Hi, this is Peter Jackson...
and I'm sitting in my living room here in Wellington, New Zealand...
and looking forward to doing this audio commentary for The Frighteners.
I've never done one of these before, and the idea of talking for the next two hours...
is a little daunting, but we'll see how we go.
I remember that the first shot in this movie...
was what you'd call a problematical shot.
It looks a little bit like a miniature...
this shot here with the buildings, but it's actually not. It's full-size.
There's the big old hospital in the background there.
And this house that we are tilting down to now...
was a big full-size thing that we built...
on the field in front of the hospital.
And we had these enormous rain towers. It was very wet and windy...
when we shot it with this giant crane, and we had to do it twice...
because the first time, for some reason, the camera didn't actually turn on and off.
The guys were pressing the buttons, but it wasn't working...
and we thought that rain must have gotten into the electronics.
The transitions that you're seeing here...
the curtain transition and this one here, is all done on the computer.
These are computerised floorboards...
that we've just gone through. They're not real.
And we're into...
So it's like three different pieces of film that were joined together...
with little dissolves and CG transitions.
This is the sequence that we call "Wallpaper Man Sequence."
And in our original screenplay...
when we first conceived this, it was actually the old lady...
Old Lady Bradley, who was being chased around by this apparition, not Patricia.
And we devised this idea that it's a game...
that's being played between the apparition...
who we reveal much later in the movie to be Johnny...
and Patricia, since they used to be lovers...
you know, 30 years ago.
They're still playing a game...
which, I know, confused a lot of people...
and people said that this was a bit of a cheat...
because she looks like she's terrified...
but, later on, we find out this is really her boyfriend.
And it obviously is a cheat to the extent that it's a red herring.
We wanted people to think that she was a victim...
until we actually reveal later that she's the baddy.
It's partly explained by a scene that never made it into the theatrical version...
but is in this director's cut, which we'll see a lot later...
where these two, Patricia and Johnny...
are actually playing around in a mortuary, and they're squealing and laughing...
and she's saying "Help! Help!" And he's jumping on her...
and the whole thing was designed...
to kind of reflect back a little on this scene and to somehow explain it.
But that never made it. It got cut out, that scene in the mortuary.
And so, this does seem as if it's a little bit of a cheat.
I gotta admit that.
The opening credit sequences were shot...
on a very, very wet, cold day in Lyttelton...
which is a coastal town in the South Island of New Zealand.
It's actually the same place as we shot a little bit of Heavenly Creatures.
There's a wharf in the docks, a great big wharf...
where large boats come and get moored up...
and we used one of the boats in Heavenly Creatures for the scene...
where Pauline and Juliet are separated at the end of the film...
and the boat's leaving, and Pauline's crying, and they're reaching out for each other.
That was actually shot at Lyttelton...
so we'd been there a couple of years earlier...
and wasn't really thinking of Lyttelton when we wrote the script...
but we did want it to be a coastal town, and we did want there to be a cemetery...
on the hill, that was visible from most places in the town...
and it just so happened that Lyttelton does have this cemetery.
It's a real cemetery. There's very little in this that we actually faked.
Well, most of the tombstones are real.
And it was shot on a freezing day. I actually remember this and will always remember it...
as being one of the most miserable days that I've ever had shooting...
just because it was so cold...
and so difficult to work.
And the umbrellas that the mourners have got were there for real...
because it was pouring with rain.
And we had a long day. We were shooting this opening sequence...
and then, at night, we had to go...
to this location where the restaurant was in the movie...
and shoot even more "pouring with rain" stuff that night.
And it was a day that never seemed to end.
Your fingers get freezing cold. You can't actually write anything...
because, you know, they're numb.
You never stay dry...
and the shots are kind of not the most interesting shots in the world.
You know you're gonna put your credits on them, so you just gotta do these long...
lingering shots that seem to take forever.
It's the type of day where I often think, "I wish I wasn't directing a movie...
"and I was lying in a bed with a book, and a fire, some food, but never mind. "
It's amazing how quickly you forget the pain.
Although this one, I'm a little bit bitter about this particular day.
Friend of the family? Really such a shame.
Get out.
Rain affected us a lot during this location shoot.
I remember we were supposed to be in Lyttelton...
this little town, for three weeks out of a six-month shoot...
so those three weeks were designed to get all of the wide shots of the town...
and the various scenes that we needed to do there...
but rain plagued us so much that we ended up spending five weeks there...
which was a bit of a problem because it was at the beginning of the shoot...
so everyone got a little nervous about the fact that we were already behind time.
But, you know, rain is one of the things...
that just seems to plague you on a film set. It's so frustrating.
The shot that we're about to cut to now is not Lyttelton but actually Wellington.
It's very close to the house where I live and the studio where we worked in.
This road here is called Aro Road...
and I drive on this road every single day...
to go to and from my office.
And I always fantasise about cutting these corners.
I've never done it, and I probably never will, 'cause I'm too much of a coward...
but in the movie I got Charlie Croughwell, who was Michael's stunt driver...
to do that for me just to... Just so it was recorded on film.
It's kind of funny looking at Michael Fox smashing through this fence...
because after The Frighteners was made...
I was looking at his movie Doc Hollywood on TV, and I saw in that...
that he actually drives through a picket fence in a very similar kind of way...
so it was kind of weird.
This guy, Peter Dobson, who's playing Ray, is a really funny actor.
He was a suggestion of Bob Zemeckis. Peter had done a TVshow for Bob...
called Johnny Bago some years ago, and Bob recommended him for the role...
and he is great.
He's got such nice comic timing.
Well, that's a good one.
How come you didn't see the corner coming? You stupid moron.
In the movie called Braindead, or Dead Alive as it's called in the States...
we had some gags with a garden gnome.
I'm kind of quite fond of garden gnomes, these things here.
I think, in the States, they're called lawn dwarves.
So we put them in here just for no other reason...
than I kind of think they're quite funny...
so you'll probably see a few more garden gnomes...
turning up in films of mine in the future.
Trini Alvarado plays Lucy Lynskey.
The name Lynskey is a tribute to Mel Lynskey...
who we worked with on Heavenly Creatures...
a light, young New Zealand actress...
and we were writing The Frighteners on and off...
during the time that Heavenly Creatures was being made.
And so, we sort of just...
It's quite fun when you're doing a movie because you end up with...
you know, 10 or 20 characters that you've gotta assign names to...
and we often delve into people that we know, friends of ours...
or even people that we're not so friendly with, and use names...
Yes, well, Dr. Kamins is attending a funeral...
and I'm seeing his patients today.
It was a lot of fun working...
with actors like Dee Wallace-Stone on this film...
because Dee's someone who I've been a big fan of for a long time.
I remember when I was a kid, virtually...
watching The Howling and Cujo...
and I just thought she was a terrific actress.
It was just a real delight...
to, you know, bring her out to New Zealand...
and get her to play this character for us.
She's a very, very hardworking actress...
and a really delightful person as...
I think one of the great things about directing movies...
and something that I always kind of feel humble about, I guess...
is the fact that I can find myself working...
with people that I admired for years...
and just to be sort of with them on a one-to-one basis...
as a professional, as it were, is kind of a big thrill.
I still feel like a little kid when I'm doing that.
I mean, people like John Astin and Jeff Combs in this movie...
who I've loved from the Re-Animator films.
Working with Jeff was a huge thrill.
They said she was an accessory after the fact.
I know the truth.
It was cold-blooded murder.
This black-and-white sequence that we're about to jump into here...
was one of those fun days of filming...
where a lot of the extras that you're seeing here are actually...
members of our film crew, and we cover this a little bit more...
in the documentary, in the bloopers section.
But it was sort of one of the crazy days where we just sort of have fun...
because we know we can just be a bit loose.
I actually enjoyed directing all this stuff.
I'd just come out of making a pseudo-documentary...
called Forgotten Silver just before we started The Frighteners.
And so, we'd done similar things on that in terms of faking old footage...
and it is great to do.
I... It's just one of those fun, gimmicky things.
This is actually a work print that we're looking at.
When you make a film, you use a work print...
during all of the postproduction, and by the time it's finished...
it gets very scratched and there's lots of splices in it, and it's...
It gets trashed, and it's obviously not what is in the final film...
because that's struck again off the negatives so it's a clean copy that you work with.
But for this particular sequence, because it's supposed to be old...
and scratched and kind of vintage-Iooking, we used our work print...
and actually made a copy directly off the work print to put into the final film.
That's her.
I was in her house this afternoon.
There's a little tribute to Heavenly Creatures on the cover of that video.
It's actually not the real Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme.
It's our two actresses, Kate Winslet and Mel Lynskey.
The electric chair that we're seeing here is not a photograph of a real one.
It's one that we built ourselves...
and it actually became the chair that our construction manager...
used to have in his office, so every time that we'd go to visit him...
he'd be sitting at his desk in his electric chair.
This lady here, Genevieve Westcott, is a New Zealand current affairs journalist.
She does current affairs news-type programs like the equivalent of 60 Minutes.
And so, she does this for a living...
and when we wanted somebody to perform in The Frighteners in that way...
we though we might as well get someone who does it for real...
so it would be much more convincing.
Should've fried her when they fried Bartlett.
She was 15 years old, you know.
This sequence here brings back memories to me...
because it was the first sequence in the film...
where a director of photography called John Blick...
took over the shoot for a while.
We started shooting with a DP called Alun Bollinger...
who is a very good friend and someone who I'd worked with...
on Heavenly Creatures...
and we'd been going for six or seven weeks, and one day...
Alun, or Al-Ball as we call him, was late for work, which is very unlike him.
We're all ready to shoot, and he still hadn't turned up...
and we started to get a little bit worried.
And we eventually heard that he had had a car accident...
on his way to work and had injured his knee quite badly...
and had knocked his head a bit and, you know, had various cuts and bruises...
so we had to very quickly find someone who was available...
to step in and to carry on shooting the film because you can't really do much...
without your director of photography. It's a very key person.
We were very lucky that John Blick...
who's another very talented New Zealand DP was available...
to virtually step in right at that moment.
And this was just about the first scene that he shot...
just a day after Al-Ball's accident.
This Elvis Presley joke is kind of funny because Peter Dobson here...
that we're looking at, was in Forrest Gump...
and he actually played the young Elvis Presley...
that you see briefly in Forrest Gump.
He's actually a big Elvis fan in real life, too...
so he got a real kick out of playing that gag.
We're coming up to the very first piece of extra footage...
that is in this special edition...
which is this gag. It's a real chicken. It's not a rubber one.
It's just one that we thawed out, and we stuck rods up its legs...
and it gets puppeteered from beneath the floor.
These plates and dishes are all computer-generated.
We just had strings pulling the cupboards open and shut...
and everything else that's actually flying is generated in the computer.
...spoon bender telling me what to do.
Ray, we have got a poltergeist.
The shot that you're gonna see coming up of Michael Fox...
was the very first shot that we ever filmed in the movie.
This one here.
It's shot number one on day number one of the shoot.
Bannister.
Every time we make a movie, these shots always stick in my mind.
I mean, I'll never forget the first shot.
Persistent residue of the departed. Always a problem this time of year.
Dr. Lynskey?
Yes. Thank you for coming.
This scene sticks in my mind because we ended up...
shooting it over a couple of days...
and it was a set that was inside a studio.
And it could have been shot at anytime of the day.
Obviously, it doesn't matter, you know.
When you're shooting a movie...
you're normally starting work at 8:00 in the morning...
and going through till 8:00 at night...
but we were in the middle of trying to shoot night footage outside...
but we kept on having rainy days.
