Ben Stiller Breaks Down a Prison Yard Scene from “Escape at Dannemora”

Hi, I'm Ben Stiller,

and this is my Notes on a Scene for Escape at Dannemora.

Don't do that.

What?

Make a fuckin' mistake and then pretend it's on purpose.

Come on, that's for hacks.

I'm not.

I wanted to direct this

because I just thought it was a fascinating story,

the idea of two prisoners escaping

from a maximum security prison for real in 2015.

How something like that happens,

what allows that to happen,

what were the mechanics of it,

what were the relationships that developed

inside the prison?

So, this is a scene from the first episode

on the north yard at Clinton Correctional,

which is a state prison in upstate New York.

And this was sort of the first time

that we see Richard Matt and David Sweat,

the two inmates who end up escaping together.

We were able to film this scene in the real prison.

It's an incredible space.

It's on the side of a mountain in the Adirondacks

and has this incredible view

and it's been there for over 100 years.

It's just a really unique environment

where all the prisoners get to go

and have their outside time.

So, this is Dominic Colón, great actor,

the person that we follow through this big crane shot

to reveal the north yard for the first time.

We basically had to get in and out in a day

to shoot in this location

because they were taking away yard time from the prisoners.

We couldn't get in there until right before we shot,

so we didn't even know how we would shoot the shot.

At one point we were talking about doing it with a drone.

They wouldn't allow us to have a drone in the prison.

They don't like having drones flying around prisons.

These are guard stations,

and basically that's where

the four or five corrections officers

who are on the yard will stay

and watch over the three to four hundred prisoners

who are out on the yard.

So, the ratio is not great

if you're a corrections officer.

This is known to be the most dangerous place in Clinton.

Basically, these are little courts

that are subdivided with numbers on them.

You'll see here a number like 120.

All of these numbers refer to a section or a court,

like here you'll see it says 121.

So, the hierarchy, a sort of seniority,

in terms of where you get it

because the higher up you go in the yard,

the better the view is out to the Adirondacks.

And Richard Matt and David Sweat were over here,

in this court over here,

which we end up getting to eventually in this shot.

So, the idea was to set up the environment,

follow one of the inmates as he walks through the yard,

and eventually got to Richard Matt and David Sweat

who are out there hanging out.

[low jazzy music]

I just have to point out this guy.

That's not a real prison guard.

This is Herby Leavers who is a Teamster driver

who's been driving with me for 20 years and making movies.

Every time I make a movie in New York,

he's one of the senior Temasters and one of my best friends.

So, he's also in Zoolander.

He's the guy who reads the magazine at the gas station

and throws it away before everybody blows up.

So, it's his...

And he's been in about probably five other movies.

Very difficult to work with.

A real prima donna.

[low jazzy music]

So, the idea was we wanted to show

the life on the north yard as Odell,

the character, was walking up to,

basically, he's getting ingredients to make a Hot Toddy

for Richard Matt who is sort of

the guy he works for in prison that Benicio del Toro plays.

He's walking up here and he's trading things,

because that's what's going on here,

guys are trading cigarettes and other illicit contraband.

As he's coming up here, up to their court,

he's got all the ingredients to make the Hot Toddy,

and now now you finally see the view

that these guys are looking at all day,

which I thought was really interesting,

just how counterintuitive it is to be stuck in a prison

but looking out at this amazing, vast landscape and freedom,

which you can't have.

Also what they're looking at over there,

you can see the smokestack to the power plant

that ultimately is where the access tunnel leads to

that they came out of.

So, that's the smoke stack,

and David Sweat knew that there had to be

some sort of an access to that power plant.

And that was where the steam pipe was coming from

that was heating the prison

that he eventually cut a hole into

that they got out through.

What do you think?

I spent a shit load of time on the fur.

Where's the light coming from?

The light?

Yeah, you could do a shot like this with a wide lens

and be close up and have the same frame,

but then the background,

everything behind them would be much further away

and you'd just see a lot more

and a lot more would be in focus.

