Original subtitles

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Back to the Future Q&A session

here at the University of Southern California.

We have the distinct honor to have the two Bobs,

director-writer Robert Zemeckis and producer-writer Bob Gale.

They're here to answer questions about the making of Back to the Future.

And having just screened the film, I'm sure there's gonna be plenty of questions.

My name is Laurent Bouzereau

and I am producing the Back to the Future DVD

in collaboration with Universal Studios Home Video.

I will be moderating today's event.

I will be also repeating each of the questions

so that the audience, of course, can hear it.

And all of you at home watching this DVD and listening to this audio commentary

can also hear what the questions were. So, here we go.

Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale.

Well, let's get started, Bob and Bob.

Can you tell us a little bit about where you were at in your career

at the time that you started working on Back to the Future?

And Bob Zemeckis, tell us about your career at the time.

Well, where we were when we wrote the screenplay

was different from when we made the movie.

When we wrote the screenplay, we had just finished Used Cars

and we couldn't get a movie made.

We couldn't get a movie made anywhere,

and it was like a three, maybe four-year dry spell.

And we wrote Back to the Future during that time,

and then I went off and made Romancing the Stone,

and then we were able to

get Back to the Future made after that movie, thankfully, was a hit.

Because I've got a...

In my archives, I've got a rejection letter from every single studio.

Every single studio.

Sometimes more than one from the same studio.

Sometimes they've sent it back twice, rejecting Back to the Future,

you know, as an idea for a movie.

Bob Gale, do you want to tell us a little bit about how you guys write together?

How you came up with the actual idea for Back to the Future?

And maybe begin with your initial fascination with time travel.

We'd always wanted to do a time-travel movie.

Actually, we were fascinated by the fact that people always predict the future wrong.

We thought it would be interesting to make a movie that took place in a future as seen

by the 1939 World's Fair, that had everything wrong in the future.

So, that was the idea of doing a time-travel movie.

It kind of came out of that.

But there was really no movie there.

After Used Cars came out, I went back to visit my parents in St. Louis, Missouri

and I found my father's high school yearbook,

and I discovered that my father had been the president of his graduating class.

Something that I didn't know.

And I started thinking about the president of my graduating class,

who was somebody I would've had nothing to do with.

I was head of the student committee to abolish student government.

"So, I thought," Gee, if I had gone to high school with my dad,

"would I have been friends with him?"

And that was the spark of the idea.

So, when I came back to California, I told that little story to Bob.

And he jumped up and said, "Yeah, and wouldn't it be interesting"

"if your mom, who said that she'd never, ever kissed a boy on a date or anything,"

"turned out to be the school slut?"

So, we started cooking on this,

and that's how the concept got going.

And, of course, there was only one way

to have a kid go to high school with his parents

and that was, from our point of view, to do it in a time machine.

Because we'd seen plenty of movies where...

And plenty of stories where somebody gets...

You know, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,

he gets hit on the head and he's suddenly back in the past,

and we never bought that.

So, we decided that if somebody was going to go back in time,

it had to be with a time machine.

So, that's how the creative juices got flowing.

Obviously, the part in the past in the movie

takes place in 1955.

The Academy Award for Best Picture that year went to a movie called Marty.

Is it just a coincidence, or was it a conscious decision

to call Michael J. Fox's character in the movie Marty?

I think that was a coincidence, wasn't it? I don't remember us thinking about that.

No, we never thought about that.

The fact that Marty...

It never even occurred to me until you just mentioned it right now.

Sometimes we name characters that are inside jokes,

other times, I think... In the case of Marty, I think it was just a name that...

Sometimes we just name characters that have a good sound to them,

that they roll off your tongue kind of easily.

Then, other times we name them after people.

Like Biff Tannen.

Ned Tanen was the president of Universal.

And when we were making I Wanna Hold Your Hand,

one meeting that we had he got irate with us in his office

and threw the script on the floor,

accused us of wanting to make an anti-Semitic movie,

even though I'm Jewish.

So, in honor of good old Ned, Biff got his last name.

How much research did you find yourself doing

on the 1955 time period to make sure that everything was accurate?

We did quite a bit of research.

That seemed to be the process of coming up with ideas,

was to just go and immerse yourselves in... Yeah, we would immerse ourselves in...

You know, we'd go to the library and read the newspapers of the time.

You know, those great Time Life series and photograph books of the time.

You have to sort of be a history buff to enjoy doing something like this,

and by doing that, it wasn't like...

When we came up with specific scenes, we would research, specifically,

if we could do a certain thing.

But most of it was just sort of getting a flavor for the time.

And then, of course, once the production gets going,

then it gets to be really fun, because then everything starts to get real

and you have whole teams of researchers in the art department,

and they start coming up with ideas,

and then you can just riff on what they bring you.

It wasn't a foregone conclusion, automatically, that 1955 was the year...

In fact, when we wrote the script in 1980, it was also 1955 then.

And as the years went by,

because it was four years later that we actually got the movie made,

we gave Marty an older brother and an older sister

so that you would understand the age of his parents,

that they would be in high school in 1955.

But 1955 was important because we wanted Marty to invent rock 'n' roll.

That was one of the ideas that we had real early on.

So, if it was any later than 1955, that couldn't have worked.

Right. We knew it had to be after rock 'n' roll.

It wouldn't have worked if it was 1950 or 1949.

When you were writing the script, did you have any specific actors in mind?

No, I don't think...

You know, Bob and I actually entertain ourselves by saying,

"Wouldn't so-and-so be funny to do this?"

But I've found, over the years, we do that on specific lines of dialogue.

"We'll sit there and say," Nicholson!

"He would really be able to do this line great."

So, for me anyway, they become these kind of shadow characters,

and I never really see anyone specifically when we're writing.

-I don't. I don't know, do you? -No.

Sometimes, in terms of trying to conceive of how a character would deliver dialogue,

we would imagine in our heads Jack Nicholson or Jimmy Cagney,

or somebody who has a very distinctive way of speaking.

And that's just sort of a guideline to put somebody's voice in our head

that allows us to give the dialogue a certain style.

Sometimes it's based on somebody that we actually know.

Again, just to give the character a style of talking.

In Back to the Future, since most of the characters were young people,

and there aren't any big stars that are gonna be young people,

we never thought of that at all.

Could you talk a little more specifically about your collaboration

and how you actually write together?

Yeah, we write together.

We just put ourselves in the office together and we write together.

I think that the way I sort of describe it is that we basically

just springboard ideas back and forth and act scenes out together,

and then if we come up with something good, Bob writes it down.

He writes it in longhand.

We put it... We first started outlining it with index cards.

And a lot of times we'll think of a scene, and we don't know where it goes.

For example, one of the first scenes in this movie

was "Marty invents rock 'n' roll."

So, we write that down on a card and we pin it up on the wall,

"and you say to yourself," Okay, if Marty's going to invent rock 'n' roll,

"we have to establish the fact that he can play rock 'n' roll."

So that automatically tells you there has to be a scene at the beginning of the movie

that has him... It turned out to be his audition,

so that you could see that he knows how to play it.

So, one scene then becomes two scenes.

And every time we come up with an idea...

He's gonna invent the skateboard.

So, we have a card that says, "Skateboard chase,"

and that means we have to see him on a skateboard somewhere

in the beginning of the movie.

So, again, one scene then becomes two scenes.

And pretty soon we have a bunch of cards up on the board,

and a lot of times there'll be a lot of space in between them, and we'll say,

"All right. How do we get from this scene over here to that scene over there?"

And we'll start kind of focusing on what would have to happen.

We always use pushpins on those cards because we're always moving them around.

'Cause sometimes we'll say, "No, we can't have that scene here."

"It's gotta come two scenes later."

And eventually we have a full outline.

And then we start really talking about each scene,

and the dialogue, and the physical action that takes place.

It might be noteworthy... I remember... To say a few things

about my recollection about writing the screenplay,

which was, it took years.

It took us years. I mean, this was...

I remember us... I think it took us at least three years to write this.

-Does that make sense? Is that about right? -No.

Well, maybe it felt like three years.

Well, from when we finally made the movie, it was.

-But we started writing in... -Maybe a year?

...I think it was around September of 1980, after Used Cars came out.

And the first draft has a February '81 date on it,

and then we spent two months doing a re-write on that.

And that was the draft that we took

everywhere in town and everybody passed on it.

I remember, one of the things that we suffered over,

one of the big breakthroughs was the...

We didn't know how to get Marty out of the Oedipal situation with his mother.

I remember that.

I think that took us months and months to figure that one out.

And we didn't know how we got...

We knew we had this great story that got us to this place,

and then we didn't know what to do. We just had no...

And I remember we were stuck on the fact that we felt that it was...

That the Marty character had to do something.

We couldn't figure out what he could possibly do.

And then the big breakthrough came when we decided that...

And my favorite line that we wrote in the entire movie is when she says,

"It's like I'm kissing my brother."

And that made it like...

That just solved that whole problem.

We were able to actually make that story work.

We struggled over that for a really long time.

