I got the idea for this robot fight while I was staying in LA.
I had jet lag, I was in a hotel room, I couldn't sleep, so I turned on the TV
and there was this infomercial for a boxing training device.
This thing looked like a big plastic dummy of a man,
and it had lights for its eyes and lights for its mouth,
and when one of these lights lit up,
you were supposed to punch or kick it in that spot.
And when I was thinking up ideas for what Lara would do in her training,
I thought, "Well, she's going to have something a lot more advanced
"than this plastic effigy of a man,"
so I thought up the big mechanical robot.
And, of course, it can climb walls, it has weapons, it has killing devices.
And it was a much more advanced version
of this very simple boxing training device.
Most of the shots in this sequence were done with a computer-generated robot,
but we did actually build a full-size, working maquette of the robot
that was eight feet tall, weighed 500 pounds.
And this was built by my special effects supervisor, Chris Corbould.
It had to be moved around on a crane, of course, because it was so heavy,
and it was really only used for close-ups of bullet hits
and when it was looking right into her face, eyeball to eyeball.
To move the robot around the set, we had a couple of old, rusty G-clamps
that we just used to attach to its head and then drag it round.
Ironically, the toy makers came to visit us one day
to take the design of the robot to make the toys for mass production.
And unbeknown to me,
they'd taken photographs with these rusty old G-clamps on its head.
And when I went to look at the toys, months later,
I found that they'd actually thought it was part of the design of the robot.
So there are thousands of these plastic toy robots out there
with these weird lumps on the top of their heads.
Angelina trained very hard for this part,
not just this sequence in the film, but the whole movie itself.
And she spent about three months learning
all these different fight skills and weapons skills.
And at the beginning of the training,
she couldn't even lift the guns up, she was so weak.
Of course, by the end of it, she's spinning them around like a gunslinger.
Again, that's quite hard for an actress to play off,
because she doesn't actually see what is attacking her
and what she's fighting with for most of the time.
This sequence only lasts about two-and-a-half minutes,
but it took almost two weeks to shoot every single shot for it.
These close-ups here are done with the full-size working model of the robot.
Of course, the gag with this sequence is
that you're supposed to think she's out on a mission,
and maybe even in somewhere like Egypt, or some ancient temple,
but, of course, it's really just in her house,
in a training area.
This set was actually tiny.
Originally, I'd planned this to be in a gigantic ballroom in the house,
with all these effigies and statues in,
but when we were cutting back the budget, I had to reduce this set.
It's actually smaller than a tennis court,
and just by careful shooting and using different areas of it
and moving the props around for each shot,
it looks like a much bigger area.
As I said, this full-size working model weighed about 500 pounds,
and so, when it came for Angelina to drag it,
we had to devise a whole system of wheels underneath it
and three or four guys with cables pulling it.
And then when she drags it down the steps,
these guys had to restrain it from running out of control.
Unfortunately, on one of the takes,
she dropped that robot's leg right on her foot,
which was extremely painful, as you can imagine how heavy that thing is.
We named the robot S.l.M.O.N.
The initials, the letters of that name are supposed to stand for something.
And it's one of the puzzles I put in the film,
for people to work out what those letters stand for.
I cast Noah Taylor after seeing him in Shine a few years earlier,
and I thought he was such an unusual character that,
for quite a predictable techie-assistant character,
I thought he would bring something different.
Now this shot shows off one of our first big,
impressive sets in the movie.
Designed by Kirk Petruccelli
and built by the incredible craftsmen at Pinewood Studios,
it really was beautifully made.
Every detail was perfect, and to such an incredible scale.
So I was always blown away every day
when I came in and worked on these wonderful sets.
Now, this shower scene was quite hard to shoot, for quite a funny reason.
Angelina has, I think, as many as 23 tattoos on her body,
so I had to paint out a lot of these,
well, not personally, but the make-up artist did,
these various tattoos that she has over her body.
And each day, depending on what outfit she was wearing,
we'd have to paint out different tattoos.
So this was the worst one, of course, because it shows a lot of bare flesh.
This upcoming shot where she throws the towel off
was very difficult, as well,
because I knew I was working in a PG-13-area type of film,
and so the idea was to show a little but not too much,
and so that took quite a few takes to get right.
Originally, I was going to shoot quite a bit in Venice,
but it proved to be too expensive
because of the cost of everything else in the film.
And so this interior was actually shot in Greenwich, just outside London,
but I think it's a pretty good match for a Venetian interior.
Our main bad guy is played by lain Glen,
but in the story he's really just sort of middle-management bad.
The leader of the bad guys is played by Richard Johnson there,
who actually turned down the part of James Bond, originally,
and left it open for Sean Connery.
lain Glen is, of course, a great stage actor, and hasn't done a lot of films,
but I'd seen some of the work he'd done and wanted to put him in this film
because he was, I think, a very evil, but also very sexy character,
and I wanted my bad guy to be almost as sexy as the good guy,
which is, of course, Angelina, in this film.
Because if there is any sexual tension in the story,
it's between Lara and Powell, the bad guy,
and not necessarily between the good guys,
because I think Lara would be more interested in a dangerous,
semi-psychotic, if you like, bad guy than in the boy-next-door type.
She's such a strong character
that she's not going to be attracted to a nice guy or anyone safe.
She's going to be attracted
to the character that is more likely to kill her than take her out on a date.
Now, this scene shows up, particularly, Peter Menzies' beautiful lighting.
Everything in the film is just exquisitely shot.
I'd worked with Peter before on my previous film, The General's Daughter,
and I loved the look of that film,
but I think in this film he really surpassed himself.
