Speaker 1: Who is it should die? People pay good money to
Speaker 1: see this movie. When they go out to a theater.
Speaker 2: They want clothed sodas, pop popcorn, and no monsters in
Speaker 2: the protection booths.
Speaker 3: Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring. It's another dry in windy
Speaker 3: day in Paradise.
Speaker 1: Based on all drivers.
Speaker 2: There's a situation developing at Ponderosa Elementary.
Speaker 1: There are twenty three kids who are stranded. Is there
Speaker 1: anybody in the area that picking them up? Is there
Speaker 1: anybody that can go and pick these kids up?
Speaker 4: Nine six, three days?
Speaker 1: I can get.
Speaker 5: It's just another rough fire, nothing new. Hi, Hi, I'm
Speaker 5: Mary Kevin. Kids.
Speaker 6: This is our bus driver, Kevin. I don't think you
Speaker 6: understand there and seen our situation here?
Speaker 5: Why we calmly? One single line? Do you know all
Speaker 5: of us are gonna be there? It's gonna take ten minutes.
Speaker 4: There have any safety protocols on this bus yep?
Speaker 1: You got that?
Speaker 3: Great?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that'll make all the difference.
Speaker 5: At approximately six thirty am this morning, a fire entered
Speaker 5: the town of Paradise.
Speaker 1: Where do you need to get to?
Speaker 5: My son's up.
Speaker 1: There with his grandma. It's too late.
Speaker 4: I'm too late.
Speaker 3: As a father, it's not too late, Kevin, can you
Speaker 3: hear me?
Speaker 5: N three?
Speaker 3: Jerry.
Speaker 7: Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth.
Speaker 7: I'm your host Mike White. On this episode, it is
Speaker 7: the return of Brandon K. McLoughlin. He is a special
Speaker 7: effects coordinator and he worked on the new film The
Speaker 7: Lost Bus. The film stars Matthew McConaughey, America Ferira, and
Speaker 7: my friend Ashley Atkinson, who gives a fantastic performance in
Speaker 7: this one. I think it's playing on Apple TV currently.
Speaker 7: Had a great time talking about mister McLoughlin. Hope that
Speaker 7: you have a great time listening to it. Enjoy the interview.
Speaker 4: Obviously, I want to talk to you about The Lost Bus,
Speaker 4: but I'm so curious, how did you even get into
Speaker 4: special effects in the first one family.
Speaker 6: For the most part, my uncle was in it, and
Speaker 6: I got hired on Twister as a PA. I worked
Speaker 6: that whole show, and I worked two other shows, just
Speaker 6: grinding and scraping at the carpet and concrete, and had
Speaker 6: an opportunity to join the Union. Joined the Union and
Speaker 6: it just took off from there. I fell in love
Speaker 6: with it. I've always been a mechanical mind, and I
Speaker 6: remember distinctly. Remember my mom tells me this all the time.
Speaker 6: She goes, yeah, I remember when you were were six
Speaker 6: years old and I bought you a little remote control car.
Speaker 6: Two hours after I gave it to you, it was
Speaker 6: all a partner bedroom, and you looked at me and said,
Speaker 6: don't worry, Mom, don't worry I'm just figuring out how
Speaker 6: it works, and I'll put it back together again.
Speaker 1: And I did. I put it back together again and
Speaker 1: I played with it.
Speaker 6: So I've always been I've always been that way, never
Speaker 6: been really good at school, always had something better to
Speaker 6: do in my mind, and it was always being outside
Speaker 6: and being physical building things. So it was a perfect
Speaker 6: fit once I got in and I just blossomed in there.
Speaker 6: And you mainly learn everything on the job, because there's
Speaker 6: no you can't go to a school.
Speaker 1: We have to know to do our job. Well.
Speaker 6: You have to be an electrician, you have to be
Speaker 6: you have to know hydraulics, you have to know water,
Speaker 6: you have to know elements, you have to know engines.
Speaker 6: You have to know everything for the most part, and
Speaker 6: a good amount, not just dabble.
Speaker 4: Well, especially you've got people's lives on the line. A
Speaker 4: lot of times.
Speaker 6: I've done a lot of things that will never do again.
