The Interviews (ft. Phil Lord & Christopher Miller; Matt Johnson & Jay McCarrol; Himesh Patel)

0:14Chris Hewitt:Hello Pod, I'm Chris Hewitt and welcome to the latest episode of The Interviews. And yes, it's another jam-packed one this week folks. First up, this week sees the arrival on Prime Video of Project Hail Mary, the sci-fi sensation that saw Ryan Gosling play a science teacher entrusted with saving humanity by going into deep, deep, deep space where he meets and befriends an alien, soon to be nicknamed Rocky, who has the same goal. Based on the novel by Andy Weir, author of The Martian, it had similar success to that movie at the box office and marked a welcome return to the director's chairs of Phil Lord and Chris Miller after incredibly over decades since our last movie as directors, 22 Jump Street.

0:59Chris Hewitt:Lord and Miller were on the pod a couple of months ago when the movie opened, but given the film's huge success, I felt this was the perfect time to jump on the zoom with them once again to talk about, well, that. This isn't a spoiler interview, but we do suppose that you have seen the film, so skip this interview if you haven't. Love talking to these guys and this was no exception. Phil Lord and Chris Miller, do please enjoy. We are delighted to be joined on The Emperor Podcast to celebrate the release of Project Hail Mary on Prime Video, Amazon MGM plus all the good stuff by the film's directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller.

1:36Chris Hewitt:How are you both? Doing great. How are you doing? Oh, not too bad, not too bad. You're both in your homes, I'm guessing, Phil, you're in chris's home and chris you're in phil's home that's how it works it's only fair we split everything 50 50 do you like to mix things up now and again just to surprise each it keeps the marriage fresh how how well do you know each other's homes chris if you could you know if you were you know what phil had his home uh renovated recently and i have not yet been to the new renovation. It's the same. It's the same. Doors are in all the same places. You'll do great.

2:22Chris Hewitt:You didn't decide to switch the kitchen out for the bedroom or the bathrooms now outside? They tried. They tried. They tried. That was the first plan. They would move all the walls six inches from where they are now. No, Chris, it would be funny if you came over and then just started bonking into walls. I was like, oh, I thought there was a door here. I memorized it, and now I can't. But it's okay. No, no, you'll figure it out. Yeah. Well, thanks for doing this, because I don't know if you guys are aware, but Project Hail Mary was kind of a big deal at the box office. Oh, I'm so glad to hear that.

3:04That's great news. Thank you. It's such good news. We put those things out, and I just I don't read reviews, I don't look at deadline I don't open emails for months until I do a podcast and then

3:20Chris Hewitt:everyone gets their news from the Empire Podcast that's right, it should work well, are you both sitting down? you both are, but you might want to hold on to your hats do you have hats? I've got a hat, I can grab a hat yeah you can afford hats now gentlemen, because this movie made nearly 700 million dollars get out of town wow look at that all of which of course goes straight into your bank account that's right that's right yeah it does the studio's a unique deal that's one fun thing about the studios that they like to make no money they absolutely do just give it all to the to the film team what was that experience like for you as a film was really connecting with people and you know taking off weekend after weekend after weekend were you sneaking into screenings were you aware of how it was catching on with folks um i mean yeah you make these things you really you're hoping like a message in a bottle you're hoping that people are going to connect to them and and we while we were making it we felt like we were working on something special everybody on the crew um could feel that it had the potential to be something special so we felt like we had a lot of um you know pressure to deliver something as good as what people thought it could be.

4:42And as we were, you know, we test our movies a lot. We do a lot of friends and family screenings. And so we knew that people seemed to really connect with the movie and be engaged by it. But then you still put it out in the world and you don't know. You don't know if it's going to hit at the right moment, if the world just doesn't want to see something, or they do. And when they did, when people really connected with it and were going over and over again and like, you know, feeling all the feelings that we wanted them to feel, you know, that they were laughing in the same places and crying in the same places.

5:18It was just, it's just a really more relieving than anything else. That's what I say, Chris. The only positive emotion you can feel in the movie business is relief.