Every single shot and every single scene is quite exquisite.
And this is a very good example of it,
with the light flooding in through the window on Lara at the desk.
I based the idea for Lord Croft's stone-tent memorial
on Sir Richard Burton's mausoleum in Mortlake Cemetery, outside London.
Sir Richard Burton was supposed to have discovered the source of the Nile
and was a classic Victorian explorer.
I discovered that he was entombed in this very cool stone replica
of his field tent,
the roof of which actually has a glass panel in it,
so you can look down on his coffin
by climbing up on this old, rusty metal ladder.
The original starting point for the story came to me
as I was reading a short article in a science magazine
about a true-life planetary alignment that was due the following year.
One of the previous times this had happened was over 4,000 years ago,
and was such a world-shaking event
that the Chinese started their calendar from that day.
There was some debate as to whether this new one
would cause all manner of natural disasters.
This fitted in with my desire
for the film to contain ideas of nature still not being tamed,
even in our age of technology, a kind of New Age mysticism.
Once I started moving the planets in the story,
this gave me a great ticking clock to count down to,
to the finale of the film.
And I realised that the theme of the film should be time.
This would fit nicely with the genre I was dealing with,
as a tomb raider is constantly dealing with the past.
I then realised that, of course,
the location or position of anything on our planet
is measured in longitude and latitude,
the units of which are read in minutes and seconds,
so a clock is what I chose to lead the way to the hidden treasure.
So it all tied together
with time as the central theme for the film.
I really liked the idea that there were greater forces at work,
the planets moving, natural things happening in nature,
things that technology and computers couldn't predict or couldn't fix,
and that there were still great mysteries out there to be discovered.
So instead of people sitting in front of computer screens
trying to work out what's going on,
they actually have to get out there and travel the world
and go to the jungles and go into the forests
and learn from nature.
Now, this scene shows up the differences between, I think,
American audiences and European audiences.
When I showed it to an American audience,
they said, "Well, how can she hear the clock ticking
"from one end of the house to the other?"
And then when I showed it to European audiences,
they all assumed that the ticking was in her head
and that she was almost possessed by this dream about her father's clock.
So that shows you the difference between
an American audience's way of watching a film
and a European audience's way.
One of the special-effects guys
specialised in making those little robotic creatures,
and every day he would come to me with a new one he'd made
and I would say, "Okay, can we have one that looks like this kind of bug,
"or can we have one that crawls, or can I have one with more lights on?"
So I think there was one guy devoted
just to making all those little robotic insects
that inhabit Bryce's trailer.
As I said earlier, I thought the theme for this film should be time,
so all through the story everyone is always dealing with clocks and time.
As I said, location is measured in time and position is measured in time.
The theme of the story being time also means
that this brought in the emotional side of the story for me,
that Lara was searching for her lost father
and also trying to regain the time that was taken from them,
the time that she lost with her father
as he disappeared when she was very young.
So the idea of time kept recurring and coming back in the story.
So time is measured with lots of different devices.
In this case, it's measured with a very antique clock,
but also it's measured by the movements of the planets
and the turning of the sun and things like that.
So, as I said, we're constantly referring to time in this story.
The bad guys in this film, the Illuminati, whose secret sign is the All Seeing Eye,
are actually a real conspiracy theory.
If you go on the Internet and type in the word "llluminati,"
the screen will fill up with all these great theories
of where they are and what they're doing and how they're controlling the world.
And it's fascinating.
So I actually used a real conspiracy theory to be my bad guys in this film.
I always liked the idea that Lara's always very impatient,
and while everyone else was being very careful and pernickety
about how they were doing their research,
Lara would wade in there with a hammer
and just cut to the chase and get on with it,
and just smash the thing so she could get the information she needed.
This clock was beautifully made by a real clockmaker
and it really lit up inside, and every piece worked on it.
It was a beautiful piece of workmanship made of solid brass.
We had two or three different versions of it that did different things.
And also, we built a gigantic,
I think, three-or four-foot-across version of it to do the close-ups,
which also was totally mechanical and worked perfectly.
Lara's motorbike was specially made, as well.
In the game, she rides a classic Norton,
but they don't make motorbikes any more.
So what we did is design a bike as if Norton were still in business
and what kind of bike they would make now.
And so Kirk Petruccelli got together with engineers and devised this
concept bike, really, of what a Norton might look like in this millennium.
This, of course, is one of the oldest jokes in the book,
but it always got a great reaction.
And I did cut it out at one point because I thought it was too cheap a joke,
but when I put it back in and tried it in front of an audience, they liked it,
so I put it back in,
'cause it's just a great, old joke
about getting caught at an auction buying something.
This is Daniel Craig, who plays Alex West in the film.
Originally, his name was Alex Mars,
but I was just about to start shooting this scene
and I got an urgent fax from Paramount's legal department
saying that the name Alex Mars wasn't cleared legally
and that we had to change it.
Normally, I would have some time to think of different names
and send them off and have those checked by the lawyers,
but I was actually about to shoot the scene,
so the only thing I could do was think of giving him my father's name
because I knew I could get clearance on that.
And so that's why he ended up being called Alex West in the film,
for no other reason than it was a very quick, legal solution to this problem.
It is ironic in this film that everybody is playing
a different accent to their own accent.
Angelina's doing an English accent.
Daniel, who is English, is playing an American,
and Powell, lain Glen, who is Scottish, is playing English.
Jon Voight, who's American, is playing English,
so there's not many people in the film that are speaking in their own accent.
