I'm Martin Brest, and it's an early Saturday morning in Santa Monica.
And I've been asked to take a look at this movie that I did 150 years ago.
And I'm as shocked as I'm capable of being as I watch these credits come up.
It is a journey. Oh, man.
I'll try and do my best here.
Wow, just seeing these names come up...
At the end of shooting,
we went to Detroit to shoot some of the chase sequence,
the part that didn't involve the principal actors,
and we shot this opening title sequence
after we finished with all the chase stuff.
This guy actually was actually describing,
as it turns out, he was actually describing
the trucks in the truck chase to one of his buddies,
I found out when we went up to him to get clearance.
We were shooting all these shots out of a unmarked van,
like, almost like surveillance footage.
We'd drive around and stick the camera through, in between some curtains
and we shot all this footage. And we had to go get clearance
and I remember we had an off-duty policeman with us.
And there was one shot of some kid spitting milk
that was in a really rough housing project.
And after I shot... I was operating the camera for this opening sequence.
This shot here of the kid spitting milk.
I went in to get clearance from their parents to use it in the movie,
and the off-duty cop who was accompanying us in the van
would not come out into that housing project with me.
He said, "If you wanna go, you can go. I ain't going in there."
And I went in there, knocked on the door and found the mother
and got clearance to use the shot.
Now, a lot of this, ironically...
It's unusual, but ironically, this sequence here,
right in the back of the truck,
was the first day of shooting.
It's unusual for the opening of a movie to be on the first day of shooting.
This was the first shot we shot of Eddie in the movie, as it turns out.
And I think we knew that we were gonna have a lot of fun with him
once we started this.
Actually, this little interchange was inspired by that little bit
between De Niro and Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets.
I don't know if this qualifies as commentary,
but I'm just sort of getting hypnotised by watching this here.
So again, all this, as I recall, was the first day of shooting,
and the chase that's about to start
was a combination of stuff that was done in Los Angeles
and in Detroit.
All the stuff with the principal actors was done in Los Angeles.
And the whole idea of shooting second-unit truck stuff in Detroit,
to get the real feel of Detroit and get real sort of urban environments,
was something the studio held over our head throughout the shooting.
If we went over budget, we wouldn't be able to go to Detroit
to shoot this chase you're about to see.
So this is all Los Angeles right now,
but we're about to start intercutting between Los Angeles and Detroit.
This was a very nerve-racking...
Some of the stuff is obviously stunt guys.
But a lot of it is Eddie. I mean, the stuff that you...
That's Eddie.
And here's this...
This was kind of hairy to shoot.
We shot all the shots of Eddie in downtown Los Angeles,
kind of just running through red lights with a police car in front of us
clearing the way. And I was in the camera car behind Eddie,
warning him on my megaphone to be alerted for turns
that were coming up so he could hold on tighter.
That was a stuntman, and after he did that, he...
...he didn't really want to go back on that truck again.
We called this truck "The Train" for obvious reasons.
It was a double-trailer truck,
and the front bumper... That's a stuntman, of course.
The front bumper of the truck was a steel I-beam.
So it could go through anything without impairing the truck's ability to drive.
Like that, for instance. Oh, man! That's me up on the roof up there.
I think I was wearing a yellow jacket in that last shot.
There's Eddie in a real truck.
This is Detroit. This was the shot that that guy was describing
in the street earlier on. He was describing the movement of the truck.
So, again, we shot all this wide stuff in Detroit,
but the tight stuff of the actors in LA.
Now, coming up on this,
there's this scene where the truck comes rolling down the street.
And there's an amazing bit of great stuntsmanship.
Gary McLarty, our stunt driver who drove this bus, incidentally,
also was driving the truck,
and one of the cars that he hit
was not supposed to, but did break loose from its tie-down.
This car here, this station wagon, almost wrapped under the car,
he whips it out of the way, makes sure he gets it out from under the car
and continues on. It was a pretty amazing piece of driving.
When I woke up the morning we were gonna shoot that street,
I woke up with a heavy heart 'cause it was probably the most
dangerous day I've ever been involved in.
And I was really concerned about getting through the day
with everybody being OK. And we did.
I was glad to have it behind me.
This gentleman here coming up was a local cop,
we just plucked out of the chorus line there.
It took a number of takes to get a usable one, but he was a good sport.
This was in LA, and if I'm not mistaken,
whatever was written on that door,
I remember it was misspelled and I was in a real panic.
But it was sort of in the days even before home video
and I really only was able to rest
knowing that no one would ever get to really examine it.
But that obviously is not true any longer.
This is Paul Reiser, of course, way back when.
And he and Eddie really were able to... to wail.
I sort of had the feeling that the Detroit Police Department,
as distinguished from the Beverly Hills Police Department,
should be a whole different sort of species.
The idea of having Jewish cops to me seemed as un-Beverly Hills as possible.
So Paul seemed a perfect candidate, we named him Jeffrey.
Sort of a little dig at Jeffrey Katzenberg,
who was the head of the studio at the time.
