RIDLEY SCOTT: Hi. I'm Ridley Scott and I'm about to talk to you about Exodus.
Doing a film about this kind of subject is tricky in the best of circumstances.
Forty years ago it was less tricky because I think the world was less conscious
and politically and religiously aware
of everything that's melting us down at the moment.
Therefore, when I was offered this film
in the form that it was written in at that particular point,
I had read the script and was kind of rather stunned
about what I didn't know about Moses
and what a warrior he was,
what a leader, what a military leader he was,
and, of course, how he was betrayed and then his journey thereafter.
And, of course, this is not only put down in that first draft,
but also, if you read the Old Testament,
a lot has to be edited out, otherwise we'd be running for 10 hours
because the story of his life is just monumental.
And, therefore, I wanted to encapsulate this as best I could
in a reasonable amount of time,
which is about, with titles, two and a half hours.
JEFFREY CAINE: Yeah, I'm Jeffrey Caine,
one of the writers on Exodus: Gods and Kings,
and I became involved when Ridley Scott asked me
if I'd like to work on the project.
I'd done a couple of scripts for him that he seemed to like
and, um, it was an invitation I was happy to accept.
He said that he wanted a version of the well-known story of Exodus
that was different from previous versions,
especially different from the Cecil B. DeMille,
which was too rigorously literal in its interpretation of the Bible.
And he wanted something that would reach an audience
that wasn't composed entirely of the faithful,
but not excluding the faithful.
So he had to be respectful
without being too deferential to the source material, which is a difficult call.
I felt that was a good brief.
The Bible story has gaps in it.
There's a lot that's left to the imagination,
there's a lot that isn't explained
and in a movie you have to expand
that basic sketchy story to make it work dramatically,
so, at the same time, being consistent with what the Bible says
as far as possible
so that you don't lose the attention of the faithful.
And that's what we tried to do.
SCOTT: There's Joel Edgerton as Ramses, um, the less-favored...
I was gonna say "son," because Ramses, whilst he is the son of Seti,
Seti prefers Moses both in his character,
his nature and his capabilities.
Of course, that creates a jealousy between Ramses and Moses,
which is a subtext to their relationship,
because on the surface, they really seem to get on as brothers might get on.
(CHANTING SOFTLY)
But something else is.
In the battle, a leader will be saved...
and his savior will someday lead.
CAINE: I wanted to introduce you to their relationship as cousinly,
but a healthy rivalry
and we can imagine, before the film opens,
that they would have been competing in competitions of archery,
swordsmanship, spear throwing.
I actually had a scene where they were wrestling at the very beginning of the film.
Um, that, I think, hasn't survived,
but that was the sort of relationship they had until the moment
when that prophecy is given.
Before they set out for Kadesh, the High Priestess gives them a prophecy
that he who leads will be saved
and he who saves him will become leader.
That, Ramses misinterprets to mean
that Moses will become pharaoh and it doesn't mean that.
What it means is that Moses will save Ramses' life on the battlefield
and later will become the leader of the Hebrews
against Ramses in trying to, uh, bring about the Exodus.
So from that misunderstanding, you could say, stems the plot.
SCOTT: So now we see them about to depart for battle
where they'll go against one of their arch enemies, the Hittites,
because the Hittites, whenever they came in with skirmishes around the border,
were obviously trying to take back land
or the land that maybe the Egyptians took from them.
That's a very familiar story today, ah,
because most of it was just rock and dust.
So they're fighting over a pile of rocks and dust, fundamentally,
but that's nevertheless what Moses' duty is,
is to do that and, uh, he'll go out there with Ramses.
Ramses is the leader of the army and Moses is his next-in-command.
These sets, for the most part, were done...
Uh, the interiors, certainly, at Pinewood Studios.
There was a little bit of the exteriors done at the Pinewood tank.
But if you see the shot that you're looking at right now,
you'd never believe that was on the Pinewood tank,
it bears absolutely no relationship with what was there.
There was two columns, those rams and some steps and that was about it.
This shot here, we actually fundamentally
shot two chariots galloping down in a carpark
in Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands.
Everything else was put in.
This is a reverse angle looking back towards the restaurant at Pinewood
and a few ratty trees and a very dodgy tank.
This is an entirely digital shot.
This is plates from Wadi Rum with the army put into it.
This itself was actually in the quarry which is in Almeria,
which is not far from our actual set
which sufficed as several things.
One, the outlook that you see right now where the Egyptian army
are looking down on the camp of the Hittites,
about 8,000 troops.
But this quarry was also very useful in being the workplace of the slaves
or the Hebrewites that were slaves to the Egyptian empire
at that particular point.
Four hundred thousand.
Leave the generalship to me.
SCOTT: Here we see...
I think we've cheated well, so you don't really recognize it,
and there we are in the Hittite encampment.
No one really knows absolutely what the Hittites really physically looked like,
so I had to make a decision
and make them that part of North Africa,
which could be a little bit Arabic and a little bit maybe Ethiopian.
But it was a tricky one to decide
and also there was no real code in the way they dressed,
but they were known to be fierce warriors
and so a lot of this dress is fundamentally created by Janty Yates,
which I think was pretty well done. Beautiful.
(HITTITE SOLDIER SHOUTING)
SCOTT: I'm shooting here in Wadi Rum
in the, uh, base camp of the Hittites,
at least it looks like that but, in fact, I'm on a flat field in Almeria
and the rocks were put in afterwards very cleverly, digitally,
because those rock plates were from, uh, Wadi Rum,
Wadi Rum being in Jordan and Almeria being a long way from Jordan.
And, frankly, all I needed really was a galloping ground,
so, for instance, these shots here with the massive rocks behind them,
the rocks are put in and the battle is live
where we shoot this in a huge flat area, which is good for horses to run on.
No animals were ever hurt on this, no horses were hurt.
(ALL YELLING)
- (YELLS) - (GROANS)
(ALL YELLING)
SCOTT: This battle is useful in the sense that it shows
the process of the Egyptians and how they fought with their chariots
and their skill with their arrows and their bows.
And also it shows the weight and the skill of Moses in the battlefield.
- (GRUNTS) - (GROANS)
CAINE: The Bible doesn't name the pharaoh ever.
It says, in the beginning of Exodus,
that the Hebrew people were enslaved and had been for a long time,
when the pharaoh of Egypt, in order to limit their numbers,
issued an edict that all newly born male Hebrew children were to be murdered.
Now, if you look at the history of, uh, Egypt,
you'll see that the pharaoh wasn't necessarily the son of the previous pharaoh
and you can identify a point around 1300 B.C.
where there was a pharaoh called Horemheb,
who was actually himself a general and not part of a dynasty.
And he was the last pharaoh of the 18th dynasty
and he died, as far as we know, childless,
although I'm assuming that he had a daughter
who was somewhat in disgrace,
who was the one who rescued Moses from her father's edict.
The daughter's name was Bithia.
Now between Horemheb and Seti, who's the pharaoh when our story opens,
there were only a very few years
and intervening was the first Ramses, who reigned for only two years,
and then Seti came to the throne
and his son, Ramses the Second, uh, succeeded him
and this is the Ramses of our story.
So I'm assuming that Ramses and Moses were coevals,
that they were raised together not as brothers,
but as more of a cousinly relationship.
Now Moses had always been around as far as Ramses was concerned
and Ramses had always been around as far as Moses was concerned.
They grew up together, they played together
and they both became leaders of their army.
And that's why I settled on the Battle of Kadesh
as being a suitable moment to start the film,
because at the Battle of Kadesh, Ramses was in charge.
Ramses was the general who took the armies of Israel to Kadesh
to fight the encroachment of the Hittites.
And Moses I put as his second-in-command.
I preceded this with a prophecy that Moses would one day be a leader
and what this does, it fills Ramses, the future Ramses the Second,
with apprehension that his father, Seti,
is going to appoint Moses to be the new pharaoh in his place.
Of course, that never happens and the prophecy,
it turns out, refers to Moses' leadership of the Hebrews
and the Exodus out of Egypt.
(GRUNTS)
So that's why Kadesh,
that's why I put them together at the beginning
and it fits in quite nicely with what we know of Egyptian history of that period.
The infanticide edict isn't mentioned in history.
The Bible talks of it. I've no reason to question that.
(ALL CHEERING)
PEOPLE: (CHANTING) Moses! Moses! Moses!
SCOTT: The hero returns and they're calling out already for Moses,
which doesn't help Ramses' disposition
and Moses is obviously summoned to see Seti,
where Seti talks to him about what happened in the battle.
And Moses says, "Nothing, "
and Seti said, "My officers told me that and I'm fed up with it.
"You've got to tell me what occurred."
What comes out is that he saved Ramses' life.
The High Priestess, her prophecy.
She said she couldn't see who would win.
The other one. "The leader will be saved..."
and so on.
You saved my son's life?
(SOFTLY) Yes.
Sit.
"Thank you" is not sufficient...
SCOTT: This was all shot inside a stage with a bit of green screen
and it becomes absolutely seamless.
Everything you see over the wall is green screen and the rest was,
for the most part, about 35% set.
The rest is put in.
Here we hear the preference by Seti to Moses that he is his favorite son,
in parenthesis.
Not his son, in fact, but his son in wishes.
He'd love him to be his son.
And he'd love Moses to have succeeded, which is impossible,
because he's not blood.
I trust you more than him to lead.
CAINE: John Turturro.
He lobbied for it. He wanted to play it and I went,
"Wow. I never thought of that. That's an interesting idea."
Because he's got such a kind of noble face that I thought it was a good idea.
So, uh, away we went.
I like it when an actor calls up and says, "Hey, I wouldn't mind doing this."
And he's so good at what he does that I thought,
"Why not? We'll go for it, okay."
I think what he did was terrific
and he's got a great countenance, you know?
Yeah, he kind of looks the real thing there.
- Shall I go on? - No, I'm sure the rest is fine.
What's next?
GRAND VIZIER: Pithom.
SETI: What about it?
The situation.
SCOTT: This gentleman was the lead in Kingdom of Heaven,
who played Saladin.
I was desperate to have him in it somewhere
and so I was able to find some small part for him,
so he came in and did it. He's got a great ethnic face,
definitely from that part of the world.
SETI: What else?
I'll go to see the viceroy.
RAMSES: No.
- I'll go. - (SIGHS)
It's beneath you.
SCOTT: The passion about snakes is...
I don't know whether he had it or he hadn't. We made it up
because I wanted Ramses to have this fascination with snakes
because this would have fitted in later
to the biblical idea where there are snakes that become lances
and I was doing a kind of reverse thing on that,
I was at least kind of acknowledging that he liked snakes.
But I thought if we keep this in we'll acknowledge that
because I've cut out the scene where Ramses hunts for cobras,
which is his passion.
This, incidentally, is a real cobra being milked for the venom.
That venom would kill about 30 people, just that small amount.
And so the guy... That clearly wasn't him doing it,
but I think the suggestion there is that medically,
he says, a little bit of venom in your blood is good for you.
So did they know at that particular moment,
from people who handled snakes, that if you got venom into your system,
it was like a prevention or antidote?
They may have discovered that by accident from the people who simply survived,
but had been bitten several times.
(INDISTINCT CONVERSATIONS)
SCOTT: This is, once again, using the quarry and here's the view from the top.
That's real.
This quarry is probably, I don't know, 300, 400 years old.
From the quarry, they actually supplied marble, I think, for the Vatican,
so that's how far back...
I mean, the Vatican goes back way, way, way, way, way.
But I think the marble, in recent years, was actually supplied from that position.
And you get a connection with that shot
from the so-called building site and the quarry,
which is now making the city of Pi-Ramesses,
which will be Ramses' place where he will reside and rule
after Seti passes on.
This will be his place, his kingdom.
HEGEP: You know what the problem is? People live too long these days.
Every year, the death rate lags further behind the birth rate.
And these people...
they reproduce like it's a sport.
This is the problem?
SCOTT: And already at that time, at the moment of the beginning of the reign,
a lot of people didn't live for more than about 50 years.
They would already start building the tombs of Ramses.
