"Hello, everybody." "Welcome to the Back to the Future QA session... here at the University of Southern California." "We have the distinct honor to have the two Bobs..." "Director/Writer Robert Zemeckis... and Producer/Writer Bob Gale." "They're here to answer questions... about the making of Back to the Future." "And having just screened the film..." "I am sure there's gonna be plenty of questions." "My name is Laurent Bouzereau... and I am producing the Back to the Future DVD... in collaboration with Universal Studios Home Video." "I will be moderating today's event." "I will be also repeating each of the questions... so that the audience, of course, can hear it... and all of you at home watching this DVD... and listening to this audio commentary... can also hear what the questions were." "So here we go." "Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale." "Well, let's get started, Bob and Bob." "Can you tell us a little bit about where you were at in your career... at the time that you started working on Back to the Future?" "And, Bob Zemeckis, tell us about your career at the time." "Well, where we were when we wrote the screenplay... was different from when we made the movie." "When we wrote the screenplay, we had just finished Used Cars... and we couldn't get a movie made." "We couldn't get a movie made anywhere." "It was like a three, maybe four-year dry spell." "And we wrote Back to the Future during that time... and then I went off and made Romancing the Stone... and then we were able to get Back to the Future made... after that movie, thankfully, was a hit." "Because in my archives..." "I've got a rejection letter from every single studio." "Every single studio!" "Sometimes more than one from the same studio." "Sometimes they'd send it back twice... rejecting Back to the Future... you know, as an idea for a movie." "Bob Gale, do you want to tell us... a little bit about how you guys write together... how you came up with the actual idea for Back to the Future?" "And maybe begin with your initial fascination with time travel." "We'd always wanted to do a time travel movie." "Actually, we were fascinated by the fact that... people always predict the future wrong." "We thought it would be interesting to make a movie that took place... in a future as seen by the 1939 World's Fair... that had everything wrong in the future." "So the idea of doing a time travel movie kind of came out of that." "But there was really no movie there." "After Used Cars came out..." "I went back to visit my parents in St. Louis, Missouri... and I found my father's high school yearbook... and I discovered that my father had been the president of his class... something that I didn't know." "And I started thinking about the president of my class... who was somebody I would have had nothing to do with." "I was head of the Student Committee to Abolish Student Government." "So I thought, "Gee, if I had gone to high school with my dad... would I have been friends with him?"" "And that was the spark of the idea." "So when I came back to California..." "I told that little story to Bob, and he jumped up and said..." ""Yeah, and wouldn't it be interesting if your mom... who said that she'd never kissed a boy on a date or anything... turned out to be like the school slut?"" "So we just started cooking on this, and that was how the concept... that's how the concept got going." "And, of course, there was only one way... to have a kid go to high school with his parents... and that was, from our point of view... to do it in a time machine." "Because we'd seen plenty of movies... and plenty of stories where, you know..." "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court..." "He gets hit on the head, and he's suddenly back in the past... and we never bought that." "So we decided that... if somebody was gonna go back in time... it had to be with a time machine." "So that's how the creative juices got flowing." "Obviously, the part in the past in the movie... takes place in 1955." "The Academy Award for Best Picture that year... went to a movie called Marty." "Is it just a coincidence, or was it a conscious decision... to call Michael J. Fox's character in the movie Marty?" "I think that was a coincidence, wasn't it?" "I don't remember us thinking about that." "No, we never thought about that." "The fact that Marty..." "It never even occurred to me until you just mentioned it right now." "Sometimes we name characters that are inside jokes." "Other times, I think..." "In the case of Marty, I think it was just a name that..." "Sometimes we just name characters that have a good sound to them... that they roll off your tongue kind of easily." "And then other times we name them after people." "Like Biff Tannen." "Ned Tanen was the president of Universal." "And when we were making I Wanna Hold Your Hand... one meeting that we had... he got irate with us in his office and threw the script on the floor." "Accused us of wanting to make an anti-Semitic movie... even though I'm Jewish." "So in honor of good old Ned, Biff got his last name." "How much research did you find yourself doing... on the 1955 time period... to make sure that everything was accurate?" "We did quite a bit of research." "That seemed to be the process of coming up with ideas... was to just go and immerse yourselves in..." "We would immerse ourselves in..." "We'd go to libraries and read the newspapers of the time... and, you know, those great Time-Life series... and photograph books of the time." "You have to be a history buff to enjoy doing something like this." "By doing that it wasn't..." "When we came up with specific scenes... we would research specifically if we could do a certain thing." "But most of it was just sort of getting a flavor... for the time." "And then, of course, once the production gets going... then it gets to be really fun... because then everything starts to get real." "You have whole teams of researchers in the art department... and they start coming up with ideas and you can just sort of riff... on what they bring you." "It wasn't a foregone conclusion automatically... that 1955 was the year..." "In fact, when we wrote the script in 1980... it was also 1955 then." "And as the years went by... 'cause it was four years later that we actually got the movie made... we gave Marty an older brother and an older sister... so that you'd understand the age of his parents... that they would be in high school in 1955." "But 1955 was important so that Marty could invent rock 'n'roll." "That was one of the ideas that we had real early on." "So if it was any later than 1955, that couldn't have worked." "Right." "We knew it had to be after rock 'n'roll." "It wouldn't have worked if it was 1950 or 1949." "When you were writing the script... did you have any specific actors in mind?" "No, I don't think..." "Bob and I actually entertain ourselves... by saying, "Wouldn't so-and-so be funny to do this?"" "But I found over the years... we do that on specific lines of dialogue." "We'll sit there and say, "Nicholson... he would really be able to do this line great. "" "So, for me anyway, they become these kind of shadow characters... and I never really see anyone specifically... when we're writing." " I don't." "Do you?" " No." "Sometimes, in terms of trying to conceive... of how an actor, a character would deliver dialogue... we would imagine in our heads like Jack Nicholson or Jimmy Cagney... or somebody who has a very distinctive way of speaking." "And that's just sort of a guideline to put somebody's voice in our head... that allows us to give the dialogue a certain style." "Sometimes it's based on somebody that we actually know... again, just to give the character a style of talking." "In Back to the Future, since most of the characters were young people... and there aren't any big stars that are gonna be young people... we never thought of that at all." "Could you talk a little more specifically about your collaboration... and how you actually write together?" "Yeah, we write together." "We just put ourselves in the office together... and we write together." "I think the way I sort of describe it... is that we basically just... you know, springboard ideas back and forth... and act scenes out together." "And then if we come up with something good, Bob writes it down." "Writes it in longhand." "We first started outlining with index cards... and a lot of times we'll think of a scene..." "We don't know where it goes." "For example... one of the first scenes in this movie was "Marty invents rock 'n'roll."" "So we write that down on a card and we pin it up on the wall." "And you say to yourself, "Okay, if Marty's gonna invent rock 'n'roll... we have to establish the fact that he can play rock 'n'roll. "" "So that automatically tells you there has to be a scene... at the beginning of the movie that has him... it turned out to be his audition... so that you could see that he knows how to play it." "So one scene then becomes two scenes." "And every time we come up with an idea..." "He's gonna invent the skateboard... so we have a card that says "skateboard chase."" "That means we have to see him on a skateboard... somewhere in the beginning of the movie." "So, again, one scene then becomes two scenes." "And pretty soon we have a bunch of cards up on the board... and a lot of times there will be a lot of space in between them... and we'll say, "A II right, how do we get from this scene over here... to that scene over there?"" "And we'll start kind of focusing on what would have to happen." "We always use pushpins on those cards 'cause we're always moving them around." "Sometimes we'll say, "We can't have that scene here." "It's gotta come two scenes later. "" "And eventually we have a full outline... and then we start really talking about each scene... and the dialogue and the physical action that takes place." "It might be noteworthy to say a few things... about my recollection about writing the screenplay... which was, it took years... you know, it took us years." "This was..." "I think it took us at least three years to write this." " Is that about right?" " No." "Well, maybe it felt like three years." "From when we finally made the movie, it was." " But we started writing..." " Maybe a year." "I think it was around September of 1980... after Used Cars came out... and the first draft has a February '81 date on it." "And then we spent two months doing a rewrite on that... and that was the draft that we took everywhere in town... and everybody passed on it." "I remember one of the things that we suffered over... one of the big breakthroughs, was... we didn't know how to get Marty out of the Oedipal situation with his mother." "I remember, that took us months and months to figure that one out." "We