So, in other words, you know, we'd try it and go out and shoot stuff...
but it was pouring with rain, and we'd have to retreat inside the studio.
But the problem with that is you're shooting at night...
so you're into weird hours...
and I know that this was one of the scenes that we had to put...
into the schedule, instead of one of these exterior scenes...
due to the rain. And we ended up shooting it...
and it was like 3:00 a.m., 4:00 a. M...
and we had all this complicated choreography to do...
with the steadicam, and it turned into a looney-hour.
I know everyone started to get the giggles.
There was a huge amount of giggling and laughing that went on.
There's a little bit of it in the bloopers on the documentary...
but there's actually a lot more of it in existence.
It was just one of those scenes where, the time of night it was...
everyone's head was getting kind of light...
and falling apart.
Okay. Excuse me, ma'am. You wanna stand back.
I don't want you to have to sign a waiver.
Plus $100 for materials. I can't be out of pocket.
Just do it, for Christ's sakes, Bannister.
This machine that Michael pulls out of his bag...
was based on an old radio.
It was built by one of our special-effects guys.
Why us? I mean, why are they in our house?
All I can tell you is emanations are normally confined to the cemetery...
although they do escape.
It's usually the young ones.
Oh, for God's sake, Bannister, come on.
Scenes like this are always difficult to shoot...
because they're long scenes that may be four or five pages long...
a lot of dialogue, a lot of explanatory stuff about setting up the story...
and the situation...
and you end up trying to choreograph it in an interesting way...
and trying to shoot it so you don't have to do too many shots...
but you also don't want a camera...
that's totally static and everyone's just sort of locked in one place, talking.
And it's... I don't know...
There's always scenes like this in every script...
and they're actually the ones that I kind of dread doing...
because they just take such a long time...
and your options always seem to be a little limited...
into what you can do, but, ultimately, you rely on your actors.
I mean, look at these guys. They're doing a great job...
a really great job.
It's funny 'cause I'm watching this with the sound off...
Iooking at the pictures, not hearing any dialogue.
And, you know, you can just...
I can see how skilful these guys are...
in just bringing these characters to life.
It's kind of fun to watch it like this.
At least that's what it says in the book.
You never really know for sure.
All right. Thank you, Bannister. You can go.
What the hell are you staring at?
I know that Michael had a lot of ideas for this scene.
He was real helpful.
And that is where it's great to work with a really good actor...
because they can come up with little extra bits of business.
Wearing the rubber gloves was his idea.
He would come onto the set, and he says:
"Is there any chance of getting a pair of rubber gloves?
"'Cause I think it'd be kind of fun just to use some kitchen gloves...
"as if it's part of my... The tools of my trade. "
So we found him those.
And it's really a lot of help when the director is being supported...
by the actors in terms of coming up with great ideas.
- There you go. - Thanks.
Thank you.
This was the first shot where we get a glimpse of...
This is actually the first shot that we did of Wallpaper Man.
We've obviously seen him earlier in the movie...
but this was the first one that we actually attempted...
to try and make him work...
and we had several goes at the shot...
before we finally ended up with that particular image...
which I was real happy about.
I thought that worked out kind of cool...
that effect of the guy stretching out of the paper.
Here we are back at the Lyttelton location.
This house of Frank's was an idea...
that we had in the script...
that I don't think we ever, kind of, quite made it work in the movie...
which is my fault.
But it was the idea that this guy who really has shut his life down...
after his wife died.
He stopped building their house. He's got a half-built house...
that he was building when she was alive...
and now he's kind of given up on it.
So the house, in a way, represents the skeletal remains of his past...
and I always liked the idea of a guy living in a half-finished house...
that he's just nailed up some plastic to stop...
the wind coming in and the rain coming in...
but, for some reason, I wasn't particularly happy...
with the way I ended up shooting it here in the film.
We would like to cruise with some style, man.
You know, you guys left me high and dry tonight.
I get to the house, nothing's happening.
I couldn't believe it.
This sequence, this little scene we're seeing here...
was shot in the first two or three days of the shoot...
and we were really feeling our way in terms of the visual effects.
I wanted to keep the camera moving.
I wanted to do shots that were kind of interesting.
It was our first attempt...
to get the actors used to working in this system that we had to use...
which was to shoot everything twice.
I mean, Michael, in this shot, is talking to nobody...
and the ghosts were added on on the computer later...
but they, likewise, had to be shot...
against blue screen without Michael.
And I wanted to do these types of shots where the camera is tracking along...
because I think we're used to seeing ghosts look transparent...
but they're often in shots that are locked off...
and I just wanted to sort of break that pattern.
Stu, man, you got to loosen up, man. I'm serious.
Come on, Stu, loosen up.
There's a really nice second half to this scene...
that didn't make it into the theatrical version, purely for pacing reasons.
We just wanted to try and get some time out of the movie...
so this stuff here had some quite nice ghost gags.
I wanted to do some of this ghost stuff very early on...
as soon as we see them...
so that we establish some of the laws of what they can and can't do...
like this whole stretching thing.
The fact that they're like toons... Cartoons. They can get hit and hammered...
and squashed, and yet they always just bounce back.
I love this idea, too.
It was something that always tickled my fancy...
of a ghost that hangs his ghostly jacket on a hook next to Michael's.
Thought that was kind of funny.
See, Stuart, that's your problem. You're too soft with him.
You gotta just walk up to Frank, just look him in the eye...
The light-bulb gag, which was a favourite of everybody's...
and, believe me, tears were shed when this got cut out of the movie.
This was a gag that we just dreamed up on the set.
There just happened to be a light bulb, a construction light hanging from a nail...
and I looked at the light. I looked at Chi, and I saw...
"Hey, you're about the same height.
"We could get this... Have you walking into this light. "
So I did. It's really great to try and keep up thinking those sorts of ideas...
when you're on the set, looking around, thinking of things to do.
And there was lot of opportunity for it in this film, too...
because, with the ghosts, it gave you flexibility to pull off some nice gags...
that you couldn't do, obviously, with normal people.
This scene was originally written...
having Cyrus's head coming out of the actual shower nozzle itself...
like it comes out of all the holes of the nozzle...
but, at the end of the day, we thought it'd be funnier if it came out of the plug hole.
...is a productive ghost.
To that end, I've drawn up a list of suggestions.
This sequence here looks as if it was shot in a studio because it's just all interiors...
but it was actually shot at Frank's house on location in Lyttelton, on the hillside.
It was again... We did it just so we could get a glimpse...
of some of the background scenery through the windows, but, of course...
we can see it there with the island and the harbour in the background.
I would like some new clothes. You get to dress nice.
Because of the fact that the house was unfinished, I wanted to have...
big, open windows to really get a sense of the outside coming in...
and, therefore, we had to actually shoot this on the location on the hillside...
and couldn't really fake it in the studio.
This is a little bit here that was cut out of the theatrical release.
...when I'm trying to speak to you.
This gag with the fly spray, I talk about it in the documentary...
so I won't go into it here, but I was real happy with that.
That actually shows you what could be done making a splatter film with CG.
I think it would be a great idea one day to do...
a total full-on, you know, zombie-style splatter film, but using a computer...
because you could achieve...
so much mind-boggling stuff that would be great.
I mean, I think the problem with it is ultimately that CG effects are so expensive...
that the sort of budgets that splatter movies have probably wouldn't sustain it...
but I'd like to certainly give it a go myself one day, if I can.
There was a lot of cuts made to the script around this point.
We never really got these opening scenes with the ghosts working quite right.
This is a gag I like that didn't make it into the movie.
The idea that Frank's cutting up his own house for firewood.
So, bit by bit, he's working his way through his house...
to keep himself warm at night.
I kind of like that as a motif for where Frank's life is at.
I was saying that the ghost scenes...
I don't know. A lot of this was written and rewritten as we were...
about to start shooting and even during the shoot...
and it's an exciting way to work...
and you're getting a lot of great input from your actors...
but it's always, structurally, a little bit daunting to be pulling it together...
at the last minute like that.
No, you're my go-to guy. Without you, I'm out of business, Judge.
The Frighteners was...
It was strange because it was around for quite a long time...
without being written. We met up with Bob Zemeckis...
and pitched Bob the idea of The Frighteners before Heavenly Creatures got made...
and he liked it, and he said, "Yeah, let's write a script."
And so, Fran and I went away, but we had to get into Heavenly Creatures...
so we left The Frighteners alone for about a year...
and, when we finally came back to it, we wrote the script as a first draft...
and Bob liked it, and the studio liked it...
and, even though you're always dreaming...
of getting, you know, everybody's enthusiasm behind you...
this happened so quickly, it kind of took us by surprise a bit...
and we actually ended up finding ourselves shooting the film, and we...
probably needed to have a bit more time to spend on the script.
And so, the movie of The Frighteners...
my memory is of a movie in which we were constantly writing...
or rewriting the script, all the way through the shoot to try and improve it...
which was obviously work that should've been done before we started shooting.
Everybody's excitement in the project sort of overtook things a little bit.
It's us, Frank.
What do you think? Pretty scary, huh?
This scene was one that we cut out of the theatrical version, too.
It was quite a nice idea of having these guys pretending to be a reaper.
The idea was sort of to plant the idea of a reaper in people's minds.
And so when the real guy turns up, you immediately say, "Wow, it's the reaper"...
without having to think too much about him.
Frank.
I love the line in this scene, at the end of the scene, where he says:
"You guys gotta do something seriously scary because..."
It would have been a great line for the trailer.
It never ended up in the film, which is a little bit of a pity.
All these opening scenes with the ghosts were severely cut back...
for the theatrical version because we felt...
that we got to know them pretty quickly...
and we thought we should get on with the story...
which is why none of this stuff is in the movie...
but, in themselves, they're fun scenes and I'm glad we can have a look at them here.
I need $15,000, guys. I need it quick.
It is time to get seriously scary.
So you checked the place out, right?
- Right. - Cool.
- How many we got in here? - Five.
Now, there is a little cameo appearance by Fran Walsh here.
She's kind of shy, and she didn't wanna appear on the documentary...
but here she is, walking past there.
Fran and I are partners and have got two little children...
and we really enjoy working together.
And I managed to talk her into doing that tiny cameo.
I love the idea of the ghosts, who are obviously totally invisible to most people...
still, kind of turning their heads as the passerby wanders by.
Yeah.
Let's kick some ass.
This was actually a sequence that was not in the original script...
and was added while we were shooting.
We were writing this scene while we were actually shooting the movie...
because we felt that we just wanted to have a sequence in which we saw...
the ghosts doing their work...
and one in which, plot-wise, things start to go bad for Michael.
He's got quite a good scam going with these guys, but we wanted a scene...
which we never actually wrote originally...
where he's sort of... As it were, he's uncovered to some extent as a fraud...
and that, you know, his future looks a little more dodgy.
The kids always get it.
- Let's go. - All right.
This guy...
this little baby is actually Fran and my son, Billy...
in the red trousers and the jumper.
There he is. He was shooting all this against blue screen...
and Billy was about three and a half months old when we shot this.
He's pretty different now.
My babies!
It was difficult to shoot some of these shots because there was a lot of crying...
a lot of tears and, gosh, I...
I mean, even just shooting that little bit of footage...
made me wanna never make a film with babies.
I have huge admiration for filmmakers...
that make whole movies about little babies and children.
It must be so difficult.
This is quite a long sequence that never made it to the theatrical version of the film.
Again, it was for pacing reasons. We just felt we could take it out...
and you just wouldn't feel as if there was something missing.
