The Girl in the Spider's Web Director Breaks Down a Fight Scene

Hi, I'm Fede Alvarez,

director of The Girl in the Spider's Web

and this is Notes On a Scene.

[light haunting music]

[Lisbeth] Uh!

Soren approached me two years ago

to see if I wanted to adapt the fourth book

in the Millennium series, The Girl in the Spider's Web

and I am a big fan of the series,

I thought it was a great entry point for a new audience.

After she's done a job, Lisbeth Salander,

thinking everything is okay, she walks out of the bathroom

and she's gonna find a surprise,

there's some people in her house.

[Lisbeth] Uh!

Argh!

This is a set, this is a build,

all that window there is actually

exactly a replica of what you would see,

if we were actually inside the apartment,

where then we did the exteriors on.

The whole idea of the interior, like you get a sense here

was based on this concept we developed with Pedro Luque,

with my DP on this kind of hot and cold combination,

so it's always the outside, it's very bluish,

it's very cold, it's ice, it's snow

and inside, you always find these like sections here,

like it's always like very warm colors.

So he has the laptop on her, on his hand,

he has that basketball mask, the purpose of that mask

is to fool like face recognition software,

because he has little patterns on the mask,

the face recognition software will crash,

when they look at those faces,

which I find pretty interesting.

It needs to have some sort of explanation,

some why behind it, it cannot just be to make it look cool.

This part, a big part of the story,

she gets shot on her tattoo, the bullet just grazes her,

as she's getting darker in the story,

she's getting to a deeper place,

the tattoo bleeds and bleeds more,

so this is the moment that she gets shot on the tattoo,

I mean, I tell you,

90% of the movies these days will do this CG,

what we did and it's so fast, you can barely see it,

if you look at the wall in the back behind, like right here,

that's a bullet, that has hit the wall

and then there's one hitting her back there, bang!

You see that, like that's a squib,

also it impacts, it's gonna impact the wall there,

all is all practical, we did this like six times

just to get a more crude and dramatic effect,

when she gets shot in the movie,

instead of being a CG, you know, a CG blood squib.

[Lisbeth] Uh!

Movies these days do a lot of fake muzzle flashes,

that's a real muzzle flash, real guns,

most of the movies, when you do this and you do a gunshot,

there will be none of this here,

because there's actually no gunshot,

it's all done in VFX these days,

so you don't get the beauty of this sort of thing.

It's slower also, because there's a level of safety

that you need to have on set, but also stuff like that,

like having a real muzzle flash in a scene

makes for better performances,

it's a sort of old school approach

always I think for me makes for way better action moments.

[Lisbeth] Uh!

Uh!

Uh!

Uh!

Uh!

Uh!

Lisbeth Salander is one of the best characters

really in literature in the last 20 years

and there's certain kind of great characters,

that you just know them too well

and you know exactly what they're going to do at the time,

with Lisbeth, she has a little bit of bad in her

and a little bit of good and that makes for great stories,

where you never know if she deserves to live or die

at the end or to get what she's really looking for.

Directors are thinking about a million things,

when they make a movie, the actors just focus on one thing,

which is their role, you need an actor,

that has the ability of really emote

and Claire Foy really is I believe

one of the best actors working today

and she can play a scene and play it very bravely

and acting like very strong, but you can see

exactly in her eyes how scared she is

or when you have an actor of this caliber,

should have to point the camera in the right direction

and you have something great.

[light suspenseful music]

Uh, uh! Uh!

Uh!

Uh!

Uh!

Uh!

It's very easy to make the mistake

of like loading an actor with characterizations

that they don't feel comfortable

or they don't understand yet, but they do it

because that's what you're supposed to do.

For me, it was very important that Claire,

everything she had on her was something that she felt

like was right and was in line or in tune

with what she imagined the character is

and what, you know the life of the character is.

We had one of the best tattoo artists

in Berlin working with us,

the part of the tattoo is a big part of the character,

of the characterization for the character of Lisbeth

and that's something I always believed,

the actor has to be deeply involved.