No, he wasn't even the head of the studio. He was...
I don't know what his title was at the time.
But it was our way of teasing him.
Now, coming up we have a guy named Gil Hill,
who I met when I was doing research in Detroit.
And Gil was the head of the homicide department in Detroit,
and I saw him... Here comes Gil.
And I saw him at the police department in Detroit
when I was scouting locations, and there was something about him.
He almost seemed to me like he could be Eddie's father.
And there was something about his bearing,
he had a kind of dignity that I really dug.
And I asked him if he wanted to read for the part, and he did,
and he was not very good,
and we kept rehearsing, rehearsing, and he got better and better.
And before too long, he was great.
And I asked him if he'd come down and do it, and he had never acted before.
And he came down and he said to me,
"You've put a lot of faith in me and I'm not gonna let you down."
And he really did it, he did a great job and had a great authenticity
and you could tell that there was something below the surface.
Gil's actually running for the mayor of Detroit now.
This movie sort of got him some public acclaim in Detroit
and he became a councilman, then head of the City Council,
and now he's running for the mayor.
I asked him after this if he did a lot of this in his job,
this kind of yelling,
and he said he never yelled at any officer like that,
but he had been yelled at like that himself.
That I think actually happened accidentally in a rehearsal
and we kind of weaved it into the take.
That car was pretty hairy.
That car, which... We were scouting locations in Beverly Hills
and we stopped for coffee, the crew and myself before production,
and somebody pulled up to get coffee in a car exactly like that.
And we said, "Oh, my God, this is the car he has to drive."
We tried to buy it from those people and they wouldn't sell it
so we went out and got a couple of old ones and sort of painted it
and dinged it up to match the memory of that one car that we saw.
Now, we're about to meet...
...Jimmy Russo, James Russo, who...
...I first saw in an NYU student film
and he was quite extraordinary and he always stuck in my mind,
and he seemed like he'd... When we needed a guy for this part,
I wanted to use somebody that nobody had seen before, and...
...went to Jimmy.
Sylvester Stallone was gonna be playing Eddie's part
until a couple of weeks before shooting.
And when we made the change,
everything got thrown into the air.
All the work that had been done on the script before
had to sort of essentially get thrown out.
Now, this scene coming up at the bar, this was quite...
There was really a wonderful moment in it,
where Jimmy Russo says to Eddie that he loves him.
As a friend, as a brother, you know.
And the way it was edited made preview audiences
laugh in the wrong way.
I guess the sort of directness of a guy saying to another guy that he loves him
kind of threw the audience a bit.
And the studio wanted that cut out, and it seemed essential to me
that this character had a love for Eddie, and would do anything for him,
and that Eddie's character knew that and I didn't want to cut it out.
But the laugh that it engendered in the audience
was just show-stopping in the worst way.
So we just trimmed it, trimmed it, trimmed it frame-by-frame
and we just got it to where it wasn't quite as...
I think we... I don't remember what we did.
I think we cut off the end of his shot after he says, "I love you",
which I think held a little too long and made the audience uncomfortable.
I think that's what we did. We just kind of adjusted it a bit
and we were able to keep it without...
...having...
...the audience go down the wrong pike with it.
Here we have Jonathan Banks.
A wonderful, wonderful villain.
We were rushed to get out of this location, as I recall,
and we couldn't get extra coverage of Eddie falling to the ground
in that little melee that preceded this, and I remember, even to this day,
Eddie kind of disappears.
You can see him lying on the floor in the background of this shot,
but he kind of disappeared from the scene. That's a little unfortunate.
It kind of confused some people.
I love Gil Hill.
There's just really something about him.
He had this quality, this sort of dignity, somehow, that really...
I don't know.
For whatever he didn't have in experience,
he made up with internal qualities that are just...
As I watch this now, even with the sound turned down,
I'm just sort of impressed by his...
...stature, somehow.
And there is this father-son thing that's really kind of nice.
Now, there is... You know, the movie's sort of like
this weird hybrid between In The Heat Of The Night and...
The movie In The Heat Of The Night,
and The Beverly Hillbillies.
There's a shot coming up, the introduction to Beverly Hills,
which is an obvious steal and homage to The Beverly Hillbillies.
The idea of some sort of outsider
coming to the rarefied land of Beverly Hills.
There we go, a little Beverly Hillbilly action here.
Again, without sounding kind of goofy about it,
the whole thing... the thing that really interested me about the movie
is sort of it echoed kind of my experience of coming out to California,
in a crummy car from the NYU film school,
coming out to the American Film Institute,
which at that time was housed in Beverly Hills.
And coming out with a buddy of mine in an old junker
that barely made it across the country and just sort of being amazed
and wondering how I was gonna survive out in the rarefied land.
I remember, whenever we screened this,
there was a laugh at the end of this shot...
...that I never could figure out. I think it had to do with this
little interchange back there. Now, I can see it.
I never saw it 'cause I wasn't aware of it as we were shooting,
but that gentleman, the extra there who played the doorman back there,
gave Eddie a great look. It's something I didn't see
until I had a little removal from the movie.
