[man] This is Jonathan Mostow,
and in this audio track, I'm going to take you behind the scenes
of Surrogates, and try to give you some insight into the making of the movie.
Surrogates is an adaptation of a graphic novel,
and it was my first adaptation that I'd ever worked on.
This story presented some interesting challenges.
The idea of these robotic surrogates, which was in the graphic novel,
was a terrific idea and the basis for making the movie.
The core narrative of the graphic novel
is a film noir detective story,
which is what we obviously have in our film.
However, in the graphic novel, every 20 pages or so
there was this interstitial section
of pages that had nothing to do with the plot,
but filled you in on the world of the movie.
"How did surrogates come to be? How did it change society?"
It was newspaper clippings, help wanted ads...
All sorts of interesting material. It was really quite fascinating.
And the challenge was, "Well, how do we integrate that into a movie?"
Because, in a movie, you can't stop the story
to suddenly fill the audience in on exposition.
So, we had only one place that we could
try to explain the world of the movie,
explain the timeline when this was happening, how it came to be.
And that was this opening title sequence,
which runs about three and a half minutes,
and gives you the evolution of surrogacy.
And, very importantly, tells you when the story is happening.
We made a decision, early in pre-production,
that rather than try to set this movie in the distant future,
which is what the graphic novel was,
we would set this in something that looked exactly like present day.
We weren't going to worry about having to show flying cars
and all the things that are, generally speaking, in futuristic movies.
But as I began to look at a lot of futuristic movies,
realized, ultimately, these things become distracting
from what the core idea of the story is.
So I made a decision that we'd set this movie
in what looks like present day...
...in this case, Boston is where we set the story.
The only difference is is that the world is populated
with these robotic surrogates.
So, you can either watch this movie and interpret that
this is occurring in an alternate reality to our own,
or that this is occurring in the very near future.
But, in either case,
we consciously tried to avoid
distracting the audience with thoughts of:
"What do cell phones look like? What do cars look like?"
All the issues that arise
when you try to set a movie in the "future."
One of the other important points to establish in this opening montage
is that there is a dissident faction
in the world of our story. People that oppose the use of surrogates.
They're led by this character of The Prophet,
played by Ving Rhames.
Whether or not you completely get that in this opening title sequence
wasn't essential.
We figured audience members that paid attention and remembered,
the idea would land.
Otherwise, if you didn't realize this connection
you'd be OK, you'd pick it up in the course of the movie.
We figured it was important enough to get in here
since Ving's character doesn't show up until halfway through the film.
This first sequence was shot at night in Boston.
We chose Boston for two reasons. First, it had a very good tax incentive.
Which meant that we could stretch our production dollars further.
Put more money in the screen.
And second, we liked the look of it for this film.
Boston is an interesting mix of contemporary architecture
with classic buildings that date back to the time of George Washington.
That mixture is very unique
in American architecture, in American cities,
and we felt lended itself well
to the sort of timeless quality we were looking for here.
Interesting thing about Surrogates, is that it has a lot of visual effects.
This has more visual effects than any movie I've worked on.
There's over 800 visual effects shots.
But most of the visual effects in this movie are people.
So you will notice the surrogate characters
tend not to have facial blemishes.
You won't see acne or zits on these people
because they've been digitally removed.
Where there's bags under the eyes, or wrinkles,
again, we tried to address these
as much as we could with visual effects,
to create the illusion that these actors are all robots.
This actor here, playing the character of the assassin,
his name's Strickland, played by a wonderful actor, Jack Noseworthy,
that's been in all my films, he's like my good luck charm.
I always try to find a role for Jack.
He's a great actor and you'll see he does a great job in this film.
This sequence was shot in an old...
...hydroelectric plant in Boston.
We converted it to look like a nightclub for the purpose of our film.
Again, it was the idea of mixing...
...old classic structures in a movie that is set in the future.
I want to talk about the narrative structure of this movie.
We explored a lot of different ideas about how to adapt the graphic novel.
Ultimately, we chose to go with the story
that was in the graphic novel, a film noir detective investigation.
The reason being, that it gave us an excuse
to be able to explore a lot of different aspects of this world.
The interesting thing about this story is the premise.
The idea that most people would stay at home
and live their lives vicariously through these remote operated robots.
So the advantage of having a detective character as your protagonist
is that he can go to different places, like the military
and the company that invented it and all these different things.
And we felt that was, in fact, the most effective way
to explore this world.
And so that's why we begin this movie with what is the traditional form.
Which is, you see the crime, and now here we are meeting the investigators.
Which, in this case, is Bruce Willis and his partner, Radha Mitchell.
One of the things we did in this film was try to not over-explain things.
After we start with the opening credit sequence,
which, of course, is all about exposition,
we then decided to take the attitude that the audience is smart.
And so, for example, you see that severed surrogate
underneath the car when it's picked up.
Or here,
Bruce opens the back of the guy's head, there's a panel and a chip comes out.
We just don't spend a lot of time explaining this stuff.
We figure the audience is smart enough, at this point,
they've seen the opening, they're going to understand what's going on.
Even if they don't completely understand,
they'll get enough of a sense of it.
They'd rather have it be that way, then a stop to overly explain
what all this gadgetry is.
[Greer] What do you got on the girl?
[Mostow] This is our first good look at Bruce Willis in the film.
If you've seen the film, you know that Bruce has two looks in this movie.
He has his surrogate self and his real self.
And the question we faced was how to differentiate those two looks.
We even, early on, talked about: Do we have two different actors?
I decided it really ought to be the same actor, just how can we have
two visual approaches to it?
So, for the surrogate Bruce, we obviously put a wig on him.
And then we digitally made his face look younger.
It wasn't even a question of removing lines in his face,
it was actually restructuring his face, somewhat,
to make him look a good ten to 15 years younger than he is.
The good thing about Bruce is he already is in really good shape.
So for the real Bruce then, it was a question of aging him up a little bit.
Making the lines in his face more pronounced,
making him feel like he had more mileage on him as a character.
[woman] Cam?
[Mostow] This location was a real apartment in Boston.
And the challenge in shooting this sequence
was simply not disturbing the other tenants of the building.
It's a challenging thing when you have 150, 200 crew people
it's the middle of the night, people are walking with walkie-talkies
and bullhorns and giant trucks.
You want to be very conscientious of the fact that
everybody else in the building is sleeping.
And nobody else in the building is benefiting from the movie being there.
The people who own the apartment are getting a location fee,
for everybody else, it's pretty much a massive hassle.
If you haven't noticed, I'll draw your attention to the fact
that we use a lot of very wide angle lenses in this film.
In an age where it's become en vogue to shoot with handheld shaky cam,
I made a conscious decision in the style of this film
to go with a very early 1960's look.
Perhaps influenced by the recent passing of one of my filmmaking heroes,
John Frankenheimer, who did really interesting movies,
The Manchurian Candidate, Seconds,
where he made extensive use of not only various wide angle lenses,
but also something called the slant lens.
