'Con Air', Editor, Glen Scantlebury

0:00Glen ScantleburyThing you were supposed to see was when the blade cuts through in an amazing…

0:04Jawad MirOh, right

0:05Glen Scantlebury... When the propeller cuts through the middle of the…

0:08Jawad MirThe plane

0:09Glen Scantlebury... Plane and splits, Cyrus and, Nicolas Cage up. I think he was supposed to be killed in that shot, I'm not exactly sure, but I remember... As I remember, I'm pretty sure that's the last shot you see of him. And then they decided, no, it has to be a… another ending. And so, literally, they went back to Vegas and faked it so he comes out underneath in that little trapdoor underneath the plane, and then John Cusack and Nicolas Cage have to get on the two motorcycles. That was all staged, you know, three or four months later.

0:49Jawad MirHello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Kingdom of Dreams podcast. I'm your host Jawad Mir. Today, I s… had a pleasure of speaking to a great editor who I've already had on my sh… podcast couple of months ago. He, co-edited, Bram Stoker's Dracula, which was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and today I spoke to him about his work on Con Air, Simon West film, which was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, starred, John Malkovich, Nicolas Cage, and John Cusack, and even Dave Chappelle in his early days. It was an amazing conversation. Glenn really dove into it and talked about so many amazing things that I did not know about, and I really hope that you enjoy this conversation as a movie lover, as a movie buff, as a filmmaker, as a storyteller, or just as a regular audience member. Thank you so much. Enjoy this episode. Like I said, when we met, I saw it a few months ago, then I saw it again this morning, and, what a, what a great film.

1:51Jawad MirI mean, it still holds. You know, Simon West did an amazing job.

1:56Glen ScantleburyYou know, he was the first time director to... And it, he was, in Hollywood at that time, 1997, he was given the most money any first time director had ever been given to make their first film. It was $80 million. And, that was a lot back then. That's probably double. That's like getting 160 now probably. And, so it was pretty, you know, and he was pretty ambitious because he wanted to shoot it anamorphically, with anamorphic lenses. And, you know, those cameras are…

2:28Glen Scantlebury... More bigger and unwieldy, you know, and he had done a lot of commercials and music videos, so he's really aware of, you know, cameras and, you know, shooting, especially shooting commercials, you get more... The commercials, especially back in those days, shot, you know, there were more money put per second on screen than anything else in the world. So he had a lot of time where he had learned his trade well. But boy, to just all of a sudden jump onto the, you know, huge platform of doing an action picture out in the desert with the sandstorms and the plane and, you know, the helicopter chases, all that stuff was done live. There's no, in most of that stuff, there's no, visual effects. Even the plane, you know, I was noticing the plane had, like, that oil that... So one of the engines had, like, they put that, kind of that smoke was real. And I remember that when they were flying over Vegas, which they did in that plane, you know, people were looking up at the side going, "Oh my God, there's, there's a plane coming down," because they, you know, they had put smoke on the engine or something to make the, you know, burn off, you know, oil on the engine to create smoke.

3:43Glen ScantleburySo, you know, they... And that was, like, a real old, that was one of those great planes that, you know, you can drop, you know, Humvees out of, with parachutes and stuff, which Michael Bay did about 10 years later in one of the Transformer movies. I forget which one. I think it was the second one.

4:00Jawad MirProb… yeah, probably the first and second, because, so interesting thing is, so Con Air came out June 6,2… 1997. The Rock came out a year, exactly a year before that, June 6 or 7, one of those two days. And Nicolas Cage being the constant. One of the great things about, Con Air is a lot of directors have tried to, you know, sort of mimic, if you wanna use the word, of Michael Bay's style, and they haven't come close to it, because they're trying extra effort to do so. Simon has that element in there, like a lot of shots and the way the camera moves, but it just feel like, feels like it's his. It doesn't feel like Michael Bay's. And then the cuts and then, as you said, the, you know, the s… the sequences of the plane landing and the sandstorm and, I mean, that's, that's, g… that's crazy even in today's time. I mean, they probably won't even do it in today's time with the sandstorm. They'd probably just do…

4:57Glen ScantleburyYeah

4:57Jawad Mir... VFX.

4:59Glen ScantleburyYeah. You know, 'cause Simon had... It was funny. One time, Jerry Bruckheimer was in the room, and he would always bring, like, sort of celebrities or big people in the business to kinda, like, you know, look at what his latest movie that he was doing, right? And he would bring somebody in and I don't know who it was, but I remember him saying that he felt like Simon was shooting a classic John Ford Western type movie.

5:24Glen ScantleburyAnd I, and I thought, yeah. You know, 'cause having just worked on Michael Bay's film where, you know, everything was swinging cameras and, you know, you know, you hunt for these little... In Michael's, you've, you, the little chestnuts are in the camera going fwoom, and you catch it right at that moment, and you go, "Oh, that's perfect." But the rest of it is n… not usable. You know? So you have to hunt and peck through Michael's stuff to find all the right bits. And he'll do it for himself. You know, he'll, if you don't find it, he'll find it for you, 'cause that's the way he shoots it. He wants, he knows that's what you're gonna get out of it. And, you know, the way Simon shot is really beautifully was, you know, there's a lot of very composed shots. Just big, wide, sweeping. That's why he wanted to go anamorphic. It looked brilliant in the big screen for that. And, you know, and I think that is kinda his style, and then e… even in the cutting, you know, the cutting is what moves it, makes it faster. The, and like a Michael Bay film, it's the camera going in and out, which is…

6:24Jawad MirYeah

6:24Glen Scantlebury... Much, you know, motion and giving you a compelling, you know, moment. But in Simon's film, it was really, how it was, how he shot it and then how we cut it to create the pace. 'Cause that's the one thing I think I learned the most on that film, and it's working with Chris Lebenzon. He was, he came in after the, when we started the director's cut. He was working on, a Tim Burton movie. I think it was Mars Attacks!