Now, this thing, this scene unfolding here...
As a lot of the scenes in the film,
we had sort of a predicament, sort of an opportunity,
of Eddie having to sort of con his way into a circumstance
or convince something of something.
As I said, Sylvester Stallone was gonna be playing this part
until just before shooting.
I thought that the idea of Eddie playing the part would be magnificent,
but I really wanted to stay away from any issues of race.
I felt that race should not be an issue in the film,
it should be more of a class thing.
There are two places where he kind of played the race card, as it were,
and they were just too good to resist.
So I kind of broke my rule here.
And we had fun with this whole Jackson thing that he does.
Coming up, we needed a shot of Eddie walking down the street in Beverly Hills
and we couldn't fit it in our schedule and I was begging for it
and they wouldn't let me have it.
So one day during lunch, we were in downtown LA in a crummy street,
and we got this guy on the right here in some outfit,
these two guys which were Eddie's buddies,
and we put some fancy cars down at the end of the street,
put on a long lens and put up some greenery,
and it looks like Beverly Hills.
This was a really scuzzy area, believe it or not.
We were able to run over there on our lunch hour and grab that one shot
because we desperately needed it.
Now... I'm just laughing in anticipation of Bronson Pinchot,
who was mind-bogglingly delicious in this.
Every take was completely different,
and every angle was completely different.
The angle on Eddie was completely different than the angle on Bronson.
And the fact that this was cut together
to look like two people are actually talking to each other,
it was a miracle of editing, it took forever.
In fact, it was so chaotic-looking in dailies
that the studio was thinking about re-shooting it, making me re-shoot it,
and Billy Weber cut it together really quickly.
And needless to say, they asked us not to re-shoot it, fortunately,
'cause it has some of the more inspired
comic acting ever.
That sounds like hyperbole, and I'm sorry,
but what Bronson is doing here is just off the scale.
Matter of fact, I'm just gonna turn the volume on so I can listen to it myself.
It's... Bronson was amazing. There's some stuff that he did
later on that was so funny I had to almost excuse myself from the set
'cause I kept ruining takes by laughing,
which happened a couple of times in the movie.
Bronson. He's unbelievable.
This is Lisa Eilbacher, of course.
One of the challenges she had was, in this kind of short scene,
kind of create the impression that she and Eddie went way back
and were friends from childhood.
And she filled it in kind of nicely
with little touches here and there that implied a history.
Although... that hair.
That hair. I remember we really were going around and around on her hair.
And I still...
Not quite satisfied with it there.
It looks a little bit something.
In any event, that's Lisa Eilbacher.
Now...
...trying to come up with a villain was...
...was kind of... it was kind of rough.
Something about Steven Berkoff's power,
the sort of the laser quality of his...
...his look, I think I saw a photograph of him in a paper somewhere,
'cause he was in a play. He's a writer and he's a director
in addition to being an actor, very sort of experimental and avant-garde work.
But that photograph I saw of him was so potent...
...that we thought it would be a wild way to go.
I remember this location. We kind of really struggled to place
in this building that towered over Los Angeles, and...
I remember fighting to try and get us to shoot it up there
rather than another location. And they built this entire office set
on this abandoned floor, this unfinished floor at the top of this building
so we'd get these great views of Los Angeles out the window.
However, the day we shot,
the city was just completely smogged in
so all you see is light.
Ouch.
Casting Beverly Hills Cop was really sort of a challenge.
I kind of wanted them all to look like TV cops,
very different than anything we saw in the Detroit section of the film.
I wanted them to all look like surfer, sort of actor-cops.
This gentleman who's frisking Eddie actually showed up to the audition
in a police uniform, which just seemed...
It seemed like the kind of thing I wouldn't have fallen for,
but it kind of worked. He just fit the bill.
Now, this next scene in the jail cell,
that's another I was desperate to have, but we didn't have any money
to build a jail set, so I think we repainted another set that we had
and just put some bars in front of it.
This one here.
This is actually the last shot we filmed in the movie, as I recall.
Eddie looks a little tired there.
Now, we never got a chance to actually see
what the Beverly Hills Police Department looked like
'cause they would never let us in, and I know, I'm sure this...
This is sort of like a fantasy of what it might look like.
We knew it didn't look like this, but we just wanted to really go out on a limb
and just make it as different as possible
from anything that might occur in Detroit.
And here are my boys, John Ashton and Judge Reinhold.
I've always been a great fan of Laurel & Hardy and The Honeymooners
and the opportunity to actually cast and put together a team
that has the sort of comedic magic of those kind of guys...
And I think that these guys together
do have that sort of perfect, perfect, perfect chemistry.
It was a blast.
John is a great actor, Judge is a great actor,
and they really sort of went into this sort of...
They just fit together like...
Perfect, they're just perfect.
The great Ronny Cox.
The whole thing in putting this together, the premise was...
And again, the conception of the Beverly Hills Police Department in this
comes totally from imagination.