Speaker 6: You know, it was commonplace thirty years ago. It was
Speaker 6: what we used to do, and nowadays it's either cgi
Speaker 6: or that they don't they don't want to risk it,
Speaker 6: or there's not enough people left in the industry that
Speaker 6: know how to do things like that. So when you
Speaker 6: do make the suggestion, there's usually you can do. That's
Speaker 6: that because you're more and more I'm dealing with people
Speaker 6: that have less experience in the industry as I do,
Speaker 6: and they're younger, and they've come up in theual effects world,
Speaker 6: not the physical effects, and I have to sit there
Speaker 6: and remind them, go, I've been in the business before
Speaker 6: there is visual effects, so yes, we can do anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: We talked a few years ago when you had worked
Speaker 4: on The Killers of the Flower Moon, and I seem
Speaker 4: to remember you're much more in the practical effects realm.
Speaker 4: And the thing that I always appreciate about effects, no
Speaker 4: matter whether they're practical or digital, is they're practically invisible.
Speaker 4: You're not there to draw attention to yourself. You're just
Speaker 4: there to add to the story. You must have had
Speaker 4: so many challenges with things like and I love that
Speaker 4: you have so many out west things, even there will
Speaker 4: be blood, like such a naturalistic film about the oil
Speaker 4: pumping and all those kind of things that must have
Speaker 4: been just arduous to work on that set.
Speaker 6: That For some reason, I don't know why I've fallen
Speaker 6: in this category, because if you look at my resume,
Speaker 6: there's a lot that falls in line where it's practical effect.
Speaker 6: But we're not using practical effects to tell the story.
Speaker 6: We're using practical effects to amplify the story, to add
Speaker 6: to it. And I think it's the hardest part of
Speaker 6: effects is doing your job to where it's as realistic
Speaker 6: as it possibly can be and have people watch it
Speaker 6: and don't think about it, Oh that was an effect
Speaker 6: or oh anything like that. Just be that's part of
Speaker 6: the story. That's I'm there to help tell the story.
Speaker 1: And I like that. I like that part because that
Speaker 1: means I'm doing my job well.
Speaker 4: How closely do you work with a director like a
Speaker 4: Paul Greengrass? How close do you work with him when
Speaker 4: it comes to helping him tell his story?
Speaker 6: Oh, hand in hand. I had a meeting with Paul,
Speaker 6: And mainly when you do films like this, where my
Speaker 6: job is a huge part of the job talking about
Speaker 6: lost bus, where it's a huge part of the storytelling
Speaker 6: aspect because if there was no fire, there wouldn't be
Speaker 6: the lost But so you mainly want to sit down
Speaker 6: and have a discussion and get the feel of what
Speaker 6: he's looking for to tell the audience. Because every director's different,
Speaker 6: they want to show something differently. Some directors might just
Speaker 6: want that in the background, just so it's in the
Speaker 6: corner of the frame so we can tell that there's
Speaker 6: something there. And with Paul it was right off the bat.
Speaker 6: It's fires a character in the story. It's the driving character.
Speaker 6: I don't want it to feel Another big one is
Speaker 6: that he said that he didn't want an audience member
Speaker 6: to sit there and go.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's just visual effects.
Speaker 6: One of the big things that we ended up doing
Speaker 6: the first meeting I had with Charlie and Paul Charlie
Speaker 6: the visual effects coordinator or supervisor. I said to him,
Speaker 6: I said, as long as we have practical fire in
Speaker 6: every scene, whether it's the full scene that's what the
Speaker 6: scene is calling for the element, or it's just half
Speaker 6: of it. If you keep practical fire and everything, then
Speaker 6: visual effects has to build to it or it has
Speaker 6: to use it right, because what I was fearful of
Speaker 6: is going from a visual effects fire to a practical fire,
Speaker 6: to a visual effects fire to a practical fire. And
Speaker 6: you see that a lot, and you can tell they're
Speaker 6: not the same. There's definite differences between the two of them.
Speaker 6: And they both agreed. They both we actually was the
Speaker 6: school is what we were talking about.
Speaker 1: Paul brought it up. He's like, how do we do this?
Speaker 6: When I said, we do the window boxes, and I
Speaker 6: do fire everywhere that I possibly can, and then Charlie
Speaker 6: builds on top of it. And that's exactly what happened.
