Back To The Future Making Of Documentary Part 1

I'm from the future I came here in a time machine that you invented now I need your help to get back to the Year 1985 time travel has always been fascinating because it's something that I think we all fantasize a little bit about and that makes it really interesting and you know when I started studying film I realized that telling a time travel story in a movie lends itself to doing it probably better than in any other medium Bob Zemeckis and I for years had discussed the idea of doing a time travel movie and we were never able to figure out sort of the hook what was gonna make a good subject for a time traveller well after we made a movie called used cars I was back in st. Louis visiting my parents and my father went to the same high school that I went to and I found his high school yearbook in the basement and I'm thumbing through it and I find out that my father had been the president of his graduating class I didn't know this and I'm looking at him and thinking about the president of my graduating class who was a guy had nothing to do it and I thought what I've been friends with him if I had gone in high school or would I have just hated his guys so when I got back to California I'm telling the story to Bob and he's going yeah that's really interesting so we just got going with that and that was the germ of the idea well used cars didn't do too well at the box office but Columbia Pictures loved it so the head of Columbia Frank Price said as soon as you guys have another idea for a movie bring it to me first I want to hear about it and by I don't know September of 1980 maybe October we said okay let's go let's go tell Frank price about this so we set up a meeting we go in to Frank and we tell him basically this kid goes back in time and goes to high school with his parents and his mother falls in love with him and was Dan within days we had a deal to write two drafts back to the future of Columbia Pictures all writing is hard but our working relationship is truly collaborative you know we really check our egos at the door and we debate everything and we do it understanding that it isn't just you know to win is to make the movie good and so we don't have a problem with that we use the index card method of plotting so we had big bulletin board member office and we would say okay we know for example Marty goes back in time so an index card goes up says Marty goes back in time and then towards the end Marty goes back to the future that's another car so we said okay wouldn't it be cool if he invented rock and roll so we put up a card saying Marty invents rock and roll well we need to establish that he can play rock'n'roll and that he wants to play rock and roll so that means that somewhere on the bulletin board before the card that says he goes back in time establish Marty desire and ability to play rock and roll same thing with the skateboard if he's gonna invent the skateboard show him on a skateboard so these pairs of index cards would come up but to write a screenplay like Back to the Future it was just an immense amount of very hard back-breaking work I mean there was nothing really fun about writing the screenplay it was really hard we had a first draft probably in five months they asked us to make changes we spent another six weeks or so had another draft in spring 81 and basically they said well you know what it's a really nice sweet story but we're kind of looking for raunchy or comedies these days no thanks we're gonna pass on this so we said okay let's go take this around and we were getting the same exact message from everybody this is just not for us but among the people that we showed it to was Steven Spielberg they brought it over to me and they said nobody gets this maybe we're crazy will you read this and let us know what you think and I read it and it was a very unusual story and yet it was based on a lot of old-fashioned principles of a family coming of age getting your first car all the dreams and desires you have for your own life the dreams and desires your parents might have had but didn't succeed in realizing and it was about the generation gap and it was about the major disconnect between our generation and our own parents generation and that was all done through an amazing object lesson which was this sort of accidental trip back into the past he said oh this is terrific I'd love to be on board and help you guys get this made a bob and I were in a position where we've done three pictures with Steve and I want to hold your hand and use cars which Steven executive produced in 1941 which we wrote for Steven and none of these movies were big hits at the box office so we were getting a little superstitious thinking well if we do another movie with Steven and it bombs we'll never get another job because we'll just be those two guys that only work because their pal Steven helps them set up their project so we were totally candid with Steven and told them that this is why we didn't want to to it and he understood completely so we're taking it to producers we're taking the studios everybody say take it to Disney take it to Disney so finally Bob and I said well let's go take it to Disney so we set up a meeting and we go in meet with an executive and we sit down and he says are you guys insane you've got the scene with the kid and his mom in the car this is incest we can't do this so it was too extreme for Disney well I think it was a tough sell at the time because Bob Gale and I had no success credentials so Bob Zemeckis said look I got it direct again I got it direct something and I'm gonna direct the next decent script that comes along that was Romancing the Stone and that was a very successful movie so suddenly studio executives thought that the future might be a good movie so it had actually nothing to do with the material and Bob is saying well let's go back to the one guy who always believed in it let's go