Hi, my name is David Goyer.
I'm the writer/director of Blade: Trinity.
I'm Peter Frankfurt.
This is the third one of these movies that I've produced.
I'm Lynn Harris. I'm a producer of the movie as well.
This is the third movie I've worked on.
I executive produced the first two, as I was the executive at New Line at the time.
And now I'm producer of Blade 3.
Actually, this is the first Blade film with the Marvel logo.
I'm Howard E. Smith.
I'm one of two editors.
Chris Gorak... production designer.
Gabriel Beristain... director of photography.
And you also shot Blade 2.
I am a cinematographer writer.
I try to paint, I try to light for the story.
After all, you have a vision of the film
and my pride was to translate that vision into images.
This was actually shot in the Mojave desert in California.
Originally, we put Iraq, right? And then...
We put Iraq and given all the stuff that's been going on in Iraq,
people just were freaked out about it,
so we said fine, it's the Syrian desert.
And, um...
What was the place that we showed before?
You manipulated the background plate as well.
This was shot in the, uh, Mojave desert.
We shot it during those two days in pre-production.
It was 115 degrees whenever.
Poison... Poison Canyon it's called.
I remember Goyer... Goyer didn't know me really well.
We'd been working together in pre-production, but he's so...
was so involved with casting and... and shit, that he didn't really know me.
And I was doing... I was doing my voodoo and things.
And then there's the first time we came back to Los Angeles
and he had to pick me up, and I was late like a half an hour.
You know, like I was late today.
So that was my beginning... the beginning of my relation with David Goyer.
He hated me that day.
Now, what's also fun, Chris, is that, um, when we get in close...
this stuff was all built on stage, this is a set.
- In... in Vancouver. - In Vancouver.
When I'm editing a sequence,
I like to make sure that the audience, especially at the beginning of the movie,
is really clear what's going on.
We really hone the scene in terms of what it's telling us.
It's a simpler version than when it's shot.
We took out a lot of lines.
But the basic essence of, uh, what we're trying to establish is clear.
And, uh, it's fun.
And we wanted that color,
and they're not... they don't normally come in that color.
And then they had to have millions of them
and then the production was getting so pissed with me
because we needed a lot because they basically last five minutes at that intensity.
And then that's it.
So every take, we had to break like five, six of them, and...
But at the same time, I think one very interesting situation here lighting-wise is
how do we create film darkness.
Film darkness is... it... it's a way of conveying...
In the real world, it might look darker than that,
and you have to, uh, still have highlights that you pick out,
so you're sort of selectively illuminating, you know, certain parts of the actor,
certain parts of the set,
but I quite like, as do you, Gabby, I know,
really pushing it and having portions of the screen really fall off into darkness
and having, you know, half of an actor's face fall off into darkness.
Go! Aah!
What the fuck?! Motherfucker!
The way we did that flash was in post-production.
The lights weren't flashing, so we literally... Howard and I, one of my editors...
literally cut in single frames of blackness.
Now, this is a limbo set.
We wanted a kind of Charlie Rose thing,
and we had... in this case, we had no money at all,
and we said, "Chris, give us a limbo set."
And we hung the black curtain.
And that was it.
- That's it. Very simple. - And it worked fine.
They'll be here for the next hour...
The name Bentley Tittle comes from one of my best friends.
It was sort of an homage to him.
And I lit it very much like a television show...
exactly like a television show.
Now, how is a television show lit?
It's incredibly flat.
I mean, basically, I used those very sort of broad lights on top,
a lot of back light, which I have to be very careful,
because I had Mark... Mark I had to be, you know,
I had to be careful that his head was not gonna be too shiny...
Because he's bald, like me.
And I used... And like me. But we're sexy, brother.
And then what I used is I used the...
I mean, but we used video camera, real 3-chip video camera.
So we tried to combine it.
And in some of the shots, you know,
it's amazing how we combined the 3-chip video camera like a television show
and, you see... you can see in the camera, we actually have the images there.
... and they're right inside.
So what you're saying is we pass the buck...
And the camera keeps moving.
And I had three cameras moving constantly.
