iokevins"I always love that shot, of the shadows of the policemen on the wall of the building."
"Yeah, meant to look like the headlights, although most cars don't have them on this side." (laughs)
"When we were doing this scene of the cops coming in and getting Cosmo, for the last take we had him kick the glass out. Because we didn't have enough money in the budget for a 2nd pane of glass, so we saved that for the last one." 🙂 🪟
"And now here was the purpose of that smaller frame is that we could dissolve from the snow on the campus to the snow on a monitor, and then pull out of the monitor and you're into a wide frame again."
"And I'll never forget how difficult it was explaining that to people all the time we were shooting. No one quite understood what we were doing."
"I always hoped that that red light would be the, another part of that transition, but I could never get the red light of the police car to flare the lens. Modern lenses are made so, you know, without aberrations, so it's very hard to get them to flare, and I had a red light right in the edge of the frame, aimed right into the lens, and I could never get it to flare in that shot on the campus."
"And one of the great thrills of working with Dan Akroyd is that, no matter how nutty the conspiracy theory dialogue was, he actually believed in much crazier stuff."
"And that's a scene from the Orson Welles' 'Touch of Evil' in which the line, 'I looked in that box and there was nothing there', is sort of a harbinger of the end of this film."
"We were criticized by one reviewer who said we used that for no purpose at all, and I always wanted to tell him."
"This shot is one of the reasons that we, at great expense, went to San Francisco, for location scout for our shooting, and looking at it now I realize we didn't actually have to go to San Francisco. The studio was right." (chuckles)
"But we ate very well while we were there."
"One of my favorite little bits of business in the film is when the fire alarm goes off, the security guard, played by Bodhi Elfman, consults his manual."
Bodhi is the son of Richard Elfman and Rhonda Joy Saboff 🤯
Richard Elfman directed the cult musical film "Forbidden Zone" (1982). Danny Elfman is Richard's younger brother.
"It was a nice piece of stunt work here. That's actually Redford coming down the stairs, but as he passes this column, the stunt man picks up the run for him, and, uh, goes head over heels." (laughs)
"This bank that we shot at is long abandoned, it's been empty for many years and it's been used as locations in a lot of films, and in fact in 1983, a picture I wrote called All of Me used the lobby of the bank for the hallway where Steve Martin goes to the elevator, walking like a woman and talking like a man."
"In fact, I seem to recall that the night that we finished shooting there, MC Hammer came in and shot a video the next night."
"Yeah, it's used all the time for commercials too."
"That computer screen blue was a color that was tricky to come up with. I ended up having a bunch of neon made in a few different colors of blues and greens and then putting them right up against the screen because neon has a quality of very soft light it doesn't, when things are lit with neon they don't have crisp edges, so the color is really saturated and it's also very soft." 💡 🖥️
"Now among the bank executives up here, the fellow in the front with the glasses looking particularly stony-faced...there he is, on the far-right, is Lin Parsons who was our line producer."
IMDB lists him as Lindsley Parsons Jr.
"Who's got my check?" was a line we sent to Lin Parsons a lot on this movie." 😅
"When we shot the scene of Bob coming out of the bank, this was in San Francisco, after one take he just got into a car of some passerby and drove off. I think that was his way of telling us that he was finished with the scene." (laughs)
"I always wonder what these tourists who had rented this car felt when Robert Redford walked in their car."
"This loft or what we called The Lair was built on a sound stage at Universal. Patrizia von Brandenstein, who was our production designer I think did a wonderful job on this. What you see out the window are huge backlit photographs of the skyline of Oakland."
"I always hate the way those backlit photographs look because they look like Kodachrome, and those particular ones we made black & white and color negatives and we blended the black & white and color together--I think it was about 80-20 color-to-black & white--so that they were very desaturated and your eye didn't go to them, because it never looks very urban to me when they turn bright colors."
Note: I think he's talking generally here, and is happy with the backlit photos in the movie (?)
"This set actually had to be built on one of the bigger stages at Universal. I think it was the stage that they used for Phantom of the Opera, right?"
