I'm Nicolas Cage.
Welcome to the Criterion special edition of The Rock.
I agreed to do the picture
on the basis of working with Simpson and Bruckheimer.
I had seen some of their other movies
and felt that they were a very successful team,
as well as trying to do things that were just a little bit different
from what everyone else was doing.
Things that were kind of timely.
I remember in the first scenes,
I was struck by Ed Harris's kind of complex character.
This is not really a bad man at all,
and yet he's providing the antagonist threat in the picture.
But somebody that we can feel for,
somebody that we identify with
and understand.
So, in that regard,
I thought it, right off the bat, stood out,
beyond your typical action genre piece.
Director Michael Bay.
Ed had a lot of problems with the character.
He struggled with the character.
To be a bad guy that could possibly kill an entire city
makes him a really, really bad guy,
and Ed had a lot of sympathy with the character, and he wanted to do it.
So it was a real contrast we were trying to play with.
There was a lot of grey area, and I don't think it was fully...
It wasn't fully explored in the movie.
It was more difficult playing General Hummel
than it was a lot of other characters that I've played.
It might seem more difficult and more complex.
But I felt pretty good about my work as Hummel
because I felt I made him believable
in a rather unbelievable situation.
And I had a lot of help.
Harry Humphries, who was a former SEAL,
was the technical adviser on the film.
We went through a lot of the dialogue and we rewrote a lot of that,
which I think helped, just in terms of the military kind of speak,
and giving it some more rhythm,
a more natural kind of voice to the guy.
But some of those raps about George Washington
and Thomas Jefferson and the Revolution,
that's pretty difficult stuff to say, man.
Technical adviser Harry Humphries.
Ed Harris is the most underrated actor in Hollywood,
as far as I'm concerned.
He can play anything.
He captured that spirit -
disgruntled with the government
and the hierarchy of military leadership.
He captured the essence of the individual
that I pictured in my eyes, in my mind, when I was reading the script.
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer.
We always wanted Ed Harris for Hummel.
Nobody ever really came into play other than him.
And he was, I guess, one of the most difficult to land.
It took us at least a month before he committed to do the picture.
So I remember Ed Harris coming to Don's house and Don did his pitch.
It was pretty hysterical.
I went to Don Simpson's house and Michael was there.
This young guy, long hair, sitting on the couch - the director.
Don said, "I want to tell you a bit about the character in this movie."
The other two guys didn't speak for 45 minutes
and Don just sat there really straight,
eyes wide open, looking right at me.
I don't think he blinked once in 45 minutes.
He didn't stop talking, just hit me with the whole story of the film -
everything the character did,
everything about the character, why I should do it.
It was pretty hysterical.
I always like to get sucked in right when I sit down in my seat.
I like to see titles that are interesting. I like to start getting engrossed.
And that's what I did. I tried to suck you in with titles that are different
than what you'd expect an action movie to be for summer.
It seemed more serious in tone, and then we'd go into
this cutty, fast-paced, elaborate break-in
at the chemical weapons base.
I was shooting in the Pentagon set and I met Richard Marcinko,
who wrote Rogue Warrior, which is a huge bestseller, and Red Cell.
From what I understand, he was one of the first US SEALS
in the United States.
Richard Marcinko is what you would consider
a master of military black ops.
I asked him. I said, "What would you do to break into this place?"
"We can use special guns that shoot a harpoon.
"And we could roll on in and do quick drops."
He said, "I'd like to come in with force, and quick."
These guys on bases get lackadaisical.
We shoot with beanbag guns,
projectiles that shoot out of a heavy shotgun-type canister,
that really can break your ribs.
But we're not here actually killing anybody.
We're shooting with darts and we're beanbagging guys.
That is an injection gun that shoots a sleeping serum.
Jerry Bruckheimer.
Michael came to us because I'd seen his work as a commercial director.
An agent had sent me his work and I said, "This kid is extraordinary."
But, initially, Michael shot the video for us for Days Of Thunder.
That's where our relationship goes back to.
Michael - who'd done, at the time, two videos - was very young.
His work was truly unique.
Of all the work we'd seen, his stood far above everybody else's.
And Michael came in and he's full of enthusiasm,
extremely bright and very creative.
And when it came time to do Bad Boys, we remembered Michael.
And the rest became history
because he got off and made a very successful movie.
It broke Will and Martin as movie stars.
And Michael was a big star as a director.
And, believe me, it was hard to get him to say yes on The Rock,
even though we had a long relationship with him.
After I did Bad Boys, it came out. It did well financially.
I started getting offers everywhere.
The Rock had come to me and I turned it down six months earlier.
I didn't feel the story was there.
It was a cool idea but the story just wasn't serious enough for me.
Don and Jerry actually took it over as producers, and we sat down.
And I really liked making Bad Boys with them.
I had a lot of mistakes to go through, making the movie.
Every time you do a movie, you learn mistakes and you correct them.
They said, "Will you commit to it without a full script?"
And I said, "Well, with you guys, I would."
I would work with Don, actually,
by faxing back and forth every day
with ideas, in terms of writers and whatnot.
He was very in tune to The Rock,
and after the script really started going
and we started to slowly get casts,
that's when Don's downfall started.
In the original script they talked about sarin gas.
It was like cluster bombs.
They shoot out these strands of pearls.
And just the idea of pearls was a really visual idea.
It was like pearls with firecrackers attached in between them.
We used VX gas because it was more state of the art than sarin gas.
It wasn't very lethal then. This is an extremely lethal gas.
We have a lot of it in America,
kept very much in bins like this.
They kept wanting me.
I went in four or five times to loop this moment here.
They wanted me to say something about the fact that this guy had died.
You know what I mean?
My favourite line was, "At least we know this stuff works."
But they didn't like that line.
And I wasn't serious about it.
I did loop that, hoping that they'd listen to it.
The entrance and the exit of any character is very important.
And I wanted to get as many different colours and shades
about Stanley Goodspeed across in this first scene.
I remember there was a line in the movie
about Elton John's song The Rocket Man,
which really came out of nowhere.
And it occurred to me that for that line to work
we would need to establish that Stanley Goodspeed was into music.
Really into music.
I thought it would be interesting to have a hero who was a Beatle maniac
and also somebody that...
I had been noticing that I had been frustrated with CDs.
I didn't like that they kept skipping, and I started to long for the old LPs,
and I thought I'd put that in the character as well.
I take a lot of my own frustrations from life
and inject my characters with them.
The Rock was not a finished script when I came on board.
And, if anything, I think Jerry really welcomed my ideas
and that is unusual.
I have, time and time again,
been told that I was crazy, or this is wrong,
or that's too off the wall or offbeat.
"What are you talking about?" You know.
But Michael really encouraged it.
I think I like to hook into many different things
when I start designing a character.
And that includes research and pieces of information
that I may gather along the way.
It's a combination of things, but it begins with the research.
I sometimes find clues that really help me shape the character.
And then beyond that, or on top of that,
I'll start to get into movements and vocal inflections and rhythms,
and it really becomes more or less musical for me.
This is something that I've been moving towards over the years,
and now I feel quite comfortable with it on a musical level
where I can find rhythms and really hit the notes, which are the words,
in ways that I think will have a certain panache.
Or sometimes I'll get into a mode where I don't want to think about it
and I'll allow myself two bars of...
I say "two bars" metaphorically.
Just a couple of sentences where I'm not gonna think about it,
and whatever happens accidentally will be interesting for me or not.
And then I'll get back to what I've already figured out beforehand.
But, for me, it's all these things together.
The skeleton, though, is basically musical.
What I don't plan or prepare
is how I'm going to come up with the organic goods
to really make it real, believable,
and feel like reality and truth.
And that's more of a sacrosanct place for me, that I don't care to analyse.
But I back up my pre-thought-out delivery with the truth,
and it's a combination of the two.
I went to Washington and I met with some of the people there,
and one fellow in particular who is really a role model
for Stanley Goodspeed.
They had some classified information
and some unclassified information.
But some of it was really terrifying,
which was that there's eight ounces of a poison
that the Russians have developed,
that properly dispersed
could exterminate everybody in the world three times over.
Eight ounces!
It could just wipe everybody out if it was properly dispersed.
And he had kind of a sad look in his eye.
He looked like a man that had things weighing heavily on him,
and I wondered what that must be like,
to be someone with the knowledge that this is in existence
and could be used at any time if it were in the wrong hands.
It occurred to me that this would be somebody
who would be worried about having children.
And I became, I remember in the early rehearsals,
interested in the idea that Stanley would be
not that happy about this news.
Originally, Jerry was sort of into it,
but then he said, "No, it's too dark. It's not positive enough."
But he sent the script to Robert Towne
and Towne said, "No, he should not want to have the baby.
"He should be concerned about the baby."
Then Jerry thought, "OK, let's go with it."
So that opened up the door for me to get into some more nuances
and do a bit of writing where I could say, "Marriage police. Pull over."
And this whole bewildered, sardonic attitude,
which to me seemed more funny.
I also liked the idea of playing the guitar.
The image of a naked man with a guitar and a glass of wine at home
to me seemed like a good image.
This was a collaboration.
Vanessa and I worked on it,
and really I wanted to be in purple Speedos,
cos I wanted it to be just funny.
I hadn't seen an actor walk around in purple Speedos before
and I thought it would be very humorous.
I show up to the set and Nic has got a robe on, and I'm like... OK.
He takes the robe off and he's wearing purple Speedos.
And I just made a big joke on the set.
"Nic, let's just get the body out of the way in the first ten minutes.
"Let's show 'em what you got.
"Let's show your cut abs, let's show that chest. Let's just get it out there."
Michael Bay would say it's cos I'm in such good shape.
Sometimes he'll tease us and say,
"Oh, this actor wanted to be so tough."
That's part of his charm and his style of frustrating people.
I realised again that I only had a certain amount of time
to establish that Stanley Goodspeed was at home.
The studio wanted me to shoot the movie in Los Angeles.
"Shoot some master shots of Alcatraz and we'll do the rest in LA."
Alcatraz is a combination of being in the south of France
with the crumbly patina kind of paint
that's peeling off the buildings,
to this really eerie world.
There's a world on the island that Nic calls Tetanus World
because it's just crumbled cement and metal rusty spires sticking out.
But, ultimately, the whole thing is beautiful.
It's such an amazing location.
Just the nooks and crannies.
I was taken on a tour where I got to see the back side of Alcatraz
where it's too decrepit to take tourists.
It's got an immense history. It's from the Civil War era. It used be a fort.
I had to go back to the studio and tell them I'd gotta shoot on this island.
I think I said the word...
"I gotta shoot on this island because this island is so fucking bitching."
There's a funny thing with this.
The little guy who walks down the aisle
introducing Alcatraz to everybody.
And then we come up to him and tell him that the tour is over.
I could not keep a straight face. That guy was cracking me up.
They wanted me to have some reaction,
but I couldn't hang in long enough.
That's a pretty quick cut after that.
I just had the giggles that day.
This is a funny shot of the helicopters.
This was the very last cut of the movie
that was put in before we locked the picture.
I remember fighting with Jerry Bruckheimer.
It's funny how one shot would stall the entire locking of the picture.
Jerry says, "You've got to lose two of the helicopter shots,"
and I'm like, "Jerry, we gotta build, we gotta build."
So we compromised. I put in one longer shot of the helicopter.
I remember it kept going on for a month.
