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00:00Science fiction storytelling exists from the beginning of filmmaking and persists through
00:09two centuries.
00:10In the early 80s, there was this wonderful explosion of highly imaginative, highly ambitious
00:17science fiction.
00:18Suddenly all sorts of stories that were prohibitive because technologically they weren't possible
00:23were suddenly possible now.
00:24When I think of science fiction, I think of stories in any medium that tell us what we
00:31could be and warn us about where we're going.
00:38Escaping when you're a little kid or a teenager into the world of science fiction is a great
00:44way to start to come to terms with your own personality, who you are, where you fit in
00:49the world.
00:50And they become really important benchmarks in how you remember your youth.
00:56For the next decade or so across the 80s, that amalgamation of science fiction and fantasy
01:03seemed to be the driving force.
01:07Science fiction became direct, straightforward, provocative, clear.
01:12Any idea that anybody had, if you set it on another planet or set it in the future or set
01:19it in dystopia, you could get the money to do it.
01:22Art shows us what can be and what ought to be.
01:26Art is what science fiction, at its best, is all about.
01:32Is showing us the world of tomorrow and how human life can be better in the future than
01:40it is right now.
01:42That's the magic of sci-fi now.
01:45This genre has always been about the expansion of our ideas and how we relate to one another,
02:05our social elements, our social structure, even elements that we should be more mindful
02:10of and even dismantle.
02:12Why do we have to take them?
02:14Why can't they go to Russia or someplace like that?
02:16No, I'll drink to that.
02:17In the 50s, sci-fi was an extension of science and science was all about the atom and the atom
02:26was all about they're going to blow us up or we're going to have a wonderful future because
02:31of our friend the atom.
02:32The people doing these science fiction films in the 80s, they cut their teeth on 50s sci-fi.
02:41But what they did is they said, we love sci-fi for what it represents, the post-atomic scare
02:46that stimulated so many of these low budget Saturday matinee type movies.
02:52They really impacted us as children, but in a different way than films now.
02:57In the 70s, films tend to be more socially conscious, more artistically presented.
03:03But let's take a B movie and just do it as though we're doing an art film without a happy ending.
03:14And it's something that really drove James Cameron as a filmmaker, nuclear war.
03:18And that whole idea is in all his films.
03:21It's a background to Skynet and the Terminator.
03:25It's there in Aliens.
03:27I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.
03:33And it's a motif in Cameron films, the mushroom cloud.
03:36And by Terminator 2, you get that shocking dream sequence.
03:41And it really was in your face by that point.
03:43It wasn't a metaphor anymore.
03:44It really was James Cameron going, this is what it's going to be like, people.
03:48Do you know exactly what your family would do if an attack came?
03:56On the other side of it, you got parables like threads, which was made in Britain,
04:02about what happens if a nuclear attack actually went off.
04:05The real threat of nuclear Armageddon was never very far away.
04:13So when the day after comes out, it took what was an existential fear for me and it gave it visuals.
04:21It won't be pretty, it won't be fast.
04:25I mean, the lucky ones will die outright.
04:28Nothing on network television like this had ever been shown.
04:33If you have a nuclear war, this is what it's going to be like on a good day.
04:39The day after was a huge television phenomenon.
04:49It showed that you could do the darker story.
04:52It was painful to watch because the radiation was definitely going to get to us and kill us at some point.
04:58The day after is the most watched movie made for television ever.
05:03It was a hundred million people watched it in one night.
05:06So I was quite stunned.
05:08I think the what if genre is definitely a sci-fi genre.
05:16And there is a sci-fi veneer to anything about bombs going off.
05:20Nuclear war.
05:21It definitely falls into the sci-fi category.
05:24At least until it happens.
05:27Miracle Mile.
05:29Listen, I'm just a guy who picked up the phone.
05:34It was a famous script.
05:36Everybody's talked about this script.
05:38It's an audacious movie made for, I think, $1.98 at night.
05:42To me, it was like early Spielberg.
05:44This can't be true.
05:46It can't be true.
05:47It can't be true.
05:49It can't be true.
05:50What would you do if you were the only person to know that you have 70 minutes to live?
05:56The Rube Goldberg thing in Miracle Mile is that he decides to quit smoking.
06:02So he throws his cigarette down and a pigeon picks it up.
06:06Lays down to take a nap to meet his new found love at midnight.
06:10And the power goes off and he's three hours late.
06:13Just missed her.
06:14Here, hand me your noodle.
06:16My alarm didn't go off.
06:18The power went out in the hotel.
06:20This movie really starts going when the phone rings.
06:23What exactly are you talking about?
06:27I'm talking about nuclear fucking war.
06:30Who is this?
06:31What would you do if you accidentally got that phone call and you just know that it's coming?