6:55Jawad MirYeah.

6:55Glen ScantleburyAnd I remember going to see Mars Attacks! Like, you know, like the week before I met Chris for the first time. Going, "I gotta go see it." And I went to a screening at the, at the Chinese Man in, on Hollywood.

7:08Glen Scantlebury'Cause I think I was stay… I was living in San Francisco at the time, and I think I was down here, and I was staying at the Roosevelt Hotel, which was right across the street. So when I was working on Con Air, I was mostly there. And I remember saying to myself, "Shit, I gotta go and see this, you know, what he's done." And that was it. I went to one of the first screenings. It was a packed theater, and there was so much laughter. I thought that was gonna be the biggest hit of the year, if you had gone to that screening, and unfortunately it wasn't. But, you know, if you'd gone to that night, you would've thought so. But Chris, anyway, came in and, Steve left, and Chris came in, and Chris really has a good way of picking the right pieces. Another person, who was the post-production supervisor for Jerry for many years, who loved Chris and always was getting Chris on to get on the movies, even when he could only come on, like on Con Air, he could only come on when the director's cut started. He said, "You know, Chris always just picks the right pieces to start with."

8:12Glen ScantleburyAnd I always thought, yeah, that's a really, you know, take your time when you're first looking because in a movie like that, just even the airplane coming out of the hangar in the beginning, I remember that could've been a two or three-minute sequence at one point, the way it was cut. And it was like, yeah, but it's not the movie, you know? It's a great, a lot of plane…

8:33Jawad MirYeah

8:34Glen Scantlebury... 'cause they were all there. So there was so much beautiful film that Simon shot, that it really is a matter of what I kinda call direct editing, where you get right to the point of something, rather than try to just, in an action picture, than to set the scene too much. You just go right to the point. So it's a great one. The movie really takes off in the beginning. As soon as they get on the plane, they're, they're beginning to take out their stuff, and Pinball pulls out the thing out of his mouth, and it all happens so fast that's what makes it so exciting. Whereas you could've spent 10 more minutes in the plane just setting the whole thing up. Even when, John Cusack walks in, there was a whole long sequence with his, sandals to show that he was this weird guy that wore sandals with socks, which y… you know, Simon at that point, being English, thought that was the craziest thing you could do was to wear socks with sandals.

9:36Glen ScantleburySo he had this whole sequence of him walking through. You know, and again, it was just one quick beat. You see it, you get it, you laugh, you move on. And that's the way the whole movie kinda got twisted and condensed down to the, just the bare minimum necessary to keep propelling it. Like, the fight down below, with, Nicolas Cage and, the other guy when they're fighting over the bunny, that also, that fight went on for, could've been two or three minutes easily, and I was really surprised when I saw it again, that, yeah, it's only about 30, 40 seconds, and then he hits the thing that finally, you know, kills him.

10:16Jawad MirYeah.

10:16Glen ScantleburyAnd it's, but you know, one of the things that Simon would say, and Scott Rosenberg was a brilliant writer on, I think, the lines he put in are so, there's so many great, funny lines and setups. But one of the things that he did do often was he would just say, like on that scene, he'd say, "Nicolas Cage and this guy get into it, and it's the greatest fight ever." And then he just leaves it for the director to figure out what that is. So, you know, you know, so poor Simon had to go down into this fusel… the fuselage of a plane and figure out, okay, what can happen in here? There's a ramp, you know, they're gonna fight on that, but how's he gonna kill him? How, what's gonna happen? And so Simon came up with a lot of little clever ideas amongst the great material that he was given by Scott to make the film a great film.

11:09Jawad MirYeah, I mean, we're talking about all these action sequences, which, it, which are great in the film. But if, I mean, again, watching it this morning, we obviously, you worked on it, but you probably would've noticed the whole idea, the way the film began with the opening credits, like, it sets up, you know, Nicolas Cage's character and how he's trying to get home to his daughter. And you see that throughout the film, like with the bunny, with the letter, and it keeps coming back, and that, I feel, was the thread that knotted the action sequences in a very profound and meaningful way.

11:43Glen ScantleburyYeah, interestingly too, 'cause they didn't shoot him... They didn't have that opening in the beginning where, you know, sort of the… ... The military. Didn't have him getting his, kind of exit pa… you know, that scene where he's out in front with all the other people and they're all saying, "Okay, goodbye. You know, you're… you come." It started with him just coming on the boat and coming home, and they felt like they needed to set up that 'don't leave your buddy behind' thing in the military sequence in the beginning. So that was an… an additional shoot, at, you know, near the end, to make that. 'Cause again, Jerry's very good when he previews something. He really gets… learns from the audience what isn't working that he feels needs to work. And a lot of it's usually heroic stuff or, you know, something that, some tidbit of the storyline that if it's not clear, he'll wanna kinda clean it up in an additional shooting, thing. I mean, one interesting thing is the whole s… it was a film... Well, there's two things I think is really great about the film and… and one of it's, you know, like, it… it… it moved out from being, like, a buddy-buddy films of that earlier era.