Slant lens is a lens where
the glass element in the barrel of the lens
can be rotated so that you can change the plane of focus.
Without getting too technical,
what that means is there's a number of shots in this film
where we have things that would be impossible to hold in focus and film.
There'd be something very close to the camera that's sharp in focus,
then something in the background that's also sharp and in focus.
And it just helps give the movie an arresting look.
Like, for example, this is a very wide lens used for this shot.
And then next thing we cut to this extreme close up
of the water pouring out of the bottle.
And it sets up a rhythm that's just somewhat unnerving.
Hopefully. At least, that's the intention.
It's all subliminal, it's all subconscious,
but it's all designed to make you feel a little bit uneasy.
There's something peculiar going on here.
This is not normal.
And I wanted the audience to have that slightly uneasy feeling
watching the film.
So, an example, a shot like this, again, we have extreme foreground elements,
and yet your attention is also directed on something in the deep background.
I've just always liked that look and had never done it before.
I experimented with it a year previous
in a television pilot that I shot.
We actually went to Panavision
and dug out lenses that hadn't been used since the 1960s.
We used some of the same lenses on this movie, as well.
It was fun for the crew, for my cinematographer, Oliver Wood,
because people don't use these lenses anymore.
They're not in fashion.
But I think they help give this film its unique look.
In terms of the lighting of the movie,
the number one thing was to make sure that the surrogate characters
looked spectacular.
That meant that, generally speaking, were lighting the movie
as if everybody in the movie was an aging movie queen,
like Greta Garbo in her later years, perhaps.
So we had to get
the more stylized look of the movie later in post-production,
in terms of digitally manipulating each of these shots
to give them more contrast...
...more of a dynamic, cinematic look to them.
Because in the actual photography
the important thing was making sure people were lit
so that they didn't have lines, wrinkles or unflattering shadows.
Bruce's apartment was a set that we built.
Everything. Bedrooms, living room,
even the hallway he walks down outside the apartment.
That was all a set built in a warehouse in Massachusetts.
And that afforded us the kind of flexibility of filming
that you don't have when you're filming in a practical location.
Rosamund Pike, who plays Maggie,
Bruce's wife in the movie, is just a dynamite actress.
She played this character...
She modeled it on an airline stewardess from the 1960s,
like a Pan Am or TWA stewardess.
Just totally fluid movements,
even her voice has this wonderful, smooth quality.
And it gives her just that level of unreality
that helps sell the idea that she's a surrogate.
You and me, going away someplace together.
[Mostow] One of the things I instructed the actors in this movie is
never to play it like they're a robot.
Having made a robot movie previous to this one,
I learned that if you try to act like a robot, it's fake.
The key to playing a robot is erasing all traces of human behavior.
Everybody is A-symmetric.
Not only in their behavior, even in their appearance.
And so we made sure that anyone playing a surrogate
didn't have facial tics,
didn't have movements that felt too human.
We even hired a mind coach to help work with myself and the actors
to give training in certain movement techniques
that the actors could use that, again, were very subtle,
but helped differentiate between robot and human.
This shot here of the campus is a little inside Hollywood joke.
That's not a campus, that's actually the grounds of Paramount Studios.
Which, funnily enough, looks more like a college campus
than anything in Los Angeles.
The stim chair that this victim is sitting in
was the subject of a lot of discussion and thought.
It's a key thing in the movie. It's what everybody spends their time in.
And it's actually, essentially, a massage chair that we purchased
and retrofitted to have these laser,
mind-reading devices on it.
So, the idea was I wanted something that looked like it would be comfortable
for people to sit in.
And yet, you could credibly believe is got the technology
to be both reading and transmitting their mental activity.
The design of the headset that the operators use
was another thing that had a lot of thought go into it.
I made the decision that it would be kind of goofy
when we cut to people in their stim chairs
if you could see their eyes, even if their eyes were closed.
So we designed the headsets so that it hides the eyes.
It just helps keep the illusion as believable as possible
that these people are actually doing something active
when they're lying immobile in their stim chairs.
Exactly.
[Mostow] I'll point out the production design in this scene
makes tremendous use of vertical and horizontal elements.
You got all these vertical blinds, you've got all the struts across.
This is why we picked this location.
We really like the tiling on the walls and the ceiling.
And then we brought in all these other elements,
the cubicles, to further enhance that idea.
So you'll notice not only are we using these very wide lenses,
but we're also dutching the camera.
In fact, there's very little in this movie that has an even horizon
across the top of the frame.
Almost every shot in this film is dutched.
...was found dead in his southern California dormitory this morning.
[Mostow] This news piece, and there's another that comes later in the movie,
these were added later in post-production
to help clarify some story points.
We actually went out and hired a real newscaster.
The gentleman there is Kirk Hawkins. He's a newscaster at CBS...
...here in Los Angeles. And I find that actors can never really
do newscasters just as well as real newscasters were.
So, thankfully, Kirk was willing to...
...to help us out.
This location is a real mansion right in downtown Boston,
it dates back to the middle of the 19th century.
You'll notice a bunch of satellite dishes
on the roof in the establishing shot.
Those were added by us in post-production.
Those are all fake computer-generated elements.
Everything else here is real. I loved the detail
of the ornate wood moldings and panelings.
I really liked the ceilings, you'll see in this sequence
and in the next sequence I try to show the ceiling as much as I can.
Great production value. You don't get those kinds of ceilings anymore
in modern architecture.
I also like the idea of
putting a classic location like this that,
frankly, you could only find in a city like Boston,
in a movie with a futuristic premise.
I mean, here's a guy, that we're meeting here,
played by a wonderful actor, James Ginty,
who's playing the surrogate robot
of what's going to turn out to be the bad guy in the movie.
And yet, he lives in this opulent, 19th century palace.
I just found that was a very interesting juxtaposition.
A surrie has to be coded to your neural signature.
I'm not exactly your average VSI consumer.
[Mostow] This is a scene that we wrestled with a lot...
...in terms of the visual effects.
One of the things that I learned doing this movie
is that you have to be very careful
when you change people's faces.
Particularly with somebody like Bruce Willis, who we all know.
I mean, if you live on this planet,
then you know what Bruce Willis looks like, it's a very recognizable face.
So we had to be very careful as to how far we went in digitally altering it
for the purpose of making him look like the idealized version of himself
as a surrogate robot.
And we found that, at one point, we'd gone kind of too far
and it was distracting, it was bumping the audience out of the movie.
So we had to go back into these shots and back off of that effect somewhat.
And, hopefully, we found the right middle ground for it.
- No. - Or yourself?
[Mostow] So the idea in this scene is that this character
of Canter's surrogate,
is actually being operated by the real Canter,
who is played by James Cromwell. And he's in a different location.
Now, there was nothing at this location in Boston that felt appropriate,
so we built what we called "Canter's Lair,"
the place that he actually operates from, on our soundstage,
next to where we had the apartment set for Bruce and his wife.