I kept... I had one camera, the three cameras were moving and moving, and...
I... I remember this was the easiest day of the shoot.
We shot on a Saturday.
It was a... what we call a six-day week.
We did that occasionally to pick up an extra day.
But we wrapped four hours early this day.
I remember we only shot for about eight hours and everybody was very happy.
This gentleman's name is Mark Berry.
He was a casting associate
that would basically sit with us in the casting sessions
and read opposite the various actors that were coming in
and we thought he did a good job
and we just thought we would reward him by giving him a part in the film.
He was ecstatic.
We called him up and said, "Can you get on a plane and be here tomorrow?"
And this is a pretty big break for him.
In fact, I remember when we called him to tell him he got the role,
we asked who his agent was so we could make a deal
and he didn't have one.
It was very sweet. He was excited.
Which enabled us to make a great deal.
- Shh. - No, I'm just kidding.
And this scene is really...
This was how David and I pitched it to you and Toby.
Yup.
You know, the whole idea
of... of him being outed by the humans and... and...
The movie used to start here.
Well, remember we had...
We actually had Blade assassinating someone
- Yeah. - on the talk show.
Thought maybe it might have been a little radical.
Yeah.
This is, for me, great filmmaking.
When I saw that in dailies, I was ecstatic.
It was very satisfying to see that in dailies.
I think it's a very powerful opening.
Rory... Rory... Rory knew... He was our special effects guy,
and he knew how to blow things up.
This was my homage to Howard... Howard Hawks, The Thing.
Now, this location was a machine shop, Chris,
and you had to make it look all junky and crappy and dress it up like that.
Yeah it was actually... it was a warehouse.
What we did was cut the windows into the existing tin walls,
so we could blow 'em out like you just saw in sequence.
And put all that fake glass in.
And then they pipe in those flame bars which are...
Yeah, Rory Cutler and his team Wayne Szybunka,
uh, just kicked some ass on this one.
I remember every time we had an explosion,
it was always much bigger than we were even anticipating it.
This is a very good and a very interesting collaboration
of a first and second unit.
Just to explain first and second unit,
uh, first unit is our unit, you know, the director's unit,
and occasionally, there are things that for scheduling reasons, um,
we don't end up with enough time to shoot,
so what we do is we give some shots to a smaller secondary unit.
Good ashings on this movie, too.
Oh, yeah.
The ashings on this movie are quantum leap, certainly from the first movie.
It's pretty crazy when you think how far effects have come
since the first movie.
Well, we finally learned what we were doing.
One of the things that we did
when we were putting this chase scene together is
I had a certain amount of it shot by Vic Armstrong, our second unit director,
so we had the whole sequence storyboarded,
and Vic would do a couple of shots, I would do a couple of shots,
and Howard then had to piece it all together.
It's the one sequence in the film that was shot exactly as we had storyboarded,
and I have to say, it came together flawlessly.
That's a green screen shot, by the way.
This entire car chase,
every time you see Wesley in this whole sequence,
is shot against the green screen, meaning he was never in these tunnels.
He was on a stage and we filmed him against literally a green screen
and then composited the background into all these shots,
so that we could have more control.
Any time that you see... if we're over his shoulder or something like that,
that's Clay Fontenot, Wesley's stunt double.
Perfect collaboration between the first and the second unit.
Here, the second unit director was Vic Armstrong, who is a living legend.
The combination between Wesley, our cameras...
This is ours and green screen, this is the second unit...
Yeah, it was back and forth. It was, you know...
And it's a perfect match. It's absolutely seamless.
And this was enormous amount of fun to cut.
And a lot of action movies are... are filmed that way,
where you'll have sometimes a secondary unit or even a third unit
and, um, because there simply isn't enough time
for the first unit to shoot everything,
so, you know, you decide on your look and you decide on your filters
and you know, what kind of cameras you're gonna use,
and then you have a big logistical meeting
between the two units, and usually, uh, usually first unit will end up shooting first
and then, uh... But I love all these shots with Wesley.
I don't think an audience would ever know that...
That they were not real. Absolutely.
That they weren't shot inside the tunnel.
Inside the location.
