All language subtitles for Die.Hard.1988.2160p.UHD.BluRay.X265-IAMABLE.mkv.stream10-eng

(Richard Edlund)
Boss Film's reputation in those days

was based on the fact that
we shot all of our plates in 65mm.

We made really high quality anamorphic
composites from the 65, the large image,

so we had a big, large negative
which would then be duped

onto a 35mm squeezed anamorphic print.

Anamorphic, just so you understand,

it's like whenever you see
the old western movies with John Wayne,

riding off into the sunset, except he looks
like a toothpick, and his horse is skinny.

That's because it's been unsqueezed
so that you could read all the titles.

I mean, everybody's seen
that from time to time.

But the bulk of the movies that we did
at Boss Film until the last couple of years

were all anamorphic pictures,

and that was sort of the way
God had meant movies to be made.

And so, since we had this large format,
and we had this collection

which was the world's biggest collection
of 65mm equipment,

and optical printers, and rotoscope cameras,
and animation and motion control gear...

I mean, we had, like, 30...
at least 30 or 35 cameras

that were all 65mm cameras of different types.

And so we could, by using
that large format in the process,

get higher quality than anybody else could.

And that kind of equipment is rare,

and so we made our move on it
and collected as much as we could.

We actually built cameras
and built optical printers from scratch.

That's all made in the composite,
part of the process.

In other words, all of the elements
are carried in the projectors,

and the camera is
photographing it anamorphically.

So it had a special lens that we had built.

It was about $80,000 for the lens.

For just the reduction lens.

For just the reduction lens.

A zoom lens on the printer,
that was even more than that.

Trumbull used to do that.

See, I inherited some of
that equipment from Doug,

and he got out of the business
and I took over the studio.

He would do that. He would composite,
and then double-dupe it down to 35,

which I never believed in.

I mean, why would you do that?

So our composites... In fact, in Ghostbusters,

our composites looked better than the
original photography, and we had to degrade.

And the same case in 2010.

The original was shot with kind of a grainy...

I forget. It was 5293 or something like that
in those days, and it was kind of grainy.

And then when you cut to
one of those deep space shots,

it was like all of a sudden you were out
on the back porch, breathing fresh air.

It had a great relief from the claustrophobic
aspect of the stuff inside the ship, the action.

But in any case, 65 was our stock in trade,

and I think that we did some of the highest
quality optical work that was ever done.

I'm sure of it.

Because we built the finest equipment in the
photochemical world that you could have.

Just as when Technicolor,

which had this incredible
color process in the '30s and '40s,

all of a sudden Kodak came out with
monopack Eastmancolor, which was one film,

about in 1950, '51, that area.

Technicolor was obsolete overnight.

Nobody shot a Technicolor movie
with three-strip cameras after that,

even though the process was not as good.

The really early Eastmancolor
wasn't as good as Technicolor,

and it took them probably ten years
to equal the Technicolor look.

But it was so much cheaper and so much
more facile to make movies, it was worth it.

Plus it was cheaper.

It was the... To the purists, it was
the "Let them eat cake" kind of approach.

That's a whole other area.

I'm a real fan of digital film projection.

I think that's a whole different subject.

When I saw a 50-foot wide image
projected at the Directors Guild

from a 1280 x 1024 chip, the Micromirror,

unbelievable! I mean, it was...

I didn't expect much,
because it was only 1280 x 1024,

and I thought, "We do everything
at 2K, and I wish it was higher."

But when I saw it on the screen,
and I was at about one screen height,

one and a half screen heights
from the picture,

it was stunning.

And there were greys...

The blacks fell off too fast, and there were
little things about it that weren't there yet,

but it was so close.

But the thing is you're trading
from one artifact for another.

If you're projecting a digital image and you're
in the front row, you're gonna see pixels.

If you're projecting a film image
and you're in the front row,

you're gonna see golf balls
and softballs of grain.

So, I mean, you're just trading
one artifact from the other.