knew we had this great story that got us to this place... and then we didn't know what to do." "And I remember we were stuck on the fact... that we felt that the Marty character had to do something." "We couldn't figure out what he could possibly do... and then the big breakthrough came when we decided that..." "And my favorite line that we wrote in the entire movie... is when she says, "It's like I'm kissing my brother."" "And that made it like..." "That just solved that whole problem." "We were able to make that story work." "We struggled over that for a really long time." "And I think the other big breakthrough, which made the movie... just charged the screenplay... was when we came up with the idea of making the time machine mobile." "Because, you know, our first drafts... where the time machine was this machine that was this big..." " It was a chamber." " A chamber." " It was in Doc's lab." " Right." "If he had to go anywhere, he had to put it in the back of a pickup truck." "And, in fact, in that early draft... the nuclear-powered thing... required them to drive it out onto a nuclear test site in New Mexico." "And that was the climax of the movie... and it stayed that way until budget problems... made it impossible for us to do that." "The thing with the nuclear test site..." "We actually went into production... expecting to design that, and the idea was... in all the early drafts of the screenplay... the only place they were able to, you know... get enough energy... was, they had to bring the time machine... to the Nevada nuclear test site in the '50s... where they set up all those little villages and towns... to blow up with nuclear bombs." "And Marty and the Doc sneak onto that... and the big countdown was to the nuclear blast." "You know, when Marty went back in time, he arrived at ground zero... and there was a bunch of tours there... you know, taking his picture and stuff." "But anyway, we were told that we had to cut $ 2 million out of the budget... and that's one of the things where there's method to the madness... because of the realization... that we weren't gonna be able to go and move the company... to Nevada or Arizona or someplace and shoot." "We were gonna have to do the whole thing at the studio... to do it for the price." "But it turned out that it became a much better scene." "It became a much better scene because there was no way... to involve the Doc, actually, if I remember right." "It was just over the walkie-talkies where Doc was just there... on the side of a mountain watching all this stuff." "And, of course, just tying everything into the town... and keeping it all local in the town... just made it all absolutely better." "And it was one of those things where... necessity becomes the mother of invention." "Because when we were told, "You gotta cut that scene out"..." "Bob and I spent a weekend walking around the back lot... at Universal, trying to figure out..." ""Well, this is the only environment that we have... that isn't gonna cost us any money that we can completely control." "Exactly what are we gonna do?"" "And we managed to cook up the clock tower sequence." "One of the most memorable characters in the movie... is, of course, Doc Brown." "I was just wondering if you had any kind of inspirations... or any kind of influences... that helped you create that particular character?" "Well, Christopher Lloyd always said that... he made the character of Doc Brown... a combination of Albert Einstein and the conductor Leopold Stokowski." "So all of those big, broad gestures that he's always doing..." "Chris is a big classical music aficionado... so that's what he had in his mind... the big shock of hair like Stokowski." "If you don't remember who Stokowski is, just watch the beginning of Fantasia." "That's Leopold Stokowski." "And, you know, in the early drafts of the screenplay... we always wrote him as Professor Brown... and that had a good ring to it." "You know, he was a professor." "We never wrote him as a doc." "And Sid Sheinberg, the head of the studio... insisted that we change his title from professor... because he thought it just sounded too corny." "There's those famous Sid Sheinberg stories which we can tell you..." "He had three notes when Steven gave him the screenplay to read." "One was that we couldn't call the Doc "Professor."" "The second one was, in the original draft of the screenplay... he had a chimp as a mascot, instead of the dog." "And Sid said, "You have to get rid of that chimp... because no one's gonna go see a movie with a chimp in it. "" "We actually had this meeting with him." "It was hysterical." "He said, "I've done the research." "No movie with a chimpanzee in it has ever made a profit. "" "And I said, "Well, in the '80s there were these two Clint Eastwood movies..." "Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can." "What about those movies, Sid?"" "And he said, "That was an orangutan in those movies. "" "And the third one was, he hated the title... but we stuck to our guns on that one." " There was a fourth one." " Which one was that?" "Originally, Marty's mother's name was not Lorraine." "It was Meg." "Remember that?" " That's right." " And he didn't like that name." "So he said, "Name her Lorraine."" "Coincidentally, his wife's name is Lorraine." "So we knew how to pick our battles... because I think Sid's comment was..." ""Nobody's gonna go see a movie with the word 'future'in the title. "" "So we decided that..." "that was the one." "We would give up the others." "We'd change the chimp to a dog, and the names." "But we stuck to Back to the Future." "And then afterwards, we were having a celebratory meeting... in Sid's office, after the movie was a giant success." "We said, "Well, you see, Sid, people went to the movie. "" "He said, "Yes, but I'll never know if I was right or not, will I?"" "And I guess not." "Bob Gale, can you actually reveal what the alternate title was?" "Well, the alternate title... and this got hot and heavy during the actual production... and postproduction of the movie, because... we'd given Sid what he wanted on these other issues... and he kept on this... and he decided that the hip title for the movie... should be Spaceman from Pluto." "And that's because of the comic book that the kid has in the barn." ""Space Zombies from Pluto."" "And Sid actually sent us a memo where he outlined certain changes... that should be made in the movie... to reflect this new title, Spaceman from Pluto." "And one of them was that instead of Marty saying..." ""I'm Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan"... he should say, "I'm from the planet Pluto."" "There were one or two other things like that." "And Bob and I got this memo... and we were really scared and worried... because he meant it." "You gotta be careful of the kind of fights that you pick... with the head of the company." "He wasn't just the head of the studio." "He was the head of the company." "And every single person at Universal thought Back to the Future... was a great title, except for Sid." "So we went to Steven with this memo... 'cause Steven had been copied on it... and said, "Steven, what are we gonna do?" "He really means it." "He really want to change this title. "" "And Steven, in this one solution of the problem, I think... earned all the money that he made off of all these movies." "He wrote a memo back to Sheinberg, and he said..." ""Dear Sid, thank you so much for your most humorous memo." "We really all got a big laugh out of it. "" "And Steven knew that Sid was too proud to admit that he'd meant it seriously... and we never..." "That was the end of it." "Going back to the time machine itself... what convinced you to choose the DeLorean?" "Well, the joke in the barn..." "Because..." "That's what my memory is..." "We backed it into that joke because we thought..." ""What would really look like a spaceship landing in a barn in the '50s?"" "And we said, "Hey, a DeLorean's got these gull wing doors." "That'll really look like a futuristic machine from outer space. "" " And that was basically it." " And it was stainless steel." "And we had no idea there would be all this cocaine controversy... and it would be such an infamous car when we wrote the joke." "We actually got a fan letter from John DeLorean... after the movie came out." "He just sent us this glowing letter, how much he enjoyed the movie... and thanked us for keeping his dream alive... and said that any of the people that worked on the car in the movie... could have a job on his design team." "Can you explain why you don't really go into the back story... of the relationship between Doc Brown and Marty?" "We never really thought about it." "We thought that... sort of the familiarity of him being able to just walk into his lab..." "Actually, you know what?" "We kind of like always saw it as... the way Leave it to Beaver was... with Gus the fireman, you know?" "It's like, you know, Beaver always had the fireman that he could go to." "Basically, he was like his therapist." "And he went there, and he would tell him about all the problems he was having... you know, with his family and that." "We sort of said, "Let's have a relationship... between Marty and the Doc that Marty would be this kid... who was attracted to this crackpot scientist... who was building inventions in his garage down the street." "But, you know, we just felt that to build a whole back story... would take too long... so we just sort of did it with trying to blast through it... with the fact that, obviously, they know each other 'cause they're so familiar." "When I was a kid... the people that moved next door to us..." "The guy was a retired professional photographer... not retired, he was just much older... and he had all this great darkroom equipment." "I was eight years old, and I'd never seen any of this kind of stuff before." "So this guy was like a magician to me... and me and my brothers would go over there... and watch him develop film... and we developed a relationship with him." "And he just was somebody that was kind of in my head... as the type of thing." "Plus, in a smaller town, if everybody tells you... there's a guy who's dangerous, who's a crackpot... well, every kid's gonna want to find out who that guy is... and get to know him." "And every single movie story can be found... in episodes of Leave it to Beaver." "So for all you screenwriters out there... if you're struggling with a screenplay problem, watch Leave it to Beaver." "You'll find the way to fix the script in that series." "As you took the script around town and kept getting rejection... did you at any point go back to the drawing boards... and revise the script at all?" "What happened was that Spielberg wanted to do it... right after Used Cars." "He's the only guy who