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When I think of
science fiction, I think of stories in any medium
that tell us what we could be
and warn us about where we're going.
Every piece of science fiction
that I enjoy works as pure entertainment,
and it also works as a social commentary,
philosophy or inspirational ideas.
It was always a genre that carried with it
a sense of taking the temperature of its own times.
It's a ripe genre, it's full of interesting
twists and offshoots.
I can get you deseases. You'd like that, wouldn't you?
There are so many subgenres that are available to us
and I think really give this kind of rich landscape.
Science fiction storytelling exists from the beginning
of filmmaking and persists through
two centuries.
Images
that we see in cinema today are built on images from movies
like 2001, a space odyssey, Metropolis and things to come.
In the '50s,
sci fi was an extension of science, and science was all about the atom,
and the atom was all about, they're going to blow us up
or we're going to have a wonderful future because of our friend of the atom.
The people doing these science fiction films in the '803,
they cut their teeth on '50s sci fi,
but what they did is they said, we love sci fi for what it represents.
The post atomic scare that stimulated so many of these low budget Saturday
matinee type movies.
They really impacted us as children.
But in a different way than films now in the '703,
films tend to be more socially conscious, more artistically presented.
But let's take a b movie
and just do it as though we're doing an art film, without a happy ending.
The twist
towards the dark, nihilistic sci fi, I think, was largely a response against
technology, government, war, especially in the Vietnam era.
A lot of those dystopian films
were warning about global warming
and the arms race.
You maniacs! You blew it up!
Things that I think made people feel very small
and very out of control. And that seems to really be
what science fiction is about until star wars.
The whole tone of science fiction and films really changes
with Lucas and Spielberg in the '703 and '80s,
and it starts showing us the positive possibilities in our world
as opposed to constantly warning us about all the ways we're messing up.
Spielberg said, "can't we go back to what
I grew up with, which is the beauty of sci fl and imagination?
Let's not dwell on the corrupting influence of technology."
For the next decade or so across the '803,
that amalgamation of science, fiction,
and fantasy, seemed to be the driving force.
Science fiction became direct,
straightfonnard, provocative, clear.
Any idea that anybody had if you set it on another planet or
set it in the future, set it in dystopia, you could get the money to do it.
Now, sci fi was viable box office.
And now the studios are throwing money at the genre
and you're getting the best filmmakers and the best actors,
and they have the funds to take you to other places.
Sci fi truly came of age and exploded
in the '80s.
We are creating machines that mimic human behavior.
The human body, human intelligence.
In saturn 3, you see the biomimicry of Hector,
the machine taking on its human creators ideas and psychopathy.
Certainly, the way
saturn 3 was sold, leaned heavily on alien, robot, science.
All that kind of stuff, but it leaned even more heavily on Farrah fawcett
and that absolutely stunning smile of hers, in the fact that all of us
were enamored of Farrah from Charlie's angels.
I had that poster, everybody had that poster.
And the idea that Farrah fawcett might be wearing something sexy or
nothing at all, definitely got my young self out to see saturn 3.
The movie you got, however, was a completely different movie.
You're quite an event in our lives.
Well, I guess you don't get many drop-ins on satrun 3.
Hardly ever, especially not from earth.
We are on a space station that is slick,
and designed and shiny and colorful, and all the edges are smoothed out.
All of the ideas that might have been initiated
by alien are gone by the time you get to the finish product of saturn 3.
We get to see kirk Douglas naked a lot,
but not Farrah fawcett.
That was kind of fonnard thinking.
Doesn't it disgust you to be used by him?
To be touched by an old man?
Can't you feel the decay?
The notion that he wanted to express his virility,
that he's still a leading man, that he was still an action star.
Kirk Douglas was very particular about that. About that in terms
of the notion of of men, of male movie stars and actors
and the way that they should come off in film.
Abort!
Glad you didn't ask him to shake hands.
It's a complicated film, you got
you got Stanley donen the singin' in the rain director, directing
this sort of science fiction opera with this crazy, oversexed robot.
No! No! No!
He's probably not the right director for that.
The production designer, John Barry, he was probably the correct person.
The scenario was based on his stories.
But kirk didn't like John and so got him fired and had Stanley donen hired.
So you have kirk Douglas, who doesn't like John Barry.
He gets rid of him.
And then you have Stanley donen, who doesn't like Harvey keitel's voice.
Now we have this weird
sort of quasi British voice coming out of Harvey keitel's face.
Why won't you talk?
Why not? What have I done wrong?
All of these decisions just sort of led
to something of a mess of a movie, except for Farrah fawcett.
Kudos to Farrah fawcett
for dealing with all those boys and what was going on there.
It just didn't seem to connect
with the bigger universe in the way that the star wars films had.
No, this was all stuff happening on this space station
between these people and a freaky robot.
Check me.
The whole star wars
experience is a phenomenon.
It opened up horizons in a way
that nobody ever imagined.
I'm going in.
I loved it
the force is strong with this one.
I always felt that George Lucas
was a very unique individual who had a unique point of view.
I often wondered if he knew
what he was really introducing.
The emprie strikes back
coming to your galaxy next summer.
With lando,
I didn't want to make a black character, or a white character. Lando was lando.
It's like Billy Dee to me is Billy Dee.
I want to show you my own personal uniqueness.
How you doin', you old pirate?
It's so good to see you!
I wanted to talk about
a swashbuckling kind of individual.
Welcome, Leia.
That was an honor, to work with kershner.
He was a real actor's director for one thing, so he really understood
the human behavior.
Well, your highness, I guess this is it.
That's right.
Don't get all mushy on me. So long, Princess.
It wasn't just purely based on
this kind of a journey into space.
Punch it!
One of the great things
about playing a kind of a dubious character.
They're not bad people, they're just caught up in situations.
I remember picking my daughter from school,
and the kids would accuse me of betraying hansel.
And I'm right in the middle of the schoolyard
having this debate with these kids.
I had no choice. They arrived right before you did.
I'm sorry.
If you express those characters through a kind of vulnerability,
then I think it makes it more palatable
and much more interesting.
I am your father.
George wanted to keep everything secret,
he wanted everything to be a surprise in the movie.
Unlike keri and Mark, who signed contracts for multiple movies,
Harrison only signed for one movie,
and each movie was a separate contract with him.
George wasn't sure he would come back for jedi.
So that's why, at the end of empire, Han Solo gets frozen in carbonite.
I love you.
I know.
They needed a way, if Harrison
didn't come back for the third movie, how do you explain what happened?
But if he does come back, you defrost him,
and we're all happy.
George is more of an idea person,
that has these great, fantastic visions.
And I was a little bit surprised because he was talking about
the budget for empire strikes back.
And he was trying to figure out
how not to spend the more money than he spent on the first star wars movie.
I'm thinking this guy is this monolith
as far as creativity is concerned.
But here's a guy thinking about
how much money am I spending to put an idea together.
Yeah, it's show business.
Part of the pressure that George was feeling
was because he had financed
empire himself as opposed to having a studio do it.
And when the movie ran over time and budget,
he had to put up more collateral.
And so there was a lot of pressure that, had the movie not been successful,
he could have ended up back at the start.
Echo-station five-seven, we're on our way.
George Lucas
was a gift. He changed the whole world of cinema.
He introduced all of these new ideas.
How do you explain that experience?
It was meant to be.
It changed everything.
Introducing Dorothy r. Stratten, playboy's
playmate of the year, as your favorite gal.
Galaxina.
I couldn't tell you the plot of that at all, it was Dorothy stratten, right?
I mean, that's all you need to know.
She was delightful to watch.
When I look at galaxina, what I see is possibility,
all kinds of possibilities.
Galaxina is a parody movie.
Name's Mr. Spot.
Star Trek, star wars, a little bit of alien.
And all of the movies that were made before it
that were way, way better. At least two tropes exist in the film galaxina.
These sort of representations of the cantina from star wars,
where all of these creatures from all over the universe are.
And the image of that spacecraft coming across the screen,
and going on forever, all kinds of nutty things going on in that movie.
There's one relationship in that movie that works and rings
as true and real. And it's the relationship between galaxina and Stephen mok's
character, he plays Thor.
You're a machine, and I'm a human being.
Which is just another kind of machine really.
They fall in love,
but they can't really be in love because she's an Android.
But she figures out how to correct something
so that she can have human feelings.
I love you, sgt. Thor
those moments between those two actors, are the realest moments in that movie.
In galaxina, we see the first idea
of sex bots in artificial intelligent machines.
How will they feel if they develop self-awareness?
Where is the line? Really pulls at our psychology.
I really think those provocative stories are important for us.
What it all adds up to is something that's not quite as good
as those individual pieces, but those individual pieces
that are stuck in my head,
I will probably remember forever.
I will remember that alien coming out of Avery schreiber's mouth, forever.
Galaxina, sadly, the thing that hangs over it
more than anything is the murder of Dorothy stratten.
It's hard to think of the movie without remembering
what happened to her.
I really appreciate galaxina, and not just because of what happened to Dorothy,
but because there was something suggested in that movie,
that there could have been more there
and there might have been more in the future for her.
The final countdown is about to begin.
The final countdown
is about the USS nimitz, an aircraft carrier in 1980
that gets sent back in time to December 6th, 1941.
That was taken less than an hour ago.
I don't understand, sir. These are pre-world war ii pictures.
Single handedly, with the one aircraft carrier and all the modern technology
they have at their disposal, could absolutely thwart
the attack on Pearl harbor.
The United States of America falls under attack.
Our job is to defend it.
The past, present or future.
Now, the question that the captain and the crew have to face
is, do they do that because they are sworn defenders of the United States,
and this is an enemy?
Or do they allow history to play out as we know it did?
The classic time travel dilemma.
You jump back.
You've now caused this weird ripple effect that you didn't expect.
This is going to create a fracture in the timeline.
We know where all of the mistakes are going to be made for the next 40 years.
And you've got the power to correct them.
You stay out of this.
The final countdown is a great example
of that idea that, you know, do you interfere or don't you?
If we could travel back in time, would we want to change history?
How it would affect the future?
What if you go back in time and it kills the bloodline of your grandparents,
then you never exist.
I still have a gut instinct that things only happened once,
and if they have happened, then there's nothing we can do to change them.
Nor should we try.
There's all these paradoxical ideas that exist in science fiction
that have never been really answered satisfactorily,
because we don't have the science yet to lean one way or another.
It's an interesting enough storyline that draws us in
and makes us think, you know, the ramifications of action or inaction.
This is the United States warship. Or at least, it used to be!
Or will be, or what the hell ever!
Who are you?
Flash Gordon, quarterback, New York jets.
Flash Gordon was true
to the buster crabbe serials and Alex Raymond
comic books.
I think if Nick roeg had done flash Gordon
as the original plan was, it would have been
a completely different movie than the one that Mike Hodges did.
I can hear dino now saying, "no, it is a crazy, don't
do it like this, it is too much dream like, we want with guns and shooting,
and girls with big tits." You know?
Dino de laurentiis.
He was like a svengali.
He had this big vision that the movie mattered
above all else.
Michael Hodges came in three weeks before filming.
Strange object imaged in the imperial vortex.
We ended up
basically improvising quite a bit.
Yeah.
When you improvise, sometimes you get gold.
Go, flash. Go!
The sets were amazing,
the costume was outrageously great.
What was flash Gordon wearing
during the execution scene?
Hot pants, okay? Green leather, hot pants.
Tip of the hat to danilo donati, who was the set and costume designer,
he should have been nominated at least for an academy award.
Pathetic earthlings.
Hurling your bodies out into the void.
Max Von sydow,
his costume was so heavy and difficult, he couldn't
sit down, they had to lean him on a backboard.
Gordon's alive!
Brian blessed. They broke the mold
when he came to this planet.
To the death!
In the scene
with the moving disc with Sam and Timothy Dalton,
Brian blessed is just making one crack after another.
I was laughing so hard.
Why are prisoners tortured?
And the scene where I'm on the table and he pinches
my bottom was not in the script, it was a Brian blessed special.
I have my suspicions.
One of the amazing things about flash Gordon,
it was the sweetness of it, the innocence.
Oh, it's so crazy!
And that sweetness allows for the room to have all these double entendres.
Some adult content, subtle and not-so-subtle.
Ming has his magic ring that causes me to have a lot of pleasure.
But it works because I'm this innocent who just doesn't quite know
what's going on.
Did you ever see such repsonse?
No, truly. She even rivals your daughter.
Look at ornella, that seduction scene
where she's sitting on my lap, I kept telling the director,
I'm not really getting this.
I need another take, okay?
Oh my god, this girl's really turning me on.
I didn't quite get that. Think it again.
Oh, yeah,
that took it to a whole nother level.
I was told in the beginning dino did not want queen.
He was quoted as saying, “no, that's a not for my movie."
Queen not only complimented flash Gordon,
it brought tremendous value.
It was rock and roll, it was festive, it was lyrical,
and that's what the movie is.
This is not a dark movie, it's a cartoon strip,
so it was supposed to be energetic and fun.
It is what it is.
Just sit back and enjoy being transported.
If you're faced with any storm in your life,
you just call upon flash Gordon.
It's timeless.
Yeah!
If you were a kid coming of age in the 1980s,
you were worried that nuclear war would start.
We were at the height of the cold war in the 1980s.
The height of an understanding of what nuclear technology could do
and its potential for devastation.
I remember as a child, we lived near an air force base.
Four bells meant get under the desk.
- Duck! - Duck and cover.
Duck and cover. Duck and cover yourselves.
Duck and cover.
And they're telling you that's going to save you from a new killer attack.
Duck and cover. Attaboy, Tony.
That flash means: Act fast.
This was a given, this was going to happen.
So, of course, we all had nightmares, I had very vivid ones.
Superpowers were going head to head every other week in the news,
and we entered the '80s with enormous apprehension.
If the Soviet union is attacked, we will answer with all our nuclear might.
What science fiction films did at that time,
I think was gave us an outlet, a catharsis,
by extrapolating the potential for devastation.
By the time you had Reagan in the us, and Thatcher in the UK,
and you had sort of the latter era Soviet leadership,
there was enormous western exceptionalism that invaded all of the art.
So it wasn't surprising that
the audiences escaped as a means of processing fears and ideas
about the geopolitical situation, but also the political situation at home,
which wasn't great either.
I was in the air force for most of the 19803.
I was stationed in a nuclear silo in north Dakota for a portion of time.
These fears were palpable.
So when we went to see movies like wargames, firefox,
these films tried to be as realistic, speculative
but as realistic as possible.
I'm speaking to the individual who has stolen the property of the ussr.
We're getting the royal treatment.
So whether you're talking about a movie
like Superman iv, a bond movie or a movie like weird science where a nuclear missile
comes up through the floor in the bedroom, the cold war is right there in the film.
When we saw these movies, we didn't have to be so scared
we could let somebody else handle the problem.
Wolverines!
And something really drove James Cameron
as a filmmaker, nuclear war, and that whole idea is in all his films.
It's a background to skynet and the Terminator.
It's there in aliens.
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.
And it's a motif in Cameron films, the mushroom clouds.
And by Terminator 2, you get that shocking dream sequence.
And it really was in your face by that point.
It wasn't a metaphor anymore. It really was James Cameron going,
"this is what it's going to be like, people."
Do you know exactly what your family would do if an attack came?
On the other side of it,
you got parables like threads, which was made in britain
about what happens if a nuclear attack actually went off.
The real threat
of nuclear armageddon was never very far away,
so when the day after comes out, it took
what was an existential fear for me and it gave it visuals.
It won't be pretty, it won't be fast,
I mean, the lucky ones, will die out, right?
Nothing on network television like this had ever been shown.
If you have a nuclear war,
this is what it's going to be like on a good day.
The day after was a huge television phenomenon.
It showed that you could do the darker story.
It was painful to watch because the radiation
was definitely going to get to us and kill us at some point.
The day after is the most watched movie made for television ever.
100 million people watched it in one night, so I was quite stunned.
But there was one person's mind who was changed overnight,
and that happened to be the president of the United States, Ronald Reagan,
who had come to power believing
that there was such a thing as a winnable nuclear war.
I spent the '80s in Thatcher's London.
I was very interested in getting Reagan out of office.
My fear of what these
politicians can do, the people that I cannot control.
I focus my energies on what I can do in my own little corner of the world.
We've been living
with the cold war since world war ii,
generations have lived under that threat, and I don't think one generation
is any more immune to that threat than another.
Today, you know, we're worried about the very slow end of the world
from, you know, environmental things or terrorist acts.
I think ever since we created the bomb, the world has been different.
People were just channeling
their beliefs, their fears or nightmare scenarios into these stories.
And now we're at an age where in the modern day,
it's all about lack of privacy and how the Internet and the machines
are going to take over.
And we're going to become dehumanized to the point
where we're just slaves to the machines.
It's an interesting cycle to have walked through.
In the '803, there were several
shrinking movies, which I guess somehow that became funny.
Honey, I shrunk the kids, the incredible shrinking woman and innerspace.
And they were all good.
Now, how about a big hand with a little lady?
The incredible shrinking woman.
To take on the book
incredible shrinking man.
The top news story of the day continues to be the incredible shrinking woman.
I'm sure there must be some logical explanation.
The satire on advertising.
Galaxy blue. Galaxy blue.
She's a tiny housewife,
and she has to deal with all these products coming at her.
The glue, the solvent, your bubble bath.
Talcum powder, shampoo...
He was making fun of these products
that are fed to them like this is going to make your life better.
It's called
tre natural.
And what started to happen
with the women's movement is they were going,
I don't want to make my life at home better that much.
I want to be out of here.
Making dinner or doing the laundry is not all
I want to do.
Judith, I don't think this is such a good idea.
Lily tomlin, she's perfect because she's a comedian
and she can embody the craziness of that. She has this insane range.
And you better lay off of buttons, fester.
I'm in it for like a very short amount of time.
I'm advertising soap, but they cut it.
When Lily hit in the Barbie dream house, it's so great
because that's an iconic thing from girls childhood to be the size of your dolls.
It's all about the insignificance.
Off the frutniture!
And what are you grinning at, you big creep?
The dolls,
if they were bigger than you, life size,
they would be terrifying.
Lily gets smaller
and smaller, and then falls into the garbage disposal,
which is, first of all, everyone's nightmare, like when you drop something
to the garbage disposal and you have to reach in,
and take it out.
There's like a built in terror.
That's the big, actual
visual point that she's not a factor anymore.
She's just doing herjob and she's becoming smaller and smaller as a person.
I'm going to lose my mind!
And it's the war that women then started to feel like
this isn't my life, I don't want this to be my life.
I'm sick of products! I'm sick of advertising!
You're talking about my work!
See, I love things that have themes like that.
More champagne?
Vance, look what you did!
Outland. The ultimate enemy is still man.
An underrated classic from early '803 science fiction.
Sean Connery plays a federal marshal who was sent to this backwater
mining colony on a moon of Jupiter.
He discovers a drug operation where the drugs that are being used
by the miners and sold to the miners to make them boost their productivity
is actually killing them.
Get it off!
I was desperate to make a western.
Certainly after people like George Lucas figured out, wait a second,
the western is not dead, it's alive, it's in outer space, so I modeled it
after dodge city, the frontier aspect of it, the harshness and the danger
and the greed, and the fact that if you just stepped outside, you died.
That's a completely conceivable future where we actually go out and we actually
mine asteroids and mine planets and stuff. And it's a corporate entity.
We're on our way to becoming the leading con amalgamate operation.
And everyone in this room has received the bonus checks to prove it.
It's a social commentary about how to control economies
and how to control corporate people.
We are all professionals.
I'm sure we are.
I first wrote it when I was at universal.
I remember ned tanen read the script and said,
"I like it, we'll make it if Eastwood will do it."
And I said, "well, you'll make the phone book if Eastwood will do it."
Sean Connery will...
He'll bring Connery to whatever he plays.
Zero ego about anything to do
with him and total ego about how to make the movie good.
So every discussion you had with him was how to make the script better.
How to make the movie better.
He was a remarkable guy.
There's a whole machine that works,
because everybody does what they're supposed to.
I did write one
line where I said, I can't wait for him to say it.
And it's at the end of a very big chase.
He's got a guy cornered in the kitchen
and then he fires his gun all around the guy.
Think it over.
It's like butter with him.
When they dig more oil, the company's happy.
When the company's happy, I'm happy.
I first knew
Peter boyle from seeing a movie called Joe.
So the first film that I ever wrote, I got to know Peter
and thought he was terrific. And I needed somebody with some grit.
If you're looking for money, you're smarter than you look.
If you're not, you're a lot dumber.
Frances sternhagen.
Hello.
It's the drug.
You just won a prize.
The part originally was written for a man.
I said, I want to cast a woman and make no change
in the script.
Almost everybody here doesn't have both oars in the water,
as far as I'm concerned.
Everything she said was a little different,
everything she said was her way.
There hasn't been so much excitement in this heap for some time.
When it came to outland,
the idea of a mining conglomerate seemed feasible to me.
I wanted you to see the kind of hostility of the environment
and who are the people who would be doing it.
And why would they be doing it.
I never won an Oscar, except one of the things that I wanted
more than anything else was to do a film that would be parodied in mad magazine.
And they did outland in mad magazine.
I was thrilled, to me the highest compliment I could be paid.
You and I know that when anybody says which it's the best Superman,
they say ii.
You haven't seen the best part.
Superman ii. The adventure continues.
Superman ii remains about truth, justice and the American way.
There is no doubt about that.
It is also about the villains coming back and maybe getting Superman,
and that's the best part.
Superman!
There is no question about the fact that Christopher reeve
embodied Superman, I just think he was extraordinary.
I believe this is your floor.
He was a little dorky.
He was more like Clark Kent than Superman.
Terence stamp remains the sexiest man on earth.
Kneel before Zod.
Jack looked like Jack,
all the time, I hasten to add.
We moved a certain way
and we moved with a fluidity.
Three villains flying along, they'd got the tracks
up in the roof like railway tracks up there.
Somebody hadn't quite worked out that when you go round a corner,
the momentum swings you out.
So the three of us start off very well,
then we go round a corner and then we all get tangled up together and there we hang.
Stepping on the moon,
it was the most extraordinary set.
What kind of a creature are you?
Just a man.
A man?
Do you know that scene where I kick the astronaut in the groin?