People will never know, really, how much work
goes into every little detail of these films.
Things like that clock obviously took weeks to build
and make every little part of it work.
And just the idea of making the dial glow was very difficult.
We had to actually find this special paper
that if you pass a current through it will glow, as if it was an electric light.
And that was built into the clock, as well, so that the face would light up.
So each little tiny part of a film can be a huge job.
I'm so glad I got to work with Leslie Phillips.
I'd always been a huge fan of his films from the '50s and '60s in England.
It was great to work with someone
that you'd watched when you were a little, tiny kid.
He's such a sweet guy that I had a wonderful time working with him.
And he's a very funny man, too.
Another idea I wanted to put in,
that Lara may be able to do all these fantastic fighting and acrobatics
and travel the world and take on all these bad guys,
but, actually, she can't cook.
So, again, going against the clichéd female attributes,
that she's really just a normal person.
And why not? Like a lot of women, she just can't cook.
The exterior for this shot was taken in central London,
but the interior was in a very special stately home
about two hours outside London,
which is an incredible interior that I found when I was scouting for locations.
The entire inside of the building is hand-carved marble
and we had to be very careful moving around our equipment in here
so we didn't do any damage,
but I think you'll agree, it's a fantastic interior.
It was just the kind of opulence and decadence I wanted to give my bad guy,
so that even though he's a respectable lawyer living in the middle of London,
he's built this whole secret, decadent, interior world for himself.
Now, my take on Lara was that whatever a normal person would do,
she would do to a much more extreme level.
Soto relax before bed, you and I might watch TV or do yoga,
whereas Lara is going to do something much more out there
and much more, as I said, extreme.
And that's when I came up with this idea of bungee ballet.
I thought she should do something beautiful,
but also very athletic and daring.
And this is a very impressive routine that Lara does
every night before she goes to bed,
but Angelina actually had to learn to do for real.
Now, I never expected her to do all this when I cast her.
I never thought of her as a stuntperson,
but during her training programme before the shoot,
she just learnt how to do this thing from top to bottom
and I realised I wasn't going to have to use stunt doubles at all.
The most terrifying part of it, I think, for me,
would have been that diving off the balcony at the beginning,
but Angelina has no fear of heights.
And the more she did this, the more she seemed to love it.
I think it's my favourite part in the film,
because, again, it shows the sort of beauty and athleticism
of the character and also of Angelina.
Now, with the action scenes in this film,
I set certain rules for myself and for Lara.
I thought, "Well, she's a human being.
"She's not a magic superhero or anything,
"so she can't fly or do anything like that."
So I wanted spectacular action scenes
and I wanted her to be flying up the walls,
but I had to have a reason for that.
And the bungee cords gave me a reason
why she was able to run round walls
and do all this spectacular action.
And my stunt coordinator and second unit director, Simon Crane, and I
went to see a dance group called De La Guarda,
who specialise in bungee work and running round walls.
And it was such a great, high-energy performance
that I thought I'd like to do something like that in the film.
So between Simon Crane and I, we devised this whole action sequence
that is the next two minutes of the film.
And of course, again,
it may only be a one-and-a-half-minute sequence in the film,
but it took many days to shoot this and many, many shots.
Also, bungee cords never really operate the way you want them to,
and, constantly, these stuntmen were flying into the wrong place
and hitting the floor and hitting the walls.
There was a lot of bruising going on in this sequence.
Even Angelina herself could only do the bungee work for short bursts.
The harness she was wearing was very painful and constricting,
and although it was exhilarating and fun to do,
she could only do it for short periods because it was very painful.
There's lots of things you have to think about in action sequences,
even down to the smallest detail.
For instance, I wanted to not have the gunfire so overpowering
that it tires the audience out,
so that's why I deliberately had all the guns silenced
so that the gunshots can be more muted
and you can have a lot more gunplay, but the audience doesn't get tired
and their ears don't get tired
and you feel exhausted by the end of the action sequence.
Of course, one of the fun things with working with a character like Lara Croft
is thinking up her gadgets,
or deciding what vehicle she's going to drive, and things like that.
So when it came to her garage, I filled it with all my favourite British sports cars,
like Aston Martin, McLaren, TVR, Lotus, Jaguar,
an Ariel Atom and an old Lea-Francis,
as well, of course, as her Land Rover and Range Rover.
The most expensive of these cars, of course, was the McLaren.
Now, the company wouldn't actually lend us one of their cars for the film,
so I had to go to a private owner,
but, unfortunately, the insurance was so steep
and expensive to have that car on the set
that I could only afford it for one day.
So we had to make a polystyrene double for the car.
And so all the wide shots in the action sequence,
in the background, the McLaren is actually just
a very crude Styrofoam version of the sports car.
Now, the idea for this scene originally
was that Lara couldn't see where the bad guys were in the garage,
so Bryce was talking her through on the radio.
And the way he identified or pinpointed where they were
was by their proximity to a particular car.
So he would shout out the name of the car to Lara,
and she would automatically know where it was parked
and just shoot blind into the darkness, and, of course, she would hit them.
Now, this was cut down later, so that it's a more curtailed version,
but, originally, it was
this sort of very clever interplay between the two of them.
And by shouting out "Aston Martin" or
she knew exactly where each bad guy was located.
Of course, it went wrong on one occasion
because Bryce had borrowed one of the cars,
the most expensive one, of course, and had driven it around and moved it.
And so that's why she ended up shooting
the windshield of the Land Rover,
because he'd moved one of the cars.
