"Maleficent: Mistress of Evil" Director Breaks Down the Dinner Scene

Hi, I'm Joachim Rønning.

I'm the director of Maleficent: Mistress of Evil

and today I'm here to do one scene breakdown

of the dinner scene.

I remember the story of a baby.

A baby cursed to sleep and never wake up.

Really?

Who would do such a terrible thing?

To an innocent child?

Well, there are many who prey on the innocent.

I'm sure your kind would agree.

What do you mean my kind?

She means humans.

There are fairies missing from the Moors.

What I'm missing is some wine.

Stolen by human poachers.

That's the first time I've heard of it.

Someone gave the order.

[quiet metallic sound]

So this is a seven character dialogue marathon

with all of them sitting.

These days were also some of my favorite days

because not only do I have Michelle Pfeiffer,

I have Angelina Jolie, I have Elle Fanning.

I have everybody there

and usually when you do dialogue scenes like this,

you tend to try and get the characters and the actors

to move a little bit around

and that's what makes a sit down scene

a little bit trickier.

Usually when you do any dialogue scene you have

the two characters here and then you try and stay on

one axis with the camera,

so that you get the feeling of them looking at each other.

It's like shooting at a football match,

you don't want them to score all in the same goal,

as they say.

So when you add a third character,

you start to suddenly be very free

on where to put the camera,

but at the same time, the audience needs to know

what the character on the camera is looking at.

So then you can add another four to this

and then you get our dinner scene.

There are fairies missing from the Moors.

What I'm missing is some wine.

Stolen by human poachers.

That's the first I've heard of it.

Someone gave the order.

There's a very good scene, I feel,

in the movie called Casino Royale

where Daniel Craig and Mads Mikkelsen are playing poker

and there are also like seven, eight people.

Raise, twelve million.

There's also other scenes from other movies

that I sat down and studied because they are very tricky

and technical, even though they might not seem

like that at all.

Usually I was shooting this scene with three cameras.

Since the light source is in the middle of the table,

it allowed the DP, Henry Braham,

to actually shoot in several directions at the same time.

So we were allowed to actually rig three or four cameras

just in the middle of the table, underneath their eye line.

So they could be looking over the camera,

talking to each other.

I could shoot basically a 360.

The whole crew just hid outside of the set.

As a filmmaker you will also visually try

to make it interesting

and you want to underline certain moments in the story.

The scene is a very important scene in the film

because it is the scene where we, for the first time,

see that Queen Ingrith has a hidden agenda.

[doors opening]

You have done an admirable job,

going against your own nature to raise this child,

but now she will finally get the love of a real mother.

Everything that Queen Ingrith says is part of her plan.

She's pretending to be a little bit naive in order

to lure Maleficent out on thin ice.

She wants her to show her evil side.

At this moment in the scene, Maleficent realizes

that this is not necessarily just a pleasant,

you know, meet the parents dinner.

Obviously, Michelle Pfeiffer was at the very top

of my list for playing Queen Ingrith.

She's one of very few that can go head-to-head

with Maleficent.

If I didn't know better, I'd say you were making a threat.

Well, do you?

Do I what?

I remember this was one of the first scenes

that I ever shot with her.

Of course, I'd seen drawings of her costume

and the jewelry and all of that,

but there's something very, very special

when she walks out on the set as Queen Ingrith

in full costume and in character.

Blocking-wise, framing-wise, I'm pushing in with a camera

on this one, which is a very common technique

in order to create the focus in the scene.

I'm focusing on Queen Ingrith

and putting her plan into life.

It's subtle.

I want the audience to focus in on what she's saying.

And I want the audience to focus in on Maleficent listening

to Queen Ingrith

and I don't want anything else to really be of importance

in this scene,

so I put them in the middle of the shot.

However, this character is a big part

of Queen Ingrith's plan.

Poor Jenn Murray, who plays Gerda in the back there,

we shot this scene over a week,

[laughing]

and she doesn't have any lines.

So, for a week she was standing back there like that

but she's in the scene and that's very important for me.

So, I liked having her out of focus, like just as a reminder

that she's there.

There's a lot of special effects in this movie

and Angelina's wings are probably the most important

for her because its' part of her acting.

It's part of Angelina's acting and it's important

that it's subtle.

We used the movement in her eyebrows actually,

when she was acting, to trigger the wings.

So if there's a little bit of movement

in an eyebrow, we would have a wing going up,

and that really worked.

[laughing]

So, that was a good little template to have.

You see the talons here,

it's always like some of the most tricky things.

So this is all CG

and you work on getting as photorealistic as possible.

So you see there's a shine in here,

there's a shine in the little

[tapping]

in the little feathers and it needs to be the same black

as her dress, but a little bit shinier

and then the focus of the wings needs to be a little bit

off compared to her eyes, so that needs to match.

And each feather is moving individually, actually.

And this takes a year to make.

These wings are just tremendous, I feel.

Of course, when we're shooting this there's no wings there,

so you have all the servants in the scene trying

to serve her food and drinks and stuff like that,

so they also, they can't be walking straight

through the wings, so they have to pretend

to go around the wings and do their thing.

Also, what I do like with her wings

is that they kind of mirroring Queen Ingrith's throne.

The talons there and then, so instead of wings,

she has her wings as well.