So we were very, very careful to try to do it.
You see, in... in Blade 2, we didn't have a second unit.
Guillermo insisted we should do everything.
But we were in Prague, so we shot over a hundred and something crazy days.
And we were doing every little bit of every unit.
Granted, the film didn't require... didn't have this very...
Blade never had any sequences like this.
Complicated, exactly.
If you... if you had shot a sequence like this with main unit,
you would've been shooting for 150 days.
This is the one that, David, you defended the most. I mean...
- This car chase. - Yeah.
I mean, every producer wanted to cut this from day one.
Everyone wanted to cut it, and I said, "Damn it..."
And I remember the first day I was on the film, uh,
line producer Art Schaeffer said, "How are we gonna do the car chase?
Where are we gonna do it?"
And it was kinda, you know, funny, that it was one of the first locations,
you know, sequences we put together location-wise
and put pins in all these locations, and you know, doing everything we could
to keep it in the movie.
Absolutely. And I... I was just adamant.
We... I had originally written it for Blade 2,
and it was cut for budgetary reasons.
And I was just adamant that we were gonna have it.
But I love... I love production design-wise, all these...
A lot of times... I mean, with production design,
there will be sets that will be built, but then a lot of times,
you need to augment, digitally composited, a cityscape,
uh, into a place where it didn't previously exist.
We shot the bulk of the film in Vancouver,
but we weren't always happy with the Vancouver skylines,
so we created digital skylines and then throughout the film, interspersed them.
And it's a good example, I think, of using special effects
in a way that's not particularly obvious.
Um, there's probably, realistically, three buildings back there
and we made it look like twelve.
People aren't even aware that it's a special effect.
Set your sorry ass up.
Then I did a beautiful shot of Parker Posey,
in which she was moving the shadow, and it was lovely.
All right, ready? That's me! That my shadow.
- Oh! You rock. - Oh, God.
He is somebody who with a dark pair of glasses and no lines,
can convey an awful lot.
This is an interesting situation here where there were actually
a number of cameras shooting the scene at the same time.
I don't think we ever shot with less than three or four cameras,
and many times, we were shooting with seven cameras at a time.
There's actually a kind of boldness,
so it just makes for a more interesting visual style.
Here's our fabulous digi-building.
I love that the vampires love the Apple products.
This is a perfect example of a Steadicam shot.
This is, uh, Craig Fikse, our Steadicam operator.
And the Steadicam, as you know, is that harness
that the Steadi... the... the operator wears
that has a gyroscopic arm.
And that arm really makes the camera float.
So what this location is is a boathouse in Vancouver
across from the city and, you know, they would hide out, you know,
across the city, across the water.
But this is actually a museum.
We actually cleared out their museum and then built our set in the museum
because we really wanted to have the water in the set.
The building is kind of a shell, and then built a set...
Every... all the set dressing and stuff like this...
even that bridge and walls were things that... that Chris built.
So it... it's an interesting use of almost treating a location as a set.
So Wesley requires double amount of light
than a Caucasian skin tone,
so you have to be able to isolate
either the Caucasian skin tone or Wesley's skin tone.
Sometimes I have to have a special light for him
so that I could increase the intensity of light on him.
So a lot of times you had one of your assistants
with... with literally a flashlight that would follow Wesley's face around.
You know what else I remember about this location?
- Besides that it was freezing? - Really cold.
Northern lights.
This FBI Headquarters...
I mean, we wanted everything to be believable and real,
so we... you know, to really ground the stories...
so we tried to make the most mundane, realistic...
I desaturated in digital intermediate,
because it was too... too real, too...
- It... it jumped out of the light. - It jumped out.
... take these cowboys down.
That's what I'm talking about.
This is one of my favorite scenes...
the fabulous Danica walk.
She can sashay like a true vampire aristocrat.
Here, we were shooting with four, five, six cameras.
Seven, eight.
Eight cameras occasionally, which was an amazing thing.
Yes, you... you truly, truly put me in a difficult...
very fucking difficult situation, bastard.
Because... How can you light that?
Well, that was the magic of that.
