I'm Jeremy Bolt, the producer.
- One of the producers. - Yeah, sorry...
And I'm Paul Anderson, the only director.
And this is the Paramount logo.
Golar, that's Larry Gordon's company.
His previous company was called Largo
- so Golar is a respelling of that. - Yeah.
And this is a bit like the Doctor Who credits.
Yes.
We first came to Event Horizon...
I read the script in the States,
so I sent it by Paramount. I'd just finished Mortal Kombat.
That had just released and done quite well in America.
And I'd been watching a lot of movies. I had some time off
and I'd kind of watched Robert Wise's,
The Haunting and also The Shining
and 2001, and then I got this script.
And it seemed like, you know, a fabulous combination
of kind of all three of those movies.
It was outer space. It was kind of a realistic vision of outer space,
Which I liked.
And also it was an opportunity to tell a kind of
classic haunted-house story.
So that's really what attracted us to it. The idea of, you know...
It was the ultimate isolation, because in a haunted house
you always have the opportunity just to run down the road
and stay in the motel like in Poltergeist.
Whereas here, of course, there's no escape.
Plus, I mean, it's true to say that Paul is a massive...
We both are massive sci-fi fans.
So to combine two genres like this was a great opportunity.
We added this text in post-production.
Just to kind of give the movie a little bit of context.
It's something we seem to do with a lot of our films.
I think we should probably pay more attention at the script stage
and then we wouldn't have to do this.
But I quite like this. It sets the scene nicely.
It's excellent. It's very reminiscent of Mad Max.
I remember Michael Kamen just putting that haunting
horn sound at the end
to symbolise the disappearance of the Event Horizon.
This was the first time that we'd actually had a classical score.
It was just outstanding.
So this is the Event and the design for the Event Horizon
was based upon Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
We took lots of elements of the cathedral,
kind of scanned it into a computer, and played around with it.
The towers, the stained-glass window designs.
Rendered it all in metal and then tried to build a spaceship out of it.
And it started as kind of like a little exercise
but it actually turned out pretty good.
Now, that book is Paul Anderson, A Life.
It's my autobiography.
Sam Neill.
- So good. - And in the background is his wife.
Her name's Holley Chant.
I loved this little set. I mean, it was,
again, it was kind of like trying to go for a really realistic vision
of what space exploration could be in the future.
And one of my favourite... Talking of editings,
one of my favourite cuts in the movie is coming up.
Martin Hunter cut nearly all of the picture but we had Terry Rawlings,
who's a fabulous British editor who came in and gave us a few pointers.
He just came in for a couple of weeks.
And he came up with this cut, which is cutting from Sam Neill's razor
to the window blinds opening.
Which was the first really big jump that we got in the picture.
It was a great movie to watch with audiences
because they got very scared from this point on.
There's a smudge on the window right there
that drove me absolutely bloody crazy.
I don't know if anyone noticed it.
But I actually think it's quite good, Paul,
'cause it makes the thing feel a little more realistic.
This shot is something we're very proud of.
It took forever to do.
I think we sent it back about 24, 25 times
to the effects company 'cause it's quite...
We're blending between a lot of different size model shots here
and obviously a live action plate to start with.
So it was incredibly difficult,
and the guy who was in charge of compositing it
actually left the effects industry for a year afterwards.
He was so tired of working on this one visual effects shot.
Kind of drove him out of the industry.
When we saw the movie for the first time with a paying audience
was in Leicester Square,
and there was somebody sitting in front of me who almost fell out of his chair
when he was watching that shot. He got so kind of disoriented by it.
And turned out it was Jenny Lee Miller.
That model shot, the move around the spaceship
is something I've always been unhappy with.
It's like the one dodgy model shot in the movie.
The camera movement's not terribly good.
I wish we could have gone back and fixed that.
Well, it just looks fake.
So immediately you're slightly taken out of the tension of the film
'cause you're reminded you're watching something that is fake.
Well, it was the movement from the side to the front of the spaceship.
And I think it was just too extreme.
We tried to hide it by putting text
describing the Lewis & Clark over the top of it.
But it's still something that annoys me.
The fabulous Laurence Fishburne. He was such a joy to work with.
Do you remember, Paul, one of the takes,
his chair just wouldn't stop swinging.
It was... The front half of this spaceship set
was built on hydraulics so that in the turbulence scenes later
we could actually shake the set.
And the first time we did a test of it
that chair that Fishburne was in was literally smashing into the ceiling.
And he was just as cool as a cucumber.
He never broke character. It was fantastic.
I would have been terrified.
We tried to do a couple of big steadicam shots here
to introduce the interior of the Lewis & Clark.
I was quite proud of the fact that we actually built
the interior of the spaceship as one set.
So you could travel from the bridge
to the grav tanks at the back if it was on two different levels.
And I thought the only way to really show that
was to do one or two continuous steadicam shots,
so that you could actually see the whole place was built as one.
You know, I also like the fact that the whites in the ship,
they're a little bit dirty and smudged. It's not completely pristine.
It's kind of like the ship in Alien.
Yeah, we were obviously very influenced by the look of the Nostromo
when it came to designing this.
You know, that kind of, like, grubby, realistic view of the future.
And we gave the actors a chance to personalise all of their bunks.
So when you see, you know, all the clippings
and all the nude girls and everything like that,
stuck inside the bunks, that was all the work of the actors.
Although that first model shot of the Lewis & Clark
is something that annoys me,
I think the rest of the model work in this movie is just terrific.
We're watching the movie now projected onto a big screen
and it's obviously, you know, many years since we made it.
But I think the model work just holds up so, so well.
It looks very, very good even now.
I think the costumes also work very well.
It's very believable.
I was always very paranoid about this shot coming up
because Sam is the only real person in there.
The rest of them are dummies.
I think they do look a little bit like dummies.
Thank you, Jeremy.
Maybe you should have said something about it seven years ago.
Yeah, I should have done. I wanted to but...
- But I wouldn't listen, I'm sure. - No.
But it's okay, Paul, 'cause it's a slightly...
