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BRUCKHE/MER: Hi, I'm Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer of Déjé Vu.
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MARSILIII Hello, I'm Bill Marsilii,
writer of Déjé Vu, with my friend Terry Rossio.
SCOTT: Hi, I'm Tony Scott. I'm the director of Déjé Vu,
and I hope you enjoy it.
I say what always attracts me to material is difference.
And I've never done anything like this before, you know.
And if you look at my last four movies,
they've all been very different approaches
to, you know, different material.
And this was a real chance for me to actually pull it off, and...
When I do interviews and stuff, and do press, the...
I always try to come up with a one-liner,
you know, that says what the movie is about,
and I found this impossible to come up with a one-liner,
It's a love story, it's a little bit of time travel,
it's science fact rather than science fiction, it involves a terrorist.
It's a bunch of different stories that are woven together,
but it's all woven together around this love story.
You know, Began/u for me is one of the toughest creative experiences,
because the world of science fiction,
if you get it a little bit wrong, you get it drastically wrong,
especially when they're trying to incorporate science fiction
into what is supposedly a real world.
So, I struggled conceptually.
I actually... I struggled because I wanted to make it science fact,
and the writers were determined to make it science fiction.
So, I won't say I struggled, I struggled with them,
to get them off science fiction and into science fact.
MARSILII: I first became involved with the story that would become Détiavu
And Terry called me and I told him I wanted to write a spec this time,
that is, to write a completed screenplay on my own,
without any studio notes, without any pay either, actually.
And I told him I wanted to write a love story.
And Terry really did something kind of charming after that.
Unsolicited, he started sending me ideas
for screenplays,
the rationale being that if I liked one of them, I'd write it
and he and Ted would be my producers again.
And I might have mentioned to him...
I think I told him about a movie that I'd always liked
But something I said jogged Terry's memory
and reminded him of a one-page treatment he had
And he started telling me this story, it was just six paragraphs that he had,
about a detective whose girlfriend gets murdered
and somehow he gets a hold of this device
that allows him to look roughly one week into the past.
And in the process of using this device,
he watches the last few days of his girlfriend's life
And as Terry was telling me about it, I started to get incredibly excited,
and I said, "Wait, wait, wait. It's brilliant. I love it, but one thought.
"While he's watching the last few days of her life.
"The first time he sees her should be at her autopsy,
“cause, you know, how cool is that? She's already dead."
BRUCKHE/MER: Terry Rossio is one of the writers of Pirates of the Caribbean
and also worked on National Treasure,
and he came to us with a new writer named Bill Marsilii.
And I think they met online.
And Terry liked his ideas
and kind of worked on a screenplay together.
So, knowing Terry was involved,
I knew it was going to be an excellent piece of work,
and also, you know, Ted Elliott was also involved in the creation of it.
And you're always looking for something
that's fresh and unique and different.
That's what Déja Vu is. It's a really fresh idea.
I haven't seen a picture like this. And we read the script.
The script was delivered to us, you read it.
One of those screenplays that you couldn't put down.
You had to keep reading it.
You had to watch, I guess, the time
because it went by so quickly.
SCOTT: Yeah, but we did have a few stumbling blocks.
Our first one, trying to blow up a ferry in the Mississippi.
The biggest concern was that
the size of the explosion we wanted to do
could actually breach the banks of the Mississippi.
So that was a little bit of a concern,
but people were amazingly cooperative.
I think generally the people in New Orleans are,
but they were just so grateful for the fact we were there
and we were employing a lot of people in the city.
And I think our biggest hardship was, when we first went down,
there was no room service and no laundry.
Other than that, it was great.
MARSILII: That's not a model,
and those are not CGI people.
Tony made the, I think, brilliant though horrifying choice
to do it practical.
Many of the effects in the movie were done for real.
And...
I can't speak for anybody else associated with the production,
but me, personally,
I don't think I could ever open a movie this way
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we were gonna save everybody at the end.
The ferry blow that you see at the beginning of the movie,
it's the biggest explosion I've ever done.
The trick there was not to sink the ferry,
'cause this was a real ferry
and we said, "We're only gonna put you out of operation for four days."
I think, in actual fact, we put it out of operation for two weeks.
But we had to put steel plates on the decks of the ferry
'cause the explosion was so big,
we were scared that the explosive might not go up, it might go down.
And that would mean, "Bye-bye, the Stump?
Which is the name of the ferry.
BRUCKHEIMER: Well, you always try to populate movies with brilliant actors,
and Denzel is in that category. He's a brilliant actor.
He can do just about anything.
He's very smart, and he comes off smart on the screen.
And somehow, he's a very sympathetic character.
SCOTT: And it's funny. I read the script...
And I always think, "Well, maybe I should...
"Oh, I'd like to try and work with..."
There's a bunch of actors I still wanna work with.
When I read the script, the first 10 pages,
I said, "This role is for Denzel."
And 'cause he... One, he always delivers.
Two, I really enjoy working with him. He's tough.
He's tough, but he has the same work ethic or the same...
He loves research, I love research,
and so, always, our characters come out of real people
And so that's why we've done three movies together.
And I think in each movie, he always delivers.
And each movie,
we've found a different character that he's never played.
Even though he's played cops,
he's played FBI agents,
and he's never played an ATF agent before,
but he said, "What am I gonna do? I've done these guys before."
You know? So...
Don Ferrarone, who's my guy who's in touch with...
Don's on all my movies
and he's in touch with the agency world.
And we really did a live casting of who was a good ATF agent
And we found a guy called Jerry Rudden.
Rudden was famous in the ATF,
and the ATF are the bomb guys.
Denzel and Jerry grew up within a few blocks of each other,
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And Jerry tells a funny story. How he got to be a police officer is,
he said being Irish-Catholic he had three choices.
He could either be a priest, a fireman, or a police officer,
SCOTT: When you give to actors, as I did in Man on Fire...
I gave him a role model in real life,
and I did the same here with Jerry Rudden,
gave him a real role model, so...
It makes life that much easier,
'cause you've always got a point of reference.
'Cause it's always hard saying to an actor,
"Well, I think you should be stronger in the way you deliver the line here,"
or, "You should wear this tie or these shoes."
But if you have a real person as a point of reference,
it's always that much easier.
MARSILII: Here we go into the investigation
that follows the horror of that explosion.
And we're starting to see Doug's process that he has.
We all wanted him to have the kind of insights
where he can take one look at a crime scene and deduce things
and steer the investigation in directions that will save everybody
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This bridge scene was part of that.
In our discussions with several ATF and FBI consultants,
among them Jerry Rudden from the FBI,
we learned a lot about ammonium nitrate-fuel oil,
and the kind of residue that would be involved,
and the bridge offered us a fantastic chance
to show Doug making an intuitive leap
that otherwise might have escaped everyone.
SCOTT: Yeah, and we got Val back.
It's my third movie with Val, obviously.
He said I ruined his life because of that one line,
"You can be my wingman at any time."
'Cause he said he walks through airports
and some joker will come up and say, "You can be my wingman anytime."
(LAUGHING) So he wants to kill me.
No, so Val and I did Top Gun, True Romance, and now this.
And this is a very different character from... You know, it's...
And I was desperately hunting for a role model for Val in real life.
And we came up with two guys from the DEA,
two guys that we found down in, actually, New Orleans,
and Val found his character or reference to his character
somewhere between these two guys.
MARSILII: This first scene between them
was originally a bit more of a character scene
between Pryzwarra and Doug.
But Jerry loves the process, and so does Tony,
and we had a lot of discussions about it.
And now, here I'm going to confess
that the way we kept it from being purely expositional,
we're pulling the dirtiest trick in the book.
Doug is risking his life just to recover some evidence.
And I love the way Val plays that moment,
because within 30 seconds of meeting this man,
Doug's literally trusting him with his life.
It's a fast way to forge a relationship.
We can't rule out an accident at this point.
-It's not officially a crime scene yet. -Here's a thought.
Why don't we double the perimeter
so we don't have wall-to-wall trailers down there?
ELKINS: No, we're gonna need all our manpower
for evidence control and witness processing.
MARSILII: One of the first things that has to be determined
İs whether or not it was an accident or a deliberate act of terrorism.
Doug found this...
Earlier we see him finding this blue plastic confetti,
as they call it in the trade,
that was evidence of,
you know, the kind of blue barrels that you'd find the bomb chemicals in.
And he's laying it all out for them.
(MARSILII LAUGHING)
I still think it strains credulity just a bit
that he found a blasting cap and leg wire on his way to work,
out of 10 square miles of wreckage,
-Oh, good, good, good. -Yeah.
And that coffeepot was also something that we got
from our discussions with Jerry Rudden.
Often that's the way he will break the ice
when there's a tense turf war going on between the numerous agencies
that are first responders to a disaster like this.
And thus the coffeepot moment made its way into the movie.
CHAD OMAN: You know, even though you see all these horrific pictures
of the surrounding areas of New Orleans,
the inner city's rebounding and the French Quarter's rebounding.
And it's kind of sad that the media's playing up the destruction of it,
which it has, believe me. It's not a pretty picture.
But the city is still vibrant. People should go there, support it.
It's just a wonderful town.
Hey, did Larry call?
Still not answering his cell.
MARSILII: Here we're planting, in plain sight, a number of clues
that seem incidental in the swirl of activity
following a disaster like this.
And later they turn out to have huge pay-offs.
Listen, I know you're maybe still pissed off at me...
MARSILII: One of the things that is kind of subtle
but that I particularly like about the way this shaped out
is here you've got the hero
of what is going to become a love story,
and the first time he hears about our female lead,
his response is, "Just have them bag it."
And he's actually returning a phone call to the dead woman
while he's busy doing other things.
He doesn't know it and neither do we,
but I think there's a really keen irony in that.
Stop right there.
As much as possible, to render the rest of the movie plausible,
Tony was particularly insistent that we take as much advantage as possible
of existing conventional surveillance technology.
Terry and I were always very on board with that, as well.
We just didn't want it to overwhelm the rest of the story.
We didn't want the time window to become, you know, irrelevant
because they were on top of it with other things.
McCREADY: Can I have your attention, please?
Thanks very much for coming.
I'm Jack McCready, special agent...
MARSILII: This dialogue from McCready
was really kind of vital for us,
because, basically, he's laying out for the press,
and we're laying out for the audience,
the near-impossibility of solving this crime quickly.