"Take those helicopter shots out. There are too many."
Apparently, The Rock was the largest movie ever to go on to Alcatraz.
It's so extremely difficult to shoot there.
You have to ship over everything.
You have to ship over water, bathrooms, electricity.
We had about six generators.
We had 26,000 feet of cable.
It was the largest cable order in Hollywood since Terminator II.
We cabled the entire island.
We brought on huge semis.
We had this gigantic crane that was 11 storeys tall.
It was just kind of weird.
I remember the first day's shooting and we had an amazing cook,
and we were eating in the place where they made license plates.
In this rusty, decrepit place eating steak and lobster.
This amazing food in this place
where men were taken to the lowest of their existence.
And it was just a real irony.
It's nice to be in a place that's got not only the history
but the strength of the walls.
If you kick something, it's not going to fall apart.
It's bleak. It helps you feel like you're on a mission of some kind
and not in the comfort of your home or a studio.
So all that stuff, it's probably subliminal or subconscious.
But it all adds up and helps.
You have to work less. It gives you less to create.
Which is good - you focus more on what you're doing.
With Ed Harris I used a lot of something I've done in videos,
where I take shards of mirror and bounce it into little highlights,
like an eye or a nose or something.
I think the film looks great. He did a great job.
When I saw the film I was pretty shocked that it worked so well
because they had shot so much.
I said, "How will they cut this?"
They'd shoot you head-on, from underneath, right and left.
They'd shoot from above, and on the move.
They'd shoot you with the camera still and with the camera moving.
He loved the camera and doing stuff with it.
I did do a lot of camera moves in this movie,
and I think it was like doing two movies in one
because you have so many teeny shots,
cos you're using so many shots.
So the actor's got three seconds.
He's got to get into it and then we cut. And then we move on.
It's tough to build up and take it down, build up, take it down.
It's really tiring and draining on an actor.
This scene was shot... I don't know how many times we shot it.
But we shot it over and over, from a lot of different angles.
There was a day when Ed Harris was in the rehearsals.
I don't know if he was testing me.
Granted, I'm a young director and there was a lot of writing to do
and a lot of rewriting to do.
We had a summer release date.
That's the way it seems like Hollywood's going nowadays.
We're greenlighting movies before we have a full script.
I remember Ed Harris, he builds up frustration and he says...
He says, "My face is going on the screen and his face" -
pointing to another actor - "his face is going on the screen."
And I stopped him mid sentence and said,
"You know what, Ed? My name's going on the screen.
"So, I guarantee you, you will be happy with this
"and we will get the words right.
"I give you my word. We'll make this something that you're proud of."
It's like two dogs that sniff each other out.
You've got to feel before you can trust each other.
There were a lot of words to say, at least for me.
Population of whatever...
I kept fouling them up a little bit
and was having a hard time getting motivated during that scene
and I started slamming the phone down whenever I'd mess up a line.
I guess Michael was slightly concerned
about the prop itself being broken.
I don't know if I broke it. I know I broke some.
I don't know if I broke that one, but it became a running joke.
Every scene he'd bring a bunch of phones to me and says,
"Come on, Ed. Go ahead, break the phone."
Which, actually, sometimes it helps.
He'd say, "Slam it." I'd slam it and get the adrenaline flowing.
This kinetic style, that I think Michael Bay has mastered,
really just forces actors who are willing to go there
to come up with the most original ideas in the shortest amount of time.
So you have to always think on your feet
to fit into this very contemporary style.
Some days, Michael would come to me and say,
"I need a line. Come up with a line."
And I wouldn't know. "Michael, I can't think of any more dialogue."
And he'd say, "Let's just go through it."
And he'd start shooting different lines,
many of which were totally improvised.
The script that we shot was pretty much the script we set out to shoot,
as far as I recall, in terms of my character.
I always felt that Hummel never had any intention at all
of sending this stuff over the Bay.
He was sure the government would fold and meet his demands.
He wasn't about to kill 60,000 people.
I don't think that was ever in his mind.
I think initially the script thought it was in his mind and he was a madman,
but I just didn't believe that.
There wasn't enough justification.
If he was a madman to begin with, why does he change his mind?
He seemed like a reasonable individual.
He's telling kids to get off the island.
He's trying to treat people with some respect.
He's making what he considers a reasonable demand.
He had to rip off the real gas to let them know that he was serious.
It's a big mission. People are leaving their families, leaving their states.
But then again, he's also trying to get millions of dollars.
This is lethal stuff.
You're not playing around here.
If one of these things breaks, it's history.
It's just a little odd to quite understand him.
But I didn't want to play him like a raving lunatic.
This shift that is occurring in films
where many of the directors are coming out of music videos,
and especially commercials,
it's both fascinating and also, for me, a little bit sad.
The only thing they lack, because they haven't done it, is storytelling.
But you have to tell a story in 30 seconds and that's a skill, too.
We ensure the screenplays are good, which you do for any director.
But if you give an Adrian Lynne
or a Michael Bay or a Tony Scott a good script,
they'll give you a great movie because they understand camera and visuals.
In other words, it's not radio, it's cinema.
The thing that was tough - this scene just kept cutting too long.
It became like a nine- or ten-minute-long scene.
It was so talky-talky. There's so much setup.
And there's so many people we had to get together in one room
in the Pentagon situation room.
This is where I feel the movie's getting talky,
and I felt, in the screening, if I can get over this hump in the movie...
I didn't know if younger viewers
were going to understand all the information being slung around.
Movies have really changed.
Technical advances.
Audiences have gotten, not more sophisticated
because there are many, many great movies from the past,
probably more from the past than there are now.
But it seems like everything is accelerating.
I get information faster. I can assimilate it faster.
I don't think it's good to go too fast.
There are wonderful moments
where you can let a camera sit on a tripod for ten minutes
and an actor just walk around
and probably do something as entertaining as a great action scene.
The Rock was a very fast-cut, fast-paced movie
and it was a hyper-movie
because that was my way of incorporating three stories,
and it was my style that I wanted to do on this movie.
That's not saying that every movie I do is going to be this way.
But, I think, for this type of genre of movie,
I think this is what audiences are buying now.
It's just - "Give me more, give it faster.
"And wow me and entertain me."
This is Harry, our military adviser, in his first feature.
I don't think anybody knew that I was going to revamp the entire character.
I don't think people knew that I was comfortable writing.
Words, I like words. I like the way words sound.
I like funny words. I like to put words together.
And that really comes into the writing aspect of acting for me.
I like to play with words and I guess it comes from that.
A sort of a wacked sense of humour.
I guess, at one time in my life, I had a wild run
and got into all kinds of different experiences with different women.
And I remember I used to, I guess,
talk about different things with them
and, for some reason, my mind would go into places
where I would talk about amaretto cream or peach sorbet.
I guess I was a bit like cheap red wine
in that I would try to pull anything out to appeal to them in some way.
And in this scene, I guess I went back in time
and pulled out some of those old sayings I had from aeons ago.
I'm not like that any more. I'm a married man.
But I still like to go back and pull these things out of my hat.
For me, making action movies is sincere.
I've always liked action movies.
As a child, I liked the James Bond movies
and I've enjoyed the Leone movies.
I like the idea of not only transforming characters, but transforming genres,
and constantly trying to do the unexpected.
I admit I like to keep people guessing.
And somebody once said that I would never be able to work
in a big action-type movie
or a movie which would be a blockbuster.
That I was too quirky or unusual to really fit in that formula genre.
Immediately I felt like the gauntlet had been thrown down
and wanted to say, "No, I can do that as well. Watch."
So there was a bit of that daredevil aspect to it.
At the same time, I thought it was
as far away from Leaving Las Vegas as I could go to do that.
I liked the acrobatics of that.
Oh, God. Look at this!
"There were situations where the director tried to prove
"he was smarter than Sean."
"But forget it," says one Disney insider,
"Sean ate Michael Bay for breakfast."
Bullshit. It sounds like a writer trying to create a headline that is catchy.
There's no way I would go to Connery
and underestimate that I was smarter than Sean.
What I heard from Sean was that you don't bullshit him,
and I like people like that.
I don't bullshit people.
I like to be upfront with people and sometimes I'm too honest.
The thing I wanted to do with Sean was to present him.
When the audience saw him I wanted them to be, like,
"Is that Sean Connery with that long hair?
"He looks like a ragged Harley-Davidson rider."
The very first scene you actually see him in contact with the FBI,
he's really kind of gruff.
I remember trying to tell him, "Sean, take away the smile
"and let's try to make him mean."
I wanted him to hide under his hair, so he had this mean look.
It's true that my father, in some ways, influenced Stanley Goodspeed.
My father is a professor and a radical thinker.
A brilliant man, who can go off onto these tangents
that are peppered with really colourful concepts.
Some of the things my father had said to me as a child...
He talked about champagne and how champagne was an accident.
And the Franciscan monks and what they did
with accidentally carbonating a bottle of white wine.
That's how it happened.
I pulled that out of the old library of memories
and used that for Stanley Goodspeed.
It was also important for me to get the point across
that Stanley really liked his job.
And Stanley really was happy being in the lab and doing chemistry.
He really had no interest in going out in the field,
which was a total role reversal from the original concept of the character.
Originally, he was a cowboy. He wanted to get out there.
Simpson had seen Guarding Tess
and he liked the idea of this frustrated Secret Service agent
who was really beside himself working for the first lady of the past.
He wanted to get out in the field
and he wanted to take that concept and put it into The Rock,
and I really felt that it was more interesting if we took a man
who loved his job and chemistry and science and just wanted to be there,
and then throw him in the field and see what happens.
I had heard that Sean wanted to work with me,
but that, for me, was just too good to be true.
That was one of those things that I had difficulty accepting
because it was too much of a dream
that a man of Connery's stature would really want to work with me.
But, by all accounts, that was the case
and I have to say it was terrific for me to hear that.
Sean is a tough guy because he's a perfectionist.
He felt that I had a good energy.
I sometimes needed to rehearse more, which he taught me.
Slow down in the morning so that I don't just shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot,
but I rehearse and rehearse and rehearse.
For Sean, that's the way he does it.
He likes to come to the set first thing in the morning,
rehearse a scene four or five times,
go into make-up, eat his breakfast, read the paper,
and come out and work.
It's kind of a weird dynamic when Sean came to the set
because I was tough on the crew -
"I don't want any dilly-dallying, I want the lights to be set.
"We'll block these guys and we're going to give Sean a time
"and that's the time we're giving him
"because we're not going to let him wait."
When there were certain technical problems,
I would go into the trailer and say, "Sean, we've got a problem.
"We need this, we need that and it's going to take us half an hour longer."
And he's fine. But you cannot bullshit a guy
who's done more movies than the years I've been alive.
Well, I felt that Sean was a mountain of wisdom,
especially for this genre.
And I was very clear in my mind
that I was not going into three months work with Sean Connery
and not take advantage of the opportunity and ask him questions.
And he stepped into the role of mentor, in some ways, for me,
which I think is as it should be.
I hope that in time I'll be able to have that experience with actors as well.
In this scene, this interrogation scene that I have with Sean,
I really became aware that Sean
wanted to encourage the Laurel and Hardy aspect of the relationship
between Goodspeed and Mason.
He really wanted to get into more of the play stuff
and the silly, offbeat stuff.
And I think it was his willingness to go there, to encourage it,
that made me feel free.
