve was really excited about that lighting idea." "Well, we're gonna see what he is." "All right?" "But I need you to stick with me." "Good boy." "He's so cute, oh, my God, in those overalls, I can't even handle it." " That's a very pretty shot." " He was so cute." "And this was a..." "I remember, we had to bring a kid in to do the hand over Bruce's mouth right here." "He was just an extra who we brought in." "And I remember he was terrified." "Understandably so because this location looks like this." "It's in that power plant." "It's a dark, scary, like, location." "And we brought him in and it was, like, nighttime, I think." "We bring him up to Bruce Willis, who was sitting there like..." "And he had to put his hand in there, and I think the kid was just..." " Was scared." " ...really, really scared." "This is one of Pierce's great scenes." "Yeah, he really..." "And he's doing so much business here also." "So Pierce..." "I mean, the way..." "And you guys can talk to..." "I mean, the way that Pierce..." "The way that Pierce did this perform..." "I mean, he would come in and just..." "He would do the whole scene, front to back a long dialogue scene like this, and nail it." "It wasn't taking it in chunks." "It wasn't taking it line by line." "He understood..." "The difference between him and lot of child actors is that he truly understood he was playing a character." "Like, he understood the distinction between his life and this kid's life." "I think a lot of credit should be given to his mom who's so fantastic with him and would really explain emotionally where he was at in the scenes." "I think that..." "Then you would go in and speak to him like an adult and speak to him in an emotional sense." "Because rather than saying, "You should be scared here" you're explaining why." "He responded better to that." "I remember at some point when we were auditioning I didn't know him yet and so I did some horrible directing." "There was a beat where I said to him:" ""So here you have to act scared." It was terrible directing that a real actor would just throw you out of the room for." "And he looked at me and he goes, "I don't know how to do that."" "I was like, "Oh, my God." "He's..." "This kid is for real."" "It's something that you said to me a long time ago." "When we had talked, a long time ago, about your experience acting as a kid." "It always stuck with me." "Just kids can act." "Absolutely." "They can be the very best because they're closest to that uninhibited..." " Imagination." " Yeah, playtime." "Yeah." "You should..." "I was acting when I was 6 years old." "Which is a year..." "I started when I was 6." "Pierce is 5 when we were doing this." "Pierce was 5, yeah, when we shot." "But it certainly brought a lot back for me..." " Yeah." " ...working with him so closely." "This truck's not supposed to do this." "It was supposed to keep going." "But it T-boned and we broke that truck." " We broke the axle on it." " Oh, boy." "Luckily, the camera was on a remote." "No one would have gotten hurt if it blasted through but that wasn't supposed to happen." "That's an example of a matte painting." "All that stuff in the background." "This is real." "This, we were up 10 stories in this burned-out building to shoot this." "But we did little adjustments to everything." " The scene that killed your shoulder." " This is it." "This was the one." "Listen, I found a..." "Yeah, that's not easy." "That's a lot of..." "The wood was all wet as well." "I think it had rained the night before." "I think that's why it kept sticking." " Or it's just my bad chopping skills." " I don't think so." "When?" " The booty-call frog." " Exactly." "Don't give it away." " Spoiler." " Spoiler." "I hope they've seen the movie already if they're..." "I hope this is not the first time anyone's watching the movie." " So shame on you." " That would really be shameful." "Shame on you." "Yeah, just..." "And now..." "Watching it, when we were editing it knowing that your shoulder was getting more and more hurt after every take, watching it in the editing room I would just be cringing." "I'm like, "Oh, what did I do?"" "No." "Then this take, I remember so well this being one of those things..." " This was it, yeah." "It just hit." " ...on set where we both really felt it." "That doesn't always happen." "Sometimes you're surprised in the edit room." " It's not the take you thought it was." " This one felt good." "This was it, yeah." "Yeah." "You just got so aggressive with the chopping." "You focused all that energy into the chopping." "How did she get killed?" "Jesus Christ." "He remembers it." "You've gotta talk to him." "There was also..." "Originally, there was..." "I can't remember what it was." "There was more complicated business, in terms of the sister." "There was a mom." "There was a mom and we just simplified it." "It did complicate it." "We did some ADR, yeah, to take out that there was a mom so it was just the sister." "You did nearly get hit when I swung that ax." "You're very brave." "And I was like, "Promise me you'll move out of the way."" " Don't worry about it." " It's all right." "You just swing that ax." "I'll be all right." "Little lady." " I'll be all right." "I swear." " I'll be all right, love." " Don't you worry." " Now swing the ax, missus." "Governor." "Let's see if it goes back to the wide." "We planted..." "The only hats in the movie are the Rainman's guy." "You see that action figure lying on the