When I went to Japan to promote the film,
they cut that scene because it was too violent.
A woman kicking a man like that just doesn't do, does it?
Margot kidder
absolutely made contact when she had to clip me
because we tried it a few times and it just didn't look too real.
You're a real pain in the neck!
She got me so much that I went over the edge.
It's like, “got the shot,
moving on, thank you very much."
We weren't killed off, we just disappeared, if you like.
To be able to come back.
There was definitely speculation about that.
Superman I and ii, we shot them back to back.
With Richard donner, who we all adored.
We took a break because at a certain point we'd shot so much of Superman ll,
they needed to concentrate on Superman I.
Of course they did.
I literally got back on the set and it was Richard Lester.
To reshoot the same sequence
with two incredibly different directors was the best experience of my life.
Consequently, when
it came to selling Superman ii, it was me.
Warner brothers put me through my paces to see if I could
talk about the film without spilling the beans.
The fact that they changed directors
was just something we never talked about in the marketing of the film.
That was a more naive period where people weren't
so into all the nuances of filmmaking.
At the beginning, it was marvelous and glorious, and we all loved each other.
By the end, it was just we'd all had enough, I think.
I often think of the enormity
of certainly the impact of Superman.
Everybody has seen Superman. Around the world,
whether it be on television, whatever it is, it's a love fest.
Before we lived in a dystopian reality,
I really enjoyed dystopian science fiction.
John carpenter's escape from New York.
The greatest escape of them all is about to blow the future apart.
Escape from New York
actually started as John carpenter's first screenplay out of film school.
After he had done a few, studio really wanted to work with him
and said, basically, what do you got?
And he went to the closet, brought out the script.
They loved the idea.
He called me.
He said, "I really need another mind
here to help me get through this and make sense of it."
So I think it was a valuable collaboration.
You go in, find the president, bring him out in 24 hours,
and you're a free man.
24 hours, huh?
Escape from New York was the biggest movie I'd made up to that time.
It was basically the same crew and some of the same cast
I'd worked with before, so it was fun to do.
It was hard work trying to keep everything light
if we can.
It was like a huge family
working with actors that he loves both personally and professionally.
He knows that he can get the performance out of them that he wants.
And they have much more fun working
if you're, you know, everything is calm, and here we go.
St. Louis, which was the beginning of the shoot.
They shot much of the exterior material. St. Louis at the time
looked like post-apocalyptical, you know, United States.
You didn't have to do a lot of window dressing.
Nothing was done in New York other than being on Liberty island.
Kurt was always known and grew up as a Disney kid,
but John can see into what the potential is in people.
I recognized Kurt early on when we did Elvis.
This guy's got it.
He really has it.
Just knowing Kurt, you know
he has the potential for doing something that's a little darker and physical.
Love the character of Maggie.
Balls out chick, you know,
and I was used to playing that kind of role.
You're plissken? I heard you were dead.
I think her entire moral character
is exhibited in the last scene, where she reaches
out her hand to snake for the gun and she fires at the Duke.
Thatjust said everything to me about her.
Escape from New York
really, its philosophical bent was it was a nihilist film.
It had a nihilist character it had a nihilist ending,
but it was also done in a way that was tongue in cheek.
We're going to go far in this direction and have fun with it.
Don't kill yourself after you see this film.
You're going to kill me now, snake?
I'm too tired.
Maybe later.
If you want to know who would win a fight between snake plissken,
Jack Burton or rj macready, snake plissken would win the fight
hands down.
He's a bad ass, that's why.
A universe of magic.
Heavy metal.
Heavy metal,
the movie, was a very interesting experience for young, 14 year old me.
Yeah, my worldview shifted after watching that film.
I was a fan of the magazine,
a fan of the art, fan of the storytelling.
It played into my interests in a very natural way.
I said, "it would be great as an animated film."
My powers continue.
It showed you the possibility of animation and sci fi and more sophisticated ideas.
Beautiful, but it's also really subversive
and countercultural.
I told you, I'm an American citizen. I just lost my papers or something.
Goddamn legal aliens.
The source material, the heavy metal stories
really in themselves had a kind of level of explicitness
that was freeing, I think, for the artists.
I saw that as something that was quite fun
and delicious.
I'm afraid that I'll come home one day and find you screwing the toaster.
You'll just have to trust me.
Gerald potterton was a really fine animation director in Canada.
I sort of enlisted him as kind of a
central filmmaking group to tell this story.
Len blum and Dan goldberg
who I had worked with on meatballs,
they came up with that sort of magical sort of deadly green ball from outer space
as a way of sort of linking the stories together.
Someone always finds me.
My favorite sequence in heavy metal is den.
Can I slit his throat, your majesty?
Yes.
I liked the heavy metal magazine.
It's an actually an adept recreation of that vibe.
And if I refuse?
If you refuse, you die. She dies. Everybody dies.
Sounded reasonable to me.
The 8-1? Bomber that crashes on the island with the zombies,
that's probably my favorite individual vignette from the film.
Nose dive!
The two space pilots
that get high on the space, cocaine is also a funny one.
Taarna,
as a huge moebius fan, I wanted to sort of give him all due respect.
Maybe she wants to fight.
I want her dead!!!
What I remember
about heavy metal is the music in that film.
All of the bands that have a song in that film,
I have cranked that soundtrack so many times over the years.
I wore out so many cassette tapes.
Yeah, the future is now pretty well illustrated by musk
sticking a Tesla into space, like the opening of the heavy metal movie.
I wish we could have finished it in a slightly more complete way, I mean,
we were working under the gun in terms of timetable, in terms of budget,
but I'm still quite taken by how still effective it was.
I think we were just really ahead of the curve
in all sorts of ways.
Okay, sucker. Hand over your cash!
Now!
One of the ways
you can say whether a film has succeeded or failed
is can you imagine a life for the characters
and the movie itself beyond the frame you've seen.
World building became enormously important during '803 science fiction.
So you have concept design and production design.
You have to go and build interiors, build these kind of planets
physically on sets, and creating locations that work.
You have concept designed around
props and imagined future technology.
Present day idea is extrapolated, and this thing goes on into, of course, costume,
how do spaceships move and travel in the future.
It's the natural evolution
of a storyteller to think beyond the things that inspire them,
imagining the possibilities of taking it to the next step.
For directors like Spielberg
and Cameron and Ridley Scott, this became almost a challenge
to create an accurate picture of the future in different ways.
Make you know, a straightfonnard film extraordinary.
Something's there.
I love the worlds that existed in all of these science fiction movies,
and I wanted to explore them as fully as I could.
Very satisfying to work on pictures like that
where you bring a whole universe to life for a film audience.
Usually when I'm hired,
nobody else is hired except for the director,
and we start discussing the script and I hire illustrators and storyboard artists.
We start to develop a look for the picture,
which is very important because he can see his vision now
of what this picture is and the studio, they start to see,
"wow, this is where our 100 million dollars is going to go.
We're going to have that". And they get excited.
Something that is, of course, hugely important in science fiction
because it doesn't exist anywhere around us, are the visual
designers, the guys that decide, what the buildings, what the landscape
should look like, the objects, the spaceships, the creatures.
It's all choices.
Syd mead, Ron Cobb, Ralph mcquarrie, just the visionaries of science fiction,
and they have dreamt up so many iconic things.
They're quite instrumental in bringing life to a lot of
what goes on on the screen.
In science fiction, a lot of the things
that you're going to see are visual effects, those things don't
exist in reality, you know, warp drives and spinners.
So we have to invent sounds that don't exist in reality.
My job is to ensure that you hear everything that you do see.
Did you see that?!
It's really
the sound underneath it coming up out of the floor
and shaking you to your core.
That's all encompassed in this term I call universe building.
I need to create the Sonic universe that we take for granted,
such that when you go to the cinema, you feel as though you're
in a believable environment, even if it's in an unbelievable context.
The genius of star wars, is it just imbued character
into everything, into its planets, into cities, into its characters,
obviously, nothing star wars touched didn't involve character and feel.
So the falcon, which is the heart of all great movie spaceships,
became an extension of Han Solo.
She may not look like much, but she's go it where it counts, kid.
I've made a lot of special modifications myself.
And then you have the complete opposite
end with films like mad Max
and their version of spacecraft is a vehicle.
Weapons.
The classic ones in star wars are the blaster versus the lightsaber,
the lightsaber represents the old order of kind of grace
from the past.
An elegant weapon
for a more civilized age.
Then you have James Cameron,
you know, he's about the physicality of armament.
And you go to something like Star Trek.
It's a cleaner universe, and all the uniforms are kind of coded
by rank, so it's much more about
a military organization.
Costumes, of course, are a great ingredient of science fiction.
I mean, the opportunity they give to costume designers to imagine
the impossible, a wonderful opportunity to be creative.
None of the work that any of us do is the end result.
None of it.
It all is part of a process
and we're all in this together.
These brilliant filmmakers give us amazing, astonishing work,
but our brains will build much more than they can possibly do,
and that's what they should be doing.
They're kind of lighting a match to a touch paper and going, okay, off you go.
You know, dream up the other elements of this world.
Imagine for yourselves what these planets are like.
They are the things that stay with you.
What's going on on the other side of the door?
If you're a movie geek and you don't understand
the significance of 1982, you have to turn in your movie nerd card.
The post-apocalyptic genre
is pretty much defined by the mad Max movies.
The road warrior.
A kind of harsher, cooler vision of science fiction,
it's like a western. Barren world where petrol
is the only commodity.
Just walk away. Give me your pump,
the oil, the gasoline, and the whole compound.
They did what they needed to do to survive.
They were working
in a genre of picture called the exploitation picture.
That's how they got funded.
Action, adventure, exploding cars, violence,
mayhem and the low budget seemed to be a challenge rather than an obstacle.
I am really attracted to that sort of bootstrapping kind of storytelling.
Good dog. Nice doggy.
George Miller is an amazing director.
George had built a universe, this dystopian future
that mad Max lived within.
You want to get out of here?
You talk to me.
George had flashed it all out.
It's not just a matter of going out and shooting a lot of cars being flipped
and people dressed up strangely and mohawk bikers running
round and screaming.
There was a definite
heart to everything that George did in that movie.
George Miller gave me all the tools that I needed
to be wez, and I'm nothing like that character.
I mean, there's no way in god's earth that I can ever be wez.
You! You can run but you can't hide!
They always used to say to me,
“just do it at 150%, we can bring it down to 100."
What he wanted was this punk rock version of science fiction.
It's unthinkable that a mad Max film would do what
a fast and furious film does and just throw in cgi.
Now they worry about us knowing the stunts we've done for real
and that kind of sense of violence that came with that.
We didn't use any
special effects of that one that was in camera.
Safety was a Paramount concern.
The vehicle I'm climbing onto, which has 16 wheels,
is going to run over me if I slip.
One of the stunt guys that was on it would just grab me.
For a decade, that was all about the future
and tech and computers and sci fi.
It's stripped all of that away.
It's very prescient if you look at where we're going with the climate crisis.
If you look at where we're going with the climate crisis and how tribalism
is sort of already taking root and people are picking sides.
You have defied me!
You will know the vengeance of the lord humungus!
Road warrior was a warning of where we were headed.
They weren't just doing a film, they were out there
showing people the dysfunction that we were headed for.
That we're there.
When star wars came out,
my dad was saying, "I think we're going to get a call from Paramount
and they're going to want us back.
Wait and see."
To dad, the motion picture was a disappointing film on a number of levels.
Star Trek is not as visionary as 2001.
It's not as exuberant as star wars.
Most of the industry thought that after the poor reception of the first star
trek film, that was going to be pretty much the end of the franchise.
It wasn't until the Nick meyer showed up, that things got back on track.
Star Trek ll
the wrath of Khan
a lot of my choices
were kind of in reaction to Star Trek the motion picture,
I wanted things to be more confined, more submarine like.
Torpedo's ready, sir.
Star Trek ii was classic storytelling.
You had a wonderful actor,
Ricardo montalban, Khan.
Why?
Yes, he was a little bit over the top.
But it called for that.
And, you know, bill is no slouch when it comes
to emoting.
Khan!!!
They were a great combination. The unstoppable force
and the immovable object.
They're locking phasers. Raise shields. Fire!
Higher!
And that's what you want.
You want that kind of friction.
Higher.
They were always at each other's throats.
With terrific character building and terrific storytelling.
I didn't think we could do better.
And who do we have here?
Midshipman first class. Peter Preston, engineer's mate, sir!
It was the most tension thick set I've ever been on.
It was a big film because of the risk Paramount was taking,
even doing the second film given how the first one was received.
As a matter of cosmic history,
it has always been easier to destroy than to create.
Bill was always acting like kirk.
He paraded around the set.
He seemed pompous all the time, and I just realized that he was just trying
to stay in character, and I think Leonard was doing very much the same thing.
Any chance to go aboard the enterprise.
George takei was my favorite.
Every single time George was finished shooting, the door would burst open.
All of a sudden we would hear "sulu got his close up today.“
and posture like - like a superhero, "sulu looked pensively to the right today",
creating some levity on the set, which was desperately, desperately, desperately
needed.
I need warp speed in three minutes or we're all dead.
Finding out that Spock actually does die was ovennhelming.
I thought they can't do this.
They can't do this. But before the film came out,
everybody knew that Spock was going to die.
We started getting threats about "if Spock dies, you die."
This is all before the Internet, so how people heard about this
I have no idea.
The idea of this demise of Spock,
which dad just thought was an interesting idea dramatically,
he wasn't even thinking about the repercussions.
They thought that maybe this was going to be the last film.
They're going to be two films and then be done with the franchise.
Live long, and prosper.
He had
much misgivings after that and regret.
Oh, by the end, it was like, whoa.
Spock is really going to be dead.
And I said, "hell yeah, he's got to be dead.
Othennise, we've taken advantage of thousands of people for whom
this is really important stuff.
And we're going to say at the end 'oh folks, it was just a dry hustle.'"
that's terrible.
And I fought it tooth and nail,
that coffin on the planet,
and I think I was probably wrong.
Death was never really death,
it was always one eye on the box office in the next incarnation of it.
I always kind of looked down my nose at that.
There's plenty of room.
They asked me if I wanted to do Star Trek ill.
And I said, "what is that going to be about?"
And they said, "well, it's about, you know, Spock comes back", I go
"resurrection.
I don't think I know how to do resurrection."
So I didn't do it.
There was a very personal,
intimate nature to a lot of the very grandiose storytelling
in the '803, and it was that contrast that often made them work.
A lot of that can be attributed to Spielberg.
Steven Spielberg's et. The extra terrestrial.
E.t., especially when you're a child, is such
a roller coaster because you go through so many different emotions.
Can you say e.T.?
Definitely a tear jerker.
Eliot.
When he is hugging him and saying
goodbye, I'm crying, I'm crying.
I cry every time I see it, every time.
This was supposed to be Steven's little film in between
all his big blockbusters.
All of his films are actually intensely personal films.
He grew up in a broken home.
His father left, his parents got divorced, it had a very traumatic effect on him.
He's making personal films about his own life,
just that the kind of canvas is a bigger one.
Everything was changing
at that time within our society, around the family.
I'm proud that I was able to portray
one of those four strong mothers.
Mommy, he can talk!
Of course he can talk. I'll be right back, in 10 minutes. Stay there.
I felt like I was honoring my own mom.
Steven, in a lot of ways is a child.
That's why I think he responds and understands the kids
so well.
Only little kids can see him.
Give me a break.
There are certain movies that are just so raw and honest
in their interpretation of youth, and the kid ensemble in e.T.
Is one of those.
E.t. Found home.
My god, he's talking now.
We used Reese's pieces
instead of M&M's, because M&M's turned us down,
and said "we don't think we want to be involved with an alien.“
oh my god.
Would you wanted to be the guy at M&M's
who turned down e.T.
Back in the '803, there were these latchkey kids
where you were allowed to go out and run through the forest.
"Back by sunset, darling."
Definitely a different time.
Suburbia,
your parents were not around you, involved in your world.
The adults were these just these things out there outside of the frame.
No TV.
The scene where Henry walks down
and is showing e.T. All the toys, Steven said, "bring all your toys."
So those were all Henry's real toys.
I think jaws was probably placed in there.
The shark eats the fish. Nobody eats the shark.
I distinctly
remember the first day I walked onto the sound stage.
There was a connection.
Steven did the voice when we shot.
Drew was very young, she really couldn't
distinguish the difference between reality and fantasy.
We would put et. In a corner when he wasn't working well,
she would be over talking to him.
So Steven had two guys
whose job it was to at all times
be on e.T. Patrol so that he could come alive and gertie
would still not have to suspend that, that belief.
We have to shoot his death scene.
I stooped down and I said, "hi drew.
We're going to go shoot the scene where e.T. Is dying,
but e.T. Is just acting like we're acting, right?
He's not really dying."
She goes, "I know, Dee.
Do you think I'm stupid?"
So I picked her up and we walked in.
She took one look at e.T,
and went, "he's dying!"
Steven's going, "roll it, roll it."
Clear!
We're losing him!
The message of the film itself
was all about love and friendship and connection.
It surpasses our brains and goes straight to our heart.
The audience was ready for it.
The world was ready for it.
And literally, it's our generation's
wizard of oz.
Right
here.
The thing about blade runner
that is so powerful for me is just the visual storytelling.
The production design, the cinematography,
the choreography is so outstanding,
it's so beautiful.
It looks really cool,
but it is everything we have warned you against.
A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies.
Ridley Scott's brother,
frank, had died, and one of the reasons Ridley Scott made blade runner
because he was trying to work his grief out, the only way he knew
which was making a film. So it was going to be imbued with
that darkness.
Replicants are like any other machine. They're either a benefit or a hazard.
If they're a benefit it's not my problem.
It's about our own life spans.
You were made as well as we could make you.
But not to last.
The light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long.
If we create a slave race, does that make us god,
what is our moral duty to that?
What makes us human? Is it memory?
Incredibly detailed themes about existence.
How can it not know what it is?
Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell. 'More human than human' is our motto.
I love the replicants.
I think, Sebastian, therefore I am.
Because they're the most human characters in the film.
They've got the most life to them, and it's kind of an irony.
My birthday is April 10, 2017. How long do I live?
Four years.
Something is very human about them, self-preservation,
wanting to matter, beyond the role as the slave
or as a second class citizen, I mean, this really is
anecdotal.
You think I'm a replicant, don't you?
I felt that my character, Rachel,
was the heart and soul of that picture.
You play beautifully.
Walking in to do blade runner, I thought I was going to meet
Han Solo. Harrison could be funny on a dime if he wanted to be.
But he doesn't take prisoners.
He say you blade runner.
Tell him I'm eating.
Rediker had a certain sort of dynamo personality,
and the character did as well, and one of my favorite lines is after
he gets hit in the head, he goes, "that's the spirit!" You know.
That's the spirit!
And he made it very iconic.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it?
I said to Ridley, why the unicorn?
And he says, “well,
I think I'm going to make another movie after this about unicorns.
And I don't think this character is really human and I think he's not human."
And I went, "really?"
I don't think they ended up making that the case because I don't think
the executives felt that you could have a leading man that wasn't human.
I remember seeing blade runner at a theater
thinking to myself, my god, what is that narration?
It's horrible.
They don't advertise for killers in the newspaper. That was my profession.
Ex-cop.
It looked like somebody had
fooled around with it other than a director.
Replicants weren't supposed to have feelings.
Neither were blade runners.
Ridley Scott shared with me
the studio was so concerned that no one was going to know
what kind of movie they were watching, that they insisted
that he put the narration up at the beginning.
This is what he said to me.
He and Harrison conspired with each other to make it the worst piece of narration
they could possibly record in order to get the studio to say,
"we can't even use this, it's just so awful."
The report would be 'routine retirement of a replicant'.
Which didn't make me feel any bettter about shooting a woman in the back.
But they ended up using it.
The precedent hadn't been set for a film like blade runner.
I think that was probably ahead of its time.
That's sort of the brilliant part about Ridley,
he's constantly thinking and imagining and gripping things up in his mind,
and that's what makes him the artist that he is.
His brain went there.
Like
tears
in rain.
The good guys always win!
Even in the '803.
Ace hunter,
who I played was just the ultimate good guy.
Hal needham always said it's very simple.
It's the good guys against the bad guys.
The original script was more like a real shoot em up, gi. Joe,
you know, slaughter the enemy kind of movie.
And hal said, "no, no, I don't want to do that."
You can't go up against blade runner with megaforce
and think that you're going to have that same audience.
You know, our audience was twelve year olds.
Mattel toys was very influential in terms of how these vehicles
would be designed, colors and shapes.
Primary objective, is to trick guerera to cross the border,
bringing him in your territory at a predetermined time and place.
Hal needham,
his wife saw me in pirates of penzance on stage,
and she went home and said to hal, “I've got your ace hunter right here."
When they offered me the part, we had to make ace hunter
look exactly like the pirate king in the pirates of penzance,
from the headband to the beard to the hair, this sort of swagger
and slightly over-the-top superhero attitude which I like to call overacting.
The ace hunter
outfits and all of the outfits were designed by mattel toys.
There wasn't a costume designer on this movie,
which is so totally unusual.
Spandex, right?
I think I was stoned most of the time, if you want to know the truth.
And then the ad would come tap me on the shoulder and say,
"oh, listen, we need you in an hour."
Just pour me in the outfit.
My guys so international in their makeup.
All the characters in megaforce were one dimensional characters.
And that's part of the fun of it, because that's what makes it
that sort of cartoon.
But I'll tell you son, we did raise some kind of hell!
Edward mulhare, probably better known aftennards for knight rider,
putting it together that international fighting for his secretively.
He probably didn't pay his taxes.
And persis khambatta played Zara.
It's too bad that she wasn't prettier. Huh?
Jesus, she was gorgeous
and she had her hair.
Kirk unit.
I always thought we were going to make
a megaforce ii and a megaforce III. When megaforce I took a dump,
we never got to the point of that.
Megaforce deeds, not words I think was going to be the name of the second one.
The script is still out there somewhere.
When anybody mentions megaforce, they just make fun of it.
You never make a movie thinking it's going to be a cult movie.
Who even knew about cult movies when we were doing
rocky horror picture show?
It's not Hamlet, for god sakes.
Tron
he is a programmer,
but he gets sucked into this world and ends up taking the whole system down.
