Hi, I'm Stephen Sommers,
the writer/director/producer of Van Helsing. And to my right...
Hi, I'm Bob Ducsay.
I'm the producer, and unbelievably, editor of the movie also.
Why unbelievably, Bob?
Because it's really bad to have two jobs on a movie.
- It's worse to have three. - it is, actually. I'm lucky only to have two.
Sit down, here we go.
Originally, when we came up with it
we thought we were going to use the old 1932 black-and-white logo.
The very first time we put it up on the screen, I thought, "No.
"I think it will take people out of the movie."
So that's how we came up with this idea to use the new logo
and go into black and white.
Interestingly enough about the 1932 logo,
this is the second movie we thought we would try to do that.
We tried it on the Mummys, too.
We're going to stop trying to put the 1932 Universal logo on our movies.
- It never works out. - it takes people out for some reason.
That intro, that whole opening there,
was shot by our second unit director, Greg Michael,
who's been with us since film school.
He was my camera operator at film school, 15 years ago.
It was about 5 degrees out.
We sent them hundreds of miles out into the wilderness.
- In the Czech Republic. - and they froze their rear ends off.
And you see all the steam coming out of Top Hat's mouth.
In fact, the snow that's there...
We didn't really ever want this to be a snowy scene,
but the snow was there, and there it is.
And now we go back to soundstages down in LA.
Success!
Count, it's just you.
I was beginning to lose...
This was really fun, I thought. Just to be in Frankenstein's laboratory.
A pity your moment...
Also, Allen Daviau, our cinematographer...
with the fantastic opportunity to shoot,
I think it's the first seven minutes or so of the movie, in black and white.
A wonderful opportunity for Allen
because you don't really get a lot of chances
to shoot black and white in movies now, especially movies of this size.
I love this moment here.
Somebody came up with that and I thought, "That's cool."
The black and white idea was in the very first draft, second paragraph.
It said, "This entire opening sequence will be shot in black and white."
The studio loved the idea, and it always remained so.
I love this bit right here.
I love Dracula popping up from different places
and you don't know how he's getting around.
- You said you believed in my work. - And I do.
But now that it is, as you yourself have said,
a triumph of science...
Every actor in this movie was just so much fun to work with.
These guys, Richard and Sam here...
terrific.
One of the things that's kind of interesting about this sequence,
something that I've never really seen before,
is the chance to do 21 st century visual effects
in a black-and-white sequence. We've got a few things coming up here
that are a great deal of fun.
I said to Ben Snow of Industrial Light & Magic...
Ben's one of the supervisors on the show.
I said, "Have you ever done special effects in black and white?"
And he goes, "No, there's not much call for it anymore."
Feel free. I don't actually need you anymore, Victor.
Look back at that window. I love that rain dripping off the window.
I could never allow him to be used for such evil.
There's Shuler Hensley. We met Shuler...
He won the Tony last year for playing Jud Fry in Oklahoma! on Broadway.
He just blew our socks off.
We happened to be casting in New York, and Bob dragged me to Oklahomal...
and there was Shuler.
You have been so kind to me, Doctor,
This is Kevin J. O'Connor. He's been in...
This is our third movie. He was Pantucci in Deep Rising,
he was Beni in the first Mummy, and now he's Igor.
It's really fun to see Kevin in this big make-up role.
It's funny, you can see him right through the make-up.
- It's hard to hide Kevin. - yeah, it's hard.
I'm already dead.
We actually shoved that sword through Richard.
That's not a special effect. We had to pay him extra.
And Richard can actually do that. That's the funny thing.
- In fact, it was the reason he was cast. - it had nothing to do with his talent.
I just love shadow work.
Michael Curtiz is my all-time favorite director.
Not only did he direct Casablanca, but what I consider one of the greatest,
if not the greatest romantic adventure movie, the Errol Flynn Captain Blood.
He was very much into German expressionism
with all the shadow work and stuff like that.
That's got to hurt.
He only did two takes of that. The stuntman was good.
This shot is a... There's a lot of different ideas here.
This exterior was shot in the Czech Republic
and some of the blue screen was shot in Los Angeles.
Then, of course, there are some matte paintings in this shot.
You see right here this beautiful painting by Syd Dutton,
who handled all of the environments in the movie.
Whenever you see steam coming out of Frankenstein's leg, that was added later.
Because the guy who invented that little piece couldn't make it work.
This was a very hard shot. It was finished very late in the game.
It was very hard to complete this transformation.
That last little bit there was always a bit of a hassle.
But I think it worked out rather beautifully.
I just love this shadow shot.
Most of this stuff is written in the script. I had these ideas.
I watched these movies.
I fell in love with the characters, the look, the feel.
I thought, "That's what this opening sequence is all about."
It's just a big homage
to all of those wonderful Universal horror classic monster movies.
- Coming up here, you're going to see... - we set up the alcohol.
That's why the windmill can blow up later.
- It's sort of a still. - absinthe. You got to watch that stuff.
People in the Czech Republic... These are extras we photographed there.
- They are the greatest torch throwers ever. - in the history of torch throwing.
It's truly unbelievable. These people just have this outrageous skill.
I'm actually not joking.
I think they've actually done this in the past. It worries me a little bit.
There's two pieces obviously.
The lower half of the windmill and the people
were shot on one location. That was mainly second unit.
And then up here was a different location.
What you are seeing here is a composite.
All those people were shot on one night,
and Frankenstein was shot on a completely different night.
We just slap it together.
There's a lot of manipulation of images. Here on this shot
the fire has been added, the lightning has been added.
Throughout the film, there are little enhancements
that are done to the original photography.
Things that you wouldn't even do five years ago
because it was a lot more difficult.
And now these smaller visual effects are common in movies of this size.
Syd Dutton and his gang did these shots right here, and I just thought...
They were so expressionist. It was wonderful, the vampires flying over.
Yeah, there's one coming up here that's particularly great.
It's so expressive.
The music, Alan Silvestri once again did the score for us.
That last one's got a "Surrender, Dorothy!" kind of vibe
to it. It's really great.
A lot of it's the music.
There's Sam.
There's Sam, there's Sam's double.
Yeah, don't look too closely, but...
That was pretty good, though. Really, you can't tell.
That's a miniature you're seeing.
But, of course, when we say miniatures, it's 15 feet high.
- Or was it 20 feet high? - Something in that neighborhood.
And there are our gals. Oh, yeah.
We cast for six months trying to find them.
It was really hard to find three gorgeous girls who can act.
And then, one day, Silvia and Elena
and Josie came walking into our lives. I remember I got this tape
from Elena Anaya from Spain. I popped it in.
She's really beautiful, and she was really scary, creepy.
And I thought, "She's perfect. Maybe this is just who she is.
"Maybe she is really creepy."
And so I met her. She's very lovely and she was perfect.
The same day I was in London, and Silvia came walking in.
She was the girl. A week later, we met Josie, and we had our brides.
I got this idea of the half-built Eiffel Tower
when I was visiting my parents in Arizona.
In one of these poster shops, I saw this poster with it half-built.
I thought, "That's perfect." I realized it was the exact time period I was shooting in.
This sequence is one of the few sequences that was restructured in the movie.
If you were to read the original screenplay
the sequence with Anna and Velkan that's going to come up
in a few minutes, used to be in this place.
We thought it was better to introduce Van Helsing sooner
given that the movie is called Van Helsing.
In that previous shot, where we go
from Notre Dame across the river and all the way down,
nothing in that is real, except Hugh.
Not even the cobblestones he's walking on are real. It's all digital.
We put a bunch of real stuff in there to try to help Syd Dutton out
and when we got into post, his famous response was,
"Guys, don't help me."
We just made his life more difficult. He had to paint out all this stuff.
Greg spent three hours putting up this gargoyle for him in the foreground.
Of course, Syd had to paint it out. It's all fake.
Elena Anaya saw that shot and was convinced we'd shot in Paris
and not invited her. I said, "No, not real."
You're about to meet Mr. Hyde here. He's obviously an all-CG creation.
But he has a lot of assistance from all sorts of people.
He's voiced by Robbie Coltrane, who we worked with
on The Adventures of Huck Finn.
We also do something called motion capture.
His more basic body movements,
the running, the jumping, that sort of thing,
were actually done by Shuler Hensley, who plays Frankenstein.
So Shuler got to partially play two monsters in the movie.
He was dressed in a motion capture suit.
It has targets all over it. And he would do a lot of the things that you see here
- while the computer captured it to... - not that.
Although that would have been interesting to see. We should have made him do that.
Over and over again. Take 46. "Shuler, jump further."
...you're a deranged psychopath.
I don't know if it's on any of the Making of stuff that's in here
but Shuler also stood in while these shots were photographed.
So he's actually standing there to the right, for Hugh to have someone to play off of.
He has this ridiculous cutout head of Hyde on top of...
How Hugh could have gotten through this scene without laughing
the entire way is beyond me. I hope some of that's on the disk. It's hilarious.
Shuler and Hugh know each other. They go way back.
They were both in Oklahoma! in London, five or six years ago.
So they can't stop laughing.
I had Frankenstein and Van Helsing in full costume singing...
These guys can sing. And hamming it up.
Singing Happy Birthday to me in Prague. Really funny.
All that you're looking at here, it's all fake.
This is real.
Real, fake, fake, real.
One of the things that happens in this sequence
is that there is actually a rather large set that was built here.
This is similar to the technique that was used throughout the movie
where Allan Cameron, our great production designer
built these gigantic sets.
But they often needed to be extended.
So there's a lot of blue screen work even in a set like this
where parts of the background are digital or matte painting.
The hat is digital, that bell is digital.
Everything else is real.
It's something that ILM likes to call Sommersizing.
They say you can't really build a set that's big enough,
or you don't have soundstages big enough to make Steve happy,
so you build the biggest set you can, and then set up blue screens and extend it.
Which is pretty much how this whole movie was put together.
There's a chart they call the "Sommers chart" up at ILM.
It has five boxes. On the far left, it says, "Just right."
The next box says, "Too much." The next box says, "Way too much."
The next box says, "Oh, my God, the computer's crashing."
And the final box says, "What Steve wants."
The butt crack shot there,
I take full responsibility for that.
And that's a mixed bag. Let's face it.
I thought Stacey Snider, the chairman of Universal...
She loves our stuff, but I thought,
"For sure, this is one of those that Stacey'll groan.
"She'll really not like that."
The first time she saw it, she burst out laughing.
And I thought, "She likes it." Watch this.
People were always shocked in the theaters when they saw that.
Stacey said, "it makes him seem so real. Especially when he pulls up his pants."
"Because he cares about his appearance," is what she said.
And, Stacey, sorry for mentioning that you liked the butt crack shot.
We do want to work with you again.
This was so much fun. This entire sequence, because it's so expensive
to have a three-dimensional creature like Mr. Hyde here, in almost every shot,
you have to not only storyboard it, but we did what's called pre-visualization,
where we did a cartoon of most of the things
so we knew exactly how we were going to shoot it
and cut it before we did. All these shots are a tad expensive.
This would be one of those scenes.
May he rest in peace.
This is probably a good time to mention Hugh Jackman.
We've been saying this a lot over the last few weeks as we finished the film
and I think it's worth mentioning again.
We never had anyone in mind outside of Hugh to play this role.
He really embodied everything we thought made up Van Helsing.
He's strong, and a great actor,
and can be very physical, and he's charming and charismatic.
He was everything we hoped Van Helsing would be.
When we cast him, I hadn't seen X-men. X2 hadn't come out yet.
This was over two years ago. Bob saw him in London, on stage.
That was about five years ago.
He was cast in this movie based on his performance in Oklahoma!
So think about that for a stretch.
In hindsight it's like, "it's obvious. He was in the X-men movies."
But at the time, you know...
Bless me, Father, for I have...
Sinned. Yes, I know. You're very good at that.
Remember this guy?
