Hi, my name is Paul Anderson,
and I was a producer on the movie. I also wrote and directed it.
And I'm here with Richard Yuricich.
Hello, I'm Richard Yuricich, visual effects supervisor.
I've worked with Paul before, and excited about this movie.
So, yeah, Richard and I did Event Horizon together.
And Richard also worked on such little-known movies
as 2001, Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
to name but a few.
And most recently, both Mission Impossible movies.
But I couldn't wait to get back to Resident Evil.
All of the visual effects in the movie were actually done in London.
The company that did the opening credit sequence was called Smoke & Mirrors,
but the company that did absolutely everything else
was The Computer Film Company, who, again, worked with us on Event.
The Computer Film Company was awarded all the work,
and the deal was so that they could do it all, an in-house boutique.
So we had a boutique on the film.
It was easy to control that film.
This very first shot, this is funny because...
The very first day Paul set me up with the producers
because this is our first added shot, we were over budget. The first day.
It's an inside joke, there was not enough room on the stage,
and Paul came up and said, "Hey, we want to do this, but don't tell Jeremy."
Yeah, the end piece of this shot was actually done...
Practically, we were actually tracking into the set
with bits of black taped to either side, so from here on in is real,
and everything else beforehand was done as a visual effect.
We reduced the image.
This guy actually operating the claws is an expert at claw operating.
We had to fly him in 'cause these things are just unbelievably difficult to operate.
I spent half a day doing it.
It's almost impossible to pick anything up with these claws.
It looks really simple but it's really, really difficult.
And if you just saw that, there's a slight continuity lapse
because the guy behind the visor there is wearing a mask.
And, of course, later in the movie you'll discover
that he's not supposed to be wearing a mask.
He did a good job operating this. Very difficult.
This is our slow-motion CG vial.
Meant to match the break.
Yes, but two shots where it's flying through the air are the CG shots.
This aerial perspective was added to suggest the gases
being drawn in and then exited.
That was about a 400% blow-up. That shouldn't work. That worked real well.
Yeah, the pull-out from the vent.
That's why the shot looks a little grainy at the start,
is because we enlarged it so much to kind of get right into the vent.
And also that rotation on that shot was added later.
'Cause that was never intended to be, you know, the rotate and pull-out.
It was just a random shot of a vent that we kind of grabbed and used.
These puppies, of course, are gonna return later on in the movie.
Rather more unpleasant form.
This is one of my favourite things in the movie,
is the Red Queen point-of-view shots,
the security camera shots, 'cause there's so much detail
in each one of these shots.
And I think that'll be one of the joys, for me, anyway, about watching it on DVD,
is being able to freeze-frame and see all the details in the...
Yeah, those weren't originally part of the film,
but when you came up with the idea
and wanted to do them, it was a really good addition.
There's another thing that took us over budget,
but we didn't go over budget.
It was a really nice storytelling tool. It was really done well.
Yeah, I think a difference between this movie and most studio movies, anyway,
is with a studio movie when you go over budget,
the studio just says, "Okay, we want that shot. Go over budget."
This is actually an independent movie,
which meant we had a finite amount of money, and we could never go over it.
So whenever Richard says, "I'm asking for additional things,"
he would always have to strike the balance of, if I wanted something more,
and he chose to give it to me,
it would mean we'd have to lose something else,
or do something we planned to do, and do it cheaper.
We'd have to really get clever if we could.
Was it AMX that did the work on the...
Yeah. Another company in London that did all the graphics on the Red Queen stuff.
And supplied the elements to Computer Film Company.
They're very bad spellers as well. They had to redo these shots a lot of times.
'Cause when we did freeze-frame them,
we discovered loads of things were misspelled.
Well, that was discovered by the French girl, Muriel Gérard,
who was the visual effects coordinator, so all the misspells, yeah. Is that right?
Yes.
That was really great shot there with the...
There was a reflection of Alice in... I'm sorry, not Alice, the...
- Of the scientist. - The scientist in the lens. That was added.
These CG were added.
This is the first of the model shots that you'll see in the movie.
How long was that lift shaft?
It was 25 feet. In scale it represented 12 storeys.
But we photographed it in such a way 'cause you wanted to make it look...
I think it was 14.
It was one-fourth scale.
So everything in that shot's practical,
apart from the counterweight that comes towards us.
And then all these wires. That's all added CG afterwards.
And all the dust coming up from the bottom.
But the elevators themselves and the shaft are all miniature.
And inside the elevator, it's a rather complicated special effect
of just shaking the camera.
Again, the brakes coming on there is all miniature,
with CG sparks added afterwards.
Halon!
Stop it!
Stop it! Stop!
Help!
Mortality decreasing.
This shot here, where the guy's pressing against the door,
I was always really embarrassed 'cause I could never get the extras
to stop pressing against the glass door so hard that they bent out.
So they're all supposed to be suffocating in there,
but if you go back and look at that shot, you can see the doors just bending badly.
Because it's all just plastic. They can actually push their way out.
This is the second or third day of shooting, wasn't it?
This was the third day of shooting.
It was incredible because the elevator was counterweighted... Counterbalanced?
Yeah, the elevator in this set would practically go up and down,
so everything in this scene was done practically.
So, you know, when her head slams towards the top of the door
at the end of the sequence, that was really happening.
It was a really nerve-biting moment on the set.
We didn't have the hydraulics, but it was a nice system.
Again, saving some dollars.
I'm stuck. You're gonna have to push.
To make it extra safe when the elevator drops to the bottom,
just in case Indra, who's the actress here...
Her head snapped forward when the elevator stops
and slammed into the ground.
We actually put a fake floor in, so when she falls, she puts her arm on it,
and you can actually see the floor bends 'cause it's all breakaway.
There it goes. She just bent the floor there.
Push her out of the way!
Didn't we repair a little bit of that, too? Not on that shot. We didn't have to.
It's great.
Coming up is another visual effects shot that was never planned.
We did a straight pull-out from Milla's eye here
with the camera just flat.
And then we thought it'd be really classy to add the rotation to it.
But that was all done afterwards as a visual effect.
Yeah, didn't we flop that first eye
so we could use the right eye that we pulled out of, I think?
That's right. The very big close-up of the eye where she wakes up as well.
Also, in order to get the pupil to move,
we were shining very bright lights into her eye.
And so you removed the lights, right?
We had the reflection of the lights in her eye.
If you go back you don't see them at all.
Not that it mattered, but for an editorial cut, we had to flop the eye.
It was a left eye close-up, but we pulled out of the right eye.
Left eye. I had my eyes flopped.
And we end up using exactly the same eye shot
at the end of the movie in the white room.
This time with the lights reflected in her eyes.
The colourisation you did here...
Paul did the re-colourisation on this montage.
Her flashback.
We cut the sequence and then we had the sequence scanned in,
so it became a digital sequence.
And then we really played with the colours there.
It's fabulous.
You know, really de-saturate a lot of the image,
but then we also put a travelling matte around her eyes and lips
so that we could keep the blue of Milla's eyes and the red of her lips
while losing the colour in the rest of the shot.
There's a great second unit shot coming up soon,
which is her point of view through the window.
And this is the second unit with, literally, just a window and a piece of curtain,
sitting in a carpark waiting for it to get dark to get her point of view shot.
I have to admit I didn't understand that cut when she started to write down what he did.
You fooled me on that because the script... I didn't know what was happening there.
I had to see the movie to understand that.
- But you understand it now, right? - Very much, yeah.
- Had to watch the DVD to understand it. - No, I had to watch the release.
Such a long stretch and no visual effects.
- No. - Just acting.
Actually, this studio is on the very street where I first started working
doing Charlie Brown cartoons as a cameraman.
We're in LA, right at the moment.
- Right now. - Excuse me. Yeah.
Hello?
- You started with Charlie Brown? - Charlie Brown, yes.
I was working in aerospace on jet fighters with inertial guidance,
and an opportunity came up
for a struggling business who needed somebody that worked very cheap.
And I was a photographer and a friend,
and wonderful, I got a chance to start working with Nick Vasu
at Nick Vasu Animation, and his major client was the Charlie Browns.
- What were you doing on jet fighters? - Inertial guidance systems.
- Right. - So they knew where they were.
Hopefully they worked.
I remember thinking when Gary Powers got caught,
I thought, "Oh, my God, I hope he didn't have our system."
That's an awful big jump from jet fighters to Charlie Brown.
- Yeah, it was a while back. - Jet fighters to 2001, I can see that.
Hello?
All these crows are CG, right?
Computer generated crows, yes, and a colour-timed shot, so it fit.