Speaker 6: That's what we did because I'm also limited to how
Speaker 6: much fire I can do practically. You can't stand in
Speaker 6: a forest fire, real fire and act. It's just too much.
Speaker 6: Eats is just too intense. He had to pick and
Speaker 6: choose what we could do what we couldn't do, but
Speaker 6: it was really good.
Speaker 1: Paul is.
Speaker 6: Very charismatic. He's a filmmaker at heart. It is difficult
Speaker 6: working with him because it's hard to get all the
Speaker 6: proper information out, But once you work with him and
Speaker 6: you do a show with him, yeah, this is good
Speaker 6: to show him. But I know he's going to want
Speaker 6: to see this or have backup plans. So going into
Speaker 6: it that way, then it's not that big of a job.
Speaker 6: If you'd never worked with him and he walks on
Speaker 6: a set and you're supposed to do Norse and you've
Speaker 6: spent a month prepping due North, he turns around, he goes,
Speaker 6: I want to go do South.
Speaker 1: It's just that's just how he is.
Speaker 6: He likes getting on a set and feeling the set
Speaker 6: and seeing how the scene in his mind would play out,
Speaker 6: and using the set properly.
Speaker 1: So it was fun.
Speaker 6: I knew about that kind of stuff, but a lot
Speaker 6: of crews didn't, and it was always, oh my god,
Speaker 6: I'm like it was a good interaction with Paul. He
Speaker 6: was really appreciative. He was really appreciative of everything we
Speaker 6: gave him.
Speaker 4: Hey, because this wasn't your first time working with him.
Speaker 4: You did what News of the World?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I did News of the World with him.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that was the first one I did with him,
Speaker 6: And that's where I stumbled through it.
Speaker 1: And learned Paul.
Speaker 6: I don't know if you remember that movie very well,
Speaker 6: but there's a big wagon Flip. We spent about a
Speaker 6: month setting it up at this location and had it
Speaker 6: all rigged and set up, and we had I had second,
Speaker 6: you know, go out there with a whole full camera.
Speaker 1: Crew to shoot a test.
Speaker 6: And we did it and it worked great, and it
Speaker 6: was a whole cable pole and it was a bigger deal,
Speaker 6: and we showed him it was all that was great.
Speaker 6: That's great, And two days before we were going to
Speaker 6: go shoot it, he completely changed the location and that
Speaker 6: was the turning point for me. It was like, oh, okay,
Speaker 6: so we got it done. But it was one of
Speaker 6: those things where it was like you really you tweaked
Speaker 6: it and you got it to work really good, and
Speaker 6: it went down a specific way and the wheels came on.
Speaker 6: It was it worked great. And then he of course
Speaker 6: he throws that at you, and it's like, okay, think
Speaker 6: on your feet, it's beIN you move.
Speaker 4: I can see a wagon flip being a major ordeal.
Speaker 4: But just the amount of fire that you have in
Speaker 4: lost bus, you must have had so much need to
Speaker 4: prep things and just know where that fire is going
Speaker 4: to be, how big it's got to be. How do
Speaker 4: you even figure that out?
Speaker 6: I guess the easiest way to talk about this is
Speaker 6: Paul doesn't textcout. He usually shows up about two or
Speaker 6: three weeks before we start filming, so it's mainly executive producers,
Speaker 6: first AD department heads. We sit down and we figure out, okay,
Speaker 6: what would work the best. We have the outside of
Speaker 6: the box drawn, but the inside of the box isn't
Speaker 6: really detailed, and we don't know exactly where we're going
Speaker 6: to go, so we end up having to lock in
Speaker 6: a direction, pick the locations, talk about how we're going
Speaker 6: to end up.
Speaker 1: Shooting specific scenes.
Speaker 6: Then I can place the products that we built starting
Speaker 6: off first conversations that we had. I came up with
Speaker 6: we were going to have to at least have six
Speaker 6: to seven full burn sets, is what I was calling them,
Speaker 6: where it's fire everywhere, and in the state of New Mexico,
Speaker 6: which is the only state in the Union, you have
Speaker 6: to have a state appointed pro pane person certify everything
Speaker 6: that you're doing. Like in any other state, you can
Speaker 6: run stuff out and make it all happen. And in
Speaker 6: this size of a film, of course, I had to
Speaker 6: have somebody there, and I'd worked with them multiple times,
Speaker 6: but that was difficult because I knew I was going
Speaker 6: to what I was going to get into with Paul,
Speaker 6: where you could only I could only move so much.
