Speaker | Time | Text |
---|---|---|
unidentified
|
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! | ||
Yeah, Chad, just get, take... | ||
Is that how I'm going to start the show? | ||
Take a hit of that, we'll start the show. | ||
Just get in there. | ||
unidentified
|
Oh, shit! | |
That's not even a fresh one. | ||
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
When they're fresh... | ||
I just wanted to do it twice to make sure that was real. | ||
Shout out to... | ||
How do you say his name? | ||
Jujumufu? | ||
unidentified
|
Jujumufu. | |
For his smelling salts. | ||
If it was fresh, you couldn't do that twice. | ||
It's fresh. | ||
If it's fresh, you get like that close. | ||
And you're just like... | ||
Yeah, no, I'm awake. | ||
That was a good one, though. | ||
I'm definitely awake. | ||
I'm going to bring these to the comedy mothership. | ||
I'm going to see. | ||
I'm going to take a big blast right before I go on stage. | ||
It's supposed to wake up your central nervous system or something. | ||
I don't even know if there's any science to it. | ||
No, it just sucks. | ||
It might be just a bunch of psychos who just like freaking their brain out with smelling salts. | ||
Anyway, man, congrats on the movie. | ||
Looks awesome. | ||
Thank you very much. | ||
It's very exciting. | ||
Very nice to be here. | ||
Big fan. | ||
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
My pleasure. | ||
Boy, Jesus Christ, is it over the top. | ||
Way over the top. | ||
This fucking deal is so crazy. | ||
It's so crazy. | ||
I saw a thing online of the amount of people that John Wick has killed compared to, like, Michael Myers and Jason. | ||
I think we beat him, right? | ||
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
By a long stride. | ||
I think we beat Rambo, too. | ||
Yeah, I think you beat everybody. | ||
But I think we had more deaths than Keanu spoke words in the movie. | ||
Oh, for sure. | ||
100%. | ||
Everybody's bringing up to me. | ||
I think he spoke 308 words in the movie or something. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, listen, it works. | ||
It's perfect. | ||
Yeah, something fun. | ||
Something for the guys. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And the action fans and everybody out there. | ||
Oh yeah. | ||
It's murder porn. | ||
Hopefully it's artistic murder porn. | ||
It's artistic! | ||
unidentified
|
It is. | |
It's interesting how they're all so different too. | ||
The fourth one is almost like a comic book movie. | ||
It's so over the top and crazy. | ||
Graphic anime. | ||
I think it's probably the best story that we've told. | ||
But it's definitely wrapped up in the hyper real world. | ||
We get bored so we wanted to go somewhere and do something. | ||
It's always like, how do we start these things? | ||
What do we do? | ||
We never start with a concept. | ||
It's usually we're done, we're done, we're never going to do one again. | ||
And then Japan gets released like six months after the rest of the world. | ||
So we're usually doing a press tour in Japan and we're sitting in the Imperial Hotel. | ||
They have an amazing scotch bar. | ||
And we start off with the first drink. | ||
Thank God it's done. | ||
God we survived. | ||
And by like the fifth scotch, we're like, hey man, I got a great fucking idea. | ||
Let's have them fight ninjas. | ||
And then that's how it starts, and it's been that way for the last three. | ||
So you started off as a stuntman. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And how did you transition to becoming a director? | ||
Because that's like, there's got to be a lot of barriers that are in the way. | ||
I think different time, for sure. | ||
You know, before cell phones, before all that stuff. | ||
We started as a stunt guy, before all the streamers. | ||
You know, I was working for this guy, Ernie Ersadi, way back in the day. | ||
A brilliant stunt coordinator, second unit director on television. | ||
And I was working on, I don't know if you remember, the old show, like Pretender, with Michael T. Weiss and stuff. | ||
He could be anything, that kind of thing. | ||
And I was doing a gig on that. | ||
I had just done a car hit. | ||
I think I was only like 24. I split my head off on the windshield. | ||
I was a mess. | ||
And then he comes to me as I'm holding the ice pack on my head. | ||
He's like, hey, they're having auditions for this sci-fi film in Burbank. | ||
You're off. | ||
If you hurry, you can make it. | ||
I'm in jeans and a t-shirt, and I'm bleeding, and I'm like, alright, yeah, sure, I'll go make it. | ||
It's for that Keanu Reeves guy, you know, and Speed. | ||
I'm like, Keanu Reeves, I'll go see him, sure. | ||
So we go up there, and it was an audition for The Matrix. | ||
And, you know, at the time, you remember, back in the day, there weren't a lot of martial art movies at a big budget level. | ||
It was like Steven Seagal or Van Damme or, you know, Mark Dukaskis, all those guys at the time. | ||
And martial arts, you know, they didn't do them in big budget films. | ||
It was considered low budget, you know, action porn kind of thing. | ||
And we get there. | ||
You get to this big warehouse in Burbank and you saw this guy really scruffy looking with a neck brace. | ||
And it's Keanu. | ||
He had just come out from neck surgery. | ||
unidentified
|
Oh, Jesus. | |
And there's like 15 Hong Kong and Chinese stuntmen there screaming and yelling. | ||
And I said, hey, I'm here for the audition. | ||
And I meet these two fellas that come over. | ||
It's the Wachowskis at the time. | ||
Now Lana and Lily. | ||
And they introduce themselves and we're like, hey, you know, I'm Chad. | ||
I'm here for the audition. | ||
Okay, great. | ||
This is Yung Wu Ping. | ||
And I was like, oh. | ||
Thank you. | ||
No one told her. | ||
And Yung Wuping, we knew, was the big choreographer that started Jet Li and Jackie Chan. | ||
Did, like, Iron Monkey. | ||
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
Once Upon a Time in China and all that stuff. | ||
So it was Yung Wuping and his guys. | ||
And they're like, okay, you just follow this guy. | ||
And this little guy named Tiger Chen. | ||
Fucking phenomenal. | ||
Guy could do triple, flip, twist. | ||
Could do anything. | ||
A wushu champion. | ||
Just follow that guy. | ||
Just do what he does. | ||
And for the next hour, I tried, you know, being the tall white guy. | ||
Trying to just keep up with him. | ||
Can you do all that stuff? | ||
God, no. | ||
unidentified
|
God. | |
I just do as much as I could until I fell down. | ||
But I was pretty flexible. | ||
I had a good gymnastic background. | ||
So I'd throw a backflip. | ||
I'd do the kicks. | ||
I'd do all the spin hook kicks. | ||
And, you know, we'd train with a lot of Taekwondo guys and stuff. | ||
So we were pretty good at all the kicking and punching and some of the acrobatics. | ||
But then it got to a level. | ||
He picks up a stick. | ||
And now it's, you know, you've seen the Wushu guys. | ||
They're going mental. | ||
And I'm like, oh boy, you know, at the end of an hour, you know, I'm in jeans and a t-shirt still bleeding from a head wound. | ||
Oh, Jesus. | ||
Did you have a concussion? | ||
Probably. | ||
I think so. | ||
Knowing now, looking back, like, yeah, it didn't seem too good. | ||
But I finished, drove home, thought, wow, I really screwed the pooch on that one. | ||
I never thought I'd hear from those guys again. | ||
And then like a month later, I got called, hey, can you come back? | ||
And exact same audition again. | ||
Exact same. | ||
And then got the call saying, hey, would you like to double Keanu Reeves on this sci-fi movie in Australia? | ||
And I was like, ah, I got this other gig on TV I think I'm going to have to pass. | ||
And the producer at the time was Barry Osborne, who went on to do all the Lord of the Rings. | ||
And he was like, ah, he's kind of a little angry at me for saying no. | ||
And I thought, okay, if I fuck that up, I'll never work again. | ||
And then cut to two months later, it was in February, and he calls back and goes like, hey, we had to push the shoot. | ||
Are you available now? | ||
I was like, yeah, actually I am. | ||
So I literally flew to Australia like two weeks later, got there, and within a day you realized, oh, this isn't a normal show. | ||
You saw the rehearsals, you saw some of the sets, you saw some of the footage, and it was the fucking Matrix. | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
So that's how I got in with the Wachowskis, and I spent the next eight and a half years with them through all the Matrix sequels and some of their other shows and with James Wittig doing V for Vendetta. | ||
I just lived in the Wachowski world. | ||
And that's probably one of the most incredible film schools you'll ever have. | ||
That's where I got to do Keanu and all that. | ||
Cut to years later after all that. | ||
Keanu and I had worked together for so long there. | ||
He knew I'd been doing a lot of second unit directing, which for people that don't know, it's the action or the fight scenes, the car chases, the sunsets, all the shit first unit doesn't want to deal with. | ||
Usually big action sequences. | ||
So they have these action directors or second unit guys go out and do the units, trying to do it more efficiently without the cast with the stunt doubles and such. | ||
And Keanu had gotten this script that he thought was something interesting about it. | ||
It was called Scorn. | ||
And it was the original John Wick script. | ||
How did it become called John Wick? | ||
Derek Kolstad's grandfather's name is John Wick. | ||
Derek Kolstad being the writer of it. | ||
So he just gave tribute to his grandfather called Wick. | ||
John Wick. | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
Pretty trippy, yeah. | ||
And so, how did that become the name of the movie? | ||
Keanu, at the original script, Scorn, the guy was like 65. He lived in a little brown, so it was a very, very grounded script. | ||
I think only two people died in the original script. | ||
It was like one of them. | ||
That's hilarious. | ||
Yeah, it was just very, it was kind of... | ||
It was very Cold War, old school. | ||
And that's where the gold coins came from because you didn't want to leave a paper trail. | ||
It had very simple little ideas. | ||
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
And he handed it to myself and was like, hey, would you like to take a look at this? | ||
And I was like, sure, sure, sure. | ||
I read it and I was like, yeah, I don't know what to do with this action-wise. | ||
He only kills two people. | ||
He's like, well, we're trying to change it and we're thinking of this. | ||
I'm like, well, you know, he's like, would you like to direct it? | ||
I was like, whoa. | ||
Yes, as a matter of fact. | ||
So you had no experience directing and then you direct John Wick? | ||
Yeah, just second unit. | ||
Me and my partner at the time, Dave Leach, I called Dave, that was on a Friday, I called Dave on a Saturday going, hey, we might have a shot, we gotta put a pitch together in 24 hours. | ||
So I always had this idea about Greek mythology and how we could layer it and do this like, I'm a big Tolkien fan, so how do you take a fantasy gig and make it modern day? | ||
So we're like, let's take it that way and we'll put gods and Greeks and Sharon and the river Styx and we'll make this whole Zeus thing going on. | ||
And we kind of layered it and Keanu just heard it on Monday and went, hmm, interesting. | ||
And he said, sure, you want to do it? | ||
I'm like, yeah, you know, me and my partner Dave, but we'll co-direct. | ||
We'll do this. | ||
And we got it to the producer, Basil Ionic, the next day. | ||
And he goes, well, Keanu, why don't you? | ||
Sure. | ||
We had done a little tape on that Sunday about, you know, the gunfu stuff. | ||
We took Aikido, Aikijutsu, put all the close quarter tactical shit with some reloads. | ||
And we did a quick little previs in our space 8711 back in L.A. and showed it to him. | ||
Everybody thought, oh, my God, this is going to be, you know, great. | ||
Can Keanu do it? | ||
We're like, yeah, I hope so. | ||
Where did the magazine reload flip come from? | ||
That funny thing, I'm going to give total cred to Keanu. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
100%. | ||
He started doing that in the second one. | ||
I'm like, dude, what are you doing? | ||
He's like, yeah, check it out. | ||
unidentified
|
Fuck! | |
He started doing it. | ||
I was like, that's awesome. | ||
It is awesome. | ||
People do that now. | ||
Yeah, it's a legit thing. | ||
They're doing a competition. | ||
You know how crazy that is? | ||
That an actor for a film decides to come up with a thing, and it's actually a quicker way to eject a magazine. | ||
He can do forehand and backhand. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
He does it with the AR, too. | ||
Like, you'll watch in the second one. | ||
He'll do a quick flip with the AR, and he'll put it on... | ||
You're like, where the fuck did he get that? | ||
Well, he really, really trained for that movie. | ||
That's him. | ||
You can really tell. | ||
I mean, there's films where guys do tactical scenes where you go like, okay, you know, I can buy it. | ||
But in that movie... | ||
The typical military way of cutting through, you know, pieing the corners and down on stuff. | ||
The very tactical sense. | ||
I think you're right. | ||
I see that. | ||
It's like with martial arts. | ||
You can do the quick finger jab in the eye, right? | ||
Right. | ||
Once in a while, that staccato beat is cool. | ||
But choreography and for the visual of it, I think sometimes you have to add something. | ||
You have to show people something they kind of expect, subvert it and give them something a little bit different. | ||
Spice it up a little bit. | ||
So I think we went more with the competition sense. | ||
I saw Taron online. | ||
J.J. Perry, a buddy of mine, introduced me to Taron online and I saw Taron. | ||
I was like, fuck, we've got to put a little spice in this. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And sent Keanu out there. | ||
Taren is such a freak. | ||
Oh my god. | ||
Freak of me. | ||
Let's be honest. | ||
No one should be that good. | ||
It's crazy how good he is. | ||
He should not be that good. | ||
The speed that he has is so insane. | ||
How many people have you seen that are good at what they do? | ||
He's such a good guy, too. | ||
He's such a fun guy to be around. | ||
So easy going. | ||
And what a great instructor, too, because he's so calm and easy. | ||
And he's got a naturalistic approach. | ||
It's just follow your body. | ||
He's one of the only reasons I like to go back to L.A. For real? | ||
He's the only reason I go to Simi Valley. | ||
Well, that's... | ||
I mean, whenever I'm in town, I always make a trip. | ||
And you get better every time, right? | ||
unidentified
|
Oh, for sure. | |
There's a little something. | ||
Just by watching him, you can see... | ||
And, you know, I was up there just yesterday, as a matter of fact, picking up something... | ||
And I had introduced him to an actor about three or four weeks ago. | ||
And he had taken this cast member in just three sessions. | ||
And the cast member happened to be up there yesterday. | ||
And to watch what he had done with him in three weeks... | ||
I mean, granted, there was a little unnatural ability there, I could tell. | ||
The progression and how fast he gets you from just pointing a firearm to drawing it, hip shooting, pressing, walking, and running through the course. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, it's hard to explain, right? | ||
You can see it online, but when you're there and seeing how fast the pings are coming and actually watching Taren go through the obstacle course, it's really, really impressive. | ||
Now, he's a freak. | ||
He's weird. | ||
Something's going on in his brain. | ||
Do you think, like, there's something about the hand-eye coordination. | ||
We all have a little bit, especially through martial arts. | ||
Not like that. | ||
No. | ||
Well, obviously he's been doing it forever, but he's got some God-given ability. | ||
It's got to be some autism, right? | ||
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
100%. | ||
I've seen him do things where he's looking one way and he's still lining up. | ||
Like, he just knows that, what would you call it, like that physical discipline or that body memory? | ||
Yep. | ||
That motor muscle memory to get in there. | ||
And no red dot. | ||
He's doing it all through the... | ||
All iron sights. | ||
All old school. | ||
All old school. | ||
And that's how he teaches, which I love. | ||
Yeah, I love it too, because he says red dots fail. | ||
And I've had red dots fail. | ||
All the time. | ||
All the time. | ||
And you're like, what the fuck? | ||
Is it fucking... | ||
Ah, shit. | ||
And you're fucking with it. | ||
And he's just like, okay, as you're fucking around with it, I'm just going to go shoot a couple of bulls. | ||
But he's been very good. | ||
Like, I'm naturally left-handed. | ||
But I always shoot with him right handed. | ||
But he's helped me so I can, he's got me to the point where I can kind of go through the range with both hands and the same dominant eye. | ||
Which is a bit of a trip. | ||
Next day you go, try alternate hands. | ||
It'll mess with your, but I think it'll help your sighting. | ||
Oh, I'm sure. | ||
Everything you do with your left hand will help your right hand. | ||
I learned that from martial arts. | ||
Yeah, absolutely. | ||
Someone told me that a long time ago, that if you practice your bad side, it actually improves the technique on your good side. | ||
I think it helps you think in a different way, right? | ||
Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons why left-handed people are so good at things. | ||
What did they say, like, you know, back in the day, you know, gladiatorial or whatever, like, you know, left-handed, because it was hard. | ||
It wasn't so much that they were better, they just, you weren't used to fighting with them. | ||
Well, there's definitely that. | ||
Like when you spar with people, especially in boxing. | ||
Yeah, when they go southpaws. | ||
When you spar southpaws, it's so confusing. | ||
Well, it fucks up your footwork because you don't want to keep stepping on their foot. | ||
Exactly. | ||
Kickboxing maybe is a little bit different. | ||
Well, in MMA in particular, the elite guys like Sanhagen, these guys, they switch stances constantly. | ||
Constantly. | ||
And so you're getting overloaded with possibilities all the time. | ||
Which makes it so interesting. | ||
When you get to these high-level guys, you know, when you get to, like, an Israel Adesanya guy, they give you so many looks, you don't know what the fuck is going on. | ||
They're changing that stance all the time. | ||
Yeah, and fainting all the time. | ||
It's very interesting. | ||
I came up, I did a lot of box francais, like Savat. | ||
Which is very open-stancy. | ||
It's constant motion. | ||
If you watch those old Savat guys, they're constantly moving. | ||
So they would fall from a false lead. | ||
And you see so much of that now in MMA. It's false leads. | ||
They're switched, so it's hard to gauge or set them up. | ||
It's fascinating to watch now. | ||
I think athletes today, especially in martial arts, are just... | ||
Right? | ||
A whole other level. | ||
A whole other level. | ||
You can't even compete with what? | ||
They're the best of the best. | ||
No one's ever been better. | ||
It's like martial arts, I've always said this, that since 1993, in the last 30 years, martial arts have evolved more than they have over the last 30,000 years. | ||
Completely agree. | ||
No question. | ||
No ifs, ands, or buts. | ||
Between the fitness, the training mentality, and just... | ||
The combative alacrity that these guys have. | ||
The ability to... | ||
I mean, they're insane athletes, number one. | ||
