Elizabeth Banks Breaks Down a Scene from 'Charlie's Angels'

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 ♪