You're aware he's in a strange sequence, anyway.
- So you think it was deliberate? - Yeah, it was.
- Damn, I'm good. - Slightly stylised.
That's what you should say, anyway.
Again, you can see through those glass windows all the way into the bridge.
We actually did have one steadicam shot
that took Sam all the way into the bridge.
You know, we never ended up using it because to amp up the tension
it was better if we just cut to different shots.
This scare coming up is, of course, incredibly cheap.
But it was an interesting thing about the screenplay
that Philip Eisner, I think, did a fantastic job of...
It's cheap but it's effective.
- Jeremy just jumped. - Yeah.
Philip did a very good job of kind of establishing
a very brooding and intense atmosphere. A scary atmosphere.
But there are actually very few jump moments in the script.
And we felt as we were going along that we had to add several of them.
It's quite difficult doing that
because if you do too many fake jumps, you start to irritate the audience.
You start to undermine the tension.
Yeah, I think we learned quite a lot about horror, making this picture.
'Cause we did have quite a brutal testing period,
where we tested the movie three times.
And certainly, the movie in terms of scariness
got much better as we went along.
Originally, Holley's eyes there were just the white contact lenses.
And then we decided that that wasn't, you know, scary enough
so we had them hollowed out and we had CG eye sockets put in there.
I actually think they're pretty good, those CG sockets.
We felt that the white eyeballs were quite familiar.
We'd seen them in a number of other films.
- Fabulous Richard T. Jones. - With his fabulous body.
Everybody was flexing when we shot this. Showing off their bodies.
- Some more effectively than others. - Yes.
- That's so cheap, Paul. - I didn't write it.
I do believe that he improvised that.
Joely and Fish were definitely playing with the idea that she...
Oh, creepy clowns!
...at some point had had a relationship with Fishburne
or definitely had, like, a serious crush on him.
Yes, clowns are creepy.
This was actually our first day of shooting.
Shooting this footage for the birthday sequence.
And it was the only day of shooting outside.
We shot the whole movie in Pinewood Studios,
on interior sound stages.
And that one scene was shot outdoors in the Pinewood garden.
It was the only time we saw daylight for about five months.
What does that mean, Paul?
"All boards are green. Everything's five by five."
I've never understood that line.
"Five by five" is an American military term.
- It means everything's okay. - Okay.
And "all boards are green" means everything's green.
She says it with great conviction.
She does. That was the fabulous thing about Joely.
We read a lot of women for that role.
And she really,
much better than anybody else, could deliver all the technical dialogue
- with great conviction. - Yeah. Plus, she's hot.
That didn't...
Yes, that helped.
- That certainly didn't weigh against her. - Jason Isaacs.
You know, I was at university with Jason.
He was president of my drama society
and would constantly not allow me to put on plays.
So I took great pleasure when I was auditioning him later with Paul.
And he was in our first film, Shopping, and actually our film after this, Soldier.
- And his voice featured in Resident Evil. - Yes.
We love Jason.
Joseph Bennett, our production designer,
I think did a fabulous job on the detail of the spaceship.
I mean, just the griminess of it.
It's not too in-your-face, but it's very, very effective.
Yeah, just there you can see the smudging behind Sam.
And one of the things about this movie is that we had to do it incredibly quickly.
Paramount didn't greenlight the picture literally until about 10 weeks
before we were due to start principal photography.
So the set had to be...
Although they were designed, they had to be built incredibly quickly.
And every single construction manager in Britain
passed on it until we found this fabulous guy called Harry Metcalfe.
And he was literally the only person in Britain
who said that he would attempt to build the sets as fast as we needed.
'Cause they were very detailed and they were very complex.
And God bless him, he did it. Although it cost a lot.
I mean, that was one of the things about Event, is that
it was so much more work than it probably should have been
because we had such a short pre-production period.
You know, not a terribly luxurious shoot
and a very short post-production period, as well.
I think we made the whole movie from greenlight
to actually it being in the theatres in 10 months.
Which for a film this complicated is incredibly fast.
But that was the deal.
These days, that's how a lot of movies get greenlit.
It's all about the release date.
The studios need something for that slot.
I love this scene. This is great.
This was one of the scenes that we were always very worried about.
Because, you know, it was a very, very long dialogue scene.
And Jeremy and I were like,
"The audience aren't gonna sit still for this."
But it turned out to be, I think, one of the highlights of the movie.
I really like it. Audiences really got into it.
I think it's very, very good work by Philip Eisner.
See, I understand this. I never understood Stephen Hawking's.
No, it's so clever. Philip Eisner came up with this.
We literally told him
"Come up with a really simple way of conveying"
"the Event Horizon and the black hole." And this was it.
Genius. And use a semi-naked girl, as well.
Paul, do you realise they use origami
to work out space calculations now, regularly.
So maybe this was a first.
You sure about that?
Yeah, I listened to it on the radio yesterday, on Radio 4.
I guess if it's on Radio 4, it must be true.
Yeah.
The T-shirt that Joely's wearing reminds me.
We had all these T-shirts made
but we never really feature them heavily in the movie.
But they have everyone's name and their blood group
and all their details like their weight and their height on them.
That was quite cool. So that...
The idea was that if you got into, like, real trouble,
you know, they immediately kind of had all of your medical details...
This is great!
I think Sean Pertwee really became the voice of the audience for this film.
He really articulates what everyone sitting in the audience thinks.
But also if you watch how he gets slowly more and more scared through the film.
So by the end he's just totally terrified.
I don't know if you noticed
how many props Jason Isaacs is wearing on his vest.
It's quite ridiculous.
He was very prop-driven in this movie.
And then about halfway through the film he came to me, he said,
"Oh, God, why did you allow me to have all of these props?"
'Cause they'd just keep falling out of his jacket and...
Now that's a good model shot.
Here you're about to see the way in which the hydraulics work.
You know, this is
all the turbulence in this scene is a combination of camera shake...
Good old Adrian Biddle just shaking the camera.
But also we got a lot of movement into the set because of the hydraulics.
I always liked the idea of a spaceship in the clouds.