And that he was cool with it.
He felt that that would be the life of the movie
if we could play with it, have fun with it.
Almost a slapstick groove together.
He liked it that I changed the name to Stanley.
It was originally Bill Goodspeed,
and when I changed it to Stanley he immediately seemed to come to life.
He got into, like I said, the Stan Laurel, Laurel and Hardy idea.
Yeah, and this scene is the beginning of that chemistry,
where we're more playful with one another than anything else.
There's one thing in this scene.
That day, I was telling Sean about Elvis Presley
and there was some story going around
that Elvis was into chimpanzees and two-way mirrors -
there's a two-way mirror in the scene.
He would send a groupie in in white panties
and say, "Why don't you go and wrestle with that chimp in there?"
And then watch the girl wrestle with the chimp in white panties.
And Sean just started cracking up.
I'd say, "Why not go ahead and take those panties..." -
that delivery for "Go ahead and take the handcuffs off."
It was coming from that, which sounds bizarre as hell,
but sometimes these ideas come from strange places.
Jerry Bruckheimer.
It's difficult to get actors like Nic and Sean. They're offered everything.
You're fighting the entire town on any one picture
that you're trying to make with any of them.
Having Nic really drew Sean into it.
One actor attracts another actor.
Sean had always wanted to work with Nic, like we had.
I said, "You've got Nic."
"The character isn't right for me. Work with me on the character.
"I'd like to be in the picture because of Nic."
So we worked with Sean.
Jonathan Hensleigh and myself went to London and sat with Sean.
We'd spend all day with Sean and then go back that night.
Jonathan would type up the pages
and we'd be up till 4am and meet him again at 9.
Go through those pages, go and rewrite every night.
Through that process, he committed to do the picture.
Sean took his character and raised it to another level.
It was his idea to have the character be a British agent
that was caught behind the lines
and then rolled over and forgotten by his own government.
The Kennedy tapes and the Hoover tapes with Kennedy was Sean's idea.
It was Clement and La Frenais who added to his character
and built his character, and gave him great dialogue.
Jerry Bruckheimer wanted to get Sean to do the movie.
He was over with the writer and they were trying to pitch Sean.
I was heavily into casting in New York City
and they said hop onto Concorde next morning and meet Sean.
I knew a few things about Sean.
He's never, ever, ever late.
So I flew the Concorde over. It's an awesome ride. You land and...
I remember there was no limo driver.
I had no idea which hotel I was supposed to meet Sean at.
And I remember calling a PA in Los Angeles at 5:30 in the morning.
I said, "OK, we spent $5,000 for a one-way ticket
"on the Concorde to London
"and I'm waiting in the airport for two-and-a-half hours.
"You tell me, is that a good deal? I could've taken a commercial airline.
"I'm here. Goddammit, I don't even know where to go!
"I'm late. This is not good the first time I'm meeting Sean Connery.
"He's gonna be pissed."
The PA had the information where I was supposed to go.
I got there, and walk in and Sean is just sitting there.
And I'm like, "Ooh, wow. That's Sean Connery."
He's just sitting there in a golf shirt and a big grandfather chair.
Sean just shakes my hand. He has this huge, massive hand.
I started talking about the story, what I thought,
in terms of the old wise man teaching the young boy how to become a hero.
He could see how passionate I was about the movie.
I remember Sean was like, "Can we get some wine?"
The waiter's, "Yes, yes, yes, yes."
They're these English guys doing a Californian bottle of wine
and they're like, "I can't get the cork.
"Mr. Connery, we have to take it downstairs."
I've got a really bad English accent, but Sean goes, "Give it here."
He takes it over and grabs it from the guy's hand and pulls the thing out.
And the waiters are just sitting there and there's silence and I'm like,
"Bond. James Bond" and everyone just started laughing.
The waiter's just in a tizzy.
And that's how we hit it off.
There was one scene where somebody said,
"Why have a gun? He's a chemical freak?"
And I immediately took that and tied it into the musical thing,
Rick James, Superfreak,
and became chemical superfreak and got into that,
which was completely off the cuff.
But it had to do with the idea that this
was a guy that was really into music
and was into that kind of hip talk.
I really like to pepper movies with funny little bits of character.
In San Francisco I went to the casting woman and said,
"You know what? I want funny, weird, fat, thin, white, black.
"Some cool people that I could pepper through the movie."
I think that's what gives movies life.
Especially movies like this, where, I think, real people help spice it up.
Like that guy in the jail cell - "What kind of fucked-up tour is this?"
That wasn't scripted. That was something that I asked the producer.
I said, "Listen, I want 20 minutes to just shoot people."
It's a great release valve.
When you build this tension and come up with a line like that,
it's a great release valve, cos these are tense movies.
To be honest with you, the stuff with the homosexual hairdresser,
at first I thought, "That's not gonna work. That's not gonna be funny."
But then I saw the movie and it was funny, and I didn't get upset about it.
I didn't think, "Gays are going to be pissed off by this."
I thought that it was...
You know, it was fine.
I think all the humour that comes from the supporting players
is really Michael Bay and his taste.
Michael has a pretty terrific appreciation for off-the-wall humour.
It's unusual really, especially in such a successful film-maker's tastes.
I mean, I don't think he's safe at all when it come to humour,
and I like that about his style.
My idea with Sean Connery was he was a rusty James Bond.
He was funny, Sean, actually.
We were shooting one day and he pulled me aside and he goes,
"You know what I'm doing?"
I said, "No, what are you doing?" He says, "Well..."
He was trying to be secret about it. He says, "I'm kind of...
"I'm getting to play James Bond without being James Bond."
"Yeah, that's kind of cool."
He says, "Yeah, it's good to kick some ass again."
It was a weird structure for a movie because it happens in a lot of places.
It's happening on Alcatraz,
simultaneously in the FBI, then the Pentagon.
There's a lot of intercutting going on
and I kept feeling, "There's so much setup time to this movie.
"We have to get some sort of relief."
My feeling in terms of pacing was the car chase.
It was Sean Connery building some of his character,
trying to get some of his humour, his charm,
and then building with some sort of release of him getting away.
Because you've got about 20 minutes of setup.
We've got a couple of tension scenes.
We've got a tension scene with Nic at the beginning,
then a funny scene with Nic.
But then there's just a lot of setup.
So it was a strange structure.
The chase was inserted into the movie,
but I think it did do some things for the characters.
It gave us a pacing element in terms of the overall movie.
We actually saw the movie without the chase,
and there is a big black hole.
Sometimes movies play like music.
You need choruses once in a while.
And you need bridges and stuff.
And, actually, I had a fight about the car chase with one of the writers,
because I felt this was a way for me to help,
after all this complicated setup,
to help to suck the younger audience back into it.
I know that sounds weird,
trying to make movies for demographics and whatnot,
but, basically, that's what it was.
I had a fight with one of the writers.
He said, "I've never heard of a director talking about demographics."
And I'm like, well, this is a writer
who's never had a script actually made into a movie.
I said, "Let me tell you something.
"If you get $60 million,
you'd better fucking know who you're selling it to
because it could be the last time they ever give you $60 million."
We're in a business, and my idea with The Rock
was to take people on a big ride and have fun characters in the movie.
This is like an E-ticket ride one third into the movie.
And I think it did the trick.
Around the world it's so far made $340 million.
Plus a Ferrari's doing battle with a Hum-V. You've got to watch that.
We started our shoot with Alcatraz
and then we went on to doing the car chase in San Francisco,
which turned out to be the biggest cluster fuck I've ever done
in my entire filming career.
Shooting a car chase in San Francisco is impossible.
To get clearance for a two-block section where we started our chase
took 5,000 signatures.
From homeowners, apartments, complexes - stuff like that.
We needed to give them free dry-cleaning, free valet parking.
It literally only had two blocks
run up time to get the cars moving at speed and then stopping.
And because I operate a camera a lot when I do action stuff,
I remember taking my camera car belt off and I threw it against the car,
because I asked the AD three or four hours earlier,
"We've got to get the trucks out the way."
We had such a huge movie crew, it was like a circus.
You try to do these action scenes
where you don't need a lot of stuff.
You need cameras, you need men moving stuff around, maybe a crane.
Not much lighting because you're doing exterior car chases.
You just need rigs. You don't need the fluff that goes with movie making,
and the fluff can sometimes slow you down.
"Oh, well, why not?" is a line that I have that was improvised
that seems to accidentally encapsulate
the whole idea behind the movie.
Or the more kinetic over-the-top action sequences
where you just say, "Oh, well, why not?" Let's go with it.
And I like that about that, although I had no idea that it would symbolize
the whole tone of this particular portion of the piece.
For me, it was a happy accident.
Well, a lot of the shots are done in what they call "poor man's process",
where you're just sitting in the car and pretending that you're driving.
That is the weirdest feeling in the world.
That really...
You could say that's what you get paid for.
Trying to make that feel real is almost impossible.
You always feel a complete fool when you're doing it.
I like - especially, doing the car chase stuff -
I like getting the camera on a long lens and getting in on the actor's face.
So what we did with Sean Connery in the Hum-V,
after he took me round the block when I did a side shot with him
and he slammed on the brake round a corner,
and I was operating the camera and my head hit the window.
I'm like, "Sean, you've got to tell me before you stop. That hurt."
And what I like to do when we do these straight-on shots
is you just have a static, non-moving Hum-V.
You get some grips underneath the Hum-V, shake the Hum-V
and you get lights surrounding the car,
from HMIs to mere boards that bounce light.
And you shake and move the lights.
I lit them through the face and I shake my camera.
I actually make the car sounds when I operate the camera on these shots.
I take the camera - it's from my music video days - and make car sounds.
It's the lamest sounding thing you've ever heard, but it helps.
I sit there on a zoom and I'm like...
Kind of like that. It helps me get into it.
Have you ever heard of anything so crazy?
But I must tell you that saved me on this production.
By shooting Nic Cage in the car chase,
and shooting Sean Connery in the car chase, it saved two days.
No, it probably saved a day, a full day of shooting,
because I knocked them both off in an hour.
I like this car chase sequence.
I feel that Michael really shows what he's got in this
because he's taking the style, a formula we've seen before in Bullitt.
We've seen it a million times before -
people trying to do their variation on that.
And he really does make it in his own way.
And it's relentless.
I got a kick out of it when I saw it in the theatre.
I think we fell behind on the car chase a few days
and I remember four studio guys coming up to talk to me.
They were going to chat with me and they were going to say,
"We're falling behind. You're going to have to cut something."
And I remember shooting operating camera
with Sean Connery in the Hum-V
and I said, "I have a meeting. The guys are about to ream me."
And he was like, "You want me to come along?"
And I'm like, "Well, Sean, that might be good."
So I walk into this meeting.
I'm ready to get my first whipping of the movie,
why we're falling a few days behind.
Meanwhile, we're pretty much on schedule,
dealing with the San Francisco winter and the fog.
We're talking about a whole other weather climate on Alcatraz.
It's surreal what happens out there.
So I walk into the meeting and they have stern looks on their face
and I said, "Sean's going to be here. He wants to join us."
Their mouths just dropped open.
Sean just sat down and he says, "I think he's doing a fine job.
"We're behind. You can't blame him for weather.
"We need more money."
So, anyway, that's how the game works sometimes.
It's give and take, you know.
I think Sean Connery has what we all call "presence".