But to kick, punch, shoot, and grapple, and not miss a beat and get right back up. | ||
Like, you just watch them. | ||
It's almost choreography. | ||
That's how good they're being trained. | ||
I mean, they're zero range. | ||
You know, before it used to be like, jab, jab, jab, so you can shoot it. | ||
Now it's like, they can change ranges. | ||
On the fly, they're so good at it. | ||
And they're switching levels on you. | ||
They're doing one thing to set up a takedown. | ||
They're using takedowns to set up strikes. | ||
I mean, it's amazing. | ||
It's mental. | ||
It's so mental. | ||
It's scary how good it is. | ||
It really is because it's so much different than any other version of martial arts that existed before the UFC came along. | ||
I think we had become so divided. | ||
You know, you were just the kicker, you were just the puncher. | ||
It was almost a stylistic civil war going on. | ||
Like, my kung fu could be ear kung fu, or my kicking will be ear punching. | ||
You're like, what? | ||
What did you start training in? | ||
I was originally a judo first. | ||
I did a lot of judo back when I was 10 to like 16. Then I started karate. | ||
It was like a Kyoko Shinkai, Koko Kondo karate, and Japanese Jiu Jitsu. | ||
Did that all the way until I went to school at USC from Massachusetts. | ||
And I got here and I bumped in this guy, Bert Richardson, who was a big student under Dan Inasano. | ||
And Bert was teaching just a Kali class, Kali and Silat. | ||
Over at USC and I met him and I was a big fan of Dan Inasano, you know, from all the Black Belt magazines. | ||
So he hooked me up and I got into the Inasano Academy and that's where it went mental. | ||
We studied with like Francis Fong and Paul Datois for Indonesian Silat and we had like every other Filipino instructor you could imagine from that. | ||
We had Francis Asseli in front, I mean Francis and Chouinard and Salim Asseli for Savat, Sir Chai Sarasut for Muay Thai. | ||
And then we get these, you know, guest appearances by like all these great martial art instructors and Oh, that's awesome. | ||
And that's where I met this guy, Jeff Amato, who at the time was a very big stunt coordinator. | ||
And he kind of recruited us into the stunt world from there. | ||
Oh, that's great. | ||
Wow. | ||
And so then you get into the stunt world. | ||
You're doing that for years and years. | ||
And it's just so crazy that John Wick is your first breakthrough movie as a director. | ||
Crazy, right? | ||
A fucking gigantic... | ||
We tried to look for something that was kind of bulletproof, we figure. | ||
Very short story. | ||
Oh, man. | ||
Killed dog guy goes, you know. | ||
And then we kind of layered it in with the subtext of grief and suffering. | ||
Everything. | ||
It's perfect. | ||
It was all about the puppies. | ||
Who's the Russian gentleman, the guy who plays the father? | ||
Yeah, Michael Nyquist. | ||
Yeah, that guy was so good. | ||
unidentified
|
So good. | |
He was in the original Girl with Dragon Tattoo, and I think he did the third Mission Impossible. | ||
I think he was a bad guy in. | ||
He died recently, right? | ||
Yeah, he died a couple years ago. | ||
I don't know if it was a heart attack or stroke, but he died. | ||
He still has a nice charity thing that they do every year for him. | ||
God, that guy was so good. | ||
Fantastic guy. | ||
unidentified
|
Fantastic guy. | |
That fucking scene. | ||
Swedish actor. | ||
The scene where he's explaining to his son, who's also awesome, the guy who was in Game of Thrones, what is his name? | ||
Alfie. | ||
Alfie Allen. | ||
That guy's incredible. | ||
So good. | ||
We cast a lot off Game of Thrones. | ||
I used to love Game of Thrones. | ||
He's so good. | ||
He plays such a good fuckhead. | ||
Oh my god, he's such a good prick. | ||
But in life, it's so funny. | ||
He is the shyest, quietest, super nice, hardest, just never left set, always there ready to do his thing. | ||
The sweetest kid ever. | ||
Yeah, well, I can believe it. | ||
And he just played, he's so good at that role. | ||
Oh my god. | ||
But that scene when he's at the bar pouring the drink. | ||
Yeah. | ||
unidentified
|
Explaining. | |
Giving him the little fairy tale of the Baba Yaga. | ||
Oh, it's such a good scene. | ||
You know, we were kind of laughing at ourselves. | ||
We're like, how do we make a movie that people are going to watch? | ||
How do we do something other than the gritty, you know, Bourne action and stuff like that? | ||
It's like, we got to do a fairy tale. | ||
We just got to do a fairy tale. | ||
We're going to do a campsite fire. | ||
We're going to have this little fairy tale. | ||
So we started looking up all these Russian fairy tales. | ||
Like, we need a cool name. | ||
Okay, Baba Yaga. | ||
It's a witch. | ||
Don't worry. | ||
No one will ever know. | ||
No one will ever see the movie. | ||
unidentified
|
It'll be fine. | |
And we're like, ah, fuck, it's not the guy. | ||
It's the guy you send to kill the boogeyman. | ||
Okay, we'll work this out. | ||
But it was like just building, like, I'm fascinated by mythology. | ||
So if you can build your own myth, that's what we're just trying to do. | ||
Like, we're trying to be a little ridiculous. | ||
That's why we use the color. | ||
Instead of just noir, black and white, we tried to do, like, neon noir. | ||
We had Jonathan Sela and then Dan Lauston, the cinematographers on it. | ||
And to try and take it and give visual cues to the audience that, like, this isn't real. | ||
It's a fairy tale. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
Trying to get on board with it. | ||
That's why I see the color differentiation. | ||
Right when the cop knocks on the door and he goes, hey, you're working again. | ||
Yeah. | ||
We just switch colors and we're like, okay, hopefully people will get that we're now in a fantasy. | ||
Well, it just seemed it was realistic but not. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And just... | ||
You need one anchor. | ||
You always need one anchor. | ||
One of my buddies called me up and he goes, have you seen John Wick? | ||
I go, no, is it good? | ||
He goes... | ||
unidentified
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Dude! | |
When you get that dude, you're gonna fucking love it! | ||
Pretty fun. | ||
And then I saw it. | ||
I'm pretty sure I saw it in the movie theater. | ||
And, I mean, right away, I was like, holy shit, this is my kind of movie. | ||
I mean, this is so much fun. | ||
It's, right? | ||
Everyone's kind of an oldest. | ||
Like, you know, we all, I'm probably the same generation. | ||
We grew up with, like, Steve McQueen and Bronson. | ||
unidentified
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Sure. | |
You know, a little bit where, like, not a lot of dialogue, but, like, bullet, he's in that car. | ||
Oh, my God. | ||
Fucking in it. | ||
We just played the bullet scene the other day. | ||
I mean, that car scene, no music. | ||
No, it's all car. | ||
Just car. | ||
And that's the real, that's what, the 68 Mustang? | ||
It's just all car. | ||
68 Fastback, yeah. | ||
Carrying that scene for the whole time. | ||
And you're like, that's pretty cool. | ||
Have you seen the Revology 68 Mustang? | ||
No. | ||
Revology, they make a replica of the Bullitt. | ||
unidentified
|
Really? | |
But it's with a sick suspension, with a 460 horsepower Coyote engine, and it's lightweight, so it's like 600 pounds less than a real Mustang GT from today. | ||
Yeah, you'd be able to throw that around all day. | ||
Oh my god, it's an incredible car. | ||
We have to check that out. | ||
unidentified
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That sounds awesome. | |
Pull it up, I'll show you. | ||
This is what he makes. | ||
Look at that. | ||
That's beautiful. | ||
That's the car. | ||
I mean, and it's, you know, fucking zero to 60 in four seconds. | ||
You know, you can get a six-speed or a manual, and the fucking car screams. | ||
It's such a fun car. | ||
This guy, Tom Scarpello, he used to work for Ford. | ||
He used to be in the program to make the Ford GT. And so he built this car. | ||
But he does it. | ||
What he does is incredible. | ||
Because he's essentially... | ||
Done it like a production car, but it's a brand new 1968. But it's not just the Bullitt car. | ||
He does the 67 GT500, 67 GT350. That's for sure. | ||
It's fucking awesome. | ||
Well, that's what, I mean, again, for all your listeners, you're the one that told us to use the 71 Barracuda. | ||
I'm so excited! | ||
When I saw it in the previews, I was like, yes! | ||
unidentified
|
He listened! | |
No, with context, I bump into you for the first time up at Taron's place, and we got the handshake, hey, you know how you doing? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
And it was, Joe writes to me going, love the movies, where the fuck are the muscle cars? | ||
Number three, that was a problem. | ||
I was like, yeah, sorry. | ||
I'm like, okay, we'll put one in for the fourth one. | ||
So we go into production and I'm literally sitting in Berlin going, I'm fucking looking for cars. | ||
We're over in Europe. | ||
I'm going to find a fucking muscle car. | ||
Joe Rogan's going to fucking hate me. | ||
It's a bad review. | ||
I'm like, how do I do this? | ||
So I text Joe. | ||
I'm like, what's the perfect car? | ||
He's like, 71 Barracuda. | ||
Don't go with any of that pussy 69 stuff. | ||
Yeah, you don't want to get the early Barracudas. | ||
You want 70 and 71. Those are the years. | ||
That's why you sent me that picture, and that's the exact car in the movie. | ||
It's the exact one with the fins. | ||
That's it. | ||
That's it. | ||
I mean, come on. | ||
That is fucking classic. | ||
We ripped that thing apart. | ||
Like, we had... | ||
Tanner Faust, like one of the best drifters. | ||
I love that guy. | ||
Tanner's awesome. | ||
Yeah, he's awesome. | ||
So he's helped us out on a lot of the John Wick. | ||
So we brought him into, my stunt trainer Scott Rogers and Steve Dunleavy brought him into TC Chicano to do all the 240 and the 360 drifts and all that stuff. | ||
So he gets right in there. | ||
They just put the new suspension in, put the fucking insane engine in this thing. | ||
And they had Keanu doing these fucking circular drifts literally like in two weeks. | ||
It hurts so bad watching you guys smash it up. | ||
I know. | ||
All of them. | ||
The 69 Mustang and John Wick 2 when he destroys it. | ||
I'm like, no! | ||
unidentified
|
I know. | |
We destroyed probably a few more than we should have on this one. | ||
Did you? | ||
Yeah, you got to break a few eggs. | ||
Well, it worked. | ||
We cracked a couple. | ||
I mean, how many people went out and bought 69 Mustangs? | ||
I know. | ||
I actually really enjoyed the Chevelle. | ||
I didn't think I'd like the Chevelle as much as I did. | ||
I have one. | ||
I have one just like that. | ||
Mine's not green, but yours didn't look green. | ||
unidentified
|
It looked black. | |
It had that matrix green. | ||
Very dark green. | ||
But in dark, the way you film everything, so dark and moody, it looked black. | ||
I know I'm supposed to say the Mustang, but I really like the Chevelle. | ||
I'm a Chevelle guy. | ||
I like the Chevelle. | ||
I love the Mustangs too. | ||
I'm a muscle car head. | ||
I love them. | ||
It's fun. | ||
The guys in Europe, when you go shopping around, it's almost you'll find a... | ||
I know there's a lot of people here, but we thought we were going to have a big problem looking for all the different muscle cars in Europe. | ||
There are amazing collectors over there. | ||
Really? | ||
I love their... | ||
Warehouse is full of... | ||
It makes sense because a lot of Americans collect European cars. | ||
Yeah, there's the 70 Chevelle in front of the Continental. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
That was kind of on a goof, too. | ||
We wanted something else, and we ended up getting this, and we're like, oh my god. | ||
We just saw one, and that's the car. | ||
Yeah, that's the car. | ||
We were trying to make a choice, and Keanu just walked away and goes, no, that one. | ||
Yeah, okay. | ||
Well, it's, you know, it's in the Mount Everest of the muscle car classics. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Especially the 70. Chevelle's weird, because, like, the old ones are nice. | ||
The 68 and 69 are cool. | ||
They're really cool. | ||
70's the motherfucker, though. | ||
And then 71, they go to, like, this goofy single headlight thing. | ||
It doesn't look right. | ||
72 looks like shit. | ||
unidentified
|
Softened up. | |
They fucked with the rear taillights, and I don't know. | ||
I think that's what we were really trying to... | ||
You kind of summed it up right there. | ||
For like the John Wicks, we did it as a goof. | ||
We thought we'd never direct again. | ||
We're like, Keanu's like, yeah, let's just do an action movie for us. | ||
You know, whatever. | ||
We're thinking no one's ever going to see it. | ||
We'll just keep our second-unit jobs just in case. | ||
And we're like, we got this big whiteboard. | ||
And we went in, we wrote down, okay, everybody take a marker. | ||
Write down the ten things you fucking hate about action movies. | ||
And then go write the 10 things you love about action movies that you'd want to see. | ||
Muscle cars, gun-fu, martial arts, suits. | ||
We want to bring a little class back. | ||
What do we love about Bond? | ||
What do we love about Mission Impossible? | ||
What's Cruise doing? | ||
What's Daniel Craig doing? | ||
What's Matt doing? | ||
Like, let's write down all the stuff we love that makes this. | ||
And then we're just gonna mix it up and throw all the stuff. | ||
Like, I have a museum fetish. | ||
I have an art fetish, obviously. | ||
I have a color fetish. | ||
I have a dog fetish, obviously. | ||
Like, making something about a dog. | ||
We had attack dogs on the first one, but they just didn't fit, so I gotta move that over to number three when we have more. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And it's just like, okay, what's all the fun stuff that you want to see in action movies? | ||
And none of the structures we had in any of the scripts fit for it. | ||
So we're just like, okay, we'll go back to Odysseus in like the Iliad or the Odyssey. | ||
And we'll go, okay, this guy just wants to get home. | ||
He just wants to grieve. | ||
And we're going to throw as many rocks at him as we can on the way and see if we can make obstruction. | ||
And we'll just have Keanu do an endurance race. | ||
That's kind of how we did it. | ||
And just threw in everything else we love. | ||
Well, it's gotta be one of the most wild, pulse-pounding movies ever. | ||
Because, like, the scene... | ||
I did this thing with my friends. | ||
We do it every year. | ||
We do this Sober October thing. | ||
And one year we did a fitness challenge. | ||
And my friends... | ||
Ari Shafir, Burt Kreischer, and Tom Segura and me and Burt Kreischer talks so much shit and the fitness challenge was we all had to wear these heart monitors and It's this thing called my zones and you You have to keep your heart rate at 80% you it's like one point per minute at 90% It's like two points per minute and so it's like it's amount of points per day right and I watched John Wick 50 | ||
times in a row and I did... | ||
I'm not bullshitting, man. | ||
I watched the scene from the bathhouse scene 50 times in a row. | ||
I did seven hours of cardio. | ||
And I did it just to try to break Bert because he was talking so much shit. | ||
And so like a normal score for a day, a guy would get like 400 or 300. I got 1150 for the day. | ||
unidentified
|
Holy shit. | |
And I put it up just because I'm like, I'm gonna kill you. | ||
Because he kept talking shit. | ||
I go, dude, I'm gonna kill you. | ||
I'm gonna drag you to hell. | ||
I'm like, you're not gonna be able to keep up. | ||
I'm gonna push myself to the point where I'm almost dead. | ||
And I'm gonna kill you. | ||
There's probably a study in that. | ||
Visual stimuli to heart rate and adrenaline. | ||
So I'm on an elliptical machine watching that scene with a remote control. | ||
Just on loop. | ||
Just rewinding it, going back, rewinding it. | ||
That fucking nobody is John Wick. | ||
And then you go through that, killing in the house, get to the Red Circle Bar, assassinations, left and right. | ||
So that just carried me through the whole sober October month. | ||
Yeah, that's a psychosomatic study. | ||
I probably watched that movie a hundred times. | ||
I'm not bullshitting. | ||
That's crazy. | ||
I watch it whenever I'm bored in the gym. | ||
I just throw it on. | ||
That's cool. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's cool that you can watch it over and over again. | ||
It's a fucking great get-you-pumped-up movie. | ||
It was fun to make. | ||
But we didn't know. | ||
Honestly, we didn't know what we were doing. | ||
Did you have any idea it would be so huge, though? | ||
When it was done, though, you had to know you nailed it. | ||
No, we got weird comments back. | ||
We got too many headshots, cut out all the headshots. | ||
You can't kill the kid, Alfion, and you can't kill the puppy. | ||
Somebody's got to live. | ||
We were independent, so everyone was scared that we weren't going to get picked up. | ||
When we shopped it, we went to four or five studios, and we didn't even finish the pitch. | ||
They're like, nah, we're cool, thank you. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah, we didn't get bought. | ||
So we made the thing independently with Thunder Road, with Basil Ionic and Erika Lee. | ||
And it wasn't until we came out here actually to Ventastic Fest, like no one was buying the movie. | ||
So Basil, let's go, we'll show it at Ventastic Fest, see if anybody will clap. | ||
So me, Dave, and Keanu sneak in real low-key. | ||
We're going to do a little surprise thing at that, and Keanu will do his little, you know, wave to the crowd. | ||
And the crowd goes fucking mental. | ||
Like mental. | ||
And like the first family and friends we had, everyone got really quiet afterwards. | ||
Like no applause. | ||
It was just really quiet. | ||
Really? | ||
unidentified
|
Why? | |
What do you think that is? | ||
I just think at the time, we're in the fast cut shaky cam and it was just so ludicrous that he's going to kill 68 or 86 people over a puppy and no one got that. | ||
I mean, you gotta remember, this is how we pitch it. | ||
So we'll go to a studio and go, okay, so we got Keanu Reeves, right? | ||
I know we're first-time stunt guys, but it's an action movie, right? | ||
He's like, okay. | ||
And he's gonna shoot all this stuff, and so his wife dies of natural causes. | ||
Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
The bad guys don't kill her. | ||
Like, no. | ||
But they kill his puppy. | ||
I'm like, yeah. | ||
And he kills all the people because of the puppy, but not the... | ||
They're like, what happens next? | ||
I'm like, no, that's it. | ||
The next 45 minutes are just rampage. | ||
And yeah, no, we didn't sell it. | ||
Boy, they must be kicking themselves now. | ||
Yeah, well, Lionsgate bought us internationally, and then they sold us to Domestic. | ||
And since then, you know, we've gone through a couple regime changes at Lionsgate. | ||
But now, like, the last one was really cool. | ||
Like, everyone's on board, like Joe Drake, Nathan Cahane, Matt Leonetti, you know. | ||
Adam Fogelson. | ||
Everybody that's part of this, you know, they really pushed this last one. | ||
They knew John Wick was cool. | ||
They loved the third one and they got on board. | ||
But for the first round, once we sold it, the movie came out. | ||
Before it even came out, there was like this lag. | ||
They bought it and then there's like six months before we hit theaters. | ||
I think Dave went off and did Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 9 or whatever it was. | ||