Speaker 6: Built forty trees three foot diameter and sixteen feet tall.
Speaker 6: We built like sixty bushes. We had a bunch of cars,
Speaker 6: we had a bunch of partial buildings, and so we
Speaker 6: spent a lot of time in the production office with
Speaker 6: a big layout of the back lot that we had,
Speaker 6: and we came up with, Okay, the bus can make
Speaker 6: this turn to Paul really wanted to stay close to
Speaker 6: what happened in reality, so we had to lay out
Speaker 6: with the small little box that we had. We had
Speaker 6: to lay out the whole travel of the bus picking
Speaker 6: the kids up, going to Paradise Elementary, and then trying
Speaker 6: to get out. So we had to lay all that out.
Speaker 6: The bus had to turn left here, they had to
Speaker 6: turn right here. It had to have fire on this side,
Speaker 6: had to have fire on that side. So there was
Speaker 6: a lot of conversations. And once we started laying everything
Speaker 6: out and had ideas of where we could place stuff,
Speaker 6: I would go out and temporarily put things, not plumb them,
Speaker 6: but put stuff, and then we'd go walk the set,
Speaker 6: you know, with the group without Paul, and go, yeah,
Speaker 6: that'll work, that'll can you move that tree? Because we're
Speaker 6: going to make the turn there. So once we locked
Speaker 6: all that in, then I had a crew guys going
Speaker 6: hard plumb everything to the propane tanks. It was a
Speaker 6: three three and a half month prep for me and
Speaker 6: a crew of thirty five guys thirty eight.
Speaker 4: At one point, what are you building those bushes and
Speaker 4: trees and cars out of? Because it's it can't be flammable.
Speaker 6: Right, Yeah, it's all steel. The trees we built, I
Speaker 6: had a bunch of sixty sixteen gauge I think it
Speaker 6: was sixteen gauge sheet metal rolled at a tank manufacturer
Speaker 6: in Albuquerque, and they sent us sections. We welded the
Speaker 6: sections together and then on the outside of that we
Speaker 6: welded on electrical conduit metal electrical conduit and then put
Speaker 6: chicken wire around that, and then we used I had
Speaker 6: a done this before, so we had an idea of
Speaker 6: what to do, and then we used a fire place
Speaker 6: mortar so it resists heat. For the most part, is
Speaker 6: a concrete base, but it's formulated to withstand a lot
Speaker 6: of heat. And I found online. I found a pine
Speaker 6: tree silicone stamps. So we would do a little section
Speaker 6: and then stamp it and then do a little section
Speaker 6: and stamp it and you could literally be standing a
Speaker 6: foot away from it and not know it was a
Speaker 6: fake tree. And we only built and it was the
Speaker 6: thing that some people had a problem with. But if
Speaker 6: you look at pictures from Paradise, they're all ponderosa pines
Speaker 6: and the branches don't start until sixteen seventeen feet up
Speaker 6: in the air. It's just massive trunk and then you
Speaker 6: start getting into the top of the tree. So all
Speaker 6: we built was trunk. I had a couple little nubs
Speaker 6: on some of the trees just to make look but
Speaker 6: we were never going to be looking up. We were
Speaker 6: never going to be looking super high. And we already
Speaker 6: knew that those big, massive wide shots that are in
Speaker 6: the movie that practically you can't do that with fire.
Speaker 6: That was always going to be visual effects. There were
Speaker 6: fires in there that were ours, but we knew that
Speaker 6: those big, massive white shots were going to be visual effects.
Speaker 6: There's just physically you can't do that and keep it
Speaker 6: under control.
Speaker 4: I imagine that's got to be the watch word, is
Speaker 4: control and just making sure you can turn it on,
Speaker 4: turn it off, that nothing's going to catch on fire
Speaker 4: that's not supposed to. I mean, safety has to be
Speaker 4: such a major concern on a.
Speaker 1: Set like that, Yeah, it was. There was always.
