Well, hello, this is Robert Weide,
the director of How to Lose Friends & Alienate People.
And if you're listening to my director's commentary,
you must be a real completist,
because Simon and I, Simon Pegg and I,
are about to do a commentary together later today.
I imagine you probably already played that.
And if you're playing this one as well, then you've got a lot of spare time.
Today is what? September 26, 2008.
We just had the world premiere of this film
two nights ago, September 24, 2008.
And the script for How to Lose Friends was brought to me in early 2006,
so that will give you some idea of how long this process took.
I loved the script when I read it, and it was the film
that I'd been waiting for to make my directorial debut.
We have here Janette Scott. There she is.
This is actually a clip from a movie called Now and Forever.
And we will find that this is actually Sidney Young's mother.
You've already seen the film, right? So I'm not giving...
I can give away spoilers.
And this is young Kelan Pannell,
who plays a young Sidney, a young Sidney Young.
And this little push-in to his eyes,
we actually started on his eyes and pulled back,
and then ran the film in reverse,
because it's very hard to get focus when you're pushing in at that distance.
See, there's your first piece of movie magic, your little secret.
There'll be a lot of those kinds of things.
This score is by David Arnold, who's a wonderful composer,
does all the James Bond movies.
He does big films, still does little films, if he likes them.
I really like this music because it's...
I wanted a very dream-like feel for this opening sequence,
like we're just sort of floating over the scene in Sidney's memory,
'cause it winds up that this is a flashback.
The woman in that clip is Janette Scott, we said that.
The movie was Now and Forever, 1956.
It was actually a colour film, but we made it black and white,
just to make it look a little more vintage.
She's still alive. She was born in 1938.
Her mother was actress Thora Hird, who was married to Mel Tormé.
No, actually, Janette was married to Mel Tormé.
By the way, that business with all the slow motion
turning into real-time motion with the applause
in that previous scene, we were trying to figure out
how to do that, and finally just told everybody
in the audience, all the extras, to applaud in slow motion.
That was the easiest way.
We're now flashing back to the BAFTAs,
and this is a combination of actual footage
from the BAFTA Awards in 2006,
plus material that we shot,
that we stitched together pretty seamlessly.
Here is Katherine Parkinson,
known to British TV viewers from The IT Crowd.
The pig, by the way, we actually had two pigs, one named Nutmeg.
I think the other one was named Cinnamon.
So Nutmeg did some things better than Cinnamon and vice versa.
So we used them both.
Here is Felicity Montagu,
also known to British TV fans as Alan Partridge's assistant
in the Steve Coogan series I'm Alan Partridge.
Yeah, the red-rope motif plays a lot in this film.
And I like that little sort of magical "cling" when the rope is taken off.
'Cause that's what Sidney lives for,
is to get on the other side of the red rope.
I don't know if that's Nutmeg or Cinnamon there.
We'll talk about the lift scenes later,
where the lift actually goes up and down.
That was a little effect I thought of when I first read the script,
a little visual I wanted to incorporate.
And my trusty crew figured out a way to do it.
By the way, that pig sitting on its haunches,
sitting on its butt,
pigs don't normally sit that way,
so whether that was Nutmeg or Cinnamon,
they were trained specifically to do that.
It wasn't easy to get the pigs...
What do they say? "Don't work with animals or children."
And if you work with Simon Pegg, you've sort of got both in one.
That's a Jack Nicholson lookalike, by the way.
Nicholson was not up for doing a cameo.
This, however, is the actual Thandie Newton.
We needed a celebrity in this scene to do a cameo.
And Simon was actually in my flat in London,
where I was staying during production.
Because he was friendly with Thandie from Run Fatboy Run,
just called her on the mobile phone and said,
"Would you like to be in our movie?" And she said yes.
And she was a delight to work with.
We were so pleased to get her.
Too bad she's not more beautiful, though.
She's kind of hard to look at.
We actually shot a lot more with Thandie.
There'll be deleted scenes on this DVD,
and you'll get to see more of Thandie's scenes
that just got cut for time, as most of the deleted scenes did.
Yeah, this whole...
You know, there was some urgency to get Sidney to New York,
so all of this stuff that's in London, prior to him going,
just got more and more condensed in the editing room.
And then our editor, David Freeman, sort of came up with the idea
of just turning this all into a title sequence,
so that's why credits are running all over this,
so you don't quite feel the film has begun yet
until he gets to New York.
I thought that was actually a smart way to go.
This was all shot at the Haymarket Hotel in London,
which had only just opened when we were shooting.
I don't think they were open for more than three weeks.
And in the past year, it's really become the hotel to stay at.
The old fake-moustache gag.
This business here, of the pig taking a piss,
was sort of an afterthought, not my idea.
In fact, it was shot as second unit, and at first, I really objected to it,
and then I thought, "Well, all right.
"It's not bad to make the pig a little more disruptive."
But we had to cut it way down, because the person who actually shot it
just shot rivers and rivers of pee. It got to be too much.
It's like the blood in the elevator in The Shining.
Here comes Sidney's jump and crashing into the table,
which I was never terribly satisfied with.
I only had two shots at it, and then I had to move on.
And neither was great,
so we got this idea in post-production, of just freezing frame in mid-air
and turning it into a newspaper headline,
which I thought ultimately worked out fine.
It was a great way to introduce the title.
This stuff in London we graded very cold.
That sort of blue tint to everything is just to make London
look sort of depressing next to New York,
which is a warmer grade for contrast.
John Beard, who has the by-line here, is actually our production designer,
so that's an in-joke. I love this photo of Clint Eastwood
and Morgan Freeman in the background.
What you can do with Photoshop.
This scene in the office/flat was actually shot at The Hobgoblin pub,
upstairs on Effra Road, for those of you in London.
That fellow with the glasses is actually a friend of mine,
Hugh Thompson, who's not in show business,
but I love putting Hugh in things.
And it really made his day to get to be in this movie.
So there's a shout-out to Hugh.
This is sort of a who's who of British actors
that a lot of people would be familiar with,
certainly the Brits watching this.
We've got James Corden. We've got Chris O'Dowd.
We've got Fenella Woolgar.
All of them way overqualified for these small parts,
but they were sweet enough to be willing
to take these small parts in the film.
That was the Preachergraphic novel that Tim was reading, by the way.
Here's our first shot of Jeff Bridges.
I just had this idea to not see Clayton Harding's face
until we're actually in the office
and sort of build suspense by seeing him only from behind.
Sort of the James Bond villain motif.
So there we see him on the magazine via a photo,
but we never see him until we're in the office.
I love all this chaos in the... There's Hugh in the glasses,
getting his face pushed by James Corden.
So, now we're seeing a little bit more of Jeff's face.
When he opens the drawer here, on the DVD, freeze frame...
There you go, "Posh Spice, Like Fuck She Is!" it says.
We had a bunch of mock-up covers made of The Modern Review magazine,
but they're only onscreen for flashes.
Some of the stuff on the wall is like that, too.
If you could really see the stuff on the wall,
it's very, very funny.
This business, I had this idea of pushing into a blue wall,
which turns into sky, and then the plane comes through,
and the art department forgot to do it,
and that day, just right before we shot, somebody got a can of blue paint
and painted the wall blue, and we were in business.
Those shots of New York are all stock shots.
There was a gag that I originally shot here
of Sidney not having enough money to pay the cab driver
and only having sterling in his wallet instead of American dollars.
You'll see that on the deleted scenes. And then in post,
people weren't certain if that gag would really play well.
So then, just from sort of found footage that we shot of New York
getting sort of darker and uglier, and that look on Simon's face,
and then we put in a gunshot and came up with another gag
of just Sidney thinking he was gonna live in a very glamorous part of town,
and instead, he winds up here.
Once again, over a kebab shop,
which is where he lived in London, so not much has changed.
And this is the wonderful Miriam Margolyes,
who I could not have cast more perfectly
for the part of Mrs. Kowalski, the Polish landlady.
People have actually asked me if she was Polish,
'cause her accent is so spot on.
But, no, she's British, and she swears like a sailor,
which only endeared her to us even more.
She's quite ribald.
Would that be the right word?
This apartment was actually shot in London
on a sound stage in the East End, 3 Mills,
which I kept referring to as Three Mile Island,
which will make sense to Americans.
It was always very, very hot there.
We were all sweating like crazy,
and of course Simon was always under the lights.
So a lot of wardrobe changes
when Simon's clothes would soak through.
That's a translight outside.
We're actually inside a sound stage, but that was a great New York translight,
which is just kind of soft-focused through the windows.
This whip-pan coming up here to change from the flat,
or the apartment, as we say in America, to the dance floor,
is sort of a device I stole from Edgar Wright,
the director of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz...
You all know who Edgar Wright is. Spaced.
But of course, Edgar ripped it off from 100 other people,
so I told him that was my homage to him,
and he said, "What are you talking about?
"I didn't come up with the whip-pan."
This dance club is The Cobden club on Kensal Road in London.
And we did two versions of this.
One actually ended with Simon break-dancing,
which he actually did pretty well.
It was almost too good for Sidney to be that good a break-dancer,
so we went with this version.
And the break-dance version should be on the deleted scenes.
Simon and I knew from the beginning that
that would be a struggle to decide that.
I love this scene. That's Nathalie Cox, who you're gonna see in the bar.
This is very Chaplin-esque,
this timing of Sidney coming back in frame
and the little shoulder shrug, right there.
I love it. That's very Chaplin.
This is actually...
This right here is the very first thing that we shot in the film,
June 4, 2007, first day of production.
This was our first location.