But what you get out of it
is this rock-steady picture.

And because you get almost full pixel area,

it has a great apparent resolution
that makes it look really good.

And Connie Hall, who is one
of our great cinematographers,

because one of the elements of the test
that I saw was Searching for Bobby Fischer.

They also had Grease and The Godfather,
and some animated movie,

and other movies like that that had been
transferred, so you could see a dark movie,

The Godfather, Grease, a lot
of stuff right out in the sunlight,

and Bobby Fischer, which was this beautiful
Conrad Hall masterpiece of photography.

And he preferred the digital
version of the movie to film, Connie did.

And that'll come. We're in the digital world,
and the digital world will enable upgrades.

With film... The film perforations
that are in the camera today

were designed by Alfred Howell in 1910.

So I have Bell & Howell cameras...

I have George Eastman's camera,
Bell & Howell camera 27009.

That camera can still be used
for standard photography today.

And it's steadier than most cameras, anyway.

We have this ancient standard with film.
But we're stuck with it.

It's this kind of blacksmith shop.
That's my metaphor.

It's like we went from blacksmiths
to become neurosurgeons,

because all of a sudden we can...

The reason we can do anything
at all in special effects

is because we're dealing with
24 still images per second.

And because each one
of those images is still,

you can then look at it and manipulate it.

You can then perform visual magic
by modifying those images.

In the digital world, however, not only
do you get 12 or 24 or hopefully more,

hopefully up to 72 frames a second,

so you get a much more fluid image.

Not only can you because you're using it
for assistance vision, but I mean...

You're not only isolating phases of motion,

but you also have pixel addressability

of every pixel in every frame.

So you really now have
this godlike capability

to really manipulate
and do incredible things.

The thing that knocked me out the most
in the last couple of years is...

Not that I loved the film so much,
but Stuart Little.

It was so charming,
and it was so realistic-looking.

And not only couldn't you
have done it before,

the funny thing is, I remember
after I did Star Wars,

I would be asked by reporters or interviewers,

"Now you've done Star Wars,
what else is there to do?"

And it's like, "Duh."

It's like, there's only
infinity out there, you know?

But there are all these holy grails
that you have to find along the way.

And one of them of course is hair,
in dealing with that kind...

And I haven't seen it done
any better than Stuart Little.

It was a different kind
of ingenuity that was required.

If you forget that digital is imminent

and you're living with those tools
in your toolbox and that's it,

and you have to,
with those tools, make it work,

and knowing the audience is constantly
saying, "Gimme more, gimme more."

As they're saying that
they're becoming more sophisticated

to seams and problems
that they used to overlook.

Thinking back to King Kong, for example.

If you go back and look at King Kong,
it's really primitive.

I mean, the animation is stuttery, his fur is
moving around on his back all the time,

because it's shot frame by frame

and you have to grab him to manipulate
the stop-motion puppet from frame to frame.

But in those days,

it was so outrageous to anybody who hadn't
seen anything like that at all to watch that.

You know, it played. I remember going and
seeing The Robe, with Victor Mature, right?

And he's up on top of the mount,
and he's got this robe on,

but he's surrounded by
this kind of green halo.

And I thought, "What the hell is that?"

I was about...

This was in '51 or '52 or something like that.
I saw it in Minneapolis when I was a kid.

And that was my first memory of a
weird effect anomaly that stuck with me.

But at the same time,
even if you look at a movie like...

Well, if you look at King Kong today,

after a bit you kind of give it that air,

because the movie kind of works.

My wife can't watch it
because she's an animal lover

and she breaks down in tears
when King Kong falls to the...

So, I mean, it still works.

Even Star Wars, which
was my first big project

that we started in 1975, that was 25 years ago.

When I saw that, even before it had
been nuanced and fixed up here and there,

it's pretty raggedy, you know what I mean?
From today's standards.

But as a movie it works,
because it was a good movie,

and so you let that stuff go.