Those are the two tombs in construction, maybe one for his wives and one for him.
To build a tomb would take you 25 years.
Or I start thinning out the herd.
You start slaughtering people...
for no reason other than this...
SCOTT: The puzzling thing about all of this doing research
is where on Earth the ideas and elegance and architecture
and costume and the direction they took... Where did that come from?
Because there's no predecessor.
Even Greek architecture didn't influence Egyptian architecture.
So the Egyptian architecture's really a thing all on its own.
It's very difficult to tell where on Earth did it come from,
because the only similarity to Egyptian culture
and architecture might be Mayan or Aztec.
They've both got pyramids, weren't a lot of stepped.
But in Egypt, there are some stepped pyramids
and I would say even what I call the marvelous "bling, "
to use a modern word, of the Egyptians, which I think we got right, uh,
they were very fashionable, fashion-conscious.
It was also matched by the bling from the Aztecs and the Incas.
There's got to be a connection there somewhere.
That's a hell of a long walk, though.
I don't see them sailing the Atlantic on their boats.
(GUARDS SHOUTING INDISTINCTLY)
SCOTT: The building site...
The bricks fundamentally were to build the grand palaces,
but the bricks are also to extend Midian, which is the, uh, ghetto, fundamentally,
and some of the buildings of the Egyptian trading class,
sort of normal class, not the upper class.
- MOSES: Stop! - (GROANS)
Why is he being punished?
Persistent troublemaker...
SCOTT: Here we see Joshua, Aaron Paul,
MOSES: Why is he smiling?
Who I really enjoyed working with and said,
"I'm gonna give you an absolutely horrible haircut full of lice and vermin."
And he said, "Do your worst." And that was that.
He was terrific. Great.
Uh, quarry from below,
seeing all the construction and all the ladders
and the wooden scaffolding
and here Moses is interviewing what would be a group of elders,
the wisest bunch, mainly because he says
insurrection tends to come from the intelligentsia.
It starts off with the scholars.
So that's why he's choosing those who
could constitute and be thought of as being scholars
Which god? Your god? The God of Abraham?
And, of course, meets Ben Kingsley,
who's playing a character from the Testament called Nun.
(MOSES CLEARS THROAT)
SCOTT: I've always wanted to work with Sir Ben,
so I thought this was kind of appropriate for him
and he might want to do it.
It's not the biggest part in the movie, but it's a very significant part
and I thought he would absolutely be ideal
and thank God he did it. He was perfect.
He was so nice to work with.
I really enjoyed it.
Very clever.
Record this one's name and the rest of them.
Bring in the next group.
My name is Nun.
CAINE: The Bible version of the Moses story,
there are other versions, but they're all really basically
based on the version of Exodus in the Torah,
which is the Five Books of Moses,
the classical Hebrew interpretation of Moses,
and he was a Hebrew prophet before he was anybody else's prophet.
And I don't think that the versions of the Moses story
after the Old Testament story have moved a long way from it.
The Old Testament story of Moses
was probably codified in the sixth century B.C.
and it has several sources.
The, uh, modern biblical scholars identify a J source
and there's a Priestly source and it was a mixture of things.
It was a story, a great story, which is why we're retelling it,
but it was also, to a large extent, propaganda for monotheism
and, therefore, God has a very large role in it.
And if so, is there any way I could please you?
You can stop living like a king.
You're not one.
(MEN URGING HORSES)
CAINE: The device I used was to have Moses sent by Seti into Pithom
to deal with what might have been unrest among the Hebrews,
and during that visit he is pulled aside
by one of the Hebrew elders and told the truth about himself.
"You may have wondered," he's told,
"why you haven't felt you belonged among the Egyptians and here's the answer.
"It's because you're not one.
"It's because you were saved from that infanticide edict of Horemheb's."
And Moses suddenly feels that everything's falling into place.
"That's why I never believed in the Egyptian gods,
"that's why I had this feeling that I didn't belong."
But, of course, that doesn't instantly make him feel he does belong
and when Ramses finds out, uh,
from a spy that Moses has been told this, everything falls into place for him.
"Ah! Now I understand where Moses came from
"because his origins had been obscure hitherto."
And knowing that Moses is a Hebrew
gives him a perfect excuse to get Moses sent into exile.
"I could kill you, but I'm going to send you into exile instead."
And off Moses goes.
And years and years later he comes back, having been sent by Malak,
i.e., by God.
(INHALES)
SCOTT: I really didn't realize that he was a soldier
or that he was a general and that he could be extremely brutal.
But those were the times.
It's the life and times of that particular moment.
They were very savage times.
We think we're savage today, but...
I think we're extremely savage today, actually.
And the awful thing is we've got weapons to,
you know...
There's no multiplication of what we are able to do today
in comparison with a few swords and spears then.
So I think what we're doing today is absolutely extraordinary,
that we've learned nothing.
I'm leaving.
If you leave now, you'll just come back...
SCOTT: And I've got a funny feeling that Moses absolutely did exist.
What was written and built upon...
I was gonna say "exaggerated."
Built upon his mythology and his legend.
Whether it's all true or not, I don't know.
But the journey...
If you pinpoint the journey, the big broad strokes and the milestones,
it kind of makes sense.
It's like saying I don't believe that Ramses existed
and yet Ramses' remains are in Cairo.
Ramses is in there,
they can't quantify his actual age that he died,
but they say he died at 90-odd, 95,
but we think it might have been more like 75,
because 95 would be extraordinary,
because Moses is meant to have died at 120.
But you don't know because,
you know, there was a documentary done on guys who are from Georgia in Russia
and the average age of the latest men
known to conceive children were in their 90s
and the average dying age was like 80-plus,
but several people went beyond 110
and some had forgotten when they were born.
So you just don't know, the times, the physicality,
the minimalistic... The food he ate,
which may have been extraordinarily healthy,
and his physicality.
Who knows, you know?
Then you say, "Well, why not?"
(STUTTERS) Why would we, one,
go to all this trouble to characterize this person
as a grand old story in the Old Testament?
It had to have been passed down for hundreds and hundreds of years,
probably being enlarged upon, or maybe simplified. Who knows?
I think, in a sense, it was very much enlarged upon,
but a man who fundamentally laid down a threshold
and understanding of what would be global religion
with, you know, the Commandments.
The Commandments, when you think about them, are simple enough
in the sense of, if everyone abided by them, we wouldn't have any problems.
So someone had this grand idea of, "Let's impose this as the law, "
and, uh, try and impose that law in what would then constitute Europe.
You can't talk about global, then you talk about Europe.
They wouldn't know much about beyond India,
they wouldn't know much about...
Into China or the Far East and that this is really...
Their world is really Europe and the European arena.
Some token you had in mind...
In England, we're still running around, purple paint and banging dustbin lids.
What about if I don't kill you?
- Hmm? - That would be sufficient payment.
You people.
SCOTT: Ben Mendelsohn, who's a great, um, Australian actor,
playing the corrupt governor.
(SETI COUGHING)
SCOTT: Now that shot there is really amazing.
There's only four real columns and the rest we put in.
Then I work in a kind of jigsaw puzzle system with Arthur
because everything you see is not built.
Everything over that wall, the background,
because this is a massive pavilion room with no real walls as you know it.
The actual skin and shell of the room is a massive pavilion
within which it's divided off into
sitting areas and walls and columns and colonnades.
So it's a beautiful form of living space.
And, um, because we couldn't afford to build it all,
I made everything on casters, on wheels, so we could wheel things around,
change the order of things.
In one room, this is this space,
where you're standing right now was the snake room,
was the war room,
it's Seti's bedroom, um,
and every time it comes up I'll tell you this is the same room.
It just kept changing. Oh!
The room where he's gonna cut Bithia's arm off,
it's all the same space.
We just turned columns around, shifted them, adjusted them, say,
"Right, I want it this way," repaint them,
and you just save thousands and thousands of dollars
and you get more.
I went through that process on Gladiator and it was very successful.
On Gladiator, the rooms of Commodus,
was his throne room, same room was the bedroom,
same room was his office, um, the same room was the Senate.
We just shifted things around and moved furniture.
And people always look slightly askance and baffled when that's happening.
They think that's not practical,
but it's completely practical and you get much more for your money,
but you've got to know what you're doing, otherwise you'll come horribly unstuck.
(CHUCKLING)
Uh, this is a digital shot with a plate of the actual four gods there.
Um, it's a famous site in Egypt
which was moved from the valley where they were gonna put the dams in.
It's the biggest architectural shift ever.
They moved that whole wall and those statues out of the valley
where the dam was going to take it away and reset it somewhere else.
So we literally went there and shot it there.
This is in a carpark,
entirely a plate except for the guy walking down the middle,
a flight of steps and a throne.
Everything else is digital.
Side view here is digital, entirely,
with no hard set except for the people on either side standing in front.
All I had here was a fire brazier and a chair.
Everything else was put in.
It's weird, isn't it?
The only thing real in that is the dais, the ramp and the chair.
Everything else is fake. That is all digital.
I'm showing a vulnerable emperor who doesn't...
Not too happy about getting the chair.
No, your left.
More, more, more.
Good.
SCOTT: This is where we will see the arrival back of Ben Mendelsohn,
who's heard, in that conversation between Nun and Moses,
that, in fact, Nun is Hebrew
and Ben is gonna come back and actually
let them know and then he's gonna be interrogated.
So they're looking at the building blocks, literally,
of the rest of the city and how they intend to finish it
in relation to the pyramids in the background.
And here's the so-called governor of Pi-Ramesses.
Arrest him.
Oh. Wait, please.
SCOTT: Getting the hats and the cloth hats right
and this was quite tricky because when you see them as sculpture
it's one thing, but when you put
a tablecloth on somebody's head it doesn't look right.
So I tried to work it out and I think the cloth was clearly a neck...
Keep the sun off, because the sun would be incredibly hot.
But it may be, underneath the cloth itself, may have been a helmet,
that'd keep the helmet cool, but also protect you.
- You are. - That's right.
RAMSES: Moses.
SCOTT: So you tend to make things up when you look at things historically
and think why is that?
And then usually what it spells out is something practical.
It's great collar, isn't it?
CAINE: Ancient Egypt was a very clerical society.
They noted everything down on tablets.
Unfortunately, many of those tablets haven't survived.
What survives is the hieroglyphic inscriptions on stelae
and on monuments
and a lot of what we know about Egypt the Egyptologists have taken from those,
but we have no very clear record.
There were some clay tablets, uh, left behind by builders.
They don't tell us too much, but they tell us a little bit more.
And if we had a complete written record of Egyptian society of that period,
it would have been useful, but we don't have it.
So in a way, that frees the writer up to invent.
I was always concerned about being respectful and not offending
people who believe in the literal truth of the Bible.
But even if you believe in the literal truth,
there is still a lot of room to invent dramatically
and Malak is one such example.
You know what I'm talking about.
Yes.
SCOTT: They had what I'd call a free service,
which was 400,000 slaves.
They say 400,000. I was trying to think... That's a hell of a lot of people.
That's four stadiums.
The biggest stadium in the world, let's say Wembley,
that's 100,000 people, that's four times that
in a village and a free work force.
So you're saying, "Right, you lot turn up in the morning,
"you're going to do a 16-hour day
"and you're gonna be chipping rock out of this thing, that's what you're gonna do."
And they do it because if you have people enslaved for so long
that eventually they would be lost without that, uh,
daily direction.
They've had their thinking removed.
They just had to turn up, do this, do that, which becomes Ramses' argument.
He said, "If you set them free, they wouldn't know what to do."
He said, "They would live like animals."
And Moses goes ballistic and says, "Do not call them animals."
Now!
Miriam!
Come. Sit down.
SCOTT: So this room was Seti's bedroom that we just saw.
We shifted things around, changed the furniture, opened it up.
When Ramses met Moses on the balcony, that was outside, on the far side.
You know how I know him...
and you.
I helped raise you both.
So you are not his sister, then?
Of course not.
And you're not a Hebrew.
No.
Place your arm on the table.
SCOTT: Sigourney plays Tuya,
who is the favorite wife of Seti,
except Ramses thinks that she's not.
