I'm Matt Shakman. I'm the director of The Fantastic Four.
Downloaded from YTS.MX
And I'm Kasra Farahani.
I'm the production designer of Fantastic Four.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
[Shakman] We wanted to start the movie with a logo that was different
from the ones you've seen before. So we don't have the classic Marvel flip.
This one is by Sirovski, a great design studio,
and it's meant to feel retro, but also a little bit retro-futuristic.
So, which was the whole design aesthetic of the movie.
We just saw an establishing shot that says "Earth 828."
We're on a different Earth in a different universe,
from the traditional Marvel storytelling.
And we named it 828 in honor of Jack Kirby's birthday.
August 28th was his birthday, and he was the creator,
one of the co-creators, with Stan Lee, of The Fantastic Four.
We should talk about that building you designed.
[Farahani] Yeah, so, that building, the famed Baxter Building.
We have taken a slightly different direction
in the design of that building.
Heavily inspired by the kind of optimism
and dynamism of the Jet Age architecture.
Specifically, we were looking at
the work of Eero Saarinen and Oscar Niemeyer.
And you'll also notice, obviously, the location of it is very different
from what we may have seen previously in comics.
Early on, Matt knew that it wanted to occupy
approximately the footprint of the UN
in the real world.
That's because it was going to have an integrated launch pad.
And it made the most sense for it to be in a body of water
as opposed to in the middle of the city.
[Shakman] We were heavily inspired by the Space Race
and by the Apollo 11 launches.
We loved the idea of people gathering at a distance
with their cameras and binoculars
to see these incredible moments when launches happened.
We knew there would be a big one in our movie, too,
so we wanted that idea of people gathering across the river
to look at the Baxter Building.
And in our universe,
it's the Future Foundation instead of the United Nations.
So it was nice they were occupying the same place.
The actual United Nations building is a Niemeyer building, right?
[Farahani] Right. He's one of the architects
that worked on that building.
[Shakman] One of the other things that we were inspired by
was the World's Fair of the mid-'60s in New York.
And, you know, it was very much this idea
of, you know, what will the future look like?
And there were monorails and unispheres,
and there were saucer-shaped buildings and all this wonderful stuff.
And the idea was, "Well, what if that World's Fair was the entire city?"
And so we brought that language,
that sense of a monorail, saucer-shaped buildings and all of that
into a New York that was very much based in the '60s.
So it's a blend of that sort of retro future
and a familiar 1960s New York.
[Farahani] Early in the conversations with Matt,
we kind of arrived at this determinative variable
in our world versus the world that the audience lives in,
which is the kind of inflection point
for the design of New York was the birth of Reed Richards.
And we kind of theorized that, like, if he's approximately in his mid-30s
and we're approximately in the mid-'60s,
uh, that he was born around 1930-ish,
and that maybe 20 years later, his influence would start
to be perceived in the world.
And so that any building, kind of, built prior to 1950 might be similar.
But every building after that might start to see some of his influence.
[Shakman] He's sort of Steve Jobs meets Einstein.
You know, he's inventing things that are finding its way into daily life,
like robots and flying cars, but also architecture.
And so Reed Richards in print is kind of everywhere.
This is Apollo 11.
This is one of the big references.
We already talked about Space Race, that sense of JFK optimism.
And I love the idea of the Fantastic Four
in place of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin being the first to space.
And this ready room here,
which was in the basement of our production office
at Pinewood Studios... We couldn't believe it.
...was dressed to match an Apollo 11 documentary from IMAX.
That was incredible, done on the anniversary of the trip to the moon.
Want to talk about finding that?
[Farahani] Yeah. I mean, this was kind of a tone setting thing,
and we wanted this to be hyper-realistic
to try to ground it as much as possible
in the archival imagery of the Apollo 11 documentary,
and try to really recreate as much of that as possible to start the film off
in this, like, hyper-grounded archival feeling,
to then move from, hopefully, visually move from that in the design
to this, to the retro-futurism, to the Jet Age stuff.
[Shakman] And this is at Times Square that we're familiar with,
except we've brought in giant televisions, we've invented our own billboards,
created a lot of our own products,
also worked with partners to bring,
you know, Little Caesars ads from the '60s in there and other vintage commercials.
- But we built this Times Square. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] And at what scale was it of the real Times Square?
[Farahani] It was two-thirds of the original Times Square,
which, as it goes for a movie set, is pretty massive, actually.
Everything was built up to 30 feet,
in a couple of places, slightly higher than that.
So, for so much of the coverage,
hopefully, we were able to stay in camera,
but of course, in the wides, our VFX team built out the rest of the world,
and we got to see this beautiful skyline silhouette.
[Shakman] It was amazing.
You could go into every store or the hotel,
go into the sandwich shop, there were sandwiches,
and a rotating sort of, you know, automatic machine to put your money in.
Everything was done with such amazing detail.
A big part of what we wanted to do was build as much as possible
and to make things as practical as possible,
because I think that fools the eye.
It makes the audience believe the world so much more.
And so, the Times Square set was one of them, the Baxter Building.
We started the movie in Reed and Sue's bedroom,
which is a gorgeous practical set that was connected
to their living room and their kitchen.
It was a full apartment that you could walk through and connect through.
This is the Fantasti-Car.
Well, that's my daughter, Maisie Shakman, getting saved by Johnny Storm.
She loved to be on the wires that day.
The hardest part of it was getting her not to smile
as she was in mortal danger being saved.
But that was a great day.
Do you want to talk about the amazing Fantasti-Car?
[Farahani] Yeah. The Fantasti-Car was an absolute joy to work on.
It's one of those rare treats. You don't often get to design a car
and build a couple of them.
And so, you know, the Fantasti-Car is obviously a storied piece of the comics.
And so we were treading very lightly on,
you know, picking the details to try to keep,
and while we were overall moving in a somewhat different direction,
we were trying to move more literally towards a car.
But one of the kind of essential pieces of the Fantasti-Car
has always been this sort of diamond configuration of seating,
and that's something that we wanted to keep even in our version of the car.
So our version of the car is...
[Shakman] Half Detroit and half retro-future.
[Farahani] Half retro-future, yeah. We were looking a lot at these, like,
turbine-powered American concept cars,
particularly the Firebird IV was a huge inspiration.
And there's another Chrysler Turbine Car that was a big inspiration
because the turbines are really cool
because they're so overtly retro-futuristic.
That idea that turbines could power an automobile
is a super-retro-futuristic car and naively optimistic.
You can take your pick of which adjective, but super-fun.
So, we wanted, like, a really elegant, sleek, beautiful car
that also had some of the right form language
for something that is a flying vehicle
more than half of the time.
But we wanted to ground it in some iconic retro-futuristic stuff,
which is why you have, you know, the bullet heads
coming out of the centers of the turbines,
and turbines on all four corners,
and the thin venting,
all those kind of distinctly retro-futuristic details
to contrast the sleek, elegant forms.
[Shakman] And it was a real car, and every part of it worked.
You could open and close the doors and the canopy,
and it had an amazing fast engine.
It could tear through the streets.
It really was a marvelous work of engineering.
It could be done, but I'm gonna add a little more garlic.
Not because it's not delicious.
I just want to add a little bit of zip. Okay?
[Shakman] We've come into the Baxter Building
and we should probably comment here
on the interior space, which, again, keeps some of these beautiful curves
that you see in Saarinen,
that you'd see in, like, the TWA Terminal at JFK,
which is now a hotel.
And unbelievable attention was paid to palette as well,
which I want to just comment on your work
and Alex Byrne, the costume designer's work,
and Jess Hall, the cinematographer,
all working together really carefully
to kind of make a palette that spoke to each other.
What she's wearing, what the kitchen cabinets look like.
Everything is speaking to each other in an interesting way.
[Farahani] That's right. Very early on, Jess pulled
a bunch of really helpful, great references from '60s and '70s films,
The Graduate...
- [Shakman] 2001. - [Farahani] 2001, of course.
The French Connection. There were a lot of great references,
and we locked in as a group on a very large palette.
And then we systematically winnowed it down to a few dozen colors.
And that was very helpful to reach that consensus so early in the process.
[Shakman] And everything about this space, I love. It was a gorgeous, practical set.
The work of the craftsmen who built this is unbelievable,
the sunken living room that looks out over New York City on one side
and on the rocket pad on the other side.
And this kitchen, which brings to life
the things I love about the '60s,
including the house of tomorrow, the house of the future.
The idea of everything in the kitchen is the Fantasta-kitchen, right,
so, the cabinets drop down, they're automated,
things turn and twist and pop up and down.
It was just so much fun figuring out how to use all of that stuff,
including this chalkboard, which also was articulated here in Reed's lab.
Another marvelous set.
That would go up and down, and it was cantilevered
to where he could move to whatever he needed to work on.
[Farahani] Yeah, our special effects team did a greatjob
with the Fantasti-Car, of course, but also with all these little
practical actuated things like the chalkboard,
like the cake display and the kitchen.
It was great. And with the H.E.R.B.I.E.s.
[Shakman] Let's talk about H.E.R.B.I.E.
[Farahani] Yeah.
So H.E.R.B.I.E. is a wonderful, practical thing
combined with some visual effects.
And his design is really driven by
Ryan Meinerding, head of visual development at Marvel,
who is a wonderful artist and a huge Fantastic Four fan.
And he really led the charge on designing H.E.R.B.I.E.,
who's absolutely adorable and looks very much of the era.
You know, he's got these kind of computer disk eyes,
and the way he sounds is kind of a lot of that... [imitates robot whirring]
that's driven by the actual, you know, mechanics of him.
At the same time, he's got Matthew Wood, our sound supervisor,
an amazingly talented person from Skywalker
who helped create WALL-E, a lot of Star Wars droids,
and was the voice of General Grievous in The Phantom Menace,
and all those movies... Not Phantom Menace, the later Star Wars prequels.
He helped bring, the sort of, human aspect to H.E.R.B.I.E.'s voice.
But he's brought to life in part by a full animatronic
that was created by our special effects team.
That required lots of people operating different aspects of it,
controlling the arms, controlling him as he moved around the space,
his eyes, his head, you know, turning, nodding, twisting.
And then he was also a puppet that was puppeteered by
a wonderful guy named Jack Parker, who was an actor.
He helped stage the scenes.
He was heavily involved in
where H.E.R.B.I.E. would be, what his attitude was.
The actors could act off of him in a way just like they would another actor.
And H.E.R.B.I.E. is, you know, he's happy,
he's joyful, he's put upon, he's exhausted, he's annoyed.
He's got all those great characteristics of any actor, and so, he would run
this puppet through the scene and we would paint him out around
and add some arms or do some extra stuff to bring him to life.
So H.E.R.B.I.E. is very much that performance from Jack.
We had other puppeteers who worked on our second unit as well,
who did similar things bringing H.E.R.B.I.E. to life.
- Have you listened to it yet? - More of the same. It's a complex...
[Shakman] You want to talk about this set with its three circles?
[Farahani chuckles] Yeah, so this is Reed's lab.
As you can see, it's got this sort of like,
coffered textured ceiling.
The idea for this was that it was supposed to be a bit of a fortified
kind of, bunker-like environment, so that,
you know, when Reed is doing all kinds of cutting-edge,
at times dangerous experiments like the one we're about to witness here,
that he in his architecture... In the architectural design of this space,
he anticipated the need for a fortification
to protect the rest of the building and the city
from what might happen in this room
as he's finding the cutting-edge of technology.
[Shakman] But what I also love is that it looks like a cathedral, right?
It has that kind of, like, knowledge, and you know, it's beautiful.
[Farahani] That's cool. That's cool. Thank you.
And you can also definitely see the influence from 2001,
in terms of our palette.
And what we were doing here, though,
is that there's meaning behind the color.
The red area is the sort of workstation area where electronics are done,
robotics are done, chemistry work.