And I think the other big breakthrough, which made the movie,

just charged the screenplay, was when we came up with the idea

of making the time machine mobile.

Because our first drafts

were the time machine was this machine that was this big, you know...

-It was a chamber. -A chamber.

-It was in Doc's lab. -Right.

And if he had to go anywhere, he had to put it in the back of a pickup truck.

And, in fact, in that early draft, the nuclear-powered thing

required them to drive it out onto a nuclear test site in New Mexico.

And that was the climax of the movie, and it stayed that way

until budget problems

made it impossible for us to do that.

The thing with the nuclear test site,

we actually went into production expecting to design that

and the idea was in all the early drafts of the screenplay.

The only place they were able

to get enough energy

was they had to bring the time machine to the Nevada Nuclear Test Site

in the '50s, where they set up all those little villages and towns

to blow up with nuclear bombs.

And Marty and the doc sneak onto that,

and the big countdown was to the nuclear blast.

When Marty went back in time, he arrived at ground zero

and there was a bunch of tourists there, taking his picture and stuff.

But anyway, we were told that we had to cut $2 million out of the budget

or they weren't gonna make the movie.

And that's one of the things where there's method to the madness

because the realization that we weren't going to be able

to go and move the company

to Nevada or to Arizona or someplace and shoot.

We were going to have to do the whole thing at the studio, to do it for the price.

But it turned out that it became a much better scene.

It became a much better scene because there was no way

to involve the doc, actually, if I remember right.

Yeah, Doc was... It was just over the walkie-talkies

where Doc was just there, on the side of a mountain, watching all this stuff.

And, of course, just tying everything into the town

and keeping it all local in the town, just made it all absolutely better.

And it was one of those things where necessity becomes the mother of invention.

Because when we were told, "Okay, you gotta cut that scene out,"

Bob and I spent a weekend walking around the back lot at Universal,

"trying to figure out," Well, this is the only environment that we have

"that isn't gonna cost us any money, that we can completely control."

"Exactly what are we gonna do?"

And we managed to cook up the clock tower sequence.

One of the most memorable characters in the movie is, of course, Doc Brown.

I was just wondering if you had any kind of inspirations

or any kind of influences

that helped you create that particular character.

Well, Christopher Lloyd always said that he made the character of Doc Brown

a combination of Albert Einstein and the conductor Leopold Stokowski.

So, all those big, broad gestures that he's always doing.

Chris is a big classical music aficionado,

so that's what he had in his mind, a big shock of hair like Stokowski.

If you don't remember who Stokowski is, just watch the beginning of Fantasia.

That's Leopold Stokowski.

In the early drafts of the screenplay, the reason we...

We always wrote him as Professor Brown,

and that had a good ring to it. You know, he was a professor.

We never wrote him as a doc.

And Sid Sheinberg, the head of the studio, insisted that we change his title

from professor, because he thought it just sounded too corny.

There's those famous Sid Sheinberg stories, which we can tell you.

He had three notes when Steven gave him the screenplay to read.

One was that we couldn't call the doc "Professor."

The second one was, in the original draft of the screenplay

he had a chimp as a mascot, instead of the dog.

And Sid said, "You have to get rid of that chimp"

"because no one is gonna go see a movie with a chimp in it."

We actually had this meeting with him. It was hysterical.

"He said," I've done the research.

"No movie with a chimpanzee in it has ever made a profit."

And I said, "Well..." In the '80s, there were these two Clint Eastwood movies,

Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can.

And I said, "What about those movies, Sid?"

And he said, "That was an orangutan in those movies."

And the third one was, he hated the title. But we stuck to our guns on that one.

-There was a fourth one... -Which one was that?

...which was that originally Marty's mother's name was not Lorraine.

-It was Meg. Remember that? -That's right, that's right.

He didn't like that name, so he said, "Name her Lorraine."

Coincidentally, his wife's name is Lorraine.

So, we knew how to pick our battles

because I think Sid's comment was

that nobody's going to see a movie with the word "future" in the title.

So, we decided that was the one. We would give up the others.

We'd change the chimp to a dog, and the names,

but we stuck to Back to the Future.

Then, afterwards, we were having a meeting, a celebratory meeting

in Sid's office, after the movie was a giant success.

We said, "Well, you see, Sid? People went to the movie."

And he says, "Yes, but I'll never know if I was right or not, will I?"

And I guess not.

Bob Gale, can you actually reveal what the alternate title was?

Well, the alternate title,

and this got hot and heavy during the actual production and post-production

of the movie because we'd given Sid what he wanted on these other issues

and he kept on this.

And he decided that the hip title for the movie

should be Spaceman from Pluto.

And that's because of the comic book that the kid has in the barn,

Space Zombies from Pluto.

Sid actually sent us a memo where he outlined certain changes

that should be made in the movie to reflect this new title, Spaceman from Pluto.

And one of them was that instead of Marty saying,

"I'm Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan," he should say, "I'm from the planet Pluto."

There were one or two other things like that.

And Bob and I got this memo, and we were really scared and worried

because he meant it.

I mean, you gotta be careful about the kind of fights that you pick

with the head of the company.

He wasn't just the head of the studio, he was the head of the company.

Every single person at Universal thought Back to the Future

was a great title, except for Sid.

So, we went to Steven with this memo, because Steven had been copied on it,

and we said, "Steven, what are we gonna do?"

"He really means it. He really wants to change this title."

And Steven, in this one solution to the problem,

I think, earned all the money that he made off of all of these movies.

He wrote a memo back to Sheinberg, and he said,

"Dear Sid, thank you so much for your most humorous memo."

"We really all got a big laugh out of it."

Steven knew that Sid was too proud to admit

that he'd meant it seriously, and we never...

That was the end of it. That was the end of it.

Going back to the time machine itself,

what convinced you to choose the DeLorean?

Well, the joke in the barn, because...

That's what my memory is.

We backed it into that joke because we thought, well, a car from...

What would really look like a spaceship landing in the barn in the '50s?

"We said," Hey, a DeLorean's got these gull-wing doors.

"That'll really look like a futuristic machine from outer space."

-And that was basically it. -And it was stainless steel.

And we had no idea there'd be all this cocaine controversy

and it would be such an infamous car when we wrote the joke.

We actually got a fan letter from John DeLorean

after the movie came out.

And he just sent us this glowing letter, how much he enjoyed the movie

and thanked us for keeping his dream alive,

and said that any of the people that worked on the car in the movie

could have a job on his design team.

Can you explain why you don't really go into the backstory

of the relationship between Doc Brown and Marty?

We never really thought about it.

We thought that the familiarity of him

being able to just walk into his lab...

Actually, you know what? We always saw it as

the way Leave It to Beaver was with...

-Gus the Fireman. -... Gus the Fireman, you know?

Beaver always had the Fireman that he could go to as...

Basically, he was like his therapist,

and he went there and he would tell him about

all the problems he was having with his family.

"We sort of said," Let's have a relationship between Marty and Doc

"that Marty would be this kid who was attracted to this crackpot scientist"

"who was building inventions in this garage down the street."

But we just felt that to build a whole backstory would take too long,

so we just sort of did it with... Trying to blast through it with the fact

that obviously they know each other because they're so familiar.

When I was a kid, people had moved next door to us.

The guy was a retired professional photographer.

Not retired, he was just much older.

And he had all this great darkroom equipment.

I was eight years old, and I'd never seen any of this kind of stuff before.

So, this guy was like a magician to me.

And me and my brothers would go over there and watch him develop film.

We developed a relationship with him.

He just was somebody that was kind of in my head as the type of thing.

Plus, in a smaller town, if everybody tells you

there's a guy who's dangerous, who's a crackpot,

well, every kid's gonna want to find out who that guy is and get to know him.

And every single movie story can be found in episodes of Leave It to Beaver.

So, for all you screenwriters out there,

if you're struggling with a problem in your screenplay, watch Leave It to Beaver.

You'll find the way to fix the script in that series.

As you took the script around town and kept getting rejections,

did you, at any point, go back to the drawing board and revise the script at all?

What happened was, was that Spielberg wanted to do it right after Used Cars.

He was the only guy who got it.

But we had made two movies that he executive produced that flopped.

-Plus 1941, which we... -We took the blame... Yeah.

Because we got...

That was his only money-losing movie up to that point, was the one that we wrote.

"So, I said to Steven," If we make this movie, and it doesn't work

"we'll probably never be able to work again."

And he said, "You're right."

And so, we just put it on the shelf.

We actually even had one meeting on the movie

with a studio executive, who I won't name, who was so excited about it.

We sat down in his office and he went, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah."

We're telling him what we want to do,

and we thought it was a really good meeting.

And then, he said, "So what's Steven's involvement?"

And we said, "Well, nothing." He said, "Oh."

And the meeting was over, and we knew that that was it.

So, then, after Romancing the Stone, now everybody wanted to make it.

Bob and I felt that the only upstanding thing to do

was to bring it to the only guy who had original faith in it,

not based on our box office track record.

So, we brought it back to Steven.