And I think part of that is natural,
something that you either have or you don't.
But I also think part of that for him was learned.
And I think he learned it from a teacher, an acting teacher,
who taught him about posture
and how to become the centre of any room that you walked into.
I don't feel I have particularly good posture, but Sean always does.
He's always standing upright and his head's squarely set on his shoulders,
and he has this very grand presence that you immediately notice.
He keeps it, in a lot of ways, through golfing. I know he's a golf fanatic.
He's passionate about golf, which... I really have no passion about golf.
I don't really care. But he is passionate about golf
and he says, with golf, in the swing,
you have to be perfectly aligned to get the right hit on the ball,
and that translates itself into his acting.
Sean Connery is definitely mythical.
The guy just appeals to so many people.
Just in public you see him and it's, "Oh, my God. That's Sean Connery."
There's something truly mythical about the guy,
and it's just because he's a legend from his past movies.
I think that Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer
were very aware of what they wanted from me.
They wanted me and Stan Goodspeed
to supply the offbeat humour in the movie.
And sometimes I found myself fighting that.
I found myself wanting to be more tough.
And Michael really would say, "No, it's not right.
"It's not right now for you to do that. You will at the end.
"You have to go through a catharsis. You have to change."
But I have to say that I think, of all the genres,
action movies really lack the most character development.
So, in some ways, it was also an experiment for me
to try my hand at action and keep doing what I've been doing.
To try to design characters
and to somehow make them fit in this format.
Through most of the movie, I refuse to swear.
I wanted Stanley to try to come up with
more interesting ways of being frustrated
than standard swearwords.
And I thought it was appropriate for his personality.
He was kind of a boy scout of sorts.
It put me in a situation where I had to come up
with more interesting ways of showing frustration
than the usual swearwords.
Michael Biehn. Remember him in The Abyss and Aliens?
What I like about Michael Biehn
was he's got a very strong, heroic look.
I thought it was good to have the leader of the SEALS
look like a guy who was going to still be in the movie,
because what we were doing with the SEALS was fooling the audience.
We were giving the audience enough screen time with these SEALS
that when we obliterate them all,
that we were shocking the audience.
And on the first test screening that worked beautifully,
because what I do, as the director, is watch body movements.
When they fidget and look at their watch,
there's a problem with your film.
When they go to the bathroom a lot,
there's a problem with the movie there.
A lot of people go to the bathroom at a certain point in the movie.
You know what it is?
If there was a formula I'd bottle it and you'd see me in Hawaii by a pool.
I'd just sell it.
But I love films and I love what I do.
And we made movies that we wanted to go see. And I still do.
Everything that I get involved with.
Besides, I have to have an idea if I can sell it,
I want to go see it, and that's why I'd make it,
cos I have to make what I want to go see.
When Nic Cage is in the trailer, right here,
he walked out of the trailer, he did one thing.
He says, "I'll surprise you with something. It may work, it may not."
Sometimes I come up with ideas on the spur of the moment
and see how they work.
And I did a pratfall on this scene where I'm walking over to this board.
I just wanted to demonstrate that Stanley was really out of his element -
in an unexpected way - but I wanted it to seem real.
And I fell down on my knees and got back up
and had this pissed-off expression on my face towards myself
for doing such an embarrassing act.
But it was important to me that I show that Stanley
really doesn't belong in this situation.
He's not really meant to be in the field or to go swimming underwater.
It was hysterical. I really considered it. I tried cutting it into the movie.
It was very funny, but I wondered if it was just a hint too twisted.
I thought it would be interesting
to have him really vulnerable in the next scene
where he's throwing up and worried.
I don't think he liked improv a lot. I think he fights with improv.
Everyone thinks he improvs all the time,
but he comes into the set
and if he's going to improv, he thinks about it before.
He doesn't like doing it on the spot.
I rarely improvise.
In fact, usually I think about a scene for four or five days
and play with different angles on it.
Somebody once said a good actor is a good rewriter.
It would drive certain directors crazy
if the script was a polished, finished,
every-word-has-been-thought-out work, a piece.
But I don't really find that to be the case with most action movies.
I find that they need the actors to come in
and really fine-tune their characters
and make them feel real.
I said to the studio, "I've got a cool movie in my head
"and I see it clearly, but it will cost more money."
And it was kind of a tug-of-war.
They wanted to get going without actually giving us
the official number of days we really needed to shoot, and so it was like...
Certain times they would dangle a carrot
in front of a scene they knew you really wanted to do.
A scene that was dangled in front of me was using the SDUs,
the subs from the helicopters going underwater.
They were going to can that.
They said, "Just drop them and they can pop up inside."
And I'm like, "We can't build an hour into the movie
"and make the whole movie based on breaking onto the rock
"and not do that scene."
So there are times when a director has to stand his ground,
and that was a point where I drew a line in the sand.
They said I couldn't do the scene I was shooting,
and when we shook hands, that scene was in the movie
before I signed on to do the movie.
They said, "We're not doing it"
and I just walked off for about two hours.
I was threatened with a $60-million lawsuit,
but I was really passionate about that scene. I knew we needed it.
Next time, I don't want to do it like that.
I want to show them my script and say, "This is how many days I need.
"Are we gonna do it or not?"
Technical adviser Harry Humphries.
Michael Biehn has played a SEAL officer
more times than any actor in Hollywood.
In any case, Michael Biehn had a tough time initially on this film
because this is the first that Mike really worked with a group of SEALS.
It was an interesting moment
because he wasn't looking at actors as he was talking.
These SEALS, they're not giving him anything.
Usually actors can emote, they can help offscreen,
they give something that you can draw on.
These SEALS were just staring, dead cold, into his eyes.
He started to be macho and talk to these guys and he started to freeze.
I was wondering, "What's going on?"
I took him into my trailer, and what I did was
I played him some Crimson Tide music.
I'm like, "Michael, when you say your speech
"I'm kind of feeling this vibe. What's going on?"
And he said to me, "You know what? I've got all these guys looking at me
"and I've got Sean Connery, an actor who I've admired my whole life,
"and then I've got Nic there and I'm meant to be the leader. I'm freezing."
He was freezing because he was looking at these 12 US real guys
and he's playing the phoney, and it just tripped him up.
Nic Cage, in this helicopter, a really crammed helicopter.
It didn't come apart.
I took my viewfinder in and I saw Nic
sitting around these cool guys
and I got down on the ground,
where I often get when I'm putting my cameras.
I remember looking at Nic's knees
and I just had him do something quirky.
I said, "Give me the camera. Put it on a sandbag."
I was operating it and I'm like,
"Nic, I want to see you moving around with your knees."
It was just a quirky shot to show how nervous he was.
There was one day where Michael wanted me to wear this suit.
Everybody got to wear these slick, cool scuba-diving outfits
and he put me in this suit with an awful helmet
and this really ungainly bubble-like apparatus.
And I just felt so ridiculous.
And there's Sean, looking all sleek and elegant in his scuba gear.
I said to Mike, "Why do I have to wear this bubble suit?"
And I guess he found it very funny.
There was always a little attachment to my wardrobe in this movie,
some little knapsack on the back of my uniform with my chemical gear,
that I just wanted to lose.
I said, "I look like a little Japanese schoolboy with this thing on.
"Why are you making me wear these?"
I had them put on dry suits, and dry suits are not wet suits.
They're basically meant to keep your body completely dry
when you go under freezing water.
The SEALS are used to this and wear wet suits.
So dry suits look a little bit more like bubble men walking around.
It's really not flattering.
Nic had his mask on his head, and when he put it on it was very straight.
I'm like, "Wait, Nic, let me adjust your mask for you cos it's a little crooked."
I totally tweaked it out, so he looked... He looked ridiculous.
That's how it's left in the movie.
Sometimes you have to say untrue things to your actors
to do that little adjustment that just helps his character.
When you see the SEALS with the war paint, it looks so movie-like.
It's not a movie at all, because I had the SEAL team come in
and they suited up, put on the face paint and came back out of the trailer
and they're looking at me with this great-looking tribal greasepaint.
And I'm like, "Oh, my God. That is so cool. Is that how you do it?"
They go, "Yeah, we're good to go this way. This is what we do."
Navy SEALS were formed up in 1963.
After the Bay of Pigs invasion,
Kennedy realised that there was a need for a small, very specialised unit
within all of the services.
And they've participated in just about every combat action
that this country's seen since then.
The training that a SEAL gets,
vis-à-vis the training that I give, or that my group gives, to the actors,
of course, is about a million to one in ratio.
You notice on the swimming
the fact that there are no bubbles coming from the swimmers.
What we are doing is we're breathing in a manner
where we chemically take carbon dioxide
or bad "exhale air ", as we call it,
and scrub it through barium hydroxide.
Then we're breathing back in pure oxygen,
replenishing what we have metabolically consumed.
It's kind of my style, like just this scene right here when they pop up.
You see maybe some weird tight shot at the start
and then you go wide from different angles, different moves.
I don't like one master shot.
I really like to see it in different worlds,
like a musical does, like Busby Berkeley.
They always showed you these privileged angles.
That's something I really like.
There is a major logic flaw in the movie.
Why are boilers working on the rock
when this island hasn't been used for years?
My theory was, well, OK - my first main theory -
screw it, it's entertaining, don't you think?
My second theory was, OK, the rangers use it as a park service.
Maybe the boiler's still working.
I decided, let's go for entertainment value here.
Stanley Goodspeed at this point doesn't know who John Mason is.
For all he knows, he's a psycho killer, a psycho maniac,
and I don't like being stuck with him.
The individual operator or operative,
the guys in the intelligence community and so on,
are a very special breed.
In my mind, perhaps aren't even all there.
They choose to go out by themselves
and that is not something that a SEAL does.
They do not operate by themselves, they operate in at least pairs,
swim buddies, as we call them.
The individual operator, if they are, in fact, hit people,
they choose to go out and kill just to kill.
That, to me, is not healthy.
And I've been through the killing process many times.
So I have a difficult time
in understanding these types of guys or gals.
When the SEALS came into the boiler room, into here, which is linked.
This is, basically, a million-dollar set
and it's going to take us into this maze of tunnels.
The interesting thing about the set, the boiler room, through the tunnels,
was, in reality, they all were woven together,
so you can walk from one all the way through, and it was really neat.
We're now coming back into our main 100-foot-long tunnel.
By attaching things, I can put a wall in between
to make it look like something different,
and then I can pull it away, so I was getting more mileage out of my sets.
So this was obviously a fun set.
Sean wanted the water to be heated to 90 degrees.
We would work in waders and there was steam in there.
One day, the stomach flu went around the set
and the entire crew caught it within four hours.
The set doctor came to the set and he goes,
"Well, here's your problem. It's a big incubator."
I must say, it was like an amusement park ride.
It's a lot more impressive in person than it was on film.
We had so many tours come in there that I kept trying...
I got irritated, as a director,
because there were so many different studio people coming in.
They were on the Sony lot, saying,
"Wow, look at this set here."
And there were people from other studios,
from Warner Brothers, Universal, coming in to look at our set.
Every year in Hollywood there are a bunch of hot sets.
This became pretty hot
because it had running waterfalls, it had water.
It was just massive.
It was in the largest set, this is actually the largest stage in LA,
Stage 30 at Sony where they did the Busby Berkeley musicals.
Esther Williams did her pool stuff in here.
