The Usual Suspects
(1995)
John's Thoughts
Because a lot of the voice-over had been performed by me throughout the editing process, certain parts that Spacey did not replace in the dialog track remain. For instance any breathing you hear in foreground as we look from behind the ropes later in the film is me, my cameo I guess. One of many examples of other tidbits: In the Suspects script, there was never any explanation of how Kuyan was in New York one moment and in an Los Angeles Police department the next. It was confusing. So I grabbed an airplane shot that was shot for later in the film, wrote some dialog about Kuyan leaving a message on his voice mail and going to LA and dubbed it in. The weirdest part of the process was hearing the actual actors voices instead of mine throughout the film for voice-overs I had dubbed in.
Another tidbit was my other "cameo" in the film created because we decided to change a storyline: We decided to eliminate a subplot of a bomb being set by Keaton to blow up the ship. (All that remains of it now is Keaton asking Keyser in the opening, "What time is it?" This was because he knew the bomb he set was going to go off. Ever wonder why he asked that???) Anyway, we now had no way for the ship to catch fire and explode. So we mocked up a deck of the ship in Bryan's backyard. We put a glove on my hand and I dropped the cigarette, and then Bryan put on a boot and stepped on it. The close up of a burned skeleton on the pier was also done in the backyard on a little deck we placed on the cement. Ok and by now, many have recognized that I used a shot of 747 approaching for the taxi sequence, and a DC10 landing. It's simply because we had no shot of the 747 landing from the back, but the shot from the front was one of the few 2nd unit shots that was really cool; so I made the decision to use it and screw continuity. Then I made the scene comprised of jump cuts, so not many noticed.
Reminescent of Public Access's optical disaster we had a scary and painful incident occur after the first couple days of shooting Suspects. We were sitting in dailies watching the footage of Verbal in Kuyan's office, which was 75% of what was shot for him in that location, as well as many shots of Kuyan. Every shot of him had a large black bar on the left of the frame, creating a smaller frame for Verbal to fit into. Since the film was shot in Super 35mm (very wide) we thought the projectionist had the setting incorrect for viewing the film. Unfortunately, the projectionist had the settings correct. Suddenly a spontaneous sweat broke across the room as we realized the scenes had been SHOT that way. The camera's setting was set for another screen size. The short of the story is that we had to optically blow up all of these shots of Verbal until the image filled out the screen again. This created an on-going nightmare of dirt and grain problems until it finally looked right. In the theatre you could tell these shots were slightly out of focus and grainier, but it's impossible to see on laser disk. Once again we had many more optical "effects" than met the eye!
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