Hi, this is J Blakeson. I'm the director of The 5th Wave.
And I'm Chloë Grace Moretz. I play Cassie Sullivan.
Yeah, so, should we talk a little about
how we both got involved in this project to start with?
Yeah, let's go for it.
So, I got sent the book a couple of years ago, now,
and read it really quickly over a weekend
and immediately wanted to do it
because it was a very interesting mix of exciting and dark
and such a great central story, great central character.
Then I rang up the producers and then started talking to them about it,
and very quickly came together.
I made a little reel that Sony had to look at.
And they liked it.
And very quickly, it sort of seemed to come together,
and very soon after that I met you.
Yeah.
And so, how did you first get involved in it?
Yeah, well, I think I remember.
I just kind of went in for a meeting with the people at Sony,
and we were all just talking about it.
And they mentioned that they just got this new property, 5th Wave.
And I already knew the project just from the book 'cause my friends had read it.
And I was like, "Cool, I know that story."
It's a young adult, interesting sci-fi kind of book.
And then they gave me the book to read and I read it.
And then I just kind of sat in a little bit of a waiting period for a while
until they found you and then I got a call.
- And I was filming in... - Vancouver.
Vancouver, yeah, I was filming in Vancouver.
- I think it was If I Stay or something like that. - I think it was.
I think it was If I Stay and they were, like,
"Hey, we found this director. He's really amazing."
I was like, "Oh, my God, I know him."
I was, blah-blah, "I love him, he's so amazing, the best director ever."
Yeah, so, then J and I met and then there was another waiting period.
We waited for another few months or something.
- Yeah. - And then I met you again in New York.
That's right, you were doing a play.
And that was, like, the real solidifying meeting, I think.
- Yeah, and by that point we had a script. - You had a script, yeah.
The first time we met each other I think I flew into Vancouver late at night
- and then left after breakfast. - Oh, my God.
- It was pretty quick. - It was immediate.
Fly-by-night sort of thing.
Yeah, it was kind of interesting to meet you in person.
'Cause obviously, with actors you only ever know what you see on the screen.
Yeah, you never know how they're going to be.
And you've played a lot of sort of otherworldly characters,
like Hit Girl and in Let Me In.
And you were in the middle of shooting If I Stay,
which is a bit more of a normal sort of high school girl.
But I don't think I've actually seen you play a normal high school girl.
I've never really played a normal high school girl.
So, it was really interesting to meet you because I had this sort of idea that you were
very much like those sort of otherworldly characters.
I met you, I'm like, "You're a normal person, like the character."
So, that was kind of reassuring.
- Yeah, that I wasn't some strange, like... - Yeah, vampire.
- ...half-vampire assassin child. - Yeah.
And obviously I'd been a big fan of your other stuff, so it was nice to kind of know
- that you were a normal person. - Could be a human.
I guess when you work with anybody you want to have them be a normal person
because it makes life more fun and interesting.
Yeah, and Cassie is such a normal girl at the heart of it.
Maybe that's why we both kind of loved her so much,
is she wasn't this trained assassin or anything.
She was just this normal girl in normal circumstances
who then is put up against all of humanity being lost.
Yeah, she's got a sort of an accidental heritage.
She's not chosen to be a hero.
She just survives the first few waves by luck more than...
- Anything, yeah. - ...by skill.
And then she kind of gets thrown in the deep and has to learn how to swim.
- And fight through it. - Yeah.
We should talk a little bit about the bit we've just seen
with the convenience store, which is the opening of the book.
I remember when I read that in the book,
I thought it was a really powerful way to open a book.
- And you're immediately sort of sucked in. - It throws you right in.
Yeah, and when we were cutting the movie,
we had various different versions of that scene
where we got up until the point of the gunshot and sometimes cut away,
then we'd cut back in time, and sometimes we even didn't do that.
We just heard somebody was behind the door and got to the door
and pushed the door open and then cut away.
And then just stopped, yeah.
And the version I really liked was the version where we saw everything,
because you're introduced to this character who's in this horrible moral situation,
where she has to make this choice of whether to trust this guy.
And we're not quite sure what's going on.
And she does what the audience is kind of rooting for her to do.
- You completely understand what she does. - What we'd all choose.
Yeah, and then when the crucifix is revealed,
very much like in the book, you kind of have this gut punch.
And you really understand where this character is
and is in a very strange, horrible place.
- And then we cut back to the party where... - Who she used to be, yeah.
...we see her now, where she's like, yeah, hanging out with her friends.
And for me that jump is so interesting.
It's like we go from this really horrible cold open to...
This anticlimactic...
Yeah, going straight back to this, like, happy, bright, warm world and the way that
Enrique shot it is, like, glowing.
It's glowing, yeah, it's exciting.
Yeah, and Nick looks like a...
- Lively and... - Yeah, and looks really pretty.
- Looks really pretty sitting on the car. - And is fun, yeah.
And the question of how did that girl get from there to there
seemed like a really interesting opening gambit.
And it was directly from the book,
but I'm really pleased that we managed to keep it in the film that way
and retain that sort of powerful opening.
And in a lot of nice ways it doesn't fool the audience.
The audience knows from the get-go what they're getting into.
And what they're about to see happen to humanity
- and to see happen to this girl and her family. - Yeah.
- So, it puts you in that mood already. - Yeah.
By the way, the father, watching TV there late at night,
he's watching In a Lonely Place, which is a Nicholas Ray movie.
Oh, my gosh, really?
Which is a Humphrey Bogart movie that I really love.
- So, we snuck in a little bit of that. - That's funny. I didn't know that.
Which I recommend everybody see, yeah, it's a good movie.
You recommend you all go see it.
So, there's Zackary.
Yeah. And we saw a lot of kids for the part of Sam.
We read a lot of kids from all over America.
We went to Texas and we read a lot of people in LA.
And what I really liked about Zack is that he didn't feel like a kid actor.
He just felt like a kid, you know, he's very good.
He's very good. He can deliver the emotion and the sort of intensity,
but he still feels like an excited kid and feels like a real kid because,
sometimes child actors who have been doing a lot of commercials or something,
- like 7,000 commercials... - And they're so prepped.
Yeah, they always feel like they're in a toothpaste commercial,
even if they're doing sort of an emotional scene.
But Zack didn't have that at all.
- He really felt like he was just this... - Raw.
Had this real kid energy.
Which he had on set the whole time as well, yeah.
Yeah, on and off screen, no matter what.
Yeah, he was a lot of fun. He was so excited to be making this movie.
He was.
Yeah, and he's very sweet and I think he did a good job.
And there's Gabriela, walking away, who was a lot of fun, too.
Yep, Gabriela Lopez, yeah.
- You and her had a good... - A good little friendship going on.
Yeah, and very convincing as best friends, as school friends, I think.
We got along really, really well. It was a nice kind of a...
Yeah, and we were lucky with this film because we shot it in Atlanta.
And a lot of the secondary characters are local.
And they were great.
Yeah, Gabriela was local and we got really lucky,
'cause we had a really good pool of local talent to...
- Pull from. - Yeah, to fish our actors out of.
- Actor fishing. - Yeah.
But it's so important.
I know it's like the cliché that most of, part of the director's job is to
- kind of hire the right people. - Yeah.
And we got really lucky with all these actors, like Maggie and Ron.
Maggie, yeah.
They're such good actors.
And they do a lot when they're doing nothing, like right here.
They really solidify it and we were staring at a blue sky.
Yeah, I was, saying, "Look at the top of that tree."
Yeah, we didn't know what we were looking at.
And we never actually saw a full template of what the spaceship would look like.
No, I think I was trying to describe something.
Yeah, you were like, "It's kind of spiky and it's really, really big."
Yeah, "It's big and scary."
It should not be floating above a suburban neighbourhood.
No, something you don't want to see floating.
No.
So, when we were location scouting,
we went to, I think, probably about 100 high schools to look around.
And this one was surprising.
I was very particular of how much I sought to use...
- That's one classroom. - Yeah, it's one classroom.
But you have to see the right things out of the window as well.
That's true, that's true.
It has to have a road and then, like, a tree line and then some sky
outside of the right kind of classroom.
And growing up in England, our schools look pretty different.
- Very different. - We don't have like banks of lockers like that.
We don't have those chairs that have the desk on them.
- We have tables that we sit at. - No, tables with chairs.
And so, for me I grew up watching a lot of high school movies from America.
So, for me there's a real romance to this kind of high school
which I think people who go to this kind of high school just probably don't feel.
So, I could see an American high school corridor or hallway...
Differently than we do.
Yeah, like this shot here.
And it really feels like it's full of sort of mythology.
It holds so much.
Yeah, yeah, because I grew up watching a lot of John Hughes movies.
And so, that really influenced this, actually, when I was a teenager.
My love for, especially Ferris Bueller's Day Off
and The Breakfast Club.
They really were like a bridge into kind of watching lots of other movies
'cause I watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off again and again and again.
- It's the first film I really got obsessed with. - Really?
Well, that and Star Wars, but everybody gets obsessed with Star Wars.
- Of course. - So, I really love that movie.
And the idea that John Hughes really didn't patronise,
didn't look down on his teenage characters.
- He treated them like adults. - He treated them like adults.
Their problems are real, 'cause teenage problems in hindsight,
when you're an adult, seem sort of ridiculous, you know?
Yeah, they seem so heightened and silly.
Yeah, and it's like, "Well, I've got a mortgage and I can't find work."
And children, yeah.
Yeah, "I've got three kids to support. And I can't make payment on my car.
"And you're worried about some guy not looking back at you across the hallway
"and not replying to your text. Are you insane?"
But I think with teenagers, those problems are real.
And in fact, because they haven't got all those responsibilities in their life, I think...
- They're more pure. - Yeah, and they're full of hormones.
They're feeling everything more acutely.
And it's the first time they're feeling love
and the first time they're feeling this fear of being in the world and grown up.
It's not jaded.
Yeah, the magic of childhood has disappeared,
and suddenly you're on the cusp of an adult world,
- realising how terrible it looks. - Yeah, exactly.
And feeling that heartache.
So, I've always loved those kind of teenaged characters in movies.
And that started off in the John Hughes movies.
But I think something that brought me to this, because people often say,
"Well, why are you interested in doing a young adult movie?"
And it's like, "Well, I don't see it as being a young adult movie.
"It's just a movie about characters who have emotions."
And the thing about Cassie I thought was great was that she's like every other...
In the beginning of her story, she's like every other teenager,
but she kind of wants to go out and have experiences and excitement.
She wants independence from her family. She wants to fall in love.
And she gets all of that, but in, like, the worst way imaginable.
- The worst, most intense way in the world. - Yeah.
This was a fun shot to shoot, zooming up to
- the tree. - Yeah, it was freezing.
I know it was kind of less fun for you because we...
This is actually a backwards shot.
When we shot this, we had a camera on two huge pulley systems over cranes.
It was wild.
And we were dropping it quite quickly towards Chloë
- and Zack as they hid in the tree. - Straight towards my head, like a guillotine.
And I had to reassure you that we weren't going to get too close to your face.
- I wouldn't have wanted to be there. - I was so nervous about that.
But you kept your cool very well and maybe that kind of fearful look...
Yeah, it was more about the camera trying to kill me, exactly.
So, here it's, like, one shot that we have in my home town, London,
where I destroy one of the most famous landmarks in London.
Yeah.
And we actually shot this in Thailand.
But I couldn't be there because I was in the middle of the edit, so...
- Someone else? - No, I was...
- Right, you were a robot. - I was a robot.
I directed that via iPad.
So, they put an iPad on a...
- On a stick. - On a C-stand.
And faced it at the monitor bank
and turned me around to talk to the actors and then turn me back to the monitors.
- And I was, you know, doing... - 21st-century direction.