I think The Wizard Of Oz was shot on this stage.
This was the stuff that I liked.
All the accoutrements and the hardware.
I loved the way Michael shot that.
The second entry was done with the benefit of an optic
that was capable of viewing what was in the room
before we broke the manhole cover and climbed into the room.
The optic, or fibre optic, that was used
revealed the fact that the room was dark.
It was empty until we picked up a trembler device.
The viewer saw it as an optical IR reflector,
that if anybody broke the IR beam, or infrared beam,
it would set off an alarm or, at worst, set off an explosive device.
The trick was exceptional in that they'd booby-trapped the booby trap.
They being the Marines, they had a backup on the backup.
Very, very tricky stuff.
And, in fact, is typical of the thinking processes
of a pro in the booby-trap business.
I liked that because I certainly didn't want to see my SEALS get killed,
but I wanted them to go down in a professional manner.
Where they did screw up,
it would have virtually been impossible for them not to.
There are those situations,
no matter how good you are, you can't defeat a particular device.
Actually, the shower set was taken from an idea,
the idea being that the guards were always up high
and separated at Alcatraz. That's how it worked.
They never were in the population of the prisoners.
They were always behind bars.
That was the theory when they built the prison.
They were always with guns.
So, we built this shower set, made it much more elaborate,
and put stalls and made it with obstacles to shoot through,
and I can keep a gunfight going where guys can hide and dive.
The fortress idea.
The enemy up top is going to win.
I definitely related to General Hummel.
General Hummel is a warrior's warrior.
I had a lot to do with writing this scene with Jonathan Hensleigh,
and a lot of the dialogue between these two
was dialogue that came from my heart
one Sunday afternoon, all by myself.
The issue of Hummel's disgruntled attitude with the status quo
in the military leadership and in government leadership is a real issue.
I don't think anybody could have played that General Hummel
better than Harris did.
I'd worked with Michael Biehn on The Abyss some six years earlier, I guess.
That experience bound a lot of us together.
If you see each other or not, it's a common bond,
almost like being in a war of some kind.
But again, there are a lot of words involved.
But we both had confidence in each other
that we could just go for it and see how it played out.
Try not to have it sound like a bunch of bullshit.
Some lines like "You walked into the wrong goddamn room"
and "What the hell's wrong with you, man?"
that's just nice stuff.
Once the first round went off, there's only one immediate response
and that is to counter fire,
because you'll lay on if you have shit to throw back.
What these guys said about real gunfights.
One guys fires, everyone fires, and it's over in a few seconds.
They happen faster than you can even say "cease-fire".
And when you watch it, it's like art. It's like they're doing a dance.
There are shots in this movie that we don't have,
where they throw mags to each other
when their partner's out and they reload.
They throw them through the air, dive and reload
and it looks like a John Woo movie.
I've been shot in my shoulder and both of my legs.
What's it like? Can you continue to fight?
The pain is horrendously difficult to describe.
I would say that the first sensation is extreme heat
and it seems for ever, when you're flying in the air, for instance,
after you've been hit. And God willing,
if the wound is such that vital organs have not, in fact, been torn,
and it's a flesh wound and the bleeding is very under control,
one can continue to fight for days.
This situation, of course, would not have occurred in reality.
There is no sound military action
that does not incorporate some diversionary action.
Microseconds, if not, perhaps, a minute
prior to the insertion of this main force,
we have created a diversion on one of the beaches somewhere,
forcing all of Hummel's troops to respond to that.
These SEALS would not have been facing that many guns.
I can assure you that they would have conquered that situation.
I wanted to demonstrate in this scene
Goodspeed's horror of the killing and the shock of it.
And in this moment where I see the boy who has been shot and he falls,
I didn't want to be a macho.
I wanted Goodspeed to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
And...
because I think it's important,
you know, when there's killing and you're playing a hero,
that you don't just gloss over it,
that you register the impact of that.
That you're, I guess, by some definition, responsible with it.
Because too many times, I've seen in movies,
people get killed and the body count comes up
and there's just no regard paid to it.
You don't think about that person's family
or the suffering that'll happen.
You just get off on the killing, which is fine,
if it's done in such a stylised way
that, you know, you kind of forget about it.
But I thought The Rock could be a bit more real than that
and that's why I wanted Goodspeed to really be in horror.
It was a great moment,
as a director, watching an audience, because it was really effective.
The audience did not move or talk,
and they did not move for basically five minutes after
until we gave them some levity.
And always, once you shock an audience like that,
and you have a very sad scene,
it sometimes takes them a few minutes to try to bounce them back.
I know something that Jerry Bruckheimer told me about.
When he did Beverly Hills Cop I, the very first,
one of the beginning scenes in the movie in Beverly Hills Cop I,
where Eddie Murphy's friend gets murdered
in kind of an execution style, it's very horrific.
They actually did it a lot worse, where there was more blood.
Jerry said that it took the audience 15 minutes to bounce back,
meaning they didn't laugh for 15 minutes
at Eddie Murphy doing jokes.
So, it's kind of a weird thing.
You can't make it too gruesome and too horrific, and so my idea was,
well, let's be serious for a while
and then slowly get into some jokes to help them bounce back.
Why I liked this list that the FBI, the head of the FBI was listing off
is that, you know, for my generation, growing up with Vietnam,
and, you know, I was just born when Kennedy was shot...
just kind of a government not telling us the whole truth.
And this is kind of poking fun at the government.
And it's kind of... That's exactly what it is.
It's poking fun at the government for not telling the whole truth
and it's why we've got Sean Connery.
He's a government prisoner.
He, you know, it's like, we've got this guy who stole government ideas
and he's been locked away without being given a fair trial,
and he's been disowned by his country.
So that's all it was. Just poking fun.
And now, after we do this, this is the first point, right here,
where we get the audience back, and with humour.
Here is Nic Cage after he's seen death. He's a bit pissed off.
We tried to make him as studly as possible. It was a fun scene to do.
The thing is, once we saw Sean and Nic work together,
we wanted to get more and more.
I wish we had a few more scenes with Sean and Nic
where there was a little more banter, a little more character.
You know, you can only... you've only got two hours and five minutes.
There was a lot of story to put together.
Sean Connery, for me,
was the highlight of my experience with The Rock.
Especially in the latter stages, when we did a lot of water work.
I spent a lot of time with Sean in the water and,
while Sean was dressed up in this dry suit
that made him look like the Pillsbury Doughboy,
and he wasn't really happy about that.
He looked at me and I could tell he was just not real happy.
Not necessarily uncomfortable, but not happy with having to get wet.
I said, "Don't tell me you don't want to get wet."
He looked at me and he says, "I hate the water and I hate guns."
I said, "Sean, don't tell me that.
"You're the reason I joined the Navy SEALS."
There was one scene, I'm like, "Sean, I'll need to put you underwater.
"You need to hold your breath for 45 seconds.
"We'll have two guys holding you down
"and there's gonna be a 50-foot fireball blowing over your head."
Nicolas Cage goes,
"So, like, if I pop my head up, is my face just gonna melt off?"
"Basically, you're correct.
"Your face will melt off and your hair will burn, so just stay underwater."
So, Nic was like, "OK, let's go through this."
We rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed.
So, 45 minutes later, I finally got Nic Cage to commit and say,
"OK. I'm going to do this."
I got very close to jumping through a ring of fire when I was a kid.
I had become obsessed with Evel Knievel.
I would have been the star of my block,
but that wasn't allowed to happen.
Sean took a little bit more convincing.
I think, actually, once I got into the first hour and a half of discussion,
Sean was saying, "Why don't you do it, you fuckhead?"
And it was scary, I would be scared.
But there was just no way I could simulate it
to make it look the way I could by shooting it through the camera.
I couldn't do it any other way.
There was some talk and written documentation to the effect
that Sean was upset about doing that underwater shot
with the flame going overhead.
All I can tell you is that I've got a lot of years
with a lot of dangerous things
and Sean and I were not a heck of a lot different in our opinion
of the danger of that situation.
I thought it was a hairy trick.
I had Marshall Teague on one side with Nicolas Cage,
and I had Sean Connery.
We could not, for any reason, come to the surface.
The fireball explosion was not an easy shot to get.
It was very frightening.
There were these giant jet-burner things
that explode in a wall of flame that could really incinerate your head.
I think there were five of them.
And if either one of us had come up, you know, for air,
or happened to float up in that three seconds where the fire was going,
we would have been fried.
And Sean wasn't happy about it. He was pretty concerned about it, too.
But Mike really wanted to get the shot.
And you look at the movie - it's a great shot. It's as real as it gets.
But, probably, one of the most terrifying days of my life.
This is a scene that I did one last take
after I found out Don had passed away.
When he died, I think everybody was told
not to tell Michael until he finished the work, but nobody told me that.
I went up to Michael and said,
"I'm sorry. I'm having a hard time concentrating because of Don."
And he said, "Well, what about Don?"
And I said that he's dead.
And he thought I was joking
and just said, "Well, he was my friend. Tell me you're kidding."
That was the first time I ever had an experience like that.
I'd never had to tell anybody that anybody had died before.
I asked Nic, just finish this one shot and we'll go.
The reason I like the morgue scene with Sean and Nic,
it's the first time where you see Sean get his comeuppance
as he's holding that thing. It's like the first time he's vulnerable.
He doesn't really know. "I'm dealing with something I have no idea about."
The storyboards for the morgue scene
scripted all the beats I needed to do,
from the guy running into the glass room
and Sean and Nic diving behind the desk,
the guy diving out of the room from the exploding formaldehyde.
I actually created, when I shot this, I created too many beats,
too many action beats.
The gunfight went on just too long and it started to wreck the credibility
of this morgue being far away from the main cell house.
Why don't they hear the bullets?
So, what we kept doing in the edit is trying to trim it down, trim it down.
Basically, so that I can get the character of Nic and Sean firing
and seeing how Sean can take on a situation.
This is the first time where you're seeing Sean display his stuff.
Being incredibly trained at what he's doing
and being clever using the air conditioning
to let it fall on the guy who's shot in the feet.
In the scene coming up, with the dismantling of the rocket,
Sean really likes to go first.
He likes to get his coverage out of the way before everybody else.
That's great, you know.
That's in his contract and that's the way it is, and I'm fine with that.
It usually is good, because then I can figure out what the actor does
and then I can rehearse and rehearse and rehearse my parts
and come up with better ideas by the time the camera gets around on me.
In this particular scene, where I'm dismantling the rocket,
I had so many lines, and we shot, for the whole day, on Sean's side,
and I was just exhausted.
I couldn't... My lines were starting to get like mud.
I had rehearsed it too much and it was losing all its meaning for me.
Sean looked at me and he said, "Let it go."
And the camera came around and it was like magic.
Something magical happened.
He gave me two awesome takes
where he had this thing in his voice, and it was tougher,
and it was the first time where, in Nic's character arc,
where he's basically saying, "Leave me the hell alone
"because I know what I'm doing. This is my ball game now."
When we're working the scene out,
Nic is like, "I'm going to take this. I've got my concentration thing.
"I'm kind of like a bomb expert."
Then, when he pulls these pearls,
I love his genuine...
struggle and his interest here of the pearls.
It's like, "They're really good-looking."
It's kind of like the scientist has just taken over,
and it was a subtle thing he did,
but it makes him fascinated by the beauty of these dangerous chemicals.
