"Hello, I'm Francis Lawrence, the director of Water for Elephants." "And I'm Richard LaGravenese, the screenwriter." "I've always wanted to have a movie that has this theme." "I've never done a movie at Fox before, but this is my favorite opening studio theme." "FRANCIS LAWRENCE:" "My first two movies were at Warner's, and their logo's not nearly as cool as the 20th Century Fox logo." "I mean, I think that maybe that comes from Star Wars or something." "Seeing that as a kid." "Somehow the big 20th Century Fox logo... (RICHARD LaGRAVENESE IMITATES LOGO THEME)" "LaGRAVENESE:" "And then they add that..." "I love that stuff." "LAWRENCE:" "I wanted to, for a while, and they wouldn't let me, but I wanted to do a thing where we actually started with the present-day 20th Century Fox logo, and then in time-lapse have it deconstruct into the old one from the '30s." " LaGRAVENESE:" "That would've been cool." " To sort of bring us back." "It was fine because we actually start in present-day." " LaGRAVENESE:" "That's right." " So, it's all good." "LAWRENCE:" "So I think bookending the movie with the old Jacob story was one of Richard's first ideas, wasn't it?" "LaGRAVENESE:" "Yeah, it was to take the end and put it in the beginning 'cause we had decided we wanted to take out all the scenes of the old-age home, and have him actually tell the story to the circus manager." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, it's tricky when you have to scale down a big experience, a 14-hour read of a book down to a two-hour movie experience." "There are going to be some things that are lost." "That was probably one of the biggest things that helped scale things down a little bit." "And Richard had the great idea of taking the last part of that story with old Jacob and putting it as our bookends, so that we're not in the nursing home at all, but he's already made it to the circus." "No, no, no, no!" "I came on my own." "No, it's okay." "We're gonna call the home." "LAWRENCE:" "We searched around also for different circuses for present day, and we found Circus Vargas, which was kind of in the area." "And it's a local California circus." "Animal-free circus that travels around and performs." "And they really were generous with us and came down to Los Angeles, and shut down their circus for a few days, and set up in a parking lot in Glendale." "I thought it was really nice because it's a very different kind of circus from the circus in the '30s now, with its color instead of the canvas, the blues, and purples, and pinks, and the vinyl tents, and the truss," "and the electric lights, and all that kind of stuff." "LaGRAVENESE:" "So, that's their look." "Jack Fisk didn't do anything to what Vargas looked like?" " LAWRENCE:" "No, that's Vargas' look." " That's Vargas' look." " That blue..." " LAWRENCE:" "That blue..." " LaGRAVENESE:" "That's great." " It's one of the fun things about this." "And then I also like this, too, the idea that the offices in the modern circus are these sort of pre-fab..." " LaGRAVENESE: ...paneled..." " ...trailers." "Rodrigo, also, you can see that the color, there's a little bit of cyan from the electric light that's very different from later in the movie." "We also shot this spherically, whereas the bulk of the movie is anamorphic." "That's using a different sort of aspect ratio and different lenses, different field, used a different film stock that has a little more grain, and we have a little more color saturation." "So it has more of a modern, gritty feel to it, the bookends do, so that we'd really be able to contrast the present-day stuff with the past." "Now, you know the Benzini Brothers never saw the end of '31." "Are you telling me that you were there for..." " Right in the middle of it." " Well, that's incredible, because..." "LAWRENCE:" "Hal Holbrook was the only guy that I ever wanted to play this role." "I'd seen him in Into the Wild." "And there's a scene where he tries to adopt Emile Hirsch's character, and he just broke my heart and I thought he'd be perfect in this." "LaGRAVENESE:" "We were all off camera crying during this entire sequence." "Hal's wife Dixie Carter had passed away just four or five months earlier." "She was a wonderful stage and TV actress." "They had been together just forever." "One of the longest Hollywood marriages." "When he talks about his wife in these scenes, just broke our hearts." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, and there's a few lines that are actually cut out of the later scene, when he's talking about Marlena that I think really hit close to home for him, and so it was very personal." "It was right around the time that we offered him the role that his wife passed away, and so I wasn't sure whether he'd want to do the job or not." " Some people would never want to..." " Go there." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, go there when something's been that close." "But he did." "He started working right away, he took the job, and I think found it cathartic." " But he did a fantastic job." " He's amazing." "Not one has a place for me since their mother died." "They take turns visiting on weekends." "My son forgot whose turn it was today, so..." "LAWRENCE:" "And in two days he probably had..." "I want to say eight pages of dialogue or something." "LaGRAVENESE:" "And he knew all the blocking, and whenever you changed something, he did it right away." " He knew all the lines." "He was amazing." " LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, he had all this down." "A big life." "LAWRENCE:" "And Charlie here is Paul Schneider, who's also a really great actor." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Wonderful." "If you've ever seen the Jesse James movie, he was amazing." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, The Assassination of Jesse James, Lars and the Real Girl." "And also Bright Star." "He has a Scottish accent and he probably gained 40 pounds." "But just a really, really good actor who transforms himself for different things." "Don't you have to call the home?" "I think we should let them sweat." "But if I could, I was wondering, you know, could you talk to me..." "LAWRENCE:" "And he's also a big film fan, and I think he was really excited to work with Hal, and wanted, I think, to talk about All the President's Men." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Yeah, they were." "On set, we would grill him about All the President's Men." "LAWRENCE:" "And now Rob." "It's interesting, the change right there and the voiceover." "For a long time through editing and also through the whole pre-production process..." " LaGRAVENESE:" "Through most of it." " Yeah." "We had planned to have Hal do all the voiceover." "And then just creatively later on in the process," "I wanted to try Rob's voice, and I thought something might actually connect more closely to the scenes and sequences emotionally" " if Rob was speaking." " LaGRAVENESE:" "It did." "LAWRENCE:" "And I think it really did because there's something distancing when you have somebody telling the story some 70 years later." "(MOTHER SPEAKING POLISH)" "Love you, too, Mommy." "(SPEAKING POLISH)" "LAWRENCE:" "Something fun we did here, too, is we shot most of this movie in Los Angeles, and we did a week in Tennessee." "So, the home that you see there with the parents was in North Georgia." "Chickamauga, Georgia." "It was about 118 degrees when we shot there, inside and outside." "But this is UCLA." "JACOB:" "Graduate of Veterinary Science." "And by the end of that night," "I'd be the first man Catherine Hale ever invited..." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Wasn't that moment with the girl actually filmed as they were in between takes, because she was so nervous around Rob that she kind of loosened up" " while you said, "Keep the camera rolling."" " LAWRENCE:" "Yeah." "We tricked her." "If she listens to this, she might not know it." "But, yeah, we tricked her." "It seemed like there was a little flirting with Rob happening in between takes, and so I had Rodrigo just roll on that." "And that was one of the moments in between, when she thought we were just sitting there and tweaking the lighting." "(DOOR OPENING)" "JACOB:" "Every plan I had vanished." "PROCTOR:" "Mr. Jankowski?" "May we have a word with you?" "Jacob, I'm afraid there's been a car accident." "It's right in there, son." "LAWRENCE:" "I like this." "Rob looks really undone." " LaGRAVENESE:" "Yes, he does." " He did a good job here." "He has a method that I will keep secret of making himself start to sweat and go a little pale and work himself up that I thought was very effective here." "Is there any other family to call?" "LAWRENCE:" "And that's Jimmy Keane playing the priest, who was actually in my favorite movie of all time, Apocalypse Now." "LaGRAVENESE:" "I didn't know that he was in Apocalypse Now." "LAWRENCE:" "He is one of the soldiers in Duvall's..." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Napalm?" "LAWRENCE: ...air cavalry units." "He's in the helicopter sequence." "He has the line, "How you feeling today, Jimmy?"" "And he says, "Like a mean...sir."" "It's one of the best lines in the movie." "That's him." "The house and all their assets, including your father's practice, are property of the bank in default of the loan." "I'm telling you, you're wrong." "My father owned that house outright." "LaGRAVENESE:" "There were many more scenes in this whole section before we got to the circus that ultimately were cut." " LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, we worked on this..." " The front section a lot." "LAWRENCE:" "On and on and on, really streamlining the story." "LaGRAVENESE:" "The first three drafts we were in the old-age home for a long time, with the fake stampede that he sees only in his mind. (LAUGHING)" " LAWRENCE:" "That's right." " That idea." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, and we really worked on this idea of really making sure that you feel this kid's loss and that he has all of this hope, and he's about to take his finals, and these great parents," "and lives in somewhat of an idyllic setting, away from the classic Depression imagery." "And then losing his parents, and realizing that he loses his home." "He used to attack the lawyer there in part of the scene." "LAWRENCE:" "And I always liked the retracing the steps that we just saw earlier." "And the house was full of sound and warmer light, and furniture, and his parents in the kitchen." "LaGRAVENESE:" "His mother also acted as his Polish coach, who taught him how to speak Polish." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, she was great." "And his father also told me he was Polish, when he came into the audition, and I bought it." "My uneducated ear bought that he was Polish even though he was Russian." "LaGRAVENESE:" "I love this shot." " LAWRENCE:" "This is my Searchers shot." " Yes, our John Ford shot." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, my homage to John Ford." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Love it." "JACOB: ...walking out the front door" "and forcing myself not to look back." "LaGRAVENESE:" "We were playing with the voiceover really right up until the end on different things." "Always cutting back was a great idea." "And I didn't see the point in going back to school." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, this was all in our couple of days that I really was happy that we got the chance to do North Georgia and Chattanooga, Tennessee." "This is the Tennessee Valley Railroad here, one of the last pieces that we shot there." "Again, dying in the heat, but just beautiful." "LaGRAVENESE:" "And Rodrigo did such a beautiful job." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah." "Everybody did a great job." "Jack Fisk, the production designer, and Rodrigo, who shot it." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Jacqueline West." "LAWRENCE:" "Jackie West with the costumes." " Jack actually built that little stream." " He did?" "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, that stream didn't exist." "He found the right little spot, and we dug it out and lined it with plastic and had water pumping through." "This is probably the first of the real visual effects sequences in this movie because this is all day for night." "We added the fireflies." "And that light you see through the trees of the train approaching is really just a bunch of sweaty electricians on a truck, aiming their light into the camera." "We cheated." "LaGRAVENESE:" "In development, this whole scene started with that visual that you had." "I wanted to see the flickering light through trees." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, this sequence has always felt really mythic to me, that lost boy in the forest and the train approaching." "And Rob here actually did his own stunt, ran alongside the track and caught the train." "I was really nervous 'cause these things, even though it's probably moving at 15 to 20 miles an hour or something like that..." "LaGRAVENESE:" "It makes such a difference." "LAWRENCE: ...if you mess up, man, you don't wanna be caught under the wheels of one of these trains." "LaGRAVENESE:" "That happened on Doctor Zhivago." "LAWRENCE:" "Somebody got caught under a train?" "LaGRAVENESE:" "Yeah." "It's a famous scene where the woman with the baby is running after, and they take the baby and she falls and she actually..." "It's off camera, but she actually fell and hurt herself." "CAMEL:" "Hey, don't be messing with Blackie!" "Throwing people off trains is one of the perks of his job." "We don't need no bums on this train." "Everybody, calm down here." "Grady, put that damn pistol away." "Blackie, let him go." "And I mean on the inside of the train." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Jim Norton is a wonderful stage actor, who a few years ago won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Conor McPherson play called The Seafarer." "He played a blind man who plays poker with the devil and beats him, which was a really cool play, and then he was in Finian's Rainbow, the musical." "LAWRENCE:" "And back here, we had Blackie, who's Scott, and there's Richard, Stephen." "I'm Jacob." "Jankowski." "Jankowski?" "Gorski!" "(BOTH SPEAKING POLISH)" "LAWRENCE:" "We had a lot of Polish in here." "There's actually a Polish song that he learned, and we shot him singing that in the forest when he was alone, that we cut." " LaGRAVENESE:" "I never saw that." " Yeah." "Yeah, he learned a bunch of Polish, and the woman who played his mother really helped." "But Rob picked up on it pretty well and it was pretty believable, which was really good, really nice." "And he could bring stuff up in the moment and he could learn it pretty quickly." "He didn't need too much practice for him to sound convincing, which was nice." "We land in Deposit in the morning." "We'll get you some work for the day, and if you're still alive at the end of it, I will take you to see August, the Lord and Master of the Known and the Unknown Universe." "LAWRENCE:" "Now this scene coming up was one of those tricky sequences, where it's only about a quarter of a page long and so, when you read it, it doesn't seem like much, but it was really tough to put together," "which was seeing the circus set up for the first time." "And it was really important to me, as part of the magic of the circus was not only seeing the performers and the acts, but the building of the circus itself." "(WHISTLE BLOWING)" "(WORKERS CHATTERING)" "LAWRENCE:" "I watched the movie Dumbo a lot for inspiration on the stuff coming together, but there was a lot of logistics 'cause we always shot everything either at dawn or at sunset." "So, we could only do a shot or two every time." "LaGRAVENESE:" "And the CGI town in the background amazes me, how beautifully it's done." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah." "We did a lot of that since we shot this in Los Angeles." "We did a lot of digital historic matte paintings." "LaGRAVENESE:" "There wasn't too much." "It was just the right amount." "That little steeple." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, and so what we would do is, we would take the Santa Monica Mountains that look very California, and if you can see in the background, we added more trees and softened them up, or in the distance you might see a church steeple in a small town." "So, you can see the difference back here behind these people." "It's nice and soft, but those used to just be California mountains." "LaGRAVENESE:" "In writing it, the journey starts in Ithaca and it ends in Pennsylvania, so I chose all these towns to actually track where the circus went, and it all had to look like upstate New York." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, and here you see, these guys." "This was one of the real fun things about this movie, is that we built our own circus family." "So all these roustabouts and circus acts and everybody, all these guys, the circus workers, were extras that we hired that went to a boot camp for circus." "And so you see here, these aren't circus people." "These are our guys who'd learned how to actually put the big top up." "LaGRAVENESE:" "That's really like a 2,500-pound pole." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, and this is the old way." "Jack Fisk really researched what these old tents were made out of and how they worked, with these big, heavy bail rings and the old center poles that were from the masts of ships, and we trained our guys to put them up, and they put the tent up." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Didn't he plant seven acres of corn or something?" "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, we planted that whole grass." "We bought out farm land and planted grass." "There's Major, our lion, who stood in for all the different lions." "That was the other fun thing, was just working with all these animals." "The day we shot this, I don't think you were around, but Rodrigo put a light, it was up above the circus tent, shining down through a bail ring, and it was so close to the tent it actually set the tent on fire." "And we all had to evacuate the tent while they tried to put the thing out." "LaGRAVENESE:" "This moment, for me, replaces one of my favorite moments in the book that we weren't allowed to do because it involved an orangutan, and PETA would not let us use any monkeys." "So, this scene was that moment." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, that was our give, that we were not gonna use any primates in this movie." "If you see all those wagons, by the way, we worked closely with Circus World Museum in Baraboo, which is a great circus museum in the old wintering grounds of Ringling Brothers." "They actually let us use all their circus wagons, so the animal wagons and a bunch of their pole wagons and food wagons and all of that." "They're big, great-looking, authentic wagons that weigh thousands of pounds." "How do you stand the smell?" "What smell?" "(CHUCKLES)" "CECIL:" "Ladies and gentlemen!" "Step right this way to see the most dazzling collection..." "LAWRENCE:" "There's a great graphic artist that Jack found to create all those banners." "Yeah, this is all fun stuff." "Rob entering the world of the circus for the first time." "Without them catching on, or else there'll be a fight." "...of pudgy perfection." "(CROWD CHEERING)" "All for one thin dime." "And believe me, it'll be the best dime..." "LAWRENCE:" "E.E. Bell." "You can't get any better than that." "LaGRAVENESE:" "For a Barker." "CECIL:" "Ladies to the right." "Gentlemen to the left." "Folks, just put one foot in front of the other, and the body will follow!" "Take this." "Smack the sides with it." "LAWRENCE:" "Coming up here is Donna Scott, who plays Barbara, who's a great character from the novel and a fun one." "She did a lot of training for this." "She found a famous burlesque dancer, I don't remember her name, and had her come over to her house and teach her how to do this routine, and we also had this great choreographer, Tracy Phillips," "that worked with her as well." "But she really learned how to do the whole thing with the tassels." "LaGRAVENESE:" "She's the wife of director Tony Scott." "LAWRENCE:" "Yes, she's married to Tony Scott." "And we have to be modest here, but you can see the tassels actually spinning at the bottom of frame." "I made sure that you'd be able to see that she knew what she was doing." "(BOTH EXCLAIM)" "LAWRENCE:" "I remember, when working on this scene, too," "I kept thinking about the sequence in Once Upon a Time in America where the young De Niro character sees little Jennifer Connelly practicing ballet." "I love that." "And here, this is the perfect combination for me of Rodrigo's lighting and this back light." "So it still stays dark, and Jackie West's costume that sparkles." "I think Reese just worked really well in this era, with that hair and the costume." "LaGRAVENESE:" "I remember how, in the book, they described this scene, her first entrance and her coloring, and it immediately reminded me of Reese." "It was like this peaches and cream glow." "That was in the midst of all this horse manure and shit that was around her." "Good boy." "Are you okay?" "You're shaking a little bit." "Excuse me, ma'am." "LAWRENCE:" "This was also our first time with the horses." "The horses were probably one of the trickier things to work with." "LaGRAVENESE:" "They were the toughest animals to work with." "So skittish." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, they were." "But also because they were supposed to be this liberty act, where Reese's character, Marlena, can order around with just hand signals and sounds." "They're really well-trained horses, but they were not a liberty act." "And so quickly, Sled Reynolds and his team had to train these four horses to become a liberty act." "LaGRAVENESE:" "But the black Friesians, they were like teenage boys, they were always looking to cause trouble." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, they were always getting in fights." "That's why they always had to be separated." "And in the ring, when you see later, when they're all circling around, if those two black horses ever got next to each other, it was like all hell broke loose." "Everybody was jumping out of the ring, and all the trainers had to go running in." "(BAND PLAYING FANFARE)" " And Christoph." " This is one of my favorite sequences." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, this is another one." "This was another one of the important ones, like the circus setting up." "In the story of a young man falling in love with the circus, you need that sequence where you see the authentic '30s circus acts, and it was really fun to gather together all the circus performers who could do like this, the Iron Jaw." "There's not many people who still do the Iron Jaw." "LaGRAVENESE:" "I love the way you shot this." "And again, at one point, this had voiceover in it, but again, the images were so strong you just didn't need anything else but his reaction and the audience just seeing how magical it is." "LAWRENCE:" "Right there are Sebastien and Katia, they were our circus choreographers." "They are the ones who actually helped us find all the circus performers that could do these things and helped choreograph everything from the parades to the Spec, parts of the routine that we would see with our trapeze team or our high-wire act," "or slack wire." "I was also really pleased with the kids' reactions, the cutaways." "LaGRAVENESE:" "I love how you didn't make this glossy, that it was real." "You could almost smell it." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, so this stuff was fun, but if anything went wrong and those horses got next to one another, a fight would break out." "And also, what was interesting about that is Reese was really in there with all the horses." "And it looks like she's commanding them, but usually right in the middle of frame, and this was tricky for the effects people, you'd have the horse trainer that we had to paint out." "JACOB:" "I thought I'd go blind from the shine." "Benzini Brothers outdid God himself." "They created heaven in one day." "And just as fast heaven was packed away and gone." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, this is another one of my favorite sequences coming up, too." "LaGRAVENESE:" "This was in one long shot?" "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, I think we had the idea in the script early on that we wanted to get this walk through the train, to see all the different life and the hierarchy from the worker car to the sideshow car to the performer car, to August." "LaGRAVENESE:" "And all this was built on the train." "These were not sets." "These were all on the train." "LAWRENCE:" "Yes, this is actually on a train that was shimmying around because of hydraulics, and then we shot this with a Steadicam and had our entire cast of roustabouts and performers and sideshow and band members and everybody." "We actually tried to do it in one shot, and it didn't work because the passageways on the train are just so narrow to try and fit everybody through, and it was really elaborate, and there were focus-pullers handing off remote controls to one another" "and really tricky stuff." "CAMEL:" "And everybody, everybody, is below the bosses." "Don't ever forget that." "LAWRENCE:" "Here's the clowns." "It was really fun that night, too, because we had really built this family, and everybody was hanging out together." "You see the sideshow, and then there'd be the coochie girls here, and the clowns all hung out." "So if you walked through that train car to make some changes, you were likely to get accosted by somebody." "LaGRAVENESE:" "And so the hierarchy of the circus, from the lower rung right up to the top." " LAWRENCE:" "Yes." " With each car." "CAMEL:" "Barbara!" "Easy, now, Barbara." " Good night, ladies." " Good night, Camel." " (ALL EXCLAIM DISAPPOINTEDLY)" " BARBARA:" "We like him, Camel." "Good night, Camel!" "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, Donna Scott again." "Tracy Phillips is in there, who's our choreographer." "And then two of the other coochie girls, who were fire-breathers, sword-swallowers." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Such an interesting group of people." "LAWRENCE:" "There's a fire-breather as well." "There's Sebastien and Katia again." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Yeah." "LAWRENCE:" "These are our showgirls and performers." "Just don't talk to them at all." "You'll live longer." "Now be nice and quiet along here, because we have to show some respect to the ladies and..." " Gentlemen." " MAN:" "Good evening." "LaGRAVENESE:" "I love how you timed that line." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, that was ad-libbed, I think." "Yeah, he just ad-libbed that." "That's the boss's wife, Marlena." "She's a star attraction." "And she don't..." "LAWRENCE:" "We shot these trains out in Piru and Fillmore." "There's a Fillmore train line, and one of the reasons we chose to shoot about an hour north of Los Angeles was this private train line." "So we brought a steam engine out, and used a bunch of the Fillmore train line cars and painted them and turned them into our Benzini cars and built our circus train." "We could park on the tracks at any given place and buy out great farmland right next to the track, so we built our own little circus back lot." "And it worked out because all the trains that we needed were from the correct era, and so Jack Fisk just had to augment most of them by painting them or doing a few little additions here and there," "but for the most part, the trains really worked." "And then they had this train, which was August's car, which I think was originally used for the movie Wild Wild West, Will Smith." " LaGRAVENESE:" "Oh, yeah?" " Yeah." "And then we just gutted the inside, and Jack built out his own version." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Jack's detail in this car blew me away." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah." "I loved shooting in this car." "Just the color of the wood and the paneling and the curtains." "And again the costumes, with this great smoking jacket that Christoph wears." "...that Polack rummy took under his wing." "College boy." "AUGUST:" "I don't believe we had the pleasure." "Jacob Jankowski, sir." "So, what am I supposed to do with a Jacob Jankowski?" "LAWRENCE:" "Speaking of Christoph, he's just fantastic in this movie." "He really liked the script a lot and liked the story and liked the character, and it was really fun to work with him." "LaGRAVENESE:" "And this shot, to me, is so classic, like 1930s when a star would make an entrance in a movie, the way that they're introduced, that turn, I love that." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, it's really fun." "For a while, we debated about what these guys would be doing, and Christoph and I talked about, should we see him at work versus play?" "'Cause I know it was poker for a while." "I think it was poker in the novel." "LaGRAVENESE:" "It's pokerin the novel, yeah." "LAWRENCE:" "Then I think we just decided on poker, so that this kid would come in and find these men dressed smartly and smoking cigars and drinking whiskey and playing poker and with a little music playing in a beautiful car." "We'd make the world a little more appealing, rather than just business." "We don't have any elephants." "That sounds perfect." "I'd love to work with the animals." "Come here." "LAWRENCE:" "I love this move that Christoph does here." "These from one day of work?" " LAWRENCE:" "There." " (LaGRAVENESE CHUCKLES)" "Wipes it off his hands." "...dirty his hands as a filthy roustabout?" "I guess because out of all that dirt and sweat, working with these fellows you wouldn't be caught dead..." "LAWRENCE:" "At the end of our schedule, we moved some of these August train car scenes to a sound stage north of California." "So, the train's moving around with hydraulic..." "LaGRAVENESE:" "You had the train car in the studio?" "LAWRENCE:" "This wasn't a set." "You had the actual train car in the studio." "Because, for the most part, some of these scenes, especially any day scenes, we would shoot them actually out at the location." "So that if you were to see out of the windows, you would see out of the windows, or you could have somebody walk in." "It was nice." "It added a certain flavor because there'd be flies buzzing around and dust and wind blowing the curtains and just certain things that you wouldn't have and feel, and I think it feels like you're really there, for most of it." "Veterinary sciences?" " What school?" " Cornell." "You're a Cornell graduate?" "He did work the rubes for me this afternoon." "LaGRAVENESE:" "This is the beginning of a little bit of a difference between the book and the movie with the character of Jacob, who in the book was a wide-eyed virgin and much more innocent to everything, and Francis and I talked a lot about" "trying to make the characters more morally complex and making Jacob a bit more aggressive." "The good guys and the bad guys, there was a little bit of a blend between the two." "Everybody had their reasons." "I wanted to understand August's back story as much as Jacob and Marlena." "JACOB:" "It's incredible." "AUGUST:" "Takes your breath away, doesn't it?" "LAWRENCE:" "I think this scene originally was not with August, it was actually with Uncle Al in the book." " LaGRAVENESE:" "Yes, it was." " 'Cause the combination that we made," "I think it was maybe the first or second draft of the script, and we decided, as we really dove into the characters, and we were looking at August, specifically, and trying to think about what his objectives were" "and what's at stake for him in the movie, and it was unclear." "Come on!" "LAWRENCE:" "Again, in streamlining the story, we realized that if we blended Uncle Al and August into one, and had August be the owner/operator of the circus as well as the ringmaster, and the one married to Marlena, there was a lot more at stake." "Come on!" "LaGRAVENESE:" "At the end of the book, August dissipates a little bit, and Uncle Al has everything at stake." "And the motor of the movie started to dissipate, too, every time we got to the third act of the film." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, so I thought it worked, and it also helped humanize August a little bit because you understood his motivations for things and that he had built this family..." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Yeah, he wasn't just an arbitrary psychotic." "LAWRENCE:" "He had his reasons, but, of course, he couldn't control himself." " LaGRAVENESE:" "Exactly." " And again, this is shot in a real train car." "This was probably everybody's least favorite room to shoot in." "LaGRAVENESE:" "It was a tiny room." "LAWRENCE:" "It was this teeny room, and it always felt like there were 17 people in there, plus a dog." "And the horses were kept right next door, so it really had the air of authenticity 'cause it always smelled like horse shit." "And there were always flies buzzing around and cramped and hot, but it really worked out." "And Mark Povinelli, who plays Kinko/Walter for us, is just great." " Darling, may I introduce to you..." " MARLENA:" "Careful." "Jacob." "Jankowski." "Jacob Jankowski, Benzini Brothers' very own Ivy League veterinarian." " He's the vet?" " Yeah." "Studied at Cornell University." "LAWRENCE:" "Now this sequence, I actually wanted to shoot in Tennessee, and unfortunately couldn't." "I think it worked out okay, but I just thought, you can't get the same landscape topography and forest that you can in Tennessee." "So, we really had to cheat it." "LaGRAVENESE:" "What was the problem?" "Scheduling?" "LAWRENCE:" "It was a scheduling issue." "I think it was really that if we shot this sequence in Tennessee, it would've added more days to Tennessee, and Reese had to be done to go to another movie, and we didn't have time out there to do that." "It worked out fine, but it was just one of those ones where I just always imagined this one in a slightly different kind of landscape, not quite as dry, something a little more lush, somewhere northeast." "I didn't want to say anything in front of Mrs. Rosenbluth." "The horse has laminitis." "English." "The connective tissue between the hoof and the coffin bone has been compromised." "So when he walks, the coffin bone rotates toward the sole of the hoof until it punctures through." "But it hasn't punctured yet." "No, it hasn't, but it's just a matter of time." "And he's in a lot of pain." "LAWRENCE:" "This sequence in the movie, too, we worked on quite a lot." "LaGRAVENESE:" "A lot." "This was a much longer sequence." "And what's coming up was changed from the book, what happens with the lion." "LAWRENCE:" "But also, there was much more time." "We condensed the time period in the movie from the book, and so Silver Star was sick for many more days." "So there was laying Silver Star down, and traveling, the train moving with Silver Star, and Marlena staying." "There was a real decline in Silver Star, so we really had to get into our research about laminitis and foundering." "And I think we're actually pretty accurate with it." "But it was a tricky section just because of the timeline of everything." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Yes." "This was a fun sequence." "What he does with the cast now was motivated, in the book, because Jacob had accidentally given an order in front of him and it irked him, and so he taught him a lesson." "I think this was a better reason, to tell him the lay of the land, the law of the circus, a bit more." "LAWRENCE:" "Again, one of the steps for us in giving August a logic, that it wasn't just, yeah, he felt threatened by Jacob." "There's a logic to..." "LaGRAVENESE:" "He has a point." "You wanna agree with him." "You can empathize with his point of view even though he's a madman." "This lion acted like... (LAUGHING) I was so amazed by what this lion did all on his own." "LAWRENCE:" "Major was a really crabby lion, and he's very scary." "And you're up on these train cars, and there's probably 18 inches between you and these bars, and on the other side, a five-foot drop to the ground." "In this take, the lion just locked on to Jacob." "LaGRAVENESE:" "It was like he knew where the camera was." "LAWRENCE:" "I was also very proud of this, because we did this hand bite live." "And when you see his hand lift up with the bucket, that's a prosthetic arm being operated by a puppeteer." "But Rob really had to open the door and pretend to stick his arm in." "His real arm is actually tied behind his back." "(AUGUST LAUGHING)" " You think that's funny?" " Yes, I do." "LAWRENCE:" "And then we had our digital artists paint the teeth out of the lion back there." "You can see." "(EXHALES)" "Does it hurt?" "Like this?" "LAWRENCE:" "And here's the speech we were talking about," " where you get some of August's logic." " LaGRAVENESE:" "Yeah." "No treatment, no hoof tester, just your Cornell gut." "You know how a circus survives?" "You said it yourself, kid." "On blood, sweat, pain and shit." "When a circus begins to die and animals eat garbage, you know what men eat?" "Nothing." "Your heart goes out to an animal suffering." "Well, that's noble, and that's good, but all that tells me is that you never saw men suffer." "LaGRAVENESE:" "I like this, too." "The way he can straighten him up and turn again." "...to get that horse ready for the parade." "As long as we can walk, we play." "LaGRAVENESE:" "There's a little, actual mistake there, if you see, because they're just on a watering stop right there, but August implies that there's gonna be a parade." "Yeah, exactly, 'cause days had to be cut." " LAWRENCE:" "Exactly." " In the original script, there were those days." "LAWRENCE:" "And this is interesting." "This is a good sequence." "But we actually ran out of time, I think." "Reese had gotten sick, and we lost a couple of hours or something." "She wasn't feeling well one day, and somehow things got shuffled around, we ran out of time to shoot Rob's close-up here on the day we were actually in the train car." "And so this close-up was shot, I think, about two months later from this shot here with Reese, once Reese had actually already been wrapped." "And so what we did was, we actually played this shot of Reese, the take that I liked of Reese, on a big monitor that we put on the floor of the train car." "And so Rob is actually performing with a televised image of Reese sitting with the horse." "Which was really fun, and it really worked." "LaGRAVENESE:" "I think one of the reasons..." "This is one of my favorite scenes of hers." "I think her performance in this scene is beautiful." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, she looks great." "Nobody stops, nobody dies until August says so." "(SOFTLY) It's okay, baby." "LaGRAVENESE:" "I read somewhere that Rob said, when they were together, that the horse's head was on her leg and she didn't say anything until after the scene." "And the weight of it, she sustained it." "And he said, "That must have hurt."" "And she went, "Yeah, I'm gonna go back to my dressing room and cry now."" "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, but she was a real trouper during this." "This was an emotional scene, and the horse had to lie down next to her, and horses don't like to lie down." "And occasionally, that horse would just jump up out of nowhere." "So Reese got stepped on a couple of times during this day." "And luckily, you only really need the horse there in the wide shots." "LaGRAVENESE:" "It's amazing how safe, once the elephant comes on, we all felt around Tai..." "Rosie, the elephant." " But not the horse." " LAWRENCE:" "This was tricky for Reese." "It really was." "It looks simple to just sit next to a horse lying down, but for these shots, the horse wasn't there." "Listen, you should go." "No, I'll keep him calm." "Good boy." "(SINGING) Hush, little baby, don't say a word" "LAWRENCE:" "This was interesting." "The shot of the gun going to the horse's head was something that we debated for a while." "LaGRAVENESE:" "We had to fight for this one, right?" "They wanted you to cut it?" " LAWRENCE:" "I'm glad we left it in." " Yeah." "LAWRENCE:" "It makes people nervous, but I think that's okay." "But without that shot, it would've just felt really fake." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Yes." "Reese was great in this." "This was a good day for her." "Really good day." "Really good performance, I think." "Are you all right?" "LAWRENCE:" "And what I really like about this, too, and something that Richard and I worked on a lot, was the building of the love story between the two of them because she's very, very guarded at first." "LaGRAVENESE:" "This is their first moment of intimacy, over the death of Silver Star." " LAWRENCE:" "Exactly." " She sees a compassionate man, a man that she's never experienced before." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, and she doesn't trust anybody in the beginning." "And then this thing happens, and it's the most unexpected thing." "She sees somebody actually disobey August's orders and do the right thing." "There used to be a scene later that we cut out, and I think it's good that we cut it out, but she used to have a scene where she told him even though she admired what he did, that it was a stupid thing," "that it was just gonna put him back out in the street." "LaGRAVENESE:" "That was the first day of shooting." "LAWRENCE:" "It was, the first real scene we shot." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Yeah, the first real scene we shot." "Roll over." "Turn around." "Turn around." "Good girl." "Sit." "LAWRENCE:" "This was one of the only train scenes we shot in Tennessee on the actual moving train, which was fun." "And Rob really did his own stunts here, being hung out to the side of the moving train." "It looks quite fast." "There, we sped the outside up, but here, just because of the angle, it looks like we're going 40, 50 miles an hour, but really it's going about 12 miles an hour." "My circus is a sovereign nation." "You break my law, you have to pay a penalty." "I tell you to fix a horse, you shoot it?" "That's breaking my law." "The penalty is red-lighting." "LAWRENCE:" "I think this was actually Christoph's last scene to shoot." " LaGRAVENESE:" "This was in Tennessee?" " This was all in Tennessee, yeah." "Yeah, that looks really fast." "No need!" "You took initiative." "I respect that." "But I'm a law-abiding man." "LaGRAVENESE:" "And Rob did it live, I have to commend it to him." "LAWRENCE:" "And poor Earl there." "Ken Foree, who plays Earl." "I swear, it was 118 degrees and 100% humidity and it was so unbelievably hot." "And when we wrapped him, this was also his last scene," " I hugged him and he was like a wet sponge." " (LaGRAVENESE LAUGHING)" "LAWRENCE:" "It was so uncomfortable, but so worth it." "You probably saved my Marlena from injury, and you solved a great problem for me." "You saw what we fed the cats." "It wasn't right, was it?" "But now because of you," "Silver Star will make sure the cats will eat good fresh meat until we can sell some tickets." "But you killed my star act, so if we don't sell the tickets and the men aren't paid, they're going to be looking for someone to blame." "Welcome to the circus, Cornell." "LaGRAVENESE:" "The impact of killing Silver Star had to be condensed into that speech." "It was a much bigger deal in the book." "It took pages." "And actually, you see the horse being cut up and turned into cat meat." "JACOB:" "Four men got tossed to save money." "And we might go belly up." "Dead circuses were common in '31." "Men tired of being mistreated would mutiny, or bosses would see the end coming and pull a runner..." "LAWRENCE:" "This was our other circus." "We pretty much, in California, set up our circus in two spots, and this was the first spot we shot on our schedule." "And this was Goshen, what we called our "ghost circus."" "Reese would joke that it was our haunted circus and she would pretend that it was from Scooby-Doo." ""Ghost