And I had to tell the operators,
"You got to know that your shot cannot be perfect."
Right. Well, that was the thing is we had to tell the cameramen...
I mean, sometimes we had to tell the cameramen...
You know, we would assign specific shots for three of the cameramen
and maybe the other three that were operating,
we would just say, "Find something. That's your challenge.
Find something that we don't see."
We were constantly telling the operators, "Find something, and maybe
we'll just use a tiny little moment of this one angle.
It... I mean, it was really a lot of fun
because in some ways, we were making the movie
almost like it was guerilla filmmaking.
This is the penthouse suite of the vampires,
and um, this is what attracted me to the movie when I read the script,
was that, you know, they lived in this large three-story, uh...
you know, atrium lobby combination space,
so, uh, we really, uh, had fun doing this.
Now, I love this sort of set within a set here, this cell,
because you came up with the idea of having all these slats, you know,
in this kind of cage,
and that provided us with a bunch of really interesting shooting opportunities.
Gabby just grabbed the opportunity, I think,
with... with having the circular panels as bars.
They ba... they're like steel, uh...
But I love some of those shots where we're...
we're kind of wrapping around the outside of that cage.
'Cause you're on the outside and the light was on the outside, too.
These guys all worked so hard physically to get in shape.
Do you remember her... Parker's meeting when she came in to see us
when we were casting?
Sheer genius.
She was so good and so funny and so completely off the wall.
"I wanna be a vampire. I wanna be really bad."
Yeah, and then she took a swig of her Evian bottle
and said, "I wish this was blood."
It's a great line that David sort of struck with Parker
in casting the sort of scary frightening vampire with complete camp
in a really good way.
Look at that, look at that. Oh, yeah!
Let's talk about this scene.
Let's see. Who's that bastard right there?
Fantastic actor, man.
I think Hollywood should discover this actor and give him a lot of money
and get him in the great roles.
As you all know, that's our cinematographer Gabriel Beristain.
Speaking in Esperanto.
Subject is heading west.
Got him.
See, this is a typical example
of how you have to be very careful with Wes.
Now, when Wesley doesn't have his glasses on, it's easier to light him,
because you don't have the added problem
of having to protect the reflections from the glasses.
It's a pleasure to photograph the man. His face is fantastic.
- He's gorgeous. - Very handsome.
Absolutely. I mean, it's phenomenal.
It's so great when Wes has his sunglasses off.
I like the addition of the tattoos
and this, uh, this sort of evolution of the tattoos on his face in this movie.
- The sideburns and... - Yeah, that kind of...
Yeah, and I also like the way his wardrobe developed.
I love this vest he's wearing.
... alive, goddamn it.
I've been doing this since before you were born...
Even that sort of stoic expression is so expressive, so to speak.
You know, even though it doesn't reflect any immediate movement,
you see those eyes and you see the expressions on his face.
Having as many cameras shooting on the scenes
can really add up in terms of footage.
I think there was about a million feet of film.
That spells out to about 185 hours of film shot.
We shot this whole sequence hand-held.
- A lot of that was hand-held. - And... and Steadicam.
The camera was always liberated in moving.
It was never on tracks or on sticks what we call.
Look at that. This is a wonderful Steadicam shot.
And it's gonna move in on them.
One of the things we like to do on the film is empower our cameramen.
Gabby and I would assign specific moments
for say, the first two or three cameras
and say, "You know, you get a wide shot and follow the action."
This way you get a tight shot,
and maybe our C-camera operator would say, "Well, what do I do?"
And we would say, "Find something interesting
that no one else is going to shoot."
And they got really excited by that
and sometimes they would come up with absolutely insane stuff.
When Jessie was rehearsing this fight sequence,
Chuck grabbed me one day and said, "Come here. You've got to see this."
That's Chuck Jeffreys, who is the fight coordinator in the film
and who was working with Jessie and Ryan.
He took me over to the rehearsal stage and he was stunned.
He goes, "She's a specimen, Peter."
Both Jess and Ryan did all... really, pretty much all of their own work.
I mean, I don't think Jess had a double for anything, really,
and Ryan had, you know, very few moments that it's not just him.
