'Bram Stoker's Dracula', Editor, Glen Scantlebury

0:00Jawad MirAnd I can't wait to see your next film, which, obviously Francis directed and, you know, this is…

0:06Glen ScantleburyIt's, it's a... I kind of began my career with Francis and now I'm at the sort of the other end of my career with Francis. It's amazing. I would have never thought when I was working on Godfather III and he was in his sort of mid-50s that, you know, you know, later... That was like 1989, '90.

0:26Jawad MirYeah.

0:26Glen ScantleburyYou know, here it is, 34 years later, and I've had a whole career, a lot based on, you know, the help that he gave me, not only just the status of having worked on those films, but just the knowledge he gave, because he's very much a teacher in the sense when you're in with him, he's very... He wants to tell you know, everything so you get it, so you can help him make the film. So, he was just the greatest teacher. And he's always got great stories and great insight to cinema, of everybody's work. Always very appreciative of everybody's work. He is the consummate director who even when someone might be saying something against him, he'll not say anything about that other person.

1:22Jawad MirGood to have you. It's funny, you mentioned, this morning that you just saw, you just finished re-watching Bram Stoker's Dracula.

1:29Glen ScantleburyYeah. I hadn't seen it for 12 years. I went to a screening at the Academy in 2012, which I guess was the 20-year anniversary of the making of the film, premiering of the film, and they struck a new print off the interpositive and, internegative, and it looked really great to see it in a big theater like that. The Academy has one of the great theaters in Los Angeles, and it…

1:54Jawad MirRight

1:54Glen Scantlebury... Just projected beautifully. It was really fun to see it.

1:58Jawad MirYeah. It, I remember watching it when it came out, and I literally just re-watched it myself, so when I got your email, I was wrapping it up. And it was just such a great, refreshing thing to... A movie to see because I had forgotten a lot of things about it. And when I first saw it, I wasn't in the film business. And then after a long time when I see it, like just looking at it, not from a story aspect, but just everything else, a great film. Very centered characters. Really well done.

2:33Glen ScantleburyYeah. I am, again, was really impressed to watch it myself because, you know, as an editor…... You kinda remember your first cut and then you remember how you start to collapse it and intercut things and move things around a bit. And, so a lot of times an editor may actually remember some intermediate cut, you know, that was, like, before you got down to the end, 'cause often at the end you may do some final big lifts, for instance, that do something to the movie and get it going or whatever. And, so it's interesting because there are some lifts in the beginning that kinda propel the story along, so you get to... I think I let... I would stop it every now and again and say, "Okay, what, how many minutes in are we?" And I think like it's 12 minutes and Harker is in Transylvania meeting Dracula for the first time. And I think there was a whole big scene where he meets Mina for the first time that was much longer. They walk down the big steps and it sort of introduces... I think there might even been a opening scene where they see each other. He comes to the door, she opens the door, and then they cut to walking down that big back garden that was all on a stage.

3:39Glen ScantleburyEvery… the whole movie was shot on stages at the Sony lot. And they walk down those big steps and then they walk around and you see peacocks going around. So when you see that peacock transition, which is a really…

3:50Glen Scantlebury... Cool one, to the train, that actually you had the setup of the peacocks more in the sort of bigger cut. But one of the things that we learned when we previewed it was that all you need to do is get the story beats out at that point and we'll develop the characters as the movie goes along. You didn't need to say everything, in that scene, 'cause they talk about, you know, when they're gonna get married and da. And then he kinda breaks it to her that he has to do this first. And in fact, he's even saying, "Do you really wanna marry? 'Cause I'm just a, you know, poor boy," whatever. And you kinda... A lot of the s… backstory kind of got s… pushed aside 'cause it wasn't that necessary, 'cause you learn it later on again. So, that scene got really truncated to just right to the moment where he goes, "I've gotta go to Transylvania before I can marry you." You know, it's really great. I... And again, I went, "Oh, yeah, that was a good lift we did pretty close to the end," because, you know, you always wanna... It was a love s… it was a love triangle. That's the basic, the way Francis…

4:51Glen Scantlebury... Always said it, Gothic romance love triangle, and that has to work. You know? It's a horror film, too, and it's other things, too, but if you wanna make the movie work, it has to do... The love story has to really work.

5:04Glen ScantleburyAnd so it was a balancing of it to try and kind of not stay on one thing too long, get it going. So that was a funny thing. And then I also noticed that there was a scene that was shot later on, after principal photography, that set up the Renfield character, the Tom Waits character.

5:24Glen ScantleburyAnd I think I actually put the beat in there and said, "Francis, we need a scene," 'cause everyone says, "Renfield," but you don't meet Renfield until the doctor comes in and, you know, talks to him and says, you know, "I'm gonna save you. You're my patient." and but he's mentioned in the, you know, both by, Dracula and even Mina even says something about it. You know, so w… we s… or the, not Mina, but the guy who runs the office of the real estate company that Harker's working for says, "Well, Renfield was a good guy, but you know, he's not..." And Harker even asks, "Well, what happened to Renfield?" And he goes, "he just had to take a, you know, break," or, you know... He, they didn't really say what happened to him, right? So by setting him up in that beginning kinda also… Propelled the story that you got a little bit of a snippet of madness that is gonna be a theme in the film very early on. So that was interesting to see. I, oh yeah, I remember, see…

6:22Glen Scantlebury... Putting that art card in and saying, "Hey Francis, we need a sh… a scene right here that sets, you know, the Tom Waits Renfield character up." So it's interesting how, you know, you… your memories kinda get weaved into, again, old cuts that you did. Like, originally, Volcheg, Kekellor's music is what we temped almost exclusively. But he only, at that time, had, five or six symphonies that he had written, for orchestra. And so we had that, and I think he had something else, I can't remember. Maybe it was a Polish television show, or, you know, Movie of the Week or something that he'd done. But he hadn't really done film, so we took, like, these, you know, parts of these scores that we got and created the wh… most of the whole sound, music soundtrack out of that. And then when he redid it changed slightly, but a lot of it is somewhat sim…... And again, that's often happens with composers, especially if you use their old work.

7:25Glen ScantleburyThey kinda say, "Oh, you want it to sound like that?" Or, you know, you kinda then they weave it in differently, but it's sort of the same in a way. So in a way, often, again, editors can remember the temp track almost better than they do the final, because by the time you get to the final, you know, if you're even in the mix at that ti… at that time, 'cause it's all so crazy. You're trying to finish visual effects and other things, that you kind of get a little, like, your memory kind of jumps over that and goes back to what you worked on with for months and months and months. So that's kinda fun, that, to see it again. It, you know, it was really cool.

8:05Jawad MirRight. And that's true about the temp music, because I had done, I had cut my first film and I used temp music, and I remember temp music more than I remember the actual score.

8:16Glen ScantleburyIt's, it's really silly, isn't it?

8:18Jawad MirBecause you could, because you just spend so much time with it over, and you have fallen in love with the temp music, right? Because you just get so used to it. But you know, one of the things that you mentioned…

8:28Glen ScantleburyOh, I…

8:28Jawad MirWhich... Sorry, go on.

8:29Glen ScantleburyI was gonna say, they call that temp love. You, that, and…

8:31Jawad MirTemp love, yes

8:32Glen Scantlebury... Composers hate it because they feel every time the director, and often the editor too, gets really in love with it. And then when they hear something fresh and new that ultimately is much better, they, you don't know it. And

8:45Jawad MirYeah.

8:45Glen ScantleburyAnd so, like…

8:46Jawad MirYeah

8:46Glen Scantlebury... I always say you have to put a movie in the oven and bake it for, like, a week, and don't look at it if you wanna have a fresh eye looking at an aspect of it, like the music or, eh, you know, whatever. So.

