Mayday: A Spoiler Special Interview (ft. John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein)

0:14Chris Hewitt:Hello Paul, I'm Chris Hewitt and welcome to the latest Empire Podcast Spoilers Special Interview. Mayday is the latest film from the directing and writing duo of John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein and sees Ryan Reynolds' ace American fighter pilot Troy Assassin Kelly shot down behind enemy lines in the Russia of 1987, right in the middle of the Cold War. 2 ,000 miles from safety, his only hope of escape and survival is in the shape of Kenneth Branagh's ultra-resourceful, America-loving, former KGB agent Nikolai Ustinov, and together the two embark on a memorable road trip across the USSR.

0:54Chris Hewitt:are. The film's been on Apple TV now for a couple of weeks, so now is the time to finally bring you the 30-minute interview I did with Daly and Goldstein just before it opened, in which we talked about plot stuff, of course, but also their approach to the movie, which is deliberately a little more serious than their previous films as directors, including, of course, Vacation, Game Night, and Dungeons & Dragons' Honor Among Thieves. Now, I love this movie. I think it is a terrific throwback to 80s buddy comedies with a really striking central duo in Branagh and Reynolds, some excellent and inventive action sequences and camera work, which we've come to expect from Daly and Goldstein.

1:35Chris Hewitt:And as we definitely have come to expect from these guys, a very, very smart and funny script. If you haven't seen it, I strongly urge you to check it out. As far as I'm concerned, these guys are four for four as directors. I also love talking to them. They are fascinating and funny guys and this was a fun chat that threw up a number of interesting tidbits about the movie. Now we do refer to another interview I did with them for the magazine where they talked about concepts like the movie beginning as a comedic riff on misery, the idea of Reynolds actually being the movie's damsel in distress as opposed to the slick confident unflappable deadpool-y Reynolds we often get in movies although there's still a bit of humorous defense mechanism of course and the film's final shot which serves as a summary of its main thesis but you don't need to have read that interview to fully get the gist here you do need to have seen mayday so if you haven't go to apple tv and do so and if you have then let's fall ass ass in to this interview oh and just so you can tell who is who or whom is whom or who is whom or whom is who daily is the one who answers my question about babies.

2:52Chris Hewitt:You'll understand when we get there. First, Goldstein is the one with the slightly deeper voice, I'm going to say. And as for me, well, I'm me, so I sound like me. I'm the one who sounds like an idiot, if that really helps narrow it down a bit. Here we go. Daily and Goldstein talking about Mayday. Enjoy. Thanks for doing this, guys. Obviously, this is a spoiler special. I like to start these things off with the question that's going to be on everyone's lips after they see Mayday, which is, for me anyway, what the hell is Nick's deal with babies? uh very good question it's one of those things that um just sort of became a runner as we went yeah in fact a couple one of them i think was we just found it on the day right the last one it was the plan it was actually not on the day it was in post we needed we needed nick to be yelling something in russian uh as they were getting onto that plane to escape and i think it was our editor that put in subtitles my baby's on the plane that we thought was the best i mean this is a testament to our editor jamie gross who finds jokes where we can't and but russians who are watching may be disappointed because i don't not true because then we put then we dubbed the russian line into his voice so it is fully accurate i love that because as comedy writers How important is the rule of three to you both?

4:26I think we try to go for five sometimes, and then we cut two out. But the rule is five minus two. Like the faucet runner in vacation. That's right. We like to beat it to death. There's a term in sitcom writing called Nakamoro, which is about a joke that you keep repeating and you're kind of committed to because it's in the script, but it doesn't get a laugh the first time. and then you know you're screwed for all the repeat instances. That's not the case with this joke.

4:57Chris Hewitt:I love jokes that start off funny and then you just keep repeating them. It's one of my personal peccadilloes. You just keep repeating them until they're unfunny and then you repeat them again and then they become funny again. You're trolling your audience. Absolutely. I adore that. There are a couple of other rules of three, examples of rules of three in the movie. How intentional are they or did they start out as rules of five and then you cut them back? There is obviously the assassin story. So Troy tells Nick the true origin of assassin at the third time of asking. So was that something that you were you always had in your pocket?