The movie came in at just over two hours, this particular version...
and it was everybody's opinion, including mine...
that we really just needed to try and get 10 or 15 minutes out of it...
just so that it wasn't quite so long...
and it didn't seem to sustain at that length.
Come on, let's go. Time is money.
You haven't heard a goddamn word I've said!
Really nice performances by these guys.
John Astin and Michael Fox did this scene really well.
You're right, Judge. Watch this.
This is on the Lyttelton hillside...
shot in that first five weeks of the shoot.
All the leaves there on the ground were put there by us.
We just sprinkled huge bags of autumn leaves around.
Give a bit of extra ticks to Charlie Croughwell, Michael's stunt driver...
who did a really nice job doing the driving on this scene.
Beautiful. Beautiful, Judge.
This is a house just north of Wellington...
and then, when we come inside it here, we're actually in an army base.
This is not a house at all, but a...
It's the officer's mess of a military base that's close to our studio...
so we dressed it up as a house.
...this time of year.
Frank Bannister, I believe you called.
Not a minute too soon. Oh, boy.
- Frank, she just... - Shut up.
Frank, it's no use. She...
Actually the maid is Leslie Klein who is Jim Fyfe's wife.
Jim plays Stuart.
And the actress here is Leslie Wing...
who was Bill Pomeroy's wife...
and Bill Pomeroy was an art director on the film...
so it was kind of fun to have him in the movie.
Mr. Bannister.
Please leave.
This character, Magda, was originally written as an American character...
but we wanted to cast this particular role in New Zealand...
and we found it quite difficult...
to get New Zealand actors to be able to put...
convincing American accents on.
It's something that just doesn't seem to work quite well, so we...
decided that having her English was a way of getting around that...
because an English accent's no problem.
And that's the reason why she's English. We thought it suited...
the newspaper-editor type of thing as well.
Not a word you'd know a lot about. Is it, Mr. Bannister?
Here's my cameo.
Part of the plot, mind you, not totally extraneous. I do wear a reaper T-shirt.
That close-up was something we just decided to take out of the theatrical version.
I just thought I was a bit self-indulgent, but here it is for you guys to enjoy.
This is Lyttelton high street again...
and this was on one of our... The first week or so of the shoot.
There's a little switcheroo that happens here.
We're in Lyttelton high street for these shots...
and we do one cut here, and we're suddenly in Wellington when he gets hit.
Right there's the cut to Wellington, and the rest of this...
plays out on Wellington Street, which is like 300 miles away...
and the reason for that was because, as I mentioned earlier...
Lyttelton was at the beginning of our shoot, and it rained so much that we were...
a couple of weeks late in leaving there...
and we had to take as much stuff back to Wellington to shoot as we could...
'cause we couldn't afford to be down there any longer than that...
and we'd only got half of the scene shot in Lyttelton.
Always intended to shoot the other half, but we never did...
so we had to mock up a street up in Wellington to match it.
Look, Ray...
just relax, all right?
You wanna tell me what happened?
I was on the rowing machine...
and then suddenly I felt this...
This is another example of one of those scenes...
where there's two or three pages of expositionary dialogue...
where the actors are just talking about the plot...
and it's information that's important...
but they're the scenes that are always tough to shoot...
because, well, I panic about not wanting to make them too boring.
You could always put the camera there and have two actors talking to each other...
for two minutes, but we tried to choreograph the moving around a little bit...
and the gag of Ray sliding into the wall...
and shot them both with motion control.
Michael and Peter Dobson do a great job of making it seem like they're interacting.
That idea there of Michael reacting to the ghost was entirely Michael's idea.
He kept throwing in those sorts of things to really sell those moments.
All right, Bannister...
The cemetery that we're about to come to is Lyttelton cemetery.
It was one of the very few fine days that we had down there. There it is.
And there's a little bit of stuff at the beginning here...
that got cut out of the theatrical version of the film.
I like the idea of setting up a ghost rule in which...
when you're a new ghost, you can't actually grab things or touch things.
That's why the door-handle gag was there, because it takes you...
a little time just to learn what the rules are and to get used to being a ghost...
which is why when Ray can actually move the wine glass later...
it's something of a triumph.
Now, this character, Hiles, the drill sergeant, played by Lee Ermey...
is good to talk about for a moment.
It's obviously assumed that it's a tribute...
to Full Metal Jacket, which it obviously is.
I mean, Full Metal Jacket is a great film...
and it was a huge kick to actually shoot this stuff with Lee...
but it never started out that way.
When we were originally writing the screenplay, we had the idea...
of the drill sergeant in the cemetery.
We had our ghosts who were in the cemetery...
and I thought it would be kind of fun if they were all kept in line by a drill sergeant.
And so, we started to write the scene...
and in writing the dialogue of the drill sergeant...
You know, Fran and I had obviously seen Full Metal Jacket a couple of times.
And so, we were writing it in the rhythms...
of the character from Full Metal Jacket and the same...
'Cause he's obviously the greatest example of the drill sergeant ever put on film.
When we came to audition actors, we actually thought...
that this was a role that we would cast in New Zealand...
because we couldn't afford to bring out American actors to New Zealand...
for every single character in the film, and so...
we auditioned several New Zealand actors, and it didn't really work.
We just didn't feel that they were as good, and the idea came very late to actually...
approach R. Lee Ermey who did Full Metal Jacket...
and I just guess I assumed that he'd never wanna do it, or he'd be unavailable, and...
And we did. We asked Lee, and he said, "Sure, it sounded fun."
I mean, he had a really good sense of humour about it...
and was very happy to come to New Zealand and reprise that character again for us...
so that was a huge thrill, doing those scenes.
I remember this cemetery stuff was kind of a little difficult at the time to shoot, too.
Not because of filming it, but because this hole that we dug here is actually...
You know, it's a real hole that we dug in this very old cemetery.
Now, the cemetery is so crowded that when we asked the grave diggers...
or the cemetery authorities if we could dig this grave...
they were kind of a little dubious because they'd lost...
the plans of the cemetery because it's so ancient.
It's like over 100 years old, and they weren't sure where graves actually were...
and where they weren't, and things had gotten moved around a little bit...
and, when they dug this hole for us, I remember the guy came over, and he said:
"Look, we've dug you a hole, but don't stamp too hard...
"on the bottom of it because it sounds a little hollow underneath...
"and we've dug it about as deep as we can go. "
And so, we had to shoot this thing in this hole...
where there may well have been, you know...
something very close to the base of it.
I know that when they were digging a hole for us...
they actually found a coffin handle in the dirt, so...
Anyway, we shot our scene and filled it up and got out of there as fast as we could.
Frank!
I know you can hear me.
Get me out of this hole, Bannister.
Frank.
- Get me out of this hole, please. - Hiya, Frank.
- Hey, Walt. - Kind of surprised to see you.
- Here on business, I guess? - Not exactly.
Bannister, they're gonna bury me alive in here.
I understand you and Lynskey had a little run-in...
the night before he died.
Troy Evans does a great job here as Sheriff Perry.
Very, very nice guy and kind of interesting...
because Troy was a Vietnam veteran...
and he is actually very active in veteran affairs in the States.
I think he was Vietnam Veteran of the Year...
the year that this film was made or the year just before.
And, obviously, R. Lee Ermey is a veteran as well...
so it was kind of interesting getting those two guys together.
- You got any theories, Frank? - Bannister!
I always liked the idea right from our original script writing...
of having a guy attending his own funeral. I thought that was kind of funny...
and then falling into his grave and getting filled in.
And it gave us a little bit of a chance to develop some of the rules of the ghost...
I mean the good thing about this character, Ray...
the Peter Dobson character, even though he doesn't have a role to play...
later in the movie... He kind of drops out of the story...
which is, in a way, a little clumsy in terms of...
It would've been nicer if he hadn't dropped out...
but he gives us a good opportunity to establish some of these rules...
about who can see ghosts and who can't and what it's like to be a ghost.
Mr. Bannister, did you wanna see me?
There's just something interesting in these shots.
If you look behind Trini Alvarado in one or two of these shots...
you can see a little red fire glowing on the hillside.
There it is, just behind her head, on the left hand side of the screen.
There's a little orange fire, out of focus, in the distance.
Now, that's actually Frank Bannister's house burning down.
Now, this scene was one of the last that we shot in Lyttelton...
before we went back up to Wellington.
We'd finished shooting all of Frank's house.
The best way to get rid of it was to burn it...
so, on this day that we were shooting down here, the guys were up on the hill...
burning his house down, and it got into the background of a couple of these shots.
How's that for a piece of absolutely useless trivia?
This is the rainy night that was the same day as we were shooting...
the cemetery stuff. We had to go and do that shot.
It was freezing cold.
Now, the restaurant, oh dear, this is another one of these big long scenes.
Pages and pages of dialogue with people sitting around the table.
I don't like these scenes. We seem to...
put in quite a few of them in the movie. We have to try and avoid it next time.
This one was made actually a lot more fun to shoot...
because of the fact that we had one of our characters as a ghost.
It was a sequence that we shot a little earlier than we planned to...
the reason being that Michael Fox had hurt his foot...
sprained his ankle, and we actually found out later that he had broken...
a couple of bones. He fractured a couple of bones in his foot.
He was doing a scene, which we will see later on, in the forest...
where he slipped and fell down a bank.
His foot was very sore, and he couldn't wear shoes.
He had to walk with a walking stick.
And we were intending to shoot quite a bit of action...
and we had to look at what else we could film instead.
And this scene was planned for later, but we...
had to build the set very quickly. They hadn't even finished the set...
so, like, people were working 24 hours a day to finish building the set...
so we could at least shoot this scene and hope that Michael's foot would heal.
So he was in a lot of pain when we were shooting this stuff.
You know, it was actually quite a difficult effort for him...
to get up and down on his chair and just to walk onto the set.
Obviously, you can't tell when you're looking at the scene...
but he was a real trouper about that.
I really like Michael's performance in this stuff. I think he's really good.
I don't know. They say that...
sometimes when you have a traumatic experience...
that it can alter your perception.
Really, so after that you could just see spirits?
I mean, what happened?
The restaurant scene had a little bit of extra stuff at the end of it...
that we shot but we never...
put into the movie and I haven't put it into this version, either...
because it featured the reaper and since we never did the reaper's stuff...
for the shots, it'd be pointless putting in here...
but the idea was that after...
Frank has gone into the bathroom and had the experience...
of seeing the guy dying in the bathroom...
he comes back into the restaurant again.
At the moment, we cut out of the bathroom and just go to something else...
but we shot this scene where he comes back in...
and he says to Lucy that something's wrong...
and she says, "What?" And at that moment...
the reaper actually oozes out of the wall behind Lucy...
and it looks like Lucy's gonna be the next victim...
and he doesn't know what to do.
And then, suddenly, the reaper swoops away...
and goes out the window and leaves...
and Frank rushes out.
We didn't feel we really needed this scene...
that it felt like this whole sequence ended fine...
just getting out of it in the bathroom.
He said he was sorry, but he wanted to leave you alone...
let you get on with your life.
I swear to god...
This was a real tough scene for the actors to do...
because obviously there's some quite tight timing between all the bits of dialogue...
and the way that we had shot this is we had Trini Alvarado and Michael...
on the set, and Peter Dobson, playing Ray, was off to the side.
And so, as they were talking, he could still throw his dialogue...
into the mix and everyone could still time off of each other.
And we were just hearing his voice...
and shooting an empty space between the sets...
between the other two characters. And then, we would shoot...