got it." "But we had made two movies... that he executive-produced that flopped." " Plus 1941, which we wrote." " Which we took the blame..." "That was his only money-losing movie up to that point... was the one that we wrote." "So I said to Steven..." ""You know, if we make this movie and it doesn't work... we'll probably never be able to work again. "" "He said, "You're right."" "And so we just put it on the shelf." "We actually even had one meeting on the movie... with a studio executive, who I won't name... who was so excited about it... and we sat down in his office and he went, "Yeah, yeah, yeah."" "We were telling him what we wanted to do." "It was a really good meeting, and then he said..." ""So what's Steven's involvement?"" "And we said, "Well, nothing."" "He said, "Oh." And the meeting was over." "And we knew that that was it." "So then after Romancing the Stone... now everybody wanted to make it." "And Bob and I felt that the only upstanding thing to do... was to bring it to the only guy who had original faith in it... not based on our box office track record." "So we brought it back to Steven." "And then he had become famous with E.T. and everything... and so it was like this perfect fit... because he was becoming this..." " The master of fantasy." " Fantasy brand name." "Family entertainment." "And that was one of their big objections to the script..." "Everybody told us it was too sweet, it was too nice." "Everybody was looking for R-rated raunchy comedies, and this was just..." "Except Disney, who said it was too dirty." "Remember that?" "They said because of the thing with his mother... they said, "Oh, no, no."" "That was before the Eisner/Katzenberg days." "That was the old Disney." "They said, "No, we can't make this."" "So it wasn't raunchy enough for most studios... and too dirty for Disney... so we were stuck." "How did you go about coming up with the mechanics... of the time travel?" "Well, the mechanics of time travel, the fact that everybody says..." ""Why 88 miles an hour?" "What's so special about that?"" "It's easy to remember." "That's all." "There's no special significance to that." "The whole idea of what the time machine should look like..." "We decided way early on that... if there was gonna be a working time machine... one of the problems that we had to solve writing-wise..." "Where did it come from?" "At first we said, "Well, it could come from the government." "The government could be working on it." We thought about that, and we said..." ""No, if the government built it, it wouldn't work. "" "Then we thought, "Well, some major corporation could be working on it. "" "And then we said, "No, we don't like the idea... that some major corporation is working on time travel. "" "That opens up a big can of worms that we didn't want to deal with." "We thought that the American myth is... that there is a guy who, in his garage, invented... the automobile engine that gets 200 miles to the gallon." "He invented the reusable match that the match companies... won't let us have because it will put them out of business." "The car companies won't let us have the engine." "That's the guy that would invent time travel... and he would look like Dr. Emmett Brown." "And so, one of the things that we kept stressing to our art department... and the people that we hired to help design the DeLorean... was that it really needed to look dangerous... and look like it was built in somebody's garage." "It couldn't have a real Star Trek machined look... because a guy that's trying to invent stuff in his garage... would just, you know, stick something on the side of his car temporarily... to see if it worked, and then he'd forget that it was temporary... and he'd put some other coil on there, and soon you'd have this big mishmash." "So we wanted it to look dangerous." "At the same time, because it was nuclear... we did do a little homework on nuclear reactors." "And those big vents that are on the back..." "Those are supposed to be cooling towers... same that you have at a nuclear power plant." "And so after the plutonium fires off... you have all this big steam come out of there... because that's what would happen in a nuclear reaction." "So we did actually try to have... some sense of logic... that we could stick to and make sense out of it that was a guide." "But as far as the actual nuts and bolts of time travel itself... that's one of the things that Bob and I are really proud of." "We were absolutely fanatics... about dealing with... what the real rules of time travel would be... and we basically based our time travel theories... on The Time Machine by H.G. Wells." "And simply, we stuck to that one, which is that you travel through time." "You don't travel through space." "And most of your time travel stories and movies make that fatal mistake." "All of a sudden, you're in California, and you travel back to ancient Rome." "How did you get to Rome if you're in this latitude and longitude?" "And in the H.G. Wells stories... the time machine never moved in space... except at the very end when he drags it a few feet." "So that is exactly what Bob and I did... and how our time machine worked." "We were very careful..." "As a matter of fact..." "I was just thinking about it as I was watching the end of the movie just now." "I remembered that the whole reason we had the car not being able to start... after we got back, at the end of the movie, to the future... was so that we didn't have to deal with the duplication of two DeLoreans." "We only had to deal with him, you know, being duplicated once." "And that one paradox, we cleaned it up real quick." "And, of course, if you talk to all the time travel scientists... and the people who study this stuff... they think that we'll probably be able to figure out... how to travel into the future." "Traveling to the past will be much more difficult... because of the paradoxes involved." "Eric Stoltz was in the movie prior to Michael J. Fox." "Can you tell us why you had to recast the role of Marty?" "The lesson that I learned was... you just have to stick to your convictions at all cost no matter what." "And what happened to me was completely my fault." "I miscast Eric Stoltz." "I didn't know it at the time." "I felt I was gonna be able to make it work." "I had always envisioned, like, Michael in the part." "But he was doing his TVseries, and conventional wisdom was... that you can't possibly do... you can't possibly do a feature film with an actor who's in a TVseries." "It's impossible." "And one of the other mandates that was given by Mr. Sheinberg was... that if I didn't have the movie for Memorial Day..." "I'm not making it, so I was stuck... and I had to cast somebody and Eric was the best that I had available." "But then when I shot the first couple of weeks of the movie... he just wasn't understanding, or I wasn't able to communicate... the type of humor that I was seeing in the movie." "The other reason that Steven deserves all the money he made off this movie... was the fact that when I went to Steven and I said..." ""I gotta recast Eric"... he said, "You're right."" "And he went to Sid and got him to agree... not only got him to agree to let me recast him... and the painful part was everything that poor Eric had to go through... but then also to agree to allow us to make the movie... basically working..." "We made this entire movie at night." "We made this movie from 6:00 at night till 6:00 in the morning... because Michael was working on the TVshow during the day." "He'd drive to the studio, and we just stayed on nights." " It was the most..." " It was splits, most of it." "But it was pretty insane, because we were on soundstages... lighting the soundstages for daylight... at 2:00 in the morning." "So it was pretty insane the way we did it." "And we didn't make the Memorial Day date... but we did make the Fourth of July." "The irony of it all is that... because we put Eric Stoltz in the movie... is the reason that we got Michael J. Fox in the movie." "We approached Gary Goldberg, who was the producer... of Family Ties." "That was the first phone call we made, 'cause we wanted Michael in the movie." "And he read the script, he said..." ""This is perfect for Michael." "I cannot let him read this script... because when he reads this and I tell him that he can't do it... that I'm not gonna let him out of the TVshow to do it... he'll hate me for the rest of his life. "" "And Meredith Baxter-Birney, who played his mother on that show... was pregnant at the time... and Michael was really carrying the show." "So that just right away put him out of it." "So we kept pushing our start date back... while we kept trying to find the perfect Marty McFly." "So by the time we made the realization... that we had to make a change... it was now the beginning of January, 1985." "Meredith Baxter-Birney had already had her baby." "So we went back to Gary Goldberg and said..." ""We are up against it, Gary." "There's only one guy who can play this part. "" "And he said, "Okay, I'll let Michael read it." "If he wants to do it, it's fine with me... as long as you guys understand... that Family Ties is always in first position... and if there's a conflict between us and you... we win, Family Ties wins."" "So that was the rules, and when Michael read the script... he flipped for it and he said..." ""Try and stop me from being in this movie. "" "One of the amazing things about the movie... is, of course, the performances." "And I was just wondering... how much of those performances are in the script... and how much of the performances... was improvisation by the actors?" "I don't like to watch actors improv in movies." "I hate watching actors trying to think up lines... while they're acting." "But if they can take the essence of what it is that we wrote... and improve it or, you know, make it theirs..." "I'm fine with that." "And, you know, the whole point is that the screenplay... is supposed to be this blueprint... for the movie." "I've always said that good directing is good casting and good writing." "And you cast the right actor and you've got a good script... your directing looks great." "The mannerisms that Crispin Glover has..." " that's what he brought." " Right." "He came in to read, and he started doing all that stuff with his hands." "We just looked at each other and said..." ""This guy was probably born to play George McFly. "" "Right." "And my job as the director in that case... was the endless, you know, throwing the net over Crispin." "He was completely off." "I would say he was completely off about 50 percent of the time... in his interpretation of the character... meaning he had bizarre ideas... of what the character's wardrobe should look like... and what his hair should look like." "Probably