He was in The Mummy Returns, he was the evil curator. Alun Armstrong.
He's the guy that many people...
Reporters are always asking about blue screen.
They're always asking myself and actors,
"How hard is it to act against nothing, act against a blue screen?"
So one day I went to Alun Armstrong and said,
"I'm always giving BS answers. How hard is it to act against nothing?"
And he said, "My dear son, often in my career, I've had to act against nothing."
So there you have it, blue screens and actors.
So he said, "Blue screen? It doesn't bother me a bit."
When we found you crawling up the steps of this church...
At this point, I... Two and a half years ago, these were ideas in my head.
I never knew if they would work or not.
Now that we've screened it, audiences seem to like it.
I've always been in love with the Knights Templar guys.
I thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if there's this ancient secret society
"based under the Vatican made up of all the religions?"
This scene at the confessional
was the very first scene that was photographed in the movie.
Yeah, day one.
This is a gigantic set
that Allan Cameron built in Prague.
We'd shot most of the location work in the Czech Republic
and then some set work here.
- One of the things that you can see... - look at the far top right.
See that red guy in the background? That's Hugh and the Cardinal.
There's a big mirror on the back wall.
You can see it right below Hugh's chin there,
that's a reflection of the Cardinal in the background.
That giant mirror is used to extend an already large set.
That's a very old technique.
Something that we really love to do,
even though the movie's filled with lots of
really advanced visual effects,
there's lots of old movie ideas in here.
Those are things that were done in the past, decades ago,
to make sets look bigger. That's a technique
that Allan employed here, really to great effect.
We've screened the movie now about a half a dozen times.
The screenings have been great.
Audiences are screaming and laughing and cheering.
The one thing I still don't know, and I wonder if I ever will:
Do people understand
that this secret society is made up of all the religions of the world?
I was wondering. Because it's in the Vatican,
I think that some people think it's just a Catholic organization.
But, if you notice, there's...
- There went a monk and a mullah... - a monk and a mullah and a rabbi.
It's probably really obvious.
One of the things by moving that sequence,
with Anna and Velkan which you're about to see,
is that it turns out now in the movie that the way we first meet Anna
is through these photographs.
Interestingly enough, those are not the original photographs that we shot.
At the time of the original production photography, we decided
that we wanted to use a different photograph of her
and those were changed in postproduction.
Nice little boring detail for you.
Valerious the Elder left this here 400 years ago.
We don't know its purpose
but he would not have left it lightly.
This was fun.
That's an interesting thing. Bob and I have been really lucky.
We've done only about a day and a half's worth of re-shoots or pick-ups.
Because as an editor, director, and writer,
we just try and figure out any problems the movie might have without re-shooting.
Just moving that one scene to later,
we never lose anything. People wonder if there's going to be a director's out.
I say, "My director's cuts are in the theater." Our scripts are very tight.
Faster, please.
Here we're going to meet David Wenham.
His character, Carl, was named after Carl Laemmle,
who was a producer way back when on the Universal lot.
It was funny, we were just about to cast this role
and Bob got a tape from Australia.
He came running into my room, saying, "You got to look at this."
And it's a guy with no neck, a really bad haircut, and big, floppy ears.
I just loved him. He's perfect. He's funny.
When he was talking about werewolves and vampires,
he was so earnest and believable. I called up Hugh,
because Australia is such a small country.
They were both Australian, they must know each other.
Hugh said, "I love him, he's great.
"But how can he be my sidekick? He's this really tall, handsome guy."
I'm like, "This must be a different David Wenham."
I found out David's about one inch shorter than Hugh.
As you go through the movie, watch how short David appears to be with Hugh.
Somehow he got rid of his neck, put black tack behind his ears,
and gave himself a really bad haircut.
It worked.
I'm sure he was very uncomfortable the entire movie.
Look at how short he is with Hugh, and really there's only an inch difference.
I don't know how he does it.
Glycerin 48.
Sorry!
This is always fun. That's a cheap gag, but sometimes I can't help myself.
You put the movie in front of an audience...
and you see that they react to this, which is great.
...arrows in rapid succession...
I sat around trying to figure...
There's only so many ways you can kill a vampire or a werewolf
but I figured in our movie, we got to use the same ways
but we got to be a little more high-tech, a little cooler.
Then, I do have to explain it. That's why he says, "Gas-propelled."
So everything has to be actually 19th-century functional.
Look at this. This is just one shot.
When you have two great actors who are always on their game
and never pause and never screw up, you can do a shot like this.
They're playing around, talking, and there's no pause or bump.
You just let the camera run. I love that.
What it does is to create a light source
equal to the intensity of the sun.
This will come in handy how?
I don't know. You can blind your enemies.
This is the first week of photography.
We're shooting this the first few days. This was in Prague.
Everybody's just getting used to each other.
I think it's actually worth mentioning. It's April 30 right now.
The movie opens in a week.
So we're sitting here, doing this DVD commentary
having actually just finished the movie about a week ago.
It was completed a very short time ago. So it's all very fresh in our heads.
- And we have no idea... -"Is it going to go well?"
"Are people going to want to see it? What's going to happen?"
We have no perspective whatsoever.
This is a forest outside of Prague. Will Kemp.
Will came to us. He literally walked off the street in London.
And he auditioned for us. He was amazing. He just did a great audition.
As he was about to leave, I said,
"Can you pretend you're transforming into a werewolf?"
He was like a contortionist. I said, "What have you been doing?"
He said, "Actually, I'm in the ballet." He's a fantastic dancer.
He said, "And I've done a few commercials."
A couple of months later, he's on television. He's the GAP guy.
He's being mauled on the streets by teenage girls.
Anyway, here we go.
Come on.
Dracula unleashed you...
We're about to meet our first of three werewolves.
The werewolves were a real big challenge
from a visual effects standpoint.
They were hard creatures to design, to execute,
to figure out how they should move.
In the end, I think the effect is actually quite terrific.
One of the things that was important about this sequence,
because we actually considered deleting this sequence from the movie
not because we didn't like it, but for pace reasons...
- I think... - people are going to go, "Pace reasons?"
Now I understand.
-'Cause the movie was too fast? - exactly.
But one of the things that we found was really important in this sequence,
among other things,
was that it established the werewolf as a vicious character.
You want to make sure that you carry that with the rest of the movie.
It also established how heroic Velkan is, and Princess Anna.
We love this scene. The problem is, when we originally had it sooner,
when it was the second scene in the movie,
we weren't getting to the story quick enough.
Then I had this idea one day,
"You got to keep this scene, 'cause it's so great for Velkan and Anna,
"and the werewolf. If you take it and put it down the line,
"that also makes the slideshow much more important.
"Because these slides we're seeing, we don't know them yet."
But now, the audience knows who these two characters are,
that they're the last of the Valerious.
They have to kill Dracula before they both die, blah, blah.
Anna, hurry!
Kate Beckinsale was the very last person that we cast in the movie.
Casting the character of Anna was a real struggle.
Because the character has to be beautiful,
she has to be capable of appearing as a Gypsy princess,
she has to be a terrific actress, she has to be able to kick ass.
It's a very demanding role.
Kate was always someone that we considered very highly
but we never even thought about casting her
because she was in a movie called Underworld.
They were in the process of making the movie while we were casting.
Not only did that seem to be a little bit of a problem
but she would never want to do it.
There would be no way that she'd want to go from that picture to this one.
In fact, after we had struggled for the longest time
trying to find someone that fit all those needs...
That could stand toe-to-toe with Hugh, in the looks and acting categories.
Exactly. We got a call from Kate's agent
and she said, "Why haven't you considered Kate for this role?"
I explained the reasons. She said, "I think Kate would like this movie.
"I think it's a terrific script." And the next thing you know...
We realized they are completely different movies.
- Different characters, different movies. - it's an absolute miracle.
Because she does a wonderful job.
I could never imagine anyone else in this role.
This is Alberta, Canada.
You get photography from all over the world.
There was one shot earlier from New Zealand. The ship shot.
About nine countries are represented here. Actors from 11 countries. So there you go.
That last shot, that matte painting was done by Weta Digital in New Zealand.
This was shot right outside of Prague.
If you notice, the mountains
in every shot in this sequence, are all digital mountains.
This was shot on a plain outside of Prague.
That's actually a good example of Sommersizing
because this is an absolutely gigantic set.
I can't help myself.
And it's really beautiful in its own right, although...
It has two cemeteries.
- Two cemeteries, a bar, a church. - back alleys.
But adding that was something that we always anticipated and planned to do
because we really wanted this village to be set in a very difficult valley.
Transylvania 's a difficult place to live, and we wanted it to look that way.
Look at these guys. You have to go to Eastern Europe to get people like this.
The extras were fantastic.
They were a delight to work with, and actually took direction.
Usually, extras are the bane of most... I say this on every commentary.
Extras are the bane of a director.
There's always one extra who keeps looking into the camera.
He just can't help himself.
Then there's always another extra who wants to show
that he is a master thespian.
Master thespian isn't called for when you're just supposed to be standing there.
But these guys are just in the background.
But they did a fantastic job. Wonderful faces, as you can see here.
You refuse to obey our laws?
- The laws of men mean little to me. - Fine.
Kill them.
I love this character Top Hat, who's in the background there,
played by Tom Fisher who was Spivey in Mummy Returns.
I forgot about that.
Here we introduce our brides as creatures.
There was an interesting methodology that was used to create these shots.
The shots are what we call hybrids.
The bodies are obviously digital creatures.
But we photographed the actresses in make-up,
on wires, against a blue screen, with motion capture suits on,
so that their faces, their heads actually, could be integrated with the CG bodies.
We've got a good one coming up here of Josie Maran that's a close-up.
There you go. That shows the technique rather well.
We wanted to try to avoid some of the problems
that we had with the Scorpion King in The Mummy Returns,
where you attempt to make a photo-real,
or a more realistic-looking character.
It was hurt a lot by being an all-CG creature.
This methodology proved to work really well.
We spent hundreds and hundreds,
probably 1,000 hours in methodology meetings with everybody,
between stunts and camera crew rigs,
and ILM people.
Because I said, "In this movie, people have to fly." See that.
Everybody's so used to putting actors on wires in front of a blue screen.
It's so boring, it's been so done.
I said, "The real challenge here is we got to get people flying,
"doing loop-the-loops."
These Cablecam operators showed up in Prague
and we had every crane in the Czech Republic
over the top of this village.
We were like giant puppeteers.
There's wires going everywhere. We're flying cameras.
The same rig is used in NFL games, but it's easy, it's on a grid.
It's a rectangle. They go up and down, back and forth.
In a movie like this, scenes like this, we had to go
do loop-the-loops, go left to right, back and forth, and spin around.
It was much more complicated. At one point
the camera got away from us and hit maybe 60 miles an hour,
and everybody's running as they thought the cable was going to snap
and the camera's going to fly into the crowd. It didn't.
Another time, the camera got so fast
it went through the front door of the church.
...the sun.
But just the camera rigs and the stunt rigs in this sequence,
and in future village sequences at night when the pygmy bats come in,
it was just unbelievable how many cranes and wires were above this village.
It's really complicated. if you go back to the shot that preceded the sun coming out
when Verona lifts the guy and bites him.
If you stop and think about that, the background was shot
with a camera that's flying, and at the same time
a guy was on wires and had to be coordinated with the camera.
It's very complicated. So not only was the camera flying
through the sequence at great speed,
but often, stunt people, and even Hugh and Kate
were often on wires while the camera is also flying.
It was a very complicated sequence.
Earlier, when Kate gets grabbed and lifted into the air,
that's Kate, and when Hugh grabs her feet and they are flying, that was them.
When actors say, "Yeah, I do all my stunts..."
Quite unbelievably, these two did virtually every stunt in the movie.
That's digital. The last shot, where Kate gets thrown.
That's such great digital work.