When we were first casting about
for a disaster that Claire's death could be tied to,
back in October of '97, I had made a list of a few things:
plane crash, train wreck, building collapse,
and I had even written, "Plane flying into skyscraper."
Ultimately, I chose not to use that
because of a Richard Burton film called The Medusa Touch
One thing here I want to give Tony full credit for is,
he felt very strongly that he wanted Doug to have his own process
that involved the city of New Orleans as much as possible.
-What? Streetcar? -Hey, don't look at me.
It's part of his process. He says it helps him think.
SCOTT: The reason that Denzel was traveling by...
In England we call them trams,
and here you call them streetcars, yeah?
And these streetcars actually weren't working after Katrina.
We had to get them all towed because all the electric were down,
all the lines were ripped up, you know, but...
And everybody was concerned that I was making it too, sort of, artsy
and too lyrical, but I said,
"Listen, I'm basing everything off what Jerry Rudden did,
"who is Denzel's role model, and what he did."
He walked, he took public transport,
just to find his own space while he worked things out.
And it's also beautiful, 'cause it's very lyrical
and it's all part and parcel of the city, very poetic, you know.
And also so this... This movie is a love story,
so it helped that aspect, just the background.
So this weird love story that begins the first time he looks at this woman...
You know, she's lying on the slab in the morgue.
And I tried to make Paula as alive as possible,
so we don't see the hand that actually turns her head.
And her head turns and her eyes are open,
and she's looking right into D's eyes, yeah?
So that was a sort of odd beginning,
but even in death, in the morgue, she looked beautiful.
Hold her hand for me, will you? Right here.
MARSILII: These missing fingers, actually, are not merely an attempt
to be gruesome on our part.
They're important for two reasons, really,
the first of them being we wanted to make it very clear
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This isn't a case of somebody faking it.
This isn't mistaken identity.
This is a love story
where the first time the guy sees the girl is at her autopsy.
-Diesel. -Accelerant, maybe?
MARSILII: The other thing about her fingers missing is,
in a story like this, in a mainstream film,
I think the audience takes for granted
that somehow the hero's going to save her life.
But there's no guarantee that he'll stop her from being tortured first.
-CARLIN: You see that? -Duct tape.
SCOTT: You know, originally, the movie,
when I shot it, was an R-rated movie.
R-rated mainly because of the tone and the violence and the...
You know, whether it's the stuff in the medical examiner's office
or the blowing up the ship at the beginning,
it's a lot more... What's the word? A lot more graphic.
I don't think it's...
Overall, the R-rated version is a lot more graphic than this PG version.
I was actually contracted to do an R version,
but it was hard, actually, getting it down to a PG.
So everything that you're gonna see there...
It's not one particular sequence
that makes it distinctively an R, it's an overall tone.
And everything from the...
Obviously, all the dangerous sequences,
the violent sequences, there's nothing...
Unfortunately, there's nothing in terms of sex that's R,
'cause that wasn't in the actual story,
but violence and content,
in terms of explosions and the gassing of Paula
is very much different in the R-rated version.
MARSILII: When Terry first told me his idea, I loved it,
but as I was looking through it,
there were a number of issues that really had to be addressed
in order to make the film plausible.
Any real time machine using existing technology
would have to cost $10 billion
and probably be hooked up to a mile-wide particle accelerator,
which is why the original draft of the script had been set
at Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island.
But given that,
if you've got a $10 billion time machine,
nobody is going to use it to find out
who killed one woman that nobody's ever heard of.
Her death, I felt, had to be tied to something just gigantic,
And when we chose to set the disaster on a ferry,
İn order to drive the bomb onto the boat,
really became the key to the whole story.
And where is he now, Alan?
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One of the wonderful virtues of Terry's initial idea
that thrilled me about working on it,
you've got a love story where the man is an investigator
and the woman's dead,
so it is his job
to go through her apartment,
read her diaries, look through her photographs,
listen to her answering machine tapes, and hear her talk to her father.
All of these things that would normally be considered
incredible invasions of privacy
are actually necessary.
His job requires it.
It's a great excuse to get a man to pay undivided attention
to the last four days of a woman's life.
See, I know how these things go, Agent Carlin,
and I need her to matter to you.
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At one point, it had fallen out of the movie, in one of the early cuts,
and I begged Tony to put it back in.
It's small,
but it really speaks to that man's grief at the loss of his daughter.
He knows he's only got a few moments
with the man who's going to try and solve her murder,
and in that moment all he asks is, "Please get to know my daughter.
"| need her to matter to you."
That, I think, resonates with Doug
throughout everything that's going to follow.
It's his first step down the path of becoming
more emotionally involved than he might.
Now, this is a subtle tittie thing with the cat,
but the cat's very affectionate with him here,
and then later on, when he goes back in time
and walks into the house for the first time, the cat runs away.
Claire says, "She always does that around strangers."
So, does the cat recognize him?
Here is the scene where we really get our first clue
that Doug's in the middle of something strange.
As he's walking through Claire's apartment,
around the edges, we're getting to know her a little bit more.
And while we're getting to know her through the small details of her life,
that beautiful mural that is uncompleted, she never got to finish it,
we're also getting to see Doug work.
He's very meticulous, he's very careful.
All of this is going on while we're laying out these visual clues
that, God willing, will have very neat payoffs later.
The trick of plotting all of this out was that everything we're seeing here
has to convince Doug and the audience
that these are signs of a struggle from when Claire was abducted.
And then, later on, each and every one of these things
has to occur on-screen exactly as they're found here,
only it turns out that Doug himself left all the clues,
It took forever to plot that out.
And originally, we had even more moments like that,
these kind of moments where the story back-flips on itself
At one point, our executive producer, Chad Oman,
had me prepare a nine-page document for the production team,
in which I laid out every setup and payoff in the movie.
There were far too many of them for Tony's taste,
but we did end up trimming back to something
that I still think holds up very well.
SCOTT: I think why it's always a good experience with Denzel,
is because we have that same intensity
in terms of our work and getting things right,
and doing the homework to get it right.
And he, like I, was worried about the science fiction aspect,
Over the years, and three movies, is trust.
And trusting that... I always trust him to deliver.
And he always comes with a ton of his own stuff,
and he always trusts me to deliver from my end, yeah?
So, the combination...
And we've touched three very different characters.
And I think he respects the fact I'm always able to give him a new niche,
even in a world he's touched many times before,
you know, this world here of the cops,
or, you know, agency guys.
But also, you know, Denzel is great because he's got such a gravity
in terms of his personality and himself, and such a reality.
He always... When he finds a character, he finds it, you know, 200%.
So, therefore, he manages to sell this world
because people trust in him, they believe in him,
they believe who he is when he plays a character,
because he gets so much into the character.
And he, you know, Denzel's totally dedicated to his work.
You know, he likes his glass of wine.
He doesn't have a glass of wine, nothing, for the duration of the movie.
You know, Denzel's all about getting it right.
But again, it's so... You know, it's great, I love to educate myself.
And I love to educate the audience and entertain.
BRUCKHEIMER: I think Tony and I, there's a mutual respect.
I think he's a brilliant director,
so he's got total control of his set, as he should,
and the way he works with actors.
And he's wonderful developing the screenplays
and working on the characters to make them more in-depth,
and give them layers,
which he loves to do, he involves the actors in that.
You know, when you find a wonderful director, you don't want to lose him.
Unfortunately, you know, we can't work on every film together,
MARSILII: Here's Denny's intro into the story,
and one of the things that I like about it is
that his first lines in the movie are about time.
What his role is going to be in the rest of the story.
She washed up before the explosion and against the tide.
Do you have a scenario?
We're into this hangar scene
where Doug is going to lay out his theory of what actually happened.
So, he's joining his federal employees who...
A disaster that hadn't happened yet.
...judging by some of the screensavers in the background,
they did not get the memo on sexual harassment policy in the workplace.
Good question. Her SUV is missing.
W's atan and red...
What Doug's laying out for his superiors,
is part of what's gonna get him the job.
They'd originally been looking for his partner Minuti.
This is how Claire's the key to the whole case.
It was really kind of vital.
What's important here, in terms of keeping Claire a key to the case,
is that the bomber was in direct contact with her.
There's a key line here where he says,
"If we solve her murder, we solve everybody's."
-What? -Larry Minuti, my partner.
That's his car right there.
The death of a partner is one of those things that
we had to be very careful about, because
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And if it weren't going to pay off in a surprising way later,
But in our conversations with Jerry Rudden,
he laid it out for us, still, that there's nothing more devastating
for an investigator.
MARSILII: Then, to not only lose his partner,
but to later discover that he was responsible for the man's death.
Sorry.
Now, there are actually two ways to interpret Minuti's car being there.
One being, that it was at the ferry dock because Minuti was on vacation
and died in the ferry disaster,
then Doug and the team only change the way he dies.
Or there's the darker interpretation
that everything was completely circular.
All right. Let's go find him.
This is another example of
where Tony's visual sense really informed the movie.
As often as possible, Tony chose to take these scenes that were,
you know, originally office scenes, indoor moments,
and place them in and around New Orleans.
One of the benefits of having great actors like Denzel and Val...
Like, that moment just a moment ago where he says, "Oklahoma City."
And Doug says, "Yeah."
As a writer, you can't just write a two-line exchange like that
and expect it to have any weight.
You have to write out the whole story, the whole thing.
Give the man a moment where he talks about
what that experience was to him.
And then you take it out, and you've got brilliant guys like this
and you shoot it.
And the whole story is in their eyes.
And all the rest of that dialogue falls out of the movie.
SCOTT: You look at Val in the movie and I think he's a little different.
Well, he's not a lot different...
He's played character actors before, but normally Val is a son' of...
You know, the good-looking,
you know, leading man, but in this he...
He very much wanted to be in this movie,
and so... It's so hard with actors, saying,
"I think you should out your hair off, because I've got this feeling
"you need this, sort of, really bad haircut,
"and you're gonna wear this really crumpled suit."
But the guys that we met motivated the glasses that he wore,
motivated the haircut that he had, and the suit that he wore.
MARSILII: Earlier, I had mentioned that Terry's premise was intriguing.
And one of the things that I'd done at the time was I rented a car
and drove out to Brookhaven National Lab
in order to see what these particle accelerators were really like.
And that huge cylindrical chamber that you're seeing right there,
the production team exactly duplicated
a section of the ion collider at the Brookhaven National Lab.
