Original subtitles

COMMENTARY: Hi, this is Gary Fleder, director of Runaway Jury...

...doing DVD commentary.

And thank you for buying this DVD and all the extra features.

I hope you like it, if you're a film geek like me.

There's an old adage that films are made three times:

The writing, the shooting and the cutting.

And I think this opening sequence is a great example of the third.

The sequence was written and filmed to be a linear sequence where you meet...

...Dylan McDermott, who plays Jacob Wood, the catalyst for the picture.

And when we watched the dailies and talked about the sequence, myself...

...and Bill Steinkamp, the editor, we saw we didn't know who Jacob Wood was.

He was simply, again, just that, just a catalyst, and simply this guy.

Never know who he is, never care who he is.

The idea of incorporating footage from the birthday party was late in the game.

Happened during the editing stage.

The inspiration was to hook the audience into him emotionally...

...give him some dimension, as much as you can do in two and a half minutes.

I think it's effective. It also gives a sense of portent.

You feel, because the intercutting's happening between Dylan's character...

...and how he's half in reality and half in flashback, half in the day before...

...it's just-- It's sort of disturbing.

Dylan was a good sport here, because he's playing the Janet Leigh...

...role from Psycho, in a sense, where we're casting a guy we all know...

...he's part of pop culture and we're gonna kill him in a few moments.

And it is what I call to the audience a "Shut the hell up" scene.

You're in the first minutes of the film, people are sort of talking, carrying on.

This is the way to sort of ground them into the picture, make them connect.

I think this opening sequence is also very effective because...

...you set up the ritualistic idea of a guy going to work...

...and the same friends, the same people, the same people he works with.

And then the counterpoint with the horror of what's about to happen.

The opening sequence is actually based very loosely...

...on a horrible incident in 1 999 in Atlanta, where a day trader came in...

...and he killed, I think, as many as 1 1 or 1 2 of his colleagues, then killed himself.

He killed his family before he came to work that day.

It was a horrible story and it always stayed with me...

...and I felt that this scene could play off of that.

And what's also notable with the scene, from a technical point of view...

...from the editing point of view and sound design point of view...

...is you never see the shooting that's about to happen.

It's all done with sound design and performance and picture editing.

And just this-- Coming up is a real nice transition...

...between the style of the film now, which is sort of loose and hand-held...

...and sort of casual to something much more frenetic.

And again, going back to the idea of intercutting the flashback.

Here's a streetcar pre-lap. It's an homage to Godfather l.

To the gunshot.

We'll plagiarize the best.

Again, this is a great example of...

...just, you know, two actors having to play to nothing, really, except the idea.

The idea of it.

We actually were firing real blanks off camera for some of these moments...

...but for the most part, Dylan McDermott...

...had to play off ofjust his imagination of "What would it be like to be trapped?"

And I've read, I think, probably 50 or 60 reviews of the movie...

...you know, some good, some not good, but not one critic...

...not one reviewer mentioned the opening sequence and how...

...we played the whole sequence without any blood, squibs or violence, really.

It's all emotional violence.

I went back to John Grisham himself when we first talked about the idea...

...the adaptation, I think he was a little bit opposed to...

...having anything exploitative with guns.

And this is a way to cure that. It's all done with sound design.

[GLASS BREAKING] [SCREAMING]

The freeze frame of Dylan McDermott was longer...

...but it became a little too much.

And you can sort of barely hear, in fact, you can sort of barely hear...

...his son still singing the song "Big Rock Candy Mountain" in the back.

It's very subtle, but it's there.

It used to be louder. It became, again, maybe too cloying.

And here we are, two years later, and you meet John Cusack.

I'm assuming those hearing the commentary have seen the movie...

...and know that John Cusack is revealed to be....

End of the first act, he's revealed to be a grifter, a con man.

And that said, so much of this next 25 minutes, 30 minutes of screen time...

...will be devoted to setting him up as being the John Cusack...

...that we sort of know and love from the '80s and early '90s.

Sort of the funny guy, the charming guy, the slacker, the underachiever.

And the charming underachiever.

It's funny, because in real life, he's not that way. John is so....

In fact, he's a pretty serious guy.

Very literate, very political.

And very cool, you know, and he's not the sort of goofy, awkward guy...

...we remember him from being in films back in the '80s especially, early '90s.

So a big challenge with John Cusack was the idea of him being this guy...

...who's playing the part of a different guy.

He's playing the role of Nick Easter.

And the idea of the next few scenes is, we don't know this...

...but on second viewing, you realize Cusack knew he was being watched.

The line about "Christmas coming early," it's his way of saying he's happy.

Again, second viewing, second blush, it has a different meaning.

There's a style we're using here...

...photographically, we used a 45-degree shutter angle to create a certain effect.

You'll see it a couple of more times, especially when you feel...

...the presence of Gene Hackman or his people, Fitch or his people, in the story.

The scene coming up here in the Santeria shop is what I call...

...the "married couple meeting in a singles bar" scene.

It was a scene that was much debated...

...with the studio and even the actors, "What's this about? Why do you have it?

If they're a couple, which we find out, why are they behaving like this?"

And the idea for me was always that...

...you meet Rachel Weisz, a mysterious woman, in backlight and silhouette.

She and John have this conversation which seems sort of goofy and banal...

...but again, second viewing, it has new meaning.

What it's really about, on second viewing, is...

...John Cusack's telling Rachel Weisz, Marlee, he's got jury duty.

And they're closer to their goal.

NICK: You know what it is?

COMMENTARY: There you have it, the reveal.

My idea with the writer at the time, Rick Cleveland, who did the big rewrite...

...was that every morning they meet at a different place.

It could be Cafe Du Monde, a Santeria shop...

...it could be a cafe somewhere in the French Quarter.

It happens to be a Santeria shop this morning.

The shot here, with Rachel walking out of the shop...

...and the camera panning over to Hackman's car....

My point here is that what I love about the French Quarter...

...which is 1 0 blocks, it's pretty small...

...is that all these characters can be constantly intermingling, commingling.

I just finished watching Nashville just a few days ago, the Altman film...

...and it's wonderful, because characters are always intermingling...

...they always cross paths, and I think that was my feeling even when scouting.

Because the film was set in Biloxi, in the book.

And we scouted, in this case, Memphis and Richmond...

...among other Southern cities, and we loved the idea of New Orleans because...

...I love that these characters can all sort of be in proximity.

The scene here in the taxi with Fitch, I love the way it's filmed.

I love the idea of reflections.

But more importantly, I love the fact that Hackman's set up as...

...a sort of uber-detective here, of people.

At one point this scene was out of the film...

...because the film was running long, but you need to set him up...

...so the next scene makes more sense. You understand and appreciate his skill.

There was criticism early on, in the script stage, even during shooting...

...about how much screen time we give Lawrence Green...

...played by Jeremy Piven.

But I like the fact that we use Jeremy Piven's character, Green...

...as the audience point of view from the outset.

You hear Dustin Hoffman's voice, you hear Wendall Rohr's voice...

...and you see this reverence for Rohr.

Green, really, he's us.

I like seeing main characters through the eyes of a secondary character.

I know how to feel about the character, and in this case...

...Piven has a very, very tough job as an actor and as a character in this case...

...to give me the exposition. What's the movie about?

The style of the film is very.... It's revelatory.

It's peeling back these layers scene by scene, sequence by sequence.

We see a shooting, we meet Cusack, he's a knucklehead, in a Santeria shop.

We see this guy, Gene Hackman, in the back of a cab.

And now here we are, jury consultants...

...and we begin, for the first time in the story...

...you know, almost 1 0 minutes into the picture, to hear about a case.

Even the Hackman scene didn't talk about the case. Here we hear about it.

It's a gun case, he's a jury consultant, "What's that?" We'll find out very soon.

And here we're sort of interspersing exposition with character stuff.

You know, Hoffman being this sort of Atticus Finch character who's playing...

...the gentility and eccentricity of a Southern attorney.

Piven's the outsider, which I love. Because he's me.

He's the outsider, he's me. He's the audience.

Exposition. Boom.

People don't win gun cases.

David versus Goliath, right there. There's your Grisham connection.

And now we begin one of my favorite sequences.

Again, this happened in stage three, the editing stage, intercutting...

...the introduction of Gene Hackman...

...and the mythology of Gene Hackman's character, Rankin Fitch, as told by Piven.

What it does, and it wasn't written this way...

...the way it intercuts, interweaves pretty seamlessly...

...it sets up the fact that Wendall Rohr is outgunned.

He's outgunned, he's outmanned...

...he's outdone technologically by this guy.

Notice, though, you haven't seen Hackman's face clearly yet.

In the reflection, in shadow, from behind.

The first time you're gonna see Hackman...

...clearly will see Hackman, is coming up right here...

...when he walks into the war room for the first time.

And you'll see this wonderful look on his face.

Here it is. Here's that John Wayne moment from The Searchers.

There's the smile. He loves it. He's in his element.

This is important, to set up that he is most comfortable in this environment.

He loves being in his war room.

Again, more mythology here.

When a scene can do two or three things at the same time, it's wonderful.

This is a case where the scene is...

...mainly about Piven's character trying to get a job.

That's his objective, that's his goal. But it's also-- It's, again, exposition.

He's telling us about Gene Hackman's character...

...and how the fact that Wendall Rohr's outgunned is a problem in this case.

People have asked me over the last few months, as I've promoted the picture:

"Is this stuff real? Does this happen?" And the reality is, yeah, it does happen.

The war room is real and everything in the war room scene...

...in the sequence is based in reality.

I hired an espionage and anti-espionage expert to work with me and help...

...design the war room. Everything here's technologically feasible.

The fact that Hackman has all these experts in forensic linguistics...

...and proxemics, these people that study behavior, it's all real.

These guys do this.

Again, now, tying up the loose ends with Lawrence Green.

Will he get hired? Of course he will. Because he's us. He's the audience.

You know, Piven also represents in the story the new way, the modern way.

The fact is that Wendall Rohr, the whole story, will be resisting Piven...

...who's constantly saying, like his superego, saying to him:

"Listen to this, what's going on. Pay attention to what's happening.

You're gonna lose this case. You're outgunned, you're outmanned."

And you'll find, deep in the second act, Piven finally breaks through to Hoffman.

MAN 1: Here's your thing. NICK: What do you got?

COMMENTARY: This is a great example of a scene that was fought about...

...pretty passionately between myself and the studio early on.

They wanted to cut the scene with Cusack and his two friends, played by...

...Orlando Jones and Ned Bellamy.

I felt the scene was important to the story because I wanted to feel that Cusack...

...his character, Nick Easter, was real...

...with a life, friends and these knuckleheads they hang out with.

And it's also a scene where you find out Cusack doesn't want jury duty.

If we're gonna play misdirection later on that he wants jury duty...

...that he's a con man, you need this scene.

Because the idea, on second blush...

...is that Nick Easter knows he's being watched, as you're about to see.

Again, first meeting, Nick is sort of getting smart that he's being watched.

Second meeting, second viewing, he knows he's being watched.

It's a confirmation rather than some sort of fear.

NICK: I should commit a crime?

COMMENTARY: The scene got some laughs in the early previews...

...which meant people were with John early on...