I just thought that rather than it just orbiting the planet
to stick it in the upper atmosphere so we could have it in the clouds.
Yeah.
I don't know if that could ever really happen.
But it was worth it for the imagery.
You remember, Paul, you wanted to surround it with clouds
but somehow I didn't get the information
and our visual effects supervisor didn't pass it on,
so we had this situation in post-production where
Paul literally said, "Well, where are the clouds?"
And we had no clouds and I had to persuade Paramount to do the clouds.
Because no one had ever really done anything like that.
They were all CG clouds.
At that point, you know, doing anything natural,
like clouds or water, computer generated, was a big problem.
And of course, this cloud effect got then used on
every movie shot in Britain for five years afterwards.
Yeah.
Sean is particularly good here.
You know, that arrival is very... It's the classic,
you arrive at the haunted house and it's shrouded in mist
or also the idea of literally a ghost ship
like the Marie Celeste or something like that.
- Yeah. - Or the Flying Dutchman.
My baby.
They are really good clouds.
- They really stand up. - Cruciform shape.
- It's a cruciform shape. - Yeah, yeah, I know.
Yeah, I know you know.
You were full of religious symbolism throughout the movie, weren't you?
Yeah.
This was your quite religious period in your life.
Hardly.
- It was quite an angry period, though. - Yeah, well.
I really like the torchlight here.
Yeah, they go past air lock number 13.
Have we no shame?
- I like the graphics here. - Yeah.
That's something we've always paid a lot of attention to in our movies
is the graphics, and how complicated they are.
We drive effects companies insane.
I like them because they're not the usual sort of pristine...
I mean, even that brown and green
feels a little used.
And all those pictures around the monitor were Joely's selection.
Fishburne loved his chair.
Surprised he didn't take it back to the States with him.
All the monitors you see, for example, that are moving behind Fish
that was all done green screen.
We had very few practical playback monitors.
And that little
thing around his neck with the little Jamaican flag...
That was something he wanted to wear.
I love the way in this set that the bottom of the set falls away.
- Yeah. - Kind of retracts into the floor.
Again, this was all built as one big, composite set.
Very sexual. It's very phallic, that, Paul.
Really?
So we built this set, actually, over a tank
that would usually be filled with water so that we could get the extra depth,
so we could have that hydraulic floor dropping away.
So the set for the Lewis & Clark actually stretched
all the way from the very rafters of the stage
all the way down to the bottom of the tank.
Originally in the script there was a lot more zero gravity.
And we came up with the idea of having these gravity boots
that they're about to use purely because the wirework took so long,
and most of it looked so bad, we had to cut back on it.
We just couldn't physically make the movie
with as much zero gravity as was written in it.
All the objects floating in zero gravity here are CG.
One of our friends is Bernd Eichinger,
and that's why it's Eichinger mineral water floating there.
He's a fabulous producer.
He produced Name of the Rose and House of the Spirits.
I always liked the fact, the way it worked out that
the bold Americans are the ones that go and explore the ship.
And by complete coincidence
it's all the Europeans who end up staying behind,
on the Lewis & Clark in a rather cowardly fashion,
watching what the Americans go and do.
Paul, look, this corridor was...
We brought in a huge mirror from France
to create the sense of the corridor going on and on and on.
Yeah, we built a small chunk of the central corridor
and originally it was planned to...
We were gonna do a humongous amount of visual effects.
And instead we brought in these big mirrors from France
and just reflected the set. So we had a mirror at either end.
So we had the illusion,
a very cheap illusion, that the corridor went on forever
and we actually got a lot of stuff in camera.
You just had to be very careful about where you put the camera
so you didn't get the camera reflected in the mirror.
A lot of these lighting effects we actually shot in camera.
They were not CG.
Which contributes to the kind of very...
- That's another one of our cheap shots. - Yeah.
That we added in while we were shooting.
The medical bay is typical of the kind of Gothic architecture
that we used for the film.
The big flared pillars are very...
That's a very, very medieval design.
We've got the biohazard logo here on the doors.
Yeah.
This is fantastic.
That should have been the poster, I think.
Yeah, I know. Jeremy lobbied very hard to have the image
of Jack in the spacesuit at that door,
as the poster for the film.
And unfortunately it's a battle he lost 'cause I agree with him.
I really disliked the poster we had for Event Horizon.
Paul, you should talk a bit about where you came up with this idea
that you were in this fun fair, the spinning...
Well, it wasn't a fun fair, actually. It was...
When you go on the Universal Studio tours ride
they have... Used to be the Six Million Dollar Man ride
and now I think it's the Earthquake ride.
- Right. - Or Dante's Peak.
And you go into this big tube that starts spinning around you
and it disorientates you.
So it's very much like a haunted house ride at the fair.
And that's what we built on a very grand scale here.
Look at that.
Yeah, that was Jeremy's poster image, right there.
The reason for this coolant...
This is something I added to the movie purely because I...
For the end result, which was when they switched the gravity back on
the idea that it was raining in a spaceship.
That was an image I really liked.
Wasn't that inspired by Solyaris a little bit?
At the end of Solyaris, when it starts raining indoors.
Solyaris? I've never heard of it. What are you talking about?
No, it's entirely original.
Philip Eisner actually denied...
- That he'd ever seen Solyaris. - He'd never seen Solyaris.
Or Disney's The Black Hole.
And I find that very hard to believe.
Have you noticed how they all have blue eyes, everyone at that monitor?
Yeah.
That's good.
The third containment, which is the big gyroscopic device there...
Something that we built practical
so every shot of it in the movie is actually a practical shot.
And because we only had 10 weeks to build all the sets
everyone was just terrified of this,
because it was actually a very complicated piece of construction.
And it had to move.
I mean, we shot on this set for about three or four weeks
and everyone, of course, was terrified that if it ever broke down we'd be stuck.
And it was really well built. Never broke down.
But what happened was, bits and pieces of it would break inside
so they'd rattle around inside those rings.
So unfortunately, all of the dialogue that we recorded on these...
On this stage in particular had to be looped afterwards.