background?" "You can see it also later when you come back to..." "We planted little toys that were basically the Rainmaker's men, the action figures of it." "Eight, sixteen..." " I love this scene with the two of you." " His moody little face." " You telling me you want alone time?" " No." "He knows it." "The other thing with Pierce..." " ...he would turn it on and off." " His eyes." "Alone time." "But in between takes, he was 5 years old." "It wasn't like he was an adult in a kid's body." "He was a 5-year-old." "He'd finish his coverage and be like, "Can I go?"" "I'm like, "No, you can't."" "You'd get three or four takes and then he'd start to get antsy because he was getting bored." "He's like, "I did it right."" " Cid, calm down." " You're lying!" "I hate you!" "I mean, like, look at this kid." "I mean, it's just so hard to get..." "That's just so amazing, you know?" "This was the first, like, dialogue scene we shot with him." "After the first take, it was another one of those things where I remember looking around at the rest of the crew." "Just everyone, their jaws were dropped a little bit." " People were just stunned by him." " Yeah, yeah, yeah." "Liar!" "Kind of fun just to shout all day if you're 5 years old." "I never get to do that." "You were so good with him too." "You were..." "I mean, he really bonded with you immediately." "He had a big crush on you, I think." "And you were so wonderful with him, and just spent so much energy." "Yeah, I tried to hang out with him all the time." "My favorite day was having lunch with him one day." "He was sitting on my knee." "He kept trying to pull my top down." "I kept going, "Pierce, come on." "Don't, don't, don't."" "His mom was like, "Pierce, that is so rude." "Stop it." Like that." "Eventually I went, "Why are you trying to undress me?"" "He went, "Because I just wanna see them."" " He was just so frank about it." " From the mouth of babes." "I remember he didn't like this." "He didn't want me holding him like a baby." "He felt embarrassed." "He was like, "You're holding me like a girl."" " He was embarrassed." " Poor guy." " He's so cute." " Yeah, he's pretty adorable." "In a devil type of way." "Another matte-painting example." "All the graffiti on the buildings here and obviously all that junk on top of that building and the blimp in the air." " We added in after the fact." " That's so cool." " Terrific." " Things like that just..." "Yeah, just terrific effects work." "That's..." "I think those are the ones..." "The digital effects that work best are the ones that are well-placed amongst real things." " Absolutely." " That blend into the real thing." "Yeah." "If you can do the right combination." "I mean, you look at, like, you know, Guillermo del Toro's monsters." "That's why they're largely so successful." "They're not cartoons." "They're practical things that are really intelligently really smartly accentuated with digital effects." " Did he do Pan's Labyrinth?" " Yeah." " God, that was amazing." " Incredible." "Even the Hellboy movies." "It's just so well done." "That's how Nolan likes to do effects too." "He makes something real, and then if he needs to beef it up digitally..." " ...you can hide the digital stuff." " Yeah." "Yeah." "It's the way to do it, I think." "Garret." "Garret is one of those guys who is just one of the best actors out there." " Truly." " Yeah." "And he's..." "I mean, I knew him from Deadwood." "I knew him from..." "Which on Deadwood, he was so good that his character, like, died and they brought him back the next season just playing another character." "And the Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was just an incredible movie." "He was fantastic in it." "He had this incredible scene with Pitt." "And..." "He's so creepy in this scene." "So kind of intimidating." "He hit that perfect balance of doing so much with so little." " Yeah." " Yeah, yeah." "And I find him really funny." "He kept cracking you up on set." "Oh, God." "He was killing me." "I couldn't even look at him." "He's a really funny dude." " Yeah, yeah." " Really funny." "...ticking off the list business is gonna require me coming in." "He makes me laugh, even looking at him now." "No, it was when he's drinking that glass of water..." " ...we got one straight take out of me." " That's right." "That poor guy." "For that scene in the kitchen, he just had to drink glass after glass of water." "That shot just of you right there, as a quick camera aside because we were shooting anamorphic which is a really specific type of format one thing I found that you could do is put a wide lens on the camera and do these really tight close-ups." "That one of Emily was an example." "The one, Joe, of you in the scene with Jeff was another example." "And usually when you put a wide lens in an actor's face you get a ton of distortion and it ends up looking very warped which can be cool, it's a distinct effect." "With anamorphic lenses, just the way the format is you can really get away with it, and it doesn't feel super-distorted." "And I just kind of just..." "One of those pleasant things you just kind of discover and I really ended up enjoying it." "Ten." "This beat with the water, it wasn't in the script." "It was something we came up with on the day of shooting." "I don't know why the sound in a silent room of someone drinking water..." " ...always makes me laugh." " Yeah." "There's something about that moment." "Again, it's something we