And then, he had become famous with E.T. and everything.

So, it was like this perfect, perfect fit, because he was becoming

-this fantasy brand name... -Master of fantasy and family entertainment.

That was one of the big objections to the script

is everybody told us that it was too sweet, it was too nice.

Everybody was looking for R-rated, raunchy comedies.

Except Disney, who said it was too dirty.

Remember that?

Because of the thing with his mother, they said, "No, no."

That was before the Eisner-Katzenberg days. That was the old Disney.

They said, "No, we can't make this."

-That's right. -That's right.

It wasn't raunchy enough for most studios, and too dirty for Disney.

So, we were stuck.

How did you go about coming up with the mechanics of the time travel?

Well, the mechanics of time travel.

The fact that everybody says, "Why 88 miles an hour? What's so special about that?"

It's easy to remember. That's all. There's no special significance to that.

The whole idea of what the time machine should look like,

we decided way early on

that if there was going to be a working time machine,

one of the problems that we had to solve writing-wise was, "Where did it come from?"

At first we said, "Well, it could come from the government."

"The government could be working on it."

We thought about that and we said, "No, if the government built it, it wouldn't work."

Then we thought, "Some major corporation could be working on it."

Then we said, "No, we don't like the idea that some major corporation

"is working on time travel."

That opens up a big can of worms that we didn't want to deal with.

We thought that the American myth is

that there's a guy who, in his garage,

invented the automobile engine that gets 200 miles to the gallon.

He invented the reusable match that the match companies won't let us have

because it'll put them out of business.

The car companies won't let us have the engine.

That's the guy that would invent time travel.

And he would look like Dr. Emmett Brown.

And so, one of the things that we kept stressing to our art department

and the people that we hired to help design the DeLorean,

was that it really needed to look dangerous

and look like it was built in somebody's garage.

It couldn't have a real Star Trek, machined look

because a guy that's trying to invent stuff in his garage

would just stick something on the side of his car temporarily to see if it worked.

Then he'd forget that it was temporary, and he'd put some other coil on there.

Pretty soon you'd have this big mishmash.

So, we wanted it to look dangerous.

At the same time, because it was nuclear,

we did do a little homework on nuclear reactors.

And those big vents that are on the back, those are supposed to be cooling towers,

the same that you have at a nuclear power plant.

And so, after the plutonium fires off,

you have all this big steam come out of there

because that's what would happen in a nuclear reaction.

So, we did actually try to have some sense of logic

that we could stick to and make sense out of it, that was a guide.

But as far as the actual nuts and bolts of time travel itself,

that's one of the things that Bob and I are really proud of.

We were absolutely fanatics about dealing with

what the real rules of time travel would be.

And we basically based our time-travel theories

on The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.

And simply, we stuck to that one, which is that you travel through time,

you don't travel through space.

And most of your time-travel stories and movies make that fatal mistake of,

all of a sudden you're in California, and you travel back to ancient Rome.

How did you get to Rome if you're in this latitude and longitude?

And in the H.G. Wells stories, the time machine never moved in space

except at the very end, when he drags it a few feet.

Right.

So, that's exactly what Bob and I did in how our time machine worked.

We were very careful. As a matter of fact, I was just thinking about it

as I was watching the end of the movie just now,

I remembered that we had...

The whole reason why we had the car not be able to start

after he got back at the end of the movie, to the future,

was so that we didn't have to deal with the duplication of two DeLoreans.

We only had to deal with him being duplicated once,

in that one paradox, and we cleaned it up real quick.

And, of course, if you talk to all the time-travel scientists

and the people who study this stuff,

they think that we'll probably be able to figure out how to travel into the future.

Traveling to the past will be much more difficult

because of the paradoxes involved.

Eric Stoltz was in the movie prior to Michael J. Fox.

Can you tell us why you had to re-cast the role of Marty?

The lesson that I learned was you just have to stick to your convictions

at all costs, no matter what.

And what happened to me is... I just...

It was completely my fault, and I miscast Eric Stoltz.

I didn't know it at the time. I felt that I was going to be able to make it work.

I had always envisioned Michael in the part, but he was doing this TV series.

And conventional wisdom was that you can't possibly do

a feature film with an actor who's in a TV series. It's impossible.

One of the other mandates I was given by Mr. Sheinberg was,

is that if I didn't have the movie for Memorial Day, I'm not making it.

So I was stuck, and I had to cast somebody,

and Eric was the best that I had available.

But then, when I shot the first couple of weeks of the movie,

he just wasn't understanding, or I wasn't able to communicate the type of humor

that I was seeing in the movie.

The other reason that Steven deserves all the money that he made off of this movie

was the fact that, when I went to Steven and I said,

"You know, I've got to re-cast Eric," he said...

-"You're right." -"You're right."

And he went to Sid, and got him to agree.

Not only got him to agree to let me re-cast him, of course,

the painful part was everything that poor Eric had to go through,

but then, also, to agree to allow us to make the movie...

Basically, we made this entire movie at night.

We made this movie from 6:00 at night till 6:00 in the morning

because Michael was working on the TV show during the day,

then he'd drive to the studio. We just stayed on nights.

-It was the most... -It was splits. It was splits, most of it.

It was splits most of it, but it was pretty insane

because we were on sound stages shooting,

lighting the sound stages for daylight at 2:00 in the morning.

You know. So...

So, it was pretty insane, the way we did it.

And we didn't make the Memorial Day date, but we did make the Fourth of July.

The irony of it all is that because we put Eric Stoltz in the movie

is the reason that we got Michael J. Fox in the movie.

We approached Gary Goldberg, who was the producer of Family Ties.

That was the first phone call we made, 'cause we wanted Michael in the movie.

And he said...

He read the script, he said, "This is perfect for Michael."

He said, "I cannot let him read this script. Because when he reads this

"and I tell him that he can't do it,"

"that I'm not going to let him out of the TV show to do it,"

"he'll hate me for the rest of his life."

And Meredith Baxter-Birney, who played his mother on that show,

was pregnant at that time, and Michael was really carrying the show.

So, that just right away put him out of it.

So, we kept pushing our start date back while we kept trying to find

the perfect Marty McFly.

So, by the time we made the realization that we had to make a change,

it was now the beginning of January, 1985.

Meredith Baxter-Birney had already had her baby.

So we went back to Gary Goldberg and said, "We are up against it, Gary."

"There's only one guy that can play this part."

"And he said," Okay, I'll let Michael read it. If he wants to do it,

"it's fine with me, as long as you guys understand

"that Family Ties is always in first position.

"And that if there's a conflict between us and you, we win."

"Family Ties wins."

So, that was the rules.

And, of course, when Michael read the script, he flipped for it,

and he said, "Try and stop me from being in this movie."

One of the amazing things about the movie is,

of course, the performances,

and I was just wondering how much of those performances are in the script

and how much of the performances was improvisation by the actors?

I don't like to watch actors improv in movies.

I hate watching actors trying to think up lines while they're acting.

But if they can take the essence of what it is that we wrote and improve it.

-Or, you know... -Make it theirs.

Make it theirs. I'm fine with that. I'm fine with that.

You know, the whole point is that the screenplay

is supposed to be this blueprint for the movie.

I've always said that good directing is good casting, and good writing.

You cast the right actor and you've got a good script,

your directing looks great.

The mannerisms that Crispin Glover has,

that's what he brought.

He came in to read, and he started doing all that stuff with his hands.

We just looked at each other and said,

"This guy was probably born to play George McFly."

Right, and my job as the director, in that case,

was the endless throwing the net over Crispin,

because he was completely off...

I would say he was completely off about 50% of the time

in his interpretation of the character.

Meaning, he had bizarre ideas of what the character's wardrobe should look like

and what his hair should look like.

Probably the single hardest thing

that we had to do in the movie was at the very end,

when he comes in as the new George McFly

and he looks like a normal, middle-class American citizen.

That was pulling teeth to get him to do that.

Crispin thought that when George shows up at the end of the movie,

he should be wearing gray baggy pants

and a sleeveless, tank-top T-shirt

like some guy in the barrio.

I swear to God, he absolutely...

He did those scenes totally under protest.

That was the second time we filmed them.

We filmed them once, and they weren't right.

He actually went around dressed the way Bob just described on the set,

trying to solicit the crew to say,

"Don't you think this is what George should look like?"

And nobody on the crew agreed with him.

There's a scene in the cafeteria

when he's writing his stories,

and if you look real close at his performance,

his face is all red and his eyes are puffy and his eyes are all bloodshot

because Crispin insisted that his hair should be sticking straight up.

And you know...

The day before, because we got this thing with Michael...

We had shot Michael's side of the scene with his hair down.

I said... It didn't make any sense. "Crispin, I don't understand this."

He said, "When I write, I think my hair should be straight up."

I said, "But I don't get that." He said, "You don't get that?" I said, "No."

And he couldn't explain it.

When Bob said, "It's not going to match with what we shot yesterday,"

-he said, "Brando never matched." -"Brando never matched."

So, that was his answer to that.