But the whole notion was that it was sort of like
the private security force for rich people,
as opposed to a more sort of democratic and for-the-people
police department that might occur somewhere else.
And again, back to the class issue, not to sound too pretentious here,
but that was sort of like the whole kinda vibe underneath it.
Sort of like there's the regular people
and then there's these rich people who are somehow different
than all of us. They buy weird art
and they have their own little police department
that takes care of just them and sort of out of touch
with all the other aspects of life. And...
Even though that is fantastic and not reality,
that was the premise underlying.
Judge is great.
I gotta say, Marge Simkin, who was our casting director,
really brought in some amazing people. This combo is just...
These guys are just perfect together. I'm so amazed seeing them
all these years later. The chemistry is really amazing.
That's... that's a lot of exposition.
Some of these scenes, there are a couple of them throughout the movie,
where we just had to sort of tie all these story points together,
they're really a little bit... less than graceful.
But, needless to say, the movie wasn't really about the story
as much as it was about the dynamics between the characters.
Yeah. I remember being in a fevered phone call with Don Simpson,
rest his soul,
about the expositional requirements for this area, the story points,
and how much we should jam in and how much we shouldn't jam in
and which story points we should hit.
I was trying to shoot the scene, and it was the early days of mobile phones.
And it was really kind of challenging to try and get off the phone
so I could actually shoot something.
Now, coming up is the banana in the tailpipe,
which is something that people always bring up to me,
it's somehow become sort of an iconic joke of some kind.
It was originally gonna be a potato in the tailpipe.
Eddie was gonna sneak down to the kitchen of the hotel
and get a potato, which would serve to clog the cops' tailpipe really well.
However, another one of those sort of budget battles ensued
and we couldn't shoot another location,
we couldn't get to another part of the hotel to light it and shoot it.
We just couldn't squeeze that in. So we had to have Eddie
get something from an area that we were already lit and shooting in.
So we decided we would do it in the lobby of the hotel.
We couldn't figure out how we'd get a potato in the lobby,
so we decided we'd set up a little buffet
and have him take a piece of fruit, a banana.
And he was gonna get it from...
He was just gonna take it from a buffet,
so we had to hire like a buffet attendant.
Eddie brought Damon Wayans in, who was at that... Here he is.
I remember asking Judge to see if he could make a car act.
I said, "Judge, can you make this car look like it's stalling out using..."?
He did a great job.
And now, Harold Faltermeyer, who did the score,
did an amazing job of...
This is sort of early on in the history
of sort of synthesised musical scores,
and what was really extraordinary,
since the movie was done on a very, very tight schedule,
is his ability to create something and rework it to picture.
So we could come in at night and see some cues that he did
and rework them and rework them,
you know, while we were right there and just alter the whole cue.
Because we didn't have a lot of time to sort of pre-plan it,
so it was sort of like created
and revised and revised and revised on the spot.
And has a really wonderful ability
to be able to sort of customise the score like that,
sort of tune in each piece of music...
...rather than just sort of get it and stick it in.
This gentleman here carrying the box,
the older gentleman, is Chuck Adamson, who is a...
...one of the great Chicago organised crime cops.
Who, just as we were shooting this,
became a writer and a television producer
and produced a whole bunch of his memories of working organised crime.
That's what a bonded warehouse is.
Yeah. As I said, we had to jam story points in wherever we could.
It was sort of a little slapdash.
So this scene, I was...
Eddie was just gonna steal a forklift and ride it up to that...
He was gonna climb over this. As he climbed over it,
we didn't even know we were gonna have another scene following it.
He was just gonna steal this forklift and head over and get the box,
pretending he was a worker.
This scene was the other scene
that had a racial reference that I just couldn't resist letting go by,
even though that wasn't gonna be part of the thing.
I can't tell you how invigorating it is, and horrifying,
to be setting up a scene
and not know exactly how it's gonna sort of work out.
Now, needless to say, this scene
was shot right after the previous scene with Rick Overton in it
because we knew that we were gonna have to have
some scene in the filing office
where he was gonna get some papers to track down, whatever...
I don't even remember what it is now.
I've always loved that cut from Eddie to these two guys sitting there waiting.
This is, needless to say...
...an homage to Laurel & Hardy.
This part of the development of the story was,
as far as I was concerned, I'm sure as far as everybody was concerned,
was sort of the real critical part of the development,
the sort of bringing together of the two
disparate schools of police work.
Guys who don't get along, guys who have different ways of doing it,
kind of uniting, based upon a common...
...common... commonality.
Common something, I don't know.
Now, this young lady,
whose professional name was Mouse...
...was sort of like a legendary stripper.
And this song...
...she used in her act, and it was just really...
...just sort of had a perfect vibe to it, so we used it in the film.
Now, the morning that I went to shoot this,
'cause we had a very little amount of time to shoot this scene,
I remember I watched 48 Hrs. that morning.
I mean, I kept watching certain scenes over and over again
because there was something about Walter Hill's bar scenes,
and strip bar scenes,
something about it that just seemed like this should have that kind of a vibe.
