Designing the world of xXx (behind the scenes on a spy movie) : CaptionKit HyperTranscript


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Special feature - behind the scenes on the movie xXx with Vin Diesel.
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Speaker	Caption
Gavin Bocquet
	It was an interesting script, an interesting premise
	of trying to put the X-generation sprit into the secret agent / espionage world.
Location designer
	It was a very interesting take on an existing genre, giving it quite an edge.
Bradford Ricker
	A script with a lot of action, a lot of gadgets, a lot of things happening.
	Very demanding.
Rob Cohen - Director
	Once this starts going, it just gets faster and faster. It never lets up.
Gavin Bocquet
	The look and style of the film was based on the premise of the script
	about tring to work in the world of extreme sports and x-generation
	and a very sort of hip, hi-tech design in both costume and gadgets and the sets
	into this world of what you understand is a secret agent world which is usually a little bit stuffier.
Bradford Ricker
	Its an action movie. Its got to have an edge.
	Its got to be something modern and somthing thats going to have devices
	that are exciting, that are maybe not completely realistic.
	but are something that are a little beyond realistic.
Gavin Bocquet
	Theres a lot of discussions about whether we would be
	contemporary or just out of contemporary, or futuristic.
	I think the conclusion was we didn't really want to be science fiction.
	Everything had to look as though it could be believable now.
Bradford Ricker
	Rob trusted Gavin quite a bit. And he wanted Gavin to give him
	a err, a look that was you know, going to push things a little bit
	be a bit new, over the top but at the same time, beautiful.
Vin Diesel
	When you get a guy like Gavin to create the environment,
	when he knocks it out of the park , which he did, you've gotta thank him
	because all you have to do is be in that point and work off the environment he's created.
Computer voice
	Opsec three - Yellow.
	Opsec four - Orange.
	Opsec five - Red [Bell from a elevator arriving]
Gavin Bocquet
	In the style of the movie, we had a lot of contrast to work with.
	We new we were working in LA, we were working in the sort of the street side life of LA.
	We were going to Prague, we were going to be using locations in Prague
	that were a mixture of elegant and romantic and very run down and grimy
	bug palaces, small bars, sort of subterranean environments
	So we had great contrasts going on all over the place.
	And I think the one advantage we had, or the one thing we were trying to do with the NSA
	was push it into a worl of very modern, hi-tech design
	to contrast with all the environments we were going to see or build in Prague.
Jonathan Lee
	The NSA hanger that was a set we built in Prague
	ws a very high end, high tech, technical set
	with a lot of very specific finishes.
	And Gavin and Rob had no mercy there.
	They wanted it to look just as good as it could.
	It had almost 120 monitors in it, and very high end, metal - steel finishes.
Bradford Ricker
	It sounds great, but it was like 'Yeah we're going to have a million monitors
	and we're gonna be underground - heh -
	But - it was exciting because its a contrast I think, to the Prague world.
	And I think that was, that was important in the set
	to give it this scale and this scope, that its -
	you know, this place has its pulse on every event in the world.
	Its the kind of place that can track a single person, or track a whole army.
Jonathan Lee
	So, it was quite hard work, but a great contrast to the look of the movie.
Rob Cohen - Director
	Yorgi and his crew are new, they're young and they're new, and they're powerful.
	Their style is the style of urban rebellion.
	The tattoos and the clothes and the clubs and the girls, the whole thing.
Gavin Bocquet
	Yorgis castle as a concept started out in slightly different form in the script.
	It was originally a castle split in two sections.
	It was a castle or palace that he lived in, in the centre of Prague,
	and it was a fortress that he had on the outside boundaries of Prague
	sort of more in the countryside or the mountains.
	Gradually it just became sensible to put these two locations together.
	And there was a castle, a palace called Ranov
	that I'd seen previously on trips to Prague or to the Czech Republic,
	or other shows, that had never been shot in before.
	It gave us the palace, the sort of the big grand scale for Yorghi
	Something he lives in, this mad opulence as an anarchist would.
	And underneath there was a belief that the AHAB launch room
	in the cliff face underneath, with the opening doors to the river.