5:33so but we certainly felt relieved that may that prophecy may be wrong there might be more than one positive emotion that's right that's my conclusion from this it was like some it's funny it's like surprising and then and then it isn't because you know you test the movie so many times and you understand that we started to figure out that parts of the movie really played no matter where we played them and the thing that's so fun and yes we did sneak into a few screenings is that people laugh in the same places no matter where you show the movie they they tear up in the same places you know you feel the movie you feel the theater get quiet people stop munching popcorn all in the same places and that to me was very encouraging about the human race.

6:26We still have that gear, you know, to like do something together. And I was just sort of proud of the audience that they went for such a weird movie.

6:37Chris Hewitt:I'm guessing as well that, you know, this isn't a spoiler thing, but we're assuming that people have seen the movie by now who are listening to this. I'm assuming one of those moments... If not, pause it. Pause the podcast. Go see it. It's now on Prime Video. You can go check it out. And then come back. or rent a theater is entirely up to you that's right works for me come back two weeks or so that's totally fine it's going to take a lot to rent a theater a lot of logistics or buy a theater circuit revive it it was one of those moments for example when grace shall we say smashes his face against the console and you drop the sound out and I imagine I've seen the movie a couple of times with audiences and it's pin drop central at that point so was it the same for you guys when you were sneaking in that's how you know people are engaged is when it when it gets super quiet and nobody is making a sound and everyone is locked in on the screen that's when you know you know it's you're like oh we've got them we've got them we've we've we felt that on the mix stage that particular moment you know because you have a sequence that's 10 minutes long and the starting place is that everything is loud because if you literally just do a good job of putting sound on what you're seeing it's loud the whole thing's loud and so we have these wonderful wonderful sound team that were like guys we've got to be more expressive than that and and we came up with this uh you know a bunch of moves to try to make sure you didn't get fatigued and that it stayed interesting and you knew what and you knew what matter and sometimes the way to know what matters is to is to drop all the sound out the idea was well he goes unconscious so he can't hear anything the fact that it people wanted to see it in the theater that they wanted to go to the theater um was was there was a reason why it was what we did what we did was to give them a reason to go to the theater, to make something that felt like it was an experience that you had to see and feel in a big, large space with a bunch of people.

8:56And the fact that people were like, oh, you've got to come and would drag their friends to see it. That was the thing that made us feel like, okay, we did what we were hoping to do. that was the thing i was the most like like pleasantly surprised by is that really like what we had hoped for happened the people brought their they saw it and then they came back and brought their friends and families and parents and kids yeah you know that's what it was like for us when we were growing up we went to see little shop of horrors then my dad was like we're bringing your mother tomorrow he also said that about this the south park movie

9:40Chris Hewitt:oh wow okay your dad's got interesting taste i like that very weird taste um but that that feeling of like this is something we're going to do together and watching people watch the movie together was the thing that i think made us the most proud was there a scene that that uh surprised you and how people connected to it i mean i know from talking to you guys in the past and from reading other interviews with you that you knew the scene where where sandra sings harry styles a karaoke that you knew you had something you'd captured something in that moment but nevertheless were you still surprised that it resonated with people in the way that it has for sure you know that's one of the things like that's not in the book it was a thing that sort of came about in this miraculous way.

10:27It was not even in the script. You know, she was supposed to be wistful that she couldn't participate in the group bonding activities. But it was just, it's the power of Sandra Huller that makes that scene become sort of the heart of the movie. And, you know, even when we got it, we're like, oh, this is amazing, this is very special, but you don't know if it's going to be not welcome as an addition to the story. But it ended up being so moving and so sort of thematically relevant that it willed its way into being what it was. Yeah, some choices in a picture are, they make perfect sense, they're logical.

11:23they're schematic you know some things present themselves intuitively you know and they are the result of a lot of creative people's intuition stacking on top of itself and that karaoke scene is one of those like I don't know why that wants to be in the movie but it does I don't know why we wanted to write it in but we did I don't know why at the last second And, you know, Ryan was like, should we get Sandra to sing? I don't know why she agreed. I don't know why she picked that song. You know, it just like sometimes things come together. And my favorite thing about making movies is that it allows for people's idiosyncrasies to seep into it if you do it right.

12:17um here's an example of how this movie had this sort of magical kismet around it which was you know we had been putting this sort of rainbow uh theme in there uh that came from uh experimentation we were doing with uh the cinematographer greg fraser and we found this very cheap like$10 lens filter on Amazon that made these like rainbowy streaks that we were trying to make the atmosphere different on Rocky's side.