T.
And they are in a sound stage in Downey, California.
Everything in terms of the main lab here.
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I shot that on Genesis. All the windows,
all the tiles surrounding that window were shot on regular def.
So the contrast and the separation,
when you see the finished print, is huge.
So, the main window, it hums and sings and stands out.
It's very different from the other smaller tiles.
And then I shot all of the main lab on Genesis
because Genesis is a digital camera,
but it's a state-of-the-art in terms of the digital world.
And everything feels almost three-dimensional.
It really does feel 3-D.
So that helped, this technology in this main lab.
It helped this world having...
Using, you know, high-def cameras.
And I think that's gonna become the way of the world, you know, high-def.
But I've only been using it... For instance, I shot all my night stuff,
all the car chases at night we shot just with existing light.
And we shot, obviously those selected locations
and I shot in low level situations in which it's at its true strength.
And everything we did in the "main lab" here, as we call it.
But bright daylight exteriors, they still haven't quite got it right.
That contrast ratio is too much for the digital world, still, to hold
in a good and comfortable way.
MARSILII: This cover story that they lay out for Doug,
about how this is spy satellite video,
this was the most contentious part of the movie as we were developing it.
We spent months working this over.
And Don Ferrarone, one of our technical advisors,
pointed out that with top-secret technology like this,
they would not be likely to tell Doug what he was really seeing.
So, the compromise position, the sort of...
Sort of fallback that we all ended up settling on,
was that they tell him this is spy satellite video.
And he's immediately skeptical of it, but he goes along with it.
If the audience sees that Denzel's not quite buying it...
Can't look back and see if there was a second gunman.
And they'll be patient, because they know that eventually
he's gonna get to the bottom of what's really going on here
and he's gonna blow it open for them.
It's the when that's always constant.
SCOTT: And then we also had Adam Goldberg,
and Adam, who's the whiz kid behind the "main |ab" as we call it.
And Adam's character's role-modeled off a guy called Brian Greene.
And so I gave Adam a bunch of tapes on Brian,
'cause Brian's a very busy guy, and then got Adam on the phone with him.
And also we got Brian Greene doing a video tape demonstration
of what he believed, you know, the whole theory
of this particular time travel that we were trying to access in the movie,
what he believed that to be, and we videotaped him,
'cause he'd done it in Jerry's office with me.
And then I gave that to Adam, and Adam copied it.
Adam Goldberg's the funniest cat on two legs,
but he's very smart, and he...
And his delivery... And that stuff was tough, 'cause it's a mouthful.
And it's a tough one to sell the general public on,
who don't really know anything about this world.
But with Brian Greene's help and Adam's delivery,
he helped, made it understandable.
Even if people, so far... Even if the audience don't quite get it,
they buy into it, and they run with it,
which is... That was always my goal.
All right, match the viewer settings to the signal.
The map, I think, was one of my fights with the writers,
in that they just wanted it like a pure, one-shot surveillance camera,
you know, from the corner of a room, that didn't move, you know.
But I took license, so I built a joystick onto the desk
where Gunnars has the ability to zoom in and travel around,
you know, which give it a whole different life, which wasn't in the...
That wasn't in the original script.
And everybody was worried about the fact that I was reaching too hard,
and getting too hip, and doing too many tricks, you know.
Basically, we can walk through walls.
MARSILII: When Doug looks at her for the first time,
and says, "Claire Kuchever,"
is he just stating her name, or is he having a déjé vu moment?
It's kind of interesting the way that Denzel played that.
SCOTT: This particular scene here
was the first time that Denzel actually sees Paula.
You know, and that was for me... I thought... I was really worried about
trying to get that connection between the two of them.
But... And I did everything, I milked it, I shot from behind the screen,
you know, through Paula's image onto Denzel, and vice versa.
But... And I reconstructed that scene a little bit, so she was left...
You thought she was actually looking out of the screen at Denzel.
So, I restructured the timing in the scene.
And you're distracted, you think she's looking at D,
but in actual fact, she's listening to her answering machine.
MARSILII: One of the great things about Tony Scott is that,
typically in a movie like this, where you've got characters
that are going to staring at a screen for some time,
the way it's handled in production is,
you stand the actors in front of a green screen,
they all stare at a big "X" made of gaffer's tape and
pretend to see something up there,
while somebody else reads the dialogue off-screen.
And you can burn through pages a day that way, if that's what you care about,
you know, shooting Denzel as he falls in love with a big
But Tony chose instead
to shoot all of these time window scenes last.
First, he shot everything that was going to be seen in the window,
I:
Then he shut down physical production of the movie,
for, I think, about a week,
maybe 10 days, to cut all of it together.
Then when the shooting resumed, with these scenes,
the actors didn't have to fake everything.
SCOTT: I shot for 14 weeks,
and I shot everything which was...
For instance, Paula going into that time window.
I then had to put it into one piece of film
that would serve as every scene,
so I had to get the actors to sign off to play to that.
They were dictated to by this window, and actors don't like that.
You know, especially at 6:00 on a Monday morning,
saying to Denzel, "Well, this is...
"You've gotta play to this timing in this scene."
But in the end, the guys got into it,
'cause that's the way it was scripted,
and we could do some little changes and stuff but it was pretty tied down,
in terms of, they had to perform and act to the window.
MARSILII: Everything on the screen in the time window that they're looking at,
is being projected onto the set in real time.
The actors are reacting to the same visuals that the audience is seeing.
And personally, as a movie fan,
I really like that we went old-school like that.
Most of the fantastic images in the film are real,
they're not CG or green screen.
It was a real boat that blew up,
real water, real fire, the stunts were real.
It would have been cheaper to do it the other way,
but I really think we have a richer movie for this.
No, do not give him my number.
SCOTT: I say, one of the challenges with 40 minutes in an enclosed space...
You know, but it's a very colorful space, you know, in terms of
all this information, all these windows.
It's a great space.
But it was a very similar challenge on Crimson Tide,
'cause that was this claustrophobic submarine environment.
But this had a little more going for me,
in terms of I could use that third character, which was the window,
And then Paula, Paula Patton, this is... Paula had done two movies.
She'd done... She had a very small part in Hitch,
where she looks stunning,
and she just finished a movie called ldlewild.
But this kid is beautiful, she's honest,
and I think the right word is "ingenuous, "
'cause you... She just soaks you up. You're engaged by her.
And so... But she's relatively new in terms of her acting career.
But she's got great instincts. But most of all, you adore her,
which was perfect for this role,
'cause it's very hard to find someone who has the right qualities
for a voyeuristic relationship.
You know, for the... If there'd been something a little more sexual...
Paula is sexy, but...
But as, I mean, something little off sexual-wise...
Or Denzel had played it a little off,
it could have become, I said, voyeuristic
and sort of a little nasty.
But then, D was absolutely... Denzel was...
He said, "This girl is so stunning, she's so beautiful,
He said, "And that's in the best and strongest possible way,"
and that was great for the character.
BRUCKHEIMER: No, we never made a decision to cast an unknown.
I think we just wanted to get the best actress
we could find who fit the part.
It's a very difficult part
because you have to fall in love with this woman
without her really saying much,
or having any interaction with the lead characters
until halfway or three quarters of the way through the movie.
And that's a very difficult role to play.
So, we had to, you know, photograph her
in such a way that she is sympathetic,
endearing, engaging. And that's what Tony did.
And Paula has just this enthusiasm and energy,
and she's very uplifting.
She's the kind of person that you wanna have around you,
because, you know, she's always got
a wonderful smile on her face and a great laugh,
and she's always looking at the brighter side of things,
which is what you want.
MARSILII: Again, one of the wonderful virtues of Terry's original concept,
there are scenes like this,
that you really can't do in any other kind of story.
You've got a man reading this woman's journal,
and then watching her record the very same thing he's reading,
and she's so spooked by what she's starting to sense.
İt's his first clue that they might be affecting the past somehow.
One of the wonderful things that Paula brought to the role...
God, thank you for blessing me with this food...
Our first meeting with her, she wanted to talk about her character a bit.
And we'd never met, although we became fast friends
because it was her first really big break and mine, too.
Of all the things she could've latched on to about Claire's character,
she wanted to talk about Claire's spirituality.
There are touches of it still in the film,
where she had suggested that her mother had passed away
not long before the movie takes place.
And that she was a bit spiritually adrift. She still wanted to believe in God,
but she couldn't imagine herself going to church again.
And her father asks her to come to church with her the following Sunday,
that Baptist revival meeting that's on her refrigerator.
That ft yer is actually an invitation from Claire's father.
And Claire dies before she has a chance to go.
These were all suggestions that Paula had made
and I thought they were lovely.
Everything God has done will remain forever.
SCOTT: This particular scene here is the oldest graveyard in New Orleans,
and all the graveyards in New Orleans are actually below sea-level.
So when they get flooded all the bodies float to the top.
The city's so unlike America.
It is, 'cause it's so much more European in terms of flavor and look.
BRUCKHEIMER: Well, we looked at Seattle.
We needed a ferry and Seattle had a ferry.
Also on the East Coast. We could've gone to the East Coast,
but Tony loved the quality of New Orleans.
And after Katrina hit, we were supposed to start in October,
of course we couldn't, because the city was devastated.
But Denzel felt that the people in New Orleans needed a shot in the arm
and he gave up quite a bit of money to delay the movie
and to begin shooting in February there.
MARSILII: Throughout the movie we wanted our villain and the investigators
to really be as smart as possible.
Terry came up with this bit about the limo drivers.
I thought it was a great way to have the bomber be there
without the audience wondering why they didn't catch on or pick him up.
One of the things we learned in our research was that
investigators will scope out a funeral to see if the killer showed up
in order to gloat.
Or in Oerstadt's case he's actually showing up
because he wants to see whether or not they're onto him.
Whether or not they realize that Claire's the key to the whole thing.
And once Oerstadt sees that he knows it's time to start running.
They got good food there.
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SCOTT: In a similar way, but that was 10 years ago, Enemy of the State...
Now, I went and did my homework on all those techno-nerds
And Enemy of the State was a homage to The Conversation,
But I will say I updated it.
All the kids in that surveillance-techno world which is the NSA world,
were taken from me during my research going to NSA
and looking at the kids who actually...
You know, and at the CIA watching all these kids walking around
in bell-bottomed jeans, and carrying computers, and long hair.