With a fantasy show, the audience
actually wants you to take license,

and therefore in those cases the balance is,
how much license do you take?

If you take Star Wars as the ultimate example,
everybody's walking around on spaceships

and there's no concern about no gravity
in outer space and things like that.

And because there were hundreds of shots,
we had to put fill light on the ships

because otherwise there would be technical
problems with blue light spilling on it.

So the look of the show was dictated to some
degree by the technology that was available

and the amount of work that had to be
done within a finite period of time.

But in any case, in a movie like that

you can have spaceships that are
supposedly traveling at light speeds

look more like biplanes in World War I

in terms of their space, in terms of
their speed and their maneuverability.

If you've ever been in a jet,

by the time you do something,
you're five miles away.

So you can't get any good, dynamic shots
with jet planes because they move too fast.

So you take those licenses,
and in the case of Die Hard,

which was not an effects film at all,
it was a suspense movie.

So the effects had to serve that end,

and look absolutely
believable to the audience.

And if you betray that believability,
the audience is out of the movie

and they're saying,
"Hey, that shot looks funny."

You can't have that. That's the responsibility
you have in a reality show like that.

It's a lot more difficult to do

that kind of thing than it is the fantasy part.

It has to look real, and it's more difficult
to get an absolutely realistic thing

than it is to get
a fanciful, groovy-looking thing.

When the armored car crashes, we put
some explosion enhancement behind it.

And this movie, of course, was done in
the Paleolithic age, the pre-digital.

So it was all done
photochemically with mattes

and animated on cel and
photograph rotoscoping techniques.

In order to put the explosion
behind something,

you had to make a matte of whatever
you had to put it behind, frame by frame.

Because the camera's always moving.
Jan de Bont doesn't like locked off cameras.

And of course neither does McTiernan.

And it was a nonstop movie,
it was constantly something going on,

here, there, up in the air, down on the street,
in the hostage area, all this stuff.

So there was a lot of
parallel tension going on.

We did motion-control to match to,
which we'll get into later.

The first big shot was dropping
the bomb down the elevator shaft.

And in this movie, either
the shot looked real or it didn't,

and that was kind of like
the criterion for all the work.

So if the shot didn't look real,
then it had to be nuanced until it did.

But in the case of the elevator shaft,
we built a forced perspective elevator shaft

which actually started small and
got big, as opposed to the other way,

so that we could shoot it on our stage.

We could only get the camera about 20 feet.

And then, of course, Thaine came up
with a good fireball for that,

and so it was shot actually with a...

We actually changed camera speed
as the explosion came towards us,

so it became less over-cranked
in order to get the effect.

We wanted the effect of
reality in terms of scale,

but we also wanted dynamics
in terms of effects,

so we had to balance those carefully.

Then we matted Bruce, the back of
his head and his shoulder, into the shot,

then he jumped out, then of course
that intercut with the live explosion

that Al Di Sarro did on the set.

Because the most difficult shot
was the blowing up of the third floor.

We had this 30-million-dollar building,
or however many millions it was.

We couldn't blow the third floor out,
even though Joel tried to work that out.

But we couldn't actually
blow windows out and put cam...

because the whole window was
a hermetically sealed chamber.

Those buildings are
like biospheres, in a sense.

So we had to, in order to do that,

we had to build a black armature
that was the exact shape of the building,

line it up to the building.

It had to be done in 35 anamorphic because
we had to use the high-speed camera to do it,

because we were working on...
I think that might have been a 14th scale,

or 12th scale, or 16th,
or something like that scale.

All these different shots
were on different scales,

depending on how big the miniature was.

We had this armature, set it up with
the camera, and then had to shoot...

The armature was actually
built like little mortars,

so these mortars of fire would shoot out

as though the whole building
were blowing out.

And even though that shot
lasted only about...

I'd be surprised if it was 30 frames. It might
have been 26 frames, something like that.

But I remember a long time ago

reading Raymond Spottiswoode's book
A Grammar of the Film.