5:34Yeah, you know, it is interesting that there is some truth to the rule of three, I think, on a cosmic level. If you if you don't do it more or if you do it less than three times, it feels like something is incomplete. Well, in that, I mean, in the case of that, we are building up a little bit of suspense. or you want the audience to be questioning, what is the story that he won't tell? So we needed to plant those seeds. Right, we need to continue to remind the audience that this is a mystery that has yet to be solved. We're really showing you behind the curtain here.

6:05Chris Hewitt:That's kind of the point, Jonathan. That's what I want. That's what I need for you. I'm going to extract this from you. But there's another one as well in the dacha, and I may be mispronouncing that, the wine cellar gag, where you go full British West End farce for a while and you cram as many people in there as possible. Well, you stop at three. But did you toy with having any more people in there at any point? No, I think at that point it would have truly become a Three's Company episode if anyone else went in their closet. Your West End farce is our 1970s and 80s sitcoms. Oh, right. Okay. So like John Ritter running around.

6:45Chris Hewitt:Yeah, there you go. Okay, there we go. Excellent. But let's go into the film itself chronologically, because I've been jumping around a little bit. Let's talk about the beginning, because I'm always fascinated by how directors open and close their movies. And you start in media res with this. Was that always where you started it, with Troy in the aftermath of the incident, shall we say, being shot down? No, that was something that came a little bit in the post-process. it was an effort to sort of lock the audience into the mystery of what this film is originally what we had was going through the water we actually had this kind of cool studio card sequence where all of our studio cards were kind of floating in the depths of the water sort of gloomily and you're wondering what the hell is this movie as we continue to rise up, then through the fish, and then up out of the water where our cormorant bird dives down and gets the fish.

7:55And we just loved the idea of starting on something that is a total question mark tonally for what this movie is to the audience. But I think we were able to achieve that with this sort of reconfiguration, because you're still wondering, I mean, a lot of people who had seen that opening have asked me or told me that they thought that he was like an astronaut because they don't usually associate fighter pilots with wearing those full pressure suits. So we love the idea of is he on this alien landscape? Is what's going on, you know, when he first wakes up? Obviously, if you've seen the trailer, you would know exactly what's going on.

8:33But we like to assume that no one has seen the trailer. Interesting.

8:37Chris Hewitt:At what point did that change? It was somewhere in the editing process. I think maybe, I don't know. I mean, it wasn't a result of any kind of issue we had with screenings. You know, the movie tested great twice. We screened it with audiences. It was just kind of like, you know, I think you want to make sure the audience is in it quickly. And, you know, that just felt like a way to hook them, like John said. It's really interesting because the film is very funny and it is an action comedy. but there are sequences in this that don't necessarily have jokes i'm thinking for example of the scene between anna and troy and that whole sequence built into her kind of reconciliation with with nick where you are parking the one-liners for a couple of minutes and i think the opening sequence being what it is now kind of clues the audience in that this isn't quite tonally on what they might expect from you guys right john and i think john and i are growing up what puberty your real voice i think i think your uh that that uh observation is the answer now we're going to use when asked why we put that scene in the beginning of the movie because it's a better answer than what we gave you no i i think can you edit the podcast yeah that you can just like our idea a i our answer uh no i look i i think that this this is in many ways the most serious film that we've that we've made in that it does explore uh some themes that are pretty dramatic and not and not like steeped in comedy but also i think that it is fun to make a comedy that diverts into to this whole other zone, specifically like the scenes between Marcin's character, Alexander Volkov and his underling, which is all in subtitles and not a single joke to be had, which really does kind of feel like another movie, but is hopefully still kind of compelling.

10:50And then I think when you have those comedic moments that follow it, it's all the more surprising and hopefully all the more funny because you never really know where the laugh is coming or if it is coming. And it's not like we've invented this. I mean, some of the most impactful, memorable action comedies have those divergence. If you think of Midnight Run, there's these emotional scenes that go off from the main thread of the movie. And I think it just makes it a deeper movie.

11:16Chris Hewitt:Yeah. There's that lovely bit, Midnight Run, where they go to see Jack's family and his daughter tries to give him some money. And Yeah, that's a really beautiful moment. And the sequence in this, between that extended sequence between Troy and Anna, where she tells him about her backstory and being gay in Russia, you know, we get a sense of genuine sadness in Troy's life as well. He has no one but his dad. And then ending with the reconciliation with Nick, I was really, really taken by that. Can you talk about that run, that emotional run? Sure. Well, I think for Troy, you know, it's an indicator of the sort of commitment that he has to his country and the fact that he's put everything on the back burner so he could pursue his ambitions.