You know, gone were the days of the suits.
And the same with Brian Greene and Elden Henson
and Shanti, Erika.
I got all those ideas for my cast from meeting the real guys
and seeing documentaries about those guys in white,
and they're all wannabe rock 'n' rollers.
MARSILII: One of the things that Terry in particular was adamant about,
that with all these investigators
and all this conventional evidence recovery going on,
we really had to be sure that the crime was still unsolvable
This scene where we got the ability
to listen in on a conversation that took place four days ago
That was a great way to demonstrate how important this technology is.
İt's also interesting that Doug immediately picks up,
the moment he hears this man's voice, that that's the guy.
Now, it's subtle, but throughout this scene
you can hear Oerstadt later telling her,
telling Claire that there's another car that he's also got his eye on,
and if it doesn't work he'll get back to her.
This is kind of a classic example of one of those story choices
that only happens after you let the idea
marinate in your brain for a little while.
When I was first outlining the story I knew that I wanted a paradox
where Doug is responsible for his partner's death.
But it was months into the process when I thought,
"Hey, wait a minute. What if it turns out they also got Claire killed?"
It had to be subtle,
because we don't want Doug to seem negligent for missing it.
But it's right there in plain sight.
The killer would have left her alone if Doug and the team hadn't interfered.
Which is just one paradox on top of another.
Behind the guy on the left.
One of things that Tony and Jerry were particularly strong on
The time-window is a tool that they're using and it's vital,
but it's only one part of the arsenal.
And it's kind of fun to watch them use conventional surveillance technology,
face-recognition software, everything they can
in order to get to the bottom of this.
Because the time window is being surrounded
by so much other technology that is
real, that is currently being used,
it adds a layer of authenticity to this, that
I give Tony full credit for.
Now, they're about to find a piece of video
Directly to the bombing,
where they've got just a glimpse of him at the dock.
And it's vital. It's only a glimpse of him,
but it gives us a vital piece of information that Doug can use later
when he wants to send a warning back to himself.
It wouldn't be enough just to send a note back
that says the ferry's gonna blow up,
because that wouldn't help anybody catch the guy who did it.
Oerstadt could just abort the mission and go blow up something else,
something even bigger.
We needed to have Doug see him doing something
that could get him arrested.
And videotaping a secure area at 4:00 in the morning worked for us.
BRUCKHEIMER: Well, when we used Val for Top Gun,
he was, you know, a young, up-and-coming actor,
and on his way to Hollywood, I think he was in New York at the time,
and he was in a play at that time,
and we saw what a gifted young man he was
and put him in a leading role, which turned out to be a big movie,
we didn't know when we were making it we were making a big movie,
we just thought we were making,
you know, a very effective movie, but the audiences agreed with us.
It became a movie that's still, you know, being played today
on DVD players around the world.
And, you know, it's always great when you see actors spar
and, you know, have to work in front of a camera, and you get the...
I guess, the opportunity to watch them do it
and be a fly on the wall.
And they're both really professional,
and know their lines, and are ready to go to work,
and have a good time doing it.
So, Val... Coming back together with Val,
I've stayed in touch with him through the years,
and finally found something that he would do with us,
And also, you know, Val...
Actors love to take on challenges of playing different types of characters.
And the fact that he got the opportunity to play somebody who's very smart,
you know, I guess he felt that was something he could do.
SCOTT: You know, I'm always criticized for my visual style,
'cause they always think it's style over content.
So, Ridley and me, and everybody that
comes out of commercials, are always criticized.
I mean, me more than anybody,
'cause I think I always reach harder and farther,
in trying to try different things.
But style for me is always dictated to by the material,
and by the world I'm trying to get into.
And you know, this movie...
Felt it needed a different touch, a different feel,
And, as I say, the center of the movie is a love story.
So, I always look for the center,
and I look for the world of the ATF, and I look for Jerry Rudden's world.
And somehow, I felt it needs to be simpler
and slower, and... But still rich in terms of look.
So, what we did, we did what are called cross-process,
which heightens the contrast,
and just makes everything that little... A little richer.
And we varied the amounts of cross-process depending on
what sequences we were shooting,
where we were shooting, and how we were shooting it.
But it just makes the film... The blacks that much richer,
And you're still getting...
It's a little dangerous, 'cause your mid-tones can...
You can lose them altogether, and we get so contrasty.
But I just thought, it really is such a high-tech film,
and I wanted that sort of... This brightness and hardness.
It just felt like that was right for this material.
BRUCKHEIMER: You know, for us, we love verisimilitude,
so we always bring experts into the projects we work on,
so we can learn, and also, the audience can learn at the same time.
We try to give it some sense of authenticity.
And Brian Greene is a physicist and an author,
and understands a lot of things that we don't understand,
and enlightened us on string theory,
So, we got educated, and so did our writers,
and so did Tony, and so we incorporated it into the screenplay.
MARSILII: Tony wanted to adhere to science fact.
He didn't want to make a "woo-woo science fiction movie," as he calls it.
In fact, when we first talked to him, he wanted to cut
the time-window completely, and replace it
with conventional spy satellites.
The idea being that the data would take four days to download,
much as it's being described here.
Then, much later in the story,
when it was time for Doug to go back in time,
they'd reveal a completely different device that they had.
SCOTT: There was a lot of pull and push between...
Between myself and the writers
was the science fact versus science fiction, you know.
And for me, this movie was the science of surveillance
that segues into time travel.
And, really, that was the one-liner I could give on the movie.
And it's...
And my battles were those, trying to get the guys to say,
"Listen, I'm really worried about it being science fiction."
MARSILII: The explanations that follow
were the source of endless, endless developmental wrestling, arguments.
Scientific exposition, in general, is tough to put across on-screen,
but especially here, if we weren't careful,
There's nothing worse than having somebody
meticulously explain something that you don't really care to know.
On the other hand, Tony and Jerry clearly had a point.
Something as fantastical as this time window,
really demands an explanation,
and Doug would demand an explanation.
Especially in a movie where everything else is as real
as the technology here.
So Terry and I took two tacks in order to make this work.
For one,
we put some of the arguments that we were having behind the scenes,
on-screen, into the movie.
İt is frustrating to try to explain this, it's frustrating to try to understand it,
the answers inevitably involve all kinds of high-end physics stuff,
so we chose to let Doug be frustrated.
Let Denny have a hard time explaining it.
Let them, you know, fall back on the same sales pitch
they used at the grant committee to get the funding for this thing.
And sometimes, that's really the best way through a problem
when you're working on a story.
The fact that we were having so much conflict behind the scenes on this
ended up enhancing the scene.
-If we keep the mass low... -No!
And the second thing we decided,
the second thing we did, was to use humor.
I had been living in New York, with my then-pregnant wife,
when that massive four-day blackout hit,
that took out half the Eastern Seaboard.
It was sweltering, and it was horrible,
but it came back to me later, when we were
in Jerry's office, talking with Dr. Greene
about how much power it would take to bend time.
And I thought it was a fun way to make this even more plausible.
BRUCKHEIMER: I think the hardest part in a movie like this
is to make the audience believe what's actually happening,
and create a scenario that they can live with, understand.
And that's the problem with pictures like this,
unless they're totally science fiction,
and we wanted to do more science fact than science fiction.
So, by bringing in the experts that we brought in,
they helped me understand, which helped us, in turn,
make the writers understand, and, hopefully, in turn,
making the audience understand what's going on.
SCOTT: We shot an additional scene,
and the additional scene was to help clarify
you know, why Denzel's character comes...
SCOTT: When he gets back at the end,
you know, and how he gets back at the end, there were two theories,
and both theories were supported by Brian Greene.
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But there's a theory of parallel universes at any one moment in time.
There's another universe where you're sitting talking to another Tony Scott.
Yeah. Or the other one is split the universe, diverse universes.
And Brian said both are, you know, pretty valid theories,
if there ever is gonna be such a thing as time travel.
He said, "Take whichever one you wanna go for."
And Brian, he saw the final movie and he said, "Damn, you sold me,"
which is good, which is the biggest pat on the back I could get.
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MARSILII: It was important here, though,
to establish some scientific theory
that at least allowed for the possibility.
Denny's telling the truth.
This is not the prevailing, accepted theory,
the "branching universe theory," as we call it,
but some do believe that it's possible.
It was important for Doug to have that
so that he didn't just seem to be committing suicide later in the film.
It's not quite clear perhaps, from the geography of the movie,
but this time displacement chamber where they're putting the note,
and where later Doug himself will go,
this chamber is directly behind the screen that they're watching.
That is how Doug's able to shine a laser light straight through it
and into the past itself.
SHANTI: We're ready.
It's kind of interesting because, considering the end of the film,
when we're going to have the four-day-old version of Doug show up,
having never met Claire, but finding her strangely familiar,
like so much else in the film, we were able to hide it in plain sight.
The other Doug is there on the screen, in the time window.
They're watching him right now.
But we still manage to forget about it, if the movie's been pulled off correctly.
If we got away with it, the audience has forgotten he's there,
off back in his own house, living the rest of his life that night,
while our guy is trying to save Claire.
One of the things I'm very happy about with, the way
the time window lab technicians have been characterized in the movie,
Denny was inspired by a Brookhaven physicist
who had died in the Swiss Air Flight 111 crash.
I was intrigued because the man's website... He looked like a guitarist.
His website listed all of his publications on quark-gluon plasma,
and right next to them was a list of all his favorite garage bands
We wanted to flip the movie cliché
that physicists are all nerds, or unattractive somehow.
We knew we were going to be with these people for a long time,
and it was a conscious choice to give them a sense of humor,
really do justice to them as characters.
If they're people you enjoy hanging out with,
that'll make it that much more palatable
when it's time for them to get serious.
SCOTT: Matt Craven, who's in Crimson Tide...
Yeah, so this is my second time out with Matt.
And I just thought that Matt was a real good combination in terms of
a buddy for Denzel in this movie.
Put it down, Larry. I'm not coming back.
MARSILII: It's kind of interesting the way this shakes out,
because with these paradoxes,
especially once Doug and the team
begin actively trying to change the past,
time itself becomes like another character in the movie.
Ostensibly, our villain is the bomber, but really it's time itself,
or fate, destiny.
It's constantly outwitting Doug. It's constantly one step ahead of him,
anticipating everything that he thinks of doing,
until everything ends up exactly the way it was supposed to go
in the first place, no matter what he does.