12:57Chris Hewitt:Yeah. Of the, you know, of shooting from his side that the world looked a little bit different. We found this filter and it had this rainbow effect. And so we started bringing it into the movie in a thematic way. And then while we were shooting a live action with the Earth section, where right at the end when Grace gets tackled and forced to go against his will. Spoiler, if you haven't seen the movie, we warned you to stop the podcast earlier. Yes, I'm in the process of renting the theater right now. What the hell? Okay, good. you're buying this in rama dome thank you a a rainbow emerged uh in the background behind where we were shooting and we were like oh my god oh my god let's move over there let's see if we can get it in the shot and everyone was like i can't believe right at the moment his last moment on earth there was actually a rainbow that we were shooting and it came out at an exact moment and then on the very last day of shooting right as we were setting up the final shot and everyone was about to say goodbye a rainbow came out at Shepparton and people were pouring out of the stages and there was a rainbow and we're like what is going on there's some magic happening.

14:23Sometimes you know like a movie can get gremlins you know and you don't know why but like everything goes wrong and things, you know, like you'll be on some stage and you're like, I don't know what it is about this set, but it's like haunted. This movie had reverse gremlins. Which is a great idea for a movie copyright. Reverse gremlins. By the way, Phil, I made a Phil's obsessed with reverse things. Wait, you're going to give this idea away for free? No, I'm not telling you. I have a counter idea and this one is called uh reverse mermaid and i drew it for you this morning yes you know there is you know there is a very dirty shell silverstein song yes called the mermaid i'm that is about this exact

15:14Chris Hewitt:that exact topic body of a fish legs of a of a woman was that head of a fish legs of a woman It's a wary old pirate talking about how that's the kind of mermaid he prefers. That's amazing. I'm trying to figure out how reverse gremlins would work. If they got wet, would they start decreasing in number? They get cuter. They get even cuter. You definitely want to feed them after midnight. That's the first thing. You definitely want to feed them after, yeah. I think the water thing is the same. Right. you get more. They just get sweeter and sweeter. They get sweeter and sweeter and do nicer and nicer things.

16:01There's a bunch of them and then with water they disappear. It's kind of like signs. Oh. Yeah, it could be like that. I'm still working on the formula. This isn't a movie pitch. I'm going to make these in real life. Perhaps it's that they fly the plane and we humans have to be on the wing. Maybe that's it. You have to be on the wing and tearing out the wires.

16:23Chris Hewitt:It's a gremlin who looks to his left. He opens up the window and it's Bill Shatner. We have to walk a mile in their shoes. That's what that was about. Oh, my God. Guys, I've got to let you go in a second. There's all these good ideas you want to stop. I know. I'm trying to shut this down. I'm trying to keep all these ideas for myself. I understand. But you have, what a segue this is going to be. You're working on some other things that are incredible ideas at the moment that brought to life. One, of course, is Beyond the Spider-Verse. Let's have a Beyond the Spider-Verse update. What's the haps?

16:57Chris Hewitt:We are deep, deep in it, I would say. And we're actually going today to the IMAX headquarters to see what the footage looks like at scale and make sure that it has a resolution that needs to look gorgeous. and you know we're chugging away in the edit room with the team and it's coming together really well just a lot of movie and a lot to do I can imagine so and doing something brand new as well you know you guys set yourself hard targets yeah that's the thing you gotta keep doing something that hasn't been done before and that's all you gotta do easy yeah piece of piss it'll be totally fine and no it's a it's the details matter you know that's the thing the thing it's a joy about those pictures is that everyone on the crew is um is so good at what they do so you just sit around marvel at all these brilliant artists and um and then you know we get to work with uh these great filmmakers and we sit in a room all day and and uh and just try to make everything incrementally better together it's it's uh it's great it's a lot of fun you've got you've got a few months left as well on that one and uh recently it was announced that uh you're skipping 23 jump street and going straight to 24 jump street as as producers on that one uh what can you say about that and where that came from there was a script uh there was a script that was made years ago um and that and it's been sort of the the dust has been blown off of it and then it's being rewritten uh right now but it is uh um it was coming from a great place it was just Our wonderful friend Rodney is directing and co-writing.

