kids.
...the roof pretty much blew off
the Alamo Drafthouse
when Leonard turned around.
'Cause he was there watching it
with those guys,
and it was just one of those moments,
you know, in life
-where I was basically, "Wow."
-I wish I had been there.
-I can't believe you weren't there.
-I cannot stand it.
It's so wrong.
And unlike other time travel stories,
this is the first time
where the knowledge of time travel
is even relevant to this story.
Everything to this point could have
played completely linearly,
and as such, it doesn't rely
on the time travel gimmick at all.
And the perfect use of a curse
in a movie, right there.
I remember
when I first saw Temple of Doom,
and Indiana Jones is in the middle
of the bridge,
and he looks,
and basically Mola Ram's guys
are coming at him from both sides,
and he just says, "Shit."
And I just felt like,
"Wow, you know, I can't believe..."
There were no curses in Raiders.
-That's funny.
-The fact that they just
basically deployed
their one bad word there.
And I felt like, again, an equally
judicious use of the doody word.
So this sequence coming up,
the mind-meld was sort of a...
We didn't spend any time on this
sequence at all.
It was like the first time we did it,
that's what ended up onscreen.
It took us, like, five minutes.
Not only did it take
obviously a million passes,
I think everyone trying something
at least a few times,
but we also recorded Leonard doing it
I think half a dozen times
in different ways.
But, finally, literally in the last night,
I believe in the last, like,
half hour of overtime that we had
on the mix of this movie,
I decided to mix it up
and just make it weird and mysterious.
I felt that if we said to the audience
that you are not intended or expected
to hear and understand everything,
that somehow it removed the burden
of not following it.
-Right.
-It also makes you weirdly
pay attention more, as opposed to
it's just a bunch of words that drone on.
Yeah, just having it be
more of a drug trip,
and just this bizarre kind of, you know...
More of a mind-meld
and less of a lecture.
There's the squid ship, which I feel,
you know, some key design elements
came from Bryan Hitch,
who is a great comic book illustrator.
The hardest part about this sequence,
though, is just that
you either get the audience to go,
"That is really cool.
"Now I understand everything,"
or they say, "You've just lost me
-"because it's too complicated."
-I gotta say,
what blows my mind is
in the early screenings that we had,
we had so many notes
and questions and confusions
-about this whole sequence.
-About that sequence, yeah.
And by losing the prison sequence,
and by making this more obtuse,
intentionally obtuse, and sort of esoteric,
people accepted it more as a...
And by the way,
it allowed the music that I think was,
we were...
Again, Giacchino, brilliantly done.
It allowed the sequence
to be more impactful.
So even moments like this, when
the ships get pulled into the black hole,
you feel them more,
and you experience it more,
and it's less about intellect,
and more about a visceral moment.
And we learn that story over and over
again on everything we work on,
whether it's Lost or Fringe,
or you guys on Alias, that,
what is the balance of exposition that
the audience needs to follow the story?
And that if you cross over that line,
you confuse them
-as opposed to elucidate them.
-Yeah, and you lose them.
Yeah, it's true.
This was the one shot
from the prison sequence
that we kept in the movie.
-Which is a much bigger moment than...
-And you can see that his ear
got bitten off somewhere.
And this is a very cool sequence,
to basically say, like,
"Nero was waiting around for 25 years,
but it was just a second for me."
-Yep.
-I always liked, too, the idea that
the black hole was both a staple of
time travel devices in science