Charlie Wright's bar in Pitfield, N1, to be exact,
for you people who want to run out and find all the locations.
Yeah, this was the first angle we shot on this scene.
This business...
That line right there, we always thought was kind of the...
Whenever we screened the film in advance,
that was the first really big laugh.
So that was our intention to get to that point as soon as possible,
and that's why the opening of the film
just really kept getting condensed more and more,
so we could get Sidney to New York and hear that joke.
Kirsten's reference to the White Russian,
if you've seen the film, I assume you have already
before you heard my audio commentary, is very significant.
Somebody put a bendy straw in that White Russian,
which I only discovered after a few takes.
There it is. It was too late to take it out.
I was really annoyed that somebody put a bendy straw
in the White Russian,
because the drinker of the White Russian
would never have a bendy straw.
These are the kinds of things that get me crazy.
Here's a gag on Gloucester, which she pronounced "Glouchester."
And Simon Pegg's actually from Gloucester,
and Peter Straughan, the writer,
actually made Sidney's character from Gloucester,
hoping that would appeal to Simon and that he would play the part.
I think that's what finally convinced him is the Gloucester reference.
These two, by the way, Simon and Kirsten,
got on so well on this film and became so close that
there were times when I felt like a school teacher,
having to separate them because they were having too much fun
and giggling and acting like little children.
But it's great because the chemistry really comes through in the film, I think,
that they really did enjoy each other's company.
Kirsten I worked with when she was 13 years old.
She had a small part in a film I wrote and produced
called Mother Night in 1995-96.
So this was sort of a reunion for us.
And Stephen Woolley, the producer, produced Interview with the Vampire,
which put Kirsten on the map, so this was sort of a two-part reunion.
This is Charlotte Devaney, an actress we found, who is a hell of a dancer
and was willing to get naked and wear a prosthetic penis,
so what more could you want?
There was actually some question
as to whether we'd go with a real tranny for a while.
Again, I can give away these spoilers
because you've already watched the film.
But we decided instead to cast an actual woman
and fit her with a prosthetic.
Don't make me say any more about that.
This is Ace of Spades.
People have asked if these
Big Lebowski references were intentional.
He calls her "Mrs. Lebowski," and we've got the White Russian.
And they really weren't. Peter Straughan wasn't...
We had no idea that Jeff Bridges would be in the film.
I mean, ultimately, he was cast,
but we weren't thinking of Jeff with these Lebowski references.
Stephen Woolley, the producer, wanted me to shoot
a frontal of Bobbie there,
but I said, "No, let's save that for the striptease later.
"We'll just intimate what's going on."
This business with the blinds was an idea that I had.
I just wanted to sort of load up the scene with a bunch of gags
on Sidney's first day at work.
So the prop department rigged up the blinds to fall.
This business about the brown, rusty water,
this may not make sense to Londoners,
but anyone who's gone to New York and stayed in an old building
understands the idea of the rusty water
coming out of the rusty pipes.
And we just...
These were all sort of last-minute gags that were thought of on the set.
And I think I got some tea.
It's basically tea.
And here we have the... Yeah.
All the guys know what that's about.
Now, here we are, obviously in New York, in Times Square.
You can't fake this.
We had a few days to shoot New York, some actual exteriors.
This, right here, is the final shot of principal photography,
shot from the 30th floor of a hotel.
This was the last shot.
And so we've got New York.
This lobby is actually a lobby of a building in New York.
The elevator, or lift as we say in England,
is yet another location.
The basic office is another location,
and then Clayton Harding's office is yet another location.
So, continuity-wise, this was difficult stuff to make match.
And here, we're about to see, finally,
the reveal of Jeff Bridges that we've been waiting for.
Whether we're actually in New York here,
or whether we're on a London sound stage
with a green screen, I won't tell you.
Love that line.
Jeff Bridges I've actually known for about 12 years,
and he just came to mind right away when I read the script.
I really wanted him to play Clayton Harding.
We had talked about doing something together,
and I sent him the script, and thankfully he said yes.
He had no idea that it was based on Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair.
In fact, when I told him that, he said, "Who's Graydon Carter?"
So, so much for people who think that Jeff is trying to play Graydon.
I told him not to research Graydon Carter
or learn anything about him,
because I wanted to think of this as an original character,
just as, to me, Sidney Young is Sidney and not Toby.
It's a fictional character based loosely on someone who really lived.
"Lives," I should say.
Although Toby really did wear a T-shirt that said,
"Young, dumb and full of come," on his first day at Vanity Fair,
and next to it was a picture of a young actor whom I won't mention,
and he was chastised for that.
He was told that dress was casual,
but he had a different definition of casual.
Simon was so excited to work with Jeff.
When I called up Simon and I said,
"Guess what, we got Jeff Bridges to play Clayton,"
he said, "The Dude! I'm going to be working with The Dude!"
He was very excited.
Simon is still a fan boy, after all. He's like a geek made good.
He's a movie geek who gets to be in movies now.
So working with Kirsten, Jeff and Gillian and Megan,
all these people really excited him.
The business of Clayton always playing with a matchbook
was something to identify him with a scene that was shot
and then cut, so...
It's sort of a long story,
but we have him playing with this matchbook,
and it's not quite clear why,
but it was to identify him in an earlier scene
when we saw him from behind,
but you never know what's going to wind up in the final edit.
Here, we have Danny Huston, also an actor I saw for this part
when I first read the script.
I hadn't met Danny. I didn't know him but knew his work
and thought he was sort of the prototypical Lawrence Maddox,
so I was really thrilled when he agreed to do the film.
When I first met with him, though, he had read the script
and thought that I was meeting with him about the part of Sidney,
for him to play Sidney, and he thought, "That's unusual casting."
And we were talking around in circles for about 10 minutes
before we realised we were talking about different parts.
I said, "No, no, no, I want you for Lawrence Maddox."
And he said, "I guess that makes more sense."
That picture on the desk is of Hannah Waddingham,
who plays Danny's wife, Lawrence's wife.
And they had photoshopped all these photos of Danny,
and I said, "You know, we really need a photo of his wife."
There was a lot of wife confusion between Maddox's wife
and Harding's wife that we needed to clear up,
and I thought photos on the desk of the wives would do it.
And there really was no photo of Hannah,
so I had them get one of her wardrobe test photos
and quickly put it in the frame and put it on the desk
and put it on the table, there, but nobody really sees it.
Anyway...
The girl he pissed off at the bar is his colleague, Alison Olsen. Oh, no!
And she's eating an apple.
You film buffs all know, of course,
that Danny Huston's father was John Huston,
one of the great American directors.
His grandfather was Walter Huston, an actor, whom his father directed.
Danny actually planned on being a director
and did direct a few things,
and I've seen them, and he was very good.
He would have had a great career as a director, but then he'd acted
in a movie called Ivansxtc and was so good that he had...
It's just been one acting gig after the next.
And I think he's finally resigned himself to the idea that he's an actor.
He might get back to directing someday. I would like to see that.
He certainly has it in his DNA. This is Margo Stilley, right here,
whom many of you will know from 9 Songs,
probably done a lot of freeze frames on the DVD.
There was more to this scene at one point.
Some stuff got around... We sort of brought back
the "what goes around, comes around" motif.
But that got dropped.
I like this scene, this Chris Blick exhibit scene,
because it's all one take. We did several takes of this,
and Simon was just always great, so we just chose our favourite.
I was actually on the other end of the phone with him for this.
That's not my voice on the finished film.
We dubbed in a new voice,
but I did all the telephone stuff with Simon, which was fun.
These things that are in the foreground, the bottle and the pole, here, the lamp,
when you make a move as subtle as this,
you can barely tell there's movement going on
unless you have something passing in the foreground,
so we purposely stuck some things in
so that we could get our money's worth out of the move.
People kept trying to get me to cut this last line about the wonky eye,
and I insisted on keeping it in.
I thought it needed sort of a secondary punch line.
It tends to get laughs, so I think it was the right move.
Here again, we're going from one set to another location,
and it's all cut together.
This business about the elevator actually going up and down on-camera
was an idea that I had when I first read the script,
because there's so many scenes that take place in the elevators.
And here, we see it go up.
And usually the camera is sort of in the elevator,
so as it goes up, we go up with it, and we don't sense any movement.
But we have all these little jokes
that I thought would be after the punch line,
to sort of have them exit frame, so to speak, either up or down.
And my crew came up with this device that we just called the "descender rig."
Actually, the elevator obviously stood still.
It was the camera that went up and down,
giving the illusion of movement, movement in the elevator,
and I really like it.
Thought they pulled it off very well.
That, by the way, was Isabella Calthorpe...
We'll see her again.
...who was in the elevator.
I never know whether to say "elevator" or "lift" now.
I've been going back and forth
between the States and England so much
that I don't know where I am.
See, now, here, the camera is inside the elevator with them.
And earlier, we actually saw the camera go inside the elevator,
which was our way of saying,
"Okay, now we are in the elevator with them.
"The elevator isn't passing us by."
The two-shots of Simon and Kirsten
were shot on a day at the end of the day.
It was late at night after a long day, and Simon was really sick.
He really had a fever and felt terrible.
All the stuff where you see dead-on like this,
Simon was really, really ill.
That's still one of my favourite moments in the movie, right there.
We had to do so many takes of that.
It was very hard to get it timed right
and get it to land right and get it to stick.
And we never went back and got the coverage until much later.
I think one of our last days of shooting in London,
we finally went back and got some close-ups and overs,
'cause we really needed the coverage,
'cause we just didn't have the opportunity the first time we shot.
You're always fighting the clock.