- Kate didn't do it. - she didn't do that one.
This is obviously Kate here. She is on wires.
- It turns digital. - that's all digital, right there.
Another one of our tricks, which we're trying to get away with in this movie
is not only... Look at Verona there. It's people flying.
The audience should watch this and be into it
and not be taken out because of the blue screen or the bad stuff.
Some good stuff with Kate coming up here. She does this stuff with the tree.
- She gets slammed into the tree here. - watch this shot.
That's got to hurt. The audience always reacts to that shot.
Even I keep going, "How did we do that?"
The craziest thing about that
is that she is hanging, I'm not exaggerating, about 30 feet in the air on wires
and is getting slammed into a tree.
To say that she was a trouper with this stuff is a real understatement.
It was wrapped with foam rubber, but hard foam rubber.
And it's also about 10 degrees outside.
Nice to see you, too, Aleera.
In this movie I decided, "it's got to either be the real actors
"or we got to push them to the very limit, and then we go digital."
So there's a lot of digital double work.
Everybody, especially ILM took a huge leap forward, just in the last year,
with digital doubles, with hair, skin color, and clothing.
Most of the time you can't tell, I don't think the average person...
Sometimes even I can't tell where it's Hugh and where it's his digital double.
That's Josie. Look at that. I just wanted people flying.
I didn't want it to be actor against blue screen on wires.
This is one of the complicated, last shots completed in the movie,
completed just about three weeks ago, maybe?
Yeah, and all these movies are so complex and so difficult,
we knew for a year we were coming out on May 7
and so we back it up from there, and need every minute we can get.
Until they ripped the film out of our hands and said,
"We got to get this out in 40 different countries and seven different languages."
I hope you have a heart, Aleera,
because someday I'm going to drive a stake through it.
That's the back alley of our set.
Allan Cameron, my production designer, he's been a...
I guess I started with him on Jungle Book, 10 years ago.
He did The Mummy movies, he did this. He's just fantastic.
We sit around, discuss things, and watch movies.
My cinematographer Allen Daviau was game.
We'd sit around and watch all the Universal horror classics
and decide what we liked and how we'd put a spin on it.
So sad.
The church!
We thought we'd try some dead air for a while.
See if we lost you. Did we lose you? I was watching the movie.
It's hard when the brides come on to pay attention.
Hello, Anna, my dear.
This is actually a sequence that we spent a long time on
in every single area.
The pre-visualization on this sequence took a great deal of time.
It was put together in a very detailed way,
and, of course, the photography of the sequence took a very long time,
then the cutting of the sequence is very complicated and involved
'cause there are so many different stories going on simultaneously,
and then the visual effects.
So this was one of those big-challenge sequences.
Hugh's stunt double, he broke his leg getting slammed into that cart.
The only injury on the movie.
Hugh's stunt double broke his leg on that cart. Is that important?
I think it is. Sure, I mean...
We're just trying to fill dead air here.
We're really interested in about 20 minutes, half-hour and then it's gonna go down.
It really goes downhill very quickly.
We should practice this, Bob. We should come in here and practice.
Here she comes!
This is fun. Those are cable rigs.
It's like flying cameras all around.
I love that shot.
I love that. That's another good shot. ILM shot.
It's just visually... I mean, we've seen fangs to death.
I just wanted to do something different.
I was watching all the old movies and reading the books,
and I thought, "Vampires, okay, well, we knew they can turn into bats
"but bats don't scare me." I grew up with bats in Minnesota.
And I thought, "But what if they had 15-foot wing spans?"
This is the last special effects shot, finished about a week ago, in the movie.
- Bye, Josie. - poor Josie.
She goes down bad.
Van Helsing has his little signature there. I think it's a small indication,
and I think you can see it in Hugh's performance.
One of the things that is part of the Van Helsing character
is that he's very torn about what it is that he does.
He has to do this job, he has to vanquish the world from these creatures...
See, no cows were hurt in this movie.
It's a good thing, too. See, the cow lived.
The audience was sitting there worrying about the cow until that very moment.
My wife would not have been happy if we had killed the cow.
It's interesting. Somehow it's all right to kill people in movies
but the second you harm an animal, you're in bad shape.
By the way, I'm sure you all knew this,
when Marishka grabbed the cow and threw it through a wall...
It was an actual cow that the vampire picked up and threw into the building.
And after 37 takes, killing 37 cows,
then we decided, "Maybe we should do this digitally."
No, that wasn't a real cow.
If you look at the shot that Steve's talking about
there is actually a real cow that's standing there.
And Hugh leaps in front of it, and then there's a switch off,
if you put your DVD player on, and look at it a frame at a time,
you'll see there's a blend that happens.
First, I think the cow's face gets changed to the digital cow,
then part of the body. Anyway, it's how it was accomplished.
And it wasn't hurt at all.
No. Again, I wanted to do amazing things with humans and animals,
and you'll see later on with the horses...
A: Horses can't do what I want them to do in this movie
and they would all die doing it if we tried to do it with real horses.
So we did a lot of digital horse work.
This is where Richard is introduced for the first time in the movie in color,
and he is in his lair in...
The brides are hanging upside down.
He's on wires here, Richard. I always thought this was a fun shot.
Everybody always smiles. People always smile during this shot.
"He can walk up walls."
One of the great things about working with the actors on this show is that
they really did have to do a lot of wirework. Right here, they're hanging upside down...
Try to hang upside down for more than two minutes.
You only get a couple of takes. We were rushing.
I can do it. I've got this thing in the house, so I hang upside down. It's great.
Besides Bob,
it's really hard, because by the time we get them up there,
it takes five minutes to get them up there, upside down, get the camera ready,
you've only got a couple of takes before they pass out.
But the actors were tremendously game.
I listen to these commentaries and people always say that.
Maybe it's really true, but it really is true here.
Yeah, as opposed to everyone else.
Exactly. Everyone else is lying, and we're telling the truth.
...forever.
My Lord.
I love the look of the hair straight up. I had to hang them upside down.
Part of being a vampire. I had to do it. I read all the mythologies, and I know my lore.
And I really wanted to take it and run with it.
But soon the final battle will begin.
I must go and find out who our new visitor is.
That was actually the first werewolf shot we did in the movie
and he started off as a shadow.
And it's a digital shadow.
This is actually a wonderful shot.
Again, combining digital with live action...
Those are digital characters, but do you know where they switch?
Take a look at it with a DVD player, frame by frame,
it's actually very impressive.
...bear the sorrow if we fail again.
Another Allan Cameron set.
One of the things that Allen Daviau was doing in the sequence
and something that happens in various moments throughout the film,
is that Steve has a real passion for photography
that has both cool colors and warm colors in the same shot.
I think you'll find that in numerous places throughout the film
where you will see blue used in combination with warm white.
Blue and gold.
Why do you torment that thing so?
It's what I do.
"It's what I do."
Greg Cannom did the effects make-up in the movie.
He did Igor and Frankenstein and also the brides' make-up
when they're creatures, and did an absolutely phenomenal job.
Again, going back to using all kinds of techniques
to make the movie where there's make-up...
- So, how did you get here? - We came by sea.
- Really? The sea? - Well, yes.
- The Adriatic Sea? - So, where do I find Dracula?
I love this scene.
This was the first scene where Kate and Hugh
got together and acted for the first time. About an hour and a half outside of Prague.
It's funny, because the first scene we shot was with Hugh and the Cardinal,
and it went all well, and we got to this scene, I love this location,
but it was the first time the two leads were getting together. They were so terrific.
I really understood the tone, as a director you hope you understand it,
but with these movies, you want it to be scary, to have humor,
romance, a little bit of everything.
I knew the exact tone of this movie.
When these two actors came in and did this scene, it shifted by about 10%.
It became a little more real and dramatic, I think.
I just knew after this scene that I was in good shape.
My father spent most of his life looking for answers year after year.
Tearing through the tower, combing through the family archives.
- Carl, the tower. Start there. - Right.
Look at this move. That's Kate's move.
I said, "Kate, put a knife in your boot or something."
She says, "How do I get it there?" "I don't know, think of something."
She did that move and behind me, I heard 10 crewmembers go, "Ooh."
So I said, "Yeah, that's what I want, Kate."
Also in that same series of shots, you should go back and take a look at this.
You will see one of Steve's annoying tendencies as a director.
On Kate's side, you will see she has her hands on her hips
which I will grant you is very cool and great.
But on the other side, her hands are not on her hips
because that was the previous thing that was photographed.
They were shot out of order
so Steve came up with this afterwards, so when you look at these...
This is an editor talking.
When you look at this, you go, "What's up with the continuity?"
- No way. No one notices. - it's ridiculous.
Nobody even in the editorial noticed that.
No, I understand, I'm just pointing out that these sort of things happen.
When she had her back to me, I was focusing on Hugh,
and somebody said, "Her hands are just staying there."
He's really lucky he got away with it.
- Yeah, it was good. - it is good. I love it.
I wouldn't change it for the world.
It's just harder to see.
So this is actually an interesting moment. That shot right there,
that was shot on location as a pick-up, because as written,
for some reason, we thought this would be okay,
he actually hit her, and knocked her out.
And it was photographed that way, and we saw the dailies and we were like,
"Well, that's never gonna work.
"We're gonna hate Van Helsing. The audience is gonna burst into laughter."
So, on location, while we were still making the movie in the Czech Republic,
we shot this little pick-up and the background is actually a slide.
Yes, as soon as I saw this shot, I just went,
"We can't hit her, let's spray her with some knock-out gas."
Exactly. Hopefully, you can catch these problems while you're making the movie
because it's much easier to solve then.
But I'm really amazed that we thought that would be okay.
There were people in our office that complained about that in the script
and we ignored them. "No, it'll work fine."
He's trying to save her life, she's trying to take on Dracula herself.
He's doing the right thing.
And, of course, it was awful. Anyway, it's fixed now.
I write the scripts that I'm directing, and between Bob and I,
we worked so diligent on the scripts. Our scripts are very tight going in.
We've thought of every possible hole and problem.
You can't think of everything, but you're trying to because
so many movies are forced to do days and weeks of re-shoots and pick-ups
because of problems, that we try to all the way along, get it while we're there.
Because doing re-shoots costs so much more.
And, when you get into post, you have everything.
Not to make this the sequence about problems with continuity
but this is slightly interesting.
Pay attention to the sequence and watch Kate's hair.
Her hair changes a lot in the sequence, and this was the very first stuff
that was photographed with Kate.
I'm going to be honest about it, Kate didn't like her hair in the movie
and it got changed a couple of times.
She addressed this up front.
It got changed while we were shooting the sequence
so you can see the many hairstyles of Anna in this sequence.
See where Kate picks up the gun, and she cocks it.
She was being really delicate about it.
She kept picking up that gun and gently cocking it.
By about the fourth take, I said,
"Kate, when you pick that up, I need a bigger cock."
And she looked at me and said, "Stephen, don't we all."
Can you put that on the DVD? I don't know if that's possible.
Here you go, look at the straight hair. It changes throughout the scene.
Then again, it works. I guarantee you, unless we pointed that out,
it's not something that you would ever notice, but the fact of the matter is
- her hairstyle changes... - now, these are Kate's first scenes
and she wasn't trusting us on the hair, and then she got into the spirit.
Of course, when you see shots like this, maybe she was right, the first week.
Yeah, there may have been a hair malfunction in that shot.
We were having some hair problems that day with Kate.
Then we got over it and were fine.
Oh, my God, you're alive.
This was actually Will's first scene also.
Again, you get this incredible benefit from his background,
on the stage as a dancer,
because these contortions that he goes through
and his ability to apparently climb a wall really does come from the actor.
I think that this shot is very cool, because it's very organic.
There's a guy crawling up the wall. It's a very well accomplished shot.
There's some old movie trickery here also, because this set is actually on the floor
and the camera is put in a position where it appears like it's the wall.
