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Hello, my name's Adrian Lyne,
and I directed Fatal Attraction all those years ago.
It does seem a long while ago,
so I hope that I can remember something about this.
I have the worst memory in the world, but I'll do my best.
I remember that I wanted
the best skyline for those water towers
that I just love in New York,
and so this was the best, I thought, that we found
and we did it in the magic hour.
And this little window that we go into,
obviously there's nothing to do with the interior of where we shot.
It was just the window, I don't know whose house it was,
but we used this skyline quite nicely. There's a plane going by.
So strange to watch New York skylines now
'cause one endlessly looks for the twin towers.
And of course, this was over on the West Side, as I remember it.
I remember when we cast Ellen, their daughter.
I remember Billy saying, "She's the best.
"She's just the best of all of the kids out there,"
and I saw everybody, obviously.
But he was right, she was.
This was a program that was very popular with kids at the time.
I used to canvass my daughter Amy, who was about the same age as Ellen.
I think a lot of Ellen's behavior in this,
in the family, reflects my daughter Amy, really.
I like the mess of the household, you know.
I like the way Michael's sitting in his underpants
and the dog sitting on the sofa.
It has a nice sort of messy feeling.
And I think you... I hope you fairly...
Michael tripping up there is nice. On one of the kids' toys, or whatever.
And I think you get a feeling of, just that this is a nice family.
It's a family you wanna know about.
And obviously in view of the story that we have,
you have to be invested in the family.
I like the way things...
A lot of things are going on at the same time.
The telephone call with a friend,
and in a moment he can't find his pants, you know.
This is certainly me. I can never find them.
I'll tell you something about this apartment,
which I haven't mentioned before,
and funny enough, one person noticed it.
This is the same apartment that they used in Nine 1/2 Weeks
for Kim Basinger's apartment with her friend.
And I searched all over New York endlessly for another apartment.
You know, for an apartment that I liked in terms of light,
in term of the angles, and I just couldn't find one.
So, the irony is, it's the same one. The secret's out.
This is Mr. Chow's in Manhattan.
On 57th Street, I think.
Stuart Pankin, I think, is interesting casting.
He's a terrific actor, but amongst other things, he's a standup comic.
Or used to be. He used to do a lot on Comedy Central and things like that.
And I think it always helps to have somebody
who just won't literally be doing the script.
He'll be offering up his own stuff. One-liners and humor the whole time.
And he did it all the way through.
Mike Nussbaum, here, wearing the neck brace.
He's wearing a neck brace
because Stanley Jaffe, our producer, used to wear one a lot.
He would get spasms in his neck and I would think, "God, that's sort of..."
I thought it was kind of amusing-looking, to be honest.
So, obviously, Michael Douglas had a chance to make jokes about it,
about how he got the neck brace, et cetera.
So it's nice having little idiosyncratic stuff like that
so that you feel these people actually have a history, you know.
That he actually hurt his neck skiing, or whatever.
Makes you feel like they're real people.
I was very worried about Glenn's hair here.
I thought, "Oh, God.
"It's a little over the top, this Medusa thing."
And it's funny 'cause it's something that the critics grabbed hold of
and mentioned a lot.
So, I guess, out of what I felt at the time was a little bit of a mistake,
good happens, you know.
It's funny, I just fixated on her hair
and I thought, "God, that doesn't seem to be right."
But it was too late then.
The barman here is Tommy Saccio, our prop-man. A very fine prop-man.
Maybe less good as an actor.
Though he'd hate me for saying it.
It's funny, Glenn, as I guess people have heard,
Glenn pursued this movie, really.
She was very anxious to do the movie and I thought, "Well, that seems wrong."
You know, I didn't...
I thought she was a fine actress,
but she'd always played sweet, stay-at-home, home-loving people,
and I thought the idea of her playing this woman
who eventually becomes psychotic was just strange.
But we had her in,
and I watched her work with Michael and it was just extraordinary, really,
just what a fine actress she was.
And in the end, you're not casting two individuals,
you're casting what happens when the two meet.
And Michael and Glenn meeting
is something that I think any director would want.
Anne Archer is a terrific actress.
I had known her for a long while and she'd come in on many castings.
And she just has...
Again, she's a fine actress, but she is nice.
And I think what was interesting was to cast somebody like Anne,
who is just wonderful-looking, apart from anything else.
And she's so attractive, sexually, and she's so attractive as a person.
I thought, "I love the arbitrary nature of infidelity,
"of how, even though you have the best-looking wife on Earth,
"you still sometimes have an affair."
I have an affair with Labradors. I adore them as dogs.
Look at this fine animal.
I actually have the daughter of this dog, Quincy.
I'm so fond of this dog.
As an indication of how old this movie is now,
the daughter puppy is on her last legs, poor animal.
This is something that would happen to me endlessly.
Come in and find your daughter in bed.
This is an interesting scene now
because I love the way everybody is talking together here.
Literally, there are three different conversations going on at once.
Anne Archer is talking to the kid
at the same time as Michael is talking to Anne
and the kid, at the same time, is talking to Anne.
So it's three conversations at once.
It is a challenge, but again, it feels real, you know.
You can't believe that this man would ever have an affair.
Why could he possibly have an affair
when his family is so nice just to be with, you know?
But I guess that's the way it happens.
There's the neck brace again.
So this is, as far as I remember,
Michael improvises a little story about the neck brace.
There's a moment coming up with Glenn
that I've actually talked about before, which I think is kind of nice.
Michael's eating a bagel and cream cheese,
and I was looking for a moment when you're really gonna sense
that maybe Michael and Glenn could maybe fall in love with each other.
It's a moment of real sweetness between them, if you like.
And I knew I had to find something,
and in the end, it was Michael who came up with the idea
of the cream cheese going on his nose
and Glenn telling him about it.
But it was fun to shoot because we could never get
the right amount of cream cheese to go on his nose.
And sometimes it would literally coat his face
and I would have hysterics.
They would literally have to carry me off laughing.
He would see me laughing, Michael,
and would laugh himself and we'd have to start all over again.
It was hilarious doing this.