But she and Ryan have this sort of extraordinary...
In addition to just being fun and great and terrific at what they do,
they have a real extraordinary work ethic.
I think that comes from starting out...
- In TV? - In TV as... as...
basically as kids.
And they really... they understand what it takes to... to do this.
I wouldn't wanna meet her in a dark alley.
- Actually, I would, but... - Well, I know, but...
Now, talk about... Chris, what did you do here?
Basically, you put in the benches, you put in the murals behind, you...
The graphics design of the film...
it's the subtle thing that we talked about earlier.
We... we came up with this kinda underground art scheme
for the... for the movie,
where the vampires and the humans were putting up propaganda, I guess.
It's a propaganda war.
And those are little phoenix images
to represent Phoenix Towers and the vampires.
The idea is that they were be...
And then the third level of that,
we decided to have a second language in the city,
which we chose, uh... I think Gabby came up...
Ultimately, we were saying, like, some kind of Asian language or something,
but Gabby came up with Esperanto.
This is a great scene, but you see, you can see that unfortunately,
the limitations that we have with the metro authorities,
they didn't allow us to put lights too far away,
so a lot of the lighting here concentrates only in this area.
You know, it made it more difficult for you to light.
And perhaps we would have lit it a bit differently.
Yeah, but I mean, in retrospect, now that I see it,
I... maybe I... I'm so glad that I had those restrictions
because by having those restrictions, I just put a top light.
Jessica, who is phenomenal in this sequence...
I mean, absolutely beautiful... gets silhouetted.
I can see her body being silhouetted.
And as long as I covered and protected her face
with a smaller source very close to her,
I think the sequence works beautifully
because we have those pools of light
and it... it's... it's... and it's very pretty.
I love this sequence.
And I'm so glad, now in retrospect, I'm so glad that I had those restrictions,
because I... I didn't overdo it.
Well, that happens a lot in a film, though.
You... You know, they throw you a curveball
and you have to think on your feet
and be creative and come up with a solution.
Well, the curve... the curveball here was
this wasn't our original subway location.
No, it was pulled from us.
- And we had to fight to keep it. - Yeah.
It was another one that we were trying to keep.
We had to find that new one.
We were scrambling and completely freaked out.
Jessica also did all of her own stunts, as did Ryan,
and there's only a handful of shots when we didn't use Jessica or Ryan,
and that was always when there was broken glass flying around.
When you have actors who clearly are doing their own stunts,
you want to show that as much as possible on the screen.
You always want to make it clear
that your principles are actually doing their work.
We actually shot this meditating sequence
with Wes hanging upside-down like a bat,
but we couldn't put it in the movie because what happens is...
Gravity?
Gravity makes you look just a little bit strange.
It was a cool idea.
Yeah. It just violated Blade's perfect cool.
It's a very short scene, consisting of just a few shots,
but people comment on it.
They... it's a very, very iconic graphic, uh, moment,
and it really effectively sets us up for what's to come.
The other really cool thing that, uh, that David did in this movie was
bring in the element of water,
sort of this... this idea that we were gonna be in this location
that had an element that we'd never seen before or used before
in any of the Blade movies.
And for everyone pausing DVD frames,
you can see the continuity problems we had with the tide,
'cause it was actually tidal water.
You can see that the tide...
It was a nightmare, depending on... You know, we would begin...
There was just a shot where there's no water.
I know. Begin... Yeah, you can go through the sequence again
and look where the water is and...
'Cause there was a tidal.
It wasn't a river, it was actually ocean water.
But it's so funny because, like, we would start, you know,
at the beginning of the day
and there would be water all the way out to the end of the boat house
and then by the end of the day, or vice versa, you know,
we would be in ten feet of water, and that... that was kind of a nightmare.
And the day was at 2:00 A. M., too.
We had to shoot this all at night because it was an interior-exterior location.
We also... Did we not destroy a camera on one of those shots
because some shrapnel from one of those explosions...
That's right, that's right.
It's a historical protected location,
so frankly, it looks like we destroyed a lot more than we actually did.
We had to leave it in pristine shape,
which we actually accomplished.