could have easily cut out, but I..." "It's funny, there's something really disquieting about it." "Something like..." " It's intimidating how at ease he is." " Yeah." " How much he makes himself at home." " Yeah." "Exactly." "So the house." "It's a really subtle effect with the phones here." "This is some nice subtle effects work." "We did design these phones." "The idea is they're these flexible things you unfold." "And I like the fact that even with that, he can't get reception." "I think we actually..." "I had him throw out the ADR line:" ""Fucking ATT" at some point." "We didn't use it." "The boy's in the city with his father." "When they getting back?" "Couldn't tell you." "I wish I could remember what I told Pierce to get him to make the face he's about to make." " How he did this..." " He's..." ""You want me to shoot this guy?" "You want I should shoot this guy?"" "I don't know how he suddenly turned into a 45-year-old man..." " "You want me to do it?" - ...for that expression." "Yeah." "He looks so self-satisfied." "Is this man dangerous?" "He shoots men down for a living." "He's a stone-cold killer." "My boss has half the city looking for him." "Half the city and me, so..." "It was fun shooting this." "It's always fun when you do a shot where the dramatic content of it plays out entirely and it times out just right." "I forget if we had somebody cuing Garret." "Also, I love what Steve did here, one of my favorite environments this set shot from this angle just because of that haze that comes in from the windows." "It looks so beautiful." "Originally, when they went in here..." "We have this in the deleted scenes." "...the door creaked and Garret appeared back there and you and Garret go down and he, like, does this speech to you about how, you know, if he gets killed they're gonna be here in 15 minutes." "They go down in the basement, have this standoff." " That wasn't the man." " No." "It's funny." "This scene, I was really..." "I had no idea whether we got this scene or not." "And it's a beautiful, beautiful scene." "You guys both do terrific work in it." "But I felt like a little bit like I was..." "Because we basically built a sweat box." "It was so hot that day." "It was so hot out there, and this is aboveground." "This isn't dug into the ground." "This is a standing set outside the farmhouse." "It's just a box with that sod kind of on top of it." "And it's all darked out." "I couldn't be in there with you guys." "I was out by the monitor." "It was this enclosed space and I couldn't really see because it was so dark." "I had set the shot, not a lot was happening with the camera I was just kind of listening on my headphones outside." "I mean, it all sounded good, but I just..." "I kind of..." "We just did a bunch of them until I felt like we kind of had it." "But until we cut the scene together, I didn't really realize how good it was gonna feel, this exchange." "You're doing great work, and Pierce, the way that he's listening here the fact that he's really listening, that's, more than anything..." "I mean, that's just great acting." " That's more difficult than anything else." " He's really connected with it." "Yeah." "That's good." "To me, that, specifically in this scene, is kind of the most amazing thing to see a 5-year-old doing." "I think we're clear." "And then this, again, we didn't have a hole dug." "This is pasted together from..." "This is kind of a standing set." "So you're up like eight feet in the air there and we cut it together with just this." "That's why I love commentaries." "You get to ruin the magic of the movie." " Ruin everything." " Talk in your ear while you're watching the movie and ruin it all." "This cue from Nathan, I remember up until the very final mix we pulled it back and pulled it back." "We kept peeling off elements because it was feeling too emotionally big." "This whole block and a couple of blocks over." "Because, really, it's the first moment of acceptance between Sara and Joe." "Yeah." "Marke Johnson who has a graphic house called The Made Shop that Joe does a lot of work with did all the graphics for the phones and for the screens and for everything." "A really good job." " Frog booty call." " Frog booty call." "Frog booty call." "I remember you were so embarrassed giving me that note." "With my hand going up my thigh, you were like:" ""Could you maybe...?"" "If you feel like it." "I mean, if it's okay." "If it's not too..." "If it's not, you know..." "Call John first if you need to just to make sure it's cool." " I just don't want..." " "I don't wanna be inappropriate."" "Yeah, yeah." "And ribbit." "It's funny, this..." "The fact that you guys do it in the scene..." "It's funny because I..." "I don't know." "When we started showing the movie to audiences, I think what surprised me is how much people thought that we were reaching for a love story with it." "And to me, it's..." "I don't know." "Which, I guess, makes sense." "But, to me, at the end of the day the point here isn't they've formed this connection and they're finally coming together." "I don't think they..." "It's not about that at all, really." "I mean, there's like a form of trust there that's kind of formed but, you know, the connection with her not having had a cigarette in a long time is almost the bigger part of it." "And the physical part of it is less about..." "It's not about love." "It's about having just somebody to..." "Someone's there." "They've been