...non-branded video conferencing over the Internet.
Non-branded video conferencing?
There's Tony in New York. That was fun.
- I'd never shot in New York before. - That's cool.
We'd been in Atlanta doing prep for a long time,
so spending a couple of days in New York...
Was nice.
Yeah, because I grew up watching Scorsese movies.
I know you've been in a Scorsese movie.
- Yeah, but it was in Paris. - Yeah, that's true.
It doesn't work.
- Paris is still cool, though. - Yeah.
So, yeah, to go to New York and shoot that with a New York crew
was really exciting and sort of like a little childhood dream come true.
I think the production design and art department did such a good job
- in destroying this neighbourhood. - Such a good job, it was amazing.
The designer's Jon Billington.
He's not only good fun, but I think he did a fantastic job making this film look
way bigger than it ought to look.
My gosh, yeah, we did not spend
that much and when we were filming it,
we didn't really know what we were going to show up to every day.
Like, when I showed up to this set,
I was imagining just a little bit of the football field to be covered.
But, no, I mean, it was huge.
Yeah, and, like, all those poor actors who were in those body bags.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
We actually put people in the body bags and zipped them up.
No, they are dummies in there, before people get upset.
We wouldn't be allowed to.
Yeah.
I don't know, actually. There's one of our drivers there on the left.
Really?
So, here's Gabriela again.
But this was a tough day because it was red hot.
- It was so hot. - It was so hot.
And there's so many people and they didn't complain. They were great.
- It was supposed to be fall. - Yeah.
And you were wearing three layers and hats and stuff.
- It was red hot. - It was burning.
And there was all these people wearing these sort of like hazmat suits and stuff.
- So many extras, so many people. - Wearing these masks, yeah.
I think up until now this basically was the biggest day of shooting that I had.
Because my first movie there's three actors in the whole movie
- and about three locations. - We had, like, 300 on this one.
Yeah, I think we've already been in 50 locations so far in this movie.
And we had hundreds of extras this day.
- It was a big day. - Yeah, it was a big day.
But it was fun and we had a great AD department who were all over it.
Yeah, we did.
And so, this is where the waves start to get personal, like you'll see.
- Yeah, it's a big hit. - Yeah.
So sad.
Yeah. Originally, we had a little bit more of the mom in the movie.
And it was heartbreaking to cut out because I thought Maggie did such a great job.
Such a good actress.
But you just need to get to the story.
You need to get through it and get to the part where Cassie is off on her quest.
Yeah.
And it's a real fine balance of deciding how much of the family story
and how much of the story before everything goes really, really wrong.
Yeah, you could have three movies pretty much in this one movie.
- That's true. - If you wanted to cut away and do it.
- Yeah, there's a lot we could have told. - So much.
- And that's the problem with adapting books. - It's so hard.
Yeah, because everybody has got a favourite part of that book.
And so, we can't put everybody's favourite part in the movie.
So, there's always going to be people who go,
"Why didn't you put that bit in? Why didn't you use that line?"
And I empathise because I'm a big fan of the book.
- And there's bits of the book that I love that... - We couldn't use.
...we couldn't put in because there just wasn't time.
And the similar thing with this book is it's an interesting book
because it's written in the first person.
So, it's Cassie narrating her own story,
kind of in real time as she then jumps backwards and forwards.
- In the book she has a very distinctive voice. - Very, very distinctive.
And she's, kind of, talking to herself in the book.
Well, you discover she's writing her journal.
And is God-like, upon like what she used to be in a lot of ways.
Yeah, and she's exploring her emotions and trying to figure it out,
and sort of saying things that she doesn't maybe feel,
but is sort of testing how she feels about saying them.
And she can be quite melodramatic and then sort of pull it back and be very real.
And everybody who's involved in the movie loved that voice in the book.
But when you're making a movie, it's a very different thing.
'Cause the only way you can get that is to either have her talk to the camera
- or have lots and lots of voice-over. - Yeah.
- I think you got a nice balance. - Yeah.
Yeah, I think in the end, well, it's all credit to you, Chloë,
because, like, a shot like this, you're doing so much with your performance
that we don't need to put the voice-over on because you can see what you're feeling.
We see the torture it is to leave your home...
- And how hard it is. - ...that you grew up in, for the last time.
Walking away from her childhood in so many ways.
Yeah, but we did lots of versions of the voice-over
as you'll remember, 'cause we made you record lots of different fixes.
From the day we were actually filming we recorded some temp ADR,
some voice-over on set.
Yeah, and then I think we did like two or three more times.
- In booths like the one we're in right now. - Yes.
Sometimes over the phone from wherever you were shooting your next movie.
Sometimes over ISDN, yeah.
And it took a long time to figure out what we needed and what we didn't need
'cause some of it you need for exposition to tell the story
and then in other moments it's about her feelings.
And every time it felt non-essential, we decided just to cut it out
and let the film tell the story.
So, you get sucked into the film rather than kept at a little distance.
Yeah, exactly.
So, if you're watching this on DVD, there will be some deleted scenes
where you'll see a scene that we cut out which was when they meet Hutchfield.
So, in the book, they meet Hutchfield in the woods,
and are kind of threatened by him and his men and we think we're in big trouble.
Yeah, and we shot that scene and it was a good scene,
- but it just felt like a lot of... - Too much.
Yeah, it felt like there was a lot of stopping and starting.
So, they just left the house and then they were stopping,
and then they were getting to the camp and then they stopped.
- Stop and go. - Yeah, so, it felt like we had to keep going.
And this definitely like, I think, when I saw the movie,
'cause I didn't know we cut that until I saw the movie,
I think what I really captured from it is that it created more of a sense of community
with the survivors, which I enjoyed
because it kind of draws you in even more on who are the Others?
Where are they? What's going on?
And sort of putting you in this awkward position.
Yeah, I think it helps to feel like maybe they're in a safe place here.
And you say in this scene, "I thought we were safe here."
It feels warm, but it's not, you know what I mean?
It's a big scene. It's a very, very scary scene.
Yeah, and I was talking to Ron about it,
and we sort of talked about this as like having "the talk" with your daughter,
like having like a conversation that you wish you didn't have to have
and wish you could put off a little bit,
but this is real life running right up against her childhood.
He knows this is the end of her childhood.
He can't protect her here, yeah.
The very end of the childhood, it's like cutting the apron strings here,
and it's killing him, but he's trying to be reassuring,
and I think the look he gives here, which kind of says it all.
- Yeah. - He's got great eyebrows.
He does, yes.
Everybody in this movie has fantastic eyebrows.
We actually all have really, really big eyebrows, especially Alex.
- Alex has big eyebrows. - Alex's eyebrows are insane.
And Liev's got very impressive eyebrows and Ron as well.
- It's a good eyebrow movie. - "It's a good eyebrow movie."
- Maybe I have a thing for eyebrows. - For eyebrows.
Maybe that's why we cast you all.
It's like on my list of things, "Talented, great performances, eyebrows."
Cara Delevingne eyebrows.
So, this, we're getting a better look at the camp here, which was built by Jon.
We built that swimming pool.
- It was huge. Yeah. - That wasn't there.
It was actually a couple of feet deep, right?
It was one foot deep up until the point
where the truck goes in, then we dug a ditch of about three...
- Well, I say "we," I didn't dig a ditch. - We... You dug a ditch.
The great guys in construction did, and so, here comes Liev and his men.
And the army.
And you can really start to hear Henry's music come through in this scene.
I think he did a great job.
There's a real balance to the tone of this film, of hope,
and of security and of fear and intimidation,
and he really embraced the ambiguity of that.
So, in that cue that you just heard of the army arriving,
it sounds big and impressive and muscular and almost like...
"We got this, we're saved," yeah.
Yeah, the cavalry has arrived, but then, there's a little hint in there
of, "Well, they're quite intimidating."
- A lot of strength there. - Yeah.
And we're very unarmed.
Yeah, and the way Henry works
is that he kind of writes these suites of music
that sort of represent emotions from the film.
Interesting, a true... Yeah, a full range of emotions.
And then he played me those suites,
and they're always a little bit more non-linear and non-story
than in the final score, but they are really interesting.
Actually, the end titles has part of the Vosch suite that he did.
I think they are both on the soundtrack.
But they're really good because that's where he gets to be
as weird as possible because then when you're trying to fit it into the movie...
- Goes as deep as he wants to. - Yeah.
When you try and slot it into the movie,
the weirdness is sometimes a little too distracting.
In scenes like, spoiler alert,
the kind of unpleasant scene that's coming up,
though I'm hoping if anybody's listening to this...
They have seen the movie already.
- They have seen the movie, I'm sure. - Yeah.
But he gets to flex his weirdness muscles
and his sort of awful clanking sounds and weird electric...
Mutilated, like, kind of tortured.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
So, Liev is so good at talking quietly
- and being powerful. Yeah. - Being so powerful.
- He exudes just strength. - Yeah.
- And safety. - Yeah, he's like a rock.
He's great. I've been a bit of a fan of Liev's work for a long time.
Same.
He's been in so many great movies and so many great parts
and steals the show, and I've never seen him on stage,
and I'd love to because he's rumoured to be fantastic.
I can imagine.
So, we were really lucky to get him.
I remember, I met him at a diner somewhere in LA.
Really, in LA?
And he was just finishing Ray Donovan and was pretty exhausted.
But immediately got on really well.
He's got a wicked sense of humour, but he takes what he does very seriously,
and I think that's true of all the actors in the movie.
They don't take themselves very seriously.
We were all super disciplined, though.
Yeah, but they take their work very seriously and I'm the same way.
It's important what you do in front of the camera is not, you know...
And we didn't have a huge amount of ego from anybody on the set.
No.
Which was great, which made the whole thing really fun.
From all the main characters, I think we were all just in it
because we loved the project and we wanted to make a good movie.
And no one really had much pushback on the...
It was a really positive set.
- Yeah, and we had a really great crew as well. - It was fun, yeah.
The crew was amazing.
- So, Enrique, our cinematographer... - Enrique was so good.
He's wild.
He's a huge talent, but he's the nicest guy as well, and very, very funny.
And we had Larry. Larry McConkey was our first camera.
- He's a legendary Steadicam operator. - What a brilliant first AC.
And did some great Steadicam work in this,
and you had worked with him before on Hugo, I think.
Yeah, he did all the Steadi for Hugo, so I knew him from that,
so it was nice to see him again in such a different setting.
Yeah, and him and Rico are a really fun double act
- to be around. Yeah. - Yeah. They are wild.
- Enrique, "No!" - "Larry!"
"Larry, Larry, you killing me!"
- But that was good fun. - "Enrique!"
It was fun.
And there's one of the many shots of feet in the film.
- So many shots of feet. - Yeah.
Lots of feet shots.
I think Zack is great in this moment.
I really think he was really good in that moment, too.
Yeah, he really soars. There's a little shot we have right now.
That's not the back of me.
That isn't, no. They weren't your feet either.
Those aren't my feet, and that was not the back of me.
- The magic of filmmaking. - The cinema. Exactly.
Some of the times when it's the back of Chloë, it's...
It wasn't me because I was underage when I made this, I was 17,
so there were times in which, with restraints of time, I couldn't do every shot.
Yeah, that was wildly inconvenient.
- How dare you've been under 18? - I know.
How dare I? I'm sorry.
So, yeah, we had Chloë on limited hours,
so we had to shoot as much as we could with her before...
But a lot of hand shots and feet.
...we had to let her go, and so, yeah, some shots of feet
and hands and wide shots from behind and stuff.
- A lot of that is... - Hannah.
Hannah, yeah, who was great.
Who was great.
Yeah. She stood by the monitor quite a lot
and watched what you were doing and how you were doing it.
She was great. She really mimicked me. It was good.
She worked really hard to get it right, so thank you, Hannah.