That was about take 18.
Take 18 getting this little amount of cream cheese on his nose.
Michael has a very nice feeling for comedy, I think.
This whole thing with the umbrella is fun now
and very endearing, I think, you know.
Something that a woman would like, I think,
seeing this guy struggle with the umbrella
that eventually goes inside out.
Those cheap umbrellas that you can buy
on any street corner in New York when it starts to rain.
People materialize from nowhere with bunches of umbrellas to sell.
This was a fabulous restaurant that I love,
that I used to go to myself quite a lot,
called the Goulue, La Goulue, it was called.
It used to off Madison, now they moved it to Madison.
It's not quite as nice as it used to be.
So it's nice eating at places and seeing restaurants and thinking,
"Shit, I gotta use this.
"If I was gonna shoot a scene like this,
"I'll shoot it in that table in the corner there."
You know, you never really stop thinking about shots
and this sort of thing.
This bar is fabulous.
They moved everything to the other address,
but it doesn't have the feeling of the old place like this.
This is Bill Evans playing on the piano here.
It's funny, they said, "You don't need Bill Evans to play the piano.
"You can get anybody to play the piano for the background music."
But somebody else did play it and it sounded horrible.
And it's just a nice moment.
There's a gap in the conversation when the piano comes through,
and it really makes a big difference without realizing it.
So when I did the rehearsal with Michael and Glenn,
one of the scenes that we did was this one,
where she says, "Are you discreet?"
And it's funny 'cause she did it over and over again, the scene,
and I suddenly realized that she had done...
Each time she had said, "Are you discreet?"
she did it with a different inflection.
It was just extraordinary. When I played the takes back,
and I saw how many different ways she had said that line,
it just made me realize what an extraordinary actress she is, really.
And what a craft it is, really,
to be able to say things in different ways like that.
One thing I did during this scene was have
Glenn play footsie with Michael under the table
that he was sort of unprepared for,
and there's a nice moment, I've forgotten where it comes exactly,
but there's a nice moment where you can tell that she's doing that.
This is the piano bit I'm talking about.
Beautiful.
Listen to the way it comes through.
Amazing.
Look how it accents the scene, it's just extraordinary.
When he's made the decision.
I like this jump cut. Bang. You go into them making out, you know.
And they're both very courageous here, with the underwear and stuff.
It's funny, we talked about the love scene,
or I would bring it up earlier on,
maybe a couple of weeks before we'd do it,
and I'd say, "Well, only a couple of weeks to go."
And then I'd think, "Oh, God. I wish I hadn't brought it up
"'cause now they're gonna be thinking about it as well as me."
And I remember when we did this,
they had a couple of drinks, which always helps.
You know, they had some champagne and stuff,
which always loosens anybody up.
And I like the grab nature of it, you know.
I think that it would have been kind of boring
if they just sort of slipped into bed or something, you know.
And also, I like the humor of it.
I like this moment when he's carrying her.
He can't get out of his pants here, underpants.
This is brave, man.
I think this is just so brave of Michael to do this like that.
You know, not be kind of grabbing. You see, he's walking across there...
Both of them pretty naked.
And I just love the spirit of actors who will do that
and not question it endlessly.
And just go balls out and do a scene like that.
Because it's them that are benefitting from it, you know.
And me, obviously.
You just sense the freedom of the scene, you know.
I was saying, I think that comedy is just incredibly important, really,
and within a love scene, or sex scene like that
because people are inclined to laugh because they're embarrassed.
So if you don't give them something to laugh at,
they'll laugh at you.
So that's why I always try and get comedy in, you know.
The idea of the plates clanking around while they're making out.
Or later on in the movie, the scene in the elevator,
when there's a guy walking past who could potentially interrupt them.
This was a great club called Club Broadway.
Though I've never been back to, I always thought I would.
Amazing salsa music.
It's funny 'cause salsa now is fashionable.
I had Glenn's apartment be in the meat market,
which in those days, when you went through there late at night...
It's changed a lot now 'cause I think there's less meat and more couture.
But at the time, you'd see these braziers burning
and people would be trying to keep warm.
And there'd be transvestites, there'd be everybody on Earth
who would be gathering around.
People said all sorts of things like,
"It was a metaphor for hell," and all this sort of nonsense,
but I thought it was an interesting place to put her apartment.
I remember Stanley's face, Stanley Jaffe's face,
when I showed him the apartment,
and it was a crappy sort of space,
but I just loved the fact that you could look out
and you could see people carrying meat around.
Here's the other love scene.
It's funny how people remember the love scene.
Both of these scenes are very short,
but people say about me, "You make those sexy films and stuff."
But it's so funny it's that that people tend to remember.
Like this scene and the scene over the sink.
I guess people are interested in sex.
Here's the moment of humor, which I think helps.
Hopefully it helps.
I love the way Michael grabs for her after she's gone, there,
like he's had a few drinks.
He's got a lovely sense of humor. Just a very amusing man, Michael.
Nice person to have a drink with, apart from anything else.
I like this kitchen.
Just the bits and pieces.
Stuff hanging off the walls, you know, the kid's drawings.
This is where the worm turns a bit, and he has to start lying.
It's nice the way the rabbit is set up early on.
I remember when I read the screenplay in France,
I live in France,
and I sat down on the steps in my place
in the middle of nowhere in the South of France,
and I started to read it, and I couldn't put the script down.
At the end of about an hour and a half that it took me to read it,
I was still sitting there on the steps,
and I went racing through to my wife Samantha,
and I said, "If I don't screw this up, this is amazing. I've got to do this."
It's a James Dearden script,
and it's very rare that you feel like that.
Usually, you feel it's a nice idea, and something you have to work on,
and we did work on this, God knows we worked a lot on it,
with, I think, more than one writer, but it just felt strong, I thought.
I love relationship pieces, I always say the same thing.
I love movies where you can put your feet in the shoes of the actors.
I like the way you see Glenn's breasts, a little bit, right there,
and she's not trying to keep her robe close together,
which, of course, you wouldn't do if you're by yourself.
This place is kind of Spartan, her apartment.