"That's right, the original 1920's Phantom of the Opera was from this stage."
"And I think after us, Jurassic Park shot there."
Dannemora refers to the Clinton Correctional Facility, a "a New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision maximum security state prison for men located in the Village of Dannemora, New York."
"And Tim Busfield had a great idea that when he was pretending to be an NSA agent in this sequence, he was going to have his hair sort of a little looser and kind of slightly more like Bob's. Later on in the movie, when you realize that he's working for a Cosmo character played by Ben Kingsley, Tim was going to wear his hair slicked back more like Cosmo's. It was a nice idea."
"And we of course humored Tim and made him think that in fact his hair did look like Bob's." (laughs)
"Because we were going to show the Federal Building standing and then disappeared we had to have some landmarks to tie the audience to that location. So we start with this post office that was in San Francisco. We cut to this building which is on the back lot of Universal with the George Bush posters. And the next time that we see this torn down, we start with the post office and cut to an empty lot in San Francisco."
Marty drives an orange 1967 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia convertible.
"And this was one of my favorite scenes to do. We decided we were going to do this whole scene in one shot, constantly moving. The actors are constantly moving and the camera is constantly moving. People walk off camera, disappear from view, emerge from another direction, and the basic idea was the two supposed NSA agents are cornering Bob, I mean they're cornering him in an emotional sense in the scene, but he keeps moving to keep them from trapping him physically. ..."
(continued)
"Whenever they come near him he always walks away and finally at the end they have surrounded him and they've, he's in the chair and he can't move. So we shot this--there's a long scene--and we shot it the better part of a day. And as I recall John you had a lot of people carrying lights and flags and all kinds of things around the sets of behind the camera there's about a half-dozen people moving equipment. It was an amazing piece of choreography, not just...."
(continued)
"... the actors on camera but everybody behind the camera to stay out of the shot. Before we shot this scene we played a tape on the set for the cast and crew a wonderful sequence in the Orson Welles film 'Touch of Evil' when the shoe-box is discovered and it was several pages long and, like this, people walk in and out of the shot and it was wonderful to see how a master does that."
"And here's Bob physically trapped as he is--in a story sense--trapped"
"This was an abandoned movie theatre in Oakland. Beautiful sort of late-afternoon glow on that scene."
This is the Fox Oakland Theatre, which was subsequently "refurbished in the 2000s and reopened as a concert venue on February 5, 2009."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Oakland_Theatre
#Oakland #FoxOaklandTheatre #NationalRegisterOfHistoricPlaces
"One of the great things about that set was because it was one huge long empty room you could do masters or wide shots with very long lenses and compress the set and still see everybody and that also makes the lighting a little more interesting."
"It's a very interesting set. If you look carefully you'll see each actor had his own work area and there's actually a little living area where the Bishop character lives. There's a little bedroom, there's a bathroom, there's a kitchen. Crease has a very neat desk. Whistler has a desk full of sound equipment, synthesizers. Mother has his completely messy sort of workshop area. I loved shooting in that set."
"Yeah, I liked it too. One thing I remember is every time we turned around it meant lighting a football field, so things took a little longer than I anticipated frequently."
"You still apologizing for that, huh John?" (teasingly)
"No, I was trying to blame [production designer] Patrizia." (laughs)
"This was a beautiful location. It was a private school in Pasadena, I think."
"Uh huh"
"And we had found a wonderful young piano prodigy to...who was really playing, and she was wonderful." 🎹
Note: As he enters, Marty holds a rectangular gift with a red ribbon behind his back (possibly chocolates). The final edit of this scene does not show him attempting to give it to Liz, but we do briefly catch a glimpse of it on the piano as they subsequently walk around the room.
"Mary McDonnell has a lovely quality in this film, of being very feminine while also very strong, and the 'We're not getting back together' was a theme--actually there are many more scenes in which she said it which are cut out of the film, because it was a little, it got to be too much even for me. But she's a terrific actress and I think her chemistry with Bob was very special. She's clearly his equal."