I went off and did like the Brothers Grimsby, the Sacha Baron Cohen movie, second unit down in South Africa for like five months because I was broke. | ||
It was pretty funny, yeah. | ||
We thought we'd never direct again, so we were like, we better go find some stunt jobs. | ||
And then it worked out, and then not even a month after it had opened, Keanu had called up and go, hey, they called me about doing number two, but I'll only do it with you guys. | ||
You're in. | ||
And I was like, are you kidding? | ||
Yes. | ||
Fuck, we're in. | ||
Whatever it takes. | ||
Wow. | ||
That's awesome. | ||
Completely nutty, man. | ||
Yeah, and number two just picks up right where number one left off. | ||
Yeah, and we just were like, okay. | ||
And right off the jump, like opening scene. | ||
Yeah, we had no idea what to do. | ||
I was like trying to figure out ideas for that. | ||
We're like, ah. | ||
You know, it's like the sensory deprivation tank. | ||
It was just go into a room and not leave until we came up with an idea. | ||
So you decided just the hunt for his car. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, you know, it's funny. | ||
I was sitting with my now partner, Alex Young. | ||
We were doing a second unit gig. | ||
We were doing Agent 47, the second one, whatever that was called. | ||
I think it was Agent 47, right? | ||
In Berlin. | ||
And we're sitting there and we had got the call to, okay, we got to come up with an idea. | ||
And my partner at the time, my partner now, Alex Young, was sitting there. | ||
And he's like, you gotta get the car back, man. | ||
He lost his fucking car. | ||
I'm like, no one's gonna care about the car. | ||
unidentified
|
I'm like, dude. | |
He was like, he fucking total loves muscle cars. | ||
He's like, you gotta put the car, every guy he kills, he's gonna get a piece of the car back. | ||
He's getting his fucking car back. | ||
I'm like, that's a great opening. | ||
He's gonna get the car back. | ||
Yeah. | ||
No, when he sits in the car and he's like touching the steering wheel and he gets the keys. | ||
But that's Keanu. | ||
That's not just John. | ||
That's Keanu. | ||
Keanu loves cars. | ||
He loves bikes. | ||
He loves the discipline of it. | ||
That's why he's got Arch Motorcycles, right? | ||
If you ever get a chance, you should check that shop out. | ||
It's the most pristine. | ||
I'm sure. | ||
I can't fuck with motorcycles. | ||
unidentified
|
I'm scared of them. | |
Yeah. | ||
But just to watch how he's got all the water cutters there. | ||
It's a very artistic... | ||
Oh, the bikes he makes are incredible. | ||
They're great. | ||
But he brings that to everything. | ||
He's very, not compulsive, he loves the art of things. | ||
Yeah, he loves the art of it. | ||
He's fascinated by like, who makes this cup, Joe? | ||
Everything he's just fascinated over. | ||
He wants a story on it. | ||
He's one of the most curious, most, I guess, curious artistically about how things are done, who people are. | ||
He's just got a genuine curiosity and love for things. | ||
He's a very unique guy. | ||
I think so. | ||
I've never met him, but just every interview you see with him, every movie, he's a very unusual person. | ||
Yeah, and he's got... | ||
You know what? | ||
I think anybody really artistic, or at least the really, I think, artistic people that I've met, they maintain that little bit of, and I mean this in the best of ways, a little bit of childness wonder. | ||
They're still kids a little bit. | ||
Like, I could talk to you all day about archery. | ||
I could talk to you all day about motorcycle. | ||
I could talk to you all day about motorcycle. | ||
I could talk to you all day about movies. | ||
And I think you've got to have that. | ||
You need that little inspiration. | ||
I think you need that little bit of wonderlust into certain things. | ||
And I think he's still got that. | ||
He'll see a sequence, he'll come in with the nunchucks and do something, and he'll start giggling. | ||
He's like, you want me to do that? | ||
He's like, okay, that's pretty cool. | ||
And he just goes from totally serious guy to, okay, now how do I learn how to do... | ||
He just, everything you need to know about numchucks, he wants to know about numchucks. | ||
He just throws himself into it. | ||
So how much time did he have to train martial arts before John Wick won? | ||
Oh God, it wasn't that... | ||
He was coming out of a couple films, so he wasn't in fight shape. | ||
You can't just jump back in. | ||
So we gave him, I think, three to five weeks with some of the trainers we found to get into shape to get into shape. | ||
Cut weight, got himself back in, stretched, kind of got back into where he was on The Matrix. | ||
And then we stuck them with the fight teams and the stunt guys. | ||
I think we had them within three months. | ||
That was probably the shortest one we did. | ||
That was about three months to get them into that shape and teach them all the Aikido stuff and the Aikijitsu. | ||
But you need so... | ||
There's so much going on in those movies physically that you need to be proficient in. | ||
The gun stuff, the throws, jiu-jitsu, striking, everything. | ||
The jiu-jitsu was the new thing for him. | ||
Probably not the most physically demanding, but you know how it is. | ||
You're used to using your hands and feet. | ||
I mean, I'm sure you remember the first time you transitioned to jiu-jitsu. | ||
It's like... | ||
unidentified
|
It looks easy, but completely important. | |
It's an eye-opener. | ||
Yeah, it really is. | ||
And only even recently for me, I'm starting to feel like, oh, I can move. | ||
It feels just as good to be on my back as my butt. | ||
But I think we took a lot of inspiration from dance. | ||
Most of what we do is dance. | ||
They're based on dance drills. | ||
They're not based on martial art drills. | ||
They look like martial arts. | ||
We kick, punch, but we don't train the actors in tie pads or focus mitts or heavy bag. | ||
We'll do maybe a little of that for impact stuff, but it's mostly about memory. | ||
Because if a guy can punch and kick, that's great, but if he can't remember five moves, you're not much good to us. | ||
And it's more, you know, martial arts is action, reaction, or causing the guy to be off balance. | ||
All our guys are trained to keep him on balance, to make it look crazy, but they've got to dance with him. | ||
So it's about that metronome, keeping the beat going. | ||
So when we trained him, he hadn't been trained that way before. | ||
It was more like memorizing, you know, a few moves, hitting some guy. | ||
But we realized we had no money and we had no time. | ||
And every time you do punches and kicks, you see in most movies, right? | ||
Like they're on you, right? | ||
Over my shoulder. | ||
Then, you know, you take the hit and it goes over your shoulder so I can sell the hit. | ||
So you're always doing these reverses. | ||
So if I do a big wide shot profile, you throw in a nice roundhouse kick. | ||
I've got to cut somewhere to show the impact, unless you're really kicking me, which is not advisable most of the time. | ||
So the more punching and kicking and striking you do, or if Keanu's not doing the motion, I've got to cut more. | ||
And every time I cut, it's a setup. | ||
It's just time consuming. | ||
Not that it's bad or good, it's just time consuming. | ||
We knew we weren't going to have that, so we're like, fuck, what do we do? | ||
Okay, we're just going to grab people. | ||
We're just going to make it all grappling. | ||
And like, is that going to look, you know, remember, it's all during the borns, so everything's going to look very slow, you know, compared to what it was. | ||
But we're just, we're going to do all great. | ||
We're going to do aikido, aikijutsu, or jiu-jitsu. | ||
That's it. | ||
That's all you get. | ||
And if you get a punch, it'll be a contact hit. | ||
That's all we're going to do. | ||
No punches, no kicks, no nothing. | ||
And we'll do it all in one take. | ||
And we're all like, yeah, sounds good. | ||
Yeah, we thought it was a complete disaster after the first two days of shooting the fight scenes. | ||
We're like, this is gonna suck. | ||
We're fucked. | ||
Why'd you think that, though? | ||
I think it was everyone's mindset. | ||
Like, we did it out of necessity and we thought it was cool. | ||
But, like, you'd see people that would... | ||
You know, sometimes people look and go, well, he's doing the same throw over it. | ||
I mean, Ipan Seinagi looks the same, but for us, the different grips, the different throw, it all looks different to me. | ||
Like, I'm a throw—you know, I love judo porn. | ||
I could watch a million different throws. | ||
It's awesome. | ||
For some people, it all looks the same. | ||
They want to see the cool jump, spin, hook, kick or something like that. | ||
But then we put in the close quarter stuff, and when you're seeing it, remember, we don't have the muzzle flashes on, we don't have the blood splatters. | ||
So you're just kind of seeing, you know, it looks like they're dancing. | ||
And then you put in the sound effects, and you put in the muzzle, and then you put in the fucking reload, and like, now it's making sense. | ||
So what do you, when he's shooting in the actual filming, is he just pulling the trigger and it's just going click? | ||
Well, see, that's the thing. | ||
You have dummy rounds? | ||
Most movies you always see A to B cutting, right? | ||
I'm on you. | ||
You're the guy. | ||
Guns into camera. | ||
You fire the blank. | ||
Most firearms up until very recently fire blanks. | ||
And for the people out there, a blank is a round without the actual bullet, the lead piece that hits. | ||
But a blank still has a gunpowder charge in it, even if it's only 50 grams of black powder. | ||
But at a range of 10 to 15 feet, that can kill you through concussive force. | ||
You hear about all the accidents that have happened with blanks over the years. | ||
You can't put a blank gun to your head and pull the trigger, it'd kill you. | ||
So we wanted to do all this close-quarter shooting. | ||
We wanted to put the muzzle and do all this close-quarter contact stuff. | ||
So, you know, we went to our VFX guys and the trick is not so much the muzzle flash, it's the lighting interaction, especially at night, and it's cycling the automatic. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Getting it in and having the casing ejection. | ||
All it do, but it can add up with visual effects costs. | ||
So we went and we found the armors and, you know, through Terran and the other technologies that we found. | ||
Through the armorers, we made a plug gun. | ||
A plug gun is a gun that has almost a steel rod inside the barrel, and it kicks the gas a different way. | ||
So we still have an ejection, but nothing. | ||
No energy, no flash, no padding or wadding comes out the barrel. | ||
Like, you know, you couldn't put a live round in it if you tried. | ||
So is it a lower level? | ||
In England, they use some that are like almost air contained that can do it. | ||
In us, it's a very, very small charge of black powder. | ||
So it's a very, very – we call them plug guns. | ||
They're very, very limited in the greenage. | ||
So it's just enough to cycle the round? | ||
Just enough to cycle it, yep. | ||
And eject it? | ||
Yeah, ejecting, but nothing comes out the barrel. | ||
So all that stuff that you see, the blood splatter, that's all CGI? The blood is all CGI. There's one or two instances where it's not, but most of the blood is... | ||
The blood's so good nowadays digitally that it saves so much time because we don't have to change the wardrobe to get it. | ||
I mean, you see it in Tarantino, like in Django. | ||
Tarantino still uses old school blood packs, which I... Old school, I fucking love that. | ||
I think it's amazing. | ||
But with just the time, you see a John Wick movie, it's like the reset on 20 stunt guys taking hits. | ||
It'd be a three hour reset to change the wardrobe. | ||
And headshots, you'd have to put a special head pack on with a wig and all that stuff. | ||
So we do the blood hits digitally. | ||
The muzzle flashes, we actually shoot against a green screen and we'll call them elements. | ||
And then we'll plug actual muzzle flashes back into the movie later on. | ||
So they're not digital per se, but they are comped in or in a composition. | ||
And that's how we get the cool lighting effect and keep the cool muzzle flashes. | ||
How long did it take you to film that red circle bar scene? | ||
I think less than four days. | ||
unidentified
|
Really? | |
Yeah, we went really fast. | ||
And Keanu, he had the flu. | ||
He had like a 103 degree fever. | ||
He was going down. | ||
It was a rough day. | ||
It was freezing cold in New York. | ||
He had the flu. | ||
Super high temperature and we were just flying through it. | ||
Like literally two, three takes. | ||
Move on, two, three takes. | ||
Filming it with the flu. | ||
Wow. | ||
Yeah, he's a trooper, man. | ||
He's hard to keep down. | ||
Wow. | ||
That's incredible. | ||
Yeah. | ||
He's a tough fucker. | ||
A lot of actors have a fucking earache. | ||
They'll call it quits for the day. | ||
Yeah. | ||
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Yeah. | |
No comment. | ||
No comment. | ||
But most of the people we work with, they get it. | ||
And we try to be smart, too. | ||
Look, if there's another way, if we could have shut down and let them, we just, it was like one of those, we either got to stop or we don't get one shot. | ||
You couldn't afford... | ||
Keanu's that guy too. | ||
You can't make him go sit there. | ||
Where did you film that? | ||
It was on New York City. | ||
But the Red Circle, where was it? | ||
It was in this little... | ||
It was up in the theater district. | ||
I forget the name of it. | ||
It was a shut down little club that we just kind of opened back up and put our own lighting rig in there and just kind of lit it up. | ||
I mean, if you had seen it in the daytime, it was all like that shit brown leather. | ||
It looked like you're walking to Big Boys or something. | ||
It looked really bad. | ||
That gives credit to John Sella, the cinematographer, on the first one. | ||
We went in, put our lighting grid up, flashed a lot of big screen lights, put the extras in funny colors. | ||
And, you know, we ran out of money, so we're like, we didn't know how to put the bad guys in something. | ||
So we're like, okay, what would Star Trek do? | ||
In Star Trek, we always called them the red shirts. | ||
You know, the guys in Star Trek that were always getting killed. | ||
Kirk was transporting down to the planet with the red shirt guy, and that guy was gone. | ||
So we put all our bad guys in the red shirts. | ||
They were just going to kill them all. | ||
I think we had a deal. | ||
There's a local, like one of the garment district things. | ||
I think we got all those red shirts for like 10 bucks. | ||
It was like a whole deal. | ||
So we just got all the stunt guys red shirts. | ||
But yeah, we did it all in this shitty little club in like four days, maybe four and a half days, something like that. | ||
And this has got to be very stressful for you, to be first-time director, doing all this, and then so much pressure, and also it's not picked up by anybody. | ||
You know, it's weird. | ||
I guess when you're in it, you're just trying to—you just go into that mode of don't suck. | ||
Like, you don't have to win. | ||
You just can't lose. | ||
Just finish, get the day, do your thing. | ||
My partner, Dave Leach, at the time, like, you know, we both were so—we just love being on set. | ||
So I think we just—it was kind of—you know, You come from the action. | ||
You say, oh, these guys can do action and you can do that. | ||
But when you're trying to put the storytelling in, you're trying to do that. | ||
I mean, you might get other guys you'll talk to or guys that come from the stunt world and say, yeah, it's just like doing... | ||
For me, it was nothing like second unit. | ||
Completely different. | ||
It had that different kind of pressure. | ||
But, like, I guess you see how things come together more. | ||
You know, you just do the action. | ||
You're worried about just making it look cool. | ||
You're trying to do something like... | ||
You have Keanu Reeves. | ||
You have Ian McShane. | ||
You have Willem Dafoe. | ||
Lance Reddick. | ||
And you're kind of going, oh, I don't know. | ||
Who was the badass Russian guy that Keanu gets in a fight with and the guy throws him off the balcony? | ||
No, that's Daniel Bernhardt. | ||
He was the star of Bloodsport 2 and Bloodsport 3. Pull that one up. | ||
No kidding. | ||
Yeah, after Van Damme, Daniel, he's a Swiss actor. | ||
That's Daniel Bernhard, yeah. | ||
He's very good. | ||
He's awesome. | ||
He's a good, good, good close friend. | ||
But I had worked with him. | ||
He had hired me as a stunt guy when he was the lead actor in Bloodsport 2, Bloodsport 3, Bloodsport 4 or 5. I don't know. | ||
They go on forever, right? | ||
But when it was time to do this, we called in every favor we had. | ||
And, you know, like, that whole lower budget. | ||
That's how we got Scott Atkinson, Mark Dacostas, and Gary Daniels, and Daniel Bernhardt, all these, Marcos Aurora, all these great, you know, up-and-coming action actors. | ||
My friend Tate Fletcher was in it, too. | ||
Tate was with the beard. | ||
Tate's awesome. | ||
He had that beard and we're like, what are we doing? | ||
Oh, we got a courtyard for the beard. | ||
We slam down and shoot him in the head. | ||
Tate's awesome, man. | ||
Yeah, I've known Tate forever. | ||
He's a great guy, right? | ||
He's awesome. | ||
I love that dude. | ||
And he's a really good actor. | ||
He's got the eyes. | ||
He can pump those eyes out. | ||
He's fantastic. | ||
But you look for those guys, right? | ||
You put them in the cool spots. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But this fucking... | ||
Look at him, come on. | ||
This whole scene is just so fun. | ||
It's such a crazy scene. | ||
unidentified
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Come on. | |
That's a real beard there, by the way. | ||
Yeah, that's his real beard. | ||
He's awesome. | ||
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Oh! | |
Yeah. | ||
No, super fun. | ||
I mean, that's always a trick. | ||
But, like, if you get the people you like around you, they kind of give you a hint. | ||
So we had a lot of... | ||
We called in a lot of favors and a lot of friends. | ||
And, you know, they all know it's your first time. | ||
Like, the crew and the cast. | ||
Like, Ian McShane. | ||
Everybody kind of knew. | ||
Keanu had gone out. | ||
Keanu had one day off on John Wick 1. And, you know, New York City base camp is like blocks away from the set. | ||
So me and my partner Dave Leach, it's Ian McShane's first day on set. | ||
So it's like four in the morning. | ||
We're going to walk over to his trailer, introduce ourselves, say hi, how you doing? | ||
I mean, it's kind of a big deal for us. | ||
Keanu's sitting outside his trailer at like 4.30 in the morning. | ||
It's one day off. | ||
I'm like, what are you doing here? | ||
He's like, I just thought he'd come in early and talk to Ian and, you know, warm up for you a little bit. | ||
And we're like, that's what kind of guy he is. | ||
So he kind of greased the wheels for us. | ||
He walks in and, you know, Ian's like, so here it's your first movie. | ||
Don't worry, we'll get you through it. | ||
You know, everybody was so cool because we just kind of admitted we didn't know what we were doing and we wanted to learn and get our thing going. | ||
How difficult is it to take the dailies and then edit it down to a film, like the editing process? | ||
You know, to put the assembly together, to actually just put clips together, it's not that hard. | ||
I mean, good, bad, you know, you could take a couple shots at it. | ||
It's to—and you don't know this until you try it a couple times. | ||
It's like, where's the actual—like, how much can you take away? | ||