Peter's stuff later against blue screen and he would have to act...
to a playback of Michael and Trini's voices from that...
From the original shoot.
I can move shit, Bannister.
Man, you better watch your back.
I better clean this up.
The restaurant set here was a Wellington set...
but this bathroom is actually back down...
in our old friend Lyttelton.
Again, in Lyttelton, we have so much rain that we decided...
since we were spending so much time running indoors from the rain...
that we should build a set to shoot while it was raining...
and this bathroom scene, right, the ideal set to build, since it was...
not too big, and we could just rent a warehouse or something near our location.
And so, we ended up renting a fish factory in Lyttelton...
which is this, you know, coastal fishing port, and the factory stunk of fish.
It was like absolutely reeking of fish, and I don't like fish, but...
And it was real tough to work in that, so if you can just imagine...
when you're watching all that stuff, this incredibly strong smell...
of old rotting fish...
that was filling this place up, it was kind of difficult.
It's always difficult...
too, in movies when you're trying to introduce your villain.
You know, I agonised about the best way to bring the reaper.
At one stage, I thought the reaper should be perched on top of the stalls...
kind of like peering down at them, but then...
we got this idea of this mirror gag, and this was...
really pulled off incredibly well by Gray Horsfield...
one of our CG supervisors who came up with the idea...
of the rippling mirror and doing all that computer stuff...
so I thought that was kind of quite creepy in the end...
and I thought it worked out really well.
This tunnel of light is...
something that we put into our script that was...
kind of based on reality. There's so many different people...
who have had experiences about dying.
These are people that have been revived again...
so they can tell us what happened, but their experiences are all...
kind of similar, where they feel like they've...
floated out of their body, and they've gone up to a tunnel...
and they've seen loved ones, and they felt themselves being pulled up this tunnel...
so, in the movie, we felt that we should try...
and create a fairly accurate representation of that.
Here we are back on this miserable cold day again...
the one that we shot our credits on.
This building here is in Christchurch in New Zealand.
It is a restaurant. It used to be a private house, I think.
It's got the sign of the takahe.
Looks like another heart attack.
A lot of people have asked me what happened to Melanie Lynskey...
the young actress that we had in Heavenly Creatures.
People were interested in whether she's been in any more films...
or if she intends to continue acting, and she certainly does.
She did a little cameo for us or a walk-on part, really, in The Frighteners.
Here she is, right here, escorting Trini past the camera.
When Heavenly Creatures finished, Mel had to finish her schooling...
because we'd basically plucked her out of school to do the movie...
and she had studies to finish...
and she spent two or three years finishing up that, doing university.
And she was actually at the university in Wellington at the time...
that we shot The Frighteners.
And so, we've stayed in touch with her, and we said:
"Why don't you come down and do a little cameo in the film for us...
"just for fun?" And she did. She was very happy to do that.
And so, she's in this scene, and she was in...
She's in a scene that's coming up a little bit later on, just in the background.
Look at that.
I like the idea of this reaper flitting around...
almost like a bird. He can almost, like, glide.
He doesn't actually have to run on his feet.
And the stuff where he sort of leaps over the rooftops and things...
that we see later on, was really where that idea worked best.
It didn't work that well with the chasing down the road.
I liked the idea of him being chased and, sort of, him running on his hands...
instead of his feet, but we never really shot enough...
of that stuff to sell that idea very well.
So the Agent Dammers's scene coming up...
with the great Jeff Combs... There he is.
What a great guy. This is...
This is...
It makes me laugh whenever I see him doing this stuff.
I think he does it so brilliantly well, these shots.
Dammers was a character that Fran and I wrote...
without imagining an actor...
in mind, but we knew it had to be someone really good...
who could just sell the... This stuff's great, too.
This stuff's great.
It was Jeff's idea to have these ear-extension things...
that were behind his ears, that stuck his ears out like that...
which I just find really funny when I see it.
I was going to take the flight, but I didn't feel good about the plane.
At what time...
This is another scene where...
it's just a lot of explanatory stuff about the plot...
and this is definitely a scene where it's not shot on anything...
remotely approaching a dynamic way, but I didn't have to...
because these actors were just so great that this is definitely...
you know, one of those sequences when you've got...
a character as powerful as Dammers that you can just pretty much...
let the character do...
their thing and not have to stress out too much.
I guess I just like moving the camera around so much and keeping...
a fluid action that whenever I don't do it...
I start to get sweat on my palms.
I start to worry that it's not going to be interesting...
but I certainly didn't have any such worries on this scene.
This moment's great, too.
Sorry, Sheriff.
I have a problem with women yelling.
Milton, can I get you anything?
Sheriff Perry!
You are violating my territorial bubble.
Now, Troy Evans there, who plays the sheriff, and Jeff...
used to do theatre together a long time ago.
I don't know the exact story, but they're basically old friends...
who've, like, known each other for 15 or 20 years.
And so, they were really thrilled to be actually working together.
I don't think that they've ever been in a movie together.
And so, the stuff between the sheriff and Dammers...
worked really well because they were old buddies.
Jeff Combs did an enormous amount of work on the character of Dammers.
I know that...
You know, we'd written, like, a weird guy in our script.
And our dialogue was kind of weird, but, you know, weird is one thing...
but to actually be able to put it on screen in a way that...
It's important. I mean, The Frighteners is obviously a...
Tonally, it's a combination of a comedy and a horror film.
I can actually talk a little more about the tone later...
but a character like this is walking a real tight rope.
I mean, the actor is absolutely balancing on...
a tight rope between comedy and drama, and to actually...
go too far in one direction could seriously undermine the scene...
and Jeff just does this stuff so incredibly well.
Was overseeing the construction...
He has got such a lot to say and I just find it always...
captivating to watch him onscreen.
...later confirm that Bannister had been consuming alcohol that morning.
12:23 p. M...
Platz sees Bannister in a heated argument with his wife, Debra.
It appears that Bannister had promised Debra a garden in the new home.
These flashbacks were kind of fun to shoot, the stuff with Michael.
He's wearing a wig. I think it's quite an effective wig.
I think he quite enjoyed wearing it...
to make it look like it's back in the early '80s...
or wherever it's supposed to be.
Platz watches the couple drive away.
The actress who's playing Frank's wife there...
is a New Zealand actor called Angela Bloomfield...
who has a leading role...
in one of, well, New Zealand's only soap opera, really, Shortland Street.
She's very popular.
She's been in Shortland Street, I guess, for several years...
five or six years since the series started...
and it was fun to work with her and to...
Even though she didn't really get to say any dialogue...
she still creates a very memorable presence as Frank's wife.
...you're mumbling. We can't understand a word you're saying.
12:33 p.m., and their '84 Volvo heads into the hills.
It is the last time anyone will see the couple together.
Now, by Bannister's own admission, the argument continues to rage...
reaching a climactic point when Debra demands that Bannister stop...
The sequence...
which covers the death of Frank's wife...
was something that again...
we kept working on it, on and off, on the script, and at one point...
I know that she was gonna die of gunshot wounds...
and when Lucy finds the murder weapon in the closet at the house later on...
it was going to be a shotgun or a gun...
with Frank's name engraved on it, rather than his construction knife...
which is what we ended up using.
This is again another piece of story that doesn't kind of hang together.
And so, since it doesn't hang together that well...
at least I get an opportunity to kind of explain it to everybody here...
which is kind of unique, I mean.
The concept was that Frank and his wife were driving up this forest road...
which was supposed to be kind of close to the Bradley House...
where Patricia and her mother lived.
Patricia, who was psychotic...
and not kept under control by her mother that well...
had deliberately put some sort of a log...
or a tree across the road to cause Frank to drive off the road...
and then had proceeded with Johnny's help...
to kill Frank's wife...
and this is all stuff that Frank has kind of blocked out of his mind.
Although, as the story unfolds later, he remembers more of this...
and he pieces it together, and he realises...
that Patricia was directly responsible for his wife dying and...
That sort of fundamental thing, we never really got across.
I can't actually remember why, but we didn't put the shot in the movie...
where he sees the log across the road and has to swerve...
and we didn't really sell the idea that clearly, I don't think...
that Patricia had engineered the car crash, which was a fairly important thing to sell...
and probably has confused a lot of people because it's not there.
The shot we've just seen at the museum was actually...
a little miniature museum that Richard Taylor made and...
the museum that Michael is about...
to drive up to here is the Wellington Museum...
which was subsequently closed.
There's a big modern museum that's been built on the harbour...
which is opening next year.
And this is an old museum that I used to go to when I was a kid.
Although now we're into a studio set. This is not the real museum.
I wanted this museum to actually be built a bit like the old Wellington Museum...
because it has been replaced, as I say, by this new one.
And I'm a big fan of museums being old Victorian barns...
big old stately halls, you know, like a lot of the museums in the States and in Europe.
I don't like modern museums.
They have a whole different approach to what a museum's all about...
and I just love these big old echoey chambers...
and so this is the one that we created for the film...
sort of a tribute to the Wellington Museum that is no longer there.
Are you threatening me?
No, that's not what I'm saying.
- He's threatening to kill me. - Just relax, all right?
- Just listen to me and... - He's threatening to kill me.
Scenes like this are kind of difficult to shoot, too...
because you've got all these extras and you're always hoping...
that, you know, none of them are going to look at the camera...
and that all of the extras are doing the best performance possible.
You tend not to concentrate on what the extras are doing...
when you're shooting the film.
You're always looking at the principal actors and sometimes...
when we look at the rushes, you see an extra in the background...
who's doing something silly or they're not performing that well.
And as soon as I see that they're the people...
that my eye goes to every time I see the movie.
I look for these extras that are not doing the thing as well as they should do...
but this crowd wasn't too bad...
and I think we got most of it. Most of this stuff looks fine.
Great.
I did it.
John Astin does a great job as the Judge.
Rick Baker designed his makeup.
Rick's someone who I've known for a few years.
He and his wife are friends of Fran and I...
and we never worked together before...
but he was very happy to help us on The Frighteners...
and just had John Astin come into...
his workshop in Los Angeles for a few visits...
and created this look for the Judge for us.
And then Brian Penikas...
who's a makeup guy that occasionally works with Rick...
came out to New Zealand to apply it on Rick's behalf.
Good catch.
I like the idea of a gunfight in a museum...
where all these fragile artefacts are being blasted apart by the cops.
Freeze!
This stuff was kind of fun to shoot.
Quite a bit of this mummy stuff was shot by our second unit.
Because we were running out of time on the film...
we gave some of the stuff to our second unit to shoot.
The Frighteners shot in New Zealand for about six months...
which is a very long shoot.
I mean, often a movie takes three or four months to shoot.
This gag is funny. This does make me laugh.
I like it when they lie still like that.
I think it offended quite a few people.
I don't know why. There's no why.
Anyway, we shot for six months and it was a lot longer than a normal film shoot...
mainly because of all the ghost shots.
Because you literally are shooting the same scene twice.
You're shooting it once with the real actor, as it were...
and once with the ghost actor.
And it takes twice as long to shoot.
Judge!
At this point in the story...
the Judge pretty much drops out of the movie...
and that was never the way it was originally intended...
and we shot a lot of footage with the Judge.
We wanted his character to continue on...
on and off throughout the film.
And, as it was, when we came to cut the movie...
we didn't have time just to keep the Judge going in all of his scenes.
And they were delightful scenes but they just...
were not directly related to the plot in enough way to justify...
keeping them in the movie...
so I haven't put them into this special edition version, either.