Wasn't it difficult for Michael J. Fox to be shooting his television series

and shoot the movie at the same time? How did he manage?

How could he even function doing that?

Well, he was young.

He was young in those days.

We started shooting with Michael

around the first or second week of January 1985,

and I think his show ended shooting

about the second or third week of March,

and then we wrapped photography in the third week in April.

And then we also had the problem of, we had to finish everything in the square

that was the 1950s, because we had to turn it around into the 1980s,

so we actually shot the daytime scenes

on the back lot, on the weekends.

So, Michael didn't even get to sleep on the weekends

because the only time we could get him for a full day of light

was on Saturday and Sunday at great expense to management

because everyone's working platinum time on Sunday to shoot.

You know, so he didn't sleep hardly at all

during that whole 10, 12 week period that we were making the movie.

How did you go about selecting Christopher Lloyd

to play the character of Doc Brown?

Neil Canton had worked with Christopher Lloyd on Buckaroo Banzai.

And I think... As I remember, the guy that we first wanted to have

play Doc Brown was John Lithgow.

Who also was a veteran of that movie.

And he wasn't available, and Neil just said, "You guys got to meet Christopher Lloyd.

"You gotta meet him." And Chris came in.

Didn't say a word, just sat in the office.

But he looked at us with those eyes,

and we said, "Shit, that's Dr. Emmett Brown."

As a matter of fact, Chris never said a word.

I never had a conversation with him the entire movie.

Chris is so shy that it...

"You know, I'd just say," All right, Chris,

"we're going to put you in a harness, you're gonna go up on the thing.

"The camera's gonna be here. You're going to hang from the clock.

"There will be lightning and wind." And he would go, "Okay."

And that's how Chris and I...

It took this entire movie for Chris to warm up to me enough

to actually, you know...

For us to have conversations in the following movies.

But, yeah, Chris is... He'd just say, "Okay."

The amazing thing about him is that he would be different every time.

Every take he'd do something a little different.

You never exactly knew what it would be, but it was always right.

He created such latitude with this character

that we always had an embarrassment of riches in the editing room.

'Cause he'd just do some crazy thing with his eyes on one line in one take,

and then he'd do something else in another take.

It was always a tough decision to try to say,

"Which of these moments are we gonna use?"

He was always wonderful, and it was good for the other actors.

It was especially good for Michael J. Fox

because Chris kept surprising him,

and so he was able to react a little bit differently in each scene,

in each take, and that kept his performance fresh.

And it kept him on his toes when he might have preferred

to have gone into his trailer to take a nap.

And you've got to love Chris because you talk about...

Somebody asked a question earlier about what happens?

How does a performance get designed?

"For example, I think Chris is 6'4"...

-6'2", yeah. -6'2", and Michael's not that tall.

And you've gotta love Chris, because Chris does the whole movie...

He does the whole movie hunched over, so I could keep them both in frame.

Chris did this whole performance like this, "Marty!"

And he did that for me,

because otherwise I couldn't keep these guys in frame.

And you know, he just kept himself in frame for me

and kind of made the character live that way.

The other thing I remember, too,

is Chris absolutely would never let you know what he was going to do

until the camera was rolling.

And I mean, he would only ever do a rehearsal

or a camera blocking, literally, at quarter speed.

And he would stumble through his lines,

and he would have the script pages with him.

So then when we would say "roll,"

he was nowhere where the camera operator could find him in frame.

So, basically, I just started rolling the camera all the time,

-knowing that and telling everybody that... - "We don't know what's going to happen..."

-"We don't know what's going to happen." -"...but it will be good."

The only way to get a full-speed rehearsal is to roll film through the camera.

It was a thing that Chris had about that.

Did you always have a sequel in mind

because, of course, at the end of Back to the Future,

Doc Brown comes back in the car?

No, I've said in this other documentary

if we were planning for a sequel, I wouldn't have put the girl in the car.

You know? I mean, no, we didn't...

-The ending was a joke. -It was a joke.

It's just a joke. "Something's got to be done about your kids."

We had no idea whether this movie would make a dime.

We would have been happy if it had just barely broke even

because our other movies lost money.

We didn't know that anybody would have the slightest interest in seeing this picture.

So, that was...

The characters go riding off into the sunset. That's the end of the movie.

What were you looking for when you were casting the role of Biff?

Interestingly, there's a character in the gang with a crew cut

who's credited as "Skinhead." His name is J.J. Cohen.

He was somebody that we were very seriously considering to play Biff.

He came in and he just knocked us out.

But he didn't have the physical presence that playing against Eric Stoltz...

You would have never believed that he could push Eric Stoltz around.

If Michael J. Fox had been in the movie at that time,

J.J. Cohen might have ended up being Biff

because he would have been four or five inches taller than him.

We wanted somebody that had a real physical presence

and Tom Wilson is a big guy.

Absolutely nothing like the character of Biff.

Just the sweetest, most gentle guy in the world.

He says that when he was a kid, he got picked on,

and that's where he drew his inspiration for what he did.

Can you make comments about Lea Thompson

and working with her on the film?

Lea was just so great, and wonderful, and sweet,

and she did everything she was told and she never gave us any problems.

It was like a dream.

She would just work and do it perfect every take.

She was just absolutely fantastic.

I can't... Just great.

We can't tell any great Lea Thompson stories.

Because there are none.

-She was a director's dream. -Always there.

Always on time, always knew her lines, always did it right.

Actually, there's something we should talk about, which is that

one of the important decisions that we made in the movie

was using young actors to play themselves old.

At the time, there were executives that thought

maybe we should find actors that looked like them

to play them older.

And we went through quite a lot of makeup tests to prove

that it could be done this way.

'Cause normally, and certainly at that time,

this wasn't done.

You didn't take an 18-year-old or 22-year-old actor

and put makeup on them and make them look like they were 47.

And so, we did quite a lot of extensive makeup tests

with Ken Chase, we hired.

He'd done all the prosthetic makeup on Roots.

Ken always told us that it would have been a lot easier for him

if he were making these 18-year-olds look like they were 75 instead of 45.

'Cause then he could have put full makeup on all over their face.

But he had to create these different appliances

so that the actual face of the actor

would be there, would be able to move,

and everybody didn't look like they had had too much Botox.

It's a tribute to all the cast

that they were able to create things in their performance

that made you buy them at age 47.

It wasn't just the makeup, it was their posture, and their body language,

and their wardrobe, of course.

Can you tell us about working with Dean Cundey,

your director of photography,

and Larry Pauli, the production designer on Back to the Future?

I had worked with both Dean and Larry on Romancing the Stone,

and got along with them great.

The design of the movie, basically...

I guess the thing we started with was the square, the town square.

We just wanted to make this kind of cynical statement

about what it used to look like, and what it looks like now,

and that was a lot of fun to do.

And to be able to just take it from there, but...

We actually considered shooting that on location, remember?

-Right. -We scouted Petaluma.

We went up to Petaluma, which is where Joe Dante made Explorers,

which came out a couple weeks before our movie did in 1985.

And it had this great look to it, but when we started realizing

all the headaches that we would have trying to change the light fixtures,

the street lighting, and every little thing, every business that had to be bought out

to change a modern-day town and take it back 30 years,

it ended up that it was pointless to do anything except shoot it on the back lot.

In terms of the car,

Michael J. Fox talks about how demonic that car was.

Do you have any memories about how difficult it was

to work with it as a prop?

Yeah, it was a terrible car. It was terrible.

I mean, the frame is plastic.

They had a four-cylinder Volvo engine in that model DeLorean.

It didn't have any pickup at all.

And it was impossible to shoot around.

We had to cut one apart because it was too small to get a camera in.

So, all the scenes that we have inside of the DeLorean,

where Michael is sitting in there and driving it,

were a process done on the stage.

We actually had to cut the car apart so that we could pull the back wall out

-and get the camera in there. -Right.

Yes, but all movie cars are like that. There's just something about it, you know?

As soon as you bring a picture car on the set, it just doesn't start.

Or it runs out of gas. It never fails. It's just one of those curses.

I've never had it not happen.

One of the problems that we had a lot was...

Again, nobody would have ever thought of this one.

We'd be shooting outside on the back lot, and at night it got really cold out there.

It was wintertime when we were shooting it.

And the way that the DeLorean gull-wing doors stayed up was

there were these little gas-jet things, like you use to open up a door.

And when we left the door open for a while,

the gas would condense in the cold

and the door would just start to drop down in the middle of a take.

So, finally, in between takes, we had the special effects crew out there

with portable hair dryers,

and they were in there heating up those valves.

Heating up that gas, so that the car door would stay open through an entire take.

ILM did the special visual effects for all three movies

and obviously, they were in their early days at the time you made the first picture.

I was just wondering if you had any concerns at the time

about some of the visual effects that had to be done to the picture?

There was no digital work.

That's what all... No, no, no, no.

Everything there was optical.

There's only about 30-some shots in the whole movie.

Everyone sees it as a big special effects movie,

but there weren't that many shots.

In those days, everything had to be a lock-off.