What's interesting about this action sequence
is we were forced to use one of the stunt doubles.
None of these shots are Wesley, but nobody seems to be able to tell.
Part of that is due to the lighting, and part of it has to do with the editing.
Most of the muzzle flushes from the guns and most of the blood sprays
were all items that we added in through visual effects.
Poor Whistler. It's hard to be Whistler. You die a lot.
But he's sort of done now, right? I mean, how many times can we kill him?
And it was so cold,
and... and the explosions warmed up the whole crew.
It was pretty crazy.
The whole location was a matchstick.
And a historic landmark.
We had to protect the entire outside of the building
where there was flames and reproduce the wood facade with non-flammable...
- Material. - Yeah.
And then carefully hang it on the building
without adding holes in the... the existing museum walls.
I have to say my pyrotechnic guys did an amazing job.
People were calling the cops from miles away.
It shook all the docks.
Look how beautiful it is there.
Well, that's a composite, you know.
Don't shatter my illusions of filmmaking.
The city back there wasn't really there.
We put that... we put that in digitally with visual effects.
Yeah, and again, a very simple...
Again, a lot of limitations to put lights, so it was one source of light, very strong,
like a 20K... one light, one shadow, very, very strong, no frills, nothing.
And that's very effective.
I do love these shots here.
Really good close-ups of Wesley. It's very powerful dramatically.
Wesley's performance is terrific and just shows you the power of the close-up.
Wesley's an amazing actor, and bizarrely, he doesn't like close-ups.
Look at that shot.
The shot is the... an homage... homage to Orson Welles.
And basically, the camera comes through...
The grating in the ceiling.
And it comes in a little crane that it was...
it is actually invented in Vancouver.
I'd love to have that mini jib.
Basically, what you get is you can move
and you can extend the jib and extend the camera.
And retract... extend and retract.
Extend and retract without having to move the chassis.
But we wanted the camera to drop down through the grate,
and in order to do that, Chris...
We built a steel grid that pulls apart.
We literally... literally having grips pull... pull the grid apart
to make room for the camera to drop through.
In the same way that Orson Welles did in his film,
in Citizen Kane, you know.
That's the way that they used to do it,
and it was amazing.
Well, you were... you did... you were a P.A. on that, weren't you?
On Citizen Kane, right? Craft service? What'd you do?
Yes, I did that, yes. Blow me.
What if mister homey vampire is, like, Jewish?
That's a good point.
Wesley was wearing Blade contacts here
and they were really irritating his eyes.
- Yeah. - He was in... actually in a lot of pain.
This location was a bitch to shoot.
Yeah, it was hard.
This was a bitch to shoot in because we had, um, you know,
the mirrors here and we constantly had to make sure we didn't see, you know,
our own reflections while we were shooting.
We had a very simple set, so the light came from the top
and then we just supplemented... supplemented the light on Wesley,
and we tried to do it shadow-less.
And then, eventually, after working very hard with Jill Bogdanowicz,
who is our color timer for the digital intermediate,
we arrived to this texture and this color,
which I think really works for this sequence.
Um, we tried to go cold, blue.
Uh, we tried different ways, and I think,
by a combination of working the secondaries in digital intermediate...
uh, meaning the contrast and the mid-tones,
and, uh, and trying to increase the c... increase the contrast,
um, uh, make sure that the mid-tones were not gonna get too red,
and, uh, we managed and we achieved this look
that I think we were very happy with.
But it's a good example, also, this scene,
of... of the look that we ended up with
after we did the digital color timing
is incredibly different from, you know, just the raw stock.
I mean, the raw film that we had... we had processed.
Totally. Because what happens is
when you have a neutral set like this, you have a tremendous tendency to have...
Basically, the color... the color invades everything,
and everything was getting too A) low contrast...
And also, too pink... too magenta.
Too pinky, too magenta.
And then by trying to remove the magenta by adding some cyan,
we were getting some... some crazy sort of bluish wishy-washy color.
And the contrast was very, very low,
so, uh, we were not finding it, we were not finding it.
The skin tones were too... either too magenta o-or if we...
