which was I, Robot.
Yeah, they were... they were shooting off...
They boned us.
They were shooting off these guns with blanks.
At like 4:00 A. M.
And, uh, the residents complained...
the local residents complained about the sound and the noise.
So we lost our location.
On... on the scene when Dex pulls in with a truck
to save the Nightstalkers, you and I literally almost got killed
because we wanted to be very close to the action,
so we... you and I were huddling, uh, outside that police station set,
uh, right as the car was pulling up,
and we had all of these, uh, squibs going off,
these little explosions that literally, the last minute, the key grip Herb decided,
"Oh, you guys should have some Lexan, you know, for protection,"
and he put up this Lexan right by you and I.
Holy shit!
And there was a piece of shrapnel embedded in the Lexan
from when the explosions were going off
that was right where your head and my head was.
That was scary.
What did happen is a piece of shrapnel embedded
in one of the stunt guys' legs, in... in the bone.
He had to go to the hospital and get that piece of shrapnel taken out.
Now let's talk about the McBarge. Talk about where you found that thing.
We could not agree on a Nightstalkers location.
We found like the classic old warehouses and the old department store.
Nothing felt right.
Chris Claridge, our construction coordinator, was coming back on his boat,
basically whispered in my ear and said, "Hey, the McBarge is out there."
McDonald's created this barge for the Expo in 1988.
And it was docked in Vancouver, and then it just fell to shit.
And it was just sitting there rusting.
Like this eyesore of, like, corporate folly, you know,
and, uh, these kids used to go there and spray paint and hang out on it
and we towed it into dock.
The thing was, like, sinking, and we had to, like,
sign all this insurance, like if the set sunk.
We were, like, docked in the bay
and... and then we gut it, it was just an empty carcass.
And then we added all the sets inside and created this ramshackle hideout.
And this was all on the boat right here.
How many of you are there?
Now, this scene is a really interesting scene
because what we're getting here is a lot of the dynamic between Wes and the actors.
Wes really felt that these guys were too young, too casual,
- weren't properly... - Attired.
Attired... tactically not up to snuff.
And so what he's saying to them in this scene
is really what he was saying to... to us.
But I think, actually, if I recall correctly...
not to toot your horn in front of you, but I think that the idea for this scene
and for the change in the dialogue in the scene
actually came from you, Peter, in a conversation with Wesley
about exactly this subject, which was his concerns
and how you wanted to incorporate that into the movie and really use it
as something that could work for all of their characters.
Just use it, Wes. Use it.
Wesley's performance... very good.
He's shot in a fairly tight shot.
We also have fairly tight shots of our new characters.
Showing and using shots of this size absolutely brings the audience
in a connection with your characters.
Close-ups are very, very important.
Rookies.
Hannibal King!
I should've ripped his bleeding heart out when I had the chance!
Uh!
The arrowhead and blood were digitally added after the fact.
Wait, I like this part right here.
Well, that reminds me of some of the executive meetings at New Line.
Yes. It's true.
That little Pomeranian farted all the time.
I had to bust my assistant director Pete Whyte here
because he told us that... I remember this particular scene...
that it was gonna take a day or a day and a half to shoot
and we... we said, "Just to fuck you, we're gonna shoot it in three hours."
And over four hours, and then we did.
But Pete was... Pete was awesome. He did a great job.
We used to challenge each other that way sometimes and...
"Oh, yeah? I can shoot this scene in... I'll top this."
I... I talked to a friend of mine who distributes this film in Mexico
and in the Latin and Spanish-speaking countries,
and this line, "She's got... she's got... uh, her...
- Fangs in her vagina? - Fangs in her vagina.
When you translate it into Spanish...
"Ah! People are gonna go crazy over there!
"I mean, I'm telling you, it's gonna bring so much laughter.
I mean, amazing, amazing."
And unlike typical vampires,
her fangs are located in her vagina.
I know, and Ryan was positive that, you know, we would cut all of this out,
and I said, "Are you kidding? This is gold."
... walking diaper stain is Marko Grimwood.
By the way, this is another sort of example
of the burden that Ryan had to carry in this movie,
'cause the hardest thing about Hannibal King
and casting Hannibal King is he literally carries every ounce of exposition
in the entire movie.
... and now I kill them.