That's one thing that television, movies, low-budget, high-budget,
never have enough time to get everything you want.
"God gave a mollusc."
"Don't have the brains God gave a mollusc."
In the script, it was, "You don't have the brains God gave a cat,"
but I love cats so much I told Peter, "I don't want to insult cats."
My cats might be watching this movie. I don't want them to look at me and say,
"Well, why are you putting down cats?"
So I told Peter, "Let's find something else,"
and he came up with "mollusc," which I thought worked pretty well.
I thought you needed to know that.
This whole business, by the way, about Snipe magazine
is really based on Graydon Carter, who had a magazine
called Spy magazine. He was one of the founders,
which was a satirical, humorous, iconoclastic magazine.
And Graydon Carter, himself, has said that he has now become
the type of person that he would have lampooned
in the days when he was running Spy.
He sort of put on a suit and joined the dark side,
so that part of our story here is borrowed from real life.
This scene, this little scene
with the answering machine kept eluding us.
It was always on the schedule,
and we'd always run out of time and never get to it.
And it was on the schedule for, like, five different days,
that little shot of the answering machine
and then Simon in the background, and finally we got to it.
I insisted that we get it. We came close to dropping it.
This is actually on a sound stage in a car with projection.
That's actually New York.
I will admit that was a line I gave Simon,
'cause I always say that when I see two people texting
who are sitting right next to each other.
That's always my stock gag. All my friends are tired of it.
But I gave it to Simon.
Now I've got it out of my system. It's been in a movie.
I don't have to say it any more.
People will say, "You got that line from Simon Pegg, didn't you?"
This is the rooftop of the Soho House in New York.
A lot of people ask me where I got this great translight for the background,
and I say, "It's not a translight. We're actually in New York."
There's Toby Young, right there,
the bald guy standing next to Danny Huston.
That was Toby's cameo.
Everyone gets 15 minutes of fame. We gave Toby five seconds of fame.
This little business with the cell phone ringing in the background
and everybody checking their phones to see if it's them,
if it's their phone, is something I insisted on putting in the film.
Everyone tried to get me to cut it, saying, "It's not that funny,"
and I said, "It doesn't need to be that funny."
It's just a little background joke.
And if you live in LA or New York,
you see that happen about 100 times a day.
Somebody's phone rings, and everybody checks to see if it's them.
This is a wonderful actress named Diana Kent, who's actually British,
who does, I think, a very good American accent.
And we'll talk later about a scene of hers that was cut
that was a follow-up to this.
It's the one thing that still sticks in my craw,
a scene that I had to cut for time that I really didn't want to.
I think she's wonderful.
And here comes Max Minghella.
We now have two directors' sons working together, here.
Max, of course, is the son of the late great Anthony Minghella.
This really breaks my heart, Diana walking off like that.
I told the editor, I said, "Stay with the pain.
"The scene is not about the dialogue between Danny and Max.
"It's about her being rejected."
And she played that spot on.
Danny is very evil in this scene. It's funny, Danny is such a nice guy.
He's such a cheerful guy, but he keeps getting cast as bad guys.
I just saw two films of his recently
that haven't been released yet, and he's just evil, evil, evil.
And he always has a smile on his face. He's always laughing.
This scene coming up here, with Sidney and Rachel, is very key,
because it's the first sense we get that there's something more
to Sidney than just being a sycophant and being a jerk.
We finally see a human side to him,
and that's one of the things I like about Peter Straughan's script,
is that Sidney starts off as one thing,
and then more of his personality is revealed later on,
and he becomes quite humanised.
But the fact that he's paying attention to this actress
that everyone else is ignoring because she's already had her day,
and he wants to make her feel good and ask for an autograph,
I think, is very touching.
This is actually, frankly, one of my favourite scenes in the movie.
And that line, "I'll remember that," actually comes into play later
in a scene that was cut,
which I'm certain will be on the deleted scenes.
You can see all the wind in the background
on some of these shots.
Something I should tell you is that every line of dialogue
in all of this rooftop scene was ADR'd, or dubbed, in layman's terms,
because there was so much...
See the wind there with the palm trees, and the little tent, the little marquee?
The wind was awful. There are sirens.
This is the problem when you're shooting exteriors in New York,
is you can only have so much control of sort of the ambient noise.
And there were some just sound-recording problems, too.
So all this dialogue was dubbed later on in a sound booth,
much like the one I'm in right now.
You can't tell, can you?
Simon and Kirsten are both excellent at doing ADR.
It's absolutely undetectable.
The other actors are very good, too, so it worked out all right.
And here's Gillian Anderson.
Very, very pregnant, as we speak.
As I speak. I don't know if you're speaking.
But I'm sure her baby will have arrived by the time you hear this.
It better,
or else it'll have been gestating for about two years.
Gillian is very different than how I first thought of the character
when I read the script, but once I heard she was available,
I thought, "Well, that's certainly worth a meeting,"
because who wouldn't want to work with Gillian Anderson?
She's such a terrific actress, and then we met and I thought,
"Okay, it's up to me to sort of rethink the role."
And, boy, she just nailed it.
There's Brian Austin Green, right there,
who's the real-life boyfriend, lucky guy, of Megan Fox.
There she is.
That sort of open-mouth look of Simon's is pretty much
how we all first looked when we first saw Megan.
Terrific actress, really, really good.
I think her career will go wherever she wants to take it.
I wish there was more for her to do in this movie.
This, of course, for you foreign film buffs,
you all know that this is Nino Rota on the soundtrack,
music from La Dolce vita.
We sort of have a La Dolce vita motif through the film.
And those of you who know who Anita Ekberg is,
who know the significance of the Trevi Fountain,
will understand that there are layers to this scene
that civilians may not fully grasp.
See, we give you everything in this movie,
pig-piss gags one second and Fellini references the next.
Something for everybody.
This lobby is actually... It's funny because the pool,
the rooftop pool sequence was shot at the Soho House,
and now we're in the lobby of the Soho Hotel,
which is a completely different building.
Probably hardcore New York-ophiles will realise right away what we've done.
Until I spilled the beans right now, no one's noticed so far.
Megan did such a great audition for this film,
and Transformers hadn't come out yet. I had no idea who she was.
And she just knocked our socks off. As soon as she left the room,
I turned to the casting director, I said, "Well, that's our Sophie."
She just ticked all the boxes. She was perfect.
I thought I'd get the credit for discovering her.
Everyone would think I was a genius for giving Megan Fox
her first big film role.
And then Transformers came out, and that was the end of that.
I'll get no credit in the Megan Fox biography.
It's funny, 'cause these are actually...
You see the people standing back there?
Those are actually real looky-loos watching us film,
but we decided, "All right, let them be on camera,"
because it makes sense that at an event like this,
there would be looky-loos.
And we had our actors playing paparazzi,
and then actual paparazzi across the street behind them.
And I thought, "Well, we could have saved money
"if we'd just let the real paparazzi come and film."
See, Cuba here... There he goes.
...totally different dog than you see later in the film.
Actually, I hate to spill the beans if you haven't noticed,
but this Cuba looks nothing like the other Cuba in the film.
But people tend to not pay as much attention to those things as the director.
I get annoyed, but no one else cares.
This walk-and-talk down West Broadway here,
the sun was coming up.
It became a nightmare, the sound and all this.
This one little side shot. Should I point out the camera shadow
on Kirsten there or should I keep my mouth shut?
I've said it.
I was able to get two masters of this shot.
I wanted to do all kinds of coverage,
but instead of losing the light, we were gaining the light,
and that was very, very frustrating.
But the editor managed to kind of make it work.
And the performances were good, so we went with it.
I would have loved to have had another hour to do this scene
and to get, you know...
You notice there's no side shots of Sidney,
no singles, no overs, other than that one brief one.
By the way, when this was shot,
that was the night of the famous penthouse robbery,
where both Simon and Kirsten were robbed.
Burglars broke into the penthouse
where we were all staying and took everything.
But me being a good Boy Scout, I had all my stuff in the vault.
So I didn't have to fill out a police report.
This scene here is all one shot.
And this, again, talk about necessity being the mother of invention...
We really ran out of time, and I asked my DP, Oliver Stapleton,
I said, "Is there any way to just set this up
"so we can do it all in one shot?" And he managed to do it.
I should point out that on Kirsten's board, there,
you see some photos. We'll come back to that later.
But there's a photo of my cat and my dog on there.
When you're the director, you can do these things.
It kind of makes no sense that we would hear
this sort of echoey clop-clop of her footsteps,
'cause you'll notice that the floor is carpeted.
But I liked the effect so much, it was so intimidating, that I let it ride.
People have asked why she's fallen.
You've got the DVD, so you can look slowly.
You'll see that she actually turns her ankle.
Some people thought it was a heart attack.
I love Simon's little look back, there.
I remember the day we shot this scene.
I have a two-shot coming up of Danny and Jeff Bridges,
two actors that I wanted from the very beginning...
There it is.
...and I remember looking at the monitor that day and saying,
"God, I've got them both, right there."
I was so pleased to have them both in this film.
Simon's brilliant in this scene.
I love this little add-on, where he says, "Just changing it."
Stony looks. Angelique Talio, a friend of mine in London, actress.
A very Ricky Gervais moment.
A lot of this part of the film was sort of re-cut and the sequence changed.
Jeff's eating the sushi actually came
after a whole montage, which got cut.
This is actor Jefferson Mays.
This scene is actually based on something that really happened
when Toby interviewed Nathan Lane
and basically asked him these questions.
We tried to get Nathan Lane to be in the movie
to play himself, to recreate this real-life travesty
of an interview, but Nathan, not surprisingly, passed.