Thank you, Hannah.
This guy's great, this tall guy.
Yeah, he was really good.
We cast him just for a really tiny part, in the woods, this scene that we cut,
where he searched Ron and found a knife on him.
That was the only part he actually really had in the movie,
but he was so great that we put him in this scene
and made him... Because he's really tall,
you can see him from every angle,
but he kind of looks like a suburban dad who can handle himself rather than a...
It's important for me to not have kind of generic tough guys causing trouble.
Exactly.
It has to feel like these are normal people under really...
That are being pushed and pressured.
Yeah, really bad circumstances. And they've got good reason
to be kind of going crazy, their kids have been taken away from them,
they are scared.
They've been in control of everything in their lives for so long
and then suddenly it's falling apart so quickly, like in a matter of weeks,
that these people are like...
Are just trying to grasp what's going on around them.
Six weeks ago they were at work and going out for a drink with their buddies
and now they're in this horrible situation,
and that's how it happens in wars and conflict zones, is that things change fast.
So drastically.
People get really feral really quickly.
Yeah. When I was reading the book,
as you do when you read a book or watch a film,
you think, "How would I react in this situation?"
Yeah.
Yeah, this is intense.
It's a big moment. It's a cool shot.
We actually have a lot of eyeball shots.
Yeah, I like eyeballs.
This next shot was actually really interesting because I remember
I didn't know what it was going to look like when we did it, this tree shot.
The upward tree shot.
I remember before that, on this bit, you did a little pretend stumble here.
Yeah, had to slow down.
Because you're very capable of all the physical acting stuff.
I had to fake it.
You had to fake it to look like you weren't a superhero already.
But this shot here, were you a little worried about it
when we had a camera underneath your nose?
I did not know.
I was like, "This is going to be the weirdest shot ever,"
but then I saw it in the movie and I was like, "I love this shot, very cool shot."
Hopefully, it gets the feeling that the world is turning upside down for you.
Yep.
And here, Rick, the author of the book, always says it's just a story about a bear.
It's so true, though.
This bear has such a life in this movie.
You pick it up and drop it a lot.
So, this bear, we designed.
So, this isn't like an off-the-shelf thing.
For so long, we had 30 prototypes of this bear, I feel.
And so, I can't remember the name of the guy who made it because I never met him.
- I was working with Jen, our props master. - He made Ted, right?
Yeah, I think he made the bear in Ted as well,
but I was sort of trying to describe what I thought the perfect teddy bear looked like.
That's a really cute bear.
And he was sending me pictures, and I would draw all over them with a Sharpie,
and then I got the final one and I showed it to my wife.
I said, "Look, we've created the bear,"
and she goes, "That looks just like the bear you had
"when you were a kid that you showed me," and I was like, "God, it does."
My gosh, how funny.
- Yeah. So, it's sort of so hardwired. - I didn't know that, yeah.
Hardwired in me, what a teddy bear should look like, and it looks like that.
- My gosh, how cool. - Yeah.
I didn't know that. That's really funny.
So, this was quite an intense day of filming.
Huge, yeah.
So, I remember watching this on the monitor, and me and Lynn, the producer,
were both pretty much in tears watching this, watching you do this.
- It's a hard moment. - Yeah.
I mean, she's lost everything.
Her brother's gone. Her mother's dead. Her dad just...
Yeah. I've got daughters, and my second daughter had just been born at this point...
You're really affected.
...so I'm bringing a father-daughter thing to it,
which is like the flip side of what you were probably bringing to it.
Yeah. I was watching the monitors, thinking it's horrible.
You're watching it, thinking, "God, this is horrible, what a horrible moment,"
but at the same, as a filmmaker, you're thinking, "This is great."
Yeah, you're like, "It's so sad, it's so horrible, but it's good."
"It's great, and Chloë is doing so great."
And those extras, I thought, were really, really great,
they stayed so still and very respectful
- of you having to stay right in the zone. - The energy.
So, there, that's a digital teddy bear you're throwing down for continuity.
I knew it, okay, because I remember we were like,
"Let's just put it in in post." Because I was like, "I don't know,
"maybe we put it in the bag and then this will be made up."
Yeah, we had a scene where you packed it in the bag,
so we put a digital bear in there for continuity.
This is actually one of the first shots we ever did.
Yeah, this is the first week.
Yeah, this is the first week and this is the first of my dirty look,
of my big emotional kind of scenes.
- This was a big moment for filming. - Yeah.
'Cause I think we were just starting to find who Cassie was.
Yeah, and that's just by the side of a road somewhere in Georgia.
It was just like a little patch of trees.
Yeah. We just stopped off, chose a little patch of trees.
But that was one of the moments where I was watching you doing that
and thinking, "Yeah, we're going to be okay."
- That was a big moment. - "We're going to have a good movie.
- "We're going to be okay." - Yeah.
Because before that, we were just filming happy teen stuff.
Yeah, happy home stuff and going towards the convenience store and things like that
but that's kind of just walking around and getting cool shots.
So, what I really liked about the way that Rick's imagination works is that
he's a very visual thinker, so he has these sort of iconic things,
like having these school buses come to this big army base.
So interesting.
It's a great iconic moment and these red spots on the ground
- and people standing on them. - Love it.
- It's all straight from the book. - So big.
And the bear as well, using this kind of symbol of innocence,
that she's got this bear and has to give it back to him
because she's sacrificed her innocence already,
you know what I mean? Because she's seen this horrible thing.
Now she's got to save that.
And now she has to take the bear back to her brother and give him his innocence back,
and that's her journey, but she doesn't quite know where he is or what he's doing.
And hopefully in this moment, we immediately feel like
he's in a different place.
He's in the grown-up world and he's so vulnerable.
It's cold and it's so distant.
And after only having natural light for about the past 20 minutes,
because the electricity's gone out, to come back to this
- cold electric light is... - So different.
Yeah, has such an effect.
And Enrique and Jon Billington and I had lots of conversations
about how to juxtapose the two sides of the story of you,
around this chaotic nature and then these kids in a very ordered army setup.
Because when I first spoke to you, I was saying
that I didn't want to make this film feel grungy and bleak.
Or dystopian.
Well, I didn't want to wash all the colour out of it as if to say...
We're all wearing grey.
"Look, it's the end of the world and like everything's brown and grey."
Dead.
Because when humans do badly, nature does very well,
and nature thrives and there's something kind of threatening
about all these bright colours in nature if you're lost in the middle of it.
- Taking over. Yeah. - Yeah.
Like the sounds of woods at night and the shadows of trees moving in the wind,
stuff can be very intimidating.
If you go for a nice hike in the day, it's beautiful,
but then, as soon as the sun goes down and you're stuck in these woods...
- You feel trapped a little bit. - Yeah.
And as you know, we shot in Georgia.
There's quite a lot of creepy-crawlies down there.
There's a few.
Yeah, and you're not the biggest fan of spiders.
No.
And so, there were a few wandering around and everybody is telling stories
about, what was it, the brown recluse spider that you get...
And so, we were all a little paranoid about that,
and there's ticks and there's all sorts everywhere.
Yeah. There were just moments when I would be sitting there,
and have to stand up and do a quick fake jog in place
because I would be imagining spiders crawling all over my body.
So, that, I hope, fed into the performance.
Yeah. It did, the uncomfortability.
So, here we get a look at post-waves Nick,
who is now a zombie, looking pretty worse for wear,
and we have Maria Bello who is, in the book, Reznik.
There's two characters. There's a doctor. Dr. Pam is her name, I think.
I'll probably get corrected. I've probably got 1,000 e-mails saying I'm right.
- It's something like that, yeah. - I think it's Dr. Pam.
And Reznik is a guy, but we combined the characters
because sometimes you just have to combine characters.
To fit it all in.
Yeah, to fit it all in, and so you get to know these characters well enough
that you care about them. And because if Reznik was male,
there would only be one adult female character in the whole movie
and that would have been the mother and she dies pretty soon,
but I thought it would be equal to make Reznik into a woman.
Which is so cool.
We checked with Rick and we gave him a call, and he thought it was a very cool idea.
I love that shot.
- I love that shot as well. - We have one later in the movie.
That's all practical.
So cool.
We had a two-way mirror
and we just changed the lighting in the two rooms and the guy appeared.
And he was great, that kid. That kid was just an extra.
And there's the gross alien living inside our heads.
The sycophant. It's sick.
Yeah. Inspired perhaps by the creepy-crawlies that we saw in Georgia.
We went through lots of different ideas for
what the alien should look like when he looks through the viewer.
Yeah.
Should he just be like a whole alien head,
should it be that the whole person looks like an alien?
Yeah.
We went by closer to what it was in the book, which is that there is a parasite inside...
- I like that. - ...feeding off.
And there's a moment that she's trying
to dehumanise the kid on the other side of the glass.
And having something inside it, inside the head
- of the kid, feels like... - Dirtier.
Yeah, it feels like it robs the kid of the humanity.
Yeah, it's nasty.
It's like somebody's in control and is just driving this kid, controlling him.
And so, you really understand when Zombie presses the button.
And I think Nick does a really good job in this scene
'cause he doesn't have any dialogue at all,
so he's just changing who he is by a series of looks.
He did a really good job in this movie
and I think that he really made Zombie his own
because I think Zombie could become such a flat character
if you don't give it so much life and so much history.
So, I think he just did a really great job.
Yeah. He's a talented young man.
Very, very talented.
Yeah. Interesting to see what he does next.
Yeah. I think he's gonna have a very long career, for sure.
I think that's your cell phone in your back pocket there?
Yeah, that's my cell phone. Yep.
You see, but it worked because Cassie brought her cell phone with her.
- Yeah, that's your excuse. - So, totally.
This montage wasn't like this in the script.
- There was a series of scenes with you alone. - Yep.
But it felt like we needed to keep you moving.
Keep going.
Keep danger on you and kind of get inside your head,
so we created this journal montage early in the edit,
and I was working with Paul Rubell in the edit.
It was great to work with him.
Did a great job of really sort of screwing down on the characters
and finding like these little moments
that really take away the need for lots of voice-over and dialogue.
It was pretty early in the edit that we had our first version of this,
and we felt pretty good that we were finding the movie we wanted to make.
- Totally. - Thank you.
There's a good piece of exposition.
- Yep, it's a big moment. - Yep.
It's a big moment, showing the "CS." I wonder why.
Yeah, enhanced by the visual effects so we can actually see it in the dark there.
Yeah, exactly, because I remember when we were doing it,
we were like, "We can't see it."
- There's a "CS" on it. - Even though it was daytime.
- This is day for night. - Yeah, yeah, this is day for night.
I'll tell you what, though, I think day for night
almost looks prettier than actually shooting nighttime.
Yeah, and it's easier because you don't have to bring loads of lights
and pretend to be the moon.
You can just use the sun to pretend to be the moon.
Totally.
And there's a cool owl that we all had fun hanging out with on set.
That owl was so scary.
It was beautiful, but terrifying.
It had a cool name. I can't remember what its name was now.
I don't remember, either, Owl?
Owly?
Yeah, it has, like, a five-year-old's name for a pet owl.
I know, right?
- We did this shot really, really, really quickly. - Yeah.
We did this like in between other things.
Yeah. I think I was setting up another shot.
And they just threw a camera down and did it.
And these shots were grabbed much later in the show.
I think I was like really, really, really sick during all of this.
Yeah. That was when the other guys were doing the assault course scene.
Yeah, yeah.
And me and you just went off with...
I think I actually had the day off and you guys brought me in to do it.
- Sorry. - It was, like, my one day.
It's worth it, though, because it really helps the movie.
'Cause it looked great.
'Cause you really see yourself go from being this sort of scared kid
to somebody who's now surviving, the sort of transition.