"This was another scene that we did in one master take and kept people moving around and as I recall I wasn't even in the room because there was no place that I could be. I was out in the hallway watching a little monitor, hoping that it was working. We literally see 360 degrees around this room."
"That door in the background as I recall we had a very hard time getting permission to put lights back there."
"Some reason we weren't allowed to see into that room or light it, and now I don't recall what it was that...."
"I think there was a religious--it was a chapel."
"Exactly. Yeah, that's right, you're right. It was a little chapel and they didn't want us to shoot it."
(continued)
"How did we get the lights back there?"
"I think in the end they allowed us to put one in if we did a couple Hail Marys." (laughs)
"If we promised to lead a good life."
"That's right. I'd rather light at 2K than curse the darkness." (laughing)
Note: I believe John is talking about the wattage of the lighting here (viz., 2000 W, or 2kW).
The Pasadena school appears to have been the Mayfield Senior School of the Holy Child Jesus, a "a girls' college preparatory high school".
I was unable to find a photo of the chapel through the doors after a brief search. It seems the administration has remodeled parts of the school in the ensuing years.
"The mirror on the back was actually angled."
"I think we tipped it up or down it was actually something I remember going to see a mansion in Newport, Rhode Island once where they said it was once considered impolite to have a mirror on the wall that reflected people, so they intentionally tipped them up to show the ceilings and stuff, and I always remembered that--and a common movie trick now."
"We were shooting I think wardrobe tests on this actor. We were shooting tests on the projection."
"The projection, yeah."
"And somebody walked in front of the projector with a white shirt and we looked at each other and said 'That's what the actor is gonna wear.'"
"And it's really just mathematical gibberish on that slide that's being projected on him, but the speech he's being, that he's giving, was written for us by one of the world-class mathematicians named Len Adleman at USC whom we gave the task of 'write a speech that only 15 people in the world will truly understand'. And he did. So all the dialogue that Professor Janek gives in this scene is actually stuff that's so smart that none of us have a clue what he's talking about."
"And here we have the great George Hearn, just before his Broadway-starring appearance in Sunset Boulevard. He's a wonderful actor, great musical, comedy, and dramatic actor, who had such a great time playing an expansive Russian diplomat. While we were shooting this movie the Soviet Union collapsed and consequently the business card that we had prepared for him which said, you know, 'Consular Official USSR' had to be redone ..."
(continued)
"... and we put in its place 'Commonwealth of Independent States' which is what they called the USSR for about a minute and a half before even that broke up."
Note: I've tried unsuccessfully to identify the logo on the business card 🤔 Anyone know what it is? It is not the main logo the Commonwealth adopted.
"It's also fun as writers to come up with a character that traditionally in movies would have been a villain: 'The Russian'. And now he actually turns out to be quite a sympathetic and lovely character."
"The woman who approaches Janek is Lee Garlington who has so far been in all 3 of my movies. She is sort of my good luck charm."
"Yeah we went out onto a rooftop in West LA where we had the Sneakers van parked opposite the building where Janek's window is seen. And that's actually Dan Akroyd on the scaffolding out there with a shotgun mic."
"Didn't that van have to get taken up there by a crane or some complicated challenge like that?"
"Absolutely right. We had to crane the van up onto the roof. Because it wasn't actually I think a parking roof."
(continued)
"Right, and then we had to work the schedule around it because we needed the van really soon afterwards but it took a couple of days to get it all off or something."
"Right."
"This is one of those complicated scenes where John and I are on a rooftop across an alleyway from this office. The actors playing Janek and Rhyzkov are in an office and the only way to speak to them really is over a walkie-talkie, so it's actually sort of comp-- it's so difficult to really get the performance you want from somebody ..."
(continued)
and they were, they were wonderful but it would just--it would take too long for me to like go downstairs, walk into their building, take the elevator up, run into the set, and back again."
"And I remember we used a very long lens; it was very slow and this building--as most modern office buildings do--had very heavily-tinted glass so there's an incredible amount of light in that office..."
"It was hot."
"...to even see anything."