Basically where anything that's dirty, where he gets his hands dirty
and he's using the physical world
to solve problems, that happens in the red area.
The yellow area is a kind of contemplative,
and the space for discussion.
There's chalkboards, there's some, you know,
whatever relevant references he's looking at, at the time.
Then there's a lot of seating for the rest of the Fantastic Four
to join him and discuss and have meetings.
And then, finally, there's the blue area, which is the sort of computing area.
Everything from, you know, monitoring the skies
to communication...
- [Shakman] Mission control. - [Farahani] Mission control, absolutely.
Heavily involved in the functions of the Excelsior rocket.
All of that stuff happens in the blue area.
[Shakman] It's worth saying, though, like, this MRI machine
with this curved screen here.
The earlier cereal box we saw
on the table with Johnny Storm on the back,
every tiny little gadget and gizmo had to be designed.
Everything in this movie had to be designed.
Kasra was overseeing an enormous team of people,
including Ty as prop master...
[Farahani] Ty, brilliant set decorator.
[Shakman] Incredible group of people who were manufacturing so much of this.
You can'tjust rent this stuff. We had to make it all.
And it all had to be part of a cohesive design language.
So we felt like we were in a world that Reed Richards designed a lot of things in,
and, you know, the curves, the way the curved screens
speak to the curved architecture,
speaks to the curves of the Fantasti-Car, the Excelsior.
Everything has sort of a coherence in terms of design language.
And we should also probably say this movie is about family.
And here we are in a beautiful scene where we get to see
Sue using her powers of invisibility
to show Franklin to Reed for the first time,
to literally make him speechless,
and we started the movie with a domestic scene of them in their bedroom.
In their bathroom, we meet Sue Storm on the toilet, doing a pregnancy test.
I wanted this movie to feel like a real family,
to come at it in a really unorthodox way.
That you meet them as real people first,
because that's what I love about the Fantastic Four. They are real people.
They are family first, they are scientists, explorers second,
and superheroes only when they have to be,
when their world is threatened, when their family is threatened.
They're real people. Like here's Ben on Yancy Street,
based on, you know, Delancey Street in New York, Lower East Side,
where Jack Kirby, you know, grew up and spent a lot of time.
And here's Ben, who's, you know, kind of a local hero to these kiddos.
And this is a backlot at Pinewood,
a gorgeous set built by Kasra. You want to talk about this?
[Farahani] Sure. Thank you. Yeah, the art department, set deck department,
amazing construction department did a fantastic job
building a second New York backlot set.
And like Matt pointed out, this is very much inspired
by the Lower East Side, which is very distinct, visually,
from Times Square and Midtown.
You know, so here, in a way,
you can look around, the palette is warm, very Hopper-like,
as opposed to the kind of futuristic cool blues and grays
that you see in Times Square.
Also, you know, there's not a ton of retro-futurism here.
Here, it's like a sleepier part of the city that hasn't...
Hasn't yet been descended upon in terms of some of that tech.
You look over the tops of the buildings, and there are moments where you see
the retro-futurism, other places in lower Manhattan poking out.
But we wanted this to feel like this kind of cozy and timeless,
warm, very neighborhood-y place where everybody knows your name,
and where Ben has always been
a central figure to the culture of the place.
[Shakman] And it doesn't change. He says that in a scene.
"That's part of its charm."
There's so much rapid change,
there's something nice about Yancy Street being the same.
It's got Maisie's Cookies there, named after my daughter, Maisie Shakman.
- I'm a shameless dad. - [Farahani laughs]
But it was a beautiful set, and it's a place where
different cultures come together, which is great,
including there's the synagogue. Ben is Jewish in the comics.
So was Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, and we were trying to honor that.
As well as all of the other cultures
that you see colliding on that Lower East Side.
Immigrant cultures kind of coming together, which is really beautiful.
Here's the Fantasta-kitchen doing its thing.
Reluctantly going down.
Included two extras, I don't know why.
[Shakman] And just to talk about costuming.
We wanted them to feel like real people. They wear those tech suits.
We call them tech suits, not superhero suits. Incredibly well-made.
They honor the comic books, beautifully R&D'd by Alex Byrne.
And they're difficult to make, and, you know, to be believable
that each one of them with their different power sets
could use these suits to support their powers.
But when they're at home and they're not doing anything super,
they're dressed like everybody else, dressed like everybody from the '60s here
to feel as grounded as possible,
'cause we want to believe them as a real family.
[Farahani] And so elegantly, all of this stuff,
all of Alex's work in this is so restrained and beautiful
and sets the period so well.
And, I mean, the tech suits in particular,
I think that's such a tricky thing to do,
to have as much subtlety as she achieved in those tech suits.
And yet they feel every bit as fantastic as they need to,
and at once super-elegant and fashionable
in a way, you know, like, really beautiful.
[Shakman] She's remarkable. She's equally at home in prestige drama.
She's won an Oscar for doing Elizabeth: The Golden Age,
been nominated countless times for the most amazing, sort of,
period classical stuff that you would expect.
And then she's also done Avengers and Thor,
and, you know, all of these amazing, Doctor Strange, Marvel stuff.
So she understands the superhero world,
she understands big scope film, and she also understands period.
And this kind of artistic integrity she brings to everything she does.
She was the perfect person for this film
because she brings all these skills together,
and kind of, I think this movie is a great showcase for her range,
as the same with you and same with Jess,
and all the amazing people who built this world.
Here's Julia Garner, the Silver Surfer, Shalla-Bal.
She... This was her first day filming with us.
She showed up, I put her in a mocap suit,
- put her 30 feet up on a scissor lift... - [Farahani chuckles]
...in Kasra's amazing, hyper-realistic Times Square set
with 500 period background artists dressed in their best period clothes,
the Fantasti-Car there, all four of our actors,
put a mic on her and a giant speaker and said,
"Tell everybody they're gonna die."
And Julia Garner, who is fearless and is absolutely amazing,
was like, "You got it," and went up there and terrified us all.
What I think is so beautiful about this performance
is you can see that she carries a burden.
You know, every planet she comes and tells that their time is up,
she feels it, which is something we obviously exploit
in the narrative of the film, the Fantastic Four exploit in terms
of trying to get her to their side.
She feels the weight of her job.
It's a tough job. Galactus, tough boss.
- Toxic relationship, I think. - [Farahani] Yeah.
You're absolutely right. You can see that in her face,
and the reluctance, the resignation, the regret of it all.
It's really powerful.
[Shakman] I mean, we're talking about Scott Stokdyk and Lisa Marra.
Our VFX team. Scott was our supervisor. Lisa was our producer.
And their amazing work, and all the vendors that worked under them,
in this case, this is SPI, Sony Pictures Imageworks,
doing this Surfer here.
But there's many different vendors. ILM and Digital Domain.
Amazing, amazing VFX houses working on this film.
But we knew that the movie wouldn't work if we didn't have
a Ben Grimm, a Thing that was believable and real
and just as real as everybody else in the film.
We knew it wouldn't work if we didn't have a Surfer
who couldn't be expressing the emotion
that we needed her to express and go on a journey in an arc.
And the secret of both of this is that they're driven
by two amazing actors
in Julia Garner and Ebon Moss-Bachrach.
But it's up to these amazing VFX vendors
to make sure they're capturing that performance,
making sure that performance is being translated through rock,
you know, to be brought to life really realistically.
And I think you can see it. I mean, The Thing is a miracle.
Throughout this film, it has Ebon's sense of humor,
it has his gruffness, his heart of gold,
his, you know, very unique sort of way of approaching,
you know, this character, which was so beautiful
and absolutely perfect for it, is there in this performance.
And in order to bring it to life, we used a lot of different methods.
Alex and her team built costumes at scale.
Barrie Gower, this amazing prosthetics artist
I've worked with since Game of Thrones.
He built a full Ben suit with a foam latex head and articulated hands.
Amazing. And we put the clothes on that stand-in Ben,
who had an actor inside, Richard Summers-Calvert,
who watched all the blocking, knew what was happening
and we would film him in the scene.
We even used him in the wide shots,
but for the most part, it was a reference,
because when you're doing anything with VFX,
if you have something real to look at and say, "This is what it looks like."
"This is what light looked like reflecting off
"of Ben's head in this moment,"
it helps the artists to know what real is, and then they can make it look real.
Because when you make things up completely in VFX,
you spend a ton of times debating, like, what's real?
Would it look real if there were birds? How do I make it more real?
- You know, add a flair. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] But what this did is, it gave us a real one-to-one
for what something real looked like, what Ben looked like.
And we also went out to the desert and found a rock,
which we called Jenny from the Rock.
Which we thought, this is what Ben's skin should look like.
And we're going to film this rock in every lighting environment.
And it really matters.
I'm notjust saying just filming this rock in this lab.
I mean filming the rock in this section in the middle,
because the lighting of that is very different from the blue
and the red,
how the bounce of the lights, the color, they all change dramatically
in terms of their color, space and how they look within the room.
So you have to be, you know, continually sort of diligent about
trying to capture as much information as possible to make it look real.
- And we did the same-- - [Farahani] I think it paid off.
I mean, hugely, because I think while it's absolutely true
that they did an incredible job translating faithfully Ebon's performance,
and that you can see this and you can see the performance.
I remember it from, you know, standing there on set,
and yet, they've also, because of all of this rigorous methodology
that you've just described, they have...
Scott and his team have achieved, what I think, nobody has done so far,
which is to absolutely capture the spirit of Ben Grimm from the comics.
You know, the silhouette, the way he occupies the space.
His body language feels so faithful to what we've seen in the comics
in a way that I don't think anything else has even come close to this.
[Shakman] It's true. And Ben has been drawn
in a lot of different ways, different sizes,
but what I've always loved about the Kirby Ben is that
he's the same height as Ben Grimm was before he went up to space.
He's the height of Ebon, which is around 6'1".
I think he looks eye-to-eye with everybody else.
He's not the Incredible Hulk.
He's a person, you know, with deep humanity,
an incredibly gruff exterior, but probably the warmest,
gooiest inside of all of them, you know?
And he was brought beautifully to life.
We should talk about the fact that we just saw the Excelsior on its launch pad.
They're getting ready to go to space, building towards our Apollo 11 launch,
and in this interest of doing everything practically, we built a miniature.
- I didn't do it. Neither did Kasra. - [Farahani] No.
[Shakman] But Ian, an amazing miniature model maker,
has worked a lot with Chris Nolan,
did Interstellar and other films with him,
and is just a legend, built this incredible...
I think it was a 14-foot tall Excelsior miniature,
because, again, we talked a lot about 2001.
We talked about these great movies from the '60s
that were using practical effects,
and we wanted to do that as much as possible.
We talked about the esthetic of the movie being where Kirby meets Kubrick.
And how would Stanley Kubrick have done it?
He would have built a miniature, and so we wanted to do that, too.
Like a rock from the desert, if you have a miniature in a lighting environment,
you know exactly what that spaceship should look like. That helped us.
There are a bunch of shots of the actual miniature in the movie,
but the ones where we had to use full CG,
we always had the miniature as a backup, a reference
to know what we were talking about.
This is one of my favorite moments, Ben seeing himself in human form
and then the TV turning off and seeing The Thing in reflection
and feeling that humanity and the weight of it.
And we understand this is a private moment for him and the burden he carries.
He's the one member of the Four
who can't turn off his power, can't make himself human.
And, you know, he loses his confidence
and doesn't go talk to Natasha Lyonne's Rachel, and walks away.
But then he comes here and he puts on a brave face for Reed, right?
And Reed's basically feeling guilty about,
well, the last time they went to space
and what happened and the accident and how it's all his fault.
A classic Reed Richards thing.
He feels tremendous guilt for what happened to everybody,
and Ben says, "Don't worry about it. It's fine.
"Stop worrying about it. You're not that smart."
And then we get to see them goofing around the way,
you know, best friends, people who've known each other a long time.