back to Steve we had this good friend in Steven who was a filmmaker and a filmmaker can see the work of a director and read a screenplay and kind of imagine what that movie might look like so he always understood what the movie was and we said Steven he's still interested in doing back to the future he says damn right I am and so we set it up it was the first Hamblin project at Universal set up with Steven not direct I guess they call you cap no actually people call me Marty obviously the most important character is Marty McFly and every young actor in Hollywood wanted to play him and we did an exhaustive search and read a lot of people and and just trying to find the right person I was shooting a Teen Wolf and we were in passing in was shooting and I got all the stuff on my face I was wolf dragged rubber and hair and I'm feeling miserable and I can't eat and to make matters worse just down the road there was a scouting crew there flirt another film and we found out it was for this new Spielberg produced film called back in the future then I heard that the Crispin Glover was in it and I knew Crispin from other things and worked with him before and I thought man Christian Glover is in this Steven Spielberg movie and I'm like Teen Wolf all of us seized upon Michael Fox right from the beginning but he wasn't available he was doing a very successful television show at the time called family ties that had been created by Gary Goldberg they wanted to offer me back the future before I even did Teen Wolf but they'd spoken to Gary and Gary couldn't really speak for my contract and Gary kind of had figured out that there was no way I could do both so we begged and tried to see if we could cast Michael and we couldn't and then we started really looking for somebody who might embody many of the qualities that Michael had but we were given a mandate that we had to make a movie by a certain date and if we didn't make the movie by a certain date they would cancel the movie so being a young and a hungry filmmaker and maybe having a bit of an inflated ego I thought well I can make this work so you know as you do when you're making a movie you meant finally make a decision and that first decision was to go with Eric Stoltz we shot for five weeks with Eric he was totally professional but there was just something missing he's a magnificent actor but his comedy sensibilities were very different than what I had written with Bob and he and I just never were able to make that work and he showed me the first five weeks of footage cut together and he just said I don't think we're getting the laughs that I was hoping we would get and and I looked at Bob and I realized that he was absolutely correct and I said Bob what do you want to do it so I had to make this horrific decision which was very heartbreaking for everybody but luckily I was able to convince the studio to let me reshoot five weeks of work so we went back to Gary Goldberg and we were on our knees begging we need Michael we really need and Gary said okay look I'll tell you what I'm gonna let Michael read the script and if Michael wants to do it with the understanding that family ties always comes first if you guys are willing to make that accommodation to us and shoot around our schedule then I will let Michael read the script and we'll see what happens so at Christmastime I was called in a Gary Gophers office and Gary gave me an envelope I'm Noah envelope with the script in it he said here's the script take it home and read it if you want to do it and you know she had my blessing I can I went like this I love it it's best thing I ever read and that was it and we literally set up this plan where we had a station wagon with a bed in the back and Michael would finish his tapings on the TV show that he get into the station wagon and he drive out to the set for night shooting and about six o'clock from the moment that I said that I would do it it just kind of my with it caught up in this this cyclone of activity and creativity of the highest level just really brilliant people brilliant filmmakers bringing artisans it was just so much stuff and at the same time then there was a practical matter of shooting it which was a I'd work at family ties from 10:00 to 2:00 about 5:00 and then go over the set and get to probably about six and start shooting and work on that till about four or five in the morning and then go back and get literally get driven home and carried in the house and dropped in bed and woke up in the morning put in the shower and I mean yeah it was just crazy somehow thanks to Michael Fox we made it work and he turned out to be the perfect Marty McFly he's a reactive character he was written that way he reacts to everything I mean because he's a stranger in a strange land so he's basically the alien in the movie and it takes an actor with a perfect sense of comedy timing and a really great actor because it's been said that acting is reacting so he was able to understand that the humor was not in the punch line it was in the reaction never trying to tackle any of the physics of it the temporal logic or the space-time continuum or any of that stuff but from Marty's point of view I understood the story I mean I understood what his what was driving him I mean he's basically you know girls rock and roll and skateboarding it's not far from being major focuses in my life just couple years earlier and two of them still were your uncle Joey didn't make parole again our approach was all right let's find young people who are you know 18 to 25 who have really good acting chops and we will get them to act old with makeup and so forth and we read again every actor of that age and Leah came in and just blew us away well I just think it's terrible girls calling boys Marty it's just terrible I got involved with Back to the Future I believe because I was doing a movie called wild but the wild life with Eric Stoltz at Universal and apparently Zemeckis