- Hey, I'm Elizabeth Banks.
I am the producer, writer, director
and one of the stars of
the new "Charlie's Angels",
and this is "Notes On A Scene".
[door creaks]
[door slams]
[intense music]
[groans]
"Charlie's Angels" has been around
since the late 70's.
It was an iconic TV show
about beauties with brains
kicking butt in a job
that few women had ever done before,
which was law enforcement.
I wanted to get involved,
because I wanted to tell a story
about women at work.
I really felt like this
could be a celebration
of women working together
of a sense of sorority and comradery.
This new iteration is about
a corporate whistleblower.
Her name is Elena Houghlin.
She works at a big tech company
that's putting out a
really cool new, sort of,
power source in the
world that's sustainable,
et cetera, et cetera,
and she knows that it can be weaponized,
and we based this story line
on a lot of corporate malfeasance stories
that we're hearing about all the time.
This women goes to meet
with Charlie's Angels,
because they're the only
people that believe her
and wanna help and support her,
and this scene is her
introduction to spycraft,
and what the Angels are capable of doing.
- If we're in the building
when they do their next security sweep,
we're all going to German prison.
[upbeat music]
- One of my big inspirations was
the end of the "Thomas Crown Affair",
starring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo.
When Pierce Brosnan goes to
the Metropolitan Museum of Art
and dresses as Magritte
in his little bowler cap,
and then he has tons of other Magrittes
run around the building
and they watch it on a screen
and get completely confused
on what's going on.
Okay, so the game is afoot,
and this is where you see
the security screens, right?
And this guy we've already established,
we don't really like very much.
He told Elena earlier in the day,
who he's obsessed with,
that she needs to smile more.
Ladies don't like that.
So he's our bad guy that's gonna close in.
- Ralph?
- [Ralph] Yeah?
- We've got [mumbles] here.
The system says he's already in the buil-
- Yeah yeah yeah, there's a glitch.
I think the computer
thinks Elena Houghlin is-
- So he's just realized
that Elena Houghlin,
who he's obsessed with
and he knows exactly what she looks like,
that this person from behind
is supposed to be Elena
Houghlin, but in fact,
if you see the ID that she just
swiped, this is Sven Ludwig,
who she's already taken
out earlier in the morning,
so this is how she got into the building.
We're doing a sort of, again,
a game of three card monty,
like where is Elena Houghlin?
Is this Elena Houghlin?
If that is Elena Houghlin, why
does she have this guy's ID?
It's a lot to process, which is what
a part of the fun of
watching this scene is.
This scene, we also
talk about as bowl cuts,
and bowl cuts, unfortunately,
don't cover the back of your
neck, and as you'll see,
I wanted to make sure
that when you're watching this sequence,
you can't tell from behind who's who.
That's part of the game,
and so we had to make the
wigs a little bit longer
and not just bowl cuts, so
they're like long bowl cuts,
and we made them ombré,
because ombré's just cool.
Fun fact, this actor actually auditioned
for another role in the movie,
and we decided that he'd
be a really good Ralph,
and so he came and played it for us,
but David Schütter is his name.
He's really a big actor in Germany.
So now the gig is up,
and they're gonna start closing in.
- Right now, I'm sending you
an image of Elena Houghlin.
Get it to all our guys.
I want her detained for questioning.
- Yes.
- I need you to exhibit some
attention-seeking behavior.
- I have so many ideas.
[monkey screeching]
- She really did about 50 takes.
This is Kristen Stewart,
and just said play around on camera.
Do whatever you want,
and she was like gimme some ideas.
I'm like act like a monkey, you know.
Walk like an elephant.
Dance.
Do whatever, just do jumping jacks.
In the script, it was scripted
as just jumping jacks,
and we just said let's play around.
She's so game in this film.
You'll see this character
as someone who you really
believe will do anything,
and that's what she's showing here.
They're walking around
with a mobile device
that has all of the cameras on it.
Here they come closing in.
- Stop!
Hey!
Hey!
- One of the things that happened
before I started making this movie
was I wanted to talk with
female stunt coordinators
about how women do action,
because we all know
it's probably different
from how men do action,
and I really wanted to make
the action in this movie
specific to a "Charlie's Angels" movie.
I wanted to understand,
can a 130 pound woman actually
overtake a 250 pound man?
What are some of the strategies
they would employ to defeat somebody?
And it was really
helpful to hear from them
about what women do or should do
to help defend themselves.
So first things first.
