Andy Serkis Breaks Down a Fight Scene from 'Venom: Let There Be Carnage'

Tom would always do his own sound effects.

So whenever Venom would headbutt him,

he'd literally go, Ah! [boom]

and he would land in the seat,

and he would do the whole thing.

[punch]

Hi there, I'm Andy Serkis, and I am presenting to you

Venom, Let There Be Carnage, notes on a scene.

I rebuilt my life, and now

I just wanna live it, goodnight.

[Venom] And how did you build this new life?

Excuse me?

Well, who found the clue on the wall

so you can be this big shinny hero?

Who found the clue?

We are gonna get into actually

one of my favorite scenes of the movie,

where Venom and Eddie, who have obviously been living

inside and outside of each other's bodies,

but in the same apartment, finally come to blows.

It's the odd couple exploding moment.

There's no more, any words for his victims,

or they were gone, any clues or outstanding bodies

we've lost forever and completely [blows nose]

[Venom] I didn't mean to.

You didn't mean to?

[Venom] And I said I'm sorry.

You didn't mean to but you did it.

Tom has played this character in the previous movie

and he works in a really interesting way.

We'd all talk about different methods

of bringing this character to life for him on screen.

But actually, it's all in Tom's head.

Before every single scene, Tom records Venom's dialogue

and then, he has that playing back in his ear,

in a tiny little ear bug, and then he's able to

basically improvise and talk over Venom.

So he's creating a sound scape, a radio play,

if you like, for the entire scene.

I mean, you just decided, I don't know,

that's it, you did it.

You know, you didn't even think that we might get caught?

You might get killed?

No, you don't think about things like that, do you?

You just think about chickens, you think about you,

you think about what you want,

and you think about you.

There's a chicken in the background of the shot.

Can you see it? It's just here.

We had a couple of chickens that work with us,

and they are all very professional,

they all turn up on time, and you know,

they were very, very undemanding,

and didn't leave a mess anywhere.

So they were perfect chickens to work with.

But, keep an eye of the chickens in this scene,

they are fundamental players.

[Venom] Let me remind you of something, Eddie,

you were a looser before I came along.

You were nothing, I made you special.

Oh, you made me special, huh?

Well let me tell you something, right,

before you came along, I had a life,

I didn't have chickens, all right,

but I had dreams, yeah, I had dreams,

and I had a fiance, and I had a really successful TV show.

[Venom] But you destroyed all of those things by yourself.

Ya.

We wanted this whole first part of the sequence

to play in a one shot.

And we could've covered it in lots of different angles

but it felt that the momentum of this royalling

kind of argument that was kind of bubbling up

between them, you needed to get a sense of the whole,

so we just let this whole thing play out in one

and rehearsed it a few times,

and it was a real tour de force by Tom.

You know what, I rebuilt my life,

and now I just wanna live it, goodnight.

[Venom] And how did you build this new life?

Here we have the introduction of Rath Venom in this movie.

The biggest difficulties in bringing Rath out of Eddie

and Carnage out of Cletus was the way, works with the cloth.

How does the symbiote fluid come out of his body.

So a lot of work was done on, you know,

finding ways of making it believable that all this fluid

sort of emanates from inside and grows,

and sort of can shoot out.

And so, in fact that affects costume even,

choices of costume color.

If you placed say a white bathrobe on Tom there,

it would be really, really difficult

to make this kinda feel believable and real.

I rebuilt my life, and now

I just wanna live it, goodnight.

[Venom] And how did you build this new life?

Excuse me?

Well, who found the clue on the wall

so you can be this big shinny hero?

One of our main ambitions for this whole film

was to integrate Venom,

and indeed Carnage, when he becomes part of the story,

into the world.

The holy grail for this was to make these kind of

seemingly quite cartoonish visual effects characters

come to life and feel photo-real.

In an attempt to make these characters more believable,

what we wanted to do with the faces of both Venom

and Carnage, when you finally see him,

is although we weren't using facial capture,

motion capture, what we wanted to do

was to take performances given by Tom

and just use references so that

there was more expression the eyes.

These are very, very difficult characters

to anthropomorphize, to actually make human,

because of the, you know, the size of the jaws up here,

and also there's very little you can get out of

the eyebrows or eye movements.

What we've managed to do is to put in very subtle shifts

in imaginary eyebrows, if you like.

And we've increased hugely the amount of lip molding

around the teeth when Venom's speaking.

And that was something that I observed from the last movie

that they were very fixed, those grins, and so we spent

quite a lot of time working around the idea,

of course they can't fully express the range of motion

that a human face can, but what can we do to

give physical cues in the facial muscles

that would make these a little bit more forgiving,

and more believable.

Who found the clue, who?

Wow!

Yeah.

Yeah, that's an example of what I was talking about

earlier, with in terms of the jaw movement, going yeah.

You know, it's kind of like really exemplifying

how powerful and the musculature in the jaw.

So if you notice, with Venom here, you know,

all of this movement is additional,

the detail of the musculature in the movement

and the flow of all the tendrils and the symbiotic fluid

that's flowing throughout all his face.

All of this lovely detail is, again,

something that we've sort of upgraded from the first movie

to give it more of reality and more texture.

No, no, no. This is not about

being a hero for me, man,

this is about wanting to live in peace.

Do you understand what I'm talking about?

No, you don't, you don't understand what I'm talking about.

Okay, this is about me wanting to live without you

whining in my ear all the time about eating bad guys

or like, nagging me about, I don't know,

destroying my place, or destroying my life.

