CraveOnline: In the budget for this film, how many day passes and season passes did you buy?
Randy Moore: Ooh, we bought day passes for the people that absolutely needed it. For Lucas, myself, the A.C. and the leads, they all had season passes. Then people who just had a few days in the park would have day passes. Same thing for Orlando when we were there. Then we of course had to buy passes for their parents too, the kids’ parents. We usually had one or two PAs with us carrying water because water’s so expensive to buy inside the park. Everyone was just dehydrated the whole time because there was so much walking involved. Imagine how much you walk when you just go there normally, but we were chasing the sun so we would shoot a scene here and then have to run or walk to the opposite side of the park to get that scene. The poor kids, we’d end up getting wheelchairs for them and wheeling them to the next location.
So you not only stole the location, but you snuck water into Disneyland?
Lucas Lee Graham: You can bring your own water to Disneyland. You can bring your own food and water.
Randy Moore: They have picnic areas.
Okay, we’ll let you off on that one. Was Base 21 a set you built?
Randy Moore: Yeah.
Lucas Lee Graham: Base 21 is built off of a rumor.
Randy Moore: There is a real Base 21. It’s a lounge. It’s a corporate lounge for Siemens. We built Base 21. We built the walls for the scene in the Haunted Mansion, which never made it into the final cut. We built the nurse’s office.
Lucas Lee Graham: The Land Pavilion when we reshot that.
Randy Moore: Yeah, but that was a wall with a trash can. A lot of sets were walls with trashcans and stuff like that or some bushes with a bench in front of a green screen.
Lucas Lee Graham: I think people don’t realize probably 60% of the movie is actual in-park footage and the rest of the movie is practical set or location made to look like Disneyland, or a combination of the two. Not just green screen, but building one wall for looking certain directions.
Were the days you shot in a hotel or a bathroom more stress-free and relaxing?
Randy Moore: Yeah, those were so nice. That was when we finally got to relax.
Lucas Lee Graham: That was the last stuff we did.
Randy Moore: We shot all the park stuff first.
Did you use both Anaheim and Orlando to make it harder for them to spot you?
Randy Moore: No, I just wanted to have the big castle in the movie. I like the vastness of Orlando. It’s more cinematic, and of course I wanted Epcot and there’s no Epcot in Anaheim. We did all the stuff that we couldn’t do in Anaheim, like Spaceship Earth and stuff like that, we did in Orlando. Anything we could do in Anaheim, because it was obviously closer being L.A. based, we did there.
Lucas Lee Graham: And some stuff we just aesthetically we liked better. The Small World is in [the] Anaheim park because the one in Orlando is really kind of a closet version of it.
Randy Moore: It’s all angular in Orlando. There’s that outdoor area.
What would the Haunted Mansion scene have been?
Randy Moore: That was originally the first time when he makes contact with one of the French girls. They’re all huddled in that room together and the hangman drops and everyone screams and the lights go out. Then when they came back on, she was grabbing his arm and that was originally their first contact. And also that was the first contact with the older woman. She was in the back of the set as well.
What if someone flubbed a line on a difficult take where you couldn’t get back into position in that location without getting spotted?
Randy Moore: We did do ADR so it wasn’t like that was all location sound. We used this exact recorder for our sound with a lavalier attached to it. I just ran it all day, and then at the end of every night I downloaded it, put a new battery in it. So every single actor had one of those wired and it took a month and a half to sync the sound for the movie because we didn’t have clapboards or anything like that. Everyone had their own sound. I just had it run all day because I didn’t really trust the actors to turn it on and turn it off before each shot, so every day we had 18 hours times however many actors were running, or 12 hours. It was a lot of media to deal with.