19:07And we developed a 23 Jump Street. And I think this is just out of respect for that. We're calling this 24. All right, fair enough. Out of respect for the dead.

19:25Chris Hewitt:and is it to uh to quote jonah um clean and rad and powerful sure is is that wait is that from the that's going on my tombstone is that from the leaked emails is that where that's from it certainly is it's how you describe the uh the 21 jump street men in black crossover it is clean and rad and powerful i mean i don't know how it's clean i I would say the clean part is maybe not clean. It was relatively clean. It was more. Yeah. Right. This movie, I would say not clean, but it's unclean and rad and powerful. There you go. There you go. Excellent. I look forward to seeing that one. And indeed refer to skrimlings guys.

20:07Chris Hewitt:I'm going to let you go. It's an absolute pleasure. Likewise. Always a pleasure. Thank you. Okay. That was Phil Lord and Chris Miller and project. Hail Mary is now available in pretty much every format on the planet, and maybe even some on ARID. DVD, Blu-ray, 4K, digital, MGM +, Prime Video, all the good stuff. It's one of the year's best films. Give it a whirl if you haven't whirled with it already. You will be amazed, amazed, amazed. Next up, this week sees the release of Nirvana, The Band, The Show, The Movie, a big screen version of Matt Johnson and Jay McCarroll's Nirvana, the band The Show, which stars Matt and Jay as well, Matt and Jay, two slacker musicians who accidentally invent a time machine.

20:53Chris Hewitt:Now, I haven't seen this yet, but we've given it five stars and we called it in our review an instant cult classic comedy. High praise indeed. So naturally, we wanted to talk to Johnson and McCarroll about the movie and its long and unusual journey to the big screen. And that is what you're about to hear, courtesy of this chat with our Harry Stainer. Enjoy. I kind of think anyone who sets out to make a time travel movie is kind of insane because I feel like watching even like Looper, where at a point in that film they go just like, don't think about it too much.

21:28Matt Johnson:I wish they didn't say that. It really breaks my heart when Willis says that line. But I know exactly what you're getting at. And both Jay and I are such time travel aficionados that we did not want to take the looper route. and weirdly we shot more scenes of me and me and jay together explaining the time travel logic than we had ever intended to because as the movie started getting put together one of the editors kurt lob was like we have to lay out for the audience that these are not the same people that you've traveled into them but we had a whole butterfly effect sequence that they had developed where you got to see the catch-up of what had happened in my life and in jay's life to set us where we were.

22:13Matt Johnson:And in the end, it was remarkably similar to The Dirties, which is that I found that the more we explained literally what we were doing, the more difficult it became for the audience to get lost. And I think that Back to the Future, the Zemeckis film that we're parodying really got that right, which is that if you really break down the space, like people fading from photographs because something has changed, like it is in some ways logically ridiculous but it really really did help to explain less than more and that was our secret if there was one we we it kind of happens from movie to movie but when you write with the intention of like trying to keep as much clarity as possible for the audience and then you shoot these things and you explain what's happening in the script oh we better make sure we shoot this too then at the end once it's all assembled it's amazing how much you can start knocking away things and realizing you're left but you only need about four load-bearing pieces and the audience will just fill in the rest and you actually just don't need all this explication and explanation we're sort of giving the audience just enough isn't it so they can kind of get the pieces in play then they can put the rest of them as possible yeah Yeah, we don't want to have any spandrels in the building of it because most movies do need those types of things.

