Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/569837
dga quarterly 21 Here Austin is in a West Side Story rumble with Britney Spears. It's Jets versus Sharks with the finger snap. Austin with old- fashioned costumes and eccentric dancers versus Britney's skintight leather, metro- sexual men and pyrotechnics. Her set is deliberately designed in blacks and grays. The worlds clash as he brings color to the set. It's a showdown between color and joy, and this more commercialized video thing that Britney represents. As Austin's joyfully colored band of Carnaby Street dancers advance on Britney, we go from quick for- mal shots to more swirly, encircling shots. It took a while. With the stunts, dancing, pyro- technics, this was a 21-hour day. Austin dances and makes Britney's head explode with a final pelvic thrust. When her head shoots around it's a low-tech, Austin- style, in-camera visual effect. We just slowed down the camera to 2-frames-per- second and Britney moved her head around at normal speed. Then, when played back at 24-frames-per-second, it looks like her head is jerking around at inhumanly high speed until the 'mechanism' accelerates past the redline. We imposed over her face a shot of a bag of gunpowder and fake fleshy bits ex- ploding. Again, it's a deliberately unsophis- ticated effect, as contrasted with modern visual effects. It's something only an Austin Powers film would do. 11 13 The guns popping out of Britney's bra in close-up are actually on a mannequin that has gas-powered machine gun bursts of flame. We just twisted the mannequin back and forth, and then cut to the wide shot of the real Britney. We had the guns mount- ed in her bra and then switched to digital effects. The guns-in-the-bra idea, going back to the fembots in the first Austin film, was something I borrowed from a very cool, very pop-art 1965 film I've always loved called The 10th Victim. Austin catches one of the bullets in his teeth in another deliberately low-tech homage to low-budget spaghetti Westerns. We threw everything into this last shot: women with Laugh-In body paint, danc- ers, Uncle Sam, and Col. Sanders on stilts. I went to Mike and said, 'We have Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, Gwyneth Paltrow, Uncle Sam on stilts, little people. What else could we possibly throw in?' He said, 'Well, would it kill you to have someone jug- gling kittens with sparks coming out of their ass?' He was joking but my visual effects guy filmed me juggling stuffed kittens and used a grinder to create some sparks, so in the bottom left of the final image, near where the director's credit is, I'm juggling kittens with sparks coming out of my ass. 12 14