They had this little VistaVision camera that could only run a minute of film.

You know, that was real old-fashioned, optical stuff

from the early days of Star Wars. That's what everything was.

The car at the end was a miniature

that they made move just like they did the spaceships in Star Wars

on an articulated arm.

I guess it was a motion-controlled camera they had up at ILM

with a blue screen.

Just all the old optical work.

We never saw a decent optical until about a week

before the picture had to be turned over to negative cutting.

We were terrified, because this was the first time we'd ever worked with ILM.

And we would get these comps down, and they would be terrible.

Bob would have these frantic conversations with Ken Ralston

about why this didn't look right, and why this didn't look right,

and would it even be possible to get it in time.

And ILM did.

There's still one shot that still doesn't work.

Ken just couldn't get the one where he sees his eye through his hand.

But you know what? That's the imperfection that we put in there for...

We didn't want to insult Allah, so...

It's a movie, so it's perfect enough.

ILM worked on all three movies,

but obviously, when Back to the Future was made,

they were in their earlier days.

And I'm just wondering if you had any concerns about some of the work

that had to be done in the movie, in terms of visual effects?

There were shots of Chris on the clock tower

where you actually can see the cable on his harness,

which would be an insult if I paid $9 to go see Spider-Man

and I actually saw a cable in the shot.

There's no excuse for that now.

But, in those days, there was no way to remove it.

You know, that was the best piece or performance.

God, this movie would be so easy to make now.

Can you imagine how I would have done the town square?

I would have just painted it in.

I would've had huge buildings. And it would have been like...

And then, when I went back to the '80s,

it would've been so completely different.

I wouldn't have had to do it all physically.

So, I could have made it better, if I had digital technology.

Movies have always been this technical thing.

It all, ultimately, comes back to the script and the imagination of the filmmaker.

The digital stuff is just a tool.

Being a director and a screenwriter,

was there a particular scene that you were excited about

going in and directing?

And did that scene come out exactly the way you wanted it,

the way you had imagined it?

I just couldn't believe how lucky I was

on the day we shot Michael walking into the town square

for the first time, because I had those great cumulus clouds in the sky.

See now, if I was doing the movie today, I just would have painted all those in.

"The sky would have looked perfect. But I was like, "I can't believe

"how lucky we were to have that sky."

-That was a great thing. -So, you have those,

or there's millions of times in this movie where the actor will do something

"that you never imagined, and you go," Wow!

"I never thought I'd ever see an actor do a reading like that, or hear that."

Those are the gems. But as far as my work,

it's always just compromise.

It's always less than I ever imagined it, you know?

I always have to go in and say, "Well, we'll piece this together."

"We'll figure out a way to make it work, somehow."

"If we had another day, it could have really been great."

You know? That's how I come away from everything.

Of course, in this movie, we did have the unusual circumstance

of actually getting to redo a couple of those scenes.

We did make them a little bit better.

Made them a little better. But they were also angst-ridden, too,

because once you go back, you feel like you're compelled to make it better.

That's why, any time you re-shoot, it's always a pain because you're going,

"Oh, no, I've got to make it better now."

There's nothing worse than re-shooting.

Michael J. Fox would go crazy because we'd have these conversations,

"Well, you did this scene before."

He'd go, "Damn it. I never did this scene before."

That's right.

Some scenes I shot, you know, exactly the way I shot it with Eric.

Completely, camera in the same place.

Other times, I was able to go back and say, "You know what?

"We can improve this by doing this." And the best thing is, you get to...

The advantage of going back and redoing stuff sometimes

is that you know what you don't need.

Well, let's not waste our time doing that wide-angle,

we're never going to use it. So, that was helpful.

Can you comment on the editing of the film?

Was it as frantic as the shooting, in terms of schedule?

And are there any deleted scenes?

I guess I was coming into the editing room about two hours before the call.

So, I'd go and I'd edit, and then I'd...

Because we were shooting nights, I'd go and I'd edit, then I'd go see dailies,

and then I'd go start to work. And I would just, you know, we had...

I think the editing rooms were trailers near the back lot.

Toward the end, I'd just get in a golf cart and zip over and they'd look at it.

Look at a scene, give them my notes.

We had to put two editors on, because

we had to have this accelerated release because... When did we wrap?

We wrapped, I think it was April 20.

-And the movie came out on the Fourth... -July 3.

So, it was nine-and-a-half weeks from when we wrapped to

when the movie was in the theater.

This movie ruined post-production schedules in Hollywood,

because nobody thought that this was even possible.

And at the point when we changed actors,

Universal was resigned to the fact that the movie probably wouldn't come out

until the middle of August now.

So, we were kind of thinking that

we'd have a release date in the middle of August.

And then we had this dynamite sneak preview.

And here comes Mr. Sheinberg again,

and he sees the movie with this audience and they just go completely nuts.

And the visual effects weren't finished,

the last shot in the movie was in black and white.

It was still pretty rough.

But the audience just got it, and got it big time.

And he pulled us aside, and he said,

"Is it possible? What would we have to do"

"to get this movie out for the Fourth of July weekend?"

And we said, "Write some checks."

And he said, "Okay, whatever it costs, do it."

And we actually had sound crews working 24 hours a day.

We had, in the Hitchcock Theater, where we were doing the mix,

we had a pre-dub crew working the graveyard shift.

They'd start working about 8:00 at night,

and go home at 7:00 in the morning.

And then we'd come in at 8:00 in the morning,

and mix the picture with the tracks that they had pre-dubbed for us the night before.

So, that was insane.

Bob Gale, can you tell us a little more about those sneak previews?

Any surprises after the first one?

The first sneak preview... We had two sneak previews.

The first one was in San Jose, and we didn't invite the studio to that one.

One of the advantages of having Steven Spielberg

as your executive producer is,

he can close the door on certain people that you don't want there.

We didn't want their feedback yet.

We didn't want the studio to see the movie and hear their feedback.

We wanted to hear what the audience had to say.

And one of the things that... The movie had gotten no publicity.

Back then, there was no Internet, there was no advance word about anything.

Here we had a recruited audience, and all they knew was they were seeing a movie

that had Michael J. Fox, who they knew from Family Ties,

and Christopher Lloyd, who they knew from Taxi, and it was some kind of a comedy,

and they didn't even know what it was about. So when the...

They didn't even know it was about time travel.

So when the DeLorean came out of the truck, they didn't know what it was.

And, I remember, when Doc does his time-travel experiment with Einstein,

and the car and the dog disappears,

there was this very nervous thing happening in the audience,

where people thought that something bad might have happened to that dog.

They were real worried about that.

There was a big sigh of relief when the dog comes back and he's okay.

And I remember that the point in the movie at that screening where they got it

was when Marty sees his father in the cafe.

In that scene, where Biff and those guys come in and start harassing, "Hey, McFly."

At that point, you really knew that they were totally with it,

and they completely went with it.

We cut six or seven minutes out of the picture after that screening.

And that was the last time that, that ever happened.

That people didn't know it was a time-travel movie.

Once they knew that it was a time-travel movie,

and the word started to get out it was about this kid that meets his parents,

a lot of the stuff at the beginning played differently than it did

with a completely cold audience.

And, of course, no one was ever again worried about the dog.

Can you tell us a little bit about Steven Spielberg?

What is he like to work with on a day-to-day basis,

in production and post-production. Was he very hands-on?

With me, Steven's great.

Steven's a director, so he doesn't ask you to do insane things.

He's always respected my vision as a director.

I can't speak for other directors, but for me,

he's never meddled in the process anywhere.

Tell them the story about the score,

and how Steven was so concerned about the score.

-Remember that? -For this movie?

-Yeah. -No.

Okay, well...

Bob had worked with Al Silvestri on Romancing the Stone,

and Steven wasn't that enamored with the score of Romancing the Stone

and he made no bones about making that clear.

And he thought that we needed somebody that could do a more...

John Williams kind of a score.

And he was always paranoid about what the score was going to be.

So, in that first preview, we had a mixture of temp music,

and we'd had the first two days of scoring.

So we actually had some of the real score cut into the movie.

So one of Alan's cues came on during the sneak,

and Steven leans over to Bob and says, "That's what your score should sound like."

And Bob said, "That is the score, Steven."

Yeah, right, I remember that.

Steven's always trying to do what's right for you and the movie.

And you just have to sometimes, you know...

You just have to cherry-pick his ideas.

Because sometimes he'll have really good ideas,

and sometimes he's not making the movie you're making.

So, it's like, he's just another opinion in the mix.

Bob has a theory. He says,

"If one person says something, that's their opinion."

"If two people say the same thing,"

"then there are probably millions of people that'll agree."

So, if one person said, "I don't like that,"

and somebody else said, "I like that, I didn't like this."

And there's all this difference of opinion about everything.

We'd just shrug our shoulders and say, "Well, let's not worry about that."

But if two or three people kept saying,

"I don't know, that thing where Biff does this really bothers me."

Then we'd go back and look at that and say, "Maybe there's a problem with that."

Did you guys have any concerns?