isolated." " Her, especially." "She is so isolated." " Exactly." "Because also your mind, I think, automatically reaches for some notion that it's a love story between the two of them that also motivates Joe's action at the end." "I feel like adding the voice-over at the end about the circle and about Cid maybe helps clear that up a little." "In my head, it wasn't that he fell in love with this woman and this boy and that's what kind of drew him to it." "It was much more about..." "You know, I don't wanna get too much into it but it's much more about what he sees in the boy and about what he sees in the woman." "It's less about a love story." "That lighter was on a string." " I don't know if you remember this." " Yeah." "Yeah, our effects guy was just up on a stool with a fishing pole swinging it back and forth and it looked so ridiculous." "I think at some point you were like, "Is this seriously what we're doing?"" "We were like, "This isn't gonna work." " We'll replace it with a cartoon."" " It worked." "It totally worked." "Even before we painted the string out, it was amazing." "This is the most your prosthetic suffered in that make-out scene." "Your makeup artist, Jamie, was having a heart attack." "Not built for kissing." "And he was like, "Do you mind, like, going a little gentler?"" " And you were like, "Nope, sorry."" " Not gonna happen." " Your nose started to fall off, didn't it?" " Yeah." "We had to do a big..." "Like a half-hour retouch between take one and take two." " You kissed his nose off." " I did." " My God." " I certainly did." "This is a really, really beautiful performance, Emily." "And this was something that in the edit, I was really protective of." " Because it is..." " One of those things that could go." "One of those things that could really easily go." "At various points, there was pressure to have it go just because it's this lull in the action." "But, to me, this is such an important moment." "And it's just so beautifully performed." "I just..." "Well, I think it also fuels the reason why he..." "Why Joe..." " It's essential." " The ending doesn't make sense..." " ...without this." " That's what I felt." "It was necessary to kind of..." "For the fabric of the whole thing." "And it's just so beautiful." "And you with the cigarettes." "And Emily had to smoke..." " Yeah." " ..." "like 30 cigarettes during the course of shooting all this." "And you were so sick of them..." " ...by the end of it." " Oh, God." "The last shot we did after you were sick to death and your mouth felt like an ashtray was the first shot where you're supposed to be taking that ecstasy drag like they're the best thing in the world." "You kept saying, "I'm sorry..." " ...but look like you're enjoying it."" " Yeah." " So I felt so bad." " I think I had three showers that night." " It's like I reeked so bad." " She just..." "Yeah." "Did you swallow shampoo..." " ...and just washed and gargled?" " Yeah, exactly." "Exactly." "The way the smoke's coming up in front of your face..." " ...that's a Steve Yedlin special." " There you go." "He's gonna be safe." "We shot this..." "Was..." "Did we shoot it in the evening?" "I can't remember if this is day for night or not." "I can't remember." "It's weird because in the middle, the windows are blacked out." "And so you're kind of..." "It's hard for me to remember when it was." "It might have been day for night." "It might have been in the nighttime." "This sequence coming up is so beautiful." "And this was really adjusted in editing." "This is another one." "I don't know if you guys remember how it was originally scripted." "Originally, straight from the end of the previous scene we cut to Bruce smashing in the door of Piper's place." "And then we intercut this extended dialogue scene that Bruce and Piper had, where he's..." "Not a dialogue scene, it's Bruce giving a monologue, which he gave beautifully." "Gorgeous monologue where he's talking about why he has to do this." "And he has to make her understand." "She has no idea what's going on." "She is terrified just sitting there." "But there was a lot of dialogue and we intercut that with this." "And we discovered at some point, it was a lot more effective to..." "Just the talking was just not necessarily that..." "Not necessary there, as good as it was." "And so we held off..." "We held it off until this moment here." "So the way we did this, we had pads laid out, but Bruce..." "Pierce is actually falling back onto pads and we painted the pads out." "But he still had to be up at the top of the stairs and falling back onto pads." "It needs guts, that kind of thing." "He was really..." "Yeah." "The fact that he was able to go up and do that..." " And this was..." " Everybody talks about this moment that's seen the movie." "This was a lot of shots." "And the living..." "And the other thing with this is the living room is a fairly compact space." "So we were doing a lot of cheating spatially." "And you guys..." " This moment here..." " I love your face there..." " ...because you were like:" " "What?"" "Because we shot slow motion, we couldn't tell if we got it or not." " We thought we had, but we had." " Oh, it was great." "That's another thing, all that..." "There's no cartoon stuff." "That's all on wires that we painted out." "It looked like a puppeteer's stage." "Love that." " His jagged little teeth." " I know." "He was losing his teeth..." " ...throughout the movie." " That's right." "And Nathan's