...which is important, that you're with him.

Because at some point in the story, you might get lost with his character.

Because you find out he's a con man, a grifter.

Early on, I wanted to be sure he was as charming and likeable...

...and as much like that guy you knew 1 0 years ago in film as could be...

...because we deconstruct that idea...

...and make John Cusack's character much more nefarious...

...in about 20 minutes of screen time.

This is a great example of layering in...

...a character, Frank Herrera, played by Cliff Curtis...

...who becomes very important to the story.

Again, I think this goes down to good writing.

Immediately you meet Frank Herrera, who plays an important part...

...and become Cusack's foil on the jury. And I think you needed this guy.

I was really worried when I read the script early on...

...that Cusack's character had too easy a time...

...winning over the jurors and I felt that if you had one guy...

...who just didn't like Cusack's character, just didn't like him...

...and didn't buy his B.S., just one guy, it made them all smarter in some way.

If every single juror was easily seduced by Cusack's charm and guile...

...then you really wouldn't think they were smart.

So I liked having the one guy who thought he was terrible.

I'm always amazed, editorially, that you can play with timelines...

...because here's a case where we're intercutting the flashback...

...sort of the "real time" of John Cusack meeting Maxine...

...with, of course, this is now the present moment...

...with Hackman's people analyzing what was going on.

What was being said, what was being done.

It's funny how seamless that can be.

The writing here is very strong because, yet again, like with the Piven sequence...

...we're doing two things at once. Setting up exposition, "Who is Easter?"

We're setting up that he has no real background...

...which gives some sense...

...to the audience and to Gene Hackman that this guy is not right.

But it also sets up the dynamic between Hackman's character, Rankin Fitch...

...and Bruce Davison, Durwood Cable, the attorney for the defense.

I give credit to Gene Hackman because he said...

...he didn't want to play a guy who was rude and mean-spirited.

I think you'll see modulation here with this character.

As the story unfolds and he begins to lose control of the jury, of his jury...

...that pronoun, "his" jury, it becomes very, very tough for him.

Here's a motif we keep coming back to in the story, which is...

...Nick Easter coming up the stairs.

Every time he comes up it's a different energy, a different idea.

At this point we think he's just this underachieving slacker named Nick Easter.

LAMB: It's not sticking. I need the other tape.

COMMENTARY: This sequence used to be longer, Bruce being wired up.

Gene Hackman used to be in the scene as well...

...and berates Bruce Davison's character for talking to the press.

But I felt it made Gene's character too mean too soon.

Sort of too mustache-twirling.

So we trimmed back the sequence, made it merely about...

...Bruce being wired up by Lamb, played by Leland Orser.

Now, the way we shoot the courtroom...

...in this opening sequence is very important because I wanted to play....

In the opening scenes in the courtroom, they're very, very symmetrical.

They're very proscenium-style, they're large shots, they're wide shots...

...and they're sort of removed.

Because to me, most courtroom films I've seen...

...the last few years are shot this way.

Again, very balanced frames, very formal compositions.

The whole sequence was storyboarded because I wanted everything to be...

...very precise and, again, very sort of formal...

...in composition.

I'm setting up that as the movie unfolds...

...you're gonna see the courtroom filmed...

...in a different way every scene, every sequence.

I want to, in a way, play with the idea that the movie's about corruption...

...and it's about the desecration of the law and of the courtroom.

Every time you go back to the courtroom...

...and things get more and more soiled and sullied...

...it becomes a little scrappier, messier.

You know, the frames are messier, less formal, more hand-held...

...Steadicam jumping the stage line, all those wonderful things.

NICK: How you doing? I'm Nick. -Lydia.

So, what are we supposed to do, sit here all day? Is that it?

-What do they want us to do? -I'm sure we can think of something.

BAILIFF: All rise.

COMMENTARY: This scene is actually the coming-together for the first time...

...minute 20, really, of all the main characters.

You have all the main players together in one space.

You've got Hackman, Hoffman.

And here's the sort of first real moment when Lawrence Green sees Fitch...

...in court and says "There he is, there's the guy I'm talking about."

Dustin kind of throws it away.

This is a nice trajectory, because this will be going somewhere scene by sequence.

Again, formal frames coming up here, sort of very fluid camera, wide shot.

Here's a shot behind the judge, coming up.

Again, very symmetrical, very formal.

Very old-school.

One of my favorite scenes in the film, the voir dire montage.

And this sequence took many, many weeks to put together.

You know, again, it was storyboarded...

...but a lot was done in the cutting room by Bill Steinkamp...

...over many, many, many months of cutting, recutting and retooling.

In fact, as a point of reference, originally I'd just shot...

...the voir dire in the courtroom, we hadn't shot the war room stuff yet.

And Bill Steinkamp put together a sequence of early montage...

...ofjust the voir dire in the courtroom, ofjust Bruce Davison...

...Dustin Hoffman and Bruce McGill as the judge.

And then I showed that sequence...

...the court montage of the voir dire, to Gene in the war room, when we shot.

I said, "Here's the look of the scene, here's the style, here's the idea."

And Gene loved it and Gene saw what we were doing.

And he was able to, in a way, project himself into the sequence.

And when we filmed this footage here, he'd just seen...

...the early rough cut and knew what he was playing against, what he was doing.

My concept for Gene's character during this scene with Fitch...

...I kept thinking about Playhouse 90...

...live television back in the '50s with guys like John Frankenheimer...

...who were very energetic and exuberant and excited...

...with their headsets on, barking commands to the cameras...

...shooting the weekly show on PIayhouse 90.

My thought was Hackman was like that. He was barking out orders...

...like to a cameraman.

I even said, "I keep thinking about John Frankenheimer on Playhouse 90."

And Gene, again, sort of got the shorthand on that.

Some of the juror comments are actually scripted, but so many were improv'd.

What we did was we brought in so many of the actors like...

...Luis Guzman, Cliff Curtis, Rusty Schwimmer...

...and asked them a series of questions, questions I got from an attorney...

...that you might ask during a voir dire session about a gun trial.

And we used most of these comments...

...which, again, were improv given on the day in the sequence.

It was a combination of storyboarding, designing, creating and documentary.

I asked these people to, in character, answer these questions.

And then we sort of made that part of the fabric, the tapestry.

HARKIN: We accept Ms. Deets as a juror. -We accept this juror.

-An AK-47 overstates the case. -I want her.

COMMENTARY: The one sequence I showed Bill Steinkamp during editing...

...was the opening sequence in Casino...

...that fantastic sequence when...

...you have De Niro walking the audience through the machinations of a casino.

And I felt that this was...

...in a similar way, gonna take a very dry subject, voir dire...

...and making it exciting and cinematic.

You're about to see, when this guy Terry Docken...

...goes nuts in the courtroom, you're about to see the first of sort of...

...the style change in the courtroom. Hand-held, Steadicam, jumping the line.

It's a taste of what you'll see in the picture.

And that was all very much intended to sort of show...

...where the film's gonna be going. It's portent.

As a footnote, the sequence when...

...the potential juror goes nuts...

...we have three tech consultants in the film, three lawyers...

...and they all said it's a mistrial. Or you have to re-impanel the entire jury.

I said, "Well, I can't do that."

So it became a thing where I definitely-- There was license here.

It's a great scene, it gets a big laugh from the audience.

But it definitely would be a problem with a sullied jury pool at this point.

One quick Bruce McGill note...

...who plays the judge, is that, you know, Bruce was always in character.

He was this guy. Bruce McGill was the judge.

He came in at 7:00 in the morning...

...in his robes behind that bench and he never broke character.

It was great, actually. We kept the crew quiet occasionally by banging a gavel.

CABLE: Good call.

COMMENTARY: The thing I always look for editorially is rhythm and dynamic.

Dynamics.

And the idea here is that we've just had a really exciting scene...

...with the voir dire and also with the whole blood bag incident...

...with the crazed juror, and I think it buys you two and a half, three minutes...

...to have this scene, which is a much more static and expository scene.

But it's also important because it sets up two things...

...with Gene Hackman's character, with Fitch.

One is, he's got a boss, which is important for the story.

The scene, we talked about dropping it, but I felt...

...and Steinkamp agreed with me...

...we felt that we have to set up that Hackman's got a boss.

There's a stake here. With this guy, if he loses the case...

...loses the trial, he's done, he's toast.

He has no other life. This is his life. He likes to control people, jurors.

That's what he does.

FITCH: "One hundred thousand."

Or we could focus...

COMMENTARY: It's also a wonderful scene about control.

The scene begins, Fitch is out of control, being ridiculed by this guy.

Even the staging, these five guys in these big cushy seats facing Hackman...

...who's back on this more flimsy chair.

And he's been sort of subjugated, been relegated to being the employee.

Now he's on his feet and he's moving around the room and he's behind them.

The staging, the performance, he's taking the room back from them.

And by the way, who better than Gene Hackman to do that?

Coming up is a style we talked about earlier on of intercutting, interweaving.

You're about to see a sequence when...

...Gene describes how they're gonna spend money, buy a small food chain...

...to control the one juror Lonnie Shaver, played by Bill Nunn.

And what's confusing here, even to me, is the scene's meant to be flash-forward.

This scene is what's going to happen if they pay the money.

But it plays sort of as flashback. I think it's okay.

It has a temporal feel of maybe flashback, maybe flash-forward...

...but it feels like a different time, or could be happening concurrently.

I'm not sure. Maybe it's not important. But the audience never was confused.

We previewed the film two or three times, the audience always got it.

And I think they sort of enjoyed the fact that there was a certain omnipotence...

...that Fitch is putting out that seems to be playing out right before our eyes.

FITCH: ...will be following me. Just like in Cincinnati...

...and Oakland and Pittsburgh.

COMMENTARY: This scene, this moment, is a little mustache-twirling.

And there's that line and the smile.

But you know what? It's wonderful, because, you know, Fitch's arrogance...

...is what underscores the villainy. I mean, he's just so arrogant.

He's so sure he's gonna win this thing. He's so sure because he always does.

Does what he has to.

MAN: Here, Your Honor.

COMMENTARY: A note about tone.

I gotta say that when I shot these scenes between...

...Bruce McGill and Gerry Bamman, who plays the blind guy...

...Herman Grimes, and also between Bruce McGill and John Cusack...

...I was worried because the scenes were pretty funny.

They felt like a different movie.

You know, I was trying to make this terse, edgy, muscular film about...

...a gun trial and jury tampering and these two scenes coming up...

...felt a little bit like a John Hughes movie or something.

I don't know how else to put it.

They just were funny and goofy scenes.

But I also felt that all the actors played them real, which kept them grounded.

And also, the audience liked the humor, liked the comic relief...

...because this film could be so serious and so self-serious...

...that these two scenes kept things light.

BAILIFF: Nicholas Easter. HARKIN: Mr. Easter.

COMMENTARY: The thing I ask you to watch in this scene...

...between Dustin Hoffman and Cusack and Bruce McGill is Dustin.

Is that John's the obvious target here. He's very funny, he's on his game...

...and he and Bruce McGill had this wonderful rapport which plays again...

...in the Cafe Pontalba scene, but just, I love....

This is a case of Dustin Hoffman being a great straight man.