But we do have a section in the documentary about...
the deleted Judge scenes...
which I've tried to put just about everything...
that we shot of the Judge into that sequence of the documentary.
So you should definitely check that out. Have a look at that.
The gag that we've just seen of Stewart coming out of the exhaust pipe...
was a lot of fun.
I wish, in some respects, that The Frighteners had more of those gags.
We had this great, you know, thing available to us...
of these ghost characters who could be bent and chopped up and vaporised...
and still bounce back again.
And we did it a few times, you know, like I was talking about earlier, in the house...
and then that exhaust pipe gag was kind of fun...
but I felt that we probably could have exploited that a lot more.
This is the sequence, here, where we should've had the log across the road...
where Michael looks and sees the road ahead.
I don't know why we never did. It was bit of an oversight.
That car crash, there was a guy actually driving the car.
Most people would probably think that we just somehow took the car over by itself...
but that was Charlie Croughwell...
Michael's stunt guy who was actually behind the wheel doing that.
Pretty brave guy. Not the sort of way I'd like to earn my money, I tell you.
This particular sequence...
was shot on the night that Michael hurt his foot.
We were shooting this very late one night.
It was one of those situations where you're shooting at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning.
And on the shot that's coming up now...
Michael had to run and leap off a bank.
This shot here.
And he leapt...
and landed very awkwardly. There's the leap.
And he just landed very awkwardly. It was like landing with his foot...
on the root of a tree or something.
And he twisted his ankle quite badly.
I mean, the fortunate thing that night...
was that we'd almost finished shooting the scene.
Except there was one major shot to go and it just...
unfortunately, was a shot of Michael running through the trees.
But he was very good about it. His foot hurt like hell but we had to get the shot done...
so that we didn't have to come back to this forest...
and film it again in the future.
So he said, "Absolutely, we should do it."
And you can see here, where he jumps up and runs...
that he's kind of limping.
And that was the best take.
We did it two or three times and each time his foot was just getting sorer and sorer...
and so we had to use take one.
And after that, as I was talking earlier about the restaurant scene...
his foot swelled very badly.
It was impossible for him to walk on it for a period of time...
and obviously when somebody has a sore foot like that...
the best way that you can get it better is to actually just rest...
is to not use it, is to put your foot up and not do anything.
And so, once we finished shooting the restaurant scene...
which was kind of the only thing we could do with Michael sitting down...
we had to close the shoot down for...
I think we closed the shoot down for at least a week, maybe nine or ten days...
in order to give Michael time just to rest and to get better.
Because we had all of the action sequences in the third act of the film...
the end of the film to shoot.
And it was kind of all we had left at that point...
and it was actually a very good break in the end...
because it gave Fran and I time just to work on the script...
and do some revisions to scenes that were coming up.
And it gave us all time to have a break...
because six months is a very long shoot.
And it was a great time for the crew to recharge their batteries.
And so, in hindsight, it was a, you know...
not a bad thing to have happened.
Not good for Michael, necessarily...
but worked out good for the movie, as a whole.
I was doing my job.
And I don't give a damn about you. I don't give a damn about anybody.
- What the hell are you saying? - Go home.
Okay.
I thought this scene worked really nice...
with Michael and Trini. Really nice performances.
The sequence coming up here, with Trini getting into a car...
is another little extra piece...
that we put on to the special edition of this film.
Got a kiss for honey bunny?
We wanted to get a sense that her dead husband, Ray...
is still hanging around. I mean, I kind of liked the idea that...
Of someone who's getting stalked by her husband...
without knowing it.
And he's just...
You know, he, sort of, somehow thinks that he still has ownership over his wife...
even though he's dead.
It was an idea that was kind of funny, and we played around with it a bit here.
...lately I don't feel that you've been giving 100%.
There has been a destructive force...
This was a fun scene to shoot.
This was a scene that we shot relatively quickly.
It only took us about half a day to shoot the whole of the scene.
And, again, it was just totally...
swung off the performances of Michael and Jeff.
I did a lot of shooting of the scene with a hand-held camera...
just to try and give it a slightly...
Ioose, kind of, documentary style.
I think hand-held is really a fun way to go sometimes...
although it's good to pick and choose the moments in the film when you use it...
because it does have a slightly different feel to, you know...
normal dolly or crane shooting.
...the hell out of this room.
Also, I use a lot of wide lenses in this scene.
Wide-angle lenses, which is what I tend to favour normally, anyway.
But, for a character like Dammers, a wide lens is a very good way...
of making him just seem a little bit more kooky and quirky.
The idea here, of him having some sort of a problem with his butt...
is one that...
I can't remember whose idea it was. I don't think it was in our script.
I don't think it was actually written or described in the script, but I always...
thought it would be kind of funny.
I always had this term, "anal-retentive," in mind for Dammers.
When we were writing it was like, "He's anal-retentive."
And just the word "anal"...
kind of got to me a bit, and I thought:
"Well, maybe, the guy, because he's gone undercover for so long...
"and he's been on all these assignments into these weird cults...
"and with weird initiation ceremonies that he's had to go through and endure...
"in order to stay undercover, before he cracks the case...
"that his butt has probably suffered extreme damage...
"at some stage...
"for the glory of his country...
"and that if he had problems in that area, it might just be a nice little character thing. "
And Jeff pulled it off brilliantly well.
There's another part of you, Frank...
that's out of control.
Your destructive impulse.
I've seen a figure in a cape.
I've seen him reach into people's chests and squeeze their hearts.
Who was it?
This was really nice, what Michael was doing here.
It's interesting.
You can't see it so well on the video.
It's better on the big screen, but Michael's eyes are incredibly bloodshot.
They're very, very red.
Very, very red, which was his idea...
to give them this look of someone who has really gone through hell...
and psychological hell and is a guy on the edge.
And the way that Michael did that...
it was Bron Roylance, Michael's makeup guy, who had this thing.
I've never seen it before and I can't even tell you exactly what it was...
but it was these crystals that he dissolved in some liquid and he blew...
just blew the gas into Michael's face.
Must be some, like, some sort of mild form of tear gas or something...
and it actually, just kind of like, sent Michael's eyes...
in this really weird bloodshot way.
And Bron used to do it to Michael just before we rolled the camera...
for this stuff...
which was really quite effective, but a lot of it is lost on video, unfortunately.
You killed your wife.
No!
I have studied the coroner's reports...
of every death in Fairwater since 1985.
Twenty-eight cases involved crushed hearts.
Arteries choked until they burst.
That started in 1990 with your...
beautiful wife, Debra.
She was the first.
Ray Lynskey.
You have an argument with him, three hours later, dead.
The large close-ups that we're looking at here...
are something that I kind of quite like doing.
I did one on Heavenly Creatures, where we...
There was a big close-up of the doctor's mouth...
on Heavenly Creatures and...
I just thought it was kind of nice to be able to...
break a scene like this up and get some shots in there...
that are just a little bit different, since there's such a lot of dialogue again.
Shooting the big eyes and mouth was really difficult.
We kind of got a really bad case...
of the giggles when we were shooting it...
and we show you a bit of that stuff in the documentary in the blooper section.
Now this breastplate that Dammers is about to reveal, if you look really closely...
there's actually nipples on it.
I kind of always thought that was very, very funny, that this guy presumably...
has beaten this thing out of lead.
He's been, like, in his garage, or his bedroom...
quietly in the middle of the night...
tapping this lead sheet into the shape of this breastplate...
and he actually took the trouble to put nipples on it...
which I kind of thought that was a really nice little twisted trait for Dammers.
The shot here that you're seeing, is one great big, long shot that we did...
that we never put into the theatrical version.
In fact, this whole sequence was not in the theatrical version...
of the ghosts finding Frank in his cell.
Again, just for pacing reasons, it was taken out, but it's quite a nice little shot.
I really liked the idea of following the ghosts...
as they moved through a series of walls...
and actually get right into the heart of the prison and into the guy's cell.
These guys are gonna stitch you up on a capital offence.
And we wanted to...
obviously, keep Cyrus and Stuart in the story...
because they had been set up earlier and we wanted to make sure that...
they stayed as important characters through this section of the film.
And it also did something else, which was nice...
which we kind of lost in the theatrical version...
in that Michael has lost his ability to see his ghosts.
He's been so psychologically traumatised by what's happening...
that he can no longer even see these guys anymore.
...the acceptance stage.
This is a nice little scene that Jeff played.
Seeking resolution.
You realise, Agent Dammers...
I loved the way that he turns and walks away from camera here.
It's just something that he does that always appealed to me in this shot.
Again, it's not one that ended up in the movie...
but just have a look at this, when he suddenly turns and walks away.
They always do.
I don't know, just something about the walk.
I mean, that's the sign of a great actor, in my opinion...
is someone who can turn and walk out of a room...
and absolutely sell a character like that.
It is something that I really admire a lot.
The sequence, here, was filmed back in Lyttelton again.
The rain was real rain, believe it or not, that we were looking at there.
It wasn't anything that we added...
although we did put some strategic drips and things into some of these buckets.
This sequence, in our mind, was a very important one...
in that it was really showing the character of Lucy...
what Frank's home life is like.
And it was kind of fun to have the husband, Ray...
sort of as a counter in the scene...
really to vocalize what the audience were thinking.
I mean, look at this place. It's a dump.
God, this guy's a loser.
Now this is a little piece that didn't end up in the theatrical version...
where he finds the plans to their house.
At that moment, he realises that they were set up.
That it was Frank that set them up.
We cut it out of the movie because it's not important that he ever finds this out.
It's not really a piece of information that we needed for the film.
And so we trimmed it out.
I always liked this little lyrical moment, though...
of the note just sort of...
drifting out and it actually motivates her to find this garden...
in the back of Frank's house.
Now this garden was something that never existed in our script...
and we put it in the movie about two or three days before we were due to shoot it.
And the art department had to quickly go and get some lawn...
and actually make this garden up for us because it was a last-minute idea...
that it go in the movie.
And it's referred to earlier when he puts his concrete basketball court there...
and his wife wanted a garden...
and after she dies he replaces the concrete with a garden.
We thought it was a nice character thing...
and it was good having in the movie and it was just, as I say, a last minute...
thing that went in only a day or two before we were due to shoot it.
He's in this house at her instigation.
Help me. Help me drive them out.
The house that you're looking at here...
is not a real house.
It was put onto a flat piece of ground...
that was in front of this old building that we used for a hospital.
The hospital itself is a real building, but we just wanted this Bradley house to be...
out on the front somewhere. This used to be an old school in fact.
It was a Catholic girls' boarding school...
which is what the big stone building is, in the background there.
And so we put this in front.
I always find, when I look at movies and I see that there's buildings that have been...
placed there by the moviemakers...
they never look completely real to me.
And that one doesn't look completely real, either.
Something to do with the fact that it just doesn't seem to belong there.
It looks as if it's been added on...
which is interesting because we're working on a movie now that needs...
quite a few buildings to look like they've been in this rustic sort of setting.
And what I'm thinking of doing is actually building them...
like, seven or eight months in advance...
and just leaving them there for seven or eight months...
and letting the weeds grow and the grass grow around them...
and actually, I think that will ultimately give us a much more realistic look...
than anything that can be done in a fake kind of way.
She needs help. She's delusional, Patricia.
You can't go on like this.
Dee Wallace-Stone really plays this character well...
in the sense that she is the red herring role...
the character who we really wanted an audience to sympathise with...
and then suddenly reveal that she's the villain.
I think she does that really well.
She does it in such a way that when you see the movie a second time...
I think you can sort of...
get a sense of who she really is and yet she's putting on this front...
that you bought into the first time round.