These guys are sort of like In Cold Blood.
They always reminded me of those guys from In Cold Blood.
I remember really being nervous about doing this scene,
'cause it was so contingent
upon people looking at things
and what their thoughts are about things.
Eddie looking at one guy, and then looking back at Taggart,
and then looking to the other guy, it was all about looks
and perceptions of what people are seeing.
And I was... I remember being very alarmed
at making sure it was shot in a way where all that was really clear.
A lot of looks in this scene, everybody's looking at...
It's like a little "look concerto".
Wonderfully edited.
I remember using all my...
...all the books I read in film school about screen direction,
and who's on what side of the room,
and which way you should look to have a look tie into such-and-such,
all that kind of stuff,
kind of like drawing on all of that to make sure we always knew
where everybody was and who everybody was looking at,
even though they were in far parts of the room.
"Gimme a kiss, baby." That's delicious.
When we shot this next thing coming up right here,
that, when we shot that,
when Eddie did it, I thought, "Oh, my God, I shot the poster today."
I just felt like that was gonna be the image of the movie.
It wasn't the poster, as it turns out, but it was an image
that was sort of remembered. Now, this scene.
This scene was hysterical, because there was no oxygen in this set.
The roof was closed and there was no way to get air in it
and it was in August or something, something like that,
or July and there was no air and everybody's getting really sluggish.
And Eddie, who had never had a cup of coffee in his life practically,
finally decided he was gonna have a cup of coffee.
'Cause he was just dragging,
and he had a cup of coffee and it sent him through the roof.
In this scene he's, like, zapped. He's, like, flying high
on a caffeine experience, the likes of which he's never had.
And he was so hilarious in this scene
that I had to go into one of those offices.
I kept blowing the takes 'cause I was laughing so hard.
I finally had to go back into one of these glass rooms behind the camera,
and listen to the scene with earphones, and even...
John Ashton's laughing there.
Even through the room, they heard me laughing,
so they had to cover me with moving blankets.
So I actually didn't even see Eddie do this scene,
I was under moving blankets, laughing my head off with headsets on.
Eddie was on fire that day.
I love these two guys.
They seem just the perfect...
In retrospect, they do seem like the perfect sort of second tier
of a Beverly Hills Police Department,
sort of ambitious and perfectly despicable.
Now, in this scene, this was a little strange,
but the idea of having two African-American actors
of different socioeconomical backgrounds seemed like something
worth having fun with, and...
I told Eddie at the beginning of this scene
that I thought that maybe it was sort of mineable,
that maybe we could sort of have fun with this notion of the two classes,
you know, one race but two classes.
And he kind of was a little confused by it and I kind of
laid it out a little clearer, and then he really wailed with it.
He really did exactly what I would have hoped.
Now, this mansion, Victor Maitland's mansion,
and the ensuing streets, was not shot in Beverly Hills.
We found that, at the time, Beverly Hills,
I don't know how it is now, was extremely un-movie-friendly.
And when we shot that scene on Rodeo Drive
when Eddie first enters Beverly Hills, we had to actually shoot that
I think between 7.30 in the morning and 8.00 in the morning.
So, literally, some narrow band of unusable time.
And for things like this, we found that it was impossible
to even consider shooting in Beverly Hills, so we found this mansion in...
I believe it was in Santa Monica Canyon.
It's still there, I think.
Of course it's still there, it's a mansion.
These streets also coming up were not shot in Beverly Hills.
Nothing really was shot in Beverly Hills. Nothing much.
Now, in the days before video assist in shooting,
it's really hard to sort of see what an actor is doing
if you have a car mount, like what's about to come up.
Eddie driving away, the camera's mounted on the car, so I was sort of
sitting in the bottom of the passenger well.
In a shot like this, for instance, I was down on the floor.
We had a lot of flies that day, they really loved that buffet.
We had to spray it down, every little piece of cake and every little...
Everything was covered in bug poison, we had to keep spraying it down,
had to make sure that we had a clean thing of cherries or whatever it was
for Eddie to munch on.
This scene coming up here...
You know, it was really great in this movie,
'cause a lot of the actors were... more than actors.
Eddie, obviously, is more than an actor.
He's directed, he's a writer, he's a comedian.
Steven Berkoff here is an actor, but he's also a writer and director.
What a puss, what a great puss Steven Berkoff has. Look at that face.
Now, these are the brunette Beverly Hills cops.
We didn't want it to be too redundant,
so these are the little brunette brothers.
I remember one guy was blonde. I think the guy... this guy, here.
I think we had to put a toupee on him that morning
'cause I didn't want it to look like the same cops that busted Eddie
in the earlier scene.
Back in the Beverly Hills Police Department set.
Now, it's hard to see from this angle, but the whole notion behind this set,
which we had to whip up on very short notice,
was based on a set that I and the production designer of this movie
developed for a movie called WarGames,
which, unfortunately, I was fired off of.
But we had spent a very long time designing this gigantic set.