And what was the reaction really before the movie came out?

We had two previews in theaters and one on the studio lot.

There was a controversy about that, too, because

they had just built the Hitchcock Theater and supposedly it was cursed.

Meaning that any movie that ever played in the Hitchcock... They said,

"Is this movie is a comedy? Don't ever play it in the Hitchcock Theater,"

"because nothing plays in the Hitchcock Theater."

"Everything we ever screened there is..."

I remember Sid got up and said,

"The problem with..." After the lights came on.

We turned to him and we said, "So much for the curse of the Hitchcock Theater."

And Sid says, "The curse of the Hitchcock Theater has been shitty movies."

Right. So he said...

And the other thing, too, was we developed the original screenplay at Columbia,

and Steven originally developed E.T. at Columbia.

So when the lights came on at the first preview that Sid saw the movie,

the other thing he said was,

"I get the best stuff from Columbia Pictures!"

It was something like that.

So, anyway...

The previews, I remember, that I got

incredibly, almost paralyzed with fear when I had all these really good previews

because I understood that the movies...

Both I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Used Cars also had tremendous previews.

And it didn't mean anything. It's two different worlds.

There are so many wonderful movies that are made,

and they're great, and they work, but nobody wants to go see them.

So, I was really terrified

that they weren't going to be able to open this movie.

I just thought...

I just was terrified that the movie might not find its audience.

But then, I also remember that...

And I didn't like the TV spots.

And I realized on making this movie that that's an art form that I don't understand

and I should just butt out of the marketing because...

I forget who it was, but whoever cut the TV spot,

every single piece of marketing material

had that one line of Michael Fox's in there, where he said,

"Are you telling me my mother has got the hots for me?"

And I thought the way you sell this movie is with all my effects and my action.

But they saw the movie and they said, "This is what the spot should be."

And that one line was in everything, and there was something about that.

They understood that that's what people would come in for.

Seeing Michael J. Fox say that was the whole campaign.

For me, the first time that I thought

maybe we might have something happening was...

We shot the exterior of the high school stuff down at Whittier High School.

And one night, we were shooting the dance stuff,

and word got out that Michael J. Fox was in this movie,

and suddenly we had kids lined up,

seven-deep, just trying to catch a glimpse of Michael J. Fox.

That never happened to us before on any movie we'd done.

And we said, "Wow! This guy's really a star."

We didn't realize how big of a star you can be from being in a hit TV series.

And Michael was unavailable to do any promotion.

I remember that, because Sid was angry about that.

"So we've got the star of this movie, and we can't even put him on TV!"

Because Michael, on top of everything else with Family Ties,

they decided they were going to shoot an entire season in Europe.

-Like "Family Ties Goes to Europe." -"Goes to London. "Yeah.

And that was the summer that the movie opened,

so Michael wasn't even around to A, enjoy all the insanity of the success of the movie,

and B, he wasn't around to promote the movie either.

He just kept hearing on the phone that the movie's a success.

Do you remember good reviews? Bad reviews?

Were you concerned about reviews or even paying attention?

You mean of the reviews? No.

There were some, you know...

We got a lot of good reviews, we got some people that didn't like it.

That's what makes the world go round.

If you start worrying about that, you can really make yourself insane.

I remember Steve Martin, I saw him do an interview once where he said,

"The critics who give my movies good reviews"

"are insightful, wonderful, genius people,"

"and those who give my movies bad reviews are worthless scum."

At what point did you guys realize that not only did you have a hit,

but you had a mega hit? And how did it change your life and career?

Second weekend, the box office gross was higher than it was the opening weekend.

You don't see that anymore.

When the movie was released, we were only in 1, 100 or 1,200 theaters

and I think our opening box office gross was $10 million for the weekend,

which was big.

And, in fact, that summer, 11 out of 12 weeks

from when the movie was released, it was the number one movie in America.

One weekend we got knocked out by National Lampoon...

Some National Lampoon movie. I forgot what it was.

Our big concern was that we were going to get clobbered by the Mad Max...

Road Warrior... Beyond the Thunderdome.

-Right. -I remember, that was going to be it.

And we rolled right over them, so we were really excited about that.

What's interesting about this movie was,

I went to a couple of theaters to watch it play with the public.

And people, when Michael got back

and he did that thing with his family,

everyone assumed that the movie was over,

and some people would start to leave the theater,

and then they would come running back in,

because the movie was still going.

Because we had so many different endings on this movie,

that people were trying to second-guess the endings

and, of course, they were always wrong.

Can you explain how you stay in tune with the popular culture, what's going on?

Is that awareness important to you and is it part of your creative process?

The awareness is that it's a constant sort of anxiety and fear,

because you don't really know why it is and you don't know when it's going to go away.

And you look around you and see it happening

to other filmmakers all over the place.

And the landscape of everything is changing so dramatically.

But I just keep asking myself the two questions, which is,

"Do I want to go see this movie?"

And, "Do I think anybody else wants to go see it?"

Because that's the best I can do, and it's really out of my control.

We find that if you try to second-guess the audience too much,

you're going to shoot yourself in the head.

There's plenty of movies where

"you see that somebody in the studio is trying to say, "Oh, this is hot right now.

"We've got to put Britney Spears in a movie." Or whoever it is.

Whoever's hot, or whatever the big thing is, has to be in the movie.

And it's a bad idea because it's not true to somebody's vision.

Yeah. I remember one studio executive, when we were trying to get this movie made,

going back to the early days...

Again, I won't mention his name, but he said,

"Look. Time-travel movies never work. They just don't work."

That's what he said.

The Back to the Future trilogy was a huge success, of course.

I'm wondering if there were any times where you had creative differences,

when you were working together on the films?

We truly respect each other's talent and opinion.

What happens is, when we'll have a difference of opinion about something,

instead of believing that one of us is right and the other one is wrong,

we'll try to figure out...

I'll say, "Bob, what is it about this that is bothering you?"

He'll start explaining it, so that I can try to get inside of his head and figure it out.

And generally what would happen is that

we would come up with something brand-new that was better

than what my original idea was or what his idea was.

So, that's true collaboration.

You get a synthesis and...

Instead of two plus two equals four, it equals eight.

There is something about that, that I think a movie like Back to the Future,

which is a movie that really benefits from the writing team being a...

The writers being a team. Because the thing that...

When you have a collaboration like mine and Bob's,

whatever that is, because it does work.

Another thing that it has is...

There's no ego involved.

When one of us comes up with a really great idea, the other person says,

"That's a really great idea."

And that goes right into the script.

But why I think it's good for pop movies like this, is because

we're able to temper each other's own indulgences.

So we don't get self-indulgent, like you can when you're writing.

You don't have somebody there killing your darlings or calling you on it.

It gets very self-indulgent.

You say, "This scene is going on forever. Cut this stuff out."

And you're making mass entertainment, so you might as well be collaborating.

Because it's not something that's like a poem,

where it's supposed to be just your...

-Your vision. -Your emotional vision.

You're already bringing in actors and technicians,

and all these other people to help you realize a vision, so...

All film-making is collaborative, all the way through.

Bring each other into it, and bring the audience in that way.

At the end of the day, we want the movie to work for an audience.

What's the point if nobody's going to go see it?

Or if they go see it and they don't get it? Make sure that they get it.

Can you tell us about the music, how you went about choosing it.

Not just the score, but also the actual songs.

Huey Lewis and the News was such a big part of the movie.

Johnny B. Goode was always in the original script.

Johnny B. Goode was...

There was no second choice. It had to be Johnny B. Goode.

And that turned out to be the most expensive piece of music in the movie.

The idea was, we were thinking,

"Look, we've got a movie that's got teens in it. We've got to have a record on the radio."

From the beginning, we knew we wanted to have a signature song

that we could get on the radio.

And Alan said, "You've got to hear this guy, Huey Lewis."

Al Silvestri, and I said, "Okay."

I didn't know... The Sports album had just come out.

We called them, and they were very enthusiastic to get involved and came in,

and they wrote a song that wasn't right. And I brought Huey into the editing room,

and I showed him the cut scene.

This was during this insane post-production.

I think I cut I Want a New Drug to it,

just to give him an idea,

when Michael blasts out of the Doc's thing on a skateboard.

Huey said, "I get this. You want a song, a major song."

"We've got to do a song in a major key."

That was it. He went off and wrote Power of Love.

Which I remember, when Neil Canton called me and he said,

"I just found out Power of Love is going on."

This is two weeks before the movie came out.

"It's going on the radio and it's going in heavy rotation. "And I said, "Great."

We had to send all the field people out to all the radio stations,

to remind them to say, "From the movie Back to the Future."

The studio always wants the song to be the title of the movie.

Right, yeah.

"Huey Lewis said," I can't work that way.

"I've got to just write the song, that is going to be right for it."

Then he decided to write the second song. We only asked him to write one.

They wrote the second song, and we put that in there.

And I think it was...

I think it was the only number one single that Huey ever did or something like that.

He had like... I don't remember.

It was some big breakthrough record for these guys, even after the album.