9:01Jawad MirIt, that is, that is so true, 'cause I made that, I learned that from after my first film, like, how you have to distance yourself from…

9:09Glen ScantleburyYeah

9:09Jawad Mir... The film. Like, you can't just be spending, like, eight, 10 hours a day continuously. You need to take breaks. But having said that, you know, one of the things that you mentioned, which I'm glad you did, because I really appreciated how the pacing of the film was, and how there were just limited number of shots or scenes or imagery that described something that could've gone on for, like, five minutes or 10 minutes, right? And that…

9:34Glen ScantleburyYeah

9:34Jawad Mir... That, you know, show, not tell, and that whole thing was evident in the entire film, and i… it was really cool to see that. And, you know, one thing I... So obviously a lot of us have…

9:49Glen ScantleburyWell…

9:49Jawad MirSorry, go on.

9:49Glen ScantleburyI can tell you one thing about the pacing that was very interesting, and, that was when, I had been an additional editor on Godfather III, which is how I kinda got in with Francis, and then he took, he said to me after he finished Godfather III, "Well, with, we're looking at doing something with Winona Ryder. She has this, she wants to do a Dracula. She has a script," and da. And he said, "Well, we're gonna start to work on it. Would you like to come in and start to do stuff in pre-production?" And I was like, "Oh yeah, sure." You know, I, 'cause I was in San Francis… I lived in San Francisco. His whole operation is in San Francisco, and it's real independent. It was always, it still is, and always been a very independent-minded place for, y… how you work with people and move 'em in and out. And he said, "Yeah, why don't you come in and we're gonna start doing, radio play versions of the script." And a radio play version is something he learned back w… in the '50s, or late '50s, early '60s, where you would take a script and you would have, m… actors read it.

10:55Glen ScantleburyHe'd get local actors to read it, do a read-through, and they'd record it. And he'd also have a narrator narrate it. So you basically had the whole script, narration, dialogue, to the next narration, to the dialogue. And he said to me, "You know, I want this to be a two-hour film, so if they can't read it in two hours, we can't cut it and make a film that's gonna be two hours." And so as we went through it a, four or five times, and I'll tell you, I can describe a little bit more the visual side of it, but just…

11:29Jawad MirSure

11:29Glen Scantlebury... The audio side, was to take the script, and if a, you know, he would say, "Well, the, you know, i… it's coming in at two hours and 20 minutes. We've gotta cut it down 20. How do we, you know, what do we do?" Or he would, you know... I'd say, "What do we do?" And he'd say, "Well, we're gonna cut down, you know, we're gonna cut some extraneous dialogue out." But also, a big part of it was cutting the narration. Or not narration. I should say description. Sorry, I kind of said the wrong word. The descriptive…

11:56Jawad MirThat's okay

11:57Glen Scantlebury... Part of a scene. So it would be…

11:59Jawad MirSure

11:59Glen Scantlebury... Description, dialogue, description. And, he said, "You know, th… th… that shot is only gonna be a 10-second shot. We don't need… You know, a quarter of a page describing that. Even though the description's good and it helps, you know, visualize it to the first time you, the director's reading it, by the time he's getting down to, like, trying to make it to be a two-hour movie, he goes, "That's a 10-second shot." You know, the Borgo Road or the train, the dissolve from the peacock to the train going along, that's gonna be five seconds. And then he would say, "Okay, let's, cut it to just, like, one line," because he was the one who first sort of trained me that it's a page a minute. And if you... You know, you gotta get your screenplay down to around 120 minute, pages if you wanna have it be 120 minutes. And so I went, "Okay." And so we would literally take the descriptions and cut them way down, and that started to give more breadth and more the right pacing that he was thinking of the film.

13:05Glen ScantleburyAnd he was very on that. He... I mean, he spent six months, easy in the sort of pre-production of then taking that radio play, and then I would, I would cross out the... I would, like, we'd cut it just like a audio track, cut it down. And sometimes it'd be half lines. You know, it would be like taking two lines and merging them together to be one line. And then I would take it and mark out the script of what we actually did, and then we would give it to his sort of script person, who would then send it back to the writer and say, "Okay, now we're thinking that we, you know, we only need to have this in here, and we don't... We're kinda trying to get it down so it can be shot," so he could present a budget that, to the studio that would be more accurate. And so, we did that for about five, at least five or six times we went back and re-recorded it with this little local sort of theater group and a person reading the descriptions. And then he started to do storyboards to it, and his storyboards were quite detailed.

14:08Glen ScantleburyAnd I'll, I'll just finish it up kinda quickly so it doesn't get to be too long, but we then… No, that's good... I would then, I would then on a Mavica, it was the original, one of the original digital cameras. The digital, the digital world was just appearing at that time, and I think it was the first digital camera I ever touched, you know? And I, you know, and it had a little hard drive or a little slip-in, disk that you then... It was a Sony product. And, it was kind of bulky and big, but we then put it on a down-shooting cam… platform, down shooter with lights, and we took every storyboard and shot them. And again, the first time we did it, he didn't have any storyboards, so we literally... He said, "Let's go to some art books, and let's put in, you know, cool shots of Gothic this and that and costumes, and it doesn't matter that it doesn't tell the story. I just wanna get in the feel of the world that we're creating." And, so we did that the first time. And then he started to get storyboards going and had storyboard artists for months working on it as it kept reworking it.

15:09Glen ScantleburyAnd it would literally, I would shoot each one. And a lot of times, if it was, like, a sword fight or, you know, the pushing down of the knife into the heart or something, he would do, he'd have the, storyboard artist maybe do two or three frames of it so you could almost animate it to show the this is what it does, not just th… you know, imagine, but doom, boom, three shots. And then we would cut it like it was animated on four or five type frame edits. And, by the time we got sort of near production, we had, he had four or five storyboard... I remember going down to Los Angeles to the Sony Studios. There might even have been, like, eight around a big table all having their scenes to do. And i… with his instructions, he would keep updating it. And we had about a th… I don't know, eh, I'm sure it was well over 500. I m… I remember it as being 1,000, but again, you know how your memory is. You can... But I remember it as being just an incredible amount of shots that would then be the two-hour movie.

16:12Glen ScantleburySo he had finally got it down to a two-hour movie, complete storyboard showing exactly what it was supposed to be. So he was very on, like you were saying, th… my whole thing is about the pacing and what he wanted to do. "I'm only gonna have this one shot. I'm not gonna need it from four angles. I'm gonna need it from one angle for this bit, and, you know, and then one angle for the reverse angle for this shot, and we're just gonna do it that way. I want it to be very streamlined when I get into actually shooting it." And so I remember being down there with eight storyboard artists, and they all do ind… i… i… if you... Storyboard artist is quite an art, but every guy does it, person, man or woman, does it a little differently. So one had big, you know, gesture brush strokes to show something. Others were much more detailed and, you know. And it was very interesting because he then said, "Okay, now we're gonna cut it all together and look at it." And he did n… he would look at it numerous times over that six-month period.

17:13Glen ScantleburyI bet he watched his storyboard representation of his movie probably 50 s… times easy. Because at the e… by the time we got to the summer, when they shot, started shooting in September, I went down there and he said, "Okay, we're going to the Director's Guild and we're gonna project this, and I'm gonna have all the heads of department who are now gathering in Los Angeles, you know, in pre-production, and we're all gonna watch it together." And everybody's gonna see it, and I wanna introduce everybody to everybody and just let them know this is the movie. This is the length. I've got it down to the exact dialogue, 'cause we cut, you know, bits of dialogue to get it down and, you know, at, you know, page 20 this is gonna happen. But, you know, and I think probably when we looked at it, probably by, I'm sure, fift… page 15, we went to back… took Harker to Transylvania to meet Dracula. And he had, so he had all those beat moments all kinda set up in his mind that it was all gonna work.

18:13Glen ScantleburyAnd it was really cool to see this thing projected, because there were all these different v… visual art styles of the different storyboard artists. And they were all, they were, that was the classic era of storyboard artists. I don't know how long it lasted after that, but it kinda all went digital, you know, started to be previz sorta stuff that became more, you know, animation, you know, graphic animation on computers. But at that time, there were a whole host of great, storyboard artists in Los Angeles. And, it was really cool to see. I was... It felt like an impressionistic version of the movie. It was so cool, and he really said to everybody, "Okay, this is what I'm shooting. We're gonna shoot on a stage, so I don't have huge vista backgrounds of, you know, where the, Mina's house is, which was the big Victorian, you know, mansion. We're gonna build it, but we're not, you know, we're gonna have s… lights, above it, so you're not gonna be able to shoot much beyond it. You're not gonna be putting a scene back, you know, scenery back there, unless, you know, we do it digitally or..."