Then we increased the green, and we didn't... everything was getting too green.
We couldn't do it, so what digital intermediate help us
is to separate the mid-tones, the highlights, the shadow areas,
increase the contrast and change some... some characteristics of the scene.
That's why digital intermediate, in that respect, is wonderful.
And digital timing is wonderful
because it's given us more tools that allow us to do it.
I think we have a chapter... a special chapter for that...
About that later on in the DVD.
Yeah, later on in the DVD. But it's really wonderful.
This is a typical example of a scene that it would've been a disaster...
Without the digital color timing.
This is great. I love this scene.
This is a good piece of directing, let me just tell you.
I hate kissing your ass, but, you know, when you let them go crazy, it's great.
I think that was also in the acting, that... that element of... of freedom.
It's reflected there in the acting, you know.
When you let them go wild and they give you wonderful moments, you know.
Michael Higgins is such a good actor.
Oh, love... loved him.
After all the explosions and action in the previous two scenes,
I felt we needed to be really grounded
and so, I just held the camera largely for a number of minutes here
on these two close-ups, going back and forth.
I also wanted to talk about this set in general, Chris,
because I remember telling you
that I wanted the police station set to look like a rat maze,
so that once... then, you know, the Nightstalkers arrive
and we're off and running,
we could be running down any given corridor
and we could just switch around
and we would have no sort of geographical point of reference.
Basically, the set is five or six hallways total,
and that's why we went for a uniformed look,
so you could confuse geography and location
and, uh, make 'em feel, uh, trapped.
We had this crane called a technocrane
which is a very expensive crane that we brought up.
And we set up all these tracks because there were...
we could remove the ceilings on this set,
and I remember I wanted this shot where we would be directly overhead
when the vampires come in,
and we're following them through the entire maze,
you know, directly overhead, and we... we set up that shot
and we took six hours or something like that to do it.
And then I cut it from the movie!
That's what directors do, you know?
There's nothing like a good needle-in-the-neck shot
just to make sure the audience is paying attention.
What do you think it costs to do that shot?
I mean, what did the technocrane cost,
what do you think it costs to, like, you know, create the platform
to support the tracks and everything.
I mean, a lot of money, but, I mean, probably just...
Fifty... fifty thousand? More?
A lot more than 50,000.
Basically, what you make before lunch.
Roughly 75,000.
$75,000 and then we cut it. But that... but that happens.
There's so many things that you decide, for one reason or another...
it's taking too much time. Even though I loved the shot,
and we were giving each other high-fives on the day,
because it was such a beautiful shot,
it wasn't telling the story that we needed it to tell at the moment.
My assistant Seth Clark, he's the one who got this idea
of, uh, changing the voice of Dr. Vance to give us a subjective feeling
of the state of consciousness that, uh, Blade is in.
Wesley really responds to guys who've got chops.
Yeah. Well, in some ways,
it's the first time he's had as strong an ensemble as this to work with,
between Ryan and Jess and Parker and John and Patton
and really, the whole team has been a strong team to work with.
Oh, yeah, it is, but some of them Wes knew how to react to,
like John Michael Higgins.
Yeah.
And others, like Parker...
I think Parker actually kinda freaked Wesley out.
He never knew exactly where her instincts were gonna lead the scene.
But we haven't talked about Triple H.
I mean, he is fantastic as a person, as an actor, as a friend.
- As a bodyguard. - As a body...
He is brilliant, absolutely.
Yeah, there were... there were definitely
some sketchy moments on the movie.
I remember there were a couple of times when Triple H wasn't supposed to shoot
and he was still on the set sitting by side.
I mean, he's good because he's richer... richer
than anybody else in the film.
He's more famous than anybody else in the film.
And so quiet and polite and, uh...
Stronger than anybody else in the film.
Exactly, and he's so quiet. I mean, he will kick anybody else's here.
I mean, amazing. Look at the size of the man.
And so humble.
And humble and wonderful and friendly.
Wesley was very good in this sequence.
Oh, he's great in it.
This is one of my favorite scenes with him in the movie.
But you know, this combination... I mean, it's amazing.