Now, the stunt coming up,
where the Range Rover flips on top of the small Mini Cooper car,
coincidentally was shot on the day that they stopped making those cars.
So on the last day of production ever for these great little Mini cars,
we actually crushed two of them,
by sheer coincidence, with a flying Range Rover.
All these stunts were very hard to do in this very confined space,
but, to me, that's what gives this scene its danger and energy,
is that she's racing this motorbike around
in a very confined and dangerous environment.
In the original cut, this upcoming scene was very much longer
and had a lot of interplay between Powell and his assistant, Pimms,
who is a very funny character, I think.
But, in the end, it got cut down to this very curtailed version,
where the clock is just delivered to Powell.
We weren't actually allowed to shoot inside this stately home,
so the three or four steps that the UPS man takes
is as far as we're allowed to go.
And then, of course, it cuts to the interior of the studio
where we'd built Lara's mansion.
Every day we would go in and do more and more damage to these sets,
and as I said, they started off beautiful, pristine copies of real stately homes,
and every day we would go and put more bullet holes in them,
more explosions, more broken glass,
and we really did wreck them.
So, by the end of the shoot, they were pretty uninhabitable.
Now, this scene where she's pulling the sheets off the books
is not supposed to mean that Lara Croft doesn't read books
and that's why they're all covered up.
It's really just because this is her father's library
and she's left it exactly how he left it
when he disappeared when she was a child.
Now this scene, where her father tells her through the letters
of the ancient fable and the existence of the bad guys
and how to find the first piece of the triangle,
originally, I had the father telling this to Lara Croft
as a small child in the library,
so this was a flashback and a memory of hers.
And so it sort of came out more organically, in a way,
when the child was just playing in the library
as the father was writing the letter.
And some small parts of that scene are still in this version,
but as you can see, it was curtailed down
to this voice-over and montage sequence of the letter,
which is much shorter and quicker.
So this was great luck, getting Jon Voight to play Lara's father.
It's not often that your lead character
happens to have an Oscar-winning actor as a father
and you need someone like that for the story.
So it was a great coincidence that
I managed to get Jon Voight to play Lara's father,
and it's actually, of course, Angelina's real father.
I'd always been a big fan of Jon Voight,
and so it was great fun for me working with him.
Every day I could come in and ask him about films
that he'd worked on as I was growing up.
And so one day I would get an anecdote about Deliverance,
and the next day I'd get an anecdote about Midnight Cowboy.
So as a film buff, it was a great piece of casting for me
because it kept me entertained every day that he was there on the set.
Of course, being Angelina's father, sometimes it was a little bit difficult
because even after I'd shot his scenes,
he would stay around for a few days just for fun, to see what we were doing.
And Angelina would be in some precarious stunt
or in a very dangerous position or something,
and he would be leaning over my shoulder,
making sure I was looking after her
and wasn't putting her in danger and things like that.
So a couple of times, I had to sort of ask him
to leave the set so that we could get on with it,
but he was always great fun to have around
and a very proud father of Angelina.
Now, this was great fun, shooting in Cambodia.
I went over for, literally, a three-or four-day scout
a few months before we were due to shoot there,
and ran around and found all these locations
and got permission from the Cambodian government and the temple organisers
and the people that look after these sacred sites to go and shoot there.
And I wanted to use this temple entrance for the story,
but I wanted to have it blocked up
so that we could break in and pull down the front of the tomb.
And so my art director, Les Tomkins, went over there
and basically measured up the hole, and then, when we got back to London,
made up all these giant blocks out of polystyrene
and goodness knows what else,
and literally, on paper, worked out whether it was going to fit or not,
and then packed it in boxes and sent it over to Cambodia.
So then when we arrived to shoot,
they put it all together like a big jigsaw puzzle in this hole.
No one knew whether it was actually going to fit or not,
because it had been done months before in London,
and, of course, it did. It fitted perfectly.
We attached the ropes to it,
and then got 200 or 300 local Cambodian extras to tug on those ropes.
And it was going to be a one-take thing.
It took days to put those blocks in,
and I was leaving the following day,
so we had one chance to pull this thing down.
We rehearsed them and rehearsed them,
and I had four or five cameras on it,
and one Steadicam camera in the middle, amongst the guys.
The idea was that the Steadicam was to run down the middle between the guys
just at the moment the blocks were pulled out and fell to the ground.
And as I said, we rehearsed this over and over again
to make sure all the extras knew what was going to happen.
At the last minute, they got overexcited,
and when we gave the signal to pull,
they pulled so hard that they all fell backwards
and knocked the Steadicam operator, David Emmerichs, flying.
So the shot looking between the guys
is all I had of the rocks falling towards us.
And the frame later,
all you see is the camera hitting the ground and then clouds and sky.
So I think David was very upset
that he didn't manage to get the great shot from the front.
And I had one take at it.
But that's why you have three or four cameras,
because I had the side angles, and they work perfectly, as you see,
so that's what ended up in the film.
For this scene with the little girl running through the temple,
it is, in fact, actually two different girls,
because the first one who I shot,
who does the close-up scene with Lara at the end,
her work permit ran out halfway through the shoot
and we had to put her on a plane and send her back to England.
And so I recruited a local Cambodian girl,
so it's actually two different girls running around that temple,
but I don't think anyone notices.
This was actually what the locals called the "Funeral Gate" of the temple,
and it's where all the dead bodies were taken out of,
originally, when it was a temple,
and so, before any of them would work there,
we had to have the place exorcised, really, by a local priest,
to say that it was safe to walk in and out of the tomb entrance.
But this is why I chose this place. It was because of those great trees
and the way they burst out through the roofs of the temples.
