All language subtitles for In_Search_of_Tomorrow_(2022)_BluRay_720p_(fzmovies.net)_2f265833cc78e68dd29e24aa824416d7.fa

When I think of science fiction,
I think of stories in any medium

that tell us what we could be

and warn us about where we're going.

Every piece
of science fiction

that I enjoy works as pure entertainment,

and it also works as a social commentary,

philosophy or inspirational ideas.

It was always a genre that carried with it

a sense of taking the
temperature of its own times.

It's a ripe genre,
it's full of interesting

twists and offshoots.

I can get you diseases.
You'd like that, wouldn't you?

There are so many sub-genres
that are available to us

and I think really give
this kind of rich landscape.

Science fiction storytelling
exists from the beginning

of film-making,
and persists through

two centuries.

Images

that we see in cinema
today are built on images from movies

like 2001, A Space Odyssey,
Metropolis and Things to Come.

In the '50s,

sci fi was an extension of science,
and science was all about the atom,

and the atom was all about,
they're going to blow us up

or we're going to have a wonderful future
because of our friend the atom.

The people doing these
science fiction films in the '80s,

they cut their teeth on '50s sci fi,

but what they did is they said,
we love sci fi for what it represents.

The post atomic scare that stimulated
so many of these low budget Saturday

matinee type movies.

They really impacted us as children.

But in a different way than
films now in the '70s,

films tend to be more socially conscious,
more artistically presented.

But let's take a B movie

and just do it as though we're doing
an art film, without a happy ending.

The twist towards the dark, nihilistic sci fi,
I think, was largely a response against

technology, government, war,
especially in the Vietnam era.

A lot of those dystopian films

were warning about global warming

and the arms race.

You maniacs!
You blew it up!

Things that I think made
people feel very small

and very out of control.
And that seems to really be

what science fiction is about
until Star Wars.

The whole tone of science fiction
and films really changes

with Lucas and Spielberg
in the '70s and '80s,

and it starts showing us the
positive possibilities in our world

as opposed to constantly warning us
about all the ways we're messing up.

Spielberg said,
"Can't we go back to what

"I grew up with, which is the beauty
of sci fi and imagination?

"Let's not dwell on the corrupting
influence of technology."

For the next decade
or so across the '80s,

that amalgamation of science, fiction,

and fantasy,
seemed to be the driving force.

Science fiction became direct,

straightforward, provocative, clear.

Any idea that anybody had
if you set it on another planet or

set it in the future, set it in dystopia,
you could get the money to do it.

Now, sci fi was viable box office.

And now the studios are
throwing money at the genre

and you're getting the best filmmakers
and the best actors,

and they have the funds
to take you to other places.

Sci fi truly came of age and exploded

in the '80s.

We are creating machines
that mimic human behavior.

The human body, human intelligence.

In Saturn 3, you see
the bio-mimicry of Hector,

the machine taking on its human
creator's ideas and psychopathy.

Certainly, the way Saturn 3 was sold,
leaned heavily on Alien, robots, science.

All that kind of stuff, but it leaned
even more heavily on Farrah Fawcett

and that absolutely stunning smile of hers,
in the fact that all of us

were enamored of Farrah
from Charlie's Angels.

I had that poster,
everybody had that poster.

And the idea that Farrah Fawcett
might be wearing something sexy or

nothing at all, definitely got my
young self out to see Saturn 3.

The movie you got, however,
was a completely different movie.

You're quite an event in our lives.

Well, I guess you don't
get many drop-ins on Saturn 3.

Hardly ever,
especially not from earth.

We are on a space station that is slick,

and designed and shiny and colorful,
and all the edges are smoothed out.

All of the ideas
that might have been initiated

by Alien are gone by the time you get
to the finished product of Saturn 3.

We get to see
Kirk Douglas naked a lot,

but not Farrah Fawcett.

That was kind of
forward thinking.

Doesn't it disgust you
to be used by him?

To be touched by an old man?
Can't you feel the decay?

The notion that he wanted
to express his virility,

that he's still a leading man,
that he was still an action star.

Kirk Douglas was very particular about that.
About that in terms

of the notion of men,
of male movie stars and actors

and the way that they
should come off in film.

Abort!

Glad you didn't ask
him to shake hands.

It's a complicated film, you got

you got Stanley Donen,
the Singin' in the Rain director, directing

this sort of science fiction opera
with this crazy, oversexed robot.

No! No! No!

He's probably not the
right director for that.

The production designer, John Barry,
he was probably the correct person.

The scenario was based on his stories.

But Kirk didn't like John and so got him
fired and had Stanley Donen hired.

So you have Kirk Douglas, who doesn't
like John Barry. He gets rid of him.

And then you have Stanley Donen,
who doesn't like Harvey Keitel's voice.

Now we have this weird

sort of quasi British voice
coming out of Harvey Keitel's face.

Why won't you talk?

Why not? What have
I done wrong?

All of these decisions just sort of led

to something of a mess of a movie,
except for Farrah Fawcett.

Kudos to
Farrah Fawcett

for dealing with all those boys
and what was going on there.

It just didn't seem to connect

with the bigger universe
in the way that the Star Wars films had.

No, this was all stuff happening
on this space station

between these people and a freaky robot.

Check mate.

The whole Star Wars

experience is a phenomenon.

It opened up horizons in a way

that nobody ever imagined.

I'm going in.

I loved it.

The Force is strong with this one.

I always felt that George Lucas

was a very unique individual
who had a unique point of view.

I often wondered if he knew

what he was really introducing.

The Empire Strikes Back

Coming to your galaxy next summer.

With Lando,

I didn't want to make a black character,
or a white character. Lando was Lando.

It's like Billy Dee to me is Billy Dee.

I want to show you my
own personal uniqueness.

How you doin', you old pirate?

It's so good to see you!

I wanted to talk about

a swashbuckling kind of individual.

Welcome, Leia.

That was an honor,
to work with Kershner.

He was a real actor's director
for one thing, so he really understood

the human behavior.

Well, your highness,
I guess this is it.

That's right.

Don't get all mushy on me.
So long, princess.

It wasn't just purely based on

this kind of a journey into space.

Punch it!

One of the great things

about playing a kind of
a dubious character.

They're not bad people,
they're just caught up in situations.

I remember picking my
daughter from school,

and the kids would accuse
me of betraying Han Solo.

And I'm right in the middle
of the schoolyard

having this debate with these kids.

I had no choice.
They arrived right before you did.

I'm sorry.

If you express those characters
through a kind of vulnerability,

then I think it makes it more palatable

and much more interesting.

I am your father.

George wanted to keep everything secret,

he wanted everything
to be a surprise in the movie.

Unlike Carrie and Mark, who signed
contracts for multiple movies,

Harrison only signed for one movie,

and each movie was a separate contract
with him.

George wasn't sure he would
come back for Jedi.

So that's why, at the end of Empire,
Han Solo gets frozen in carbonite.

I love you.

I know.

They needed a way, if Harrison

didn't come back for the third movie,
how do you explain what happened?

But if he does come back, you defrost him,

and we're all happy.

George is more of an idea person,

that has these great,
fantastic visions.

And I was a little bit surprised
because he was talking about

the budget for Empire Strikes Back.

And he was trying to figure out

how not to spend the more money than he
spent on the first Star Wars movie.

I'm thinking this guy is this monolith

as far as creativity is concerned.

But here's a guy thinking about

how much money am I spending
to put an idea together.

Yeah, it's show business.

Part of the pressure
that George was feeling

was because he had financed

Empire himself, as opposed
to having a studio do it.

And when the movie ran
over time and budget,

he had to put up more collateral.

And so there was a lot of pressure
that, had the movie not been successful,

he could have ended up back at the start.

Echo-Station Five-Seven,
we're on our way.

George Lucas was a gift.
He changed the whole world of cinema.

He introduced all of these new ideas.

How do you explain that experience?

It was meant to be.

It changed everything.

Introducing Dorothy R. Stratten,
Playboy's

playmate of the year,
as your favorite gal.

Galaxina.

I couldn't tell you the plot of that at all,
it was Dorothy Stratten, right?

I mean, that's all you need to know.

She was delightful to watch.

When I look at Galaxina,
what I see is possibility,

all kinds of possibilities.

Galaxina is a parody movie.

Name's Mr. Spot.

Star Trek, Star Wars,
a little bit of Alien.

And all of the movies
that were made before it

that were way, way better.
At least two tropes exist in the film Galaxina.

These sort of representations
of the cantina from Star Wars,

where all of these creatures
from all over the universe are.

And the image of that spacecraft
coming across the screen,

and going on forever, all kinds of nutty
things going on in that movie.

There's one relationship in that
movie that works and rings

as true and real. And it's the relationship
between Galaxina and Stephen Macht's

character, he plays Thor.

You're a machine, and
I'm a human being.

Which is just another
kind of machine really.

They fall in love, but they can't really
be in love, because she's an android.

But she figures out how to correct something
so that she can have human feelings.

I love you, Sgt. Thor

Those moments between those two actors,
are the realest moments in that movie.

In Galaxina, we see the first idea

of sex bots in artificial
intelligent machines.

How will they feel if they
develop self-awareness?

Where is the line?
Really pulls at our psychology.

I really think those provocative
stories are important for us.

What it all adds up to is something
that's not quite as good

as those individual pieces,
but those individual pieces

that are stuck in my head,

I will probably remember forever.

I will remember that alien coming
out of Avery Schreiber's mouth, forever.

Galaxina, sadly, the thing
that hangs over it

more than anything
is the murder of Dorothy Stratten.

It's hard to think of the movie
without remembering

what happened to her.

I really appreciate Galaxina, and not just
because of what happened to Dorothy,

but because there was something

suggested in that movie,
that there could have been more there

and there might have been
more in the future for her.

The Final Countdown
is about to begin.

The Final Countdown

is about the USS Nimitz,
an aircraft carrier in 1980

that gets sent back in time
to December 6th, 1941.

That was taken less
than an hour ago.

I don't understand, sir.
These are pre–World War II pictures.

Single handedly, with the one aircraft carrier
and all the modern technology

they have at their disposal,
could absolutely thwart

the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The United States of America
falls under attack.

Our job is to defend it.

The past, present or future.

Now, the question that the captain
and the crew have to face

is, do they do that because they are sworn
defenders of the United States,

and this is an enemy?

Or do they allow history to play
out as we know it did?

The classic time travel dilemma.

You jump back.

You've now caused this weird ripple
effect that you didn't expect.

This is going to create a
fracture in the timeline.

We know where all of the mistakes are
going to be made for the next 40 years.

And you've got the power to correct them.

You stay out of this.

The final countdown is a great example

of that idea that, you know,
do you interfere or don't you?

If we could travel back in time,
would we want to change history?

How it would affect
the future?

What if you go back in time and it kills
the bloodline of your grandparents,

then you never exist.

I still have a gut instinct that
things only happened once,

and if they have happened, then there's
nothing we can do to change them.

Nor should we try.

There's all these paradoxical ideas
that exist in science fiction

that have never been
really answered satisfactorily,

because we don't have the science yet
to lean one way or another.

It's an interesting enough storyline
that draws us in and makes us think,

you know, the ramifications
of action, or inaction.

This is the United States warship.
Or at least, it used to be!

Or will be, or what
the hell ever!

Who are you?

Flash Gordon, Quarterback,
New York Jets.

Flash Gordon was true

to the Buster Crabbe
serials and Alex Raymond

comic books.

I think if Nick Roeg
had done Flash Gordon

as the original plan was,
it would have been

a completely different movie than
the one that Mike Hodges did.

I can hear Dino now saying,
"No, it is a crazy,

"don't do it like this, it is too much
dream like, we want with guns and shooting,

"and girls with big tits."
You know?

Dino De Laurentiis.

He was like a Svengali.

He had this big vision
that the movie mattered

above all else.

Michael Hodges came in
three weeks before filming.

Strange object imaged
in the imperial vortex.

We ended up
basically improvising quite a bit.

Yeah.

When you improvise,
sometimes you get gold.

Go, Flash. Go!

Go, Flash. Go!

The sets were amazing,

the costume was outrageously great.

What was Flash Gordon wearing

during the execution scene?

Hot pants, Okay?
Green leather, hot pants.

Tip of the hat to Danilo Donati,
who was the set and costume designer,

he should have been nominated
at least for an Academy Award.

Pathetic earthlings.

Hurling your bodies
out into the void.

Max von Sydow,

his costume was so heavy
and difficult, he couldn't

sit down, they had to
lean him on a backboard.

Gordon's alive!

Brian Blessed. They broke the mold

when he came to this planet.

To the death!

In the scene with the moving disc
with Sam and Timothy Dalton,

Brian Blessed is just making
one crack after another.

- I was laughing so hard.
- Why are prisoners tortured?

And the scene where I'm on the table
and he pinches

my bottom was not in the script,
it was a Brian Blessed special.

I have my suspicions.

one of the amazing things
about Flash Gordon,

it was the sweetness of it, the innocence.

Oh, it's so crazy!

And that sweetness allows for the room
to have all these double entendres.

Some adult content,
subtle and not-so-subtle.

Ming has his magic ring that
causes me to have a lot of pleasure.

But it works because I'm this innocent
who just doesn't quite know

what's going on.

Did you ever see such response?

No, truly.
She even rivals your daughter.

Look at Ornella, that seduction scene

where she's sitting on my lap,
I kept telling the director,

I'm not really getting this.

I need another take, okay?

Oh my god, this girl's
really turning me on.

I didn't quite get that.
Think it again.

Oh, yeah,

that took it to a whole 'nother level.

I was told in the beginning
Dino did not want Queen.

He was quoted as saying,
"No, that's a not for my movie."

Queen not only complemented
Flash Gordon,

it brought tremendous value.

It was rock and roll, it was
festive, it was lyrical,

and that's what the movie is.

This is not a dark movie,
it's a cartoon strip,

so it was supposed to
be energetic and fun.

It is what it is.

Just sit back and enjoy being transported.

If you're faced with
any storm in your life,

you just call upon Flash Gordon.

It's timeless.

Yeah!

If you were a kid coming
of age in the 1980s,

you were worried
that nuclear war would start.

We were at the height
of the Cold War in the 1980s.

The height of an understanding
of what nuclear technology could do

and its potential for devastation.

I remember as a child,
we lived near an air force base.

Four bells meant get under the desk.

- Duck!
- Duck and cover.

- Duck and cover. Duck and cover yourselves.
- Duck and cover.

And they're telling you that's going
to save you from a nuclear attack.

Duck and cover.
Attaboy, Tony.

That flash means: act fast.

This was a given, this was going to happen.

So, of course, we all had
nightmares, I had very vivid ones.

Superpowers were going head to head
every other week in the news,

and we entered the '80s
with enormous apprehension.

If the Soviet Union is attacked, we will
answer with all our nuclear might.

What science fiction films
did at that time,

I think was gave us
an outlet, a catharsis,

by extrapolating the
potential for devastation.

By the time you had Reagan in
the US, and Thatcher in the UK,

and you had sort of the latter
era Soviet leadership,

there was enormous Western exceptionalism
that invaded all of the art.

So it wasn't surprising that

the audiences escaped as a means
of processing fears and ideas

about the geopolitical situation,
but also the political situation at home,

which wasn't great either.

I was in the air force
for most of the 1980s.

I was stationed in a nuclear silo
in North Dakota for a portion of time.

These fears were palpable.

So when we went to see movies like
WarGames, Firefox,

these films tried to be
as realistic, speculative

but as realistic as possible.

I'm speaking to the individual who has
stolen the property of the U.S.S.R.

We're getting the royal treatment.

So whether you're talking about a movie like
Superman IV,

a Bond movie, or a movie like
Weird Science where a nuclear missile

comes up through the floor in the bedroom,
the Cold War is right there in the film.

When we saw these movies,
we didn't have to be so scared

we could let somebody else
handle the problem.

Wolverines!

That's something that
really drove James Cameron

as a filmmaker, nuclear war,
and that whole idea is in all his films.

It's a background to Skynet
and The Terminator.

It's there in Aliens.

I say we take off and nuke
the entire site from orbit.

And it's a motif in Cameron films,
the mushroom clouds.

And by Terminator 2, you get
that shocking dream sequence.

And it really was in your
face by that point.

It wasn't a metaphor anymore.
It really was James Cameron going,

"This is what it's going
to be like, people."

Do you know exactly what your
family would do if an attack came?

On the other side of it, you got parables
like Threads, which was made in Britain

about what happens if a
nuclear attack actually went off.

The real threat

of nuclear Armageddon
was never very far away,

so when The Day After comes out, it took

what was an existential fear for
me and it gave it visuals.

It won't be pretty, it won't be fast,

I mean, the lucky ones,
will die outright.

Nothing on network television
like this had ever been shown.

If you have a nuclear war,

this is what it's going
to be like on a good day.

The Day After was a huge
television phenomenon.

It showed that you could
do the darker story.

It was painful to watch
because the radiation

was definitely going to get to
us and kill us at some point.

The Day After is the most watched
movie made for television ever.

100 million people watched it
in one night, so I was quite stunned.

But there was one person's mind
who was changed overnight,

and that happened to be the president
of the United States, Ronald Reagan,

who had come to power believing

that there was such a thing
as a winnable nuclear war.

I spent the '80s in Thatcher's London.

I was very interested in
getting Reagan out of office.

My fear of what these

politicians can do, the people
that I cannot control.

I focus my energies on what I can do
in my own little corner of the world.

We've been living

with the Cold War since World War II,

generations have lived under that threat,
and I don't think one generation

is any more immune to
that threat than another.

Today, you know, we're worried
about the very slow end of the world

from, you know, environmental
things or terrorist acts.

I think ever since we created the
bomb, the world has been different.

People were just channeling

their beliefs, their fears or nightmare
scenarios into these stories.

And now we're at an age
where in the modern day, it's all about

lack of privacy and how the internet and
the machines are going to take over.

And we're going to become dehumanized to the
point where we're just slaves to the machines.

It's an interesting cycle
to have walked through.

In the '80s, there were several

shrinking movies, which I guess
somehow that became funny.

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,
The Incredible Shrinking Woman and Innerspace.

And they were all good.

Now, how about a big
hand for a little lady?

The Incredible Shrinking Woman.

It's a take on the book

Incredible Shrinking Man.

The top news story of the day continues
to be the Incredible Shrinking Woman.

I'm sure there must be
some logical explanation.

It's a satire on advertising.

Galaxy Glue.
Galaxy Glue.

She's a tiny housewife, and she has to
deal with all these products coming at her.

The glue, the solvent,
your bubble bath.

Talcum powder, shampoo...

He was making fun of these products

that are fed to them like
this is going to make your life better.

It's called

Tray Naturale.

And what started to happen with the
women's movement is they were going,

"I don't want to make my life
at home better that much.

"I want to be out of here.

"Making dinner or doing
the laundry is not all

"I want to do."

Judith, I don't think this
is such a good idea.

Lily Tomlin, she's perfect
because she's a comedian

and she can embody the craziness of that.
She has this insane range.

And you better lay off
of buttons, Buster.

I'm in it for like a very
short amount of time.

I'm advertising soap,
but they cut it.

When Lily hid in the Barbie
Dream House, it's so great

because that's an iconic thing from girls
childhood to be the size of your dolls.

It's all about the insignificance.

Off the furniture!

And what are you grinning
at, you big creep?

The dolls,
if they were bigger than you, life size,

they would be terrifying.

Lily gets smaller

and smaller, and then falls
into the garbage disposal,

which is, first of all, everyone's nightmare,
like when you drop something

to the garbage disposal
and you have to reach in, and take it out.

There's like a built-in terror.

That's the big, actual

visual point that she's
not a factor anymore.

She's just doing her job and she's
becoming smaller and smaller as a person.

I'm going to
lose my mind!

And it's the war that women
then started to feel like

this isn't my life,
I don't want this to be my life.

I'm sick of products!
I'm sick of advertising!

You're talking
about my work!

See, I love things that
have themes like that.

More champagne?

Vance, look
what you did!

Outland.
The ultimate enemy is still man.

An underrated classic
from early '80s science fiction.

Sean Connery plays a federal marshal
who was sent to this backwater

mining colony on a moon of Jupiter.

He discovers a drug operation
where the drugs that are being used

by the miners and sold to the miners
to make them boost their productivity

is actually killing them.

Get it off!

Get it off!

I was desperate to make a Western.

Certainly after people like George Lucas
figured out, wait a second,

the Western is not dead, it's alive,
it's in outer space, so I modeled it

after Dodge City, the frontier aspect
of it, the harshness and the danger

and the greed, and the fact that
if you just stepped outside, you died.

That's a completely conceivable future
where we actually go out and we actually

mine asteroids and mine planets and stuff.
And it's a corporate entity.

We're on our way to becoming the
leading Con Amalgamate operation.

And everyone in this room has
received the bonus checks to prove it.

It's a social commentary
about out-of-control economies

and out-of-control corporate people.

We are all professionals.

I'm sure we are.

I first wrote it when I was at Universal.

I remember Ned Tanen read
the script and said,

"I like it, we'll make it
if Eastwood will do it."

And I said, "Well, you'll make the phone book
if Eastwood will do it."

Sean Connery will...

He'll bring Connery to whatever he plays.

Zero ego about anything to do

with him and total ego
about how to make the movie good.

So every discussion you had with him
was how to make the script better.

How to make the movie better.

He was a remarkable guy.

There's a whole machine that works,

because everybody does
what they're supposed to.

I did write one line where I said,
I can't wait for him to say it.

And it's at the end of a very big chase.

He's got a guy cornered in the kitchen

and then he fires his gun
all around the guy.

Think it over.

Think it over.

It's like butter with him.

When they dig more oil,
the company's happy.

When the company's happy, I'm happy.

I first knew Peter Boyle
from seeing a movie called Joe.

So the first film that I ever
wrote, I got to know Peter

and thought he was terrific.
And I needed somebody with some grit.

If you're looking for money,
you're smarter than you look.

If you're not, you're a lot dumber.

Frances Sternhagen.

Hello.

It's the drug.

You just won a prize.

The part originally was written for a man.

I said, I want to cast a woman
and make no change

in the script.

Almost everybody here doesn't
have both oars in the water,

as far as I'm concerned.

Everything she said was a little different,
everything she said was her way.

There hasn't been so much excitement in
this heap for some time.

When it came to Outland,

the idea of a mining conglomerate
seemed feasible to me.

I wanted you to see the kind
of hostility of the environment

and who are the people
who would be doing it.

And why would they be doing it.

I never won an Oscar, except one
of the things that I wanted

more than anything else was to do a film
that would be parodied in Mad Magazine.

And they did Outland in Mad Magazine.

I was thrilled, to me the
highest compliment I could be paid.

You and I know that when anybody says
which is the best Superman,

they say II.

You haven't seen the best part.

Superman II. The Adventure Continues.

Superman II remains about truth,
justice and the American way.

There is no doubt about that.

It is also about the villains coming back
and maybe getting Superman,

and that's the best part.

Superman!

There is no question about the
fact that Christopher Reeve

embodied Superman,
I just think he was extraordinary.

I believe this is your floor.

He was a little dorky.

He was more like Clark Kent than Superman.

Terence Stamp remains
the sexiest man on earth.

Kneel before Zod.

Jack looked like Jack,

all the time, I hasten to add.

We moved a certain way

and we moved with a fluidity.

Three villains flying along,
they'd got the tracks

up in the roof like
railway tracks up there.

Somebody hadn't quite worked out
that when you go round a corner,

the momentum swings you out.