That's one of the things I wanted to try to get, was this sense of history,
and you want the characters to feel lived-in.
You want the world to feel lived-in.
Even though you're building this incredibly beautiful Times Square set,
- it needs to feel like it's New York City. - [Farahani] That's right.
[Shakman] That there's gum, and trash, there's all this kind of stuff.
And so, wherever we could make it feel real...
Let's talk... There was a glimpse of it for a second there.
But that was Calatrava.
[Farahani] Calatrava's beautiful building in Oviedo, Spain,
that we were lucky enough to have the privilege of filming in.
Our locations team did a greatjob finding
what was not easy to find, which was a lobby space,
and a kind of assembly hall space location
that matched the aesthetic of the Baxter apartment
and the Baxter Building exterior and Reed's lab
that we designed these, like,
these dynamic spaces based on parabolic curves
that you see throughout the film,
whether you're looking at the Excelsior rocket
or the Fantasti-Car, or these blast shields coming up from the sea,
you constantly are seeing these conic sections,
these curves of parabolas
all over the place.
So it made it impossible to find a location...
[Shakman] In London.
[Farahani] In London, that would work for a lobby.
We talked about shooting at the TWA Terminal in New York.
It didn't end up being practical for us.
And then we found this amazing building in Spain.
[Shakman] Which you're going to see when Reed's doing his speech,
in all of its glory.
Yeah, he's doing it here on stage, and when we cut wide here,
you'll see this is an actual space in Spain.
No VFX here except some crowd replication because we didn't have
2,000 background artists, unfortunately, in Spain.
But it's gorgeous, and it also served as our Baxter lobby,
which we see as well in the movie.
And then let's talk about the Excelsior interior,
which I think is, you know, maybe my personal favorite set.
I mean, this thing is so gorgeous from just form standpoint,
but also function.
Like, it has...
The detail is very Apollo 11 meets 2001.
Kasra and his team had thought through every button.
There was someone on set who'd be like, "Press this button, this will happen."
Which is wonderful as a filmmaker and as for the actors, too, to be like,
"Okay, this is how we dock with, you know, the faster-than-light engine.
"This is how we launch." We'll get back to it in a second.
But this is all, you know, based off of Apollo 11
documentary photography, really.
Like, you know, all of these things are drawn
from the space program in the '60s.
It's amazing how the decade was defined by this, you know,
looking to the future, looking to space,
looking to the unknown and feeling like
the right technology, right heart, right mind would get you there.
It's that JFK stuff of like, "By the end of this decade,
"we're going to put a person on the moon."
That is informing everything.
I have this beautiful Taschen book of advertisements, decade by decade.
In the '60s one, when you flip through it, it's all rockets...
- [Farahani] Yeah. - [Shakman]...and, you know,
- models wearing space helmets. - Right.
And it's just a part of everything.
- Every kid's toy is a rocket, you know? - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] And the idea of, you know,
of the family there, of the little girl
sitting on her dad's shoulder looking and dreaming of space,
really was what was fueling this whole section of the movie.
[Farahani] And also, I feel like that was such a big inspiration for the way
the whole world looked, in that, like,
it felt like we were trying to take the world that was promised
and all those advertisements that you just described,
but in this world, they weren't just pie in the sky.
All of it came to pass, and it didn't come to pass in decades,
you know, in the distant future, it came to pass right then,
at the time that they imagined it.
- Or, you know... - [Shakman] Yep.
[Farahani] That is the kind of secret sauce
of our retro-futurism in so many ways, that all those promises were real.
We are... locked.
And clear for...
[Shakman] The shot of the Excelsior heading towards
this faster-than-light engine, the FTL,
is right out of the little Pan Am jet flying towards the space station,
by, you know... Intentionally.
And then also, you know, borrowing a little bit from Christopher Nolan
and, you know, sort of how he mounts cameras in Interstellar
with the airjets coming off the side.
You know, there were so many different inspirations.
We looked at Apollo 13, at The Right Stuff.
We looked at every great movie about space,
- every documentary about space. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] But one of the things here
is we are in zero-gravity in the Excelsior,
is that I really wanted it to be a zero-G environment
when they are in space. I love Marvel,
I love Marvel space movies like Guardians of the Galaxy. I love Star Trek.
- But they're just walking around. - [Farahani] Yeah.
But in order for this to feel like the '60s and Space Race and Apollo 11,
I needed them to be floating. I wanted to feel like space was dangerous.
Space was difficult, that all of these things weren't easy.
And then having zero-G allowed us, you know, as we head into this sequence,
to do some pretty amazing things that we otherwise wouldn't have.
Which we'll get to, of course, in a little bit.
But do you want to talk about Excelsior design?
[Farahani] Yeah, absolutely. So, the design of the Excelsior
was interesting because there's basically three kind of major functional jobs
that the ship had to do.
Number one, it had to have the kind of vernacular of a shuttle,
which is very aircraft-like, very plane-like,
in terms of what the workstation of the cockpit feels like,
and the design of the exterior
with the rockets attached at the end of each fin.
Because it has to, basically, serve the purpose of getting out of gravity.
So you see that in terms of what the cockpit looks like.
The second function is the function of a zero-G environment,
which is more of a workstation where there's padded surfaces,
and workstations upside-down and all this,
which is different than what a plane is like.
And so, we had to kind of merge those two aesthetics for the interior.
And then the third kind of job the ship had was this faster-than-light travel,
which is how we kind of arrived at
this idea of an exterior faster-than-light engine
that it could dock into and use as needed,
and that this engine. would stay in space,
perhaps even be used as a space station when not being used as an engine.
It's all gone, the whole planet.
And it was 13% larger than Earth.
[rumbling]
[Shakman] We've just seen Galactus' worldship make its introduction.
And, you know, "How do you eat a planet," was something I thought a lot about,
because he ranges in size in the comics
from being just 20 feet tall, to being 1,000 feet tall, sometimes bigger.
And so, I wanted to think about it
as realistically as possible, as scientifically as possible.
So we talked to scientists.
We talked to Dr. Clifford Johnson, who was our advisor
throughout this whole process.
And was like, "What kind of planets would you want to eat?
"Why eat planets with life on them?"
He's like, "You would need carbon. That would be the fuel."
It would make sense you'd eat planets with life on them.
And then we thought about, "Well, his ship should be like a big factory."
You know, it's the idea that he's going to consume an entire planet,
but he's still somewhat of a humanoid shaped kind of character, right?
He has to process that somehow.
So that's how we came up with this idea of this giant drill
that essentially goes through a planet, and as it's drilling through,
it's sucking everything in through the front and the back.
And then it enters inside...
You know, when we go inside, we see how all this material has been sucked in,
and it's part of a big assembly line.
It's being, you know, ground up by big giant grinders.
It's being sent through purification.
It's being burned by these enormous giant furnaces,
and eventually, it's being purified into this kind of magma blood,
- this lava that's... - [Farahani] Pure energy.
[Shakman] Pure energy that's being pumped into the very center of the ship
through big tubes right into the back of Galactus.
So when we meet him, we see that he's this cosmic space vampire
hooked up to his blood supply,
and that this entire ship exists to create
this blood for him to survive off of.
[Farahani] Yeah, the interior of the worldship
was our moment to create the cathedral to Kirby, also.
To, like, really celebrate these kind of distinctive
geometric shapes and motifs
- that you see right there, for instance. - [Shakman] Right there. Yeah.
[Farahani] In so much of Kirby's work.
You know, it was a challenge to translate
his beautiful, very high contrast style, which is so often just white and black,
into a fully photographic environment, and still keep the spirit of it.
That was the goal here. Absolutely.
Here are those furnaces you were talking about, Matt,
where the raw materials, the good stuff
is burned and purified into that energy.
[Shakman] We spent a lot of time thinking about scale, right?
Because this is an enormous ship
which has the largest thing in the universe inside of it,
constantly trying to think about how do we make
this space feel believably large.
And when you watch Star Wars, and the ship flies over the top,
you understand its scale because you see the doors,
the little windows, and they're human-sized.
- But this is a Galactus ship. - Yeah.
Everything is Galactus-sized.
So until you get a tiny Surfer,
a tiny Fantastic Four character walking along,
it's only then that you realize the scope and the scale of it.
But we also realized that it was going to be impossibly large.
We talked about going to factories, about, "Where could we go
"that's enormous in the world that would reflect this?"
And the fact is, there just isn't anything big enough.
So we built huge sections
- that still are really very, very small... - [Farahani] Tiny.
[Shakman]...relative to what the worldship would be built,
the stair-type vent that goes up into his chamber here.
We built sections of what you kind of called a worm...
That was a series of twisty, turned tubes that they would walk along.
And depending on lighting and how we framed it,
it could be used for different environments.
[Farahani] Yeah, that's right. It's the scale of a landscape.
- [Shakman] Right. - [Farahani] It's like trying to make--
Trying to make an interior, a mechanical interior
with the scale of Yosemite Valley or something like that.
[Shakman] Here's Galactus in all of his Jack Kirby glory
by way of Ryan Meinerding designing our take on this.
Ryan really led the charge on this.
I love that he feels enormous, but, like, stars.
There's all these lights in his suit.
He feels like a star field.
- There's so much texture. - [Farahani] Just ancient.
[Shakman] He feels ancient. He's 14 billion years old.
A scientist from another universe who tried to escape
the end of his universe and managed to do so.
And he was reborn into our universe during the Big Bang,
into this universe, 828, as Galactus.
He was transformed into Galactus, whose purpose is to consume planets.
He's neither good nor bad in a way, right?
- He's inevitable, like Thanos. - [Farahani] Right.
[Shakman] He's this cosmic force that moves through the universe
and probably does some good.
In the comics, it's great.
- He's a gardener in a way, right? - [Farahani] Right.
[Shakman] He eats these planets, which allows for new things to grow,
and for the universe to expand.
- So, arguably he's helpful. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] In some comics, it's great.
Reed even argues not to kill Galactus because he thinks he's necessary.
[Farahani] None of it's personal for Galactus.
[Shakman] It's not personal.
- They're ants. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] He just goes, and he keeps swimming like a shark through the cosmos.
At the same time, if it's your planet, then he's a bad guy.
- [Farahani] It feels pretty personal. - It feels very personal.
[Shakman] And so, just designing this was a great joy.
But then it's Ralph Ineson, who's the actor who is playing Galactus,
who brings him to life.
Just like Ebon and Julia are bringing Ben Grimm and the Surfer to life.
We had Ralph on set here.
He's wearing an actual suit,
a gorgeous suit built by Alex Byrne and her team,
that had so much detail in it, and it weighed a ton,
and it was uncomfortable, and Ralph never complained
because he is just an amazing veteran.
But it was wonderful. He sat in a big throne that you built.
And we filmed him the way you film a miniature, right?
You have a 14-foot-tall rocket,
but you want to make it feel like it's 1,000 feet long.
You have to flood it with light, you have to consider the lensing of it.
You have to film it the same way you would...
You would film a miniature rocket to make it feel large.
So we filmed the human to make him feel like Mount Rushmore.
And so there would be no focal fall off. Everything's in focus on Galactus.
And there's a ton of real photography that's driving these images.
But then SPI, Sony Pictures Imageworks, is working over the top of that
to help integrate it, to make it feel old and enormous.
[Farahani] It's very effective. Very effective.
[Shakman] Good combination of different approaches.
We should talk about these space suits,
which I absolutely adore, which are retro-future.
Earlier, we saw them in their first set of space suits,
which were much more Apollo 11, but with Fantastic Four covers.
But now we've moved more into a Kubrick territory,
in terms of retro-future quality with this great backpack,
which reminds me of a super-cool Dyson vacuum from the era,
which is incredibly cool.
These helmets, which have really beautiful lines.
- [Farahani] So great. - [Shakman] And are very much unique,
but do nod towards 2001
and some of the other great space helmet designs of the '60s.