- It's a huge shift. - Yeah.
And it connects to this.
Yeah, and as I was saying earlier,
we weren't sure how much to put in of the previous version of this sequence.
- I really love this shot. - That's such a good shot.
That's one of my favourite shots in the movie.
I really love this shot.
There's a police car just around that corner stopping traffic.
- I know, right? With cars honking. - Yeah.
And there's a great shot, actually, you walking towards,
like, a Steadicam of your face here, which we didn't use,
- which is, I think, in most of the trailers. - Really?
I remember it. Yeah, yeah, I remember that. It's in every trailer.
Yeah, because it's like, you're really determined, but it felt...
I wanted to keep our powder dry until we get to the highway,
'cause we have some shots a bit like that when we get to the highway.
Totally, we have a lot of shots like that.
Which is up next.
My hair looks really well done
for this time period in the movie.
Yeah, yeah, it's, like,
I don't know, maybe you just ran away so fast that it got a good blow-out.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. It definitely worked up some good volume.
Yeah, so this was a crazy day when we shot this...
It was wild.
...because we had two days scheduled to shoot all of this stuff on this highway,
and we shut down these two highways on a weekend.
- It's actually in my hometown, in Georgia. - It is, yeah.
Yeah.
And we had two days' worth of work to do.
But the weather report was that the Sunday...
We shot this on a Saturday.
The Sunday was 100% chance of rain all day.
Chance of thunderstorms, yeah.
So, we decided to try and get the whole thing in one day.
And it was crazy.
We were running around with three cameras.
- It was wild. - And we had a walking lunch.
- We just kind of went for it. - I don't think we sat down once this day.
- No. - And we started at, like, 6:00 a.m.
But it was a real buzz, though.
- It was, like, real adrenaline. - It was cool.
I don't know if it was helpful for you
because you had a lot of emotional stuff to do at the end,
and so, not having to break and come back and pick it up the next day.
It really helped me, actually, with the breakdown, 'cause you're tired.
- Yeah. - He was gonna give in.
Yeah, and this was freezing, this day.
And these poor guys had to lie on the ground for quite a long time,
- pretending to be dead. - The cold, cold pavement.
Yeah.
And again, the art department guys got these cars in and out so fast.
- I don't know how they did that. - I don't know how they did that.
- That's some real talent. - It's wild how they did that.
This was a fun shot to do.
- We did it three times. - Yeah.
- We picked it up... - I like this shot as well. It's a cool shot.
A drone
that we don't really explain.
Nope, never.
Which I quite like.
- And that's not you getting shot. - No.
- It was a stunt double. Ashleigh. - That was Ashleigh.
She was a great stunt double, though.
So, because we shot all the stuff on the highway during the day,
this was actually somewhere else.
Yeah, this was under...
This was at an airport, I think.
Yeah, this was near Wright-Patterson.
Yeah, near where that bus is going.
Yeah.
- And we just came in and shot it really quick. - Yeah.
And this was the day that Tobey actually came to visit.
- That's what I remember. - Yeah. Yeah, Tobey was there.
Tobey was... One of the two times or something like that he came to visit?
Yeah. He came...
- A few times. - A few times in prep as well.
Yeah, yeah, he came in prep, but during production.
- Yeah. - Yeah, I remember that.
So, yeah, when I first got involved in this,
it was Tobey Maguire and Matthew Plouffe, from Material,
who, I think, first sent me the book.
'Cause I'd been talking about other things with them, and got on well.
I think we only did two takes of this.
This is the very end of the day, so it's three cameras on you.
- I remember that, yeah. - Yeah.
- We were covered in hay. - Yeah.
I remember they kept on picking all the hay off you for continuity.
It's like, "We're gonna clean you up."
I was like, "No, just leave it on, 'cause she's gonna get covered in hay again."
They're like, "No, no, no."
Yep, we kept brushing it off and brushing it off.
- Yeah. - It's just such a stark shift.
It's so interesting to see the two worlds like that collide.
Yeah.
And this is a set that we built, which was pretty big.
It was huge. It was a really big set.
And then we're introducing the audience...
- Teacup. - ...to the squad.
So, there's Teacup, and Oompa,
and Dumbo.
And again, a bit like the montage that we just did
with Cassie going through the woods,
this originally was written as
- separate scenes. - Separate scenes.
So, we had a sequence of them paintballing,
and a sequence of them on the assault course.
- I remember that. - And this speech was separate.
But in the edit, we decided to cut them all together to keep it moving.
I was a little sad to cut the paintball sequence 'cause it had
- a nice little moment between... - That was a cool sequence.
...Nick and Zack, between Ben and Sam.
But when you're cutting the film, you're always sad to lose little things.
But they'll be on the extras, hopefully,
- you can watch the deleted scenes. - I wanna see that, the extended cut.
Yeah. And one of the biggest cuts we made was the character of Tank.
- Tank had a couple of fairly sizeable scenes. - Good scenes.
One, where he's being mean to Sam,
and then another scene where he has a breakdown after the assault course.
And goes crazy and gets disappeared, to be replaced by Ringer.
And we had an actor called Flynn, Flynn McHugh, who did a really good job,
but there was just not space for it in the movie.
But you can go watch those scenes now.
Well, not now. Finish the commentary.
- Finish the commentary. - Finish the commentary.
And then go and watch them.
But you can see Flynn in some of these scenes.
Was that Nick kicking in the door?
- Yeah, of course. - My gosh.
His favourite thing in the world is kicking in doors.
Yeah, he loves it.
Yeah, here's Flynn, here on the right. So, he's still in the movie.
And he's behind the glass, later, when you go into Wright-Patterson.
He is. There's Tank.
Nick really enjoyed dressing up like a soldier
- and playing a soldier. - God, he loved it.
- He really loved it. - He was so into it.
- He loved the gun. - Yeah.
This is such a cool shot.
I think when he was a kid and was dreaming about acting,
it's this kind of movie he was thinking of, like, dressing up like a soldier or a cowboy.
Like, pretending to be one of those big movie characters.
Especially for a guy, that's such a little boy's fantasy.
Yeah, and so he was loving it.
You guys darkened this up, right?
- Or was it dark to start with? - No, no, this was dark already.
Yeah, I just remembered because we were shooting this in the daytime.
- Yeah, we blacked out the windows. - Yeah.
It was a cool little farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, we found.
It was, and the woman, Jenny, who was in charge of it, was very sweet.
She would make us homemade biscuits.
Yeah, every time we went on location scout there,
she'd make a pie, a peach pie...
She was so sweet.
...or biscuits or cinnamon rolls. She was great.
- The crew loved her. - Yeah, the crew loved her.
Yeah, she was great.
Here's the injured Alex.
And so, this is Alex being creepy.
I look like I have one long neck right there.
It's a really flattering shot.
It's a flattering angle that I've got on you there.
That was the most flattering angle I've ever seen on myself.
That's the moment that he falls in love with you, right there.
We should do more of those.
That double chin.
You were just a normal girl in the movie.
Just a normal girl.
- You put that in your portfolio. - Chinless wonder.
With the other fashion shots that you do, magazine covers.
My fashion shots.
That's a sick shot.
Yeah, but that was practical. That's not VFX.
I actually shove a needle... No.
Yeah, it's nicely sold by you, it's like a little look of disgust on your face.
Yeah, that's sick.
This quite intentionally made you look unwell there.
Like you've lost a lot of blood.
I look really tired.
Now your hair looks a little less perfect, but it still kind of looks cool.
- The pratfall. - Yeah.
The CG blood, I really liked on this to see it expanding,
- because we tried it with a pack. - Yeah.
And it just didn't expand the way you needed it to.
And we just didn't have time.
- On this movie, we just didn't have time... - To do all that.
...to try something and have it fail and then try something else.
We just had to go with the one time.
So much of it was also daylight dependent.
'Cause Enrique really didn't use that many lights.
We were shooting for the day, like really how it was.
Yeah, and because of your limited hours and because we're shooting mostly daylight,
we were going home really early, like, 5:00 p.m.
Yeah, we would wrap at 4:00 or 5:00 p.m.
Here is, like, Alex's little hero introduction.
Little Alex.
It's his first scene.
Yep, hopefully, people will look at his pretty face and gasp a little.
They're like, "Look at his blue eyes."
I remember telling Enrique, "Make him look as pretty as possible in this shot."
- It's the perfect beauty lighting. - Yeah.
He's a good-looking guy.
He is. He's handsome.
There are some handsome men in this movie.
And he did a lot of hard work
because he wasn't as sort of ripped at the beginning of prep.
He was definitely a big guy,
- but they needed huge. - He's athletic.
Yeah, he played soccer and stuff, and was definitely fit, but...
That's a lot of blood. We kept adding blood.
Yeah.
You can play bingo,
or if you're old enough, you can play a drinking game
with the number of overhead shots or feet shots in this movie.
You can play bingo, or if you're old enough, a drinking game.
Bingo sounds like so much more fun, though, J.
If there's a prize, it's good.
- That looked painful. - Yeah.
I just flinched at myself.
Yeah, well, that's acting.
This poor girl.
- I like the colour of the blood in this movie. - Yeah, me, too.
It's nice, it's dark. It's not this red, flashy blood.
Well, it's not a horror movie.
The blood isn't there to make you scared.
It's there to just be part of the human story.
I love the CG drops of blood.
That's what makes it so sick.
- You've given away all our secrets. - I love it.
This is a real needle coming up.
When he pushes the needle into the prosthetic.
- Yeah. - And that's sort of, like...
- It's kind of... - Yeah. I forgot about that.
He shows it to the camera, and then, here he goes.
This is sick. I hate that.
Oh, my God.
The steak was actually really delicious
- that I ended up not eating in the scene. - We ended up cutting it out.
- Yeah. - But it was really good.
We rearranged this scene quite a lot in the edit.
Yeah.
And also, when we were there, we were just trying to find
what is their relationship and how safe does she feel with him?
It was really difficult.
Yeah, because we had very few scenes to really establish
- their relationship... - Their relationship.
...which is more established in the book.
Yeah, there's a lot of the middle of the book which is their relationship,
but a lot of it is in her head and her thoughts about it.
Yeah, so much of it is.
So, you can't really just have endless scenes of her staring at him
thinking, "Is he a good guy? Is he a bad guy?"
So, we really had to try and put it all together.
- Make her more definitive. - Yeah.
- And put it all on your shoulders to sell it. - Thank you.
Well, you do it. You do a great job at it,
because at the beginning he's kind of creepy, then he helps you out,
- but you don't trust him. - Yeah.
- And then, here, you can really see... - You just don't know.
...you're doubting the fact that he's a bad guy.
And he talks about his family,
and he says something about being human and then the fences go back up again.
Yeah, you have a problem with that, with feeling human.
And then at the end of the scene he smiles, and you kind of...
I think the audience is sort of reassured by him.
- It's hard. - Yeah.
It's hard as an audience member, especially,
to be so conflicted on both sides of these stories.
- But the character of Evan is a difficult one. - So difficult.
And it's difficult for Alex
because he's got so many secrets,
but he is having to try and project something which he isn't, at the same time,
and he's being so careful not to scare you away.
Nadji, with, "I love you."
Yeah, he's been following this girl around that he's fallen in love with,
and then she gets shot.
She doesn't care who he is.
And then he helps her and it's like,
"Oh, my God, I've got this girl that I'm in love with, in my house."
And he's just terrified of her because we spoke a lot that...
I don't think he's a very cosmopolitan character.
I think he's been living in a small town, in a rural environment all his life.
So, his group of friends is quite small,
and everybody who he knows has known him since he was a kid.
And there used to be a scene in the script,
which, when we rewrote the script, got taken out with it.
We directly addressed the fact that he thought you were wildly sophisticated,
even though you're not even a big-city girl.