It was a nice job.
It's 'cause we shot most of the movie in Germany
and we couldn't find one trained crow in Germany,
never mind a whole tree full of them.
I really liked those cuts here.
Now there's a puck being pulled across the floor on a string
to a camera position.
Yes, that shot was just a straight wire removal.
Amazing how well those things work when you've gotta save some money,
which has made the story of making the movie fun.
One of the things I have to say about working with Richard,
and it's interesting, having done two pretty heavy visual effects movies with him,
is that whenever I want to do a visual effect, the first thing Richard will always say is,
"Do you have to do a visual effect? Can't you do it for real?"
And I think that's a really good approach to have
because I think your argument is real is always best, right?
Yeah. Well, it's good...
You always handle it very well, so when we do that, it always looks best.
But my favourite scale is one to one.
Nobody ever questions the scale of the miniature.
I hope people understand what I meant there.
- Yeah, you build it for real. - Build it for real, do it for real.
You can't let the special effects get in the way of telling the story
and making the movie.
You're just trying to help get the story told.
No. We take him with us.
You can't do this!
Blow me.
Still no visual effects.
So tell us about the mothership from Close Encounters.
You told me a story about that.
While we're waiting for something interesting to happen in Resident Evil.
Let me see, I think it was the amount of electricity...
Wasn't there something stuck to the bottom of it?
Oh, yeah. You know, the miniature builders...
Everybody's gotten credit for doing this, and I didn't do this,
but R2-D2 can be seen standing on the mothership,
and most people would never see it until they've looked real closely.
And I believe it was probably Greg Jein, a fabulous, fabulous miniature builder.
He and his madmen in his department.
They had all sorts of little things, Volkswagen buses,
- and F104jet fighters... - Stuck to the bottom?
Yeah.
But the mothership... I mean, the R2-D2 really shows up.
And it was fun because when they were doing Star Wars
and Close Encounters at the same time,
we were all such friends, it was the same community.
We knew what they were doing, they knew what we were doing,
and we had these inside jokes, and that one really paid off.
It took years for some of the people that worked on the film
before they even noticed it.
I think you see it when Melinda Dillon's on the ship
and there's a shot over her shoulder when the mothership first crosses the screen.
You know, the gentleman I worked for, Nick Vasu, had a partner,
took a partner named Jim Dickson,
and he went over to England to work with Douglas Trumbull,
he'd worked with Douglas before,
and helped set and build the slit-scan camera.
When Jim came back, they'd gotten a call.
They needed somebody to work on the rostrum camera on 2001,
and my speciality was working on opticals, and optical elements, and rostrum shots,
so I was a natural, and so I got the job.
- It was really very fortunate. - Not bad for a first credit.
Great experience, I call it the Class of2001.
Julia Phillips once asked me...
Steven Spielberg, really, asked me where I learnt that stuff
when we were doing Close Encounters.
And I said I attended nine months of school in the Class of2001.
Actually, at the completion of Close Encounters,
they gave everybody on the crew a diploma,
"Graduating Class of CE3K," and it was signed by the head of production.
John Veitch, Steven Spielberg, of course, and Julia Phillips.
- Now, back to Resident Evil. - Back to Resident Evil.
The Class of Resident Evil.
So, coming up, I think we've got the first of our model shots,
'cause we built two big models. One was the elevator shaft,
and the other was a train tunnel with a model train in it.
And this is the first probably least favourite of my shots coming up.
Yes, it actually wasn't a planned shot.
We just did a camera test and shot this, and editorially it became a good piece to use.
Yeah, I think it was a good shot to show that the train is leaving the station.
I never felt that the... It's interesting, 'cause the paintjob we did on the station,
maybe because you were never intending for us to use it, was not very good,
so you had to clean the shot up a lot.
Cleaned the shot. Grain and paint was added, yes.
Again, the miniature was built... Most of the monies dedicated to the miniature
was given to Paul so they could build a real train
'cause we weren't going to do that at first.
So that train was built by the special effects crews in Germany
and it worked really well.
Yeah, the real train you see is pretty much... It's the size it is in the movie, obviously,
but it's all made out of wood.
It runs on rubber tyres, and there's a metal chassis,
but it's a construction of wood, and if you look closely at it,
when it's moving pretty fast, it's wobbling quite badly.
So when we built it, the reason we could do that to the monies, fund them over there,
was that we were only gonna have two, or three at the most, train cuts,
- and I believe we ended up with five or six. - Yeah.
How long was the model train?
The model train was 130 feet long with an arc in it.
The train itself was eighth scale, and it was propelled along the track
by a cable whose power was given to it by a drill plug,
I think it was a Black & Decker drill, to move the train along.
- So the track was 130 feet long? - Yes. 130 feet, yes. Excuse me, 130 feet.
- How long was the train itself? - Oh, the train itself?
Oh, boy, I think it was, again, eighth scale, I think it was...
- Two feet long? - Two...
- It was about three feet long, yeah. - Three feet long.
With little men in the doors.
There you go, that's a model shot right there.
Model shot.
Actually, they tilt up so that the lights on the train
could match the lights on the miniature.
This is one of my favourite locations in the movie.
It's the reason why we went to Berlin to shoot the movie.
'Cause they had this fantastic underground station
right beneath the Reichstag, which is the German parliament.
And they'd built 90% of it but they hadn't finished it,
so none of the flooring is done, none of the tiling on the walls.
But it looked pretty amazing, and really, the only thing we had to put in there,
we put some barrels and boxes in there and we put our own train in there.
But otherwise, everything you see is real.
Cinematographer David Johnson had to block up all the light sources
that seemed to come from the ceiling 'cause it was daylight that came through there.
We were about two storeys beneath the ground.
So he had them blacked out, and they were illuminated.
And we obviously built that door there.
I want to know who you people are and I want to know what's going on here.
Now!
You and I have the same employer.
We all work for the Umbrella Corporation.
The mansion above us is an emergency entrance to the Hive.
This is towards the end of the shoot, we shot this.
Like, when directors run out of ideas on how to cover a scene with a lot of people,
it's always like, "Make the camera go round and round them."
These work well, they're nice cuts.
It's always really difficult with a scene like this
because you have so many different eye lines.
That's why you end up doing something like going round and round.
Because otherwise, if you do normal coverage,
it takes forever to get all the eye lines correct.
The imagery was added to that little computer as he turned to the screen
so that was tracked and the flat imagery was added.
And then this is an entirely CG shot, right?
This is something that was never intended to be in the movie to start with,
this whole 3D map of the Hive.
And we looked at the first cut of the film,
and it became obvious that it was very confusing as to where these people were.
A lot of people who watched the movie went, "Well, I don't understand.
"Are they still underneath the mansion? Where have they gone?"
So the kind of size and scale of the Hive never really came through
until we did the maps, and then suddenly, everyone's confusion disappeared.
And I thought the shots ended up great as well.
Yeah, your idea of adding the infra-red human imagery,
really good to explain the story.
The Hive has its own defence mechanisms, all computer-controlled.
Again, this is all digital colour timing.
Which, eventually... All movies are going to be timed like this,
rather than going to a lab and doing a chemical process.
'Cause when you time a normal movie, colour time it,
the actual control you have over the colours is very limited,
whereas when you do it as a digital shot, you have all the colours of the rainbow,
you have incredible little...
The changes you can make in slight green and slight blue is quite extraordinary.
The range is quite deep.
There! Those are the technical words I was looking for.
But you could also fix a shot up, or two, if you keep a little secret,
something you always didn't like,
and I think you got an occasion to do that in the sequence.
So this is really a neat methodology.
Actually, if you go back and you look at that last flash back sequence
where Milla remembers collapsing, there's some great shots left in there
where there's a guy standing there with a clapperboard.
That's just for one frame.
If you have the patience to go through it frame by frame,
there's loads of great flash frames of just a guy with a clapperboard.
There's a man standing beside the bathtub for no reason whatsoever.
I think it's one of the camera assistants in another shot.
I don't know where it's at, but just like on Close Encounters,
where we wrote the crew's name on the mothership in a matte painting,
we had all sorts of names written on one of the set-pieces here,
but I don't know where it's at. It'll go unseen by the audience,
but if you were to buy the prop you'd see everybody's name.
I didn't know that.
That's actually a view of downtown San Francisco.
That's the Transamerica building on the right there.
It was great fun working on the film because all the actors, especially Milla and Michelle,
really liked the visual effects, so it was really kind of fun to go on the stage.
This is a CG flare added, and the cable bounce, to a cut of the miniature.