the single hardest thing... that we had to do in the movie... was at the very end when he comes in... as the new George McFly... and he looks like a normal middle-class American citizen." "That was pulling teeth to get him to do that." "Crispin thought that when George shows up at the end of the movie... he should be wearing, you know, gray baggy pants... and a sleeveless tank top T-shirt... like some guy in the barrio." "And I swear to God, he absolutely..." "He did those scenes totally under protest." "That was the second time." "We filmed them once, and they weren't right." "And he actually went around dressed the way Bob just described... on the set, trying to solicit the crew to say..." ""Don't you think this is what George should look like?"" "And nobody on the crew agreed with him." "There's a scene in the cafeteria... when he's writing his stories." "And if you look real close at his performance... he's very... his face is all red and his eyes are puffy... and his eyes are all bloodshot... because Crispin insisted that his hair should be sticking straight up." "And the day before... because we got this thing with Michael... we had shot Michael's side of the scene with his hair down." "It didn't make any sense." ""Crispin, I don't understand this."" "He said, "Well, when I write, I think my hair should be straight up. "" "And I said, "But I don't get that."" "He said, "You don't get that?" I said, "No."He couldn't explain it." "And when Bob said, "It's not gonna match with what we shot yesterday"... he said, "Well, Brando never matched."" "So that was his answer to that." "Wasn't it difficult for Michael J. Fox to be shooting his television series... and shoot the movie at the same time?" "How did he manage?" "How could he even function doing that?" "Well, he was young." "He was young in those days." "We started shooting with Michael... around the first or second week of January, 1985." "And I think his show ended shooting... in about the second or third week of March... and then we wrapped photography in the third week in April." "And then we also had the problem of... we had to finish everything in the square that was the 1950s... because we had to turn it around to the 1980s." "So we actually shot the daytime scenes... on the back lot on the weekends." "So Michael didn't even get to sleep on the weekends... because the only time we could get him for a full day of light... was on Saturday and Sunday, at great expense to the management... 'cause everybody's working platinum time on Sunday to shoot." "So he didn't sleep hardly at all during that whole... ten or twelve-week period that we were making the movie." "How did you go about selecting Christopher Lloyd... to play the character of Doc Brown?" "Neil Canton had worked with Christopher Lloyd... on Buckaroo Banzai." "And I think, as I remember... the guy that we first wanted to have play Doc Brown... was John Lithgow... who also was a veteran of that movie." "He wasn't available, and Neil said, "You guys gotta meet Christopher Lloyd." "You gotta meet him. "" " And Chris came in and..." " Didn't say a word." "Just sat in the office." "But he looked at us with those eyes... and we said, "Shit, that's Dr. Emmett Brown."" "As a matter of fact, Chris never said a word." "I never had a conversation with him the entire movie." "Chris is so shy, you know, that I'd just say..." ""A II right, Chris, we're gonna hang you in a harness." "You're gonna go up on the thing." "Camera's gonna be here." "You're gonna hang from the clock." "There'll be this lightning and wind. "" "And he would go, "Okay."" "It took this entire movie for Chris to warm up to me enough... to actually..." "for us to have conversations... you know, in the previous movie and the following movies." "But, yeah, Chris, he'd just say, "Okay."" "And the amazing thing about him is that... he would be different every time." "Every take, he'd do something a little different." "You never exactly knew what it would be... but it was always right." "He created such latitude with his character... that we always had an embarrassment of riches in the editing room." "'Cause he'd just do some crazy thing with his eyes on one line in one take... and then he'd do something else in another take... and it was always a tough decision to try to say..." ""Which of these moments are we gonna use?"" "It was always wonderful, and it was good for the other actors." "It was especially good for Michael J. Fox... because Chris kept surprising him." "So he was able to react a little bit differently in each scene, each take... and that kept his performance fresh and it kept him on his toes... when he might have preferred to have gone into his trailer to take a nap." "Yeah, and you gotta love Chris..." "Somebody asked a question earlier... about what happens, how does a performance get designed?" "And, for example, I think Chris is like 6'4"." " 6'2", yeah." " 6'2"." "And, well, Michael's not that tall." "And, you know, you gotta love Chris... because Chris does the whole movie hunched over... so I could keep them both in frame." "Chris did this whole performance like this." "And it was like he did that for me, because otherwise, you know..." "I couldn't keep these guys in frame." "You know, he just kept himself in frame for me... and kind of made the character live that way." "The other thing I remember, too, is..." "Chris absolutely... would never let you know what he was gonna do... until the camera was rolling." "And I mean he would only ever do a rehearsal... or a camera blocking literally at quarter speed." "And he would stumble through his lines." "He would have the script pages with him." "And so then when we would say "roll"... he was nowhere where the camera operator could find him in frame." "So, basically, I just started rolling the camera all the time." "Knowing that and telling everybody that..." ""We don't know what's gonna happen, but it'll be good. "" "The only way we're gonna get a full-speed rehearsal... is to roll film through the camera." "It was kind of a thing that Chris had about that." "Did you always have a sequel in mind?" "Because, of course, at the end of Back to the Future..." "Doc Brown comes back in the car." "I've said in this other documentary... if we were planning for a sequel, I never would've put the girl in the car." "The ending was a joke." "It was just a joke." ""Something's gotta be done about your kids. "" "We had no idea whether this movie would make a dime." "We would've been happy if it just barely broke even... 'cause our other movies lost money." "We didn't know anybody would have the slightest interest in seeing this movie." "So, you know, the characters go riding off into the sunset." "That's the end of the movie." "What were you looking for when you were casting the role of Biff?" "Interestingly, the character... there's a character in the gang with a crew cut... who's credited as Skinhead." "His name is J.J. Cohen." "And he was somebody that we were very seriously considering to play Biff." "He came in and just knocked us out." "But he didn't have the physical presence... playing against Eric Stoltz." "You would have never believed that he could push Eric Stoltz around." "So if Michael J. Fox had been in the movie at that time..." "J.J. Cohen might have ended up being Biff... 'cause he would have been four or five inches taller than him." "We wanted somebody that had a real physical presence... and Tom Wilson is a big guy." "Absolutely nothing like the character of Biff." "Just the sweetest, most gentle guy in the world." "He says that when he was a kid, he got picked on... and that's where he drew his inspiration for what he did." "Can you make comments about Lea Thompson and working with her on the film?" "Yeah, 'cause Lea was just so great and wonderful and sweet." "She did everything she was told, and she never gave us any problems." "It was like a dream." "She would just work and do it perfect every take." "I mean, she was just absolutely fantastic." "I mean, just great." "We can't tell any great Lea Thompson stories..." " Because there are none." " She was a director's dream." " Always there." " Always on time, always knew her lines." "Always did it right." "Actually, there's something we should talk about, which is... one of the important decisions that we made in the movie... was using young actors to play themselves old." "At the time, there were executives that thought... maybe we should find actors that look like them to play them older." "We went through quite a lot of makeup tests... to prove that it could be done this way." "'Cause normally, certainly at that time, this wasn't done." "You didn't take an 18-year-old or 22-year-old actor... and put makeup on them and make them look like they were 47." "And so we did quite a lot of extensive makeup tests... with Ken Chase." "He'd done all the prosthetic makeup on Roots." "Ken always told us that it would have been a lot easier for him... if he were making these 18-year-olds... to look like they were 75 instead of 45." "'Cause then he could've put full makeup on all over their face." "But he had to create these different appliances so the actual actor's face... would be there, would be able to move... and everybody didn't look like they had too much Botox." "It's a tribute to all the cast... that they were able to create things in their performance... that made you buy them at age 47." "It wasn't just the makeup." "It was their posture and body language... and their wardrobe, of course." "Can you tell us about working with Dean Cundey... your director of photography... and Larry Paull, the production designer on Back to the Future?" "Well, I had worked with both Dean and Larry on Romancing the Stone... and got along with them great." "You know, the design of the movie, basically..." "The thing we started with was the square, the town square... and we just wanted to make this kind of cynical statement... about what it used to look like and what it looks like now." "And that was just a lot of fun to do... to be able to just take it from there." "We actually considered shooting that on location." "Remember, we scouted Petaluma." "We went up to Petaluma... which is where Joe Dante made Explorers... which came out a couple of weeks before our movie did in 1985." "It had this great look to it... but when we started realizing all the headaches we would have... trying to change the light fixtures, the street lighting... and every little thing, every business that had to be bought out... to change a modern-day town and take it back 30 years... it ended up that it was pointless to do anything... except shoot it on the back lot." "In terms of the car..." "Michael J. Fox talks about how demonic that car was." "Do you have any memories about how difficult it