I think that works really well.
Oh, my God.
The urn that we're seeing, the urn with the ashes in...
was another script idea that was put into the movie at the last minute...
that was never in our original script.
And we felt, as we were shooting the movie...
that we needed some sort of a device...
a McGuffin, they call it in script writing terms, which is a Hitchcock term.
It's basically something that all the characters are focusing on.
We needed a McGuffin for our third act...
when Michael and Trini run into the hospital.
And we thought that having Johnny's ashes...
and carrying them to a chapel in the hospital...
would be a really good thing to concentrate on.
In the original script, all that was happening was...
they were being chased into the hospital, which didn't seem to work that well.
This isn't you.
This isn't who you are now.
In one of our earlier drafts of the script...
when they open the suitcase...
there was actually a lot of pills in the suitcase.
And Patricia was saying to Lucy that her mother keeps her drugged...
which obviously makes the mother look really bad.
And they're drugs from the old hospital and that's terrible...
but what we were hoping would happen is that...
an audience would realise that they were drugs that were necessary...
because Patricia was so psychotic that her mother was actually...
doing the right thing for humanity by keeping her sedated.
But, in the end, we decided to get rid of the whole idea of the drugs...
and just have some old newspapers in the cupboard.
Julianna McCarthy does a really wonderful job as Old Lady Bradley.
She has just a wonderful air of...
sort of, menace and intensity about her.
I think she used to be in The Young and the Restless...
several years ago.
Though I can't say I ever watched it.
This was supposed to be an important plot point...
where Lucy finds one of Frank's knives in the house.
The logic behind it got a bit jumbled...
because the idea was supposed to be that it's supposed to clarify...
that Frank's wife was actually killed by Old Lady Bradley...
but I don't think that ever really came across very clearly.
I always loved this shot of the wallpaper man that's coming up.
I think this one works really well in terms of its creepiness.
As always, it's great in movies to see something...
coming up behind a character without them knowing.
I always wanted to try and get a feeling of the wallpaper man being like a spider...
being like a crawling spider.
And I guess that shot probably is one of the most successful ones at doing that.
Here's another example of CG splatter.
It would be great. A CG splatter film would be a cool thing to do one day. Definitely.
This location is in Lyttelton high street...
and it's actually the town's public library...
dressed up as a sheriff's office.
And when she runs inside it's obviously back to our Wellington studio again.
Frank.
Thank you, Deputy.
Just call me when you're done, Dr. Lynskey.
Yes.
Frank. Frank, listen to me. I found your knife.
It was hidden in old lady Bradley's closet.
She's crazy, Frank.
You haven't hurt anybody.
You're a good person, Frank.
Don't do this.
Please don't do this.
Jesus, do you think that you're the only person...
who's ever lost somebody?
God, you walk around like you don't have any feelings...
but the truth is that you're just scared.
You're a goddamn hypocrite. Why are you doing this?
What are you afraid of, Frank?
I don't want to...
The sequence in the cell...
is a scene that was nightmarish to shoot...
and it shouldn't really have been quite that way.
I was hoping to do a really effective action scene here...
which I don't think really came off anywhere like I hoped it would.
And not because of any reason other than I think it was an idea that, conceptually...
It's one of those ideas that, when you think about it...
it's better than what it actually turns out to be.
And the idea that I had was...
we had this character, the reaper, which is able to move through walls.
It's a frightening spectre that is unstoppable...
in the sense that you cannot barricade against it.
It can just walk through anything...
and, on the other hand, you have these guys in a jail.
So there's no better way of keeping two people contained than a...
you know, a 6 by 8 foot jail cell with a locked door.
And I really liked the idea of two people fighting for their lives...
against the reaper, where they are confined in this little box...
and the reaper's able to come and go, in and out.
And also add in to that mix the fact that there's these two ghosts that turn up.
Cyrus and Stuart turn up to help them.
And I thought the combination of having Michael and Trini stuck in the cell...
with Cyrus and Stuart able to come and go...
fighting or trying to keep the reaper away...
and the reaper is trying to squeeze Lucy's heart to kill her.
I thought all that made up, you know, for the ingredients of a really exciting scene.
So we shot a big fight scene here...
where Michael and Trini were fighting for their lives against this creature...
and what you're gonna see coming up here is very much a shortened version...
of what it was originally intended.
We shot in the cell for days and days and days...
which is a fairly soul-destroying exercise...
just filming in such a confined little space.
And, I don't know, as I said earlier, it was just a scene that I...
I felt in my head would work a lot better and when I saw it cut together...
and the way that we choreographed it and the way that it played...
and everything just seemed to not work as well.
So we basically have a very short version of it here.
This, kind of, is what I was thinking of.
Something like this, but much more exciting.
It never really worked out quite that well.
This is a sequence where we had intended to use...
a guy in a costume to play the reaper.
We were hoping that, to save on the number of CG shots we had to do...
we could get away with quick shots of somebody in a suit.
But it never really looked that good.
I mean, you know, I think the CG reaper's kind of effective...
and I'm very pleased with the way he turned out.
But because the CG reaper had such a specific look...
we couldn't really pull it off...
and have it matching, doing it in a practical way.
So, at the end of the day, I think every shot in the movie is a CG reaper...
instead of anything that's done with a guy in a suit.
He was also able to move in a much more exciting way.
So in a scene like that, where Cyrus was grappling with him...
Chi McBride, who played Cyrus, was just fighting with thin air...
and the animators, who were animating the reaper...
just match him to Chi's movement.
Shit!
What was that in that cell, Frank? I felt something crushing my heart.
Now when I first met Fran Walsh...
and Fran and I have known each other for 10 years...
she used to live in this incredibly dingy Wellington apartment...
in this little back alleyway, which has since been demolished.
But it was not quite demolished when we were shooting The Frighteners...
and we wanted a dingy alleyway so I said:
"Why don't we just use that place where Fran used to live?"
And so, here it is here.
When we used to write The Feebles and Braindead together...
I used to walk up this alleyway to go to her front door...
which was like at the back of an old Chinese restaurant and stuff.
So as a sort of homage to the old days...
where I spent so much of my time...
we shot this sequence in this alleyway right here.
And, as I say, the whole block has been demolished...
about six months ago, so it's gone now, so...
For the rest of my life when I watch The Frighteners, I'm always gonna...
This is always gonna be a very special place to me...
because it's where we used to work, there, for years and years and years.
...you don't have to do this.
Lucy, better close the door.
Hurry up.
I love the way that Trini and Michael play this scene.
The big freezer that we're using here was something that we built.
It's just a set, but we actually built it as a refrigeration unit.
And it's not... The refrigeration wasn't confined to just the freezer room...
because we had to get cameras and crew in there.
Yeah, there's sometimes 10 or 12 people in there along with Michael.
We wanted to be keep it cold...
so we had to actually refrigerate the room outside the freezer as well.
So, in other words, the people were coming and going...
the temperature wouldn't keep rising all the time.
Because I wanted to really get that steam on Michael's breath.
So these were very, very cold days.
All the crew were in, like, Arctic-wear...
with gloves and things, apart from Michael, who was just in his T-shirt.
You can sort of see, with his breath there, how cold it is.
I really liked this idea of somebody...
who basically has to die for a brief period of time but wants to come back.
They're not committing suicide as such.
They're not permanently doing themselves in.
They just need to become a ghost for a brief period of time.
And the idea of freezing themselves, I thought, was kind of interesting.
I'm sure it's totally impossible scientifically.
Although I did hear a story about...
I think there are several stories actually...
about people that have died of hypothermia or been frozen...
that have actually been revived a short time later...
only, you know, several minutes after they died.
...9:00. - Why would we want to do that?
Jeff does this sequence incredibly well.
This was a set that was made and it was full of disgusting...
sort of, medical specimens.
You don't really get to see any of it in the movie.
But we had, as props, we had lots of shelves of jars...
with, sort of, dissected human lungs and various horrible bits and pieces...
in them that was all part of the dressing.
I like this shot. It was...
It was a moment that I thought would be quite powerful.
And I think it works pretty well, where the ghost frees itself from the body.
The idea now of ghost law because there hasn't been that many ghost movies...
not comparatively.
It's quite good because you have a lot of freedom and flexibility...
to make up your own rules.
It's not like a vampire film with all the garlic and the stakes in the heart...
or a werewolf film with silver bullets and things. Ghost films...
You know, you can...
A lot of ghost films treat ghosts in different ways and so there are no real rules.
And so, I like the idea that, you know, this tunnel of light opens up...
and you get an opportunity to go up it.
But if, for whatever reason, you turn and go in the other direction...
then the tunnel of light clicks off and you're stuck on earth as a spirit, as a ghost.
It's obviously what Michael's done.
The Carpenters tribute song here, that's played by Sonic Youth...
is a piece of music that Fran found.
We just wanted something loud for Dammers to play in the car...
and Fran suggested that.
And we used it in one of our very early temp versions of the film...
which just has temporary music.
And we liked it so much that we got Universal to buy the rights for us...
to use it in the movie.
All of these shots are actually miniatures:
The road, the houses, everything.
All this stuff here, you're looking at models that we were filming...
and just compositing Michael in, shooting him against the blue screen.
This whole sequence of Michael on the road here...
was originally designed as a far longer...
more elaborate scene.
In the documentary, there's the storyboards for this sequence presented.
But due to the timing constraints on the film...
we were just so far behind schedule that to shoot all of this sequence...
was just not going to happen.
So that's very much a shortened version of what I originally wanted to do.
The stuff of Michael being flattened by the truck, I love.
I thought that was so much fun, to be able to take...
you know, a star like Michael Fox...
and to squash him flat under the wheels of a big truck was quite a cool thing to do.
...restful places, don't you?
Turn this car around and take me back.
Now there's a sequence coming up right here...
that was removed from the theatrical version of the film.
And it's the sequence where Dammers reveals...
the Swastika on the palm of his hand.
And this is one of the few cuts that we made...
as a result of our preview screenings.
You know, the preview process where you have to take a film...
and play it in front of an audience...
usually two or three different screenings, to get, you know, an opinion about the film.
And the audiences that we tested The Frighteners with...
came out criticizing this stuff.
They said that they loved the character of Dammers...
right up until the point that they found out that he was a Nazi.
And, obviously, the Swastika is such a potent symbol...
that it suddenly offended people.
And they didn't understand why this guy was a Nazi and they objected to it.
And so we removed that stuff from the film.
And we also had to use a computer...
to remove the swastika from the palm of his hand in a couple of later shots.
Of course, the preview audience missed the point entirely...
because Dammers is not a Nazi.
He refers to being in Spahn Ranch...
to being with Charlie and the family.
That's obviously, we're talking about Charles Manson.
Then we get the idea that his first assignment...
was to infiltrate the Manson cult...
and the Manson cult had the swastika.
Manson, in particular, had the swastika on his forehead.
And so that was all supposed to be a piece of back story...
that he had to have the swastika tattooed in order to successfully infiltrate the cult.
But I guess the fact that, you know, the whole Manson tragedy...
was 30 years ago...
and young kids who go to these previews...
whose opinions the studio relies on, they just didn't know about...
anything to do with Spahn Ranch or the Manson family.
So it just seemed like this was...
an extraneous piece of Nazi stuff that we'd thrown in there for a laugh.
And so we were asked by the studio to get rid of it...
but it's nice to have it back in this special edition...
so at least people can see it.
...painful thresholds of intense physical eroticism.
A lot of these chest tattoos that Dammers has got on...
were ideas that Jeff himself had.