- And each of them is slightly different. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] There's a red stripe down Johnny's to... nod to his hot rod.
And Ben has... Everyone has slight differences.
And one thing about Ben's helmet is that because he's a rock,
he doesn't have to worry about the same things they worry about.
He just needs oxygen, needs to protect his eyes.
That's why his helmet doesn't fully enclose him.
[Farahani] Yeah.
[screaming]
[Farahani] There's so much to talk about here.
[Shakman] Zero-G coming back as they burst out of the...
We imagined the Galactus ship was so large that it had its own gravity.
Maybe like the moon, slightly less than Earth gravity.
But still they were in there...
It was toxic, so they're wearing their helmets.
There's probably limited oxygen.
But now, they're back out into the vacuum of space.
So this sequence was shot with a lot of actors on wires.
They were amazing.
So difficult to act on wires, very uncomfortable.
Even in something that's incredibly well-designed,
it's putting a lot of strain on your back.
It requires strong core muscles.
The actors took training with Rowley Irlam, our stunt coordinator.
And the set had to be designed to have lots of tracks and ways to open up
so that we could put these lines in and choreograph all of this action
to get as much of it in camera as possible.
Every now and then, Framestore, our vendor here,
amazing vendor, took over,
and would do part of the body in CG or anything.
Like here, there's Reed stretching out and grabbing Sue.
We did film a version of that, but we enhanced it using CG
to help the zero-G of it all.
[Farahani] What does a wormhole look like?
[Shakman] Again, Dr. Clifford Johnson working with us, working with Framestore,
working with Scott, our VFX supervisor.
This is where we came up with something that felt like
the mix of real science meets Space Mountain,
which was what I wanted.
I wanted this to feel very much like '60s space Disney at its best.
Even in the sound design, that synth sound that's coming into...
The Moog sounds, synth sounds that are coming into...
Into play in the '60s. The '50s, '60s.
And amazing score.
As we talk, we're not listening to Michael Giacchino's amazing score.
But when he came up with our theme, he said it was a combination
of The Right Stuff and the Disney Electrical Parade,
which I absolutely adore because it's the perfect thing.
And that's very much the spirit of how Skywalker
was approaching the sound design as well of space here.
And then we imagined...
They have these blasters,
but they're more like a particle accelerator.
And so the back of the ship is like a giant collider,
like you would have in physics.
[Farahani] That ring you see when you look up from below,
you see that collider where that energy is.
This was a great idea of Scott's, where that energy just spits around...
Spins around there and powers this cannon.
[Shakman] So it feels everything is scientific in a way.
The Fantastic Four are not your classic superheroes
that are getting into fist fights all the time
and pulling out guns or blasters.
But we needed them to have that ability,
and they knew they needed to have that ability.
But what's the most scientifically interesting way to have a blaster?
We were like, "It's a collider."
They're sending sort of pure, accelerated electron energy out at the Surfer.
- And then here she is surfing. - [Farahani] So cool.
[Shakman] It's essential to me that the Silver Surfer surfed.
And so we gave her a chance to surf on lava in the ship.
Surfing in a wormhole, what's that look like?
And now she's literally surfing the accretion disk of a neutron star,
which I think was really fun.
We had a couple of amazing professional female surfers come in and help us.
Work with Julia and help us with how a real surfer would move on a board
to make sure that the physical language was accurate to surfing,
even though the environment is something no one has ever surfed before.
But here she is.
And so, this is an amazing sequence,
where they're heading into the center of a neutron star,
which is essentially a black hole,
and they're trying to trap her into going into
the gravity well of this neutron star, where time will dilate,
and everything for her will go much more slowly.
And also will just be exerting so much force on her
that it will trap her in there.
And this is a Reed Richards way
of getting out of what seems like an impossible situation.
You've got your wife in labor, you're being pursued by a super-powered
- cosmic entity you've never seen before. - [Farahani] Stress bomb.
[Shakman] It's a lot of stress.
How do you get away with it?
And luckily, your wife, who happens to be in labor,
also happens to be able to be
- a master of invisibility. - [Farahani] Cloaking.
[Shakman] And so Sue was able to cloak the ship, and they escape.
We don't see them doing it, but they do.
And the Surfer doesn't because of all of the particle dust in the air.
And she follows the bait right into the center of the neutron star.
And then the ship appears and flies off.
This was a fun mix of miniature and visual effects design,
Kasra's amazing set.
The stunt coordinator, Rowley, doing so much amazing work with these actors.
These brave actors on wires.
But this was one of the things that was super-important to me in this movie,
this moment, this birth.
I think Kasra's a dad, became one during the--
[Farahani] For the second time, yeah.
[Shakman] Second time during this movie.
The birth of my daughter remains the most fantastic moment of my life.
The journey into the fantastic is really part of what these stories are,
whether it's going into the Negative Zone in the comics,
or going into space, or going into a neutron star.
But the biggest mystery of all, I think, is the birth of a baby, right?
And this mysterious future of being transformed...
- [Farahani] Magic trick. - [Shakman]...into a parent.
Yes, in a moment.
We thought, "What's the most high stakes place to have a baby?"
In zero-gravity while rotating around a neutron star.
- [Farahani] And being pursued by-- - While being pursued by a Silver Surfer
who is like out of a Grimm's fairy tale.
I think when I came up with the idea of her reaching in
because I knew she could have the phase ability,
to reach into the womb and try to pull the baby out...
- [Farahani] Terrifying. - [Shakman]...was when I was like,
"Ooh, that's terrifying. Let's do it."
That remains one of my favorite moments.
But it is a little bit like a Grimm's fairy tale,
something is always coming for a child in one of those.
And in this case, you have the largest, oldest,
biggest thing in the universe that, inexplicably to them,
wants the smallest, newest thing.
[Farahani] And the most precious thing to them.
[Shakman] Exactly. And so now, not only do they have to protect their world,
they have to protect their child.
This offer Galactus has made to spare the planet if they give him the child
is one of these impossible Sophie's choice moments,
where, how can you choose between your planet and your child?
As a parent, you know you can never give up your child.
It feels like an impossible choice
between two things that they can't allow to happen.
But this birth, an amazing performance from all of them.
But Vanessa Kirby, who just absolutely gave it her all here.
I love this notion that she...
Staying visible is probably an effort for her.
[Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] Invisibility is probably more natural.
And in this moment of exertion, I know being there with my wife,
and it's such a miracle and such a physical burden.
But the idea that she loses visibility in this moment of birth.
Spoilers. If you're watching this, you will have seen the whole movie
at this point, I don't know.
At the end, when she's at her moment of death,
she's going in and out of visibility as well.
These moments of birth and death are interconnected, are very, very close.
We had a real baby here on the day.
And this is a mix of some CG and a real baby
to bring this birth to life.
There was a shot I absolutely love that we had in for a long time,
which was that Ben reaches out. You can see that he almost does it.
The way we cut it out, you de-emphasize it.
But Ben floats Franklin across the gap between him and Reed,
and then Reed stretches out and receives him.
As Franklin crosses the middle of the big window,
they exit hyperspace.
Boom, there's the Earth right there,
and Franklin is framed against the edge of the planet.
It's a direct homage to 2001 and Kubrick and the space baby.
It was one of those things where you're like,
"This is the most important shot in the movie."
And you execute it, and you think it's beautiful.
You show it to people, and they start to giggle
because it seems silly that you would float
a newborn baby across a space.
And I was like, "Okay."
It's the lesson of filmmaking, where you're like,
"You have to kill your babies." Not the real one.
You have to cut the thing you never thought you'd cut.
The most important shot becomes the shot you need to lose.
And it was the right decision
because it took people out of the moment, of the emotionality, this birth.
That birth used to be in different places.
The movie used to open with the birth of the baby
in the opening action sequence.
And as we kind of played around with how the story could work,
it landed at the midpoint of the movie.
Right after Galactus had dropped this Grimm's fairy tale deal.
I think it's right. I'm happy it ended up where it did.
The drama of the moment.
We ended up doing something in filmmaking, which...
Which is happy accidents, where you're like,
"We developed this neutron star set piece,
"and we developed this birth set piece in zero-G at the opening of the movie,
"when they'd save a space station" was the original idea.
We were like, "I could put those together."
Now you can have a birth in the middle of this neutron star thing.
[Farahani] Level up. Yeah.
[Shakman] You can level up by combining ideas.
They're ready for you. Step up.
[Shakman] This is the lobby of the Calatrava building in Oviedo, Spain,
which, again, it was remarkable to find this building that felt like...
I know Calatrava designed it,
but it felt like you designed it because it fits the movie perfectly.
[Farahani] It was an unbelievable score to find this building.
And for Tim Lewis and our amazing producing team to figure out a way
that we could get there and shoot this.
It really makes it...
These are critical scenes. This scene in particular.
So many critical scenes we were able to capture.
And it's also just so important.
Matt, you were talking about this from the very start
that you have to get into real locations.
It just does something critically important for the scope
and believability of the world, and thereby, to a degree, the film,
if you can offset all these curated environments
by adding in real places that have a scale and a materiality
and a patina that you can only achieve by a space
that's been used by big numbers of people for long periods of time.
[Shakman] Yeah.
[Farahani] And this space absolutely provided
- that anchor of realism to so much of it. - [Shakman] Yeah.
If you have a real foreground, a real mid-ground,
you can put anything you want.
You can put a giant Galactus beyond that.
You can have a rock man walking around
in a super-realistic apartment set or a realistic Baxter lobby.
Again, the more you have that's real,
the more your mind will be tricked for the things that aren't.
- And you did build this whole back wall... - [Farahani] We did.
[Shakman]...which is in the middle of their lobby, to create this connection.
[Farahani] Yes. There were things we had to do
to synchronize it with the design of our building and of the Baxter apartment.
Materials we had to bring in, some specific details.
[Shakman] One of the things I loved about that interior is
you built this giant model of the Baxter Building,
which was a cross-section you could see through.
And each floor was labeled, which is a classic nod to Fantastic Four comics,
and one of the things I've loved decade by decade.
It started with Kirby, where they'd do a doodle
of the Baxter Building in a schematic and tell you where things were.
[Farahani] Got a view of the building.
[Shakman] Where the labs were, the rockets,
- where everything was kept. - [Farahani] Gym, the screening room,
the radar array, all that stuff, yeah.
[Shakman] And every generation of Fantastic Four artists
has done their version of that.
And so we did that in model form in that lobby, which is great.
We can't blast it. Conventional weapons won't work.
- So we run. - We run?
[Shakman] We should talk about babies.
We used multiple babies in the making of the film
because you have to, because when you have very young babies,
they only can be on set for a few hours at a time.
And sometimes babies are not in the mood to be in filmmaking,
which I understand.
I'm often not in the mood, too, but I can't go home.
I have to keep doing it. The babies get a break when they need to.
So we knew we wanted the baby to have one hero baby look,
and that we would need to use every trick in the filmmaking book
to bring that about
because we wouldn't have that baby available to us
for the amount of time that we would need to film everything.
So this is Ada in here.
That's Pedro. But that's Ada there in the hands of Ben Grimm.
And she was the hero Franklin.
And she has wonderful expressiveness.
Her eyes are just so alive.
There are many scenes in this movie that Ada completely steals.
[Farahani] Adorable.
[Shakman] She just seems very much like the progeny
of the most brilliant man in the world,
and probably the most brilliant woman, too.
We needed that. We needed that intelligence
and that incredible sense of being alive, which she brought.
But it meant that, for instance, this stuff we shot her
and needed to comp her in to lots of different takes.
So, we did this thing.
She really was carried out of the space, and we had her in this environment.
But then we needed to add her to Ben Grimm
and combine her with different takes throughout.
And then every now and then, we didn't have her,
but we had a CG version of her.
And we could take the baby that we had filmed with.
And because we had scanned Ada extensively and had a CG model of her,
we could then transform the other baby to look like Ada,
and that worked well for wide and medium shots.