It's like chipping away at the statue, right? | ||
It's not adding things. | ||
It's taking away things to really shine what's good. | ||
You know, lose some of the good to get to the great. | ||
So you don't want to cut your action. | ||
You don't want to cut any scenes, but then you watch the movie as a whole. | ||
And this is what I'd say to any other editor or directors out there that are just getting started. | ||
If you just edit a scene or you just edit a sequence or you just edit like an act and then watch it and go, I got it, I got it, you still haven't got it because there's this thing we've all felt in movies about pacing, right? | ||
There's a way a three-hour movie can feel like two hours. | ||
There's a way a one-hour movie can feel like three hours. | ||
It's all about the pacing, right? | ||
So what I learned from it is you got to sit and every time you make, when you're in that place where you can just make these one minute or two minute changes, you got to take the time to sit back and watch the whole thing. | ||
No pee breaks, no phone calls. | ||
And that's what we did on WIC 4. A lot was like, everyone kept telling me it's too long. | ||
I know, but let's just watch it. | ||
And my editorial would hate me because like twice a week, we're like, everybody's watching it. | ||
You know, like we're watching this. | ||
And you'd have to sit and get through the two and a half hours of it. | ||
And that's the only way you know. | ||
And then you're like, still, we're not there. | ||
This is too fast. | ||
But is it hard to, when you're in the middle of it, is it hard to see it? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Because you've seen it so many times. | ||
Is it hard to see it the way another person is going to see it? | ||
It's like... | ||
It's like knowing you're lost but also not being nervous by it. | ||
It's being lost in a good way because you can feel it, right? | ||
You can feel there's something cool there and you can feel like – I just go back to being an audience member. | ||
What do I wish I had seen in Star Wars? | ||
Push that microphone up too first. | ||
Sorry. | ||
That's okay. | ||
You're trying to figure it out, right? | ||
And that's the exciting part. | ||
You know there's something tingly there. | ||
You know there's something good. | ||
But what is it? | ||
It's kind of, you can't be afraid to try. | ||
Because now digitally we can go back and forth and have 20 versions of the movie. | ||
Like it's not like the old days where you cut film and glue it. | ||
So we would always make a new, we'd try, I've always had good editors. | ||
I've always had young, hungry, great, great editors that wanted to experiment. | ||
And they swing big. | ||
Can we do this movie an hour and 20 minutes? | ||
And they'll do a version of it. | ||
Can we do this an hour and 45? | ||
What's the version of it? | ||
And you'll start to see things that you obviously hate, but you'll also see choices that you could make to tighten things up. | ||
I'm sure everybody you talk to will have a different process, but I think it's both terrifying and exciting. | ||
Again, it's hard to explain. | ||
You can feel like you're on the right path even though you don't know it. | ||
Does that make sense? | ||
And you just have to keep trying until you watch it in the room with the sound and you're like, that's it. | ||
That's the movie I want to see. | ||
Did you bring in people that hadn't seen it before and just watched them watch it? | ||
Yeah, I'm a big fan of friends and family stuff. | ||
At first, your ego may not be ready because everybody likes something else. | ||
Everybody thinks something should be cut. | ||
Everybody thinks it's too much blood or not enough blood. | ||
Literally in the same day, I've had some of our female friends came in and wanted more action. | ||
Some of our guy friends were like, we want less action. | ||
You just couldn't tell what people wanted. | ||
But you listen to what they all love, and that was the cool thing. | ||
They all love Keanu. | ||
They all cried when the puppy died. | ||
They all felt it was something they hadn't really seen before. | ||
It was action in a different way. | ||
They liked the mythology part of it. | ||
They liked the color. | ||
They liked the sound. | ||
They thought it was all very well made. | ||
I mean, whether you like it or not, you know the crew was really good, that kind of thing. | ||
And that's what sticks with you. | ||
But now, I'll show my movie today. | ||
I love showing it. | ||
Because I love it. | ||
I get some of the most insane comments. | ||
It's pretty funny. | ||
Even the reviews. | ||
Keanu and I have this little thing. | ||
I know I've talked to some director friends that don't read reviews. | ||
We read like everyone. | ||
We're masochistic about it. | ||
Everything on Rotten Tomatoes or Honest Trailers or Everything Wrong With or The Critical Drinker. | ||
All these great guys on YouTube are just fucking hammering us on little shit. | ||
And we're kind of laughing. | ||
It's like, okay, fair game. | ||
You're right. | ||
We're a little over the top. | ||
But it's very interesting to see what grabs people. | ||
Because part of it, you're kind of like, okay, what's working? | ||
You just can't let it direct you, really. | ||
You know, you don't want to chase the dragon of what other people like. | ||
You want to do the movie that you want and hopefully people like it. | ||
But it's very interesting to see what does touch. | ||
Because, I mean, you know, the only true north you have is what you like and what you're interested in. | ||
And that's how you drive your show. | ||
And that's what makes the show unique because it's from you. | ||
You start doing what you thought was popular, what everybody wanted to see. | ||
And it didn't work. | ||
How do you course correct? | ||
You don't know because it's not you anymore, right? | ||
Yeah. | ||
And that's just kind of what we try to do. | ||
Yeah, that becomes a real problem with people that pay too much attention to criticisms or comments. | ||
You can get lost in the middle of it. | ||
I was actually just talking to a friend the other night that he said he thinks about negative comments while he's writing his jokes. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
Yeah, I don't know if that's productive in the right way. | ||
I think it's okay to be aware of it, but I certainly wouldn't want to... | ||
I don't want to sit down and write a movie based, well, hey, you know, how many sequels have you seen where they bring back the same cast over and over again? | ||
Or the same jokes, or the same gag, or the same... | ||
Because they think it works. | ||
Ooh, we better not fuck with it. | ||
Okay, that's great in a lot of businesses, but in entertainment, I don't think that's going to push or move the needle the way we need to do it. | ||
I think we've got to take chances, right? | ||
Otherwise, what are we doing? | ||
Well, one of the interesting things about the whole Wick franchise is that you've created this universe, this universe of the Continental, this universe of all these different rules that this group of assassins has, and now you have this opportunity with that to do so many other things, because there's a whole world. | ||
We have tea for you there if you want it. | ||
Oh, thanks. | ||
I guess we created the world based on stuff that we had done. | ||
Being a stunt guy, you travel around, you live in hotels all the time. | ||
Wouldn't it be cool if the concierge gave you a firearm? | ||
That'd be great. | ||
Or if they had a gun range downstairs instead of a gym, that'd be fantastic. | ||
But it's also like, I mean, again, if you made your list of the top ten things you wanted to see in movies, you'd have dogs, ninjas, muscle cars, guns, archery, sword fight. | ||
And then you made a list of the top ten people you'd want to see. | ||
I want to see Donnie Yen fight Steve McQueen, do Bruce Lee on Schwarzenegger. | ||
We just tried to create a franchise where we could put all that stuff in and no one would call us on it. | ||
We've been called for the superhero movies and all the other stuff. | ||
Which are all interesting and I'm a big fan. | ||
I just don't think that's what I'd be good at. | ||
Right. | ||
You know, I think a little crazier mindset of what's not being done, how do we get that in? | ||
Like, you know, the old Shoukasuji movies, you know, Enter the Ninja or something like that. | ||
Or Chuck Norris' Invasion USA. Like, you know, things that were kind of so nutty and wacky, but like, you know, they hit a chord. | ||
So how do we bring that back in just a, and I don't want to say a cooler way, but like a more modern or technically more developed way? | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's why we spend so much time on the look of the John Wicks. | ||
Like we want people to take the action. | ||
Like, look, we're trying to do a good job here. | ||
We're not just trying to phone it in. | ||
But at the same time, we do want to be a little crazy. | ||
Like, I mean, how many dog bites to the crotch did I do? | ||
Quite a few. | ||
You know how long it takes a train built in Malawans to bite a crotch? | ||
Does it take a lot? | ||
No, actually about a day. | ||
They're pretty smart. | ||
It takes a stunt guy a lot longer to get used to being bitten in the crotch. | ||
What do you do to pad their crotch? | ||
We have these cool little Kevlar suits. | ||
It's funny, right? | ||
Andrew, our dog trainer, when I first... | ||
He's the guy that trains all the wolves for Game of Thrones. | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
So I called him and said, like, I have dogs myself. | ||
And, you know, you know how you play with a dog? | ||
He's got a little ball and, again, you have the little tug-of-war fight with him. | ||
I was like, I want to do that. | ||
How do I do that? | ||
Because, like, I don't know if people will say that. | ||
When you've... | ||
Normally, up until very recently, if you see a dog attack at a movie... | ||
That's a dog attacking a human. | ||
The dog doesn't know it's a fucking movie. | ||
The dog is literally trying to hurt that person on camera. | ||
It's not good for the dog. | ||
It's not good for the person. | ||
Those professional animal trainers wearing a bite suit. | ||
You know, all fucking Kevlar padded. | ||
You've seen them. | ||
It's bulky, like a suit of armor. | ||
And the dog just goes to kill him. | ||
We didn't think that was such a brilliant idea in the way we wanted to do things. | ||
So it was like there's got to be another way to train dogs because I can train my dogs just to wrestle with me. | ||
So what we do is we take these long cylindrical pads, bite pads, that are painted green screen green, right? | ||
And they're Velcroed on one side with a ripcord, like the parachute ripcord. | ||
So they're laced onto either the forearm, the crotch, the leg, the calf, wherever we want the dog to bite. | ||
And the dog's been trained to attack green. | ||
So you can't wear green on set. | ||
Holy shit. | ||
So we've got the dog trained to attack these green bite pads. | ||
And the dogs, that's why we go out. | ||
Andrew finds the Belgians that seem to have the most promise. | ||
And they're trained to wrestle. | ||
They're not trained to attack. | ||
They're not trained to kill or to bite. | ||
They're trained to wrestle. | ||
They have fun. | ||
So the dogs think it's now fun. | ||
So we're training them. | ||
You know, usually when a dog wrestles with you over a bone, you know, down boy, down. | ||
We've encouraged it. | ||
So the dog is actually having fun, so it's not mentally traumatic on the animal. | ||
So it's fun. | ||
So the stunt guys go in, they go in for their martial art training and their physical training, Keanu and whoever else we're working with. | ||
And for an hour and a half a day, each stunt guy that worked with the animal has to go in because the dog has to recognize you, has to smell you, has to get used to them. | ||
The camera guys, everybody that's around dogs has to go play, basically just an hour of play. | ||
So the stunt guys go in, put the gear on, and they wrestle with the dog for the hour. | ||
And then the dog gets used to them and we put the... | ||
wherever it's got to go. | ||
And then we have these really cool sleeves that have a little bit of a bite-proof ethafoam in it, covered with a really soft pad so the dog doesn't hurt his teeth. | ||
And the dog will go in and bite and Belgians, once they clamp, that's why they call them like maligators, once they bite they don't let go. | ||
So we had to figure out a way to get them off when we yell cut. | ||
Because they're so angst about getting the... | ||
getting the temp. | ||
So we have the ripcord going. | ||
So we yelled cut. | ||
The stunt guy would pull the ripcord. | ||
The pad would release. | ||
The dog would hold the pad, walk away with it, and just hold on to it for the next five minutes until he got tired and just would drop the pad. | ||
So we had five Belgians. | ||
And then we just rode to every take was a new dog because the other one had to let the pad go. | ||
And what did Halle Berry have to do? | ||
How much... | ||
Well, we figured since, just like we did with Shamir Andersen in this one, you can't have that, because we're so, we shoot so wide, we couldn't have a trainer, you know, right behind the couch telling the dog. | ||
So we just, Andrew and I had talked about, well, let's just, we'll just raise the dogs for the next six months with the cast. | ||
So Hallie, for like, I think it was almost eight and a half months, actually, Hallie would come in and she'd learn to train them. | ||
She'd carry the little treats and So they listened. | ||
The two Belgians that were her and number three, there's actually four of them, but the two that were always on camera, like she literally trained from scratch. | ||
No kidding. | ||
So they were like her dogs. | ||
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Wow. | |
And they listened to every word she said. | ||
Like she could just snap her face and they'd be like, boom. | ||
But it got crazy to the point where, that's Andrew back there, but yeah. | ||
I mean, if you came over to Hallie, you know, and the dogs were there, they'd give you the eye like, What are you doing next to my master? | ||
Yeah, they're intense dogs. | ||
They're so brilliant, but they look at you. | ||
They sort things out. | ||
Yeah, the team guys call them meat missiles. | ||
They fly! | ||
Like, we've played so many videos of Belgian Malinois running up hills, just jumping over walls, and they literally can fly through the air. | ||
That's really one of our Belgians that ran up the wall in that movie. | ||
That was like a 13 and a half foot thing. | ||
Yeah, it's insane. | ||
They are such athletes. | ||
And the funny thing, they're not huge, but it is a real 65 to 75 pound animal. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And I think the funniest thing when we're bringing in a new stunt team and we've got the... | ||
Before we even do anything, you line them up and you let the dogs go in. | ||
And everyone says they're good with dogs, or I'm a dog person, until you see that... | ||
You see the dog attack on camera. | ||
If you were to turn that camera around, what you see are two trainers holding this dog back. | ||
And the thing is like, just ready to go. | ||
And it's a whole other level of animal behavior. | ||
And you can see who gets a little shaky and who's comfortable. | ||
Dave Camarillo, who we were talking about earlier, who trained Keanu for the Judo and the Jiu-Jitsu in number four. | ||
I think he did over 100 dog hits. | ||
For whatever reason, Crazy Dave and the dogs bonded, and they spoke the same language. | ||
They loved him. | ||
So whenever we needed a dog hit, it's Dave sitting in the pad. | ||
He's so calm. | ||
And the dogs vibe on that. | ||
And even when they're going, they're just, yeah, go play with Dave. | ||
And Dave, wrestle with him. | ||
I think he had done so many by the end of the movie. | ||
Can I give him a special t-shirt of just like 109 dog hits or something? | ||
It's crazy. | ||
But the surprise is the first time you see the stuntman get hit by the dog, because it doesn't look that big until 75 pounds hits you at 20 miles an hour. | ||
It sits them down, and they all get up with the same eyes, like, what just happened? | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's pretty impressive. | ||
We use those on Fear Factor. | ||
Really? | ||
To attack people. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But unfortunately, we found that they're too light. | ||
So, like, with really heavy people, with really strong people, they'd get bit and they could carry the dog as they ran. | ||
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Yeah. | |
And so then we moved to Mastiffs. | ||
Which are not small. | ||
We had this animal called a Regency Mastiff that's part pit bull, part Neapolitan. | ||
And this guy had bred them specifically so they don't show any animal aggression. | ||
And when they bite, it's just, it's horrific. | ||
They're 150, 160 pounds. | ||
Exactly, right? | ||
And they're just built like an athlete. | ||
What did they have to do? | ||
Just attack them and then they had to walk with them? | ||
Yeah, well, the people, with the Mastiffs, there was a room, and they had to enter into the room, and they had to perform a very specific task. | ||
I don't remember what it was, but as soon as they get into the room, they're wearing a bite suit, and nobody got past it. | ||
The dog's name is Curly. | ||
The dog, they used the dog for the original, one of the Hulk movies, the one with Eric Bana, those were the dogs, they modeled it. | ||
And when Nick Nolte, that's it right there. | ||
See, the original dog, though... | ||
See if they can find the original dog. | ||
The original dog is this... | ||
Just Google Regency Mastiff. | ||
See if you can find that. | ||
Yeah. | ||
See if there's any images. | ||
So those are the dogs in the Hulk, but the actual, yeah, that's what they looked like. | ||
They look like giant pit bulls. | ||
Yeah, they have the jaw that goes out to you. | ||
But they're so sweet, like really calm. | ||
I actually had one of their dogs. | ||
I had a curly son. | ||
His name is Johnny Cash. | ||
He lived a long time. | ||
He lived like 13 years, which is really old for a Mastiff. | ||
Yeah, for a big dog like that. | ||
But, yeah, so the Malmois, they were just a little too light. | ||
Because, like, with the bite suit on, it hurts, but it's 65 pounds. | ||
You can run with 65 pounds. | ||
It's like a suit of iron. | ||
Yeah. | ||
For sure. | ||
Unless there's two or three of them. | ||
So how long did Halle Berry have to train for that move? | ||
Because she had so many physical... | ||
First of all, she's awesome. | ||
She's so good in that movie. | ||
She's so believable. | ||
And she's so like physically adept. | ||
Like, I had no idea she could move like that. | ||
No, I think she... | ||
And she came to... | ||
I hadn't even written the script yet. | ||
You know, I just got a call from WME and my agent saying, hey, would you like to meet Halle Berry? | ||
Yes, yes, of course. | ||
Yeah, huge fan. | ||
I think she was down either that day or the next day just banging on my door. | ||
I'm like, okay, open it up. | ||
She just walks in, jeans and a t-shirt, goes, hi, I'm Hallie. | ||
I was like, yes, I know who you are, of course. | ||
She's like, I want to be in your movie. | ||
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Wow. | |
She was that straightforward. | ||
No bullshit. | ||
I'm going to be in your movie. | ||
And I'm like, I'm flattered. | ||
Thank you. | ||
That's very cool of you. | ||
We haven't even written it yet. | ||
Yeah, I know. | ||
That's why I'm here now. | ||
unidentified
|
You're going to write it for me. | |
And I'm just laughing. | ||
That's some serious confidence. | ||
Yeah, she was right on. | ||