And that's where this sequence is filmed.
James Cromwell is just such a wonderful actor.
Just world class. I was so thrilled that we could get him.
And I think it works because
James Cromwell has some similar facial features
and attributes as James Ginty.
So, although generally my rule in the movie was that
people should play their own surrogates,
in this case, because of the great age disparity between the two characters,
it made sense to have it played by two different actors.
About two-thirds of this movie is shot on location in Boston.
This location was a biotech company in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
right next to MIT.
And all these video displays we created ourselves in their lobby.
The challenge was, because it's a very active, busy company,
we were only able to get access to it on one day,
which was a Sunday, when they were willing to close it down for us.
These are always nerve-wracking shoots
because we had a lot of material to cover.
We had this whole scene.
We had the scene where they enter, the scene where they take down the elevator.
And all of it had to be done within the course of one day
because there was no going back.
Whenever you're shooting scenes like this, as a filmmaker,
it's always... you're looking at your watch
because you understand if you don't get it, it's not gonna be in the movie.
What do the operators say?
Not much. They're dead.
[Mostow] Again I direct your attention to the compositions here.
Very unusual to place actors this close to the lens,
particularly with wide angle lenses.
Again, it's one of the things that helps give this movie its look.
...even blown to bits without the least bit of harm to their operators.
[Mostow] At this point, we're about midway through
what I call the "investigative" portion of the movie.
Primarily, the first act is about Bruce's surrogate
conducting this investigation.
And from a storytelling point of view,
the challenge here is that
the audience isn't fully able to connect emotionally
with this surrogate character.
They can connect emotionally to the real Bruce,
the bald guy in the chair at home.
But there's something...
...sort of artificial that doesn't completely let you in
with this surrogate.
And, as we were editing the movie,
we realized we had to just accelerate through these beats as much as we could
to get to the meat of the story.
The meat of the story is once he loses his surrogate
and the real Greer goes out in the world,
that's really when the emotional journey of his character
kicks in to high gear.
All this stuff was procedural investigative stuff that was necessary
for laying the groundwork of the plot.
But we were always conscious of the fact
that we might emotionally lose the audience
if we just didn't keep this moving fast enough.
The problem is if you try to cut too deeply into it
then you also lose the audience
because there's nothing for them to sink their teeth into.
You have to find that middle ground where
you're keeping the story moving along as fast as you can,
but not so fast that the audience can't stay engaged with it.
Mind if we take a look at them?
[Mostow] This actor here was not this tall.
For all his scenes he walked on...
...ramps that we built that are just below frame.
So that he would tower over the other actors.
The big shot of the factory, that's all digital.
Basically, all we actually shot was the actors on a balcony,
in front of a large green screen.
Then everything else was created digitally by a very brilliant,
Academy Award winning
visual effects team, headed by Mark Stetson.
And those scenes are always fun to do
because you get to create it all in post.
The only limit is how much money you have available to spend in the shop.
The idea behind these generic soldiers was that they didn't need to talk.
They needed minimal, if any, facial features.
So they almost have this mannequin-like appearance.
All they basically have to do is run around and do what soldiers do.
Of course they're operated by these pimply-faced teenagers
back at the home base.
Yes, sir.
[Mostow] This is a wonderful actor named Michael Cudlitz,
who plays the colonel and makes an appearance again later in the movie.
This location that was the base where they were working
is actually an abandoned manufacturing plant,
right in the Boston suburbs.
What's interesting about this location was that there was another movie
shooting here at the same time.
It was such a big facility.
The Massachusetts tax incentive was so attractive,
that at the time we shot this movie,
I think there were more movies shooting in Massachusetts than in Hollywood.
You'd run across other movies and be bumping into them at the same locations.
This being one of them.
All these stim chairs you see here with monitors, those were added digitally
later in post-production.
The space we shot in was, in fact, just a big, empty warehouse.
Miles Strickland. Meatbag.
I did a run on criminal records for Moto Guzzi drivers
in black Arai helmets, and guess what I found?
[Mostow] This scene here represents the last of the investigative beats
in the first act of the story.
And I knew that if we could keep the audience engaged
up to this point in the movie, then we would be in a pretty good place.
Because from this point forward we get into the pursuit of the bad guy,
and there's a whole action sequence, and then we get into the emotional story
of real Bruce going out into the real world.
We probably spent as much time editing everything you've seen
up to this point in the movie, as we did everything that follows.
Because, again, the trick was how to condense that first act
into something that had movement and pace
in a way that kept you engaged.
And I go back to this theory I have which is that...
...knowing that you're watching a robot
in the form of Bruce,
because you've seen the real Bruce at home,
seeing this guy, you couldn't identify with him emotionally
as much as you could with the real Greer.
So I was, frankly, kind of relieved once we could get to the point in the story
where we were able to have his surrogate be destroyed.
Because then you're left with a real character
with a full set of emotions and expressiveness.
And you could really engage with him.
And that's, frankly, what Bruce does best.
Bruce is great at playing that everyman character.
When you do a movie like this you're always looking for
how to inject some moments of levity in,
without stopping the story for seemingly
what's clearly just a joke for joke purposes.
And we were really lucky to find this wonderful actor, Devin Ratray
who you may recognize from the Home Alone movies.
He's a terrific comedic actor.
And he brought some much needed, not only levity,
but also human quality into the movie, uh,
as a guy who works in the surrogate world,
but has decided that there's no surrogate that's good enough for him.
He just helps give a whole energy lift to this sequence
that really helps sell a lot of exposition.
Because we are selling a tremendous amount of exposition here,
but it's so entertaining 'cause it's coming from this guy.
- [laughing] - [Bobby] Boom.
[Mostow] If you notice, there's hundreds of monitors in this set.
And every monitor is fed with footage that we had to create.
It was all point of view footage that's from the surrogates.
Theoretically, we're tapping into the communications
between all these surrogates and their operators back in their homes.
So it's sort of, I guess, a commentary, I suppose, on wire tapping.
[police radio chatter]
[sirens wailing]
[Mostow] So here we are with our first big action sequence in the film.
Because all my films have big action sequences in them,
I think people assume that I put them in on purpose.
That I just think about "Where can I stick in a good action sequence?"
And, at least for me, it doesn't work like that.
I've never gone to see a movie because somebody said,
"Go see this movie because it's got a big action sequence."
I go to see movies like everybody else,
because I'm interested in the story and the characters.
And it just so happens in my films that
it often is required that there is a sequence with a lot of action in it
that helps, and is needed, to tell the story.
So I view this sequence as simply advancing the story.
Now, from an audience experiential standpoint,
it does help to have a big, loud, noisy, action-filled sequence
because it injects energy.
And I view a movie as a
hour and a half, or two hour dream experience for the audience.
And it's got to have its highs and its lows.
Its big moments and its small moments.
It's like a piece of music, like a piece of orchestral music.
It's something in sound called "dynamic range."
Where you measure the loudest points, the quiet points.