We knew for every close-up,
we would need to have an actual close-up of Ada.
So oftentimes, we would go back with second unit,
and film Ada in all of the same lighting environments multiple times
to make sure we had enough information so we could add her.
So sometimes her photography is actually done weeks after the scene,
and we add her in to try to make it persuasive.
But making a CG baby was one of the big challenges of this film,
and I think they did a greatjob.
- [Farahani] Absolutely. - [Shakman] It's a tough one to pull off.
[Farahani] The sheer number of titanic VFX feats
that Scott and his team and Lisa had to pull off
between Ben and Johnny and the stretching
and the baby and Galactus and the interior of the worldship,
it's incredible.
Each one of them is a staggering feat.
And to do all of them, and they did them so well.
[Shakman] The workload on this movie is incredible,
because we were building a period world, a retro-future period world
as well as these CG characters, and like you said, all these powers,
there's not a shot in the movie that doesn't have a VFX in it somehow.
There might be 100 of them out of 3,000 or 2,500,
or however many shots there are,
but a tremendous number of visual effects in it.
A staggering job that they did.
[reporter 1] Financial institutions remain closed as angry protesters take--
[reporter 2] The newly-formed Galactus...
[Shakman] All this stuff had to be shot.
We had to create the Galactus cult
going up to meet their new leader at the top of Mount Everest.
This is an alleyway. Practical location
- in East London. - [Farahani] Yeah, practical location.
- Not far from-- - [Farahani] Beautifully lit by...
- [Shakman] By Jess Hall. - [Farahani] By the team. Yeah.
That's an amazing shot. So many.
[Shakman] And that was close to a synagogue location
that we used in East London as well.
- That was a fun day out there. - [Farahani] Yeah.
But they choose not to...
[Shakman] And I talk about Stephen Woolfenden,
who was our second unit director, who was incredible
and a real storyteller,
who had worked on all the Harry Potter films,
and just brilliant at doing anything really,
whether it's shooting baby stuff and getting magical stuff with Ada,
or whether it's shooting those two pundits talking in a perfect period way about,
should the Fantastic Four give up their baby.
Shooting crowds, shooting reactions to the launch,
shooting action stuff,
or Fantasti-Car flying around the streets at speed.
His team did an amazing job.
Second units are crucial on films.
And there's oftentimes so much stuff just to get done,
you never have enough time to get it done.
And their team did an incredible job.
...mathematical, it's ethical, and it's...
[Shakman] This becomes the big moral quandary of the film,
which is like,
how do you save your world and also save your baby?
In the case of the Silver Surfer, as we'll learn later,
she volunteered to become the herald of Galactus in order to spare her planet.
But in this case, this is a baby.
This is a baby whose future is uncertain.
The Fantastic Four don't know Franklin's nature.
They don't necessarily believe what Galactus has said about Franklin
and what his destiny is.
And the baby is not able to... to say, "Yeah, I want to go.
"I'll serve Galactus to spare the planet."
That's not possible.
So in this particular situation, they can't accept either option.
And this scene in particular is one of my favorites in the movie.
It's beautifully written by Josh Friedman, one of our writers,
who is a brilliant, brilliant writer.
- And it feels like a real married couple. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] This is part of every marriage,
which is that people don't always get along.
And things that you love about each other
can sometimes become difficult and can become obstacles.
And the fact that Reed is always thinking about the larger picture,
and him trying to prevent all these terrible things from happening,
sometimes it means that he's not thinking enough
about the small thing, the personal thing.
- [Farahani] Yeah. - [Shakman] He's not thinking about...
As Sue feels, he's not being aware of how she feels in this scene.
It's beautifully acted between both of them,
beautifully written by Josh.
And involves some great, subtle CG baby shots
to help make this work.
Because we did have to replace some of the babies in Vanessa's arms,
and I think they're very effective.
- This is one of my favorite shots. - [Farahani] Beautiful.
Just beautiful.
[Shakman] The baby with an adorable little coo.
[Farahani] The light, just this beautiful light on Vanessa and on Ada.
- The shots. - [Shakman] Yeah.
I am not giving him up.
[Shakman] And this is Sue being Sue, which is that she doesn't accept the idea
that it has to be one or the other, that it has to be the Earth or the baby.
And she basically comes out without a real plan, exposed,
not within a forcefield.
She brings that baby out and says, "There's a lot of talk about this baby,
"and I want you to meet Franklin, and I want you to know
"I'm not going to abandon my child, and I'm not going to abandon you."
And this is so much about the thematics of the movie
and the idea that the Fantastic Four,
unlike so many other superheroes who hide and have aliases.
[Farahani] Yeah, that's right.
[Shakman] They are very public figures.
That's one of the things that's made them so special over the years
is they are the leading lights of their age.
Sue is the head of the Future Foundation.
She's basically the UN Secretary-General.
While Reed might be the most brilliant man in the universe,
she's probably the most emotionally brilliant person.
And Reed is great for mankind and struggles with individual men.
She is adept at handling the world from an emotional standpoint.
She's a true leader in terms of bringing them together, inspiring.
The speeches are sort of JFK speech, that we will not accept the idea
that it's the planet or the baby, that we will find a solution.
We don't know what it is yet, but I need you guys
to believe in us and to believe that we can all do it together.
And this was shot outside.
This is one of those where it's an enormous set,
but again, we couldn't build this entire area.
You built this amazing statue. You wanna talk about it?
[Farahani] Yeah, this statue was... It's definitely a high point for me.
I'm very proud of how it turned out.
We had a lot of brilliant artists, from Alex Bailey, the art director,
to Neil, the lead sculptor on this particular project.
All the different trades.
We wanted to come up with something that was super-dynamic,
that showcased their powers in a very subtle and elegant way,
and that had a composition
that would, in a subtle way at least, evoke a four,
a symbol of a four that brought them together.
And I was feeling very, very happy with it.
And then I showed it to you, I remember, an early sketch of it,
and you had the great idea that we should create a little accent,
kind of a focal point, specifically with Sue,
that her outstretched arm be made of glass,
and that the arm was turning into the invisibility.
It became this very beautiful point of accent
in the overall bronze sculpture.
[Shakman] Yeah, it was amazing.
Really an amazing work of art.
Sue...
you solved it.
- I did? - Yes.
[Shakman] And so here we are, back in the lobby at Spain.
And we have some Ada photography that we got on the day,
and then also some Ada photography that we added later,
as well as a little bit of CG work here.
Across the room.
- You think you can do that with a planet? - [Reed] We are out of options.
We have to make it work. We will make it work.
[Shakman] We should probably talk about these amazing actors.
We've talked so much about design,
and I haven't talked enough about how wonderful they all are individually,
and how great they were together as a family.
Reed Richards is a really tricky character.
In the comics, sometimes he's just the scientist in the lab
who's oblivious to what's happening outside.
He's trying to solve everything.
And sometimes he's a man of action, out there, trying to save the day.
Leading the Avengers, doing remarkable heroic stuff.
Sometimes he's the family man, the father, the husband.
He really has so many different aspects to him.
And I knew that we needed all of them in this film.
Then I knew I needed an actor who could bring all of those things to life.
Someone who would be believable as this brilliant person.
Someone who was also terrific in moments of crisis and action.
Wait a minute. That was Kasra.
We just missed Kasra's cameo in the movie
- as the Farsi translator. - [Farahani] My debut.
[Shakman] Translated Sue's words.
And you even rocked, maybe the best mustache since Magnum P.I.
[Farahani] Thank you. Thank you, sir. It's a high point.
I'm sure my wife and mother will print and frame that frame of the film.
[Shakman] Yes.
Yes. A huge part of the film.
- Yes. Stunning work. - [Farahani] The sequel will be all about
- the Farsi language translator. - [Shakman] Yes.
- [Farahani] I'm confident. - [Shakman] Yes, exactly.
100%. We're building the sequel around him.
[Farahani laughing]
[Shakman] With Pedro, we needed someone who could do that.
And also, Reed Richards is not without emotion.
He actually has a tremendous amount.
So much love for Sue, his family, so much love for Franklin.
In the comics, they have a daughter named Valeria.
And so I knew that this emotional undercurrent was really important, too,
and that it would become more and more important as the film
went on into these huge moments, like the birth that we just witnessed.
And certainly the end of the film,
where that emotion would be much more on the surface.
Pedro is a remarkable actor, in that he's able to do all of those things.
All four of our lead actors, actually everybody in the movie is...
I think of them as Swiss Army knives right there.
Every tool available to them, like any tone, any style.
It's just about getting on the same page.
And we had three weeks of rehearsal, getting together and figuring out
this world and this family and how we wanted to approach things,
and to build that chemistry that's so important.
And Vanessa Kirby, the same way, she has such range. Incredible range.
Ebon and Jo here are both brilliant actors who are alive.
Lots of little moments of improv that they brought to the movie
that are some of my favorite moments in the movie.
[Farahani] Great brothers dynamic, and warmth and humor.
And it's a very full...
The full palette of emotions is constantly being provided between the four of them.
It's very dynamic and engaging all the time.
[Shakman] Here's Ada looking at Pedro in a remarkable way.
Like as if she's hearing exactly what he's saying,
as he talks about his vulnerability and his concern about
how there's something that's wrong with him
because he's so brilliant, but sometimes he doesn't feel like
he can access every part of his emotional life.
He misses some things because he's focused on the bigger picture.
This fight that he had with Sue
comes into this scene here as he's being vulnerable with his son.
And Ada is super-alive in this.
I love this moment when he says, "Are you a little space God?"
And she claps her hands together like Mr. Burns on Simpsons.
- It's like... - [Farahani laughs]
Just so much life.
And really connected and really present.
And it was one of my favorite scenes.
It was one of my favorite scenes on the page
and definitely one of my favorite ones when we were filming.
I also love this relationship.
There's so much family, even between Johnny and H.E.R.B.I.E.,
who he calls Herbert every now and then.
Every time he rubs H.E.R.B.I.E.'s head,
H.E.R.B.I.E. makes a little happy dog noise.
He just loves when Johnny pays attention to him.
And here we have a Future Foundation flag
on the moon because they got there first.
No Apollo 11 in our world.
And then this enormous shadow of the... of the worldship coming.
These are some absolutely gorgeous shots of the bridge technology
being deployed around the world.
And we worked with Sarah Shepherd, our dialect coach,
who helped create the Zenn-Lavian language,
and she worked with some linguists, and we came up with this stuff for Johnny,
who's cracking the Zenn-Lavian language based off of these gold records,
which are, of course, a reference to the Voyager journey,
where we sent out a gold record
that had lots of information about Earth's culture
in case an alien came in contact with it.
We love the idea of gold records.
And here is full mission control.
So now we're in Apollo 13 territory,
as they're getting ready to move the Earth.
Taking advantage of all these amazing circles
in this truly wonderful set.
[Farahani] Yeah. This workstation was
an unbelievable build by Ty's props team,
and Jilly and Fergus, her assistant buyer.
The amount of complexity and detail in this mission control area
is mind-boggling, and absolutely stood up to being right next to it,
which I hope in some small way contributed to the performances.
Fantastic work by the team.
[man] Eleven, ten, nine, eight,
- seven, six... - [alarm blaring]
- What is that? - What's happening?
[Shakman] So the Surfer shows up and ruins their plan.
This is a all-is-lost moment for them as they realize
they can't get away from Galactus,
and their amazing Fantastic Four idea of moving the planet
isn't going to work.
And that she's going around the world destroying bridges,
and is going to come for them and come for Franklin.
And this is where Johnny gets to be the hero in a great way.
And he's the youngest one.
It's easy for them to have a laugh at him.
Earlier, he tries to tell them about how he spoke to her,
she spoke to him, and they dismiss it a little bit.
But what I've always loved about Johnny is that he is...
He was on that mission for a reason. He is incredibly smart.
He was young when his whole life was transformed.
