MATT BETTINELLI-OLPIN: Hey, I'm Matt Bettinelli-Olpin.
SAMARA WEAVING: Yup. Sorry...
- Sorry. Whole name. - TYLER GILLETT: We'll be doing that a lot.
I'm Samara Weaving. Just call me Sam, though.
I'm Tyler Gillett.
CHAD VILLELLA: And I'm Chad Villella.
All right, we did it.
Chad, your ringer's not going off right now.
No, I know.
I've had the Searchlight fanfare as my ringtone...
- Really? - ...for six years.
But it's the most annoying, obnoxious flute version.
Yeah, it's by this kid who did it with a flute.
- That's awesome. - Yeah.
And really stuck the landing. So...
- He tempted fate. - Yeah.
And Chad's the only person we know who leaves his ringer on.
- Yeah, all the time. Volume up. - All the fucking time.
Look at that. Who did the games for this? Who was the...
Well, it was... Andrew Stearn was our production designer,
and Bradley Graves was the art director,
and they had a team of really incredible artists
that designed all of these from scratch.
- Yeah. - And I remember...
Also who did the... I love the, what's it called?
- The titles? - The titles.
- Yeah. - I love the title scenes.
This company called Film-O-Graph.
- Who's done... - They're so good.
...a ton of really amazing title work.
It was actually, it was a Hail Mary throw,
sort of the last thing two days before... Yeah.
Two days before we were lock picture.
- Really? - Maybe we should
have a conversation about our opening title.
- Yeah. - Abracadabra.
♪♪
I remember doing the...
trying to get names for those board games cleared.
- That was a crazy thing. - I remember that.
It was nuts!
We'd sent a list for 200 different weird names
and they only cleared eight of them or something crazy like that.
And this opening shot we only had two takes of it,
maybe three, and it was right after lunch, middle of the night.
- I don't know if you guys remember this. - Yeah.
And we had to set everything up, scramble
and then there was a weird stutter on the camera,
and we literally were stopped down for ten minutes.
I don't know if this is gonna work.
I guess we'll get to post and hopefully we can fix it.
Yeah, and that was it.
What do you tell the kids in this?
- They were incredible. - Run away!
Just run!
Yeah, Etienne, who plays Young Daniel...
- Yeah. - ...he's just at the age
where he understands the kind of the game.
- Right. - And so took direction really well.
Chase was just this young kid who you said just go have fun.
- Just go. - Follow your older brother's lead.
He... when he was running talked into his microphone and would say,
"Can anybody hear me? Can anybody hear me?"
That was really funny. Yeah, it was great.
And then I remember at the end of the run
he got into that dark room and he was like, "This place is scary."
Also, this sequence is probably the closest to the storyboards that we...
- Yeah, absolutely. - ...we got.
Like, we storyboarded this whole thing out.
Yeah, the first thing we storyboarded, and this one kind of stuck to it.
'Cause we only had half a day to do it,
so you kind of like, here's the guide, let's get these...
So, the rest of the shoot you were like...
We boarded a bunch of things out,
- but they, we shot list everything. - Like the well, the well.
But this was the one sequence that was boarded
that we were fairly, fairly loyal to.
This was also a scene, though,
that it was like the middle of the day
we showed up post lunch
and we had worked with those actors absolutely zero
until they showed up to do that sequence.
- For two hours. - Yeah, it was a really...
They match really well with Aunt Helene, though.
Hey.
- Who the hell is that? - That's you.
Look at that.
Do you remember when you first heard about this?
- I was nervous doing this scene. - This scene in particular?
Yeah, because it was...
...a bit of a monologue.
I mean, not really but then...
and then the camera angle we had to be...
- Really precise. - With the mirrors.
Well, there were so many, yeah, mirrors everywhere.
There's three grips with bounce cards and flags
running around behind Adam Tupper, who was our Steadicam operator.
That was my first cigarette in four years.
Sorry.
No, it was really gross 'cause they had the...
Yeah, those are gross.
- The herbal ones. - The herbal ones.
What's in 'em? What's herbal?
- Herbs. - Yeah.
- Carpet shavings. - Grass and...
Mark.
This was also a tricky scene because this is...
really the only scene in the movie
- where things are like happy and... - Only joyous one.
- So hopeful. Full of love. - Yeah.
Sunlit. You guys are joking around with each other.
- Having a grand time. - Yeah. Yeah.
He just puts out the cigarette. He's, like, no smoking.
So, the weird thing about this room that we shot in,
we'd originally scouted it. It's in this house in Oshua,
but the one we'd originally chosen was on the other side of the house.
- Is this the Billy Madison one? - This is the Billy Madison one.
But that shot looking out down onto the wedding
was actually shot from the opposite side of the house,
but that room was this like sea foam green color.
That's right! I remember...
You couldn't paint anything 'cause it's this historic...
You can watch Handmaid's Tale, it's in there.
Yeah. Yeah.
But the geography of this house,
this was the first kind of brain-breaking situation for us,
because where the secret passageway is that you'll see coming up
and where all the hallways are.
This room, actually, looking out those windows and beyond that wall,
that's behind the two of you right now is just open air.
Makes no sense logically, but we...
That was just a cupboard, right?
- What was... Yeah. - Yeah, it was a weird wardrobe...
It was a fun cupboard to jostle in there.
Adam!
Here comes the groom...
We had so much fun.
Yeah, I remember on this scene asking him to give jokes...
Give me a line, and then you cut it.
And then, yeah, it didn't make the cut.
They were really good. He came up with some great stuff.
I was waiting for that. I was like, Adam's jokes gonna...
This is one of those scenes, too,
that I think we were worried about in the shooting of.
We thought it was gonna be really complicated
but actually ended up shooting out a lot quicker.
- Yeah. - And was a lot smoother.
It was... Which a lot of it is just
how we kind of blocked it with the Steadicam
and has this sort of drifting quality
that you can kind of fall into different frames
instead of having to move the camera
and do a bunch of different setups, but...
And it's also... we're gonna say this probably a hundred times
but it's testament to you and the rest of the cast
how locked in everybody is
and how just natural everybody feels and connected
and so it made everything in the edit so much easier.
Well, the writing was so well done and then you guys were so trusting,
like, "Just have fun and feel it out,"
and working with Mark was,
we were kind of on the same page all the time and just...
Yeah, you guys seemed like you clicked from day one.
...trying not to laugh.
Did you have conversations about the scene
before you guys got in and did it
or was it really more about just being sort of spontaneous.
You know my memory's shocking,
but I remember we went
- and had... - Just make something up.
Yeah.
Yeah, we spoke long and deeply about...
No, I think we went and had beers and just got along.
- Right. - And we have similar sense of humor,
I mean, everyone in the cast is so funny.
Truly.
Really.
But so, it was more about trying to have a natural chemistry
than it was about rehearsing a thing or having an idea about how to do a thing.
Yeah, and then I think Matt,
I think, was whispering in both of our ears.
- Like... - You suck. You suck, do it better.
Just saying, he's already a bit controlling,
but you don't really notice,
and I don't think he said that to Mark 'cause then he'd be like,
"Wait, am I? No. I'm fine."
I don't wanna be.
This was the coldest day on the shoot.
- Yeah. - It's the only exterior day scene.
- I'm shivering! Look! - Yeah, I know.
But it works 'cause it just looks like I'm nervous.
This was the second day of shooting, too, right?
So, we shot in the YWCA first.
We shot the end sequences of the movie
and this was the second day, and I think we were like,
"Fuck, it's gonna be so nice, we're gonna be outside."
- Yeah. - It's not.
It's not gonna be super cold yet, and it was absolutely...
So exciting to be shooting at the Billy Madison pool.
Oh, my God.
But this was also a super cloudy day, Brett did a great job, our DP.
I thought it was really clear.
- It would change. - It changed.
Soon as we got the big thing up...
- The silk. - ...we had to take it down.
- The silk up, we had to take it down. - That's right.
- Andie! - Andie.
She's so funny.
I remember this scene, working with her during the shooting
and being so nervous, 'cause it was day two.
- Yeah. - And day one was punching.
Yeah.
And then this was like, all right, now let's do the other end.
She was so excited, though.
Yeah. She just loved it.
She was like, "Look, I'm in a horror."
I'm sorry, Andie. Bad, bad rendition of your beautiful voice.
This was also one where it was the loudest possible location.
They were like, yeah, the cigarette wouldn't light.
There was somebody with a wood chipper six feet away
- throwing logs into it. - Blocked that out.
So incredibly loud.
Yeah, we're about 200 yards away from a hospital.
Just had everything going.
Which I went to that one time.
- TYLER; Right. - Is that where you went?
Yeah, wait, no, it was like an hour away, wasn't it?
Yeah, this was...
Of course why would they bring you to the convenient hospital?
That was a good take.
This shot we weren't supposed to get,
but luckily, we had ten extra minutes, so we turned the camera around.
- You guys remember that? - Yup.
- There was a spot for it. - You were speed demons, you guys.
- Nicky standing up like that. - So good.
So resentful.
Yeah, and this was... a lot of why we were able to move
as quickly as we were is our camera department
- was just unbelievably incredible. - They were so... They were great.
Yeah, Adam... Adam, our Steadicam OP.
Directed by...
Who are those jokers?
This scene is one that when we first saw the assembly,
Terel Gibson, our fantastic editor,
sent it to us when we were on set, and he was like, "Hey, I put something together."
And I remember this scene and the first scene we already saw
were the two he sent us and we were like,
"Holy shit. Their chemistry is working."
- We're gonna be okay. - We're fine. We're fine.
It was the first time we actually got to see footage put together
and breathe a little sigh of relief.
Not that we didn't know it, but you never really know until...
- Yeah, of course. - Oh, my gosh.
So anxious.
Actors have to wait till the screening.
We're like fingers crossed, fingers crossed.
I know. There's so much trust and faith involved in what you do,
that people are gonna make the right choices.
That's why I'm like, "I'll work with you guys again," 'cause trust.
This is also one of the really good examples
of the big technical cheat of the movie
where it looks and feels like it's all being lit
- with candlelight... - Candle, yeah!
...fire light and it's...
There's a lot going on, lighting-wise,
to make it feel like there's not a lot going on...
We weren't allowed to have any fire in this room.
We couldn't even light those candles there. It was just like...
Without a fire marshal sewn to your body.
Yeah, I know. It's like, "Can we just light the candles, please?"
And that door gag was something I remember,
I don't know if you guys remember this, that was not in the script,
and we had to come up with it on the day,
'cause we were like, "How do we set up..."
How does she get out of the room?
'Cause I remember I threw you guys those lines being like,
"We gotta figure out this servants' corridor."
Servants' corridor thing. Yeah.
And it was, I remember talking to Guy and Ryan
on the way to the shoot being like,
"How can we just slide this into this scene?"
And it feels so natural.
All the reference to it, yeah...
- We'll just make a joke about it. - Exactly.
It's the way to go.
What do I say? I'm like, "Of course you do."
Right.
