Grease's Director Breaks Down the "You're The One That I Want" Scene | Notes on a Scene

I'm Randal Kleiser and these are notes on the scene from Greece this is the number called you're the one that I want when we were shooting this we showed up that day and we had the audio track but we had not rehearsed it at all this is something you'd normally not do but we've just been handed the track and Pat Burgess the choreographers just sort of did it in about 20 minutes so we didn't know it's going to be a hit although it sounded pretty cool and everyone on the set who heard it for the first time went wow that is great but the sequence itself we were just scrambling to do it you know doing this is a Letterman sweater that he got from running track and the three boys here are the t-birds and they're dressed in their their t-bird jackets he has shown up unexpectedly wearing this albert Wolski was a costume designer came up with these ideas and more importantly came up with the idea of what Sandi's were danny zuko has been dressed similar to the other three tea birds in a tea birds jacket most of the time kind of the 50's James Dean or Elvis Presley look more Elvis Presley I think he was channeling Elvis Presley in this movie because the hair as you can see it's very much an Elvis thing Elvis sideburns and so here he's trying to go against it to woo sandy we wanted to reveal sandy slowly so we wanted to show the new look starting from the feet up to her face because if we just cut to it it would be not as exciting and this is something that's done an awful lot in movies where you start with people getting out of a car you start with their shoes and go up to their face so this is kind of like a throwback to a whole style of revealing women this outfit this look that she has here with the hair like this and the eye makeup and the lipstick and everything I thought to be perfect for the good sandy but I wasn't sure if she would work out for the bad sandy because she just doesn't have any of these qualities in person and she came out on the set to show me how she was gonna look and she was coming at me from a distance and she was backlit I didn't know who it was until she got up real close and the whole crew was going nuts / this new look of hers much like you see here everybody swarming around her like a superstar now this day was very very hot and as you can see here she's squinting a little bit when we were shooting this I noticed this and I thought what are we gonna do about this when she starts singing it she's got to be able to perform so I talked to the cinematographer bill Butler who shot jaws by the way and said how do we help her and we'll put this giant silk up which is kind of like a sail on a ship but in this big square and the grips hold it up over them so that they don't have this bright Sun in their face sandy tell me about it step you noticed all back here it's all dark and that's because this was one of the last shots we did that day this whole musical number was done really really fast we didn't even get to finish it we had to come back and do some of in the studio because we weren't enough time but as you can see the Sun is setting behind him and we saved his clothes up for last well here she's backed up by her three Pink Ladies and one of the things that we came up with was the idea that she would be smoking and dropped a cigarette and put it out and she was being told by Dinah Manoff to do that and that was something we came up on the day just to show that these girls are helping her become a pink lady and be sexy we did many many many takes to get the cigarette to land here because it kept bouncing off this way that way and we kept rolling in rolling and doing all these takes and finally the prop man came up and said hey put a bobby pin in the cigarette and then it'll land and stay there and that's how we got that shot [Music] this is the background we chose the Shake Shack which seemed the most colorful part of the carnival and it's Pink Ladies t-birds John Olivia and they're coming together here this was done in the traditional sense of musicals where normally you shoot a musical to playback and all this tracks are done ahead of time you just did lip sync to playback most actors will sing along with it just to give the vocalization of their throat but they have to be careful that they match it exactly and there's usually someone standing right beside the camera or just watching for lip sync that the silk is now being used you see here how olivia is not squinting because we have this big silk and you can see in the background these guys are in bright Sun she's a she's a little darker so that so that she doesn't squint and here you can see the line right there of the silk it went like that and it was just you know being held by grips off camera [Music] these are the famous zippered pants that she was sewn into she couldn't go to the bathroom during this day because the zipper had broken I know that she was uncomfortable and she didn't drink any water because she was afraid that you know she'd slow down production especially since the Sun was setting we couldn't really take the time to have her redone this set was here I mean the sign was here danger ahead walked through all that was there it kind of looks tacky and rundown which I think worked okay for it it looked very lived in had just used what was there to come up with a way to give moments like him jumping off here just instinctual at