06:36By getting people to really think about that and reflect on it, it affects decision-making in the real world.
06:44It's always walking that tightrope of, is this happening? Am I crazy?
06:48So he was calling from a missile silo.
06:51He said that they were locked in 50 minutes and counting.
06:54The real time when the clock started counting down, it's a fabulous convention.
07:00Condoms? We won't be needing these.
07:02We gotta repopulate a whole planet.
07:04The interesting thing was the odd people in it and the love story within it.
07:09Trust me with this.
07:11With what?
07:13I love you.
07:15By the end, it's sort of one of the iconic images.
07:18This river of cars in human chaos.
07:25It was pretty crazy for us to do that on this low budget.
07:30I'm shot and my face falls on a grate.
07:33That's my Hitchcockian cammy.
07:37It was $3 million to make this movie, which even in the 80s, I don't know how we did it.
07:42Hey!
07:43This shit, now you tell me now!
07:45You're joking, huh?
07:46Get up!
07:47I was in danger of being fired every day of the shoot because they said it was impossible to do.
07:55Warner Brothers offered a fortune.
07:58They said that we thought about making Miracle Mile as a single story Twilight Zone.
08:03The only change they wanted to make was he woke up and it was all a dream and then started happening again.
08:10Which would just not satisfy anybody.
08:13It's torn to chaos. The fear is torn. It's absolute.
08:16I didn't want to do anything that gave you hope. I hate to say it.
08:21I wanted to shake people up. I wanted to have them walk out of the theater and go do something about the issue.
08:27We're going to Antarctica if it's true.
08:29It could happen more likely tonight than back in 89.
08:34Forget everything you just heard and go back to sleep.
08:46Is this a game or is it real?
08:50War Games.
08:51If you were a kid coming of age in the 1980s, you were worried that nuclear war would start.
08:58We were at the height of the Cold War in the 1980s.
09:01The height of an understanding of what nuclear technology could do and its potential for devastation.
09:13I remember as a child, we lived near an air force base.
09:16Four bells meant get under the desk.
09:19Duck and cover.
09:21Duck and cover yourself.
09:23Duck and cover.
09:25Attaboy, Tony.
09:26That flash means act fast.
09:27This was a given.
09:28This was going to happen.
09:29So, of course, we all had nightmares.
09:30I had very vivid ones.
09:31Superpowers were going head to head every other week in the news.
09:33And we entered the 80s with enormous apprehension.
09:34If the Soviet Union is attacked, we will answer with all our nuclear might.
09:38What science fiction films did at that time, I think, was gave us an outlet, a catharsis, by extrapolating the potential for devastation.
09:51What happens when you play a thermonuclear war as a game, but it actually connects to NORAD?
10:09I love the what if of it.
10:16I had seven.
10:17Correction, eight.
10:18That's eight red birds, two degrees past Africa.
10:20There was another film before war games, Colossus.
10:24The good guys, us, have these supercomputers, and the bad guys, the Russians, have these supercomputers, and they connected.
10:32So, all of a sudden, this artificial intelligence started to make decisions for us because we're so immature and violent and all that.
10:39We will work together unwillingly at first on your part, but that won't pass.
10:45What a lot of these movies were doing is trying to hew as closely as they could to things that might actually happen and then play them out in the most frightening way that they can think of.
10:57They wanted to look and feel real.
10:59The Whopper has already fought World War III as a game time and time again.
11:05War Games.
11:06It was a really smart little movie.
11:08What it took was the growing fascination in the early 1980s with computers. The home computer became a thing.
11:17They barely had 10K in them at the time, but they were the most wonderful things in the universe.
11:21You're really into computers, huh?
11:22Yeah.
11:26You could dial into a computer and see stuff you weren't supposed to see. Oh. Oh, yes.
11:31What are you doing?
11:32I'm changing your biology grade.
11:34No, I don't want you to do that. You're going to get me in trouble.
11:36No, nobody can find out.
11:37Forbidden knowledge. Bring that on.
11:41It's a great geek kid, Matthew Broderick.
11:43What if a kid at home can, through the phone line, no less, can link up to some giant mainframe that operates all of the nuclear weapons in America?
11:53It's just kind of feasible somehow in our brains.
11:56This is what computers do.
11:58And he could be starting World War III.
12:00Shall we play a game?
12:02How about global thermonuclear?
12:06What?
12:08It's really suspenseful.
12:09Joshua's trying to find the right code so he can launch the missiles himself.
12:13They're trying to divine how to beat this supercomputer at its own game.
12:17Come on.
12:19Learn, goddammit.
12:20Learn, goddammit.
12:22It was science out of control film.
12:25But it keyed in to that permanent fear that was going on.
12:29Normal kids and nuclear threat.
