Hi, I'm David Lowery. I wrote and directed this movie, and...
I'm sitting here talking about it on opening weekend.
Itjust opened yesterday, so it's...
I've got interesting perspective on it.
I feel like I've just casted out into the world.
And this'II probably be the last time I ever watch it.
So, tune in as I...
make my way through this film one final time, in real time.
This title card here is, that was always in the script.
It always began that way and it's a
overk nod to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
It was something that I didn't wanna get too heavy with those influences.
But I did wanna have a couple very overt nods and that was
probably the most overt.
This scene was shot in Waco, Texas, or Bellmead, Texas,
which is a little town outside of Waco.
And it's a bank called The American Bank.
And it's one of the...
The big Iandmarks when you're driving from Dallas to Austin.
It's an amazing, amazing bank. Just right out of the sixties,
hasn't been updated.
I could've shot an entire movie ¡n there.
It's just an amazing space.
A really iconic Iandmark on I-35.
I really wanted this to be... This bank to be in the film.
It just feels like Texas.
It's called The American Bank, it's got an iconic quality.
And it was originally just gonna be part of this robbery montage
that happens later, but then,
as we were working on the film,
it was Suggested to me that we kick the movie off with a bank robbery.
Initially it began...
a little later, it began with Forrest Tucker meeting Sissy Spacek
on the side of the road,
which was a great-- a great beginning in it's own right.
But it just-- It was missing something.
And some of our friends at Fox Searchlight
Suggested we kick things off with a bank robbery,
which seems obvious in retrospect.
But at the time, I hadn't written that.
So I wrote this sequence, and we shot it.
And... let it be said,
sometimes studio notes are exactly what you need.
You should listen to them.
It was really fun to just go-- We were just driving around, you know,
Texas for a couple days with Bob,
just shooting these scenes.
And it was outside of the main unit.
And we just had so much fun.
It really felt like just a scrappy little independent film
that happened to star Robert Redford.
These were all shot on highways outside of Waco and Austin.
And really tried to get that Texas Iandscape in the movie.
Because most of the movie was shot in Cincinnati, Ohio
and Dayton, Ohio and Kentucky.
This scene, for example, is a highway in-- in Cincinnati.
And we digitally put the Dallas skyline ¡n there.
This was exactly where the movie initially started,
It was just right here, side of the road.
This would have been the first time we see Bob.
And the initial idea was...
to share Sissy's uncertainty as to whether or not he's up to no good,
as to whether or not he's telling the truth
when he says that he's a bank robber.
But ultimately, itjust felt like we needed to
just get the story going and to understand from the get-go
that's who he is and also just to
add some fun to the proceedings.
Those cop cars thatjust drove by were CG.
They were not there on the day.
One of a handful of...
visual effects that are in the film that-- We tried to make this movie as,
in as old-fashioned a way as possible, but...
we also, you know,
definitely relied on visual effects here and there.
We had to paint out some modern cars in this sequence,
'cause we were just...
There's one right there that was definitely a modern car.
That one, we could not paint out. But...
One thing that I don't like using visual effects for is driving stuff.
I really like to have all the driving always be real,
which is always a pain.
Shooting on a process trailer is hard.
And you end up breathing exhaust all day long.
It takes forever to get going.
In fact this scene we had, you know--
I think we were supposed to shoot this scene
Immediately after that scene on the highway,
which, when you see it, it's a bright, beautiful, sunny day
And then as we were driving to the stretch of road
where we were gonna shoot this, this rainstorm blew in and
we lost half a day because it took so long to get out there
on the process trailer and then it started raining
and then we just were never able to get it.
Process trailers are no fun, but you can't beat them.
You really see characters driving.
Like, green screen just never, never works for me,
exceptfor Inside Llewyn Davis.
That one had really good green screen driving.
Anyway, I should talk about the characters.
And... Forrest Tucker, played by Robert Redford, is a real guy.
I'm sure everyone watching this movie, by now, knows that
this is at least partially based on a true story,
as the opening text suggests.
And Jewel is kind of based on a real person.
There really was a Jewel in his life. And he married her.
But...
I borrowed her name, and the rest of her was invented...
and written specifically for Sissy Spacek.
I really wanted Sissy to be in this movie. I wanted to see her and Bob together.
And it really was, you know...
important for me to get someone that could...
go toe-to-toe with him ¡n the way that she does.
And she does it so beautifully.
We shot then Scenes 'm the moxne 'm sequence.
So we get to watch them get to know one another
over the course of the film in real time.
They had met once 'm passmg,
when they were both making Michael Ritchie movies.
Sissy was doing Prime Cut. Bob had just done Downhill Racer
and was gonna move on to do The Candidate shortly thereafter.
And somewhere 'm passimg they met. And Bob remembere kms.
No, Sissy remembers this. Bob does not.
But, really, the first time they officially met was on this film.
And if I were to take credit for anything on this movie,
it would be bringing them together
Because I could just watch them all day long.
In fact, if the entire movie was set in this diner,
I would have been happy. It would have been a great movie.
It couldn't have been...
I don't know if anyone would have let me make that movie.
But I would have just been so pleased to just have a 90-minute
My Dinner with Andre-eme, conversatton between the two ot them
right here in this diner.
I love diner Scenes in movies.
I mean, I think it's one of the classic tropes of any movie,
is to have two characters meet up over coffee and pie ¡n a diner.
I was thinking a lot about Thiefwhen I was writing this movie.
I could never dream of writing a movie as good as Thief.
I mean, Michael Mann is a genius. Especially when...
When his films are within the crime genre.
But there's that amazing scene where James Caan and Tuesday Weld
are meeting at that coffee shop over the highway.
And itjust goes on and on.
And I never wanted that scene to end.
L just loved it. lt was so beautifully done,
so beautifully sustained. And so much of it is just one shot.
Just, like, this high-angle shot,
kind of looking down at them as they sit there.
And the simplicity of that, ofjust Iingering in that one shot was a...
big inspiration to me in thinking about how to do this scene.
I mean, this scene's much more orchestrated.
There's a lot more editing going on.
And a Iot more bits and bobs to it.
But nonetheless the restraint there, and that Michael Mann had in Thief
in this long, long diner scene was...
something I always admired and thought about for this scene.
The passing of the note here was something I love.
I love seeing people write notes.
I mean, anyone who's seen my other movies,
especially A Ghost Stoiy, knows that
handwritten notes mean a lot to me.
Especially when you don't know what they say.
And I didn't want to see what was written there.
I just love the idea of them writing, both writing something down.
Obviously, Sissy's writing a phone number.
We never know exactly what Bob is writing, but that's the fun of it.
This shot right here was the last take of this scene.
And by the time we got to this shot,
we had been doing this scene for a day and a half.
And they knew the entire thing like a play.
And so we just got to all sit back,
gather around and watch these two Iegendary actors do a--
a one-night-only performance of a one-act play.
And ¡t was truly marvelous.
It's one of those things that you just, you know...
Sometimes when you're making a movie, you just pinch yourself,
because you feel like you're getting to watch something that is truly Iegendary.
And this scene was one of those things.
And just watching them go toe-to-toe, watching them spar, watching them flirt.
It was really... It was really special.
This is one of the few scenes in the movie also,
in which the dialogue remained intact.
We, always on my films,
give actors the room to just have fun with what's written.
But with this scene,
it was written to be performed a certain way.
And Bob and Sissy both loved the idea of digging into it
as a piece of writing, as a piece of text
that they were going to perform.
And I don't often do that in my movies.
But when I do, I always have fun with it.
I always think, "Man, next..."
"Next movie I make, I need to make more dialogue
for actors to say verbatim."
'Cause it's really fun when you just...
When you just accept that the dialogue ¡n the script is there to be performed,
and you work with that rather than using it as a platform to jump off of.
Not thatjumping off isn't a ton of fun, as well.
And it's enjoyable in its own right. And I usually just go for that.
But... in A Ghost Story, we had Will Oldham doing this monologue
And he stuck to every single syllable that was written.
And it was such a joy to see the words respected in that fashion.
And to know that...
that when given the opportunity, I can write pretty okay dialogue.
And it gives actors something fun to work with. And so,
this was another opportunity to let two great actors...
have fun with dialogue that I
did my best to write specifically for them.
And they...
They did a greatjob of it. I could watch this scene all day.
For 90 minutes. I wish the movie-- I wish this was the whole movie.
I love this diner which was heavily featured ¡n
'(cargos Lantmmos' Killing of a Sacred Deer.
And we knew that gdmg 'mio h. We knew they had shot here.
I did not know, until I saw that film, that it was...
exactly the same booth and that we were using
the same shot structures. And it kind of goes to show
that when you find a specific location...
You know, often how you shoot it is dictated to you by the location.
The location speaks to you.
I love that the title doesn't hit for the first, 12 minutes of the movie.
I love when titles take forever to show up.
I just saw Gaspar Noé's Climax, and I think the title
occurs halfway into the film and that was delightful.
This shot right here...
of Casey and John David Washington driving is a nod to...
Sugarland Express. The way the...
police radio is lighting up their faces was something that we
saw in that film and loved and wanted to borrow.
This is one shot in the movie that I wish was longer.
I feel like this is one movie where
I am completely 100 percent happy with the edit, but...
except for this shot.
There was originally this whole bit with jelly donuts
that were on the floor.
The whole floor was just Iittered with smashed jelly donuts.
And it was a-- It was really funny. And I don't know why we cut that out.
No one does the-- No one sells
the midlife crisis better than Casey Affleck.
These three beats of him just being really bummed.
No one's gonna do that “ke mm.
This painting you see in the right hand...
of the screen there of the family was just
one of those marvelous touches that
Scott Kuzio, our production designer, and Olivia Peebles, the set decorator,
put together, one of their friends did that.