12:54Glen ScantleburyEven The Rock is essentially, with Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage, is a buddy-buddy film. It has Ed Harris in there and there's some other characters. It's really kind of a buddy-buddy film. But this one is really a broad film where they bring in great character actors. Like, Steve Buscemi had just been in Fargo, and I think that's how…

13:11Jawad MirYes

13:11Glen Scantlebury... He was noticed by, Jerry and… and Simon, and they brought him in and said, "Oh, great. You can play this character." And Malkovich was al… I think always gonna be that char… But, you know, like Dave Chaparrel that, you know, that plays Pinball, I mean, he, you know, he has a great part and, you know, nobody even knew who he was at the time, but…

13:32Jawad MirYeah

13:32Glen Scantlebury... There was that kind of synergy at that time that… that Jerry said, "Let's make as m… get as many, you know, John Cusack, as many big stars as we can in this, and good actors, so that we can make it a multiple, you know, all these different storylines that… that kind of intersect and… and come together." But another thing too about it as being unique in an action picture is it kinda started the, I feel it did anyway, the kinda ending and then an ending and then an ending. Because literally the film ended when the plane crashed, and they got out and, you know, and they, Poe goes up to his wife and kisses her, and that was the end of the movie. There was not that final little chase scene. I think the last scene that you would've seen

14:25Jawad MirThe firetruck owner, John Malkovich, is on the firetruck and he's being chased by the…

14:28Glen ScantleburyYeah. The… the last thing you were supposed to see was when the… the blade cuts through in an amazing…

14:34Jawad MirOh, right

14:35Glen Scantlebury... When the propeller cuts through the m… the middle of the…

14:38Jawad MirThe plane

14:39Glen Scantlebury... Plane and splits, Cyrus and, Nicolas Cage up. I think he was supposed to be killed in that shot. I'm not exactly sure, but I remember, as I remember, I'm pretty sure that's the last shot you see of him. And then they decided, no, it has to be an… another ending. And so literally they went back to Vegas and… and faked it so he comes out underneath in… in that little trapdoor underneath the plane, and then John Cusack and Nicolas Cage have to get on the two motorcycles. That was all staged, you know, three or four months later, where all of a sudden they… they felt like they needed to get one more ending. You know, and now it just feels like there's five endings on a film and, in these action pictures, and it's too long for me. I just can't, stick with…

15:24Jawad MirYeah

15:24Glen Scantlebury... The feel of that. That was kinda stretch… We thought it was stretching it at the time when they went out and shot it. We were like, "Oh, God." And of course, you're editing and you're kinda thinking, "Okay, we finally got this movie together. Oh, no, you wanna shoot another 10-minute sequence that has to be just as exciting as the, you know, the last 10 minutes that you saw?" So

15:43Jawad MirYeah

15:43Glen Scantlebury... That was pretty, crazy to have to go and do. But, you know, again, that was the middle of the sorta '90s when they were first sort of expanding how big an action picture can be, how much money you'll spend on them. You know, if it wasn't a James Bond movie, they didn't spend as much on those kind of movies, and that was, you know, a very expensive movie for Disney Touchstone to do at the time.

16:08Jawad MirYeah. It's interesting you mentioned that, the final sequence, because I felt that was over. 'Cause, you know, i… in a, in a traditional action film, like, when you have a scene, like, where a plane lands or crashes into middle of Vegas strip, like, that's the climax. And then all of a sudden you see John Malkovich on top of the firetruck, and I was like, "Wait, what… what just happened?" It was like the anti-climax, right? And…

16:30Glen ScantleburyYeah

16:30Jawad Mir... It's kinda like in The Rock, which... And imagine in The Rock after those fighters, you know…

16:35Glen ScantleburyYes

16:35Jawad Mir... Shoots down i… where Nicolas Cage was, and imagine having another ending to that. That would've killed the film, because that was, like, a beautiful ending.

16:44Glen ScantleburyYeah.

16:44Jawad MirI mean, still Con Air was great, but it's just I felt that... I'm glad you mentioned it, because I felt the same way.

16:50Glen ScantleburyYeah, it's just funny how, you know, again, y… I don't, I don't, you know, and I don't know why Jerry did that. I'll tell you an interesting story, though. I was in the room…

16:57Jawad MirSure

16:58Glen Scantlebury... With Chris Lebenzon, and Jerry was trying to get some money out of…... Disney to go and shoot a bunch of stuff, 'cause he knew he needed an opening that he l… that was different than just coming off the boat and going into the bar and getting into the fight, and he knew he needed these little things, other things I can talk about. But, he brought us, he brought Chris and I into a room, and there was, I won't say who the head of the studio was at that time, but, or head of production, but he was there, and Jerry was going through this big list of all the additional, you know, pieces that he wanted. And he was sitting there going, "Okay, let's go through the list. Now, I got Glenn and Chris in here, and we'll go through the list together with you," th… this big producer guy and from Disney, "and we'll go through and we'll decide what, which ones we really need, right?" And the, and so the list was all Jerry's, you know, inserts and stuff. N… we hadn't added anything hardly, you know, 'cause, you know, when you're in a big action picture, you think, "Oh my God, why would we need that? There's so many other holes if you wanna really poke stuff at it."

18:00Jawad MirYeah.

18:01Glen ScantleburyBut Jerry had his set things, and so he starts going through the list and he goes, "Ah, let's see. Why do we need that?" The, he names off the first thing, some, you know, we need a mid-shot here, something. "Glenn, why do we need that shot?" And I was like, I just about out of my mouth said, "Well, you put it on the list, right?" And then I realized, oh no, this is like he's playing good cop, bad cop. I'm supposed to fumble for an answer, and if it's not good enough, he's gonna scratch it and say, "Okay, we don't need that one." And he literally did that. He literally went through this big list that he had, and he knew which ones he wanted to favor, so he didn't ask me. He would just say to himself, you know, "Well," to the, this big producer, "Oh, we need this because we've gotta fix this problem. Remember we saw that in the, in this preview?" And, but then if there was, like, one that he was kinda, like, staging as, like, one of the throwaways to give this producer a bone to say, "Well, I went back and I got him to cut a third of his shots out," those were the ones he would say to me or to Chris. And I kinda went, afterwards, I walked out and I said to Chris, "Did we just get ambushed in that meeting? What was that?"