I believe in filmmaking when you have big action moments
it helps makes the small moments actually have even more impact...
...because the audience is really focused on it.
There might have been a way to do this sequence with less adrenaline,
but if we're going to do an action sequence, my attitude is
it ought to have the most amount of adrenaline possible.
This is a good example of combining
practical, on location stunt work with digital effects.
Those shots of the helicopter are digital. That helicopter didn't exist.
We shot the shot going over the building and added the helicopter later.
I really like the way that this intercuts between...
...Bruce in his chair and Bruce as the robot.
The way that he blinks awake.
Just a little thing like that that an actor does helps sell the illusion
that... there's a guy at home controlling him.
Again, going to this question of what's real, what's digital,
some of the shots of the helicopter skidding, that's a real helicopter,
other shots are digital. The fire on Bruce is digital.
The liquid coming out of his arm, that's digital.
The fire behind him, that wasn't really there.
There was a small fire, but we amplified it digitally.
A lot of the smoke, that's real.
So, when you make a film, every shot you have to know in advance.
What are you going to film on the day, what props do you have to have there,
what special effects do you have to have there.
And then, what things will be done later in the computer.
Literally, every one of these shots requires its own meeting.
Its own pre-production planning.
It's why these sequences wind up costing so much money.
Because there's so much planning and technical work
that goes into them.
And then, of course, the most important thing with stunts is safety.
[man] It's a machine!
[Mostow] The safety of the performers and the crew is your number one concern
above anything else. So that often adds to the expense.
Because it's easy and cheap to blow something up,
not so easy and not so cheap if you want to do it in a way
that wouldn't possibly cause harm to anybody.
We went back and added this piece
of Strickland not being able to operate the OD
because we don't want anybody thinking in the sequence,
"Why doesn't he shoot him with the device?"
We wanted to make very clear that the device wasn't operational.
When we were designing this sequence the question came up,
exactly how super-powered is Bruce's surrogate?
Is he able to jump ten feet, 20 feet, 50 feet?
And so we worked to find a level
that was super human, but, I'd say, not super hero.
I never wanted it to stop feeling real.
I just wanted it to feel like this is a super high functioning machine.
It can obviously take a lot of damage.
That shot's one of my favorite stunts in the movie.
But all these stunts had to exist within some range of credibility.
It had to be big enough to be spectacular,
but not so big that it felt like it was suddenly out of a different movie.
It was breaking the "rules" of our world.
I ain't done nothing!
[Mostow] I remember this so well, this was right before the July 4th holiday.
A massive, massive storm was coming in.
I think it was one of the record storms of the decade.
And, literally, the edge of the rainfall
was probably a mile and a half away at this point.
And we were desperately trying to get this in the can before the storm hit.
And then we were all going to disperse for the long holiday weekend.
No chance of coming back and we didn't know what damage the set would sustain.
And so much of this stuff was done in one or two takes.
We were scrambling like hell to get it done.
Oh, God.
[Mostow] As it is, this low angle shot of the woman with the shotgun,
we didn't get to that, we had to shoot it months later
in a soundstage against green screen.
So, here we are, 35 minutes into the movie.
Now we are fully with the real Greer character.
The surrogate has been destroyed,
and from this point to the end of the story,
becomes much more about Bruce's emotional journey.
And that was really, as I've said before, our challenge,
from an editing and filmmaking point, was to keep the first act of the movie
something the audience could stay engaged with though
they've gotten very little of the Bruce Willis character so far.
In the first 35 minutes, you only had a few minutes with his real character.
That's pretty unusual for a movie.
And although Bruce has been onscreen as a surrogate,
as I've said, I don't think it's quite the same.
I don't think there's that audience-actor connection
in quite the same way as there is with his real self.
That's one of the things that was probably the biggest
storytelling challenge for us.
To keep the audience in a movie
where they haven't had a chance to fully connect with their star.
There's a reason that there are movie stars.
There are movie stars because they are people who,
for whatever reason, the audience connects to.
And Bruce has many gifts on that level.
And yet, it's not until this point in the story
that we're letting the audience plug into him in that manner.
This scene presents one of the other big storytelling challenges in the movie,
which is the character, The Prophet, who's a key character in the movie,
doesn't have his first scene until we're into the second act.
We're now 37 minutes into the movie,
and this is Ving Rhames' first real scene.
So, from a storytelling point of view, we're breaking a lot of the rules.
We knew that going in.
And that, I think, was one of the creative risks we took
in this story construction.
Which is, number one, you're holding back the real Bruce Willis
until the second act.
And you're also not really introducing
one of your key bad guys, so to speak, until the beginning of the second act.
That's pretty unusual.
...crash landing inside Boston's Dread Reservation.
[Mostow] Here's one of these other news pieces we created, after the fact,
just to hammer home some of these story points.
And to further help bulk up the character of The Prophet.
It's very important that you understand that The Prophet is very anti-surrogacy.
That's the purpose of this little sound bite.
[The Prophet] We did not throw the first stone, but we will throw the last.
[Mostow] This hospital room, actually, was my office on location.
At a certain point we just ran out of space.
I had to give up my office so we could turn it into the hospital room set.
One of the things that I will point out in this scene that's interesting
is they used that slant lens I mentioned.
There's quite a bit of use of it in this scene.
All these shots, for example,
shoot across Bruce to the other actor in the scene.
You'll notice he's right next to the lens, he's razor sharp.
And, like the shot here, so is his wife.
Hi. Oh, my gosh.
[Mostow] So this little moment that's occurred between Bruce and his wife
is getting at this issue that there's an elephant in the room
as regards to their relationship.
They've had personal tragedy, they've lost a child.
And it's not something that they can talk about.
It goes to the core of Bruce's character,
which, he's this guy in this existential dilemma
that he doesn't even understand himself.
He's vaguely dissatisfied with his life, he can't connect with his wife,
and yet he doesn't know what to do about it.
He uses this technology of surrogacy and yet,
he understands, on some level, that it's bankrupting him.
And bankrupting his relationship with his wife.
What's going to happen now, in the rest of the movie, is
he's going to get more and more of an understanding of that.
He killed five cops, Andy.
[Mostow] At this point, his primary concern
is trying to follow through with the case.
But as he does so,
he's going to make discoveries about what he thinks about technology.
I think that gets to something that is universally relevant for all of us.
I think that we all have some generalized anxiety
about the role of technology in our lives.
We're consumed by it. We love it, we use it.
We understand at some level, probably, it's costing us something,
but we can't articulate for ourselves what that is.
I think that's really the theme of this movie.
Which is, what is the price we pay
for immersing ourselves in all this technology?
How do we retain our humanity in this world
that just is increasingly, relentlessly technological?
How long has it been since you've been out without a surrie?
I can't even remember.
[Mostow] One of the real challenges we had in this movie was
casting it with actors that looked like they could be surrogate robots.
If the idea is that people, generally speaking,
choose an idealized form of themselves to be their surrogate robot,
it means you need a cast of actors and extras that look like underwear models.