and Spielberg were looking at Eric Stoltz and they said who's that girl that's the story I heard and so they called me in to audition and for some reason it just clicked for me when I was your age I never chased a boy or called a boy or set a parked car with a boy we were shooting the first scene where you see Lorraine and as the older mom and you know it was a really difficult scene because we had to hit the comedy but we had this show just how sad she was just how bad her life had become was then that I realized I was gonna spend the rest of my life with him and that's one of the interesting things about comedy and one of the interesting things about working with Bob Zemeckis is that you have to kind of weave you know you have to know you're the the reason you're there in that scene and you have to hit the jokes and then hit this the depth luckily bob was there to like tell you what points to hit with with a lot of precision you know he demands a lot of precision and so I loved working with him for that reason Biff know I never noticed that the car had any blind spot before when I would drive it I son Crispin had this unusual way of talking in these strange mannerisms and he was George McFly there was no question I loved Crispin and I loved working with him before I did Back to the Future he did some episodes of family ties and they did a TV movie with him and people think about the way he actually he talks on all that stuff but in his head I mean he sees things differently and thinks about things differently like one point when I chase him across the street and onto his porch step and tell me he's had to take her to the dance he had this broom and he wanted to give us do you want to give a sweep with the broom like this is elaborate sweep and Bob's him what's with the broom he said oh it's a sweep of indignation okay that's cool I mean I was born with it but but you know you just have to why you didn't try to figure it out and again it gave me more reactive hey what the hell is this breakfast when did you ever was my daughter and she just was really funny she just was totally hilarious and so comfortable and because she knew Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale you know I was jealous of her because she just like knew them and like could joke around with them and I was still a little bit in awe of them with Wendy we met on I want to hold your hand and we became brother and sister like right away for the rest of our lives from that moment and then Bob hired us for used cars and then we got hired for back to the future and we always kept saying like how lucky we were you know first of all to have met Bob Z and Bob Gale get kicked out of school you wouldn't want that to happen with you everybody has bully in their school interesting thing is that Tom Wilson is absolutely the total opposite of Biff he's the most gentle good-natured decent guy you could ever meet but he had this persona that he put on that was intimidating and he plays it so straight that's why it's funny so why don't you make like a tree and get out of here no Jennifer Marty don't go this way Strickland's looking for you if you get caught it'll be for tardies in a row I had auditioned for young Sherlock Holmes gremlins and Goonies they were all done by Amblin and it got down to me and one or two other girls for each role so when they called me in for Back to the Future it was all the same producers and I was like hey it's me again and then when I got the part they talked to ABC because I just done a pilot for ABC called off the rack and they wanted to make sure that the pilot wasn't getting picked up because they were going to film at the same time and ABC said we love the pilot but it's not gonna get picked up you can cast her they cast me and then ABC changed their mind and picked up the pilot and so I had to back out it back to the future and and turn it down so they had to recast my part I did six episodes of my series but when they let go of Eric they recast me in 1984 I was doing the David Mamet play Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway and we had run about a year and then I got a call from Robert Zemeckis to do this little movie Back to the Future and I understand that it was because of my performance in Prince of the city that they thought of me for this character no McFly ever amounted to anything in the history of Hill Valley I was doing a film and Mexico City and I got a call from my agent saying that he was sending a script which of course the past the future and the script arrived and I just had no interest in it and I put it aside and I just thought was that I was back in New Haven into a play where real actors belong all that stuff and a friend said never leave a stone unturned as far as the business goes you never know you know so I read it I thought about it I thought well the least I can do go back and meet Bob Zemeckis and it's very engaging exude confidence and intelligence and it's just a certain rapport I felt immediately with him and I felt I'm in good hands here and this is something that if if this man is involved with this project it's something I should do and as I do with any character you know I read it that we can begin to think about what did this guy look like what are his characteristics and almost right away Einstein was a no-brainer and my other thought was a renowned doctor by the name of Leopold Stokowski I remember I presented these thoughts to Bob Zemeckis and he didn't even just like okay this is it there's no jokes we tell everybody Bob tells you're playing this completely seriously and you watch Chris Lloyd's performance he's taking you totally seriously he believes everything that he's doing but you never knew what Chris was gonna do until the camera rolled and Chris would do something on take one and take two that he never he would never do in rehearsal but just so that we could understand what Chris was about to do we would roll