(continued)
"It's another reason I didn't run in there." (laughing)
"The actors were frying in there."
"It's a lovely piece of acting by Sidney here. Just this very subtle 'Let me see'. Always cracks me up when I see that." 🙂
"And one of my favorite accidents in the movie is what happens when the curtains are closed and it's something that we saw happen that they close the curtains and bumped up against them and it made this remarkable pattern that--I remember at the time that we all just laughed hysterically, we thought it was the funniest thing we'd ever seen."
"I think you didn't say cut for awhile because we just kept watching the blinds pulsating."
"We let the scene go on and on and on." (laughing)
"Walter Parkes, Larry Lasker, and I wrote this screenplay over the course of about 8 years. I think it was from about 1981 to '89 or so, and um, this was one of the scenes that we spent a lot of time getting right and it was one of the most fun scenes to write because it's all about the repetition of the sound--"I leave message here on service"--that the audience isn't supposed to be concentrating on. The idea is to give them visual things to be looking at, and other concepts ...."
(continued)
"... to be thinking about while they're hearing this other thing over and over and over again, not realizing that that's the clue to what the, where the box is. And it takes the blind guy, Whistler, who can only hear these things to discern that that's the clue."
"And this little bit of dialogue about the faking the Apollo moon landing at Norton Air Force Base was just a little reference to that's where I was stationed when I was in the Air Force making training films, and they did in fact have huge sound stages, but to the best of my knowledge they did not fake the Apollo moon landing there. They faked the landing on Mars there." (laughs)
"This was a fun scene to shoot. It was in an office building in Westwood, because you could just say to the actors, just go for it. Just drive this guy crazy. I also love the idea that in a high tech security environment that if you just say 'Push the goddamn buzzer' somebody will push the goddamn buzzer."
"And again in keeping with the theme that these are low-tech guys in a high-tech world, I love the solution that Bishop comes up with for how to open this lock. All through this sequence when we're shooting Bob, David Strathairn and Sidney Poitier--even though they were not on camera that day--came to the set and were in the next room with little radio microphones feeding him his lines. Very generous."
"That little shot there I remember being a horror show because this van interior was...existed as a set but in that shot you see three of the walls."
"Right"
"And it's sort of working in a submarine, trying to figure out how to get the camera in there with the actors because it's only a few feet wide, the available walking space."
"How did you?"
"I don't remember now how we did that thing, I just remember it took forever. I don't know if we flew a wall or if we just had a little sled dolly."
"And if you look on the office building roof across the street you'll see the van. It was very expensive to get that up there. We want you all to see it." (laughs)
"And I think it's up on blocks because that wall actually blocked most of it, so it had to be raised."
"Right"
"I remember people coming to you and showing you chip design options for quite a while and I don't remember the rejects very well."
"Rejects didn't look very special and finally Ken Pepiot designed this one which was sort of silver-plated and really beautiful and really stood out."
Note: Ken Pepiot is credited as special effects coordinator.
"This was great fun to shoot because Lee is a very talented actress and a wonderful comedian and I think they both had a lot of fun in doing it. I love Bob's reactions. We all too easily forget what a talented comedian he is too."
"The photograph on the door over Bob's left shoulder is a picture called 'Einstein on a Bicycle' and the art department chose that because they thought that is something that a scientist like Janek would have on his wall. Turns out it's copyrighted and we had to actually give credit in the end of the film to the copyright holder of that photograph."
"And now Bob pours on the charm."
"I don't think any audience in any movie theatre ever heard Bob's line, 'Give him ... help.'" (laughs)
"The laughter kind of covered up the next ten seconds."
"We struggled to get the van in this shot, as I recall. We had to get very low."
"Yeah, which we tried to avoid generally."
"Right"
"And this was great fun. We were shooting a party sequence and realized we didn't have any party. We had a lot of people talking. So very late one night, I think I said to you, 'Pick a spot where I can just put them and we'll jump-cut them dancing with each other', and you sort of lit a little area and we told everybody without any advance warning you're going to dance and they all danced differently."
(Continued...)
