Our Top Films of the '70s & Tarantino Podcast News

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0:20Hello everyone and welcome to Screen Talk, IndieWire's weekly podcast, bringing you up to date on what's going on in Hollywood. I'm Ann Thompson in LA and happily, my co-host Ryan Latanzio has returned to New York. How was your sojourn in Spain? I had a great time in Spain. I was all over Catalonia. So I did not go to Madrid, the land of Almodovar, but that will be my next trip to Spain. I'm back in New York. And then I'm turning around and returning to Europe again on Tuesday night for the Venice Film Festival, getting there Wednesday morning and testing my luck and exhaustion a little bit by going to the opening ceremony that very day.

1:01So hopefully. You're younger than I am. And I will add that you are also intrepid and brave, and I wish you luck on that one. But you have time to do your laundry. That's the important thing. That's why I'm here, and some dry cleaning. But you're headed out soon, too, as well, to Telluride. Yes, I will head for the Colorado Mountains next Thursday for Telluride, and we will see some of the same movies, such as Yorgos Lanthimos's Begonia, as these overlapping festivals play out. But you will catch Catherine Bigelow's A House of Dynamite for one long before I get to it in New York. And I'll likely see Chloe Zhao's Hamnet and Edward Berger's Ballad of a Small Player before you get to them.

1:43Meanwhile, this week, we're going to look at two online interviews that came out of podcasts. One was a two-hour sit down on this fan podcast called The Church of Tarantino with director Quentin himself. and Warner co-chairs Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdi also sat down with Franklin Leonard for a candid conversation about their recent home run of some really strong releases that have done well for Warner's after a kind of rocky start. And we're also going to honor the 70s week that's been going on at IndieWire since Monday and we will talk about our favorite movies from the 70s. It was a decade I actually lived through.

2:19So I have a slightly different roster and ranking than the list picked by the much younger staffers at IndieWire. And there's a lively debate, which is what you want, of course. That's the whole point of doing these things, about what should have been included. I have no trouble with the top pick, All That Jazz. I think it's one of the great movies of all time. I think Sallow is a very strange pick for number two, and I blame you for it, Ryan. I'm assuming this was entirely your responsibility. I would not put Sallow as my number two of the 70s. It certainly would be in or adjacent to a top 10 for me.

2:56Actually, in IndiWare, we did a whole Sallow Day on Thursday in which I did a couple interviews with John Waters and Bruce LaBruce, two queer filmmakers whose works have also straddled art and exploitation film the way that Pasolini's movies do and the way that Sallow does. It wouldn't be my number one. And I agree there is some perversion to some of the ranking here. And there's some people understandably upset online about some of the movies omitted. But first, obviously, Anne, this is your era. You came of age as a cinephile in the 70s. What's your number five pick? I'm going to start with a couple of films that were left off because I feel sort of strongly about this.

3:36We're going to rank them backwards. Five, four, three, two, one. So number five for me is the deliriously rebellious one flew over the cuckoo's nest, Milos Forman's extraordinary adaptation of the Ken Kesey novel. And, you know, it helped to push Jack Nicholson into the stratosphere. I mean, he did an incredible job working with an incredible ensemble of people playing people in a mental institution. And it's just a great example of directorial control in service of an anarchic, seemingly anarchic subject. And Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched deserved her Oscar. I have to think that there are some films that were really big at the time and I think survive, you know, as continue to be great, but somehow have been missed by many of the people who are making this list at IndieWire.

4:32How did you create this list? Because I was out of town when you did this. I didn't create the list. Our chief film critic, David Ehrlich, did. And this came from basically polling the staff for their rankings of as many films of the 70s as possible. And I just kind of vomited out a list of all the movies from the 70s I love with a kind of loose ranking to the 10. And One Float with the Cuckoo's Nest was not on the top 100, as were a number of other movies that are more maybe male oriented. Maybe there is some disillusionment with that now, which I kind of thought we were over that as a cultural phenomenon.

5:08But something like The French Connection wasn't embraced or Mean Streets or Superco, Last Tango in Paris, which obviously is entangled in a great deal of controversy. The Last Picture Show, I thought, was a really egregious omission. And I guess my number five, which did end up on this list, it's interesting. So Manhattan, this was a really important movie for me as a kid. I mean, basically, I started watching movies in the 70s as a young teenager, and my parents would drop me off a blockbuster, and they'd say, you've got a half hour, and we're coming back. And so I would come back with things like Manhattan, Chinatown, Network, One Floor with Cuckoo's Nest.