And 400-year-old, prehistoric-looking trees like that, you just can't simulate,
and you can't build on the set to that kind of detail and scale,
so that's why I ended up going to Cambodia, is for this realism.
And I have to say, it's one of the easiest
and most fun places I've ever shot in the world.
The people there were so welcoming and so hard-working
that I would love to go back and shoot there again.
Now, when Lara falls through the hole in the ground
and she's tumbling through the earth,
I shot this in one of the oldest techniques possible.
It's not blue screen or green screen. It's not CGI.
It's literally her standing on the ground with a rolling background,
with three or four guys pulling these sticks,
like a giant conveyor belt, I suppose, behind her head,
and just a fan blowing on her.
So it's a technique, I think, that was probably used in silent movies,
but I think it still works great,
and it was probably one of our cheapest effects and our cheapest rigs.
And it looks... I think it looks brilliant.
This, of course, is one of our bigger sets, the Cambodian tomb interior.
Again, designed by Kirk Petruccelli,
who did an incredible job designing this stuff,
and then, of course, all the craftsmen that worked on it, and the art directors,
especially Les Tomkins, on this one.
The detail and complexity of this set is just mind-blowing.
And every day we went to shoot on this set,
I think, the actors, the cast, the crew all thought that they were really there,
and they were privileged to be on something
that was built to this kind of scale and this standard.
It was just incredible.
I also wanted to do everything for real as much as possible,
so instead of doing a lot of green-screen or blue-screen work,
or computer-generated stuff,
almost everything in the film happens in front of the camera.
So as well as this set being on a gigantic scale,
it's also a mechanical set.
You'll see, later in the scene, that, of course, the log gets released
and flies across the room.
And all this stuff really did work,
and, again, as I said, was built to a gigantic scale.
And so some of the difficulty shooting this scene
was actually moving all the equipment around
in such a big area and on so many different levels.
And it really was like being in a real, gigantic tomb.
These flares that are used inside the tombs
are actually chemical flares that you click together,
like kids have at concerts and things like that.
And I got the brightest ones possible you could find,
so that they lit the cast when they held them up.
And I think we got through, like, 6,000 of them,
because they only lasted 15 to 20 seconds at their full brightness,
so every take they would have to be handed a new flare,
and, as I said, we got through thousands of them.
This set was actually freezing cold.
Although it was supposed to be set in Cambodia in the height of summer,
we shot it in England on the 007 Stage,
which is actually more of an aircraft hangar, really, and totally uninsulated.
It was freezing cold every day,
and sometimes you could see the breath coming out of the actors' mouths,
but everyone is sort of stripped down
and constantly being sprayed with fake sweat
to try and make them look like they're hot,
but, actually, the second the camera stopped,
everyone was throwing on puffer jackets and scarves and hats
to try and keep warm.
Also, the sets were so big
that we would get our own weather systems within them.
So late in the afternoon sometimes,
we had clouds of mist gathering in the ceilings,
and sometimes they even dropped low enough
to interfere with the lighting and the shots.
But that's what happens when you have sets this size.
They have their own little ecosystem in there.
Now, the giant log that swings across the tomb
in this scene was entirely mechanical.
I dreamt up the idea quite late in the shoot.
Chris Corbould, my special effects supervisor,
had to come up with this design and somehow build this thing
that would actually swing across the temple without hitting the set
or knocking over people, and looked good to camera.
And this meant that he brought in a computer-controlled system of winches.
So every shot, the log is actually at a completely different height
and a completely different trajectory.
And this was all worked out with a computer,
and it's much more complicated than it would appear.
It always fascinates me that I come up with an idea like this,
and I just scribble it on paper,
then someone like Chris Corbould has to work out
how to actually physically pull this thing off.
And he did it, obviously, brilliantly, as usual,
with this mechanical system for the log.
As I said, I came up with the idea of the swinging log quite late,
while we were already shooting,
so the set wasn't actually built with the log inside it,
so it was a late addition.
Angelina hadn't had time to rehearse jumping on this log and riding it,
and so I had the stunt doubles have a go at it,
and I got reports back saying that it was impossible
and they couldn't stand up, and there were all these problems with it.
Then the day came to shoot the scene and I asked Angelina,
I said, "Listen, I know you haven't had a chance to rehearse this thing,
"but will you have a go at it to see whether it's possible?"
As usual, of course, Angelina said, "Yes, of course I'll have a go."
I set all the cameras up and I said, "The trouble is, we're gonna be
"shooting this in about 20 minutes."
She said, "Fair enough." She rolled her eyes, of course,
but she got on the log and we let it start swinging.
And, literally, within three or four minutes she was standing up on it,
something that not even the stunt doubles could do.
She obviously, of course didn't just stand up,
she did it with style and grace.
I was rolling with three or four different cameras,
and I got the whole thing with Angelina actually surfing the log
into the urn for the scene.
As I said, it's one of these things you just think up very quickly
and you're not sure whether anyone's gonna be able to do.
Luckily, everyone came through and we got the shot.
It was a very dangerous thing to have on a set.
It weighed a great deal, that log, and it swang backwards and forwards,
so everyone was constantly having to look over their shoulder,
whether they were on the camera crew or one of the cast,
because that thing was big and heavy and it was always moving.
Now, the creatures that come to life in this tomb, the stone monkeys,
I devised, really, for several reasons.
One was because I didn't want Lara Croft
to have to shoot a lot of people or animals
the way she does in the video game,
and so that's why I came up with these stone creatures.