So the three of us start off very well,

then we go round a corner and then we all
get tangled up together and there we hang.

Stepping on the moon,

it was the most extraordinary set.

What kind of a creature are you?

Just a man.

A man?

Do you know that scene where
I kick the astronaut in the groin?

When I went to Japan to promote the film,

they cut that scene
because it was too violent.

A woman kicking a man like that
just doesn't do, does it?

Margot Kidder absolutely made contact
when she had to clip me

because we tried it a few times
and it just didn't look too real.

You're a real pain
in the neck!

She got me so much that
I went over the edge.

It's like, "Got the shot,

"moving on, thank you very much."

We weren't killed off,
we just disappeared, if you like.

To be able to come back.

There was definitely
speculation about that.

Superman I and II, we shot
them back to back.

With Richard Donner,
who we all adored.

We took a break because at a certain point
we'd shot so much of Superman II,

they needed to concentrate
on Superman I.

Of course they did.

I literally got back on the set
and it was Richard Lester.

To re-shoot the same sequence

with two incredibly different directors
was the best experience of my life.

Consequently, when

it came to selling
Superman II, it was me.

Warner Brothers put me through
my paces to see if I could

talk about the film
without spilling the beans.

The fact that they changed directors

was just something we never talked
about in the marketing of the film.

That was a more naive period
where people weren't

so into all the nuances of film-making.

At the beginning, it was marvelous and
glorious, and we all loved each other.

By the end, it was just
we'd all had enough, I think.

I often think of the enormity

of certainly the impact of Superman.

Everybody has seen Superman.
Around the world,

whether it be on television,
whatever it is, it's a love fest.

Before we lived in a dystopian reality,

I really enjoyed dystopian science fiction.

John Carpenter's Escape
From New York.

The greatest escape of them all
is about to blow the future apart.

Escape From New York

actually started as John Carpenter's
first screenplay out of film school.

After he had done a few, Studio
really wanted to work with him

and said, basically, what do you got?

And he went to the closet,
brought out the script.

They loved the idea.

He called me.

He said, "I really need another mind

"here to help me get through this
and make sense of it."

So I think it was a
valuable collaboration.

You go in, find the President,
bring him out in 24 hours,

and you're a free man.

24 hours, huh?

Escape From New York was the
biggest movie I'd made up to that time.

It was basically the same crew
and some of the same cast

I'd worked with before,
so it was fun to do.

It was hard work trying
to keep everything light

if we can.

It was like a huge family

working with actors that he loves
both personally and professionally.

He knows that he can get the performance
out of them that he wants.

And they have much more fun working

if you're, you know, everything
is calm, and here we go.

St. Louis, which was the
beginning of the shoot.

They shot much of the exterior material.
St. Louis at the time

looked like post-apocalyptic,
you know, United States.

You didn't have to do a
lot of window dressing.

Nothing was done in New York
other than being on Liberty Island.

Kurt was always known
and grew up as a Disney kid,

but John can see into
what the potential is in people.

I recognized Kurt early on
when we did Elvis.

This guy's got it.

He really has it.

Just knowing Kurt, you know

he has the potential for doing something
that's a little darker and physical.

Love the character of Maggie.

Balls out chick, you know,

and I was used to playing
that kind of role.

You're Plissken?
I heard you were dead.

I think her entire moral character

is exhibited in the last scene,
where she reaches

out her hand to snake for the gun
and she fires at the Duke.

That just said everything
to me about her.

Escape From New York

really, its philosophical bent was
it was a nihilist film.

It had a nihilist character
it had a nihilist ending,

but it was also done in a way
that was tongue in cheek.

We're going to go far in this
direction and have fun with it.

Don't kill yourself
after you see this film.

You're going to kill
me now, Snake?

I'm too tired.

Maybe later.

If you want to know who would win
a fight between Snake Plissken,

Jack Burton or RJ MacReady,
Snake Plissken would win the fight

hands down.

He's a bad ass, that's why.

A universe of magic.

Heavy Metal.

Heavy Metal, the movie, was a very interesting
experience for young, 14 year old me.

Yeah, my worldview shifted
after watching that film.

I was a fan of the magazine,

a fan of the art,
fan of the storytelling.

It played into my interests
in a very natural way.

I said, "It would be great
as an animated film."

My powers continue.

It showed you the possibility of animation
and sci fi and more sophisticated ideas.

Beautiful, but it's also really subversive

and counter-cultural.

I told you, I'm an American citizen.
I just lost my papers or something.

Goddamn legal aliens.

The source material,
the Heavy Metal stories

really in themselves
had a kind of level of explicitness

that was freeing,
I think, for the artists.

I saw that as something that was quite fun

and delicious.

I'm afraid that I'll come home one
day and find you screwing the toaster.

You'll just have to trust me.

Gerald Potterton was a really fine
animation director in Canada.

I sort of enlisted him as kind of a

central film-making group
to tell this story.

Len Blum and Dan Goldberg

who I had worked
with on Meatballs,

they came up with that sort of magical
sort of deadly green ball from outer space

as a way of sort of linking
the stories together.

Someone always finds me.

My favorite sequence in Heavy
Metal is Den.

Can I slit his throat,
your majesty?

Yes.

I liked the Heavy Metal magazine.

It's an actually an adept
recreation of that vibe.

And if I refuse?

If you refuse, you die.
She dies. Everybody dies.

Sounded reasonable to me.

The B-17 bomber that crashes on
the island with the zombies,

that's probably my favorite individual
vignette from the film.

Nose dive!

The two space pilots

that get high on the space cocaine
is also a funny one.

Taarna,

as a huge Moebius fan, I wanted to
sort of give him all due respect.

Maybe she wants to fight.

I want her dead!!!

What I remember about Heavy Metal
is the music in that film.

All of the bands
that have a song in that film,

I have cranked that soundtrack
so many times over the years.

I wore out so many cassette tapes.

Yeah, the future is now pretty
well illustrated by Musk

sticking a Tesla into space, like
the opening of the Heavy Metal movie.

I wish we could have finished it
in a slightly more complete way, I mean,

we were working under the gun in terms
of timetable, in terms of budget,

but I'm still quite taken
by how still effective it was.

I think we were just
really ahead of the curve

in all sorts of ways.

Okay, sucker.
Hand over your cash!

Now!

One of the ways you can say whether
a film has succeeded or failed

is can you imagine
a life for the characters

and the movie itself
beyond the frame you've seen.

World building became enormously
important during '80s science fiction.

So you have concept design
and production design.

You have to go and build interiors,
build these kind of planets

physically on sets, and
creating locations that work.

You have concept designed around

props and imagined future technology.

Present day ideas extrapolated, and this
thing goes on into, of course, costume,

how do spaceships
move and travel in the future.

It's the natural evolution

of a storyteller to think beyond
the things that inspire them,

imagining the possibilities
of taking it to the next step.

For directors like Spielberg

and Cameron and Ridley Scott,
this became almost a challenge

to create an accurate picture
of the future in different ways.

Make you know, a straightforward
film extraordinary.

Something's there.

I love the worlds that existed
in all of these science fiction movies,

and I wanted to explore
them as fully as I could.

Very satisfying to work
on pictures like that

where you bring a whole universe
to life for a film audience.

Usually when I'm hired,

nobody else is hired
except for the director,

and we start discussing the script and I
hire illustrators and storyboard artists.

We start to develop
a look for the picture,

which is very important
because he can see his vision now

of what this picture is and
the studio, they start to see,

"Wow, this is where our
100 million dollars is going to go.

"We're going to have that".
And they get excited.

Something that is, of course,
hugely important in science fiction

because it doesn't exist anywhere
around us, are the visual

designers, the guys that decide,
what the buildings, what the landscape

should look like, the objects,
the spaceships, the creatures.

It's all choices.

Syd Mead, Ron Cobb, Ralph McQuarrie,
just the visionaries of science fiction,

and they have dreamt up
so many iconic things.

They're quite instrumental
in bringing life to a lot of

what goes on on the screen.

In science fiction,
a lot of the things

that you're going to see
are visual effects, those things don't

exist in reality, you know,
warp drives and Spinners.

So we have to invent
sounds that don't exist in reality.

My job is to ensure that you hear
everything that you do see.

Did you see that?!

It's really

the sound underneath it
coming up out of the floor

and shaking you to your core.

That's all encompassed in this term
I call universe building.

I need to create the sonic universe
that we take for granted,

such that when you go to the cinema,
you feel as though you're

in a believable environment,
even if it's in an unbelievable context.

The genius of Star Wars,
is it just imbued character

into everything, into its planets,
into cities, into its characters,

obviously, nothing Star Wars touched
didn't involve character and feel.

So the Falcon, which is the heart
of all great movie spaceships,

became an extension of Han Solo.

She may not look like much,
but she's go it where it counts, kid.

I've made a lot of special
modifications myself.

And then you have the complete opposite

end with films like Mad Max

and their version
of spacecraft is a vehicle.

Weapons.

The classic ones in Star Wars
are the blaster versus the lightsaber,

the lightsaber represents
the old order, a kind of grace

from the past.

An elegant weapon

for a more civilized age.

Then you have James Cameron,

you know, he's about the
physicality of armament.

And you go to something like Star Trek.

It's a cleaner universe,
and all the uniforms are kind of coded

by rank, so it's much more about

a military organization.

Costumes, of course,
are a great ingredient of science fiction.

I mean, the opportunity they give
to costume designers to imagine

the impossible, a wonderful
opportunity to be creative.

None of the work that any of us do
is the end result. None of it.

It all is part of a process

and we're all in this together.

These brilliant filmmakers
give us amazing, astonishing work,

but our brains will build much more
than they can possibly do,

and that's what
they should be doing.

They're kind of lighting a match to a
touch paper and going, okay, off you go.

You know, dream up the
other elements of this world.

Imagine for yourselves
what these planets are like.

They are the things that stay with you.

What's going on on
the other side of the door?

If you're a movie geek and you don't
understand the significance of 1982,

you have to turn in
your movie nerd card.

The post-apocalyptic genre

is pretty much defined by
the Mad Max movies.

The Road Warrior.

A kind of harsher, cooler vision
of science fiction,

it's like a western.
Barren world where petrol

is the only commodity.

Just walk away.
Give me your pump,

the oil, the gasoline,
and the whole compound.

They did what they needed
to do to survive.

They were working in a genre of picture
called The Exploitation Picture.

That's how they got funded.

Action, adventure,
exploding cars, violence,

mayhem and the low budget seemed
to be a challenge rather than an obstacle.

I am really attracted to that sort
of bootstrapping kind of storytelling.

Good dog. Nice doggy.

George Miller is an amazing director.

George had built a universe,
this dystopian future

that Mad Max lived within.

You want to get out of here?

You talk to me.

George had fleshed it all out.

It's not just a matter of going out
and shooting a lot of cars being flipped

and people dressed up strangely
and mohawk bikers running

round and screaming.

There was a definite

heart to everything that George
did in that movie.

George Miller gave me all
the tools that I needed

to be Wez, and I'm
nothing like that character.

I mean, there's no way in God's
Earth that I can ever be Wez.

You! You can run
but you can't hide!

They always used to say to me, "Just do it
at 150%, we can bring it down to 100."

What he wanted was this
punk rock version of science fiction.

It's unthinkable that a
Mad Max film would do what

a Fast and Furious film does
and just throw in CGI.

No, they worry about us knowing
the stunts were done for real

and that kind of sense of
violence that came with that.

We didn't use any

special effects on that one
that was in camera.

Safety was a paramount concern.

The vehicle I'm climbing onto,
which has 16 wheels,

is going to run over me if I slip.

one of the stunt guys that was on it
would just grab me.

For a decade that was
all about the future

and tech and computers and sci fi.

It stripped all of that away.

It's very prescient if you look at where
we’re going with the climate crisis.

and how tribalism is sort of already
taking root and people are picking sides.

You have defied me!

You will know the vengeance of
The Lord Humungus!

Road Warrior was a warning
of where we were headed.

They weren't just doing a film,
they were out there

showing people the dysfunction
that we were headed for.

But we're there.

When Star Wars came out,

my dad was saying, "I think
we're going to get a call from Paramount

"and they're going to want us back.
Wait and see."

To dad, The Motion Picture was a
disappointing film on a number of levels.

Star Trek is not as visionary as 2001.

It's not as exuberant as Star Wars.

Most of the industry thought that
after the poor reception of the first

Star Trek film, that was going to be
pretty much the end of the franchise.

It wasn't until the Nick Meyer showed
up, that things got back on track.

Star Trek II.

The Wrath of Khan.

A lot of my choices

were kind of in reaction to
Star Trek The Motion Picture,

I wanted things to be more
confined, more submarine like.

Torpedo's ready, sir.

Star Trek II was classic storytelling.

You had a wonderful actor,

Ricardo Montalbán, Khan.

Why?

Yes, he was a little bit over the top.

But it called for that.

And, you know, Bill is no slouch
when it comes

to emoting.

Khan!!!

They were a great combination.
The unstoppable force

and the immovable object.

They’re locking phasers.
Raise shields. Fire!

Fire!

And that's what you want.

You want that kind of friction.

Fire!

Fire!

They were always at each other's throats.

With terrific character
building and terrific storytelling.

I didn't think we could do better.

And who do we have here?

Midshipman first class.
Peter Preston, engineer's mate, sir!

It was the most tension thick set
I've ever been on.

It was a big film because of
the risk Paramount was taking,

even doing the second film,
given how the first one was received.

As a matter of cosmic history,

it has always been easier to destroy
than to create.

Bill was always acting like Kirk.

He paraded around the set.

He seemed pompous all the time,
and I just realized that he was just trying

to stay in character, and I think Leonard
was doing very much the same thing.

Any chance to go
aboard the Enterprise.

George Takei was my favorite.

Every single time George was finished
shooting, the door would burst open.

All of a sudden we would hear
"Sulu got his close up today."

And posture like-- like a superhero,
"Sulu looked pensively to the right today",

creating some levity on the set, which was
desperately, desperately, desperately needed.

I need warp speed in three minutes,
or we're all dead.

Finding out that Spock actually
does die was overwhelming.

I thought they can't do this.

They can't do this.
But before the film came out,

everybody knew
that Spock was going to die.

We started getting threats about,
"If Spock dies, you die."

This is all before the internet,
so how people heard about this

I have no idea.

the idea of this
demise of Spock,

which dad just thought was
an interesting idea dramatically,

He wasn't even thinking
about the repercussions.

They thought that maybe
this was going to be the last film.

There are going to be two films
and then be done with the franchise.

Live long,
and prosper.

He had much misgivings after that
and regret.

Oh, by the end, it was like, whoa.

Spock is really going to be dead.

And I said,
"Hell yeah, he's got to be dead.

"Otherwise, we've taken advantage
of thousands of people for whom

"this is really important stuff.

"And we're going to say at the end,
'oh folks, it was just a dry hustle.' "

That's terrible.

And I fought it tooth and nail,

that coffin on the planet,

and I think I was probably wrong.

Death was never really death,

it was always one eye on the box office
in the next incarnation of it.

I always kind of looked
down my nose at that.

There's plenty of room.

They asked me if I wanted
to do Star Trek III.

And I said, "What is that
going to be about?"

And they said, "Well, it's about,
you know, Spock comes back", I go...

"resurrection.

"I don't think I know
how to do resurrection."

So I didn't do it.

There was a very personal,

intimate nature to a lot of the
very grandiose storytelling

in the '80s, and it was that contrast
that often made them work.

A lot of that can be
attributed to Spielberg.

Steven Spielberg's E.T.,
The Extra Terrestrial.

E.T., especially when
you're a child, is such

a roller coaster because you go through
so many different emotions.

Can you say E.T.?

E.T.

E.T.

Definitely a tear jerker.

E.T.

Eliot.

When he is hugging
him and saying

goodbye, I'm crying, I'm crying.

I cry every time I see it, every time.

This was supposed to be Steven's
little film in between

all his big blockbusters.

All of his films are actually
intensely personal films.

He grew up in a broken home.

His father left, his parents got divorced,
it had a very traumatic effect on him.

He's making personal films
about his own life,

just that the kind of
canvas is a bigger one.

Everything was changing

at that time within our
society, around the family.

I'm proud that I was able to portray

one of those first strong mothers.

Mommy, he can talk!

Of course he can talk. I'll be right back,
in 10 minutes. Stay there.

I felt like I was honoring my own mom.

Steven, in a lot of ways is a child.

That's why I think he responds
and understands the kids

so well.

Only little kids can see him.

Give me a break.

There are certain movies
that are just so raw and honest

in their interpretation of youth,
and the kid ensemble in E.T.

is one of those.

E.T., phone home.

My God, he's talking now.

We used Reese's Pieces

instead of M&M's, because
M&M's turned us down,

and said "We don't think
we want to be involved with an alien."

Oh, my God.

Would you wanted to be the guy at M&M's

who turned down E.T.

Back in the '80s, there were
these latchkey kids

where you were allowed to go
out and run through the forest.

"Back by sunset, darling."

Definitely a different time.

Suburbia,

your parents were not around
you, involved in your world.

The adults were these just these things
out there outside of the frame.

No TV.

The scene where Henry walks down

and is showing E.T. all the toys,
Steven said, "Bring all your toys."

So those were all Henry's real toys.

I think Jaws was probably placed in there.

The shark eats the fish.
Nobody eats the shark.

I distinctly

remember the first day
I walked onto the sound stage.

There was a connection.

Steven did the voice when we shot.

Drew was very young, she really couldn't

distinguish the difference
between reality and fantasy.

We would put E.T. in a corner
when he wasn't working well,

she would be over talking to him.

So Steven had two guys

whose job it was to at all times

be on E.T. patrol
so that he could come alive

and Gertie would still not have
to suspend that, that belief.

We have to shoot his death scene.

I stooped down and I said, "Hi, Drew.

"We're going to go shoot the scene
where E.T. is dying,

"but E.T. is just acting like
we're acting, right?

"He's not really dying."

She goes, "I know, Dee.

"Do you think I'm stupid?"

So I picked her up and we walked in.

She took one look at E.T,

and went, "He's dying!"

Steven's going, "Roll it, roll it."

Clear!

We're losing him!

The message of the film itself

was all about love
and friendship and connection.

It surpasses our brains
and goes straight to our heart.

The audience was ready for it.

The world was ready for it.

And literally, it's our generation's

Wizard of Oz.

I'll

be

right

here.

The thing about Blade Runner that's so powerful
for me is just the visual storytelling.

The production design,
the cinematography,

the choreography is so outstanding,

it's so beautiful.

It looks really cool,

but it is everything we
have warned you against.

A new life awaits you
in the Off-world colonies.

Ridley Scott's brother,

Frank, had died, and one of the reasons
Ridley Scott made Blade Runner

because he was trying to work
his grief out, the only way he knew

which was making a film.
So it was going to be imbued with

that darkness.

Replicants are like any other machine.
They're either a benefit or a hazard.

If they're a benefit it's not my problem.

It's about our own life spans.

You were made as well
as we could make you.

But not to last.

The light that burns twice
as bright, burns half as long.

If we create a slave race,
does that make us God,

what is our moral duty to that?

What makes us human? Is it memory?

Incredibly detailed
themes about existence.

How can it not know
what it is?

Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell.
'More human than human' is our motto.

I love the replicants.

I think, Sebastian,
therefore I am.

Because they're the most
human characters in the film.

They've got the most life to them,
and it's kind of an irony.

My birthday is April 10, 2017.
How long do I live?

Four years.

Something is very human about
them, self-preservation,

wanting to matter,
beyond the role as the slave

or as a second class citizen,
I mean, this really is

anecdotal.

You think I'm a replicant, don't you?

I felt that my character, Rachel,

was the heart and soul of that picture.

You play beautifully.

Walking in to do Blade Runner,
I thought I was going to meet

Han Solo. Harrison could be
funny on a dime if he wanted to be.

But he doesn't take prisoners.

He say you Blade Runner.

Tell him I'm eating.

Rutger had a certain sort
of dynamo personality,

and the character did as well,
and one of my favorite lines is after

he gets hit in the head, he goes,
"That's the spirit!" you know.

That's the spirit!

And he made it very iconic.

Quite an experience to
live in fear, isn't it?

I said to Ridley, why the unicorn?

And he says, "Well, I think I'm going to make
another movie after this about unicorns.

"And I don't think this character is
really human and I think he's not human."

And I went, "Really?"

I don't think they ended up
making that the case because I don't think

the executives felt that you could have
a leading man that wasn't human.

I remember seeing Blade
Runner at a theater

thinking to myself, my God,
what is that narration?

It's horrible.

They don't advertise for killers
in the newspaper. That was my profession.

Ex-cop.

It looked like somebody had

fooled around with it
other than a director.

Replicants weren't
supposed to have feelings.

Neither were
Blade Runners.

Ridley Scott shared with me

the studio was so concerned
that no one was going to know

what kind of movie they
were watching, that they insisted

that he put the narration
up at the beginning.

This is what he said to me.

He and Harrison conspired with each other
to make it the worst piece of narration

they could possibly record
in order to get the studio to say,

"We can't even use this,
it's just so awful."

The report would be
'routine retirement of a replicant'.

Which didn't make me feel any better
about shooting a woman in the back.

But they ended up using it.

The precedent hadn't been set
for a film like Blade Runner.

I think that was
probably ahead of its time.

That's sort of the brilliant
part about Ridley,

he's constantly thinking and imagining
and ripping things up in his mind,

and that's what makes him
the artist that he is.

His brain went there.

Like

tears

in rain.

The good guys always win!

Even in the '80s.

Ace Hunter,

who I played was just
the ultimate good guy.

Hal Needham always said it's very simple,

"It's the good guys against the bad guys."

The original script was more like
a real shoot 'em up, G.I. Joe,

You know, slaughter the
enemy kind of movie.

and Hal said, "No, no,
I don't want to do that."

You can't go up against Blade Runner
with MegaForce

and think that you're going to
have that same audience.

You know, our audience was
twelve-year-olds.

Mattel Toys was very influential in
terms of how these vehicles

would be designed, colors and shapes.

Primary objective, is to trick
Guerera to cross the border,

bringing him in your territory at
a predetermined time and place.

Hal Needham, his wife saw me
in Pirates of Penzance on stage,

and she went home and said to Hal,
"I've got your Ace Hunter right here."

When they offered me the part,
we had to make Ace Hunter

look exactly like the Pirate King
in the Pirates of Penzance,

from the headband to the
beard to the hair, this sort of swagger

and slightly over-the-top superhero
attitude which I like to call overacting.

The Ace Hunter outfits and all of the outfits
were designed by Mattel toys.

There wasn't a costume
designer on this movie,

which is so totally unusual.

Spandex, right?

I think I was stoned most of the time,
if you want to know the truth.

And then the AD would come
tap me on the shoulder and say,

"Oh, listen, we need you in an hour."

Just pour me in the outfit.

My guys so international in their makeup.

All the characters in MegaForce
were one dimensional characters.

And that's part of the fun of it,
because that's what makes it

that sort of cartoon.

But I'll tell you, son,
we did raise some kind of hell!

Edward Mulhare, probably better
known afterwards for Knight Rider,

putting it together that international
fighting for his secretively.

He probably didn't pay his taxes.

And Persis Khambatta played Zara.

It's too bad that she
wasn't prettier. Huh?

Jesus, she was gorgeous

and she had her hair.

Kirk unit.

Kirk unit.

I always thought
we were going to make

a Megaforce II and a MegaForce III.
When Megaforce I took a dump,

we never got to the point of that.