19:02Glen ScantleburyAnd he goes, "Yeah, that's what he does." You know, he works it so that, you know, makes us look like the bad guys asking for all these shots, and then he gets the, you know, he reads the room. He's seeing that the producer's going, "Okay, no, we've gotta cut more of this. That's not enough," you know? And he kinda reads what he's gonna get. But so the ending was all shot, the beginning, and also the Lerner Airfield, the bit where they come, the military comes down that, in that, down that road with all the dead airplane parts…

19:37Glen Scantlebury... The boneyard they call it, that was all, that was all additional shooting too, 'cause originally, it was more, less happened. I think what happened was, if I recall, there was some second unit stuff shot, and it, the people that were supposed to be coming, they were kinda like rednecks with, like, beer and guns coming out their windows, and shotguns. It was really kind of not, it's not what Simon wanted either, 'cause it was all second unit shooting. So they threw it all out and tried, we tried to cut the movie without any kind of, anybody coming. And so it just sort of went after Poe and John Cusack had their little meet in the, under the airplane hangar where he beats up three guys, but one guy's still in the plane.

20:23Jawad MirYeah.

20:23Glen ScantleburyPoe goes to get the, goes into the gas station, and then somehow the other guy, some, you know, the drug cartel guy, runs back in and they just take off. And then, so there wasn't this other element of somebody else, you know, danger coming at them. And so they went back and set up that whole boneyard again, and came up with this idea, you know, and again, I was sitting there going, "Oh God, we need to, you know, cut more..." You're, you're so dying at that point, you know, eight months into cutting a movie, that you're going, "Oh God, do we really need that?" But again, I think it's kind of fun because, you know, it was another tricky thing for them to do, to open up all the, you know, liquid gas, you know, to, like, set up an explosion and then cut them off. And, so it was just funny. And then, you know, Simon even said, "I don't even know why we're doing this joke about when they, when they have the, when Cyrus lines up the different parts on the, on the ground, and then the one tall guy goes, you know, and he's saying, 'Okay, we're here.' The, you know, 'The cars are coming here, and the plane is here.' And then the, this other guy goes, 'But what's that?' And then Cyrus goes, 'Ah, it's a rock.'" You know, and it got a huge laugh, and I thought it was funny, but, you know, Simon found it, he didn't even think it was funny, you know?

21:42Glen ScantleburyIt was sort of like, "Oh, why are we doing this?" And I said, "Well, I think that's actually funny." And it always got a big laugh in the theater. But, you know, so that was all additional shooting. It was probably done in, I don't know, probably April. Like, not that, you know, that was a fast movie that shot up until Christmas, and then had a very fast, furious, amount of, you know, editing and visual effects work. Because the, I was also thinking the Vegas strip was, there's the plane that's flying over, you know, where you actually…

22:22Jawad MirYeah

22:22Glen Scantlebury... In Vegas, and that's a real plane. And then there's, when it starts to land, they actually built the strip, on a, some visual effects company, I can't remember their name, built this long on a, on some sort of a airplane runway, somewhere north of LA. They commandeered it for a couple months and actually built, like, this whole strip. And the plane was, oh, it was probably 15 feet, it was probably 15 feet wide, and, you know, it was a real, they were real big models. That's back in the days when they used to do that kind of stuff. For the weight and for the feel of it. And when it's breaking through, you know, different buildings all the way down, they're all, you know, buildings that were built. But what was funny was they had a windstorm, like, in February, and most of it got knocked down before they shot anything. And, you know, and I remember the visual effects people going, "Oh my God." Or the v… the special effects people going, "Oh my God, what do we do?

23:24Glen ScantleburyIt's just all fucking come down and we've gotta rebuild it in two weeks, and it's taken two months just to..." And I was, like, going, "Wow, where is it?" And I actually went up to look at it, 'cause I was so, when they actually were shooting some of pieces of it, 'cause I was just so amazed to see that they had this big lumbering plane that, you know, was on these pulleys, and they were doing all this stuff practically. And, it was pretty cool. I thought that added to it. The last, the only thing that wasn't, that was done in Vegas besides flying over it, they did crash into that actual casino, because they were gonna tear that casino down. And so…

24:03Glen Scantlebury... They were allowing him to be, before they started to do the demolition, they allowed him to crash into that kinda entrance area. And I can remember sitting there one night with Simon, 'cause we got pretty friendly, 'cause i… we were... Back in those days, you sent a director something every couple of days what you've been cutting. So I'd gotten to know him during the shoot really well. And so when, by that time they were having us come out to show him stuff and to make sure he had all the pieces that he needed at this thing. So I'd cut something, and then we'd, I'd fly out in a evening, and then show him the next, you know, that evening or the next, because they were doing night shoots. And then the next morning I'd fly back and then cut, and then two days later fly back and show him more stuff. And, at one point I was sitting there watching them try to m… take this plane, and it goes over, you can see it too, it goes over water. There's a water feature out in front of the lobby, and it kinda…

24:58Glen ScantleburyThey had a pulley that w… was a big, you know, airplane wire, I don't know what kinda thing, to, that pulls airplanes around, and it had a big pulley system so that a truck was going the opposite way of the plane, so as the idea was this p… this, and the, they oversold it to Simon, because he's sitting there telling me, "They say it's gonna go 40 miles when..." 'Cause he really wanted to be fast when it into there. He says, "They say it's gonna go," I don't know, 25, 30. I forget what he said, but fairly fast. And I looked at it and I saw this setup, but I'm going, "How is this truck that's like a, you know, is like a dump truck or something, is gonna m… go fast enough this way to pull this plane, which was only about 30, 40 feet from where it was gonna end up, how is it gonna get the momentum to get up to that speed?" And it's kinda, we ended up having, it went about five miles an hour when it actually did it. Five, maybe 10 at the most. So we had to speed stuff up, and there's a lot of…

25:58Jawad MirYeah

25:58Glen Scantlebury... To see. What he really wanted was, like, one kinda shot that showed you going over the water feature and just right into it, but it turned out to be quite a few shots a… to make it kinda work. But, you know, again, that's what I thought was, at that time when I was just sorta getting into the real Hollywood movie business, it was cool to see big practical stuff done practically, and now I don't think anybody would ever do that. Now they just say, "Oh, it's CG, the whole thing."