So again, using many old-time and new-time techniques all within the same shot.
When I was thinking about the werewolf when I watched movies
and I didn't want him to just grow hair. I thought of these creatures logically
and said, "A werewolf is like an alcoholic or a drug addict.
"He could be your neighbor, best friend, brother. He's very noble during the day
"but at night, when his demons come out, when the full moon comes out,
"he's uncomfortable in his own skin, so he'd want to rip it off.
"He just can't stand it anymore."
That's when I thought, "He can rip it off..."
And I mentioned these things to some of the guys at ILM
and they came down and created this idea.
They did some drawings that represented that, and they took it and ran with it.
It looked great. We had some really great creature designers on this movie.
Crash and Patrick Tatopoulos,
a group of great people.
Greg Cannom and the whole slew of people up at ILM,
a lot of people contributed to the great design work you see in the movie.
At least, we hope you think it's great design work.
Bob, they've already bought the DVD.
So chances are they actually like the movie.
That's true.
I like these shots.
This is a very iconic shot.
When Steve spoke with Gabriella Pescucci who's our costume designer,
this great Italian lady who did a phenomenal job,
he said, "What I need out of the Van Helsing costume, is it to be so iconic
"that if you see him completely in silhouette, that you'll know who he is."
Silhouetted against the moon.
I have Dracula, Frankenstein, and Wolf man, and they're so iconographic,
Van Helsing's got to have that. It's funny, so many people said,
"The hat. Where did you get that from? Was it from Indiana Jones,
"or Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,
"or Vampire Hunter D?" They had all these ideas.
"No, I told my costume designer to come up with something so iconographic
"that if he were silhouetted against the moon, you would know it was him."
This is a fun scene. I love the snow.
What a coincidence.
People don't know this, but every movie made, you have to lip-synch dialogue.
You just do. There's all kinds of mechanical problems. It has nothing to do with,
hopefully speaking, it doesn't have to do with the performances.
It's just that in a scene like this,
what you have is snow machines and wind machines blowing snow around.
So you can't hear a thing.
So all you're getting on the set is actually guide track.
And then the actors come in afterwards and they have to lip-synch all their dialogue.
Whenever you see two people talking in front of a waterfall
or in the middle of a Manhattan street, they have to lip-synch that.
Because it's just so loud, and the background is so obnoxious.
This is one of the first sequences that we had to deal with the Velkan werewolf.
That's a cool shot. We had a lot of problems...
This is my least favorite shot in the movie coming up, I'll show you.
Sorry, ILM.
We love your stuff, but... Right there.
What was with that werewolf? But the rest was okay.
Maybe you all have your favorite shot to hate, but that's ours.
If people knew...
These two together, it was just great.
He's not your brother anymore, Anna!
- You knew? - Yes.
Before or after I stopped you from shooting him?
Before.
And still you tried to kill him!
He's a werewolf! He's gonna kill people!
He can't help it! It's not his fault!
I know, but he'll do it anyway!
Do you understand forgiveness?
Yes. I ask for it often.
In this movie, I wanted as much... Watching the old horror classics,
I wanted as much atmosphere as possible. There's always rain, steam, and mist,
and I wanted to throw in snow as well. Just to keep things interesting.
Transylvania's a really amazing place, because you get all kinds of weather.
If you actually stop to think about it, that last scene in the armory
where she ran into Velkan, it's pouring down rain
and we come to this scene and it starts to snow. I guess it got colder.
In fact, we knew that was going to be an issue, it's all wet down
when we start, but the fact is that the weather in Transylvania is always changing.
That's what the thousands of hours of methodology means, we go through,
the whole gang of us, every department, line by line through a movie like this.
That's why at the beginning of the sequence, you see the snow start.
I have to give that to Sylvie, my French script supervisor
who's been with me for about 15 years. But she's really into continuity.
That's her nickname. She's the continuity girl.
She keeps everything straight. She wanted to know,
"When does it starts snowing?"
So we had to show that it started snowing. I thought it was kind of nice.
It's always good to have a Jacob's ladder. These are great iconic images,
things that go back to the original movies.
When you think of Frankenstein's lab,
all those weird machines are the first thing that come to mind.
- Igor. - Yes, master.
How long before we are ready?
You see the little Dwergi here. When I was figuring out the script
I realized, at some point, somebody's got to take apart this lab
and move it from Castle Frankenstein to Castle Dracula.
It couldn't just be Igor,
and Dracula's not going to do it, so he had to have helpers.
And I came up with these Dwergis.
Actually, I just called them trolls or something.
Bob's assistant looked it up and found that German Gothic trolls were called "Dwergi."
"Dwerger" plural, "Dwergi," singular, I think. I can't remember.
Anyway, I thought they were pretty cool.
Nightmares.
This is the last scene we shot in Prague.
We blew fake snow throughout...
You would not believe how cold it was.
God bless the Czech Republic, it's a beautiful place, the people are wonderful,
it is just so cold there.
See, Bob's from Miami, I'm from Minnesota, so I thought it was rather balmy, actually.
Yeah, maybe it does relate to Minnesota a little. It just seems colder.
The man who lived here was killed a year ago.
- A grave robber, among other things. - A year ago.
It was just after that that your father went missing.
Sometimes you make decisions like,
"I was gonna have them do that whole dialogue riding horses."
It was the last night in Prague, it's freezing cold, it was time to go
and I said, "Let's just have you walking. You're looking at the trail.
"It's too hard to follow these horses down for one line of dialogue."
There was even a question of whether that scene would make the movie.
But it did.
Now all that is fake, it's digital,
and now we're on a real set.
For those of you who care, for that sort of thing.
Werewolves are such a nuisance...
And for people keeping track from a financial standpoint
the shot you're about to see is one of the most expensive shots.
So, ENJOY-
That's a great moment right there.
One of the things that you really hope for is that you can make it seem like it's real
and when you see that moment there, with the furry face,
I'm not sure you could imagine how that was done.
Right. When his ribs pop up and his leg bone pops out...
ILM did a terrific job.
There's only the one werewolf shot we really hate.
I think we've only complained about one shot.
And there are 1,200 in the movie.
I'm not sure how many have passed by by this point, but...
Don't wish for death so quickly. I intend for you to be quite useful.
I would rather die than help you.
Don't be boring. Everyone who says that dies.
Besides, tonight,
after the final stroke of midnight,
you will have no choice but to obey me.
The thing about Richard is that while casting Dracula
we went to several actors, and it was funny because they'd read the script,
they'd really love the character and how it was written.
They loved the script and the story.
We got several responses. They would call me up and they'd say
"I love your script, I love the play, but I don't know how to play Dracula."
I'd be terrified. Like my wife said, it's been done a hundred different ways
some good, some not so good. And then, we were casting actresses,
and we met three Australian actresses in a period of about four days.
The first one read the script and said,
"Have you ever thought of Richard Roxburgh for Dracula?"
I said, "I don't know who he is." And she said, "He's great."
Two days later another Australian actress said the same thing.
By the time the third one came and said, "Richard," I said, "Who is this guy?"
So we started looking him up, sent him the script and I flew to Prague
because I thought, "I got to get this guy." He is so fantastic and he is just fearless.
And he did a terrific job.
And that's how we got Richard.
If you get the chance to kill one, do it...
- because they'll do worse to you. - Right.
Apparently Anna can understand Dwergi.
She's translated here and now she's relaying that information to Van Helsing.
I love the fact that she can speak Dwergi. I wish I spoke Dwergi.
Remember this room? See how big this room is?
We are always taking sets and revamping them.
Richard is actually upside down here. He's just on wires here.
He was always game for that sort of thing.
In fact, if you look very closely, the wire is still in the shot.
Yeah, at the bottom of his feet.
Now look at Velkan. Why is he so oiled up?
If you look at that shot, the make-up girls were really into oiling Velkan up.
I'm watching the shot on the monitor and I go, "Why is he so slimy?
"He's covered in oil. What's that all about?"
The make-up people were all giggling.
- You ever see these things before? - No.
What do you think they are?
This line right here,
A man with three gorgeous women for 400 years.
That's when I knew I could write this movie.
I sat around for a long time. The studio had no idea what I was doing.
I told them I wanted to go off and make a small movie.
And then I watched all the original horror classics, just as a lark.
I fell back in love with all the characters and the look and the feel.
It's all so visual and atmospheric. It's just wonderful.
But I thought, "What if I put all three of them,
"Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolf man into the same movie?"
That sounds like a great idea, but if it's just our hero
kills off the three monsters, people will hate me, critics will kill me.
And these movie lovers will kill me, so I didn't think it was possible.
Then one day, I was looking at this poster in my office of Dracula and three brides
and I thought,
"What would a man do with three gorgeous women for 400 years?"
I answered that question and thought, "Maybe I'm going down a dead end
-"because vampires are the undead..." - no pun intended.
"...their children would be born dead.
"The brides would be ragging on Dracula: 'We've got to do something about this.".
And what would he do?
He'd go find the most brilliant, mad scientist surgeon
he could find, Victor Frankenstein, hire him,
bring him over to Transylvania, set him up in a lab,
and Victor Frankenstein would try to find the key to life.
And that's when I knew a plot was born, and I knew
I could come up with a great story with these three characters.
And that's when I started thinking about Van Helsing.
I just loved his character in the original Bela Lugosi movie.
I thought he was really worldly and confident. Loved him.
But I thought my guy had to be younger, cooler, and hipper
with a lot better weapons.
It was that moment when I said,
"What would a man do with three gorgeous women for 400 years?"
Then I figured it out. I sat around for two more months,
scene by scene, plotting it out.
That's when I went to Stacey Snider, the chairman of Universal.
Mary Parent, one of the Presidents was there.
Bob and I went in, and I pitched them the story.
They both had these big smiles. They were really excited.
But Stacey said, "What happened to that small movie you were writing?"
I said, "Forget it, we're doing this."
And here it is.
And here's a great moment.
I just loved the audience's reaction to this.
It's a guaranteed leap.
That's one of the cheapest shots.
We set up a camera over Hugh's shoulder and said, "Reach for it."
It is one of the few places that puppets were used.
Both, that hand and also the creature that pops out there
is a puppet done by Greg Cannom and his group.
Yeah. They did a great job.
Come on!
This shot coming up here is all digital until the end.
The environment is digital, the cocoons, the bat,
everything that you see there is...
And right here, we come into our set.
So I grabbed this piece with Dracula and the brides,
and ILM hooked up the first part.
I always like this moment here, because there's this moment of this creature
bonding with its mother, and it's kind of twisted in a good way.
They need to feed. Teach them how. Teach them!
I tell you, Silvia, Elena, they just love flying.
I never got on wires. I always wanted to go on the wires.
They had so much fun. I love this shot.
These little baby bats presented a fairly big design challenge.
Not so much a design challenge, actually the design of the creature is quite nice
but the decision to have them look to be very light-colored
actually presented a lot of problems for ILM.
Because they just didn't take the light very well
and in some places they appeared to be blue,
and in some places, a little white.
At first it looked like a flock of sea gulls for a while.
And then they kind of started getting it down.
Now that I have your attention...
This is the same dining room that Hugh and Kate were walking through earlier.
We just revamped it into this.
It's something that a good production designer would bring
because the last thing you want to be doing is spending a lot of money on a set that...
The dining room set that that came through, it's a small scene.
And if you can somehow do both scenes with the same set, all the better.
This is my homage to Wizard of Oz shot.
I should probably point out,
there's homages to about 15 movies in this movie.
Again, this is down in Playa Vista in LA.
I wanted to do this as a oner.
I just thought, "Richard, take it away. Have fun."
I can tell the character of a man by the sound of his heartbeat.
Usually when I approach...
This is such a strong performance.
If you didn't know how much you would like Dracula, this is when you went, "Okay."
Strange that yours is so steady.
So I went back to the original, not only movies, but the books,
and I just thought the same with Frankenstein.