It was one of the biggest sets done ever at the time,
and it was this hugely complicated set for NORAD Mission Control,
for the Air Force and...
We had done so much research and so much theoretical discussion of it,
and it was... and built it, although I never got the chance to shoot on it,
that when it came time to do this set, which was a significant...
...we had a significantly smaller budget, we kind of used
the same ideas that we took a while to develop for the other set,
which was essentially having a staging area,
this office area where they are now that overlooks a control room.
And even though the control room area,
with its screens and monitors and buttons and whatnot,
cost 50 times more than this room,
and even though we hardly played any other action in that room,
it always served as a background.
And we kind of used the same layout as we did in WarGames, 'cause...
It was nice to finally get a chance to use some of those ideas.
But, as I said, in this... in these angles you can't really appreciate it.
It's sort of the reverse angles where you see into the room itself
you get more of a sense of that.
Now, these lines that Ronny Cox is saying here,
I'm sure he was given those
probably a half hour before we shot this or something.
It was really... We were really winging it around here
'cause this is where the whole story had to sort of come together.
All the loose story points had to start to knit here,
and I know this was done like two seconds before we shot.
In fact, Stephen Elliott, who played the chief of police
who's about to enter, is holding a piece of paper in his hands,
and that is his script pages,
which he was sort of like reading just before he went on.
And in the rehearsals, he had it in his hand
and it just seemed like a good piece, but yes, ladies and gentlemen,
that piece of paper he's holding is his script, his pages for the day.
And Stephen,
I met years ago in an audition for another movie.
He was auditioning for another part and the audition wasn't going well.
He was reading lines with the casting director in a scene.
And she wasn't an actor and he kind of railed
at reading lines with a non-actor,
and he stopped the audition and screamed at both of us
and scared the hell out of us.
And he walked out of the audition and it was so impressive.
He scared me so much I thought, "This is the guy we gotta get for the chief",
'cause the chief has to just come on for a tiny scene
and he really has to be extraordinarily intimidating.
And I remembered that horrible experience and thought,
"This is the guy."
And also that thing that he did, he said,
"Is this the man that... blah, blah, blah with Taggart and Rosemont?"
Instead of saying, "Taggart and Rosewood".
That was an accident he did in rehearsals.
I remember the dolly grip, the guy pushing the dolly,
looked at me when we were shooting and he said,
"We should keep that, that was pretty funny."
I said, "Yeah, good idea, let's keep it", and we asked Stephen to keep it.
We knew that this scene was gonna tie everything together in some way,
and that people were gonna be angry at everybody.
We kind of had the general vibe of what was going on, but not the specifics.
And if you listen closely,
you'll see it's deliciously vague about what the nature of the conflicts were.
Not this scene, but the next scene,
with Judge and Eddie outside the police department.
Now, this scene...
...the studio wanted to cut out of the movie,
because they felt the movie was too long.
But without this scene,
the whole sort of impetus for Eddie
to want to really get into the mansion
and save Lisa Eilbacher at the end was completely shot.
This scene really established the villainy
of the Steven Berkoff character.
And I really wanted it in.
So I wound up trading this scene for a freeze-frame
at the end of the movie when Eddie... Eddie's last line in the movie,
there's a freeze-frame which I thought was a little tacky.
But I kind of negotiated, "OK, we'll do the freeze-frame,
but let me keep this scene in", so that was Directorial Negotiations 101.
Now, here comes the scene I was telling you about
between Judge and Eddie outside the police department.
It's... I mean, as you watch the movie, it seems like it's...
"Of course, yes, this makes perfect sense
for what transpired in the previous scene."
But believe me when I tell you we had no idea what was going on.
It's just like perfectly right on the edge of vagary.
Now, this scene was the first scene that was shot with Bronson,
and again, in this scene, I was just...
I didn't know how Bronson's character was exactly gonna unfold.
But when he said this line here...
And when he said that line,
I was biting through pencils to keep from laughing
'cause there was no place I could hide and I'd ruined
many, many, many, many takes.
But it was just the beginning, 'cause he was just unreal.
I remember trying to find that building was really hard,
wondering what a warehouse would look like in Beverly Hills.
And we all know, like, warehouses can be kind of old and depressing,
but we wanted a chic warehouse, and we found this building,
it wasn't even in LA, but...
I mean, it wasn't even in Beverly Hills, but it really had...
It looked like a Beverly Hills warehouse somehow.
This is one of my favourite cues in the movie, this piece of music.
It was a very elaborate piece of music,
way too elaborate for the moment.
And we wound up clicking off all the different tracks
to just reveal sort of like this rhythm track that was left,
and that's all we kept.
Coffee grounds.
Yeah, it's just sort of amazing that,
even though the plot is very sort of tinny...
...it does amaze me that it does kind of stick together,
that it's remotely coherent
and that the concerns of all the characters tie together.
It boggles my mind.
This scene has one of my favourite shots of Steven Berkoff in it.
He says something to Eddie's character,
and Eddie's character said...