And then having once designed them, we had to think about things
like how would they break,
how would they fall over, how would they walk,
what were their movements like.
That took weeks and weeks of research and testing on the computers
to see what would look real in a very unreal world
and a very unreal situation, because, of course,
stone creatures don't move around, so no one knows what they look like
when they move, and you can't suddenly make them out of plastic
so that they can stretch like skin, or as a human being would move.
So that took a while to develop, the style for these things,
how they moved and how they collapsed and how they broke up.
Originally, I had these fast, flying creatures, as well,
that would attack them from the air, that would be a sort of counterpoint
to the more zombie-like movements of the monkeys,
but we had to cut those out in the storyboard stage.
And so what we're left with is these monkeys
and what we called "the Griffins," who were the...
Almost like gorilla creatures that run on the ground.
These sort of scenes are quite hard for the actors to shoot.
Something like that sword fight with Angelina, there's nothing there.
She's just faking it, having to assume and guess
and take my guidance on where a stone monkey may be,
where its head is, where its legs are.
So it's hard enough doing a fight scene anyway,
but when your opponent isn't even there, it's very difficult for the actors.
It's also very difficult for the director and the camera crew,
because they're having to guess where these characters may be.
I have to go around and explain to everybody what's happening,
because at that stage, it's only happening in my head,
and not on the set.
So each camera angle and each camera move has to take into account
characters that aren't really in front of the camera.
Designing the voices of these characters is also fun.
As I said, the monkeys, to me, were more like zombies,
so they had a very low, kind of guttural growl,
whereas these running griffins were much more athletic
and had a more squealy voice, l suppose.
So the sound designers take real-life animal sounds
and bend and twist them in the computer,
so we get this sort of amalgamation of what an animal and a stone creature
might sound like.
Now, the original idea for this six-armed,
stone-character sequence
was that, obviously, it comes to life
and then starts slowly pursuing Lara
across the ladder and through the tomb.
The idea was that she lets loose with both guns
and, of course, soon runs out of ammunition,
and you think she's done for and so does the statue,
but then, of course, she presses the button on the back of her pack,
a whole new tree of clips drops out,
and she's suddenly got all the bullets she could need.
She then pounds those bullets into him again and again
and runs out of that ammunition.
In the meantime, she's shot off one of the creature's faces,
and he appears to be obliterated,
but, of course, he just spins his head round
and he's got a whole, brand-new, fresh face,
which smiles at her
and is about to go in for the kill when she gets the idea of kicking the log.
This jungle is actually shot in Windsor.
It was winter again, and we had to wait for the frost to melt on the undergrowth
before we could shoot that sequence to match the Cambodian steamy jungle.
Now, this is Angkor Wat.
The authorities there let us build this village right in front of the temple itself.
I've tried to make it look like there's a river and a large lake or whatever,
but it's actually a very small, ornamental pond in front of the temple.
But by using a wide-angle lens
and not showing the edge of the water, which is literally where the camera is,
it looks like she's paddled up the river
and made it to this Cambodian village in front of the temple.
Then, of course, you have to fit in with other restrictions,
like the fact that there were these beautiful pink water lilies
that bloomed on that pond,
but they only open for two hours in the morning,
so I had to devise a schedule
where all my wide shots were in this two-hour period
just so that I could have these pink water lilies blooming
for Lara to paddle her canoe through.
The only disadvantage of shooting in that jungle,
of course, is that every day we'd come in
and a special snake guy used to have to go round with a long stick
and get all the snakes out of Powell's tent
that had moved in in the night and then set up home
in some of the cushions and the chairs and things.
So that was the downside of shooting in the jungle,
but on the other hand, it does look beautiful, and it sounds beautiful,
and it was a great experience being there.
Now, this is a real blessing with these Buddhist monks.
They're not acting.
They don't really think of this as anything to do with the film, really.
They just are actually blessing Angelina.
They blessed the film crew and the film itself,
so we were well-protected while we were out there.
This is another testament to Peter Menzies' great lighting.
I ran out of time in shooting this scene in Cambodia,
so all the shots of Angelina were really done in Angkor Wat temple,
but the reverses of the monk were shot in Pinewood Studios.
I don't think anyone can really tell the difference.
The matching in the lighting is brilliant.
Also, the set builders and art directors did a great job matching, as well.
This scene was quite a bit more surreal in the original concept in the script,
and the monk actually metamorphosed into her father
and they both levitated and moved around the temple
before going back to reality,
but, again, this was simplified for the final film.
This is the version as it exists now.
The lamps behind the monk were actually oil lamps, originally,
and I wanted to copy real Buddhist oil lamps,
but, unfortunately, there was something wrong with our design
and they all caught fire,
and our poor monk nearly went up with them, and so did our set.
With 20 minutes to spare,
I had to substitute all the oil lamps for candles.
And that's what ended up in the scene.
The whole thing was shot in literally 20 minutes.
This scene, of course, is back in Greenwich, outside London,
even though it's supposed to be set in Venice.
It's late at night, obviously,
and so it's quite a different lighting look to the first time we were in this room.
We shot this in the middle of the night, I think,
because the size of the windows in this building were so great
that we couldn't tent the whole building
to make it look like night, so we had to wait for the real night.
And there's always a downside with shooting at night
because although it's very quiet, there's no aeroplanes, there's no traffic,
there's no telephones ringing,
everyone is working at 4:00 in the morning.
And to try and be creative and diligent about your craft
and how the scene is going and the performances,
it's very much harder at 3:00, 4:00 and 5:00 in the morning
than it is during the daytime.