was... to work with it as a prop?" "Oh, yeah, it was a terrible car." "Oh, it was terrible." "I mean, the frame is plastic." "They had a four-cylinder Volvo engine in that model DeLorean." "So it didn't have any pickup at all." "And it was impossible to shoot around and..." "We had to cut one apart, because it was too small to get a camera in." "So all the scenes that we have inside of the DeLorean... where Michael's sitting in there and driving it... were processed, done on a stage." "We actually had to cut the car apart... so that we could pull the back wall out and get the camera in there." "Yes, but all movie cars are like that." "I mean, there's just something about it, you know." "As soon as you bring a picture car on the set... it just doesn't start or it runs out of gas." "It never fails." "It's just one of those curses." "I've never had it not happen." "One of the problems that we had a lot was... again, nobody would have ever thought of this one..." "We'd be shooting outside on the back lot..." "At night it got really cold out there." "It was wintertime." "And the way that the DeLorean gull wing doors stayed up was... there were these little gas jet things... like you use to open up a door." "And when we left the door open for a while... the gas would condense in the cold... and the door would just start to drop down in the middle of a take." "So finally, in between takes, we had the special effects crew out there... with portable hair dryers." "And they were in there heating up those valves, heating up that gas... so that the car door would stay open through an entire take." "ILM did the special visual effects for all three movies... and they were in their early days at the time you made the first picture." "I was just wondering if you had any concerns at the time... about some of the visual effects that had to be done to the picture." "There was no digital work." "Everything was optical." "There's only about 30-some shots in the whole movie." "Everyone sees it as a big special effects movie... but there weren't that many shots." "And in those days, everything had to be a lock-off... and they had this little VistaVision camera... that could only run like a minute of film." "And, you know, that was real old-fashioned optical stuff... from the early days of Star Wars." "That's what everything was." "The car at the end was a miniature." "They made it move just like they did the spaceships in Star Wars... on an articulated arm." "I guess that was a motion-controlled camera they had up at ILM... with a green screen and a blue screen... and just all the old optical... you know, old optical work." "We never saw a decent optical... until about a week before the picture... had to be turned over to negative cutting." "We were terrified, because this was the first time we'd worked with ILM." "And we would get these comps down, and they would be terrible." "Bob would have these frantic conversations with Ken Ralston... about why this didn't look right and why this didn't look right... and would it even be possible to get it in time." "And ILM did." "There's still one shot that still doesn't work." "Ken just couldn't get the one where he sees his eye through his hand." "But you know what?" "That's the imperfection that we put in there." "We didn't want to insult Allah, so..." "So it's like..." "It's a movie, so it's perfect enough." "ILM worked on all three movies... but obviously when Back to the Future was made... they were in their earlier days." "And I'm just wondering if you had any concerns about some of the work... that had to be done on the movie in terms of visual effects." "There are shots of Chris on the clock tower... where you actually can see the cable on his harness... which would be, you know, an insult... if I paid $9 to go see Spider-Man... and I actually saw a cable in the shot." "You know, there's no excuse for that now... but in those days there was no way to remove it." "That was the best-played piece of performance." "This movie would be so easy to make now." "Can you imagine how I would have done the town square?" "I would've just painted it in." "I would've had huge buildings." "And then when I went back to the '80s, it would have been completely different." "I wouldn't have had to do it all physically." "So I could have made it better if I had digital technology." "Movies have always been this technical thing... and it all just ultimately comes back to the script... and the imagination of the filmmaker... and the digital stuff is just the tool, you know." "Being a director and a screenwriter... was there a particular scene that you were excited about... going in and directing... and did that scene come out exactly the way you wanted it... the way you had imagined it?" "I just couldn't believe how lucky I was... on the day we shot Michael walking into the town square the first time... 'cause I had those great cumulus clouds in the sky." "See now, if I was doing the movie today, I just would've painted all those in." "The sky would've looked perfect." "But I was like..." ""I can't believe how lucky we were to have that sky!"" "That was a great day." "So you have those." "You know, there's millions of times in this movie... where that actor will do something that you never imagined, and you go..." ""I never thought I'd ever see an actor do a reading like that or hear that. "" "And those are the gems." "But as far as my work... it's always just compromise." "It's always less than I ever imagined it." "I always have to go in and say, "Well, we'll piece this together." "We'll figure out a way to make it work somehow." "If we had another day, it could've really been great. "" "You know, that's how I come away from everything." "Of course, in this movie we did have the unusual circumstance... of actually getting to redo a couple of those scenes." "We did make them a little bit better." "Made them better, but they were also angst-ridden too... because once you go back, you feel like you're compelled to make it better." "That's why any time you reshoot, it's always a pain because you're going..." ""Oh, no." "I gotta make it better now. "" "And, you know, there's nothing worse than reshooting." "Michael J. Fox would go crazy because we'd have these conversations, saying..." ""When we did this scene before..."" "He'd go, "Damn it." "I never did this scene before. "" "And some scenes I just shot it... exactly the way I shot it with Eric... you know, completely..." "camera in the same place... and other times, I was able to go back and say..." ""We can improve this by doing this."" "And the best thing is you get to..." "The advantage of going back and redoing stuff sometimes... is that you know what you don't need." ""Let's not waste our time doing that wide-angle." "We'll never use it. "" "So that was helpful." "Can you comment on the editing of the film?" "Was it as frantic as the shooting in terms of schedule?" "And are there any deleted scenes?" "I guess I was coming into the editing room about two hours before the call." "So I'd go and I'd edit..." "'Cause we were shooting nights." "I'd go and I'd edit, and then I'd go see dailies... and then I'd go start to work." "I think the editing rooms were trailers near the back lot, weren't they?" "So toward the end, I was just getting in a golf cart and zipping over there." "And they'd look at a scene, give 'em my notes." "And we had to put two editors on, because we had to have... this accelerated, you know, release." "Because when did we wrap?" "We wrapped..." "I think it was like April 20." " And the movie came out July 4." " July 3." "So it was nine and a half weeks from when we wrapped... to when the movie was in the theater." "This movie ruined postproduction schedules in Hollywood... 'cause nobody thought that this was even possible." "And at the point when we changed actors..." "Universal was kind of resigned to the fact... that the movie probably wouldn't come out until the middle of August now." "So we were kind of thinking that we'd have a release date... in the middle of August." "And then we had this dynamite sneak preview... and here comes Mr. Sheinberg again." "He sees the movie with this audience, and they just go completely nuts." "The visual effects weren't finished... the last shot of the movie was in black and white." "It was still pretty rough, but the audience got it and got it big-time." "He pulled us aside and said..." ""Is it possible..." "What will we have to do... to get this movie out for the Fourth of July weekend?"" "And we said, "Write some checks."" "And he said, "Whatever it costs, do it."" "We actually had sound crews working 24 hours a day." "In the Hitchcock Theater where we were doing the mix... we had a pre-dub crew working the graveyard shift." "They'd start working about 8:00 at night and go home at 7:00 in the morning." "Then we'd come in at 8:00 in the morning... and mix the picture with tracks they'd pre-dubbed for us the night before." "So that was..." "It was insane." "Bob Gale, can you tell us a little bit more about the sneak previews?" "Any surprises after the first one?" "The first sneak preview..." "We had two." "The first one was in San Jose." "We didn't invite the studio to that one." "One advantage of having Steven Spielberg as your executive producer is... he can close the door on certain people you don't want there." "We didn't want their feedback yet." "We didn't want the studio to see the movie and hear their feedback." "We wanted to hear what the audience had to say." "One of the things..." "The movie had gotten no publicity." "Back then there was no Internet, there was no advance word about anything." "Here we had a recruited audience, and all they knew was... they were seeing a movie that had Michael J. Fox from Family Ties... and Christopher Lloyd from Taxi." "It was some kind of comedy, and they didn't even know what it was about." "They didn't even know it was about time travel." "So when the DeLorean comes out of the truck, they didn't know what it was." "And I remember, when Doc does his time travel experiment with Einstein... and the car and the dog disappears... there was this very nervous thing that happened in the audience... where people thought that something bad might have happened to that dog." "They were real worried about that." "There was this big sigh of relief when the dog comes back and he's okay." "And I remember the point in the movie at that screening where they got it... was when Marty sees his father in the café... in that scene when Biff and those guys start harassing... "Hey, McFly!"" "At that point you really knew that they were totally with it... and they completely went with it." "We cut six or seven minutes out of the picture after that screening... and that was the last time that that ever