5:49I was also an early, very early user of the Netflix when it was a rental operation. You got the red envelopes. Yeah, I got the red envelopes. Thank you. Was Annie Hall left off of this list? Annie Hall was left off of this list. Manhattan isn't better than Annie Hall. And I would say if there's political reasons it was left off, you would think Manhattan would be the one excised because - Too young protagonist. Yes, yes. And, you know, based on a real relationship with a really young girl. Yeah. And Mariel Hemingway, who plays a 17 year old in the movie, was very young herself. I mean, she's been really outspoken about how she was traumatized by that movie and the making of it and sort of the entreaties that Woody Allen made upon her.

6:36That said, I just I have to put this movie. I understand. But if there was ickiness, why not go with Annie Hall? You know, which is I think is pretty ick proof. It was perfect. It's one of the great movies of all time. There's a lot of good Woody Allen movies in the 70s. Love and Death, hilarious. That's one of the funniest movies. I actually really like Interiors, which was his sort of Bergman knockoff. It's actually really good. But yeah, I'm going to put Manhattan as my number five. What's next for you? And it looks like your next one is going to be another film that was left off the list. I'm being a little bit perverse.

7:12I picked another movie that was left off the list, which is... Now, I happen to have seen this recently in the last, at least in the last five years or so. You know, it knocked my socks off. I think there was some new 4K disc or something like that. I saw A Clockwork Orange, obviously Stanley Kubrick. Why would this be left off the list? It has lost none of its searing power. Another Rage Against the Machine movie. There are scenes in it that everyone quotes. Everyone knows this movie, you know, singing in the rain, the eyelids being held up, Malcolm McDowell kicking people. You know, it's an incredible movie.

7:51I cannot fathom how it did not make it onto this list. There's something to be said of what might be the criterionification of Kubrick in the sense that Barry Lyndon was recently re-released. I feel like in recent, that's always been an excellent film. Some more people saw that. Yeah, I think that one's fresher in people's minds now. It's been more reappraised in recent years. I don't remember where that was on our list. I'm glad that's on the list. It's on the list. Yeah. My next one is Clute, the Alan J. Pakula movie, which is actually a film I saw a little later. It might have been toward the end of college.

8:26I was certainly in my younger 20s. It's interesting with that one. The Leonard Maltin movie guide was my totem for understanding taste and sort of my viewing guide when I was really young. And that had three and a half stars. It wasn't a perfect four. I don't know what it was. I didn't see that movie early on. And it really blew my mind. Jane Fonda won Best Actress Oscar for this. And it's interesting that it's called Clute, which is the name of the detective character played by Donald Sutherland. It might as well be called Bree because it really is about her sex worker character who is not this prostitute with a heart of gold or whatever trope maybe people were used to in that period.

9:06She's very self-aware. She's self-doubting. You see her in these therapy sessions really kind of peeling back the layers of her own experience as a woman and as a sex worker in New York. Those are the most interesting aspects to the movie. Some of the thriller elements don't hold together necessarily in the end, but I find the flaws about it to be really interesting. Part of it was that Fonda did a lot of research, and besides it being one of the great noir thrillers, it broke new ground for its nonjudgmental portrayal of sex workers. And also Gordon Willis did amazing work on this. It's one of the most gorgeous sort of on the street in New York capturing.

9:47He was good at that. He did it for Woody Allen, too, capturing the street life in a very effective way. I think the thriller works, but I also think the romance works. It's an interesting question. Clute breaks through to her in a way that very few people do. It also has a really great ending that is sort of open-ended and questioning. She's telling her therapist, oh, like, I'm going to go off with Clute and maybe things are going to get better. You know, maybe I don't, maybe I want to be happy, but probably I'll be back next week. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And what is your number three?

10:24A Woman Under the Influence. I think we lost Jenna Rollins pretty recently. This is one of the best. I think this is the best performance of the entire 70s by anyone. I think it's one of the great actor performances of all time. She and her husband Cassavetes, they came up with the idea together. It was originally going to be a play. She realized that would be way too hard to do eight nights or eight shows a week or whatever have you, because she's playing a manic depressive housewife who is also philandering. and very mercurial in terms of her moods. But she has a really wonderful relationship with her husband, played by Peter Falk, who loves her for everything in spite of her faults.

11:05And I just love to rewatch this one. I think anyone who wants to be an actor or cares about what serious acting is should study that one. So my next one is a Marty Scorsese movie, and it's one of the few movies that he did that's focused on a female character. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. It's one of the great movies of the 70s, and it was written by Robert Goetzel. And Ellen Burstyn gives an amazing performance in the leading role, and there's support from Jodie Foster and Diane Led and others. But it is one of the best movies that Scorsese ever made. And you wrote it up. I agreed with what you said.

11:43Yeah, there's no question that anyone who lobbies the criticism of Martin Scorsese that he doesn't care about female characters, which is allegedly something Meryl Streep said in certain vaguer terms at one point. Really should look to this movie, which was an early one for him to understand that is true. Yeah, it's a good one. So what's next for you? Here's where I'm going to start to zag, where other people zig and get a little weird, which you know is my want to do. Again, these are not the five, what I think are the five greatest movies of the 70s necessarily. And maybe, yeah, this is one I saw more recently, but it really kind of blew my mind a little bit, is the Barbara Loden film Wanda.

12:26I don't know what your thoughts are on that one. I watched that one at the, I think it's called the Maryland, I want to say, Baltimore Film Festival, Maryland Film Festival, years ago. And John Waters presented it, actually. It was a big deal that they had a print and it had been lauded for so long. And I watched it and I got it. I understood why people responded so well to it, but it's certainly not in terms of its filmmaking or anything. It's a portrait of a lost woman on the road, but it's not one of the great movies of the 70s, in my view. She's a flinty, alienated character who falls into a kind of crime scheme as she is leaving her.

13:08Basically, she is leaving her husband, giving full custody of the child and then just sort of drifting in the world. And what I love about this movie is the sort of backstory that led to it. This is the only feature that Barbara Loden made. And you know she was with Elia Kazan previously. This character is not her, but her struggles as a woman are really what the movie is about. It informs the character. It's rare to see such a personal, it's not diaristic, but it's a very personal story directed by starring just entire, it's this one woman's vision. And when we talk about the great female directed films of the 70s, Sean Dielman wasn't number one here or something as it might have been on like a sound list a few years ago.

13:51It was high, though. It was very high. You know, I mean, some of these things they put they put the parallax view ahead of Taxi Driver. There are a lot of really weird things ahead of Taxi Driver, a lot of horror movies and genre movies. There's a lot of Martha Coolidge on this list. She was an important figure. But, you know, if you look at the films now, you kind of I'm not casting any aspersions, but in the context of The Godfather and Jaws and, you know, Days of Heaven and Dog Day Afternoon. You know, that's a tough one. I understand the impulse to get some women in there. I actually one of the films that I'm really glad is on there is for Magnus Varda.

14:36One sings the other doesn't. That's one of my favorites. It's a good one. You know, it's just a testament to the fact that the 70s was such a rich era that a top 100 list, even though there are some that we disagree with here, is a really difficult endeavor because there are way more than 100. I'm glad they put Sorcerer on there, one of the best. I saw it on a double feature with Chinatown. I'm so glad they put Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, one of my favorites. If you've never seen it, you must see it. Oh, I love that one. But number one has to be Chinatown. Chinatown, end of story. Roman Polanski, Jack Nicholson again, Faye Dunaway, the best she's ever been, the extraordinary screenplay, the legendary screenplay by Robert Towne, the story of all LA and the water rights and everything else.

15:19It's just one of the great movies of the time, and it's hard to top Chinatown. I would have put Chinatown at number one. I don't object to all that jazz, but Chinatown should have been number one. Faye Dunaway had a really good, I think arguably one of the best runs, not even arguably, inarguably one of the best runs for an actress in the 70s. Network wasn't on this list, which I find a little crazy because actually that movie is fresher than ever when you rewatch that one. And Prescient. And Prescient. Patty Chayefsky. Yeah. And I think I'm going to go with that as being my favorite movie of the 70s.

15:54um faye dunaway in that movie she tried to bring some humanity to this really ruthless cold unfeeling network if it bleeds it leads network executive and sydney lumet said if you try to do that i'm going to take it out of the movie but she still manages to launder it in there there's like there are a couple you actually do feel for her you really do but some of the other movies she's really great that weren't on the list from the 70s eyes of laura mars super fun campy kind of giallo movie promise crown affair jerry schatzberg puzzle of a downfall child love that one as well four days of the condor that's pretty good too good thriller it actually is and i like the parallax view i just don't i mean how could you put that ahead of of taxi driver i don't understand maybe there's some strange revisionism going on now that everybody's always assumed that Taxi Driver was such a great movie, and I don't understand why you wouldn't continue to do so.

16:51Paul Schrader took issue with that on Facebook. He posted, what happened? He said, what happened to IndieWire? Yeah, he didn't specify. Everybody assumed he was talking about the list. Yeah, well, he's also kind of pissed when, or questioning at least, when John Dielman was top on Sight and Sound poll a couple years ago. Yeah. So he pays attention to these things. Yeah, he cares about this stuff. Well, he's a critic. He always was a critic and he always will be to his credit. All right. Well, that's that's the list. There was some nasty stuff on that IndieWire thread that that was suggesting that that doing lists like this is somehow beneath us or it's clickbait or it's stupid.

17:31I think this is great fun and people should enjoy it. Don't make a big you know, don't make too much out of it. It's just a it's fun percentile files to compare their taste. And wouldn't a list that made everybody happy, well, first of all, that would be impossible, but a list that maybe tried to placate some of these people more, I think it would be boring. Also, to IndyWire's credit, there's a lot of very arcane and obscure stuff on there. A lot of international entries are on there. So, you know, if some of the American canon was left off, so be it. Yeah, I brought up a couple of those. I wouldn't call Celine and Julie go boating arcane, but I was really happy to see that one pretty high up.

18:09And then one that I wrote up that I rewatched because I hadn't seen it in many years was the Nicholas Rogue movie Walkabout, which was really stunning. That's a good film. That's a good film. I think Don't Look Now is on there also. That would be in my top 10 of the 70s for sure. That's a good one. But again, some of these were very highly ranked, whereas other things did not get as high as they should have. Anyway, enough. Enough. 60s week, we'll get it right. We'll get it right. 30s week, hopefully we're still here. All right. So the next thing is the Tarantino podcast was the Church of Tarantino, as you say, very much a fan podcast.

18:46And you have to sort of suffer through. In some ways, the interviewer did a good job of being very thorough and asking some very detailed and pointed questions over a long period of time. In another way, he was just sucking up to Tarantino egregiously the entire time. And Tarantino, who I adore and have a great relationship with and hope to interview again when he finally makes his last movie, is reasonably taken with himself. So he doesn't need help. But that goes with the territory of a great director like him. Well, no, he says in the podcast, me and David Fincher are the best directors. And then he wins and says, I'm the best director.

19:27Yes. Yeah. But obviously we know the two of them are collaborating because Fincher is directing The Adventures of Cliff Booth for Netflix with Tarantino. At the beginning of that podcast. Yeah. I actually this host, Scott Kay, I liked that Tarantino called him out for saying that he's funny looking and was like, you're like you like you shouldn't be talking because you're not exactly you're not exactly gorgeous yourself. there was a fire hose of kind of news and information at the beginning of the podcast. There was this eight episode limited series he was working on turns out that was going to be the movie critic which was then going to possibly be his tenth film but the kind of the air sort of came out of his soul tires if you will on that one and he kind of ran out of gas on it It's fascinating to hear him talk about how this was the most interesting thing to me on this thing was how he weighs these things, how he figures it out, how he writes something that takes a lot of time.

20:29And then because of the premise, he doesn't admit that he's feeling any kind of pressure or that he's afraid or that he's scared. But for it to be, just say, even if it's his last movie, which is a thing, for it to be his last, for it to be the 10th movie, it has to measure up to certain standards that he has. And I was very interested in how these different projects ended up not measuring up for him. Well, he's going to be doing a play and the goal is to take it to the West End, which means it'll come to Broadway. We don't really know anything about it. Obviously, from the Hateful Eight, we understand that he knows dramaturgy and could mount something like this, right?

21:11Totally. We call him a writer and he says, I'm going to keep writing. And I have been writing a lot. You know, he wrote the book that the Brad Pitt Fincher movie is based on, which I read. And it was basically the Cliff character extrapolated over, you know, many pages. It was fun to read, a lot of fun to read. And then the play and then the TV series that sort of got shelved. So that's not happening. So it's a very interesting question. Apparently, he's taking some time off to pay to hang out with his kid the other thing that stood out in as much as i i didn't listen to the full two hours candidly but he talked about how everyone a lot of press are kind of psychologizing him right in this moment oh he must have this anxiety about his legacy he's paralyzed with fear about what the next project is that is not the case he is insisting and so we don't have a 10th movie now we don't know what it is but we have no truth between this play.

