Grease's Director Breaks Down the "You're The One That I Want" Scene

I'm Randal Kleiser and these are

Notes On A Scene from Grease.

♪ Ooh ooh ooh ♪

♪ The one I need ♪

♪ Oh yes indeed ♪

This is the number called You're the One That I Want.

Hey Danny! Whoa whoa!

When we were shooting this,

we showed up that day and we had the audio track

but we had not rehearsed it at all.

This is something that you would normally not to

but we had just been handed the track,

and Pat Birch, the choreographer,

sort of did it in about twenty minutes,

so we didn't know it was gonna be hit.

Although, it sounded pretty cool,

and everyone on the set who heard it

for the first time went, wow, that's great!

But the sequence itself, we were scrambling to do it.

You turned jock? That's right, I did.

What are you doing?

This is a letterman's sweater that

he got from running track,

and the three boys here are the T-birds

and they're dressed in their T-bird jackets.

He has shown up unexpectedly wearing this.

Albert Wolsky was our costume designer

who came up with these ideas, and more importantly,

came up with the idea of what Sandy's wearing.

Danny Zuko has been dressed similar

to the other three T-birds, in a T-birds jacket,

most of the time.

Kind of the Fifties James Dean or Elvis Presley look,

more Elvis Presley.

I think he was channeling Elvis Presley in this movie,

'cause the hair, as you can see,

is very much an Elvis thing.

Elvis sideburns.

Here, he's trying to go against it to woo Sandy.

We wanted to reveal Sandy slowly,

so we wanted to show the new look

starting from her feet up to her face,

'cause if we just cut to it,

it would be not as exciting.

This is something that is done an awful lot in movies,

where we start with people getting out of a car,

you start with the shoes and go up to their face,

so this is kind of like a throwback

to a whole style of revealing women.

This outfit, this look that she has here,

with the hair like this and the eye makeup

and the lipstick and everything,

I thought she'd be perfect for the good Sandy

but I wasn't sure if she'd work out for the bad Sandy,

'cause she doesn't have any of these qualities in person.

She came out on the set to show me how she was gonna look

and she was coming at me from a distance

and she was back lit.

I didn't know who it was until she got up real close.

The whole crew was going nuts over this new look of hers,

much like you see here,

everybody swarming around her like a superstar.

Now this day was very very hot,

and, as you can see here, she's squinting a little bit.

When we were shooting this, I noticed this,

and I thought, what are we doing to do

about this when she starts singing?

She's gotta be able to perform.

So I talked to the cinematographer,

Bill Butler, who shot Jaws, by the way,

and said, how do we help her?

He said, we'll put this giant silk up,

which is kinda like a sail on a ship but in this big square,

and the grips hold it up over them

so that they don't have this bright sun in their face.

Sandy?

Tell me about it, stud.

If you notice, all back here, it's all dark,

and that's because this was one of

the last shots we did that day.

This whole musical number was done really really fast.

We didn't even get to finish it,

we had to come back and do some of it in the studio,

because we ran out of time.

As you can see, the sun is setting behind him,

and we saved his close up for last.

(You're the One That I Want from Grease Soundtrack)

Here she's backed up by her three Pink Ladies,

and one of the things that we came up with

was the idea that she would be smoking

and drop the cigarette and put it out,

and she was being told by Dinah Madoff to do that.

That was something we came up on the day

just to show that these girls are

helping her become a Pink Lady and be sexy.

We did many many many takes

to get the cigarette to land here,

because it kept bouncing off this way, that way,

and we kept rolling and rolling and doing all these takes,

and finally the prop man came up and said,

hey, put a bobby pin in the cigarette

and then it'll land and stay there,

and that's how we got that shot.

♪ I got chills, they're multiplyin' ♪

♪ And I'm losin' control ♪

This is the background we chose, The Shake Shack,

which seemed the most colorful part of the carnival,

and the Pink Ladies, T-birds, John, Olivia,

and they're coming together here.

This was done in the traditional sense of musicals,

where normally you shoot a musical with the playback

and all the tracks are done ahead of time.

You just lip sync to playback.

Most actors will sing along with it,

just to give the vocalization of their throat,

but they have to be careful that they match it exactly,

and there's usually someone standing

right beside the camera watching for the lip sync.

♪ The power you're supplyin', it's electrifyin' ♪

The silk is now being used.

You see here how Olivia is not squinting?

Because we have this big silk and you can see,

in the background, these guys are in bright sun,

she's a little darker so that she doesn't squint.

Here, you can see the line right there of the silk,

it went like that, and it was

being held by grips

off-camera.