Speaker 6: I required a lot of rehearsals, especially when we had
Speaker 6: a lot of people running around when they got stuck
Speaker 6: on one of the roads. I forget the name of
Speaker 6: the road. It was the big main road and there
Speaker 6: was a bunch of people running around. We rehearsed that
Speaker 6: for hours before we shot that. Just moving vehicles, fire,
Speaker 6: It's just throw all the elements at them as you can,
Speaker 6: a bunch of smoke, all that kind of stuff. So
Speaker 6: it was. It was always well rehearsed. We had a
Speaker 6: great stunt team. Everybody was really on point and we
Speaker 6: knew everybody knew what was going on. Where we were
Speaker 6: shooting was in the center of Santa Fe. And I'm
Speaker 6: not kidding you. It was in the center of the city.
Speaker 6: I had houses, schools, I had businesses. Everything was around us.
Speaker 6: It was a logistical nightmare to try to get the
Speaker 6: city to say yes, you know, I was a huge
Speaker 6: battle right at the beginning, me smoozing them and having
Speaker 6: trying to build the confidence that was needed for the
Speaker 6: city planners and the city council and the fire department
Speaker 6: and the police department. But I had worked there a
Speaker 6: couple of times, and I knew the chiefs, and I
Speaker 6: knew quite a few people, and it was it was
Speaker 6: more along the lines of just telling them what the
Speaker 6: plan was and what what my thoughts were and how
Speaker 6: I was going to move forward with it.
Speaker 1: And everybody was pretty cool. They were pretty decent. It
Speaker 1: was only the.
Speaker 6: Police department was a little bit hard to get through
Speaker 6: just because of the amount of smoke that we were
Speaker 6: going to have. It was live traffic all the way
Speaker 6: around us. It was live traffic. And my biggest concern
Speaker 6: was is that we were going to have white outs
Speaker 6: and we were shooting this at night.
Speaker 1: That was my biggest concern.
Speaker 6: That we would end up getting to a point where
Speaker 6: the wind was moving just right and the main thoroughfare
Speaker 6: in Santa Fe bordered one side of our property, and
Speaker 6: I was worried about putting so much smoke in then
Speaker 6: we'd have accidents. So the on specific days that we
Speaker 6: were doing that amount of smoke, we had police officers,
Speaker 6: We had big construction signs, lit construction signs saying hey,
Speaker 6: filming in the area, there's no fire. And that was
Speaker 6: another thing, having the citizens freak out that something's burning
Speaker 6: that didn't know what was going on, so we did.
Speaker 6: Before we started shooting, we did a lot of social media,
Speaker 6: Hey this is going on, please be aware. You don't
Speaker 6: need to call nine one one. And the first night
Speaker 6: we started shooting, they had something like eight hundred and
Speaker 6: fifty calls.
Speaker 1: To nine one one.
Speaker 6: I was standing next to the fire chief on set.
Speaker 6: I required the fire department there, even though it was
Speaker 6: completely under control and there was nothing that was going
Speaker 6: to burn and everything. I just personally want to have
Speaker 6: somebody who's got a radio to the closest fire, you know,
Speaker 6: calling nine one one, then has got to go to them.
Speaker 1: Then it just turns into a nightmare.
Speaker 6: And we were sitting there talking one night and he
Speaker 6: goes yeah, or the first night and he goes, yeah,
Speaker 6: the phones are ringing off the hook, and everybody knew.
Speaker 6: It wasn't like we were trying to sneak something by
Speaker 6: it just do people don't pay attention to their phones
Speaker 6: or whatever, and they didn't see this warning and everything else,
Speaker 6: or the big construction signs, so they'd be called, oh
Speaker 6: my god, the college is on fire. No, it's okay,
Speaker 6: we're filming.
Speaker 4: He talked about how fire is one of the main
Speaker 4: characters of the movie, and obviously right there in the
Speaker 4: I got the bus. Were you in charge of any
Speaker 4: of the vehicle stuff as well?
Speaker 6: I wasn't in charge of the vehicles, But what does
Speaker 6: fall in my lap is the safety of the children.