12:31I think I auditioned for War Games about six times.
12:34The original script was much darker and much more scary.
12:39And the guy was more of an isolated kind of loner.
12:42Worked at Radio Shack.
12:43War Games scared people so much that there were actual computer hackers who were put in jail.
12:53Kevin Mitnick was put in jail and not given access to a payphone because some idiot senator believed that he could, using his voice and a payphone, launch a nuclear missile.
13:05You can watch War Games today, particularly today, as the nation is being hacked by Russian operatives every 25 seconds.
13:15And that movie don't seem silly at all.
13:18How about a nice game of jail?
13:21We've been living with the Cold War since World War II.
13:25Generations have lived under that threat.
13:28And I don't think one generation is any more immune to that threat than another.
13:34Today, you know, we're worried about the very slow end of the world from, you know, environmental things or terrorist acts.
13:41I think ever since we created the bomb, the world has been different.
13:46I was in the Air Force for most of the 1980s.
13:48I was stationed in a nuclear silo in North Dakota for a portion of time.
13:53These fears were palpable.
13:55So when we went to see movies like War Games, Firefox, these films tried to be as realistic, speculative, but as realistic as possible.
14:04I'm speaking to the individual who has stolen the property of the USSR.
14:10We're getting the royal treatment.
14:12So whether you're talking about a movie like Superman IV, a Bond movie, or a movie like Weird Science, where a nuclear missile comes up through the floor in the bedroom, the Cold War is right there in the film.
14:23When we saw these movies, we didn't have to be so scared. We could let somebody else handle the problem.
14:32Wolverines!
14:33By the time you had Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK and you had sort of the latter era Soviet leadership, there was enormous Western exceptionalism that invaded all of the art.
14:48So it wasn't surprising that the audiences escaped as a means of processing fears and ideas about the geopolitical situation, but also the political situation at home, which wasn't great either.
15:01But there was one person's mind who was changed overnight, and that happened to be the president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, who had come to power believing that there was such a thing as a winnable nuclear war.
15:14I spent the 80s in Thatcher's London.
15:17I was very interested in getting Reagan out of office.
15:21My fear of what these politicians can do, the people that I cannot control, I focus my energies on what I can do in my own little corner of the world.
15:34The twist towards the dark, nihilistic sci-fi, I think, was largely a response against technology, government, war, especially in the Vietnam era.
15:55A lot of those dystopian films were warning about global warming and the arms race.
16:05You maniacs!
16:08The post-apocalyptic genre is pretty much defined by the Mad Max movies.
16:12The road warrior.
16:19The post-apocalyptic sub-genre.
16:21It just allowed the filmmakers' imagination to run wild.
16:25You can feel the ruin of the past as if we're just trying to hold on to civilization again.
16:35And that's what makes it powerful.
16:37How do we keep living?
16:39And how does civilization grow again?
16:43With the road warrior, you're focused on gas and misery and just living day to day.
16:50The idea develops into trying to create a new resource using methane to move toward a new future that can be sustainable.
16:59I don't know anything about methane.
17:01You can shovel shit, can't you?
17:03A kind of harsher, cooler vision of science fiction.
17:07It's like a western, barren world where petrol is the only commodity.
17:12Just walk away.
17:14Give me a pump.
17:16The gasoline.
17:17And the whole compound.
17:19They did what they needed to do to survive.
17:25They were working in a genre of picture called the exploitation picture.
17:29That's all they got funded.
17:31Action adventure.
17:32Exploding cars.
17:33Violence.
17:34Mayhem.
17:35And the low budget seemed to be a challenge rather than an obstacle.
17:39I'm really attracted to that sort of bootstrapping kind of storytelling.
17:44Good.
17:45Nice story, eh?
17:46George Miller is an amazing director.
17:47George had built a universe.
17:48This dystopian future that Mad Max lived within.
17:49You want to get out of here?
17:50You talk to me.
17:51George had fleshed it all out.
17:52It's not just a matter of going out and shooting a lot of cars being flipped and people dressed
17:58up strangely and mohawk bikers running around and screaming.
18:00There was a definite heart to everything that George did in that movie.
18:13George Miller gave me all the tools that I needed to be Wes.
18:14And I'm nothing like that character.
18:15I mean, there's no way in God's earth that I could ever be Wes.
18:16You.
18:17You can run.
18:18But you can't hide.
18:19He always used to say to me.
18:20He always used to say to me.
18:21He was just a matter of going out and shooting a lot of cars being flipped and people dressed
18:22up strangely and mohawk bikers running around and screaming.
18:24There was a definite heart to everything that George did in that movie.
18:27George Miller gave me all the tools that I needed to be Wes.
18:32And I'm nothing like that character.