I love his looks and face. I love the way he plays to the judge, back and forth.

It's terrific.

ROHR: I see. Well, tell me--

COMMENTARY: Perpetuating the idea that Nick does not want to have jury duty...

...and John Cusack does this perfectly.

HARKIN: Your situation, Mr. Easter?

COMMENTARY: Uh-oh.

When we first previewed this film...

...this scene really worried me because I felt that it didn't get a laugh.

If people didn't like the scene or John, we were in trouble.

I don't know why, I just felt that if this scene didn't play...

...the second act wouldn't work.

I just had this funny feeling that if people were with John...

...at this point, that we had them for the second act.

I also felt if the audience didn't laugh or like John in this scene...

...we were in deep, deep trouble.

And I'm happy to report that when we first previewed the movie...

...this part got a big laugh. They liked John.

It didn't hurt to have Bruce McGill, who's a wonderful straight man.

I kept telling Bruce he was the Margaret Dumont of this movie.

Marx Brothers fans will know what that means.

Those of you who aren't, well, I don't know.

Go on IMDb and type in "Margaret Dumont," you'll find out.

And here's a transition that-- I think this is wonderfully cut by Bill Steinkamp.

Here's the turn, here's the changeup.

Yet again, intercutting two timelines.

Gene Hackman giving directives to his crew...

...with some mysterious journey by John Cusack's character, by Nick Easter.

The travelogue of New Orleans.

One small note about the war room now is it's been changed over.

We've actually, at this point-- This was written, this was conceived.

Hackman's now scaled back his personnel.

Now that they've impaneled the jury...

...they have jury boards up, two-thirds of the personnel are gone.

In fact, they now have this long sort of table...

...this stainless steel table, which has become a conference room in a way.

It's gone from the opening sequence of triage and information-gathering...

...to just sort of maintaining. To maintenance.

Jury maintenance, as it were.

I was concerned here that when John goes to Rachel Weisz's apartment...

...the audience might be confused, they might think:

"Is he back at his place?" And I think the way John plays it...

...it helps a lot to clarify this is not his house.

We're not sure where he is, but it's not his house.

Therefore, it's simply a scene of mystery and, clearly, some threat.

And the big reveal coming up here...

...that Cusack and Weisz are a couple, really worried me.

You know, as worried as I was that John wouldn't get a laugh...

...during the voir dire, I was really worried that if this scene...

...didn't work for an audience, meaning they didn't get a moment of, "My God...

...they're a couple and she's his girlfriend...

...and he's not that knucklehead slacker, he's actually this con man...

...this grifter." If that didn't work, if that didn't play...

...as a big reveal to end the first act, I thought we were in deep trouble.

You sit in that first preview screening, which we did, of course...

...and you're just dying inside, waiting to see if it plays.

And it did. It really played.

The original screenplay that I was offered, that I was given...

...before I got involved with Rick Cleveland in the rewrites...

...this reveal was thrown away. It was very strange.

John Cusack gets on the jury and kind of goes off, I think to some diner...

...sits with her, says, "I'm on the jury." She's like, "Let's do our thing."

And I thought to myself, "My God, it's this huge reveal to end the first act."

And now, of course, it was a big deal. He's not who you thought he was.

He's someone else. And the question is, will the audience stay with John?

Now that you know that he's a grifter, he's a con man, will you stay with him?

A quick word about the song you hear in the background, which is...

..."Bitter Tree" by David Baerwald.

And David's a very talented American songwriter...

...who's written stuff for Sheryl Crow...

...and also a few of his songs were on the Moulin Rouge! soundtrack.

David's also a solo artist. I heard this song when I was prepping.

I heard a bunch of music and I just found this interesting inspiration...

...in hearing David's song, "Bitter Tree."

I thought it was really evocative and.... I don't know, it really-- It just struck me.

I like the lyrics, I like the sound of the song.

I felt it somehow tied into Nick and Marlee...

...that they were sort of damaged people.

Doesn't quite make sense why or how, but we'll find out, deep in the third act...

...what happened to them.

I tried the song in this scene. I thought it worked really well.

And then I asked my composer, Chris Young, to incorporate the song...

...thematically, melodically, into the score, which he did.

In fact, the Nick and Marlee love theme...

...comes in the Baerwald song. In fact, you heard...

...Baerwald playing guitar and that melody back in the Santeria shop.

And you're gonna hear it again.

I love the sequences on the page...

...the idea of the jury boards connecting all the players.

The end of the first act sets up the rivalry...

...not between two, but between three parties.

Cusack and Weisz, Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman's characters...

...they're competing for the jury.

It's a great example of how film can just do it so quickly, boom...

...the image is there. I love the difference between the jury boards.

You've got the kind of simple...

...rough and tumble...

...of John and Rachel's board...

...and Dustin's very Spartan. You've got Hackman's elaborate jury board.

The rain here is no accident. We created this. But I felt...

...it was repeating, again, the motif...

...of Cusack coming up the stairs of the courthouse.

This time it's more dangerous, it's darker. The fun and games are over.

The knucklehead slacker from before is gone.

This is now a different story.

It's a story about three groups of people pursuing the same thing...

...the same MacGuffin.

John looking up at the statue is a little on the nose, and I'm embarrassed by it...

...but it worked thematically, because on second viewing it makes more sense.

LONNIE: Lonnie Shaver. SYLVIA: Hi, I'm Sylvia DeShazo.

COMMENTARY: Earlier in the film we saw Fitch in the cab, profiling the cabdriver.

Now that we've revealed John Cusack to be also...

...kind of a master of humanity...

...we have a similar scene here where you see Nick's point of view.

"Nick vision," I call it.

Heightened reality...

...sound, picture.

This is where John Cusack is brilliant. He's fantastic.

He can shift from this sort of dark, predatory character...

...in a private moment to the charming, likeable guy. And accessible guy.

I think it's also John in real life. John's a very complicated guy...

...like many smart actors, but in this case he's playing a guy who's very....

He has this great duality.

HERRERA: If no one else feels strongly, I'd throw my hat in the ring.

COMMENTARY: How do you, in two and half minutes, which this is...

...how do you set up that John can walk into a room as this character...

...and take over the room?

Even the staging: John walks in the room, checks out the players...

...figures out who they are quickly, moves behind Herrera, moves back out...

...and then chooses the moment.

We're meeting the key players: Rikki Coleman, played by Rhoda Griffis...

...who's wonderful, who plays a key part.

Bill Nunn, who we already know at this point has been compromised.

And then here comes Nick Easter.

HERRERA: And who might that be, Mr...? -Easter. Nicholas Easter, sir.

COMMENTARY: Frank Herrera-- Cliff Curtis plays it like he thinks John wants...

...to be the jury foreman. Then here's the swerve.

I have to confess...

...there was, in an earlier draft, there was a C-D-E-story...

...where there's a reason why Herman Grimes was elected.

At first it was so John Cusack could sort of control the jury by having...

...an affinity for, and also get him gaining the trust and confidence...

...of the jury foreman, played by Gerry Bamman.

But that was cut out.

There wasn't time. We cut a sequence out...

...when John tries to schmooze Gerry Bamman. There also was...

...an end of second act reveal which was insane and absurd that we tried...

...where Bamman was on the take. He was on the take from Fitch's team.

It just didn't work and it was silly.

And we cut it out.

ALL: Thank you. -Make sure you circle what you want.

Don't make it too expensive. Thank you.

COMMENTARY: One small note about the location.

We built this jury room into the Fish and Game building in the French Quarter...

...and it went from rainy to sunlight...

...well, we just couldn't control that. We actually tried...

...when we shot the original scene to create the rain, in which we did...

...but it became sunny. That's why there's a hard cut from rain to sunlight.

Every courtroom scene, maybe except for the closing statement...

...there are two and three and four things happening at the same time.

The film works that way. People say this is a courtroom thriller.

To me it really isn't. It's more of a psychological thriller...

...and the background of which is this courtroom film going on.

This is a case where you begin the scene-- We've set up that Nick Easter...

...has an agenda.

He's ambitious, he has an agenda.

And then all of a sudden you begin to sort of peel away the layers...

...by setting up also a case that has to make sense.

Dustin Hoffman's case has to make sense to the audience and to the jury.

And as you do, as you initiate that...

...there's a left turn.

Rachel Weisz in a wig.

It seems easy to watch, but this is hard to cut, hard to make work narratively.

To keep the flow, what Dustin Hoffman's saying...

...to keep the integrity of his opening statement...

...but also set up the secondary story...

...which is giving out the "jury for sale" note.

It's also a tonal shift...

...because this has to be very earnest, serious, can't be made fun of...

...but you have to have the fun of the game. That was very important...

...is that the con in this movie cannot be dark.

It cannot be nefarious. It has to be fun. It has to be.

It's a game. And that also comes from the music.

Chris Young tried and discovered a really great way of using different rhythms...

...zydeco rhythms and these sort of eccentric...

...rhythms and polyrhythms to create that fun.

When you watch this, the different points of view you've got going on...

...you've got attorneys looking at a "jury for sale" sign, John clocking them...

...but you have to make sense of Bruce Davison's opening statement...

...and then, boom, ignite Hackman's involvement in some way.

It's very complicated to keep this sort of....

This moving and making sense geographically...

...and also narratively make sense.

CABLE: Why? Because they drive them.

The people at Vicksburg work every day...

...to keep the guns out of the hands of criminals.

Why? Because they have families with children....

COMMENTARY: And the game begins.

Part of my theory with Gene Hackman's character, with Rankin Fitch...

...was that he be slow to react to this, that he be slow to take it seriously.

There were two layers happening with Fitch the entire movie.

One layer is he doesn't want to take John and Rachel's characters serious.

He doesn't take their threat or that they can influence the jury seriously.

He's almost as resistant to the idea as Dustin Hoffman's character is.

The second idea, which was much deeper in the second act...

...is that Gene Hackman doesn't want to lose control and believe he has to pay.

He'll do anything possible except pay this couple the money...

...to control the verdict. Not because he doesn't wanna win, he doesn't want...

...to lose control, to give in and doesn't wanna be under their thumb.

The second act really is a different film than the first act.

The first act is much more of this sort of linear, traditional...

...the goofy guy, the bad guy and it's all very clear.

And in the second act you're not-- It's not as clear.

I made the point before about the audience being with John Cusack...

...in the scene with Dustin Hoffman, the voir dire...

...how important the laughter was to confirm the audience was with John.

This is the payoff, because they were. Audiences in the previews liked John.

And this scene, all of a sudden, again confirmed that they liked John...

...because this is a different film than the first act. This is the con movie...

...the grift movie. They're in John's point of view, what he's seeing, hearing.

Because he and Marlee have created this situation...

...by delaying lunch, with the clock.

More information for John Cusack to pick up is Nora Dunn's drinking problem.

You also saw before Nora Dunn was reading a book...

...with a Jerzy Kosinski black-and-white photograph. That was The Painted Bird.

I'm a big Kosinski fan. That was my inside.

Directors can sneak in their favorite books and favorite music into films...

...as a form of, sort of, propaganda.

And here's the payoff of the game.

Little footnote here is that you're about to hear Bruce McGill telling a joke...

...about a golf course. When we shot the scene, I think we did...