He was saying that it only took
the human eye a fifth of a second

to register a change in shot,

cos he was intellectualizing the cinema
before he touched a foot of film.

He was the Russian cinema editor.

But anyway, I think that
fifth of a second has shrunk down

to where somebody could see rats
superimposed in the commercial,

like they did the other day.
Did you hear about that? Somehow...

The Republicans say that
it was a mistake, and I believe it was,

because I did read that in
the studio monitor you could see the "c."

Because they had bureaucrats, and somehow
that frame got burned into the thing.

So the Democrats were all saying
it was a subliminal, nasty message.

But somebody would pick that up,
a 25th of a sec or a 30th of a second in video.

So the bottom line is,

it doesn't take the human eye very long
to register whether something works or not.

So that shot turned out to be
the most difficult shot to do.

We did it over and over again,
trying to get the glass to look right,

and the smoke would go behind a matte,

and it was all these little complex
layering problems that had to be worked out.

I think we used hundreds of these FF31
flashbulbs which I discovered on Raiders,

and what they were were big flashbulbs
that look like about a 150-watt bulb,

and they last about two seconds.

And they were made for Fastex cameras.

Fastex cameras were cameras that
would go 30,000 frames a second, in 16,

and basically a 100-foot roll of film would
go through the camera in about two seconds.

And they would use these flashbulbs
to light whatever they were shooting

because they were like the sun,
incredibly bright.

So then we did the plates,
and I'm trying to remember

if one plate had a lens flare in it.

We had problems like that.
It was just a nightmare.

And when you have a flare in the plate,
that's that kiss of death,

because you can't get rid of it
with any analogue techniques 100%

without doing it 500 times

with Marlboro package wrappers,

and neutral density
difference in certain areas.

You put one piece of cellophane in,
it would make it work.

And I still don't think McTiernan
loved the shot once we finally finished it.

He still wasn't happy with it.

Foot moccasins,
because Bruce was gonna be

running around on glass all the time
because of all the shooting,

and he was barefoot
cos that was part of the scene.

So we actually cast his foot and made
a rubber foot that would go on top

so that he could run around
on these shards of glass.

They put a strong kind of vinyl material
so that he wouldn't get his feet cut.

Steel-belted.

So we made half a dozen
sets of those, I think.

This is funny. Because the helicopters
we got were one-seventh scale,

we built the miniature one-seventh.

So we built a portion
of the Fox Plaza building,

which had just been finished
and it was perfectly pristine,

and not only was
Ronald Reagan's office there,

but I have a patent
and labor relations attorney

whose office was in the building as well.

Because Joel Silver
had taken over the building

and was supposed to finish shooting
by a certain day but didn't,

all the people in the Fox Plaza building
decided they weren't gonna pay their rent.

They said, "We'll pay the rent as soon as
you turn this back into an office building,"

cos it was a mess.

The grounds around the building,
which were perfectly just done marble,

and the grass had all been sodded,

and wonderful specimen trees
and all that stuff was around,

was going to look like Beirut.

But in any case, in order
to make the shots work,

because a movie is always done by the shot,

and you see this angle, then we can build
what you see in that shot as a miniature.

So we built about the top ten floors or so

as a miniature that were
in scale to the helicopter.

And, of course, that was a big shot,
the helicopter exploding,

cos the explosion was
the ultimate crowd pleaser.

Everybody watches fireworks on the 4th of
July. It's wonderful to watch explosions.

But it had to be great,
and we did some testing.

We built all this in our parking lot
down in the marina,

and raised the ire of people who lived
on the other side of the street in apartments

that we were blowing things up
all day or all night.

In fact, we even had David Horowitz show up
because one of the women called him up,

but he was kind of a sympathizer because
peculiarly, the street that the studio was on,

on one side of the street it was zoned for R1,

which is apartments or something like that,
or R1A or something.

On the other side of the street,
it was zoned for light industrial,

and so we had been there as a studio
before these apartments were there.

So the cops were kind of
looking the other way.