Speaker 6: So we spent time in sealing the buses up to
Speaker 6: where they were not hermetically sealed. We filled gaps and
Speaker 6: closed vents and stuff like that, and then I came
Speaker 6: up with an idea before we started shooting was to
Speaker 6: purchase the air purifiers. So I got two big air
Speaker 6: purifiers and we put them all the way at the
Speaker 6: back of the bus, so I was always circulating the
Speaker 6: air inside the bus and any kind of particulate that
Speaker 6: was going to be in there. But I wasn't emitting
Speaker 6: anything into the air that was going to be harmful.
Speaker 6: It's just children. You don't want to expose them to.
Speaker 6: Even if you've got the okay and all the research
Speaker 6: and the products that you're using, do you try to
Speaker 6: do as much as you possibly can to protect that.
Speaker 6: Because I knew we were going to run into problems
Speaker 6: with parents and SAG and everything else working with children.
Speaker 6: That's one of the things you don't do in film.
Speaker 6: You don't work with animals, and you don't work with children.
Speaker 6: It's a problem problem because you can't get around it.
Speaker 4: Well, especially you're shooting at night, and I know there's
Speaker 4: all kinds of rules about like kids working at late
Speaker 4: hours and all that stuff as well. That must have
Speaker 4: been difficult too, it was.
Speaker 6: And then we pitched the idea of building a little
Speaker 6: gimbal for the bus, so we had a stage, and
Speaker 6: we turned one of the stages into a volume stage
Speaker 6: so that we could shoot during the day and use
Speaker 6: the majority of their hours in the school bus.
Speaker 1: And have that element.
Speaker 6: And then I was able to rock it and roll
Speaker 6: it and like it was going down a bunch of
Speaker 6: rough road and everything else. We ended up spending I
Speaker 6: think it was like two weeks two and a half
Speaker 6: weeks like that in element stage. And I had hid
Speaker 6: firebars that would move.
Speaker 1: And be able to throw the light in the bus.
Speaker 6: And because the interior of the bus was like an
Speaker 6: awe slightly off white, but it was it was a
Speaker 6: gloss so it would pick up as you see the movie.
Speaker 6: You can see it in the movie. You can pick
Speaker 6: up the flame flickering and dancing in the bus and
Speaker 6: everything else. So we did that on stage, and I
Speaker 6: also had concern the bus. I had a backup planet
Speaker 6: if there was going to be an issue with anybody saying,
Speaker 6: oh my god, it's too close to the fire, so
Speaker 6: on and so forth. That we had a magnet system
Speaker 6: that we could put on the bus and hang welding blanket,
Speaker 6: black welding blanket that would have completely blocked all the heat.
Speaker 1: But we never ended up using it.
Speaker 6: Nobody ever said anything like that, but it's that's part
Speaker 6: of my job, is trying to solve problems before they're problems.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 6: The majority of this is you don't walk into a
Speaker 6: film like this and go, Okay, I'm.
Speaker 1: Gonna do fire everywhere.
Speaker 6: No, you start off by making sure everybody's comfortable with you,
Speaker 6: then laying out all the safety and how you would
Speaker 6: protect just in case something happened, and then you figure
Speaker 6: out how are you going to do the fire, and.
Speaker 4: I know you're talking about the kids and everything, and
Speaker 4: then I'm sure you have to deal with the actors
Speaker 4: and having them too close to the fire. I'm hoping,
Speaker 4: and I'm sure that there were a lot of stunted
Speaker 4: people that were doubling our main actors. But how close
Speaker 4: is like McConaughey and America Ferrer were getting close to that.
Speaker 1: America Ferrer was pretty close a couple times.
Speaker 6: It was we would light it up and then we'd
Speaker 6: walk her in and she would go to where she's comfortable.
Speaker 6: So it was never Okay, stand here and then the
Speaker 6: fire is gonna light And there was never any of that. Yeah,
Speaker 6: there was never any of that. It was always we
Speaker 6: would bring it up and then they would get to
Speaker 6: a point where they were comfortable, and then Paul would
Speaker 6: set the shot and then we'd reset every thing and they.
Speaker 1: Go, Okay, here we go.
Speaker 6: But you'd be surprised Matthew was doing a lot of it.
Speaker 4: It seems like he would do that.
Speaker 6: He's a good old boy. He's a good old boy.