One of the shades that I wanted
was really similar to what Richard Dreyfuss had done in Jaws
when he's going through the breakdown of the shark-attack victim
at the beginning, and he says, "Do not smoke in here."
I remember it came out most clearly when I said, "Do not move that."
I remember I sat here with Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay
and played Jaws for them.
And I said, "Now, look at this.
"This is how we can make Goodspeed more interesting.
"Make him really into his work."
So I admit that I steal from other places.
I think actors should be allowed to do that.
In fact, I ran into Richard later, when we were up for the Oscars,
and I told him that I had studied his work in Jaws for The Rock.
He said, "Which part did you play in The Rock? The convict?"
I think he thought I was blowing smoke up his ass.
But I wasn't.
It's obvious that I did learn
from some of what Dreyfuss had done in his movies.
One of the things that I do before I go on a talk show,
which is really terrifying for me, I don't like talk shows.
I always find myself in complete denial
and telling myself that I love pressure and that I eat pressure for breakfast
and I want more pressure.
I told Jerry Bruckheimer about that and I wanted to put it in the script.
I wanted that to be a trademark of the character.
We're going into a large action scene
that was supposed to be a mine cart chase,
but it wasn't meant to be on tracks.
It was to go on a track suspended above on the ceiling.
So it was these carts that would go very fast,
go down through tunnels and would swing and sway
and we were going to have some Marines chasing them on these carts
that were kind of suspended there.
You can see one of the suspended carts in here,
but we ran out of money.
Basically, plain and simple.
So we had to revert to a cheesy rail mine cart.
This tight stuff with Sean and Nic on the track,
this is my camera technique of them not moving at all.
We used lights strobing in front of their faces
and I'm shaking the camera,
operating the camera with headsets on and hearing their dialogue.
Granted, this was a hard scene to shoot,
because we only had 150 feet of track and we had to go back and forth.
There was no camera operator
brave enough to do the shots with Sean and Nic on it.
I volunteered and the problem is, when the thing would stop,
it would stop very abruptly over a 75-foot pit.
Those are the monorail carts Nic is hanging on
that were supposed to be a huge track chase.
It went round curves and banks,
and it was something that just became way too expensive to shoot.
This was not fun for me.
I have a fear of heights.
I really do.
I don't like to be up high.
I never have.
And I was up pretty high in that little basket.
I was never comfortable with it.
I really was glad when they would wheel it back
and bring me back to the ground.
Yeah. I had trouble all the way around with that little thing. I didn't like it.
Now, there's a funny story coming up here
that I guess I have to tell you.
I'm on the set, and I happen to be just coming back from a telephone call,
and I walk across
and I see a guy dangling in the air
and totally on flame.
I couldn't even see his head. He was totally consumed by fire.
I picked up the fire hose
and I pointed the fire hose at the actor and I put the fire out.
I looked at Harry, by my director's chair, on his knees, with a fire hose
putting this guy out, thinking, "I got it. I saved this guy."
I'm like, "Harry, what are you doing?!"
He says, "What do you mean? He's on fire."
I said, "Harry, it's the movies, man."
"That's how it's supposed to look. It should look scary."
And he's like, "But man, it looked really bad."
I'm like, "That's good."
Here was a scene where Sean Connery actually took his knife out
and pinned the guy's hand against...
He stabbed the guy's hand and pinned it to the cart,
so the guy was pinned to the cart.
And then he used another knife to cut the rope.
We took the guy's hand being pinned to the cart out,
because it felt wrong for Sean's character.
I loved it. Many women loved it who had seen it.
But it was just actually probably too gruesome.
I ultimately felt the scene could have been stronger
if we went the original way of the monorail carts.
It was a - conceptually in my head - a much cooler scene than this.
The purpose of this entire scene
is to provide jeopardy for Sean and Nic.
And, ultimately, what's going to happen here,
is that Sean is going to save Nic's life
and then vice versa,
Nic is going to save Sean's life.
It's the first time he's ever going to have to kill somebody.
And I generally am a director who likes to do my own second unit,
because, invariably, I feel they never really get what I'm really looking for.
And, case in point, the guys threw this dummy over.
They did it twice, because they had to drag this 150-pound dummy back,
find it in five feet of water, and drag it up.
Dummy.
I remember giving the guys hell.
"Now look what I've got. I've got a $72-million movie,
"with a guy falling out of a cart, who looks like a dummy."
Well, actually, this moment was important to me.
I wanted to make it very clear
how difficult it was for Goodspeed to kill somebody.
And this is the first person I kill in the movie.
And it doesn't come easily.
Again, when I saw the young man who got shot,
that weighed heavily on me, and to kill somebody weighed heavily on me.
I thought it was a new way of approaching the action character.
Typically, though, it is not an easy thing
to simply shoot and have somebody drop
and that's the end of the individual.
I have seen ambushes where eight, nine of us have been in an ambush
and we've completely covered a field of fire with tracers flying.
Every square inch of the panorama in front of me was loaded with tracers.
I've seen people walk through that kind of a thing and never get hit.
So it is very possible, in the midst of an extremely effective ambush,
to simply have a target pass through, and fate is fate. You know, God's will.
Perhaps that very same individual
who walked through that kind of ambush
got hit by a bus four years later.
You know, it's a fatalistic attitude, perhaps,
but I honestly believe, as a result of seeing some things like that,
that when it's your time, it's your time.
Sean Connery coming out of the tube
is the very first shot I shot with Sean Connery.
Shooting this, with this guy on the prison yard
was actually pretty scary.
It looked like we were going to...
It was actually one of the scariest scenes that I shot
because the actor was so in character.
It looked like we were going to perform an execution.
It was frightening.
There was a weird fog on Alcatraz, as if it was a weird dream.
I'm a director who likes to use smoke.
It's kind of a mythical guy disappearing.
This shot, where he walks into the steam,
Sean Connery goes, "I love that. That's great."
Ed Harris wanted Sean Connery's character in the movie.
Ed wanted to be, as he said, the guy.
I'm like, "Ed, why do you want to be the guy?"
He says, "Well, because he's cool."
The joy I get out of being an actor
is just trying to play different kinds of characters.
Plus, my guy didn't have any humour.
These guys get all the funny lines.
I'm like this pretty straight guy.
He could have been played much more cocky,
much more, you know...
But that's not who he was.
You can't necessarily play a jokester who's got 18 canisters of poison gas
because then he is a madman.
The guy's deadly serious.
He's a little kind of like, "Lighten up, pal."
But that's who the guy was, as far as I was concerned.
But my technique is...
That's like Just Cause.
I had a physicality of this guy. It was pretty out there.
And I see the cut of the movie and it's just my head.
Where is the rest of this guy's body? He's a pretty strange fellow.
Let's get some of the movement in there.
I kind of had an interesting...
I felt I had created some kind of interesting,
very bizarre human being here.
This mass murderer guy.
And a lot of the stuff was just really tight head shots.
I'm not saying that it's not a powerful thing to move in on,
but to just live there...
It's not like I sit down and orchestrate
to move this finger on this word,
and do this particular gesture.
I believe in economy of gesture,
and that gesture should mean something.
The one thing I can't stand in the end, and you see a lot of it in film,
you see people with their hands gesturing on every word they say,
which means absolutely nothing,
other than that they don't know what they're talking about,
or they need some help to say what they're saying.
It's not a gesture that has meaning, it's an excuse
and it's very haphazard, it's very generalised and it doesn't add much.
There was some effort to make this guy well read,
but that didn't pan out.
Since this guy really wasn't, we didn't play up that aspect.
It wasn't really justified to do so.
We sort of had to break down some of these other passages
and, you know, and speeches that he had,
so that he sounded a little more inside of himself,
as opposed to somebody trying to be somebody.
I'm not a writer. I'm an actor.
When I have to rewrite a script, I'm not very happy
because I don't consider that that's my job.
My job is to act material that has been given to me to interpret and perform.
I've always appreciated Sean from being a kid, and James Bond.
He didn't know much about me when we worked on Just Cause,
and I think he went, "Wow, this guy's all right."
And he allowed me to kind of blow some stuff out in that film.
I kind of screamed in his face and he was totally up for it.
He's not precious about, "Hey, I'm the star. Treat me..."
It's like, "Let's get down and dirty. Let's do this." He's got guts.
Movies are truly the collaborative art form.
And I know most directors don't agree with that, but they really are.
I think that many actors shoot themselves in the foot
because they make it hard for the rest of us
because they will go to dailies and go, "Oh, I look terrible. Reshoot it."
And it's coming out of an irresponsible place.
And that hurts us
because other directors don't want to show actors the footage or the dailies.
So this was the scene where I had not quite worked out the dialogue.
And I really wanted to get the idea of the Russian poison,
that eight ounces properly dispersed would exterminate the world.
I wanted to get that information in there, but we shot it one way
and I wasn't happy with it.
I guess it was too much of a downer at this point in the movie,
and they were looking for some humour.
Michael kept pushing me to find the humour.
So we were not working well together on this particular scene.
And I remember I went into Michael's trailer
and we were trying to come up with the right way to play that scene,
and I said, "Look, why don't you show me
"some of the cut footage of the scenes preceding it
"so I can get the ideas."
"Well, it's not ready yet. I don't want to show it to you."
A lot of actors run up against that, where they're frustrated
because they're denied the right to see the cut footage.
And I said, "But look, Michael, it is a collaborative art form.
"We're a team. We're working together here.
"If you show me, I might come up with an idea that will help the movie."
And he said, "Oh, well, OK, fine." And he showed it to me.
And that was when we luckily were able to get that line about,
"I take pleasure in gutting you, boy" from the Marine,
and spin off on that into this whole kind of diatribe about violence.
You know, "I'm 16. I'm angry at my father."
And, you know, "Shame on them." And all that kind of...
I guess, really condescending attitude from Goodspeed,
which, for me, was a lot of fun to play.
That really came out of the collaboration
of Michael letting me see the preceding... the previous scene.
If he had not shown it to me,
I never would have gotten into that groove with Michael.
In this scene, I say this phrase, "How in the name of Zeus' butthole?"
because my character doesn't swear,
in such a way that I had heard it in my head
almost like a rhythm, or a musical thing.
And I wanted to really hit those two words hard.
And also hit the word "maybe" hard.
And I guess that's what I meant by musical.
Even, like, hitting my foot on the ground after I say it,
it's almost percussion, you know.
But you really have to learn to be objective
so that you can make the right choice.
And I think Michael might have had a bad experience.
But when he did show me the previous scene,
it really did help the movie as a whole.
It all depends on how you work.
It depends on what the part calls for.
It depends how adventurous you feel like being. It just changes.
To me, the thing that allows you to get into the character the most
is a good script and a solid script
and a relationship with other characters, you know.
That's, to me, where always the key lies,
because ultimately you're defined by what this guy does,
what your character does, what he says.
And that's scripted, you know.
For better or for worse, whether the dialogue's more flexible,
where it's a movie where you change words every other day,
or one where the script is the bible and you're saying what is written.
So it really changes, but the story line and what the character does,
what moves him through the film, what his through line is,
that's more defining than any of the work one does really, in some sense.
It's an interesting question about where your responsibility lies,
with the budget and the acting and the spirit of collaboration.
And, look, on a $90-million movie you're allowed to experiment,
and my argument is, yeah, you know, you've got $90 million.
Spend the money where it counts and give the actors more time.