Do you know how lucky you are that I chose you?

You chose me?

In the first movie, Venom had I think

about three or four lines of dialogue.

He really had to act in this movie.

He really is a big character.

There's so many scenes, which are duologues

between the two of them.

We really needed to invest him

with a growing sense of humanity.

For all intents and purposes, you know,

he's settled in, he's not an alien.

He's one of us and he wants to be accepted.

He also wants to be the lethal protector

and he thinks that Eddie is vastly underselling

their potential by keeping him hidden.

He wants to go out there and save people,

and kill bad guys, and bite their heads off.

If we don't believe that central relationship

between Eddie and Venom, or care, then there is no movie.

That's crucial, that's sort of like base one

of the whole task of this movie, is to make sure

that these creatures feel truly organic

and living, and have an emotion.

It can be achieved in different ways.

You try and create as much physical

reality as possible, first off.

It can go through being described

and just speaking it out for them.

But, I'm the only person that took you in

when your friends kicked you off the planet may mong

cause you are a reject, you are a pariah,

lethal protection my ass, you couldn't protect anything.

You are useless, you couldn't get a job

down here cleaning toilets.

[punch]

This is one of the funniest moments of the film for me.

Tom would always do his own sound effects.

So, whenever Venom would head-butt him,

he'd go, he'd literally go 'ah boom'

and he would land in the seat,

and he would do the whole thing.

[punch] [yells]

Sorry, I don't know what came over me,

please, let me fix it.

I'm gonna nose

I'll punch it again [punch] [yells]

I love the fact that Venom apologizes

and then breaks his nose again.

I think that's typical of their relationship.

It reflects a very human trait, if you like.

You know, one minute, you can be so forgiving

and so sorry or apologetic, and then the desire

to hurt that person again.

Of course, Eddie can't ever really be hurt,

he repairs himself and if you notice,

in between the shots very quickly, his nose,

which is bent out of place, kind of comes back to life

again and reforms and becomes perfect,

and the blood disappears in that split second,

and then it gets broken again immediately afterwards.

I'm gonna nose

I'll punch it again [punch] [yells]

I mean, Eddie Brock is such a narcissist,

and actually, what's great about Venom,

he's such a direct character and he has no filter,

so he's able to pinpoint all the weaknesses in Eddie

and tell him straight up.

Eddie really is looking at a mirror of himself

and discovering what a narcissistic,

self-obsessed human being, flawed human being he is,

which is why their relationship is so perfect.

They are stuck with each other,

but they are also the perfect match for each other.

You son of a bitch. [slap]

This is the beginning of what ends up

being a huge fight between them.

When I cam onboard to direct the movie,

one of the first things I thought was

there was an enormous amount of humor

to be had out of this entire scene,

and that it should escalate, and become a real buddy-buddy

kinda bromance break-up, on a massive scale.

And it grew, very organically.

All of the things in apartment we wanted, you know,

these elements of the set that had been made.

This is his chew toy, so when Venom kinda gets hungry,

and he, you know, he wants to bite people's heads off,

I wanted that to get pulled down and thrown at Eddie,

so we used elements of the set that were all around.

And as the scene progresses, it's a combination of

practical elements, so lights get thrown out the window,

all of Eddie's possessions, clothes, all manner of things.

So these were all on wires which literally

flew out of the window, combined with

the visual effects of tendrils then grabbing

those things and pulling them through.

[furniture breaking and crashing]

So what we really wanted achieve in this scene

is a couple of lovers breaking up,

it's reached that moment in time,

and it's the classic scene that you get

in many, many movies where everything

gets thrown out of the window,

and this lover's tiff kinda escalates

into this massive war, basically.

And of course the sound plays a huge part of this as well.

Let's not forget sound, cause that emphasizes

and articulates every moments, gives it comedy,

gives it danger, gives it, you know,

ah you really feel the pain for the character.

This shot, particularly, happened, I think,

we felt we needed just a split second, like a few frames

of seeing Tom fly through the air,

or be dragged though, to make sure people

didn't think it was a stunt guy.

Get out! Take your stuff, get out!

This is my house.

I love that Venom is telling Eddie

to get out of his own apartment.

That was a brilliant piece of Kelly Marcel writing.

Or maybe it was even Tom improvising, I can't remember.

I have to ask him.

But, you know, Tom is so inside the character

that it wouldn't surprise me that he would,

maybe that moment in fact was him sort of saying,

oh no, no, it's him telling, it's Venom

telling Eddie to get out of his apartment.

He was fantastic at kind of re-working this radio play

that I was talking about earlier, getting spacings

between the sound operator, who is then playing

each individual line into his ear.

It was a real dance between the two of them.

[bags crashing]

Keep it down up there!

What was the most important thing about this whole film

was that level of humor that surreal,

slightly psychotic, very funny, but believable situations.

I was lucky enough to be able to come in

to take on this story after all of that heavy lifting

work had been done on the setup of the characters.

Now, it's seeing that delicious,

kind of evolution of their relationship as a couple.

They go through all the ups and downs of the familiarity,

the excitement of being with each other,

the boredom of being with each other,

the day-to-day nightmare living with each other in a flat,

and the sort of different agendas that they both have.

And all of that kind of very human behavior,

but reflecting in these two very different, you know,

one human being and this symbiote

who wants to bite people's heads off.

And we've talked about him before being like

an out of control toddler, that's exactly what it's like.

You know, an eight-foot toddler living in your living room.