I think it's a brilliant piece of casting, and this film, also, in that respect...
You know, Parker Posey, Wesley Snipes, Triple H...
I mean, this is amazing, you know?
- Ryan Reynolds. - Ryan. See?
It's an extraordinary combination of actors... very inspiring.
And this is very important...
See, directors and people believe that lighting cinematographers,
we just get inspiration by... by... by the visuals itself,
because we just want things to look good.
I think that we need to have good acting to really get inspired.
This is a great, uh, piece of visual effects,
adding the ash and the glass flying throughout the whole thing.
There are a million... a million things going on there at once.
Yeah, and it's just... really makes the scene.
I mean, we actually jumped through the glass,
but to add all that extra atmosphere and the ashing,
I think is pretty fantastic.
But then you made the decision, both of you,
or I mean, what we talked about,
that once the Nightstalkers enter, we have these flashing lights,
and then it completely changes the dynamic of the way the set looks.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
And then we created shadows and... and what is amazing...
But... but let me just go back a bit about the visual effects.
That's very important that... that people know
that every visual effect that we have in the film
we talk extensively about it, we have fights about it,
we... we... we kill each other about it, we really make sure that...
Because it has to be a combination of everything...
drama, art direction, uh, cinematography, eh, every... every little element.
They have to be together.
If they are not... if they don't have... they don't have a perfect communion,
we don't get it.
And the best, uh...
the best visual effects are the ones you don't notice.
And that was a perfect example of the gla... added glass flying.
Oh, yeah. A lot... most of that...
I would say 50% of that glass wasn't real... it was computer-generated.
Goyer insisted on getting that camera down,
and I was not putting it down and more "lower, lower!"
I kept on saying, "Lower, lower, lower."
He should be like a god.
I remember I was thinking of some of the shots of the giants
in Time Bandits with Terry Gilliam,
where, you know, he's very good at shooting a normal person
and making them look like a giant,
and I just said, "We gotta get that camera down, down by his feet.
We gotta get it down."
This was a masterful job of editing by Howard.
I liked the scene from the beginning,
but I knew that there were problematic aspects to it,
having to do with this very interesting way it was shot... the lighting.
We worked on it bit by bit over a period of months
until we finally got it where it was all in balance
and everything made sense.
It's funny, because for months, it was my least favorite sequence in the film.
I hated it, to be quite honest,
and now it's become one of my favorite sequences.
The one thing that we haven't talked about...
maybe you have, Gabby... is, uh, the 2.35 frame.
I was just noticing in this sequence.
And the fact that all the Blade movies had different aspect ratios.
Yeah, but I think it's... I mean, you fought for the 2.35,
which is just fantastic and really eats up the sets and it's great.
Why did Guillermo pick 1.85?
Guillermo is very, very used to the 1.85 composition.
As I said, he's a very classical filmmaker.
And, um, he decided that 1.85 was the way to go.
He's familiar with the lenses, he's familiar with everything,
and he felt more comfortable working with that aspect... aspect ratio.
Um, uh, the first Blade as you know, that was an anamorphic one,
and we were having, for us, for all intents and purposes,
we are also shooting in scope.
Right. We're simi... we're more similar,
obviously closer to the first Blade, in terms of this aspect ratio.
But we are using Super 35.
Meaning that our frame is more elongated
than the composition that Guillermo chose for Blade 2.
Which I think is far more dynamic and epic.
Look at that shot. Just great.
And by using the Super 35, what you do is you deal with...
you have a... a spherical lenses, which are not anamorphic.
Consequently, you... you have better depth of field,
um, and things are a tiny bit easier for everybody.
For anamorphic lenses, you need a bit more light, right?
Oh, totally. Well, it's not as much as you need more light,
but, I mean, for instance, just to simplify it,
if I have a shot with a... a 35mm shot with 2.35 with Super 35,
the same shot I have to do it with anamorphic with 50 or 65mm lens,
which gives you less depth of field,
it's more difficult for the focus puller,
and therefore, you have to be... you know, it takes a bit more time.
And this location was, uh, a problem child, too.
We had lost our original police station
because a... a movie was also in town and broke the curfew rules