- All right. Is everybody ready? - Yes.
One of the first ideas I came up with for the film
was the bungee ballet.
Because I thought, "What would Lara Croft do to relax?"
She's not gonna play chess. She's not gonna watch TV.
She's gonna jump 50 feet off the balcony of her staircase
and bungee ballet.
We talked about it in the beginning of this film
that the big thing for me would be to learn what I could
from this person, to, kind of, become her as much as possible.
Camera! Take three!
Three, two, one, go!
It's exciting and dangerous, but it's also beautiful.
I wasn't even sure whether she was ever gonna be able to do it.
I didn't know that I could do certain things. I never tried bungee ballet.
It was all her. We did not use a double at all.
You know, she does double, triple somersaults,
coming right to the floor and then taking her right back up again.
And that is something for a leading lady, your star,
to do that was absolutely incredible.
Originally I planned to do it mainly with stunt doubles.
And then just do the usual coming in for close-ups with the star.
But, of course, Angelina, you know, is brilliant and can do anything
and so we put her in the rig.
We found out that she could do it all herself
so I don't have to use doubles at all.
That's great. Whenever you can have your star doing these things for real,
then you should do it. She's amazing.
The bungee thing is fun.
It's free. She's really open
and flies back and falls forward, and there's no boundaries.
A lot of people live in a, kind of, careful space
and she's just like really out.
And that's the perfect thing,
Just to fly around. and control it, and go up and down.
And it's very graceful. It's ballet.
Cut!
The bungee ballet was always in the script.
On action, just straight past it, okay?
But then, we wanted to take it one stage further.
And there's an assault on the house with all the intruders coming in.
So we wanted to use the bungee,
in some original way or form, to dispatch all the intruders.
Action!
One of the main action sequences in the film is this attack on Lara's house.
And, of course, this annoys her to a certain extent
because she was relaxing.
So she decides to take them on.
It's very fun to watch, but it's very time consuming to shoot.
Watch them go under, and then I'll shout, "Now!"
And a third one drops right in front of you, and that's when you go.
Fasten the security thing.
Most of the time I'm having to explain that some things she just can't do.
But it's not very much because she's very young, athletic
and she's trained for months for this.
So she's actually very skilful in all these things.
One. Action!
Now!
And the thing with her is that she learns so quickly.
It's very surprising how fast she can learn something.
I think they've all gone.
Well, they got what they came for.
"A" to Alpha Foxtrot. Take one, "A" camera.
"B" camera.
Angelina knows exactly what she wants
and she knows she's capable of doing lots of things.
She wants to be involved in everything.
Instead of backing down from it,
I don't want to be her, and I don't want to step…
Instead, you, kind of, want to jump from thing to thing
and do some crazy thing
and get everybody to look at you and go, "Yeah, that's her again."
D220/Kilo, take one.
This is once again, when everybody starts to clear
and I'm stuck on a prop somewhere.
You go into these fantastic sets, you have these great action sequences,
but at the centre of it you love this person.
I mean, you just want to be with Lara Croft the whole time.
And I discovered that from the first day of shooting.
I just realised, as long as I'm pointing the camera at Angie,
I can't go wrong.
Okay, here we go!
Three, two, one, go!
It was a lot more intricate than it appears because
it's not just a fixed column swinging backwards and forwards.
The whole idea of it… It had to be released.
It had to move forward across the set as well as going down at the same time.
We'd rehearsed this numerous times with stunt doubles
and both of them had to take motion sickness pills
because they were on this column for about 20 minutes
and they were both, sort of, getting seasick.
And also, they actually found it very difficult.
They couldn't stand up on the log.
Angelina literally got on, she stood up straightaway
and she was like riding a surfboard.
Everyone was so stunned. She did it better than the stunt doubles,
better than what we'd seen in rehearsals,
and I was saying this was not possible.
Very nice.
As much as it's a thing for people to believe that I can be her.
I really would like to be like her.
So if anybody even thinks I'm remotely close to her, I'm extremely flattered.
And if they don't believe that I'm anything like her,
1, kind of, would say, "Well, yeah!"
I'm the first one to say that I'm, you know…
I'm a bit of a dork, so…
At the end of the day, I'm clumsy.
The orrery set was actually very difficult because it's a very mechanical set.
And there's a lot of elements in there
that are actually not only difficult, but dangerous.
The harness that you have to wear has to be extremely tight
and it is extremely uncomfy.
I always used to say to her, "Remember the key word."
And the key word was "suffer."
'Cause it really hurts. There's nothing you can do about it.
And it's very dangerous.
You're quite high up and revolving around
and there's nothing beneath you.
But Angelina, she seems to have no fear.
Let's roll video.
Action!
I just wanted to win, and I did.
But now we've saved the world, right?
Alex, not now!
- What are you doing? - Forget about the clock.
What if you were right?
Alex, give me the clock. I know what to do.
We never planned to blow up the orrery
but it soon became apparent
that we were gonna take it apart anyhow, so why don't we blow it up?
I think, at one point, I had 14 cameras on the big set piece
Just because these events are unrepeatable.
I'm running through this orrery with water just crashing down,
a tidal wave coming.
There's planets exploding. debris falling.
I'm not even acting.
It's just like, "Go from here to here, and don't get hit by anything."
We were all commenting
that how lucky we are to have Angelina.
She kind of raised the bar very, very high.
Angie became Lara Croft.
And so, in a way, I kept forgetting that she was an actress playing the part.
Once she started things, there was really no stopping her.
There's so many things in this film. I'm really proud of it.
I don't know how I'm gonna adjust to normal life.