And I think Casey kept it. It was just one of those
beautifully awkward family portraits that...
doesn't really qualify as a genuine work of art,
but is just too wonderful not to fully embrace.
Tika Sumpter was an actress who I had seen in
Southside with You. She played Michelle Obama.
And I thought she was just phenomenal in that film.
And so when I was thinking about actresses to play Maureen...
her name popped up, and I immediatelyjust thought,
"What a great choice. I would love to see her in this film.
I would love to see her and Casey."
And they really...
Somefimes you dom know 'fi an actor and actress are gonna have chemmry,
but you just have a gut instinct that they would work well together onscreen.
And in this case they completely did.
They just were... They make such a beautiful couple.
These kids...
Ari Johnson and Teagan Johnson are real brother and sister,
an acting duo in Cincinnati, Ohio.
And l think l met Ari first, and she just knocked ¡t out of the park.
Maybe I met Teagan first, and he also knocked it out of the park.
Whichever one I met first.
I can't remember anymore, 'cause they're inseparable ¡n my mind.
But they-- I was like, "You are amazing.
Now we just have to find a sibling for you."
And whether it was Ari or Teagan, they were like, "Well, I have a..."
I'm gonna go, I think it was Ari. She was like, "I have a brother,
and he acts too." And...
I instantly was like, "Okay we need to meet him, but he is already hired."
When you can get a real...
brother and sister in film to play siblings, itjust goes a long way.
This was the very first scene we shot with them and with Casey.
And the whole scene is just a...
a joke about poop. Nothing like a good poop joke.
We had this whole idea that this robbery sequence
was gonna take place on a rainy day.
Because when I met the real John Hunt,
who Casey plays...
he said that when the Over-the-Hill Gang was active in the Austin area,
they would often wait for rainy days to spring their robberies.
'Cause it just made the police a little slower ¡n the uptake.
It took a little longer for the cops to show up.
And so they called them the Rainy Day Robbers.
And I loved that idea, and wrote that into the script.
And so we had all these rain towers on set
We had, like, several city blocks just, you know,
covered by these rain towers, all ready to send a torrential downpour.
And so, of course, that day it was actually pouring rain.
So much of the rain you're seeing here is completely authentic...
2017 April weather in Ohio.
And I have never seen so much rain as I saw in Ohio.
This shot, zoom in on Bob in the back seat.
We used every single frame of that.
I just love Ietting those things just Iinger for as long as they can.
Shots like that, for better or worse, often matter more to me than the plot.
Here we me Danny Glover and Tom Waits,
the representations of the real life Over-the-Hill Gang in the film.
And Tom had this idea that he was someone who had found--
found religion when he was in prison. So he's got this Jesus tattoo on his neck.
And he's often praymg, as we see 'm that scene.
He's praying to a saint of his own invention.
This bank is called the Three Day Bank. That's the name of the bank chain.
It's a fictional bank chain. And the reason it's called
the Three Day Bank, is because we always knew it was gonna take
three days to shoot this scene.
And so it was always referred to in this, in the schedule,
and the planning stages of the film, as the Three Day Bank sequence.
And when we were trying to think of a name for the actual bank,
it's like, Three Day Bank actually sounds like a real bank,
so Iet's just use that.
Gene Jones, what a guy.
Most people know him from No Country for Old Men.
But he's an amazing character actor who's done a tremendous amount of work.
And, uh...
And I really wanted him for this part, so we sent him the script.
And he agreed to come 'm tor two ot those three days at the Three Day Bank
and really just knocked it out of the park.
This whole sequence, this whole bank,
much “ke, 'ws a tam} day outside. 'ws a gray ramy day,
and the whole bank is gray, and we were...
the production design in here, and the costume design is...
very heavily influenced by Jacques Tati's Playtime.
We were trying to find, like, outside-the-box references.
Things that didn't necessarily feel like,
a traditional sixties or seventies heist film.
And we were looking at all these old banks,
and just looking at the structures,
and something about this one
not only felt unique and felt very eighties,
but also reminded me a lot of the office building in Playtime.
And so we just took that and ran with it. And, and so all the--
the color palette of this entire sequence really...
is a subtle ode to what Tati did in that movie.
This story that Casey is telling, this joke,
is something that... he told me.
He...
he was just trying to think of... He had a bunch of ideas of things
he could do to engage Ari and Teagan.
Just things he could do on set to sort of, like, you know,
interact with them.
And things that he has used with his own children.
And that was a joke that he's told his own kids.
And, so...
I think there's probably, like, a day or two before we shot this sequence.
I just thought it'd be really funny if we just took this joke
and had it be the through line to the whole robbery.
In the script, all these beats are there
but it doesn't have that...
dialogue from Casey, stitching everything together.
And that's one of those things we just...
decided to do almost on the day.
Lisa DeRoberts is an actress in Cincinnati.
She plays Helen the Teller there.
And she just cracked me up in her audition.
She just, she was so funny.
And...
And this shot right here just makes me laugh so much.
L just-- l love these characters ¡n the film.
Like, like her. Like Helen.
Who just, you just get a quick snippet of them, and,
they just really pop.
And feel like... They feel very memorable.
I love, I love...
I really wanted to fill this entire film with
memorable faces and characters.
Even if they only had one line. Even if they had no line at all.
Like this guy behind Casey there, I just love looking at him.
I always admire the casting in Steven Spielberg's movies
and the Coen brothers' movies.
They always feel like they find all these amazing faces.
Whether they have dialogue or not.
I mean Gene Jones is a case point ¡n that.
And a case study in that. And with this film,
I really wanted to populate the entire movie with characters
that felt like they walked out of a Spielberg movie
or a Coen brothers' movie.
Background casting and-- and extras casting,
and casting in general ¡s such an amazing art form.
I mean, I think there should be an Oscar for it.
Because...
You really depend on that.
It really makes the movie.
And Lynn Meyers and her team in Cincinnati
did an amazing job... putting this together.
This is the only handheld sequence in the movie, I think, right there.
For some reason that just felt Iike it needed to be handheld, the energy of it.
And I never know why those things feel right until you put them together
and just... it feels right. But, like, that was like.
I think, I think that is the only handheld shot in the movie.
This sequence was one of those scenes where...
you're, like, pressed for time,
and you're, like, do we really need to shoot these guys
getting into their cars with a crane, under an overpass.
But it's one of those little details that adds veracity
to ¡t actually being a heist film.
It would have been all too easy for me to just focus on Gene Jones' face
for the whole movie, 'cause that's the kind of thing I love.
But I always had to remind myself, we need these details about the robbery.
We need to see them trading out their cars.
We need to see them painting their fingertips with nail polish.
The little details that remind you that yes, these guys are professionals.
They know what they're doing. That this is a crime film.
And that it's not all just about these amazing characters
bantering with one another.
The police officer, the detective here who's talking to Gene Jones,
is Barlow Jacobs, who's one of my oldest friends.
He was 'm my very first feature, St. Nick.
I've known him for years. And he was briefly in A Ghost Story.
We've collaborated on and off over the years.
And we always, I always want to get him in my movies.
I'm gonna get back to Barlow in a second,
but first I want to talk about this shot right here.
This beat of Forrest driving away from the robbery
is my favorite shot in the movie.
Very often when I make a movie, I can distill them down to one shot.
The movie's reason for being can be distilled down to one shot.
And for this, it's this.
The entire movie can be summed up with this one image.
Again, we used every frame we had
and then just let it last for as long as we possibly could.
And I couldn't-- I could probably tell you exactly
why it means that much to me.
But it's more important just to say, like, that--
that shot is why I made the movie.
I love crawl spaces.
Every one of my movies, I think, has a crawl space in it.
And if you ever need to spice up a film, spice up a script, you just add some,
add a scene where a character puts something in a crawl space.
Forrest Tucker invented a...
...a device,
his crowning achievement as a robber, which was a police radio
attached to a hearing aid. And he was really proud of this.
And it was something that he used in all of his robberies.
And I wanted to, to showcase that heavily.
There's so much of the movie that doesn't really...
There's so much of the movie that we invented.
So much of this is the mythical version of Forrest Tucker.
But I always tried to find these touchstones that tie us to the real guy.
And one of them is this, this hearing aid idea.
And I forgot that hearing aids were just so big back then.
I'm so used to the wireless ones that people have now.
And so when he... When our, when Sean, our prop master,
brought in all these vintage hearing aids, I was like, "Man.
Are people even gonna know what these are?"
Like, it looks so strange.
Biggest punch line in the movie here is... this newscaster.
Josh Jacobs, with the Cincinnati News
talking about the local Honey Festival.
Or I guess in the movie, he's with the Waxahachie News in Texas.
And I don't know if that's actually funny or not.
But I die Iaughing every time I hear him say, "Bees."
It's my favorite line in the movie, perhaps.
This scene was really important for me to...
It was important for me to end this scene on Tika.
In terms of the narrative rhythm of the movie,
it made sense to cut back to Casey.
That's where your instincts tell you the film is going.
In this scene, it would make sense to cut back to Casey
and see his reaction.
But I always wanted to let the women in this film to have the last word.
And so it was really important to end it on Tika,
and to hold on her, and then to dissolve into the next scene.
And it's a weird transition. It pops out.
It takes you out of the rhythm of the film for a second,
but that's by design.
I really wanted us to be aware of these female characters
who are the moral Compass of the movie.
And even though they're not front and center for much of the film,
they really ground it.
And it was important to give them those moments to ground it.
So every character, Sissy, Tika,
Elisabeth Moss later in the film, Ari, who plays their daughter.
They all have those moments where we just hold on them
as they ground the film with some words of wisdom or some moral center that,
the male characters otherwise lack.
This scene was... We shot this at the end of the day,
afiershooüng the other diner sequence.
And we '¡Ned '(ms cïmer wüh teenagers.
And it was really nice to let Bob and Sissy just be out on a...
another young couple
out on a date amongst many other young couples.