...nine or 1 0 takes, different angles, points of view.

Every take was a different joke by Bruce McGill.

He always would end at the exact right moment to have John Cusack appear.

It was bizarre.

We should do a DVD section of simply having the 1 0 jokes by Bruce McGill...

...but of course there won't be enough room for that.

I made a point before about the Robert Altman approach...

...of having an environment where everybody can be in the same proximity.

This is a great example. Being Memphis, Richmond, a different Southern city....

Sprawling cities wouldn't make sense. Here's the French Quarter.

Here's Cafe Pontalba in the middle of the French Quarter.

You can really believe...

...when all of a sudden, in a few moments...

...Dustin Hoffman and Piven walk by, it makes sense.

Then a few moments later, when Gene drives up in his car, it all makes sense.

I'm not sure, but I believe I'm buying lunch for the jury.

Funny about this Isley Brothers song. We tried a different piece of music.

We tried this Buckwheat Zydeco song. It just didn't have the same flair.

It's funny about shorthand. The song feels like a party.

When we previewed the film and didn't have that song, it didn't play as well.

So we actually went and got the song and it's really worthwhile.

ROHR: In 35 years, that is the most absurd thing I've ever seen.

-You have mustard on your tie. -I did it on purpose.

COMMENTARY: I love how the different characters deal...

...with this jury lunch in different ways.

Hoffman's ticked off but doesn't want to take in what it means...

...whereas Hackman knows what it means.

Fitch knows. There's some influence happening, but he doesn't quite want...

...to acknowledge it beyond his private circle.

But obviously it interests him.

This scene was a great success, in the cut, because I have to admit right now...

...that a lot of stuff with the jury members was cut out of the picture.

I say "a lot"-- There was a sequence in a bar we cut...

...there was subplots with John Cusack...

...which you'll see some on the DVD excised scene section.

There's stuff between John and Luis Guzman, John and Jennifer Beals...

...there's stuff with Gerry Bamman that was cut out.

Because that one scene at the lunch I really felt sold...

...in a very, very clear way, sold how much the jury liked John.

It's funny how that took on a life of its own.

On the page it wasn't that important, somehow...

...but when we saw the cut...

...the Cafe Pontalba scene really sold that John was liked by the jurors.

That was huge. To believe that was to believe he could influence them...

...and we have two or three more scenes when he does that...

...but the Pontalba scene set that up so perfectly...

...and so economically, time-wise.

Now, the scene between Piven and Dustin is another example...

...of Piven being the guy saying to Dustin, "You have to accept reality...

...you have to accept that this is a new way, this is happening...

...there's something happening on this jury."

And I love the fact that Piven represents just that. The new way.

Dustin's Atticus Finch and it just-- "You're living in the past.

This is a new way."

But it's funny. Again, the parallel...

...between Dustin's character and Gene's character.

Neither want to acknowledge that anybody has any influence on this jury...

...that anything's going on.

LAMB: Mr. Fitch, I got a call for you, line seven.

COMMENTARY: It's funny.

There's a screen wipe coming up, not a cut, but a wipe...

...which we use-- Which, literally, that one wipe...

...helped the audience understand there's two different timelines.

It's coming up.

There she is, Rachel Weisz, she's now outside.

It's subtle, but it's easy to see now...

...that this scene, if cut less skillfully by a different editor...

...might not have worked to show these are two different conversations...

...intercut in a way which feels seamless, which is clever on the page...

...but really hard to convey on film.

FITCH: I'm also old enough to remember Watergate, Abscam, Linda Tripp--

COMMENTARY: It's a little cute. It's a little cute in that sort of bad way...

...but, again, it sort of economically sets up the fact...

...that Rachel Weisz has now put the hook in on the two players.

The scene in the film between Fitch...

...and Jankle at the trap range used to come right here.

But it's a funny thing about flow. I really felt that by juxtaposing....

By putting right next to each other the setup, the scene with her saying:

"Patriotic," right to John Cusack, playing it off...

...with the jurors, was very important and actually felt like cause and effect.

You'll see it when she says, "We're gonna bump a juror."

I like the connectivity...

...between her saying "patriotic" and then here's John Cusack doing his con.

And the audience, as I hoped they would, really....

They love watching Cusack's character work the jury and play them.

HERRERA: Yeah, well, that was mostly air power. Not much real action.

COMMENTARY: Another insight is that John Cusack....

You always have that scene with every actor where they just don't really...

...like the scene.

And John Cusack just didn't really like this scene. He felt it was....

I think he felt, and I think he was right, that he had to....

He wanted to earn the payoff with the pledge.

He felt the pledge of allegiance could potentially be very goofy.

He just thought it was a goofy scene. And he didn't like it.

I think he'll say it now, he'll admit publicly he just didn't like the scene.

I think we must have done literally 1 2, 1 3, 14 drafts of this one scene...

...because he felt that they were a bunch of idiots. So we actually...

...spent some time improvising and workshopping this scene.

The idea that finally panned out was that John had to veto the ideas he didn't like.

"The prayer." "No, no, not the prayer."

"Let's sing." "No, let's not sing." "Well, I have an idea."

And the result was, when we previewed the movie and had the early screenings...

...this got one of the biggest laughs in the movie.

I think that, actually, it's a case where...

...the resistance that John was giving the scene and giving me helped...

...because it made us do better work and made us really play it, workshop it.

And in so doing, I think it refined it and just made it smarter.

So now Dustin Hoffman's character is finally on board.

He sees that somebody in the jury has influence and maybe...

...he's not in control. It's not an objective case.

The playing field's not level in some way.

I love these two shots here.

One of Gene's $2000 shoes in the mud and then the next shot...

...of Gene dancing in the field. It's just fantastic.

That shot was actually my homage to one of my favorite films, JFK.

The scene with Garrison, played by Kevin Costner, and Kevin Bacon at Angola.

It's one of my favorite scenes. Very conspiratorial.

And this scene, again, used to come before...

...the pledge of allegiance scene, but it was more impactful coming here...

...as the payoff.

Because Hackman and Dustin are now seeing...

...scene by scene, that they're not in control of this jury.

And the reminder here is so important, that Hackman has a boss.

He has a boss. There's a stake here.

I want to believe that if Fitch didn't have this pressure, this heat from above...

...he wouldn't do what he does, which is avidly pursue this guy on the jury.

It might come slower. It might happen slower.

"Find out who it is."

He's going to. Look at his face.

DOYLE: At some point, everyone on the jury acknowledges Herrera.

COMMENTARY: It's an important scene. It's small...

...but I like the fact that Hackman sees things they don't see.

You have Nick seriously talking about Frank Herrera...

...and Fitch sees the behavior.

Of course he does. He's the superdetective.

This one moment here is an important moment because I got a lot...

...of commentary and notes early on in the script stage.

"How did John get on the jury? How did Nick Easter get on the jury?

How did he do it?" And I said, "I'll have a little scene...

...where you've got the cliched egghead giving one reason...

...and going on, giving 1 5 reasons how." Finally Hackman's like, "Just stop.

Okay, I get it, I get it."

That's how I felt hearing the notes early on. I got tired of hearing about them.

I mentioned before that this film-- No courtroom scene really lives by itself.

This is a great example. We set up the scene between...

...Rohr and a gun dealer, but within a few seconds we'll be cutting away...

...to the break-in at John Cusack's apartment.

Which I think, when people saw the movie, it really-- I was worried...

...it would sort of, you know, mitigate or fracture the case.

But it makes it stronger, because you assume things are going on...

...and you get the essence of it while things are going on...

...with Fitch's espionage.

Here we have Nick Searcy playing Doyle. Nick's terrific.

I've worked with Nick on a miniseries called From the Earth to the Moon.

He's a great combination of being charming and funny but a little dark.

If you saw his cameo in One Hour Photo...

...he's wonderful at playing the angry technician.

Funny story about this scene with Dustin and the actor playing the gun dealer:

This actually was a re-shoot, the second day of filming.

The first day we shot this scene, it was raining.

We were in a warehouse in New Orleans.

And it was a tin-ceiling warehouse. The rain was just horrific.

You could barely hear yourself think.

I actually persuaded Dustin Hoffman to try doing this scene with the rain.

Maybe we could loop it or salvage it in postproduction...

...because I hated to sit there and not film all day.

It was one of my crazier moments. He knew we couldn't use the footage.

I think he did, I'm not mistaken, 25 or 30 takes of this entire scene...

...all of which were unusable.

Dustin was not on his game because he was distracted. And he was right.

He came back the next day and said, "We needed to shoot this scene again."

And he literally did the whole three-page scene in one take...

...with Steadicam and the whole courtroom broke into applause.

He turned to me and said, "Never again can you film in the rain."

And he was right. It was one of the occasions of me being unkind to him...

...and to any actor in the film. Pushing through because of schedule...

...not because of their needs, but my desire to make the day.

And that happens sometimes.

DOYLE: Oh, hi. Yeah, the landlord let me in.

He said some tenants have been having trouble with the cable.

But I checked yours out, and--

COMMENTARY: Chase scenes are hard because you want to reinvent them.

The only thing I could do with it was keep it moving...

...but also try to show off the French Quarter and use New Orleans.

There was a bigger version of this sequence...

...in the movie Heaven's Prisoners by Phil Joanou, also cut by Bill Steinkamp.

It involved Alec Baldwin chasing a bad guy across the French Quarter...

...but also onto a streetcar and then off the streetcar.

So I couldn't do that.

I didn't have two weeks to shoot it. I had three days and I shot the scene.

It was pared down from the earlier cut.

If you live in New Orleans, this scene doesn't make sense geographically.

We go from Chartres Street to Jackson Square to Clinton Alley...

...which is right by the customs house.

But it sort of works in a film reality.

Another dicey idea was Nick Easter, Cusack's character, showing violence.

I was worried throughout the movie about how John was coming off...

...because if we didn't have the audience liking his character...

...this scene would be potentially really harmful.

You have a scene where....

What makes the chase scene go from a B minus to an A or A minus...

...is the shock moment of Nick Searcy being surprised by Cusack.

I know John Cusack liked this moment, but it showed incredible violence.

Nick seems very comfortable with what he's doing here.

With the bar, with the violence, with the attack. Very aggressive.

The payoff, which makes it work and softens it a little bit...

...is the moment right here, which John plays perfectly.

The smile coming up here, which doesn't really make sense.

This doesn't make sense until you see this:

That's why Cusack is so wonderful.

What does this smile mean? He didn't get the hard drive.

I talked before about cause and effect and about connecting.

What Rachel Weisz tells Hackman and/or Hoffman connects to John Cusack.

This is a great example where we took a longer scene in the war room...

...between Gene Hackman and Rachel Weisz and we pared it back a bit.

And it became simply, yet again, a scene.

The first half of the second act, for me, is Marlee proving to Gene Hackman...

...that he does not have control of this jury.

That she does and John Cusack does.

That is the objective of the first half of the second act.

And here it is: cause and effect.

"We're gonna punish you. Punish you for the break-in."

This thing with the Carmex was John's idea.

There was a version of this scene in an earlier draft which was more...

...obvious and banal, and John had the idea of faking the hangover.

This is a great example of a scene that's just not on the page.

It does not exist on the page beyond two or three lines.