And the shot beforehand where you see Pasquale, who plays J.D.,
dropping the flare, we added a computer-generated cable in the foreground
so it would match with the shot afterwards.
That's my favourite kind of CG, is where you just don't even know it's an effects shot.
Were they standing on a forklift? Isn't that the set in front of them?
The foreground set piece when they threw it down?
- Oh, when they throw the flare down? - Yeah.
- No, that was... We built a scaffold tower. - Built a tower, yeah.
And they were about 30 feet off the ground.
This was, actually, the first set we shot on
and was one of the last sets we shot on, as well.
So it was standing for about three and a half months,
and, you know, got very wet and it got very damp.
And... God, it stank really bad.
The other thing, talk about adding pressure, was
the film's only motion control shot. We'd avoid motion control equipment
and think of another way to do it, but the only motion control shot
was the very first shot in the film with Milla standing in the pristine set,
and then we had to come back later and match that same move.
So we had little markers on the floor and laser measurements,
and we moved the equipment out, and it actually came...
We don't do that too often, but it matched.
We've got Milla standing
and we had, like, seven pieces of photography there.
Hey. You okay?
- Here. - No.
- I'm fine. - Please, come on.
It's cold in here.
Are you...
Do you remember anything from before this?
No. Nothing before the train.
Back to that motion control shot.
I believe the first day we shot Milla only has a reference,
but we have the laboratory workers moving up and down the hallway
in their clean clothing and...
Yeah, we had the corridor clean,
- which is where you end up at. - End up, yeah.
And, then, we came back,
probably like a month later, where the corridor's all destroyed
and shot that part of the shot.
And Milla, we shot her in her red dress when the corridor was destroyed.
So even when she's in the shot and the corridor's pristine,
she's actually taken from the other part of the shot.
We shot her against a blue screen.
All right, we're behind schedule.
So let's move it.
And one of the reasons for doing that, actually, was that
at the start of the shoot, when we're shooting the clean corridor,
we still hadn't locked down the final look for Milla's dress.
So, if you look somewhere on the DVD, hidden somewhere,
I believe, is the original camera test.
She originally had a blue dress, and then we ended up changing it.
This is a really interesting shot
'cause this is, like, three different shots combined, right?
Right here, yes.
Her arm's gonna come up on the window, and it was repositioned.
It was moved more screen right so that the composition was more pleasing.
And, then... So originally that shot, the wide shot, there was no push-in, right?
- There was no push-in. - It's a fake push-in we did afterwards.
The hand, is that from a different shot?
The hand? Yes, the hand's from a different shot.
Again, it was pulled over to the right, so... Screen right.
And, then, the eyes opening was animated as well.
Yeah. 'Cause you wanted... For impact you wanted to make the move-in.
And to do the move-in, the hand was off-screen, so we brought it in
and it... Again, composition, which is usually...
The whole reason for doing all of this, obviously,
is that it was very difficult for Anna Bolt, the actress,
to, like, hold her breath and pretend she was dead
for, like, 15 seconds and then suddenly come to life.
- She was fabulous. - She spent a lot of time in that tank.
We didn't have to remove any bubbles or anything.
J.D., you and Rain keep the prisoner here and secure the exit.
Sir, halon levels are nonexistent in this room.
I think the system malfunctioned.
All right. There may be survivors.
Give me a search line, but keep it tight.
Oh, the boom at this...
So do you want to tell us what you did here?
Yes. Originally we had planned for a camera way high to extend the set,
but this camera is booming up wild,
and there are blue screens just behind the man here on the right, and on the left,
and, actually, the whole back end of that set is painted in and tracked in,
so it's a moving matte painting. They did a nice job.
But if we had time, Paul was gonna have another set of lights going down the right.
It's sort of an unfinished shot, but it's a real good shot.
- Is that fair to say? - Yeah.
Yeah. No, I think... I mean, that was one of those shots that...
- You know, you've got to release the movie. - Yeah.
And there's always, like, three or four shots you're still working on
and you would like to, kind of, work on for another month.
But, you know, the movie has to come out.
I just realised we only had, as far as foreground sets, these containers
that Milla's leaning against, there were only maybe 12 real back in that shot.
Many of them were just CG and added.
Yeah. And a lot of the practical shots that we did as well.
A lot of the background tanks that you see are just cardboard cut-outs.
Because they'd, kind of, fallen off into the darkness,
and I think you really notice that.
What do they keep in these things?
How do I know?
This is pretty cool.
Heat signatures and the...
And the large breasts that one of the animators added to Milla.
She noticed that, obviously.
I think he thought he was working on Tomb Raider for a moment.
You know, these screens are practical, and then, as they change...
When you see the logo, that was practical,
but otherwise, the imagery was tracked onto the screens after the edit
to explain the story.
They're real right now.
As with all the screens throughout the movie.
'Cause I believe you rewrote some stuff later.
- Changed the way it was gonna be. - Yeah, I think.
I mean, these kind of screens are always great for, like, plot points
that you haven't quite explained properly in the movie,
and you want to, like, put some little bit of plot work in there.
So it's always good to have some nice computer screen close-ups.
It's a really unique set here. It's like the funnel set.
It's like the whole crew trying to get through the opening of a funnel.
It had to be built that way.
One of the interesting things about this set, well, like a lot of the sets in the movie,
is wherever possible, when we constructed a set, we tried to build camera tracks in.
So, for example, here, you know, when we're cruising behind Colin Salmon,
you can see on the floor there are four black lines
and those are actually tiny little dolly tracks.
And we had a dolly that could run down the corridor.
'Cause, otherwise, you know, you can only go so far with the track
before you end up seeing the track unless you build it into the set.
We did that in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey
- down the hallway. - That's right.
It's a great camera trick.
This was added later.
So there, you know, we're running down that camera track on the floor.
Normally if you pulled back that far,
you'd start seeing the track on the floor in front of you.
Checkmate.
Move up.
This is one of my favourite sequences in the movie coming up, the laser sequence.
- What is that? - That's what will shut the Queen down.
Delivers a massive electrical charge.
Scrambles the mainframe and forces it to reboot.
Some kind of dormant defence mechanism.
- Opening the door tripped it. - Put it back to sleep.
Working on it.
- Would you open that door now, please? - I'm trying.
Want to talk us through this sequence, Richard?
Sure.
What's that?
Actually, we had a story board to use as a guide
but we always knew, Paul, actually... You mentioned
you knew you'd get into some trouble on the editorial.
We placed this laser, off colour laser,
according to the edit. So we had to wait till...
It was very difficult for the actors, and we'd carry little sticks saying,
"There's your eye line," etc.
This is the blood that we added, which I thought was pretty cool.
It advances...
This dolly shot here, the whole crew, and the camera,
and everything is reflected in that back wall,
so the back wall had to be shot clean.
We shot lots of elements so that the artists at CFC,
supervised by Mark Nelmes, could paint out that back wall.
Replace it. Get rid of the reflections.
So we shot it wild, without a motion control.
- There's just so much to say here. - And that's...
That's actually the head falling off.
When Liz May Brice's head falls off.
I look back at that shot,
and you can actually see, for, like, half a second,
you can see some of the camera crew reflected in the glass.
And I literally only noticed that after watching this thing,
like, 200-250 times.
The lines were added. This head was...
This is all in miniature and it was done as...
We talked a lot about this, actually. Paul wanted to play a reflection,
we played the whole thing in reflection, leave it up to the imagination.
I think it was a very powerful shot.
You think... What I also think, you know, with Colin Salmon's head falling apart...
I mean, what you're seeing inside there is all anatomically correct.
I mean, you see his brain as it would be, you see the inside of the skull.
Richard had a full-size model of Colin's head.
- Firstly, he had his head cast... - Cast.
...so that we'd have a perfect replica of his head.
And then we actually built the inside of his head.
So you kind of see what you'd really see if someone's head was chopped up.
But I think if we'd chosen to stay and keep the head in focus perfectly,
we would have gone into a real ratings problem.
You know, I don't think we would have gotten R rating in America.
It would have been NC-17,
which, of course, no one will release.
So, I think if we hadn't pulled focus to the reflection in the door,
see the body fall apart, we would've had to cut away from it anyway,
you know, which would have really ruined the sequence
'cause it's kind of nice to see that head fall apart and see what's inside it.
And I think the only reason we get away with it
is because it's just slightly out of focus.
We start pulling focus after the lines are registered in his head.
So that close-up,
that's actually a combination of Colin's face for real,
- a miniature of his head... - Yes.