MegaForce Deeds, Not Words I think was
going to be the name of the second one.

The script is still out there somewhere.

When anybody mentions MegaForce,
they just make fun of it.

You never make a movie thinking
it's going to be a cult movie.

Who even knew about cult movies
when we were doing

Rocky Horror Picture Show?

It's not Hamlet, for God sakes.

Tron.

He is a programmer,

but he gets sucked into this world
and ends up taking the whole system down.

Little guy.

What a concept.

What if we went down in there
and it was actually a world?

I auditioned for Star Wars.

I didn't get that one.

I looked at this and I said, Well,
it kind of looks like space. Okay.

I felt a part of a pioneering effort.

And Steven Lisberger,
the creator of this, I call him Yoda.

Everything was hanging on this.

That's a lot of responsibility.

We could miserably fail.

Or we could wildly succeed.

If you look at the performances
by Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner,

Cindy Morgan, who had to
act in front of nothing.

So what am I looking at?

Okay, you're looking at the Solar Sailer.

Here's a sketch.

We wore hockey

helmets and motocross shoulder pads.

We were wearing what a male
ballet dancer would wear.

It was probably the early
thong, male thong.

Tron was a warrior.

He dominated the game grid.

Who's that guy?

That's Tron.
He fights for The Users.

I would get my frisbee
and we'd play with our discs like

just the battles and stuff
and pretend I had a light cycle.

They loved the light cycles.

I never saw it.

It was a stick in front
of me with a crossbar.

We were all standing there
and they kind of

we bent over.

And that was it.

And I did the whole chase like that.

Finish the game!

No!

David Warner, who played the villain Sark,

who I had to have my final big battle
with, was not a physical guy.

So he had to be doubled
through most of it.

People were encouraged

to put what they call Easter eggs.

one of the compositors
had put in Pac-Man.

We loved it.

The Solar Sailer
going over the landscape

and seeing the outline of Mickey Mouse.

What a great idea.

Alan

Where did you hear that name?

Well, that's your name, isn't it?

Name of my user.

There's a theological element
to Tron from the perspective

of the programs inside the computer,
and that question is, are the users real?

The user even wrote you!

No one user wrote me.
I'm worth millions of their man-years.

Should we believe in the users

and use it to resist the oppression
of the Master Control Program?

It becomes this meditation
on faith, where science

and theology collide.

If you are a user.

And everything you've done has
been according to the plan, right?

You wish.

When I saw the final product,

I felt like a proud father.

And it was basically F you
to the rest of Hollywood.

You thought we couldn't do it?

Yeah. Well, how do you like us now?

For those kids

in all those arcades throughout
the country, in the world,

they got it, and I knew then
that we had a revolutionary thing.

It's not going to be appreciated
now, but it will be.

End of line.

The movie-going experience

became something that started way before
you could actually go see the movie,

a movie is a product just
like Coca-Cola is a product.

I did it again.
Catch the wave. Coke.

It's putting the name in your head

so that you will think about it
and feel interested in it.

You have to remember

if it's at all possible, that in the 1980s
there was no such thing as the internet.

What we knew of future films
was given to us by the lobby of the cinema

where we were currently
going to see a film.

And it was a thrilling thing.

There was that little moment
where you looked at the poster

and you started to make the film
in your head as you looked at it.

All we had to go on was the title,

the tagline and the imagery.
I remember that first great image

from Star Wars: Luke holding
the lightsaber, it's evocative of medieval,

whether it's the Tom Jung version
or the Hildebrandt Brothers version.

It was such a powerful
image, and still is.

Back in those days,

movie posters were
legitimate works of art.

Now we know them.

You know, it's
kind of great range of artists.

Bob Peak who did all The Star Trek posters,
Drew Struzan,

who's now a legend.

And Robert McGinnis
and John Berkey and others.

It's a great range of artists
who have become cult

figures and the whole idea of
science fiction poster art

has become a collectible
and desirable in its own right.

Brilliant marketing,

the Michelangelo picture
has so much meaning to us.

I thought it was a brilliant
representation of that.

Tron was a poster
that was very important to me.

Great visual idea.

The Thing had a fabulous poster.

For me, really, the next level

in terms of poster art is the VHS box,
because when you went into

video stores, that's what you
were using to make your choices.

A movie that had been playing
to crickets in theaters

was now a movie that people thought,
'oh, this must have been a big hit.'

I think partly because of the appeal
of what was on the box. That transformed

what people remember about
the success of these pictures.

What a difference!

If you weren't alive in the '80s,
you will never know the unbelievable

high stakes selection

process at the video store.

You kind of flipped it around and looked
at some of the words in the background

and read maybe a few of them and looked
at some of the quotes, "Two thumbs up

"Roger Ebert", you know?

But it was the image on the front
that made you excited and our hunger

not only to know
about the worlds of the film,

but also to know about how they made
the worlds of the film began to grow.

The audience was

very intelligent, and I said,
"I think we can do a magazine

"that will target people like me
that have been a science fiction fan

"since I was a kid that really covered
all the stuff that I love."

Geeks grew not out of necessarily

wanting to be Luke Skywalker,
but because they wanted to be George Lucas.

They wanted to become filmmakers,
and they wanted to understand film

as much about the story it told.

But the story that went on behind
the scenes as well, and this expanded

across the 1980s.

I told George Lucas, when I met him,
"Your movie made my magazine a success

"because when it came out,
suddenly the whole audience

"for science fiction
came alive.

"They want to know

"facts, information, knowledge.

"That's what we were giving them."

Starlog, Cinefantastique,

Cinefex is very much hardcore making of.

Premiere.

Then in 1989 in Britain, Empire was born,
which I went on to work for.

one of the things I did at Lucasfilm

was I started and oversaw
the first few years of the official

Star Wars fan club, and for far less money
than it cost us to operate,

you could join and we sent out
a membership kit with an exclusive poster

and photographs and stuff, and a
quarterly newsletter called Bantha Tracks.

We wanted to keep fans
interested and happy.

Fandom developed around these magazines.

We created a place for the reader to come

and pour out their geekdom
and be amongst like minded people.

There was a point in the '80s when the
marketing and the product placement

and the sort of eye towards what
these films were going to do beyond

when you left the theater would
sometimes overtake the movie themselves.

Don't you worry.

Suddenly, you've got

songs from movies
that are on Billboard charts.

Ray Parker Jr. from Ghostbusters,
that was so fantastic.

If there's something strange
In your neighborhood

MTV, they would take a
song from the movie

and make a video,
and it made it really fun.

- Who you gonna call?
- Ghostbusters!

You associated all those things together
and then you wanted to see the movie.

It was kind of incredible marketing.

Look at the stereo.

No, no, no, don't touch it.
It's not a stereo, it's--

What is it?

And this is how films grew in our heads.

It was a way of enticing you in.
These days, they're much more

like an accompaniment
of the whole hype machine.

But we didn't know what hype was.

I mean, we experienced it without
putting a name on it back in the '80s.

So that's all part of our
advertising and publicity.

It just makes sense.

Who's going to want to go see this movie?

Let's let them know about it.

I'd buy that for a dollar!

SpaceHunter.

Adventures In The Forbidden Zone.

In 3-D.

So the first big 3-D science fiction movie
of the '80s was Spacehunter

Adventures in the Forbidden Zone.

For some reason, all of these '80s

3-D sci fi movies have
really long, wordy titles.

I remember seeing a lot of these
'80s 3-D movies in the theater.

I was their target audience.

I was the one who sort of pitched

doing it in 3-D.

I thought the title was right.

It is the kind of
science fiction exploitation movie

that was popular at the time.

Three women have crashed

landed on this planet
and they get captured.

Michael Ironside

is the villain in this film,
his role is the Overdog.

I imagine he hated the makeup process,
but enjoyed the scenery eating.

Ah, you can't hurt me.

But I can hurt you.

Peter Strauss plays the pilot,
the Han Solo knockoff character.

Whatever you say, princess.

Molly Ringwald, who at this point in time
is very pre–Brat Pack plays

Niki, a sort of an urchin pain
in the butt character.

What the hell are you?

What do you think I am, you scrawny earthbag?
I'm a woman!

A pre Ghostbusters, Ernie
Hudson is in this movie

as a rival smuggler slash pilot,
opportunistic guy, and they end up

one-upping each other through the film,
before coming together.

Just look at it.
Look at what you did!

It's ruined!

There's a lot of location shooting,
some very impressive landscapes.

They really make it look bigger
than it has any right to be.

John LaFleur was the young

Canadian filmmaker
that sort of invented this story

initially, but he had very
little film experience.

He fell behind very quickly
and we had to make a change

in our filmmakers and
we found Lamont Johnson.

His concept was to try to make it
as realistic as possible

and sort of didn't take
advantage of the fun of it.

I felt that Spacehunter was
a little bit of a lost

opportunity finally, given the cast and
the concept and the use of native 3-D.

Using two cameras,
using two projectors to show it

kind of impossible
from a commercial standpoint

in terms of exhibition.

But it really looked beautiful

when you could see it
in its original form.

Let the games begin!

Star Wars
had this wonderful level of authenticity.

Just required a lot less
of that suspension of disbelief.

That was a real revolution
in storytelling.

What cinema could do and
storytelling could do,

and the connection with the audience can do,
was absolutely at its height.

I think that even for Lucas, the
expectation became Unattainably high.

There's stuff in Jedi

that is absolutely masterful
that I have really fond memories of.

Get alongside that one.

The chase through the forest,

which is like an epic piece of cinema.

I love that sequence so much.

I did go see Return of the Jedi
23 times in the theater.

The Sarlacc Pit and Jabba's
is going to throw them all in there,

but Luke's got the plan with R2.

You'd think that
there would have been

this big battle with Boba Fett
and someone and Han, right?

He just gets like accidentally rocket
packed into the side of Jabba's

big space cruiser.

And becomes a burp joke.

Boba Fett

first showed up in the Star Wars
Holiday Special in the animated sequence.

He was supposed to be the main villain

in the movie that turned out
to be called Return of the Jedi.

It was all going to be about
chasing Boba, rescuing Han Solo.

But during the making
of Empire, George decided

he did not want to make
more Star Wars movies.

I was sitting with him
in a sound mixing room,

and he told me that he'd made
this decision and was going to end,

and that's why he was going
to condense the third trilogy

and the redemption of Darth Vader
into Return of the Jedi.

And then, Boba

he went from going to be a big star

to an afterthought.

When we came onto the set,

they had these shirts
that said Blue Harvest.

Sort of like just a distraction
for the local people that they wouldn't

find out that we were
doing a Star Wars movie

the first time we go out to dinner
and Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, my father,

you know, Harrison Ford,
are having dinner together.

They're going to figure it out real quick.

Corey and I have always
been very, very close.

He traveled a lot with
me whenever I did movies,

stood in for me.

The opportunity to be
a part of the Star Wars

franchise was - couldn't overlook that.

When he fell into the pit,

Han is trying to shoot
the tentacle off of his leg.

An explosive charge went
off and went into his foot.

And burned his foot,

so they put me in Lando's outfit,
they hung me over the side.

They didn't tell me all these
explosions were going to happen.

I guess they got a
genuine reaction out of me.

And then they needed someone
to put on Klaatu’s mask.

He was just a random creature.

He was going to run towards Skywalker,
get into a quick skirmish,

and I couldn't see a thing.

It was sort of like a random
last minute thing.

And here I am, an action figure.

The big battle at the end,

the Death Star and then everyone
on Endor waiting for, you know, Han

will get that shield down,
we got to give him more time.

Go Billy Dee.

We've got to give
him more time.

I did seven stunts

for seven different Ewoks.
Every time Dave Tomlin,

who was the first assistant director
goes, “Deep get into the suit.”

I said, "But I just got killed."
He said, "Got to do another one."

When I watched Jedi, I was like this.

Just leaning forward, and I think the true
moviegoers posture, right, like that.

So what we have here
is a linking of almost a child's imagination

with all the technology
at the command of a movie maker.

These movies take us from childhood
into an era where we're growing up.

We're changing,
they're indelibly connected.

It was this huge part of my life.

We certainly never thought

we were going to get
any more of these movies.

What I think George Lucas did
amazingly was to show that it was possible

to execute these grand visions
with a level of believability

that was something
we haven't really seen before.

There are a lot of filmmakers
that were really inspired

and freed by what George
had done on Star Wars.

You got immersed into it and you
believed it and that was really wonderful.

Is this a game or
is it real?

WarGames.

What happens when you play a
thermonuclear war as a game,

but it actually connects to NORAD?

I love the What If of it.

I have seven, correction, eight, that's
eight Redbirds two degrees past...

There was another film

before WarGames, Colossus.

The good guys, us have these
supercomputers, and the bad guys,

the Russians have these
supercomputers and they connected.

So all of a sudden,
this artificial intelligence started

to make decisions for us because we're
so immature and violent and all that.

We will work together. Unwillingly at first
on your part. But that will pass.

But that will pass.

What a lot of these movies

were doing is trying to
hew as closely as they could

to things that might actually happen
and then play them out.

in the most frightening way
that they can think of.

They wanted it to look and feel real.

The WOPR has only fought
World War III as a game

time and time again.

WarGames, it's a really
smart little movie.

What it took was the growing
fascination in the early 1980s

with computers,
the home computer became a thing.

They barely had
10K in them at the time,

but they were
the most wonderful things in the universe.

You're really
into computers, huh?

Yeah.

You could dial into a computer
and see stuff you weren't supposed to see.

Oh, oh yes.

- What are you doing?
- I'm changing your biology grade.

No, I don't want you to do that,
you're going to get me in trouble.

Nobody can find out.

Forbidden knowledge, bring that on.

He was a great geek kid, Matthew Broderick.
The kid at home

can through the phone line, no less,
link up to some giant mainframe

that operates all of the
nuclear weapons in America.

This is kind of feasible
somehow in our brains.

This is what computers do.

And he could be starting World War III.

Shall we play a game?

How about... global thermonuclear war?

It's really suspenseful.

Josh was trying to find the right code
so he could launch the missiles himself.

They're trying to divine

how to beat this supercomputer
at its own game.

Come on.

Learn, goddamn it!

It was science out of control film

but it keyed in to that permanent
fear that was going on.

Normal kids and nuclear threat.

I think I auditioned for
WarGames about six times.

The original script was much
darker and much more scary,

and the guy was more of an isolated
kind of loner who worked at RadioShack.

WarGames scared people so much

that there were actual computer
hackers who were put in jail.

Kevin Mitnick was put in jail
and not given access to a payphone

because some idiot
senator believed that he could,

using his voice and a pay phone,
launch a nuclear missile.

You can watch WarGames today,
particularly today,

as the nation is being hacked
by Russian operatives every 25 seconds.

And that movie don't seem silly at all.

How about a nice game of chess?

The Superman movies

are absolutely special to me.

Christopher Reeve
was so phenomenal in the part.

Every time a franchise tries
to carry the story on, it's fraught with

difficulty.

This time is going to be
the best time of all.

Superman III encapsulates

so many different genres in one film.

Oh, I'm sorry.

It was a comedy vehicle for Richard Pryor.

It was an action adventure Superman film.

It touched upon contemporary
technology of computers.

Getting down to business.

Richard had been in

Some Kind of Hero with Margot Kidder.

Richard got a chance to do some
drama playing a returned Vietnam vet,

and he really was hoping
that he would get the chance

to do something like that
in Superman III.

But that's not what they
had in mind for him.

Robert Vaughn plays
the villain in the film

and puts Richard Pryor's
character to work for him.

I asked you to kill a Superman.

And you're telling me you couldn't
even do that one simple thing.

Annette O'Toole playing Lana Lang,

sort of replacing Lois Lane as Superman,
Clark's love interest in the film.

Lois, say hello to Lana Lang,
Smallville's newest gift to Metropolis.

They were really trying to experiment

and dig deeper into who Superman was.

The part of the movie of going,
Yeah, man, that's heavy, I don't

I don't know how you hold

the weight of the entire world
and everyone's fate in your hands,

as one being, I don't care how much
super strength you get from the sun.

Like, there's got to be a point
where you break, right?

Literally break in two.

We see Superman, Chris Reeve,
Clark Kent, battling his darker self.

Dealing with his demons,
dealing with who he is,

dealing with the weight of being Superman.

It was a very interesting infusion
of a different kind of

sci fi into a superhero movie.

A massive supercomputer at the end

that produces a cyborg,
which is absolutely terrifying.

The computer digging into her
arms, basically taking over

and turning her into a sort
of robot android,

it's a very, very
scary moment.

If you're young enough,
that could be pretty damn traumatizing.

A lot of folks felt that the
real problem of the third

Superman film is that it did not live
inside the Superman universe at all.

Richard Donner had wanted to
and worked on a script.

It involved Brainiac and Mxyzptlk
and all sorts of other characters

from the Superman universe,
including an introduction of Supergirl.

They came around to making
Richard and Superman buds.

They kind of give each other five

at the end of the movie,
which is very, very cool of Superman

back in the day.
But the movie itself just really didn't

come together.

Superman III,

not the best of the Superman films,

but it's better than Superman IV.

Strange Invaders

I love the script of Strange Invaders.

I fell in love with it
the minute I read it.

Bill Condon was the writer.

I always thought that Bill
should have directed that film,

and he had never directed.

So clever, so fun.

You know, a great send up
of '50s sci fi films, those little nods

to films were really
right there in the script.

I want you to look at them
and tell me if you see anything

that reminds you of the creature
you saw last night.

The picture of Spielberg, you know,
is this an alien, that's really my favorite.

I'm sorry, Mr. Bigelow,
just a little joke we have around here.

It's a film that doesn't take
itself too seriously.

According to what we have, no one
has lived in that town since 1958.

I do believe that for Paul Le Mat
it was probably the greatest challenge.

That particular role,
I don't think it was necessarily something

that he fell into very comfortably,

but we brought him along for the ride.

But I'm a scientist,
I know what I saw.

I loved my character.

You know, smoking the cigarettes
and with a trashy newspaper.

Two-headed dogs, maybe.
But Aliens are passe.

She's fun because there's really
no boundaries with this character.

And there was an alien in my apartment
who gobbled up my soup.

It sounds ridiculous.

It was a kind of a no holds barred set.

I mean, there really wasn't
a lot of direction, if you will.

All of those wonderful actors
that were thrown together

really got it
and had a good time with it.

Wallace Shawn, he was so excited
because he hadn't really done

any acting, and here he is,
this great playwright.

All he wanted to do was act,
he was so thrilled.

He said, "I can't believe I'm here
acting in this movie."

He was willing to do anything,
looking for the next shot, you know?

The funny thing is for me that

Kenneth Tobey had
a wild crush on Diana Scarwid.

It was probably more fun than
it should have been.

That film, for me is a heartbreak,
because even though people like it

and enjoy it, I do feel like

I know what it could have been
with a different director.

It does have a very lighthearted tone

contrasted with really scary alien makeup.

It was done really well.

I remember being really impressed
and stunned when I saw it

because they had no budget on this film.

That does scare you,

but mostly you're really having fun.

In the early '80s, there was
this wonderful explosion

of highly imaginative, highly ambitious
science fiction.

Suddenly, all sorts of stories
that were prohibitive because

technologically they weren't possible,
were suddenly possible now.

What Star Wars did,

both in terms of the visual effects,
but also George's approach

to the storytelling aspect of it.

Was it opened up the
door for genre films

that people had been
afraid to make before.

It's driven by the story,

the tools that we had were capable
of certain levels of finish,

and then it was an artistic
interpretation of how the illusion

was going to fit into the bigger
story, which was really critical.

There's something about the real feel

of the thing
and seeing it that brings you into it.

If you look at it as something that's
a visual effect and it doesn't quite work,

you're out of it.

When it works, it really does work.

The job of a visual effects
supervisor at ILM

is to be able to fulfill the
vision of the director.

Also, the effects supervisor

should contribute something to the film
if they can,

if it's not inappropriate, that possibly
the director didn't even know he could do.

Always, always

it starts with the idea
of the finished shot.

I'm motivated by the finished shot.

The shots that are magic

are the ones that have good
design embodied in them.

Star Trek II the battle in the Nebula

that was all shot in
cloud tanks here at ILM.

Beautiful taste is being exhibited
there with compositions of

where the ships are, the shot designs,
how they're lit, how the clouds swirl.

That's just some of the
most beautiful work

that ILM's ever done.

Miniatures were defined to

a certain extent
by how they had to be used.

If you look at the Star Destroyer,
scale notwithstanding, the model had to be

incredibly highly detailed
to stand up to that

kind of macro photography.

And when we started
blowing stuff up,

we had to build things
in a little bit larger scale

so that we could photograph them
at high speed photographic rates.

The bigger the model,

the more properly scaled the explosion

appeared to be.

Every optical composite

was a performance.
The way that we used to put

together a shot of a bunch of spaceships,
you didn't shoot them all at once.

You shot them one at a time.

There's a really remarkable shot
in Return of the Jedi,

and it's remarkable for the
huge number of separately

photographed spaceships
that are all in there.

It was intended to be a wow moment.

And it really accomplished that.

It's kind of overwhelming when you think
about the mechanical complexity

of all those separately
photographed elements.

The thought process that goes
in to breaking down the barriers

that we have for this component,
that component, and how do you do this.

Those are strong.

We came up with this

system called Go Motion,
which is kind of a joke.

We didn't know what to call it, so we
called it the opposite of stop motion.

The first time we used Go Motion
was on the Tauntaun, and it totally worked.

It gave a blur to the thing.

That was effective.

Then on Dragonslayer,
we developed it further.

In Jedi with the two legged Walker,
when the Ewoks rolled

the logs down the hill,
Go Motion allowed me

to do that.

And that was really complicated.

You get into the zone.

You know, it's a form of
meditation to shut the world out

and be in the zone, you know,
and do it, do what it tells you.

I'm walking by and it's
shh, very quiet.

It'd be Dennis Muren at the camera.

Click.

And then all these hatches opened up

and out came Jon Burge and Phil Tippett,

and then move it ever so slightly
and then disappear down the hatch.

Click.

Matte painting,

as a way of adding on
to a set by painting,

for example, on a piece of glass.

Not only is it a budget
saving device,

it's an opportunity to enhance.

You're working on something
that is supposed to be

invisible.

Ghostbusters II is the film I was working on,
where I said to myself

at the end of this, we've really reached
the end of traditional visual effects.

We can't keep doing it this way.

The ideas are getting bigger
than the toolbox we have.

Fortunately, in ILM, we had
a computer group

that had been working on computer graphics
and I had jumped into that.

I did Young Sherlock Holmes
with them.

That really proved to me
that this is the future.

It needed more time for the technology,

both the hardware and the software
to get up to the level

where we can actually make
it a productive tool,

which we experimented again with
on The Abyss, Jim Cameron's film.

Water Weenie is the way
that we respectfully

talked about it.

Seeing things like Tron

and Last Starfighter,
I thought computer graphics is coming.

It's not quite ready,
but something to keep your eye on.

The Last Starfighter used digital effects.

It was the first one to use it
for the entire film.

When you look back at it now,
there are some really some growing pains

and you can see where things
were not as effective

as it would have been if you got models.
You didn't know if it was going to work.

So it was a gamble.

It's a good example

of the beginnings of CGI.

My brother, Jeff, is a
visual effects supervisor,

and he worked on Tron doing the Bit.

So he was one of the first CGI
artists, and later

I worked with him on Flight of the Navigator,
where he helped me

design the spaceship morphing
and reflectance mapping.

This is the flying version of the ship.

And behind there is the
hovering version of the ship.