But, hopefully, the night scenes are just as good as the day scenes.
This is a great scene for me because you have two wonderful actors
who are just giving the best possible reading of this scene,
and, literally, I have to stand back and let them get on with it.
I just shoot it very simply, knowing that...
These guys, it's like a champion tennis match, really,
and all you want to do is sit back and watch.
So I don't tend to do a lot of flashy camera moves or angles
in this kind of thing. Maybe just to introduce it and to exit it,
but ostensibly, it's an actor's scene, and these are two very fine actors,
so I just let them get on with it, really.
Now this scene was one that was actually originally cutout.
It was one of two scenes that I cutout of Alex's apartment in Venice,
but after the one and only test screening that we had,
the audience actually asked for more of Alex in the film, so I reinstated this one.
The other scene involved Lara coming in
in the middle of Alex having a poker game
with some of his more disreputable friends.
She confronts him and lays down the law to him,
but she also retrieves the first half of the triangle
that she supposedly hid in his apartment in this scene,
so it explains where the triangle went
while she was talking to Powell in Venice.
Again, this is one of those classic scenes
where you have a male nude actor
and you have to arrange the furniture and the camera angles
very strategically, so you don't see anything
you're not supposed to see in a PG film.
Everyone thought that I'd specially installed
these enormous red drapes in this scene
as some bold colour statement.
In fact, these were just what we found there
already hanging in the Royal Air Force helicopter hangar.
I hadn't art directed this or brought them in specially at all.
They just happened to be what the Royal Air Force
had in that particular building of theirs.
I couldn't afford to take the helicopters to Iceland,
so when you see them taking off after they've dropped off their passengers,
that shot is actually taken in England, on Salisbury Plain,
and then the opposing shot when they're walking away
from camera is in Iceland,
and just the sound effect of the helicopters carries over the cut,
and so you feel that the helicopters have taken off over their heads,
but actually they're in two completely different countries.
So this shot is in England on the Salisbury Plain
and this shot is in Iceland, by the iceberg lake,
and it's just the sound effect that carries you across the cut.
This is where great prop people come in,
when you're in the middle of nowhere and you want to build an Inuit village.
They have to come up with tents and dead fish
and dogs and sledges and things like that.
I had a great prop master with Terry Wells,
who put all this together and built this, what I thought looked like
a very atmospheric Inuit village in the middle of Iceland.
Now, I had these three amphibious landing craft,
which were about 50 years old and quite decrepit,
and, on land, could actually only run for about 15 minutes
because their cooling systems had been taken out years ago.
I had the camera crew and camera equipment on one of them,
and Angelina, Noah Taylor, myself and about 12 husky dogs
were on another one.
We were going through the middle of these icebergs and, of course,
the one we were on broke down,
and I soon realised that the only thing keeping these things afloat
was the engine running,
pumping out hundreds of gallons of water every minute.
And as soon as the engine stopped, they became what they were,
trucks trying to float on water.
Ours slowly began to sink, and water started to come over the deck.
Angelina and Noah were discussing the view at one end of the boat
and looking out, and seemed not to have noticed our predicament,
while I and the driver were searching around,
trying to find hydraulic oil in one of the lockers
to try and get the engine started again.
I was just calculating how long we would survive in that water
before the rescue boats would come and catch us,
and how long it would take to unhook 12 husky dogs,
when we managed to get the engine started again
and it rose up out of the water.
I don't think Angelina or Noah, still, to this day,
knew just how close we were to taking a swim in that water.
When I scouted the glacier, months before,
it was all covered in beautiful, white snow,
and very easy to get around on Ski-Doos,
but when we came back months later, that had all melted
and it was down to the perma-ice,
which was full of crevasses and very dangerous
and treacherous to move about.
So it was quite hard to shoot those sequences out on the glacier
because it was such a treacherous terrain,
and quite a few times our vehicles got stuck and started sinking.
These tunnels were one of our most economical sets in the whole film.
They were, in fact, a tiny, circular set.
Every shot that the sledge is travelling through
is achieved by sending them over the same piece of tunnel
over and over again.
Just by changing the camera angle, it looks like a never-ending labyrinth,
but it is actually a very small set.
And again, John Fenner, the art director, did a brilliant job
of making this look like a huge complex of tunnels,
when, really, it's about the size of a tennis court.
This is another of Kirk Petruccelli's amazing sets.
Originally, this was to be set in Venice,
as there were to be three pieces to the triangle
hidden in three different tombs.
To ease the budget this was cut down to just two tombs,
and I merely combined the idea of this planetary orrery machine
with an icy tomb that I had set in Siberia.
Chris Corbould, again, enhanced this set by the use of steam,
water, bubbles, atmosphere,
everything that would make the set come alive.
So although it was obviously a very beautiful
and dramatic and gigantic set,
it really needs to have life put in it with all these separate effects
that Chris puts in.
The series of stunts where people are actually climbing on the machine
was incredibly dangerous.
Each of the rotating arms weighs over 3 tonnes.
It took Simon Crane, my stunt coordinator and second unit director,
quite a while to work out a route that would not lead to disaster
for the actors and the stunt players.
Chris Corbould was responsible for the construction
of this giant mechanical machine.
It really is a totally working, mechanical device.
Again, it's one of those incidences where I think up this idea very quickly
and scribble a few things on a piece of paper
and then he has to go away and actually work out
how to build this thing full-scale,
make it work and make it safe.
It was incredibly dangerous working on this orrery set,
because if you're standing in the wrong place, you will get hurt.
And so, there was constant vigilance by everyone
so that the stunt people and the actors and the camera crew were always safe.