score leading up to that point." "This took a lot of explaining, a lot of work to get that blossoming of the blood exactly right." "It couldn't be gory." "It had to look beautiful." "If it's gory, it would be too gross..." " ...and we'd get a... effect and what..." " Yeah." "So I kept describing it as a rose kind of opening in slow motion to the effects guys." "All the stuff with Cid and the powers a lot of this imagery at the end was inspired by Katsuhiro Ohtomo's work who did Akira." "But he also did a graphic novel before that called Domu which is a beautiful graphic novel that's about kind of a kid with telekinetic powers going apeshit." "It's him." "What is he, some TK freak?" "You knew." "I remember this scene we worked with you guys." "And getting it up to this anger level was the big step in actually doing that." "That was something that we kind of, on the day, decided and found and that shove down to the ground and the level you take this up to..." " ...is so necessary at this point." " Yeah." "But that wasn't something that we knew sitting down to shoot it." "But it's great because you got her panic, because when your child is at risk like that..." "You know, because he's taking off after him with these guns." "Nice for Joe because he's been so contained the entire movie." "Exactly." "It's the one thing of emotion you don't see from him is the anger." "And we also had..." "Dale Myrand by the way, our camera operator, did all this on Steadicam." "And he was a champ." " Oh, poor Cid." " Most unhappy day of Pierce's life." "So Pierce hated having this blood on his face." "Pierce could not stand having this icky, disgusting blood on his face." "He hated it so much." "Because fake blood is very sticky." " It's like syrup and..." " Yeah." " Like pouring maple syrup on yourself." " Yeah." " And so those..." " You wore it all over your face, Rian..." " ...to make him feel better." " I glopped it all over and I let him..." "It didn't help much, but it got us out onto the set and..." " You let him put it on you." " Yeah, yeah." "But those tears..." " I mean, he was, you know..." " That's real." "He was really not..." "We just had to get it as quickly as we could and keep him comfortable." "He wasn't in pain or uncomfortable." "It's just he did not enjoy the feeling of having that stuff on there, yeah." "But he was a trouper." "He really got through it and gave the performance." "Yeah, and because of that we had to shoot all this so quickly." "It was really so strategic in terms of how long we had Pierce before he just couldn't handle it anymore." "In this shot, he's not wearing the stuff on his face." "I remember, anything we could do without it, we did." "My loop knows Cid's the kid he's looking for." "And my gang knows I'm here." "So that means in 15 minutes..." " Joe, you're just watching the movie." " I know." "I'm sorry." " He's gone." " You haven't spoken in a while." " It's a good movie." " It is." "What's there to talk about?" "Just stopped talking." "Yeah, exactly." "Again, all fake cane." "That's a parking garage, La Belle Aurore." "That facade is a parking garage in the middle of New Orleans that Ed Verreaux did a whole thing on the front of." "I got him, Abe." "I got him." " "I got him, Abe."" " My dad's big scene is coming up here." "I love it." " This was my dad's big scene." " Mr. Johnson." " He did so good." " Oh, bless him." "Big Craig. it was funny." "I..." "My instinct was to cut around him." "And I kept truncating him and cutting away from him." "Our editor said, "You're doing that because he's your father." "He's really good." "You have to trust his performance and just let him do his lines."" "Not such a fuck-up now, huh?" "I'm bringing him up to see Abe." " Yeah." "This was a fun day." "My dad..." " He loved it, though, did he?" "You can't even see it, but my dad has this gory prosthetics on his face when he falls." "One of his prized possessions is a picture of him with that gore on his face with his arm around Bruce." "Oh, fantastic." "All the guns here in the gat..." "James Kroning, who was our props master and who figured out all the guns, did that work throughout the movie and made and designed the blunderbusses, just did a fantastic job." "There was originally much more to this sequence with him going through the tunnels and shooting everyone up." "There was a lot more business, but we found that just a short, brutal punch..." " ...was all it needed." " It's so cool." "And it was fun to shoot." "I remember my mom was on set this night." "It was funny because anyone in the universe this would be the night to show up because you're seeing Bruce Willis with machine guns." "My mom was so bored." "She was like, "Are they gonna talk at any point?"" "I'm like:" "That was a lot of explosives and these two huge cannons filled with debris." "Bruce was so into the amount of blood that we put on here." "He was just like, "Let's do this." He said, "If we're gonna do it, let's do it."" "And he made me do it." "He made me pour the blood all over his face." "Handed me the bottle." "Took the cap off and handed me the bottle." " He was like, "Do it."" " And he told us, "Do it."" " I mean, this shot is so cool." " It's worth it." "Like your goddamn ties." "Not showing the confrontation between them was something that was just in the script and made a lot of sense to me." "I've..." "People who have seen the movie have asked about it." "It just..." "It made sense to