the time she came up with his jump and then utilized the up coming up and down and back and forth as part of the choreographer somehow figured that out into the song right on the spot to this Shake Shack was sitting on the grounds of the carnival set when we arrived and Pat and I just walked in to see where we could shoot we walked through it and went up and down and back and forth said well what could you do with this and she went in with John and Olivia and worked for about I'd say 20 minutes to come up with this choreography and it was just all improv us in provides on the spot this was shot with a Hannah vision camera with town vision lenses two three five lenses and if you notice here these are just blasting lights arc lights shooting in because the Sun was going down at this point and we were losing our day in the back these guys would have been in black shadows had we not lit them and that this kind of reflection is not really looking too hot but we just had to do it that way because we were running out of time and light when we shot this we really wanted to go in and get some close-ups like this of the two of them to break it up because this is all on one wide master shot and when we got our dailies back this was the dailies this is what we saw and we said we really need this and we so we called up and said can we go back and shoot the carnival they said no sorry it's moved on so we had to go into the studio and try to duplicate this background here you know these colors this these these things here and in the next shot you can see that we reproduce these lines here and the colors the yellow and the green here so that it would match the wide shot and this was done on a soundstage at Paramount I don't think that the choreography works quite as well as it did in the wide shot because we were trying to match and in those days you didn't have video to look at and match so we had to do it by memory and just hoping that we got when they put their heads together it matched with the choreography this one see a little bumpy there my idea for this shot and we did this we did an optical which was a blow-up I wanted to start like this what and then pull back and integrate this optical pull back with the pull back of the camera so it would be all one slow move out out out out out so we did the optical and I thought it worked but you know in the musical you all want to see the feet of the dancer so it was determined that we would use this wide shot instead but if you imagine it went like this and then pulled out as they continued the move so it looked like all one move [Music] these are the dancers 1 through 20 these people here and they were with us the whole shoot Pat Burch came up with the idea of giving each of these dancers a name and a backstory so that they could work all the way through the picture and always be in character so that if you watch the movie it really looks like instead of just background X just crossing these people are all doing things all through it and Pat choreographed all the background action for the whole movie and they're all doing very specific things and having interactions as characters these little things we saw when we were there and the actors came up to me and said hey can we can we put our heads in here and sing a verse I said sure so that was all done on the day - that was not planned Barry pearl came up with putting the little little head this thing was his idea and then the idea that he looks over in season as a surprise just know these are the type of little improv that the actors were doing all through the picture and really helped me because you know they were always saying what about this what about this what about this and and if you notice like even back here these are two of the dancers who had a story a back story and they were coming together here so little subtleties like that that just make you feel this is a real high school and not just extras crossing in the background and then we go right into another musical number from here when we go together where they go really nuts running down the football field and that was probably the toughest for the actors because it was so hot that day but that's the end of this particular song it's pretty extraordinary and I like lightning striking you know you can never predict when it will happen and things fell together in a nice way these outfits this this look has been reproduced in all over the place in other movies and in Halloween costumes and at the sing-alongs that we've had the most exciting are the ones at the Hollywood ball where 17,000 fans show up dressed like this and cheer and sing along and

Channel: Vanity Fair

Views: 686,801

Rating: 4.9766421 out of 5

Keywords: grease, grease movie, you're the one that i want, notes on a scene, notes on the scene, randal kleiser, grease you're the one that i want, grease notes on a scene, grease scene, grease bts, grease behind the scenes, grease john travolta, john travolta grease, grease song, grease songs, grease lyrics, grease dance, grease dance scene, grease one that i want, musical grease, behind the scenes, dance grease, vanity fair

Id: ErALN36KMkA

Length: 10min 50sec (650 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 24 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/DelaneySvea]

You better shape up!!! 🎶🎵🎶

[u/Shimster]

I wouldn’t have known what he was talking about if he did not draw circles over everything in a pen colour you cannot see.