When I say miniature, although it was, like, full size. It was, like, one for one.
One to one, yes.
And then, you literally made that fall apart.
Yes. We held it together with magnets and strings and poles.
And we'd say, "Okay, ready. Action." And all the poles will be pulled out,
and the pieces would fall. It was really...
We did a real quick test, and, again, we got to save some money.
Again, we took some monies that were dedicated to that
to take back to the train set.
- Or somewhere else. - The train set.
But it worked real well,
the miniatures crew headed by Chris Howes.
So it was the miniature crew that actually built the body?
Yes. Yes, we did the moulding and the body, and...
So the miniature was the train, the elevator, and
dicing of Colin.
The knife that fell, incidentally, had the little steam added to it.
That knife was magnetically connected to his belt back in the corridor,
and Paul hit a micro switch when it fell, and then we added the laser to sync.
Here's the Red Queen.
She'll try to deceive us, confuse us.
I wouldn't advise this.
We had an actress play the part of the Red Queen, so the eye lines...
And she was then removed, the young lady.
That same lady was cyber-scanned
so that she could be recreated later in CGI.
The lines and the reflections were minimised
so that we could photograph quickly.
I think you shot this in two days, didn't you? It was a tough set.
Yeah, I shot that whole sequence in two days.
- And it was difficult to shoot. - It was very difficult, yeah.
Because every shot required three passes.
We'd shoot with Michaela, who's the actress who played the Red Queen,
with Milla and Martin looking at her.
Then we'd have to shoot the same scene again, but with Michaela gone.
And then we'd have to do a clean plate with nobody in it.
So you're kind of having to shoot everything three times.
Yeah, but after half the day was mass-producing, Paul, you just blasted...
This, the water was added later to a miniature.
We couldn't afford... I think it was very expensive to do the real rain in the set.
So we got lucky,
and the second unit got to shoot that door and the door slamming open.
If you were to see that without the water,
you'd see the man on the other side of the door that slammed the door open.
And then we built a three-quarter scale water tank with about 800 gallons of water
and just dumped it, and then it was basic superimposure.
That pulse forces the circuit breaker to shut down her mainframe for 30 seconds.
After that, if I don't have her board, she can reboot.
Going back to the Red Queen,
I mean, the original idea was that she was going to be totally synthetic.
So, really, the actress was only there as a reference.
And we built a 3D CG Red Queen, and it just...
We got so used to looking at the cut just with the actress standing there,
that when eventually we ended up with just the visual effect,
that was really disappointing because we felt it lacked humanity.
It just felt too synthetic.
So what we ended up doing is putting the actress back into the shot slowly.
So what you see is a combination of the very, very expensive 3D CG,
but also just with the very, very cheap actress standing there.
And I think I was really happy when we did that
because you just see a little bit of life in her eyes.
It adds a little bit of humanity back to her.
Well, I really like how it turned out for you,
because it definitely looks like it was something that was built
by the head programmer.
Yeah, the idea was to keep the hologram as realistic as possible.
In fact, Richard, you did a lot of research on what holograms really look like.
J.D., we got a survivor!
And that visual effect was pretty much a result of that.
We tried to imagine, if you really had...
You want a laser projection, a hologram projection,
what would it really look like if you had the finest technology available today?
And that's pretty much what we tried to recreate.
It's the same with most of the technology in the movie, actually.
When we were constructing the lab sets, we did a lot of reference work,
just to see what real labs look like,
and a lot of the technology we used in the labs were real props.
Yeah, there's very little that's actually science fiction in the movie.
It's almost science fact.
...I'll fire.
I mean it!
Damn you.
This push-in into her eyes was added afterwards as well.
Just add a bit of dramatic effect.
A couple of wire removals there.
I shot her five times.
I'm really happy with how this set turned out
because I got to say, when we were shooting it,
it was a complete nightmare, only having 12 of these boxes.
But when you watch the movie, it feels like you're lost in a forest of them.
There's a whole labyrinth of them.
But in reality, it was just...
Every single shot, we were struggling just to fill up the background.
She's gone. She's gone!
Added to which we shot this whole thing on location,
and it was in the basement of a hotel that was still under construction in Berlin.
And it was so cold. This was probably the crew's least favourite set.
They were so glad when we got out of here.
- It's not possible. - Why not?
There was going to be a choreographed,
it was a different way, choreographed key drop,
and again, to allocate some visual effect monies to other visual effects,
you rewrote this sequence,
and it played really well with the way it happens with the keys.
They're real keys, not CG keys.
What the fuck are you talking about?
Wait.
Quiet.
This guy can really dislocate his foot, which is why that looks so good.
'Cause it just shouldn't be like that.
His foot shouldn't look like that. It's not natural.
His shoulders also popped out as well. He could dislocate the shoulder.
As much as possible, we tried to use actors and extras for the zombies
that could do awkward and weird things with their bodies.
And then everyone actually went to what we call the zombie boot camp.
'Cause there were hundreds and hundreds of people
who wanted to appear in the movie as zombies.
And we only took, like, one in 10 people who applied to be in the movie.
Because I really wanted the zombies to have a realism to their movement.
Everybody trained for about a week or two weeks before they appeared on camera.
And they were told, "You have a broken leg,
"and that means the leg has to be twisted this way, you have to move in this way,
"you can't move too fast."
And the thing what had stopped happening
was everyone doing their own schlocky zombie movement.
Which could have ended up a little bit like Thriller, Michael Jackson's Thriller.
Those two zombies with part of their face missing was done later in CG.
Yeah, the one where the woman turns, and there's half of her face missing.
And also there's the guy who we always thought
looked like Quentin Tarantino with the tie.
Watch the tank! The tank!
I think that for me, that's a good use of CG
because most of what you're looking at is real,
like most of Quentin's face is just makeup effect, right?
- Yeah. - And really, the only CG in it
is something that's impossible to do with makeup, which is to take his nose away.
Move!
We had one of those "stable-unstable" props in the visual effects room
so that depending on the mood of the day,
you could flip it up and make it "stable" or "unstable," the environment.
And we knew when to and when not to have a meeting.
I don't know if you heard about that one.
No, I haven't. I don't understand. What do you mean?
I had... On my desk, was one of the props from there that said "stable" or "unstable,"
and depending on how things were going, we'd move the sign up.
"Stable," they'd come in... The producers could come in or...
So when "environment unstable" was on your door,
no one was allowed to come and see you?
- Yeah, that's the way it worked. - Yes. Rather good idea.
It came from the production office.
So they were suggesting you were unstable.
No. We were all unstable, yeah.
The stuntman who did this full body burn
underneath the tank with Eric Mabius, just great.
We burnt this guy, like, 30 times, and he never complained once.
'Cause there's no visual effects here.
The guy's wearing a Nomex suit which protects him from the heat.
And he's wearing a little fireproof gel on his face.
But otherwise we just burned the guy, over and over and over again.
I think he went through 10 costumes,
'cause even though the suit was fireproof, after a while, the fire does burn through.
And also we could just set light to Eric's leg there.
He let us, like, again, set light to him.
And I think, going back to Richard's favourite saying, "One for one is best."
If you can really get the actors to participate in stunts,
and put them on fire, then you always end up with the best results.
Zero, four, three, two... No, fuck!
- What? - Zero, four, three...
- What is the code? - Zero, four,
zero, three, one, nine, six, five.
- Got it? - See how easy that was?
This scene really works well in the movie.
At one of the screenings that I went to, a bunch of kids in front of me said,
"Oh, man, what a haze."
Grab my hand, man! Come on!
Obviously, you're gonna make an undead movie,
you have to watch all of Romero's films, 'cause he is the master.
And also what you realise is once you've made three of these movies as he did,
you pretty much run out of ways to shock the audience with the zombies.
So I'm not ashamed to say
that obviously this scene is completely stolen from Day of the Dead.
There's a scene where somebody opens a door,
and there's a bunch of zombies standing there,
and they grab him and eat him alive.
This is a reverse-printed shot here.
Lickeris 3D CG added to pieces of background plates that already existed.
We went through all the background plates,
and Paul and Alex edited a sequence that the Licker could be added to.
Because when we first started the show,
I guess the introduction of the Licker hadn't been decided yet...
Yeah. Originally, we weren't going to have that scene
where the Licker climbed out of the box, so we never shot the door coming off the box.
And so what happened was that we just had a bunch of shots that...
When you go and you shoot in a set, you tend to just shoot a lot of spare shots,
just in case you might need something.
And this is like one of the times when it really paid off,
was we'd done a bunch of shots that just had boxes in them, with no actors.