We should say that half of the objects of furniture in this room,
you're not allowed to touch because they're all artifacts.
I was so naughty, I was like, "I'm gonna touch everything."
The second that you say don't touch it, I'm like, "Watch me."
This is when Mark sells the whole premise into the movie.
In a very vague way.
Just vague enough to not...
- "It will be fine." - ...without being too absurd.
He does like the third of the speech that he ends up ultimately giving.
You can see the... He's so good.
You can see the wheels turning of, like, "No, I'm convincing.
I'm lying, but it's a really convincing lie."
- You feel his struggle. - Yeah.
And the way he brushes it off and you guys both agree that it's silly
and stupid I think is part of what...
With a partner you're gonna marry, you can tell when they're lying
and he does such a good job of doing a great lie.
Yeah.
And even going back to the servants' quarters thing,
it's like the first absurd thing
in the series of absurd things he's about to tell you,
so it worked well for the whole scene.
Right. And how long have Grace and...
Eighteen months.
Yeah, so there's that too.
- The bowl-a-thon, remember? - The bone-a-thon.
This shot is one that we loved
'cause you have this nice little moment here
where we get a little serious?
Yeah.
We were always like, "There's no way this is making the final cut."
- They're gonna cut this. - They're gonna cut this.
Someone's gonna tell us to cut it.
And they never did, and we always loved it.
It's a good little snippet.
Yup.
That was a shot of you going down the stairs
that we almost weren't allowed to get.
That was a, "Let's go, let's go, let's go."
On the fly. We were scheduled down to the minute...
- We were rushing? - ...for all of this stuff.
Yeah.
And this is the first shot in Casa Loma.
And that last one was the last shot first day.
And it really looks like the same place.
Again, Terel, great use of cross-cutting here too
to get the story out and get everybody throughout the house.
- Yeah. - Henry.
- Show the scope of the house. - He's so funny.
Yeah, Henry was a real godsend. Everybody in the cast was.
We had so much fun in that room just playing games.
Mark came up with the most annoying game.
You have to guess a word using five...
you get five letters.
Do you remember us losing our minds about it?
Yeah.
You guys played that in most of the...
Yeah. We started recruiting more and more people.
So this is back in Parkwood.
All of this, minus the paintings on the walls which we swapped out,
this is all the original artwork in this room.
- It's been cleared... - I'm just lost in Andie's eyes.
She's so beautiful.
This was probably one of the hardest scenes to shoot just because...
This was the day that we had
the most cast members on set at the same time.
We had a lot going on.
Well, no, there were 15... there were 15 people.
This was the only day that every single present-day cast member
was on set, including the kids.
- Yeah! - Kids, the maids.
- Everybody. - Yeah.
Plus, my parents and your parents, Tyler's parents,
- plus Guy and Ryan, the writers. - Yup.
Everybody was on set for this scene.
- Yeah. - I feel bad for the ADs
- trying to wrangle all of us. - I know.
Yes, speaking of ADs.
- Joanna Moore was like... - Oh, my goodness.
I don't know how this movie would've ever been made without her.
It wouldn't have, yeah.
- She's such a legend. - Yeah.
Still locked in a cabin somewhere.
We broke her! Yeah.
She would go, she would drive her kids to school,
hang out, pick her kids up, and then go home to work,
and work till seven in the morning.
- Yeah. - And was always chipper.
Oh, my God, she was amazing.
And she'd have... everything was in her head.
You could be like, "Hey, next Tuesday."
She'd be like, "Yup, got it."
This, that, and the other but I can move this over here.
What?
I remember on this day, too, there was a little break in the shoot,
and I decided to put on the Steadicam rig
and realized how our Steadicam OP
had been carrying around a 75 pound camera.
Do you remember Adam when he was on a chair
and someone was pulling his legs
and he had the camera in his hands.
When we were shooting you taking your...
Yeah, when I was cutting my dress, and then we couldn't fit a dolly
I guess in there, so he just was like, fuck it,
- I'll just... have an ab workout. - I got pictures of that.
Yeah, Adam Tupper is a real trooper.
Take it off, now!
Look, it's Kristian and Melanie.
Kristian and Melanie.
This is one of my favorite parts in the movie
just because of how energized it is.
What did he keep saying? It was like, "Just keep on..."
The line is keep on playing.
- Just keep on playing there, buddy. - Just keep on...
- Yeah. - Couldn't... Yeah.
I love Mark's reaction to Kristian and Melanie here.
- So dismissive. - Not into it.
He's just like...
- Hi. - Hi.
I'm Emilie. Oh, my God, your dress is amazing!
We couldn't keep a straight face when Kristian came across.
- I know it's... - Came to talk to us.
- It's so ridiculous. - The outtakes from this scene.
It's like, "Good on ya. Yeah."
Everybody's laughing at my face.
Mark's not here, but I can say it was all his fault
'cause he broke before me.
He will decide that...
my dear.
Aunt Helene. It's nice to see you.
You continue to exist.
Such a good line.
I remember having a lot of conversations
when we were blocking this scene about how to stage it
to make it go as quickly as possible.
There was a lot of that on the shoot where it's like,
cool, I mean, they can all be anywhere
but how do you, how do you stage people
so that you have to shoot the minimum number of shots to get there?
How did you... Did you draw it out? Did you map it out?
Yeah, we sketched it out, and then we talked about it
and then brought you guys in.
And I remember during, you know, just the walk-through rehearsal,
everyone kinda did it fairly quickly,
and it kind of made sense.
Well, it's such a big space.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
But it was fun...
It felt natural to be like okay, cool. I'll wander...
Yeah, and then there was the scenes where just two people would be
in a room sometime would be harder.
It would be like, are we standing, are we walking around,
are we sitting, are we...
I think one of the things that we very intentionally wanted to do
was to make sure that there weren't a lot of sequences
where people were just talking.
- Hanging out in the back. - Hanging out, talking to each other.
That it was just like a shot, reverse shot thing.
We loved that the rooms were so big, the house was so big,
it felt like the more we could move around through things,
the more of a sense of the grandeur you get.
So, this room is crazy, right,
'cause none of what's in there was in there.
These walls that she's... that you're looking at,
that have all the weapons on them,
those were all added by our production designers.
What about the dead animals? All the taxidermy.
We brought those all in, right?
- There's a guy that had all those. - Did he really?
Yeah, they're all from one source.
So, he has that bear with the...
With the goat in the mouth.
I nearly fainted walking into that room.
It's crazy how tailor made that feels.
The white goat in the bear's mouth, and that existed in somebody's collection.
Someone killed it just as.
Yeah.
I remember walking into this set, though,
and seeing the gaming table for the first time and just being so blown away
by the level of fabrication.
I honestly thought it was part of the house.
It's really crazy.
And the amount of measurements that they took,
the lattice work on the walls that they added, all of that stuff is...
It's so hard to not just want to shoot an insert of everything
because the production design was so painstakingly done.
But at the end of the day, you feel that, whether you see it or not,
it just feels like this really convincing texture in the background.
This was also a scene where it was like,
"How do we make this scene not boring, just everybody around a table,"
so the camera's always moving and I feel like...
I love this shot from the top.
Yeah, that took half a day basically to set up.
- Really? - Yeah,
and because of exactly that, we were like, it's worth it, though, it's just...
So gorg.
And then we use it again later.
Also, you can call back to it. Yeah, that's...
...to resell to wealthyAmericans.
One of my favorite things about this scene, too,
is when the camera stops
and the music stops and you can just hear a pin dropping.
I just loved it.
...was... that box.
Also, we haven't mentioned Brian Tyler's score yet, but man.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
Brian.
There's something weird and ominous and mischievous.
There's so much going on in it,
which was such a hard target to hit in a temp music pass.
And he just absolutely nailed it.
Destroyed it.
- Yeah. - He did.
This was also, I think we did two takes of this with Henry.
I mean, this is the longest monologue in the movie
and it's a lot.
He was so good. He made it, I was like didn't have to act.
I was like, wait, what's gonna happen? This is amazing.
We hated cutting it. We had to cut a few lines out.
- Really? - Yeah,
just to tighten it a little, and we hated it.
We were like, "Let's just leave it all in."
We really wanted to.
- It was so good. - Leave more, yeah.
And that again, that's a testament to Guy and Ryan.
They wrote something that is just, you know...
It could have been, like, yeah.
And it's funny the way that he delivers it.
If you're not paying attention to specifically what he's saying,
there's still this magic and mystery in how he's saying it
that you get all of the overtones that you're supposed to
from the way that it's said.
And it's also...
one of the things during post that helped this scene a lot,
and it actually helped a lot of the movie was...
I know you got this a ton from us and so did the rest of the cast,
but you probably get these texts from us all the time being like,
"Hey, can you just do this random line of ADR
with no context into your phone and send it to us?"
Sure! Why not?
I think some of that phone ADR. lives.
Yeah, it's amazing.
Yeah, I think...
What does it say, girl?
I mean, doing ADR if I'm on a shoot, in a hotel,
and you can sense that someone can probably hear you
and you're screaming in a cupboard...
'Cause they tell you to go somewhere padded and small,
so I'll get into the cupboard of the hotel room and be like...
(Screams)
I'm surprised no one checked in on me.
This scene was also really fun
because for the first time in the movie you see...
you see everyone's various reactions and responses
to the tradition and the box
and what they know is inevitably gonna be the outcome of the night,
though obviously your character, Grace, totally flips that on them.
It's totally that sort of one percent guilt of,
"Where did you get your money from again?"
- Right. - Yeah, totally.
Maybe we just don't talk about it.
It's just a really cool story. They leave out most of the other facts.
The murder.
- By the way, gonna bury the lede here. - Yeah.
But we loved that,
one of the things that we really wanted to achieve was
that the family, while they're clearly...
there's an element of them being sociopaths and the whole conceit,
there's only a few of them that actually want to be doing
what they ultimately have to do. It's a hard...
Nobody expects the night to end up being what it is.
They're so confident. They're like, "We've got it in the bag."
It was the nice flip to like what we talked about a lot too,
- that you're not a superhero. - No.
And it's 'cause we didn't want it to be like,
"All of a sudden she's super well-equipped to handle everything."
It's like, "Let's make it the bar fight."
- Let's have, you know... - Make it scrappy.
- Scrappy, yeah. - And honest, yeah.
More exposition, but this is, this is again a testament
to, I think, the writing but also just the performances
that you don't realize that you're getting...
you're getting rules but you're...
...you're just in the kind of tension of what this is.
You obviously, the audience knows something that Grace doesn't
and so it's okay to have those explanations,
to live in that a little bit.
This Hide and Seek Song, this was something that was like very...
- Was it? - Yeah, we temped with
the Boogie Man song that they used in Sinister 2?
- Yeah. - Sinister 2.
And we wanted...
we always wanted The Hide And Seek Song,
that's what was in the script.
And within maybe a month of before we were finished with the cut,
we got in touch with our friends who did the score for South Bound for us.
We were like, "Do you guys wanna write a song?"
And they did, and this is what they put together in a matter of days.