Woo hoo. Little guy.
What a concept.
What if we went down in there and it was actually a world?
I auditioned for star wars.
I didn't get that one.
I looked at this and I said, well, it kind of looks like space. Okay.
I felt a part of a pioneering effort.
And Steven lisberger, the creator of this, I call him Yoda.
Everything was hanging on this.
That's a lot of responsibility.
We could miserably fail.
Or we could wildly succeed.
If you look at the performances by Jeff Bridges, Bruce boxleitner,
Cindy Morgan, who had to act in front of nothing.
So what am I looking at?
Okay, you're looking at the solar sailer.
Here's a sketch.
We wore hockey
helmets and motocross shoulder pads.
We were wearing what a male ballet dancer would wear.
It was probably the early thong, male thong.
Tron was a warrior.
He dominated the game grid.
Who's that guy?
That's tron. He fights for the users.
I would get my frisbee and we'd play with our discs like
just the battles and stuff and pretend I had a light cycle.
They loved the light cycles.
I never saw it.
It was a stick in front of me with a crossbar.
We were all standing there and they kind of
we bent over.
And that was it.
And I did the whole chase like that.
Finish the game!
David Warner, who played the villain sark,
who I had to have my final big battle with, was not a physical guy.
So he had to be doubled through most of it.
People were encouraged
to put what they call easter eggs.
One of the compositors had put in pac-man.
We loved it.
The solar sailer going over the landscape
and seeing the outline of Mickey mouse.
What a great idea.
Alan
where did you hear that name?
Well, that's your name, isn't it?
Name of my user.
There's a theological element to tron from the perspective
of the programs inside the computer, and that question is,
are the users real?
The user even wrote you!
No one user wrote me. I'm worth millions of their man-years.
Should we believe in the users
and use it to resist the oppression of the master control program?
It becomes this meditation on faith, where science
and theology collide.
If you are a user.
And everything you've done has been according to the plan, right?
You wish.
When I saw the final product,
I felt like a proud father.
And it was basically f you to the rest of Hollywood.
You thought we couldn't do it?
Yeah.
Well, how do you like us now?
For those kids
in all those arcades throughout the country, in the world,
they got it, and I knew then that we had a revolutionary thing.
It's not going to be appreciated now, but it will be.
End of line.
The moviegoing experience
became something that started way before you could actually go see the movie,
a movie is a productjust like Coca-Cola is a product.
I did it again. Catch the wave. Coke.
It's putting the name in your head
so that you will think about it and feel interested in it.
You have to remember
if it's at all possible, that in the 1980s there was no such thing as the Internet.
What we knew of future films was given to us by the lobby of the cinema
where we were currently going to see a film.
And it was a thrilling thing.
There was that little moment where you looked at the poster
and you started to make the film in your head as you looked at it.
All we had to go on was the title,
the tagline and the imagery. I remember that first great image
from star wars: Luke holding the lightsabers evocative of medieval,
whether it's the Tom young version or the hildebrandt brothers version.
It was such a powerful image, and still is.
Back in those days,
movie posters were legitimate works of art.
Now we know them.
You know, it's kind of great range of artists.
Bob peak who did all the Star Trek posters, drew struzan,
who's now a legend.
And Robert mcginnis and John purkey and others.
It's a great range of artists who have become cult
figures and the whole idea of science fiction poster art
has become a collectible and desirable in its own right.
Brilliant marketing,
the Michelangelo picture has so much meaning to us.
I thought it was a brilliant representation of that.
Tron was a poster that was very important to me.
Great visual idea.
The thing had a fabulous poster.
For me, really, the next level
in terms of poster art is the vhs box, because when you went into into
video stores, that's what you were using to make your choices.
A movie that had been playing to crickets in theaters
was now a movie that people thought, 'oh, this must have been a big hit.'
I think partly because of the appeal of what was on the box. That transformed
what people remember about the success of these pictures.
What a distance!
If you weren't alive in the '803, you will never know the unbelievable
high stakes selection
process at the video store.
You kind of flipped it around and looked at some of the words in the background
and read maybe a few of them and looked at some of the quotes, "two thumbs up
Roger ebert", you know?
But it was the image on the front that made you excited and our hunger
not only to know about the worlds of the film,
but also to know about how they made the worlds of the film began to grow.
The audience was
very intelligent, and I said, "I think we can do a magazine
that will target people like me that have been a science fiction fan
since I was a kid that really covered all the stuff that I love."
Geeks grew not out of necessarily
wanting to be Luke Skywalker, but because they wanted to be George Lucas.
They wanted to become filmmakers, and they wanted to understand film
as much about the story it told.
But the story that went on behind the scenes as well, and this expanded
across the 19803.
I told George Lucas, when I met him, "your movie made my magazine a success
because when it came out, suddenly the whole audience
for science fiction came alive.
They want to know
facts, information, knowledge.
That's what we were giving them."
The starlog, cinefantastique,
cinefex is very much hard core making of.
Premiere.
Then in 1989 in britain, empire was born, which I went on to work for.
One of the things I did at lucasfilm
was I started and oversaw the first few years of the official
star wars fan club, and for far less money than it cost us to operate,
you could join and we sent out a membership kit with an exclusive poster
and photographs and stuff, and a quarterly newsletter called bantha tracks.
We wanted to keep fans interested and happy.
Fandom developed around these magazines.
We created a place for the reader to come
and pour out their geekdom and be amongst like minded people.
There was a point in the '803 when the marketing and the product placement
and the sort of eye towards what these films were going to do beyond
when you left, the theater would sometimes overtake the movie themselves.
Don't you worry.
Suddenly, you've got
songs from movies that are on billboard charts.
Ray Parker Jr. from ghostbusters, that was so fantastic.
If there's something strange in your neighborhood
mtv, they would take a song from the movie
and make a video, and it made it really fun.
- Who you gonna call? - Ghostbusters!
You associated
all those things together and then you wanted to see the movie.
It was kind of incredible marketing.
Look at the stereo.
No, no, no, don't touch it. It's not a stereo, it's -
what is it?
And this is how films grew in our heads.
It was a way of enticing you in. These days, they're much more
like an accompaniment of the whole hype machine.
But we didn't know what hype was.
I mean, we experienced it without putting a name on it back in the '80s
so that's all part of our advertising and publicity.
It just makes sense.
Who's going to want to go see this movie?
Let's let them know about it.
I'd buy that for a dollar!
Spacehunter
adventures in the forbidden zone
in 3-d
so the first big 3-d science fiction movie of the '80s was spacehunter
adventures in the forbidden zone.
For some reason, all of these '803
3-d sci fi movies have really long, wordy titles.
I remember seeing a lot of these '8033-d movies in the theater.
I was their target audience.
I was the one who sort of pitched
doing it in 3-d.
I thought the title was right.
It is the kind of science fiction exploitation movie
that was popular at the time.
Three women have crashed
landed on this planet and they get captured.
Michael Ironside
is the villain in this film, his role is the over dog.
I imagine he hated the makeup process, but enjoyed the scenery eating.
Ah, you can't hurt me.
But I can hurt you.
Peter Strauss plays the pilot, the Han Solo knockoff character.
Whatever you say, Princess.
Molly ringwald, who at this point in time is very pre-brat pack plays
Niki, a sort of an urchin pain in the butt character.
What the hell are you?
What do you think I am, you scrawny earthbag? I'm a woman!
A pre ghostbusters, Ernie Hudson is in this movie
as a rival smuggler slash pilot, opportunistic guy, and they end up
one up in each other through the film before coming together.
Just look at it. Look at what you did!
It's ruined!
There's a lot of location shooting, some very impressive landscapes.
They really make it look bigger than it has any right to be.
John LaFleur was the young
Canadian filmmaker that sort of invented this story
initially, but he had very little film experience.
He fell behind very quickly and we had to make a change
in our filmmakers and we found lamont Johnson.
His concept was to try to make it as realistic as possible
and sort of didn't take advantage of the fun of it.
I felt that spacehunter was a little bit of a lost
opportunity finally, given the cast and the concept and the re-use of native 3-d.
Using two cameras, using two projectors to show it
kind of impossible from a commercial standpoint
in terms of exhibition.
But it really looked beautiful
when you could see it in its original form.
Lift the gates! Begin!
Star wars
had this wonderful level of authenticity.
Just required a lot less of that suspension of disbelief.
That was a real revolution in storytelling.
What cinema could do and storytelling could do,
and the connection with the audience can do, was absolutely at its height.
I think that even for Lucas, the expectation became unattainably high.
There's stuff in jedi
that is absolutely masterful that I have really fond memories of.
Get alongside that one.
The chase through the forest,
which is like an epic piece of cinema.
I love that sequence so much.
I did go see return of the jedi 23 times in the theater.
The sarlacc pit and jabba's is going to throw them all in there,
but Luke's got the plan with r2.
You'd think that there would have been
this big battle with Boba Fett and someone and han, right?
He just gets like accidentally rocket packed into the side of jabba's
big space cruiser.
And becomes a burp joke.
Boba Fett
first showed up in the star wars holiday special in the animated sequence.
He was supposed to be the main villain
in the movie that turned out to be called return of the jedi.
It was all going to be about chasing boba, rescuing Han Solo.
But during the making of empire, George decided
he did not want to make more star wars movies.
I was sitting with him in a sound mixing room,
and he told me that he'd made this decision and was going to end,
and that's why he was going to condense the third trilogy
and the redemption of Darth Vader into return of the jedi.
And then, boba
he went from going to be a big star
to an afterthought.
When we came onto the set,
they had these shirts that said blue harvest.
Sort of like just a distraction for the local people that they wouldn't
find out that we were doing a star wars movie
the first time we go out to dinner and Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, my father,
you know, Harrison Ford, are having dinner together.
They're going to figure it out real quick.
Corey and I have always been very, very close.
He traveled a lot with me whenever I did movies,
stood in for me.
The opportunity to be a part of the star wars
franchise was - couldn't overlook that.
When he fell into the pit,
han is trying to shoot the tentacle off of his leg.
An explosive charge went off and went into his foot.
And burned his foot,
so they put me in lando's outfit, they hung me over the side.
They didn't tell me all these explosions were going to happen.
I guess they got a genuine reaction out of me.
And then they needed someone to put on klaatu's mask.
He was just a random creature.
He was going to run towards Skywalker, get into a quick skirmish,
and I couldn't see a thing.
It was sort of like a random last minute thing.
And here I am, an action figure.
The big battle at the end,
the death star and then everyone on endor waiting for, you know, han
will get that shield down, we got to give him more time.
Go Billy Dee.
We've got to give him more time.
I did seven stunts
for seven different ewoks. Every time Dave tomlin,
who was the first assistant director goes, “deep get into the suit.”
I said, "but I just got killed"
he said, "got to do another one."
When I watched jedi, I was like this.
Just leaning fonnard, and I think the true moviegoers posture, right, like that.
So what we have here is a linking of almost a child's
imagination with all the technology at the command of a movie maker.
These movies take us from childhood into an era where we're growing up.
We're changing, they're indelibly connected.
It was this huge part of my life.
We certainly never thought
we were going to get any more of these movies.
What I think George Lucas did amazingly was to show that it was possible
to execute these grand visions with a level of believability
that was something we haven't really seen before.
There are a lot of filmmakers that were really inspired
and freed by what George had done on star wars.
You got immersed into it and you believed it and that was really wonderful.
Is this a game or is it real?
Wargames
what happens when you play a thermonuclear war as a game,
but it actually connects to NORAD?
I love the what if of it.
I have seven, correction, eight, that's eight redbirds two degrees past...
There was another film
before wargames, colossus.
The good guys, us have these supercomputers, and the bad guys,
the Russians have these supercomputers and they connected.
So all of a sudden, this artificial intelligence started
to make decisions for us because we're so immature and violent
and all that.
We will work together. Unwillingly at first on your part. But that will pass.
But that will pass.
What a lot of these movies
were doing is trying to hew as closely as they could
to things that might actually happen and then play them out.
In the most frightening way that they can think of.
They wanted it to look and feel real.
The whopper has only fought world war ii! As a game
time and time again.
Wargames, it's a really smart little movie.
What it took was the growing fascination in the early 1980s
with computers, the home computer became a thing.
They barely had 10k in them at the time, but they were the most wonderful
things in the universe.
You're really in to computers, huh?
Yeah.
You could dial into a computer and see stuff you weren't supposed to see.
Oh, oh yes.
What are you doing?
I'm changing your biology grade.
No, I don't want you to do that, you're going to bet me in trouble.
Nobody can find out.
Forbidden knowledge, bring that on.
He was a great geek kid, Matthew Broderick. The kid at home
can through the phone line, no less, link up to some giant mainframe
that operates all of the nuclear weapons in america.
This is kind of feasible somehow in our brains.
This is what computers do.
And he could be starting world war III.
Shall we play a game?
How about global thermonuclear war?
Josh was trying to find the right code so he could launch the missiles himself.
It's really suspenseful.
They're trying to divine
how to beat this supercomputer at its own game.
Come on.
Learn, goddamn it!
It was science out of control film
but it keyed in to that permanent fear that was going on.
Normal kids and nuclear threat.
I think I auditioned for wargames about six times.
The original script was much darker and much more scary,
and the guy was more of an isolated kind of loner who worked at radioshack.
Wargames scared people so much
that there were actual computer hackers who were put in jail.
Kevin mitnick was put in jail and not given access to a payphone
because some idiot senator believed that he could,
using his voice and a pay phone, launch a nuclear missile.
You can watch wargames today, particularly today,
as the nation is being hacked by Russian operatives every 25 seconds.
And that movie don't seem silly at all.
How about a nice game of chess?
The Superman movies
are absolutely special to me.
Christopher reeve was so phenomena! In the part.
Every time a franchise tries to carry the story on, it's fraught with
difficulty.
This time is going to be the best time of all.
Superman III encapsulates
so many different genres in one film.
Oh, I'm sorry.
It was a comedy vehicle for Richard pryor.
It was an action adventure Superman film.
It touched upon contemporary technology of computers.
Getting down to business.
Richard had been in
some kind of hero with margot kidder.
Richard got a chance to do some drama playing a returned Vietnam vet,
and he really was hoping that he would get the chance
to do something like that in Superman III.
But that's not what they had in mind for him.
Robert Vaughn plays the villain in the film
and puts Richard pryor's character to work for him.
I asked you to kill a Superman.
And you're telling me you couldn't even do that one simple thing.
Annette O'Toole playing Lana lang,
sort of replacing Lois Lane as Superman, Clark's
love interest in the film.
Lois, say hello to Lana lang,
Smallville's newest gift to Metropolis.
They were really trying to experiment
and dig deeper into who Superman was.
The part of the movie of going, yeah, man, that's heavy, I don't
I don't know how you hold
the weight of the entire world and everyone's fate in your hands,
as one being, I don't care how much super strength you get from the sun.
Like, there's got to be a point where you break, right?
Literally break in two.
We see
Superman, Chris reeve, Clark Kent, battling his darker self.
Dealing with his demons, dealing with who he is, dealing
with the weight of being Superman.
It was a very interesting infusion of a different kind of
sci fi into a superhero movie.
A massive supercomputer at the end
that produces a cyborg, which is absolutely terrifying.
The computer digging into her arms, basically taking over
and turning her into a sort of robot Android, it's
a very, very scary moment.
If you're young enough, that could be pretty
damn traumatizing.
A lot of folks felt that the real problem of the third
Superman film is that it did not live inside the Superman universe at all.
Richard donner had wanted to and worked on a script.
It involved brainiac and mxyzptlk and all sorts of other characters
from the Superman universe, including an introduction of Supergirl.
They came around to making Richard and Superman buds.
They kind of give each other
five at the end of the movie, which is very, very cool of Superman
back in the day. But the movie itself just really didn't
come together.
Superman III,
not the best of the Superman films,
but it's better than Superman iv.
Strange invaders
I love the script of strange invaders.
I fell in love with it the minute I read it.
Bill condon was the writer.
I always thought that bill
should have directed that film and he had never directed.
So clever, so fun.
You know, a great send up of '50s sci fi films, those little nods
to films were really right there in the script.
I want you to look at them and tell me if you see anything
that reminds you of the creature you saw last night.
The picture of Spielberg, you know, is this an alien, that's really my favorite.
I'm sorry, Mr. Bigelow, just a little joke we have around here.
It's a film that doesn't take itself too seriously.
According to what we have, no one has lived in that town since 1958.
I do believe that for Paul le mat it was probably the greatest challenge.
That particular role, I don't think it was necessarily something
that he fell into very comfortably,
but we brought him along for the ride.
But I'm a scientist, I know what I saw.
I loved my character.
You know, smoking the cigarets and with a trashy newspaper.
Two-headed dogs, maybe. But aliens are passe.
She's fun because there's really no boundaries
with this character.
And there was an alien in my apartment who gobbled up my soup.
It sounds ridiculous.
It was a kind of a no holds barred set.
I mean, there really wasn't a lot of direction, if you will.
All of those wonderful actors that were thrown together
really got it and had a good time with it.
Wallace Shawn, he was so excited because he hadn't really done
any acting, and here he is, this great playwright.
All he wanted to do was act, he was so thrilled.
He said, "I can't believe I'm here acting in this movie."
He was willing to do anything, looking for the next shot, you know?
The funny thing
for me that Kenneth tobey had a wild crush on Diana scannid
it was probably more fun than
it should have been.
That film, for me is a heartbreak, because even though people like it
and enjoy it, I do feel like
I know what it could have been with a different director.
It does have a very lighthearted tone
contrasted with really scary alien makeup.
It was done really well.
I remember being really impressed and stunned when I saw it
because they had no budget on this film.
That does scare you,
but mostly you're really having fun.
In the early '803, there was this wonderful explosion
of highly imaginative, highly ambitious science fiction.
Suddenly, all sorts of stories that were prohibitive because
technologically they weren't possible, were suddenly possible now.
What star wars did,
both in terms of the visual effects, but also George's approach
to the storytelling aspect of it.
Was it opened up the door for genre films
that people had been afraid to make before.
It's driven by the story,
the tools that we had were capable of certain levels of finish,
and then it was an artistic interpretation of how the illusion
was going to fit into the bigger story, which was really critical.
There's something
about the real feel of the thing and seeing it that brings you into it.
If you look at it as something that's a visual effect and it doesn't quite work,
you're out of it.
When it works, it really does work.
The job of a visual effects supervisor at ilm
is to be able to fulfill the vision of the director.
Also, the effects supervisor should contribute something to the film
if they can,
if it's not inappropriate, that possibly the director didn't even know he could do.
Always, always
it starts with the idea of the finished shot.
I'm motivated by the finished shot.
The shots that are magic
are the ones that have good design embodied in them.
Star Trek ii the battle in the nebula
that was all shot in cloud tanks here at ilm.
Beautiful taste is being exhibited there with compositions of
where the ships are, the shot designs, how they're lit, how the clouds swirl.
That's just some of the most beautiful work
that ilm's ever done.
Miniatures were defined to
a certain extent by how they had to be used.
If you look at the star destroyer, scale notwithstanding, the model had to be
incredibly highly detailed to stand up to that
kind of macro photography.
And when we started blowing stuff up,
we had to build things in a little bit larger scale
so that we could photograph them at high speed photographic rates.
The bigger the model,
the more properly scaled the explosion
appeared to be.
Every optical composite
was a performance. The way that we used to put
together a shot of a bunch of spaceships, you didn't shoot them all at once.
You shot them one at a time.
There's a really remarkable shot in return of the jedi,
and it's remarkable for the huge number of separately
photographed spaceships that are all in there.
It was intended to be a wow moment.
And it really accomplished that.
It's kind of ovennhelming when you think about the mechanical complexity
of all those separately photographed elements.
The thought process that goes in to breaking down the barriers
that we have for this component, that component, and how do you do this.
Those are strong.
We came up with this
system called go motion, which is kind of a joke.
We didn't know what to call it, so we called it the opposite of stop motion.
The first time we used go motion was on the tauntaun and it totally worked.
It gave a blur to the thing.
That was effective.
Then on dragonslayer, we developed it further.
In jedi with the two legged Walker, when the ewoks rolled
the lodge down the hill, go motion allowed me
to do that.
And that was really complicated.
You get into the zone.
You know, it's a form of meditation to shut the world out
and be in the zone, you know, and do it, do what it tells you.
I'm walking by and it's
shh, very quite.
It'd be Dennis muren at the camera.
Click.
And then all these hatches opened up
and out came Jon burge and Phil tippett,
and then move it ever so slightly and then disappear down the hatch.
Click.
Matte painting,
as a way of adding on to a set by painting,
for example, on a piece of glass.
Not only is it a budget saving device,
it's an opportunity to enhance.
You're working on something that is supposed to be
invisible.
Ghostbusters ii is the film I was working on, where I said to myself
at the end of this, we've really reached the end of traditional visual effects.
We can't keep doing it this way.
The ideas are getting bigger than the toolbox we have.
Fortunately, in ilm, we had a computer group
that had been working on computer graphics and I had jumped into that.
I did young Sherlock Holmes with them.
That really proved to me that this is the future.
It needed more time for the technology,
both the hardware and the software to get up to the level
where we can actually make it a productive tool,
which we experimented again with on the abyss, Jim Cameron's film.
Water weenie is the way that we've respectfully
talked about.
Seeing things like tron
and last starfighter, I thought computer graphics is coming.
It's not quite ready, but something to keep your eye on.
The last starfighter used digital effects.
It was the first one to use it for the entire film.
When you look back at it now, there are some really some growing pains
and you can see where things were not as effective
as it would have been if you got models. You didn't know if it was going to work.
So it was a gamble.
It's a good example
of the beginnings of cgi.
My brother, Jeff, is a visual effects supervisor,
and he worked on tron doing the bit.
So he was one of the first cgi artists, and later
I worked with him on flight of the navigator, where he helped me
design the spaceship morphing and reflectance mapping.
This is the flying version of the ship.
And behind there is the hovering version of the ship.
It was a maquette, meaning that we took a computer and we touched it
all along here to create the wire frame
that was then used to wrap the backgrounds on.
Shortly after the lucasfilm computer division had been sold off as pixar,
we saw that there was a lot of value in that tech and that this had a big
future in visual effects.
Star Trek iv, that hallucination scene was just about
the first foray of the island computer graphics department.