If there's a gun in any situation,
you're very likely to get shot,
and it's not like disarm
him, take the gun, and shoot.
Disarming somebody of a
gun's also really hard to do,
and it's still likely
that it's gonna go off
during that process,
so one of the things that
happens in this scene
is that the first thing Sabina does
when this guy comes in
is she makes sure that
the gun is out of the way
and it's not, she's not gonna use it,
and neither is he,
so she is waiting,
bang.
Gone, and not only gone, but
totally out of the scene.
That's just helpful, because it means like
we don't have to worry about the gun,
is it gonna go off,
so the gun is out of the way.
The other thing that the stunt
coordinators, who are women,
said draw them into as
small a space as possible,
because then they don't have
the full reach of their power
for punching and hitting and kicking.
They're really good at climbing,
Kristen Stewart's character's
like a little monkey in here.
She can literally, you can
use their body as leverage
to get up and over them.
I felt like if we put them
in this really cool space,
and of course
I wanted to make something
very graphic as well,
that we could put them in here,
she's now in a small space.
We can understand how a woman fights.
The other thing I'll also
tell you about this scene
is every time you see
them from this side angle,
[groans]
we actually moved the entire
sequence into this stall,
because this wall we were
able to chainsaw out,
and I got to use a chainsaw on set,
which was very exciting.
This wall was the one
we were gonna remove,
and when we removed it,
the whole set shook and it didn't work,
so we had to at the end of the day,
chainsaw through a wall
to shoot all the side
angles of this sequence.
So the other thing is I love
playing with some of the tropes
in action movies, especially dude movies,
and "Mission Impossible" had
a really fun bathroom scene.
[fighting thuds]
So this is like a small homage.
The other thing that this
scene showcases really
is how much training Kristen Stewart did,
how much of her own fighting she did,
she was incredible.
All of the women were.
Ella Balinska does almost
all of her own stunts
in the movie.
Naomi Scott did some training as well.
They all did weapons training, driving,
and a lot of kickboxing
and Thai kickboxing,
and fight choreography,
so this was well choreographed.
This guy was the stunt guy
that we used the whole time.
He was in the rehearsal with Kristen,
so she was super confident
in playing around with him on the day,
because the thing is as
much as you choreograph it,
at the end of the day,
you kinda want it to look really real,
and when adrenaline
comes into the equation,
which it does when you're
actually calling action on set,
you never know what's gonna happen,
and the two of them were really
comfortable with each other,
so they were able to,
she was really able to give
it to him in this scene.
[intense music]
[punching thuds]
[groans]
Lotta elbows,
because it's a good pressure point,
or a good fighting point for women.
[body thuds]
So one of the reasons
they're wearing red boots
is for this exact moment in the movie.
I wanted to make sure that
the feet were really iconic
as well in this scene.
Right now, if you had a toilet in here,
and a toilet in here,
then what you would see,
look I'm even gonna put
the little flusher on it.
What you would see is that right now
there's a girl crouched.
She's pretty, she's got cute hair,
crouched on the toilet here,
and then Kristen is on
this toilet, so cute,
and then she's about
to jump down right now.
Right now, bang-o.
And out she comes.
So as you can tell, I don't draw,
especially under pressure,
and especially toilets.
The next beat of this scene
that was written to the script
always was this idea of
women's invisibility,
and we play with that as a
theme throughout the movie,
and just little easter eggs,
because invisibility in "Charlie's Angels"
is a total superpower,
as is underestimation.
This is just a little nod right here,
when the sensor doesn't recognize her,
that she's invisible.
[groans]
[screams]
And then you know,
very easy way to transition
out of this scene,
because again, it's just part
of a much bigger set piece,
just blind the guy,
also very good advice for anyone
in a bathroom who's being attacked.
Just put stuff in guy's eyes.
Also kick him in the balls.
That's actually the number one thing
the stunt coordinator told us.
Go for the balls first.
My film school has been
my career as an actor,
and I've been on so many sets
and worked with so many different people
that you kind of start to understand
and get into a rhythm with people,
and I just try to give as
much love and care to people
and make them feel confident and excited
about being on set every day.
Working with a female ensemble now
was not a coincidence at all.
I think I really wanted to build
on the themes of sorority
and comradery and teamwork,
that I established in the
work in "Pitch Perfect",
and I just love that feeling.
It's something that runs through
most of what I make as a producer,
and as a writer/director,
and this is not an exception.
It's really the rule.
♪ We in it together, but
don't call me angel ♪