People are like, "Frankenstein's a big monster.
"He screams and yells and kills people." But he's so much more.
And so was Dracula.
This was so much fun. I guess this might have been my favorite set.
Just being in Frankenstein's laboratory. Something about it.
It has such a different vibe and color than it does in black and white, too.
Even though we're in this location twice, once in the beginning and again here,
it's really wonderful to see it both those ways.
Now we're back in Prague,
this is the shot...
Greg Michael grabbed this shot. He and the second unit did a lot of this here.
Oh, my God.
This is actually a very complicated shot.
You see those people being lifted up there, they're on wires
and the camera is flying on a wire also.
So there's a lot of coordination between stunts and the camera department.
It's a very complicated shot.
People wonder, "Why do they have a second unit shooting this stuff?"
It's because I can't afford to spend all night long getting one shot.
And that's why you have the second unit come in
and they've got 30 stuntmen on wires and a camera on wires.
They spend nine hours lighting it, setting up and testing it.
Sometimes they'll go all night and get one shot.
The most complicated shots sometimes...
are all storyboarded, pre-visualized, and figured out.
Greg helps me every bit and then I got to send Greg out to do it.
I know all my mythology, I know all the lore, like I said earlier.
We know you can kill vampires with a stake in the heart,
but I'm thinking, "Dracula, he's like the godfather of all vampires.
"He's the king vampire, father vampire.
"You can't just stick a stake in his heart and kill him."
So I like to play with the rules a little bit.
We all know you can't see Dracula's reflection in a mirror.
But nobody has ever asked why. So I asked why.
I guess I have too much time on my hands.
I asked why, and then I come up with an answer.
See this first Dwergi? Watch this.
This is one of our stuntmen and he missed.
He really hurt himself there, if you're wondering.
He was supposed to fall into the pot and he missed.
This is another one of those sequences that we all talk about.
That boring talk about how the actors do their own stunts.
But, in fact, every shot in that sequence, except for one, Kate actually did.
When she leaps on to that rope, that's actually Kate.
It's great to have cast members that are game for doing that
because it allows you that much more latitude
when you're putting the movie together because it's the real person.
You don't have to cut around a stunt person.
Also myself, with the metabolism I have, I have to go, go, go.
And to suddenly stop, de-rig an actor to rig up a stunt person...
with all the padding and all the wireworks...
- And the harnesses. - let's keep going.
She probably won't break her leg.
Yeah, the insurance companies enjoy listening to that.
Trained by monks and mullahs from Tibet to Istanbul.
Protected by Rome herself.
It was funny because both the actors
showed up, and I could tell they were really excited,
the two of them to be playing opposite each other, with each other,
and they were almost nervous.
They were really excited, there was a little bit of tension...
You just have to have this scene.
This moment where these two get to suss each other out.
It is the good guy and the bad guy meet.
And you really need this moment in a movie like this.
When I'm plotting these movies, I'm trying to figure out...
First I have to figure out all the characters, then the story,
the plotting, how it weaves in and out. I just know there's a point where,
"When does the good guy meet the bad guy? What happens there?"
How do you know me?
That was a really fun scene.
The whole crew was just watching two great actors talking.
Sometimes it's just as exciting as all the explosions.
People probably don't believe me on that one. That's the problem.
And why should they?
The problem with me is that, as a writer, I love special effects
and things blowing up, and I love to be as creative and imaginative,
and as interesting as possible.
But as a director, I'd really rather just sit with two actors in a room.
So I'm kind of schizophrenic. Every day on the set, I curse the writer.
I hate the writer. He drives me crazy. Look at this.
Every shot has got to have some complication in it.
So when I'm writing it, people say, "Do you visualize it as a director?" Never.
Even at this stage, I just sit and write
and I'm having so much fun letting my imagination go wild
and when I finish it, I think, "God, I have to direct all this stuff."
That's why every day on the set I curse the writer.
Allow me to reintroduce myself.
I am Count Vladislaus Dragulia.
Born 1422.
I wanted the actors to be free to walk around and,
so we did the scene with a Steadicam. I use a Steadicam rarely.
I use it during chases a lot. It's a really great tool.
But people tend to overuse it. But I thought, "That scene is a dance."
Van Helsing would never let Dracula get too close to him,
and yet Dracula wants to connect with him, remind him of their past history.
So it was fun, because it was myself and two actors walking around
figuring out the beats and the moments. It was fun.
Carl.
These guys were great.
Doesn't work out well for them at all.
This was shot over our set in Prague.
It's actually funny.
In the scene that's gonna come up here, for some reason,
the friar is the only person that gets laid in the movie.
So we were still trying to figure that one out.
There is something wrong with me.
This is on a soundstage in Los Angeles.
We just added all the sky and the mountains.
It's actually a gigantic set,
but again, a gigantic set with a 360-degree blue screen
which allows all those backgrounds to be put in.
Obviously, the mountains are not there on the soundstage.
We had so many sets on this movie.
Some of the biggest sets ever built were built for this movie.
Some of the sets were so big, that's why they call it Sommersizing,
we actually couldn't build them indoors. We rented a huge,
somebody said it's the world's biggest parking lot in Downey.
Though they were supposed to be interior sets
we had to shoot them at night, exterior
because we had to build on these parking lots.
Because they wouldn't fit into any soundstage on this planet.
Now, when I wrote this next bit... I love humor. I'm always going for humor.
I love to scare people, and I love drama and romance and humor.
I never thought this would make the movie. This moment right here.
How can I ever repay you?
I just thought, "I'm pushing it a little bit. Maybe it's a little silly."
I've seen it screened in front of six screenings now
and the audience eats it up. So what can I say?
It's great. The actress who plays the barmaid is a Czech actress.
Her name is Dana Moravkové, and she did a lovely job.
She's someone we found locally and is well-known in the Czech Republic.
- She was terrific. - she did a very charming performance.
It would appear the good doctor took the key to life to his grave.
Hunt them down.
The brides in the background. They're kind of dramatic.
I don't know if you've noticed, but they're a little overwrought at times.
Because they're bigger-than-life characters.
The intention behind all the vampires is that
they live kind of a operatic life.
See that big pinwheel in the background there?
That's why I put it in the ILM shot up front, it's a hint as to where they are.
So we got to this location, I thought, "When we get here
"we won't know it's that windmill that burned down."
That's why I put the pinwheel in the background.
I wanted people to remember...
We could've given the windmill an eyepatch.
- Or a big sign. -"Windmill this way."
This scene was shot at a ranch in Malibu.
- it really is an international movie. - We were everywhere.
Hugh putting the hat on her, I thought of this as I was driving to the set. I thought,
"it's pouring rain, he's wearing a hat, she's getting wet.
"Wouldn't he be a gentleman and give her the hat?"
But I didn't know how it was going to come across.
I remember calling Bob, saying, "What do you think of this?" And he says, "Well
"let him put it on her head and you'll know when you see it."
By the way, that hat? It's a one-of-a-kind.
We could never duplicate that hat, we don't have time to tell the whole story.
So in that scene when it's raining, after every take
people kept grabbing it and they'd use air blowers to dry it off.
They were so afraid of ruining that hat.
This is a little set we built on a soundstage in Prague.
Vampire.
Vampires!
And as Bob said earlier, the only person who gets his due is the friar.
Now I remember.
This used to be real elaborate.
When the script was originally written, they were in bed
and it was a tapestry above them on a canopy.
And Allan Cameron and I talked it out and decided it would be too hard
especially shooting up David's nose
and so we decided to switch it to a secret trapdoor in the wall.
"May become a wolf"
This was great fun, at least for me.
It's what I always hoped for in movies like this
where you've got this sort of mysterious prop
and something that comes to life to help tell the story.
It's very adventurous and a great deal of fun.
David's so good.
He is Mr. Exposition in this movie. He has to deliver so much of it
but I think it's so interesting, what he's saying and how he performs it.
He does such a great job.
Meanwhile... - back in Prague,
back in Barrandov studios... Another Allan Cameron set.
Okay, so I have a question here.
What you're gonna see here is that... We meet Kate here and she gets out...
But her hair's great.
She gets out and then, Hugh shows up.
So where's he been? And he just let her...
I mean, she's just supposedly staying in there.
He didn't go wake her up or something? What's up with that?
Look at the big pile of food that Frankenstein has been eating.
What are those bones?
The head of that shot, no one notices we built this big tent
with all that stuff in the background. No one notices that.
Around 360 pounds.
8.5 to 9 feet tall.
It's actually kind of funny here 'cause in the original production dialogue
he tells her to be quiet.
And then he continues to yap, and make so much noise.
We went back and looped it with a softer performance
so it made a bit more sense.
The Frankenstein monster!
Monster? Who's the monster here?
You spend thousands of hours in methodology meetings
trying to figure every single detail out.
Sometimes, in hindsight, you look and go,
"You didn't need to figure it out." Here's one of my favorites.
That was in the script, and it turned out so well.
Talking of methodology meetings,
see what Frankenstein is wearing? His costume?
We'd discuss where he would get clothes.
He fell down, he didn't have anything on, he burned up
and we decided, "The sails of the windmill."
That's what he's wearing. The sails of the windmill.
That was our logic. Of course, no one will have any idea.
- There's logic in everything. - there is a reason behind it
even if you don't get it.
This is great make-up
by Greg Cannom,
- Yeah, he did great. -...who executed this make-up,
plus Igor and also the brides.
One of the reasons we like Greg is that
in all his work, you can always still see the actor
behind the make-up.
If we were to put Shuler's face up next to Shuler in make-up
you would see that there are a lot of similarities.
Frankenstein looks better. He's a much more handsome man.
That's what I was getting at.
In fact, Shuler walks around with this make-up on a daily basis
because he feels it has improved his love life.
I heard his wife makes him put it on.
Shuler, are you out there? We love Shuler, he's so good.
Five to nine hours in make-up every day he was on the set.
Another thing you'll see when you watch the make-up
is you see how well it moves.
It's important, because you want to see the humanity behind the creature.
It's the reason that you use this technique.
Many techniques were used in making the movie.
We liked combining them, so it's not all CG,
so it's not all blue screen.
You have all kinds of different techniques. Sometimes even within a single shot
you have a real person and a digital person,
and all different kinds of techniques.
It's very complicated to work that way. But hopefully, the results...
Going into this movie, I decided I don't want...
I don't like prosthetics.
Every time I know it's a man in a suit or a man in a mask,
I'm like, "it's a man in a mask." I'm taken out of the movie.
And that's why Greg Cannom's gang did such a good job on Frankenstein.
You're just watching a man, a performance.
It's same with the werewolf. Especially the final werewolf.
I said, "Guys, it can't be a man in a suit
"and it can't be CG." It's got to be real.
My wife said, "I want to run my fingers through his hair
"it looked so real."
We took a huge leap forward between Mummy Returns and this movie.
We're always learning.
Oh, my God. He's seen us.
Now they'll come for him.
Neither you nor I will be able to stop them.
If I can get him to Rome, we can protect him there.
And then the painting came alive
and the two creatures attacked each other.
- What does it mean? - I don't know.
Listen, Carl, whatever you do, don't stare at him.
I'm staring at him.
Is that a man?
This movie gets a lot of great laughs, a lot of great screams.
It's very interactive.
I always like how
Anna shuts the door mid-sentence. She's like, "Enough from you."
She deals with these monsters on a daily basis.
She doesn't have to put up with this.
This is a great moment here to hear Alan Silvestri's main Van Helsing theme
which is very surprising and a wonderful addition to the movie.
Alan said at one point,
"You know, I really find that I can do anything in this film and it sticks."
And he often did, too.
He's got the choir, the electronic instruments,
all kinds of stuff going here.
I think the score is magnificent.
See those horses down there? Those are digital horses.
Real horses there.
We did a lot of this. Lot of everything.
It's like magic.