23:42Matt Johnson:And you'll find more and more these days, it seems as though movies over-explain everything to audiences. And we're always trying to do more with less. It's why we reshoot so many scenes, because we find that the thing that we're trying to get away from is the characters saying exactly what's happening, which is which is the easy thing to improvise, but the very hard thing to write around. well when you say about reshooting scenes i'm still like trying to figure out how you like filmed some of this but like what i found was so key and we were talking about it in the office which was like there are so many cultural touchstones of 2008 that just feel like so on point in this so you've got like the hangover the dark knight like two of the most memorable films and then you've got like the kind of the 2000s goth clothing how did you decide on what like the cultural touchstones of 2008 would be a lot of those were decided for us because we filmed that stuff in 2006 2007 2008 so the clothes that's just what people were wearing when we filmed that stuff but in terms of like effort to like uh find more of those cultural touchstones we were running out because there really wasn't so much that couldn't be conveyed in what we would replace on the billboards when we're in Toronto and we're seeing you know Obama and iPod and GTA 4 you know and maybe there's a few fashion things that we're maybe touching on but that's how we kind of arrived at uh the hangover joke because we said well this that's something that was different about 2008 and that's a little more interesting and that's how we kind of came up with the joke like what if that is really the only thing that these guys realize we can play all these other things like fake outs like the audience will know this yeah because we didn't have anything to do with what people were wearing we just shot in public and people were wearing what they were wearing both then and now you didn't have like a rich thing to choose from in terms of like the references because i when it's like when the when it was like the dark knight and gta4 came up i was like these like seminal things from 2008 if that's just like love but we were there you gotta remember that's right when Jay and I were living together on Queen Street.

25:56Matt Johnson:And so that was the stuff that we were involved in. And we saw those posters at Yonge and Dundas Square, so it was easy for us to be like, oh, it was just like that. Because our memory at that time is so encased in amber because it was such a meaningful time for both of us. It was when we came up with this show. We were spending so much time together that every one of these things, the only thing that's not in it that really deserves to be is some Mario Kart stuff. We don't actually play Nintendo 64, I guess for good reason. We try to, but that was the only big thing that we sort of missed. But in terms of working together on the film, was there anything you, as a pair of collaborators, had to go back and forth on, or do you ever have big debates about stuff, or do you feel like you're both quite in sync?

26:42Matt Johnson:You know, thinking about it, the only thing that was a debate, and I won't say it was just between Jay and I, actually there were two. I'll give the one that I've never talked about publicly before, and it was actually about the ending of the movie as to whether or not matt should know for sure that jay has time traveled along with him and um has been lying to him so this is a huge spoiler for the movie so so i'll have to talk about this in slightly coded ways but the idea was we were We're debating whether or not we should over explain to the audience what exactly was happening at that moment when when they're going to travel through time at the end.

27:25Matt Johnson:And that went back and forth right to the very end. We spent weeks back and forth talking about this. It was another example of something where less was more. and when you leave it's a lesson that keeps happening as i say from any time that i'm working on any of our movies where you kind of watch something become more powerful the more sort of space you give it and the less that you have it insist upon itself then an audience can really sort of make space for how they're going to feel that and they can project and do a lot to work for us as long as like the skeleton of our notion is being presented but we jay and i did not have any um high temperature creative debates about anything it mostly would be a discussion that is to say that like the entire process is almost a painful grind to to like reach what our standards were but the thing is is that what we're going for i think most of us but and really matt and i have always luckily we wouldn't be be able to keep doing this if we weren't in lockstep with what we had like in terms of vision of just like what this should be even if we can't fully describe that but we kind of know whenever there's an idea presented when we react to it we're like okay we don't know how to do this yet but we feel it we know what we're going for there's there's never never i would say in the history of nirvana the band as an entity there has never been a time when i have really wanted to do something and jay wanted to do something the opposite and we fought about it that's never ever happened because there's something about the right dream it's like you just know you just know in this instance this whole movie was sort of jay's instinct to have it be a gigantic cinematic time travel movie like that was sort of his idea broke the rules of what we normally do with our universe, which is keep it quite grounded.

29:22Only in a sort of treehouse of horror excursion could we indulge ourselves with something like high concept sci-fi. But yeah, it was fun to take it there. Some of my favorite scenes are the ones that you shot in the hardware store and on the streets. There is a bit in the hardware store where the guy who you are trying to get the pliers off sincerely seems very concerned about what you're doing and it just kind of cracked me up but I was also wondering how much of that didn't make it into the final film?

29:57Matt Johnson:Well, we shoot with real people every day and so there's more stuff that we didn't use than we did use but what I will tell you that the short answer to that is that we shot like six versions of that scene at six different hardware stores with different people until we would get busted And then we shot like I would say 10 different versions of the scene with the girl from Brazil where I see her in both timelines. We shot that 10 times with 10 different people. And so there's tons and tons and tons and tons of iterations of these things that you just will never see. Because once we get one that works or when we decide later, that's the only version we can use.