I think, again, the lighting follows very much the story.
And, uh, I mean, if I had had this scene and I would have done a half-lighting,
that would've been contrived.
And we make it a tiny bit lighter... help us to be easy on the spectator
and, uh, and sell the scene a little bit better.
Those choices, I think, for a cinematographer
are very, very important.
I believe that lighting should and must work for the story.
Beautiful art.
All of which was created for the movie.
By the fabulous Chris Gorak.
This shot, look how dark Wesley is.
I mean, this is the kind of situations in which I would give Wesley a mark.
Normally, Wesley is very good at hitting his marks, his lighting marks.
And if not, his stand-in, who we love, will tell him, "Uh, Wesley..."
"You need to be... step forward a little."
Step forward, step back.
And every actor has problems with that.
I mean, because there's a million things that you're thinking about
when you're giving your performance, and sometimes, you know, you forget.
... fairy tale compared to the real deal.
Bram Stoker...he wrote a good yarn,
but the events that he described back in 1897...
God. That was just a tiny piece of the mosaic.
I remember Ryan was freaking out about this scene
because it was basically four pages of him doing a monologue
and he said, "How the hell are you gonna make it interesting?"
I said, "Don't worry, don't worry. We're gonna be constantly intercutting
"between what you're saying and this sort of expressionistic trip through history
"and it's gonna be playing counterpoint to everything that you're saying,
so don't worry, don't worry, don't worry."
And he did it all in one single take.
Remember when this was originally scripted,
Drake's mark through history was a multi-million dollar extravaganza.
Sometimes, you just have to be a little more resourceful.
- But I think this works pretty well. - It does the trick.
It gets you where you need to go.
We wanted to show that Drake was out of touch with the real world.
It required that we shoot a tremendous amount of footage,
all these tiny little pieces and we had help in assembling it
with, uh, Peter Frankfurt's company again, Imaginary Forces.
And just like the great white shark,
this guy has never had to evolve.
Forget the movies, forget the books.
There's no happy ending with this guy.
He's been there, moving behind the scenes,
cutting a bloody fucking path through the ages, until suddenly...
... just like that...
Dom was such a good sport
when we put him into that big bucket of blood.
Ugh.
I mean, that was just... that was not easy to do.
"Just go down one more time, Dom.
I wanna just shoot it again, make sure we have focus."
Blade's not a character that speaks unnecessarily.
No. You remember from the first movie,
Wesley was cutting out his own dialogue.
- Sure. - "Blade wouldn't say that.
Blade doesn't talk much."
Oh, I hate this shot. Oh, God.
You hate this shot? But people...
It's like a commercial for Advil.
"Everyone is fuck up except you, because you did... you take Advil."
People like this shot. I like that shot.
My one comment out of the box would be
I always argued for Drake to have long hair.
Yeah, but our cha... our actor didn't have long hair,
and I didn't want to have to put a wig on him.
But I agree with you. I think it would've looked interesting.
Well, more...
well, I guess we were also trying to contrast the history of it all, too.
That would've... that would've been the obvious choice, I guess.
No, no. But I... I don't disagree with you.
It's just that, uh...
A wig would've been silly.
It would've... I think on him it would've looked cheesy.
I have to say that if... if we had this to do again,
this is a sequence that in order to really get the full mileage out of it,
Drake should've just torn the shit out of this entire store.
He should've just destroyed it.
- Yeah. - Completely.
It's kinda fun though, watching his sort of...
- His slow burn? - Yeah.
- And I love this guy. - Oh, he's terrific.
He's coming to grips with the commercialization of his own myth.
That must be tough.
You know what? Something I have to face every day.
You know, I didn't wanna say it, Lynn, but it's true.
You know, this just proves you never quite know who you're dealing with
and you should always be polite to the customer.
That's right.
That... that Lolita, it was... she was lovely.
And my wife's gonna kill me.
No, but she was a great actress and a very good trooper
because that was a very difficult scene.
I was absolutely shocked that, uh, the Count Chocula people
actually allowed us to use Count Chocula cereal in the film,
that... that they gave us permission.
I... I thought, "Never in a million years are they going to give us permission,"
but that... that was a lot of fun that they did.
What?
You wanna kiss me, pretty boy?