I think that shot was in reverse, 'cause we could never get
the gyroscope to actually stop smoothly.
Yeah.
So we shot it in reverse and then had Jack actually step out of the shot.
We were quite inspired by the cube in Hellraiser,
in the way that it realigns itself and reshapes itself.
Yes.
It's almost like it's alive.
That's shades of The Matrix there.
Even those glass windows, they're like a medieval triptych.
There's Sean holding his cigarette in his mouth!
I love the way he keeps his cigarette in his mouth there.
He was really worried about the amount of explosives
we were putting between his legs on that shot.
He did that stunt for real, Sean.
I don't know if he'd do it again, though.
This was pretty scary for the actors.
There was a lot of explosives going off here.
The sense of panic that we're getting here is very real.
'Cause, you know, those sparks are bloody hot
when you get those down the back of your neck.
And of course, poor Sean didn't even have any hair on his head.
So I think he was getting quite...
Here comes Richard, like Superman to the rescue.
With all of the zero gravity stuff, I tried to move the camera
as much as possible to be as disorienting as possible.
Because otherwise I think it's...
It just becomes all too apparent that people are moving around on wire rigs.
Yes.
So that's why we put as much rotation
and as much movement into the frame as possible.
Yeah, looking back on it, we probably could've done with more.
Yes, 'cause even now they feel a bit wooden in those suits.
Yeah, again, something you should've mentioned seven years ago.
Thank you.
Well, I guess the idea behind the suits, Paul, was they're like knights
in medieval armour.
The suits were incredibly heavy, I remember.
We actually built leaning posts for the actors to lean up against
to take some of the weight off them while they were wearing the suits.
'Cause they were so heavy they couldn't sit down in a chair.
They would just have broken the chair.
Of course, what added to the weight is all of these light packs
are being powered by batteries that have to be carried around in the suits.
Bob Keen built the corpsesicle here.
This was quite a big number for us
to drop the corpsesicle and for it to shatter.
And the first time we did it, one of his guys, as a joke,
had baked a Barbie into the gory centre of the corpsesicle.
So the whole thing broke apart and Barbie popped out.
That's nice.
Again, you've got those kind of Gothic flared pillars
which if you ever go
into the substructure of a cathedral
you see those pillars, but obviously in stone rather than metal.
I remember these sets...
The actors used to find them very unsettling.
This set in particular, I remember Joely used to say
that she hated coming to work on it.
You know, they found them very claustrophobic
and something kind of quite off-putting about them.
Maybe that was just working with me.
Well, they look like medieval dungeons, for one thing.
We have a little CG guy walking on here
which I was always very happy about.
At the time, you know, doing little CG people wasn't such a...
You know, it's done a lot now.
Troy is about to come out with armies of tens of thousands of CG people.
But at the time, that was quite something, to do a little CG guy.
I don't know if you remember
but Titanic was really celebrated for all of its CG people.
It was groundbreaking and we were the same year.
Something unpleasant.
I'm really happy with the mixture of characters and actors
we have in this movie.
It was one of the things, again...
I mean, obviously we were very, very inspired by Alien.
But I think it's one of the genius things that Ridley did in Alien was
it had very, very distinct, different character types.
And that's something we were definitely, you know, striving for here.
Also, I just like the fact, in the background, we've got the clouds
just rushing past outside. Again, very much like a haunted house.
It's almost as though it's wind.
And better than having a green screen out there.
Indeed. Again, you know, we shot so much for real.
Richard Yuricich, our visual effects supervisor
who did 2001 with Doug Trumbull,
really believed in shooting as much in camera as possible.
And I think it's really paid off, actually.
Well, it's one of the reasons why I think the visual effects in this movie,
you know, with a few exceptions,
they still hold up very well, was they were done in...
Well, where we didn't need to do a visual effect, we tried to avoid it.
And if we did do them, we did them in a very traditional way.
There was more of a reliance on models rather than CG.
And if we had to use CG, we tried to use it as an enhancement
rather than having totally synthetic CG shots.
We had a big discussion about whether we should do this, actually,
as a visual effect.
And I just wanted to build it for real.
You'll notice that Joely's hair in this scene is completely different.
This was the first day that she shot with us.
And I saw the dailies, I didn't like her haircut, and then we changed it.
Yeah, she's got a bun here.
It looks like she's just stepped off a horse.
Right, Sam.
This set was built on the Bond stage at Pinewood,
which is the really big stage there, where they usually build
the big sets for the end of a Bond movie.
The ubervillain's hideout
where they have big explosions and machine gun fights.
And it was an incredibly cold set, I remember.
Because there's no insulation there. The walls are just tin.
Which means when it rains, it's deafening in there
'cause of the reverberations from the roof,
but also, it becomes incredibly cold
and we were shooting over the Christmas period in London.
And the actors were freezing.
It was particularly difficult for Sam Neill
towards the end of the movie where he's essentially walking around naked.
- That was a good shot, Paul. - Thank you, Jeremy.
The old crew of the Event Horizon, there's Bharat Nalluri,
who British audiences will know.
He just did the BBC TV show Hustle and before that Spooks.
He also directed the last Crow movie.
Also in the...
Actually, the crew of the Event Horizon, the original crew,
seemed to be composed almost entirely of film directors.
So it's no wonder they went to Hell.
There's also Gary Sinyor in there, who directed The Bachelor.
And Stiff Upper Lips.
Yes, which Jeremy Bolt produced.
Look, it's like a torture chamber.
I'd just come off doing a PG-13 movie, Mortal Kombat,
and I really, really enjoyed the darkness and the horror of this film.
You know, it was really, really refreshing.
Probably it wasn't a good career choice,
but I turned down X-Men after Mortal Kombat to do this.
Because I just didn't wanna do another PG-13 movie.
I definitely had something kind of dark and scary in my psyche to get out.
You can say that again.
These tables are quite good. They're all based on mortuary slabs.
It's my little boy.
In the original cut of the movie,
we held on his withered and distressed legs a lot longer.
