Speaker 3
And it was one of those things that we kept talking about all during the shoot, which is why it was the last day of the shoot. And testing with different vehicles and testing with this, you know, going big first, you know, surely it should work this way and that way. And it ended up being so simple. It was really one of those cases where less is more.
Speaker 1
We couldn't afford to do it any other way. And I said, well, we don't need to. It's really about establishing the characters in this strange dark world with a moving
Speaker 2
light. It's so funny how things happen. That's amazing. It's amazing to talk about, you know, how the movie was originally going to begin because and it sounds like, you know, that's, that would have been an interesting intro. But of course, the way it hits a great scene, actually. You
Speaker 1
know, I mean, it was a beautiful show. I rarely regret scenes being cut out of movies because of the way they feel. Right. But that's one scene that kind of stays in my head and I teased Denny about it. So you've got to use that scene in the film you do sometimes. Right.
Speaker 2
It's pretty good. I mean, it's funny because the beginning of the movie to me seems so perfect in that it, it thrusts you as a viewer into the story with immediate suspense and immediate horror within the first five minutes. I mean, something it really reminds me of the shower scene in Psycho, the Hitchcock film Psycho, or, or the, you know, the opening of, you know, Jaws, where you, it's funny. I remember talking to director Scott Cooper about this in terms of the beginning of his film that we worked on together, Hostiles, where you want to set the table with the audience with something very, very violent and memorable. And that informs the rest of the movie. In other words, if you, if you believe with something like the shower scene, the viewer is, is then going to be in suspense or be afraid of, of something happening for the rest of the film. And that's something I think that Sicario does so brilliantly is that you start with this incredibly suspenseful scene where, where our protagonists discover these bodies. And the way you linger on these bodies, you, you're almost like, I mean, you're, you're kind of like sticking the viewer's nose, you know, you're making the viewer go nose to nose with a, with a corpse in the wall. And I thought that was extremely effective because you, that informs everything that comes after it.
Speaker 1
And that's the, that's the key of the key of the story in the sense that this is the world. This is what Benicio says is the wolf that's at the door. Yes. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's this, you know, drug cartels creating this kind of hell, really. So to establish it early, establish the aftermath of what these people are doing and these bodies hidden in this wall, that sets the whole film up as being, this is what we, you know, Emily, this is what Benicio and just what, what they're, you know, trying to
Speaker 2
combat. And what's interesting to me is that there's some imagery such as the bodies and the smeared blood on the plastic that's very, the beginning is very hard to watch in some ways because it's so gruesome. But you do this amazing thing where it isn't just that all of that is accompanied by the light, this sense of light. And it's the dust particles in that scene that we actually even come back to with some other insert shots when, you know, after we go to the FBI headquarters where we find ourselves about to embark on the mission and we're on this Lear jet that's flying and, at some point, we cut to these inserts, these details of light playing across the instrument cluster in the cockpit of the plane that Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin and we want to run. We see an insert shot, a beautiful insert shot of sneakers just kind of sloppily thrown on the floor with an empty peanut, a salt and peanuts wrapper and the light plays across that. So to me, what I remember is that I associate that light that is moving across things almost like a phantom infiltrating the aircraft, you know, almost like from from the Faratu or something like a vampire movie. I associate that light with the death that we had in the opening. So I feel like because I was experiencing all of that together, every time I see a certain sort of light that you do throughout the movie, it brings back, it brings back that horror of those hanging bodies, the bodies in the wall without having shown me the bodies. It brings, it evokes and brings back that feeling that I had. I'm in this almost like have lobbying way. And it's just amazing. And I, you know, something I want to ask you about is that, you know, I think how the movie is put together in the pace is so brilliantly done. I guess my quick question is, is it what you thought about or expected when you, when you were doing it? Like when you see the finished film, are there, you know, is it, is the pace in the editing what you kind of expected?
Speaker 1
Yeah, you know, having what we've done before that, yeah, I mean, we did something very similar on Prisma's and the way we, the way we work was very similar. We spent a lot of time just talking and conceptualizing and I
Speaker 3
think the biggest surprise to us was the soundtrack.