When we shot it over Eddie's back looking at Steven Berkoff,
Eddie's character improvised something,
Eddie improvised something, rather, and it didn't quite fit the scene.
So we cut out Eddie's dialogue,
but kept Steven's reaction.
And it's a brilliant reaction, but was really based upon
him hearing something. But when the dialogue was yanked out
that he was responding to, it became even more interesting.
As you watch it, you can really sense... I'll show you when it comes.
I think it's coming right up now... Yeah, here it comes.
Yeah, he was actually responding to something that Eddie said,
which we yanked. And without Eddie's dialogue,
it just became the most interesting, bizarre, scary reaction.
So it still had validity.
Maybe even more so.
This was I think the second time I worked with Angelo Graham,
the production designer.
And it was really fortunate we had a shorthand,
'cause we had to sort of whip stuff up at the last minute. Everything was,
not to be redundant, but improvisational and...
We didn't have a lot of time to talk about sets.
And everything came together very quickly.
It was good having somebody I'd worked with before.
I've since worked with Angelo on a number of other movies, I adore him.
It's not his fault that I asked for a warehouse location.
What is it about villains and warehouse locations?
There's always a villain in a warehouse,
an empty warehouse, in movies, isn't there?
I remember this area when we were...
Once Eddie got on board to do the movie
and we kind of changed everything, this area was sort of a thing
I was really aiming towards in the restructuring of the movie,
this whole notion that...
...the unorthodox policing techniques that Eddie's character used
wound up wearing off
on the most orthodox Beverly Hills cops.
And they actually started to use his technique of following their instincts,
bending little rules if that was required.
And the idea of Judge, who's playing a real by-the-books kind of kid,
would actually sort of use some of that technique
was almost like a victorious turnaround for the Beverly Hills cops,
followed by John Ashton's scene,
coming up in a couple of scenes.
That was one of the most important structural dynamics
we tried to go after,
the sort of infection of Eddie's style
onto the uptight BH cops.
Now, this was way before there was satellite tracking of vehicles.
We just figured that would be something the Beverly Hills cops could do.
Totally made up.
Now, this scene coming up,
the assault on the mansion, really freaked me out,
because I never really did action scenes before.
The whole idea of shooting
and all that kind of stuff was like a total new one on me,
and I was very concerned about getting the geography of all of this right,
and came out a couple weekends before we shot it and walked the grounds,
and came up with a structure for the scene
in terms of when they're all walking together,
how they split up, how they rejoin each other.
I just assumed we could get John Ashton on Judge Reinhold's shoulders.
I just hoped that would work out. It seemed like it would be funny.
Even though it's a very simple scene...
...it kind of intimidated me in a way,
because I wasn't really secure about shooting it.
So we had very little time to shoot it and I kept this next little bit,
I think, where they're just walking together as a group
through this one little area on the other side of this door.
I must have shot
from a million different angles and a million different ways
'cause I was a little flipped out about moving on to the heart of this scene.
And we only used one little shot of the walk for it.
Let's see, is it here? Oh, no, it's right when we cut back to them.
This was the actual set we made the jail out of, as I was describing earlier on.
It was the only way I could get to have a jail set,
was if we could just sort of repaint that and put bars on it.
So this shot and this shot
and this shot are all that remain
of, like, a million miles of film covering that little walk
because I was a little afraid about moving into the heart of the scene.
This location worked out really great. This was supposed to be at night...
...for some reason early on in the script,
but night shooting was too expensive.
It was kind of a... The budget was very minimal
and so we had to make it day, and thank goodness.
There's something about all those bougainvillea and the palm trees
and the sunny Beverly Hills of it all that kind of really worked well.
I've always loved the way the music kind of changed here.
In the middle of sort of like an action sequence.
I thought it was really kind of a beautiful touch of Harold's.
And the way it kind of built.
It's gonna cut back to them and it kind of goes back to that little...
The way it builds and sort of comically supports their...
...changeover to Eddie's MO
always seemed kind of delicious.
This is one of my favourite moments in the movie.
The way the music starts to lift, this is really one of my faves.
And the way Eddie kind of enjoys them, I really kind of, I love that moment.
And I sort of loved interrupting it, too, with this,
like putting one's foot through it.
Putting one's foot through the moment with another kind of tension.
Oh, man!
It seems almost like, as I watch this, in terms of action movies nowadays,
this really does seem almost like...
...something from the silent era. It seems so primitive
by action movie standards.
But it wasn't strictly action,
it was sort of like this comedic action, this Laurel & Hardy action,
sort of an odd hybrid for the time, I guess.
It's since became like a thing, but this sort of like...
The idea of combining this kind of humour
with this kind of action...
...was kind of new territory.
That little somersault, Eddie had to do part of that.
He had to jump off the staircase and land on some...
...some cushions, and he wouldn't do it.
I said, "Let me do it. If I can do it, you can do it."
And I did it and Eddie said, "All right, I'll do it, too."
Now, the next stuff in the mansion is a different location,
a completely different location.