Then we cut back to Kathleen, and then we cut to yet another shot
of the little boy's legs.
Only now, the open sores were writhing with maggots.
And at that point, when we tested the movie for the first time,
the audience were just disgusted.
And we learned a lot about horror
because they were very, very scared up until that point,
then when they saw the maggots, they just became so disgusted
they disengaged from the movie.
Yeah, they became...
"That's enough, I can't take any more of this."
They kind of stopped watching the movie and stopped being scared by it.
It went from horror to sort of indignation and anger.
I hope what we ended up with in the movie was quite a fine balance
between horrific stuff, but horrific so it shocked the audience,
but not so horrific that it made them completely disengage from the film.
Look at that blue screen in the background.
It's so cheap, we should have done something about that.
Sorry.
This orgiastic death scene
where the crew of the Event Horizon, the original crew,
basically kind of tear each other apart
while fucking each other to death was a lot longer.
Yeah.
And a lot more gruesome.
And again, it was something we kind of cut back on in the film.
We didn't want to show too much of it just because it was so horrific.
This is great, this scene.
It's very much like the ship is becoming... Is coming alive.
We built this whole set out of old computer circuit boards.
It's very Matrix, actually, Paul, that green.
Fishburne actually rang me to thank me
from Australia, when he was shooting The Matrix.
Because he said,
"If I hadn't practised the wirework in Event, I would have died on The Matrix."
This was actually quite a very small and cheap set.
We just used a lot of wide-angle lenses to make it look bigger.
That's why you get the slight distortion at the edges of the frame.
It's always a fuse.
I always found this very funny, Paul, that such an advanced ship
basically has blown a fuse.
I'm glad you found it amusing.
It's so low-tech.
But that, I mean, to be fair, that was one of the design aspects
we did work into the movie. Some very, very low...
The spaceships are a mixture of high and low-tech.
Correct.
And also, my favourite thing is, later on Jason Isaacs is listening
to the Latin message on, like, a crappy old tape recorder.
Yes.
It's obviously an antique that he collected.
Yes.
He can say that again.
I think it's one of the things that
I think critics at the time didn't really fully appreciate was that the movie
does have, I think, quite a funny sense of humour.
And there were lines that I think some critics just thought were,
you know, like, unintentionally funny,
but totally, it was our intention to include amusing lines.
Especially Fishburne's, which always got a massive laugh,
which is after he saw the kind of orgy scene,
he said, "We're leaving."
The Burning Man.
The idea here is that the ship is beginning to plague
each of our characters with things that they are guilty about,
which we will discover.
I remember we were getting quite behind on the schedule here
when we came to this scene.
And originally this scene was slated...
We were supposed to spend about two days shooting it.
And we ended up picking up a lot of time. We shot it in about half a day
because I decided what we were gonna do was just rotate around.
Going on tighter and tighter lenses with the steadicam, going round and round.
And I think it ended up being quite effective because of that.
And because we had to do so many takes
'cause of the way I was shooting it,
I think Sean had to put up with quite a bit.
But you see how kind of angry he is.
It actually contributes, Paul. I'm sure this was about the fifth take.
Yeah, well, all the close shots were the later takes, yeah.
'Cause we started wide and then ended up going in closer.
But I think, you know, it gives the scene a bit of energy,
the constant camera movement.
They really bonded, the actors on this movie.
I mean, they really developed a very good kind of team spirit.
They really felt like a crew that had spent a lot of time together.
Yeah. Well, they're all very good actors.
And they were, especially Sean and Jason,
I mean, they were just so overjoyed to be working with Fish.
I mean, he's been a particular hero of ours,
I mean, ever since Apocalypse Now.
You know, just the idea of working with this guy
- was a dream come true for a lot of us. - Yes.
- Apocalypse Now, Deep Cover. - Matrix Revolutions.
What's Love Got to Do with It.
I think we got Joely's cap wrong.
- Her cap? - That is just the wrong brim on that cap.
Yeah.
The great clouds again.
This is a movie where we did a lot of this kind of stuff.
Panning off people and then literally getting them to get off and run out.
Yeah. It's a little bit telegraphed here, I think.
- Now you tell me. - Sorry, it's...
- hindsight. - Hindsight, yeah!
Hindsight's a beautiful thing, Paul.
Look, there's another blue screen you were too cheap to take out.
X-Men, Event Horizon.
Look, there.
- I love that reflection. - Excellent.
Now, anyone who has seen Robert Wise's The Haunting
will kind of know where this kind of
booming sound coming from the distance is originally inspired by.
It's a good homage there, Paul.
- It's done very well. - That's right, it's a homage.
I think we did more justice to Robert Wise's movie
than Jan de Bont did when he actually remade The Haunting.
I'd agree with that.
It's our Star Trek corridor.
There's only a tiny bit of it, keep going round and round it.
This is...
Cutting between these kind of wide angles, all clutched,
again, is a visual reference to Robert Wise's movie.
Yeah. A lot of films have been influenced by that.
I saw the Japanese horror film Dark Water
and they do a similar thing in the water tank.
When we built the sets, we tried to make a big deal
out of the underfloor lighting that you see using.
It gets used an awful lot.
Adrian Biddle was really excited about that.
Of course, the actors were less excited when they realised
that the majority of their light sources will be coming from under their feet.
Shining up their nose with lots of ugly shadows.
This scene was...
The structure that Fish is scooting along there was real,
but everything else is obviously a visual effect.
And we were down in a complete kind of 360-degree green screen box.
It was really complicated to shoot.
And it's funny 'cause your eyes adjust to the green after a while,
so when you walk out into the real world everything has changed colour.
So I remember we'd go out, it was very trippy, the sky would be purple.
Kathleen Quinlan is particularly good here.
It's very important for Fish that he saves his crewmember here,
because the thing that is haunting him in the past is that he left a man behind.
So in a sense, the ship is giving him a second chance here.
And this is a scene that was originally a scene from Philip's original script
that we ended up cutting.
You met the crew of the Lewis & Clark
when they're actually on a different rescue mission.
And we cut it for cost reasons.