12:05and it's a lonely life. You know, we spent a lot of time with people on aircraft carriers as we were doing research for this, people who do have families but are still deprived of them for months and months at a time. And it is a real sacrifice that these guys are making when, you know, enlisting. And that's something that we definitely wanted to depict in this. And as far as Ana, you can talk about that. Yeah, I mean, we like the notion that she has this secret. As it turns out, it's not a secret. Nick knows because Nick knows everything. But that that is a thing that has both divided them as father and daughter, but also one of the things that led to Nick leaving the KGB because of how they perceived his daughter.

12:53That was part of his kind of awakening that happened where he said, I can no longer be a part of this thing because it's demonizing my own family. And, you know, that felt like a very kind of emotionally driven thing for his character. I also love characters that are very astute and self-aware, but blind in certain aspects. And the fact that Nick knows so much and knows this truth about his daughter, but doesn't know that he should be the one to talk to her about it. And you see that generationally with a lot of people of that age, just not knowing how to access their emotions, kind of using the fear of the confrontation to justify not ever broaching the subject.

13:39And that's something that, you know, you see, I saw in my grandparents' generation, you know, and even in the boomer generation as well. So it is fun to sort of play into these kind of vulnerabilities in people that don't often present themselves right off the bat. Because he's a strong guy, you know. Nick is a fearless, stoic guy. But there is something about him that is kind of broken that he hasn't yet been able to access. I think it's also there's a cultural aspect to it. Not to say that American men in the 80s were so enlightened and in touch with their feelings. But there is a kind of a notion that Americans are less able to keep their feelings inside than Europeans tend to be.

14:25Europeans tend to be a little more sort of like, you know, reserved, certainly in the northern regions, perhaps. And so we wanted to play up that notion that like, even though Ryan is this playing this, you know, kind of iconic, strong figure, he's got this American, like, you got to talk to your daughter attitude that Russians wouldn't necessarily have.

14:47Chris Hewitt:Yeah. I mean, we've talked about this a little bit already for the magazine. But, you know, I'm just fascinated by the sort of the dangers of propaganda in this and about, you know, this is about two men discovering that their worldview is slightly wrong. It's off and the lies have been sold by their own countries about the other countries are wrong. Well, you know, it's funny, like I was thinking about how right now we probably are, you know, back then there were three television stations in the States, you know, you got your news, there was barely there was CNN, but it's fairly new. And, you know, you didn't have a lot of outlets, then there suddenly became a million different places to get your information.

15:29But now we've siloed ourselves into these, you know, categories where I get my news from a certain place, but my neighbor gets it from somewhere else. And so our worldviews are once again being shaped much in the way that it was in the 80s by what we choose to consume. And so just like Americans in that period had a very clear perspective on what they thought the Soviet Union was and what those people were all about, we're getting back to that in a dangerous way. Yeah.

15:56Chris Hewitt:In terms of Troy having his eyes opened about America, the thread with his dad contracting cancer from working with asbestos for the American government coming up, I know there is a thread of the element of truth to that, that there's something that actually exists, is real. Can you talk about that and incorporate that into the film as the eye opener for Troy? We'd be disappeared if we talked about that. Yeah. No, I mean, look, it is a real document, by the way, and it kind of happened. We wanted there to be this sort of reveal about how the American military was complicit to a degree in what happened to Troy's dad.

16:41uh we didn't know that that particular uh fact was was was true um it was something that we kind of stumbled upon as we were doing research and developing the story but yes it was something that they had suppressed for uh many decades um and it's this is in no way to sort of you know in condemn or indict America. Every country does versions of this, and it is sort of in an effort to kind of protect themselves and the greater good, they would say. So this wasn't a way to sort of, you know, demonize the American government. Rather, it shows that just like people, there are flaws, you know, and every system has these flaws.