me." "It's a kind..." "Because we've seen people get shot." "It's not like you're gonna get anything huge more than that scene out of seeing Abe's death scene." "And more than that, though, what was important about this was having this play from Kid Blue's perspective having not getting the satisfaction of even seeing it." "And as the audience feeling that." "You wake up and the whole party is over." "And you've messed up and this is all your fault and it's done." "There was..." "You weren't involved in it." "And getting the audience in that headspace was the real point of these couple of scenes." " Noah, again, doing quite a bit here." " On his ninth life." "Yeah." "He's the cockroach of this..." "That was the other reason to cut that thing is because we had one too many things where Kid Blue almost dies." "And I think it was..." "Taking it back just kind of helped the whole thing at the end here." "Showdown." "This is the scene where we were shooting where at some point..." "I forget exactly what." "After some take, Bruce just very casually was like:" ""You sound like me." I was like, "Yes!"" "Love it." "Because the loud stuff was what you were concerned about." " I remember talking about that." " Yeah, it's easier to do him quiet." "My life?" "Your life." "Becoming you." " That's great, though." " Yeah." "You've lost your fucking mind!" "It's crazy how different it is." "...everything you've got." "And everything I got!" "See what he becomes." "That's a lot of blood on his shirt." "So that, for instance, I mean, that..." "We actually did have..." "We shot two passes." "We did one with the truck and one with it not." "But we drove the bike through on that truck rig." "And all this stuff, it's removing physical rigs." "But the bike is actually there in the scene." " It was fastened to a pickup truck." " It was." "Yeah." "It was armed off the edge of a pickup truck." "This was one of the last effects sequences we finished." "And I was always nervous about it because all this dust was put in after the fact." "And I think it ended up coming out all right." "That's a cool final confrontation between these two characters." "Kid Blue has given Joe all of this shit about his gun that can't shoot distance." " And in the end..." " It comes back to it." " That's good writing." " Hey." "Yup." "Put your seat belt on." "The layout of that farm is just... it kind of..." "I just can't get over how..." "Oh, you see the actual..." "The crop duster right there, crop-duster robot." "That was the physical build of it." "We kept making jokes that at the end, in the edit room, that if we needed to..." "If we tested really badly and needed to have a happy ending we'd have the crop-duster robot save the day." "Just him about to shoot her at the end and the crop-duster robot knocks him out of frame, going:" "So this..." "We actually flipped that truck." " We had a cable attached to it." " So cool." "And we had..." "We did what they did in one shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark." "We did it to a huger degree where we had a cannon underneath the hood of the truck that fired a piston down into the ground and launched the truck back up and into the air." "And then we painted out the piston." "And..." "Which they actually..." "They didn't have the technology." "If you watch Raiders, where the truck goes on its side to this day you can still see the piston sticking out." " Oh, really?" " Yeah." " She's always falling." "Look at that." " Always." " Stumbling around." " Such a klutz." "This field is..." "Actually, it was really dangerous because when you have a mowed-down cane field all those little bits that are sticking up are like daggers." "And so we had to cut a safe path through that you couldn't really see, for you guys to run across." "And then the birds that flew up in that big long shot..." " I remember that, yeah." " Pierce's hit and fall there..." " ...always impresses me." " Looks great." "He led with his head into the fall and that's a tough thing to do." "How did you do that blood effect?" "Afterwards?" "Yeah." "Yeah, that was afterwards, yeah." " Here he comes." " Yeah, there's the fury." " Don't make him mad." " You're gonna stare down Bruce Willis." "Yeah." "So all this dust and all this grass I was so nervous about because it was all done in post, but we had a..." "We had a terrific effects company that ended up..." "Called Scanline, based over in Germany." "And they ended up doing a fantastic job with it." "But those poor guys, I was so nitpicky." "And we would just spend months just saying:" ""That bit of grass looks fake." "That dirt looks fake."" "Back and forth, and they were so patient and worked their asses off." " Look at that little face." " Yeah." "And with this too." "I mean, with you guys, we had cranes in the middle of the field, and we had you on wires and painted the wires." " That was my first wire work." " Yeah?" "Yeah?" " I like to break you in." " I loved it." "It's okay, baby." " Bless him." " Bless." " This is the part of the movie that gets me." " Yeah." "I love you." "Calm down." "Good boy." "Mommy loves you." "Mommy loves you." "It's okay." " I think that was..." " Real." "Real because of the blood." "He was actually so sick of having that blood on, the tears started flowing and we got one more "Mom" out of him." "And then he was done." "Shit." "See his little smile there right before he hugs you?" "Five-year-old poking through." "This was..." "We