We weren't making that much noise anyway,
but they were still uptight about it.

In any case, we built
the several sized miniatures,

and when we exploded
the helicopter off the top,

originally we planned to have a flying
helicopter, and we had some in other shots.

There were quite a number of helicopters
added into those scenes

because you couldn't fly a helicopter
within 500 feet of the building.

There was no helipad on top
or anything like that.

We could only fly the helicopter
right down the middle of the street.

So a few of those are real shots,
but all the other shots of helicopters

were either shot on
a stage with a bluescreen, such as the shots

of the guys getting ready to shoot
and things like that.

I'll come back to that part in a minute, but let
me concentrate on the helicopter explosions.

We had a virtuoso miniature helicopter pilot,

who had worked out a lot of those problems

and had worked out a charge
in the helicopter, and the timing system,

and it had lights on it and everything.

When it crashed into the building,
it would blow up,

but the explosion was not
being carried by the helicopter.

It was already on the building.

All the synchronization of that
had to be within a frame or two.

If you look in the scene, the high-speed
camera was shooting at 300 frames a second.

The idea here is that when a big thing falls,

it takes more time for it
to fall than a small thing.

So if you take a cereal box and tip it over,

at 24 frames a second it looks
like a cereal box tipping over.

If you took the cereal box,
painted little windows on it,

and shot it at 300 frames a second,
it would look like a building falling.

So that's the kind of trick
of high-speed photography,

and the way to make miniatures work.

So when it came down to
actually getting the shot

the night that we got the hero take,

I think we only did about two or three
takes on it before we had it down.

Of course, after every take there would be
a fire, and the guys would put the fire out.

Then another helicopter would be...

We had, I think, three helicopters
available to us for this thing.

And they're not cheap, these real
fancy remote-controlled helicopters

that are all painted up and tricked out.

They're not just out of the box,
cos they have to be detailed.

The audience picks up detail peripherally,
and if it's not there, it looks like a toy.

So Thaine is on top of the building,
out of camera range,

and we're getting ready to shoot.

The motor is running on the helicopter,
and it's hovering there.

It comes down and hits, and Thaine sees
that it's not going to go over the edge.

He has a stick in his hand just in case,
and he pushes the thing over the edge.

And it tumbles over the edge
perfectly and then blows up,

and the shot came off fantastic.

We were just ecstatic the next day.

Then Joel Silver, the producer,
calls me up on the phone.

And Joel sometimes talks so loud
on the phone that the sound breaks up.

The mic can't handle his volume.

He says "Edlund, that shot
was absolutely legitimate,"

which was a great compliment
from Joel, and he was real happy.

"That shot better be good",
cos you get pressure from him, too.

And it's always a happy accident
in those situations,

because you get everything
as perfect as you possibly can.

The building is tricked out and detailed,

there's guys up there putting little
pieces of chart tape on the thing

to get the thing to look
just like the Fox Plaza building,

which is a really beautiful building.

It has photographic marble glued
onto the sides of Plexiglas for windows.

It's a simple building, actually,
but it still has to be detailed well.

So, in any case, you get all of
these elements as close to perfect as you can,

then you cross your fingers and you're
at the mercy of the gods of visual effects.

And also the talent, and intelligence,

and split-second reactions
of a guy like Thaine.

He made the shot work, otherwise we would
have been shooting again the next night.

Then there's a scene where Bruce has
these people on top of the building,

and you've got Johnson
and Johnson in the helicopter.

You have the gun aiming at him,
you have the focus change shot,

all of which was done separately.

The plate was shot

actually on the top of the building,

and then the helicopters were shot
out at Veluzee's ranch by Bill Neil,

who then would line up
the plate to the helicopter.

And then when the helicopter flies
behind Willis, we have to rotoscope him,

but when it flies behind the satellite dish,
it's a panning shot, a compound move,

and all of this was done
by seat-of-the-pants kind of approach.