It's a behavioral scene. It's what's happening between the lines.

NICK: I woke up on my stove.

COMMENTARY: I got some grief about underusing some wonderful actors.

But my thing is, why not?

In the Altman tradition, why not get great actors to do smaller parts?

Because this case, you have to believe Nora Dunn.

You have to believe what John Cusack and she are doing here.

What's happening between them, this exchange.

When a drunk sees a drunk, there's an instant sympathy here.

But the one shot that sells it is John's foot kicking the bottle.

To me, it seals the con.

Bruce McGill again, as a perfect straight man.

HARKIN: You still trying to get off my jury, is that it?

Your Honor, I took an oath to do my best, and I meant it.

Difficult as that is to believe...

COMMENTARY: I have to credit Nora Dunn here. I didn't see it on the page...

...but she made sure that when Stella Hullic is bumped off the jury...

...that she really is distraught.

Nora spent 1 5, 20 minutes getting those tears to be real.

It wasn't a joke for her. And she was upset when we tried to rush the scene.

She wanted to make sure we got that and it played honestly.

This is a very important moment in the story.

This is the moment where Fitch knows he's not in control of the jury.

And it's also the first time you see Hackman raise his voice.

When we filmed the scene, I remember saying to Gene--

I mean, Gene's a very smart guy.

He knows that people like me do multiple takes.

We do two, three cameras, we do seven different angles.

I said to Gene, "When I shoot this scene, I wanna do two or three takes.

I'll do two cameras, because I want to let you lose it if you want to."

FITCH: Because you're losing me my jury!

COMMENTARY: When somebody yells, they're out of control.

When somebody is that pissed off, they're expressing their weakness.

Gene Hackman's character was demonstrating his weakness.

This sequence, I call it "the swarm," is a sequence of overcompensation.

MONROE: Mr. Coleman has racked up three cases of domestic battery.

COMMENTARY: Referencing Bill Steinkamp's fantastic editing.

Very elliptical, moving, pre-lapping, overlapping, jumping in time.

The style's been set up earlier, but it really comes to fruition here.

We're telling three stories in just moments.

MAN: Get off me.

That's what I'm talking about.

COMMENTARY: We weren't sure when we cut the scene this way...

...if audiences would be able to follow it.

You just don't know. The style of the film is very aggressive.

It is very cutting-edge.

It is playing off of conventions we've seen...

...in recent.... Certainly in commercial filmmaking and music videos.

The sort of work done on films like Traffic and The Limey...

...are this advanced and this nonlinear.

But to make this work, tell three stories in two minutes and make sense...

...and have the audience track it, is a testament to Steinkamp's talent.

ROHR: ...a little bit about your schooling?

KINCAID: Well, not a whole lot to tell.

I mean, most people got a college degree.

COMMENTARY: Again, cause and effect. We've seen three jurors...

...during the Fitch rampage and now we see the play out of that.

There's a subtle indication here...

...that Fitch has gotten to Dustin Hoffman's witness.

"Lawyers never ask questions they don't know the answers to."

In this case, when the witness is asked about gun trafficking...

...the answer surprises Dustin Hoffman. The implication, what we infer, is that...

...Fitch got to him.

CABLE: --that you were out there reselling their product?

COMMENTARY: At the top of the second act...

...you saw John Cusack clocking the jurors in the jury room...

...taking them in, sizing them up, profiling them in some way.

You now have a reprise of that in the jury box.

Here's John Cusack watching the jurors.

I think this is some of Robert Elswit's best photography in the film.

I love how this was shot, how it's lit.

Even the compositions are simply perfect for the point of view.

And then, here's a great transition.

John's being watched. Nick's being watched.

Here's a courtroom scene which plays Nick's point of view...

...and Green's point of view of Nick,

all in the same scene.

LAMB: I've retrieved some fragments. I've got two things.

COMMENTARY: This scene was dicey. I wish we could have cut this.

But there's so much exposition to convey in this film.

And this scene was yet more.

Gene Hackman and Leland Orser having to explain the files, what they all mean.

And then the next maybe red herring, maybe not, which is the iPod.

And then setting up a new character, which is Janovich.

I thought this moment was funny. Audiences never laughed.

"Bring this guy with you." And Nick Searcy being petulant.

The break-in of Nick's apartment might strain credibility.

You wonder why Fitch, at this point, would be destroying the apartment.

I felt that it was setting up something more important.

Fitch, losing control, was going to hire Janovich, who is also out of control.

I thought of him as a Russian mobster that he brought in as part of his crew...

...in case things get dicey, which they have at this point.

But it's important to counterpoint that...

...with Cusack's empathy for the jurors.

First or second viewing of the film...

...it's important that Nick Easter has a conscience.

And I think you see it here. He's watching the jurors unravel.

NICK: Sorry, man.

COMMENTARY: Coming up is an example that Lawrence Green matters to the story.

He's not simply an appendage or a device.

He's the one guy that saw Nick Easter in the jury box.

He saw Nick Easter being the guy on the inside from that previous scene.

He's now going to investigate.

There's the feeling here that he might run into these two bad guys.

There might be some violence, some sort of horrible outcome.

To me, for the story, it's important...

...that we connect Piven's character, Lawrence Green, to Nick Searcy.

So he can say to Dustin Hoffman in the next scene or two:

"I saw this guy. He was at Nick Easter's apartment.

Nick Easter is spinning this jury. We have to accept that this is rigged."

It's a great example of using intercutting...

...and crosscutting to create tension, to keep the story moving.

Presumably Piven's there to break into Nick's mailbox, see who the heck he is.

Do some research, do some reconnaissance.

Here we set up the loose cannon idea with Janovich.

He'll burn the guy's place down, even at the protest of Nick Searcy.

Here's that great moment, a connection between Piven and Nick Searcy...

...which will play into the next sequence.

Important moment, boom. Now, escalation.

SYLVIA: Hey, guys. There's something really wrong with Rikki.

I mean it. Come on.

COMMENTARY: This scene was potentially troubling, and mawkish and maudlin...

...but I think that John Cusack keeps the scene grounded in reality.

It's also important that the audience sees that Nick has conscience.

That he cares about these people. He might be ambitious and predatory...

...but he also doesn't want people to get hurt, people to die.

You really feel when he says to her, "I'm sorry, Rikki. I'm sorry"...

...it's real. He doesn't want her to die. He doesn't want her to be hurt.

SYLVIA: Is she breathing, Nick? NICK: Yeah. She'll be okay, I think.

COMMENTARY: Coming up in a few moments is the protagonists' low point.

Nick and Marlee in the church is the low point of the story for them.

Not for Fitch, but for them.

The ticking clock. Every thriller has to have one.

The missing iPod should be the ticking clock.

We'll find out in a few moments what that means.

Nick is obviously very upset they burned down his place.

But very upset when he finds out the iPod's gone.

Just a word about staging, in a church scene:

I knew this would happen when we shot the scene, and it did happen.

When you do any scene, you work with the actors...

...you say, "Let's rehearse it, stage it, let's find a way to make this play."

The idea was: It's a church, midnight, 1 :00 in the morning, empty.

Still, the two actors decided to rehearse sitting in one of the pews.

Which, you know, you've seen it before and it works.

I could name five movies where it's happened.

Then we had this idea: what if you put the scene on its feet?

You have this beautiful church. It's quiet and private.

Rather than have them sit and whisper, let them be on their feet.

Let them be moving around. Let it be more dynamic that way.

What came out of it was exciting. You have John's height, his size...

...and the fact that he loves to move around.

And you got Rachel Weisz, who in a way is pursuing him.

Staging-wise, John's to the left, she's to the right.

In a second they'll shift, once the scene builds to this initial climax.

This scene's very well-played and nicely written.

It underscores to the audience that these two people care.

There is conscience. They do care about the jurors.

Again, there's that switch up. Now she's behind him.

MARLEE: And Fitch wants to meet.

We knew I'd have to go face-to-face with him.

COMMENTARY: It was important for the audience to believe...

...that Cusack's character was saying, "I'm out of here. I'm done."

And she has to say, "There's a reason. There's something we have to do."

Second blush, that makes more sense, knowing the endgame.

You don't know the endgame yet.

Even the first time out of the gate, the scene does work in that way.

HARKIN: Take a good look.

DOYLE: Oh, hi. LandIord Iet me in.

A Iot of peopIe have been compIaining about their cabIe.

COMMENTARY: This is pure story. Not much character-wise.

The pure story is: we've now triggered the connection...

...between Piven and Nick Easter.

Piven's now going to get Dustin Hoffman to realize that he's lost this thing.

The thing is not in his control anymore.

It's a funny balance between character and plot.

Some scenes are plot, some are character.

When they can be both, it's wonderful. This scene is a great example of that.

When we first shot this scene on the steps...

...it's a funny thing: the earlier takes, Dustin had a tough time with it.

The choice he was making was more passive and confused and confounded.

And I had a very hard time. I felt this scene didn't have energy.

It felt sort of quiet and just confused. The scene wasn't working.

Finally I said to myself, "Maybe Dustin should fire him."

He should say to Piven, "You did what? You went to a juror's apartment?

You were watching this guy? You're fired."

By giving Dustin that objective, the idea that he's sick of this guy...

...he's outraged at this guy's behavior...

...it makes Piven rise above that energy-wise and say, "Listen, you idiot.

They're buying this jury. Don't you get it? They own this thing.

It's not you."

The scene coming up with Joanna Going, I have to admit...

...every film has a couple of scenes that you wish you'd done better.

This scene is okay.

It goes back to the writing and also having not rehearsed the scene properly.

Wish there'd been some way to make this scene smarter.

I just don't like scenes to be so on-the-surface and so obvious.

It became a scene where the semi-shrill widow with the beatific kid...

...is saying, "You have to win this one. We have to win this."

It feels very dated, like it's not of this movie.

There might have been a better way to do it.

It works and the intention's correct, but I think it could have been better.

Joanna Going, who's wonderful, is trying her best...

...to breathe life into this very obvious little scene...

...about "win one for me and the kid."

LAMB: I got Easter's list of potential jurors.

Boston, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati.

COMMENTARY: Coming up in the scene with Hackman and, potentially, Marlee...

...is a great example of making something wonderful out of nothing.

All it was on the page, really, was:

Fitch waits for Marlee, wrong woman shows up...

...he leaves, she's on the streetcar.

I wanted to make it a scene about how smart Marlee was to make Fitch go there.

And be in this cacophonous environment with all this noise.

And even the fact that his back is to the wall...

...and the girl coming in the restaurant in a few moments is backlit.

Incidentally, you'll see when she walks in...

...that we have Rachel Weisz in the shot and then somebody else.

You'll see right here, there's Rachel Weisz here, but not there.

And then she's back again and then she's not there.

We shot this scene twice, of course. One with Rachel Weisz, one without.

Even when we shot the scene, the crew was saying, "What are you guys doing?

This will never work." Of course, I knew it would.

I wanted to make Rachel Weisz seem very smart in this scene.

That she could outthink, outsmart, outmaneuver this guy.

She knows he'll be photographing her. She can't show up on his turf.

She'll be made. She'll be taken in.

Who knows what will happen to her? It's too dangerous.

I love the payoff here with the 360 camera. The disorientation.