And I'm all about the actors and that's what I'm mostly concerned about.
I would rather take the money and do a few more takes and get it right.
Or try something and then you have a collection of takes
and different experiments.
And then you do your rough-cut
and then, as everything seems to be today,
go to your test screenings
and see what the audience likes or doesn't like.
I mean, Jerry Bruckheimer knows how to be a crowd pleaser,
and he does that by really incorporating the audience
and their reaction.
The problem with that sometimes is on other movies,
like Leaving Las Vegas, for example,
you know, you're making a very personal vision,
and either you like it or you don't.
And Mike Figgis really wanted that
and opted for a much smaller budget
so that he could do his movie his way.
And that was it.
If you think about movies like Citizen Kane,
that movie would have been shot down by test screenings.
It wasn't until later that it was hailed as the great movie that it is now.
I may have gotten off the right track,
which is more about, you know,
where you're allowed to explore and improvise
with the low-budget movie and the big-budget movie.
And I say both places, you know.
On a smaller budget,
I feel like we're not, you know, spending all your money.
Let us try really new things.
You know? And let's take a chance on this.
And that's the way I've approached it.
I've used independent movies as a lab to come up with ideas.
But I find now that I've made some big-budget movies, like The Rock,
I borrow so much from these smaller movies
that there really is no difference.
You just approach it with the same energy
and the same creative place.
And in this scene in particular,
this is a scene that I did two minutes after I wrote it in my trailer.
I came to the set and I read the whole thing off a cue card
because I wasn't sure what I was going to say
until I'd finished the scene.
And Michael immediately wanted to strike that down.
I said, "But, Michael, I've been doing this for years.
"I read off cue cards in times of a pinch,
"where you don't have time to memorise the lines.
"Sometimes you don't know what you're going to say,
"and I need you to let me use cue cards."
And finally he did, but at first he was really against it.
He said he could see me reading, but I don't believe it.
I think that was just a phobia of his.
This is an $80-million movie,
but I feel that the creative process is really the same,
whether you're working on a little movie or a big movie.
At least, I hope to try to make it the same,
and not be intimidated by all the money that was spent.
And then, also, in some ways, The Rock really taught me a lot,
because of the style, the genre,
and what needs have to be met for it to work.
And it teaches you to be succinct,
pristine in your choices,
or you'll get cut out.
You have to really propel the plot and serve the script in these movies.
And so you're forced to come up with original ideas
in the quickest amount of time possible.
And I do like that about action movies.
I think that's the most rewarding thing about doing this movie.
But Michael again did encourage me
to get more far out with the character,
to be more, you know, humorous.
And he also, at the end of the day, is the one that selects the right takes,
and the one that either pushes for the comedy or doesn't.
And I like his choices.
I feel that he went out on a limb and took some chances,
which I always admire.
Well, Michael Bay, he did often ask me during the course of the film,
"What was Jim Cameron like to work with? What was he like?"
I actually met with Jim Cameron at Titanic.
Jim goes to me, "So, I hear from other crew people
"we're very much alike when we work."
He seemed to want to be compared to Cameron in some sense.
And I kept saying, "Michael, Jim's an OK guy. I like him.
"But when he was working, he was a total asshole.
"Why do you want to be like him?
"Why do you want to emulate this guy? I don't get it, you know.
"You can get just as much out of people by treating them with respect,
"and, you know, not having to raise your voice, and being organised,
"than you can yelling and screaming and running around
"and having 55 fucking cameras working
"and shooting thousands and thousands of feet every day.
"I mean, you know, you don't have to do that, man.
"You're just starting out. You can do anything you want."
For some reason, he liked the image of being like the tough guy,
the guy with the whip, you know, yelling and screaming.
But Michael's a good guy.
He's so obviously a sweet guy at heart, that it's...
The crew will give you another story,
but as far as the actors are concerned,
I never had a hard time with him.
I would laugh more than get upset. He never offended me.
Some of the crew were ready to strangle him, and he enjoyed that.
He worked them hard and we were working on Alcatraz.
It was cold and wet and not that pleasant,
and we worked some really long hours.
He got into it. He dug it, you know.
He's a former athlete and likes challenging people that way.
I'm definitely not mean. I'm not cruel. I'm tough.
I heard Jim's a maniac. I don't think I'm a maniac.
But I know I'm very energetic.
I just can't stay still.
Otherwise I get bored.
I liked working with David Morse a lot. He's a really interesting man.
Very soft-spoken.
He's not in the film much, but I think you do feel his presence.
He has a very strong presence.
We actually did rehearse this scene quite a bit, me and David.
Sometimes Mike was there, but we worked on it a lot on our own,
just to try and make sense out of it,
change some of the dialogue, but mostly just try to physicalise it
and get down to some truth between us, you know.
It's in the middle of the day. It's out of nowhere.
You've got to create all this shit.
So when actors have a certain appreciation of the work itself,
and know how to rehearse and what it means to clarify certain moments,
what is going on between us, what do you need from me here
to help you with this moment, whatever it might be.
Even if it's half an hour of that,
it helps inform the scene somewhat.
We kind of left the president out.
I sometimes have a hard time, I think a lot of people do,
when they see presidents in movies.
It reads false, so what I tried to do with the president,
I tried to keep him in shadow and shoot really tight obscure shots,
never seeing him front on and giving a full-face shot of the president.
I wanted him to be more of a figurehead.
I like Philip Baker Hall.
He's an actor that I worked with on Kiss Of Death,
and I saw his work on a movie called Secret Honour by Robert Altman.
He's one of my favourite performances,
so I was happy that he was in this picture as well.
In the flight of this attack force
that's getting pulled together here,
we're using F-18 jets. F-18 jets are being flown by the Air Force here.
And that, of course, to the knowledgeable observer,
is not possible because the Air Force did not buy the F-18 jet.
The Navy and the Marines fly F-18s.
So my apologies to the technical world on the outside,
but the aesthetics of the F-18 was much more desirable to the director.
He was fully informed
of the fact that the Air Force was flying a naval weapon.
Again, it's a movie, folks.
What happens a lot on bigger movies is we need rewriters.
I mean, in a picture-perfect world
you would have one writer write a script
and it would take him a year, year and a half,
to do his masterpiece.
But that's not the way Hollywood works.
When there's a hot idea, you've got to move on it.
The big summer's coming. We need product in the pipeline.
It's very business-orientated and a mixture between art and commerce.
When The Rock came, there was an idea written by Weisberg Cook.
It was an idea that I originally had passed on.
When Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer decided to produce it,
I came on board.
Granted, we were going to make the script a lot smarter
in terms of what the government would really do in this situation,
and change a lot of the script.
So after we had Weisberg Cook's draft,
we went to Mark Rosner, who then made a draft
that added some good things, good character things,
but I felt it was the wrong movie.
I didn't really sign on to do that type of movie.
It was too much like a Crimson Tide.
And I wanted a broader, more appealing movie than Crimson Tide.
When a rewriter comes in, he wants to throw out all the good ideas
so he can put in all his ideas so that he can get screenwriting credit.
You want this person to get credit for the hard work they put in
so ultimately they can get residuals on the movie when it's released,
and if, hopefully, it's financially sound, they can make a lot of money.
Basically, we're talking about an ego and a money game here.
And that's why rewriters like to change everything
when they attack a new script.
The major writers involved were Weisberg Cook,
Mark Rosner, and then Jonathan Hensleigh.
And Clement, La Frenais and Sorkin came in for a few weeks at a time.
They weren't due credit, cos they were just doing punch-up
and some scene work.
The problem was, when the movie was released,
we had posters that said,
"Movie written by Weisberg, Cook, Jonathan Hensleigh."
They left out Mark Rosner's name on the poster.
The Writers' Guild got involved
and I guess there was a terrible struggle.
Jonathan Hensleigh was denied credit,
cos there was a lot of writer infighting.
I was vocal about it because I felt
that I made the movie that Jonathan Hensleigh wrote.
I didn't make the movie Mark Rosner wrote.
And I made an idea that Weisberg Cook wrote.
But what this does, the bad thing it does,
when a rewriter comes in, he is now going to ask for a small fortune,
because he knows most likely he will be denied writing credit
and he won't get any residuals,
and he won't have the ego of having his name on the big screen.
So it kind of creates a bad thing in Hollywood.
Watch when Ed Harris dies.
Ed Harris is going to fly down and land on a blue mat.
See at the bottom of the frame.
It was actually left in the movie. It's there.
Slow your laser disc down when he lands
and you'll see him land on a blue mat.
Yeah, me and Nic, we had a lot to do with each other in this movie.
That was it just then.
He drags me down the hallway and asks me questions.
As soon as I give him the answers, it's, "See you later, pal."
I look forward to maybe working with him some day in a real sense.
Sean used to say, "Go with the priority."
I said to Sean, "Here's the General. He's been shot, he's dying.
"Do I play the horror of that,
"or do I just get the information on where the last rocket is?"
He said, "You gotta go with the priority.
"This is not the time in the movie
"where you dwell on the horror of death.
"The audience wants to get going, get moving. Let's save the day."
It would have been irresponsible of me to sit there
and lament the horror of Ed Harris' character dying like that.
It was more appropriate in the other scene that we talked about.
But, in this case, Sean kind of got me out of hot water.
As this movie was basically in the final stages,
people were starting to see the edit and Nic Cage's performance.
Nic Cage has always been Nic Cage. He's always been a great actor.
But people were saying,
"This is the movie that will make Nic Cage a movie star."
There's a difference between being a great actor and a movie star.
A movie star is someone that has appeal around the world.
People want to see a movie because this actor is in it.
And this is Nic's first big worldwide major exposure film.
This scene is really right on the edge of being over the top
in an entertaining way.
You go with the fun of saying,
you know, "You're the rocket man."
And I didn't know how to make that work
unless I could begin building Stanley Goodspeed's character
by being a Beatle maniac, talking about being a chemical superfreak.
Talking about music, loving music, playing the guitar.
And that way I could say, "You like Elton John's song Rocket Man.
"You're the rocket man."
It had to come out of an organic place and not just out of anywhere,
which is what it did in the beginning in the first script that I read.
"How do you like how that shit works?"
is really a tag punch line.
You know, a sort of ba-da-ba-ba-da-ba attitude.
But I went with it because, in this particular case,
I guess it was right for the movie at that particular point in the movie.
But it wasn't easy for me.
The reason why I like Nic Cage as an action hero,
when he pushes that button,
take a look at that little cut when he pops his eyes up.
He's got these big bug eyes.
You just don't see that with action heroes.
I mean, that's just like so endearing and cool.
This was the scene Michael Bay kept making me do over and over,
grabbing the pearl ball, looking at it.
And in one take, I needed him to stop and reset and do it again.
This was actually some of the first stuff we shot.
And, in fact, we reshot it later at the end of the shoot
when we got into step with each other
and we found our best way of working together,
which really did happen.
I love the way Michael shot this.
And I love the way the ball looks,
running for the ball, the leap, and then they use it in the trailer.
You can see his eye and his love of stuff, you know.
It's the way he photographs things.
He makes them look more interesting than they are.
I mean, all it is is a green ball of Prell.
This was weird for me.
After all this lamenting, this chemical that's so poisonous,
I just put all the stuff in a little crate, but there's no time.
You gotta hurry and go with the priority.
It seemed like I would have been a bit more ginger with all that poison,
but, anyway, what are you gonna do?