And we could do that because the sky's all
black and the helicopter's not nailed down,

so we just had to get the dynamics of
the helicopter to work within another scene.

We could approach it that way
and not get overly complicated

with a bunch of motion-control equipment,

which takes too much time to set up,
and oftentimes in those situations,

where you do certain types of things
with motion-control, it stiffens the shot.

So you don't have Jan de Bont's hand-held
camera on the shoulder feel to a scene,

which gives it a verve, which is what
I think is part of the charm of that movie.

So it's kind of a nervous
photographic approach to it.

It's like, "You're there and you
got to get the shot" kind of feel

transfers from the operator of
the camera through to the audience.

And this was a really tricky shot because
John McTiernan's a very demanding guy,

and he knows what he wants.

In this case, he even talked Alan Rickman
into doing his own stunt,

and stunt men, by the way,
won't fall backwards.

You can't ask a stunt man to fall backwards.
You could check it out with quite a few,

and they'd say, "l don't wanna do that,"
cos they wanna see where they're going.

In this case,
Alan Rickman had to fall backwards,

and the setup was, we had the camera
looking down, up very high in the stage.

And then there was a huge blue mattress,

an air mattress, about eight or ten feet thick,
that was covered with bluescreen material,

which was lit by hundreds
of thousands of watts.

This was in 1987 or 1988 when we shot this,

and I think we may have had 250-speed film.

But he was falling...

At the start, if you remember, the close-up
was close on his face, close enough to...

Maybe it was like this, cos you
could see him reaching for the gun,

and then pulling the gun out, and shooting.

And we shot at... I believe
it was 300 frames a second,

and I think because of the film speed,

we had about a two-eight stop.

It might have even been wider than that.

We may have horsed it back
a little open from two-eight

cos the scene was slightly underexposed.

Which I hate, underexposed shots.

But the thing is, the focus was so critical.

And in order to deal with the focus,
we built a special device,

which was a little Miller head
for a 16-millimeter...

A small Miller hydraulic head.

And we mounted an encoder on that,

so that as you moved the head,

it would spin out numbers
at a very high resolution.

And we mounted a 2-7 zoom riflescope

on top of the head so the cameraman could...

We had an eyepiece that came out with
a rubber thing so he could glue his eye to it.

And so Bill's assistant...

The assistant had to follow him down
with this tripod and the cross hairs,

and as he followed him down,

the angle that he went
was then interpolated to distance.

And we did focus changes,
and we did a look-up table,

so that he was 30 feet away
with this telescope.

And so the focus was automatic,
filtered through this.

And we only had one shot at this,
so there was an extreme pressure.

Because Rickman said,
"OK, I'll doit, but I'll only do it once."

And, of course, we had the high-speed
camera, and we had video tap.

And we did the shot, and it was good.

The focus was right,
and we looked at the video.

He fell quickly in the video, but we'd stop it,
and we could see the focus was holding.

John said, "Let's do it one more time."

So he talked Rickman into doing another
take, and I'm not sure which take we used.

We may have actually used the first take.

We used every single frame possible to use

because at one point he fell into the lights
that were lighting the bluescreen,

and of course the lighting went berserk
and we couldn't use it any more.

But he would say, "Can you
give me two more frames?"

We went through that, and we probably did.

But that was all there was left to give.

It was 26 or 28 feet,
I seem to remember, that he fell.

And he started about maybe three
or four feet, if that, from the lens,

because it was a pretty wide lens,
I think it was a 35, that we used for it.

So he would have been probably
three feet from the lens,

and held sharp focus all the way back.

That was a really great shot, then behind it
we shot a plate from the top of the Fox Plaza,

and then Bill Neil shot miniaturized
pieces of paper with a high-speed camera.

Because on all these shots, the air's filled
with all this paper that was floating around.

And because the shot was...

We had to start on the miniature.

The miniature was
composited into the scene,

and then at a certain point
we panned off the miniature.

And once we'd panned off the miniature,
the camera was then booming around

on this huge Titan crane.