And, you know...
What I discovered is,
although the impression is Hollywood is teeming with these people,
the fact is it's not really so much like that.
Especially when you take the smaller subset of people that are good actors.
So we had to fly our extras in
from all over the country because we were shooting in Boston.
We had extras flown in from Las Vegas, Miami, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.
No knock on Boston, but we couldn't find enough extras who fit the bill
in New England.
This scene is an important turn for Bruce's character,
because it's the first time he's pushing back against surrogacy.
He can't articulate for himself why it feels wrong,
but something to him just feels wrong about it.
It's where he makes the decision to get up out of the chair and he leaves.
And he can't even explain why.
But something doesn't feel right to him, he can't go back to using a surrogate.
[man] No charge on the improvements.
[Mostow] This actor, Trevor Donovan, who plays the robot, wonderful actor.
Very tricky to play a robot. He had to erase all human aspects of himself.
And play it with a certain stillness that felt convincing.
These extras, one of the things that makes them feel like robots,
is we digitally stabilized them, we had them hold as still as possible,
but we went one step further and digitally stabilized them,
gives them an unreal look that really helps for us.
[Peters] Stone is going to run things his way.
And as far as we're concerned, it's over.
[Mostow] You can see here Bruce is starting to play the growing angst
in his character.
He's trying to do his job, he's trying to follow the case,
but you can see that there's some kind of inner turmoil going on with him.
And it's building.
The concept of these reservations, these areas inside cities
that are kind of walled-off oases of non-surrogate life,
was a concept from the graphic novel that we all liked
and wanted to keep in the movie.
The challenge was, "How do we represent this visually?"
It's got a border to it and then
it's got this outer perimeter zone
that looks almost like a war zone.
And then it has to have, deeper inside, an aspect to it that feels appealing.
You can understand why there are people who'd be attracted to this way of life.
There was no one location that could represent all this,
so this was all comprised of many different locations
throughout the Boston area.
The "border crossing," as we call it,
that was in... a city called Lynn.
The area where he walks past that crucifix
with his surrogate strung up to it,
that was in an old abandoned manufacturing plant.
A 20 acre site that we took over.
And then this area here, which is the inner core of the reservation,
it's almost like a communal life going on.
That was in an area called Taunton,
which is about an hour drive from Boston.
And we had to create the idea these places were all... it was all one place.
And that is part of the trickery of filmmaking and editing.
[The Prophet] Here, inside these walls, we understand the truth.
[boy] Sorry.
[Mostow] These are the first kids we see in the movie,
outside of that commercial for child surrogates.
It's a conscious attempt to avoid showing children in the movie,
until this moment.
Of course, this moment connects emotionally with
the moment early in the movie where he goes in his dead kid's room,
sees the baseball glove. No dialogue required, the audience gets it.
That's a testament to Bruce's performance here.
[The Prophet] Soon the day will come when surrogacy must end.
That day, I promise you, is close at hand.
[Mostow] One of the interesting aspects of this movie
is that a lot of it is very realistic,
in recognizable characters, recognizable situations,
and then you have this character, The Prophet,
an invention from the graphic novel.
It's a very theatrical character.
There's no counterpoint in real life that you can point to.
So it has to integrate into the story,
you have to believe that this character exists,
that he's the spiritual leader of these people.
He's part guru, part political leader, part revolutionary.
And so what we did was simply borrow elements
from all those things.
There are visual cues that shortcut you
to understanding, on an intuitive level, who this guy is.
[grunting]
[The Prophet] Enough.
[Mostow] The dreadlocks, the shirt, the necklace.
And then, frankly, it's the way that Ving plays it.
Ving plays it in appropriately a theatrical manner,
and I say that in a good way.
He had a weapon. A very dangerous weapon.
[Mostow] Ving was very interested in what he was saying.
He and I spent a lot of time working on his dialogue,
in his big speech and this scene as well.
Ving is a Juilliard-trained actor. A very serious actor.
We had a lot of interesting and productive conversations
about the script and his character.
There's a poetic majesty that Ving understood he had to bring to this guy,
because the guy is both sleazy and slimy.
Clearly something is off about him.
And yet, he has to be a guy you believe that people are going to follow.
People are going to look to as some quasi-social, religious leader.
It's a fine line to walk between those two things,
and I think Ving did a great job of it.
On a movie fan note, it was fun because it was the first time Ving and Bruce
were working together since they did Pulp Fiction.
Which was about 14 years earlier.
Agent Greer. May I offer you a ride?
[Mostow] This scene was very interesting
because there's so few children in the movie,
and here we have this child robot. Very hard to find an actor to play this.
I was lucky to find this actor, Cody Christian, who is terrific in this role.
Long enough to know you're getting nowhere solving my son's murder.
You lost a child, Agent Greer.
[Mostow] He understood that
he had to erase those human idiosyncrasies
that I'd spoken about before, that's really hard for a kid to do.
Kids have a lot of extra movements they do that they're not aware of.
And Cody worked really hard
at getting himself to be very machine-like,
but not in an obvious robot way
that somebody might do in a TV sketch.
This is very nuanced kind of things that he's doing.
Lived on the res.
- He was killed by his own people. - And that's it?
[Mostow] After we shot this scene for the first time,
I actually decided to make some changes in it.
I went back and Bruce was unavailable to us on the day I had to shoot it,
so Cody wound up doing a lot of this scene to empty space.
Cody's side of the scene was shot on a different day than Bruce's side.
And, again, it's a testament to his acting that he makes you feel
like he's in that car with Bruce.
Focus on the weapon, where it came from.
[Mostow] This Monday Night Football poster behind them,
where you see the guy holding the severed head,
one of the touches we did in the production design
where we don't stop, we don't comment on it, it's just there.
We don't try to explain it, and if you get it while you're watching, great.
If you don't, it doesn't take away from the movie,
it just helps enrich it if you happen to notice things like that.
That was intense.
[Mostow] This is a scene that we talked a lot about before we shot it.
Because we had to calibrate very carefully
to put Maggie in a position where
she was involved with something that Bruce could look at
and decide it was just flat out wrong and inappropriate.
And get angry about.
But not take her so far that we'd lose audience sympathy for her.
So, here her friends are getting ready to go out for the evening with Maggie,
and they're engaging in this activity, but I kept her off to the side.
She's putting in her earrings or something.
She's not actually doing the activity, per se.
Tom.
[Mostow] These scenes are really the emotional core of the movie.
Because the marriage, the relationship between Bruce and Rosamund here,
is the heart of the story.
His inability to connect with his wife
is the thing that's driving him mad.
He's frustrated, he doesn't know what to do about it,
and it's interesting 'cause it's the real him
interacting with the surrogate of his wife.
His wife is down the hall, but won't come out of the room.
The conversations Bruce and I had about this scene for months before we shot it,
was it was really key here that
Greer just lose it. This is where he just uncorks.
And, again, he's not consciously aware of what's bothering him.