He didn't quite know who he was.
So part of his journey in this movie is to figure out who he is.
And he dreams of space, he dreams of exploration.
And they don't do enough of that.
They're grounded more on Earth at the beginning of our movie.
And Reed's afraid of going back into space a little bit
because of what happened to them and how they were transformed.
But Johnny still dreams of it.
He meets this character, Shalla-Bal, and he's fascinated by her.
He wants to do what she can do,
which is fly the stars, right, see every part of the universe.
And as he becomes more and more fascinated with her language,
he gets to know more and more about her, learns about her history,
learns about the sacrifice she made,
and how she saved her planet and saved her family,
and ended up being the herald of Galactus.
And she...
In this scene is a great performance from Julia Garner,
as she remembers her past, remembers her own family.
And also has to remember all of the other planets
that weren't as lucky as her planet, the planets that she brought Galactus to,
where so many people died and so many families were killed.
And so Johnny comes up with this amazing plan on the fly
and manages to touch a chord of humanity in the Surfer.
This amazing beach was filmed
- in Los Angeles, not far from LAX. - [Farahani laughs]
[Shakman] There's some cargo ships that were painted out and a few other things.
But we had to film this in LA because of Julia Garner's schedule.
But it was great. It was a wonderfully overcast day,
which made all these colors and everything much richer.
Here we get to see this moment,
where she sacrifices everything to become the Silver Surfer.
I absolutely adore this shot.
These eyes open here, these amazing eyes that Ryan Meinerding designed.
And then it's Julia's performance there, it really feels quite alive.
And then this whole sequence we filmed with Julia,
where she is overwhelmed by hearing the screams
and the sounds of civilizations and planets dying.
And all these tears you see are real.
It's her performance driving all of this.
[Johnny] You brought Galactus to all of these planets.
And now, you're bringing him here to my home, to my family!
[screaming]
[Shakman] We had to create a bunch of other languages here,
notjust Zenn-Lavian.
So Sarah had to create a bunch of different planets screaming for help.
And it had to be clear that they were screaming for help
because we wouldn't translate it or subtitle it.
[Human Torch] I'm just trying to save my world.
[Shakman] Johnny's "flame on" effect, the Human Torch effect, was deceptive.
I thought, "We all know what someone on fire looks like. That'll be easy."
But how do you create something that's glowing from the inside?
We did a lot of tests.
We filmed a lot of different things on fire.
- Not actually Jo Quinn, ever. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] But we did light up forms that we had.
We heated up things to see what...
When you made different materials glow, what would it look like?
We used that as reference in creating this look for him.
And then we also had an LED vest that Jess and his team made to...
That Jo could wear so that there would be proper interactive light.
And then because the Surfer is a mirror essentially, which is very tricky,
we had a reflective version of her head that we brought in and used,
like the rock for Ben that we would have,
and see what the lighting looked like with her in every single environment.
I really wanted her to look like an old mirror.
I love that idea of coppering and the sense of seeing the tarnish of...
- She's been flying the stars. - [Farahani] Texture and history.
[Shakman] Yeah.
[Farahani] Just a perfect characterless mirror.
[Shakman] Yeah. Nine million years of flying the stars.
And so it was that blend of how reflective could she be.
And we cheated a little bit.
Sometimes she's more reflective, sometimes less.
We had to shape the lighting very carefully because she is a mirror,
and sometimes reflecting everything means you don't feel enough of the emotion,
you don't feel enough of the performance.
So we had to alter that a little bit from time to time.
[Sue] Hold, Paris. Paris, hold.
[man] Line's not very good. Say that again.
[Shakman] So all of this, you know... You know, "Nothing's going to change,"
they say to each other at the beginning of the movie.
And then, obviously, while the baby is being born,
Sue says, "Everything is going to change, " he says, "No."
Then they fight about, "How can you think of the worst thing
"when it relates to our child?"
And here we are in this moment of crisis where they've managed to turn the Surfer,
taken the Surfer off the table.
But Galactus is still coming. The Earth is still threatened.
Things are really dire.
And Reed realizes that there's only one way to save the day,
and it does involve putting their child at risk.
And, you know, so this is the sort of continued story
of this kind of marriage fight, you know,
these two people with very strong opposing thoughts,
kind of having to come together and make a decision.
And Sue ultimately knows, in this moment,
that Reed's right, that this is the only way to defeat Galactus,
and that they're going to have to take this risk.
But it doesn't mean that she comes to it easily.
I think there's a tremendous performance here by all four of them,
but Pedro and Vanessa are remarkable in this,
and the emotion that you see, the war that is happening within Sue
as she realizes what Reed has figured out.
You can see that sort of anguish,
that personal anguish there, which is remarkable.
She's putting it together here.
It's a wonderful performance, both of them.
Reed knows there's only one solution,
but he can't, kind of, bring himself to tell her
- that this is the only way. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] They must use Franklin.
So, this is sort of a dramatic, I think, high point, for the film
in terms of performance.
[Farahani] And Ben's got his beard here.
[Shakman] Oh, yeah, we haven't talked about Ben's beard.
Which was a great thing.
It's in the comics. He gets spiky. There's spikier versions
of Ben in the comics, and I always liked that.
And so, we came up with this idea that
he gets spiky every day and he just has to shave.
[Farahani chuckling] Yeah.
[Shakman] And, you know, he uses this grinder
that Reed probably made for him and he shaves it down.
And then during the worldwide conservation of power moment,
his grinder doesn't work, and he ends up getting spiky
in a way that he doesn't like, and he's ashamed.
- Johnny goes, "A beard will look good." - [Farahani] That's cool.
[Shakman] So we end up with a bearded Ben.
And bearded Ben does have some precedent in the comics, which I love.
But this is, again, a Ryan Meinerding design,
which I think is really fun.
[Farahani] Yeah, very cool.
[Shakman] Gives us a Ben we haven't seen in film before.
And also, I think it's nice.
Here's a guy who secretly wants to be human again,
and these are these little ways that he can, you know.
Which is why I also don't have a shirtless Ben in the movie very often.
He takes it off when he jumps in the water at the beginning to pull the ship out
with that kind of classic shirtless Ben wearing short shorts.
You know, from the Kirby run.
That's one of those early comic book things I chose not to do,
because to me it felt like this is a guy who wants to be human...
- [Farahani] Wants to be a person. - [Shakman] Who is a person,
- and would dress in a human way. - [Farahani] Yeah.
Unless they're going out in a space suit or a tech suit
or something like that.
And so, we had one nod to the comic early on, because, you know,
he's jumping in the river, makes sense.
[Ben] Johnny, go check, see if...
[Shakman] This is one of my favorite scenes. These guys are very funny.
A lot of this is improv.
And then I love the Andy Warhol portrait of Johnny Storm
in the background there.
Johnny is one of the most famous people in the world,
of course, Warhol would've done a silkscreen.
Come on.
But just again, the fun family dynamic and the idea of Sue just appearing,
and I love this last moment here of Ben.
You know, "I hate when she appears. I don't like that."
He's so sensitive. He's so sweet.
You know, this big, tough guy, and he doesn't like to be scared.
[Farahani] Exactly.
[Shakman] This is an amazing prop that you and...
[Farahani] Ty's team.
- [Shakman] Yeah. - [Farahani]...threw together this amazing
baby carrier that just
fits exactly the aesthetic of the Fantasti-Car and clicks in
just as you would expect.
All the mothers and fathers out there...
- will know. - [Shakman] Yes, car seats.
We know how difficult they are.
Ben is wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers hat here.
This was much discussed.
In one comic run, I think they have Ben as a Yankee fan,
which always felt wrong to me
because, you know, those are the fat cats
from the... from the Upper East Side, right?
And he feels, you know, with a Yancy Street, like,
- he'd root for the bums from Brooklyn. - [Farahani] Right. Exactly.
[Shakman] And I also love the idea that in our world,
they haven't moved to Los Angeles.
- They're still there, still in Brooklyn. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] In this retro-future, alt universe,
things stayed the way they should have been.
[Farahani] Right.
[Shakman] And also it's blue in a great way.
- [Farahani] Yeah. No, it's fantastic. - [Shakman] So I talked to
Jack Kirby's son, Neal Kirby, just to kind of make sure I could
dial this in appropriately in case they grew up Yankee fans,
and he said "No, I was a Brooklyn Dodger fan as a kid."
His dad wasn't a big baseball fan.
Jack wasn't a big baseball fan, but he was a big boxing fan.
But he's like, "No, he would absolutely be a Brooklyn Dodger fan."
[Farahani] That's awesome.
[Shakman] So that's how we settled on that.
Everything, you know, we went back to the source.
Why don't you butter me up?
[Shakman] Here's Paul Walter Hauser, who I worked with
on one of his first professional jobs, I think,
on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and he was amazing.
He was very young and he could hold his own
with those guys and improv and was so funny.
And I've just been so thrilled to see his career grow,
you know, winning Emmys and all sorts of other awards for his work.
And so, when we were thinking about who could be Mole Man, Harvey Elder,
you know, Paul seemed perfect, and he brings so much humor to it,
but also, a lot of gravitas here.
And I love his relationship with Sue.
You know, these are two leaders who kind of understand each other.
And he was once an enemy, and now an ally,
and he's going to help them evacuate the entire New York City
to Subterranea, which, you know,
we should talk about as well because part of our approach
to practical filmmaking, what you're looking at, is real.
This is a real mine in the middle of England, and we drove...
First, we had built this set very, very deep,
and we found this thing called Cathedral Row.
[Shakman] That's what the mine folks called it.
- It was epic. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] But there was ten minutes
of driving underground, basically, to reach it.
[man]...prepare for what could be our final moments.
The hours ahead may feel long, but we must use them...
[Shakman] It was great. I mean, you guys built
such an incredible world down there.
[Farahani] Thanks. Yeah, it was really an amazing collaboration
between Jille's fantastic set dec team
and our construction department, led by Art Director Oliver Goodier,
basically, to build the Mole Man HQ,
which was a kind of an adaptation of a disused bus,
and to create this sort of hub of activity
where you can imagine Harvey held court.
In the layers of dressing and stuff,
the kind of old stuff from the first half of the 20th century,
we imagine brought down, things that had been cast off
by society on the surface had been kind of
salvaged and reused down in Subterranea, which had a kind of,
maybe, a more humble feeling initially.
And I think that's sort of the arc of Subterranea.
And Harvey's collaboration with Sue is to get better treatment
and acknowledgment for the people of Subterranea.
So we wanted to kind of represent the "before" state of that in the decor.
[Shakman] I really want one of those giant drills I could drive around in.
[Farahani] Yeah, the giant retro-future drills. Super-fun.
[Shakman] They're really, really cool.
[Farahani] This amazing texture here on Galactus' neck,
you get a great sense of the scale in these shots.
[Shakman] And this was all... You know, Jess lit this beautifully.
You know, Ralph's performance,
and obviously there's a ton of beautiful CG work on top of it,
but a lot of this is really close to what we filmed in camera.
I love that it's starting to snow here. It snowed beautifully the night before.
I love those shots of Ben walking on Yancy Street
with the little bits of snow on his coat, that Framestore did so beautifully.
And just the sense that we start this movie really in the spring,
you know, everything is bright and lovely and optimistic.
- [Farahani] Yeah. - [Shakman] And by the end here,
as the world is threatened, we've entered into, you know,
it was Halloween when they launched to go up to Galactus,
and now we're heading towards Christmas when he's arrived.
[Farahani] A great shot of the Fantasti-Car there.
- And this amazing shot. - [Shakman] This amazing shot,
which I knew when we were conceiving it, that would be... Would be epic.
And this, a lot of this stuff here,
I want to just tip my hat to Richard Bennett,
who's an incredible storyboard artist, who, you know, one of the best
and has done a lot of Kaiju stuff
like King Kong and Godzilla as well.
I've worked with him on many things over the years. He's brilliant.
