00:00The beginning and end of every sequence, it is either impact through a wall, impact on a table, impact through a mirror.
00:07Everything is happening in real time and it's being filmed.
00:11And it's a do-si-do between me and my stunties.
00:15There's something wrong with me.
00:20Just a void.
00:26It's an interesting thing to try and explain the void.
00:30It's this thing that Bob doesn't have control over and once he loses control over it, it becomes this all-powerful kind of wormhole-esque thing.
00:38And when you get taken into it, it's essentially an interwebbed series of endless rooms of places that you've experienced the most shame or grief in your life.
00:52We wanted the spaces to feel realistic.
00:55So when you first see it, you're not quite sure if it's a flashback or you're trapped in the memory.
00:59And then later on, you discover it's void spaces.
01:03And it's a deliberate design to make it feel boxed in as if they're trapped.
01:08Each character is trapped in their trauma memory.
01:11And it's pretty cool how Jake's designed it.
01:14It's almost like this eternal sunshine in the spot, this mind kind of Schenectady, New York fever dream.
01:21Just the encouragement to try to do something different, like Spike Jonze and Jonathan Glazer.
01:26There's an old Jonathan Glazer commercial, I think, for Levi's, where they're bursting through walls.
01:30There's explosions as they do that.
01:32And then, obviously, the sequence from being John Malkovich, of going into Malkovich's subconscious.
01:37It's like your mind is somewhere else.
01:41We are in one of the void rooms, and this is the forest set.
01:44It's one of the first void rooms that Yelena goes into.
01:47It is a flashback to when she was a child luring one of her friends into the forest to be then killed.
01:53And so it's sort of a nightmare of hers that she has to relive over and over and over.
01:57And ultimately, she has to bust through a wall to get out of here, which then takes her into another void nightmare room of her own.
02:03Starting from a practical base, like if you really see something happen and you can really make something happen, there's a kind of unpredictability and a magic to that.
02:12The transition between all these rooms is quite tricky because gravity shifts and is different in each room.
02:17And there's different rules in each room.
02:18So she starts this way, slams through a wall, and then gravity shifts, so now she's falling.
02:29And so as far as sizing and timing and how we needed to do that, we really had to prep, you know, with camera and stunt team and effects and everybody to be on par with that.
02:38Every team has to work together to do that, like, you know, Dan and Charles and the whole special effects team and Grace and Heidi and her whole team.
02:45You know, just the stunts and the practical execution, getting it all on camera takes so much coordination.
02:51They got to run from one side of a set to the other, and we had a fake wall prepped.
02:56And the moment I made impact, the whole thing broke and dust powdered everywhere.
03:01I mean, it's all different in every single room.
03:03So when she comes out of the training room, she dives through a mirror, and that mirror sends her, she's sick going this way.
03:08And once she dives through the mirror, she ends up coming up through the bathroom floor.
03:11So it's all very tricky and technical, but very, very cool.
03:15So because this connects directly to Yelena's bathroom void space, which she had to climb up into because we're doing all the practical transitions,
03:22and then we knew that we needed this to connect to the attic, we actually had to add height to the attic,
03:27also for some of the lighting elements from underneath, for what they're looking at, so that all of this could practically connect.
03:32This is actually, like, tied more into sees Bob in the mirror again, so that becomes motif.
03:38We built that bathroom set here, and also the training room set, so when she sees Bob in the mirror, that's all done practically,
03:43and he's actually in reflection.
03:45She kind of dims the lights in the bathroom and allows her, and in one shot, we sort of pan and dolly and push her into this space.
03:51It was really important that we didn't rely on CG for this sequence.
03:55We wanted it to feel real, and we wanted to use simple camera tricks.
03:59And even though they're simple, they are incredibly technical, in that you have to match these frames up perfectly
04:04to make it feel like we are blending this sequence together seamlessly.
04:08Something that we're doing on this movie that we've really never done before is we have an editorial department
04:12almost set up on set with us, so as we are filming, these shots are getting cut into an edit.
04:18That was really important for a sequence like this, where it's very important that we have these shots seamlessly blend together,
04:24so we were able to go to the monitor, make sure they match to make sure we can move on to the next thing.
04:31They are human beings more so than they are superheroes, and so in that way, they're much more relatable,
04:38and it lends itself to being shot in a very practical way.
04:41The sets built as much as possible, everything in camera as much as possible,
04:45the stories being told in a way that they're every man, they're every woman.
04:50We can all relate to them in every way possible.
04:53And even if it doesn't make the emptiness go away, I promise you it will feel lighter.
