Chapter 316: A Luxurious New Crew

Have Jennifer Love Hewitt take drugs before filming? Duke might be a workaholic, but he hadn't lost his mind. Besides, she had only said that to show him, as the director, how committed she was.

Still, Jennifer Love Hewitt's hard work genuinely deserved credit. Her standout performance won over not just Duke, but the entire crew.

In front of the camera, Jennifer Love Hewitt, playing the daughter, was locked in a confrontation with her police officer father, played by Liam Neeson.

"Now you remember to care about me?"

She slouched in the room, seemingly using her posture to vent her resentment toward her father. "Isn't work the only thing you care about? The L.A.P.D., ha... they're your real family, aren't they? A cop upholding justice? You couldn't even keep my mom from leaving..."

With that, she shot Liam Neeson a bitter glare, spun around, and walked deeper into the room, tossing a cross necklace over her shoulder.

Liam Neeson watched his daughter's retreating figure, at a loss for how to talk to her—and completely unaware that she had already started using drugs.

The door slammed shut.

"Great!"

Duke offered a rare word of praise. "Jenny, Liam, good job. That was outstanding!"

As filming continued, Duke found that Jennifer Love Hewitt had far more range than Kate Beckinsale. Even so, breaking out of the teen idol mold was brutally hard. Never mind someone like her who had debuted as a pop singer—even Britney Spears had been battered and bruised when she tried to leave the teen idol path behind.

Jennifer Love Hewitt had solid talent and a strong work ethic, yet Duke remembered all too clearly how quickly her career had faded. It just went to show how crucial the right opportunity could be in Hollywood.

If she landed a role that suited her the way Juno suited Ellen Page, she could shoot straight to the top. If she didn't, she might simply sink into obscurity.

Of course, if this film succeeded, her path might very well change from here on out.

By late November, Duke began taking the crew out for location shoots around Wellington. The film didn't require many exterior shots, and he had already sent Anna Printz back to Los Angeles to film the true wide establishing shots.

It was hard to tell one city from another in tight shots without recognizable landmarks, but panoramic shots gave a location away at a glance.

Even though at most fifty percent of the film's plot matched the actual North Hollywood shootout, passing off a panoramic shot of Wellington as Los Angeles was the kind of rookie mistake Duke would never make.

Street filming in Wellington didn't take long. After just over a week, the crew returned to the studio lot to prepare for the most crucial sequence of all—the final climax, that insane shootout.

Not far west of the main soundstage, the open-air backlot had been transformed by the set and prop teams. Using sets and models, they had recreated the Bank of America Los Angeles Branch and a stretch of Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Repainted junk cars had been towed into their designated spots. Seen in close-up, it looked exactly like the morning the Bank of America robbery went down.

It was a massive scene involving nearly a hundred police officers, hundreds of civilians, dozens of reporters and cameramen, and hundreds of vehicles of every kind. Between the police and the gunmen, over 1,500 rounds of ammunition were fired, leaving 14 people injured and 2 dead in what was one of the most ferocious bank robberies in the history of Los Angeles and the entire country.

Still, for Duke, who had helmed the gritty, realistic war scenes of Saving Private Ryan, staging a sequence on this scale wasn't difficult.

In truth, filming the movie as a whole was straightforward enough. The real challenge lay in post-production editing—how he would cut the finished footage into a tightly balanced three-thread narrative.

If not for the chance to hone his command of three-thread storytelling, this film would have meant nothing to Duke.

Duke broke the entire shootout sequence down into countless small segments, filming them separately to be stitched together later in the editing room. It was the simplest approach, saving both time and effort. The film's budget was limited; even after Warner Brothers added another $2 million out of confidence in Duke, bringing the total production cost to $10 million, that was tight for a director accustomed to budgets of $50 million or more and earth-shattering set pieces. Without careful advance planning, going over budget would have been almost guaranteed.

Although filming had only been underway for a little over a month and was moving much faster than scheduled, Duke still wanted to wrap as soon as possible. What he was going through right now was sheer torture.

All while shooting, Duke had to oversee every stage of pre-production for The Lord of the Rings.

Unlike when he was filming The Matrix and the pre-production for The Lord of the Rings trilogy existed only as plans and designs on paper, preparations for The Lord of the Rings had now entered the critical stage of full-scale execution. Even without handling any specific tasks himself, simply giving final approval on props, sets, casting, makeup tests, visual effects, costumes, and filming locations was an exhausting mountain of work.