And these shots, like Galactus standing up,
water dripping off of him, turning around, looking at the Statue of Liberty,
all this stuff is just amazing.
- It comes right out of his boards. - [Farahani] So cool.
[Shakman] And he still hand-draws them all, too.
- [Farahani] Yeah. - [Shakman] So incredible.
You know, the artistry is just amazing.
The speed he can draw at, I've never seen anything like that.
Speed and quality, like, at the same time, it's really amazing.
And so he really led the charge
on Galactus here in this third act set piece.
And the scale here. But again, Ralph was really in the suit,
shooting all of this stuff, and then ILM is doing the work
throughout the sequence on top of that.
And I love these shots that come up here like this,
you know, teasing, the size, the giant boots coming through.
[Farahani] People have asked me how that shot was done
- because it's in the trailer. - [Shakman] Yeah.
[Farahani] Because it's so real. All of it is so real.
- [Shakman] And yet it's all virtual. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] Well, we shot some tarmac, we shot some cars,
things like that for, you know...
- So much of it is ILM... - [Farahani] They did a greatjob.
[Shakman]...but it's based on Richard Bennett's boards,
and on the pre-visualization The Third Floor did.
But here you are, you know, the collision of the oldest, most enormous thing
and the small, most innocent thing coming together.
[groans]
[Shakman] It's like this idea, you know, of creating a magnifying glass,
and what would happen to Johnny's flame if it went through one of Sue's fields?
You know, kind of like little kids torturing ants, you know?
But it means that, you know, Johnny is even more powerful
and all they need to do is to distract him for a moment
in order to be able to do this swap
and to get Franklin to safety, which works.
And it manages to poke the bull, which is what they're trying to do.
They want him to walk into this bridge.
They want him to not think about this,
and he's almost doing exactly what they want them to do.
But he's Galactus, and he won't be fooled so easily.
This is also one of my favorite moments here,
when this big boot hovers over this line and the jig is up.
[Farahani] The tension.
[Shakman] And then he says, he calls them clever little bugs,
- which is sort of a classic Galactus line. - [Farahani] Right.
[Shakman] You know, ants, bugs, tiny things.
Everyone is inconsequential to him,
but he's kind of moderately impressed at this point.
And then off he goes.
We destroyed so many buildings in New York City,
but because they're the Fantastic Four,
- everybody's safely down below. - [Farahani] Exactly.
They're in Subterranea.
[Shakman] And with ReedTech, they'll rebuild all of this stuff. No problem.
So here is this fast-moving Fantasti-Car,
which, some of this stuff is ILM,
some of that stuff is actual plate photography
of a fast-moving Fantasti-Car, which Stephen Woolfenden in the second unit
went out to this old air force base in England
and took the stunt version of the Fantasti-Car,
which had an electric engine in it, a Tesla engine in it.
And it cooked as they had a stunt driver swinging around curves...
We got amazing stuff based off of that photography.
[Farahani] This is so cool.
Galactus on fire is so cool.
[Shakman] Galactus on fire. He can't be stopped.
- Ben being thrown out in space. - [Farahani] So ominous.
It's amazing.
Ben!
Ben being tossed out of the atmosphere.
Eric Pearson, one of our screenwriters, had this fun idea.
Just Galactus doesn't care, he's just going to throw him out of the atmosphere.
[Farahani] Right.
[Shakman] Love this moment, which, of course, then helps to set up
- one of the runners in the movie... - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman]...which is "clobberin' time."
You know, we made a whole cartoon,
which, if you stay through to the end of the credits,
you get to see the wonderful animated opening
to a kind of in-universe Fantastic Four cartoon
made by an animation company called Titmouse. They're amazing.
They also worked on WandaVision for me, doing a Bewitched opening,
Bewitched-style opening to one of WandaVision's episodes.
And so they made this great opening,
and part of that has Ben saying "clobberin' time," which makes it famous.
And so, we love this idea of playing with their catchphrases.
You know, catchphrases in comics are always great.
It took Marvel Studios a decade
before Captain America said "Avengers assemble..."
- [Farahani] Right. - [Shakman]...and we liked the idea
of playing around with it, too.
So, you know, the toy in the kitchen says "Flame on,"
until Ben smashes it, saying, "Flame off."
And here, we're building to "clobberin' time,"
which is coming up in a second
where Ben actually says it finally, again.
[Farahani] This is so cool. This is really clever.
[Shakman] So all of this stuff, this is Reed
really at wit's end trying to stop Galactus.
But he's still brilliant, and he knows how Galactus is fed with those tubes,
and so he's trying to literally drain him of lifeblood,
and it's almost working.
This is an image literally trying to copy a Goya painting,
Saturn devouring his children, which I love.
And here he is, stretching the stretchiest man in the world
and just enjoying it, almost like a kid, you know,
pulling the legs off of an insect or something.
And we really wanted this to be impactful. We wanted him not to have stretched
nearly as far as this before,
so we would understand that now he's being stretched too far.
And stretching is a big thing.
We should take a moment to probably talk about stretching,
because it's the hardest one just to translate into film.
People on fire, people being invisible, rock guy,
- we can kind of understand those things. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] But nobody can stretch in the real world the way Reed does.
An octopus can kind of jam itself through tiny holes and do amazing things,
but we try to figure out how do we do this and make it work in live-action.
- It works great in animation-- - [Farahani] With a skeleton.
- In an organism that has a skeleton. - [Shakman] Exactly.
And so, we wanted to maintain anatomy.
There's always a wrist, always an elbow, a shoulder.
You can see the muscles in there.
We looked a lot at Alex Ross,
who's an amazing comic book painter, artist, writer.
And he always keeps these heroic portions for Reed.
Even when he's stretching, there's a dynamic to it.
And the way he moves. He moves quickly, like Spider-Man,
you know, in our version of him.
So, we're not living very long in these sort of uncanny poses.
You know, the stretching is happening fast.
- There's an elastic quality to it. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] We also thought about conservation of mass.
If you're stretching your arm really far,
you need to take it from your leg or waist or something.
So that's what so much of the stretching you see here is based off of.
And I also wanted to use it, kind of, when he had to,
as opposed to, I think, using it for comic purposes,
or, you know, just kind of having it happen here, there, everywhere.
But it's something that's done purposeful,
and it's done in moments of high stakes for the most part.
[Shakman] He stretches a bit in the lab
because he's busy doing a bunch of different things,
but it's always got a purpose to it.
All right, so now Galactus has the baby, and we have, you know, a battle between,
you know, Sue and Galactus here,
a battle that she should not be able to win.
But because so much is at stake,
she's literally willing to sacrifice herself
to push Galactus towards Times Square and to get their child back.
And this was just an unbelievable performance
- from Vanessa. - [Farahani] Incredible.
[Shakman] Gave it her all, just for hour after hour after hour.
Several days of this required,
because of all the different areas she was doing this,
the different moments of the story.
- But she was a rock star. - Sue, stop!
Save our son.
[Franklin crying]
[Farahani] And you can see the sort of disbelief in Reed's eyes, too.
He just can't believe that she's able to do this.
[Shakman] Yeah.
[grunting]
[grunts]
[Shakman] This notion, as parents, which we all feel,
which is, you'd do anything to save your child.
The parent who, full of adrenaline, can lift the car off of their kid.
You know, and it was the idea of, "Okay, what's the version of that
"if you're already a superpowered person?"
And it's this, you know, which is that
she's able to lift, you know, the biggest creature in the universe.
[Farahani] Yeah. She's using all the reserves.
She's not saving anything for herself. She's just using everything in her.
[Shakman] Her last full measure.
But, you know, she hits a snag here.
Galactus is grabbing this building, Ben comes to her aid,
everybody is working together as a team, which is really important.
They're all doing what they need to do to save this world, to save this baby.
[Farahani] Crosses the line...
[Shakman] Right, which we've set up earlier.
- Lot of debate about how many seconds. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] Can't seem too long, can't be too short.
[Farahani] Right.
[Shakman] Amazing images. Franklin, just barely...
[Farahani] That's nuts. Yeah. So cool.
So well-calibrated by you guys.
- Scott, and everybody. - [Shakman] Great work.
ILM. If you see that field kind of engulf the hand
just as Reed saves the baby.
- And then this, a real stunt. - [Farahani] Yeah.
An amazing stunt performer, which I think,
that was a tough one.
She did great.
Then, emotion. Again, like,
the emotion of birth, the emotion of death,
trying to make this feel as real as possible.
It worked!
[Shakman] Galactus comes back like a horror film, you know, villain here.
Which sets up this wonderful moment for Johnny,
who has offered to sacrifice himself several times,
who is willing to do what Shalla-Bal did.
And now, in this last moment as the seconds tick away,
he knows that it's on him, and he's willing to do it.
But then, at the last minute, this happens,
- which is a wonderful shot. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] Really well-executed.
Based off of, again, Richard's boards, and amazing previz by Third Floor.
Pat Gehlen, Pat Haskew, who are supervisors.
They're amazing artists.
And then, finally, boom.
They're gone, thrown to the other side of the universe,
where, you know, we won't hear from them for millions of years.
- And poor Ada. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] She was upset that morning.
- I feel bad. - [Farahani] Yeah.
- But performance-wise... - [Shakman] It works for the scene.
She was fine. Nothing was done to her.
- [Farahani] I'm glad she's okay. - [Shakman] She was happy.
But just in that moment, you know, babies cry.
And then this, you know, resurrection here,
was a very difficult thing.
I think there's... You know, trying to figure out sound design,
trying to figure out her look. You know, she's obviously very pale.
We wanted to make sure it was understood that she was gone.
And then this is where that amazing
emotional, you know, work of Pedro comes to the surface.
And his desperation to save her is so believable, powerful...
Stay with us, baby. Stay with us, baby.
[Shakman]...culminating really, in this incredibly sad resignation moment
when he realizes that he can't save her and that she's truly gone...
[Reed] Come on, baby!
[Shakman]...is really heart-breaking.
And he does this thing where he goes down and kisses her,
and one tear falls from his eye onto her cheek.
- And it's just there... - [Farahani] Perfect.
[Shakman]...in the performance, you know?
No, no VFX happening there.
He really brought it.
You know, she brought it in that incredible battle against Galactus.
And then Pedro brought it amazingly here.
And they did, all four of them did every day.
But this in particular, here's the shot, which, you know,
when I saw it on the day, I was just stunned.
[Farahani] It's perfect.
- Just that face also. I mean... - [Shakman] Yeah.
[Farahani]...so much emotion here.
[Shakman] You know, watching your sister die
and maybe never having the language or knowing what to do with yourself.
- He's just kind of frozen, you know. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[crying]
[Shakman] And then here's Ada, actually, on the day, which was amazing.
We filmed a lot of her on different days,
but this performance is, again, these moments where
you're like, "Does the baby understand
- "the scene she's playing?" - [Farahani] What's going on here? Yeah.
[Shakman] 'Cause her hands are doing what they needed to do.
- [Farahani] Right. - [Shakman] She's focused,
she was crying, as you saw in different parts of the scene, then stopped.
- [Farahani] Right. Amazing. - [Shakman] She's making eye contact.
Sure, we did a few tricks, we had, you know, some toys down below
- to draw her eye. - [Farahani] Right.
[Shakman] But, like, it was these moments where I was like,
"This baby knows what's happening and what her job is in the scene,
- "and she shouldn't 'cause she's a baby." - [Farahani] Right.
[Shakman] Including, you know,
the shot that comes up here in a second, which she just did.
She just clapped after she resurrected her mother.
And it was... I didn't make her do it.
- I didn't ask her to do it. - [Farahani] That's unbelievable.
[Shakman] Yeah, and it's just those lucky moments in filmmaking
where you're like, "Wow, that just happened," you know?
[Farahani] Yeah. That's so cool.
[Shakman] So much of this moment... I just love the...