And that was always the carrot for me and the promise back in the early '803
that this is what it could do, you know, and we're there,
but it moved too quick, and I think there hasn't been enough recognition
that it needs to fit within the imperfect world of reality.
"But I can make it perfect", you know.
No, don't make it perfect.
Sometimes understanding those limitations
becomes key to capturing a feeling.
The '803 represents an era of a lot of bravery.
The filmmakers were pushing new techniques, trying new things.
Some of them worked great and some of them didn't.
Some of them really show their age today, but there's something kind of wonderful
about that, that they were fearless about the things that they would try.
Star Trek III: The search for Spock
the adventure continues
I believe that the major theme that runs through
Star Trek III is one of family and sacrifice.
Have some friends.
If you count Spock, the seven people have been through
so much together and they've faced down death together.
We are now at a point where a decision that has to be
made is going to cost them dearly.
If there's even a chance that Spock has an eternal soul,
then it's my responsibility.
Yours?
Kirk, in particular,
has to make tremendous sacrifices during this film.
My god, bones... What have I done?
Christopher Lloyd
as the klingon commander is an interesting casting choice.
You, will tell me the secret
of the Genesis torpedo.
He just sinks himself right into that role.
He chews scenery just as well as William shatner does.
You fool! Look around you! The planet's destroying itself!
Yes! Exhilarating, isn't it?
You realize just how versatile an actor he was to go from reverend Jim
to this and then, you know, a year later, he's in back to the future.
Leonard, he took Spock to heart.
I mean, really, really took him to heart.
As soon as he passed that gate with the word
Paramount scrawled on top of it, he became Mr. Spock.
Spock brought a lot of opportunity to Leonard nimoy.
There's no doubt about it.
But does he need Spock? No.
When Star Trek III came along,
I think
he was more than willing to walk away unless he had something more
challenging to do, which was direct.
What I recall is Michael eisner trying to talk
Leonard out of directing himself, making his directing debut.
Leonard's calling me up and I said, "are you prepared
to let the ship sail without you?"
And he said, "absolutely"
I said, "then sit tight, you're going to direct the movie."
If he says he's not going to be in the movie
unless he gets the director, he'll get the director.
Period, the end.
Spock is the linchpin of it.
He would say to me repeatedly, “the studio really only understands
a two by four to the head."
What they understand is leverage, and he had leverage.
They realized that their box office is going to be bigger
if Spock appears in the film.
They kept the thumbscrews on him.
Jeff Katzenberg looked over his shoulder every day to make sure he was on time
and on budget.
The fact is, he had no experience other
than directing some episodes of TV, including t.J. Hooker,
you know, other than that, he was a neophyte.
I didn't know what we were in for.
Leonard directed by omission,
if he didn't say anything, it was fine
when I got that through my head,
I felt less neglected.
Good. More, more. He is dying. Dying.
He had confidence in him, I felt that he knew what he was doing,
he had taste, his story sense was quite good.
He's the guy who prepped things to death.
You try to deal with as many variables
as possible during the pre-production process
so that when you're in production, things hopefully run smoothly.
So much so that you can have these happy accidents.
Filmmaking is really, a lot of it is just dealing with problems
all day long, it's story,
it's story, it's always story,
first and foremost.
You saved the ship.
You saved us all.
Don't you remember?
The really, really
renegade, seat of your pants crazy comedy of the '70s
found its way into like a big mainstream sci fi spielbergian thing.
Ready?
Ghostbusters
you've got this
sort of rag tag New York story, but then into it,
you have this extremely sci fi, techy,
supernatural, insane thing, and it worked.
Get her!
Action!
I just worked with bill Murray on stripes, and Harold as well.
And that turned out well.
That's the fact, Jack!
My agent, Michael ovitz, at that time, sent me
this sort of 80 page treatment that Dan aykroyd had written.
He had written it originally for belushi and himself.
I think he had spoken to Eddie Murphy at some time
about doing with him.
It was set in the future, there were multiple
ghost busting groups on various plantes.
And the competed with each other.
These groups, they worked like firemen. Their service was to rid the universe
of ghosts or monsters.
I said, "look,
it has this great idea in it, but it's almost impossible to make.
I think it should happen today
and I think it should happen in a big city like New York.“
I really pitched the story of ghostbusters.
Our courteous and efficient staff is on call
24 hours a day to serve all your supernatural elimination needs.
We're ready to believe you!
When the actors are really in their finest, most involved way on the set, in costume,
they can be the most creative as well to find some unique way
of maybe finding a fresh spin on it.
It's directed and free at the same time, and there was
I could by just using as few words
as possible, interrupt the improvization and refocus things
so that the storytelling made sense in the context of everything else
in terms of character and in terms of intent and tone.
And so that things weren't just silly.
There is no Dana, only 2qu!
What a lovely singing voice you must have.
And just look for comedy
in the reality of the situation.
We came, we saw, we kicked its ass!
It really boils down to the ghostbusters themselves,
it's charming
when Dan aykroyd slides down
that fire pole, when they first go see this dilapidated firehouse.
Wow! This place is great!
They're all big kids.
We should stay here, tonight! Sleep here. You know, to try it out.
It's so crazy and wonderful, and they're having such a blast
and that just spills right over to us.
It's the perfect bill Murray movie
that laid back goofiness that only bill Murray has.
I'll take miss Barrett back to her apartment and check her out.
I'll go check out miss Barrett's apartment.
The addition of Ernie,
I think, was really special in a lot of ways.
If there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say.
Ernie brought in the outsiders to people
that didn't really feel like a ghostbuster, you know?
It would be a twinkie... 35 feet long weighing approximately 600 pounds
that's a big twinkie.
I think I was very fortunate
to be making popular movies
in this era, an era of directorial power which we didn't really quite
have as directors prior to it and certainly
after it.
It's the stay puft marshmallow man.
My films,
they almost uniquely have a kind of emotionality that made you feel good.
It's the positiveness that made for repeat
viewing.
Let's show this prehistoric bitch how we do things downtown.
The last starfighter
the last starfighter is about a boy
in a trailer park who is really good at a video game.
Yeah!
It turns out to be an
actual recruitment tool.
Aha! A test sent out across the universe
to find those with the gift to be starfighters.
It's the perfect fantasy
if you play video games.
It was a genius idea, the fact that nobody came up with it
before that, is kind of amazing.
You were recruited by the star league to defend -
to defend the frontier against xur and the ko-Dan armada.
Although most of it takes place in outer space,
there's such a down to earth element about it.
Nick castle, the director, wanted to imbue it
with a sort of a capras esque sort of quality.
I'm shaking the dust of this crummy
little town off my feet and I'm gonna see the world!
Forget it, man. I'm doing something with my life.
He has this girlfriend,
he has dreams of doing bigger things and all his dreams
keep falling through.
Still go to city college with your friends.
Until this incredible situation comes along,
and he almost doesn't take advantage of it.
Listen, centauri. I'm not any of those guys, I'm a kid from a trailer park.
That's what you think! Then that's all you'll ever be.
Robert Preston,
the music man, the music man in outer space.
Trouble with a capital t, and that rhymes with p,
and that stands for poor.
When we found out that he would do it, we were just so happy.
Centauri!
Very robust fellow. Smoke like a chimney,
but he had that great voice.
Say hello to my assistant, beta.
Howdy.
I did get to act with two Alex's lucky me.
I'm a state of the art, top of the line beta unit,
put here as a courtesy replacement for while you are away.
He's just comically inept.
That's why it was fun to play, because you can
just put yourself in that position where everything is brand new.
Nothing is normal.
Ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha!
Dan o'herlihy.
He agreed to play Greg.
Greg, the gung-ho iguana.
He would never be seen. There would always be
this prosthetic giant mask over him.
He had to triple what he would normally do in terms of gestures.
Ah, now you look cute!
I never saw him
not looking like lizard man, and he's very distinguished looking,
you know, white haired, blue eyed Irish guy, you know, and I just didn't
I didn't really know what he looked like.
How do you do?
He does this like...
I was cast in last starfighter
playing a role called Lewis's friend.
Spaceship lands to return Alex to the trailer park
and I go, "aliens, awesome!"
Oh my god!
They cut that scene from the movie before it was ever filmed,
but I had already done a bunch of featured extra work, so every year
I get a couple of hundred bucks from the last starfighter as a residual payment
and I get to be part of a movie that, as a fan, I was crazy about as a kid.
Are you kidding me?
I was not aware
of the amount of pressure because of the cgi,
the tension it was surrounding, oh my god, is this going to work or not?
This may be a colossal failure.
The very end of the death blossom sequence,
when I sat in a cage, it was like a carnival ride.
And I could do about two of them and then I was like...
The movie didn't make any money when it came out,
it was only the people that saw it on vhs or hbo.
Someone told me that last starfighter was number one in video rentals.
Thank god for science, creating another Avenue for people
to see it and enjoy it.
That's what the movie's about,
the possibilities are unknown,
but are out there, and all you have to do is find them
and then hold on tight and go for the ride.
Wow!
No words,
really, for what buckaroo banzai is.
Let's rock and roll!
Could I really tell you the storyline?
I'm not sure.
Buckaroo banzai, perhaps you can explain yourself?
Do you have to know what the film is about,
even if you starred in it?
Buckaroo banzai is a film
that to this day, I do not understand. If you can tell me what it's about,
I'll give you money.
He was able to do everything.
He was like a scientist, a rock star, a samurai warrior.
No limitations whatsoever.
Just a fun imaginary story about a group of scientists
that play rock and roll and, you know, defy the laws of physics.
Is it a comedy, is it sci fi, is it action?
Is it a social satire?
Is it a love story? Is it romance?
What is it? And it doesn't spoon feed you anything.
It just throws you in the middle of this haywire crazy world.
It was a shipn that was being steered by Richter.
Richter and Mac would always powwow. To them,
it made sense.
Subcutaneous microphones are gonna allow the
patient to transmit verbal instructions to his own brain.
All we had to know
is that we had to act like it made sense to us,
right?
What are they?
Lectroids from planet 10 by way of the the eighth dimension.
I guess
I'm going to be the dry, straight man surrounded by lunatics.
I had great fun watching Peter go through his process and Alan go through
hers and Jeff goldblum just brilliantly
stealing every scene that he was in.
We all gave up to Jeff's antics and just enjoyed them
rather than try to compete with them because you couldn't, you couldn't win.
You know, I thought you were gonna rehearse or something.
The Hong Kong cavaliers.
Billy Vera and the beaters were kind of the musical center of that show.
That was really the Hong Kong cavalier band.
Peter brought in the clarinet because he could play.
It works perfectly.
Jeff goldblum and I got a band together after that.
Matter of fact I've got to leave right here and go play the trumpet.
Evil! Pure and simple from the eighth dimension!
I had special abilities to do stunts and things,
and so they asked me if I wanted to be a lectroid.
John whorfin destroyed.
John lithgow is also an intense actor,
but he's also very silly.
Of course it's me, you fool. Who'd you think?
I think he found lizardo to be liberating,
given the gravity that had been laid on him as an Oscar nominee.
John lithgow, in the world according to garp.
He was just having a good time.
Where are we going?
Planet 10!
When?
Real soon!
You put John lithgow and Christopher Lloyd in a room,
the mind can't conceive of what the acting result would be
I was supposed to be tortured and all I'm doing is hysterically laughing.
I think of that scene now I crack up.
Those are two gifted human beings.
Bigboote'.
Activate your probes.
And then they promise you a sequel, and the sequel never comes.
A lot of the studio bosses didn't know what to make of it.
It was supposed to be a series of movies and they were supposed to all
be as lighthearted and antic and sort of over-the-top.
It would fit in so well right now,
that sort of alternative universe world
audiences now are more attuned, I think.
It would have been fun to see it go on and get weirder and weirder.
My eight year old watched it, I said, "what's it about?"
He says, "who cares what it's about?“
we don't have to care what it's about, do we?
I guess not.
Remember, no matter where you go,
there you are.
Terminator is a classic.
The Terminator
out of the gate, I appreciated Cameron's filmmaking.
It was so satisfying.
You're just watching this extremely talented filmmaker erupt onto the scene
and you just go, oh, I'm going to now see every film
this person does because they're obviously really good.
What day is it? The date!
12th, may, Thursday.
What year?!
It goes and it's just perfect.
You can't do that.
Wrong.
I was very inspired by the editing of Terminator,
the speech of Terminator, the harshness of Terminator.
The script was an excellent blueprint for the movie.
It had propulsion, mystery, annihilation, suspense,
romance, time travel.
It was all there.
Come with me if you want to live.
Because the exposition is all on the run
during a shootout.
I'm Reese, assigned to protect you.
You've been targeted for termination.
You're like living and dying in a scene
and getting the back story.
It was a dark version of the future.
I loved the down and dirty spareness of a b movie
sort of aspect to it.
His hope
was to make a world class genre picture heavily influenced by George Miller
other than the fact that he broke down all barriers and went
Gonzo.
Jim had a certain vision and he was pushing the envelope.
We weren't Hollywood redoing the same thing.
Jim was saying, "no, no, no, we can go here."
In between
all the action pieces,
there are some genuine high concept ideas that get discussed about predestination
and your fate and what role you play in history.
You're talking about things that I haven't done yet
in the past tense. It's driving me crazy.
Computers, once
they become sentient, artificial intelligence will turn on us.
The technology itself will be bent back upon us in the guise
of Arnold Schwarzenegger with an uzi.
Lance henriksen was
who Jim originally did his concept sketch of the Terminator around.
With his skin coming away and seeing the skeleton underneath.
I'm sure Lance was very disappointed when he didn't get to play the Terminator,
but I can't imagine that character without Arnold
portraying it.
Get out.
The Terminator skull itself,
many people don't know this, the dimensions of it were arrived
at by taking a life cast of Arnold and then carving down
from his features down to a skull that would fit.
And those are Arnold's teeth.
The Terminator has Arnold Schwarzenegger's teeth.
The point for Cameron was Sarah Connor.
He wanted the target to be the most ordinary person he can imagine.
It's almost a hitchcockian rule.
The ordinary person.
With extraordinary circumstances.
That's what makes you relate.
Sarah Connor is an ordinary waitress who will give birth to the savior
of the future.
I didn't ask for this honor, and I don't want it!
Any of it!
Linda Hamilton and Michael biehn's performance was incredible.
By the time the two of them got together at the end, they so deserved it.
You knew exactly why they were making love, obviously,
to save the world, to have this child.
I came across time for you, Sarah.
I love you.
I always have.
She may be able to change the timeline
that she's on, is our future determined?
Do we have a choice in this algorithm that we find ourselves in?
There is an ethical dilemma here.
We have to ask ourselves, why are the terminators
trying to get rid of the humans?
Are the machines of the future going to be environmentalists?
Because if they are, we better be very frightened because we're
not doing the job that we need to be doing to protect this planet.
And they may see us as a threat and want to take us out.
I'll be back.
2010 is based on Arthur c. Clark's novel: 2010 odyssey two,
which is itself a sequel to the film version of 2001.
It has the thankless task of being a sequel
to the greatest science fiction film ever made.
The last thing you want to do is make the sequel
to 2001 and piss off Arthur c. Clark or Stanley kubrick.
That would not do the film unless kubrick said okay and Arthur c. Clark said okay.
And Stanley kubrick, to me,
is one of the great directors of the greatest directors that's ever lived.
I am not.
The only way to do it was to make a film that
honestly could not be compared to 2001.
They're different in every possible way.
Kubrick said, "just make sure it's yours.
Just make sure you make your film.“
Roy scheider plays Heywood Floyd,
who was originally portrayed by William Sylvester in 2001.
He has an opportunity to go out to Jupiter
and determine what actually happened with the crew of the discovery.
Scheider, along with John lithgow and Bob balaban,
hitch a ride aboard a Russian spacecraft captained by Helen mirren.
What has happened to American bravery?
Alive and well, thank you very much.
What's happened to Russian common sense?
This was the height of the Reagan era, and here's a film
about Russians and Americans doing a joint venture in space.
In Arthur's book, everybody got along famously.
I thought it would be interesting to have all hell break loose on earth
and have it become serious.
All American personnel are ordered to leave Soviet teritorry
immediately, or they will be placed under arrest.
It plays with the cold war
thing, the early '803 paranoia that we had, but it also takes hal,
who is essentially the villain in 2001
and kind of reprograms him to be the hero.
Do you want me to stay with you?
No. It is better for the mission if you leave.
Keir dullea returns to
reprise his role as Dave bowman.
And Douglas rain returns to voice hal,
the computer.
Talked to Floyd?
Yes.
Would you like to play a game of chess?
I play very well.
I'm sure you do.
I had recorded Douglas first.
So when keir did his scenes, he did them with hal.
I'm afraid.
Don't be. We'll be together.
And he came to me aftennards in tears,
because when he did 2001, he did it with a cockney third assistant director.
Open the pod bay doors, hal.
Sorry, Dave. Can't do that, Dave.
We use the docking ring in leonov to attach to the discovery.
For a trip back home.
Roy scheider was joy
the only quirk with Roy was he was always in the sun.
He would be outside the studio with a reflector.
The crew put the sign of scheider beach outside the stage.
In 2001, the monolith was a sentinel, it's an alarm that goes off
that tells some other
intelligence that somebody has stepped on the moon.
I certainly think they left a lot to people's own interpretation.
In 2010, the
monolith is a basic life form building block.
I think it's kind of futuristic DNA.
I tried to make a science feasible film.
I just wanted to make a film that was completely different,
so it could not rightfully be compared to 2001
because I can't be compared to Stanley kubrick.
It's as simple as that.
What's going to happen?
Something wonderful.
Dune, a world beyond your experience,
beyond your imagination.
Dune,
that's a huge, bestselling book with a dedicated fan following.
Back in the '803, those marketers,
they had no idea. They couldn't figure out how to sell the real hard sci fi,
even though there was huge demand for it.
People weren't ready for them.
The precedent hadn't been set.
Dune takes place on four planets, I could never keep them straight.
I've had more fun with sand at the beach.
David lynch's dune, is this brilliantly evocative story
about 3000 years into the future,
and it's all about the planet dune Iraqis
the source of spice.
The spice extends life.
The spice expands consciousness.
The metaphor is it's about the middle east and about discovery of oil
and how everybody wants to get their hands on it and occupy it.
I mean, the drug metaphors are quite clear.
You know, throughout.
Thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains,
stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
But it's this wonderful kind
of messianic adventure story,
full of great detail.
So the design of the technology, the spacecraft,
and the hardware is lynchian. Wonderful sort of gothic sensibility
or art deco. When you get David lynch making anything,
he is fascinated by the textures
of existence and life.
The thing that came in, we were just like, oh lord,
they were so ugly.
Who's going to clean up the messes in science fiction.
Who's the guy with the mop.
And of course, we were obsessed with this idea of what the worms looked like.
They were the great challenge of making dune work and very wisely,
lynch called upon the talents of Carlo rambaldi, who was the great puppet creator.
The worms, little...
And then we had t-shirts on the show that said 'i rode the worm'
and it was ridiculous, you know?
I am chani, daughter of liet.
From my dreams.
The first day
of working on dune, I was a little scared.
That's a huge project.
I will love you forever.
You are my life.
Kyle was a lot of fun, and he was very diligent.
He worked hard.
And he really wanted to do the best job
he could.
- The pain! - Enough!
Siam felt pretty silly in that blue thong,
I got to tell you, he was kind of like, oh my god.
I just used to crack up whenever I saw myself
on that movie, going, "more deep!"
More deep!
The stillsuit is built for you.
With a fremen suit in good working condition,
life can be sustained for weeks.
Even in the deep desert, sire.
They took about half an hour to get on,
and then basically we wouldn't take them off,
but they'd zip down to here, but we'd squirm
out of the top of them and you'd literally avoid liquids
so that you wouldn't be the one saying, I have to go to the bathroom
and make everybody wait half an hour
while you go over to where the bathroom is in churubusco studios.
Your ears and nose, and your scalp and your skin
and your body was just filthy, so it was quite a commitment
to clean every night.
. I think David at a certain point was like, holy crap,
this is a big project because he would go, "well, we'll fix it in post."
I remember saying, "oh oh“, you know.
Long live Duke leto!
After a while, man, it really just became like
everybody would get off work and hit the bar.
When people saw the movie dune,
they would be handed a glossary sheet.
There was a lot of dazzle factor with it,
but the characters themselves, it was hard to
for me anyway, it was hard to relate to it sometimes.
I will kill him!
Paul!
Why dune didn't didn't land,
I think, is debatable, but it didn't, and some people still love that movie
and some people it never landed with, no matter how much time passed.
I think David in a way felt out of his element. With the other films,
I think he had much more control.
The struggle is what's more common in show business is people
struggling to get that vision out, and I don't think he had ever
experienced that obstacle before.
Tom Selleck
Cynthia rhodes
gene Simmons
runaway
runaway was directed by Michael crichton.
It is a futuristic cop movie about robots
that are programed to kill people.
I played the bad guy.
No, really?
A guy named Luther.
I said drop your gun.
I'm not kidding, asshole.
The way I auditioned is, he said,
"look into my eyes with intensity that you're going to kill me."
So I just looked at him.
He says, "okay, you got the job."
I never read for the part.
| just
did a lot of brooding.
Kiss meets the phantom of the park.
Other than that,
runaway was gene's first villain role, for sure.
I loved Magnum p.I.
And I also loved kiss growing up. Gene and his crazy tongue.
I remember when I met him the first time I was like,
"do you really have a goat's tongue sewed onto your own?"
And he'sjust like, "no, it's just really long.
The ladies love it, right?"
Hey, come on, tiger.
The father-son scenes with Tom Selleck
came out real.
It wouldn't kill you to get married again, you know.
I know. It wouldn't kill you to go to sleep.
The heart of the story and finding that underlying humanity and connection
or relatability to the characters in these stories.
Advanced technology in the movie with my gun,
which I have in my collection, I have that original gun,
you shoot the bullet and it goes around and finds you.
Heat seeking.
Little remote control cars.
One down.
The spiders that shot acid.
Those were remote control, really neat.
There was a couple of different kinds.
Some would jump.
Some would scurry.
I wanted a spider
so bad.
Dad, are you coming to get me?
Kids in dangerous situations, yeah,
the '803 were a little more free with that.
Let him go. Now!
He's going to let him get killed
by these crazy acid blowing up spiders. And it's pretty dark.