Tony likes to joke sometimes that the movie is about Denzel versus Jesus.
But another way to look at it is that it's Denzel versus time, or destiny,
SCOTT: You know, I had found this guy in the bayou who bred pit bulls
and he was a good 0|' boy from the South, from New Orleans.
So I got him, I cast him. Then we went out and actually put him on tape here.
And this guy's extraordinary. He was way out there.
Brilliant. A guy called Chad.
Anyway, I made the mistake of giving it to JC, just for 20 minutes
and all of a sudden he became this guy.
It was fantastic, 'cause it was audio-visual.
And he worked so hard at his New Orleans accent
and this character... Just after 20 minutes.
And it took me a lot to talk him off the ledge.
But it's funny, all this stuff all in the dark here at night,
this was Genesis at night in the rain
in February, in New Orleans. February in New Orleans is freezing.
Don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise.
It is so cold. Night shooting in the rain with Genesis.
Genesis is still, you know...
Digital cameras still have this umbilical cord, so it's all a pain in the ass.
We managed to get it down in the end so it became less cumbersome.
But it's still tricky, especially night-shooting in the rain.
GUNNARS: He's still breathing.
MARSILII: We're setting up the big goggle-chase here.
One of the wonderful things for me about working with Terry was that
he and I think on the same sort of off-kilter wavelength.
My initial outline had this split-level car chase with these time goggles.
I really desperately wanted to do it because,
well, I'd never seen anything like it before
and whenever you can do something like that with a car chase,
that's golden.
I was afraid he might not go for it,
because it requires another leap of scientific faith
on the part of the audience.
It's one thing to say that we can look back in time
using this gigantic, you know, time-window device
and this huge particle accelerator, or whatever it is that powers it.
I was afraid it might seem like too much
that we also have a portable version that can fit on somebody's back.
Fortunately, Jerry, Tony, everybody involved got on board with it.
With the drama of the scene and the cool mechanics,
the dynamics of this chase were just so irresistible
that we were willing to push the bounds of science fact.
SCOTT: I think the movie's got, you know,
some really unique aspects to it.
For instance the... Which is all Bill Marsilii,
you know, who was the original writer.
Which is, you know... Car chases have been done to death.
You know, shootouts have been done to death.
And always the true strength is concept or idea.
And that's what was so interesting here, 'cause the idea...
I don't think I shot the car chase particularly well.
To be honest with you, I thought it was pretty mediocre, what I did,
by nature of time and logistical problems and stuff.
But the concept is so strong,
İn terms of the general public who have seen it.
MARSILII: One of the movies that for me
that had kind of inspired this goggle chase...
There was a Clint Eastwood movie, one of the Dirty Harry films,
I think it was The Dead Pool, where there's a car chase.
Everything about it obeys the normal conventions of a car chase,
but one of the cars is a toy car with a bomb in it.
Oh, shit!
What? What happened? What happened?
And once we got into this idea
of goggles that would extend the time window,
it got really fun to sit down and come up with all kinds of variations on,
"Okay, what could happen during this chase?"
Okay, I got him. I got him. He's back in range.
One of the little secrets I can tell you here is
that the only reason the time window goes back
four days, six hours and some minutes,
was so that during this car chase,
Oerstadt could be driving on an empty road in the middle of the night,
while Doug has to plow through rush hour traffic.
We didn't originally envision so much vehicular mayhem,
but it is pretty exciting. I'll give him that.
One of the fun things with this goggle chase was
ringing all the possible changes on,
"Okay, what possible situations could we have?"
There's a moment where the bad guy's got a clear road
and Doug doesn't.
Good. Now stay with him.
At one point Oerstadt stops
at an accident and that causes Doug to
have to stop in the middle of rush hour traffic.
Originally, in fact, we had a moment where Doug hits the brakes
and actually slides into Oerstadt's back seat.
He puts the goggles on
and he is inside the other guy's car.
They've overlapped in time.
It turned out to be incredibly daunting, physically to do that
and Tony also felt that it was a bit "woo-woo." Science fiction.
So, instead we gave him this 180 spin.
SCOTT: Actually, on first screening, we had one bad laugh, which...
I died, 'cause I thought we'd really screwed up.
I thought that was it.
It's where Denzel... He spins his truck and he ends up facing Jim Caviezel.
And Jim Caviezel, obviously, played Christ in The Passion.
And Denzel said... Spontaneously, he just said,
"Jesus, yeah, he's dead ahead of me."
And we had it in the cut and nobody in the editing room spotted it.
And all the audience laughed out loud, there was this roar of laughter.
We thought we'd fallen off the wagon in terms of credibility.
İt was because JC, as we called him, Jim Caviezel.
I think Jim's real name was Doug Caviezel.
Till he did the Passion, he changed it to Jim Caviezel.
Consequent initials JC.
MARSILII: And yet another situation now, we've got a scene where...
Earlier we had Doug being able to see,
and the guys at the time-window lab can't.
Now the goggle's smashed, so they can see what's going on and he can't.
Whenever you've got something like this,
you really wanna try and take advantage of
every possible cool moment within it.
And I'm so glad we got as many of them as we did.
SCOTT: And I felt I was always a little bit, little bit, little bit loose.
Not loose in terms of the size of my frame.
But I never quite got a handle on this goggle rig.
I mean, trying to...
I just hoped that the audience was getting enough of this.
Goggle rig was actually the piece of technology
which is communicating all this back there.
They obviously get it.
But I wanted to make that connection I didn't feel was strong enough.
'Cause I felt, I wanted to get inside the rig a little bit more.
Inside, you know, Denzel, the pupil of his eye,
and do that sort of stuff, you know.
You know, so I never quite got it as sophisticated,
or as much of a study as I wanted to make it, you know.
BRUCKHEIMER: Well, Tony loves to storyboard things.
In fact, everything that he does is storyboarded, every single scene,
he gets up at 4:00 in the morning, and he starts doing his storyboard.
Something like a Hummer chase, of course,
We started filming it.
He does a lot of the drawing himself. He brings the storyboard artist.
But every frame of this film was storyboarded.
MARSILII: One of the things
that strongly helps motivate this chase for me
is that we've seen earlier that Minuti is still breathing.
Yes, it's been four days since he got shot,
but there is still somehow the possibility, at least,
that his partner is still alive.
And if that weren't enough,
this might be their last chance to track down Oerstadt.
If they lose sight of him here,
they could probably lose sight of him forever.
This is Doug's only chance to track him down
To ultimately go back and try to save everybody on that ferry.
SCOTT: I wasn't just shooting in New Orleans,
but I shot a lot in the bayou, you know.
And that was never in the script. Long Island was in the script.
But I just wanted, you know...
And, so, therefore, I adapted lots of locations
and moved them out of the city.
And the bayou in winter.
'Cause, you know, we ended up because of Katrina... Originally,
we were meant to be shooting in September.
And because of Katrina, we had to move our shoot back till the winter,
but I love the winter in the bayou.
Those birch trees became sort of silver white,
and the graphics were spectacular.
And after Katrina happened, they wanted me to go to Miami.
And wanted me to go to Seattle
which would've been different movies there, but...
You know, it's hard to let go
because it became such an important character in the movie,
where we placed the movie.
And I couldn't come to terms with those other places,
they'd have been different movies.
MARSILII: Yet another example of planting the clues in plain sight
to what's going to happen later.
No. Nothing.
Originally, we had a couple of lines earlier in the FBI briefing scene
where somebody alluded to the fact
that somebody claiming to be a federal agent stole an ambulance
out of the hospital, the other night.
But, ultimately, that fell out of the picture.
The sequence that's coming up now,
as Doug makes his way into the bait camp with the backpack,
and the fellows back at the time-window lab,
are talking him through it describing everything.
Do you see him?
I was reminded of a scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca,
which is also present in the Daphne du Maurier novel.
Mrs. Danvers is describing to Mrs. de Winter
how Rebecca used to walk across the room.
"There's where she used to write her letters.
"There's where she would lay her things.
And you're following it in an empty room.
I think it's the diesel fuel, like at the ferry.
Doug's having that same sort of experience here.
I have to say, watching this,
it's one thing to write a line of stage direction that says,
"Shanti begins to cry."
It's another thing to see it.
I really love the performances from these folks.
The moment between Elden and Erika there,
as they're watching what's happened,
really sells the impact of this for me.
Doug still has some hope that he's wrong here and...
Of course, getting shot and stabbed and set on fire is not enough.
Tony felt that it was really important
that he also get eaten by alligators afterwards.
SCOTT: But actually a little spooky because all the alligators around there,
and they're all in hibernation.
But we came in with our air boats, and these alligators are really pissed off.
So they come out, they're all trying to sleep for the winter, so...
And alligators can move fast.
They can do the 100 yards in even time, yeah,
so you gotta get out of there.
MARSILII: If we had chosen to, we could have decided
that the reason they're watching this woman
is because she's the President's daughter,
or the Prime Minister, or something like that.
That would've been one way to solve a number of plot problems
as we were creating the story.
But Terry and I both felt
that the wonderful thing about it is that she's a normal woman,
living her life, coming out of a bad relationship,
and she's looking forward to a future that's never gonna happen.
As they're discussing the possible ramifications
of whether or not they've changed the past,
it's also kind of intriguing
that now they're part of what they're investigating.
They're not just watching.
They have to discuss whether or not they're responsible for it.
Also, these guys are physicists, they're not investigators by trade.
“ Flw. “ w. '
They're not used to seeing people get killed.
It's kind of uniquely frustrating to be a witness to a murder,
and they're not allowed to testify about it.
All they could do was watch.
When Doug finds Claire's earring there,
this is how he knows this is where she was killed.
This is where he has to go,
when he comes back in time, steals an ambulance,
that's where he has to drive, if he's going to save her life.
SCOTT: Carroll Oerstadt, the bad guy,
Jim Cavieze|'s character, we adapted him,
we put him... He had a house in the 9th Ward.
And, so, when they eventually locate, you know, where he lives,
they go to the 9th Ward, which is the area
that got hit the hardest during Katrina.
This particular sequence here is, was in the 9th Ward.
But, emotionally, everybody is like they were knocked sideways,
you know, looking at all that devastation,
and it was emotionally very upsetting.
The guys were... They were all dragging all afternoon.
MARSILII: At one point, Tony had wanted the scene to play out
in a son' of a cookie cutter suburban area.
And then, after Katrina,
we realized that if we were going to portray the devastation at all,
this was really the place to do it.
Oerstadt, as a character, has relatively little screen time
where we actually get to hear him talk.
So, by his very nature,
we need to see whatever we can about him through implication.
BRUCKHEIMER: You know, Tony found a location for the Oerstadt chase,
where he was arrested, that he felt was intriguing.
And that's why he picked the bayou, it's really beautiful looking
and the way he shot it makes it even prettier.
SCOTT: When we were scouting the bayou,
we were scouting in airboats,
which are brilliant. Yeah. 'Cause you can go over...
You can actually drive... We were driving across roads
and over intersections in these things, in these airboats.
And I just thought it was interesting to have Oerstadt try to escape
When we shot that sequence there, it was pouring with rain, it was...
But it worked for the sequence.
MARSILII: This interrogation scene was informed to a great extent
by transcripts from Timothy McVeigh that Tony had found.
And he also had video footage of ATF interrogations of other bombers.
And we did use some of it here, particularly in Doug's trade craft.
Often an investigator will flatter the suspect,
as Doug does here, saying, "We're impressed with the expertise.
"Could you help us out? Tell us how you did this? It's fascinating."
But we didn't want Oerstadt's military background
to ultimately be the thing that motivates him.
Terry and I were very strong that we wanted this character
to really be about destiny.
It's much more in keeping with the themes of the rest of the film,
if everything he does is motivated out of a sense of thwarted destiny.
There was a way that his future was supposed to go and it didn't.
And he's taking steps to rectify that.
SCOTT: Yeah, it's funny 'cause I didn't...
When I was trying to piece together,
it's really tough trying to piece together a bad guy.
Even though, in the script, it was a domestic terrorist and...
But I did... They didn't...
They didn't have him down in terms of who he was,
and I'll be very blunt here.
The guy was not a good bad guy. He was stereotypical.
And I had a different sort of feel or a different actor in mind,
and then I only met with JC, Jim Caviezel
because Denzel's agent is his agent.
And I said, "| don't wanna meet with Jesus."
I said, "He's not right for this role."
And, now, he came in. He sat with me for 30 seconds. I said, "You got it."
I said he's great, 'cause JC is such an extraordinary odd individual
And the character you see in this movie is JC.
BRUCKHEIMER: I think Jim wanted to do a part like this
because, you know, he's remembered as Jesus.
And he wants to be remembered as a good actor.
And that he's versatile and you can make him play any kinds of parts.
The fact that he took on this role was a thrill for us
'cause he's such a gifted actor.
And he does such wonderful preparation.
He spent a lot of time reading transcripts
from people who were serial bombers
or people who were, I guess you would say,
on the wrong side of the law.
And really got into their psyche.
And fortunately for us, transferred it to the screen.
He's a very creepy character on screen.
MARSILII: This scene perhaps
more than any other critical exchange in the film
was really improved through Tony's fidelity
to research, through Jim Caviezel's suggestions
for what motivated the character, how he wanted to play it,
and certainly, you know,
Terry and I, our own views on the subject.
The danger when you have three or four people collaborating
on what a scene should be about,
is that it'll end up a horrific jumble.
This all came together very well.
-'Cause I seen what's coming. -Did... Have you? What?
In fact, it was during the course of our meetings
about the interrogation scene
that it occurred to me that a bomb has a destiny,
"a predetermined fate set by the hand of its creator," as Oerstadt says.
He's got a second sense about this.
He knows that he's never going to be convicted,
that the case is never going to go to trial,
because ultimately, he's going to die on the ferry.
And anyone who tries to alter that destiny will be destroyed.
He might not know that that's how it's gonna go,
I'm happy that we lucked onto that metaphor that, with a bomb,
"Anyone who tries to stop it from happening causes it to happen."
That's really the theory that Doug is up against
throughout the whole movie.
He's been trying to prevent Claire's death,
trying to prevent the ferry explosion.
And could he actually be helping it happen?
SCOTT: Bruce Greenwood was another great actor
that I wanted to work with for a long time, but...
No, I had a great collection of actors,
and they feel very real, there's a strength.
And nobody feels out of place, nobody feels shooed-in,
they all feel like they sit comfortably.
MARSILII: We were really great fans of law enforcement,
and we were pretty clear that we didn't want anybody
on the law enforcement side of the story to be a bad guy.
McCready's being harsh here, but he's absolutely right.
They've got the evidence they need.
Using this machine,
at least in theory, got one of their agents killed.
And Val's character isn't a bad guy either.
He had to file a report. He waited as long as he could.
SCOTT: And this roll I shot with sunglasses on. Jerry hated me for that.
Wanted to see their eyes.
He thought Val...
Although the sun was going down and I think Val had his glasses on,
so I think that gave D the idea to put his glasses on.
To be honest, in hindsight, I think
maybe I should've shot the scene without the sunglasses,
'cause it's a pivotal scene, an emotional scene,
so therefore, it would've helped a little bit if you had seen D's eyes.
I think we shot this whole scene in 40 minutes,
because we started off shooting the scene,
had rainbirds, and we were in good shape...
We were meant to start shooting at, like, noon,
and had the rainbirds, we were gonna shoot it in the rain,
'cause it was, you know...
That other stuff we'd seen in the bayou was in the rain.
And the guys had all these plastic macs on.
And the rain sounded like fish frying.
The sound was just impossible,
so in the end I just ripped their raincoats off and we shot it.
MARSILII: People have asked me if Déyévu was a response
to the September 11th attacks.
And of course, it wasn't originally.
It was something that we'd been working on for many years before that.
But one thing that I did take away from that experience,
was the memorial service,
the candlelight vigils that happened afterwards.
They were heartbreaking.
And I thank Tony and Jerry, because they were expensive to shoot.
It took a long time.
And it's only a touch, but
I give them full credit that they went that extra mile to include it.
Personally, it was important to me.
SCOTT: All these pictures you see in Paula's apartment are of Paula.
She gave me a whole bunch of boxes of her pictures,
just 'cause when she was a kid, her parents
obviously photographed her growing up.
So, all those pictures you see, those are pictures of Paula.
' .' M .' ' .' ' _ ' “_ '.' ' .' '4' (I\ W'.' (“
MARSILII: Denzel, Jim, Paula,
and then later, even Adam, with the Denny character, who's so cynical,
all of them, at one point or another, suggested moments
in which their characters were seen as having a spiritual dimension.
And the danger is always about
becoming too heavy-handed about that,
and nobody wants to get a Sunday school lesson
when they're out to see a good action film.
But the fact that they all saw that in the story and embraced it,
really warmed my heart.
And it gave me some hope that maybe
the same themes would reach an audience the same way.
We both know what happens if I don't.
I mentioned a moment ago
that we didn't want anyone to come off as a bad guy,
In an early cut of the film, Val's last moment in the story
was when he tells Doug, "It's not your fault Claire dies."
And reshot this, and added an extra moment
where Val tacitly approves of what they're about to do.
Nobody here wants a disaster to happen.
This scene coming up, when Doug goes back
and Denny helps him out,
I got a phone call the day that they were shooting this.
Adam Goldberg had asked for an exchange
where Doug asks him,
you know, "Why are you helping me to do this?
"| thought you didn't believe it was possible to change the past."
And Adam suggested the line, "Yeah, but I do believe in God."
And I said, "Adam said that?"
There were spiritual themes in the movie
that I was hoping nobody would notice until it was too late to out them.
So, I suggested a slight addition.
"Don't tell anybody."
He doesn't want to lose his cynical, physicist science cred.
And I'm really happy with the way he played it.
SCOTT: You know, the time box, or whatever you want to call it,
that's a really hard thing to make credible, you know, so...
And obviously, we educated the audience
in terms of the process of sending solid matter back
where we sent the note back, and we put it into that little time box.
And originally, the machine that actually transports objects back,
again, I went into the real world and took it from an MRI machine.
You know, so I took an MRI machine.
But in the end they say, "Well, we've never sent humans back."
Or they say they've never sent humans back.
So therefore, it felt like an MRI machine is built for a human,
so therefore, we just made Denzel climb into this little box, you know.
So we had to try and find something that I felt was more credible.
You know, it feels like he's one of those astronauts,
when he's sitting in there talking back to him.
So, that was good, in that it had a sense of humor to it, as well.
So, the humor and the moon-shot quality, you know,
gave a sort of credence, or a validity, to what we were trying to do.
MARSILII: One of the potential stumbling blocks
of the original premise was
that if you could use this machine to go back, or to send something back,
why would anybody spend most of the movie just looking?
It wasn't enough to just say, "You're not allowed. It's a rule."
We felt that we needed to have a seemingly insurmountable obstacle.
Otherwise you'd just get impatient with the movie.
And maybe we never did overcome that for some people,
but the key to a really good love story
is the obstacle that separates the lovers.
And the greater the obstacle,
the stronger the love has to be to overcome it.
So, I thought, what if this machine kills you?
That made... To me, that actually made the whole story
a lot more profound.
And Terry dove into it.
He thought it was fantastic that Doug has to literally die
in order to try to save Claire.
NURSE: What the hell? DOCTOR: All right, hold on, everybody.
About exactly how Doug should arrive when he's in the past.
Our sale draft of the script had him arriving fully clothed
with his gun, his ID, and a Brookhaven National Lab badge
that helped Claire at the end to figure out what might be going on here.
Then Tony at one point wanted him to go back naked.
And we thought that's a little bit like The Terminator.
We ended up with Denzel in his underwear. Collaboration.
SCOTT: I have a style.
I mean, it's not just the filming style, it's the editing style,
and, you know, this is my eighth movie with Chris Lebenzon, who's my editor.
And Chris, he was just the one editor.
You know, on Man on Fire I had three different editors.
But Chris edited the... He was the... He's the master.
And he... And Chris is, this is my eighth movie.
But Chris is absolutely brilliant in terms of story, character,
performance, timing.
And after eight movies, obviously has become my right arm.
And this was...
It was a long movie on the page.
And when I say long, the script was a little long.
But I tend to shoot things at a given pace,
and so they tend to come out shorter
than the average director, say. My rule of thumb, I think, is...
One page constitutes one minute of screen time,
I think with me it's more like two-thirds of a minute of screen time,
but my first cut, when I'd finished shooting
was two hours, I think, and three minutes.
That's brilliant for a first cut, you know.
But that's all down to Chris, Chris Leb,
'cause I was actually shooting when he's doing all of that.
But Chris has got a knacky, an uncanny...
Chris has an uncanny knack of, you know, selecting
the right performance for the right moment.
And being able to let things sit and breathe a little bit more.
I've got, say, ADD, and I sort of,
when I'm left to my own devices, it'll be like Domino on speed.
A bounty hunter on speed.
But Chris lets things breathe and live and move,
and he always has a great shape to every scene he does in a movie.
MARSILII: Now here, structurally, this is kind of interesting
That we ever jump to a scene that does not in any way include Doug.
We're seeing a moment that took place in the past
But we're not looking through the window.
The point of that structurally is that
we're seeing what's about to happen to her
but Doug is racing to get there.
SCOTT: I've got an amazingly strong family in terms of my work family,
and they all have a say.
You know, Chris Seagers, who's my production designer,
You know, Chris was my art director on Spy Game.
And I made him my production designer
right at the beginning of Spy Game.
And he stunned me when he did Spy Game.
He did Man on Fire, he did Domino, and he's done Déjé Vu with me.
And Chris is tireless, tireless in his pursuit of getting things better,
and making it work, and he's a huge talent.
And the same with Harry Gregson-Williams,
who does my music, you know.
Harry's got a little bit of a tortured soul.
Harry's a little bit of Man on Fire, he's a little bit of Creasy.
And every time he does a movie he gives a part of his soul,
so that's why the scores that he does are so interesting, 'cause they're...
Harry's very sweet and he's got a very dark side as well
so you always get that combination.
So again, he's one of what I call my family.
MARSILII: Also here we see Doug getting shot
which became vitally important.
After Tony initially signed on,
one of the things that he was concerned about was
after the rescue of Claire,
he didn't feel that Doug was strongly motivated enough to take her home.
At one point he'd even suggested cutting that entire sequence
and going straight to the ferry.
But he had a point.
And the way that we got around it was having Doug get shot here.
Then it required them to go to her house
because he wasn't going to make it otherwise.
SCOTT: You know, this bait camp in the bayou was actually a working store.
It was a working bait camp. And the people who ran the bait camp,
they were an old couple, very sweet couple who were retired,
and they lived in the house next door.
But they said, "Listen, we wanna remodel."
I said, "Done. We'll help you remodel."
So we blew... So now the store got rebuilt.
So that was the store they wanted to remodel, that thing in flames there.
That's what's called "Hollywood remodeling."
MARSILII: This explosion and fire,
beyond the physical spectacle of it,
and we all love it when something blows up real good,
it was important to the story that Oerstadt believe
Claire and Doug are dead.
Otherwise, it would not quite be plausible
that he continues with his plan if he thinks
that there's a cop or somebody who's already on his case.
By blowing the place up
and allowing him to drive off without seeing them escape,
it makes it a bit more plausible
that Oerstadt still thinks he can get away with this.
He's already killed one agent.
Now he believes he's killed these folks as well.
And he's on his way to blow up the ferry in Claire's car.
I'm a federal agent. Hang on, hang on.
There's only one reason, really,
that I wanted Claire to have a hood over her head,
because that moment when they look into each other's eyes for the first time,
that was something that... It was just that much stronger
Later, when Doug seems to know too much about her,
Creates so much suspicion in her
that it motivates everything that follows.
SCOTT: Denzel falling in love with Paula,
that was a challenge in itself,
because they never get together on-screen
until you're an hour into the movie.
BRUCKHEIMER: No, I think the major concern with the fact
that they don't have much screen time is,
when do we get them together?
How quickly can we get them together on-screen?
So, we constantly had to look at the screenplay
and find out ways to bring them together much sooner.
MARSILII: And especially in a story like this,
every moment they do have counts,
because he's had four days to become emotionally attached to her.
Here she has really a matter of hours.
And every look Paula gives him, every moment, every touch,
is so delicate, it really helps us.
SCOTT: And so, I was worried that the love story, or the relationship,
whatever you wanna call it, wouldn't work.
You know, but I think the strength is in the...
You know, one, in terms of how I shot it,
but two, most of all, the chemistry between the two people,
between Paula and Denzel,
and, you know, Denzel's commitment to making this relationship work.
I think that I managed to pull it off.
MARSILII: One of the lovely things about this to me is that,
here you've got a man who knows everything about this woman.
He's read her dairies, he's gone through everything she owns,
he's watched her in the most private moments of her life.
She doesn't know a thing about him.
He's gonna have to try as hard as he can to play this properly,
so that he doesn't come off to her like a stalker.
SCOTT: And this house we shot, you know, Claire's apartment,
was actually in a house which was in
a suburb of New Orleans called the Bywater.
And the house had a preservation order on it, though,
so we couldn't put nails in the walls or do anything, so...
But the people were very sweet,
so we actually built the house on-stage,
but we took all the doors, all the windows, from the real house,
and brought them to the stage, so that's why I think it feels like a real...
And that... You know, that's what I do with Chris, it's the same.
Actually, it's funny, I just realized it's the same rule of thumb, so...
What Chris Seagers, my production designer, and I do,
we always find real locations
and then we then we build them if we have to.
You know, we always take the... Everything.
Beg, borrow and steal as much dressing
as we can from the real locations,
'cause it's funny, real life, it's always hard to reproduce,
it's always much stranger than fiction, you know.
And so, Chris and I, we'd beg, borrow and steal from the real locations and...
But that's the way we... You know, you can say,
"God, I wonder what her house looks like."
So, we looked at,
you know, in terms of Claire on the page,
what does her house really look like?
And Claire, you know...
And Paula's character in the original script,
she was a child's book illustrator,
and I felt it was a little too saccharine and a little too cliched.
So, when I started scouting,
when I first went down to New Orleans,
I met a girl who was a maitre d' in a restaurant,
and I found it much more real to have a working girl as a...
You know, who did...
She painted some murals inside her apartment,
but I felt a real girl was much more interesting,
so Paula's character, and her work, was based off this real girl
we met at a restaurant in New Orleans,
and I gave that character to Paula.
And then I got her to go and spend time working as a maTtre d'
in one of the hot restaurants, called NOLA,
just to get a sense of, you know,
not just about how you're a maitre d',
but it'd give a sense of who the people are around you.
And you always get ideas when you touch the real world.
MARSILII: Tony's big note about these scenes,
once Doug and Claire are actually together is that,
he felt that the less of them, the better.
He very much wanted to get to the ferry.
We had scripted, and he had even shot,
a bit more between them,
more character moments,
moments where Doug is telling her what he knows about her
It's very fortunate
that Denzel and Paula have such a strong chemistry together.
That's something that, as a writer, you can really only pray for.
The danger of this story, structurally, is that
it's a love story where the man and the woman
really don't have that much time together
If they don't seem made for each other,
the whole thing can really, kind of, just fall flat.
SCOTT: Now, we talked, and the writers here, they said the same.
This is, you know, this is a piece of Hitchcock.
This movie, this story, is a piece of, you know, movie history.
And to be honest, I was never a great fan of Hitchcock's.
But Hitchcock's movies, you know, they were great films, but they're not...
It's like, people say, "What sort of painting do you like?"
And I'd say, you know, "I'm not into,
"you know, modern, contemporary, abstract painters, you know.
"I'm more into Hieronymous Bosch and Brueghel, "
psychological, religious persecution.
Yeah, so...
No, listen, he did some really interesting movies,
but they were not... They were, I don't know...
I mean, Roman Polanski, Nic Roeg,
they were the guys that I sort of aspired to, they were...
I don't want the word more "strange," "surreal," "odd."
Yeah, I think I, too, son' of...
My guiding lights in terms of the older cinema.
Nic Roeg has been one of my biggest guiding lights.
I think I've said before,
his movie Performance, his first movie, was...
I've stolen from that movie so many times.
Yeah. Others... I steal from everybody.
MARSILII: Now it all starts paying off.
Up until now, it was possible for Doug and for the audience
to believe he'd actually saved Claire.
But now, as moments like this start replaying themselves,
Donnelly writing her number on the candy wrapper,
the blood that's going to be found later on will turn out to be Doug's,
as everything starts to dovetail
and fold back onto itself plot-wise,
we start to wonder if he's ever going to be able to change anything at all.
I'll let you in on a little secret here,
this answering machine moment... Originally, as scripted,
Doug was going to lip-synch perfectly Beth's message
as it was being left.
I don't know if they ever shot a take that way,
but ultimately, I think they just felt it wouldn't play.
SCOTT: I mean, it's funny, obviously, this...
The location in New Orleans didn't resemble
what was in the original screenplay,
which was Long Island,
and the ferry journey is a much longer journey
in Long Island than it was here. This is just a very short hop.
It's a 17-minute hop across the river.
But the writers came down, and...
When I was actually...
A week before I started shooting, and sort of said,
"Wow. I don't know how this is gonna work."
But you know...
It's hard for a writer, 'cause they fall in love with what they've written.
And they see it. The location is... They see it.
Then we try to give them something else,
and you have to adapt to what you find.
You know...
So I, obviously, had a big adaptation to do
to get away from Long Island to New Orleans,
but New Orleans is so much,
I felt, the better place for this story and this movie.
Then on our, you know, our very first ferry,
when we were scouting, our first trip across the river,
we got diverted because a tanker came through.
And that diversion pulled us towards the bridge, which gave me the idea,
which is now in the movie,
the ferry gets diverted and goes underneath a bridge,
which is a good excuse for a much better location for the ferry to blow.
And that's what also gave me the idea about the guy on the bridge watching,
that, whether you get it or not in the movie, the guy...
When he sees the ferry coming towards him,
and he knows it's gonna blow, he splits, gets on his bike and goes.
So, all of that all comes about through scouting locations, you know.
It was actually, you know, Chris Seagers, my production designer,
and Marshall Vernet, one of my location guys,
and Richard Klotz, they sent me back these pictures.
And the pictures, in terms of
the ferry docks, and the journey that the ferry took...
Then, you know, it was actually Chris Seagers that said, you know,
"You know, what happens if these guys were in
So, it was Chris' idea to say that these sailors were coming in for
Mardi Gras, for the weekend.
Once Oerstadt sees his own car back there,
he realizes that Doug and Claire are not, in fact, dead,
and the final act of the picture really kicks into gear.