were out in the middle of this field shooting this whole sequence for about a week." "And it was your first week and it was Bruce's last week." " Yeah." " And it was hot and there was no shade." " Shit, that week was really hot." " Yeah, it was a tough week." "And you were in the middle of this dirty field." "Bruce shaded me with an umbrella between takes." " That's right." "A parasol." " A parasol." "I don't know where he got this parasol." "It was a parasol." " Flowery parasol." " Worried about my skin." "Yeah." "Rightly so." "Love this." "Then I saw it." "The voice-over here was a very, very late addition." "Up until maybe the last month of editing..." " Yeah." " ...this played without voice-over." "This played just silent." "And then we had talked about it." "I remember you and I talked about it." "I was like, "Okay with it?" You said, "That could work."" "And so I wrote this and we just gave it a shot." "I think this might actually still be..." "I can't remember if this is the temp or the final." "We might have left the temp in..." " ...the original thing we did." " Goose bumps." "I remember when you sent me just in an e-mail..." " ...your first draft of this voice-over." " Yeah." "And I was like, "Fuck, yes, this is great." I'm like, "Let me do this."" "Yeah." "It really needed it and needed..." "This little thing of Bruce reacting to it..." " ...also was a thing that..." " Yeah." "We did this as a one-day reshoot." "We got Bruce back just to get that reaction." " We needed one last recognition." " Wow, when did you do that?" "That was..." "I forget when it was." "It was..." " February." " February." " Last February." " Yeah, just on a stage in L.A." "And just to grab that last little reaction from him." "But that and the voice-over just kind of helps to cinch that moment and really make it land." "And that was..." "I remember." "The first stuff we all talked about was making the ending of this land is the challenge." "Like, we kind of back everything up from there and..." "It's a tricky thing making an ending like this feel satisfying, I guess." "You know, it can..." "And the worry was, you know, we really have to earn it." "It's got to..." "Otherwise, it'll feel cheap and like a cheat." "And just kind of like, "Yeah, well, they killed him."" "And building up to the level of emotion where it would feel earned and it would feel right was, you know, a huge part of just the work in the movie." "Oh, bless." " Bless him." " Bless him." "He was embarrassed giving me that kiss." "No, he was not." " He told you he was." " He was just being coy." "We got lucky with the sun placement on this shot." " Gleaming off the silver." " Yeah." "This last cue of Nathan's is one of my favorites in the whole movie." "He gave me, like, the tracks." "And this I still will, like, listen to every few weeks, this last score." "It's so beautiful." "And, Emily, what you're doing here in your face when you kneel down by Joe, it's really beautiful." "You talked me through this one, I remember." "It's really, really nice stuff." " Your hand." " That is my hand." "You insisted." "Rightly so." "Yeah, you always wanna..." "It's always best when..." " Obviously, when it's you doing it." " Yes, it is." "For something like this, which is so essential, it is performance, you know?" "Something this fine, it's, you know..." "A lot of details go into that." "That sky we replaced." " What was it?" " We added in..." "It was just a blank sky." "And we put in those clouds." "I had a vision." "I wanted it to match the backdrop of Suzie's bed." "And it doesn't exactly, but it's fairly, fairly close." "Originally, we didn't go back to Cid at the end." "That was kind of a thing we discovered in the editing process." " Yeah, that wasn't in the script." " Yeah." " Who was that?" " Emily, we threw out to Twitter asking people if they have any questions about the movie." "Let's see." "So you're in this Twitter experiment." "See what we got, if we got anything interesting." "Should we pause it while we look or should we just see if we...?" "Let's pause it real quick." "So first of all, I should mention this song is a beautiful old soul song by Chuck  Mac." "And they..." "It's something I found on this collection, which is..." "Eccentric." "Eccentric Soul." " Eccentric Soul and it's..." "Yeah." " You gave it to me." "Is it Numero, the name of the label?" "We'll double-check." "I forget." "Anyway, so we threw out to Twitter whether anyone has any questions." "So we got a few questions from you folks." ""How much pressure was there to shoot digital over film and use CG effects?" "How can we keep film alive?"" "I didn't get any pressure at all." "I'm a film guy." "I love..." "I think film looks a lot better than digital." "And we shot this on 35 and we did as much as we could practically and didn't get blowback." "And the answer to how you can keep 35 alive is to shoot with it." "It's still the best-looking image format." "And it's also..." "I feel like the difficulties of it compared to digital are incredibly inflated." "I feel like there's a fear of film and a feeling that it's more complicated and it's exponentially more..." "There's just a fear of it." "And that's baseless." "It's really, in many ways, a lot easier shooting on film than on digital." "We just shot Don Jon's Addiction on 35 mm and that's a really low-, low-, low-budget movie." "And it turned out to actually make more sense budgetarily..." " ...to shoot on film than