So I was talking about Barlow Jacobs.
Here he is again.
I just love Barlow.
He makes me laugh. And his part just kept growing.
W e ¡ust kept, we kept bñngmg mm 'mio more Scenes,
putting him in the background.
And he's just really good at giving everybody a hard time.
He's “ke the captam of busïmg shops.
And he busts chops like nobody else.
This sequence includes a cameo from Isiah Whitlock Jr.
An amaimg actor, you've seen Nm 'm,
in countless films and television series, including Pete's Dragon.
Here he is reprising his role from Pete 's Dragon.
He's playing deputy Gene Dentler, or sheriff Gene Dentler,
who was played by Robert Longstreet in Ain't Them Bodies Saints.
But he's a character that keeps showing up from one movie to the next.
And I really wanted him to be in this movie, again.
He was written in the script. I wanted Isiah to play him.
And we went so far as to rent the costume
that he wore in Pete's Dragon from Disney,
so that he could be wearing exactly the same outfit.
We shot me scene 'm prep, me ha“ of the convereaüon.
And he is in my office, in our production office,
which we just decorated to look like a police station.
This whole scene, like, we just,
we're trying to consistently delight ourselves.
We 'Net try to keep thmgs, “Ke, 'm the background here,
you see there's, like, a guy being tackled in the back room.
And all the cops rushing towards him. We're just trying to fill,
be as maximalist as possible with this entire sequence.
But initially it was only, itjust had John Hunt.
It was just a lot of whip pans to Casey, digging into the case.
And after we had started cutting together,
we realized we needed to have Forrest in there, too.
And so we added of whip pans to Forrest.
And every sequence there wüh Forrest Tucker was shot 'm Texas.
We just went to all these banks in, in Fort Worth.
And just drove from one bank to the next.
Just Shooting all these little robbery sequences.
And again, it was part of our Texas unit
which really felt like a, a student film ¡n many ways,
a student film that just happened to involve
one of the biggest movie stars of all time.
I think it was a lot of fun for Bob to do that.
To just run into this bank, shoot these quick,
these quick Scenes, pack into a van, drive to the next one.
This scene has, there, there we have Keith Carradine.
The one shot and the one line he has in the entire scene.
He came in to play the police captain.
And there were originally quite a few more scenes with him.
But we... turned out we didn't need as much police station business
'm the meme as we had.
And so, almost all of his, his scenes got--
h“ the cutïmg room floor except for that one “ne.
But they will be on the Blu-ray. He has one really beautiful scene with...
Casey that we, wrote the night before we shot.
Ijust kept... I have a bad habit
of just writing more scenes for characters,
because I love working with the actors.
And so we had this amazing scene with him
and Casey that is beautiful and elegiac
and is a perfect capper to the John Hunt arc.
But it just didn't fit in the movie. So tune in to the Blu-ray to--
which I think you're probably watching this on, hopefully.
And it'II be there. This is another scene in, in Fort Worth.
It's a really wonderful bank in downtown Forth Worth.
I think it's called the Worthington Bank.
And it had this wonderful mural that we saw Forrest walk past.
And he... I should also mention,
this scene has been in every draft of the script in one way or another.
It took me four drafts of--
or four years of writing this script,
plus making two other movies in the meantime.
But this was one of those Scenes that was always there.
This scene where a woman cries, because she is being robbed
at gunpoint which is a terrible thing.
And then somehow he manages to just still--
still charm her and make her smile.
Whether that's a good thing or not, I don't know.
Forrest Tucker occupies a weird,
gray area in terms of morality, for me, as a story teller.
Because I do not condone what he does. I hate that he uses a gun.
Whether it's loaded or not, it doesn't matter to me. I hate it.
And yet l still like him. l like what he represente
in terms of his sense of perseverance and spirit and doing what he loves.
And it's impossible not to just like him.
And so there are lots of people in this world
and this country who I disagree with,
but who I could still have a Conversation with.
And who I might still like, begrudgingly or not.
And Forrest Tucker is one of those.
I often ask myself, how can I make a movie about a guy
who does somethmg them don": agree wüh.
And I think it was somewhat valuable for me to do that.
Whether or not you feel like this movie
is Ietting him off the hook or not, which it kind of is.
I do feel like it was valuable to engage with him and,
and find things to like about him. And there is a lot to like about him.
I mean, Ifound myself really admiring him,
and enjoying him.
And, of course, having Robert Redford play him,
does a Iot of that heavy lifting for you,
'cause you can't help but like him. But I really, I really appreciated the...
chance to 'gust, “Ke, ens': 'm that gray area.
Whether it was, whether I ultimately think Forrest Tucker
was a good person or not, I don't know. I can't answer that right now.
I don't think there is an answer to it.
Thereis good and bad 'm everybody.
But I liked playing around in that gray area.
There's nothing better than being on horse ranch
with Robert Redford and Sissy Spacek. It just puts you in a Zen state.
You just feel like you're where you belong.
This shot right here, just zooming into him,
is just one of those most beautiful shots in the film.
I just love just taking the patience to just sit there
and watch their performance.
Watch Sissy ask him these questions.
And then watch him... maybe lie to her face.
I don't know, maybe. It was interesting.
We didn't really talk about it too much.
It was sort of like... maybe he's Iying.
Maybe he doesïü know that he has mas.
Maybe he's forgotten. Maybe that's not who he is anymore.
But... again, it's definitely a gray area.
And it was important to keep that moment in there.
I love Ietting Casey's kids help him solve the case.
I really wish we could have just had them in the car the entire time.
Every time he goes somewhere, he's just bringing his kids with him.
There was like a degree to which we couldn't let him be
that irresponsible of a parent.
But certainly... his kids are his partners ¡n crime, so to speak.
His partners in anti-crime. God, that was a lame pun.
That's not even a pun. I don't know what I'm talking about.
This whole sequence right here is...
Partially that was shot in Waco. This part's in Dayton.
I don't know why we picked St. Louis.
I mean, we could have just made this actually Dayton, Ohio.
But the script said St. Louis, so we stuck with it.
Never see the St. Louis arch.
This shot right here, I mean, that's really Robert Redford
standing at the edge of a 20-story building.
He had a safety line on in case he got too close to the edge.
And I just, this shot right here is just one of those
things where you just don't quite know if you can pull it off.
It's a focus puller's nightmare.
You have to pull iris as well. And getting all the timing right.
But, man, it was fun to do.
I wanted there to be a Iot of...
...bits and bobs of planning heists, and the little, the details.
But I also never wanted to get too caught up in, like,
the fact that they are actually robbing banks.
We had that one great, rainy day bank robbery sequence.
And then this one felt like it was setting us up
for, like, the next big score.
And there's all this dialogue suggesting that they're trying something
that's bigger than what they normally do.
But there's also part of me that just doesn't really...
W s not thaH dom care.
lt's just that I've seen it all before.
We've seen so many great heist films.
And so I loved the idea that we're gonna set it up,
but then just skip past the heist itself.
So there's all these beats that are just Ietting us know
that they know what that they're... that they know what they're doing.
They're professionals. They're on the job.
They've got a plan of some sort.
We never know exactly what it is.
But they're putting something together.
And we see that. We see them.
We start to ramp up, the music is suggesting
that we're building towards something.
But we never fully have a grasp of exactly what their plan is.
And then, we skip right past it.
We never see the actual robbery. And I love the perversity of that.
I don't know, maybe it's...
Sometimes I watch, and I'm, like, did we push it too far?
Should we have seen the actual robbery?
But there's something nice about just taking a detour.
This whole sequence was...
again, all aboutjust Iaying the groundwork
for a robbery that we will never see. we're establishing geography.
We're Ietting audiences know exactly how they might plan to pull this off.
But the real purpose of this scene is not to do those things,
which we are nonetheless doing, but to give Forrest a moment of pause.
To have him see something else that...
that maybe could lead him down a different avenue.
He looks here and sees these guys,
taKmg then taKmg the money out of the veu“.
And he's clocking them.
And he's doing all the things he does when he's planning a robbery.
But then he gets distracted. And those distractions,
both Iiterally the one we're seeing right here...
and figuratively are
the things that are more exciting to me as a filmmaker.
And as an audience member.
I'm always just thinking, to myself, like, yes,
sometimes I do want to see a really good heist film.
But I also know there are lots of films
I can turn to, to provide that satisfaction.
And what can I do that's a little bit different.
And sometimes it's just, like, Ietting them get distracted.
Other times it's stopping the movie dead, so Tom Waits
can give a monologue about why he hates Christmas.
And... there's no Iogical,
narrative reason for this scene to be in the film.
It is completely superfluous to the plot.
But the movie would not be as good without it.
This was story that Tom told me.
And as far as I know, it's a 100 percent true
and autobiographical tale from the life of Tom Waits.
And who am I to doubt that. I completely believe that this happened.
And when Tom told it to me, I asked if we could use it in the film.
And he said, sure.
So wrote ¡t into the script. lt was there in the schedule.
Everyone knew it was gonna be the day where we shot Tom Waits
telling the story of why he hates Christmas.
And when we got to the edit,
I think there was some doubt about whether it would make the final cut.
Because again, it's superfluous.
The movie's built up to a certain rhythm.
But when I say it's superfluous, I'm Iying, because it's essential.
This is a type of movie
where a scene Iike this ¡s 100 percent essential.
And if we had cut it out, ¡f it had hit the Cutting room floor,
that would have been a real sadness.
A little part of me would have died inside.
And so we kept it. We had to keep it. We were compelled to keep it.
We shot ¡t for a reason.
And that reason lives on right here on screen.
And I'm just glad it's there.
This is the final scene we shot in the film.
This is Fort Worth, Texas.
Beautiful Fort Worth skyline back there, standing in for, I guess...
I guess the Dayton version of St. Louis, Missouri.
And...