Jonathan Lee
	Exterior of the castle was a fantastic location
	down in Moravia, and we added to it with various quite large pieces of scenery
	just to seal the courtyard off, to make it into the area that Rob wanted the action to unfold in.
	but to seem like impregnable fort and in fact it was a three sided castle that looked out over a cliff
	so we had to seal that fourth side off.
	So that was a fairly big element from the construction point of view.
Gavin Bocquet
	AHAB was the sort of thirty foot long submersible.
	The idea was that this was being built in a subterranean environment underneath his palace.
	So we obviously weren't going to find that as a location
	so we knew we were going to have to build this.
	The difficulty of working with water in this instance
	was obviously building the set in what was going to be a water environment
	and there was no stage available in Prage that actually had a tank
	as we would call it, like a waterproof tank below the stage floor.
	Luckily the studio complex, which was an old industrial works that we were using,
	one of the stages there did have a sunken floor.
	err so we started with a shell that was mainly a period interior undergound
	of columns, sort of brick columns and brickwork
	but then applied a lot of modern technology into it
	as though Yorghi had turned it into a modern hi-tech workshop.
Jonathan Lee
	The AHAB set was erm our largest set.
	And it was our most complicated effort, both as an art department and a construction department
	The end section, the launch room had a very large tank in it that was over six feet deep.
	And we had to build a metal tank within the existing tank
	within the stage, because it was basically just a huge depression in the floor which wasn't water tight.
	So we had to build a metal tank within that.
	And there was huge collaboration with the special effects department.
	Because the set was animated in various ways, there were huge doors that shut,
	there was an extraction system for taking gas out of the air
	when one of the rockets goes off inside the workshop.
	But it was probably the hardest in that it combined
	basic set construction finishes of stone and brick,
	err with the hi-tech metal, glass and all the rest of it.
	And in fact, by the time the water was in the tank
	it became very very difficult just to get about the set,
	to get to certain areas of the set you had to get into a boat
	and literally row over to it. But it was a great end result.
Vin Diesel
	This is movie making to the highest degree !
Gavin Bocquet
	The drug farm was one of the first sets that we could actually get our teeth into.
	It was scheduled early, it was in LA, we knew what we had to do.
	We had all the reference from all the Columbian, South Americal drug farms
	which was obviously quite hard to get, but we had enough to work with.
	So we initially made up some little concept models to show to Rob,
	little different ideas of how these buildings could be constructed, how big they were
	what sort of designs were there, what would happen in each one
	in the real world of sort of drug farms.
	So we had the basis of a real drug farm layout.
	And then we built a big scale model. Or a small scale model, but
	a big size ten foot by six foot board that had the whole of the drug farm on it.
	Which became our talking point really, it was almost sort of
	like a second world war operations room, with all the commanders around
	looking at the model explaining where the motor bike would fly,
	the helicopters would fly and all those things would go on.
Bradford Ricker
	The drug farm was really designed for the stunts. I went with a stunt man
	and my art director working with me, Bruce Hill, went with me round the whole drug farm.
	and started labelling places where we'd have to have jumps
	where we'd have to have fences, where we'd have to have an obstacle
	so it would become a very exciting sequence for Vin and the motor cycles and for Rob to coreograph.
	Rob sat down with the model, he looked at it all, and he said :
	'This building's the first to blow, the helicopter comes round here'
	He just started playing with it, in about an hour he had sort of mapped it out in his head.
Sound effect
	Motorcycle
	7 rapid gunshots, shell cases rattle on the flooe
Xander Cage
	Oh my god !
Gibbons
	She's checking you out, man.
Xander Cage
	Think I'll hang on to these.
	The script had a number of demands for weapons and gadgets for the NSA and the Xander character.
	and also Yorghis world as well.
	So there were a number of real weapons, from great big rocket launchers
	down to handguns that were real, practical film weapons.
	and then there was a series of gadgets , weapons and guns
	that we designed and made ourselves as props, that obviously didn't function.
	And generally they were on the border of being real in terms of their design and what they could do.
	When these things appeared they inherently looked naturally part of that world
	even though if you took them away from that and looked at them
	you probably might think a couple of them were more on the futuristic side
Jonathan Lee
	We're taking things that people can recognise, I think
	And taking them a step further into a new realm.
Bradford Ricker
	We didn't want it to make it too high tech - we didn't want them to be delicate.

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