Now Hackman's out of his element. He's out of control yet again.

The scene on the streetcar, I worried it would take days to shoot.

This is Robert Elswit, the DP, being terrific in his collaboration.

There might have been a way to shoot this scene...

...with lots of lights and lots of equipment and lots of cables.

We shot this scene like a film student might shoot it.

We shot it with available light, hand-held camera...

...and some little Kino Flo lights, for fill light, on the cheek side.

We shot this scene pretty quickly, in less than a full day's worth of work.

Which is pretty amazing on a moving streetcar.

With a very small crew. And it feels like it's happening.

It feels very real. And the actors could maneuver around, stand...

...and not feel confined by hitting marks and by light.

I think by keeping it loose it just kept things very real.

This scene is really, for me, subtextually about a sexual flirtation.

The way she plays with Hackman is not the way she plays with Dustin.

With Dustin it's much more of a paternal thing.

With Hackman I felt that she was playing him sexually.

In fact, I think he takes her rejection of the check as a sexual rejection.

"I'm asking for a date." "No. You can't have a date."

I felt, at this point, that Hackman saw her as being, not an equal...

...but certainly just as soulless and rapacious as he is.

And then, again, this rejection is huge.

Gene is a very charismatic guy.

In films, he deals with women in a way that's often times as a leading man.

This scene is rejection. It's one of the most important scenes...

...for Rachel Weisz, her vulnerability at this moment.

People have come up to me after screenings and said, "I love that scene...

...when she's out of breath, winded, nauseous."

It happened late in the game, but it's huge.

It's amazing how one moment like that with an audience...

...can give them the license to like or dislike somebody.

That one moment with her off the streetcar had so much mileage.

People said to me they didn't like her until that moment.

They weren't sure if they could like her until that moment.

We already know that Nick Easter has compassion...

...that he has empathy for these people, from the church.

But at that moment, you feel that she's human.

HERMAN: Why would anyone want to get to her?

NICK: Same reason they want to get us.

-To influence the outcome of the trial. -Are we safe?

-Okay, here are your keys. -We are now.

COMMENTARY: This scene between Cusack and Rusty Schwimmer...

...used to be intercut with a different scene:

John Cusack in a flash-forward scene...

...talking to Rachel Weisz about how many jurors they're losing.

But I cut that and this became just one scene. It feels a little awkward to me.

I'm not sure how to fix it, the little montage of her crying.

It was awkward.

The redemption is this scene between John Cusack and Cliff Curtis here.

I was talking before about giving the jury...

...one juror who doesn't like Nick Easter. And this is how important it is.

I think this scene makes all of them smarter.

This scene was actually a re-shoot.

It's funny, we shot this scene early in the schedule...

...and Cliffjust hadn't really found this guy yet.

I don't know what it was. It could have been the accent...

...it could have been just a philosophy on who this guy was.

He played the guy sort of humorless.

We came back and shot this scene a second time in half a day.

It turned out much better. This is the scene that's in the film.

Cliff found the guy. That does happen.

Sometimes you shoot a scene and it just doesn't work.

Somehow you have to simply say, "Let's come back a different day and shoot it."

The Cafe Du Monde scene is one of my favorites. This too was a re-shoot.

This whole scene was shot first couple of weeks of shooting.

Every choice that I made, that we made, that we all made, creatively, was wrong.

We had a different wardrobe for her, like a KGB agent with her leather coat.

Her hair was back. She looked very hard and harsh.

Frankly, we hadn't talked about the scene enough.

Because the scene is very complicated.

You can tell from the first walk-up that she likes this guy.

She wants to help this guy, but help him by being tough love.

And then, when he goes on the attack with her, she has to defend herself.

It was just a very complicated scene, psychologically and intellectually.

And the first scene didn't really work.

The studio let us come back and re-shoot the entire scene.

That meant, yet again, buying Cafe Du Monde for an entire day...

...and making these poor extras eat beignets for 1 5 hours.

People ask me to this day if I like beignets, I'm like, "Not anymore."

MARLEE: ...or you can win a huge victory for gun control. The choice is yours.

COMMENTARY: People have asked me, knowing that they're gonna screw Fitch:

"Why did Nick and Marlee work Dustin Hoffman so aggressively?"

The reality is, they need to get him in the game.

They have to make him engage to make Fitch pay.

If Dustin doesn't pay-- Doesn't get in the game, Fitch is not gonna pay.

He won't feel the heat. So it's part of the big con.

The short con might be: get Dustin to agree to pay.

The long con, the big con...

...is getting Fitch to see he has competition.

I think you see that Marlee knew she was being photographed.

She knew Fitch was gonna be spying on Dustin, therefore spying on them.

This moment coming up is so important.

Dustin Hoffman, in rehearsal, comes up with such incredible stuff.

Behavior and lines, and this moment when he grabs her and he says:

ROHR: Who hurt you?

COMMENTARY: This was not written. This came out of rehearsal, out of improv.

By the way, he's right about her.

Even if you find out that she's not who you think she is...

...she is damaged and she is sort of the monster.

The thing that happened to her in Gardner, Indiana, with her sister...

...did change her forever. Dustin saying that, to me...

...is when films can be great.

When the behavior and the subtext...

...can be so powerful, beyond just the obvious text and the story being told.

Of course, followed by a scene of complete exposition.

With Gene Hackman and photographs. But these are important scenes too.

I love to point out the flaws in my films, and this film especially.

Here you have Dustin Hoffman lamenting the loss of a witness...

...who he just heard about two scenes ago.

Really, it's pretty....

There was discussion about, do we actually meet this witness...

...have a scene with the witness and make it Ned Beatty or something.

That would have been a Pandora's box, if you met a witness who's now missing.

You have to explain who they are, what happened to them.

Were they bought off, were they injured.

By making this witness a concept, I think it made it much more powerful.

It made it much easier.

I made the point before about how the courtrooms are being photographed.

Here you have a scene, it's all hand-held.

The courtroom's been sullied by Gene Hackman's character, by Fitch.

And there he is.

This is Gene Hackman at his best. I love when he straightens his jacket.

Little half-smile and now the big scene, the famous Hackman/Hoffman scene.

If you have the DVD, which of course you do, because you're hearing this...

...you have lots of great stuff to look at and to listen to besides me.

I'll do my best to give you stuff that you haven't seen or heard on the DVD.

FITCH: Rankin Fitch.

Nice suit. Very "of the people."

Yours is nicer. You call it, "gun lobby protecting its own"?

Swank shoes.

-Big tobacco? -Big alligator. Wrestled it myself.

Excuse me, we're cleaning up in here.

-Am I gonna get beat up? -What'd you do to my witness?

Threaten his family, write a check? Just curious what your technique is.

Maybe he decided against biting the hand that fed him.

You know exactly why he came to us.

Oh, please, don't tell me you hung your case on somebody's conscience.

COMMENTARY: We only had 1 2 hours to shoot this scene.

Seems like enough time, but when we're shooting two and three pages a day...

...this is a six- or seven-page scene and we had one day.

This scene was shot during the last week of filming in January of 2003.

It was meant to be shot in the November before that.

What happened was, the scene wasn't ready. The scene just didn't work.

It was two pages long, it just felt like it was anticlimactic for these two guys.

And the challenge is, how do you make this work in 1 2 hours?

What we did is that Dustin and Gene came the day before we shot the scene.

I was there and Scott was there and we sat and we spent four to five hours...

...the day before rehearsing it.

We began like the theater. We sat there and had a read of the script.

We talked about every line, every beat, intellectually, conceptually, emotionally.

And then we made sure all the words made sense to the actors...

...and then we took the scene that same day to the set and we walked the set.

The thing is, when you shoot a scene during a film...

...it's always, like, the time, the clock, the sun's going down, you're behind...

...you're two hours behind, and we didn't have the clock problem.

We sat there and we literally spent two hours, I believe, that day...

...walking the scene, laying the marks and I brought in the DP...

...and some of the principal crew and began to block out the scene.

The day before we shot the scene.

And what happened, too, was when the actors left that afternoon...

...to go home, they knew the scene, they knew the staging...

...and they could go off and think about that rather than...

...the day of, "Will this scene be there? Will it work? Will the staging work?"

The second big thing was, the day we shot the scene...

...they were both well-rested, they'd had several months off from having shot...

...the principal material back in the fall and they're both very well-rested.

And Gene was especially on his game that day.

He was very exuberant and excited and I shot his coverage first.

The idea was that I knew Dustin, who's very competitive...

...in tennis and in acting, would want to rise to the occasion.

So when we shot Gene first, and he was just terrific, he was on fire.

Exuberant, interesting and he really smoked the character...

...he smoked Wendall Rohr. And we shot Dustin after lunch.

Dustin had to come back and be just as exuberant...

...and as energetic as Gene, and I think he was. I think he really was.

And Dustin had asked me to shoot him first, but I knew if I shot him first...

...he wouldn't have the incentive he had having to match and maybe even top...

...Gene Hackman's performance.

So in some Machiavellian way I did play with the idea of these two guys...

...who were very good and very competitive.

As well as being good friends, they were also gonna be competing to some extent.

Anyway, I love the scene and I'm very proud of the work that they did.

ROHR: I'm going to need access to the firm's emergency reserve.

-Emergency reserve? -Yeah.

-In what amount? -Ten million.

COMMENTARY: Another great example of behavior.

Dustin Hoffman playing a guy who's beaten but also...

...angry at himself for having to be corrupt.

I have to admit that this series of scenes with Nick Searcy running around...

...investigating, worried me, because he wasn't a main character.

He wasn't Hackman.

He was this guy, this schmo...

...being sent around to sort of do investigative work.

I was really worried the stuff would not play. I was in trouble if it didn't work.

It was conveying all the information, the story, the links in the chain...

...to him finding out who the real Nick and Marlee were.

What we did was, we found ourselves making these scenes really tight...

...and paring them back, for example, this cut we're about to make...

...from Nick Searcy muttering to himself here about Jeffrey Kerr...

...to the Bloomington University records office, this was not written this way.

This scene came, I think, another half-dozen scenes later in the story.

What we did was, we tried to make it all connect up.

That way we could sort of make it not just a scene but a sequence.

And my worries about Nick Searcy working as his own character...

...were not founded, because when we showed the movie...

...to the first two audiences, they liked him and they went with it.

So he was fine.

CABLE: Mr. Jankle, are you a family man?

Yes, sir, I am. I have a son. I have an 8-year-old grandson.

COMMENTARY: Stanley Anderson and Dustin had a really nice rapport.

They liked each other very much as actors and as people.

And they enjoyed the sparring matches.

This scene was troublesome because it was a lot longer...

...in the earlier cut of the film and the scenes about Dustin Hoffman...

...meeting Stanley Anderson, to sort of lose control...

...to go off the deep end and scream about the Second Amendment.

It had to be earned. It had to feel like Dustin earns that moment of explosion.

And the explosion really comes out of the.... Just through attrition...

...that Dustin keeps wearing him down and wearing him down.

But the scene was just too long, so the question was...

...in the condensed version of the scene, by taking out three, four, five beats...

...that preceded this moment about the fingerprints section...

...would that be enough? I'm not sure it is. I have to say as I watch the scene...