happened... that there was this... that people didn't know it was a time-travel movie." "Once, of course, they knew that it was a time-travel movie... and the word got out that it's about this kid who meets his parents... a lot of the stuff at the beginning played differently than it did... with a completely cold audience." "And, of course, no one was ever again worried about the dog." "Can you tell us a little bit about Steven Spielberg?" "What is he like to work with on a day-to-day basis... in production and postproduction?" "Was he very hands-on?" "You know, with me Steven's great." "Steven's a director, so he doesn't ask you to do insane things." "He's always respected my vision as the director." "I can't speak for other directors, but for me... he's never meddled in the process anywhere." "Tell him the story about how Steven was so concerned about the score." " Remember that?" " For this movie?" "Yeah." "No." "I don't remember that." "Okay, well..." "Bob had worked with Alan Silvestri on Romancing the Stone." "Steven wasn't that enamored of the score of Romancing the Stone." "And he made no bones about making that clear." "He thought that we needed somebody that could do... a John Williams kind of score." "He was always paranoid about what the score was gonna be." "So in that first preview we had a mixture of temp music... and we'd had the first two days of scoring." "So we actually had some of the real score cut into the movie." "So one of Alan's cues came on during the sneak... and Steven says to Bob, "That's what your score should sound like. "" " I remember that now." " Bob said, "That is the score, Steven."" "I remember that." "Right." "Right." "Steven is always trying to do what's right for you and the movie." "You just have to sometimes..." "You know..." "You just have to cherry-pick his ideas." "'Cause sometimes he'll have really good ideas... and sometimes he's not making the movie you're making." "It's like he's just another opinion in the mix." "Bob has a theory." "He says if one person says something, that's their opinion." "If two people say the same thing... then there are probably millions of people that will agree." "So if one person said "I don't like that"... and somebody else said "I like that;" "I didn't like this"... and there's all this difference of opinion about everything... we just shrug our shoulders and say, "Well, let's not worry about that."" "But if two or three people kept saying..." ""I don't know, that thing where Biff does this really bothers me"... then we'd go back, look at that and say maybe's there's a problem with that." "Did you guys have any concerns..." "What was the reaction, really, before the movie came out?" "We had two previews in theaters... and one on the studio lot." "There was a controversy about that too because... they had just built this Hitchcock Theater... and supposedly it was cursed... meaning that any movie that ever played in the Hitchcock..." "They said, "Is this movie a comedy?" "Don't play it in the Hitchcock Theater." "Because nothing plays in the Hitchcock Theater." "Everything we ever screen there is..."" "I remember Sid said, "The problem with..."" "We turned to him and said..." ""So much for the curse of the Hitchcock Theater. "" "Sid says, "The curse of the Hitchcock Theater has been shitty movies. "" "Right!" "The other thing was... we developed the original screenplay at Columbia... and Steven originally developed E.T. at Columbia." "So when the lights came on at the first preview that Sid saw the movie... the other thing he said was..." ""I get the best stuff from Columbia Pictures. "" "Or something like that." "So, anyway... the previews..." "I remember that I got... incredibly..." "almost paralyzed with fear... when I had all these good previews... because I understood that both I wanna Hold Your Hand and Used Cars... also had tremendous previews and it didn't mean anything." "It's two different worlds." "There are so many wonderful movies that are made... they're great, they work... but nobody wants to go see 'em." "I was really terrified that they weren't gonna be able to open this movie." "I just thought..." "I said..." "I just was terrified that the movie might not find its audience." "But then I also remember... that I didn't like the TVspots... and I realized on making this movie that... that's an art form I don't understand... and I should just butt out of the marketing." "I forget who it was, but whoever cut the TVspot... every single marketing piece of material... had that one line of Michael Fox's..." ""A re you telling me my mother has got the hots for me?"" "And I thought the way you sell this movie... is with all my effects and my action." "But they saw the movie and they said this is what the spot should be." "That one line was in everything." "There was something about that that they understood that's what people would..." "Seeing Michael J. Fox say that was the whole campaign." "For me, the first time I thought... maybe we might have something happening was..." "We shot the exterior of the high school stuff down at Whittier High School." "One night we were shooting the dance stuff... and word got out that Michael J. Fox was in this movie." "Suddenly we had kids lined up... seven deepjust trying to catch a glimpse of Michael J. Fox." "That had never happened to us before on any movie we had done." "And we said, "Wow, this guy's really a star."" "We didn't realize how big of a star you can be from being in a hit TVseries." "And Michael was unavailable to do any promotion." "I remember that because Sid was angry about that." ""We can't put the star of this movie on TV?"" "Because Michael, on top of everything else with his Family Ties... they decided they were gonna go shoot an entire season in Europe..." " Family Ties Goes to Europe." " Goes to London." "Yeah." "And that was the summer that the movie opened." "So Michael wasn't even around to enjoy the insanity of the movie's success... and he wasn't around to promote the movie either." "He just kept hearing on the phone that the movie's a success." "Do you remember good reviews, bad reviews?" "Were you concerned about reviews or even paying attention?" "You mean of the reviews?" "No." "No, there were some, you know..." "We got good reviews, some who didn't like it." "That's what makes the world go around." "If you start worrying about that, you can really make yourself insane." "I remember Steve Martin did an interview once where he said... the critics who aren't..." "the critics who... give my movies good reviews... are insightful, wonderful... you know, genius people... and those who give my movies bad reviews are worthless scum." "At what point did you guys realize that not only did you have a hit... but you had a mega-hit?" "How did it change your life and career?" "The second weekend box-office gross was higher than it was opening weekend." "You don't see that anymore." "When the movie was released, I think we were only in 1, 100 or 1,200 theaters... and our opening box-office gross was $ 10 million for the weekend... which was big." "And, in fact, that summer... 11 out of 12 weeks from when the movie was released... it was the number-one movie in America." "Only one weekend we got knocked out by... by some National Lampoon movie..." "I forgot what it was." "Our big concern was we were gonna get clobbered by the Mad Max..." "Or The Road Warrior..." "Beyond Thunderdome." "I remember..." "Oh, man." "Uh-oh, that was gonna be it." "And we rolled right over them, so we were really... we were really excited about that." "What's interesting about this movie was..." "I went to a couple theaters... to watch it play with the public... and people..." "When Michael got back... and he did that thing with his family... everyone assumed the movie was over... and some people would start to leave the theater." "And then they would come running back in... because the movie was still going." "We had so many different endings on this movie that people... were trying to second-guess the endings, and they were always wrong." "Can you explain how you stay in tune... with the popular culture, what's going on?" "Is that awareness important to you... and is it part of your creative process?" "The awareness is that it's a constant sort of anxiety and fear... because you don't really know why it is, you don't know when it's gonna go away." "You look around and see it happening to other filmmakers all over the place." "The landscape of everything is changing so dramatically." "I just keep asking myself the two questions, which are, you know..." ""Do I want to go see this movie?"... and "Do I think anybody else wants to go see it?"" "'Cause that's the best I can do." "It's really out of my control." "We find that if you try to second-guess the audience too much... you're gonna shoot yourself in the head." "And there's plenty of movies where... you see somebody in the studio trying to say, "This is hot right now." "Let's, you know..." "We gotta put Britney Spears in the movie. "" "Or whoever it is, whoever's hot." "Whatever the big thing is has to be in the movie." "And it's a bad idea, because it's not... it's not true to somebody's vision." "I remember one studio executive when we were trying to get this movie made... going back to the early days..." "Again, I won't mention his name, but he said..." ""Time travel movies never work." "They just don't work. "" "That's what he said." "The Back to the Future trilogy was a huge success, of course." "But was there was any time when you had creative differences... when you were working together on the films?" "We truly respect each other's talent and opinion." "What happens is, we'll have a difference of opinion about something." "Instead of believing that one of us is right and other one is wrong... we'll try to figure out what..." "I'll say, "Bob, what is it about this that is bothering you?"" "And he'll start explaining it so I can get inside his head and figure it out." "Generally what would happen is, we would come up with something brand-new... that was better than what my original idea was or what his idea was." "So that's..." "that's true collaboration." "You get a synthesis and... instead of two plus two equals four, it equals eight." "And there is something about that that a movie like Back to the Future... which is a movie that really benefits from the writing team being... the writers being a team." "Because... you know, the thing that..." "When you have a collaboration like mine and Bob's... whatever that is, because it does work..." "And another thing that it has is..." "There's no ego involved." "When one of us comes up with a really great idea, the other person says..." ""That's a really great idea."" "And that goes right into the script." "But why I think it's