circus." ""Nobody's been seen at this circus in 100 years."" "LaGRAVENESE:" "Old men." "LAWRENCE:" "But Jack built this great hut, this great, all torn-up tent, and built these facades of these warehouses, and we had our visual effects team build up the town all around it." "And, yeah, we shot the one sequence where Reese warned him from doing admirable things, and then got into this." "This was one of the first big sequences we shot, the introduction of Rosie." "Which was great because it brought her in very quickly, and everybody just loved Tai." "I know I could never truly replace Silver Star for you, but I hope you'll give me a chance to try." "Oh, August, you didn't need to do that." "Joe, the doors?" "Children, meet our salvation!" "LAWRENCE:" "That was amazing." "I remember doing this shot and sort of knowing that it was going to be a trailer shot." "There was something about the doors opening and her coming out into the light." "AUGUST:" "She's 53, and she's brilliant." "What's that in her mouth?" "She ran off." "They found her eating a cemetery plot." "I'm going to come up with a whole new star act around you and her." "LAWRENCE:" "This is also great, too, with Rodrigo, that he and I really worked together through all the scenes and sequences before shooting, and knew the look and feel we wanted." "And that idea of her coming out of the dark and into the light, we really set up with Jack the exact orientation of the warehouse so that at a certain time of day it would be perfectly side lit," "so that inside would be dark and she could step out into light." "And then we scheduled it with Lars, our AD, so we knew we had one hour where we could shoot stuff toward the warehouse over the course of a couple of days, so we could get the light just right." "And then here, you'd look out at the guys and they would be back lit at a certain time of day." "And it really worked out, and so we could move pretty quickly and we used really mostly natural light for a lot of these scenes and sequences, and it looks quite beautiful just because of planning and Rodrigo's intuition." "LaGRAVENESE:" "This was one of your earliest days." "And you shot this twice." "Not her entrance, but the actors' side of it." "LAWRENCE:" "Some of the introduction I shot twice, yeah." "I felt we got a little ahead, I think, on our third day or something, and we went back and shot a couple more pieces to it." "(JACOB LAUGHS)" "LAWRENCE:" "The first couple of days everybody's warming up, including me and some of the actors, and it was like," ""Okay, let's go back and try again with a slightly different direction."" " And it worked." " It was worth it." "LAWRENCE:" "We were also able to get into the groove of the '30s movements and the slight '30s dialects and things like that." "We shot some of this again as well." "But this was a great thing." "This was something we were all worried about in the beginning, with what could Tai, our elephant, do?" "How much of this could she do?" "She could do everything, and she was great." "The trainer would just give us cues, give her the cues." "The only trouble was really just finding the sync with the trainer in terms of what and when he should give her the cues to lift her trunk and do things." "LaGRAVENESE:" "We all fell in love with the elephant." "The trainer told us in the beginning," ""You're gonna think you have a relationship with her," ""but really to you she's just props." "She'll only listen to me."" "But I don't believe him." "I think she fell in love with Rob." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, I think so, too." "LaGRAVENESE:" "She'd go after him even when he didn't have treats in his pockets." "LAWRENCE:" "It's interesting, later we started..." "There's that close-up of Rob and you see the trunk, and what's weird about it is, we avoided close-ups when we were with Rob and Rosie because it starts to look like an effect, like a fake trunk." "Like we had Stan Winston's company come in and build a fake trunk." "It was all her." "We never had or used an animatronic elephant in any part of this movie," " or computer-generated animals either." " Never." "LAWRENCE:" "But it just felt like that in certain spots." " LaGRAVENESE:" "Because of the angle?" " Yeah." "So I always thought we'd try and stay wider for shots with the elephant." "I'm confessing that I love you." "Hmm?" "Uh, it's the name of the song." "LAWRENCE:" "Were those jokes in the book?" "LaGRAVENESE:" "No." " LAWRENCE:" "Those were yours, right?" " Yeah." "I like this little joke about the song here, and then the callback to it later in the dining car." "LAWRENCE:" "Again, this was a great Rodrigo reference for light." "The big profile shot and the really nice soft light spilling in." "This is great, too, with Jack and Rodrigo, the soft light." "But there's something about the color palette that I love in here, the color of the wood and her costumes, and that faded head piece that she has on." "She's a really beautiful elephant, too, all of her freckles and her coloring." "LAWRENCE:" "I just remember we'd be behind the monitor, and in between shots and talking about stuff, and you'd kind of forget, and then everybody would take their places, and this giant creature would just gracefully walk" "and we'd all turn our heads and it was like we were nine years old." "And she never tripped over a cable, she never bumped into a light." " She was the most graceful creature." " Yeah." "She really is beautiful." "LAWRENCE:" "I think that's the only change we made for rating in this movie." "We put the stars on the nipples in the pictures." " LaGRAVENESE:" "I didn't notice it." " Yeah." "It looks totally real, as if it could've been from the era." "There's lots of details, too, in this movie that we did that are hard to see." "When Rob first comes in, you'll see there's a bunch of equipment on that back wall, and I wanted it to feel as if there was really no space for him there." "And now that equipment's been cleared out and he's put a mat down and there's a little space for him to sleep." "(LIVELY JAZZ SONG PLAYING ON PHONOGRAPH)" "LAWRENCE:" "I don't know if you noticed, but there's a scratch on her back." "LaGRAVENESE:" "A scar on her back, yeah." "LAWRENCE:" "And that scratch on her back was..." "We didn't add." "That actually happened because we shot our stampede sequence at the end of the movie before we did these scenes." "And you'll see that there's a moment in the stampede where Christoph pulls her out from under Rosie, and she scraped her back on a pebble or something." "And then we got in here, and I thought it was actually kind of cool." "It made it feel like she really works." "LaGRAVENESE:" "She has been wounded in the job." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah." "And so we left the scratch there on her shoulder." "LaGRAVENESE:" "And again, when we were working on the script and Reese got involved, the difference is Marlena became a more aggressive character, a tougher, more Barbara Stanwyck kind of survivor, and we give her a completely different back story than the book." "Perfection." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, she was..." "I should probably mention, too," "Reese was the first one that we brought on the movie." "She was the first one, when Richard and I traveled around to the different studios, trying to sell them on this, she was the one that I pitched for Marlena and she was the first one to come on board." "And Richard and I met with her, and she really liked the script and the story." "But then she actually worked pretty closely with us for a while on her character, and had some really good ideas about her strength and being a survivor." "And I think we found this really interesting mix." "You look at her here and she's so glamorous, but to keep the scar and there's something kind of tough under there, and guarded and protected." "And I think she did a really, really good job with that." "There was also stuff here that was nice, too, that she added." "This idea that the two of them in the beginning, which is why they're in a two-shot," " is they really work as a team." " LaGRAVENESE:" "Exactly." "LAWRENCE:" "There's a dynamic at work." "LaGRAVENESE:" "She has a lot at stake in keeping this life going." "She's a co-conspirator in a way." "In the book, she's a bit more of a damsel in distress." "Yeah." "Those damn brothers had a stroke of genius." "They sold families the idea they wanted a show their mother and sisters could see." "No sex, no grift." "Safe for the kids." "And nobody can touch their bookings." "But we're on our way." "Yeah, this bull?" "This bull has got to be spectacular!" "I take care of the spectacle." "Now I need someone to take care of the bull." "LAWRENCE:" "This was an important scene and a very fun scene." "We worked on this a bunch as well." "And there used to be more." "I'm a little sad." "It's probably one of the only cuts I'm sad about." "There was more..." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Well, when we cast Christoph, we made up the back story because he had an accent." "We had to explain the back story of how his father abandoned him at a circus after they had left Austria when his mother died, and he had been with the circus since he was nine years old." " But that part had to get cut." " LAWRENCE:" "Yeah." "It was just a very, very long scene, but I miss that, because we created this idea that, in a way, the three characters here, pretty much everybody actually in the story, had been orphaned somehow." " They were all in search of a family." " LAWRENCE:" "Reese was abandoned when she was two days old." "LaGRAVENESE:" "That was different in the book." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, Rob was orphaned 'cause his parents were killed." "And Christoph was abandoned when he was 10 and just left at the circus." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Everyone was in search of family." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah." "So everybody kind of has the same goals of building a family and finding and building a life for themselves." "And really, their fate is determined by the morality they use in building that life." "She's 400 at the tops." "Do you think the Tattooed Woman was tattooed by headhunters in Borneo?" "MARLENA:" "She's from Pittsburgh!" "It took her nine years to ink herself." "LAWRENCE:" "I always liked keeping this stuff." "This stuff gets a good laugh." "We swapped out her water for formaldehyde, kept showing her." "For two weeks we traveled with a pickled hippo!" "LAWRENCE:" "I always loved those details in the stories." "And Sara did a good job with that kind of stuff in the research." " LaGRAVENESE:" "Research?" "Her details." " Yeah." "LaGRAVENESE:" "It was the world that really attracted me to the book." " It was the world she had created." " LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, she really did." "And so, trying to keep some of those details in." "There are certain things..." "For a while, we had the parade where they paraded out when Lucinda the Fat Lady died." " We used to have that." " LaGRAVENESE:" "Yeah, the funeral." "LAWRENCE:" "The funeral off the side of the train tracks." "And I loved all that stuff, and unfortunately, when you get into scheduling and budgeting and time, length..." "LaGRAVENESE:" "It would've been a three-hour movie." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, you have to whittle away things that just aren't absolutely necessary to the story." "(I NEED A LITTLE SUGAR IN MY BOWL PLAYING)" "LAWRENCE:" "One other aspect, too, of this movie that was a lot of fun was the music." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Yeah." " This Bessie Smith song is my favorite." " LAWRENCE:" "My favorite, too." "LaGRAVENESE:" "No one realizes how filthy it is unless you really listen to the lyrics." "LAWRENCE:" "And my assistant, Janette, and I did a bunch of research on music and found tons of stuff." "And, Richard, I know you wrote in a bunch of things." "And then we had this great music supervisor, Alexandra, that found some good stuff, including this Bessie Smith song, which I loved." "But it was really fun, the music from this era." "And then James Newton Howard, our composer, also wrote a bunch and recorded a bunch as well." "So the Louis Armstrong song that you heard earlier was actually James' version." "LaGRAVENESE:" "I'm Confessin' That I Love You?" "LAWRENCE:" "I'm Confessin' That I Love You." "Yeah, that's James' version." "And then he did..." "In a minute, when Reese and Rob dance for the first time, that's his recording of the Ruth Etting song Don't Tell Him What Happened." "He did all the circus music and a bunch of the jazz stuff and the speakeasy." "And it was really fun." "Probably the most music I've ever had in a movie in terms of score and source." "It just adds such great atmosphere, I think, and helps really set time and place." "It's such a different sound, the music from this period." "Move your finger" "Drop something in my bowl" "I need a little steam-heat on my floor" "Maybe I can fix things up, so they'll go" "Get off your knees" "I can't see what you're drivin' at!" "It's dark down there!" "LAWRENCE:" "I'm glad we added this as well." "I like this moment with him watching her." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Again, he's more complicit." "Clearly, he's a guy who's fallen for a married woman, as opposed to just a wide-eyed virgin who's infatuated." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, Christoph and I would always joke actually about this." "We all, I think, tried not to judge Christoph's character of August." "And Christoph and I would always joke that this handsome young kid comes in" " and steals his wife." " Yeah." " LAWRENCE:" "Brings down his circus." " Yeah!" "LAWRENCE:" "The only reason people cheer is because he was mean to the animals." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Exactly. (LAUGHING)" "LAWRENCE:" "I was really happy with this sequence." "It's probably one of my favorite sequences in the movie." "I think their chemistry's great and I think they look great, and I like the performances and I like that we just sit and hold." "And I also love this idea that Christoph is just there in the other room." "Just behind the curtain." "There's a feeling he could come out any moment." "It's a pretty song." "Don't tell him what happened." "No, no." "LAWRENCE:" "I really felt like, when we did this scene, it felt like making an old movie." "That's the name of the song." "Don't Tell Him What Happened to Me." " The song?" " (CHUCKLES) Yes." "LAWRENCE:" "It's nice here in James' recording, you can hear he brings the strings in here just for this moment." "LaGRAVENESE:" "I found an old movie that uses this song after we had put it in the script." "I didn't know." "The original The Champ with Wallace Beery." "LAWRENCE:" "Really?" "The Champ uses it?" "LaGRAVENESE:" "Jackie Cooper sings it on a rooftop as he's waiting for somebody inside a house." "I forget the reason, but he sings it." "But he sings it fast, up tempo." "LAWRENCE:" "What I didn't know..." "So I went to the recording session, what I didn't know is it's really tricky because it changes tempo four times or something within the song." "It's not a consistent tempo, this song." "This was a fun night." "This was on our first location as well, and it was one of the first times we got a large portion of our circus family together." "And there was something just great about the camaraderie that was starting to build and seeing the cast of characters all together and the color of it." "I think Rob does a good drunk here." "It's nice." "This is my new friend and roommate, Jacob!" "(ALL CHEERING)" "I'd like you all to make him feel at home." "LaGRAVENESE:" "It was great to see Rob smile a lot in this movie." "Donna Scott." "I'd love to make you feel at home." "LaGRAVENESE:" "He was so happy not to put in yellow contacts in his eyes." "LAWRENCE:" "Yes!" "LaGRAVENESE:" "Or have all that makeup on." "And also, he told me how so much of Twilight is done in green screens, and he was so into how live and real this whole set was." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, this was actually the first time." "This was fun." "This was the first time we saw the whole circus family together, where we had a bunch of roustabouts, the cookhouse guys, the performers and sideshow and everybody." "It was really fun to see it all start to piece together." "We actually went through different versions of this, too, right?" "The prank." "I was happy with this." "LaGRAVENESE:" "And in the book he was humiliated by it." "But it just felt right that..." "LAWRENCE:" "He accepts it." "He accepts the hazing." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Yeah, you like him more, too, as a character because he goes with it." "What the hell did I do last night?" "You threw up on Barbara." "LAWRENCE:" "This is a nice little scene, too, with Walter." "But if you notice here there's a fly that actually lands on Rob's back, and that was one of the things of shooting in the train cars and not on stage, on an air-conditioned stage, but actually out in the place." "What I like, it gives that authenticity." "But I also think what happened was earlier that week, we had shot the scene where he's shoveling horse shit, and we had a fly wrangler actually come out and sort of dump..." "LaGRAVENESE:" "That's the first time I've ever seen a fly wrangler." " I couldn't believe there was a fly guy." " LAWRENCE: ...5,000 flies into the train car." "And we just cursed ourselves." "We had flies from then on, on set, everywhere." "The other thing, too, is Queenie." "Whenever we shoot with Queenie, whose real name is Uggie, who's actually a boy, he would always fall asleep." "He'd get tired of laying there and fall asleep and he would start to snore." "We'd always have to wake him up 'cause we wouldn't be able to use the sound." "Good morning." "I forgot how big you were." "LaGRAVENESE:" "I love how she sits there with those paws of hers." "LAWRENCE:" "Remember, this was actually scripted originally to take place in the ripped-up tent." "Then I remember, because we met her there, we discussed, and I'm glad we did it, this feeling of her doing this scene in the warehouse." "LaGRAVENESE:" "But you said logically she would've been stuck there all night, and they would've forgotten about her till the next morning, so it made total sense." "LAWRENCE:" "And then you feel bad, like she's this dog that was left in the doghouse, and there she is, still sitting there." "About last night, I..." "It was just the champagne." "What was?" "You're new at this, aren't you?" "When a woman gives it to you straight, don't give her a line like you don't remember." "LAWRENCE:" "Remember, we had to do a bunch of looping for this scene because there was some small airport out near us, and during the day we were shooting this there was some air show, with all these biplanes and little airplanes buzzing around everywhere," "and the sound quality was horrible." "Where are you going?" "Good morning, children." "LAWRENCE:" "This sequence also had a whole second half, much more violent." "Christoph starts to beat Rosie." "He used to follow them out into the yard there." "And he keeps jabbing the elephant in a circle around Rob." "Word has it you didn't, though you gave it the old Cornell try." " Can we get on with this, please?" " Yes, of course." "Now, Cornell, when it comes to working with a bull, charm's the last thing required." "You know, any living creature needs to know who's in charge." "They can sense when a man's power is, shall we say, in full strength..." "LAWRENCE:" "I guess this is a good time to talk about, too, the beating sequences." "The beating sequences of Rosie were tricky because obviously we didn't want to harm Tai, the elephant, in any way, or upset her in any way." "So, we actually came up with a process where we wouldn't touch her at all." "And so what we did was Christoph would have a bull hook in his hand, except it was just a stick with a little green ball on the end of it." "LaGRAVENESE:" "A little green screen at the end of it." " LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, this little green ball." " Yeah." "LAWRENCE:" "And he would basically swing or jab as if he's hitting her, but he would always stop the stick a foot away." "And if he just did that, Tai would just stand there, but then what we would have is Tai's trainer Gary would give her cues to do things like raise her head, lower her head, open her mouth," "raise her trunk, step to the side, blink, do all these different things." "So, it looked as if she was reacting to being hit." "And then our effects guys would erase the green ball and add an extension of the hook to the front of the stick that Christoph was holding." "And Rob." "Right here, you can see it looks like he touches her with the point, but he didn't." "That's a visual effect." "And it really was convincing." "And even without the visual effect, it looked as if Christoph was jabbing her." "It was really hard to watch." "LaGRAVENESE:" "It's amazing how a little of this goes so far." "LAWRENCE:" "And you can also see the visual effects people, they would warp her skin in post using visual effects." "So this is really just Gary giving her commands, and it looks like she's really reacting." "And that stick is all computer-generated there that he's holding." "So any time you see that bull hook touch her, it's fake." "Up!" "Move!" "Up!" "Up!" "Move!" "LaGRAVENESE:" "Who was the couple that did all the CGI?" "LAWRENCE:" "Paul and Christina with Crazy Horse Effects did all of the CG, like that matte painting, which is really beautiful." "LaGRAVENESE:" "This is one of my favorite shots." "LAWRENCE:" "Robert Stromberg was the matte painter who did all that." "Was really nice." "Yeah, this was another great Rodrigo shot." "LaGRAVENESE:" "All done inside the train car." "LAWRENCE:" "All done inside the train car, moving around with hydraulics." "Not really moving, but lighting it so it looked as if this lantern was lighting everything." "The elephant emerging out of darkness." "And another sequence, I thought, that's very important for the love story, even though there's no dialogue, just the fact that she joins Jacob to take care of Rosie." "(DOOR OPENING)" "(BELLOWING)" "LaGRAVENESE:" "Love her." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah." "We did, I will say..." "We did exaggerate a little bit the sounds that Tai makes." "Tai's very, very, very quiet." "That kind of growling, rumbling sound that you hear a lot is a real elephant sound." "They're all real elephant sounds, but that's usually the sound that comes from their sinuses that they make when they speak." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Gary said the hardest thing to train her for was the picking up of the spike, and then putting it back." "LAWRENCE:" "This was a fun scene to shoot." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Again, in the book, this is a long sequence about her stealing lemonade, and Uncle Al, the head of the circus, blaming the roustabouts and docking their pay for it." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, and it's the cause of one of her horrible beatings." "I think the worst beating in the book is actually because of the lemonade stealing." "And here, we're actually using it for a couple of reasons." "One is to set up the fact that she can pull the stake out of the ground, and the other is to show that she's not as dumb as people think she is." "Ladies and gentlemen, and children of all ages, welcome to the most extravagant extravaganza the human eye can behold!" "Welcome the stars of the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular..." "LAWRENCE:" "So, this was the Spec." "We actually shot a Spec, which is kind of the circus parade where you bring out all the animals and acts and everything in the beginning." "We did one for the first circus performance, too, where Jacob sees the circus for the first time, but it just didn't fit and work." "But this was one of the things that Sebastien choreographed with our band and the clowns everywhere and the order of animals, and performers, and acts." "And you see our Spanish web girls on the ropes up above." "(BAND PLAYING MARCH)" "This was fun." "(CROWD CHEERING)" "I will say, too, looking at Reese up on Tai here, that Reese did the majority of her own stunts in this." "I think there's very few." "I think there's the back flip off the horse, and maybe grabbing onto the pole." "LaGRAVENESE:" "She did everything with the elephant in terms of..." " LAWRENCE:" "Pretty much." " When the elephant goes on its hind legs." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, she did all of that stuff on her own." "See, there you go." "That wound is fake as well." "But, yeah, where the elephant rears up, and all the elephant act stuff she did on her own." "I mean, she had a double for a couple of scary, really tricky things, back flips, and I think grabbing onto the bar, and that's about it." "Up!" "Move!" " LAWRENCE:" "But this is all Reese." " That's her." "LAWRENCE:" "She's great." "She really trained and got really comfortable with her." "In shooting, this was one of those moments for me, too, where we really created exactly what was depicted in the book." "And it felt strange to see something that you remember so vividly from the book, really there with the bar, the back flip, everything." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Reese was a gymnast, wasn't she, when she was young?" "LAWRENCE:" "She had done a bunch, yeah." "Along with the elephant training, she did a bunch of circus training, so she was practicing trapeze and tumbling and posing and all the different kinds of things that you need with the circus." "(PLAYING MARCH)" "ROUSTABOUT:" "In the big top!" "Come on!" "LAWRENCE:" "I don't even know if you can see them in the scene, but there was some zebras around in this setup, and this was where the zebras decided to go buck wild and we all had to scatter 'cause the zebras went crazy." "I don't think you can even see them." "Maybe we got rid of them." "CAMEL:" "Some of the boys saw her heading for town." "I'll help you, kid." "Come on." "LAWRENCE:" "So this is the Fox back lot for Weehawken." "JACOB:" "Excuse me, ma'am." "Excuse me, ma'am." "LAWRENCE:" "Sara Gruen actually has her cameo coming up at the end of this sequence." "When this was shot in the parade, the entire Fox executives, groups of people, were coming down because they'd never seen a movie shot on the lot before." "They were so used to movies being done with CGI or in studios, and everyone was on a list, saying, "Can I please come visit the set?"" "It was really like a great, old Hollywood filmmaking moment." "Yeah." "Yeah, really fun." "And then there's Sara here, right there on the right in the hat, the light dress." "So, she came down with her family this day." "She visited before when we were actually in the circus tents, and this was at the end of the schedule and we brought her down." "And another great matte painting by Paul and Christina." "Evening." "LAWRENCE:" "This was a sequence..." "No, sorry, I'm thinking of something else." "But this is the beginning of the big beating sequence, that was obviously really important for the film." "But I think August could use a drink." "Maybe you should take him out, Jacob." "Get him to relax a bit." "Did you catch that bull?" "Yeah, I..." "LAWRENCE:" "One of the last-minute adds to this, it was much quieter, was keeping the crowds in the background in the music." "And I really liked that." "The way it sounds." "That you still hear people having fun while all this happens, it adds a creepy feeling." "August!" "Don't!" " August!" "August!" " Stop!" "August!" "She was good!" "She was good." "She came back on her own." "She just needs more time." "She wasn't ready yet." "Hey!" "(BELLOWING)" "(GRUNTING)" "LAWRENCE:" "So again, this was one of those moments where we had Tai with her leg chained up to the inside of the car." "And Christoph came in, and they had practiced where he could come in and kind of swing his arms and scream, and she doesn't care at all about that stuff." "She was just listening to Gary." "Gary would tell her to step to the side, so it would look as if she was getting backed into the corner." "And then we decided to play most of the sequence outside of the train car with sound and the rocking train car." "LaGRAVENESE:" "The suggestion of it was powerful enough." "LAWRENCE:" "And then just a little splattering of blood on his shirt." "And there was a shot coming up here where Rob goes running in to see Rosie and we had Rosie laying on her side and we put blood on her chest, and it didn't quite look hard enough for me," "so I remember sitting there in between takes, thinking about it and watching the monitor." "There was a moment where we saw Rosie was getting up." "That Gary, the trainer, was having Tai get up." "So we got her to writhe around, and he got that by basically saying, telling her, "It's okay to get up."" "Then, "Oh, wait, wait." "Don't get up." "Don't get up." "Okay, you can get up." ""No, wait, wait." "Don't get up." "Don't get up."" "And she would roll around, and it looked really bad." "Everybody was shocked 'cause it looks like she's writhing in pain." "And it was that kind of stuff is the way that we really worked with most of the animals, was finding how we could fake behavior." "And I think it worked out really well." "And I don't think we ever really got hung up on anything either, which was nice." "CECIL:" "He shouldn't have the right if you ask me." "LAWRENCE:" "Now this sequence was one that we really added." "This was the one that we really..." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Beginning with his father, in the beginning, which represented you can be a good man in this time and be destroyed." "Do you have to change into an August man to survive in this world now?" "And it's this inner conflict in Jacob, between, is he gonna flip into one kind of person, or is he gonna stay true to his own values?" "He sees a violence in himself here that is akin to August 'cause he really wants to beat him." "LAWRENCE:" "Right, but I remember in the book the other thing is, it was after one of these big, horrible beatings," "August came to him to apologize." "And I always felt that it was a little manipulative, that I would never believe August." "And in the book he doesn't believe August, but I actually thought it was going to be really interesting to discover August wrecked and hunched over, over what happened." "And then you know there's a truth to the way he feels." "And so I know that's why we actually had Jacob come and discover August hunched over and distraught because Marlena's gone and because he's actually hurt this creature." "We didn't want to make him purely evil." "And then his speech here about the men, and bills to pay, and the pressure that he has," "I think it makes him more tragic, which I like." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Definitely more human." "It's really about that more than anything else, how much he loves her, or thinks he does." "I've spent all that money on that bull." "I need to pay the workmen." "I have debts to pay." "I need to sell tickets." "And that bull is useless." "If I lose Marlena, you understand, I'll lose all of this." "What were you planning on doing with that bull hook?" "Jacob?" " LaGRAVENESE:" "I love that moment." " That's the great Christoph stuff." "LaGRAVENESE:" "He held back that, "Jacob?"" "LAWRENCE:" "Very precise." "Are you sure that's not too much?" "She might get drunk." "She weighs four tons." "She just gets sleepy." "She can barely move as it is." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Originally, there's a back story that the original owner of Rosie was a Polish immigrant, which is why she understood Polish and nothing else." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, and this was tricky." "This was also a change from the book, too, that we incorporated Camel into the Polish scenes." "Yeah, there was a different guy." "It was a guy named Greg, right?" "LaGRAVENESE:" "Greg." "He was the bull man." "And we combined those two characters." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, and then we just thought, "If we're gonna have Camel," ""let's make Camel more vital to the movie, and bring him in, include him."" " It's under your foot." " Oh..." "Lift your leg." "Lift your leg." "(REPEATS IN POLISH)" "(SPEAKING POLISH)" "I want you to read these out loud to Rosie." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Yeah, this stuff is fun." "LAWRENCE:" "I remember, I've lived with this screenplay for so long, but we did a lot of reorganizing of scenes." "That's what we spent a lot of time doing." "LaGRAVENESE:" "For the first 12 drafts or so, yeah." "We were just putting things in different order" " to find the story structure." " Yeah, like the speakeasy comes much earlier in the book." "LaGRAVENESE:" "And it was in the earlier drafts, too." "LAWRENCE:" "It comes off of an apology rather than a celebration, I think." "So we were trying to track when the speakeasy makes sense for us, for our version of the story." "And we don't have as many of the beatings as the book has." "Again, just because we have to streamline the experience down to the two hours." "Now the next one." "(SPEAKING POLISH)" "(AUGUST REPEATING)" " (JACOB SPEAKING POLISH) - (REPEATING)" "LaGRAVENESE:" "I used to have a bookmark on my computer for a Polish translation site." "I'd come up with a line and just put it in the computer, and then it'd translate it for me." "LAWRENCE:" "This was really fun." "This was one of the first times we really got out of the circus, too, when we were shooting, to get out of the dust and the dirt." "I think Reese called it "the dirt patch."" "And we got out of there and had to stop wearing our bandanas around our faces." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Where'd you shoot this?" "This is in LA?" "LAWRENCE:" "This is in LA." "We shot this in downtown Los Angeles at The Alexandria Hotel." "And what's cool about this room is, this room here is the mezzanine level of the hotel." "The ceiling used to be the ceiling for the lobby, but they filled in the mezzanine level, so now you have this strange room with these huge, deep, ornate, molded ceilings that are only about eight feet off the ground." "And it makes a really interesting space, so we decided to turn that into our speakeasy." "We just cheated as if it's underground somewhere by having them escape upstairs to the alley in the back." "And we just figured that this was in New York somewhere." "I think it's in Chicago in the novel." "We turned it into New York City." "LaGRAVENESE: 'Cause I kept everything in New York." "LAWRENCE:" "And again, so that we could have..." "There's an image later in the alley when she runs away that's reminiscent, once again, of Once Upon a Time in America, with that great, classic shot of the Manhattan Bridge in the distance." "Why do you stay with him?" "I was born a passenger." "They found me wrapped in a newspaper under a seat on the Baltimore and Ohio." "LaGRAVENESE:" "This whole back story is invented." "You get a sense that she was abused in most of these foster homes, and became a real survivor, so that no matter what she may or may not start to feel for Rob, if it's love, she's not gonna sacrifice this life she's built" "to survive for love, at least at this point in the movie." "...and that I was just dreaming that I was a girl." "And that one day I'd wake up, and I'd run home." "LAWRENCE:" "For a long time, this speech that she gave, which we called "Marlena's aria,"" "was in the first dance with Jacob, where they were dancing and she started to tell him the story." "I remember we decided, A, that the dance was becoming too long." "We had been in those scenes for a long time, but also, it was too early for her to tell him the truth about who she is and what makes her who she is." "And this was a perfect spot for it, I think, because now she still hasn't forgiven August for what he's done to Rosie, and she's been slowly growing closer to Jacob." "LaGRAVENESE:" "And she knows that even though this is probably gonna be a big act, it's not gonna change anything." "But she's gonna survive it." "And you know, I'm a star attraction." "Out there..." "LAWRENCE:" "Another great performance from Reese this day." "She did a great job." "LaGRAVENESE:" "That idea of people who are in abusive relationships would rather stay in them than risk really feeling something again, something like love." "LAWRENCE:" "And I love the way these guys look in this, too." "It's just really nice." "The great hair, and that unbelievable dress." "LaGRAVENESE:" "When you were doing costume tests, you actually put a table together when she was wearing that dress and had him sit with her." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, we did, with the candlelight." "LaGRAVENESE:" "It looks just like that." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, it does." "(HOT JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING)" "Tracy Phillips helped us with our dancing a lot, gathering great people, all of them knew how to do the foxtrot." "(MUSIC FADES)" "LaGRAVENESE:" "There was a shot here at some point of August seeing them on the dance floor, and Francis had a great idea about not using it, making the audience question whether or not he did." "And then later on in this scene, you understand that he did see this." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, we went back and forth a lot in the edit on that." "And it's probably the one shot that made a big difference in the back third of the movie." "And I'm really glad that we took it out." "I think it's much more interesting to stick with Jacob's point of view and be unsure of whether or not they were discovered." "Raid!" "Marlena!" "Marlena!" "MARLENA:" "Jacob!" "LaGRAVENESE:" "Remember, there was a question about a younger generation not knowing what a raid was" " and what Prohibition was." " LAWRENCE:" "We saw that in tests, them not understanding what Prohibition is, and so there was really no way that I was really interested in doing, honestly, of somehow having somebody explain Prohibition in this movie." "It's a shame." "But I think there's a majority of people under 16 years old that don't know what Prohibition is and don't understand why the speakeasy's being raided." "I don't know how we're going to find our way back, especially if we don't find August." "We should probably go look for him, right?" "LaGRAVENESE:" "I love the way Reese plays this scene." "She does that thing girls do when they wanna get kissed." "That look in her eye, I don't know." "(LAUGHING) It just was so truthful." "LAWRENCE:" "This night was probably also one of the only nights that I was really bothered by the paparazzi." "I remember they were always around, taking shots and circling." "Every day before we'd finish shooting, a bunch of shots of the characters were around on the web." "Somebody actually had rented a room in the hotel right there and was shooting video, and actually had video of the tops of their heads during this kiss." "And that really bothered me." "And I'm glad most of the fans decided not to host it and put it up 'cause that kind of stuff is ruining the surprise of movies." "JACOB:" "I told myself, let her go." "She'll tell August that I got lost in the crowd." "It's the best thing for her." "It's the best thing for everybody." "LAWRENCE:" "I like this piece, too." "LaGRAVENESE:" "I think we moved this around a little bit." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, this is one of the last voiceovers I did that was in another scene at some point, and we brought it back for this one." "(SIGHS)" "(SPEAKING POLISH)" "LAWRENCE:" "Now, this sequence coming up, the "Camel getting sick" sequence, was something that was out for a while in the edit." "But once we had made some changes and done some additional photography, and tweaked the ending a little bit and the turn from the second act to the third act," "I decided to bring it back in, and I'm really glad I did just because it really closes him out, and I think it's also a real iconic moment in the book, in the story." "But also, it keeps Jacob really active and keeps his morality active, and that he's gonna risk something to try and help an ill friend." "LaGRAVENESE:" "It gives us a break from the love story." "Other things are happening." "LAWRENCE:" "And luckily, the sequence only added a couple of minutes of screen time." "But it became important because Wade and Grady over there on the left become much more important in the story, and it's important to also see Camel and Kinko here again, as we near the end." "No such thing, is there, Doc?" "Manufacturer started putting this plasticizer in this to get around regulations that" "Jamaican ginger extract not be sold as booze." "LaGRAVENESE:" "We had a running gag throughout filming that we never decided who was Wade and who was Grady." "And then Wade was either Wayne or Wade." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, Wayne or Wade." "Nobody really knew if he was Wayne or Wade." "But these guys are great, I love their faces." "Stephen and Richard, great actors and really fun." "They're the voice of the revolution of August's circus workers." "Yeah, I just thought it was important, for many reasons, to bring this stuff back, to see everybody again and to feel everybody again, and to reinforce the idea that people still aren't being paid" "even though the circus is probably gonna start doing better." "LaGRAVENESE:" "It pays off emotionally with what happens to these characters later in a strong way." "All right." "Jacob, in a week, he's not gonna be able to move his legs at all." "Listen." "He told me he has a son in Reading." "LAWRENCE:" "And there's a montage coming up, and we used to actually have a scene where Jacob went into town and tracked down Camel's son." "And we had a bunch of voiceover where we heard this, but we got rid of the voiceover and we got rid of that." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Which was fine, 'cause you didn't need to see it." "I'm glad this is back." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, the walk through the tent." "This was one of my favorite sets." "Jim Erickson, who is the set decorator that Jack Fisk uses, was great and just built this amazing cookhouse tent with these great stoves, and we had our cookhouse team and they were really cooking breakfast and it smelled great." "I just remember, there were real breakfast foods cooking over there, in grease." "I like this scene." "I like this dress on her, too." "Somehow, it really brought out the color of her eyes." "Why?" "ls something the matter?" "I just wanted to apologize about what happened last night." "That's silly, Jacob." "Why would you apologize?" "You weren't even there." "I explained to August what happened as best I could remember it." "Champagne just overwhelms my senses." "LAWRENCE:" "This is one of those scenes that becomes really interesting when you're unsure whether or not August has seen them dancing." "When he approaches and he's got this big smile on his face, you look at him and wonder, "Has he seen?" "Has he not seen?" ""He couldn't have seen if he's this happy."" "LaGRAVENESE:" "Then you realize why she did the right thing." "It made so much sense to me that because of her feelings for Jacob, she ran home and had sex with her husband." " LAWRENCE:" "Yes, exactly." " Just to keep things safe." "She knew even his suspicions would be too dangerous." "LAWRENCE:" "Yes." "But for August to flaunt it" " in front of Jacob..." " LaGRAVENESE:" "Yeah." " Thank you, my darling!" " August, please, we're in public." "What?" "Nothing to be ashamed of." "LaGRAVENESE:" "The audience gasped a little bit when this happened." "LAWRENCE:" "Yes, they did." "LaGRAVENESE:" "But it really defines Marlena's pragmatism." "She's not gonna risk everything for love yet." "(AUGUST COMMANDING IN POLISH)" "LAWRENCE:" "This was a real fun scene to do 'cause in rehearsal, it was written much different than we shot it." "LaGRAVENESE:" "It was two and a half pages long." "I'm proud of this one 'cause we got it down to five lines." "LAWRENCE:" "We got it down to five lines, but it was much more overt before." "It was much more overtly threatening." "And I think this was a much more interesting way." "This was a Blackie scene, too." "We cut Blackie from it in rehearsal and I felt bad, but it had nothing to do with Blackie himself." "It was just about turning it into a much more subtle threat." "So again, if you thought maybe August had not seen them in that speakeasy from the previous scene, you start to question again here." "That maybe he knows more, maybe Marlena said something." "Maybe..." "You're not sure." "LaGRAVENESE:" "I learned a lot from this." "You were so great about having me come to the set when I could." "Again, learning cinema, 'cause I over-write everything, and I'm learning how much images can tell you in a story." "JACOB:" "If August knew anything about that night, you'd never know it." "All he seemed to care about was Rosie, and God love her, she played her part to a T." "We all did." "Everything went back to how it was before." "LAWRENCE:" "This was our "life is good" montage, and this was really fun." "There are a few different things." "One is, Rodrigo used a different film stock for this 'cause things were getting very vivid stock, so it's a little more contrasty and colorful." "And we also intercut Reese's performance with the elephant here." "There's one of my kids passing by." "My two boys are in that shot." "Again, on the back lot." "But the spine of this is the performance of Rosie as the crowd builds to sell-out shows, with moments of everybody interacting, and her being treated well, and everything is going okay now." "And beautiful music by James Newton Howard." "He just did a fantastic job." "Again, one of the people on this movie that really wanted to be a part of the movie, it was so nice, from Rodrigo to Jack to Jacqueline to James, everybody really wanted to be a part and really made an effort" "and really loved the project." "It was really nice to be around that energy." "(INDISTINCT)" "And again, all Reese here, doing this." "It was really fun." "I was really proud of her for doing all that." "It's one of my favorite sequences in the movie." "And this also had voiceover through the whole thing." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Yeah, we really pulled back." "I'm so glad we did." "LAWRENCE:" "One of my favorite shots in the movie." "(CROWD CHEERING)" "LAWRENCE:" "There's a couple of little sequences here." "There was some stuff that she did on the ground with Rosie that we cut out, and then there was one bit where she was waltzing, where Reese would lay on the top of her head and Rosie would spin around." "LaGRAVENESE:" "I asked Gary what it means when her trunk is like that." "He says, "It's just as if you're standing there," ""folding your arms, waiting for something to happen."" "LAWRENCE:" "That shot of Reese looking out at Rob brushing Rosie is important, and it was something that we added, and it's one of our breaks from point-of-view." "But it was important to see that even though she had, in a way, rejected Jacob, she definitely had not stopped thinking about him." "JACOB:" "With straw house sell-outs," "August promised the men he'd finally pay them with increases, once his debts were covered." "Success had made a new man out of August, they all said." "But I watched him, and I knew it was just a matter of time." "LAWRENCE:" "Another great moment by Christoph right there." "(BLOWING WHISTLE)" "Shh!" "Children." "The circus is nothing without..." "LAWRENCE:" "Another one of our giant circus family sequences." "I really like this scene." "When a new member is born, its arrival has to be greeted with celebration and with gratitude." "LaGRAVENESE:" "This was in different places, wasn't it?" "LAWRENCE:" "It was." "This used to be toward the end of our "life is good" montage, and then we used to go back to the finale." "So, he used to see the kiss on the cheek with Rob and Reese here, and the whispering, and then you'd go to the finale, and that's when you'd see his face go dark." " But I switched it around." " LaGRAVENESE:" "Right." " I think it's more interesting." " LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, so do I." "...whoever's up there that sends desperate men running for the rails." "(ALL LAUGHING)" "Because it was a lucky day when Jacob Jankowski jumped our train." "It is because of his discovery that we have the greatest star attraction in the Benzini Brothers' history!" "LAWRENCE:" "One of the things that I loved, too, when you look at this scene about just building this world, were these old tents." "And the tents from the '30s were these great canvas tents that were oiled and waxed, and during the day, they just had this unbelievable, beautiful light and glow." "It's one of the fun things, and the mix of that with all these great costumes and this great makeup just helped make such a great world." "But none of that existed." "Jack had to build it all." "(MUSIC PLAYING)" "LaGRAVENESE:" "He was a really good sport, Rob." "Great kid." "He never complained about a thing." " He did anything." " Yeah." "And we did this a lot." "I wanna say..." "We probably did this 30 times or more, you know." "LaGRAVENESE:" "He was always in such a great mood." "LAWRENCE:" "Another one of my favorite shots here, this shot of Christoph watching and going dark with these laughing girls passing in front of the frame." "LaGRAVENESE:" "And it's this look, of him looking at Marlena, that really nails it for him." "This scene." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, this was a big, complex scene that we worked on a lot in the script." "One of the last scenes that we got right before we started prep, or pre-prep." "LaGRAVENESE:" "We used to call it our There Will Be Blood scene." "LAWRENCE:" "Yes." "But it was tricky." "It was about seven pages, I think, in its original length." "It was a really long scene and it was night shoots and we were in the middle of summer, too, so the nights were short." "We had about eight hours of night, so there wasn't much time to get in before the sun was coming up." " LaGRAVENESE:" "A lot has to happen." " And it would also get really foggy, yeah." "And a lot had to happen." "There was a lot of blocking and it was complex and emotional, the three characters and an elephant." "We ended up shooting this over three nights just because of the amount of stuff there, especially leading into the fight at the end of the sequence." "It's really the turning point for the whole movie." "It's your thing." "No, please join us." "Come." " Marlena." " (STAMMERS) Of course." "LAWRENCE:" "Christoph, I think, does just an amazing job in this scene." "And Reese, too, being strong with him." "What I really enjoy, too, is this idea that we set up earlier, when Christoph grabs her chin, that she can manage him by soothing him and by talking to him a certain way, and by touching his face." "She tries to do it here, but things have changed enough where it's not gonna work." "Many thanks to both of you." "And forgive me for arriving too soon and spoiling the surprise." "LAWRENCE:" "It's also now, in this scene, is where you realize that he probably did see them dance." "And I remember in the book, August did this scene with a cane, or with the bull hook or with the cane." "And so he was always swinging it around and knocking things over." "Again, this is one of the scenes where the threat was a little more overt, originally." "We pulled it back and made him a little more sadistic." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Which is much more interesting." "And for Christoph to play it, it was much better." "...who teases his affections." "Hmm?" "We start with a romantic melody that sweeps them onto the dance floor." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, this was one of those things where we had this story that we worked on here, and the idea of sweeping him onto the dance floor and a dance and a new act and a young, awkward man," "that we had the basis for this story, but I think we rewrote it as we were shooting and I probably did 25 takes with Christoph doing different versions of it." "We would try different lines and different descriptions..." "LaGRAVENESE:" "More detail." "...more detail or less detail and really manipulating them." "And we got this great moment here, which was great." "That kind of stuff, I just loved." "We got to really play around with it." "And gently runs her hand down his neck, playing with his hair." "Never leaving his eyes." "Never leaving his eyes." "LAWRENCE:" "There's some great sound design in this scene as well, and it's very subtle." "But you'll notice when the scene starts out, there's music playing on a record player and you hear the guys taking down the circus and the tents and the work." "And slowly through the front of this scene, all that sound disappears." "So by the moment where he yells, "Look at him,"" "all the ambient sound has dropped out, and it's really only the three of them, their voices and James Newton Howard's score." "(CHUCKLES) That's it!" "The audience will eat it up." "They love the illusion." "They'll never guess you have no honor to protect." "August." "Please." "It's funny how things pan out." "I've always known the kind of woman you really are." "LAWRENCE:" "There's a thing that we took out of the scene, actually, that if you look closely, you can see it feels like a teeny, little bit of a mistake." "But you notice she has a necklace." "In the beginning of the scene," "August actually points it out as a gift that he's gotten her." "And there's a part of the sequence right around here where he used to rip it off of her neck, but we cut that out." "Marlena, we should go." "Is that the plan?" "LAWRENCE:" "See, she's holding her neck and her necklace is actually gone there." " He got rid of it." " LaGRAVENESE:" "Right." "LAWRENCE:" "But I don't think anybody notices." "Tell me to fire him." "Fire him." "Tell me to unleash Blackie and his men to teach him a lesson not to touch my things." "Marlena." "Marlena, it's all right." "Jacob, just go." "Ooh." "Dissention in the ranks!" "Betrayal trumps lust!" "That's what sells tickets, kids!" "LAWRENCE:" "So fun." "I'm not going anywhere." "I'm right here." "LAWRENCE:" "He used to also throw a cigarette into Rosie's mouth, which we got rid of because it started to feel just a little forced." "I'm not one of your things." "Prove it." "Look at me!" "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, and this is where you think that it might work for a minute." " She might be able to sooth him." " LaGRAVENESE:" "Mmm-hmm." "MARLENA:" "I'll never leave you." "Of course, an innocent woman wouldn't have to get on her knees." "But you can't help it, can you?" "Just force of habit for a woman like you." "(MARLENA GROANS)" "(BOTH GRUNTING)" "LAWRENCE:" "I remember working with Reese early on about this scene, and she said, "If I'm gonna get hit, I'd better get hit really hard."" "And I think it was really effective." "LaGRAVENESE:" "The sound on that is really effective." "LAWRENCE:" "Especially 'cause she gets smashed into the Victrola." "And I like this, too, this idea about to really smash somebody in the head with a champagne bottle." "But Blackie, who's probably the worst guy in the bunch, actually stops him just 'cause there's witnesses." "Boss!" "The rubes." "LAWRENCE:" "I think Jacob now understands that nothing's the same." "Walk away now, or this will get a lot worse a lot faster!" "I got him!" "Okay?" "I got him." "(JACOB COUGHING)" "The only thing keeping you alive right now are those rubes." "August hates witnesses." "CAMEL:" "Oh, jeez, kid, what did you do?" "I'm not leaving her with him." "LAWRENCE:" "So, this next chunk actually is where we made the most changes in the movie." "We basically had this sequence, and we had them jumping off the train, and we had a hotel room scene, but we discovered that, A, we didn't really have a love scene, and that we wanted the relationship to develop a little further" "and to have a real love scene." "What we also discovered was that the scene that we had in the hotel room, we actually should put into them jumping off of the train." "And so that's what we did." "We actually reshot this sequence of scenes over the course of a day and a half, and brought Wade and Grady back in here because again, they're very pivotal at the end and they're gonna have been thrown off the train," "a goodbye with Camel and Kinko, and new dialogue here at the train car door, where he tries to convince her to go with him, and then our love scene in the hotel room." "And it marries right back up to the old footage, when Blackie and his men burst into the hotel room." "What?" "You think there's nothing out there for you, but there is." "You just can't see it." "Jacob, you don't understand." "I can't." "He'll find me." "Marlena, there's a better kind of life that's meant for you." "Whether that life is with me or not, or whether you love me or not, it doesn't matter." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Those lines used to be in the original hotel scene that was shot before." "LAWRENCE:" "That was always my favorite lines from this, that selfless statement of, "I'm gonna help you."" "LaGRAVENESE:" "Again, for a woman who's been abused most of her life, that is something she's never seen before." ""I just wanna do this for you," ""whether you wanna give me back anything or not."" " LaGRAVENESE:" "I love this shot, too." " Me, too." "Reminds me of an Edward Hopper painting, something that's very spare." "Running off into the darkness." "That's also on the Fox lot." "We created our own little hotel." "And I liked this idea of this scene, that it wouldn't be perfect when they got there." "They hadn't run away and they're just perfectly happy to be together." ""We've gotten what we've always wanted."" "It's scary and tired and sad." "LaGRAVENESE:" "We had to maintain the danger." "LAWRENCE:" "And that the love scene's born out of comfort, trying to comfort her, telling her it's gonna be okay." "And here I also think that James' score is really beautiful." "Very spare." "LaGRAVENESE:" "On a lighter note, this was a funny sequence to do" " because Rob was really sick." " LAWRENCE:" "He had such a bad cold." "He had a really horrible cold, so..." "And it was very hot, for whatever reason, it was really hot even though it was in January, I think." "And so the stage was hot, and there was all these smelly grips hanging out and around, the dolly and everything." "And so everybody was really sweaty." "And there's him sniffling and snorting with snot dripping out of his nose." "And poor Reese making out with this guy who's obviously gonna give her some virus." "So, it was a good laugh." "And by the way, not to mention, there was me directing them like over all this." "Like, "Okay, now grab her leg." "Grab her leg." " "Okay, strap, strap, strap."" " LaGRAVENESE: "Pull her dress down."" "LAWRENCE: "All right, go for his belt, Reese." "Go for his belt."" "So on the day, it doesn't feel very romantic." "When you turn all the sound off," "I really like how quiet and simple it is." "It's really, again, about comfort." "And I love this last moment." "This last look." "LaGRAVENESE:" "This next scene we wrote on set, the four of us, each one contributing an idea, and had it down in about five minutes before you shot it." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah." "And actually, we had planned on reshooting the sequence where Blackie and his men come rushing into the room, but somehow with the way we rewrote the scene that morning and figured this all out, they ended up in the exact same spots on the bed." "LaGRAVENESE:" "What you had shot previously." "LAWRENCE:" "And we could cut seamlessly back into the old footage, and it saved us quite a bit of time." " LaGRAVENESE:" "Yes." " Which was nice." "And then we go to Ringling." "Ringling's a tough act to break into." " You can't just walk through the door." " No, no, no." "Not if we offer ourselves as a team." "LAWRENCE:" "Again, I was really happy with this idea that just 'cause they had run off and felt like they'd gotten away, it wasn't perfect." "Their future was still very uncertain." "And this actually we had much more of a beating, but we decided to cut it to black." "But he used to get flipped over the back of the bed and get stomped on for a while before blacking out." "I also really like the way this feels, that you see that it's now dawn outside and the cool morning light coming in." "And she's obviously gone." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Here we go on our march back." "I was out to dinner with someone last night who saw the movie at the premiere, and it's this thing Rob has with the camera or the camera has with Rob." "He's one of those actors, like the old-time stars in the '30s, there's a relationship there." "The camera just loves him." "And the guy said, "He looked even better when he was beaten up."" "He says, "How does that work?"" "He says, "If I were beaten up like that, I'd have like a swollen lip" ""and to hold my eye."" "He says, "It looks even better."" "LAWRENCE:" "This stuff was all Tennessee." "ROUSTABOUT 1:" "Easy, up." "ROUSTABOUT 2:" "Come on." "Mind yourself." "Get that branch." "Get back on." "Come on." "We're losing time." "Come on." "LAWRENCE:" "Like this, too, the real steam trains." "You can see, get a glimpse here, when they kick the train into gear, you can see the furnace actually igniting the coal, right there." "That glow, that warm glow, which is fun." "And the steam coming from the train, which I really like." " Rob did a good job in this." " LaGRAVENESE:" "Yes." "LAWRENCE:" "Nice performance." "And again, this was a really great choice from James for the score." "I really like this idea, this strange South American string instrument he decided to use that sort of pulses through." "We wanted a different sort of tempo and feeling for the back third of this movie." "A bit more like a thriller once she's been taken." "And so we created this pulse with this music, and a different energy to bring us through to the stampede, feeling as if everything is building." "(GRUNTS)" "And one of the things we shot, too, is we discovered in the first cut of the movie that when he came into this room and it was empty, that you didn't feel the emotion of the loss of Camel and Kinko." "So you'll see a little bit later that we actually flash to an image of them being found on the side of a trestle." "And I think it was really important to see them and feel what August had done to them, because it wasn't feeling the way that I imagined it would when we discovered that empty room with Queenie." "So, I was happy about that." "I also like this sequence, too, with such minimal dialogue through this whole thing." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Then again, this was pretty much the same, this scene, as it was always done." "This is his turning point." "What kind of man is he going to become?" "Is he going to become like August, or is he going to stay with his own values?" "And clearly she doesn't want him to cross that line." "LAWRENCE:" "Right." "And a lot of movies, characters are supposed to really change throughout, and I think one of the goals for me, in this one, was that he not change, that he stay the way he is." "And it's like, the risk of change for him is what's at stake." "LaGRAVENESE:" "He's being tested." "It's like he goes into the underworld." "I always thought this was the moment where she knows she loves him and there's no turning back." "CECIL:" "Ladies and gentlemen!" "Step this way!" "Just follow the sound of my voice!" "Don't be shy!" "Plenty of time before the big show starts in the big top!" "Jacob." "It's okay." "I don't have much time." "LAWRENCE:" "This was another one that we re-shot, and it was really just in terms of clarifying the plan, and here's our flash of Walter and Camel on the rocks, which I think is important." "Important in many ways." "Important to really viscerally feel the loss of them, but also, again, to see Wade and Grady, who are the big players in the stampede at the end." "Wade and Grady are gonna take August down." "I don't know how, but you have to get out of here." "I'll stay hidden until the matinee starts." "LAWRENCE:" "We also made a subtle shift, after the back third of the movie, that Jacob just becomes much more active." "He really takes control and becomes the man in the relationship." "In the old version of this scene, the plan was much more hers, and she was coming up with the ideas of getting out of here." "Instead, we turned the tables and made her nervous again, and gave him the plan of getting to the church and meeting at the church and when she could leave." "LaGRAVENESE:" "For people who hadn't read the book, we wanted to give them the sense of," ""Is she going to make it?" "Is she going to survive this?"" "I love you." "Ladies and gentlemen, and children of all ages, welcome the stars of the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth!" "(BAND PLAYING MARCH)" "LAWRENCE:" "So, originally, we never planned on showing the Spec entering again." "We just wanted another last glimpse of August as the ringmaster before the stampede, and then decided to use the Spec." "But we hadn't shot a Spec for the end, so this is actually..." "We're reusing the footage from the Spec when Rosie rears up, but I think it worked out really well." "LaGRAVENESE:" "I remember, for this coming sequence, writing the beats of the stampede in every draft, but then when we were on set, I remember walking into the tent and you were sitting there alone in this giant tent" "with your head in your hands, thinking about each beat of what the stampede had to be." "And we had to work it out." "LAWRENCE:" "Yeah, it was fun." "We had fun with this." "Richard and I worked out all the different beats 'cause I was really thinking, "What would make a stampede?" ""What's going to happen?"" "Directing the animals and the people and all of that." "Then getting to the set and seeing the practicalities." "We created pre-viz, and then there were some things we couldn't do because of animal safety, and figuring it out." "And then we actually wanted to create an obstacle, so we added Blackie to the scene and sequence, and created a little bit of a fight there." "And we really walked through it." "But it was fun 'cause we'd get together with video cameras, the crew, and we would film each other playing the different parts, and we blocked it out with our own little video cameras." "But I'm really pleased with the effect here, and then we have the stunt coordinator's little girl who did a nice little fall for us, and we had all the animals." "Most of these things, most of these animals we shot separately, but all of them are real animals, live animals, nothing computer-generated here." "So, that was the thing that created the stampede, the idea of the opposite end of the tent collapsing and forcing everybody and everything to come back his way, and this great fight with August." "We'd actually shot other stuff of August, too, seeing Jacob, and I liked staying with Jacob's point of view and having August come out of the crowd." "It was nice, coming up, that Jacob actually gets a couple of shots in." "He spends a lot of time in this movie getting his ass kicked." "And this is where she gets her back scratched, being dragged out." "LaGRAVENESE:" "This first time Christoph turned on her to go towards her, she got so scared by his look she started giggling 'cause he frightened her so much." " LAWRENCE:" "Reese, yeah, she did." " (LaGRAVENESE LAUGHS)" "LaGRAVENESE:" "She ran away." "LAWRENCE:" "Reese and I also spent a lot of time working on this choking, which she did a great job on because she looks really frightened." "And I think it's really important." "And you can see she makes noise at first, and when he really starts to choke her, she can't make noise anymore." "Right here, she's really good." "She's got the vein going in the forehead, some of our flies." "LaGRAVENESE:" "I think in the early drafts he was killing Jacob," " and then we changed it to Marlena." " LAWRENCE:" "Yeah." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Works much better." "LAWRENCE:" "I was excited when we saw this was really going to work." " I love this part." " LaGRAVENESE:" "I love her eyes." "Rosie!" "(GASPING)" "LAWRENCE:" "So Rosie..." "Tai actually just swung it through frame." "We had a marker where she needed to swing the stake, and we did Christoph later getting hit in the head with a kind of padded mallet." "The stunt guy would knock him so his hair would move and his body would jolt." "I think that worked out really well." "And everybody had run out of the tent, no witnesses to see what had happened." "And that was also a change from the book." "In the book, we don't have all the fighting." "It's basically the stampede creates an opportunity for Rosie to kill August." "LaGRAVENESE:" "It isn't motivated by anything." "LAWRENCE:" "And in the movie, we created more of a scene and a little more story within the stampede itself." "JACOB:" "Blackie was never seen again after Wade and Grady dragged him out of that tent." "And no one was charged with letting the animals out of those cages." "LAWRENCE:" "This was a beautiful day." "This was our final day shooting in the big top, and it was windy, and it was blowing everything around, and it had the most fantastic sound." "It sounded like being inside an old ship with all the ropes and wood creaking." "And then we cut the tent down, and the whole cast and crew stood there to watch the tent drop like that." "JACOB:" "Property of Altoona, Pennsylvania." "Shows on the road would get the scent soon enough and come to pick off our bones." "I wouldn't leave Rosie to that." "I wasn't gonna let anybody touch her with..." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Shot reminds me of Bonnie and Clyde." "It reminds me of Faye Dunaway." "OLD JACOB:" "And with my degree, our animals, and Marlena's act," "Ringling got themselves a sweet deal." "A sweet deal." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Back to Hal." "Our first son was born that season." "Walter." "He spent the first seven years of his life with Ringling." "That's why I cannot..." "LAWRENCE:" "As a part of this sequence, we used to have a police officer come to the door, like in the book, and say that the nursing home's looking for an old man." "We decided to cut it." "We just decided that it wasn't really the time for that kind of humor, with Hal pretending he had had a stroke or anything, and decided to play through." "But this was the sequence that I think was tough on Hal, to talk about Marlena, and how closely it paralleled his own wife." "...and then five kids." "Oh, before you know it, the kids are borrowing the car and moving out." "So then it was just Rosie and us." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Ah!" "That moment." "When Rosie passed on," "Marlena cried for days." "LAWRENCE:" "And he just got this scene." "I mean, he really did." "I think we maybe did..." "From each angle, we did maybe two or three takes, tops, of him." "He really got it." "He knew all the dialogue, but he just got the character and got the performance." "My Marlena died in her bed." "Still beautiful, though." "LAWRENCE:" "This, surprisingly, is a green-screen shot 'cause Reese couldn't go to Tennessee with us 'cause she had another movie that she had to do." "And we did that in LA with the background shot in Tennessee, and then Rob and the kids out there behind the house." "(CHUCKLING) Boy, I'm telling you!" "Are you hiring me?" "LaGRAVENESE:" "So, it was right in there where we used to have the policeman come to the door." "We got around it, and I think it works really nicely." "There's nothing wrong with me." "I'm just old." "LaGRAVENESE:" "It connects to the young Jacob wanting to be hired in the circus." "It goes right to it, same guy." "...ought to be working the ticket wicket, not some kid ringed up like..." "LAWRENCE:" "It's funny, too, with Hal just being in the very beginning and very end of the movie, he gets," "I'd say, 90% of the laughs of this movie are all Hal's." "You won't be sorry." "Yeah, we'll get you in the record books." ""Oldest man that ever ran away with the circus."" "(LAUGHS)" "I'm not running away." "I'm coming home." "LAWRENCE:" "And then one of the other things that we shot in the additional footage was this coda at the end." "Just feeling that we wanted to end with some of their life together." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Yeah, so the audience could see what they had together." "LAWRENCE:" "And what home meant for the circus, because the circus for him, through this point, has been quite bad, actually." "And so you wanted to see that they had this existence together with children and family and Rosie and Queenie and a bigger circus, and a good life, and that they had fun, and that the circus actually meant something else to him as well." "And James brought his great Circus Fantasy theme back for this." "Just nice, I think, to end with some of the magic of the circus." "LaGRAVENESE:" "Absolutely." "The audience loved this." "LAWRENCE:" "And that's it, Water for Elephants." " LaGRAVENESE:" "That's it." " Thanks for listening." "English" " US" " SDH" " Commentary"