Hotel Artemis' Director Breaks Down Jodie Foster's Opening Scene

Hi, my name's Drew Pearce,

and this is Notes on a Scene from Hotel Artemis.

(eerie music)

Screen.

The scene we're gonna be watching today

is essentially the introduction to the hotel itself,

this secret hospital for criminals in 2028.

(phone rings)

Hello, how can I help?

How many?

Yeah, I got two rooms left.

Cool, let's go to that wide shot, if I may.

This was supposed to be the frame

that I introduced Jodie in.

The camera panned down beautifully to find her on the bed,

but in the end, that didn't give me

the resonance and the ability

to really let the audience sink

into the look that Jodie has,

so Chung-hoon Chung, the cinematographer,

had a camera here that I was really

just getting for a coverage closeup,

but because we sat on it for the whole shot,

we ended up having this beautiful

introductory image that I would never have thought of.

I wanted it to feel like this was just

another Wednesday in the nurse's life,

and this establishes the routine of her day

when a criminal is coming in.

Everything needs to feel like

she's been doing it for 25 years.

That's how you bed in the story and make it feel real.

[Announcer] Has announced a mandatory curfew

for all citizen--

(sighs) Just another Wednesday.

Mute.

The scene we're watching is really

the first scene after the cold open of the movie.

One of the ways I wanted to do it

was set it to a piece of music.

There's also a thematic thing.

The nurse has a tragedy in her background,

and the music of her youth is one of the ways

that she blocks that tragedy out.

I tried maybe 800 tracks for this section,

but in the end, California Dreaming actually sums up

a lot of the themes and the vibe of the movie.

♪ On a winter's day ♪

♪ I feel safe and warm ♪

♪ I feel safe and warm ♪

What's kind of befitting for a movie

that references the 1920s and the 2020s is that

we actually used all of the old Hollywood techniques

that we could to make the space seem bigger.

We built it on a budget.

Frankly, though you're looking at

what should be the entire penthouse floor of a hotel,

we have this corridor, and then a tiny corridor over there,

one room over there, one room here,

and that's our entire set.

You have to work out what will make

the audience feel claustrophobic,

but also what will make them not think

they're watching a small movie

that's been jammed into a space.

One of the tricky things when you're making

a movie on a budget like this is,

you actually can't have a ceiling.

One of the things you end up

using your precious VFX money doing

is just filling in black gaps

the whole way down a corridor.

Even when you get to the end, I remember,

we were watching the very final playback

with Chung-hoon, the cinematographer.

He said, Stop, and he pointed up,

and there was literally just one tiny light here

that you could see through,

and if you look through the movie,

there are maybe two shots that I couldn't afford,

but I tried to make them as dark as possible.

Hit me up on Instagram, and I'll give you

a prize if you see them.

(California Dreaming by The Mamas and The Papas)

♪ On a winter's day ♪

♪ I feel safe and warm ♪

♪ I feel safe and warm ♪

You won't be able to see it here.

Maybe you will in the next shot,

but these water bottles,

which are the complimentary water bottles of Hotel Artemis,

are actually a brand called Mulwray,

who was in Chinatown, the Mulholland analog,

the guy who brought water to Los Angeles.

I love the idea that, somehow,

we might exist in the same universe as Chinatown.

The challenge of making this movie

on a tiny budget is really apparent in this shot.

We had to redress the two bedrooms that we had

four times in order to pretend

that we had all of these different rooms.

When it came to Nice's room,

which we only shot for half a day in,

I literally couldn't afford

to redress the room past this curtain or this trellis.

Everything behind here is just

a different room from a different day.

This is as wide a frame as I could even hit.

Part of the reason for that is,

I had this amazing production design team

lead by Ramsey Avery, and one of the things

we really cared about is how much

you break down the walls, is how much

you make it feel lived in.

(California Dreaming) ♪ California dreaming ♪

♪ On such a winter's day ♪ (Acapulco snorts)

Mm-hm.

Korean movies of the last 10 years

are probably the biggest aesthetic influence on me.

One of the great things about

how Korean cinema uses light, it's very practical sources.

You'll see there's lots of golds.

Gold ended up being a color that represented

the safety of the hospital

for the beginning half of the movie.

Then, in the second half, it represents

the riot coming in and destroying the hospital.

(California Dreaming) ♪ Such a winter's day ♪

I love the idea you can be looking

at one side of the room, and seeing

these beautiful, busted art deco murals,

and then switch around, and you get

this kind of brutal field medical 2028 tech

that looks like it's been through the mill

and has had blood on the walls.

All the tech in the movie, however farfetched it looks,

is actually fully researched by a team of futurists.

What I'd do with my futurist group is,

I would ask them, How will we fix bones in 10 years' time?

How will we print livers?

which is what's happening just here.

As ever, detail upon detail, the brand

of the 3D printer is Marlowe in a reference

to Chandler's crime icon.

Similarly, the screen itself is Danko-made,

which is a reference to the Russian character

in Walter Hill's Read Heat.

Walter Hill was a massive influence on the movie,

and so I tried to jam it

with alternative Uncle Walt references wherever I could.

One of the things that's incredible

about this sequence is that

only half of it is Jodie Foster herself,

because Jodie has a body double

that she's had since she was 17,

who has grown with her through the last 40 years.

Her name is Jill.

She's an amazing actress, and she physically

has even changed, and grown,

and aged the same way that Jodie has.

For example, this isn't Jodie Foster.

This is Jill.

She walks into the frame.

To be honest, we even catch the side of her face,

and it's absolutely perfectly Jodie.

See, the mannerisms are exactly the same,

the way she holds her shoulders.

Even that section, as we walk off,

you would never guess.

The brilliant thing about VFX these days is,

we had an incredible team, Cantina Creative,

but some of the problem-solving

came from the 22-year-old called Chris

who was interning in our office,

who, with After Effects, could do things on screen that,

20 years ago, you wouldn't even get in a blockbuster.

A lot of these shots, like the comps

of Jodie walking in front of doors,

the key, moving forward, is always get yourself

an intern called Chris who knows

everything about digital effects,

even though it's his first job.

(California Dreaming)

This shot is crucial to the movie

in a whole bunch of different ways.

On one level, it's aesthetic.

It's, again, the juxtaposition between

the futurism of these military-style gates

that have been jerry-rigged into this busted

1920s hotel that's falling apart at the seams,

and I really wanted that sense that

time hadn't necessarily been taken

to jam this stuff into the walls.

The shot's also important because the movie overall,

though it's about an entire universe,

it's really just seen through the keyhole

of one small personal story, and that story is the nurse,

Jodie Foster's character, who created this hospital

because of a tragedy in her past

that she somehow, we realize, feels like she's atoning for.

There's a motif in the movie of cages

that runs through that, and this is an interesting shot

because, on one level, this is Jodie protected

from the outside world by this cage,

because coming through these doors

are about to be the criminals that

she will end up looking after for the evening,

but compositionally, I like the idea

that she's always trapped in cages the whole way through.

Actually, you'll see through the movie,

there are lattices in every room,

and I shoot through them as much as possible

to always give a sense that all the characters in this film

have kind of been drawn together

because they're trapped in their own emotional cages.

It's the kind of stuff that, when I was a teenager,

I maybe didn't notice on the first watch,

but it's the kind of thing

that made things my favorite movie.

I've worked on big movies,

and you try and make them great,

but the thing they have to be on every level

is okay for everyone.

With Hotel Artemis, I didn't want to do that.

I wanted to make one person's favorite movie,

and that's what I hope we've done.

(elevator dings)

Show time.