19:13Glen ScantleburyHe did a lot, there's a lot of things I can talk about the visual effects, too. But anyway, he said, "I want it to be just like this." And in some cases, he's, you know, he said, "N… I don't even need to have the whole house built. You could just build to the second floor, and half of it can not even be built." Well, again, everybody looked at the storyboards and went, "I don't trust him." You know, when he gets on a set, you never know what a director's g… Not just him, just any director.

19:37Jawad MirAnybody, yeah.

19:37Glen ScantleburyBecause when they get into a set, and they start to go, "Ooh, look at that shot. Let's turn the whole thing around." So they didn't quite do exactly what he wanted, and I think probably the production ends up going a bit over budget because it was a tight budget for the movie for what Sony was wanting to pay for it. So, it was interesting that they... And he didn't totally, you know, he went off the map. You know, I remember Michael Ballhaus one time going, "Oh, we had these storyboards all set up." Well, we get into the scene with the cinema gra… when he goes to the see the cinema, right? And he goes... You know, and he came in that morning. I remember being down there one time when he said, "Oh, my God." And I said, "How you doing, Michael?" And he goes, "Oh, this has been a really rough day, 'cause we had it all set up the night before in pre-lighting. When Francis looked at it, he said, 'Yep, that's what we're gonna do.' And he woke up the next morning and went, 'Huh, I wanna do it from over here.'" And he changed where the wolves came in, and you know, and where he pulled Mina out of the scene and into the little corner, but he didn't want to use the corner he had set. He wanted, you know. So y… you still go, what I learned was that you, y… y… you still are, y… you know, a director's still gonna improvise all the way through.

20:43Glen ScantleburyBut he did, in that movie, he was very adamant about really having a great map and a plan to get going and to know what he wanted to shoot. So I, it was really an, a huge, for me, it was my film school. I never actually went to film school, and that was my graduate film school program, was hanging out with Francis for six months in the pre-production period.

21:09Jawad MirThat's incredible. Thank you for sharing all that. That's, that's really…

21:11Glen ScantleburyYeah

21:11Jawad Mir... Valuable information. And you know…

21:14Glen ScantleburyYeah

21:14Jawad Mir... One of the things that you talked about was, well, storyboards, right? Obviously, the thing is that it's the, it's not just in the world of film, but even in business planning or anything, it's all about the planning. And then when you have that plan, even if it improvises, at least you know where you're going instead of completely being lost in the tunnel, right?

21:36Glen ScantleburyYep

21:37Jawad Mir... I'll, I'll ask you to talk about the visual effects, but I do wanna make a comment. So we all know Francis' body of work, you know, the Godfather trilogy. One of my personal favorites, which nobody talks about, is The Outsiders. I don't know if you've ever seen it. If you haven't, I highly recommend…

21:52Glen ScantleburyYeah, I've seen The Outsiders a couple times. Love that film.

21:53Jawad MirYeah, I lo… I love that film. I love the book. I love the film. Apocalypse Now. What was it, Tucker with Jeff Bridges? Was it Tucker?

22:01Glen ScantleburyYeah.

22:01Jawad MirIt was…

22:01Glen ScantleburyTucker was a great film.

22:03Jawad MirYeah.

22:03Glen ScantleburyYeah.

22:03Jawad MirBut if you look at all those films, and then you look at Bram Stro… Stroker's Dracula, the way the, I'm not saying they were di… it's different, but the editing was, style was little bit different. I mean, the pacing was different, everything. But at the same time, the core of it, which are obviously the characters, were consistent to his other work. And one thing that I really found interesting with the film, and which you kinda talked about the visual effects, the shadows that are going in the other directions and the camera going up. You know, obviously you speed it up in post. You go up the stairs, and you come back, and just either the point of view of Dracula. I thought that was really masterful. And I, you know, when I started watching it, I was thinking about now you s… nowadays if they make Dracula, it would be, like, very kind of like a horror film. Like, you know, they will try to scare…

22:54Glen ScantleburyYes

22:54Jawad Mir... Scare you…

22:54Glen ScantleburyYeah

22:54Jawad Mir... Jump scare you. This wasn't horror.

22:57Glen ScantleburyNo.

22:57Jawad MirYou know? It wasn't horror at all, and that's what I loved about the film.

23:03Glen ScantleburyI think so, too. Again, that's one of the things I think Francis is really great for. Whenever he goes in, it's not a genre film. He makes it his own. You know, he makes it a world of his own. So he took what would be a normal, 'cause it was kind of... I mean, I remember him one time, well, I don't know if I should say this, but it's a little unfair. But, he at one point said to me, "Well, this isn't the best Dracula script we read. This is the one that Winona Ryder wants to do." And then he made it. He kinda helped by, again, doing this… Process of, over the six months working with the writer. Francis always, you know, deferred back to the writer and said, "Here, we've done some lifts, we've done some changes. You know, come, you go take a look at it. You know, put it back into your format of your pro… you know, script writing program," which, again, were more primitive back in '92. Not even sure Final Draft was around. I can't remember what they were using. But, and so the writer was all very involved.

24:04Glen ScantleburyIt's just that he was, you know, it was the, it was like the director working with the writer, only he was doing it through actually editing, pre-editing the movie, and getting it to a pace where, you know, you, when you heard it, you know, the actors had their lines, they had their moments. It all kinda had the same fluid. But, your point is good that it still feels like a lot of that, a lot of the scenes when they are actually into their emotive dialogue scenes could have been right, should have, could have been in Godfather III. The same pacing, the same c… the emotional level of where he was going with the scenes, he let them play. And not a lot of cutting. A lot of times, when Dracula's on the bed with her towards the end and he's saying, "No, I don't, I don't want, I want you," but then, "No, yeah, I don't wanna kill you. I don't, I don't know if we can do this." And then they do it. Those are all, it's like four or five shots, and you could have made it 15 shots and made it a lot more cutty and, you know, but you don't.

25:05Glen ScantleburyYou know, you let a shot play. So it has a pace that is both fast and slow in a funny way, so that you can get, you know, you get tension, and then you get kind of release, and it goes off, and all of a sudden you're walking on the street with Dracula, and it's got all that. Because they used, they used some old cameras to get that flickery look that…

25:28Jawad MirYeah

25:29Glen Scantlebury... Is the pr… the POV, say, of Dracula, whether he's the wolf or whether he's walking through that street. That was an old camera that they used to get that effect, rather than, say, pulling out a bunch of frames in post, which, you know, you could do. And I think that's one of the things that Francis was always great at. He always wanted to mix different film types of effects. You know, like the green, that green mist that comes under the door up to Mina, that's live. That was all done right there on the set.

26:02Jawad MirNice.

26:02Glen ScantleburyAnd the shadows that you talked about, that's all live. That's somebody behind in an angle working it just to be, so even when Drac… is in Dracula's sort of count… his room where he's talking to Harker and the map is in the background and the big shadow comes up and sweeps over, they've shot it in such a way that they have an actor off to the side who can be hit with that light with the shadow to make it all the same moment. So that's all live, and including there's a shadow that comes over Mina when she's in the parlor with, the other woman, and she, all the suitors are coming in, and there's another shadow that comes in. That was one of the first days of shooting, and I remember we were both looking at it going, "How did he... I know he's got this shadow." We didn't really know that's how it was gonna go, and was like, "Oh man, look, he's got this shadow working in here. Where is that coming from?" You know, we're always trying the other editor and I, 'cause Nick, Smith and I were the original editors that worked on it for many months, and then Anne Grasadck came on, in, like, May of the f… next year.

27:06Glen ScantleburyI think it was shot in '91, finished at the end of '91, a little bit into '92, and then they re… was released in '92, if I, my memory serves me right.