You're a medium-sized town, Ohio girl.
In the outskirt of... Yeah.
Yeah, but your life seems so glamorous compared to his.
Totally.
And it was a nice scene, but it was just two people sitting around talking about stuff.
When you're in a movie where the end of the world is coming,
it felt like you had to feel the tension and you have to keep it moving.
The intensity.
So, yeah, Maika has turned up as Ringer, as a badass.
With her charcoal.
Yeah, she was very nice to let us dye her hair jet-black.
- I like it. - I think she looks great.
I think she looks cool with black hair.
Yeah, I mean, I was pushing to maybe shave half her head,
but I didn't really push that quite so hard
because I think she looks cool anyway in this,
and she's really got a distinctive look,
and she comes across as really, really badass,
which is a real different kind of character for her.
She's great in It Follows and in The Guest,
but she's very much playing girls-next-door in those movies.
In this one, she really got to
have fun with this attitude.
And Talitha is great. Teacup is great in this.
She's great.
Yeah. "If in doubt, cut to Teacup," is what... We shot her in the scene.
- I really love her. - Yeah.
That's the farmhouse you were talking about, a nice farmhouse.
We've got a little bit of movie exposition, looking at a map and drawing a line,
going to... Where are we going to go?
Should we go to Wilberforce?
No, we're going to go to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which is a real place.
It does not look like the air force base in this movie.
I'm all for realism of character and performance,
but with everything else...
Oh, my God, he did not know how to chop wood, remember?
Yeah, Paul's done a great job
making it look like he's brilliant at chopping wood.
I think we have an outtakes reel on the DVD,
which will show Alex getting into a little bit of trouble while he's chopping wood.
He didn't know how to do it. He really didn't.
Well, he's a boy from London. Why does he need to chop wood?
I wouldn't know how to...
It was just funny because this big, strapping man throws down a log,
and then he has no idea what to do.
I always thought it was funny that there's a Big Fish poster there.
Yeah.
There's a couple of our AD team in there,
with our PAs pretending to be his friends there.
Yep.
Yeah, there used to be... When I walked into that room, instead of that Big Fish poster,
there was a giant ceramic giraffe head.
Oh, my God. I remember.
- That didn't feel right. - We used to make a joke about it.
Yeah. I had it next to me for quite some time in my director's chair.
Yes. Yes, you did.
- And I gave it a name. - He would comment.
Yeah, he was called Colin.
- Colin. - Colin the giraffe.
Because I was always pushing
the art department to be as interesting as possible,
- but that was just a little too interesting. - Yeah.
We shot that way later. We shot that way later.
This is a real period house.
So, we weren't allowed to chop the floor and put a camera in there.
So, we shot that on a stage right at the end of shooting.
Yeah, and it was the last week.
Yeah, I think the hand close-up where we don't see your face isn't you,
because you were busy shooting something else.
Yeah, you can tell.
So, here, this is your favourite thing, which is running.
My hobble was... Really, that was a fast hobble.
That was. And here's a bit of
- Chloë Moretz doing her own stunt work. - This is terrifying.
Here she goes.
And here comes Alex, who is the fastest runner in the world.
Terrifying, terrifying.
- And then he body-checked me. - We had to keep him moving, like, boom!
Oh, my God. Remember how aggressive that was?
Yeah, and I think in the outtakes, we've got a couple of clips of you...
- Dying. - You're not quite timing it right.
Yeah. Breaking a few ribs.
And him tripping up a couple of times over that wire
- because he forgot it was there. - Yeah, he kept tripping.
- He flew. - Yeah.
He tripped over the wire, and literally flew, like, four feet in the air.
Yeah. I don't think Alex had done a lot of stunt work before in movies,
- but he was really good at it. - He killed it, though.
That scene later, he is a badass.
Yeah, what he does in the fight later, 99% of it is Alex doing it.
It's amazing.
And he worked so hard. He'd turn up early and work with the stunt crew.
He was a great stunt guy.
It's funny, he was having to learn how to do stunts,
and I was having to forget how to do any stunts.
Yeah, how to hold a gun.
Try and pretend I wasn't holding guns.
I love the way Enrique's lit this scene.
I love the way he lit this scene.
You're looking at Alex, you can't see one of his eyes,
you can't tell to trust him or not. It's really nicely done.
He did some great eye-lighting, always. He really captured it.
Yeah. Every time, no matter how dark it was,
there's always a little ping in the actor's eyes. There's always light.
Look at Alex's right eye there.
Even though it is dark, there's a little something in it.
He did a very good job of that.
The silver cards.
He always said, "Get the silver card." Always.
God. I gotta get Sam.
Cassie.
Rallying points, places like Wright-Patterson...
He's got such great eyes, Alex,
because they look pretty, but they also look cold.
Totally.
- You're not quite sure... - What's going on there.
...if he's the boy next door, or if he's a psychopath.
When you meet him in real life it's very clear he's just the nicest guy in the world.
The sweetest, most innocent guy ever.
- Yeah, he's such a nice guy. - He is.
This is a big, big movie for him.
- This is his first real movie ever. - His first real big movie.
He's made some really small stuff before this.
It's a really big movie, and I think he handled it really well.
He did.
He was a little nervous. He was great, though.
As was I. For me, my last movie was a $1 -million movie.
- Now this is a big studio movie. - Totally.
It was nice, it was a really young, fresh everything for everyone.
- Everybody was excited to be doing it. - Totally.
- No one was just clocking in. - Jaded.
Yeah, and a couple of times, I took Alex aside and said,
"Don't worry about it. It's my first big movie, too."
It's true.
This was fun. I got to hit him so many times.
- Yeah, I kept on telling you to hit him harder. - Every time.
And he was like, "Yeah, it's fine." I was like, "Go for it."
I was like, "Are you sure?"
Because I did this once to Alec Baldwin, and I hit him way too hard.
I did it.
I just slammed him right in the face, and he had a red face for hours.
What was that on?
I was doing this movie called Hick,
and it was with Derick Martini directing it,
and Blake Lively and Eddie Redmayne and Alec Baldwin.
And he's supposed to capture me, but I had just been kidnapped,
and I was crazy.
Was that before you were in 30 Rock with him or afterwards?
Right after.
I did 30 Rock.
I did another season of 30 Rock right after that, but...
Was he nervous of you on that next season of 30 Rock?
He was like, "Don't let her hit you."
That became the joke. "Don't let Chloë hit you."
And I was like, maybe I should try and understand my strength a bit better.
So, they are going to do some fighting here.
You don't know anything about me.
Let me guess.
You did good in school, had a bunch of friends.
You probably played football.
You might have even been team captain.
Life was easy.
And then, all of a sudden, it wasn't.
No more games to win.
No one to get weak-kneed at that pretty smile.
You weren't ready for the end of world.
And you were?
I know how to survive.
And I was doing fine out there on my own.
Till they forced me onto their stupid school bus.
They were rescuing us.
We didn't get rescued, dumb-ass. We got drafted.
Good, good.
Try it again.
He also put on a good bit of muscle for this movie.
Yeah, he did, yeah.
She's so little comparatively.
But he sells it so well.
His cheekiness is infectious,
makes you just enjoy whatever he's doing while you're watching it.
- He's fun to watch. - He is.
Girlfriend or sister?
Sister.
You can tell that Nick just wanted to sit on the ground.
It's a little like being in the school yard
and pushing each other around there.
Yeah, push each other's buttons.
- Or pulling each other's hair. - Yeah.
This is the first time Alex and I were on screen together.
Yeah, that's Alex's first day, and so is this.
Can you teach me that thing where you took the gun out of my hand?
I was so sick here.
So, so, so sick.
Which time was this? You were sick about four times in this movie.
- This is the same time we did that owl shot. - Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, this is like when... I was on a steroid.
I was so sick for this.
I'm not tough, okay?
- You can hear it. - Yeah.
I'm happy we didn't ADR it, though.
You did a really good job of keeping a lot of our...
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of ADR.
If you're listening and don't know what ADR is,
it's where you come back after the movie has been shot and edited,
and some of the sound is...
Maybe you've got a plane going over,
or you're trying to slightly change the cadence of a line,
because you've shoved in a line from halfway through a scene
towards the end of the scene or something,
and ADR is when we get the actors back into a booth, like this one,
where you're watching the film on a screen.
You have a big microphone in front of you.
And then you've got to say the line again and try and fit it to the lip movements.
And because you're not out in the wood,
you're in a very dry studio, and you're not in the middle of the emotional moment,
it's very hard to...
You can mimic, I think, the way you maybe said something,
but it always feels a little bit dead.
The emotion is never there.
Yeah, so I try as hard as I can to use as little as possible.
We always record a lot just to be safe.
I couldn't even get my arm around him.
Here's a little cut from one flirtation to another little moment here.
Yep. Something's happening.
- Yep. - Eyes up, down, up, down.
- We kept that going for so long. - Yeah.
I remember that shot, you were like,
"Act like you don't know how to load the gun that well."
- "Maybe trap your thumb in it or something." - I know, right?
I was like, "Right, I don't know what I'm doing."
So, Scott, who was our VFX supervisor,
had the idea of putting those alien heads on the targets.
I like that.
They weren't there when we shot it. We put them on afterwards.
That's cool.
And it just tells the story a little bit more, I think.
- Totally, the brainwashing scene. - Yeah.
All these guys really enjoyed doing this scene.
- Of course, especially Nick. - Yeah.
Though it was right at the end of the day. We had no time to do this.
Like always, I had a grand plan of about 90 setups.
Were these live bullets? No?
No, they're blanks.
Those are blank bullets.
But when we did that shot of the targets, down in front of the camera,
there's a guy with a paintball gun, like a dust pellet gun.
Pop, pop, pop.
And we went to the crew and said... We had a Georgia crew,
so a lot of them were pretty good at using guns,
so we were like, "Who wants to have a go at doing some target practice?"
And they all wanted to do it.
So, Alan, who was the key grip,
- he was like really keen to do it. - He loved it.
So, he did it. Yeah, Alan was great.
All of our Georgia crew was great, we got so lucky there.
They've got a real broad spectrum of talent down there now.
Totally.
So many movies were getting made there when we were there.
It's another great set that Jon built.
It's funny, Nick built up a lot of muscle for this movie,
especially in his shoulders and stuff.
- It's a big difference from at first. - We sent you all to a trainer.
You did. Gunnar, Gunnar Peterson.
- Yeah, he worked you hard. - That's who we went to.
That was fun.
- So, you'll notice we're getting serious. - They're great together.
Which is why tomorrow at 2100,
I'm sending four squads into battle equipped with these helmets.
Your squad will be among those four.
Yes, sir.
Make me proud, son.
Bring that squad back in one piece.
Yes, sir.
So, this scene is quite fun.
It seems really funny, actually.
This was freezing cold. So cold. The water that Alex had to go into...
- Oh, my God. - ...was so cold.
I don't know how he did it.
And I felt so bad having him in there.
We had a hot tub right next to the place where he was in the stream, in the river.
This is wild.
And he was a little self-conscious at doing this.
He was, yeah.
And he was so cold.
I couldn't even see it. That's not even me there doing this.
I couldn't see anything.
And I was directing the camera operator,
with Larry saying, "Go slowly down his chest to his abs,
"to the reflection of him in the water."
- You feel so pervy. - Yeah.
We actually did some shots in this that we didn't use,
which were quite funny, which are real close-ups of your eyes,
and you were kind of like, your pupil...
I remember that, oh, my God.
And you biting your lip and stuff.
I remember that.
We did it over and over. I'm like, "This is ridiculous."
You were like, "J, really?"
"Really? Is that what we're doing right now?"
He looks really good with wet hair.
We should have kept his hair wet all the way through the movie.
He should've kept his hair wet for a while.
Maybe it will be raining all the way through the second movie.