But this scene was so good, we transposed it
to the actual body of the film.
Those veins in his arm, that was actually a practical effect that we did.
Yeah, it was very good.
You know, they were just rubber veins
that we kind of blew up with an air pump.
In addition to Bob Keen, we also worked with Pauline Fowler of Animated Extras.
And she's very...
Now, we built a version of this set
that was kind of built on 90 degrees, so at that point,
Justin's actually hanging with the camera on the floor of the studio
to get the blood to tumble towards us.
And when he's bleeding from the eyes, what he has is blood tubes
up the inside of his fingers.
We used a lot of lightning boxes on this movie
to get that kind of strobey lighting effect.
Very symmetrical, this scene.
I really had a thing about symmetry.
Well, it's very Stanley Kubrick, Paul.
In fact, there's another homage to The Shining coming up.
- One of many. - It's understandable.
But you know, it was a very...
We really paid a lot of attention to the framing of the shots.
I actually got a note from the studio when we started shooting the movie
because I think at that point
I'd become quite well known for moving the camera a lot and cutting very fast.
And I got a note from the studio after the first week, you remember,
when they asked, were we ever going to move with the camera?
Because everything was very stationary, everything was very static,
everything was very perfectly framed.
But we were very influenced when we were designing the movie
by a lot of painters, by Bosch, by Brueghel
and by the photographs of Witkin,
and we wanted to give the movie a kind of a painterly feel
in the way that it was framed.
This is one of the few scenes that I think really works
with Fish and with Sam Neill together.
Where they're actually in the same frame acting together
'cause interestingly, they have very different acting styles.
Fishburne, you'd find that he would give you just a terrific performance
first, second, third take.
And if he hadn't given it to you by the third take,
you were basically never gonna get it.
'Cause he would get worse as you went along
'cause he puts so much preparation
and so much thought into the very first take.
So by kind of the fourth or fifth take
he would literally start to forget his lines.
And Sam Neill is the complete opposite.
He's someone who likes to improvise on camera
and kind of warm up on camera.
So he really took till the fourth or fifth take to really get going.
Which is why in the movie, when they have their big exchanges
it tends to be shot reverse shot
because when they're together in the same frame...
- That wasn't pleasant. - That always gets a big jump.
I mean, this movie was really built for DVD.
There are some terrific images in that Hell sequence.
We spent a long time shooting those kind of stroboscopic visions of Hell.
We shot a lot of different frame rates.
We shot a lot of it shooting into Mylar mirrors,
which is kind of flexible material
that you can bend and warp to distort the image.
Look at the symmetry on that, eh?
Originally there was supposed to be a flashback here
so you'd see what Fish is talking about.
But I was so blown away by his performance
that I thought, "There's nothing I can possibly put onscreen"
"that will be as evocative as the way he is talking about it"
"and the images that that evokes in your head."
So we decided not to shoot the sequence and just to play it in dialogue.
There's his retro tape recorder.
Bit of a mistake to make.
What is Jason's accent, Paul?
It's supposed to be slightly Irish.
- Again, that's the future. - That's true.
The Irish talk slightly differently in the future.
He's good.
This shot's actually a pickup shot that we did
a couple of months after we'd finished principal photography.
Which is why it has a slightly different feel to it.
But I quite like that. It's very intense.
And we had to go very close on him
because we obviously didn't have much of the set in the background.
Back on board the Lewis & Clark.
Named of course, after the famous American explorers, Lewis and Clark.
One of the other things about the whole design of the Lewis & Clark
and of their costumes is that
the Lewis & Clark is supposedly part of the Coast Guard service.
I always thought it was a cool idea that the shores around the Earth
would still be policed by the Coast Guards.
So that's the Coast Guard logo that you can see on Joely's outfit there.
I don't know if you saw, there's a stake going through that guy's...
Yeah. There's a man,
the back of his head, and through his teeth.
A man puts his hand down his throat and pulls out his innards.
- "We're leaving." I love that line. - Yeah.
I always got a fabulous laugh on that.
I think the score here is
a mixture of Michael Kamen and Orbital,
who worked with him on the more, kind of technoey aspects.
Yes.
The pulsing aspects of the score are the work of Orbital.
Now, that's a bad shot. I mean, what is that?
That was something we did in about half an hour.
We were really running out of time.
Like two wide-angle lenses, neither of them particularly good.
In an early design the idea was those spikes on the outside of the set
were going to kind of engage with the third containment in some way
so that when it stopped, they would extend out from the wall
and look into the third engagement.
It was something we talked about maybe doing as a visual effect but...
We never had the money.
That's one of the things I'm really pleased about.
I mean, the movie, it has a very handsome look to it.
I mean, it's certainly one of the best-looking things I've ever shot.
And we were constantly doing it on a pretty low budget.
Yeah.
This sequence was
a little bit reminiscent of Don't Look Now
in the way that little kid's wearing the little raincoat.
Coffin-shaped corridors.
You shouldn't go down a coffin-shaped corridor.
Oh, no! Don't go up the ladder.
Adrian Biddle, our DP, loved those lightning boxes.
What I like about the lighting scheme, particularly of this set,
is that it has a very, kind of like
browny sepia tone, which you associate with period movies.
And then it's combined with the very modern cool blue
of the lightning boxes.
You know, that's very much the hallmark of the movie,
its kind of very old-fashioned, period style architecture
combined with very modern aspects.
Just look at how her legs are broken. It's really painful.
I remember Richard Yuricich, our visual effects supervisor,
just really wanted her shattered legs,
- the bones to protrude out in that shot. - That's right, yeah.
Did that as a practical transition.
We actually took a part of the containment set
and moved it over to Sam Neill's set here.
So that he could just practically walk between the two.
So this is Claire, his wife.
We have some more of our CG eye sockets coming up.
That was a sequence that Paul came up with, I think, during the shoot.
We're trying to convey something really terrifying.
So, to watch your wife kill herself because of your abandonment
'cause it had to lead to something that would make...
Would have to lead to him pulling his eyes out.
And I think it's pretty good.
