The Caveman Scene

Still Quiet on the Western Front. I've been doing lots of interviews for TIOL this week. They'll all be held until the films release -- and some released the week of Toronto.

I've done interviews before, mostly during my short stint as a non-fiction author. I had to wake up at 4AM a bunch of times to be on CNN. That was always fun. And by fun I mean very similar to being on acid.

More importantly, this week we convinced the generous souls at Warner Bros. Home Video to spend the necessary dollars to get our Caveman scene in tip-top condition for the DVD. What Caveman scene you ask?

Well.... originally the film opened up with a caveman scene. It was to be a parable for the film as a whole, and give a brief explanation as to how a world could exist in which no one had ever learned to lie. Basically it was a "Here's how lying was first invented in our world.... but what if that had never happened... what if man had missed that all-important invention of the lie and had carried on without it until the present day."

Anyway, the scene ended up taking three days to shoot, cost about ten percent of our production budget and force Ricky, Rob Lowe, Jonah Hill, Jeffrey Tambor, Louis C.K, Karl Pilkington and about thirty extras to stand in the freezing cold rain in a rock quarry outside of Boston (fun film fact: same quarry as used in Gone Baby, Gone) dressed only in bear pelts that covered little more than a long t-shirt.

It was the only hard part of the shoot and the only time any of us got a bit grumpy. Freezing cold rain, hard wind, bear pelts and a constantly moving sun can do that. But it was also very cool for all the obvious reasons as well. Karl Pilkington being a big reason.

Long story short, we cut the scene from the film because we couldn't get it in fighting shape at under five minutes. Any shorter than that and it lost a lot of the comedy. At five minutes (or any longer) it just slowed things down too much and made it feel like it took too long to get to the actual start of the film.

We never even tested the film with the Caveman scene. It was just that obvious of a cut to us.

But we loved the Caveman scene. And that is why it will be featured on the DVD in it's FULL LENGTH, and will be billed as a "Prequel Short", tentatively titled "The Dawn of Lying".

We got our composer Tim Atack to do a brand new score for it, the whole nine.

I think there's even going to be a special Karl Pilkington commentary. But I can't promise that just yet.

Anyway, I'm excited about that today. The Caveman shall get their due.