18:33I mean, there's no way in God's earth that I could ever be Wes.
18:38You.
18:39You can run.
18:40But you can't hide.
18:41He always used to say to me.
18:43Just do it at 150 percent.
18:44I can bring you down to 100.
18:51What he wanted was this punk rock version of science fiction.
18:55It's unthinkable that a Mad Max film would do what a Fast and the Furious film does and
19:00just throw in CGI now.
19:02They were about us knowing the stunts were done for real.
19:05And that kind of sense of violence that came with that.
19:12We didn't use any special effects on that one.
19:15That was in camera.
19:21Safety was a paramount concern.
19:24The vehicle I'm climbing onto, which has 16 wheels, is going to run over me if I slip.
19:30One of the stunt guys that was on it would just grab me.
19:35For a decade that was all about the future and tech and computers and sci-fi, it's stripped all of that away.
19:42It's very prescient if you look at where we're going with the climate crisis and how tribalism is sort of already taking root and people are picking sides.
19:50You have defined me.
19:53You will know the vengeance of the Lord of the Mangus.
19:58Road Warrior was a warning of where we were headed.
20:01They weren't just doing a film.
20:03They were out there showing people the dysfunction that we were headed for.
20:08But we're there.
20:11We all went to see Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
20:25Huge movie.
20:26There's a unique challenge in doing sequels.
20:31There's an audience you're beholden to.
20:33And you want to honor that.
20:35And yet, we all feel compelled to express ourselves uniquely.
20:40Civilization.
20:42I'll do anything to protect it.
20:43We continue this theme of resource scarcity.
20:48Don't you understand?
20:49This is water.
20:50You can't think without it.
20:52Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome really focuses the futuristic forecast and the warning that if we don't change, if we don't alter the way we think about how we share resources, that we'll end up fighting over these resources in the future on a planet that could be a desert.
21:09This is a stick-up! Anybody moves and the dead makes-
21:16Tina Turner, biggest pop star in the world at the time, had a hit song on the radio, We Don't Need Another Hero.
21:22All we want is what we are, Thunderdome.
21:27Thunderdome.
21:29Sorry.
21:30I remember the Rolling Stone cover too, with Mel Gibson and Tina Turner, and you just went, oh man, this is big.
21:36Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
21:41For what?
21:42I don't know anything about methane.
21:44You can shovel shit, can't you?
21:46Tina Turner was just so big on screen.
21:49Being a woman of color, just sort of running that whole situation.
21:53The Master Blaster, you know, their competition between each other.
21:57Who run by the town.
22:00Master Blaster runs by the town.
22:03Lift Pimbargle.
22:05She tries to force Max to do her bidding by killing the blaster of the Master Blaster team.
22:11This is Thunderdome.
22:13Death is listening.
22:15And we'll take the first man that screams.
22:17We have this big, extravagant, perfectly insane fight on bungee cords inside this Thunderdome.
22:25They had that really menacing character that he's gotta fight, and it's this big dude, and you think he's just gonna mop the floor with him.
22:33But then the other thing that was sort of shocking was when they took the helmet off, you just sort of felt for the character.
22:46You saw that he was this person who was an adult that was a child.
22:52Instantly, that scene changed for everybody.
22:54I think that was a magic moment.
22:57There are two movies in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
23:00There's the first movie, which has our hero wandering into Barter Town after his rig is stolen from him.
23:06Then there's this other movie after he gets kicked out.
23:11He stumbles across these sort of, like, lost children in the middle of the desert who are apparently the leftover refugees from an airliner crash from years and years and years ago.
23:21It was too disjointed with the fact that it was two stories.
23:25Whereas with Road Warrior and even with Mad Max, the original, there was a direct correlation from A to Z.
23:38Outland. The ultimate enemy is still man.
23:44It was desperate to make a Western.
23:47Certainly after people like George Lucas figured out, wait a second, the Western is not dead, it's alive, it's in outer space.
23:54So I modeled it after Dodge City, the frontier aspect of it.
23:59The harshness and the danger and the greed and the fact that if you just stepped outside, you die.
24:05That's a completely conceivable future where we actually go out and we actually mine asteroids and mine planets and stuff.
24:14And it's a corporate entity.
24:15We're on our way to becoming the leading con amalgamate operation.
24:19And everyone in this room has received the bonus checks to prove it.
24:22It's a social commentary about out of control economies, out of control corporate people.
24:28Sean Connery plays a federal marshal who is sent to this backwater mining colony on a moon of Jupiter.
24:35He discovers a drug operation where the drugs that are being used by the miners and sold to the miners to make them boost their productivity is actually killing them.
24:45Get off! Get off!
24:47Get off!
24:52We're all professionals.
24:54I'm sure we are.