So she has this thing here,

she has like little three dots there on the neck,

Claire even has stuff written on her body,

but you have to really in the movie, kind of stop to see it

and some of the stuff, I don't even wanna know what it is,

some of that stuff is kind of written

on places on her body, you'll never see in the movie,

that means a lot for her as an actor playing this role.

The most interesting aspect of this one to me

was the fact that it was moving on her shoulder blade

in some of the scenes, when she does have her shirt on,

I mean, you can see her back,

you can see how it moved and feel very alive

and that beautiful bowl haircut,

I remember as we were shooting, as the movie progresses,

that haircut was popping up everywhere in Berlin,

which we thought that showed us we were on the right track.

[suspenseful music]

Every time you're about to have an explosion, I think,

the best design possible is to create an emptiness.

The music is rising, the sound is rising,

it gets louder and louder,

[suspenseful music]

[alarm bell ringing]

[gas hissing]

and then the loudest boom you'll ever hear in a theater.

Again, I mean, the whole spirit of, we don't do anything CG,

if we can do it for real, we're gonna do massive explosions,

so once we're really done with this set

and we shot everything we needed to shoot,

we said okay, now we can blow it up.

I think we have like four different cameras,

because you don't get to do this twice, never,

because everything gets destroyed,

you can see, if you look at the glass here,

hear how the shockwave destroys it,

when it reaches it there, boom!

That's just out of the explosion is so loud

and the shockwave so strong,

that it's destroyed the whole glass.

In a lot of movies, when you get to see something like this,

the camera never moves, because the camera is on a rig,

it cannot be on a Technocrane,

because the explosion will damage the crane,

so usually you cannot have anything

too technological on a set, that is gonna explode.

We had the camera on a dolly and we had a rope,

that the grips are like pulling from the dolly,

so what we get is like something that is rare,

which is actually see the camera traveling

as the explosion happens.

There's actually, there's one camera

hidden down there behind this wall,

this actually, this one we're actually looking at

would be number two, which is this whole camera

we're seeing now, which is a Alexa 65,

then the rest are like standard Alexas,

but they're inside a crash box,

so they're inside of, you know, with an expensive camera,

you particularly don't wanna damage the camera or the lens,

the lens usually is the most expensive part of the camera,

you wanna make sure it's inside a box,

so when an explosion like this will happen,

you don't want the camera to get damaged.

There's another camera right on this table,

which is a little GoPro,

there's a GoPro there,

there's another one, there's like two more here,

actually there's like four and five here,

which one is this Alexa and the other one

is actually a crash cam, that we call them, right,

small cameras that you don't mind if they get destroyed.

With crash one, I like a mini on a drone on the car chases,

I think we damaged one on a car crash as well,

you really try not to.

This is stunt double, right,

like you could never put the actor in a situation like this,

because it's really life or death situation,

I'll show you how close it is.

She has to run, make a jump and land inside the water

and there's a countdown, but the explosion's gonna come

and if she doesn't make it behind this wall here

before that explodes, she will be really badly hurt

and you can see how perfect time it is,

she jumps out right when the explosion

is detonating behind her.

But not only that, this actually,

things that you never can really plan for this,

there's always objects and things that fly

and there's this like basket, a plastic basket,

that flies overhead, there you see there,

you see the thing here,

smashes the wall and makes a dent inside the wall,

that would have hit her in the head,

it would have been really bad.

If you think about all the elements

you have to synchronize in this scene,

you have a guy with a finger on the trigger,

that has to pull the trigger to make the explosion,

you have the stunt double,

that should jump at the same time,

every time you add in an element,

you add a level of complexity to the shot.

Sometimes you try to reduce them at the most

or you try to have the stunt later, do first explosion,

the way I like to do them is really take my chances

and do all of those elements at the same time,

so all it takes is one of those people,

that teach us, go a little bit later

and then you have to destroy the set

and the shot is not good.

After you've done it like five or six times

and everything works

and the timing of the camera movement is right,

that's when you go for the explosion, right.

All that yellow dust that you see,

most of all that cloud is not smoke or fire,

it's pollen and the flower pollen actually ignites

and it creates this beautiful explosion

you see in Hollywood movies.