I just feel like you can see how happy Bob is in this scene.
The film is done.
He had a great time making it. And you just see the smile on his face.
And after this shot was over, we did a couple takes.
We were considering doing another angle, but we did this one.
And we just ran through all the dialogue.
He nailed it. And we called the cut. And that was that.
We all applauded, he got in his car, and he drove off.
And now he's saying he's never gonna act again. He's saying he's retiring.
So if that is the last scene he ever shoots in a movie, it was a fun one.
This is a fictional western edited together by many...
Edited together from many different public domain westerns.
Josh Jacobs, my assistant on the film,
a wonderful friend,
he cut those together on Final Cut Pro 7,
which I was delighted to see he still used,
and kind of invented this western that needed
to just kind of build up throughout the scene.
And then clímax in a gun fight,
which was made up of many different gun fights from many different movies.
When we were Shooting it...
Bob just kept getting caught up in the film.
Like, he would just sit there
and was actually just enjoying the movie that was on the TV
and kept getting distracted which was great.
That plays into the scene.
He's not paying attention to these guys' banter at all.
He is just caught up in this western.
This line that Danny has here, this was like the line for Danny.
I wanted it to be an iconic moment for him.
And it was only in post-production that I realized that it was...
It was essentially a...
paraphrase of him saying, "I'm getting too old for this shit."
And I'm grateful that he didn't call me out on that, on set.
Definitely when we were shooting in public.
When Danny Glover goes out in public, that's a refrain
that he has to deal with, I'm sure, on a day-to-day basis.
Just people calling out, "Hey Danny, I'm getting too old for this shit."
That was Toby Halbrooks and Annell Brodeur,
our producer and costume designer,
arguing in the parking lot in the preceding scene.
And they're arguing about something
that l think really happened to them ¡n their relationship.
I don't know the exact details. But I just wanted them to be fighting.
They are dressed as characters from the classic documentary,
Heavy Metal Parking Lot. It made sense at the time.
I can't remember why we chose that.
I mean, Ithink it's set in Ohio, isn't it?
So maybe it was just because we were in Ohio.
And we '¡en “ke we were,
we were soaking up Heavy Metal Parking Lot vibes.
It's either Ohio or Indiana. Can't remember.
Either way, it's a great documentary. Definitely seek it out.
We really wanted all of the televisions in this film to be real.
Here's my favorite Barlow Jacobs movie.
He's about to pop up over Caseys shomder.
And even though he has no dialogue,
he is busting Casey's chops right there in the background right there.
We really wanted all the televisions to be functional.
So all of these scenes were shot with real...
We shot all these scenes on video, all of the news casts,
all of the interviews here, and then played them back live on set,
which was way harder than we thought it was going to be.
We thought we would just,
have a digital file that we would run into a TV.
But we were using all of these, what are essentially now,
antique televisions that barely work.
And we actually had to hire a Specialist,
from New York to come run video on set.
And it turns out he had done all of the video on Quiz Show,
which was a fun little coincidence.
We kept meeting all these people who had worked with Redford in the past.
Which isn't surprising when you've had a career as long he has.
He's worked with probably everyone in the industry.
But all these people would show up who had a
long-standing history with Bob. And they'd get to
catch up with him and talk about the good old days.
And I'd Iike to think we were keeping the good old days alive.
The good, good old days, not the bad, good old days.
These days, the good old days have a bad connotation.
But we were trying to stay true to the good ones.
So now wewe 'wmped past the mg robbery,
the last big score,
the one that these guys have spent their whole career building up to,
and pen/ersely have just cut to the aftermath of it.
And I couldn't figure out exactly how to shoot this sequence
until we got there that day and just saw the money on the floor.
And I was like, "Okay, that will tell us, that tells us a story."
If you just see all that money on the floor, you know something went wrong.
And then we'll go from there to this, this dialogue with the detectives.
And this detective here in the blue shirt is J. Todd Anderson,
who is our storyboard artist.
And he is a Iegendary storyboard artist,
famous for doing every single Coen brothers' movie
ever made, going back to Blood Simple.
And he is also the dead body in the field in Fargo.
He shows up in movies from time to time.
And that maybe is his most famous role, though.
You only see him from the back,
'cause he gets shot and then tays there 'm the show.
This beat with the hundred dollar bill was one of those nods
to the cat and mouse
aspect of the police, detective, cop, robber drama,
and it was not part of the true story.
Forrest Tucker never left a clue like that.
But he did, I think, enjoy the Chase. And I needed to find ways to allude
to that cat and mouse aspect of the genre
without ever really getting too deep into it.
So that was one of them, that little hundred dollar bill beat.
And originally there was a lot more of that,
a lot more of that interplay with him and John Hunt
and them going back and forth. It just felt at a certain point
that John Hunt would definitely just catch them.
There was a point in which, we would have had
to either invent too many incidents to keep the drama going,
or that John Hunt would have just caught them.
And so, I went the opposite direction, and just removed as much I could,
removed as much incident as I possibly could,
and just left little details like that hundred dollar bill
to sort of keep the vestiges of a cat and mouse pursuit alive
without ever actually spending too much actual running time on it.
Again, I just kept trying to look for weird detours
and left turns to take that would keep us
from following the strict path
that most police procedurals would take.
This was a scene that we added in post-production,
just an extra little beat. Brought Barlow back, of course.
Had to get Nm 'm there one more üme.
And um...
the footage on the police monitors
is not of the bank in Dayton.
It's a train station in Fort Worth, Texas that Iooked surprisingly similar.
And so we shot all that CCTV security camera footage. CCT?
Whatever it is. Closed circuit security footage.
And again had to deal with the nightmare of playback on set.
These two police officers, or these two FBI agents were a real hoot.
I really felt like I was pushing the...
They're comic relief, certainly.
They really are chewing up the scenery here.
And this really, we were pushing the tonal boundaries of the movie
when we shot this scene.
We really had fun with it. We pushed it a lot further.
But I wanted to find just the right balance ofjust
having fun with it, Ietting it be funny.
And also never going into outright...
an outright Iampoon of FBI agents,
you know, telling a cop he's off the case.
Every FBI agent in this film
is named after a character from Rick and Morty.
And these guys are Agent Rick and Agent Morty.
The whole... me and my AD department,
we are all big fans of Rick and Morty.
The third season premier which was an April Fools' gag,
it was-- they premiered that one episode on April Fools,
which just happened to be our first day of principal photography.
So we felt like we wanted to just pay back the creators of Rick and Morty
for giving us that gift at the end of our first day of production
and name a bunch of characters after characters 'm that show.
This was another scene that we shot in Fort Worth.
We had a whole Texas unit planned.
We knew that we were gonna go to Texas
and shoot a lot of the movie there,
or some of the movie there, because we wanted it to feel like Texas.
We had to go to Cincinnati for budgetary reasons,
for tax incentives. Which is often the case with movies.
You don't often get to shoot movies where they actually take place.
And it's kind of a shame, because Cincinnati is an amazing city.
I had an amazing time there, and in Dayton.
And I felt bad that we weren't actually representing Cincinnati
by Ietting it be itself.
But it did a great job standing ¡n for Texas.
And then we went to Texas 'm October,
after we had the first cut of the movie together,
and shot a number of additional scenes.
And that's one of those important things...
It's one of those things that I always try to make room
for ¡n our budgets and our schedules.
You can plan all day long,
but there always gonna be things you discover in the edit
that you wish you had or you wish you had a second shot at.
And so itjust makes sense to me to, to add some padding ¡n the budget
to go back a couple months after you finish shooting.
And get some extra pieces that you think you might need.
Or that you know you want at that point.
And there's always a negative connotation around reshoots or pickups.
But it's one of the greatest gifts you can give to yourself as a filmmaker.
There's always gonna be those things that you know
'fi you had the chance to do agam,
or the chance to pick up that would make the movie better.
And you don't know what they are when you're shooting.
Sometimes you discover them while you're shooting.
But very often it's not until you're in the edit that you just realize,
"I wish I had this shot."
Or, "I wish had another scene to get this point across."
And so to have the opportunüy to 90--
to go shoot those things ¡s a wonderful luxury
to afford yourself as a filmmaker.
And I'II always make sure that our budgets have a little extra padding
and that our actors are ready to come back,
'cause it's--
You can't always do it, but it's always important to try.
This scene right here existed,
because when we were location scouting, we found this house that we liked.
And it just happened to be across the street from a cemetery.
And so, of course, I just had to write that in.
This little beat right here with John David Washington,
who is an amazing actor, who came in for this very small part
and really did an amazing job.
So often he was just reacting to Casey,
or there 'm the background, or ofiecreen.
But he really came in, and just had so much fun with us.
But that moment right there is based on this old...
photograph from a police department
in the early eighties that our production designer,
Scott Kuzio had on his, his wall of reference material.
And it was of two cops playing with a police puppet,
like a little policeman puppet. And itjust made me laugh.
And I really wanted to have a moment with that.
So we found one of those old puppets and gave it to JD,
and just let him have fun with it.
Now this is an iconic Robert Redford shot if ever there was one.
This was a scene where he was originally supposed to be on the horse.
He was supposed to be riding horses with Sissy.
But we realized right before we shot it that it made sense.
He talks about wanting to ride a horse at the beginning of the movie,
and he's on a horse at the end.
So ¡n this one, he should just be sitting there watching her.
And the dynamk: 'gust 'mstanfly came to me.
That was what this scene was supposed to be.
And plus we get this amazing shot of him
just standing against the fence looking like a hero.
And he was wearing this blue suit through the entire movie,
except for the end.
And that came from the original New Yorker article.
There was an illustration of a robber running out ofa bank
wearing a blue suit and a brown fedora.
And so when I was talking to Annell Brodeur,
our costume designer, l just said, like, "Let's just use that."
And Iet's just keep in that through the whole film.