27:17Jawad MirYeah. It was released in '92, for sure.

27:19Glen ScantleburyYeah.

27:19Jawad MirIt was.

27:19Glen ScantleburyAnd so, and she came on and did some work on, the love story. There was, they thought that a woman's touch could help with the love story. And she did a, we well worked on it really hard, and we all did really good work on it. So but they, with the old camera styles, there's also, when you mention his older films, One From the Heart was what he was referencing. There's a lot of the scrims also that are creating something that's happening in the background where they just drop, if you drop, if you have a scrim up, and it's sh… you have the foreground scene, when you hit the right light on a scrim, you then see a background that wasn't there before, and that's apparent I think in the scene, one of the places it's really apparent is in the scene where, Van Helsing and Mina are on the, are on that cliff, and the other three women are coming around. That was kind of a scrim that just sort of appeared, and all of a sudden they were there. And, so it was very interesting, all those kind of methods.

28:22Glen ScantleburyA lot of, just BiPaks, the blue circle light, the circle, fire that comes through when he first… ... Going, when Harker's first coming in, and as, the stagecoach, and he looks over and he sees this weird, you know, blue light, flame. That was all just BiPaks, so it was very simple kind of techniques. And then of course the, at the end was one of the big digital shots when the face change happened…

28:49Glen Scantlebury... From him being an old Dracula to the young Dracula as he's dying. That was done as a, one of the few tr… full digital effects in the movie.

29:01Jawad MirAnd see, that's one of the things…

29:02Glen ScantleburyOne of the…

29:02Jawad MirSorry, go on, please. I thought you…

29:04Glen ScantleburyWell, I just wanna tell you one more thing that's always, was always stuck to me, was I was down there the day they were shooting a plate for the Borgo Road. And all they were shooting was on a stage, and they just had, these horses that were all, going around the road, which was part of the Borgo Road leading up. And there's a great shot where you see the full, stagecoach and the horsemen behind it going, and they kinda, it's about a four-second shot, and they're going around…

29:33Jawad MirRight

29:33Glen Scantlebury... The road, end in the road, and they start to go around the bend. And you see the big Dracula, you know, castle up on the precipice of that big craggy cliff area. And… That was a matte painting. And I remember being there that day, and they're, they're all being very careful to get the counts of each take right, to know what frame it started and what frame it ended on a roll, a 10-minute roll of film. And I think they shot three or four takes, and that was the roll. Well, that roll was then not processed, but put away for about f… I think seven, eight months maybe. It was probably, I think it was shot in October or November, and they pulled it out in probably May. And they, and Lucasfilm w… working in a lot of the, of visuals effects that were done, had a matte painter paint it. And I guess, and I'm not exactly sure what she used as a reference, because they never processed the film.

30:35Glen ScantleburySo she did a matte painting based on whatever they got from the art department. Maybe it was still shots from the ca… the, you know, 35-millimeter camera. But they did this whole matte painting that put all that in. And then back in May at Lucasfilm, they re-put that same film in that was shot six months earlier, and then sh… and then went to, like, we, you know, we p… say we picked take three. They went to the, you know, 650 feet into that roll s… and then started filming again with the background matte painting, marrying the two together.

31:16Jawad MirWow.

31:17Glen ScantleburyAnd so we didn't know what we had. And, you know, we had a videotape that was a video tap from the thing. You know, so we know where we were cutting when it was just the horses. But we didn't see the whole thing put together until, like, the end of May. And it was just so cool to all of a sudden go, "Wow, you can do that?" I didn't even know that you could do that, you know, and make it seamlessly all blend in together so you really feel like that's, you know, a real shot. But, that is, two pieces shot six months d… apart. And the matte painting was quite big. I saw the matte painting at one point, and it wasn't, you know, it wasn't just like this or anything. It was, you know, 10, 12 feet by 10 feet. You know, it w… it was a, it was a full-size m… canvas. I was shocked. I thought it was really cool that they put that much effort and detail so that when it was projecting it on a big screen, unlike watching it today on tele… you know, on a television again, but on a huge screen, that it really had the detail that was necessary to sell the shot.

32:22Jawad MirYeah, I wish, I wish I had seen, and I can probably see this again sometime in, on a big screen because it is one of those films that needs to be seen on the big screen. Not because of its jump scares or anything, just the production design and the pacing, the music, and everything. It's just so beautifully done. And one thing that I, really, I'm... You know, I miss, and I think you're probably on the same boat. Now with so much technology and visual effects, and now there's this, you know, LED screens and all that stuff, there's just something about doing things without visual effects completely. You know, I'm not saying don't use visual effects, but I…

33:04Glen ScantleburyYeah

33:04Jawad Mir... I w… I would use them, too. But just to a limit. And one of the, one of the directors who's really masterful at it is Spielberg. Like, he has this way of…

33:12Glen ScantleburyYes. Yeah

33:12Jawad Mir... Blending, you know, live action and

33:16Glen ScantleburyYeah

33:16Jawad Mir... Visual effects. And I really miss that, and I really hope, you know, that stuff comes back. And Dracula came just before Jurassic Park, a year before. That's when…

33:25Glen ScantleburyYes

33:25Jawad Mir... The technology just kind of, you know, shot through the roof.

33:28Glen ScantleburyYeah, that's, you know, like I said, in '92, you know, there weren't a l… visual, the digital effects were m… were much harder to do because just to get the resolution. It's easy to do if you wanna do it at, you know, normal television resolution. They had all kinds of, in '92, all kinds of machines to do that.

33:50Jawad MirRight.

33:50Glen ScantleburyThere's a thing called the Quantel Paintbox in Harry. They could do all kinds of things. But at that time, to actually do it in a resolution that was even 1K. I mean, now it's, you know, 8K or whatever. Back then, y… those, most of those movies would have been 1K digital effects. That was as much as you could pop onto.

34:10Jawad MirWow.

34:10Glen ScantleburyYeah. And, you know, I, it, and I saw one time the resolution difference, and I just kinda went, "Wow, we used to buy that." You know, the, back in those days, that was great, and we thought it was great. But when you see it in comparison to the sort of sharpness now that you have in digital effects, it's, it's a… it's astounding how much m… more detail there is and sharpness and stuff, so.

34:36Jawad MirYeah, there is. And I, maybe I'm old school, but I still appreciate the older way of doing things.

34:43Glen ScantleburyOh, I totally do.

34:43Jawad MirLike, don't get…

34:44Glen ScantleburyYeah

34:44Jawad Mir... Right, don't get me wrong, I'll watch it. But there's just something, like, nowadays, like, when you watch these visual effects, like a blast going off or something, you just kinda go, "Okay, here we go again," right? Like, but when you see it, like, really raw, it pulls you in without you probably even knowing it, and that's the beauty of it.

35:02Glen ScantleburyYeah. I just worked on Megalopolis, and Francis did the same thing. He wanted to do basically as man… many things as he could do i… a… as live as possible. And that was one of the problems he, I think he had with the visual effects department was, o… originally, was that they kept saying, "Oh, you could just do this, do so easy in digital effects. Why are we doing this? You know, we could do that. You don't have to waste time on the set doing it." But to him, it was part of the fun of filmmaking 'cause there's a, there's a fly that flies around in one scene in Megalopolis, and it's a real fly. And, they were, like, desperate to say, "No, Francis, don't do that. Don't do that." And he's going, "No, this is the way I wanna do it 'cause I want my actor to interact with this fly, and we'll just take our chances and shoot it a bunch of times if... You know, I'm willing to sit on the set and get it right." And, In that particular instance, I think much to the chagrin of the visual effects department, I think it was take two, and the fly did exactly…

36:01Jawad MirOh, really?

36:02Glen ScantleburyIt was interacting with Adam Driver. Did exactly what we wanted it to do, and they, we only did about three or four takes. That was it.

36:09Jawad MirThat's awesome. I saw the trailer…

36:11Glen ScantleburyOther effects did take a, do take a long time. I'm not saying that, you know, other ones did…

36:14Jawad MirOh, no, I know. I know.

36:15Glen ScantleburyYeah.