One of the things that, uh, I wish we'd done more of in Blade 2
was we didn't have many scenes where vampires actually fed on humans.
And I... I knew that that was important, and so I fought to get some of that in.
Aah!
This area of the film was challenging because
in all of the Blade films there comes... and in a lot of action films...
there's an inevitable area where there's a lot of exposition,
a lot of explaining that has to be done, and usually it can be a little boring,
so you have to figure out ways of spicing things up
or intercutting it with something else.
And I remember Norrington and Guillermo, on the other Blade films,
being annoyed with me because they were saying,
"They talk too much in this scene!
We gotta cut it down, we gotta cut it down."
And I would fight for every single word of my dialogue to be in the final film,
and I would be angry if they cut a line out here or there.
So, we come to the day where I'm shooting this scene,
and I'm the director and the writer,
and I'm thinking to myself, "Oh, my God.
"There's no way I'm gonna leave all of this in the film.
It's too boring! I have to cut it out."
So I realized what Guillermo and... and Norrington were having to deal with.
Goyer loves the science or pseudo-science of vampirism...
If you recall from the first movie,
Karen spent a lot of time talking about blood and science.
That's part of the... no pun intended... the DNA of these movies.
Do you remember Natasha's line? Yeah, we had to give it back.
She almost jumped Wes here.
See, one problem that I have with Wesley here
is the glasses that he wears were very light.
That was the other issue is that he chose glasses
with lenses that oftentimes, if we weren't careful,
showed his eyes, and you would see that he wasn't wearing his contacts,
and it's tricky, because if you put too much light on his face,
you would see that he wasn't wearing his contacts,
but by the same token, if you didn't have enough light on his face,
he wasn't... he wasn't lit properly.
So it was a... it was a delicate balance,
and often, in the digital intermediate,
we would put little power windows around those glasses
and... and we would bring up more light on his face,
but around his glasses, uh, lower the light.
I think that if we... if we did this film again,
the only thing that I would've asked you to do for me
is to take that horrendous sweater.
Oh, my God. Yeah, I agree completely.
- Off... off Patton there? - Patton, yeah.
No, no, no. I... I... I went... I... I must've been high that day.
I agree completely.
My bad. My bad completely.
And the other... the other thing about this set, it's...
If you look out the window, it's really raining.
We were out in the elements,
and this was a boat, so it actually moved.
And we were seasick.
Oh, we were seasick all the time, and also,
this... this... this right here was... it was leaking like a motherfucker.
Yeah, 'cause of the rain.
And... and all around the set,
you would have little discreetly hidden containers to...
And it was nightmare on the sound recording
because you would hear plink, plink, plink, plink.
I know. It... it was...
But... but I'm glad everyone jumped on board
and supported these kind of locations because...
And it was humid and horrendous, yes.
- But it makes for a better... - And moldy.
But I love this location, 'cause it was so unusual and...
That's the problem with a place like Vancouver where there's so much filming...
- And it's a small city. - It's a small city.
You would go to locations and ten movies had already filmed there.
And the nice thing about this location is no one had ever filmed there before.
- Well, we towed it into the city. - Yeah, it didn't exist in the city.
Look at... look at the digital intermediate here,
how the desaturation works so beautifully.
This is... We're sort of achieving, uh, a bleach bypass look.
Yeah, yeah. But digitally.
Now, just as an aside, Wes hated the first car
- Yes, he did. - where he was rescued,
so we had to have a little story beat
where Dex boosts a nice, brand-new Navigator for him.
We always gotta ditch the getaway car and start anew,
so it works out.
He went through about five or six different ad-libs that were...
They were pretty funny.
My favorite was "Celine Dion. She's a national treasure."
That's right.
The chemistry between the Nightstalkers and Blade works quiet well.
Blade warms up a little bit to them,
to the point where we are now taking little baby steps
into his grudging acceptance of their presence.
This montage is totally a product.
That was a very structured sequence.
The reason why we did it
was because we couldn't film what we'd planned on filming,
and so out of necessity, we picked up all these little moments
and strung them together.
You can plan to film something a certain way
and then there are a million different factors
that will impede upon that plan.
You lose a location, you lose an actor, it rains when you didn't plan on raining.
This particular day, the lighting, you know...