So we got Jefferson Mays, here, and called him Bill Nathanson,
so that we could keep the "Nathan" part, anyway.
It was a little in-joke.
This was actually shot in New York,
so the New York scenery that you see behind the window,
through the window behind Simon sometimes,
is actually New York. And the idea was to turn around...
Where you see the blind there,
ideally, we should have been able to see the scenery,
but we were running late and the sun was going down,
so we had to pull down the blind and light it, which was a shame,
because the reason you want to shoot on location
is so you can actually see the location.
So we got the New York scenery out of one window, but not the other.
Sadly.
I love that cut.
All the stuff with the Jewish, gay, Bill Nathanson, this follow-up scene,
had been cut from the film for some time,
then, at the last minute, we decided to put it back in.
We always loved it.
But again, a lot of things that you love just get cut for time,
otherwise you wind up with a three-and-a-half hour movie,
and then you're, what, Oliver Stone, I guess.
I always felt that no comedy has the right
to be more than an hour and 50 minutes,
which I said out loud at one time,
and those words came back to haunt me,
because we were running at close to two hours,
and I was happy with the cut. Then somebody said,
"You were the one who said, 'No comedy..."'
I said, "All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah."
So back into the cutting room.
At one time, this scene, here, followed that Paris Hilton pitch scene,
and then after this came what we called the "Failure Montage,"
which got cut, and then it was the scene with Jeff eating the sushi,
and then Bill Nathanson.
I don't know if any of this is interesting to you,
if you could care at all,
but some of this stuff you might see on the deleted scenes reel on this DVD.
"Corporate dick-lick" was an ad-lib.
There are a few moments in the film where I just told Simon,
"Just say something funny here," and he always obliged.
I do regret here, I wish there was more tape on his face.
This is always very funny, but it's just a little thing of mine.
I would have liked to have gotten a few more pieces there, but...
This was another ad-lib, "The break-dancing posse,"
and, "She's a body-popper more than anything."
Simon did all kinds of variations of that line about the Queen.
Maybe we'll talk about it on our dual audio commentary.
"What's it feel like to be a star?"
Danny sounds very much like his father there, John Huston.
Danny's actually, as he's getting older, sounding more and more like his dad.
I love that line of Gillian's, "Such a cynical age."
She delivered that exactly the way
both the writer, Peter Straughan, and I had it in our heads.
Megan has a real Marilyn moment here.
Look at her face after Danny says, "He can stay in my office."
Right there. That's such a little Marilyn move.
And Megan loves Marilyn.
She actually has a tattoo of Marilyn Monroe on her forearm.
She has a lot of tattoos,
which take a couple of hours in make-up to cover
whenever she's being exposed on camera.
This ring, of course, comes into play later.
A very talented writer/director friend of mine named Audrey Wells
had read the script when I was considering doing it.
Not that I had to consider doing it. I knew I wanted to do it.
And the ring didn't come into play until much later in the script,
and she said, "You need to reference the ring earlier in the film."
And I thought, "That's a really good note,"
which I passed on to Peter.
So that's why Peter dropped that reference to the ring in here,
so he could sort of plant the seed.
Gillian can be very hard on herself as an actress, which is a good thing.
She takes her craft very seriously,
and I remember as we were shooting this scene...
I just had to be quiet for the water bubbles, there. I love that.
I remember between takes, she'd sort of go off
and sit by herself very quietly,
and I could tell something was bugging her,
it was on her mind, and I'd come up to her,
I'd say, "Tell me, what are you thinking? What's going on?"
She says, "I'm just not certain I've got this right,"
and I said, "You have no idea how good you are in this."
We talked it through a bit, and she got more comfortable with it,
but I just think she's brilliant.
But Gillian is one of those actresses, and Jeff Bridges is like this, too,
who really want to talk about character,
who really want to have those conversations with the director
about how they see the part and how to play it.
This was a different kind of role for her.
I had some hesitancy to cast Gillian
only because she was younger and prettier
than the way I saw the part...
More bubbles.
...and I didn't want people to think that she might be
a possible romantic interest for Simon, for Sidney.
So one of the things we talked about was just making her character
so icy and self-involved that she wouldn't be warm enough
for anyone to really cosy up to her that way.
This scene gave me some hesitancy when I first read the script,
because I'm a huge animal lover.
And I really do not like it when movies
sort of use animals, endanger animals,
for comic relief. It genuinely bugs me.
And I really talked about whether or not we had to do this scene,
and I thought, "Well, maybe the dog doesn't die.
"Maybe it just has a little heart attack.
"He gets scared, and then he wakes up later,"
and of course everybody stared at me, saying, "What are you talking about?"
And it is important to the scene, so I went with it.
But my thing was,
"Make the dog's death... Make Cuba's death off-camera.
"Handle it tastefully. Don't torture him. Make it quick."
And you gotta love that.
And I have to say this is a huge, huge laugh.
But it's like... What was it? Something About Mary,
where I think the dog's on fire and gets thrown out the window.
That stuff really bugs me.
But this is all off-camera,
and we never see the dog being harmed, so...
And it's just all make-believe.
Aside from the dog that we had in the car in New York,
which is a completely different dog,
we had two Cubas working, who were identical,
just like we had two pigs.
Animals and little kids you have to have two of,
because you don't know what their individual skill sets will be.
And don't worry, that is a prosthetic. That is a fake dog paw.
No animals or actors were harmed in the making of this film.
There's the translight again.
That same translight pops up in three different places,
but it was a big enough translight we could use different pieces of it.
I love Gillian's delivery of that line.
"Have you seen Sophie's dog?"
This scene is interesting, because it's the first indication
that Alison may be warming up to Sidney,
because she has the opportunity to sell him out, and she doesn't.
And I think that's a smile on Sidney's face, here,
the relief that she hasn't sold him out.
He's realising, "Maybe she doesn't completely hate me."
Jeff's character, Clayton, is interesting here,
obviously being very contemplative
as he's looking out the window and thinking about his life.
This sort of speaks to the thing I was talking about,
that Clayton used to be a rebel.
Then he put on a suit, and he joined the dark side.
Now he's been drinking a little bit, and he's reminiscing
and sort of...
We still see the old glint in his eye of the rebel
who wants to sort of tear down the system, burn down the building.
And Sidney sort of gets his chance here,
because he found Clayton during a loose moment,
and pitches his Vincent Lepak story,
and Clayton is sort of back in rebel mode.
So he agrees to let him write the piece.
I've always loved that, Simon backing up in fear.
He doesn't know why Clayton is approaching him.
This business here where
Jeff is about to put his hand on Sidney's neck,
that was something I asked Jeff to do because it reminded me
of Tony Soprano and Christopher Moltisanti,
for those of you who know The Sopranos,
a very sort of avuncular move.
Actually, a very father-son kind of moment.
And he says, "You can be my hit man,"
which is also sort of a Sopranos reference.
This scene, here, was a pickup scene.
This was actually shot months after we finished principal photography.
My editor felt we needed
a little connecting link between the previous scene,
where Clayton says, "Go ahead and write the story,"
and then the scene that's coming up with the fish in the hotel lobby,
the dialogue about the fish.
And it's nice to actually see Sidney writing,
because, other than a montage later on,
which was also a pickup shot the same day as this,
we never see our writer writing.
And he looks so happy that he's finally getting to write the kind of piece
that he wanted to write on the pretentious Vincent Lepak.
The actress coming up here, her name is Lisa McAllister,
and she does so much with this small part.
She's actually a Brit, and she plays American.
Her accent is spot on.
And I did not get to audition her personally.
I auditioned her on videotape.
There she is. We'll talk about her more in a second.
This bit with his shirt being hiked up, his sweater being hiked up,
was actually a gag we came up with on the day.
I wanted to open this scene with some gag.
There was nothing in the script.
She's about to do this thing where she puts her hand out to him,
right there, to sort of shut him up in mid-sentence.
She did that in the audition, on the tape, and I said, "That's it.
"That's a brilliant move."
The other thing, too, here, is when he says, "I sent the fish,"
look at what she does.
She kind of looks around like,
"This is the guy who sent the dead fish."
It's like she's looking for security just in case he's a maniac.
My wife was watching this scene with me the other day, and she said,
"This actress is so good." I said, "I know.
"I only cast good actors in my movies."
"My movies." This is my first one.
Again, no animals were harmed in the making of this film.
Those were fish that already happened to be dead.
They were received from the back of a pet store,
where they keep the dead fish, so I promise we didn't kill the fish.
And then for the rest of the scene, we actually have three fake goldfish.
And when we shot... This, by the way, was the second day of production.
We're back in the same location
that we were in earlier when Alison and Sidney meet,
and I wanted to shoot the scene
with the three dead goldfish, the fake ones,
and then I was told that we only had two,
and I said, "What are you talking about? I approved three.
"I just saw three two weeks ago,"
and somebody said, "Somebody stole one of the goldfish."
I said, "Who steals fake goldfish?"
And they found another one so we could shoot.
'Cause two dead goldfish isn't funny. You need three.
Three is funny, two isn't. Take a note.
And again, here, this is just Peter Straughan's writing,
this sort of character arc
with the relationship between the two of them.
We can see that Alison is starting to warm up to Sidney a little bit.
He's asking her why she didn't sell him out.
You know, she's opening up to him, talking about writing her book.
She's smiling a bit, so...
There's our White Russian.
What does that portend, the White Russian?
It seems very important. We'll find out.