digital." " There you go." ""How long did it take to put JGL in the Bruce Willis look?"" "It was three hours." "Yeah, it was three hours in the morning." "By the end, after you practice it for months they got it down to two and half hours and it was about an hour..." "No, sorry." "It was a half hour at the end of the day to take off." "Also, Joe couldn't eat while he had the stuff on." "He could only drink disgusting shakes." "They weren't disgusting." "Pretty good." "Anyway, we..." "If you ate at lunch, we had to do a half-hour reset." "And basically, Joe was tired, uncomfortable and hungry for the entire length of the shoot." ""Did you make changes to the script after running it by Shane Carruth?" Shane Carruth is an incredible director." "He's a friend of mine who did Primer one of the best time-travel movies ever." "And I was lucky to be able to run the script by him and get notes." "No, I didn't really make any huge changes." "He basically told me all the time-travel stuff was wrong." "And I said, "Screw you."" "No." "He made some good suggestions, but there weren't any major changes that ended up happening, but it felt good just to bounce it off of him." "Let's see." "You got anything good?" ""I heard on Brick the cast watched movies like The Apartment." "What did they watch on Looper?"" "I don't feel like I fed you anything specific for this." "Did I?" " You can correct me." " It wasn't as stylistic as Brick was." "I mean, me, I was just listening to Bruce Willis' voice..." " ...in various movies." " That's right." "And he actually recorded himself doing your monologues." " And sent you the recording to help you." " That's right." "That's right." ""Was it considered to have the same actor play Joe with the use of makeup?"" "They..." "One thing we did consider, I remember, really briefly was you brought up the possibility of playing both parts." "Yeah, I begged you." "Briefly." "It would have been great." "You would have pulled it off." " Hey, thanks." " No, I mean..." " I'm so glad we didn't do it that way." " Just because thematically it's so much about an old man looking at an old..." "A younger man looking at an older man, and you can't..." "As great as you would've..." "First of all, it's always hard to age up a young actor I feel like, even when it's fantastic makeup." "You can, to some degree, see through it." "But also I think you earn something with someone like Bruce..." " ...sitting across the table from you." " Yeah, I think no matter how good a young actor is or isn't there's no faking what comes from a few more decades of life." " Right." " And that's what Bruce has and I wouldn't claim to have it." "The character of Older Joe should have that." "Right." ""Doctor Who time travel or Loopertime travel?" "Which would you choose?"" "Doctor Who has a lot more fun than Joe has on this one so I would choose Doctor Who time travel." "What you got over there?" "Kind of scanning through them." "Let's see." "We got..." ""What parts of the film do you think pay homage to science fiction and how has sci-fi grown to let you be able to make Looper?"" "Well, I mean, there's..." "Science fiction is such a..." "I mean, it's one of my favorite genres, but calling it a genre is deceiving because it's something that pairs with something else." "Or it usually does." "The way that Blade Runner is a sci-fi noir or Alien is a sci-fi monster movie or Star Wars is a sci-fi and a lot of stuff mixed together." " Right." " I love sci-fi so much but you really have to kind of talk about genre, sub-genres when you start getting into talking about sci-fi." "And this, I'm not sure exactly." "It's a couple of things." "Part of the pleasure of it, it starts kind of as a sci-fi time-travel movie and kind of morphs by the end." "It has some horror elements, largely becomes kind of a Western by the end of it, I think." "To me, that's part of the pleasure of it was having this thing that transformed and became something else..." " ...by the end of it." " Right." "Well, and I think that that's all three of your movies." "You know, Brick was a detective movie." "Brothers Bloom is a con-man movie." "This is a time-travel movie." "But they're all standing on the platforms of those genres in order to do something completely unique and not boxed in by that genre, but kind of using those tropes." "Also, these genres, especially sci-fi it's something we grew up watching, absorbing." "So for me, you know, it's..." "To just sit down and write it, I read..." "You know, I reread Macbeth because of the dynamic between the..." "It's the Numero Group right there, the name of the great label that puts out all these soul collections." "The dynamic between the witches giving Macbeth this information was similar to Old Joe coming back and having this information that he acts on violently and that ends up destroying everything." "So you have all the sci-fi stuff baked into you from watching all the movies." "It's more interesting to look at stuff outside of that genre." "Also, Warren Zavala's name just went by." "That's worth mentioning." "He's my agent that helped a lot over the years..." " ...putting this movie together." " Warren really was one of the guys who put the thing together." "And Ram Bergman who I didn't get in the booth." "You didn't come out here." " Now he's giving us the thumbs-up." " He's giving us a thumbs-up." ""I give you the finger." "Get the fuck out of here." "No fucking way."" ""Do your thing.""