All the special effects teams and houses
took a huge leap forward.
I've learnt a lot doing The Mummy and The Mummy Returns.
We're getting good at sleight of hand.
The audience doesn't want to know if it's a man in a suit or if it's real.
They just want to be in the movie.
They don't want to be taken out. That's our job, to keep them in the movie.
In this sequence, virtually every camera rig you could imagine was used.
Those point-of-view shots
of the brides, or the coach, like this one here.
These are photographed with a small remote-controlled helicopter
that has a 35-mm camera on it, which is interesting.
The camera that's on cables is also used
when Hugh gets picked up off the coach, here.
You're going to see that device in use.
So pretty much anything you could do is in here.
Watch this next shot.
It's really funny when using those helicopter shots
the man guiding them would be in the shot and we had to paint him out.
Watch this shot. This is very complex.
Hugh is in this shot, including the cameras and horses.
Now, to have all this work
and the horses to come back into the shot, that's a oner.
There was no editing in that.
There was a lot of special effects in the background, but...
When they were preparing to do that shot, I thought,
"We'll have to find another way of doing this
"because we're never going to get that shot."
This is digital Hugh. That's not really Hugh Jackman.
There's Hugh.
Not Hugh.
Hugh.
If you're wondering how it's made, that's how we do it.
This is also a great sequence to listen to for the sound.
There's just amazing work here
by Per and Karen, the sound-effects editors,
and our mixing team, Leslie, Dave, and Dennis. Tremendous work in here.
Storytelling.
We worked with a lot of the same people for a long time.
Even the new people in this movie did great.
They're absolutely terrific.
This sort of sequence is very difficult to accomplish on every level.
Every single shot.
Planning, all the figuring out that has to happen.
How do you shoot this?
All the visual effects, the cutting, the mixing, the music.
This is one of the better sequences in the movie.
There's a great story-telling lie here, obviously, which is a great deal of fun.
Because when you see that carriage go over
we know that Frankenstein and Carl are in there.
It turns out that they're not. They're in another coach,
and poor Verona is duped into her death.
- Good riddance to one more bride. - these are real horses.
But there was a guy driving them.
We painted him out.
The stuntman jumps off the coach, but then that's Hugh.
It's funny. Hugh has a good story about that.
During this sequence
the stunt guys were putting him between the horses under the wheel there
and Hugh did that.
He was underneath the coach, with his legs spread,
and the wheel right between them, and they raced him down the road.
And when they stopped, the stuntmen hugged and cheered, saying
"We've never seen an actor do something like this!" That's Hugh Jackman there.
After they did this shot, they said,
"That was fantastic! We've never seen an actor do anything like this."
And Hugh was like, "What?"
"Why have you never seen anyone do this before?"
"Well, because it's wildly dangerous."
I think Hugh thought,
"Maybe I should be reevaluating some of the stunts I'm doing in the movie."
Those are digital. The whole shot is, in fact, digital.
When I say "digital," what happens is we scan these actors into a computer.
See those horses? That's digital. Those aren't real horses.
That's not a real carriage. Nothing in this shot is real.
We scan all this into a computer so that it is absolutely,
dimensionally, in every way possible, as real as we can get it.
Things like the fire are added into these shots
as you couldn't safely put fire in that close to the actor.
- That's added in postproduction. - that was where they balked.
Actually, Hugh caught Shuler on fire a few times
and he said, "I really can't do it again."
So we settled on the visual effects.
The funny thing about the Dwergi earlier on...
They're supposed to be in all these rain sequences.
So Gabriella made their costumes
with this thick coating of something on them to make them waterproof.
Then, when they end up in Frankenstein's laboratory
with all those raining sparks... They were always catching on fire.
Every day, half a dozen Dwergi would catch on fire.
It's one of the things we learnt about Dwergi while shooting the movie.
- They spontaneously combusted. - they are quite flammable.
I'm going to write a little handbook on Dwergi.
I could make some money off that.
As a sort of nod to the reality of setting Dwergi on fire
in the last sequence of the movie, you see a lot of Dwergi in the movie on fire.
At that point, we were doing it on purpose.
We found out that it was obviously very easy.
You just ignite their costume, and off they go.
You only have to pay them when they know they'll be set on fire.
Then they negotiate with you.
If you don't tell them that, you say, "Sorry, we didn't mean to do that."
I wonder if at any point, this Dwergi-on-fire story was interesting.
This scene was shot in Griffith Park, Los Angeles.
Which is usually something reserved for a Roger Carmen-budget movie,
but for some reason, not that there is anything wrong with that,
but for whatever reason,
we were supposed to shoot this sequence in Prague.
The scheduling got messed up and we ended up...
And then to find something that was reasonably appropriate... But it worked out.
Elena's crouched down below this tree, and she popped up,
just timing there.
- No special effects there. - she really lays into her there.
I think they liked each other, though. The actresses.
So, running through Griffith Park
and we find ourselves in Budapest.
Who would admit, on a movie of this size, that you shot in Griffith Park?
I think that's impressive.
We love to point out our mistakes, how lame we can be,
as long as it all comes together.
These are some beautiful paintings by Syd Dutton.
The St. Charles Bridge in Prague.
We got called when they were looping the movie in Hungarian
and in several other East European languages.
She says it's Prague. They asked me, "Couldn't you say..."
It was supposed to be in Budapest.
In many languages she'll say Prague 'cause they say, "Everyone knows that bridge."
She can't say it's in Budapest. Everybody will laugh.
The master commands a trade.
The monster...
This day was freezing cold. Absolutely freezing.
Elena is in bare feet.
She was kind of hanging out all over the place, and she was frozen.
She kept saying, "The fingers on my feet are so cold."
But she was such a trouper.
Because I think it was 20 below here?
And look at what she's wearing.
It was so outrageously cold, you cannot imagine it, and there she is doing this.
Do we notice she's in bare feet? Elena hasn't come to me.
Now that she's seen the movie, and she's very happy, she never asked me,
"Why are my feet freezing in that scene? Why was I in bare feet?
"You don't even see my feet.
"Dumb director."
He has been bitten.
Bitten by a werewolf.
Now you will become that which you have hunted so passionately.
Here is where, for a moment, Frankenstein thinks he's being betrayed
by Van Helsing.
Maybe the audience thinks Van Helsing will betray him.
At this point, you know Van Helsing so well, he's got something up his sleeve.
But Frankenstein makes a good point. That's what is so beautiful about this.
"You're a monster now.
"You're going to see what it's like to be like me."
The symmetry law.
This scene had no dialogue in it.
I made this up the night before.
I realized I had this one big shot I wanted to do
and there was a lot of exposition to happen in the next scene.
I thought, "The next scene I've got ballroom stuff.
"I don't want David yapping there."
So I added those lines where he's talking about his hat.
This must be some sort of sin,
how many commandments can we break in one day.
I just added that the night before.
And we decided to put all the dialogue here. This is a cemetery.
I can't believe they let us shoot in a cemetery.
Not without some help from the dead.
This was a fun afternoon.
Two actors, a camera, and a cemetery. What more do you want?
This sequence is probably
one of the most complicated sequences in the entire movie
because there had to be so much coordination
between every single department in the movie,
between the hundreds of costumes that Gabriella had to make.
We photographed this in a church in Czech Republic in Prague.
There were lot of restrictions on what we could do in here.
We couldn't actually have that flamethrower there.
That had to be added in postproduction.
All the wires, the trapezes are very important part of the sequence
and yet we weren't able to rig the church
because we weren't allowed to do any rigging of any kind.
So it complicated things for everyone.
All the trapeze artists and high-wire walkers were added in post.
We shot them all in LA and added them in post.
In the script, I thought, "if Dracula threw a ball
"what would it look like?" A veritable Cirque du Soleil.
And it was Bob who said,
"It isn't a veritable Cirque du Soleil. It is Cirque du Soleil. "
So we got Debra Brown who choreographed.
She's done a bunch of their shows.
O and Mystére...
All kinds of Cirque du Soleil work.
She was a fantastic asset to the production and to the sequence in particular.
How does it feel to be a puppet on my string?
We had 400 of the greatest ballroom dancers in Europe
who happened to be based in Prague, so we got them
which made my life so easy.
It was up to Debra just to get these two actors to dance.
They did a pretty good job.
This is the second time that Steve's had a ballroom sequence in his films.
The last time there was a sequence like this in one of his films was Jungle Book.
Doing this in India made it very difficult,
so the dancing was very bad, to say the least.
There were extras off the street.
It's very hard to manage. It was a real problem.
We really lucked out here, because we were able to avoid that problem.
We actually had real ballroom dancers here to work to Debra's choreography.
Carl, I need you to do something.
I'm not gonna like this, am I?
Don't we make a lovely couple?
That was a really good move of Richard's.
Richard and Kate, every once in a while we had to stop
because they couldn't stop laughing,
because they were so appalled by each other's...
There's a shot earlier, where Kate's literally trying to lead.
You've heard us mention how cold it was in Prague.
The coldest I've ever been in my life was in this church.
Later on, Richard walks up in a close-up. And you can see his breath.
We thought a vampire shouldn't have breath. We had to paint his breath out.
It was 20 degrees outside.
Minus 10 inside, because it was a freezing, damp,
- concrete building. - it was like you were in a freezer.
The problem was we couldn't have heaters inside
because there were frescoes in the church
and they were very concerned about damage
which we understood, but it made shooting very difficult
especially for the actors.
Because if you were to jump behind the camera
you would see everybody in parkas and polar gear,
and there's Kate in that dress.
All the extras were such troupers.
Every time I called, "Cut,"
people behind the scenes would come running out
with 450 parkas and hats and gloves.
It was so cold. Yet you look at this and go,
"How can that be? It looks really nice and warm."
Gabriel.
Here's one of these questions you have to ask
in movies like this.
Of all the plans Van Helsing could have had to rescue Anna,
was that a good plan?
If you stop to think of all the things that could have gone wrong.
That's my daughter there.
-...It would have been disastrous. - samantha June and her cousin Abby.
What if they would've stepped 10 feet to the left or 4 feet to the right?
Van Helsing would have swooped down and missed her.
Exactly. What if Carl didn't catch him on fire in time?
What if Van Helsing couldn't make the exchange
from one trapeze to another? It would have been embarrassing.
I think that there was a better plan.
I don't think that he thought it through.
But it was really cool.
At the end of the day, it was really cool and cinematic.
It was really fun shooting. To have this many extras...
Again, my daughter and my niece up in the top left. ..
Were you paying attention to Dracula? You were drawn to them.
I was drawn completely to them.
Poor little girls. It was freezing cold here.
They were in make-up, hair, and wardrobe
just because they wanted to do it for 10 hours.
There's Bob's wife, right in the middle, dead center.
That's Bob's wife.
See, it was Old Home Week. It was Family Day on the set of Van Helsing.
She doesn't normally look like a vampire.
Now I know what it's for.
- Where are we going? - Through that window!
That's a fun effect.
This next shot, this wide shot, this was added very late.
Two weeks before the movie came out.
Not very long ago at all, because Steve felt
the way it was designed, you didn't have this big shot
and it felt a little anticlimactic.
This was really fun.
We shot this whole water sequence in less than two days.
We had to get to our next set, get out of town.
Just one of those things. No matter how big the movie is, you got to keep moving.
It was fun, playing in the water...
It's raining, there's water, there's Frankenstein, Dwergi.
It was one of those really fun sets.
It's actually a really big set in a very small soundstage.
There is no room.
Every wall in there is pushed up against the stage wall.
I'll find you! I'll get you back and set you free!
Right at the end of this next shot, the boat actually hits the blue screen.
Right about there, it's hitting the blue screen.
That's how tight we were.
- I must save him. - No, you can't.
Why?
I cabled Rome earlier to apprise them of our situation.
What did they say?
Kate's kept ballooning up. The air would fill out her costume.
