oh that's you hello and welcome back to another edition of the Kino corner starring me you see Kino is no longer with us alright mr. key no man has quite the sweet tooth and decided one day to try all the different flavors of the Flintstone vitamins needless to say mixing such a deadly combination together has led to his absence they're not so sweet now are they Kino recorded something personal for me before he passed and if you don't mind right now I'm gonna listen to it for a little bit not that following the production of Pete's dragon David Lowry used a portion of his Disney paycheck to fund and create his most personal film to date a ghost story filmed in secret in Dallas and for only a budget of about a hundred thousand dollars the ghost story was a small film that Lowry didn't expect to succeed but he made anyway it opened at Sundance and 8:24 bought the rights to the film instantly assuring that every upper middle-class white person between the ages of 16 and 35 would love the movie hence it saw some success in his garnered a bit of a cult following but how was it made and what does it mean I know you might be thinking Kino a hundred thousand dollars no way it's got Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara in it not to mention special-effects in-house destruction well let me remind you that Affleck and Mara had worked with allow a previously on the pretty great film ain't them bodies saints Larry also called in some help from the effects supervisor of Pete's dragon so if there's anything to learn from this it's that it can be pretty useful to have celebrity friends but what about the house we're gonna have to backtrack a little bit all the way to pre-production obviously it's a bit difficult to afford to buy a house and completely decimated when your budget is only a hundred thousand dollars but what Lowry and his team did was scout out condemned houses that were scheduled for demolition they found what would become the Picture House in pretty bad condition needless to say some of the shots from the test shoot made it into the film so you can see how the house looked before they spruced it up the house next to it was also condemned so they used that house to hold all the gear and art department stuff since they had to regularly redress the picture house and in the main house they really did elevate it to being kind of livable I mean some of the crew members actually did live in that house during the shoot but it was just a happy little accident that both houses were scheduled for destruction so when the shooting and the reshooting was done the filmmakers let the right authorities know that it was time for a little bit of what I like to call interment destruction the whole demolition of the house lasted 15 minutes that's probably as long as this video is going to be so think about it by the time you finish watching this video a whole house could be destroyed by a bulldozer since time was so limited and it's not like they could ask for another tape the filmmakers use three cameras for the demolition scene two cameras locked down with prime lenses and one camera with a zoom lens operated by the cinematographer Andrew Palermo as for the interior shot of when the destruction begins they had the camera in a crash box with the crew looking at monitors safely outside and speaking of camera a ghost story was mostly shot on the re Alexa Minnie so it's a digital film but I can't help but notice grain in the images perhaps the grain was added in during post visually the first thing that stands out with the ghost story is its aspect ratio not only did Lowry frame it in a 4 by 3 ratio he also put a vignette around the frame rounding its corners was there a purpose to this or was it just some stupid artistic gimmick Larry chose 2 4 by 3 ratio because he wanted to express a feeling of being trapped he wanted the ghost to be trapped within the box of this aspect ratio as he is trapped within the walls of his house there's also an element in the style juh to using this ratio in the vignettes on the corners heighten that nostalgia making the film look kind of like an old photograph the rounded corners also bring attention to the aspect ratio in the framing of the film so the audience is consciously aware of the framing and thus the claustrophobia of the situation if the film had been shot in a widescreen ratio it would have given the frames too much space too much freedom it would have gone against the themes of the film the 4 by 3 ratio also in my opinion heightened sea intimacy many of the scenes especially the scenes with both Affleck and Mara it's an aspect ratio that lends itself to close-ups for sure even though Lowry and Palermo held off on overusing close-ups in the film they had an idea initially to most of the scenes is medium or long shots but during the shoot they started to add in close-ups to avoid creating an overly clinical feeling to the movie the most famous scene from the movie is done as a medium shot you all know what I'm talking about yep the four-minute long shot of Rooney Mara eating an entire pie it's a breathtaking scene Mara's acting is captivating and the scene just breaks your heart some people think that this scene is super slow if you're one of those people go watch seats and tango and then come back to me but seriously go watch the otago I love it it's great that PI the Rooney Mara 8 was the first pie that she ever had in her life and get this it was a vegan low sugar chocolate pie honestly no wonder she threw up at the end I don't think I could have made it two bites in that's how you know that she's a great actress and in that shot the ghost just stands over her watching her the whole time but is he in reality the ghost was never shot in a scene with the humans no the ghost was shot separately and then composited into the frames with the people and not only that but the ghosts and the people were shot at separate frame rates the people at 24 frames per second in the ghost at 33 this gives a ghost a subtly different motion a slower motion just enough to make it feel as if it's not of this world but the ghost is of this world isn't it it's just some dude with a bedsheet draped over him I saw him get off that hospital bed and quick note about that scene Larry used a stopwatch to direct that shot as he wanted a flick to wait at least 60 seconds before he sat up on the bed but the ghost costume is simple it looks like a child's drawing of a ghost or like one of the kids ghost costumes from the Charlie Brown movie about the Great Pumpkin the costume though isn't as simple as you might think to achieve a more rounded look to the top Affleck had to wear a helmet and there weren't any bedsheets that were big enough for what was needed so it's not technically a bed sheet another problem they faced with the costume was it keeping its form so they had to use petticoats underneath the cloth to ensure that the costumes form was consistent throughout the film needless to say it wasn't the most comfortable costume especially considering the fact that they were shooting this film in the hot Texas heat but even after they perfected the costume for what they wanted I still posed a myriad of issues in terms of what they could and couldn't film it's safe to say that the costume limited a flex mobility he looks fine on camera when he walks slowly but not so when he ran because to avoid tripping over the cloth he