Perfect. I think it's supposed to snow.
But both of you, I really love this scene.
It's a good scene.
And both of you are really good in it.
Because it's a nice warm scene about something that is very sad.
Totally.
I think it's one of his best scenes.
He has a very full beard, you know, like, some people are kind of patchy.
- Yeah, like me. - It's pretty good.
Like my entire family.
My entire family has it, but, no, it's very laid out.
Yeah, he's a real man.
He's a real man.
You know, with full beard, a full, even beard.
We had lots of debates about whether he should have a beard or not.
I remember that and how thick it should be or if it should be scruff.
I like that he has one because it definitely is like... It feels adult.
Well, if he was a guy living on his own in the woods,
there's no way he would be shaving every day.
He wouldn't be like shaving, no.
Unless we made a plot point of it that he shaves
and turns up and is like, "Hey, look, I've made an effort."
Plus, he felt a little more dangerous when he wasn't clean shaven.
He seems a lot younger when he has no beard on, actually.
Yeah. That's one of the reasons we were going to shave him
because he was the actor who is a little further away from the character's age,
but you and Nick are very close to the ages,
and it was important for me to cast people who were pretty close to the age,
rather than having a 28-year-old playing a 16-year-old.
I hate that, yeah.
But Alex was, what, 22, 23 here, I think?
Yeah, 23.
And so, he's playing 19, 20, so it's not too far-fetched,
but he just looked so much sort of a man.
Totally.
He looks older than me sometimes.
Yeah, he does.
But he plays the naivety very well.
I think you get a sense that this guy is quite young,
even though he looks fully grown.
It's true.
It's like a little New York sort of romantic comedy going on here.
Yeah, I know, right, a little walk and talk.
This took forever. We did so many takes of this scene.
There was a bit at the end where he sees a squirrel and raises his gun
and says, "It's just a squirrel,"
that we cut out for good reason because it was just hilarious.
Yeah, it was.
And so, this is where you find the car,
which we shot right at the end of the schedule.
I love that shot introducing the car.
Yeah, introducing the Jeep.
But here we go, a movie secret, this is not a real wood.
- We built this wood in a studio. - Soundstage.
But it looks so good.
It looks so realistic.
And they did such a good job building that and they didn't have a lot of time to do it,
and it really helped us out because we had a lot of work to do there.
I love that, it's so pretty.
This is kind of a heartbreaking moment.
I love it. It's so beautiful.
Harkening back to your singing at the beginning of the movie.
It's beautiful.
Have you sung in a movie before? Is this the first time?
- That was my debut. - That was your debut.
An auspicious debut.
- My hoarse, whispered Coldplay. - Your hoarse, whispered Coldplay.
But it's sweet. It plays really nicely.
I think Chris Martin is going to want to hire me for backup vocals.
Yeah, maybe they'll release it in a remix or something.
I sound so hoarse in all of it. I always sound hoarse.
Even when I'm not.
That always gets a good laugh, Tony's line there.
Tony is great. He ad-libbed quite a lot in this movie.
And we kept quite a few of them in.
He was nice. It was a good break.
There's a base that we built from scratch there.
Completely false.
Looks pretty good, though.
Yeah, this was some medical intimacy.
We fumbled around with the props so much on this.
Yeah.
- A pretty fast healer, you're pretty good. - Looks good, looks real good.
- He healed that up real quick. - Yeah.
- Well, he's an alien as well. - Super human, as if.
Right, right, so he put, like, some alien juju on me.
Yeah, something like that.
So, this obviously leads into
a bit of a kissing love scene, I guess.
- Yeah, I guess. - What do we call it?
I don't know what to call it any more.
It became so many different things.
I think on the extras we have the extended scene.
My gosh.
In this one we hint that maybe something more happens than the kiss.
- It's a good kissing shot. - Yeah, thank you.
It's a good little zoom.
You did a nice little look up and down there,
like "going in for some more."
It's good lighting.
It's so weird kissing Alex, he was like my brother.
Well, I should stress he's not your brother.
- It just felt like it. - I know. It just felt like it.
So, yeah, there was a little more happening inside,
which was actually quite nice and fun.
And it was sad to cut it because it felt like a normal high school moment
happening in the middle of the end of the world.
Yeah, it was nice and intimate and it wasn't kind of...
Aggressive.
No, it was kind of soft and, like, you were in charge of it.
It kind of divided people who watched it about Cassie's character
and it felt a little distracting.
I'm sure a lot of women were probably more polarised by it.
And when we were making the movie, we'd been making it for weeks and weeks.
It feels like your characters have been together a long time.
But when you're on screen it's about 15, 20 minutes.
Three days, yeah.
And so, it feels like it's perhaps quite quick.
My argument is always, it's the end of the world.
- Yeah, it's the end of the world so... - You might get killed tomorrow.
Yeah.
It looks cold.
Yeah, they were actually inside there. That's just a wind machine.
You clear on your orders?
Infiltrate enemy hornet's nest, verify enemy and terminate.
He loves that.
He loves that, the helmet and the guns.
Such a dork.
- When they land here... - This is so cool.
...this is Macon in Georgia, doubling for Dayton, Ohio.
You ruined the town. You blew the town up.
Well, we blew a bus up, as you will see in a minute.
You blew the town up.
And it was slightly bigger than anticipated.
We made a bit of a mess, but we cleared it up.
And I'm very sorry if we inconvenienced anybody.
I feel bad, you know, it's just a movie.
I feel bad if anything happens that is unexpected.
It was one of my days off.
But it does look cool.
I didn't have any part in that.
But we had a very short amount of time to get this whole sequence.
- I think a day. - Because obviously, like,
Cade, who plays Oompa, and Talitha, who plays Teacup,
they were under 18, so we only had them until about midnight.
And we were shooting all through the night, so it was a real rush to get all their stuff.
But obviously, they are there through the whole sequence,
so you have to grab their stuff and go back to the beginning again.
- It's stressful. - It is stressful.
And this is, like, 2:00 in the morning. Well, this one isn't.
This is about 11:00 at night.
And you're letting off a whole load of,
I mean, it's all blanks, but automatic weapons firing
- and helicopters landing. - It's wild.
So, people of Macon, I thank you very much for
allowing us to disrupt your sleep for three days
because we made a lot of noise.
Got you, you motherf...
I peed. I definitely just peed.
I was very happy with the way this ended up looking.
Yeah, it's aggressive.
- Yeah, it feels kind of like a war movie. - Real.
I always liked it in the book that...
We couldn't really get it in the movie because there wasn't time,
but Teacup is kind of a tough cookie
when she's at the camp and then as soon as she gets into...
She can't handle it. She's a kid.
...real war, she just goes to pieces.
And so, the younger kids were just sort of terrified
and it was kind of important for me that it wasn't like,
"Hey, isn't it cool? Kids running around with guns."
- It's like, "No, it's horrible and terrifying." - Yeah.
- Dangerous. - Scary.
- And one of them gets killed. - It was so sad.
Then you think, once they, again, spoiler alert,
but you've probably watched the movie, hopefully, if you're listening to this,
when they figure out what really is happening,
it's kind of horrible to realise that they're actually just shooting at people.
- Humans. - Humans, they are not even aliens.
- Killed themselves. - They realise they are the bad guys.
So sad.
Which again, was another thing I loved in the book,
that you're rooting for these guys
and you realise they are kind of on the wrong side of history.
They are sort of aiding and abetting the people that have done this to the world.
Evil. So scary.
And everybody was great in this moment.
We were watching this and I was like, "Wait.
"Wait, oh, my God, someone dies."
And everybody is like, "No, he's going to live."
And I was like, "Wait, no. He actually dies."
Because they run through a lot of firefighting and nobody gets killed at the beginning.
And in the book somebody gets killed, so it was important to
show the stakes of what happens when you throw people into war
and you watch this and they're child soldiers,
but a lot of the cast here are over 18,
so they could actually go and fight in a war.
So, you're watching and it's shocking. It's, like, Maika and Nick
and Nadji and Tony,
- they could easily be in the army. - Be in it, yeah. Kids.
Yeah. When you walk through airports
and see servicemen walking around, they look so young in their uniforms,
and so, that was something that we wanted to sort of mirror here.
Listen up!
On my go, haul ass to the alleyway.
Back out there? Are you crazy?
She's so good.
Listen, Teacup, you just gotta trust me, okay?
You're gonna run and don't look back.
- What about Oompa? - He's dead, man. We gotta leave him.
Sorry, man. I'm sorry.
- Zombie, now! Run! - Haul ass!
So, this explosion hasn't been enhanced by visual effects.
This is what we got in the camera.
My God. That's crazy.
It was a little better than we anticipated
and we blew out a couple of windows.
But we replaced them very quickly.
It does look cool.
It's huge.
Now were they on green screen running away?
No, they were there. We did it in two passes.
So, they ran out the bus
and then we did another pass, a day later, and the bus exploding
- and then we just combined the two. - It looks great.
It looks really good, good job.
- Thank you. - Good job.
This scene is a real highlight, I'd say, of Nick's acting
because it's very difficult to accomplish.
It's all exposition.
A very difficult scene.
Yeah, it's very difficult.
See, I never saw any of this film, so for me it was...
And he found it tough,
- he found it tough when we were doing it. - I can imagine.
There was a lot of just doing it over and over and over.
It's an incredibly difficult scene.
And he was ad-libbing a little through it and I was saying,
"Just throw in stuff and it will make you feel comfortable."
Yeah.
And we got quite a lot of footage from it because we kept on
doing it over and over and over.
Nick gave us some real gold to work with.
Yeah, well, he's convincing the audience in this moment.
- Yeah. - It's hard.
I'm unenlisting.
I'm better out there on my own.
If you know what's best for you, you'll do the same.
Holy shit! What the hell is this?
They are reacting to something that's not really happening
because all these effects were put on later.
So, we're trying to describe to people what they're seeing.
If she's one of them, we have to take her out now.
Poundcake, just calm down, all right?
- We have to. - I can see it!
I can see it inside of her!
- There's nothing inside me! - Shut up!
And then you keep remembering how brainwashed they've become.
Yeah.
And how they had to hit that red button.
Yeah, and so we've all realised, and there's a moment,
sinking in that they're the bad guys,
in this moment,
that the person on the other side of that glass was probably just another kid, too.
What's up, man?
- Oh, my God! What's going on, man? - Come on, man.
Yeah, I think Nick does a really good job here.
It's hard to keep this kind of energy up as well
- when you're doing it all day, all day. - Really, really difficult.
And the first half of this speech is just all about the energy of
trying to stop them.
Play guns, yeah.
I'm not an Other.
I don't even think any of those people out there shooting at us are Others.
Reznik, Vosch...
They lied to us.
This is a location that we didn't have until the very last minute.
This was written for somewhere else
and the place that we were going to get didn't turn out to work.
We couldn't make it work
and so, I think it's one day after shooting somewhere else
we went and scouted this.
Had a look around and I was like, "Yeah, all right."
So, the art department had a very small amount of time
to turn it into a department store,
- or, like, a ladies' clothing boutique. - It's great.
And I think we were there about a week and a half later to shoot it.
So, we should probably talk a little about the costumes in the movie.
There's a lot of the military stuff.
Our designer, Sharen, had done Godzilla before this,
where she got every detail of all the military stuff absolutely correct
and factually accurate.
And then she came to work with me
and I was like, "I don't care about it being factually correct.
"I just want it to look cool."
She was like, "I'm going to get letters from the military saying it's wrong."
So, the army in this, like Vosch,
he's wearing like the digi camo,
which the army don't really wear unless they are travelling, apparently.
They don't wear it in the field because, I don't know why...
- Doesn't really work. - Apparently it doesn't work as well as
patch camo, whatever they call it.