And it got nominated for an Academy Award.

So, it was great.

All the DJs were saying, "From the movie Back to the Future."

It just was one of those things where all the...

You know, I guess they call it synergy now, all came together.

The plan came together.

Bob Zemeckis, I was just wondering if you could tell us

how you feel about the movie, looking back at it today.

Other than there being some pretty sloppy stuff in the movie.

From a technical standpoint, I was watching that early remote head,

and I hadn't seen this movie on the big screen...

I don't think I've seen it on the big screen since it came out.

And so, I'm sitting there and I'm watching in the dance scene,

we had this terrible remote head called Hot Head

and you could see it jerking. I'm going, "Oh, man."

But you know, nowadays, all that stuff is perfect.

I don't know if I'd be doing this comedy,

with that broad kind of comedy, maybe. I don't know...

Maybe. If the script is right, maybe I will. I don't know.

-It's a pretty good movie, actually. -It's pretty good.

I think... I don't know if...

I don't know if we've grown as screenwriters from this.

-This is the best thing we've ever written. -It's a pretty terrific screenplay.

And we're always flattered that we hear it's used in classes

as a quintessential example of how you set stuff up

and how you pay it off.

All that stuff works. Those are tried and true rules of storytelling,

and we made them work.

That's the nice thing of having the writers be the filmmakers.

When the director totally gets the script because he wrote it.

We start talking about Sid Sheinberg a lot.

When the movie came out, he said, "That screenplay is like a Swiss watch."

And you know what? He's right.

There is not a single frame of that movie that isn't

doing what they told us we're supposed to do in film school,

advance plot or character. Not a single frame.

It's really economical, this movie.

Can you discuss some of the deleted scenes

that were in the movie and were taken out prior to the release?

God, I don't remember.

I know what they are because we pulled them out to put them on the DVD.

What are they?

We had a scene...

The Darth Vader scene was a whole lot longer.

-Right. But that was just shortened. -That was shortened.

That was two minutes longer. There was a scene where...

Everything was pretty much lifts.

There was a scene where Doc Brown,

in the '50s, opens up the suitcase that we see him put in there.

He's going through all of his personal belongings

and he wants to know, "What's this thing?" and he pulls out this hairdryer.

He's got this fixation on underwear, so he pulls out this pair of underpants

and he's disappointed that they're cotton

and the underwear of the future isn't made out of paper.

We had a little scene where,

as a stall to get George McFly out... Before he could get out to the car,

the kid in the red hair

that cuts in on him at the dance locks him in a phone booth.

When he looks at the clock to see what time it is,

he decides he'd better be sure and calls

the time and temperature to find out exactly what time it is,

and ends up being locked in the phone booth.

That just turned out to be a scene that we didn't need.

How did he get out? Or didn't we show that?

We showed Strickland coming over there and saying,

"See what happens to slackers, McFly?"

And we filmed him letting him out, but we didn't ever use it.

You'd see him come out and you knew that Strickland must have let him out.

You know, I do remember...

This is how dangerous it is, how you can get so self-destructive.

I remember,

we almost cut the whole Johnny B. Goode scene out of the movie.

-Do you remember this? -Yes.

We were in the edit, it was the eleventh hour, and it was because of this thing,

it's the only place in the movie where the storyline stops.

For Michael to do this performance. And I remember,

I actually had Artie lift it and I looked at the movie without it,

and it worked okay, and then Artie, my editor, said,

"Why don't we leave it in for the preview?" And it's always like...

See? It's like...

These things are scary, what happens.

You just lose your focus, and you're thinking,

"Maybe I should make the movie shorter, and it doesn't really advance anything,"

"and it's fun to watch this, but..."

But then once the audience went crazy, then, you know.

It's really a shame that we can't preview anymore,

because previews are so important, but you just can't because

the movie is reviewed on the Internet the next hour.

It's a terrible tool that's been destroyed. It's so important to be able to do that.

One of the end sequences, with Doc in the car, uses fusion.

It is a contemporary concept now, but how did you know about it then?

Fuel cells.

We knew about that. We read about that.

Fusion was something that everybody's been experimenting with, and in fact,

I think about six or eight months after the movie came out

was when those scientists in Utah claimed that they had figured out cold fusion.

That was all over the news for four or five months,

until nobody could replicate those experiments.

It turned out those guys just didn't know what they were doing.

We actually got a letter from the Defense Department

when the movie came out.

They wanted to know what did we know about fusion power.

-Very scary, kids. -This is how the... That's how it works.

The sneak previews went really well, and, obviously,

there was great potential for the movie, but were you still

concerned somehow that the movie would maybe lose money and not turn a profit?

It's the studio's money, and the way we rationalize it is, we say,

"The studio has decided that it's worth $20 million to them to make this movie."

We're going to realize it as best we can,

"but they pushed the button and said, "We're gonna put...

"We're going to write this check against this movie and hope that it works."

Otherwise, you'd drive yourself crazy.

You have better odds if you took your $20 million, went to Las Vegas,

and put the $20 million on the come line at the crap table.

Your odds are better than making money on a movie.

But that's the business we've chosen, so there's nothing we can do.

We have to do this gambling.

You have a little bit more control because you do actually make the movie yourself.

But as far as the odds of what movies make money and what movies don't,

most movies actually lose money.

Bob Zemeckis, at the time you were developing the screenplay,

your name was attached to the project as director.

Was that a plus in getting the project made?

Before I made Romancing the Stone, it was a hindrance.

And after I made Romancing the Stone, it was a help.

-But the fact is nobody... -But the script was the same.

The script was the same, but nobody ever read the script and said,

"Gee, we'd like to give this script to this other director to make."

Because nobody liked the script.

All these rejection letters that Bob has in his archives,

we got 42 or 44 of them from studios and different producers.

It wasn't like anybody was calling us up and saying,

"Hey, I'll do anything to make that script Back to the Future."

There wasn't anybody that was interested. So, there was no...

That wasn't a decision that we ever had to wrestle with.

Bob was going to direct the movie, end of conversation.

Before Romancing the Stone, I was getting the worst possible reputation,

which is, "His movies are good, but they don't make any money."

Man, that was the kiss of death.

Bob Zemeckis, you mentioned earlier that you noticed a few flaws in the movie.

Things that the average viewer would not catch.

What is your take on that?

Well, that's just...

Me seeing all the little flaws and things.

I mean, I think that's just...

That's just the way it is. I look at movies that I love and I think they're perfect,

then I talk to the filmmakers and they don't know what I'm talking about.

It's always the same in all the arts. A painter will look at his painting

and he'll look at that tree limb that he never got right.

That's the only thing he'll focus on. When everybody else

is looking at the whole canvas, saying, "Gee, what a great painting."

I don't think you'll ever find a director that will say, "I made the perfect movie."

If they do say that, the movie is probably a complete piece of junk.

At the end of Back to the Future, Marty returns to a new and improved 1985.

Was it always written that way?

Yeah. It was 1985.

You've got to look at that ending in historical context.

It was a very '80s ending.

The fact that things changed for the better

as a result of his actions was always something that...

It's the story of a kid who teaches his father how to be a man.

Yes, but things changed for the better, they were material things.

They were possessions. He had a truck. His father had a BMW.

But his father is a successful author, Bob, come on.

Yeah, but it was the '80s.

It's interesting. There were a couple of reviews that came out of Europe

that keyed in on the blatant idea that, wait a minute,

how can these filmmakers equate this kind of happiness

with material possessions?

But not a single critic, that I remember, talked about it in America.

There's quite a bit of product placement in the movie.

Was this supposed to be a direct slam against

the materialistic attitude that we had in the '80s?

In terms of creating an image of the past,

one of the ways that you create the past is through brand names.

We made a conscious effort

to find products that had a different logo in the past,

so that we could use those.

It used to be, in the '60s or in the '70s they'd make a movie,

and a car would pull into a gas station,

and there would be no name on the gas station.

We would say, "That's ridiculous. It has to be..."

"Somebody owns that gas station. It's some brand of gasoline."

Put the brand in there, that makes it real. So, we actually...

There was a product placement department at the studio that had just gotten started,

and they were trying to cram all kinds of stuff at us.

We would nix anything that really didn't work too well.

Shell gasoline, for example,

would have paid more for a placement than Texaco did,

but Shell didn't change their logo.

So Texaco was the perfect gas station

because of how different a Texaco station looked in the '50s, compared to the '80s.

The same with Pepsi versus Coke.

A Coke bottle in the '50s and a Coke bottle in the '80s were the same.

But a Pepsi logo was completely different.

When we talk about the sequels,

we'll tell you all the product placement horror stories.

Nobody really cares about product placement until they know that the movie

is going to be a hit. That's one of the problem with sequels.

There is one product placement story I've got to tell you.

The product placement department hired this real sleazy guy.

A lot of these product placement guys are sleazy because that's what they do,

they try to figure out how to graft these corporations

and make these ridiculous promises.

So he made this deal with the California Raisin Board

that Back to the Future was going to do for raisins

what E.T. did for Reese's Pieces.