So it becomes the two thrones

that these queens are sitting on.

Who would do such a terrible thing?

To an innocent child?

Well, there are many who prey.

Angie and I, we spent hours discussing the color

of her lips, 'cause I felt a little bit,

in the first film, that they were too colorful

and so we were going a little bit back and forth

and I think we landed on a slightly cooler red.

So those are the things that needs to be discussed

and it's very important because it's such a big

and important feature for Maleficent.

And then, of course, her eyes.

She's using lenses that are very, very hard to see through.

You basically get a tunnel vision, I think.

So you basically just see the middle of your sight.

Her face is a mix between prosthetics and CG.

So these are all in camera, so these are prosthetics

and then the kind of pale hue

that Maleficent almost radiates

that's applied in post-production

to give her that otherworldly feel.

There are many who prey on the innocent.

I'm sure your kind would agree.

What do you mean, my kind?

So here you see we're shooting the other characters

in this scene.

This is Prince Phillip,

this is the Queen Ingrith, so we're kind of covering

the king here.

I put the characters that I really want the audience

to focus on in the forefront of the shots

and then framing the king

as slightly further back amongst them.

We feel like we're further away from the king

and we're closer to the main characters in the foreground.

What do you mean my kind?

She means humans.

Eye lines are interesting

when you have seven characters sitting

around a table, talking like this,

because you have Prince Phillip on that side of the camera,

you have the king on that side,

you have Aurora on that side

and then you have Maleficent on that side.

Two looking camera left and two looking camera right.

And when you're shooting this,

she will always be looking at whoever speaks,

or whoever she speaks to,

but then in editing they try to create the geography

in the room, so you have the king looking at the queen

and then I will use that eye line to cut

to the queen looking at the king

and then looking from the king to, for instance,

Maleficent.

She means humans.

This shot I love 'cause it's a wide shot

and you get to see some of the fantastic production design

that Patrick did.

It was a 360 set.

Huge dining hall.

We built this on the soundstage at Pinewood Studios

outside of London.

You can see the pillars built

and then the king and queen thrones in the back there.

This guy, he's the etiquette expert,

like a medieval, you know, he knows how they ate

and what they ate and it was important for me

to have this overflow of food on the table,

like colorful, and the only issue of medieval times,

they didn't really have colorful food.

It was like potatoes or something like that.

It's a fantasy, fairy tale,

so it doesn't need to be absolutely real,

but it was good to have him

and also etiquette when it comes to how they would sit,

how the servants would behave, how they would put food

on it and all that stuff.

He's in several scenes in the film.

This table is actually huge, it measured almost 70 feet long

and at one point I came actually really, really close

to putting the queen and the king on each side of the table

so you had them like that and then they would be like that

and then I'd put Maleficent in the middle next to Aurora,

but it just turned out to be a shouting match basically

because they were so far away from each other.

So, I ended up putting them all at the end of the table

and then of course putting the queen next to the king

and then having her team, team Alstead on this side,

and then team Moors on that side

and then the king is kind of like the referee in the middle.

We actually went back and forth a lot actually

in regards with what was the Alstead color

and we ended up with it being red,

so you see Percival, you know, the General here

being in red.

You see the king being in red,

the cloth being in red

and that's part of the castle colors.

And this is the sky outside the windows there.

It's dusk.

So that's why it still has a little bit of glow

to it.

And that's not blue screen, that is actually a backdrop

that we had painted.

There are fairies missing from the Moors.

What I'm missing is some wine.

Here you see Prince Phillip trying to break the ice

a little bit, 'cause he's, everybody's in the room

kind of feeling that the conversation's going

a little awkward.

And I think it was important for the scene,

also for me, to create the little bit of lightness

to it.

'Cause it gets long and gets a little dark.

What I'm missing is some wine.

Stolen by human poachers.

Oh this is kind of fun.

You see these guys?

[laughing]

They're playing instruments,

it's kind of a band in the scene,

but they can't be playing for real,

'cause you need the sound from the dialogue,

so they're just miming, they're just pretending

to be playing, so that's what they did all week.

[tense music]

This magic here, that's also hours and hours of meetings

with visual effects supervisor, Gary Brozenich,

deciding the color of this green,

the amount of it,

the density,

the movement.

It always baffles me how much actually goes into

creating these effects because this is not in camera,

so we have to design it from the bottom

and at the same time also honoring the first film

and the color of the magic in the first film.

Maleficent here is starting to put things together

and her instinct is to go full evil.

[laughing]

And the only one that can calm her down is Aurora,

so that's why I went as close as possible.

I didn't want any of the other characters

to really notice her fingers having a little bit

of green magic to them.

Only Aurora is reading her at that moment

and trying to calm her down.

She's seeing where this is going.

[quiet magic sound]

Elle Fanning, so amazing to work with

and every day impressing me how she really held her own

with Angelina Jolie and Michelle Pfeiffer in the room.

She's the only one that can handle Maleficent,

so in a way she's a very powerful character,

despite her innocent and sweetness.

As a director, you sit behind a monitor

and you listen in and you're watching what's being filmed,

especially also since we're shooting three, four cameras,

it's actually feels almost live,

that we're making a live movie,

so these were very, very special days.

That was notes on a scene

for Maleficent: Mistress of Evil.

Thanks for watching.