SUPERMAN II (1980) | Behind the Scenes of DC Classic Movie (Part 2)

[Music] so what do you think you like it like it it's incredible i mean uh not that it couldn't use a woman's touch you know especially around dinner time dinner oh i'm sorry see i don't usually do too much about listen tonight sky's the limit anything you want [Music] it was a risk if in fact it had been as it was originally written that it was superman with all his faculties and powers in bed with it with a human being i think that is an amusing risk but certainly a risk here cheers cheers for the first time in my life [Music] everything's clear [Music] well it was important that the eternal love story between superman and lois uh does come to a conclusion the big problem was to to to respect the audience of children and i think the way it comes in the film it works because there is absolutely no feeling i think of any kind of vulgarity or or any kind of uh you know there's so many words i could use here but any anything uh unpleasant for children mark mcclure is photographer jimmy olsen not quite a child but the youngest member of perry white's staff and perry himself is once again portrayed by the former child star jackie cooper so from the beginning it goes now now right i can't understand it where is he i mean he shows up every time a cat gets stuck in the tree i tried to write a series or reshape the existing screenplay so that there was always every other scene or every third scene so little special effects within that sequence that the actors could perform in a naturalistic manner oh sorry you were you weren't here um can you see the the and i shot them in a normal relaxed manner with no marks on the floor and and freedom to change lines and and and perform in a way where they were not restricted in any way by camera movements or positions or grids within the cameras that's too long and i think you need a very a very steady move move across so that you can come and watch it richard yes sir suppose i don't suppose i finish the game plan speech gameplay i can't understand it where is he i mean he shows up every time a cat gets stuck in a tree and now he decides to pull a disappearing act know maybe we just haven't figured out his game plan game plan it's fourth down the two-minute warning is sounded and the ball's deep in our territory how brilliant do you have to be well superman's got something up his sleeve that's for sure we just haven't figured it out right miss wayne he'll be here if there's any way at all he'll be here see and she knows his play's better than anybody yeah better than anybody [Music] [Applause] gene hackman is once again lex luthor with all this accumulated knowledge when will these dummies learn to use a doorknob i i like to see him as as being playful even though uh it's written in the script he is a villain uh i don't know how to play a villain because you know villains really uh for my experience of uh as an actor is that you can't really you can only play what's in you finally uh if you play beyond that then it becomes false or becomes like a comic book character i i can only you know if if he's villainous it's what he says from the script it isn't it isn't that i'm going to sneer and people are going to hiss at me i uh you should see the white house i'll be cleaning for months lex luthor well i've learned i've learned the things about films that actors really don't need to know i mean like how blue backing works and things like that which i might have been better off not knowing but it certainly has killed the time it's helped it to go faster i've been here for nearly three years you know and i've enjoyed learning about how a model works and about how the difference between putting on a 75 versus a 40. when you're turning do you ever let it go and catch it something like that yeah how can you catch it without getting a bump on it you know without getting a hitch if you for christopher eve the superman set is sometimes better than attending film school anyway thank you very much the fortress of solitude had to be completely rebuilt for superman 2. one of the main scenes is when superman renounces his powers and gets destructured right any last words before you get de-structured all right on stage i'd much rather make the all-american movie in england than anywhere else because in the states everyone's going wow hey wait a minute that's not superman you're not doing it right you know there's five you know five uh grips i can think they know the part better than you do over here they don't know so much about superman and so they'll say well i guess he's i guess he's all right you know and i find it's a less critical crew unless they're more sympathetic because they don't have the overexposure to superman um that there is in the states it's not part of the folklore uh feel much more of a sense of freedom right action chris i'm walking and i'm walking [Music] now [Applause] move your head around chris [Music] [Applause] [Music] i know finally take my hand and swear eternal loyalty to thought being hurled backwards holds all the terrors of flying for terence stamp and more in fact it's quite dangerous and if you if your mind is wandering and you're up in the air um there's a big chance that you're going to get hurt so i find that danger really adds to my presence [Music] some of the footage was shot more than two years previously and is cleverly blended in with the new material [Applause] wow [Music] five and a half thousand tons of sand cement and tar [Music] two hundred and fifty thousand feet of timber six thousand cubic yards of concrete half a million feet of scaffolding 66 000 sheets of plywood 10 000 square feet of glass helped to make up the 4 million dollars spent on building new york's 42nd street in england the whole street was built in pinewood obviously it was impossible to shoot in real manhattan which of course is metropolis as we all know but you can't have people throwing buses at each other in the middle of the street where pedestrians are i mean it's impossible so we had to build it the designers had to create not only the real street but two identical models as well using photographs taken from every conceivable angle they remodel skyscrapers that only needed to be high enough to fill the panavision camera's lens the whole operation took 160 craftsman 16 weeks at the end of the street they managed to save some money by painting a backdrop this white line will never be seen in the film but the artist just wanted to make it look perfect the 30 lamp posts had to be real but where there was a danger of a building or a shop coming under the camera scrutiny everything was fully recreated down to the most minute detail [Music] just like the main street in countless westerns this was to be the location of the major showdown between the good guy and the bad guys but unlike countless westerns here they're going to use more than [Music] bullets i actually lifted the bus up and of course that enormous bus with 40 people in it has got a a chain on it and it's on a crane that's how they they do it and it's hauled up and as i lift it up obviously the crane lifts the the crane lifts the chain which lifts the bus and the crane actually the chain actually moved a fraction of an inch there was a little bit of settlement right so of course i went on holding the bus instead of just relaxing my arms you know i went on holding it because i was superwoman i was a superwoman for that minute and afterwards of course i pulled all these to all these muscles here richard i said you know why did he go on holding it and i said well for that split second you know that split second you do believe that you have sort of extra strong extra strength push their hands up if they can yeah but instead instead of pushing if you if you push that way from on action instead of doing all that three two one [Music] [Applause] okay bit more there down a bit with your hands sarah there good three two one oh having shot the bus sequence on the life-size street they did so again on the model unit just for that split second shot that would add an extra dimension of danger to the action once again every minute detail had to look real and exactly mirror the exterior [Music] can we put them all in now put them all in there turn [Music] he stopped it that time oh it's terrible this little guy's gonna take over for me in part three i'm not coming in he's doing the whole thing dude i think it's incredible because this is exactly the way it was i mean i'm absolutely exactly right down to the letter even even the window dressing in there yeah yeah i mean some of these doll's houses yeah that place is great when we had on the back lot we all went in there trying that's tremendous i'll draw his fire some of my [Applause] [Applause] the explosions look real and that's because they are real colin chilbers and his special effects team have filled the cars with an explosive chemical called naphthalene preparing each car for the exact way it will blow up these cars have been prepared with the doors to go off the bonnets and the trunk to come up and big balls of flame because we've got lots of people around we can't make it dangerous and we've got to make sure there's no bits that fly or anyone gets hurt once one got onto the street i found that it was very much like ordinary filmmaking because although the effects in that street were more like ordinary action filming for example there's a whole sequence where the villains blow you use their super breath to to create a kind of tornado that that sweeps people down the streets once you know how to do that specific effect with one stunt man it's very easy to ad-lib and in fact in a period of three nights we ad-libbed that whole sequence and it wasn't something that had to be written out in advance it was and therefore for me it was is a delight it was a joy to be able to go up and invent gags on the spot a team of hundreds of crew and extras work night after night in near zero november temperatures to shoot and reshoot every aspect and angle of the chaos caused by the tornado from krypton [Music] [Music] ah [Music] so [Music] the end product wasn't just a stunning piece of cinema magic it was an example of the dedication of everyone from stars and director down to tea ladies and carpenters that has put the superman films in a class of their own [Music] [Music] we can all say on superman really that there was not one place where it didn't go well and go someplace better some place much better but it's always done very well all in wherever it went i think he i don't know if he exists i think he should exist [Music] [Applause] i don't think he could have made this movie in the 60s now i feel it may be wrong but i feel sort of a new kind of loyalty in in america i mean a new sort of perhaps patriotism where we feel it's not a bad thing it's not embarrassing it's not bad to say okay for our country sort of thing and i never i never thought of superman as a as a piece of american propaganda i don't think him as being particularly american he's just happened to land up in america he might have landed in russia for god's sake he might have landed in alaska or tibet it doesn't matter but to be able in a movie unabashedly have a leading figure come out and say that he's loyal to something and has an allegiance to that we can dare to put the ending on the film that we have where superman returns the american flag back to the white house i mean five years ago i don't think we would have been caught dead doing that kind of thing [Music] [Music] good afternoon mr president sorry i've been away so long i won't let you down again [Music] okay stay with me as i have some cool behind the scenes trivia stop motion has featured prominently in famous science fiction films two of the robocop movies feature the stop-motion technique at work and the finale of the first terminator feel was done with stop motion now do you like my shirt you can 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Channel: FilmIsNow Movie Bloopers & Extras

Views: 30,445

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Keywords: Behind the Scenes of Superman, Making Of Superman, Superman, Superman 1978, making of, on-set, B-Roll, Behind the Scenes, green screen, Making of Documentary, superhero movie, Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, Marlon Brando, Glenn Ford, superhero, dc comics, 1970s, alien superhero, based on comic book, supernatural power, Krypton, Kal-El, Clark Kent, Metropolis, Lex Luthor, FilmIsNow Extra

Id: nNb741BJTEw

Length: 24min 14sec (1454 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021