Wow.
Yeah, and they were very much like, "Yeah, no, it's... totally. We got this."
And we were like, "Really, are you sure?"
And they sent us a temp.
I know that they auditioned a couple people
and they sent us the guy that they really liked,
- and we were just absolutely floored by... - Yeah.
We just sent them a bunch of random conceptual lyric ideas,
and then they took it and sent this back,
and we were like, whoa.
Musicians blow my mind.
- I know. - It's crazy.
They also did the end song. The end version of Love Me Tender.
- Yup. - That's also them.
- Stop. Really? - Which is funny
- 'cause it's so different, but yeah. - It's so good.
They are like a one-stop shop, though if you want score,
if you want music, if you want rock and roll, like whatever.
- We used them for everything so far. - Can they just score my life?
- Seriously. - For fans of...
- Get you a new ringtone. - Right?
Hey, I'm not changing my ringtone now.
This was one of the most, I think, edited scenes
in terms of how to handle the cross-cutting of all of this,
and we shot versions where the family was counting down with the song.
- It was a... - Melanie's face.
Melanie's expressions in this whole movie are just...
So good.
So great.
- And Adam bringing his... - Elyse.
She is the sweetest woman.
Truly.
And she just brings that evil, sinister lady to...
Ice cold.
- It's crazy. - So ice cold.
Do you guys remember her audition?
It was the first one, which is true for a lot of the cast.
They were the first or second auditions we saw.
And hers was literally like, "Whoa, ice fucking cold."
She's got that model look, and she's so talented.
And she's not that at all in person.
- She's not at all! - No, so nice.
- She's so goofy and wonderful. - So gentle.
Have you heard her speaking French?
No.
It's so hot.
- And she's also a painter. - Yeah, she's an artist.
And in a hip-hop band, a hip-hop group.
She can do it all.
A real renaissance woman.
Seriously.
Watch the door.
I love the conflict Andie has right now.
Yeah.
And this is the beginning of one of your great hidden things in the movie
that we talked about earlier,
but when we shoot the scene of you behind the bed,
we got notes from Searchlight saying that your hand,
- your nail polish... - My nail polish.
Yeah, your nail polish was fucked up, and we were like,
"Yeah, shit, it is."
And then unbeknownst to us, you had decided
that you're were gonna be biting them in here...
- Yeah. - ...which you then did,
which is one of those little textures that we just love,
'cause then when we have you biting it in here, we see it later,
we're like, that's an attention to detail that...
If I was like, "I was gonna bite my nails" and you're like,
"Actually, you know what, that doesn't work with the..."
That would've been bad. It was a risk. It paid off.
Lot of cutting between Parkwood and Casa Loma in these.
We should say, too, that this dumbwaiter that you're sitting in
was an appliance that, yeah,
our production designer built and put into a...
installed in a doorway in a hallway in Casa Loma.
It was fun.
And I think we were all... We were all very naïve.
We were like, what's a dumbwaiter?
It just is a thing, and then he designed an actual dumbwaiter
that had a moving mechanism in it.
Our low budget background was steering us towards like...
- Put her in a box! - Yeah.
"Just paint that cardboard brown. It'll look like wood. Yeah."
And it had a removable back on it,
which is how we got, we were able to get inside.
Got that camera in there.
This is when BlueBloods, the restaurant at Casa Loma
- where we were shooting was... - Oh, my God.
Do you remember that? You can just hear...
I was so tempted just to go and grab a beer and a burger.
- We went the night before. - So, it was like 10 p.m., wasn't it?
- It was open until 11... - Late.
Weren't there some quite tipsy people just...
The bathroom, you had to walk down that hall.
They'd just be like, "Hello."
I remember a family walked through on this,
this part of the shoot.
This was Andie's last shot of the movie.
What was Andie's dog called?
- Ava Gardner. - Ava Gardner!
Such an amazing pup.
Such a quiet pup.
- So quiet. - Yeah.
- It went everywhere with her. - It went everywhere!
No one would notice.
I remember being out to dinner with her
and realizing that Ava Gardner was...
- In her purse under the table? - Yeah.
Ava Gardner's here.
- This was one of the... - Great costumes.
...unintentional scares in the edit,
and we were like, "Just play it really quiet"
and that tear actually plays like a little mini jump scare.
Also, this is one of the two scenes that we cut here,
which we also didn't want to cut,
but the only two scenes that got cut from the whole movie
were the first scene with you and Adam,
and it was just 'cause we had two of them back to back,
and then this, it's Melanie doing coke.
- More coke. - More cocaine, yeah.
And it just felt like we had two of the same beat
right next to each other.
Georgie!
Grace still thinking it's a fun time.
- Yup. - We're still having a blast.
Grace just should've hid in that dumbwaiter.
Hiding from the maid.
Mark was so nice about that. I was like, "Just grab my face."
- Don't worry about... - I remember that.
Just place it lightly on my...
This is one of my favorite shots in the movie.
So, we just went from Casa Loma to Parkwood.
It was this long kind of swinging handheld.
I honestly can't tell.
I'm starting to forget too.
And when we were in the edit with Terel,
he would not know which would be really interesting to be...
He just had no idea. He'd be like, "That's... wow, okay, cool."
Do you know, Hank does dance classes with Nicky now?
- Yeah, I love that. - It's so good.
- Nicky is Aunt Helene. - Yup.
She... drops and pops it with...
with this lovely lady.
I remember having a lot of conversations about this first kill
and how to... just tonally modulating the movie
- and this sequence was a really... - Oh god.
...was a real tightrope for us.
There's obviously a lot of weird humor in the family
witnessing the death of this person, but...
wanting it to feel graphic and scary
but also still kind of strange and off-kilter...
Well, it's great that you can have the comedic beats for the family
and then cut to us.
And it's... in this scene especially,
but it's the whole movie is like you're grounding it for everything.
So as long as we have you having this natural, honest emotional reaction
that other stuff gets to go a little further.
Right. Yeah, they can be as OTT as they want.
But I remember this scene was... this was much longer,
the scene that was scripted and it ultimately was...
You're sort of with the family too much
when you wanted to be with Grace in the fear and tension.
Finding the balance took a while.
- Yeah, in the edit room for sure. - True.
How many people do you think are gonna have
chili pepper tattoos after watching this?
I hope everyone, but people keep thinking it's a feather
and they get confused.
It's a chili pepper, guys.
How long was Hank in that prosthetic for?
- Prosthetics are so uncomfortable. - Like, at least a half a day.
Especially on your eye?
You get really dizzy 'cause you can only see...
Your balance gets really off.
She was a trooper though, man.
And who... The maid with the...
Or was it a stand-in, I think, for Andie later on.
- Yeah, it was a stand-in. - Who had the whole face.
- Yeah, all mangled face. - Olga.
Yeah, Olga, and she was just sat there for seven hours.
The whole day, and she would be in...
- She was like, "I'm fine!" - Yeah,
- just on the floor. - I was like, "No, you're not."
'Cause it gets really itchy after four or five hours,
but you can't scratch it.
There's one of my favorite shots.
Shit. Okay. Stevens must've taken the phone, so...
Yeah, this was great.
Mark was amazing with this and you guys...
trying to find the level of...
I don't wanna be...
Too frantic.
...too frantic and I wanna kind of stay in this shock
'cause I was like, there's so much of the film to go where she's like,
how do I play all these beats
where I'm essentially saying what the fuck over and over again.
- Different levels of what the fuck. - How many levels of what the fuck.
I remember talking about how splitting that up between those two beats
but being like let's let that be the shock and let the next one be the explosion.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I remember we talked about that.
That felt good. Yeah, right here.
Came from Parkwood to Casa Loma.
Mark and I wrote our initials on one of the bricks here.
So, what you don't see,
or you can maybe barely see, on those brick walls, the people.
This is all open to the public, it's, again, a heritage site in Toronto.
Do people go out there to find ghosts or what do they...
Yeah, I think they have a haunted house.
- There's an escape room there, too. - Ghost tour.
Really?
People carve their names in all those bricks and there were...
I don't think there's even a single square inch of that that was covered...
That didn't have graffiti on it.
We flagged it for VFX. We were like...
But we didn't do it. We were like, "Fuck it."
I mean, maybe Alex and... went when they were little.
Yeah, and did the whole wall.
This is one of my favorite scenes between you two guys.
This was another one that was like...
that we're gonna get asked to cut this down,
we're gonna get asked to cut this down, and we just... it's so good.
- Just stayed in there. - And it's so...
Yeah, it's all so valuable and so fun to watch.
I mean, Fox Searchlight...
That is Guy and Ryan there, the writers.
They are the writers!
Someone asked me they... I've seen them before!
Yeah.
They did, I don't know, ten takes of that.
They're all so wonderful.
Twenty. Did a whole bunch. We had...
They're on for such a split second, and they've got fake beards on.
- I was like, is that... - They did it.
Did they?
When we told them, hey, just send us this video,
we had no idea what to except
and then it shows up, and Guy is in his Robin Hood costume.
Ryan is in a cowboy hat
- and camo shirt. - That's so good.
Yeah, it was, it was...
- They over delivered as usual. - Oscar 101.
This is Mark again selling exposition just fucking flawlessly.
It's so...
What a gem.
This is also a really tricky scene because he has to...
he's selling the...
he's selling that he believes in the game?
- Kind of. - Kind of,
but he's not sure he believes in it enough that he has to play along
and now of course he knows what's at stake and...
and even if it's not true, you're still gonna die.
They're still gonna kill you.
And it's when he lets you go.
This is the last scene you guys are together
- until the end of the movie. - But he's a nice man.
Yeah, we talked about this, like a breakup.
Sort of most tragic breakup.
And it's also... We love that the look of the movie changes in this moment,
to go from the kind of warm hallway look
- to this cooler, more exposed. - Remember that time I was smiling?
Yeah.
I'm gonna get you out of here, okay.
All right? So just listen to me.
You just need to go...
There was one take in here where we couldn't stop laughing.
- Yeah, I remember that. - You flagged it, I remember...
Yeah, and then it was right in the ADR, and I was like,
I'm laughing. I'm not crying...
It got three months into the edit without us noticing you laughing.
It's amazing how physically similar laughing and crying look.
Well, I think there's moments in the film
where we've been working for so long
and it just hit me... how ridiculous this situation would be?
- Totally. - Yeah.
It's the whole movie...
I think that's what gave me the idea to do that laugh...
- The laugh at the end? - Yeah.
Yeah. Which is...
And we'll talk about when we get there, but that was like...
- 'Cause he just... - ...saves the movie.
I was like, what is the, my natural response would be to just...
- To laugh. - ... "This is ridiculous."
It's one of those things
that I'm shocked that we didn't talk about before
and then the fact that you had that instinct on set and went with it...
And that it was so much the right thing.
We did one edit without it, and all of us were like, nope!
The laughing is the way to go.
Yeah, get this dress off, babe. You got some running to do.
Yeah. We've heard that this is a lot of people's favorite scene,
- we've seen that they just love this. - Yeah?