But all this stuff is all real military stuff,
it's just we put it together to make it look, basically, as cool as possible.
And those helmets were modified by the props team
for the visors and the lights,
though if we sent people into nighttime warfare
wearing the lights on the side of their head, it's basically a big target.
Yeah, I always thought about that.
- But it makes the film look cool, so again... - It looks great.
All of a sudden like this was meant to feel a little bit like Aliens or something,
which I loved growing up.
There's too many organs.
There's gotta be somewhere, man.
But your look. You have three major looks in the movie.
I mean, after the school stuff which is, like, you kind of changed up,
but we tried a lot of clothes on you,
- a lot of clothes. - So many fittings.
A lot of people had a lot of opinions on your clothes.
So many opinions.
And so, you have your leaving home look, which is
the red hoodie and the red Vans
and the skinny jeans and the bright blue backpack.
I'm a big fan of colour, using bold colours in films.
And so, the backpack was chosen to sort of really pop out.
And the red is to pop out of this,
and to pop out from, like, a woodland environment
so you can really see you in a wide shot.
And also bright colours, when you dirty them up,
you can see the decay.
Yeah, I see the texture a lot.
And then you have the look that you are in this scene,
- which is sort of the cool... - Post.
Yeah, the kind of cool wool jacket and the hat
and the boots, the Doc Marten boots.
- She's stole his sister's clothing. - Yeah.
It fits perfectly, by the way.
It did.
- That's very convenient. - It was the perfect size and everything.
Shocking, I know.
Alex does such a good job in this.
He did such a good job.
And we were changing up as we were shooting it as well,
so there's a bit at the end of the fight where he slides across the bonnet of the car,
which he'd never done before.
That was amazing.
We were going to do another piece of wire work.
That isn't Alex.
That's one of the times that's not him,
- we didn't throw him into the glass. - That was wild, though.
I was in that car and I was like, "Oh, my God, are you alive?"
But with the sliding across the bonnet, he just watched
his stunt double do it a couple of times and then just did it,
just threw himself at it and it looked awesome.
So, yeah, our stunts coordinator was Joe Box, who was good fun, a good guy,
and that's Rob Alonzo who is chasing you with that knife.
That was fun. They were good guys.
They were good guys.
Because after he gets killed in a minute, Rob actually had to lie on the ground
the whole time when you were having that conversation with Alex.
And we never see him once
and he's there the whole day, he's been lying on the floor snoring.
Totally, he just had to sit there the entire day.
Yeah.
"There's something not quite right about this boy," is what you're thinking there.
"Wait a second.
"One of these things is not like the other."
He's unusually talented.
"How?"
So, yeah, and so, you had that middle look, what you have here,
which is kind of different
and a little bit more grown-up than the original look.
The original look is kind of teen and a little bit high school
with the backpack, schoolbag.
And there were bright colours in here, we sort of took the colours down a lot.
So, you are sort of mirroring Alex's colours a little bit, so you're sort of a team.
And then when you get to the base, obviously, you're wearing...
You steal Maria's uniform, which fits you really well, as well.
Really well, it's almost exact.
Yeah, it's good casting.
This is shocking. I don't know how it worked out.
And I think the costumes throughout look really good, actually.
I think they did really good work and they had
a lot of work to do with all those extras,
those extras in the blue jumpsuits, because all of those blue jumpsuits
are made bespoke.
Well, they're modified from an off-the-rack thing,
but still, it's a lot of work for a department to do.
- There were a lot of jumpsuits. - Yeah.
But I think, especially,
we really wanted for Cassie to have an iconic look
when she was in the woods on her own.
We really found it.
We tried so many different tops and jackets and bottoms
and some came off too kind of cold.
Yeah, trying a little too hard, a little too tough.
And there was like a softness to that hoodie that...
It was just nice, yeah. The texture of the cotton.
It just had a really nice delicacy.
Yeah, and it felt right. It felt right to the character.
And it made you feel vulnerable and tough at the same time, which was a hard trick to pull.
So, this was the last day of shooting, I think, when we did this scene.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
And this was Alex's big, tough scene.
- He has a lot of exposition in this scene. - I know.
I actually don't talk much in this movie.
- Like, I don't... - No, you do.
That's cinema though, isn't it?
- You don't have to say too much. - Yeah, it's interesting.
Because we know Cassie so well, her secrets are there.
- Yeah. - They are laid out for all of us.
And you've got the voice-over towards the beginning but you also...
I think when we do have a dialogue scene with you it's really important.
Sort of, like, the scene with the father, at the camp.
And then the scenes in the kitchen at the farmhouse are both pretty big scenes.
And then we have a scene a little later on when you
bump back into Evan again in the base.
I love it. That's such a good scene.
And it's kind of a tricky...
It's such a movie moment.
Yeah, it's a movie moment and deliberately so.
There's kind of a tonal shift that runs through the movie because
you can't sort of maintain the sort of,
"The world is ending, everybody's being killed,"
- for the entire movie. - For the entire time.
You have to change it up.
Because even when you are in a horrible, tough situation,
humour pops out, the ridiculousness of the situation pops out.
- It comes out and you're like, "Wait." - Yeah.
This is a good moment in the movie.
I never actually met that stunt guy because
he was in position and I was next to Alex.
- My God, really? That's so funny. - I was directing him via walkie-talkie.
And we were going so quickly that I didn't even have time to shake his hand.
Oh, my God.
Because this is all on the same day that we shot the highway stuff.
I really like the way that your hand lolls around there.
Really selling the fact that you're passed out.
You know, guys, it took years, years of training.
I can imagine a montage of you practising that and it becoming, like, a robot arm.
- Or, like, a Popeye arm for a while. - Yeah, a Popeye arm for a little bit.
And it's like, "That's a good pendulum swing I've got going on."
We really found it. We really found it.
It took us like five weeks of rehearsals and prep, just to get that right.
Just for that one exact moment.
Very quickly re-packed your bag there at the back of that car.
The most perfect repacking job.
Yeah, it's the movies.
All right. Come on, just get on your knees.
That's the last shot of the whole show.
After that, we called wrap.
That was crazy.
The Army is controlled by the Others.
It was a big moment. We all became a big family.
Yeah, it was a fun show.
And it was because there was never any down days, really.
I mean, you had days off, but you were always ill.
- So, you were always recovering. - Like barely, yeah.
But we were working, I think, six to eight weeks for most of that.
Yep.
And I always want as much as I can get,
having as much footage and it to look as good as possible.
And I'm always pushing people for more and better.
Yeah, exactly.
And they never complained about that and everybody really stood up to the plate.
That makes it hard work on a film of this size.
Well, you need it because you get in that edit
and if you didn't take that extra 10, 15 minutes
to get all that we need or want, then you are stuck.
Yeah, but even in the prep when I say
I wanna do a shot where we pull our camera up through a tree,
it's, like, they're, "Are you insane?"
To do that, they had to build a head for the camera.
They had to get the crane to build a whole pulley system.
And then trim a couple of bits in the middle of the tree
for us to get the camera in and out.
But that shot's so strong.
Yeah, and it kind of tells you the story.
- Ashleigh. - There's Ashleigh falling in front.
But you did do that stunt on the reverse.
You did it on this one, but we used Ashleigh's one,
because you were engulfed in the fog.
Yeah.
And this is showing off our lenses that we're using.
I think this is also post my knee injury.
So, I think I just didn't throw myself down very hard because I hurt myself.
So, for the camera tech nerds who are listening to this,
this was shot on the Arri Alexa, which is a really nice camera.
And we used two different kinds of anamorphic lenses.
So, I love anamorphic lenses anyway,
which give you this nice wide-screen image without having to crop it down using the...
What used to be using the whole frame of the film
and now we're using the whole piece of information on the chip.
- That's cool. - But we used two different kinds of lenses.
We used the G Series and the C Series.
The G Series are brand-new and really precise
and that's what we're using in the base.
That's why everything feels sharp and contemporary.
And the stuff where after you leave your house,
the stuff where we're following you in the story?
It's a lot more raw.
We were using vintage C Series. So, the kind of lenses
- they used to shoot, like, Close Encounters... - Interesting. Yeah.
- ...and so, there's like lots of faults in it. - More warmth.
So, they're sort of colourful and more lens flare.
And it looks more imprecise and chaotic and it has a lot of...
It's got a gauzy texture to it.
- You get like this mistiness. - I love that.
People often use them for, like, nostalgic sort of flashback sequences,
whereas we were using it for the end of the world.
And Enrique kept on saying this is the most beautiful "end of the world" movie.
'Cause I really didn't want to go for that bleak look.
I wanted it to be full of colour and be rich.
Well, that was part of, like... In our first meeting.
That was such a huge part of what we talked about, was the fact that
you wanted the world to look as if it's thriving
and that's what the aliens are trying to achieve.
Yeah, they're not trying to destroy the world,
- they're just trying to destroy humanity. - Trying to save it.
- And then to keep the world for themselves. - In so many ways. Yeah.
There was a metaphor in the book
and we use it in a bit of your voice-over earlier,
where she talks about
if your house is full of cockroaches and you bug-bomb the house
to get rid of the cockroaches, and there's still a few left.
But that's all they're doing, they're moving into a house and it's full of cockroaches.
"I don't want all these cockroaches here, so let's get rid of 'em,"
and it is kind of an emotionless thing.
- We just happen to be the cockroaches. - We have been, by them.
So, yeah, we cut out the very end of the Reznik fight scene
where you took the tracker and shoved it up Maria's nose.
- And killed her. - And then she gets up
and there's a little bit more of a moment
and she presses the button and she dies,
which is in the book and we shot it and I think it's in the deleted scenes.
So, you can go and watch that.
But the reason that we cut it is that we never really explained...
Because the Tank story never got included
that we didn't really explain the fact
that these trackers explode and can kill you.
And it didn't seem hugely important for the rest of the story to include that scene.
So, that's something we could just like take that whole scene out and still...
It seemed like another thing that you just had to have in your head
- that only went to that moment. - It's too much, yeah.
And it seemed enough that the trackers...
The alien things.
They were doing too many things.
They were telling the army where you were
and they were also giving you this sort of fake alien vision
- in the lenses that you're looking through. - Yeah.
And so, it's almost making you appear in a certain way
through a lens when people look at you.
So, it felt like it was just another thing for the one thing to be doing
and it felt like we were overloading...
- The audience with all those things. - The audience and overloading this prop
with so many things that it felt too much.
But it was a fun moment and it was kind of a silly moment, but it was a fun moment.
I felt bad because Maria kind of really went there
with her look after she gets killed,
after she gets knocked out, then she kind of stood up.
And the makeup. She kind of looks like the Joker or something.
It was wild.
But in the end we ended up deciding that it was probably for the best to lose it.
It was a great scene, this.
This was much longer when we shot it.
Really?
But again, it was one of those things,
you get two actors and they're giving each other looks like that
that you just don't need all of the exposition.
- 'Cause it could've really easily turned into... - They're both so in it.
Yeah, they could have easily turned it into like a Bond movie scene
where it's, like, big bad guy sits James Bond down.
Not that anything is wrong with Bond movies.
But he sits him down and describes the whole plan
of why he's there and what he's doing
- and then gives Bond the opportunity to... - The entire exposition.
Yeah, gives the entire exposition and then Bond still manages to escape.
And so, we felt like we just needed to give enough,
which was Liev's character, Vosch,
he's like not ashamed at all that he's a...
Hats off there for Nick selling the stunt in a oner there.
- That was a big hit. - This is the only oner in the whole movie.
- Really? - Yep.
For those out there who don't know what a oner is,
it's where you get a whole scene in one take, one setup.
That was an accident.
That was an accident. That's not you. And then that was an accident, too.
All of these were accidents.
Both of those were accidents. At the end of that day I felt terrible
because that should not have happened and you were not happy about it.