The spiders will let you in, but they won't let you out.
I can't have any witnesses, it's too messy.
The spiders have been programmed to kill the first person that comes out
of the elevator.
He was just like, "what? Bobby!“
Bobby!
I thought it was good.
I thought it came off well.
Is the movie a triple a movie?
No, but my kids saw it and they gave me a thumbs up.
That's good enough.
Ohoh
Creature effects are a huge part of the science fiction experience.
It is so important that we believe that the creature is real.
They're really important decisions for how these films work
or don't work, if the alien hadn't worked in alien and aliens,
they don't work at all.
And if e.T. Is absurd, then e.T. Fails.
When you see something on screen, that you know for a fact
was just a bunch of people pushing buttons in a dark room somewhere,
there's a disconnect there.
But if you see something,
even if it doesn't look perfectly real, that's a practical effect.
You're like, wow! How did they do that? Where are the operators, what the hell.
And so there is a connection there.
There's a charm, it's a stylistic approach.
They were still dynamic enough when presented the right way
to immerse you in it, and you forget all about the technology,
which is a good thing, and you just follow the story.
I think that was true of Yoda.
I think that was true of et.
I saw an early e.T.
Without the sound effects, and I was like, "uh, I don't know about this."
You see it with sound and music and fine cutting, you don't question
anything.
E.t. Found home.
E.t.'s design was magical,
in the scenes that I did with e.T.
I could suspend my imagination like that.
It was just like working with another kid.
When we first saw
the Yoda stuff and some of the rushes, it was like,
I don't know about this puppet.
And then you see it cut together in the scene and it's like,
yeah, totally works. You buy the intention.
I'm looking for someone.
Looking? Found someone you have I would say.
The walking Yoda.
It was a long prospective shot they wanted, and they were looking for
a perfectly proportioned guy that'll fit in the costume.
They said, "you're too tall to be Yoda."
So they gave me the knee pads and you have to learn to walk on the knees.
I worked with Kenny baker on star wars,
used to have too many beers at lunchtime.
Couldn't get in, and Dave tomlin would go, “get into r2-d2.”
I said, “but that's not made for me.” he said,
“yeah, get in there.”
Kenny was only three feet, seven inches tall.
Man, I'm 4“4. To squeeze into that was hard.
It was tough.
I love that every creature effect is a team of people working together,
whether it is all of the puppeteers doing jabba the hutt,
whether it is one guy in a suit in predator.
That giant space worm in the asteroid in empire strikes back.
I love that that thing looks like an oven mitt.
And it's just someone going like,
chase it out and do that.
I'm just certain
slimer is my most lovable, endearing creation,
and for those of you that don't know how he was made,
I tried to look at it as a cartoon character.
You know, slimer was big. It wasn't actually a puppet.
It was a device that a gentleman named Mark Wilson wore.
He looked through the mouth.
We shot against a black stage.
I can get people in black suits as many people around him as possible
to stick their arms in this puppet and muscle a smile, even the tongue
that comes out of his mouth and licks his lips, that's a tongue glove.
The whole thing was just to make him as funny as possible.
In the movie it works, and I'm really happy with it, it's the most iconic
thing I've worked on.
Everybody knows slimer.
He slimed me.
The thing for me has yet to be surpassed
in the ingenuity and imagination that you see on screen.
Rob bottin was the mastermind behind the majority
of what you see. At a certain point during the production,
Rob was ovennhelmed.
He was ill and he was not able
to finish the dog thing effect.
So Stan Winston decided
to really make it a very simple hand puppet.
You can see if you really look for it,
the body is where the puppeteers head is, and the head
and mouth are simply a hand puppet.
- Come on. - Okey dokey
with Howard the duck, George wanted to do it as a costume.
I tried to talk to George out of it, you know.
I was like, "you don't know if it's going to work."
We don't have the flexibility
to do what we did today, what we would be doing with computer graphics.
But it was going to be a guy in a suit.
It was a challenge.
My suit was animatronic.
We went through 19 different heads at 50,000 each.
It was put on, and then hot glued shut.
So therefore I couldn't take a regular break.
No lunch breaks and no breaks at all.
So they would drop M&M's down my beak.
I was a natural.
I could find my Mark without seeing it.
If you move shit, tell the duck.
And I tripped over, 50,000 dollar mask on.
This is beginning to seriously undermined my self-esteem.
Predator is the biggest black
Mark on my career for no good goddamn reason.
They handed this design over that their production designer had done,
and I immediately said, "this is never going to work."
It didn't matter how much time and money we had, it was impossible.
They hired Jeanne-Claude because he's a martial arts expert,
and they put him in the suit where he can barely totter.
It was meant to be replaced and roto'd.
So of course the guy's like,
"why? Why did you even hire me?“
no one had bothered to tell from production, and he gets there an goes,
"what's with the suit?"
And I said, "well, you're playing a monster in this film.“
“I never thought it was a real suit."
"I hate this suit.
I look like a superhero."
And then he found out he was going to be invisible
for half the movie, and he was enraged about that.
He didn't know about that, right?
Don't think these guys read the script?
I tried and tried to get them
to let me do something else that I knew would work.
And they were like, "absolutely not.“
it was absolutely doomed from the beginning.
They pulled the plug pretty quickly.
I think it was thanks to Arnold,
who had formed a relationship with Stan Winston on the Terminator
that Stan was approached for the job, "why don't you call Stan for this one?"
That's a terrible Arnold impression.
Knowing they had very little time,
they decided to take an old school approach. It's just a man in a suit,
but it's a man in a suit with a killer
facial design and a killer finish.
And one of the great creature suit performers of all time,
Kevin Peter hall, who had just done Harry from Harry and the Hendersons.
Unlike the alien, the predator could express
a little emotion when it looks at you,
you can almost sense its disapproval.
Alien,
one of the most unique and influential creature
designs ever. In aliens,
James Cameron made the wise decision to really honor
H.R. giger's designs.
They removed the clear skull carapaz thing
to reveal this sort of bony under structure.
It was a combination of men in suits,
cable actuated puppets.
And that sort of thing to bring those alien warriors
to life.
You got gymnasts and dancers, people could really morph
into these creatures bodies and bring them to life.
Occasionally, when you had a break, you know, you'd see one of these guys with
with their alien head tucked under their arm, just smoking a cigaret, right?
I think it was quite amazing to see how James Cameron
and Stan Winston worked together to create the queen alien.
It was awe inspiring, really.
It was like
watching kabuki theater Manning Poles that had wires,
going over pulleys that would work her arm
or make her walk fon/vard.
Then in the queen alien head,
the smallest special effect guy on the crew, was tucked in her head
and his only job was to push goo out of her teeth.
That was extraordinary filmmaking, man.
While most of the shots you see of the alien queen are the full size
puppet or parts of the full sized puppet, there are few moments
where it's actually a rod puppeted miniature
built by the skotak brothers from the Stan Winston studio maquette.
I mean, that film is the perfect example of how
you take every technique
and you bring it all together, and that's where magic happens.
This baby hits 88 miles per hour.
You're gonna see some serious shit.
Back to the future.
How far you're going?
About 30 years.
I love time travel,
I love the idea that you could just be transported somewhere in time.
I'm a huge back to the future fan.
It's a perfect movie, it's probably one of the great Hollywood scripts of all time.
It's just an unbreachable screenplay.
1955
you're my mo-you're my mom.
People say to me,
“what would you say are the most important aspects of screenwriting?"
I say, "there's three of them: Character, character and character."
If you're not with your characters, you've got nothing.
When you see doc brown introduced in back to the future,
you're going to say, "okay, I will believe that what he invents works.“
you look at the delorean and you say, "yeah, this looks like
it's something that the guy actually did build in his garage.“
I'm from the future.
I came here in a time machine that you inveneted.
Yes, we can have fun with the
bells and whistles of time travel, the clock tower, all that stuff.
But the end of the day, what we have in back to the future
is a very simple idea, which is what would happen
if I was there on my parents' first date.
We had always wanted Michael j. Fox
to play Marty mcfly, but we couldn't get him out of family ties TV series.
We cast Eric stoltz, particularly
at the urging of sid sheinberg.
President of mca. Sheinberg actually said, "I am so sure
that Eric stoltz is going to be great in this that if he's not,
you know, you start the movie all over again with somebody else."
Now, he never expected us to take him up on that.
Eric didn't have the natural sense of humor that Michael j. Fox had.
He kind of played it less for laughs.
Bob zemeckis gave Eric the bad news on Thursday night
and the following Monday or Tuesday night, we were back at twin pines mall.
It was the first time Michael j. Fox
came to work. Once he started performing,
everybody could see this is Marty mcfly.
Are you telling me that you built a time machine
out of a delorean?
The way I see it...
With the costars, he brought things out in them,
and so Christopher Lloyd was better.
I finally inveneted something that works!
Lea Thompson was way better.
Oh my god, he's a dream.
Wait a minute, doc, are you trying to tell me that my mother
- has got the hots for me? - Precisely!
The scene with Marty and Lorraine in the car
that was always a really critical scene
to be able to pull that off.
Don't worry.
If this was going to work, Lorraine had to break it off.
We wrote this line,
"I feel like I'm kissing..."
My brother.
The look on Michael j. Fox's
face when she pulls away
after she makes the move, is priceless.
It gives us permission to make that work.
Would it have worked like that with Eric?
I don't think it had a chance of working like that.
This is why actors get the kind of salaries that they get,
because when they're that good, it's worth it.
This one tells you where you're going.
This one tells you where you're are.
This one tells you where you were.
There are basically two different kinds of time travel in science fiction.
There's the ones where you can change the past and there's ones where you can't.
Science fiction theater.
The third kind of time travel is what I call the back to the future mechanic.
The picture in back to the future is the quintessential example of that.
They establish that as this is the way things work and they stick to that.
It's like it has been erased.
Erased.
That's the first
rule of science fiction, you establish some rules, you stick to those rules.
It helps, of course, obviously that it's a comedy.
We are sending you back to the future!
One of the questions ilm had for us
is what is it going to look like to the time traveler?
And they were suggesting all kinds of elaborate effects.
But at the end of the day, Bob and I said “time travel should be instantaneous,
so let's just get on with it."
Going back to our belief that what we were telling here
really was a human story, it was not a story about technology.
People say to me, "why do you think back to the future
is still as compelling and popular today
as it was back in the day?"
Hello? Hello? Anybdoy home?
- Think, mcfly! - Think.
It's all about the characters.
These are all really powerful human elements.
And that is what the movie is about.
Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads.
From the producers of jaws, and the director of splash,
cocoon
one of the things I think
was very evident in the '803, we saw a lot of young heroes,
we saw a lot of youth in this physical prowess.
What cocoon did, in a very interesting way
call into this social standard of
what old means. A movie like batteries not included really wouldn't exist
without the proof of concept that cocoon was able to supply
to the industry.
Everything's happening so fast...
I absolutely love
cocoon, beautiful Ron Howard film.
It's a science fiction film about aliens, but not really.
Cocoon is about aging, it's about life.
Don ameche, Jessica tandy, hume cronyn, were these
aging actors.
Will you still love me when I can't keep up with you?
Of course. I love you now and you can't keep up with me.
Wilford brimley, who played one of the older gentlemen in the movie,
was only 50 years old during the making of that film.
They're in this old folks home and doing what they're doing, every now and again,
they would go to the swimming pool and just fool around and have some fun.
What they don't realize is that at the bottom of the pool
are these cocoohs.
What are rocks doing in a pool?
These older folks start to feel rejuvenated.
They can do things they couldn't do before.
You think there's cocaine in that pool?
Might be.
They would do their favorite things, they would go dancing,
they would go try to fix the thing they regretted.
Some enchanted evening.
Brian dennehy
peels back his body suit and reveals these sort of really magical aliens,
these sort of glowing beams that float through the skies.
These older folks were offered the opportunity
to leave earth with these aliens and live forever.
Forever?
We don't know what forever means.
The question
in cocoon becomes, is this cheating human mortality?
Is our clock supposed to run out?
It's a deeply, deeply moving film.
Can you help me?
I adored cocoon.
Ron Howard is able to get to the heart of the man's struggle
or the woman's struggle and be able to overcome it.
One of the things I love about Ron Howard is that he is a true storyteller.
If it's a comedy or a drama or it's in the future,
or if it's in the past, or if it's right here in this very moment.
The way nature's been treating us, I don't mind cheating her a little.
I feel like Ron Howard cares about how the audience feels
at the end of the movie.
We all went to see madmax beyond thunderdome.
Huge movie.
Tina Turner, biggest pop star in the world at the time, had a hit song on the radio,
we don't need another hero.
Thunderdome.
Sorry.
I remember the rolling stone cover, too,
with Mel Gibson and Tina Turner, and you just went, oh man, this is big.
Madmax
beyond thunderdome
the post-apocalyptic subgenre.
It just allowed the filmmakers imagination to run wild.
You can feel the ruin of the past
as they were just trying to hold on to civilization again.
And that's what makes it powerful.
How do we keep living?
And how does civilization grow again?
With the road warrior, you're focused
on gas and misery and just living day to day.
The idea develops into trying to create a new resource
using methane, to move toward a new future
that can be sustainable.
I don't know anything about methane.
You can shovel shit, can't you?
Tina Turner was just so big on screen,
being a woman of color and just sort of running that whole situation.
The master blaster, you know, their competition
between each other.
Who run bartertown?
Master blaster runs bartertown.
She tries to force Max
to do her bidding by killing the blaster of the master blaster team.
This is thunderdome.
Death is listening,
and will take the first man that screams.
We have this big, extravagant, perfectly insane fight on bungee
cords inside this thunderdome.
They had that really menacing character that he's got to fight.
And it's this big dude, you think he's just going to mop the floor with him.
But then the other thing that was sort of shocking was when they took
the helmet off, you've just sort of felt for the character.
You saw that he was this person who was an adult
that was a child, instantly, that scene changed for everybody.
I think that was a magic moment.
There are two movies in mad Max beyond thunderdome. There's the first movie, which
has our hero wandering into part of town after his rig is stolen from him.
Then there's this other movie after he gets kicked out.
He stumbles across these sort of like lost children
in the middle of the desert, who are apparently the leftover refugees
from an airliner crash from years and years and years ago.
That was too disjointed with the fact it was two stories,
whereas with road warrior and even with mad Max the original,
there was a direct correlation from a to z.
There's...
A unique challenge in doing sequels.
There's an audience you're beholden to and you want to honor that.
And yet we all feel compelled to express ourselves uniquely.
Civilization.
I'll do anything to protect it.
We continue this theme of resource scarcity.
Don't you understand? This is water. You can't live without it.
Madmax beyond thunderdome
really focuses the futuristic forecasts and the warning
that if we don't change, if we don't alter the way we think
about how we share resources, that we'll end up fighting
over these resources in the future on a planet that could be a desert.
This is astickup! Anybody moves, and they're dead meat!
Everybody was terrified that explorers was going to
was going to be such a big hit that nobody would think about back to the future.
The adventure begins in your own backyard.
It was supposed to be a Wolfgang petersen movie for Paramount, and they decided
they didn't want to make it in Bavaria, which is what he wanted to do,
and so they sort of kicked Wolfgang off the picture and sent me the script.
I thought it was a terrific script and really fascinating, particularly
I just come off of gremlins and it was very grueling and
time consuming and difficult, and here was a movie about three kids
who built a spaceship and I thought, this is just like huey, Dewey, and Louie.
This is like,
you know, this would be so much fun to do after this arduous special effects movie.
Well, not realizing, of course, that it was...
Not only was this an arduous special effects movie, but had children
in it which can only work certain hours of the day
and which also didn't have a third act.
It's pretty neat, huh?
Nonetheless, I made the movie, but then in the middle of making it,
the studio changed hands
and the new people decided they w anted to put it out on unfinished.
So they said, “stop working on it. We're gonna put it out because it's last
year's movie from the old regime and we don't care if it makes money.
Anyway, good bye."
I firmly believe there was a hell of a lot
better moving in there than we were allowed to get out.
In the end, it didn't matter. We could have released a blank film
and nobody would have noticed.
I've always had a knack of finding kids that I could relate to
on a personal level.
If you cast your movie right, you don't have to do a lot of directing.
And if you cast your movie wrong,
you have to do a lot of directing and a lot of editing.
But in this case, these kids were perfect for the part.
Incredibly talented.
And this was Ethan's first movie, he'd never been on the sound stage before.
I can't stop thinking about what's up there.
He picked it up
so quickly that some of the camera people said,
“are you sure this kid isn't a professional?"
And now he is.
Oh my god.
There she is.
In the original script, the kids go to another planet
and they find kids just like themselves and they play baseball and they go home.
And I didn't think that was enough for a feature film.
And so we reworked it so that the aliens are indeed like our kids.
But they're even more like earth kids because they're a product
of listening to earth broadcasts.
They get TV up here?
Just waves in space.
So they speak in catchphrases, trying to communicate with the earth kids
by using phrases that they've heard on commercials,
on television.
- Me Ben. - Me Tarzan.
This, it turned out,
was not an especially popular conceit.
We come in peace.
When Ethan hawke
says that he's waited all his life to speak to aliens and the aliens says,
Ehhhhhh, what's up doc?
He gets very confused.
The audience also got a little confused, and because he became disappointed
in what had been promised as a great big space adventure
that would give him the secret of the universe.
I think they all felt the same way.
But it don't make any sense.
That's the way they think that we talk.
It didn't help the fact that it opened on the day
of the live aid concert where nobody went to the movies.
However, the miracle of home video kind of resurrected it, and even though
it's only a shadow of the movie I was intending to make,
it still has retained its popularity over the years.
That was great!
What would you do
if you had everything you wanted?
Universal pictures presents
a John Hughes film
weird science
it's purely sexual
weird science really resonated with me because I was an awkward kid
who loved technology and just to think of,
I could suddenly become cool.
It was the teenage Frankenstein.
So they created this beautiful woman.
I think that was probably
every geek's dream.
What would you little maniacs likd to do first?
I think what he was best at,
John Hughes, is teenage angst and being left out. His compassion for that.
It really resonated, I think, to a lot of people.
Yo! Check this out!
Teenage life,
thank god I'm not there anymore. Oh, god.
You made me.
You control me.
Kelly lebrock.
She had a sense of humor and a sexuality
and a confidence and a personality.
I can be a real serious bitch.
It was elevated, her portrayal of the character.
And it made everything come together
the way it was supposed to.
You guys have better loosen up.
One of the themes is
be careful what you wish for.
Using all of our technology to do something wrong
and then not being able to control it, then having the consequences,
which is me.
Tossed off into any good books lately, have we?
Warner brothers were going to sue their ass off if I looked like wez.
And yet they got me to look as close
like wez as is humanly possible.
I walked around that set when I came onto it at universal,
like a two story house that could be pulled
into two halves to film in a real two story house.
And when they needed to have a rocket to go through it,
they actually had a rocket.
This actual shell of a rocket
was built under stage 26 at universal
to come up hydraulically and Pierce
the actual floor of the set of the house.
And it was a one time shot.
What a big deal this scene, right when John calls action
Anthony Michael hall farts a silent but deadly.
It had to be a several hundred thousand
dollar moment that got ruined by a fart.
That's not cool, man.
If you watch the movie real closely, we did this scene again
and they lowered the rocket and we had to do all of our action backwards
and then they ran it backwards for the final cut.
It was massive anarchy
at the end of that movie, that movie truly is almost like the cat in the hat.
She is the the cat in the hat.
Oh, my god, weird science forever to me is now going to be Dr. Seuss.
When are you gonna learn people like you for what you are,
not for what you can give them.
The ultimate theme of weird science was
be yourself and you'll still get the girl.
I love you!
It may not be that girl,
but you'll still get the girl.
Drop and give me 20.
I was really excited by the space shuttle program as a kid
because it was putting people back in space.
The first space shuttle.
That had it happened in my lifetime to that point.
The space shuttle was amazing because of what promise it held,
which was we were going to be able to do this much more often, much more cheaply.
The fact that they named the very first space shuttle enterprise
was really cool and made me feel seen because I was a Star Trek
nerd and I was like, wow, they named real science after a TV show that I like.
That's really cool.
The vehicle came around the corner of the building,
and in tow was the shuttle craft,
and across the nose of the shuttle craft
were the words the enterprise.
Knocked me out.
My perspective just totally changed, and I said, "we are genuinely
in some small way, a part of history."
Suddenly, the highest form of technology in the space program
became something extremely familiar to everyday people.
We're not just in the audience anymore.
Now we can become a part of the adventure when it's a space shuttle.
You start to see these films like life force and hangar 18,
and airplane ii, spacecamp, that have at the center of them, the space shuttle.
Go for main engine test.
It was this great bridge between our reality
and the fantastic imagined world
of the future.
It was almost to the point where soon we're going to be able to get a ticket,
you know, and take a flight around the earth.
I was pretty close with Steven Spielberg,
and we would both
talk about wanting to go and wanting to go, because they were talking about
taking an artist, taking a filmmaker, taking a poet.
I'd like to go out and be behind the camera, photographing up there.
Everyone just assumed
that space travel was so safe, you know?
Three, two, one... and liftoff!
I was shooting a TV movie.
We all gathered around a television screen
to watch this spectacular event because we also knew
that there were civilians aboard, so it made it extra special.
I was in New York, editing a video production, we were interrupted.
Someone came in and said
"the challenger has just exploded."
- Challenger, go at throttle up. - Challenger, go at throttle up.
And it just like stuck a knife in my heart.
2,900 feet per second, altitude nine nautical miles,
downrange distance seven nautical miles.
We were all standing there just in shell shock.
It was something... It was unthinkable.
Absolutely devastating in every possible way.
The first teacher in the teachers and space program
was killed, and one of the first African-American astronauts
was killed on the challenger explosion.
That shot of christa mcauliffe's parents on the beach looking up at that twisted
contrail, knowing something's wrong and not knowing quite what it was.
That image is seared into the minds
of a lot of people who saw that.
Today is a day for mourning and remembering.
They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths.
They served all of us.
They, the members of the challenger crew, were pioneers.
I think it was our first taste
of the genuine danger of it.
I just remember being so afraid
that this was going to be the end of human space flight.
They wouldn't have sent a teacher up, for god's sakes,
you know, if they knew that there was some
any chance at all of it being tragic.