One of the things that's a staple of bomb movies,
that Terry and I both desperately wanted to get away from,
was the cliché of the digital timer that you keep cutting back to,
to show how many seconds we have left.
So many polite bombers that put these big, readable timers on their bombs.
Instead, the countdown, the ticking clock, so to speak,
is the inevitable repeat of a series of events
that we saw at the top of the movie.
The teacher counting the children, the horn going off, the captain talking,
everything repeating exactly.
All while Doug and Claire are running around underneath them
trying to avert a disaster.
And every time we see one of those events replay itself,
it's just one more clue that maybe they're not changing anything.
SCOTT: We used a lot of our extras. On our biggest day, on the ferry
That sounds very indulgent,
but when you look at that ferry, and you do aerial shots of the ferry,
750 people disappear like that.
So the whole idea was meant to be a full ferry.
So our biggest days were, I think, 750.
But it's funny, all these uniforms you see here,
a lot of the guys came from the naval base in New Orleans,
but we couldn't use their actual uniforms, we had to wardrobe them.
But, you know, when we first started shooting,
right after Katrina,
originally there were 500,000 people every night who slept in New Orleans,
after Katrina it went down to 60,000.
By the time we started shooting it was still 60,000.
By the time we finished shooting it was 250,000. So that was good.
The confidence in the city, not because of the film,
but just people were coming back.
But there were not a lot of people in New Orleans,
so we had to ferry a lot of people,
we had to bus people in from Baton Rouge every day.
We had huge busloads leaving at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning.
Then all these guys that you see had to be wardrobed. Yeah.
MARSILII: One of the reasons that we ended up
choosing a ferry disaster, Terry and I,
was there were a number of virtues to it cinematically.
One, it had never been done, to my knowledge.
I'd never seen something like this.
Plane crashes have unfortunately been done to death in movies.
A ferry is a visually interesting place
to stage a cat-and-mouse suspense sequence.
There are multiple levels, some indoors, some outdoors,
lots of innocent people around.
Also, the deep water makes the evidence so much harder to obtain
and thus it helps justify the use of a time-window.
And it's also a contained space.
Once the boat sets sail,
there's no way for Doug, Claire or anybody else to escape the bomb.
Doug has to solve the problem or everybody dies.
It worked out very well for us I think.
No passengers allowed, sir.
SCOTT: In the script this sequence was very different.
Obviously, the ferry that they had in the script was a Long Island ferry
And it was very much motivated by action shootout
and the bad guy, in the original script,
was carrying pipe-bombs that he kept throwing around.
So this, I tried to structure it,
I tried to make Jim Cavieze|'s character very much more real.
MARSILII: Tony very much wanted Caviezel to come off as a...
He mentioned Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver
where this guy's got his guns, he's unstoppable,
and he just marches through shooting anybody that gets in his way.
SCOTT: And then the location itself, the ferry itself,
dictated how the set piece laid out, how Denzel and he faced off,
and have this monologue with each other at the end.
But that stuff's hard, 'cause you know you got to tell the story,
and then you gotta tell the story between the two characters
that had to drive the Bronco off the ferry and into the water
and trying to keep those things real
without them becoming sort of old-fashioned action set pieces,
that's hard. It's a real challenge. So...
But I think it's successful. I think it works.
MARSILII: One of the nice things about this,
as Doug starts to draw Oerstadt out,
we can see he's got a plan even if it's not clear yet.
So Doug starts using Oerstadt's own words against him.
And you can even imply
that Oerstadt's having a dejé vu moment here that will cost him his life.
One of the other things I'm kind of proud of here
is that so often in a hostage situation,
you know, where you've got a woman who's tied up,
she doesn't take any part in her own rescue.
We wanted to give Claire something more active.
Who are you?
So Doug depends on her at this moment to save his life,
even though she has to do something horrible in order to do it.
SCOTT: You know, and Paul Cameron, this is my second movie with Paul,
I've done many commercials. And Paul is...
No, no. The last movie I did with him was Man on Fire.
So, Paul loves to experiment, try different things, and he is...
Paul's brilliant in terms of, you know, technology
and to do something like this, I mean cross-processing, you know,
and shooting in all the different formats,
and we were shooting in terms of,
you know, the digital world and the film world,
was a really dangerous thing to do, so...
But with Paul I always have confidence in him.
He can take me right to an edge.
It's irreversible. You're left sitting on this knife edge,
in terms of the final released product, your film,
and your DVDs, and your digital world, yeah.
" ' '
He always gets it right then, gets it there in a great way.
'Cause the film is so... I mean, I think it's the most rich and...
Densely rich and most... What's the word?
Contrasty, in the best possible way, movie, that I've ever done.
MARSILII: When I wrote this action beat,
with the ferry running over the car,
and causing it to tumble upside down,
I was working other jobs,
my screenwriting career had gone fallow, and I really
could only imagine how they would ever pull this off,
if I was lucky enough to see it happen.
And they did. I'm really amazed at how
this sequence looks.
SCOTT: This particular sequence here,
this stuff, we shot at Warner Brothers, underwater.
And Paula had swum, but she wasn't a great swimmer.
Denzel was a strong swimmer.
So, imagine how scary it was being 30 feet down in a tank,
inside a car which is on a... It's like a rotisserie,
you know, that's being barrel-rolled along, and you're on a hooker line,
which is like a tank, air tank, yeah.
And you gotta take that line out and then swim out, you know.
And then, when you swim out,
you gotta get 30 feet out beyond the hull of the ship.
So, Paula was a real trouper, 'cause she was terrified.
She had claustrophobia, 'cause she's inside this car.
The car's underneath the hull of the ship.
When it's being rotisseried and slamming against
D was great. So, what you saw there, we had doubles,
you know, we had stunt doubles doing it,
but I'd say the majority was Denzel and Paula.
MARSILII: Let you in on a little secret here, too.
In the original version of the script,
Claire was literally blown out of the water.
She was still struggling to reach the surface when the bomb went off.
She hit the water face down and was floating,
just like a doll.
SCOTT: Then, this end of the movie here, was the...
Which was always the biggest leap for me, when Denzel
turns up at the end, getting the audience to buy into the fact
that Denzel lived because of what we explained earlier in the movie about
parallel or diverse universes,
that there's a second Denzel somewhere else
at the same point in time.
And this... You know, this was the culmination of the love story.
So, it's funny, the movie does give you a sentimental jolt.
And I was surprised, I mean, how people responded in that way,
which was the best possible response I could have got, because
it was very hard to pull that off. Well, it's very hard to pull off.
It's pulled off because of Denzel, because of Paula.
But it was dangerous whether this end would come off,
It could have divorced you totally from the emotional content
MARSILII: Originally, in the opening scenes
of the movie, after the ferry explodes
and Doug comes to the dock to investigate,
we had rain, at least scripted, we had rain.
İn the scenes afterwards, where Doug's on the boat,
because we needed that in order to obliterate the evidence.
But originally, all the scenes at the dock,
were covered in torrential downpour.
And at the end of the movie, when Doug comes to get Claire,
and he's alive again,
it's drizzling, but it starts to taper off
That's different from what happened at the beginning of the movie.
And the last lines of the film, originally...
...he has his déjé vu moment, he's looking out of the window,
and Claire says, "What is it?"
Doug says, "It was supposed to rain all day."
And they look outside, and it has stopped raining.
And the last line of the movie was Claire turning to him and saying,
"I guess God changed his mind."
Fast forward to the day that we shot it.
I wasn't there this particular day,
but they had several hundred feet of scaffold over the dock
in order to provide rain.
Everything was good to go.
And the sun was so brilliantly bright out,
it was like 98 degrees, not a cloud in the sky.
They couldn't even fake the rain.
0on9-.
To see the ferry explode,
Chad took me aside and very...
Chad Oman very delicately informed me that
we had to change the ending just a little bit,
And I stood there smiling and nodding as he explained it all to me,
and he said, "Don't freak out,"
and finally I pointed at my own face, I said, "Look at me. I'm fine, I'm okay."
He said, "Yeah?" I said, "Yeah."
What can I say?
If God wanted the movie to end that way,
he'd have helped us out with some cloud cover.
SCOTT: And then Macy Gray, we had...
You remember Macy? She was in Domino.
And she does the final song in the movie now.
And Macy's great, because, you know,
the danger with the song at the end of the movie, is it becomes,
you know, a little too... What's the word?
Is mainstream, or a little too on the nose, you know.
But Macy's voice is so great,
and she's got such mystery, and she embodied so much about...
Her voice embodied so much of what I wanted the movie to feel like.
People always ask me, you know, in terms of the press,
"So, tell us about your déjé vu"
I say, 'cause I'm 62, dejé vu gets difficult to differentiate between
memory loss, or did it actually...
Have I been there, have I not really been there?
And, it was funny, the title always... I was surprised, actually,
because I thought Déja Vu sounds a little too artsy for an American public,
you know, for a Jerry movie,
and, like, a little too artsy, but...
And they liked the fact that the public were a little...
It's a little mysterious, a little confusing,
because that's the nature of the screenplay that they had.
So, they built into it those strengths, doing it.
But you know, the first thing I do when you get a title like oegavu...
So I said, I mean, "What does déja vu mean to you?"
And everybody's got a different interpretation.
So, I went to the Oxford English Dictionary
and looked in there, and they said,
"It's an uncomfortable feeling about a place you've been before,
"a person you've been with before."
So, it's funny, 'cause that word, "uncomfortable,"
then became my key to my day every day.
Always... Whether it's Denzel's performance, or...
The movie gave it this odd and uncomfortable, odd feeling.
And so, that was sort of a driving force,
one of my driving forces through...
You know, through the movie.
Okay, so, that was my journey.
That was my journey into a world which frightened me.
That was my journey into a world that I got to educate myself,
Educate and entertain, and I hope this movie did it for you.
İn honor of New Orleans, and I wanna see the city back on its feet.
And it's amazing that the public spirit there...
How much, how strong it was after Katrina.
And I want them to get it back to where they were before Katrina.
Thank you.
BRUCKHEIMER: Well, we really appreciate you joining us
for this commentary in Déjé Vu.
İt was a very complicated movie, a very interesting movie.
It's a movie you have to see more than once, there are a lot of clues
that you miss the first time,
and I know you'll appreciate them when you see them again.
(COMING BACK TO YOU PLAYING)
(SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC PLAYING)