17:31And I think it is foolish and dangerous to look at any institution as being flawless because institutions are built by people and no person is perfect. So it's the kind of the last piece in this puzzle of Troy's journey to realizing that this in the same way that Nick had put America on a pedestal, so had Troy. And the first real wake up call is when the at the embassy calls the embassy and they tell him, We can't come pick you up because that would be admitting that we were involved in an espionage. And so that's the first notion of like, huh, I would have assumed that my country would come run and get me.

18:12And so that's part of his whole journey.

18:15Chris Hewitt:There's a lovely irony as well. And that is Volkov, who is responsible for giving him the document. Yeah, he gave him the key. He really did. I mean, I love I love marching in this. I thought he was terrific in Mission Impossible, Dead Reckoning as well. He is also, and correct me if I'm wrong here, guys, the second bad guy in a Dalian Goldstein movie to meet his end via plane propeller. It's true. We have a weird fascination with our airplanes. Airplanes are cool, man. Like, how do they even get up there in the sky? Airplanes are great from a dramatic perspective because no one can just enter the scene.

18:54You know, you got who you've got and that's it. Except Volkov. He does enter the scene. Well, he hasn't left the ground. Just Volkov. But yeah, it's in the air. There are seatbelts and tray tables and all kinds of fun. You would also, it's also, I think, necessary to note that our end sequence of Spider-Man Homecoming involves a plane as well. That's true. It's a choice. It's a rule of three. We have a deal. That's right. We have a deal with the airlines. Big air. If we kill someone on an airplane, we get a ticket. Which seems counterintuitive.

19:32Chris Hewitt:Yeah, they show it on the big screen. They bring a big screen onto the planes and they just show only those clips from your movies and that's it. And they go, have a nice flight, everybody. This is what happens if you open the exit hatch. Precisely. There's another plane mishap in this movie as well, the sudden and shocking death of Sanders. Ah, yes. Colonel Sanders. Yeah, this is something that has never happened in real life. No SR-71 has ever been shot down in reality, but this is where we took artistic license. Much to the chagrin of certain aviation nuts, I would say it's probably a vocal three that seems like a hundred.

20:10By the way, we also know that a MiG plane would not normally be able to catch or shoot down a SR-71. We're aware of that. But it is Sanders' sort of hubris that becomes his undoing. He doesn't take the advice of Troy. He makes a gaffe when trying to evade this MIG, and it is to his detriment.

20:33Chris Hewitt:And of course, it ends up, indirectly, bringing Troy and Nick together. And we've spoken about this in the past, the idea that this began as a comedic version of misery. And that is most obviously there in that first meeting, where Troy is tied to the bed, utterly terrified of this complete madman who has seemed to be as tied him up and is watching Top Gun a hundred times. Was that the key scene for you in terms of Troy and Nick? And how difficult was it to write that scene? It was certainly the beginning. It's where we laid the groundwork for everything that follows. And it's where we wanted the audience to be most unsure of what this guy's intentions are.

21:11We deliberately kept in the weirder performances and the strange pauses when Nick says, you could almost say, I'm obsessed. Beat, beat, beat. You know, we held on that. But it wasn't a pure gimmick. I would say we could justify the weirdness of those performances as Nick being very nervous to meet his hero. Nick is, while he is stoic and incredibly tough, he is also a softie, as we see later on in the film. And the idea of this, you know, this hero falling in his lap, you can understand why he would be quite awkward in speaking to him. Also, the fact that he's probably not spoken to another person outside of the losers at that bar for a decade at least.

21:56So, yeah, I mean, it wasn't purely weird for weirdness sake. I think there was method behind the madness of Nick's personality at the beginning of the film. But, yeah, we shot that stuff in the cabin sequentially. We wanted to make sure that each scene sort of progressed and built on whatever came before it.

22:19Chris Hewitt:You also have that scene with Volkov coming to the cabin, which I love, because every line is laced with meaning and it's so tense. Was that a fun scene to write? That was a lot of fun. you know, we had watched a number of scenes where this kind of thing where the bad guy is coming into the home of the good guy and there's a secret and one of them being Inglorious Bastards where Christoph Waltz is joyfully filling his pipe and all that, you know, and the Jewish families under the floorboards. And we even sort of addressed the fact that people were probably expecting Troy to be under the floorboards if they had any knowledge of Inglorious Bastards, which we then obviously rug pull.