24:56I first wrote it when I was at Universal.
24:58I remember Ned Tannen read the script and said, I like it, we'll make it if Eastwood will do it.
25:03And I said, well, you'll make the phone book if Eastwood will do it.
25:06Sean Connery will, he'll bring Connery to whatever he plays.
25:10Zero ego about anything to do with him and total ego about how to make the movie good.
25:15So every discussion you had with him was how to make the script better, how to make the movie better.
25:22He's a remarkable guy.
25:24There's a whole machine that works because everybody does what they're supposed to.
25:29I did write one line where I said, I can't wait for him to say it.
25:34And there's the end of a very big chase.
25:36He's got a guy cornered in the kitchen and then he fires his gun all around the guy.
25:41Think it over.
25:42Think it over.
25:44Think it over.
25:45It's like butter with him.
25:47When they dig more oil, the company's happy.
25:49When the company's happy, I'm happy.
25:51I first knew Peter Boyle from seeing a movie called Joe.
25:54So the first film that I ever wrote, I had got to know Peter and thought he was terrific.
26:00And I needed somebody with some grit.
26:02If you're looking for money, you're smarter than you look.
26:04If you're not, you're a lot dumber.
26:08Francis Sternhagen.
26:10Hello.
26:12This is a drug.
26:14You just won a prize.
26:15The part originally was written for a man.
26:17I said, I want to cast a woman and make no change in the script.
26:21Almost everybody here doesn't have both oars and the water as far as I'm concerned.
26:25Everything she said was a little different.
26:27Everything she said was her way.
26:29There hasn't been so much excitement in this heap for some time.
26:33When it came to Outland, the idea of a mining conglomerate seemed feasible to me.
26:37I wanted you to see the kind of hostility of the environment and who are the people who would be doing it.
26:42And why would they be doing it?
26:50I never won an Oscar except one of the things that I wanted more than anything else was to do a film that would be parodied in Mad Magazine.
26:58And they did Outland in Mad Magazine.
27:00I was thrilled.
27:02To me, the highest compliment I could be paid.
27:03A post-apocalyptic world that has this kind of technological utopia that is very similar to what we find ourselves in today.
27:23You know, everything's kind of taken care of and yet there's a whole underworld just barely getting by and getting by in the most ingenious and sort of violent and horrible ways.
27:34Where are you from, mister?
27:36You and I.
27:40It really is a little scary in its visionary aspects.
27:45Most of the world has given up on relationships.
27:48So if you had your domestic mate, a Cherry 2000, which was the epitome of what you would want.
27:55You know, if it breaks, you can't get it fixed in the current world.
27:58So you have to go out into Zone 7.
28:01She's a Cherry 2000.
28:03I want you to go into Zone 7 and get me one just like her.
28:07A director just fell out. I found out later it was Irv Kirshner.
28:10And they were desperate to get somebody and go shoot.
28:13I read 20 pages and it was brilliant, weird stuff.
28:16So I jumped on Cherry, which was a moving train.
28:21Melanie Griffith, she just had a baby, so it was a very tough shoot.
28:25She really had to endure a lot.
28:29There's a little Easter egg in the robot repair thing where Sam Treadwell, played by David Andrews, goes to see a robot repair guy.
28:37And I put Robbie the robot and Gort in there at my expense.
28:42It was out of my little director's slush fund.
28:45Forbidden Planets, probably the first movie of sci-fi genre that really influenced me.
28:50So it was giving back to that.
28:53I am monitored to respond to the name Robbie.
28:55We shot in every toxic location in Nevada.
29:03Inside Hoover Dam, electromagnetic forces in the spillways and radiation zones concocted some crazy over-the-top RPG fights and things like that.
29:15The one big set piece with the magnet and the Mustang.
29:23You'd never do it today.
29:24It'd all be CGI.
29:25It's a real stunt woman hanging on to that car out over Hoover Dam.
29:36Thank God there's only one take.
29:43Vegas buried in sand dunes.
29:45I think that was the first time it was ever done.
29:47We did old glass mats.
29:50You actually paint and shoot through them.
29:51Built, you know, big sets poking out of there.
29:54The Vegas showgirls and all that.
29:57Besides blowing up a lot of Nevada and the process is really about love.
30:01About finding true love.
30:03Not an idealized mate that does your bidding and cooks you dinner.
30:08It's about interactions with a tough, equal or superior woman.
30:14And finally realizing that that's more desirable.
30:21Terminator's a classic.
30:32The Terminator.
30:34Out of the gate, I appreciated Cameron's filmmaking.
30:37It was so satisfying.
30:38You're just watching this extremely talented filmmaker erupt onto the scene.
30:43And you just go, oh, I'm going to now see every film this person does because they're obviously really good.