So in that sequence of three shots, where we tip up to the box,
the front of the box comes off, and then we go to the side shot of the Licker coming out,
those were shots that originally had no flame in them, no smoke in them,
and no Licker in them, and all that was added afterwards.
But that's something I learnt very quickly, doing visual effects movies,
is if you have a set, and you're going to tear it down,
you better just shoot a bunch of shots, just do them really quickly,
'cause you never know what you might need.
Sure came in handy there.
- So, zombie dogs, eh? - Zombie dogs, yeah.
We put a lot of effort into the zombie dogs.
This was the last scene we shot in the movie during principal photography.
And it was one of the reasons why we stayed on budget, I think,
is that everyone always said, "If you go over budget,
"we're gonna have to cut the dog scene."
And Richard and I so wanted to shoot the dog scene,
we had to stay on budget.
And also we realised quite quickly that
what we were asking of the dog trainers and the prosthetics people
was something that had never really been asked of them before,
which was to do an extended action scene with dogs.
Firstly, has never really been done before.
And then also the idea of putting makeup on dogs
again, has never really been done before,
so we really needed the whole length of the shoot to prepare for this scene.
It was touch and go whether the scene was gonna be in the movie.
There were some sequences... And, Paul, I called you "the gang of one"
because you really wanted to do this and you saw how it was gonna work.
And I believe everybody was happy that this happened. I mean, we're real thrilled with it.
The dogs took their makeup real well, which we didn't think they would.
Their teeth were modified in CG later.
Again, you have to wait till the sequence is edited
so that you can minimise the work and maximise the efficiency.
So, whenever you see the dogs... Like over the dog's shoulder,
or the dog in a wide shot, I mean, if you go back and you freeze the DVD,
especially on the wide shots, you see that they actually have
none of that decomposing flesh makeup on their faces.
And the reason for that was the dogs would just eat the makeup.
Anything within range of their tongues they would just eat, 'cause they liked it,
so it was impossible to put makeup on their faces.
So whenever we went to a close-up, Richard would have to take flesh from their body,
in CG, obviously, and then track it onto their faces.
And that's why, once we started getting into doing that,
we thought we may as well chip their teeth and make them look really gnarly as well.
Take an ear away.
Plus, the dogs... You learned real quick, I didn't zero in on who they were,
but of the dogs, two of them were superior actors
and they were used sometimes to play stand-ins for the dog right next to them.
Yeah, we actually shot the sequence with four dogs.
Like here, these are two dogs used seven times. Or four times.
Yeah, we could only shoot two dogs at a time
because you can't really get more than two dogs in one room
'cause they distract each other, even if they're trained.
But, yeah, as Richard was mentioning, some of the dogs are better actors
and some of the dogs could do things better.
There was one dog that was very good at snarling,
and there was one dog that was very good at chasing,
and there was one dog that just jumped through the window.
That's all the dog was trained to do. So, actually, that one dog, this dog here,
that's chasing Milla throughout the whole sequence,
is a combination, ultimately, of fourseparate dogs.
When Milla kicks the dog, we can talk about this, I believe,
that's called the dog on a stick. There was a man standing in that scene
with a stick attached to the dog, holding it in place for Milla to kick,
so that scene was done with three different pieces of film. Split-screened.
One's Milla kicking a tennis ball, then Milla kicking the dog on a stick,
and then the dog jumping through in another piece,
and it was split-screened together to make it look as though it happened at once.
She did kick a dog so that the physics of her foot action did play against something.
- But it was a dummy dog, it was a stand-in... - Rubber dog.
- Yeah, Milla never kicked a real dog. - From $80,000 to $29.95.
That was the original budget, $80,000?
Yeah, they would have done a great job, but we didn't have the money to do a CG dog.
Yeah, that's if we wanted to build a CG dog.
And also, I think the real dog just looks better as well.
I love that dog sequence, actually.
When Milla slams the door in the dog's face,
and then turns around to see the eight dogs,
you can see the dog she just locked in the room jumping up behind.
You can see its head, and it's great 'cause that's just a rubber dog's head on a stick.
It's a guy behind the door jumping up and down with this rubber dog head.
It was a lot of work in that room with the dogs.
First of all, you had to respect the dogs, they were really good,
and all the pieces of equipment necessary for the dogs to run and jump from,
for their trajectories, very much like a stuntman,
so there was a lot of equipment, wire removal, bluescreen work,
measurements of the room. It was a nice job done by CFC.
There's the 3D cartridge that could spell
- the ownership of the... I'm sorry. - The Umbrella Corporation 9mm cartridge.
Yeah. That's obviously a CG shot.
But just to go back to the dogs, obviously, one of the things I get asked a lot is,
"Were the animals mistreated in any way?" And of course they're not.
That whole sequence was built around the comfort of those dogs.
In fact, the whole set was kind of constructed around
what the dogs could and couldn't do.
The floor on the set was made of rubber so that the dogs could have traction
'cause there are certain things that dogs don't like running on.
The dog that jumped through the window
was trained to, originally, just jump through an empty window,
and then a window with a bit of... What's that clear stuff called?
- Visqueen? - Yeah, jump through the visqueen,
the plastic, to start with.
And then eventually, for the one shot we did that's in the movie,
it jumped through very, very thin sugar glass, which is completely painless.
And we know it's painless because we had a great animal trainer,
and he said, "My dogs don't do anything I don't do."
So anything we wanted the dogs to do, like jump through the sugar glass,
he would insist on putting his head through the sugar glass first.
And if he felt anything, he said, "That's it, my dog's not doing this."
We filmed him doing it, I think there's a piece of film showing it.
Yeah, they were great guys. In fact, the dogs ended up with a fan club.
There was special housing out behind the stage,
and people at lunchtime would go visit the dogs.
Yeah, they were lovely dogs.
They don't look like it in the movie, but they were just very nice.
There are hundreds of thousands of us who think the same
all over the world.
Some of us provide information,
others give their support.
Some take more direct action.
Like you.
If your friends had been a little more thorough,
they would've seen right through my false ID.
Quite often the dogs, in the close-ups where they're snarling
and growling and looking really intense, it's because the dog trainer
is standing just behind the camera with their favourite teddy bear or chew toy
and he's just waving it at the dog.
And, of course, at the end of the take, they let go of the dog
and the dog just goes off and grabs teddy and tears it to pieces.
We needed something concrete.
It was a very physical set with Milla running around and jumping a lot.
One of the stunt coordinators played the actor that got kicked.
That's right. Jaymes Butler is the zombie that gets killed in the lab.
When she goes to get the gun, it's really neat to see how he's moving a bit,
and you wanted to leave that cut in there, so the audience didn't know
whether he would come to life or she'd get the gun, or not.
Yeah, well, the idea's to set up a false scare. You think the zombie's gonna come to life,
and then, actually, the scare comes from the dog jumping through the window.
So, one last thing about that dog scene is that
when Milla runs up the wall, that's actually her doing that.
There's obviously a wire attached to a harness underneath her jacket
to get her up there. But she was quite notable for me, anyway,
because she did all of her own stunts in the movie.
There's literally only two things she didn't do,
which she wasn't allowed to do for insurance purposes.
And she was so angry when we wouldn't allow her to risk her life
in those two sequences
that she just walked around in this terrible mood for a couple of days.
But I think it's one of the things that makes her action scenes good, is
when you see stuff happening, it's really her,
so I could get in there with the camera and really shoot the actress doing it,
rather than having to go for a wide shot and use a stunt double.
The interesting thing about her training for that sequence,
it took a while to train.
It was a duplicate set built across the way in another building
because we'd train the dogs in one set, so Milla had to train in another.
Yeah, it was all about the dogs, that sequence.
There was no movie-star treatment for Milla.
It was like, "I'm sorry, the dogs are in your set.
"You have to go and practise next door."
If someone doesn't hear from you, they'll send backup or something.
Right?
What? What's wrong?
We don't have much time.
You know those blast doors we passed on the way in from the mansion?
They seal shut in just under an hour.
If we're not out of here by then, we're not getting out.
What are you talking about? They can't just bury us alive down here.
Containing the incident is the only fail-safe plan they had...
The fabulous Michelle Rodriguez. Just talking about insurance...
The insurance company objecting to Milla doing several stunts.
Whenever you insure an actor or an actress for a movie,
there are certain things that they are, of course, forbidden to do, which...
I think Michelle read through her contract
and decided to do all of them while we were shooting Resident Evil.
So we'd, to our horror, discover that if we ever gave her a weekend off,
she would go sky diving, which you're not supposed to do.