I think you can see probably all this section here

also is like all padded, it's all soft

and actually probably this section here is soft,

so when she hurt her back there, it doesn't hurt,

but there's no way to do this without pain, I tell you,

I mean, you can see here how she's gonna hit her ankle

against it, that hurts like hell

and for any of us, it will break our ankle,

but the stunt persons are hard to crack.

[explosive booming]

[car alarms blaring]

Explosions is something that Hollywood has done

a million times and a whole thing for anybody, I think

is how do you do it in a special way,

how do you do it in a way

that hasn't been seen a million times?

For me usually, it's like to go to an unpredictable place

and while you're in the middle of the explosion

here in this sequence, instead of staying inside,

you go outside and go small.

For the main character,

it might be their whole life is falling apart,

her apartment is blowing up,

but for the city, it's just an explosion,

a small building down there,

instead of going big, going counterintuitive

and going small is a thing I love to do.

But this is a lot of visual effects here,

I mean, this is one part, all this is CGI,

we do have real lights on the explosion,

we have like massive light rig around the apartment,

but the explosion is shot separately,

we don't do the fire on the day,

we do then on a sound stage the same explosion,

the same size, but we do it in a controlled environment,

I guess a black version of the building

and then we compose it into the shot.

So it's actually real fire, it's a real explosion,

but it's done on a different day on a different set,

because with actually the real lights,

you do get this part, which is a reflection

of the actual explosion on the ice,

so it's all this combination of light,

invisible VFX with actual practical effects

at the end of the day, that for me

is always the best way to do it.

So you see the explosion, if you go frame by frame here,

you'll see, you barely notice,

but all these lights flicker as the soundwave hits them

and eventually triggers all the alarms,

until it gets to these cars here,

we did have these cars are real,

this car's a CG, we didn't have enough cars,

this is kind of great combinations of craft,

when you get the picture and the sound

to portray the explosion in a different way,

a slightly different way.

[suspenseful music]

Back inside her house,

this is actually a crash cam, one of those,

you see this is actually in the middle of the explosion, so,

and then this is one of the shots,

that you know, you kind of dream about,

when you're writing it, Lisbeth under the bathtub

just hoping for the fire to dissipate in time

before she drowns basically.

The way we did this, it's like a completely different set,

we had a bathtub, that had glass at the bottom

and we had this massive roof with this massive setup,

which is basically like an actually massive roof,

that will catch the fire and the fire will dance inside,

so and the bathtub is underneath with the glass

with Claire on this other massive platform,

so the camera can be underneath,

there's actually two cameras, one for her closeups

and one that catches the whole bathtub.

So this very complex setup just to get a beautiful shot

in the movie, that really dramatizes her situation

and it's real and I think you cannot do that

in the United States legally, I think,

because we shot this in Berlin,

they allowed us to have such a massive fire indoors,

because again, most movies these days

will do CG fire for safety and we don't do that,

so all this is like the real fire that was on top of her.

You wanna really hope that Claire

won't pop her head out of the water too soon,

because just the heat will just burn her skin.

It's not that I have anything against VFX,

I mean, good VFX, you should never see them, right,

so they should always be invisible,

but you go for a story like this,

that doesn't have, you know, VFX creature

or a CG creature or monster,

when it's supposed to be the real world,

I think the audience should never notice something in CG,

I mean, sometimes you do and you don't mind,

because you accept it, but you accept it today,

10 years from now, you won't,

so I always try to avoid anything

that is like super new and untested,

I tend to go with techniques

that at least are like five or 10 years old.

For me as a director, you make these movies

to go into an adventure, you know, you write the scripts

and you spend all the time imagining that place,

so what I do, like I do in this movie,

I do find that place for real, I will go to that place

and hug yourself with a wire

and hopefully you won't fall to your death,

but you really try to go through the experience yourself,

because if you do, then you'll put that,

the audience in the theater through that same experience

and not because you cannot be done in other ways,

a lot of things you do, you could have done in VFX

in a cheaper, quicker way,

but for the actors and for the people involved in the movie,

when you're doing things for real,

the whole writing, the involvement of everybody

in the movie, it's priceless,

it's basically what you give them back

to really put them through the real elements.