30:47What day is it?
30:49The date?
30:5012th.
30:51May.
30:52Thursday.
30:53What year?
30:55It goes and it's just perfect.
30:57You can't do that.
30:59Wrong.
31:01I was very inspired by the editing of Terminator, the speed of Terminator, the harshness of Terminator.
31:07The script was an excellent blueprint for the movie. It had propulsion, mystery, annihilation, suspense, romance, time travel.
31:22It was all there.
31:25It was all there.
31:29Come with me if you want to live.
31:31Because the exposition is all on the run during a shootout.
31:35I'm Reese, the sign to protect you. You've been targeted for termination.
31:38You're like living and dying in a scene and getting out the backstory.
31:45It was a dark version of the future.
31:47I love the down and dirty and spareness, the B-movie sort of aspect to it.
31:56His hope was to make a world-class genre picture heavily influenced by George Miller just in the fact that he broke down all barriers and went gonzo.
32:05Jim had a certain vision and he was pushing the envelope.
32:13We weren't Hollywood redoing the same thing. Jim was saying, no, no, no, we can go here.
32:23In between all the action pieces, there's some genuine high concept ideas that get discussed about predestination and your fate and what role you play in history.
32:30You're talking about things that I haven't done yet in the past tense. It's driving me crazy.
32:36Computers, once they become sentient, artificial intelligence will turn on us and technology itself will be bent back upon us in the guise of Arnold Schwarzenegger with an Uzi.
32:50Lance Henriksen was who Jim originally did his concept sketch of the Terminator around with his skin coming away and seeing the endoskeleton underneath.
32:59I'm sure Lance was very disappointed when he didn't get to play the Terminator, but I can't imagine that character without Arnold portraying him.
33:08Get out.
33:11The Terminator skull itself, many people don't know this, the dimensions of it were arrived at by taking a life cast of Arnold and then carving down from his features down to a skull that would fit.
33:26And those are Arnold's teeth. The Terminator has Arnold Schwarzenegger's teeth.
33:31The point for Cameron was Sarah Connor. He wanted the target to be the most ordinary person he could imagine.
33:38It's almost a Hitchcockian rule, the ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances. That's what makes you relate.
33:44Sarah Connor, this ordinary waitress who will give birth to the savior of the future.
33:48I didn't ask for this honor and I don't want it! Any of it!
33:53Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn's performance was incredible. By the time the two of them got together at the end, they so deserved it. You knew exactly why they were making love, obviously to save the world, to have this child.
34:06I came across time for you, Sarah. I love you. I always have.
34:14She may be able to change the timeline that she's on. Is our future determined? Do we have a choice in this algorithm that we find ourselves in?
34:22There is an ethical dilemma here. We have to ask ourselves, why are the Terminators trying to get rid of the humans? Are the machines of the future going to be environmentalists?
34:32Because if they are, we better be very frightened. Because we're not doing the job that we need to be doing to protect this planet and they may see us as a threat and want to take us out.
34:41We find ourselves now in this somewhat both inspiring and dystopian future world that's very much like the movies that we all watched.
34:51Part of the nostalgia for the 80s movies is that they dealt with a lot of these fears very, very well. They dealt with government paranoia. They dealt with technological overreach and hyper-innovation.
35:05What are you really sacrificing in the name of progress? And yeah, computers are going to try to kill us. And yeah, I think in some way computers have tried to kill us.
35:20We already live within the construct of Skynet. If you're on any social media, all of those systems are artificial intelligence systems that are aggregating all of those algorithms and figuring out who you are in a way that you are.
35:35You don't even understand.
35:36They cannot make things like that yet. Not yet. Skynet in Terminator was the warning. And every time you input a piece of data, you're adding to that quote unquote Skynet.
35:49I'll be back.
35:50I'll be back.
36:01Akira.
36:03A government experiment that creates superhumans who are so powerful, their thoughts can destroy everything.
36:11Akira in the late 80s was one of the first Japanese anime things that came to the States that people started to appreciate and realize how big this stuff is in Japan.
36:26Like it's not just Saturday morning cartoons. It was a big, big movie. I think Akira kind of opened that door in America.
36:32Before I was aware of Akira, I was a fan of Japanese animation. I really loved Battle of the Planets and Macross and Robotech. These are all cartoons I watched after school.
36:45When I was at a convention and I saw the artwork for Akira on a VHS, I thought, wow, cool, a movie.
36:52We put it in and what we had was a third or fourth generation bootleg. And it was all in Japanese. It was not subtitled or dubbed. We had no idea what the story was.
37:07The animation was so compelling. We just knew that this was amazing and earth shaking and was unlike anything we had ever seen.
37:18It's about his Tetsuo's friends trying to save him, even when they realized that the way to save him is to destroy him.