Was the opposite, yeah. It was so beautiful.
It was the sunniest day in the history of Canada.
We had a lot of difficulty trying to make this scene match.
We hadn't planned on this kind of weather at all.
The whole idea was to get those incredible sort of dull images
and yet, you have the most beautiful days.
So what we would do with the digital intermediate
is try to even things out.
- I swear. I swear!
This poor actor we had to drop off that roof, God, I don't know,
about 20 times and his brain was absolute jelly by the end of the day.
That guy actually didn't make it.
He was just one of the casualties
along the, uh, path of making Blade 3.
No, it's all real until the splat. He didn't actually splat.
No, but he was dangling there, for sure.
Oh, no, he was miserable.
That poor guy was upside-down in all sorts of crazy harnesses and rigs.
It was tough. It was not a fun day for him.
If you look carefully in those shots of the guy hanging upside-down,
you can see some of these safety boxes that were put to pad his fall
should the rope break.
We covered them with trash
and a piece of fabric that looks like asphalt.
This is the first day the three of them worked together.
This is another one of the places where there's some really funny Ryan stuff
that we didn't end up using 'cause it wasn't right for the scene,
but just watching the dailies was so much fun.
Just a thought, but you might wanna consider blinking once in a while.
Ryan's ad-libs...
I wasn't sure if was gonna actually make it back to his trailer.
It's true. He pushed, uh, he pushed the edge of the civility envelope
for a first day of working with the movie star.
People will notice when we go to this next shot...
Yeah, this was shot a week or so earlier.
It was much closer to dusk.
If the entrance is the location, and then once you go upstairs,
the stairs and the rest of this were built to match an actual location.
The Vance Institute had a great infomercial
talking about all of his special brand of whim-wham...
holistic life experience...
that plays in the reception area of the Vance Institute.
It just... it took up too much screen time to really be able to...
to show it to its full effect.
But hopefully that will be included in this, 'cause it's funny as hell.
This is a beautiful set that Chris constructed.
And, uh, what happened in the lobby downstairs, that was a real location,
and Chris built this set so that it would match what happened downstairs.
And you did quite a nice job.
Yeah, they, um, all the artists and the painters and sculptors...
I mean, to do all that custom tile work and...
Also, working with Gabby, we decided, you know,
different, unique ways of getting light in this space,
and we came up with this idea of putting these lit columns
and the background lighting,
which was also, I know, a challenge for Gabby... this set.
And people may not realize that the city back there, that's not real.
Oh, that... that's actually a trans light.
That's... that's old school. That's not even computer.
Yeah, that's basically a... a giant, uh, a giant photograph.
Aah!
So, you're the hunter...
This was really the first foot chase
that we've tried in... in one of the Blade movies.
Well, it's the first because this is the first time
he's out in the real world during the day.
I mean, there was a scene in the first movie where he's out in the streets,
but this is the first time he's sort of out in the world in such a public way
because he's been outed.
- Don't like that. - No, my least favorite shot...
shots in the movie.
The car didn't cave in the way it was supposed to and all sorts of...
First day of filming.
And he would use very interesting techniques.
The shots are angled at 45 degrees,
which what it does, it makes these staccato images.
- Flicker. - Yeah.
When you're taking pictures with a faster shutter angle
like five hundredths of a second,
that will be the equivalent on film.
Each one of the 24 frames in the second are more defined,
sharper in every respect.
Not flickering, but just like a stop frame.
It's not a smooth run of the film.
Remember that poor stunt guy that day?
Yeah. He cut a tendon out of his hand.
Steve. There was a lot of blood.
This was also the endless foot chase, David, that you also fought to keep.
- Yeah, they wanted to... - And I think it works great.
People wanted to cut all of this, and I think it's a fun sequence.
Oh, it is a great sequence.
Between multiple locations and multiple sets...
Oh, yeah. We stitched this scene together
through God knows how many locations.
And over a six months' period.
Blade's not aerobically challenged, thank God.
Digital pigeons, by the way.
This was very much in David's plan
when he sort of pitched himself as director...
the idea that he'd have this foot chase with a lot of handheld
and sort of looser than the first two movies had been in terms of style.
- And more real. - Cowboy switch.