I like that because I'd seen lots of editors' apartments.
I'd gone to look at them with Mel Bourne, the production designer.
And all they had was piles of manuscripts next to their beds,
and they looked a little mournful, really, so we did that.
I like this little hand-held shot.
Craig had a rig. I used to call it the sickle.
It was a little rig that got the camera really low
so that you could practically scrape the ground with it,
and you really get a nice feeling of speed when the camera's that low.
This was in Central Park, in the West Side, I think.
Again, there's that little rig there.
That little point-of-view move in on Michael there.
It's kind of a tubular rig.
The camera, he puts an Arriflex on the bottom of it,
and you can get it really low.
I like this double thing where she pretends
that she's lying about her father's heart attack, in a minute,
but then he finds out later on in the apartment,
that, in fact, she was telling the truth.
Which is interesting 'cause you really feel that this woman is mentally sick.
I remember doing this.
This is one of the first shots we did, this shot of Manhattan,
and I remember Stanley arriving, Stanley Jaffe, the producer, arriving.
We'd been about three hours doing the shot,
and he was epileptic with rage that we'd still be doing the shot.
I don't know much about opera but I did come to love this, actually.
Madame Butterfly.
This is the apartment in the Meat District.
You can see out of the windows that the Meat District is down below.
There's a little bit coming up, which I quite like,
with the dog and the pigeons.
We had to keep the pigeons in, obviously, or they would've flown away.
So we put Perspex that you can't see,
Plexiglas around the window outside, and when the dog barks,
that kept the pigeons in.
Brilliant music.
I don't go to opera much, but this Puccini opera is amazing.
Heartbreaker, really.
We had an ending that reflected Madame Butterfly
more at the end, which was interesting.
But in the end, I thought...
There's the pigeons I was talking about.
So, they couldn't get out because they had that Plexiglas there.
We had a scene, funny enough, later on in the movie
where Glenn went to the opera, and Michael wasn't there.
Michael's seat was empty.
It was kind of a heartbreaker, but we couldn't afford to do it.
You know, have all the people involved in the audience for the opera, et cetera,
just for one shot of her sitting there with Michael's seat empty
'cause she invites Michael to the opera.
So I just did the same thing with her sitting by the light,
the lamp,
switching the lamp on and off,
and you see the opera tickets on the table,
so that was the cheap and cheerful way of doing the opera.
But I think it worked
'cause I quite liked her switching the light on and off.
It's kind of a bizarre thing to do.
It's funny, when we previewed the movie,
there'd always be a couple of people who would laugh
when she switched the light on and off.
So, that's kind of an interesting moment in a preview.
You have to say to yourself, "I like the shot. I'm gonna keep it in
"regardless of the fact that people are laughing here."
I think Glenn Close's character is interesting, really,
'cause I think we've all known somebody...
I think this is one of the reasons why the movie caught on.
We've all known somebody who,
like in this situation here, he says, "It can't work out. I'm married."
And there's a sort of look on their face
that says that you're just not getting through,
that it doesn't matter what you're saying, they don't understand.
There's a shot coming up, as far as I remember it, where...
I often have arguments with the editors, actually.
There's a shot where she's sitting up in bed,
as far as I remember it.
At one moment, her breasts are covered,
and another moment, they're not.
It's coming up here.
Of course, the editors say,
"You can't use that shot because the continuity's bad."
It's coming up. I think this is the scene.
It's coming up here.
And I chose the shot that was best for her performance,
and the fact that her breasts are showing in one
and not in the next, in the end, I don't think matters.
Five or six people will notice that the continuity's wrong,
but in the end, what's important is the actual performance, for me.
Again, I think, so brave, the way she's sitting here like this,
because it's real, you know.
It's not necessarily the most flattering way for her to be sitting,
but that's life.
There we are, there's the shot. Now she's covered.
But I thought that the performances were best in this take.
Maurice's music is nice here. Maurice Jarre's music.
I love scores that don't draw attention to themselves.
I've never been a fan of those scores
that feel like they're a separate movie going on above the visual one.
So this one is just nice. It just reflects the mood of the piece.
Richard Dean's makeup is terrific.
Coming up, his slit wrists are great.
I like the way the blood is revealed there,
that we see it before he does, which I think is interesting.
Funny enough, I've never been sure about these kettledrums here.
I'm not sure I'm crazy about them.
Having said that, I love to work with Maurice Jarre.
He's just a fabulous composer, really.
It's nice. You'll go down to his house in Malibu where he lives,
and he'll play the theme for you on the piano there,
and it's a terrific moment. You feel lucky to be there.
He'll play different themes,
and if you don't like something, he'll do another one.
It's always nice, just getting a one-note piano theme,
and you know that in two or three months' time,
you're gonna hear it with an orchestra. It's exciting the way it develops.
We built quite a lot within this apartment.
For example, that bath wasn't there. The partitions weren't there.
This brick that you're looking at isn't real brick.
It's brick that Mel put in.
But I just liked... I don't know.
You react instinctively to stuff, I suppose.
Often, there's no logical reason.
See, this is what I liked, was the fact that
you could shoot that from the window.
It doesn't look so good now, it's funny.
The Meat District has gradually become gentrified
and the rag trade's moved in.
It was nicer in those days.
I'm getting quite nostalgic for it, really.
She'll go down and check the meat.
The Meat District is fabulous. It won't be there much longer.
For a long while, I really sympathized with Glenn, really.
I just thought, "Here's a guy who has a one-night stand,
"and he wants just to have it and forget about it and move on."
It's a nice moment, I think, coming up,
when he gives the spaghetti sauce to the dog.
Michael just did that.
Just the idea of making it look like he's been sleeping in the bed
and not messing it up with his hands but actually getting in it, was his idea,
and I just think it's brilliant.
He's just a fabulous comedian apart from anything else.
There's Wall Street, on a very long lens.
This is my dear friend, Lois Smith, who I've used before.
I always try and use Lois. She's just such a fine actress.
I like the way she had her sneakers on, and she's carrying...
This is a very New York thing, of coming in with your sneakers
and changing into your high heels when you get to work.