Karen Allen
Barry bostwick
you're a wonderful crew. Fine, that's great!
Challenger
we just wanted to honor the memories
and the talent and the heroism of those original astronauts.
It was not only
the people who were lost, who were killed,
but it was the program itself had been damaged.
The human race's fonnard movement toward
a future in space
beyond this planet, something I had cheered for
since the time I was a kid.
The dedication of Star Trek iv
to the crew of the challenger was a way of acknowledging
that there is a question and a price to be paid
for going boldly
where people haven't gone before.
When the lights dimmed in the theater and the dedication came on,
you could hear a pin drop for a moment and then applause.
Science fiction fans, they're much more focused
on the possibilities than the dangers
that every mission is life and death.
And the challenger disaster
was as if someone dear to me in my life had died.
I said, "we've got to come back from this.
It will not be easy,
but we've got to come back and we've got to keep going fonnard."
And thank goodness, that's what we did.
John badham
is among the last of the utilitarian directors.
He could just direct anything: Action, comedy, like comedy, romance, you name it
John badham could do it. Short circuit,
it proved this as much as anything else.
Short circuit
I am a light.
Short circuit. I. Am. Alive.
Only instead of it being an alien, it's a robot.
Welcome to my planet!
And you got Steve guttenberg
and ally sheedy, and the guy who was supposed to be an Indian-American
but is actually being played by Fisher Stevens.
It's only being wires and several mechanisms and other
such machine-type apparatus, for the Pete of sake.
Today, I'm not sure you could get away with that.
Where are you from, anyway?
Bakersfield originally.
- No, I mean your ancestors. - Oh, them. Pittsburgh.
Ally sheedy, as a young girl,
I looked up to, I loved and adored.
Malfunction
oh, you can talk!
Short circuit is a caretaker friendship bond.
This concept of this robot finding his humanity.
I need information. I must learn everything.
I am alive.
Holy crow you can read!
And he has this quirky,
outgoing, weird personality, much like me, that was based on all of the movies
and pop culture that he had picked up.
Disguise! Camouflage!
- Hi! - Number 5!
There's a sense of joy
to that movie and a sense of life and a sense of adventure.
He's built as a military weapon of war that can destroy things with like
a single laser bolt.
Hello bozos!
But as a kid, you don't see that.
You don't think about that, you're just like, he's alive.
Johnny 5.
He's just like, "no, I'm going to smell flowers and hang out
and dance or make friends or whatever", which was really neat premise.
One of my favorite moments in that movie is when he accidentally steps
on a grasshopper.
Look what you did!
Error.
And he has this moment where he realizes
that he's mortal.
Disassemble.
Dead.
Disassemble!
Dead!
Being aware of your own mortality is one of the deepest, most profoundly
human things, and that drives us and that makes us what we are.
Of course I know it's wrong to kill, but who told you?
I told me.
What short circuit does really, really well
it makes you feel for this metal.
It's got some,
you know,
wonky little eyebrows or whatever, and he's cute in his own sort of way,
but his metal, right?
And yet by the end of that movie, you're like, "no, Johnny 5 is alive.
You can't disassemble him."
Don't shoot!
Don't shoot! He's alive!
He's alive!
You feel for it, and it's hard to know sometimes
whether that's just another part of the way
that humans are hardwired to sort of anthropomorphize things
or whether that's a thing that we're going to have to really sort of
worry about in the future.
Maybe Johnny.
Yeah! Johnny 5. It's cool.
Alien is one of the most frightening movies
I've ever seen.
Alien is about survival,
aliens is about something bigger.
Aliens
this time it's war.
It's a war film in space.
Aliens, the draft,
the running name that Jim had, was called grunts in space.
Cameron was writing Rambo ii
and aliens pretty much simultaneously.
And they kind of bled into one another and aliens became a Vietnam film.
Subconsciously, it was sort of about troops going under fire,
against an enemy they couldn't see.
Let's go! Let's go!
The other story was a story about mothers and daughters. The queen
and her children fighting against Ripley and her adopted child.
You instantly
feel for and need to rescue this little girl who's seen her
parents killed and is still come up with the wits to survive.
There's a very mythic and primal thing going on here.
This is now mama bear versus mama bear.
Get away from her, you bitch!
At the time of filming, obviously,
I didn't really have any idea of the magnitude
of the character Ripley, or the character of vasquez or my character.
It was so important, especially in the '80s, having
the female be the center of it, the female with the flame thrower.
The females are the ones that are
taking charge.
Have you ever been mistaken for a man?
No. Have you?
It began this movement,
a huge impact on the future
of action movies and sci fi movies.
We did operate
like as best as possible, a marine crew.
Al Matthews, sergeant apone.
All right sweethearts, you heard the man
and you know the drill, assholes and elbows...
He was, in fact, a former green beret,
so all of us Hollywood types, you know, would demure
and avert him at all times.
What are you waiting for, breakfast in bed?
Another glorious day in the corps.
The cohesiveness was really formed in and around
training in the morning and then also the rehearsal process.
And at that time, Hicks was played by James remar.
Remar's involvement would have made it
even more intense.
Why he had to leave had nothing to do with his acting.
However, it was quite shocking
to lose one of the leads of your film.
We all felt for Michael biehn.
Are you all right?
He literallyjumped into remar's costume
and created his version of Hicks.
I'd like to keep this handy
for close encounters.
Bill Paxton was the glue of our set.
Check it out, I am the ultimate badass!
And that's actually something
that sigourney Weaver said at his memorial.
Yo! Stop your grinnin and drop your linen.
To say we miss bill Paxton is a true understatement.
Sometimes I'm still in awe, like, oh my gosh,
I was in a James Cameron movie.
And they mostly come at night.
Mostly.
Sigourney just took care of me on set.
When we were in the eggs with the queen alien in front of us and everything,
that was a very scary situation with all the fire going on around us.
If you watch in the movie, she's going like pushing me behind her.
That was a natural response.
I'm sure for everyone on set, it was very difficult
and they probably were a little bit concerned.
The last few years that I've seen everyone,
they've actually asked, did you have nightmares?
Did we like affect you psychologically?
And it didn't.
They would show me the process of building
something. They would show me than how it was going to work.
Sometimes they'd throw something at me
to try to get my natural reaction of a scare, different things like that.
At the time, I was definitely afraid of dogs,
so I just pretended like the aliens were dogs
coming after me.
This alien comes up and grabs me, and it is terrifying,
however, for me, it was my friend who was a stunt man in a suit
and then they put the head on, and off we go.
To me, it was normal, which is so abnormal,
really, if you look back at it.
Jim really took her under a wing and made sure she was protected at all times,
and Paxton actually formed a really sort of avuncular relationship with her.
When you got Lance, Paul Reiser and bill Paxton together, there was trouble.
Keeping us all light hearted, which is nice.
What do you want me to do, fetch your slippers for ya?
Gee, would you, sir? I'd like that.
I'm always amazed when I go to a convention
how many military people come up to me and say before they deployed,
they watched aliens because it brought that feeling of unity
together.
You're just too bad.
I had an amazing experience.
It was definitely once in a lifetime opportunity.
Run!
When you come out and you're up here on top,
how much further can you go?
Not bad for a human.
Flight of the navigator was wish fulfillment
for every 12 year old.
It's a story about time travel,
about alien contact and connection,
futuristic technology, creatures from other planets
and then under it, the journey of David Freeman
to find his way back home to his true family.
Time has changed for everyone except him.
He's still 12 years old and his family has gotten older.
It seems that we...
David.
It's the story of how he adjusts
and how he tries to undo that problem.
Been gone for eight years.
Gone where, outer space?
We videotaped hundreds of kids to find Joey cramer.
And when I saw him, I just knew that that was the kid.
Let it go, let it go.
A key element in why
I got the part in flight of the navigator was because of that
emotional availability, being able to connect
and cry realistically.
It's like a bad dream.
The key to the whole movie and the reason I think it still resonates
is the human drama.
It's 1986, man.
Eight years since that night.
Randal kleiser
was an amazing director and was able to really bring things out of me
so I could really immerse myself in that world.
The script was children, special effects and animals,
which are all no no's, but I found it to be an exciting challenge.
Just take us 20 miles from here.
Compliant.
What are you doing?
Mark Damon
wanted to make an action movie with the government
trying to shoot down the spaceship and lots of explosions and stuff.
And Disney wanted to make a family drama.
So I was caught in the middle trying to make them both happy,
and I think that made the movie a little more interesting.
Can you follow it?
Follow it? I can't even see it.
I wanted to find a spaceship that was different
from all the movies I'd seen.
Wow!
Cutting edge cgi,
there's a little bit of it in there, and it holds up.
When I first walked into that set of the interior
spaceship, that cool, reflective mylar, I rememberjust being blown away by it.
It was so cool.
- I'm a trimaxion drone ship. - Trimaxion?
- Affirmative. - Okay, I'll call you Max, it's easier.
We wanted this character of Max
to have a personality, and yet he was a robot.
I'm just a kid.
That is obvious. But your brain has been programmed
with all appropriate star charts.
Before the mine transfer, Max
just sounds like an alien spaceship, and he's like, sit down navigator.
Sit down, navigator.
You would never know that it was pee-wee Herman
or Paul Reubens.
I think there's been some sort of mistake.
I do not make mistakes.
And then when he scans the boy's brain,
we let him do the character pee-wee Herman.
- That's it? - That's it Davy!
Working with the puppets and that world was really cool.
They were all built into the set, the space terrarium.
Weird.
I love the big eyeball.
I love you.
What's really special
about flight of the navigator is the heart of it.
Losing the family, getting the family back together,
it has that warm Disney feeling without being saccharine, I hope.
Goodbye, Davy.
It was so much fun.
People love it.
I'm so proud and grateful to be part of it.
See you later alligator!
George Lucas presents an electrifying new comedy.
Howard the duck
Howard the duck is about a duck that comes from outer space,
is sucked down accidentally by some laser pointed in the wrong direction.
All he wants is to go home.
I've got no intention of being stranded here.
Then he meets up with this
all girl band fronted by Lea Thompson.
I love the early comics.
Steve gerber, who created Howard for the comics, was a friend of mine.
A lot of people went in and thought, oh, Howard, cute, duck,
expecting much more of a family film, and they had actually taken
the more adult storytelling of the Howard
the duck comics.
Must be mating season.
None of it was g-rated.
I love irreverent comedy.
Kids are just little adults
with a lack of discernment. For me as a kid, I was like,
there's a talking duck and he's sassy.
Well, sex appeal. Some guys got it, and some guys don't.
Howard...
This is great.
Lea Thompson was my girl.
She hugged me and she goes, "oh, my mand duck.“
you are great, ducky.
Howard the duck was my very first film, ever.
Lea was one who kept whispering to me,
"listen, don't be afraid to say no" because I did all the major stunts
except the airplane.
Well, they wanted Howard the duck
to be edgy and a doll, but they thought, well, we got to make it a family film too.
And I don't know that those two things really work.
It's so life-like and realistic!
Bug off!
Howard the duck is a pg rated movie that opens
with a topless duck and duck boobs if there is, in fact, such a thing.
And there are a few blue jokes
in Howard the duck, Lea Thompson opens up
this wallet and finds a sort of duck condom.
No, there's a condom in the wallet?
Why would they think that's a family movie?
Crazy!
Howard...
Unfortunately, you got this vibe,
that the duck is going to do it with Lea Thompson.
You could always give it a try.
He's a little cigar smoking horn dog,
and he gets the women on his planet, so he's here.
So when in Rome... and he came on to her and she called his bluff.
I just can't resist your intense animal magnetism.
As an adult, seeing
Howard the duck wake up in a bed with a human lady, it's a little questionable.
There were a lot of things going against it and not enough going for it.
Willard huyck, Howard the duck was definitely his first big budget production.
Willard would shoot 20, 30, 40 takes of just this...
Cut! Do it again.
Willard and Gloria didn't quite get it.
I saw the whole thing going south, you know,
because they were having trouble making decisions like in everything.
The director had a meltdown.
I had a meltdown, too.
And so Lucas came in to direct.
He didn't pull punches.
Not so passive aggressive, more aggressive.
You and babyface are gonna beat it! Right, Mr. Zits?
Before I get really mad!
The technology
just wasn't there to make Howard believable.
And if you didn't believe Howard, then the whole movie falls apart.
What's this?
The notion of an alien duck cracked me up.
Of all the alleys in the world I could have fallen into that night.
Why did it have to be yours?
But at the end of the day, it really is just a guy in a duck suit
telling dirty jokes, and I think that's the ultimate problem of Howard the duck.
The duck wanted to do it with the girl.
This is not what you think. We're just very good friends.
Star Trek iv: The voyage home
I know a good idea when I see one.
I knew that Star Trek iv was going to be an enormous success.
I read it and I said, "this story has it all."
Do not approach earth.
The transmissions of an orbiting probe are causing critical damage to this planet.
Leonard nimoy had proven with star trek III that he was a capable director.
So when it came time to direct Star Trek iv,
he was then in a position to negotiate.
I want to do something different.
We're going to attempt time travel.
And we're going to lighten things up, we're going to have more fun.
Can you direct me to the naval base in Alameda?
It's where they keep the nuclear wessels.
I got to write comedy.
There was a previous draft of a story that harve and Leonard had concocted together.
I was told that it had a big role for Eddie Murphy.
My friend dawn Steele, who was head of production at the time,
she said, “we have a problem, we're going into production in a month.
We're not going to use the script.
We have to start over."
So I walked across the lot to their office,
and they told me the story about the whales.
As suspected, the drone's transmissions are the songs sung by whales.
And harve said, "I'll write the parts in outer space
and you write the parts on earth, in San Francisco."
And I said, "San Francisco? That's the same movie as time after time.“
can we go some place else?
Why can't we go to Paris?
And they said,
well, because the whales wouldn't fit in the sand or some - you know.
And I took stuff that I'd cut out of time after time and threw it into this movie.
You know, waste not want not never throw anything away.
Very complicated to be in front of the camera and behind the camera.
Star Trek iv is something that he worked on
really heavily before they ever shot it for the film.
He really knew what he was doing, had a clear vision going in,
and I think that's what really saved him.
I'll give you 100 dollars.
Is that a lot?
Star Trek iv ends up becoming a very accessible film,
even for non Star Trek fans.
Why don't you watch where you're going, you dumb-ass!
Double dumb-ass on you!
Every laugh is earned,
every laugh is honest.
Everybody remember where we parked.
I thought the scene between bill
and Leonard in the car was just charming.
It was just delightful.
You guys like Italian?
- No. - Yes.
Yes, I love Italian.
At the end of the movie,
we took whale song and processed it with some electronic stuff.
There's no dialog.
You have to tell the audience that this is a communication
between whale in this weird sci fi object,
there are sort of two distinct sounds of the probe.
There's the danger mode.
I went in with my best designs.
Leonard, he said, "they don't work.
It should sound like this. And he went 'whab, whab, whab, whab'"
in this deep,
he's got this big, deep voice.
And I said, "great.
We're recording Leonard."
And he called my bluff.
And Leonard bellied up to the microphone just like this and he went,
"whab, whab, whab, whab"
just like that.
And that's what's in the movie.
But the ultimate villain,
which is in Star Trek iv, is man.
Since the dawn of time, men have harvested whals for a variety
of purposes. Most of which can be achieved synthetically at this point.
The studio wanted to know
what the probe was asking or saying.
And I said
"that's dumb, could never live up to the mystery."
I said, "we're not doing that.“
and I remember dawn Steele saying, "you're wrong, Nicky Mayer."
And I said, "well, that's just how the cookie is going to crumble."
Star Trek ii, III and iv
is my absolute favorite Star Trek trilogy.
It tells a really wonderful story.
No one was doing anything like that at that time.
So to take these three movies and really make them a cohesive trilogy
is really super beautiful.
Hello computer.
Just use the keyboard.
Music hits us on a very visceral level.
These beautiful, symphonic,
gorgeous scores that are bringing you on a journey and advancing action.
A good composer picks a range for a character. When they're sad,
and when they're happy and when they're in action
and when they're resting.
Would anyone like to review that for us today?
I think all good film composers are chameleons,
if they're talented in a wide ranging way
for that career, you have to have a wide open musical mind.
What really changed in the '703 was really Steven Spielberg,
because he brought back the idea
that big orchestras are great.
And everybody followed suit because those movies were making money.
It's very easy
to evoke the emotions of the film by listening to the score.
The movie's already in your head, so when you drop that needle on that vinyl
and close your eyes and you listen to that opening score
for Superman or star wars, you're right there,
you're back in the movie.
That music is huge.
It reminds you that this is a story about an entire galaxy.
When you heard...
You know what's coming.
John Williams, certainly what he produced,
or created was monumental.
It made an unbelievable impact.
With the last starfighter,
the problem was you were in the footsteps of star wars,
and if you go off and say, "hey, Nick, let's do this electronically,
you're doomed."
So you had to respect
that your palate was going to be a big symphony orchestra.
It's pretty normal when I'm explaining what I want to do to a director
to just sing a melody or try to imitate the sound.
When I played the theme to the last starfighter,
I was sitting on a piano, going
"And now six trumpets play..."
They had to imagine it all from a guy playing a piano.
That ain't easy.
Back to the future turns out to be
Alan Sylvester's very first orchestral score.
Bob zemeckis said they need your score to make
it feel like it's a much bigger movie than it really is.
So al put together what turned out to be, I'm told,
the biggest orchestra ever assembled in Hollywood at that time.
Ai nailed it.
American movies are partially basil poledouris
and partially Jerry goldsmith's. Basil is much more epic.
You see the scenes through a filter.
The filter is the music.
Elmer Bernstein got to your heart in a way
that very few composers managed to do.
I trusted his laugh and his lack of laugh,
when it happened, and it gave me confidence in what I was doing.
I love him and I really miss him.
One of the things that you have to do when you make a movie and you have to show
the rough cut to anybody is you have to put a temp track on it.
Composers generally
don't like to have to watch the movie with somebody else's music on it.
The editor and the director are often
what we call married to their temp track.
And so now you find yourself unwittingly turning your movie
into something that is cut to the rhythm of the music that you're not going to use.
The most famous example of a temp track
would be 2001: A space odyssey,
in which Stanley kubrick temped the entire movie with Richard Strauss,
Johann Strauss and then had a composer and immediately went, "you know?
I think the temp track's way better than what you did" and he threw out the score
and went back to the temp.
First, let me see your film in musical silence,
because that's how my imagination works in that blank slate plays.
Mr Cameron and Gale Anne hurd came to my studio and showed me the rough
cut of the Terminator, without a temp track. I was kind of blown away.
There was a very primitive early sampling device called an emulator one.
You could plug a microphone into this keyboard
and make some weird sound and then reproduce it with the keyboard.
And that's how I did the clank on Terminator.
I had this cheap little Mike and I hit a frying pan
because I wanted this big ample sound and I got an anvil sample.
It just sounded like...
That little piece of technology
was the key to establishing the sound for the original Terminator.
Ben jealous from blade runner.
That was so strange and different and new, he created these ambient
pads, which was a very progressive idea in that day,
in a way that sound designers now very commonly do, he'd create these emotive
kind of atmospheres that weren't music, but he used synthesizers and chimes
and embedded them in scenes to create an ambiance feel.
The soundtrack to repo man is a little more my speed
than the soundtrack to blade runner.
They started flipping the script a little bit by introducing modern
rock music into what should be a science fiction film.
Excuse me.
Kirk Thatcher did the vocals for I hate you and he wrote the lyrics,
I literally wrote a song in a lunchtime, recorded it live in one take.
And he's the punk on the bus.
We just had a ton of fun doing it.
Today, there's very little thematic music.
Music is more almost like a sound effect.
But in the '80s, there was a lot of use of melody and themes.
There are so many great composers of that era who wrote themes
and wrote melodies that you could hum when you left the theater.
I love that.
That's one of the joys of cinema.
You can associate the moment in the score with the images in the film
inside your head.
By the way, that's how you know it's a good score.
This moment with that moment will go together forever.
It's just a beautiful thing.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
predator
it was at the height
of the Rambo craze and the height of the craze over aliens,
and all of a sudden some whiz kid just said,
"put them together“.
I think in the '80s you saw a transition in these kinds of movies
to something that was more superhero in a way than hero
in a way. A branded physique.
The heroes were all buffed up.
It was a time where your physical appearance
determined your masculinity in terms of buffness.
I was fond of predator because it felt like the most uniquely
crafted Schwarzenegger film in which he was allowed to be more of an actor,
he was allowed to be afraid and desperate.
Payback time.
We go down there expecting to do our jobs
as a rescue team.
Stick around.
But we end up becoming the hunted.
There's something in those trees.
I think what's great about predator in the storytelling
is allowing the audience to understand who the characters were beyond Arnold.
I think they did an outstanding job
of giving everyone in the platoon
their bit of time on screen.
The question is, do you care about anybody
that got shot?
I just like great writing.
I was the ultimate tough guy.
Of course, the most special scene for me
and the one where I'll brag and say, I stole the film
from Arnold.
You're hit, you're bleeding man.
I ain't got time to bleed.
And it almost didn't come about. That scene got cut.
You've got time to duck?
And I'll never forget,
I can than montezuma's revenge, because Arnold got sick
and Arnold couldn't shoot that day.
Predator is the one that everybody really talks to me about.
The razor.
I'm gonna have me some fun tonight when I'm going up the hill.
“I'm gonna have me some fun.
I'm gonna have me some fun.”
It still plays.
When I die, that's when the platoon falls apart.
That's when panic set in.
These guys are really scared.
They're really big and muscular, and they're dying and they're really dying.
The toughest guys in the world who already know
that they're doomed, this now becomes an existential movie.
There's something out there waiting for us.
And it ain't no man.
Kevin Peter hall played the predator.
Kevin was the only one who probably truly could have did the part,
because he had to be able to pick Arnold up and make Arnold look small,
and he certainly did that.
John mctiernan knew what he was doing in slowly revealing that character.
And it finally culminates in one of the great reveals
in the history of sci fl, and that's when the predator takes off
his bio helmet and reveals that face with those mandibles.
And Arnold says, "you one ugly motherfucker."
That is my favorite moment in that movie
when they have their final mano a mano battle.
Predator reveals his face
drops his shoulder Cannon, he's like, "let's go."
That's badass.