the camera during rehearsal because unless the camera was rolling Chris wouldn't really give you anything close 100% of his performance and because the energy he had and focus he had I could see why he couldn't do that for five takes a rehearsal for the sake of the lighting guys in the camera guys but it worked out fine because you know Chris once he found what he wanted to do was very consistent and would keep doing it over and over again I felt it was a need for a certain is a meanness I mean doctor was sort of constantly in crisis he had this excitement and I kind of drove the physical life and whatever way I went I didn't I didn't think too much about it I just went with that the energy that came out of that kind of crisis mode you feel it's a time machine it was an important character in the movie obviously it's the device that sends our hero on his adventure so there wasn't like a lot of serious thought going into should the car have a grand entrance it was just always assumed in my mind that it would one of the things that pleased me was to see the car for the first time I made sure that all of the details were brought out we would cross light the various functioning parts and so forth it wasn't as if they just took a car and said okay inside this car somewhere is the time machine it had been very thoughtfully designed they took the trouble to make the car a sort of an offshoot of Doc Brown's character in the early drafts it was not the time machine was a time chamber it was not a DeLorean and the draft I read it was a refrigerator and I don't have a problem with it but Zemeckis and Gale weren't satisfied with it and they were doing their old pacing back and forth Bob was behind the typewriter and Zemeckis was pacing and pacing and trying to figure it out and they couldn't figure it out and I kind of got bored and left and Bob said you know what wouldn't it make more sense for this to be mobile next thing I knew a week later they gave me some revised pages and they had turned the time machine into a DeLorean as far as designing the car you know we just wanted it to look like it was something that could actually look like a time machine and also something that looked like was built in someone's garage and the third thing was that had to look kind of cool that car slides were very clean it's not a sculptural form it's a very simple almost boxy kind of shape and I think that it made a good kind of a canvas to put all that crazy stuff on top of we received three of them in October of 1984 and brought him to my shop we had some lovely drawings from Ron Cobb and Andy fro Bert was very very big on it and the drawings they weren't made with the idea that here are these specific parts we want to put in these specific places it was about the feel of a thing so it was like a scavenger hunt to go to surplus stores electronics shops all these places where you can find used things bring the use things to a workshop and start putting them on the car and then our crew built it and made all the parts work and made sure everything made sense and was properly attached for all the rewards so the filmmaking that went with it and Bill clinger I hired to do all the electronics we had a team of about three or four guys that had nothing but putting in all the electronics we started with three DeLoreans for the very reason one was going to be our hero car it was going to have a full complement of all the electronics all the design elements all those pieces that told parts of the story the second car was going to be used exclusively for driving shots and stunt work and don't worry we'll never see it up close action then in addition we had the C car what we called a B and C car the see car we used for the process work and when he just literally kept sawing it in half like a sausage as the camera moved forward to right over Michaels shoulder when the Scarecrow in the field comes up on the windshield it wasn't outside it was actually done on a stage and so that was the process car and that had very little in it I got to tell you I hated that car I really hated it you hit that freaking sharp metal box that you know I just went like that I just jam my knuckles and I just ripped my hand up and also limited the gears so it would only be low gears and I'd be revving high at load years and feeling that was gonna crap then came the next conversation which is what exactly his time-travel gonna look like when this baby hits 88 miles per hour they're gonna see some serious and we met with ILM and talked to them and they said well here's some ideas and that was one where Bob and I quickly came to the conclusion you know what it's not about the visual effects it's not about how long does it take him to travel through time he's traveling through time should be instantaneous so there is no time-travel sequence as you see in other time-travel movies it's like that but one of the various ideas that I elem came up with was fire thing and we work with Kevin on that there was something interesting on a sort of a primal level about that and it just constantly got refined and worked on and we knew the idea that we had this neon on there the neon oughta glow and do something and ILM came up with some image where bolts were shooting out and it was sort of like opening up a hole in the space-time continuum and the DeLorean was going to go through that so that's sort of what you're seeing during time travel that's how it happened

Channel: Pop Culture Pandora

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Keywords: Science Fiction Movies, Back To The Future (Award-Winning Work), Making-of, Documentary (TV Genre), History, michael j fox, Christopher Lloyd, Robert Zemeckis, Steven Spielberg (Film Director), Behind The Scenes, SCI FI, Time Travel, Science Fiction (TV Genre), making of, making-of, behind-the-scenes

Id: N2Isa1Y9K7s

Length: 27min 24sec (1644 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 19 2015