I was like, "I do not want to be blown up."
But if you get that kind of stuff, you have to use it.
It looks great, yeah.
- Because it's a real reaction. - It looked realistic.
I was injured here, so I was trying to...
Yeah, you were injured.
We had loads of discussions about how much of a limp you should have.
You doing the gun grab like a pro.
For some reason, both you and Nick at that exact moment,
when you run into each other, you both go, "Yeah!" on every take.
"Yeah!" It's just one of those things.
I think we got into the high teens in takes on this one, I think.
This is one of Nick's first days, I think.
We were for sure, like, on 16 or so.
And you're kind of a five-and-under take kind of actor.
I'm better at that, yeah.
You kind of turn up and you kind of like...
You're focused and you kind of know what you're gonna do
and then we sort of talk about it and it gets like nudged a little.
And what you do is great
and then Nick comes in and he's much more sort of live wire.
And even though he knows the lines perfectly,
he sort of riffs around them and takes risks and stuff.
And sometimes that goes great
and sometimes it goes really the wrong way for the scene.
But he gives you great stuff and it's really exciting,
but that means you get a lot of takes on it.
You get a lot of takes.
But it's great because it gives me more to work with later on.
- And here comes Alex. - Boom.
Yeah, that's a real superhero moment
that he's just like, "If you're going to do it..."
He could have like just stepped out from right behind the door.
But I don't think it would've been as cool as
- him dropping from the ceiling. - Never, he dropped down from the vent.
It's a real Batman sort of moment.
I love the flicker, it's a good moment.
And then this moment's fun because
you're in this really tense situation where the world's ending.
And this triangle is happening.
- There's a bit of... - Tension?
I always saw this as a parody...
- I always found that funny. - ...of the love triangles
that you have in movies where
- the characters are kind of this age. - Totally.
Because people often think that this has a love triangle in it.
- But it's not. - But it has this scene, that's it.
That's it, yeah.
- In the book, there's a little more... - She's not exactly torn...
- She's not torn between them. - No.
I think she realises that by her relationship with Evan
that she never really knew Ben, you know?
She didn't know who he was
- and he was just an idea. - She has no idea about him.
And now she's living in a world where that sort of nostalgic infatuation doesn't work.
Trailer shot, always. Always.
Because it's the only real kiss we have in the movie besides the car.
It's a very specific direction... That sort of thing with Alex,
"Then move your hand up to her face
"and give her another soft kiss before you run away."
That's the joke. None of this is ever beautiful,
sexy on set, none of it.
And he had that scruff on his face.
- And he kept rubbing my face raw. - After about eight takes of it,
- you were raw. - I was like, "I can't do any more."
It's like, "Can I just phone this in a little bit? Can we just, like, leave a gap?"
So, there's a lot more running away that we filmed.
- There were a couple of people... - Covered in powder.
...chasing you. There's a couple of really great locations
that we got that look great, but we just didn't need it.
And actually, that scene where the three of you run into each other?
Originally it was in the script as after you found Sam.
So, when we shot that scene, Zack was in the scene.
Yeah, yeah!
Oh, my God, why did I forget that, too?
Because it feels totally natural to be where it is.
Because it felt weird that she kind of got her brother
and then they stop and have a chat.
And you kind of wanted the Alex moment
to sort of help her get the brother, rather than help her just get away.
And originally he kind of goes,
"Get out the door, I'm about to blow this place up!"
And you step out the door and the place blows up.
And it's kind of weird that, why did he stay in there?
Why did he do it that quick? Yeah. It felt dumb.
One of the first things I did after watching the assembly was
move that and ask Paul if there was a way
we could cut it together, cutting around Zack.
And it made it hard because there were so many setups where Zack was in it.
And where he talked in it.
Yeah, there were like little jokes in it that he was doing.
Like, he had a line where he goes, "Cassie, is that your boyfriend?" and things like that,
- which totally didn't work out. - I love this.
He, like, stops.
Well, if you'd kept on running, he would've walked into the camera.
I know. It's so cute. I love it.
But he does feel so vulnerable in this crowd of people.
This was a tough one to do because we didn't have a lot of time.
It was cold.
And we had so many kids, and they were all cold.
So, they just like wore those things
and I think I had about nine layers on, shooting this.
- My family came to visit that day, actually. - Yeah.
That was the convention centre in Georgia, which is a great location.
- It looked fantastic. - Yeah, and now we're back
inside in the studio, weeks later.
Way, way later because the day we shot in the convention centre
was the weekend just before Thanksgiving.
And this is right before Christmas.
This is after Christmas, I think.
No, this is probably right before Christmas.
No, this is right before Christmas, this is the last week.
Yeah, maybe so.
Because it was the same time as we were doing the Reznik stuff.
I was all over for that scene for weeks.
But we finished... Those last two weeks were after Christmas.
- We went home for Christmas and came back. - Yeah, we did, we came back.
I love the way that Liev doesn't react at all to things blowing up.
I love that.
It sort of reminded me of Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now
when the bombs are going off and he doesn't even flinch.
- He's just like, "Yep!" - "Yep, it's happening."
Some more running.
So, this was from the scene that you ran into Alex,
- but instead we ran outside. - It was.
This was post-kiss.
This was post.
- This was just after the kiss, yeah. - Just post.
This is cool, we had real Hueys.
- No, they're Black Hawks. - Yeah, Black Hawks.
We had Hueys when they went into Dayton.
Which were written as Black Hawks but Black Hawks are way more expensive than Hueys.
So, we used Hueys for the Dayton stuff, Black Hawks for this day.
Black Hawks are cool.
So, this is Enrique operating handheld in the Black Hawk
and I'm just behind him looking at the monitor.
So, we're flying round and round in a Black Hawk.
- That's quite cool. - That was so cool.
And so, helicopter pilot did a great job in this.
- Yeah, they killed it. - Yeah, that's so good.
They were amazing.
- They can land it on a dime, it's amazing. - Yeah.
Oh, my gosh, scary.
And so, the idea of this scene went through a few iterations of stuff.
- That's a really big explosion! - Yeah.
Chloë is only watching this final version for the first time.
That was the first time I saw the explosion.
My gosh, it's huge! My gosh.
My gosh.
- It's bigger than I imagined. - So, yeah, that's why you're running.
That's why you're running away.
Good to know. How could I know now, a year later?
It was freezing, freezing cold.
And windy as well, this day, because when you make movies
- you have these little E-Z UP tents... - It was horrible.
...that you put the monitors in
to get away from the light so you can see what's on the screens.
But it was so windy and so cold, they kept on blowing away.
God, it was bad.
Because there was no shelter because you're in the middle of this runway
and this is a proper airport runway.
He really blew it up.
And then this is weeks later.
- He really blew that up didn't he? - He did.
We did this on blue screen outside the studio.
We reshot it, yeah, in blue screen.
Because we shot this originally at the location,
but we never really had time to get the emotional close-ups,
so we came back and did it again.
- It's about the only thing we reshot, I think. - Yeah.
And we reshot you singing, as well.
- Yes, we did. Yeah, we did. - We did that a bit. Yeah.
Yes, one more.
And I think you and Nick are really good in this scene.
And this was a crazy day, this was the first day back after Thanksgiving.
We were all so tired.
We were all so tired and just post-Thanksgiving.
This is the day that I accidently ran into the crane.
Oh, my God, yeah, and you knocked yourself out practically.
I didn't actually pass out, but I was seeing a lot of stars.
And I had a big gash in my head that was bleeding.
And you had a big bandage on it.
So, on this day, I'm directing with a bandage
and then an ice pack and then a hat on top of that to keep it all in place.
- I remember. - And people were trying not to laugh at me.
Yeah, that was funny.
I remember showing up and I was like, "What did you do?"
And people were like, "Do you wanna go to hospital?"
I was like, "No, I've gotta shoot this scene! We've got to do this. We're losing light."
I remember that, end of the day.
I think this stuff here is really nice between the two of you.
You don't have a lot of screen time in the movie,
basically these bookends of the conversation at the party
and the conversation here.
And it really shows the way that
both your characters have totally changed through the movie.
In the second movie, we would have a lot more, a lot more together.
I like Cassie and Ben together,
- it's a nice friendship. - This bit here, after he talks about his dad
and then he turns it around.
- That's such a really nice acting moment. - It's so Nick, yeah.
Acting moment from Nick, there.
He's great. He's very dimensional.
That's why it's fun to see Cassie and Ben together.
Because they both have so much history that is, like, intertwined but not.
But not, yeah, they have shared history, like here he says, "Do you know each other?"
He says, "Yeah, we knew each other in high school."
But you didn't really know each other in high school.
No, we just knew of each other.
Yeah, you knew who each other were and that happens so often in...
In high school.
In high school and in workplaces, it's like,
"Yeah, you know so and so, and so and so."
But it feels like you know each other.
In a different situation, you'd talk to each other, but if you're in your home situation,
you just don't because it's like,
- "Well, I don't know you." - You just don't interact.
And he was very sweet with Zack because
Nick has a lot of younger siblings and so he was, like, very easy.
He's really good with that, yeah.
The Others see our hope as a weakness,
as a delusion.
But they're wrong.
And you really enjoyed eating these beans.
Zack loved them. Zack went through about three plates full of them.
Oh, my God, he couldn't stop eating them.
He literally could not stop eating the beans.
I don't think I even had them once.
I think you sort of like...
I think you put the spoon in your...
- And there you go! - No, I did it, I did it.
- See, I'm regretting it. I was regretting it. - That was the one take.
And I like that shot where Ringer is giving you a dirty look.
Yeah, she kind of hates me.
We had shot a big crane shot of
leaving the little gang together and, like, going off towards the horizon.
But we put that in the movie and it just felt better to end on Cassie's face.
Because she sort of smiles and finds hope in the rest of...
There is some future and she's talking about hope.
And the thing I loved about the book was that
it is about humanity. It's about trusting humanity
and what makes somebody human.
Am I human? Are they human? What makes me human?
Because it's not how you look or how you behave.
And what is humanity, in a lot of ways.
Yeah, exactly, and so the way that
she divorces herself from humanity to feel safe, that she pushes humanity away.
Questions so much of it.
Yeah, so by the end of the movie,
she's being embraced back into this world with other people
and that's the way that she finds hope.
So, it's not like a real kind of downer, bleak movie about the end of the world.
Because it's actually about the strength of humanity and the strength of hope.
It's perseverance. It's a story of perseverance
and ultimately, love, of, kind of, companionship, in a weird way.
Yeah. It's like people needing people, you know, to be people.
And even when she thinks she doesn't need someone,
not that she actually even really needs the help of Alex or Nick,
it's just the fact that them together are stronger personally.
And just emotionally, they lift it up.
Yeah, because I think if you're, like,
one person alone in a vacuum, you're not really a person any more.
You need other people.
Yeah. You'd be strong, but you're not a human.
Yeah, you need other people and I'm very much like that.
I need other people.
I like my alone time, but you need other people
to get the best from yourself.
To interact with.
And so, here's lots of lovely talented people
who worked on the movie, so thank you very much to all of those.
- They're great. - And thank you to you, Chloë.
Thank you to you, J Blakeson.
- Because we had some good fun making this. - We did.
But I think you are very good in the movie and I think you did a great job on it.
This is your baby, so you did an amazing job with it.
Yeah, well, thank you.
It turned out even better than I expected, honestly.
It did.
It's just turning into a love fest here, at the end.
- People are gonna be turning this off fast. - It is.
I know, like, "Okay, shut up."
That's so Hollywood. Okay, well, thank you very much for listening.
Yeah, I hope you stayed to listen to it, that you didn't turn us off halfway through.
And hopefully, we'll see you on the next one.
- Yeah. - All right, bye.
Bye.