FILM 1882: ROBOCOP

FILM 1882: ROBOCOP

TRIVIA: It was discovered that when in full RoboCop costume, Peter Weller could not fit properly into the police car as he was too bulky. That's why most shots of him show him exiting the car or preparing to get into it. For shots where he actually needed to be in the car, he only wore the top part of the costume and sat in his underwear. However, to maintain the illusion that RoboCop wears the entire suit while inside a car, most shots show his robotic feet exiting the car first.

Some 25 years later, an internet rumor began to get funding for a RoboCop statue to be placed in Detroit. Peter Weller himself created a public service announcement to support the proposal. Eventually, a Kickstarter campaign was created and proved successful, as the 12 foot statue is now in production.

The RoboCop suit was so hot and heavy that Peter Weller was losing 3 lbs a day from water loss. Eventually, an air conditioner was installed in the suit.

In Sacramento, California, a robbery suspect fled into a darkened movie theatre to escape pursuing police. He became so engrossed in the movie playing on screen (RoboCop), that he failed to notice that police had evacuated all other patrons from the theatre. When the lights flipped on, the stunned man was taken into custody.

Paul Verhoeven and Rob Bottin clashed repeatedly before and during production over the design and make-up of the RoboCop character. What they argued most about was the scene where Murphy takes off his helmet. Bottin wanted the scene to be filmed in a darkened area, fearing that harsh light would reveal too much of the make-up effects; Verhoeven wanted the scene to be filmed as brightly as possible, citing that director of photography Jost Vacano would be able to light it properly without revealing anything. Verhoeven got his way and Bottin refused to talk to him any further for the remainder of production. However, at the premiere, both men were so impressed with how the scene had turned out, that they instantly forgave each other. Bottin, who had even vowed to never again work with Verhoeven, happily accepted the offer to work on Verhoeven's next project, Total Recall (1990).

Nancy Allen first arrived on set when Paul Verhoeven was shooting the deliberately cheesy sitcom "It's Not My Problem" which appears on television screens throughout the film. Allen was initially horrified to think that she had signed on to make a film with an incompetent director.

Because the hands of the RoboCop suit were made of foam rubber, the car keys would bounce off of Peter Weller's hand every time he attempted to catch them. The production took up to 50 takes and an entire day's worth of filming before finally getting the shot right.

On the DVD Ray Wise explains that he and Kurtwood Smith ended up being too close to an explosion which caused pieces of glass to be embedded into Ray's face. He received an additional stunt pay for this mishap as per the studio. Ray then jokingly states that he devised ways where he would be as close to the explosions as possible to gain extra money.

RoboCop's first Directive, "Serve the public trust", was inspired by a fortune cookie.

After Peter Weller complained about the costume during the first few days of filming, the role of RoboCop was offered to Lance Henriksen, who turned down because of time conflicts - Henriksen was also considered for the title role in The Terminator (1984) (before the cyborg was decided for to be large and bulky and Arnold Schwarzenegger was brought on), and finally got to play a robot in Aliens (1986) (see also trivia for The Terminator (1984)).

Paul Verhoeven's first American film.

Included among the "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", edited by Steven Schneider.

DIRECTOR TRADEMARK: Paul Verhoeven: [in-movie fake commercials] Several fake advertisements are featured throughout the movie: The Family Heart Center (a medical center specializing in artificial heart transplants), Nukem (a futuristic Battleship-like board game), and the 6000 SUX - the primary vehicle that Clarence Boddicker and his gang use.

FILM 1765: ISLE OF DOGS

FILM 1765: ISLE OF DOGS

TRIVIA: This is the longest stop-motion film of all time, beating out Coraline (2009) by two minutes.

Writer and Director Wes Anderson hosted a competition for someone to be a member of the voice cast for this film. The only requirement was that you donated ten dollars or more to the Film Foundation, a non-profit founded by Martin Scorsese, which specializes in the preservation and restoration of film around the world.

The movie was influenced by the work of Akira Kurosawa and Rankin-Bass stop-motion Christmas specials.

The hair of the dogs is made out of Alpacca wool.

Jeff Goldblum recorded his lines over the phone in California. Because of scheduling conflicts he couldn't go to England to record his lines with the rest of the cast.

Wes Anderson's eighth collaboration with Bill Murray.

At the end of the movie Anjelica Huston, who is a long time collaborator with Wes Anderson, is credited as the "Mute Poodle".

"Isle of Dogs" could also be read as "I love dogs"

FILM 1682: ALIEN: COVENANT 

TRIVIA: This movie contains a scene where a toy bird drinking water (named, aptly, a "drinky-bird") is visible. In the opening scene of Alien (1979), there is such a toy bird shown on board the Nostromo's bridge.

This was the first "Alien" film to be released after the death of H.R. Giger. Giger inadvertently designed the original "Alien" looks and environments in his "Necronomicon" book, which led to Ridley Scott hiring him as Art Director for the film (and franchise). Giger essentially gave birth to the entire "Alien" look that we all know.

Walter breaks the pattern of the androids' names proceeding in alphabetical order (Ash, Bishop, Call, David). There is another pattern to their names, however. "D" is the fourth letter of the alphabet, and "W" is the fourth-to-last. The characters are named for David Giler and Walter Hill.