37:29Kaneda!
37:31Kaneda!
37:36I've only been to Tokyo once, and my overwhelming impression of it was that Tokyo's just on top of you. You can't move.
37:44In Neo Tokyo, they've rebuilt Tokyo and actually expanded some of the highways and given it more space.
37:51Akira's the very first time I ever saw one of those shots.
37:55Just an incredible motorbike coming at you and starting that power slide like what seems like hundreds of feet away.
38:02It's the visual Wilhelm scream of anime. It has to be in every anime.
38:08And all of that was hand animated and hand painted.
38:12That was just jaw-dropping to me.
38:15I finally did see Akira in English, and it's even better than what I thought it was as a kid.
38:28Many of us are drawn to the antihero. There are aspects within them that maybe fulfill some of our desires.
38:43This concept of rule-breaking and nonconformity.
38:48I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass.
38:53There's something snarling about those characters. The anti-establishment. It's a different attitude.
38:59Yes, I bet you have.
39:01We think about Han, Max.
39:03I'm just here for the gasoline.
39:05Snake.
39:06Get a new president.
39:07Selfishness is there. That sense of wanting to do what's best for them is there.
39:14And yet, somewhere in that rugged individuality, somewhere in that stubbornness, is a heart.
39:21I'll chase him round the moons of Nibia and round the Antares Maelstrom and round Perdition's flames before I give him up.
39:32Before we lived in a dystopian reality, I really enjoyed dystopian science fiction.
39:44John Carpenter's Escape from New York. The greatest escape of them all is about to blow the future apart.
39:52Escape from New York actually started as John Carpenter's first screenplay out of film school.
39:59After he had done a few, the studio really wanted to work with him and said, basically, what do you got?
40:03And he went, went to the closet, brought out this script, and they loved the idea.
40:09He called me. He said, I really need another mind here to help me get through this and make sense of it.
40:17So I think it was a valuable collaboration.
40:20You go in, find the president, bring him out in 24 hours, and you're a free man.
40:2524 hours, huh?
40:27Escape from New York was the biggest movie I'd made up to that time.
40:29It was basically the same crew, some of the same cast I'd worked with before, so it was fun to do.
40:35It was hard work.
40:37Try to keep everything light if we can.
40:42It was like a huge family.
40:45Working with actors that he loves, both personally and professionally.
40:51He knows that he can get the performance out of them that he wants.
40:56And they have much more fun working.
41:01If you're, you know, everything is calm and here we go.
41:05St. Louis, which was the beginning of the shoot, they shot much of the exterior material.
41:11St. Louis, at the time, looked like post-apocalyptic, you know, United States.
41:17He didn't have to do a lot of window dressing.
41:20Nothing was done in New York other than being on Liberty Island.
41:23Kurt was always known and grew up as a Disney kid.
41:28But John can see into what the potential is in people.
41:32I recognized Kurt early on when we did Elvis's.
41:35This guy's got it.
41:37He really has it.
41:41Just knowing Kurt, you know he has the potential for doing something that's a little darker and physical.
41:46I love the character of Maggie.
41:54A balls out chick, you know, and I was used to playing that kind of role.
42:01You're Plissken? Heard you were dead.
42:05I think her entire moral character is exhibited in the last scene where she reaches out her hand to Snake for the gun and she fires at the Duke.
42:17That just said everything to me about her.
42:24Escape from New York really, its philosophical bent was it was a nihilist film.
42:30It had a nihilist character, it had a nihilist ending, but it was also done in a way that was tongue in cheek.
42:35We're gonna go far in this direction and won't have fun with it.
42:40Don't kill yourself after you see this film.
42:43You gonna kill me now, Snake?
42:45I'm too tired.
42:49Maybe later.
42:51If you want to know who would win a fight between Snake Plissken, Jack Burton or R.J. McCready, Snake Plissken would win the fight hands down.
42:59He's a badass, that's why.
43:06The future of law enforcement.
43:10Robocop.
43:12Robocop was urban dystopia.
43:14I based it on elements that I saw, of course, that were happening in society already, but were not visible yet.
43:22But now we are here.
43:25Power of its messages, trickle down economics, the privatization of the world and capitalism run amok.
43:32Yes.
43:37Robocop has all of those elements that make greatness in cinema and storytelling.
43:44The fight for dignity, the human condition at stake, humor.
43:50I'd buy that for a dollar.
43:53A slap in the face of society.
43:59I called my agent and I said, they're changing this title, right?
44:01His whole concept of the violence in Robocop is he wanted it to be so over the top that you got the joke immediately.
44:11You have 20 seconds to comply.
44:14I think you'd better do what he says, Mr. Kenny.