- She's terrific. - Yeah.
Both these women were just great to work with, really good fun.
That homicidal bitch killed my team.
And the nice thing about both of them was,
they were very, very committed to Resident Evil.
They were both huge fans of the video game.
And we had actors who, every morning, they wanted to be on the set.
They really wanted to be part of Resident Evil.
And the same was true with a lot of the crew as well.
A lot of the crew had already played the game,
and if they hadn't, I made sure that they did play the game.
So that when we were designing the sets, for example,
our production designer, Joseph... Our production designer...
Richard Bridgland.
Sorry, I was on Event Horizon there for a moment.
- I was about to say Joseph Bennett. - Yeah, you were.
It's having you sitting in the room, Richard.
Well, Richard and Richard. Richard Yuricich and Richard Bridgland.
We changed our name to Bernie because there was a great gaffer,
Bernie Grill, who was a massive man, nobody messed with Bernie,
and Bernie Eisinger.
So we figured if we called ourselves Bernie, nobody'd ever holler at us.
Nobody caught on, but all the way through the show,
- I called him Bernie and he called me Bernie. - Yes.
- Did you catch onto that? - No.
I didn't get the kind of "stable" and "unstable" thing either.
We just didn't figure anybody'd holler at Bernie Grill or Bernie Eisinger.
Safe name.
So, back to Richard Bridgland, our fabulous production designer.
He watched a lot of the game and he played a lot of the game,
so a lot of the sets we designed and built have a feeling that they're from the game.
We used the same kind of colours that were used in the game.
And some things we just recreated as much as we could,
for example, the train, is pretty much based
on the train from Resident Evil 2, the video game.
And also, David Johnson, my cinematographer,
he would always be trying to shoot the movie
as though it were shot in the videogame,
'cause the videogame has a lot of signature sequences,
signature ways that things are shot.
For example, when Milla is in the lab, in the dog scene,
where she's reaching for the gun from the zombie that you think is dead,
you know, we go to an overhead shot,
and those overhead shots are very much a signature of the game.
Why did you kill everybody down here?
The T-virus escaped into the air conditioning system
and an uncontrolled pattern of infection began.
The virus is protean,
changing from liquid to airborne to blood transmission...
The entire crew is a great family. I have never seen as many people
go to other departments and take a look at what was going on, especially the girls.
Milla and Michelle.
Yeah, they'd be forever hanging around in the construction department.
They're really interested in every single aspect of the movie.
It's great to work with them that way.
...and then you become one of them.
A check of my systems indicates my main drive circuit breaker
has been disabled.
May I ask why?
Insurance. We need a way out of here.
If you refuse to help at any time, we flip the switch.
Understand?
After you.
- What the hell is this place? - The utility tunnels.
This set, for example, is straight out of a Resident Evil game.
You know, this looks very Resident Evil.
This is all a set that was constructed.
And it was very, very difficult to shoot in. It was very tight, very claustrophobic.
You know, it was really difficult getting five actors in there,
never mind a camera crew and lights.
- Why are you listening to her? - Enough already!
But I think that's one of the things, you know, we're very aware of,
is that zombies are only scary if they're in tight, confined spaces.
I mean, that's something you learn from Romero's movies
is that when they're in the open,
these things are just easy to run around, they're easy to push over
and, you know, they become jokey. You know, they become funny.
And that's why Romero's movies, you know, deliberately turn into comedies
for part of their running time,
is 'cause the zombies, themselves, are funny.
And with this movie, we didn't want that.
We wanted the zombies to remain as scary as possible,
which is why we limited the amount of screen time,
the amount of time they're actually on screen.
And whenever you see them, there's a lot of them.
And it's always in a tight, confined space
where there's just no getting away from them.
It was just enough of space to do what's happening here.
Go on up! Move it!
Shit. Okay.
Again, this is a set that was constructed with a lot of camera track in it,
so once they get up onto the pipes,
we had camera track built into the rails,
hanging from the ceiling, so that we could follow the actors.
A lot of this fight scene with Milla was shot at a 120 frames a second,
so it was, like, super slow motion.
And then we speeded the frame rate up and slowed it down,
so in some shots you're going from very, very fast to slow motion.
So on the Avid, the edit was done at whatever frame rate they wanted
and then we'd match it later. CineSpeeding it, they call it.
Rain? Rain.
What?
We have to do something about your wounds.
I'm fine.
I said I'm fine.
You like that, don't you? Huh?
You like the way it tastes, don't you?
So here we've got the actors,
you know, they're seven feet up, sitting on these pipes,
and we still have to shoot them,
and there really was nowhere for the camera to go.
So all these shots looking over Michelle's hand, for example,
what we did was, we'd take the roof of the set off,
and then my cameraman would be hanging there
suspended from a bungee cord,
so that he could, you know, he could literally step out into space
and he was still suspended, so he could hover up there with the actors.
There weren't many wires used here. It was just all physicality.
And then these shots are using the hidden camera track.
You know how stages have four doors on them and exit doors?
This is about the only stage I've ever worked on
where the set was so big and encompassed so much of the space
that if you knew you went to certain sides of the set, you'd walk outside
and go around to another entrance door.
Coming up is the one stunt
that Milla wasn't allowed to do by the insurance company.
And it's just as she jumps off the pipe.
And the reason is those cables that are holding the pipe up,
they were scared that...
The reason why the pipe is dropping is 'cause those cables were released.
That one of them, 'cause they're under high pressure,
would, kind of, spring back and could potentially wrap around her neck
and strangle her.
Which, of course, nobody wants.
- Help him. - I can't.
- What are you waiting for? - I can't focus!
I can't see!
- Kaplan, go up! - Get up there!
You almost got it. Keep going!
- Come on! Come on! - You can do it!
You got it!
- Okay, Kaplan. - Just stay there!
Hold on. We're gonna come get you.
Cut this wire and throw it to him. Then we can go get him.
Hold on!
One of the unique things we did on this movie is,
our production designer was also our costume designer,
so Richard Bridgland filled both jobs,
which, if you look at movies made 50 years ago, was not that uncommon.
Quite often the production designer and the costume designer
would be the same person.
Because what I wanted was a very de-saturated look for some of these scenes.
For example, all these scenes down here in the access pipes.
And if you look at the scenes, really, they're almost monochromatic.
You know, the only colour that you'll see is a sudden, like, the red of Milla's dress.
Or the red of the blood, or, occasionally, the blue of Eric Mabius' shirt.
The rest of the scene almost looks like we put it through bleach bypass process,
you know, we've done some kind of post-production process,
and actually we didn't.
What we did was, because Richard was filling both jobs,
you know, he would build a set that really had no colour in them.
And also, he'd give us costumes that, again, had no colour in them,
so when you do see the splash of red
or the splash of blue it really does have impact.
All these zombies, for example, are all just dressed in shades of grey.
Or off-white.
You're gonna have to work for your meal!
Talking about the claustrophobia,
and keeping the sets very, very tight and confined
to enhance the claustrophobia and keep it more scary.
This is the first movie that Rich and I have done in a while
that we actually shot 1:85 rather than widescreen.
For example, Event Horizon was widescreen. It was 2:35,
and that was a deliberate choice because although I prefer widescreen as a ratio,
I think it's more cinematic,
it is a lot less claustrophobic,
and I always knew we were gonna shoot a lot of this movie in big close-up.
I wanted a lot of big close-up of people's faces.
And the problem with widescreen is if you go in for tight close-ups,
even if it's the tightest close-up possible, you know, just eyes and mouth,
you still end up with a huge amount of the screen which is empty space
which, I think, kind of works against the claustrophobia.
The introduction of the Licker there that we saw that you had added,
I don't remember what we had to do there, but the rain is falling,
and I think the set had to be enhanced 'cause it was a major blow-up...
- Well, again, that was... - ...in size?
Yeah, that was a sequence that was never gonna be in the movie,
the Licker running by the wall, and then we added it afterwards.
And what it was, was it was just a snatch shot of an empty corridor.
It was actually for a scene after Milla and Michelle had just walked out of shot,
and we only had about 24 frames, one second worth of film,
so what we had to do was slow it down.
So if you look at the drops they're actually dropping in slow motion.
Just to provide us with enough footage to then insert the creature.
This is that motion control shot.
So it was the first day of the movie and about the 30th day of the movie.
- So the elements here are what? - The actors have been separated.
The clean actors have been separated, so it's three pieces of film there.
The clean set is separated with Milla in her wardrobe.
The actors in the background were on another piece of film,
but it was all motion control, and they were bluescreen separated.
- So how many elements in all? - I believe there are seven elements in there,
but that's so you could have all the people passing over each other.
The way you designed the scene, the way you wanted them fading in,
the final timing of the scene for when the real set came in,
was a decision that was made at editorial stage, I believe.
Yeah.
That's one of the tough things making a movie like this is,
a lot of the visual effects take so long to do
that even while you're shooting the movie, even before you've completed shooting,
you're having to make decisions about how the movie is cut
just in order to get the visual effects done to meet your release date.
So it kind of makes...
It makes the difficult job of shooting an action movie even harder
'cause after you work, like, an 18-hour day, including preparation in the morning,
you then have to go to the cutting room and make really important decisions
when you're just dog tired.
And that's not to say you can't change those decisions later on,
but it's just expensive if you do
because you're throwing away months' worth of work that's already been done.
I can't remember.
The truth.
I don't remember the truth.
The ramp that held the motion control system had to be built,
and all the marks and things, so it took a lot of cooperation
from a lot of departments to understand what was going on,
and we really had great cooperation from department to department here.
As Richard said, that motion control shot was one of the first things we shot,
and it actually took half a day to do our first shot
'cause motion control's always slow,
so I think people thought Richard and I were completely insane.
Completely out of control. Every single shot we did was going to take half a day.
This set was a particularly difficult one for the actors to shoot in
because they spent a couple of weeks in this water,
and if we'd heated the water, we would've had steam rising from it,
which wasn't the look I wanted,
so it was pretty damn freezing cold in there.
Milla would leave the set and go and sit in a little bucket of warm water in between takes.
...security codes, surveillance plans, the works.
But there's gonna be a price.
The white flashes that you get in this sequence
are actually a practical effect that were done on the day
just from switching the camera on and off randomly.
And the image, it's just the last few frames you get
as the camera switches off, is you get one frame of white,
and also, the speed of the image changes slightly.
Spence?
This is a reprise of the CG shot.
I really like that shot of the tumbling vial.
Reminds me of the shot you did for Mission Impossible.
The first one.
- The knife? - Oh, the knife, yeah.
That was done at ILM by John Knoll himself.
Great job. He did it at home, I believe.
Spence?
Talk about making it tough on yourself.
The minute Milla decided that she was going to dive into the water there,
she then had to spend the rest of the movie in a soaking dress,
which, filming in Berlin, is no fun, I can tell you.
It was, like, so cold. She made it... I mean, it looks great,
but it was very, very hard on her.
Because she did all her own stunts as well,
and there was nowhere to hide the stunt pads...
If you're a guy, you can wear a pair of pants,
and you can pad your knees up when you have to take a tumble to the ground.
She could never do anything like that 'cause she's wearing a tiny little red dress,
so whenever she hits the ground, she really hit the ground.
And she would do it again and again and again till we got the take we wanted.
So, the start of the movie, when we started shooting,
and we did the earlier scenes of her waking up in the bath,
we were painting a bruise onto her shoulder.
And literally, by the end of the shoot, we were trying to paint bruises off her.
Because about 80% of her body was covered in these big, black, ugly bruises.
You knew what they did.
I was trying to stop them.
No. You...
You really believe that
people like him will ever change anything?
No.
Nothing ever changes.
Where...
Where is the antivirus?
It's on the train
where you found me.
Couldn't have been standing more than three feet from it.
I so nearly made it out.
Didn't realise that bitch of a computer had defence systems outside the Hive.
In or out?
I don't know what we had but it's over.
Back...
the fuck off.
So, just in a quiet visual effects moment,
Richard, tell us about the miniature at the start of Blade Runner.
I'm missing you already.
About how small that was.
'Cause I remember when you told me about that. It was just fantastic.
I couldn't believe...
Yeah. Well, actually, the designs of Syd Mead, and Ridley, and Doug Trumbull
and photography by Dave Stewart.
But the miniature itself was about 12 feet across and only about 8 feet deep,
and it was built with a forced perspective by Mark Stetson and his gang.
So that's the whole cityscape...
- Yes, that's it. - ...at the start of Blade Runner,
- which looks immense. - And the camera moves...
- It's like 8 foot by 12 foot? - Yeah.
Some of the flames that came out of the foreground towers
that were 50 gallons of napalm that were set off in the desert.
And then the flames in the smaller shots in the distance were little Bunsen burners.
You talk about contrasts in elements that were used.
A little Bunsen burner like you have in your science class,
and then 50 gallons of napalm.
Did we miss the first dog here? I mean, the first creature?
No, he's coming from the ceiling. He's just...
No, no, in the banging against the window into the lab.
No, no.
No, the Licker's on his way. He's just about to arrive.
- Clint was his name. - Yeah, we called the creature Clint,
- because, like Clint Eastwood, he was cool. - Nobody was gonna mess with Clint.
So just tell us about the CG creature here and the dust falling and everything, Richard.
'Cause this was quite a challenging bit of the post-production process.
This was added later. And rather than go through the standard operations
that the CG people want to do of building a model and building this man in CG,
we didn't have much time and money,
but with the supervisors at CFC,
Sally Goldberg and Dominic Parker, we took a...
We discussed it and had an idea that we could use a muscle man,
a bodybuilder, with putting marks on him to get the flesh and the tone
for the texture and measurements of his moves.
So we had all these girls on the set with this fabulous bodybuilder
with little X's marked all over him, and photographed simultaneously
with six cameras from all sides to shortcut,
to jump over the labour-intensive and expensive area of building the man.
So anyhow, that bodybuilder then became the textures
that were stretched and fit to this Licker,
so the Licker was constructed from part of the game,
and an unnamed bodybuilder in Berlin.
So the torso of the Licker is based on a real human being?
- Yes. - And then the head
was actually built full-scale, wasn't it? As a model?
As a model and then cyber-scanned in, which is tracked in electronically to build...
And just tell us what cyber scanning is.
Cyber scanning is the name of a process where you scan the imagery
and you get, actually, mathematical measurements to reconstruct
a three-dimensional object in digital space. It's called cyber-scanning.
There are different sizes of cyber-scan. We cyber-scanned the young lady in England,
and a chair, and then there's different ones that are hand-held that...
So what happens? She sits in a chair and it rotates,
- or is there a machine that rotates... - The machine rotates about her,
and then the lighting is done in a flat way, so that it could be...
Again, it's just to reconstruct the images mathematically and rebuild.
And then the textures from our muscle builder,
or the way the muscles laid under the surface of the skin
were then placed on top of this 3D rendition of the man.
Virtual man.
The man you see in the background there is a model that we built.
It was built in the beginning of the show,
and we had one built as a maquette, coloured maquette
to establish the size and scale.
So the creature now is a mixture of a physical creature moved by a man
and a computer-generated virtual creature.
Yeah, when it's slamming against the glass like that, that is all practical.
Kill her now.
- Please. - Do it.
So we've actually got a guy inside that, and the creature's hanging from the ceiling
on a bungee wire, and the guy's literally slamming himself against the glass.
And the chips of glass that fly out were added CG afterwards.
Added CG, yes.
The dummy, I'm sorry, the model that was built of the creature
so that it could be then scanned into the computer
and then the virtual creature would be built from,
was also built in the beginning to do double-duty.
It was built as a guide to make an electronic creature, a virtual creature,
and it was built so that a man could move it about and we could play these...
Play certain physical actions, but...
You had your wish list of shots that we tried to do.
And I think we used it about 30% of the time.
Yeah, I think... Essentially, we had three creatures.
One was a very complicated animatronic which had a lot of movement,
but obviously it was only the front half of it,
'cause you had to have room to have the puppeteer behind it.
So for a lot of the close-up work on the creature, we used that.
Then we built what we called a battering ram creature,
which was less detailed, didn't have that much movement in it,
but it was great for slamming against windows and things like that.
So there was less detail, but it was more sturdy.
And then, obviously, if we wanted a creature running around on the ceiling,
or jumping into a railway carriage, as later, then that had to be a virtual creature.
The creature that just jumped into the lab and into the water was a virtual creature,
but it was done with four different elements of film.
The chair flying that he hit was done in one piece of film.
The glass was broken with the battering ram creature,
but the battering ram creature was painted green.
It could be taken out and then superimposed onto...
The virtual creature could be imposed on top of him.
So it was a nice job done.
So the water flying towards the camera's real, right?
Actually, I forgot about that.
The water flying towards the camera was made
by a seven-foot stuntman splashing into the water.
And he would be wearing what? Like a blue suit, so you could take him out?
In this case he was wearing all black.