26:27Jawad MirYeah. Well, which is interesting you say that, because when the plane comes into Vegas and you see the stratosphere and the whole s… city, but then there's that shot with a shot upwards of that, I mean, normally I would say, think it's, like, a Hard Rock guitar. Hard Rock Cafe

26:44Glen ScantleburyIt's, Hard Rock. It's, Hard Rock had just come out.

26:45Jawad MirThe ri…

26:46Glen ScantleburyAnd that was the guitar.

26:46Jawad MirRight. Yeah, and then it hit the guitar, and I'm thinking in my head, because it looks so real, that they actually did that. B… and then the whole thing, you know, there's some small elements which look like when the plane was about to land that you could maybe figure out that it's not 100%, authentic in terms of the real size plane. But, yeah, when what's going and into the lobby and hits the Corvette, I think it was, or a Porsche, I forget, I mean, that just looked crazy. It just looked, even watching it on my, I have an anamorphic monitor

27:18Glen ScantleburyOh, right

27:18Jawad Mir... 32 inch And just watching it on that, it's just so, I can't even explain to you. I mean, it's just amazing.

27:26Glen ScantleburyOh, the Hard Rock, that was a prop. Again, that was part of this street that they built. So, you know, that guitar was probably, you know, at least eight feet tall. It was pretty good size for the plane…

27:40Jawad MirYeah

27:40Glen Scantlebury... That came in and crashed into it. And all that's to scale. I forget what they called it. They, maybe they called it, you know, one-tenth scale, but it was bigger than anything I had ever, like, seen built, you know, for a visual effects thing. I mean, there's just one funny shot when they went back in to shoot, the boneyard and that, you know, that, the setup where they have all the explosions and they're fighting the soldiers that come down. They also had the tr… they had, they had the car there again, 'cause they wanted, Simon wanted to reshoot the car coming in. 'Cause it had to go down that bone, they had to set up the boneyard.

28:20Glen ScantleburyGet the Corvette back out, have it drive down that road so you tie it all in. And just one little shot, 'cause this was Simon, it was classic Simon. He goes, "I want, like, it to, we wanna reveal it by a boot that comes out." And, so you go behind this old beat up boot, and then you see the car. It didn't end up that way, because it, s… s… could be because Jerry wanted to come down the boneyard first, so you really established the boneyard. So you got this se…

28:45Jawad MirYeah

28:45Glen Scantlebury... But you can still see that shot. It's a backup shot now, where as I remember it, at first it was supposed to be you pan off this boot and you'd come out and you'd see the car coming towards you. In the end, it's kind of a backup shot where he decides he's gonna go into this little s… shed to hide the car. So it's a backup shot. But you see that boot. Well, that boot, you know, he ha… he brought that in… 'Cause I said, "Oh, that's really cool. How'd you get, how'd you get such a cool shot with the boots in focus?" And he goes, "It's a big boot." And I said, "Really?" And he brought it in, and the boot was, like, this big. It was…

29:17Jawad MirOh, wow.

29:18Glen ScantleburyYeah, to get that shot right, get everything in perspective, you know. And he was really good at that. I think it was his, some of his commercial training, because he had... One of the things he was, had won Clios for at the time was the original Bud Frog, commercials. You may, you may not be old enough to know but originally in the mid, in the early '90s, they, Budweiser made a frog that would go, "Bud."

29:47Jawad MirOh, yeah. I know.

29:49Glen ScantleburyYeah.

29:49Jawad MirI know what you're talking about. I've seen those. Yeah.

29:50Glen ScantleburyHe cut those. He shot those. Those are... And again, those are all, you know, again, on a big miniature set essentially. It's li… you think it's, y… you might, "Oh, could you do it on something the table size?" No, that was, like, a huge, you know, in a stage that was a huge room that they built that. So he was good at the perspective and knowing, you know, what you could shoot and how you would need to get it, on, so pretty amazing. He had a great eye. I always thought Simon had a great eye. Always knew where to, you know, where he wanted the camera to be. And it was difficult. Inside the plane I was, they shot the plane in Hollywood, the interior stuff…

30:29Glen Scantlebury... Of the plane. That was shot on Stuart Street in Hollywood. And…

30:32Jawad MirRight

30:33Glen Scantlebury... We were cutting right by there. So I would go down every morning just to say hi to him, see what's going on. And, I remember one day in there, and I think they were trying to do Pinball's thing and, you know, just getting a camera down underneath. They kept, keep cutting out places in the... 'Cause originally it was a real plane there, but they had to keep cutting out pieces of it in order to push the camera down far enough, so with the big anamorphic lens, which is, like, this big, you could ac…

31:02Jawad MirYeah

31:03Glen Scantlebury... You know, get the shot that he wanted. It was difficult. And also in the Corvette, getting shots of John Cusack, very difficult. So, and so he went a little bit over. I think that's w… one of the things that was hard for the studio to swallow is, you know, all action pictures you go over, and in this case they went over a couple weeks of shooting just because of the, how hard it was to get not only all those actors together, but they also had to do their little ad libs. And this was another interesting thing that I learned on that movie, was there's, there were a lot of good actors with good ad libs. There were, you know, Steve Buscemi, he's a fabulous ad liber. John Cusack had a bunch of ad libs that he added throughout the movie. I don't think, I think that was the, and Pinball had a bunch of stuff. They all had, like, their things. Malkovich didn't. I think Malkovich pretty much that was, he performed what was there because he knew that's what you wanted and you needed.

