The Stepford Wives

Hi, this is Frank Oz, director of Stepford Wives.

This opening that you're gonna see here

is not the original opening that I had intended.

The original opening was hundreds of women

dressed in black suits and dresses and power suits

walking in Manhattan to the tune of "I Am Woman."

I loved this opening, and I thought it really set the tone for the movie.

Everybody worked so hard on it.

We actually did shoot hundreds of women in all areas of Manhattan.

No men whatsoever. We cleared the men from the set completely.

From every set.

It turned out that it didn't work.

And Ron Bozman, my executive producer,

and all the people who worked so hard on it,

it made me feel bad.

But it didn't work for various reasons.

What you're seeing right now

is something that was done in the last three weeks of postproduction.

And I love this.

I wish I had just gone to Randy Balsmeyer, who did it, immediately,

because he did such a great job.

This was done the last three weeks in the postproduction time.

And this is all original footage.

We didn't shoot any of this.

Randy had to get permission

from, I guess, whoever owned this material.

And John Corbett cut it with Randy.

They do Big Film Design. That's the company.

And they just did a fabulous job.

This really set the tone of the movie much better than the other piece.

I told you various reasons why the other piece didn't work.

One of the reasons was that my feeling was that this should be

all about very, very powerful women, a world full of women,

and this is Paul Rudnick, the writer's intent, also.

They should be determined going to work.

But actually what happened was that there seemed to be

a feeling they weren't determined as much as unhappy.

And that's not what we wanted. We wanted them happy and determined.

So, all that wonderful footage we didn't use.

However, this, as I said, worked just great.

What this set, you know...

I consider the credits of every movie the overture which sets the tone.

And this has a delightful tone. You can see the actual...

On the right-hand side

and at various times on the left-hand side and around,

there's these little squares.

Randy's thought was that those are little digital squares.

So, instead of just pretty little squares,

they're really intended to be digital elements or pixels,

which harkens to the feeling of the technology of Stepford.

And then the women here in this are way over the top,

and they set up the comedy of Stepford.

Now, the next shot here,

we did bring a thousand people in.

This is not digital here.

The "EBS," those signs there, are digitally placed in

by a Chicago company called Digital Kitchen.

But when you see the reverse here everything is real,

except on the very top.

You'll see there's some cardboard cutouts...

but everybody else is all real here.

So we had to have everybody dressed and made up and everything

for this huge shot.

I love Nic coming out here in this kind of saunter.

Her body language really told how confident and cocky she was.

The idea is to set this woman up as a confident, cocky...

very powerful woman.

You might also notice that the plan was

after we had all the women

in the original opening,

the hundreds of women in black on the streets,

we were going to go right to this.

And if you take a look at the audience sometime,

you'll notice that it's 95% women.

So the idea was it was supposed to be a world inhabited by powerful women,

as you can see here, with just a few men,

which is not the usual ratio.

Now, here, this is our first game show.

Are you ready for the final gender challenge?

- Who makes more money? - I do.

Who enters Ironman triathlons every year and wins?

I do.

Who secretly wishes they were married to a hot, sexy lesbian?

- I do! - I do!

It's Tara!

This next game show,

which is called, as Nic says here, I Can Do Better,

was actually the very, very first thing we shot in the entire movie.

It was actually before we started shooting.

What happens often in production is you set a schedule,

and just to get a little jump ahead of the schedule,

you might do a day or two of shooting before the schedule starts,

which really kind of gets the crew going and it also helps your schedule.

And this is the first thing we actually shot.

I think we shot it in two days.

We shot it with video cameras and then we...

So it looks a little bit like video.

Although the resolution's so good, maybe it looks like film too.

This was inside

a studio in New York City.

And that's Billy. Billy was just wonderful.

It was Scott Rudin's idea, I think,

or Paul Rudnick's idea, I'm not sure who it was.

Or my casting directors, Juliet Taylor and Laura Rosenthal.

But it's a wonderful idea to get Billy. He was just perfect for this.

A lovely guy, too.

And that's Mike White, who's a brilliant writer,

besides a brilliant performer.