That shot you saw of Fishburne running there,
that was all practical in camera.
So he basically ran all the way up to the mirror and bumped into it.
Yeah.
A rather cheap cheat, he runs back towards the camera again.
So Sean is in a really exasperated state
searching for the explosive
back on the Lewis & Clark, and here it is.
Originally this was gonna be another visual effect
where you see Sean kind of blown apart
and I just liked his expression so much
I thought I'd rather just go out on his face than go out on big visual effect.
I thought he did a good job there.
So, this is a miniature that we blew apart.
With another one of our little CG guys in the foreground.
Although that's actually a stuntman in front of a practical explosion.
But again, I mean, it's...
Compared to how we might do this now, there was so much that was practical.
We built a lot of different sizes of the Lewis & Clark.
And that model that we blew up was quite big.
It was a big model.
- It was about 25 feet long or something. - Correct, yeah.
The model for the Event Horizon was actually what, about 70 feet?
Yes, something like that.
And also the Daylight Station at the start of the movie
- was a very, very big miniature. - This is great!
Richard T. Jones on a piece of wreckage in space.
This actually is a piece...
An old aeroplane chunk that we got from an aeroplane graveyard.
And it's a big, full-size piece that we had in a big, green-screen box.
And we actually... It was kind of on almost like a bucking bronco device
so we could rotate it and make it move backwards and forwards.
And Richard actually stood on the thing and we tried to throw him off.
- Famous last words. - Yeah.
That again is CG enhancement
- of the original prosthetic. - Of eye sockets.
We did quite a lot of that in this movie. I think we had very good prosthetics
and then we tried to enhance them with CG
rather than doing, like, full CG face replacements.
This, I remember, was a deeply expensive visual effects shot.
Just seeing Fishburne's face on that monitor.
It was just very expensive to track it in and have,
'cause there are lots of bits of junk falling over the front of it.
This of course, is Jason's character's big fear.
He's had some kind of major traumatic surgery,
like heart surgery, which is where the scar comes from
and then Weir just opens up the scar again.
And of course, takes all his intestines out.
And originally in this scene, the idea was that the intestines
would be lying on the table in front of Jason
but they would still be attached to his body,
so you'd still have the entrails going up to the inside of his body
and then you'd realise, 'cause his head would raise up,
that Jason's character was still actually alive.
And then,
Fish would have to shoot him in the head and put him out of his misery.
But we actually did shoot that body hanging up there, which is Jason.
We actually shot him lifting his head up as Fishburne walks in.
But it was almost too grotesque.
You can't underestimate the kind of shock that this movie had
when it was shown to people. I mean, it really...
- People were very distressed. - People were really, really upset by it.
Even by the level of unpleasantness there is in it now.
You can just imagine the kind of response
to the really hard-core version that we had originally.
And that response incidentally came from the studio as well.
And I think when they saw the finished movie that I presented to them
and just saw how gruesome it was, they freaked out a little bit.
I think they didn't really know what to make of it.
Paramount are the studio that are known for the Star Trek franchise
and I don't think this was quite the space movie that they had anticipated.
But in retrospect,
I wish they had given us a bit more time in post-production
to finish the narrative because I think
that the more extreme version actually is the better version.
Yeah, I think part of...
Well, a main part of our problem with the film
was that we had such a compacted post-production schedule,
that we were testing the movie way too early.
We were putting it in front of an audience
before we really had a chance to refine the cut.
And the negative audience reaction just made the studio react against the film
and so all the notes were, "Cut, cut, make it shorter."
And I think if we'd had more time to work on it we could have...
We could have kept a lot of the more gruesome aspects
if we'd had a chance to refine them.
I know certainly in the first cut of the film
I was just enjoying the gruesomeness of it so much
I just probably put way too much in there.
And there's probably a halfway house cut that could've worked very well
where the gore is just a little heavier than it is at the moment.
- Yes. - But there you go
we're left staring at a man who's sewn his own eye sockets shut.
- It's pretty bad. - For example, the sequence
when Kathleen Quinlan falls down the hole and breaks her legs.
I think we got that exactly right. It's scary. I don't think we should've...
We would never have shot the bones protruding.
I think that was the right balance.
I love that, "Now she has another crew."
This was definitely the first action movie that Joely Richardson had done.
She was a real sport, because she'd never done any of this stuff before.
And we just spent days strangling her and hurling her across the floor
and bashing her into things.
And then of course, later on in the movie we dump,
I think it's like 100 gallons of blood on top of her.
In the original script,
because they were the Coast Guard service,
all of the characters carried guns.
And that's something I took out 'cause I never understood
why they would have, like, sidearms out in space.
Especially in a kind of universe that we've established
that doesn't have aliens or monsters.
What are you gonna meet in outer space that you need
- a firearm to deal with? - These are CG pieces. Yeah.
That's why we came up with the idea of the nail guns.
'Cause we knew we needed a weapon of some kind
towards the end of the picture and we wanted to justify it in some way.
All of the atmosphere rushing past Sam and Fish here,
it's all fire extinguishers. All carbon dioxide fire extinguishers.
Those are rubber railings that he was clinging onto.
Where Sam Neill goes out of the window,
the final bit there, was actually a CG Sam Neill.
Which I'm not quite sure how well that holds up now.
Not well at all.
But at the time, to kind of do a CG person that big in a frame was,
it was pretty cutting-edge.
This is a sequence I never got right.
I mean, this is just nowhere near as exciting as it should have been.
Yeah.
And I think it's partly the time constraints
we were shooting the movie under.
- You know, it's just not exciting enough. - No.
You know, we went back and we did some close-ups.
Like the close-up of the door closing and that thing he's wedged in there.
Those were all pickup shots we did later on
to try and kind of amp up the excitement of the sequence...
I think you lose a sense of geography, as well.
It's almost as though we needed a couple more wider shots.
Yeah.
It's definitely six out of ten, could do better.
I like the fact that they're in the far future, they're on a space ship
and there's Joely with an axe in her hand.
You know, it becomes very, very low-tech.
You know, I'm glad we decided to take out the firearms.