good for pop movies like this... is because... we're able to temper each other's own indulgences... so we don't get self-indulgent like you can when you're writing..." "You don't have somebody there killing your darlings... or calling you on it." "It gets very self-indulgent and you go, "This scene is going on forever"... and cut this stuff out." "You're making mass entertainment... and so you might as well be collaborating... because you gotta..." "It's not something like a poem... where it's supposed to be just your, you know..." "Your vision." "You're already..." "You're already bringing in actors... and technicians and all these other people... to help you realize a vision." "So it's all..." "All filmmaking is collaborative all the way through." "So, yeah, bring... bring each other into it and bring the audience in that way... because at the end of the day... we want the movie to work for an audience." "What's the point if nobody sees it, or if they see it and don't get it?" "Make sure that they get it." "Can you tell us about the music..." "how you went about choosing it?" "Not just the score, but also the actual songs." "Huey Lewis and the News was such a big part of the movie." ""Johnny B. Goode" was always in the original script." "There was no second choice." "It had to be "Johnny B. Goode."" "And that turned out to be the most expensive piece of music in the movie." "The idea was, Look, we've got a movie that's got teens in it." "We gotta have a record on the radio." "That was from the beginning." "We knew we wanted..." "We knew we wanted to have a signature song we could get on the radio... and Alan said, "You gotta hear this guy Huey Lewis."" "And I said, "Okay."" "I didn't know..." "The Sports album had just come out." "We called them and they were very enthusiastic to get involved." "They came in and wrote a song that wasn't right." "I brought Huey into the editing room... and I showed him the cut scene." "This was, like..." "This was, like, during this insane postproduction where..." "I think I cut "I Want A New Drug" to it just to give him an idea... when Michael blasts out of the Doc's thing on the skateboard." "And Huey said, "Oh, I get this." "You want a major song, a song in a major key. "" "That was it." "He went off, wrote "Power of Love," which..." "I remember when Neil Canton called me and he said..." ""I just found out 'Power of Love'..."" "This was two weeks before the movie came out..." ""is going on the radio and it's going in heavy rotation. "" "And I said, "Great."" "And we had to send the field people out to the radio stations and remind them... to say, "From the movie Back to the Future."" "'Cause the studio always wants the song to be the title of the movie." "Right." "Yeah." "Huey Lewis said, "I can't work that way." "I gotta just write the song that's gonna be right for it. "" "And then he decided to write the second song." "I think we only asked him to write one." "They wrote the second song and we put that in there... and I think it was..." "I think it was the only number-one single that Huey ever did." "He had, like..." "I don't remember." "But he had some big breakthrough record for these guys even after the album." " It got nominated for an Academy Award." " So it was great." "But all the DJs were saying, "From the movie Back to the Future."" "It was one of those things where all the..." "They call it "synergy" now... all came together." "The plan came together." "Bob Zemeckis, could you tell us how you feel about the movie..." "looking back at it today." "Other than there being some pretty sloppy stuff in the movie... from a technical standpoint..." "I was watching the early remote heads." "I hadn't seen this movie on the big screen..." "I don't think I've seen it on the big screen since it came out." "So I'm sitting there watching, like, in the dance scene..." "You know, 'cause we had this terrible remote head called the Hot Head." "And you could see it just jerking." "And I'm going, "Oh, man!"" "But, you know, nowadays all that stuff's perfect." "But I don't know if I'd be doing this comedy... this broad kind of comedy." "I don't know if I'm..." "If the script's right, maybe I will." " It's a pretty good movie, actually." " It's pretty good." "I think..." "I don't know if..." "I don't know if we've grown as screenwriters from this." "This is, like, the best thing we've ever written." "It's a pretty terrific screenplay." "And we're always flattered when we hear that it's used in classes... as a quintessential example of how you set stuff up... and how you pay it off." "And all that stuff works." "Those are tried and true rules of storytelling, and we made 'em work... and that's the nice thing of having the writers be the filmmakers." "The director totally gets the script because he wrote it." "We're talking about Sid Sheinberg a lot." "When the movie came out he said, "That screenplay is like a Swiss watch."" "And he's right." "There is not a single frame of that movie that isn't... you know, doing what they told us we're supposed to do in film school... advance plot or character." "Not a single frame." "It's really economical, this movie." "Describe some of the deleted scenes that were taken out prior to release." "God, I don't remember." "I know what they are, because we pulled them out to put them on the DVD." "What are they?" "We had a scene..." "The Darth Vader scene was a whole lot longer." "Right, but that was just shortened." "But that was two minutes longer." "There was a scene..." "Everything was pretty much lifts." "There was a scene where Doc Brown in the '50s... opens up the suitcase that we see him put in there." "He's going through all his personal belongings... and he wants to know, what's this thing?" "And he pulls out this hair dryer." "He's got this fixation on underwear... so he pulls out these underpants and is disappointed that they're cotton... and that underwear of the future isn't made out of paper." "We had a little scene where... as a stall to get George McFly out to the... before he could get out to the car... the kid in the red hair that cuts in on him at the dance..." "Iocks him in a phone booth." "When he looks to see what time it is, he decides he'd better be sure... and calls the time and temperature to find out exactly what time it is... and ends up locked in the phone booth." "It just turned out to be a scene that we didn't need." "How did he get out?" "We showed Strickland saying, "See what happens to slackers, McFly?"" "We filmed them letting him out, but we didn't ever use it." "You'd see him come out, you knew Strickland must have let him out." "You know, do you remember..." "This is how dangerous it gets... how you can get so self-destructive." "I remember we almost cut the whole "Johnny B. Goode" scene out of the film." "You remember this?" "We were in editing, it was the 11 th hour... and it was because of this thing..." "It's the only place in the movie where the story line stops... for Michael to do this performance." "And I remember, I looked at..." "I actually had Artie lift it." "I looked at the movie without it, and it worked okay." "Then Artie, my editor, said, "Why don't we leave it in for the preview?"" "And, I mean, it was like..." "See?" "It's like, man, these things are scary what happens... because you just lose your focus and you're thinking..." ""Maybe I should make the movie shorter." "It doesn't really advance anything." "It's fun to watch this, but..."" "But then once the audience went crazy, then, you know..." "It's really a shame that we can't preview anymore, because..." "Previews are so important, but you just can't... because the movie's reviewed on the Internet the next hour." "As a work in progress..." "It's like a terrible tool that's been destroyed." "It's so important to be able to do that." "One of the end sequences with Doc in the car uses fusion." "It is a contemporary concept now." "But how did you know about it then?" "Fuel cells." "Yeah, well, you know, we knew about that." "We read about that." "Fusion was something everybody had been experimenting with." "About six or eight months after the movie came out... was when those scientists in Utah claimed they'd figured out cold fusion." "That was all over the news for four or five months... until nobody could replicate those experiments... and it turned out those guys just didn't know what they were doing." "But we got a letter from the defense department when the movie came out." "They wanted to know, what did we know about fusion power?" " Very scary, kids." " This is how the government works." "The sneak previews went really well." "Obviously there was great potential for the movie." "But were you still concerned somehow that the movie would maybe lose money... and not turn a profit?" "It's the studio's money, and the way that we rationalize it is... we say, well, the studio has decided... that it's worth $ 20 million to them to make this movie." "We're gonna realize it as best that we can." "But they said we're gonna write this check against this movie... and hope that it works." "Otherwise, you drive yourself crazy." "You'd have better odds if you took your $ 20 million, went to Las Vegas... and put the 20 million on the come line at the crap table." "Your odds are better than making money on a movie." "But that's the business we've chosen, so..." "There's nothing we can do." "We have to do this gambling." "You have a little more control because you actually make the movie yourself... but as far as the odds of what movies make money and what movies don't... most movies actually lose money." "Bob Zemeckis, at the time you were developing the screenplay... your name was attached to the project as director." "Was that a plus in getting the project made?" "Before I made Romancing the Stone it was a hindrance... and after I made Romancing the Stone it was a help." "But the fact is, nobody..." "But the script was the same." "The script was the same, but nobody ever read the script and said..." ""Gee, we'd like to give this script to this other director to make. "" "'Cause nobody liked the script." "All these rejection letters that Bob has in his archives..." "We got 42 or 44 of them... from studios and different producers." "It wasn't like anybody was calling us up and saying..." ""Hey, I'll do anything to make that script Back to the Future."" "There wasn't anybody that was interested." "So there was no..." "That wasn't a decision that we ever had to wrestle with." "Bob was gonna direct the movie." "End of conversation." "And before Romancing the Stone..." "I was getting the worst possible reputation... which is, "Yeah, his movies are good, but they don't make any money. "" "And, man, that was the kiss of death." "Bob Zemeckis, you mentioned that you saw a few flaws in the