You've got the stunt double Clay crashing through the glass,
jumping out of frame, and then Wesley was hiding just beneath the camera
and then he stands up and it looks flawless.
Flawless. Old fashioned school.
And then this sequence, shot on a real rooftop,
which ultimately, probably should've been on-stage with a green screen,
but it was a financial thing, and we just went for it,
um, which added a whole bunch of difficulty safety-wise and lighting and...
Well, the lighting... lighting here, because of, you know...
Again, this proved to be...
We got this spate of incredibly sunny days in Vancouver
that we hadn't anticipated at all.
And what we did with the digital intermediate...
You know, the natural sunlight was quite flat and it was hard to combat,
so in the digital intermediate, we made this much more contrasty.
Contrasty and desaturate the color.
Which is fantastic.
We pulled the color out
so that it would almost feel a bit more black and white
but... but with the red and the skin tones still in there.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
And I also had... made the decision,
because we were being so frenetic during the foot chase,
that we wouldn't move the camera hardly at all in this sequence
- and that it would be very still. - Stabilize it.
Yeah, this is the only moving shot in the sequence.
You know, it would be very stable and you know, very simple composition.
It'd be cool if his hair was blowing in the wind.
- If he had hair, you mean? - Blowing in the wind, yeah.
It was a little hairy with these guys on the buildings, though.
Fortunately, neither Wes or Dom has any vertigo.
This was Dom's first big scene. It's a tough scene.
It's funny... on the first movie, Frost...
Stephen Dorff's first scene was his confrontation with Blade in the park?
Mm-hmm.
It's interesting that... that, uh... I just thought of it now...
that the first scene for Drake is his confrontation with Blade outside,
with a lot of dialogue.
One on one. That's a tough thing to do.
Trial by fire.
Especially when you're coming into a movie where the star's been working.
In the first movie, for a couple of weeks,
and this... case of this movie, many years.
Nice ad-lib here coming up.
Cootchie-coo.
Great little comedic moment with Wesley.
Did you see that guy?
We're gonna lose, man. We're gonna...
Oh! God!
We're gonna fucking lose!
What did the one lesbian vampire say to the other?
Shut up, King.
Look at that. I love this shot.
It's so dramatic.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on.
What are you...what is that? What are you doing?
It's an elastic protein, okay?
It's gonna stop the hemorrhaging.
Okay.
Is it gonna hurt?
- Yeah, it's gonna sting a little. - Really?
- Ew! - Ow, baby.
- Yeah. - You want it to hurt.
Aah!
Wouldn't you say we used a lot of wide lenses in this... in this...
I mean, more than... than on a normal film.
You know, we used a 14mm lens a lot.
- A lot. - Even the 10mm lens.
A lot, and the 16mm, um, 17mm Macro.
Uh, one of my favorite lenses is a 16mm Macro.
But is there that big a difference between a 16mm...
Believe me, every time that I shoot with Arri and I get the 16 Macro,
I feel that it's a wonderful...
To me, it looks better than 17.5 Macro.
I just wanna say this is David Goyer.
I mean, we complain about a lot of stuff that's cut out of the film,
but David also works his story where he rearranges the script
cuts his dialogue, and re-works scenes to come together in a stronger story,
so it's not just our stuff hittin' the floor.
Well, no, I'm not precious...
Trust me, there was a... a scene where I did a cameo,
and I cut myself out of the film.
I mean, I... I'm definitely not precious about my dialogue.
If I don't think it's moving the story along, bang... it's gone.
'Cause there is a lot of dialogue in the first script.
Ah. Gabby Beristain's favorite scene to shoot.
Now, that moment of Jessica in the shower scene is wonderful.
And this... this film on TV is the one Esperanto film.
With... with William Shatner.
And this, again, is on McBarge, and that's the real water behind him,
and we're... we're rockin' on a boat.
We were rocking a lot that day.
There was... I don't know why, the water was quite rough.
There were a couple of times in the movie where I had to take a break
and lie down for about half an hour 'cause I was so seasick.
Somehow, I...I don't picture you teaching karate at the local Y.
Once again...
Another fabulous Ryan Reynolds ad-lib.
And that look of disgust from Blade was quite genuine.
And this moment between the two of them
is one of my favorites in the movie.
Really, what the movie is missing though
is some... is a beat where Blade just clocks King.