I really love the idea of distilling this character down to a silhouette,
both thematically and visually.
And so... Ijust thought, Iet's keep him ¡n a,
'm one costume through the enüre meme.
And then have all the other characters wear kind of the same thing, as well.
Like, their costumes change, but they all look kind of the same.
And the benefit of that is we could just move these scenes
around wherever we wanted. And try them out 'm cüfierent manes.
So these scenes with Sissy, for example,
we tried them at the beginning of the movie,
right after he meets Sissy. We tried them later on in the film.
They moved around a lot. And we had the freedom to do that,
because the characters were always wearing the same thing.
And there were no, there's no risk of continuity.
So that was a... You can't do that with every movie.
But it felt like a smart thing to do here.
Hmow Francis Ford Coppcfla (hd that 'm The Conversation.
And I remember Walter Murch talking about what a boon
it was to the editing process.
So it's something I've always kept in mind.
And I'm sure I'll do it again at some point.
It just makes editing so much more fun and easy.
And you can have so much more fun with it.
The characters in this scene are really sort of
just espousing my own personal philosophies on life.
I've wanted to make movies since I was seven years old.
And I've been doing it ever since then.
And often I pause, and in moments of self-doubt,
I just will ask myself, "Would the seven-year-old version of me
be happy with where I am now?"
Like, would he be satisfied?
And then another part of me will then fire back, "Maybe,
but the seven-year-old version of you has no idea what you've gone through."
And who is he to hold you to a certain abstract set of expectations
that he had with seven years of life experience under his belt.
And so, it was great to get to...
have these characters sort of lay out my own two
conflicting perspectives on moving through life.
Both living up to my own ¡deals
of who I would be as a child.
And also recognizing that there's no reason to hold oneself to that.
That I'm my own person. I'm moving through life in my own way.
And the decisions I make are gonna define me.
And there's no need to be tied to the past.
This scene right here was, was one that...
came ¡n and out of the edit a lot.
It was another scene like the Tom Waits
monologue that was sort of an island unto itself.
And ultimately, I decided that it was really important to keep it in.
Partially because I love this actress,
Torie Wiggins, who I met in Cincinnati.
She auditioned for one of the bank teller roles...
'm some of the other Scenes.
And l just loved her so much that l wanted her to play this character,
and just give her an entire scene.
And then the other thing about it is that it's the one time in the movie
where Bob sort of shows signs of growing as a human being.
He's thinking about someone other than himself.
And it's just a baby step in a certain direction.
He doesn't actually commit to what he's setting out to do.
But 'fi he had had the money,
and if he had... If Torie had told him that,
"Yeah, just give me the money and
her mortgage will be paid off." He would have done it.
He's a character with a generous spirit.
And yet, he's got tunnel vision. And this is the one moment
where he breaks outside of his own myopic world view
to think about someone else, above his...
Someone outside of his own self-interest.
And when you think about, as a character, realistically
he's kind of putting himself at risk going into a bank here.
Although I don't think he actually was thinking about that.
And it also is just a wonderful, I mean, I love Bob's acting here.
One of the things that Bob taught me was that...
when you're looking at a little monitor on set,
you're often not gonna see what a great actor is doing for you.
You really need to see it big. And that's one of the things you lose
when movies are relegated to the small screen.
There's so much amazing work that he does specifically for the big screen.
And often, I would miss it. I'd see it in the monitor on the screen,
on the set, and then I'd watch dailies on pics.
And I wouldn't see what he was doing until we got to post-production
where we Iuckily had a really big screen.
And I was able to see just how much
nuance he was bringing to every...
every moment he had this... in this film.
And that's one of the reasons he's a movie star,
is 'cause he does those things.
He knows how to make the mg screen work for mm.
And he does things that other actors don't think to do.
And I wonder if acting styles will change as...
as movies gravitate towards smaller screens.
I mean that'II be a loss in my opinion,
but perhaps it's an inevitable one.
So here we have a scene with Elisabeth Moss
who was Kmd enough to come 'm for one day to
really sort of provide a very specific moral center to the movie.
That represents the side of me that does not approve
of Forrest Tucker ¡n any shape, way or form.
Here is someone who has been hurt by him,
and who does not... Who is not charmed by him.
She does not see the twinkle in his eye. She sees the other side of him.
And it was really important to have that.
I really wanted to make sure that we did not...
sand off the rough edges of Forrest Tucker.
And here, Elisabeth Moss, beautifully represente
all of those rough edges. And she is just so good.
I showed this film to Alex Ross Perry
who's made several films with, with Lizzy at this point.
And, 'm fact, thaïs how we met her. My producmg partners
and I worked on Listen Up Philip with Alex.
And we met her on that film.
And one of his big notes
on this film was, "Why are you cutting away from Lizzy?
Why are you cutting away from her to Casey?
Just Keep the camera on her, because 'ü' s worth ü.“
And it was. So we... Most of this scene is one closeup
of Elisabeth Moss just doing amazing work.
She flew 'm the mght before.
I think I gave her the script pages a few days before that.
And she came to set and just...
It was interesting, because we had been shooting for two weeks
at that point with Bob and Sissy.
And the Bob and Sissy side of the story was kind of over at that point.
And so now we were picking up the John Hunt side of things.
And this was a really amazing way to start with John Hunt.
I think I said earlier that the first scene we shot with John Hunt
was him and his kids. That was actually the second scene.
This was the first scene.
And it really just set a new tone for the entire production.
ItreaHy,Hke, put everyone on their toes again
after having gotten used to the rhythms of the Bob and Sissy side of things.
And it was such a... I don't know.
It was such a beautiful thing to see the two of them just
reveal this new side of a character who we, as a crew,
had fallen in love with over the past two weeks.
It really reminded us exactly of what it was
we were making and the type of film we were trying to make.
And it was really important to Lizzy and me
to have her smoke through the whole scene.
Even though there was a child present.
And it really, I don't know, that said a lot about who she was.
It said a lot about the time in which the movie's set, of course,
but also about who she was and how she's been hurt.
And it was a beautiful defense mechanism that she used beautifully.
This young actor who plays Lizzy's son, his name's Asher.
And he was...
We had another actor 'm mmd for that scene,
to come play that part,
and he turned out not to be available the morning of.
And so, our... Jane Streeter, our locations manager,
just wandered around the neighborhood. lt was pretty early ¡n the morning.
And just Iooked for kids who were walking to school.
And she saw this young man walking to school with his mom,
and asked him if he would be interested in coming and acting in a movie
instead of going to school. And ¡t turns out that that day,
the neighborhood knew we were shooting a movie.
And apparently he had told his mom
that maybe if they walked to school that day
and walked by the set, they would have the opportunity to be in the film.
And his mom said, "We can walk by the set, but that will never happen."
And sure enough, that's exactly what happened.
He got a line of dialogue, playing Elisabeth Moss' son.
And he got to go, skip school,
which is the best part about being in a movie when you're that age.
And he did a great job. And so the moral of that story
is if you want to be in a movie, and you're seven years old,
just have your mom walk you by a set on your way to school.
This scene was... the first thing we shot in the movie.
Because we started shooting during prep.
The first official day of production was a car Chase.
And we'II talk about that when we get to it.
But this was the last day of prep.
And we didn't have any other room in the schedule to,
shoot this scene, to go to this location.
And so we just decided to take our last day of prep and shoot it.
And it was a scene that Sissy and I had spent a lot of time talking about.
When I first sent her the screenplay, this scene was in it.
But it ended with them walking out of the store here, and leaving the mall.
And it ended with the thrill of shoplifting.
A thrill I remember very well from when I was thirteen
and tried shoplifting at the mall for the first time.
I assume I'm not alone in experiencing that.
And then later deciding that it wasn't worth the risk,
after I saw a couple friends get Caught.
I learned my lesson. And I do not approve of shoplifting.
But nonetheless, I remember that thrill well.
And I wanted Sissy to partake in it.
But then the great thmg that she dm was she
Suggested that the scene not end with that thrill.
That she, wise-up, grow-up, turn around, and be the grownup in the scene.
And in doing so, to help Forrest Tucker grow up a little bit as well.
And so, in a way, this scene is just a microcosm
of their entire relationship.
And I give all the credit to Sissy for fighting for that.
She didn't have to fight too hard.
When she told me, it was a definitely a...
It was something that I quickly wrote into the script and sent back to her.
But then also fighting to make sure we got the scene.
There was discussion when we didn't have it in the schedule.
It was like, "Can we shoot it?
Can we find a location? How do we fit it in?"
And she was just like, "We have to have that scene.
Their whole relationship is summed up in that scene."
And she was right. And so we just all...
We decided to end prep one day early, and start shooting one day early.
And we got it. And it's such a wonderful scene.
I also love that there's just no dialogue ¡n it.
We mixed all the dialogue out for the most part, Chris Nolan style,
and just let it be a silent film.
In this scene, we get to meet Robert Longstreet
who is playing Stephen Beckley Jr., Esquire.
And he is a fictional Iawyer
based Ioosely on one of Forrest Tucker's real Iawyers who I corresponded with.
And who gave me a lot of the details
about his perspective on representing Forrest,
and on Forrest as a person.
And this is the Citizen Kane sequence of the movie where,
John Hunt is just sort of uncovering who Forrest Tucker really is.
And in the process, sort of falling in love with him.
And that is representative of my writing process with this movie.
As I talk to these people.
Like Steve Ringhoff, the Iawyer, and the real John Hunt.
I kind of fell in love with Forrest Tucker.
Even though, once again, I do not approve of what he did,
I really liked him.
Outlaws are just always gonna be appealing.
Culturally, America has a love affair with the outlaw.
And maybe that's not a good thing.
Maybe that's a source of illness ¡n our culture.
But nonetheless it's part of it.
And there's something about one guy going up against--
one guy going up against an institution that is just ingrained in our culture.