This was no longer a matter of reviewing plans on paper; he had to inspect the physical items in person. Otherwise, if he waited until cameras rolled only to discover that the props and locations didn't meet his standards...

If he left pre-production on The Lord of the Rings entirely to others, that kind of disaster was bound to happen.

Duke wasn't the only one being put through the wringer. His director of photography, John Schwartzman, and his art director, Hannah Serena, were suffering right there with him. When it came to inspecting locations, props, and sets, their presence at the director's side was indispensable.

If this pace dragged on much longer, Duke was sure the team's nerves would snap. People weren't machines, after all. Even if he could endure the grueling fatigue and pressure of prepping one film while shooting another, the rest of the crew might not hold up.

Fortunately, filming this realistic shootout wasn't particularly difficult for Duke and the team.

Jason Statham and Gerard Butler, who played the two gunmen, were the ones who really had to suffer. When Larry Phillips and Emil Matasareanu robbed the Bank of America, they had been armed to the teeth, wrapped head to toe in at least two layers of Kevlar. Each man's load weighed even more than a Navy SEAL Team operative's gear; calling them two hulking, bloated human monsters wouldn't be an exaggeration.

While Jason Statham and Gerard Butler didn't have to carry that kind of crushing weight, both still had to be padded out to match the gunmen's bulky build. It was summer in Wellington right now, and even with layers of highly breathable material wrapped around them, the heat was miserable.

The only saving grace was that Wellington's summer wasn't overly hot. Had they been shooting on the streets of Southern California in the middle of summer, that would have been a true nightmare.

Even so, Duke called a halt every hour or so to let Jason Statham and Gerard Butler strip off their thick gear and catch their breath. It slowed filming down, but if an actor went down with heatstroke, it would waste far more time.

Over the three days since the shootout scenes began, deafening noise had inevitably become the constant theme on set, and countless sedans had been riddled with bullets like hornets' nests.

During a break, Duke called Liam Neeson over.

"Did I make a mistake?" he asked as he walked up.

"No, you're doing great." Duke glanced at his suit. "In the next scenes, Liam, keep one thing in mind—rescuing the wounded always comes before everything else."

Liam Neeson nodded in understanding. "I get it."

Aside from this final shootout, Duke's script had largely departed from the actual incident. Still, a gunfight on screen could never just be a gunfight; it had to showcase the brilliance of humanity, and that spotlight naturally had to fall on the Los Angeles Police.

On the surface, two gunmen had pinned down nearly a hundred officers and left them barely able to fight back. It looked as though the Los Angeles Police had been thoroughly humiliated and would surely become the target of fierce public and media condemnation afterward.

In reality, the exact opposite happened: the Los Angeles Police later received unanimous praise. Setting aside the massive disparity in firepower between the two sides, the simple fact that many officers were wounded while shielding ordinary civilians was enough to overshadow any less flattering aspects.

By the time the film reached its finale, if it didn't lean toward the Los Angeles Police as the representatives of justice, what was it supposed to do? Plead the case for gunmen firing wildly at everyone in sight?

Some directors might be able to pull that off, but given Duke's current stature and position, that was completely out of the question.

So during this final shootout, the officers of the L.A.P.D. had to be tenacious, brave, and unyielding heroes who overcame superior firepower through sheer willpower—and at the end of the film, they would receive the full treatment accorded to every Hollywood hero.

Gunfire, shattering glass, panicked screams, and cries of pain rang out across the set almost constantly every day over the following week. Alongside those sounds, the number of remaining shots dropped rapidly, bringing the film's production close to the finish line.

By December 18, as the SWAT team led by Don Cheadle surrounded Jason Statham and gunned him down, the crew finally heard Duke announce that filming had wrapped.

Duke had finished shooting the new movie in just over a month and a half, much faster than planned. Yet neither he nor his director of photography, John Schwartzman, could hide the exhaustion on their faces. A vacation was an absolute necessity.

Even so, Duke couldn't leave New Zealand just yet; his rest had to be taken in Wellington. With the cameras wrapped, there was a wrap party for the crew, and he would attend. Though exhausted in both body and mind, he would do little more than make an appearance. The party was held on a large private beach he had rented out, offering plenty of space for him to rest in peace and quiet.

After instructing Anna Printz to send the day's film footage to the bank vault, Duke left the set. He walked back to his office and got on the phone with Tina Fey, who had returned to Los Angeles. She brought him updates on the negotiations with Google and The Matrix ending its theatrical run across global markets.