The mansion exterior worked really nice, the exterior, but
they wouldn't allow us to step foot in the house. So we had...
Well, this is still the exterior.
But when we finally head inside...
That guy on the right...
The machine-gunnist on the right, who we'll see later on,
is the guy who drove the truck in the beginning scene, Gary McLarty,
one of the great stunt drivers.
This is a different location.
And we ran out of money in the budget for set dressing.
We had to use the furniture they had in the real place,
which was kind of bizarre for an art dealer.
We brought in a couple pieces just to doll it up, but
we just didn't have any money for this location anymore,
we were kind of at the end of the deal.
This was this wonderful motif. It happened accidentally.
Eddie's sneakers, his tennis shoes, kind of squeaking,
which sort of flipped out the sound guys in the beginning of the movie.
Then we realised it was sort of like a little, nice motif for his character
and it happens a lot throughout the movie.
We kind of made a point, we actually put it in places where it wasn't.
That machine-gunner, that's our driver. Our truck driver, Gary McLarty.
Now, all this furniture belonged to the people who owned the house.
Except for that vase.
Now, the day we shot this, we spent...
We had a horrendous day.
We had to shoot just this van hitting the fountain,
not this other stuff, but the van hitting the fountain.
And just the van end of it, not even the police car end of it,
the van hitting the fountain
and this gigantic dialogue sequence that's coming up.
We had to do all that in one day. We had to spend a half a day
on this van hitting the fountain thing,
and had no time to shoot the resolution of the movie,
which was a scene
which I gave Ronny Cox that morning.
And it's got tons of dialogue, you're about to hear it.
And it just dazzled everybody's...
It just blew our minds that he was able to sort of pull it together
and actually do the scene. I think in struggling with some of the dialogue,
he actually used that dynamic to help give the scene the feeling
that he was making it up as he was going.
There's Gary McLarty.
I love these guys.
So this scene coming up was...
We only had, I don't know, a couple hours to shoot this whole scene,
which resolved all the characters.
We used every camera that we had on the truck,
and we just...
Thank God that Ronny Cox was able to pull it off.
We just kept moving this barrage of cameras.
It was like a firing range of cameras.
We just had anybody who could man a camera, man a camera.
We kind of set up all the cameras on this whole group of actors
and shot, shot, shot, then moved them all a little further to the right,
shot, shot, shot, kept moving it all around
so we can get every possible configuration of close-ups of Eddie,
over-the-shoulders to the chief, over-the-shoulders back to Ronny Cox,
singles on everybody, group shots, two-shots,
the whole combination of shots, we had to get in...
...in practically no time. It was...
You know, I was in a panic. I called the studio during lunch and I said,
"We've got this really important scene to shoot.
We don't have enough time." They said, "Do the best you can."
I was really flipped out and I was smoking cigarettes at the time.
I smoked around seven, literally, seven packs of cigarettes this day.
A lot of setups. A lot of...
Not just a lot of setups. Again, it's a very simple scene,
just close-ups of people.
But the thing that was tricky is making sure
that there was orchestration of looks for any given moment.
A moment when the chief looked at the cop...
...at Ronny Cox, when...
...when... the chief looked at various other characters,
we had to have the right shots of those characters looking at the chief,
we had to have the right shots for Eddie's character
looking at John Ashton, etcetera, etcetera.
Every combination of look had to be covered.
There's sort of like a million different combos.
And...
We got it all, we shot a lot of film that day.
This scene basically came down to... looks
and people sort of always being aware of what every other character is up to
at any given moment.
That's what this film was all about.
Actually, the idea of Eddie wearing his gun
in his back belt like that without a holster or anything
was something that we got from Gil Hill, the guy who played his boss.
Back in the beginning of the film, back in Detroit,
Gil Hill, who was a cop, that's how he carried his gun.
And it was a similar kind of gun, in fact.
Eddie's gun and wardrobe and all that was, again, based upon the notion
that everything he had was the cheapest,
most low-down possible.
The only thing he had going for himself was his wits,
was the theory.
And here's the director with hair.
That's the singular worst performance in the movie,
my performance as the guy behind the counter.
Now, just before shooting, also, the last scene in the movie
was the previous scene at the mansion, where...
...where the whole sort of criminal aspect of the plot was resolved.
But it seemed to me that there needed to be a non-plot resolution
because of the bonding that occurred between all of these guys here.
But that was sort of the real story of the movie
and that needed to really get tied together as well.
So this was kind of thrown together at the last minute, also.
Judge is great. Judge is just great.
And John. These guys are great.
Here comes the dreaded freeze-frame.
Again, it was a trade-off, forgive me.
But otherwise, I wouldn't have that scene with Victor Maitland and the girl.
I always kind of loathe this freeze-frame coming up.
There's actually another very touching little scene here
between Eddie and John Ashton that we had to cut out, as I recall,
because there were just too many goodbyes.
But that's the way it goes.
Here comes that freeze-frame. Oh, I hate it! I hate it!
Oh, well, what can you do?
ENGLISH ESL