It just comes together as a thrill ride.
It's a perfect slice of what pulp does best.
One of the prime examples of testosterone driven
badass sci fi.
Yeah.
You son of a bitch.
Spaceballs
the movie.
The very first
joke of spaceballs is its title, and everything after that is just one
joke after another.
May the Schwartz be with you.
Adorable.
All of this stuff kicked off
with star wars, obviously, the very first shot of star wars.
You see the spaceship and it just goes on and on and on. So many movies like just
absolutely copied star wars and said, we need the giant
biggest spaceship ever.
When you think it's over,
it's not over.
And then when you think it's over,
it's still not over.
Mel Brooks
was able to take satire and make it into a blockbuster.
Oh, no. Not again!
He honored the genre,
whether with history of the world, part 1, blazing saddles.
He was able to truly understand the genre
he was trying to make fun of.
Dear me, what are those things coming out of her nose?
Highbrow jokes
that really invited you in to intellectually
make fun of the world we were currently living in.
Spaceballs!
Breaking that fourth,
fifth, sixth, seventh wall.
Uhm, he did it.
He's making fun of the commercials that we're watching on TV.
He's making fun of what happens when we eat that much fast food
and we become what we eat.
The notorious gangster became locked in his car
and ate himself to death.
You satirize
what it means to be a completely vain society
that wastes all of its natural resources and then goes and tries
to take those resources from another planet.
Suck! Suck!
In spaceballs,
they talked about the hilariousness of merchandizing.
I mean, that was how George Lucas made all his money.
How did he know?
What is it that you do here?
Merchandizing.
Where the real money from the -
- movie is made.
Spaceballs the lunchbox!
Spaceballs the breakfast cereal!
Spaceballs is the flame thrower.
Flame thrower! The kids love this one.
That was just nuts.
Dinks, first speaking role, by the way.
Dink dink.
Dink dink, dink dink dink dink dink dink.
To this day, I don't know what the dinks really did.
I don't care.
I was working with John candy.
I'm my own best friend.
Give me paw!
Bill Pullman, Daphne zuniga.
He shot my hair!
Son of a bitch!
Shields and yarnell
lorene yarnell was the gold robot that Joan rivers voiced.
Will you turn that thing off?!
What?
What is it?
We were in on the joke
and it was peak Rick moranis.
Oh, your helmet is so big!
Dark helmet!
Michael winslow has this unique talent.
And the creeps.
I'm sure there's more on the cutting room floor.
There's no way there's not.
It shows how diverse
the cast was in their skills.
It feels like all
the worlds are just colliding in this one little mini comedic universe
that we're all waiting for spaceballs ii to come out for.
God's willing we'll all meet again in spaceballs ll:
The search for more money.
Still waiting.
Hello, my baby. Hello, my honey.
Hello, my ragtime gal.
Dennis quaid
Martin short
give yourself a shot of adventure.
Innerspace
innerspace is about technology gone awry.
The first person that can put someone inside someone's body
and use them to kill them is the winner.
When innerspace came to me,
it was a picture that Peter guber and John Peters owned.
And it was not a comedy.
It was a straight
spy movie with the plot of a guy who gets shrunk down and put inside another guy.
I suggested diplomatically that people would laugh at this idea,
and then they came back and they had hired
Jeffrey boam, who was a very good writer, and he had come
to it with a different idea, which was what would happen
if Dean Martin was shrunk down and injected into Jerry Lewis.
And that was something that as a Martin and Lewis fan of my youth,
I could certainly relate to, and I said, "yes, now this works.
Now it's funny."
That's when Steven Spielberg became involved.
When fantastic voyage was made, it used the best technology.
Everything in it was cutting edge for the time.
When we did innerspace,
of course, the technology has improved so much, and we've gone so far ahead
in leaps and bounds.
I loved all the practical stuff
in that movie.
Just relax, Jack.
Let's see what's going on in here.
And how realistic they looked
prior to the advent of any sort of computer
graphics.
Entering blood street.
You know, things like him flying through the bloodstream
with the red blood cells or seeing out of
Martin short's eyes.
Firing optic sensor.
And then you have the battle inside the car
where there's a very clever use of force perspective.
If you're working with Martin short,
if you do ten takes, take ten is like from a different movie than take one.
He likes to discover. He likes to try new things.
Jack, you've just digested the bad guy.
He and Dennis are never on screen together, except at the very end.
But yet it wasn't going to work to pre-record
Dennis's dialog or pre-record Martin's dialog.
So our sound guy, Ken kahn, came up with an idea
that allowed them to talk to each other during takes.
So whenever I did a scene with Marty, Dennis would still be there off screen
and they could talk to each other and they could improvise.
In here, inside you. Inside your body!
Somebody help me!
I'm possessed!!!
One of the reasons that their relationship in the movie works so well is
because it's actually a real relationship that they were having
at the moment.
You have seen parts of my body
that I will never get to see.
Believe me, you're not missing all that much.
I love my character in the film, just a malevolent presence.
He didn't talk.
He was just there.
My hand,
I had a multitude of things, which was kind of fun.
The gun, the flame thrower, an automatic submachine gun,
which we don't see because that scene was taken out of the film. And the sex toy.
Yeah, the sex toy.
Very quick, but you see it.
They had this rig that they put me in.
Then they lowered it down into the floor, which is where I get
shrunk down.
I have a fear of claustrophobia.
I was sweating bullets, really, hated it.
It went very smoothly, and everybody liked the movie when they saw it.
And the only thing
that I will say, that terrible ad campaign, and so it didn't make any money.
But aside from that, it was a great experience.
The future of law enforcement.
Robocop
robocop has all of those elements
that make greatness in cinema and storytelling.
The fight for dignity, the human condition at stake, humor.
I'd buy that for a dollar!
A slap in the face of society.
I called my agent and I said, "they're changing his title, right?
It's not going to be the title."
Who's going to go see a movie called robocop?
Boy, was I wrong about that.
In the beginning, for me, was very weird,
because Peter weller said to me, "you have to call me robocop.
You cannot call me Peter."
So there was already some tension, you know?
The robo suit ten hours later,
we're sitting there going, oh my god.
He was so frustrated.
In fact, in the very first weeks, there was a crisis.
They were thinking of pulling the plug on on the film.
They literally had to assemble him.
It was like a toy, putting him together with a screwdriver.
Every time I started feeling sorry for myself,
I just looked at Peter, who was in this big plastic thing.
And they got it down to about
three or four hours.
It's not as easy as it looks.
Robo teams robocop.
It's robocop lore, the battles he had with Paul verhoeven
and I was there for many of those battles in Rob's studio.
The way Rob sculpted that, the way it was painted,
the finish on that machine, it's a piece of art.
Drop it!
The shooting experience,
it was like this fast moving train, and the film had that energy to it.
We felt so creative and we were so loose, it was everything but was in the script.
I thought that it should have a different style than American action movie,
that it should be partially light hearted, that it should be a bit funny,
that you would be a bit amazed.
Can you fly, Bobby?
Clarence boddicker, he's having a great time.
Bitches leave.
He's this sociopath.
You probably don't think I'm a very nice guy.
You can't get crazy with it
because he still has to be taken seriously.
Cops don't like me.
With the language,
I kept adding things, especially f-bombs, I was big on
throwing those in all the time.
I don't want to fuck with you, sal.
Bad guys,
they never think they're bad.
This corporation will live up to the guiding principles
of its founder: Courage, strength, conviction.
There is a vague
religious component to robocop,
of course, because I felt that the death of Murphy
should be a crucifixion because there was a resurrection.
That's why that scene is extremely violent,
because crucifixion is one of the worst punishments that you can imagine.
Paul grew up in world war ii.
He saw real violence.
His whole concept of the violence in robocop
is he wanted it to be so over the top that you got the joke
immediately.
You have 20 seconds to comply.
I think you'd better do what he says, Mr. Kinney.
Oddly enough, they cut it back so much so
that it finally got to where it was right on the edge of what you could stand.
They made the violence
more egregious by doing it that way.
That's non-artistic people trying to make decisions
that they have no business making.
Ed-209 really wanted to emphasize
the stupidity of American automobile design.
And so I proposed to Paul that we build a full scale ed-209.
When ed falls down the stairs,
the sound effects was a baby pigs getting their throat slit.
Shootouts, things blowing up.
It was a pretty active show.
Guns going off and car crashes,
it was pretty exciting.
One of the things that Nancy
and her character, Louis were really responsible for,
within the movie, was bringing robocop back to his humanity.
Murphy, it's you.
It really was about
the human connection that I had with this part human character.
The soul was really still there.
Parable of loss of who are you
when that's gone.
Murphy had a wife and son. What happened to them?
The scene when he goes to his house
and it's empty, it just made me almost cry,
and that's when I said, this is a really good movie.
Can you that, dad?
It's a sad frigging movie, man,
it is a poignantly sad, sad, though, even at the end, he said,
"what's your name, kid?“
"Murphy."
Okay, he's got something back, right?
But he doesn't have it back, Matt.
That's gone.
He's not a guy, he's a machine.
What are they gonna do, replace us?
I like when a good film
will present those ideas and do it in a humorous way,
but enough that it gets your attention and gets you to think about it.
Robocop was urban dystopia.
I based it on elements that I saw.
Of course, it was happening in society already, but were not visible yet.
But now we are here.
The power of its messages trickle down
economics of the privatization of the world and capitalism
run amok.
Yes.
I was not aware of how long lasting
the social strata of robocop would last.
I don't know. It's a one off man.
That movie is extraordinary.
Excuse me, robo, any special message for all the kids watching at home?
Stay out of trouble.
The running man
what running man did. It predated reality TV.
The running man: America's favorite game show.
Running man is kind of dead on to
what happened with reality TV, only in the case of the running man,
the reality was termination, which we have unfortunately got to,
but I'll say yet.
It's time to start running!
Richard Dawson was your perfect comedic bad guy.
He was just playing the role he did on family feud.
Come on, let's play the feud, let's go.
It made perfect sense to me.
I'd like you to volunteer to appear on tomorrow's broadcast.
Halfway through filming predator,
Arnold came up to me on the set and he said, "my next film this fall
is called the running man, there's a part in there you're perfect for."
This is a sport of death and honor! Code of the gladiators!
By the time
my part got there, they were on their third director.
Fortunately for me, that director was
Paul Michael glaser.
Daven, here in the locker room, there's a lot of excitment here.
Captain freedom, my character
in running man, he was the greatest stalker of all time,
and he got old and like all old stalkers,
he ends up with a microphone.
Are you ready for pay?
Are you ready for suffering?
Running man was on the edge of technology
predicted in the movie that has become reality today.
Maria conchita goes into her apartment and starts turning things on by voice.
Well, that's a common practice now.
- Kitchen, Some coffee. - Channel one.
We've already reached the running man
stage of technology.
There's a very crude,
1980's style sort of digital frame to make you think that one person is there
when in actuality, it's someone else.
You'll never know the difference.
All right boys.
Running man
definitely predicted deepfake technologies.
They created this phony fight.
Peter Kent,
I ended up fighting Peter because Arnold wouldn't take a suplex.
He made Peter do it instead of him.
Let one out there, didn't I?
I'll always
Cherish this, I get to go to my death
as being one of only a handful of people who've ever killed
Arnold Schwarzenegger on screen.
Running man was more to show how sick
I think we, a society, can actually stoop to.
Entertainment knows no boundaries.
We don't give a damn what it is as long as we get entertained by it
in the end, a pretty sick thing to have sitting in our systems,
isn't it?
I'll be back.
Only in a rerun.
We all know that the hero's journey is fundamentally
a part of many stories and science fiction, usually a single character
who is initiating some adventure, some call to action,
and that there is this tremendous transformation.
Father! The sleeper has awaken!
Where do I come from?
Why do I matter?
What can I do to contribute to the universe
in a real, meaningful way? When we connect to heroes,
those are our idea! Selves.
Flash Gordon, he's just a guy
he doesn't have any superpowers,
relies solely on his wit and his athleticism.
They carry attributes
and features that we want to see in ourselves.
Brave, courageous, taking risks, being compassionate, being vulnerable,
intelligent. When we're in these moments with these characters
feeling the fear, the phobia, the desperation,
sometimes even grief.
Why not make me an author?
We all need to see the hero
have those things to relate to them.
Alex is essentially a very reluctant hero.
I mean, I would say a coward, really.
There's been a big mistake.
Am I to understand you're actually declining the honor
- of being a starfighter? - You got it.
What are you a coward?
Are you a coward?
Which I found very believable.
We also come to learn that heroic actions do
not have to be huge, extraordinary broad things,
they can be small, very meaningful actions.
It is illogical for you to perform this energy pack transplant. Oy.
I like unsung heroes.
I like the people who nobody ever talks about.
Hold him in the security tower. Keep it quiet. Move.
If you boil down the classics as we know them, empire strikes back,
et, the Terminator, what unites them all is humanity.
And is the way that the directors and the writers create character
that's accessible.
When you're gotten past the energy shield, proceed directly
to the randevue point.
Women like Princess Leia,
like vasquez, like Sarah Connor.
They're empowered.
They make decisions that other people don't like.
They take initiative, they take control.
You're terminated, fucker.
We needed to have that as young women.
Lewis, I received so much mail from young girls
that just loved this character.
I made them feel powerful.
You just stay away from me, bishop. You got that straight?
These are characters
that the audience can relate to.
It was very encouraging for young girls that they could accomplish
these things that may traditionally have been left to the guys to do.
Many of us are drawn to the anti-hero.
There are aspects within them that maybe fulfill some of our desires.
This concept of rule breaking and nonconformity.
I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass.
Something snarly
about those characters that anti-establishment.
It's a different attitude.
Yes, I bet you have.
If we think about han, Max.
I'm just here for the gasoline.
Snake.
Get a new president.
Selfishness is there, that sense of wanting to do
what's best for them is there.
And yet somewhere in that rugged individuality,
somewhere in that stubbornness is a heart.
I'll chase him down the moons of nibia and 'round the antares
maelstrom and 'round perdition's flames before I give him up.
We connect to so many villains.
They're fascinating, they're alluring, they're different.
I'm supposed to hate or despise the villain,
but I actually feel connected to them. Why?
If only you could see what I have seen with your eyes.
I had no idea of the power of ursa.
I have powers beyond reason here.
There's a real outlet
for bad behavior in these villains.
There's a vicarious indulgence in rooting for the villain.
Ooh, guns, guns, guns!
And I think
that's a safe way to be close to evil, destruction, bad behavior, and know,
that's ultimately not what I'm about at the end of the day.
To be a good villain you had to believe you were the good guy.
Once you believe you're the villain, then suddenly you become stereotypical
of everything that everybody wants a villain to be.
Take that program to the holding pit!
Part of humanity
is acknowledging that we're not all good and all perfect, that we have elements
of destruction, we make mistakes, that's
human psychology.
There will come a day when I'll show all of you! Don't you forget it!
Seeing these characters overcome adversity
gives us really important suggestions for our own lives
and our own behaviors.
No, biff. You leave her alone.
You leave her alone.
Is there anything
from this narrative that I feel inspired by, that maybe I could do.
And what is it like to overcome something that seems insurmountable?
I don't want you to think earth girls are easy.
Earth girls are easy
earth girls are easy
was like an mtv musical.
It is a provocative title,
but the idea is that girls are complex and you have to be open to changing
what you think is going to make you happy.
I need surprises. I need romance.
I mean, how long has it been
since you said, "I love you"...
The original original idea came from -
you remember those national enquirer stories?
I saw one where this woman said an alien came in through the doggy door
and she had sex with him.
We thought that was hilarious.
Hey, come on everybody! We're doing a makeover.
I thought the whole thing should be a break into song musical.
Charlie coffey, my writing partner and I, we proceeded to write,
I don't know, 25 drafts, the reality of it was much different
when they finally landed on Julien temple,
they sent me his movie absolute beginners to break into song musical.
So I thought, oh my god, this is perfect.
Once Julien got attached, they realized the budget was going to be
this certain amount, and I wasn't a big enough name to warrant that amount.
So I went in and pitched me as the second lead.
And they went for it, but I was like, so freaking
depressed about it and angry.
I've had to come to terms with earth girls.
Geena Davis and Jeff goldblum, they're both really nice.
It came as a package deal.
They were so in love and they were making out on the set
all the time, and I found it irritating
because I was like, "this is my movie.
We must take this seriously."
The aliens,
we thought it would be really funny if they were hairy when they first showed up.
Not recognizable as cute boys.
Shit, Valerie! Those are aliens!
And that there'd be this transformation.
Wow!
When they suggested Jim carrey
to me, for whitlock, it was the craziest of the aliens.
He has this like not quite human quality
that he does on stage.
You won't be seeing much more physical humor on my show.
There was a big search for that part.
I mean, I feel like we're very lucky that he did it.
I'm going home with him.
Bitch.
Damon wayans is willing
to sort of do anything.
The aliens themselves
didn't have any kind of racism,
we thought that was very cool.
It very much captures '803
valley specifically, and, you know, they use the observatory
as the disco.
I would have loved
if there was more valley landmarks that were in there that are gone now.
It really has this time capsule quality of the '80s.
Love comes in
many forms and many shapes, right, and it could be an alien from space,
something that is very relevant and means something to me,
especially with, you know, all my gay friends.
The thing is, earth girls really are not easy,
but if she just took her vision and changed it a little,
the perfect man did show up.
Sounds like you have two hearts.
- Yes. Don't you? - No.
Akira
a government experiment that creates
super humans who are so powerful their thoughts can destroy
everything.
Akira in the late '803 was one of the first Japanese
anime things that came to the states that people started to appreciate
and realize how big this stuff is in Japan.
Like, it's not just Saturday morning cartoons.
It was a big, big movie.
I think Akira kind of opened that door in america.
Before I was aware
of Akira, I was a fan of Japanese animation,
I really loved battle of the planets and macros and robotech.
These are all cartoons I watched after school.
When I was at a convention and I saw the artwork for Akira on a vhs,
I thought, wow, cool, a movie.
And we put it in and what we had
was a third or fourth generation bootleg.
And it was all in Japanese.
It was not subtitled or dubbed.
We had no idea what the story was.
The animation was so compelling.
We just knew that this was amazing and earth shaking
and was unlike anything we had ever seen.
It's about tetsuo's friends trying to save him,
even when they realize that the way to save him is to destroy him.
I've only been to Tokyo once,
and my oven/vhelming impression of it was that Tokyo is just on top of you.
You can't move. In Neo Tokyo,
they've rebuilt Tokyo
and actually expanded some of the highways and giving it more space.
Akira is the very first time I ever saw one of those shots,
incredible motorbike coming at you and starting that power slide
like what seems like hundreds of feet away.
It's the visual Wilhelm scream
of anime, it has to be in every anime,
and all of that was hand animated and hand painted.
That was just jaw dropping to me.
I finally did see Akira in English,
and it's even better than what I thought it was as a kid.
Hi, kids! It's me, Ronald McDonald.
And I'm on the set of my very first motion picture ever.
It's a movie called Mac and me.
Mac and me is the kirkland e.T.
There is an entire
generation of people who only know Mac and me
because Paul rudd shows a scene from Mac and me
on conan o'brien every time he goes there to promote a movie.
I get a phone call and it's the guy that I've never met.
And he said, "I have a film that I want you to direct and write.
It's a lot like e.T., but I want to do it with a family with an actual person
with a spinal bifida condition."
We didn't steal anything from him,
it was just a concept to have an alien creature,
so I need the prototype aliens, big big eyes, nothing like e.T.
And animated and cute.
It's the kids.
Can we go there and watch?
No way!
The lead boy, Jade calegory,
he was exactly what we want, and he could act and he was wonderful in the movie.
Please? I won't anybody hurt you.
It was fun to make
the film, but it was extremely limiting because the creature
is really a puppet on cables.
Everything was time consuming,
but it worked.
He's so wholesome in his element.
They were both very cute together.
But it's all done on the level of children.
It's a whole different world when you're writing for kids.
It was a charitable endeavor.
The producer is a man that worked for McDonald's,
who is this big, main supplier, a multimillionaire.
He was probably, you know, polishing his own look
by making a film and giving all of the money to this company.
Everything is a deal
behind films because films just cost way too much money to make.
Well, the Ronald McDonald actor in the film
was the one that was actually on TV in all the commercials.
It was a crossover of perfection.
We have this building that they're giving us.
We have as many dances as we can put in there.
That's how it was created.
One of the dancers
in that background, which we shot was Jennifer Aniston.
Can you believe that?
Nobody paid tribute to this producer
than made a whole movie to help people who were handicapped
have more presence in the film business, and it destroyed the kid.
He did it because he wanted to show the people that couldn't move
except in a wheelchair could do all this stuff.
So then Paul rudd comes along and he sticks out this whole scene
with Jade losing control of his wheelchair
and flying off a cliff.
He did it
year after year after year, he is single
handedly kept that movie alive.
I would love to sit down with him and write a sequel
to that movie with him starring in it with this creature.
My wife's always saying
we should call Paul rudd.
Sometimes science fiction holds an obligation
to give messages and even commentary
about our social systems.
Alien nation
alien nation was tackling
themes of racism and segregation.
At least I'm a detective, not some outer shit space thing.
Not very subtle metaphor.
Their ship was a slave ship,
washed ashore on earth with no way to get back to where they came from.
There are immigrants who have ended up in la.
A lot of the time doing the menial jobs.
So it's a kind of it's a look at the way L.A.
Works.
Alien nation is basically a science fiction
version of a buddy cop movie.
Change your mind?
Two mismatched cops come together to solve a crime,
well known trope by this point in the '803.
Hey, nice signal dickhead!
The film stars
James caan as the human cop, Matt Sykes and Mandy patinkin
as his alien counterpart, George Francisco.
My true name is stangya-sorenz-ahhhh. Sorenz-ah,
- well, gesundheit. Ha. - Thank you.
I'll call you George.
Terence stamp plays the newcomer, the villain in the film.
You move one finger and you're history, you hear me?
Not history. Eternity!
Gale Anne hurd.
She didn't want to be seen just as James Cameron's producer, she wanted to say,
actually, I do my own things. And that's where alien nation comes in.
It has the feel of the Terminator, it has a feel of that
look the way that Cameron went about science fiction.
Where's the drug?
Bring the science to the contemporary.