The first shot of this scene that I took was sort of a master shot,
a two-shot of the two of them,
and both Simon and Kirsten were so brilliant
that I thought, "Maybe I'll just use this scene
"in the two-shot, one continuous shot,"
'cause it was just perfect.
I got some perfect takes from beginning to end.
And then I realised, "You never know what you might have to cut
"in the editing room for time," so I did get this coverage.
And the performances were great in the coverage as well,
these overs, so it worked out okay.
And in fact, this scene did get a little chopped up.
We did have to lose time, so it was good that I had the coverage,
but I really loved both of their performances in this scene.
There's some cutting earlier in this scene that got a little choppy
just because...
Just some things we had to cut. There's always continuity issues,
where suddenly people are in slightly different positions.
But again, it's the kind of thing
that a director and an editor notice more than an audience.
Of course, I love this spot.
"Sophie Maes is Mother Teresa."
We had a placeholder in the script for the longest time,
where we just knew there'd be a funny trailer.
And then, in production, I told Peter,
I said, "We better write this trailer, 'cause we're gonna have to shoot it."
So he gave me two options.
He gave me the Madame Curie story or the Mother Teresa story.
I liked them both, but we just thought the idea
of Sophie Maes playing Mother Teresa was so ludicrous
that we had to go for it.
And we actually shot a full-length trailer, which got cut down to this,
and then we put the full-length trailer at the end of the movie.
If you stay for the credits, it's a little treat.
And it hopefully will be on this DVD on its own.
It's the White Russian again. What does it mean?
I like what's going on here with the faces, because look at Sidney,
obviously realising that Lawrence is stealing his idea.
But look at Kirsten, as well. Look at Alison.
She knows what he's doing.
She's not so happy with... She knows that that was Sidney's idea.
And that was a specific conversation Kirsten and I had
before we shot the scene, is, "How much does she know?
"Does she realise that he's stolen the idea?"
And we both agreed that it would be interesting to play it that way.
And I think what's going on, on her face, is very telling and very interesting.
Now, of course, Clayton has sobered up,
so he's not gonna go for the Vincent Lepak piece, after all,
because he knows that's gonna alienate Gillian...
I'm sorry, Eleanor, who represents Vincent,
and Eleanor has other clients that Clayton needs for his magazine, so...
I'm sure magazine publishers and editors deal with this all the time.
"Don't upset the publicists,
"or else you don't get their clients for your covers that you need."
I like that move where Danny is shaking hands with everybody,
and Sidney comes up to him and Danny, or Lawrence I should say,
automatically puts out his hand, thinking that Sidney's gonna shake it,
and it sort of hangs there for a while before it drops.
I remember us playing around with different levels
of intimidation here, with Danny. How mean should he be?
And there was one take where he was really mean,
and the camera pushed-in to him, and it was too intense.
And so it was either push-in and be a little less intimidating,
or keep the camera back and be more intimidating, so...
That smile, I love.
I actually had to talk Danny into doing that.
Danny didn't get the smile.
I said, "Just please do it for me as a favour."
And then when Danny saw it in the cut, it was like,
"Okay, I get it. It works."
That's another moment that my wife loves.
She always laughs when Danny turns around and gives that smile.
It's very evil.
Here comes Charlotte Devaney as Bobbie again.
You know, she's actually got the blonde wig here,
because we were gonna bring her back at the end of the film in a blonde wig,
and I was trying to connect her
to the way she looked at the end of the film,
and then that scene got cut before it even got shot.
So there are actually some people here who don't realise that this is the same...
Woman?
That Sidney brought home at the beginning of the film from the bar.
This is sort of based on something that Toby really did,
where he did hire a stripper for a colleague
on a day that happened to be Take Our Daughters to Work Day.
Now, this is the wife, not of Lawrence Maddox,
but of Clayton Harding, the Jeff Bridges character.
But there was a lot of wife confusion in this film.
It's, "Who is whose wife?"
So this line, "Let's go see Mr. Maddox," was actually dubbed in later
to make it clear that this was not their father.
And there we go.
There's our money shot. "What the hell was that?
"This can't be good."
There was a lot of talk about when we had the reveal...
There it is again. Let's cover that up, very good.
...whether it should be during the dance or after,
and so I shot it both ways. We wound up using a bit of both.
Here comes Simon's great ad-lib...
...which, in the theatres, gets such a huge laugh
that it covers this little piece of muted dialogue
between Eleanor and Clayton.
Basically, Clayton is saying to Eleanor, you know, "Don't worry.
"We have plenty of time to change things before we lock it."
Presumably that girl on the cover is a client of Eleanor's.
And this was an element of the script
that we sort of continued to develop and polish
after I got attached to the project. We were wondering, you know,
"What would be the big awakening that Sidney has,
"that sort of opens his eyes
"to how things really work in this kind of an establishment?"
And he still thinks of Clayton Harding as this all-powerful editor
who's in control and admires him from his early days.
But now he realises that Clayton is really in the hand of the publicist.
And, you know, if you have...
If you want to write about a celebrity, say, in a magazine,
and you want to really take them down a notch,
you gotta think about who the representatives are
and how that may harm your access to other clients of theirs.
And it's sort of the final verification that Clayton is no longer
the iconoclast and the rebel that he used to be.
And that's how things work here.
So Sidney really is what Clayton used to be,
but he's at the wrong magazine
if he wants to write these kinds of things.
And this dialogue plays into that thought.
Even Clayton admits that.
There you go.
"I used to bitch about them," says Clayton.
"You're at the party now."
All of our audio people used to repeat that line
whenever Jeff would say it. We just liked the rhythm of it.
And that's sort of the...
The final making of that point.
If Clayton wants to fire him,
wouldn't he have to run a decision like that past Eleanor?
So Clayton knows that Sidney's on to him.
There was a scene that followed that that I really liked,
a little fantasy sequence of a little applause sequence,
which hopefully will be on the deleted scenes.
This used to be one long shot that pushed-in.
If you look closely, you'll see what looks like Clayton from behind,
the grey hair, right there. And we're off of him now,
but Jeff Bridges wasn't available when we shot this party,
which was supposed to be Clayton's Fourth of July party
in his Hamptons estate.
So I always figured, if anybody asked, I would say it was like a Gatsby thing,
that he stayed inside the house
and just looked out the window at his party.
But anyway, we got a body double and put him in a Jeff Bridges wig.
And then that scene just got truncated.
It used to be one long sort of crane shot
that pushed-in to Alison and Sidney at the buffet
and followed them to their seats,
but you're always cutting for time.
This whole sequence at the Fourth of July party,
the scenes really got reshuffled.
This probably took the most hits out of any other part of the film,
just to sort of clarify some information
and to, again, get the running time down.
There were whole little subplots and scenes that got cut here.
Hopefully, some of that will be included on the deleted scenes,
and you'll see what we were trying to get at.
This handsome young actor, right here, Oscar-worthy performance.
That is yours truly, that is Robert Weide the director
doing a little cameo in his film, doing a little Alfred Hitchcock.
And now we learn that Lawrence used to be a poet.
And... He's the drinker of the White Russian!
Now we know what that means! He's the secret boyfriend of Alison.
This scene had a bunch of stuff going on that's been cut.
And the stripper line, which was something
I gave Danny on the set that day, sort of saved us.
It was the motivation for Simon storming off,
when, in fact, the way the scene was originally shot,
he walked off for a very different reason,
and hopefully you'll see that in the deleted scenes.
This scene here, we sort of learn later,
what's going on here is Alison is basically breaking up with Maddox,
and Maddox is taking it very seriously, throwing peanuts in his mouth.
That's the kind of thing that you may not catch
until you watch the film a couple times and realise
when she says she broke up with him
that that's probably when it was taking place.
This is Andy Lucas, a wonderful actor, who plays the wizard/dentist.
And that wig, my understanding,
was actually the Gandalf wig from Lord of the Rings,
because our hair and make-up supervisor, Peter Swords King,
won his Oscar for, I think, the third LOTR film.
And I think that really is Gandalf's actual wig.
Andy, actually, has a fairly strong cockney accent,
so, again, we were lucky to find a lot of Brit actors
who could do American accents.
He sounds a little sort of New York, there.
He was also in an episode of Simon's series Spaced.
You Spaced fans will know that.
The business about the coke, by the way,
the original cut of the film, Simon actually said
no to the coke,
and then, for reasons that are difficult to explain,
we had to leave it a little ambiguous.
This "Engerland" bit tends to play very well in England,
and people in the United States often stare at the screen
and wonder what the hell he's doing.
That's gotta hurt.
I like the idea that the band just goes back...
Everyone goes back to what they were doing, like nothing happened.
I should say also that it was David Arnold, our composer,
who was singing Yankee Doodle.
It was not actually the person who was singing it on camera,
but David dubbed that in later.
I'm sure he's thrilled that I'm telling you that.
This was another scene... There were a few scenes in this film
that I really wanted to get more coverage
where, you know, we ran out of time.
And here, again, this was sort of dusk, and we were losing the light,
and I love this master shot because it allows me to do this trick
of people leaving the frame and then entering.
And there, I think, that angle,
this angle here, I was able to get one take,
and then one take from this angle.
And I also wanted to get the camera closer in both cases,
and I just couldn't do it because it was getting too dark.
And the thinking was, "Well, we'll come back and get more coverage later,"
and, of course, you never get to.
Once you're in the editing room, you figure out whether
you can really make the scene work with what you've got,
and I actually think the scene came out just fine.
I love, again, here, Alison leaving frame, coming back into frame.
That gets screams in the theatre.
Little kind of Dudley Moore, Peter Sellers kind of moment, there.
This is all special effects stuff. The twinkle lights reflecting in the pool,
and this magical Megan reflection, which was all done in post.