- 'Cause he deserves it. - It's true.
That's the Sheraton Hotel.
Doubled as our vampire headquarters.
Now, this scene is on the extended cut,
but I ultimately cut it from the theatrical version,
and I like this scene a lot.
This is such a wonderful, courageous, and interesting scene.
You know, people coming out of shadows
and texture of the bodies and the... the muscles
and really getting people going from one texture of light to another.
It's so beautiful.
Then the camera keeps moving.
It's also an example of the slats that unfortunately,
we don't see it as much in the finished film, but we had this notion
that all the windows in Phoenix Tower would have these slat...
Automated louvers.
Different kinds of skins on it to, uh, layer that idea of the danger of the UV light.
Sometimes you shoot something, and you're just crazy about it, you know?
Just because it looks great visually, does it service the story?
Dom really got in shape for this movie, too.
I mean, he had a good body before, but he really worked hard.
- Very dedicated. - Lost some weight.
Shape, you know, got really cut
and all that sword work he does at the end is all him.
I wouldn't consider the relationship
between Drake and Danica a romance.
It's more of a master and servant.
- A power play. - A power play, precisely.
I think that, uh...
Although what's sort of fun about it is that Danica is sort of is a...
is a woman who has always been in control, clearly, and is used to, uh,
having her little vampire cabana boys as Hannibal King so rightly says,
and this is the first time she's not completely in charge of a man.
But I think she's quite enjoying it.
- I think she's loving it. - Yeah.
But, you know, I mean, even vampires are star fuckers, right?
That's right.
If she's gonna go, she's gotta go with the ultimate vampire.
Dracula's the Brad Pitt of vampires.
It was actually Wesley's idea that instead of the serum
that he would normally shoot himself up with in the other two films,
that it would be an inhaler.
Oh, I love this scene.
Because we all wanted to say what the little girl said.
Why do you do that?
Because there's something bad inside of me.
Just the dynamic between him and that little tiny girl is really good.
- She's good, that little girl. - Why can't you just be nice?
Because the world isn't nice.
I think it's such a genius line to put that line in Blade's mouth.
I'm so happy that Wesley was willing to say it.
Yeah.
This scene coming up is tricky,
and it's... it's a perfect example of what wonders you can do with editing.
Wesley was originally supposed to film this scene,
and, uh, we didn't have him, so we filmed it without him.
It turns out that tho-those shots came from an earlier scene.
It's a very nice cheat.
Lucky seven.
Silver hollow points.
Done.
Oh, my God. It was so cold at this location.
We were freezing our nuts off.
See, I had to operate that shot.
We had a bunch of these giant lights on cranes
to illuminate this place,
and what we did, all the lights were on the left,
and we created some shadows that didn't exist.
The smoke was showing the source.
It is what we call very "sourcy." That light is very sourcy.
You can see where it comes from.
So we have to create some... some shadows in the digital intermediate exactly.
That was a very simple...
We have a... a big hose with... with steam in the background.
And it was cold enough where all the body head was... was real.
Do you remember how much fun we had shooting this night?
Yeah, not so much.
This would be one of those times when you say...
Why am I doing this?
God, I should've listened to my parents and gone to law school.
Med school.
I should've done anything
other than what led me to this moment right here
standing here on this location.
The glory of movie making.
Freezing, exhausted.
But you know what?
This scene turned out to be pretty damn good.
Mm-hmm. I love that moment from Jess.
Now, what's behind door number one?
This line coming up... an ad-lib.
They'll kill me.
Kill you? Motherfucker, I'll kill you
I'll just enjoy it better.
Said with...
That was said with a lot of conviction also.
It was.
I think he was actually talking to me.
You know what? Sometimes method is good.
I think it was Chris Gorak our production designer's idea
to encase the bodies in Saran wrap.
But I think it was your suggestion that they still have, you know,
some of their clothes on and whatnot.
Yeah, like they were just people that they dragged off the street,
and just wouldn't waste any time strippin' 'em down.
It was, like, all about the blood.
Yeah, didn't even bother, so screw it.
It's just farming the blood,
and so you see people with a missing shoe
and still have their watch on and...
And one of the guys still has his cell phone, I think, in his hand
or something like that.