You know, it's a very New York thing.
It's nice, I think, when you do stuff like that.
A nice shot of her carrying his briefcase off like that.
That's something that Amy did, again, my daughter.
How could anybody have an affair when they're married to Anne Archer?
This is a scene I talked about before, actually, that I kind of like.
Again, my daughter Amy would always be telling me card tricks,
showing me card tricks that didn't work, you know,
so I like the layer of it in this scene.
It was kind of a boring scene, to be honest.
She's trying to persuade him to go up to the country
and see this house that she wants them to buy.
And it was sort of expositional and a little bit boring, I thought,
and so adding the whole layer of the kid,
who's very charming, Ellen, teaching him this card trick,
I think it made the scene fun and it just felt like family, you know.
It's great working with a kid like Ellen.
That age is just fabulous. She was six, I think, as I remember it.
'Cause it's before they get that knowing quality.
Eight or nine, they change. They become little adults.
But then, there's just a sweetness.
The exterior of the house
wasn't the same as the interior, if that makes sense.
All of it was on location, but I love this exterior.
But for whatever reason, the interior didn't really work,
so I used the interior somewhere else.
This was the scene that we did first of all.
Everybody was a bit petrified.
It's always a bit agonizing, the first scene.
I was very nervous, I know that.
This is Justine Johnston. I worked with her on Nine 1/2 Weeks.
She was the lady that was trying to sell Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger
the bed that they were lying on, or Kim was lying on.
I like the attic here, that later on,
Michael listens to the tape recording that Glenn Close has left him.
I remember when I was doing this scene, it was just agonizing.
I couldn't work the shot out at all, and I was sweaty,
and Stanley was behind me, biting his nails.
He was more worried than I was.
It's a great coat, isn't it? I like Glenn's coat.
Brilliant.
This is quite a nice track here.
I remember it was a little tough
to incorporate with Stuart here, Stuart Pankin.
There's a nice moment coming up,
when Michael hugs her at the end of the scene.
And you sense Glenn's need.
It's just a heartbreaking moment, I think.
He hugs her at the end of the scene,
and you see Glenn's face over his shoulder,
and he doesn't see it, but we just sense, in a way,
the awfulness of what Michael is doing to her.
At this stage, I really feel enormous sympathy for her.
I was always attacked vehemently by the feminists.
It was said that I was destroying
people's idea of career women.
They said that I was making an indictment of career women
and nonsense like this, you know.
You know, she was one career woman
who happened to end up being psychotic.
But the idea of it being an indictment of all career women
was just hilarious, just ridiculous.
She really breaks your heart here, I think, the whole thing.
With the offer of the tickets.
There's a thing on his desk that I put on, a kind of ball of rubber bands.
I was looking for something that somebody would fiddle with,
something that made the desk like his own.
You'll see it in a minute now.
I always think that details like that help. There it is, you can see it down there.
He fiddles around with it, later on.
This is the moment I'm talking about.
There. Jesus.
It really breaks your heart, and he doesn't see it.
That's later on, when he... This is the scene I was talking about.
The cheap and cheerful Madame Butterfly opera scene.
This is what people laughed at sometimes.
The intercutting works nicely.
The stuff with Stuart, here.
We made that real, really. They were drinking beers and stuff.
It was fun, you know.
People are very serious on movies these days.
I'd say "We'll give them a drink or two."
"Well, you can't do that. Somebody might sue you.
"Or they might fall over or something."
But I guess those were happier days.
I mean, you can see they're having fun, really.
Oh, man. It was fun to do.
It's a nice kind of contrast with poor Glenn here.
So you should think about whether this is a better scene
than maybe her sitting alone in an opera without Michael there,
maybe this is better.
This is Fred Gwynne.
Munsters.
Fred Gwynne is a terrific actor.
Unfortunately no longer with us.
Very tall man, Fred.
It was a challenge to shoot him with Michael, who's about a foot shorter.
Lois was great in Five Easy Pieces.
She played Jack Nicholson's sister, as I remember it.
Just an amazing, amazing movie.
So this is where he uses that elastic band ball I was talking about.
That's funny, isn't it?
Again, the phone with that kind of attachment
so that you don't have to actually hold it, I thought that was interesting.
Again, it gives it a bit of history.
It makes it a phone that he actually uses.
This is a sexy scene, I think.
It's often the scenes
that suggest what might happen rather than...
In sexual terms, I'm talking about.
Rather than when they're actually happening.
The suggestion of what might happen here
is very sexy, I think.
I like this shot.
And then the bell rings.
See, if Anne Archer had been plain, it wouldn't have worked, I don't think.
This scene was fun to do.
We shot it...
Again, a lot of this was just made up,
was just improvised, really.
Again, as I said, Stuart is hilariously funny.
And this is another scene.
There's a lot of scenes in this movie where they had a drink or two.
It's all flooding back.
A lot of this, as I said, the dialogue was improvised.
I like this thing where they do the Japanese together.
Well, this one now.
They just kind of did it, you know.
It's fabulous when as a director, you just turn it on
and they just do it for you.
What you do is you try and create a situation
where they're not aware of you.
The camera was a long way away.
And so, half the time, they didn't really know
whether we were shooting or not.
One thing I try to do is, quite often, to put the clapperboard on at the end.
Because I always think that the sound of the clapperboard
petrifies everyone, me included.
And actors, especially, when you bang that thing, they tense up.
So I try and put it on at the end,
which doesn't endear me to the editors,
who quite often get it out of synch.
It's quite a nice move, I think, through the glass here.
It's always nice shooting through glass.
Shooting through a layer, I think, is always...
It's fun, you know, just makes it more interesting.
In this scene coming up, I always think that Glenn is truly terrifying in it.
You feel that she's gonna leap down the phone at him. It's amazing, I think.
I love her breathing.
This is every man's nightmare.
I mean, over and over again, people are...
When this movie came out, people would say,
"Well, thanks a million, you've ruined it for us."
Many, many married men were pissed off at me.
I'd be there.
This is a nice hand-held.