It's ingrained ¡n the founding of our country.
And so there's something that ¡s just inherently appealing about that.
And so here we see John Hum
just sort of falling under the sway of Forrest Tucker's spirit,
and everythmg that he representa.
Anyway, I was talking about Robert Longstreet,
who is just an amazing actor, who I have known for many years.
In fact, I met him through Barlow Jacobs.
They did a movie together called Lo and Behold
that was at Sundance back 'm 2007 or 2008.
And he's been a great friend and a collaborator ever since.
He was 'm Ain't Them Bodies Saints,
playing Gene Dentler, the part that Isiah Whitlock
then played in Pete's Dragon and in this film.
And he... can always count on me to
try to get him in a movie and to give him a monologue.
'Cause he's just an amazing...
He can just spin yarn like nobody else.
This whole sequence was, at one point,
in an early draft of the script that,
followed Forrest throughout his career,
was an actual scene in the movie that had an impact on the narrative.
And at a certain point, when the movie became more focused,
and we zeroed 'm kms one pefiod 'm Forresïs me,
the scene fe“ by the waysme narraïweh}.
But I wanted to hang onto it.
I felt like there was a lot of value ¡n it.
And it was great to see him in his heyday.
Therés somethmg so mumphant about seemg 'mm
drive through that cornfield.
And I also just wanted to have a car chase in a 55 Chevy...
...to kind of like nod to Two-Lane Blacktop,
which is one of my favorite movies of all time.
And driving in that car was a real beat.
L mean, ¡t was hard to drive.
It was tough.
But just seeing Bob driving down that highway,
and then veer off into that field. And then here to do this moment
which, in our current culture, this ¡s a very questionable scene.
But when it was written, it was just... The idea was to give Bob
another one of those iconic, outlaw moments.
And again, can we still enjoy those outlaw moments?
I don't know. Maybe this is the last time
we get to put a scene like that in a movie.
It's certainly the last time I'II put a scene like that in a movie.
But...
I still appreciate it. I still appreciate it from that perspective.
To see him stand there, surrounded by police cars with his hands in the air.
It's sort of like the Butch Cassidy scene in some ways.
And he's not going out in a blaze of glory.
There would be no glory to have, if he were to go out in a blaze.
But something about him staying there on a windswept highway
is iconic in a meaningful way.
So...
there was always a lot of question about whether not
John Hunt should actually catch Forrest Tucker.
In real life, he did not catch him. In real life, he never even met him.
But there's some demand ¡n this genre for the cops
and the robbers to not only meet,
but for them ultimately to have a showdown.
And I think what you're having in this scene is,
¡s John Hunt sitting there,
“stemng to mus“), dfmhng a beer, wondeflng 'fi 'ws gonna come to that.
Because so often, in the screenplay, I would be wondering if it had to came...
If it was gonna have to come down to that.
And in wondering that, I would just transpose those,
those musjmgs upon John Hum,
and let him represent my own conflicted feelings about it.
He really became an avatar for me, writing the screenplay.
His detective work is me trying to figure out where the story needed to go.
And sometimes, I would just try to put it off
by having a scene where he comes home late at night,
turns on the radio, and dances with his wife.
That was, in many ways, way more important to me than actually,
sticking to the chase.
Those moments of warmth between him and Tika just resonate.
And when you're taking these detours from the plot.
When you're intentionally depriving audiences of the tropes
of the genre which they might expect,
it's really important to have something to fill that space.
And what I wanted to fill that space with in this film
was just warmth and humanity and love between all of the characters.
And so here's a beautiful scene
in which they are ostensibly talking about Forrest Tucker.
And John Hunt actually has a very romantic line
about Forrest Tucker here.
But really, it's just all about the two of them,
and the love that exists between the two of them.
The respect they feel for each other and the affection.
And I just love looking at that.
Claire Denis is one of my favorite filmmakers.
And in some of her best films,
characters will just start dancing with one another.
And you just feel the love and tenderness between them.
And that's what I wanted to capture there.
I think about this amazing scene in a bar in 35 Shots of Rum,
one of her very best films.
And there's an amazing scene where her father and daughter are dancing.
And then she leaves the father behind to dance with her boyfriend.
And I don't know, I think about that scene all the time.
And certainly, it comes through here.
So when they walk into the diner there, it's worth noting that Casey is telling
'fika the enïxre story of Ain't Them Bodies Saints.
We had some dialogue in the script for them,
but there wasn't that much.
And, so we were always looking for more things for them to talk about.
Casey often will ask me, like, "What can I talk about?
Give me something to talk about."
But in this scene, he just asked if he could just regale her
with the tale of Bob Muldoon from Ain't Them Bodies Saints.
So you dom hear much of 'ú.
Most of it's mixed out, buried beneath The Kinks.
But you hear a little bit of it.
And that's what he's telling her.
It wasn't part of the script to have The Kinks in this scene.
But when we shot the scene of John and Maureen dancing,
that night I was just like, "Okay,
"we need to have something for them to dance to
so that we can get the rhythm of it." And I have always loved "Lola."
lt's always been one of my favorite songs.
So I just kind of pulled that out of the hat,
and let that be the song they danced to,
assuming that we would replace it in post-production.
But what ended up happenmg 'm post-producüon was that we,
edüedthatscene.
And when we got to the end of it, I kept wanting to hear the song.
I just love "Lola." I wanted to keep hearing it.
And so we... we brought it into this scene.
And we started mmng 'ú 'm creaïwe ways.
We mixed in and out of the diegetic and non-diegetic space.
So sometimes it's part of the movie's soundtrack.
Sometimes it's just a song that's playing in the diner.
But it's always there.
And it adds something to the movie that I can't quantify.
I don't know why it works so well, other than it, itjust works well.
And we tried out lots of other songs that were more cost effective.
And none of them worked. It just had to be "Lola."
This scene was... There was a lot riding on this scene.
We never knew quite how it was gonna take place.
It was written to take place ¡n the...
in or around that diner.
We didn't know where exactly.
Sometimes it was in the back parking lot.
Sometimes it was in the diner itself. Sometimes it was in the bathroom.
And then when we found that real diner...
we Iooked at where the restrooms were.
And there was this hallway. And it wasn't exactly right.
But it Suggested a certain type of blocking.
A blocking in which Forrest Tucker would get to escape if he
was able to with that back exit.
And so we built this on a empty Iot next door to the diner.
And so it's the one set in the movie that we constructed.
And it was constructed specifically to allow the scene to play out this way.
And yeah, there was lot riding on it.
A lot of people wondered,
including me, "Would this be enough?
Can we get away with John Hunt Ietting Forrest Tucker go?
Will the audience demand a chase after this?
Should he rush out that back door?"
In fact, that day we had scheduled a moment
where he (hd run out the back door, 'm case we {eh we needed h.
But when we shot the scene and saw the way the actors were playing it,
and saw how delighted Casey was.
Which was, that was the one direction I gave him.
I was like, "Yes, there's a power play ¡n this scene.
But more important than that,
just be delighted that you're face-to-face with Forrest Tucker.
Just be delighted that you're face-to-face with Robert Redford."
And when I saw that delight spread across his face,
I knew that that scene would be enough.
I still second guess myself sometimes. And sometimes I wonder,
"Should John Hunt have arrested Forrest?
Shomd he have chased mm'?
Or should there have been more to it?"
And I just have to trust that, my instincts on the day were right.
That was the choice I made that felt right on the day.
And it's important to just trust those gut instincts sometimes
and to not spend too much time thinking about it after the fact.
Because 99 percent of the time,
the choices you make on the day are the right ones.
I really, truly believe that.
When you're making a movie, you spend so much time preparing.
You spend so much time writing the script and thinking about the characters
and talking about the characters.
And then you get to the set, and you dom have that much '(me to tïfmk.
You really don't. And so you're operating on a gut level.
And if something feels right while you're shooting it,
99 percent of the time it is right.
And that one percent of the '(me that Ws not fight,
is worth it for the, all the times that it is.
And so, when I'm in doubt, whenever I'm in doubt at any stage of the process,
when you're on set or when you're in the edit.
You just trust that whatever was guiding you
while you were Shooting a given scene was correct,
and that you somehow deep down knew what you were doing.
This scene was one of the hardest scenes to shoot.
And watching it now, I don't know why.
I mean, part of the reason was that ¡t was really late.
I think we shot this at like, two in the morning or...
I know that day we didn't wrap until four in the morning.
So it was probably around 2:00 AM that we shot this.
So I'm sure we were all tired.
But there was a lot of nervous anticipation to it,
maybe because it was such a climactic moment for the characters
and their relationship, and there was so much running through
Sissy's mind as a character, having just seen the gun.
And reaflzed that 'm some shape, way or form kms guy
that she's fallen for has been Iying to her.
And yet she still has so much affection for him.
And so we were just talking about it a lot with both actors.
We spent a lot of time talking about the scene.
We spent a lot of time setting it up.
We didn't really spend a Iot of time rehearsing it.
'Cause we wanted to let it be fresh in the moment.
But we just spent a lot of time dilly-dallying, getting to it.
And then we finally shot it, and when Sissy opens that door
and Bob walks up there and takes his hat off
and hits that gold and beautiful sodium light
that Joe Anderson has set up just for him.
The years melted away.
It felt like we were watching these two actors ¡n their twenties again.
Again, I wanted them to kind of function as teenagers.
Forrest Tucker went to prison when he was thirteen.
And so he was in many ways a very arrested adolescent.
And something about his adolescent spirit
brings out the sixteen-year-old girl ¡n Sissy.
And she blushes, blushes like a teenager when she's around him.
And that really just came through in that moment.
You just watch them both just...
become teenagers again.
You 'gust see those years me“ away.
And it was breathtaking on set.
Everyone around the monitor just sort of gasped.
And then you wonder,
"Why were we so worried about this scene?