But we still, in those shots even,
had to have this paper.

There was a certain amount of real paper,
but we had to put paper in the distance.

That was an incredibly complicated shot,

and I thought that was
gonna be the most difficult shot.

And that was one of those things that...
It was the most difficult shot,

but it fell together so well
that all the elements worked,

and it was basically done all of a sudden,
and everybody loved it, and I was dazed.

Then the final shot, which was the...

This was this nightmare, and it was
Bill Neil who did the tracking on this.

But Neil and I, Neil Krepela and I,
were over there shooting the plate,

and so we're working with Jan's assistant,

and we got pushed into the corner on this.

This is what McTiernan wanted in this shot,
and I was extremely nervous about it.

And one of the problems that we had was...

Remember that this is a pre-digital age,

so what you got on the negative, you were
stuck with, and you had to deal with it.

We had made a request to all these people
in the building to turn their lights out

so that we could then put
our own lights into the building.

But there was such anger
towards the motion picture company,

because they had been
inconvenienced for so long,

that there were about 20 or 30
window lights on still in the building,

which meant that we would then

not be able to go into black with that,

and just track in a miniature.

The miniature had to track window for
window, and this is in the pre-tracking days.

All that kind of stuff you can do now.

Some guy that's just learned
how to spell "CG" can track now.

But in those days it was an unbelievably
masochistic, difficult proposition to do that.

But we did it. Bill did it, and what he did is,

projected the shot through the camera
onto a miniature on the stage,

and lined up each shot, and then he'd move it
to the next shot, and we'd line that one up.

So it was like this sort of
big projection animation setup,

and then when he'd get it all tracked
frame by frame that way,

we had nice motion-control equipment
that Jerry Jeffers and his guys had built.

I think we may have even had
an early Kuper system,

which was Al Tondreau,
who for some reason -

that's another mystery -
changed his name to Kuper.

He disappeared from the planet. He had some
kind of brain tumor or something like that,

and all of a sudden he was gone.

And everybody in town was depending on
Bill Tondreau for motion-control equipment,

and all of a sudden he was gone,
and it was, "Oh, God, where do we..."

It was like paralysis.

There was such dependence on this one guy
and his brilliant motion-control thing.

Then all of a sudden he surfaced again,
but he had changed his name

and didn't want to talk about it.

But anyway,

Bill had gone through
this arduous tracking procedure,

and it was perfect.

Once he had the tracking, we had to
put the fire on the top of the building.

And then the same tracking had to be used
for all this paper that was floating around.

I was real happy with
the success of the movie.

What I loved about it,
it was really great collaborating with Al on it,

cos Al Di Sarro is
a really good physical effects guy,

and we got along just great.

My attitude always is to try
to get it in camera if you can,

and then use effects if you can't,

and not try to get extra shots to do it.

Because usually you have enough under your
arm at the end of shooting to worry about

without stacking with extra shots.

And on top of that, somehow to do it
in the camera, in reel, always looks better.

Or not always, but most of the time,
so if you can do it that way,

I'm a big supporter of trying to
work with the physical effect guy

to figure out how we could do it physical,

or do most of it physical
So we're enhancing certain parts of it.

And one great shot that he did, because
he had a second-unit guy go over and shoot,

there was a big explosion from a distance,

and we thought, "There's no way they're
ever gonna allow you to do that, Al."

It wasn't actually that difficult a shot
if we were going to do it.

But Al pulled it off. He had a guy over there
and it was a great shot,

a distant shot where you saw the building
and this big flame going up on top.

So that kind of thing is always great,

and in that sense it was one of my favorite
collaborative jobs with a physical effects guy

because we knew were supporting each other
in the things that either one of us couldn't do.

And I think basically McTiernan
was very happy with the show,

and Joel Silver was elated
because it made millions,

and everybody loved it.

Even my wife likes it, and she's not that
much of a fan of action-adventure films.

But she loved it. She likes Bruce Willis, too.