It's just the rage.
I guess you could say it's rage against the machine.
But it just all comes out.
He's kept it all bottled up and it comes out.
He can't articulate it until this next scene with her where she stops him.
She says, "What is it? What do you want from me?"
In that moment, for the first time,
the words come out about what he really wants. He wants...
He wants to connect with her.
- What? - What do you want from me?
[Mostow] To me, a scene like this in a movie like this
is so key because, first of all, it's great acting,
it's raw emotion.
And it's just not the kind of scene you expect to see
in a movie about robots.
You look at the advertising for this movie and it promises you
an action-thriller-mystery.
And I think the surprise of it is that it has this really powerful,
very deep, emotional story at the center of it.
Things have changed, Tom.
[Mostow] At the end of the day, that's really why we go to the movies.
We go to the movies to...
...have truths revealed to us about the human condition.
And this scene in particular speaks to that.
It speaks to this whole question of what technology is doing to us...
...both as a society, a human society, and an individual, psychological basis.
In the case of Maggie, it's an addiction.
Every hour that you spend on the Internet or the email or something,
that's an hour you're not spending with your family or friends.
Or interacting with other people. I think that a thousand years from now,
historians will look back at this time we're living in
and see it as a transformative period
in the human experience.
[elevator bell dings]
[Mostow] Until the last ten years or so
we weren't living with this amount of technology in our lives.
And now we're all totally connected to each other through the Internet
in a way we never were before. And yet, you can make the argument
we're more disconnected from each other than ever,
because we don't interact with each other anymore.
We do it all vicariously through technology.
Whether it be email or Facebook or Twitter,
or any of these other technologies that are
increasingly... coming into our lives.
I would say the biggest miscalculation
that we made with the movie,
that we had to go back and fix with some additional shooting,
was that we played too many of the plot elements cards down.
What I mean by that is we left too much for the audience to try to figure out
by the end of the movie.
So, for example, we never actually showed
Radha Mitchell's character being murdered.
We found out about it later, but we never actually showed it.
And we went back and decided to show it.
We filmed that shot of the guy coming in and shooting her.
And then the subsequent shot where
we see the control of the surrogate is transferred.
And then we see her wake up. And that tells us very clearly,
OK, the real Peters character is no longer operating the surrogate.
Somebody else is operating the surrogate.
And somebody else pretty nasty.
Because they went to the trouble of murdering the real Peters.
Wish I could help.
This thing killed five cops, one of my men.
[Mostow] It just changed the complexion of everything that follows.
Again, it's just a bet that we made in the screenplay stage
that the audience would enjoy unraveling the puzzle for themselves
at the end of the movie.
We discovered it was the end of the movie, there was so much going on
at such a breakneck pace
that the audience didn't have time to do all that back-thinking,
and didn't want to do that back-thinking.
So we had to go back and shoot some additional pieces
to keep things a bit more spelled out as the movie progresses.
And, again, it's already a complicated story to begin with,
so I don't think we dumbed it down necessarily,
I like to think we just clarified it.
VSI.
[Mostow] That shot there, where he says, "VSI," for example,
that close up we went back and shot months later
to clarify VSI's role in the story.
It's an interesting thing with the film noir genre,
in that most film noirs...
...the audience doesn't really follow what's going on.
They grasp the general basics,
but they're left with 100 questions during and after the movie.
The fact of the matter is, if they're engaged in the bigger picture of it,
which is maybe what's going on personally with the characters,
or some bigger issue in the story. They'll forgive the fact that they
don't completely understand the details.
It's impossible, particularly in a movie like this with a complicated
science fiction premise, where you have James Cromwell operating this surrogate,
and he's also operating The Prophet.
How does that all work? It's OK to not completely understand.
What matters more is do you understand
that Bruce Willis is trying to reconnect with his wife.
Do you understand that The Prophet is, in fact,
a fraud being perpetrated by James Cromwell for some other purpose.
Do you understand that surrogacy is essentially a metaphor
for the digital age that we all live in?
That's what people are gonna remember from the movie.
They're going to remember Bruce Willis beating up the robot in his living room.
They'll remember that long after they'll remember these plot elements.
That's not to say we didn't work as hard
to make the plot as clear as it could be,
but at some level we have to accept that
the film noir structure is always going to leave a lot of unanswered questions.
The point is where the priorities of the movie lie,
and what satisfaction the audience is really seeking from the story.
Have you given them satisfaction on that level?
Hopefully we have.
See, I feel like I'm going crazy.
[Mostow] Here's another scene that I'm proud to have this kind of scene
in a action-thriller.
It's a quiet relationship scene between a man and his wife.
Or, in this case I should say, a man and his wife's robot.
But, the point is
it's speaking to one of the really big themes in the movie,
which is this obsession
that we have in western civilization with physical beauty.
And how she's saying she can't go out of the house unless she looks like this.
This is what gives her self confidence to be able to get past
her own personal emotional problems and function.
So this is no different from any woman saying that she needs
makeup and good clothes to be able to leave the house.
Otherwise her own sense of self image
prevents her from functioning.
So I think these are really interesting themes
and I'm very happy that we were able to get to explore them.
In the original screenplay we don't reveal the real Maggie
until the very last scene in the movie.
After looking at the movie put together, we decided that we would trade that
for the value that we'd get in adding a scene like this.
And also the scene where she comes back into her bedroom
after the fight in the hallway with him, seven minutes prior to this.
And that reminding the audience that there is a real Maggie
behind the surrogate robot.
And that Maggie is suffering an emotional pain about something.
We felt tremendous value in that.
We went back and shot those scenes with Rosamund and added them.
[The Prophet] The day of the resurrection is upon us.
Today we make history.
- Today we launch the revolution! - [man] Gotta go now!
[Mostow] This location was kind of creepy. It was an abandoned,
giant, sprawling 100 acre
hospital for the mentally ill.
In... Massachusetts, it was a state owned hospital.
It was all very drab and depressing and dreary.
We were very happy when we were able to finally leave this location.
But it suited our purposes very well for the reservation.
It felt like exactly the kind of place that they would have probably given
to this group of people
that were wanting to live outside the mainstream of society.
These abandoned, public structures.
Another example of a change we made in post-production
was, again, along this idea of playing more of our cards up.
It was never our intention to reveal that James Cromwell
was behind the hijacked surrogate Peters until the very end of the movie.
But we decided, you know what, it would be better to show it now,
as opposed to waiting until the end of the movie.
We actually stole that shot of...
There's two shots of James Cromwell, we stole both
from two different scenes we'd shot for other purposes.
One was the final climactic scene,
there's a moment where he pushes the monitors away from him.
Then we had the scene where he's crying, early in the movie,
after we meet the James Ginty character.
So we stabilized his face,
and we airbrushed out the creases in his eyes that work from the crying,
and we combined the two to fabricate, essentially,
this moment of him pushing away the monitor.
Again, all this done for the purpose of just
revealing more plot in the moment, as opposed to waiting till the end
and forcing the audience to back-think it.