FILM 1412: INTERSTELLAR

TRIVIA: Early in pre-production, Dr. Kip Thorne laid down two guidelines to strictly follow: nothing would violate established physical laws, and that all the wild speculations would spring from science and not from the creative mind of a screenwriter. Christopher Nolan accepted these terms as long as they did not get in the way of the making of the movie. That did not prevent clashes, though; at one point Thorne spent two weeks talking Nolan out of an idea about travelling faster than light.

To create the wormhole and black hole, Dr. Kip Thorne collaborated with VFX supervisor Paul J. Franklin and his team at Double Negative. Thorne provided pages of deeply sourced theoretical equations to the team, which then created new CGI software programs based on these equations to create accurate computer simulations of these phenomena. Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, and ultimately the whole CGI program reached to 800 terabytes of data. The resulting VFX provided Thorne with new insight into the effects of gravitational lensing and accretion disks surrounding black holes, and led to him writing two scientific papers--one for the astrophysics community and one for the computer graphics community.

For a cornfield scene, Christopher Nolan sought to grow 500 acres of corn, which he learned was feasible from his producing of Man of Steel (2013). The corn was then sold and actually made a profit.

The majority of shots of the robot TARS were not computer-generated. Rather, TARS was a practical puppet controlled and voiced on set by Bill Irwin, who was then digitally erased from the film. Irwin also puppeteered the robot CASE, but in that instance had his voice dubbed over by Josh Stewart.

The method of space travel in this film was based on physicist Kip Thorne's works, which were also the basis for the method of space travel in Carl Sagan's novel "Contact", and the resulting film adaptation, Contact (1997). Matthew McConaughey stars in both films.

The giant dust clouds were created on location using large fans to blow cellulose-based synthetic dust through the air.

The wormhole explanation using paper and pen is exactly the same as it appears in Event Horizon (1997).

Cooper's first name is never revealed throughout the entire film.

Kip Thorne won a scientific bet against Stephen Hawking upon the astrophysics theory that underlies Interstellar (2014). As a consequence, Hawking had to subscribe Penthouse magazine for a year. This famous bet is depicted in The Theory of Everything (2014) which was released in the same year as Interstellar.

Some space sequences were shot with an IMAX camera installed in the nose cone of a Learjet.

Production designer Nathan Crowley based the Endurance ship's design on the International Space Station: "It's a real mishmash of different kinds of technology; you need analog stuff as well as digital stuff, you need back-up systems and tangible switches. Every inch of space is used, everything has a purpose. It's really like a submarine in space".

The apocalyptic Earth setting in this film is inspired by the Dust Bowl disaster that took place in the United States during the Great Depression in the 1930s.

This is Christopher Nolan's seventh film to be included in the IMDb Top 250.

Many of the characters' names are found on the books in Murph's room as authors.

The film began as a Paramount production. When Christopher Nolan took the director's chair, Warner Bros., which had released Nolan's recent productions, sought a stake in the project. In exchange for international distribution rights, Warners gave Paramount the rights to co-finance future sequels of Friday the 13th (2009) and South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut (1999).

The "hyper-sleep" chambers place the astronauts' bodies in a cold liquid, as seen after they wake up, when they are covered on blankets or thermal blankets. This is likely a practical reference to studies that have shown a state of hibernation can be achieved in the human body by causing hypothermia. This technology has been used to treat brain damage, and has been proposed as a viable means of keeping people with severe injuries alive after accidents, while they are transported to medical facilities, where they can be treated by specialists.

The TARS robot, when standing upright, strongly resembled a much smaller version of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Cooper tells Murph her name means "whatever can happen, will happen." Murphy's law actually states "Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong."

The documentary-style interviews of older survivors shown at the beginning of the film and again on the television playing in the farmhouse towards the end of the movie are from Ken Burns The Dust Bowl (2012). They are real survivors, not actors, of that natural disaster.

FILM 1339: EX MACHINA

TRIVIA: Director Alex Garland has described the future presented in the film as 'ten minutes from now'. Meaning that 'if somebody like Google or Apple announced tomorrow that they had made Ava, we would all be surprised, but we wouldn't be that surprised'.

When Caleb sits down at Nathan's computer and begins coding, the code he types is for an algorithm called the Sieve of Eratosthenes an algorithm for finding prime numbers. However it also chooses primes that form an ISBN = 9780199226559. This ISBN is for the book "Embodiment and the Inner Life: Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds", a book about the history of Artificial Intelligence.

The title derives from the Latin phrase 'Deus Ex-Machina', meaning 'a god From the Machine', a phrase that originated in Greek tragedies. An actor playing a god would be lowered down via a platform (machine) and solve the characters issues, resulting in a happy ending for all.

Early in the movie, Caleb listens to the OMD song "Enola Gay" (1980). The Enola Gay was the airplane used to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima at the end of World War II. Later, in talking to Nathan about how AI will transform the world, Caleb shares J. Robert Oppenheimer's quote from the Bhagavad Gita about the making of that atomic bomb ("I am become death, the destroyer of worlds").

Alex Garland's directorial debut.

Throughout the film, the colors red, blue, and green are prominently displayed in each scene (the green forest, the red brick hallway, the keypad's red and blue functions, etc.) This is a nod to the RGB color model, which is used to display images in electronic systems, such as computers. Ava, of course, being the main computer in the film.