36:15Jawad MirI know.

36:16Glen ScantleburyDefinitely took…

36:16Jawad MirBut I did see the trailer for that film, and it looks amazing, and I think it's still seeking distribution, right? I know it premiered at Cannes, and…

36:23Glen ScantleburyNo, it has. It is, it's coming out…

36:24Jawad MirIt has

36:25Glen Scantlebury... In September. But, yeah. Yeah, it's…

36:28Jawad MirWe need to talk about that when that comes out.

36:30Glen ScantleburyLate September, yeah. So…

36:33Jawad MirNo, that's awesome. I would love to talk to you about that when that comes out.

36:36Glen ScantleburyOkay. Yeah, let's do that.

36:37Jawad MirI'm looking forward to it. You know, have you seen the series, Offer, The Offer?

36:43Glen ScantleburyNo. You know, when we were, when we were, when I was working on Megalopolis, that's, it was showing, and Francis said…

36:50Jawad MirYeah

36:50Glen Scantlebury... Somebody asked him, "Well, did you buy off on this as the real, as the, you know, kind of…

36:54Jawad MirYeah

36:54Glen Scantlebury... True story?" And he went, "You know, you can't... You know, it's never gonna be a true story." so…

37:00Jawad MirYeah

37:00Glen Scantlebury... I'm never... I could get involved and say this isn't right or that isn't right, but then maybe I don't remember it the same way that an actor does, and maybe that's not any more true. So he didn't have any... As I understand, he had very little to do with any of the creative decisions of…

37:18Jawad MirYeah

37:19Glen Scantlebury... Of it.

37:19Jawad MirI am pretty sure, but if you haven't seen it, I'm sure there is a lot of, you know, embellishments and the changing of things. It's an amazing series. It's just eight part, and it just…

37:29Glen ScantleburyOh, I'd like to s…

37:29Jawad Mir... Hooks you on, and it doesn't let you go.

37:32Glen ScantleburyAh.

37:33Jawad MirIt's really good. I mean, again, forget about the fact that it's about Godfather, right?

37:38Glen ScantleburyYeah.

37:38Jawad MirJust this one guy, the producer, I forget the name, of the ac… the character

37:44Glen ScantleburyRobert Evans. Is it that?

37:45Jawad MirYes.

37:45Glen ScantleburyIs it... Yeah.

37:46Jawad MirHow he just makes this happen regardless of ongoing, you know, struggles from the studio, from the mafia. A great little series.

37:55Glen ScantleburyWell, you know, one of the things Francis said to me a long time ago, he said that, being a director is 90% being a salesman and 10%…

38:04Jawad MirOh

38:04Glen Scantlebury... Creative directing. And, you know, and I saw him do it where he, you know, whether it was, asking for more money from Sony when we had a preview, and he did a preview, and he did it kinda early. He wasn't even through his director's cut, and he said, "Let's do a preview down in San Diego and see how it's playing. We'll invite the studio." And in the back of his mind, I didn't really realize it, but in the back of his mind, he knew he wanted a, you know, $3 or $4 million more to finish shooting some of the, more stuff and getting stuff right. And, you know, and, you know, so he did this preview. N… n… n… n… we thought it was gonna play better than it did. Didn't actually play so well, and we need... It really helped us cut it down and get it, get some, get the, especially that beginning going. And, but he used it as a way to get the studio involved earlier than if he waited until his end of his director's cut would've been another four weeks, plus you could've pushed it. You know, a lot of directors will push another two weeks or three weeks and show the movie as late as possible to the studio, and then still say, "We need to do additional shooting," whatever.

39:13Glen ScantleburyAnd he was like, "No, I'm gonna get them wet with it, and let's get them involved." And, I'll never forget, we had did this preview down in San Diego, and then we all flew back up really early the next morning, and he'd had his private jet, and he had already come back or whatever, and he already had, like... He's really good at notes.

39:32Jawad MirYeah.

39:32Glen ScantleburySo he would type out notes, and w… we were in his, in his, the eighth floor of the penthouse of the Sentinel Building in San Francisco, where his offices are, and that's his private residence sort of area. And we were all sitting under... He has a, there's a dome there, and we were all sitting under this dome. The, it was just Nick at that point. It was just Nick and I, and the produc… two producers and Francis, and the dome has, like, individual little motifs of the different films that he's worked on. So, you know, it's kind of a fresco kind of thing, where there's someone has gone up there and painted on the, on the plaster. And there were, like, 10 films there. And, anyway, so we were sitting there, and he, we're... I'm reading five pages of single note, you know, single line, not even double line, just single line notes. Boom. And some of them would be as little as, "We need to take about five frames off of this shot." It was very specific in some parts. In other parts, it's like, "We need to figure out how we're gonna make this happen faster," or whatever.

40:35Glen ScantleburyAnyway, we're sitting there looking at it, beginning to go through it, and then he gets a call from the head of Sony Pictures. And, the, one of the producers at the time, looked at, said to Francis, "Hey, it's blah, on the phone from Sony. Do you wanna take this?" And he looked at me, and he went, "Yeah, I wanna take this." And he looked at me and he says, "Watch me put my producer hat on." And he kinda did that little thing like he had a cap, imaginary cap on. And he goes like this, right? And then he gets on the phone, and it was a masterful job of selling them on the additional shoot. And it wasn't long after that before he would say, "Okay, we got the money. We're gonna, you know, blah." So it was very interesting, but he, you know, and he even said to me, he goes, "You know, you're, you're constantly selling your movie to, whether it's the production designer, the, you know, cinematographer, the editor, you're constantly selling your vision to get them to help you do it, essentially." And, you know, so he, I thought that was very interesting, and he's very good at convincing you to go with him over the cliff or the Philippines or wherever he's going.

41:45Jawad MirNo, it certainly is an art, and I have... You know, when I made my first film, well, I started working on it about 12 years ago. And, you know, the first film that you make, it's all about creativity, right? And when it doesn't go anywhere, you're like, you know, "Oh, crap." You know, it goes somewhere, but not the way you envision it. But now I've realized in the last five, six years that selling... I'm not saying creativity's not important. I know that I, you know, as a creative individual, the director, I know what I want and I know what I wanna do, but the selling part is the part that takes you that this is what you wanna do, and it's so freaking important. And I, and I…

42:21Glen ScantleburyYeah

42:22Jawad Mir... It's, it's so true. It's so true. It's just probably the most important job on, as a, on the film as, you know, just because if you don't have the selling angle, then nobody's gonna make it. Nobody's gonna buy, back it up.

42:33Glen ScantleburyYeah. Well, one thing I can say about the editing of the movie, too, is, it was done on an early digital editing system, which is how I kind of originally got into Zoetrope in the late '80s. I was a young San Francisco independent editor, cutting music videos and commercials, and I had gotten, onto working on a system through a company that I kinda had a relationship with that was called the Montage Editing System. And it was before the Avid. It was the first... There were, George Lucas had one called EditDroid. There was one called Edit Flex. There were, three or four.

43:12Jawad MirRight.

43:12Glen ScantleburyCMX, which is an edit, which was the online editing system, which I used to do when I first got into it. I was an online editor. CMX had one called the CMX 6000. There were a bunch of them, and most of those, all of those systems, I think, used, laser discs. So you had to print your stuff on laser discs, and there was limited lim… They had some limited problems with them, one being how much you could put on a laser and how many lasers you could hook up to a computer so that they could, you know, go from one cut on one laser disc to another cut. You'd have to duplicate lasers. Well, the Montage fa… realized that when they first started to make a front load Betacam, which is the VHS and Betacam were the two monsters fighting it out in the digital, or the cassette world.

44:04Glen ScantleburyAnd, the first one that came out was a Betacam. So when it front loaded, it kind of would load up properly. So you could put a rack of... I think there was 16 beta machines all in two racks, and all would have the same material. And you have a, it was a high up, you know, tried to do it at the highest quality, so it'd be two hours per tape, but every tape had the same two hours. So, and it was very revolutionary because it also used, digital frames to actually edit. So you had this big mon… this big kind of monitor setup thing with two monitors, and then a bunch of low monitors that were very small, little typical television monitors, that when you said, "I wanna make an edit here," it would, do a digital representation of two seconds either way of that cut point. So if you wanted to adjust the cut five frames, you could literally see frame by frame what you were doing as a digital reference and go boop.