And Jessica just really helps this believability of her...
the look of horror here.
She had to cry on cue quite a few times throughout this movie.
And again, we built only like four racks of the bodies.
There are only really 20 bodies there and we would shoot one shot
and then move the two racks back ten feet or whatnot
and then shoot them again and move them back
and then combine all the shots together.
Hats off to construction and Chris Claridge's crew.
They... they came up with the idea of putting it on a rail like a... a train car.
So a huge rack rolled through the warehouse.
- You could just push them. - And you could lock it.
It wouldn't move left to right, it was locked,
so that's what lined up the visual effects shot, which was...
Everybody really collaborated for this.
Jeff Upton, my gaffer, also wonderful.
I mean, he came with great ideas of how to light that.
Gabby would take digital pictures,
and then in Photoshop manipulate them
for, you know, a number of different given looks,
and, uh, we would decide ahead of time upon a final look.
We did a lot of tests with, like, what's gonna look the most real
with the bodies inside
and getting the real dummies and spending the money on getting that right.
We did a lot of... of mock-ups on what those bodies would look like
and how to... and how to light them.
And pre-visualization, which are sort of, uh,
computer-generated pre-visualizations
of what... what the shots and the moves will look like.
We... we call it pre-vis.
He's come back!
There's nothing stopping them now.
There's me.
And again, Wes... his instincts are so often spot on.
When he says, "I'll count to 20."
"20"...then he drops him.
Twenty.
That was something on... on the fly.
Isn't Dawn, uh, Jess' stand-in?
Yes, that's a good... good observation.
Little movie trivia.
Let's go.
And then from there, we start creating mood, a lot of mood.
Yeah, it's kinda nice.
The next 15 minutes or so of the film
are more sort of traditional suspense and horror
and lots and lots of pools of shadow.
- Oh! You win. - One more, one more.
"Now, Nome King, having never tried to be good,
was very bad indeed."
"Having decided to conquer the land of Oz
and to destroy the Emerald City..."
The irony of this basketball scene
was that Patton could play basketball.
He was amazing.
He shot at one point, ten baskets in a row.
And Ron could not play basketball to save his life.
Classic Craig Fikse, uh, Steadicam move here...
these what we call wraparounds.
And I... I employ them lots and lots of times in the movie.
I just love it. It... it's cool here because we're...
Initially, we're in Drake, who is in Whistler's shape.
We're in his point of view,
and then the camera wraps around out of his point of view to include him.
And I like, you know, playing with the...
going from a subjective viewpoint to an objective viewpoint
within a single shot.
Some people feel that that's a rule you shouldn't break,
but, uh, I broke it all the time.
Those changes of the line occasional, etc.
they will work really well for our film.
Yeah, and if... and if I thought that emotionally,
it would be more interesting, you know,
I had no... no objection to breaking the rules.
- Rules are made to be broken. - Exactly.
People that steal are very strict with the film grammar,
and the great thing about this film is that we were fearless with the film grammar.
I think Natasha did a very good job playing a blind person.
And again, you have to be judicious.
Because if you just do it because it's crazy,
then it looks like a mistake, and it looks like you don't know what you're doing.
Zoe?
Get out of here, Zoe!
Hide!
Goddamn it, Zoe!
Goddamn it!
Now, originally, all of this was shot in a single take.
We added some of these other angles.
Again, this is what I like to call old school filmmaking,
that it also employs, again, one of the cowboy switches.
From this point on for, God, the next minute and ninety seconds,
we stay in a single shot.
And, you know, we show Drake there and we move away.
It's just fun doing these
because there's nothing different about this kind of filmmaking
than there would be, you know, back when they were making Wait Until Dark
or a Hitchcock film or something like that.
Hitchcock loved to do really long takes.
Then we switch around, he's still there,
but she's blind, she doesn't know he's there.
We switch back again. And this is where it really gets fun.
I remember the day that we were working on this.
Again, the camera sort of shifts point of view
so that, uh, you know, we're no longer largely shooting her viewpoint,
and we do another cowboy switch
and we have Kris Kristofferson literally duck out of frame and crawl away.
And then we have Dominic Purcell crawl into the shot,
and it's all done in a single shot
and, uh, I think it creates for a lot of suspense.
And also, it's great to see shots.
I mean, basically, in this time of... of MTV sort of filmmaking,
which is very choppy, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut,
and you know, we have... we have millions of cuts, you know,
Sure, we have plenty of cuts.
But it's great that we find moments in the film
in which the camera does those very virtuoso shots.
And... and doesn't cut.
It's a ballet you know, with films like...
beautiful films like the Chinese Roulette... Fassbinder.
Those films are really great
because the symbiosis between the camera and the acting
and the characters and the sets... that's what filmmaking is about.
Mamet embraces that idea and uses the camera as a character in the film,
and I think David did that here, absolutely.
The camera, it is a character in the film.
We have a very fun thing that David did on set.
You'll see that Jess is going through the barge looking for King and Zoe,
and when we were actually shooting it,
she was going through corridor after corridor
and upstairs and downstairs,
and at one point, he actually jumped out of a closet at her,
and the genuine scream you got from her was just hilarious.
She was really genuinely scared. We laughed a lot.
I love shooting these sequences, though,
where there... it's just darkness, darkness, darkness,
and these tiny little patches of light.
And I love, uh, camera flares,
you know, which are, you know, when the... when a light source,
in this case, Abigail's flashlight,
pans across the lens and the light flares out.
I like that... that edgy kind of filmmaking.
But you have to be very careful.
It shouldn't look underexposed.
It's just a tiny bit of light in one corner of the frame,
but it is an obvious element of composition.
It's not like the image is underexposed.
Highlights in these scenes are on exposure, meaning they are okay.
You can see perfectly well.
Y-you don't have to squint to see the highlights.
No, the highlights are there.
This whole sequence is really, really well shot.
When I first cut a version of it and... and Conrad first cut a version of it,
the sequence probably ran about seven minutes.
What was funny is you independently
each cut a version of the scene
and the two versions were nearly identical, almost shot for shot.
It was pretty funny.
As the characters go and enter areas of light like that...
I don't necessarily need to justify there, and it's what we...
We create... we call film darkness.
Use the silhouette element by just having a bit of light in the background
that comes from nowhere.
It's just a way to create the film darkness.
Wow. Lighting 101.
I like that shot. I don't know why.
I just like that shot.
You just see these brief flashes of her face,
and she drops away into darkness.
This is the really extended version.
This is so extended that you don't even have to pause the DVD
to go out and get a coffee or some popcorn.
What's great about filmmaking and cinema is that you can sculpt a scene.
You can make it as long as it needs to be,
so oftentimes, we do shoot more than we need,
and it gives us the freedom to use just the best pieces
and make it just exactly the right length overall.
- I love that shot of Wes, though. - Yeah.
Again, that was one of those things that was also his idea...
to not have dialogue in the scene and to let her lead into the scene,
that she should go first and he should follow and hang back
'cause it's her emotional connection to the scene and not his.
- He's got good instincts. Mm-hmm.
So, this scene, for instance, what I... I decided to do, lighting-wise,
is... is I open it again, because that was... that was the corollary of the scene,
the dramatic dark scene inside the boat.
So, now we came into the bathroom area,
and... and I thought, "Well, you know, why not?
Let's open it. Let's see it."
- More... more... more light. - More light.
And in that way, also, by having... by having that element of more light,
I can use very, very wide angle lenses.
It was fun watching David's facility and confidence develop
as we... as the movie went... went along.
Yeah, there was definitely a real transformation from beginning to end.
- Sure. - He went through a lot.
It wasn't an easy movie logistically to make.
It was really difficult, but he's a quick study.
He really learns, and it sticks.
Aah!
Abigail's theme there was the first piece that Ramin played us.
And we were, like, "Ramin, you're hired. Fantastic."
Meanwhile, back at the lipstick.
I fought with the studio.
They did not like the idea of vampire dogs,
and they were horrified when they learned
that I decided to make one of the rottweilers a Pomeranian instead,
but I just felt instinctively that we should go for humor in this scene.
The preceding scenes are so dark
that I felt like the audience really needed a break.
His name's Pac-Man.
This I absolutely loved,
and Gabby took full advantage of the set.
Now, what we did is we basically lit this scene
with just almost a single light source
and we used the slats in the cell
to constantly have the light source moving about.
Gabby embraced lighting from the side,