They come to me with this proposal to put raisins in the movie.

I'm saying, "What brand? Sun-Maid Raisins?"

"No. Just raisins. Can't you have a bowl of raisins at the dance?"

"I'm going," What do you mean? A bowl of raisins looks like a bowl of dirt.

"How is that going to photograph?" If we can't put a brand name somewhere...

They had taken $50, 000 from the California Raisin Board for this placement

that wasn't going to happen in the movie.

Finally, what we gave them was the bum on the bench,

in 1985, when the DeLorean comes back at the end,

it says "California Raisins" on that bus bench.

That was what came out of that deal.

When the California Raisin Board saw it, they were livid.

I didn't realize at the time they'd already actually paid the money.

They told the studio they were going to sue them,

and the lawyer at the studio called me into her office and asked me about it.

"I said," You'd better settle the lawsuit and give them back their money,

"because I'd be happy to be a witness for them"

"because of the way they'd just tried to force this on us,"

"and we weren't going to do it."

So the California Raisin Board ended up not paying for that exposure.

The lesson I learned on this, and the subsequent sequels,

was never do product placement. Ever. Anymore.

The only real way to do product placement is to get permission,

and then get cooperation.

If you're going to do Texaco, and they give you signs

and uniforms and stuff that you don't have to make,

that's the only way. But I never take money anymore because it's like,

-you've got another creative person. -You've got another producer saying,

- "What am I getting for my money?" -It's just never worth it.

Product placement just isn't worth it.

You've touched on it throughout this whole discussion,

but I'm just wondering,

if you could tell us what was your favorite part of making this film.

My favorite part of making this film was writing it.

The actual making of the movie, I don't remember any good times.

I don't remember a single...

Seeing the movie work when it was finally put up on the screen,

that was a thrill.

But the actual shooting of the movie was just survival.

It was cold.

I remember never having enough sleep, always being half-asleep.

I was the most unhealthy I ever was when I made this movie.

I was the fattest, and the most

out of shape and sick that I ever was, making this movie.

So, I guess, the writing and the finishing were the favorite parts.

And the actual shooting was just survival.

I think the best moment I had on the set was Michael J. Fox's first day.

When he walked in front of the camera and he started doing the scene,

and I just felt, "Thank God. That's Marty McFly."

"It's gonna work now. It's gonna work."

Kind of along the same lines, about your expectations with the actors,

you said you were very happy with the performances.

But would you say that they exceeded your expectations?

Yeah, they're brilliant.

This is one of those movies where everybody just is on the same page.

Once Michael came into the movie, it was like everything just gelled together.

Everybody just got the tone of what the humor of this movie should be.

All the performances around Michael were better.

Lea was fine with Eric Stoltz, and Chris was fine,

but when Michael J. Fox was working with them, it just supercharged it.

It just went into the stratosphere.

If you talk to actors, they'll talk about

give and take, and how important it is to be playing a scene with somebody

that gives back something for them to work from.

And that was always what was happening.

I would say, honestly, they're better than I thought they could ever be.

I've been fortunate to work with so many great actors

that it's always better than I ever imagined. It really is. It really, truly is.

How much control did you have over the final cut?

That's the final cut.

You know, I've never had any of these final cut problems.

Never, ever, once in my entire career have I ever had to have a struggle

over the cut of the picture.

Now, of course, I contractually have final cut in everything that I do.

But even in the early days,

I didn't have final cut, but nobody wanted to tamper with it.

You know, I really believe that

most studio executives don't want to do the filmmaker's work.

And it becomes more of a personality clash

than it has anything to do with the movie, when you have these issues about final cut.

I've never had anyone ever try to take the movie away

on any movie I've ever made.

Are you making any changes to the movie for the DVD?

Taking out, for example, the wires that you mentioned,

the ones we see in the clock tower scene?

-No. -Nope. I hate that.

I don't think you should ever do that. That would be like...

That's like colorizing a movie, a black-and-white movie.

-It is what it is. -Warts and all.

I don't get this adding scenes back in and re-cutting the movie.

I don't get that at all.

It should be the way it was.

At that moment in time, this is the movie and this is the way it was, and...

That, I think, is what it's supposed to be.

For those of you that have only seen the movie on home video,

on the video it says "To be continued" at the end.

You didn't see that here. That was never on the theatrical release.

It won't be on the DVD.

We only put that on the video as a way of telling the world

that there was going to be a sequel.

So, if anybody says, "That's different." No.

The film that you saw was a new print made from the original elements.

It's been re-mastered in hi-def, and it looks absolutely great.

I supervised the video transfer. But it is the movie that you just saw.

Is the trailer for III going to be on the end of II?

Yes.

If you could travel in time, where would you go?

It depends. If I could come back,

I would go to the future. I mean, I would go to the past.

But if I could only go one way, I would go to the future.

And Bob Gale? Where would you go?

Maybe I'd go back and see what my parents were like in high school.

That would certainly be about the most interesting thing I can think of.

Can you tell us who were some of your major influences,

when you were making this movie?

Any other writers, directors, that truly inspired you?

The classic American directors.

I mean, I think that the main influences on this movie are definitely,

you know, Frank Capra and Billy Wilder.

Throw a little John Ford in there when you start getting into the sequels.

But I'd say it's probably like a Billy Wilder movie more than anything.

Maybe? But those are the filmmakers that we love.

The classic American filmmakers.

I think we're going to end on that note.

Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale, thank you so much for your time.

This was really, truly an amazing experience. Thanks so much, everybody.

Thank you.

Doc.

Crazy drunk driver.

All right. Red.

You look great. Everything looks great.

1:24. I still got time. I'm coming, Doc!

No! No, not again! Come on! Come on!

Libyans.

No!

You bastard!

Go!

Doc! Doc!

No! No!

You're alive.

Bulletproof vest?

How did you know?

I never got a chance to tell you.

What about all that talk about screwing up future events?

The space-time continuum?

Well, I figured, what the hell?

-So, how far ahead are you going? -About 30 years. It's a nice, round number.

Look me up when you get there, all right? Guess I'll be about 47.

I will.

-Take care. -You, too.

Right. Bye-bye, Einie.

And watch that re-entry. It's a little bumpy.

You bet.

What a nightmare.

If Paul calls me, tell him I'm working at the boutique late tonight.

Linda, first of all, I'm not your answering service,

second of all, somebody named Greg or Craig called you just a little while ago.

Well, which one was it, Greg or Craig?

I don't know! I can't keep up with all of your boyfriends.

Hey.

-What the hell is this? -Breakfast.

Did you sleep in your clothes again last night?

Yeah. I...

Yeah. What are you wearing, Dave?

Marty, I always wear a suit to the office.

-You all right? -Yeah.

-I think we need a rematch, George. -A rematch?

-Why? Were you cheating? -No.

-Hello. -Good morning.

Mom! Dad!

-Did you hit your head? -Marty, are you all right?

You guys look great. Mom, you look so thin.

Why, thank you, Marty. George!

Good morning, sleepyhead.

-Good morning, Dave. Linda. -Good morning, Mom.

Marty, I almost forgot. Jennifer Parker called.

I sure like her, Marty. She is such a sweet girl.

-Isn't tonight the night of the big date? -What? What, Ma?

Aren't you going up to the lake tonight? You've been planning it for two weeks.

Mom, we talked about this. How can I go to the lake?

The car's wrecked.

-Wrecked? -Wrecked?

-When did this happen? Why wasn't I told? -Quiet down.

I'm sure the car is fine.

Why am I always the last one to know about these things?

See? There's Biff out there waxing it right now.

Now, Biff, I want to make sure that we get two coats of wax this time, not just one.

-I'm just finishing up the second coat now. -Now, Biff, don't con me.

I'm sorry, Mr. McFly.

I meant I was just starting on the second coat.

Biff. What a character. Always trying to get away with something.

I've had to stay on top of Biff ever since high school.

-Although, if it wasn't for him... -We never would have fallen in love.

That's right.

Mr. McFly! Mr. McFly, this just arrived.

Hi, Marty. I think it's your new book.

Honey! Your first novel.

Like I've always told you,

you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.

Marty, here's your keys. You're all waxed up, ready for tonight.

Keys?

-How about a ride, mister? -Jennifer.

Are you a sight for sore eyes! Let me look at you.

Marty, you're acting like you haven't seen me in a week.

I haven't.

You okay? ls everything all right?

Yeah.

Everything is great.

Marty! You've got to come back with me!

-Where? -Back to the future.

Wait a minute. What are you doing, Doc?

I need fuel.

Go ahead. Quick! Get in the car.

No, no. Doc, I just got here, okay?

Jennifer's here. We're gonna take the new truck for a spin.

Well, bring her along. This concerns her, too.

Wait a minute, Doc. What are you talking about?

What happens to us in the future?

-Do we become assholes or something? -No, no, no, no, Marty.

Both you and Jennifer turn out fine. It's your kids, Marty.

Something has got to be done about your kids.

Hey, Doc, we better back up. We don't have enough road to get up to 88.

Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads.