Live with Jeremy O. Harris from Lincoln Center

0:05Welcome to Screen Talk, IndieWire's weekly podcast bringing you up to speed on the latest goings-on in Hollywood. And I'm Anne Thompson in New York with Ryan Lattanzio. We are live at Lincoln Center and we're waiting for Jeremy Harris to come join us, but we'll do some brief banter before that.

0:24Ryan Lattanzio:So before he gets here, we're going to talk about the current box office, which had some interesting developments over the weekend, as well as upcoming Can Expectations with that lineup having been announced last week. And, you know, it's funny. And we had some reservations about the drama. But now that movie has made$28 million so far for A24 and is doing really well. And it kind of seems like we're in the minority in terms of people who were resistant to it. So what do you think is going on there? 28 million and it dropped only 28 percent on the second weekend which is amazing I mean that's a really good hold that means people really like it so our reservations are irrelevant yeah well I think a lot of the reason that keeps people going to the movie is the kind of attention grabbing lure of the the premise and what they're hearing is a major twist when it's actually just the plot of the movie and people want to and people want to talk about it that's it I think it's a lot like Celine Song's The Materialists in that way.

1:23It isn't that it's a satisfying romantic drama. It isn't at all, but it is it gives people something to discuss afterwards and that seems to be the thing that's driving the box office. And it means that the movie stars in the movie are actually bringing people in as well. I mean Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal and Dakota Johnson and brought people in to the materialists, but for the drama, Rob Pattinson and Zendaya are doing a lot, even though each of them has franchises, but outside of franchises, it's actually Zendaya who does better.

1:59Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, you know, I mean, look, we kind of both thought this movie might be disastrous, but it's turned out to be quite a sleeper hit, and a lot of that has to do with Zendaya. I mean, Euphoria, which is now back on TV, so the timing is sort of perfect for this movie being out. That show's wildly popular. You've got Gen Z, as the biggest quadrant of ticket drivers, ticket buyers. And those are people that are all really big fans of Zendaya. But I still feel the drama is still, it's like a third of a movie, I feel. There's not really even enough story there to drag it into a feature. But yeah, it doesn't matter what I think.

2:33Ryan Lattanzio:Doesn't matter what we think? No, so the other thing that's fun is that Pattinson and Zendaya are together in the Odyssey, which CinemaCon is going on this week. That movie is, according to polling, the one everyone's most looking forward to this summer over all the other sequels and all the crazy, you know, everything else, even the Marvel movies or the Spider-Man movies or the, you know, none of those movies are beating the Odyssey. Well, you're really looking forward to the Odyssey. Of course I am. I studied classics in college. Yeah, I'm more measured about that one. I'm not sure how I feel about it yet, but I will be seeing it.

3:13Of course you will. Of course you will. And we're going to go to see The Devil Wears Prada 2. And we're going to go to see...

3:18Ryan Lattanzio:That can't be great either. Toy Story 4. Ryan! That one I forget is even coming, to be honest. And Dune. Dune, yeah. Part 3. We're doing that again. Everything that we did before, we're doing it again. And then Spielberg's Disclosure Day. These are the movies that everybody's talking about at CinemaCon. Well, that one I'm really looking forward to, Disclosure Day. Though it doesn't look super great. But, but I'm, you know, I - Why are you looking forward to it? I like it. I like an alien takeover, alien among us kind of a movie. Okay. All right. I'm just curious to see how Spielberg changes the model, you know, makes it different, makes it not the same as Close Encounters or E.T.

4:00or those other films. He's got to do something different, you know, or War of the Worlds, whatever. It's got to be. It can't be the same.

4:08Ryan Lattanzio:No, I mean, there's rumors that it's like set in the world of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which that would be that would be interesting. Yeah. Meanwhile, Project Hail Mary is tracking ahead of Avatar 3, would you believe? And it has grossed over$510 million worldwide. That's big. That's really big. And we're going to be writing about that one for another year, probably. And overall, the box office is up 23 % over last year, and even attendance is up 16%. So the exhibitors are in a good mood at the moment. Yeah, I mean a lot of that has to do the fact that there are exciting interesting original movies to go see you know if Paramount ends up Taking over Warner Brothers, which just today there was a letter with over a thousand signatories from Hollywood that are decrying We know what's really going to be what could be a devastating reduction in output and to diversity and to compensation for workers and so forth so David Ellison is saying that they're going to do 30 releases a year with 15 from each studio, but that seems like a pretty high number.

5:1415 each, yeah. That will be a promise that will be hard to keep. But I like to see specialty fare like Neon's The Christophers, the Steven Soderbergh movie, which you and I both liked, and Exit 8. Both of them are doing well, so it isn't just big movies. Speaking of Neon, they've got already, before Cannes, before the gates have opened, they already have six movies so they still have a shot at the palm door even if they don't pick up anything else

5:45Ryan Lattanzio:the pre-sales so far it's just been like Mubi and Neon trying to one up each other and they are jockeying one of them once is going to win the palm probably oh my god so you know we have you talked about it last week but it just seems it's all auteurs all the time so there's the Na Hongjin sci-fi thriller with Alicia Vikander and Hoi-Yan. That's the guy from Squid Game. And Michael Fassbender, The Unknown, directed by Arthur Harari, who co-wrote Anatomy of a Fall, a fjord, directed by the great Christian Manjou, who's always good, starring your favorite, Renata Renze. And Her Private Hell, directed by Nicholas Winding Refn.

6:33And he is kid or miss.

6:35Ryan Lattanzio:He's been kind of miss since, I would say, even back to Drive. And then there's Sheep in the Box, directed by Hirokazu Koreda. So that's an amazing list, and that's what I'm looking forward to seeing. Now, they're saying that Terry Frimo turned down Hollywood movies. I don't think he could get any. I mean, honestly, he would have died to get Disclosure Day. I think a lot of these ones that are, just aren't ready. Something like Inuretor's Digger, that's going to be at Venice. Yeah, well that's later anyway. Yeah, so what are you looking forward at new directors new films? I've seen like five or six so far.

7:10Ryan Lattanzio:I'm still kind of working my way through it But the festival opened with Leviticus directed by Adrian Charella and I've talked about that one before that was a Sundance It's a queer horror movie coming from neon in June. Of course neon has it basically about a men and a malevolent force that impersonates your crush and and seems to be activated by this conversion therapy camp that's going on. That is a very good film. It reminds me a lot of It Follows. I think that director will do really well. I was a really big fan of a queer Catalan. I always do the gay. I'm doing the gay movies, so forgive me.

7:43Ryan Lattanzio:This Catalan movie called Strange River, directed by Jaume Claret Mouchart. And this one was an interesting kind of spin on what I would call the Call Me By Your Name genre of queer coming-of-age movie. It's set in the summer. It's in like a gorgeous European location, but it's a little more surreal than that. There's another one called Trial of Hine by Kaush Tanika, and this is another queer kind of coming home type of a story. These movies are for sale, and then the word is really high on a film called Chronovisor, which I actually haven't seen yet, but it's a 16-millimeter movie about a Columbia professor who's tracking down a time travel device.

8:22Ryan Lattanzio:That one got bought just before the festival. But I want to recommend Erupcha. Yeah, Uruptcha is really good. And that one, the one that we're also here to celebrate. So Jeremy O. Harris is behind that. Hello. Welcome to Screen Talk. So we want to give everybody just a little bit of background about you. I mean, I saw Slave Play along with a lot of other people. Amazing. 12 Tony nominations, which was remarkable then and would be remarkable now. But what's so fascinating, and this is what we're going to get into, is all the things you've done since then. And it's HBO or television or acting or writing or a rupture.

9:04So we're going to dig into that.

9:07Ryan Lattanzio:I also saw you this weekend in Cat's the Jellicle Ball. Yes, yes. Yeah, how did you get that gig? Well, listen, someone knocked on my door. And when a cat knocks at your door, you feed them milk. No, I know a lot of the producers on it, and they were really, you know, this is such a specific and special moment, and I think it's a moment where people from a community that's very rarely served on Broadway, which is Black queer people, are finally feeling like we can really own the space that we have in that theater. So I know that a lot of people are trying to get as many, like, of the, in the same way that, like, you know, have you ever been to a ballroom?

9:47Yeah. So when you go to a ballroom, if there's any, like, legends, and that like living legends who maybe aren't even a part of the ballroom scenes, they get to walk, right? They get to show up. And I think they want a lot of those people from the Broadway world. So while I often try to forget that I got nominated for 12 Tonys, they wanted me to remember and for that to be celebrated in some small way with that community, which was really cool because that show should get 12 to 40 Tonys. I don't know how many they have available, but that was one of the best shows I've seen. They should create new Tonys for it.

10:17Yeah, yeah.

10:18Ryan Lattanzio:No, the audience went really crazy for it. It's kind of a lot of experience. Have you seen it yet, Anne? Oh, my God. You have to. The first act of it, I was a little kind of like, is this wrong? I think that there's a problem in our generation where we've over-literalized everything because identity politics forced us to make people who seem to not be able to realize that the civil rights they fought for still hadn't been won. So we had to be like, actually, this is what it means to be black. This is what it means to be a woman. And a lot of our work got very literal. you know think about the monologue in Barbie that America Ferreira gives where it's like is that necessary I don't know but I guess a lot of guys didn't know that right still you know and and so I was watching the first act of it and being like guys like like wasn't cats already the gayest thing we'd ever seen it was like actually like a kink show really right it was about it was four furries but they sold it to children and I was like do we need to bring it to the ballroom and then the second act starts and I was like wow this is history this is insane like it's crazy that like Wildcats was on Broadway the first time Dorian Corey was like you know well she had a dead body in her house but she was also you know being like a mother to all these people who had no home and creating houses for all these people who had no home and Cats now gets to celebrate her and all that history while also having Junior LaBagia in it I don't know sorry this is about movies not about theater but that was an amazing piece of spiritual gift this week that I got and I'm very grateful for it.

11:44Thank you. So you said something about trying to forget that Slave Play was nominated for 12 Tonys. What impact did that success have on you? Just trying to meet those expectations afterwards. Yeah. I mean, I think I talked about this a bit yesterday in our Q &A. I think that one of the things that was really wild was that I didn't have a chance to learn what my process was because my last year of grad school I had two plays from here off Broadway that had a lot of success and immediately upon graduating I was being asked by T Magazine to interview Rihanna for the cover and so they flew me out to London and then a week later I found out I was going to Broadway and I had to move to New York and be on Broadway and then halfway through my show being on Broadway the first time I was given an HBO deal that was a three year overall deal.

12:40And all those opportunities came in front of me after having had no opportunities for 28 years of my life. And so I said absolutely yes, yes, yes, yes. I said yes to everything before I had time to metabolize what I had gone through. And so that meant that when I was two years into the deal, no TV show had come of it. lots of scripts have been written inside of it and I felt drained I felt drained and I didn't know how to refill my battery because they wouldn't give me an opportunity to and so I think that like um instead of wallowing in depression I decided to start utilizing that energy towards like other people and other work that I wanted to see because I was like if no if my work isn't being made then how could I make sure that like I can use the things I learned about putting my own work on to help other work that might look like mine.

13:30I don't know, some weird thing happened where instead of taking the sort of depression that was on the horizon, I took the energy that depression can have on its surface and on its corners and grabbed it up. You know, that silver lining. I took all that silver and tried to force it into other people's work and turn silver into gold. I don't know. The metaphor got really lost there, guys. I think we got it. Yeah.

13:54Ryan Lattanzio:Very inspiring. Well, we should talk about Arutzia, which this movie stars Charlie XCX and it's got Lena Gora, who I think we're not maybe not as familiar with her, you know, in North American audiences. And it's set in Warsaw. And you produced and co-wrote and also star in this movie. So very entertainingly so. Yeah, yes. And I know you play an expat American painter who becomes a kind of mediator for these two girlfriends that have a really explosive kind of literally relationship. But you had worked with Pete O's before in a movie called The True Beauty Being Binned by a Tick. I also really liked that movie.

14:32Ryan Lattanzio:How did you come to know him? Well, Pete and I met at South by Southwest a decade ago. He and I both really like film festivals. He liked going as a filmmaker. I, at the time, was going as a film critic. I used to always go to the IndieWire party at Sundance. Thank you. I loved your hot tub there. It was great. And that South By, I was there because I really liked the beat of short films. I liked celebrating the films that people maybe weren't noticing and seeing voices right when they were popping in. And we got to talking about that and those energies and the kind of movies we liked. And he was doing his first feature that starred Julia Garner called Everything is Beautiful is Far Away.

15:12So he invited me to a Friends and Family screening of that, in which he says I gave a note that he's never forgotten. I have forgotten giving this note because I'm a Gemini and I just say crazy things off the top of my head. So I watched the movie and I was like, I guess I said, well, autism is real, which was a note that he liked. And it spoke to something inside of that film. And from then on, he became a friend that would show up for me and celebrate the work I was doing in the same way that I tried to show up for him when I did that Friends and Family screening. I said more than just that.

15:47And so he came to see my play, Water Sports, which was in this weird hospital in Koreatown in LA. He saw the first production of Slave Play. And because I went inside of the sort of monastic life of being a grad student, I was just like aware that I had this new friend who would see all my work, but we hadn't been able to go deep. And it wasn't until I needed an editor for my doc and his name came up and i was like wait i know this guy that we really became truly good friends we realized that in many ways we shared a brain or as they might say in like a korean shaman like you know if you know anything about korean shamanism you know that they have granny spirits and we think maybe our granny spirits are talking to each other so talk about the the actual writing of of i'm fascinated by this because you have several writers and you're you know you're writing you.

16:37So what was that like? What was the collaboration like? I like I like this movie and I'm curious to see how it was written. Yeah. I mean, he opened me up to something again. And this goes back to what I was saying about not knowing what my process was after grad school as a writer, because I just like write. I procrastinate. That's how I write. It's a lot of loneliness. It's a lot of me talking about my ideas. And it takes a long time for the script to come out. And I didn't realize until I worked with Pete that actually I write quite quickly when I'm around other people, when I'm writing for people, right?

17:07And his writing style demands that there are friends around, demands that there are people around because he wants to invite back into his creative process what made him feel creative for the first time when he was 15 years old, which was like making up stories with his best friends and filming them. So in many ways, you're in a writer's room where he's the lead writer, the showrunner, the director, and you're all pitching as your characters consistently, right? And I think the thing that he's really good at weeding out is like, is that Jeremy O. Harris or is that Claude? Is this Charlie XCX or is this Bethany?

17:40He's really good at filtering what feels like ego and what feels like the story. And that's how we build a thing together. Every day you shoot three scenes. That's all you shoot. Each morning you wake up, you write the scenes for that day or the night before you write the scenes for that day. And sometimes the scenes still haven't been figured out by the time you had to go. Right. Like you might have we might have decided that we we know that the first scene of the day is going to be Bethany and now meeting up at their flower shop, which we only have from one to three. Right. And if we haven't figured out what happens when Bethany's leaving that night, then we have to figure it out during a walk when we're doing a setup, you know.

18:19So it's really fun. It's really fun. It's really activating. And I say so often, it's kind of like being in an escape room where like the timeline is we have 14 dates until our hotels are done, until we have to get back on a flight back to America. We only are shooting the movie there. We're not we don't have a budget to reshoot because none of us come from enough money to like finance that kind of thing. Right. We have a finite amount of resources and we have to utilize all of them while we're there. And it's really fun. So there's a script that you're working with or do you end up improvising?

18:48No, there is a script in that script. I have it right here for you. that script exists on a collaborative note um on the notes app i really want to get endorsed by apple i think pete's movie should all be endorsed by apple because he writes all his movies vis-a-vis um these notes apps let's see where's the collaborative note um pete oh here we go shared notes he's the only person i have a shared note with um because i don't really fuck with those beat one see um yeah 33 rob goes to claude hi cod it's rob we met at that sushi restaurant and i come to the parties nights ago it's like all there and we write it together and we'll say like that doesn't make any sense or that and especially in this movie where half the scenes are in polish right pete doesn't speak polish i don't speak polish like lena doesn't speak or lena speaks polish but will doesn't so we have one polish speaker a lot of other writers who are like, I think that she needs to say this in Polish, and her saying things like, I don't think Polish people say I'm sorry.

19:49And we're like, what do you mean Polish people don't say I'm sorry? And that was when we learned that, like, things that are simple for us in English, because we speak that language, or sensibilities we have, do often change the language that we could even utilize in the script. I love it. I love that.

20:06Ryan Lattanzio:Now, that's very, what this process you're describing is very, like, French new wave, almost. And, you know, this movie reminded me, Or mumblecore. Or mumblecore. I was thinking mumblecore. Yeah. So you debuted the film at Toronto. And so I wanted to know about ending up at this new indie distributor 1-2 special. I'm sure as a producer on the movie, you were involved in this process. And I think in terms of the marketing for this movie, you're obviously benefited by having Charlie XCX's name on it, of course. But the movie is much more than just that. What I have to say is this whole process, this movie, there's a way to read this movie and be like, Jeremy and Pete, especially Pete, hate magic.

20:43They hate magic. Magic's not real to them. But I do really believe that coincidence and magic are real and energies that we have to invite into our life. And the day that One Two Special announced that they had picked up two Radu Jude movies, and Jason Hellerson was the person who created this thing and decided to distribute two movies by Radu Jude, who's my favorite living filmmaker right now, I DM'd him and said, hey, you don't know me, but I'm obsessed with you, and I really want to be a One Two Special artist. I know a filmmaker who's phenomenal and I think right up your alley, his name is Pito's you should see our next movie and he left me on read and then right after Can I messaged him again and he was like oh cool yeah I'd love to talk to you at some point can't wait to see the movie and from that point on 1 Too Special was my target every movie that they acquired felt more and more like it affirmed the sense that I had that it had to be them, like when they picked up Urchin, I was like what, Urchin?

21:38I loved Urchin Ryan and I both loved it. You're obsessed with that movie. It's so good. And Harris is one of my really good friends and he's British like Charlie. So therefore, obviously they would want to do our movie. It was like everything became like the string board going. So they've been really, really great. And yes, having Charlie has been amazing. I mean, the Angels, I say it over and over and over again, they've been the best fan base ever. They've been so supportive of this movie. But what I like about One Two Special is that they are they are excited about playing pretend with Pete and I in the same way that Pete invites people to play pretend.

22:13And we have a group chat with him and Nika where we just like throw out random ideas for marketing that like have nothing to do with Charlie and have everything to do with us wanting to see something fun. And they are so down for that. Whereas I think there would be, if we were with some other distributor, I think that they would care less about what the filmmaker wanted or what his producing partner wanted and more about, well, we have this pop star in it. How can we squeeze every bit of life out of this pop star's fan base in order to get something from that? And that'll be the end-all be-all of the marketing.

22:45And the idea that Pete and I had of letting audience members in general remix and make their own fan edits of the trailer would have gone by the wayside. Because they were like, unless we directly market that to Charlie XCX's fans, we don't care. It's like, actually, we care about people on Letterboxd who make their own posters. We think those people are really cool. Like those posters are really good. They're better. Like I will never forget that like I saw a poster for Zola That was so good and I messaged H24. I was like, why aren't we using this poster? What's going on? They're like, we didn't make that poster and I said who did and they were like, I don't know some kid on Twitter and I was like Well, hire the kid on Twitter You know, I think one too special with though.

23:24All right So I'm getting the general impression that you are all over the place and you're you've got juggling this and that and the other thing and all these different media what are you up to what are you trying to accomplish I think that I'm trying to keep myself interested I think that like a thing that's really important what that was really important for me to learn about myself this might be ADHD this might be being in the gifted and talented program as a kid this might be just being a double Gemini um I like to juggle a lot of things in order to stay interested when I was in grad school, I was taking classes with the theology students and the architects and going to crit for the photography and sculpture students while writing my plays.