And I'm like, okay, cool. | ||
Let me give it a think. | ||
We'll figure out something. | ||
And now I'm like, oh, I got to write something cool for Haley Berry. | ||
But it was like, I think three or four months later, I was like, okay, you can come back in now. | ||
She's like, that's awesome. | ||
It's great. | ||
Change this. | ||
I see it more like this. | ||
Okay, we're going to do this. | ||
Oh, to Casablanca. | ||
So I'm going to be like, Rick, I got it. | ||
I'm going to do this. | ||
And she's like, when do I start training? | ||
I'm like, well, you know, technically we go into – she's like, no, just – I'm going to start training today. | ||
Just tell me what to do. | ||
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Wow. | |
She was so on – just on. | ||
I was like, okay, well, first let's get you into shape. | ||
Tell your trainer this is what we need to do. | ||
We need you to stretch. | ||
We need you to get all the conditioning stuff in so we can start taking you in. | ||
And we literally had to slow her down the first week. | ||
Like, you know, if you haven't done shoulder rolls, if you haven't been thrown before, if you haven't done this stuff, you've got to pull something. | ||
So she just went crazy the first week. | ||
We couldn't kick her out of the gym. | ||
She's another Keanu. | ||
We just couldn't get rid of her. | ||
She's in the gym all the time. | ||
She's like, put her up at Terrence and like, she just lived it. | ||
Just lived it up there. | ||
She'd go with Keanu. | ||
She's like, whenever Keanu goes, I'm going. | ||
So just make room for me. | ||
After that movie, did she ever want to do it again? | ||
Yeah. | ||
We've actually been in talks several times to try and get... | ||
I hate the term spinoff, but they're trying to do other satellite projects off the Wick franchise, which it's very flattering. | ||
Hopefully, there'll be good ones. | ||
I don't believe John Wick is dead. | ||
Is John dead or is John Wick dead? | ||
We don't know. | ||
We just don't know. | ||
Yeah, but that's what I'm saying. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Because it was very ambiguous at the end of the movie. | ||
It's supposed to be, yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
We'll see. | ||
Yeah. | ||
We'll see how Keanu and the director feel in three, four years. | ||
You've got to take him to that bar in Japan and get him drunk. | ||
We're going in September, so you talk to me again then, man. | ||
It could be John Wick five and a half. | ||
I don't know. | ||
You never know. | ||
But Hallie wants to do... | ||
She's definitely still game for... | ||
When Hallie came, I think she had just turned 50 or 51. I don't want to misdead. | ||
But she's in amazing shape. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Amazing. | ||
I can't even tell you. | ||
To see her in person. | ||
She looks 35. Yeah, it's insane. | ||
It's insane. | ||
Like, look at her. | ||
Well, she's so fit. | ||
I mean, that's the key. | ||
Like, never stop. | ||
This is one of the first couple weeks she ever did anything with us. | ||
Like, she hadn't been doing anything at this point. | ||
That's so Corey Raft, right? | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
Scissor takedowns? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Wow, that's awesome. | ||
Yeah, and she trained down at Terrence, too. | ||
I saw videos over there. | ||
She's so game. | ||
She's like Keanu. | ||
They think on the deal. | ||
Like, some people turn off to memorize the choreography. | ||
They learn it so much that they can throw it away. | ||
It's like learning your lines, right? | ||
They learn their lines so, so much they can just flow. | ||
They spend so much time doing that because they know they want to add in their little details and stuff. | ||
They make it theirs. | ||
It's pretty impressive to watch. | ||
You almost feel lazy next to him. | ||
I'm like, God, I need to work harder. | ||
But it's cool. | ||
When the crew sees it, you can always tell when you're on a good movie, people don't give a shit. | ||
And then the crew kind of doesn't give a shit. | ||
But when you see the cast, it starts with Keanu. | ||
The guy never leaves set. | ||
Then you've got him and Halle, and neither one want to leave set. | ||
They don't want to miss a beat. | ||
They don't want to miss a chance. | ||
And then you've got the rest of the cast and the rest of the crew. | ||
And then the crew's like, oh, we've got to... | ||
It's just this constant inspiration thing. | ||
And it's really, it's pretty fun. | ||
It's pretty cool. | ||
Now, there's, aren't you guys doing some sort of a television show? | ||
Yeah, well, there's, there's coming out, uh, it was on, on, uh, what is it? | ||
I think it's on, uh, Amazon now, whatever, uh, called The Continental. | ||
It's kind of a spin-off that was done very separate from the world that we've created and the feature world. | ||
It's something that the studio had done a little on the side of us as we were going just to see what they could do with this Continental series. | ||
It's kind of interesting. | ||
It's out? | ||
It's not out yet. | ||
I think it comes out end of the summer, I think. | ||
But there's not a... | ||
There's real no tie-in to the John Wick films, but it does have a... | ||
It has the Continental in it. | ||
It's kind of like Ian McShane's backstory a little bit and how he got there. | ||
A little disjointed from the feature stuff, but it's just another... | ||
I don't know. | ||
It's kind of a cool world they built like that. | ||
It was very on the side of us. | ||
And then hopefully we'll be seeing another TV show that's really about the John Wick features. | ||
The door at the bar. | ||
I made a door like that for my comedy club. | ||
Yeah, you could open up the thing to see who's coming through. | ||
Literally, it's the same door. | ||
When people go, what the fuck is this door for the green room of the comedy club? | ||
And I go, that's the door from the Continental. | ||
That's the shh, shh. | ||
Ours opens like a hinge, but yeah, it's the same sort of deal. | ||
That's pretty awesome. | ||
It's pretty dope. | ||
We've inspired the comedy green room. | ||
Yeah. | ||
When people see it, they go, what the fuck is up with this door? | ||
What are you expecting? | ||
No, no, no. | ||
It's like this fucking real heavy steel door. | ||
There's something cool about that, right? | ||
Oh, it's real cool until someone gets their finger slammed in it. | ||
Nothing says secret world like a slamming finger. | ||
But it is kind of like a secret world deal. | ||
You have to punch the code in to get into the door, or you have a key fob. | ||
You know, that's kind of... | ||
Subcultures have always interested me. | ||
There's always Subrosa, right? | ||
The Subrosa world of the inside, whether it's comedians or stunt guys or cops or military, there's always that in, that in-click. | ||
And I think that's what fascinates a lot of people a lot of times because they want to be part of that little... | ||
We're originally going to name... | ||
Some people give me shit because we called number three Parabellum and then number four was like, just John Wick 4. We actually had a title for John Wick 4. It was called Haga Curry. | ||
Japanese word that really meant like hidden leaves. | ||
It was a treatise on samurai code of ethics. | ||
And it really spoke to... | ||
It was kind of like the art of the way of dying. | ||
Like, how do you prepare yourself for a good death? | ||
And a lot of it dealt with... | ||
You can only relate to people. | ||
A warrior can only relate to a warrior, you know, whether you're on other sides or not. | ||
A cop can only relate to a cop. | ||
And like, you know, whatever. | ||
A teacher can only relate to a teacher. | ||
That inside sub-rosa thing that only each other knew each other kind of thing. | ||
We got it, but we didn't want to put it You know, a title on it. | ||
We kind of lost it. | ||
But I thought it was a really cool thing about being sub-rose or being in the inside click or something. | ||
Yeah, maybe on the next one. | ||
Why'd you decide? | ||
It was like, you know, it was... | ||
The actual treatise, it was from like 1646 or something like that. | ||
Unfortunately, it had been used during World War II as a rallying cry. | ||
For militaristic Japan to get behind. | ||
So in some Asian markets, it could be considered... | ||
Could be a problem in China. | ||
We didn't want to take a chance. | ||
It was between China and Japan and Korea. | ||
I get it. | ||
We want to be sensitive to that. | ||
But we still thought it was a cool name. | ||
Yeah. | ||
What a weird world it is to make films and then have them be distributed worldwide. | ||
I'm sure you know. | ||
You're always going to piss off somebody. | ||
You're always going to get something or somebody can be something. | ||
Again, I like doing the fantasy film kind of thing. | ||
I like creating our own worlds. | ||
I like doing that because it's ours and it's not taking a side. | ||
It's not really... | ||
I don't have to adhere to history. | ||
I don't have to adhere to an IP and kind of just do our thing. | ||
And I think that kind of freedom helps a lot. | ||
You know, I don't think people get bent out of shape sometimes on that because you're creating your own world. | ||
Do you feel like there's room for another thing like this in your life? | ||
Like is this something you're gonna try to do again? | ||
Like recreate an entire ecosystem, an entire world? | ||
That's a good question. | ||
Again, like we say, it was unintentional, completely unintentional, almost a fluke. | ||
We did one. | ||
I didn't know anything about the Continentals worldwide or the markers or anything until the second we made that up. | ||
And the third one, we're like, oh, let's call it the high table. | ||
Sure, someone will buy that. | ||
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Sure. | |
And we just keep, you know, kind of riffing on stuff to do and just use your imagination. | ||
But it works. | ||
It does. | ||
And I think, again... | ||
And it works that it's intercontinental, too, that it's international. | ||
Like when he goes to Italy and he goes and gets suited out there. | ||
Right. | ||
That was probably one of my favorite things. | ||
I love the suit. | ||
I love... | ||
That actor, whoever that actor was that is explaining to him the guns and... | ||
Oh, what is it? | ||
Peter Saronovitz. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, he was in a couple. | ||
He was in... | ||
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|
God, he's so good. | |
The suits and the guns. | ||
Like, this whole scene is awesome. | ||
That guy right there, the ball guy right there? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
That's Luca Mosca. | ||
That's actually my wardrobe supervisor. | ||
I couldn't cast somebody in time, so I made him do it. | ||
And then Peter Saronovitz. | ||
This guy's fucking great. | ||
He's so fucking funny. | ||
Yeah, you just buy him as a complete psycho that's... | ||
He literally flew in on the day, learned the lines, did the gig, and flew out. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah, he was awesome. | ||
Wow, he's incredible. | ||
What was that movie, Spy? | ||
With Statham? | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
He was an Italian. | ||
He played the Italian spy. | ||
He was so funny. | ||
So the guy that's doing the wardrobe was your actual wardrobe guy? | ||
Well, yeah, I couldn't. | ||
I kept telling, like, people would come in and start reading. | ||
I'm like, just be like my guy here. | ||
Be like my wardrobe guy. | ||
And we couldn't find anybody to be Luca here. | ||
And Luca was so subtle. | ||
I'm like, ah, fuck it. | ||
Luca, you're doing it, dude. | ||
unidentified
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You're doing it. | |
And he'd never acted before? | ||
Never acted before in his life. | ||
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He's great! | |
He's fantastic. | ||
He's great. | ||
I got that, like, same in number four, like, the actress that plays Akira. | ||
That's Reena Samayama. | ||
She's a pop star from England. | ||
But she had never acted before, either. | ||
Wow. | ||
I just saw her in her YouTube videos, and I was like, she's got to be able to act. | ||
Like, she's got so much presence. | ||
And we just picked her up, too. | ||
Sometimes you get really lucky and cool like that, you know? | ||
Was there ever a time while you were doing four where you're like, this is just too over the top? | ||
Oh yeah, like every fucking day. | ||
Like the shotguns that spit fire. | ||
You're knee deep in it and you do have those moments of like, yeah, let's go, okay, get the gun. | ||
And you have those quiet moments where you're like, Way too far. | ||
Like you watch the monitor and like, you know, you can feel everybody behind you and you can kind of get that vibe that, you know, most of your crew thinks you're crazy. | ||
And you're like, yeah, yeah, let's spin the car one more time around. | ||
It's just so over the top. | ||
It's so over the top. | ||
And there's so, it's so, like, I guess you kind of have to one-up The movies before, but you just like one-up the one-up the one-up. | ||
You just kept going. | ||
I guess I didn't want it to make it feel like it was a mistake or we were just trying to do the one-up thing. | ||
Like, no, we're all in. | ||
We're going all out. | ||
You know, in Keanu, I have those talks. | ||
He's like, did you jump the shark? | ||
I'm like, yeah, let's jump too sharp. | ||
Let's just go. | ||
We'll just keep going. | ||
Because why fall down? | ||
You know, we're... | ||
A lot of my influences are all from Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd, a lot of silent movie stuff. | ||
Really? | ||
You go back and watch the movies now, and go back to the documentary on Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd. | ||
How did Buster Keaton do all that stuff? | ||
I'm not sure. | ||
Because we've watched some of those clips, and it's like, how are you doing it? | ||
Because there's no special effects back then. | ||
I have been a part of so many great stunt teams and work with so many great stunt riggers and visual effects people. | ||
There are still gags that he does back then that we're all kind of like, yeah, it's a bit sketch, man. | ||
I don't think you do a lot of what he even do nowadays. | ||
Because, like, look, this is... | ||
I mean, they're cranking the footage a little bit, but, like, that's him falling off a motorcycle at the end. | ||
Like, he's still doing, like, these are all great gags. | ||
And, like, if you miss, there's a penalty. | ||
Well, how about the one when he grabs ahold of the back of a train and he gets pulled? | ||
Yeah, the trolley. | ||
Like, look at this right here. | ||
This is, like, yeah, this is going probably a little bit slower. | ||
Yeah, but you know what happens if you miss? | ||
You're dead. | ||
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Yeah. | |
Dead as fuck. | ||
There's no out. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And when he's got, like, watch the shit he's doing here. | ||
Like, how's he even doing that? | ||
This is early wire work that you can't even tell. | ||
It's wild. | ||
But, like, every time he falls and does this stuff, those are real falls. | ||
Like, he's buried a mat in the dirt there, but he's still taking the hit. | ||
Yeah, it's a big hit, too. | ||
I mean, that's a long... | ||
I mean, look at this. | ||
Like, watch this. | ||
Watch this shit. | ||
He's gonna grab the dummy as it comes over the waterfall. | ||
Like, he's still gotta do it. | ||
Yeah, it's insane. | ||
You know, like, we'd be doing it with green screen double safeties. | ||
We'd have wires on them. | ||
We'd have a backup in there. | ||
The stunt guy would do it a couple times. | ||
And, like, you know, that's not Tech 12 rope there. | ||
And that's a woman. | ||
That's not even a dummy. | ||
No, no, no, yeah. | ||
He's just throwing her right to the ledge. | ||
Yeah, he just throws her to the ledge. | ||
There's so many of these, like, look at that. | ||
I mean, the penalty for that miss... | ||
Is your dad. | ||
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Yeah. | |
I mean, that's not breakaway balsa wood. | ||
No. | ||
I mean, that's probably one of his most famous gags that Jackie's repeated and a few other things. | ||
But that's, you know, so like, I love this. | ||
Like, you know, this is early trick cutting and stitching. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You know, but there's gags he does and we're still like, whoa. | ||
How is he not like completely broken by the time he was done filming? | ||
I mean, the one when he grabs the train and you see him go sideways, like he's holding onto the train and it's... | ||
Yeah, I think it's this one right here. | ||
Yeah, this here. | ||
Like, watch this. | ||
He flagpoles it. | ||
How the fuck? | ||
Like, you know what your deltoid's got to be? | ||
Right. | ||
You have to be so fucking strong. | ||
How about your grip? | ||
I mean, I just... | ||
This is one. | ||
Yeah, watch this thing. | ||
Like, how does he do this? | ||
Like this. | ||
That's a wire. | ||
He's got a wire coming out of his belt. | ||
You can see it right there. | ||
He's probably got an arbor up top there. | ||
But like, you know, this is the one where I think they said he broke his neck on this one. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah, he got injured on this one. | ||
Back then when you broke your neck, it wasn't a lot of help. | ||
I don't know what the fuck the doctors did for you, but like this here. | ||
Like, ugh. | ||
Boom, then he falls down the railroad track. | ||
That's a railroad track. | ||
There's no pads down there. | ||
Look, and he got up. | ||
Look at this guy. | ||
I mean, what the fuck? | ||
That guy. | ||
And how many movies did he do like that? | ||
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A lot. | |
Oh my god, he had a ton. | ||
He had over like 100 productions by the time he was done. | ||
Harold Lloyd was no slump either, Charlie Chaplin, all those guys. | ||
He had to fall, all of them. | ||
There's no trickery to it. | ||
They gave you the setup. | ||
But that's pretty over the top, too. | ||
So when we send that guy down the stairs in number four, we're like, Keanu stunt double, this guy, Vincent from France, saying just muscles where you shouldn't have muscles. | ||
We scouted Sacrecur and there's over 400 steps and the portion we're using is like 222. We're like... | ||
Yeah, we gotta send somebody down this. | ||
Jesus Christ. | ||
And we're like, nah, we're gonna make Keanu climb up. | ||
Then we'll send him down. | ||
And then, you know what? | ||
We'll send him down again. | ||
So we had Vincent come out and look at it. | ||
And Vincent's English is limited. | ||
You know, he's just, you know, very French. | ||
And he looked down and said, Vincent, you cool? | ||
Like, you know, one take, you're gonna... | ||
He's like, we just lit up a cigarette and said, sure, when do we go? | ||
Really? | ||
He did it. | ||
The first take, he went down only about 10 steps. | ||
And he got stuck in the railing. | ||
Second take is the take that's in the movie where it just went all the way down, like 200 steps. | ||
Yeah, I mean, this is crazy. | ||
That this guy did this. | ||
What kind of padding is he wearing? | ||
He's just wearing like, you know, the regular Kevlar padding the stunt guys use in gel packs. | ||
He's getting some fucking air, too. | ||
Vincent's not shy. | ||
Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
Yeah, he's great. | ||
And Keanu doing the overlap, it's awesome. | ||
Yeah, we have a stair fetish, too. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Love throwing guys. | ||
It's car hits and stairs. | ||
It's funny. | ||
You get Tom Cruise hanging off the airplane. | ||
I think it's awesome. | ||
Yeah. | ||