You can actually see that in the wide shot where they're starting to swim.
In the first take, I said,
"Soon as Van Helsing's swimming, you guys start swimming, too."
No matter how good a swimmer Kate is, she couldn't move more than 6 inches.
Did they tell you how to kill me?
The correct angle of the stake as it enters my heart?
The exact measure of silver in each bullet?
- Stop! - No, I left you out!
I remember writing this.
How important was that? When I came up with the idea
that Van Helsing gets bitten,
I knew that it would be a great twist for an audience.
No one is expecting Van Helsing to get bitten
and he's going to turn into a werewolf.
"God, then what's going to happen?"
It's a matter of keeping the twists and turns,
having everything somehow come together at the end.
It's starting.
Thank God for waterproof make-up.
This is a late entry in the script. Suddenly we realized,
"We have to make sure everyone knows they took
"the lab from here to Castle Dracula." So we added this scene.
This is actually added during photography.
I always wondered what the studio thinks
when I see something like this roll in.
"What's this? I don't remember this being in the movie."
That's why we read the script repeatedly and be as meticulous as we can.
As big goofballs as we are, we're very meticulous because we hate story holes.
...the son of Valerious the Elder.
The son of your ancestor.
Everybody knows that.
Watch this scene. It's one take.
I had a shot list, about 17 shots.
I said, "I'll get inserts of everything he's talking about."
Then I thought, "I have these three great actors
"who will do a brilliant job, they won't miss a beat,
"they won't have a bad pause,
"I've got a great cinematographer,
"a great camera operator, let's just choreograph this."
And we spent a couple of hours rehearsing and playing around, and...
it's really hilarious to watch a scene like this being photographed.
Because all the crosses the actors have to do...
They're trying not to trip over...
There, he's got to step over the dolly track...
There are so many people in this room right now,
the production mixer, the boom operator, all these various people,
it looks so ridiculous
watching it being photographed.
It's amazing that it looks the way it does when it's actually on film.
sending him through a door from which there was no return.
- And then the Devil gave him wings. - Yes.
So where is this door?
You have to make sure the actors are always facing camera.
It was a real dance. You get three great actors, a great camera operator,
myself, and all of us sit around and dance for an hour or two, rehearsing.
And you get this. it's mainly so Bob doesn't have anything to do editorially.
I know. I wish the whole movie was photographed like this.
It would make my job so much easier.
You said your father spent hours
staring at this painting, trying to find the lair.
I think you were right. Quite literally.
This is a great scene. Sort of like that painting turning around.
This is the stuff of adventure. There's a map.
The map is going to turn into something.
It's going to be a portal into another world.
That's what these movies are all about.
Transporting people to some place that they can't normally go.
- Your father didn't have this. - Where did you get that?
When I was making The Mummy movies...
I watch all the movies and do a lot of research because I love this stuff.
I'm always reading books. Every book I get my hands on...
With the Mummys, I read about scarabs.
Some people thought they were flesh-eating.
I thought, "That's a cool thing. I have to remember that."
With this, I thought Dracula doesn't have a reflection in the mirror
so Hugh has to ask why.
And David says, "Maybe to Dracula, it's not a mirror."
And here we go. We have a portal.
Dracula has no reflection in the mirror.
While thinking about the script, I got to this point,
"We're heading into the third act. We want to go. We can't say,
"'Our heroes have to go on another trekking montage.".
Get the map out, they've got to get on a horse,
a train, and a steamboat.
I thought there's got to be a way, some sort of a porthole,
but it has to fit into the mythology. That's how I came up with the mirror thing.
These are very nice visual effects. Very organic.
It's cold. And it's snowing.
This was a complicated scene to shoot
because it's a mirror. Who'd have put a mirror in? That's always a problem.
Be careful.
We shot part of this in Prague and part of this in soundstages in LA.
There's a location in Prague, a soundstage in Prague
and I think a pick-up here in Los Angeles.
The other side of the mirror was what we photographed in LA.
So three different places.
It's just the way of scheduling and the mechanical effects,
special effects, all have to work together.
If you notice, this is just on a soundstage
but it's snowing, so we wanted to make sure it looked cold, so...
Watch Kate's mouth.
See that breath? That's digital breath.
We're persnickety about this stuff.
Even if you don't notice it, it will feel more real.
If you actually see the real element that this visual effect came from,
it's pretty ridiculous. There's an actual mirror there.
The actors are standing in front of the mirror...
And you're seeing me and the whole camera crew.
You see these guys in shorts moving a camera.
It takes some of the magic out of the scene.
For the longest time
that's how you watch the movie.
You see the whole camera crew right there, and it drives you... For month after month.
This is a great... I really don't want to call it a matte painting.
A great visual effect by Syd Dutton.
The only element in the shot that's real, not surprisingly
is the shot of the three actors as they walk forward.
We're going to go stop Dracula.
This is in Downey, a lot of stuff coming up.
All the exteriors, the bridge coming up, all the stuff.
The sets were too big to build on a soundstage.
That moment there, and this moment here were rather problematic for Steve.
He was always concerned that
even in the realm of this movie, the fact that he's a werewolf,
that seemed to really push things.
I think that if you could have changed that in the end, you probably would.
It kind of worked out.
Another great shot. I just love that.
This is a parking lot in Downey, California.
And Syd Dutton came and added a few things.
This again... This set was so big...
It's an interior. So you think you shoot during the day, on an interior set,
but it was so big, these were all nighttime shoots in a parking lot.
- Please don't kill me! - Why not?
It's funny because Kevin gets so into his character.
I was halfway through writing the script, and I called up Kevin,
"I have this idea, Igor is in it. You want to play lgor?"
"I got to play lgor." "Right, you're the guy.
"Start thinking about it." Even before I'd finished the script...
When I'm writing, I never think about what actor can play what part.
'Cause I don't know if they're free, if they want it, if we can afford them.
There is one exception, and that is Kevin J.
So halfway through the script, I said, "Kevin...
"you're Igor, start thinking about it." His walk...
Right down to the way he walks, limps, the way he turns his head,
he did just such a great job.
- There is a cure. - What?
Dracula. He has a cure to remove the curse of the werewolf!
In the book, he ends up in the Arctic, Frankenstein.
I thought, "I wanna put a lot of ice in for Frankenstein."
I hope people think he's encased in ice. That's the idea.
Also, Dracula's castle is a bit of an ice castle.
It's not made of out ice but it's in a frozen, cold place.
So, it just fits.
Vampires don't feel cold.
Why does Dracula have a cure?
- I don't care! - I do.
Why does he need one? Why?
See the thing in lgor's hand?
We gave it to Igor because it's got to be something he can have.
Hugh can't have too many weapons in his sleeve.
It'll get ridiculous, so we gave Igor that thing.
Hugh grabs it away from him.
What do you think Igor was planning on using it for?
- Clipping wires. It was wire clippers. - yeah.
Everything makes sense, even if you don't think it does.
I thought maybe he smokes cigars.
Yes, I am.
Here's the plan. When the bell begins to toll midnight
you'll be able to kill Dracula.
We just need to find the cure
and get it into you before the final stroke.
Are you insane? What kind of plan is that?
If they even suspect you of misleading them...
This little throwaway gets a big laugh.
Look at the way Kate puts her leg up, she knows how to work it.
Look at her posture there.
Would I lie to you?
This is really fun. For me, as a director, this is fun, having the four actors on stage.
Just coming up with the coverage, choreography, it's really fun.
- I don't think I could. - You must.
It was fun, because once Kate got over the initial week of bad hair
then it was all great.
David's hair... Friars back then always had these bad bowl cuts
with the bald thing on the top,
and Gabriella Pescucci, the costume designer, insisted that David do this.
David was like... As game,
and as sweet as David is, he's like,
"I am not going to shave the middle of my head bald.
"I want..."
And he was right in the end, 'cause it's really cute. it makes him really cute.
Even as Gabriella was pushing that, I thought, "Those hair-cuts look..."
Let's get back to the kiss here.
Both Kate's fiancé and Hugh's wife
came up to me after this, and they were so...
Usually when there's a kissing scene, the director milks it all day,
they do a hundred different takes.
We popped this off in an hour and a half.
They were passionate and polite.
Every time I've seen this now, the audience cheers.
I think it's one of those things you can't really plan.
You can only hope that there's chemistry between your two leads
and we got it in such a great way here because
the romance in the movie is not given an enormous amount of time
and yet, it's an essential part of the film.
So it really needs to come from the actors.
They really pull it off. The audience is really glad
that they get together in that moment.
I find that shot where she runs off to be kind of a sad shot
because I always imagine that's the last time he'll ever see her.
I think you get that feeling from that shot.
There's a sadness to it, no matter what.
And now you must give that life to my children.
Up!
These shots were fun. Again, the laboratory stuff.
This is Syd Dutton, and this is ILM.
This is a very...
This is me, actually,
- and then right now, it becomes ILM. - Very large model.
It's funny, because whenever people say,
"We're using miniatures," I always think,
"This miniature you'd think is 6 or 12 inches tall. It's 15 feet tall."
It's absolutely gigantic. It took up a better part of the soundstage.
It's another thing we really like to do as much as we can.
We've had some bad luck in the past when environments were all digital
and if you use parts of real sets or models and enhance them
with digital paintings, you get a much better result.
Just matte paintings alone usually don't cut it anymore.
Audiences can feel it's a painting.
You have to enhance it with everything you can.
Put people in, clouds, water, atmosphere, miniatures, models.
There's our little set.
I like this next prop coming up. I thought this is a really cool...
I vaguely described it in the set
and I knew it had to be encased in a jar because of what happens later.
I'll go first.
This is a good example of what I was talking about earlier
where the combination of warm and cool light...
It's just a very adventurous palette
and something that works very well for the movie.
Allen Daviau really mixed it up a lot in the film.
There's a lot of different photographic looks.
Carl!
Stay as long as you like.
You try to get Igor.
Kevin just threw those lines out. Improvved it.
Igor's so proud of himself there.
"You try to get Igor. Igor get you!"
There was so much electricity added to shots in this movie
it's all over the place. Electricity plays such a vital role.
Lightning and electricity is a big theme.
This is a pretty successful digital double here.
Here I thought there's going to be some point
where we see what Dwergi really looked like. There you go.
We don't get to look at him for very long, do we?
He gets dispatched pretty quickly by Van Helsing.
He took Anna's advice.
- Go ahead. Grab it. - You go ahead and grab it.
If there's one thing I've learned
it's never to be the first to stick your hand in a viscous material.
It's funny. One of the guys, Joe Grossberg, came up with the idea of the mouth.
I just thought she was going to drop down and scare the kids.
One of the guys in our department came up with,
"What if we put the mouth in?" I thought, "Great!
"Now we know where the vampire babies get their mouths."
...get their beautiful mouths from. Look, it's from Mom.
Viscous material! What did I tell you?
Get it!
This was funny. I can't remember how they escaped from this room.
But Bob said in one of the drafts, "it's too easy."
That's how we came up with the acid.
It's like she knocks it over and acid burns Aleera's face.
Instead of them breaking out of the room, why doesn't she use the acid?
You can't go until I say you can go!
- That was a fun shot. - yeah, really good.
Things just weren't working out for Aleera here.
Kate's stunt double.
As much as Kate did, she had to land on the floor.
There's no pads. We threw her over things a lot and she just has to land.
She took a beating, Karin did.
She did an amazing job.
As much as Kate did, sometimes, you just would not...
That's the problem. Kate did so much stuff that,
eventually, we had to use Karin, her stunt double, and it'd be like,
"Karin, we're really going to hurt you. We're really sorry."
Earlier, when the three stunt people jumped out that plate glass window
back at the ballroom sequence...
They jumped out, and I came around to thank them for what I considered
a small stunt
and it's one thing seeing two stuntmen cut up and bleeding,
it's another seeing a stuntvvoman cut up and bleeding.