I agree.
- The idea is obviously that the crew... - He hated that line.
"I don't wanna go where the other crew went, I'd rather be dead."
So he would always deliver it incredibly quickly.
I think that was the slowest reading I ever got out of him.
The idea, of course, is the other crew are in Hell.
Or somewhere that might resemble Hell.
- There it... Look, that moment of... - "You stay here and get really scared."
You know, one of the things that I think we did quite well in this film is we...
There are a number of sequences where our characters are isolated
and are alone.
Sam Neill in the long corridor with the circuits
or Kathleen Quinlan with her son.
It's those sequences that are really frightening.
And we got one coming up here with Joely.
This blood that's flowing above Richard T. here
is just actually a red bit of tracing paper
that we're dragging along on a piece of fishing wire above him.
That of course, is blood.
There's just a plethora of references to classic haunted house movies here.
The Shining, obviously, the bleeding walls of The Amityville Horror.
So we actually shot this for real.
This was quite a dangerous stunt, actually, the weight of the blood there.
We had a scene right there where Sam Neill came down that ladder...
- Headfirst. - ...headfirst like a spider crawling down.
That looked very unpleasant.
This is a narrative device I wish we hadn't used
which is the speaking computer
telling you how long there is until detonation.
We needed it, I think, to kind of juice up the pacing of the movie
and remind you that there was a ticking clock.
When the burning man appears here, we did this as...
We shot the man separately, we tracked flames onto him
but the big fireball he throws at Fishburne is...
We did that as a practical fireball on the stage.
We had this huge flamethrower
that shot a massive practical fireball down the stage
and we were all looking at it happening.
Obviously, the stage was empty, the cameras were remote control
'cause it was quite dangerous,
and the flame first started and the force of the flame was so great
that it knocked the flamethrower back over.
It fell off its pedestal and it started shooting the flame at the ceiling.
And the set was all wood so the set started to burn
and this was a really intense flamethrower.
It was like real kind of wartime stuff.
And I turned to my stunt co-ordinator and I said, "Switch it off."
And he said, "I can't, 'cause the button is right beside the flamethrower."
And then the flamethrower rolled over and started shooting through the floor
of the set and...
Well, essentially we burned down the stage.
We did. But we could have done worse than that
because underneath the floor was where all the gas tanks were
that were feeding the flamethrower.
So it was actually shooting flame at the gas tanks
at which point we just had to abandon the stage.
I mean, we literally thought the whole thing was gonna blow up.
So we just burned down the stage, but not the whole of Pinewood.
Despite all the flames, this was freezing cold when we were shooting this.
And poor Sam, 'cause he's in a complete body suit.
'Cause his whole body is covered in these scars.
I mean, he was virtually naked, wearing a little thin layer of plastic.
So he would stand very close to a heater
to try and keep warm between takes, but he couldn't stand too close
otherwise all the prosthetics would have melted.
These prosthetics were done by Pauline Fowler of Animated Extras.
I really think they're good, the way they hold up very close like that.
All of those visions of Hell I shot at the weekends.
I would work with the main unit during the week
and then on the Saturday and Sunday I'd direct second unit.
And we'd, you know, knock out about two or three of those
individual characters in Hell each day.
They took a long time to shoot 'cause, again, I wanted to get
a kind of, like, painterly quality to the images.
So even though they're, you know, onscreen for only a few frames,
a disproportionate amount of effort went into actually getting them.
At one point we had to finish shooting this...
We had to stop shooting this scene
because the fire brigade, all the water froze in their hoses
so they couldn't put any of these flames out when we set alight to the set.
This is actually Fishburne sticking his arm through the fire here
to go and get that button.
What we did was, we covered his hand in a little bit of fire-retardant gel
and then he just went for it.
It's nice slowing that down, Paul.
I mean, this is something I did in post with Martin Hunter, our editor.
I never shot it in slow motion. I probably should have done.
That's why it's got a kind of slightly strobey feel to it,
- because it's all step printing. - Step printing, yeah.
So what you're doing is, you're printing every frame three or four times
to slow the film down.
But without it there just wasn't enough of a moment at the end.
You know, it was just over too fast.
But I actually quite like the feel of the step printing.
I really like that.
- The black hole. - There's your black hole.
I like this shot where we pull focus to the glass.
We did something similar in Soldier.
- Yeah, not quite as successful there. - No.
Now, is it just me or does she become more attractive
the more blood we put on her?
I think that's just you, Paul.
She's always attractive.
The reason why we came up with the shadow of the rescue ship is
we couldn't afford to build another model.
So we had to leave it up to the audience's imagination
as to what that looked like.
These guys, I wanted them to kind of have a slightly samurai feel,
which is where the feeling of the helmet comes from.
Those tanks were actually the cockpits
from fighter jets.
So in a typically happy ending
the idea is that, you know, she's kind of...
She's kept the Event Horizon with her
and the darkness is now inside of Joely.
So even though she escaped, she's kind of basically being driven insane.
I can't believe it's over. I was thoroughly enjoying watching that.
That's really good.
This was Prodigy.
Yes, this was the Prodigy.
This is before anyone knew who the Prodigy were
and I remember we had conversations with the music department
of Paramount, saying that we really want...
Because they actually came down to the set and they visited
and they were really keen to use some of their music on the movie.
And we said to Paramount, "We should go for this group"
"and put the song on the end of the movie."
Then their album literally went to number one
about three weeks later in America.
I have to say, looking back at it, the special effects were really awesome.
We did shoot so much in camera and we worked with Neil Corbould
who's certainly, probably the best in the UK.
Really outstanding special effects guy.
And Harry Metcalfe, the construction designer.
Really incredible, without equal in my experience.
- Okay. - Well.
I don't know.
I hope you enjoyed that as much as we did.
Jeremy and I are sitting here having not watched the movie for quite a long time.
So our apologies if we were a little muddled at times.
But we were trying to remember it as we went along
and God, I enjoyed watching it. I wish we could do it again.
Yeah.
Or maybe we should just go to Hell next time.
After you.