It was a maquette, meaning that
we took a computer and we touched it

all along here to create the wire frame

that was then used to wrap
the backgrounds on.

Shortly after the Lucasfilm computer division
had been sold off as Pixar,

we saw that there was a lot of value
in that tech and that this had a big

future in visual effects.

Star Trek IV, that hallucination
scene was just about

the first foray of the
ILM computer graphics department.

And that was always the carrot for me
and the promise back in the early '80s

that this is what it could do,
you know, and we're there,

but it moved too quick, and I think
there hasn't been enough recognition

that it needs to fit within
the imperfect world of reality.

"But I can make it perfect", you know.

No, don't make it perfect.

Sometimes understanding those limitations

becomes key to capturing a feeling.

The '80s represents
an era of a lot of bravery.

The filmmakers were pushing
new techniques, trying new things.

Some of them worked great
and some of them didn't.

Some of them really show their age today,
but there's something kind of wonderful

about that, that they were fearless
about the things that they would try.

Star Trek III: The Search For Spock.

The adventure continues.

I believe that the major
theme that runs through

Star Trek III is one
of family and sacrifice.

To old friends.

If you count Spock, the seven
people have been through

so much together and they've
faced down death together.

We are now at a point
where a decision that has to be

made is going to cost them dearly.

If there's even a chance that
Spock has an eternal soul,

Then it's my responsibility.

Yours?

Kirk, in particular,

has to make tremendous
sacrifices during this film.

My God, Bones...
What have I done?

Christopher Lloyd

as the Klingon commander is
an interesting casting choice.

You, will tell me the secret

of the Genesis torpedo.

He just sinks himself
right into that role.

He chews scenery just as
well as William Shatner does.

You fool! Look around you!
The planet's destroying itself!

Yes! Exhilarating, isn't it?

You realize just how versatile an actor
he was to go from Reverend Jim

to this, and then, you know,
a year later, he's in Back to the Future.

Leonard, he took Spock to heart.

I mean, really, really took him to heart.

As soon as he passed that
gate with the word

Paramount scrawled on top of it,
he became Mr. Spock.

Spock brought a lot of opportunity
to Leonard Nimoy.

There's no doubt about it.

But does he need Spock? No.

When Star Trek III came along,

I think

he was more than willing to walk away
unless he had something more

challenging to do, which was direct.

What I recall is Michael Eisner
trying to talk

Leonard out of directing himself,
making his directing debut.

Leonard's calling me up
and I said, "Are you prepared

"to let the ship sail without you?"

And he said, "Absolutely."

I said, "Then sit tight,
you're going to direct the movie."

If he says he's not going
to be in the movie

unless he gets to direct it,
he'll get to direct it.

Period, the end.

Spock is the linchpin of it.

He would say to me repeatedly,
"The studio really only understands

"a two by four to the head."

What they understand is leverage,
and he had leverage.

They realized that their box office
is going to be bigger

if Spock appears in the film.

They kept the thumbscrews on him.

Jeff Katzenberg looked over his shoulder
every day to make sure he was on time

and on budget.

The fact is, he had no experience other

than directing some episodes of TV,
including T.J. Hooker,

you know, other than that,
he was a neophyte.

I didn't know what we were in for.

Leonard directed by omission,

if he didn't say anything, it was fine

when I got that through my head,

I felt less neglected.

Good. More, more.
He is dying. Dying.

We had confidence in him, I felt that
he knew what he was doing,

he had taste, his story
sense was quite good.

He's the guy who prepped things to death.

You try to deal with as many variables

as possible during the
pre-production process

so that when you're in production,
things hopefully run smoothly.

So much so that you can
have these happy accidents.

Film-making is really, a lot of it
is just dealing with problems all day long.

It's story,

it's story, it's always story,

first and foremost.

You saved the ship.

You saved us all.

Don't you remember?

The really, really

renegade, seat of your pants
crazy comedy of the '70s

found its way into like a
big mainstream sci fi Spielbergian thing.

Ready?

Ghostbusters.

You've got this

sort of rag tag New York story,
but then into it,

you have this extremely sci fi, techy,

supernatural, insane thing, and it worked.

Get her!

Action!

I just worked with Bill Murray on
Stripes, and Harold as well.

And that turned out well.

That's the fact, Jack!

My agent, Michael Ovitz,
at that time, sent me

this sort of 80 page treatment
that Dan Aykroyd had written.

He had written it originally for
Belushi and himself.

I think he had spoken to
Eddie Murphy at some time

about doing with him.

It was set in the future,
There were multiple

ghost busting groups on various planets.

And they competed with each other.

These groups, they worked like firemen.
Their purpose was to rid the universe

of ghosts or monsters.

I said, "Look,

"it has this great idea in it,
but it's almost impossible to make.

"I think it should happen today

"and I think it should happen
in a big city like New York."

I really pitched
the story of Ghostbusters.

Our courteous and efficient
staff is on call

24 hours a day to serve all
your supernatural elimination needs.

We're ready to believe you!

When the actors are really in their finest,
most involved way on the set, in costume,

they can be the most creative
as well to find some unique way

of maybe finding a fresh spin on it.

It's directed and free at
the same time, and there was

I could by just using as few words

as possible, interrupt the
improvisation and refocus things

so that the storytelling made sense
in the context of everything else

in terms of character
and in terms of intent and tone.

And so that things weren't just silly.

There is no Dana, only Zuul!

What a lovely
singing voice you must have.

And just look for comedy

in the reality of the situation.

We came, we saw,
we kicked its ass!

It really boils down to the
Ghostbusters themselves,

it's charming

when Dan Aykroyd slides down

that fire pole, when they first go
see this dilapidated firehouse.

Wow! This place is great!

They're all big kids.

We should stay here, tonight!
Sleep here. You know, to try it out.

It's so crazy and wonderful,
and they're having such a blast

and that just spills right over to us.

It's the perfect Bill Murray movie

that laid back goofiness
that only Bill Murray has.

I'll take Miss Barrett back to her
apartment and check her out.

I'll go check out
Miss Barrett's apartment.

The addition of Ernie, I think,
was really special in a lot of ways.

If there's a steady paycheck in it,
I'll believe anything you say.

Ernie brought in the
outsiders to people

that didn't really feel
like a Ghostbuster, you know?

it would be a Twinkie… 35 feet long,
weighing approximately 600 pounds

That's a big Twinkie.

I think I was very fortunate

to be making popular movies

in this era, an era of directorial power
which we didn't really quite

have as directors prior to it
and certainly

after it.

It's The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

My films,

they almost uniquely have a kind
of emotionality that made you feel good.

It's the positiveness
that made for repeat viewing.

Let's show this prehistoric bitch
how we do things downtown.

The Last Starfighter.

The Last Starfighter is about a boy

in a trailer park who is
really good at a video game.

Yeah!

It turns out to be an

actual recruitment tool.

Aha! A test sent out
across the universe

to find those with the gift
to be starfighters.

It's the perfect fantasy

if you play video games.

It was a genius idea,
the fact that nobody came up with it

before that, is kind of amazing.

You were recruited by the star league
to defend -

to defend the frontier against Xur
and the Ko-Dan armada.

Although most of it
takes place in outer space,

there's such a down to earth
element about it.

Nick Castle, the director,
wanted to imbue it

with a sort of a Capra-esque
sort of quality.

I'm shaking the dust of this crummy

little town off my feet and
I'm gonna see the world!

Forget it, man.
I'm doing something with my life.

He has this girlfriend,

he has dreams of doing bigger
things and all his dreams

keep falling through.

Still go to city college
with your friends.

Until this incredible
situation comes along,

and he almost doesn't
take advantage of it.

Listen, Centauri. I'm not any of those guys,
I'm a kid from a trailer park.

That's what you think!
Then that's all you'll ever be.

Robert Preston, The Music Man,
The Music Man in outer space.

Trouble with a capital T,
and that rhymes with P,

and that stands for Pool.

When we found out that he would
do it, we were just so happy.

Centauri!

Very robust fellow.
Smoked like a chimney,

but he had that great voice.

Say hello to my assistant, Beta.

Howdy.

I did get to act with two Alex's, lucky me.

I'm a state of the art,
top of the line beta unit,

put here as a courtesy replacement
for while you are away.

He's just comically inept.

That's why it was fun to play,
because you can

just put yourself in that position
where everything is brand new.

Nothing is normal.

Dan O'Herlihy.

He agreed to play Grig.

Grig, the gung-ho iguana?

He would never be seen.
There would always be

this prosthetic giant mask over him.

He had to triple what he would
normally do in terms of gestures.

Ah, now you look cute!

I never saw him

not looking like lizard man,
and he's very distinguished looking,

you know, white haired, blue eyed
Irish guy, you know, and I just didn't

I didn't really know
what he looked like.

How do you do?

He does this like...

I was cast in Last Starfighter

playing a role called Lewis's Friend.

Spaceship lands to return
Alex to the trailer park

and I go, "Aliens, awesome!"

Oh, my God!

They cut that scene from the movie
before it was ever filmed,

but I had already done a bunch of
featured extra work, so every year

I get a couple of hundred bucks from
The Last Starfighter as a residual payment

and I get to be part of a movie that,
as a fan, I was crazy about as a kid.

Are you kidding me?

I was not aware

of the amount of pressure
because of the CGI,

the tension it was surrounding,
Oh my God, is this going to work or not?

This may be a colossal failure.

The very end of the death
blossom sequence,

when I sat in a cage,
it was like a carnival ride.

And I could do about two of them
and then I was like...

The movie didn't make
any money when it came out,

it was only the people that
saw it on VHS or HBO.

Someone told me that Last Starfighter
was number one in video rentals.

Thank God for science,
creating another avenue for people

to see it and enjoy it.

That's what the movie's about,

the possibilities are unknown,

but are out there,
and all you have to do is find them

and then hold on tight
and go for the ride.

No words,
really, for what Buckaroo Banzai is.

Let's rock and roll!

Could I really tell you the storyline?

I'm not sure.

Buckaroo Banzai,
perhaps you can explain yourself?

Do you have to know
what the film is about,

even if you starred in it?

Buckaroo Banzai is a film

that to this day, I do not understand.
If you can tell me what it's about,

I'll give you money.

He was able to do everything.

He was like a scientist,
a rock star, a samurai warrior.

No limitations whatsoever.

Just a fun imaginary story
about a group of scientists

that play rock and roll and,
you know, defy the laws of physics.

Is it a comedy, is it sci fi,
is it action?

Is it a social satire?

Is it a love story? Is it romance?

What is it?
And it doesn't spoon feed you anything.

It just throws you in the middle
of this haywire crazy world.

It was a ship that was
being steered by Richter.

Richter and Mac would always powwow.

To them, it made sense.

Subcutaneous microphones
are gonna allow the

patient to transmit
verbal instructions to his own brain.

All we had to know

is that we had to act
like it made sense to us, right?

What are they?

Lectroids from Planet 10
by way of the the eighth dimension.

I guess I'm going to be
the dry, straight man surrounded by lunatics.

I had great fun
watching Peter go through his process,

and Ellen go through hers,

and Jeff Goldblum just brilliantly

stealing every scene that he was in.

We all gave up to Jeff's antics
and just enjoyed them

rather than try to compete with them,
because you couldn't, you couldn't win.

You know, I thought you were
gonna rehearse or something.

The Hong Kong Cavaliers.

Billy Vera and The Beaters were
kind of the musical center of that show.

That was really the Hong
Kong Cavalier band.

Peter brought in the cornet
because he could play.

It works perfectly.

Jeff Goldblum and I got a
band together after that.

Matter of fact I've got to leave right
here and go play the trumpet.

Evil! Pure and simple from
the eighth dimension!

I had special abilities
to do stunts and things,

and so they asked me
if I wanted to be a lectroid.

John Whorfin Destroyed.

John Lithgow is also an intense actor,

but he's also very silly.

Of course it's me, you fool.
Who'd you think?

I think he found Lizardo
to be liberating,

given the gravity that had been
laid on him as an Oscar nominee.

John Lithgow,
in The World According to Garp.

He was just
having a good time.

Where are we going?

- Planet 10!
- When?

Real soon!

You put John Lithgow and
Christopher Lloyd in a room,

the mind can't conceive
of what the acting result would be

I was supposed to be tortured,
and all I'm doing is hysterically laughing.

I think of that scene now I crack up.

Those are two gifted human beings.

Bigbooté.

Activate your probes.

And then they promise you a
sequel, and the sequel never comes.

A lot of the studio bosses
didn't know what to make of it.

It was supposed to be a series of movies
and they were supposed to all

be as lighthearted
and antic and sort of over-the-top.

It would fit in so well right now,

that sort of alternative universe world

audiences now are more attuned, I think.

It would have been fun to see it
go on and get weirder and weirder.

My eight year old watched it,
I said, "What's it about?"

He says, "Who cares what it's about?"

We don't have to care what
it's about, do we?

I guess not.

Remember, no matter
where you go,

There you are.

Terminator is a classic.

The Terminator.

Out of the gate, I appreciated
Cameron's film-making.

It was so satisfying.

You're just watching this extremely
talented filmmaker erupt onto the scene

and you just go, oh, I'm going
to now see every film

this person does because
they're obviously really good.

What day is it? The date!

12th, May, Thursday.

What year?!

It goes and it's just perfect.

You can't do that.

Wrong.

I was very inspired
by the editing of Terminator,

the speed of Terminator,
the harshness of Terminator.

The script was an excellent
blueprint for the movie.

It had propulsion, mystery,
annihilation, suspense,

romance, time travel.

It was all there.

Come with me if
you want to live.

Because the exposition is all on the run
during a shootout.

I'm Reese, assigned to protect you.

You've been targeted
for termination.

You're like living and dying in a scene

and getting out the back story.

It was a dark version of the future.

I loved the down and dirty
spareness of a B movie

sort of aspect to it.

His hope was to make a world class
genre picture

heavily influenced by George Miller

other than the fact that he broke down
all barriers and went gonzo.

Jim had a certain vision
and he was pushing the envelope.

We weren't Hollywood
redoing the same thing.

Jim was saying,
"No, no, no, we can go... here."

In between
all the action pieces,

there are some genuine high concept ideas
that get discussed about predestination

and your fate and what role
you play in history.

You're talking about things
that I haven't done yet

in the past tense.
It's driving me crazy.

Computers, once

they become sentient,
artificial intelligence will turn on us.

The technology itself will be
bent back upon us in the guise

of Arnold Schwarzenegger with an Uzi.

Lance Henriksen was

who Jim originally did his concept
sketch of The Terminator around.

With his skin coming away and
seeing the skeleton underneath.

I'm sure Lance was very disappointed
when he didn't get to play The Terminator,

but I can't imagine that
character without Arnold

portraying it.

Get out.

The Terminator skull itself,

many people don't know this,
the dimensions of it were arrived

at by taking a life cast of Arnold
and then carving down

from his features
down to a skull that would fit.

And those are Arnold's teeth.

The Terminator has Arnold
Schwarzenegger's teeth.

The point for Cameron was Sarah Connor.

He wanted the target to be the
most ordinary person he can imagine.

It's almost a Hitchcockian rule.

The ordinary person.

with Extraordinary circumstances.

That's what makes you relate.

Sarah Connor is an ordinary waitress

who will give birth
to the savior of the future.

I didn't ask for this honor,
and I don't want it!

Any of it!

Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn's
performance was incredible.

By the time the two of them got together
at the end, they so deserved it.

You knew exactly why
they were making love, obviously,

to save the world, to have this child.

I came across time
for you, Sarah.

I love you.

I always have.

She may be able to change the timeline

that she's on, is our future determined?

Do we have a choice in this algorithm
that we find ourselves in?

There is an ethical dilemma here.

We have to ask ourselves,
why are the Terminators

trying to get rid of the humans?

Are the machines of the future
going to be environmentalists?

Because if they are, we better
be very frightened because we're

not doing the job that we need
to be doing to protect this planet.

And they may see us as a threat
and want to take us out.

I'll be back.

2010 is based on Arthur C. Clark's novel:
2010 Odyssey Two,

which is itself a sequel to
the film version of 2001.

It has the thankless
task of being a sequel

to the greatest
science fiction film ever made.

The last thing you want to do
is make the sequel

to 2001 and piss off
Arthur C. Clark or Stanley Kubrick.

I would not do the film unless Kubrick
said, "Okay" and Arthur C. Clark said, "Okay".

And Stanley Kubrick, to me,

is one of the great directors of
the greatest directors that's ever lived.

I am not.

The only way to do
it was to make a film that

honestly could not be compared to 2001.

They're different in every possible way.

Kubrick said,
"Just make sure it's yours.

"Just make sure you
make your film."

Roy Scheider plays Heywood Floyd,

who was originally portrayed
by William Sylvester in 2001.

He has an opportunity to go out to Jupiter

and determine what actually happened
with the crew of the Discovery.

Scheider, along with John Lithgow
and Bob Balaban,

hitch a ride aboard a Russian spacecraft
captained by Helen Mirren.

What has happened
to American bravery?

Alive and well,
thank you very much.

What’s happened to
Russian common sense?

This was the height of the Reagan era,
and here's a film

about Russians and Americans
doing a joint venture in space.

In Arthur's book, everybody
got along famously.

I thought it would be interesting
to have all hell break loose on Earth

and have it become serious.

All American personnel are ordered
to leave Soviet territory immediately,

or they will
be placed under arrest.

It plays with the Cold War

thing, the early '80s paranoia
that we had, but it also takes HAL,

who is essentially the villain in 2001

and kind of reprograms him to be the hero.

Do you want me to
stay with you?

No. It is better for
the mission if you leave.

Keir Dullea returns to

reprise his role as Dave Bowman.

And Douglas Rain returns
to voice HAL, the computer.

Talked to Floyd?

Yes.

Would you like to
play a game of chess?

I play very well.

I'm sure you do.

I had recorded Douglas first.

So when Keir did his scenes,
he did them with HAL.

I'm afraid.

Don't be. We'll be together.

And he came to me afterwards in tears,

because when he did 2001, he did it
with a Cockney third assistant director.

Open the Pod bay doors, HAL.

Sorry, Dave.
Can't do that, Dave.

We use the docking ring in Leonov
to attach to the Discovery.

For a trip back home.

Roy Scheider was a joy

The only quirk with Roy was
he was always in the sun.

He would be outside the
studio with a reflector.

The crew put a sign that said
Scheider Beach outside the stage.

In 2001, the monolith was a sentinel,
it's an alarm that goes off

that tells some other

intelligence that somebody
has stepped on the Moon.

I certainly think they left a lot
to people's own interpretation.

In 2010, the monolith is a
basic life form building block.

I think it's kind of futuristic DNA.

I tried to make a science feasible film.

I just wanted to make a film
that was completely different,

so it could not rightfully
be compared to 2001

because I can't be compared
to Stanley Kubrick.

It's as simple as that.

What's going to happen?

Something wonderful.

Dune, a world beyond
your experience,

beyond your imagination.

Dune, that's a huge, bestselling book
with a dedicated fan following.

Back in the '80s,
those marketers,

they had no idea. They couldn't figure out
how to sell the real hard sci fi,

even though there was huge demand for it.

People weren't ready for them.

The precedent hadn't been set.

Dune takes place on four planets,
I could never keep them straight.

I've had more fun with sand at the beach.

David Lynch's Dune,
is this brilliantly evocative story

about 3000 years into the future,

and it's all about the planet Dune, Arrakis

the source of spice.

The spice extends life.

The spice expands consciousness.

The metaphor is it's about the Middle East
and about discovery of oil

and how everybody wants
to get their hands on it and occupy it.

I mean, the drug metaphors
are quite clear.

You know, throughout.

thoughts acquire speed,
the lips acquire stains,

stains become a warning.
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.

But it's this wonderful kind

of messianic adventure story,

full of great detail.

So the design of the
technology, the spacecraft,

and the hardware is Lynchian.
Wonderful sort of gothic sensibility

or art deco.
When you get David Lynch making anything,

he is fascinated by the textures

of existence and life.

The thing that came
in, we were just like, oh Lord,

they were so ugly.

Who's going to clean up
the messes in science fiction.

Who's the guy with the mop.

And of course, we were obsessed with
this idea of what the worms looked like.

They were the great challenge
of making Dune work and very wisely,

Lynch called upon the talents
of Carlo Rambaldi,

who was the great puppet creator.

The worms, little...

And then we had T-shirts on the show
that said 'I rode the worm',

and it was ridiculous, you know?

I am Chani, daughter of Liet.

From my dreams.

The first day of working on Dune,
I was a little scared.

That's a huge project.

I will love you forever.

You are my life.

Kyle was a lot of fun,
and he was very diligent.

He worked hard.

And he really wanted to do the best job

he could.

- The pain!
- Enough!

Sting felt pretty silly
in that blue thong,

I got to tell you, he was
kind of like, Oh my God.

I just used to crack up
whenever I saw myself

on that movie,
going, "Muad'Dib!"

Muad'Dib!

The still-suit is built for you.

With a Fremen suit
in good working condition,

life can be sustained
for weeks.

Even in the deep desert, Sire.

They took about half an hour to get on,

and then basically we
wouldn't take them off,

but they'd zip down to here,
but we'd squirm

out of the top of them
and you'd literally avoid liquids

so that you wouldn't be the one saying,
I have to go to the bathroom

and make everybody wait half an hour

while you go over to where the
bathroom is in Churubusco studios.

Your ears and nose, and
your scalp and your skin

and your body was just filthy,
so it was quite a commitment

to clean every night.

I think David at a certain
point was like, holy crap,

this is a big project because he would go,
"Well, we'll fix it in post."

I remember saying, "Oh oh", you know.

Long live Duke Leto!

After a while, man, it really
just became like

everybody would get off work
and hit the bar.

When people saw the movie Dune,

they would be handed a glossary sheet.

There was a lot of dazzle factor with it,

but the characters themselves,
it was hard to

for me anyway, it was hard
to relate to it sometimes.

I will kill him!

Paul!

Why Dune didn't land,

I think, is debatable, but it didn't,
and some people still love that movie

and some people it never landed
with, no matter how much time passed.

I think David in a way felt
out of his element. With the other films,

I think he had much more control.

The struggle is what's more
common in show business is people

struggling to get that vision out,
and I don't think he had ever

experienced that obstacle before.

Tom Selleck.

Cynthia Rhodes.

Gene Simmons.

Runaway.

Runaway was directed
by Michael Crichton.

It is a futuristic cop
movie about robots

that are programed to kill people.

I played the bad guy.

No, really?

A guy named Luther.

I said drop your gun.

I'm not kidding, asshole.

The way I auditioned is, he said,

"Look into my eyes
with intensity that you're going to kill me."

So I just looked at him.

He says, "Okay, you got the job."

I never read for the part.

I just

did a lot of brooding.

Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park.

Other than that,

Runaway was Gene's
first villain role, for sure.

I loved Magnum P.I.

and I also loved Kiss growing up.
Gene and his crazy tongue.

I remember when I met him
the first time I was like,

"Do you really have a goat's tongue
sewed onto your own?"

And he's just like,
"No, it's just really long.

"The ladies love it, right?"

Hey, come on, tiger.

The father-son scenes
with Tom Selleck

came out real.

It wouldn't kill you to get
married again, you know.

I know.
It wouldn't kill you to go to sleep.

The heart of the story and finding that
underlying humanity and connection

or relatability to the characters
in these stories.

Advanced technology
in the movie with my gun,

which I have in my collection,
I have that original gun,

you shoot the bullet
and it goes around and finds you.

Heat seeking.