He worked quite closely with Richard Taylor to design the look of the tattoos...
and this stuff was all trimmed out of the movie as well...
where he's trying to talk to Lucy...
and he's obviously very...
fond of Lucy, in a Dammers kind of way.
And I thought that Jeff did some really nice stuff there.
It was a shame to see that stuff get trimmed.
But pain...
has its reward.
This sequence of Michael's character, Frank, returning to the squad car here...
was actually conceived to happen in a slightly different way.
You get a sense of the alternative version...
from the storyboard chapter in the documentary...
and also from the deleted scenes chapter.
There's actually some footage that I've put in there that sort of shows you...
other ways that we conceived this during the course of production.
Frank.
Frank, is that you?
The cemetery is a combination of models and a real cemetery.
Most of this is a real cemetery, another 100-year-old historic cemetery.
I love the idea of Michael actually going into the coffins.
And, originally, I conceived an underground chase which was...
Michael pushing himself through the dirt...
and actually going from coffin to coffin with the Reaper pursuing him.
And we never did that in the movie.
But what we did do was have Michael's character, Frank, push himself...
through several coffins.
And, again, in the deleted sequences chapter of the documentary...
you'll see a little moment of that...
that ultimately didn't survive in the movie.
Who in the hell are you? Sound off like you've got a pair!
Hey, asshole.
This was fun stuff to shoot. It was...
Trini and Jeff were really wonderful at staging this fight.
Trini got incredibly badly bruised because we shot many, many takes of this...
of her climbing over the hood of the car.
And she was a real trouper about it. She never complained.
And she used to come in and show me these bruises that she had the next day...
and try to make me feel guilty about it.
But her and Jeff did a great little fight together.
This CG work here, I won't talk too much about it...
because it is extensively covered in the documentary.
This was, I thought, very effective.
The slimy face that we have of...
Jake Busey's character, Johnny, sliding down the tombstone.
It was a very good combination...
of a performance by an actor and a computer.
Because what you're seeing there is you're seeing a computerised version of Jake.
We filmed Jake saying his dialogue...
and then his face was what they call "mapped."
It was bent over a three-dimensional computer model of a face.
It's almost like it's projected onto it.
And the guy is mainly John Shields, who's one of our computer supervisors.
He did a very nice job of putting that together.
Most of the ghosts that you're looking at here are actually members of the film crew.
This was one of the last things that we shot and we invited any crew members...
who wanted to play a ghost to come up and get into the makeup...
and appear in the movie.
You've got a number.
This is Des Kelly, who's a New Zealand actor, who does a very nice job.
The character's name is Harry Sinclair.
And Harry Sinclair is actually a New Zealand filmmaker...
who's just directed a movie called Topless Women Talk About Their Lives.
And he was in a group called The Front Lawn, he's a friend of ours.
So that's where the name Harry Sinclair comes from.
Shit!
The sequence that we're looking at here, which is called "blob"...
Well, we call it "the blob man sequence"...
was another scene that was never quite as successful as what I hoped it would be.
I liked the idea...
of Frank fighting this creature that's reforming...
and sort of, like, encapsulating him...
and, again, we never got it to, kind of, work quite that well.
The way that this scene was achieved...
is by having Michael fighting his stunt supervisor, Charlie...
who was dressed in a blue leotard...
and then we replaced Charlie with a CG model.
Frank.
That was a moment that I really liked as well...
which was where Frank gets revived...
at the moment that he could have killed the bad guy.
It's just a case of bad timing.
All right, Lucy, come on.
And this is a really great performance by Michael and Trini in this scene.
Very nice makeup, too, by Bron Roylance, Michael's makeup guy.
I really liked the...
I really liked all the little icicles and things.
He's back.
Totally far-fetched, of course...
totally unrealistic, if you think too hard about it, to have somebody...
being revived like this, but never mind, this is the movies.
Lucy, you got to get her out of the house.
Go!
This is the beginning of, I guess, my favourite stuff in the movie.
Whenever I watch The Frighteners, I think, from this point on, I enjoy it the most.
You know, I think the, what you essentially call the third act in the movie...
the stuff from here on till the end is, I think...
the best part of the film.
I think where we needed to spend more time and to do more work on the script...
was all of the earlier stuff...
the stuff with Michael and the ghosts and the setups.
Once we reached this point, things were cooking quite well.
And I was really happy with the way that some of the stuff came out.
I love the lighting in this scene...
and the way that the leaves and the branches of the trees...
are blowing around.
I was, kind of, really happy with this.
The photograph on the wall...
that Lucy looks at here, of the young Patricia...
is actually a New Zealand actress called Nicola Cliff.
And she appears in the movie shortly.
And when we were casting the movie...
we cast Dee Wallace-Stone as the older Patricia.
And we wanted to find somebody who looked like Dee...
at the age of 15.
I remember, we asked Dee to send over some photos of herself as a 15 year old...
which she did.
Some high school photographs.
And using those we sent a casting director out into New Zealand...
to actually look for somebody, a local actress.
And we found Nicola who did have a very uncanny resemblance...
to the young Dee Wallace-Stone, as well as being a wonderful actor herself.
And we'll be seeing her shortly.
That's eight clear of Gacy.
Another nine and we'll have broken Bundy's record.
I thought this stuff worked really well, between Jake and Dee.
This is all good stuff. I was...
I think the creepiest moment in the movie, for me, is this shot here.
We really should wait for Mother.
"We really should wait for Mother." I think that was just...
The way that Dee delivered that line is brilliant.
- He made us look stupid. - You're gonna be okay, Patricia.
- Everything's going to be all right. - Shut up.
That Russian cannibal creep's...
This was some of the fun writing that Fran and I did.
It was at this point in the script that we were...
getting into a territory of black humour. That's something that we enjoy very much.
The way that he says, you know, "This is a record that should be held by an American. "
I don't think an American scriptwriter can probably even write that.
It is a bunch of... It is a couple of Kiwis who were, like, poking a bit of fun...
at America's obsession with serial killers.
Certainly, cinematic obsession anyway.
We were very much aware that we were making a serial killer movie...
in a climate where, I think, everybody's a bit fed up with serial killer movies.
And so, what we tried to do was just to parody and satirise it a little bit.
Patricia...
What we're about to have a look at here is actually...
Danny Elfman's favourite shot in the movie that we had to cut out.
Again, it was a request from Universal.
They felt that the stabbing shot was just a little bit too much...
even though the film was an R rating.
And I know that when Danny Elfman found out that we'd had to take it out...
he was rather distressed about it.
And, certainly, this is a tribute to Danny.
I'm very happy to put it back into the special edition.
I love it when you do that, baby.
And I think it's a really fun shot.
Something I should actually just mention, that I'm sure Danny would want me to say...
is that just be aware, when you're looking at the movie...
that wherever we come to sequences that we've put back into this special edition...
and I think there is about 12 or 14 minutes worth of stuff...
that none of the music was written by Danny for those particular scenes...
because they were cut out.
Before he scored the film, there was no music.
And what we've had to do was take pieces of music...
of his music, from The Frighteners and other places...
and put it into the sequences.
So I'm sure he'd want people to know that it's not his original score that we're hearing.
That's just particularly designed for those scenes. I think it still works pretty well.
We were as careful as we could at making the music match the pictures.
Lucy!
This was the first shot. This shot of Michael running up the stairs...
was the first shot that we shot of him after the break when he hurt his foot.
And so we started with something just to make sure...
that his foot was in full operating condition.
And it certainly was.
And from this point on he had to do an awful lot of running and jumping around.
So having that time off to get his foot better was certainly a very good idea.
The scene here with the painting is one that...
I know that Bob Zemeckis had doubts about.
He always used to say to me, "Well, what exactly is this painting guy gonna do?"
You know, "What's he gonna look like?" He couldn't quite imagine it.
And it was really nice that after we showed Bob the finished movie...
he came up to me and he said that he thought that the painting scene was great.
He was really pleased that we, sort of, we ultimately did it.
'Cause I think, at one point, he was trying...
to talk us out of having it in the film...
because he didn't think it was going to be that effective.
But he actually really enjoyed it in the end.
What?
We gotta get these to the other side.
As I was saying earlier...
that this urn with Johnny's ashes was never part of our original script.
It was an idea that we had at the very last minute.
What was originally gonna happen...
is that these guys were just gonna race out the window and be chased...
by Patricia and end up in the hospital.
It's just one of those things that, you know...
It was Fran that had the sudden idea...
of using ashes of Johnny's.
And so they have to take it to the hospital to get them to a chapel.
It's one of those things that you just wonder why you never thought of it originally...
because it's such an obvious idea to motivate these characters.
And without it, it would have been a scene without a point, really. Just a pursuit.
There's a little bit of extra footage that I've put in here...
that was not in the theatrical version...
just this little scene coming up that we took out for pacing reasons.
This is, kind of, quite cool, though, quite creepy.
The location that we're in here is a real location.
Very little of this is a set.
In fact, the only set is when they end up in the mortuary.
Everything else that you're looking at is a very old building...
called Erskine College, which is in Wellington, in New Zealand.
And it used to be a Catholic girls' high school for many years...
for, like, 100 years.
About seven or eight years ago it closed down...
and it's been abandoned ever since.
And we did add a lot of dust and junk in there...
but, essentially, it's a very old, derelict, abandoned building.
We were filming for about three weeks...
and filming at night time because they had so many windows...
that it was impossible to, like, block the daylight out.
And so we had to, pretty much, film it there at night...
and it was kind of creepy in these big old corridors, to be walking around...
at, like, 3:00 in the morning.
This is great.
I wanted to...
try and have these transitions...
of coming in and out of time...
to be just a little bit different to what we normally expect.
Of course we had a really good advisor on the set, you know, with...
I mean, Michael J. Fox has got to be the expert at time travel in terms of actors.
So Michael gave our stuff the stamp of approval, which was kind of good.
I said, Orderly, are you deaf?
Moron!
I think Jake Busey looks fantastic here...
when he turns around and he does this...
this look at the camera.
It's always...
Those moments when you're shooting the movie...
and you're actually looking in your little video monitor...
which is showing you what the camera's filming...
and you see the stuff, you just know that...
that you've really got it and you can move on to the next shot.
No point doing take 2.
The sequences that we're looking at here...
was actually shot on my birthday.
Just one of those things that sticks in your mind.
Sometimes...
you film on your birthday and sometimes you don't.
I think the last time that I shot something on my birthday...
was actually on Braindead and that was fun...
because that was the lawnmower massacre scene from Braindead that was...
that was like... It was a great thing.
What a great way to spend your birthday.
Here's Nicola Cliff, the young Patricia.
Great little actress. Very, very good in this film.
Has a wonderfully scary...
intensity that just makes those moments work so well.
A lot of the action was really devised around the location...
because, as I said, we were...
shooting all of the stuff in a real building.
This is not a set. It was this old abandoned school.
We walked around and devised...
places and ways in which we could do certain gags.
And Michael Fox was a huge help in that.
Just before we started to shoot the three weeks' worth of hospital material...
I asked him to meet us at the hospital.
Just Fran and myself and Michael...
met up there on a Saturday, I think it was, which was our day off...
and we walked around together and actually...
devised a lot of these situations.
The whole thing that is coming up, with the elevator...
and Lucy in the elevator...
and a lot of the stuff like these corridors and these wards.
You can't script this stuff very well...
because when you're writing you don't know whereabouts...
you're going to shoot it and you're sort of inventing things.
But there's nothing more effective than actually being on a location like that...
and planning certain gags.