Speaker 6: We had some good conversations. I think acting is something
Speaker 6: he fell into, but if he didn't, he would be
Speaker 6: an efects guy or a stunt guy. He drove the
Speaker 6: bus a lot. There was very few times we built
Speaker 6: pods for the bus so that we could remote drive it,
Speaker 6: and we used them, but we didn't use them nearly
Speaker 6: as much as we thought we were going to be
Speaker 6: using them. So it was he was just gung ho.
Speaker 6: He said, no, I got this. There was a couple
Speaker 6: of times where the stunt coordinator came out to me.
Speaker 6: He goes, no, Matthew's going to drive through that, and
Speaker 6: I'm like, if you're cool with it, I'm cool with it,
Speaker 6: but let's have something backup standing by okay, just in case.
Speaker 6: So there's a running joke between the two of us.
Speaker 6: But no, it came out great, man, and it really did.
Speaker 6: The one that I'm talking about right there is the
Speaker 6: phone pole. He's driving through the scene and the telephone
Speaker 6: poles are breaking and falling, and Matthew drove that that
Speaker 6: was not a stunt driver. When I found that out,
Speaker 6: I had to end up put I put safeties in
Speaker 6: so I could stop that pole just in case he's
Speaker 6: not on his mark or something like that, because I
Speaker 6: wasn't planning on it.
Speaker 1: I was planning on a stunt driver and going.
Speaker 6: Okay, the pole drops here, don't be here, and you
Speaker 6: can trust that if you know the driver, if you've
Speaker 6: worked with him before, so on and so forth. Then
Speaker 6: I had worked with this stunt team multiple times. But
Speaker 6: when he said yeah, Matthew's going to drive him, like okay,
Speaker 6: So I had to go back to the drawing board
Speaker 6: and figure out how to stop a eight hundred pound
Speaker 6: pole following it twenty five miles an hour.
Speaker 4: Sounds like so much of your job as just forming
Speaker 4: relationships with other people.
Speaker 6: You do jobs like this, and you're responsible for people's lives,
Speaker 6: you know. And I don't think there's enough guys in
Speaker 6: my position that think that way. I think they spend
Speaker 6: more time thinking that it's a job and it's not.
Speaker 6: People come up to me and we're talking about a gag,
Speaker 6: and sometimes I step back and I go, they're gonna
Speaker 6: run at fifty miles an hour head into a dumpster
Speaker 6: and they're trusting me to pull the dumpster out of
Speaker 6: the way. When you think about it that way, make
Speaker 6: sure it's right. You build much more of a relationship
Speaker 6: than you would with just having a conversation with somebody
Speaker 6: in a supermarket, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: So it's yeah, you know what I'm saying. And it's
Speaker 1: the same with my guys.
Speaker 6: It's the same with my guys because I put them
Speaker 6: in situations or I'm in situations, and I'm trusting them,
Speaker 6: even lighting fires, even lighting the pilots on fires. You
Speaker 6: better trust the guy that's on the bottle, because if
Speaker 6: you're standing right there and you're lighting it, it could
Speaker 6: completely engulf you in flames. So it does take a
Speaker 6: little bit higher of a stance than just shaking somebody's hand.
Speaker 6: You know people you know pretty well. So, but that's
Speaker 6: why you hire the people you hire. That's one of
Speaker 6: the big things. Not everybody can do what we do,
Speaker 6: and it takes experience, and it takes the proper mindset.
Speaker 6: It takes that kind of a relationship that you can
Speaker 6: trust somebody to do it and say, hey, you're going
Speaker 6: to go prep this car to explode, and know that
Speaker 6: you're saying something to somebody who understands who's done it before,
Speaker 6: and everything's going to be safe because it could be
Speaker 6: a piece of glass that hits the director, it could
Speaker 6: be a car door that came off and hit an actor,
Speaker 6: and that's it.
Speaker 1: That's the end of it, you know what I mean.
Speaker 6: So it's there is a lot there that I wish
Speaker 6: we could portray a lot more in the industry, but
Speaker 6: cost money.
Speaker 4: Well, what are you working on now, my tan, how's
Speaker 4: that going for you?