...I've seen the film a few times with an audience, it's barely enough if it is...

...to get Jankle to lose his cool on the witness stand.

But this is a case where you sort of try to balance out--

I'm always fighting rhythm...

...versus emotion. Rhythm versus emotion.

At what point can the audience appreciate the guy lost control...

...and therefore feels a setback, which then triggers Hackman...

...to have to do what he does, because at this point he's losing the case.

He's losing the case in the courtroom. Jankle lost his cool...

...jurors are being tampered with beyond his own people.

He has to control the jury, so this scene's important...

...from a story point of view.

Again, listen, the scene's well-acted, it's well-shot.

I love the way we play with jumping the line, the hand-held, the Steadicam...

...the cutting is fantastic.

ROHR: ...who lost her husband, that it's not your problem.

-Tell the people... -You amaze me.

...that the print-resistant finish is not your problem!

I stand on the Second Amendment, goddamn it!

COMMENTARY: Little smile here from Cusack that does kind of sell two things.

A, that Stanley screwed himself, and B...

...that actually John likes Dustin Hoffman. It's a very subtle thing...

...but it's important the audience feel, even unconsciously...

...that John Cusack likes this guy.

I love how this is all just one shot.

When you have actors this good, Stanley, Gene, Bruce Davison...

...it's just all a one-er.

Camera pulls around.... We shot this, actually, in the Criminal Courts Building...

...on Tulane Street, the same place where they shot JFK.

I know that Nelson Coates wasn't crazy...

...about the architectural differences between...

..the Fish and Game Building in the French Quarter and then this corridor...

...a different building, then the courtroom.

But I felt that the audience could go with it. And I think they do.

We're coming to the end of the second act here.

Yet again we have intercutting building to the climax of the second act...

...which is John Cusack's escape, meeting Gene Hackman...

...intercut with Rachel Weisz meeting Janovich, the Russian mobster.

I've talked throughout the film about intercutting...

...and how it's made the film better and scenes and sequences better.

And this section is no different.

The script did not reflect what ended up on the final cut of the picture.

What we did was, Bill Steinkamp and I...

...and also Armen Minasian came in, who cut with me...

...in Don't Say a Word with me and Bill...

...and we cut these two sequences, the John Cusack meets Gene Hackman...

...and the Rachel Weisz meets Janovich, and the whole fight sequence...

...as separate sections. And we spent two weeks, maybe longer...

...on the Avid trying different combinations of intercutting them.

It seemed like everything we tried eventually unraveled in some way.

But something happens that happened earlier in the film...

...with the Hackman-Hoffman intercutting.

When you find the right rhythm, it just sort of should be there.

It just sort of becomes seamless and it sort of works.

And what you're watching now is that outcome.

And my biggest concern was, I was so terrified...

...of making the Rachel Weisz section with Janovich...

...sort of the B movie version of the girl in jeopardy...

...the attack. I've done the film Kiss the Girls.

I've done Don't Say a Word, with Famke Janssen being attacked...

...by Guy Torry, so I've done the home invasion attack scene.

So I was trying to find a way to avoid some of the cliches.

One way to avoid that, by the way, was to make Janovich not sort of--

He was snarling back. I had to make him charming and he's not there to hurt her...

...and he wants sort of-- Again, it goes back to, all roads lead back to...

...Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man saying to Dustin Hoffman:

"Oh, you're a major in history. I love history. I'm part of history."

You know, that sort of charm, rather than being just evil and dark.

I give great credit here to Robert Elswit who, of course, shot the film...

...and this whole sequence to create this incredible contrast in color...

...from the Riverwalk, because it doesn't look like this at all, by the way.

It's just-- I mean, the extras, of course, are important...

...and the fire-breathing in the background, all that.

The fact that Bob found shape in all this is really quite amazing.

I like this scene between John and Gene.

I wish there was more stuff between them.

There isn't, but I wish there was. They're so good together.

And the chemistry was just perfect from the outset.

MARLEE: What's this about? -Well...

COMMENTARY: And here comes the fight scene.

The fight scene you're about to see was actually longer than ended up.

It was probably maybe a half, maybe a third longer...

...than what you see here, but it seemed to me that when the fight scene...

...got longer and more elaborate, it became more of a movie fight.

And I always look back to a film like Jonathan Demme's Something Wild...

...there's a fight scene at the end between Ray Liotta...

...and Melanie Griffith and Jeff Daniels, which feels very real...

...very scrappy, very messy. It didn't feel like a bunch of stunt guys.

Felt like real people. I like to have scenes like this feel like real people fighting.

Very messy, very scrappy, just kind of rough-and-tumble, which it is.

But the scene has been pared down from an earlier cut which was longer...

...and frankly just got too cartoonish.

But here's where I want to talk about the....

Where editing can take a B-scene and make it into, I think, an A-scene.

The way this played out is Janovich throws Marlee into the jury board.

She's knocked unconscious, we think.

We cut back to John Cusack and Gene Hackman and then we assume...

...we cut back to her and she's unconscious...

...he's walking up to her, he pulls a knife out of his boot.

And there's a moment in that scene where you think:

"Oh my God, she's gonna get cut. She'll get killed. She's in jeopardy."

And then she grabs this piece of wood, this wooden stake...

...from the easel that broke. She stabs him and she rises, she beats Janovich.

It's a very straightforward, very linear idea.

And it works fine. We shot the scene that way, we cut the scene that way.

But we all knew it felt a little cheap. It felt a little B movie-ish.

And what happens, coming up, was completely Bill Steinkamp.

We're all in despair because we spent two weeks...

...cutting a sequence of scenes together...

...and that linear ending with Marlee and Janovich just felt very weak.

It felt very cheap. And Bill called me and tried to pitch to me on the phone...

...at midnight one night, pitch to me on the phone what he wanted to do...

...which was to make it a scene in flashback.

Well, he said, "The whole film has a style of being intercut...

...crosscut, flashbacks, flash-forwards. Why not do a scene where...

...Gene Hackman leaves John Cusack at the Riverwalk...

...we cut to black, phone rings, Gene Hackman picks up the phone...

...and there's nobody there, and then he realizes it's Marlee calling him to say...

...per the scene we shot, 'Your guy's not gonna come home tonight.'

And then in flashback you tell the story." And I said to Bill:

"I have no idea what you're talking about. That makes no sense.

I can't track it. I have to see it."

And the genius of the Avid is that you can try stuff...

...even in a sketchy way, pretty quickly, and nobody gets hurt.

In the old days of film, pull splices apart, spend two days doing it.

You can literally on the Avid, in several hours...

...which Armen and Bill did, put together a sketch...

...of what they meant to do with this sequence, which you're now looking at.

I have to admit, it's one of my favorite scenes in the film. And I think it's...

...testament to the film, as to the scene, it works.

The audience bought it. I think we all felt a sigh of relief that we'd gotten away...

...from the cliche version of the scene, which was the girl in jeopardy...

...she's beaten up and then she sort of surmounts somehow.

MARLEE: You're gonna need it.

COMMENTARY: The scene right here was out of the movie for one of the cuts.

I used to cut right from the hang up with Gene Hackman...

...right to the courthouse for the top of the third act.

But I really felt we missed this scene. It's funny about this movie.

The movie was so delicate. I wanted to get this movie under two hours.

And the film's now 2:03, 2:04.

MARLEE: l want you to get some sleep. -Yeah.

COMMENTARY: Logically, if you're Rachel Weisz's character...

...and you think, if you've been attacked, you've been held hostage...

...what happened to him?

I wanted to make sure that she knew he was okay.

I felt that connection with those two-- We also hadn't had them together...

...physically since the church scene, which was almost 45 to an hour ago.

Again, I mentioned the motif of the courthouse steps.

Here we are, the third time.

First time was Nick Easter the slacker.

Second time was Nick Easter the con man.

And now you've got Nick Easter...

...man potentially of conscience, even though he's still a con man.

And Robert Elswit hates the lighting in this shot, but I kind of like it.

I think this is not attractive on John, but I think it's sort of raw and very real.

The closing statement with Dustin Hoffman used to be a lot longer.

There was a whole prologue piece of writing...

...which Dustin played beautifully...

...about compromise and how people shouldn't compromise.

It was really sort of about himself.

It was commenting on himself and how he had compromised himself bit by bit.

How that reflects into the case itself.

And, you know, it just went on too long.

And I felt in the first preview that the audience at this point...

...was getting edgy to get the film going. What was the culmination of the film?

The film doesn't really begin winding up until the deliberation begins...

...in about seven or eight minutes from now.

And I tried a pretty aggressive trim back on this scene with Bill Steinkamp.

We pulled back half of Dustin Hoffman's closing statement...

...and got down to the core of it, which was him saying, "If you vote this way...

...you can make the gun company in this case accountable."

And we tried it and it worked fine. It felt very seamless.

I know Dustin Hoffman was not happy with that cut.

And we had discussed it. He felt that we had taken away the heart of the piece.

But I felt the audience would get it.

I felt that they would get it in a scene coming up in a few moments...

...between Dustin Hoffman and Rachel Weisz when he says he's not paying her.

Now we bring back the video from the beginning.

And I tell you, this is a case where we originally were gonna save the footage...

...forjust this one scene, but having seen that footage of Jacob Wood...

...and his child earlier, now it comes back full circle.

You remind the audience...

...in a way, what the movie's about at the core. It's really about this case.

It's not about the grift, the con, jury tampering, the worm.

It's really about this case.

Back to Nick Searcy, what he's doing, and Doyle.

And, you know, terrified the stuff wouldn't work...

...because it's away from Hackman, it's away from the courtroom.

But it does. Because, you know, Nick Searcy, in a way, is Gene Hackman.

He's one of his tentacles out there in the world.

Of course he's smoking, because he's the bad guy.

CABLE: --the incomprehension, that gives way to anger.

COMMENTARY: The Bruce closing statement, which was condensed...

...even this was shorter earlier, but we felt we needed to keep enough of it in...

...so we felt we gave the audience and also the jurors...

...something to hang their hats on, in terms of the counterargument...

...which is that you can't be emotional.

This comes down to the very point in real life when people do try gun cases...

...you want to say to the jurors, "You can't vote emotion. Vote logic."

And we know you're pissed off and distraught that 1 1 people died...

...that day, but can you really...

...punish the wrong person because of that horrific event?

HARKIN: ...and then you will begin deIiberations.

[PHONE RINGING]

COMMENTARY: This scene with Dustin and the phone call was also a reshoot.

We shot this in L.A. in a sound stage.

ROHR: Wendall Rohr. MARLEE: Hello, Wendall.

COMMENTARY: The original scene was shot in a conference room...

...where you saw the previous scenes with Dustin Hoffman and his crew.

Didn't feel private enough to me. I felt the scene....

It felt like he was in this big room, it was very lit up...

...it just didn't feel intimate. And I also didn't feel that the case...

...that he'd spent perhaps two or three years developing was around him...

...was really enveloping and developing the character.

So when we reshot the scene I put all these books and posters and exhibits...

...around him, foreground, background, to remind him and the audience...

...he's about to throw this all away...

...to not buy the verdict, but he's gonna do it the right way.

Little smile from her, which, again, will make sense on second viewing.