I think this was on the Steadicam. I'm not crazy about the Steadicam
because it tends to have a floaty quality.
I prefer hand-held, really,
but this was the only way, really, to do this in one piece.
I mean, this shot now, coming up,
as far as I remember is, I think, a Steadicam.
Maybe it wasn't.
I think it was.
This scene coming up, when she says that she's pregnant,
There.
I started off doing it as a circular track.
We laid down track around them, literally, a circle of track.
So that this conversation was
one minute seeing her, one minute seeing him.
And I started off, and then abandoned it.
Because it just didn't seem to be working, dramatically.
It was better in the end, I think,
to shoot it conventionally like this.
Because then you can alter the weight between the actors.
But although the other one was attractive to look at,
the circular track, I think it took away from these moments.
I like this advert. We thought about it quite a lot,
him standing against this idyllic scene with the rings or whatever.
The idealized, romantic...
Yeah, here it is, there. I thought that's quite funny, really.
Just a truly terrifying moment, I think, for Michael, really.
I think it's terrifying for a lot of married men, who, somewhere,
thought about the remote possibility of having an affair.
It's funny how people have taken...
It's exciting, really. Have taken the movie to heart.
And they talk about women who are of similar quality
or character to Glenn's here, as being bunny boilers.
This is quite an interesting...
Again, this is shot through a car window, as I remember it,
just to make it more interesting.
It was pouring with rain, I remember.
I just didn't want to do it boredly,
him crossing the road, and so it's interesting,
more interesting, like now you see him, now you don't,
shooting it through the actual car window.
And then when we go to the staircase in a minute,
that was yet another interior, it was another cheat.
This wasn't.
It just had a great staircase.
It's funny how you use bits and pieces from different locations
and they fit together.
Producers don't like you doing it too much.
See, this bit here is another building.
You'll like the fact. This is a nice hand-held here, I think.
This was hand-held, but with the stabilizers.
Again, Craig, the operator has these interesting gyro stabilizers,
which make the hand-held camera just a little bit more stable,
but not as stable as the Steadicam.
This is where you find out, in a minute, that, in fact,
she was telling the truth about her father dying.
It's quite interesting.
It's always a challenge when you have to do a bio of somebody,
an imaginary character like that,
and to do it believably.
I quite like this opening there, with the guy with the trolley.
This was interesting. This is a scene that,
to be absolutely honest, didn't work great, I didn't think.
And so we cut it way, way, way down.
I've forgotten exactly what we did cut out.
I've always liked trolleys.
I used a trolley in Jacob's Ladder with a wheel that was wonky
and sort of flipped around.
It's funny how you have bits and pieces
that go from one movie to another.
Suppose the danger is repeating itself.
This was a real case. I remember that.
The police brutality case.
The operator is pretty funny on this scene.
This was something that we added in later on,
when we were doing the post-synch.
This scene coming up is half-interesting,
when he gets home and he finds Glenn there.
I think it was shot quite interestingly, really.
With her looking into the camera,
directly into the camera sometimes
rather than looking off-screen to him,
it was more unnerving, I think.
And I like this shot coming up, where he comes around the corner,
and it's like his point of view, as if he hears a voice here.
But then the camera creeps around the corner and finds her.
Here it is.
With that nice cue from Maurice.
It's nice the way the cue, the music creeps in.
The danger is it becomes
like television or something, it really feels like a cue.
See the way she's looking into the camera there,
rather than off-screen to him, it's good.
It's kind of interesting, I think. More unnerving.
Oh, God. Imagine going through that.
Now she's looking off-screen to him. It's interesting.
Now she's looking straight into the camera.
But he's always looking off-camera.
Obviously because it's unnerving for him.
Now, I think, is when your heart starts to go out to Michael now.
Your allegiance changes, you know.
It's horrifying that she now knows that address as well.
The end of the scene was tough to sort out,
just in terms of the shooting.
I remember thinking how complicated it was.
I'm not the brightest of people.
It was when Anne goes off now to get the telephone.
To write a telephone number down, I think.
It's very complicated.
So it's a nice moment,
because it now leaves Michael alone with Glenn.
Which is a nice moment, when he wants to kill her.
He wants to leap on her and grab her by the throat.
It looks easy, but it was complicated to work out
in terms of the actual shooting of it.
It's kind of heartbreaking the way she's kind of dressed up for him.
You know, she's put the nice nighty on for him.
I always remember in this scene
how Michael screamed himself hoarse for Glenn.
And so often with an actor,
they will sort of save their performance for themselves.
But I just remember how much he gave off camera for Glenn.
It was amazing, really.
A lot of actors don't realize that if the other actor is good,
they look good, as well.
There's often a kind of rivalry between actors,
but there certainly wasn't in their case.
Fabulous.
And it's somewhat funny how the allegiance goes,
'cause you go, "Yay," when she says that, you know?
This moment is great, when she says she'll tell the wife.
Scary moment.
It's a good angle.
I think that low angle sort of works nice there.
It's nice staying low, I think.
I like the way the phone becomes a third character, really,
in this scene.
And on one end of the table here is "Packy" Dolan, our gaffer.
A fine actor.
There he is. A fine actor.
I used to do commercials,
and I remember Anne Archer was mocking me
about this particular scene, where she's doing the painting at home,
and she said it reminded her of a commercial.
It's funny. I like her fingers here, covered in paint.
It's the sort of thing it'd be very easy to forget,
you know, not do, not to have the paint on her fingers, you know.
And, unconsciously, it would feel wrong, you know.
There's a scene coming up that I quite like in the elevator,
where you kind of feature the rabbit prominently,
and he's going up to get his car, which, of course, would never happen.
They would get the car for him.
But in a movie, it doesn't really matter, you know,
and I wanted him to be alone and to have Glenn looking down on him.
I wanted there to be maximum suspense.
And obviously, another thing is that there would be a gate on the elevator,
but I wanted to see the stories as you go up and down, the different floors.
I mean, obviously, this would be incredibly dangerous,
but you don't really think about it.
I stuck the red light in there. I thought it was kind of more interesting
to get the red light on the bunny.
