Ahhh… DVD and Blu-ray special features. So good. So fascinating. So detailed. I love special features.
But I never watch special features. Sure, I still get really upset if a disc – or legal download – doesn’t offer them but seriously though, going through special features is like watching the news on SBS. A lot more people say they’ve done it than actually do.
Me, I’m a couple of deleted scenes after a re-watch kind of guy. Which means you might find out about the insane Wolverine/Storm kiss in X-Men: Days of Future Past, but would mean I’d have missed out entirely on Ridley Scott wearing Google Glass while making Exodus: Gods and Kings. Yeah, that bizarre thing happened, but more of that later.
Exodus has some cracking special features. A doco on the behind the scenes where at one point it seems the heavens actually opened up and tried to kill the film (and/or its producer). A detailed near instruction guide on how you too can recreate the plagues of Egypt in your own home (clue: you need many frogs). And deleted scenes where Joel Edgerton desperately tries to make the severed head of a rubber snake terrifying. I watched them – ahead of the movie even – because I was going to speak to the guy who made them.
The film business is all about being in the right place at the right time. Take for example DVDs and the career of Charles de Lauzirika. He’s recently returned from Budapest where he shot the behind the scenes footage on Ridley Scott’s forthcoming feature The Martian, which is only to be expected as he has become Scott’s go-to special features guy, which means he has had the chance to re-cut some of the greatest films of the twentieth century and made the behind the scenes on some of the biggest of the last decade.
“I was going to film school and then you’re looking for a job after graduation,” he says in an effort to explain how one can possibly get this job. “One of the many internships I did was at Scott Free and it really clicked. It’s almost a family there. After a few years in development, DVD came along as a format and I think I was the only DVD geek in the office. I told Ridley I’d heard through the grapevine that Fox was working on the first Alien box set of the four films and that he should get involved. He was getting ready to shoot Gladiator and he asked me if I would take charge and become DVD supervisor and that’s where it all began.”
Since then Lauzirika has overseen the restorations and new cuts of Alien 3, Legend and Blade Runner: The Final Cut and produced DVD content for David Lynch, James Cameron & the Coen brothers. Is he living the film geeks wet dream? “Absolutely. When I went on the set of Prometheus I got to see the space jockey chair in person and believe me I took a couple of photos of me in that chair. ”
Don’t quit your day job to go join the Ridley Family (click click) just yet. Lauzirika smells change in the air. “Exodus is obviously a big film and I think it warranted a big treatment. Right now I’m working on Martian his new movie and we’ll see how that evolves because I think the studios appetite is changing for special features. I’m not sure where we’ll go from here.”
In a risky move, Lauzirika may have replaced himself on the set of Exodus when he arranged for Scott to wear the Google Glass camera while directing. The resulting footage feels a little shaky but has the desired effect of letting us look through Scott’s eyes, mostly into Christian Bales as they have a series of intense yet somehow almost mundane conversations about the minutiae involved in scenes like the parting of the Red Sea.
“We tried an early version on Transformers 3 where we took a much bigger HD camera and slapped it on people’s baseball caps and that was clunky and nausea inducing,” he recalls. “Google Glass was a little better. And it was interesting because Ridley was wearing it, that was the big trick. We never would have got that close to Christian or Joel or the actors. Ridley became our behind the scenes cameraman.”
Which is a dangerous statement when you’re the behind the scenes cameraman.
It’s a real dilemma. Studios want these features to act as big draws in a dwindling home entertainment market. Lauzirika frustratingly insists that Edgerton, Scott and Christian Bale were all lovely on set. Would sales do better if they contained a solid rant by one of them about walking through his eyeline?
As Lauzirika himself states, “Viewer’s attention span for the stuff has changed over time because they’ve seen a lot of them. You want to try something unique. Indicate why this making-of should demand your attention.”
Or of course re-cuts. Scott is famous for having multiple cuts of his films. Though Lauzirika suspects this is on Exodus that won’t get a do-over in the edit suite to give it a truly biblical length. “I seriously doubt it. He could have done it this time if he’d wanted to. They decided not to. They decided the cut in the theatres is the director’s cut.”
Perhaps with the advent of Google Glass, Scott will just limit himself to recutting his own experience on set over and over again. Now that is a special feature worth lining up for.