I've talked and talked forever about intercutting.

Here it comes again.

The next 1 5 minutes of film...

...these interweavings, was not scripted as such.

They were written, but it wasn't written precisely as how this plays out...

...the pre-laps, the overlaps, exact rhythms.

This can only happen in editorial. You don't know until the material's cut...

...and to get these scenes cut separately in a linear fashion...

...how they're gonna interweave. It's also trial and error.

And we tried-- This must have been three weeks of intercutting...

...and trial and error to make this work.

Also a very important note with the jury deliberation is that...

...the deliberation scene was shot after the jurors had actually heard...

...the court case, had actually heard all the stuff with Bruce Davison...

...and Dustin Hoffman and, in fact, had heard the case, seen the evidence...

...heard and seen the witnesses, and even though it wasn't a full case...

...those actors as those characters had an opinion.

So a lot of what you're seeing in the deliberation sequences, scenes...

...it's them ad-libbing, jumping in. And they're being very passionate.

One of the hardest things about that deliberation sequence...

...was they wanted to say more and argue more and talk more.

In fact-- Of course, there's a big thing coming up when Frank Herrera...

...loses his mind and begins spewing all this bile about Celeste Wood...

...and when he first rehearsed that for the table, the jurors shut him down.

I said, "I know you want to, but you can't. If you do, I've got no ending."

I had to restrain them all from wanting to strangle Frank Herrera in this scene.

MARLEE: You bought yourselfa verdict.

HERRERA: lt's not ourjob to change the Iaw.

It is our duty to serve it. The law says this guy Kevin Peltier was responsible...

...not the gun company.

Yes, we are meant to serve the law...

...but the law is also meant to serve all of the people.

I'm with you, Frank. Founding Fathers and all that.

HERMAN: Ladies and gentlemen, whoa!

I think a preliminary vote would help us, if nobody has anything new to say.

EDDIE: Let's vote. -I'd like to say something.

-Couldn't be easy. -Hey, Frank, let him speak.

Well, I hope you like lots of sugar in your iced tea.

-Oh, yes, ma'am, I surely do. -Well, that's good.

-Thank you. -You're welcome.

-Are these your daughters? -Mm-hm.

Gabrielle and Margaret.

They were Irish twins.

-You know, just one grade apart. -Mm-hm.

[SOBBING]

COMMENTARY: I want to segue into the casting of these two actors...

...Celia Weston, who plays Mrs. Brandt, and Nick Searcy, who plays Doyle.

I've made mistakes earlier in my career of not giving the kind of attention...

...I should to the "smaller" parts, the smaller roles.

But I knew these roles were crucial and Deb Aquila and Tricia Wood...

...who cast the film with me, we spent many months talking about this.

And every single part, every single juror.

And I talked before about Nick's quality, the duality he plays, the darkness...

...and also the humor.

And Celia Weston, she has this quality as Mrs. Brandt.

She has this quality, even if she's being charming or funny or eccentric...

...she still seems like something's just wrong, something's wrong with her.

But in a good way, in that sort of filmic way.

There's a tension with her that I think is helpful to a part like this.

This whole sequence here with the clippings...

...we actually, I'm being honest here, we actually reshot...

...a lot of coverage for the scene in L.A. We did it originally in New Orleans...

...but we shot the scene quickly. I had to shoot the entire drive up...

...walk up with Nick Searcy and the scene inside her house all in one day.

It was the last day of filming and we just were all toasted and giddy...

...and the scene just didn't have the power it needed.

Also there was an issue with the writing.

What we all felt was missing when we had the first preview of the film...

...was we knew that it was Marlee's sister...

...who had been killed in the high school shooting.

But the connection to Nick, to John Cusack's character...

...was very fuzzy, just didn't feel organic to us.

And so we had this inspiration, we talked about making it...

...it was either John Cusack's girlfriend or maybe he was with the deceased...

...with the girl, when the shooting happened.

And he felt somehow he couldn't stop it, he couldn't help her.

And so the driving force became this reveal in the scene that...

...yes, it was Marlee's sister who was killed that day...

...but Nick was there as a kid.

He was there at the shooting and he couldn't stop it.

And I thought that was very, very.... Much more powerful.

And also, the idea of adding photographs of a young John Cusack...

...young Rachel Weisz, that came from another friend of mine.

And I thought that was extremely powerful.

And here it is. The staged photograph of the classmates mourning...

...with the young John Cusack, young Rachel Weisz.

I must say that when we previewed it, and filmmakers say this a lot...

...when you make little changes that could be a few seconds here and there...

...a few trims, adding a shot, an insert like the photograph...

...it's huge, it's huge.

The audience no longer was confused of John's connection and motivation here.

It just really informed all his anger and his drive.

In talking about Celia Weston and Nick Searcy and the photos...

...I haven't talked much about this deliberation scene, but I was saying...

...before a little bit about how the jurors, the actors playing the jurors...

...had all at this point heard the case and were all really passionate in that scene.

And I really think you feel that everyone's involved.

Everyone's there. They're all real people.

And Cliff Curtis especially was committed.

And he wasn't committed to being, again, the bad guy.

Cliff Curtis was committed to being a guy with a point of view.

But his point of view was so biased, it was so out of whack...

...it was so about not listening to the case...

...that we.... I'll say it, we pilfered a little bit of 12 Angry Men...

...with Henry Fonda saying to the room, "Let's just hear the case.

Not saying the kid's innocent, kid's guilty, let's just hear the case."

A breakthrough for us in the writing of the scene...

...was when John Cusack says:

"Frank's right. I'm guilty too."

That was a huge, huge thing, and it didn't happen till deep in the rewrites.

Because the scene always felt a little.... My gosh, that scene, John's reveal...

...felt a little cute, a little pat, and finally the idea of him saying:

"I'm guilty too. I knew what I wanted to do when I walked in.

I have an agenda."

To me, took the heat off that scene a lot, in a good way...

...took the heat off the onus of John being just still a con man.

Because at some point the con's gone.

The con's gone.

These scenes are the ignition point with the police arriving, driving us...

...to the end of the third act, the end of the movie.

This is driven completely by the editing style, where scenes aren't resolved.

Where things are just falling forward onto themselves.

Leland Orser being burdened with the idea of exposition.

"'87, Fitch worked the case."

You know, lot of story being told by secondary characters here.

There's the steps again of the courthouse. There's that motif.

Something, new chapter.

This is funny because the verdict, in a way, shouldn't be that big a surprise.

At this point we sense, or we know, that Rachel Weisz and John Cusack...

...are going to screw Gene Hackman's character. We know that.

Even though we know it, there's still a sense of, "Is it really gonna happen?

Will there be a second twist, maybe John failed to get the votes?"

So there is still a bit of suspense here. It's funny. I wasn't sure.

You don't know until you preview movies with an audience if this will play.

Stylistically here, I stuck with the idea of shooting the whole scene hand-held.

It just felt very immediate, it felt raw, it felt dangerous.

When I was shooting that day I couldn't believe I committed to it, because...

...the idea of this "big Hollywood movie"...

...with these big Hollywood stars, and shooting it in this style...

...felt a little irreverent, but that was the style.

The film had a style where we had taken the courtroom and turned it on its head...

...in terms of style, in terms of content. And likewise here.

I love this moment when the camera comes up from Jankle...

...and then racks back to Cusack in the background.

It's one of the great discoveries we found on the set that day.

To me, the mark of Gene Hackman's greatness, beyond all the obvious stuff...

...of his incredible performance in this film and many other films...

...is the way he embraces the moment of loss.

The moment of being destroyed here...

...when he comes down the steps in a few moments. And you see his face...

...and his behavior and his attitude in his collar and how he's just choking.

And a story that will not be in the DVD, but I will tell it...

...we shot, I think, three takes of him coming down the stairs...

...outside the building and clutching the bars outside the Fish and Game Building.

And after three takes Gene said to me, "May I do one more take...

...when I think I should throw up at the end?" I said, "Okay."

And he took this mouthful of, I think it was soup or something, it's all true...

...and he came around the corner and we did this take and he grabbed the bar...

...and he just puked. It was more like a spittle.

It wasn't really a full, you know, Linda Blair puke...

...it was more of a spittle. But it was so grotesque...

...I just felt that there was no way to go lower than that...

...in terms of this character, because we have the scene right now...

...when John and Rachel come in and have that final moment of....

Sort of the epilogue, the confrontation scene at the end.

The resolve. You're done, you're retired, you're out.

And I felt that scene, the throwing up, would have been just...

...how do you beat that? How do you--? That's it, man.

So this became the final kick in the face to this character.

But the point is Gene really, really embraced this scene and this....

Something about the loss, something about the guy being so beaten here...

...just worked with him and something he talks about, I think, in the commentary...

...in his own commentary, is there's an older couple sitting in the corner...

...of Napoleon House here, behind Cusack and Weisz.

And the idea there was that Dustin Hoffman said to him in that scene:

"One day you're gonna be all alone in some room...

...with nothing but your shadows and your bad memories."

That's what this scene becomes. And there's this couple...

...this happy older couple, that Gene will never be that couple.

He'll never have that woman in his life, because he's such an isolated guy.

He's so without humanity. He'll never be that guy.

This scene was shot very quickly. We shot this scene in six or seven hours...

...in the second half of a day.

Funny, we shot this scene with very few shots, shot it very simply...

...but the actors are all so good here.

And also, really, I love Bob Elswit's lighting here. It's very organic.

It's mainly from the window, with a little bit of fill from that little lamp.

This is, like, the Citizen Kane moment.

If you see Bob Elswit, ask for his imitation of Gene Hackman...

...yelling "You're nothing. You're nothing."

Bob will do it for you for free.

This shot here, I just adore this pullback of Gene.

We actually had this shot from his front.

What I loved in dailies, pulling back and leaving him...

...in a private moment of despair. I thought it was so, so strong.

The scene you're watching here was shot in the French Quarter.

And originally, as scripted in the shot, it was John and Rachel alone.

They see these kids.

There's a connection to the kids from their own school, and they walk away.

And it didn't feel complete, so what's coming up here...

...this very moment here, when Dustin Hoffman comes in the scene...

...this was added on.

We shot this in Olvera Street, downtown L.A. Only a few months ago, really.

So we shot the stuff with Dustin, with all the extras.

This was all created in L.A., and the coverage here...

...of John and Rachel was also redone in L.A. In fact, there's some subtle hair...

...and makeup differences between the two bits of footage...

...but it doesn't really pop out.

But I felt it was so important to take the burden off of Rachel Weisz...

...and John Cusack with how Dustin Hoffman perceived them.

He saw them as these con people, as these scumbags.

I think to take the weight off of that and give him the moment and the exit...

...because, frankly, Dustin Hoffman has become the moral center of the picture.

And giving him an exit was so important.

NICK: Okay.

Let's go.

COMMENTARY: And they walk off.

I have to believe my cynical side says that there may be some way...

...though these kids in the French Quarter may be safe from guns...

...who knows what John and Rachel will do now.

Because, in a way, Gene's right about them.

I think they're gonna have a very tough time...

...getting back to real life and being themselves.

Thank you for hearing my commentary and thank you for buying this DVD.

And I hope you enjoyed both.

English - US - SDH