23:02But like him, Marcin is kind of a charming fellow. He's almost never threatening. There are looks, there are moments, and he played it so well. Also, the fact that that scene plays entirely in Russian was something we really embraced, you know, because we wanted the audience to feel a bit out of their element in the same way that Troy is. I also love the idea that Marcin's character is probably a little bit jealous of kennett's character for being in alpha group for having such um a crazy kind of reputation because you can sort of see it in in volkoff's face when he realizes that um that somehow this guy who is potentially a better fighter or was you know in his heyday, then Marcin is better at espionage, better at all the things that Marcin prides himself in, I think is a real thorn in his side, especially when he discovers that Kenneth has, you know, moved to the dark side in his mind.

24:08Chris Hewitt:Nick's prowess in the film is incredible. He is an unstoppable one-man army. Again, this is something we talked about for the magazine, but I'm just fascinated with how you present that relationship between Troy and Nick. Because Troy, when he's on the ground, he's wounded, admittedly. But he is, a liability would be maybe overstating it, but he is certainly, he says at one point, Nick saved my life about 44 times in the last couple of days. And that is something of an understatement, in a way. Ryan called him a damsel in distress. Can you talk about that approach to that relationship? It's only when Troy is in the air, at the beginning and the end of the film that we really see his true history skill set i think part of that was playing with audiences expectations of what a ryan reynolds character is going to be as well as what a top gun pilot has been shown to be in movies up till now we we like the idea that um he's injured and he's out of his element and so this guy who has this unique set of skills is actually better equipped to handle all the challenges that they face for that part of the movie.

25:19Yeah. I mean, Ryan's character probably had a rudimentary level of combat training, but they don't count on their pilots to be shot down. They count on them to stay in the air and win. So we love the idea of everything that made this guy confident get stripped away from him early on in the film, so suddenly he is out of his element. There's a little bit of a Luke Skywalker Han Solo thing where, you know, Han fights dirty, Han knows the tricks and Luke is more of a wide-eyed, you know, idealist.

25:55Chris Hewitt:Yeah, and the second he's behind the controls of a plane again, he's completely in his element. That's right. Apart from the fact when he's adjacent to the plane, when he tries to catch a bullet with his hand. When did you come up with that idea? It was... You know what? I think it might have been a note from the studio. They wanted to have another heroic moment or an attempted heroic moment from Ryan's character. And we loved it. We loved the idea of giving him something that, an attempt to sort of make up for all of the betrayal and the shit that he did to Nick in that, you know, the beginning of the third act.

26:38but then we had to undermine it because that's what we do so you know it was a very ineffectual attempt to save his life we were kind of uncertain if we if if i remember thinking like i don't know if we're going to be able to pull this off just from a visual standpoint for whatever reason like we were shooting on this airport on the day we had like one day to shoot a ton of coverage right and i was questioning if if it would even work and of course it ended up being like one of the funnier

27:06Chris Hewitt:moments in the movie so thank god there's a couple of um specific sequences and shots we only have a couple minutes left that i wanted to talk about with you guys uh one is the end the final shot which we'll get off to in a second but i want to talk about that that great sequence when uh troy and nick are traveling to moscow and you have that fixed shot of the car with the background change and as they drive through russia and it's set to bruce springsteen's i'm on fire and it's got this lovely melancholy tone to it where did that come from and how difficult was it to shoot that given that you weren't in russia we knew we had to have a bit of a travel log um and we were always trying to think of how can we portray this visually in a way that you haven't seen before we fell in love with this thing in game we used in game night called the r1 arm which is this carbon fiber arm that can extend 20 25 feet from a mount on a vehicle so that it moves exactly with the car and it makes everything look a bit like a video game when you do it from behind.

28:03We hadn't seen it done from the profile. So we did that. We loved the way it looked. And then we had people drive through Hungary, basically. That's where those scenes were filmed. And we added a bit to the backgrounds where we needed to, but it is what you see is what you get. Yeah. And the sort of melancholy nature of it, I think, is just to showcase that the world that Troy kind of thought Russia was is not quite what it is. And it is full of communities and people and people that are in no way involved with the politics that's going on around them. I mean, it's something that we definitely want to showcase throughout the film is that like every country is filled with people.

28:50And obviously that's a very simple statement, but I don't think people think about that as much as they ought to.