I like the way Maurice's music comes out of that sound effect,
and you're really not quite aware of what is music and what is sound effect.
That's the way it should be, really. It's a great shot of Glenn there, I think.
She looks amazing.
Again, shooting through glass, through windows, is always fun,
you know, so much more interesting.
She looks great. And she looks best here, I think,
better here than anywhere in the movie.
I like the false alarm of the car alarm here,
before he sees the acid on his car, coming up.
This was tough to do and make it sort of look believable.
Again, shooting through the glass,
I find it's much more interesting.
It's funny, when Michael did this,
that scene, Kirk Douglas, his father, turned up.
I remember, on the morning of this shoot,
they turned up with a red car.
And I said, "I can't do it with a red car."
And one thing I try to do, by the way, and you'll notice it on this street,
is I always try and keep color, as much as I can, out of the scene.
I love when color is kind of monochromatic, you know,
when it's like black-and-white, but in color.
So there was a frantic search for another car,
and everybody was incensed with rage 'cause we were waiting,
and then, eventually, one of the crew had this car, so we used his car.
This tape is based,
the kind of ramblings on the tape, if you like,
are based on something that an actress,
who also, funny enough, came in for Fatal Attraction,
told me about. She told me about a girl who was obsessed with her husband,
who was actually an actor,
and how this girl would camp out, literally, in her car, outside of their door.
And she gave me the tape, funny enough,
of one of this girl's conversations,
and I gave the tape to Glenn,
and I said, "I'd like you to do this.
"I'd like you to follow this very closely."
And that's exactly what she did.
It's funny, 'cause when I listened to the tape, it was kind of heartbreaking.
You would hear that...
You would understand that this woman had made the tape in her room,
in her bedroom somewhere, and off screen,
you would hear other people talking,
and when she was doing the tape,
you would hear that part of the time, she'd be crying.
And you'd hear a kind of a clicking from the tape.
It was obviously some cheap sort of tape recorder.
This is a nice focus pull now,
if I remember, her car being behind.
Actually, it wasn't that great a focus pull. It should have been slower.
Should have just pulled focus,
racked focus slower, through to Glenn's car.
I like the way Howard lit those trees, you know?
Again, I think your allegiance sort of changes here,
and you think, "Oh, God." You feel so sorry for the woman,
in her cold apartment looking at this sort of cozy domesticity,
and you understand her throwing up after it, really.
This is the scene I was talking about before
that just was a nightmare to shoot. I don't know why.
The shadow's nice there, I think.
It was later on, actually.
I remember when I was trying to get some suspense
out of the actual listening to the tape recorder here.
Trying to get some sort of a tracking move.
It's not this close-up. It's, I think, when you cut wider.
Maybe I didn't use the shot.
Obviously, the shot didn't work out. I spent so long doing it.
Oh, this was the shot here.
I was trying to track past things, you know,
past sort of upright beams and stuff like that, and it just didn't work.
This is nice, I think.
As I remember it, Anne's hand comes on his shoulder or something like that,
so we are shocked, as well as him.
We're not prepared for it.
There.
People were very frightened in this movie.
I remember at the end, when Glenn appears in the bathroom,
and he's downstairs in the kitchen making the tea or whatever,
there really was bedlam in the theater.
People would be screaming and yelling and jumping into each other's laps.
It was great.
This was a real police station we did it...
I mean, it all was real, really.
The only thing we did use a studio for, or sort of a studio,
was for the actual scene at the end,
when we had the bath overflowing and stuff like that, you know.
We had to build the bath on a plinth,
so that we could do all of that overflowing and stuff, you know.
We didn't want to flood a house, a real house.
This is Sam Coppola, who I used later on in Jacob's Ladder.
He's a taxi driver in that.
I particularly have enjoyed working on this movie with Howard Atherton,
who's somebody that I used to...
Howard Atherton being the cinematographer,
who I've worked with in the past on commercials,
and also, subsequently, he did Lolita with me.
This was his first American feature film, anyway, and it was...
I was so excited at the prospect of working with him,
because I'd worked so many times with him on commercials,
but, of course, convincing people that somebody who you've worked with
on commercials is going to work out fine for a feature film is not always easy.
So I remember it was something of a battle to get him to do this.
But I'm just thrilled at working with him, really.
We've subsequently done Lolita and other movies together,
and I think we bring out the best in both of each other's work.
And the idea of intercutting Ellen going to the...
Here she is going off to the rabbit hutch thing.
The idea of intercutting that with Anne finding the bunny in the pot,
I think it's quite interesting, really. It worked quite well.
This shot kind of sets up that there's something wrong,
something a bit off.
I like that shot there. I like when you half see people, you know.
You don't see them too clearly, so they're half in the frame. It's nice.
The intercutting starts soon,
if I remember it.
She approaches here, I think.
So the two discoveries are at the same time.
This is where Michael finally tells Anne.
There's a scene coming up that's quite interesting with the kid, you know.
I wanted Ellen to cry, and I remember talking to Ellen's parents about it,
and I said, "What we're going to do is play a little bit of a trick on her.
"We're going to pretend to take away her dolly."
As I remember it, I was kind of the good guy,
and Michael was the bad guy. Michael said he was going to keep her.
And there's a dolly, I forgot what it was called,
Kangy or something, it was a kangaroo, I think,
that Ellen would have the whole time,
and he said, "I'm going to keep it," or something like that,
and I said, "No, give it back to her."
You know, it helped her to cry, and it was a little something
we went through very carefully with Ellen's parents.
But you'll see in a minute.
This is the moment coming up that I was talking about with Ellen.
That was the dolly that I was talking about.
It's funny, 'cause after this shot, I remember rushing in
and cuddling her. Literally, a frame after that shot,
I was in it, I was in the frame.
It's funny, my mother, who lives in England, actually,
my mother worked with autistic kids,
and I went along to watch her work with them,
and they had a certain sort of a mannerism,
the way they sat, and the way they would fiddle obsessively
with their hands or whatever,
and I tried to get Glenn's body language to be a bit like that,
to get a sense that she was mentally ill.