They just hate the next hour of the movie, though.
Can we talk about my hair for a second?
- Let's. - It's the longest hair.
They did such a good job
making it into that beautiful bun.
I remember when you showed up in Toronto in prep, we were like,
"Holy shit, that's a lot of hair."
That's a lot of hair.
- And everyone's like... - I was like, "Yeah, cut it!"
The producers called us, and they were like,
"We gotta get rid of that."
And you were like, "Just trust me. It's gonna be..."
And of course...
Fuck.
...we made the right decision trusting you.
Thanks, guys.
This was another one of those sequences,
this one in the bowling alley, here in the hallway that we...
Is that actually Hank or is that a dummy?
That's actually Hank,
and then in this shot here where they drop her, that's the...
- This is a funny... - Jennifer?
Yeah.
It's a stunt? I see!
And all this muzzle flare stuff, the glass shattering,
all VFX done by our amazing team at Deluxe Toronto.
Melanie just sells it so well that I can just run past her
and she doesn't try and stop me.
- Yeah, she almost moves. - She's like a child.
She really goes into a four-year-old who's like,
"I'm trying, I don't know!"
Melanie brought so much to that character
in such a kind of great and unexpected way.
I remember we'd have conversations about what level of cocaine.
Being like, if it's too much cocaine,
maybe like a little less cocaine, a little more,
- and she was just like such a... - Two bumps.
You're two bumps cocaine in this scene.
You're coming down now.
I love that I'm telling the chair to shush.
You know what's funny, is that that helps.
It sells the moment, 'cause we've always been like,
can you see the people in the background?
This is an actual secret door.
One of the really cool things
that was so exciting about shooting at Parkwood was...
Yeah, that was cool.
Yeah, there were like four or five passageways
that you wouldn't know existed
unless people showed you specifically where they were,
and that was one into this study.
And that Wild Turkey on the table is a remnant of the scene
that we talked about cutting earlier with you and Adam,
the gobble gobble scene that got cut.
That's why there's Wild Turkey on the table there,
'cause he put it there in that other scene.
My memory's so bad. What was the scene?
You run into him in here before the we... or before...
On the way to the music room.
And then Charity cuts you off.
Remember the gobble? The turkey gobble?
Gobble, gobble, gobble.
I don't remember that at all. What's wrong with my brain?
You've shot 17 projects since you shot this.
You've been working for 12 years straight.
Adam too, man. He brought something so special to this role.
On the page, it was great and really funny on the page,
but he really brought that kind of dark undertone to the character.
- That guilt. Real guilt to it. - Yeah, there's a sadness, guilt.
It becomes kind of a redemption thing.
I'm hoping everybody...
that nobody's watching the movie for the first time.
- He's the only good guy. - He's the only good guy.
Yeah.
Who'd watch it for the first time and be like, "You know what?
I want to hear people talk throughout the whole thing."
This movie sucks.
Yeah. What's she on now? She's coming down.
- Yeah, this is her popping pills. - Some Vicodin.
That hallway there, it's used many times.
Many times.
- It got very... - We didn't get enough...
We got fewer running shots through the house
than we would've liked.
- That was just one of the challenges... - Scheduling issues.
- We didn't have time... - I got real good at running.
...with the people being there and everything.
This is the Charity scene.
Elyse makes holding a gun look real glamorous.
- She does. - Yeah, she does.
- And drinking whiskey. - It's like an accessory.
She's like, "Watch."
She has so much attitude.
She's intimidating.
Yeah.
...you reacted when I told you about this?
Yeah, they pack a lot into this little scene.
But she's so kind and so warm in real life.
I know. In real life.
Everyone's so good.
This was one of those, I remember in preproduction,
there was this chunk of dialogue,
this interaction between the two of them,
it happened later in the story
and it was in a different location and it was just gonna make,
that made it impossible to schedule.
It was one of those scenes that was like, we loved that
it was so valuable, but it wasn't gonna work,
- so we moved... - We had to cut...
- Tripp call this in. - But sets their relationshit up...
- Totally. Which is why we kept it. - Exactly.
Relationshit? Relation-shit.
Relation-ship. It is a relationshit.
- It's a relationshit. - Yeah, it is a relationshit.
- It is. Yeah. - But it was, 'cause Tripp,
Tripp and Jaime, the two producers
who we owe everything to for this movie, yeah, they...
You know, we were in preproduction and Tripp brought us in,
and he was like, "Guys, we can do this the hard way
and we can pick away at the script over the next week
before we start shooting,
or we can all sit here right now and tear the Band-Aid off
and figure out how to cut this so we can shoot it."
He's just like, "We don't wanna shoot everything half..."
You need someone like that.
- Yeah, he's like let's... - Guys!
Guys, we gotta do it. We gotta make it good.
- We can't just half measure this. - Buckle up.
Exactly. So, we sat down for one evening
- and cut, I think, ten pages. - Yep.
- That was quick. - And that Charity-Adam scene
was one of the ones that got moved around,
'cause a few things we were like "We can't lose this character," yeah.
This gag was so fun to shoot.
One of the most memorable days on set.
It was so fun to watch, 'cause it's one of those scenes
where I was just with you guys.
And then Kristian's improv here was just fantastic.
We had so much material to work with.
How many did we do? We did six takes,
and every one of them was as funny as the...
- And he gave us two on every take. - Yup.
'Cause there's the one and then he gives us the second one as he's walking.
- As he's walking away. - Yeah.
And that gag was done, the crossbow was a combination of VFX
and then a whip pan that we hid
and edited over to Selene who plays Tina, the maid.
And she was wearing an appliance in her mouth.
So a lot of the gags in the movie we wanted to feel like
the camera wasn't really set up for them,
that it was in the moment and finding the action
instead of preparing the audience for the action.
We thought it plays... it just plays more spontaneous,
it's funnier, it's more thrilling.
That was kind of throughout
how we wanted to handle capturing the action of those beats.
Yeah, and then when it becomes this character kind of scene here,
this is another one of the ones where it's...
Henry, as Tony, thinks he's in control and then Andie's like,
"I'm gonna just handle this, honey."
Tracking Tony's breakdowns is just a lot of fun throughout the movie.
He keeps snapping and just losing it.
I actually think this is a weird turning point in the movie.
This is... We've...
We can kind of see what sides they're taking.
We leave your character, yeah,
now we're like with the family for a huge chunk of time.
This is, I think, this scene sort of gives the audience permission
to think a little differently about what's gonna follow.
You're processing it. You're like, "Okay, so, okay."
In the first cut too, I remember being like, is this gonna work?
'Cause we're away from the family for...
Or we're away from Grace for a long time,
and then it became the job of just making sure
that scene was entertaining,
and everybody was doing a very specific character thing,
- and it just worked. - Every personality really works.
Badass scene.
We should say, too, that the candelabras in the movie,
we only had five of them.
That's true.
So if it ever appears like you're in a hallway that's filled with candelabras,
that is just movie magic,
that is our set dec department moving those things.
I can't even...
couldn't even tell you how many times.
- This is... - How heavy was that gun, Sam?
- This is one of the... Yeah. - It was very heavy.
It was a real gun, right? That was like a real antique.
I got really good, muscly shoulder after wearing that for a couple scenes.
Well, and the bandoleer too with the elephant gun...
- the elephant gun bullets. - Yeah, that was heavier than the gun.
That bandoleer, I think I whacked myself in the face...
It's just not enough torture you're going through.
We needed to add more.
No, it was fine.
But also, everybody knew that was gonna be poster material...
- Yeah, I leant into it for sure. - ...as soon as it was...
This kitchen was oddly the hardest location to find in the entire movie.
There was, there were...
Well, 'cause it was the kitchen.
This was the kitchen of the house.
The family kitchen. Yeah.
We needed it to feel grand and it doesn't feel grand
so there's a line if you're paying attention,
he says "the service kitchen."
- But this was the only location that... - Sorry to whoever lives there.
- The geography felt... - This is Parkwood.
This is the closest thing,
the closest approximation in our brains of how this room would look
and so they built this island, Andrew Stearn and his team.
His construction team built this incredible prop that you're walking...
- you're crawling around. - Crawling around.
And the menacing figure's John Ralston.
- John. - That's Stevens.
One of the most kind, lovely man.
- He was awesome. He was so great. - He was so great.
When we were outside doing the car, so all the exterior stuff,
I was probably like, "Guys, I'm freezing!"
Can we... I was trying to be... But he was so... he was like, "Okay. I'm fine."
He was... He sold...
There were so many lines for him too, that I was just like,
"Man, we're gonna end up cutting that, we're gonna end up cutting that,"
and then his delivery of these really difficult, weird...
They're like somewhere between being an arch villain
and being a joke, and he just got it.
There was just something about,
- yeah, his... - It was creepy.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
I think that's exactly... He totally knew that.
- He's kind of the villain... - Yeah.
...for a huge chunk of the movie.
- He's the henchman, the henchman. - Yeah.
He has nothing to gain.
- He's just trying to prove himself. - He's so loyal.
Yeah, he's so loyal. Yeah.
But he's sort of, I mean, it's a little bit...
- Jason Vorhees turn coming up. - Exactly!
He's sort of the slasher, the slasher villain.
Even his wardrobe with the white gloves and the...
I know. Avery.
It's just creepy. Avery.
Avery, the costume designer just...
So specific for every character to give them little things like that.
Well, right, and for the characters to only wear one outfit the entire movie
other than when they put the robes on, that's like...
- It's a crazy challenge. - ...that's such a huge ask.
And I mean the dress we could do a whole two hours on.
- I mean, so many... - Was it comfortable?
- It was. Yeah. - Yeah.
I think that was the main thing. We wanted it just to be
something that didn't feel like it was in the way.
I think the corset after a long day got a little bit uncomfortable,
but it was stretchy corsets.
Did you have a worst day of shooting?
Is there any that stands out as something you just didn't like?
- The worst day... - Yeah, let's get to it.
Yeah, let's get to the good stuff now, therapy.
- What did you hate? - My day off!
Your day off?
Good answer. That's the answer...
I think my weakness is that I'm a perfectionist.
No, okay, let me think.
Worst day was the day after we wrapped.
Worst day. Maybe...
...maybe the goat pit stuff.
I think just because it was the last week.
It was the last stretch, and we'd been outside
and in darkness for maybe two weeks?
- Yeah. - It was getting a little trying.
That was also... Like, there's wire work.
And it was the most stuff on me.
There was the blood and the goat carcasses.
- And the plethora of goo. - And you had to throw up pea soup.
I mean, that was the highlight. That tasted delightful.
This is one of my favorite shots. I just fucking love this scene.
The shotgun is so badass.
It's built for the trailer.
Move.
Yeah, and it fires.
- And it fires. - ...you should come by.
- Really? - Yeah.
I'm afraid I can't do that.
Gotta get butts in those seats, guys.
Yeah, don't pay attention.
John as Terminator.
I really have the worst memory.
I love how much fun he's having with fucking with you.