The music in here is beautiful, the restraint,
you know, holding out on the music for as long as possible,
keeping it absolutely quiet until you hear the one,
- you know, twitch of her finger. - [Farahani] Mmm-hmm.
[Shakman] Just trying to kind of hide what's happening as much as possible...
[Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman]...you know, to keep it mysterious.
And then just until you see the stars, really, in Vanessa's eyes,
you understand that this loss, you know, the death of Sue
has opened up something in Franklin, has triggered this Power Cosmic
that Reed could never find in all the scans that he was doing,
that something has awakened.
- [Farahani] Yeah. - [Shakman] And they realize it.
And she says, "He's not like us, he's more."
So, Galactus is sort of right, but not really right,
that there's something mysterious and unknown about the child.
That, to me, was what the movie was so much about.
Because I think, as parents, we have that same feeling,
where we worry about our children, we want the best for them,
- their future is unknown. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] Parental anxiety, you know,
is something that these folks have just like we do,
but that, ultimately, you have to kind of accept that
whatever their future is, is up to them, and all we can do is
do the best to love them and protect them and support them now,
and then they will have to take their first steps out into the world
and do what they're going to do.
And that's what they're saying here backstage.
Who knows what he will become,
but he's here now, so we're going to love him.
- [Farahani] Adorable... - [Shakman] Yes.
- [Farahani]...five tech suit. - [Shakman] Five onesie.
[Farahani] Onesie tech suit.
He's too young for that kind of stuff.
[Reed] Can't even sit up without help.
[Shakman] This is Pinewood stage, one of the classic early Pinewood stages
where Kubrick shot stuff and Bond movies were shot,
and we were using it as backstage for "The Ted Gilbert Show."
[Sue] Who knows where his powers will take him.
But right now, he's here.
What's that guy doing?
Baby... [kisses]
You got him?
[man] Explorers, heroes, citizens or leaders, they continue to change...
[Shakman] I love Joe fixing his hair after the baby messed with it.
- [Farahani] Yeah. - [Shakman] Great moment.
And even Ada there, just putting her hand
on Pedro's face in such a wonderful way.
This audience was great, they really got into it.
[Farahani] Beautiful light, once again, Jess.
[Shakman] This is our split screens. We do a lot of this
kind of, boxes and stuff in the movie,
very '60s-inspired Thomas Crown Affair.
- [Farahani] Yeah. - [Shakman] That kind of stuff.
You can see the period lighting there.
We used so much period lighting, vintage lenses.
Here's Ben, precious cargo, rushing down the hallway.
And then, this was a scene that existed in every version of the script.
It moved around. It was on a spaceship
because they had the baby at the beginning of the movie.
I just never wanted to let it go because all of us parents out there know...
- [Farahani] I've done this so many times. - [Shakman] Yes!
- Car seats are tough. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] Even retro-futuristic Reed Richards, slacks are tough,
especially if they have a really annoying buzzer
- that tells you you're not doing it right. - [Farahani] That's right.
- Feedback. - [Shakman] This was fun.
This was a fun one. And these guys did a ton of improv
- and, you know, it felt very alive. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] You know, bickering at each other.
You know, Ben saying he can't feel his hands,
and Johnny's saying he did pull the slack.
All this feels very familiar.
I think that's what the charm of the Fantastic Four is,
that they're a real family.
It was a bold idea in the '60s
to make a superhero team about a real family.
And I think it works because they're like us.
They're relatable.
Here they are flying off to save the day.
This end title sequence is by Perception.
They worked, they also did the end title sequence credits for WandaVision.
They've done a lot of great stuff for Marvel over the years.
I thought they knocked it out of the park
using a lot of stuff that Kasra created here.
- The graphics department-- - [Farahani] Posters.
- [Shakman] Those posters. - [Farahani] Jason Sweers,
graphic designer, yeah.
[Shakman] And there's even some fun little stuff in here that didn't make the cut.
We did commercials. We made our own in-world commercials
for little bubble cars that you made. They were adorable.
This was from an opening where they gave a tour of the Baxter Building,
like Jackie Kennedy's tour of the White House.
[Farahani] That's right.
[Shakman] Some of this is concept art from Ryan Meinerding and his team.
It really was a chance to kind of pull together,
you know, things that we didn't get a chance to use in the full movie
or only had used snippets of.
But I love how... Like this, we had a longer
Red Ghost and the Super-Apes opening there,
and you see Reed getting his face stretched by one of the monkeys,
which is a reference to a great Alex Ross painting
of Reed getting his face stretched.
So it's got a lot of little Easter eggs of things
that didn't end up in the final cut, but they're really wonderful.
- I loved all the magazines you guys made. - [Farahani] Yeah.
Charis and Dom, our graphics team, they did so many fantastic,
really layered, detailed things for the background of all the sets.
It's awesome to get to showcase some of them here in the credits.
[Shakman] I love them, you know, the flipping through
the sort of Teen Beat type magazine
with Johnny, you know, with the insert, with all of his photographs,
you know, posing and his sort of coquettish ways.
But this was really meant to be, again, retro-futuristic in style.
It has that Saul Bass feel with the split-screen
and all of that with the boxes,
but it also has a polish to it that makes it feel
like it's slightly more elevated and more futuristic.
Four years later, a little snippet of what's to come.
- They've changed the colors here... - [Farahani] Yeah.
...[Shakman] for this look at Avengers: Doomsday.
Moving a little more into the '70s.
- [Farahani] Yeah. I see that. - [Shakman] You see oranges.
Franklin's grown up,
and here we get a sort of, you know, glimpse of things to come.
[Sue] H.E.R.B.I.E., have you seen the book Franklin loves?
[indistinct mechanical voice]
Not that one. We did that one yesterday, and I know he loves it...
Here we are. It's here.
See, we're going for something a little bit more fun today, yeah?
[Shakman] And we changed, sort of, the hair as well for Sue.
- [Farahani] Yeah. - [Shakman] A different era, slightly.
Which is what's really fun about Fantastic Four.
- We started in sort of 1960s... - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman]...moving them into the '70s. Like, there's...
It's a really fun opportunity, design-wise.
[Farahani] Yeah, to see the progression
and the space... Oh, wow.
- [Shakman] And there he is. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] Doctor Doom, things to come.
It's amazing how many super-talented people
are required to put a movie together of this size.
And every time I watch this crawl
and see the amazing folks who worked on this,
it sort of takes my breath away.
So many talented people.
[Farahani] Yeah, in different countries, you know,
over such a sprawling period of time.
You know, between the prep, the shoot and the post,
it's a small army of people that go into doing this.
[Shakman] Truly talented.
We've called out so many of these folks already,
from Jille, the set decorator,
and Rowley, our stunt coordinator.
You know, and then Alex Byrne, our costume designer,
and Dan Grace, who is the costume supervisor
who did an incredible job as sort of her field general
of organizing and pushing through all of these things
from both an artistic and also just a logistics standpoint.
- [Farahani] Yeah. - [Shakman] Amazing.
[Farahani] Always had an answer.
[Shakman] Tristan, our post-production supervisor,
who made post work so well,
just an incredible group of in-house VFX folks.
[Farahani] Alistair, SFX supe.
[Shakman] He built the Fantasti-Car in part, and built H.E.R.B.I.E.
- and did a greatjob. - [Farahani] Yeah.
Ty, who we just saw go by is our prop master
who built this entire world in an incredible way.
Gaffer, Lee, who lit this thing beautifully.
Steve, key grip, and his team that...
You know, we worked almost exclusively off a technocrane,
and his team did a wonderful job,
you know, making all these complicated shots work.
It's a dance, it requires a lot of folks to bring to life.
- Look at how many carpenters. - [Farahani] Yeah, just the carpenters,
the plasterers, brilliant plasterers,
the painters, sculptors, all of these brilliant artisans.
So many of them required to do this.
[Shakman] Yeah. Incredible.
Hats off to Graham here, listed among the drivers,
- who drove me back and forth every day. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] Lovely human and hard worker, and made things go very smoothly for me.
Thank you, Graham. Spain unit.
We were hosted there by, you know, a wonderful group from Sur Film
and made that all possible in Oviedo.
We shot plates in New York again to make things look as real as possible.
We got as much New York photography as we could.
And again, I mentioned we shot on the beach in LA.
- [Farahani] Yeah. - [Shakman] These folks made that possible.
And these are all the folks at Marvel Studios who are amazing.
Hats off to Danielle Costa, who runs visual effects.
Chris Russell who runs post-production.
Mitch Bell, who was in charge of production.
And everyone who works with them, truly an incredible group.
"Fantastic Four, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby."
And then a bunch of folks, special thanks.
All of the amazing comic book artists and writers that worked
as, you know, inspiration for us, but also as advisors.
And then SPI here, I want to call out Theo,
who was the VFX supervisor, did a brilliant job at SPI.
A lot of Galactus' worldship, Silver Surfer was handled by SPI
and this amazing team.
ILM, Daniele, who was our supervisor.
They're so talented.
Again, a lot of the Galactus third act set piece
when Galactus comes to New York is Daniele and his team,
in addition to lots of other things throughout the movie,
but did a brilliant job working on Ben as well.
They were one of the leads on developing Ben Grimm.
Digital Domain, Phil and his team there, they did a lot of work on Ben
as well as CG babies and bringing Franklin to life.
So much work.
Framestore, hats off to Rob. They did a ton of space.
The neutron star, escaping Galactus' ship, wormhole,
just beautiful work throughout as well,
but that was their... their main focus was the escape and in that section.
Weta did a lot of great work early in the movie
when we're establishing their powers and who they are.
Thanks to everyone else here, Rise and Base.
Rise did a lot of the bridge shots around the world, alongside Base.
And Barnstorm and Capital T.
Cantina worked a lot on WandaVision with me,
did a ton of the stuff you see in TVs
and the sort of period ads, and things like that.
Really beautiful work.
And Imaginarium. Hats off to... to them, everyone at Imaginarium.
Andy Serkis and his partner, Matt,
they were very helpful with us,
and helped Ebon and Julia learn about mocap and understand...
You know, Andy developed that whole world, starting with Gollum,
and Caesar in Planet of the Apes.
He is, you know, the Yoda of that world,
- and he's so generous with his time. - [Farahani laughs]
[Shakman] I want to thank Matthew Wood and his Loop group.
Several members of Loop Group are amazing actors I've worked with in theater
who came out and helped out.
Helen, Hugo, Leo, thank you guys for doing that.
Great soundtrack.
I want to call out Andrea. "Let Us Be Devoured,"
which is a song played over this section here,
which she wrote as a kind of in-universe song about Galactus coming,
almost as if sort of Joan Baez had written it.
- [Farahani] That's great. - [Shakman] We had planned to use it
earlier in the movie, but couldn't figure out how to make that work,
and so we put it here at the credits,
and it fits beautifully here at the end.
"Specially formatted in IMAX." The entire movie is in IMAX.
- I'm a big fan of IMAX. - [Farahani] Yeah.
[Shakman] It's been a pleasure working with them to develop this film,
and to see, you know, Galactus in all of the IMAX glory is great.
I want to just mention Jamie Christopher,
who was our original line producer on this film
and worked for Marvel for many years,
who unfortunately passed away early in our process.
An amazing human and an amazing filmmaker.
Great quote."If you look at my characters, you'll find me.
"No matter what character you create or assume,
"a little of yourself must remain there. Jack Kirby."
That's true, and that's the special sauce of the Fantastic Four,
is that they are based on real people.
You know, Jack had a daughter named Sue,
and I think there's a Ben in the family there, too.
These are based on real people,
and that's what makes them so relatable and so special.
- It's clobberin' time. - [Farahani chuckling]
[Shakman] And this is Titmouse's amazing animated opening
for an in-universe Fantastic Four cartoon.
It's clobberin' time.
[Shakman] All right, thanks, everyone, for watching.
♪ Get ready to watch Fantastic Four! ♪