32:05Glen ScantleburyBut everybody else was throwing in stuff. But, you know, we, as you edited through it, you almost threw out everything that was an ad lib because… ... When you really get down, the ad libs are funny on the day, and everybody thinks they're funnier than the script because they've, you know, they've been shooting the script for, you know, half a day or whatever. Then all of a sudden they go, "Okay, let me do a few ad libs." And then everyone does the ad libs and they go, "Oh, that's even funnier than the script." Well, it's not in the end, and you have to get rid of all those, and it's hard. And John Cusack came in to see the film and, 'cause the al… the actors always get a chance to see a film before they have to loop.

32:43Jawad MirYeah.

32:44Glen ScantleburyJerry's always holding them back, when I worked for him anyway, I don't know how he does now. But he was always trying to not let them see it because he didn't wanna lose them in case they didn't like anything or something. And he, so he…

32:55Jawad MirYeah

32:55Glen Scantlebury... So finally he's gotta show John Cusack, 'cause he's gonna come in and loop. And John comes in and goes, "Where are all my ad libs?" To Jerry. And Jerry goes, "I don't know. What ad libs? I, do, did they, did the editors miss your great ad libs?" You know, again, throwing us under the bus. And he goes, he goes, "Yeah, you missed them all." And he goes, "Well, look, we'll give you..." And he literally gave John Cusack a set of dailies. I think we had to, like, have a, an assistant go through for two days and pull out everything that John Cusack shot, and gave him a chance to write these elaborate notes. And he had his spreadsheet, and he had all these notes for us, and it was like, "Oh my God." And I just remember getting these, this big, you know, bank of notes, a big book, and going, "Oh my God, he's gone through every scene, and he's added every little ad lib he's ever done on this movie." And we cut, we've cut them all out. And so I, Jerry said, "Well, just try a few." You know, and so I tried a few. We showed it to him. He goes, "Oh, that sucks.

33:55Glen ScantleburyThat sucks. Get rid of that. Get rid of that. We can't have that in there." And I said, "Well, Jerry, these are all of the ones that he's saying are the, you know, we think are the best ones of all the ones he's done." He goes, "Well, we can't do them. We just have, we won't do any of them." So literally it was, like, a thing for poor John to go through and find all this great stuff, and then it, none of it was in.

34:15Jawad MirYeah.

34:15Glen ScantleburyAgain, because of the time. And you just find that, you know, in most cases what was in the script w… was what you need, because it tells more stories than one. Like Buscemi's line about the band, you know, playing this song of a, you know. I mean, what better line could you have than that, right?

34:35Jawad MirYeah.

34:36Glen ScantleburyYou know, the band playing the song that they d… killed in a plane crash was just like... You know, so there were just genius lines that, Scott Rosenberg had in the script. He was a very good writer, especially of the sort of comic but personality elements that he gave each character. So they had a funny line, but it also showed their personality. And, he's, he was a good writer for that. And so literally we had to go through and cut out most of everybody's ad libs. The s… the funny scene in the scene with Buscemi and the little girl

35:13Glen Scantlebury... Screened it. We had, one, public, you know, sort of preview screening, and again, it was for Jerry to th… be able to then go back to the studio and say, "We need another five million bucks to fix all this and this and this." And so when we screened it, I will say this, Michael Eisner, who was running the studio at the time, was sitting literally right in front of... I was sitting with Chris, and we had the post-production supervisor, who was an ex-Disney employee, was sitting with us, and we were sort of... You know, we had the dial where you're, you know, for the sound because, you know, you f… we'd learned you don't give it to the director, because as soon as the director has it's up to 10 for the whole movie, right? You know?

35:57Glen ScantleburyAnd so I had it or Chris and I, we both had it. Anyway, we're sitting there, and Michael Eisner's, in a reserved seat, is sitting right in front of us with his wife. And when that scene started to come on, the... I didn't really notice it, but the post-production supervisor, who knew the whole Disney thing, kept looking at the wife going, "Oh, no. Oh, no. This scene's gonna get so cut down," because she's just, you know, you know, freaking out about what's gonna happen to the little girl, right? And Jerry always wants to make sure that, you know, women wanna come to his movies. He never makes them so, you know, hard-edged that, you know, he loses that audience. He wants to make it a date film. So, you know, sure enough, as soon as the screening was over, the post-production supervisor looked at me and went, "Oh my God, we're gonna have to hack out most of that Buscemi scene, because the, all, everybody in the audience is just thinking, for the rest of Learner Airfield, 'What happened to that little girl? What's gonna happen?'"

36:56Jawad MirYep.

36:56Glen ScantleburyAnd that was a whole bit longer, and so interesting, when I watched it this time, I was surprised that we had still left, there's, like, f… four beats that you go to her and him. The set up, then they sit down and they have tea or, you know, and then they start to sing the song, and then he leaves and you wonder what happens, and then you see her. So there's, like, five beats in there to create that little thing. And I think there were five beats in orig… they were just longer. Like, the tea scene, just where they're sipping tea, I,.. It just goes o… It was just... Because Steve would say these funny things to her and, you know, and they were, it was great. It was really funny. But you just realize, no, you have to s… you can only stay on that scene the least amount, rather than the most amount. And in general, that's what I learned from that movie and doing action p… pictures, is that funny enough, it's this, you wanna get through a m… an action scene kind of as fast as you can, getting all the great shots in, as opposed to double cutting it and doing things that when you're an independent filmmaker and world, you take one shot and you cut it four times into the thing.