Victor Welch wanted me to say hello.
- I'm sorry? - Victor Welch, VSI.
Good-looking kid? Very excited you're coming over there.
Finally moving into the private sector. You must be excited, huh?
Why don't you come in my office. You're not looking too sharp.
[Mostow] I really like how the natural lines in this location
and the things we added to help give this a tic-tac-toe board
of verticals and horizontals
that we then further enhanced by dutching.
Notice how we arranged everything in right angles to each other.
What are you talking about?
Miles Strickland. The guy I was chasing.
- The guy you hired to kill Canter. - Tom, you got it all wrong.
[Mostow] Boris is a really good looking actor to begin with.
But, again, this is a case where, for all his shots in the movie,
we gave him a little bit of digital touch up.
We had to do that with all the surrogate actors.
Everybody, no matter how good-looking they are,
Boris Kodjoe is an unbelievably good-looking human being.
Everybody has some facial imperfection somewhere or another.
And so...
That's where we spent many of our millions of dollars,
improving those, not to mention shots like these.
Obviously Boris does not have
a compartment in the back of his head with circuitry inside.
This was a challenging scene for Boris because he had to stay completely still
while we were shooting it.
Very, very difficult. And not blink, that's the other thing.
Very hard to be under hot movie lights and not blink.
[phone ringing]
[Mostow] It was interesting for the actors
that had to play both the surrogate and their real selves.
When it came time to have them be their real selves,
which generally meant making them look older and dumpier,
giving them big butts, or whatever thing we did with them,
I wondered how these actors would respond to us
essentially downgrading their physical appearance.
It was interesting, 'cause they loved it.
These people like Boris and Radha Mitchell,
who are just gorgeous in real life
they got a total kick out of... How can I put it charitably?
...taking a few...
...taking themselves down a few notches on the appearance scale.
We get the codes, we nail Stone.
[Mostow] This sequence is interesting
because it was never in the original script.
It was a sequence we came up with after we finished principal photography.
And we realized that we wanted to inject
more excitement into the movie at this point,
when the noose is tightening around the characters.
We had already come back to Los Angeles and we'd been editing the movie.
And so we needed to recreate Boston in Los Angeles.
Everything you see in this sequence was shot on the backlot of Paramount.
As it's been explained to me, nobody has ever attempted to do a chase sequence
on the backlot of Paramount, it's just not that big.
You don't have long stretches, there's just a few city blocks.
So through a lot of technical trickery,
which I'll get into, we were able to both recreate Boston
and give ourselves enough real estate
that we were able to do this chase sequence.
First thing to notice is in the background,
if you stood on this backlot you'd see a lot of palm trees.
We digitally erased those and we put in shots of the Boston skyline.
We went to Boston and shot still pictures of the Boston skyline
and put them in the background of certain shots.
The next thing that helps us here is that, in fact,
a lot of Boston looks like a backlot.
Ironically, some of Boston in our movie looks more like a backlot
than the actual backlots in Hollywood do.
But the look of this backlot happens to match Boston really well.
That made things work well.
The shots of Bruce inside the car,
those were done on a soundstage against green screen.
Then integrated in here with plates that we shot.
Same with Radha on top of the car.
That's a stuntwoman, we digitally replaced the stuntwoman's face
with Radha's face.
These were all the kind of tricks that we employ
to give the sense that the actors are in the action and doing the stunts.
[sirens wailing]
- [man] FBI! - [woman] Get out of the car.
[Mostow] The sequence that was in this place...
...can be found in the "Deleted Scenes" section.
There's a scene where Bruce drives up to Peters' house in New Hampshire
only to discover that she's dead in the basement.
And, as I said earlier, we decided that we would rather
show her being killed onscreen so the audience understood already,
earlier, in this section of the movie, that the surrogate has been hijacked
and is being operated by somebody else.
This shot where Bruce gets in the car and peels out,
that was shot in Boston, where he originally drove off to Peters' house.
But now he's driving directly to Canter's house,
because he knows that Canter must be the guy behind all this stuff.
[Greer] Bobby? Hello, Bobby?
Peters... have you gone insane?
[Mostow] I've talked about some of the actors in the movie,
I haven't said anything about Radha Mitchell yet.
I was waiting for this section of the movie.
This is where you get some appreciation for
how good an actress Radha Mitchell is.
Because you believe, as you're watching her here,
that you are watching a hijacked surrogate,
that somebody else is in control of her.
So, she plays in the movie her real self,
she plays her surrogate controlled by her real self,
and now she's playing her surrogate controlled by Dr. Canter.
In a few minutes she will be playing her surrogate controlled by Bruce,
who has stepped into Dr. Canter's chair to control her.
If that sounds confusing to you, imagine how that is for an actress
who has to keep switching from one to the other.
It goes against the grain of how actors approach their roles.
A good actorlactress
will spends months and months thinking about their character's backstory,
and how they got to be where they are.
In this case, the backstory of the character
she was playing for the first half, that's out the window.
That doesn't matter anymore.
I would say to her, shooting the movie, I said,
"I wish I could bonk you in the head and give you amnesia
so you could forget about your character, because now you've gotta play
James Cromwell's character or now Bruce Willis' character."
It was a really challenging thing, and she does such a brilliant job of it.
It completely sells the illusion.
She is James Cromwell in the climax of this movie.
And she is Bruce Willis in the climax in this movie.
You think you're watching them, but, really, you're watching Radha Mitchell.
It's very hard to do, and I'm just so impressed with how she did it.
[Stone] Really, doctor.
You should learn to live with your regrets.
Now, give me the gun.
[Mostow] It goes really to the heart
of what one of the big creative risks going into this movie was,
and we knew it.
If you have a movie where actors are essentially portraying puppets,
operated by off camera characters, how is that going to work?
Is that going to sell, is that going to be credible?
Particularly when you get the climax of the movie
where you've got this actress
who has to portray several different people
right in a row, in the space of several minutes.
Are we gonna get away with that? Is the audience gonna buy that?
That's one of the scary things about making movies, you never know
if it's gonna work until you're done and you put it in front of an audience.
[Greer] I need to see your boss. I need to see Dr. Canter right away.
Oh, good. Listen to me. I got to see your boss, Dr. Canter.
[Mostow] One of the other creative risks going into the movie, is that
we knew that the story was barreling toward a climax
where the stakes were unclear, potentially, to the audience.
First of all, the audience has to understand
a lot of information that's on computer screens.
That's always challenging. Secondly, what is Bruce trying to prevent?
We don't really know until we actually see it happen.
So the actors have to give us the sense that
the stakes are dire, something terrible is going to happen.
We clearly see that there's desperation on Bruce's face.
But unlike a movie where Bruce is racing to stop
the bad guy from blowing up the building,
or saving the girl dangling from the ledge,
or whatever the typical high stakes are in the climax of the movie.
Here, because it's such an original premise,
with such an outlandish idea,
the audience doesn't have a visceral way of measuring
how scared they should be for what's going to happen.