♪ Ooo ooo ooo honey ♪

♪ The one that I want ♪

♪ You are the one I want ♪

♪ Ooo ooo ooo ♪

These are the famous

zippered pants that she was sewn into.

She couldn't go to the bathroom during this day

because this zipper had broken.

I know that she was uncomfortable

and she didn't drink any water because

she was afraid that she'd slow down production.

Especially since the sun was setting.

We couldn't really take the time to have her redone.

This set was here, I mean, this sign was here.

Danger Ahead, Walk Through, all that was there.

It kinda looks tacky and rundown,

which I think worked okay for it.

It looked very lived in.

Pat used what was there to come up

with a way to give moments, like him jumping off here.

It's instinctual at the time,

she came up with this jump and utilized the upcoming

up and down, back and forth,

as part of the choreography,

somehow figured that out into

the song right on the spot, too.

This Shake Shack was sitting on the grounds of

the carnival set when we arrived

and Pat and I walked in to see where we could shoot.

We walked through it and went up and down,

and back and forth, and said, what could you do with this?

And she went in with John and Olivia and worked for about,

I'd say, twenty minutes to come up with this choreography,

and it was just all improvised on the spot.

This was shot with a Panavision camera

with Panavision lenses, 235 lenses,

and if you notice here, these are

blasting arc lights shooting in

because the sun was going down at this point,

and we were losing our day.

In the back, these guys would have

been in black shadows had we not lit them.

This kind of reflection is not really looking too hot,

but we had to do it that way because

we were running out of time and light.

When we shot this, we really wanted to go in

and get some close-ups like this

of the two of them to break it up,

because this was all one wide master shot.

When we got our dailies back,

this was the dailies, this was what we saw,

and we said, we really need this.

We called up and said,

can we go back and shoot the carnival?

They said, no, sorry, it's moved on.

We had to go into the studio,

and try to duplicate this background here.

These colors, these things here.

In the next shot, you can see that we reproduced

these lines here and the colors,

the yellow and the green here,

so that it would match the wide shot.

And this was done on the sound stage at Paramount.

I don't think that the choreography works

quite as well as it did in the wide shot,

because we were trying to match and in those days,

you didn't have video to look and match

so we had to do it by memory

and hoping we got when they put their heads together,

it matched with the choreography.

This one.

See, it's a little bumpy there.

♪ Ooo ooo ooo ♪

♪ The one I need ♪

My idea for this shot, and we did this,

we did an optical, which was a blow up.

I wanted to start like this,

and then pull back and integrate this optical pullback

with the pullback of the camera.

It would be all one slow move out out out out.

We did the optical and I thought it worked but,

in a musical, you always want to see

the feet of the dancers so it was determined

that we would use this wide shot instead.

But if you imagine it, it went like this,

and then pulled out as they continued to move,

so it looked like all one move.

♪ You're the one that I want ♪

♪ You are the one I want ♪

♪ Ooo ooo ooo honey ♪

♪ The one that I want ♪

♪ You are the one I want ♪

♪ Ooo ooo ooo honey ♪

These are the dancers one through twenty,

these people here, and they were with us

through the whole shoot.

Pat Birch came up with the idea of

giving each of these dancers a name

and a backstory so that they could work

all the way through the picture and always be in character,

so that, if you watch the movie,

it really looks like,

instead of background extras crossing,

these people are all doing things all through it.

Pat choreographed all the background action

for the whole movie and they were all doing

very specific things and having interactions as characters.

♪ Ooo ooo ooo honey ♪

These little things we saw when we were there,

and the actors came up to me and said,

hey, can we put our heads in here and sing a verse?

I said, sure, so that was all done on the day, too.

That was not planned.

Barry Pearl came up with putting the little,

(laughing) the little head, this thing was his idea,

and then the idea that he looks over

and sees it as a surprise.

These are the type of little improvs

that the actors were doing all through the picture,

and really helped me because they were always saying,

what about this, what about this, what about this.

If you notice, even back here,

these are two of the dancers who had a backstory

and they were coming together here.

Little subtleties like that that

make you feel this is a real high school

and not just extras crossing in the background.

Then we go right into another musical number from here,

We Go Together, where they go really nuts,

running down the football field,

and that was probably the toughest for the actors

because it was so hot that day.

But that's the end of this particular song.

It's pretty extraordinary and

kind of like lightning striking.

You can never predict when it will happen

and things fell together in a nice way.

These outfits, this look, has been reproduced

all over the place, in other movies,

and in Halloween costumes,

and at the sing-alongs that we've had.

The most exciting are the ones at the Hollywood Bowl,

where 17,000 fans show up dressed like this

and cheer and sing along and it's fun.

♪ Oh yes indeed ♪

♪ You're the one that I want ♪