Megan, I think, had three different scenes for her audition,
and basically, this scene that you're watching
was one of the audition scenes.
Again, like I said before, she just nailed it. She was so good.
When we shot this that night... By the way, the entire time
we were shooting in this location, for the garden party,
we had terrible weather in London.
It was supposed to be the Hamptons in New York,
Fourth of July, the middle of summer, and we found this location.
But, boy, we got the London weather.
It was, I think, the rainiest summer that they had in, like, 478 years,
and it just really screwed with our schedule.
'Cause we'd be shooting out in the rain, and then, you know...
Or when the rain came, we'd have to stop shooting,
and then the sun would come out. We'd film for another minute,
and then have to run for cover again as it rained.
So it happened all night here when we were shooting,
and we have shots in sunlight and shots in the shade,
and it made the editor, David Freeman, a bit crazy, but...
I remember the night that we were shooting this,
this was really Megan's first big scene, is that the crew,
everybody was coming up to me between takes, saying,
"God, she's good!"
Mainly the guys with their mouths open.
And I'd say, "Yeah. I didn't hire her just because she's beautiful."
But they were all quite surprised that she was as good as she was.
And again, this is sort of a reveal that Sophie is kind of at a crossroads,
realising that all the celebrity thing is, you know, a bunch of crap,
and she's either gonna go with it or fight against it,
and she winds up going with it.
That shot of the sky was Stephen Woolley, the producer,
his idea, 'cause we really needed a cutaway here,
because we had to cut a bunch of material,
and we had body position, continuity issues
and didn't know how to get around them,
and Stephen said, "Well, why don't we get a shot of the stars,
"and then we can cut back to whatever we want?"
And it allowed us to cut about 30 seconds of the scene.
This business coming up,
I don't know if the gag really plays with Simon's face in the windshield,
but what I was trying to do here was implying that this was a time cut,
and that Sidney saw the wizard driving away
and actually jumped on top of his car to stop him.
It's all off-camera, though. It's all implied,
and whether it actually plays, I don't know.
This is yet another scene...
See, we got so screwed by the weather, it made our days so much shorter,
because there was so much time we couldn't shoot
that a lot of the scenes that take place at this location were ones
that I never felt I got enough coverage of.
And of course this is all handheld, and I got, I think, like, two masters,
and I really wanted to turn the camera around and get some faces
and get some different angles, and we just ran out of time.
And even though we did whatever it was,
the two or three takes and the master, my editor did find cutting points
that allowed us to use different takes instead of just one take straight through,
so that was helpful.
Her line earlier about "I hate rental cars,"
I realised that we needed a car for the scene,
but it was ridiculous to think that a girl like Alison,
living in New York City, would own a car.
You wouldn't own a car if you were in your early 20s
and not making a huge salary and living in New York.
Even if you made a huge salary,
few people have their own cars in New York,
unless there's good reason to.
And so Kirsten ad-libbed that line, "I hate rental cars,"
to give the audience that information.
Simon actually makes a reference to the rental car here, too.
But I didn't want people to think, "Come on, she wouldn't have a car."
There was more dialogue in this scene at one time,
her talking about, you know, "Lawrence isn't what you think he is.
"He puts on that front.
"He's disappointed in himself because he wanted to be a poet."
Again, this was a scene that was really lovely,
but it just ran too long, and we had to cut a lot out,
so we lost that little piece about Lawrence.
But that's why God invented DVD, so I could tell you.
Nothing better than a good vomit gag.
That scene from up above, shooting down on the highway,
was sort of a stolen shot. We waited for the traffic to stop,
and then had our driver drive a little crazy, filmed it,
and then we ran away.
And here's Bill Paterson, wonderful actor,
playing Sidney's father.
Toby Young's actual father was named Michael Young,
who was, in fact... I don't know if he was a lord.
He had some sort of title. He was a sociologist
and an author who wrote the book The Rise of Meritocracy.
So all this business about the relationship between
Sidney and his father is not far from real life.
We didn't know what song we were gonna put in here
for Alison to say, "I love this song,"
and sometime during post, I thought it should be a really raunchy song,
because, again, it's the last thing we'd expect from someone
as buttoned down as Alison that she would hear a raunchy song
and say, "I love this,"
and so we put in Me So Horny, and it got a laugh.
I don't know if it's exactly the right choice,
but if you get a laugh, it's hard to let it go.
Again, this is another scene that ran much longer,
and we just had to get it cut down for time.
I'm not certain that I like, ultimately,
the way the rhythm of the scene changed,
but again, that's just me.
Before, it had a little more casual pace
and there were more moments and looks and pauses.
Just had to kind of plough through it, so we sort of lost the rhythm of it,
but shaved probably a good minute and a half off of the running time.
Bill Paterson, here, we really had to age him up.
He's much healthier and younger-looking than he is here.
We just had to sort of grey him up, and with some make-up and the glasses
and the sort of frumpy clothes make him look a bit older than he is.
But he's a terrific actor.
I should disclose that, since you last heard from me,
I've actually now done the dual commentary with Simon Pegg,
so now I'm very self-conscious about what we've already said
in that commentary that I don't want to repeat myself here.
'Cause I know if you only listen to one, it's going to be that one.
See, now, what I want to tell you right now
I think I said in the last one, which is that
when I showed this scene to Simon's mother,
who came to visit the set one day, she got very touched
and actually cried a bit of a tear, seeing her son in this dramatic scene.
This is...
I've always maintained that if Simon were to try his hand
at doing dramatic acting, he'd probably be terrific,
and, in a few of his films, you get a taste of that.
I think this scene bears that out,
and I will never forget the scene in Shaun of the Dead
where he has to shoot his mother who's become zombified,
and it's a horrible scene, and he's crying, and he's very upset,
and it's quite real. If it weren't for the fact that, you know,
the whole concept of his mother becoming a zombie,
it wouldn't be comedic at all, actually.
I know that Simon really enjoyed doing this scene with Bill, too.
It's such a change of pace. It's one of the things
I like about our film, is that there's so many different kinds of things in it
that it's not all just one thing.
It's not all just silly or all low-brow or all sophisticated, or...
Just sort of a little something for everybody.
And I already talked about, in the other commentary,
the hand hovering. See, now I've got nothing left to say.
Simon needed that hand on his shoulder to motivate him
to make his confession to his dad that things weren't working out so well,
but I wanted the hand to just hover,
so he put his hand on Simon's shoulder and then I cut it out in editing
and got the best of both worlds.
I like this bit coming up here. Simon says that
Alison says that New York girls don't go for losers,
and his father says, "But Alison's not from New York.
"She's from Port Huron." Of course, he never offers the idea
that perhaps his son isn't a loser.
He seems to go along with that quite readily.
And this is a very idyllic scene,
and David Arnold's sort of love theme creeps in here.
And we sort of take the piss out of the sentimentality
by making Alison a snorer.
This is what we call an establishing shot.
There was a lot of discussion about whether
Alison would be wearing pyjamas
or wearing her clothes from the night before,
and I realised that if she's wearing pyjamas
that must mean that Mrs. Kowalski changed her, which...
I guess that could happen,
but it was just too cute to pass up, the idea of Kirsten wearing,
or Alison wearing Sidney's pyjamas. The feel is right.
This scene actually always reminded me a bit...
Not that I have 5% of the talent as someone as great as Billy Wilder.
But this scene, just in structure and tone,
has always reminded me a bit of The Apartment,
with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine,
which is a film I love because it rides that line
between comedy and human drama,
the fact that, in the middle of this somewhat light-hearted comedy,
Shirley MacLaine tries to commit suicide in Jack Lemmon's apartment.
And then there's the scene when she's coming around,
and he's cooking and making spaghetti on his tennis racket
and he kind of likes having her around his apartment.
This scene has always reminded me a bit of that.
That little butterfly stamp was an idea that I had to make certain
that when we saw the red book,
we understood that it was always Alison's book.
So it's sort of a last-minute idea.
I like the lighting in this room.
This is our wonderful director of photography, Oliver Stapleton.
Gives us a great morning light.
Again, that's a translight outside.
You can see it a little better now
than you do during the night-time scenes,
the brick building across the way.
So now Sidney has gone from quoting
from popular movies to quoting philosophers,
now that we know he was a philosophy major.
We know there's more to him than meets the eye.
This, in Peter Straughan's script, he had Sidney give Alison,
I guess, a CD of La Dolce vita.
And I thought it was much more romantic
to actually get an old-fashioned, 12-inch vinyl record than a CD.
And then I thought, "Well, nobody really..."
Most people don't even have turntables any more,
and then I thought, "Well, let's use that to our advantage,"
and that informed the whole decision to have Sidney
have a turntable in his house, so that we could have this moment
where he says, "Well, you can always come over here and listen to it,"
which is sort of like, you know,
"Come to my place and see how my etchings are hung,"
but I just think it's sweet that he puts on the record for her.
And it's not so romantic to give somebody a CD,
but a used record from a used record store is kind of sweet.
This I love. This, you know, we...
This was a very complicated effect to do here,
because we're actually on the sound stage, here.
What happened originally is we actually pull out through the window magically,
and then this is actually a location in New York,
and the shot of Kirsten and Simon dancing through the window
is sort of a little matte job.
And this is actually the skyline of New York.
This is all on location, and everything was sort of melded together.
But again, in that pressure to keep things moving,
that shot took a long time to play out, and people were saying,
"It's lasting too long," so we cut out the magical part
of the moment where the camera pulls out through the window.
And I believe, again, that will be on the deleted scenes, hopefully,
and you'll see what the original shot looked like.