This here for, I think, the airline version, I had been cutting it.

I had to cut a couple things because it was too sexy, I guess.

There was a couple of things in there I had to omit.

One thing we omitted completely, by the way, was--

You'll see in a moment that she has to make a choice between her husband

and this hunk here.

And just before the choice, he...

he wagged his tongue very fast.

Everybody thought it was a bit too gross. I loved it personally, but we took it out.

Actually, I was thinking, "How can we get somebody who looks really huge

and a big hunk, and ready to waggle his tongue real fast?"

I didn't know how to do it.

All the sudden we cast this fellow. I forgot his name, but he was wonderful.

Now, the EBS-- We put it in in postproduction, by the way.

That's some digital work.

Also, by the way, the set on this--

I tried to make all of New York kind of cool

and glass and concrete and harsh,

so when we get to Stepford it's lovely and warm and beautiful.

And if you look at the set here, I asked Jack De Govia to make a very harsh,

really over-the-top, glitzy set, as you see behind her,

just to enhance the idea that everything's hard and cold in the city,

and that changes when you get to Stepford.

All subtle stuff. Probably no one cares but me.

Now here we had, for this effect coming up,

I think we had about four cameras going.

We had more footage than this.

But again, you know, the audience wants the story to get going.

So if I had more footage-- We have more footage of Mike.

We have more footage of this whole area.

But I cut it way down because the audience really wants to know what's going on.

They say, "Okay, fine, I know this is happening. Now tell me the story."

And so, all this footage of him firing, we have much more,

and I cut it down because we want to get to what happens next.

Which is this.

And this is the scene where she's going to get fired.

This is Mary Beth Peil, a marvelous actress.

She was on Broadway at the time, in Nine.

And she's just a wonderful actress.

There's a moment here when she's fired,

which is a close-up of Nicole,

and I thought about this for a year prior.

I knew what I wanted to do a year prior.

So for a year, I was waiting-- or maybe less than a year--

I was waiting for the moment I was gonna shoot this

because I just love the idea of seeing Nicole totally--

or rather the character Nicole plays, Joanna-- totally deconstruct.

You'll see it in a moment. I just love--

I tried several takes, and Nic did it many different ways.

And this was my favorite take.

She is totally in denial. She just doesn't believe--

I told Nic, I said, "You know, don't think you're gonna get fired. Go in there and..."

I gave her direction and suggestions saying,

"Go in there thinking you're gonna get a promotion,

thinking, 'That was great television.'

Just think about it that way."

So she's smiling, expecting a promotion here.

And so when she realizes she's fired, it's such a long distance to travel

from what she thought was gonna happen

to what's really happening.

This is what I looked forward to for about a year, shooting this.

And that deconstruction in her mind.

This woman, Joanna,

has made her work more important than her children and her husband.

Her work is everything. It's how she defines her life.

So once her work is gone, she is totally, completely lost.

Of course, she's putting up a brave face here.

I told Nic to hold it in as tight as you can.

Hold that emotion as tight as you can.

Put as much cover as possible. Don't let anybody know you're hurt.

Don't let anybody know.

And then she'll let it out in the elevator when she screams.

Because then she just loses it.

Now, here is a situation where we cut a whole subplot.

When you get to the elevator, what should've happened

is that Matthew was coming out and we learn, by a misunderstanding,

that Matthew is having an affair with this secretary right here.

That's Andrea Anders, a wonderful actress.

And what was gonna happen here is

that Matthew Broderick was going to step out of the elevator

and, through a misunderstanding, Nic was going to realize that,

"Oh, my God, not only am I fired,

but my husband is having an affair with my secretary."

We took that out.

And the reason we took that out is because later on in the movie,

when Matthew is talking about Nic, or rather Joanna, changing,

that it's time for her to change,

we were thinking, "Wait a second. This guy had an affair with another woman.

How about him changing, for God's sake?"

So we took it out because it seemed disingenuous of Matthew's character

to try and have Nic change.

This scene in the hospital was originally meant to be much funnier.