Little remote control cars.

One down.

The spiders that shot acid.

Those were remote control, really neat.

There was a couple
of different kinds.

Some would jump.

Some would scurry.

I wanted a spider

so bad.

Dad, are you coming
to get me?

Kids in dangerous situations, yeah,

the '80s were a little
more free with that.

Let him go.
Now!

He's going to let him get killed

by these crazy acid blowing up spiders.
And it's pretty dark.

The spiders will let you in,
but they won't let you out.

I can't have any witnesses,
it's too messy.

The spiders have been programmed to
kill the first person that comes out

of the elevator.

He was just like,
"What? Bobby!"

Bobby!

I thought it was good.
I thought it came off well.

Is the movie a Triple A movie?

No, but my kids saw it
and they gave me a thumbs up.

That's good enough.

Creature effects are a huge part
of the science fiction experience.

It is so important that we
believe that the creature is real.

They're really important decisions
for how these films work

or don't work, if the alien hadn't
worked in Alien and Aliens,

they don't work at all.

And if E.T. is absurd, then E.T. fails.

When you see something on screen,

that you know for a fact was just a bunch of
people pushing buttons in a dark room somewhere,

there's a disconnect there.

But if you see something,

even if it doesn't look perfectly real,
that's a practical effect.

You're like, wow! How did they do that?
Where are the operators, what the hell.

And so there is a connection there.

There's a charm,
it's a stylistic approach.

They were still dynamic enough
when presented the right way

to immerse you in it, and you
forget all about the technology,

which is a good thing,
and you just follow the story.

I think that was true of Yoda.

I think that was true of E.T.

I saw an early E.T.

without the sound effects, and I was like,
"Uh, I don't know about this."

You see it with sound and music and
fine cutting, you don't question anything.

E.T. phone home.

E.T.'s design was magical,

in the scenes
that I did with E.T.

I could suspend my imagination like that.

It was just like working with another kid.

When we first saw

the Yoda stuff and some of
the rushes, it was like,

I don't know about this puppet.

And then you see it
cut together in the scene and it's like,

yeah, totally works.
You buy the intention.

I'm looking for someone.

Looking? Found someone you
have I would say.

The walking Yoda.

It was a long perspective shot
they wanted, and they were looking for

a perfectly proportioned guy
that'll fit in the costume.

They said,
"You're too tall to be Yoda."

So they gave me the knee pads
and you have to learn to walk on the knees.

I worked with Kenny Baker on Star Wars,

used to have too many beers at lunchtime.

Couldn't get in, and Dave Tomlin would go,
"Get into R2-D2."

I said, "But that’s not made for me."
He said,

"Yeah, get in there."

Kenny was only three feet, seven inches tall.

Man, I'm 4'4.
To squeeze into that was hard.

It was tough.

I love that every creature effect
is a team of people working together,

whether it is all of the puppeteers
doing Jabba the Hutt,

whether it is one guy
in a suit in Predator.

That giant space worm in the
asteroid in Empire Strikes Back.

I love that that thing
looks like an oven mitt.

And it's just someone going like,

chase it out and do that.

I'm just certain Slimer is my
most lovable, endearing creation,

and for those of you that don't
know how he was made,

I tried to look at it
as a cartoon character.

You know, Slimer was big.
It wasn't actually a puppet.

It was a device that a gentleman
named Mark Wilson wore.

He looked through the mouth.

We shot against a black stage.

I can get people in black suits
as many people around him as possible

to stick their arms in this puppet
and muscle a smile, even the tongue

that comes out of his mouth
and licks his lips, that's a tongue glove.

The whole thing was just to make him
as funny as possible.

In the movie it works,
and I'm really happy with it,

it's the most iconic thing
I've worked on.

Everybody knows Slimer.

He Slimed me.

The Thing for me has yet to be surpassed

in the ingenuity and imagination
that you see on screen.

Rob Bottin was the mastermind
behind the majority

of what you see.
At a certain point during the production,

Rob was overwhelmed.

He was ill and he was not able

to finish the dog thing effect.

So Stan Winston decided

to really make it a very
simple hand puppet.

You can see if you really look for it,

the body is where the puppeteers
head is, and the head

and mouth are simply a hand puppet.

- Come on.
- Okey Dokey.

With Howard the Duck, George
wanted to do it as a costume.

I tried to talk to George out
of it, you know.

I was like,
"I don't know if it's going to work."

We don't have the flexibility

to do what we did today, what we would
be doing with computer graphics.

But it was going to be a guy in a suit.

It was a challenge.

My suit was animatronic.

We went through 19
different heads at 50,000 each.

It was put on, and then
hot glued shut.

So therefore I couldn't
take a regular break.

No lunch breaks and no breaks at all.

So they would drop M&M's
down my beak.

I was a natural.

I could find my mark without seeing it.

If you move shit, tell the duck.

And I tripped over,
50,000 dollar mask gone.

This is beginning to seriously
undermined my self-esteem.

Predator is the biggest black

mark on my career for no
good goddamn reason.

They handed this design over
that their production designer had done,

and I immediately said,
"This is never going to work."

It didn't matter how much time
and money we had, it was impossible.

They hired Jeanne-Claude
because he's a martial arts expert,

and they put him in the suit
where he can barely totter.

It was meant to be
replaced and roto’d.

So of course the guy's like,

"Why? Why did you even hire me?"

No one had bothered to tell from production,
and he gets there and goes,

"What's with the suit?"

And I said, "Well, you're playing
a monster in this film."

"I never thought it was
a real suit."

"I hate this suit.
I look like a superhero."

And then he found out he was going
to be invisible for half the movie,

and he was
enraged about that.

He didn't know about that, right?
Don't think these guys read the script?

I tried and tried
to get them to let me do something else

that I knew would work.

And they were like, "Absolutely not."

It was absolutely doomed
from the beginning.

They pulled the plug pretty quickly.

I think it was thanks to Arnold,

who had formed a relationship
with Stan Winston on The Terminator

that Stan was approached for the job,
"Why don't you call Stan for this one?"

That's a terrible Arnold impression.

knowing they had very little time,

they decided to take an old school approach.
It's just a man in a suit,

but it's a man in a suit with a killer

facial design and a killer finish.

And one of the great creature
suit performers of all time,

Kevin Peter Hall, who had just done
Harry from Harry and the Hendersons.

Unlike the Alien, the
Predator could express

a little emotion when it looks at you,

you can almost sense its disapproval.

Alien, one of the most unique
and influential

creature designs ever.

In Aliens, James Cameron made
the wise decision to really honor

H.R. Giger's designs.

They removed the clear
skull carapace thing

to reveal this sort of bony
under structure.

It was a combination of men in suits,

cable actuated puppets.

And that sort of thing to bring
those alien warriors to life.

You got gymnasts and dancers,
people could really morph

into these creatures bodies
and bring them to life.

Occasionally, when you had a break,
you know, you'd see one of these guys with

with their alien head tucked under
their arm, just smoking a cigarette, right?

I think it was quite amazing
to see how James Cameron

and Stan Winston worked
together to create the Queen Alien.

It was awe inspiring, really.

It was like watching Kabuki theater
manning poles that had wires,

going over pulleys that would work her arm

or make her walk forward.

Then in the Queen Alien head,

the smallest special effect guy
on the crew, was tucked in her head

and his only job was to
push goo out of her teeth.

That was extraordinary film-making, man.

While most of the shots you
see of the alien queen are the full size

puppet or parts of the full sized puppet,
there are few moments

where it's actually a
rod puppeted miniature

built by the Skotak brothers
from the Stan Winston studio maquette.

I mean, that film is the
perfect example of how

you take every technique

and you bring it all together,
and that's where magic happens.

This baby hits 88 miles per hour.

You're gonna see some
serious shit.

Back to the Future.

How far you're going?

About 30 years.

I love time travel,

I love the idea that you could just be
transported somewhere in time.

I'm a huge Back to the Future fan.

It's a perfect movie, it's probably one of
the great Hollywood scripts of all time.

It's just an unbreachable screenplay.

1955

You're my mo-
you're my mom.

People say to me,

"What would you say are the most
important aspects of screenwriting?"

I say, "There's three of them:
character, character, and character."

If you're not with your characters,
you've got nothing.

When you see Doc Brown
introduced in Back to the Future,

you're going to say, "Okay, I will
believe that what he invents works."

You look at the DeLorean
and you say, "Yeah, this looks like

"it's something that the guy
actually did build in his garage."

I'm from the future.

I came here in a time machine
that you invented.

Yes, we can have fun with the

bells and whistles of time travel,
the clock tower, all that stuff.

But the end of the day, what we
have in Back to the Future

is a very simple idea,
which is what would happen

if I was there on my parents' first date.

We had always wanted
Michael J. Fox

to play Marty McFly, but we couldn't
get him out of Family Ties TV series.

We cast Eric Stoltz, particularly

at the urging of Sid Sheinberg,

president of MCA.
Sheinberg actually said, "I am so sure

"that Eric Stoltz is going to be great in this
that if he's not,

"you know, you start the movie
all over again with somebody else."

Now, he never expected
us to take him up on that.

Eric didn't have the natural sense of humor
that Michael J. Fox had.

He kind of played it less for laughs.

Bob Zemeckis gave Eric
the bad news on Thursday night

and the following Monday or Tuesday night,
we were back at Twin Pines Mall.

It was the first time
Michael J. Fox came to work.

Once he started performing,
everybody could see this is Marty McFly.

Are you telling me that
you built a time machine

out of a DeLorean?

The way I see it...

With the costars,
he brought things out in them,

and so Christopher Lloyd was better.

I finally invented
something that works!

Lea Thompson was way better.

Oh my God, he's a dream.

Wait a minute, Doc, are you trying
to tell me that my mother

- has got the hots for me?
- Precisely!

The scene with Marty
and Lorraine in the car

that was always a
really critical scene

to be able to pull that off.

Don't worry.

If this was going to work,
Lorraine had to break it off.

We wrote this line,

"I feel like I'm kissing..."

...my brother.

The look on
Michael J. Fox's

face when she pulls away

after she makes the move,
is priceless.

It gives us permission to make that work.

Would it have worked like that with Eric?

I don't think it had a chance
of working like that.

This is why actors get the
kind of salaries that they get,

because when they're
that good, it's worth it.

This one tells you where you're going.

This one tells you where you are.
This one tells you where you were.

There are basically two different kinds
of time travel in science fiction.

There's the ones where you can change
the past, and there's ones where you can't.

Science fiction theater.

The third kind of time travel is what
I call the Back to the Future mechanic.

The picture in Back to the Future
is the quintessential example of that.

They establish that as this is the way
things work and they stick to that.

It's like it has been erased.

Erased. From existence.

That's the first rule of science fiction, you
establish some rules, you stick to those rules.

It helps, of course,
obviously, that it's a comedy.

We are sending you back to the future!

One of the questions ILM had for us

is what is it going to look
like to the time traveler?

And they were suggesting
all kinds of elaborate effects.

But at the end of the day, Bob and I said
"Time travel should be instantaneous,

"so let's just get on with it."

Going back to our belief
that what we were telling here

really was a human story,
it was not a story about technology.

People say to me,
"Why do you think Back to the Future

"is still as compelling and popular today

"as it was back in the day?"

Hello? Hello?
Anybody home?

- Think, McFly!
- Think.

It's all about the characters.

These are all really
powerful human elements.

And that is what the movie is about.

Roads? Where we're going
we don't need roads.

From the producers of Jaws,
and the director of Splash,

Cocoon.

One of the things I think
was very evident in the '80s,

we saw a lot of young heroes,

we saw a lot of youth
in this physical prowess.

What Cocoon did, in a
very interesting way

call into this social standard of

what old means. A movie like
Batteries Not Included really wouldn't exist

without the proof of concept
that Cocoon was able to supply

to the industry.

Everything's happening so fast...

I absolutely love

Cocoon, beautiful Ron Howard film.

It's a science fiction film about aliens,
but not really.

Cocoon is about aging, it's about life.

Don Ameche, Jessica Tandy,
Hume Cronyn, were these

aging actors.

Will you still love me when
I can't keep up with you?

Of course. I love you now,
and you can't keep up with me.

Wilford Brimley, who played
one of the older gentlemen in the movie,

was only 50 years old
during the making of that film.

They're in this old folks home and doing
what they're doing, every now and again,

they would go to the swimming pool
and just fool around and have some fun.

What they don't realize
is that at the bottom of the pool

are these cocoons.

What are rocks
doing in a pool?

These older folks
start to feel rejuvenated.

They can do things
they couldn't do before.

You think there's cocaine
in that pool?

Might be.

They would do their favorite things,
they would go dancing,

they would go try to
fix the thing they regretted.

Some enchanted evening.

Brian Dennehy

peels back his body suit and reveals
these sort of really magical aliens,

these sort of glowing beams
that float through the skies.

These older folks were
offered the opportunity

to leave Earth with these
aliens and live forever.

Forever?

We don't know
what forever means.

The question in Cocoon becomes,
"Is this cheating human mortality?"

Is our clock supposed to run out?

It's a deeply, deeply moving film.

Can you help me?

I adored Cocoon.

Ron Howard is able to get to
the heart of the man's struggle

or the woman's struggle
and be able to overcome it.

one of the things I love about Ron Howard
is that he is a true storyteller.

If it's a comedy or a drama
or it's in the future,

or if it's in the past, or if it's
right here in this very moment.

The way nature's been treating us,
I don't mind cheating her a little.

I feel like Ron Howard cares
about how the audience feels

at the end of the movie.

We all went to see Mad Max
Beyond Thunderdome.

Huge movie.

Tina Turner, biggest pop star in the world
at the time, had a hit song on the radio,

We Don't Need Another Hero.

Thunderdome.

Sorry.

I remember the Rolling Stone cover, too,

with Mel Gibson and Tina Turner,
and you just went, oh man, this is big.

Mad Max

Beyond Thunderdome.

The post-apocalyptic sub-genre.

It just allowed the filmmakers
imagination to run wild.

You can feel the ruin of the past

as they were just trying
to hold on to civilization again.

And that's what makes it powerful.

How do we keep living?

And how does civilization grow again?

With The Road Warrior, you're focused

on gas and misery
and just living day to day.

The idea develops into
trying to create a new resource

using methane, to move
toward a new future

that can be sustainable.

I don't know anything about methane.

You can shovel shit, can't you?

Tina Turner was just so big on screen,

being a woman of color and just sort of
running that whole situation.

The Master Blaster,
you know, their competition

between each other.

Who run Bartertown?

Master Blaster runs Bartertown.

She tries to force Max

to do her bidding by killing the Blaster
of the Master Blaster team.

This is Thunderdome.

Death is listening,

and will take the
first man that screams.

We have this big, extravagant,
perfectly insane fight on bungee

cords inside this Thunderdome.

They had that really menacing
character that he's got to fight.

And it's this big dude, you think he's
just going to mop the floor with him.

But then the other thing that was
sort of shocking, was when they took

the helmet off, you've just
sort of felt for the character.

You saw that he was this
person who was an adult

that was a child, instantly,
that scene changed for everybody.

I think that was a magic moment.

There are two movies in
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

There's the first movie,

which has our hero wandering into part of town
after his rig is stolen from him.

Then there's this other movie
after he gets kicked out.

He stumbles across these
sort of like lost children

in the middle of the desert,
who are apparently the leftover refugees

from an airliner crash from years
and years and years ago.

That was too disjointed with the
fact it was two stories,

whereas with Road Warrior
and even with Mad Max the original,

there was a direct correlation
from A to Z.

There's...

A unique challenge in doing sequels.

There's an audience you're beholden to
and you want to honor that.

And yet we all feel compelled
to express ourselves uniquely.

Civilization.

I'll do anything
to protect it.

We continue this theme
of resource scarcity.

Don't you understand? This is water.
You can't live without it.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

really focuses the futuristic
forecasts and the warning

that if we don't change,
if we don't alter the way we think

about how we share resources,
that we'll end up fighting

over these resources in the future
on a planet that could be a desert.

This is a stickup! Anybody moves,
and they're dead meat!

Everybody was terrified that
Explorers was going to

was going to be such a big hit that nobody
would think about Back to the Future.

The adventure begins
in your own backyard.

It was supposed to be a Wolfgang Petersen
movie for Paramount, and they decided

they didn't want to make it in Bavaria,
which is what he wanted to do,

and so they sort of kicked Wolfgang
off the picture and sent me the script.

I thought it was a terrific script
and really fascinating, particularly

I'd just come off of Gremlins
and it was very grueling and

time consuming and difficult,
and here was a movie about three kids

who built a spaceship and I thought,
this is just like Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

This is like,

you know, this would be so much fun to do
after this arduous special effects movie.

Well, not realizing, of course,
that it was...

Not only was this an arduous
special effects movie, but had children

in it which can only work
certain hours of the day

and which also didn't have a third act.

It's pretty neat, huh?

Nonetheless, I made the movie,
but then in the middle of making it,

the studio changed hands

and the new people decided they
wanted to put it out on unfinished.

So they said, "Stop working on it.
We're gonna put it out because

"it's last year's movie from the old regime
and we don't care if it makes money.

"Anyway, good bye."

I firmly believe there was a hell of a lot

better moving in there
than we were allowed to get out.

In the end, it didn't matter.
We could have released a blank film

and nobody would have noticed.

I've always had a knack of
finding kids that I could relate to

on a personal level.

If you cast your movie right,
you don't have to do a lot of directing.

And if you cast
your movie wrong,

you have to do a lot of directing
and a lot of editing.

But in this case, these kids
were perfect for the part.

Incredibly talented.

And this was Ethan's first movie,
he'd never been on the sound-stage before.

I can't stop thinking
about what's up there.

He picked it up so quickly
that some of the camera people said,

"Are you sure
this kid isn't a professional?"

And now he is.

Oh, my God.

There she is.

In the original script,
the kids go to another planet

and they find kids just like themselves
and they play baseball and they go home.

And I didn't think that was
enough for a feature film.

And so we reworked it so that the
aliens are indeed like our kids.

But they're even more like Earth kids
because they're a product

of listening to Earth broadcasts.

They get TV up here?

Just waves in space.

So they speak in catchphrases,
trying to communicate with the Earth kids

by using phrases that
they've heard on commercials,

on television.

- Me Ben.
- Me Tarzan.

This, it turned out,
was not an especially popular conceit.

We come in peace.

When Ethan Hawke

says that he's waited all his life
to speak to aliens and the aliens says,

Ehhhhhh, what's up doc?

He gets very confused.

The audience also got a little confused,
and because he became disappointed

in what had been promised
as a great big space adventure

that would give him
the secret of the universe.

I think they all felt the same way.

But it doesn't make
any sense.

That's the way they
think that we talk.

It didn't help the fact that it opened
on the day of the Live Aid concert

where nobody
went to the movies.

However, the miracle of home video
kind of resurrected it, and even though

it's only a shadow of the movie
I was intending to make,

it still has retained its
popularity over the years.

That was great!

What would you do

if you had everything you wanted?

Universal Pictures presents

a John Hughes film

Weird Science.

It's purely sexual.

Weird Science really resonated with
me because I was an awkward kid

who loved technology and just to think of,

I could suddenly become cool.

It was the teenage Frankenstein.

So they created this beautiful woman.

I think that was probably

every geek's dream.

What would you little maniacs
like to do first?

I think what he was best at,

John Hughes, is teenage angst and
being left out. His compassion for that.

It really resonated,
I think, to a lot of people.

Yo! Check this out!

Teenage life,

thank God I'm not there anymore.
Oh, God.

You made me.

You control me.

Kelly LeBrock.

She had a sense of humor and a sexuality

and a confidence and a personality.

I can be a real serious bitch.

It was elevated,
her portrayal of the character.

And it made everything come together

the way it was supposed to.

You guys have better
loosen up.

one of the themes is

be careful what you wish for.

Using all of our technology
to do something wrong

and then not being able to control it,
then having the consequences,

which is me.

Tossed off to any good
books lately, have we?

Warner Brothers were going to sue
their ass off if I looked like Wez.

And yet they got me to look as close

like Wez
as is humanly possible.

I walked around that set
when I came onto it at Universal,

like a two story house
that could be pulled

into two halves to film
in a real two story house.

And when they needed to have
a rocket to go through it,

they actually had a rocket.

This actual shell of a rocket

was built under stage 26 at Universal

to come up hydraulically and pierce

the actual floor of the set of the house.

And it was a one time shot.

What a big deal this scene,
right when John calls action

Anthony Michael Hall farts
a silent but deadly.

It had to be a several hundred thousand

dollar moment that got ruined by a fart.

That's not cool, man.

If you watch the movie real closely,
we did this scene again

and they lowered the rocket and
we had to do all of our action backwards

and then they ran
it backwards for the final cut.

It was massive anarchy

at the end of that movie, that movie truly
is almost like the Cat in the Hat.

She is the the Cat in the Hat.

Oh, my god, Weird Science forever to me
is now going to be Dr. Seuss.

When are you gonna learn
people like you for what you are,

not for what you can give them.

The ultimate theme of Weird Science was

be yourself and you'll still get the girl.

I love you!

It may not be that girl,

but you'll still get the girl.

Drop and give me 20.

I was really excited by the Space
Shuttle program as a kid

because it was putting
people back in space.

The first space shuttle.

That hadn't happened
in my lifetime to that point.

The space shuttle was amazing
because of what promise it held,

which was we were going to be able to do
this much more often, much more cheaply.

The fact that they named
the very first Space Shuttle Enterprise

was really cool and made me feel seen
because I was a Star Trek

nerd and I was like, wow, they named
real science after a TV show that I like.

That's really cool.

The vehicle came around
the corner of the building,

and in tow was the shuttle craft,

and across the nose of the shuttle craft

were the words The Enterprise.

Knocked me out.

My perspective just totally changed,
and I said, "We are genuinely

"in some small way, a part of history."

Suddenly, the highest form
of technology in the space program

became something extremely familiar
to everyday people.

We're not just
in the audience anymore.

Now we can become a part of the adventure
when it's a space shuttle.

You start to see these films
like Lifeforce and Hangar 18,

and Airplane II, SpaceCamp, that have at
the center of them, the Space Shuttle.

Go for main engine test.

It was this great bridge
between our reality

and the fantastic imagined world

of the future.

It was almost to the point where soon
we're going to be able to get a ticket,

you know, and take a
flight around the Earth.

I was pretty close with Steven Spielberg,
and we would both

talk about wanting to go and wanting to go,
because they were talking about

taking an artist, taking
a filmmaker, taking a poet.

I'd like to go out and be behind
the camera, photographing up there.

Everyone just assumed

that space travel was so safe, you know?

three, two, one...
And liftoff!

I was shooting a TV movie.

We all gathered around a television screen

to watch this spectacular event
because we also knew

that there were civilians aboard,
so it made it extra special.

I was in New York, editing a video
production, we were interrupted.

Someone came in and said,

"The Challenger has just exploded."

- Challenger, go at throttle up.
- Challenger, go at throttle up.

And it just like stuck
a knife in my heart.

2,900 feet per second,
altitude nine nautical miles,

downrange distance
seven nautical miles.

We were all standing there
just in shell shock.

It was something...
It was unthinkable.

Absolutely devastating
in every possible way.

The first teacher in the teachers
and space program

was killed, and one of the first
African-American astronauts

was killed on the Challenger explosion.

That shot of Christa McAuliffe's parents
on the beach looking up at that twisted

contrail, knowing something's wrong
and not knowing quite what it was.

That image is seared into the minds

of a lot of people who saw that.

Today is a day for mourning
and remembering.