30:36Matt Johnson:But it happens all the time. The magic stuff for us is like, you remember when I've got the cable at the end of the movie and I'm trying to plug it in? and all those people keep coming up to try to help. Like there's the French girls who come up and they're like, okay, we'll help you. Or there's the people looking at me or the guy that I say, hey, will you watch this for 30 minutes? And he's like, okay, I'll do it. That's the kind of stuff that I think we like the best because really the plot of the movie is just back to the future, except it's set in the real world of real people. And that is what gives us, well, I would say that's our favorite part about it, is that it's also out of control.

31:14yeah i think as well like there's something like really honest about like when when the french girl grabs the cable and she starts laughing it's like there's kind of like a sweetness to it but it's really funny um i was like what's going on with her um i'm aware that you're both uh spielberg fans am i right in saying that your favorite indie is last crusade yes for both of us i'm with you i'm

31:36Matt Johnson:with you on that one um and and it's a it's a movie that we are constantly trying to recreate that feeling of even this movie has a lot of last crusade in it i love last crusade people think it's hokey or it's the most family well i mean look nothing's worse than temple of doom but but i i to us it's absolutely the the high water mark for for the franchise the one the spillover film that i was kind of like drawing comparisons to and this is mainly with your character matt is um catch me if you can yeah my favorite because i feel like frank in that film's got all these like madcap ideas and i feel like pretending to be an adult it's something that left a deep impression on me and and i'll tell you another thing uh leo is perfectly cast because if you've ever seen that he is the archetypal um he's he's the perfect version of a boy pretending to be a man and spielberg nail casting with him in that movie because you just buy it everything he does you You see it both sides.

32:33Matt Johnson:That movie has had a major impact on me. We even made a Nirvana the Band episode based on it that never got into air. Well, I just kind of see some parallels between Frank and Matt. I was like, what do you think it is about characters that are kind of like bumbling their way through their lives that are so engaging for audiences to watch? I found that with Matt in this film, like you're even though his ideas are kind of mad, I was rooting for him the entire time. Well, look, who knows? I mean, you're asking me to basically like break apart what the value of like a picaresque story and i can't i have no idea i don't even know why i'm drawn to them but but i will say that my my favorite favorite movies catch me if you can talented mr ripley they are all about somebody pretending to be a status or an age above what they are and i relate so closely to that in my own childhood i was so obsessed with the idea of like the doogie hauser type like the kid with infinite potential who decides no no i'm going to be an adult and that's what i want to be but getting it all wrong but because they do it with such charisma and and they're so a you know magical like that way that's what you are still even in your career right now yeah ironically just from being close to it it's almost like i can feel the peripheral like imposter syndrome well you're both working together again now on tony uh you're scoring jay is that correct and then um i know anthony wardain is such like a he's just a gargantuan figure in so many people's lives how do you approach that from both a musical point of view and from a directing point of view matt like working on something that's separate than something that's your own creation i guess you know it's funny i've been asked this a lot and it really wasn't a different approach than what i'd taken towards blackberry which is i i only try to make things about things i know nothing about so that I can view them from the perspective of an audience who also doesn't have any kind of expertise.

34:30Matt Johnson:And then I just read the material and see what in it appeals to me. So I'm lucky in that I'm somewhat unintimidated by the expectation around portraying this, as you say, gargantuan figure. But I felt the same way about the Blackberry movie, where a lot of people would say, wow, this is an important story, an important Canadian story. You really want to get this right? And while I agree with the second half of that, the import of the topic has, I would say, virtually no impact on me. Yeah, I mean, with every movie, one of the neat things that a film composer gets to do is be one of the last major creative influences on the movie after all of these things have been made.

35:18And so a privilege that you have as a composer is to listen to what your marching orders are with the movie. And that comes with, okay, we're setting out to make this movie and we want it to be like this and we want it to feel like this. But then, no matter what, I get to have that movie in front of me and I can be very realistic with what I see. Like no matter what we're making it about, who it's based on, what the goal was, the movie is the movie. And so my job is to then support the ideas and support the good things that are happening on it. And if there's any parts that need extra support, I need to save it with this.