45:10Glen ScantleburyOh, I wanna cut right here, you know, the eye's open or, you know, the gunshot just, the arm just goes out to the right point. You could easily see that and make that cut. And it was an, a revolutionary system that I kinda helped bring into Zoetrope for Godfather III. And Godfather III was one of the first really big films that ever did edit digitally. Walter Murch was the only editor on that movie that actually worked on film. Everybody else was working, Barry Malkin, and Lisa Fruchtman, and myself, and another additional editor were all working on this, these two, couple of Montage machines. And, I had set that up a couple years earlier there because at one point Francis was helping Roman get into the film business at, after he just got out of NYU. And he said, "Let's make a low budget film, and we'll test out some of the new gear that's around." And he said, "This is one of the new pieces of gear." So I happened to know the director of that film. It was never actually sort of released.

46:10Glen ScantleburyIt didn't quite work out so well, but it's called Smash Crash & Burn, and it was actually written by Richard Shepherd, a… as I think one of his first scripts that he ever wrote coming out of NYU. Anyway, and another guy. There were two e… writers. Anyway, that got me into Zoetrope, which then, we did another low budget film called Spirit of 76, and then that ended up, which again, Roman was a produ… that produced, I believe. And then I got onto Godfather III when he said, "Oh, okay. Now I've seen it work." We were able to do... What was hard back then was the, 'cause the video speed and film speeds are two different things. Don't need to get into it, but they don't... If you line up a 10-minute roll of film that's playing the same thing that you have on videotape, the f… the videotape goes longer.

47:00Glen ScantleburyRuns out of sync to the picture. And so, I think it's that way. One or the other. One goes out of sync. So you have to about every, I think within about s… 50 seconds, you really start to see a mouth go out of sync. It gets a frame or two out. So y… it's a big adjustment.

47:17Jawad MirIt drifts basically.

47:18Glen ScantleburyYeah.

47:18Jawad MirYeah.

47:18Glen ScantleburyIt's a whole big thing, but I managed to get it to work with the system. I proved to Francis on these two little low budget films th… that he did that it worked, and then he said, "Okay, we can use it to Godfather III." Because in the one for Spirit of 76, again, a Zoetrope production, we, were able to actually mix to the videotape, which meant we knew that the videotape was gonna be exactly when the n… cut negative was actually cut, was gonna sync up. And so we could then take the mag track from the end of that mix session, put it up on the, against the film, make a print, and it would all be in sync. The end pop would be whoop at the end would be in sync. And I proved to him that worked, and he was, he was knocked out 'cause he had tried many over the years, like in, especially I think in, The one from the heart tried to do a digital editorial, you know, electronic editorial edit, and it just didn't work. It was all out of sync. Nobody could get it to work.

48:18Glen ScantleburySo anyway, this system called the Montage, which had these 16 decks all lined up, and you could hear them rack up. Like, if you said, "Okay, let's play, you know, from here," you could hear them all go... And they all lock in. And then the first one would play the first edit, the second one would be already lined up to do the second edit, and all these edits would be all ready, the first 16. And then by that time the 16th was done, the first one would get a chance to get... Would race down. As soon as it did it little, its little bit, it would then race down to get part 17. And, you could, unlike some of the s… the other laser disc systems, you could play a 10-minute reel, which is the way film used to be done. You always would cut, a negative was always cut in 10-minute reels, so you always sort of edited in 10-minute reels, as well as on the flat bed you cut in a 10-minute reel. 'Cause a, on a flat bed it's, a 20-minute reel of film is too big to have three, to have a music, a soundtrack and a music track as well. Just too big a space.

49:20Glen ScantleburySo it w… it was all done in 10-minute reels. So you could play 10 minutes all the way through without having to stop and let the things rack up and catch up, and that's what Francis loved. He loved it that you could do that. And, so it was w… you know, as well as Godfather III, Dracula was again a very early digitally cut. And that was totally cut digitally. And there was never a cut on film. It was just conformed. Back in those days, unlike later, 10 years later when I was doing it, you just didn't even bother conforming a workprint. You just went to the negative and cut the neg 'cause you knew it was gonna work. Back then it was still like, "Nah, let's make sure we have it right. Let's cut a neg, a workprint together," and then put that against the sound that you made off of the, off of the montage, 'cause that's how you had your sound. And then you would project it and go, "Okay, that's the movie." And that was the preview. The preview that we did down in San Diego was the mix out of this little montage machine which had four tracks, I believe.

50:20Glen ScantleburyAnd the, and the, and a workprint cut from the, from the negative and sunk together and projected. And it was about two and a half hours long, I think. It was about may… it cut down about 20-some minutes, I think, in getting it to be the right pace. So that was…

50:37Jawad MirRight

50:37Glen Scantlebury... A real fun thing. And then, you know, literally that, the same year was when Avid came out, and I was a very ear… early user of Avid as well, 'cause they were sort of in the Bay Area. And

50:47Jawad MirYeah

50:47Glen Scantlebury... '93, I think, I started cutting commercials on the Avid, and da. But, that, and then it sort of di…

50:54Jawad MirWow.

50:54Glen ScantleburyBut the funny part is in the end, the Montage editorial company sued Avid for the idea of doing digital frames…

51:06Jawad MirOh, wow

51:06Glen Scantlebury... And labeling them. That was the other part. It was labeling them so that you could say, "This is take one," you know, "Scene one, take one," and it's on a label on a digital image, and that you would scroll through the frames, was a intellectual property idea. And they won a pretty good lawsuit from Avid.

51:24Jawad MirOh, they won it?

51:26Glen ScantleburyThey won it. As I mi…

51:28Jawad MirOh, wow

51:28Glen Scantlebury... As my r… mem… That's my memory, anyway, is that…

51:31Jawad MirThat's crazy

51:31Glen Scantlebury... They were able to put the, put the whole company to bed based on the fact they won a lawsuit.

51:37Jawad MirI mean, you look at now DaVinci, Premiere, Avid, I mean, they all pretty much use the same thing.

51:43Glen ScantleburyThe same thing. It's…

51:44Jawad MirAnd I think Avid just got bought out. They were not doing really well, so they were sold to some…

51:50Glen ScantleburyI think so

51:50Jawad Mir... Some holding company, I think.

51:51Glen ScantleburyW… as an editor, one of the interesting things in my career is that between 1979, when I sort of started editing, the first thing I ever did, to 1992, I must have learned five or six different systems. From the CMX system. There was a bunch of little offline systems that did what I call the whack pack technique, where you just use control, track editing that didn't actually use time code, but you burn time code in, so later on you take a pencil and literally figure out what your edit is. But at the time, you're just using control track editing.

52:27Jawad MirWow.

52:27Glen ScantleburyI call those whack packs. And most music videos cut between 1990, or 1985, when music videos really started taking off, till probably until the Avid came out in '93, '94, were all cut on these little whack pack systems. But there were other systems. There were the CMX 600…

52:45Jawad MirRight

52:45Glen Scantlebury... 6000. All kinds of systems. And anyway, so it started, when I started working on Avid in 1993, it's been the same machine ever since. And I would have never thought that, having learned six different systems to get to that point, that now if anybody that knew Avid, learned Avid in '93, could sit down to an Avid today, and it's not four tracks, it's a million tracks. There's not two or three picture tracks, there's 100. But essentially it's the same box.

53:15Jawad MirYeah.

53:15Glen ScantleburySame program.

53:16Jawad MirYeah, 100%. And you know, one of the things I wanted to make a comment on is, Godfather III. We can talk about this some other time, but just to kinda make a comment. I don't know how much y… work you had done on it, but for me, I know a lot of people give, hard time to the Godfather III. They pretend that doesn't even exist because the first and two they…

53:38Glen ScantleburyOf course

53:38Jawad Mir... Consider the best, right?