Normally, when a director's done with the movie,
he takes a week or two off.
I actually went right into the edit room. I had no time off.
ZWe brought on four editors, and each editor had different...
I would take scenes and move them to different rooms
cos each editor was good at certain things.
Richard was good at finding those moments in performances.
Glen Scantlebury was kind of a commercial sensibility.
He was very good at some of my quicker-cut stuff.
Then I would take into Mark Goldblatt.
He would sometimes rough out some of the action.
Then John Wright, who was an editor
who cut some of the Die Hards and Broken Arrow.
He's an editor who doesn't like to have a director in the room.
I guess that's OK,
but I'm a director that always sits over the editors' shoulders.
John had some very good ideas.
It's sometimes great to have another editor to have a second opinion.
It's kind of funny how I used all the editors
to try to make one cohesive picture.
There are things I would have cut longer,
but apparently when we did our screening, it tested huge.
We got a number that was so high for action movies
that the people who do the numbers in the National Research Group
came up to shake my hand.
It was kind of overwhelming.
That's what got the studio to really market the hell out of the movie.
I direct a movie so that people watch and enjoy it,
and forget the world for two hours.
That's my ultimate joy.
By doing two movies that have been very successful at the box office,
I've gotten clout in Hollywood.
And it's kind of weird, because Jerry Bruckheimer told me,
"You now have the power to greenlight a movie."
You need to attach your name to a movie
and a studio will greenlight your movie.
And that's kind of a weird feeling.
Michael Bay said, "You're gonna be in this movie now for 50 minutes
"and there's no dialogue. I need you to say something
"so they know you're still there."
So we did the "I love pressure" thing.
Oh, this scene, I tell you, they wanted me to say something here.
I say, "Eat that, you fuck!"
which to me made sense.
The character had become a hero.
He had gone all the way and kind of just went for it,
and became guttural and visceral and started swearing,
and just was at the end of his rope.
They wanted me to say, "Did I ever tell you I was gonna be a dad?"
tying back into the Carla scene and her being pregnant.
Jerry called me and said, "Would you just try it? It might work."
I said, "Look, I'll try it, but it's not going to work."
And Michael Bay knew it wasn't going to work
and it didn't wind up in the movie.
That's testimony to Bruckheimer.
He said he wouldn't use it if it didn't work, and it didn't.
How do you play being injected with atropine? What does that do to you?
So I got into the idea of Japanese kabuki
where he could be a little bit larger than life there
and do movement that would be more kabuki-like.
You know, hari-kari and stabbing yourself
and kind of Japanese acting.
And also The French Connection.
There is a scene where Gene Hackman is injected
or is going through some kind of withdrawal.
He moves his legs in a certain way and I looked at that.
Michael Bay kept saying, "Why are you talking like this?
"Why do you wanna see The French Connection?"
But I remember these things from these old movies that I'd seen
that made a lasting impression on me.
And I tried it. I did this speed legs thing, I call it,
where I injected myself with atropine
and my legs start kicking like a bicycle.
And then I stop myself.
And I really liked it, but Bruckheimer played it for a test screening
and I guess he got a laugh there that he didn't want.
And so they cut it down, but I think it was interesting.
I think it worked. It just wasn't the right audience for it.
What you get is a more condensed version of it.
In building towards the Zen scene with Nic Cage,
my impression was that moment in Platoon with Willem Dafoe
after Tom Berenger left him in the woods and they're flying away.
Tom Berenger, I think, shot him.
Willem Dafoe is now running through the jungle
and he's being chased by a horde of VCs.
And explosions are going off in the background.
That was the kind of total mood I was trying to create with Nic Cage.
The impending doom of the flames coming in on him
that were not seeing his flare because they were coming in so fast.
This actually... I got that idea from Matthew Modine.
In Birdy there's a wonderful shot
where Matthew's screaming after the birds get incinerated.
And the camera pulls up.
There's a really good marriage
between Alan Parker's camera and Matthew Modine.
In that shot, where I'm yelling at the jets,
I remember Michael Bay really wanting me to be crying.
And I just thought that that would not be appropriate that this man...
It's more sad to see a man trying to yell to stop the jets.
Even then he won't get out.
To cave in and start feeling sorry for himself,
I don't feel that that would... The audience would not accept that.
When I saw the first cut, you get totally depressed.
And then you work on it and you work on it and you work on it.
You've seen it so much and you're kind of numb to it.
And what I did, cos I didn't want to get too insulated,
I took some edits home to my house
and I showed some people at my house.
I mainly tried to get a lot of women to see it at my house
because I wanted to get their opinion.
There were just too many guys cutting in the cutting room.
Getting that female opinion was so important,
and they had a lot of great things to say.
In this last scene in the movie
we really demonstrate our friendship.
I get Connery out of hot water
and say, this is it, you know, "He's dead." And he's free.
And you could see how difficult it is for Mason to say thank you.
I say, "There's clothes in Room 26",
which is a private message to my son who was born on the 26th.
I guess it's no longer private.
At least now he'll know definitely it was him I was thinking about.
I remember going to this screening on the Disney jet,
and it's very funny about the Disney jet because you go...
I'd just done this R-rated action movie with a lot of "fucks" in it,
and a lot of tough guys and a lot of killing,
and I'm on a plane, with the hostess wearing a Disney Mickey Mouse tie,
and we have Mickey Mouse napkins and Mickey Mouse cups.
It just didn't fit. It just seemed so funny.
I just kept thinking, "God, what if this movie flops?"
I realised, "Oh, my God. I'd better take a deal and get this money
"cos this movie will flop and my career will be over."
I guess I didn't fully believe in myself.
I didn't know how the movie would respond
and I didn't feel we had any advertising campaign.
But a miraculous thing happened after Joe Roth saw the movie.
He knew he had a big movie and he marketed the hell out of the movie.
When we were talking about mythic characters
and do they exist in action movies,
this shot of Sean disappearing,
he's there one moment and then he's gone.
It's kind of like the mythic thing that I liked with Sean.
It's just like he's gone.
I remember there was a discussion. Sean was wanting to ask...
Sean asked me, "Why wasn't the shot
"with me and my daughter driving up the coast in the movie?"
And I was pretty adamant, saying, "With Nic Cage calling you,
"and you are there and then all of a sudden you've just vanished,
"it's just a much more mythical way to end
"your presence in the movie."
Actually, the sequel that I have in my mind for this movie
is basically Nic Cage after he is married to Carla.
They drive off.
Nic Cage has the microfilm of all this bad government confidential,
like who killed JFK, whatnot.
The government comes after Nic Cage with a vengeance.
I mean, we're talking "out to kill".
And it turns into more of a thriller, and Nic Cage has nowhere to turn.
He's been stabbed in the back by the government and they're after him.
Maybe he takes Carla, maybe they separate.
I'd really like to separate Nic and Carla
and have Nic try to employ the help of Sean Connery.
Basically, taking The Rock off exactly where it left off.
I was not a fan of the last scene in the movie when we shot it.
I really didn't want that scene in the movie.
But it is a coda, it is a tag to the end of the whole thing
and it smacks of sequel in some way.
But then I saw the movie,
and I saw how much fun the audience got from the scene
and it didn't offend me.
It works, somehow.
That is kind of the great magic of Jerry Bruckheimer, you know.
He really knows what he's doing and what he wants.
He really wanted this scene to be in the movie.
It was, I think, his idea.
I was very pleased with it. Pleasantly surprised.
Sure, it's unfortunate on this picture I lost my partner.
He died during the filming of it. He passed away.
Besides being a terrific friend,
he was a great partner, although we had split up.
Our agendas had changed during the making of the picture.
But he brought an enormous amount to everything he did in his life.
He did everything at high speed.
And he added a lot to the character of Hummel
and to a lot in this picture, as he did in all our movies.
I was fortunate to have his great expertise in storytelling.
He was a great storyteller and showman.
I went to the Don Simpson school of film making.
I knew I understood the camera and how to make movies,
but I didn't understand the depth of character.
He was a great critic on screenplays.
He used to write at least 45 pages of notes on every script
where he'd tear them apart and build them back up again.
It's a skill that very few people, if any, have in this industry.
It was a great loss to lose that and to lose him,
because he was a great friend and a partner.
But I feel he's up there.
He's with us every day. He's with me every day.
And he guides me in what my future will bring.
He's a great voice. Always.
Being around Don, he was so charismatic,
you're around a guy who's kind of a larger-than-life type of guy.
Granted, you always have to put the Don theory in things.
When he says something, it sometimes...
He multiplies it by four.
He says he grew up in Alaska, where he did,
and he once fought a bear.
It's like, "Oh, I killed a bear once when I was a kid, with a knife,
"cos I was attacked."
I think his saying was, "One night, it got so cold
"I had to sleep in the belly of a bear."
I think that's it. It's kind of a weird character to be around.
I just do know that there were demons he had.
That's why he was never married and...
You know, the sad thing was, I just felt Don was a lonely guy.
You know, sometimes, you go to Don's house,
and you can't leave for hours
because he'll tell you story after story after story.
Don is a great showman.
I mean, this man could sell anything to anybody.
I've seen him sell actors,
I've seen him sell studio executives, presidents of studios.
I mean, Jerry's the first wave of attack, and then he sics Don later.
That's the way they work.
I remember I was cutting Bad Boys,
and Don and Jerry
were going to see their screening of Crimson Tide in Arizona.
Jerry's sitting at the edit table with me and the editor,
and Jerry's kind of in ratty jeans and a ratty jean shirt.
Don comes in with his assistant, carrying all black suits,
all either Armani... whatever, yada, yada, yada.
Just expensive labels.
He kind of unfurls them. He has his assistant place them on the couch.
Let me tell you a bit about the edit room before I go on.
The edit room, you rent a lot of bad furniture,
it's very unglamorous.
Every day, at lunch, I would go, at Columbia,
and get three scoops of chocolate mint-chip ice cream.
And Jerry was sitting there at the edit room and he goes,
"Don, why are you bringing suits?"
He says, "Jerry, because we are producers.
"We need to show them who we are.
"We're producers and this is our movie."
Don, in his very grand way, is like,
picking out his black suit where he's gonna go.
Jerry's miserable because he doesn't have time to go and get a suit for him.
Jerry's going to be wearing ratty jeans
and he's just focusing on cutting Bad Boys.
Don unfurls the suits
and then, suddenly, in the background, you hear,
"Goddamn motherfucking cocksucker. What the fuck?!
"Who the fuck put the fucking ice cream on the...?
"All over my fucking suits!"
He got green chocolate-chip ice cream all over all of his suits,
because I left it there on the couch, like an idiot.
And Jerry just kind of looked back at Don,
because Don is just screaming, ranting and raving,
trying to wipe off his $2,000 suits.
Jerry's like, "Oh, good, Don. Now you'll go dressed like me."
It just doesn't faze Jerry -
Don and his big outbursts and whatnot.
That was kind of a moment that was ingrained in my head
just because of how funny it was,
and it showed how different these guys were who worked together.
What I think I'll miss about Don most, besides his stories and his humour,
was his intense passion for things,
his intense passion for film making.
He had a real fire to him.
There's a bit of Don in all our movies' characters.
There's a little bit of the character in Days Of Thunder,
a little bit of the character in Top Gun.
There's a little bit of all of us in our movies.
So, you know, we kind of live on through our films.