The art director on this set was John Fenner.
He built a beautiful model of it first so I could work out all of my camera angles
and block out the action.
The set is actually only a semi-circle,
so all the shots had to be designed not to reveal this
and to give the impression of a complete cavern.
Each one of those balls represents a real planet,
but to this day, no one could ever remember which planet was which ball,
so in the end, we used to just point up and say, "The little brown one,"
or, "The big red one," or, "The green one," and that's how we identified them.
Again, this was another huge set that had its own weather system in there.
Sometimes we actually had to stop filming
because a fog would move in from the heated water and the freezing cold air
that was so thick that you couldn't actually see across the set.
Sometimes we couldn't shoot wide shots
in the morning when the air was very cold.
We had to wait for the afternoon for the atmosphere to heat up.
In this upcoming sequence of throwing the knife,
there's another secret puzzle piece, I suppose, hidden in the film.
Anybody that wants to go through it and collect all the hidden messages
that I put throughout the film,
this is a good spot here. There's one right in this sequence.
This scene was originally a little longer.
The idea was that Lara was keeping Alex alive under water
by breathing into his mouth.
Powell laid out his deal up top
in the short moments that Lara came up to fill her lungs.
In the script stage, I had notes from people saying that this was impossible,
as she would be breathing carbon dioxide into him.
I tried to explain that this would mean an end
to the CPR business or the kiss of life,
but, in the end, I had to go to the trouble of finding out
the actual percentage of oxygen in a human's exhaled breath
to prove the point.
Incidentally, it's 21% in the air around us
and 16% in our outgoing breath.
Of course, in Los Angeles, it's probably a lot lower.
This scene was quite different, originally.
On entering time itself, or the fourth dimension, as we called it,
everything became very surreal.
Lara found herself in what appeared to be her home,
being led around by herself as a child.
Powell, too, was there, and a battle of wills ensued,
even to the point of Powell physically changing into her father
and then setting fire to the library.
This was a very emotional scene for Angelina and Jon,
and they modified the dialogue to be even more personal and relevant
to their real relationship.
I briefly tried some unusual camera angles and moves,
but in the end realised it had to be kept very simple.
In the editing stage, I also experimented with strange atmosphere
and sound effects
to make it sound like we were in the fourth dimension, or inside time,
but, again, I stripped it back to the basics just to let the scene play itself.
Now, this scene originally was where Powell met his final end.
Lara simply turned the knife around, time started again
and it shot into him, and that was the end of Powell.
But it was felt that Lara should do
something more energetic to finish him off,
so the fight scene that follows this one was added.
Powell's chief henchman was played by Robert Phillips,
and I actually discovered him driving a cab in central London.
I just loved the way he looked and the way he sounded,
so I offered him a part in the film.
That's him there, with his machine gun.
I also love the shot of Julian Rhind-Tutt and Noah running down the tunnel
in slow motion with their machine guns.
I actually had them fire them off and spray bullets everywhere in the orrery,
but that later got cut out.
But Julian Rhind-Tutt did some brilliant comedy in the film,
and a lot of great gags in scenes that didn't make it to the final version,
but I think he is a very funny actor and added a lot to the film.
The picture of Lara's mother in the watch
is actually a photograph of a girl
that worked in the art department on the film.
Now, for the fight scene between Lara and Powell,
I deliberately went for a street style of fighting.
I didn't want martial arts or flying through the air
or running up walls. I wanted it to be as real as possible.
Lara, of course, is a human being, and so is Powell.
She would want to get things done as quickly and as efficiently as possible,
and so that's why we ended up with this very,
l suppose, gritty and real street-fight style.
The hardest thing in this fight was to get lain Glen
to actually kick hard, really, because he was
so reluctant to kick a woman, a fellow actor or stuntperson,
that we had to do quite a few takes before he would kick hard enough
that it looked realistic.
Now, this final destruction of the orrery set
took about three days to prepare.
I had about 14 cameras, I think, and we placed them in all different positions,
up in the arms, in the planets, under the waterfall.
We had to dig them in, protect them,
then we had to rehearse it over and over again.
It took about three days just to get the cameras in position
and work out where and when the effects were going to happen.
Literally on the last day, at about twenty past midnight,
we finally rolled cameras.
The whole sequence only took eight seconds to occur,
but time is stretched out by running slow motion
and using all these multiple angles.
Again, we're using this incredibly small series of tunnels.
Again, by changing angles and constant cutting,
you feel like she's travelling through this great underground network,
but it is actually a very small set,
and we're just going round and round in circles with these dogs.
Again, this was one of my earliest ideas for the film.
I thought, "Wouldn't it be great to see Lara Croft
"barefoot water-skiing, as it were,
"but with dogs on ice?"
And this is how it ended up.
So this is something I thought would never happen in the film, actually,
seeing Lara Croft in a dress,
but it soon became apparent that
we needed to open up the character at the end.
She needed to have changed in some way.
She was quite emotionally shut down at the beginning of the film.
She'd missed her father since she was a young child
and didn't even really admit to it,
so she wasn't a very warm person to start with.
This dress, I suppose, was kind of a symbolic image
that would represent that she was open to new ideas
and maybe even a little more emotional, a little bit warmer
and a little bit more friendly.
In the end, I think, Lara Croft came across as a very strong,
proactive, positive person,
and she seemed to end up being quite a good role model
for girls and women.
It's rare for an action hero to be a woman, anyway, in Hollywood,
and to have someone that was also leading the story and in control,
I think, made her very attractive to women and girls.