When Anne Archer tells her here, the audience yells,
the audience applauds there.
This is what I was talking about.
I've forgotten exactly what she does.
She does something there with her hands.
There's a funny moment here, when...
We put an extra cushion on the stool for Ellen, to bring her up high.
We put some gaffer tape, you know, the prop man put it on or whatever,
and in a minute, now, you see it, there it is on top.
You shouldn't really see that.
And I like this fruit roll thing.
Again, my daughter was always eating these fruit rolls,
and she'd kind of wrap them around her finger and suck on them, you know,
which is what Ellen does in this... Again, I stole this from Amy.
This is a bit of Chopin, it's a prelude that I really love.
And Anne, I got her to learn to play it.
She didn't play much piano, but she played it nicely, I think.
What's so lovely about kids of Ellen's age is you can tell them
you want them to eat the Fruit Roll-Up, whatever,
while they're talking, and they'll make it all so charming.
You won't have to say anything.
They'll just sort of make it enchanting.
Always smart to get lots of dogs and kids in your film,
then you've got a fighting chance.
This is quite interesting. I remember,
after Anne Archer finds that the kid's missing,
that Ellen's missing, she goes out and drives frantically, looking for her.
What I didn't have was her point of view,
looking around for Ellen,
and I asked Craig to go out and shoot some point-of-views,
using a hand-held camera, through the windshield.
And he went out and shot it, I think, on a 35, either on a 35 or a 40.
And it's interesting, 'cause when he brought the footage back,
it just didn't look sort of like her point of view.
The angle was too wide, so he went back and did it on a 50,
or maybe it was a 75, I've forgotten. I think probably a 50.
And it suddenly worked. It suddenly felt like her viewpoint.
I like this shot here,
where the kid's got her coat half on in silhouette, there.
It's a kind of interesting image. Again, this was hand-held, obviously.
But these are the points-of-view that I'm talking about here,
where the camera's kind of swinging around looking for her,
looking for the kid.
Here.
And when he came back, having shot it with a...
I think this is... This may be a 75, actually, some of it.
That's nice, that kind of whirligig music there,
the way it's intercut with the dramatic stuff.
Here.
I quite like that Dutch shot.
If I was doing that shot again of her running up the stairs,
I would Dutch it a bit less, I think. It seemed a bit over-the-top.
I remember... I'm not big on roller coasters.
I get queasy. I don't feel that well on them.
And I had to, unfortunately, go on this thing.
This is at a place called Playland.
There's the point-of-view stuff again. This,
which I think is quite good. It feels like her glancing, looking out the window.
I had to go on this rollercoaster to work out where to put the camera.
And I remember, every time I got on it, thinking, "God, what am I doing here?"
I just loathed it.
I would have given any money to get off.
But Ellen liked it a lot. It's funny,
because we had to make sure she was well strapped down.
She loved it.
See, we had to put mounts, of course, on the rollercoaster, you know,
to get her near to the rails and different places.
Crash, quite a lot of the...
Some of the shots on the... Or one shot, I think, on the crash,
was shot in reverse, you know,
tracking back from the number plate.
Amazing. When he does emotional scenes, Michael,
his voice takes on a kind of husky thing,
like he can hardly get the words out, and I never quite know whether
it's just for real, or whether he does it. But whatever it is, it works.
It's always interesting when an actor has to dig down emotionally, you know,
and you need tears in the scene.
I think the moment that helps him here is,
she has a little plastic bracelet on,
and I have a feeling that looking at that, you know, the hospital thing
that is what helped him.
I remember, funnily enough, I remember,
with Tim Robbins in Jacob's Ladder,
he was trying to find a moment
of heartbreak, you know, with his son, who had died,
and he couldn't find it, and eventually,
the way that he found it was sort of scratching...
He was looking at the kid's photograph and he was scratching a bit of dirt off
that had gone on the photograph, and that's what helped him dig down
and find the tears. It's interesting,
you know, what different actors find.
Again, this Dutched angle here works quite nicely with...
This scene was fairly elaborate, when he's chasing after her.
We used a little skateboard dolly, you know, a little tiny...
On the ground, in a minute, I mean.
This is just static, obviously, here. Again, Dutched.
But there's a moment later on, where the glass breaks,
where there's a little skateboard dolly that we use.
I like this image when her face is against the window there.
I remember thinking at the time that it would have been corny to do that,
but then Michael suggested it, and she did it and it worked.
Again, Dutched here,
and this skateboard dolly is coming up in a minute,
just after this, there, with the glass there.
There, with the glass again.
It's kind of interesting.
And there's a nice moment now,
when the lamp is swinging backwards and forwards,
so we're using that as our light source, like, dark, light, dark, light,
and if you think about it, it's swinging for much longer than it really would do.
One other thing I would say here, which I really like
is that when he's throttling her there, you see,
Michael again taught me something that was interesting,
was that he would be trying to pull his hands apart,
whereas Glenn would be trying to squeeze his hands together,
and, of course, Michael would win,
but that's an interesting technique to make it look like
you really are throttling somebody without actually doing it.
I like the knife setup there. You know that's going to be used.
You know, it's always nice when... See, it's still swinging, the lamp,
which is a bit nuts, but it sort of works.
But it's interesting, when you set up the suspense of the use of the knife.
There's a moment I really like in a minute, which I think is bizarre,
when they look at each other, you know, when he puts the knife down, here,
and she stares at him, and he stares at her,
and I really think, in a twisted, strange, strange way,
there's a kind of a sexuality in the moment.
They're like animals here.
And then she smiles in a minute, and I...
I really wanted to sort of, in a strange way, get the feeling
that they could almost have fucked their brains out here.
That, insane though it would have been, it might have been,
without being crude, the fuck of the century.
The moment I'm talking... It's a strange,
strange moment, the moment's here,
when she smiles at him.
In a minute. Not yet.
It's now, coming up.
Such a weird moment.
There.
Strange.
And kind of nuts, as well.
It's interesting, 'cause with the original ending,
when he puts the knife down there,
it's kind of the setup for his fingerprints being on the knife,
and, in the original version, she commits suicide,
and he gets the blame for it.