Why was there so much stress about u?“
All we had to do was just shoot it, and it would work out.
When you work with really good actors,
and you have people like Robert Redford and Sissy Spacek.
So often, you stress about how you're gonna shoot it,
and you just think, "How can we make this scene work?"
But then you just have to remind yourself,
you're working with Robert Redford and Sissy Spacek.
They know how to act in a movie.
All you have to do is get the camera set up
and have them step in front of it.
And whatever's happening, you know it's gonna be magical.
This whole sequence in the film is based in fact.
This is all rooted in the, the David Grann, New Yorker article.
Forrest Tucker came home one day.
And his accomplice, Teddy Green, was standing there on his front porch.
And before they could exchange a single word,
the police descended upon them.
And it was unclear whether...
whether or not Teddy knew that was gonna happen.
Whether he was setting Forrest up, whether he'd given him up.
Or whether the police had, in fact, followed Teddy to Forrest's house
and used Nm to ensnare 'mm.
And I'm sure I could have found the answers to that question.
But I didn't really do too much deep digging.
I liked the ambiguity of it.
And there's something so beautiful about that,
that silent moment. Something beautiful and tragic.
And this car Chase is all, this is all based ¡n reality too.
Forrest (“d get shot many ümes.
Here, he got shot once, because I thought it strained credulity
to have him get shot as many times as he actually did get shot.
And he claims that he never actually fired his gun.
Although, I think at one point,
he said he actually fired it in the air, just to scare the cops.
And they fired back on him.
And he was hit many times, and yet still managed to escape
and to hijack a young woman who was out driving with her son.
So all of this is completely based ¡n fact.
As much as the movie is
a mythologized version of the Forrest Tucker tale,
there are many Scenes and instances and incidents
that are directly tied to things that really happened in his life.
And this is one that is directly tied to both his life
and to the New Yorker article.
The actress in this scene is Augustine Frizzell who happens to be my wife.
And she has been hijacked by an outlaw in my movies before.
In Ain't Them Bodies Saints, Casey Affleck,
hijacks her and steals her car in a scene very similar to this one.
So when I read that scene in the New Yorker article,
I was like, "Can I get away with this? I mean, I've already done this scene."
But then I realized the best way to get away with it was to just...
Was to recreate it and have the same character.
And at one point in the script, I had her say,
"This keeps happening to me,"
as an allusion to the fact that she is indeed the same character.
Although, we had to change her name. You never hear her name in this movie
or 'm Ain't Them Bodies Saints. Buün Ain't Them Bodies Saints
her name was actually Sissy as a allusion to Miss Spacek.
And I felt that I couldn't keep that name.
So we changed her name to Sant“.
At this point, we leave reality behind.
Bob, or Forrest Tucker, rather...
They're inseparable in my mind at this point.
But the real Forrest Tucker left that young woman and her son behind.
As we see in the film, he left them in front of a store,
took their car and was eventually apprehended by the cops.
L think he actually crashed into a tree, ¡f l remember correctly.
He was bleeding out, he was losing consciousness.
He crashed into a tree, and at one point in the script, that's what happened.
But I felt that the fact that he was in such a low state.
That he was physically...
He was bleeding. He was dying.
He was stradcflïng me and death.
Gave us permission to sort of enter this more symbolic realm.
And in doing so, to really lean in to the fact
that it is Robert Redford playing Forrest Tucker.
And that there is a history there that we need to acknowledge.
So seeing Bob on a horse at sunset, looking at all these cop cars
streaming in with a poncho over his shoulder.
It really... it really was designed to remind us
of who Robert Redford is as an actor, what he has meant to us as a movie star.
And what his legacy is on the silver screen.
And that's something I never wanted to talk to Bob about.
I think he knew that reading the script.
And he certainly understood and wanted this to be a spiritual successor
to the type of roles that he made his name with.
To really follow ¡n the...
'm the spmt of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
And The Electric Horseman, and Jeremiah Johnson, and The Sting.
But we never talked about this movie being meta in any sort of way.
And yet, I knew it would be. There's no way to escape it.
When you have a movie star who's been around
for as long as Robert Redford's been around.
When you have a movie star who's been around for that long...
you can try to run away from it.
But it's a fool's errand. It's betterjust to lean into it.
I did that a little bit with Keith Carradine in Ain't Them Bodies Saints.
I felt that...
it was better to just lean in to who he was,
to who he was as an actor and what we expect from mm.
And then this was the same thing. But one hundredfold.
When you hire Casey Affleck in a movie,
you can always count on him to make your script better.
I write dialogue fairly well. I like writing it.
I feel like I do a pretty good job of it,
of giving these characters things to say.
But I always know that Casey will make ¡t even better.
And this final line he had, I can't remember what it was ¡n the script.
I'm sure it was something clunky and not as graceful.
It was the same intent, but it had...
It almost certainly had far too many words.
And he had read the script, certainly.
And he knew what the dialogue was.
But when we rolled Cameras, he just said, "I'm not."
And I thank him for that.
This actress on this television right here
is an actress from Forth Worth, Texas.
And she was in A Ghost Story, playing the doctor
who takes Rooney to the morgue. And again, l just really liked her.
And I always try to just, these actors who I meet, who have these small parts,
I always just try to keep bringing them along from one movie to the next.
'Cause I just really, really like them.
This scene here is notable for... many things.
It's the second meeting between John Hunt and Forrest Tucker.
It's a callback to that hundred dollar bill
that Forrest Tucker left for John Hunt earlier in the film.
And it also is...
It contains an overt nod to The Sting, right here.
And that was Casey's idea.
I knew he had been wanting to do that in the film.
He was looking for a place to do it.
And this was the, this was the perfect scene for it.
And I missed it when we were shooting it,
because I was looking at Bob and not Casey.
And so afterwards, Casey came up to me and he was very excited.
And he was like, "Did you see it? Did it work?"
And I had no idea what he was talking about.
Bob though, I think, Bob did catch it.
And he said afterwards that he was very moved by it.
This shot of Bob sitting up in the prison
was originally for a different sequence
in the movie that we ultimately scrapped.
Or parts of it are in the film. It's him in San Quentin.
But this whole San Quentin sequence turned out to be far less...
It wasn't as necessary as we thought.
And so we shot a lot less of it than we had ever initially intended,
and included even less of it than we shot.
But this was one shot that I loved. And so we repurposed it to use here.
Just that shot of him just looking so broken behind bars.
After seemg mm...
So, 'fi youre ever seemg mm
so at his best through the entire film.
To see him at his worst there was really impactful.
And ¡t was a shot that, I think it was,
in our Cincinnati leg of the shoot. It was the last thing we shot.
And it was at hour 18 of a very long day,
in which we also shot this scene that you're seeing here.
And it was a...
We had an idea of what it was gonna be,
but we didn't know that Bob was gonna sit up into it the way he did.
And the camera team wasn't ready for that.
And the fact that they managed to, like, pull focus in just the right way.
It really was one of those magical things where...
You can plan as much as you want.
You can plan all day long for a shot to work a certain way.
But then when you get a great actor 'm 'ú,
they'II turn into something new that you...
you could never have planned for.
And when you get those, those amazing moments,
you just, you hold on tight to them.
And you don't cut them out of the movie which is why that shot's here.
This scene here...
that list of prison breaks
is something that is in the New Yorker article.
Forrest Tucker gave a list of his escapes to David Grann
at the end of their interview.
And, as you see in the movie, as you'll see in a few minutes,
the last spot was blank.
And that was such a beautiful, a beautiful note to end the,
article on, but also to include in this film.
And I really wanted to include that.
And so I gave that, that scene to Sissy.
But then I also reallyjust wanted to see that list of escapes realized.
I wanted to see all of those, those prison breaks.
That was such a huge part of who Forrest Tucker was.
He was an amazmg escape amet 'm adcïmon to bemg a bank robber.
And he really did break out of prison all these times.
And we donï spend that much üme wüh 'mm
as an escape amst 'm the moxne.
In fact, we never even really hear the name,
Forrest Tucker, for like an hour of the film.
But I wanted in the final act of the film to really,
dig into who he really was.
And to let the breadth of his character finally be revealed.
And what better way to do that than a really big, fun montage.
Initially, it was meant to be fun. It was just gonna be fun.
It was gonna be a lot of clever little snippets,
based on so many great prison breaks that we've seen in movies.
And some of Forrest Tucker's actual prison breaks.
But then I decided we needed to see Bob's face.
And so we used that clip there from The Chase.
Which is a film he made in 1966.
It's a great movie, directed by Arthur Penn, written by Horton Foote.
And not a lot of people have seen it.
It's sort of been forgotten. But it's a really exceptional film.
And 'm the first scene, Bob breaks out of pñson.
I got to say, that's the real John Hunt right there.
That is John Hunt himself
who not only is an amazing
human being, a wonderful detective.
He is also, it turns out, a really good actor.
But it was really important to me to have Bob's face in that sequence.
So we used that clip from The Chase.
And suddenly what had previously been just a really fun sequence,
suddenly became very emotional.
To see him as he was then, and then the cut to him as he is now.
It really...
It kind of breaks the fourth wall.
Once again, you really think about Robert Redford, the actor.
And what he means to you, as an audience member.
And what he means to movies, what he means to cinema history.
And I Iike that. I like breaking the fourth wall in that way.
And really, again, just like seeing him on the horse,
gave us an iconic image that was a quintessential Robert Redford moment.
More so than it is a Forrest Tucker moment.
I felt that acknowledging where Bob came from
and where he is now was,
was a beautiful thing to include in this movie.
And I was really glad we had the opportunity to do that.
In the midst of a really fun, rollicking prison break,
a really fun, rollicking prison break sequence
that was just a heck of a lot of fun to shoot.
We got in a van and just drove all over Texas.