movie... things that the average viewer would not catch." "What is your take on that?" "Well, that's just... that's just me seeing all the little... all the little flaws and things." "I mean..." "You know, I think that's just the way it is." "I look at movies I love, I think they're perfect..." "I talk to the filmmakers and they don't know what I'm talking about." "It's the same in all the arts." "Apainter will look at his painting and see that tree limb he never got right." "That's the only thing he'll focus on... when everyone else sees the whole canvas and says, "What a great painting."" "So you'll never find a director who will say, "I made the perfect movie."" "And if they do say that, the movie's probably a complete piece of junk." "At the end of Back to the Future..." "Marty returns to a new and improved 1985." "Was it always written that way?" "Yeah, it was 1985." "You gotta look at that ending in historical context." "It was a very '80s ending." "No, but the fact that things changed for the better... as a result of his actions... was always something that..." "It's the story of a kid who teaches his father how to be a man." "Yes, but things change for the better..." "They were, you know, material things." "They were possessions." "He had a truck." "You know?" "His father had a BMW." "Yeah, but his father is a successful author, Bob." "Come on." "But it was the '80s, you know." "It's interesting." "There were a couple of reviews that came out of Europe... that keyed in on the blatant kind of idea that..." "Wait a minute..." "How can these filmmakers equate this kind of happiness... with material possessions?" "But not a single critic that I remember talked about it in America." "There's a lot of product placement in the movie." "Was this a slam against the materialistic attitude of the 1980s?" "In terms of creating the image of the past... one of the ways that you create the past is through brand names." "And we made a conscious effort... to find products that had a different logo in the past... so that we could use those..." "It used to be, in the '60s and the '70s... that they'd make a movie, a car would pull into a gas station... and there would be no name on the gas station." "We would say, "That's ridiculous." "It has to be, you know..." "Somebody owns that gas station." "It's some brand of gasoline." "Put the brand in there." "That makes it real. "" "So, we actually..." "There was a product placement department at the studio that had just started." "They were trying to cram all kinds of stuff at us... but we would nix anything that really didn't work too well." "Shell Gasoline, for example... would have paid more for a placement than Texaco did... but Shell didn't change their logo." "Texaco was the perfect gas station... because of how different a Texaco station looked in the '50s... compared to the '80s." "The same with Pepsi versus Coke." "A Coke bottle in the '50s and a Coke bottle in the '80s were the same... but a Pepsi logo was completely different." "When we talk about the sequels... we'll tell you all the product placement horror stories." "Because nobody really cares about product placement... until they know the movie's gonna be a hit." "That's one of the problems with sequels." "There's one product placement story I gotta tell you." "The product placement department hired this real sleazy guy." "A lot of these guys are sleazy, because that's what they do... figure out how to grab the corporations and make these ridiculous promises." "So he made this deal with the California Raisin Board... that Back to the Future was gonna do for raisins... what E.T. did for Reese's Pieces." "They come to me with this proposal to put raisins in the movie... and I'm saying, "What brand?" "Sunmaid Raisins?"" ""No." "Just raisins." "Can't you have a bowl of raisins at the dance?"" "I'm going, "What do you mean?" "A bowl of raisins looks like a bowl of dirt." "How is that gonna photograph?" "If we can't put a brand name somewhere..."" "And they had taken $50,000 from the California Raisin Board... for this placement that wasn't gonna happen in the movie." "Finally, what we gave them was the bum on the bench in 1985... when the DeLorean comes back at the end." "It says "California Raisins" on that bus bench." "That was what came out of that deal." "And when the California Raisin Board saw it, they were livid... 'cause..." "I didn't know it at the time..." "they'd already actually paid the money." "They told the studio they were going to sue them." "The lawyer at the studio called me into her office and asked me about it." "I said, "You'd better settle the lawsuit and give them back their money... because I'd be happy to be a witness for them... because of the way they just tried to force this on us... and we weren't gonna do it. "" "So the California Raisin Board ended up not paying for that exposure." "And the lesson I learned on this and the subsequent sequels was..." "I'd never do product placement ever anymore." "The only real way to do it is to get permission... and then to get cooperation." "So if you're gonna do Texaco and they give you a bunch of signs... and uniforms and stuff that you don't have to make, that's the only way." "But I'd never take money anymore, because it's like... you got another creative person..." " You got another producer." " And it's never worth it." "It's just never worth it." "Product placement just isn't worth it." "You kinda touched about it throughout this whole discussion... but could tell us what was your favorite part of making this film?" "You know what?" "My favorite part of making this film was writing it." "I mean, the actual making of the movie..." "I don't remember any good times." "I don't remember a single..." "I mean, I guess seeing the movie work when it was finally up on the screen... that was a thrill." "But the actual shooting of the movie was just... you know, survival." "It was cold and..." "I remember never having enough sleep... always..." "always being half asleep... just never, you know..." "I was the most unhealthy I ever was when I made this movie." "You know, I was the fattest... and the most out of shape and sick that I ever was... making this movie." "So I guess the writing and the finishing were the favorite parts... and the actual shooting was just survival." "The best moment that I had on the set was Michael J. Fox's first day." "When he walked in front of the camera and he started doing the scene..." "I just felt, "Thank God." "That's Marty McFly." "It's gonna work now." "It's gonna work. "" "Kind of along the same lines, about your expectations with the actors... you said you were very happy with the performances." "But would you say that they exceeded your expectations?" "Yeah, they're brilliant." "This is one of those movies where everybody is on the same page." "Once Michael came into the movie, everything just jelled together... and everybody got the tone of what the humor of this movie should be." "And all the performances around Michael were better." "Lea was fine with Eric Stoltz and Chris was fine... but when Michael J. Fox was working with them... it just supercharged it, it just went into the stratosphere." "If you talk to actors, they'll talk about give and take... and how important it is to be playing a scene with somebody... that gives back something for them to work from... and that was always what was happening." "I would say, honestly, they're better than I thought they could ever be." "I've been fortunate to work with so many great actors... that it's always better than I ever imagined." "It really is." "It really, truly is." "How much control did you have over the final cut?" "That's the final cut." "Yeah." "I've never had any of these "final cut" problems." "I mean, nobody..." "Never, ever once in my entire career have I ever had to have a struggle... over the cut of the picture." "Now I contractually have final cut in everything that I do." "But in the early days, I didn't have final cut, but nobody wanted to... nobody wanted to tamper with it." "You know, I really believe that most studio executives... don't want to do the filmmaker's work." "It becomes more of a personality clash than anything to do with the movie... when you have these issues about final cut." "I've never had anyone ever try to take the movie away... on any movie I've ever made." "Are you making any changes to the movie for the DVD?" "Taking out, for example, the wires that you mentioned... the ones that we see in the clock tower scene?" "No." "I hate that." "I don't think you should ever do that." "That would be like colorizing a black-and-white movie." "You know?" " It is what it is." " Warts and all." "I mean, yeah, I don't get this... adding scenes back in and recutting the movie." "I don't get that at all." "It should be the way it was in time..." "At that moment in time, this is the movie the way it was." "That, I think, is what it's supposed to be." "For those of you who have only seen the movie on home video... on the video it says "To Be Continued" at the end." "You didn't see that here." "That was never on the theatrical release." "It won't be on the DVD." "We only put that on the video as a way of telling the world... that there was gonna be a sequel." "So if anybody says that's different, that's different..." "No, the film that you saw was a new print... made from the original elements." "It's been remastered in high def and it looks absolutely great." "I supervised the video transfer." "But it's the movie you just saw." " Is the trailer for 3 on the end of 2?" " Yes." "The only thing different about that is at the end of that trailer it said..." ""Coming Summer 1990."" "And now it doesn't say "Coming Summer 1990."" "If you could travel in time, where would you go?" "It depends." "If I could come back, I'd go to the future..." "I mean, the past." "But if I could only go one way, I'd go to the future." "And Bob Gale, where would you go?" "Maybe I'd go back and see what my parents were like in high school." "That would certainly be about the most interesting thing I could think of." "Who were some of your major influences when you were making this movie?" "Any other writers, directors that truly inspired you?" "The classic American directors." "I think that the main influences on this movie are definitely..." "Frank Capra and Billy Wilder." "Throw a little John Ford in there when you get into the sequels, I guess." "But it's probably like a Billy Wilder movie more than anything, maybe." "They're the filmmakers that we love, the classic American filmmakers." "We're gonna end on that note." "Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale, thank you so much for your time." "This was really, truly an amazing experience." " Thanks so much, everybody." " Thank you."