"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

"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.

"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 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.

#CommonwealthOfIndependentStates

"I like to think of SNEAKERS as the first post-Cold War film" 🤯

#Sneakers #ColdWar

"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."

#LeeGarlington

"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."

"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)

"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.