would have to sort of bunnyhop around he wanted to move quickly it looks silly let's be real for a second here with this costume a lot could look silly so Lowry had to walk a tightrope when dealing with how the ghost acted too much movement in the film becomes a comedy too little movement and the ghost becomes a prop so Larry decided that the film wouldn't show the ghosts entrances and exits and halted his mobility and a lot of the scenes but he did show occasions of the ghost walking in interacting with the environment the fact that we don't see the ghosts enter scenes actually adds to its ethereal mood and they're surprisingly a lot of emotion with the way that Ghost moves his head the eyes are cut slightly diagonally given in a melancholy expression it's a cold sadness that envelops the whole character of the ghost and as the film progresses the ghost sheets get dirtier and dirtier there were three costumes used in the film each marked by a level of dirtiness as time passes the dirt builds up on the sheets which is crazy because this is a ghost we're talking about there's no way real dirt could get on a ghost here's how I see it and I could be wrong but as time passes the ghost becomes more and more tied to that plot of land as a human he didn't want to leave the house and as a ghost he's stuck in the house the dirt building on him it's like Earth shackling him to that place and the only key to those shackles is to note his wife left in the wall what does the note say no one knows Larry told Rooney to write something meaningful in the paper and then they put it in the hole in the wall it stayed there until the house was destroyed no one else read the note and the note that they use for the over-the-shoulder shots was just a blank piece of paper but what said on it doesn't matter in fact its impact would be lessened if we knew what was written and when he reads the note the ghost vanishes the sheets fall to the floor serving as the only remnant of the ghost in this world the technique that they used to achieve this effect was based on the vanishing lady magic trick that magicians use on stage weirdly enough there were actually magicians on set who did these practical effects one of whom played as the pioneer father speaking of the pioneer scene they shot that whole sequence over the course of 24 hours but had much less time to shoot it as they were contending with thunderstorms they can only shoot in between storms and downpours so they had about 15 to 20-minute intervals to get the shots that they needed the only lighting that they used was the fire and the lightning ellipses are he's frequently in the movie to move the ghost from one time or place to another and it's this kind of editing that gives the film a rather hypnotic rhythm and allows the passage of time to slip between our fingers the script was much different than the final film this is normal for movies Larry wrote the first 10 pages as being heavy with dialogue between Affleck and Mara but during the shoot Affleck suggested shooting a scene on the couch and that ended up becoming the first scene most of the dialogue scenes were either cut or repurposed for the final act we also don't see the relationship between the two main characters in a chronological way and you know who you can thank for that shane carruth the absolute legend if you haven't seen upstream color or primer well then go see them Carruth advised lowry to cut intuitively not rationally salah recut the film by feeling allowing the film to progress emotionally rather than chronologically which definitely creates a better experience for the viewer in the sense that we feel the build-up of emotion over the course of the film but also the fact that it's not an order plays right into how the ghost perceives time this is a case of a film essentially being rewritten in post-production and as I said earlier Lowry allowed actors to add to the script he'd write dialogue but always encourage actors to say their lines in the most natural way possible so if they needed to change around a few words that was fine one actor didn't and that was will oldham the prognosticator who is more dialogue in the film than anyone else and his scene has become the most controversial some people think it fits and some people think it ruins the film and explains everything too easily Larry wrote his speech long before he wrote the script of the film which may explain why it does feel different than the rest of the movie he did try cutting out the scene but said that the film became too vaporous that there wasn't much to latch on to so he put the scene back in funny story about the scene you might notice an appearance by Ke$ha Lowry wanted the extras dancing to a Ke$ha song during the party and she heard about it two days later she was on set in front of the camera but anyways Larry saw the scene as something tangible to give to the audience known as something that easily explains to film how could it explain the ghosts relationship to his wife his feelings the cosmos no it doesn't really explain that and you're reading the film entirely wrong if you think everything in the movie is summed up in this one monologue it's more of a prelude to the next segment think about it he talks about hammering in a fence post and what do we see immediate in the Pioneer seen a man hammering in a fence post and he talks about creating the song that after the fall of humanity someone homes its melody and what happens in the Pioneer scene the little girl hums the melody to a flex character song I get overwhelmed which means that in this scene he's not in the past but in the far future that perhaps in this world time is cyclical and everything is starting over again with a faint knowledge of the previous cycle but again that wasn't written into the script a guy who was working in the marketing department of a24 thought that she was humming the melody and Lowry loved the ideas so much that he brought the actress intercourse but after they finished shooting the film and for anyone curious the song is I get overwhelmed by dark rooms it just so happens that the lead of dark rooms is Daniel Hart the composer for the movie he gifted the song to larry while he was still writing the script while making the soundtrack Hart used programs to exponentially lengthen bits of the song to use his background music but for other parts of the score he created music based off the Tibetan Book of the Dead Old Testament verses and more okay I need to start wrapping things up so some quick factor unni's the other ghost was played by the director David Lowery the subtitles between the ghosts weren't written in the script but decided upon him post the most expensive shots in the film were the shots were Affleck was shirtless as they had to digitally remove his tattoos the scene with the kids in the bed looking at the door was inspired by the conjuring - yeah you heard that right the following scene where the ghost breaks two plates was inspired by poltergeist for an art film it sure has some mainstream influences and what about the movie a ghost story could have been Lowry initially wanted to make a horror movie or the ghost war sheet like he does in this movie but he'd make it as scary as it could be well I'm glad he didn't make that movie if you liked this video please leave a like comment and subscribe and I will see you all in the next video did you guys hear that too