- Right? There's a sense of joy. - Yeah. No.
- Yeah. - So diabolical.
He's finally got some power and he's going to use it.
Exactly!
A lot of this sequence was kind of designed late in the game.
Yeah, 'cause I had to not be able to get to the door.
- Right. - So you said...
Who was it? Was it stunts that were like
- you could grab a knife. - Grab a knife. Yeah.
But also the teapot was multiple things.
For a long time, it was just gonna be a pot of hot water,
and then it was gonna be a tea glass,
and we just got to the stage of prep
where we were designing all of these stunts,
and it just felt so much cooler.
How long did they have to make the fake teapot?
Not long.
- Fake teapot was... - They actually had a...
We modeled the real teapot off of what they had available.
Wait, really?
Actually, I feel like Henry's the kind of guy
who'd been like just...
He was. He was like, yeah.
He would've held it. He's so dedicated.
That's exactly what happened. He was like...
Did he just hold his breath?
I don't know! We were watching it...
Our stunt coordinator Eric Bryson was consistently pissed off at Henry
for doing it all and going way too far.
In the woods, when he just collapses.
This is some amazing, amazing improv from Henry.
- This coin flip he does. - Wait, really?
Yeah, he's done it a couple times...
- Henry brought it. - Yeah.
It was just this...
There's a third one too after Adam knocks you out that...
And Adam's like, "I don't care."
And Adam's like, I don't give a shit, yeah.
Just be pushed for time.
But then this little beat too that I've gotta get my gun,
all of this, they were just having so much fun.
And they were genuinely kind of annoyed with each other too.
I mean, they're carrying Mark out of that room.
We're at the dumbwaiter.
Yeah, go back to the dumbwaiter 'cause that was safe.
Right?
- I know where they can't find me. - Yeah, no.
Oh, my God.
This was oddly one of the hardest scenes to shoot
just because it was such a tight little space.
It was so...
'Cause the dumbwaiter closed to an extent, is that correct?
And it was slow.
It was slow. The door closing and the death.
But you guys shot it so well. It just looks like it's squishing her.
- Big Ben. - But this was...
- That is from Big Ben. - Yeah.
That insert is from Big Ben.
The gears, that's the clock, that's the clock tower.
The only movement that is not ours, yeah.
- Stop. Really? From Big Ben. - Yeah.
You'd be surprised how long it took us to find a good shot of gears spinning.
Go to London for it.
Some dumbwaiter engineer is like,
"That's not what a fucking dumbwaiter looks like!"
This was difficult because you wanted Grace
to be a good guy and be apologetic,
- but there was a sense of urgency as well. - Exactly.
And it's also... I think you really sell
trying to help her, which gets us.
That was all you.
I was trying to be like, "See ya!"
What are you doing?
But yeah, and again, that was another scene that was just like,
we just didn't have time.
Which I think goes for basically the whole shoot.
You got... what, two takes,
maybe three at the most for most things?
...unable to repair the security system.
I remember going into the shooting of this scene.
We were, I think, sort of midway,
midway to the end through the shoot
and we had shot a lot of the scenes
with all of these characters in the same room,
talking to each other, and I remember we were all kind of stressing out about,
"Fuck, it's all gonna feel the same, it's all gonna feel the same!"
And this was one where we got the camera really loose
and just right up in people's face.
And we put it in the middle, remember? It was like that choice.
Let's get inside for a swinging feel.
Also, we have to point out Adam's... face.
- So good. - Yeah,
he's so disgusted.
The off-screen relationship between Stevens and...
Stevens and Daniel is so funny.
So good.
And then this is the scene where you get a lot of Helene's...
"This is why she is who she is,"
and Nicky just really brought it.
We talked a lot about that moment in Mulholland Drive
where Naomi Watts...
'cause she's been playing this sort of campy actress the entire movie
and then you see her in the audition
and you realize, "Holy shit, she's a great..."
- She's amazing. - There was...
This is sort of same kind of, you know, pivot
for Nicky's character for Aunt Helene
where she's so big and over the top and arch,
and then she's just so emotionally grounded here.
And it kind of gives you permission to go to the craziest, the craziest...
You would go mad.
Yeah, a hundred percent.
And Nicky was so, the whole shoot she was very aware of,
"I'll go as big as I can,
you guys rein me in,
we'll get options" and it was...
To her credit, she knew that we'd find
a lot of what that balance was in the edit,
when we were kind of ironing the tone in throughout.
And she gave us everything we needed, as did everybody, I mean...
But she had a... You know, she...
- She... - That level of trust.
- It's a level of trust. - Like, here's a whole palette.
- Exactly. - You pick the color.
A hundred percent.
Well, sometimes actors can be a little bit hesitant to do that
'cause they want to have some control over what makes the edit.
Which makes sense,
you do it all and then you got to just...
Yeah, gotta do again.
When you guys would come by the edit a lot,
when we were only a couple weeks in, which we loved.
We've been very open for visitors.
We had some people tell us maybe we shouldn't,
but we were like, "But everybody's so cool!"
Open door policy. Yeah, why not.
While we're talking about the edit, Tripp and Jamie came to the edit a lot.
They were so... their fingerprints are on every scene in this movie
as much as any of ours.
- This is such a great gag, yeah. - I love this gag.
I loved.
This was another one Kristian shot, last shot of the night.
He waited the whole day?
...at, like, 3:00 in the morning.
That's when your trailer starts to feel like a jail cell.
Paff, by the way, is how the explosion...
the exploding bodies were written in the script.
Yeah, paff on that text chain with Kip.
- And that's an homage. - Butterscotch stallion.
That stunt was a cowboy switcheroo.
Had Jen, our stunt, your stunt double jumping off of that balcony.
That was just like, peek-a-boo.
And Kate, our assistant editor, threw together that flashback stuff.
This was so cold. Colder for you than us I'm sure.
So cold. This was another one
that was a company move at the end of the night.
We were told, "Guys, this is a target of opportunity,"
is what we kept being told.
There are a lot of targets of opportunity, and we just...
But we got it, you got it in five minutes.
Once you set it up, it was... ready to go.
These are two wildly different locations.
This is a backyard in Parkwood, this is in Toronto.
Those goats, one of those goats kicked Gino in the nuts.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
Didn't one of them just keep coming out
when you were trying to do this shot?
Yeah, there were a few that were very loud.
I remember one that took a dump right in the middle.
I always love, though, when you have animals in movies.
This is one of those things that just as a movie watcher
- whenever there's animals... - There's balls.
...It just feels real.
- Yeah, exactly. Goat balls. - Big ol' balls.
- Yeah, you can't choreograph it. - No.
In fact, an overly choreographed animal does the opposite.
You just feel like it's bullshit.
That appliance, the well, the hood of the well was something
that was, you know, went through so many iterations.
Yeah.
And then I remember shooting this scene.
And we had not got that reverse shot of it, the kind of push through POV,
and literally remembered on set being like,
"Shit, we didn't get that."
And we had to go... And I remember we talked to Joe,
and she was like, "Guys, there's no time."
And we were like, "We have to," and so of course she was like,
"Okay, we're gonna figure it out,"
and we just had to really quickly go get it in one take of that whole push.
Amazing.
So this goat jumping out at you
was originally designed to be a puppet
because we weren't sure
- we were gonna have... - Do you remember the puppet?
- I don't remember... - Did you ever see it?
- My memory's shocking. - Shit, it was so funny.
- And it was, we... - He did one take with her.
...we showed up, the puppeteer showed up on set
and we got him cinched back inside of that stable, underneath a tarp.
Yes, yes, yes. With the hand!
That was so funny...
- I remember... - ...to try to play that seriously.
And you were off doing fire stuff, and we did one take of that
and Matt and I, we just looked at each other like nope.
This is... We're gonna lose it.
We've got to figure something out.
- Carl's body. - That is so funny.
Thankfully, the goat wranglers were so down
to get one of the goats in there and...
That was hysterical.
No goats were harmed during the making of this.
The fact that one nail can make such...
Yeah, they had the time of their life.
The goats had a great time.
...horrific scene...
One nail is the most gruesome thing.
That nail.
This is our only set built in the movie.
- Yup. - This goat pit,
- which was actually built in the attic. - I'm on wires.
Right. This is all wire work.
But this was built in the attic of the stables
that we shot the goat well...
- You fell into the upstairs. - I fell into the upstairs.
Yeah.
And Andrew and his team designed and built this apparatus like
- up on some scaffolding... - Oh no,
- there it goes. - ...so that...
Yeah, I'm so strong to hold myself up with one hand.
We're like, man, your right arm is...
This is your superhero moment.
Yeah.
No, not the nail! Honestly, I can't watch, every time.
There it is.
That's VFX, though, too 'cause the nail wasn't there
and they put the nail in, and that whole little sequence was great.
Well, it's still not over, is it? No.
Okay, just tell me when it's finished.
Yeah, now we're back in the stables.
That nail... I look at it and I can't even tell.
- Yeah. - Like you have a hole in your hand.
This was another sequence that I think
we were worried about really selling,
and then when you...
Your reaction to it was so genuine
and so hard to watch without the nail there,
without any of the movie magic there that we were like,
- "This is gonna be great." - Thanks, guys.
Well, it's just you,
and so much of this section of the movie is you.
The obstacles are not other characters.
They're you dealing with physical limitations of your injuries.
Just me and the prosthetics just hanging out.
Yeah, and that's really hard shit to sell,
and it's just as watchable, if not more so.
This part was gruesome.
- It was like a ten minute... - It was.
Tearing that sleeve off.
And that was one of the things that was...
That was a great add that you brought to it.
The idea that right, even...
That had never occurred to us, but once you get the sleeve,
- that's gonna hurt. - Yeah.
That was really cool.
Well, I didn't think of it until I was like, wait a minute,
if I'm... until I was doing it.
It was originally scripted that you punch Georgie
another time here on your way out.
We were debating it up until the day.
Such a...
Like, people were cheering...
- Yeah, when you knocked that kid. - ...the punching of the kid.
I was like, how many people want to punch a kid?
- Yeah, there's a lot of child angst. - Lot of parents in the room.
- Yeah, exactly. - Pent-up anger, dude.
I got you, bitch.
Elyse aiming with the wrong eye gets me every time.
- She's aiming with the top eye. - I know.
This was another one that we storyboarded that we shot almost to frame.
- Yep, this one was. - So John...
This is one of our favorite in-jokes that John is going to clean up
the dumbwaiter maid right now.
He's got a mop bucket.
Also, moments before we rolled, we were like, "Give him a mop bucket!"
- He's gotta be going somewhere. - He's cleaning up the maid!
It's like his broomstick.
And this is the beginning of the outside.
Running, running, running.
So this fence is just a 30 foot section of fence that Andrew designed
and we extended with visual effects, but this was...
We talked about the obstacle of this fence,
the kind of set piece of this fence,
more than maybe anything.
Well, 'cause originally, in the first drafts of the script
years and years ago, this was a...
- You climb over the fence... - It's electrified.
