- The elevator is an important character in the movie.
Margot Robbie's character Kayla
leans back against the back wall.
I wanted Megan to kind of be the watcher
and I wanted Kayla to be in the back
and you just feel like she's stuck there
and she's going to have to take this horrible journey up.
♪ ♪
Hi. My name is Jay Roach.
"- Jay Roach is an Emmy, Golden Globe and Peabody
award-winning producer and director."
- I'm the director of the movie "Meet the Parents."
"- All right now look, father."
- The "Austin Powers" franchise.
"- Do I make you horny?"
"- In recent years, Jay is helms some of the most
acclaimed political docudramas."
"- Jay Roach."
"- His name is Jay Roach.
I'm going to give a shit, all right."
Literally...
- Well, you really underplayed that."
- Today, we're going to break down and analyze
the elevator scene in "Bombshell."
♪ ♪
So "Bombshell" is the movie about several women
who worked at Fox News.
Who ended up taking down one of the most powerful media figures at the time
Roger Ailes, who founded and ran Fox News.
"- But I need to know that you're loyal.
I need you to find a way to prove it."
- And it's partly a story about sexual harassment in the workplace.
Because I was portraying real-life women...
"- Women are everywhere. We let them play golf and tennis now,
it's out of control. - You know what?"
...who would be controversial.
It was extremely important to get the very best actors
on the planet to play each of them.
And Roger Ailes would pit the women against each other.
The idea was to trap them in a situation
where they were in the same place,
but couldn't talk about it.
And it's an extremely simple scene on its face,
but there are a lot of complicated elements that went into it.
So let's go through a shot by shot
and I can get at some of the specific choices
that went into exactly
how it was staged and designed and shot.
Let's check out the elevator scene in "Bombshell."
"- This is Kayla."
- So at the beginning of the scene,
Margot Robbie's character Kayla
who we know is being harassed by Roger Ailes
gets a call to come up for another visit with Roger.
"- Hi.
Uhm."
- Jess played by Kate McKinnon.
She knows that she's in for more trouble
and she's watching her and there was even a sense
that other executives are watching or two.
Everybody's always watching.
There's a sense of being surveilled the entire time
you're in this movie.
She's stuck there
and she's going to have to take this horrible journey up,
but it gets worse.
In walks Megyn Kelly.
One of the interesting choices,
I actually didn't want them to just seem stagy
and preset there.
So I had some background actors walk into the shot too,
so it just felt more real.
A lot of times what you're trying to do in this kind of staging
is mess it up a little bit.
You can make it so clean that it feels fake.
Choosing total hell.
Her favorite mentory role model
is studying her.
She just couldn't be in a worse
more disturbing and upsetting situation,
but it does get worse.
I let the background people come out of the scene
and in walks Nicole Kidman playing Gretchen Carlson.
Now the three of them are trapped in this box.
"- Hot in here."
We're sort of rooting for them to come together as three strong women,
but Roger Ailes has made it
so that they're afraid of each other.
So one of the things that not just shot listing and storyboarding
that helps me is I have a breakdown
that I do for every scene.
What's the camera doing?
Is that a moving camera, static camera?
Is it a wide-angle kind of feel
or a long lens filled with selective focus.
What are the turning points in the scene?
What are they all the key moments?
In this case,
I knew that when Kayla walked in
that was a kind of a beginning of tension.
Then that each new characters entrance was another ramp-up
of the tension of the scene.
All those things came from that "What Matters Breakdown"
But the challenge was
how do you shoot that?
Where did the cameras go in a box?
The elevator is an important character in the movie
because traveling from flour to flour to flour
had a very important meaning.
To go up to see Roger Ailes on the second floor
meant you were talking to the boss
and maybe on the way up as an ambitious anchorperson reporter.
But it also meant
that you were walking into a sexual predator's den.
The elevator became in a really important motif for that.
We had to build an elevator that actually could be taken apart.
So we could put the actors in and pull panels out
and shoot from different angles with multiple cameras.
This particular film.
There are always multiple cameras.
So there's never a time
when an actor is off-camera.
Much of filmmaking as we all know is issue one direction.
Somebody's talking from off-camera.
You're the actor on cameras looking at them past the lens.
In this case, we never did that
because I wanted a sense of tension at all times.
And I never wanted a sense of I'll do my good acting
when I get to my close-up.
I told the actors you're on camera all the time.
Barry Ackroyd and I talked about where the cameras would be
during most of the scenes.
We would shoot the three-shot from the front at the same time
as that great side-shot over Margo towards Charlize Theron.
Long lens probably like 75-millimeter lens
from fairly up-close
and now suddenly were into the mind
of what's she going through.
A long lens can even seem more intimate than a up-close camera and a wide lens
because of the selective focus.
This is an empathy machine.
Movies and storytelling to pull you close into what these people are experiencing
and asking you to put yourself in those shoes.
Long lens can be very very effective.
A lot of times we start close
which is different from the way you often shoot them.
A lot of DPS prefer to start wide,
light for the whole scene and then work their way in
and then they can piece the lighting end to make it more dramatic.
In scenes where the actors are facing each other
you very often back cross keys.
Just means the cameras are on one side of the line.
And the lighting is coming from the other side.
So each person's backlight is the other person's key light.
But in this particular scene,
we lit for the general feel of the elevator.
You know, I knew it needed to be kind of bright and uncomfortable.
Everyone should be able to see each other really well.
We weren't exactly sure where everyone would stand
and I just rehearsed it.
I wanted Megan to kind of be the watcher
and I wanted Kayla to be in the back
and hope that she could hide how she felt.
Once you rehearse and figure out where the camera is going to be
you do have to keep tracking,
kind of edit the film in your mind at the monitor.
To work back and make sure
that the geography is clear enough
that the audience can keep track of what's going on.
And it allowed everything to be less stagy.
It was more live, more performance-driven.
It just made everything
that much more real and immediate and suspenseful.
The suspense is will these women support each other?
And in this whole scene,
you wonder maybe they won't.
Will other women come forward?
♪ ♪
So that's how we shot the elevator scene in "Bombshell"
to create the maximum amount of suspense
and story importance as the pinch point
in the middle of the movie.
I should say one important motto I start every day with
script and cast, script and cast, script and cast.
When I'm working, there's so much of a temptation to think too much
about the technical, the lenses
and all the many millions of distractions.
But if you just think, am I serving the script?
Am I making it possible for the cast to be their very best?
That's what this scene is a perfect example of.
If you have scenes
that you admire that are suspenseful like this,
please tell us about them.
We'd like to hear what you would recommend.
♪ ♪