He thinks she's gone to the end of the queue.
She played Isabella in 1492
and, um, I really enjoyed working with her and just thought, "I wonder if she'd do it."
And she did. She's great. She is a queen.
She loved all the Egyptian costume, because she can take it.
She's tall and so statuesque, she can kind of wear anything, you know?
And this is going to be the real test,
because Ramses does not want to believe it,
but the accusation is so damaging
he has to know.
Are you his sister?
No.
SCOTT: So there's his sister, Miriam,
a wonderful English actress,
Yes!
And here is Bithia,
a wonderful actress from Palestine, living in Paris.
This really is, in a funny kind of way, the beginning of Moses,
which is he's now on the road.
You don't need a reason to kill him.
And they talk about execution and Ramses will not do it.
He cannot do it. Ramses, in the scene says,
"But I saw in his eyes he is not a Hebrew.
"He's lying. He lied to save her life,
"to get that woman out of the room all in one piece."
Fundamentally saying he's a great man, but it's done.
He's admitted it and that's what it is.
And she wants him gone and she wants him dead, so this is the goodbye.
That, I'm sure, will follow...
where he's going.
SCOTT: That crumbling sphinx, which is from another dynasty,
maybe that sphinx is 1,000 years old.
Ramses, at this point, I forget where he was in the dynasty.
But that sphinx could easily be 1,000 years old.
That sphinx is entirely digital.
All we did was build the base, the brick base.
We didn't do the head or the wall, it's pretty good.
(SIGHS)
BITHIA: Come, Miriam.
It isn't every man who would protect
a servant who's nothing more to him than that.
Certainly no one else in this family...
including me.
SCOTT: Christian I met six years ago for a cup of tea and he said,
"We should really do something." I said, "Absolutely."
So we sat and had a coffee and it was a good meeting and I thought...
I was kind of impressed and I'd been watching him work for a while.
And nothing for five years and then I suddenly decided,
out of the blue, to do this
and immediately just... (SNAPS FINGER)
A light bulb went off and that's Christian.
And I've watched him evolve over the last three or four years really brilliantly.
And I think so far his best thing has been...
I loved American Hustle. I think it's fantastic.
Um, he's absolutely fearless, doesn't care.
Puts on 40 pounds, does a terrible wrap-over
and just enjoys the hell out of it.
And he did the same thing here, became what is extreme.
He was extreme, which Moses was, extreme.
He's carrying a passion to change the world and that's what he tried to do.
At this particular point, you have to be pretty fervent to do that.
MOSES: Miriam.
SCOTT: A great face. Timeless, somehow...
She's very English, I think. I don't know what her background is,
but she's got a marvelous, timeless quality and she has a great, great voice.
Sorry, sir.
SCOTT: In fact, both of them were. The mother and the sister were fantastic.
(SOLDIERS URGING HORSES)
SCOTT: On this day I was really lucky because I had a lot of wind
and people always said, "Mmm, mmm. The weather's bad," and I said,
"No, no. It's fantastic."
So we shoot in the wind, it was perfect for a goodbye.
No one wants to ask what happened to them,
but, uh, I think, in one version of the film,
weren't they put in a leper colony or something terrible?
In a time where people thought that leprosy was fatal
and the devil's disease and all that
and leprosy really fundamentally is about...
It's not... It can be cured.
But in those days, I always remember as a child seeing the colony.
I was horrified by what the leprosy could do.
And I think the mother or the sister ended up there and one had died.
So we chose a rocky bit, here's what you do.
You don't learn this in film school.
You just walk out... We're gonna do it right here.
He's got no water.
I'm gonna have him eat aloe vera. Have you got any aloe vera?
So we had six aloe vera plants on the truck, slammed it in the ground,
got the crane and slid it up the back and here you got a shot set.
And ironically the landscape in Fuerteventura is kind of very biblical
because it's so Spartan and sparse.
There is no green at all.
It kind of worked brilliantly
and we had everything we wanted to find in those islands, frankly.
Between Almeria and Fuerteventura, you've got everything.
(HORSE NEIGHING)
And, of course, Wadi Rum.
The secret of this is I shot these for Prometheus,
so all those shots were by helicopter in Prometheus in Wadi Rum.
We got so much footage that I thought,
"You know what, this could be the walk in the desert."
So we took shots from Prometheus,
from the original negative that had not been used,
and put them in this and put whatever we wanted in it,
so it worked great, brilliant.
Saved me doing another trip.
Wadi Rum is spectacular and we're doing the next one there.
I'm gonna actually go and shoot there for The Martian
because Wadi Rum is about the best example you could have
of what Mars is like.
It's great.
(PANTING)
I have nothing to steal.
My horse is dead.
We're not here for your horse, Moshe.
CAINE: Now, Moses goes into exile
and Ramses is still unsettled
because the man who might well be his rival
is still out there somewhere and he doesn't know what's gonna happen to him.
So when the assassins catch up with Moses in the Sinai Desert,
Moses sees them off, using the sword that was given to him as a gift by Seti.
He's found the sword under his saddle.
He wasn't given a weapon, but he's found it there
and he doesn't know who put it there.
And it turns out later that Ramses claims he put it there,
rather than see Moses murdered.
He's in two minds.
The assassins were sent, but we're not sure who sent them.
Ramses certainly gave him the weapon to defend himself.
SCOTT: This is actually Bedouin gear, black glazed silk,
purple glazed silk and they were quite dandified.
And, uh, he took his gear right off a Bedouin
who was quite elegant in their desert gear
and they're very wrapped up against the heat.
So I think they must sweat like crazy underneath,
but maybe the sweat is like a cooling system, you know?
There must be, I think something happens like that, the weather.
But they wrap up. Or certainly it's all very flappy.
It's like me, I cover up completely.
Oh, this is the straits where he would hope to find, in the third act,
where he literally rode across at low tide,
which took him into this place where he would meet Zipporah
and which would be his wife for the next nine years.
They would have a child called Gershom.
A little bit higher.
(DOG BARKING)
SCOTT: The original screenplay was written and was given to me by Peter Chernin
and, uh, I didn't think really I was gonna do it,
but I thought, "You know what?
"Because it came from Peter you better read it."
So I read it quick and I was surprised,
as I said, what I didn't know,
and I read it again and thought, you know,
"This is one hell of an adventure, "
and also with a strong undercurrent and very powerful subtext
about the beginning of one God and one belief.
And so I met and then said, fundamentally, um,
"I think it could do with a new draft."
So then I thought, "I really need to put my edge into it,
"my stamp into it."
So I did some research and met Jeffrey Caine,
who I knew to be an expert in this particular field.
This is his thing.
And, uh, we talked and...
Uh, it was only two Christmases ago, I think.
And, um, I spent 13 days of one Christmas on the phone to him,
so I ruined Christmas, fundamentally, talking to him every day.
And out of that we got a screenplay and an interesting draft,
but very long.
And we had gone down the whole nine yards of what happened after.
We had two variations of going up to the mountain to meet,
as it were in the Testament,
meeting with God,
with the voice of God or whatever his experience was.
So we have a version of that.
But towards the end we had written in
the two versions of the tablets being broken.
Then he has to go back up, the violence...
So I think Jeffrey was exhausted, so we then had Steve Zaillian read it
and Zaillian came in
and actually did a rather elegant editing job
and he fundamentally made the dialogue less period
and more plain, I would say, rather than accessible,
because I think Jeffrey's dialogue, some of it was very, very good,
but I think it was very, very, um, biblical, right?
And I think that's fundamentally what I got out of the two writers
and here we are.
But I appreciate what they both did and they're both endlessly patient
and it's a tough subject to do.
There's more there than sheep and goats.
(BOTH CHUCKLING)
There's more here than that.
Really? Where?
(LAUGHING) I'm sorry, that was rude.
That was rude.
I'm not ignorant just because I live here.
Hmm. I can see that.
I can tell you one thing.
This is by far...
the nicest place...
between here and there.
And so you're leaving?
Of course.
SCOTT: So this interlude in Moses' life, which, I think, history says
or the Old Testament says,
was nine years where he was married to Zipporah and had a son called Gershom.
And so this is about to happen. This particular scene was, in fact,
about Moses wooing Zipporah.
But he doesn't realize that actually Zipporah is in charge
and is actually wooing him.
She's actually weaving the wedding cloth already, without him realizing it,
that will be over their heads when they get married.
I don't think anybody picks that up, but that was the whole idea.
There it is.
This was kind of a pretty long rehearsal because I kept worrying about,
"How do I do a marriage at a time, 3,000 years B.C.,
"before any formal weddings were created?"
And how did they get married
and, in fact, did they have a formal coming together like this?
So we took it from several aspects of other religions
and I just had to pretty well select it on the morning.
But I think it works out really well in its simplicity and beauty, actually.
And so this particular scene we didn't rehearse.
I said, "Just do it and say it together," so they were slightly out of sync,
which I think is a very nice, sweet thing,
because she knows she's out of sync with him
and so she's kind of amused by it.
She was really charming. Great.
And from that, they have the child, Gershom.
BOTH: In all that life may bring us...
MOSES: I pledge my love.
ZIPPORAH: I pledge my love.
Who makes you happy?
You do.
SCOTT: This was written a long time ago, earlier, um,
and I always loved it so much that I kept it in
on subsequent drafts because there's something very basic about
this bonding between a man and a woman as a marriage
and it felt right and felt simple, but honest
and I liked it so much and they did it so well...
Again, in films, you sometimes have to make things up on the spot, which we do.
I do all the time.
And I thought at the very end, when he returns,
the first thing he'll do when he actually settles...
When you get there we'll see it.
He says to her the beginning of the vows.
This is what I call their vows, and it works very well.
Nine years later the city, Pi-Ramesses, is getting there
and Ramses himself is angry because it's taking so long.
(MAN SHOUTING)
(MEN CHANTING LOUDLY)
SCOTT: Here we are in what will constitute his house or house and temple, um,
which obviously is so enormous that it's just taking so much time to do.
And so Ramses is now changed somewhat in his character
and really comes across as the true emperor or the real pharaoh,
very much in charge of what he has at his fingertips,
and has become quite dangerous.
And they're all afraid of him.
Moses, of course, is out of his mind now, out of his sight,
as Moses, to all intents and purposes, is gone.
Long gone and long dead.
You said that months ago. Meanwhile I'm living there like...
a Bedouin.
Get it done.
Faster!
SCOTT: They always had these models, too, which makes sense architecturally
in scale, to actually preconceive what they're gonna do.
That wind was real.
It just hit and I just said, "We're gonna shoot in this wind," 'cause I really liked it.
It's a perfect cut to, uh, the nine years later.
But I use this device of the stone-throwing later.
At the very end of the film you'll see that. That's not written either.
And this was made up on the morning.
The dialogue, the way it was placed, I don't think was good
and Christian said, "Well, how about throwing stones into a bucket?"
And I just picked that up and away we went.
So we made this up on the spot. I think it worked really well.
And doesn't become too biblical or too holy or too godlike,
yet, and the child, Gershom, does it really well.
He said, "God's mountain."
And he believes it. He just completely accepts the situation
as it's handed down by, you know, great-grandfather, grandfather, parent.
It's all an accepted situation that they worship the mountain
and, therefore, worship the god on the mountain.
This is where it gets kind of interesting and debatable
because how and when did it really, really, really happen?
And did it actually happen on Sinai?
- It's my faith. - I know.
- And it's his, too. - I understand.
He can make up his mind when he's older.
SCOTT: Sinai is a mountain which is, I think, only 2,500 meters.
I think it's feet.
No, I think it's meters, but that's 7,000 feet roughly.
So it's not a huge mountain.
The one in California, Whitney, is 14,000 feet, so that puts it in perspective.
And Whitney is, by no means, an enormous mountain
in terms of global mountains.
So this is not a big mountain and, therefore, Sinai, to a certain extent,
is a really heavy-duty walk and scramble up shale
and when it's raining, it's pretty unforgiving.