- All black? - Yeah.
But we had a blue suit and a green suit for him,
and it was really funny to see this. Actually, he was a dancer.
His name was Mikhail, I think? Michael? He was about seven-foot tall?
Yeah.
He was the same guy who actually had his neck broken between Milla's thighs
in an earlier fight scene.
So the splash was...
The virtual creature was built to coincide with the splash.
...walking around without a soul.
You won't.
The lights that are moving inside this train is kind of interesting because
to keep registration we knew we'd have to add a creature into this set many times,
so the lights had to be stabilised so that there's sort of a consistency,
and again, what you normally get is some equipment off the shelf
that would rent expensively to turn these lights,
but in this case we had to be frugal, and the lights were actually focused into
a multi-faceted mirror assembly that was attached to a household fan.
The fan was removed, the mirror was added,
and we'd attach these four different positions of lights
to the standard circuitry in the morning,
so that the electronic phases would keep them in sync.
So our synchronisation of the lights, instead of costing the budgeted $14,000,
cost us four times $29.95 again.
But the crew was really terrific, and the camera crew was terrific,
but the electricians would set up the lights in the morning,
and run the fans, the mirrors, all day,
but then when Paul wanted the lights or when we shot,
they'd refocus the light onto the mirror,
so that they were always in phase with each other.
So the randomness didn't matter,
but they were always in phase with each other,
which was a big help in having to add the lighting
to the creature when he jumped into the set.
And the reason for all of that is basically whenever you do a visual effects shot,
you always need several passes. You need to shoot the set several times,
and the problem with this was the lights.
Unless they were in phase, as Richard said, the lights would always be different,
you know, going at a different speed,
which would make it impossible to amalgamate four different shots
of the same piece of set if the lights are different.
So it was actually a big problem for us.
Yeah, when you see them in here, it's just a second nature. You accept it,
but had we done it wrong, then you would have really noticed it.
That's a real creature for one of these shots, and the rest are all virtual creatures.
The real creature was hung from the ceiling
and brought in for the beginning of the shot.
And then every other cut there had a virtual creature, which was done real well.
Those doors were modified. They were jump cut and moved in time.
They were advanced eight or twelve frames, or up to a half a second,
because the physical timing on the stage would've...
Rather than take a chance at injuring Eric... As it turned out, they were modified,
so that it looked as though the bounce from the creature on the door
that propelled Eric into the set was in sync with the creature banging the door.
Yeah, because in order not to harm him,
the first bang on the door that sent him flying backwards was quite small.
Then once he was out of frame, there were some big bangs on the door.
And the trouble was, you know, of course afterwards what I wanted
as the director was just a huge big bang on the door with Eric in shot,
so Richard had to do a bit of work to kind of advance the big dents on the door.
Oh, boy, this is really active with the creature.
I remember these days, we had the creature on the set for lighting reference,
we had little pieces of string from the physical creature's mouth
that would attach to where it was supposed to be,
so that they could then put in a virtual tongue to the physical Clint.
So when Clint's moving through the air here, he's real.
In some of these shots he's real,
so it's a mixture of our physical Clint, physical creature and virtual creature.
But always the tongue is a virtual tongue. A computer generated tongue.
Yeah, we built an animatronic tongue, but it just didn't look very good.
So this is a piece of string. Now, the claw was ripped later. Paul wanted that.
When he saw the scene he wanted this added,
so we had a little miniature set built.
That was done in visual effects, adding the scrape to the floor
in sync with the creature falling, and, of course, this is all the CG creature.
We had a couple of other creatures built that we could burn,
or in clothing to burn.
It just happened so fast. It happened too fast to talk about.
The reveal of the flames there was done live, one for one.
There was a big body of flames built in a flat carriage
to simulate the size of the train was pulled over it,
so just that instant when the flame gets revealed from the train,
going over the top of it was done live and then enhanced at a later day.
- As the creature tumbles back towards us? - Yes.
I mean, that's always the problem with flames, I always find, is the size of them.
You know, unless you do them for real
and you do them big, they never look right in CG.
Yeah, we had the special effects man's pickup truck inside of a building,
dragging along a simulated portion of the train that was all black.
So all we photographed was flames that day,
super-imposed into that miniature set.
This shadow was added later to represent the door closing, which...
Was cheaper than building the door, actually. And looks a lot better.
Little hesitation was put as it travelled across the steps.
Now this is a visual effects shot you'll never realise why it was a visual effects shot,
but when we shot this scene, there was a huge scratch on the negative
that runs right down the middle of the shot and actually over Milla's face,
so this whole shot, that scratch had to be removed.
It's a pretty expensive procedure,
but it was really the only take we had that was good,
so we didn't have any choice.
Shot coming up here, the wounds in Matt's arm, Eric's arm,
was named by Sally Goldberg. It's called "Matt's wiggly bits," because
the beginnings of some other life form within his body,
break through the scabs on the arm.
But there's actually only one shot that is, you know, a CG enhancement.
And I think one of the great things about Eric was his arms were so pumped up.
He was so cut, and he had such control over his muscles,
he could kind of make them...
- Just that bit there. - Yeah.
Just really looks unpleasant, I thought.
What he would do is he would flex his muscles,
and then the prosthetic built on top would actually move as well
and would enhance the movement of his muscles,
so it felt like the prosthetic was slightly splitting apart.
You really felt there was something under there.
Matt!
Colour timing was used to allow these scenes to cut together, too.
'Cause they shot at different times. And then you wanted it brightened,
I remember, when we photographed, because of the scene that it's gonna lead to.
Yeah, we deliberately over-exposed all of these shots.
And then this whole sequence going white to white.
This became a digital sequence, so that we could get crisp, clean white.
This is something, as an optical effect, you could never really do.
You'd never have enough control.
It's the limitations of doing some things, you know, in a chemical bath,
is you can't have the control that you have
when you do something as a digital sequence.
Now this whole sequence in the white room and then in the street outside,
again, was... This was shot after the end of principal photography.
So this was kind of the sequence held over my head
to make sure that I didn't go over budget on the dog sequence.
Right. That's right.
We shot all of this... The whole movie was shot in Berlin,
but we shot for two days in Toronto,
which is where we did the sequence of the white room
and then the sequence in the street afterwards.
It's really tough to watch her rip that stuff out of her head.
Yeah, it looks really painful.
So here's an example of Milla doing her own stunts.
I mean, that's a really hard floor with a metal plate on it.
And she fell off the end of that bed for like five or six times.
We'd anticipated the need of doing some digital work in here
to remove some reflections and et cetera,
and Paul realised that if you didn't have to do that with the camera angles,
then we could use the monies on the scene that follows this.
And that's what happened. We didn't have to do a thing in here.
No, we thought because we had that huge mirror,
we'd end up having the camera crew and Sean would have to take them out,
but we ended up just getting angles where we were just out of shot.
This is actually a real operating theatre in a functioning hospital.
It was empty,
but the lights and the bed she's lying on are, in fact, all real.
They're the real deal.
Then we went in and we painted the whole room white
and added a few extra props.
But the basis of it is actually based on a real hospital room.
As are all these corridors.
Again, this was a slightly closed-down bit of a functioning hospital.
This is a live feed.
Video playback. Video camera's live feed.
You reprised something you did earlier.
And it was absolutely great
when we persuaded Milla to shave her head for this scene.
Her manager almost had a heart attack.
"No. Think of your L'Oréal contract. Your hair."
This was all shot on a street in Toronto, where we closed down two city blocks,
and we dressed two city blocks' worth of devastation.
We got to rehearse ahead of time.
I got up into a cherry picker and photographed.
Tried to mimic the angles that we thought we'd have with a wide angle lens,
and it was used as an aide to dress the set.
I mean, we knew lots was going to be dressed.
Richard Bridgland and his crew had a big task in front of them,
but by knowing where the composition was going to occur,
they could then dress it accordingly.
'Cause soon it's going to reveal an area that isn't dressed,
and CG cars and regular traffic is removed.
Also an extra complication here
is you can see there's a tram system that runs through Toronto,
and there's a lot of live electrical wires, some of which had to be taken down
because the wire we're hanging the CatCam, which is the camera system, from
was actually touching a lot of these live electrical wires,
so we had to do a lot of work just to prepare the set.
It was a 440-foot pull-back that went up in the air 200 feet.
The foreground steam was added, and some windows were broken
in computer generated imagery.
I can't believe this is the first one of these you've done, Richard.
All the great movies you've worked on,
and you honour us, Resident Evil, with your comments.
- Thank you very much. - Thank you for having me.