It puts much more pressure
on the actors and the filmmaker
to convey a sense of dread and desperation and stakes.
This character... we called him the "stalker" character.
He was the guy we saw kill Peters.
And it's always one of those things where you're never sure if the audience
is going to remember a face they saw 45 minutes earlier.
Some people in audiences have terrific retention, of memory for these things.
And other people, you could cut to somebody two minutes later,
they don't know who it was, even though they just saw them in a scene.
So going back to this question of suspense and stakes,
I made the choice here to shoot this
in traditional, suspenseful manner as you would with the hero
going to the bad guy's lair,
even though we don't really know what's going to happen.
Bruce's character doesn't know what's going to happen.
This is where you get your bang for the buck by having an actor
like James Cromwell because he's able to convey so much
just in his performance.
You get the sense, once the scene gets underway,
that something pretty bad is about to happen.
And the question is: is Bruce going to be able to stop it or not?
Feel that?
[Mostow] The other interesting thing here in this scene
is here's the bad guy in the movie,
but really it's the first time he's spoken.
Now, you could say, "Well, his character's been in the movie a lot."
You've seen his character as the young surrogate Canter,
we've seen his character as The Prophet,
we've seen his character as the boy Canter in the limo,
we've seen his character as operating Peters' surrogate.
His character's been in the movie a lot, but the actor hasn't.
And this really tests the boundaries of what I call "emotional transference."
And that's the principle that the audience
invests in the actors on screen.
But the question is, can they transfer those feelings to different actors
who are, theoretically, playing the same character.
I think there's a limit to that.
I think it's probably a pretty low limit.
We certainly have tested that theory to the max on this movie.
But it's one of the things that has been a challenge for us,
yet it also makes the movie interesting and different.
It's things that I've never seen before.
So that's the double-edged blade of taking on a movie like this.
You're going to get to do something original, it's going to be different.
And yet, it might not work. You won't find out until it's too late.
It's really like walking a tightrope that's miles off the ground
with no net or parachute.
I guess I've always been attracted to taking those kinds of risks.
Or at least I was in this case.
So recording this commentary before the movie comes out,
and I don't know yet how it's going to be received,
and these things may be perceived as the virtues of the movie
or potentially its undoing.
We tried to make the best choices we could
to deal with these issues, but they were endemic to the premise.
If you're gonna make a movie about
people staying at home operating surrogate robots,
you're going to confront these issues,
that you have multiple actors playing the same character.
How does that work?
Since no one's ever done it before, we don't know.
This scene here is a good example
of what two actors in a room are capable of doing.
We get right down to it, here we are in the climax of the movie,
and it's two actors and some computer screens...
...maybe some exciting music on top of it,
and they're able to bring you to these peaks and these valleys
in this sequence.
And they are selling the reality.
It's simply through their performance. There's nothing else going on here.
There's no explosions going off, there's no cars crashing into each other.
It's a viscerally exciting sequence,
but it's all done with good old-fashioned acting.
And I just think that's cool.
It also helps when you have a comedic actor like Devin Ratray,
who turns out to be an incredible dramatic actor, too, you know.
And so he's disarmed the audience with this comedic presence,
then when he turns really serious like this...
...it pulls you right in.
But if you don't press abort, all the surries are going to be destroyed.
[Bobby] We don't have a lot of time. Hit "yes."
Hi. Hello. Hit "yes," Greer.
Greer, I'm talking all the surrogates.
[Mostow] Now here's something else that breaks the rules
of Film Storytelling 101.
Here we have the star of our movie, Bruce Willis,
one of the biggest action stars in the world,
in the climax of the movie,
sitting immobilized in a chair with his eyes covered up.
If that doesn't break the rules, I don't know what does.
And, again, time will tell if it was a clever choice
or just completely wrong-headed.
It was not something we did,
going, "Hey, let's subvert the rules of filmmaking,"
It was necessary for how the rules of this particular world works.
Now one thing that we did do
is that we let Peters, obviously being operated by Bruce,
press the "No" button.
Even though it wasn't necessary.
Had no button been pressed, the same result would have ensued,
but it just felt right from a movie star point of view,
from a storytelling standpoint,
to have the movie star do something affirmative
that would affect the outcome of the movie.
That's why we have that shot of pressing that "N" key on the keyboard.
All of these surrogates falling down,
We did a lot of thinking about how they should collapse,
so it felt like they'd been unplugged.
They were collapsing in certain ways on their joints.
There was some wonderful stunt work done by our stunt folks.
The shot of Rosamund on the floor here,
where the camera is rotating down toward her,
is remarkable for the fact that there's no digital work in this whatsoever.
Rosamund is holding completely still,
she's got 2,000 pounds of equipment corkscrewing down onto her face,
and she doesn't move an eyeball.
It's just amazing.
That's poise.
This is no digital work here whatsoever.
They let us shut down downtown Boston
on a weekend and bring in all these cars and stage this and shoot this.
It's one of the great things about going to other cities.
Not that LA isn't cooperative,
but these other cities are sometimes so excited to have filmmaking happen.
It's pretty terrific.
That little country western song that you hear
as the camera comes around, that's from a song I created for Breakdown,
and used again in this movie.
It's just my own personal satisfaction with having a song in the movie.
One of the things I like about the end of this movie,
is the last several minutes of this movie
have no dialogue in them whatsoever.
Basically, once Cromwell is dead
and we finish the scene where Bobby is yelling at Peters,
there's no more dialogue in the entire film.
It's all told with moving images.
We put that shot of the pills in just to make you think,
"Did she do something terrible to herself?"
It just raises the tension level a little bit as we come into this moment.
Finally, for the first time in the movie, and probably for his character,
the first time maybe in months or even a couple of years,
he's getting to lay eyes on his real wife.
And from this point forward, it's really the actors' performances
that carry this moment and make this work.
And this is, in my opinion, this is the definition of movie acting.
You know exactly what these characters are thinking.
You know what Bruce's character is thinking
without him having to say a word.
That's ultimately the difference between film acting and stage acting.
So now we come to the question of how to end the movie.
The graphic novel ended in a very dark way.
We didn't want to do that. We wanted something more hopeful.
So the idea of him reconnecting
with his wife, that maybe there's a future for them,
felt like the right note to end the movie.
However, if we just ended it there it would feel saccharine.
It would feel too much like a Hollywood happily-ever-after ending.
So...
I knew I wanted something with a different, haunting feel to it,
and I knew that this movie was a metaphor.
That's just the nature of the subject matter of the movie.
It's just people see it as an allegory for living life
in this computer age that we live it in.
This hyper-connected, Internet...
...Blackberry, Facebook, Twitter age that we live.
So that's where this last shot came up from.
The shot itself was simply an aerial shot that we had done as a plate shot.
And then we digitally added in all the fallen people and cars.
Otherwise that would have been a four million dollar shot.
As it was, it cost a lot less to do it digitally.