22:10And he's not going to pull out the yellow notepads anytime soon, it appears. So we are going to have to wait. Oh, he's a young man. He's not, he's not ancient. He's not doddering. He's got plenty of energy. You know, I can understand, I actually get it that he wants to be home. And I think it's an excuse of a sort that he wants to be home in the afternoon with his kid. And he's just putting off this thing that's weighing on him. But it was interesting to hear why and why he wasn't. And he doesn't. It sounds like he's not going to have. One thing that was interesting was that he apparently delivered to Fincher some tome of a screenplay that's really big and long and full of notes and things that Fincher is going to have to break down and make into a I guess that movie is already filming.

22:55It's in it's in production. Yeah. If anyone can parse and whittle down a tome of material, it's definitely going to be Fincher who works with a scalpel and an X-Acto knife on any material. Yeah, that's true. So that was fun. And then I highly, I highly recommend listening to that. And also the other thing was interesting that is, is he hanging on to some of his original, he gets the rights back. Remember he has, he's going to eventually get the rights back even to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood after 25, after 20 years. But he has been getting the rights back on some of his other things. One of them is Kill Bill, and he's hanging on to these two, Kill Bill 1 and 2, and showing them together at his theater, his Vista Theater.

23:40Well, that's a good segue into the other podcast interview that you wanted to talk about, because in conversation with Franklin Leonard and Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdi of Warner Brothers, they made the contrast that Sony has Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for 20 years, Warner's has Sinners for 25. and they talk about how that was a movie that they were all, it was all or nothing on that one. That was one that they just had to have. And you did some analysis about this podcast and they're going on a little bit of a tour here of talking to people maybe more candidly than they have in other cycles. Well, they're on a victory lap.

24:16They have every reason to be pleased with themselves because they pulled it out. After Joker, Folly Adieu, and the Bong Joon-ho Mickey 17. They just had some flops in there, and they had to pull it out, and people were saying, oh, they're going to be doomed. They're going to lose their jobs. And to make a deal like the Sinners Deal required cojones. They had to step up, and they had to offer this. And people went after them afterwards and really criticized them for doing this reversion, quote-unquote reversion deal, and that they thought it would be setting a precedent. And the day after they made the deal, which was also first look, it was also first dollar gross, they argued that the track record that Ryan Coogler had, all from Black Panther and the Creed movies onward, all the money he's made, he totally was in the running for some kind, that, you know, it was earned, that he could command on this particular African-American project, especially, he could command this ownership.

25:30And they went along with it and argued that other people would have given the reversion to them as well. So, but the day after somebody asked for a reversion deal, they turned it down and got the deal anyway. There was also a bit of lore spilled about weapons and how that came to be. So basically, DeLuca got the script at 8 a.m. in January 2023. And by 930, the deal was closing, basically. So we know he's a speed reader for one. But New Line secured the rights to that one within 24 hours after offering almost$40 million to cover everything, including production and salaries. And Craig himself, Zach Craig, the director, got a big salary on this one,$10 million.

26:14And remember, this is one where Universal was up bidding for weapons as well, along with Jordan Peele's Monkey Paw Productions. They offered less. Warner Brothers ultimately won out. And that movie's been hugely successful. They both have. So Sinners and Weapons are originals, too, by the way. So duly noted. You can get away with that with horror, by the way. They are horror films. They are genre films. It isn't like they did this with, quote unquote, prestige movies. But what's really interesting is that Sinners is probably the front runner for the Oscar at this point. We'll see what happens with all the films that are about to break.

26:56But at the moment, it is. Somebody asked me about that in Spain, and I said the same thing. What about the grassroots campaign for Amy Madigan to get Best Supporting Factors nomination for weapons? Other people have picked up on that. We said something right away that we thought she was Oscar worthy. But yeah, of course, Warners would have to put up a campaign. Yeah, she needs to get like a New York Film Critics or National Board of Review or something early on. And I do see the critics going for this one because it's and also remember, it's it's really kind of modeled on Ruth Gordon in Rosemary's Baby, which she won for.

27:32And that was in 1969, a way different era where the Academy was more hostile to horror. And I think we're going to see we're obviously we're seeing an increase in Academy receptiveness to genre movies such as these. Yes, we have. No question about it. OK, so that covers that. Now, the other thing that's going on right now is that critics are losing their jobs. I shouldn't laugh. It is not funny. But it is a situation where it has been going on for a long time, you know, slow attrition. But the last round has just all of Anne Hornaday at the Washington Post, Michael Phillips, Chicago. She took a buyout.