Bring it to the current city and that idea that Los Angeles
is an essential character in the whole piece.
Initially, when Stan Winston and his team got that job,
they were hoping to make the aliens a little less humanoid.
Some of his team were looking at the
Louis gossett junior character in enemy mine as inspiration for where they could go
but in the end, and I believe wisely so, the filmmakers said, no,
we want them to be closer to human to really play up that theme of
we're similar in the end, right?
So why these differences?
Yeah, I mean, it's made ofr rubber, it's stretches, right?
And still it fits?
This genre has always
been about the expansion of our ideas and how we relate to one another.
Our social elements, our social structure, even elements
that we should be more mindful of and even dismantle.
So why do we have to take them? Why can't they go to Russia
- or some place like that. - I'll drink to that.
Alien nation
thrived later, when it was redeveloped for television.
That's when the themes that we talk about are in your face every week,
and the show becomes an allegory for all of these topical stories
that are still resonating today.
Where do you go looking for a cherry 2000?
A post-apocalyptic world that has this kind of
technological utopia that is very similar to what we find ourselves in today.
You know, everything's kind of taken care of
and yet there's a whole undennorld just barely getting by and getting by
in the most ingenious and sort of violent and horrible ways.
- Where you're from, mister? - Anaheim.
It really is
a little scary in its visionary aspects.
Most of the world has given up on relationships.
So if you had your domestic mate at cherry 2000, which was the epitome
of what you would want, you know, if it breaks, you can't get it
fixed in the current world, so you have to go out into zone 7.
She's at cherry 2000.
I want you to go into zone 7, and give me one just like her.
A director just fell out, I found out later it was Irv kershner,
and they were desperate to get somebody and go shoot.
I read 20 pages and it was brilliant, weird stuff,
so ijumped on cherry, which was a moving train.
Melanie Griffith, she just had a baby.
So it was a very tough shoot, she really had to endure a lot.
There's a little easter egg in the robot repair thing where
Sam treadwell, played by David Andrews, goes to see a robot repair
guy, and I put robby the robot in gort in there, at my expense,
it was out of my little director's slush fund. Forbidden planet is
probably the first movie of the sci fi genre that really influenced me.
So it was giving back to that.
I am monitored to respond to the name roby.
We shot in every toxic location in Nevada
inside hoover dam, electromagnetic forces
in the spillways and radiation zones
concocted some crazy, over-the-top
rpg fights and things like that.
The one big set piece with the magnet
in the mustang.
You'd never do it today, it would all be cgi.
It's a real stunt
woman hanging on to that car out over hoover dam.
Thank god it was only one take.
Vegas buried in sand dunes, I think that was the first time it was ever done.
We did old glass maps where you actually paint
and shoot through them, built big sets poking out of there.
The Vegas showgirls and all that.
Besides blowing up a lot of Nevada in the process, it's really about love,
about finding true love, not an idealized mate
that does your bidding and cooks you dinner.
It's about interactions with a tough, equal or superior woman.
And finally, realizing that that's
that's more desirable.
One of the aspects
of being a science fiction fan was a fascination
with what science can bring us in the world of tomorrow.
What might be? What could be?
Hello, I'm Johnny cab.
It is a forecast into our future.
A lot of science fiction writers are writing
and developing technologies that end up becoming real in the future.
People in the fields of medicine and technology and science,
it's very exciting to know that all of these people were inspired
by watching Star Trek.
Klingon mummification glyph.
What were the principal historical events on the planet
earth in the year 1987? Correct.
Sci fi
imitates real life, real life imitates sci fi.
We create
art through our movies and our stories that is of our imagination,
and then someone somewhere goes, "hey, hey,
what if I could do that?"
You think of all the things
that were figments of someone's imagination.
Motion trackers, who would have thunk?
And now we're almost reliant on GPS.
What about tracking? We can check his exact
location at all times.
The phone, which is not a phone, it's
a phone, it's a camera, it's your day runner, it has a tape measure.
It's everything. It's your entire life.
I never thought I'd be wearing a computer
on my wrist, it's just laughable.
There are computers in our iPhones that are actually more powerful
than the computer that was in the Apollo missions, right?
Which is mind boggling.
In runaway, there was that almost Internet
before its time.
The drone technology.
Police are preparing a floater camera which will enter the house
in an attempt to locate the runaway 912 and the infant.
All of that stuff
has pretty much come to life.
The science has caught up to the science fiction.
There is more technological advance in the past 50 years than there is
in all of recorded history up to 50 years ago, and that will continue.
Arthur c. Clarke's definition
that any advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic.
What we think of today as impossible
and magical in 15 or 20 or even 1000
years will be commonplace.
We just don't know what's around the corner.
And it's bound to be something that will blow our minds right.
I would only hope that humankind would continue to be inspired
by the possibilities of the future.
It's crazy.
I don't know where we're headed.
At some point, all of this stuff is going to be implanted into our heads somewhere
and we'll just think something and there it'll be in front of us.
Why not?
I would like to ask a quesiton. Will I dream?
Of course you will dream.
Some of the things that have come to fruition are very scary.
You know, when we talk about facial recognition, deepfake technologies,
artificial intelligence that could potentially take over the planet,
these are the kinds of things that were forecast
in the '803 sci fi films that are just now starting to break.
Deepfakes, this is an existential issue,
because we're going to come back to the idea of, do you trust your fellow man?
It's not the deepfake that's going to make the difference.
It's the guy behind the deepfake.
Right now, you don't even have to do a deepfake.
Just tell the same lie over and over and over again and you're in.
To me, that's the disturbing part, not the ability to sing the siren song.
It's the people who are seduced by it.
We find ourselves now
in this somewhat both inspiring and dystopian
future world that's very much like the movies that we all watched.
Part of the nostalgia for the '803 movies
is that they dealt with a lot of these fears very, very well.
They dealt with government paranoia.
They dealt with technological overreach and hyper innovation.
What are you really sacrificing in the name of progress.
And, yeah, computers are going to try to kill us.
And I think in some way computers have tried to kill us.
We already live within the construct of skynet.
If you're on any social media,
all of those systems are artificial intelligence systems that are aggregating
all of those algorithms and figuring out who you are
in a way that you don't even understand.
They cannot make things like that yet.
Not yet.
Skynet in Terminator
was the warning, and every time you input a piece of data,
you were adding to that quote unquote skynet.
Enhance 34 to 36.
I think every generation looks at the new technology.
There's the scariness and this hopefulness that I think always coexist.
And so it comes down to do we have systems in place
that allow us the beneficial aspects of technology
while limiting the potential for abuse and misuse.
I think that for
every new technology, for every sci fi idea,
you can find a movie that's hopeful
about what that's going to do to transform the world.
And a movie that's terrified about how this thing is going to destroy everything.
There isn't a single sci fi concept where you can't find
both of those kinds of movies.
Bill & Ted's
excellent! Excellent!
Excellent adventure
what if you had the ultimate power of the gods in your hand
and yet you're such an imbecile that you did
nothing with it, really.
All we are is dust and the wind, dude.
It was so nice to see a script written
with young people who were still young.
We're wild stallions!
Who had innocence
and openness and weren't cynical and jaded and weren't talking
like characters out of a Woody Allen movie at 16.
How's it going, royal ugly dudes?
The reason that Keanu and I probably got hired was that
we were both theater kids and we both took the characters very seriously.
Really playing them with
sincerity and not with a wink and a nod of the audience.
It's not back to the future.
You know, we're not that big.
We didn't have a lot of money, but we really leaned into the kind of ragtag,
sincere analog nature of this hyper
real situation that we were in.
Hey! That's us. We're back in San dimas!
Yeah. Only now it's not now. It's last night.
My favorite scene from bill and Ted is the circle k
when the phone booth arrives.
Not bad!
In terms of sci fi conceits,
acting opposite yourself was really fun.
Strange things are afoot at the circle k.
Time travel.
Multiple versions of yourself.
- 69 dudes! - Whoa.
That kind of mind screw
type stuff is the most fun.
Want a twinkie, genghis Khan?
Our film is a strange movie.
I'm darth Ted.
I'll never rule the universe with you!
We didn't have a Rufus for,
you know, it was well into production.
Greetings, my excellent friends.
I'm here to help you with your history report.
They kept throwing names at us, and they went after Connery,
I think with the time bandits thing,
Keanu and I were actually genuinely worried that they were going
to cast the wrong Rufus, but we were really, really lucky with carlin.
I'm not strict about time travel rules, I just want to be entertained.
The time travel mechanics are actually very, very tight
and very, very realistic.
We'll time travel back to two days ago, steal your dad's keys and leave them here!
My favorite time travel mechanic is when bill and Ted decide
that they're going to do a thing in the future using the time machine.
W see? Ow, yeah!
That's the ultimate sort of closed
loop time travel mechanic.
We can't forget to do this, othennise it won't happen.
But it did happen!
It really could have gone off the rails
at any point along the way.
We're history.
For all of the circuits of time stuff, they just had a boot that was like a canoe
just kind of wedged onto the top of like this really rickety hydraulic pole
that was very high in the air and like a shoddy sound stage
outside of phenix somewhere.
125 degrees.
Sweating profusely all the time.
Everyone just stinking to high heaven looks like a bad carny ride.
And it's like going... jerking around, you know, certain we were going to die.
The movie got shelved, so it came out a full year later.
I'd written it off as having any success, and then it just exploded.
When you're in a film that punctures pop culture like that, there's
really no way to be prepared for it because it is very surreal.
Party on, dudes!
I think the what if genre is definitely a sci fi genre
and there is a sci fi veneer to anything about bombs going off, like nuclear war.
It definitely falls into the sci fi category, at least
until it happens.
Miracle mile
listen, I'm just a guy, who-who picked up the phone.
It was a famous script.
Everybody's talked about this script.
It's an audacious movie made for, I think, a 1.98 at night.
To me, it was like early Spielberg.
This can't be true.
It can't.
What would you do
if you were the only person to know that you have 70 minutes to live?
The rube goldberg
thing in miracle mile is that he decides to quit smoking,
so he throws his cigarette down and a pigeon picks it up.
He lays down to take a nap to meet his newfound love at midnight,
and the power goes off in these three hours late.
You just missed her.
My alarm didn't go off. And the power went out in the hotel.
This movie really starts going
when the phone rings.
What exactly are you talking about?
I'm talking about nuclear fucking war!
Who is this?
What would you do if you accidentally got that phone call
and you just know that it's coming? By getting people to really think about that
and reflect on it, it affects decision making in the real world.
It's always walking that tightrope of is this happening?
Am I crazy?
So he was calling from a missile silo.
He said that they were locked in! 50 minutes and counting.
The real time when the clock started
counting down, it's a fabulous convention.
Condoms! We won't be needing these.
We got to repopulate the whole planet.
The interesting thing
was the odd people in it and the love story within it.
Trust me with this!
With what?
I love you.
By the end, it's sort of one of the iconic images, this river of cars
and human chaos.
It was pretty crazy
for us to do that on this low budget.
I'm shot and fall, my face falls, and I'm like, "great.
That's my hitchcockian cameo."
It was $3 million to make this movie, which even in the '803,
I don't know how we did it.
You tell me now! You joking, ha?!
I was in danger of being fired every day of the shoot
because they said it was impossible to do.
Warner brothers offered a fortune.
They said if we thought about making miracle mile as a single story twilight
zone.
The only change they wanted to make was he woke up and it was all a dream
and then started happening again, which would just not satisfy anybody.
It's total chaos! The fear, it's total, absolute...
I didn't want to do
anything that gave you hope, I hate to say it.
I wanted to shake people up.
I wanted to have them walk out of the theater and go do something
about the issue.
It could happen more likely tonight
than back in '89.
Forget everything you just heard and go back to sleep.
I got a huge kick out of honey, I shrunk the kids.
What an absolutely silly idea that I thought was really well handled.
You don't realize how terrifying all the little things around
you can be until you're smaller than everything.
Honey, I shrunk the kids is about
a scientist played by Rick moranis, who accidentally shrinks his kids
and they have to traverse this backyard in order to get back home and, you know,
fight all sorts of dangers in his backyard now that they're this big.
I shrunk the kids.
What?
The Thompson kids too. They are about this big, they're in the backyard.
- What?! - Threw them out with the trash.
It's a dead lift on the Richard Matheson story, the incredible shrinking man,
which was one of my favorite sci fi movies when I was a kid.
Matheson was very ahead of his time.
There's allusions to that movie in it.
There are sequences where they're fighting certain insects as an homage
to those movies of the past.
Honey, I shrunk the kids.
The movie was called teeny weenies and gave me an opportunity
to work with my buddy Joe johnston on his first theatrical feature film.
There was a big scorpion scene.
What we essentially did was that, the fighting ant
and going after these children, and the ant comes to the rescue.
Stop motion creatures, you don't want camera moves to drive
the performance, we want the performance to drive the camera.
And then there is another unit down in Los Angeles
with Dave Allen that was doing the other scenes with the ant.
One of the things about making movies in the '803
that people today don't necessarily understand
is how many different solutions to things you had to find.
You couldn't just throw it into a computer, and that's it.
You had to use force perspective, miniatures and bigatures,
and sometimes in the single scene, you might have a animatronic
and the kids are riding on and then a close up that's just a head.
It's an entirely different prop.
And you had to really sort of think about how you were going to do
every single shot in a movie and come up with a different unique
solution.
Thanks for the lift, anty.
It has this esthetic that is not quite realistic looking
in a lot of places, but it 100% works for the movie
and the tone of the movie that they're telling. These giant blades of grass
look exactly how they should look for that movie.
The great thing about
knowing that a movie was done practically is that you know
that at some point there was actually a kid swimming around
in a giant bowl of milk using a giant cheerio as a life preserver.
Help! Don't eat me!
Some of us feel like the world was getting a little
too cynical for its own good, a little too self-aware for its own good.
A movie like honey, I shrunk the kids was just like, look, let's just go,
enjoy ourselves and enjoy the innocence and sweetness of the world.
It's always got a place on my shelf
for that reason.
Nick! I've got six hours to get home, get big, and get to the mall.
Now get moving!
I'm James Cameron
and I want to take you into a world of cold darkness
and unrelenting pressue.
The abyss is a film that's made on a frontier
in terms of the physicality of how
they made the film literally undennater
as a film made in a frontier of technology and filmmaking ability
and a classic camera and storytelling sense.
It's a mix of things.
It's a bottomless pit, baby.
Two and a half miles, straight down.
Mary Elizabeth mastrantonio
and ed Harris, the two lead characters, are an estranged couple.
Under extreme circumstances,
love flourishes.
You can do this.
It's a lovely inversion of aliens
in a way. The Navy seals are the bad guys
and the aliens are the good guys.
Wouldn't you have liked the picture better if they hadn't had the aliens down there
and just spent more time with the rest of us
I just think they just put in another element that was more fun.
It doesn't work for me.
Aliens was a cakewalk compared to the abyss.
Jim Cameron, he doesn't suffer fools, but the reason why
he's known as being a taskmaster is because he's done the work
and he expects all of the crew to work as hard as he is.
Crew members actually had a t-shirt that said
life's abyss, and then you dive.
He was almost his ethos as a filmmaker.
I will make the impossible.
I will find a way of doing these things.
They shot it and these nuclear silos,
and gaffney filled it with water, filled it with chlorine.
They had to put black beads across the top of the tank to stop the light getting in,
but it allowed you to get out of the water in case of emergencies.
It's dangerous filmmaking like that you can get the bends just in the olympic
swimming pool or at 18 feet deep if you jump up too quick.
They had to take their time at the end of the day to safely get out of that set.
- Bud. - Relax now, bud.
Watch me.
That sequence where
they had to basically breathe in water.
I was like that when I saw them, I just I couldn't believe it.
And he had breathed the liquid oxygen, that's fake.
So he has to hold his breath.
We all breathed liquid for nine months, bud. Your body will remember.
A Navy seal demonstrates you can breathe liquid oxygen,
and that is a real demonstration of the effect, the experiment.
There were five rats, five takes.
The fifth rat struggled.
Cameron had to give it cpr.
- See? He's fine. - It's a she.
But the endurance test
for the filmmakers and for the cast was beyond difficult.
Everyone had experiences on it, which will kind of make or break moments.
They had safety divers, they called angels.
Okay, that was a good take Edward. I want to print that, but let's do it again.
Ed Harris, a tough guy.
He had to swim under water for about 40 meters,
and there are scenes where he just at the brink of not being able to breathe anymore.
Cameron himself has
an incredible story because people forget he would just stay undennater.
He had wights and everything. He could keep himself at the bottom of the tank.
And Cameron pulls on his oxygen mask.
Nothing. And he goes, I'm in trouble.
And that's when a safety diver thinks he's in distress
because he is and comes out with a respirator
and puts the respirator in Ron, pulls water
straight into his lungs,
and he starts to push away because he's going to drown.
And the guy holds him closer
because he thinks he's struggling because he's lack of oxygen.
And the story is Cameron punches him.
The only thing
last thing he can do is punch the guy and break through into the surface.
His assistant and the safety diver were fired on the same day,
and he was back down the boat in the tank within hours.
That's James Cameron for you.
That's the abyss for you.
What the hell is going on?
Back to the future ii picks up
exactly where the last film left off.
And then we go to the far off
future of the year 2015.
The future. Unbelievable.
We are big believers
in the set it up, pay it off.
We thought to ourselves, hill valley needs to be recognizable.
It's recognizable from 1955 to 1985 and in 1985 to 2015.
It has to be recognizable as well.
The great splendor of back to the future
really is its ethos is 1950, when in terms of science fiction,
the dream was a flying car
and the cities of the future and that's where back to the future
part ii comes in, is that it's just jokes about 1950's idealization of the future
and all of those kind of consumerist ideas,
wonderful kind of humaristic things.
We thought about how does the world change. You recognize a time period
on a pop culture level based on what new products look like.
Is it ready?
We were very cognizant about choosing brands
that would give us a change in period.
All I want is a Pepsi.
That's what's going to make people feel comfortable
that this is where we are.
Drying mode on.
Even though
2015, as depicted in back to the future I! Didn't quite pan out
in reality, we all still want a hoverboard and
I still want a pair of those self-lacing Nike tennis shoes.
We didn't get 19 jaws movies.
They forecast our obsession with the '803,
so they were on point with that.
There's a whole like genetic line of this
really,
really
good writing as far as a villain that just carries all the things
that really trigger us and push our buttons.
What's wrong with mcfly? Chicken?
We all know a biff.
Go get it!
Back to the future ii gets
real dark, real fast.
Somewhere in the past, the timeline skewed into this this tangent
creating an alternate 1985.
Time paradoxes, man.
You don't know what's going to happen.
Third time's the charm.
The way that you see characters have changed
as a result of this new timeline and these new actions that have happened.
You're very much in Marty's shoes of like
this is not the way the world is supposed to be.
And how did it get this way and how do I fix it?
Doc, what if we don't succeed?
We must succeed!
The cool thing
about back to the future ii is where they go back in time again
to the events of the first movie, and you now have this second Marty
running around witnessing the events of the first movie
and you get the sense that that was always happening behind the scenes
while the first movie was going on.
As a time travel junkie,
the idea of reinserting yourself back into another set of events
that you've already gone through once it just cracks me up.
This '80s nostalgia
that existed in these sort of future 2015, which was obviously meant to mimic
the 1950s nostalgia that people had in the 1980s.
But when you're in the 19803, you don't think of that that way
to see that come true, to have lived long enough to see what
I grew up and become this nostalgia thing.
I don't know.
In one sense, it makes me feel a little old,
but it is also a thing that was very prescient about
back to the future ii.
We have a quaint little piece from the 19803.
It's called the dustbuster.
Science fiction, certainly the best of science fiction is inevitably
a reflection of what's going on on earth at the time it was written,
all works of art are ineluctable products of the time in which they are created.
This isn't about space.
This isn't about deep water.
This isn't about another dimension.
This is about us.
It's really up to the audience to decide what they want
out of the experience.
Science fiction allowed people
to tell stories and talk about extremely
important social issues
in ways that got people thinking, maybe without them realizing
they were thinking about it.
We have a hard time talking about this directly,
but if I tell you this story about people who are half painted white
and half painted black, hating the other people
who are half painted black and half painted white.
The idea of racism, we see how silly and dumb it is
when you sort of see it reflected in a different set of cultural norms
hits you in a way that you can't see without the metaphor.
Escaping when you're a little kid or teenager
into the world of science fiction is a great way to start
to come to terms
with your own personality, who you are, where you fit in the world,
and they become really important benchmarks in how you remember your youth.
So there's something I think that's universal about that in terms of age.
A lot of these movies
cater to a young audience
that perhaps was in a real transition in their lives.
And these are times in your lives that you never forget.
A3 simple as these movies appear to be, especially by today's standards,
there's a magic to them because of their relateability and their intimacy.
It belongs to the person that it made an imprint on, and that's the wonderful thing
about stories. You tell it so that somebody else
can relate to it because you related to and that's why you wanted to tell it.
There's something about being able to have
your favorite movie and your favorite moment
and have it with you and watch it as many times as you want.
And it became this tradition.
We could go rent a movie and we could sit down with our family.
It was about where we were and who we were with at the time, and we all wish
we could be back there in some way doing that with those people at that time.
Everybody likes to remember good times.
Some of these movies remind us of the good times.
By the way, why are we wearing bras on our heads?
I think that nostalgia connects us
not only with an innocent part of ourselves, but also with our imagination,
because as we get older, we kind of lose that imagination.
Everybody has it, but it starts to get tarnished as we get older.
These movies endure
because it's a part of us we don't want to lose.
As you get older, you want to relive those moments
that meant so much to you as a kid.
You don't want them to go away because they're actually part of who you are.
I think that what you've got as artists and filmmakers
are a lot of adults who are still kid3.
They're capable of working in an adult world,
but they feel like a child and want to express that.
There's something that
keeps these directors making these phenomena! Films.
They're affecting you in some emotional way,
and they're feeling that emotion when they're making it.
And I'm really glad there's people around that are listening to their inner selves.
Art is the one thing that looks
beyond the reality that we know around us
and it shows us what's possible
and it's most noble. Art shows us
what can be and what ought to be.
That is what science fiction at its best is all about.
Is showing us the world of tomorrow
and how human life can be better
in the future than it is right now.
That's the magic of sci fi, man.