38:04Glen ScantleburyYou don't do that in a big action picture like that. You use each shot once, and only go back to it if you absolutely don't have another angle to show the next beat, would you ever use something twice. And that's why it makes it ferocious feeling, because you realize you have all these, you know, even as a viewer, you see all these great shots that are showing all this great action. But, you know, you never get bored, because it's always a new angle showing the next beat. And, that's…

38:33Jawad MirYeah

38:33Glen Scantlebury... That's another kind of one of my, I kinda learned again on that movie, was, ca… I called it beats per minute. And I realized that the faster you get through beats per minute, the more exciting the movie is. I think Chris Nolan says it's like falling forward. You wanna... I think I heard him say it once.

38:53Jawad MirYeah.

38:54Glen ScantleburyAbout that, where he said, "Yeah, you wanna feel like you're stumbling forward, that you don't quite, you don't hang on any shot long enough, an action sequence, so to really get a handle on what's going on. You wanna keep stumbling forward through the sequence, to kinda go, 'Whoa.'" And, I call it beats per minute, that you wanna have enough beats per minute in there that nothing languishes, but it just keeps driving forward. And, 'cause I was, I was surprised, 40 minutes in and you're in Learner, y… you're, they're, they're doing the, exchange and Steve Buscemi comes on in 40 minutes, and there's a lot that goes on in that pre-40 minutes to get to that point.

39:32Jawad MirYeah.

39:32Glen ScantleburyHe appears, and then all hell breaks loose. But…

39:36Jawad MirYeah. And, you know, sort of talking about three things, and one being that scene with the little girl, I genuinely feel when I was watching it, even though I had seen it a couple of months ago, you know, like, I was still concerned for the safety of the girl, when you see the broken cup, right?

39:53Glen ScantleburyYep.

39:53Jawad MirAnd then there's all this action s… stuff happen, then you forget about it, and then you see her running when the plane takes off, and you have this relief. 'Cause I think that is pr… in the entire film, that entire tension with Steve Buscemi's character, because, you know, he's one of those characters that is literally a butcher. The way you guys crafted that, oh man, it's just, it's just amazing. Like, I think that stood out for me the most, the tension and, like, not knowing what happened to her, but as soon as you see her, like, oh, she's fine, you know?

40:26Glen ScantleburyYeah.

40:26Jawad MirAnd that relatability and that empathy really connects. And, you know, another thing that we didn't talk about and, the, it's probably the most under…

40:36Glen ScantleburyThat plane is flying over her, too. That's not, again, not…

40:39Jawad MirYeah

40:40Glen Scantlebury... Sweet.

40:40Jawad MirNot VFX.

40:41Glen ScantleburyNo. Yeah.

40:43Jawad MirThe underrated thing about this film is the score by Mark Mancina and Trevor, Rab… Rabin. Amazing score. I've spoken to Mark, I've spoken to Mark Mancina a couple of times, and he had a story about Jerry Bruckheimer when he was working on Bad Boys. You know how he just…

40:57Glen ScantleburyYeah

40:57Jawad Mir... Comes and sits with a newspaper and he just, like, tries to, like, you know, doesn't bother you, but he would listen to it, like, "Okay, that's garbage, and that's garbage." but what a great score, and it really plays into the film's narrative really well.

41:13Glen ScantleburyYeah, we d… we had heavy metal music in there, because that's the flavor that they wanted. That's, like, partly why they brought Trevor in, 'cause, you know…

41:21Jawad MirYeah

41:21Glen Scantlebury... He was like a lead guitarist, and he was in Yes, the later renditions of the band Yes, and w… co-wrote one of their big hits in the '80s, which was called O… Owner of a Lonely Heart. So he had been, like, a big rock star in, I think, South, Amer… South Africa, and then he joined Yes, and then he was in Hollywood. And I think he was sort of hanging out with Hans Zimmer, if I recall. He might've been set up by Hans. Hans brought him over for something. And so, when Jerry said this had to have a real heavy metal score, he wanted to bring a guitarist in to kinda give that, you know, heavy metal rock sound, which Trevor does really well. But together, those two also brought in all those crushing as rhythm…

42:10Jawad MirYeah

42:10Glen Scantlebury... Sections pretty early on in that era of trying to blend sound effects with music. Th… a lot of that is them… The sound effects guy too, I forget his name now, did a really great job, though, of making all of the sounds of the airplane and all of the things. But the mu… there's some musical elements of a kind of a pounding, almost Nine Inch Nails sound of a.

42:36Jawad MirYeah.

42:37Glen ScantleburyThat's part of the sound, the music track, which is very…

42:40Jawad MirIt's a very, it's a y… it's a very unique track. And, y… you know, I was reading, it's kinda like off topic, I was reading... I don't know how much truth there is to it, but I was reading some fun facts about Con Air. One of them was funny, the other one was sad. I'll talk about the funny one, that how in France they had to rename the film to The Wings of Hell, because "con" in French means apparently dumb. I don't know.

43:06Glen ScantleburyOh, yeah.

43:06Jawad MirBut the, so it, Wings of Hell. Like, I mean, that's an interesting name. But also one thing that I read, and you can correct me if this is not correct, there was a individual name, I think he was a welder, his name was Phil Schwartz. He has a model of an airplane fall on him, and he passed away. Is that accurate informa… story?

43:27Glen ScantleburyThat may be. I'm, I'm not entirely, couldn't, couldn't verify that.

43:32Jawad MirOkay. We'll leave it at that, then. We will consider it as not verifiable. So I just read it somewhere, and it was…

43:38Glen ScantleburyYeah

43:38Jawad Mir... It was kind of sad to read that.