- ...it's electrified... - That's right.
...you climb over it, you get on a limb, the limb breaks,
- there's a car coming. - It was a huge piece.
It was a huge thing.
Yeah, you cause a car crash.
And we scheduled that, but it was two nights
to shoot this one, you getting over a fence.
'Cause then you just made it the car going past.
And Tripp was like, "Guys, we can't spend two nights."
With the tree and the branch breaking. Yeah, I remember.
And that's why the nail...
again this gets to what we were talking about earlier,
moving stuff around, the nail gag that we just watched,
that was originally supposed to be on the fence.
No, it was knot. It was a knot on the branch.
- Right. - But there's another nail.
Ugh, I can't.
Effects. That's all visual effects, Deluxe.
And we were debating how to do this up until a couple days before.
Remember, we talked to Jamie a lot about it
and this thing he was very right about is...
Wait, pause for Soft White Sixties is one of my oldest friend's band
- ...playing in that douchebag's car. - Really?
And that was Matt's voice, too.
- And that's my voice. - Yeah.
But that was one that Jamie was really adamant...
Can you just line read really quick? Get the fuck outta the road!
- Get the fuck outta the road! - Get the fuck out of the road.
That you had to pay the price pushing through the fence,
that it can't just be you wiggle through.
He's like, you've got to pay a price.
And that's where the cutting came from.
Most controversial shot in the movie.
That shot over Grace's shoulder.
- What happened? - Through the fence,
Tripp was like, "Guys, we don't need that shot,"
and we we're like, "You have to see that Stevens is..."
And we argued about it.
That's the last shot of the movie.
We shot that after the goat pit,
we ran up and we had a half an hour.
Yeah, and I remember Ashley being like,
"Okay, guys, we have three minutes, just don't call cut.
If you're going, we're just gonna run it overtime.
You can get it, but yeah..."
Tripp, to his credit, eventually said...
"I hate it, but you guys were right."
Shoots always end so unceremoniously.
You never are doing the last shot with all the cast.
No, never. They're all gone.
It's a cutaway of a fucking phone or...
I always feel like the last man standing
and then it was, yeah, a POV of a car.
This is another... This is the family's entire lineage
is on the line and they're like,
- well, the butler will take care of it. - Right?
That's how entitled these people are.
This was a really fun scene too 'cause it's the first moment that you...
Henry, Tony, hints that this pact with Mr. Le Bail
is something that other families have participated in.
He's talking about the Van Horns and you realize,
which is such a blue blood name, the Van Horns.
Is that your next movie? The Van Horns?
Prequel!
And they play Monopoly or something.
But there are all of these little hints that...
Who did the painting of him?
Henry's performance here is fantastic...
The Henry portraits.
Henry portraits is gorg.
Andrew's team got those together, and they're all based on Henry.
Did Henry keep them?
We told him he should take all of them,
but apparently they're still in storage in Toronto somewhere.
- We should go find them. - We really should.
Someone's gonna break into that storage unit
and just find a treasure trove.
You should get all of them and then
put them in your house and invite him over for dinner
- and not say anything. - That is...
I remember when we got 'em,
'cause they're kind of funny and they're like, you know,
and we got 'em, and we hadn't known Henry that long
and I remember us being like, "I hope he's not mad at us for these."
Yeah.
This is another moment that we kept thinking
is gonna be on the chopping block,
but it's just such a great joke.
I miss Kristian.
So this little interim section where you're running through the woods
was actually something we crafted using footage from a few different beats.
That's before the goat pit, right?
This is all post goat pit, but we chopped it up.
We had to chop it up. We created a new scene there for flow.
Yeah, it felt like...
It felt weird to be cutting from between Mark
and then the scene with Adam and Melanie that's coming up
and not check in with Grace and see where she's at outside.
Thanks for taking care of me.
Well, no, to Searchlight's credit,
that was a note they gave a lot was, "Guys, we have to, as much as we can,
we have to know where Sam and where Grace are in the movie,
we just have to be clear..."
- Which is so right. - Makes sense.
Which makes total sense
and the movie's so much better for cutting.
This is another scene that we had to really kind of fight for
and again it's the same thing we talked about earlier
with the Charity and Daniel scene
is that this scene with Melanie and Adam,
you get so much character out of it and for us,
it was the beginning of kind of Adam's...
- "Fuck it, I'm gonna..." - Redemption.
Yeah, exactly. "I'm gonna redeem myself."
And the moment Melanie has with the kids, where you're like...
- She's a mom. - Yeah, she's a mom.
- Like, she's also fighting for them. - A terrible, terrible mom.
- Horrible mother. - Most awful mother.
But we just thought those were both, it's so valuable, you know.
Melanie's a great mom by the way.
In real life, she's fantastic!
Yes.
I think, too, if you're paying attention,
just to the larger theme of the movie,
this idea that privilege is something that's passed down
from generation to generation.
These kids, Georgie and Gabe, are gonna just become a part of being raised...
They're gonna be the products of their parents.
...thinking this is fine, which is so fucked up.
That head.
They're being told the same thing
that Daniel was told as a kid by Becky, you know.
And he's miserable. He's here now, on this night,
a miserable drunk with a life that's something he's...
...wants nothing of.
And this is both of their last day.
She never says, "Did someone punch you?"
- Like, why is your... - She did.
There's a longer cut. We had to...
It's hysterical, makes her even like, "Yeah, of course.
I got punched back in my day, too."
There was a lot more explanation in this scene
that we just kind of cut down.
Yeah, this was one of those weird scenes
where the audience is ahead of the characters,
so it feels weird for the characters
to just recap something the audience has seen,
is one of those, yeah, sort of strange...
...strange instances.
This was my least favorite night of shooting.
- This is day five. - Day five, yeah.
You were a bit... Yeah.
- Well, this was... - You were an asshole!
You were... No, you were never...
Neither of you were ever assholes,
but I'd never seen Tyler stressed before.
Well, this was one of those... This was the last day of the first week,
and Tripp, to his credit, had sort of created
this behind-the-scenes negotiation with the studio
where if we were making our days, we'd get an extra day of shooting.
And there was a version of the movie that would exist
had we not gotten that extra day that is full of problems,
so he basically said, "We can't go over.
We cannot fuck up anything on the first week of shooting.
It has to be on schedule.
The dailies have to look great,
'cause if they are, we get this extra day."
Gotcha.
And this was the night where we had a windstorm coming in,
and I mean it was like...
We also actually technically didn't make our day.
Really?
Because we forgot that shot that we were just talking about,
- that's Tripp's. - Tripp!
The last shot of the movie, we forgot it.
We just... it just slipped away.
And also, this fight scene was... it was so scrappy.
The stunt team was so good at making it look really...
Yeah.
But so much of that is you and John, and that's just like covering...
The bit where we fall to the ground,
but the stunt team said that would make it look more sort of...
...touch and go where you don't know who's gonna...
Right.
But that was... the way that we shot that again,
this idea that the camera's...
that that fight would happen whether the camera was there to pick it up or not.
It feels like you're just in the frantic, fucked up nature of that.
It's not this well-choreographed...
Do you remember teaching me how to drive?
Yeah, that's right.
- 'Cause you don't have a license. - I was like, what do I do?
You thought the OnStar button was the on button.
The ignition button, yeah.
Also, it was amazing when we realized that you couldn't drive.
I remember being like, "Hm, wow."
Every set they're like, "Wait, you can't? No."
They're like, "We'll call you back in 15 minutes,"
and it costs them an extra 20 grand or something.
I'm so sorry!
We should say...
'Cause this is just a bunch of trees in a circle.
Yeah, this is trees being pushed in a circle.
And I'm just...
The little Easter egg in this is the voice of Justin on TripSafe
is Academy Award winner Nat Faxon.
Who was another Hail Mary late in the game...
He's in the Searchlight family, and they called them in.
We needed someone to deliver for this.
...there's nothing I can do, my hands are tied.
And he did. We met him in person for the first time
at the ADR. to record the scene.
Hey, Nat, congrats.
Justin.
Hello. Justin.
Is there anything else I can help you with?
Yeah, you can go fuck yourself, Justin!
Okay. Thanks for using TripSafe. Have a great night.
- This is one of those ones where... - Yeah, this is scary.
Yeah, John showing up,
we were like "Let's embrace the Terminator 2 of John."
We did it through the whole... we did it like...
That dude can run, yeah.
There's also, I think...
one of the sleights of hand that we do throughout
both outside of the house and inside of the house
is that you're never so familiar with the geography of where things are
- that you can't cheat things. - It makes sense.
You've been running through the forest,
you're not sure if it's on these looping, winding roads,
and a lot of that is just...
The movie kind of exists in a bit of a fantasy land...
Well, you never see the top of the house
which is something we were very conscious of.
You don't actually see how big it is.
Or the ends, it always fills the frame.
It's never... You never see them...
This is it.
How much fun did you guys have doing this scene?
We were having fun.
We just could not keep a straight face, oh, my God.
That took like what, four hours to shoot?
If you're listening in the commentary,
you've probably seen the gag reel
which is mostly made up of you guys laughing.
We just couldn't keep it.
That was fun, though.
I felt so bad for Mark 'cause he just came in for that one scene
and I was like, "Right, okay, cool, I've got it, I've got it, I've got it.
I don't have it."
He was such a good sport.
The editing of this scene is...
This is one that when Terel showed us the assembly cut of the movie,
this was pretty much locked in.
I mean, we obviously changed a few things here and there,
- and added... - And VFX...
This use of 1812...
It was just a really amazing first...
That shot got flipped.
We had to keep the screen direction.
I just liked pretending to knock him in the head.
This was also hard because you...
I had to... All my abs going into...
I remember you were in so much pain.
Well, 'cause you had to sit here like this all crunched up for...
Yeah, 'cause I had no...
and I kept just falling to the side of the chair.
And I was like, "Someone help me."
That shot of the car going off the road...
They had to prop me back up every shot.
- This was fun. - ...that was the last special.
This is the most fun. It was like a rollercoaster.
- The car is on a rotisserie. - Was it fun?
The first night wasn't, it was freezing,
but when they got that heater up and running.
'Cause we had to reshoot. Yeah, the first night I remember
we all felt like... we were all like, "Fuck."
- Well, it was just snowing. - And it was snowing.
Directly snowing.
And you're just in the dress
- in the car with the windows open. - In the dress. Yup.
Well, it's so funny, I remember originally pitching that crash
as it's just something that you see through the phone
and you're never really in the car.
And everyone was like, "Yeah, that's great, that's gonna be easy to shoot."
And it evolved to involve you guys sitting in the car on a motorized rotisserie.
It was so fun. That second night was so... I was like, "Weeee!"
I remember John having less of a good time?
John was a bit ill.
Yeah, John did not love it.
Poor, poor man.
Déjà vu.
I like this. Adam's so good in here.
- Yeah, you guys both brought it. - You guys both killed this scene.
...came out here to escape the madness.
I feel like I can say that about every scene but...
- Yeah. - True.
This is my least favorite scene...