Speaker 6: The business is pretty slow right now. I'm sure you're
Speaker 6: aware of it. There's a big shift going on. So no,
Speaker 6: I haven't. I haven't worked since January. I did a commercial,
Speaker 6: but I'm trying trying to find something to do. But
Speaker 6: it's just it's dead. It's really it's a sad state
Speaker 6: of affairs, a real sad state of affairs. I've lost
Speaker 6: a lot of friends out of the industry. That's the
Speaker 6: worst I've ever seen it. In thirty two years.
Speaker 4: Casting your mind back twenty years ago, were you just
Speaker 4: working all the time?
Speaker 6: In thirty two years, I've never had more than two
Speaker 6: months off at any given time. It was always job
Speaker 6: after job after job after job after job. There was
Speaker 6: times where when I was working with Steve Kremen, we
Speaker 6: worked for four years straight in a row. We literally
Speaker 6: I would finish a job, he would leave a month
Speaker 6: early to go start prepping another job, and we would
Speaker 6: just constantly do that. I've been really fortunate to work
Speaker 6: on the projects that I have been that I have
Speaker 6: worked on. I look at my resume and I step
Speaker 6: back and I go, damn, good films on there. And
Speaker 6: I've been one of the fortunate ones. And where I
Speaker 6: haven't had this grounge around, There's always been phone calls
Speaker 6: people are calling and everything else, and it's very new
Speaker 6: to me to be in this position. And it's just
Speaker 6: there's just no work. The producers and the up ms
Speaker 6: and the directors that I know that everybody's in Europe
Speaker 6: or they're not working. I can't go to Europe.
Speaker 4: So well, Miss McLaughlin, thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate this absolutely, Mark, thank you.
Speaker 2: Get me a yeah, gotam doubles coming down the street,
Speaker 2: gate out the boy, oh dean, what I be doing
Speaker 2: here becomes the double dungeon consist on the street, dramatic
Speaker 2: off the transpass.
Speaker 5: That's the way my last ain't no card, care a rap?
Speaker 1: What I kin?
Speaker 5: Downtown? Now I'm gonna drink, That's what I wanna say.
Speaker 5: But I'm no sleeps the flak.
Speaker 2: It didn't kind of way, you know, right, I can
Speaker 2: say so man, well I can understand the town down.
Speaker 2: Everybody is getting down, say o town same downtown. Well,
Speaker 2: I'm missing my bust, dor leave, I do something to
Speaker 2: await walk to work. Fifteens already got off live.
Speaker 6: So that's okay.
Speaker 8: Of course, what I really wanna say, I got bad.
Speaker 2: Feet, my coins hurt.
Speaker 5: It's top. But all think the work.
Speaker 1: Let me tell you when I say, when I'm thinking.
Speaker 5: What I'm doing this side and let me see you
Speaker 5: have when I can I do my fuck walk. Let
Speaker 5: me tell you what I what I'm.
Speaker 1: Thinking, what I'm.
Speaker 9: I said, He's ain't Usul, you know he's at the
Speaker 9: missles at the Wizard says, so the kids out today?
Speaker 9: Business is.
Speaker 5: That us a miserable Willie shows you.
Speaker 8: Killer wheels, That news up baby, will sell up lay double,
Speaker 8: then that still double, then that the double, then that
Speaker 8: will they up lay double, then that the doubles there
Speaker 8: double the las.
Speaker 9: Movie kills still rule kills.
Speaker 2: Us my kisser, We'll say, is it's always out Willsie,
Speaker 2: Willie bif my dam ala o Sam, But only get
Speaker 2: your grouping with the double dute man.
Speaker 5: Put off your.
Speaker 2: Skates, don't book in your rope because I know I'm
Speaker 2: gonna seeing you at my double Dutch show. Rup back up,
Speaker 2: slowly down for Sean and Doharty. May time you do
Speaker 2: the double done? You really turned it on, Bill Sarpery,
Speaker 2: Bill Sam Rep Bill Saddy, Bill Sam Till Sammie, Will
Speaker 2: Sam Rins and Phil Sobbie. That's my man, Come on,
Speaker 2: get all.
Speaker 5: My double dutch bush.
Speaker 2: Let me, he say, Let me he say do that again.
Speaker 5: Let me say d d.
Speaker 2: Let me saying dude, don't do that.
Speaker 5: Do dude, do that?
Speaker 1: Do that?
Speaker 5: Doti to m hm