44:18Oddly enough, they cut it back so much so that it finally got to where it was right on the edge of what you could stand.
44:25They made the violence more egregious by doing it that way.
44:29That's non-artistic people trying to make decisions that they have no business making.
44:37Ed 209 really wanted to emphasize the stupidity of American automobile design.
44:43And so I proposed to Paul that we build a full scale at 209.
44:54When Ed falls down the stairs, the sound effect was a baby pigs getting their throats slit.
45:01Very satisfying to work on pictures like that where you bring a whole universe to life for a film audience.
45:13Shootouts, things blowing up.
45:16It was a pretty active show.
45:18Guns going off and car crashes.
45:21It was pretty exciting.
45:22One of the things that Nancy and her character Lewis were really responsible for within the movie was bringing Robocop back to his humanity.
45:36Murphy, it's you.
45:39It really was about the human connection that I had with this part human character.
45:45The soul was really still there.
45:47In the beginning for me it was very weird.
45:50Because Peter Weller said to me, you have to call me Robocop.
45:54You cannot call me Peter.
45:57So there was already some tension, you know.
46:00The robo-suit.
46:02Ten hours later, we were sitting there going, oh my God.
46:05He was so frustrated.
46:07In fact, in the very first weeks, there was a crisis.
46:11They were thinking of pulling the plug on the film.
46:13I literally had to assemble him like he was a little toy.
46:17Put him together with a screwdriver.
46:20Every time I started feeling sorry for myself, I just looked at Peter, who was in this big plastic thing.
46:27And they got it down to about three or four hours.
46:31It's not as easy as it looks.
46:35Rob Boatine's Robocop.
46:37It's Robocop lore.
46:38The battles he had with Paul Verhoeven and I was there for many of those battles in Rob's studio.
46:44The way Rob sculpted that, the way it was painted, the finish on that machine, it's a piece of art.
46:51The shooting experience, it was like this fast moving train and the film had that energy to it.
46:56We felt so creative and we were so loose with everything that was in the script.
47:02I thought it should have a different style than an American action movie.
47:06That it should be partially light-hearted.
47:09That it should be a bit funny.
47:11That you would be a bit amazed.
47:13Can you fly, Bobby?
47:14No!
47:15No!
47:16No!
47:18No!
47:19Larens Bodiger.
47:20He's having a great time.
47:22Bitches leave.
47:23He's the sociopath.
47:25You probably don't think I'm a very nice guy.
47:28You can't get crazy with it.
47:29Because he still has to be taken seriously.
47:31Cops don't like me.
47:33With the language, I kept adding things.
47:37Especially F-bombs.
47:38I was big on throwing those in all the time.
47:40I don't wanna fuck with you, Sam.
47:42Bad guys.
47:44They never think they're bad.
47:45This corporation will live up to the guiding principles of its founder.
47:49Courage.
47:50Strength.
47:51Conviction.
47:53That is a vague religious component to Robocop, of course.
47:57Because I felt that the death of Murphy should be a crucifixion.
48:03Because there was a resurrection.
48:05That's why that scene is extremely violent.
48:07Because crucifixion is one of the worst punishments that you can imagine.
48:12The parable of loss.
48:15Of who are you when that's gone.
48:19Murphy had a wife and son.
48:20What happened to them?
48:22The scene when he goes to his house and it's empty, it just made me almost cry.
48:29And that's when I said, this is a really good movie.
48:31Murphy.
48:32Can you do that, Dad?
48:37It's a sad, frigging movie, man.
48:39It is a poignantly sad, sad film.
48:43Even at the end, what's your name, kids?
48:45Murphy.
48:47Okay?
48:48He has something back, right?
48:50But he doesn't have it back, man.
48:51That's gone.
48:52He's not a guy.
48:53He's a machine.
48:54What are they going to do?
48:55Replace us?
48:57I like when a good film will present those ideas and do it in a humorous way.
49:01But enough that it gets your attention and gets you to think about it.
49:04I was not aware of how long-lasting the social strata of RoboCop would last.
49:11I don't know.
49:12It's a one-off, man.
49:13That movie is extraordinary.
49:14Excuse me, Robo.
49:15Any special message for all the kids watching at home?
49:18Stay out of trouble.
49:22Science fiction, certainly the best of science fiction,
49:25is inevitably a reflection of what's going on on Earth at the time it was written.
49:31All works of art are ineluctably products of the time in which they are created.
49:38This isn't about space.
49:41This isn't about deep water.
49:43This isn't about another dimension.
49:48This is about us.
49:50It's really up to the audience to decide what they want out of the experience.
50:01Let's go seecreed.
50:03The music grandeurs is the best.
50:04Honestly...
50:12The music Awakening is the best we can do now,
50:27Someone isn't expecting.
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