- Right. - ...the two of you did.
- Nothing technical going on. - I hate you both...
There's no rigging or anything...
No, this is... Well, it's so great too because you've seen Adam,
you've just seen Adam decide
in himself that he needs to stop things
but then you're not sure what the fuck he's going to do in this moment.
She's got nothing to lose.
- Yeah. - Grace is like just, "All right."
That's your second take in its entirety.
- Really? - Yeah.
'Cause I remember we all were watching it on the monitors being like,
"Fuck. This is fucking perfect."
And then in the edit,
Terel just dropped it in, and then we cut to Adam.
The timing... we didn't even really change the timing
in the way the lines were read, it was very...
But also, one of the tricky things about shooting handheld is,
if you... you typically have to...
- You cut back, then it's wobbly take. - ...to commit to a take.
Or 'cause if you're cutting in between and the size is different. Yeah.
So it's really all about just finding that perfect take and milking it.
- Alien planet. - Yup, alien planet shot.
So much fog and atmosphere.
Bring in the fog! Which we loved.
I love...
I think it's the only thing Searchlight...
Searchlight was so great the whole process,
and they did ask us not to go overboard on the fog
- and I think we got a little carried away. - So what did we do?
'Cause we loved the fog.
Look, that gun is right...
This was a hit that every time we watched a take of it,
we thought you'd...
- Really? - That you got hit.
- Yes! - Smacked you with it.
You can come out now.
We had a cut where you could see Henry behind the tree right here.
- When he pops out... - It's so funny!
- So Scooby Doo! Yeah. - So Scooby Doo.
That's awesome!
You knew I was here?
- Yeah, you're standing... - Hello!
...five feet away.
- It's also this thing... - We shot that blind.
This is when Adam starts to become the other lead in a way
and Mark is being tied up,
and it becomes Adam's redemption story because...
And it was one of the things that we loved about Mark
when we were talking to him about just coming on board
was he got it, that, you know,
you're the hero of the movie in the beginning
and then you're locked up for half the movie
and you're ultimately totally flaccid. You know what I mean?
He was great about his family actually did mean everything to him,
especially his brother.
He did that, he played that so well.
So well.
This scene here is like more of the tipping point
- and calling him out on it. - TYLER & Yeah.
Andie's performance and giving it to Mark.
This is one of my favorite scenes to shoot.
And it's so simple but it was...
they were just both so locked in and so good
and poor Andie smoked like 800 cigarettes.
I don't wanna do this.
But we have to protect...
She's got that motherly instinct
mixed with just years of being in a strange traditional...
- But also that mother's guilt too. - Yeah.
'Cause she knows what buttons to push on.
Right.
And she doesn't feel good about it.
- No. - It's not...
It's sometimes you've got to do the hard thing,
- and I think she... - She's being manipulative but feels...
- Yeah - Yeah, exactly.
Well, and again, she says "I didn't want to do this."
And it's genuine.
She really likes you and hates that this is what...
that this is what it's come to.
And this scene got written very late in the process
when we were trying to get someone attached to this role,
we realized we needed to really focus on the Becky character.
Yeah, make it meatier, and so the guys put together this scene
and, you know, we joked about it that like, "Oops! Saved the movie."
Because so much of the movie hinges on this moment of selling this stuff.
Mark has that hilarious line about cutting goat's throats.
Yeah, slicing the throat of a goat.
Yeah. It gives them a history.
This scene is a little bit the Rosetta Stone of the tone,
I think, too 'cause it's so...
they're so convinced of what they're saying,
but what they're saying is so insane and ridiculous at the same time.
Did anyone break during this? No?
- No. - No. Mark...
Damn, just me.
Well, Mark was having the same problem you had
with sitting in the car with his arms.
He was like, "My fucking arms."
- No. - His gigantic muscly arms.
- Such big guns. - He got the guns up.
They're the size of his head.
- Tear. - A single tear.
A single tear.
No fake tears were used in this movie.
I choose her.
What a wuss.
I don't believe you.
I really love those shots of Andie.
Yeah. This is another one where the coverage is just so simple,
but when the writing is good and the performances are good,
you just don't need much of anything but to just...
In fact you need less of everything else.
It's just about holding on the right thing.
No.
- Double tear. - Babe.
You thought you liked the single tear,
wait until you see the double tear.
And he can't wipe it 'cause his hands are all tied up.
The bowling alley!
Yeah, it's like, "Welcome to act three."
We tried so hard to write a sequence
or move one of the action sequences into the bowling alley
where the bowling pins were used as weapons.
Melanie just becomes one of the kids.
She literally becomes a child.
I fully thought a painting was moving.
When Nicky starts moving?
Yeah. Doesn't it look like a painting?
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- Now I'm gonna see that every time now. - It's so cool.
This is another of "Kristian's coming in at 3:00 in the morning
- to do one scene." - Shot for 15 minutes.
- Improvise and you're out. - Yup.
I know tonight didn't go...
I remember we were shooting this while we were also shooting
the inserts of the gun that Melanie drops shooting at you way earlier.
And we'd have to run back and forth in Parkwood like...
- There was a lot of... - You guys had a lot of running.
A lot of stairs. Yeah. Many flights of stairs covered.
- Jon Snow. - Oh, Adam. Jon Snow.
And one of the great things Adam did in this scene is,
he was supposed to be drinking more here,
and Adam was like, "I'd love to try a take where we just... I don't."
- Like, the decision is the opposite. - I'm sobering up.
And so, we did both and we went with the one that's his idea.
Smart.
No.
All right.
This was a funny day.
Yeah, this was a weird one.
- That thing over... - I took a nap in between takes.
You were tied on that table for a minute.
What was the most uncomfortable sequence for you?
This one?
- Are we looking at it? - I think the one in the car
when I had to... when I couldn't keep upright.
Right, you were laying down...
Because you don't have the... And then everyone,
everyone turned the car door open and I'd just fall out the car.
Someone was like, "I just need to check your mic."
And I'd just slide.
The fun of this scene is obviously
it goes into just absolute absurdism for a few moments.
- Like, Latin. - Just anarchy.
And this is the black mass?
- This is the black mass, and it's... - Is this the ham?
Fresh ham?
- Some ham for us. - Some ham for us.
A ham sandwich.
And this is the...
...the scene, this is like the scene of them
pretending they know what a satanic mass is.
Right. This seems cool.
These guys don't know what they're doing.
Let's stand in a circle and drink some blood.
Weird robes.
Aunt Helene is the only one who's really into it.
Yeah. She probably curated it all.
I love that shot. There's the Jedi shot.
We were also asked by the MPAA to translate the Latin.
- Well, Henry and... - So ridiculous!
Henry and Nicky were googling...
They did a deep dive too!
They did some deep... Yeah.
'Cause they contacted a Latin professor to do the translation
and to get the proper pronunciations on them.
Yeah, they fully, they went all out.
I remember Henry came up to Guy and Ryan, the writers,
when they were visiting set, and he was like,
- "Hey, I've got some notes on the Latin." - Yeah!
- And they were like "Absolutely!" - They looked it up.
They did their homework. Everybody did their homework...
They really did.
Yeah, Henry was delighted when Guy and Ryan were there.
He was talking about some of their dialogue,
and I remember he was so polite
asking them to change a word in the first kind of exposition...
The monologue one?
And he was like, "Would it be okay if I change this?"
That's so sweet.
It was great.
This was fun.
Yeah, this was really...
this was a really tricky technical part of the edit
because there are so many things happening.
So many balls in the air.
There's this escape,
there's Alex escaping.
Yeah, I remember trying to shoot under the stairs was tricky too.
Yeah, it was. To get your faces.
And it's also one of these weird tricks where... do you remember this?
It's not like you're not really hiding.
No, we're outside. We're very obvious.
Elyse.
- We... - Mean Elyse.
One of the big challenges of this sequence
was just figuring out geographically in the house
where this scene would take place,
where Daniel's taking you in the event that he didn't get shot,
and we loved staging this in the same foyer where you see the kids,
you see the younger version of Daniel and Alex run by...
- That's a good call. - ...earlier in the movie.
We tried to get them to explore more when we were with the kids.
We could not... It was so awkward doing this scene.
We were laughing so much.
Every take ends with you guys laughing.
'Cause we're just glaring at each other, doesn't feel natural.
We've been going to dinner every night.
And I think it was the first scene we'd done.
We'd only known each other as friends for a month.
And then we had to... This is the only scene we have together.
- Right. - Yeah.
So it was weird. It was like, "Hi, friend.
- Okay. I guess we're..." - "Let's murder!"
That scene was the reason
our script supervisor wanted to do the movie.
The two of you fighting.
Like, "I've just been waiting to shoot this scene."
Really? I had no idea.
You're just another sacrifice.
This is when Henry insisted on doing his own fall.
Yeah.
- Yeah. - His own stunts.
His own stunts. Yeah.
Without the camera even on him, so he's just like...
"Okay, you can stop." There you go.
For those of you paying attention, that's the lantern
that Melanie leaves when she's eating pills earlier...
Yeah, way earlier.
- Earlier in the movie. - Got it! I didn't even know that.
I feel like continuity's only noticed when something's wrong.
People just take it for granted when it's perfect.
And speaking of continuity, the dress, the blood, all of that,
shot so out of order, it's a miracle that...
How many were there? You guys said it.
- It was like 17? - It was 17.
I've been saying 47.
- But they were doubled... - There's 36.
...for you and then doubled for stunting.
- For stunting. - Yeah.
- There was a crazy amount... - So there were 40?
- Yeah. - There was a lot.
Adam dying...
- He's so good at it. - he's so good at it.
Yeah, I know.
We killed Adam Brody, guys.
I remember on set this night,
we talked to everybody about all the death scenes they'd done,
and we were all very impressed with how many times everybody's died.
Elyse had been killed like 50 times.
She got killed as an alien.
- Right. - She'd never been exploded, though.
I think this is everyone's first time exploding.
This is first day.
Oh god, this is the first day and we were rehearsing,
and I whacked Andie MacDowell in the face. with a stunt brick.
- A soft prop stunt brick. - And she got a welt.
It was the one bit of the soft prop where it was hard.
We all thought she was gonna walk away.
And that was your first time performing with her, right?
Yeah. I'm like, "Hi, nice to meet you. Let's rehearse."
- Bash. In the face. - Way to break the ice.
She was really lovely. She's so funny.
And this is when she was asking on set.
You know, we were all intimidated 'cause she's a movie star
and this is our first day and she's throwing punches
- and after the first or second take... - She went for it.
She did. And she was like, "Just so you guys know,
feel free. Please give me notes on throwing punches,
'cause I do not know what I'm doing."
- I'm like, okay, okay, great, you know... - Seems like she did.
- Good ice breaking. - That's our first AD's hand, Jo.
- Is it really? - Yeah.
Parts of Jo are in this.
That's right. I saw her wearing the wedding skirt.
It was actually just a little piece of tulle
Little piece. Yeah, I saw her walking around with that.
Where was I?