53:39Glen ScantleburyYeah.

53:39Jawad MirThe first one and the second one. To me, the third one, the one thing that wraps up, i… it's... Okay, so third one, the way it ends, right? The, with…

53:50Glen ScantleburyYeah

53:50Jawad Mir... On the steri… staircase.

53:52Glen ScantleburyYeah.

53:53Jawad MirAnd that entire scene is pretty much for me, when I remember I watched it, in order, like, I, II, and III, was the whole crux of the family. Like, this…

54:05Glen ScantleburyYes

54:05Jawad Mir... Is what happens when you spill blood, you know, one of your own… Yeah, your own daughter.

54:10Glen ScantleburyYeah.

54:10Jawad MirAnd I really love Godfather III for that particular reason. I'm not saying anything else wasn't good, but that scene really took that film to another level, and I don't know how people don't see that.

54:24Glen ScantleburyYeah. Well…

54:25Jawad MirBut it's, it's, it's just amazing

54:26Glen Scantlebury... In… interestingly enough, I, what we'll digress, and don't, shouldn't digress too long into Godfather III, but I, when I was working on it, and I worked on it for about five months, I, we went to a screening where Francis went up to George Lucas's ranch and said, "I wanna watch I, II, and now III," 'cause he was just finished, you know, had done a cut that he was ready to screen, "I wanna see them all three together to see how they line up," just like you said.

54:53Glen ScantleburyAnd we did that. We, he also had Al Pacino, Gino come in because we, he was ready to loop for the third one, and…

55:01Jawad MirRight

55:01Glen Scantlebury... That's when Walter first, 'cause it must have been in August, 'cause I think that's when Walter came on. Walter came to see it for the first time, and then George came in for the third one. But Francis wanted to see all three, and he invited everybody. He said, "Hey, if you wanna come watch all three, I'm gonna watch all three. I'm gonna start at 9:00 in the morning. We're gonna watch the first one, then we're gonna have a little lunch, and then we're gonna watch the second one, and then we're gonna have a dinner, kind of a l… you know, and then we're gonna watch the third one." And we did. And I think, I think I and the other additional editor were dying to do that with him. So I think we sat for the first two, and then all of a sudden, while we were sort of all beginning to have a bite for little bit of a s… dinner s… snack kind of thing, all of a sudden Walter walks in, George walks in, Al walks in, and we s… then we sat down and we watched Godfather III. So it was really interesting to see, like you said, and it does culminate to, like you said, a real moment if you see the progression of all three at that end scene.

55:58Jawad MirIt is. It is.

56:00Glen ScantleburySo Walter did, Walter did one great thing in that scene, too, is that he said to Francis... 'Cause as we were cutting it, Al was, you know, projecting his, sadness with a lot of moans and stuff, and, it was really interesting. And it was a l… because it's a fairly long moment, it got to be a little monotonous and it was great. Walter said, "Why don't we just cut that out? Why don't we just have him be silent at that moment? It'd be much more effective." And he was really right. When we saw it that way, it was like, "Oh, wow, that add another, adds another level," that you strip away the sound, they, then you're just on his face and it becomes the classic cinema sort of sad face thing, and it plays really well. So I always credit Walter for, c… coming up with that idea.

56:46Jawad MirWell, I mean, he's the father of editors, right? He's the best one there is.

56:50Glen ScantleburyHe is. I…... I learned a lot from working with him in that, at that time. He was pretty interesting character. But again, cutting all on film, so he had... Well, we shouldn't go into that. It's another whole thing.

57:02Jawad MirYeah, absolutely. And…

57:03Glen ScantleburyThat'd be excellent.

57:04Jawad MirNo, go on, sorry.

57:06Glen ScantleburyNo, I was gonna say, what else can, what else do you wanna know about?

57:09Jawad MirI think, I think we're, we're good. Let me ask you one last thing. So that s… th… that scene where, Gary Oldman Dracula turns into, like, a bat, I'm assuming that's, like, the giant bat, that's like a whole puppeteer work, right, that we was doing, right? Or it was, this was stop motion, or because it seemed stop motion, but it didn't. Tell me.

57:30Glen ScantleburyWell, again, it's, I shot with that camera, but it is all live.

57:34Jawad MirLive.

57:34Glen ScantleburyAnd he's in it. He, his makeup work was phenomenal. It was always…

57:39Jawad MirOh my God, he was in that thing?

57:40Glen ScantleburyIt was always him. When he was the bat, it was him. It's always him. When he's the wolf, it's him. And his makeup was, just took forever, and that, I think it was the bat suit was the one that I think he broke out pretty bad in a, in a kind of a rash all around his body, 'cause that was kind of like…

57:58Jawad MirLike a bat

57:58Glen Scantlebury... A rubberized suit, right? And it was very tight right when he, you know, he's kinda doing that. And he was in it for probably two or three days shooting some of that stuff, to create that scene. And I do remember, that there was, like, a big worry about how bad his rashes were gonna... You know, 'cause again, it was like, there's no s… you can't s… you're just sweating inside. There's no place for the sweat to go when you're in that tight body suit. But yeah, that was all, Gary. Gary was phenomenal. He came to... We did a, down in Los Angeles, there's a church that's on Highland and Franklin, which is where they did all his, rehearsals, and, there was a r… a read-through where one of the things Francis says he always wants to make sure is that everybody knows the script. And so after he had Marlon Brando show up on, Apocalypse Now and not having read the script, which is a big thing, he always said, "I always wanna do a table read with everybody before we actually shoot so I know everybody has heard the script, everyone has read it, you know, been a part of it, said their lines, you know, just to get and everybody, so I know everybody knows they know the script."

59:13Glen ScantleburyAnd they can have questions. If they have questions, you know, f… big questions, ask them now, right? Don't wait till you're in a costume and it's all hot and the lights are on you, but to say, "I don't get this." If you don't get it, say it after this read-through. And, some of the actors were kinda doing it their big, you know, the way they were gonna do it, and Gary just didn't give anything. He just did it totally flat and totally straight. And I was so amazed when all of a sudden he's Dracula in those scenes, and the, one of the first scenes that were shot with Dracula in his full outfit was the opening scene where he comes to Harker, and Harker's having dinner, and he's, you know, and there's again the big shadow stuff, and it's the big, photo or the big map of London…

1:00:00Glen Scantlebury... Where he's gonna go behind him. That was one of the first scenes, and we were just knocked out when we saw what Gary was doing. We had no idea. And that was very cool, I thought, that he held back. He didn't go the, "Rah." He didn't do any of that. It was very straight.

1:00:16Jawad MirWell, he's a phen… pheno… yeah, he's a phenomenal actor. He's a phenomenal actor.

1:00:19Glen ScantleburyYeah.

1:00:20Jawad MirI mean, look at his body of work. But this has been great. Thank you so much. I mean, I just wanna sort of point out some of the films that you worked on. I was going through your IMDb. Obviously, we talked about Con Air. You helped, On the Rock, I think, with Richard Francis Bruce, if I'm not mistaken.

1:00:35Glen ScantleburyYeah, that's my, that was my intro to Michael.

1:00:38Jawad MirIntro to Michael. And then obviously Armageddon, and then there's... I'm just looking at your Transformers. You even helped on Tropic Thunder, which was a great film, by the way.

1:00:47Glen ScantleburyWhich was really fun.

1:00:48Jawad MirYeah.

1:00:48Glen ScantleburyI worked on the, yeah, the director's cut about, for about half of it. Yeah, it was fun.

1:00:52Jawad MirYeah. And I can't wait to see your next film, which, obviously Francis directed, and, you know, this is…

1:01:00Glen ScantleburyIt's, it's, I kind of began my career with Francis, and now I'm at the sort of the other end of my career with Francis. It's amazing. I would have never thought when I was working on Godfather III, and he was in his sort of mid-50s, that, you know, you know, literally that was like 1989, '90.

1:01:20Jawad MirYeah.