They had a hunger to explore
the universe and discover its truths.

They served all of us.

They, the members of the
Challenger crew, were pioneers.

I think it was our first taste

of the genuine danger of it.

I just remember being so afraid

that this was going to be
the end of human space flight.

They wouldn't have sent a
teacher up, for God's sakes,

you know, if they knew that there was some

any chance at all of it being tragic.

Karen Allen,

Barry Bostwick.

- You’re a wonderful crew.
- Fine, that’s great!

Challenger.

We just wanted to honor the memories

and the talent and the heroism
of those original astronauts.

It was not only

the people who were lost, who were killed,

but it was the program
itself had been damaged.

The human race's forward movement toward

a future in space

beyond this planet,
something I had cheered for

since the time I was a kid.

The dedication of Star Trek IV

to the crew of the Challenger
was a way of acknowledging

that there is a question
and a price to be paid

for going boldly

where people haven't gone before.

When the lights dimmed in the theater
and the dedication came on,

you could hear a pin drop for a
moment and then applause.

Science fiction fans,
they're much more focused

on the possibilities than the dangers

that every mission is life and death.

And the Challenger disaster

was as if someone dear to me
in my life had died.

I said, "We've got to come back from this.

"It will not be easy,

"but we've got to come back
and we've got to keep going forward."

And thank goodness, that's what we did.

John Badham is among the
last of the utilitarian directors.

He could just direct anything: action,
comedy, light comedy, romance, you name it

John Badham could do it.
Short Circuit,

it proved this as much as anything else.

Short Circuit.

I am alive.

It's part E.T,

only instead of it being an alien,
it's a robot.

Welcome to my planet!

And you got Steve Guttenberg

and Ally Sheedy, and the guy who
was supposed to be an Indian-American,

but is actually being played
by Fisher Stevens.

It's only being wires and
several mechanisms and other

such machine-type apparatus,
for the Pete of sake.

Today, I'm not sure you could
get away with that.

Where are you from,
anyway?

Bakersfield originally.

- No, I mean your ancestors.
- Oh, them. Pittsburgh.

Ally Sheedy, as a young girl,

I looked up to, I loved and adored.

Malfunction.

Oh, you can talk!

Short Circuit is a caretaker
friendship bond.

This concept of this robot
finding his humanity.

I need information.
I must learn everything.

I am alive.

Holy crow you can read!

And he has this quirky,

outgoing, weird personality, much like me,
that was based on all of the movies

and pop culture that he had picked up.

Disguise! Camouflage!

- Hi!
- Number 5!

There's a sense of joy

to that movie and a sense of life
and a sense of adventure.

He's built as a military weapon of war
that can destroy things with like

a single laser bolt.

Hello, bozos!

But as a kid,
you don't see that.

You don't think about that,
you're just like, he's alive.

Johnny 5.

He's just like, "No, I'm going to
smell flowers and hang out

"and dance or make friends or whatever",
which was really neat premise.

one of my favorite moments in that movie
is when he accidentally steps

on a grasshopper.

- Look what you did!
- Error.

And he has this moment where he realizes

that he's mortal.

Disassemble.

Dead.

Disassemble!

Dead!

Being aware of your own mortality
is one of the deepest, most profoundly

human things, and that drives us
and that makes us what we are.

Of course I know it's wrong to kill,
but who told you?

I told me.

What Short Circuit does
really, really well

it makes you feel for this metal.

It's got some, you know,
wonky little eyebrows or whatever,

and he's cute in his own sort of way,

but he's metal, right?

And yet by the end of that movie,
you're like, "No, Johnny 5 is alive.

"You can't disassemble him."

Don't shoot!

Don't shoot!
He's alive!

He's alive!

You feel for it, and it's hard
to know sometimes

whether that's just
another part of the way

that humans are hardwired
to sort of anthropomorphize things

or whether that's a thing
that we're going to have to really sort of

worry about in the future.

Maybe Johnny.

Yeah! Johnny 5.
It's cool.

Alien is one of the most
frightening movies I've ever seen.

Alien is about survival,

Aliens is about something bigger.

Aliens.

This time it's war.

It's a war film in space.

Aliens, the draft,

the running name that Jim had,
was called Grunts in Space.

Cameron was writing Rambo II

and Aliens pretty much simultaneously.

And they kind of bled into one another
and Aliens became a Vietnam film.

Subconsciously, it was sort of
about troops going under fire,

against an enemy
they couldn't see.

Let's go! Let's go!

The other story was a story about
mothers and daughters. The queen

and her children fighting against
Ripley and her adopted child.

You instantly

feel for and need to rescue
this little girl who's seen her

parents killed and is still come up
with the wits to survive.

There's a very mythic and
primal thing going on here.

This is now Mama Bear versus Mama Bear.

Get away from her,
you bitch!

At the time of filming, obviously,

I didn't really have any idea
of the magnitude

of the character Ripley, or the
character of Vasquez or my character.

It was so important,
especially in the '80s, having

the female be the center of it,
the female with the flame thrower.

The females are the ones that are

taking charge.

Have you ever been
mistaken for a man?

No. Have you?

It began this movement,

a huge impact on the future

of action movies and sci fi movies.

We did operate

like as best as possible, a marine crew.

Al Matthews,
Sergeant Apone.

All right sweethearts,
you heard the man

and you know the drill,
assholes and elbows...

He was, in fact, a former Green Beret,

so all of us Hollywood types,
you know, would demure

and defer to him
at all times.

What are you waiting for,
breakfast in bed?

Another glorious day in the corps.

The cohesiveness was really
formed in and around

training in the morning
and then also the rehearsal process.

And at that time, Hicks was
played by James Remar.

Remar's involvement
would have made it

even more intense.

Why he had to leave
had nothing to do with his acting.

However, it was quite shocking

to lose one of the leads of your film.

We all felt for Michael Biehn.

Are you all right?

He literally jumped into
Remar’s costume

and created his version of Hicks.

I like to keep this handy

for close encounters.

Bill Paxton was the glue of our set.

Check it out, I am
the ultimate badass!

And that's actually something

that Sigourney Weaver
said at his memorial.

Yo! Stop your grinnin'
and drop your linen.

To say we miss Bill Paxton
is a true understatement.

Sometimes I'm still in awe,
like, oh my gosh,

I was in a James Cameron movie.

And they mostly come at night.

Mostly.

Sigourney just took care of me on set.

When we were in the eggs with the
queen alien in front of us and everything,

that was a very scary situation
with all the fire going on around us.

If you watch in the movie, she's going
like pushing me behind her.

That was a natural response.

I'm sure for everyone on set,
it was very difficult

and they probably were
a little bit concerned.

The last few years
that I've seen everyone,

they've actually asked,
did you have nightmares?

Did we like affect you psychologically?

And it didn't.

They would show me the process
of building something.

They would show me
then how it was going to work.

Sometimes they'd throw
something at me

to try to get my natural reaction of a scare,
different things like that.

At the time, I was definitely
afraid of dogs,

so I just pretended
like the aliens were dogs

coming after me.

This alien comes up and grabs me,
and it is terrifying,

however, for me, it was my friend
who was a stunt man in a suit

and then they put the head on,
and off we go.

To me, it was normal,
which is so abnormal,

really, if you look back at it.

Jim really took her under a wing and
made sure she was protected at all times,

and Paxton actually formed a really sort
of avuncular relationship with her.

When you got Lance, Paul Reiser and Bill
Paxton together, there was trouble.

Keeping us all light hearted,
which is nice.

What do you want me to do,
fetch your slippers for ya?

Gee, would you, sir?
I'd like that.

I'm always amazed
when I go to a convention

how many military people come up to me
and say before they deployed,

they watched Aliens because
it brought that feeling of unity

together.

You're just too bad.

I had an amazing experience.

It was definitely once
in a lifetime opportunity.

Run!

When you come out and
you're up here on top,

how much further can you go?

Not bad for a human.

Flight of the Navigator
was wish fulfillment

for every 12 year old.

It's a story about time travel,

about alien contact and connection,

futuristic technology,
creatures from other planets

and then under it,
the journey of David Freeman

to find his way back home
to his true family.

Time has changed for everyone except him.

He's still 12 years old
and his family has gotten older.

It seems that we...

David.

It's the story of how he adjusts

and how he tries to undo that problem.

Been gone for eight years.

Gone where, outer space?

We videotaped hundreds of kids
to find Joey Cramer.

And when I saw him, I just knew
that that was the kid.

Let it go,
let it go.

A key element in why

I got the part in Flight of the Navigator
was because of that

emotional availability,
being able to connect

and cry realistically.

It's like a bad dream.

The key to the whole movie
and the reason I think it still resonates

is the human drama.

It's 1986, man.

Eight years since that night.

Randal Kleiser was an amazing director
and was able to really bring things out of me

so I could really immerse
myself in that world.

The script was children,
special effects and animals,

which are all no no's, but I found it
to be an exciting challenge.

Just take us 20 miles from here.

Compliant.

What are you doing?

Mark Damon

wanted to make an action movie
with the government

trying to shoot down the spaceship
and lots of explosions and stuff.

And Disney wanted to make a family drama.

So I was caught in the middle
trying to make them both happy,

and I think that made the movie
a little more interesting.

Can you follow it?

Follow it? I can't
even see it.

I wanted to find a spaceship
that was different

from all the movies I'd seen.

Wow!

Cutting edge CGI,

there's a little bit of it
in there, and it holds up.

When I first walked
into that set of the interior

spaceship, that cool, reflective mylar,
I remember just being blown away by it.

It was so cool.

- I'm a Trimaxion Drone Ship.
- Trimaxion?

- Affirmative.
- Okay, I'll call you Max, It's easier.

We wanted this character of Max

to have a personality,
and yet he was a robot.

I'm just a kid.

That is obvious.
But your brain has been programmed

with all appropriate star charts.

Before the mind transfer, Max

just sounds like an alien spaceship,
and he's like, sit down navigator.

Sit down, navigator.

You would never know that it was
Pee-wee Herman or Paul Reubens.

I think there's been
some sort of mistake.

I do not make mistakes.

And then when he scans the boy's brain,

we let him do the character
Pee-Wee Herman.

- That's it?
- That's it Davy!

Working with the puppets
and that world was really cool.

They were all built into the set,
the space terrarium.

Weird.

I love the big eyeball.

I love you.

What's really special

about Flight of the Navigator
is the heart of it.

Losing the family, getting the
family back together,

it has that warm Disney feeling
without being saccharine, I hope.

Goodbye, Davy.

It was so much fun.

People love it.

I'm so proud and grateful
to be part of it.

See you later alligator!

George Lucas presents an
electrifying new comedy.

Howard the Duck

Howard the Duck is about a duck
that comes from outer space,

is sucked down accidentally by some laser
pointed in the wrong direction.

All he wants is to go home.

I've got no intention
of being stranded here.

Then he meets up with this

all girl band fronted by Lea Thompson.

I love the early comics.

Steve Gerber, who created Howard for
the comics, was a friend of mine.

A lot of people went in and thought,
oh, Howard, cute, duck,

expecting much more of a family film,
and they had actually taken

the more adult storytelling of the Howard

the Duck comics.

Must be mating season.

None of it was G-rated.

I love irreverent comedy.

Kids are just little adults

with a lack of discernment.
For me as a kid, I was like,

There's a talking duck and he's sassy.

Well, sex appeal.
Some guys got it, and some guys don't.

Howard...

This is great.

Lea Thompson was my girl.

She hugged me and she goes,
"Oh, my man-duck."

You are great, ducky.

Howard the Duck
was my very first film, ever.

Lea was one who kept
whispering to me,

"Listen, don't be afraid to say no",
because I did all the major stunts,

except the airplane.

Well, they wanted Howard the Duck

to be edgy and a doll, but they thought,
well, we got to make it a family film too.

And I don't know that
those two things really work.

It's so life-like and realistic!

Bug off!

Howard the Duck is a PG rated
movie that opens

with a topless duck and duck boobs
if there is, in fact, such a thing .

And there are a few blue jokes

in Howard the Duck,
Lea Thompson opens up

this wallet and finds a
sort of duck condom.

No, there's a condom in the wallet?

Why would they think
that's a family movie?

Crazy!

Howard...

Unfortunately, you got this vibe,

that the duck is going to do it
with Lea Thompson.

You could always give it a try.

He's a little cigar smoking horn dog,

and he gets the women on
his planet, so he's here.

So when in Rome... And he came on to her,
and she called his bluff.

I just can't resist your intense
animal magnetism.

As an adult, seeing

Howard the Duck wake up in a bed with a
human lady, it's a little questionable.

There were a lot of things going
against it and not enough going for it.

Willard Huyck, Howard the Duck was
definitely his first big budget production.

Willard would shoot 20, 30, 40
takes of just this...

Cut! Do it again.

Willard and Gloria didn't quite get it.

I saw the whole thing
going south, you know,

because they were having trouble
making decisions like in everything.

The director had a meltdown.

I had a meltdown, too.

And so Lucas came in to direct.

He didn't pull punches.

Not so passive aggressive,
more aggressive.

You and Babyface are gonna beat it!
Right, Mr. Zits?

Before I get really mad!

The technology

just wasn't there
to make Howard believable.

And if you didn't believe Howard,
then the whole movie falls apart.

What's this?

The notion of an alien duck cracked me up.

Of all the alleys in the world I could
have fallen into that night.

Why did it have to be yours?

But at the end of the day,
it really is just a guy in a duck suit

telling dirty jokes, and I think that's
the ultimate problem of Howard the Duck.

The duck wanted to do it with the girl.

This is not what you think.
We're just very good friends.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

I know a good idea when I see one.

I knew that Star Trek IV was
going to be an enormous success.

I read it and I said,
"This story has it all."

Do not approach earth.

The transmissions of an orbiting probe
are causing critical damage to this planet.

Leonard Nimoy had proven with Star
Trek III that he was a capable director.

So when it came time to
direct Star Trek IV,

he was then in a position to negotiate.

I want to do something different.

We're going to attempt
time travel.

And we're going to lighten things up,
we're going to have more fun.

Can you direct me to
the naval base in Alameda?

It's where they keep the nuclear wessels.

I got to write comedy.

There was a previous draft of a story that
Harve and Leonard had concocted together.

I was told that it had a big role
for Eddie Murphy.

My friend Dawn Steele,
who was head of production at the time,

she said, "We have a problem,
we're going into production in a month.

"We're not going to use the script.
We have to start over."

So I walked across the lot
to their office,

and they told me the story
about the whales.

As suspected, the drone's transmissions
are the songs sung by whales.

And Harve said,
"I'll write the parts in outer space,

"and you write the parts on Earth,
in San Francisco."

and I said, "San Francisco?
That's the same movie as Time after Time."

Can we go someplace else?

Why can't we go to Paris?

And they said,

Well, because the whales wouldn't
fit in the Seine or some - you know.

And I took stuff that I'd cut out of Time
after Time and threw it into this movie.

You know, waste not want not
never throw anything away.

Very complicated to be in front
of the camera and behind the camera.

Star Trek IV is something
that he worked on

really heavily before they
ever shot it for the film.

He really knew what he was doing,
had a clear vision going in,

and I think that's what really saved him.

I'll give you 100 dollars.

Is that a lot?

Star Trek IV ends up
becoming a very accessible film,

even for non Star Trek fans.

Why don't you watch where
you're going, you dumbass!

Double dumbass on you!

Every laugh is earned,

every laugh is honest.

Everybody remember
where we parked.

I thought the scene between Bill

and Leonard in the car was just charming.

It was just delightful.

You guys like Italian?

- No.
- Yes.

- No.
- Yes.

Yes, I love Italian.

At the end of the movie,

we took whale song and processed it
with some electronic stuff.

There's no dialog.

You have to tell the audience
that this is a communication

between whale in this
weird sci fi object,

there are sort of two distinct
sounds of the probe.

There's the danger mode.

I went in with my best designs.

Leonard, he said, "They don't work.

"It should sound like this."
And he went, "Whab, whab, whab, whab"

in this deep--
He's got this big, deep voice.

And I said, "Great.

"We're recording Leonard."

And he called my bluff.

And Leonard bellied up to the microphone
just like this and he went,

"Whab, whab, whab, whab."

Just like that.

And that's what's in the movie.

But the ultimate villain,

which is in Star Trek IV, is man.

Since the dawn of time,
men have harvested whales for a variety

of purposes. Most of which can be
achieved synthetically at this point.

The studio wanted to know

what the probe was asking or saying.

And I said "That's dumb,
could never live up to the mystery."

I said, "We're not doing that."

And I remember Dawn Steele saying,
"You're wrong, Nicky Meyer."

And I said, "Well, that's just how
the cookie is going to crumble."

Star Trek II, III and IV

is my absolute favorite Star Trek trilogy.

It tells a really wonderful story.

No one was doing anything
like that at that time.

So to take these three movies
and really make them a cohesive trilogy

is really super beautiful.

Hello computer.

Just use the keyboard.

Music hits us on a very visceral level.

These beautiful, symphonic,

gorgeous scores that are bringing you
on a journey and advancing action.

A good composer picks a range for a character.
When they're sad,

and when they're happy
and when they're in action

and when they're resting.

Would anyone like to review
that for us today?

I think all good film
composers are chameleons,

if they're talented in a wide ranging way

for that career, you have to have
a wide open musical mind.

What really changed in
the '70s was really Steven Spielberg,

because he brought back the idea

that big orchestras are great.

And everybody followed suit because
those movies were making money.

It's very easy

to evoke the emotions of the film
by listening to the score.

The movie's already in your head,
so when you drop that needle on that vinyl

and close your eyes
and you listen to that opening score

for Superman or Star Wars,
you're right there,

you're back in the movie.

That music is huge.

It reminds you that this is a story
about an entire galaxy.

When you heard... "Dum dum dum da da dum"

You know what's coming.

John Williams, certainly what he produced,

or created was monumental.

It made an unbelievable impact.

With The Last Starfighter,

the problem was you were in
the footsteps of Star Wars,

and if you go off and say,
"Hey, Nick, let's do this electronically,

"you're doomed."

So you had to respect

that your palate was going
to be a big symphony orchestra.

It's pretty normal when I'm explaining
what I want to do to a director

to just sing a melody
or try to imitate the sound.

When I played the theme
to The Last Starfighter,

I was sitting on a piano, going

"And now six trumpets play..."

They had to imagine it all
from a guy playing a piano.

That ain't easy.

Back to the Future turns out to be

Alan Sylvestri's very first
orchestral score.

Bob Zemeckis said they
need your score to make

it feel like it's a much bigger
movie than it really is.

So Al put together what
turned out to be, I'm told,

the biggest orchestra ever
assembled in Hollywood at that time.

Al nailed it.

American movies are
partially Basil Poledouris

and partially Jerry Goldsmith's.
Basil is much more epic.

You see the scenes through a filter.

The filter is the music.

Elmer Bernstein got to your heart in a way

that very few composers managed to do.

I trusted his laugh and his lack of laugh,

when it happened, and it gave
me confidence in what I was doing.

I love him
and I really miss him.

One of the things that you have to do
when you make a movie and you have to show

the rough cut to anybody
is you have to put a temp track on it.

Composers generally

don't like to have to watch the movie
with somebody else's music on it.

The editor and the director are often

what we call married to their temp track.

And so now you find yourself
unwittingly turning your movie

into something that is cut to the rhythm
of the music that you're not going to use.

The most famous example of a temp track

would be 2001: A Space Odyssey,

in which Stanley Kubrick temped
the entire movie with Richard Strauss,

Johann Strauss and then had a composer
and immediately went, "you know?

"I think the temp track's way better than
what you did", and he threw out the score

and went back to the temp.

First, let me see your film
in musical silence,

because that's how my imagination
works in that blank slate place.

Mr Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd
came to my studio and showed me the rough

cut of the Terminator, without a temp track.
I was kind of blown away.

There was a very primitive early
sampling device called an Emulator one.

You could plug a microphone
into this keyboard

and make some weird sound
and then reproduce it with the keyboard.

And that's how I did
the clank on Terminator.

I had this cheap little mic
and I hit a frying pan

because I wanted this big anvil sound
and I got an anvil sample.

It just sounded like... "Dink."

That little piece of technology

was the key to establishing
the sound for the original Terminator.

Vangelis from Blade Runner.

That was so strange and different and new,
he created these ambient

pads, which was a very
progressive idea in that day,

in a way that sound designers now very
commonly do, he'd create these emotive

kind of atmospheres that weren't music,
but he used synthesizers and chimes

and embedded them in scenes
to create an ambiance feel.

The soundtrack to Repo Man
is a little more my speed

than the soundtrack to Blade Runner.

They started flipping the script
a little bit by introducing modern

rock music into
what should be a science fiction film.

Excuse me.

Kirk Thatcher did the vocals for
I Hate You and he wrote the lyrics,

I literally wrote a song in a lunchtime,
recorded it live in one take.

And he's the punk on the bus.

We just had a ton of fun doing it.

Today, there's very little thematic music.

Music is more almost like a sound effect.

But in the '80s, there was a lot
of use of melody and themes.

There are so many great composers of
that era who wrote themes

and wrote melodies that you could hum
when you left the theater.

I love that.

That's one of the joys of cinema.

You can associate the moment in the score
with the images in the film

inside your head.

By the way, that's how you
know it's a good score.

This moment with that moment
will go together forever.

It's just a beautiful thing.

Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Predator.

It was at the height of the Rambo craze
and the height of the craze over Aliens,

and all of a sudden
some whiz kid just said,

"Put them together".

I think in the '80s you saw
a transition in these kinds of movies

to something that was more
superhero in a way than hero

in a way.
A branded physique.

The heroes were all buffed up.

It was a time
where your physical appearance

determined your masculinity
in terms of buffness.

I was fond of Predator
because it felt like the most uniquely

crafted Schwarzenegger film in which
he was allowed to be more of an actor,

he was allowed to be afraid and desperate.

Payback time.

We go down there expecting to do our jobs

as a rescue team.

Stick around.

But we end up becoming the hunted.

There's something in those trees.

I think what's great about
Predator in the storytelling

is allowing the audience to understand
who the characters were beyond Arnold.

I think they did an outstanding job

of giving everyone in the platoon

their bit of time on screen.

The question is, do you care about anybody

that got shot?

I just like great writing.

I was the ultimate tough guy.

Of course, the most special scene for me

and the one where I'll brag and say,
I stole the film

from Arnold.

You're hit, you're bleeding man.

I ain't got time to bleed.

And it almost didn't come about.
That scene got cut.

You've got time to duck?

And I'll never forget,

I can thank Montezuma's Revenge,
because Arnold got sick

and Arnold couldn't shoot that day.

Predator is the one that everybody really
talks to me about.

The razor.

I’m gonna have me some fun tonight
when I’m going up the hill.

“I’m gonna have me some fun.

I’m gonna have me some fun.”

It still plays.

When I die, that's when
the platoon falls apart.

That's when panic set in.

These guys are really scared.

They're really big and muscular, and
they're dying and they're really dying.

The toughest guys in the world
who already know

that they're doomed,
this now becomes an existential movie.

There's something out there
waiting for us.

And it ain't no man.

Kevin Peter Hall played the predator.

Kevin was the only one who
probably truly could have did the part,

because he had to be able to pick
Arnold up and make Arnold look small,

and he certainly did that.

John McTiernan knew what he was doing
in slowly revealing that character.

And it finally culminates
in one of the great reveals

in the history of sci fi,
and that's when the Predator takes off

his bio helmet and reveals that face
with those mandibles.