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Right? | |
I think it's amazing. | ||
It's awesome. | ||
I know what it takes to do that. | ||
But a lot of people can't relate to just, you know, hang off an airplane. | ||
They've never done it. | ||
But everybody's falling on ice. | ||
Everyone's falling down stairs. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Everyone gets the car thing. | ||
So we've focused a lot on body falls and, you know, falling down stairs. | ||
Shit that makes people go, ooh, that That could really hurt, especially being hit by a car. | ||
You know, I love car hits. | ||
I love watching that. | ||
Yeah, he gets hit by a bunch of cars. | ||
When you see the stunt guys actually get hit by the cars, you're like... | ||
In two, like in the scene when he's retrieving his car. | ||
Oh, he whaps this one stunt guy, Efka. | ||
He whaps him with the reverse 180. He really sent him. | ||
It was a good hit. | ||
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Really? | |
I was like 20 feet away watching it going, oh, that was a great hit. | ||
How did you do when he hits the pole? | ||
We had a little bit of a wire on him. | ||
So the car hits him, sends him. | ||
The wire doesn't really pull him, but when he hits the pole high, the wire helps the landing. | ||
So we decelerate him a little bit. | ||
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A little bit, but is he actually hitting the pole? | |
Yeah, it still sucks. | ||
Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
But the downside, just in case he gets knocked out, we don't want to land on his head. | ||
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Yeah, here it is. | |
Poor AFC right here, yeah. | ||
Boom, bang. | ||
I mean, how the fuck? | ||
Yeah, it's fun. | ||
Again, we're super fortunate. | ||
We get some of the best stunt guys. | ||
Most movies prep for like six to ten weeks. | ||
We'll prep for five months with our core stunt team. | ||
So the guys are really trying to design stuff. | ||
And other than some bumps and bruises, no one's ever really been tweaked. | ||
That's amazing. | ||
So that's, again, just having the right people. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, I guess that helps that you have this long background of stunt work. | ||
I think it helps knowing, one, who to call. | ||
And I think you get that sense of how far you can push. | ||
And again, I'm not against CGI. I'm not against digital help. | ||
We do so many digital stitches and hide things. | ||
Like, I think it's all great. | ||
It's just what gives you that energy or that energy. | ||
Feeling of what's going on. | ||
If I could do it all digitally and get the feeling and not hurt anybody, yes, that's an option. | ||
But there's something to still real-world physical effects that make me feel, you know, still crunch. | ||
Yeah, there's something about CGI and that's the big... | ||
I had Rick Baker on and we were talking about monster movies where they use CGI versus monster movies where they use like his type of special effects. | ||
Well, The Thing is still one of the best. | ||
Yeah. | ||
When you watch The Thing or American World of London. | ||
One of my favorite all-time films. | ||
It's one of the greatest movies ever. | ||
Ever. | ||
And it hits you in all the right ways. | ||
It's so subtle. | ||
It's almost like an old Hammer film with Christopher Plummer and Christopher Lee. | ||
If you watch it, it's got that weird kind of in the moors, you know, old school fog machines when they're in the thing. | ||
Well, John Landis did such a good job with that movie, too, because he made it funny. | ||
Well, that's the thing. | ||
Look at the tone of that movie. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's so different. | ||
It's not quite action. | ||
It's not quite thriller. | ||
It's not quite horror, but it's that little nexus of that weird, almost cheesy, but he rides the line, but then it's still fucking scary. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And it's got the best transition into a werewolf. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
Ever. | ||
And I mean, what would you call them? | ||
Werewolf Nazis? | ||
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Yeah. | |
Those monster Nazis. | ||
unidentified
|
It's so good. | |
It's such a good movie. | ||
But I would agree, man. | ||
There's something about, you know, I put the KY jelly on the creature suit and it comes out. | ||
There's something about that. | ||
But I think the really way to do it, if you could blend it, you know, if you could blend that great prosthetic effect with the CG motion and somehow really put those two together, it's just most people nowadays, they choose. | ||
Like, half of what we're doing are blends. | ||
Like, it's a practical stunt done in a digital composition. | ||
Like, I'm layering in things. | ||
Like the shotgun stuff. | ||
The guys are on fire but I'm putting the shotgun stuff and they're all different layers that I've stitched together. | ||
And all the guys are doing it so I don't have to worry about putting guys out because they're still on fire. | ||
So we're doing like a Texas switch. | ||
We see one stunt guy on fire run in and another stunt guy, he goes out, he gets put out. | ||
And the other guy comes in So what was the inspiration for this? | ||
What was this shotgun supposed to be loaded with that lights people on fire? | ||
It's actually called Dragon's Breath. | ||
You can check it out. | ||
It's real? | ||
It's real. | ||
Dragon's Breath is real. | ||
Call of Duty, I've seen it at all. | ||
There's this great YouTube video with this Russian guy. | ||
If you type in Dragon's Breath, he's got a red, white, and blue shotgun. | ||
He's this crazy Russian guy that does it, and it's fucking... | ||
That guy, second one down. | ||
That's the first video I saw of it, with this crazy Russian guy. | ||
He shoots like a spear gun out of his 12-gauge. | ||
He does all this stuff. | ||
He's doing all these wacky rounds. | ||
Like, you know, these little needles that come out and the spear. | ||
And he does dragon's breath. | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
And so it really does light people on fire. | ||
That is fucking crazy. | ||
They're like the big balls, right? | ||
They're covered in phosphorus. | ||
So when they hit the air, they ignite. | ||
So they're putting holes in you and they're lighting you on fire at the same time. | ||
Where do I buy them? | ||
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See? | |
I saw that early in prep. | ||
I was just fucking bored out of my mind. | ||
I was surfing through the internet. | ||
We already did the Benelli thing. | ||
We did the caddy, his quad loading. | ||
I'm like, I don't know if I want to do shotguns again. | ||
But I'm like, look, it's the third act. | ||
I got to go ramp somewhere. | ||
I have the Arc de Triumph sequence in my head. | ||
I know I'm going to do the stairs. | ||
And then Taron introduced me to the Genesis shotgun, automatic shotgun. | ||
That thing is insane. | ||
I shot that at his place. | ||
It's crazy. | ||
Isn't it like 12 rounds? | ||
How many rounds is it? | ||
I think it's more than 12. Is it 20? | ||
It was a giant banana clip. | ||
Yeah, I thought it was almost like 14 or 15. It's something like that, right? | ||
Boom! | ||
It's like on an AR platform, but it's a shotgun. | ||
So he had already introduced me to that. | ||
And I was out in Berlin going, I don't, you know, how am I going to, because to regular people it looks the same. | ||
It's not a stylistic change. | ||
It looks like, again, like an AR or a 308 or something. | ||
Right. | ||
So it wasn't going to be a shocking change if he grabbed it from the guy. | ||
So I'm like, yeah, I'm going to do this. | ||
And then I saw that video. | ||
I'm like, oh. | ||
That's it! | ||
But then I couldn't figure out, because it's just that starburst. | ||
Like you, they're going to call bullshit on me. | ||
That doesn't exist. | ||
So I thought in the montage, I'll have these guys pull out the Dragon Smith. | ||
And then I saw this huge video game, cinematic trailer collection. | ||
And I was just scrolling through it, and something I saw years ago was called Hong Kong Massacre. | ||
Do you have Hong Kong Massacre? | ||
Trailer and I was like what was cool about it was from the top like we use top shots a lot in film and action But it always looks like if I did a top shot here She's looking at the carpet and be the top of our heads doing fight stuff, right? | ||
So it's okay, but like I want a way to make it color and poppy So I saw this in the blood on the white floors in the paper and all the fuck is this right, but this is some wacky Yeah, I'd never heard of but I'd saw the trailer is fucking cool. | ||
This is a video game. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Oh my god Well, we're getting so close with AI and CGI and the ability to recreate scenes that aren't real. | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
Are you worried that there's going to come a time where you're not going to need to film movies anymore? | ||
I don't... | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, that's part of the thing with the writer's strike right now. | ||
Is it? | ||
Part of the negotiations is AI, and they're trying to – How do you prepare for emerging technology that's going to replace you, though? | ||
That's what's interesting. | ||
People think the writer's strike is about something, but that – and there's pay raises. | ||
There's a lot of issues to what the WGA is doing right now. | ||
But I think the writers are addressing something that people dismiss too easily, which is the AI influence. | ||
Like, somebody's got to be the first one to bring this up. | ||
Like, you'll have some people might critique going, well, why are we talking about AI? Like, they're not going to write. | ||
But yeah, it can. | ||
I think the writers are doing the absolute right thing right now by bringing this up, by introducing this, because it's at that point where... | ||
AI is doing the art already. | ||
You can pipe in, right? | ||
Yeah, illustrators are freaking out. | ||
Yeah, and they should. | ||
I mean, we've seen what it can do. | ||
It's impressive. | ||
But you do have to feed it from somewhere. | ||
It's not quite going to take over the world yet. | ||
Well, there's this artist. | ||
Her name is Molly Crabapple, and she's been speaking out about this, and she's got a very good point. | ||
They're not really... | ||
Making these, they're kind of stealing them from online. | ||
That's what's happening. | ||
That's what the writers are about, because the scripts have to come from somewhere. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
They have to input something. | ||
Well, at least with writing, you're kind of inputting from language, human language, that has existed forever. | ||
But with illustrations, they're taking illustrations, like, are you aware of the artist Alex Gray? | ||
Alex Gray is a famous visionary artist. | ||
Does a lot of this wild, psychedelic stuff. | ||
You can ask AI to make, like, pull up the ones that I have on my Instagram. | ||
They did these images in the style of Alex Gray, and they're as good as Alex Gray's stuff. | ||
I mean, but it's stealing from his style. | ||
It's his style. | ||
He created his style, like all that. | ||
Right. | ||
That is all AI generated. | ||
And it's fucking fantastic. | ||
And some people are like, I don't like it. | ||
Well, I do. | ||
I like it because I like to look at it. | ||
But I would rather it be something that Alex Gray actually made. | ||
But if you look at that, that art is incredible. | ||
I mean, it's undeniably incredible. | ||
And it's all psychedelic-inspired. | ||
Like, look at that. | ||
I mean, come on. | ||
AI made that. | ||
I mean, what the fuck, man? | ||
Yeah, I don't... | ||
Keanu's really big on that, too. | ||
Like, we're all worried about... | ||
I guess we're concerned about what... | ||
Not just the licensing. | ||
I'm not worried about being out of a job. | ||
Yet, I don't think. | ||
I think we're still a ways off from that as far as live-action film goes. | ||
As far as animes or video game cinematics and stuff, I think that's on the horizon. | ||
Yes. | ||
I really think that's coming. | ||
If you're doing trailers or if you're doing short films, especially with computer-generated animation, I think that's a legitimate concern. | ||
As far as the overall creative, I agree with you. | ||
I think it's a concerning thing, but we're... | ||
How do you control technology? | ||
You can't say don't do it. | ||
unidentified
|
So what do you do? | |
It's just going to get better. | ||
I think, unfortunately, my thought is that one day it's going to get to the point where people have to cherish things that are actually made by humans. | ||
Like this table is made by a person. | ||
Handmade. | ||
Literally handmade. | ||
And it's not going to be everybody that cares. | ||
There's going to be some people that go, I don't give a fuck. | ||
Get me an AI-made table. | ||
Yeah, maybe they want, look, I want a human-written song. | ||
I want human-composed music. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You know, but I think the licensing part of it is like, until, I mean, as far as I know, they still have to input, like you were saying, James or John Gray, they have to like him. | ||
They don't have a word for it. | ||
So they have to import and literally steal his input. | ||
unidentified
|
Alex Gray. | |
Alex Gray, sorry. | ||
Yeah, it's like you have to steal his images and then use AI to make something in the style of him. | ||
But as far as like illustrators for like the cover of books and things along those lines. | ||
I think that's very viable. | ||
Yeah, they're fucked. | ||
Performance still, I think, because even now with what they can do with Avatar, they still need performers to go and give you that little twist. | ||
I mean, I think directors come in and kind of create the animations. | ||
You're still using a model that you've seen in your head to try and get that computer-generated character. | ||
But I think the real genius of film sometimes is the unknown, right? | ||
The happy accident, as Orson Welles would say. | ||
You'll get Keanu or Brad Pitt, or you'll get these wonderful actors up there, and you'll get... | ||
Like, I just watched Heat last night. | ||
Oh, amazing. | ||
Like, you can't tell me... | ||
Man had all that. | ||
Those are just great people on screen. | ||
Al Pacino, it's a great ass! | ||
That wasn't scripted. | ||
There's still those moments. | ||
How about Al Pacino having a kid at 82? | ||
What a fucking psycho. | ||
Or stud. | ||
I guess, but I mean, where is he going to be when that kid's 20? | ||
Or five. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Or five, yeah. | ||
Right? | ||
Right. | ||
But that's crazy, right? | ||
It's crazy. | ||
That's pretty crazy. | ||
Yeah, that's crazy. | ||
He's 82 years old. | ||
He's still shooting live rounds. | ||
What the fuck, dude? | ||
Or it's a great cover story. | ||
I don't think it is. | ||
Yeah, but that's impressive. | ||
I mean, maybe he needs to get a DNA test done, but I bet. | ||
He did demand one. | ||
Did he demand one? | ||
Oh, boy. | ||
That's a tense moment. | ||
I thought he could no longer have children. | ||
Oh, boy. | ||
It turns out he is the father. | ||
That's a tense moment. | ||
That's an uncomfortable conversation. | ||
I thought I couldn't have kids! | ||
You wonder if he was like that, right? | ||
But he had to. | ||
I mean, to say, I don't trust you, I want a DNA test done. | ||
That flavors the entire rest of it. | ||
Yeah, it's not going to go well after that. | ||
There's always going to be the mommy-daddy talk. | ||
You might not make it to the kid being five because of her. | ||
She might have a heavy pillow for him. | ||
I was going to say. | ||
Have another cup of tea, darling. | ||
Yeah. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Whoops. | ||
What is that, a banana by the stairs? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's a tense moment. | ||
You're asking someone to take a DNA test, and then you say, I'm sorry. | ||
That's not enough trust out there anymore. | ||
unidentified
|
Well, that's probably going to be remedied too. | |
I think mind reading is around the corner. | ||
You think? | ||
Is that where we're headed? | ||
I think we're about a decade away from no secrets. | ||
None. | ||
Zero. | ||
People being able to read people's thoughts. | ||
Really? | ||
I think the application of it will probably – they'll start probably doing Neuralink and similar technologies. | ||
They'll start doing human trials probably within – I think they already have. | ||
But I mean in terms of like the ability – Proved. | ||
Yeah, they're approved for human trials. | ||
What kind of a psycho do you have to be to be one of the early adopters? | ||
Like, yeah, go ahead. | ||
Cut a quarter-sized hole in my fucking skull. | ||
Pretty desperate. | ||
You really want that cigarette or that bowl of soup. | ||
Yeah. | ||
There was all that crazy stuff in the 70s on MKUltra and all that. | ||
They were already trying to do all that shit. | ||
Oh, they were doing some wild shit in the 70s and the 60s. | ||
Yeah, that's with the book Chaos by Tom O'Neill. | ||
I talk about it too much and I'm sorry for everybody listening. | ||
No, no, I haven't read it. | ||
I'd love to read it. | ||
unidentified
|
You haven't read it? | |
No, I haven't read it. | ||
You haven't read it? | ||
It's about Manson. | ||
It's about Manson and the CIA and MKUltra. | ||
Yeah. | ||
MKUltra. | ||
Fascinating story. | ||
Jolly West. | ||
He was also responsible for making Jack Ruby go crazy. | ||
He visited Jack Ruby in jail after he shot Lee Harvey Oswald, and then Jack Ruby was like saying, they're burning the Jews! | ||
He's like hiding under his bunk, screaming, like, I'm in hell! | ||
They fucking dosed him with acid. | ||
Then they dosed Manson with acid, and I think they taught Manson. | ||
I mean, according to Tom O'Neil's research, which I trust, and it's an amazing book. | ||
Tom O'Neil, It was a guy who was a neighbor from my friend Greg Fitzsimmons. | ||
And he was like, hey, what are you working on? | ||
He's like, oh, I'm writing this article about Charles Manson and the anniversary of the Manson family murders. | ||
He starts writing it 20 years ago. | ||
And he starts doing research and he can't get the article out. | ||
It's just too much research. | ||
He's doing too much. | ||
It extends fucking forever. | ||
He keeps having to give money back and like the publishers are freaking out at him and then finally they got him someone to help him and an editor to sit down with them and he puts out this masterpiece and this book is called Chaos. | ||
And it's the definitive book on Charles Manson, the Manson family and their ties to the CIA. And it's fucking crazy. | ||
They did it to discredit the hippie movement. | ||
They had this guy and these flower children, they had them go out and fucking murder people. | ||
And they talked him into doing it with acid. | ||
And they trained them how to do it through the techniques that he learned through MKUltra. | ||
Yeah, it's pretty definitive. | ||
I mean, when you read it, it doesn't leave a lot to imagination. | ||
Yeah, it's like pretty much that's what they did. | ||
And, you know, they were involved in all kinds of shit with that back then. | ||
You know, that's the Stanford prison experiments. | ||
That's the Harvard LSD studies. | ||
The Harvard LSD studies, when they did that, you know who was in that? | ||
The fucking Unabomber. | ||
The Unabomber. | ||
Yeah, Ted Kaczynski. | ||
He was a part of the Harvard LSD studies. | ||
He was already fucked up. | ||
His brother said he was already fucked up because when he was young, there's a great documentary on him that's on Netflix. | ||
It's really good. | ||