But this sort of puts the focus on the actors,

and it just has a feeling of cinematographers

like Victor Kemper or Owen Roizman from the 70s

did this a lot really beautifully.

And that was just coming out of, I think,

the necessity to shoot scenes

without being able to do long setups.

So, on a setup like this, we have the camera here.

So, there's the two-shot and then there's the second camera.

Basically, we would be grabbing as much coverage as we could

every time we did the scene,

and we'd just do the scene over and over again

as many times as we could.

Jessica Lee Gagné, our cinematographer,

just made sure that we were rolling cameras all the time,

and we just had to kinda take what we got.

But here you can just feel

there's just so much texture here,

even the heat ripples coming off

of the potbellied stoves behind them.

And then here, what's behind Benicio is, you know,

that's the guard tower down there.

So, all this stuff here with a wide angle lens

would be much sharper

and you would actually know what it was.

And when you have this kind of a longer lens,

it just kind of makes it more like everything's stacked up,

which just kinda gives it this nice kind of feel,

which I always enjoy.

Now, you see he kinda goes from Paul over to Benicio there.

That was our camera operator

just basically sort of free styling,

and they had free reign to just go ahead

and kind of go okay,

let's just go between, let's follow the dialogue,

because we wanted to have sort of that kind of roaming feel,

but I didn't want it to have a super jerky

kind of handheld overly noticeable feeling,

but just kind of allow it to have

a little bit of that sort of found feeling that, to me...

In this prison environment,

these guys are having all these different conversations

that they don't really want anybody else to hear.

So, it's kind of intimate,

but yet it's happening in public too.

That's, again, I think another reason

why the long lenses are cool,

because they focus you in on the people

in an environment that's actually very big.

A lot of this scene is also showing

the dynamics between prisoners,

and Richard Matt was sort of a kindpin.

He's kind of top of the food chain there.

This is based in reality.

Richard Matt ended up painting Joyce Mitchell's two pugs

and gave it to her as a gift.

They would barter paintings

for favors from corrections officers

and it was definitely a commodity for them.

The light?

Yeah, I mean, you got two dogs

sitting on a couch in a living room and I can see them.

I mean, your light comin' from somewhere.

Uh, okay.

Yeah, from the window.

Here's your window.

There's your window.

I mean, you can't see it in the drawing.

What, do you want me to paint a fuckin' window?

No. You sort of see

the dynamic between these two men

who I think became friends

really just because they have the sole goal

of escaping together.

It's really interesting to hear David Sweat

talk about Richard Matt, and basically,

he claims that he did everything in the escape,

all the leg work.

Yeah, it's from the window.

Here's your window.

There's your window.

[David] I mean, you can't see it in the drawing.

This was an idea that Benicio came up with

that I thought was really interesting,

which was you can see here he is...

That's a really bad arrow.

He's drawing on the [laughs]

He's actually drawing on the table there,

he's not drawing on the paper,

and his idea was to show that, literally,

the character's thinking out of the box.

Like I said, we had one day to shoot the whole scene,

which was scary to me 'cause it's just that thing.

You're like, alright.

You know, you wake up that morning

and you're like we gotta get this whole thing.

And yeah, it went really well, everybody knew their lines,

the guys were great with the scene,

and we were done with it...

I'd say we were done with most of it

by 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon

when the light had then not gotten as good,

and then we were able to go for the crane shot,

which is the first shot, this shot.

And this scene was actually the last shot

that we did of the day

because we were waiting for the sun to get low again

because when the sun's lower,

it's better light and it looks better.

This I think was the last take that we did.

We only had three takes of this

because the light was going down and it was tight,

and every time, you know, the first time they did the move,

they'd never done it before

and we didn't have time to rehearse it, really.

So, it was figuring it out on the fly.

[soft rock music]

That landscape and that texture was really a character

and part of the show.

Having access to the prison

and trying to show the reality of this situation

was what was interesting about the show for me,

that's why I wanted to do it.

I was interested just to have the experience

of seeing what really went on in there and tried to,

since it was a true story,

try to communicate that through this show

and also hopefully make it entertaining.

Maybe.