43:40Glen ScantleburyTrue. There's sad things that can happen on a big movie like that when, again, when everything is practical. I mean…

43:46Jawad MirYeah

43:47Glen Scantlebury... Watching that plane go crashing into the, into the, you know, entranceway of that, Vegas building was pretty crazy. I mean, it, once it started to move, you know, you didn't know what was gonna... I think the first time it, if I recall, it, I think the cable actually broke, so it got about halfway through the, that water feature, and then it was stuck in the water feature, and then they had to re-hook it up again to get it to go the rest of the way. So I mean, you know, and but when that thing broke, it flew, right? And it would've flown around the b… the pulley and come out the other side, and the truck would've gone, whoa, you know. Anything, you know. So there's some da… it's a dangerous business. So…

44:36Jawad MirYeah, and you know, just to s…

44:39Glen ScantleburyI think…

44:39Jawad MirYeah, no, I agree. And at, one of the things, just to wrap it up, the fact that it ended in that, you know, Vegas strip, had it been some other city, I mean, maybe New York would've probably had a similar effect, like Manhattan, but it just wouldn't have that same effect. To have it land in the city of lights and, you know, gambling and all that, which, you know, everybody goes to, and it's like up, everybody's up until, like, God knows when, 5:00 AM, 4:00 AM. But just to see that, it was a very starking contrast to how the place is versus what happened, and I thought that was really well... If it was written in the script, that's fabulous.

45:14Glen ScantleburyYeah, no, it did, really well done. And again, like I f… I said, that blending, you know, really large practical model work with, you know, the real thing and flying it around the scene, so you had these great shots of it at sunset, pretty amazing. And the stuff in the, Grand Canyon also was pretty hairy, because those three helicopters, it's all live. They're all flying.

45:39Jawad MirYeah.

45:39Glen ScantleburyYou know, Malkovich is really there, you know, at the back of the plane with that thing open. I think he has, like, you know, obviously has rope…

45:48Jawad MirA harness on, yeah.

45:49Glen ScantleburyThis is... But he's there, so I mean, you know, it's, you know, phenomenal. And just all of the way the helicopters were flying all around. There's a lot of footage. Again, it had to be all truncated to get to the real beats and the m… mo… keep the momentum going. But, you know, you could've cut a, you know, a 10-minute sequence just of all of the maneuverings all those planes did. And of course the shots were, a lot of the shots were added, but the actual vehicles flying around are all real.

46:19Jawad MirYeah.

46:19Glen ScantleburyAnd that plane really went through a lot of locations and had to fly around quite a bit. It was a real thing to get that plane up, if I recall, just, working and making sure it was gonna fly and do all that it needed to do. It was pretty great.

46:37Jawad MirYeah.

46:37Glen ScantleburyWell, you know, I…

46:37Jawad MirAmazing

46:37Glen Scantlebury... The thing that I think also that S… Scott did a really good job was working out the mechanics of, you know, what the transponder, how they, how they were gonna fake the other guys to follow somebody else, and do it in a really fun way with Pinball going and talking to the girl and, you know. It just, he made, he had good character beats for every plot point that needed to be done. So I just think in that sense, it's a, it's a master class of how to write an action picture, to have it all kinda work out and be, you know. I mean, like, the Steve Buscemi character never touches anybody, right? And yet…

47:21Jawad MirYeah

47:21Glen Scantlebury... He's the menacing guy in the whole thing And yet all he did was just the way he appeared in that outfit and the way he was set up, you think, "Oh my God, he's..." You know. But he doesn't do anything to anybody the whole time. In the end, it's very funny 'cause that was an additional shoot too when they went back to Vegas. They brought Steve back to... They said, "Oh, let's put..." 'Cause then you didn't really see what happened to Steve, so they said, "Oh, let's have him pretend like he's, you know, he's now playing, you know, the sl… not slot machines, roulette," right?

47:51Glen ScantleburyAnd, so that's just a great little moment, and that actually is Scott Rosenberg, who's the dealer, who's saying, "Okay, who's betting? What bet…"

47:58Jawad MirOh.

47:59Glen ScantleburyThat's him. They brought him in just for a little cameo. So that's a funny little…

48:04Jawad MirThat's cool.

48:05Glen ScantleburyYeah.

48:05Jawad MirThat's so cool. You know, that's incredible. Glenn, listen, you know, this is, as usual, amazing set of stories. I'm glad that you shared so much information. Wonderful film. And you know, that's... Again, it's like one of those, that movie I even remember when it came out, Con Air and The Rock a year apart, are probably two of the most best action movies in the top 10 in my view because nowadays the action movies that are made, they don't have that heart. They don't have that, you know, that s… that every character... I mean, they do, but not that effectively, that every character has a goal, you know…

48:43Glen ScantleburyYes

48:44Jawad Mir... To be where they wanna be, and i… it's missing from nowadays movies, so I really enjoyed Con Air again, watching it after a couple of months and then after a lot of years.

48:52Glen ScantleburyYeah. Well, cool.

48:53Jawad MirYeah.

48:53Glen ScantleburyWell, it's always nice to talk to you.

48:56Jawad MirAwesome. Would love to do another one whenever you're ready for another episode or anything that you wanna chat.

49:02Glen ScantleburyHey, Nick, are you a Tom Waits fan at all?

49:05Jawad MirWhich... Who, what has he done?

49:07Glen ScantleburySinger-songwriter.

49:09Jawad MirOh, no. I, but I would love to. I mean, I can, I can well,... Bring myself up to speed to him.

49:14Glen Scantlebury'Cause that's the film that was the first film ever digitally cut on video, in 1987. That's the, one of my…

49:23Jawad MirWhat's the, what's the name of the film?

49:24Glen ScantleburyBig Time, and it's a concert feature of Tom Waits, the singer-songwriter.

49:30Jawad MirOkay.

49:30Glen ScantleburyYeah. We…

49:31Jawad MirI'll take a, I'll take a look at it. I mean, I'll definitely watch it, and we can chat about that. I'm always interested in new stuff, so that's awesome.

49:38Glen ScantleburyAll right. Well, nice to talking to you, as always.

49:41Jawad MirThank you, Glenn. Have a good one.