1:01:20Glen ScantleburyYou know, here it is 34 years later, and I've had a whole career, a lot based on, you know, the help that he gave me, not only just the status of having worked on those films, but just the knowledge he gave me. 'Cause he's very much a teacher in the sense when you're in with him, he's very, he wants to tell you know, everything, so you get it. So you can help him make the film. So, he was just the greatest teacher, and has always got great stories and great insight to cinema of everybody's work. Always very appreciative of everybody's work. He is the consummate director who, even when someone might be saying something against him, he'll not say anything about that other person. He'll just let that ride, you know? He just, he's very gracious, a wonderful person, and just like the best filmmaker, one of the most creative. And I've worked with a lot of different directors, and I'll always see, him as being one of the most, creative, ready to take a left field idea.

1:02:30Glen ScantleburyLike I said, even though he had those storyboards all lined out, if a left field idea came out of somewhere, he would take it and go, "Yeah, let's try that." And, letting actors, do their thing. I remember I was, one time in a, with Anthony Hopkins, I was the emissary. We were cutting in San Francisco, but it was shot down in Los Angeles, all on the stages at the Sony lot. They took the biggest stage to create the Borgo Road, and they made it circular, so the road never ended. So he could continue to shoot that whole fight scene and keep the horses going, because turning around, funny enough, the big, one of the big drawbacks of horses and carts is trying to turn them around to go back and do it again. And this way, he just always had them going one direction, and if they stopped for a cut, they're ready right there, ready to go again. But I was in the, so I would go down about every two weeks and show him what we were cutting and talk to him about it. And, so one time when I was down there, I was in the Silverfish, which you've probably heard of.

1:03:31Glen ScantleburyThat's his mobile home ... Airstream that he's always had with his editing. A kind of, again, the whack pack editing stuff, where it's just total control track, just total, you know, boom, very slam dunk kind of editing system that he had in there. And I was in, and he also has his feed, so he could be in there actually, you know, directing from there when he wanted to. And I remember, he said, "Oh, why don't you show Anthony some takes?" And so Anthony came into this Silverfish, and I was in there. I was all nervous talking to Anthony Hopkins for the first time, thinking, "This is a huge actor I love," you know? He's just such a great actor. And he, and he said something really interesting. He, you know, said, "I'm not getting a lot of direction from Francis. I thought he would be like, you know..." And he's always been the actor's director. That's what he came in thinking, you know? And what did that mean? Well, it really meant that he didn't give a ton. He gave everybody the world. You know, you've got your, you've got a great costume on, 'cause you've got a great costume director.

1:04:36Glen ScantleburyYou've got a great, you know, cinematographer who's shooting, giving you great lighting. He's giving you the world to be in, and he wants, you know, he hired Anthony to give it a go, as opposed to him trying to micromanage an Anthony Hopkins performance. He would say just a few things. And again, Anthony kind of like, "That's not the way I like to be," you know? I guess maybe more from theater or whatever, you get really directed down to a final thing when you do a stage performance. It was more, you know, a little bit freeform, and he would kinda go, "Oh, okay." You know, and just one of the biggest things, notes that Francis gave him was how big he was gonna get in his personality when, once he realized Dracula was, you know, on the scene. And that's that scene with the candles, and it's all, you know, the wind is blowing off the ocean from, Dracula arriving or... I'm sorry, I guess he's, he's going, he's starting to go back. And, there's the big wind, and all of a sudden the wind blows, and it blows through, and all the candles go out.

1:05:41Glen ScantleburyAfter he comes out and he goes back to the big mansion house, and he gets out, and he's talking to the other guys, he's really over the top and big. And there was a different performance. You could, he could have been much more controlled and been his normal Van Helsing sort of thing. But I think that was the one note Francis gave him. "Try it bigger. Try it as though you're going mad as well." And I think that's a great performance when all of a sudden he goes, "Ha, I found this and that and that, ha." And they're all looking at him like, "Wow, you've gone nuts." So I think that's…

1:06:14Jawad MirYeah

1:06:14Glen Scantlebury... A great moment.

1:06:16Jawad MirNo, it's, it's, Francis is, I've seen some of his interviews. I mean, they're very rare interviews of his, but… Aside from being a film, great filmmaker, he just seems like a very well-knowledged and very humble human being.

1:06:33Glen ScantleburyYeah

1:06:33Jawad Mir... Not necessarily at the age that he is right now, but just, you know, over the last few decades. But this has been incredible, and I'm so pleased at, the amount of information that you've shared. It seems like your memory is pretty good.

1:06:47Glen ScantleburyWell, having watched it helped.

1:06:49Jawad MirNo, but still, I mean, you remember a lot of stuff, which was, what? 35 years ago?

1:06:55Glen ScantleburyYeah, 30-some years ago, yeah.

1:06:57Jawad MirYeah. Incredible.

1:06:58Glen ScantleburyNo, I... It was, you know, again, that was when my career was just beginning to sort of take off in the movie business after toiling away for about a decade in music videos and, you know, other c… in commercials. And not long after that, I actually connected up with David Fincher and did a bunch of commercials for him. When I, after Dracula, Francis t… told everybody that he was gonna take a year or two off. That's when he started his wine business and got that really starting to go.

1:07:26Jawad MirYeah.

1:07:26Glen ScantleburyAnd so I said, "Oh, shoot, I gotta go down to LA and find some other directors." And I had met David years before, and I think after he saw Dracula, he, "Oh, yeah, why don't you know, we'll, we'll do some stuff together." So I worked on a bunch of commercials with him, and that's where I met Michael Bay. I cut one of the Meat Loaf videos.

1:07:42Jawad MirGorubinski was there, too, I think, in that group.

1:07:44Glen ScantleburyYeah.

1:07:44Jawad MirRight? Yeah.

1:07:45Glen ScantleburyYeah, and, that's where I met Michael. He had me cut,.. Again, he loved Dracula, and he had me cut a Meat Loaf video, one of those really long, torturous Meat Loaf videos. And then, and then from there, I was able to, like, make my way in with LA directors.

1:08:04Jawad MirThat's great.

1:08:04Glen ScantleburyWhich at the time, interestingly enough, were all music video directors. All of the big directors of the '90s that came out of…

1:08:11Jawad MirYeah

1:08:12Glen Scantlebury... That, you know, became their, the directors we now know, were all music video directors, and they were all working out of Propaganda. And, if you knew people in Propaganda, you could be in the middle of, you know, what became four or five of the biggest ad directors in the business…

1:08:27Jawad MirYep

1:08:27Glen Scantlebury... Now. Yeah, very interesting.

1:08:30Jawad Mir100%.

1:08:30Glen ScantleburyAll right, well…

1:08:31Jawad Mir100%.

1:08:31Glen ScantleburyWell, let's do Con Air next, then. I'll do Con Air in the Sep… sometime in s… around be back in the US in sometime in September, and I'd be…

1:08:39Jawad MirSure

1:08:39Glen Scantlebury... Happy to do Con Air.

1:08:41Jawad MirI would love to. Thank you so much for sharing.

1:08:43Glen ScantleburyBut Simon West is another one of my favorite directors. I love Simon.

1:08:46Jawad MirSimon West was, is great, too. I really appreciate your time and your knowledge and everything that you've shared. I mean, I've, I've obviously on a, on a learning, a journey myself, so thank you so much for y… everything that you've shared.

1:08:59Glen ScantleburyOh, well, cheers.

1:09:00Jawad MirThank you so much.

1:09:01Glen ScantleburyHope this wasn't too long.

1:09:01Jawad MirLook forward to talking to you.

1:09:01Glen ScantleburyYou could always edit it down.

1:09:03Jawad MirNo, I'm not cutting anything down. I think, this is, this was great, and I look forward talking to you about Con Air and Francis Ford Coppola's next film. How do you pronounce it again? I'm gonna butcher it if I…

1:09:13Glen ScantleburyMegalopolis.

1:09:14Jawad MirMegalopolis. Megalopolis.

1:09:16Glen ScantleburyYeah.

1:09:16Jawad MirOkay, perfect. Thank you so much.

1:09:17Glen ScantleburyAll right. Well, cheers.