And by all over Texas,
I mean we just drove all over Fort Worth Texas
which is where we shot most of it.
And just Iooked for places that Iooked like prisons.
And just came up with fun ideas based, again,
on other prison breaks from movies.
Obviously, there's Escape from Alcatraz in there.
And there's A Man Escaped. And so many fun, “me beats.
Digging through the dirt at the end was a nod
to the Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Which was actually a really big influence on this movie.
Whenever I was writing the script,
I often had the Fantastic Mr. Fox soundtrack playing.
Sometimes I would just have the movie playing in the background.
And when people would ask me what the tone was gonna be like,
I would just say, "Just imagine a live action, Fantastic Mr. Fox."
And I can see that in the finished film.
I don't know how much it comes through, but ¡t definitely is there.
The movie could have easily ended with Sissy saying,
"Maybe you should stay put."
At one point, it did end with that.
It really... It was a nice way to go out.
It was a nice way to let Sissy have the last word in the film.
But once again, I just felt the pull of fact, so to speak.
This is what really happened to Forrest Tucker. He got out of prison.
He... reunited with Jewel.
He... Iived ¡n Florida with her.
He enjoyed the country club Iifestyle for a while.
He taught trumpet lessons to children.
He, by all accounts, was pretty happy.
They were wealthy.
Jewel was already wealthy. They had money.
And yet he couldn't keep himself from robbing banks.
I think a couple months went by. Maybe it was a couple years.
I can't remember exactly anymore. But at one point,
he just decided he needed to get back to doing what he loved.
And so...
He went, robbed four more banks.
Got Caught. And spent the rest of ms “fe 'm pfison.
And that just says so much about the character. It really does.
And I felt that we really should include that in the film.
And it's a sad thing. There's not, it's not a...
It's not a happy ending for Forrest Tucker.
The fact that he had... this chance for a real life.
A real life with someone he loved.
And turned it down to do...
something else that he loved.
But that wasn't...
that was ultimately the root of his undoing.
Thereïs tragedy 'm that.
And so I didn't want to shy away from that.
So this entire sequence is very melancholic.
There's no music. Almost the entire film has score.
Wall to wall score from Daniel Hart, who does a wonderful job.
Providing that engine to the movie that he always does for my movies.
But at this point, we tried putting score ¡n there. It just felt wrong.
It was counter...
counter-intuitive to what the movie needed here.
What it needed was the tone that that clip from Two-Lane Blacktop
that we just saw, had.
That elegiac tone, that idea that something is within your grasp,
and yet it's slipping away.
So much of that is in this shot right here,
which who knows what he's looking at.
Probably nothing. But just... you just see that...
that sense of...
things not quite adding up in his face there.
He's not where he needs to be, even though he's where he should be.
When they go outside of the movie theater there, it was really fun
to try to pick out the movies that were on the marquee.
I mean, it was really hard to kind of narrow it down.
So the movies that were showing at that movie theater
were Alien 3, which is amazing.
If you haven't seen the director's cut of Alien 3,
I think it's a Iegitimately brilliant film.
Miller's Crossing, another Iegitimately brilliant film.
And then a made-up poster for The Names, which is a future film
from Alex Ross Perry based on the Don DeLillo novel.
And Alex Ross Perry is one of my favorite filmmakers.
I'm lucky enough to call him a friend,
and l wanted to just have a little nod to him there.
I'm giving all the credit to Scott Kuzio, our production designer,
who also is Alex's production designer, for putting that there.
But I was happy to...
to tip my hat to Alex.
He's a wonderful, wonderful filmmaker and a wonderful friend.
This scene has the one fake mustache in the movie
that is not supposed to be fake.
We wanted Casey to look different.
It's a number of years later. And so we had him cut his hair.
This is the last thing we shot with him. We cut his hair and shaved.
And when Casey shaves, he looks like he's 20.
It was an error on our part to have him do that.
And itjust felt like he had traveled back in time.
And John Hunt had regressed 'm years.
And so we quickly scrounged up a fake mustache.
And slapped it on. And I don't like it.
I don't like fake mustaches in movies.
But we had to.
And it would've have been really weird if he hadn't.
So hopefully, you didn't notice.
Hopefully the fact that I just acknowledged it doesn't
depreciate too much from the end of the film.
And now we're at the end of the film.
This was something that was always gonna be the last shot.
It's a very unremarkable moment.
And yet it's very remarkable for its sheer un-remarkability.
I just wanted him to walk away. There's nothing too dynamic about it.
And just walk into that bank and disappear.
And now that Bob is talking about retiring, you think,
this might be the last shot he ever fills in a film.
This might be the last shot of Robert Redford in a movie.
Should we have made more of a big deal out of it?
The answer is, no.
He had talked about retiring before we started shooting.
And it was one of those things I just did not ever let myself think about,
because it would have been too much pressure.
We would have made that shot fancier. We would have made it more climactic,
rather than just let it just be a simple grace note to a very simple story.
And I didn't want the movie to be burdened with the weight of finality.
Even though it is very much about finality ¡n so many ways.
I really wanted it to be light-hearted. I wanted it to be fun.
And I didn't want to constantly be aware.
And constantly reminding the audience that this is the last time
we might see one of our great, favorite, long-standing,
Iegendary movie stars appear onscreen. That was a long list of adjectives.
Maybe we should cut some of those adjectives out.
Nonetheless he deserves every single one of them.
It was a real joy to work with him on this film.
We had worked together on Pete 's Dragon.
Which came about after we'd started working on this one.
So he was 'm Pete's Dragon, because...
we had already been developing The Old Man & the Gun.
And he was gracious enough to come along for that particular ride.
And I was so glad that we had the chance to get to know each other.
To work in that way in New Zealand.
For me to direct him, to have the opportunity to direct him
before we dove headfirst into this movie was a real luxury.
Because I got to know him.
I got to know him as a friend, as a collaborator.
And thaïs one of the, the great 'yoys 'm my me,
that I've had the chance to work with him twice now.
And to know that he trusts me.
And that he is...
To know that he's happy with this movie was...
I make movies for audiences. I always want the audience to be happy,
to come out of the movie having had a satisfactory experience.
But...
knowing that Bob liked this movie, that he was happy with it.
When he called me to let me know that he loved it
and he didn't want me to change a frame.
It wasn't gonna get any better than that.
Everything else was just gravy.
So I, in many ways, made this movie for him.
I made this movie, because I love him.
And I'm so thankful that he gave me the opportunity to...
To make it with him.
And you donï get those opportunmes too often 'm me,
and I'm glad I had this one.
I love watching credits. Naturally that would be
where you would end a Commentary track with something like that.
But I just love sitting here and just...
looking at all the people that helped make this movie.
They're all friends of mine. They're all collaborators.
I always try to bring as many of my movie family with me
from one film to the next as I can.
And you always meet new people and fall in love with them
and just want them to be there on your next film.
And it'sjust a... It's like a traveling Circus.
And sometimes people who are there, sometimes the...
The names and faces sometimes change,
but you always try to create that, that familial environment.
So for me, sitting here watching the credits,
I could just talk.
I could tell you stories about every one of these people.
'Cause they're all just such wonderful people.
And we wouldn't have been able to make the movie without them.
I don't like to have a sense of hierarchy on my sets.
I don't want there to be that sense that any one person's job
is more or less important than anyone else.
And so, anyone can come look at the monitor.
Anyone can come talk to me.
Anyone can talk to the actors, unless the actors are in a scene,
in which case it's important that they have their space.
We really try to have that sense of community on our sets.
And we try to have fun.
And as a result, there's a great deal of affection on our sets for everyone.
We really try to treat everyone...
wemmw.
And as a result,
I wind up working with a lot of people over and over again,
'cause I think our sets are a Iot of fun.
And it's... I try to create environment that's worth coming back to.
So, l just love... being reminded of,
of all my friends in Cincinnati and Fort Worth
and everyone that helped make this movie.
And I'm not gonna go through here and give shout outs to every single person,
because... that would... The credits aren't long enough.
But it ¡s great to just be reminded of
all the folks who were so vital to making this film.
One of the great things about this credit sequence
is that it has a song from Bonnie 'Prince' Billy ¡n it,
Will Oldham, who is a wonderful musician.
And I have been lucky enough to collaborate with him a few times.
He was 'm my short 'mm, Pioneer. And then he (hd musk: for Pete's Dragon.
He wrote "The Dragon Song" that plays over the beginning of the film
and then agam at the end creeme. And then he was 'm A Ghost Story.
He has that monologue that, that kind of occurs
at the third act of the film. And he is one of my favorite musicians.
And I...
l just felt like l wanted to have him be part of this film.
He came to visit set at one point.
And I tried to convince him to be in the movie.
But he's... He's very...
He knows which parts are right for him.
So, I was happy that we were able to get a song of his in this film.
I'm sure there's a lot more I could talk about.
The movie's opening this weekend,
and I'm very curious. lt's been great.
We premiered it a couple weeks ago at Telluride.
And then we showed it at Toronto.
And then we did a couple screenings in New York.
And now here we are, and it opened last night.
And I did some Q&A's and to get to go...
Showing it to an audience is always terrifying to me.
I lose all my confidence before we show a film to an audience.
But then the audience is always there to catch me.
And so it's been really nice over the past few weeks to...
To just unveil this film and to
set it out on its own two feet and let audiences have fun with it.
We really... Most of my films are relatively heavy.
Including Pete's Dragon, which is just a really sad movie
when you get down to it.
But with this one, I really just wanted to make a movie
that audiences would go see and leave with a smile on their face.
We wanted to have fun making it. We wanted it to be fun to watch.
And I reallyjust wanted people to... When people ask me,
"What do you want audiences to take away from this film?"
And I get asked that a lot.
I'm getting asked that a Iot right now as we do press for the movie.
And, for once, the answer is just, I just want people to smile.
And sometimes, that's all you need.