And in it, they talk about how he was ill when he was a child, when he was a baby. | ||
And they put him in like this... | ||
I guess some sort of a hospital and in this hospital they didn't pick him up They didn't take it. | ||
They just let him cry in a crib for like weeks and months and like he had no human touch Yeah, so he became like this fucking psychopath and then on top of that they put him in the Harvard LSD studies So then they don't and then he writes the manifesto and then starts fucking killing people because he thinks rightly so that technology is gonna replace human beings Which I think is probably as crazy as he was he probably saw something I mean if you extrapolate what's happening now with | ||
technology And you take it to its logical end. | ||
Like, what's the event horizon of technology? | ||
Well, it's an artificial life form. | ||
It's probably not just AI. It's probably life itself. | ||
It's not the artificial intelligence that exists in a computer. | ||
It's probably a new form of life. | ||
And I think that's probably what human beings give birth to. | ||
I think that's what we're doing. | ||
That's why we're obsessed with technology and innovation. | ||
I think it's a part of the process that leads intelligent life forms to create intelligent life. | ||
Yeah, which is evolution. | ||
And that intelligent life creates vastly superior intelligent life because it just knows how to do it better and it probably does it almost instantly. | ||
It's like, oh, you guys fucked up everything. | ||
Exactly. | ||
And looks back and goes, okay, we don't need you anymore. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, not only that, all you'd have to do to get rid of people It's people like, oh, they're going to wipe us out. | ||
All they have to do is give us free electricity, free food, free internet, and an app that makes you cum. | ||
And that would be it. | ||
That's it. | ||
We'd all just stay in our homes. | ||
Yeah, no one would go anywhere. | ||
And just let it. | ||
Yeah, if you can come 300 times a day, good luck having a family. | ||
Good luck having relationships. | ||
Good luck even forming them. | ||
If you can have these experiences through an app or through artificial intelligence, something that's attached to your brain, that's infinitely superior. | ||
I mean, look how addicted people are to just looking at TikTok. | ||
Just looking at people do dances and get hit by cars. | ||
It's annoyingly crazy. | ||
It's insane. | ||
And it's so addictive. | ||
And it's very minor in the reward that it gives you. | ||
It gives you this very minor dopamine rush. | ||
But if it gives you transcendental experiences, like unbelievable experiences... | ||
Surreal to the point that they feel real. | ||
Well, that's the worry about the simulation, right? | ||
There's a lot of people, Elon included, that believe that it's more likely that we are in a simulation than not. | ||
And that's like, I had a long conversation with this guy about probability theory and simulations and according to probability theory we are in a simulation. | ||
But it's like, huh, how do you, what does that mean? | ||
Like, what are you saying? | ||
Like, well, if there is a simulation, if it's possible, if there is infinite galaxies out there, which we're pretty sure there are, and there's infinite numbers of life forms that are where we are and superior. | ||
And then superior to that. | ||
And then every variation in between. | ||
It's inevitable that someone is going to come up with something that's indistinguishable from reality or superior to it. | ||
And maybe we're in that right now. | ||
And if we are in that right now, you know... | ||
How'd you know? | ||
Yeah, how would you know? | ||
I mean, maybe that is what life is. | ||
Maybe that's exactly how it works out. | ||
Self-evolving. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Autocorrecting. | ||
Yeah, and we think of it as like, oh my god, it's not even life, but maybe that is what the universe creates. | ||
The Matrix did hit on a few things like that, which makes it a little bit... | ||
There's a whole thing I remember after that came out was 98, 99, everyone was really thinking like that. | ||
You're like, how would you know? | ||
Right. | ||
And they had that great little scene at the end was like, you know, the first one failed because it was too perfect. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Turned out you fucking humans needed failure, you needed pain, you needed misery to make it work. | ||
And that kind of autocorrects back to, yeah, like at first you'd go like, well, we can't be in isolation because my life wouldn't suck so bad. | ||
And you're like, well, actually... | ||
Yeah, maybe it would. | ||
Maybe it would suck. | ||
Well, maybe that's also what motivates people to continue to buy things and innovate. | ||
I was going to say, without that, I want more. | ||
Right. | ||
How do you keep the machine going? | ||
How do you keep the gerbil on the wheel? | ||
And it's kind of like people inherently know it, which is why people are like, oh, I just want a cabin by the lake. | ||
Yeah, but they want to go buy a new tent and they want to buy a canteen. | ||
Everybody wants their kit, man. | ||
Everybody loves kit. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Ah, they never stop. | ||
It never stops. | ||
It's a desire that human beings have that no other animal has. | ||
Which is weird now, too, because it's not only just going out and go camping. | ||
They want to go out camping so they can share the experience with someone else. | ||
Right. | ||
I'm still a little old school, so I don't really do the social media thing or anything. | ||
You don't do it at all? | ||
We have Instagram for the company. | ||
That's good. | ||
But you personally don't do it? | ||
I don't, no. | ||
Good for you. | ||
I'm so happy when I meet people that are just... | ||
I would know how. | ||
Good for you. | ||
Good for you. | ||
I'm going to say Adrian. | ||
TikTok's where I draw the line. | ||
I don't have a TikTok. | ||
I'm like, get the fuck out of here. | ||
Plus, it's Chinese spyware. | ||
Yeah, exactly, right? | ||
It's another way into the phone. | ||
As opposed to what, though? | ||
Well, that's what I'm saying. | ||
It's the same thing. | ||
It's just, okay, different country. | ||
Who do you want listening to you today? | ||
Well, this is interesting. | ||
That car that I showed you, the Steve McQueen bullet car. | ||
I was Googling that. | ||
And then all of a sudden it shows up on Instagram. | ||
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
A bunch of them show up on Instagram. | ||
I'm like, what the fuck is this? | ||
Do you know many times? | ||
Yeah, of course. | ||
How is that on my Instagram? | ||
I didn't look for it on Instagram. | ||
No, they just cross-referenced. | ||
Somebody's sharing it. | ||
Somehow or another, it's getting in there. | ||
Is this what you want? | ||
Is this what you want? | ||
I literally have a separate computer at work completely dialed in, like almost air-capped off me because the shit I look up is pretty sketchy. | ||
It's pretty sketchy. | ||
Yeah, that's probably smart. | ||
You know? | ||
Yeah. | ||
And then, I don't know. | ||
It's weird. | ||
People do experiences just to share them instead of experiencing them. | ||
That's always been weird. | ||
That is weird. | ||
Like, when people go camping just to let people know they're camping. | ||
They're camping. | ||
Like, look, if you love camping, right on. | ||
Because, like, I don't need to videotape myself rolling to know I love jiu-jitsu. | ||
Right. | ||
You know? | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
But people do love to do that. | ||
They do it. | ||
Look at me! | ||
I'm like, okay, that's a bit... | ||
There's also value in it for some people that do it that are in that world, like competitors. | ||
No, absolutely. | ||
No, marketing is one thing. | ||
But when you're doing it as a social structure, I think that can be damaging because you're not giving 100%. | ||
You're not focusing. | ||
I think that's eroding a lot of the... | ||
It's a blurry line, though. | ||
It is, right? | ||
Because it's weird. | ||
I get a lot of our stunt teams are younger kids. | ||
Obviously, they're younger kids. | ||
I call them kids. | ||
But they're in their 20s. | ||
I mean, freak athletes. | ||
Fantastic. | ||
But that generation is completely woven into that. | ||
But again, we're in the entertainment industry, so they're trying to get themselves out there because that's not how you get jobs. | ||
Like my day, you had to go knock on doors. | ||
Now it's like put yourself out on Instagram, doing a cool trick, and now you get the next gig. | ||
So, you know, I can be the old crusty guy going, oh, you guys with your Instagram. | ||
But to them, it is part. | ||
It is a weird line because it is how they get work. | ||
It's how they get themselves out there. | ||
Self-branding is a part of our world now. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You know? | ||
But it is. | ||
It's weird where people just want to take pictures just for the gram. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
That's all they want. | ||
Like experience it and take pictures. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
But don't do it to take. | ||
I met this guy at the gas station today and he asked to take a picture. | ||
I go, sure. | ||
And he goes, don't worry, I won't post it. | ||
unidentified
|
I'm like, do you have any pictures of me that are out there? | |
Go ahead and post it. | ||
It was nice of him to say. | ||
It is nice. | ||
unidentified
|
It's weird that you have to say that. | |
I think he's a pretty old school guy. | ||
But the fact that he said that, don't worry, I won't post it. | ||
Well, that's good. | ||
It wasn't for him to get recognition. | ||
It was for him because he's actually a fan and he just wanted to show his... | ||
Well, he wanted to do it for his wife because he said his wife calls me his boyfriend or something like that. | ||
That he's a fanboy. | ||
A little deep with the story there. | ||
Just some fucking, you know, oh, you got a man crush on Joe Rogan. | ||
So he took a picture, but he's like, don't worry, I won't post it. | ||
I'm like, that's interesting. | ||
I thought it was interesting at the time. | ||
I was like, I don't care. | ||
It's okay. | ||
But it was interesting that he was aware of that. | ||
But I think that's a good thing. | ||
unidentified
|
That's a good thing. | |
Yeah, that's a good thing. | ||
But the thing is, does it exist if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it? | ||
And you don't Instagram it, does it exist? | ||
Yeah, it's an inevitability. | ||
And my kids are firmly entrenched in that world. | ||
Born with cell phone in hand. | ||
What's shocking to me is how well they are at navigating things. | ||
Have you seen... | ||
Ten. | ||
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
Flying through that iPad. | ||
Crazy. | ||
I'm like, I can't, I'm still looking for my email. | ||
Right, they know how to edit shit. | ||
My daughter figured out when she first got a phone that if she screen records, because my wife gave her a time limit on it, but it was a password time limit thing, So she would have to give it to my wife to get extra screen time. | ||
So she said screen record. | ||
So she knew when... | ||
So she just rewound it in like three, four, six, nine, whatever the fuck the number is. | ||
She literally did the bank heist. | ||
I'm like, first of all... | ||
I want to give her knuckles. | ||
Yeah, A plus for figuring that one out. | ||
That's pretty dope. | ||
I like how you did it. | ||
That's a clever little girl. | ||
Craftiness is a big skill. | ||
Well, it's like they're like little prisoners. | ||
Prisoners figure out all kinds of stuff to do because that is a necessity. | ||
They figure out a way to make things and manufacture their own stuff. | ||
Isn't that a trick? | ||
People always come up and ask, hey, I want to get into directing. | ||
How do I get into directing? | ||
I'm like, okay, what have you directed? | ||
What do you mean? | ||
Well, you have an iPhone, right? | ||
Do you see what these things can do? | ||
Remember the big VHS cameras? | ||
Two VCRs? | ||
With an iPhone, let me get this straight, you can edit, shoot, color correct, sound correct, sound effect, visual effect. | ||
You can edit it on the phone! | ||
Again, my 10-year-old niece and nephew can fly. | ||
They're so good. | ||
You can do effects. | ||
You can do slow motion. | ||
I've seen stuff that... | ||
You can do wire removal. | ||
You can do full-on composition. | ||
It's unbelievable. | ||
It's unbelievable. | ||
And they're free apps. | ||
All the photo ones, you can get different heads on people. | ||
You can start deepfaking people literally on your iPhone right now. | ||
That's another thing that's fucking people up is these filters. | ||
Where girls see these girls that have this perfect face and perfect... | ||
Yeah, and they don't realize that it's a filter. | ||
It's Photoshop. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
You're getting photoshopped out there. | ||
Basically, you're looking at animation. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's a version of animation applied to an actual human being. | ||
Isn't that creepy, though? | ||
But everybody thinks that's what you have to be. | ||
Yeah. | ||
We, you know, there's a lot of VFX companies nowadays that do strolly cosmetic work. | ||
You know, not just to, you know, fix scars or inconsistent, like, flyaway hairs and stuff, but you can do... | ||
The level of what's possible cosmetically in digital work right now is pretty fascinating, too. | ||
One of my wife's friends was a model, and they would take photos of her with no makeup on. | ||
It was all no makeup, and they put it all on afterwards. | ||
That's insane. | ||
Like, she's basically a canvas. | ||
Very strange. | ||
See, now you go to AI and you go to, like, because I know Keanu, a lot of actors have deals. | ||
You cannot digitally alter their image in any way. | ||
Keanu tells a story when we were talking about AI a while ago. | ||
It was like, you know, he had done a certain performance and they had added a digital tier. | ||
It seems so subtle and so trivial, but it did change the performance. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
So you've come in, you've committed to a performance, and someone's changed it without your knowledge. | ||
Granted, that's beyond editing because we could choose different takes, but still, it was augmenting a performance that was never given. | ||
That's just the tip of what you could do. | ||
Now, what if you started digitally enhancing smiles or frowns or you gave an eye? | ||
It's not just a look. | ||
It's not cosmetic. | ||
It's performance. | ||
Yeah, you can alter so much about a person's facial features in a film. | ||
Well, I mean, I do it in this. | ||
We do face replacements all the time. | ||
Not on camera, but on some of the other cast, or when we're doing a dangerous stunt, or we have a helmet on a guy, we'll erase it and put a nondescript person's face or head on it. | ||
It's fucking cake. | ||
It's really easy. | ||
Which is scary. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You're laughing about it when you're in the theater and you're editing, but you're like, eh. | ||
But that's what my thought is that in the future, will you even have to make that scene? | ||
Can it all be done with AI? Because I think right now there's that uncanny valley, right? | ||
Where you see AI scenes, you're like, oh, that's not real. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You know, like in Game of Thrones, like when they have the dire wolves walking around, you're like, that's not a real wolf. | ||
Right. | ||
How far away are we from totally being... | ||
I think you could do it now. | ||
It's time and money. | ||
If you gave a digital artist enough time with just the technology we have today, you could do a digital character and work with the... | ||
I mean, just it's time. | ||
But we can do the... | ||
We can make it look photoreal. | ||
It's just... | ||
It's the organicness, right? | ||
It's that heaviness when you step or it's the incons... | ||
It's almost too perfect. | ||
It's the inconsistencies. | ||
It's the fucked up hair. | ||
It's the little gesture that you can't figure out. | ||
Looking like a person. | ||
Or the Steve Buscemi. | ||
Yeah, exactly. | ||
The unpredictability. | ||
The nuttiness that you can't quite get. | ||
But that's just a matter of time. | ||
That's just time. | ||
But the technology is there. | ||
If they're just going to take all the weird characters that have ever existed and come up with one... | ||
Well, then you get an algorithm to pull in the aggregate of all the fucked up weirdness out there and how do you spit that back out, right? | ||
It's basically a version of these Alex Gray paintings. | ||
They're just going to take all the weird guys that are... | ||
Yeah, no, I don't doubt it. | ||
Character actors. | ||
You know, I mean, that's why a lot of directors get into animation. | ||
There's very... | ||
Other than, you know, taking references and stuff. | ||
But, like, no one's calling... | ||
I mean, those animators, they're drawing their characters from somewhere. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Whether it's a person they see in the street or it's a Tekken video or it's, you know, a Taekwondo match. | ||
They're taking that action from somewhere. | ||
And then they're embellishing upon it. | ||
So, like, you know, no one's calling them out on where they're drawing it. | ||
Yeah, it's just such a strange world that we live in now, especially, I'm 55, I don't know how... | ||
54. Yeah, so we're, essentially, we grew up in the age where we were there when the answering machine came about. | ||
Yeah. | ||
We had pagers. | ||
Yeah, we had pagers. | ||
We were there when the VHS came about. | ||
To go from that to where we are today. | ||
Yeah, it's fucking insane. | ||
And to try to figure out what's next, like where the future is. | ||
Right. | ||
I mean, it's like, what the fuck? | ||
That was just in the last, God, what, 20, 30 years? | ||
And then Apple released that thing today. | ||
Did they release it? | ||
Did we know what it is? | ||
I'm looking. | ||
It's going to be expensive. | ||
It's not going to come out until next year. | ||
But it's got a headset, and I'll try to find a picture. | ||
They just released some new Apple AR headset that's supposed to be a real game-changer. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah, it's going to be augmented reality and virtual reality. | ||
With the goggles. | ||
It's got see-through, though. | ||
There's a picture I've seen. | ||
I'll show it. | ||
You can see their eyes through it. | ||
Oh, wow! | ||
What does it do? | ||
Does it layer in reality and...? | ||
Okay, so it's augmented, right? | ||
And that might be able to shut off and you can do some VR stuff. | ||
I haven't seen that. | ||
We're doing the show, so I can't watch some stuff. | ||
This might be the step. | ||
This might be the one. | ||
But is this with touch? | ||
No controllers, so it's all with your hands. | ||
Right, that's what I'm saying. | ||
But you can project the hologram and then you... | ||
So Minority Report style. | ||
Yeah, Minority Report style. | ||
Moving stuff around. | ||
Underrated phones. | ||
Yeah, very underrated film. | ||
Yeah, here's everything. | ||
This is it. | ||
So was that a screen? | ||
So you're watching? | ||
They do have a controller there, but maybe you don't need it. | ||
So I guess they're playing video game there, I think. | ||
Oh, so you play the video game right in front of your face. | ||
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Oh, wow. | |
And still see the world around you. | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
So there's no screen, so you're watching a movie. | ||
But that could just be a screen. | ||
I don't want that. | ||
What I want is full immersion. | ||
That's what I'm interested in when it comes to video games and films. | ||
Full immersion. | ||
We'll find out. | ||
You don't want to see the world. | ||
You just want to be wrapped in it. | ||
I think that's what's going to get real weird. | ||
That's what you were talking about earlier when you're talking about the Wall-E thing. | ||
You've got a bunch of people sitting in chairs. | ||
Now you've got your family on the couch instead of watching a TV together. | ||
Yeah, you're all wearing goggles. | ||
And you have five individuals in their own world. | ||
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That's weird. | |
Very bizarre. | ||
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Yeah. | |
You're all watching a show together, but then your kid sneaks in porn. | ||
Yeah, and you got another show. | ||
You're like, how's that going? | ||
It's great, Dad. | ||
It's great. | ||
It does end up doing what you were asking for. | ||
So here's just a little video that showed at the event. | ||
So here's the guy's looking at different screens that would be on his phone or computer. | ||
And this thing then expands out here in a second. | ||
He probably hit a button. | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
And the next one then shows it taking over your whole room. | ||
Whoa. | ||
He's floating in space watching something. | ||
You're not going to get anybody to leave the house in 20 years. | ||
It's going to be very strange. | ||
I know. | ||
Very strange. | ||
Remember when you had to go to a bar? | ||
Yeah, remember those days? | ||
You just told your friend to meet me somewhere because you couldn't call him? | ||
Oh yeah, you had to meet him. | ||
You couldn't call him? | ||
Yeah, I remember those days. | ||
When I used to go to the pool hall, the most valuable thing was the payphone. | ||
Because people would call the payphone. | ||
How many quarters did you used to walk around? | ||
We'd have our pager, and in Stuntz, you'd have about 10 minutes to get back to the answering service if you were available or not. | ||
So you had to pull off the 405, find a pay phone, and put those quarters in. | ||
You always had that roll of quarters. | ||
I remember the phone cards, too. | ||
Remember phone cards? | ||
You had to slide them in. | ||
Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn't. | ||
Fucking... | ||
Strange. | ||
Strange world we live in now. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, who would have ever thought that everyone would have a phone on them everywhere you go? | ||
Not even kids. | ||
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Yeah. | |
And none of that, you don't need the computer after a while. | ||
Yeah. | ||
The computer's kind of an afterthought now. | ||
It's just so you can see something, but you can do it all on your phone. | ||
Yeah, I used to always travel with a laptop. | ||
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Yeah. | |
Like, if I was going on the road, I always, and now all my notes are on my phone. | ||
Yeah, it's a phone, or at most I'll take an iPad. | ||
Yeah. | ||
At tops. | ||
And it's just to read on. | ||
I know. | ||
It's so strange. | ||
Such a strange time. | ||
Like, on set, like, you know, people just throw their phone. | ||
Everything's happening. | ||
I'm moving. | ||
I don't know how else you'd do it now to be that efficient. | ||
Well, it definitely makes you more productive and more efficient. | ||
You can get a lot done. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And with the right motivation. | ||
Like you said, with the right people, it's a tool. | ||
For people, it becomes a distraction. | ||
Yeah, but it's just most people do not have the kind of discipline that's required to like... | ||
To manage the technology we have. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I get it. | ||
And as it comes, it gets stronger. | ||
Like, you know, maybe you have the discipline to avoid coffee. | ||
Do you have the discipline to avoid meth? | ||
Exactly. | ||
That's what your iPhone is. | ||
It's brain meth, right? | ||
And it's also like, if you're doing meth, you know you're fucking up, right? | ||
But what if your doctor gives you the meth? | ||
You know, it's great. | ||
Like we're doing now, like we say something, he pulls it up. | ||
It's good for research. | ||
It's good for something like that. | ||
But like, it also can be that, like, don't you want to think about it a little bit? | ||
It doesn't always have to be a reference. | ||
It doesn't always have to be what's on YouTube. | ||
YouTube has become the new Encyclopedia Botanica. | ||
And you take it as real, which is the scarier part. | ||
Oh, that's the scary part. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
Oh, it's on YouTube. | ||
If you have gullible friends and they send you things, you're like, hey, man, that's not real. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You need to, like, Google that thing and then debunked. | ||
In fact, don't even Google it. | ||
Go to DuckDuckGo. | ||
Well, like, there are people that are actually like, great story idea. | ||
They'll Google it. | ||
They'll actually Google, great story idea or great script or great action sequence. | ||
Well, AI will do it for you now. | ||
ChatGPT will do that for you. | ||
And this is just ChatGPT4. | ||
What happens when they get to ChatGPT30? | ||
So again, to all that, it's like, okay, so let's think. | ||
If you're not inputting it, right? | ||
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Right. | |
If you're just asking it and you take that idea, is that copyright? | ||
Right. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
That's where it gets funky, right? | ||
It does get funky. | ||
You could be the programmer. | ||
You're doing the copyright infringement. | ||
But if I'm the one benefiting it by Googling it or doing the AI thing, am I infringing? | ||
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Right. | |
That's a very good question. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
I mean, they can code websites for you now, like really quickly, like instantaneously. | ||
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Right. | |
They can do code flawlessly. | ||
They can do so many different things. | ||
So, yeah, what does it do to that industry? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Oh, it's going to kill so many industries. | ||
I mean, this is something that Andrew Yang was talking about with automation, but I don't think he anticipated AI and things like this. | ||
The creative aspect of business is a whole other level. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
Yeah, that's weird. | ||
Visual, graphic art in general. | ||
Right. | ||
Architectural design would be the same thing. | ||
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Right. | |
Yeah, exactly. | ||
And I think really anything like that. | ||
But coding, especially. | ||
And it can do it instantaneously. | ||
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I know. | |
Stuff that would take people months. | ||
I know, months. | ||
What's the waiting time? | ||
Right. | ||
Eight minutes, you know? | ||
No need for creativity. | ||
No need to be sitting alone, bored, just trying to figure out ideas, just trying to get those ideas to pop into your head. | ||
I think that's, you know, they call it like zero to one learning, right? | ||
I hand you a blank piece of paper. | ||
Give me a great idea. | ||
That's different than if I give you a shitty idea and I say, okay, Joe, fix it. | ||
Right. | ||
Like, that's one to ten thinking. | ||
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Yeah. | |
You can, like, I'm good at, like, somebody gives me a shitty sequence, I can make a better sequence. | ||
Yes. | ||
You know, the zero to one is, that's what they really pay you for, to come up with the original cool idea. | ||
That was a problem with joke thieves. | ||
Because joke thieves would go to open mic nights and they would watch amateurs, but amateurs that had like a pretty good premise. | ||
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Right. | |
But they just sucked. | ||
Yeah, didn't quite have it yet. | ||
Oh, I know how to do that. | ||
So a professional would sit in the back of that open mic night and watch the open. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
It was a real issue. | ||
Really? | ||
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
I never would have thought of that. | ||
Well, they've all been busted. | ||
Most of them have been busted. | ||
But how do you get busted on that? | ||
Comics, other comics, and then now the YouTube people. | ||
The YouTube people take bits and show that this is where it came from, and some pretty prominent people have been busted doing that. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah, because it's just too easy. | ||
I'm really good at, like, if a young comic says, I got this idea, it can't work. | ||
I go, tell me the bit. | ||
And they'll tell me that. | ||
So I'm fresh, right? | ||
Like, I'm looking at it completely from the outside. | ||
But they already have structure. | ||
So I go, oh, okay. | ||
Cut that part out and put it in the front. | ||
And say, just set it up with almost like the punchline. | ||
And then your new punchline is this. | ||
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Like, oh! | |
Yeah, you layered it. | ||
Yeah, you just figure out a way, but I didn't have the idea. | ||
Ideas are the hardest thing. | ||
Way hardest. | ||
Premises, for stand-up comedy in particular, they're some of the hardest things to acquire, a good thing to talk about. | ||
And there's things that everybody talks about, like Biden falls down. | ||
Ha ha. | ||
Everybody talks about it. | ||
It's simple, it's easy, it's right there for everybody. | ||
So there's a lot of parallel thinking. | ||
But then like weird premises, like someone who takes something that no one ever would have thought would be comedy and then turns that into a bit. | ||
Well, if that person's an amateur and someone's sitting in the back of the room, they're kind of clunky with their way of doing it. | ||
But the person who's a pro sees it and goes, I can fix that. | ||
And then they just steal it. | ||
Yeah, that's the thing. | ||
Yeah, that's the thing. | ||
So when you ask AI to write jokes for you, how do you know if AI is not stealing it from a blog? | ||
Right. | ||
Because AI is scouring the entire internet. | ||
Right. | ||
So they could be getting it from all sorts of different people's intellectual property. | ||
Right. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's true. | ||
I think even more to that is, again, what the writers are saying about now is like, you know, they're paid on their first pass. | ||
They're paid in passes. | ||
You know, pass the script, pass the script. | ||
And they get paid less for a rewrite than they do an original idea. | ||
I think what they're most concerned about, and I could have this wrong, but what I was told by a lot of my writer friends is that, you know, a real concern is no one's trying to replace writers with, you know, the finished draft, but an AI can kick out a shitty draft. | ||
Yes. | ||
And then they can hire a human to do the second draft. | ||
Yeah. | ||
At, like, half price. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Like, that's it. | ||
So, like, AI's pumping out the shitty first, so they get, you know, that's the thing. | ||
So, what's a human, like you're saying, what's a human first draft? | ||
What's a... | ||
Yeah. | ||
What's a first draft? | ||
What's a second draft? | ||
And we're talking about a business that already has a bunch of shady practices. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
I mean, everybody's copying everybody. | ||
Everybody's stealing ideas. | ||
Everybody's doing it. | ||
But, you know, whether you're evolving those ideas, whether you're just straight out ripping them off or whether they're inspiring you, you're still using off something that exists, right? | ||
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You're getting it from something. | |
Well, we're all influenced by everything that's been created before us. | ||
Well, that's life, right? | ||
You can't stop by being influenced. | ||
Of course. | ||
That's why you people watch. | ||
That's why you get all your material. | ||
That's how I get my retail. | ||
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Of course. | |
We just go out and watch. | ||
We observe. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Or we read, you know, whatever. | ||
There's a guy I used to do jiu-jitsu with, and he was a screenwriter. | ||
And he brought a screenplay. | ||
He brought a fully formed script to a very prominent production company, and they stole it. | ||
They completely stole it and made a blockbuster film, and he went to court with them and won. | ||
And got credited in the film. | ||
But it was a battle. | ||
It was a fucking battle. | ||
And he probably had his draft right there. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
And he also had the papers. | ||
He had all the documentation that showed that he had registered it. | ||
Well, that's what the WGA is for, right? | ||
Yes. | ||
That's what they would do all that. | ||
But it's just dirty as fuck. | ||
They just took it. | ||
They're like, well, let them fucking sue us. | ||
And that's what he did. | ||
Because they're like, nope, fuck you. | ||
He's like, fuck you. | ||
I met with you. | ||
I gave you this idea. | ||
And they're like, fuck you. | ||
Like, we're huge and you're some guy and, you know, don't fucking cause trouble or you're never going to work again. | ||
That's a horror story. | ||
It's scary, but that is – how common is that in Hollywood? | ||
Again, it's that fucking soft line because you're so inspired and everybody's – But this wasn't inspired. | ||
I think, no. | ||
What I'm saying is... | ||
This was the star that he wrote it for, wound up starring in the movie. | ||
Yeah, okay, that's probably how they got caught. | ||
That was all two on the nose. | ||
But, like, that's why I think a lot of studios stay with existing IP. That's why, you know, comic books. | ||
You get a book, like, you're not going to run into a battle. | ||
I am doing the book. | ||
There's no interpretation. | ||
It's not like you said... | ||
It's Spider-Man. | ||
Yeah, you and I didn't have this, hey, we got this idea for, like, this lizard guy, and, like, we just... | ||
Right, right, right. | ||
We made it up in parallel thinking. | ||
Right, right, right. | ||
You have a little lukewarmness there, but... | ||
But for people like that, that have come up with a thing and had it stolen, AI is so scary. | ||
Well, yeah. | ||
Again, that's a double whammy, right? | ||
And what if it can get into Google Docs, right? | ||
What if you upload it to the cloud, and so you've got all your shit sitting up there on the cloud? | ||
Well, all your notes, all your personal thoughts, all your diaries, all your rough drafts. | ||
All of it. | ||
I guess that's the real thing. | ||
People now, like, you know, I have notebook and notebook and notebook. | ||
I'm sure you do, too, of, like, all your past ideas. | ||
I still have hard copies, but a lot of people I know have all their... | ||
You know, like my production designer, designs that are yet to be experienced. | ||
It's all uploaded. | ||
It's not all digital copies. | ||
Shit that's never made it out. | ||
Like, I have like three or four ideas that haven't made it out yet that are fully flushed. | ||
And like, you know, somebody gets a hold of that. | ||
Like, you can't argue with them because they haven't written a thing yet. | ||
Right. | ||
You know, and they're like, oh, that was funny. | ||
We both had that space fantasy. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Interesting, right? | ||
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Yeah. | |
It's a weird world we live in. | ||
And in your world, the world of creating these entertainment properties, these things like John Wick, that's a world where you're more likely to get poached. | ||
I think so. | ||
But again, I'm going to go, yeah, it does suck. | ||
And we should at least start the talks about how to protect ourselves against that or what it could be. | ||
But at the same time, like, look, if you're creative, if you have good ideas, you're going to keep coming. | ||
So to answer your earlier question, yeah, I'm going to give it a go again. | ||
I'm working on this project called Highlander. | ||
We're going to redo Highlander a little bit. | ||
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Really? | |
Yeah. | ||
No shit. | ||
I loved Highlander. | ||
Highlander's awesome. | ||
I'm super stoked to do something with that. | ||
We have Ghost of Tsushima on the plates, based on the video game, the samurai film. | ||
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Oh, wow. | |
And Rainbow Six. | ||
Those are the three I'm working on. | ||
Yeah, we need a good samurai movie. | ||
The Last Samurai with Tom Cruise? | ||
If you can, check out the game Ghost of Tsushima. | ||
It's one of the best-looking games out there. | ||
But it's got a great story. | ||
What is it about? | ||
Jin Sakai and the Mongol invasion. | ||
Oh shit, when the Mongols invaded Japan? | ||
Yeah, they had to stop in Tsushima Island. | ||
Japan was the only people that kept them out. | ||
The Samurais were the only people that defeated the Mongols. | ||
They got their asses kicked, but they stalled them long enough for bad weather to sink them in the kamikaze, the typhoon that hit. | ||
Oh, wow! | ||
That's incredible! | ||
It's based on Kurosawa's cinematography and stuff. | ||
Look how good this looks! | ||
Holy shit! | ||
Again, won every award out there for cinematography. | ||
When was this made? | ||
This is just a few years ago, and we've been developing the script ever since, which we have, and we're working with Sony right now to bring this to fruition. | ||
Oh, my God. | ||
This is going to be incredible. | ||
But a great storyline. | ||
Fantastic storyline. | ||
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Wow! | |
This is amazing! | ||
The graphics! | ||
Yeah. | ||
Oh, boy! | ||
Some of the best sword fights you'll see. | ||
Oh, Jesus. | ||
It's basically the birth of the first Shinobi, about how he asked it, you know, be something less than a samurai, but more than anything else to save his people. | ||
This is incredible. | ||
Yeah, fantastic. | ||
I didn't even know it existed. | ||
Yeah, fantastic. | ||
Check it. | ||
I'm not a big game guy, but I love the story so much as, like, I contacted Sony going... | ||
Sony PlayStation going, we gotta do this. | ||
Like, we really have to do this. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Oh, that's a great idea for a film. | ||
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Yeah. | |
So between these guys and, like, what they got going on with Rainbow Six and Michael B. Jordan, I think one of those three will build a few worlds and have some fun. | ||
I'm sure. | ||
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Yeah. | |
We'll see what happens. | ||
Well, listen, man, it was great talking to you. | ||
It was great meeting you at Terrence. | ||
Yeah, hopefully we'll see you again. | ||
I'm super pumped that you put the 71 Barracuda in the film. | ||
All because of you. | ||
It was awesome. | ||
I mean, I could tell people that. | ||
They're like, shut the fuck up. | ||
I'm like, no, I'm telling you. | ||
I talked to Chad. | ||
No, that's the reason. | ||
We listen to the fans. | ||
I appreciate it, and I am a fan. | ||
Thank you very much for being here, and congratulations with the movie. | ||
No, thank you guys very much. | ||
My pleasure. | ||
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Thanks. | |
Bye, everybody. |