People think it's candy glass. What I learned that night
is you only jump through candy glass if it's 4 feet by 4 feet.
A window that big actually has to be tempered glass.
So those three stunt people are leaping through
your windshield. A giant windshield.
It turns into these little shards. When they jump through, they land
and they don't move. They can't move, because there are so many tiny bits of glass.
Karin must have had 30-40 little...
It's like somebody took a razorblade and... Oh, God.
I didn't know until that moment. I thought they were jumping through candy glass.
- And we think our jobs are hard. - that was unpleasant.
But that's what they do. They knew going in.
The next day, I'm walking down a Prague street,
I see Karin walking down the street with her boyfriend.
I was like, "Should I cross the street? Is he going to kick my ass?"
But he's a stunt guy, too. He's okay.
This is all fun stuff.
Here's a lot of storytelling without dialogue.
With all these shots, you understood what was going on.
In fact, if you think about it
this whole section of the third act
has virtually no dialogue in it, whatsoever.
One more bolt...
- There's your flaming Dwergi right there. - one more to come.
Hopefully, that one was lit on fire intentionally.
Look at the blend they did here.
They did such a good job going from human to monster.
There's a better one coming up.
You're almost out, my friend!
Stuff like this is really hard to shoot
because the actors are being rained on all the time.
The effects make-up is always more trouble in the rain.
Flaming Dwergi. That's a real guy.
Any time you see rain in a movie
know that the filmmakers went through a lot more trouble
to have to deal with that. No one's happy about...
It's one thing to run out in the rain if you have to get to your car
and you get a little wet, but...
Unfortunately, when you have these rain sequences...
the whole last part of the movie is done in the rain...
it means that for weeks and weeks, everyone is soaking wet.
When you're Frankenstein, and you're lying on a table,
and it's pouring on your face, and every time you open your eyes...
This particular shot was pre-visualized way before we even shot the movie.
We just did... Rpin and his gang
did these shots because we couldn't storyboard them.
They were so complicated, no one would understand if we just drew them out.
So what we did was pre-visualization. It was just animating the shots.
So people could see it in 3-d.
Some of this is all digital, up in Marin County.
Some of it was shot in a parking lot in Downey, some on soundstages.
It's like playing 3-dimensional chess 16 hours a day, six, seven days a week,
for two straight years.
It's nice with all the swinging in the movie. Frankenstein does it,
Anna does it, Van Helsing does it.
I think we'll probably find out
there's some circus family in their common past
that put them on wires, day after day.
They are actually quite good, quite acrobatic.
This was a fun little effect we just came up with in post.
She should have vampire vision. She could see veins and a heart and...
I thought this was a really good moment.
A company called Zoic did that shot.
This was a pain-in-the-butt shot.
The other two actresses were flying about, and trying to time that shot was a pain.
It kind of works out.
There's a big blue screen behind both these actors.
We built the bridge.
This is a very nice moment between Carl and Frankenstein.
Frankenstein making his case...
when Carl knows what he's supposed to do for the Order and the Vatican.
Maybe that's the scene everyone hated so much they streamed out of the theater.
That's a possibility, but from my standpoint, it's a very nice scene.
I don't want to make any assumptions about anyone who's watching this...
what they think of anything.
If they're watching the disk, they must have liked the movie.
Or they thought, "I have to buy the DVD to see what these guys were thinking...
"when they set out to make this movie."
This is a stuntman. Watch the Frankenstein stuntman.
He's out cold there. He missed the mat and his head hit.
Here we have more Dwergi on fire, which is always a great deal of fun.
Tired of talking about the Dwergi on fire yet?
You're going to see a fire extinguisher blast come in at the bottom of the screen
because obviously those actors need to be extinguished as quickly as possible.
Even though we're joking about this,
there's real danger in that any time you have fire involved.
We had R.A. Randell and a world-class stunt crew.
They were so safe, these sets. They were always in good hands.
That's why I think they can push it so much.
So be it.
Dracula has some type of time fetish, apparently,
because right out his window is the most gigantic clock
you've ever seen in your life.
And you'd think a guy who's been around for 400 years, who can't die,
would not give a crap about time.
Maybe it was one of the previous tenants', and he hasn't had a chance to get it out.
We're very happy with the way the Van Helsing werewolf turned out.
He was the third werewolf of the trilogy of werewolves.
He was the last one to come on line and so a lot of things
that were learned from doing the other werewolves were applied here.
And I think, really successfully.
When you watch this, you know it's a visual effect. What else could it be?
We didn't really use a real werewolf.
One of these is a visual effect, the other one I raised from birth.
I won't tell you which one.
But at the same time, as a visual effect, I think that it's extremely successful.
You have beautiful work with the hair
and it's got real emotion. It's great work by ILM.
Every one of those shots is a real pain, because I wanted it to be so interactive.
So when they're moving, touching things, slamming each other around,
things needed to explode and break and the bridge needed to collapse.
Go!
This was a really fun scene.
We called it The Beauty and the Beast scene.
Because, you know, look at this shot, right there.
She's looking so beautiful there, and he's this beast in the background.
This is a really great moment. Audiences seem to just love this.
Two great actors. What more do you want as a director?
We had lots of combinations of techniques. This is a matte painting.
That's a real set.
That's a real set but with enhancements in the background.
This is digital. That's a digital Carl running around there.
And that's a digital Carl.
You know what we should do? We should go through it and lie.
- See that? - that's a digital actress right there.
That is not Kate Beckinsale.
That actually is Kate, who went out the window there.
This is Kate, actually on wires.
Obviously she's against a blue screen, and there's all kinds of safety involved
but she is actually doing most of what you see here. That's Kate on a wire.
The only time we don't use safety is on the actor's last day.
- Then it doesn't matter. - exactly.
Because your chances of having some problem are greatly reduced.
That's got to hurt.
Those are strong fingers.
You are being used, Gabriel, as was I.
But I escaped. So can you.
All of this, every shot,
because these shots are so complicated, difficult, and expensive,
everything had to be figured out in detail.
I had to sit there. We'd shoot this and I had to imagine every move.
I just had to sit there, staring at a blank.
Nothing's happening, just the camera's moving around.
I had a storyboard in my head and a world-class crew and people helping me.
Dracula just got it like a bug.
- That was a bug-zapper shot. - i love when he gets zapped there.
There's no dignity sometimes. He got zapped by his own lab equipment.
That was a great shot.
This scene, I was always excited to get it in front of the real audience
because by this point of the movie, you've really had it with Aleera.
She has to go. I always hoped that the audience would react well.
Thankfully, they did. They are really pleased
that Aleera finally gets her comeuppance.
It was just wonderful.
All the actors were game. They were so into it.
They just brought so much to it and took it seriously.
I had so much fun making this movie.
It would be so much more interesting if it was really awful making the film.
- No. - it would, it really would.
It was awful, but in a really wonderful way.
- Exactly. - the people were all great.
It's a lot of hard work, but we just had a great time making the film.
Not that anyone listening to this really cares about that at all
- but it really is true. - look at that.
ILM outdid themselves on this stuff.
One of the interesting inventions of this scene
is the fact that the characters switch back and forth.
- It was key for me. - the reason for it isn't the transformations
because the transformations are handled really quickly.
- We're not interested in them in this scene. - at this point.
Yeah, but rather the fact these two actors,
these two characters get to face-off as themselves
and not as CG creations.
So I think it was a very effective tool. It worked out really well.
That's why I came up with the invention of the moon. I tried to establish it up front.
When the moon's covered, he turns into human.
When it's revealed, he goes back into becoming a werewolf.
When I'm plotting out the movie, I know I don't want to get to the third act
and have Hugh Jackman and Richard Roxburgh as CG characters.
I got to figure how to get them in and out, 'cause you want moments like this.
And then the moments of the CG guys. It's a good blend.
So Dracula is missing his finger there in that shot.
And in the subsequent couple of shots, if you're interested...
- When you watch the movie again... - notice that's the only time that happens.
We didn't want to spend money getting rid of his finger in those previous...
When you're watching the movie the first time
you're not watching it with that in mind. You don't think in reverse that way.
But that is a continuity mistake, if you will.
But we knew going, who wants to spend money and time
getting rid of something that no one's ever gonna notice?
This whole scene right here, for me, it's a cover of a romance novel.
I looked at this and said it has to be so romantic. Look.
We know what's about to happen here.
But the design of the window, the clouds, the moon
and the fact that, like, "What is a red velvet couch doing in this laboratory?"
I knew it had to be a red velvet couch.
You got to check that couch out. I really want to meet Dracula's interior designer.
Apparently, it looks like it's made out of some spine or something.
I just love the reactions of audiences. Audiences cheered.
They were cheering during that, and suddenly it gets real quiet.
The ending to this movie was first draft.
I thought this was the perfect ending to this movie.
You know, Van Helsing accomplishes his mission.
Princess Anna accomplishes her mission. She saves her family
and now she's going to go. She said earlier she would see them again.
See this shot. Look at that, the candles, the moon, the werewolf,
the beautiful woman, the velvet couch. This is all off the cover of a romance novel.
It's the only ending the movie could have had.
It worked out so great.
That shot there where Hugh transforms originally,
take a look at this when you watch the shot again.
He was naked and we added digital pants on to him.
Not for ratings reason, but we found when we were showing the movie to people
the audience would be where we wanted them to be,
- feeling bad about Anna having died. - they were so with us emotionally.
- This is the very first screening. - yeah.
We were watching it. Bob and I had the same feeling at the same time.
As the werewolf's turning back into Van Helsing, I'm thinking,
I could feel the audience, they were with us emotionally.
I thought, "My God, we were both right and felt the same thing."
Suddenly every woman in the audience went, "There's Hugh Jackman's ass!"
And half the men in the audience or all the men went:
"I don't wanna see no man-ass."
I could just feel it before we even saw it.
And so, the next screening, we just kind of painted it out.
It had nothing to do with ratings, it would have still been PG-13.
It was all about keeping the audience emotionally where we wanted them.
But in the director's cut...
We ought to put it like a screensaver. Sell a screensaver,
"You wanna see Hugh Jackman's..." Don't worry, Hugh.
Part of this is shot in a soundstage, and a part of it in a parking lot.
And part of this is shot out at Palos Verdes, California.
This is a real location. Everything in this direction is real location.
- That's real water. The sky's been changed. - we always replace skies.
The sky's been changed, but everything else you see there is in Southern California.
This is a very tricky scene, probably the hardest
from a visual effects standpoint. Weta Digital did these shots.
The trick is you want to tell the story, you want to understand,
have some idea what's going on
but at the same time, you want it to be as vague as it possibly can.
It's the only time I ever used the word "subtle."
No one's ever heard me use the word "subtle." And this one, it had to be subtle.
And we were very worried, taking this into the first preview,
whether this would be accepted or not.
You always have the possibility that people will respond very badly.
Thankfully, that wasn't the case.
We learned a few things about the sequence and made adjustments.
We found that people...
You never know, people might look at this, "it's such a downer ending."
Actually, it's the only ending. It was the perfect ending.
We have seen it now with a lot of audiences.
It was a worry and a risk.
It sucks that Anna dies because Anna's a great character.
And it would be great if she could be kept around.
She's heroic and has accomplished everything she wanted to.
From the story's standpoint, it's the only ending you could imagine.
Let's be honest. Were Van Helsing and Anna gonna settle down
and buy a little house?
They're both adventurers.
I keep hoping that Eve from The Mummy will show up with a book.
- And bring her back. - she'll say a chant and she'll be fine.
Every time I watch it, it never happens.
This was shot out in Piru, California, for those of you still with us
after two hours and two minutes.
And I have one question for you, why would you be? That's the big question.
Anyway, thank you very much for watching the movie,
buying the DVD.
Thank you from Stephen Sommers and Bob Ducsay.
We'll see you next time. Thank you.