And the elevator was never in the script...
that Lucy's running to here.
It was something that we just did because this...
old school happened to have an old iron elevator...
and we thought, "Wow, it'd be pretty cool to include this in the movie.
"What can we do?"
And as it was, it works out really well because it gives us a bit of action...
and it also gives us a great moment later...
where Lucy's trapped in the elevator and Frank...
has to take the urn off her.
I like that moment, the transition between...
the time zones.
The idea that I liked here...
which I don't know whether it comes across in the movie or not...
but I liked the idea that Frank's being hunted down by Patricia.
Here she is here.
And he's in one time zone but she's in another.
And he can't see her because he's sort of locked...
into this 30-years-ago thing.
The idea for the shot, of having Patricia's feet...
appear under the bed, was actually Bob Zemeckis'.
Bob visited the set in New Zealand twice while we were making the film.
He came when we were doing the Lyttelton cemetery stuff...
where Ray falls into his coffin in the funeral early in the shoot.
And then he came and visited us for two or three days while we were shooting this.
It was the only two trips he made during the six months that we were shooting.
And I remember saying to Bob, you know:
"How can I sell the idea that Michael's seeing one thing...
"while he's being hunted by the killer?"
And he came up with the idea of having Patricia's feet below the bed.
The chapel sequence that we're looking at here...
was, again, something that was really devised by...
Fran, Michael, and myself on that walk around the building.
This chapel business was never in the original script.
It was only there because we put in the urn and the ashes as a McGuffin.
So this whole thing came together at the last minute.
But I still think it was very successful.
I kind of, you know, really enjoy all this stuff.
Don't go anywhere.
No.
It was Michael's idea to have the gag...
that we're going to see, where the urn flies up in the air and Dammers catches it.
I thought that was a really good idea.
That's "The Shining shot," as we call it.
So all this just came from that brainstorming session that we had.
- Give that to me. - Let me guess.
You have to get these ashes to consecrated ground...
I think Jeff and Michael play this scene really well.
Give me the goddamn urn, Dammers!
Under no circumstances must these ashes ever be released.
Jeff had really nailed this character by now.
I mean, this was amongst the last of the Dammers' footage that we were shooting.
And he was totally into it...
at this stage.
There's a little bit of extra dialogue...
of Dammers here that we trimmed out of...
the theatrical version.
I thought it was kind of quite funny so I thought I'd just slip it back in here.
...struggle between good and evil...
in order to gratify your pathetic need for self-glorification.
You are such an asshole.
Now we cover this a little bit in the documentary...
but it's worth just talking about it here.
One of the things that happened with the film is that...
we designed the whole movie as a PG-13...
and that was what it was always supposed to be, to be released at Halloween.
As it was, we ended up with an R rated film that was released at summer...
which, you know, was, sort of, circumstances beyond our control.
One of the things that I did when we found out that we had an R...
was to actually do this gag where Dammers gets his head shot off.
That was never designed to be done that way.
It was going to be done just by blasting him back through the door.
We did a computerised head-blasting-off shot once we knew we had an R rating.
The sequence that we're about to look at in the morgue...
the mortuary, is...
again, something that got taken out of the theatrical version of the film.
Now this was what I was talking about way back at the beginning where...
having Patricia chased around the house by Johnny...
was supposed to be a mirror of this scene...
to, sort of, show that these two used to get into these types of games...
which was supposed to explain why...
she appears to be terrorised at the beginning of the film.
This stuff was all just a little bit twisted and sick.
This is where I actually chickened out a little bit.
I decided to take this out 'cause I thought it made the film a little bit too extreme.
They're making love on the dissection table.
But, I mean, looking at it here, it's not too bad, is it?
Frank!
This mortuary room is a set that we built in the studio.
It's the only part of the hospital sequence where we did actually build a set.
I was never particularly happy with the way that this stuff turned out.
This was the one weak area in our script...
and, unfortunately, I shot it in a kind of a weak way as well...
which was supposed to be clarifying who was doing what to whom...
and why they were doing it and how.
Everything sort of turned out to happen the way it did...
with revealing all the surprises about who killed Frank's wife and I never felt...
it worked out quite as well as it should have done.
I love that shot.
I love the idea that these two are lovers now and that the ghost is able to...
sort of, slip in and out of her body at will...
and it kind of turns her on. I always thought that was a pretty cool idea.
No! Get him!
This was a very intense kind of scene to shoot...
and I thought that...
I thought that all of the cast did it incredibly well.
I mean, this is where we wanted the tone of the film to get kind of grim...
to really feel that this was a brutal murder that we were looking at here.
It was funny because...
I realised at one point when we were shooting this...
I realised that we actually killed Michael Fox off twice in this film.
I mean, he freezes himself to death and then we kill him again here...
which is a twist I love.
I love the idea that we can get rid of our main character...
and actually follow him into the afterlife.
But anyway, I was saying to Michael...
I asked Michael at one point, when we were shooting, I said...
had he ever been killed in a film before?
And he thought for a moment and he didn't think he had.
He couldn't remember ever doing a dying scene in a film.
And here he is in The Frighteners, he gets two death scenes in one film.
That was kind of fun.
Dee did this stuff incredibly well.
I'm in the mood for a little vivisection.
It was these scenes that really got us our R rating.
We had a long, drawn out situation...
with the ratings board in which we tried to get a PG-13...
and it was impossible because they couldn't...
tell us what we had to cut out to get a PG-13.
All they could say was it was the overall intensity.
It was really the fact that we had...
a situation in our movie that involved a serial killer...
that involved two killers, in actual fact, who were lovers...
and they were, sort of, getting off on the idea of killing.
And it was just a situation that we all felt...
that it was virtually impossible to get a PG-13...
even though I had shot it for a PG-13 and I hadn't put anything...
in the movie that I thought was going to get us an R rating.
I was very careful...
about what I actually shot.
I tried to do a lot of stuff with suggestion...
and with threat and with menace and with suspense.
But in the end, I, kind of, it was just...
just seemed to be so intense that it freaked the Ratings Board out, which is a shame.
I think the combination of the R rating and the summer release...
really damaged the potential audience.
I mean, we had a lot of fun with The Frighteners...
in the sense that it was designed for Halloween.
It was always, right the way from the time we wrote the script...
all the way through the shooting...
to, well, almost to the end of the shoot.
It was a Halloween movie and it was only at the very end of the shoot...
that Universal came up with the idea of giving it the summer release.
I think would have probably fared a lot better if it had stayed in Halloween.
Johnny.
- Step back, Frank. - Yeah.
This isn't going to be pleasant.
This was a cool little scene...
that one of our CG guys, Gray Horsfield, did almost single handedly at the very end.
I love that shot there.
That shot of the worms going through Jake's eyeballs...
was not designed to be shot like that.
That was an idea that I had...
when I looked at, just, some footage that we had of Jake screaming.
Again, it's a blue screen and I suggested that we have...
this worm threading its way in and out of his eyes like thread through a needle.
That was just because of the look on his face that just gave me the idea.
It's really something, isn't it?
Excellent libraries.
Premium cigars.
And of course, the honeys.
Yeah, how about that? Stu's a regular chick magnet up here.
The shot that we're looking at now of Frank's wife...
Angela Bloomfield is the actress...
coming back to say goodbye to Frank.
This was a shot that we actually did in postproduction.
When we shot the scenes of Michael here...
he was never shot to react to his wife because that was never part of the script.
But the preview audiences all felt...
unanimously, that Frank should see his wife and have a reconciliation with his wife.
And so, fortunately, Michael acted it in such a way...
that we were able to shoot some shots...
of Angela a long time after the end of the shoot...
a long time after Michael had gone home and cut the two together...
and make it look as if it was always meant to be like that.
So we were kind of fortunate that Michael's performance suited it so well...
and we didn't have to get him to come back to do it.
This is kind of a little bit of a sappy happy ending.
I always think it's important to have...
cute, happy endings for heroes that go through so much.
It's a bit like the movie Braindead that I made, or Dead Alive.
You know, the character, Lionel, and Paquita...
the two characters in that, go through such a, sort of...
a lot of stress in the last...
30 or 40 minutes of the film, just as these two do...
that I think it's always, you know, nice...
to come back to a little bit of a fairy tale ending for the movie.
This demolition of Frank's house was done for real.
It was the set that we used for our shooting.
And then we got this machinery in and we destroyed it and filmed it.
And then it was the day after that we burned the rubble down...
and is what was appeared in the back of Trini's shot in the cemetery...
that we talked about earlier.
This was one of the few fine days that we had while we were shooting down there.
Got a bit of sunlight in the movie, finally.
This was actually strange because we were shooting this scene...
about four or five weeks after we started the shoot...
and we had, like, five months still to go of filming.
And that always seems to happen to me. We actually always...
I always seem to film the endings of my films at the very beginning...
which is very, I don't know, scary.
I know on Heavenly Creatures, the scene that we actually shot...
down on those Lyttelton docks...
of Pauline and Juliet being separated on the ship at the end...
where Juliet's sailing away on the ship.
That was shot on the third day of the shoot.
And on Braindead, the scene with Lionel and Paquita...
kissing on the street at the very end of the film...
that was done on the fifth day of the shoot.
And it's very hard for the actors, and for me...
to get my head around the idea of how you're going to wrap up this film...
where you just haven't shot the rest of the movie, and you just...
You've got it in your head but it hasn't happened yet and it's kind of weird.
But it usually seems to work out okay.
I got you, Walt.
I'll see you, Frank. Bye-bye.
Here we go. There's Dammers, who could've come back for the sequel.
If this film was more successful we could have done another film...
that had Dammers as a ghost, but never mind.
One day maybe.
Well, sometimes, Frank, you see...
The closing song...
Don't Fear the Reaper, was a song that we always wanted to have in the film.
We had it in the script. I think we mentioned the song.
Although I liked the idea of getting a New Zealand band...
to do a cover version of it, so we chose The Mutton Birds...
which is a New Zealand band based in England...
who've released a couple of albums...
and are certainly growing in popularity internationally.
They're very big here in New Zealand.
The Mutton Birds did a really nice cover of the song for us...
which was, you know, a nice way for me to end the movie...
with a Kiwi band singing the song.
So, I'm going to...
Going to have to say goodbye to everybody now. The credits are rolling.
And I certainly haven't got a lot to say about the credits.
So, I hope that you...
have enjoyed this commentary and if you haven't seen the documentary yet...
I hope you enjoy that. I had a lot of fun making that.
The reason that the documentary is four and a half hours long is actually...
It was actually supposed to be an hour long and I was supposed to be...
making it very quickly before I got too heavily involved...
in the remake of King Kong...
that I was supposed to be doing.
And what ultimately happened with Kong is it got shelved...
by Universal at the very last minute...
because they were worried about the Godzilla and Mighty Joe Young movies...
that were coming out in the summer of '98 and wanted to put Kong on hold...
so we didn't get into competition with them.
And so suddenly I didn't have anything to do and I...
decided to pour all my energies into the documentary...
and so it kind of just grew and grew and grew...
and got out of control a little bit.
It ended up being this four-and-a-half hour, kind of, epic...
which I hope is not too boring.
I mean, it's ultimately, I'm assuming, that it's for fans of the film.
And, you know, that's who I'm making it for.
Nobody else. And I'm really happy that Universal...
gave me the opportunity to put the whole four and a half hours on the laserdisc.
I thought that they'd probably ask me to cut it down and they didn't.
So I'm really grateful for that and I hope you enjoy it...
and look forward to doing this again some day.
Good. Bye-bye.