And Arnold says,
"You one ugly motherfucker."

That is my favorite moment in that movie

when they have their final
mano a mano battle.

Predator reveals his face

drops his shoulder cannon,
he's like, "Let's go."

That's badass.

It just comes together as a thrill ride.

It's a perfect slice of what
pulp does best.

one of the prime examples
of testosterone driven

badass sci fi.

Yeah.

You son of a bitch.

Spaceballs.
The movie.

The very first joke

of Spaceballs is its title,
and everything after that is just one

joke after another.

May the Schwartz be with you.

Adorable.

All of this stuff kicked off

with Star Wars, obviously,
the very first shot of Star Wars.

You see the spaceship and it just goes
on and on and on. So many movies like just

absolutely copied Star Wars and said,
we need the giant

biggest spaceship ever.

When you think it's over,

it's not over.

And then when you think it's over,

it's still not over.

Mel Brooks was able to take satire
and make it into a blockbuster.

Oh, no. Not again!

He honored the genre,

whether with History of the
World, Part 1, Blazing Saddles.

He was able to truly understand the genre

he was trying to make fun of.

Dear me, what are those
things coming out of her nose?

Highbrow jokes

that really invited you in
to intellectually

make fun of the world
we were currently living in.

Spaceballs!

Breaking that fourth,

fifth, sixth, seventh wall.

Uhm, he did it.

He's making fun of the commercials
that we're watching on TV.

He's making fun of what happens
when we eat that much fast food

and we become what we eat.

the notorious gangster
became locked in his car

and ate himself to death.

You satirize

what it means to be
a completely vain society

that wastes all of its natural
resources and then goes and tries

to take those resources
from another planet.

Suck! Suck!

In Spaceballs,

they talked about the
hilariousness of merchandizing.

I mean, that was how George Lucas
made all his money.

How did he know?

What is it that
you do here?

Merchandising.

Merchandising.

Where the real money from the -

- movie is made.

Spaceballs the lunchbox!

Spaceballs the breakfast cereal!

Spaceballs the flame thrower.

Flame thrower!
The kids love this one.

Mel was just nuts.

Dinks, first speaking role, by the way.

Dink Dink.

Dink Dink,
Dink Dink Dink Dink Dink Dink.

To this day, I don't know
what the Dinks really did.

I don't care.

I was working with John Candy.

I'm my own best friend.

Give me paw!

Bill Pullman, Daphne Zuniga.

He shot my hair!

Son of a bitch!

Shields and Yarnell.

Lorene Yarnell was the gold robot
that Joan Rivers voiced.

Will you turn that thing off?!

What?

What is it?

We were in on the joke

and it was peak Rick Moranis.

Oh, your helmet is so big!

Dark Helmet!

Michael Winslow has this unique talent.

And the creeps.

I'm sure there's more on
the cutting room floor.

There's no way there's not.

It shows how diverse

the cast was in their skills.

It feels like all

the worlds are just colliding in this one
little mini comedic universe

that we're all waiting for
Spaceballs II to come out for.

God willing we'll all meet
again in Spaceballs II:

The Search for More Money.

Still waiting.

Hello, my baby.
Hello, my honey.

Hello, my ragtime gal.

Dennis Quaid.

Martin Short.

Give yourself a shot
of adventure.

Innerspace.

Innerspace is about
technology gone awry.

The first person that can put someone
inside someone's body

and use them to kill them is the winner.

When Innerspace came to me,

it was a picture that
Peter Guber and John Peters owned.

And it was not a comedy.

It was a straight

spy movie with the plot of a guy who gets
shrunk down and put inside another guy.

I suggested diplomatically
that people would laugh at this idea,

and then they came back
and they had hired

Jeffrey Boam, who was a very good writer,
and he had come

to it with a different idea,
which was what would happen

if Dean Martin was shrunk down
and injected into Jerry Lewis.

And that was something that as a Martin
and Lewis fan of my youth,

I could certainly relate to,
and I said, "Yes, now this works.

"Now it's funny."

That's when Steven Spielberg
became involved.

When Fantastic Voyage was made,
it used the best technology.

Everything in it was
cutting edge for the time.

When we did Innerspace,

of course, the technology has improved
so much, and we've gone so far ahead

in leaps and bounds.

I loved all the practical stuff

in that movie.

Just relax, Jack.

Let's see what's going on in here.

And how realistic they looked

prior to the advent
of any sort of computer

graphics.

Entering Blood Street.

You know, things like him
flying through the bloodstream

with the red blood cells
or seeing out of

Martin Short's eyes.

Firing optic sensor.

And then you have the battle
inside the car

where there's a very clever use
of forced perspective.

If you're working
with Martin Short,

if you do ten takes, take ten is like
from a different movie than take one.

He likes to discover.
He likes to try new things.

Jack, you've just
digested the bad guy.

He and Dennis are never on screen together,
except at the very end.

But yet it wasn't going
to work to pre-record

Dennis's dialog,
or pre-record Martin's dialog.

So our sound guy, Ken King,
came up with an idea

that allowed them to talk to each other
during takes.

So whenever I did a scene with Marty,
Dennis would still be there off screen

and they could talk to each other
and they could improvise.

In here, inside you.
Inside your body!

Somebody help me!

I'm possessed!!!

one of the reasons that their relationship
in the movie works so well is

because it's actually a real relationship
that they were having

at the moment.

You have seen parts of my body

that I will never get to see.

Believe me, you're
not missing all that much.

I love my character in the film,
just a malevolent presence.

He didn't talk.

He was just there.

My hand,

I had a multitude of things,
which was kind of fun.

The gun, the flame thrower,
an automatic submachine gun,

which we don't see because that scene
was taken out of the film. And the sex toy.

Yeah, the sex toy.

Very quick, but you see it.

They had this rig that they put me in.

Then they lowered it down into the floor,
which is where I get

shrunk down.

I have a fear of claustrophobia.

I was sweating bullets,
really, hated it.

It went very smoothly, and everybody
liked the movie when they saw it.

And the only thing
that I will say,

that terrible ad campaign,
and so it didn't make any money.

But aside from that,
it was a great experience.

The future of law enforcement.

RoboCop.

RoboCop has all of those elements

that make greatness in cinema
and storytelling.

The fight for dignity,
the human condition at stake, humor.

I'd buy that for a dollar!

A slap in the face of society.

I called my agent and I said,
"They're changing his title, right?

"It's not going to be the title."

Who's going to go see
a movie called RoboCop?

Boy, was I wrong about that.

In the beginning, for me, was very weird,

because Peter Weller said to me,
"You have to call me RoboCop.

"You cannot call me Peter."

So there was already some tension,
you know?

The robo suit
ten hours later,

we're sitting there going,
oh my God.

He was so frustrated.

In fact, in the very first weeks,
there was a crisis.

They were thinking of
pulling the plug on on the film.

They literally had to assemble him.

It was like a toy, putting him
together with a screwdriver.

Every time I started feeling
sorry for myself,

I just looked at Peter,
who was in this big plastic thing.

And they got it down to about

three or four hours.

It's not as easy as it looks.

Rob Bottin's RoboCop.

It's RoboCop lore, the battles
he had with Paul Verhoeven

and I was there for many
of those battles in Rob's studio.

The way Rob sculpted that,
the way it was painted,

the finish on that machine,
it's a piece of art.

Drop it!

The shooting experience,

it was like this fast moving train,
and the film had that energy to it.

We felt so creative and we were so loose
with everything that was in the script.

I thought that it should have a different
style than American action movie,

that it should be partially light hearted,
that it should be a bit funny,

that you would be a bit amazed.

Can you fly, Bobby?

Clarence Boddicker,
he's having a great time.

Bitches leave.

He's this sociopath.

You probably don't think
I'm a very nice guy.

You can't get crazy with it

because he still has
to be taken seriously.

Cops don't like me.

With the language,

I kept adding things, especially F-bombs,
I was big on

throwing those
in all the time.

I don't want to fuck
with you, Sal.

Bad guys,

they never think they're bad.

This corporation will live up
to the guiding principles

of its founder:
courage, strength, conviction.

There is a vague

religious component to RoboCop,

of course, because I felt that
the death of Murphy

should be a crucifixion
because there was a resurrection.

That's why that scene
is extremely violent,

because crucifixion is one of the worst
punishments that you can imagine.

Paul grew up in World War II.

He saw real violence.

His whole concept of
the violence in RoboCop

is he wanted it to be so over
the top that you got the joke

immediately.

You have 20 seconds to comply.

I think you'd better
do what he says, Mr. Kinney.

Oddly enough, they cut it back so much so

that it finally got to where it was
right on the edge of what you could stand.

They made the violence

more egregious by doing it that way.

That's non-artistic
people trying to make decisions

that they have no business making.

ED-209 really wanted to emphasize

the stupidity of
American automobile design.

And so I proposed to Paul
that we build a full scale ED-209.

When ED falls down the stairs,

the sound effects was a baby pig's
getting their throat slit.

Shootouts, things blowing up.

It was a pretty active show.

Guns going off and car crashes,

it was pretty exciting.

one of the things that Nancy

and her character,
Louis were really responsible for,

within the movie, was bringing
RoboCop back to his humanity.

Murphy, it's you.

It really was about

the human connection that I had
with this part human character.

The soul was really still there.

Parable of loss of who are you

when that's gone.

Murphy had a wife and son.
What happened to them?

The scene when he
goes to his house

and it's empty,
it just made me almost cry,

and that's when I said,
this is a really good movie.

Can you do that, dad?

It's a sad frigging movie, man,

it is a poignantly sad, sad, though,

even at the end,
"What's your name, kid?" says Dan O'Herlihy.

"Murphy."

Okay, he's got something back, right?

But he doesn't have it back, man.
That's gone.

He's not a guy,
he's a machine.

What are they gonna do,
replace us?

I like when a good film

will present those ideas
and do it in a humorous way,

but enough that it gets your attention
and gets you to think about it.

RoboCop was urban dystopia.

I based it on elements that I saw.

Of course, it was happening in society
already, but were not visible yet.

But now we are here.

The power of its messages
trickle down

economics of the privatization of
the world and capitalism run amok.

Yes.

I was not aware of how long lasting

the social strata of RoboCop would last.

I don't know.
It's a one off man.

That movie is extraordinary.

Excuse me, Robo, any special message
for all the kids watching at home?

Stay out of trouble.

The Running Man.

What Running Man did.
It predated reality TV.

The Running Man:
America's favorite game show.

Running Man is kind of dead on to

what happened with reality TV,
only in the case of the Running Man,

the reality was termination,
which we have unfortunately not got to,

but I'll say yet.

It's time to start running!

Richard Dawson was your perfect
comedic bad guy.

He was just playing the role
he did on Family Feud.

Come on, let's play the Feud,
let's go.

It made perfect sense to me.

I'd like you to volunteer
to appear on tomorrow's broadcast.

Halfway through filming Predator,

Arnold came up to me on the set
and he said, "My next film this fall

is called The Running Man,
there's a part in there you're perfect for."

This is a sport of death and honor!
Code of the gladiators!

By the time my part got there,
they were on their third director.

Fortunately for me, that director was

Paul Michael Glaser.

Dave, here in the locker room,
there's a lot of excitement here.

Captain Freedom, my character

in Running Man,
he was the greatest stalker of all time,

and he got old and like all old stalkers,

he ends up with a microphone.

Are you ready for pain?

Are you ready for suffering?

Running Man was on the edge of technology

predicted in the movie
that has become reality today.

Maria Conchita goes into her apartment
and starts turning things on by voice.

Well, that's a common practice now.

Kitchen, toast and coffee.
ICS Channel one.

We've already reached the Running Man
stage of technology.

There's a very crude,

1980's style sort of digital frame to make
you think that one person is there

when in actuality,
it's someone else.

You'll never know the difference.
All right boys.

Running Man definitely predicted
deepfake technologies.

They created this phony fight.

Peter Kent,

I ended up fighting Peter
because Arnold wouldn't take a suplex.

He made Peter do it instead of him.

Let one out there, didn't I?

I'll always cherish this,
I get to go to my death

as being one of only a handful
of people who've ever killed

Arnold Schwarzenegger on screen.

Running Man was more to show how sick

I think we, a society,
can actually stoop to.

Entertainment knows no boundaries.

We don't give a damn what it is
as long as we get entertained by it

in the end, a pretty sick thing
to have sitting in our systems, isn't it?

I'll be back.

Only in a rerun.

We all know that the
hero's journey is fundamentally

a part of many stories and science fiction,
usually a single character

who is initiating some adventure,
some call to action,

and that there is this
tremendous transformation.

Father! The sleeper has awakened!

Where do I come from?

Why do I matter?

What can I do to contribute
to the universe

in a real, meaningful way?
When we connect to heroes,

Those are our ideal selves.

Flash Gordon, he's just a guy

he doesn't have any superpowers,

relies solely on his wit
and his athleticism.

They carry attributes

and features that we
want to see in ourselves.

Brave, courageous, taking risks,
being compassionate, being vulnerable,

intelligent. When we're
in these moments with these characters

feeling the fear,
the phobia, the desperation,

sometimes even grief.

Why not make me an offer?

We all need to see the hero

have those things to relate to them.

Alex is essentially a very reluctant hero.

I mean, I would say
a coward, really.

There's been a big mistake.

Am I to understand you're actually
declining the honor

- of being a Starfighter?
- You got it.

- "What are you, a coward?"
- Are you a coward?

Which I found very believable.

We also come to learn
that heroic actions do

not have to be huge,
extraordinary broad things,

they can be small,
very meaningful actions.

It is illogical for you to perform
this energy pack transplant. Oy.

I like unsung heroes.

I like the people who
nobody ever talks about.

Hold him in the security tower.
Keep it quiet. Move.

If you boil down the classics
as we know them, Empire Strikes Back,

E.T., The Terminator,
what unites them all is humanity.

And is the way that the directors
and the writers create character

that's accessible.

When you're gotten past the energy shield,
proceed directly to the rendezvous point.

Women like Princess Leia,

like Vasquez, like Sarah Connor.

They're empowered.

They make decisions
that other people don't like.

They take initiative, they take control.

You're terminated, fucker.

We needed to have that as young women.

Lewis, I received so much
mail from young girls

that just loved this character.

I made them feel powerful.

You just stay away from me, Bishop.
You got that straight?

These are characters

that the audience can relate to.

It was very encouraging for young girls
that they could accomplish

these things that may traditionally
have been left to the guys to do.

Many of us are drawn to the anti-hero.

There are aspects within them
that maybe fulfill some of our desires.

This concept of rule
breaking and nonconformity.

I have come here to chew
bubble gum and kick ass.

Something snarling

about those characters
that anti-establishment.

It's a different attitude.

Yes, I bet you have.

If we think about Han, Max.

I'm just here for the gasoline.

Snake.

Get a new President.

Selfishness is there,
that sense of wanting to do

what's best for them is there.

And yet somewhere
in that rugged individuality,

somewhere in that stubbornness is a heart.

I'll chase him down the moons of Nibia
and 'round the Antares

Maelstrom and 'round Perdition's flames
before I give him up.

We connect to so many villains.

They're fascinating,
they're alluring, they're different.

I'm supposed to hate
or despise the villain,

but I actually feel connected
to them. Why?

If only you could see what
I have seen with your eyes.

I had no idea of the power of Ursa.

I have powers beyond
reason here.

There's a real outlet

for bad behavior in these villains.

There's a vicarious indulgence
in rooting for the villain.

Ooh, guns, guns, guns!

And I think
that's a safe way

to be close to evil, destruction,
bad behavior, and know,

that's ultimately not what I'm about at
the end of the day.

To be a good villain you had to
believe you were the good guy.

Once you believe you're the villain,
then suddenly you become stereotypical

of everything that everybody
wants a villain to be.

Take that program
to the holding pit!

Part of humanity

is acknowledging that we're not all good
and all perfect, that we have elements

of destruction, we make mistakes, that's

human psychology.

There will come a day when I'll
show all of you! Don't you forget it!

Seeing these characters overcome adversity

gives us really important suggestions for
our own lives and our own behaviors.

No, Biff.

You leave her alone.

Is there anything

from this narrative that I feel inspired by,
that maybe I could do.

And what is it like to overcome
something that seems insurmountable?

I don't want you to think
Earth girls are easy.

Earth Girls Are Easy.

Earth Girls Are Easy

was like an MTV musical.

It is a provocative title,

but the idea is that girls are complex
and you have to be open to changing

what you think is going to make you happy.

I need surprises.
I need romance.

I mean, how long has it been
since you said, "I love you"...

The original original idea came from--

You remember those
National Enquirer stories?

I saw one where this woman said
an alien came in through the doggy door

and she had sex with him.

We thought that was hilarious.

Hey, come on everybody!
We're doing a makeover.

I thought the whole thing
should be a break into song musical.

Charlie Coffey, my writing partner
and I, we proceeded to write,

I don't know, 25 drafts,
the reality of it was much different

when they finally landed on Julien Temple,

they sent me his movie Absolute Beginners
a break into song musical.

So I thought, Oh my God, this is perfect.

Once Julien got attached,
they realized the budget was going to be

this certain amount, and I wasn't
a big enough name to warrant that amount.

So I went in
and pitched me as the second lead.

And they went for it, but I was like,
so freaking

depressed about it and angry.

I've had to come to terms
with Earth Girls.

Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum,
they're both really nice.

It came as a package deal.

They were so in love
and they were making out on the set

all the time, and I found it irritating

because I was like, "This is my movie.

"We must take this seriously."

The aliens, we thought
it would be really funny

if they were hairy
when they first showed up.

Not recognizable as cute boys.

Shit, Valerie!
Those are aliens!

And that there'd be this transformation.

When they suggested Jim Carrey

to me, for Whiplock,
it was the craziest of the aliens.

He has this like not quite human quality

that he does on stage.

You won't be seeing much
more physical humor on my show.

There was a big search for that part.

I mean, I feel like
we're very lucky that he did it.

I'm going home with him.

Bitch.

Damon Wayans is willing

to sort of do anything.

The aliens themselves

didn't have any kind of racism,

we thought that was very cool.

It very much captures '80s

valley specifically, and, you know,
they use the observatory as the Disco.

I would have loved
if there was more Valley landmarks

that were in there
that are gone now.

It really has this
time capsule quality of the '80s.

Love comes in

many forms and many shapes, right,
and it could be an alien from space,

something that is very relevant
and means something to me,

especially with,
you know, all my gay friends.

The thing is, Earth girls
really are not easy,

but if she just took her vision
and changed it a little,

the perfect man did show up.

Sounds like you have two hearts.

- Yes. Don't you?
- No.

Akira.

A government experiment that creates

super humans who are so powerful
their thoughts can destroy everything.

Akira in the late '80s was
one of the first Japanese

anime things that came to the States
that people started to appreciate

and realize
how big this stuff is in Japan.

Like, it's not just Saturday
morning cartoons.

It was a big, big movie.

I think Akira kind of opened
that door in America.

Before I was aware

of Akira, I was a fan of
Japanese animation,

I really loved Battle of the Planets
and Macross and Robotech.

These are all cartoons
I watched after school.

When I was at a convention
and I saw the artwork for Akira on a VHS,

I thought, wow, cool, a movie.

And we put it in and what we had

was a third or fourth generation bootleg.

And it was all in Japanese.

It was not subtitled or dubbed.

We had no idea what the story was.

The animation was so compelling.

We just knew that this was amazing
and Earth shaking

and was unlike anything we had ever seen.

It's about Tetsuo's friends
trying to save him,

even when they realize that the way to
save him is to destroy him.

I've only been to Tokyo once,

and my overwhelming impression of it
was that Tokyo is just on top of you.

You can't move.
In Neo Tokyo,

they've rebuilt Tokyo

and actually expanded some of the highways
and giving it more space.

Akira is the very first time I ever saw
one of those shots,

incredible motorbike coming at you
and starting that power slide

like what seems like
hundreds of feet away.

It's the visual Wilhelm Scream

of anime,
it has to be in every anime,

and all of that was hand
animated and hand painted.

That was just jaw dropping to me.

I finally did see Akira in English,

and it's even better than what
I thought it was as a kid.

Hi, kids! It's me,
Ronald McDonald.

And I'm on the set of my
very first motion picture ever.

It's a movie called
Mac and Me.

Mac and Me is the Kirkland E.T.

There is an entire generation of
people who only know Mac and Me

because Paul Rudd shows a
scene from Mac and Me

on Conan O'Brien every time he goes
there to promote a movie.

I get a phone call and it's this guy
that I've never met.

And he said, "I have a film
that I want you to direct and write.

"It's a lot like E.T., but I want to do it
with a family, with an actual person,

"with a spina bifida condition."

We didn't steal anything from him,

it was just a concept
to have an alien creature,

so I need the prototype aliens,
big big eyes, nothing like E.T.

and animated and cute.

It's for kids.

- Can we go there and watch?
- No way!

The lead boy, Jade Calegory,

he was exactly what we want, and he could
act and he was wonderful in the movie.

Please? I won't anybody
hurt you.

It was fun to make

the film, but it was extremely limiting
because the creature

is really a puppet on cables.

Everything was time consuming,

but it worked.

He's so wholesome in his element.

They were both very cute together.

But it's all done
on the level of children.

It's a whole different world
when you're writing for kids.

It was a charitable endeavor.

The producer is a man
that worked for McDonald's,

who is this big, main supplier,
a multimillionaire.

He was probably,
you know, polishing his own look

by making a film and giving
all of the money to this company.

Everything is a deal

behind films because films just cost
way too much money to make.

Well, the Ronald McDonald
actor in the film

was the one that was actually on TV
in all the commercials.

It was a crossover of perfection.

We have this building that
they're giving us.

We have as many dances
as we can put in there.

That's how it was created.

One of the dancers

in that background,
which we shot was Jennifer Aniston.

Can you believe that?

Nobody paid tribute to this producer

than made a whole movie
to help people who were handicapped

have more presence in the film business,
and it destroyed the kid.

He did it because he wanted to show
the people that couldn't move

except in a wheelchair
could do all this stuff.

So then Paul Rudd comes along
and he sticks out this whole scene

with Jade losing control of his wheelchair

and flying off a cliff.

He did it year after year after year,

he has single-handedly
kept that movie alive.

I would love to sit down with him
and write a sequel

to that movie with him
starring in it with this creature.

My wife's always saying
we should call Paul Rudd.

Sometimes science fiction
holds an obligation

to give messages and even commentary

about our social systems.

Alien Nation.

Alien Nation was tackling

themes of racism and segregation.

At least I'm a detective,
not some outer shit space thing.

Not very subtle metaphor.

Their ship was a slave ship,

washed ashore on Earth, with no way
to get back to where they came from.

They are immigrants
who have ended up in L.A.

a lot of the time doing the menial jobs.

So it's a kind of it's
a look at the way L.A.

works.

Alien Nation is basically
a science fiction version

of a buddy cop movie.

Change your mind?

two mismatched cops
come together to solve a crime,

well known trope
by this point in the '80s.

Hey, nice signal dickhead!

The film stars James Caan
as the human cop, Matt Sykes.

And Mandy Patinkin as his alien counterpart,
George Francisco.

My true name is Stangya-Sorenz-Ahhhh.

- Sorenz-ah. Well, gesundheit.
- Thank you.

I'll call you George.

Terence Stamp plays
the newcomer, the villain in the film.

You move one finger and
you're history, you hear me?

Not history. Eternity!

Gale Anne Hurd.

She didn't want to be seen just as James
Cameron's producer, she wanted to say,

actually, I do my own things.
And that's where Alien Nation comes in.