Which I always thought was great.
That was in the original screenplay,
and I thought, "That's fabulous." She gets him from the grave, you know.
He's carted off to prison, having got the blame,
and so, as I say, she gets him from the grave.
But then, what I didn't think worked was that
we had a solution to get him out of the prison,
which was the finding of the tape recording
that suggests that she's going to kill herself
if he doesn't come through for her,
and I just thought it was too easy. I thought it was too pat, you know.
This is a pretty shot.
It's funny, quite a lot of people didn't quite know,
because of her haircut, whether Ellen was a little boy or a little girl.
This whole sequence coming up was fun to do,
the different elements, you know, with the plug and the faucets
and the water spilling over and...
It was a lot of fun to do, really.
There's a moment when you set up the gun in the drawer in a second,
and he locks all of the doors, and you know absolutely
that she's going to be in the house somewhere,
that essentially, he's locking her in, rather than out.
There's the setup for the gun.
But it was fun, I think, just...
In the cutting, especially, was how long you could keep him downstairs
making the tea and looking at water coming through the ceiling.
And her upstairs, with Glenn. You know by that time,
the audience knows that Glenn is upstairs,
because they've seen her in the reflection in the mirror.
And the fun is to know how long, believably,
you can delay Michael downstairs
before he goes up and rescues her, and...
'Cause you want the audience to be at screaming point,
I mean, literally at screaming point.
This is quite nice, 'cause you've set up the mirror before.
You know, she's looking at her black eye from the...
Very good makeup, I think,
Richard Dean's make-up there, of the black eye.
Tough to do convincingly, I think.
I like the way the door shuts here. This suggests...
You know, we've spent a lot of time just making it creep shut, you know,
so that you get a sense that something awful is going to happen.
All of this locking of the doors, you know it's all going to go to rat shit.
This is the sequence I'm talking about with the kettle
and the intercutting.
I spent a lot of time working with Peter Berger on this sequence.
It's interesting, doing all of this in one shot.
I like the idea of moving from the water, via the faucets, up to the mirror,
when she goes squeak, squeak, squeak, and wipes the condensation away.
And then we see Glenn.
It's kind of a challenge, doing all of this in one,
and then we see Glenn's face.
It's a fabulous moment in the theater.
I mean, the whole place screams, you know.
This moment, when she appears
with the knife is interesting 'cause Glenn was very anti,
for a long while, doing the new ending, as we all were.
We were all sort of very wary of re-shooting the ending,
'cause we liked the Madame Butterfly aspect of the ending.
And one thing Glenn was petrified of was that she would look like
kind of a one-note villainess,
coming into the bathroom here with a knife.
I remember talking to her about this, this moment here, and saying,
"Well, you don't have to, you know, be wielding the knife.
"It can be down at your side."
And then I thought, "Well, God, what if the knife,
"which would be very sharp, would cut the cloth?"
And then I thought, "Well, what if it went further
"and cut her skin, as well, and into her flesh?"
And the idea of her not feeling that would be extraordinary,
because if she couldn't feel that pain,
it would set up the most amazing jeopardy, the most awful...
Here it is now.
You know, the awful jeopardy of what she might do to Anne Archer.
This is good, and all the time Michael's downstairs,
and the water's coming through the ceiling,
and the dog's licking it up here.
And it's nuts, really, when you think about it,
he would see the ceiling.
I liked him eating the fruit roll.
Here, I mean, Michael... It's crazy.
Michael didn't run up and say, "Look, the bath's overflowing."
But I guess it worked.
See, he still hasn't gone up to tell her the bath's overflowing.
It's interesting, when we were thinking
about what Anne Archer could possibly use
as a weapon against her, and the fact that she had a plaster cast
on her arm was obviously a good solution.
The glass here. So it was rigged, obviously.
That was broken already.
I like the slashing of the thing.
That was the real knife, the slashing of the curtain.
That's a cardboard knife.
One thing that was fun, with the water, it was actually amazing with the water,
was that we did a little test with Glenn,
and she tried to go backwards into water and keep her eyes open and...
By the way, this, I think, is a mistake.
I think I shouldn't have put the white contact lenses in here.
I think that was a mistake, really, when I look back at it.
But Glenn found terrible difficulty. I mean, she...
There, the white things, I think they're a mistake, really.
I like that, setting up.
You know she's going to come out with the knife again.
She could not spend any time under the water with her eyes open.
And she just practiced and practiced and practiced,
and finally managed to do it.
I couldn't do it.
You know she's going to come out of the water here.
This moment here, actually, I have to say,
I remembered from a Clouseau movie of years ago...
I've forgotten what it was called. Amazing movie.
This is a good shot.
It's interesting, when we were talking about the ending,
the possibilities for the ending, the new ending,
you know, it came up at one stage,
I remember Stanley bringing it up, as far as I remember,
that the only person who, in the end, could kill Glenn, if she had to be killed,
was the only innocent in the piece, Anne Archer.
Then he sort of dismissed it, and I remember grabbing on to it
and thinking, "No, that's such a good idea."
And there we are.
I mean, I'm sure there's a better ending than what we've just seen.
I'm sure something less operatic, may be more credible or whatever,
but in the end, it was fun to do
and it was, I think, better than the original,
in that the original just seemed...
It seemed anticlimactic.
We felt that the movie worked until the last 10 minutes,
and then it sort of fell apart dramatically,
and the critics all said, inevitably, "The marketing men changed it,"
and all of this nonsense,
and it was just me and the writer and Stanley and Sherry
sitting in the theater,
saying, "Well, what are we going to do? 'Cause it doesn't work here."
And there weren't any marketing men there.
So there we are.
Again, the critics said that this photograph means
the family that kills together stays together,
and this sort of nonsense.
And I always thought that this photograph was sort of ironic, really.
I mean, there's no way the family's going to stay together
in delirious happiness for the rest of their lives.
So, as I say, I saw it in a sense of irony, really,
but there we are.
Anyway, thank you for letting me do this,
and I hope some of it is amusing or helpful.
Thank you.