We spent so much money on it, I thought, you know,
"At least let's put it on the DVD and get our money's worth."
This scene was originally written... Peter Straughan wanted some gag
to end this scene, and he had Simon,
Sidney, opening up a door and falling down a flight of stairs,
which we really couldn't effectively film,
and I thought, "It doesn't really make sense,
"because there'd be a little landing before he'd get to the stairs.
"So if he opened up the door, how could he fall down the stairs?
"And why would there be stairs off the office like this?"
So, in coming up with an alternative, I thought of this idea
that it would be an emergency exit that would set off an alarm,
and then the rest is kind of Simon's brilliance in ad-libbing,
his pointing to the sign and saying, "It works."
Right there, and then we just had a bunch of books on the shelf
that were sort of clearable through our clearance department,
and lo and behold, there was a book on elephants.
So Simon used that to comic effect, as well.
And that has always been a very consistent laugh
in all of our previews,
and it certainly scored at the premiere last night.
Let's hope you enjoy it.
This scene was always strange to me.
I shot in the bathroom mirror and during preview screenings,
I always wondered why people were giggling at this and laughing at this,
because, until he puts the teeth in his mouth,
it wasn't a particularly comic scene.
And then I realised that the line going down the middle,
dividing the mirror, has just distorted his face enough
that people found that humorous, so to each their own.
I'll take a laugh any way I can get it.
A slight regret, here. There was more to this scene
before Simon entered in his Dracula outfit.
There were some other extras who looked great dressed up
as Marilyn and Groucho Marx and all that,
so maybe we'll put that on the deleted scenes, as well,
and you can see a little bit more of our extras before Simon walks on.
I remember that day the assistant editor saying,
"All right, I want to see Elvis kissing a nun,"
which is a strange thing to hear in any context.
This scene, when I read the script, I pictured Simon and Kirsten...
Well, it wasn't Simon and Kirsten when I read the script,
but I pictured Sidney and Alison shoulder to shoulder like this
and always had that in my script,
and then when we were setting up the shot, I completely forgot about it
and basically told the crew to set it up
so that they'd be facing each other, which they did.
And then, just before we shot, I said, "Oh, no, I've blown it.
"I want them shoulder to shoulder," which took some rearranging.
We basically had to reset. We lost about a half hour.
Everyone was quite annoyed with me,
but you can see here what I was going for,
was that the two of them could talk and not make eye contact,
that Sidney could be devastated by this news
and be able to take it without having to look at her,
and that Alison could be saying what she had to say
without having to make eye contact with him,
and the two of them could sort of stare forward together.
I love this moment where they both take the sip simultaneously.
That was not planned. That just happened,
and it was the only take where it happened,
and it was so lovely that I wanted very much
to make sure that it wound up in the cut.
But anyway, it was worth the reset
to get them shoulder to shoulder like that,
'cause the blocking of it really captures the feel of the scene.
Another regret, a scene cut here.
Hate to go and on about all my regrets, but there you have it.
Again, I'm certain that'll be on deleted scenes,
and you'll see a little bit more of Sidney's motivation
to literally beg in the street to write the piece on Vincent.
That I always loved.
That was... I told my crew this wasn't in the script,
but I had this idea that Gillian, that Eleanor should actually
put the window up on Sidney's fingers,
and so they rigged this gag
so that we could close the window on his fingers
without actually harming Simon, of course.
And when he screamed like that, I thought, you know,
"What does that remind me of?"
I realised that it reminded me of a vampire suddenly meeting daylight.
And then we added the thunderclap,
and there's poor little Sidney, in the rain, on his knees.
Here he went and begged, and it didn't pay off.
This billboard is sort of funny.
You'll see that she's dripping in diamonds.
And we thought we were going to get
a little bit of a stipend from Chopard, and that deal fell through.
It was gonna be a billboard for Chopard.
And then we tried to do a deal with Gucci, and they said,
"Well, we can't do it. She's wearing a Versace dress,"
and Versace didn't make a deal, so we wound up with Woolmark.
Don't ask.
So it winds up that Sidney's begging did pay off, after all.
Even though Eleanor drove away,
apparently she placed a phone call to Clayton and said,
"Let's let him do the piece on Vincent if he wants it so much."
I tend to go quiet when there's a Jeff Bridges scene,
because I just want to sit back and watch him.
And here we go, our success montage.
Sidney's dressing a little better. He was making fun of Sidney's,
or rather Vincent's sunglasses, and now he's wearing them himself.
This copy, here, on this page,
was actually written by my assistant, Ross Ferguson.
I said, "Write up an article about Vincent Lepak."
These pictures you see of Max in the king outfit, we actually...
The idea was that part of this montage would be the photo shoot
of Vincent in that outfit, and we never got around to it.
It was one of those things we ran out of time.
And he was actually there and everything was set up,
but we just couldn't film it, 'cause I couldn't be two places at once,
and we didn't have a second-unit crew that day,
so, in any event, we got the photos to use for this.
There it is, again, in the magazine.
But we couldn't actually film the photo shoot.
These shots, here, were all done on our one pickup day,
months after we finished principal photography.
There was some question about how much time had gone by
and how long it took for Sidney to make this rise
past the second and third rooms,
and so this montage sort of helps give the idea that time is passing,
that it didn't happen overnight.
There, he's got the watch now
that we see him wearing at the beginning of the film.
There's the name Oscar Wright,
who is Edgar Wright's brother, who actually is
a wonderful graphic artist and storyboard artist.
We didn't do much storyboarding for this film.
A couple of the scenes we storyboarded,
the Cuba death scene,
and I think the scene at the screening in the park at the end of the film.
Although, whenever I work with storyboards, which is rare,
I tend to kind of discard them partway through the scene,
because there are always unforeseen circumstances
that sort of dictate how you wind up shooting something
no matter what you think you're gonna shoot going in.
Here, we've given Danny a little bit of five o'clock shadow
and some kind of unflattering makeup, just to sort of give the idea
that he's not really on top of his game any more.
Things are sliding.
His new home life with Alison seems not to be working out so well.
They are not the happy couple we thought they would be.
Still drinking White Russians in the middle of the day.
And here's the deepest cut of all,
knocking her book.
She's not happy. That was shot at the Automat
on Dover Street in Mayfair, London, as was the costume party.
This scene I love,
and I will admit the Ralph Lauren joke is mine.
I'll just go through here and tick off every piece of writing that I contributed.
Simon just plays it so well. It always makes me giggle.
I just love Kirsten in this scene.
This is a very sad scene to me.
There's this look coming up,
when Sidney goes off to get her notes,
and I told Kirsten, I said, "I have this idea
"of the sort of reaction you might have when Sidney ducks behind the door,
"and you're alone," and she says, "I've got something I want to do.
"Let me do mine." There it is.
She says, "Let me do mine and then we'll talk about
"what you want to do," and I said, "Fine, that's great."
And what she did was exactly what I had in mind.
It's just how I pictured it.
It's very exciting when you and your actor are very much in line with...
In sync with something that specific.
I don't know if you've noticed this, but Margo Stilley's character, Ingrid,
always calls Alison, "Alice."
That's on purpose. I mean, for us, not for her.
But the implication is that she doesn't even care enough
about Alison to bother memorising her name,
thinks her name is Alice.
I think there were a few other instances of that
in earlier cuts of the film that got edited.
This concept is really based on the Golden Globe Awards.
I don't know if it still works this way,
but there was a time with the Golden Globes,
because there's such a small membership,
that you could sort of know ahead of time
whether or not you won an award. You could kind of work it.
I had to be quiet for that line. "I'm gonna have a logo." I love that.
That and, "You can be my bitch." My two favourite Megan Fox lines.
So the whole thing here about she's gonna be nominated
but the nominations aren't announced yet,
and then Gillian's saying, "Yes, but when she is nominated..."
That was at one time sort of how the Golden Globes worked.
Consequently, the Golden Globes would not allow us to call
our awards show the Golden Globes,
so we fictionalised it as the Apollo Awards,
which actually worked out fine. It means we weren't beholden.
Now, again, I'm talking about things that I talked about
in the dual commentary with Simon,
but I have to point out again, here, the weather this night.
You'll notice it's snowing and it's raining,
which is very bizarre weather.
What you don't know is that it was really, really hot that night.
It was hot and rainy. The snow was fake.
The snow was ours, and I guess there's a lot of salt involved,
so then the rain was washing away the fake snow.
It was kind of a mess.
This also got very truncated.
This was going to be my Martin Scorsese Goodfellas shot.
The idea was that the camera would follow them in from outside
and walk them through the corridor
and down the stairs and into the nightclub.
What can I say? Everybody looked and said,
"It's taking too long," so it got cut way down.
You'll see on the deleted scenes,
this is Alexandra Aitken, who was basically the dancing girl,
but she had more to do in the original film.
She actually had a wonderful scene that we shot,
where she and Sidney are doing cocaine together
in a little private booth at this club.
And in some ways, it's my favourite scene that's been cut, just visually.
But we had to lose it for time, sadly.
That scene of Megan and Simon on the dance floor
was actually shot in an entirely different location
than the rest of the club stuff, just the logistics of filming.
We were shooting in London,
ran out of time at the Café de Paris, where we shot the other stuff,
and then we found this club in New York where we could shoot.
And I had to shoot in such a way,
you know, the tight shots and the bird's-eye view,
so that no one would notice that the wall
and the decor was different than the Café de Paris.
This is all on a sound stage, too.
This is actually inside a sound stage, lit to look like it's outside at night.
I remember when we shot this scene, the new Harry Potter book,
whichever one it was, I don't read the Harry Potter books,
but whatever the last one was, had just come out,
and Simon could not put it down,
so I actually have some very funny shots
of Simon standing in what looks like a hotel balcony,
in his underwear reading a Harry Potter book.
This scene is very hard for the fellas to look at, I know.
Megan Fox in her underwear. Who needs to watch this?
This scene, going back to another classic film reference,
reminds me of The Blue Angel,
with Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings,
where he just falls in love with this showgirl,
and she humiliates him in front of everybody,
in front of his students and everybody in the club,
and makes him crow like a rooster on the stage,
and Sophie making Sidney do his limpy pig dance
in front of her friends sort of makes me sad the same way.
It's just the final humiliation.
I love the look on Simon's face, here. Right there.
He's getting a little annoyed at being asked for the ring
one time too many, but here comes the offer he can't refuse.
There you go.
I decided that I wanted the next scene
to be a woman screaming after mention of having sex with Sidney,
so we found this old Boris Karloff clip.
I just like the juxtaposition.
We actually had some... If you look closely,
you can see a line of cocaine on the table, there.
We cut out him actually snorting the cocaine.
We thought it was one drug reference too many.
That's our editor, David Freeman, lending his narrative voice
to that little meerkat scene of Rocky.
And here we're back to Now and Forever.
Who is this? It's Sidney's mom.
This is really amazing
that this clip about the ring happened to be in this film,
and it just fit in so perfectly with our own storyline.
This shot, right there, I actually shot. That's a fake.
That's a shot that I got of a ring being put on a finger,
and we cut it into the clip, 'cause I thought we needed
that visual of the ring actually going on the finger.
Push-in to Sidney's face, push-in to his mother's face.
And we actually made his eyes look very red,
because of the idea that he was doing cocaine.
I don't know if that quite works with the liquor. I guess it does.
I was very annoyed at this, because I wanted a stretch limousine.
At an awards show like this, an actress like Sophie
would be coming out of a stretch, not a town car.
And instead, I wound up with a town car.
Stretch limousines are much more rare in London than they are in LA,
because the streets here are so narrow
that you can't really get those long cars through them.
You wind up driving up on the kerb and running over pedestrians.
But anyway, we wound up with a town car.
Not quite realistic for LA,
but no one's gonna know unless I tell them
on the DVD audio commentary.
And here, again, Danny with very unflattering make-up
and five o'clock shadow,
as he sort of drops further and further down on the food chain.
Clark, of course, being Sidney's alias, Clark Baxter.
Can't have a reveal like that without a musical sting.
Thank you, David Arnold.
And this was always in the script, this idea of bookending here,
and I always really liked it.
There was some talk about cutting out all of the Apollo Awards stuff
at the beginning of the film, and I really put my foot down on that.
And I really like this notion of returning here,
to where we started the film and repeating these shots.
There's Sophie Maes.
There's the memorable mouth of the presenter, saying her name.
And so I just like the concept that we're looking at
the same scene being repeated, but now through very different eyes.
We know it isn't all what it was cracked up to be,
and that Shangri-la has sort of soured now.
And, as Simon said on the other audio commentary,
it's kind of a funny time for Sidney to suddenly grow a conscience.
This is one of my...
There was a few Mel Brooks moments in this film,
and this is one of them.
The sort of collective gasp and the musical sting after,
"I killed Cuba," not quite realistic, but funny, admit it.
This was fun.
Again, this was one of those scenes that I look at as a director.
You know, people tend to like this, and I just look at it
and think of all the additional coverage I wanted to get
and all the shots that I didn't have time for,
and, as a director, you tend to see all the compromises
and all the things that you wish you could do over again
or you wish you had more time for
or you wish you had the money to do right.
And if you're smart, you keep your mouth shut,
but if you're like me, you go on and on about it,
and you tell everybody about all the faults
that you see that they wouldn't notice.
I shot this two ways. Once, with a few takes
with Alison looking very pensive and contemplative,
and then other takes where she was giggling,
and my vote was really for the more serious kind of looks,
but everybody talked me out of it and said,
"No, no, it's nice to see her sort of giggle
"and be happy seeing Sidney return to form."
And this was a very conscious choice
to have Max play Vincent very cool here, like he...
Barely paying attention to all the pandemonium.
He's kind of too cool for the room.
And there's our final statement on Clayton,
who lets the mask slip just for a second
before going back to the serious Clayton.
And this was an idea that night.
There was really nothing special about this in the script.
It was just Sidney running out of the theatre,
and I got this idea of all the geeks and the fans
standing out in front...
I don't use the word "geeks" pejoratively, by the way.
Standing out front, and one of them lifting the rope,
and Sidney going back to return
to the side of the rope where he belongs.
And I actually auditioned a number of those people
to see who would be the rope lifter,
and that fellow who lifted it won the audition.
I lined them up and had everybody do it and sort of make a face.
This was all a pickup.
As I say, we had one day of pickups after the principal photography,
and there was always some version of an airport scene
in the script here, of him going back,
and it was one of the things we actually had to cut in script form,
because we had to get our number of shooting days down,
and I remember announcing, I said, "We can cut it from the script,
"but we're gonna need it eventually,"
and basically what I was told was, "Fine, if we need it, we'll shoot it."
And then it finally came to that. We really needed the information here
as to when Sidney was going to New York
and why he was still in the same clothes
and what time he got there,
so this scene, actually, is jam-packed with information
that helps clarify all those questions
that people had during the early preview cuts.
And here it is. Sidney is finally a celebrity.
He's on TV. They're talking about him.
There he is, with the stars.
In the background, you've got a lot of our crew.
Again, this was one of those days where we didn't have enough extras,
so I see my assistant, Ross. I see Stephen's assistant, Joanna,
and there's Peter Straughan, our writer, the tall guy,
and that was Stephen Woolley standing next to him.
Of course, we discussed all that on the other commentary.
When Simon saw this cut of the film,
he thought that rather than see the ring in Sidney's hand, here,
that we should wait and not reveal that he did get the ring back
until he's at the screening with Alison, which I sort of agree.
But we shot it this way, and I just love the look on Simon's face,
the way he looks so pensive,
and that really comes off of the ring, so it was a trade-off.
I wanted to keep the look and the drama of pushing-in on his face like that,
which I thought couldn't be justified without the ring.
So now we are back in New York.
And, at one time, I worried about the geography of this,
because if you know New York
it wouldn't make too much sense if you came in from JFK
that you would come into Manhattan via Brooklyn,
which is where we are now.
But nobody thinks about that stuff unless the director is silly enough
to point it out on the audio commentary.
And here we have La Dolce vita.
So perhaps that's what Alison meant when she said,
"I've got the tickets for Empire Park."
We actually shot this little sign here as a pickup to help people along
who may not realise that this film is La Dolce vita
and understand that's why Sidney knew that she might be there,
'cause it is her favourite film.
So that sign helps.
Now, I don't know if that's the Brooklyn Bridge
or the Manhattan Bridge, but in any event,
our New Yorkers will know it,
and they'll all complain that I don't know.
I should, but this is...
That bridge had to be lit by Oliver Stapleton.
Our DP did a fantastic job.
This scene, here, in the script, was actually written.
This is where Bobbie, our transsexual, was gonna come back,
because the gag was that he would see Alison with a guy
and think that the guy was her new boyfriend,
and then Bobbie was gonna run up,
and the guy was gonna stand up and give her a kiss,
and then he'd realise that they weren't together as a couple.
But it was a complicated thing to try to shoot,
so I came up with the simplified version of Kirsten talking to the guy.
Same assumption, that she's with a guy until the other couple embrace,
and then we realise that Kirsten is just the third wheel here.
I love this scene. I still get touched by this.
I have to admit I'm enough of a sap,
but it helps to have David Arnold's really lovely score, here.
And I love this. This is just happenstance,
the way Marcello Mastroianni is lined up behind Simon like that,
sort of a similar body English.
And here's the kiss.
'Cause I am Simon's friend, I let him do many, many takes of this.
People have asked me here,
"Why does he put the ring in her pocket?
"Why not just put it on her finger?"
The answer is we chose to go this way.
And now we bring back our Nino Rota music,
which you all remember from the record album.
And here's our call-back to the dance.
The idea, here, by the way, was to do this big pull-out
and have people think, "The film's over,"
and then have the camera sort of swoop back down in,
which we did shoot,
and it just didn't come out quite as smoothly.
You know, again, it was a long night. There was a lot to do.
I couldn't get as many takes as I wanted. Never felt we nailed that,
but we had to move on.
There's our final punch line.
So we made it a direct cut instead of using the full shot.
The burning book was not in the original script,
but again, every time this film got too sentimental,
we thought we should do something
to sort of pull the rug out from under us.
Or what do we say in England? To take the piss out of it.
So adding that gag was sort of letting us know that,
in some ways, Sidney was still his old self.
You realise when I say goodbye to you now, that's it.
I'm officially finished with this film.
What is it? As I said, it's late September of '08,
and I got the script in, like, January of '06,
and here I am doing the audio commentary on the DVD,
so when I say goodbye, that's it.
So why don't I just ramble on a bit? I'm not quite ready to let go.
No, actually, I am.
Hope you enjoyed the film.
Isn't it funny? At this point, when I'm doing the DVD,
I have no idea if anyone's gonna see this film,
if it'll be a big hit, if it'll be a big flop, something in-between.
You presumably know, but I don't.
The film actually opens a week from today, as I speak.
All right, listen, it's been fun, and see you next time around.
Thanks a lot. Bob Weide, signing off.