It has the feel of the Terminator,
it has a feel of that

look the way that Cameron
went about science fiction.

Where's the drug?

Bring the science to the contemporary.

Bring it to the current city
and that idea that Los Angeles

is an essential character
in the whole piece.

Initially, when Stan Winston
and his team got that job,

they were hoping to make the aliens
a little less humanoid.

Some of his team were looking at the

Louis Gossett Jr. character in Enemy Mine
as inspiration for where they could go

But in the end, and I believe wisely so,
the filmmakers said, no,

we want them to be closer to human
to really play up that theme of

we're similar in the end, right?

So why these differences?

Yeah, I mean, it's made of rubber,
it's stretches, right?

And still it fits?

This genre has always

been about the expansion of our ideas
and how we relate to one another.

Our social elements, our
social structure, even elements

that we should be more mindful of
and even dismantle.

So why do we have to take them?
Why can't they go to Russia

- or some place like that.
- I'll drink to that.

Alien Nation

thrived later, when it was
redeveloped for television.

That's when the themes that we talk about
are in your face every week,

and the show becomes an allegory
for all of these topical stories

that are still resonating today.

Where do you go looking
for a Cherry 2000?

A post-apocalyptic world
that has this kind of

technological utopia that is very similar
to what we find ourselves in today.

You know, everything's
kind of taken care of

and yet there's a whole underworld
just barely getting by and getting by

in the most ingenious
and sort of violent and horrible ways.

- Where you from, mister?
- Anaheim.

It really is

a little scary in
its visionary aspects.

Most of the world
has given up on relationships.

So if you had your domestic mate
at Cherry 2000, which was the epitome

of what you would want,
you know, if it breaks, you can't get it

fixed in the current world,
so you have to go out into zone 7.

She's a Cherry 2000.

I want you to go into zone 7,
and get me one just like her.

A director just fell out,
I found out later it was Irv Kershner,

and they were desperate
to get somebody and go shoot.

I read 20 pages
and it was brilliant, weird stuff,

so I jumped on Cherry,
which was a moving train.

Melanie Griffith, she just had a baby.

So it was a very tough shoot,
she really had to endure a lot.

There's a little Easter egg in the robot
repair thing where

Sam Treadwell, played by David
Andrews, goes to see a robot repair

guy, and I put Robby the robot
and Gort in there, at my expense,

it was out of my little director's slush fund.
Forbidden Planet is

probably the first movie of the sci
fi genre that really influenced me.

So it was giving back to that.

I am monitored to respond
to the name Robby.

We shot in every toxic location in Nevada

inside Hoover Dam, electromagnetic forces

in the spillways and radiation zones

concocted some crazy, over-the-top

RPG fights and things like that.

The one big set piece with the magnet

in the Mustang.

You'd never do it today,
it would all be CGI.

It's a real stunt

woman hanging on to that
car out over Hoover Dam.

Thank God it was only one take.

Vegas buried in sand dunes, I think
that was the first time it was ever done.

We did old glass maps
where you actually paint

and shoot through them, built
big sets poking out of there.

The Vegas showgirls and all that.

Besides blowing up a lot of Nevada
in the process, it's really about love,

about finding true love,
not an idealized mate

that does your bidding
and cooks you dinner.

It's about interactions
with a tough, equal or superior woman.

And finally, realizing that

that's more desirable.

One of the aspects

of being a science fiction
fan was a fascination

with what science
can bring us in the world of tomorrow.

What might be? What could be?

Hello, I'm Johnny Cab.

It is a forecast into our future.

A lot of science fiction writers
are writing

and developing technologies
that end up becoming real in the future.

People in the fields of medicine
and technology and science,

it's very exciting to know
that all of these people were inspired

by watching Star Trek.

Klingon mummification glyph.

What were the principal historical events
on the planet Earth in the year 1987?

Correct.

Sci fi imitates real life,
real life imitates sci fi.

We create

art through our movies and our stories
that is of our imagination,

and then someone somewhere goes, "Hey, hey,

"what if I could do that?"

You think of all the things

that were figments of
someone's imagination.

Motion trackers, who would have thunk?

And now we're almost reliant on GPS.

What about tracking?
We can check his exact

location at all times.

The phone, which is not a phone, it's

a phone, it's a camera, it's your day
runner, it has a tape measure.

It's everything. It's your entire life.

I never thought I'd be wearing a computer

on my wrist, it's just laughable.

There are computers in our iPhones
that are actually more powerful

than the computer
that was in the Apollo missions, right?

Which is mind boggling.

In Runaway, there was
that almost internet

before its time.

The drone technology.

Police are preparing a floater camera
which will enter the house

in an attempt to locate
the runaway 912 and the infant.

All of that stuff
has pretty much come to life.

The science has caught up
to the science fiction.

There is more technological advance
in the past 50 years than there is

in all of recorded history up to 50 years ago,
and that will continue.

Arthur C. Clarke's definition

that any advanced technology
will be indistinguishable from magic.

What we think of today as impossible

and magical in 15 or 20 or even 1000

years will be commonplace.

We just don't know
what's around the corner.

And it's bound to be something
that will blow our minds right.

I would only hope that humankind
would continue to be inspired

by the possibilities of the future.

It's crazy.
I don't know where we're headed.

At some point, all of this stuff is going
to be implanted into our heads somewhere

and we'll just think something
and there it'll be in front of us.

Why not?

I would like to ask a question.
Will I dream?

Of course you will dream.

Some of the things that have come to
fruition are very scary.

You know, when we talk about
facial recognition, deepfake technologies,

artificial intelligence that could
potentially take over the planet,

these are the kinds of things
that were forecast

in the '80s sci fi films
that are just now starting to break.

Deepfakes, this is an existential issue,

because we're going to come back to
the idea of, do you trust your fellow man?

It's not the deepfake
that's going to make the difference.

It's the guy behind the deepfake.

Right now, you don't even have
to do a deepfake.

Just tell the same lie over
and over and over again and you're in.

To me, that's the disturbing part,
not the ability to sing the siren song.

It's the people who are seduced by it.

We find ourselves now

in this somewhat
both inspiring and dystopian

future world that's very much
like the movies that we all watched.

Part of the nostalgia
for the '80s movies

is that they dealt with a lot of
these fears very, very well.

They dealt with government paranoia.

They dealt with technological overreach
and hyper innovation.

What are you really
sacrificing in the name of progress.

And, yeah, computers
are going to try to kill us.

And I think in some way
computers have tried to kill us.

We already live
within the construct of Skynet.

If you're on any social media,

all of those systems are artificial
intelligence systems that are aggregating

all of those algorithms
and figuring out who you are

in a way that you don't even understand.

They cannot make things
like that yet.

Not yet.

Skynet in Terminator

was the warning,
and every time you input a piece of data,

you were adding to that quote
unquote Skynet.

Enhance 34 to 36.

I think every generation looks
at the new technology.

There's the scariness and this hopefulness
that I think always coexist.

And so it comes down to do
we have systems in place

that allow us the beneficial
aspects of technology

while limiting the potential
for abuse and misuse.

I think that for every new technology,
for every sci fi idea,

you can find a movie that's hopeful

about what that's going to
do to transform the world.

And a movie that's terrified about how
this thing is going to destroy everything.

There isn't a single sci
fi concept where you can't find

both of those kinds of movies.

Bill & Ted's.

Excellent!
Excellent!

Excellent Adventure.

What if you had the ultimate power
of the gods in your hand

and yet you're such an imbecile
that you did

nothing with it, really.

All we are is dust
in the wind, dude.

It was so nice to see a script written

with young people who were still young.

We're Wyld Stallyns!

Who had innocence

and openness and weren't cynical and jaded
and weren't talking

like characters
out of a Woody Allen movie at 16.

How's it going, royal
ugly dudes?

The reason that Keanu and I
probably got hired was that

we were both theater kids and we both took
the characters very seriously.

Really playing them with sincerity

and not with a wink and a nod
at the audience.

It's not Back to the Future.

You know, we're not that big.

We didn't have a lot of money, but
we really leaned into the kind of ragtag,

sincere analog nature of this hyper

real situation that we were in.

Hey! That's us.
We're back in San Dimas!

Yeah. Only now it's not now.
It's last night.

My favorite scene from Bill and Ted
is the Circle K

when the phone booth arrives.

Not bad!

In terms of sci fi conceits,

acting opposite yourself was really fun.

Strange things are afoot
at the Circle K.

Time travel.

Multiple versions of yourself.

- 69 dudes!
- Whoa.

That kind of mind screw

type stuff is the most fun.

Want a Twinkie, Genghis Khan?

Our film is a strange movie.

I'm Darth Ted.

I'll never rule the universe with you!

We didn't have a Rufus for,

you know, it was well into production.

Greetings, my excellent friends.

I'm here to help you
with your history report.

They kept throwing names at us,
and they went after Connery,

I think with the Time Bandits thing,

Keanu and I were actually
genuinely worried that they were going

to cast the wrong Rufus, but
we were really, really lucky with Carlin.

I'm not strict about time travel rules,
I just want to be entertained.

The time travel mechanics
are actually very, very tight

and very, very realistic.

We'll time travel back to two days ago,
steal your dad's keys and leave them here!

My favorite time travel mechanic
is when Bill and Ted decide

that they're going to do a thing in the future
using the time machine.

- See?
- Wow, yeah!

That's the ultimate sort
of closed loop time travel mechanic.

We can't forget to do this,
otherwise it won't happen.

But it did happen!

It really could have gone off the rails
at any point along the way.

We're history.

For all of the circuits of time stuff,
they just had a booth that was like a canoe

just kind of wedged onto the top
of like this really rickety hydraulic pole

that was very high in the air
in like a shoddy sound-stage

outside of Phoenix somewhere.

125 degrees.

Sweating profusely all the time.

Everyone just stinking to high heaven
looks like a bad carny ride.

And it's like going... Jerking around,
you know, certain we were going to die.

The movie got shelved,
so it came out a full year later.

I'd written it off as having any success,
and then it just exploded.

When you're in a film that punctures
pop culture like that,

there's really no way to be prepared for it,
because it is very surreal.

Party on, dudes!

I think the What if? genre
is definitely a sci fi genre

and there is a sci fi veneer to anything
about bombs going off, like nuclear war.

It definitely falls into the
sci fi category,

at least... until it happens.

Miracle Mile.

Listen, I'm just a guy,
who-who picked up the phone.

It was a famous script.

Everybody's talked about this script.

It's an audacious movie made for,
I think, a $1.98 at night.

To me, it was like early Spielberg.

This can't be true.

It can't.

What would you do

if you were the only person to know
that you have 70 minutes to live?

The Rube Goldberg

thing in Miracle Mile
is that he decides to quit smoking,

so he throws his cigarette down
and a pigeon picks it up.

He lays down to take a nap
to meet his newfound love at midnight,

and the power goes off
and he's three hours late.

You just missed her.

My alarm didn't go off.
And the power went out in the hotel.

This movie really starts going

when the phone rings.

What exactly are you
talking about?

- I'm talking about nuclear fucking war!
- Who is this?

What would you do
if you accidentally got that phone call

and you just know that it's coming?
By getting people to really think about that

and reflect on it, it affects decision
making in the real world.

It's always walking that tightrope of
is this happening?

Am I crazy?

So he was calling from
a missile silo.

He said that they were locked in!
50 minutes and counting.

The real time when the clock started

counting down, it's a fabulous convention.

Condoms! We won't
be needing these.

We got to repopulate
the whole planet.

The interesting thing

was the odd people in it
and the love story within it.

Trust me with this!

With what?

I love you.

By the end, it's sort of one of the
iconic images, this river of cars

and human chaos.

It was pretty crazy

for us to do that on this low budget.

I'm shot and fall, my face
falls on a grate.

That's my Hitchcockian cameo.

It was $3 million to make this movie,
which even in the '80s,

I don't know how we did it.

You tell me now!
You joking, huh?!

I was in danger of being fired
every day of the shoot

because they said it was impossible to do.

Warner Brothers offered a fortune.

They said if we thought about making
Miracle Mile as a single story Twilight Zone.

The only change they wanted to make
was he woke up and it was all a dream

and then started happening again,
which would just not satisfy anybody.

It's total chaos! The fear,
it's total, absolute...

I didn't want to do

anything that gave you hope,
I hate to say it.

I wanted to shake people up.

I wanted to have them walk
out of the theater and go do something

about the issue.

It could happen more likely tonight

than back in '89.

Forget everything you
just heard and go back to sleep.

I got a huge kick out of Honey,
I Shrunk the Kids.

What an absolutely silly idea
that I thought was really well handled.

You don't realize how terrifying
all the little things around

you can be until you're smaller
than everything.

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is about

a scientist played by Rick Moranis,
who accidentally shrinks his kids

and they have to traverse this backyard
in order to get back home and, you know,

fight all sorts of dangers in his backyard
now that they're this big.

- I shrunk the kids.
- What?

The Thompson kids too. They are
about this big, they're in the backyard.

- What?!
- Threw them out with the trash.

It's a dead lift on the Richard Matheson story,
The Incredible Shrinking Man,

which was one of my favorite
sci fi movies when I was a kid.

Matheson was very ahead of his time.

There's allusions to that movie in it.

There are sequences where they're fighting
certain insects as an homage

to those movies of the past.

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

The movie was called Teeny Weenies
and gave me an opportunity

to work with my buddy Joe Johnston
on his first theatrical feature film.

There was a big scorpion scene.

What we essentially did
was that, the fighting the ant

and going after these children,
and the ant comes to the rescue.

Stop motion creatures,
you don't want camera moves to drive

the performance, we want the performance
to drive the camera.

And then there is another unit
down in Los Angeles

with Dave Allen that was doing
the other scenes with the ant.

one of the things about making
movies in the '80s

that people today
don't necessarily understand

is how many different solutions to things
you had to find.

You couldn't just
throw it into a computer, and that's it.

You had to use forced perspective,
miniatures and bigatures,

and sometimes in the single scene,
you might have a animatronic

and the kids are riding on
and then a close up that's just a head.

It's an entirely different prop.

And you had to really sort of
think about how you were going to do

every single shot in a movie
and come up with a different unique

solution.

Thanks for the lift, anty.

It has this esthetic
that is not quite realistic looking

in a lot of places,
but it 100% works for the movie

and the tone of the movie that they're telling.
These giant blades of grass

look exactly how they
should look for that movie.

The great thing about knowing that a movie
was done practically

is that you know that at some point
there was actually a kid swimming around

in a giant bowl of milk
using a giant cheerio as a life preserver.

Help!
Don't eat me!

Some of us feel like the world was getting
a little too cynical for its own good,

a little too self-aware for its own good.

A movie like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids was just
like, "Look, let's just go, enjoy ourselves

"and enjoy the innocence
and sweetness of the world."

It's always got a place on my shelf

for that reason.

Nick! I've got six hours to get home,
get big, and get to the mall.

Now get moving!

I'm James Cameron

and I want to take you into
a world of cold darkness

and unrelenting pressure.

The Abyss is a film
that's made on a frontier

in terms of the physicality of how

they made the film literally underwater

it's a film made in a frontier
of technology and film-making ability

and a classic camera
and storytelling sense.

It's a mix of things.

It's a bottomless pit, baby.

Two and a half miles,
straight down.

Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio

and Ed Harris, the two lead characters,
are an estranged couple.

Under extreme circumstances,

love flourishes.

You can do this.

It's a lovely inversion of Aliens

in a way.
The Navy SEALs are the bad guys

and the aliens are the good guys.

Wouldn't you have liked the picture better
if they hadn't had the aliens down there

and just spent more time
with the rest of us--

I just think they just put in another
element that was more fun.

It doesn't work for me.

Aliens was a cakewalk
compared to The Abyss.

Jim Cameron, he doesn't suffer fools,
but the reason why

he's known as being a taskmaster
is because he's done the work

and he expects all of the crew
to work as hard as he is.

Crew members actually
had a T-shirt that said,

"Life's Abyss, and then you dive."

It was almost his ethos as a filmmaker.

I will make the impossible.

I will find a way of doing these things.

They shot it in these nuclear silos,
in Gaffney.

Filled it with water,
filled it with chlorine.

They had to put black beads across the top
of the tank to stop the light getting in,

but it allowed you to get out of the water
in case of emergencies.

It's dangerous film-making like that.
You can get the bends just in the

Olympic swimming pool or at 18 feet deep
if you jump up too quick.

They had to take their time at the
end of the day to safely get out of that set.

- Bud.
- Relax now, Bud.

Watch me.

That sequence where

they had to basically
breathe in water.

I was like that when I saw them,
I just-- I couldn't believe it.

When he had breathed the liquid oxygen,
that's fake.

So he has to
hold his breath.

We all breathed liquid for nine months, Bud.
Your body will remember.

A Navy SEAL demonstrates
you can breathe liquid oxygen,

and that is a real demonstration
of the effect, the experiment.

There were five rats, five takes.

The fifth rat struggled.

Cameron had to give it CPR.

- See? He's fine.
- It's a she.

But the endurance test

for the filmmakers
and for the cast was beyond difficult.

Everyone had experiences on it,
which will kind of make or break moments.

They had safety divers,
they're called angels.

Okay, that was a good take, Edward.
I want to print that, but let's do it again.

Ed Harris, a tough guy.

He had to swim underwater
for about 40 meters,

and there are scenes where he just at the
brink of not being able to breathe anymore.

Cameron himself has
an incredible story

because people forget
he would just stay underwater.

He had weights and everything. He could
keep himself at the bottom of the tank.

And Cameron pulls on his oxygen mask.

Nothing. And he goes,
"I'm in trouble."

And that's when a safety diver
thinks he's in distress,

because he is,
and comes out with a respirator

and puts the respirator in wrong,
pulls water

straight into his lungs,

and he starts to push away
because he's going to drown.

And the guy holds him closer
because he thinks he's

struggling because he's lack of oxygen.

And the story is
Cameron punches him.

The only thing,
last thing he can do,

is punch the guy
and break through into the surface.

His assistant and the safety diver
were fired on the same day...

and he was back down the bottom
in the tank within hours.

That's James Cameron for you.

That's The Abyss for you.

What the hell is going on?

Back to the Future II picks up

exactly where the last film left off.

And then we go to the far off

future of the year 2015.

The future. Unbelievable.

We are big believers

in the set it up, pay it off.

We thought to ourselves, Hill
Valley needs to be recognizable.

It's recognizable from 1955 to 1985
and in 1985 to 2015.

It has to be recognizable as well.

The great splendor of Back to the Future

really is its ethos is 1950,
when in terms of science fiction,

the dream was a flying car

and the cities of the future, and that's where
Back to the Future Part II comes in,

is that it's just jokes
about 1950's idealization of the future

And all of those kind
of consumerist ideas,

wonderful kind of humoristic things.

We thought about how does the world change.
You recognize a time period

on a pop culture level
based on what new products look like.

Is it ready?

We were very cognizant
about choosing brands

that would give us a change in period.

All I want is a Pepsi.

That's what's going to make
people feel comfortable

that this is where we are.

Drying mode on.

Even though 2015, as depicted in
Back to the Future II, didn't quite pan out

in reality, we all still want
a hoverboard

and I still want a pair of those
self-lacing Nike tennis shoes.

We didn't get 19 Jaws movies.

They forecast our obsession
with the '80s,

so they were on point with that.

There's a whole like genetic line of Biffs

really, really good writing as far as a villain
that just carries all the things

that really trigger us
and push our buttons.

What's wrong McFly?
Chicken?

We all know a Biff.

Go get it!

Back to the Future II gets

real dark, real fast.

Somewhere in the past, the timeline
skewed into this tangent

creating an alternate 1985.

Time paradoxes, man.

You don't know what's going to happen.

Third time's the charm.

The way that you see
characters have changed

as a result of this new timeline
and these new actions that have happened.

You're very much in Marty's shoes of like

this is not the way
the world is supposed to be.

And how did it get this way
and how do I fix it?

Doc, what if we don't succeed?

We must succeed!

The cool thing about Back to the Future II
is where they go back in time again

to the events of the first movie,
and you now have this second Marty

running around
witnessing the events of the first movie

and you get the sense that that was always
happening behind the scenes

while the first movie was going on.

As a time travel junkie,

the idea of reinserting yourself
back into another set of events

that you've already gone through once
it just cracks me up.

This '80s nostalgia

that existed in these sort of future 2015,
which was obviously meant to mimic

the 1950s nostalgia
that people had in the 1980s.

But when you're in the 1980s,
you don't think of that that way

to see that come true,
to have lived long enough to see what

I grew up and
become this nostalgia thing.

I don't know. In one sense,
it makes me feel a little old,

but it is also a thing
that was very prescient about

Back to the Future II.

We have a quaint little piece
from the 1980s.

It's called the dustbuster.

Science fiction, certainly the best
of science fiction is inevitably

a reflection of what's going on on Earth
at the time it was written,

all works of art are ineluctable products
of the time in which they are created.

This isn't about space.

This isn't about deep water.

This isn't about another dimension.

This is about us.

It's really up to the audience
to decide what they want

out of the experience.

Science fiction allowed people

to tell stories and talk about extremely

important social issues

in ways that got people thinking,
maybe without them realizing

they were thinking about it.

We have a hard time
talking about this directly,

but if I tell you this story about people
who are half painted white

and half painted black,
hating the other people

who are half painted black
and half painted white.

The idea of racism,
we see how silly and dumb it is

when you sort of see it reflected
in a different set of cultural norms

hits you in a way
that you can't see without the metaphor.

Escaping when you're a little kid
or teenager

into the world of science fiction is a
great way to start to come to terms

with your own personality, who you are,
where you fit in the world,

and they become really important
benchmarks in how you remember your youth.

So there's something I think that's
universal about that in terms of age.

A lot of these movies

cater to a young audience

that perhaps was in a real
transition in their lives.

And these are times in your lives
that you never forget.

As simple as these movies appear to be,
especially by today's standards,

there's a magic to them because of their
relatability and their intimacy.

It belongs to the person that it made an
imprint on, and that's the wonderful thing

about stories.
You tell it so that somebody else

can relate to it because you related to
it and that's why you wanted to tell it.

There's something about being able to have

your favorite movie
and your favorite moment

and have it with you and watch
it as many times as you want.

And it became this tradition.

We could go rent a movie
and we could sit down with our family.

It was about where we were and who we were
with at the time, and we all wish

we could be back there in some way
doing that with those people at that time.

Everybody likes to remember good times.

Some of these movies
remind us of the good times.

By the way, why are we
wearing bras on our heads?

I think that nostalgia connects us

not only with an innocent part of
ourselves, but also with our imagination,

because as we get older,
we kind of lose that imagination.

Everybody has it, but it starts to
get tarnished as we get older.

These movies endure

because it's a part of us
we don't want to lose.

As you get older,
you want to relive those moments

that meant so much to you as a kid.

You don't want them to go away because
they're actually part of who you are.

I think that what you've got as artists
and filmmakers

are a lot of adults who are still kids.

They're capable
of working in an adult world,

but they feel like a child
and want to express that.

There's something that keeps these
directors making these phenomenal films.

They're affecting you
in some emotional way,

and they're feeling that emotion
when they're making it.

And I'm really glad there's people around
that are listening to their inner selves.

Art is the one thing that looks

beyond the reality that we know around us

and it shows us what's possible.

At it's most noble, art shows us

what can be and what ought to be.

That is what science fiction
at its best is all about.

Is showing us the world of tomorrow

and how human life can be better

in the future than it is right now.

That's the magic of sci fi, man.