(SIGHS)
SCOTT: So this was all shot on the side of a cliff in Fuerteventura
with our rain machines and the local storm at the top of the mountain.
She's obviously concerned about that.
(EXHALES)
(SHEEP BLEATING)
SCOTT: One of the biggest challenges for me in the film is,
"How do I do this encounter
"without having God's voice from a rock or from the sky?"
Which I think is what it's always been.
I think in the, um, previous epic that I watched,
I think it was the voice of God talked to him,
and I figured today I shouldn't do that.
I must find another solution, and here is the solution,
which I will not comment on because...
I think it works really well from my point of view.
And this little man is called Malak,
which, in Arabic, or I think even Hebrew,
is the word for "angel" or "messenger."
But, of course, he never declares that,
he simply talks to Moses and allows him to drown in this slurry pit.
Slurry is the mud from the avalanche of rock.
It's a strange scene because he allows him to drown.
CAINE: That raises the question of how do you deal with God?
The Bible itself provides the answer.
There's a device that the Old Testament and the New,
but mostly the Old Testament uses
of the angel or the messenger from God in human form,
coming to one of the principals, coming to one of the prophets,
and saying what it is that God wants him to do.
Now, the Hebrew word for that, "messenger" or "angel, "
same word in Hebrew, is "malak."
So I introduce the idea of a human being called Malak.
Uh, in this case, a small boy, but there's something unearthly about him.
He's a normal-looking kid, except that when you see him,
you are quite capable of believing that he has been sent by God.
He seems to be everywhere at the same time.
He turns up in different places.
He speaks with a wisdom and authority
that a little boy of that age wouldn't normally have.
And Moses isn't entirely sure that Malak is a messenger from God.
But he becomes increasingly more convinced as the story moves on.
SCOTT: You could also look on this scene as a symbolic scene of Moses' conscience.
So if, over nine years, Moses must have often wondered,
"Whatever happened to my people and what I was told,
"I, of course, now know was true, or accept was true,
"and, therefore, I must go back and see them."
So he will take his leave.
I like to think of Malak as a messenger.
...was an effect of that.
The storm...
The storm started before I was hit on the head.
- It was not a storm. - Fine, fine.
The storm was something.
It was something else.
(VOICE BREAKING) But the boy was all in your head.
How do you know?
Because God isn't a boy!
Then what does he look like?
Describe him. Describe him to someone like me.
Do you know what you sound like?
SCOTT: One has to be thoughtful and respectful of, uh, faith or faiths,
because, you know, every faith is embedded in the one single word
which is that word, which is "faith," and you either believe or you don't believe.
You're gonna have no specific representations or apparitions.
It's unlikely any single person's gonna receive any kind of apparition.
Therefore, the whole basis of religion is based on faith.
"Do I believe or do I not believe?
"Or do I half-believe or do I partially believe, "
the sort of atheist, agnostic or faithful.
I think he finally gets the message and I don't think he's faithful at this moment.
I think he's more conscience-driven to return home.
Rest.
SCOTT: But that experience on the mountain,
if you like, in modernese,
shook him up and made him think about everything that he'd done so far in his life.
And to go back is essential,
on the basis that he said and promises them that, "I will return."
He now looks at this symbolic thing, which is actually a piece of gristle now,
which was the only connection
between him and his real mother, which is the umbilical.
From the umbilical, they had actually made into little bracelets for a child
and put little stones on it, and each stone represented a Hebrew letter form,
which would spell out the word "Moshe."
And I thought that was a good connection,
that the umbilical was an interesting thing to do
because today, many people, couples, who have a child
will very often keep the umbilical and the umbilical will be deep-frozen,
because the umbilical represents
the absolute center and core of the little being.
And that, um, DNA, that distilled DNA,
may become incredibly useful later for anything,
from spinal problems to brain problems to anything that involves DNA.
Who knows where medicine is going with that research?
And, therefore, they now recommend
that you keep the umbilical and deep-freeze it, you know that?
A lot of parents deep-freeze the umbilical.
So it's just a little piece of gristle that is absolutely the center of his being.
Interesting.
CAINE: Moses goes by the shortest route across the Red Sea to banishment
and marries
and lives for several years the quiet life of a shepherd, has a couple of sons.
And then, one day, he goes up to the top of the mountain,
which is locally known as the Forbidden Mountain.
It's where God supposedly lives.
And there, there's a flash flood and he sees the boy, Malak.
And he can't be sure that it wasn't a vision or a dream,
but Malak tells him that God was looking for a general
to lead his people out of bondage.
He comes home again and he still isn't quite sure
that it was God he spoke to or God's representative,
but he wonders about it.
And then something happens,
the way his own son is building a pyramid of stones
sort of confirms for him
the notion that he was approached by a representative of God
and he does go back.
SCOTT: This is a really lovely scene between Christian and the boy,
telling him he will be back.
And, of course, the boy... In those days...
For his father to go away like this and go down to Egypt,
he would never return.
On the way he'll die, either of robbers or disease or will simply not come back.
Something will happen to him. He's convinced of that.
And, therefore, as far as they're concerned, this is almost like a death sentence.
So he's gonna forget his father and she's gonna have to forget her husband,
even though he insists, "I will come back."
I treat kids like adults.
Never talk to a child like a child,
otherwise he'll say, "What are you talking to me like that for?" if he's smart.
"So what we're gonna do to..." "Why are you talking like that?"
(CHUCKLING)
I treat them like little adults.
And, you know, frequently it's good to ask them about the scene.
And they'll start to talk about the scene,
and once they start talking about the scene, they're inside the scene.
I do that with all actors.
I get them to talk about themselves and talk about the scene.
Let them in because chances are they've done a lot of thinking about it,
so it's interesting to hear what they've got to say.
And before you know it you're on the waltz.
She did so well because she walked into this.
She, funnily enough, did my daughter's film.
My daughter, Jordan, directed her film five years ago, called Cracks,
and she was one of the leading girls in it.
And that's when I first saw her, and she was then playing an Italian, actually.
An Italian rich diplomat's daughter
who was sent to this English private school.
So I said, "Who's that?"
And then later she became pretty big in Spain,
and, uh, that's how we found her again.
So we now see him find, more by accident,
which I think is accident, the Tiran Straits, when he went out there.
He now knows what to do on the way back.
I want to show or invent
how he could have possibly made that mistake for a general, a traveler.
How did he make the mistake?
And we invented this scene where he meets the old shepherd,
saying, "Where have you just come from?"
"I've just come from the sea." "But that way is narrow and dangerous."
"Oh, okay. Thank you, Father, for the milk." He rides on.
I thought it was a fair enough thing to do
and then that's why I had him draw the map on the rabbit skin later,
where he gets a bow, an arrow,
so that he can kill food, eat, but most important, he draws the map.
So I always wanted to put that in. Everyone was saying, "Nah, nah, nah."
I said, "No. I want to see how he made the mistake.
"Because when he goes back, we'll get to it and we'll see how he makes the mistake."
(GUARDS SHOUTING INDISTINCTLY)
SCOTT: On his return, we find that actually things have become worse.
They were pretty bad before, but I hadn't done the burning of the dead.
I'd held back on that
to make somehow things have escalated and, therefore, it's become worse.
So we hold back the incineration, the burning of the bodies here,
because then, when he meets Ramses, he will say to Ramses, "Things are worse."
Ramses said, "No, no, things are better." He said, "What are you talking about?"
So Ramses got this extraordinary assumption
that after four centuries Of their hold over the Hebrews,
that it's an assumed condition.
And, therefore, the Hebrews are simply victims of their own birth,
and, therefore, it's the Egyptians' right to have them as slaves,
which is kind of horrific.
CAINE: The story goes in different phases.
First of all, there's Moses, who was raised as an Egyptian
to believe in a multiplicity of gods, um, a belief that he rejected early.
Then he discovers that he's actually a Hebrew,
but he doesn't yet understand Hebrew beliefs.
And eventually he gets to be convinced that there is one God only,
that he speaks to Moses through Malak.
And at that point, he becomes a little bit of a rebel
because he doesn't accept unquestioningly, just as Moses doesn't in the Torah,
everything that God says he must do.
He asks him, "Why do you want to do this? Am I the right person to do this?"
And Malak explains that what God is looking for is a leader, a general,
somebody who will go back into Egypt
and perform what we would now call, "mission impossible, "
to get the pharaoh of Egypt to release the 400 Israelites
who have been, uh, held as slaves for hundreds of years.
It's not gonna be easy and he wants somebody with those skills.
(LOUD BANG)
SCOTT: Now we find Ramses has actually married his queen,
which is Golshifteh, is an actress from Iran, actually,
and, uh, I'd had in a film before, called Body of Lies,
and she's probably one of the best actresses in the Middle East.
And there's not a big part for her,
but she was very happy to do it and, um, I'm glad she did it.
She's great.
When you're gonna do a bad guy,
and everybody tends to make things black and white,
they're either good guys or bad guys.
I think in this instance, I think Ramses...
I kind of deliberately constructed around the fact he has a child
and he adores the child. He adores his wife.
He adores his horses and animals.
He's a curious character.
Because by any standards of him living and enjoying
the privilege of 400,000 slaves at his beck and call and bidding,
makes him a horrible person, inhuman.
And yet, he is human because he's dimensional, three-dimensional,
and actually loves his child like a normal man,
loves his wife like a good man, and actually loves his horses.
So it's that you're torn with this man because...
That's what I wanted. I don't want anyone just to be the bad guy, you know?
Who do you think hid your sword where you would find it?
CAINE: When Moses has gone into exile and returned,
Ramses is meeting his nemesis.
He thought he'd got rid of Moses, and here is Moses back again as a rival
and, again, he fears for his place on the throne.
It's all story stuff that's not in the Bible, but it's in between the lines.
You could put it in and not interfere with the thrust of the story of the Bible
and certainly not interfere with its meaning.
Nobody who believes in the Bible should have a problem with any of this.
- We have order. - Order?
SCOTT: I think it was such a departure for Joel
because the last time I saw Joel,
he was playing that white trash family in, um, Animal Kingdom,
and he got shot-gunned in a carpark.
So I think he can be forgiven for feeling uncomfortable
that he's playing the pharaoh of Egypt.
I mean, I think he did so well.
I knew his theatrical capabilities.
Theatrical, in a good sense.
When I was doing Kingdom of Heaven, he had sent me a tape of himself
reading for Balian, and he was pretty, pretty bloody good.
But that was 10 years ago and he was 10 years younger.
But I think he handles it so brilliantly
and his dimension as an actor is really, really quite amazing.
I'm not saying no.
I'm saying time.
Time.
You're listening to Hebrews.
I'm not listening to Hebrews.
Who are you talking to?
God.
(STAMMERING)
God.
SCOTT: "Which God?"
And there's even an amusement to, "Which God?"
And he won't answer him.
We couldn't cut his neck,
so we had to put on a little bit of blood, and you just see it.
That's razor-sharp, that sword, so...
Ah, you're not seriously considering his proposal.
Is it a proposal?
If a man is holding a dagger to your throat, Minister?
SCOTT: Now you're really entering the third phase of the big story,
where we're gonna encounter war
between what would be regarded, from Ramses' point of view,
as the troublemakers or the revolutionaries
that definitely had to be taken seriously
because they could easily stir up the problems
with the people and the mass.
If there were 400,000, that's a huge riot.
That would be an enormous problem to them, so they had to deal with it
and squash it and squish it immediately, uh, like any rioting group would be dealt with.
And, uh, so they go in heavy-handed and they go in to look for Moses.
(PEOPLE SCREAMING)
Moses.
Where's Moses?
(SCREAMING)
(GRUNTING)
Moses? Where's Moses?
SCOTT: But, of course, no one knew where he was.
He'd be hidden by the family.
And, um, so we dug the hole in the floor.
I mean, this warren, this city of slaves
would be absolutely a warren of tunnels and hiding places, et cetera.
(PEOPLE SCREAMING)
SCOTT: There's very little evidence of this kind of city
because, if it was, it would be literally bad timber, if there was any,
and adobe, fundamentally, which would have long gone to dust,
because their bricks were made of the clay and straw.
The straw bonded the bricks together.
So they would make the bricks for the working class,
the middle-class Egyptians that would build the city,
but this is all solid stone.
This is sawn and carved stone.
And, of course, the slaves would be building their own community.
(WOMAN WAILING)
This is not Moses.
This is not his family.
This is a man...
his wife...
SCOTT: Pretty big scale, wasn't it? Yeah. CAINE: Mmm.
SCOTT: And you've got to imagine, when you're doing this,
that we supply, um, set-wise, it's about 15 feet to a column.
The first 15 feet or 10 feet, and 10 feet to the wall
and I know afterwards, everything's gonna get put in.
If you took out what we put in digitally, you'd be shocked.
That's the way you have to think about it.
I helped myself enormously by being able to board,
so I can board really quite accurately what I want.
And so I've now found that I've boarded every film.
I've already boarded Martian, which I'm doing now,
and the boards are this thick. I've already done it so I'm prepped.
When you're boarding, you hit the ball from any direction.
Whatever's coming at you, you know where you are.
I've kind of planned it in my head.
And, you know, things vary,
and people say, "What about this?" and "What about that?"
If it's a good idea, I'll definitely acknowledge it
and say, "That's a good idea," or, "It's not what I want to do," you know.
"I'm gonna do this." And I tend to stick with that.
Because once you think of your idea, all this planning is done privately.
All of my real work is done at home, on the weekend,
so sitting with a blank sheet of paper and I draw.
And I usually draw boards next to frames on the script
or on a piece of paper parallel to the script and then it's printed.
And when I'm done, it's distributed and everybody can see quite accurately,
mid-shot, wide-shot, close-up, very wide-shot.
Because it will go through the course of the screenplay and the dialogue,
if that's what it is, in an appropriate fashion.
You know, after a while you just get to know what you want
and that's what I do anyway. I just know.
I think it took a while, but by the time I'd finished,
God knows, hundreds of commercials, I did my first film.
So doing The Duellists was really straightforward.
I thought, "Wow, that was easy."
Then Alien was pretty straightforward.
My school was art school and then a huge number of commercials.
Commercials that you don't see today.
I mean, I've got a reel of commercials which are like film
and they don't do those kind of commercials anymore.
I think they either can't afford them or they don't think that way.
CAINE: Back in Egypt, I didn't want him to go in front of Ramses.
Now, this is the place where we do diverge from the biblical account.
It seemed to me that the trick with the serpent wasn't sufficient,
and for this reason.
In the Bible, Moses turns his rod into a serpent.
Along come three Egyptian magicians who do exactly the same thing.
So if the trick is not that great that three magicians can duplicate it,
it shouldn't be anything close to convincing Ramses.
Now we use the idea that Moses is a general and a man of military experience,
and what he wants to do is to start a guerilla war.
Thinking, perhaps a little arrogantly,
that if he can organize some troops among the Hebrews to fight the Egyptians,
that he'll get their freedom that way.
That's not what God told him to do.
But then Moses has a history of disobedience
and Moses' final disobedience to God,
which occurs when he strikes the rock instead of just talking to it
and earns himself the punishment of never seeing the Promised Land,
that's the final disobedience, but this is a disobedience of the same kind.
He tries to deal with Ramses directly and it doesn't work,
because Ramses is too powerful, his armies are too powerful.
So you have the battle sequences.
You have the guerilla raids on Egyptian armories and so forth.
Then God intervenes.
SCOTT: And also you learn to say, "Okay, it's not quite the farm I want.
"Not quite the oil refinery I want, but that's what I'm gonna do.
"I'm gonna put troops in there, gonna have men with...
"Archers, bows and arrows. It's kind of an army.
"Must be a huge plantation."
Put two and two together, you never question it.
Otherwise you could actually Study your navel for weeks
and simply not get this location, and it's fine.
You don't even question it.
And they look like Aztecs actually. There's the plantation.
That's actually the plantation where we popped in three fires
and the rest were put in digitally.
This flipping plantation of reeds was in the back lot.
That running through here was like eight feet wide and 50 feet long.
That's it.
That is eight feet wide and 50 feet long in the blue screen. (EXHALING)
Crazy.
And then I need more archers later,
so I sent a second unit off to Egypt to get the wider riverbank stuff.
So then this is all kind of...
That tank stuff cut into digital, so there's all digital,
except for the wooden hulls. We did those in the back lot tank.
You've got to have patience.
That's the back lot with his close-up. This is entirely digital.
There's a studio with a handrail in the studio where...
The studio wall from that stone handrail is about 20 feet away
and you see all of the river.
The baby loves Ramses.
Every time Ramses held his hand out,
the baby would hold his arms up to be picked up.
It was uncanny. So we just used that. I thought that was great.
Because I knew, when he lost his child, it was devastating.
(ALL SCREAMING)
(SCREAMING)
(URGES HORSE)
(SOLDIERS YELLING)
(PEOPLE SCREAMING)
SCOTT: I've never done a Western.
I'd love to do a Western because I haven't done that.
I haven't done a musical.
No, I go at everything like a craftsman.
I don't get too intellectual about it,
although what I do and whatever comes out,
I guess, is pretty intellectual in its quality.
But I will never write a book about it. I just love doing it.
So I thought, "My God, here's an opportunity to do Egypt."
And, um, recently I was given something to look at, which is bigger than this,
which is something I haven't touched on for years
and I thought I could easily do that.
But the challenge here was doing Egypt.
And the fact that the story of Moses is fascinating,
in the sense of unless you are very familiar with the Old Testament...
I knew very little about him.
I mean, other than from way back... Sunday school, you know?
MOSES: Still, if you're not going to listen to me...
then why did you take me away...
(SHOUTING) from my family?
SCOTT: Considering he's one of the most important figures
in both Old and New Testament, in a sense he's as important as Christ.
And, therefore, the little I knew about him,
I sat there thinking, I think, for about an hour
having read it and thought, "I think I'd like to do that.
"I'd like to go there and I'd like to create Egypt.
"And I'd like to bring this guy to life.
"Because I think if we can bring him to life and show him as a human character,
"rather than necessarily a Hollywood epic character, a real person,
"that's a challenge. That's interesting."
Because we forget it wasn't...
God bless Charlton, but Charlton was a giant Hollywood star at that point.
And, uh, I think this works very well
because Christian seems to play the part of Everyman so well, so very well.
And in that respect, whilst Moses was extraordinary,
he, in a funny kind of way, was Everyman,
except for what he brought to this part of the world.
In fact, what he brought to the world.
The crocs, um, when you're making a film, even me,
people always stand on the edge going,
"Do you really need this? Do you really need that?"
And I say, "Yes," because what I've got in my head is a word called "vision."
It sounds pretentious. It's not pretentious. I've got it right there.
I know exactly what I want it to look like.
I know exactly what it's like when it gets done.
When I did Alien, somebody said, "My God, that's gross."
I said, "You're paying me to be gross, dude.
"I want to scare the living shit out of the audience,
"and that thing coming out of his chest will not be funny."
He said, "Are you sure it won't be funny?" I said, "No. "And that was it.
So I just insist.
And you have to, that's part of the director's job, to insist.
Unless you're being crazily erratic, in which case you should be fired.
But I'm not. I'm always right on budget.
And, therefore, for the most part, incredibly, um, cohesive
and reasonable,
most of the time.
How long will it take?
Not long.
(SIGHS)
But longer than that.
(PEOPLE CLAMORING)
(FLIES BUZZING)
SCOTT: You notice the insects? We added those. Aren't they great?
That's the grass in the bloody studio. Can you believe it?
And this is in the bloody studio. Right behind me is the coffee wagon.
I put these little midges in
because I thought there'd be a trillion midges that'll drive you crazy
running out into the island of Fuerteventura,
where I had some paddy-like ground.
We filled it with water and had these guys standing in it
and then I needed more later, so this is Egypt just north of Cairo.
North of Cairo, that's actually in the Nile.
This is Fuerteventura, where I laid in the grid of the, um, paddies.
'Cause they work with paddies in Egypt.
(GASPS)
SCOTT: The frogs were always a problem
because they always looked like "Frog he would a-wooing go."
And with a, "Cro, cro, cro," and they just weren't gonna be that good.
But then we gradually worked it up.
And Peter Chiang did a great job of going into overkill, into waves of frogs
and then we had to put those all over on the bed.
She said, "Do you really need to do that?" And I said, "Absolutely."
So we dropped about 50 frogs on her. She was great.
She had to lie there with the frogs crawling all over her.
Enough!
Do something!
They're just frogs.
(FLIES BUZZING)
SCOTT: Frogs into fly... Frogs will die. The meat will become putrid.
It will make, um, flies. Flies will come to it.
From flies become maggots and more flies,
and so you have the beginning of pestilence and real disease.
So they'd burn everything, trying to burn the dead frogs,
but they'd never seen a plague of flies like this.
We based this on some documentary footage I saw in...
That's fantastic, isn't it?
In, um, fishing boats off Madagascar
that were inexplicably raided by flies and the fishermen choked on the flies.
The boats were black with flies, like this is the guy.
They just... Into his windpipe.
So then you cut to this thing, here. It's great.
And a few of the people were saying, "Do we have enough flies in here?"
"Yes, when we finish the effect."
And one of my favorite characters in this scene
is the little white dog that we put a sound on, so when he said, um...
You'll see, when he shouts at the end,
you look at the white dog by his feet and it's really funny.
I had to put a whimper on so you'd notice the dog.
It goes... (MIMICS BARK) That one.
In a minute, watch.
I love Ewen, he played at getting a fly in his mouth. That's so funny.
Yeah.
There. (LAUGHS)
Now watch.
Here we go. It becomes...
EXPERT:...the gnats come and the maggots come and the flies come.
And then...
- And then what? - (DOG WHINING)
SCOTT: See the dog? All you do is put the...
It sounds great, because the dog goes... (MIMICS DOG WHINING)
And you see it immediately.
Now you have sores and pustulences.
And here's the hospital. The hospital is entirely digital.
Pretty good, isn't it?
I'd had, at the very beginning of the film,
a, um, hospital made up for Moses
going in to visit his wounded and maimed soldiers.
So when I was in there I shot that and thought, "You know what?
"I'd better cover myself and do a hospital with sores and abscesses."
And thank God we did that,
because we didn't use Moses going in after the battle,
but we did use the hospital again on those shots,
just to show that... It was key to say it's spreading amongst the community
and not only that, it's actually into the royal family.
No one is protected from this.
The sores are powdered.
They would powder 'em and ointment them,
so that's why they look kind of ridiculous, almost clown-like.
Uh, where I'm sure the Egyptians,
who were into embalming and all kinds of preservatives,
would be very, very good at things like antiseptics
and fixes, cures, ointments.
I'm sure a lot of that was invented there.
(GUARDS SHOUTING INDISTINCTLY)
That's that quarry again. My God, we got use out of that quarry.
Beside that, on the rock behind him, I wanted to put a bit of the...
That rock is probably part of the old city from 1,000 years ago.
It might be a pharaoh from, well, 800 years ago,
and if you notice, it's between a sphinx head and an old, um, pyramid.
We use this, which is where they depart from, come back to,
and now we've turned into a stable.
It's the same place. The same ramp.
So you just reuse your sets.
You give them a week off, 10 days off and they repaint it and reconstruct it,
and then you shoot it for something else.
Because all you're doing is changing the paint.
What is this?
SCOTT: His horror of losing his horse.
- Is this you? - No, no!
He's very sympathetic, Ramses, even though the horse wants to get up.
Now's the beginning of the death of animals.
You go from a real bull here to a fake bull.
From the minute that bull collapses, that's fake.
They just pull the pins out of the joints and the thing tumbles to the ground.
It's pretty good.
(MEN CHATTERING INDISTINCTLY)
CAINE: Now, the plagues themselves are accountable for.
There are people who have accounted for them in naturalistic terms.
It's a bit of a stretch, but they sort of can be accounted for.
The blood may well be the rivers having been churned up in the mountains
and bonding with red clay and turning the waters red.
It's a bit of a stretch, but it's possible.
And similarly, the other plagues arising could come from naturalistic sources,
until you get to the killing of the Egyptian children at the end.
I make it the newborn, rather than the first-born,
but it's a parallel to Horemheb's edict.
It's almost like God ironically saying,
"Well, you wanted to kill all the Hebrew first-born,
"I'm gonna kill some Egyptian children. I can do it, too, and I can do it better."
And that's how you get to that final thing.
But remember in the Bible, it isn't that Ramses is being hard-hearted.
It's that God is making him hard-hearted.
God is affecting Ramses' mind so that he won't capitulate
because God wants him to learn the lesson
that God is God and you don't argue with him.
Well, you can argue, but you don't, in the end, win.
So that's how the plagues were dealt with.
And, of course, they're one of the big visual treats of a film
which is full of big visual treats, because that's Ridley's specialty.
SCOTT: It was always tricky
because fundamentally they'd both become observers
of one of the biggest things that happened in this story, in the Old Testament.
Because God has taken over and is demonstrating to both parties,
"I am here and I am angry and I can do this if I want."
And, uh, so he's not only demonstrating to Ramses, I think he's also...
The way I adjusted it, he's actually making a point to Moses
and that's why I had this to-and-fro between him and Moses,
like a conversation with God, saying, "It's affecting everyone now. Enough."
And there's a scene where Malak shouts at him
and says, "It's gonna get worse. It should get worse."
I love the scene where he says,
"If you think this is gonna make me toe the line, it won't.
"It will make me worse."
He's shouting at the rock.
Is it meant to humble me?
Because it will not!
SCOTT: In the thunderstorm, he turns away and, of course, he's there.
He's there if he wants to be.
I always thought that's a good trick.
(LOCUSTS CHIRPING)
(SHOUTING IN NATIVE LANGUAGE)
(ALL SCREAMING)
SCOTT: These are great.
We just shoot the plates and we then put 'em in,
but what I do is I get the shot and then I draw on it
with, um, felt-tip.
A picture's 1,000 words
because it immediately, "Okay, get it, get it, get it, get it."
And then they've got to make it work, you know, they've got to make it real.
This is entirely digital, the whole bloody shot.
That's pulling back inside the studio,
trying to imagine what they're gonna look like
and then having these servants run in and pretend that there are
these creatures there and they're whipping at the trees.
And it all looks faintly ridiculous.
Of course, everyone is rolling their eyes, until you say... It's like the crocodiles.
Even for me, it's like, "Shut up. You've got to let me finish the shot."
And when it's done, they go, "Wow, that's good."
I said, "Yes, that's what I do." (CHUCKLING)
I think a lot is lost frequently
because a lot of people aren't in my position, my, um, experience
and longevity, success.
And so it's hard for a first-, second-time director today
that can get pushed and stood on by less-informed executives.
That's the tricky thing.
Because half the time you've got to let your man run if you've got him,
providing he's not going over budget and he's not running out of control,
let the man run.
That's why you brought him in, right?
You bought the horse, let him run, you know?
There's more films ruined by being looked at too early,
saying, "I don't think he's gonna get there," rather than saying, "Let him run."
It's interesting. "Let him run."
You know the difference, as well.
You know if somebody simply is scared to death
and doesn't know what they're doing.
Then you have to do something.
But I think there's a few talented people that got knocked and hurt today.
You've got to be strong. You have to fight your corner.
(SLAVES SCREAMING)
SCOTT: But then, on the other hand,
I think there's too many big films given to people... I was gonna say youngsters.
Not so young, but people who aren't ready to do that yet.
And give somebody, by all means, a $10-million movie or a $20-million movie.
But don't go from a commercial to a $180-million movie.
What, are you insane? Are you crazy? Because the stakes are so high, you know?
They think they're gonna get a bargain or something, and they don't.
All the bargain is, you wear another $60 million.
I don't know what it is. Or it'll be cool.
It ain't cool if you can't play tennis
and you get thrashed by the old geezer from the other end of the court.
(CHUCKLING)
Brother?
Have you come to negotiate?
SCOTT: I didn't do a film till I was 40.
And people are always amazed.
They say, "Forty?" "Yeah. I didn't do a film till I'm 40. I couldn't get in."
I was ready to do a film when I was 27 because I was so experienced.
By the time I was 27, I'd done like, I don't know, 300, 400 commercials.
And so I was like, "What? This is straightforward."
And I never got in till I was 40.
I started The Duellists in my 39th year,
because I paid for it, completion bond, and I got no fee.
So today, when people say, "It's really hard to do."
I say, you know, fundamentally, "Fuck off!"
You know what it was like to get a movie going then?
Jesus, it was impossible.
It's a bit like... I wanted to operate because that's against the union.
And, therefore, I thought, "I'm gonna go to a school where they teach operating."
Of course, they don't teach operating.
You've got to go out and you just got to do it, so I just started to do it.
I was able to do it on commercials, so I learned to operate on commercials.
Because I learned on commercials,
if you can operate, you can get faster quicker.
Orin the morning, you say, "Let's do this, let's do that."
And you know exactly what you want. You know the lenses and the position.
And you can't do that until you do it, you know?
(SHEEP BLEATING)
SCOTT: Okay, this is...
The night, it's gone to eternal night.
Now, you can go completely black,
in which case, you got night lighting on rocks, which...
It's not grand enough, so you need to see it.
So this was, you know, filtered by Dariusz.
Then later we graded it with a little help of the effects house,
but mostly graded it on the grading desk, whatever you'd call it, the colorists.
So you sit there with an electronic desk and you electronically color
and crush it and remove things and pop things and sharpen things
and you make it into like a silver twilight.
And this is the scene where he gets angry with Moses
and I love this scene because he kind of loses it in front of Malak,
and almost reels with anger, which at the end of the take, I burst out laughing
because he was so good.
As long as Ramses has an army behind him...
nothing will change.
Anything more is just revenge!
Revenge? After 400 years of brutal subjugation?
SCOTT: Here we go. See, he loses his...
(SNICKERING)
He's really telling off the adult.
I want to see them on their knees, begging for it to stop!
(SCOTT LAUGHING)
He did a great job. Absolutely great.
And, "General!"
Love this scene.
I have heard Ramses' final threat.
SCOTT: "It's gonna get worse before it gets better."
And I think this is a point when Moses
is at the crossover of believing.
I think we'd call it quite a long way...
He's still not sure.
And then this little thing happens here where I think very simply it goes light,
he looks back at him, "Did you do that?"
Boy nods. Says, "Make your mind up." Okay.
So one of the biggest things in the story is the dark shadow at the end,
which kills the Egyptian children,
the first-born, and I didn't know really what to do with that,
other than, "Let's just do it as a dark shadow."
And then when it goes black at night, as night,
we just do that with what I call a fish flash, which clearly is biblical.
(CLICKING TONGUE)
I should say, "God."
And then, to bring him back, just to make it simple
and he just does it and I turned it more around into humor
when Moses can look at him and the boy just nods and said, "That was me."
Or, "That was my master." Right?
The boss.
I could have you killed.
I don't think so.
Unless you do it yourself.
Your own soldiers let me in.
CAINE: Ridley didn't specify that he wanted modern dialogue or that he wanted, uh...
I mean, I don't know what kind of dialogue would be appropriate.
Frankly, we don't know how 13th-century-B.C. Egyptians actually spoke,
but I imagine they had a formal register and I imagine they had a colloquial register.
What most people think of as biblical speech
is the speech of Jacobean England,
the speech of the King James version of the Bible, published in 1611.
And people did speak like that then, but they don't now and it feels strange.
Now, DeMille did that, "untos" and "whereupons."
I don't feel that a modern audience can relate to that.
On the other hand, if you go to the other extent and make it too slangy
and colloquial street speech of the 21st century,
that isn't right either.
So what you strive for is something that's neutral in tone, um,
that could be anybody speaking at any time,
translated into modern English.
That was the style I chose and I don't think Ridley had a problem with that,
except there are one or two places where I think
my dialogue may have changed a little from the way I left it.
But other than that, it's a compromise.
Is that a threat?
Is that a threat? Moses!
Moses!
CAINE: Speaking of Ridley, he's a great director for this kind of film.
He knows instinctively what works on the screen
and he has a wonderful imagination and he likes to have it stimulated.
So his brief to me was always this,
"This is a big visual film.
"Anything you can imagine, I can put on the screen.
"The budget allows it and I can make it work with special effects.
"Just make sure when you write the scene
"that I can imagine it from your description."
And that was a wonderful thing to be told and it left me completely free.
So I had to write those scenes in great detail
so Ridley could imagine them
and then how he translates them to the screen
is entirely his work and nobody does that sort of thing better.
SCOTT: You know what's interesting, out of this came...
I had never thought about that, never realized, fully landed that...
You'd better check this,
but there are only approximately 15 million Jews in the world.
You know that?
What does that say for the Jews in terms of their strength?
It's formidable, isn't it?
Absolutely formidable.
Fifteen million.
I thought there would be, you know, a couple of hundred million.
No. It was shocking.
And that's... What is that? Through years of persecution
and, of course, they have the right to want their own land.
(BREATHING HEAVILY)
(BREATHING STOPS)
SCOTT: So here we have the shadow.
I didn't really know what to do with the shadow, "Let's do a shadow."
And, uh, it kind of happened on the spot.
I thought, you know, with the shadow, why doesn't it bring the lack of oxygen
so it might, for some reason or other, be selective?
And on the spot, me and Billy, who's the prop man on the floor,
worked out, "Let's blow the candles out," it's all done that afternoon.
And it kind of works, doesn't it?
I was thinking what...
And I knew in the back of my mind, "Should it be the candles?
"Because there are these lights everywhere
"and what else could it be, linking that with lack of oxygen?"
But then why wouldn't it affect anyone else and I just said,
"Do not ask, just do it." (CHUCKLING)
And I think it works.
She then feels the death of the child.
A mother would feel the death of a child.
RAMSES: No!
(RAMSES SOBBING)
SCOTT: So Golshifteh finds that, um, the child is dead
and in the arms of Ramses, the father,
and, uh, we've seen the shadow
take the lives of what would constitute first-born in the city.
Uh, it was a tricky one to actually decide what to do,
so I followed the biblical description of it's simply a shadow
where we'd come in and kind of try and invent a process
that somehow selectively this shadow sucks the oxygen out of the air.
But it's pretty...
You don't want to think too carefully about this,
because otherwise it only sucks oxygen out of the bodies and the air
around the first-born
and that's a pretty clever shadow, selecting who's first-born and who isn't.
But I thought... I think it works pretty well and I eventually just went with it.
It's like anything, when you make it,
if you're not sure, you better enter with absolute certainty and surety,
so that's what we did.
I think it comes off.
I think it's very nicely assisted by some very good score here,
by our composer.
And, um, it's really kind of tragic,
because these Egyptian people have now lost hundreds, hundreds of children.
First-born, of course, can be anything up to 30 years old, 40 years old, 50 years old.
Don't think of the first-born just as children.
So many people are dying, including adults.
(HORSE NEIGHING)
MAN 1: Get out!
MAN 2: Murderer!
MAN 3: Child killer!
Their children died last night.
As did mine.
SCOTT: So this is the meeting of Moses and Ramses
where Ramses is clearly...
Assumes that other people died that night.
"Is this your god killing children?"
And he thinks there's been no selective process to this
and that's where Moses informs him
that actually no Hebrew child died last night.
And Ramses, by that, I think, if anything, shows his fear.
He must be doubting his own gods and wondering who these people are,
which will provoke him to say, "Get out. Get out."
And is he saying that out of fear of them, uh, or just saying, "Get out"?
Get...
out.
SCOTT: This is a big, huge moment
because they're fundamentally giving away and pushing out his entire economy
because this is the balance of their prosperity
in that they have all these people, all these slaves, do everything for them
and there is no overhead, which is just terrible.
I'm using a terribly modern association with how the businesses run.
The businesses run on free labor.
From this moment on, it's gonna change Egypt.
I guess Egypt changed forever after this, right?
CAINE: There's a tradition in, uh, Jewish belief
that you can argue with God.
He always wins in the end,
but if you present a good cogent argument,
you can maybe get him to change his mind.
Now an example of that is Abraham.
When God decided to destroy the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah,
Abraham argued with him and said,
"Well, if I can find," I think it was, "40 good people in these cities,
"will you spare them?" And God said, "Yeah, okay. Find 40."
And Abraham came back and said, "Well, I can't find 40. Will you accept 20?"
And God said, "Yeah, okay, 20 will do."
And so it went and it came down to 10 and I think, in the end,
if I remember my Genesis,
Abraham couldn't even find 10 good people
and so the cities were destroyed.
But God is open to argument
and that's a cornerstone of Jewish belief
and I like that about it.
I think it gives the religion room to move.
You don't have to believe fervently and adamantly and irrevocably
one particular course of action.
If you can persuade God to change his mind, he's open to argument.
(EGYPTIANS SHOUTING INDISTINCTLY)
SCOTT: This is a very touching scene in the film, which I think
is Ramses picking up his swaddled or his bound dead child
and places him in the box and he'll go into Ramses' tomb,
waiting Ramses when Ramses dies.
He'll be placed in the tomb somewhere in the Ramses pyramid
where the Ramses pyramid will wait for Ramses
and whoever dies with him or is...
Ramses had like 50 wives, I think,
and he outlived them all, so he did pretty well.
That's what it says historically.
Ramses lived till he was 95 and had, um...
Sorry, more.
Roughly 150 wives and 200 children.
So he must have been prolific and eaten a lot of carrots.
And oysters.
CAINE: As I've said, God, if he wanted to,
could have solved this problem in an instant.
He could have just killed Ramses and all his army
in one great flash of lightning.
But he chooses not to do that.
The deaths of the first-born may seem a little crude
and a little like overkill,
but in the end, they're the one thing that make Ramses change his mind
and he lets the Hebrews go and immediately decides to go after them,
and that's where a sequence occurs
that I invented for the purpose and it serves more than one purpose.
When Moses went to Midian the first time,
he crossed at what are now called the Straits of Tiran.
It's a seven-mile stretch of water with some land mounds in the middle of it,
where you can rest.
And at low tide, the water is almost shallow enough to wade across.
It's the obvious crossing point.
And Moses wants to take the 400 released Hebrews by that same route.
They get to a point in Sinai
and if you look at the map, you'll see exactly where this is,
where there's a crossroads and there's a road going due east
through the mountains
that reaches the Red Sea at a different point,
where the crossing is even wider
and there are no land mounds in the middle.
And this is clearly not the way to go with 400 refugees on foot with cattle.
But Moses is persuaded to go that way
and he's saying all along that, "I know better. I know the route.
"The Straits of Tiran is the straighter, better route for us."
But he goes the other way and discovers, in the process,
that God has seen things that Moses hasn't seen.
"I know this land," says Moses,
and he's reminded that God made it.
And God knows better because he leads the Hebrews
by a very steep, mountainous route,
suitable just for people on foot, certainly not suitable for chariots.
And when pharaoh follows him along this track,
many of the chariots fall into the chasm and that's God knowing better.
And when they reach... The time they reach the crossing point,
the eventual crossing point,
Moses has admitted that it was a more sensible route to take,
given there was an army in pursuit.
SCOTT: Of course, historically and geographically,
the walk to the Straits is about 800 miles.
So I'm sure somebody's gonna bring that up, but you can't.
I mean, in this story, whatever you want to call it,
I don't want to actually have them walking for 800 miles.
That would take them the best part of a year.
So the magic of film is it enables you to skip across certain considerations
to actually get on with the story.
But if Ramses really, really did pursue them,
then he must have thought about it long and hard for months
and then said, "I'm gonna go after this guy. I'm going to take them all down."
Because if the parting of the sea and that encounter,
in fact, the way it's written, occurred,
then it would have been months later.
The Reed Sea, people think it was the Red Sea, right?
Well, they used to call it the Reed Sea.
And so maybe at that particular point, this sea at that moment, was shallower.
I think now the depth's about 200 feet.
In those days rumored that you'd cross at low tide by wading
because there was a coral bridge kind of thing between the two shores.
The shores, in fact, were 11 miles.
Uh, they're 11 miles and it's a long way,
and if you stand on the beach and you look at the horizon,
with an average person, a 5'10" man,
is about six miles to the horizon.
So 11 miles takes you way over the horizon.
We kept it about six miles because I wanted to be able to see the far shore.
He's actually trying to remember the way he came
and, um, he also is asking for help.
This scene was in and was out here
because I like the fact that Moses goes off to pretend, as it were,
that actually he's gonna have a private word with God
and, in fact, what he's doing is saying,
"Please help me. I am lost. I don't think I know where I'm going."
He went up the route that the old man had said,
"Well, I came from there," hoping that's gonna bring him to the shore
and, of course, it doesn't.
It leads him more deeper into the mountains,
so he is fundamentally lost.
This is where he asks God for help and God does not help him.
Christian's really good at internalizing this agony
and confusion and his dilemma.
The very fact that he's now asked God for help
constitutes that he is, if you like, faithful, right?
You consider the fact that he must be faithful at this point to be asking for help.
Interesting how I always wasn't sure whether to have
Malak standing on top of that hill that we have, or not.
And I'm kind of in two minds.
I wish I hadn't taken it out, but maybe I should have taken it out,
because when they walk out,
we pan up and we see there's a little tiny figure on the top
and that's all done on the spur of the moment.
I just did it and thought, "Yeah."
And we didn't take him up there, we just digitally put him up there.
But I covered the shot of Malak looking down on him as if...
Not to help, but at the same time the fact that he's there
constitutes the fact that he is helping, right?
He's keeping an eye on them.
God helps those who help themselves. What's that old saying?
They didn't think they could with theirs.
RAMSES: How would they know?
They've never been here.
Moses may have.
SCOTT: Symbol of, "How do I know I'm going this way?"
Had them make up a straw doll that morning on the spot
and that's why he stares at the straw doll going up that hill
and knows he must come this way.
So he's gonna take the worst possible route for him
and his horses and his wagons.
These wagons weigh about 500, 600 pounds,
so they're murderous for those horses to pull.
Moses has now found the shoreline and it's not what he expected.
There's no way this shoreline is anything like
the straits where he crossed before.
He's probably 20 miles out.
Is this high tide or low tide?
Doesn't matter.
This isn't the straits, is it?
No.
AARON: Do you even know where we are?
SCOTT: The only dwelling in this entire valley probably runs...
It's not a valley, but a mountain range.
Maybe runs, I don't know, five, 10 miles?
And the beach is five, 10 miles without a building on it.
As Moses is walking right there,
on that rise there, there's a schloss,
which is like a Bavarian house
with a tower and battlements
and apparently in the war years, this was a Nazi household
where a man who was getting away out of Germany, and Europe at the time,
built this place and in this...
All these slopes, he had wheat farms...
Wheat-growing...
And he used a lot of local labor,
worked out a system of irrigation
and had quite a thriving corn-growing community.
The other rumor has it that
this is an earlier settlement where U-boats...
I find this hard to believe...
Used to drop off people in rubber dinghies and row them ashore
and where there was plastic surgery done in the house.
So if Adolf got away, it may have been here.
Do you believe he died and was burned with the gasoline tank? I'm not sure.
(PANTING)
SCOTT: This was a clever benchmark of how to do it.
This was written three years before we did this.
He discards everything that the sword represents to him,
his honor, everything.
His speech about, "I have failed, "
both to his people and to God and to himself,
is kind of pretty nice and, from that, he takes a symbol of everything
that he likes about the gift of that sword
and throws it into the water to leave it forever and sleeps.
As he sleeps, he wakes in the silence
and looks up at the heavens and in the heavens, there is a comet.
There's many comets that occur at night.
If you're in the desert, you see them all the time.
So there's nothing special about this comet,
except it goes this dead straight line, straight across the far shore,
almost as if it's telling him something and that's about as far as we know.
That's the second really nice silence in the movie.
It's all in silence.
(PEOPLE CHATTERING EXCITEDLY)
In the morning,
a trillion birds wake him up.
I mean, the birds would be attracted.
They would know something's up, animals always do.
Like when there's a tsunami,
do you know there were no dogs found, no carcasses of dogs?
The dogs knew and buggered off on the high ground.
They just knew something.
They can probably hear it or feel it.
So I thought the wildlife, which was there
maybe to find confused fish floating to the surface,
there's a feeding frenzy.
To make this current, I had to use five motorboats,
engines locked, to...
This foreground thing's all done live. This is not digital.
So I had six motorboat engines just out of shot here,
lashed down to concrete weight in the ground
and scaffolding tube.
And they kind of worked pretty good.
You're limited to the narrow shot
and then the digital effects were then enhanced to...
You know, because I could only do a certain area.
I was doing something like the size of half a tennis court,
then everything else had to
be digitally enhanced and brought to bear to make it look bigger and bigger.
What is it?
The current.
It's strong.
SCOTT: Rocks appearing.
Pretty subtle, but I don't know how to do it any quicker,
because fundamentally it's a rapid... It's simply rapids now.
It's like a giant river draining, okay?
We need to cross now!
SCOTT: And that's why it provokes him to say,
"We cross here. We cross now."
We cross here.
We cross here!
CAINE: The belief in God and God's influence on man
is not affected by offering naturalistic reasons for things to happen.
It's like Darwinism.
You can believe in Darwinism and still believe in God
because Darwinism, you could argue, occurred as a result of God's decision.
That was the way he made things happen.
And the Hebrew God seems to make things happen
by having them arise out of naturalistic circumstances.
He lets men and nature be the agency of his will.
So when Moses is instructed to return to Egypt
and free the Israelites from bondage,
it's because God chose to do it that way.
I mean, if you think about it,
given an omnipotent God,
if God had wanted the Israelites freed from their slavery,
he could quite easily have erased Ramses and the entire Egyptian army in a second.
He could have just obliterated them with a flick of his thumb.
But he doesn't do things that way.
He uses human agency and that's why he chooses Moses.
SCOTT: Always try and address this stuff logically rather than magically.
So this is just gonna be a really hard, tough and rather frightening walk
and, of course, you're not just gonna have flat sand.
You're gonna have drainage channels.
The deepest are gonna be the last ones to drain and that's what...
I tried to work it out and that's, I think, what we've got fairly successfully.
You can't just have a big flat road at sea
like the Yellow Brick Road all the way across.
You can't do that.
But he's just gonna walk in.
He's kind of just blind...
He's blindly doing it, he's now showing absolute blind faith.
He's gonna assume... He's gonna walk and he'd rather drown than turn back.
(SOLDIERS YELLING)
Steady!
To the right, to the right! Tight!
SCOTT: The period is very difficult to do.
We got really good at doing period generally, I think.
People learn, you know, from doing stuff.
You gradually separate from the cheesiness to the reality.
And I learned to do real very early on.
I was always getting period commercials, so I just found it pretty easy.
It's all to do with research.
You need to smell it, you know?
(SCREAMING)
(GASPING)
SCOTT: The idea of the horse falling would be a symbol there because...
Not of freedom or anything like that, but the fact that
you want to see the full scale of what's coming before they do.
So that horse has run away down the beach,
escaping, thinking it's got its own freedom, even with a saddle on
and to suddenly be confronted by a giant wall of water.
That was the only reason for that.
(SOLDIERS YELLING)
Ramses!
SCOTT: This road, we found this road, is literally on the way there
and that's what it's like, except that we've added the rocks gradually
shaken loose by the stamping of the hundreds of horses
and the chariots.
They would definitely shake that road loose.
And this guy's gonna catch his own comeuppance and everybody loves it.
Oops. Here we go.
(CHUCKLING)
Wow! The stuntman was very brave to actually sit there.
Stop! That's not the stuntman, that was the dummy.
This is very difficult without hurting horses.
We had to shoot... Second unit did this. ...a lot of this on wire,
so guy's hanging on the... That guy's on a wire.
And then this is all digital. It's a pretty good mix, works very well.
(ALL SCREAMING)
SCOTT: And then it creates a, um, you know, avalanche.
CAINE: The waters parting, again, you could say it's naturalistic.
There have been tsunamis reported in that area
and it's depicted in the film as a tsunami.
It's a great vacuum as the water disappears and then a great rush as it comes back in.
It doesn't divide in half like the center parting in a haircut.
It disappears all in one direction and comes back in the same direction
as a mighty flood, an enormous, irresistible wave.
So you could just about believe that God has caused that to happen naturally,
because everything that happens naturally you could argue is caused by God.
He's the prime mover of all things.
So there's nothing you could explain in natural terms
that wouldn't be explainable as God's choice.
SCOTT: There it is.
That's what the bottom of the sea looks like.
I think people thought it was just gonna be a big, white stretch of sand.
I said, "No."
You're gonna have rock, seaweed,
not so much seaweed, you're gonna have a lot of black coral.
I found that part of the beach was this black coral,
so we were able to sample a lot of it.
And I discovered it by accident, looked down,
it looked kind of about the size of a tennis court.
Went down, it was huge, like six football fields.
So we shot a lot of the stuff there.
It was, the sand, pools of water and black coral.
Great.
(MAN SHOUTING)
SCOTT: This would be savage mayhem,
a bloodbath everywhere.
So let's say his troops now are ridiculous,
maybe 100, 200 men on horseback with lances.
They'd already begun the idea of defending themselves
and the notion that we must defend ourselves
and we must have an army so the army would grow.
Later, Joshua would be nominated the head of the Hebrew army
and would be the leader of the army which would finally arrive in Canaan.
So he became pretty tough.
Prepared to defend and fight for what they want.
Moshe.
SCOTT: When you're galloping on a big, flat beach,
you're saying, "Right. The tide is gonna come from there
"and these 100 horses, or 65 horses, are gonna be,
"you know, 1,000 horses, et cetera, et cetera."
You just got to believe it.
But fortunately, I'm able to visualize this stuff so I can draw it
and I know it's gonna happen, I know it's gonna be there.
With today's capabilities and, you know, this visual effects house such as this
and, uh, you know, Peter Chiang,
you know this is just gonna end up looking real.
It's a matter of turning the screw till it's better and better
and it's a learning process.
Water's the most tricky thing to actually make look real
and I think they did quite well here. It's pretty bloody good.
This is the big deluge. That's the white horse saying, "What?"
Again, I wanted to put gulls in,
because I think the gulls enjoy it because they're untouchable,
but they also give it scale.
Moshe.
SCOTT: And there's always this tricky thing of how fast is the wave traveling?
This wave's probably traveling... Got to be 100 miles an hour.
I know the weight of the water, the tsunami...
They said at a certain point in the middle of the Indian Ocean,
I find it hard to believe,
but they said it was traveling about 400 miles an hour
from the first eruption, whatever caused it,
the deluge was like... And then it gradually slowed down.
I think by the time it hit shore, about 45 miles an hour.
At 45 miles an hour, a 15-foot wave would absolutely knock anything over, right?
Because I think that wave is only like 45... I mean, not even 15 feet, right?
It's a solid wall of water, would flatten anything.
Immovable force.
Knock out, rip out trees and everything.
(GRUNTING)
SCOTT: And see, here's the bit where we try and keep going as long as we can,
because that sea's coming in pretty fast.
Come! You'll never make it back!
SCOTT: And it doesn't do to actually analyze his question here right now, saying,
"You come with me. We won't hurt you."
Because it doesn't matter how fast they ride.
(CHUCKLING) They're gonna get screwed anyway.
But I love the fact he just does not give up
and wants to take him down before the wave takes them both down.
(ALL URGING HORSES)
SCOTT: Good stuff. Fantastic.
Uh-oh.
That's terrific, isn't it?
The gulls on the top were always a thing I wanted.
I wanted one that was just a big albatross taking fish out of the top,
but they ended up with half a dozen gulls, which I think were really great.
Here we go.
Ain't gonna make it.
Bang.
This is a helicopter shot, pulling back through a rock,
which I thought we might use and then I thought we never would use,
but here we have... We've got it.
I love this way the wash of sea passes beneath us on those cliffs.
Tank at Pinewood. Here's the tank at Pinewood.
You drop a couple of things in and then now you go digitally underwater.
Then you come back to literally...
This water's all digital, which I think is amazing.
Then the dead army, there's, I don't know,
2,000 men falling to the bottom completely dead, drowned,
crushed by thousands of tons of water.
And the clearance and somewhere in here you got a little bit...
I had to show a bit of God here somewhere, so I have a little bit of God's light
and, of course, his survival.
He has to survive, because people will say,
"Well, how do you do a wave that... How the hell does he survive it?"
Fact is, he did.
Fact is, Ramses' remains now are in Cairo or London, somewhere.
He survived.
Whether or not, of course, he went off the beach onto the...
And pursued or not, I don't know.
We don't know. We're told he did.
Story has it... There you go, a shark
ripping up a horse
and he's watching it bemused, bewildered,
till he realizes he's being watched by the man
who's watched him right through the story.
Bringing in dead bodies. Look, already survival, eating.
It's just me here.
SCOTT: He says, "Come here. There's only me here."
In other words, he's not talking to God.
Sit.
SCOTT: Aaron did really well. Um, very good.
Just took to it naturally.
I think he must come from theater, because he eased into it so easily, you know?
He's a very clever actor,
but this was effortless.
Well, he asked to do it and I said, "Are you sure? It's not a big part."
He said, "No. I want to do it."
So I said, "Okay. Great."
And, uh, Christian, I think, enjoyed the whole experience.
Good man. Great, great,
great partner in this in terms of such a huge undertaking.
It's a big film.
We'd never have got through this without anybody...
This was 74 days, which is insane.
You can't try that. It's like crazy.
But it was like flat-out all the time and you've got to be crisp,
you've got to be two takes, three takes.
You can't do 90 takes.
You'd just never get through.
You know somewhere in there you've got it, the key is getting the coverage.
That's why I always work with a minimum of four cameras,
even for dialogue scenes.
What happens when we stop running?
SCOTT: Saying, why do you have to have Ramses survive?
I said, A, he did, and, B, I love the fact he's here
and I see the army already cleaned up with the garbage collectors,
i.e., vultures.
They're feeding already
and, um, the carrion will be soft flesh within a few hours in the heat.
Ramses...
the Great.
SCOTT: I love the fact he reflects on himself saying, "Ramses the Great."
And this is a very nice device.
We used the rock twice to bring us back home.
I thought it was pretty nice.
And I'll use the repeat, except in reverse of the vows, when he sees her.
I was always worried about hitting him in the back of the head.
I think the makeup on this film and the hair, that's a wig on the boy,
and I think
the makeup and hair on the film is absolutely fantastic.
On Moses, it's just incredible,
because you have to go through many changes of different length on him,
right, from Egypt and then, of course, nothing's shot in continuity,
so you're constantly on a program of "Where was he when we did this?"
So the beard was not like that, but the hair was...
So his hair, beard changed all the time.
But he was in the makeup chair
averaging every morning around about 4:30, quarter to 5:00.
That's tough.
My favorite shot.
In cinema, I think that's my favorite shot, when John Wayne
walks out through the doorway.
It's like, "Wow."
I think that's the reason why I wanted to get into movies.
I went, "God damn."
I think I've done this almost in every movie.
I did it in Kingdom of Heaven,
I did it just here and I probably certainly did it in Gladiator.
But the subtlety here of making her look older is very good,
because she's only 27, but she looks like, you know, could be in her mid-30s.
Very subtly done. Beautifully done.
(PEOPLE MURMURING)
Who are they?
SCOTT: In a funny kind of way, you could end the film right here.
He says, "They're my people."
You could end it right there if you want. (CHUCKLING)
But you can't.
You have to go on
and you got to keep moving, otherwise people will say, "Oh, that's it, that's it."
And he already is into the vows.
You are.
SCOTT: The climax of the movie was he didn't get to Canaan.
And I had a caption saying that he lived on till he was... Untold.
They don't know. Biblically they suggest 110,
but Jeffrey Caine said it was probably more like 70,
that wandering in the desert couldn't have been 40 years,
but what was he doing, you know?
But it could have been a couple of years.
And then circling Canaan and not daring to go in
till you're trained as an army,
because the Canaanites were really tough.
The Philistines, really tough.
He knows somehow he's up there. No one questions it.
But it is the mountain where he met him, so why not go and see him?
Maybe he goes up that evening.
My one concession to the calf, the golden calf,
which they biblically say
they made from all the stolen gold from Egypt,
the Hebrewites stole a lot of gold and things
and they were carrying it with them, so they're already now making an effigy,
which is what he was afraid of.
But that would represent... You know, we're talking about...
We're trying to talk about the 40-day jump here and then he would go down.
I couldn't do...
I think people will feel they know where it's going
and you don't want to have to do him going down,
smashing the tablets and coming back up again,
because he'll do this again,
having rewritten the tablets, then go down and then they'll be off to Canaan.
So we tried to précis this as best we could.
You know, as respectfully as we could.
And that's where the boy kind of puts him under a little bit of pressure, saying,
"Do you agree with what you're doing?
"Because if you don't, put down the hammer."
You don't always agree with me.
Nor you me, I've noticed.
CAINE: I wrote a scene where Moses is given the Ten Commandments by Malak
and writes them down and then he descends from the mountain
with the tablets and drops them when he sees the rebellious Hebrews
dancing around a golden calf.
But the giving of the Ten Commandments doesn't dramatize well.
It's just that it needs to be there.
And I ended the film with Moses going up the mountain,
having been denied entry to the Promised Land
and Malak is there again and Moses
leans against a rock and closes his eyes and dies
and he has a final tender scene with Malak,
which I think... I think that scene has disappeared from the film
because there probably wasn't space to put it in.
Uh, Ridley is the best judge of those things
and I think that was probably Ridley's choice.
SCOTT: And now you've got the long walk to Canaan
and there it is.
That's theoretically...
You wouldn't call that the Holy Grail, but if those existed today,
more important than the Grail, I think.
(TABLET CLANKING)
And there he is, looking, I think, satisfied.
(SIGHS DEEPLY)
Great.
And hasn't aged an hour.
Hmm.
And he's gone.
This is on tires at a carpark.
The platform on tires with a bit of canvas, no wheels
and people doing this in a bit of dust,
somebody blowing dust up from underneath. (CHUCKLING)
CAINE: It's a story of a liberation hero.
It's about the defeat of an oppressor,
it's about faith, it's about doubt, disobedience, sacrifice.
It's a story of mission.
And there's always room for those in any world.
It's particularly, I think, relevant today, with the problems in the Middle East
and it's time it was retold.
I think the last big retelling was the DeMille version in '56.
There have been a couple of television films since,
they've all been over-reverential.
The problem with being over-reverent and literal
is that there's no room to expand one's dramatic sense.
And you can do this very well without offending,
at least I hope so.
If I've offended anybody, then it's my failing.
There was certainly never any intention to do that.
So it's entertainment consistent with respect for people of faith.
And how much of it reaches the screen,
well, that is director country
and Helmuth von Moltke famously said,
"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy."
And in the same way, no screenplay ever survives contact with a production
because the exigencies of production
make for changes, so directors see things that looked okay in the script
that just don't work on the spot,
and he has to make those decisions and make those changes
and that's par for the course. That's the way it always works.
So this isn't really a writer's project, it's very much a director's movie.
And I'm glad and proud to have been part of it.
SCOTT: I think it was one of the more enjoyable films I've tackled.
I mean, I enjoy all my films to do,
because they're so physically challenging and that's part of the fun.
I'm very pleased with it. Um...
And I'm very pleased with what the actors did with it, um,
and what Alberto did with it and Peter
and, you know, Arthur Max really long overdue for, I'll say, an Academy Award.
Way overdue.
But, you know, you can't ever assume that.
I never think about it. It really doesn't matter.
I just enjoy doing what I'm doing
and I'm thrilled with the fact I'm still allowed to do it.