You were getting bloodied up for the walkout.
- Gotcha. - For the walk out of the mansion.
You and Mark in this scene, oh my God.
The three of us had talked about it endlessly how great you both are,
and this is one of the scenes that we talked about with Tripp and Jamie
and Tara and Searchlight, Guy and Ryan for years.
- The turn! - The turn!
Is the turn gonna work?
And then to watch you guys do it, I remember just being...
Mark's eyes go black.
- It's crazy. - It's insane.
And your levels of...
Just all the different levels you have here of...
That you can not respond in such a variety of ways, it's...
But watching it on set, I remember being like...
- We got it. - ...like this is gonna work.
And we only did the line that Mark delivers,
that, "You won't be with me after this," we only got one take of that.
This was like one take of each side.
He's right.
That we just were able to fully commit to.
This was the only location where we were allowed to use live blood.
Yeah. And we used all of it.
'Cause all the other ones were museums.
And we used all of it.
- We went through gallons. - Yeah.
Alex.
- You're hurting me. - She's in here!
No, please, no, no!
Please!
Let me go!
This again is a new location.
- The matriarch is dead. - New location,
and we set the look for everyone.
I mean, this was day three or four.
And then reverse-engineered how everyone looked for the rest of the shoot.
- Yeah, makeup. My god. - We were just lucky.
The sun is about to rise! We must do it now!
Yeah, we had to guess with the...
We didn't know how much goat goo would be.
Yeah.
But it worked 'cause I'd run so much afterwards and before
that it could have fallen off.
It really worked, and the goat pit is the...
- Those aren't effects. - That's real, live fire.
You lit that on fire?
Did a big burn. They built a wall, right?
Remember the wall that would show up everywhere?
Yeah!
Did a whole bunch of different paintings
and everything to get everything.
A lot of games, display cases.
Man, the family really holds you down a lot.
Do you remember this is when I went to hospital?
- Yeah. - Yep, this is the time.
For no reason.
Tripp told us he was like, "Whatever happens,
you don't... the lead... Sam can't get injured,"
and then the second or third day, you roll off the table.
'Cause they put... I think it was right before action, they put...
really slippery mud on the bottom of my shoes,
'cause you could see that they were crispy white,
and I hadn't practiced with the mud and no one knew how slippery it was on the floor.
And Joe told the two kids,
just come in at the very end 'cause it's gonna be a bit scary,
and then I roundhouse off the table
- and smack my... - I'll never forget that yell.
It was like a shock 'cause I thought I was...
And here we go.
- Made it. - It was one of the takes on that.
I'm like an animal.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
I look like a little...
- Caged animal. - ...rabbit.
This is my...
- Oh god, this is so good. - ...funniest moment in the movie.
This curtain pull.
So good.
Such a good sound there too.
I love that Henry makes the choice
to hide behind the table like it's gonna...
All of them, they're just scared, 'cause they watch too many vampire movies.
- Yeah. Yeah. - Yeah.
Yeah, I would be curious to go around the room of an audience
and guess... and hear what they think might happen.
- What's going on? - Kristian.
I remember, and then talking about this scene too...
'Cause this reads on the page as...
a quarter of a page, like they all wait,
- nothing happens. - Right.
And talking about how to stage it and shoot it,
we all were like, "This has to be as long as possible."
This is a beat that is uncomfortably... you sit in it longer than you should...
- You wanna feel really... - ...before you realize
that's it's... Yeah.
- 'Cause they're so uncomfortable. - So uncomfortable.
And the tables have turned.
I love how you're still a caged animal there though.
- It's like... - I've been through too much.
Yeah, you're like, "I'm not fucking done yet."
And it's such a fun moment,
like, "What the fuck is gonna happen next?"
Yeah, I'm in more danger if anything.
Yeah.
...not fail you again.
And then, yeah, it's the...
Well, here we go.
This is thing we did not know if or how it will work.
There's so much pressure to get it right on the...
'cause of those blood rigs.
Yeah, we didn't have a lot of takes with this.
You have to get it right, right away.
And there's a part of me that just wants to laugh a little bit.
- I'm sure. - So maybe I just laughed
and then just went with that.
And that's where it came from! Great.
We showed up on this day of shooting,
and Tripp was pretty emphatic, our producer,
that we would not be able to spray people with blood
Yeah, and then Elyse was the first one...
Yeah, who was shot in the face, and then everybody did it.
Blood gun.
Yeah, we shouldn't...
And we blew up the kids...
- But not on screen. - Yeah.
So that effect, Melanie and the kids running out and exploding,
we had these giant meat cannons
filled with blood and banana and...
It actually tasted quite nice.
- Did it really? - Yeah. 'Cause the blood is...
- Like minty. - ...caramel syrup
that they dye 'cause they want it thick.
- So it's like what you put on ice cream. - Makes sense when...
With bananas and jelly and stuff. It's great.
- You do lick it later? - Yeah.
- Off your lips. - But it's sticky as hell, right?
- It's super uncomfortable. - It's in your hair,
where it stick to your neck.
That snort is one of our favorite moments of the whole movie.
But yeah, to finish up on the laugh too,
we do not know what the movie would have been
if you hadn't decided to laugh.
He's not taking me.
And then Mark going full, like...
- Nic Cage. - Yeah.
And again, when we were shooting this,
this was early, this was day three maybe.
He was like, "I'm gonna go full Nic Cage."
It's actually great that you did these scenes early on,
'cause we were still so full of energy
and it wasn't those night shoots yet.
- We were just exhausted. - So gnarly.
- That's a lot of blood on my face. - Lot of blood.
There's a lot of blood. Yeah.
This is a 50-50 split between practical and effects.
- So much of this is done in camera. - Except that shot is painted.
- The window, right? - The window's painted, yeah.
Was there any point during this first week of shooting,
especially this stuff that you were like...
That's Jamie Vanderbilt...
- Yeah, Jamie Vanderbilt... - As Mr. Le Bail.
Was there any point that you were like,
"What the fuck am I doing with these guys?"
- No. - Okay, great.
No, 'cause...
...doing so many other films with just a lot of blood in it,
I was kind of like...
- what's it called... - Par for the course.
I was like, "Great, cool."
Just so pleased how those fire shots...
So this is a real fire?
- Yeah. - Yep.
Wow.
And then a hand-off to this shot,
which is our wonderful folks at Deluxe...
Real fire elements were placed in the hallway. Yeah.
Yeah, and this music is The Gifted who did The Hide and Seek Song as well.
Yeah, and this VFX shot is over 2,000 frames long,
so it's just a crazy, crazy shot.
I think they did 70 versions of it.
I think the 70th version is the final version.
Yeah, 70th. Sounds right.
With all the explosions and this evolved.
It originally was just gonna be the house on fire
and then when we found the song that had the right kind of cadence
and it felt like there was something kind of romantic and weird
and sort of ethereal about it,
we decided to progress the effect with various explosions
and really seeing the house fall apart...
- And having you be so calm. - And she's coming back together.
- Just chill. - Exactly.
It's falling apart, and she's like,
"I'm gonna have a cigarette and finish it."
Not flinching, not... Yeah.
It's your first exhale of the entire movie.
- Right. Yeah. - And your line, I mean...
I know we talked a lot about it going into it,
but your delivery is just so pitch perfect.
I think 'cause I flagged it day one, and then I had so long to think about it.
To make sure like, "Okay, we're gonna nail this.
If we're gonna do this, we're gonna really commit to it."
- 'Cause it could be so cheeseball. - It could be so cheesy.
- Yeah, also oddly... - If you shot this on the first day,
- it would have been really cheesy. - Not as cool.
Well, I think, out of context.
There's probably no way that it wins.
You have to have seen...
And that's the movie.
- Awesome! - Yeah.
What do you think Grace does after this?
She probably still goes on her honeymoon.
Probably, like... I don't know. Do you think...
She probably gets interviewed, and no one believes here.
- Book tour? - Yeah.
Well, she's in jail 'cause she murdered a whole family.
She just burned down the house,
- and she's married so... - She has so many weapons and...
This movie is actually an adaptation of her story of what happened that night.
Yeah, then the next one will be like what really happened.
She's like, "Let's play a game."
The prequel we want to do is like with just Fitch and Emilie...
- Amazing. - They're touring Europe...
Yeah, Melanie and Kristian just hanging out.
Just being terrible people
- somewhere else. - So good.
Just doing coke and hanging out.
I would so make and watch that movie.
- Same. - Yeah, it'd be so fun.
We should say too
that you definitely want to stick through the credits
and listen to Brian Tyler, the score...
- That's amazing. - ...that plays over this.
It was the first piece of music that we heard that he composed.
We went up to his house, and he'd been working on it for a few weeks
and said that he'd sort of found the theme
and he'd written this piece that he wanted to play for us,
and we were just slack-jawed.
It's the most incredible...
We should also call out our sound team
'cause they, our sound designers, killed it on this.
We were up there with them in Toronto for a couple weeks,
and they just brought it to a whole new level.
There is so much to design in the movie:
a car crash, people exploding, fire...
I mean, it's the level of sound work that needed to be done
and was done so perfectly is...
I wanna talk about every single person on this list,
about how much they brought to it.
- Hire all... - Everybody.
- Everyone was incredible. - Yeah.
They're so, so good.
Yeah, the special effects guys,
they saved our asses with the exploding bodies.
Didn't have a single mis...
Well, the meat cannons misfired once.
- Did they really? - Yeah.
- But they didn't... - Preemptive fire.
One fired low.
It just fired a little stuff.
Sinclair! Landon!
Do you remember when you first got sent this script?
Yeah. Yeah, I was in Boston.
Do you remember what you thought?
Were you like, "I wanna do this" or was it like...
I think I was on the fence 'cause I'd done so many like it,
and it's so hard to get right,
and it wasn't until meeting with Fox Searchlight
and my now fiance, Jimmy, read it
and was like, "You are so dumb if you don't..."
'Cause Jimmy's a writer so he was like, "You know how tough..."
Thank you, Jimmy. Yeah.
And then meeting you guys, I was like, "I'm all in now. Let's go."
Awesome. That was...
Yeah, once you go on board, we were like,
"Okay, now we know what this movie is."
Took a chance on me.
Man, Philip Tallman did some heavy lifting for us
- on the temp mix. - He did.
We owe him drinks in perpetuity. That guy...
I'll have drinks with you guys.
What are you doing right now?
- Get some beers. - Drinks time. Yeah.
I know we usually are drinking during these commentaries.
We had a little early in the morning.
- Getting soft. - We could have an Irish coffee.
- Is it Irish... - Yeah.
- I wanna get that one. - Drink some Bailey's.
Delightful.
- All right. - Cool.
- Guys. - And... break.
- Thank you so much. - Thank you.
- Thanks for listening. - I love hanging out with you guys.
- Yeah. - Let's do dinner sometime.
- Yeah, for real. - Let's do commentaries...
- What are we making... - Yeah. We'll just do this.
Do you know what we think about?
Okay, signing off.
Ready or not, here I come.